Category: Issue 39

How Storytelling Gave Me Hope and Perspective

Diana Raab

I’ve always been somewhat obsessed with reading and hearing stories that offer a sense of perspective and hope. Over the past six decades, I’ve earned my chance to share my own thoughts and stories passed down from my ancestors. I was blessed to have grandparents who were survivors of two world wars, and who were able to share their stories and life perspectives with me, in journals and during dinner conversations. Now that I’m a grandparent myself of five beautiful grandchildren, I feel that it’s my turn to carry the torch of perspective and hope.

            Parents and grandparents play many roles in their children’s lives, but one of the most important is instilling them with a sense of hope and perspective. One way to do so is through storytelling. Nurturing a sense of hope and perspective is about honoring the present, appreciating the past, and planning for the future. It’s also a way to be grateful for our blessings, both personally and spiritually. 

            As a Holocaust survivor, my father was a master at instilling hope and perspective. Even though he died more than thirty years ago, I continue to hold his values close to my heart. He was very grateful to be alive and to be able to put food on his family’s table. He was grateful for his freedom and hopeful about humanity. 

            For five of my father’s most formative years—from age fifteen to twenty—he was a prisoner at the Dachau concentration camp in Germany. While there, he ate scraps of left-behind food, and at night he slept on wooden barracks with hundreds of others, all shivering under thin blankets. His father, who’d died of pneumonia just before the war broke out, had owned a well-respected lumberyard in the neighboring town, and the Nazis knew him, so they gave my father a job working in the kitchen peeling potatoes. Unlike most of the other prisoners in the concentration camps, my father was fortunate to always have food available to him. But no matter what horrible things he witnessed and endured, he never lost hope. Like Viktor Frankl, the author of Man’s Search for Meaning, my father believed that if you have meaning in your life, you can survive anything.

            Years before he died at the age of seventy-one from congestive heart failure (after coughing up blood after thirty years of smoking), my father shared the story about the scar on his forehead, which he was left with after a Nazi soldier hit him with the butt of his rifle when he spotted my father taking too much peel off the potatoes and tossing it to his barrack mates. My father’s generosity got him into trouble, but for him it was worth the risk to help those in need. He was also the type of man who walked down the streets of New York City tossing coins from his pocket into homeless people’s buckets. His life experience taught him the importance of cherishing life, and he would have given the shirt off his back for those in need.

            Being a prisoner during World War II left my father with lifelong physical and psychological scars. For example, he couldn’t stand the sight of red meat because during the war he claimed that he’d seen too many dead bodies. “The sight of blood just turns my stomach,” he used to say. 

            He shared how he witnessed his younger brother, Joshua, and his mother being taken from their ghetto apartment by the Nazis, herded onto a train, and then being transported to the gas chambers, which led to their ultimate deaths. He and his brother Bob were the only ones in the family to survive. Enduring this life experience offered my father a unique perspective on the rest of his life. 

            In 1989, when my husband and I named our youngest child Joshua, it dulled my father’s grief, knowing that in some way his brother would live on, and bearing my uncle’s namesake continued to offer me perspective about my own past.

            My mother-in-law had her own share of hair-raising Holocaust stories. As a young teenager, she’d hidden from the Nazis in a Swiss family’s basement. For more than five years, she didn’t see her parents. Each and every day, she and her sister lived in fear that they would be discovered and ultimately killed.

            The fear of death is huge, and when faced with war or illness, dying is often the inevitable outcome, but living with hope can save us. After receiving my first cancer diagnosis, my oncologist looked me in the eyes and said, “If this doesn’t rivet you, nothing will,” and he was so very right. Having cancer shed a new light on my life, in the sense that it encouraged me to slow down, be mindful, and appreciate the smaller things. 

            Now that I’ve been a writer for more than fifty years, I’ve often turned to this form of creative expression as a way of understanding certain lived experiences and healing from them. Writing about cancer was no different, except that I hoped that detailing my journey would also help others navigate theirs. Taking stock of our lived experiences through the written word can help provide a much-needed perspective.

When I was in my 40s, I wrote about my midlife crisis. For a while, I lost hope, but what grounded me was thinking about my father’s story and how he never lost hope and perspective. It was a difficult time for me, as my three adolescent children were becoming more and more independent and didn’t need me as much as they used to. At the same time, I was becoming preoccupied with the inevitable physical and psychological changes inherent in the aging process. There have been so many shifts over the years, but when putting them into the proper perspective, none were as serious as dealing with terminal illness, childhood traumas, or the effects of war. Simply put, my own challenges just didn’t carry much weight, relatively, and I realized the importance of maintaining a proper perspective on life.

            These days, I find that looking back not only puts life into perspective, but is also an excellent way to bring hope to the present. This became even more apparent when I was in my 40s and discovered a special family heirloom. While doing some spring cleaning, I sifted through our hall closet—the place where we put things we didn’t quite know what to do with—and made piles of what I wanted to keep and what I wanted to discard. (These days many people are guided by Japanese organizing consultant/author Marie Kondo’s philosophy of only keeping what brings us joy, and I think I’ve always intuitively lived that way.)

            Anyway, as I went through that closet, I pulled out my first nurse’s uniform from two decades prior. I placed it into a pile called “Questionable and to Be Reviewed Later.” Then I stumbled upon my father’s figure skates that he’d worn while teaching actor Paul Newman how to skate when my dad worked as an instructor at Rockefeller Center. I didn’t have the heart to give away those nostalgic items.

            The items that were easy to discard included party invitations from ten years earlier, my children’s Halloween costumes, birth announcements, expired coupons, old straw hats we used to wear at Jones Beach, and incomplete decks of playing cards. 

            The “Must Keep Pile” was the most fascinating, because this comprised all the things that helped honor and respect the idea of perspective, and which gave me hope about the present. This pile included baby pictures, old school notebooks, kindergarten pictures, Dad’s favorite clothes, stamp and coin collections; and other miscellaneous collectibles, such as framed photographs with broken glass, awards won in tennis tournaments, autographed paraphernalia, posters, and favorite outfits. 

            Sorting through this memorabilia provided me with a perspective on my current life while also taking me for a stroll down memory lane. It’s amazing how an entire era can be illuminated by one item. During this task, I came across a very special treasure that touched a magical place within me where my inner writer resides. In a carton of papers, which included my children’s artwork, letters from sleepaway camp, old report cards, and income tax returns, was a stack of faded papers in a plastic sheath. It was something I’d seen before but had misplaced. I felt my eyes momentarily bulge like a bullfrog about to pounce on its prey as I realized what I’d rediscovered. What I was holding was my maternal grandmother’s journal depicting her life as an orphan during World War I in Poland—she’d been orphaned at the age of eleven. I yearned to share it with my family as a way to provide a much-needed sense of hope and perspective. 

            My grandmother, who was also my caregiver committed suicide when I was ten years old, and although I knew she was tormented, I never really knew why until I read her journal. Typed on an old Remington typewriter, the document was single-spaced, on paper that had turned light brown over the years. Correction fluid wasn’t available yet, so the pages were filled with strikeovers. Grandma Regina obviously didn’t care much about the use of paragraphs, as the fifteen pages were typed as one continuous document without indents.

            For years after my grandmother’s suicide, I’d been fascinated by her story. I’d gathered bits and pieces of information about her life and had concluded that she’d had her share of childhood traumas and miseries, but once again I was reminded of the extent of her misfortunes. Reading about her trials and tribulations offered me perspective about my own life and how little annoyances like having to shovel the snow in order to get my children to school was nothing compared to what she’d been through—like having to identify her dead parents lying on an infirmary floor. I also realized that I’d inherited from my grandmother the passion for the written word and the importance of writing for healing, something I’ve advocated for others for many decades since.

 
My grandmother was born in Poland in the early 1900s. Her journal began with her father telling the family during dinner one night that war had been declared—Austria-Hungry against Russia. The following morning my grandmother looked out her second-floor bedroom window and watched “swarms of soldiers marching” among the children on the way to school. “There were horses running without riders on their backs. Many of those who were riding horses had neither arms or legs, as blood poured from their bodies,” she wrote.

             She observed that the soldiers looked emaciated, and their clothes were all torn up. They were hungry and looked as if they could eat anything in sight. Within moments, they began running into homes on the street and raided the residents’ refrigerators. There were people standing on the street holding out jars of water. Some of the soldiers reached out for the water, but they barely had time to swallow, as they were ordered to march on. 

            My grandmother said that her mother was frantic and wanted to run with the army, but her father refused to leave. The next day, my grandmother roamed the streets and saw menacing-looking Cossacks dressed in long black coats and fur caps with ammunition slung across their breasts. In their hands, they held swords raised toward the heavens. 

            “I ran when I saw a young boy on the deserted street and the Cossacks were hacking him into small pieces. His mother ran to pick up the bloody pieces on her apron. My father finally decided it was time to leave and go to Poland as the fighting continued relentlessly,” she wrote.

            Finally, her father agreed that they should all leave, but a cholera epidemic had already taken over their small village. 

            “First, only a whispering with single cases here and there, and then we all went into a state of horrified stupor. The stores closed. There was no school. There was no visiting, no handshakes, and no taking money from others. Some people had a little bag of camphor around their necks, which was thought to offer little protection against the disease,” she wrote.

            My grandmother’s parents died a slow and inevitable death from cholera. Without warning or anticipation, my grandmother was orphaned with her eight-year-old sister. 

            “I was only eleven years old and very scared,” she wrote. Just before the war broke out, her two brothers had left for jobs in Vienna. Her once full and lively household was now empty, and more than half the town’s population had perished. 

            Much like children today who come from troubled homes, my grandmother found solace and hope in the daily ritual of attending school. She felt as if it was the only time she was cared for, and the only place where she could still behave like a child. Thankfully, she received a lot of support and food from her school, as well as from compassionate neighbors, but she still felt empty inside—all the compassion in the world couldn’t compensate for the sudden and tragic loss of her parents. 

            She and her sister finally decided to trek through the snow and hitch a ride to Vienna to find their brothers. When they finally found them, they felt very unwelcome in their brothers’ family homes. Their brothers’ wives practically slammed the doors in their faces. They said that they had enough trouble feeding their own children and didn’t have enough money to also take care of them.

            Feeling that there was no other choice, the brothers decided to place their sisters in a small nearby orphanage. The shift in living situations was almost too difficult to bear. While at the orphanage, the girls learned that they were the only residents without parents. They wore “rags” that no one else wanted, and as their bodies grew, they became hungrier and hungrier. My grandmother’s journal ended with her high school graduation and her subsequent struggles to support her and her sister while working as a bank teller. All in all, my grandmother’s life was filled with turmoil and grief, and although just about everyone has demons to deal with, the fight for survival is, by far, the most primal and difficult.

 
I read my grandmother’s journal for the first time when my children were younger, and the second time when they were young adults. Each time, I was able to link my current perspective to that of my past, which gave me hope in navigating my own life challenges. What affects us now depends upon our current perspective. Of course, our family went through the usual turmoil relating to our children’s adolescent years, but overall, our life was safe, relatively calm, and somewhat predictable—something I couldn’t have said about my grandmother’s life. There were no menacing, hungry-looking soldiers marching down our street, and no deadly epidemics to fend off (not until now, that is). 

            Reading my grandmother’s journal also gave me hope and inspiration when I was diagnosed with breast cancer in 2001. As part of my healing process, I wrote Regina’s Closet: Finding My Grandmother’s Secret Journal, which shared both of our stories. 

            There’s no doubt that there are times when life feels overwhelming, but when we look outside our own stories, we usually learn about someone else who is in a more tenuous predicament. Like my grandmother must have felt, I find that when life throws us curveballs, it’s very helpful to write down our feelings as a way to understand what’s happening and also to come to terms with our situations. Reading about the life experiences of our ancestors can give us a true sense of hope and perspective; plus, it’s a way to maintain a sense of control over our circumstances, try to change what we can, and let go of what we cannot change.

I am already more than six years older than my grandmother was when she committed suicide, and I continue to acknowledge the importance of maintaining hope and a sense of perspective in my life—knowing that the past gives me insight and meaning into my future. 

            My grandfather once confessed to me, “You watch, my dear, history will repeat itself. Mark my words.” Although he mentioned this in the context of fashion, I can certainly see how it applies to just about every aspect of our lives, as I continue to remind myself of the importance of instilling hope in my children and grandchildren by sharing stories that give them a much-needed perspective. 

---

Diana Raab, PhD, is an award-winning memoirist, poet, blogger, speaker, and author of ten10 books and is a contributor to numerous journals and anthologies. She’s also editor of two anthologies, “Writers on the Edge: 22 Writers Speak About Addiction and Dependency,“ and “Writers and Their Notebooks.“ Raab’s two memoirs are “Regina’s Closet: Finding My Grandmother’s Secret Journal,“ and “Healing wWith Words: A Writer’s Cancer Journey.“ She blogs for Psychology Today, Thrive Global, Sixty and Me, Good Men Project, and The Wisdom Daily and is a frequent guest blogger for various other sites. Her two latest books are, “Writing for Bliss: A Seven-Step Plan for Telling Your Story and Transforming Your Life,“ and “Writing for Bliss: A Companion Journal.“ Visit: www.dianaraab.com.

Agate

Ted Lardner

The last time I saw Craig, I was curled against the spare tire in the trunk of his mom’s car. He was reaching up to close the trunk. I saw a belt loop, the side of his jeans. “No!” he yelled, then he slammed the lid. That was on a Monday. It was late July. July 23^rd. Three weeks later—Monday, August 13, 1973—around five in the afternoon, Craig drowned in the floodwater of the creek that runs behind the house that I grew up in. Wading and swimming with five other boys, Craig was swept into a culvert. He was fourteen years old. The funeral was on Thursday. A warm August morning, the summer between eighth and ninth grade. I rode my bike. 

            From the Davenport Times-Democrat, from Tuesday, August 14, 1973, I learn:

1. Except for Craig, none of the boys I had pictured were there.
2. Five boys, wading and swimming with Craig in the creek. 
3. A storm dumped an inch of rain in 45 minutes late Monday afternoon.  
4. The emergency call came at 5:27pm.  
5. A little after 7pm, Craig’s body was found.

            By then, the rain had stopped. 30^th Street and 31^st Avenue were drenched with runoff, and the clouds were breaking. The air was soft. A soft summer evening. Neighborhood kids had come out.  Some pedaled down to see what was happening.

            “A 14-year-old youth drowned Monday night in a rain-swollen drainage ditch in Rock Island,” the Times-Democrat says. (It’s not a “ditch.”) “The youth was swept into a four-foot storm drain opening by rushing waters at the bottom of the ditch. The ditch is reportedly a favorite swimming and wading spot for area youngsters.” (Not a “ditch.”) “Police said the group of youths had gone into the drainage ditch at a point just northeast of St. James Lutheran Church. Police said at one point in the ditch, water measured at least eight feet deep.”

            After a few minutes of stunned shock, one boy ran to a nearby house for help and the other boys hustled across 31^stAvenue. They slid down the embankment hoping to see Craig on the other side. Rock Island patrolman, Leo Ford, was first on the scene. From where they stood gaping at the water, the boys waved to him. With a rope from the patrol car, Ford scrambled down through the weeds. Rain still falling. Cars wiping slick tracks of sound off wet pavement. Thunder rumbled. A siren climbed the 30^th Street hill.

            Ford tied one end of the rope around his waist. He gave the other end to the boys and told them to hold on. He waded out into the water. Rain splashed up everywhere on the muddy surface and the wet got in his eyes. The woods echoed the rush of runoff everywhere. Ford stepped deeper, feeling his way, close to the edge where the creek’s bank, deeply submerged, sheared away in a rush of current. He lurched when he found it, almost falling. Then he slid in, yelling, “Hold on!”  Suddenly up to his chest, he struggled for his footing. The smell of the floodwater, like old drain pipes and mud and sticks and deep damp cellars, filled his lungs. To his right, a few yards upstream, the opening of the culvert, the top curve of the O of corrugated pipe stubbed into the base of the embankment, just visible in the outrush. Ford leaned into the current, inching upstream. Reaching low under the water, he tried to find Craig at the culvert opening, but he slipped, catching himself. Pushing again into the current, he slid his foot another step, but the bottom disappeared, the boys felt the rope jump, and Ford yelled again, sharply, as he spun off his feet. The boys grunted. Ford pumped his legs and arms, crawling to catch the bank of the creek. Wrapping his grip on streamers of grass, he lunged, hauling himself up, crawled another two yards, then stood up. Bending, hands on his knees, he breathed hard, then wiped his eyes, then looked around.

            In the whole time since Craig’s funeral, when I rode my five-speed past Beth Heming’s house and Jim Eagle’s and DeeDee Beaudry’s and Belinda Lawhorn’s to St. Pius, and walked in with what seemed like most of the rising 9^th-grade class from Washington Junior High School, I’d had in my head two details, details, as it turned out, I had essentially made up, invented, now I think, out of next to nothing, out of trying to picture what had happened, and trying to make that make sense.  One detail was that the water rose almost to the top of the culvert, which meant that Craig, riding low in the water, could have slid into the gap. The other detail was I always pictured that Craig had seen the culvert as he floated toward it, and that he had turned and looked back, and that he had smiled. “Watch this,” I imagined him saying. These details, like names of the boys I thought were with him, were wrong.

            On the Wednesday before the Rock Island (Illinois) High School Class of 1977 40th reunion, alone, I went for the first time in many years to see a rock concert. I’d been to one reunion before, my fifth-year, and I hadn’t been interested in going back for any of the others since then. Still, something was pulling me. Related, partly, to social media. Connecting with my classmates and childhood friends had become a million times easier. In virtual space, geographical space seemed to dissolve. Also, 40 years seemed portentous, practically Biblical. Since the concert fell on the night before I would depart for the reunion, going to the show became part of the trip, the first step in the ritual of return. Only, on the very first leg of the journey back, I got lost. The concert was out at a music venue in Summit County, twenty miles south of Cleveland, and on the way out there, I got lost. I was following GPS directions, but, as with so many mistakes I only figure out later, I had shifted accidentally a setting on my phone, switching my directions from traveling by car to walking. For sure, the directions seemed off. Especially the timing: four hours to destination? Yet down the wrong-way route, farther and farther from the six-lane freeway that I knew to be the way, I persisted.  

            Gnats and no-see-ums in your eyes, and mosquitos. And the smell, there is a green smell, a mud smell, a cold smell comes off the creek when it floods in the woods, a sweet smell, chilly, a rank smell, like damp cellars, clammy, like storms and cold run-off gushing through drains. A friend I knew who lived on that block by the creek where Craig’s body was recovered says Bret Winger found him first. That’s not in the newspaper. Neither is this. Bret found him, my friend says, and Bret was never the same, because of how it was. They scrambled, carrying Craig. He was wrapped in a blanket. At the top of the steep ravine, they lifted him over the guardrail, bundled him into the back of an ambulance. My friend had been out, riding around. She saw emergency vehicles, people, including two or three boys from the neighborhood—Bret, and some friends from school—milling at the top of the ravine. Straddling her bike, she wanted to believe when, swinging the doors closed, the man in the ambulance said Craig was just short of breath. This also isn’t in the Times-Democrat story: Craig looked back. Following behind him, the boys saw, as they waved and called out, he glanced back at them. “Craig looked back,” I remember one boy said. Memory is tricky though.  There was a deep wound, a gash, across his face, one boy said. Through the blanket, the wound seeped. You could see it, he said. I can still see it.  

            The funeral was Thursday. I rode my bike. I don’t remember planning on it. I put on school clothes and went. I didn’t expect to meet up with anyone. I knew friends from school would be there. I left my bike behind the church and went around and in through the big glass doors in front.  In tight groups in the foyer, some girls I knew stood, shooting glances over each other’s shoulders. Grown-ups tipped their faces, kneeled, crossed themselves, disappearing into their pews. Matching each other’s movements, two altar boys lifted tapers along stands of white candles. Beautiful stained glass windows. I didn’t understand then that the world had always already been riven by invisible divisions, hidden fractures, voids, separations. Maybe we cannot see them until we are taken across, which is when we learn how to look back. Up until that funeral morning, there hadn’t been a “before.” And then “before” was over. After the funeral, I rode my bike home, changed out of my school clothes, and went outside. The only agate I ever found, I found down the creek where the body of Craig Alongi was recovered.

            

Crystals transform energy. Walking by the creek, the weight of your step makes a phone call. Down in the pebbles under your shoe, inside the quartz, across lattices of crystals, little phone booth doors flap shut. (Remember—this is 1973). Mechanical energy from the weight of your step dials tiny signals through the quartz into the ground: Where are you? People attribute special properties to agates. Spiritual, emotional, and physical vibrations are contained in the mineral banding. Diverting dangerous storms stands high on an internet list of the properties of agates. Truthfulness is up there near the top. Spiritual protection. The only agate I ever found, I found in the scoured pool below 30^th Street where Craig’s body became entangled in the sweeper branches of a fallen tree. 

            Clouds boil and spread themselves out. If you stop and look and watch closely, you can see the cauliflower curlicues bulge out of their edges as they float on rivers of air all one direction over the summer trees. The trees look like clouds, too, if you were to look down on them from above, if you were a bird, if you flew out of your body. From above, oak trees in summer sweat deep greens into the sun, breathing and foliating, each bulge of them a green hump of smoke over a smokestack, a mushroom cloud of chlorophyll explosions, a vegetable breath. Thunderstorm clouds can weigh 1,000 tons. Landing at Moline, I rent a car, cross the canal, then Rock River, pass the quarry, then hang a right onto Black Hawk Road.  

            In September after the reunion, using a number I had gotten from a friend of a friend, I sent a text message to John Wiggins, one of the boys who was with Craig the day he drowned: “I got this number from Eric _____. This is ________. I’m looking for _______. I want to talk to him about Craig Alongi. Please text me back if you want to. If you don’t, I understand.” One minute after I sent the text, my phone rang. It was John.

            “I was pretty far behind him,” John said. “He was in front of everyone. I knew every inch of that creek,” John said. I was sitting on the back step outside. I had pulled the door shut behind me.  I wanted to talk to John alone, without my family hovering in the room. It took a bit for us to find our rhythm. We kept starting in, talking over each other. We’d stop, wait for the other, then interrupt each other again. “It haunts me,” John said. “Every single day. I knew every inch of that creek. I knew that construction was there.” I was thinking how another of the boys, Kelly Rudd, described it. “I do remember we had done this several times,” Kelly said, referring to swimming in the flooded creek—creek riding, they called it. “All the way back behind Eugene Field School. To my knowledge, no one knew that they extended the pipe under 31^st Avenue. As I recall, about a city block. Behind the church. I can kind of still see it in my head. All of a sudden, we went around the bend and the creek just stopped. In an instant you realize the creek is going somewhere. In that water, all that volume is going somewhere. And you have to get out. Evaluate. Where is it going?  But—too late by then,” Kelly said. 

            On the phone, John’s voice sounds far away. Maybe he’s on speaker. The effect is muffled, echoey. Like I’m talking to him from a different dimension, his voice has that tremulous sound, like we were speaking under water. John said, “I saw his arms fly up. His legs and arms.” John paused. “Kind of a thrashing.” He paused again. “That was it. He was gone.” Picturing so fiercely the accident unfolding as he described it, I heard John talking to me as though he were back, still there, too. Somehow, we were looking back in time, scanning the flow of the creek, feeling our eyes catch on the silent, corkscrewing crease of the whirlpool. John’s voice sounded ragged. His sentences clipped, just a few short words. “John,” I said. “How high was the water? At the culvert I mean. Was it, like, half-way up? Was it almost to the top?”  

            Later, I told a friend that when I’d gone back home, before I went out to the reunion, I’d climbed inside the culvert and that, as I’d left, I had crossed myself, and my friend said, “You breathed within it.” Later, I examined the picture I had taken while kneeling just inside the opening, pointing my phone into the dark. The rings of the corrugated pipe made halos that emanated from the dot of light far down at the other end. The creek lapped, daylight in wedges of ripples ever flowing. I thought about how buggy it was, and how anxious I had felt, scooting down the side of the gully, peering into the culvert, sure someone was about to yell, “Hey! What are you doing?”  

            “Nothing,” John cut me off. “It was covered,” he said. “Completely.”

            “Underwater?” I asked.

            “You couldn’t see it,” he said. They took about ten minutes where they kind of stood there, he said. Figuring out what to do. One of them went to a nearby house to call for help. John said, “I’m only telling you what I think I remember.” I told him I had it in my head that Craig had looked back, that Craig had smiled. Like he knew what he was doing, I thought. Like he was doing it on purpose. “He never knew what got him,” John said. “I saw his legs fly up, and his arms. Like something grabbed him from below.”

            I knew then the movie I had made in my head, in which Craig is looking back, speeding with the current into the open mouth of the culvert, was mistaken. And I could feel the shift that resulted: I became bereft. The tragedy reframed itself, from a version where I could in some self-protective way blame the victim, to one where all of us are in the creek, all of us are swimming and playing. “We were young kids,” John said. Stoned, goofing in the current. And, out ahead, nearer or farther, there’s the place where the bottom opens, and no one told us about it, no one told us this trap had been opened, and when we are swallowed, it happens so fast we won’t know what got us.  It wasn’t the tight-hearted morality tale I had warped it into, out of resentment, and projected fear.  It was awful, in the archaic sense of “inspiring reverential wonder and fear.” It was baffling and nauseating and dreadful. It wasn’t Craig’s fault. It was worse. It was an accident. They were swimming in the creek. The creek was gloriously flooded, going everywhere out of its banks. They were stoned; they were having a ball! Playing and swimming in a backyard flashflood the likes of which no one had ever seen. From when they jumped in near 38^th Street to where Craig disappeared, the lines were erased, the woods were free space. No one was peering down, yelling, “Hey! Get out of here!” The ravine through all those backyards in those neighborhoods was turning into a lake! And they were on it. They were in it. They were helping make it happen. “Fuck you, Alongi! You pussy!” Bill Naab yells. Everyone is laughing as the floodwater rips like a waterpark slide around S-turns and tumbles them off of their feet. 

Agates form inside voids in the host rock, the mother rock. Mineral-rich water seeps, filling the voids. The minerals crystalize. The predominant mineral, in the case of agates, is quartz. Healers around the world have used quartz to focus or read energy. Crystals harness energy, and transform it. Crystals function as energy channels, like radios signaling through crystal receivers, news from the winter front at Chosin Reservoir. On Hawthorn Road, in 1950, my grandfather tips his head, listening. The radio console’s single telescoping antenna: rectitude. Monotheism. It stabs a finger into the radiosphere. Gusts of static, white noise, snow. Inside the cabinetry, a glow, tiny lights, vacuum tubes. A city below the pass. Hungnam, with the Sea of Japan in the blackness beyond. After news, the opera. My grandfather sings. In his basement, his voice floats on its back. I feel it push against the underside of the kitchen floor in a house off campus, on Elizabeth Street, where my girlfriend from college stands, watching the rain. The rain makes wet tracks in the dawn light streaking on the window. I turn off the faucet in the bathroom. Wipe my face on a damp towel. She practices saying it: she is moving out.

            Agates outlast their surroundings. At the reunion dinner at the downtown botanical center, I am counting, and counting time. It is hard, watching them, not to think of wishes lifted up, whispered or thought. Or prayers. Or souls, settling into their journey. The Road of Straw, as the Milky Way is called in dozens of different languages, in cultures across central Asia, the Middle East, north Africa. We watch until the sparks become too small. Impossible to pick out of the enveloping gloaming. Back inside, the DJ flips a switch. Jingle-jangle post-punk-retro-surfer-queer-campy guitars drenched in locker room reverb and shouty slutty lyrics explode from under-amped speakers:  Glitter on the mattress  /  Glitter on the highway  /  Glitter on the front porch  /  Glitter on the hallway Some people, the reddest of my red-state MAGA people of my high-school class, get up in a dance line, weave through the tables out onto the little parquet floor. Others square up, stamping and clapping.  It’s hard to tell what the middle of it is. I’m embarrassed to watch. Coffee burning in my hand, I step into the rainforest room. By philodendrons near a koi pond, another moment, approximating a meditative pause. Then a cricket. At my shoulder. “Chirp.” From the skylight ceiling three stories above me, a drip falls, dimples the pond.  

            People said, “Did you see Terry lately?” and people said, “Yeah, I seen him, he looked horrible, pass me that would you, out in Silvis, thanks, really, really.”

            People said, “Then her sister died so she raised him. . .”

            Then people said, “With my rheuma and my osteo. . .” and they hold up their hands to you and their wrists showed, tumorous bulges, knuckle joints swollen, angling the wrong ways and the fingers you didn’t see because you were looking too long at the wrists.

            Poison ivy loves edges, you thought.  

            “We’re ready to go back,” people said. “Five weeks would’ve been perfect. Six is a stretch.”

            “The corruption in this state is epic and the state is failing as a result, it’s like czarist Russia when Chekhov was writing,” people said.

            People said, “Your poetry is so deep, when I read it, it just comes from here,” and they slide their hand down their front and you smile gratefully and feel something tremble inside and you think, “You lost your three babies, and you’re telling me my poetry is deep?” embarrassed, but not too embarrassed to keep saying thank you, thank you, and wondering what it would feel like. 

            Then people said, “I timed my drugs all wrong,” and then they said, “You had wine at breakfast?” meaning in France. (Yes.)

            “Look at the pelicans!” people said. “It’s on the map. Check it. See? It’s called ‘Pelican Island.’ So, yeah, they been here before, and now they’re coming back.” And people said, “That one is called Gooz Island. And that one is called Red Neck Island.” 

            Then people said, “Do you remember?” and you do. One was the daredevil from the carnival who climbed up and jumped off the top of Centennial Bridge, and when two days and two nights later they found him, he was stuck like a knife in a brick of butter, right under the bridge, ass deep, wedged in the mud.  

            People said, “Can I carry that?” and they said, “You get him a cookie, I’ll carry that.” 

            People said, “119. I was city champion. Is Price here? Let me see. No. I remember him skinny. Not white hair.”

            People said, “My doctor said he’d really like me to consider that if I don’t want to die from a heart attack, I should lose 90 pounds.”

            Then someone spectacular said, “I lost all my woman parts!” And, “See? Right here, I got stitches, under the eye and over it, where I got kicked one time at Lincoln Park,” and she leans in showing you the scars, where the feet walked across her face, and you thought at first she was going to say “kicked by a horse,” but instead she says it was a man, wearing a boot, who kicked her in the face, at Lincoln Park. She lost 190 pounds since then and lives now on Social Security and the number she gave you, what her check is every month, is the smaller hundreds, and how does she, you’re about to wonder, but she says, “We spend my check on cookies and cigarettes, and his check goes to the electric.” Then she turns around, and other people nearby see her and all of them let out reflexive cries as tears spill into their smiles, as they embrace and embrace each other, and say each other’s names over and over.

            A cubic foot of water weighs 62.427 pounds. The creek was flowing 5 miles-per-hour, speed of the average flood at Rock Island. Through 50-inch pipe, that equates to 100 cubic feet of water per second. 100 cubic feet of water weighs 6,427 pounds. Per second, 6,427 pounds, the curb weight of the 1973 Miller-Meteor Cadillac hearse. Go ahead. Look it up. 

            It’s not that there are no boundaries. 

            It’s that boundaries create the conditions for connection.

            Crystals form on boundaries.

            Did you ever read John Keats’s poem, “To Autumn”? It’s such a strange trance. Stoned stillness dwells deep within lines teeming with subtle motions. It’s the bubble tension of lucid dreaming. “To Autumn” is nearly the last poem John Keats wrote before he went and got a “real” job because his poetry wasn’t paying his keep. About a year later, he died. In Rome, where he’d gone, seeking treatment—he was 25—for pulmonary tuberculosis, which he’d contracted while caring for his brother, who died of the same thing. It’s like Keats wrote that poem to make the brook, then reach across the brook, to reach into the void his brother disappeared into.

            In early September the creek goes still and quiet. Indian Summer days. The creek often will subside into a ghost of itself, a shadow, imprinting the silt, of an invisible flow, seeping among reddish threads of weeping willow roots. I am only beginning to assimilate how thoroughly the one detail has disrupted the course of the memory, the story I had trained in my mind. The culvert—it’s 50 inches high, a little over four feet, about as tall as your shoulders—lay entirely submerged. Thus, Craig had no idea what he was heading for. John did, but was too far back, too late to see what was about to happen, only seeing it as it did happen and knowing at the same time what it was. “He got in the whirlpool,” John said. When an agate is freed from the mother rock, its outer surface is pitted and rough, and typically a muddy color, earthy green or reddish brown. The agate I found in the creek where Craig drowned was reddish brown.  

            On a social media site relating to the upcoming 40th reunion of my high school class, some people were posting comments about Craig. These exchanges of remembrances and tributes, which occurred in a scattering of posts over several months leading up to the reunion, perhaps is what at last sparked me to begin thinking about him. One former classmate, a girl who lived in the neighborhood between my neighborhood and Craig’s, who for the life of me I never would have thought would have felt this way then, posted that she always adored Craig Alongi, because of how cute he was, because of his curly hair, his electric smile. I’m saying it awkwardly here. I cannot tell for sure whose post it was. For many of us, Craig was the first of our friends who had died. For me, Craig’s funeral was the first of the three funerals I would go to at the age of 14. 

            On the Wednesday before the reunion weekend, I went to see Dead and Company out at Blossom Music Center in Cuyahoga Valley National Park. I felt like the show was part of going to the reunion, and I got lost on the way there, because you can’t go home. Each turn taking me to smaller, less-traveled roads, finally entering a dismal-feeling woods, I followed a last command, a left turn into a parking lot. Adjusting derailleurs, tugging on helmets, a squad of middle-aged white guys like me, except they are wearing tight shorts and psychedelic jerseys, tapped around, pushing speedy looking bikes across the macadam. Fuck! Wrong life! In some trees, a sign indicated a trailhead. I checked the time. Already, the gates would be open. The lines are backed up at security: toss your bottle, open your backpack, empty your pockets, remove your hat. Out on the parking fields, swirling tie-dyes on hangers from the open backs of vans sway over card tables spread with tooled leather wallets, woven handbags, beaded bracelets, braided headbands, homemade earrings, jewelry made of sacred stones, dream catchers, hash pipes, roach clips mounted on lanyards decorated with feathers. The music is decent. There isn’t a song you don’t know by heart. It’s strange, a little. As though from that wrong turn, deep in a dream, you dove, popping into a future where everything looks back at you and seems familiar, but nothing is quite itself. The concert ends. Up the sloped hillside towards the exit at the top the crowd flows. In the humid air, halos shimmer, ringing the arc lights. After dancing for three-plus hours, to walk feels like swimming. I’m wobbly. I stop and look up. Hundreds and hundreds of fans, voices bubbling with joy from the music in the sweet Midwestern night. Then as I watch, the busses go by. Along the crest of the hill, amber roof lights scroll like a chyron across the bottom of the sky. You wonder where—where are they going?  

            A gallon of water weighs 8.34 pounds.

            Alongi throws an arm around my shoulder and hugs me in. Pulls open the collar of his shirt. “See?” he says. I see. . .bruises. Three. Four. Gum ball, red-purple, like plums. Like thumb prints at the base of his neck, along his clavicle. I look at him. “Hickeys,” he says. “My girlfriend gave me them.” He pulls up his shirt. Lets me go. It isn’t in the Times-Democrat story, but I was sure I wasn’t making this up: Craig looked back. He smiled. Then suddenly, he was gone.  

            We’re at Kavanaugh’s, the bar on the hill, the night before the big reunion banquet. I come up to Donnie, a guy I used to know before we all moved after high school. Donnie in the past year posted a lengthy comment on a discussion board devoted to the unsolved murder of a boy named Jeff Ramsey on Arsenal Island in 1972. Donnie says again as he said in his post that he was supposed to have gone fishing with Jeff on the day Jeff disappeared. Jeff asked Donnie if he wanted to go and he was going to, he says, but his mom made him come shopping with her. We can barely hear each other. The music is loud and the laughter around us is even louder. Donnie’s been a detective sheriff for 25 years in rural South Carolina. He’s talked to local cops back here and federal investigators, too, who were involved in Jeff’s case. But this isn’t about solving a cold case, although they think the guy who did it, a serial pedophile and murderer, committed suicide in prison. It’s different. It’s about reconciling our lives with the voids that our losses have opened inside them. It’s not what we are saying to each other, then. It’s that that we are both trying to catch hold of an understanding, by digging out the first, deepest cut, where the outlines may still be evident of the people we were becoming before we were touched by tragic loss in these different ways. Donnie is yelling at me, “Yeah, I went by Jeff’s old house today,” at the same time I’m yelling, “Yeah, I went down in the creek today, where Craig went.” I don’t tell Donnie I crossed myself. I wasn’t raised Catholic. I don’t know if I did it right. Standing in the mouth of the culvert, I wanted to give a sign.

            Successive depositions, and the variations in their ingredients, create the banding. If the cavity in the middle never completely fills in, instead of an agate, the inner surface erupts with crystals stabbing inward, reaching towards the center of the void. The result is a geode. Like the one that a neighbor boy from a long time back home, Randy Brolander, kept on a shelf in his basement. Randy’s geode had been sawed in half and polished. The inside was chunked, spikey and jumbly looking, like dozens of teeth had grown smooshed together in a crystal mouth. 

            In the summer of 1973, the summer Craig drowned, excavators digging a utility line at the southeast corner of 11^thStreet and Black Hawk Road uncovered an intact food storage pit containing corn, dried squashes, and pumpkins. As the Sauk clans, including Black Hawk’s, (the Thunder clan), prepared to disperse onto their winter hunting grounds, this food cache would have been carefully filled, covered in a heavy layer of clay, and fire-sealed. It was likely sealed up the autumn of 1828, because that was the winter white settlers started moving in, into the Sauk’s longhouses. That August day, it started to rain, and it rained really hard. They decided to go creek riding. They left Hodge Park and walked down through the Carriage Place subdivision towards 38th Street. They saw the creek was really flooding and they were just playing. “We were young kids,” John said. “We were just playing.” They got in the creek below the goal post at the north end of Saukie Field, wading and swimming downstream. There are burial mounds scattered throughout the Watch Hill neighborhood of Rock Island, and up along the bluffs of the Rock River, too. Craig was buried in Chippiannock Cemetery, on the hill above 11^th Street, not far from where two of Black Hawk’s children were buried. “Chippiannock” is a Sauk word. It means the village of the dead.

            Randy told us to follow. We ducked into the culvert, crept into the darkness. We straddled the trickling creek. Inside the culvert, it felt cool. “It stinks in here,” said my brother. “No, it doesn’t,” Randy said, his voice corrugating. You could see the far end glowing. Deep down in the middle of the pipe, “Sit,” Randy said. We sat, our butts on one side of the water, our feet braced on the other.  “Look,” Randy said. He clicked his flashlight, pointed it up. It’s not that there are no boundaries. It’s that boundaries create conditions for connections. Every crystal forms a boundary. All our weird minerals, our impurities interweave and foliate through us. At the edges of the crystals’ fibers, tiny channels open and thread. The funeral, which outlasts our lives, has already begun when we get there. I rode my bike. Pushing on the big glass door, I enter through my reflection.

            On the backstretch, opposite the compact grandstand, the stage: Tinker Toys of scaffold, planks and plywood. Mics up front, and stacks of Marshall amps and PA speakers flanking the drums. Local rock-and-rollers, older than us, wobbled the snow fence barrier. Bell bottoms, halter tops. Biker boots and sandals stirred the dirt of the racetrack. Davenport, Iowa. 7pm. July 23, 1973. Monday.  Mississippi Valley Fairgrounds. Tickets, five dollars. Does it matter who the headliners were? 7pm.  July 23. Monday. Tickets, five dollars. Bumping down the driveway, I pedaled over to Craig’s house.  Got there, they’re standing out by the car. I don’t remember who. Mrs. Alongi came out. “Get in,” Craig said. Craig said, “Here, gimme the keys.” He opened the trunk. I climbed in. I was the littlest.  I leaned down on my side. Someone from inside the car said something. I couldn’t hear what.  Reaching up, Craig laughed. “No!” he hollered. He lowered the trunk lid, laughing, then banged it closed. I could see a snick of light from a rusty spot near the wheel well. The brake lights flared on and Mrs. Alongi started the car. The muffler barked. Exhaust filtered into my nose. Mrs. Alongi backed into the street, turned the car towards downtown.  

            I look into the agate. Imagine the force of the flood. A cubic foot of water weighs 62.427 pounds. Times one hundred. Per second. I see Craig smooth his hair with his hand. His eyes glimmer up from the water. He reaches into the air behind me. Lifts down his drum sticks. He’d sort of inherited the drum set. A full-sized rig, with a kick bass, high hats, two splash cymbals, a snare and two toms, the smaller one and the bigger one, to your right as you sit on the stool. He’d inherited it, I guess, from his father, or an uncle, maybe. One of those guys sure taught him to play. In fifth grade, Craig could do the entire “In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida” (“In the Garden of Eden”) drum solo. You’d probably recognize it if you heard it. Craig could PLAY it; he could WHAM it; he POUNDED it; he ROCKED it. He played it at his desk, at your desk, on your head, with his hands, or with pencils on his metal lunch box, on his math book, on Miss Feldman’s globe, dee-dee-dee-dee / dah-dah / doom-doom! tapping his funny flat-sole loafers, skedaddling his hands across encyclopedias, the map rack, the chemistry set, dee-dee-dum (tick-tick-tick-tick-tick-tick) dee-dee-dum (tick-tick-tick-tick-tick-tick) dee-dee-dum-dum / doom-doom / dee-dee-dee-dee /dah-dah / doom-doom!  SRA Reading Lab to bike rack, snare-to-toms, the phrases that launch Ron Bushy’s solo. From the kick-bass intro to the rim-click outro, Craig knew the solo inside and out. A prodigy! Diving in where the drums like the waterfall footfalls of a giant centipede crunch and pan and phase-shift through your headset making all the hairs on the back of your neck stand up.

            Fifty-inch pipe, almost shiny when they put it in, and we went scuttling through it many times, down into semi-dark getting darker all the way to the place where the new big pipe butted against the old pipe that was smaller, a foot shorter diameter, and you had to duck down farther, it was damp all the way up its sides and down in your crouch scooting through under 31st Avenue you came to where down through a shaft some ladder steps hung from a rim of dark under a manhole cover, the iron thumping when cars hit it coming down the hill and drove over you. On through to the downstream end opening into the back yards, light, trees, birds, grass, the backs of houses along 31st Avenue behind Bret Winger’s house, and Diane Jingst’s, and Mr. Anderson’s ((the algebra teacher)). The creek jiggles their reflections then longwise again through a culvert deep under 30th Street that opened on its downstream side into a pond scoured into the woods at the foot of the parking lot behind the playground at Eugene Field School. Craig’s up there on the blacktop, showing me his hickeys. Bruises. Fifth grade is almost over. “My girlfriend gave me them,” he says. We head inside.  

            A cubic foot of water weighs 62.427 pounds.

            5 miles-per-hour.  

            100 cubic feet of water per second. 

            6,427 pounds.

            Per second.

            Alongi would have loved Aerosmith’s third album, Toys in the Attic. 

            Where the creek presses itself against cave-in banks, oak trees and sycamore trees lean into space under flecks of turkey vultures who float up high on silent currents of air. Upstairs in my sister Emily’s room, we watched rain lash the neighbors’ houses. The oaks get punched with wind. The gusts make the leaves flatten and shake furiously. Thunder hammers the ceiling and rattles the walls. We inch the window higher for the cold blast. On the valley floor the creek is up. Churning and turbulent, it sucks through turns, pulling at its banks then spilling over, spreading all the way out. Moving inside a tunnel of sound, as best I could I kept track of where we were. From the top of the 17^th Street hill, we rolled down the long incline, heading for the Centennial Bridge. Mid-span, a hundred feet above the glinting black of the Mississippi River, at the toll booths, I heard the automated message replay its ten-cent command: “Deposit toll, keep moving.” Through the backseat, my friends’ voices, muffled laughter. Through a rust hole in the wheel well, a speck of light. Coasting down into Davenport, Craig’s mom put on the gas. We climbed Harrison Street. A few blocks from the fairgrounds, traffic thickening, she pulled over. The doors chunked open, and then Alongi popped the trunk. A stab of sunlight. Squinting, I climbed out. We hustled toward the gate. Edgar Winter played “Frankenstein.” Savoy Brown played “Tell Mama.” Jo Jo Gunne played “Run Run Run.”    

 
Alongi hitting his drums, the sound of atoms breaking, crystals cracking in the torrent, unrolling ruffles and fills over a gut-punch kick bass, the room so loud the air felt dense, on the verge of gelling, Alongi popping, looking straight up through the basement through the roof, sticks skating, whacking the snare, booming the toms, he drove it through the floor into engine rooms underground, into the diesel woods, with blackbird mobs in ravine thickets, along the old Sauk trails, shell middens and the shadows of longhouses under 11^th Street, bones of Confederate soldiers, prisoners of war in their pine boxes under white stones on Arsenal Island, poor Jeff Ramsey’s soul in the afterlife pedaling, and Brenda Greenwood swimming up from the drowned front seat, her car off the bridge by the quarry in Rock River rising, her breath folding out of her father’s arms. Across the old pasture, fence posts still visible, rust-roughened barbed wire like strings from a big broken guitar pulling off the bent forms of hedge apple trees. At the creek, I might see anyone. A glance, from the water’s clutter. My shoes soaked and darkened. Where are you? In the culvert, he answers. At the far end. Looking out, he says. Or, just regular water then, purling, smooth, in long downstream consonants speeding over the gravel.  

            The deep river twilight will feel warm, the soft air barely moving. Paper lanterns will be opened and distributed and, after some difficulty (“Who has a lighter? Matches?”) one by one they will be lifted, held until they are ready, then gently let go. On the farther set of tracks, at the base of the levee, empty flatcars creep by us, a long, slow train of almost imperceptible shadows rolling, swaying. First one, then two, then three, rise, floating up, sideways, slowly away. Wish lanterns. Paper lanterns. They drift over our cars. Beyond the botanical center parking lot, they float away, out over the railroad tracks then the buildings on 2^nd Avenue. Southeasterly, they drift, the direction of old St. Anthony’s Hospital. When in late autumn the trees lose their leaves, we rake them in piles on the curb and light them and tend to them as the burning piles send up clouds of smoke into the void of night.

---

Ted Lardner’s writing has recently appeared in or is forthcoming from About Place Journal, Pleiades, Missouri Review, and other journals. He teaches at Cleveland State University.

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