Author: Post Road

Rating Food I Purged in Sydney as I Walk Three Miles to Weigh Myself

Cara Lynn Albert

Lord of the Fries is on my right when I pull my phone from my back pocket. I don’t have to search long to find Kyle’s number. Of the last ten calls I have made or received, his name occupies seven slots. This morning, as I boarded the train that delivered me to my internship between Green Square and Waterloo, we chatted while he prepared dinner. Other straphangers like me pressed into the train car, and Kyle’s metalware chimed.

            Through the window of Lord of the Fries, employees flare red beneath grease and sweat. Kyle knows it’s my favourite fast-food franchise in Australia, more than Macca’s or Hungry Jack’s. Veggie patties hiss on the griddle. Behind me, the front door opens, and I hear them sing.

Lord of the Fries. Shoestring fries, Parisian Sauce, and a Spicy Burger. 1115 Calories. Consistent, layered flavour. My first time purging, though, and it took three tries. I made a “W” with three fingers—the middle one tickled my uvula while the index and ring fingers balanced in my cheekbone hollows. The first attempt resulted in a soft gag. After the second, lava boiled in my chest, but I had come too far to surrender now. I erupted with the third stab. Bits of undigested jalapenos lingered on my oesophagus, burning holes through the tissue. The Parisian Sauce mostly contained vegan mayo, and it reappeared as milky syrup. I smacked my lips together, tasting vinegar, and blinked back water in my eyes. Some difficulties, but overall a decent first experience. Still hoping this franchise expands to America. 9/10.

            “I’m thirty minutes away,” I tell Kyle. In Central Florida, where he lives, it’s a quarter past three o’clock in the morning. In Sydney, I have under fifty minutes to reach Target before they close, find the scales, weigh myself, and possibly weep in despair or sigh in solace.

            “Are you alone?” he asks.

            “Yes.”

            “Is that safe?”

            He says this because the first time I was alone in Sydney, the night ended with me sobbing in the back of an Uber, interrupting Kyle’s work shift to tell him I kissed another man on the rocks near the Sydney Observatory that overlooked the Harbour, because the stranger wouldn’t leave me alone until I did.

            “Safe-ish,” I say. “There are people around me.” They stare at their phones or chat with other locals. No one pays attention to the dull American.

            “Well, do what you gotta do and get home safe. Maybe you can take the train back.”

            “I’ll be fine. I could use the exercise.”

            I currently weigh 152.8 pounds. 69.3 kilograms. The lowest in my life. Or at least that’s what my mother’s twenty-year-old scale told me when I stepped on it the day before I left for Sydney. The skinny red arrow trembled between numbers marked by fine black lines like millipede legs. I wanted to punch through the glass and turn back the dial myself.

            In high school, I was at my largest. 220 pounds by senior year. I’ve deleted most photos of myself from that period. I didn’t exist before the age of eighteen. Occasionally, a memory will surface on social media, or long-time friends will send me a snapshot I didn’t know they’d taken. The pink-tinted girl with the soft, protruding belly and ill-fitting jeans is a stranger, of whom I’m an expert. I know her favourite flavour of pie and what her fourth grade teacher wrote in her yearbook, but she is a ghost.

            “What’s your plan when you get there?” asks Kyle. Like me, he used to be chubby. On the dresser in his bedroom is an old picture of himself from early college. I like to study it while he showers in the mornings. His long, curly hair with flaxen highlights spirals off his face, so unlike the crew cut man I’m falling for now. This version of Kyle also has a small belly that mushrooms over jeans and a belt. I don’t tell him that I find this picture unattractive. That I wouldn’t be with him if he looked like this now.

            Some of the most fatphobic people are those who were once considered “fat” themselves and have since lost weight. They believe every overweight person should seek to achieve similar goals, and they don’t consider physical limits, health issues, or that people are capable of loving their own bodies no matter the shape. I know this because Kyle openly complains about obesity. I know this because I sometimes privately agree with him.

            Kyle doesn’t challenge my hunt for a scale. I will only begin to question his lack of concern in the years following our split.

            The sun set twenty minutes ago. A glass building on my left fractures the chromatic clouds, each plane now its own watercolour. Wind carves through the bare skin around my collarbone, and I zip my hoodie up until it chokes my neck. Today may have held a high of ninety-five degrees in Central Florida, but it’s the middle of winter in Australia. I tell Kyle I’m giving myself ten minutes to find the scales, no asking for help, and when no one is watching I’ll weigh myself on three different machines and average the numbers, converting them to pounds from kilograms.

            He yawns.

            “Smart,” he says.

Harry’s Cafe de Wheels. Tiger Pie. 635 Calories. Four Harry’s pie carts dot the central neighbourhoods of Sydney, and I hit all of them in two months. Same order each time: Tiger Pie with curry chicken, Pepsi, and a chocolate chip cookie. Mashed potatoes and a neon-green scoop of mushy peas melted over the flaky crust. Warm gravy surged down the perimeter, etching trails. Coming back up, they rendered into a thick, greige slurry. Something caught in my throat. A bit of chicken, crumb of crust, or fragment of underdone pea. I choked into a toilet bowl at the Capitol Square shopping mall next door to Harry’s. My pants for breath sounded like teary wheezes. Maybe I was crying, too. When I finished hacking, a gooey voice echoed from the stall next to mine. “Are you okay?” I lapped the briny sweat off my top lip. “Yes.” Her footsteps faded, and I waited five minutes before exiting the restroom. Extra points for convenient locations. 7.5/10.

I reach Target at a quarter to six.

            “It’s…weird,” I tell Kyle. Targets in America are carbon copies of each other. I can enter one in rural Iowa and feel at home in Orlando. This one is inside a large mall off of Broadway—just one of many shopping options, not its own entity. I see the familiar red bullseye, but it lacks comfort with congested aisles and polar lighting.

            “How so?” Kyle asks. He yawns again.

            “Getting tired?” My shoulders brush stuffed rows of winter coats. The aisles offer no labels or numbers, and I sweat knowing I might not find the scales in time.

            “Yeah, I am,” he says. “I’m sorry, sweetheart. It’s almost four in the morning here. I can’t even keep my eyes open.” I picture him kneading his corneas until they glow pink, purple bags like bruises staining the skin beneath them.

            I’m barely listening as I tell him to get some sleep. Chrome shower caddies and toilet brush holders fill the shelves around me. I know the scales are close. My feet feel tethered to the nearest one.

            “Let me know how it goes. I’ll call you tomorrow on your way to work,” Kyle says, and he hangs up. I’m in Sydney for an unpaid summer internship, which is really just a privileged excuse to live abroad for two months. Monday through Thursday I work from eight o’clock to four o’clock because the sun sets at five and my boss doesn’t want me walking home in the dark. Friday through Sunday I jet around Australia and New Zealand, or I frequent overpriced nightclubs in Sydney that, at twenty years old, I wouldn’t be allowed entry to in America. But indulgence has a price, and now it feeds off of my mother’s wallet and manifests as the fat swelling in my stomach.

            Or am I imagining the extra weight? I’ll know momentarily because I’ve found the scales. They are on the bottom shelf beside too-green rubber trees, leaves flaccid and waxy. Hidden, as they would be in someone’s home—stacked beneath magazines and newspapers or perched behind a toilet. Most of the scales are packaged inside boxes, and opening one might draw too much attention, but one, matte black and slender, floats freely above the others.

            I rest the scale gently on the vinyl tile so slick it looks wet, breathing in my gut out of habit. An intercom voice tells shoppers that Target will be closing in five minutes and to please make our way to the cashier registers. My eyes peer up as I step on the scale, and I don’t allow them to look down for four or five seconds, until after it settles on a number.

Café Portman. Vegan Coconut Donut and a Surprise Cream Pie. Calories unknown, which means too high. On the final day of my internship, I purchased a vegan donut from the cafe next door to the office—the one I ordered coffee or tea from every morning. Inside the display case next to a row of pies, they were dressed in pastel icings and ribbons of fudgy drizzle. I pressed my index finger to the glass above one that was dusted with coconut shavings. No purging today. I was going to gift myself this luxury, just this once. Coconut flakes were still fixed between my teeth when my boss called me to our conference table two hours before I was meant to leave. My co-workers were gathered around it, and in the centre was a small, wrapped gift, a card with my name in red marker, and a vanilla cream pie. My boss portioned the dessert, also sold by the cafe next door, and distributed a wedge to each of us. It was armoured in sliced almonds, toasted like mud cracks in the desert. Its insides were whipped and vaguely sweet. Everyone finished and returned to their desks while I paced to the restroom, which didn’t receive heat, and my skin prickled as I thrusted my middle finger onto my uvula, expelling smog. Translucent clouds suspended in the toilet water. I flushed and scrubbed my tongue with rose-scented soap, appreciating the variety of flavours that had graced my palate that day. 10/10.

There’s no time to open another box and test if the scale is lying. Other shoppers shoot past me, like popcorn in a microwave, and I can’t wait for the three second break between them. I want to purge right now, over the polished tile and plastic plants and into trash cans beside the registers as I exit Target. I want to empty everything in my stomach, even though I haven’t eaten since my quinoa salad at lunch. Let my skin turn to jelly so that I may rake my nails through it, shredding the pulp until I reach bone.

            I don’t tell Kyle about my purging. I never will. I’ve only relapsed twice since that summer in Australia.

            I wait to cry until I’m outside. The night is void, and I hold my stomach as though it were carrying something heavier than a few extra kilos. Walking the one and a half miles back to my apartment, I watch myself in the reflection of glass buildings. My silhouette is deeply blue and always taking up too much space, and I think about how much better the world might be if we were born vampires. Sickly thin with minimal cravings. Mirrors would become obsolete. And if I wanted to, I could wait twelve hours until the sun rises again and finds my skin, splitting me into fine dust that might forgive all hunger and desolation.

---

Cara Lynn Albert is a writer and educator from Florida, and she is currently completing her creative writing MFA degree in fiction at the University of Colorado Boulder. Her work has also appeared in Catapult, Puerto del Sol, Baltimore Review, and elsewhere. She serves as the Editor-in-Chief of TIMBER Journal.

Fallow Periods

Brittany Ackerman

I.

In sixth grade, our homeroom teacher brings a full-length mirror to class. He makes us get up, one by one, stand in front of the mirror, and tell ourselves we are beautiful. We are eleven, twelve. We have just eaten lunch and are in the time of day between the cafeteria and attending our last two periods. We have stains on our uniform shirts and our eyes are heavy, stomachs full. We have thrown away our pre-packed lunches to buy churros or slices of pizza. Mr. Wilson asks the girls in our class to sit on his lap when they are sad. I never do, even though I’m sad, but he does put his hand against my back as I look in the mirror and say, “You are beautiful” to myself without meaning it. I take it as an assignment, a task to accomplish and ace.  

            Mr. Wilson is reported and fired.  He invites everyone to a going away pizza party at a local spot in town and we go, me and my friends, me and kids who didn’t even have his class but it was something to do, somewhere to be. I drink a Coke and eat a slice of pizza and take a picture with Mr. Wilson and when my mom comes to pick me up she says he looks just like Jim Carrey. She asks why he’s leaving and I tell her how he was asked to leave, the girls on the lap, the mirror. She cries in the car and doesn’t understand why I wanted to say goodbye to such a monster. 

            The following year, a history teacher is fired for letting girls change in his room while he watches. The girls had shaken their bodies out of their pleated skirts and pulled spandex shorts over their backsides. They had shimmied out of their tops and unhooked their bras while the teacher in the room assured them they were safe, the blinds were closed, no one could see.  

II.

            Another summer. Another boy I shouldn’t be with. This time it’s Mack, the lifeguard at the day camp where I’m a counselor. During the week he sees me in my uniform camp polo shirt and khaki shorts, but tonight we’re at a party at his friend’s house. Mack has friends named Kevin and Josh and Dylan. We’re all nineteen, twenty. We drink rum and Coke and play stupid drinking games like Ring of Fire or Truth or Dare or Never Have I Ever. Mack’s ex, Kristy, is at the party and she’s in all black: leggings, a tank top, a hoodie. She’s so skinny, and even though this is the summer I get toned from carrying kids all day, from swimming, from running, from holding myself up while I grind on top of Mack, she’s skinnier. There’s a huge gap between her legs when she stands and her arms look like wires. She has a tattoo of a parrot on her chest.  

            We’re in Mack’s friend Josh’s apartment for the party. All along the walls, he has outlines of people’s bodies drawn in colored markers. I ask him who they are and he says friends, random people who have come over throughout the summer, anyone really. Mack goes outside to talk to Kristy and I ask Josh if he will trace me on the wall. He says I have to hold something or do something funny so it looks different than just a normal body. I see some of the figures have beer bottles titled towards their mouths, or are holding up a peace sign. I put my hands on my hips, unsure of what else to do, how to make my shape matter, but he starts tracing.

            People are leaving the party and I know Mack can’t drive, so I’ll have to wait. I’ll have to drive him home and put him in bed. I’ll go to the bathroom and take off my makeup and see the cologne on his counter from Kristy that he hasn’t gotten rid of. I’ll watch his phone light up with her name over and over and him too drunk to answer, passed out while I watch her name appear again and again like a chorus.  

            When Josh is done tracing, I stand back and look at my image on the wall.  

            “How do I look?” I ask.

            “You look nervous,” he says and rolls a joint. 

            Kristy is crying when she runs through the apartment and out the front door. A girl I don’t know follows her and they leave. I want to go home, but Mack wants to stay a while longer. He puts his arm around me and another round of whatever game starts back up again.

            I look at my image on the wall and agree that she looks nervous. If only I could convince her otherwise. 

III.

            Jennifer is always late to pick me up for Wednesday night Bible study. She always wears her hair in a ponytail and is dressed in slacks and sweaters from her office job she deems as temporary. We’re both living at home in the in-between time, me working at the restaurant and Jennifer at the legal advisor’s office. We became friends because we go to the same church and we are both in relationships that are going to end soon. 

            I am twenty-three and should be on the other side of the country, but I’m spending most of my time with Jennifer: in her car, in other peoples’ cars, at church, at the bars, at clubs, at the beach, at the pool, at her house. Her childhood bedroom is one-fourth the size of mine growing up. She has pictures tacked to the wall and Mardi Gras beads strung on her bedposts. Her Bible is underneath a mess of clothes on the floor. 

            We’ve known each other for three months and have built up a steady stream of conversation that flows even when we’re not speaking. It was Jennifer who told me about the Wednesday night meetings, who begged me to come and offered to give me a ride. After Bible study, we go out for sushi and end up in hot tubs with older guys whose parents live in nice condos along A1A. When we’re not together, she’s with Tucker, the guy who doesn’t love her enough, and if I’m not with her, I’m with Matt, who doesn’t love me nearly enough either. We are always trying to convince our boys to take us clubbing on Las Olas or take a weekend trip to Orlando or rent a boat in Miami and they never want to do anything except play X-Box and watch movies, go to AA meetings, call each other and go workout. We once shared a cigarette on the train tracks of Atlantic Avenue when we were mad about our boys, another conversation about how they weren’t enough, how we wanted more, and Jennifer cried a little and I didn’t know if I should hug her so I let her stand there smoking and crying.  

            Matt says Jennifer’s a dumb bitch, one of those church girls who isn’t really into Jesus, but just pretends. I don’t believe him though. I see how she prays. I watch her write in her journal, taking notes while the pastor is speaking. I love her hands, her delicate fingers, her long nails, the ring she wears that was her mom’s. 

            When I move to Los Angeles, my mom brings up Jennifer from time to time. She sees her at the mall with new friends. She says she’s still with Tucker. She thinks she saw an engagement ring on her finger, but she could be wrong.  I look Jennifer up online and see her bio is still the same: “Charm is deceitful, and beauty is vain, but a woman who fears the Lord is to be praised.” 

            I remember the time that Jennifer’s mom made us tea with honey. I’d never had it that way before. Her mom told us it was a reminder of how sweet life can be. “Sometimes we forget to add the honey,” she said. She’d made the tea because I had a stomachache and Jennifer still wanted to go out and it worked. It had felt like such a miracle to be cured that way, cared for, a magic potion like characters drink in stories.  

---

Brittany Ackerman is a writer from Riverdale, New York. She earned her BA in English from Indiana University and graduated from Florida Atlantic University’s MFA program in Creative Writing. She teaches Archetypal Psychology and American Literature at AMDA College and Conservatory of the Performing Arts in Hollywood, California. She was the 2017 Nonfiction Award Winner for Red Hen Press, as well as the AWP Intro Journals Project Award Nominee in 2015. Her work has been featured in The Los Angeles Review, No Tokens, Hobart, Cosmonauts Ave, Fiction Southeast, and more. Her first collection of essays entitled The Perpetual Motion Machine is out now with Red Hen Press, and her debut novel The Brittanys will be published with Vintage in 2021.

The Architect

Mehdi M. Kashani

A play in one act

CHARACTERS
THE PRISONER: 66, barefoot, in striped pajamas. Long tousled hair. Unshaven face, a week’s worth of growth.

THE VISITOR: 60, in a white shirt tucked into belted black pants. A dark coat over his shirt. Crew-cut hair and groomed mustache. He looks younger than his age.

TIME
Contemporary times, one afternoon.

PLACE
A prison cell, demarcated by metal bars. The cell occupies two-thirds of the stage. The rest is an area for visitors ending at the far right by a huge metal door. A leather chair is the only prop in the visitor area. Inside the cell, there’s a toilet in a corner next to a cot covered with a slim twin mattress. On the other side of the cell, there is a wobbly Polish chair. On the ground, lie a bunch of newspapers of the same size, neatly organized. The name of the newspaper, The Holy Grail, is printed on the top one with large font size. The setting is lit by a long fluorescent light whose annoying buzz can be heard during the performance with ebbs and flows.

(PRISONER is seated on the Polish chair, facing the audience. He stoops, face down. It’s hard to say if he’s even awake. The turn of the lock breaks the silence and VISITOR enters the scene. PRISONER is still motionless.)

VISITOR
(Loud.)
Hey! (PRISONER looks up, expressionless) You look good, relatively speaking.

PRISONER
(Turns his head. Shaken, he recognizes his visitor. He slowly stands.)
What do you want here?

VISITOR
What’s with the face? You wouldn’t look at me like that if you knew the extent of measures I’ve taken to make you feel reasonably comfortable.

PRISONER
You consider this “reasonably comfortable”?

VISITOR
Well, you still have a tongue rolling in your mouth. You can stand on your feet unassisted.

PRISONER
(Chuckles.)
The only reason I’m not being tortured is because I’m expected to smile in front of cameras, to confess. So, cut the crap.

VISITOR
Right! Of course! Who am I kidding? You used to be the great orchestrator. The architect of the system. (He draws a semi-circle with his hand in the air) This establishment owes its glory to you and your scrupulous methods. (He waits for a reaction from PRISONER who stumbles to his chairs and props his bare feet on The Holy Grail papers.) Oh no! That newspaper used to be your baby. It was the source of your pride. You spent more time at the office than being with your daughters and wife. You oversaw every single aspect of the publication. Now, it’s relegated to a stand for your feet?

PRISONER
(Shakes his head.)
The Holy Grail is a cog in the machinery of the regime, a means to justify the crimes committed under this very roof, to back up the accusations, the false confessions. And it brings me to this question: are you here to take my confession?

VISITOR
I’m sure with a sound mind like yours you’ll eventually do it. I’m here just to facilitate the process.

PRISONER
I’ve already made my confession.

VISITOR
(Cocks his head in fake surprise.)
You did?

PRISONER
Isn’t that why I’m in jail?

VISITOR
You call that open letter to the Leader your confession? Betraying a nation’s confidence in The Way? An exercise in sophistry and falsification. Abusing half-truths liberally and out of context? Come on. You’re better than that. That was just bait for the foreign media, wasn’t it?

PRISONER
That’s what I believe in. Word by word.

VISITOR
Funny how your whole belief system makes a U-turn overnight.

PRISONER
And yet, you’re here asking me to make another one.

VISITOR
Well, you know we have means for that to make sense. Your role was actually crucial in achieving this systematic technique to make traitors repent.

(All of a sudden, painful shouts coming from off-screen interrupts the conversation. VISITOR cranes his head around as if to identify its source. PRISONER looks indifferent. The shouts are incessant, not intermittent. They sound like someone is under constant, intense pain. They die down after six-or-seven seconds.)

VISITOR
Not a pleasant sound.

PRISONER
It recurs every few hours. I wonder if it’s for my benefit.

VISITOR
My friend, I think you’re overestimating your importance. If you don’t agree to clean up the mess you’ve made, you’ll be just another hapless prisoner making those screeching shrieks. And, by then, it’ll be out of my hands. Like you said, every one of us is a cog in the system.

PRISONER
Don’t pretend you care.

VISITOR
Oh, I do care. Why else would I spend time with your youngest daughter to hash out a way to get you out?

PRISONER
(Stands up.)
What?

VISITOR
She was the one coming to me. I was finishing off my editorial when she called. Uncle, she said. She’s never called me uncle before. She wanted to come to the newspaper office. It was indiscreet, of course. I gave her the address of one of those unidentified places we use for interrogations. You know them, right?

PRISONER
You didn’t.

VISITOR
She really loves you, probably more than the other two. Well, they’re married with children. I suppose their loyalties are divided. But your youngest…the sentimentality of youth isn’t yet lost on her.

PRISONER
Leave her out of this.

VISITOR
I would if I could. You see…you have three daughters; I have three sons. I always figured a family bond between us was inevitable. Or even better. Your three daughters. My three sons. A fairytale. But your elder daughters snubbed our family. I wondered if they were under the influence of their father. After all, you looked down to me. Even now, behind these bars, you’re plainly condescending.

PRISONER
I taught you everything. I was the one sheltering you in the tumultuous days of the revolution. You could barely write a sentence longer than eight words and yet I made you a copyeditor at The Holy Grail. How ungrateful….

VISITOR
Of course, you were my guru, but you stopped being one. You turned. You never even acknowledged how I did well for myself and my family. You still see me as that awkward young man you deigned to “save.”

PRISONER
(Returns to his Polish chair.)
(Pensively) To you, I was always a rival to be quashed.

VISITOR
Well, if we let you spread lies, we’ll all be quashed. Wiped. (Shrugs.) We had to cut the losses.

PRISONER
I know cameras are mounted in every corner of this dungeon and you’re trying to ingratiate yourself, but you very well know there wasn’t a single lie in that letter. We were wrong. We jailed people for The Way. We tortured them for The Way. We killed them for The Way. And all The Way was, was a way to rule.

VISITOR
I did warn your daughter about your stubbornness, but she pleaded with me. (He adopts a contemplating pose by rubbing his chin.) You know, the more you procrastinate, the more burden you put on your daughter’s shoulder. That’s fine with me. I always have time for her. (He winks. Furious, PRISONER lunges at him, stopping at the bars.) It reminds me of the story of that butcher. Have you heard it?

PRISONER
(Restless and agitated, he relents for a moment, amused by the question.)
What butcher?

VISITOR
Once upon a time there was a butcher inflicted—

PRISONER
What does the story of some fucking butcher have to do with anything?

VISITOR
Oh, I learned it from you. To frame the situation in an anecdote. To let the inmates find the references in it. I miss those days when you were one of us. It was the height of my day when you cross-examined the traitors. I shadowed you in those dark rooms. You had a different strategy for each. It was like every one of them was a puzzle to crack, a novel to be written. And your deadpan face. They were blindfolded, of course. They couldn’t see the inscrutability of your expression. It wasn’t a show for them. It was who you were. Your exemplary panache. You couldn’t help it. And your expression remained unchanged, even when your assistants exerted their methods of torture. You wouldn’t have grimaced even if we’d skinned them alive.

PRISONER
You can never be me. You should never be me. I don’t want to be me.

VISITOR
Let me at least try. (Coughs to clear his throat. Then, he gears his intonation into a more composed, slow level.) Once there was a butcher inflicted with severe pain in his teeth. So he finds a dentist. Gives him a good chunk of cow tenderloin as token of appreciation.

PRISONER
I don’t have to listen to this unimaginative garbage.

VISITOR
Oh, you do. Those you grilled had no choice and neither have you. (Pauses for this to sink in.) Anyway, it’ll get better. Where was I? The dentist fixes the tooth, but only temporarily. Who doesn’t want another hunk of fresh meat?

PRISONER
(Covers his ears and sings out loud.)
La-la-la-la-la-la-la.

VISITOR
(Increasingly raises his voice.)
The butcher returns and returns and returns, each time with a piece of tender meat. A piece of tender meat. A piece of tender meat. (When he realizes PRISONER can’t hear him, he starts to draw the outlines of a woman in the air—bosom, waist, hips.)

PRISONER
Shut up. Shut up. That’s fucking bullshit.

VISITOR
Might be “fucking,” but no “bullshit.” (Sneers, but soon composes himself.) You’re right. I’m not good at wordplay…like you once were.

PRISONER
You’re horrible, and not only at that.

VISITOR
I am but a messenger.

PRISONER
No. Just a mirror. One of those distorting mirrors they put in amusement parks. A caricature.

VISITOR
Whatever I am, my job is done here, my friend. I’ll relay your message to your daughter. Oh, and by the way (He digs his hand into his breast pocket and brings out a pendant on a chain. The design on the pendant is not visible.) She asked me to give it to you, to help you believe me. You can sense the aura of distrust between us, can’t you? But, I’m afraid you might hurt yourself with it. (He dangles the pendant from the back of the leather chair.) I leave it here for you. It can help you get some perspective. And make sure you read the upcoming issues of The Holy Grail. You might want to know about some later developments regarding your family members. I’ll ask your guards to bookmark the Current Events section for you. (He knocks on the metal door. It opens and he exits.)

(The PRISONER leaps to his feet and grabs the bars. He struggles to shake them to no avail and then extends his hands as much as he can. The pendant is far away, out of his reach. He whimpers. The off-screen shrieks start again. This time, they originate from various directions, like an echo. The PRISONER looks around, as if to find the source of the commotion. Then, he joins them. His shouts are louder than the others, with more immediate pain in them. He continues to shout heartily. At the end, his is the only one to be heard. The curtain drops.)

---

Mehdi M. Kashani lives and writes in Toronto, Canada. His fiction has recently appeared in Epiphany, EVENT, and Zone 3, among others. This year, one of his published stories was a finalist for Canada’s National Magazine Awards. To learn more about him, visit his website: mehdimkashani.com

ART
Ghosts — Roycer

FICTION
Travel, Travel — Wayne Conti
The Last Field — Colin Fleming
Goddess — Mary Granfield
Sick — Colter Jackson
Sad in New York — Elise Juska
Death of a Daughter-in-Law — Judith Lichtendorf
Way of the Dog — Douglas Silver
Mermaid — Gregory Spatz
Renunciation — Diane Yatchmenoff
Poker — Trevor Creighton
Midday Clusters — Casey Haymes

NONFICTION
Anchored — Rachel Fleishman
Hodads in Wonderland — Phillip Hurst
On Inis Mór — Helen Sitler
Shortly Before the First Time My Nephew Went to Jail +
One of My Cousin’s Photos from The War + Dang It +
Ordinary Exchange — Nance Van Winckel
Adult Education — Brandi Handley
Dalinian Triangle — Jeremy Klemin
Middle Passages — Reverie Koniecki
New Year’s Day — Helena Rho
Sticks and Stones — John Wamsted

POETRY
Sabbath + I will not be embalmed and placed behind
an iron gate — Kaitlyn Airy
State fair + “Diadems–drop–” — Lauren Hilger
Frugality — Mark Halliday
The Light the Light the Light the Light (One) + The Light
the Light the Light the Light (Two) — Margaret Yapp
The Butterfly House + Climate Change — Adam Scheffler
The First Aerial Bombardment — Serhiy Zhadan (Translated from
the Ukrainian by Ilya Kaminsky and Katie Farris)
The Correct Approach — Regina Derieva (Translated from
the Russian by Katie Farris and Ilya Kaminsky)
[Night. Street. Lamp. Drugstore] — Aleksandr Blok (Translated from
the Russian by Katie Farris and Ilya Kaminsky)
Infrared — David M. Sheridan
The Pond + Origins and Forms: Eight Sijos — Sarah Audsley
A Habit from Tikrit + Fleeing Never-Pleasure Island — Gordon Kippola
Our Friend Karl — Mark DeFoe
Deepfake Ashbery — Benjamin Aleshire
This is the Light — Carl Phillips

GUEST FOLIO
Edited by Christopher Boucher
The Speed of Living + Mother, False — Tara Isabel Zambrano
I Love You, Joe Ceravolo + Sweet Venus + Feldspar — Dan Chelotti
How Do You Roll + I’m Still a Little Sassy — Kim Chinquee
The House — Guillermo Stitch

RECOMMENDATIONS
On ONE HUNDRED YEARS OF SOLITUDE — Richard Z. Santos
Brandon Hobson: The Cherokee Novelist Who Quietly Kicked
Off the Fifth Wave in Native American Fiction — Erika T. Wurth
Camellia-Berry Grass’s HALL OF WATERS — Elizabeth Deanna Morris Lakes
Joy Priest’s HORSEPOWER — Chet’la Sebree

New Year’s Day

Helena Rho

Staring at the peeling floral wallpaper in my dimly lit kitchen, I feel the first regret of the New Year. It is noon, January 1, 2003. I am hosting a Korean New Year’s banquet, and my sisters and their families will be here in an hour. I wonder why I chose to do this: this meal, this year.

            I walk across the white and navy blue ceramic tile floor, chipped in so many places that I lament, yet again, the fact that I haven’t replaced it. I swing open a creaky cabinet door and extract the largest pot I own. As I fill it with water, I stare with dismay at the stained enamel sink, no longer a pristine white. I switch on the bulb above the grimy, formerly white range stuck in an awkward corner of the kitchen. The light flickers. I hold my breath. The weak, yellowing halo stays on.

            Although we have spoken for many years about gathering for a traditional Korean New Year’s celebration, this year will be the first. If we had a brother, the jangsohn, we would be going to his house because it would fall to his wife to cook and host the meal. Instead, my sisters and I remain in the shadow of the missing son. My sisters and I all live in the metropolitan New York area. But, in two months, I am following my husband to Pittsburgh, to advance his career.

            Still, I regret the invitation I impulsively extended to my sisters when I saw them over the Christmas holidays. Christmas matters because of our acquired families, our children. But for my sisters and me, it is Seollal or New Year Day’s that has resonance. When we lived in Korea, we celebrated Seollal on the first day of the lunar calendar, like millions of Koreans on the peninsula. But now, like other Koreans in the diaspora, away from our homeland, we celebrate Seollal on the first day of the solar calendar.

            I have already made pots of steamed white rice and mounds of jhap chae—clear vermicelli noodles sautéed with beef, mushrooms, onions, carrots, spinach—and small, assorted side dishes called banchan. I have also cheated and catered gimbap, Korean cooked sushi rolls, and mandu teugim, fried pork dumplings. But I haven’t started on the tteok guk, rice cake soup.

            Tteok guk is the soul of Seollal. And there is an art to cooking tteok guk. A deceptively simple dish, to get it right one has to be vigilant and patient. Tteok or rice cake, the heart of the soup, is capricious. Cook the sliced white ovals too long and they turn to mush, cook them too briefly and they retain the consistency of rocks. The list of ingredients is spare: beef broth, rice cake, eggs, scallion, sesame seeds. But it is the proportion of each component in relationship to the others that is important. And the order, in which the five elements are combined, is crucial to the taste.

            Start with the broth, and then slide in slivers of rice cake. Eggs, whisked with a little salt, have to be stirred in before the scallions, or else the eggs clump around the minced green onions, creating chunks, not wisps. Crushed sesame seeds go in last, otherwise the soup tastes burnt. Sometimes, mandu or meat dumplings can be added. But that changes the soup, and then it’s called tteok mandu guk—rice cake and dumpling soup. My sister Sophia prefers tteok mandu guk. But not me. I am a purist at heart. Any other time of year I will eat tteok mandu guk gladly, but not New Year’s Day. Because Seollal is always about tteok guk.

            When my sisters and I were growing up, whether it was in Kampala or Petersburg or New Jersey, my mother made rice cake soup every New Year’s Day. My mother used to say: “You can’t grow another year older and wiser if you don’t eat tteok guk on Seollal.” New Year’s Day, not New Year’s Eve, is the time of celebration for Koreans. It is our Thanksgiving. We reunite with family members and feast on an elaborate meal, prepared by the host family. There is no such thing as a potluck dinner for Koreans. Guests are not expected to bring anything other than the honor of their presence. After every grandmother, uncle, older sister, and youngest cousin have gorged themselves on the plethora of flavorful dishes, the children perform a time-honored tradition called sebae, in front of each adult. Boys bow, girls curtsey. And the children must recite a specific phrase: “In the New Year, may you receive much good fortune.” In exchange for these symbolic gestures of good will, the children are rewarded with cash. When we were young, my sisters and I competed to see who could win the most money.

            In my kitchen, the maple cutting board clatters on the warped and slanted counter as I slice beef into slender two-inch strips to make broth. Blood oozes along the grain of cut wood and drips onto blue-speckled Formica. I think: I should have bought three pounds of beef, instead of two.

            My sisters are petite women: none of them crest the five foot barrier. In pictures of the four of us, at five foot two inches, I am the bump that breaks the straight line. But their husbands are all tall, and my oldest sister’s husband is a big man. Susan, already twenty pounds past her ideal body weight, tries to keep up with her husband in the amount of food consumed. As though eating were a competition. Their only son at age three can eat at a pace which will no doubt match his father’s very soon. Rather than being disturbed by this potential problem, Susan is proud of her son. As a pediatrician, I feel duty bound to warn her against what I believe is permissive parenting. But despite my supposed expertise in childrearing, Susan dismisses me. She tells me that unconditional love is good for a child. She says she wishes she got even a drop from our mother. Susan is a clinical psychologist, who now devotes her life to her son and has not worked outside of the home since his birth.

            I sigh and press my lips into a thin line, as the stainless steel pot squeaks on the uneven surface of the old, outdated cooking range. Dense constellations of bubbles erupt on the surface of the water. Steam rises and soon obscures the faded blue flowers on the worn wallpaper, coming undone at the seams.

            My sister Sophia, older than me by two years, has no patience for Susan’s parenting. She tells her seven-year-old daughter and four-year-old son that she runs a boot camp. Sophia is all about scheduling. She is so organized and determined that she involves both her children in a frenzy of activity, six out of the seven days of the week. They race from school to the ice-skating rink, to piano lessons, to soccer games. I tell her to slow down or she will run herself and her children ragged. But she quotes from the Bible instead: “Idle hands are the devil’s workshop.” Sophia has rheumatoid arthritis, but works full-time as a pharmacist, volunteers in her children’s classrooms, and flatly refuses to stop the frenetic pace of her life.

            I drop shreds of beef into scalding water and add dashida seasoning. I swirl the stew meat around. Clear water clouds into broth. I worry: Will there be enough?

            My younger sister, Clara, doesn’t understand any of our arguments. She and her fiancé live in Manhattan, work miserable hours as attorneys, and get take-out most nights, unless they actually go out to a restaurant. Clara is childless and not about to change that any time soon. I tell her that thirty-three is not so young, but she rolls her eyes and tells me that she has plenty of time to have children. Someday. She disdains the advice of a sister, older than her by five years, as out of touch: “Why should I have children?” Probably a legacy of being raised by our mother.

            Paralyzed by anger and guilt, my sisters and I avoid the subject of our mother. We cannot all agree on how to deal with her willful isolation and increasingly erratic behavior, and it is easier not to argue. But we are united in our failure. We all married non-Korean men, a moral crime in my mother’s eyes. Even Susan’s husband, the Chinese man among the white brothers-in-law, is not good enough. Two of the brothers-in-law are physicians and one-yet-to-be is a lawyer, professions my mother considers successful. But that is still not good enough.

            My mother remained so opposed to this notion of tainting thousands of years of pure Korean blood that she did not attend Susan’s wedding. The first wedding among the four sisters. Although she was present at my nuptials, she came only grudgingly. I remember pleading with her while her face remained unmoved, as smooth as alabaster. “How could you do this to me?” she said. It was the first time in my life I disobeyed my mother’s wishes. She did not attend the Rehearsal Dinner, the night before my wedding, and until I saw her seated in the front pew of the poorly lit St. Catherine’s Catholic Church, I did not know she would come. Of course, I could not know the price I would pay in marrying an emotionally and physically abusive man.

            Susan bitterly points out that our mother is too much of a snob to have missed my wedding—who would take the credit for me becoming a doctor and then crowning my achievement by marrying another? Certainly not my father, another failure in my mother’s eyes, and not just because they are divorced. To say that divorce is rare in Korea is an understatement. Koreans do not get divorced, especially those in the upper class like my parents. My mother still hasn’t told her family fourteen years after her divorce, and she probably never will. Because of her overwhelming sense of shame, a character trait I inherited. She rarely visits Korea, and her mother and sister last visited when I was a child. She no longer speaks to her family on the telephone. The last time she got a phone call, it was news that her father had died. So she writes letters, blue folded notes with “aerogram” printed on them. I imagine she can create a parallel universe on those thin azure sheets: one in which she is happy, one in which her family does not have to worry about her.

            In the tight confines of my dreary kitchen, the fragrance of meat rising in temperature fills the air. The blade of my knife falls across the bodies of the scallions, releasing a bitter yet refreshing scent. I finish the rest of my mis-en-place: prying apart oval slices of rice cake, resisting the starch sticking them together like glue; cracking open large brown eggs into a white bowl and whisking them with a little salt; grinding sesame seeds in the ceramic mortar and pestle. The nutty, nostalgic aroma of crushed seeds bathes my nostrils, reminding me of all the meals my mother cooked during my childhood.

            Until my children were born, I did not know how to make tteok guk. Growing up, my mother shooed me away from the kitchen whenever I asked to help. She would say, “You need to study. You are going to do important things when you are a doctor. Cooking is easy. I can teach you that later.” Except later never came. To learn how to cook Korean food, I bought a cookbook written in English by a Korean-American, who interspersed her mother’s recipes with personal family stories—about her grandmother, a renowned chef, in what is now North Korea, and her mother, the primary bread earner, struggling to start a restaurant in the East Village in New York. Estranged from my mother, I can’t call her to ask if she uses more soy sauce and less sugar in her bulgogi than the author suggests. Or if she adds more scallions and fewer sesame seeds to her tteok guk. I have to rely on my memories of tasting her soup. With the guide of a cookbook, I am trying to recreate my mother’s tteok guk.

            Like a cyclone of motion, my six-year-old daughter bursts into the cramped kitchen. “Mommy, Mommy, you have to help me!” She careens around, making miniature circles on the ceramic tile floor.

            “Erin, please, stop the noise.”

            She fights to contain her energy, but her arms flail with each word. “I need your help putting on my Korean princess costume!”

            “Do you have to wear that today?” I am referring to the Korean hanbok or traditional dress worn by women in Korea for special occasions. I had bought a miniature, pink and white one, fashioned like a Joseon Dynasty princess, for my daughter as a Halloween costume.

            “Yes, yes, yes!” Her eyes are wide, her head nodding vigorously. “I’ll get more money if I’m dressed like a Korean!”

            “I don’t think your cousins are coming dressed in hanboks. Can’t you just put on your regular clothes?” I try to reason with her.

            “No!” She is impatient with my lack of understanding. “Mommy, please, let me wear it!”

            I am defeated. “Okay, okay. Just bring it down. I will help you.”

            She thunders upstairs, her shout of thanks echoing in the stairwell.

            I remember dressing up in my mother’s hanboks as a child on New Year’s Day, to do my sebae with my sisters. I can’t blame my daughter for wanting to do the same.

“Why didn’t you start the tteok guk sooner?” Sophia asks the moment she steps into my kitchen.

            My sisters have arrived in a flurry of noise and activity, one after another. Their children play with mine downstairs in the family room while they set two tables—putting out the fine bone china, glasses, silver chopsticks for the adults’ table and the paper bowls, plastic cups, and wood chopsticks for the children’s table. I hear snatches of my sisters’ chatter and laughter. One of them scolds a child not to run in the living room. One of them tells me that the fried pork dumplings are delicious, while another sister wanders into the kitchen, chewing on seaweed-covered gimbap filled with rice, beef, spinach, daikon, egg, and carrots.

            I dip my Korean spoon into simmering soup and take a cautious taste. The beef broth has infused heartiness into the rice cake ovals; the scallions are bright and tangy; the eggs are light and delicate; the crushed sesame seeds have been absorbed into nuttiness. And the slices of rice cake are soft, but structured. All five ingredients have melded, and harmony has emerged. I ladle the soup into round celadon bowls. We sit down to eat.

            “Next year we should have it in my house. My kitchen is bigger. And it will be renovated,” Sophia says.

            I nod.

            “Why didn’t you put mandu in the tteok guk? You know, it would taste better that way,” Sophia says, wanting her dumplings.

            “Because I didn’t want to,” I snap. Immediately, I regret my curtness. The new year will not bode well if we start with a fight. “Tteok guk is what we always have on New Year’s Day,” I amend, passing out gim—roasted and salted seaweed squares—to crumble into the soup.

            “It’s boring. It would taste better with mandu,” Sophia insists.

            “Tteok guk is comfort food.” I bite on a sliver of rice cake, savoring the firm yet yielding center and the play of flavors and textures—so simple, yet so complex.

            Sophia shrugs. “Whatever.”

            She will never understand my love of tteok guk.

            Immediately after the meal, our children clamor to do their sebae. We decide that each adult couple will take turns sitting on the sofa while all the children bow and curtsey together. That way, the children will prostrate themselves four times, instead of eight. Sophia and Clara give one dollar to each child. I do the same. But not Susan. She distributes twenty-dollar bills in shiny red envelopes. The children shriek with delight at their windfall. When the adults look at her askance, she says that it will be Chinese New Year in a matter of weeks, and we should celebrate that, too.

            Clara, characteristically quiet through most of the chaos, approaches me with her coat draped over her arm. She intends to go into the office, billing more hours even on this holiday.

            “Why don’t you stay for coffee?” I say, hoping to extend her visit.

            She brushes me off, as expected. “I can’t. I’m going to trial next week.”

            I am resigned. “It’s good to see you. Let’s get together for dinner in the city before I move.”

            She shakes her head. “I don’t know how long the trial will be.”

            We still have time. You can’t squeeze me in? Instead, I just nod.

            But Clara hesitates in her haste to leave my house. She slowly pulls on her coat, adjusts her scarf, carefully inserts each finger into her gloves.

            I wait.

            “I got a letter from Mom,” she says, her words rushed.

            I close my eyes and hold my breath. When I open my eyes, I see Clara staring at the broken tiles in my kitchen floor.

            “What does she want?” I ask.

            “She needs money.”

            “What else is new?” I say.

            “She’s getting worse. She used to ask for a couple of hundred dollars every few months, and I would just send a check. But this time, she wrote me some story about an emerald that is worth $30,000. But she will sell it to me for $20,000.”

            Clara speaks softly to try to hide the fact that she is crying, but her tears fall faster. I try to put my arm around her shoulder, but she rebuffs me. I understand. Sometimes, one touch and I come unraveled.

            “It’s not your fault. You know she tried that with me. When I told her I couldn’t buy the emerald, she stopped speaking to me. She moved on to Sophia then Susan and now you,” I say.

            “What do I write back? I know she needs money, but $20,000! If she needs that kind of money, she needs to sell her house.” Clara is literally wringing her hands.

            “The roof is falling in. But she clings to that house. Insisting it will be worth a million dollars in a few years. How do you reason with a delusional woman?” I say, rehashing old ground.

            “If only we could get her out of that house!” Clara twists her scarf into a knot.

            “We tried. We can’t,” I say softly.

            Silence and failure hang between us.

            Clara wipes away her tears, her mask back in place. “I have to go. I’ll call you about dinner.” She slips on her shoes and steps out the door.

            I lean the weight of my body against the worn floral wallpaper of the kitchen, rest my head on the wall. I want to close my eyes and go to sleep. Instead, I take a deep breath. I go back to the party.

            My children and their cousins are running around my living room, shouting with joy, dropping crumbs carelessly. I do not curb their enthusiasm.

            “I guess they’re having a good time. But they’re making too much noise.” Sophia says, as she tries to rein in her children, with no success.

            “Leave them alone. You’re too uptight,” Susan says.

            “No, Sue, just because your kid is out of control doesn’t mean my kids should be too. My children know what is expected of them,” Sophia says, as she pointedly stares at Susan.

            “Okay, you guys, no fighting,” I interrupt before things escalate.

            Susan and Sophia live in the same development of cookie-cutter houses, only blocks apart. They rely on each other to pick up their kids from school, car pool to activities, and trade babysitting. Most of the time it works. But they clash in their methods of discipline, and their children play together often. I frequently get complaints from one about the other, especially in the aftermath of a battle. Like our mother, they haven’t made close friends, maybe because they have each other and perhaps feel they don’t need others.

            “Do you remember the last New Year’s we spent in Korea?” Susan suddenly asks, her voice wistful. “It was the last time we saw our cousins.”

            Her yearning is too much to bear. I look away.

            On Seollal, 1972, my parents, sisters, and I lived in Seoul. We took a taxi to a relative’s house in the suburbs of the city. I can’t remember which one. I think it must have been someone on my mother’s side of the family, but I could be mistaken since my father’s family is from Seoul and my mother’s family is from Gwangju. By the time we arrived, groups of people occupied every room. My sisters and I went to play with other children, plotting ways to get more money from the adults when time came for the bows and curtseys. We were allowed to eat everywhere and run while doing it, something quite unusual in our everyday lives. I remember a whirlwind of sound—adults laughing, children yelling, music playing. I remember my mother happy. At the end of the night, I was the child who made the most money. I paid for our taxi ride home. I was proud of my accomplishment. I couldn’t stop smiling as I sat, among my sisters, looking out at the lights illuminating Seoul. I thought: what a wonderful end to the first day of the new year.

            After my sisters go home, I am left with the remnants of tteok guk. The broth has congealed from the starch of rice cake ovals, which are now bloated and misshapen. Beef strips, shriveled and discolored, stick out of the soup like brown twigs. Dried, yellow egg tendrils cling to the sides of the stainless steel pot. I pick up the dirty dishes from the dining room table and take them into my woeful kitchen. The peeling wallpaper, the mismatched melamine cabinets, the stained sink are thrown into sharp relief by the dismal lighting.

            I tell myself that I am glad I saw my sisters before I go through yet another disorienting shift in geography. But I have to stop myself from dropping to my knees on that broken tile floor. I want to mourn the girls that my sisters and I used to be. I want to mourn the woman my mother was. But I do not cry. Instead, I wash the plates, the pots, the chopsticks. I erase the detritus of a misguided meal.

            An opportunity was lost that New Year’s Day. I still go over the events of that day and wonder what I could have done differently. How I could have convinced my sister Clara to stay for coffee. How I could have persuaded my sisters to sit down and talk about our mother, to find ways to show her kindness and preserve her pride. So she wouldn’t feel shame in asking her daughters for help.

            I wonder if I could have changed what happened the following year. I wonder if I could have stopped my mother from trying to commit suicide.

---

Helena Rho, a former assistant professor of pediatrics, has practiced and taught at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, the Johns Hopkins Hospital, and the Children’s Hospital of Pittsburgh. Her work has appeared in Creative Nonfiction, Slate, Crab Orchard Review, Entropy, and Fourth Genre, among others. “New Year’s Day” is part of her memoir-in-essays, American Seoul.