Dear Readers, Reading your stories has given me great hope for the future of our craft. It’s incredible how talented and erudite you all are. I am hosting a new summer writing competition. The theme of your stories should be RELATIONSHIPS, in the broadest sense of the word.
Ilona loved baths as far back as I can remember. Maybe they helped calm her anxiety. Maybe she never trusted showers again. I don’t know, we didn’t discuss the reasons for this preference.
As a child she didn’t want me in the bathroom when she bathed. It didn’t seem fair; she was always there to hover over me — I think she feared I’d drown. Imagine drowning in ten inches of water. The shallow tub in our apartment did not seem at all dangerous.
One time, when I was five, I heard the water running; the bathroom door was ajar. It was easy to peak inside. The tub faced away so that your back was to the door. I was quiet, I observed her without detection. Inside, I saw mother spooning up water to her face with her beautiful soft hands - she sighed “ooOoooOoo” like you’d sooth a baby. My mother was in her mid-thirties, her hands were punctuated with firm blue veins and her perfect fingernails bright red; long slender fingers dancing like silky underwater plants in motion. Her face was smooth — creamy and taught, she was skinny and pale.
Then I saw her naked back. As she ran the washcloth over her neck, then across her shoulder blades down to her lower back I saw some shiny shimmery pinkish shapes, like fossils you learn about in school. They looked like worms of varying lengths, some one inch some five inches but not bigger. I wondered if she was made of stone but giggled to myself knowing she was soft, not hard that way — but could sometimes be mean and scary.
My mother had but a few simple habits and desires. She was steadfast in her love of long comforting baths. When she grew old she couldn’t care for herself and moved to an elder care home. Time had altered her - her mind was soft; her body plump.
The care staff were very kind. Most were obviously immigrants, usually in their twenties or thirties — Mother asked about their homelands, their histories. Her favorites bathed her twice a week in the luxurious tub with jets, which were at first scary to her but then quite exciting.
I visited her often, right after work as the building was located on my route home. Sometimes we had dinner in the community dining room. The care staff knew me and welcomed me and politely repeated their names until I knew them too.
Several months after she moved in, I was approached by Andrew who’d been nominated to be the spokesperson on behalf of mom’s care team.
“Judy, can we ask you a question about your mom?”
“Yes, of course, anything - is everything OK? I know sometimes she’s difficult.”
“Oh, no - not at all. She is most kind to all of us and wants to talk about our lives. We wonder what language she is speaking to us when not in English?”
“Yiddish, or maybe Hungarian. As people age they sometimes fall back into their native language even if they stopped speaking it years ago.”
“Oh, sure that’s probably right. But Judy can I ask you another question please?”
“Yes, what’s up?”
“Your mother’s back. It is full of scars. Deep ones, like trenches. We care for many people but have never seen a back like hers. What caused such marks on her body?”
“Ah, have none of you asked her?”
“No, we wouldn’t want to make her sad.”
“Ask her — she would love to tell you her story.”
The next time I visited, I was greeted by the care team. They pulled me aside before finding mom in her favorite chair watching TV.
“Judy, your mother was in the world war. She was a teenager and they killed her parents and beat her with a whip to make her work harder in the factory.”
“Yes, this is true.”
“She said she was a slave, she and her sisters nearly starved to death because they were Jewish people. After she was set free she came to this country.”
“That’s true as well.”
“None of us knew this was so recent a history of the world. Now we’ve learned this from your mother.”
“Did it make her sad to tell you about it?”
“No, she said she was happy to help us to learn something new. Then she held Amara who cried in her arms. She is from Ethiopia and escaped a war to come here. Your mom said to her: “We are the same, aren’t we?”
I realized after the first contest that writing for a contest is not my thing. I really enjoy reading what others have written. This is a good thing. Thank you for doing it.
Into the cardboard box he placed the pieces of a life. The process had begun in the late afternoon, weak winter light coming through the shutters and into Andrew’s living room, as he wrote out the list in neat, small handwriting (his “schoolboy’s handwriting”, Mae would call it). Three weeks ago, it had been Andrew and Mae’s living room, in Mae and Andrew’s cramped flat in Tooting, but that was before the separation. By eight o’clock he had gathered the various items and carefully laid them out on the rug.
The heaviest items would go first. He had wanted to add them chronologically, beginning with the earliest, the first memories, but soon realised this would not do; the shot glasses stolen on their third date would shatter under the accumulating weight, the Portishead record, bought for him by Mae their first Christmas together, would scratch.
To keep the items intact he sacrificed the chronology of their story, the history of their shared life. 18 years, 11 months, 5 days.
First went in a book of Philip Larkin, a weighty hardback slab in a cream dust cover, yellowing at the corners. Andrew had bought it when they moved in together and would read out verses at random, self-conscious, half-serious, while they shivered through evenings in their first damp-filled flat. They were poor and hungry and happy.
Next went in the photo album, 100 pages showing holidays and weddings, sun-bleached buildings in foreign countries and evenings lit by hanging garden lights. Andrew picked up a pair of high heels. He felt inside the right shoe, touched the toe indentations, a finger for each toe. Size 5, in a salmon pink colour, the tips lightly scuffed. The shoes went into the box, laid on their side as though on display.
Next, a bottle of perfume, almost empty. He carefully removed the lid and, feeling a chill run through him, breathed in the cruelly familiar scent. The smell of eternal night and flushed cheeks in winter, deep and musky, redolent of winey kisses in dark corners.
Earlier that morning, he had stood at the window and watched the rush hour traffic swimming by, scanning the fleeting faces in each car. He wanted to catch the eye of a driver and mouth to them urgent words: “Turn around. Go home now. If you have someone waiting for you then hit the brakes, skid into a U-turn, fuck the speed limit, quit your job. Just get back to them. You’re making a mistake; we’ve all made a terrible mistake!”
He sealed the perfume and placed it inside a high heel. He added Mae’s keyring and her favourite fountain pen, the calculator she had once used to plan their budget while sat at the kitchen table.
It wasn’t enough. How could it ever be enough? He needed a bigger box, one that could contain all of Mae’s clothes and shoes, her jewellery, the postcards from her friends that adorned the fridge, her old bank statements and invitations to parties. A box as big as the living room, as wide and tall as the flat, that could hold all the words she had spoken, each weighted glance, the callouses on her fingers and the sleepy whispers from every Sunday morning they had woke together into morning light. A box to carry away the whole street, all of Tooting and the city. To hold a marriage. 18 years, 11 months, 5 days.
In went the two shot glasses, the Portishead record, a bottle of champagne from their last anniversary (Moet, emerald glass, unopened).
Andrew looked at his watch. It showed 9:54. Darkness outside. 9+5+4. 18 years. He took off the watch and put it in the box. Time would stop here, with the hour hand trailing behind, the minute hand closing in on 12.
He took off his wedding ring and dropped it without looking, sending it clinking down, disappearing into the box. Then he folded the lids and taped them closed. The sealed box sat before him. He felt a rebuke coming from its plainness and its size, small enough to hold in two arms, burdened by the impossible task – he could not preserve the memory of Mae with these inanimate items. He could not halt time.
He put the pieces into a box and sealed it. The rest, invisible and weightless, he kept for himself, to take with him as he followed her towards midnight.
In nineteen sixty one the fledgling Beatles were filling the Kaiserkeller every night in Hamburg, Yuri Gagarin became the first man in space and Adolf Eichmann was sentenced to death for organising the murder of millions of Jews in World War Two.
But for nine year old Peter and boys like him, all these momentous events were of no significance. All that mattered to Peter was to play with his school friends firing make-believe bullets from toy cap guns.
At the end of such a day, no matter what traumas the day threw up, scrapes in the playground, teacher’s telling-offs, at the end of it all he knew that he would always be comforted by his loving family and their two cats, Miff and Muff. Whatever misfortunes happened in the world outside Peter knew that nothing was as strong as that family unit and nothing could ever pierce it. His home.
Sometimes for special treats only, Peter’s dad, Henry, would take the whole family out to The Carvery dinner and dance at the Cumberland Hotel, where for nineteen and sixpence one could eat as much as could be managed, a novelty then for the aspirational middle class residents of London’s suburbs.
One warm July evening, Peter and his father set off from home on their own to The Cumberland.
“Why aren’t the others coming?” Peter enquired as they drove off.
“They’re at Auntie Dot’s,” said Henry.
The band was playing Glenn Miller, and Peter and his father must have looked an odd couple, a man and a small boy at a table for two.
“How’s the roast beef, son?” asked Henry.
Peter nodded the affirmative whilst still chewing.
“Peter?”
“Yes dad.”
“How would you like to go to boarding school?” he said, stressing the word ‘boarding’.
Peter froze, the roast beef caught in his mouth. He heard the word clearly enough. He looked at his father in total disbelief.
“What?”
“Boarding school,” repeated Henry.
“No. Never.” replied Peter without hesitation or thought.
“Why not?” asked his father.
“I don’t. Ever.”
“ Mummy and I have been thinking, and we both think that you would be better off at boarding school.”
Peter’s eyes started to well up. Better off? He couldn’t believe what he was hearing. Something tore at his insides.
“I’m never going!” Peter sobbed, tears now streaming down his cheeks and falling onto the roast potatoes.
“Here son,” Henry passed him a handkerchief.
The band sounded muffled and distant and for the first time in his life Peter felt an emotion which he wasn’t capable of understanding or articulating. The one thing in his life that he thought was so secure, so solid, so impenetrable, his own family, his own father wanted to… to send him… away.
“There’s lots of grounds there son.You’ll like it.”
“No! No! No! No!” Peter’s hysterical screams could now be heard by the occupants of the nearby tables and the handkerchief was soaked with his tears.
“The term starts in September, son. There are visits once a month. You can come home for the day then. Lots of boys like it, Peter. You’re being silly now, not very grown up at all. Come on son, eat your food, it’s going cold.”
Peter had no appetite and was completely numbed and in a state of shock. It seemed as if his father had made up his mind.
“I’m not hu… hungry,” he sobbed, unable to look into his father’s eyes.
“Have some ice cream then.”
Peter shook his head, unable to speak, his little body shivering in uncontrollable spasms of disbelief.
His father carried on talking about sports and making new friends at the nice boarding school and the wonderful grounds there and how boys from all kinds of different backgrounds went there and that it was expensive but we want the best for you, Peter. The best, Peter thought. How could this be the best. This is the worst.
Peter wasn’t listening to his father any more. He could hear his voice vaguely mingling with the music, but it sounded distant. He probably would never listen to his father ever again.
The one question Peter wanted to ask, but didn’t know how, was… why? Why dad are you sending me away? Why? Why? Why? And it wasn’t until many years later, that he found out. But by then he didn’t care at all. For by then, Peter too had also learnt how to avoid telling the truth.
I saw sparrows gliding in threes and that was the most I ever saw.
But my grandma told me that the thing that made her believe in God when she was a child was to see the murmuration of starlings on the Avalon marshes.
She had held my hand in the hospital bed and asked me to describe the trees and birds outside.
Looking down from the high windows of the ward were gravel verges and grim paving and benches on a route to car parks and canteen. All things were shades of concrete, steel and stone, blanched clouds, the railings and breeze block walls of a utility building where hospital laundry chugged out steam from funnels into the leaden suburb and sky.
I told grandma that outside the window there were giant trees not tall enough to be seen because the ward she was in was so high up, but the branches swayed, the verdant leaves shimmied, and around them were many birds who were very lively and she said they were loud too.
“I can hear the cuckoos in the afternoon, the owls at night and the willow warblers and chaffinches in the morning.”
I looked out at the scenery and was pleased that she believed she heard them all singing so lyrically.
Then she told me about how watching the murmuration of starlings as a little girl had made her believe that something was directing us all in nature because it seemed like a dance for her alone, as she watched in the reed marshes in the twilight.
“I think I’ve only ever seen a few sparrows gliding together in threes at the most,” I said, and when I said it, she nodded and lapsed into sleep again.
*
After grandma died my aunt said to me,
“Doting on her as she lay dying after spending your life in defiance of us all. Your only relationship with us to curse and reject us. And did you think that you would be given something from her inheritance just because of that? Spending time with her at the end suddenly, when you realised you had neglected her forever.”
In the corner of the room was a colourful porcelain plate from Margate which had at the base many sea shells that I had fixed to it as a child. I felt an urge to check to see if there was dust on the porcelain. I felt affronted that there may be dust on it. I said,
“When she was a little girl, grandma spent her days running through the marshes in Somerset. She told me about it. It was so vivid and lovely. And I want us to scatter her ashes there. Its where she felt like she was near to God to see the starlings in murmuration, as if they were swimming in the sky as one.”
My aunt said,
“What nonsense. She never went to Somerset in her life. That lady she was stuck next to for a year in the care home never shut up about that, seeing the birds all ‘swimming in the sky together’ when she was a child. Your grandma was fading away for years, and her own memories faded away, and she thought any memory that was fed to her was her own.”
A few days later, I rose before dawn and made eggs and toast for breakfast and drank two cups of coffee. My cat stirred and purred at my early rising. I fussed over little things for a while.
My teeth held a little trace of warm woody caffeine taste as I pulled up to the driveway of my aunt’s empty house. The air was minty and foggy. I knew how to ease a rear window open and found my grandmothers ashes in her old bedroom upstairs.
I set the navigator and began the drive westwards.
It was mid-afternoon when I arrived at Avalon Marshes.
I walked out into the depth of reeds and sat in various places contemplating all around how nature was combining. I waited the hours until the twilight murmuration arrived, and with grace and flow starlings made a memory transmitted that she had never known in the sky.
I moved slowly towards them, aware of the receding of light and time, and scattered her ashes under their dancing flight, under her fading memory and final meridian.
“Wouldn’t it be my luck,” mused Rusty, “to be stuck in an old folk’s home with the one person in the world I can’t stand?”
It’s lunchtime and the usual suspects hunch around the table with its paper tablecloth, plastic utensils and fake flowers. Caroline, at center, is the ringleader given her status as a former Society writer for the local newspaper.
That was before corporate powers bowed to progress and in a headline announcing the change declared, with no hint of irony, “Society Is Dead; It Is Now Living.” The rechristened “Living” section was change in name only.
Given the shapeshifting world of journalism, “The more things change, the more they stay the same” was Rusty’s credo. She proudly wore her outsider Mobile, ‘Bama badge — from opinions on all things culinary and creative cussing to her acumen for pissing people off.
Caroline, a Daughter of the American Revolution, was polite to a fault, but not big on the benefit of the doubt. Which made her a wildly successful columnist. “I’m like karma cleaning house,” she would quip, oblivious to the paths of destruction she plowed through people’s lives.
Caroline’s husband Maurice was at the paper for 50 years and killed himself on his last day of work. Took the 50 silver dollars he was given as a going away gift and bought a silver shotgun. He was expecting, at the least, a nice watch.
In his last 10 years, as corporations devoured family-owned newspapers, he should have known the jig was up. Slowly, his fancy desk in the News department was moved to Sports, then Features and finally to the bank of newly installed computers, where copy boys bitched about rewriting the obits.
Caroline, working from home, never stepped foot in that filthy office. So only Rusty noticed Maurice disappeared from the newsroom all together. And Rusty only because she wandered into the recesses where the computer main frame was isolated for safety. Sensing movement from a dark corner of the ice-cold room, Rusty squinted. “Maurice, is that YOU?” Like the unpredictable computers in those early days of technology, corporate overlords figured if it got too hot the old boy wouldn’t go kerflooey back there. They were wrong.
Despite dumping all their typewriters in the basement and converting to computers in the ‘80s, neither woman got invested in online until they were relocated by relatives to Honey in the Rock Assisted Living. There they reinvigorated, though the wonders of social media, a longstanding feud.
Animal lovers, Rusty a dog person and Caroline the crazy cat lady, they crossed pens in the Lost Pets pages, especially over the inadequacies of owners. Otherwise, they weren’t speaking.
Rusty usually got the first and last words in: “Wow I never called you names even though you have eye issues and a squeaky voice!”
Caroline: “It’s ok I love my stupidity as long as I don’t have lazy cross eyes 🐱 And I’m fine with my stupidity bc I do for my old neighbors and don’t post for attention.”
Rusty: “Pets get loose, get over it! You knew where that dog lived. It’s your old neighborhood. Everyone knows. Be normal and no one will get mad. It’s simple.”
That was a few days before a Cat 5 hurricane blew out the power and much of the city. Parked in their wheelchairs in front of the TV — the norm, disaster or not — they’d seen it unfold. Amid the exodus, one image stuck with Rusty. On the jammed interstate, a woman abandoning her car clutching a bowl full of fish.
“We can do this. There’s nine of us, let’s put our heads together,” she told the women. They looked up in horror from their Meals Ready to Eat. With phones out, along with air conditioning and most of the Certified Nursing Assistants, their prison was quickly turning into death row. Any and all questions to staff were met with, “Quit complaining. It’s for your own good.”
Caroline answered for the group. “Rusty, you’re still mobile. Get help and get us out of here.”
Rusty remembered what Maurice said about corporations on his last day, “One tentacle doesn’t know what the other tentacles are doing.”
The lunch bunch created a diversion by launching their MRE’s at the CNAs and in the ensuing battle, Rusty slipped out the security doors when reinforcements arrived to quell the riot.
Ahead was Highway 98 and 100 miles to Mobile. “Some people have all the luck,” she thought, “until they don’t.”
I wish I didn’t have to interact with you. Everything I say is dismissed.
You look down on me, you lean back, shoulders straightened, in your chair, legs wide apart, claiming space, claiming importance, and ignoring me.
Sometimes your eyes are giving me haughty disparagement. As if you knew better. A smirk telling me that you cannot, possibly, take me seriously.
You are so full of yourself. You literally think you are better than me.
You are also so busy with yourself. It’s a full-time occupation. I wonder sometimes, for brief moments, if there is someone else in there. But you never allow me in.
You behave as if I had greatly insulted you. You watch me, my dogged determination, you watch me, and you let me continue. I labour, and you just watch me doing it.
You are doing my head in.
Your attitude, your arrogance, your cheek.
You never listen to me. Have I ever gotten through to you? Maybe at the beginning, after we had just met? Was there a moment when it all went pear-shaped? Did I mess it up?
Was it something I said? When? And what? And why didn’t you tell me?
Are you punishing me for something? Then tell me!
I am drained. I am fed up looking at you, at your face, those judgmental eyes. It’s never fair judgement. Nobody can live up to your standards.
I am tired of trying as well. Of trying to connect, of trying to make myself understood. You are not interested in us getting along. You are you and I am not important enough for you.
Nor am I good enough for you.
You are doing my head in.
I want to support you, to work out where you struggle. But more often than not, you refuse my help. You are too proud. My help remains unwanted.
You are doing my head in.
I have always been honest with you, but I know you haven’t. You lie to me, no qualms.
I have always respected you and everything you say. You disrespect me continuously.
I have never excited you, nothing I do or say excites you. What does?
When I was in my early teens my friends and I were into Madonna. The boys in our group went on about a rock band called U2. A new album called The Unforgettable Fire had just been released and the lads were beside themselves with excitement. Two months later the Band Aid single ‘Do They Know It’s Christmas?’ was released and shot to number one, staying there for five weeks. The voice of Bono was easily recognisable on this single. It made me sit up and listen. Gradually I lost interest in Madonna and U2 became my group.
The Live Aid Concert the following Summer was on a glorious July day. My friend Helen and I watched the bands that interested us and went outside on our bikes for the bands that didn’t. U2 played around tea time and they were brilliant. I was hooked from then on. I recorded their full set on an old black Panasonic portable tape cassette recorder. I played that tape over and over again. That drove my Mother mad. “I wouldn’t cross the road to see them.” She never understood my obsession with U2.
“I’ll meet Bono some day and you’ll be the first I’ll ring to tell. Just wait and see!” I often joked back at her.
I queued up to buy the tape of The Joshua Tree on the day it was released in 1987. A world tour was announced and I attended the mind-blowing concert in Dublin’s Croke Park on Saturday 27th June. My Mother bought me the ticket.
“Welcome to The Unforgettable Fire,” said Bono, introducing that song. We all sang along.
“Anyone there play the guitar?” Bono inquired. “Someone in the front?” A delighted fella got up on stage. He was a member of a band called ‘Par Excellence’ and he played the guitar through the Curtis Mayfield song People Get Ready. Someone at the front was being jostled by the stewards. “If he’s misbehavin’ my manager will throw him out,” said Bono to the stewards.
Some boy got up on the roof of the Cusack Stand and everyone on the pitch looked up at him. Bono didn’t know what we were looking at so he peered out from the front of the stage and he saw that lad on the roof. “You have a hard neck but it’s not funny if you have a broken neck so get down,” Bono said to him. We all cheered at Bono. I longed to be the boy on the roof so Bono would speak to me.
Over the years my U2 obsession softened a little and my relationship with my Mother blossomed into a beautiful understanding of each other. She learned to tolerate my excitement for the announcement of yet another U2 tour and she even managed a trip to Vienna for babysitting duty. I sipped champagne in the Red Zone for that 360 tour.
I have another Red Zone ticket in the bag for the Las Vegas Residency later this year in the long awaiting marvel that will be the MSG Sphere. The music world is alight with anticipation for the U2 opening.
Most recently I stood behind a railing for Bono’s book signing walk, having listened to a most enlightening hour of conversation between him and Fintan O’Toole at the Dalkey Book Festival. In the rush to get out of the house I left my copy of Surrender sitting on the kitchen table. No Bono signature for me that night. As he came closer signing the books held out to him I knew I had to think of something to get his attention. He signed the book to my left, glanced at me as his pen went to the right of me. I took my chance and dared to say to him “I’m going to see you in the Sphere Bono.”
He finished signing the book on my right, and then he stopped, looked directly at me and spoke.
“It’s mad. It’s random madness but it’s pretty cool; really good. We won’t know how great you might be able to see ‘cos it’s just been finished. If it works out as well as we think it’s looking at the moment you’ve made a really good choice. If it doesn’t.... I’ll see you later.” He walked off to peals of laughter from the crowd.
My excitement on the drive home was tinged with a sad realisation. Dialling Heaven is not the same as dialling home.
The light came on at 3:00 AM, and for a split-second between sleep and wake I thought my husband was still alive. At the same time as I remembered he was dead I wondered how the light had come on. No sound had awoken me, so I got up and walked into the living room to see that the computer had come to life of its own accord, which kinda freaked me out. Here I was, alone in the apartment, and the computer had just started up.
I double-checked the deadbolts on both my doors, shut the computer off, and unplugged it. Whatever weird glitch had turned it on was now depowered.
Three nights later the same thing happened. During those intervening days I had started to wonder if maybe my husband wasn’t really dead, but was living in the Ethernet somewhere. If I emailed him, would he respond? The thing still find weirdest about death, any death, is that unanswerable question. Where do you go when you die? Maybe I’d found the answer. Maybe my husband was some type of cyborg with his metal hip and the twisted wire holding his sternum together. Maybe the atomic electronic impulse that was his soul lived on in some other place, just without a body. But during daylight hours and after some rational consideration - a more realistic thought occurred to me. My late husband, an inveterate night owl and computer putzer, had probably set some type of automatic disk clean or something for 3 AM, knowing he’d be awake. And I’d be asleep.
I mean, maybe he was somewhere. But not on this mortal coil. And probably not in the Ethernet.
I got home from work one day, turned the computer on and started flitting around, trying to figure out how to turn off any automatic features for disk clean and disk repair, and it was during this that I stumbled across the email account. Not our email account. One I’d never seen before. His email account.
I mean, I knew he had his own email account in the same way he had his own bank account and his own friends. We were adults, individuals, with different interests. His password was easy because he used the same one for everything. But before I opened the email, I paused. Was it an invasion of privacy? Even if he was dead? My pause didn’t last very long.
The very first email was from Sarah. She’d shown up at my husband’s funeral, all teary eyed and sympathetic. During his second marriage (I being number three), they’d had an affair that lasted for years and brought about the demise of that marriage. But she’d been out of the scene for years when I showed up. Or so I thought.
Apparently, on his last trip home to attend his sister’s wedding, it had been reignited. Her showing up at his funeral hadn’t been an old girlfriend wanting to say a final goodbye to a man she had once loved, but rather a current girlfriend, a reignited romance with all the passion and longing that entails. The first email at the top, dated after he died, was an email from her saying her final farewells. How much she loved him and missed him and had hoped they could be together again in the future. And how all that hope was gone. And she was bereft.
For a moment I wasn’t sure what I was reading or what to do. Had it all been a lie? Had I loved him and nursed him and watched him die while this cow was sending sexy flirtatious emails and planning their future?
Dear Sarah, I wrote. I just saw this. So what was that song and dance at the funeral? Were you giving me sympathy? Wishing you were the widow? All those kind things you said to me must have been like ashes in your mouth. I’ve read your emails. I’ve read all of them. All the time I was caring for him and watching over him, he was emailing you, at night, in secret. What sort of a nasty bitch does that to another person?
I deleted the account, shut down the computer, and sobbed inconsolably.
Three mismatched suitcases stood at the bottom of the stairs next to the hall radiator. Still in her dressing gown and curlers, Rose peeked at them through the gap in the door of the front room cum — for the past ten months — bedroom. “Good riddance!” she hissed under her breath, holding the door only slightly ajar just in case Frank suddenly appeared and she had to close it quickly. The last thing she wanted was to come face-to-face with him in what those cases suggested were the final moments of their awkward cohabitation.
‘Separated but living together’ was how the lady at the Citizens’ Advice Bureau had described it. “There’s a new divorce law,” she had explained, flourishing a bunch of leaflets as if they were holiday brochures. “It’s much easier these days”.
Divorce. The word had made Rose shudder. It may well have been the seventies and women’s lib very much the norm, but she could not help feeling a deeply ingrained sense of shame at the breakdown of her marriage.
“You just have to prove to the judge that you have effectively been living separately, even if it is under the same roof, for two years. Two if your husband agrees to it, that is. Five if he doesn’t,” the lady had continued matter-of-factly. “That means not doing anything together. No eating, no shopping, no socialising and definitely no sharing a bedroom”. Nothing new there, Rose had thought to herself. She had already started sleeping downstairs and they barely spoke anymore. Now she was going to have to go one step further and avoid him completely.
That was ten months ago. Ten months of keeping to separate parts of their small terraced house and shutting herself behind doors whenever Frank was at home. Ten months of living in constant dread of bumping into him on the landing or coming out of the bathroom. Ten months of adhering to a strict routine based on his night shift hours so as to ensure that that never happened, that their paths never crossed. For ten months, every day at five forty-five in the afternoon, the time she knew his alarm clock was set to go off, Rose had retreated to the front room. From there, she had listened for the sounds that told her he was up and about, the toilet flushing, the cutlery scraping on the plate as he ate his breakfast in the back room while watching the Six O’clock News and smoking his first cigarette of the day. The newscasters’ voices, with their crystal clear BBC delivery, easily penetrated the thin wall dividing the two rooms. Pressing her ear up against it, Rose had been able to follow all the stories of those ten months: the miners’ strike; the oil crisis; the three-day week; and something about a plan to build a tunnel under the English Channel. “It could never be done,” she heard one interviewee comment. “Sheer folly!” said another. Finally would come the most liberating sound of all: the thud of the front door closing as he left work. Only then would she come out of hiding to reclaim the back room and its prized attraction, the television set, just in time for ’Crossroads’, but not before she had cleared his dirty plate, emptied the ashtray and squirted the room with air freshener.
Still holding the door ajar and staring at the three mismatched suitcases, Rose felt a surge of joyous relief rush through her veins as the realisation sank in that it was all over. No more hiding away. No more listening to the News through the wall. Ten months had seemingly been enough for Frank. “Good riddance!” she repeated to herself. Her heart pounded as she heard his heavy tread on the stairs and she gently pushed the door to. Behind her, the room was in disarray, yet to be transformed from bedroom back to sitting-room, the leatherette sofa-bed still open, the bedclothes ruffled, the low coffee table pushed up against the wall. There was some shuffling about with the cases then came the sound of the front door closing with a force that sent shockwaves through the whole house. She darted across to the window, just in time to see him slamming shut the trunk of a brown Vauxhall Viva before climbing into the passenger seat. She watched in numb amazement as the car drove off — far too speedily, she thought, for their narrow residential street — and disappeared round the corner.
I met the writer in Hammersmith one summer. My neighbour, the magician, told me that the writer was running a course in a hall round the corner. He said the writer normally ran courses at the Royal Court, but he wanted to have a go with real people. I had heard of this writer, but I hadn’t read any of his books – not then, which was unusual as I had read many books, so many books that I felt it must be impossible to write another, even though that had been my childhood dream: to write.
Anyway, the magician’s wife knew the writer’s wife because their kids were all at the same school, and I got on the list for the course and paid the necessary amount. The magician’s wife said that the writer’s wife wasn’t sure if she wanted me to go on the course because of my name. I share a name with a supermodel, but I am not a supermodel. I am pretty ordinary or ordinarily pretty, I suppose.
The first session took place on a hot summer evening. I had rushed home from work, wherever work was back then – oh yes, an office in Holborn. I caught the Piccadilly Line home. I remember the black linen dress I wore because I wore it all the time, spaghetti straps and flip-flops. I hadn’t been to the venue before – a hall up some steps off Hammersmith Broadway at rush hour. But it was light and airy, with all sorts sitting there, waiting for the writer to arrive. I realised I didn’t know what he would look like, but others did and it was obvious when he arrived.
We sat round on those ordinary plastic stackable chairs that always used to be found in halls like that and maybe still are. I can’t remember how he opened the session, but he set a pattern. We would begin by talking about something that we had read or seen that week that we’d enjoyed. I didn’t say anything. I wasn’t ordinarily shy – quite the opposite. I had a work persona that was very comfortable with sharing and shaping ideas and strategies. But that persona hadn’t come to the session. The persona I brought was about seven years old and longing to write something as magical as the Wizard of Oz, longing to be shown how to click her heels and fly elsewhere.
I watched and listened. I could see people trying to be clever and impress – maybe they were clever and impressive. I didn’t know. And I remember the atmosphere that the writer brought into the room – he wasn’t a big man, but he was sturdy, by which I mean he knew where his feet should be in order for him to be steady and in control. He was balanced and he had a flickering smile or maybe it was a twitch of a smile. I didn’t know what to make of that smile. I wasn’t sure if it was contemptuous. Entertained for sure, but I wasn’t sure what was entertaining for him, and that made me uncertain. I still feel that way now when I think of him.
But then he got us to do an exercise. He asked us to think of an image of one of our parents and then to write it, and with that request, his smile and balance were irrelevant because he just kicked open a door for me – a door that I needed kicked open – and shoved me inside, and it was the only place I wanted to be. We all wrote and, a little while later, he asked if anyone wanted to read what they’d written. And the clever, corporate professional me knew that the seven-year-old star-struck me was frozen, and so I took hold of the child’s shaking hand and stuck it in the air. I was the first one to read. I was shaking as I read. It was as if I was breathing for the first time. It changed my life – not always for the easier; in fact it would have been far easier if I’d never gone. But I did go – I had to go – and what happened as a result shifted tracks for me, and that’s changed everything ever since.
And I read all his books in the end and, when I think of him now, I don’t worry so much about that flicker of a smile that I thought was contempt. I am just glad we shared the same space for a while.
I’m 5 years old, sitting atop my designated kitchen perch watching her intently as she prepares her workspace to make paratha, my favorite pastry-like flatbread. Whole wheat flour, vegetable oil, salt, and water all neatly placed in their respective bowls, ready to be mixed by her arthritic hands.
She starts with the bowl of flour, adding and mixing water, salt, and tads of oil. As the flour thickens, she uses the heel of her hand to assist the phalangeal effort, kneading the formulating dough to the appropriate consistency. She then starts flattening the dough with a rolling pin, sprinkling flour intermittently between rolls. Once flat, she cuts the large circle into strips, each one eventually giving rise to the individual parathas. She drizzles drops of oil and folds each strip several times before rolling each one final time. I watch closely, all the while my grandmother verbally entertaining me with sweet nonsensical children’s songs passed down through generations.
I met Chloe when she was 17 years old, standing over her gurney one late morning assessing the tiny 100-pound adolescent who presented to my ER via ambulance for loss of consciousness. “I found her passed out in the garage this morning, wreaking of whisky,” her agitated mother states irritably, not realizing how sick her daughter truly is.
Her blood alcohol level indeed registers 3 times the standard limit; however, I’m more concerned about her blood glucose of 1400, over ten times the normal level, and the acid in her blood has reached catastrophic quantities.
I’m 7 years old, just having attempted to throw away the leftover food on my plate. My grandmother sequesters me at the kitchen table, demanding I finish every bite. I sit for hours in silent protest, rearranging the perfectly cooked basmati rice, turmeric cauliflower, and cold remnants of curried meatballs around my plate. Years later as an adolescent, I will huffingly slam my bedroom door so that the aroma of her cooking won’t seed my clothes. I will insist on dining out with friends, choosing shitty fast food over my grandmother’s handmade meals. Lentils topped with lightly fried mustard seeds, curry leaves, dried red chilies, and cumin seeds. Goat chops in tomato yogurt gravy. Chickpeas, onions, serrano peppers, and potatoes wading in a tangy tamarind sauce. As a college student I will refuse her offerings to take food back to the dorms, dreading the thought of smelly Indian food wafting from my bag, ready to stink up the entire hall when I heat it up later in the microwave.
“I don’t have room, grandma.”
I may as well have stabbed her in the myocardium with a kebob skewer. Our hug goodbye is awkward at best, no “I love you” or “I’ll miss you.”
Only, “Kuch nai khai.”
“You didn’t eat enough.”
Chloe is discharged from the hospital seven days later with the diagnosis of insulin dependent diabetes. Like most diabetic teenagers, she would rebel against her disease in various ways, like ingesting an entire bottle of cheap wine and a dozen cupcakes after arguments with her mother, landing her in the ER. On one such occasion, her lab results would not only show the usual severe metabolic derangements, but also a positive pregnancy test. She was now feeding a 6-week old fetus connected to her blood stream through the highly vascular placenta in her womb, unfortunately also passing along a dangerous amount of glucose, tripling the chances of mortal birth defects. She would carry the pregnancy to term, only to deliver a stillborn fetus 7 months later.
My grandmother lays in the hospital bed that occupies one of the bedrooms in my aunt’s house. She suffered a massive stroke 2 years ago, a clot occluding the largest blood vessel responsible for delivering the necessary oxygen, glucose, and nutrients to a sizeable portion of her brain. I beat two eggs, add salt and pepper, and fry up a fluffy omelet while the store-bought frozen paratha warms in the toaster oven. Her appetite is weak at best, and she refuses most everything save for a handful of longtime favorites. She accepts my spoon-fed bites reluctantly, chewing the best she can from one side of her mouth before slowing down and then refusing the next bite, the egg now cold and the paratha flakes hardened.
An hour before dawn, a man sits at his kitchen table drinking coffee from a blue mug. A bar of milky light from the window stretches across the table and spills onto the floor, fading into darkness in the corner of the room. He’ll have to leave soon for work but the stillness of the house holds him. The cat circles around his ankles to remind him about her breakfast. The coffee is cold and sweet when he takes his last sip as he rises from the table.
In the faint light, a woman crosses the room from her bed to the arm chair by the high window, seeking escape from the tide of pain that swamped her night. Settling, she adjusts the pillows behind her back. She thinks of tea but is drawn into the softness of the opalescent sky, pulled into the sound of sea birds waking by the water. The dog’s head finds her hand waiting when he comes to lean against her leg. The dog thinks of food, but leans closer.
Aware of the light growing steadily as the wind rises in the forest, the small red squirrel flexes her tail and licks her nose, looks down the side of the tree, hesitates, then drops to the branch below. Shaking off sleep, she races down into the shadows. Somewhere a raven shouts. The squirrel spirals up the nearest tree. Again the raven shouts.
Lying in his bed under a red plaid blanket, a boy hears his mother rise and go into the bathroom. The sound of water running in the sink, the sound of a pot set on the stove, the dog sniffing persistently under his door. A low whine. When his mother opens the door, he suspends his breath and pretends to be sleeping still. His mother’s long sigh sets his breath in motion again. He’s hungry.
Standing at her kitchen sink, a woman stares into the darkness. She sees the light come on in the kitchen window across the street. A shadow moves behind the yellow curtains. She holds her hands under the warm water before filling the kettle. Through her reflection in the window, the yellow light across the way glows steadily. The shadow moves again and the woman wonders whose face it wears. She sees her own face in the glass, watery rivulets of eyes and hair, pale skin.
An hour into a drive begun in crisp darkness, a woman uncurls stiff fingers from the steering wheel and reaches into her shirt pocket. She inhales the pleasure of solitude intermingled with the taste of cigarette smoke in her mouth. Her body registers the vibration of the truck in the wind that whips the aspens at the side of the road. Anticipating nothing, she settles her mind into the symmetry of white lines. A flock of crows crisscrosses the long stretch of road ahead. The stars fall back against the advance of the sun.
He keeps carefully to the side of the road. The light on the back of his bike
flashes red in the thin light. A car approaches from behind, slowing as it passes, trailing a rush of cold air that bites his hands. His gloves are too thin and he’s still 10 kilometers outside town but he’s happy to be headed where he wants to be. He thinks of hot tea and the taste of the sandwich in his coat pocket, to be eaten later at the long wooden table in the school lunchroom. High overhead a plane heads west out over the ocean.
The sound of the plane drops like a bell jar over the ones who are awake. It reverberates in the hollow morning air around them, all the comrades of the early hours. They think of distance to or from anywhere they’ve ever rested or never reached. In the bell jar of sound, the squirrel thinks of vibration. The raven thinks “carry the sun.” Dogs everywhere think “don’t leave.” The plane fades away into the ordinary day somewhere to the west.
Thousands of baby sprouts unfurl across the greenhouse, an emerald carpet of soft fur engulfing her in her now dormant Instagram post, her yellow rain jacket wrapped around her like a cowboy’s duster. Short cropped black hair against the massive windows, the baby blue Ontario sky framing her like an earthly sprite, so fragile in bone structure, yet planted and ready to stand her ground. Mara, named for the bitter taste of wisdom, an affinity for the sea, or eternally, enduring beauty.
Her recent theatre performances, fecund as the crops she carried into the city market every Saturday where I re-discovered a touch of joy and delight in those barren months after my break up when, on most Saturday mornings, I’d head to the market and Mara.
She eventually asked me in the kindest way if she could send me the script she intended to make as a short film. It led to some notes, new drafts, and a loving friendship. And yes, dear reader, even to a crush, though she was more often gay than not and I was well, too much older.
Around that fateful Saturday I remember telling her “whatever you do make sure that you give your character the final decision in the film, since she is your main character and the farm was to be sold. Letting the hose run in the greenhouse flooding the sea of sprouts, symbolically saying goodbye to a life on the farm should be hers, marking the end of an era, the final action in the film.
The film was to be shot that weekend.
I exhorted her that final day- just trust yourself, though it was her first film. The day of the train, the day she looked one way and crossed, but forgot to look the other - and her life ended, uprooted in an instant.
She had been accompanied by a friend who reported on the accident in this way, the accident that somehow never made the papers.
A few weeks before that she had paused during a conversation and said to me “I adore you.” Immediately shy, I said thanks and walked away, to a stall around the corner. But then, without realizing that anything would be coming to an end so abruptly, I felt that this needed an immediate response.
“I adore you too,” I said returning.
I knew Mara had a girlfriend or a boyfriend. But this wasn’t about either. This was about kindred spirits.
I didn’t find out until an entire week later at the market.
Two days later a woman called me. “It’s Erika, Mara’s mother. I got your name from Joan,” the woman who ran the sprouts farm and who worked with Mara.
“Erika, I’m so sorry for your loss…”
“This is a mystery I don’t think will ever be solved, someone like Mara taken from us all,” she said.
“It was such a joy, such an honour to be her mother.”
She said she felt compelled to call me to tell me how much I had meant to her daughter and how much I had helped Mara. I could barely hear these touching comments from her and could feel all the pain through the phone. All the loss and the suffering, and the suffering yet to come.
We had a very natural and effortless connection.
When is it too soon to ask questions, to write stories? A writer just knows these things don’t they? Who gets hit by a train? Yet it was explained to me in detail by Joan of the sprout farm how it supposedly happened. And she was with someone so there was a witness.
That summer a few months later we planted a tree at Joan’s sprout farm, all sat in a circle under the shade of a stand of trees telling stories about Mara, then joining together to plant a tree in Mara’s favourite spot behind the greenhouse, together shovelling dirt, down in the dirt digging, planting, feeling Mother earth.
I drove back into the city alone.
I spent the next week in Winnipeg with my mom who turned 93. I got into some arguing which I regretted and managed to repair. But still… I once saw Borges the great writer at an auditorium in downtown L.A. and he said – “the biggest regret in my life is that my mother never saw me happy.” This would not happen. I would not have this regret. I would be happy.
A Healing Bath
Ilona loved baths as far back as I can remember. Maybe they helped calm her anxiety. Maybe she never trusted showers again. I don’t know, we didn’t discuss the reasons for this preference.
As a child she didn’t want me in the bathroom when she bathed. It didn’t seem fair; she was always there to hover over me — I think she feared I’d drown. Imagine drowning in ten inches of water. The shallow tub in our apartment did not seem at all dangerous.
One time, when I was five, I heard the water running; the bathroom door was ajar. It was easy to peak inside. The tub faced away so that your back was to the door. I was quiet, I observed her without detection. Inside, I saw mother spooning up water to her face with her beautiful soft hands - she sighed “ooOoooOoo” like you’d sooth a baby. My mother was in her mid-thirties, her hands were punctuated with firm blue veins and her perfect fingernails bright red; long slender fingers dancing like silky underwater plants in motion. Her face was smooth — creamy and taught, she was skinny and pale.
Then I saw her naked back. As she ran the washcloth over her neck, then across her shoulder blades down to her lower back I saw some shiny shimmery pinkish shapes, like fossils you learn about in school. They looked like worms of varying lengths, some one inch some five inches but not bigger. I wondered if she was made of stone but giggled to myself knowing she was soft, not hard that way — but could sometimes be mean and scary.
My mother had but a few simple habits and desires. She was steadfast in her love of long comforting baths. When she grew old she couldn’t care for herself and moved to an elder care home. Time had altered her - her mind was soft; her body plump.
The care staff were very kind. Most were obviously immigrants, usually in their twenties or thirties — Mother asked about their homelands, their histories. Her favorites bathed her twice a week in the luxurious tub with jets, which were at first scary to her but then quite exciting.
I visited her often, right after work as the building was located on my route home. Sometimes we had dinner in the community dining room. The care staff knew me and welcomed me and politely repeated their names until I knew them too.
Several months after she moved in, I was approached by Andrew who’d been nominated to be the spokesperson on behalf of mom’s care team.
“Judy, can we ask you a question about your mom?”
“Yes, of course, anything - is everything OK? I know sometimes she’s difficult.”
“Oh, no - not at all. She is most kind to all of us and wants to talk about our lives. We wonder what language she is speaking to us when not in English?”
“Yiddish, or maybe Hungarian. As people age they sometimes fall back into their native language even if they stopped speaking it years ago.”
“Oh, sure that’s probably right. But Judy can I ask you another question please?”
“Yes, what’s up?”
“Your mother’s back. It is full of scars. Deep ones, like trenches. We care for many people but have never seen a back like hers. What caused such marks on her body?”
“Ah, have none of you asked her?”
“No, we wouldn’t want to make her sad.”
“Ask her — she would love to tell you her story.”
The next time I visited, I was greeted by the care team. They pulled me aside before finding mom in her favorite chair watching TV.
“Judy, your mother was in the world war. She was a teenager and they killed her parents and beat her with a whip to make her work harder in the factory.”
“Yes, this is true.”
“She said she was a slave, she and her sisters nearly starved to death because they were Jewish people. After she was set free she came to this country.”
“That’s true as well.”
“None of us knew this was so recent a history of the world. Now we’ve learned this from your mother.”
“Did it make her sad to tell you about it?”
“No, she said she was happy to help us to learn something new. Then she held Amara who cried in her arms. She is from Ethiopia and escaped a war to come here. Your mom said to her: “We are the same, aren’t we?”
I realized after the first contest that writing for a contest is not my thing. I really enjoy reading what others have written. This is a good thing. Thank you for doing it.
Boxing Day
Into the cardboard box he placed the pieces of a life. The process had begun in the late afternoon, weak winter light coming through the shutters and into Andrew’s living room, as he wrote out the list in neat, small handwriting (his “schoolboy’s handwriting”, Mae would call it). Three weeks ago, it had been Andrew and Mae’s living room, in Mae and Andrew’s cramped flat in Tooting, but that was before the separation. By eight o’clock he had gathered the various items and carefully laid them out on the rug.
The heaviest items would go first. He had wanted to add them chronologically, beginning with the earliest, the first memories, but soon realised this would not do; the shot glasses stolen on their third date would shatter under the accumulating weight, the Portishead record, bought for him by Mae their first Christmas together, would scratch.
To keep the items intact he sacrificed the chronology of their story, the history of their shared life. 18 years, 11 months, 5 days.
First went in a book of Philip Larkin, a weighty hardback slab in a cream dust cover, yellowing at the corners. Andrew had bought it when they moved in together and would read out verses at random, self-conscious, half-serious, while they shivered through evenings in their first damp-filled flat. They were poor and hungry and happy.
Next went in the photo album, 100 pages showing holidays and weddings, sun-bleached buildings in foreign countries and evenings lit by hanging garden lights. Andrew picked up a pair of high heels. He felt inside the right shoe, touched the toe indentations, a finger for each toe. Size 5, in a salmon pink colour, the tips lightly scuffed. The shoes went into the box, laid on their side as though on display.
Next, a bottle of perfume, almost empty. He carefully removed the lid and, feeling a chill run through him, breathed in the cruelly familiar scent. The smell of eternal night and flushed cheeks in winter, deep and musky, redolent of winey kisses in dark corners.
Earlier that morning, he had stood at the window and watched the rush hour traffic swimming by, scanning the fleeting faces in each car. He wanted to catch the eye of a driver and mouth to them urgent words: “Turn around. Go home now. If you have someone waiting for you then hit the brakes, skid into a U-turn, fuck the speed limit, quit your job. Just get back to them. You’re making a mistake; we’ve all made a terrible mistake!”
He sealed the perfume and placed it inside a high heel. He added Mae’s keyring and her favourite fountain pen, the calculator she had once used to plan their budget while sat at the kitchen table.
It wasn’t enough. How could it ever be enough? He needed a bigger box, one that could contain all of Mae’s clothes and shoes, her jewellery, the postcards from her friends that adorned the fridge, her old bank statements and invitations to parties. A box as big as the living room, as wide and tall as the flat, that could hold all the words she had spoken, each weighted glance, the callouses on her fingers and the sleepy whispers from every Sunday morning they had woke together into morning light. A box to carry away the whole street, all of Tooting and the city. To hold a marriage. 18 years, 11 months, 5 days.
In went the two shot glasses, the Portishead record, a bottle of champagne from their last anniversary (Moet, emerald glass, unopened).
Andrew looked at his watch. It showed 9:54. Darkness outside. 9+5+4. 18 years. He took off the watch and put it in the box. Time would stop here, with the hour hand trailing behind, the minute hand closing in on 12.
He took off his wedding ring and dropped it without looking, sending it clinking down, disappearing into the box. Then he folded the lids and taped them closed. The sealed box sat before him. He felt a rebuke coming from its plainness and its size, small enough to hold in two arms, burdened by the impossible task – he could not preserve the memory of Mae with these inanimate items. He could not halt time.
He put the pieces into a box and sealed it. The rest, invisible and weightless, he kept for himself, to take with him as he followed her towards midnight.
Special Treat
By Keith Hammond
In nineteen sixty one the fledgling Beatles were filling the Kaiserkeller every night in Hamburg, Yuri Gagarin became the first man in space and Adolf Eichmann was sentenced to death for organising the murder of millions of Jews in World War Two.
But for nine year old Peter and boys like him, all these momentous events were of no significance. All that mattered to Peter was to play with his school friends firing make-believe bullets from toy cap guns.
At the end of such a day, no matter what traumas the day threw up, scrapes in the playground, teacher’s telling-offs, at the end of it all he knew that he would always be comforted by his loving family and their two cats, Miff and Muff. Whatever misfortunes happened in the world outside Peter knew that nothing was as strong as that family unit and nothing could ever pierce it. His home.
Sometimes for special treats only, Peter’s dad, Henry, would take the whole family out to The Carvery dinner and dance at the Cumberland Hotel, where for nineteen and sixpence one could eat as much as could be managed, a novelty then for the aspirational middle class residents of London’s suburbs.
One warm July evening, Peter and his father set off from home on their own to The Cumberland.
“Why aren’t the others coming?” Peter enquired as they drove off.
“They’re at Auntie Dot’s,” said Henry.
The band was playing Glenn Miller, and Peter and his father must have looked an odd couple, a man and a small boy at a table for two.
“How’s the roast beef, son?” asked Henry.
Peter nodded the affirmative whilst still chewing.
“Peter?”
“Yes dad.”
“How would you like to go to boarding school?” he said, stressing the word ‘boarding’.
Peter froze, the roast beef caught in his mouth. He heard the word clearly enough. He looked at his father in total disbelief.
“What?”
“Boarding school,” repeated Henry.
“No. Never.” replied Peter without hesitation or thought.
“Why not?” asked his father.
“I don’t. Ever.”
“ Mummy and I have been thinking, and we both think that you would be better off at boarding school.”
Peter’s eyes started to well up. Better off? He couldn’t believe what he was hearing. Something tore at his insides.
“I’m never going!” Peter sobbed, tears now streaming down his cheeks and falling onto the roast potatoes.
“Here son,” Henry passed him a handkerchief.
The band sounded muffled and distant and for the first time in his life Peter felt an emotion which he wasn’t capable of understanding or articulating. The one thing in his life that he thought was so secure, so solid, so impenetrable, his own family, his own father wanted to… to send him… away.
“There’s lots of grounds there son.You’ll like it.”
“No! No! No! No!” Peter’s hysterical screams could now be heard by the occupants of the nearby tables and the handkerchief was soaked with his tears.
“The term starts in September, son. There are visits once a month. You can come home for the day then. Lots of boys like it, Peter. You’re being silly now, not very grown up at all. Come on son, eat your food, it’s going cold.”
Peter had no appetite and was completely numbed and in a state of shock. It seemed as if his father had made up his mind.
“I’m not hu… hungry,” he sobbed, unable to look into his father’s eyes.
“Have some ice cream then.”
Peter shook his head, unable to speak, his little body shivering in uncontrollable spasms of disbelief.
His father carried on talking about sports and making new friends at the nice boarding school and the wonderful grounds there and how boys from all kinds of different backgrounds went there and that it was expensive but we want the best for you, Peter. The best, Peter thought. How could this be the best. This is the worst.
Peter wasn’t listening to his father any more. He could hear his voice vaguely mingling with the music, but it sounded distant. He probably would never listen to his father ever again.
The one question Peter wanted to ask, but didn’t know how, was… why? Why dad are you sending me away? Why? Why? Why? And it wasn’t until many years later, that he found out. But by then he didn’t care at all. For by then, Peter too had also learnt how to avoid telling the truth.
THE ALIENS
In the full bloom of Summer.
It is snowing.
.
We sit beside each other, under this jasmine adorned wedding canopy.
No, get it right - under this manavarai.
I hold your hand in mine.
Your skin, electrically cold.
The heady heaven-scent fails to penetrate this vacuum absorbing us.
Underneath the buttoned up St Michael 1970s winter coat.
Label inside sloping cursive ‘MADE IN THE UK’ thank you very much.
The gold thaali around your neck glints, dreaming of some light.
Sari at odds peeking from her shins towards the not earth.
A Frigidaire bride.
.
I love you.
.
Time has passed both quickly and slowly since you -
Feel closer to you now.
More than ever.
Isn't that funny?
My duty to drape this bridal sari over your washed, preserved body.
No, I didn’t entertain seeing you wearing it IRL this way.
Do you spell it "s-a-r-i" or "s-a-r-e-e"?
Don’t think I ever saw you write it down.
Can remember your lovely English handwriting.
.
Can’t quite remember how you sound.
.
You’d love to see me married under here.
But even when I was younger, young, youngest -
Endless family weddings doomed to stasis.
In scruffy community halls.
Then in sterile luxe hotels.
Now in evergreen National Trust estates.
Incongruous imposter I.
Couldn’t imagine that for me.
.
Now time has left.
.
Now I can’t imagine any of it for me at all.
.
I wasn’t sure at first if this was your bridal, sorry, koorai sari.
Appah, disengaged yet incensed, howled “Use any old one for the
cremation”.
That didn't feel right.
.
You taught me why it’s always red.
And it looked technicolour red in your wedding photos.
Even in the black and white ones.
But on the hanger, in the fitted wardrobe that smells of mothballs, it had faded to a sort of orangey colour.
Unrecognisable now.
.
When I showed it to Appah I knew he couldn’t tell if this was the sari he married you in.
Zero to sixty white hot.
“What does it matter now? It’ll be incinerated. With her.”
.
Your ways: like praying to the framed Gods
in your tiny corner wardrobe cupboard,
before the school run for our safety.
Or promising God you’d be vegetarian after turning 50 but abstaining instead at 47: a devil’s pact for my still crappy A-levels.
Thought you were silly.
.
Now I am almost 47 and then -
Silly me.
.
Whenever I was worried about something, or unsure what to do, you would say “Kunju, everything is in you”.
.
.
There’s something I need to tell you.
You used to sit with me when I was scared.
Think I miss that the most.
.
That day.
Alien day we called it.
You remember?
The day was coming to take the little aliens away.
We could have said eggs.
We couldn't say how they might become a baby.
.
The day was now to suck the little aliens out of me and pop them in the freezer.
You held my hand in yours.
When the Nurse asked “Have you ever had a general anaesthetic”
And I said “Yes”.
And you said “When”.
And I heard but ignored you.
And you said nothing.
.
Did you know?
Did you guess?
.
I’ll never know now.
I’ll never know if you knew I had an alien life truly growing inside me once.
.
Couldn’t do it then.
Couldn't do it to you and to Appah.
Not sure which one of three is more.
Now there are no excuses are there?
Running out of excuses.
Nearly.
Nearly.
.
I still have so many questions to ask you.
.
Do you still love me?
.
I love you.
.
I love you.
.
I love you.
.
As she gets up to go, I am clinging to her hand.
I notice her fingernails.
The iridescent lilac Chanel varnish I’d used, grown apart from their crescent cuticle moons.
Five weeks and three days since I’d last painted them for you.
No, I know.
I should have come sooner.
Please.
Can I paint them perfectly for you one last time?
.
I love you.
.
She’s trying to leave.
I’m trying to stop her.
It
is
so
trying.
I wish I hadn’t been so trying.
.
I love you.
.
Don’t go.
Please.
.
Please.
.
Marooned.
.
Where the fuck are you?
No, really.
.
.
.
The jasmine suddenly an acrid elixir choking my airways and unclenching my fists.
.
Gazing skyward between the silent flakes, now two lone petals drift languidly down.
.
They meld to become a melting one with my Earth.
.
I might cry at this point.
.
That’s probably the point.
Avalon Marshes
*
I saw sparrows gliding in threes and that was the most I ever saw.
But my grandma told me that the thing that made her believe in God when she was a child was to see the murmuration of starlings on the Avalon marshes.
She had held my hand in the hospital bed and asked me to describe the trees and birds outside.
Looking down from the high windows of the ward were gravel verges and grim paving and benches on a route to car parks and canteen. All things were shades of concrete, steel and stone, blanched clouds, the railings and breeze block walls of a utility building where hospital laundry chugged out steam from funnels into the leaden suburb and sky.
I told grandma that outside the window there were giant trees not tall enough to be seen because the ward she was in was so high up, but the branches swayed, the verdant leaves shimmied, and around them were many birds who were very lively and she said they were loud too.
“I can hear the cuckoos in the afternoon, the owls at night and the willow warblers and chaffinches in the morning.”
I looked out at the scenery and was pleased that she believed she heard them all singing so lyrically.
Then she told me about how watching the murmuration of starlings as a little girl had made her believe that something was directing us all in nature because it seemed like a dance for her alone, as she watched in the reed marshes in the twilight.
“I think I’ve only ever seen a few sparrows gliding together in threes at the most,” I said, and when I said it, she nodded and lapsed into sleep again.
*
After grandma died my aunt said to me,
“Doting on her as she lay dying after spending your life in defiance of us all. Your only relationship with us to curse and reject us. And did you think that you would be given something from her inheritance just because of that? Spending time with her at the end suddenly, when you realised you had neglected her forever.”
In the corner of the room was a colourful porcelain plate from Margate which had at the base many sea shells that I had fixed to it as a child. I felt an urge to check to see if there was dust on the porcelain. I felt affronted that there may be dust on it. I said,
“When she was a little girl, grandma spent her days running through the marshes in Somerset. She told me about it. It was so vivid and lovely. And I want us to scatter her ashes there. Its where she felt like she was near to God to see the starlings in murmuration, as if they were swimming in the sky as one.”
My aunt said,
“What nonsense. She never went to Somerset in her life. That lady she was stuck next to for a year in the care home never shut up about that, seeing the birds all ‘swimming in the sky together’ when she was a child. Your grandma was fading away for years, and her own memories faded away, and she thought any memory that was fed to her was her own.”
A few days later, I rose before dawn and made eggs and toast for breakfast and drank two cups of coffee. My cat stirred and purred at my early rising. I fussed over little things for a while.
My teeth held a little trace of warm woody caffeine taste as I pulled up to the driveway of my aunt’s empty house. The air was minty and foggy. I knew how to ease a rear window open and found my grandmothers ashes in her old bedroom upstairs.
I set the navigator and began the drive westwards.
It was mid-afternoon when I arrived at Avalon Marshes.
I walked out into the depth of reeds and sat in various places contemplating all around how nature was combining. I waited the hours until the twilight murmuration arrived, and with grace and flow starlings made a memory transmitted that she had never known in the sky.
I moved slowly towards them, aware of the receding of light and time, and scattered her ashes under their dancing flight, under her fading memory and final meridian.
Thanks Hanif and Company!
“Nine Brains, Three Hearts and Blue Blood”
By Elena S. Jarvis
“Wouldn’t it be my luck,” mused Rusty, “to be stuck in an old folk’s home with the one person in the world I can’t stand?”
It’s lunchtime and the usual suspects hunch around the table with its paper tablecloth, plastic utensils and fake flowers. Caroline, at center, is the ringleader given her status as a former Society writer for the local newspaper.
That was before corporate powers bowed to progress and in a headline announcing the change declared, with no hint of irony, “Society Is Dead; It Is Now Living.” The rechristened “Living” section was change in name only.
Given the shapeshifting world of journalism, “The more things change, the more they stay the same” was Rusty’s credo. She proudly wore her outsider Mobile, ‘Bama badge — from opinions on all things culinary and creative cussing to her acumen for pissing people off.
Caroline, a Daughter of the American Revolution, was polite to a fault, but not big on the benefit of the doubt. Which made her a wildly successful columnist. “I’m like karma cleaning house,” she would quip, oblivious to the paths of destruction she plowed through people’s lives.
Caroline’s husband Maurice was at the paper for 50 years and killed himself on his last day of work. Took the 50 silver dollars he was given as a going away gift and bought a silver shotgun. He was expecting, at the least, a nice watch.
In his last 10 years, as corporations devoured family-owned newspapers, he should have known the jig was up. Slowly, his fancy desk in the News department was moved to Sports, then Features and finally to the bank of newly installed computers, where copy boys bitched about rewriting the obits.
Caroline, working from home, never stepped foot in that filthy office. So only Rusty noticed Maurice disappeared from the newsroom all together. And Rusty only because she wandered into the recesses where the computer main frame was isolated for safety. Sensing movement from a dark corner of the ice-cold room, Rusty squinted. “Maurice, is that YOU?” Like the unpredictable computers in those early days of technology, corporate overlords figured if it got too hot the old boy wouldn’t go kerflooey back there. They were wrong.
Despite dumping all their typewriters in the basement and converting to computers in the ‘80s, neither woman got invested in online until they were relocated by relatives to Honey in the Rock Assisted Living. There they reinvigorated, though the wonders of social media, a longstanding feud.
Animal lovers, Rusty a dog person and Caroline the crazy cat lady, they crossed pens in the Lost Pets pages, especially over the inadequacies of owners. Otherwise, they weren’t speaking.
Rusty usually got the first and last words in: “Wow I never called you names even though you have eye issues and a squeaky voice!”
Caroline: “It’s ok I love my stupidity as long as I don’t have lazy cross eyes 🐱 And I’m fine with my stupidity bc I do for my old neighbors and don’t post for attention.”
Rusty: “Pets get loose, get over it! You knew where that dog lived. It’s your old neighborhood. Everyone knows. Be normal and no one will get mad. It’s simple.”
That was a few days before a Cat 5 hurricane blew out the power and much of the city. Parked in their wheelchairs in front of the TV — the norm, disaster or not — they’d seen it unfold. Amid the exodus, one image stuck with Rusty. On the jammed interstate, a woman abandoning her car clutching a bowl full of fish.
“We can do this. There’s nine of us, let’s put our heads together,” she told the women. They looked up in horror from their Meals Ready to Eat. With phones out, along with air conditioning and most of the Certified Nursing Assistants, their prison was quickly turning into death row. Any and all questions to staff were met with, “Quit complaining. It’s for your own good.”
Caroline answered for the group. “Rusty, you’re still mobile. Get help and get us out of here.”
Rusty remembered what Maurice said about corporations on his last day, “One tentacle doesn’t know what the other tentacles are doing.”
The lunch bunch created a diversion by launching their MRE’s at the CNAs and in the ensuing battle, Rusty slipped out the security doors when reinforcements arrived to quell the riot.
Ahead was Highway 98 and 100 miles to Mobile. “Some people have all the luck,” she thought, “until they don’t.”
You are doing my head in
You are doing my head in.
I wish I didn’t have to interact with you. Everything I say is dismissed.
You look down on me, you lean back, shoulders straightened, in your chair, legs wide apart, claiming space, claiming importance, and ignoring me.
Sometimes your eyes are giving me haughty disparagement. As if you knew better. A smirk telling me that you cannot, possibly, take me seriously.
You are so full of yourself. You literally think you are better than me.
You are also so busy with yourself. It’s a full-time occupation. I wonder sometimes, for brief moments, if there is someone else in there. But you never allow me in.
You behave as if I had greatly insulted you. You watch me, my dogged determination, you watch me, and you let me continue. I labour, and you just watch me doing it.
You are doing my head in.
Your attitude, your arrogance, your cheek.
You never listen to me. Have I ever gotten through to you? Maybe at the beginning, after we had just met? Was there a moment when it all went pear-shaped? Did I mess it up?
Was it something I said? When? And what? And why didn’t you tell me?
Are you punishing me for something? Then tell me!
I am drained. I am fed up looking at you, at your face, those judgmental eyes. It’s never fair judgement. Nobody can live up to your standards.
I am tired of trying as well. Of trying to connect, of trying to make myself understood. You are not interested in us getting along. You are you and I am not important enough for you.
Nor am I good enough for you.
You are doing my head in.
I want to support you, to work out where you struggle. But more often than not, you refuse my help. You are too proud. My help remains unwanted.
You are doing my head in.
I have always been honest with you, but I know you haven’t. You lie to me, no qualms.
I have always respected you and everything you say. You disrespect me continuously.
I have never excited you, nothing I do or say excites you. What does?
I am tired of you.
You give me nothing.
Absolutely nothing.
I am your teacher.
And you are doing my head in.
Great offer to all of us! What a pleasant challenge to embrace. Thank you for your gift🍒 🫐🍓 🍑
Phone Line Down.
When I was in my early teens my friends and I were into Madonna. The boys in our group went on about a rock band called U2. A new album called The Unforgettable Fire had just been released and the lads were beside themselves with excitement. Two months later the Band Aid single ‘Do They Know It’s Christmas?’ was released and shot to number one, staying there for five weeks. The voice of Bono was easily recognisable on this single. It made me sit up and listen. Gradually I lost interest in Madonna and U2 became my group.
The Live Aid Concert the following Summer was on a glorious July day. My friend Helen and I watched the bands that interested us and went outside on our bikes for the bands that didn’t. U2 played around tea time and they were brilliant. I was hooked from then on. I recorded their full set on an old black Panasonic portable tape cassette recorder. I played that tape over and over again. That drove my Mother mad. “I wouldn’t cross the road to see them.” She never understood my obsession with U2.
“I’ll meet Bono some day and you’ll be the first I’ll ring to tell. Just wait and see!” I often joked back at her.
I queued up to buy the tape of The Joshua Tree on the day it was released in 1987. A world tour was announced and I attended the mind-blowing concert in Dublin’s Croke Park on Saturday 27th June. My Mother bought me the ticket.
“Welcome to The Unforgettable Fire,” said Bono, introducing that song. We all sang along.
“Anyone there play the guitar?” Bono inquired. “Someone in the front?” A delighted fella got up on stage. He was a member of a band called ‘Par Excellence’ and he played the guitar through the Curtis Mayfield song People Get Ready. Someone at the front was being jostled by the stewards. “If he’s misbehavin’ my manager will throw him out,” said Bono to the stewards.
Some boy got up on the roof of the Cusack Stand and everyone on the pitch looked up at him. Bono didn’t know what we were looking at so he peered out from the front of the stage and he saw that lad on the roof. “You have a hard neck but it’s not funny if you have a broken neck so get down,” Bono said to him. We all cheered at Bono. I longed to be the boy on the roof so Bono would speak to me.
Over the years my U2 obsession softened a little and my relationship with my Mother blossomed into a beautiful understanding of each other. She learned to tolerate my excitement for the announcement of yet another U2 tour and she even managed a trip to Vienna for babysitting duty. I sipped champagne in the Red Zone for that 360 tour.
I have another Red Zone ticket in the bag for the Las Vegas Residency later this year in the long awaiting marvel that will be the MSG Sphere. The music world is alight with anticipation for the U2 opening.
Most recently I stood behind a railing for Bono’s book signing walk, having listened to a most enlightening hour of conversation between him and Fintan O’Toole at the Dalkey Book Festival. In the rush to get out of the house I left my copy of Surrender sitting on the kitchen table. No Bono signature for me that night. As he came closer signing the books held out to him I knew I had to think of something to get his attention. He signed the book to my left, glanced at me as his pen went to the right of me. I took my chance and dared to say to him “I’m going to see you in the Sphere Bono.”
He finished signing the book on my right, and then he stopped, looked directly at me and spoke.
“It’s mad. It’s random madness but it’s pretty cool; really good. We won’t know how great you might be able to see ‘cos it’s just been finished. If it works out as well as we think it’s looking at the moment you’ve made a really good choice. If it doesn’t.... I’ll see you later.” He walked off to peals of laughter from the crowd.
My excitement on the drive home was tinged with a sad realisation. Dialling Heaven is not the same as dialling home.
On death and email
By Babz Clough
The light came on at 3:00 AM, and for a split-second between sleep and wake I thought my husband was still alive. At the same time as I remembered he was dead I wondered how the light had come on. No sound had awoken me, so I got up and walked into the living room to see that the computer had come to life of its own accord, which kinda freaked me out. Here I was, alone in the apartment, and the computer had just started up.
I double-checked the deadbolts on both my doors, shut the computer off, and unplugged it. Whatever weird glitch had turned it on was now depowered.
Three nights later the same thing happened. During those intervening days I had started to wonder if maybe my husband wasn’t really dead, but was living in the Ethernet somewhere. If I emailed him, would he respond? The thing still find weirdest about death, any death, is that unanswerable question. Where do you go when you die? Maybe I’d found the answer. Maybe my husband was some type of cyborg with his metal hip and the twisted wire holding his sternum together. Maybe the atomic electronic impulse that was his soul lived on in some other place, just without a body. But during daylight hours and after some rational consideration - a more realistic thought occurred to me. My late husband, an inveterate night owl and computer putzer, had probably set some type of automatic disk clean or something for 3 AM, knowing he’d be awake. And I’d be asleep.
I mean, maybe he was somewhere. But not on this mortal coil. And probably not in the Ethernet.
I got home from work one day, turned the computer on and started flitting around, trying to figure out how to turn off any automatic features for disk clean and disk repair, and it was during this that I stumbled across the email account. Not our email account. One I’d never seen before. His email account.
I mean, I knew he had his own email account in the same way he had his own bank account and his own friends. We were adults, individuals, with different interests. His password was easy because he used the same one for everything. But before I opened the email, I paused. Was it an invasion of privacy? Even if he was dead? My pause didn’t last very long.
The very first email was from Sarah. She’d shown up at my husband’s funeral, all teary eyed and sympathetic. During his second marriage (I being number three), they’d had an affair that lasted for years and brought about the demise of that marriage. But she’d been out of the scene for years when I showed up. Or so I thought.
Apparently, on his last trip home to attend his sister’s wedding, it had been reignited. Her showing up at his funeral hadn’t been an old girlfriend wanting to say a final goodbye to a man she had once loved, but rather a current girlfriend, a reignited romance with all the passion and longing that entails. The first email at the top, dated after he died, was an email from her saying her final farewells. How much she loved him and missed him and had hoped they could be together again in the future. And how all that hope was gone. And she was bereft.
For a moment I wasn’t sure what I was reading or what to do. Had it all been a lie? Had I loved him and nursed him and watched him die while this cow was sending sexy flirtatious emails and planning their future?
Dear Sarah, I wrote. I just saw this. So what was that song and dance at the funeral? Were you giving me sympathy? Wishing you were the widow? All those kind things you said to me must have been like ashes in your mouth. I’ve read your emails. I’ve read all of them. All the time I was caring for him and watching over him, he was emailing you, at night, in secret. What sort of a nasty bitch does that to another person?
I deleted the account, shut down the computer, and sobbed inconsolably.
TEN MONTHS by Linda McCall
Three mismatched suitcases stood at the bottom of the stairs next to the hall radiator. Still in her dressing gown and curlers, Rose peeked at them through the gap in the door of the front room cum — for the past ten months — bedroom. “Good riddance!” she hissed under her breath, holding the door only slightly ajar just in case Frank suddenly appeared and she had to close it quickly. The last thing she wanted was to come face-to-face with him in what those cases suggested were the final moments of their awkward cohabitation.
‘Separated but living together’ was how the lady at the Citizens’ Advice Bureau had described it. “There’s a new divorce law,” she had explained, flourishing a bunch of leaflets as if they were holiday brochures. “It’s much easier these days”.
Divorce. The word had made Rose shudder. It may well have been the seventies and women’s lib very much the norm, but she could not help feeling a deeply ingrained sense of shame at the breakdown of her marriage.
“You just have to prove to the judge that you have effectively been living separately, even if it is under the same roof, for two years. Two if your husband agrees to it, that is. Five if he doesn’t,” the lady had continued matter-of-factly. “That means not doing anything together. No eating, no shopping, no socialising and definitely no sharing a bedroom”. Nothing new there, Rose had thought to herself. She had already started sleeping downstairs and they barely spoke anymore. Now she was going to have to go one step further and avoid him completely.
That was ten months ago. Ten months of keeping to separate parts of their small terraced house and shutting herself behind doors whenever Frank was at home. Ten months of living in constant dread of bumping into him on the landing or coming out of the bathroom. Ten months of adhering to a strict routine based on his night shift hours so as to ensure that that never happened, that their paths never crossed. For ten months, every day at five forty-five in the afternoon, the time she knew his alarm clock was set to go off, Rose had retreated to the front room. From there, she had listened for the sounds that told her he was up and about, the toilet flushing, the cutlery scraping on the plate as he ate his breakfast in the back room while watching the Six O’clock News and smoking his first cigarette of the day. The newscasters’ voices, with their crystal clear BBC delivery, easily penetrated the thin wall dividing the two rooms. Pressing her ear up against it, Rose had been able to follow all the stories of those ten months: the miners’ strike; the oil crisis; the three-day week; and something about a plan to build a tunnel under the English Channel. “It could never be done,” she heard one interviewee comment. “Sheer folly!” said another. Finally would come the most liberating sound of all: the thud of the front door closing as he left work. Only then would she come out of hiding to reclaim the back room and its prized attraction, the television set, just in time for ’Crossroads’, but not before she had cleared his dirty plate, emptied the ashtray and squirted the room with air freshener.
Still holding the door ajar and staring at the three mismatched suitcases, Rose felt a surge of joyous relief rush through her veins as the realisation sank in that it was all over. No more hiding away. No more listening to the News through the wall. Ten months had seemingly been enough for Frank. “Good riddance!” she repeated to herself. Her heart pounded as she heard his heavy tread on the stairs and she gently pushed the door to. Behind her, the room was in disarray, yet to be transformed from bedroom back to sitting-room, the leatherette sofa-bed still open, the bedclothes ruffled, the low coffee table pushed up against the wall. There was some shuffling about with the cases then came the sound of the front door closing with a force that sent shockwaves through the whole house. She darted across to the window, just in time to see him slamming shut the trunk of a brown Vauxhall Viva before climbing into the passenger seat. She watched in numb amazement as the car drove off — far too speedily, she thought, for their narrow residential street — and disappeared round the corner.
The Writer
I met the writer in Hammersmith one summer. My neighbour, the magician, told me that the writer was running a course in a hall round the corner. He said the writer normally ran courses at the Royal Court, but he wanted to have a go with real people. I had heard of this writer, but I hadn’t read any of his books – not then, which was unusual as I had read many books, so many books that I felt it must be impossible to write another, even though that had been my childhood dream: to write.
Anyway, the magician’s wife knew the writer’s wife because their kids were all at the same school, and I got on the list for the course and paid the necessary amount. The magician’s wife said that the writer’s wife wasn’t sure if she wanted me to go on the course because of my name. I share a name with a supermodel, but I am not a supermodel. I am pretty ordinary or ordinarily pretty, I suppose.
The first session took place on a hot summer evening. I had rushed home from work, wherever work was back then – oh yes, an office in Holborn. I caught the Piccadilly Line home. I remember the black linen dress I wore because I wore it all the time, spaghetti straps and flip-flops. I hadn’t been to the venue before – a hall up some steps off Hammersmith Broadway at rush hour. But it was light and airy, with all sorts sitting there, waiting for the writer to arrive. I realised I didn’t know what he would look like, but others did and it was obvious when he arrived.
We sat round on those ordinary plastic stackable chairs that always used to be found in halls like that and maybe still are. I can’t remember how he opened the session, but he set a pattern. We would begin by talking about something that we had read or seen that week that we’d enjoyed. I didn’t say anything. I wasn’t ordinarily shy – quite the opposite. I had a work persona that was very comfortable with sharing and shaping ideas and strategies. But that persona hadn’t come to the session. The persona I brought was about seven years old and longing to write something as magical as the Wizard of Oz, longing to be shown how to click her heels and fly elsewhere.
I watched and listened. I could see people trying to be clever and impress – maybe they were clever and impressive. I didn’t know. And I remember the atmosphere that the writer brought into the room – he wasn’t a big man, but he was sturdy, by which I mean he knew where his feet should be in order for him to be steady and in control. He was balanced and he had a flickering smile or maybe it was a twitch of a smile. I didn’t know what to make of that smile. I wasn’t sure if it was contemptuous. Entertained for sure, but I wasn’t sure what was entertaining for him, and that made me uncertain. I still feel that way now when I think of him.
But then he got us to do an exercise. He asked us to think of an image of one of our parents and then to write it, and with that request, his smile and balance were irrelevant because he just kicked open a door for me – a door that I needed kicked open – and shoved me inside, and it was the only place I wanted to be. We all wrote and, a little while later, he asked if anyone wanted to read what they’d written. And the clever, corporate professional me knew that the seven-year-old star-struck me was frozen, and so I took hold of the child’s shaking hand and stuck it in the air. I was the first one to read. I was shaking as I read. It was as if I was breathing for the first time. It changed my life – not always for the easier; in fact it would have been far easier if I’d never gone. But I did go – I had to go – and what happened as a result shifted tracks for me, and that’s changed everything ever since.
And I read all his books in the end and, when I think of him now, I don’t worry so much about that flicker of a smile that I thought was contempt. I am just glad we shared the same space for a while.
FOOD
Irfan Hydari MD
“Kya khaiga, beta?” my grandmother asks.
“What would you like to eat, my dear?”
I’m 5 years old, sitting atop my designated kitchen perch watching her intently as she prepares her workspace to make paratha, my favorite pastry-like flatbread. Whole wheat flour, vegetable oil, salt, and water all neatly placed in their respective bowls, ready to be mixed by her arthritic hands.
She starts with the bowl of flour, adding and mixing water, salt, and tads of oil. As the flour thickens, she uses the heel of her hand to assist the phalangeal effort, kneading the formulating dough to the appropriate consistency. She then starts flattening the dough with a rolling pin, sprinkling flour intermittently between rolls. Once flat, she cuts the large circle into strips, each one eventually giving rise to the individual parathas. She drizzles drops of oil and folds each strip several times before rolling each one final time. I watch closely, all the while my grandmother verbally entertaining me with sweet nonsensical children’s songs passed down through generations.
I met Chloe when she was 17 years old, standing over her gurney one late morning assessing the tiny 100-pound adolescent who presented to my ER via ambulance for loss of consciousness. “I found her passed out in the garage this morning, wreaking of whisky,” her agitated mother states irritably, not realizing how sick her daughter truly is.
Her blood alcohol level indeed registers 3 times the standard limit; however, I’m more concerned about her blood glucose of 1400, over ten times the normal level, and the acid in her blood has reached catastrophic quantities.
I’m 7 years old, just having attempted to throw away the leftover food on my plate. My grandmother sequesters me at the kitchen table, demanding I finish every bite. I sit for hours in silent protest, rearranging the perfectly cooked basmati rice, turmeric cauliflower, and cold remnants of curried meatballs around my plate. Years later as an adolescent, I will huffingly slam my bedroom door so that the aroma of her cooking won’t seed my clothes. I will insist on dining out with friends, choosing shitty fast food over my grandmother’s handmade meals. Lentils topped with lightly fried mustard seeds, curry leaves, dried red chilies, and cumin seeds. Goat chops in tomato yogurt gravy. Chickpeas, onions, serrano peppers, and potatoes wading in a tangy tamarind sauce. As a college student I will refuse her offerings to take food back to the dorms, dreading the thought of smelly Indian food wafting from my bag, ready to stink up the entire hall when I heat it up later in the microwave.
“I don’t have room, grandma.”
I may as well have stabbed her in the myocardium with a kebob skewer. Our hug goodbye is awkward at best, no “I love you” or “I’ll miss you.”
Only, “Kuch nai khai.”
“You didn’t eat enough.”
Chloe is discharged from the hospital seven days later with the diagnosis of insulin dependent diabetes. Like most diabetic teenagers, she would rebel against her disease in various ways, like ingesting an entire bottle of cheap wine and a dozen cupcakes after arguments with her mother, landing her in the ER. On one such occasion, her lab results would not only show the usual severe metabolic derangements, but also a positive pregnancy test. She was now feeding a 6-week old fetus connected to her blood stream through the highly vascular placenta in her womb, unfortunately also passing along a dangerous amount of glucose, tripling the chances of mortal birth defects. She would carry the pregnancy to term, only to deliver a stillborn fetus 7 months later.
My grandmother lays in the hospital bed that occupies one of the bedrooms in my aunt’s house. She suffered a massive stroke 2 years ago, a clot occluding the largest blood vessel responsible for delivering the necessary oxygen, glucose, and nutrients to a sizeable portion of her brain. I beat two eggs, add salt and pepper, and fry up a fluffy omelet while the store-bought frozen paratha warms in the toaster oven. Her appetite is weak at best, and she refuses most everything save for a handful of longtime favorites. She accepts my spoon-fed bites reluctantly, chewing the best she can from one side of her mouth before slowing down and then refusing the next bite, the egg now cold and the paratha flakes hardened.
“Aik or nivala, Amma.”
One more bite, grandma.
Donna Sullivan July 8, 2023
Camaraderie of the Early Hours
An hour before dawn, a man sits at his kitchen table drinking coffee from a blue mug. A bar of milky light from the window stretches across the table and spills onto the floor, fading into darkness in the corner of the room. He’ll have to leave soon for work but the stillness of the house holds him. The cat circles around his ankles to remind him about her breakfast. The coffee is cold and sweet when he takes his last sip as he rises from the table.
In the faint light, a woman crosses the room from her bed to the arm chair by the high window, seeking escape from the tide of pain that swamped her night. Settling, she adjusts the pillows behind her back. She thinks of tea but is drawn into the softness of the opalescent sky, pulled into the sound of sea birds waking by the water. The dog’s head finds her hand waiting when he comes to lean against her leg. The dog thinks of food, but leans closer.
Aware of the light growing steadily as the wind rises in the forest, the small red squirrel flexes her tail and licks her nose, looks down the side of the tree, hesitates, then drops to the branch below. Shaking off sleep, she races down into the shadows. Somewhere a raven shouts. The squirrel spirals up the nearest tree. Again the raven shouts.
Lying in his bed under a red plaid blanket, a boy hears his mother rise and go into the bathroom. The sound of water running in the sink, the sound of a pot set on the stove, the dog sniffing persistently under his door. A low whine. When his mother opens the door, he suspends his breath and pretends to be sleeping still. His mother’s long sigh sets his breath in motion again. He’s hungry.
Standing at her kitchen sink, a woman stares into the darkness. She sees the light come on in the kitchen window across the street. A shadow moves behind the yellow curtains. She holds her hands under the warm water before filling the kettle. Through her reflection in the window, the yellow light across the way glows steadily. The shadow moves again and the woman wonders whose face it wears. She sees her own face in the glass, watery rivulets of eyes and hair, pale skin.
An hour into a drive begun in crisp darkness, a woman uncurls stiff fingers from the steering wheel and reaches into her shirt pocket. She inhales the pleasure of solitude intermingled with the taste of cigarette smoke in her mouth. Her body registers the vibration of the truck in the wind that whips the aspens at the side of the road. Anticipating nothing, she settles her mind into the symmetry of white lines. A flock of crows crisscrosses the long stretch of road ahead. The stars fall back against the advance of the sun.
He keeps carefully to the side of the road. The light on the back of his bike
flashes red in the thin light. A car approaches from behind, slowing as it passes, trailing a rush of cold air that bites his hands. His gloves are too thin and he’s still 10 kilometers outside town but he’s happy to be headed where he wants to be. He thinks of hot tea and the taste of the sandwich in his coat pocket, to be eaten later at the long wooden table in the school lunchroom. High overhead a plane heads west out over the ocean.
The sound of the plane drops like a bell jar over the ones who are awake. It reverberates in the hollow morning air around them, all the comrades of the early hours. They think of distance to or from anywhere they’ve ever rested or never reached. In the bell jar of sound, the squirrel thinks of vibration. The raven thinks “carry the sun.” Dogs everywhere think “don’t leave.” The plane fades away into the ordinary day somewhere to the west.
“Sprouts” by Howard Wiseman
July 6, 2023
Thousands of baby sprouts unfurl across the greenhouse, an emerald carpet of soft fur engulfing her in her now dormant Instagram post, her yellow rain jacket wrapped around her like a cowboy’s duster. Short cropped black hair against the massive windows, the baby blue Ontario sky framing her like an earthly sprite, so fragile in bone structure, yet planted and ready to stand her ground. Mara, named for the bitter taste of wisdom, an affinity for the sea, or eternally, enduring beauty.
Her recent theatre performances, fecund as the crops she carried into the city market every Saturday where I re-discovered a touch of joy and delight in those barren months after my break up when, on most Saturday mornings, I’d head to the market and Mara.
She eventually asked me in the kindest way if she could send me the script she intended to make as a short film. It led to some notes, new drafts, and a loving friendship. And yes, dear reader, even to a crush, though she was more often gay than not and I was well, too much older.
Around that fateful Saturday I remember telling her “whatever you do make sure that you give your character the final decision in the film, since she is your main character and the farm was to be sold. Letting the hose run in the greenhouse flooding the sea of sprouts, symbolically saying goodbye to a life on the farm should be hers, marking the end of an era, the final action in the film.
The film was to be shot that weekend.
I exhorted her that final day- just trust yourself, though it was her first film. The day of the train, the day she looked one way and crossed, but forgot to look the other - and her life ended, uprooted in an instant.
She had been accompanied by a friend who reported on the accident in this way, the accident that somehow never made the papers.
A few weeks before that she had paused during a conversation and said to me “I adore you.” Immediately shy, I said thanks and walked away, to a stall around the corner. But then, without realizing that anything would be coming to an end so abruptly, I felt that this needed an immediate response.
“I adore you too,” I said returning.
I knew Mara had a girlfriend or a boyfriend. But this wasn’t about either. This was about kindred spirits.
I didn’t find out until an entire week later at the market.
Two days later a woman called me. “It’s Erika, Mara’s mother. I got your name from Joan,” the woman who ran the sprouts farm and who worked with Mara.
“Erika, I’m so sorry for your loss…”
“This is a mystery I don’t think will ever be solved, someone like Mara taken from us all,” she said.
“It was such a joy, such an honour to be her mother.”
She said she felt compelled to call me to tell me how much I had meant to her daughter and how much I had helped Mara. I could barely hear these touching comments from her and could feel all the pain through the phone. All the loss and the suffering, and the suffering yet to come.
We had a very natural and effortless connection.
When is it too soon to ask questions, to write stories? A writer just knows these things don’t they? Who gets hit by a train? Yet it was explained to me in detail by Joan of the sprout farm how it supposedly happened. And she was with someone so there was a witness.
That summer a few months later we planted a tree at Joan’s sprout farm, all sat in a circle under the shade of a stand of trees telling stories about Mara, then joining together to plant a tree in Mara’s favourite spot behind the greenhouse, together shovelling dirt, down in the dirt digging, planting, feeling Mother earth.
I drove back into the city alone.
I spent the next week in Winnipeg with my mom who turned 93. I got into some arguing which I regretted and managed to repair. But still… I once saw Borges the great writer at an auditorium in downtown L.A. and he said – “the biggest regret in my life is that my mother never saw me happy.” This would not happen. I would not have this regret. I would be happy.