Tag Archives: JULY 2023

John Zedolik, JULY 2023, POETRY

A Portion of Success                                                                 

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A Portion of Success                                                                 

John Zedolik

I chose the wrong trail

while ascending Angel Island

so missed the summit in my

parsed-out time though I did

glimpse the top where 

eponyms take flight or alight

whom a pilgrim might see

if in the correct loft of mind

even upon a false path, a fire

lane, only circling the crown

like a tonsure in reverse,

the eucalyptus massing

dark and dream-thick on each

side to confound the climber

on a sweating quest to the apex

commanding the attendant bay,

where near-heaven meets earth

at a sharp final edge, a port

for destinations down and up

whose node will bestow

a blessing even upon the hoofer,

head befuddled and point unachieved.

JULY 2023, Louise Carson, POETRY

Third anniversary

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Third anniversary

Louise Carson

And even after six hard frosty nights,

dry standing corn still sings with insect life.

The squirrel jerks its tail, clucks my approach,

relayed by blue jay cry and thudding grouse.

Reflecting colour up, the fallen leaves

(it’s not autumn unless I mention these),

the fallen leaves complete my metaphor:

feet grind them into finest mould.

Where is she now that time, time’s her betrayed?

The address in my hand’s too small to read.

By morning’s side then, somewhere near a farm.

In the crypt, other women keep her warm.

Did I, do I ever, visit her grave?

My heart her grave, I walk there every day.

Creative Non-fiction, Cyndy Muscatel, JULY 2023

THE CHALLENGE

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THE CHALLENGE

by

Cyndy Muscatel

Okay, I admit it. We’re old. No spring chickens in our roost. Even if we didn’t realize we had passed the “forever young” age, our kids have kept us informed. Right before COVID hit they sat us down to have the power-of-attorney talk. That we’d laughed in their faces shocked them.

“We’re just trying to be helpful,” our daughter said.

“We want to make sure you’re okay,” our son said.

“We’ll let you know when we’re not,” my husband said.

He shot a seventy-one that day, beating our son by two strokes. Meanwhile our daughter had trouble keeping up with me on our walk.

Three years later the whole family came to visit us on the Big Island of Hawaii during winter break. By their solicitude we could tell our children thought we were one step away from assisted living, if not the grave. It was unnerving although, somehow, I was the only one doing the dishes.

While they were there the Kilauea Volcano erupted. Newsweek calls Kilauea “one of the Earth’s most active volcanoes…and one of the most dangerous.” Our 23-year-old grandson and his girlfriend decided to go see it. They came back with a glowing report of their experience.

“You should go,” Evan said, showing us photos of golden-red ripples of lava in a lake at the bottom of the Halemaumau Crater.

“We hiked a mile into Viewing Site 3, but there’s other viewing sites you could get to easier,” Amanda assured us.

A week later my husband and I decided to go see this natural phenomenon for ourselves. It’s about a two-hour drive on the Daniel K. Inouye Highway. Since the best viewing is in the dark, we decided to stay overnight at Volcano House.

The mountain pass can be treacherous with dense fog and rain, but the day we went it was clear. The snowcapped peaks of Mauna Kea were to our left. Mauna Loa, graceful with a dusting of snow, was on our right.

We pulled into the parking lot of Volcano House at about 2:30. The hotel is right at the rim of the volcano. Mark Twain stayed at the original Volcano House in 1866, but this hotel was built in 1941. When we checked in the receptionist was very knowledgeable. She gave us advice and a map showing where the viewing sites were located.

I couldn’t help wondering what she saw when she looked at us: two old fogeys who should know better or just two people being tourists?

In the dining room, while we ate lunch, we looked over the map.

“We’re doing Viewing Site 3, the one the kids did,” he said. “The one with the hike.”

“Understood,” I said. The gauntlet had been thrown down.

After a healthy lunch of Coke, pizza, and French fries, we set out for Devastation Point. We arrived there at about 4:15. Once we were out of the car, I saw a park ranger standing in front of a huge sign that said Eruption Viewing This Way.

“Is this where we go to see the eruption?” I asked him as I got close. I have a terrible sense of direction so I thought I’d check.

He looked us over. “Yes, it is. But do you think you’re up to the hike there?”

“Isn’t it only a mile?” I asked.

“A mile each way,” he cautioned.

“Is it rocky and steep?” my husband asked.

“No, it’s a regular road until you get to the site. Then there’s some gravel.”

“No worries. We can make it and besides, we have our phones,” I assured him.

He still looked dubious but finally nodded. “Okay, I’m just checking because we had a fatality yesterday.”

I laughed as we walked around the barrier. “I think he’s just trying to discourage us old folks. He probably doesn’t want to do any kind of rescue,” I told my husband.

(Two days later I read this online: “Hawaii News Now – A visitor from Arizona died Sunday at a lava viewing area at Hawaii Volcanoes National Park, officials said. A spokeswoman said the 70-year-old died from apparent natural causes at the Keanakakoi lava viewing overlook.”)

It was an easy mile to the Keanakakoi lava overlook. When we got there we joined the small group of people who were at the edge of the viewing site, looking down at the lava lake in the center of the immense caldera. Since it was daylight you couldn’t see much of the molten lava’s color.

As the sky darkened the lava’s orange glow became more apparent until we were looking at landscape crisscrossed by deep veins of lava. Pele, the goddess of fire, had been very busy. It was as if the elements of the Earth were being revealed. I wish the word “awesome” was not so overused because that’s what the site was—awe-inspiring.

In 1866 Mark Twain described it like this: “The greater part of the vast floor of the desert under us was as black as ink…but a mile of it was ringed and streaked and striped with a thousand branching streams of liquid and gorgeously brilliant fire! It looked like a colossal railroad map of the State of Massachusetts done in chain lightning on a midnight sky.”

“It looks like Los Angeles at night when you’re coming in for landing,” my husband mused in 2023.

Then he started dialing his phone. In a moment our son appeared on the screen.

“Guess where we are,” my husband said and turned the camera so Dave could see the lava.

“Wow,” Dave said, then asked, “How did you get there?”

“We hiked here. This is the site that Amanda and Evan went to,” I said.

“Amazing,” he said.

I rolled my eyes. “We’re not decrepit yet,” I wanted to say.

When the sun set the temperature dropped quickly. Our grandkids had warned us, so we had parkas, although most of our fellow viewers were shivering with cold. But we were all mesmerized by the incredible sight.

When some people started to leave, my husband said we should join them.

“We should navigate up the gravel path while there’s still light,” he said.

I was reluctant to leave, but it was a good decision—it was completely dark by the time we made it to the road. With no moon to guide us through the forest, Mark Twain’s expression “black as ink” came to mind. Fortunately, I had a flashlight.

My husband’s knees had stiffened up in the cold, so he was having a hard time walking.

“I don’t know if I can do it,” he said.

“We can go slow and take breaks, but you are doing it,” I said in my schoolteacher’s voice. “First of all, you don’t have another choice, and secondly, we’re not going to let the kids think we can’t.”

As we walked he limbered up, but we were both glad to see the lights of the ranger station ahead of us. We drove back to Volcano House with the heater blasting.

During a dinner of seared Kona Kampachi, we looked through the photos we’d taken. We remembered that overwhelming feeling of reverence we’d experienced.

“I’m so glad we did this,” I said. “Not only because it was so incredible, but sometimes I start believing in the kids’ viewpoint of us, and I think I am on my last legs.”

My husband gave me a wink. “I love your legs,” he said and took my hand.

photo: G.E. Ulrich – pubs.usgs.gov – picture #007, GU6830A – cf. Selected Images of the Pu‘u ‘O‘o–Kupaianaha Eruption, 1983–1997

FICTION, JULY 2023, Louise Turan

HOW DONNA GOT IN A BAD GROOVE

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HOW DONNA GOT IN A BAD GROOVE

by

Louise Turan

Donna, age fourteen, moved back to the U.S. with her family to California. Her father, The Colonel, had been assigned to Ft. Ord to run the Base hospital and attend a special medical training course. For the past four years, they were living in Italy, in a villa on a hilltop overlooking sprawling vineyards and the Dolomites. The only thing she saw now, from their square, ugly, cement quarters, was a depressing view of sand, ice plant, and more cement houses. Her high school was an equally unattractive, flat building with rows of multiple green doors under flat roofs. California was like a strange planet Donna had landed on by mistake. She felt like a foreigner, especially when everyone around her, at school and otherwise, seemed obsessed with the Monkees, the Mamas and the Papas, and Flower-Power. Donna didn’t really have a clue what they were saying, singing about, or, for that matter, wearing.

Back in Italy she wore pleated skirts, sweater sets, knee socks, and comfortable shoes to school. No one dressed like that here, she observed on her first day, looking and feeling out of sorts, not to mention uncomfortable, in clothes her mother had bought her to help her fit in. Her mother wanted her daughter to be fashionable, just like her. See, her mother said, self-satisfied, now you look like the other girls. Donna was wearing a tent dress with neon stripes slashed in horizontal patterns, making her somewhat wide body look wider. And the white fishnet stockings, which matched the tight, white Capezios on her feet, hurt her legs and was the last time she wore them. No, I don’t, she wanted to tell her mother. Donna didn’t think she looked anything like the other girls in her class, who had blond hair, cheerleader legs, and wore either very short or very long skirts with flowy blouses. The only one wearing tent dresses was Twiggy, and Donna looked nothing like Twiggy. Donna looked like a girl named Carla, who became her best and only friend. Like Donna, Carla had dark hair and dark eyes, features inherited from their European ancestors, and stuck out, they realized, like sore thumbs.

Donna found herself falling into a bad groove, a word she heard frequently. She thought about her situation at school, her looks, living with overly inquisitive parents who wanted her to be happy, which only made her unhappier, and couldn’t see a way out. On top of everything else, she had to ride her bike to school, in the sand and through sticky, gluey ice plant, which left brown stains on her legs and knee socks. If misery was a friend, it was with her all the time, making her think how unlucky she was to be living in Ft. Ord and have a teacher like Mrs. Carver. 

Where was Signora Sari? Her beautiful, Italian teacher who had them reading Dante? Mrs. Carver was bony, with white stuff on her head that could barely count as hair and fake, clackity teeth. It was the despicable Mrs. Carver who pulled Donna’s mother aside at the PTA meeting and said she had serious concerns about her daughter. She laid out the details with hard evidence so that Donna’s mother would get it because so often mothers of teenage daughters don’t. Mrs. Carver had years of experience in these matters and was not to be doubted, especially about something this serious. 

Donna hated what she called Planet Ord, a confounding place so different from her idyllic Italian childhood. What she found confusing was not only how change was happening around her but also inside her; she was becoming a teenager. She and Carla huddled in her bedroom with Teen Magazine. Following the experts in the magazine, they bought Cover Girl blush in a darker tone and applied it to the contours of their cheeks and the sides of their knees to look slimmer. Disappointed, they found it didn’t work. Carla stole cigarettes from her brother, which they smoked behind her garage, spraying themselves with Windsong Carla had borrowed from her mother. The smell was harder to get rid of than the smoke and, they quickly realized, instead of hiding the fact they had been smoking, was an obvious sign they had. But the one thing in their favor had been obvious all along. No need for padded bras or falsies or wads of Kleenex. Both Donna and Carla, unlike their long-limbed classmates, had inherited ample breasts. They saw boys staring at their chests, admiringly and longingly, as they walked to class. The looks made them self-conscious at first but also grateful, if not pleased, with all the attention from the popular boys. That is how it started, when Donna’s bad groove got worse. It was all Mrs. Carver’s fault.

Donna was sitting in the kitchen doing her homework when her mother returned from the late-night meeting with Mrs. Carver. Her mother’s face was the one she wore when something in the house got broken, like a precious piece of china, or when one of Donna’s good sweaters was found in a ball on the floor, that how-could-you-do-such-a-thing-to-me-your-mother kind of face. Part of Donna knew it would be a good idea to run away, hop on a bus, and find her way back to Italy, or New York, which she had always wanted to see, as she sensed living at home now was going to get worse. The other half wanted to stay and watch disappointment contort her mother’s face in a myriad of shapes and colors and then try to return to normal again. The facial contortions seemed to be happening a lot more since she had become a teenager, which Donna found very curious as well as interesting.

A little voice spoke up, some wisdom bubbled up from a wellspring of youthful hopefulness, and told her not to worry, everything was going to be alright. But the whole mess could have been avoided if Mrs. Carver had not been so nosy and gone to the girls’ bathroom between fifth and sixth period and asked Carla what she was doing with a bra in her hand. Now her father, The Colonel, would have to be involved and God knows who else. In her future she saw a tribunal composed of her father, her mother, Mrs. Carver, the school principal, and Mrs. Jake Preston, outraged that her perfect son had been implicated in the embarrassing incident. She heard her father say, let’s just treat her like I treat my men, which no doubt meant a court martial. They’ll probably send me to a shrink, she thought, or march me off to some home for bad girls near a remote army base in Utah. 

Okay. So she had made this deal with Jake Preston. JAKE PRESTON!  

Jake Preston, one of the cutest guys in her class, had come up to her and Carla in the cafeteria at lunchtime and said that he and Charlie Summers, and bunch of other guys sitting at his table, had made a bet. Jake leaned in closely and whispered, and not in a nice way, that Donna and Carla wore falsies because no one in seventh grade had boobs that big. His sharp grin squeezed his eyes into brown slits, like a sly fox. There is only one true test you know, only one way to prove it. You have to let me feel you up. 

Carla and Donna turned to each other, horrified, then incredulous. Why, if they could prove they did indeed have the largest, most attractive boobs of the century, they’d rise to the top of the heap and be the most popular girls in school. 

It was the Ultimate Sleepover Question. How far have you gone: First Base (French Kissing), Second Base (Being Felt Up), Third Base (Everything But All the Way) and Fourth, All the Way. Extra bonus points if the guy was cute or popular. This was the question you were asked at sleepovers hosted by girls like Hilary Medway, or Mandy Clark, or Susan Whitefield, cute girls with frosty white eye shadow and tight-fitting sweaters, girls who everyone dreamed of being like, including Donna and Carla.   

Not that they had ever been invited, or would be anytime soon, because Donna and Carla’s parents had ancestors with hairy, dark genes and were from places impossible to spell, inheriting names too difficult to pronounce, with consonants and vowels that just went on and on forever. But Donna and Carla did have the curves that came along with those genes, and now, with Jake Preston’s little scheme, at least they would be prepared (in the event they were invited) when the question was put to them playing Truth and Dare. They would answer proudly in the affirmative: Second Base. And Jake Preston, no less. Bonus points! Yes, this was their chance. A passport to popularity. 

Donna glanced sideways at the huddled mass of boys’ heads when Jake returned to his table. If Jake had looked like a sly fox, Charlie Summers looked like a cat that had swallowed a mouse. It turned out that it was actually Charlie who had instigated the bet because Jake pissed him off, acting like he knew everything. Charlie had four older sisters and knew a thing or two about boobs, real and fake, and wasn’t going to lose a bet with his soon-not-to-be-best-friend Jake, but that’s how it goes in the seventh grade sometimes.

Eating the rest of her lunch slowly and deliberately, Donna knew if they hesitated, delayed too much, even by a day, they might lose their nerve or, worse yet, Jake would see their reluctance as a sign of defeat and prove him right. Donna was not about to be defeated or called a liar. For once she was in control of the truth and told Carla her plan. During study hall Donna passed a note to Jake: 

Meet me underneath the stairwell next to the gym between 5th and 6th period.  

In the girls’ bathroom at the end of fifth period, in one of the green stalls that never shut properly, Donna unhooked and removed her bra. Her large breasts were released to the wilderness beneath her sweater and bounced as she handed the bra to Carla. Donna clutched her arms over her chest and made her way to the dark space beneath the stairs.

Jake was waiting, wearing his foxy grin. So, he said, his eyes fixed on her breasts. Donna held her breath and closed her eyes, bracing for his bare hands on her bare chest. Jake took his hands and then placed them, like magnets, on each breast, giving each a firm squeeze. On top of her sweater.

Jake removed his hands quickly, as if her sweater was red hot. He stood back, surveying Donna’s chest, recognizing immediately he had not only lost the bet but had been too chicken to do what he needed to do. Jake, blushing deeply, quickly disappeared down the hall. 

Donna was crushed. She had been tricked. Jake Preston had not felt her up. Touching her breasts on top of her sweater didn’t count. She did not have the coveted sleepover bounty prize. No passport to popularity. Crestfallen, she walked back to the bathroom to retrieve her bra and tell Carla the bad news.

But neither Carla, nor her bra, were anywhere to be found. The bathroom and the hallways were silent and empty. Teachers’ voices could be heard through thick wooden doors giving short, clipped instructions, which always marked the beginning of a class. Someone had her bra. Donna had an alarming suspicion it wasn’t Carla.  

So now, according to Mrs. Carver, who handed the tightly sealed paper bag containing Donna’s bra to Donna’s mother the night she came home with the sour, how-could-you-do-this-to-me face, her daughter was a misguided teenager.

That is how Donna got into a bad groove. She had a feeling she was likely to remain that way. At least until next time.  

THE END

photo: Harry Rajchgot

Brian Michael Barbeito, FICTION, JULY 2023

the sewist

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the sewist

Marty Laura McNicol Mills

Prologue 

Inside the world that lost its way, Mary Laura McNicol Mills did not. she had no choice. not having what others had, she didn’t have the luxury of time, or the upbringing, to know the things like fine clothing or travel, languages and literature and a hundred other things besides. she had to work. yet, she was special because of her ordinariness. higher than special in her grounded-ness. we will learn about her and see that she is mostly invisible to the world. a salt of the earth soul, that by being herself, maintained integrity and goodness, a smarts better than the educated. a heart, though not untouched by sorrow, by sadness, a heart whose rhythm’s value outweighs most others. nobody would notice or laud such a character, yet the universe is creating a mystic and seer in the midst of melancholic metropolitan streets and their secular vacuity. Mary is not in tune with her times nor is she successful by societal standards. the world can’t see her. yet she is like an avatar or path lighter, whose dreams are more valid than even the harshest realities. Mary will prove to be the penultimate survivor. 

the factory is cold. the streets are colder. I wore two sweaters today under my coat. my coat is old and part of it is ripped. but the zipper still works and there is nothing wrong with it overall. sometimes Janice drives me to the bus stop. the industrial road is long. and it’s already almost completely dark by the time we punch our cards. there are horrible looking old buildings to the right on the way to the bus stop. and long empty fields to the left. I don’t know which is worse. the fields even have a path. but nobody walks it. nobody in their right mind anyhow. not at that time anyways. I am always cold lately. sometimes I shiver. I wonder if I am sick again. I don’t know. will see. for now I need to get home. Janice is a good soul. she asks me if I want a drive further along the bus line, but i don’t want to put her out. I go in the other direction. it’s raining. it nearly always rains in this town or so it seems to me. the air bus brakes and the flickering lights aggravate my headache. I take a pill and swallow it with no water because I forgot my water bottle in my locker. there aren’t a lot of people on the bus. nobody here talks to anyone. I look out the window at the darkness and the lights. I begin early and end late. I realize then I haven’t seen the sun in days.

there is a howling wind. it pulls up debris and throws it against the tenement buildings. the contrast between inside and outside is too much. yellow lights flicker here. somewhere out there the rains find their way down industrial grates. I have to mail a gift to my nephew. warm pyjamas. the design I don’t know if he will like. and a book. it is a book about the sea. stories about the sea. treasure. islands. ships. divers. I will send it tomorrow and hopefully it will all get there in time for the holidays. I drink tea. it warms me. the wind rattles the old windows. they are not much better than the single pane factory windows. I stare at them both, both sets of windows. one day, there will be something better on the other side. for now, there is physical and spiritual darkness. but there are people like Janice. I have to think of her. I have to buy her something, if even a card. or a book. but I can’t afford that. I cannot buy her a used book. I know where to get them though. I must read more. besides Bible passages. I must teach myself. i reuse the tea. there is nothing wrong with this. I wash the few dishes. i will change out of these clothes. and pray and go to bed. why can’t I warm up? I put on two pairs of socks. maybe i am sick and don’t realize it. tomorrow will come too early. I hope I dream of something nice. last time I had the recurring dream again. i am on a ship. alone. the crew and passengers had left. it was sinking. it was nighttime and the sea was lit by the moon. there was nothing I could do in the dream. I couldn’t find a life raft. hmm. I must pray. i wonder sometimes how that storm wind doesn’t break those windows right in. maybe one day it will.

Janice wants to pick me up for coffee. I’ll go. It’s the weekend. the problem is that her friend Cassandra sometimes tags along. they call her Cass actually. if she is not a demon or does not have one or some crawling around inside her then she is a good candidate anyhow and displays similar characteristics. she is manipulative, lying, self centered, spiteful, worldly, materialistic, untrustworthy. how I try and avoid looking her in the eyes, not because i am afraid of her or shy around her, but because I would rather not. i sense so much darkness about her. but I’ll go, for I need get out and maybe she won’t. it’s the weekend. the factory is closed Saturdays and Sundays. I’ll walk back home after coffee. the branches are barren since it is winter, and some of the trees have strange dark marks from pollution or disease. but I don’t mind the outline the branches make against the grey sky. they are sad and lonesome trees on the way yes, but in spring green blooms and other colours appear on them. spring. far away. but it always comes, one way or the other, doesn’t it? and I’ll stop and try and find a book to keep me company. something. plus find wrapping for my presents. I can hear the traffic outside. tires slushing through dirty street water fallen and melted. the exhaust fumes will make the little snowbanks even dirtier. a distant horn, sometimes sounded lightly, but sometimes laid upon, a horn signifying anger and even hatred.

I have wrapped the gifts and sent them. I feel good about it. my sister lives far away. I won’t see her this holiday. she has a family. I don’t. but we write letters and she calls sometime. I might take a bus there in the summer. the factory gives me two weeks holidays so that’s good. and i am allowed to take them at once or separately. and I found a book. it’s about St.Theresa the Christian Catholic mystic. it says she used to levitate but was embarrassed about it and didn’t want people to know. the reason I am interested is because my other life path would have had me out of the grim city and living as a nun at a convent somewhere in a countryside. that was my idea of life anyhow. but for now St.Theresa will have to do. I like soft cover books not hardcover. they are lighter and easier to carry. I went out with Janice this morning and her horrible friend couldn’t make it. what a nice time we had. Janice I won’t see until Monday at the factory now. she lives with her boyfriend. I don’t have anyone. it has stopped raining. the sun even came out to shine on the dirty city. but it’s cold. I long for the spring and suppose most people do. for now, work in the weeks and keep to my books on the weekends. I am okay with that mostly, but when not, that’s the way it has to be anyhow.

there is a missing girl. a teenager. I try and not watch the news, but there was posters up at the bus shelters. it’s a horrible world. I hope they find her safely but my gut tells me otherwise. I said a prayer in my head for her while I rode the bus. though this is an industrial zone, there are ravines everywhere. polluted, graffiti stained, murky air and low vibrational ravines. and as anyone knows, a city houses too many people, and makes it hard to find the bad person or persons. I am a sewist, and work at a table with other women sewing whatever they give us. sometimes emblems, patches on industrial work clothing, and sometimes putting together clothing itself. it all depends on the contracts the company gets that year. I have worked there going on nine years now. my grandmother taught me since I was a little girl. but her main thing was crochet and her hands were always busy making something by hand for someone. i am good at my work and proud of my work. I just wish they paid us more wages. in my locker which is in the lunch room, I have a prayer book, a needle work book, some mints in small metal containers, and a picture of my sister and I with my nephew from when we went to Niagara Falls a few summers ago. in the photo it is bright, sunny, and we are all genuinely smiling. sometimes I don’t notice the picture but on difficult days, especially in the middle of winter, I sometimes look at it and touch it with a finger as if to connect with that day, a time of happiness, again.

the walking foot of my sewing machine is broken. I was let off an hour early and walked halfway home before catching the bus. my boots are old, but I have begun wearing two pairs of socks. all my socks are in great shape because I can sew them, reinforce them, stitch them, anything. I can mend or even make socks that last a lifetime. I had a plan taking the foot route. I stopped past the old graveyard. it’s not far enough from the road to be very peaceful, but it is calmer than the city streets and I brought a flower to the grave of my grandmother. both grandmothers were good ones. the one there is the one that taught me to sew. she made homemade popsicles in the summer, and great stews in the winter. I am sure she made many other things but these things i remember mostly and with the greatest fondness. we used to go to the fairgrounds in the city. I recall the lights. it was cheap. this is one of the first words I learned. therefore, money was a large concern. if something was ‘cheap,’ to her, it meant good whereas it sounds like it has a bad meaning to many people. if she was angry she was ‘vex,’ and if a doctor could not fix someone, though a Catholic, she would whisper sometimes that so and so ‘…needs to go see the Obeah Man,’ which was a type of mysterious healer she knew about. so a few worlds converged in her. the main thing was crochet and sewing though. well, I left the flower and said a few words, told her I missed her and said I hoped she was doing well wherever she was. a strange wind did arrive then, and I wondered. I made my way home. a regular night. reading about St.Theresa. mending some socks. drinking tea. I just had a bowl of soup for dinner and one piece of bread. I don’t eat a lot anyhow and wasn’t very hungry. they said come back tomorrow and if the sewing machine is not fixed they will find other tasks for me to do. fine. fine with me I thought.

the sun only showed up here and there for a short periods. it’s mostly grey and dark. lately the days have been extra monotonous. some of the workers went out to eat and invited me but i didn’t go. I didn’t tell them, but I couldn’t afford it. I don’t know how they can. maybe they save better, or borrow from family members back and forth. I don’t have anyone family-wise, to borrow from. Janice would lend me, but I don’t want to. I think I dreamed of the missing girl. I feel she is deceased. there was water and she stood beside it and asked me, ‘What do I do now,’ and I didn’t have an answer. then the dream changed or ceased. soon I woke up in a sweat. I don’t know if it was real, a vision or psychic sense, or just a dream. sometimes I dream real things. I prayed the rosary for guidance. that was Wednesday night. today is Friday. I don’t feel well. I have a cough. the rains are getting to me. my sister sent me the warmest quilt ever. it has a high thread count and is green and blue, my two favourite colours. the earth and sky living together. how I love it and shall cherish it. I will wrap myself in it. there is sometimes hope, a hopeful thing from the universe. if I do dream of the missing girl again I hope I can help her cross safely to the other side if she is deceased and lost. I hope I can do that. I don’t talk about it much, but I have helped people before, lost souls transitioning. May God help us all.

I walked to the small lake in the early morning that is a few stops past the work stop. then back. I headed out early because I couldn’t sleep. the air was crisp and the area plain. I liked it. I have drank two teas to help keep me warm and I have tea in a mug. there are houses at certain points along the shoreline and ones seen in the distance. some are old from generations ago, white clapboard, hardly any brick, more like cottages than homes, with screen doors in front. but sometimes a stream of smoke comes from a chimney. then, there are monster homes, overdone, too opposite, vulgar if you ask me. I can hardly afford rent. but I wonder. what is wrong with just a structurally sound brick home? one that would be neat and comfortable and has a few rooms and a fenced yard perhaps. I don’t know. my socks are warm and guard against any problems with my boots. there are winter seagulls that saw me and flew off somewhere. two crows interested in something in the road, their black so different than the light and snow and ice. I like nature, but don’t get to see much of it. and any green space they seem to build upon. I wonder in half seriousness if someone will one day propose to fill in the lake and built a housing development upon it. 

~~~

Janice was crying in the lunchroom. I put my hand on her shoulder and asked her what was wrong. ‘They found the missing girl. Didn’t you hear? In the forest.’ and by Janice’s tears and slouch I knew they hadn’t found her alive. I sat her down and wiped her tears. ‘She is in heaven at least,’ I said, and Janice nodded. we went to the sewing tables and began our day. it was a solemn day and they talked about it once on the radio. we are allowed to listen to the radio but can’t hear much of it. in a gap or at lunch or break though one can. they caught the criminal. he will not be getting out of jail. and we are safe. from him anyways. after work I took the bus again and sat in the back, with only two or three other passengers. before I got off i had a strange feeling about the girl, like she was around. I hurt my finger at that point while mending a button to a sweater. so I put my things away and just waited for my stop like most other people. I like to keep my hands busy. like my grandmother. she was never idle. never lazy. always doing something to add to the world. I guess she is my only mentor if I had to name one. and I like St.Teresa, the mystic nun.

10. I had put down my book and stood by the window looking out. then the phone rang. it was my sister and the pyjamas and book had arrived for my nephew. he thanked me on the phone and it was the first time I’d heard his voice in a while. I hope he wasn’t being dutiful and really liked them. but overall it’s okay either way. it’s the thought that counts, right? I told her the blanket is great and that I would write her again soon. I put the phone down and closed my eyes. I suddenly saw the girl, the girl they had found. she stood in front of me it was windy around her. some of the wind lifted her long messy hair. she didn’t say anything. I told her to go upwards, to the next world, and that there was angels and light and God there. she didn’t move. I lifted her upon my back, and stood up, and her hands held my shoulders. I stood as straight as possible and told her to climb upwards into light. suddenly she was gone. but I feel she was assisted by the light. I felt a mix of puzzlement and fright and goodness- many emotions at once. I have soul rescued before and put people on my shoulders to get them to light. no angel or message arrives before or after to say whether it worked or not, though I feel it did. I received no good mark or review, and no bad mark or review. I was tired. I fell asleep right there on the couch for a few hours before waking up and moving to the bedroom. I told myself I had tried my best by her and that everything would be okay, somehow. I held my rosary in my hand tightly. I fell again into a deep dreamless sleep. 

Epilogue

Mary continued at the factory, and though Janice moved away, she remained in the city. it was her home after all. her sister took her away the next year to the sand and salt sea for a week. and for Mary, who had never seen the sea, this had been like having been taken to heaven on a tour. the memories and photos would sustain her for a long time. the factory remained the same, and she went on to read about other saints, though none resonated quite as much as her St.Teresa, the one she adopted as her own guide and spiritual mentor. and the souls. the lost souls still came for help sometimes. mostly she didn’t know who they were, but tried to assist them to the heavens or at least higher places in the astral worlds. who would think, if they saw Mary, not too tall, not too interesting looking, adorned in her torn coat and old boots, entering up the bus steps after the factory shift in the rainy city, anything much about her? who would notice her at all? and who would know that she was perhaps the best sewist in the city, and the hardest working? what’s more, who would guess she was a helper of lost souls?

Creative Non-fiction, JULY 2023, Margaret H. Wagner

RETRIEVING AN ETCHED MOTHER AND CHILD

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RETRIEVING AN ETCHED MOTHER AND CHILD

by 

Margaret H. Wagner

The heavy silk navy curtains at the Hotel La Perouse in Nice, France, rustled to reveal the morning sun. I unlatched the floor-to-ceiling French glass doors and pushed the blue wooden slatted doors open. The tranquil Mediterranean met the horizon line, with the sky a lighter shade of blue. Nice’s Promenade des Anglais, a four-mile paved walkway along the beach, which began to the hotel’s right, already had pedestrians; a few souls dotted the sand beside it, near the low white surf.

I readied my room service breakfast tray to take it outside to the red-tiled deck. Birds chirped through the open door, sentinels-in-waiting for my croissant or brioche. A window fixed in front of the sky, framed by an interior. Was it worth hurrying off to see the artist Matisse when I was already inside one of his paintings, luxuriating in the mysterious spirit of color? The turquoise rug, the emerald tree, the chestnut table, the goldenrod walls.

My mother camped throughout the south of France during her seven-month trip through Europe in 1951, so I doubted she experienced a hotel with an artist’s view. Perhaps in Nice she enjoyed the scent of seaweed, plums, or apples and the sound of church bells hinting at whispered prayers? A year after her sudden death at age 86, I found a box with her 1951 trip notes and letters. That sparked my plans to retrace parts of her trip in 2017. I hoped to retrieve a piece of her.

Years ago, when I was in my twenties, a postcard of one of Matisse’s Nu Bleu cutouts graced the refrigerator in my New York City studio apartment. The deep blue shapes cut with scissors formed a curled nude woman in a yoga-like pose. I often mailed my mother cards, replicas of the art I had seen in New York City museums. I sent her Matisse’s goldfish in a bowl and one of those blue nudes, plus Renoir’s and Mary Cassatt’s idyllic depictions of the mother-daughter bond. Decades later, when I was home to help my parents move to a retirement community, I awoke at 2 a.m. to discover my mother in our guest room sorting and tossing those greeting cards. My parents were of an era that burned correspondence, much to my writerly dismay. I tried to save a bag of their letters, but my father caught me and made me put the stack back in the “to be burned” pile. It would be sweet to find a Matisse card I sent to my mother.

I was fascinated that Matisse’s daughter, Marguerite, was adopted, just like me. I doubted my mother knew that. Birthed by one of his models, Marguerite was raised by Amelie, whom Matisse married four years after Marguerite’s birth. During World War II, the Gestapo arrested both Marguerite and Amelie and charged them with Resistance activities. They subjected Marguerite to months of solitary confinement and torture; Matisse thought his daughter was dead. Eventually, Marguerite made her way to him in the south of France after she escaped from a stalled cattle car that was taking her to a concentration camp.

There was a time I felt imprisoned in my parents’ house in the early 1990s. That was the weekend my parents hired a man to deprogram me because they thought I was in a cult. I sat on my single twin bed on a Saturday night beside the cabinet with my childhood collection of dolls from the places our family traveled. The dolls represented happy vacations around the globe—I got to choose a doll from each country we visited. I surveyed the eight shelves of figures in native costumes as I considered climbing out the window, dropping from the gutter to the ground, and running. But I was in my mid-thirties, an adult after all, and decided I could handle anything.

My parents had endless advice as to what I should be doing. By that point in my life, I had stopped sharing much with them and kept conversation to the weather, museums, or other family members. Before that weekend, my parents showered me with phone calls and sounded excited to have me home. “Progress,” I thought, “maybe they are interested in my endeavors.” But they orchestrated the weekend differently—the deprogrammer arrived after breakfast on Saturday. After continued questions and interrogation, I left the living room by mid-afternoon without baggage to walk to the train station. One of my cousins, who was there at the time, came after me, and we returned home.

“I love your haircut,” my mother said to my cousin as we approached my parents and the deprogrammer in the driveway. Those four words seemed to reflect my family’s lack of connection around emotional issues. My scientist mother and I, a budding artist, looked at the world through different lenses. And at this moment, I didn’t feel any maternal relatedness, only inexplicable parental control.

I bet my mother forgot her defensive response to her parents about camping in the south of France. In a letter to her parents, she wrote: “It was so nice that we camped out every night, which is another reason this letter is so late in being written as there was no place to do anything.” Her parents must have written back with their concern about camping, as in a later epistle, my mother countered: “We stayed in organized camps several times. There are many in France, as people camp for their vacations over here.” I got the impression she tried to assure them it was safe and perfectly proper for a young woman—“everyone did it, so we did, too.” Only the “terrible mosquitos” drove them to sleep inside their Morris Minor (a small car like a Volkswagen Beetle). I was shocked by this because I grew up under the impression that my mother’s version of camping was staying at the Ritz.

Marguerite Matisse was probably glad to be bitten by mosquitos when she finally made it to her father in the south of France. Matisse seemed overwhelmed by her story of torture: “I saw in reality, materially, the atrocious scenes she described and acted out for me. I couldn’t have said if I still belonged to myself.” But he kept those feelings to himself and threw himself into his art.

One of Matisse’s last projects, the Chapel of the Rosary in Vence, a town located in the Cote d’Azur region in southeastern France between Nice and Antibes, was open a few weeks when my mother was nearby in the summer of 1951. Would she, who majored in chemistry and minored in physics, have appreciated the abstract charcoaled geometries of a body tortured on the cross? The diamond of the waist to crossed ankles. The pentagon of the torso and outstretched arms. Symmetrical eyes, a nose, and a mouth from the shroud held limply by a figure with a faceless bowed head. Matisse spent a lifetime paring faces to their barest elements, repeatedly delineating his wife, daughter, mistresses, and models. Mother, mistress, Madonna—impossible to tell who was who.

If the Chapel of the Rosary was forgettable for my mother due to its abstractness, it would be no surprise. However, I was astonished that she shrugged off the artist Picasso. So how did she meet Picasso? I’ve always imagined my mother and her travel companion, a female college friend, sitting in a café in the town of Mougins, where Picasso resided, fifteen minutes between Grasse and Cannes. They would have enjoyed the view looking back up the hill to Grasse and down the hill over terra-cotta tiled roofs to the Bay of Cannes. Sitting under olive, cypress, and pine trees, maybe they smelled stewed hare with tarragon or simmered lamb and rosemary. My mother probably ordered lemonade (lemon soda) with mint because she would have already bought Gruyère cheese, tomatoes, grapes, and chocolate at a local market to save money on the French Riviera.

Despite my insistence that she must remember more of the encounter with an icon of twentieth-century art, my mother never got more specific about Picasso. “He talked about fascism,” she said. I imagined she gave Picasso her signature face of disapproval—the arched left eyebrow in the shape of an inverted V. At my grade school, when she surveyed the cafeteria as a volunteer lunch mom, my cheeks grew hot—I studied my milk carton as her evil eye hit every table.

Politics might have bored my mother, who wanted to see the world before she got married. But since, according to another letter she sent to her home, my mother had a robust conversation about fascism with two dashing sherry magnates a few weeks before in Spain, I suspected my mother’s disdain of Picasso had to do with something else. Did my mother feel Picasso’s eyes fixed on her, taking in her white button-down blouse, calf-length dark cotton skirt, white bobby socks, and saddle shoes? At age twenty-three, she was the right age for Picasso, who then was age sixty-five. Maybe Picasso was with his twenty-five-year-old mistress, Francoise, and their two toddlers? Or fighting with the twenty-one-year-old girl he had an affair with that summer?

I was in my late fifties in 2017 and met no famous artists in the south of France. Instead, I had a heated conversation with a muscle-bound policeman outside of Nice who pulled me off a bus headed to the Musée Matisse. “Billets, billets,” (tickets, tickets) murmured the woman sitting next to me. I showed my ticket to the policeman. “Descendez, descendez, maintenant,” the policeman barked, pointing with a black-gloved thumb to the backdoor exit. “Get off, get off…now!” My mouth dropped. What had I done?

“I have a paid ticket,” I explained in the best French I could manage. The gendarme switched to English, with an accent fit for romance.

“Your ticket isn’t punched.”

“I gave my ticket to the driver.”

“It’s not validated in the machine.”

“Where’s the machine?”

“On the bus.”

The handsome man-in-uniform’s pen forcefully checked items in his notebook. He tore off the sheet, swung it in front of my face, and said: “Fifty euros. You pay me.”

Was this a sting operation over bus tickets?

My mother never had this—men rushed to assist her. The only time she encountered an official who detained her was at the border of Gibraltar. The officer on the Spanish side wouldn’t allow her into the UK territory because she didn’t have the proper paperwork to return to Spain, and he needed to stamp those forms. My mother was proud to have gotten past the Gibraltar border patrol. Was it her youthful smile and the determination that no one would stop her European grand tour? “You’ll see us in a few hours after we’ve toured the Rock,” deterred any discussion of monetary fines.

But, here on a quiet suburban bus stop in the south of France, I paid a man who towered two feet from my face fifty euros and waited another hour for the next bus to the museum.

Back at the hotel, in the evening light, I thought of Matisse’s book Jazz. One page depicted Icarus against a royal blue night sky with yellow stars. A red dot was on Icarus’s black body, approximately where the heart should be. Critics wondered if this was a response to World War II and Marguerite’s torture. Perhaps it was only a depiction of artistic yearning. Matisse wrote: “The character of a face in a drawing depends not upon its various proportions but upon a spiritual light which it reflects.”

Before I embarked on my trip, I discovered a photograph my father took when I was about eight years old. I had climbed onto the kitchen counter to reach the cupboard to put dishes away, and my mother helped me get to the floor. My arms draped around her neck; her hands clasped around my thighs. My mother’s blue-flowered shorts echoed the blue of my headband. My smile missed a front tooth; hers, beatific. Our cheeks pressed together and tilted down to the left. The outline of our round faces and the upward arc of my arm were in the same position as Matisse’s line drawing of mother and child on entrance tiles to the Chapel of the Rosary in Vence.

I etched our faces into my memory with the same awe and joy I felt seeing Matisse’s entrance tiles. My mother never felt closer.

Creative Non-fiction, JULY 2023, Sarah A. Odishoo

NEW YORK CITY: A NEW HEAVEN?

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NEW YORK CITY: A NEW HEAVEN?

by

Sarah A. Odishoo

My brother and I disagreed about what cities we thought conducive to living well in the United States. He loved New York City, and I adored Chicago. But we both agreed that San Francisco is a toy city. He says San Francisco is a movie set, a façade, an idea of a city rather than a real on-the-dice city like New York—a city you can bet on, one that has substance, the currency of life. New York, he said, was unique, one that had everything a soul could desire.

What I started to realize is that the city one lives in is the citizen’s windowless view of a landscape that mirrors everything in that individual that takes time, given the geography, to develop. It is the territory where the like-minded gather to observe the darkening and lightening, the dashing back and forth betwixt and between the natural world and human artifice, and how much the gathering can tolerate that darkening and lightening landscape of the soul. That’s why people move. The place stops reflecting them in the way they want to see themselves.

My brother lived in New York City for most of his adult life. He ran away from Chicago. It had started closing in on him. He and his girlfriend packed the car and headed east. It was the seventies. New York, he said, was the center of the nation, misplaced on the East Coast. 

I had visited New York with my husband in the sixties and vowed never to return. My husband was an artist, and he wanted to see the art galleries. So we came with little in our pockets, and the city of cash and compromise was haunted by poverty and the impoverished according to our budget. We stayed in the YWCA where the drug addicts, the needy, and “the wretched and the tempest-tossed” stayed. We heard them all night long in the hallways and through the walls. In the daytime the streets were glutted with trash bags and the sidewalks with the disenfranchised, begging, sitting on the curbs, wandering up and down crowded streets, watching with glazed, preoccupied eyes. We ate at storefront diners in SoHo, bought hot dogs at the street carts in front of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and after we couldn’t see any more art, when the streetlamps lit, we took a bus to the Y and slept an obsessed sleep.

When my brother asked us to visit, I said, “No, thanks, I hate New York City.”

He said, “No, no, I’ll show you some of the most beautiful…no, stunning…parts of the city. You’ll love it, I promise.”

So we went again.

He was right. He had fallen in love with the energy of the city, its intellect, its moods, and its beauty. He found its consciousness. It was everything he didn’t know, and he wanted to track whatever vibration he felt while his attention was strong and could take it in. Attention is the task we all share, and to keep attention strong means to follow, track, trail, chase down, stalk, pursue, hunt down the vibration—be mindful so its meaning comes into focus. What he probably didn’t know consciously was that mystery he was tracking was him.

He took us to the Brooklyn Bridge, and we walked across and back and dined at one of the oldest restaurants in New York, the River Café, under the trestles that loomed outside the small windowpanes, reminding me of the industrial structure of the city. Sitting at the tiny table facing the small pane of a window, I could see us wedged in the fulcrum of the bridge’s ironworks, as well as see the world’s arc in the East River’s flow, seeing the two connected somehow. Then we walked to his tiny one-bedroom apartment on Eighty-eighth Street, across from the mayor’s Gracie Mansion on East End Avenue. 

We went to the Strand Bookstore, the writers’ hangout. We walked everywhere as we tramped from the east side of Central Park to the west side, stopping at Tavern on the Green and ordering wine as we sat at the café tables, and he told us about Balto, the snarling statue of the dog safeguarding Central Park. 

We set off for the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, whose dome rose out of the horizon long before we reached it. Inside we were transported to Europe and the holy of holies. Within the massive doors the aisles led straight through the darkened here and now, lightened by the dome’s stained glass windows, and the stories imaged in the parallel universes of a sainted time lined our journey to an altar that was circled by what seemed endless chapels in praise of the mystery the city couldn’t contain, and neither could the church, but its structure pointed up and up, just as the city did. The confluence of odd combinations struck me—the city’s glint of muscular ambition and impoverished anybodies, and the medieval mysticism of the church with its boxer’s stance reminding passersby of the city’s internal rhythms.

Then on to Columbia University and its greening campus and academic dark walls. Then to Zabar’s, the West Side’s answer to hungry rich, with its ripened fruit, exotic sauces, fractious butchers, and entranced customers—the glut of gluttony overcome with sweet thoughts.

In SoHo, after we saw enough galleries, my brother did the unthinkable. He asked if we wanted to stop and eat lunch at the Prince Street Bar. The last time we came to New York, my husband’s sense of budget and priorities meant we could neither eat nor drink in a place for which he perceived we had no currency—both materially and socially. We did not dine. We ate at noon and at 7:00 p.m. after the galleries closed. My brother said he was going in. My husband said no; he was going to look at more art. Then he stared at me. I looked at him, then at my brother, and I said, “I’m going with my brother.” 

That choice was a kind of epiphany for me. I somehow did not know that I could choose outside of my relationship with him. As my husband doggedly went on to more art galleries, my brother and I ate and drank and laughed and played as we had as children in the hour he was gone. 

In a gleam of inspiration, my world changed as the city offered itself to me. I leaped ahead of myself and justified the impossible: I managed to stand outside the messy reality of my past—my preexistent conscience—and see a new order of reality: A New York Moment.

My brother’s New York unspooled as I kept leaping until my brother’s enchanted eyes drove an industrial steel bridge into my glassed eyes, the panes unclouding.

What my brother showed me about the nature of New York City was the paradox of freedom—a freedom to choose among choices, a freedom to be audacious and address my own limitations, an energy of bustle and hustle that relies on a kind of street intellect to get to the spiritual, and a principle of discovery—the unknown, the mystery, even if you never get to the meaning, is exciting, edgy, and incautious. 

What he finally showed me was that some of the charm of New York comes from its scope and its capacity to hold the opposites in tension—its surprising, conflicted, bloated, self-inflicted, mouth-foaming license to do and be anything, alongside its guilt-inflicting moral judgments of itself and others—the leftover platters of the American pilgrims, hedonistically turned on by both food and fasting, appetite and abstinence, orgasmic delay understood as God’s delight.

When I looked down from the plane, the city’s island gave a new context—one that floated outside the mainland. It revealed a deeper structure—a city packed tight with contradictions turning in on themselves, abruptly awakening a sleeping spell-cast soul to imagination and craft, the necessary acts of transport and transcendence.

What I realized is New York is a spiritual playground. The stakes are high and the outcome? Freedom itself. Freedom to see outside accepted contexts. The caveat: You choose—Heaven or Hell?

photo: Harry Rajchgot

FICTION, JULY 2023, Vivian Lawry

PRINCESS

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PRINCESS

by

Vivian Lawry

There was no road noise at the head of the holler, just the scissor-y whir of the reel mower and the soft murmur of insects. The smell of cut grass wafted up on the summer air, herby and green-smelling.

I stopped to knot a bandanna around my sweaty forehead. Roses along the critter fence bloomed pale pink, perfuming the air, smelling like no other flower. I didn’t stop long, though, lest the bees decide I was trespassing.

Beestings have laid me low ever since I was a toddler and stepped on something in the yard. Daddy said it might be a bee, but more likely a spider or suchlike. My foot swelled up four times its size, and at the hospital they said it was a good thing we got there when we did ’cause I could’ve died. They gave me a shot of something and sent me home. I don’t remember much between screaming bloody murder in the yard and lying on the couch, whimpering, begging Mommy and Daddy to rub my hot, itchy foot. Since then, insect bites of any sort swell me right up. Mosquito bites last for a week. One time I got a sweat beesting on my eyebrow, and my eye swelled shut and half my face puffed up like a circus fat lady.

So I spent as little time as possible near the roses and headed out back. It was a little cooler by the crick, or maybe I just imagined it because the water was burbling over the rocky bed. It had been right dry, so the water was running low and louder than usual.

In spite of the breeze bein’ cooler, I didn’t tarry there, either, because the cooler breeze was smelly. The outhouse sat over the crick, but when the water was running so low, it didn’t really wash the waste away.

Mowing done, I’d earned a rest. I flopped onto the wood porch swing, worn smooth by decades of butts, and made my own breeze, lazily toeing the swing back a little, breathing in time with the creak of the chains.

Great-granny sat in the ladder-back chair, the one with a woven seat made from strips of truck tire inner tubes. She’s blind but does what she can, like churn butter. Right then she was snapping green beans for supper. She seldom talked to me, and she wasn’t talking then. I yawned and went to find Granny.

She was in the backyard, her hatchet in one hand. Her other hand clamped the legs of a big, old red hen, not good for nothin’ but the stew pot. Granny brought the hatchet down true. She brushed the head off the chopping block and threw the body aside to flop around on the ground and bleed out.

Granny picked up the body from the pool of bloody mud the hen had made. I was looking at the drops of red spangling the grass when a cloud of butterflies floated in from the pasture and settled around the little pool. I ran to tell Granny.

“Oh, yes,” she said. “They puddle like that right often. They drink lots of liquid from muddy patches—though not from ponds or streams or such; their eating tubes can’t handle that.” Granny stepped to the cast-iron kettle sitting over the fire and held the hen’s feet to dunk it into the boiling water. While she plucked the hen, I watched the butterflies: little blue, white, and yellow ones, and the dramatic swallowtails and monarchs.

I eased my hand into the bloody mud and lifted it up, covered in rust red and butterflies. They stayed on my hand a right long time. That was more excitement than I’d seen since the black snake moved from the corncrib to the front porch.

A few days later, when I scraped my knee climbing the maple tree, I ran for the pasture where butterflies flitted from joe-pye weed to clover to hawkweed. I propped up my knee and soon had a rainbow mountain. It seemed that for the butterflies, blood was blood. I showed Granny my scabbed knee but didn’t mention the butterflies.

A few days later, when I went out to the meadow, I made sure Granny was in the house. Pulling out my pocket knife, I drew it up my left arm, wrist to elbow. I smeared the red line around and sat still as a stump on a big flat rock. Waiting for the first butterfly felt like forever. But the butterfly sleeve I ended up with was worth the time.

I told Granny I scratched my arm on a raspberry bramble. She swabbed it with alcohol—which burned like bejesus—and it healed with nary a sign.

The next time I fed the butterflies, I pricked all the fingers on my left hand and dripped spots along my right arm. This time, the butterflies came sooner. Each one weighed less than a safety pin.They left tiny red footprints like itsy-bitsy chicken scratches, but I imagined they were really a secret language.

I told Granny I’d pricked my fingers quilting. She inspected the quilt in progress on the frame, declared it was a good thing she found no blood stains because if she had, she’d have pinched off my arm and beat me with the bloody stump. She made that threat often, and I still had both my arms. But she likely would have tanned my butt, and sent me to get the strop to do it.

I dreaded the end of summer. As autumn approached, I fed the butterflies every day. That last day, Granny spied me on the rock and shrieked. She ran flat-out to the meadow, skirt and apron flapping around her legs. I’d never have imagined such a thing. My bloody knife had fallen from my hand and slid off the flat rock where I lay, made over into a fairy princess. Butterflies covered both arms and both legs, my bare chest, even my face. Too content to move, I just drifted.

THE END

photo: Harry Rajchgot

FICTION, Joseph J. Dehner, JULY 2023

COUNTY FAIR

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COUNTY FAIR

by

Joseph J. Dehner

Our bronze Pontiac Chieftain sped westward from Cincinnati on the annual pilgrimage to Iowa. It was 1958, when two-lane, undivided federal highways had no set speed limits. I watched Dad slam on the brakes every forty-five minutes to avoid the small-town speed traps, as Mom coached from the right. In between the traps, green and yellow fields of corn, sunflowers, and soybeans skirted the pavement. Each field looked like the last, a monotony interrupted occasionally by signs like this: 

DON’T STICK YOUR ELBOW

OUT SO FAR

IT MAY GO HOME

IN ANOTHER CAR

Burma-Shave

After a night at a motel, we’d continue on, and by afternoon we’d cross U.S. 6’s iron-girded bridge across the Mississippi River and enter Iowa. Soon we’d arrive in Iowa City.

Gramma would greet us in an apron over a flowered dress faded from Twenty Mule Team Borax washings, her face wrinkled like a sun-scorched prune, gray hair stretched into a bun. She served kolaches and tea as a welcome. Years later I would learn how her family, the Kozderkas, fled European wars to settle on farmsteads with Hungarians, Slovaks, Czechs, and Germans near where Dvořák composed the New World Symphony. There she met and married Adolph, a grandfather I never knew. They built a grand farmhouse on his earnings as a saloon owner and New York Life Insurance agent. When I visited, Gramma had been a widow almost fifty years.

Her aging, gabled house refereed a land battle between city and country as Iowa City sprawled and farms surrendered to housing plots. A damp straw odor spewed across the yard, filled with its hand-planted vegetable and blackberry patch that was home to snakes. Chickens clucked in the barn, home to spiders as big as golf balls with legs. In command of all the inhabitants was a guardian goose I’d been warned never to approach.

Gramma loved having Dad come home, and though he no longer considered this home, he loved seeing his mother. Iowa certainly wasn’t my home, and I had no plans to make it so. The week in Iowa interrupted my city library’s how-many-books-can-you-read contest, hitting tennis balls against a wall, and bicycling to a woodland park where I hunted trilobites and crinoids in a glacier-carved creek. 

Dennis Detwiler lived right across the blacktop street from Gramma’s house in a cottage built of boards with peeling paint. He and I were both nine that summer. I pictured our fathers growing up as country boys, when Teddy Roosevelt, William Howard Taft, Woodrow Wilson, and Warren Harding took turns as President. Black-and-white photo scrapbooks and a framed collection of my father’s National Rifle Association championship medals hanging in my parents’ bedroom memorialized Dad’s youth, when he shot mink and muskrats and sold their pelts for spending money. Looking for adventure, at seventeen he yearned to join the Army to chase Pancho Villa, but his parents squelched that and enrolled him at the University of Iowa. Dad left for Army service, then to Chicago, then to Cincinnati, or he wouldn’t have met my mother and I wouldn’t be here to tell you about the 1958 Johnson County Fair.

The fair highlighted the week in Iowa. While Gramma’s entry in the strawberry-rhubarb pie competition awaited judgment, my parents ambled with her through General Electric’s Wonders of Electricity exhibit, marveled in the Quilt Arcade, beheld enormous yellow tractors and harvesters, gawked at the world’s largest Statue of Liberty made entirely of butter, and learned how to use more Crisco. Dennis and I were unleashed with five dollars of tickets each until two o’clock, when we’d meet up by the Ferris wheel.

Eating our corndogs on a stick, we scanned the day’s offerings, ranging from the elocution contest semifinals to the dunking booth to the Whirligig to the strongman’s hit-the-bell stand. We headed to the swine shed, where Dennis’ classmate Pamela was vying for a prize. It cost nothing to enter but my innocence.

Pamela grinned with braces glinting and pigtails tightly wound. With my plastic Kodak I took a snapshot of Dennis standing next to but not touching Pamela. She stretched an arm toward Dodie, an enormous hog sporting a pink lace collar. On “cheese,” the sow seemed to smile but then let loose in the other direction. This was methane contributing to climate change, but not a worry back then.

Pamela boasted that Dodie weighed about eight hundred pounds.

Does Dodie sleep in your room? I asked.

Pamela giggled. Nah, she said, but sometimes I sleep in the barn.

Dennis explained that hogs wallow. No kennel, just a fence and a place to slop. And plenty of feed to get ’em plump.

Why plump? I dumbly inquired.

Doncha know?

What?

You like bacon?

Oh, I said. Death in the country—destiny for animals hugged at the fair. I pictured Dodie as an Aztec warrior like in the book I read, waiting for the high priest to cut out her beating heart as an offer to the gods of our gluttony.

Dennis and I left for the Pizza Pop Stand. We chomped on greasy slices as we passed a ten-foot-tall ear of corn emblazoned with a red company logo and an unfamiliar word—HYBRID. Behind it was the Swine Weigh-in Booth. Next came a yellow squash-like vegetable the size of a giant beach ball atop a stand in front of the Ugly Cake Contest tent. We wandered through the Bovine Barn, divided between Beef and Dairy. The milk cows mooed last rites for their neighbors.

Here today, steak tomorrow, said Dennis, pointing at a gold ribboned cow oblivious to its fate. Its cud moved from side to side. I sneezed three times.

Back outside, a barker in a peppermint jacket challenged us to hurl baseballs at bottles, while another fellow waved us toward an array of holstered water guns aimed at targets that could win a stuffed Japanese panda. But it was a tuxedoed guy with a bulging Adam’s apple waving a cane and promising a never-to-be-believed experience who won our attention. We handed him two twenty-five-cent tickets and went inside the tent.

The first spectacle shocked—a stuffed cobra in mortal combat with a mongoose. A spotlight beamed on an enormous glass jar where a two-headed calf fetus floated. Take your seats, blared a speaker. We grabbed two in the front row. Curtains parted. A human appeared in a shocking pink dress and ruby shoes. But she had a moustache and foot-long beard. And yet, she appeared to be a she.

The Bearded Queen, the announcer proclaimed. Marvel at this wonder of nature!

Freak, you mean, snickered Dennis, eyes riveted on the stage.

I was struck dumb. Girls and boys—as different as truth and falsehood. Yet, here was a challenge to that. She stroked her beard, and it didn’t come off. Years later I would learn that hirsutism is a rare condition affecting women. But then it was sheer shock. We fled.

Hey, let’s go in this one, said Dennis, pointing to an enclosure with posters of fashion models in fur coats gracing the entrance. RICHES AWAIT!—letters above the lintel boasted—NUTRIA AND YOU!

Riches—now that gets your attention. The bow-tied man at the entrance grimaced and asked if our parents were here. 

His are, said Dennis.

Bring your folks, the guardian said, they’ll thank you. Come, learn how bright your future can be.

We entered and were enraptured by beautifully shaped panels, charts, photos, and large dollar signs. A woman who looked like an aged Doris Day asked about our parents, and when she learned they were nearby, she led us around the circle. She pointed to a photo of a statuesque woman in a fur coat with the Empire State Building in the background.

Is that mink? I asked, recalling that Dad used to hunt them here, though as Dennis had told me, none remained in Iowa. 

Better than mink, she said. That’s nutria.

What’s nutria? Dennis asked.

I’ll show you, said the woman.

She led us to a pen holding cages of nutria of several colors, most a dark brown. The creatures had blazingly orange incisors. They looked like large rodents with Halloween pumpkin teeth. 

Their pelts are worth a fortune, said the woman. Look at this, she said, stroking a life-sized poster of a model posing before the Eiffel Tower. Give this to your folks, she said, handing us a dark blue folder with gold script. Opportunity of a Lifetime, it glowed. Projections trumpeted that a small investment for a breeding pair ($200 said the fine print) would multiply to thousands in months, and profits would never end.

How can that be? I asked.

They breed quickly and often, the woman said. You sell the offspring back to us, we sell them to others, and you make money every time. Or you can use the pelts and sell the meat or enjoy it for dinner. You can’t lose. You get rich. Bring your folks!

On our way to meet my parents, Dennis and I talked over this investment opportunity. 

You know, said Dennis, we could bring back hunting here in no time.

But they’re not mink, I said. They’re ugly. They’re…they’re rats.

We stopped to use our remaining tickets to buy red velvet funnel cakes, powder wafting like a cloud with each bite. Wind was picking up.

Fur’s one thing. But eating nutria. Yuck, said Dennis. 

Bacon was one thing, rat meat another, I agreed about that. Getting rich by selling rat fur and rat guts? Something’s off, I thought.

They’d be good hunting, said Dennis. We need something to shoot around here.

Okay, what about this—freedom, I blurted, unable to picture myself killing an animal. What if we let them out? Maybe they’ll skedaddle and settle here. You get your target practice, and the nutria go free.

A siren whined. An announcement sounded—tornado conditions in the area. Dennis said this happened all the time—if we see one, that’s when to take cover.

Dennis and I ran back to the nutria booth. As the saleswoman tended to a couple who were scouring the get-rich details on a wall panel shaking from the upswell outside, we sneaked into the nutrias’ lair. Remembering the story we read in Sunday School, I pictured the rodents fleeing like Moses and the Israelites from Pharoah, scampering to the exits for a new home in Iowa’s woods and streams. They’d scurry through the animal sheds. The hogs and cows would panic and stampede, providing cover for the nutrias’ escape. Perhaps all the fair’s doomed creatures would be liberated and spared execution.

I could see the future. Nutria would flourish and restore Iowa 1900. Dennis could hunt like his father and mine did. We would turn back the clock.

Years later I would learn about nutria—how Ponzi-scheme promoters sold them to farmers in the 1920s, and the rodents were abandoned when buyers couldn’t feed them or get a cent for their fur or meat as the Depression struck, how nutria native to Peru and abandoned in America as undocumented aliens invaded Louisiana and were destroying its protective delta marshes. I sensed as a boy there was something wrong with their Iowa appearance, and I knew without proof that the nutria barkers were like snake oil salesmen out to get your money. This was a fraudster invasion into farm life, the ineffable intrusion of greed disguised as commerce into the country life of honest toil.

But a siren interrupted our plot. 

Tornado conditions in the area, blared the announcer.

Dennis and I abandoned our free-the-nutria scheme and headed toward the Ferris wheel as a crowd scrambled toward the exits. Wind scattered fliers promoting Dinocide. I thought, why kill dinosaurs? I grabbed one to read how this miracle substance saved crops and could even be used to control head lice in children. Years later I would learn that Dinocide was a tradename for DDT.

Within a minute, calm and blue sky returned. The sound system announced, Tornado warning lifted.

We met the folks and Gramma on time. She grinned with two gold teeth gleaming and clutched a blue ribbon for her strawberry-rhubarb pie. A spin on the Ferris wheel capped our visit before our return to Kimball Road, the day before our long drive home to Cincinnati.

That afternoon Gramma asked me to come with her. She unlatched the barn door and glared into its dim interior. She approached the goose, who seemed to sense its fate. She grabbed the creature’s neck just below the beak and began to swing the bird. It blared a few honks as the neck seemed to stretch the width of the barn. Then she struck with a hatchet. The headless body stumbled, wings flapping briefly before collapsing in the dirt.

Just before we sat down for dinner, Gramma had me go pick eight ears of corn. Run back with them so we can get them in the pot before sugar turns to starch, she instructed. That corn was the sweetest I ever had that night. And the goose was tender. This was different—and better—than buying ready-to-roast poultry parts at Albers or Kroger back home.

Iowa, country, would never be my home, but the visits taught me how American life began with what we could make of the land and it of us. But then doing better meant leaving the farm behind, as did my father, who moved to cities in search of progress, in search of fortune, in search of Oz. Over time the land lost its magnetism and became dollars per square foot, subject to blandishments of peddlers of pesticide and nutria. Agriculture became agribusiness.

I’m a city guy, but I can feel country deep inside. County fairs persist because of their promise of America as it was, when our country was of spacious skies above a fruited plain. When we called the land home and acknowledged we live off its bounty.

THE END

photo: Harry Rajchgot