11/1/2018 0 Comments How to Love Someone who has Never Been Loved (or How to Learn to Love Again) by Nina Belen RobinsHow to Love Someone who has Never Been Loved (or How to Learn to Love Again) 1 The first time you touch him he will flinch. He is an abandoned warehouse which has not felt electricity pump through its walls since it was built. Your fingertips are the first lanterns to light the rooms, his cold floors and windows were not anticipating their warmth. The first time you kiss him he will turn away, deny the touch he has long since deemed impossible. Try again, be gentle. Hold his hand in yours and squeeze until he softens. Once his body realizes you are safe he will unravel into your arms. The first time he is in your bed he will be unable to focus. Move slowly and do not rush. Keep his attention and show his body that your touch is trustworthy, that his skin has no reason to be afraid. 2 The first time he touches your scars do not tremble, remember that the desire is mutual this time, that neither one of you is an unwilling party. The dents left in your skin have had time to heal, you are letting yourself relax because he does not need to to be the one to sew you back together. The first time you undress for him make eye contact. Do not let your hesitation show. His touch is not tainted this time, unhealthy, your skin deserves his fingerprints. The first time you make love, you close your eyes anticipating the discomfort and flashbacks you are accustomed to. You prepare for your disassociation, but his breath and kiss and hands do not feel uninvited. You can open your eyes without cringing for the first time. 3 When you realize that this is your first real intimacy just as much as it is his, hold him closer than you had planned. Let him hold you as much as his warehouse walls need to, melt into his arms. Light your fingertip lanterns, fill him so that neither one of you feels empty and barren again. Smile and relax, you are home now. Nina Belen Robins is a poet and grocery store employee. She lives with her husband and cats. She is the author of the poetry books “Supermarket Diaries”, “A Bed with my Name on It” and forthcoming “T. Gondii” and can be found at www.ninabelenrobins.com.
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11/1/2018 0 Comments Wichita Lineman by Grace YannottaWichita Lineman Something felt wrong the moment the GPS lost signal. Your car had been chugging dutifully since you had left the Northeast twelve hours earlier, but you had a feeling that these steep hills, the winding turns and ragged medians, might get the best of the old girl. Still, you regarded yourself as a good navigator. You could get out of here fine, make your way out into the urban sprawl for your mother’s birthday. There was only one way to go anyways -- straight. You kept your hands very tightly wrapped around the leather wheel. Your eyes could not move from the dashboard -- you would not let them. It was only pale, fluttering fields around you, overrun with weeds. The stalks blew, flexible, in the wind. You felt some Orphean force behind your eyes. Look, it told you, see. You did not look. You kept your eyes on the uphill road ahead of you and turned the radio up. It was miles of that wheaten repetition. You expected, in your suburban ignorance, to see a farm or some cattle or just about anything, but you were proved, eventually, wrong. The blond stalks waved in praise to the cornflower blue sky. There was not a cloud in sight. You could not see the sun either. You supposed it was someplace behind you. Then, in the upcoming distance, you saw it, stark against the weeds - a chimney, pokes of red peeking out among the dirt, the last vestige, maybe, of a home once loved. The pale weeds straggled around it, wrapped, suffocating, tugging across the last of the musty bricks. Instinctively, you diverted your focus. You could not look at something dead for too long without flinching. The radio crackled, mumbled something or other. The radio had been changing constantly as you had switched between wavelength zones and you switched it on to the first receptor without static. You needed to hear something. Anything. But rapidly, the brass solo coughed, abruptly switching to something far softer. I hear you singing in the wire. Glen Campbell, you thought you recognized. His voice was smooth, soft, and for just a moment the sky grew richer, as you watched the sun cast a loving shadow over the endless fields. Something blinked in the distance and for a moment, you didn’t feel so far removed. There was a flash of color in the horizon. It felt like civilization -- no, you took it back. It felt civilised. Your eyes gravitated towards a church coming up on the left side of the road and sub-consciously you found yourself slowing down the car. You drank it in, simple white planks and the cross on the chapel glaring starkly against the jewel-toned sky. The sign in front was dirty, worn, you couldn’t even make out the name nor the description out front. But the church itself stuck out -- stark, shining, clean. You continued driving, eyes flicking back to your phone eagerly. It should be syncing up any second now, you thought. But the phone continued to search for its signal. Glen Campbell crooned. You passed another church and only bothered to drop your speed limit down by ten miles an hour or so. It looked nearly identical to the one you saw before, down to the vague, dust-dirt-laden sign in the front. At an intersection moments later you spotted another and yet one. You didn’t bother to stop. You needed to find a signal. But you could tell out of the corner of your eyes that it was the same as the past two churches you had seen before. Something in your gut dropped. I can hear you through the whine. Just as you prepared to pass the third church, your car huffed, choked, stumbled to a stop. It was old but it wasn’t that old. You blinked at the church just across the road -- no one appeared to be there. A vague tremble overtook your fingers and you took the key out of the start with the slightest fanaticism before shoving it back in again. Your car wheezed, sighed, and tripped itself until it began again. The radio did not turn on. You carried on your way, in the silence, trying your best to keep the world around you in your peripheral vision. That feeling of peace, of easy humanity, crept lower and lower in your consciousness the longer you lingered in front of the old church. You drove. Your phone did not sync. Twenty minutes passed and your heart had stuck in your throat -- a notification popped up on the screen of your cell. Hope rapidly took over your system and you pulled over, ripping your phone out of the mount on the dashboard. 10% Battery remaining. Your brows knitted - 10%? Your charger was dangling from the port in your phone. You did your best to check the charger from the butt and the USB but nothing would connect. You were so certain it was halfway charged just half an hour ago. You had to find somewhere to pull over. You continued to drive through the narrow roads, the skeletons of gas stations dotting the roadsides, wrapped in the tangled kudzu fingers. When was the last time they had gas, you wondered. Did they ever? A sign appeared in the midst of the weeds in front of you. Welcome to Canaan. Your phone flickered to black. Well, you hoped, you sort of knew where you were now. You could work with that. The longer you went with the fields at your sides, the deeper your tartaran pit of unease grew. But the landscape began to develop -- the weeds were unkempt but not as bad as they were before, they had been contained at least sometime within the last month, maybe earlier. A sign, then two, popped along the sides of the road but still, as it had been this whole time, the only way to go was straight. As if from the pastel sky above, a warped sort of downtown appeared in the street in front of you. Walls were painted an off-cream concrete, juxtaposed next to aging bricks. Traffic lights flicked from red, to green, to yellow, and yet, still, there wasn’t a single car to obey their orders. No cars, of course, except for yours. Hesitating slightly, you pulled over to the first little building in the line, feeling as if you were intruding. Your phone had been dead for about fifteen minutes now -- your mom might have been getting concerned, without you having checked in in so long. How long had you been off the GPS track? You had no idea. The sky was looming in that odd place between noon-sun and heavy pre-twilight and you revelled in that lull for a moment. That pungent feeling of disconnect. Sighing, you grabbed your charger and headed out of the car. The first store appeared to be a homemade goods sort of antique store, a little Southern haunt. You were familiar enough with those -- if you bought a coke or something, maybe they’d let you use their outlet? You pushed open the door and it hit you, then and there, the smell of sawdust. You weren’t sure what you expected but it wasn’t the slate clean white walls and piercing lights. Something more quaint, maybe? A plump women sat with her legs crossed behind a table of opalesque jewelry. She was almost drained of color. Her shorn hair was a white-blonde, her skin was milky pale and her eyes, just a bit too far apart for your comfort, were a grey blue. The irises were made all the more eerie when reflected from the walls. You did not say anything. She did not say anything. You cleared your throat, tore your eyes from hers, and only then did she elicit the weakest, twangiest of welcomes. There was no vending machine or cheap snack shelf. Just hand-painted plates, smatterings of blurred color as if done by an elementary schooler. Part of you thought you should just leave but you thought it rude and beyond that, even though you knew for a fact that her eyes were currently locked on the iridescent necklaces, something told you that she was waiting for you to do something. Anything. You continued to look. The acoustics amplified your every inhale, puffed your every exhale. You weren’t used to hearing it. Towards the back of the shop a set of brown, almost-burlap-knit sacks hung haphazardly. Intrigued, you stepped forward towards them -- where would you have worn these dresses, anyways? Were there even sizes? -- to clasp the rough fabric between your fingers. The air was suddenly filled with the pluck of a banjo and there should be something soothing about it, but the echoing acoustics made it feel almost tribal. You realized a moment later that you recognized that song from somewhere. It was the one from the country station you had listened to in the car earlier, after your phone had blipped out of signal. There was nothing warm about it anymore, the sweet harmonies removed to the barest, most native of chords. No one uttered a word but somehow, you heard the lyrics in your head. I hear you singing in the wire. With a jerk, you snapped your gaze up and there sat a man on a stool, all wiry limbs where the other woman was heavy. They had to have been siblings, with the same grey-laced porcelain skin and colorless eyes, the only difference surrounding his dank brown hair in comparison to her blonde. He played, and he stared, and you snatched your fingers from the burlap dress as if scalded. I can hear you through the whine. Trying to stall your rapid breaths, you retreat to the other side of the room. A series of rain sticks linger, the wood looking sharp and dry and you couldn’t rip your eyes from the beads and feathers dripping from their handles. These people didn’t look Native American but the sticks were labeled as Lumbee. You supposed that these were real and took a step closer. None of them looked exactly the same and each had an individual, string-attached tag. Regal, one was labeled, bedecked in violet streaks. Humble, all amber beads. But they grew more and more bizarre; Lowlands was far too smooth and there didn’t seem to be a handle in the entirety of the stick. Subjugate, you noticed with a furrowed brow, the biggest stick in the batch. It probably had an inch or two on you. And the last, nestled lightly in the corner: Annihilate. It was the smallest out of all the sticks, you thought with an funny note of irony. What a stupid name for a walking stick. Who would buy it? After pushing a handful of the surrounding sticks out of the way, you wondered if maybe it wasn’t finished, that’s why it was pushed to the back, because it was splintered, looking almost painful to the touch. You didn’t think anyone could really grip it. The banjo music tweaked in oddity behind you and you reached out just to see if it was quite as sharp as it looked, and suddenly the music stopped. “That is not for your use.” You yanked back your hand at the sound of the woman at the front’s voice, as coarse and bland as her coloring and rough enough to elicit a primal sort of warning in the back of your mind. That is not for your use. Suddenly, the menial tag and messy splinters didn’t feel so amusing to you. Annihilate. You, motivated by the heavy, mortal sound of your own breaths coming in jagged streaks in and out of your chest, lost all sense of politesse -- did this situation even warrant it? -- and burst your way out of the corner store. You could find another place to charge your phone, or at least ask for directions. Anything to get out of here. Even after you returned to the outdoors, the sound of your breath still pulsed in your ears. You considered heading back to your car and getting in, but there was a line of restlessness bursting in you upon your exit from the corner store. There was a little shop right next door -- you might as well go there, sit down and grab something to eat for fifteen minutes, and book it back on the road. Every town had its weirdos, you were fully aware, and yes, the vines twisted around the siding of the small restaurant -- that was the way it was labelled, at least -- and you could not help but feel a brief blast of apprehension. It looked like a quaint old home, but it appeared to be on the only place on the block with any sort of life inside it. Besides the corner store, of course. But you could not fathom returning there. Steeling yourself, you pushed open the worn white door. The golden handle was not necessary. The door did not close all the way. You were hungry. A young girl a couple years younger than yourself tilted her head at you from the wooden entrance counter. She nodded at you and slid a menu over. You figured that with skin as translucent as hers you’d be able to see every vein and capillary but nothing. Pure white. You were very hungry. You were seated at a long brown bench. You wondered if you had stumbled into a hostel or something, you could not recall the last time you dined with strangers in this very way. The shop was coated in wood, but different shades. The floor was an orange streaky sort, wallboards a deep brown-black, and the table glaringly moderate, a red mahogany. You felt almost dizzy. Your blood sugar must be down -- you hadn’t eaten since you left your house how many hours earlier? You could not remember. A family was sat next to you, distant at the other end of the table. They all had those wide-spaced pale eyes and variants of that thin, nondescript hair. You wondered if everyone in this town was related. One of those towns, you tried to crack a joke to yourself. But it fell oddly flat. Looking at this family, and watching them blink back at you… You could not bring yourself to find anything funny. They spoke amongst themselves in warped twangs and you were sure, one hundred percent sure, it was English. It didn’t sound like a dialect you were familiar with but were there, truly, any niche dialects in the United States? You shifted on the hardwood bench. Maybe you should have gone. Continued to drive until you found a McDonald’s. There had to be one somewhere. You were in the American South, after all. You were just standing up when the waitress reappeared, bearing a small burger on a paper plate. You did not remember ordering. But you must have, it was just yourself and that family at the other end in the shop. That would be a notable mistake to make. You were hungry. That was it. You bit into it. The burger was almost exclusively bread, just a sliver of meat in between but you savored it. Would they make you pay for it? Thus so far, the shop had been nearly silent, delicately interloped with the quiet, vague conversations of the family across from you, but a static speaker cut the room like a knife. You stopped with the food halfway to your mouth. You knew this song, these cords, far more warped than the first time you had heard it, what, hours before? And still more twisted than the banjo in the corner store. I hear you singing in the wire. The other family did not react, just continued to talk amongst themselves in that ripped American way. You wondered if they could hear it. Almost jolting, you faced a terrible thought. What if you were the only one to hear it? What if there was no speakers after all -- you could not see them, scan after scan. From where? From who? You placed your half-eaten burger on the plate. The family spoke even now but you could tell out of the corner of your eye that their attention was on you. With the utmost care, you turned your head to look at them, to find them all looking back at you. Their eyes were so far apart you had to focus on one or the other. You could not look at both at the same time. You heard your breaths reflected in your ears yet again. This was not safe, said your instincts. It’s time to leave, said your animalistic core, and you had to go. Pushing away your food you slid out of the bench, trying to rationalize the world around you. The family ceased to speak and looked at you, unabashed. You did not look back, at those spaced, pale eyes. You could not. You shoved past the waitress, halfway to a run, and prepared to push through the door when it swung open. Reeling, you wheeled yourself to a stop. You were embarrassingly out of breath. But you had nothing to be embarrassed about. Standing in front of you was the tallest, widest man you had ever seen. There was not a speck of hair on his head. His worn, faded wifebeater was the same tone as his cargo shorts was the same tone as his sunken irises was the same tone as his sullen skin. His jaw jutted out and his eyes -- you could barely permit yourself to look -- his eyes were almost piscine, scooped to the side of his head, parallel on the same line. I can hear you through the whine. You sighed in ragged gasps and turned, motivated fully on your core. There had to be a bathroom somewhere, a back exit, this man was melting, his skin drooping and then for the first time you put a reasoning to the sentiment of unease that had been plaguing you: it was inhuman. All of it. You remember the splintered, spiked wood and you saw it flash behind your eyes: Annihilation. You slammed the bathroom door behind you and pressed your hands together. You stepped forward to do something, anything, maybe to wash your face, that would be a regular emotion to emit when surprised your voice did not sound the exact same in your mind but it was yours you had to be how amusing you thought that you could still hear the speakers from the bathroom you wondered if they cleared out your food or if it was still there you were hungry you were very hungry You looked in the mirror. You were yourself. But you were not. Your skin had lost a little of its glow and your hair its luster, something heavier hung in your face -- when was the last time you had slept? But most notable were your eyes. A little duller, shoved a bit too each respective side. Too wide for your face. You had to look at one, and then the other in the mirror. Humble. As you should have been. Regal. You hoped your food was still there. Subjugate. You tossed your charger, then your phone, into the toilet. Annihilate. You heard it then, again, on a permanent loop. I hear you singing in the wire. I can hear you through the whine. And the Wichita lineman is still on the line. Grace Yannotta is currently in her senior year of high school in North Carolina. She's an aspiring author and an aspiring historian and an aspiring a lot of things. She has work published or forthcoming in Dream Noir, Angry Old Man, and Zin Daily among others, as well as an upcoming astrology column in Dark Wood Magazine. PLEASE ANSWER EACH QUESTION COMPLETELY NAME: Harris “Hands” Conaway DOB: 5/1/ 77 ADDRESS: Withheld because of privacy concerns (available from applicant) Employer: St. Louis Cardinals, L.L.C. Person Making Referral: self Describe when you first knew you were addicted to drugs, include references to the circumstances leading up to the realization and describing the life events, traumas, experiences and relationships that you believe caused the addiction. It all started that September weekend in St. Louis three years ago. We were chasing Pittsburgh for the second wild card. Skip wanted to pull me in the top of the sixth while we were down one. I talked him out of it. “Its in my hands, Skip,” I told him, “there’s a reason that’s my nickname.” In the bottom of the inning I worked Hashman for a walk. A dribbler got me to second and then Garp pulled one into left that got down and I was off for home as fast as my 37 year old legs would motor. Bledic’s got a cannon so Pop should have held me up but he was giving me the windmill. I put it into high gear and put my head down. I looked up just in time to see a white blur flash into Espinosa’s mitt. I was still ten feet from home. Putting on the brakes as fast I as could, I felt a tug and then left knee exploded in pain. I went down, folding up like a paper bag. I tried to get up but I wasn’t going anywhere. They tagged me out. I was out for the season, having torn my ACL. My knee swelled to three times its normal size, the ligament was completely torn. To put any weight on it was like setting my leg on fire. Doc said at my age it’d be best for me to give up activity that put stress on the knees. That’s hard when you pitch for a living. Its even harder when you’ve got 291 career wins and nobody’s ever supposed to reach 300 again. So I asked Doc what Plan B was. Plan B was reconstructive surgery. He took out the damaged ligament and replaced it with a grafted tendon. The tendon acts like scaffolding that a new ligament can grow on. A couple of weeks off and I started the rehab from hell. My knee hurt all the time. Even sitting in the Laz-E-Boy too long made it throb When I tried the exercises the first time I cried like a baby. I’d read about Brett Favre’s problems with pain-killers so I said no the first three or four times I was offered them, but eventually it just got to be too much. The first time I took an Oxycotin it was like swallowing manna from heaven. In a matter of minutes it took me from cold sweats and nausea to a warmth I hadn’t known since my moma wrapped me in a blanket as a child. I had a new best friend. In this rehab you needed a friend. The static bike was o.k. but when my PT guy said hop on my bad leg I asked him if he was kidding? He wasn’t. It was like somebody put a jack hammer to my knee cap. Doc’s number was my most frequently dialed. By the time I started jogging I was eating pills like candy. Nothing else really touched the pain. Not the constant ice packs, not the local injections. I should have known then I was hooked but I wasn’t thinking about that. I was thinking I had nine more to go and not much else. By February Doc said I could try throwing again. He wasn’t making any promises, but I could try it. It was show time and the pressure was on. Funny thing about them little pills. If you’re feeling uptight and tense before you take them all that goes away pretty quick. The Club didn’t say it in so many words but I knew I only had so much time. 300 wins or not they had a rotation to fill and they wanted to know if I was their man. So I was tense a lot, at least till my best friend showed up. I hadn’t really thought about the fact I would have to pee in a cup when I got to camp. That wasn’t on my radar in years past.. It didn’t take Einstein to figure all the pills I was popping would put me over the limit. Still, I’d never been one to juice, so I went in ignorant of what might happen. I was nearly twice the legal limit. A referral to the Health Policy Committee and an order to report for a treatment evaluation followed. The Club told me not to go back to my doctor, I was to report to their handpicked pain doc. I squawked a little but I was doing what they said, not wanting anything to come between me and number 300. Their doc was a pill Nazi. He cut me off the Oxycotin. I started cramping up all the time. I threw up nearly every day and constantly felt like I had the flu. The pill Nazi was not sympathetic. Ibuprofen was his solution to everything.. But Ibu didn’t even touch what I was dealing with. I could get in about ten minutes of warm up before I got nauseous. Pitching and stomach cramps don’t mix. The Club declared me an addict and mandated me to inpatient rehab. The Recovery Farm might have helped some people but for me it was an education in the fine art of sourcing illegal pills and passing urine screens. I was there two days before a college kid in my group therapy had me hooked up with a dirty doc in Collinsville. A friend of his from St. Charles sold high priced urine and a tube contraption that worked even in the presence of a “collector.” I’m not proud of it but I didn’t see how sitting in a folding chair spilling my guts to a group of pill heads was going to get me back in the rotation. Time was not my friend and my GM was not a man of unlimited patience. I did what it took to get out of there quickly. Twenty eight days later I walked out of The Recovery Farm a “new man.” The press release talked about the dangers of opioid over prescription and the importance of selecting your medical providers more wisely. Meanwhile I was making a weekly trip to Collinsville. The Club send me back down to Florida for an extended spring As long as I had my best friend along things progressed well in the Sunshine State. The surgery worked and my knee was feeling pretty normal as long as the pills were available. The Club sent me up to Peoria for a rehab stint and I was looking forward to getting quickly back into the Show. But things fell apart in Peoria. My Collinsville doc got arrested. His runner didn’t show up at the appointed time.I knew I was in trouble. The next day I was cramping pretty badly and scheduled to pitch that night. Late that morning I got a knock on my hotel room door. It was my urine guy. “Hear you got a problem,“ he said, after closing the door.Reaching into his hoodie pocket he pulled out a plastic baggie full of brown cakey powder I’d never seen heroin before but nothing else in a baggie looks like what this did. “No!” I shouted. “Get that outta here now, I ain’t no junkie.” I pressed my hand to his shoulder and went to open the door. Pills were one thing, but in my mind there was a difference between guys who took a pill to help get them through a rough patch and the junkie that shot up. I wasn’t going to be one of those. To my surprise he pushed back. “ Look,” he said, “it’s a temporary solution just til you find another doc. You don’t have to shoot it, you can snort it, just keep it to that and it shouldn’t be a problem.” Somehow, between the stomach cramps and the nerves that made sense to me. I took the bag and got a quick lesson on the finer points of snorting heroin. One line later, I had a new best friend. If Oxycotin was like watching cable TV then heroin was watching in HD. I was feeling no pain. I threw seven innings of two hit ball that night. The Club called my rehab a success and placed me back on the roster. I left Peoria with a new best friend. Describe previous treatment for your addiction, include assessments of your success or failure in treatment, and to what you attribute those successes or failures. Nothing has really worked well, but I guess some programs made more of a difference than others. I’ve already told you what a farce The Recovery Farm was. Part of that was me just looking for paperwork to show the Committee I had “recovered.” Part of it was a lack of commitment to holding people accountable on their part. Both sides were more interested in what looked good on paper than what actually gets people clean. But take that for what’s it worth, I know I’m not clean yet. When the Club called me back up, I tried for a few weeks to get rid of the junk and back to the pills, but I soon found out pills were hard to come by. My doc’s arrest had spooked off those that had them. My name recognition probably kept them at arm’s length too. No matter how much money I offered, nobody was selling. In the meantime, my urine guy kept the junk coming. Taking his advice, I kept doing lines and nothing else. I had no intention of sticking a needle in my arm. I never liked them even in a doctor’s office, and there was no way I was doing that to myself. My season started off pretty well. The Club had already set their rotation by the time I got back from my extended spring so they slotted me in as a long reliever The idea was I would get stronger and wait til one of the five starters was struggling before I would go back into the rotation. I went along with it, thinking it wouldn’t be long before somebody’s year went south and I’d be back where I belonged. But near the end of May, my urine guy just disappeared. Our deal was he would deliver a week’s worth of junk at a time when we were home and two weeks if we were going on the road. But near the end of a homestand he didn’t show. No call, no text, no nothing. We left the next day for Miami and I only had three days worth. By that next Wednesday my stash was gone. The trip was a short one, just three games in Florida and then three more in Atlanta. I was hoping he’d show when we got back home and I could make it through somehow til then. I had a buddy on the team that had just had hammie surgery and a script for Vicodin. He let me bum a pill once or twice when I told him I was short. That helped a little but by the time we left Miami for Atlanta I was hurting. Sitting in the pen the next night I started to cramp up. It was hot in Georgia so I didn’t have explain the sweat on my forehead, but when they told me to warm up, standing up made my head swim. I threw 5-6 pitches before the cramps got real bad. I had to bend over and try to get my head on straight. “What’s wrong, Hands?” was the last thing I remember hearing before I passed out. I went down right from the bullpen mound, crashed into a heap in front of the whole crew and twenty some thousand Braves faithful. I woke up two hours later in the ER, hooked up to IV and a nurse taking my blood. I was praying the junk I’d snorted three days ago was out of my system but I was pretty sure that Vicodin was gonna show up. Turns out they both did. I was violated under the Substance Abuse Policy. I spend two days in the Atlanta hospital and got my notice of an intent to suspend the day I left. Fifty days off and I was to complete treatment. The team doc sent me to a rehab called Clarity. It was part of a hospital in the middle of Utah. One nice, long drive for any media that might think about snooping around and in a county that was dry, enough to keep any reporter I knew away. Clarity was big on structure. In that way it was a cut above The Recovery Farm. They kept you busy twenty four seven. Out of bed at six. Breakfast at 6:30. Group at seven. Drop sometime after that unannounced. Individual therapy at ten. Lunch at 12 Plenary session with special speaker at 1. Back to group at three, Service project at 4, Dinner at 6, Serenity time (by yourself in your room ) til 8, Lights out at 8. Get up at 6 and do it again. Structure was supposed to give you no time to think about using. The special speakers were mostly ex-jocks or business people that beat their addiction. They did it mostly by focusing on their goal. “If you want the ring, you gotta stay clean, “ more than one of them said. That struck a chord with me of course. I had a goal- number 300- and now what stood between me and it was getting clean. I started to pay attention to what the counselors in group were saying. The pill heads and junkies in group weren’t such losers after all. They were all working toward something. One guy towards his MBA, a soccer gal trying to get a D I scholarship, another kid trying to keep his marriage from falling apart. Suddenly it all made sense to me. Focus on the goal and you’ll stay clean. Pretty simple. Why hadn’t it sunk before now? I checked out of Clarity ninety days later with a clean bill of health and a new attitude. I found out I could work out without too much pain without my best friend. I kept the focus on what lay ahead, I forgot about the past. I was going to finish well, get those nine wins and help the team make the playoffs. The Club sent me back down to Florida for conditioning. My trainer started me out light, riding a bike, stretching and jogging. But gradually we worked back toward throwing. I started slowiy, fifteen minutes the first day. Twenty the second. Gradually I worked it up to an hour and a half. Then we brought in some kids from the Rookie League team and had a three inning simulation. That’s when it went South again. I mowed the first six newbies down without working up much of a sweat. But then in the top of the third the first guy up drove one down into the dirt in front of the plate that high hopped toward me. I jumped up to catch it. Coming down, I landed on the back side of the rubber with my right foot, twisting as I pivoted to throw to first. My kneecap was twisted and I felt pain like I hadn’t in a long time. I had to have help getting up.They rushed me to a local ER. The pictures didn’t show a break but the ER doc thought I might have slightly torn my reconstructed ACL. The thing was burning like crazy. They called the pill Nazi but he wouldn’t give me anything but Ibu. The ER doc was sympathetic but he didn’t have any other solutions. They sent me back to the hotel with some Ibu and told me to rest. Fat chance I was doing that. My knee throbbed all night and I couldn’t sleep. I flipped on the TV just after midnight and was greeted by some talking head on FS1 telling the world how I was the new Roger Clemens. Opioids were the new steroids and I was the poster boy for MLB getting tough on them. He didn’t care if I won 400 games, it didn’t mean anything as long as I was drug addled. And how would anybody really ever know? That was about as much of that as I could take. I hit the remote and limped down to the bar. About halfway through my second beer the thought occurred that the talking head might be right. I sat in the near empty lounge, knee barking, head pounding and began to wax philosophical. Was I the next Roger Clemens? Was it really worth it punishing my body the way I was and would have to for the next year to make a goal that the geniuses on cable sports would dismiss as “fake news.?” I’d spend my whole life playing a game meant for ten year old boys. I’d loved every minute of it until that day in September. But the thrill was gone. It wasn’t fun anymore. It had become a grind. A grind I was risking my life and liberty daily to make happen. And who really would care? Some die hard Cardinal fans, maybe some of my old teammates. Plenty of media types, but not because they cared about me. They’d care because it would give them something to write about, talk about, yell at each other between commercial breaks about. Four beers and forty five minutes later the bar was closing. I didn’t feel much better, in fact I was getting nauseous so I stopped by the concierge desk to see if they had any pink stuff. The guy behind the desk brought me a bottle and I gimped my way back to the elevator. Five minutes after I got back to the room I heard a knock at the door. Looking through the keyhole I saw the guy from the concierge desk. I opened the door and he thrust a foil packet of Tylenol toward me. “You looked like you was hurtin’ Mr. Conaway, so I thought these might help.” As he plunked the packet into my hand, I felt something underneath it. Turning it over, I found a large white pill. I assumed it was a sleeping pill, but comparing the markings on it to what I could find on my phone showed it was probably Vicodin. Definitely on the list of prohibited substances. I threw it onto the desk next to the TV and hopped back to bed, flipping the TV back on. The talking head was now part of a panel of three debating whether I should give my Cy Young back. “How do we know he wasn’t takin’ his happy pills back then?,” the genius pronounced. I didn’t wait to see if I had a defender, I shut if off and tried to go to sleep. Sleep didn’t come easy, I rolled and tossed for a couple of hours before I finally drifted off. Next thing I knew my phone was going off. It was the pill Nazi wondering how I was. He was flying down to take a look at me. “Maybe we can get you something a little stronger for your knee,” he mumbled. Something a little stronger turned out to be a double dose of Ibuprofen. That didn’t really touch the pain. Give it time said the Nazi. Easy for him to say I thought. He gave me an exercise regimen that kept me busy 4 hours a day and flew back to St. Louis. I wasn’t supposed to throw til the second week. That left me too much free time. My knee throbbed ten minutes into the PT regimen. The Ibu was worthless and I had nothing to do but trade jokes with my trainer, drink, play games on my phone and watch TV. I wasn’t sleeping well, lucky to get 3-4 hours a night. After four days of this I limped in from the bar and tried to find the TV remote. There sat that white pill. It felt like it was calling me. I was a little buzzed and my knee was barking pretty loud. Why not? I thought, I’ve had Vicodin before, what’s one little pill gonna hurt. I grabbed it and swallowed. My knee pain disappeared within a few minutes, finally I thought, a little peace. But then I started feeling a high like I’d never had before. The rush was incredible. This stuff wasn’t Vicodin. It just kept getting more intense. I broke out in a sweat, the room started spinning, I couldn’t breathe. I staggered out into the hallway and yelled for help. Somebody rushed over to me from the elevator. That’s the last thing I saw for two days. I woke up in the hospital, Turns out the pill was Fentanyl That was the start of my next rehab. I was suspended for a year. The foil packet had two more in it. Good thing I hadn’t taken them. But I’d stuck the foil in my jeans, that earned me a Possession of Controlled Substances charge. Describe why you believe Drug Court will be beneficial for you and why you believe you will succeed in it when you have not succeeded in traditional treatment programs, be as specific as possible in describing the factors you believe will make you successful. When my one year suspension was announced The Club released me. It wasn’t that I didn’t expect it, but still after 18 years you might expect an effort to try to work something out. All I got was a phone call. The isolation I felt was killing me and there wasn’t much I could do about it. Baseball had been my life for as far back as I could remember. Now nobody in baseball wanted anything to do with me. Guilt by association I guess. I got a visit or two from a retired teammate, a couple of calls and texts from current ones but after the first couple of weeks they all stayed away. Everybody but the press of course. After I got back from my second stint at Clarity they were everywhere I went. I holed up in my house if I wasn’t at the Doctor’s, the gym or my P.O.‘s office. I couldn’t leave the house without a car following me, somebody snapping photos. I keep telling myself I wasn’t giving up on my goal. I went to the gym everyday and hired my own trainer to keep me honest. But had I been honest with myself, the truth was I really didn’t believe I would pitch in another MLB game. My agent was not calling. There was no interest in signing me. I was fooling myself into believing things were going to get better. I was so desperate I took a couple of calls from Independent League teams. All of the workouts were not making my knee feel better. It was hurting all the time, barking loudest when I got home from the gym. Which is why I eventually convinced myself relapse was inevitable. Embarrased as I am to say it, I called on my urine guy and, as usual, he was faithful to deliver. This time though I didn’t get away with it. There was a new prosecutor assigned who didn’t trust urine tests. He had all his cases blood tested. And naturally I came up dirty. They arrested me on the spot.I was headed back to court on a Probation revocation and looking at the possibility of prison. My lawyer was shocked the next day when the Judge took my bond reduction request under advisement, leaving me in jail for the time being. He and the prosecutor went back to the Judge’s chambers to talk. When they came out he said the Judge wanted me to talk to somebody and wasn’t going to set bond til I did. The lawyer and I went back to the jail and they sat me down at the table in the Visitation Room.My lawyer was being mysterious about whom I was to talk to. “Just be polite, and keep in mind the Judge will hear hear about everything that goes on here,” was as much as he offered. He’d barely finished when the hallway door opened and in walked Colten Lynch. Colten Lynch was my 19 year old son. He looked terrible, pale and thin, tattoos everywhere. Colton’s mom and I had briefly been together during Spring Training of my rookie season. When she told me she was pregnant, I asked how she was going to care of that. That offended her I guess and I didn’t see her again til Colten was eighteen months old. She invited me to court to wrangle over child support. She wasn’t happy with what I was willing to pay. She didn’t understand how hard it is for a MLB player to see their kids during the season. One ugly shouting match in the Courthouse lead to me not seeing Colten for another three years. Even after that it was only in the off season and only when the Court said so. Since he’d gotten into high school it seemed like he was busy or I was busy and we were just missing each other. I’d kinda lost track of him. But here he was now. Reflexively I stood up and went to give him a hug. “Sit down old man,” he scowled back at me,.. I ‘m not here for no family reunion, you’ve had plenty of time for that which you never bothered with, …It’s plenty clear you don’t give a rat’s about me, never did, I’m done with all that.” Puzzled and hurt I slowly sat back down. “ I dragged myself down here cause somebody who does care for me asked me to. See you and me got a mutual problem, seems we both like smack too much and we both been runnin’ in and out of rehab..” He paused and stared at me, looking for a response, but I really couldn’t of said anything, even if I’d of thought of something to say. “O, Colten…I had no idea…” was all I could manage. “Well, course you didn’t!” he shot back, “ you had important stuff to think about, pennant races and World Series rings, Cy Young and of course, the Holy Grail…number 300, God knows you can’t let a little thing like family get in the way of important stuff like that. It’a been awful selfish of me to get in the way of that! So hey, don’t sweat it man, no biggie...” I hung my head, not really thinking about what was coming out of my mouth. “ Nobody told me, son, I’m so sorry but I didn’t know.” “Yeah,” he snarked, ”poor old Hands,” He put his hands on his hips and looked away from me. There was award silence in the room that felt like it lasted forever. Finally I thought of something to say. “Why did you come, son, why’s this Judge want me to talk to you?” He calmed down a bit and pulled up a chair, “I been clean for nine months now. Haven’t touched the smack. I’d been using just about every day for two years before that. Mom had me in rehab for six months. That didn’t work. I caught a Burglary and was lookin’ at 3 years but then the DA offered Drug Court. At first I said, “No way, I’ll go to prison before I sign up for that Nazi crap, droppin’ every day, huddlin’ up with all the other junkies teliin’ them how I feel their pain, that ain’t me…. But my lawyer said you think you’d like prison better? So that made me give it a try. And you know, all I can say is it works. It works cause you can’t b.s. your way through it like you can with rehab. You screw up you go to jail, not six months after you screw up but the next week, man. You see the Judge every week and you gotta tell him everything you did since last time you seen him. Plus you drop just about every day at first. If you’re using their gonna find out…” Colton and I had never really gotten deep before. Most of the time when we spent time together we’d talk about me and my latest and greatest acheivements. I really had no idea there was a problem with him using. His mom and I had stopped talking years before. The gears were spinning wildly in my head. The noise from my head was too loud for much to be clear, but one thought seemed to blast its way through. My life had been all about me for too long. Somehow I’d let the golden ring I was chasing overshadow the things that should have really mattered. While I was chasing 300 wins my son was drowning in drugs and I had no clue. They called me “Hands” because I also seemed to be in control. Skip could hand me the ball every five days knowing he could count on six or seven innings of solid work. I was like clockwork. I was as dependable as the sun rising in the east. But that dependability came at a terrible cost. I had drawn my circle too narrowly. Anything that fell outside the orbit of baseball was excluded. And now that baseball had forced me out of its orbit, I was drifting, lost in an unfamiliar space, tethered to nothing. I hope that Drug Court will give me a base of stability to be anchored to. I’ve come to realize I can’t control my urge to do heroin on my own. I thought I could control my injury with the drug, but in reality the drug was controlling me. I know now that I can’t do conquer this addiction on my own, its out of my hands. Tom Funk is an Associate Circuit Judge in the Eleventh Judicial Circuit of Illinois. For the past four years he has been the presiding judge in the Logan County Drug Court where he meets weekly with 3-5 participants in recovery and hears their stories. He is married to Karrie and has three children. 11/1/2018 0 Comments A Psychoanalytic Guide to Dressing Oneself During the Internal Afternoon: A Study Inside of Cafes by Adam ShechterA Psychoanalytic Guide to Dressing Oneself During the Internal Afternoon: A Study Inside of Cafes Forty-three years of dedicated practice has taught me that the spectacle of internal overwhelm—in public—is an invisible, psycho-culinary stage-act worth mining with psychoanalytic picks and pens. Invaluable shining elements of tasty personality emerge—that teach about the character’s appetite for its own identity—in a way like no other. The nature of this psychological truth requires a cannibalistic gymnastics of language to obscure the direct blast of emotional pain—the ego and its latticework seasoned with precise humor to be appropriately consumed. During fairly recent research, this phenomenon of hiding from oneself in the maze work of café-words made itself delightfully transparent. The last few field notes of observation show that a startlingly familiar epiphany can instantly echo an experience of one having eternally known something in realms of uncanny starvation. This delivery of archaic knowledge in behavior needs dressing in the archeological stylistics of literary desire. Careful use of the greatest sounding depth-language has been recommended, lest one wind up opening the cold door of a thought-kitchen, isolated from the bodily warmth of emotional ingredients. And yet, I have an aversion to consciously planned seduction. I lean more towards the spontaneous interaction of highly articulate personalities. This revised schedule of communication raises the concern that if I just say the bistro’s name of where I presently sit, that I may never be discovered. I want to be lost in the gaze of implication. I want to be mistakenly found in a location that constantly changes its environment due to unstable, shifting planes of perception. I will place my show of the unconscious upon the specimen slide of the cafe and hold it up to the new afternoon light, so that its wish to metaphorically explode can glow in the coal-burning stove of the written word. Here is the clinical-cafeteria reality, recorded as absorbed: 1) The balding pattern of a man--lonely in loose white skin--erodes by the door. He is hunched over in a slight black sweater, reading in the prison release of a thick yellow prism of a book. 2) The hipster-age/late middle-age mother-daughter duo furiously engage in codependent talk at varying speeds of aging hopelessness. 3) The spritely dressed gay men market their artisanal flavors of unique gestural excitement about being experts at never starting a start-up. 4) The magnetic Tuscanite grandmother with vague owl eyes labors over Anglican repressive styles of quarantining her gothically dressed toddler-granddaughter into the fragmentation of her café swivel seat. 5) The pattern of I-phone conversations zigzag the collective sound dust of the premature daylight acoustics. 6) The sunlight slants at 12:03pm UWS latitudinal angles through the storefront window and onto the frilly flan colored fabric of a dress. 7) The anxiety of afterschool rage lines the countertop with the calculation of giggles. 8) Two cousins fight over a great uncle and the fantasy of his wallet/the emptiness of his heart. 9) The graphs of an architect, towering in laptop luminescence, depict line maps of obsessive need. 10) In a sudden chorus, two mothers pronounce toddler recidivist acts of silly-ism while unspecified consultants declare Genexes something arrogantly un-hearable. 11) The threat of spectacular abandonment is everywhere, the silence of half-eaten orange cake is on a small white plate, and 2.35 hour old Cappuccino stains settle into the little world of an oversized coffee cup. 12) The freedom of coming and going through the cool spring door permeates the psycho-locomotion of all respiratory emotion. 13) The squinting of tourists’ inquisitions through the façade’s glass add postcard evaluation to the yearning mix. 14) The paranoid conceit of sunglasses casually mystifies. 15) The accumulation, coagulation and thinning of the food-drink line syncopates with the dismissive pauses and haste of the slender Caribbean cashier. She adjusts the buying operation of her eye movements. 16) The slowing of conversation in the foreground of the room’s emotional life subsides to the building echo of male competing voices at the top of the stairwell. 17) The acceleration of the dominant-articulating conversational partner climaxes a round of narcissistic bullying. 18) The roaming of curious eyes behind slightly retro-eyeglasses and grease in long curls that’s just about to wilt the integrity of hair physics, calls into question discreet notions of self-care correlated with mid-range levels of superior intelligence and mediocre achievement. 19) The heads that nod too much harmonize with other forms of agreement that fall flat. 20) The beat of Euro-pop pumps an endless soundtrack to 1980’s French Indie films about lost seedy young minds, buttressing the Slavic belligerence of an insecure chap out of sync with the cheer of public festivity. 22) His wife who smiles too much still betrays her want of an uncertain connection. 23) The lineage of café writers who have recorded the downward gawk of the written letter amidst a party of flames in darkness are eulogized in the pity of this onrush of new words. 24) The Korean businesswoman rushing for the door in a black suit with a large silver hip zipper and a hard grey jacket in a V is all about that fast flying images of her mother. 25) The blown-out sunlight that hides her face and seems to follow her everywhere, also swallows the shaking tambourine of the Slavic gentleman’s sugar packets, shimmering in this wall of illumination—and then teaspoons bang in coffee cups reifying the auditory narrative hyper-feelings of the café’s shared adrenalin. 26) The gospel runner’s voice booking it out of the radio runs deep into the archive of the blue-sky’s bass line. 27) The bald man closes then opens the book, gazes inward to a sacred symbol of cohesion he almost found. 28) The golden fingernails of the architect, adjust, one just on top of the other, next to scraggly hair on a passable pink sweater. She brings two thoughts together, each about a former client she will never possess again. 29) All the minds go in and out of deep thought, unable to spy one another in the black hole union of the unconscious gathering, this suckling emptiness to be the first entity to catch the author’s eye. He hears the sound of sad children’s voices top the swell of punk guitars filling the sound pool of the room—the memory of being in a Jewish Social Worker’s womb, circa 1972. The café as an exhibition of emotional portraiture highlights that the interior dance of ones third-eye can be appropriately blended with the ecology of the surrounding population. Who is the "I" of the house poetico-scientist in this projected café? A long documented history of wine, coffee and cigarettes mists the literature, so that if these obfuscating potions are removed, we are then left with the infant's page. The fictive oasis of the cafe cuts the narrating "I" a break, as do all environments that designate/intend for a leisure of depositing the unwanted aspects of self. The ego's speech can set down its armor-plated angst and don the more loosely fitting gown of observation and alimentary experience—this penetration of thoughts into the artifice of the other gracefully goes hand in hand with the id currents of slurping at a coffee cup and noshing a sweet chocolate pastry. The park and the sea can both be makeshift places of work, yet scribes are not providing a direct service to the systemic operations of such spaces. Dissimilarly, the cafe is a meeting place of intersecting purpose—off the main freeway of the 9-to-5 flow—yet still deeply connected within the electric current of the collective socio-economic body. Mothers with babies, the homeless, the retired, tourists, teenagers; also within the routine of work: the variety of schmoozing appointments orally exchanged via caffeine and alcohol; as well as the satellite workers, freelancers wrapped up in laptop tasks, and just plain remote corporate wanderers in search of regulated communal zones. The wavy line of these sheltering effects poses a multifaceted problem to the writer of the psychological self. The cafe's importance here is not so much in the surface drama of its stage, but more in the mirror of its actors and the overall reflectivity of the show’s not-so-subterranean gestalt. A panic trance of wacky interruption genies up from the utilization of a communal arena as an introspective tool. Donating the psyche as a civic laboratory for our intellectual species to better understand the nature of its unconscious processes, may cast gothic shadows into the illumination of the words. The challenge becomes how to keep the speech clearly lit and audible, and with solidly delineated boundaries of authorial voice, as the language comes apart in frenetic shadows—the silhouette of a word mascot dancing in front of the flame of collective pathology, transmogrifying the unprocessed anxiety of scientific morality through the impish crystal of the ironic intellect. One refracts in beams of healing comedian, self-hating magician, or just plain old professional neurotic filtering the medicinal properties of psychoanalysis through the spectacular alchemy of sharing a culinary unconscious. The memoir can be a technology of superior isolation, a polemic for aggressive loneliness, or a feeble plea of the street animal negotiating a domesticating blueprint for business. The underground voice of the restaurant owns the irrationally narrated psychic worlds of food and talk, and being so close to the primal act of its representation, the poetic concealment is so repetitively punctured by the social feeding frenzy of the senses. The street is in the home. The café population can be just as much of a bureaucratic fiction as this paranoid menu of the emotionally starving psyche—a live chorus-cauldron to dump the incomprehensible paradoxes of true selves into the creative play of exaggeration. Words are consumed and whimsical hallucinations of character assumed, interacted with and digested in the arc of a collectively eaten spell of woven-others. The conclusion of what's wrong with humanness as an all-encompassing mind-meat floats to the surface of the brew. The writer sits in front of his metaphor, eats it as a sacrifice for the ritual of narrative creation, consumes his shadow face to become his own golem of infantile neglect. This mask of triggers is the overwriting anxiety—the desire to cover up the simplicity of feeling and its thin layer of protection inadequately designed for a very complicated, deep problem. The ornamentation of description deepens the veneer of the splitting apart object—the visual epic clouding vulnerability with the adornments of lyrical rebellion. Taking for granted that ones soul-deed on earth is drafted in an ink of spaceless substance, although still a moral property of this world, makes for a constant judgmental nervousness, especially when it comes to eye contact and pre-verbal communication through posturing in the literary café arena. The banal event of eating something at the communal table is then an exigent threat to ones very bookish existence. The conflict projection is even available during the capitalist transaction, as if the currency of undesirable psychic material is more precious than the exchange of money for goods to be devoured. These urges are as transparent as a monarch butterfly in the diaphanous heartbeat moments before he violently births himself from his sullen cocoon. And yet this rage, this primitive body want, is/are but mere pulses of the psychesoma—emotional secrets stimulating the story machine of a place in this world with the pleasure of just being. I am a happy baby man who loves being taken care of by being rid of himself through the pyrotechnics of projective poetry—I coach myself—before entering the café-theater, beginning the work of unpaid guilt. Just how does one budget the rental chair of the unregulated seat in the café. Why is there not a parenthetical time limit beside each item on the menu. Café Au Lait (25 minutes) - $3.50, Greek Salad (45 minutes) - $8.99, add chicken (add 15 minutes) - $4.00, equipped with calculations for the computer as non-eating guest, as well as relative and composite time. This displaced feeling of an unspecified role in the void, both within/without is the residue of the primitive mother’s tones of relating—the lack of a clear contractual agreement for financing the concerns of annihilation in the protective coating provided by a precisely purchased container for timed existence. I love people and they love me; I say, repeat, bloom smiles in the neural rivulets of my mantric supplication. Thank god for being able to learn patience in the years of middle life and the blessing of moderation, the gray zone of desire and frustration. I am having fun at the sleeping boundary of socializing with unknown people. I pull my face from a puddle of dreams and overhear the acceptingly savvy food server, as he clears the narrative rich complaints of the Old World traumatized consumer. I duck the murderous projectiles of his kvetchy voice. I don’t need to ask for help covering my ears. Instead, I explore the emptying coffee cup. It's large roomy pot able to be filled with all that I would need for an ambulatory workday of the itinerant mind: Lap top, dress shoes, sweater, snacks, papers, random odds and ends comprising the arsenal of defensive props—placed alongside the barricade of a coffee mug. The almost aerodynamic curve scheme of the cup’s shoulders, chest and waist give the impression that I might climb in—cling to the walls of this porcelain exoskeleton like a weightless ladybug. I am complete and ready to descend the verticals of my day as an aesthetic insect at the bottom of an empty well. In the dream pit of the café, the scale/exposure of architectural elements comes across in unusually large dimensions of height, light, width and length—gravity opens up awareness to the poetico-regressive inquiry. The subjection of public space to the single patron destabilizes the realm of the object, so that the audience as performer grows susceptible to psychic swaps with the spectator. A field of salad greens is a safe haven, in particular, munching with one's face too close to the flow of the vegetable landscape. All the planes of sight jagged with the ruffled contours of leaves offer the camouflage needed to tend to the latent pain of an Old World narcissist's broadcast across the restaurant floor. The warm chunks of grilled chicken provide anchors to sink his anger to the stomach shore. The chore of his inter-Atlantic hysteria is mitigated by the sedation of olive oil. The need to connect through the silence of hypercritical watching dissolves the free radicals into the peaceful blood of hearty artichokes, thin carrot strips, crunchy green beans, and the health stream in general. Narcissism is only further irritated by interpretation, challenge; any question to its state of illusory wholeness that reveals its incomplete composition of fragments. These shards are sharp and when released from their wall, easily cut a perceived enemy, dissect shrewdness through their momentary shatter, so they can return to their placement in a picture perfect whole. Philo-narcissism, a caring love for the narcissism of the self or other, is understanding this need to keep the mirror as is and to respect the self-hatred that this self-love constantly battles as fundamental to the healthy balancing act of any psyche. The stranger’s voice that aggravates and elicits the "would he just shut up," is not the voice of my own, but perhaps the voice of his most important ancestor, who might've felt just that way about him, "the object who hates him" that he transplants with the tentacles of his needy desire to each relational vector of his occupation. He, who is the other of the restaurant laboratory-cage. When the restaurant-other exits, suddenly I can breathe again. The respiratory reality of the café resumes. Clearly, I was linking my emotional scuba gear with his in the symbiotic underworld tank of this place of eating. Detaching my psycho-carnivorous ways from the public space would clearly benefit the lucidity of this text. This realization having the same metabolic effects of peppermint tea on the gastrointestinal system as it does for its psychic corollary. The surplus of unconscious objects accumulated from deconstructing the internal-outside world experience reveals itself with the hormonal taste of over-narration in the lonely esophagus of café history. The guilt continues: I came to this innocent public space to pillage it of its metaphors, forming the unbearable sense of needing to belong somewhere that I am too much for—typical. Primal identity is illuminated in the fluorescent boxes of desserts--coated in the thinness of ego membrane—bringing bright invisibility to the interface of oral capacities, or opacities as it were, an activation of primal deficiency in darkened mirror. Almost amoebic, plasmic, the festival of little life swirls to the surface at the slightest maternal touch—brownies, creampuffs, a banana muffin—making good decisions about pleasure strengthens the ego’s insulation. In the adult, this representation for extrauterine envelopment, feeding for systemic regulation, manifests in distorted currencies. The glass display case is a pornography of the greed wound—mammary gland by design, it signifies that the most longed for object of consumption can be contained inside the outside of optically penetrable beauty. Even before I realize that I am through with this meal of myself, I plan departure into the meta-habitat of street mammals, birds, rodents—pedestrian predators of the more monetized food groups. Perhaps, I shouldn't even bother going out. I have already colonized the café’s instinctual symbolization, even before seeing the notion of a full day. The twirl of tourist desire agitates my native roots, as if I am sealed in a diorama of my syllogistic gaze—they are me (in me) in my vision of eating myself, in a now that I have cooked for them in the deepest, hottest pots of my mind. So then, I am assume the joyful blame of devouring the primal mother screen in public—a less than candy flavored cartoon of the intrapsyhic sorts. Killing time is depressing by its very concept, except when done in preparation for a holy feast of the unconscious. As if time is something to wipe away—the only thing we have—still, seconds are best gradually swallowed in an arena of blissfully nervous dining. Adam Shechter has been published in The Minnesota Review, The Literary Bohemian and Psychoanalytic Perspectives, among others. He delivered a paper called “Notes on a Theoretical Script for Poetic Living in a Therapeutic Trance,” at the 2017 Annual Conference of the Association for the Psychoanalysis for Culture and Society. His chapbook, Paul Celan and the Messiah’s Broken Levered Tongue was co-authored with Daniel Y. Harris and published by Cervena Barva Press. He lives in NYC with his wife and two children, where he works as a psychotherapist in private practice and at a neighborhood clinic. 11/1/2018 0 Comments Six Blocks Apart by Trisha KostisSIX BLOCKS APART I don’t know what my mother wants from me. I mean, I’m almost 40, and I still can’t figure it out. Sometimes I think she’s bipolar or something: one day she’s spilling over with joy and affection and the next, she’s closed up like an oyster. She’s been after me about helping around her apartment. It feels like every time I see her, she’s got these pleading eyes like she’s helpless or old or both. I don’t think 57 is old. She’d be so much more competent if she just took better care of herself. I’ve run out of empathy because I see her still smoking and just flat out refusing to do any kind of exercise. So, her back hurts – big fucking deal – whose doesn’t? She’s got excuses for everything, always has. I sound angry. I don’t actually feel angry but shit, I’ve got my own life and kids and work, and I’m choking on everyone’s needs. My mother’s dripping kitchen faucet doesn’t make the cut. And then there are the guilt trips: a finely honed technique she learned from 12 years of Catholic school. She’s perfected this look that screams “you’ve disappointed me again”. Just put her in a habit, and she could easily be mistaken for Sister Mary Shame-On-You. When my phone vibrates, and her picture comes up, I feel an outrage I can’t quantify. “Mark, honey, I bought this (insert whatever thing she bought for whatever inexplicable reason that she now realizes she cannot assemble) and I can’t figure it out. Can you come over and take a look at it?” “Did you look at the instructions?” “Of course. I can’t make sense of it.” “Google it.” “I did. But I don’t have the tools to put it together.” “I left that toolbox at your house.” She falls silent; the phone lines an echo chamber of recrimination. I should probably just do it. She lives so close; I could walk the six blocks to her apartment and have it done in 30 minutes. But I don’t. Her increasing helplessness infuriates me. And the neediness: she’s now worse than my 3-year-old. This is the same woman who dragged me across the country at the age of ten to start a new life in Seattle with nothing but our shitty Goodwill clothes shoved into Hefty garbage bags which we stuffed into the trunk of our tired old Ford Escort. I remember my dad’s twisted and forced half-smile as we pulled out of my grandparent’s driveway. I watched him disappear through the back window of the car as we drove away. I can’t recall how she convinced me that moving 3,000 miles away from everyone I loved was going to be a positive life change. Maybe she didn’t say anything. That wouldn’t surprise me. However she managed it, one thing’s for sure: It took a lot of grit and moxie to bust us out of that lifeless stagnant town and roll into a whole new future on bald tires. And it wasn’t terrible. It took some time, which felt like an eternity to me then, but by High School, I had made a few friends and dug myself into our new home. She was a tough disciplinarian when she was sober. It was ironic, the things she flipped out about. “You’re SMOKING?” she screamed, after finding a strange pack of cigarettes in the kitchen cupboard. “Not exactly.” “What the fuck does that mean? Whose cigarettes are these?” she yelled, grabbing her lit Newport from the ashtray with one hand while waving my pack of American Spirits in the air with the other. “They’re not mine. I swear I only tried a few. It was gross. I’m not going to smoke, mom.” “What happened to the little boy who used to nag me about smoking? I thought you hated it!” “I did. I do. I’m not going to smoke anymore.” But I did, for a while. I just got a lot better at hiding it. And I drank and smoked pot and took some other drugs. And I was excellent at hiding all of that too. It certainly helped that she was busy with her drama. She took a couple of “vacations” in rehab. She stumbled into an absurd relationship with a freak of a married man who moved in with us for a year and tried to convince us both that he was an aspiring punk rock star. I was probably the most concerned about her during that year because she hadn’t been in a relationship since she left my dad and she was behaving like a drugged out 13-year-old girl in the throes of puberty. It was embarrassing. There were things I heard in that little two bedroom apartment that I can’t unhear. After she had strung together a few years of pretty stable sobriety, the remorseful inquests began. “Do you remember when I (insert whatever heinous parental transgression she might be remembering as she navigated the 12 Steps)?” “No, mom.” “You don’t? How is that possible? You can be honest and tell me!” “I really don’t remember.” Conversely, she didn’t seem to remember the things that had meaning for me. “What happened to my baseball card collection?” Flummoxed pause. “Huh. Well, it must be in the basement?” “No, mom. You said that the last time I asked. Try again.” “Are you sure I didn’t give it to you?” “Yeah, I’m sure.” We kept up this charade because she couldn’t admit that she lost them. I think I’m still pretty pissed off about it. I mean, it was a collection. Unexpectedly, I fell in love – crazily, insanely, blindly and fatally in love. It shocked the shit out of me. I was such a nerd, such an awkward guy. Girlfriends, romance – it all seemed unattainable. Somehow this beautiful, smart, sassy girl liked me. Then loved me. Then married me. It turns out, this was the one time my mother was totally NOT disappointed in me. In fact, I sometimes felt she loved her more. They quickly became “girlfriends.” They liked the same music, same clothes, same hairstyles. My mother’s high school graduation picture, which sat in an ornate frame on her bed stand, looked eerily similar to the prom pictures I took of my girl. Things between my mother and I changed. We drifted a bit further. That’s not terribly unusual. A man gets married; he turns his attention to his wife. And the perks of this partnership kind of ameliorated my apathy toward my mother. I felt peripheral, and that wasn’t a bad thing. It was no longer my responsibility to remember birthday gifts and cards and Christmas presents. My wife, ever so resourceful, answered all the desperate calls to fix this or pick up that or put together those. I felt unburdened and guilt free. My phone no longer felt like a terrorist. We became parents –she became a grandmother. There was so much joy to go around it felt like we had been washed clean, like absolution. More than birth, it felt like a rebirth. As a grandmother, my mother was a revelation. In any stretch of my imagination, I could not have known that she would absorb this role like the rising sun engulfs the dark sky. Watching her with my son, long forgotten and nebulous images of my own childhood joyfulness would surface without warning. They were all so in love with each other, that it was easy for my mother to miss the gradual disintegration of my marriage. I didn’t talk to her about it. I didn’t even accidentally talk to her. I didn’t know how to tell her that the one thing I had done that pleased her was falling apart. Now I’ve got baggage and confusion and more than a little chaos. There are details to work out and legal concerns and financial snarls that crash into my dreams nightly, depriving me of the relief of sleep. And in addition to all this, I have to worry that as she gets older and less competent her needs are going to surpass any interest I might have left to help. She’s like a job description that I have to sign when I know I’m not the qualified candidate. I try to imagine what it would have been like if we’d never moved those many miles away. In a picture I have from the day we left, we both look so young and earnest. We are leaning against the car. Her arm is around me, and I am snuggled into the curve of her lean hip. There was a connection there, then. Something was developing. But she tried to move us closer together by putting distance between who we were and who she wanted us to become. Now we live six blocks apart and it’s too far for me to walk. Trisha Kostis is a writer and Chef who spends the bulk of her time running a misfit crew of cooks and servers in a Seattle food establishment. When not creating dishes that diners can insult on Yelp, she is writing flash fiction and working on a short story collection that she previews to her grandchildren for their candid appraisal. Her essay “Parts Unknown” is published in the June issue of Into the Void. https://intothevoidmagazine.com/ “Freud in the Kitchen”, a non-fiction essay on restaurant life, will be published in the June issue of the 45th Parallel. http://45thparallelmag.com/about Whatever Is Pure, Whatever Is Lovely, Preserve Woman curls at the center of the white featherbed, listens for her man’s footfall. Fat sprockets of snow pile along the frame of the window. It is dusk and she is the pearl of Switzerland. But within that pearl are thoughts, the grit of an alien dream. A boy, nine maybe, head cocked, face shadowed and crowned by window light, appears nightly to say, “You don’t know me yet, but I’m sorry.” She lies in the chalet bedroom, geraniums in window planters mounded with caps of snow. A dreadful chill, anticipation of the mournful boy, pricks her fingertips. Who is he, with his cocked head and close-cropped riddles and sorrow? He returns. “There were these kids. They stuck a pin in a beer can and hid it. They made me find it in the woods.” She thinks, A pin like a button? A pin for sewing? and he's gone. She listens and hears the cog train, its hearty clicks of dumb horsepower, haul up the incline to her village. Last night she and her lover drank warm cider. They knew when to nod, when to laugh. Later, the little boy finds her again, stands between her and the window. He shifts his head upright and says, “Take my hand.” It is cold, rubbery like the fingers have no bones. The man flips back the sheets and climbs on top and bites the woman’s neck. She rocks him in some carapace of bliss; he responds with a crashing growl. Each kisses the other’s eyelids. Propped on her left elbow, right hand fallen to the surface of the soft, deep coverlet, she remembers: the dream boy said, “They’re all here, ma.” She was with the boy in an old pine forest. She heard water trinkle down rock. She asks her lover as she pulls on dry snow boots, a ski sweater, “Do you one day think we’ll have a boy?” She narrows her gaze. She remembers asking in the last encounter, “Who is all here?” She wants to protect that tenderly familiar boy. “All of them, ma. Look here one day.” He looks past her shoulder, and her gaze follows; she sees a grotto, then tail lights of a car, double rectangles with a red dot at the center, slink farther over tire-rutted pathways. The boy, high above black branches outside, somewhere above repeated cuts of triangular conifers, above the crowding crown of peaks, above cracking Bernese glaciers, sees the lovers like a film, the snow speeds toward them in darts of silver. He smiles, tender toward them, and doesn't want to lead her to the ruined old grotto, but this dream prepares her to swim up through heartache's scheduled avalanche. One day, the dream will have a different setting: a flooded copper mine, devourer of old shopping carts and refrigerators, of boys that collect war medallions, sunk heavy in shadowy veins. A.E. Weisgerber is a teacher, editor, and writer, a 2018 Chesapeake Bay Writer and 2017 Frost Place Scholar. Work in Heavy Feather Review, The Alaska Star, SmokeLong Quarterly, FLAPPERHOUSE, great weather for MEDIA, Matchbook Lit, DIAGRAM, and Zoetrope Cafe’s Story Machine. Her work has been nominated for Pushcarts, Best of the Nets, Wigleaf Top 50s, and Best Small Fictions. She reads for the Wigleaf Top 50. Follow @aeweisgerber or visitanneweisgerber.com Artemis Mourning A One Act Lament by Brent Gudzus Cast: Artemis, Greek Goddess of Wild Creatures; Chorus Scene: Artemis speaking alone on stage with the chorus chanting off-stage. Artemis: It saddens be greatly that you have taken for granted the great gift of the Earth’s bounty of endlessly diverse varieties of life, of plants and animals, and that you have relentlessly assaulted the biological integrity of our beautiful planet with poisons and with no regard for the needs of the other organisms with whom you share the Earth. Do you think that there are no consequences for your actions and that you can live selfishly for ever without destroying this great gift of life we call Earth? Chorus: You’ve poisoned the oceans, the earth and the sky, All of the animals are starting to die, With all of your science, what it is worth, If you kill all the creatures that live on the Earth? Artemis: It has never been easy for you to survive, but then if it had been easy you wouldn’t have the skills that you have, the great cunning that has allowed you such domination over the other creatures and which domination you assume the right to pursue without question. For so long the elements kept you contained and restrained but then you discovered the great gift of science and that was the end of evolution: you are in control of the planet but you cannot control yourselves or control the consequences of the fruits of your applied sciences. You sad, lost, and self-destructive creatures. Chorus: You’ve poisoned the oceans, the earth and the sky, All of the animals are starting to die, With all of your science, what it is worth, If you kill all the creatures that live on the Earth? Artemis: Your ignorance has created a conflict with the available resources of the world. You are over-populated and out-of-control; your way of life is not ecologically sustainable. At the very least, then, you need clean technology to minimize the damage of over-population. Because we are in the middle of an inter-glacial period between ice ages there is going to be global warming, but you have accelerated the warming with your reckless fossil-fuel addiction. Carbon dioxide emissions and the burning of fossil fuels must stop; all forms of pollution must stop. Chorus: You’ve poisoned the oceans, the earth and the sky, All of the animals are starting to die, With all of your science, what it is worth, If you kill all the creatures that live on the Earth? Artemis: If people are fortunate when they are young they see the truth with great clarity, but the business of survival in human society soon overwhelms them with compromise after compromise until the truth is lost or deeply buried. We must maintain the purity of our youthful values that sustains the most intelligent vision for the future of the only planet in the universe that we know life of that has life. We are letting Earth die before our eyes and on our watch – we are cheating future generations of the magic of the beauty and abundance of the gift of biodiversity that we have so extravagantly squandered. Chorus: You’ve poisoned the oceans, the earth and the sky, All of the animals are starting to die, With all of your science, what it is worth, If you kill all the creatures that live on the Earth? You’ve poisoned the oceans, the earth and the sky, All of the animals are starting to die, With all of your science, what it is worth, If you kill all the creatures that live on the Earth? The End Brent Gudzus is a life-long Californian wildly fond of hiking & ecology, art & science, philosophy & religion. He is very happily married with no children. 11/1/2018 0 Comments My Heart by Stacey JonesMy Heart My heart, The one that kept yours beating for nine months, is torn. That flapping hanging piece no longer seems to fit back into its place. I try to pat it back and can hold it there to staunch the bleeding but I have little confidence that it will ever reattach. My fingers grow sticky holding it and I am aware that you are unaware. The currency we once used has changed and instead of boundless love, has converted to a clipped and measured script. Hollow and insincere echoes of words gone by. I've spoken. There is nothing left to say and nothing being said and I am left wondering if anything was ever actually said at all. The small torn piece begins to feel larger as the other part of my beating heart seems to whither and shrink until it is only that tear that exists. Who knew we could ever be this way. Stacey Jones, a former New York City Cabaret singer, and alum of the Actor's Studio and the Singer's Forum, somehow became the mom of three now grown children who were homeschooled from birth to college. At present she is transitioning into herself again and is currently happily living in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, where she was born and raised. Lost Keys and St. Anthony’s Corner A woman appeared out of the thicket and startled me. She was middle aged and wore denim, a sweater, and rubber boots that said Hunter on the top in small lettering. I did a quick energetic and pragmatic survey of her aura and her apparel and decided she was not crazy or a threat. I would love to say I read her past and future, but it is not the case. It was mainly the boots, because those boots are a sign of affluence. If women can glance at a man’s shoes, then why can’t men glance at a woman’s footwear? This is not to say that a well off person can’t be nuts, especially since this is often the case, but let’s just say for our purposes here, that she didn’t seem like she had been living in the forest or in any type of real distress. My wife and I were there with the dogs, and the woman had a dog also. She looked bothered by something and offered, ‘There is police tape in the forest, just up the way a bit, on a back trail.’ I didn’t say much, and she continued with, ‘I want to go look at the crime scene a bit more, but with you both if you don’t mind, because I am frightened, but interested.’ ‘Sure, let’s go,’ my wife said, and that is what we did. There was in fact a crime scene and the yellow tape was all around marked with the regional police designations. Someone had dug up an area and they had put plastic under the dirt that was brought up. I could see they had been sifting through the earth looking for something. The lady, or Hunter as I named her in my mind, was intrigued and perhaps had watched too much television, because I could tell she thought it was a murder scene when it could have been that someone had buried an old pet there, or something else more prosaic. We spoke briefly about this and that, and shared stories about strange encounters in the woodlands. There were keys that were found unclaimed, odd sounds at times, even peculiar people. But those stories we agreed are nearly always open ended, sort of unclaimed like lost keys themselves. ‘I don’t know what it all is,’ I mentioned to her, ‘not wanting to obsess like it seemed she was, but rather continue with the walk,’ but the police rarely give information about things like that, and other stories about animal predation or lurking wolves human or actual are always about a friend of a friend that knew someone who was through here…’ ‘Yes, but this looks serious.’ ‘They found something, or someone did, and notified them. I’ll give you that.’ The three of us stood there in the early autumn with our two dogs and her one dog. The place was verdant but wet, which took away from the summer picaresque scenes. Feral flowers once proud, bloomed, were wilting, getting ready to re-enter the earth like whatever was buried that the police dug up. I looked up at the canopy that made a firmament over the forest and sighed. Glancing down I noticed that the police tape was bobbing up and down practically violently, but nobody, not even the canines, was touching it. ‘There,’ I said, motioning with my head. Now Hunter, who was half immersed in this whole thing, was all in. I was now half in and so was my wife. ‘Look at the leaves,’ I cautioned, ‘they are completely and absolutely still. There is no wind whatsoever. What is making that tape go like that?’ And then it would stop suddenly. And begin again. Stop. Go. Stop. Go. The lady wanted this to be her moment, her real experience of the paranormal. Though I have spoken to spirit, and rescued spirit, and am a true believer, I was not receiving anything. But I knew this lady really had watched too many television shows, both crime programs and paranormal ones. ‘I am here,’ she yelled, ‘I am ready to hear what you have to say!’ It was then I felt embarrassed for everyone. I just wanted to go. But there was the tape, and it did keep starting and stopping. I told her to film the thing and that I was going to look at it. I did. I looked closely. There was nothing touching the tape like a branch. The trees were large, and there was no motion to them either. After a while we did separate from her, left her there, and told her to be careful. We found a key not far away. A week later, another key, from the same type of vehicle. This could be discerned because there was a designation in the form of an auto decal design on the key. It was a Saturn, which I thought about in a willfully poetic way, and said to myself, Saturn. The planet that the term saturnine derives from. And it is sad. Sad that something happened, to something or someone it looks like. Also sad, if you will, that nobody will find out the facts, the whats and whys and wherefores… And Hunter. She is sadder than she knows. She is well off but a bit too bored. Maybe she killed someone. Then…No, it could not be, the forest is not the only feral thing around town, but your imagination is…wild. Yet, - stranger things have happened. Maybe those boots are just a cover. Maybe the boots belong to the victim. And two keys, from what are probably the same vehicle, both found close together on a small labyrinthine back path that hardly any soul travels. Maybe Hunter did have something to do with it. She friggin’ killed someone, is totally ‘off her nut,’ and somehow dropped these keys as she was burying the body. The rest of the song and dance is a way of getting her sick jollies. Not only that! Maybe she planned on killing when she thought it was just me she was confronting, but with the wife and dogs and all, it was just too many, too risky, too much work… And how about the end of summer itself? A certain sadness creeps in with the autumnal wind, and with the early nights and the cold that takes away the robust August flowers of several different hues, shapes, and scents… In the light of the morning each time, we left the keys on a sign at the beginning of the path that creates a corner along the way. It is where walkers leave things for one another. It’s like an honor system, an open air space of lost and found of sun glasses, animal tags, clothing items, and of course keys. They should call it St. Anthony’s corner, because he is the patron saint of lost things. It’s been weeks, and nobody has claimed the keys. One just waits there affixed to a part of metal on a wooden pole, and the other juts out from the wooden frame of a large map that the town has made. I for one, can hardly believe that one, or two persons, would not come and claim their car keys. I scoured the news but there was no mention of any type of crime. I don’t know what became of the lady, and I am not sure what happened there. I do know that my wife, the dogs and I, got caught in the dark that night because of the delay. I heard something following me just off to the back left, flanking me as it were. My wife was ahead. I mentioned it to her. ‘Something is here following…’ ‘It’s just the dogs.’ ‘It’s not the dogs, because they are in front of me and besides, we are on a path made of sand now.’ Nothing else was said. The noise of the footsteps in the dark, about fifteen feet behind, became more pronounced. But we kind of scurried along faster and made it the car. The light of the road, those electric lamps, were like a haven. Driving out of there, I asked her what she thought it was. ‘I don’t know, but I heard it too.’ Brian Michael Barbeito is a Canadian writer, poet and photographer. Recent work appears at Fiction International from San Diego State University, CV2 The Canadian Journal of Poetry and Critical Writing, and at Catch and Release-The Columbia Journal of Arts and Literature. Nominated for two Pushcart Prizes and one Best of the Net Award, Brian is the author of Chalk Lines (Fowl Pox Press, 2013, cover art by Virgil Kay). He is currently at work on the written and visual nature narrative titled Pastoral Mosaics, Journeys through Landscapes Rural. 11/1/2018 0 Comments Roman Villa By By Caroline HenleyROMAN VILLA My mother’s house has been conquered by barbarians--my own family, squatters who refuse to leave. To sell this house in DC while living in New York, I have to engage in a little self-promotion: master of the house sounded good. The hitch is that the youngest daughter is often the easiest to ignore. Inheritance, too, seems to cast quite a binary. While I have to muster everything against my nature to become a manager to these squatters, I realize that I’m becoming a servant to this house. My brother isn’t ready to sell yet. “I need more time,” he says. “Don’t even worry about it. Everything’s under control.” He buys modest gadgets--a vacuum sealer, a butter making machine--with our mother’s life insurance money, and runs a home business from the suburbs. My father begins staying at my mother’s house during the weekdays three months after she dies. The commute to his IT job at Geico is much shorter now, and he can also keep an eye on my brother, the 33 year old who had never moved out of his mother’s home. He is stocking the cabinets with Yorkshire Tea. His monogrammed LLBean dopp kit hangs from the bathroom hook. My brother and my father go out to dinner each night, and line the fridge with take-out containers of pasta and half-eaten hamburgers. He is moving in, not helping to move out. We set up an altar in the living room. I pour my mother’s ashes into her favorite Chinese vase and set it in the middle of the mantle. My mother’s middle sister says she has always loved that vase, and asks if she can have it. “Mom’s in there,” I say. I explain that ancient Roman families each had a household altar, a shrine to the spirits that they can interact with personally each day. A lararium! I say. Your older sister, she’s like a Roman god! She says it’s getting late and she really must head back home. I need to get everything out, but it’s hard to say goodbye to each square foot. A piano once served as the entryway’s tabletop. She had bought it in the hopes her children would pick up the skill, which would train our minds and help us grow to be wealthy lawyers. After a few years of growing dust, it was sold to a more musically ambitious family. What’s left is a heavy oriental rug that needs cleaning, four feet of a piano still imprinted in the wool. We lived with the house’s original 70’s campy interior design for most of our time there. The kitchen countertops had been bright yellow linoleum. The bathroom mirror was ringed with light bulbs, as if we’d be going on stage after brushing our teeth. Only recently did my mother start fixing it up, knowing she wanted to get married, sell it to retire into something grander. My mother spent years researching the perfect marble kitchen countertop replacement, asking my opinion between slabs every time I visited. “Earth green? Or mother-of-pearl?” she asked, shoving the rock samples in my face. She finally settled on a bright white marble, and from then on, followed her guests around with a cloth to ensure no rings or stains were ever left behind. The first floor of the house is small but warm, outfitted in rich Roman reds and golds. Bulky raw silk curtains line the windows; frames of Audubon birds, regattas, and English castles line the walls. The den hides the TV, as well as a large salmon pink couch. The three of us would pile on that couch together, ignore whatever late-night show was on to joke around and catch up. The house was in its tip-top DC socialite prime when she died--no expense spared for the engagement party she hosted for me just a few months before. “You’re stressing her out. You’re killing her,” my brother had said, calling me from the car as the two of them scoured Bethesda for new couch covers. “She should not be stressed out right now, and you’re making her have this party.” It was a good party. My mother picked up a magnificent chocolate ganache opera cake from a patisserie in Georgetown and served it to a mix of my worlds: my future in-laws who flew in from the midwest, the ex-co-workers who still talked to me, her book club friends. We decided to repeat the party’s model for the funeral. My future in-laws rebooked the same flights. “Look at her white couches! Look at her marble countertops,” I said to the funeral guests, among them an interior designer or two. Come, sample the cheese plate, and marvel at my mother’s furniture. They didn’t know my mom was looking on from the lararium. We have to decide whether to repair the deck, or sell as-is. One of the deck’s planks had buckled under the weight of all the guests who came back to the house after the service that sunny funeral afternoon. “Woahhhhh!,” the crowd cried as the plank snapped beneath. I jumped up to find my father--what had he done now? My father was yelling all day that day, yelling before the service even began. He paced back and forth on the church’s front courtyard, screaming into the air as the guests streamed inside. “ICE! I asked you to get ICE, and you ignored me! We have two hundred people coming over and there is no ICE? Are you both insane?” My brother and I tried to calm him down. We were nervous for our eulogies, and thought the ice could probably wait. I talked him through the idea that the first round of Heinekens might not be cold, but people would be understanding. My monthly routine after the funeral becomes consistent: a four hour bus ride down, a cab to the house, whipping out the garbage bags, getting right down to business. I throw out our childhood artwork, our skis from the 80’s, my mother’s swimsuits. I heap my grandmother’s boxed-up house that we never dealt with, my mother’s piles and piles of paperwork that she never dealt with, and my American Girl dolls that I never dealt with into a giant dumpster. My father is only there on the weekdays, we just miss each other each time. My brother is filled with promises, but also always disappears as soon as he smells work. I paint the unfinished basement and sweep a dead bird from the rafters. I try and sell her fanciest clothes to various consignment shops but I am told they have too strong a certain smell. Then I hug a massive cup of white wine and cry all the way back up I-95, thinking about how much I’d lost. The routine lasts a year and a half. Dealing with death is life. I put my brother in charge of the utilities. He resents my self-promotion to house manager--after all, he is the one living there. I am the sister badgering him with phone calls about “next steps.” He whirls around the broken deck on his new hoverboard--his newest gadget--cell phone under his ear, smoking a cigarette, talking to Pepco. “Let’s say, like, hypothetically, I don’t pay this electrical bill… how long would I have before you guys shut it off? Oh, really, that soon? Okay, say word, say word. Well… question, how can I pay a bill if I don’t have, like, an account, like a bank account?” Each trip finds fresh horrors. I call Pfizer. “Hi, um, my mom passed away and I was checking in on her pension? She worked there for twenty years.” The voice on the other end asks me for the date of death. “Oh, wow, so she really recently just passed away,” the HR rep says. “Don’t you think it’s a little early for you to be calling about money?” “Can’t you dust? Can’t you at least clean the bathroom every now and then?” I ask my brother, exasperated after one of the more spirit-crushing bus rides. Toothpaste cakes the sides of the sink, hair is everywhere, my mother’s monogrammed towels lay on the floor. “We clean. You could clean,” my brother says. “Everything is under control.” He takes a long pull from his vape pen. The year before she got sick, my mother and I met in Rome for a long weekend. We spent the first morning looking down at the ruins of two patrician villas, an excavation site that the city had converted into a museum. They had installed a glass floor over the site, allowing us to walk over the dining rooms, bath houses, and gardens, and peer into these ancient Romans’ ways of life from on high. A new estate was built right on top of the ruins a few centuries later. We looked down into the spaces between the interior walls, where the new family had built a unique form of insulation. The tenants threw any recovered Roman busts and statues between the walls, padding that space to make their rooms warmer. Augustus’ cheek now hugged the wall, his feet wedged to just graze the head of a shrouded Apollo. These newcomers were truly medieval--the excavators found remnants of food scraps, and the cracked plates themselves, tossed into a gigantic garbage pile in the alleyway. The Dark Ages had descended on the beautiful ancient villa, trashed its stone tributes to bow-happy Diana and winged Mercury, and wouldn’t even run the dishwasher. Upon exiting the museum, I made my mother sit through a ninety-minute video about Trajan’s Column. I wanted to take the train to Ostia to see the ancient fishermen’s stalls. My mother would’ve rather flown to Tarquinia for tea. We compromised and went shopping. She led me into a Ferragamo store with high hopes. Surrounded by silk scarves, leather purses, and the brand’s legendary black patent mid-heel pumps with the bright gold buckle, she was ready to invest in the goods needed to propel her daughter into the upper echelons of sophistication. A saleslady sat us down and served shots of Nespresso in white cups and saucers. “And what size shall I pull for the Vara pump?” “Oh well I don’t know. I’ve got really big feet.” “Sweetie, this is the flagship store. They have a wider selection here.” She patted my hand. “Well I’m American size 12, I’m not sure of the conversion?” The saleslady didn’t bat an eye, and brought out their biggest pair. They didn’t fit. I got flustered. “I’m a monster!” I said, plodding around the showroom bow-legged, my heels sticking out the back of each shoe. “Rawrrr, I’m a big-footed monster!” My mother blanched, quickly yanked my feet out of the shoes, thanked the staff, and rushed back outside to join the bustling tourists at the foot of the Spanish Steps. She recovered next door at Acqua di Parma, ignoring me and taking her time, testing each scent on her forearm before purchasing a bottle of the magnolia perfume for herself. If we sell the house, I could go back to Rome, maybe even special-order some size 12 Ferragamos. I have to convince my brother to finally “get with the program”--our mother’s phrase. My cab pulls up to the walkway, which is now covered in brown stalks. After stooping down to inspect, I realize the brown thrush is the previous year’s dead tulips, bowed at their bases. The key is still under the mat. The house stinks of men. My brother has moved the Tiffany candlesticks off the dining room table to set up a Playstation. My father had set up a new queen sized mattress to replace my lumpy twin from high school--he is too scared to sleep in the master. He bought a big-screen TV to watch from the new bed. I am trying to get everything out, and they are still trying to keep everything in. Spilled coffee beans cover the marble countertop alongside stacks of dirty dishes. I take a big black trashbag and start going at the cupboards. Rusty cookie cutters, vintage mixers, a dozen half-empty boxes of dried pasta. For some reason, the spices in the spicerack have already been cleared and replaced with stacks of jumbo jars of coconut oil, Jello packets, and a mysterious herbal liquid. To be an effective manager, sometimes you have to turn off your emotions and throw every fucking thing in the garbage. I pour my brother’s edibles solution down the drain, and recycle all the coconut oil jars. I walk into my mother’s bedroom, surveying the scene. There are still a few items of clothing I needed to reckon with or give away. My mother’s tray of perfumes had once been the focal point of the room, an impressive display topping her tallest dresser. In her last year, medicine took priority, and she had dismantled the perfume tray. I watched her store the bigger bottles, the Hermès and the Chanel, in her underwear drawer. Picking up the bottle of Acqua di Parma, I asked, “Hey, wasn’t that fun in Rome?” She shuddered when I sprayed the air. “Perfumes make me nauseous now.” “Oh. Well then can I have it? It’s not like you’ll use it.” The room got heavier, darker. Why did I say that? Give me everything you’ve got, allow me to pillage your last remaining pleasures in this life. My natural instinct shining right through. That was the first moment--the moment Death got his foot in the door. My daughter can’t even wait until this was over?, she was probably thinking. She didn’t answer. I put it back, the last tall perfume bottle on the tray. A year and a half later and the tray looks as if it hasn’t been touched since. I’ll take the Acqua di Parma home on this trip, I decide. Everything out. My mother’s bedroom is the last room in the house that still smells right. The colors are still right. The dresser, the four poster bed, the makeup bench is still right. Everything’s under control, my brother promised. Placing my bag down on the floor, I gasped. A dead, puffy sparrow lay on the hardwood floor in the middle of the bedroom. The bird’s twiggy feet stand straight up in the air. Another dead bird, who had flown in from God knows where, God knows when. Our cousin is a realtor who helps us put the house on the market. He has been asking about our timing all year. I point to my vaping brother and shrug. He warns us that he is going out of the country for his honeymoon in June--it’s the first time he’s ever been out of the country, and they’ll be touring around Italy for a week and a half. My brother and I put the house on the market the week he leaves. A recent divorcee snatches the house up right quick. He needs to be near his kids and the price is right. He’ll uncover our mound of cigarette butts in the ivy over the fence a few months in. We threw them in abandoned despair while taking breaks from upending the house. The house is emptied of all furniture but I need to sleep on the floor of my childhood bedroom for the final night. My cheek rests on the cool wooden floorboards and I stare at the robin’s egg blue painted walls I had applied twenty years prior. I breathe the dust particles off the floor and into and out of my nose, and I can’t sleep. I feel each final minute of each final hour, and the insomnia lingers from there--it is the last thing I take from the house. Caroline Henley is a writer and a social media marketer, with a career that has spanned book publishing, tech startups, and higher education. Her essays and fiction have been published in Mockingbird Magazine, LoftLife, and The F Word. She is at work on a memoir, Havishamarama, about losing a parent while planning a wedding. |
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