|
4/3/2022 Chunk by Brianne Kohl fiction of reality CC Chunk On a long-running group chat with my three best friends, I send the obituary of the guy that sexually assaulted one of us over twenty years ago and I think this is the best way to deliver the blow – in a negative, neutral space – since we can’t all be together but the second I hit send I have my doubts and then E—responds, “Good. He was a predator” and A—wants to know how he died and we’re all sort of giving J—shit for not being the first to know about it (she stayed in our hometown; she’s our unofficial hub for gossip) and we start to guess since this information is never available online: heart attack? At 41? Blood clot? My money’s on prescription medication mixed with alcohol because this is Appalachia we’re talking about and then J—who is still smarting from not being the first to know says, “Well, did you hear about Chunk?” and no, no, no, what happened to Chunk? He got arrested and convicted of raping his own daughter, Jesus Christ, but I say that is actually really weird because I was just talking to another high school friend whose ex-boyfriend, Jason, just went to prison for molesting his step-daughter for years and J—says, “wait, I know that guy!” See, Jason did some handyman work for them at the house the weekend before he got arrested and A—says, “He wasn’t alone with the kids, right?” and we all go back and forth in a panic before J—realizes no, we’re talking about two different Jasons from our hometown who molested family members and got caught, he was never alone with her kids he was always outside the house and the group chat goes quiet for a little bit and E—pops back in and says, “Whoa guys, dark” and we make a few more guesses about what might have killed the guy that sexually assaulted one of us (auto-erotic asphyxiation? Complications from Covid-19? Suicide?) and J—says if she dies randomly, she wants us to post cause of death so no one assumes she’s a closet drug addict or that she killed herself and I say, “Auto-erotic asphyxiation. Got it” and then we all say love you, love you, love you, goodnight.  Brianne Kohl's work has appeared in various publications including Catapult, The Masters Review, and River Teeth. In 2018, she was awarded the Wigleaf (Mythic Picnic) Prize for Fiction and in 2020, was given second place in the Atticus Review CNF Flash Contest. For a full list of her publications and awards, please visit at www.briannekohl.com.
4/3/2022 Wisp by Charlotte Zang LuxFactory CC Wisp The man sat at his usual place at the kitchen table on a dismal Sunday morning. Paul Harvey’s baritone voice blared through the static on the radio right next to him. The harsh fluorescent ceiling light glared, reflecting off the glossy mint-green walls, giving the room a sickly glow. The man, who needed a shave, wore olive-colored work clothes, pants and matching shirt, purchased from the Sears catalog. The thin, dirty fabric hung loose and rumpled on his six-foot frame. The clothes may have looked presentable at one time, but now they were dull from countless hours in the truck. They carried a perpetual odor of cigarette smoke and diesel fuel that no amount of laundry detergent could totally remove. On the table in front of him was an empty beige cup stained from years of use. The spoon lay near it in a puddle. Toast crumbs littered the table in all directions. Newspapers were scattered around the chair, dropped after he read each section, landing near his bare feet which were caked with mud. He had obviously walked in the damp, freshly plowed field without shoes early this morning, just for this purpose. He methodically scraped his feet together, causing the dried mud to fall to the floor. This seemed to please him. He did this often, always leaving the debris for his wife to clean up. That was her job, after all. Her oldest brother sat across from the man. He was a boy and therefore worth talking to, unlike her mother and sisters who were of no use except for cleaning and cooking and whatever else he needed. Everybody knew, even her brothers, that girls were not smart. They needed to be told what to do at all times, and most of all, they should keep quiet. A skinny little girl with wisps of fly-away blonde hair, she tiptoed into the far end of the kitchen, desperately pretending to be invisible. She had tried to wait until the kitchen was empty but her stomach rumbled so loudly that she couldn’t stay in the bedroom a minute longer. She always fixed her own breakfast but Sundays were the hardest. Reaching into the bottom cabinet, she found a box of cereal and tucked it under her arm, planning to scurry away without being noticed. And then Bang! The cupboard door slammed. She cringed and held her breath. The man, her father, saw that she dared to intrude into the room while he was talking. He would not tolerate the interruption from a child and definitely not from a girl. He barked something at her and she froze, her brown eyes wide and searching, even though she knew no one would help. She didn’t understand the question he had yelled, possibly because he sometimes used made-up words that made sense only to him, and probably because she was so frightened. She stood there, paralyzed in her hand-me-down flannel nightgown that bunched at her toes, wishing she could disappear. She looked down at the peeling linoleum and could not speak. She was silent. She defied him by not answering his question. That was a mistake. “Christ, she’s worthless. Get her out of here!” he demanded, scowling as if he had just tasted something foul. Her brother said nothing. She withered and shrunk away, fully aware of her place in this dreadful family. She was four years old.  Still finding her voice, striving for elusive authenticity, the only thing Charlotte has ever known for sure is that she is a writer. She writes the things she should for business and the things she wants at all other times.
4/3/2022 So Much Shit by Christy Lorio Jason Tessier CC So Much Shit If I want to be polite, I tell people that I had an ileostomy bag. If I’m trying to be funny or crass, I tell them I pooped out of my stomach for nine weeks. The general public doesn’t know what an ostomy bag is (there are different kinds) and, prior to having one, I wasn’t really sure either but now I have an intimate, first-person account of it after having my rectum and a cancerous tumor removed. An ostomy is necessary when a person has to expel waste out of a surgically made opening other than the plumbing they were born with. Many people with Crohn’s disease or post-colorectal surgery cancer patients, like me, need them temporarily or permanently. I needed an ileostomy, which connects to the small intestine. The bag collects the waste. It’s a shitty situation. My surgeon told me I wouldn’t need a permanent ileostomy bag, which was great news. I insisted on going to my initial surgery consultation alone. At that point I had been through brain surgery, what would be a little butt tumor removal? My surgeon was just going to go in and remove it and I’ll wake up and be back to normalish, right? I was so, so wrong. The bag was something necessary for me to let my insides heal after I had my rectum removed and rebuilt out of part of my small intestines. The five hour surgery was without incident and went as smoothly as these things can go. I woke up with excruciating pain in my shoulders, a result of being pumped full of air to give the surgeons more room to work around my internal organs. The gas that settled in my shoulders was even more painful than my abdominal incisions. During my pre-surgery consultation the ostomy nurse explained what an ileostomy bag and a stoma was. I wasn’t sure what a stoma was, even while my nurse held the little plastic stoma model in her hands. I was half overwhelmed, half in denial. I didn’t realize I would need a temporary bag prior to this consultation. I thought the hard part— the brain surgery and twelve rounds of chemo, were over. The nurse measured me for my bag. She had me sit and bend, evaluating the natural folds of my stomach in order to decide what the best placement would be— underneath my belly button and slightly to the right. Prior to this, the only time I had someone analyze the curvature of my body like this was for a tattoo, the design complementing a shoulder blade or the generous blank canvas that a thigh provides. Having a body part removed was disconcerting enough, much less rerouting an internal organ to the outside of your body. But I didn’t realize the full extent of it until I got home. The nurses showed me the plastic model of a stoma, which looked like a pink plastic plug. I thought getting an actual plug, a tidy little opening in my stomach. Then I went home, googled “stoma” and realized a piece of intestines would be sitting out of my body. Wait, what? The bag almost looked like a whoopee cushion. It’s the color of a bandaid and hangs off the body, collecting waste. After I got the ileostomy I made jokes when Thomas and I walked the dogs. I pointed out that it would be much easier to just grab one of our dog’s poop bags and secure it with a rubber band over my stoma. He asked me if I had poop bags for our walk. “Yes, but what about for the dogs?” would be my response. My sister also just had a baby, which requires so much to just get out the door. Diapers? Check. Baby wipes? Check. Extra bottles? Check. I felt like we had this weird parallel with her baby and my bag. I had to bring an ostomy kit with me everywhere I went. A spare bag, wipes, scissors to custom fit the bag, etc… March 2019- You don’t realize how much you use abdominal muscles until you have your abdominal wall sliced into. Standing up just to walk down the hall and back right after surgery felt like an impossible task, not just from the physical pain but from the juxtaposition of my life. The week before I went rollerskating; this week I was barely able to put one socked foot in front the other to stare at the river out the gastrointestinal ward window. I could see joggers and cyclists whizzing down the levee, which made me feel trapped inside my body, trapped inside this hospital. One of the stipulations of me leaving the hospital was learning how to empty and change my bag. It was upsetting seeing an internal organ hanging out of my body. It took two days for me to muster the courage to look at it. The nurses emptied my bag out for me, which made me feel stripped of my humility. My shoulders and abdomen still ached from surgery, and I felt fragile and vulnerable while I watched them empty the contents of the bag out, wipe fecal matter off the opening, then pressing the velcro tabs back in place. I felt bad that they had to literally handle my shit. Two nurses came in to help me care for my stoma. I closed my eyes and winced as I looked at it for the first time. The small, pink nub of my stuck out small intestines looked like a round, quivering tentacle, spewing out fecal matter like an alien which I had no control over. I felt equal parts detachment, horror, and curiosity. I was able to temporarily detach myself from the situation and see this as an interesting insight into the human body until a wave of pain would force me back to the reality at hand. I could do this the easy way— even though there was nothing easy about it— and accept this burden, or do it the hard way and resist it. I had to come to accept what was happening to me if I was going to get through those next nine weeks. I found a small online community of other people, almost exclusively women, who took to Instagram to connect to others going through similar situations. Some of them were unbelievably upbeat. I found their attitudes inspiring sometimes but mostly they just really pissed me off. They gave their stomas cutesy names like Meatball and Bob. Look, I get it. They were choosing their attitude, choosing to see the silver lining on the ostomy cloud, but when my bag leaked fecal matter in public, or I woke up to shit soaked sheets at two a.m. I couldn’t do anything but break down and cry. Instagram captions included, “Thank God for this life saving bag!” And “I love my bag.” It was a little too much. I wanted to shake these women sometimes and ask why they were lying to themselves. Quite frankly, having the bag sucked. Who really wants this damn thing? There was nothing cutesy about it. I found #Freethestoma, a hashtag that got started after the suicide of an eleven year old ostomate that broke down after having been bullied for his bag. Fellow ostomates showed up online, their pink nubs out for the world to see, unencumbered by the bags that catch their output. I didn’t want to go as far as they did, displaying their new buttholes to the world, but I also didn’t shy away from talking about what I was going through, both in person and online. I joked about my shitty situation but I didn’t show my new poop portal to anyone except my medical team. I didn’t want my husband to see my stoma. Hell, I didn’t want to see my stoma. Most ostomates have opaque bags but, since I was just using hospital sample bags, mine were clear. I wore a modified belly band to hide the bag and so I wouldn’t have to feel warm fecal matter pressing against my stomach. Emptying the bag in public was an exercise in patience and stress management. One of the first times I had to empty the bag in public ended in utter humiliation. I was at a restaurant with my husband and made the grave mistake of trying a new tactic to empty the bag. “Just sit on the toilet like normal and empty it in between your legs,” the ostomy nurse instructed when I was still in the hospital. Prior to this moment, I had a different approach: stand facing the toilet, squat down, and dump it out. I must have been feeling adventurous to try to change up my tactic and was horrified when I released the plastic velcro tabs, unrolled the plastic opening, and missed the toilet completely. Shit spewed onto my underwear and the biker shorts I had on underneath my dress. I was horrified. I tried not to panic and see the upside in the situation. At least I was wearing a dress, so going commando was an option. At least I didn’t have to walk out the restaurant in shit stained shorts? I tossed my underwear and shorts in the tampon receptacle in the stall and walked out to the dining room, visibly shaken by the experience. I started to cry, apologizing to my husband for ruining the upbeat mood we were in just a few minutes earlier. “Sorry I ruined our dinner.” “You didn’t ruin anything.” I didn’t want to leave a shitty surprise for the poor waitstaff at the end of the night, so I asked for two plastic bags, went back into the bathroom, fished the offending articles of clothing out of the trash, brought them home, and washed them about six times. Emptying my bag in public wasn’t the only inconvenience when dining out. You don’t realize how unaware you are of chewing your food until you have to start paying attention. “Most people don’t chew their food well enough,” my ostomy nurse explained, hence why you get a laundry list of foods you can’t eat when you have a stoma, and yet “People with permanent ostomies eat whatever they want,” she explained. People with permanent ostomies get used to chewing their food well, whereas newbies aren’t as in tune with their eating habits. The trick is pulverizing almonds, machinating the food into a paste so you don’t give yourself a blockage later. It’s one more thing most healthy adults have the luxury of not having to think about. Having to slowly chew, chew, and chew some more wasn’t all bad; how many of us wolf down our food in a rush, or mindlessly snack in front of a computer screen? Taking the extra time to chew helped me savor my food and be a more mindful eater. Certain foods produced foul smells, which were fortunately not detectable when the bag was closed and tucked away. Gas producing foods weren’t off limits but they resulted in the bag inflating like a balloon, I had to “burp” my bag frequently, otherwise I risked it exploding under the pressure. If I had a beer (or anything else gas producing) too close to bedtime I would wake up with a bulge; it looked like I was smuggling a water balloon in my pants. I heard horror stories of bags bursting under the pressure, but fortunately that was one disaster that I managed to bypass. I could have reduced the risk of an exploding bag even more by abstaining from beer but damn it, I deserved a drink. I had grown used to having some dietary restrictions after chemo, such as not eating undercooked meat and fish due to risk of infection; goodbye sushi, sayonara medium rare steak. Buffets were off limits during chemo (not the worst thing tbh) but as soon as I finished treatment I was enjoying eating whatever the hell I wanted; now I had to consider even more dietary changes. Seeds, sausage casings, nuts, and fibrous vegetables were all off-limits. I had been eating sushi at my campus’s coffeeshop one day when I realized my rolls were coated in sesame seeds. Would I combust? No, but I pooped sesame seeds out of my stoma and it was gross and strangely fascinating to watch— a peek inside the human digestive system, not unlike dissecting owl pellets in middle school science class. Throughout the process I became more attuned to my body. What I ate in the morning would come down the pipeline eight to twelve hours later. It was an anatomy lesson and an exercise in humility; when things with the bag went awry, which they frequently did, it was inconvenient and messy at best, totally humiliating at worst. I tried to handle it with as much grace as I could muster but there were times when I sat in the bathroom and cried after a leak so bad that it warranted a shower at three a.m. I had to remind myself that I am an intelligent, well-rounded human being with two college degrees and working on a third. I made it through multiple surgeries, chemo, and radiation. There were lots of people worse off than I was. This was only temporary, a blip on my cancer timeline. At least I didn’t have cancer anymore, right? No, fuck that. This sucks. Everything about this sucks. I didn’t want to hear “At least you’re alive,” from my own internal dialogue or anyone else. I didn’t want to deal with part of my intestines pushing shit into a plastic bag. I didn’t realize how lucky I was to use my own plumbing before. Cancer teaches you how to take nothing for granted. I read The Wounded Storyteller by Arthur Frank, a Professor Emeritus of Sociology at The University of Calgary. I wanted to gain perspective on my cancer experience. Frank explains that society allows contingency for the infant body; it’s expected that infants have little to no control over bodily functions such as burping, spitting and defecating. Yet “when adult bodies lose control, they are expected to attempt to regain it if possible, and if not then at least to conceal the loss as effectively as possible.” Frank goes on to note that stigma “is embarrassing, not just for the stigmatized person but for those who are confronted with the stigma and have to react to it.” So let me get this straight; not only do I have to worry about embarrassing myself but I’m also supposed to avoid making other people feel uncomfortable? Screw that, I’m the one with ass cancer. May 2019— When I woke up from my ileostomy reversal surgery I was in minimal pain. The surgery hooked my small intestines back up and my surgeon sewed up the layers of my abdominal wall to close the hole where the stoma once was. I was uncomfortable but not horrendously so like the surgery that removed my tumor and my rectum. A gauze pad and medical tape covered the hole my stoma once occupied, which looked like a relaxed cat butt that would heal and scar over in the next few weeks to form a purple scar below my navel, the only indication of what was once there. I thought about getting a tattoo over the area to cover the scar but I chose to see it as a source of pride. Besides, there is a divot where the hole was, imperceptible to anyone but me. It doesn’t bother me and it could have been much worse; I could have been gutted up and down like a fish. The blessing and curse of reversal surgery is that it’s invisible. No one is going to know that you’re still healing, that you’re still hurting. No one is going to know that every time you have to poop it feels like you are collecting rocks inside your rear end. The healing process varies wildly from person to person and, to be honest, there’s a lot of humiliating moments that can come with it so there’s a real want for that invisibility, to minimize embarrassment. Sometimes it would take (and still does) multiple trips to the bathroom to finish making #2. I quickly realized that I wouldn’t have to worry about shitting myself in public (thank god) but I was often in crippling pain, even months after surgery. Just three weeks after my rectum takedown, my husband broke his elbow after a bad accident while riding our Vespa. It was a nasty break. “I think he left a piece of bone on the road,” the surgeon told me after Thomas’s second surgery. I was still adjusting to my ileostomy bag when Thomas was getting nerve blocks and walking around in a sling for several weeks. When we were out in public together I noticed the way people reacted to him. Some people ignored him, others asked what happened out of sympathy. The thing with cancer is this: people don’t react to you because they don’t want to be rude, which is a good thing. The only visible indicator that I had cancer is when my hair fell out. When my hair started growing back but I was still dealing with cancer I was invisible. Now that my hair was back, I could walk around in public and no one would know that I had my rectum removed and my new stomach butthole was pooping uncontrollably as I exchanged casual banter with the grocery store cashier. I couldn’t express that maybe I also wanted a little sympathy sometimes without coming across as oversharing. No one knew I had to wear the damn bag. Unlike a cast, there was no visible evidence of what I had endured. I was happy the bag was discreet yet I also felt as if I was harboring a secret. I was at my brother-in-law’s 50th birthday party. I was just three weeks post-surgery and my body was still healing. I was in a lot of pain, still figuring out the cocktail of pain pills, stool softeners and laxatives to take. I was in so much pain after my body digested that morning’s breakfast. Sharp shooting sensations coursed through my new plumbing. I tried to mask the pain I was feeling and carry on conversations with other guests like normal. I thought I would have to leave the party early but the pain eventually subsided; I only felt comfortable telling a handful of people what I was going through in that moment. Later on, as the evening was winding down, I joined a friend in the living room. She was talking to some friends and the topic shifted to the nuances of New Orleans accents and pronunciations. I was trying to express how I default to pronouncing certain words a certain way since I’m from the West Bank, a suburb of New Orleans. At least that’s what I was trying to say before she interrupted and told her friends that I had brain surgery. Their mouths dropped. “But that’s okay, she’s fine now.” “I don’t have cancer now but no, I’m not fine,” I said and quickly changed the subject. I could have slapped her. I make light of my brain and butt cancer all the time. I couldn’t tell if she was going for shock value, trying to be funny, or looking for an ice breaker but it wasn’t her story to tell. I went from being just another party guest enjoying myself to being singled out for having cancer. And, just two hours ago, I was not fine. I was in serious pain but I didn’t want to talk about it. In that moment I just wanted to another guest at the party. A few weeks after that party, my husband and I went to Mississippi with the dogs one weekend for a much needed quick getaway. I had taken a new laxative and took too much of it, to the point where I had to go to the bathroom no less than six times during lunch one afternoon. I just hoped that our waitress didn’t notice. It was embarrassing and I was frustrated that I was souring our lunch with my bathroom trips. I didn’t want my husband worrying about me but I was also in pain. July 2019— I posted a picture of myself, pulling my shirt up and my skirt was down just enough for the scar where my ileostomy once was to be visible. I did it to show others that this had been my reality, the only visible proof that I had an ostomy bag, as well as to do my part in destigmatizing having one. A friend of mine, who reached out to me in private as she was going through her own bout of butt cancer, emailed me. “Seeing your post today flaunting your scar=goals. You’re awesome. I’m desperately looking forward to those days!” I hardly felt like I was flaunting the scar, more just presenting it for public consumption. It wasn’t a close up shot, either. It was full body, as if to say this scar does not define me. I am still me. *** I had a dream where a woman was making people take laxatives as a form or torture and to make sure they weren’t working as a drug mule. In the dream I felt scared but also partially immune. I had been through cancer. What could possibly be scarier than that? I suppose this meant that my suffering has given me some kind of upper hand in life, like I’m better equipped to handle physical and mental anguish now that I’ve been through this. Nothing could be more torturous than all that I had been through. *** I’m in New Orleans, back at the doctor’s office waiting for the doctor to come in and snake my pipes with the sigmoid scope. I have to have a sigmoidoscopy once every three months for the next two years. The sigmoid is a specific part of the colon. The doctor wants to look up my butt, much like a colonoscopy, but it doesn’t go up as far and I don’t get knocked out for it. I bought an art print off Etsy that reminds me of my new normal. It’s a woman with her pants at her ankles, bare ass in the air with an audience of physicians, nurses, photographers, etc… and text that says, “Rectal Cancer Be Like.” It’s funny because it’s accurate; I’ve had more cameras up my butt than most porn stars. As I continue waiting for the doctor to come in, I glance at a poster of the human gastrointestinal tract. I stare at it hard every time I come in, trying to remember the names of body parts that most people forget after high school biology. I previously thought the Wall of Jejunum was a key geographical component in Game of Thrones. Didn’t the White Walkers destroy it in the final season? I imagine cancer cells invading my body not unlike the White Walkers breaching the wall in order to take over the North. They’re trying to take down everything in their way, breaking through the wall of my rectum, sailing wooden ships through my lymph nodes to land in my brain and now my lungs. Maybe (spoiler alert) after nearly everyone dies in the final episode, I’ll be able to start anew as well. In the meantime, chemo sends out its own armies yet again to attack these shit heads that spread to my lungs. After all I had been through the cancer popped back up again just as I was adjusting to my new normal. At least I got my poop proclivities down; I got a bidet attachment for my toilet, I went to pelvic floor therapy sessions to strengthen my muscles down there, and I started taking fiber supplements at the recommendation of my doctor, which have all helped with a problem that Amazon reviewer Gorn so eloquently described in his description of fiber pills: We're not talking about diarrhea here. Diarrhea is nasty stuff but at least it's easy to clean. What we're talking about is more like pushing toothpaste through a straw or squeezing tar out of a baloon [sic]. The real problem, if I have not yet been sufficiently graphic, is that cleanup is a nightmare. All of this has been a nightmare, but at least my problems are manageable. I don’t have to worry about shitting on myself, which was one of my greatest fears after my ileostomy reversal. There was a video circulating on Twitter of a man caught on surveillance cameras shitting on himself in a shopping mall. The quality of the video obscures the man’s face but there is no mistaking what happens; one man wearing white shorts walks past a luggage display and has explosive diarrhea, soiling his pants and smearing the floor. As soon as he exits the frame another man rides up the elevator, doesn’t see the feces and slips and falls, knocking over the luggage. The footage of this man is out there for eternity, for future love interests or bosses to find. I’ll admit that part of me laughed, but I also couldn’t help but feel sorry for both parties involved. It’s one of those videos that is equal parts hilarious and disgusting; we watch content on our phones in pure disgust, shaming both parties by firing off tweets and Facebook messages. When I saw it my immediate reaction was “Thank god that wasn’t me” followed by anger at the people that shamed this man online. Give him a little grace. Give me a little grace.  Christy Lorio is a writer and photographer. She is currently making work about living with stage IV colorectal cancer. Her essays have been published in Had, Scrawl Place, Nurture Literary, and Entropy, among other places. She was a 2021 fellow for Arizona State University's Desert Nights, Rising Stars Writers Conference. She frequently contributes to Ochsner Healthcare's blog and is currently working on her MFA in Studio Art from The University of New Orleans, where she also received her MFA in Creative Writing.
4/3/2022 it was dark by E.B. Cotenord Jason Tessier CC it was dark It was dark. That’s the one detail I’m sure of about how I woke up. Was I in vomit or next to vomit? On the floor or on the mattress? The mattress was on the floor, too. I broke the bed in a blackout months earlier. Maybe during a one-night stand or maybe falling out of it--both? Who knows? It was dark though, for sure. And there was vomit, for sure. I’d been drunk for days three or ten or more. At this point, it didn’t matter. I’d been drunk for a good couple of years straight. I couldn’t tell you when I ate last. Or how long the vomit had been next to me. Or if the vomit came before or after the last time I ate. I couldn’t tell you what day it was. I last remembered waking up on the kitchen floor. That could have been yesterday or last week. And now, I am in my room. Near the floor. The light from my next-door neighbor’s house shining through the window behind me. The closet light might be on. It might not be. There’s enough light to make my way around the room with my hands to find my drink on the floor next to me. And the bottle next to it. A couple of bottles rolled under the dresser two feet from me. I’m not sure if they’re empty or if they rolled away before I finished them. If they’re not empty, I’ll get to them soon. If they are empty, I won’t. My husband will get them. My phone has dozens of missed calls and texts. A few texts have been answered, badly. Those texts would be embarrassing if they weren’t too incoherent to be anything but concerning. I don’t go back and read those texts. I will never go back and read those texts. I don’t remember them and I don’t need to. I do remember that Dad’s text came through that night. “How are you doing?” That’s an odd text for my dad to send. He checks on me, regularly, but not like that. Normally he asks how the kids are doing. Or he sends me an article or a funny video. He likes to ask me what the weather is like. He checks in with small talk. With simple messages that just tell me he’s thinking about me. But that night, I wasn’t in any shape to realize it, but the direct question meant he was concerned and it was urgent. The simplicity of the text, the soft tone, and the question itself, a question asked in a way that would tell him immediately whether or not I was even alive. It’s a question my dad would ask from his couch, eighteen miles from my bedroom. He sits in the corner of his couch, too. His is black and leather, but not to accommodate wine spills. My parents buy furniture for comfort. For function. They buy beautiful furniture they can relax on. And that their dogs can relax on. Comfortable couches for people and large dogs. And my dad sits in the corner because it’s next to the door, where he can let the dogs in and out and watch squirrels climb his bird feeder and he can be close to the feral cats who come up onto the deck to eat the food he puts out for them. The cats he traps to take to the vet to get neutered and have their health checked. My parents buy furniture to accommodate a home. My parents never bought furniture to accommodate dysfunction. The house I grew up in housed dysfunction. We battled loss and heartbreak and sickness and mental illness. My sister died in the street in front of it. But the house wasn’t a place that nurtured dysfunction. It was a house that offered comfortable couches, comfortable food, and comforting words, affection, and love. My childhood house was not a place where dysfunction thrived. It was a place where a family thrived despite the demons that should have torn us apart. My dad texted me from that house. To check on me in the house I was in now. The house with no comfortable furniture and no functional parents. No cats. No squirrels. No dogs. My house was dark. He asked how I was doing, but he knew the best he could hope for was bad. “I’m gonna be honest, Dad. Not good.” “Can we FaceTime?” I don’t remember if we did or if we didn’t. We talked on the phone, though. I just remember his voice. I probably didn’t FaceTime because I thought I’d get away with hiding my wine-stained lips from my dad. Sure I was thirty-eight and going back through my Instagram, it was doubtful anyone I knew would even recognize me without wine lips anymore, but I was still holding strong to the illusion that my dad didn’t know that I drank until I didn’t have to cope with sunlight or moonlight, depending on whatever light was shining at whatever hour I woke up. It didn’t matter. If it was light, I needed it to drown. I never have to see my dad’s face to see his face. I can see his face that night now, even though I couldn’t see it that night. Pale, terrified, and holding it together for his only living child. Years ago, he opened the front door to tell my sister to come back inside, that he was going to drive her to the store, that he didn’t want her to walk in the dark and in the rain. If he had just opened the door 10 seconds earlier, she would be alive. Instead, he opened the door to see her body, crumpled in a puddle on the street, bleeding in the headlights of an SUV. He wasn’t going to be 10 seconds late ever again. And I knew that every time he called me now, he was afraid he might be. I didn’t need to see his face to see his pain and fear. And he didn’t need to see my face to see the stain of wine on my lips. I wasn’t fooling anyone. You could see the lip stains in the slur of my speech. You could smell the dirt of my hair in the stumble of my footsteps and taste the booze on my breath in the thuds of my body falling against the bathroom walls. My dad spoke to me like I was an adult but reassured me like I was a child. “What’s going on? Talk to me, Elyse.” We don’t have heart-to-hearts. I sobbed. I want to say I was honest, but honesty is a thing for people who are alive. I wasn’t really that anymore. Even if I kind of was, I wasn’t alive in a world where reality existed with enough power to influence things like truth and honesty. There was pain, real and imagined, and there was sleep. There were nightmares to blur the distance between the two. And really, that was all that was left of me. I explained that to my dad or rather, it explained itself in whatever it was I said to my dad. “Elyse, you’re going through a really hard time right now.” He wasn’t wrong. I let him know I was sorry or ashamed or certain that I’d let him down or my mom down or both of them or probably everyone around me. “Elyse. Your mother and I love you very much.” I wasn’t buying it. It’s not that he was ever an unloving father. The opposite. I’ve never known anyone who loves anything with the stamina and determination that my father loves his family. That man is incapable of keeping his heart from churning love for us, no matter how brutal we’ve been with it, the part that loves me is eternal and unstoppable. It’s not something I can break. And I’ve done my best to try. I just couldn’t believe that I was still someone they could love. He loved me, but the me he loved no longer existed. She left my body a long time ago and was replaced with a thirty-eight-year-old woman who sleeps on kitchen floors with vomit in her hair. “Think about this. If you want to know how much your mother and I love you, just think about how much you love Bug.” Bug is my daughter. She was 5 at the time. To say I love her would not be fair. I am obsessed with how absolutely perfect she is in every way. She isn’t even human. Bug is magic in the body of an unstoppable force in the body of a little girl in the body of a miracle and she manages to all of that despite having me for a mother. To think anyone loved me that much. “We love you more than you love Bug.” That’s a strong statement, and he knows it. He knows I don’t believe him. “No, listen, how much you love Bug, that’s a lot. But you’ve only known her for less than 6 years. Your mom and I have known you for 38 years. We’ve had 32 more years to love you. We love you more than you love Bug.” The last thing I remember is the heat on my cheeks from tears. And then my life sort of fast-forwarding, skipping through days and weeks until I found myself once again in the hospital, but this time, I was ready to accept help. I’m sure Dad would be surprised that I remember that conversation. I know I am. Because I don’t remember anything else except that it was dark.  Chicago-based professional dream girl, E.B. Cotenord, is a sex worker, writer and the host of The eXXXistential Podcast. Her creative endeavors serve as explorations into her experiences navigating society as a current sex worker and recovering addict. E.B is a single mother raising a 14 year old boy and 12 year old non-binary child as well as 4 michievious rabbits. She seeks to help humanize marginalized communities by writing about her life as an adult entertainer and suburban mom in recovery. She can be found on Twitter @ebcotenord.
4/3/2022 Loretta Young by Elizabeth Rose Bernard Spragg. NZ CC Loretta Young E named the long-haired white kitten Loretta Young after the eponymous TV star of the fifties show. With that name, E meant to project a feline destiny of elegance and proper manners onto her. In many ways Loretta Young lived up to her name, but in one incident, early in the long life she shared with E, she relinquished manners to shift her owner’s life trajectory. The human Loretta Young had radiated into E’s home every Sunday evening as a spellbound mother and daughter watched from their flowered couch. The family’s cat-eared TV set, typical of the first models, was a coke-bottle thick glass tube set in a Milk Dud brown cabinet. Three large gold buttons marched horizontally across its front like a Studebaker dashboard. Miss Young was a whirling sashaying dancing vision welcomed into every living room in America. For E it was like seeing her mother, D, luminesce through the television. Miss Young and D shared a common identity. Both were fluent in skin toner, lipstick, rouge, eyeliner, and hairstyles. Both exuded elegance, mystery, and self-confidence. D imperiously handled the hired help and the round Kosher butcher. E watched, and learned, behind D’s skirts as she pushed through the crowd to the refrigerator case in Cecil’s delicatessen to obtain the needed smoked whitefish, pumpernickel bread, and corned beef. Years later, Loretta Young, the white longhaired cat, would embody this same model of the grand feminine: perfect attire, self-confidence, and wisdom. E woke from an alcohol haze to the sound of shattering glass on the morning of her thirtieth birthday. The night before, her boyfriend, J, and she had partied. Friends were invited. She had slept like a free-wheeling adult child, her unconscious dialed to chill. It was 1978 and she was a single woman with a white cat, substantial career, no mortgage, and no school debt. But the morning of shattered glass funneled her forward into a new maturity. She lived in a hack-job of a cottage steps from Lake B’s third and shallowest basin located in mid-state Massachusetts. Her boyfriend had found the place. Its appeal for both was its patched together mismatching parts, like a crazy quilt. Their bedroom was on the cottage’s small porch. It was only a foot wider than their double-thick mattress that stretched between the low hung windows. Summer brought the humid fragrances of mud and rotting grasses. They heard mallards, bullfrogs, and great horned owls. One winter a cluster of cedar-waxwings flocked the juniper berries outside their windows. December nights, like the one of E’s birthday that had just passed, brought the haunted shrieks of shifting ice. Since the bungalow wrapped around itself like a caterpillar, the bedroom windows offered a clear sight into the kitchen. Sometimes E pretended she was peeping at someone else’s boyfriend lurking in their kitchen. With a practiced dispassion she watched him brew his morning coffee, using the complicated French press his mother had gifted him at Christmas, or crack the refrigerator for his fifth beer of the night. She noted his dishwater-colored hair long and uncut. The ends were still blonde from his days as a California surfer dude. It was usually pulled back in a ponytail for his day job as a contractor. The morning after her thirtieth birthday marked more than two years of estrangement from E’s parents. Their last conversation, two Septembers before, coincided with the couple’s visit to E’s hometown. On the last day of that visit E’s father invited her to walk around the block. Such invitations were never a good thing. E’s father was not a relaxed fellow fond of leisurely strolls. In fact, he was an anxious vice president of a hardware chain who was rarely separated from his suit and tie. If he was looking for recreation, it usually came in the form of a three-mile jog. The neighborhood was a dozen houses built on spacious lots configured around an ersatz pond. It was a body of water E could never quite appreciate, even when authentic cattails sprouted at the water’s edge. “It’s a fake. Minnesota is the Land of 10,000 Lakes. Why must they build more?” she said. They were circling the family home for a second time when E’s father voiced his intentions. Her father was disinterested in the lake debate. He was happy to have been allowed to buy into the exclusive Minneapolis suburb that had excluded Jews like him a generation earlier. An artificial lake was a small sacrifice to endure for such privilege. “Everyone wants lakefront property. I want to talk about you and J. Your mother and I don’t think he’s right for you.” he said. “Why?” “He put you in danger when you were hiking. He wasn’t prepared and made mistakes. You could have died.” “We were in it together, dad. It wasn’t his job to protect me.” Her father was referring to their misadventure in the Wyoming Wind River Reservation where she and J had gotten lost on a day hike. They had almost been forced to spend the night in the woods before stumbling on the trail as the sun was setting. Yes, they had been frightened and yes, they hadn’t prepared well but all had worked out. It had become lore for them. “Dad, I’m not a helpless waif. It’s both our jobs to keep each other safe. That’s the way it works.” And just as her father had condemned her very first love, D, a red-headed jazz musician who dressed in tight black jeans tucked into his leather cowboy boots, he had it out for J as well. Back when she was 17, when D had picked her up for a date, her father had forbidden her to leave the house. He had screamed, “He’s junk,” dismissing him just like he was now rejecting J. His face had gotten red, spittle flew from the corners of his mouth, his dark eyes lit with anger. E had left anyway when her father had cleared out. She had run down the street and climbed into D’s red Austin Healey. They had a night of shopping, cooking, and making out on his madras covered bed, smoking weed, and talking. However, ten years later, while walking her suburban Minneapolis neighborhood, her father had been composed, rational. He had amassed his evidence and presented it to E. “He’s not trustworthy. You should just forget him,” he said, as though she could return J to the shelf, get a refund, and shop for another make and model. E felt heartbroken. She had wanted her parents to see the qualities in J that she loved. After all, he could fix or make anything. This was unlike her father, or any other member of her family, who were all born with paws for hands. J had a chest of tools he knew how to use. He was ambitious and entrepreneurial. He’d started his own contracting business and had amassed famous Boston clients from sports teams. Unlike her father who worked as a mere VP, a lot in life his wife continually belittled him for choosing. Instead of security, benefits, and a fat salary E’s mother wanted enormous oodles of money that could be made in a solitary business. Both sides of E’s family were Jewish immigrants who became owners of Midwestern millinery shops. E’s father had decided early to never be his own boss. He recalled the panic he felt as a 9-year-old witnessing his dad’s tears when he came home and handed the store keys to his wife. “Store closed.” The cause of bankruptcy had been “Too easy with credit. Not a good businessman.” And E had seen how it was a trait passed down. Her father was a marshmallow, despite his bluster. He was tender, kind-hearted, and generous to a fault. In an alarming irony E realized that her father had judged J for reasons that were only a minor aspect of the reasons J was not the dreamed of future son-in-law, or the husband she desired. Her father had taken a small thing and divined a problem which had its core in larger issues. They had no idea of the real reasons she should forget him. She had never told her parents about J’s experimentation with hallucinogenic drugs in the sixties. Most vivid of her recall about his experiences was one conversation. He had lived in California during the Haight-Ashbury era, dropping acid, smoking marijuana, and consuming hallucinogenic mushrooms. He had told her, “Some days people were spiders. I would accept that. I would tell myself, ‘Today people are spiders,’ and go out.” This struck E as courageous, but not something she would have liked for herself. She had also never confided in them about his stubborn refusal of marriage, and all its accompanying pleasures, including shared financial pooling and children. This was a contract E had not accepted lightly and was not her life plan. On the way back to Massachusetts E shared her conversation with her father. “My dad doesn’t think you’re the one for me. He wants us to break up.” “That’s insulting.” “Because we got lost in Wind River. He blames you. He doesn’t think you have good judgment.” “I knew where we were. We could see the town. If worse came to worse, we could have just walked down the mountain. Are you going to let your parents run your life?” “It was seven miles. He doesn’t even know about all the other stuff. Like your attitude towards marriage and your overuse of alcohol.” “I told you from the beginning I was never going to get married again. Once was enough and it only lasted seven months. I’ve never been dishonest about that.” “I thought you would eventually love me enough to change your mind.” After the vacation, E and her parents had limited contact. E had spoken a few times with her parents but hadn’t visited since that day. She was at a standstill. E took the serpentine route to the kitchen after the night of breaking glass. She had to first climb out of bed and scoop her scattered clothing off the scant floor space left over from the greedy bed. She then opened the mullioned glass door, careful not to wake J, and descended five stairs into a large unfinished room he kept as a warehouse for construction materials. She passed through trying hard not to envision the vast living room it could become if they renewed their lease with the house and each other. She then climbed another set of stairs, a dozen this time, into the oldest portion of the bungalow. She pattered through the small dining room, marveling at the antique cherry drop-leaf table they had bought while on a van excursion through Pennsylvania. She recalled how she and J parceled out who would buy which pieces of furniture and home goods, careful to avoid merging property that would make a break-up more complicated. This had been J’s idea. Initially, when they began living together, they had to both equally love a piece but only one of them would purchase it. Using this method, they built a “home” that could be easily dissembled like color-coded tinker toys. Lately they had made some large purchases together and this had encouraged E to believe they were in it for the long haul. But if she added up his excessive drinking, unwillingness to move forward with a commitment, temporary nature of their lease, and the waste of five of her best baby-making years, she could feel hopeless, yet she had been unable to move on. In their small kitchen E found a dozen finely etched, highly valued wine glasses, owned by her, broken into tiny shards on the linoleum floor. The glasses had been left to dry on a towel following the party of the night before. Loretta Young was glancing at the shards with innocent dismay. While E looked on the scene with horror, Loretta Young purred and rubbed her length of long-haired grace upon E’s legs. Loretta Young had forced the moment to its crisis. Seeing only remnants of her precious glasses set off a reaction. Just as a broken wine glass as the final ritual of a Jewish wedding represents the frailty of human relationships, reminding that even the strongest love can be subject to collapse, E’s broken glassware was the fractured smithereens of a once hopeful relationship. Loretta Young, a dainty careful feline, was sending a message: “Break up with him.”. E’s decision to leave J was met with continued passivity. “I’m moving out.” “OK.” And then later, “How do you want to divide the things we own?” J said. “Do you have an idea?” “Yes, we’ll flip a coin and whoever wins the toss chooses. The other person gets two choices the next turn to make up for having lost the toss.” “That seems fair. Why are you so good at breaking up and so bad at making a life together?” “I’m not sure.” This was confirmation that it was the right move. J was unable to summons the energy to protest. Within two months, E moved away, buying a home of her own. Loretta Young enjoyed her new territory stretched on the boundary of an apple orchard where both chipmunk and mouse populations thrived. Bobolinks could be spotted on fence posts in the surrounding meadows. Loretta Young was never again responsible for any damage to E’s possessions and lived to a grand 21 years. She died peacefully in E’s arms at the end of a happy feline lifetime.  Elizabeth Rose is a writer and community activist who has published journalism and essays in the Boston Globe, New Mexico Review, Revue Magazine, Truthout, MS Blog Online, GirltalkHQ, Fifty Plus Advocate, and the Worcester Journal. She authored a chapter in Today's Wonder Women: Everyday Superheroes Who Are Changing the World, edited by Asha Dahya (Ixia Press, 2020). She received her MFA in Creative Non-Fiction in 2019 from Lesley University. Rose lives in Massachusetts where she teaches writing. She helped to found a community development organization seventeen years ago in Guatemala called Long Way Home, http://www.lwhome.org.
 Octavio Ruiz Cervera CC Lament for the South Side For decades I have tried to forget the The South Side of Chicago. I am tired of all the hackneyed cliches—the White Sox baseball team, black leather clad tough guys pitching pennies on schoolyard pavements, shot-and-a-beer corner taverns. I am tired of the isolation I felt deep in my gut while reading my books and listening to classical music. For years I tried to break out of the racial and ethnic and religious insularity that stymied my childhood as I’ve passed through viaduct passageways to other neighborhoods, breaching borders to what feels like other countries. Yet here I am. I try to forget the Chicago River, the south branch Bubbly Creek, even though I smell the rot and stench from Stockyards blood and offal dumped there for decades. I try to forget squawking seagulls, cackling crows and grackles, cooing pigeons that weigh down sun-starved trees on all the streets and avenues. I hear them day and night, like newscasts of the Daleys senior and junior stuck on an endless loop. My heart quakes at the memory of those unforgiving concrete streets. The images and shrieks of lacquer-haired baby boomer bubblegum-chewing girls still drown out the traffic noises on Wallace Avenue, and the biting winds off Lake Michigan still knife through my arms and legs. Fifty years later my memories still sleep in the Bridgeport neighborhood, dream there, leap from mind to page though long hidden by, obscured by, and dirtied by clouds of gray car exhaust. Even though the dirty-face moon strains through the street lights and cannot guide the way, my stories and poems still steer me off the 35th Street ramp of the Dan Ryan expressway, back to Union Avenue, to Halsted Street, Comiskey Park, to St John Nepomucene Catholic Church, the Ramova Theater. The South Side inhabits the space between my eyes and brain like lost visions running through narrow gangways separating 2-flat apartment buildings. All of my words root me to those Arctic clippers of grief and anger, the stifled pains and passions without pity.  Frank C. Modica is a cancer survivor and retired teacher who taught children with special needs for over 34 years. His work is forthcoming or has appeared in Beyond Words Literary Magazine, Blue Mountain Review, and Raconteur Review. Frank's first chapbook, “What We Harvest,” nominated for an Eric Hoffer book award, was published this past fall by Kelsay Books.
4/3/2022 Doppelganger by Matthew Harkins Mayank Ganger CC doppelganger The night before his sister’s wedding, after the rehearsal dinner when the twenty-something crowd spills into the hotel bar, Mattie won’t let you buy him a drink. Doesn't want a hangover, needs to set up the audio system for the reception with his dad early in the morning. You’re having none of it. When's the next time your sister's getting married? Two years previously, and ten minutes after meeting him, he’d deliberately flipped you off the back of his jet ski going 40 mph across a glassy lake. You know nothing about jet skis, but you know the fine line between friendly and dickish behavior. And you’ve seen since how often he dances on it, taunting his sister’s fiancé without ever being openly insulting. You’re not sure he fully understands his behavior. Your first-year college roommate, a man you loved, had to sit you down in your senior year to explain how much your teasing hurt him. You’ve never forgotten it, never stopped being grateful he’d pointed out how obtuse you’d been. Maybe no one’s ever helped Mattie out this way. But you’re not close enough to him to do it. You’ve only met him three or four times, when you and your girlfriend (his sister’s best friend) visit his family at their lake house. That day you met, he made a mock announcement: there isn’t room for two Matts at the lake house. In deference to your role as guest, he’d change his name to Mattie. Everyone laughed at the performance, including you. But you’d noticed how his parents seemed to like you, how they’d grin at your self-deprecating jokes. Mattie noticed too, you’re sure. The nickname had sent a message: this was his house and family; he knew which jokes the audience would like. And he was right. The Mattie nickname never went away. So now, at the bar, you can flip him some shit. He grins when you tease him about not drinking the night before the wedding. Fifteen minutes later, he has that drink after all. The two of you start buying rounds. When you call out his stunt with the jet ski he laughs, then asks how many years you plan to waste on a dissertation. You start to think the two of you could end up friends, if neither of you ever leaves this bar. The next day—after you see his dad struggling alone with the audio system and go over to help, after the groom’s brother has to step in at the last minute when Mattie isn’t there to read the passage from Corinthians 13—no one knows what to say. It’s not until three A.M., working through a cooler of beer with friends in a hotel room, that the newly married couple tells the story: how the night before, Mattie and a friend, loaded, beat up a stranger in a parking lot and stole his new BMW. The cops yanked Mattie out of bed, and no judge would grant bail for the felony charges of grand theft auto, robbery, and assault. The friend he was with is an asshole, the groom explains, always in trouble, but Mattie knocked the stranger down and drove his car away. And only then do you recall hearing that Mattie crashed a boat into a dock late one night, months ago, after leaving a lakeside bar. You feel your chest constrict. As if you’d taken a punch or thrown one. That’s when you choke out a confession: how you bought him the first drink of the night, how you and he and the asshole friend had several rounds together. There’s half a beat of silence. Then both the bride and groom insist it’s not your fault. Mattie knew better. You hear the sloshy rustle of a hand digging in the icy cooler. My dad was so grateful, the bride explains, when you came out of nowhere to help him with the audio system. He could never have done it without you.  Matthew Harkins writes and teaches in rural Minnesota, where he also directs a reading series for visiting creative writers. He has recent creative work in Club Plum and forthcoming in Pidgeonholes.
4/3/2022 Rituals By Melody Greenfield fiction of reality CC Rituals “The body is its own ritual…” – Emily Rapp Black, Frida Kahlo and My Left Leg Staring into the bathroom mirror in your open bathrobe, you look beyond your reflection and the cobalt blue terrycloth that hugs your frame loosely, and you let your mind wander. If the body is its own ritual—as your writing teacher has said--your ritual is preparing the body for men. You imagine that, like you, every girl wants to feel beautiful. You feel most beautiful when a suitor becomes engorged at the sight of you, then fills your body with his own. That instant when he—something outside of you—is inside of you, leaves you feeling not only desired, but also powerful; whole. At least once a month, you follow these precise steps preceding sex so that the latest man will find you irresistible. Even if he’s a veritable stranger, his approval and wanting are paramount to your sense of self-worth. You know this, or at least the still, small voice inside you does, so you begin again—taking it from the top. In the shower, you shampoo and condition your hair, which can run the gamut from long and wheat blonde to layered and chestnut brown to collar-bone length in a sassy red to jet black with bangs. No matter the length or the current color, you let the conditioner sit for several minutes, so your locks are silky smooth. Next, you soap up your entire body before tackling your legs. You lather shaving cream on them evenly and glide your razor slowly and purposefully over all that surface area. You wonder: Do skinny girls finish shaving faster? You suppose it depends how tall they are. At 5’7, 130 pounds—a whopping ten L-Bs more than you weighed a decade ago in high school—you know you shouldn’t complain about your physique or the width of your thighs, but with your Jewish hips and ample bum and full, pert breasts, there’s no way anyone is calling you skinny either, which is exactly why you check the “voluptuous” box on your online dating profiles. After the shower, you apply smoothing serum to your hair, twist it up onto the top of your head with a clip, and let it air dry for a while before blowing it out straight or taking a hot, ceramic curling iron to it. This gives you time to begin your parallel routine—cleaning your space. This second routine is even more ritualistic and precise than the first. The trash has to be emptied from every room, the sweeping done, the bed made, the pillows fluffed, the dishes washed and put away—not that you ever let things get out of hand—but it’s all about presentation. You need everything to look its best. As a preteen, cleaning was something you did to feel in control. You arose every morning at 5 am, so you could wash. With a loofah, you would scrub yourself clean. Then, you’d change your underwear and change them again and again and again. Now, you have so many panties—from boring, cotton workout ones to sexy lace ones in every color of the rainbow—that you hardly ever have to do laundry, and when you do run out of underwear, you usually just go online, hoping for a sale, and buy more instead. “Add to cart” are your three favorite words, second only to I love you. Even as far back as childhood, you had cleaning rituals. You’d come home from school and try your hardest to erase any evidence of your messy home life. There was Mom, whose catering business, and other debris, spilled all over the kitchen: dirty dishes; greasy countertops; broken marriage. There was your neurodivergent pest-of-a-little-brother, who regularly put his sticky paws all over the glass coffee table when he wasn’t bouncing off the walls. And then there was Dad—cold and largely-absent—whose dusty, size-ten shoeprints marked up the chocolate-covered hardwood. No matter. Armed with Windex, sponge, and broom, you fixed it all. No footprints or fingerprints on your watch. Anyway, this filth, this disorder, this chaos didn’t reflect you. “You’re sick,” your father said, locking eyes with you, whenever he made an appearance during waking hours and saw you cleaning. “You have a problem.” His words sent the same chill down your spine, every time, causing the peach fuzz on the back of your neck to stand at attention. Now, an adult in your own apartment, there’s nobody around to judge your quirks but you. You feel free to pick up unwanted hairs from the tile floor and shower drain, and you do. You’re just as fastidious as you were then, but your energy is different: less frenzied; less feverish; less frantic. Afterward, you turn the focus back to you. Up until the last moment, you repeatedly curl your lashes until they nearly touch your eyelids. Up until the last moment, you comb your thick eyebrows, so they are arched, just so. Up until the last moment, you sweep powder over your nose to eliminate any shine and hide your dusting of freckles. Then, you brighten your cheeks, apply a pinky-red lipstick, and put an extra coat of mascara on, just to be safe. You spray lavender mist all over your apartment; dab perfume on your neck and wrists and chest and arms; burn fragrant, citrusy candles with fancy names like Tarocco Orange, Pink Citron, and Red Currant. There’s the doorbell now. You blot your lips—your only pop of color—with a tissue and do one more appraisal, one final full-body scan. Black jeans, black boots, black silk top, black leather jacket, black cross body bag. Slimming. Edgy. Good. You’ve got this, you say to yourself as you head to the door to greet him. You’re finally ready to let go.  Essayist, poet, and book reviewer Melody Greenfield has an MFA in creative nonfiction writing from Antioch University Los Angeles. She has been published—both under this name and another—in Brevity, Lunch Ticket, Annotation Nation, The Los Angeles Review, the Los Angeles Review of Books, the Pup Pup Blog, The Manifest-Station, Poke, Neuro Logical, The Erozine, Moment Mag, Sledgehammer Lit, Screenshot Lit, Pink Plastic House, Impostor, the Jewish Literary Journal, Potato Soup Journal, The Muleskinner Journal, Kelp Journal, Rejection Letters, Drizzle Review, Fusion Anthology, The Wave, GXRL, and Meow Meow Pow Pow, where her flash piece was nominated for a Best Small Fiction award. Her work is forthcoming in Drunk Monkeys and HOOT's Cookbook Anthology.
Melody and her Canadian husband live in LA, where she teaches Pilates, and he teaches elementary school. When she’s not working or writing, Melody can be found reading, singing, or on the socials: https://www.facebook.com/melody.greenfield.520/ melody.greenfield_writer on IG. 4/3/2022 Sacred Mist by Niles Reddick LuxFactory CC
Sacred Mist It had been over forty years since Elvis Presley passed away, and when the radio disc jockey announced the anniversary of his death and asked listeners where they were when it happened, the memory of my mother steering the Oldsmobile Ninety-Eight station wagon toward the city from our small rural community swirled into view—the four of us children sliding on the maroon vinyl seats and not wearing seatbelts. As the oldest, I had claimed the front seat, and when we came to a stop sign close to the city, regular broadcasts were interrupted to announce the king’s death, likely from cardiac arrest and his body found in a seated position in front of the toilet on the floor, a fact no one would likely want reported. Mom’s hands shook, tears rolled down her cheeks, and she pulled into a new subdivision with brick homes just outside the city built mostly for the expansion of Air Force base employees. “Is something wrong?” “Elvis is dead.” “Who’s Elvis?” “A singer,” she said. She pulled a tissue from her purse, wiped tears, and pulled back onto the state highway, driving slowly and listening to the Elvis music playing on the radio. I recognized the music from records she played while sweeping and mopping the wooden floors in our clapboard house. She drove slowly, the station wagon floating along the highway like the layered mist floating above the river we crossed and the layers of smoke floating in my grandfather’s den from the Swisher Sweet cigars he smoked while sipping Jack Daniel’s at night after work. When I’d first thought I’d try smoking, I stole a pack of matches from my grandparents’ kitchen, and when they were outside in the porch swing, I took a partially smoked Swisher Sweet from my grandfather’s amber-colored glass ashtray, lit it, and had a few puffs. I choked and gagged until I saw particles of light in my eyes like poor Wile E. Coyote saw in every Looney Tune episode when he was run over, crushed, or fell from cliffs in pursuit of the Road Runner. Like Wile E., I shook my head clear of stars, stubbed out the Swisher Sweet, though not completely, and when my grandparents came in from their swing, my grandmother said to my grandfather, “Are you trying to burn down the house? You left that stinking cigar burning in the ash tray.” “I’m sorry,” he’d said. I let out a sigh of relief, as if I’d exhaled and blown smoke upward toward the ceiling, and I was happy they didn’t suspect their thirteen-year-old grandson. My grandmother had raised her apron, wiped sweat beads from her forehead, looked at me with her blue-gray eyes and said, “Don’t you pick up that bad habit.” “No mam,” I’d said. Knowing it was Elvis’ death anniversary, I turned on my computer in my office, clicked on my Pandora shortcut, and listened to Elvis love songs softly in the background: “Love Me Tender”, “Can’t Help Falling in Love”, and “Are you Lonesome Tonight?” I thought of my mother sweeping and mopping the wooden floors of our old house that was torn down years ago and my grandparents dancing in their living room at Christmas when they both sipped whiskeys surrounded by cigar smoke. I wondered how many people Elvis must have made happy with his music even though the end of his short life was fraught with problems. I imagined the mist of my memories spinning like a vinyl record on a player, the needle inching us forward with the music, until the song is over, the sacred mist evaporates, and there is stillness. Niles Reddick is author of a novel, two story collections, and a novella. His work has been featured in over four hundred fifty publications including The Saturday Evening Post, PIF, BlazeVox, New Reader Magazine, Citron Review, and The Journal of Compressed Creative Arts. Website: http://nilesreddick.com/  YoLaGringo CC Hotel Hopping I don’t remember the exact day my father lost his sanity. I don’t remember if I was at Winston Churchill Middle School or if I was playing baseball during the weekend. I don’t remember if I walked or rode my skateboard home to the news, nor do I remember if I was placed on psychiatric medication before or after this incident. What I do remember is packing up a duffel bag of clothes and watching my house disappear in the rearview mirror, my father white knuckling the steering wheel and I wondering if I’d ever see my dog again. When I was in middle school my father was misdiagnosed with Lou Gehrig’s Disease. At the time, I only knew Lou as a baseball player on my older brother’s baseball cards, I didn’t know the famous Yankee had a disease named after him. Medically, this disease is known as ALS, or amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, a “progressive neurodegenerative disease that affects nerve cells in the brain and the spinal cord.” It’s similar to Huntington’s disease except your cognitive function is usually unscathed. While your body deteriorates your mind is still sharp, trapped in a sinking vessel without the ability to keep it afloat. Both Stephen Hawking and Charles Mingus had ALS. Doctors told my father he was going to die an inevitably slow and painful death. When he heard this, a chord in his brain snapped. The chord wasn’t taut to begin with though - my father is the prototypical American drugstore cowboy of the 60s and 70s. A life of abandonment, incarceration, drug dealing, speed freaking, and the list goes on and on. Trauma atop trauma. Deep seated unresolved adverse experiences never dealt with but instead shoved deep deep down in a chamber pot waiting for the spark to ignite. The misdiagnosis was that spark. We didn’t live long in hotels, just a little over half a year (but this would fuel the beginning of my hotel life as an adult). My father became delusional and paranoid, causing schizophrenic and radical behavior. He believed the home we lived in was pestilential, the water was poisoned, the air was toxic and everything was harmful. We can’t stay here or we’ll die he would say. We switched our routine from The DoubleTree to Red Lion to Motel 6. After a few days staying in one hotel, he would get paranoid again. A week was as long as we could stay before the voice in his head convinced him there was lead poisoning in the water pipes. All the motels we stayed at were within the perimeter of the failing mall outskirts of downtown Sacramento, which seemed to make the nightly news every week for drive-by shootings and grand theft autos. When I got older, I figured out why we stayed around there; easy freeway access. My father relapsed back on methamphetamine during this time and needed to venture all around the city - as any veteran speedfreak does. The DoubleTree was my favorite place out of the hotels we lived in. It was the only one over two stories and the only one with a gym. There was a fountain when you walked into the lobby and a spiraling staircase leading to the second floor. It was very open in the middle and I could always look below from any floor I was on and see the fountain. Something about the movement of the water captivated me. When I would run into guests in the hallways or the lobby I would strike conversations, telling lies as if I was traveling with my important father, from far away, on business. I felt like I was in a Kerouac novel, in some prequel to a city grid subterranean storyline. --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- One night after picking me up from school, my father drove us the opposite direction of the hotel. He never really said anything when he picked me up. He mumbled constantly, like he was having a conversation with himself but he didn’t want anyone to know the words being exchanged. Sometimes I wish I knew what he was saying, it would have made me feel less alone. He had nervous ticks too. The one burned into my memory was his ceaseless need to adjust his shirt collar. It was never in the right place. I imagine he thought it felt like it was choking him, no matter the shirt he wore, even if it was a button up. We must have circled around the city for a while because when we arrived at the secret destination it was nightfall. We were deep in North Highlands, in a rundown apartment complex. My grandmother’s last house was in this neighborhood before she died and my mother currently rents a room in the area. The first time I was ever shot at was down one of the side streets. North Highlands has a 65% greater crime rate than the rest of America. A comfortable place for hotel hoppers. I didn’t ask why we were at the apartment complex. It didn’t matter. I was intrigued. Anything seedy, out-of-the-normal, or a potential-story-producing situation I was hungry for. Unlike most kids who learn their fathers were incarcerated, slammed dope in their neck, and knew Hell’s Angels, my first reaction was I would surpass his crazy antics. As soon as I was aware of who my father really was I wanted to out-do him. Thinking back now I’m probably the crazy one. When we entered the apartment, my father left me and went straight down the hallway to the back bedroom. The kitchen was overfilled with dirty dishes, clothes were piled in corners, and an incense was burning but I couldn’t see where. I looked around the living room and started picking up little nick-nacks and figurines; a Ganesh, a rotund Buddha, and two promiscuous cats locked in a sexual position. On the coffee table surface there were little spoons and cotton balls. I moved a pile of clothes and sat down on the couch, wondering if I should walk down the hallway. Is this why my father brought me here? Was this some sort of coming-of-age ritual I was unaware of? As soon as I gathered the courage to get off the couch, I heard a baby crying. The whimpering froze my movements. A deep depression barreled through me and all I could think about was is this baby safe? My father entered the living room and motioned we were leaving. I could no longer hear the baby and I never saw anyone else in the apartment. A light rain began to fall when we pulled onto the freeway and the high beams of cars coming from the opposite direction looked like flashing Christmas lights. I fell right asleep when we made it to the hotel. When I woke up in the middle of the night my father was nowhere to be seen. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- It was near my 8th grade graduation when our hotel hopping lifestyle came to an end. A few weeks before my father disappeared and I moved in with my father’s older sister, I experienced a humiliation like no other. One weekday I was alone in our DoubleTree hotel room doing homework. I ran out of paper in my school notebook and the only medium I could find was a small complimentary hotel notepad in the bedside drawer. I thought nothing of it and proceeded to finish my homework. The next day in science class we all turned in our homework, like another day. I was always last since my last name started with a W, so when I was walking towards my desk every other student was waiting for lecture to begin. Before I could make it to my desk my teacher called out my name. No one ever likes to hear their name called out loud. There is a troubling quality, always. I walked up to the front of the room, my teacher holding up my homework written on the DoubleTree notepad pages. What is this? He said it with such disgust it made my stomach curl. I began to redden and my palms moistened with sweat. I stuttered, it’s my homework. He held it for the entire class to see. But why isn’t it on normal line paper? How could a thirteen-year-old possibly answer this question? I panicked and stared at the floor, hoping this was a dream and I would wake up in my own bed, in my own house, with my dog nudging me awake to take him outside. I missed my mom. I missed hanging out with the few friends I had after school. Even though my parents were constantly fighting, I missed the familiarity of them yelling back and forth and slamming kitchen cabinets. When I finally raised my head and locked eyes with the DoubleTree lettering printed on the notepad, I realized I would never return to familiarity.  T.William Wallin-sato is a Japanese-American who works with formerly/currently incarcerated individuals in higher education. He is also a freelance journalist covering the criminal justice system through the lens of his own incarcerated experience as well as an MFA Creative Writing student at CSULB. He was the winner of the Jody Stultz Award for Poetry in the 2020 edition of Toyon Literary Magazine and had his first chapbook of poems, Hyouhakusha: Desolate Travels of a Junkie on the Road, published this summer through Cold River Press. Wallin-sato's work comes out of the periphery and supports the uplifting of voices usually spoken in the shadows. All he wants is to see his community's thoughts, ideas and emotions freely shared and expressed.
|
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. Archives
December 2024
Categories |
RSS Feed
