TWO POEMS by Anna Gual, translated by AKaiser
Profanity
I didn’t want a map.
I wanted a machete to clear a path
in the jungle, to follow the unconscious.
When they say too late,
you mean maybe they’re not exaggerating?
I found a small knife
and I think I’ll be able to cut the plants
that get into my eyes,
those that obstruct my will,
those that exalt contradictions.
That’s right,
I didn’t want a map.
I wanted a God within everyone.
The evidence
A seaweed print dress
or some algae on a body
turned into a dress, or
better,
a skin camouflaged among algae,
yes, that, a skin camouflaged among
algae inside the sea,
cloudy, no,
floating, floating on the ocean,
no, floating, floating on a
river, that’s it, floating
down with the current
transparent river downward, yes, that,
transparent river flowing inward.
Unknown mystery hanging in the air.
Infinite the caress that is to come.
AKaiser is the Pushcart Prize-nominated author of <glint> (Milk & Cake Press) and an NEA-awarded translator of Catalan, French & Spanish. Poems, translations & photos in Amsterdam Quarterly, Circumference, Harvard Review, Pen + Brush’s In Print, No. 5, Poetry International, POETRY and The Rumpus. Poem “Astronaut, or Blues Singer” (<glint>) breathes in song, by Mel.lif.lu.ous. Unnamable, by Catalan poet Anna Gual, is forthcoming in English (Zephyr Press, 2025). https://akexperiments.org (Photo credit: F. Veyrat)
- Published in Issue 30
LET ME IN / LET ME IN by Josh Nicolaisen
after Jean Valentine
| never knew I could wail so loud never swallowed hailstones so sharp my old boots were soaked carcass draped across my back plodding back toward where might I ever be held as well |
never begged this much of anything never drank the moon’s sour milk I’m not sure how I arrived here or it was eaten while I slept fishers are grinding their teeth I’m pleading with you |
- Published in Issue 30
GANG OF CROWS by Alison Zheng
dad promised mom
they’d age
as trees
a linden and an oak
surrounded by hybrid
tea roses
/
once again, I am empty-
ing the vacuum of
clumps of dust
and my old hair
the timer on my phone
says our two baked potatoes—
free in a box
from the food bank—
will be done in thirty-six minutes
/
I can’t stop talking about death
even though I sit in an open office
and winter’s atmospheric river
has already come and gone
and the engineers are trying to code
/
death looms
in the darned holes of
every sweater I own
/
near the baseball field,
a gang of crows
peck their way
through garbage cans
plumage
shiny black
like dad’s hair
- Published in Issue 30
TWO POEMS by Samantha DeFlitch
Ode to a Sharp-Shinned Hawk
In 1993, a report from Sandia National Laboratory offered language suggestions for long-term nuclear waste warnings in the event that humanity’s current knowledge of nuclear waste did not survive into the far future.
When she returns from September observation the other is delighted
to inform me of her findings: one thousand and seven hawks
rising from the mainland bog, all marsh marigold, cardinal flower, round-leaved sun
dew—engulfed in autumn’s flame as Saint Teresa, woman entirely on fire.
I have observed no such things with my two eyes
though I have seen detailed photographs of The Ecstasy of Saint Teresa
and also sketches of red-shouldered hawks, peregrine falcons and I held a sharp-shinned hawk
in my hands this morning, in the laboratory. It was dead, as are most birds
we hold in the palm. Dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane read its specimen tag, and who alive
can translate? It cries out as the Sandia Report, a message only fathomable in its
feel on the tongue: the danger is still present in your time, as it was in ours.
The danger is to the body, and it can kill. I would carve this inscription above
the filing cabinet of birds poisoned and struck, birds shot, concussed
beyond repair: this place is a message and part of a system of messages.
Pay attention to it! What message have you for me, sharp-shinned hawk,
that must be delivered in the mouth of the dead? Someone must
observe the peatland migration, flash of life against a magnificent sunrise as
awake and flying very fast, things blur at their edges— the dawn creatures
we snag in net, in palm—it is hard to see the truth. We are wide-eyed and still
settle for hearing crickets in their dried sedge fields; only get a good look at warblers
if we grasp their legs or find many small bodies beneath the tall tower
and even then we have changed them. Carelessness is a function of perception
and choice: beached rock crabs could be dunlin eggs or doorstops; an open palm
is also a gun. At the edge is a door shaped like a door.
There is nothing behind; only another world, an entire shoreline and diurnal tides
inclusive, with its small animals we will scoop into buckets in the night.
North American Mesoscale Forecast System
Sometimes the New Year is like this: Your back hurts. Next week, you will receive a layoff notice. An x-ray indicates the presence of free fluid in your dog’s peritoneal cavity, and Eleanor has gifted you her old Janome sewing machine—an exchange for nut rolls. Down Mendum, a man decorates in reverse, leaving a bare evergreen in his front yard. We should not stare. It is a private thing, like a poem written beneath a heavy quilt, how the dog is naked when they remove her green-striped collar to find a suitable, large vein.
The weather has warmed, comfortably, to a false spring, bringing nuthatches and busybody black-capped chickadees to your back porch. The dog turns her face toward the sun. Further down Mendum, past an Ampet gas station and Rye, you find yourself at the edge of the river. Sometimes the New Year is like this: You need another surgery. Your dog’s body has healed, and she despises the sound the Janome sewing machine makes when its needle passes through the throat plate.
It is 8:55 p.m. You have eaten a meal alone. Downstreet, the man shortens his lawn, and the dog is crying to go out. She has grown old, is weaker in the bladder. Tomorrow, they will split you open, remove the strange growths that cause hurt. The medical professionals will do this. Sometimes the New Year arrives and you have already passed through the hills. You feel in your body the quilt of time, as one whose footprints are covered, tenderly, by the season’s final snow.
- Published in Issue 30
ISSUE 30
POETRY
THREE POEMS by Malik Thompson
THREE POEMS by Dana Jaye Cadman
THREE POEMS by Omar Sakr
TWO POEMS by Alex Tretbar
TWO POEMS by Samantha DeFlitch
TWO POEMS by H.R. Webster
ONCE I WAS A PLAGUE OF LOCUSTS by Stevie Edwards
MECHANICAL PENCIL by Duy Đoàn
SOME DAYS ARE LIKE THAT by Luisa Caycedo-Kimura
GANG OF CROWS by Alison Zheng
DURING SHAME by Prince Bush
LET ME IN / LET ME IN by Josh Nicolaisen
FICTION
GIFTS by Samantha Neugebauer
FALL FOR IT by Claire Hopple
THE JUNIPER 3 by Trudy Lewis
TRANSLATION
INTERVIEW with Khairani Barokka
THREE POEMS by Juan Mosquera Restrepo, translated by Maurice Rodriguez
TWO POEMS by Maniniwei, translated by Emily Lu
TWO POEMS by Anna Gual, translated by AKaiser
CREATIVE NONFICTION
FIGHTING THE LION by Lydia A. Cyrus
ART
Cover image uses “On A Sea Beach” by Mikuláš Galanda as its base
- Published in All Issues, Issue 30
INTERVIEW with Khairani Barokka
FWR: “To enter the indonesian language is a science fictional enterprise,” you write in the first section of amuk. Reading forward, you show readers how Indonesian tenses permit a simultaneity of temporal possibilities not included within the narrower scope of English; traveling through time or existing beyond the limits of time altogether. What does it mean to you to move into and through languages, recognizing how structures and concepts so often cannot map directly? How do you feel through and comprehend the idea of translation, knowing it as something different from and more than the word-to-word equation of which one (at least in the Anglo-American context) is often trained to think it?
KB: Firstly, thank you for having me in this space, and for the time you’ve given to the work. I see the whole of the book amuk as my translation of the word. A strong interest of mine over the past years has been to query what the west thinks of as objective ‘truth’ and expose it to be fiction, and also giving encouraging people to provide the grace of truthfulness to what is called ‘fiction’. amuk highlights what is ultimately speculative non-fiction, and the infinite possibilities that affords, in terms of so many languages (including Indonesian) not having time tenses. And isn’t it strange that innumerable translations from languages without time tenses, like Indonesian and Malay, pin down just one time tense for verbs? So, as the titular poem says, each translation from these languages is both right and always wrong.
The book is a way of elucidating how moving through languages is equivalent through moving between differing cosmologies, psychogeographies. Any translator who really understands two or more languages will know that translation is not at all a word for word equation, especially considering differing grammar rules—and again, it’s about moving away from that deeply colonial understanding, that there is only one kind of English rather than different Englishes, that there is an ‘objectively right’ translation at all. Translation is an art form, and is a form of creative writing, no two translators will translate the same poetry collection the same way.
FWR: The body and body parts arise frequently over the course of amuk. What, to you, does it mean to understand the body as implicated in language—beyond simply the mechanics of its production? On the other end, thinking of lines like “language cosmologies […] hunted at the throat,” what does it mean to you to configure language itself as a mode of embodiment, with all of its potentials and vulnerabilities?
KB: Thank you for pointing this out, I suppose the bodily is a preoccupation. I think that each bodymind being so unique means each interpretation of language is uniquely ours, and the beauty of language is communication being potentially misunderstood in so many ways, as well as the hope of being potentially understood in so many ways as well. It is the hope for community, in a sense. Just as, in the book, rage is a prayer, is a manifestation of hope.
FWR: On the note of embodiment: among the multiplicitous ways in which amuk exists, it declares itself very early on as being a performance. We are even told what voice-voices we are switching into at various points, from that of amuk to one that is human. Have you performed this work before? If you have, what was that experience like? If you haven’t, how do you imagine it being performed—especially when it comes to facets, like the brackets, that cannot be communicated using the voice, or parts like the wall of texts pronouncing “I love your rage”? What does it mean to you for this work to exist as or be understood as a piece lived bodily, viewed bodily, and not encountered only in the context of the page?
KB: Yes, the long poem ‘amuk’, that forms half of the book, was originally a performance lecture on climate justice commissioned by Edinburgh University. I’ve been fortunate enough to perform excerpts from it, as well as the entirety of the poem, since the book was published, as well. Each performance is different, as a big fan of improvisation, and I make use of the voices by using different accents. I recently performed that wall of ‘I love your rage’ by asking the audience to yell it with me—and they did! The beauty of poetry always existing in different sensorial states—audio, visual performance, text—is part of an ethic of disability justice, to me, and access as translation. I love how seemingly singular texts reveal different aspects of themselves in different mediums, and I certainly have a different relationship to the text each time I translate it, so to speak, through my body. And therefore a different relationship each time to the audience I’m trying to connect with. That’s a really astute observation that the bodily connection is foregrounded intentionally, because I hope this understanding of ‘amuk’ is felt bodily by others, as I feel it within myself. I think the work as text is just as bodily received as the work as audible performance—how you read visually is always very much your bodymind involved in the art.
FWR: Much of the book discusses the “mistranslations” (if one can call them that) wrought by colonial/hegemonic ignorance and arrogance, from “run amuck” to the poetic genre of the pantoum. What was your intention behind giving voice to human and nonhuman alike in this work—and particularly giving voice to an act of language itself? How did you first land on the term amuk to be the word at the heart of your collection?
KB: I’ve been thinking about the mistranslation of ‘amuk’ for years… To me, it encapsulates the history of colonialism, to mistranslate ‘rage’ into psychopathy or a ‘culture-bound’ homicidal syndrome or a ‘running amuck’ of chaos. It’s the theft of rage, by Dutch, Danish, Portuguese, English, and these languages deliberately mistranslated the word in the late 17th century, during violent colonisation. Criminalising and pathologising the rage of colonised peoples has been going on for centuries, as a very specific tool of oppressors. The history of this one word ‘amuk’ stretches all the way into what’s happening in the present, with the multiple genocides ongoing in Palestine, Papua, Sudan, Congo, and elsewhere. And with regards to the nonhuman, all of these continued colonial genocides are also environmental genocides, as I’m glad the book makes clear
To answer your first questions, I suppose voices are important to me because I felt the original and persistent soul of the word ‘amuk’ contains hundreds of millions of lives. In each word’s etymology in mis/translation is the history of so many voices.
FWR: One of the many innovative aspects of this collection is the way it uses punctuation, and specifically brackets. Brackets even open the book—framing the incantation of “bahasaku” and then filling, in various sizes and formats, the otherwise empty space of “In Praise Of.” In a book so much about both the idea of alternate possibilities of seeing or understanding and about what it means for such possibilities to be hidden or devalued, among other subjects, what led your decision of how you use brackets? Do the meanings and motives behind this punctuation change for you as we see them across different poems in the collection?
KB: Yes, it relates to the use of voices, I think—the truth that lies behind each word, and how it’s used in the English language. Saying the quiet part exists, the quiet part is out loud for a lot of people, and having to make it ‘quiet’ does something to you. And also drawing a boundary of respect for language. There is something protective about brackets for me, that the true meanings will always be there, no matter how much people try to obscure them. Protecting from disrespect what needs to be held in secret spaces, to avoid the surveillance of disrespectors. The great thing about brackets is that meanings and motives are also open to interpretation, throughout the book.
FWR: amuk is astounding both for what it communicates and how it communicates it; the stories it tells and the innovative ways in which it tells them. There are many instances of playing with or complicating form, and the book even includes and references work from other art areas like photography and film, as with the photos of hands and in the poem “preceding a prayer for the dead asian men who inspired a nightmare on elm street.” As you were writing this work, who were you looking towards as your models and inspirations (can be writers, musicians, painters, relatives—whomever!)? How would you say your experience in performance and working with artists in other mediums has influenced your work?
KB: Thank you so much. As you say, I come from a performance/interdisciplinary art background as well as a literary one. My PhD was in Visual Cultures. For me, these interests have always been tied to poetry, and to translation, and to a wide range of influences, and to collaboration with other artists. So ‘amuk’ starting out as a performed text—with the words on a screen as I performed it—was just an outpouring of all the different artistic influences I’d accumulated, probably many I’m not even conscious of. Certainly my family, and Minang and Javanese traditions of poetry as communal, as voiced. Certainly artists who use performance, such as Arahmaiani, and the late, great Cok Sawitri, and many musicians I admire. Certainly other disabled and ill artists in the literary and performance world.
FWR: Though a collection of original writing, your background as a translator certainly shines through in amuk, especially in its interest in language and the politics between languages. What do you feel that being a translator as well as a poet gives you access to? How do each of your practices inform the other? What do you feel like is/are the responsibility/ies of translators?
KB: Many thanks, I’m glad the translation background comes through. One understanding being a translator gives me access to is that the notion a translated poem is only good if ‘it reads as though it was first written in English’ is a false colonial paradigm, and again, one that presumes there’s only one kind of English in the world. And using multiple tenses in one verb is definitely something that comes from my understanding of language as a translator—it is actually quite weird that all verbs from non-tense-containing languages are translated in just one tense in English. I started playing with multiple tenses in one in my previous book, Ultimatum Orangutan, and decided to really go in on it for this one. Translators’ responsibilities are manifold, but I feel that ultimately, it is about humility and respect for languages as entire universes and philosophies of thought. I’m so glad you enjoyed the book, thanks again for having me.
- Published in Interview, Issue 30, Translation
THE JUNIPER 3 by Trudy Lewis
No one even remembered our dad’s sad song until Tate brought it back on TikTok. The angst and the ecstasy. The emo vocals and the math rock chord progressions. The long and whining bridge between curt, accusatory verses.
My mother killed me
My father ate me
My sister gathered up my bones
I’d heard it hundreds of times, of course. It was The Juniper 3’s anthem back in the aughts, before the drummer took up with the Sufis and Tate’s mom OD’d on oxycodone. The band only recorded one album, but they toured the Midwest for four years on the strength of cult favorites. For the last few months, they brought baby Tate along with them, leaving him in the motel with his teenage aunt while they banged it out at college music festivals or milked the instrumentals for hardcore fans in the clubs.
Maybe that’s why Tate was always vocalizing. I remember him rapping nursery rhymes when I was a toddler and beatboxing with his cheek next to mine, so that I could feel the rhythm pop and swell against my skin.
By then, Dad had gone back to programming and married my mom. It didn’t take him long to realize that he needed a responsible woman to help with Tate, who was already becoming difficult, throwing tantrums and refusing to sleep. So Dad got on a dating app, one of the early versions, where the developers clearly hadn’t worked out the kinks. Of course, people can make bad life choices without any help from an algorithm. But the external validation only encourages them to ignore their mistakes.
I was thirteen before they admitted anything was wrong. Meanwhile, I had been noticing for years. Dad steered around her in the kitchen, so that they never touched. She flinched as he leaned across her to open the glove compartment. Mom set the alarm for five a.m. so she could get some quiet before going into the insurance office, and Dad stayed up making music until one.
What did it measure anyway, that outmoded app? Sexual compatibility? Economic stability? Common interests? She must have claimed to enjoy music, at some point. After all, she insisted I learn an instrument and bragged to anybody who’d listen when I made first chair flute. But ever since I could remember, she’d been shouting at Dad to keep the volume down. When I was little, he’d bring his guitar into the living room and pass out triangles and maracas so we could play along. By elementary school, he was down in the basement experimenting with his sound system every night. By middle school, he didn’t even eat dinner with us, just grabbed a plate and took it down to his studio.
But they were adults. The person in our house I felt sorry for was Tate. You couldn’t turn Tate down. He was always spilling over with sound, humming, beatboxing, pretending to speak French or German, whistling, cracking his knuckles, snapping his fingers and clicking his tongue.
One day when he was nine or ten, he got detention for disrupting a school assembly and Mom asked if Dad thought the kid was on the spectrum. She certainly hoped so, because then maybe they could get some medication to even him out.
That was one of the few times I saw Dad explode at her, his voice cracking into sheer static and his thin, handsome face turning red as his goatee.
Because, of course, Tate’s mom had died of drugs.
I was thrilled to see him defending my brother for once. Usually, Dad wasn’t around when Mom punished Tate by making him go without his dinner and sit out in the mudroom in the dark. Once, she made him pee in the girl’s bathroom for getting into her make-up. Another time, when he had a meltdown in the electronics store, she left him there, driving halfway home before going back to pick him up. Even then, she sent me in to get him.
She was constantly asking why Tate couldn’t be more like me.
“See how Lena cleans her room without anyone asking?”
“Look how Lena sits still for the dentist.”
“Lena is so quiet that she gets an extra stick of gum.”
I’ll never understand why Tate didn’t hate me for the preferential treatment. I know I hated myself, that pitiful zombie who followed along behind her mother without any will of her own. If he was a regular person, my brother would avoid and resent me. But, being Tate, he loved me more than anyone else I’d ever known.
*
One afternoon just after my thirteenth birthday, we were sitting outside under the tulip tree when Mom drove up in her Escalade. Tate had been telling me about his confrontation with the gym teacher, punctuating the story with sound effects: the bouncing basketball, the squeaking bleachers, the banging lockers, the splashing in the pool. Sometimes it was hard to look at him when he talked. So I stared up through the branches instead, admiring the pink blossoms with mouths as wide as teacups and remembering how we pretended to drink out of them as kids. A plain brown bird perched next to one of them, singing a sad and piercing song.
The jerky motion of Mom’s vehicle let me know something was wrong. My throat closed, and I thought about the anti-anxiety pills I was supposed to be taking. I’d skipped a couple of days because they were making me dizzy, and now I felt a full-fledged panic attack coming on.
She pulled the car up too close, nearly veering into the yard, and emerged like a storybook pop-up, with her long neck, bright make-up, curly hair, and ruffled blouse. Even her smell was dangerous, a perfume so strong that it singed the hairs inside my nose.
“Get in the house, both of you. We’re not going to give the neighbors a free show.”
She herded us up the front steps, kicked the shoes out of the doorway, and slammed the front door behind her. I stayed as far away as possible without appearing to retreat, because I knew from experience that would only make things worse. Tate, of course, went right into the path of danger, taking her canvas tote from her and setting a hand on her arm.
“Bad day at the office?” he asked. “Trouble at the low-cal, no foul, farm insurance saloon?”
“You could say that. I found out my stepson is making a fool of himself on social media, letting his freak flag fly out over the internet for everyone to see.”
Tate blushed, bringing his new sideburns into focus. Although he’d always been a brunette, his facial hair was going to be as red as Dad’s.
“Yeah, it was just an experiment.” Tate said. “I wanted to see if I could drum up some interest in Dad’s old band. You’d be surprised how many people remember. And then some younger kids just like the bebop bipitty of the down and dirty beat.” He began demonstrating, pursing his lips and blasting out a series of verbal farts that shook the windowpanes and ruffled Mom’s hair.
She turned away, waving her hand in front of her face, and swung the sharpened blade of her profile toward me. “Lena, did you know about this?”
I couldn’t deny it. After all, I was the one who had filmed the video of Tate mugging for the camera in Dad’s studio, wearing his mom’s old blue fright wig and a vampire cape.
“It was just a goof.” I said. “We did it last week when we had early dismissal.”
Tate’s rendition was nothing like my father’s. It was speeded up and syncopated until it was nearly unrecognizable. My brother punctuated his lines with a flurry of clicks and whistles, his cheeks puffing out, then deflating with a loud pop over his cheekbones. His phrasing was so erratic you could only make out a few of the words. Mother. Father. Sister. Kill. Eat. Bones.
“And what about your father?”
“I was going to surprise the old duder once I got up to a million views.”
“Which should happen, like tomorrow, if it keeps on blowing up,” I said, bragging on my brother even though I ought to know better by now.
Tate tugged on the string of his sweatshirt. “It’s supposed to be a birthday present for his fortieth, you know, to show he’s not completely and irrevocably irrelevant.”
Mom rolled her eyes and pulled a miniature bottle of hand sanitizer out of her purse. “You need to take it down,” she said, pouring a clear puddle into her palm. “Take it down or I’ll cut up your learner’s permit and never let you drive the car again.” She rubbed her hands together, as if she had the problem solved.
“Don’t you even want to see it first?” I asked.
“Believe me, I’ve already got an earful from my colleagues. Take it down and your father never has to know.”
*
But I couldn’t let that happen. Not when Tate was so invested the project. I waited until Mom was asleep, then walked down the orange-carpeted stairs to the basement, feeling the shag catch between my bare toes. I smelled pot smoke and popcorn. I saw a flicker of fluorescents, heard the blunt attack of the guitar. My father was singing in his angry young man’s voice. The sound was much more confident than his speech, and for a minute, I wondered what my life would be like if I’d been raised by a singing father instead of a silent one.
He must have known what I was thinking, because he inserted my name into the music: Lena, Marlena, Marla, Marlene! The sound enveloped my body and warmed my ribs, until I could almost believe he was a regular father and not just a sad, defeated hipster who had given up all pretense of parental responsibility.
He sat at the bar in his day-glo T-shirt and hiking sandals, head bent over his guitar so I could see his bald spot, an icy, white thumbprint in the lava flow of red. Behind him, a huge poster showed The Juniper 3 at the height of its fame: Dad skinny, in horn rims and a paisley button-down, the drummer rocking a fedora, Tate’s mother ripped as an apocalyptic warrior in her leather vest and shredded tights.
“What’s up?” he asked, gesturing for me to speak over the music.
“It’s Tate,” I said. “He did something amazing. And now Mom wants him to throw it away.”
“What was it, this spectacular thing your brother did?”
I handed him my phone.
Dad’s face went white and his hands slid off the guitar.
He pulled it close, then blinked and adjusted the volume. There was Tate, puffing and blowing, clicking and tic-ing, bringing out the banger side of Dad’s mumblecore song.
“That’s it, all right. Though I don’t know if I’d recognize it if you hadn’t pointed it out to me.”
“It’s heading for a million views.”
“Which translates to what, about twenty bucks and fifteen minutes of fame?”
I shrugged. “Who knows? Anyway, Tate did it for you. For your birthday.”
He replayed the video, slapping his leg in time to the beat. “I never knew he had any interest in that old tune.”
“Mom’s telling him he has to take it down.”
He rubbed at the screen, like he was trying to wipe away a smudge.
“His mom always thought he’d grow up to be a musician. I mean his biological mother, Krista.”
Krista. The bass player with the shaved head and the arms bigger than Dad’s.
“She was deliberately trying to get pregnant, you know. It wasn’t an accident, like your mom always assumes. Krista went to a psychic who said it might be now or never. Why she consulted a psychic and not a doctor, I’ll never know. Then after five months, she finally missed her period and we knew that Tate was on his way.”
I blushed, thinking of three months earlier, when I found the first clot of blood in my underpants and had to borrow a pad from my frenemy Blair Simpson who was applying eyeliner in the girls’ bathroom. But I felt a kind of pride too, knowing that Dad wasn’t too embarrassed to discuss the female anatomy with me.
Dad started the video again. “I guess I’ll have to talk to Mom.”
*
Sometimes, I envied Tate because he had another mother, even if she was dead. At least there was a reason he got treated like a stepchild. Though Mom favored me, her attention could be dangerous, and her praise sometimes felt like a curse. She monitored my weight, my schoolwork, and my medication. She made a chart where I was supposed to record my flute practice. She was always nagging me about me getting a solo in the band concert or raising my grades. Tate, on the other hand, she could ignore for days, until he did something disruptive.
But the TikTok really got under her skin—maybe because it was so public. Now there was no way to hide the eccentricities of her adopted son, who, though he had never been diagnosed with any particular condition, was clearly some kind of genetic anomaly. When I came home from school the next day, she was already there.
“I got off early for good behavior,” she said, switching out her sunglasses and snapping them into her purse. “I thought we could go out for ice cream.”
“What about Tate?”
“Just us girls. So we don’t have to talk over the noise.”
She hadn’t been so chatty when I got my period, only tossed me some pads and told me I better stay away from the boys.
But now her voice was low and sweet, melting as quickly as soft serve.
“Did Dad say anything to you?” I asked.
“Your Dad has bent my ear with fish stories and fairytales, most of which I attempt to ignore.”
She drove me downtown to the Sweet Spot where she ordered a cup of mango sorbet for herself and chocolate marshmallow on a waffle cone for me. We ate our treats outside, watching little kids smudge their faces and dogs beg for the tail ends of their cones.
“Should we get something for Dad and Tate?”
“They already eat enough sweets, don’t you think? Besides, I wanted to talk with you about the TikTok.”
“Tate didn’t take it down?” I asked, even though I knew he hadn’t because I checked the app multiple times a day.
“No, and now your Dad is backing him up. It’s all this ego he has around his college band. Sometimes, I think he’ll never get over it. I can’t imagine what people are saying about your brother’s performance. But I can’t see the comments because I don’t have an account.”
I could tell where this was going. I licked at a drip of chocolate that was sliding down the side of my cone and tried to buy some time.
“Lena, I wouldn’t be asking if I didn’t think it was for your brother’s own good.”
“Hmm,” I said, biting off a brittle piece of waffle.
“You know, it’s a thin line between admiration and sick curiosity. And I think we both know the kind of attention your brother tends to attract.”
I thought about the kids who’d piled up on his Insta, the lacrosse player who did an imitation of his stutter, the language arts teacher who made him stand at the front of the room and recite a tongue twister every time he talked out of turn in class.
“OK,” I said. “But only because I don’t want him to have to delete it.”
I texted her my password and she immediately got on the app.
I thought about the comments I’d seen.
Sick vibes, Dude. Props to your old man
When we saw The Juniper 3 in Milwaukee, they played for two hours and the bass player flashed her tits
This kid is hilarious
Seriously, what kind of yodeling is this? It reminds me of those African throat-singers
Just think about the kind of head this guy could give
“Well?” I asked.
“I’m reading.”
“Why do you hate The Juniper 3 so much anyway?”
“It nearly killed your father. And now it’s doing a good job on his son.”
*
By Dad’s birthday, Tate’s TikTok had hit a million views. A few followers contacted him, asking for signed memorabilia. A college radio station in Kansas asked if Tate and Dad would perform a father-son duo at their fall festival. A music industry scout wrote asking if Tate had any other songs. Even Dad’s drummer got in touch after a solid decade of silence, wondering if he’d like to play a set of old Juniper 3 numbers for a Sufi fundraiser.
There was no way anyone was taking the video down now. I bought a penny whistle for Tate, even though it was Dad’s birthday and not his. I thought maybe I could teach him the basics so he could add a legitimate instrument to his next video. We celebrated with dinner at a Japanese restaurant, where they threw pieces of meat and vegetables onto your plate like confetti. Mom got a shrimp stuck in her hair.
Dad told us he was looking for a job where he could work remotely and spend more time on his music. Tate, who must have picked up on the permissive atmosphere, asked if he could quit school and finish his degree online. He’d never liked the academic gig much anyway and now that the bullies had started sucking up to him, it was even more obscene.
Mom didn’t relish the idea of everyone hanging around the house, making more messes for her to clean up. But she didn’t actually say no. Was I imagining it, or did I see her touch Dad’s leg under the table? For once, I could see why they were together, his tender voice and her raspy laughter, his deep dimples and her pixie face.
*
Of course, the truce didn’t last for long. Dad’s new job turned out to involve a lot of travel in addition to the down time at home, and we saw less of him than usual. Tate’s TikTok started attracting negative attention when some activists claimed it mocked the disabled. And I was having more episodes, losing my balance while standing in the lunch line, my mouth so dry it began to affect my embouchure when I was playing my flute. I hadn’t entirely stopped taking my medication but, at this point, I couldn’t distinguish the symptoms from the side effects. I felt alienated from my friends, who didn’t want to talk about anything but Tate, begging me to put them in one of his videos. Meanwhile, Mom had started monitoring my social media accounts, demanding my passwords and editing my posts.
Tate wasn’t making much progress with his online courses. As far as I knew, he still hadn’t recorded another song. He never took out his Airpods and if I wanted to talk to him, I had to reach in and pull one off him, like breaking a wishbone.
“Hey. What’s up? Is anybody in there?”
“Hey, what’s going down, sister? Beep-bop you later on the B-B-B-B side.”
I admit I understood Mom’s frustration, trying to communicate with a person who’d rather use his words to make music than actually tell you what he means.
After a couple of weeks, he stopped taking showers and wore the same gray hoodie every day, until it was covered with mustard and ketchup stains. He didn’t shave his beard when it came in red, just let tufts accumulate like random feathers on his lip and chin. It began to look like he might flunk out of high school. What was Mom going to do with him then? According to her, he was Dad’s responsibility. But according to Dad, Tate was nearly an adult who could make all major life decisions on his own.
One day, when I came home from band practice, I saw Tate sitting on the floor of the mudroom, his face hidden behind the coats.
“What’s up?” I said, sitting down next to him. “Is anything wrong?”
For the first time I could remember, he was completely still, so that I noticed how long his legs had gotten, stretched in front of him in his outgrown jeans, one leg ripped over the kneecap and the other covered in purple ink.
Mom called from the kitchen, her voice animated with insider information. “Your brother is sulking because he got some negative comments on his Ticky-Tacky. Maybe you can cheer him up.”
I gave him a punch on the shoulder, and he still didn’t respond.
“Come on, Tate. Don’t let the haters get to you.”
What could be bad enough to make him go silent?
I pulled out my phone and scrolled through the comments, where I saw my own profile picture, a cartoon goldfinch, next to words I would never say. That I was the sister of this dimwit genius. That I was already struggling with depression and anxiety. That I begged him to take down the video so I didn’t have to quit school or die of shame.
I felt a stab in my stomach like the worst cramp I could imagine and my mouth went so dry I couldn’t feel my own tongue. But I didn’t need it anymore. I had someone else speaking for me.
“Ask him when he’s going to stop pouting and clean out the mudroom,” Mom called. “If he’s giving up on his schoolwork, at least he could do something to pull his weight around the house.”
I shook Tate’s shoulder, but he didn’t respond.
“It wasn’t me who wrote that,” I whispered. “I promise. It was Mom.”
He slumped toward me, his weight shifting onto my shoulder, like he might consider forgiving me after all.
“I gave her my password. I know it was clueless. But she just kept badgering me until I couldn’t hold out anymore.”
I breathed in the sour smells of lunch meat and marijuana, mustard and cereal, oily hair and stale sweat. I thought of all the times I couldn’t look at him because his face made me dizzy. I pulled harder at his shoulder, wishing that I could go back and stand up to my mother. Then he toppled over, the weight of his head in my lap. For a minute, I thought he was just goofing. Then I looked down and saw the broken veins marking up his face like red pixels, the spot of blood in his eyeball, the bungy cord wrapped around his neck.
In some ways, it was the first good look I ever got at him and I didn’t recognize what I saw.
*
After the emergency workers left, Mom gave me a pill, and I fell into a sleep so deep I couldn’t find its edges. Then I woke up in the middle of the night, sweating into the school clothes I’d never managed to change out of. Lying there looking at my hands on the comforter, I almost convinced myself it was just a nightmare: the hateful TikTok comment, the silence in the mudroom, Tate’s head heavy and still on my lap. Then I felt my stomach split open, ripping like an outgrown one-piece bathing suit from groin to navel when I realized again it was true.
Even though it was two a.m., I could see the light under my door and hear Mom talking to my father in her dripping, soft-serve voice.
“Honey, you should try to sleep.”
“First Krista, then Tate. What is it that I do to people?”
“It would never have happened if we’d gotten him on medication.”
“I don’t know. Look at Lena. The pills don’t seem to be doing her much good.”
“He was disturbed, Babe. He was suffering. He was not equipped to live in this world.”
There was a long pause and my neck prickled as I imagined her touch on his shoulder, her hand in his hair. How many times had she comforted me like that, tenderizing me like meat before going in for the kill.
“This TikTok incident was too much for him. I know you were flattered by the attention. But it’s a lot of pressure on a kid trying to kick-start a moribund career.”
His groan seemed to come up from beneath the house, trailing like a tree root though my intestines. It unearthed worms and mushrooms, tore through grass and spattered mud. This time, Dad wasn’t the musician, but only the instrument. And it was my mother who played him like a cheap penny whistle, putting her own spin on the tune.
*
Of course, Mom handled all the arrangements. She scheduled the funeral in the Presbyterian church where she and Dad got married and forbade any mention of suicide. She had to give Tate credit, at least, for choosing a method that left a presentable corpse.
I couldn’t stand the idea of people coming to gloat at his funeral, gratified that his one spectacular success had ended in the ultimate failure. Why was it that the other big life rituals—weddings, anniversaries, bar mitzvahs, birthdays—were by invitation only? It’s only at the end they let the whole un-curated world in to gawk at your remains.
At Mom’s request, I prepared a flute solo to play in between the scripture reading and the eulogy. I’d been practicing Bach’s Partita in A Minor for months, getting ready for the state competition, but I never thought I would have to perform it under that kind of stress. Somehow, I made it to the front of the church in my black recital gown and waded into the opening bars of the Sarabande.
I looked from the audience members with their smug living faces to the still body in the casket, nothing like the real Tate. Then I locked eyes with Mom, who was dabbing a Kleenex over a face dry and perfect, makeup unsmeared. She knew I’d never tell anyone what she did to my brother. Because accusing her would incriminate me.
I wandered through the Bach until I found the nodes of Dad’s song: the C and the A, the trill and the rest, the aching whole note and the treacherous bridge. I was on my way now, playing the song without lyrics, telling the story without words. The tune sprang free from the score and flew around the church, echoing off the rafters and lingering like a ghost over the pews.
Some of the kids from school recognized the music. They stood up and flashed peace signs or pounded their fists over their hearts.
And Dad, who had been drifting, came up to join me, filling in the sad, mad lyrics of the final verse.
*
Afterwards, Mom went into a flurry of redecorating. She cleaned out the mudroom, scrapped the living room furniture, and took all of Tate’s possessions to Goodwill. She finally had the quiet house she always wanted. Meanwhile, Dad flew to California to meet with the industry professionals who’d contacted him after Tate’s death.
As for me, I spent most of my time outside in the tulip tree. The blossoms were gone by then, but I could still make out their melon smell on my fingers. And when the branches moved above me, I thought I could hear Tate whispering: mother, father, sister. Sometimes, Krista joined him, harmonizing in her reedy alto. And if I was very still, I could even hear my father singing along in his angry young man’s voice.
After what had happened, I was afraid he’d never come back to us and that I’d be left alone with my mother, growing more and more inseparable from her. Even if he wasn’t much of a parent, at least Dad formed some buffer between us, and I missed his silent approval every time I passed the basement door.
Then, a week and a half later, he texted to say that he’d signed a music deal and was coming home to celebrate. Did we get the gifts he sent us? They should be arriving any day now: a necklace for me, a freezer for the mudroom, a designer purse for mom. It was all Tate’s doing, bringing good things to his family even after he was gone.
I was sitting in the tulip tree when Dad drove home from the airport and Mom ran out of the house to greet him, so excited that she hadn’t even bothered to put on a sunhat or slip into her shoes. Even the tree shook its branches, welcoming Dad home.
But I thought heard something else in the branches above me, a bird singing a familiar tune.
The mother and the father. The sister and the brother. The killing and the eating and the bloody bag of bones.
I reached in the pocket of my shorts for my phone so I could play Tate’s version, remembering how happy he’d been when he recorded it. My chest expanded and I felt a strange comfort in the the clicks and pops, the garbled lyrics and the explosive beats.
Then I looked down at Mom and made sure she heard it too. Her expression went flat, weighted down with memory. Did she even feel sorry for what she’d done to my brother? Did she expect me to forgive her? Or did she believe that keeping the secret would bring us even closer, uniting us forever in a sinister sisterhood?
I gripped a tree branch and shook it as hard as I could. If I could bring the whole tree down on top of her, that’s what I’d do.
But I only managed to startle the poor bird, a bright Blue Jay who flew down in front of me, sailing past my mother and off into the woods.
- Published in Featured Fiction, Fiction, Issue 30
FALL FOR IT by Claire Hopple
After they escort us out, we are told to wait here. The here being a square of sidewalk.
If you could see the two of us on this sidewalk square. Trying to maintain appearances. It’s a delicate operation. A heavy quiet.
Some convenience store employees switch off who gets to peer out the window at us. They take turns and they take their time having a look.
Ben is carrying around his old fourth grade science project. He refuses to set it down. It’s a standard volcano, but he never quite finished the eruption part. The magma reservoir’s empty. It won’t be petrifying any ancient civilizations anytime soon. When he showed it to me, I told him my school had an arts and science fair (not exclusive to science), and that my project had been a short story about a giant blob overtaking a city, and he said that was just typical. The course of history changed on that fateful day of the Heritage Elementary Arts and Science Fair— probably! I think I got third place in my category. I don’t think there were more than three people in my category.
Now I sit here on the concrete and I see it all coming. I know how things will turn out for us. But not Ben. He appears caught unawares at all times. His face looks like a damp sandwich. There’s no other way to explain it. I guess his face is stuck like that. He’s forever cornered.
You wouldn’t say his volcano is dismantled per se. More like lethargic. Painted rivulets of what must be molten lava punctuate its sides.
We exchange information about the comings and goings of passersby on the street while we wait. I scootch away, tapping the sidewalk.
“Hang on a sec. Maybe there’s a trapdoor under here,” I say.
Ben shrugs, in all likelihood too busy pondering his next move to respond.
“Call the embassy. They’ll sort the whole thing out. Write this down!” I start shouting.
No one knows what to say. And by no one, I mean me.
So that’s the situation.
He can’t let go of his science project, yet he insists on continuing his errands. Turning the whole day into an expedition of sorts. A sad one. Can there be sad expeditions? They seem part of our destiny. Which adds up. Because otherwise, we’d be unstoppable.
We sit and blink like everyone else. When really, we are untamed animals.
They let us go. This teenager wearing a polyester vest walks out and says, “You can go.”
The whole escapade is very anticlimactic. There’s nothing they can do. No charges they can press for carrying around your childhood science project. There they go, attempting to press charges like you can press a button. I imagine a big red button with the word CHARGES on it, and there’s some old white guy in a suit sitting at a large desk swiveling around in his chair, caressing the button and laughing. That can’t be how it works. Or can it?
Admittedly, he looked vaguely threatening in there, hauling the volcano in a nearly somnambulant state. But come on. Who isn’t a threat?
We leave. Ben drives his car like a movie prop. His steering is all over the place. Somehow, I’m noticing this for the first time. I check behind me for a projector screen with a phony background playing on it just in case.
He gets panicky about yellow lights. You never know if he’s going to accelerate really hard or hit the brakes or sort of waffle around and make these timid little mewling noises while going the exact same medium amount of speed.
Earlier, in the store, I asked him why he was doing this, why he felt the need to carry this thing around, and he said, “To get the blue ribbon.”
He seemed a bit mysterious to me after that. I liked the feeling and wanted to leave it there. Knowing what he meant would ruin it in a sense, and so I didn’t ask any follow-up questions.
“And now it’s time for Amelia’s piano recital,” he finally says, tapping on the steering wheel with the volcano nestled in his lap.
“That won’t do,” I say.
“What do you mean? I can’t go alone.”
“Yes, but I can. She’s my niece.”
“What are you saying?”
I think about reaching over him to open his door handle, then ejecting him and his failed project out of the vehicle and onto the pavement. Somehow making it look like an accident. Corralling the car into a parking spot without moving from the passenger seat.
To get the blue ribbon. The blue ribbon of murder. An art and a science.
I stay buckled. I stare at my seatbelt and say nothing— but one of the many rewarding tasks of camaraderie with my fellow humans.
“This is really important. I don’t know when I’ll see anyone again. I’ve booked a trip and I’m not sure when I’ll return,” Ben says.
“Oh yeah?”
I feign interest to throw off suspicion. To have him at my disposal. I’m not used to it though. I’m always interested. Even when I shouldn’t be.
“Yeah, I’m going to visit the real Bigfoot. Prove his existence and all that. Develop a pact with him. Maybe even a secret language, who knows.”
“A commemorative plaque,” I say.
“Huh?”
“You should get him a commemorative plaque for the occasion. That’d be a nice gesture,” I say.
I can tell he’s waiting for more from me. So I cup his kneecap in my palm. Nice and snug.
“These things happen,” I say, not really knowing what I’m saying.
“Anyway, I wanted to tell you first,” he says, glancing down at his knee and back up at the road a few times.
My hand is still cupping his kneecap and I squeeze it firmly. With my grip strength, I could pop that cap right off.
I release my hand. That was close. Too close.
I open his sunroof and lift his project up through it, showcasing his handiwork for the whole town to see. This paper volcano is part of my life now. That’s the main thing.
I examine Ben’s damp sandwich of a face, awaiting a signal.
GIFTS by Samantha Neugebauer
Marie and Ms. Simpkin’s unexpected meeting on the park’s northwest corner got their lunch off to a bad start. Neither felt quite ready to commit themselves to conversation, yet what else could they do? They would need to proceed around the gated park and down Irving Place together as if the ten minutes of solitude they’d lost had been no loss at all.
Walking side by side, each suspected the other’s inner disappointment, though neither could right it, and the more questions they posed to one another, the more each mourned their solitary stroll and the things they would have seen and pondered on their own. In the body, disappointment, the quotidian sort, wedged firmly between tension and imagination, the only paths outward. Taking shorter steps than she was accustomed to taking, Marie fixed her gaze on the old woman’s plump, jaundiced hand clutching an ornate snakehead cane; its one eye a bright costume sapphire, the other, a tarnished cavity.
Ms. Simpkin had been Marie’s professor in her first-year writing seminar, The Palace Versailles, the previous spring. On the first day of class, Ms. Simpkin had arrived late, out of breath, large, and mummified in a floral, gauzy scarf. Their class had met in a tight, square, windowless room in the library, the walls the color of a hearing-aid, and the first thing Ms. Simpkin had uttered was that if a shooter came in, they’d all be killed. “You should demand more for your money—or your parents’ money,” she’d told them with a wicked chuckle.
Now it was late June, and Marie could barely recall how exactly the lunch had come about. She must have arranged it near the end of the term. She must have approached Ms. Simpkin after class and, in a surge of daring and career-mindedness, encouraged a further meeting. But had Ms. Simpkin suggested a meal off campus and the particular date? Marie could not recall any kind of back and forth. She felt funny about it, and all summer, she’d jailed the lunch inside a thick blue circle within her calendar notebook so that she could forget about it until the time came.
Circumstances forced Marie to be a meticulous calendar user. She had three part-time jobs and an active social life. The previous night, she’d been drinking at El Cantinero with her friend Will, a screenwriting major. For a few months, Will had been crushing on the handsome older man who tended bar there, and though it was beyond Will’s current powers to draw the bartender’s interest, Marie and Will made a game of studying the bartender’s words and mannerisms for signs of hidden affection. For her services, Will bought Marie as many Blue Hawaiians as she wanted. It was 2009, Marie was nineteen, and Blue Hawaiians were the only drink she was sure she liked. She drank five that night, as well as three large glasses of water, and she and Will were the last people to leave the bar at four in the morning.
And in three hours, after her lunch with Ms. Simpkin, Marie would need to report to her dorm for her overnight R.A. shift, where in exchange for summer housing and ten meals a week, she served in an on-call rotation, minding the other students staying in New York over the summer completing unpaid internships and taking extra classes. The position also required Marie to work thirty hours a week at the university housing office. In addition, she cashiered fifteen hours at the Union Square Barnes and Noble and babysat for a Tribeca family on Saturday afternoons and Tuesday nights. Although Marie considered the babysitting the least impressive of her jobs, she enjoyed it most. It got her out into the city and into an interesting lofted apartment—her possible future!—and the two little girls weren’t the spoiled monsters Marie’s mother had told her to expect.
*
Daria had seen something in Marie, a little talent, but now whatever she’d seen did not seem enough to warrant this outing. A haze of pity, directed at Daria (!), floated on the edges of the large-chested girl, who was chattering gently about her sibling structure back home in “Delco.” Marie was the eldest apparently, and Marie thought this meant something, although she faltered at saying so directly because, Daria intuited, Marie didn’t know what it meant, and staying one step away from the meaning allowed the meaning to be more mysterious. If the girl wanted to be a writer, she’d need to overcome that. They waited for the light. Daria checked the clasp on her dark floral carpetbag. “What about you?” Marie asked. “Do you have siblings?”
“Siblings?” Daria hollered. “Yes, yes. Two brothers and a sister.” To be kind, she added, “I’m the eldest.”
Marie smiled knowingly, knowing nothing. Not for the first time Daria scolded herself—she could not continue to use her heart to make all her decisions.
Daria was sixty-four, a contract faculty, and lived in a one-bedroom apartment in Brooklyn. She had moved to New York in 1965. Initially, she’d worked as a magazine copy editor while earning her master’s. She stayed and stayed, working and working and writing novels that never sold. In her chic way, she’d scorned marriage, children, and large single houses. She’d seen so much! So much!
A whoosh from a too-close bike startled them both, and too soon, Marie asked, “Do you have any animals?” wearing an indulgent smile, and Daria wanted to whack the girl with her cane.
*
Inside the tavern, they were seated in a tall booth in a far, dark corner where Ms. Simpkin immediately ordered a burger deluxe and an unsweetened ice tea, and Marie said she would have the same as her friend. Her friend—Marie had known the phrase had been the wrong choice as it was leaving her mouth, and she kicked her inner self for saying it. She had become more nervous since sitting down, and she found only a smidgen of relief in that Ms. Simpkin seemed too preoccupied sighing and arranging her large handbag on the booth cushion to notice what Marie had said.
Middle-aged men in pale blue dress shirts, the sort of men who looked to Marie as if they ran before work, filled the tavern’s tables. They ate easily and spoke assertively to one another like they had all the time in the world. Opposite Marie and Ms. Simpkin was an enormous black-and-white portrait of O. Henry, his handlebar mustache as long as Marie’s plastic straw. Marie felt glad to see the portrait; she would use it as a conduit to bring up the writer, as Will had advised her to do at El Cantinero. Will had been a student in The Palace Versailles too. He was from Connecticut and his parents worked “in the city,” so he knew that O. Henry had written his short story “The Gift of the Magi” at this very tavern.
Will had also said that if he were Marie, he’d cancel with Ms. Simpkin. “Agreeing to it was a moment of temporary insanity,” he explained to her. “You’ll never see Ms. Simpkin again anyway. Thank god. It really doesn’t matter! Just email her and say you’re sick and come back to my apartment and have a sleepover with me.” For reasons she hadn’t quite worked out yet, Will’s insistence that the meeting “didn’t matter” irritated Marie.
Marie had stopped by The Strand bookstore that morning to read “The Gift of the Magi.” She chose The Strand because she felt clumsy inside the Barnes and Noble when she wasn’t working. She had not felt that way before she’d worked there. In the same way, she avoided certain streets in Tribeca when she wasn’t scheduled to babysit.
*
They were discussing Michael Jackson, who’d died the previous day. Ms. Simpkin took the top bun off her burger and tucked it inside her napkin, then proceeded to cut and eat her burger like a steak. “Michael adored Versailles,” Ms. Simpkin said.
When Marie mentioned the pop king’s child abuse allegations, their budding conversation immediately deflated. Ms. Simpkin sighed with gloomy concern.
To Marie, the teacher seemed equally irritated by her bringing up Jackson’s errors as she was by the errors themselves. Fazed, Marie gestured feebly to O. Henry’s portrait, hoping to redeem herself. She told Ms. Simpkin that she liked the line in “The Gift of the Magi” about the tiny mirror hanging in the couple’s apartment, and quoted: “A person could see only a little of himself at a time.” Daria, pleased and touched by the girl’s preparatory instincts, responded kindly. Daria felt better about making time for the lunch—she would bestow upon the girl some valuable advice after all.
After a final bite of dry patty, she said, “I’ll be frank with you, Marie. If you truly want to write, you should leave New York. Keep your overhead low.” Marie dipped her fry in ketchup, smiling and nodding politely.
“You don’t believe me. But a girl like you won’t be able to do both. You think your thoughts and your feelings are unique, but they’re not, especially here, and what will happen is your peers with more means will get those thoughts and feelings down before you.”
Marie’s eyes froze blankly. Her ears felt stuffed with cotton.
Daria continued, “Then more girls will come, younger and younger than you, and your experiences will feel older and smaller and more overdone.”
*
Later, on the train home, Daria forgot nearly everything about the lunch except her own magnanimity and the girl’s tepid responses, especially during the latter half of their meal when Daria had given the girl some tough love. Marie, Daria contemplated, might not have been ready to be given such sincerity, but Daria felt no remorse: her gift would remain inside Marie and deny her the delusion that nobody had warned her. With a sense of calm and self-satisfaction, and feeling that twinkle of purpose that never lasted long enough, she folded her hands over the carpetbag perched on her lap and enjoyed the skyline view as the train crossed the East River.
Meanwhile, strolling down Broadway back to her dorm, Marie checked her phone. Will had already texted four times:
How’d it go???
I can’t get out of bed
Could I still be drunk??
Tell me everythinggg
Marie’s first instinct was to call Will right then and tell him about the unfortunateness of the impromptu meeting beside Gramercy Park and the long, dragging walk, and the almost-getting-hit by the bicycle, and the prettiness of the tavern’s tin roof, and a few of Ms. Simpkin’s odd comments about this and that. But when her mind reached the part where Ms. Simpkin gave her the writing life advice—the part that would be of most interest to Will too, she supposed—a mixture of protectiveness and self-consciousness strained her. She could, she thought, share what Ms. Simpkin had said, leaving out its specific application to Marie’s own situation.
Marie veered to the side of the sidewalk and leaned against a brick wall between two shops. People appeared, disappeared. Buses, shouts, small and large dogs. Long columns of gold light reposed in charming delicacy across the building ahead. Marie felt significant in this atmosphere of significance. She fell into a premonition of Will’s reaction to Ms. Simpkin’s advice. She heard his blithe laugh, his oh-my-god-no, and then, his voice becoming a little more serious as he actually considered what their former teacher had said. Will could be serious when he wanted to be.
He would say something like, “She might be onto something,” then quickly dismiss it again because he could, because he could “never leave New York,” and Marie would agree with him, “of course.” Marie leaned forward; the rough brick was scratching her neck and the backs of her shoulders. A small woman with an enormous Saint Bernard climbed the steps of a townhouse on the street parallel. Once she and her canine were inside her door, Marie imagined what else she might say to Will. Perhaps: “Promise me I’m not going to end up like Ms. Simpkin!” and Will would assure her, no, no way, never, and Marie started forward, feeling their harmony lifting her and levitating her heart into her eyes so they shone like that charming light as she strode ahead. One saw these young women all the time—coming, going, the knowing far back behind their eyes, then rushing forward at unexpected intervals, like a cool draft entering a house, dropping the temperature before departing again in some mysterious way.
FIGHTING THE LION by Lydia Cyrus
My great-grandfather was named Martin and when he got to a certain age—somewhere after sixty but no one can say for sure now—he had to be locked up in the back bedroom of the house. He was mean and he would yell and beat on people. Martin died long before I was born. I’ve heard stories about his cruelty. I wonder, often, if I look like him in any way. I wonder if I’ll become cruel in my old age. Fate, it would seem, has always felt like a carrion bird to me. The word carrion has such a negative connotation for some, but for those who understand the importance of vultures, it sounds beautiful. In the case of my family, it is hard to find beauty in the face of fate.
My grandfather, Martin’s son, presses his own shotgun shells. When he lived with his third wife, their garage was full of rows of presses. Boxes of lead pellets and red or blue plastic casings were neatly organized around them. On the other side of the garage, there were rows of Christmas villages. Reality split evenly: shotgun shells and the charm of domesticity. The presses sit in the garage of my childhood home now, lined up in a row. Even now, I remember the movement of making bullets.
My father says we have a family curse: no matter how badly you might want something good to happen to you, no matter how badly you want happiness, you’ll never have it. He says that’s just the way it is.
In December of 1898, John Henry Patterson sought to engineer the Uganda railway which would run through present-day Kenya. Before the railway could be finished, two male Tsavo lions killed and consumed thirty-five workers. Patterson, a former tiger hunter, took the responsibility of killing the “man-eaters”. Construction on the railway stopped for several weeks before Patterson could shoot the lions. In his 1907 memoir, he writes, “their man-stalking so well-timed and so certain of success that the workmen firmly believed that they were not real animals at all, but devils in lions’ shape.”
The lions typically struck in the nighttime. Patterson writes, “at about midnight, the lion suddenly put its head in at the open tent door and seized someone—who happened to be nearest the opening—by the throat.” The man begged the lion to let go and tried to wrap his arms around the lion’s neck. After the man’s death, one of his fellow workers asked, was he not fighting a lion? That question stuck between my ribs, imagining when my father would be pulled out of bed late at night. Faced with certain death if the gun went off and yet he fought instead.
Sometime after my youngest uncle was born, my grandfather began to wake his children up with a shotgun aimed at their faces. My father and his older brother were the ones who had to wrestle the gun away. My dad says his younger brother is too young to remember it. When I ask, that’s all he’ll say: He was a baby, he doesn’t know the half of it.
Patterson wrote about how the lions had an “uncanny” ability to slip away, always near midnight, whenever he would stake out with his hunting party. Armed with guns and goats, he would hide in areas where the lions were known to kill or were spotted. Each time, silence would fall over the camp, and, in the distance, Patterson could hear the cries of the men in the camp as the lions attacked. They knew when he was away.
It is said the lions knocked men off their donkeys, pulled them off trains, and even leaped onto tents, smashing them. Once they decided to take a man, nothing would prevent them from doing so, “shots, shouting and firebrands they alike held in derision.” A hiccup in the gene pool gave them jaws that closed around the lives of men like an inescapable sickness.
Patterson instructed the men to build tall, thorn fencing around their camp. For a while, it worked. But despite every precaution, “the lions would not be denied, and men continued to disappear.” They found ways beneath, above, or around the fencing. Estimates of their death toll do not include the deaths no one knows about. The number of thirty-five is the number of men consumed. Not men attacked, not men killed, and not those left to die. No one knows the true number of the dead, but it is believed to be in the hundreds.
Before my father was my father, he tore down houses with his dad. From the time he was thirteen, he had a job. He followed his father from abandoned houses to condemned buildings, always tearing them down. In photographs, my father has a baby face. Nothing at all like the coal-black beard and hair I know. He’s covered in soot and dirt, standing between his father and an uncle. Smiling. Out of the four siblings, all three boys became ironworkers. They all picked a profession that required sparks, soot, and pain.
Being part of this family, I’ve gathered, is much like being a plow horse. Retiring when the weight of the plow and its sharp edges are too much. Only to become a trail-riding horse, carrying the weight of other people. Nothing good. Only hard work.
The first lion to be killed by Patterson, once shot, measured nine feet and eight inches long from nose to tip of tail. It took the strength of eight men to carry its body back to camp. It took ten shots to kill the second lion.
The Ghost and The Darkness, as the workers called them, live behind a glass case now. Scientists still study the skulls and teeth of the lions. Trying to ascertain a true number and a true cause for their killings. The only way to make sense of the uncanny is to explain it. They have many theories as to why the lions ate humans. Some think they had severe dental damage or they were accustomed to the bodies of men left behind by caravans carrying enslaved people. Some of the men were practicing Hindus and created funeral pyres for their dead, something scientists suggest could have attracted the lions. They keep trying to find a definitive answer. Identify the causation of the killings, number the bullets, count the teeth, and someday you will have an answer. Someday you will understand.
If you asked me what my relationship with my father is like, I would tell you about the time we were passing a football around in the backyard and his throw landed in my face. I would tell you how bad it hurt, how the tears were instant. I say instant because, normally, I would not have cried in front of him. He was devastated his daughter wasn’t a volleyball player or a softball pitcher. I would tell you the only thing he said to me after that was to stop crying like a girl.
I should tell you my father loves dogs. Every dog we’ve ever had has loved him too. When he comes home from work, he often walks through the door and says, “Where’s my girl? Where’s my baby girl?” When I was born, my parents both had Rottweilers. Greta and Bear both belonged to my parents prior to their marriage. I grew up with them. My mother tells me often now how much she and my father loved those dogs. How they wanted to have more of them, but having children changed their plans.
One evening, Bear got tangled in his chain, tied out in the yard. Someone tried to help him get loose but got bit in the process. The way I remember the story is that the man demanded the dog be put down.
My father took Bear outside and shot him.
I’ve never asked, but I know the place where the dog was shot must be where our storage building is now. Sometimes, if I think about it and close my eyes, I can see that spot of land before a building stood there. Bear is buried in the hollow where all of our dogs are buried. My dad says he’ll never do it again. He says he would never shoot a dog again, even if his life depended on it.
As a graduate student, living states away from my father, I drove to Chicago to see the lions in the Field Museum. Two maneless, male lions. Their paws and heads were larger than I imagined they would be. When I went to the museum, I looked at the maneaters in wonder. I felt as though the lions were always calling for me to see them, like we were meant to meet. Like I was meant to understand something after seeing them.
Now, I believe that those lions are a sadness. The maneaters live behind glass and were it not for a Michael Douglas movie, they would be forgotten.
Worse still, was the fact that there was a display of a mother lion and her cubs. Meaning a lioness and her cubs died. Their fate isn’t listed on the case—they weren’t violent like their male counterparts. They ended up in the glass boxes at the same museum. I came to Chicago without knowing the mother lion and her cubs were even there. But now I think about the small, hand-sized cubs often. They must have weighed nothing in life and now even less in death.
When my mother was nine months pregnant with me, my uncle held my father at knifepoint. He held a knife to his throat and his then-wife yelled at my mother. Do something! My mother looked at her, her hands folded over her stomach, over me, and said no. He doesn’t know I know this story. When he held the knife to his brother’s throat, he was eighteen. He didn’t know who I was. He couldn’t have guessed I would ever know about that moment. But I was in the room with them. I always have been.
When my father was a teenager, he held his father at gunpoint. No one remembers why and he doesn’t know that I know this story. All my mother said was that he changed his mind and thought better of it; he put the gun down.
When I was around the age of five, the same uncle made a visit to our house to take the guns away. He took away every single gun in the house, because my mother thought my father was going to kill himself and maybe even us. If I was five, my brother would have been a newborn.
I don’t remember this story; I only know I was there.
The state of Ohio used to have no laws or regulations about the ownership of exotic animals. It was, in fact, a hot spot for animal auctions, a wild Midwest. Tim Harrison, a retired animal control officer, is one of the people who got the calls about tigers in basements or vipers in garages. In Zanesville, you didn’t have to go to Asia to see a tiger. You didn’t even have to go to the zoo.
In the earliest years of Tim’s career, the animals had nowhere to go. A lioness named Tabitha ended up living with Tim for that reason. Lions reach the age of sexual maturity at around three to four years old. Before that deadline, Tabitha stayed in the house. Whenever she roared, the sound rattled the windows of the house.
After a lion reaches the age of sexual maturity, instincts kick in. An ancient need to be the leader drives the cat to dominance, to violence. This isn’t “turning.” Lions and tigers are born to hunt and kill. Even if they live in a house in rural Ohio, instinct cannot be replaced or removed.
The lion will fight to assert dominance. To prove they are the ruler of the family, the center. Just like tigers living in basements, pacing back and forth. They know on a cellular level what is and what is not wild, what should and should not be. At an animal sanctuary in upstate Indiana, the tour guide told me the animals remember the people who abused them. A baboon has lived there for fifteen years but because of whatever her owner did to her, she never bonded with another animal or human. Sometimes, when they move her to her outdoor exhibit, she pulls the grass up by the root and throws it.
When I interviewed Tim, he said the animals experience trauma the same way we do. It changes their brain, their body even. But they can’t tell you in our words how it feels. Tigers make a specific sound when they feel happy. It’s a sound deep in the back of the throat reminiscent of an exhaust pipe on an old truck. At the sanctuary, when the tour guide comes, some of the tigers walk up to him and they make that sound. Over and over again. The guide says if an animal makes it to their facility, it means they’ll be there for the rest of their life. They got out of their toxic homes, out of the basements in Ohio, and roadside attractions in Texas. Now they live better lives, not quite free, but sometimes happily.
On October 18th, 2011, a man in Ohio named Terry Thompson let fifty-six exotic animals out of their cages. Forty-nine of the animals were “put down” on the spot: eighteen Bengal tigers, seventeen lions, six black bears, two grizzly bears, three mountain lions, two wolves, and one baboon. Prior to their release, Terry was sentenced to prison for illegally selling guns. He told the judge if he went to prison, his first act as a free man would be killing himself. But only after he let his animals loose.
When the news broke of the animals being shot and buried, I was a freshman in high school. I remember saying, “it really is a zoo over there in Ohio.” The bodies of the animals were buried on site, at Terry’s home, even though officials were warned the animals were worth more dead. The black market thrives on the selling of pieces of exotic animals. Terry’s wife left town with some of the surviving animals. I wonder what her new life must be like, free of a gun-running husband. I wonder if she ever thinks about the deaths of forty-nine animals.
I can’t remember what my father said, even though that was the biggest thing to happen in the tri-state area for a long time. It would have still been the biggest news story for years to come, until a family was murdered execution-style in their Kentucky home. We didn’t talk about guns or violence in our home, but we always talked about animals.
I watched the story of Terry Brumfield play out in a documentary. I was twenty the first time I watched it and I return to it often. Terry lived in Ohio. Across the river, as I would have said, the river which separates my home from his. In the film, he’s introduced as a man who owns two large, African lions.
Lambert, the male lion, and Lacey, the female. Two lions bought off of a friend after a trucking accident left Terry disabled. With every appearance, I felt endeared to him. After a second viewing of the film, I realized why. Terry Brumfield’s hair and bear-like looks are akin to my father’s. His voice, and his work ethic, all matched my father’s.
In the film, Tim Harrison offers to help Terry with his lions. They have been living in a horse trailer after an accident caused Lambert to chase cars down the interstate before he was captured and brought home again. As Terry speaks, he tells Tim about a time when he thought local law enforcement would take Lambert away.
He said do you remember that thing that happened down in Waco, Texas? Well, if you try to take my lions, what I’ll do won’t even compare to that. That was when I knew whatever cloth my father had been cut from, Terry came from it too. He wouldn’t start it, but if his lions were lost, he would certainly finish it.
Over the course of filming, a freak accident involving an electric current kills Lambert. He was five years old and weighed over five hundred pounds. Terry, with camera in hand, lies on the ground petting the lion as he takes his last breath. Terry cries I’m done, I’m done.
Tears always welled in my eyes when I thought of Terry. He was a stranger I felt I knew, a stranger I know. The lions, he said, brought him out of a deep depression. They gave his life a purpose he had never known before. He cried in the film, something my father rarely ever did. The love he felt so deeply for Lacey and Lambert was the kind of love I always wanted my father to have for me. It felt so strange to be so envious of a dead lion, so envious of all the dogs we had when I was growing up. It also felt like one of the deepest sadnesses I have ever known.
Terry buried Lambert on his property at home and agreed to give Lacey and her cubs up. He became a champion for legislation that would change the way people interact with animals. He began writing a book about his life with the lions. His pain was twisted into purpose, not swallowed or echoed.
Shortly after the release of the film, Terry died in a car accident right outside of his home. When the paramedics arrived, Tim said, they found him lying on top of Lambert’s grave. Terry is now buried with Lambert. When I read about his burial in a local newspaper, I cried. It felt like losing a chance to meet someone I had grown fond of. Then it became a reminder: someday my father would die, and I may never know him well at all. We may never be bonded or endeared to each other the way Lambert and Terry were.
When my father was a child, my grandmother swears there was a mountain lion that lived in the woods behind their house. When they talk about this lion, they call it “her.” My grandmother says her because the lion never bothered the children or the dogs, a supposed gentleness. Now, I marvel at this. Gentleness is still somehow wild but feminine all the same. Whereas masculinity is violent. They saw her often and heard her even more often. My grandmother told me if I ever saw a big cat, I should run. You better run faster than it can. You never want to be caught alone with the cold clip of claws and death.
Once when we were camping, I heard one. I was sleeping in a small tent with my younger cousin. The sound was a woman screaming for her life. It had been so silent then, like a crack of lightning, all silence and safety was lost. Fear kept me from crying out. Then my uncle talked to us from his own tent. He said to be still and not to worry. I can’t remember if we held our breath, but I’m certain we thought it couldn’t hurt. I trusted what he said. He survived a lion when he was a child and through him, we would do the same.
Eventually, we fell asleep.
Tigers kept in unfit conditions are prone to having ingrown claws and decaying teeth. They are found with urine burns on their skin too, from the inability to escape their own waste. Once, in Ohio, a building caught fire, and a tiger jumped out of a window. No one had known it was even there, but when the flames began to lick the home, it leaped. A tiger, in the wild, can consume up to a hundred pounds of a carcass in one sitting. In an American basement, the best they’ll get is frozen chicken or a dead deer.
People with money buy exotic animals for show, breeding, and trading. They do it because they can. Isn’t that the way most bodily violence happens anyway? Because you can. In one case, a young girl set out to play with a family friend’s “pet” tiger. The cat swatted at her head in play, and it broke her neck instantly.
My neighbors have a ceramic, white tiger on their porch. The color white is a genetic hiccup for tigers. Once in the wild, a cub was born white, and someone stole it. Now white tigers are inbred for their color. Those tigers have the potential to suffer from a multitude of pains. Some have spines that never grow past their hips, so they can’t use their back legs. Nearly every white tiger has crossed eyes. The thing that makes them beautiful—that sets them apart from their brethren—kills them. I often wonder how heavy the ceramic tiger is, if I could steal it, and then how badly would the neighbors miss it. Then later, I think of the math—the statistics really—and wonder if they have a tiger in their basement.
Our grandmother kept water guns in her garage. The biggest one, a Super Soaker, belonged to my youngest uncle. When we would have a water gunfight, he would always hide in plain sight. Except, it never seemed that way. Armed with smaller guns, we would run and aim for each other. The entire time knowing he was somewhere. Waiting. Then, as if he were a shadow all along, he would turn to face us and chase us down. He would empty the entire tank of the gun in your face, while we laughed and ran. My father, during a similar fight, was sitting on the roof of the house with a bucket of water. Like his brother, no one knew to look for him in places like that. No one noticed until it was too late. They knew where we were, and what ammunition we carried, and they soaked us to the bone every time.
One Halloween, I snuck around the side of the house to scare my dad. When the heavy door swung open, I yelled BOO! And watched my father’s hands smash into a fist and saw his arm pull back. When he saw that it was me, he shook his head. Later, my mother said you scared him. You’re lucky he didn’t punch you. I thought it was odd that in our family luck did not equal wealth or laughter, it meant not getting punched.
Shortly after that, my grandfather contracted cancer and got divorced. My dad, always so committed to his father, couldn’t let him suffer. So my grandfather came to live with us. He too would resort to swinging when afraid. He lived with us for fourteen years before I moved out. Even now, when it’s time for dinner, we yell from across the room. We motion with our hands, pretending to scoop a spoonful of food into our mouths. This is the safest way to get his attention. This is how we are lucky.
When I was twenty-three, my brother got into an argument with our father in the driveway. My father taunted him and dared him to throw a punch. They fought until one of them ended up on the ground. My mother and grandmother pulled them apart. After it was over, my father said to his son you’re lucky your mom was there.
I knew, without asking, that this was not the first time my grandmother had separated a fight between father and son.
My uncle, on the day I graduated college, told me to leave and never return. When I was eighteen and upset after a fight with my father, the same uncle provided me solace. My father followed me and yelled and cursed. I hid in my uncle’s garage; when my father finally left, my uncle came to talk to me. He had been building a shelf and wood shavings were everywhere. He sat across from me.
He said I had to work hard to graduate, to leave. I was the first one in the family to do that, so it meant more. This was what made me stand out from the rest of the family. I was the hiccup in the family line, at least I was trying so hard to be. He said I had to look at my father as an example and decide to be better than that. Decide not to hit my kids or yell or be distant or curse like that or seethe. I had to learn to forget.
In all the books I’ve read about trauma, psychologists have discussed how trauma lives in the body. Strangely, how trauma travels through bloodlines and rears its ugly head in many ways. I poured over these books in the same way the scientists pour themselves over the teeth of the Tsavo lions. I’m trying to explain the uncanny to myself. Up until now, the uncanny could not be explained. This haunts me, knowing I may never know.
When I started college, I began to have intense night terrors. Sometimes waking up screaming and crying. Sometimes waking up standing in the kitchen and having no idea how I got there. When you have a night terror, everything seems and feels real. Like it would if you opened your eyes. However, something sinister will be waiting. Sometimes, I’ve seen people sitting on my chest or standing at the foot of my bed. More often than not, I don’t remember what happened. I only know I wake up and I’ll be sitting up in bed and sobbing so hard that I question if it’s even possible to cry any longer, any harder.
While being diagnosed with Complex Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, I talked a lot about my symptoms with my mother. She had a hard time understanding how it could be possible for me to have such a disorder. Like everyone else in my family, she overlooked the history. She missed the forest for the trees. I still have night terrors when I’m excessively tired or stressed out. I have long accepted that it is simply my reality. When I stay in foreign places for work trips, I create walls of pillows around me and I stay up as long as I can. I worry that it’ll happen and the person in the next room will wake up in terror too. Although I had accepted it, I had never thought much of it. Until I learned my father would wake up with a gun shoved in his face. Then I understood.
After my father assaulted my mother, the police officer responding to the call had them standing apart from each other in the driveway. The officer was loud and perhaps shaped that way. He yelled a lot and assumed a lot. My mother explained she is separated from my father and has been for years, but didn’t divorce because she has kids and needs health insurance.
The officer looked at me and said, “She’s an adult, so that’s solved.”
For the rest of my life, I will always think of that man and think how lovely it must be to not understand what a legacy of pain was. He kept his thumbs hooked into his belt, next to his gun.
He asked, “What can we do tonight about what just happened?”
Unable to hold it back, I started to cry and said, “Officer, he has a history of aggression and abuse.” Meaning: Officer, if you do nothing and you keep yelling at us, he’ll think the behavior is okay. He’ll eat us. He’ll put us in a big, glass container so everyone can stare at what’s left. You have to reprimand him, you have to tell him if he ever does it again, he’ll go to jail.
My dad spent the night somewhere else that day. I don’t remember where. In the years to come, he would cheat on my mother. He would break my heart so many times over that it felt as natural as breathing—as pacing. I’ve tried to understand it in the only way I can: Through the lens of what is wild. Instinct. I count backward and find there are three generations of violence alive in me. Rather than flounder in the revelation, I’ve thought about it like this: I’ve transitioned from the basement of someone’s house to living in a sanctuary. I’ll never be the same but I’ll be free. I wish my father could see it that way.
- Published in Issue 30, Nonfiction
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