Bathroom Confessions

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By Danny Fisher

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EDITOR’S NOTE: The following story contains graphic content and is a frank and honest look at issues surrounding domestic abuse.

My sister, Mel, dreams about having Mike Brady as a father. But our father is dead, and even if our life was like The Brady Bunch, everyone knows she’d be Jan. I don’t know why she longs to be recognized as the ignored middle sister, the one who whines too much to be endearing. When life becomes too stressful for even ABC’s Saturday night line-up to offer escape, Mel sneaks out of the house through the bulkhead in the basement. She rebels, I recoil. I cling to the sanctuary that is my bedroom. There, in the dark, the multi-colored lights from my strobe-lamp dance across the wall, wanting to transport me to another place and time. But the music from my stereo, its bass deep and throbbing, can’t quite mask the turmoil happening beyond my bedroom door. At night, I lie there in my bed unable to sleep. Eventually I roll over onto my side, shut my eyes, draw the covers high over my head and will my brain to let my ears go deaf.  

In the morning, I wake to exactly the kind of silence that I had prayed for only hours before. I dress quickly and quietly. I grab my books, turn the knob of my door ever so slowly and edge my way into the hallway. I am hoping to slip out undetected to the safety of school. To do that, I must clear the bathroom door. I slink past the slim tables littered with knick-knacks that crowd the hallway like giant chess pieces put there to give me away. Suddenly, a shaft of light pierces through the shadows. The metal door-stop goes waaannnggg as the bathroom door bangs against it.

“Danny, get in here!” Mom clutches my collar and yanks me inside. She slams the door behind me, locks it and points to the toilet. “Sit down.”

I obey because that’s what I do.

I try not to stare, but it’s hard. Her hair is matted to her head, which is so unlike my mother who has been known to take three hours to get ready. One eye is red and puffy from crying, the other has swollen shut and turned an ugly shade of dark purple. Her arm is held close to her side, her wrist limp. She uses her good hand to light a cigarette. She inhales the smoke deep into her lungs, exhaling through blood-encrusted nostrils. I sit and watch—as I know I’m supposed to wait to speak until spoken to, if at all. She winces as she slides her robe off her shoulders. It falls to the floor and I stare at my mother in all her nakedness. I’m twelve or thirteen years old, and it’s awkward. Her breasts are firm because they are fake. Her stomach bears the scars of childbirth, both natural and otherwise. Her legs are slim, but pockmarked with cellulite and covered with bruises, old and new.

When my gaze meets her pubic area, my untied Timberlands turn inward. I fold into myself. I tuck my right hand in the crevice between my jean-clad thighs, pick at the edge of the laminate counter with my left one. I stare at the worn rug on the floor, focus on a single thread of carpet that has pulled loose.

Mom locks eyes with her reflection in the mirror. When she opens her mouth, her voice is laced with all the anger she dares not show on the other side of the bathroom door.

“I don’t even know what I said,” she begins. “But I never do. It doesn’t matter. He slammed my face against the wall. There’s blood all over the carpet in there. How am I supposed to get that out?”

I shrug but say nothing. I don’t know why my mother confides in me. I don’t know how to respond to her any better than she knows how to respond to him. I’ve learned to stay silent. Maybe it’s because my bedroom is next to hers, maybe it’s because my sister can’t be counted on, or maybe it’s because she knows I’ll never stand up and say no. But she chooses me, every time. And I hate her for it.

Mom reexamines herself in the mirror. She scrapes at the crusty blood on her upper lip with a fingernail and tilts her head backwards, so she can see up her nostrils. “I don’t think it’s broken this time, not for his lack of trying,” she says.

She bends over to pick her robe up off the floor. At the sight of my mother’s bare backside cracked open, I turn away toward the window. My eyes are squeezed shut.

Mom hangs the robe on a hook on the back of the door. “Danny!”

I turn around—open my eyes, quit fiddling with the counter and sit up straight. “Yes, ma’am!”

“How the hell are you going to testify to a judge about everything he did to me if you’re not paying attention? Look at me!”

I work hard at keeping my expression dull while inside I want to scream. I just want to go to school so I can fail my math test and sit by myself at lunch.

“You see this shit?” The lower half of her right arm dangles limp in front of my face. “He broke my fucking wrist!”

“Are you going to call the cops?” My question is half curious, half pleading.

“Why? What’re they gonna do? Drag him out in cuffs and let him back out tomorrow?”

“If you pressed charges—”

Mom’s laugh is sharp. “You don’t get it, do you? If I press charges, then what? A restraining order? So, fucking what? That just pisses him off more.” She’s digging through drawers with her good hand looking for something to brace her wrist. Her breasts bounce in rhythm to her movements. “Don’t we have an ace bandage for Christ’s sake?”

I point to the closet behind her. “On the shelf,” I say.

Once she finds it, she tosses the ace bandage to me. I catch it, begin unraveling the cloth so that I can wrap it around her wrist. She holds her arm towards me, sucking air through her teeth at every slight movement as I try to make the brace snug enough to do some good.

“After he slammed my face, he snapped my wrist. Kicked me a few times.” She turns her hips and shows me the spot where fresh bruises are blossoming on her thigh. “I should have you take pictures, but I left the Polaroid at his apartment. You look here, Danny, remember this, okay? Make sure you remember everything I said so you can tell the judge.”

I stare past her, focus on the doorframe while I picture the scene from last night in my mind: I can see the look on his face as he calls her a cunt. He’s smug. He thinks he’s funny. I see my mother’s shoulders rise in defiance, but then quickly slouch when she realizes she’s gone too far. I see his hand as it reaches for her, grabs a handful of beautiful chestnut curls. He slams her face into the nearest wall. I see the blood that pours from her nose as he smiles down at her, daring her to speak back to him. I hear the sobs as she begs for forgiveness. I see him reach down between her legs and shove his meaty fingers inside her. He whips her into a frenzy and then calls her a slut for her body’s reactions. And when she dares to reach up and caress his cheek in the hopes of turning his mood around—he snaps her wrist in two—and fucks her anyways.

And while I don’t know if how I imagine it is exactly how it happened, I know this much: no judge is ever going to ask me about any of it.

Danny Fisher is a current degree candidate at The Mountainview Low Residency MFA in Fiction and Nonfiction.

Voices from the Void: A Brief Meditation on Saint Ambrose and the Muses

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By Kevin P. Keating

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A visitor entering the south entrance to the Cleveland Museum of Art will pass through a massive neoclassical, Georgian marble, Beaux-Arts rotunda that opens to several enormous galleries. By continuing to walk straight ahead, resisting the temptation to turn into the Amor Court with its hunting spears, chain mail and battered helmets that once belonged to rampaging wreckers of mead halls and Viking villages, the visitor will encounter five paintings of grand scale. Noted for their rich color harmonies and flowing brushwork, these monumental paintings depict the classical Greek muses of eloquence, history, astronomy, and epic poetry. Set in hand-carved frames of gesso and gold, Apollo and the Muses (figure 1) are considered the masterworks of 18th century French artist Charles Meynier. Though sometimes overlooked by visitors in a rush to see the famous prints and paintings of celebrity artists like Andy Warhol and Salvador Dali, the gallery showcasing Meynier’s Muses has become a kind of secular temple for creative types seeking guidance and inspiration.

            During my weekly visits to the museum, I’ve noticed how students from the Cleveland Institute of Art, sitting crossed-legged on the floor and feverishly doodling with charcoal pencils in the pages of their sketchbooks, often gaze at the larger-than-life Muses as if hoping one of them will sing to them. The gallery remains eerily still, and with the notable exception of Calliope, the Muses look down upon these aspiring painters and part-time baristas with expressions that  seem curiously indifferent, maybe even a little contemptuous.

(figure 1 — ARTIST: Charles Meynier)

(figure 1 — ARTIST: Charles Meynier)

With their Romantic and wildly theatrical grandeur, the five paintings that comprise Apollo and the Muses have always struck me as a bit contrived, perhaps a tad corny; nevertheless, I pause here like all unworthy acolytes who dare set foot within this holy of holies and pay homage to these gaudily gowned ladies, always noting how Calliope (far right), the muse of epic poetry, gazes over her shoulder at a bust of Homer as if the revered poet is singing to her rather than the other way around. Of course the daughters of Zeus are said to be irritatingly fickle and choose to bestow their favors only on a lucky few.

            Well, what can you do? Not everyone is capable of composing complex and endlessly engaging narratives like The Odyssey. At least we, from our privileged vantage point in this age of science and reason, can take some comfort in knowing that the Muses are nothing more than a silly superstition, a bit of confused thinking on the part of the ancients who believed they heard voices in their heads. Today, any artist claiming to hear disembodied voices is likely to seek medical treatment and, in the unlikely event he has health insurance, subject himself to a battery of tests. Doctors, using electroencephalographs and positron emission tomography to detect large-scale fluctuations in the artist’s neurophysiology, will regretfully explain that the Muses are in fact an insidious manifestation of a mental crackup that could prove potentially harmful both to the delusional patient and the general public.

            Now, rather than attribute works of genius to the quasi-mystical voices of the Muses, we must accept the grim diagnosis of modern medicine. This new cultural paradigm, with its battalions of materialistic killjoys in white lab coats intent on reducing inspiration to mere neural eructations, really takes the fun out things. But perhaps there are other ways to account for the mysterious source of an artist’s inspiration.

            In a distant corner, initially hidden from view as you enter the gallery, there hangs a different kind of masterwork, one that never fails to unsettle me (figure 2). The low viewpoint and large scale suggest that this painting once hung high on the wall of an important religious institution. In the painting an austere holy man wearing a ceremonial miter, a flowing white cassock and an elaborate ferraiolo is seated before the viewer. With feather quill in hand, he appears to be writing in a golden book of thick vellum pages. Behind him we see nothing but empty space, an abyss of complete and total darkness. Aside from his anachronistic clothing, there is no indication of time or place. There are no billowing clouds, radiant beams of divine light, or choirs of rosy-cheeked cherubs crooning “Hallelujah!” from the heavens. And yet, from out this strange emptiness, a voice seems to be calling to the troubled figure.

(figure 2 — ARTIST: FRANCISCO GOYA )

(figure 2 — ARTIST: FRANCISCO GOYA )

Unlike Calliope, who looks over her shoulder with an expression of deep admiration at a bust of Homer, this man stares into the ineffable blackness with an expression of awe that borders on pure metaphysical and existential dread. The image is significant because the artist, by the time he began working on this painting in 1796, had completely lost his hearing after an extended illness. It was also during this period in his long and productive creative life that he completed and published a suite of eighty allegorical etchings called Los Caprichos, including the iconic The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters (figure 3). In stark contrast to his early Romantic paintings, the Caprichos introduce us to a world of witches, ghosts, and fantastic creatures that invade the mind, particularly during dreams, drunkenness and drug-induced visions (or perhaps a combination of all three).

The man in the painting is Saint Ambrose and the artist is Francisco José de Goya. In the late 1700s, after the expulsion of its Jesuit priests, Spain underwent a radical religious transformation, and many artists turned back to early Church history for inspiration. Saint Ambrose, probably commissioned by a new organization attempting to fill the gap once occupied by the Society of Jesus, belongs to a series of paintings depicting Muses of a very different sort—the four doctors of the Roman Catholic Church. Aurelius Ambrosius (CE 340 – 397) was bishop of Milan in the fourth century and teacher (though “guru” might be a more accurate word) of Saint Augustine. Like his more famous pupil, Ambrose possessed a formidable intellect and was revered for his diplomatic skills. He is known for having resolved important theological conflicts within the early Church and for working effectively with advocates of Roman paganism, but Goya seems less interested in depicting the saint as an early medieval bureaucrat and more as a Gnostic who, for perhaps the first time in his life, is apprehending a reality so deep and so utterly baffling that he is having trouble finding the words to describe it in his fancy codex.

(figure 3 — Artist: Francisco Goya )

(figure 3 — Artist: Francisco Goya )

When attempting to convey a sense of the infinite, the unfathomable, the absolute, human language often proves inadequate. The experience is one that transcends all worldly categories of human thought. In fact, it is the complete absence of limiting and often contradictory linguistic imagery that brings on the experience in the first place. But human beings, irrepressible chatterboxes that we are, need simile and metaphor if we wish to communicate anything of value.

            Over the millennia serious thinkers have made valiant attempts at describing Ambrose and his disquieting encounter with the unknown. Theologians, for instance, will sometimes use the word “apophatic” when describing a supreme mystical experience. For pious devotees of psychotropics like ayahuasca and psilocybin mushrooms, the nearest parallel might be the “entheogenic” or, to put it more bluntly, hallucinogenic or psychedelic experience. In the more esoteric philosophies of the East, the experience is sometimes described as shunyata, a Sanskrit word that designates a state of mind based on the renunciation of what one believes to be real. In the West, channeling the more cumbersome language of scientism, the experience is described as a supremely immanent action that, paradoxically, annihilates all action. European alchemists believed this mystical encounter with darkness signified an eclipse of the ego due to an incursion of the unconscious.

            Goya’s depiction of Saint Ambrose seems to echo all these concepts. Having gained access to the unconscious, Ambrose ceases to be a high-ranking spokesperson for a particular dogma. He isn’t the avatar of a pernicious ideology, and he isn’t espousing any kind of religious doctrine. He isn’t a political propagandist or heresy hunter trying to root out all those who dare to deviate from the rigid orthodoxy of his Church. He doesn’t have some important point to make, and he isn’t trying to win an argument. The allure of the material world no longer matters to him. Titles, prestige, fame, fortune—all of these things seem trivial in comparison to the annihilating maw of unconscious forces. Ambrose, perhaps for the first time in his life, bears witness to the formlessness of the Beginning, a state of mind where the light of reason has yet to shine.

            A product of the Enlightenment, Goya was a vocal critic of superstition and could have easily painted Ambrose in a conventional romantic style, making use of a regal setting as in his Charles IV of Spain and His Family (figure 4). But like so many artists before and after him, Goya knew that in order to give the viewer a sense of the truly mystical nature of Ambrose’s experience, he would need to jettison convention while at the same time retaining familiar religious imagery. The religious, it would seem, is the best tool we mere mortals have for approximating a direct encounter with that which transcends all categories of human thought.

(figure 4 — Artist: Francisco Goya)

(figure 4 — Artist: Francisco Goya)

According to art historian Robert Hughes, Goya was no high-minded theoretician or grotesquely overeducated hyper-intellectual. But he was the product of a long Catholic tradition. Born into a working-class family and raised in a modest brick cottage in an Aragon village, Goya was probably provided with an education described as “adequate but not enlightening.” His father specialized in religious and decorative craftwork, overseeing the ornamentation during the rebuilding of the Basilica of Our Lady of Pillar. In 18th century Spain, during Goya’s formative years as an artist, there existed, as there still does today, a powerful strain of mysticism that flirted with the dangerous heresy of the free spirit (libertas spiritus). Looking at Saint Ambrose hanging in the Cleveland Museum of Art, one can’t help but wonder if this freedom included liberation from the very concept of God itself.

            Today it might fashionable to reduce this masterwork to nothing more than a distorted vision of the oppressive patriarchal power structure of the Church. But I firmly believe Goya is attempting to express something that exceeds convenient and wearisome post-modernist categories. The abyss resists categorization because it lacks boundaries. It is unitary in nature and thus becomes a symbol of endless potential and unlimited creativity. And yet for some people, especially those who are strident about their ideological worldview, this interpretation can be frightening beyond belief, both literally and figuratively speaking.  

            Any artist who is honest about the source of inspiration must contend with the power of the void, the abyss, the darkness, the thing that obeys no authority, the thing (which is no thing) that devours and destroys predictable patterns of behavior and pathological systems of thought. This is not to say the abyss is without its dangers. The adverse effects of this self-dissolution and terrifying emptiness include neuroticism, depression, suicidal impulses, insomnia, nightmares, anxiety, psychosis, dysphoria, even alien abductions. And can you think of a single artist who hasn’t experienced at least some (or in the unusual case of Philip K. Dick all) of these symptoms?

            Skeptical students in my creative writing classes invariably ask where I get my ideas, and for many years my response has always been the same. Shrugging my shoulders in resignation, I offer them a sheepish smile and mumble without any real conviction, “I just listen to the voices in my head.” But now, having given this question careful thought, I believe the correct answer is, “Ideas, the best ideas, arise spontaneously—from out of nowhere.” Oh, sure, I can pat myself on the back and take credit for these rare flashes of creative insight, but this would be dishonest. The insights are not mine. I am not in control of the creative process, if indeed it is a process. It would be more accurate to describe it as a feeling, a wholly unpredictable and overwhelmingly convincing sensation of harmoniousness. And I also know these fleeting moments of inspiration float on the surface of a treacherous reality, Goya’s blacker than black canvas, a thing infused with irrationality and incoherence.

(figure 5 — Artist: Oliver Munday )

(figure 5 — Artist: Oliver Munday )

Maybe Oliver Munday, the graphic artist who designed the cover of my second novel, knew a lot more about the nature of the void than I did (figure 5). When I first saw his minimalist design, I thought it much too grim, too unrelentingly bleak, but Mr. Munday knew that, trapped beneath those haphazardly hammered planks of wood, a very frightened man, his mouth agape, his eyes searching desperately for a thin sliver of light, presses his ear against a crack and listens to an ungodly voice calling to him from the outer dark. It’s a voice I sometimes hear, too, although I should be grateful not to hear it very often.

A Thanksgiving Story

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By Heather Poulin

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Thanksgiving meant burgundy tablecloths and polished silver; it meant everything fresh and nothing from a can; it meant Grandma was up early to start the turkey while Gramps was out in the garden, picking rosemary that hadn’t yet died and pulling sprouted potatoes out of the ground. The herbs and potatoes would be joined later by fresh butternut squash and spinach purchased from the farmer’s market. There’d be paper bags full of blueberries and blackberries Gramps collected for making pies, and loaves of pumpernickel and sourdough bought from the bakery just up the road.

            There’d be whiskey and wine in decanters on the counter, golden-glittered pinecones lining the porch, the soft melody of classical music playing through the speakers of the Bose home entertainment system, and a small glass bowl of Hershey’s Hugs and Kisses resting on the window sill.  Thanksgiving meant my mom and dad would be in the same room and no one would yell. It meant that Gramps and Grandma could show off all the nice things they owned. It meant that I could finally wear the new sweater Mom bought me from JC Penney. It meant that we could eat as much as we wanted. Thanksgiving meant we could be normal for a few hours, one day, every year.

            In those days, there were a lot of us who made the journey to Grandma and Gramps’. It was a long, four-hour drive, especially back in the 90’s, when all we had to be entertained was Mom’s Elton John cassette (Princess Diana had died just months before, so now “Candle in the Wind” was her favorite song) and forced conversations.

            My dad also made the journey—a short, thirty-minute drive for him. His being there thrilled my sister and me. My mom, not so much. She smiled through it, though, as she always did. Dad also brought around his girlfriend—the one he cheated on Mom with—along with the girlfriend’s two kids, one of which we still, to this day, think is my dad’s.

            At dinner, after we said what we were all thankful for, we passed around the food. The girlfriend passed my mom the green bean amandine, and they would smile tightly at each other. My dad would pass my sister the whipped potatoes—the one’s Grandma said tasted best when a whole stick, not a half stick, of butter was added. One of the girlfriend’s daughters would pass me the gravy, and I would pass it right to Grandma. Gramps would serve himself last. And at the end of the meal, like he did every year, he’d proclaim, “Well, I’m just about as stuffed as the turkey,” and we’d all laugh.

            Each year after that specific Thanksgiving in 1998, the dinners got less populated. In 2000, Dad and the girlfriend broke up, so that year it was just Grandma, Gramps, Mom, Dad, my sister and me. Gramps, though, still delivered his turkey line, and I still laughed—too much probably—but it made him smile, and that’s what mattered.

            In 2003, Thanksgiving was even smaller because Mom didn’t want to go, since Dad was bringing his new girlfriend—a stripper named Brenda. So, that year it was just Gramps, Dad, my sister and me. Grandma was there, but said she didn’t feel good and wanted to eat alone in her room. I knew it was because of Brenda, and Dad knew it, too, but no one said anything. The only thing that felt normal that year was the end of the meal, when like clockwork Gramps delivered his turkey line, the one that still made me laugh.

            I was the only one who laughed that year.

            In 2005, I got my license and didn’t want to go up for Thanksgiving. My mom and sister went to see my grandparents without me. That year it just the two of them. Dad got back together with Pam—the first girlfriend—and they had their own holiday that year. I still called Gramps, though, and he repeated my favorite line. I made sure to laugh louder this time because I could tell his hearing was going.

I didn’t see my grandparents again for the next ten Thanksgivings. Even though I always intended to. But it was always something: I had plans; the weather was bad; I didn’t feel like going. Excuses.

            I went back one last time in 2015. My mom and sister had plans—I don’t remember what they were—so I went alone. On the long drive up, I tried to mentally prepare for how much older my grandparents would look.  

            When I pulled into the driveway, I almost didn’t recognize their house. It looked smaller than I remembered. The paint was chipping. The yard wasn’t raked. The garden where Gramps used to grow food was covered in a thick, dark dirt. There were no welcome pinecones, just pine needles that had fallen from a too-tall tree.

            And they did look older. They somehow appeared shorter than I’d remembered. They didn’t stand with the same regality as they had when I was a child, like the passage of time had weighed heavily on them.

            Inside, the house felt different. Colder. The dining room table had been turned into a catchall for clothes and paperwork. The decanters were behind a glass bureau, untouched for years. There were no Hershey’s kisses. The Bose speakers had been replaced with a flat-screen tv, still in its box.

            “The food’s in the fridge, dear. Could you throw each in for a couple minutes?” Gramps asked. I was confused, but upon looking in the refrigerator I saw what he was talking about. There were three Styrofoam containers that lined the bottom shelf, right under the cranberry juice cocktail, next to an old box of girl scout Samoas.

            I unpacked the three containers, each contained a turkey breast and leg, an ice-cream scoop of white potatoes, and a gelatinous cube of cranberry sauce. I did as I was told, putting each in the microwave for a few minutes. While the dinners rotated, I pulled out the three sets of plastic silverware and a couple packets of salt and pepper that were still in the bottom of the delivery bag. Gramps told me he’d ordered the food yesterday.

            We sat on the couch, three in a row, three tv trays parked in front of us.

            “It’s so nice to be here. I know it’s been a while.” I said. I poked the plastic knife through the cellophane wrapper.

            “It surely is,” Gramps agreed, turkey leg waving in his hand as he spoke. His eyes were cloudier than I’d remembered.

            We ate our microwaved meal in silence. After we finished eating, I waited for the turkey line, but it didn't come. Instead, Gramps stood and gathered up the empty Styrofoam containers and started for the kitchen.

            “Gramps?” I asked, puzzled.

            He paused. “Yes, dear?”

            “I’m just about as stuffed as the turkey!” I said.

            He stared at me, baffled, unsure of how to respond.

            “That’s too bad,” he answered, finally. “We have some ice cream in the freezer."

Ducklings - A Photo Essay

By Elodie Reed

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Khaki Campbell ducklings are, obviously, incredibly cute, but that doesn’t mean you should purchase fowl to celebrate getting over the mysterious week-long-kick-you-in-the-ass illness that spread around your newspaper office, which, oddly enough, seemed to come over everyone the day after you made that reporting trip to the bird rescue.

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But you’re riding that sudden invincible-health-high, and you’re at Tractor Supply with your mother, and the two of you have always wanted ducks, so you convince her to buy three, and you tune out the brain-voice saying THIS IS A BAD IDEA by concocting a foolproof plan: you’ll raise the ducklings in your apartment – you won’t tell your landlord, of course – and your mother will take them after two months and integrate them into her chicken coop.

 

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To house the ducklings, you dig out that old cage from when you adopted chinchillas as a kid, chinchillas who lived for so freaking long, long enough that you sort of lost interest and kind of regretted being responsible for them those last couple years before they died, somewhat conveniently, right as you left for college.

 

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In your first week as a duckling-mom, you leave the office as early as you can each day to get home to your ducklings, and after playing with them on a poop-protective blanket, feeding them, watering them, cleaning their cage and unclogging the bathroom sink full of shavings, you record in a special “duckling journal” everything about them that you love: the way their brown eyes watch you; the way they waddle with their stubby wings spread out for balance; the way they go cheep cheep because they can’t quack yet; the way they stick together like so many fuzzy-feathered magnets; even the way grey and white matter rockets out from their hind ends with a little pfffft sound.

 

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You stop journaling because the ducklings grow wicked fast and kind of take up a lot of your free time now that they’re big enough to get baths each night; you’ve also had to go back to Tractor Supply for a bigger water dispenser, and to Walmart for an extra-large Rubbermaid bin so they stop spraying shit on the walls through your chinchilla cage bars.

 

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It’s been a month, the ducklings are unprecedentedly huge and smelly, your heat lamp fell and bonked one of them on the head, and you’re somehow sick again. That’s how you guilt your mother into meeting you in the parking lot halfway between your parents’ house and your apartment, and that’s where you shove the extra-large Rubbermaid bin full of ducklings into her backseat.

 

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You visit your parents’ backyard coop a month later, which now has a kiddie pool, and you chase your full-grown ducks until you manage to get one and hold it that one time before your mother calls you a few days later with some bad news: it was raining the night before, the ducks wouldn’t come inside the coop, and in the morning, she could only find one of them, splayed out on the driveway as if dropped from a great height.

Elodie Reed is a current degree candidate at The Mountainview Low Residency MFA in Fiction and Nonfiction.

Student Picks: The Book of Strange New Things

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Arun Chittur - Despite the several weeks it took for me to finish Michel Faber’s The Book of Strange New Things, I recommend it strongly as an example of fiction that explores tough philosophical questions using a plausible, speculative approach. It’s science fiction without being over-the-top, a world easy to imagine as a successor to our present.

An Earthbound multi-national leads an effort to colonize an alien world to support mining of a valuable mineral. Unlike James Cameron’s blockbuster Avatar, the indigenous population capitulates and learns to live as humans overtake them. At some point in an undefined past, a visitor from Earth introduces the Christian Bible to the planet—this leads to hundreds of converts looking for someone to lead them in their question to understand the story of Christ as told in the “Book of Strange New Things.”

Faber crafts a deeply flawed character in Peter, the pastor enlisted by the corporation to minister to the new converts. He leaves behind a family and war-torn world for a new dawn in his own journey as a man and a Christian. We are left to wrestle alongside him with questions of love, loss, and our responsibility to this world and the next.

On the Campaign Trail with the Last American Man  

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By Paul McNiel

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It’s the rainy afternoon before election day and the roads around Boone, North Carolina are littered with little square plastic signs—red, white and blue. Many have blown over. But, there must be thousands of them, most just a name, a name representing some person—a person with a team of staff and volunteers making sure those signs are seen, and working the phones. The signs represent politicians who want to represent me. 
Tomorrow is the big day.
I’m in an old Chevy truck with mountain man legend Eustace Conway. On the bench seat between us is a small backpack of “important papers,” my oilskin raincoat, his thick, red fisherman’s sweater, his small adz axe with its darkened hickory handle, worn shiny, and a leather cover tied over the blade. There is also a jar of chunky applesauce—a gift from his brother Walton, whom we just visited. I pull the heap toward myself, away from the stick shift as we brake at an Y intersection. 
“Are we clear?” asks Eustace.
I look over my right shoulder. Clyde, his Aussie Tri, is seated calmly in the truck bed beside a plastic trashcan of mushy pears for the hogs at Turtle Island. There is fog on the ground and the road twists upward and dissolves between two hills covered in the last of fall foliage.
“Clear,” I reply.

*

I’m hunched down holding a locust log and he is bowed facing me, the adz flying in a close arc, taking away wood between his boots in clean golden scoops. The energy is startling, or maybe the thought that the slightest slip and that blade could be scooping into me. He stops and we stand up and let out a deep breath. A few chips have caught in my hair and on his blue wool shirt. The light is fading and there is a whiff of wood smoke. We heave the log into place.
Well past dark we finally quit and go inside, where it is dry and there is light and the warmth of a wood fire. At his table there is a large cast iron pan and under the lid, she tells us, is fried mushrooms and onions and pieces of hog fat. Eustace slaps his hands together and rubs them with the bright-eyed enthusiasm of a kid on Christmas morning. 
“Ol’ miss piggy. She was a fine hog!” We all smile with him. I hold his left hand and reach across the table with my right, and we bow our heads. “Thank you, thank you, thank you…”

*

In the morning the air inside is cool. I have let the fire go out. Eustace has a busy day of work, but I am leaving. The sun is not up, but I can just make out some of the artifacts: an old Laguna pot he traded some moccasins for, a large wooden tub with four handles all carved from one piece, full of clean, sharp hand tools, a gallon jar full of peppers, a very asymmetrical painting of a heart: red with finger swirls of blue. I can hear Eustace loading things into his truck and talking on his flip phone, briefing his guys on the day’s plans.
We are standing at his door. He is wearing that thick red sweater, and a silver braid rests on each of his shoulders. 
“I guess you’re leaving.”
I nod, and he furrows his brow, then a bright smile spreads over his face and he puts his arms out and wraps me in a hug, all wool and sawdust and forgiveness. I get in my truck and roll out, and there are the plastic signs, even more than yesterday. I try to imagine “Eustace Conway” signs, but all I can see is him, filling his doorway and smiling bright, with wood chips on his sweater and a full day of work ahead of him. We aren’t voting today, we have other plans.

Some of My Parts

By Lyndsay Ryor

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Stiff, silent, afraid, I lie on my back beside you as you undress me for the first time. You unfasten the button at my waist, pull down the zipper and slide my jeans down over my pudgy stomach and cellulite-dimpled thighs…

Her thighs look like cottage cheese, it’s disgusting. A woman’s voice cuts into my thoughts. My friend, Sarah, was judging another woman in the YMCA’s locker room. Because women judge as harshly, if not more harshly than men. I think she had a thigh gap. I didn’t go to the gym with her anymore after that.

               …now my carefully-shaven calves and finally my toes, gleaming with the fresh just-for-you pedicure I told myself was just-for-me. My tummy flattening jeans hit the floor…

Those stretch pants make her look like a can of biscuits that busted open at the seams, remarks Jared, the boyfriend of my friend, Jenn. I heard him say this about Steph, the Admin Assistant at the office job we all worked at. I laughed, but I thought I would look about the same in them. So would Jenn, for that matter.          

             …and so does my heart as you reach for my low-cut tank top; the one that clings nicely to my breasts, enhances cleavage, but fits more loosely around my stomach so my fat doesn’t bulge out in rolls…

Just roll her in flour and look for the wet spot, says my cousin, Jon. We were fourteen and he was talking to his creepy friend, Eugene, about the possibility of fucking the morbidly obese girl who lived in the trailer next door.

             …when I sit down. I lift up my back a little to assist, raise my arms above my head like my kids do when I help them undress.  You peel it off and it drops to the floor with my jeans. I arch my back a little as your hands slide around beneath to unclasp the underwire bra that lifts and separates my large, saggy breasts, creating an illusion of buoyancy and cleavage…

Her tits looked like tennis balls stuffed in nasty old stretched-out gym socks, says an entire chorus of men. I have heard that one many times, not referring to my own breasts, but those of some other woman whose tits failed to defy gravity and other laws of nature after pregnancy and nursing and weight gain and loss. Still I felt it.

             You remove the bra, drop it to the floor, and they sprawl out, nipples gravitating in the direction of my armpits. I try not to wince, I fail. You don’t notice or perhaps simply don’t acknowledge my discomfort; you have moved on to my lacy, black boyshort panties, chosen for how they ride up my ass, showing off my nice, round cheeks, but sit high enough to cover my stretchmark-riddled stomach…

It looks like a wrinkled up plastic grocery bag, says a voice from over two decades ago. Shane Granger, this trashy-hot skater guy I was sleeping with, wasn’t talking about me, but about some teen mom, named Regina, whom he slept with before. These are the words I hear when I try to imagine how men see my post-baby stomach.

             …and the horizontal six-inch welt beneath the flab that marks the place from which my second and third child emerged into this world.

It’s called a gunt. This voice is brought to me courtesy of an old friend and lover, Wayne, to describe the flap of extraneous skin that I did not have yet, but do now; a portmanteau of “gut and “cunt” coined by some clever asshole.

             You pull them off so very slowly, gently, and top off the pile of my armor you’ve made on the floor. This is the moment: the lights are on. Full disclosure. I wait for your reaction to my nakedness, watch your face for any number of expressions I have seen before, all variations on the same theme: disappointment and disgust. I want to say something in the way of apology or something funny to break the tension I feel, but my lips won’t move and I am holding my breath. I wonder if you wish you could put my clothes back on, like a rewind where everything moves backwards in double time until we reach the point when you first said you wanted to see me after all these years.

             You see me now. After all these years. You see how two decades have eroded the landscape of my body; replaced the smooth plains with wrinkles and creases and bulges and scars like a relief map of my life story carved into my flesh. 

             What you can’t see is how these years have italicized the script of our lovemaking. Italics to emphasize a narrative that refuses to be ignored. These are just the shallow thoughts, surface thoughts; other peoples’ voices I hear in my head. Friends, family, co-workers, strangers overheard at the gym. These phrases and others play like a cassette tape with auto-flip in my head. The one about the busted can of biscuits made me laugh because it was so apt and colorful a description, but I still hear it blaring in my head over the poppy dressing room elevator music when I try on clothes and get that “muffin top” effect of my fat spilling over the top of jeans that fit tight enough to make my ass look good. I often wish I could just grab a scalpel and excise the offending flab. Literally cut pieces off of myself so I can fit into a pair of jeans made for someone else.

            I still hear this script any time I think about my body, or when I am being undressed for the first time by someone who has fallen for my pretty face, my wit, my intelligence, my sense of humor… but has yet to see me without the smoke and mirrors of my well-chosen wardrobe. I wear dresses cut low in the cleavage, tight to the upper ribcage, but flowy beneath, as if to say look HERE, not here. Jeans with double-button waistbands for extra support to battle rolls of abdominal fat while still fitting tight to my more desirable curves. I wear T-shirts that fit snugly on my breasts, but avoid words across the chest because I hate how much of a joke it is that you can’t read them stretched over my DDs. I wear uncomfortable bras a size too small because the ones made for tits this big are always full coverage and ruin any chance of cleavage. Cleavage and a pretty face are what “allow” me to feel some semblance of physical beauty when I am carrying 50 extra pounds.

Physical shit can almost always be addressed, but a beautiful spirit you can’t manufacture.

             These are the words, your words, that first gave me a little bit of hope when I told you I was “crazy out of shape.” They were only words, typed on the keyboard of your phone into the Facebook messenger application, and of these kinds of words I have long been leery. Men have said many sweet things to me that they didn’t mean in this way because there is no eye contact, no body language to betray the lie. But I believed you, or I wanted to believe that my pretty face and big tits weren’t all you found beautiful about me. At the same time, since I take a hell of a flattering selfie, I wanted you to know that I wasn’t the same wiry hippie chick with bouncy tits you last saw almost two decades ago in Boston.

“Todd wasn’t the first, the last, or even the worst. He’s just the most vivid image, like some poster boy to validate my self-loathing.”

I remember the first time I saw you, at a Phish show in Chicago or Detroit or maybe Pennsylvania. I was walking through some hippie-infested, nitrous balloon-riddled parking garage by myself. I rounded a corner and there you were with your best friend, and we spotted each other at the same time. I just walked right up and introduced myself because you guys looked like two fellas I needed to know, and I guess you felt the same because we hung out the rest of that night and at every venue that tour, the three of us. You were both cool, but you were the finest boy I had ever seen, and I wanted you bad. I guess I almost had you, and it’s funny because we both remember kissing each other only once, but strangely I remembered kissing you in Boston, rolling around high as fuck on dope on some hotel room floor, while you remembered me kissing you at Mardi Gras. You conjured up an anecdote of my inebriated self; stepping right up to help myself to your lips and pushing this guy, Crackhead Dan, over into a trash can when he started talking smack. You don’t remember Boston, and New Orleans only stirs a foggy wisp of a memory for me. It’s like we just missed each other, I guess. You looked for me, you said, after that night, but I was gone. Well, I looked for you, too, but I didn’t find you until you popped up on Facebook almost two decades later and began laying that sweetness on me, all while I dropped subtle hints about how little I thought of myself. I was giving you an out before you were even in. It’s what I do.

             Maybe I underestimated you, but how could I not? I still hate the way I look naked, and that hatred has been reinforced by the men who came before you; the men who always came before me. Like that SoCal douchebag bassist named Todd. Plenty of men have shown disappointment in my body, but Todd is the one who keeps coming back to mind, all the sweet things he said to me when we were getting to know each other superimposed over the sweet things you’ve said to me and when you pull off my tank top, I remember his revulsion as he lifted my t-shirt to cum on my stomach… and promptly pushed it back down and came on my shirt instead. I never saw him or heard from him again after that, but the next day, some bitch posted something on his MySpace page, admonishing him for hooking up with fat chicks, to which he responded, “lol – no shit.” And that was nine years, forty pounds, and two kids ago.

             Todd wasn’t the first, the last, or even the worst. He’s just the most vivid image, like some poster boy to validate my self-loathing. He’s the reason I am searching your face for that deer-in-the-headlights look, but you give me no time to worry about that. You brush my hair away from my forehead, where it’s plastered by static cling, so I feel an electric crackle. Your blue eyes meet my brown ones and you smile, that grin of yours I love, the one that crinkles up the corners of your eyes. I exhale and the tension takes leave of my body. The breath I gulp is fresh and free of italics. I don’t wait for you to act; I pull you down for a kiss.

             You kiss me back. There’s passion in it, as if you are hungry for me, but I feel no urgency, so it seems you wish to devour me slowly. You straddle me, remove your shirt and lean down to kiss me on the forehead. Now each temple. The nose and cheeks and chin. And the throat, God the throat, where you pause for a taste of my pounding pulse, and whether it is fear or desire you taste, I don’t know. Perhaps the two are synonymous in me. You trail kisses across my collarbone and shoulders, and I shiver as the breeze from the open window touches the trail you leave. You find a nipple, kiss it, now my breastbone, now the other nipple, no mind to how far apart they lie. You kiss the beauty mark below my right breast, now down towards my tummy, a kiss for my navel and now, now you begin to kiss the places on my stomach that are puckered with iridescent, white skin, kissing all around my stomach, the places others have neglected, ignored, avoided, and I swear my blood turns to smoke in my veins as you kiss my caesarean scar and look directly into my eyes. Your message is as clear:

             “I see you, all of you, and I want you.”

             It seems like the men in my life only want certain pieces of me. They want the physical parts: tits, ass, mouth, vagina; or they want the emotional parts: understanding, comfort, friendship, loyalty – just not both types at the same time. I’m a salvage yard, where men are free to pick the parts they want and leave the rest. Like, “Hey, that chassis is in great shape, but the entire front end needs to be replaced.” Or, “I really just want those headlights.” And I allow it. I let men come at me like Doctor Fucking Frankenstein building the perfect patchwork pussy. Whether they’re looking for a mouth for their pleasure or a shoulder to cry on or hands to hold them through the heartbreak of some other, more perfect woman, I let them. I don’t know why I do. Because I am lonely, starved for affection? Is it because I hope it will evolve into something more? Or is it because I know it won’t and so then it will hurt just a little less when they leave me for someone with nicer parts?

             You caress my thighs, something I thought was just a romance novel cliché, but no, you run your hands up and down, slowly applying more and more pressure with your thumbs until I move them apart. You continue with the caresses, then they turn into kisses and then your lips and tongue find their way to the tiny center of my pleasure; one part that no one ever seems to want anything to do with unless it’s to stroke his ego. I am usually dead silent during sex, but an “Mmmmmm” escapes my lips, and you look up at me. I see the smile in your eyes and know this isn’t about your ego; my pleasure is yours. We are connected. I feel the tension leave my body all at once; my muscles relax. I can see clearly and I am present in this moment – with you. The pleasure intensifies, becomes almost unbearable. I try to push you away, but you won’t stop until my entire body shakes and erupts with my climax.  

             Never in the history of ever has anyone made this happen without explicit instructions or in less than five minutes, or even fifteen. Your skills are undeniable, but I think it’s also due to the sense of connection I feel with you, allowing me to abandon my insecurities and relax not just physically, but mentally because I believe you. I believe all the sweet words you have typed to me in these few weeks because your eyes, your face, your smile do not belie them. I believe you because you left the lights on, because you don’t look away from or skip the flawed places, because you pull me closer when others have pushed me away, and because you rest your head on my thigh and smile up at me like the cat who just swallowed the canary. I laugh when you ask me if that was good, as if you didn’t know. I run my fingers through your baby-fine hair until the trembling stops.

             When you leave the pillow of my thighs and pull off your boxers, I get ready for the next stage, because surely you’ll want your own satisfaction now, but you just curl up beside me, content to put your arm and leg over me and pull me close and squeeze me tight, and I notice now how very soft your skin is, softer than the underside of my arm, even. Soft hair, soft skin and soft, sweet words in my ear, you soothe me with security, and like Mulder from the X-Files, I want to believe. I want with all of my everything that you, once the cutest boy I had ever seen, that you, whom I never forgot over the course of two decades, that you, the best lover I have ever had, could truly love me. It seems possible, probable, even. As you hold me close, with an erection you seem in no big hurry to appease, my wandering emotions all come home to roost, and I realize that for once I know exactly how I feel.

             I have never been so scared in my life.

Dutch

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By Mickey Fisher

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I worked the morning shifts at my town’s only gas station in November of 2012, during a break from courses in my senior year at the University of New Hampshire. Nobody else seemed to want that shift, and I didn’t mind sleepwalking through the opening routines: turning on the lights, starting the pumps, making the coffee – one of our biggest sellers in the mornings. I had to brew six different flavors, and I usually sold the first cup before the last carafe was full.

It was on one of those mornings that a semi-regular came in. I never got his name, but I’ll call him Dutch, due to his hair – the color of hay – which fell over his head in a Dutch-boy cut. He hid his eyes behind big aviator glasses and hid the rest of his face behind a robust, well-kept beard. An old hippie, maybe. He was in his late forties, maybe early fifties. He came in every once in a while in the mornings; today it was for coffee and scratch tickets.

  “World’s gonna end next month,” he said, as I rung him up. “Mayans predicted it.” I didn’t know what he was looking for from me, so I stayed noncommittal. The way he said it made something go wrong in my gut, though. It was either the surety with which he spoke, like it was something that had already happened, a box score from last week’s game. Or maybe I was thrown because there was a kind of wistfulness in his voice. Like he couldn’t wait to see how it would all go down.

“As I got closer, I noticed that the passenger’s window – now pointing towards the sky – was shattered, little teeth of glass ringing its lip.”

I left the gas station job in December to go back to courses and a work-study position in UNH’s library, which I worked every Monday. I was on my way to one of those shifts, going north along NH 43 towards Durham, doing at least 50. It was a highway in the loosest sense of the term: a rough two-laner with gray guardrails thrown up wherever the land dipped down enough to justify their existence. The pavement was almost free of ice, and the snow on either side of the road was just starting to think about melting. It was 35 degrees, and by rights, the patch of black ice that was in front of the big white Colonial coming up on my left shouldn’t have existed.

My Volvo started drifting left when I hit the ice, carrying me into the oncoming lane. Someone reached into my guts and started tugging around as I watched the end of one of those guardrails approach the front of my car, like the blunt face of a hammer. It was about a hundred feet away from me, but that distance was closing at brutal speed.

I slid into the dirt driveway of the old Colonial and got some traction back, spraying cold clods over a sedan that was parked near the front door, but I didn’t get enough traction to avoid hitting the blue plastic newspaper mailbox. Its thin metal pole smacked against my door. Compact newspaper bundles, bound with rubber bands, flew up and out. I managed to straighten the car out and stopped about twenty feet short of the guardrail.

I let myself breathe and let go of the steering wheel. My hands were shaking. I sat there for a moment, thinking about how likely death would have been had someone been driving towards me in the oncoming lane as I lost control. Seemed likely. I made a cognizant effort to check both lanes – made absolutely sure that no one was coming – before slowly pulling back onto the road and to the opposite side’s shoulder, where I pulled over and parked. I got out of the car and headed back towards the house. Apologizing to the owners would give me some more time to let my hands shake from the cold instead of from my nerves.

The ice threatened to undo me again as I crossed the road; I had to walk slower than I would have preferred to, being on a highway and all. When I got to the driveway, I noticed the set of furrows that my tires had dug into the dirt, plus a set of tracks older than mine. I wasn’t the first one undone by the ice.

I picked the scattered newspapers up off the ground, darting around to catch the advertising flyers that had come loose from their pages before the wind blew them away. Once I collected the news, I went up to the front door, which was made of old wood and painted forest green, and knocked. My knuckles stung a bit from the impact. Silence. I hoped no one would answer. No one did. I laid the newspapers on the stone front step and started walking back to my car.

As I crossed Route 43 again, I noticed that my front driver’s side tire was going flat; it’d probably been punctured by the metal pole of the newspaper mailbox. I started to open my door so I could sit and give my parents a call, see if I could get a ride. As I did, though, I heard a motor growling. I couldn’t see it yet, but the car was coming from behind me, going the same direction I’d been going.

I closed the door and saw the car – a pickup, actually – coming down the road towards me. I started waving my hands above my head. There was no real way for me to warn the driver of what was coming, but I couldn’t think of anything else to do. Not that it mattered.

He was a good distance away from me when he hit the ice. The truck swerved around, its back end swinging in an arc from left to right, before it flipped over sideways and landed, driver’s side down, on the lawn of the Colonial.

            “Holy shit,” I said.

  No one else was coming, so I started to half-jog, half-slide towards the pickup, crossing the highway yet again. As I got closer, I noticed that the passenger’s window – now pointing towards the sky – was shattered, little teeth of glass ringing its lip. A man poked his head up and out of the cab through the space where the window used to be. He looked like a gopher sticking its head out of its hidey hole, seeing if the coast was clear. I recognized him immediately. Dutch looked unharmed.

“You ok?” I asked him.

            “Wow,” he said, and he brought his hands up to the lip of the window to try to pull himself out of the cab.

            “Just stay there, man, I don’t want you to cut your hands,” I told him. “I’m calling 911.”

The local fire department was not five minutes away, and I stayed with him until they got there. I kept having to tell Dutch to stay in the cab, because he kept trying to pull himself out. An ambulance and a fire truck arrived, and firemen helped Dutch out of his pickup. By this time, the elderly couple who lived in the house had come outside in their bathrobes, finally awoken by the truck beached on their frozen lawn. Dutch’s only wound was a little cut on the side of his palm. I don’t think he even needed stitches.

He puzzles me still. For as little as I knew the man (besides his claims regarding the world’s end), he never struck me as suicidal, or even like he was welcoming death. So I think that he was happy to have survived the accident on that December morning. But I sometimes wonder why. Had his perspective on the end of the world changed since he spoke to me about the Mayans? Was he now optimistic about the future? Or did he still believe that the end was coming at that point, and was he glad that he’d avoided missing out on the big show, scheduled for the 21st? What kind of weight did the accident carry for him, what kind of relief?

I saw Dutch a year or so after the accident at a Walmart. He didn’t recognize me.

One Book, One Burg

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by Garrett Zecker

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I searched my students’ eyes for recognition of a shared experience. “He enjoys the surprise on people’s faces when he tells them he’s a professor of American history,” I read of the Chinese-American protagonist in the opening pages of Celeste Ng’s Everything I Never Told You. “‘Well, I am an American,’ he says when people blink...” 

The One City, One Book model of community engagement is generally accepted as having started in 1998 in Seattle with Russell Banks’ The Sweet Hereafter. Many communities across the country have since found success in running such a program by creating a communal consciousness driven by one work and supported by inviting all citizens to read and participate in events, lectures, and discussions. Everyone is theoretically able to participate as physical, digital, and audiobooks are provided for free through grants, the public library, and public schools. While it isn’t meant to be a utopian lesson in social engagement, one can’t help but relish in the idea that everyone in the city might all have something in common for a brief period of time. 

I find it fascinating that programs like this exist at all. A recent Pew research study reported that twenty-four percent of American adults have not read a book in the last year. This includes print books, ebooks, audiobooks, any format of books available for consumption. Those with a high school education or less are five times less likely to have read a book (thirty-seven percent haven’t) in the past year than college graduates at any level (seven percent haven’t). In bringing together a community, in other words, organizers choose to come together with an activity that is only practiced by some of its members. In education, I can assign tasks to my students, but the same can’t be said about adults whose independent lives may not have room for the self-motivating, self-driven act of reading.  

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Everything I Never Told You is the third annual community read for one of the communities I teach in, Fitchburg, Massachusetts. It’s a precise debut novel about a young woman who is found dead (no spoiler, really - it’s the first sentence of the book) and the various ways in which secrets, regrets, resentments, and expectations can all interact like ripples in the lake of time to lead to the destruction of a life. It is about a mixed-race family and how difficult it is to exist when everything feels undermined by your otherness. The characters’ complex motivations seem to collide in every chapter and drive the audience to a conclusion that seems to guarantee no one will escape the terrible repercussions of the young girl’s death. In some ways, no one in this novel is particularly innocent of leading the teen to her destruction. 

As this was only the third year the library and the university have engaged the public in this manner, and since I know the limitations of the activity itself, I thought my students should invite their nonparticipant neighbors to engage even if they weren’t aware of it. Students read the book independently, and in class we’ve examined Ng’s themes of youth, otherness, and secrets. They’ve examined these themes within themselves and their lives through a series of journaling activities. Their next goal is to hold a mirror up to their unseen lives through film, music, art, dance, and sculpture. Their work will soon be displayed around the city, the art museum, windows, and projections, and open the doors to their lives through their medium. They will then exist outside themselves. They will be proud of what they bare because they have survived their own traumas. Perhaps those consuming their work decorating our city, even simply walking by, will see something in themselves. Maybe their own regrets will be transformed by the images and sounds of their city’s youth. Maybe their expectations of themselves will grow, and in turn, foster growth in their neighbors. All this without turning a single page, but experiencing deeply that those in our city are all ‘we’ and so few of us are ‘them.’

I tasked my students with opening the pages of the book – and their hearts – to everyone in Fitchburg. 

Edmund Wilson famously observed that “no two persons ever read the same book.” I wonder if he meant something other than the metacognitive act of reading, and that a community’s consumption of the written word is less about the text and more about the people. A book’s themes, after all, are universal truths. Finding new ways to interact with those truths and to welcome everyone to face and grapple with them in any way will make us more of a community.  An empathetic community.  I wanted them to learn that, when we seem to have so many differences, it’s time to ask a friend, acquaintance, or neighbor to join them in their experience. Not just with the text, but as citizens. As creators, collaborators, and expressers. As humans sharing everything they never told you. They’re inviting you to do the same.

Sormé

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By Mojgan Ghazirad

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It is called sormé in Farsi, the black soot that women use to magnify and beautify their eyes and face. You can name it eyeliner, but in reality, sormé does not “line” the eyes. It is used inside, on the inner pink rim that harbors the eyelashes.

I saw the sormé-dan, the jar containing sormé, first time in my grandfather’s pistachio robe. I was a curious little girl, eager to explore the gifts and gadgets he had brought from the Hajj Pilgrimage. The sormé-dan was a souvenir he’d bought from a salesman in Mecca’s Bazaar. It resembled a pocket watch, a tiny arrow jutting out from the twelve o’clock location. The picture of Mecca’s cubic shrine was engraved on one side of that brass jar and Medina’s emerald mosque on the other. He twisted the arrow and pulled the metal rod attached to the arrow out from the jar. The rod was blackened with sormé. He drew the rod against the back of my hand. A narrow black line marked the touch. Then he drew another line and a tiny little V of a flying bird emerged.  Then another V and another V and soon a flock of birds flew in the peach sky of my skin. He showed me how to apply sormé on the eyes. He separated the eyelid from the eyeball and carefully dabbed the inner rim with continuous soft strokes until the pink line surrendered to a black coat. He didn’t press the rod too hard, just a caressing, tender touch, enough to blacken the rim.

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Applying sormé is a delicate task. It’s scary when the sharp stick is aimed at the cornea. One wrong move and it can scratch the eye. But this is how women and men in my country have been applying sormé for thousands of years. If you don’t put your heart in it, you will make a mess of your face. Just like using charcoal on a snow-white blank paper, you have to be mindful of every line that you draw. Even the softest accidental stroke of the hand can fade the boldness of the lines. Just a tiny drop of that fine powder under the lower eyelid is enough to ruin the look of your face. And if you try to clean that betraying dot, it will seek revenge by leaving a tarry hue under the eye: never will the two eyes be the same again. This is the reason many women avoid sormé nowadays. It deserves the attention and delicacy our rushed world lacks.

My grandfather used sormé to heal his clouding eyes. He said, “Sormé sooyeh chasm ra ziyad mikonad.” It is considered by many a medicine more than a cosmetic in the East. Muslims say it was the tradition of Mohammad, the Prophet of Islam, to line eyes with sormé. They apply it during the month of Ramadan and on Eids to pursue the path of the Prophet. Egyptians believe the blackness surrounding the eyes shields them from the ominous rays of sunshine. Indians paint the newborns’ eyes to protect them from the “evil eye.” Persians believe it accentuates expressions of love. Somehow this supreme, black powder brings protection, treatment and affection for the ones who wear it. It has something to do with lining hope for a better future when it adorns the eyes.

I always wondered why Persians believe using sormé accentuates expressions of love. I used to apply the sormé and stare at my face in the tall mirror hanging in my bedroom. I had hard time believing the blackness added beauty to my eyes, though it did highlight them in the constellation of my face. The voiceless powder cried to be seen. Eyes grabbed immediate attention: “Seekers of beauty! Do not sail around and get lost!” Like a bright lighthouse in a deadly storm, the blackness pointed to the light that resided in the sea of inside. Is that why they said sormé accentuated expressions of love?

“We tread the bazaar, in awe of the colorful shawls dancing in the air and the layered spices that mound in gunny sacks in front of the stores.”

Persian poets love using sormé as a metaphor for light—in contrast to its stygian blackness. Naderpour, a contemporary poet, says in his Sun’s Sormé poem:

               I was the blind bird of the black forest,

               The whirling winds my sole companion.

               When the night bore down on me,

               I only asked for death in my sleep.

He pictures himself as a blind owl in a deep black forest, sunrays pricking him one early morning in his dark nest. He imagines the sunrays as rods containing sormé. The rods line his eyelids with light and bring back vision to his eyes:

               But it was your warm hands, dearest love,

               Your hand and your infinite fire,

               I was the blind bird of the black forest,

               You brought sight with your sun’s sormé.

In the love poems of Attar, the great mystic poet, winds bring dust from faraway lands, from the land of the beloved. Even a speck of dust from the beloved is a cure, those tiny particles she shakes from her cloak. The wind-brought dust becomes sormé, and makes him see the silhouette of the beloved:

               The dust that morning breeze

               Veers from her door to me,

               Is the sable sormé,

               That brightens the world in my eyes.

There is a secret when stones are crushed to dust. The stibnite or the sulfur compound of antimony is abundant in Iran. For three thousand years, Persians have pried tootiya—the stibnite—from the mountains near Isfahan and grinded the stone in tiny mortars to make the fine black powder. They believe when a stone is pulverized into powder, the idol of grandiosity is broken into tiny pieces of modesty. By applying the powder, the secret in the stones is released and the eyes able to see through the veil of ego. You can see what’s hidden from the eyes. Fables have it that Khosrow Parviz, the great king of the Sasanian Empire, possessed a special sormé that when he applied, he could see through the earth for almost a year.

But while sormé can bring light to the eyes, it can be a silencing sword for the throat. There is an adage in Farsi that says, if you swallow the sormé, you will lose your voice. Bidel, a mystic poet, sings this adage in a beautiful poem:

               My lute of hope is broken and I am silenced forever,

               Of all the colors, I wonder why sormé has stolen my voice.

Sormé is destined to guide one from the glitter in the eyes to the lilting throbs of the heart. But if you use it by mistake on your lips, you will diverge into a dead-end, a hushed-voice chamber, rather than into flowing songs of love. 

~~~

I take my little girl to Tehran’s Grand Bazaar. We come out of the Jameh Mosque after the prayer. This is the first time I have taken her with me to the mosque, and I want to show her how Muslims pray together in Iran. Raised in America, she has never prayed in a mass. She likes the flowers woven in the rugs. She thinks it is poetic that we caress the flowers with our foreheads while we genuflect during the prayer. We tread the bazaar, in awe of the colorful shawls dancing in the air and the layered spices that mound in gunny sacks in front of the stores. We pass a tiny turnery that has hundreds of wooden handicrafts. Every little object in the store is embellished with patterns of petals and twisted twigs. She likes the colors and configurations of the crafts. She pulls me into the turnery and points to a bulb-like jar. “What’s that?” she asks.

The old salesman brushes his grizzled beard and puts the azure-colored jar on the counter. A sharp arrow is pointing to the sky from its narrow neck. Tiny flowers entangled in each other, ornate the surface of the jar. “It’s a sormé-dan, little lady,” the salesman says to my girl. He pulls the arrow out from the jar and a thin blackened applicator appears.

“What’s this for?” she asks. I have never told her the story of sormé. I have abandoned using it since I came to America. The old antimony stone is long forgotten in the mountains of Iran.

The salesman asks for my girl’s hand. She looks at me and I nod. She places her hand on the counter and the old man nears the applicator to the dorsum of her hand. A black line appears. He dips the rod back into the jar and strokes her hand with a soft touch again and again. The magical flock of birds appears on the peach sky of her hand. She smiles. She wants the azure jar. The old man reveals the secret of sormé: the medicine, the evil-eye catcher, the beautifier, the eyeliner, the illuminator, the heart’s pathfinder. He says it accentuates expressions of love, and smiles. He keeps the love-emphasizer for the last. She stares at him with her large, beautiful black eyes. She has hard time believing the old man.

He wraps the sormé-dan in a parchment paper and puts it in a brown bag. He puts two vials of stibnite powder tightened with a cork in the bag and hands it to me. His fingertips have tainted black from handling the vials. He has sormé in his eyes like my grandfather. I wonder if he has visited Mecca and seen the thousands of men who apply sormé after the Hajj Pilgrimage.

We swing back to the bazaar. White pillars of light descend from the domes’ circular openings. Tiny black dust particles dance in the light, twirling up to the dome. Maybe a young lover has passed these narrow alleys and the sudden breeze has swept dust into the bazaar. Maybe the beloved has shaken her cloak near the old wooden gate.

Sunshine stings our eyes as soon as we come out. My little girl squints and tries to find her love-shaped sunglasses in her strapped handbag. Doves fly to and from the mosque’s dome in flocks of thousands. She sails her hands in the air like the doves. The black Vs on her hand merge with the birds in the sky. “Mommy, have you ever put sormé in your eyes?”

I smile and I nod.

They say sormé accentuates expressions of love. It’s the secret pathway to the heart.

Faculty Pick

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Arctic Dreams: Imagination and Desire in a Northern Landscape by Barry Lopez

Richard Adams Carey - There are books that you enjoy and admire, and then books that you so enjoy and admire that you take them into your bones, and their phrases and themes become part of your own DNA as a writer and storyteller.

Such a book for me was Barry Lopez’s “Arctic Dreams: Imagination and Desire in a Northern Landscape.” Published in 1986, the work is a steaming broth of travel, history, folklore, ecology, and philosophy, its subject matter a part of the world as big as China, no more populous than Seattle, and as remote to most of us as the moon.

The impressions of European, Russian, and American explorers in the Arctic are quoted liberally, but Lopez—radically for that time—gave equal or greater weight to the oral histories and belief systems of the Inuit and Yupik peoples he moved among. He is particularly eloquent on what Western explorers called “the native eye,” that nearly occult sensitivity to the nuances of sky, water, landscape, and wildlife behavior that has been lost to Westerners since, more or less, the Agricultural Revolution.

Lopez’s knowledge of and respect for that other mode of being and this other-worldly geography was rocket fuel for me as I researched and wrote my first book, “Raven’s Children,” about the life and struggles of an Alaskan Yupik family. Lopez’s empathy for all things human, along with the grace and precision of his language, inspire me to this day.

 

My Church

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By Zachary Scott

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Have you ever seen the sun as it breaks the horizon and rises over the ocean?

Have you ever looked down from a mountaintop, surveyed the bustling life on the lake just beyond the sea of green treetops, all the while knowing that you’re merely a spec, a blip in the timeline of Earth’s long life?

Have you ever witnessed the messy glory of childbirth?

Or, conversely, have you ever wept silently in the corner of a room, watching as someone who witnessed your first breath breathes her last—your heart broken, your spirit overwhelmed with awe?

Have you ever stood naked, chest deep in a river, churning into a torrent as the skies open into a downpour? Have you felt the current rush around you, your body the rock refusing to erode as Mother Nature washes away your sin, baptizing you, again?

Have you ever sat, still, in a moonlit sanctuary beneath the cross, and even there not felt alone?

Have you ever bared your soul, allowed yourself to be vulnerable, expressed your deepest fears, your greatest challenges—only to be swept away by love, support, understanding?

Have you ever dared to ask the universe for something—anything really—and then receive it?

Or, perhaps, you were denied your request, but found yourself stumbling into something far greater than you would have ever been courageous enough to ask for?

Have you ever experienced love at first sight?

Have you ever felt, in an instant, a molecular connection to another person—to a person you seemingly have nothing in common with, a person who lives their life in a manner completely different from your own?

Have you ever forged a new family? Out of strife? Out of shared goals? Common ground? Over rich coffee or copious amounts of alcohol? Out of a desire for a deeper connection to the planet? To fellow humankind? Out of a calling to be the voice of the future? A voice of the present?

If so, you’ve been to my church.

*

“God hates sin. He hates sinners. If you don’t change, you’re going to Hell. But, the good news is that all you have to do is admit your sins and ask for his forgiveness, and stop being gay, and he will forgive you. It breaks his heart when people sin and refuse to turn away from them.”

My best friend’s girlfriend said that to me shortly before he moved halfway across the country to live with her and her cult-like, hardline, neo-evangelistic family. They were the ones who actually believed that nuclear war would soon be breaking out – and I don’t mean in a few years or decades, they believed it was immanent – and that God’s reckoning was soon to be upon us.

I didn’t really stay in touch with my best friend for a while after that. He had been among the first to whom I’d come out to, and he was overwhelmingly supportive. We went to our last semi-formal dance together because he thought I should be able to go with a guy after having come out. Then he met her and was smitten and followed her to the Midwest. It’s okay, though, he realized her flavor of crazy, we’ve reconnected. And though he lives even further away, we keep in touch, and he’s got a beautiful, sane wife, and an adorable baby.

After being informed of my sinful, God-angering nature, I swore off religion. I swore off God. To be clear, I hadn’t been raised in a church-going household, but I’d been taught about heaven, and believed that there was a God. I buried any questions I had about the Divine. I refused to accept that there existed an all-powerful deity who created humans as they were, but then dared to condemn them for their innate, hardwired, feelings. Shortly thereafter I began to read the Bible. If I was going to do battle, it was best to know the playbook my enemies were using.

That came in handy when I was able to argue, in a tiered classroom, looming angrily in my semi-agnostic liberal glory, a row above the strange little woman who lived with her grandmother and believed that because of Leviticus 18:22, homosexuality was a sin and same sex marriage should not be allowed or recognized by our government, that Leviticus also condemned the cotton-poly blend she was wearing that day. When someone had a scriptural argument to hurl against the sin that was an inherent part of my being, I was prepared and willing to leap to my feet with evidence from the same book that refuted the claim they raised.

The funny thing about reading something so often is that you eventually stop reading it as just a manifesto of your enemy, and more for what it is. You begin to find comfort and inspiration in the words on the page. Jesus may have been angry at times, but he was righteous in his anger against injustice. He ate with sinners and outcasts. He lived with and loved those whom society had forgotten about or condemned. Yeah, sure, he flipped tables that one time, but his anger was never ignited by who someone loved, or the color of their skin, or the gender they identified with. He called out hypocrisy. He called out judgement. He called out hatred and apathy and violence. His followers did so because he was preaching a message of radical love and acceptance. His mother trusted that God had plans for her son, and she followed and supported him because she saw that light shine from within him. She made the sacrifice of standing aside as he made his own sacrifice for us – if the story of his life teaches anything, it’s that love reigns in the kingdom of heaven, and that we ought to make it reign here on earth.

A few years after that inciting incident, I found my way to Buffalo, New York, and to a religious studies class. My eyes opened more to the world of spirituality, and my heart swelled with the desire to better know God. I studied what I could of the religions of the world, finding myself drawn to the teachings of Buddhism, Hinduism, and the radical world of progressive Christianity – the ones who actually strive to live the teachings of Christ. I prayed with an Indian student at a Hindu temple, asking Lord Ganesh to help keep my heart pure and focused, and to remove the obstacles that held my prayer hostage. I lit candles to the Holy Mother, asking for intercession at the minor basilica in the city. By the time we moved home from Buffalo, my husband (then boyfriend) and I had been regular attendees of the Pilgrim-St. Luke & el Camino Nuevo United Church of Christ in our intensely diverse neighborhood.

Home, in northeastern New York, I spent nearly six years studying on my own, attending yoga classes, falling in and out of regular prayer and spiritual practice. Something was missing from my life, and it wasn’t a mystery. After finishing my undergrad and applying to Southern New Hampshire University’s Master of Fine Arts program, I made the eleventh-hour decision to attend seminary instead. Chicago Theological had an online Master of Divinity program that would lead to ordination, and I was convinced that this was the only way to effectively study religion, and further convinced that I was being called to lead a congregation as its pastor. To this day, my semester at CTS remains one of the most invigorating times of my life – ten thousand dollars well spent.

“I make no attempt to hide my sexuality. I try and fail to control my trucker’s mouth. I pierced my nose, rock hipster haircuts with vintage-inspired glasses, brandish my tattoos with pride, and never try to fit into a heteronormative, binary idea of masculinity.”

It was during my single, formative semester at CTS that I began to regularly attend the First Presbyterian Church of Hudson Falls. It had been the home church of my maternal great-grandmother, Clara, and I had been swept away by the kindness of the young, bearded pastor as he prayed with the family during her final hours. The reception, held in the fellowship hall after her funeral, was further divine interference, as kind members of the congregation welcomed and consoled our family, and especially when two white haired women took my hand in theirs and emphatically insisted that my grandmother had spoken sweetly of my husband and me, and that we were truly welcome to visit them whenever we wanted. So, a year later, deep into my first and only semester of seminary, I met with Michael, the pastor, over beer and hard cider at a local brewery to discuss what being a Presbyterian was all about.

As I write this, I am entering the final year of my first term as a Ruling Elder and member of Session – the governing body of the congregation, nominated by committee and approved by congregational vote. Michael and his wife, Lauren, are among my dearest friends, and I’ve become completely immersed in the family that is this congregation. I was not wrong when I thought that I heard the call of God to religious leadership, I just got off at the wrong exit. We are a truly welcoming community. Everywhere you look, churches are hanging banners that read, “all are welcome,” but their theology and practice don’t reflect that message. I often comment that I want a banner of our own that reads, “all are welcome, and we really mean it.”

I make no attempt to hide my sexuality. I try and fail to control my trucker’s mouth. I pierced my nose, rock hipster haircuts with vintage-inspired glasses, brandish my tattoos with pride, and never try to fit into a heteronormative, binary idea of masculinity. I am open about my increasingly liberal ideologies (which became even more liberal during seminary) and share my excitement and passion with pride. When I fall on my face, there are dozens of people to pick me up. I have shared my journey with them, and they’ve embraced it as wholly a part of me. I have spoken plainly about my struggles with depression and anxiety and have been dragged from the brink by these people who refuse to love with any less than their whole hearts. Together we work to make our community a safer, healthier place full of abundant welcome and acceptance. What’s more, my belief that creating that kind of loving energy and sending it into the universe will have a tremendous butterfly effect, and will return to us all, is respected and shared by many.

I have asked the universe and I have received. Sometimes it’s not quite what I was expecting, and sometimes I am refused what I first asked for, only to receive what I truly needed. But I trust that the Divine has guided me to where I am and will continue to do so. The angry and frightened eighteen-year-old, whose best-friend’s crazy girlfriend insisted he would burn in hell, would not have believed that he would someday be a thirty-year-old professor, Christian leader, writer, uncle, and husband. My journey has been one of hills and valleys, and there will be more to come. But faith is not easy. Trust in something all-powerful and beyond adequate description with words is not easy. Willingness to bare your soul, show your bruises and scars, along with the moments of celebration, is not easy. Nevertheless, in my church, I’ve found the support that guides me through all those difficulties. Tonight, I will read more about my chakras. Tomorrow, during my lunch break, I will read more from the Upanishads. Sunday morning, I will prepare communion, welcome back my friend from sabbatical and help him lead worship. Next Thursday, I will teach my students how to write effectively, and discuss gender issues in our society, and then attend the monthly meeting of the Session, where we will worship and prayerfully make the decisions and do the business of leading our congregation forward into the bright, bright future.