Essay Daily: Talk About the Essay

Saturday, January 4, 2020

What Happened on 12/21/19: Andrew Maynard, Susan Olding, Emma Thomason, Casey McConahay, Ann Beman

On 12/21/19, we invited writers and readers to write about "What Happened" that day, however they interpreted it, as an exercise in mass attention, and promised to publish as many of the resulting essays as possible. So here we go! For more details and a full list of the contributors, click the What Happened page.

ANDREW MAYNARD

Back to the Desert (Again)

December 21, 2019: The shortest day of the longest year. It’s dark when I materialize in the stone-gray neighborhood that neither I nor anyone else could possibly recognize. Delirious, I pull my car over to rest a few moments on a lone bench centered in a stranger’s cartoonish, Burton-esque front lawn. I lay my head down for a moment and then wake to find that my vehicle has vanished. I shed a blanket (?) and get up to search the neighborhood only to discover that I am now inside the stranger’s house, trespassing. Stifled, my heart rate nevertheless amplifies as I clumsily tiptoe across the wooden floor, searching for an exit. Halfway to the front door, my surroundings come into focus: I’m in my dear friend Jason’s Santa Monica apartment, halfway from San Francisco to Phoenix, where he is asleep in bed with his husband, possibly dreaming, but not like this illusion bleeding into reality. It’s 3 a.m., so I fall back asleep on the couch, a mere ten days away from making it an entire year without one of these episodes, and now the clock resets to zero.

The drive: I toss my bag into the Honda Odyssey mini van that used to be my grandpa’s, make a quick stop for gas station coffee, and begin the second leg of the drive. I’ve made the 800-mile trip over 20 times now, and this is the part—shitty Los Angeles roads and traffic—I still dread most. All I have is radio, so top 40 it is. Taylor Swift is in love. A woman takes her new man on a hometown visit and warns him that her family fits neatly into stereotypes and will also be sad when they inevitably split. Selena Gomez hums about the streaky highs and lows of loving/losing Bieber. In 2019 my grandpa lost his second of two sons in as many years. He sold the house in Huntsville, Alabama, where he raised his children. He bounced between Phoenix and Tuscaloosa with his wife who has no idea who she is anymore, staying with their daughters, stretching out their timeline while others’ were cut unexpectedly short. Cancer. A sledding accident.
Rows of windmills signify that the never-ending city is behind me, so I put my phone on my lap, tap speaker, and call my sister in Oregon. She tells me about her recent trip to Phoenix and the kids nature journal she’s launching, and then my nephew chimes in to warn her that she has forgotten to put a pot beneath the coffee she’s brewing which is now spilling on the counter.
I pass the marker in Indio where my recently rebuilt Subaru engine threw a rod earlier this year, coincidentally on Coachella weekend, which then spiraled into a series of unfortunate events where I had to get an expensive tow to an auto shop a mere three miles away because you can’t U-turn on the I-10; where the kind garage owner told me about a BBQ restaurant in Phoenix he heard was worth the trip as he drove my dog and me out of his way to the Palm Springs airport so I could rent a car; where I couldn’t rent a car because my credit card had recently cancelled due to fraud protection; and where I waited, dog at my feet, for four hours for my dad to pick me up and take me home to Phoenix. Later that week I returned with a bag of BBQ and a signed title to my car to give the garage owner. He smiled big and shook my hand, and I left.
I pass the truck stop just outside of Blythe where I pulled my Tacoma over five years ago. With a U-Haul in-tow, I was 12 hours into the drive back to Phoenix to get settled after the girl I loved told me we were done. Delirious and hopped up on coffee and my first 5-hour Energy, I tried to take a nap that turned into what I now think was probably a panic attack, before I walked circles around the 18-wheelers, mustering the steam to continue.
I cross into Arizona and pull over for the first time in Quartsize to fill my car with the cheaper gas and Wendy’s. The speed limit increases and I put on “Pod Save America” to hear what I missed in the recent Presidential debate. Apparently it was a positive showing by all. Biden didn’t ramble. Warren called out a wine cave without adequately framing her point, leaving room for Mayor Pete’s to rebut as an outsider who is younger, gayer, and poorer than the other candidates. Booker is gone, but hopefully not for long. Harris has left. Yang dispels the myth of grassroots in politics and opts to fix it with monthly checks. Klobuchar reminds Pete that experience isn’t synonymous with poison and that he did not in fact win Indiana. Some rich guy has bought access to the stage. My 7th grade students spent the past month writing essays on the American dream, using Pursuit of Happyness, Monster, and James Baldwin’s debate with William F. Buckley to counter the illusion of equal access in America. We workshopped and revised our essays to distance ourselves from moments of victory in favor of cutting toward discovery, possibly truth. These debates are best when they do the same.
I’m about 800 miles into the journey as I turn onto my mother’s street. I breathe relief that the Honda Odyssey has arrived intact, confirming my newest theory: there are two types of people, those who love minivans and those who have never owned one. I am 31 years old, single, no kids.
My mom greets me at the door and I say hello to my brother as I rush to the bathroom. My coonhound/pointer mix, River, paws at the back door. When they let her in she runs straight to my bag and sniffs it clean before trying to break down the bathroom door while I piss. When I open the door she smothers me, bouncing, nails clicking on the wood, forcing her face into my chest as if trying to crawl inside me. She’s been staying with family while I try to figure out a new living situation in San Francisco to bring her back. She sits at my feet while my brother’s wife and baby, my father, and my nephew who now has pink hair arrive to sit and chat in the living room for an hour or so before I leash up River and head to the mountains.

The run: I’ve run about 1100 miles this year, but, nursing a sprained ankle after belly-flopping last month down Mt. Tamalpais in the middle of a 50k, my strides feel clunky on the trails. I haven’t taken a running step in five weeks. River jogs at my side, panting, also working her way back into shape. After a quarter mile of flattish terrain, we start the ascent up Shaw Butte. We’d probably be better off acclimating on something paved and steady, but it’s the mountain trails we fell in love with in Marin County that have made the absence hurt most, so here we are. I have headphones in but no music. I want to hear our pants, focus on the technical, rock-studded trails, and give my ankle some attention, at least at first. Our jog devolves into a quick-footed, hunched-over power hike as the grade steepens. In towns with real winters, landscapes are covered in snow and ice and sleet but not here. In Phoenix, this is when the desert is most alive.
In the spring River and I could knock out 10 miles of trail without much problem. On days we couldn’t leave the city, I drove after work to Ocean Beach, dark and empty, and we ran north from Sloat until the beach quit, guided by the rising tide and moonlight bouncing on the water. She looks exhausted when we reach the summit, so I remind myself to take it easy going down the backside because I know she loves this too much; she’d likely run herself to death before stopping. On the downhill the quads engage as I brake lightly. When we pass a woman walking her lab, I pull River to the far side of the trail anticipating her lunge. She’s like her dad: when she feels restraint, she pulls harder.
I’m tired too. I have a 100-kilometer race through the Black Canyon in February that it’s hard to imagine being ready for as I struggle after a mere two miles. I turn Joan Jett’s “Bad Reputation” on repeat, not because it kicks, which it does, but because I need to learn the drums for it in the next few weeks to play at my middle school’s student concert because I am very bad at saying no. I’ve long pictured myself teaching writing at a University, but the longer I teach middle school the harder it is to picture leaving. Things I never imagined doing have now become nonnegotiable parts of my future: playing drums in punk bands with kids trying on rebellion to see how it fits, instructing snickering kids how to poop outdoors on backpacking trips through the Sierras, helping a 4th grader create a board game that helps you fall asleep for her Academic Pursuit project, integrating koosh balls into my advisory as many mornings as possible, proctoring middle school dances and jogging to Target in the rain to find the kids who ditched. Like everything else in my life, longevity translates to essentiality. But I’ve quit and been quit on before—this may just be an illusion. The song plays over and over until River and I are back at the van. Four miles. The top of the sun disappears as we leave.

The game: My brother asks me last minute if I’d like to catch the Suns vs. Rockets game. We find tickets online as we drive downtown in his minivan and make it inside the stadium just a few minutes after tip-off. We’re in the nosebleeds. A twenty-something-year-old Rockets fan a few rows over shout-narrates every play. Not ten years ago my brother and I would have taken this as a challenge, talked shit back, and made a point of shutting him up, but not anymore. My brother’s a dad now and I’ve settled with age. My brother carries the type of demons that make it so, depending on the week, he’s either my favorite or least favorite person to sit next to. Today it’s the former. I’m grateful, with the caveat and long history of evidence to know that tomorrow could be different.
James Harden is lighting us the fuck up. I remember watching him at Arizona State. A smooth, subdued ball handler who could methodically pick apart a defense. I followed as he evolved into the Sixth Man of the Year that gladly played third fiddle to Westbrook and Durant in Oklahoma City, overlooked and eventually — mistakenly — traded. Now he’s the most lethal offensive player in the world. He’s high usage, a one-man team. He became what the Rockets needed to be, and I admire that. However he’s incredibly irritating to watch play my team. Unlike the lower bowl of the stadium, the upper rows are stacked steep. It’s easy to picture yourself tilting forward and falling the long way down.
After the loss we sit in traffic as thousands of cars bottleneck through construction in downtown Phoenix. I ask about our nephew who’s a freshman in college. In addition to his new pink hair, his voice has changed since starting hormones a few months ago. He’s getting ready to have top surgery a week from now, and my brother and I talk about how glad we are that he didn’t go to school in Tucson when we did. I remember how fraternity dudes struggled to not use the N word anymore after SAE accepted its first black pledge. How they wouldn’t have considered letting a gay guy in because it’d just be weird for all the other brothers. My night is not over. I’ll get dropped off at my mom’s, and she and I will watch Eddie Murphy host SNL until we fall asleep on parallel sofas. But let’s stop here, zoomed in on my nephew who is proof that, as the days get longer and the nights shorten, as we rapidly approach a new year with the potential for massive shifts in politics and self, it is possible to change into the person you were always supposed to be.

Andrew Maynard teaches 7th-grade English in San Francisco, and he has taught creative writing at the University of San Francisco and San Quentin Prison. His essays have appeared in Essay Daily, True Story, DIAGRAM, Mud Season Review, Switchback, and elsewhere.

SUSAN OLDING

The sun doesn’t rise until 8:05 a.m.

No. The sun does not show itself at all.

It’s the third, or maybe the fourth or fifth or fifteenth day of incessant rain in Vancouver, and the darkest day of the year, and we can’t even start lighting Chanukah candles until tomorrow.

I’m grumpy, tired, fighting a stubborn virus. I sit in our sunroom listening to the drip and patter of the rain. I don’t do the many chores I’ve planned to do.

The world doesn’t end.

At least, it doesn’t end for me. It ends for countless others.

Some, not far from here, where the rain is snow and highways are closed under threat of avalanche. Some on the continent of India, in protests against a divisive and discriminatory new citizenship act. Some in another hemisphere, where winter is summer and a hundred bush fires sweep the skies of New South Wales.

In Vancouver, night begins at 4:15 p.m.

Around 7, I put on a sequinned top and head for a friend’s party. At the table, we break hunks of bread from a warm baguette and eat it with crumbly cheddar or creamy St. André. We drink red wine. We talk. Our voices swell loud and louder.

What would you see if you stared through the fogged-up window? Wild kaleidoscope. Asian, South Asian, white, mixed race, we are as old as seventy-five and as young as one. Female, male, and trans; queer and straight. Some of us wear beards, some wear braids. Many of us sparkle. Eight-year-old Priya takes the prize, head-to-toe in shimmering red.

At around 9, we start to sing. We sing popular Christmas tunes and traditional carols. Few of us know all the words. Some grew up in Christian homes. Others are atheists, Muslims, Hindus, Jews. We read along to print-outs, fumble, laugh. Our voices falter or break. The teens experiment with harmonies while the toddlers stomp and clap. Dandy the dog paces the room, wagging his tail at those who still hold plates of food.

Outside, rain continues to fall. It runs in rivulets from the branches of the hemlocks and cedars and firs. The waning moon hides behind the clouds. It casts no light. But this has been the shortest and the darkest day. Tomorrow, the sun will rise at 8:06 a.m. Even if it doesn’t show its face.

Susan Olding is the author of Pathologies: A Life in Essays. Her poetry and prose have appeared widely in literary journals and anthologies throughout Canada and the U.S. Her second collection of essays is forthcoming in 2021.

EMMA THOMASON

1. This is the moment I hold onto most days: It is 3 or 3:30 in the morning, sometimes 4, when Ian gets home from closing one of the bars he works at. I am a light sleeper, so most nights, I rouse at the sound of his key freeing the deadbolt, the door creaking open. I hold consciousness long enough for him to come into the bedroom, kiss me on the forehead, and whisper that he’ll try to come to bed soon. Most days, by the time he’s shut the bedroom door, I am already gone again, drifting elsewhere. This morning, I make a mental note to remember the way he smells: vaguely smoky, vaguely alcoholic, both scents unspecific. I hear him sit down on the couch and begin to unlace his boots, before falling to sleep again.

2. It is mid-morning when I re-wake. Ian sleeps next to me, open-mouthed, and I whisper-walk out of the bedroom before shutting him inside. I wash my face. I hear our mailman opening our front gate and silently race him to the door to prevent his ringing our violently loud doorbell. Emma! You surprised me. I laugh. He hands me the box.

The package is a box of all black clothing. I have recently started serving at a restaurant downtown and the uniform is simple: Solid, all black, few restrictions. I feel freed by this. I contemplate shifting my entire wardrobe to black, like I did for a bit at the end of high school and start of college. I wonder if this would make getting dressed in the morning easier, if it would help me to think less about my body, if it would make me feel more confident, more put together. It would be a choice to match black with black each morning, my choice, as well as a utility.

I try on the pants. They are a size too large, but I decide to wear them for a walk to test them out anyways. I have a tendency to buy clothes that are ill-fitting, always on the too-large side. I am still adjusting to buying somewhat smaller clothing after losing some weight this year, and I still prefer for all of my clothes to hover around my body, as opposed to press against it. Though, with pants, too big often means they sag in the ass, they lose their shape, causing even the most expensive and well-made pairs to lack neatness.

I walk downtown. It is a bright December day in Tucson and the sun presses against my back as I move. It is the kind of morning I remember liking best as a kid. Crisp but bright, next to no wind, with the sun warm enough to be comfortable without causing me to break a sweat. I call my mom. Recently, I made the decision not to go home for the holiday. This, partially, is out of convenience, but primarily, about control. I did not want to travel, especially for a short time. I wanted to stay behind in the Tucson quiet and work on my current manuscript. So, I chose not to go anywhere, which also feels like a choice to not celebrate the coming holiday. It will be my first Christmas spent away from my childhood home, away from my family, primarily alone. On the phone, we talk about the weather. We talk about my mother’s dog. We talk about the pants I bought, which leads to a brief conversation about the restaurant. My mom doesn’t understand why I want to work there, or why I want to have another job at all. Mostly, she thinks it is about money, or that I am lying, in some way, about my life here.

I explain why I want to work in the restaurant in the same way I explain my writing: with a disclaimer. I underscore the conversation with an upbeat, cheery tone, use words that imply I’m just doing this for fun, and temporarily, before returning to the “real” things I do: teach, work in academic administration, get the oil changed in my car on time, eat healthy, exercise. I talk about writing and serving as if they are hobbies, or my version of taking a break, but what I want to say is that I write and I wait tables to slow down time. They are, to me, the only things that keep me from thinking.

3. I get home at 11:40. Ian is still sleeping; we were meant to go out for breakfast this morning, but he is sick. Instead, I put on a load of laundry so that he will have a clean towel to shower with before returning to work this evening. I wait. I try to play Stardew Valley. I try to play Untitled Goose Game. I try to re-watch the first episode of Sharp Objects. I can’t seem to focus on any of these. Depression is strange in the way it creeps through otherwise normal moments in otherwise normal days and stalls me. I want to crawl into bed, to sleep and sleep and sleep, but I know that if I do this now, I will do nothing else for the coming two weeks. I will not meet my writing deadlines. I will not cook or eat enough or exercise or bathe. I will put even more strain on my relationship with Ian. Instead, I decide to clean.

4. The laundry isn’t done at 2pm, despite nearly 3 hours having passed. Shitty drier. I read a cookbook by Matty Matheson to kill time. I’ve been watching his Youtube videos when I am alone at night and cannot focus on anything longer. I make Ian tea and set it next to his sleeping body. I think about what we might do together if we were ever both well and awake. I wonder if we have ever both been well and awake at the same time.

5. I try to make coconut rice in the instant pot. I torture myself with this task occasionally. I love coconut rice, and it should be so easy to make, but this time, like the previous few, before the pot can get to pressure, there is a loud beeping and the screen shouts in all red: BURN. I release the pressure and pour the semi cooked rice sludge into a normal pot. I heat it over the stove and end up with a risotto-like, coconut-heavy goop. It tastes alright. I make a note to try again another day, perhaps solely on the stovetop next time.

6. When it is 4pm, I try to wake up Ian. He doesn’t flinch, so I fold the laundry and resolve to try again later. I try to wake up Ian again. He finally gets up around 4:45, and I finish folding the laundry while he showers.

7. I think: I am supposed to be writing. I am supposed to be writing. I am supposed to be writing.

8. I drive Ian to work at around 5:20, to save him from walking in the cold when he is already under the weather. On the way home, I stop at Walgreens. I walk with headphones on through the aisles. I pick up offbrand Dayquil & Nyquil, Kleenex, some La Croix, a Gatorade, and a small bag of Doritos. In the car, on the way home, a song comes on that makes me feel deeply and inexplicably sad, so I cry and I cry and I cry.

9. At home, I think about the last essay I wrote for this project, on June 21, 2018. I think about how it was a week prior to my moving to Tucson, alone. How I wasn’t yet in graduate school and was scared of what was to come. How I didn’t know then that there would be a full year of waiting and wanting and hoping prior to Ian moving out here to join me. How I hadn’t even begun thinking about the book I’m now working on. There are so many things, since that day, that have gone right. And yet, so much still aches the same.

Before bed, I try to meet my writing goal. I aim for one hour a day. I am trying to finish 100 pages of the manuscript I’m working on by mid-January. Some days, I am excited by my current project. Some days, I am terrified of the work of it. Today, I am tired. When I reach almost one hour, and have hit just over 700 new words, I sit for a moment in silence, before texting Ian to say goodnight. I take off the new black pants and, having decided that they are definitely too big, reattach their tags. I put them back in their box, decide to print the return label and deal with the rest of the process tomorrow, and get in bed.

10. I fall asleep after the 21st has ended listening to the hum of the heater and the yowl of a teenage male yard cat looking for a female in heat.

Emma Thomason has a human body stationed on earth and a mind that is often elsewhere entirely.

CASEY MCCONAHAY

Pleasure Horses

My grandmother owns horses. She is too old and too weak to take care of them, and she seldom goes to her barn anymore—seldom stumbles through ice and snow or through the cruel winter winds that blow through vast, barren fields.
Seven years ago, she fell in the horse barn, and she injured her leg. She crawled through the yard and somehow crawled to her home, and she called my father, who came to help her. Her clothes streaked with horse manure, my father carried her to his vehicle, and he took her to the emergency room. It was an unseasonably warm day in January, and when my father went home, he decided to do some work in our barn. He had a heart attack that afternoon, and he died in what had once been our horse pasture.

My grandmother has a mare and a gelding. The mare’s name is Maddie. The gelding we called Gelding, but some time ago, when I suggested that he be given a real name, my grandmother told me that she’d chosen a name already.
—His name is Red, she explained.
My uncle cares for her horses. He’s a horse trainer, and he comes over each day to feed and water her animals.
I visit her horses also. I bring them apples. The horses are shut in the barn in the winter, but when they see me in the summer, a bag of apples in my hand, the horses run through the pasture to meet me.

The summer after I graduated high school, my grandmother took us horseback riding at a ranch near Jackson Hole, Wyoming. She rode a mustang named Lady, and at the end of the trip, my grandmother purchased the horse. We were angry at her. We knew she’d never ride the mustang—would never saddle her even.
For a time, she had three horses. But Lady fell in the water tank in the horse barn, and she died of her injuries.
I learned a long time ago that nothing in this world is freely given and that the cost owning animals is one we pay when we lose them.
I live alone. I have no pets of my own.

Last fall, I heard a coughing in the horse pasture. I wasn’t especially concerned about it. I knew that my uncle would hear it also and that he’d know what to do.
The coughing continued. My uncle told us that the gelding had pneumonia, and things were touch-and-go for a week or so. The vet was over often, and Red had no interest in apples.
When the mare got pneumonia a few weeks later, we weren’t worried. She was stronger than Red, and she stayed hungry and fat, and she rushed to my side when she saw me. I brushed dry dirt from her shoulders and neck.

I visit my grandmother at the start of each week. Simple things are difficult for her, so I do whatever needs done. I clean cat-boxes. I take the trash out. I replace the parts in her broken toilet.
I take more apples to the horse barn. Maddie looks well again, but Red has grown thin. I see his ribs, and his shoulders are sunken. I give the round, fattest apples to him.

Today—this day: December 21, 2019—we have dinner with my grandmother at the Back 40 in Decatur. She wants to thank me for fixing the toilet. She wears a lacy red dress but doesn’t know where it came from. She thinks that my mother bought it for her, but my mother insists that she didn’t. My mother tells my grandmother that the dress is on backward—that the zipper is at her throat instead of on the back of her neck—but my grandmother decides to keep the dress as it is.
Two waitresses compliment my grandmother on her dress, and at dinner’s end, when my grandmother is opening her Christmas gifts and I am eating a cup of rainbow sherbet, my mother shows me a text she’s received from my uncle. The gelding died in the morning, but my uncle has not told my grandmother. He’s buried the horse in the pasture. He plans to tell her in the morning.
My grandmother is having a nice time. Despite her hearing loss and her poor eyesight and the dress she wears backward, my grandmother is happy at our dinner table, and we don’t mention the gelding. As the early darkness of the winter solstice swallows the sky outside the restaurant, my grandmother smiles in her backward dress and tell us:
—We should do this more often.

Casey McConahay's fiction has appeared in Lake Effect, Southern Humanities Review, and other publications. He lives in northwest Ohio.

ANN BEMAN

Someone stole the baby Jesus out of the Nativity Scene in the yard with the anti-abortion and "Jesus es el Rey" signs. Around the corner I run across three deer and a juvenile buck with only one antler. Something is wrong with his right rear leg, too. He won't set it down, and the hoof has grown long from lack of use and wear. I wonder if he's been attacked by other bucks. The raven my friend Elise calls Bud sits on a power line above. I'm guessing he's just come from her house, where he sometimes pilfers cat food from the bowls in her yard.

The trees along Tobias are naked but for more ravens, and mistletoe. The clickity-clicking black birds show themselves in silhouette in the sycamores along Sirretta Street, while the parasitic green pompons favor the gray-barked thornless honey locusts.

I keep running. I’m slow as I review the morning.

It occurs to me that I’ve become the mean lady.

That’s me, hands on my hips, head shaking back and forth—the words ‘don’t’ ‘no’ ‘you can’t’ spilling from my lips. Yep, I’m the mean lady who won’t let the kids scooter in her yard. It’s not just the liability I worry about. Although I do worry: What if one of those kids crashes while jumping the bridge over the pond, falls in, cracks his head, and drowns? I’m also concerned about the integrity of the small wooden bridge itself. How much more pounding can it take? And let’s not forget how fucking annoying the noise is. My yard is not a playground, a scooter track. The dogs go nuts. I go nuts.

I remember the mean lady back when I was the scooter kid. I even named my schnauzer Scooter.

Back then, mean meant anger, disappointment, I’ve done something wrong … again, shattered joy, fun spoiled, you’ve made me feel bad about myself, you’re someone to blame for my ruined fun, you’re someone who wants to spoil my fun, you’re someone I can blame for making me feel bad, you’re not nice, you don’t like kids, you don’t understand.

All right, so I don’t like cranberries. They’re too tart. They cause me to make the pinch face, the one I associate with a certain school teacher, the old-school kind, the one who’s stuck with that pinch face even after she retires from teaching. When she smiles, though, it changes her face. The smile affects you, warms you. You feel like you’ve been rewarded for being the clever boy or the clever girl. I think of the pinch face as the face old ladies make when they’re upbraiding you, making you feel bad, wrong, like you’re never going to get anything right, or be good enough. They—cranberrries—need help to be sweet, to have their sweetness coaxed from them. They need apples—good apples—or oranges or onions. They need a ready disguise.

When I was a little girl, I told myself I would never be that cranberry-faced lady. But I’ve changed. I’ve aged. I scold. But I’m no good, even, at that. I haven’t had enough practice. Dogs need a stern “no!” They don’t require the meandering negotiations of speechified scolding. Though I may project all manner of speeches at them.

Until now, until the scooter kids, I’ve been very good at avoiding such things -- cranberries, scolding children.

In any case, here I am today, putting the 'mean' in meander. And looking for meaning in 'mean.'

I used to look for meaning in books.

Now I look for meaning in freckles, warts, bowel movements.

I used to look for meaning in songs, their lyrics speaking directly to me.

Now I look for meaning in a list of tasks I can tick off with a gel ink pen.

I used to look for meaning on the faces of my friends. Am I OK? Are we OK?

Now I look for meaning on a bicycle, in hiking boots, with a hat on my head protecting me from sun, or wind, or rain.

I used to look for meaning in endings.

Now I look for meaning in detours.

Ann Beman is Tahoma Literary Review’s nonfiction editor. Beman also serves as prose reviews editor for the Museum of Americana online journal. She’s hatching a series of essays based on the seasons in Kernville, California, where she lives with two whatchamaterriers, a chihuahua, and her husband, on the Kern River, in Kern County.

Check back tomorrow to read more about What Happened on December 21, 2019. —Ander and Will

Friday, January 3, 2020

What Happened on 12/21/19: Rose Pacult, Anna Kate Blair, Melissa Matthewson, Lynn Z Bloom, David LeGault

ROSE PACULT

DEAR CLAIRE,

You would have laughed hearing Zee’s music. Part of the reason this 12 hour drive is looking to take 24 hours at the current rate is ‘cause I just couldn't stop myself from being a pervert. All of sudden I’m circling off the clover interchanges, winding into these small towns, and ogling mailboxes.

The diversity in mailboxes, and the platforms posted up and holding up everyone's mail, in the three states I've gotten to so far, is good as each time you had me bent over the sink at 4 AM. I know I shouldn't and really can't compare sex to checking out mailboxes, but since you went AWOL, this really was electric.

The mail slots reminded of so much out there I didn't know could make me see and feel.

Usually everything drawing circles but this witness of variation in shape, Color, form, positioning, and personality of mailbox was circling then spiralling then propelling out of my regular days in the way the shape color form positioning and personality of intimacy between us ranges from every other crushable second.

Wish you were in this parking lot and I could hug you into a small safe blanket instead of your large unsafe person. Imagine I hug you, tell you the SHAPES I saw, maybe kiss your always sweat laced hair.

In Cotton City, Arizona, over an hour detour, I set out looking for a place to pee while blasting Zee's music—a band called BIRDS EATS BABY. The road was a pure distilled kind of boring boring, nothing but asphalt and desert stretching every where. I looked out. Blossoming from a paling orange pitchfork welded out that Satan himself would wield—mailboxes. Three hexagonal prisms—paling orange mailboxes—shape as odd as the rust growing at the top of the box. Unusual, truly, why rusting at the top?

The rust should be at the bottom, not at the top, just like I should not see rust on top a mailbox and think of you on top of me. God. I wanted to just cry.

BIRD EATS BABY could be called dark rock, but coming from Zee, listening to this song ,,Lady Grey,, pissing next to these mailboxes that seemingly connected together in an unconnected place seeing as no homes or businesses were within a mile was like God said something to me.

Don't know what God would have to say but I finished peeing, snapped a pic of what I could see from where I peed, and sending the message for you to me, like I do with everything so I can show you when you’re clean.

Losing your partner of 5 years to meth makes me nuts.

I realised two hours ago when I pulled into a gas station, bout 10 PM, I left everyone's presents at my house. I realised I forgot to get my antibiotics.

I only realised it when this strange scene for middle of nowhere highway late at night flew by—

Two blue and white postal service vans tailing each other so tight they appeared taped rear bumper to front bumper from the angle where I stood, watching, at the pump. They came into the gas station in Pueblo, Colorado. Then parted ways. Didn't fill up or anything. Just came in together and parted ways. Turned out different directions. Happened fast. The gas stopped pumping and that shut off click reminded me—

I hadn't taken the medicine the doctor prescribed. Realised I didn't get it. Realised when I walked to the sedan's back I definitely forget. I also confirmed my absentee status as a caring body owner. I saw no medicine. Also saw I forgot the box of presents for the family.

God. My pulse got so fast I was pre-arrest. I think the smell of pep pills comes out most when caffeine switches my eyes into spotlights, my nose into a black pond picking up fields of muck for scent surrounding it. Caffeine sweat is a swamp.

I wish I could wash the irreparable damage I'm doing by forgetting our family's presents, forgetting to care for my body, and forgetting to care for everything aside from the meaningful—i.e. replacing love with caffeine and the stalking of mailboxes (did I even tell you about the torus mailbox yet? like a perfect hemorrhoid seat but steel and sited in Truth or Consequences, New Mexico outside a retirement home).

I know I'm beyond unravelling this damage already imparted. This trip is going to devastate all of us. I know it.

I assume you understand. Since we stopped talking it's been incredibly hard to digest any information beyond connecting you to everything I do. I want life to serve me a diet of news bland as unsalted scrambled eggs.

I don't even think I could eat that. Digestible news or the food is funny as Claire never smiling.

So far in the 24 hours plus I've been awake, the only meal I choked down today the 21st was a high cornstarch peach cobbler bought outside a cubic mailbox, grey and white and red—a scheme akin to a fancy airline jet (budget's from Ryan Air to Spirit to Frontier always use colours more liberally) outside a Mexican food joint outside a gas station in Raton, Colorado. But I don't care about Raton ColOORADO. I move the cobbler into my mouth taking the fork upside down. I don’t realise it until I’m scraping scraps from the side of styrofoam. I’m lookin’ at the greying sky, thinking of your red dress sliding up and then the white lightening striking as we fuck on 2426 N Janssen Street’s roof top we climb to through my window and there everyone watches. I need you and then the CPA Chad came out with an envelop and asked: Hey Claire, hey Rose, and we crouch on black tarp under rain torpedoing in burst like yr thighs and we are hiding ourselves. You push me in front of you and I push you down because the roof is flat and there is nothing except our bodies, Chad blows a bubble with his gum. It pops and finally: You missing any mail?

Thinking about food makes my pulse rate disappear more and more. I feel the beats calming by three or four. Each minute I think of how hungry I am and how I can't eat anything with how sick. It wipes me out. I'm gonna go out on a limb and send this. Just know I wish you could be there and perhaps, this time next year, if you and I are alive, we can do this drive together.

Not to see my family.

I bet we won't speak after the train about to fly through their window. I'm the train here, so off path I forget the tracks and with excellence and confidence crash past the front door through the windows.

Wouldn't be the holidays without, perhaps, disaster.

My stomach is churning and I'm hitting send. Just know I miss you. If I can be sober for years, so can you. Just because you're dying from your illness and I'm dying from mine, doesn't mean in three days we wouldn’t be primitive forms of ourselves before variations of life made us part from one another.

I'm leaving this Holiday Inn. I want cell reception so I can call someone. But who is gonna want to hear about this day? I'm crossing off the 21st of December as one of those days where I spend too much time with myself, like every day, of late.

Love you. Miss you. Please know you're my flashlight cutting through this landscape.

Ros

Rose Pacult is a multimedia artist exhibiting in 10 + countries. Her next two books Set Up & Execute and Goals and Predictions will be released through Possible Books in 2020 and 2021. The focus primarily deals with the autopoiesis: physical systems, how to build incredibly large destruction machines, use them, destroy sites, and examine the system from origin to end. The second is a joy ride documentation of 7 artists: social structures and dynamics of a melting pot of talent and conflicting personalities: hundreds of public work then orgies to brawls—there is everything a cross-continental road trip should have. Her post studio practice is a role of risk and unabashedly speaking out on people places and things. Her favorite gossip topic, herself.

ANNA KATE BLAIR

December 21

I wake up and everything around me is pink. Hannah’s bedsheets and her pyjamas are a soft, blushing sort of pink, and she is lying beside me and it’s such a delight to be horizontal, on the edge of consciousness, and aware of her. I don’t seem to remember my dreams when I wake up in Hannah’s bed, perhaps because she’s an instant distraction from them, perhaps because unconsciousness pales, is bleached out, by how lucky I feel, lying there, to have met her.

I am still learning how to write about happiness, and I fear that this might seem saccharine, coloured with the pink of a Sweet’N’Low packet where I’d rather have the pink of rhubarb, of strawberry, of lips stained by cherries. I am a millennial, though; many of my reference points are online. I think of the emoji of pink hearts. I think of that Instagram Story filter where the screen fills with hearts in candy colours. I imagine my pupils dilating into the shape of hearts. There’s an emoji for that, too. I wonder if it’s hard to write about happiness because dopamine dulls anxious fixation or because I can’t retain the critical distance of the observer, am always reaching toward Hannah when I wake up, wrapping my arm around her or tracing her hip with my hand.

Hannah’s dogs skitter down the hallway, across the wooden floor, past the bedroom door. Hannah brings me coffee. We play one another songs about dinosaurs, still in bed, on an iPhone, and then I change into a bright pink jumpsuit. In the kitchen, we measure and mix flour, molasses, melted butter, extract the yolk from an egg, make dough for gingerbread. We wrap it in cling film and place it in the fridge.

I notice, when we take the dogs for a walk, some pink berries that have fallen on asphalt, metallic pinwheels for sale outside the toy store, and the way that Hannah’s black hat frames her face, punctuates her outfit.

“Are there any pastries that you don’t like?” I ask, outside the coffee shop.
“Apricot,” she says.

Inside, I choose a raspberry danish and a sea salt and honey donut and order coffee for us both. I check my email on my phone, waiting, and am reminded that I’m supposed to be writing this. I tell Hannah, walking back, that I’ve been noticing pink things, mostly, and then I spill coffee on myself just before we reach her house.

“The impossibility of pink,” says Hannah, sponging soap and water onto my pocket. “Pink’s fleeting nature.”

I change into a black dress, hang the jumpsuit out to dry.

It is 12.30, now, and we get into Hannah’s car, prepare to drive to the hardware store.

“This is very gay,” says Hannah. “Going to Bunnings together.”

We listen, in the car, to ‘Ode to Skywhale,’ a song about the inflatable creature commissioned for Canberra’s centenary, and everything feels light and we are both singing—you’re the apple of my eye, the Skywhale of my sky—and I’m apparently unable to read a map properly, though I used to be a good navigator, and suddenly we are on the freeway, driving on an elevated bridge, heading in the wrong direction, onto a toll road, and we are both slightly panicked, and I am apologising, but Hannah is still singing—the Skywhale is a renegade of style—between worried exclamations, clutching the steering wheel, as we struggle to exit and turn around, go back across the river, slip onto and off another freeway. We go to the hardware store, seek and find sprinklers for Hannah’s garden, and return to the north, eat lunch and exchange presents, finish making gingerbread and change into outfits for the Christmas party we’re attending. We don’t have to leave immediately, and so I sit in the garden watching Hannah, in her party dress, tend to her tomato plants, tying them to stakes and spraying them with water, noticing the green tassels of her festive earrings, shiny and matching my own pink ones, sparkling in the sun…

“It’s very idyllic when you list it like that,” says Hannah, later that night, when I recount our day to her. “I feel like other people will be sickened by how idyllic this is. You haven’t even written about singing Christmas Carols yet. It’s absurd.”

The Christmas party is hosted by two friends of mine, both lawyers, and I’ve met some of the other guests before, but don’t know them well. Rachele tells us, when we walk into the kitchen, that she has brought two bottles of wine, one costing $25 and the other costing $11, and that she won’t tell us which bottle is the more expensive one, that we have to guess. There are so many people and we all like talking, and it is hard to reach the end of anecdotes, with every conversation disrupted by another conversation, by something cooking, by somebody arriving or departing, and the gingerbread with lime icing is delicious and the house where we’re gathered is unbelievable, like somewhere a family, financially and emotionally secure, might live in a sitcom, with a golden retriever, and nobody quite explains it. We eat lasagne and salads and pull Christmas crackers open, read jokes aloud around the table. We file into another room, after dinner, which has a piano and an enormous wooden table, on which Trina has spread printouts of lyrics for Christmas songs. I’m terrible at singing, and shy about it, and really confused as to why the sharehouse has a room like this, empty save for a piano and formal table, but I feel happy, anyway, and when Rachele tells me, as we’re leaving, that somebody I loved once, long ago, is getting married, it just seems like an amusing anecdote, an event that my friends will have to attend and will complain about, but which I can just laugh about from afar.

“Do you think it surprised your friends that you have a girlfriend?” Hannah asks me, later, brushing her teeth.
“No,” I say, surprised by the question. “Why would it?”
“Because when they knew you, you were straight?”

I was never straight, I want to say, but I do know what she means: these friends probably presumed it when we were younger. I doubt it surprises Trina or Rachele—they’ve never met a woman I’ve dated, but I’ve told them plenty of stories—but I can be oblivious to the impressions that I’m making, often guess inaccurately. I wonder if Hannah noticed something that I missed.

I check my phone while Hannah showers. She has uploaded a picture of us, in her backyard, wearing our tassel earrings, sparkling, smiling, sun glancing into the edges of the frame, with the words sorry not sorry this is 24/7 Hannah and Anna content now, to her Instagram Story, followed by photos of the gingerbread that we made. I feel delirious, glittery, and lucky, again. I still can’t write anything that matches my feelings, feel language is an inadequate tool with which to convey happiness, though I do believe that there’s no writing problem that can’t be overcome with thought and practice, tell myself that if I keep trying, failing, flailing, attempting to write about Hannah, about all these different shades of pink, I’ll eventually succeed. I’m writing long, tumbling, messy sentences in an attempt to echo the giddiness, mimic the syntax of existing without overthinking, of feeling good; sadness is staccato, tightened.

I repost Hannah’s picture on my own Instagram Story and my friend Michael responds to it with the heart-eyed emoji. I suppose the difficulty, always, in reporting one’s own experiences, particularly while inside them, is in striking the right tone; I can only know if I’ve been successful if somebody sends the right emoji in response. I take the tinsel-pink earrings off and lay them on the bedside table. I recount the day, to Hannah, lying on the rosy sheets, with the intention of taking notes so that I can write this, later, but I smile and laugh and forget to write anything down, save her comment on how idyllic it’s all been, and then I turn on my alarm and turn off the light and we sleep, muting the pink with the night.

Anna Kate Blair is a writer from Aotearoa.

MELISSA MATTHEWSON

December 21st: On Tinder, 70s Rock & Codenames

I forgot I was supposed to pay attention until 11:30 a.m. Also, I want to frame this around intimacy. Also, I want to lie about an event, one that happened the next day, not the shortest day, but the next longest day, the 22nd. But I won’t. If you want to know, you’ll have to ask me. I want to add it here because what occurred was a fascinating conversation about art and Hieronymus Bosch and The Garden of Earthly Delights, 16th century zealots, sex worker rights, moral questions about God and eating animals. All of this around whisky and fire with two couples and a man and me with the ocean raging outside. I wore a yellow t-shirt with a picture of Vincent Van Gogh with Things are about to get weird beneath my breasts. But again, that happened the day after. Not the day of. I was on the southern coast of Oregon in a vacation rental with eight adults, two teenagers, one tween, and four children under nine. Also, a pug named Xander. On the day of the 21st, not the 22nd, I woke with a headache and my daughter, A, repeatedly interrupted my sleep (I was sharing a king bed with my friend T_): Make bagels. Play games. Wake up! The rain was heavy (it would continue for 48 hours without pause) and upstairs, while I rummaged the kitchen for coffee, S, T and G all talked about lawyering. In a good way. As advocacy. I opened the NY Times on my phone and read about privacy and data (Twelve million phones, 50 billion location pings, tracking people from mobile homes in Virginia to towers in Manhattan) while I drank coffee. This is the opposite of intimacy. Interruption. Invasion. Infiltration. Other I words. The Times reported, “If you could see the full trove, you might never use your phone the same way again.” I thought it was too early for that shit, so I turned to G who asked me about my son. I rattled small talk—basketball, hormones, tween living, #goals. We decided to move the furniture—leather couches and chairs and coffee table—from the upstairs great room where I would lead the group in Zumba. I used to teach Zumba, I don’t anymore, but Lizzo is always a popular choice. If I want to frame this around intimacy, dancing together became a tight band of bodies working together. I don’t know what I mean by tight. I think I mean loose. I think I mean when we dance together, it’s intimate. I liked watching them all move. This group was unusual—can I mark them by their identities—no, I’ll reduce them to a group of professions and meaningful work like foodies, activists, farmers, lawyer, bakers, wilderness advocates, teacher, writers. After Zumba, I walked to the beach with T and the kids. We found a dead seal that we thought didn’t smell, but then it did. The ocean was white and violent, and we sprinted up and down the beach and found river teeth in the sand. I didn’t take one to the house. I was cold with dried sweat on my arms from Zumba, so I peeled a few mandarins (they’re in season, it’s December) and decided to take a shower. I had to use the coconut hand soap for my body. I was a little disappointed about that, but it smelled nice anyway. It seemed like a good time to check the coastal Tinder population and shop for some matches, but all I found were clichés: “Living my best life” and “Live every day” and “Smile every minute.” There were also guns, motorcycles, and fish, and Kinkster 47 who liked full body massages with lots of oil and a picture of a praying mantis.

I’m trying to find the metaphor here.

I decided to make a ginger hot toddy, even though it was just noon, but I was annoyed that I had to meet a deadline while on vacation, so I was pairing joy (bourbon) with work (writing), transcribing an interview with a Dutch author, but instead of transcribing, I was using the shitty wireless network to download a transcription app, but I soon grew frustrated and emailed my editor to tell her the interview would be late. I enjoyed my toddy then, while watching the sea out the big window. I ate some ham and cheese and watched R, T, J, and S watch a YouTube video about a Russian plane that flies close to the water. I asked them to send me the video. They didn’t. I asked them to tell me the name of the plane. They did, but I don’t remember it now. I like S and T because they like weird history and name their dogs after Estonian cities. J was climbing along the windows, so we decided to play Codenames with Curtis Harding on the speaker. Codenames is a game of conjecture between teams, but the theories, definitions, and word play make it the kind of game that tests intuition in a strange sort of methodology. While playing, M thinks that littering is not illegal, and this becomes the weekend joke: “For someone who is as smart as you, I think you need some help with the law,” and R disappears, but then comes back to tell us that S wanted everyone to see how red her face was after hanging upside down for several minutes.

For the shortest day, it was long.

S decided to take apart the table and R told me and T that, “T thinks like a revolutionary and you, M, you think like a poet.” By the time it was five, I’d had several hot toddies, T and M were cooking a dinner of cauliflower and Shepherd’s Pie. I wanted to woo them with music, so I took them through a 70s rock retrospective: Led Zeppelin, Bob Seger, The Who, Tom Petty, America. I didn’t remember our dialogue except that there were friendly arguments about the best albums. Arguments about overrated artists (I’m still pissed about Wilco). Arguments about guilty pleasure albums. We were drinking eggnog cocktails and the firewood was wet, so we couldn’t start a fire (Bruce). At dinner, in honor of the winter solstice, we went in a circle and voiced those things we wanted to let go and those things we wanted to let in. I didn’t want to participate, so R decided for me, which I think had to do with finding a new job in 2020 (which is important, and yes, if you need me, I’m on the job market). I was thinking about partnership, and also not partnership, and also bodies. And being newly single. And intimacy. Other notes I took from this day, but for which I have forgotten the context, so a list:

Watch your back
Impeachment
Turkeys are the cockroaches of the poultry world
The Donnas and Steve Earle
What is illegal
The clue is clues
Squishy things

The evening ended when my son arrived from the east with a friend at 11:30 p.m. as we all watched the four members of the P_ family participate in a plank-off by the fireplace. They went as long as a collective 12 minutes. It felt intimate. Was it a good day? Yes, we all had lived.

Melissa Matthewson’s essays have appeared in Guernica, DIAGRAM, Longreads, American Literary Review, Mid-American Review, Bellingham Review, River Teeth, and The Rumpus among other publications. Her first book of nonfiction, Tracing the Desire Line, was published in 2019 from Split Lip Press. She teaches media studies at Southern Oregon University.

LYNN Z BLOOM

The Somber Solstice

I crave light. I revel in sunrises that start at 5 am, sunsets that linger on past 9 pm. In my ideal world summer solstice would prevail year-round. Every day would begin with an espresso-jolt of energy, recharged at intervals by sprinting in the sun, swimming in the sun, reading and writing on solar-powered laptops. Circadian rhythms would govern spirits incandescent, dancing to the drumming of love and friendships and work during the long days with just enough time for sound sleeps at night. Scandinavia for sure, but only in the summer.

Instead, we live in Boston, where the 42.35 degrees latitude means that like it or not, the winter solstice grudgingly allows only 9 hours 5 minutes of daylight on December 21, in contrast to the 15 hours 17 minutes (and one second!) that will illumine June 21, 2020. I do my best to ensure that summer solstice parameters will prevail all year long, with floor to ceiling windows, no curtains; and for 28 years (before we moved to an apartment), 13 skylights. Like a moth drawn to a flame, I position my writing desk and reading chair to bask in the light. But when darkness falls, even bright lights do not fully dispel the atmosphere of gloom.

I certainly appreciate the vivid lights that flare and flame throughout the holiday celebrations of Christmas, Hanukkah, and Kwanza—church aisles and live trees aglow, sometimes with real candles. I appreciate glow that emanates from the joy of making a superabundance of Christmas cookies with family members, for we never bake alone. This year’s solstice sustenance—made for the pleasure of hanging out in the kitchen with our med student granddaughter—were Dirty Chai Earthquake cookies (with lots of spices—one of the New York Times’s hottest cookies of the year) and World Peace cookies, so chocolatey and delicious that world peace will break out amongst those who eat them, says Times dessert columnist Dorie Greenspan. The fragrant cookies that my German grandmother in Detroit sent to New Hampshire every Christmas in big heavy straw hampers—springerle, lebkuchen, butterkekse, vanillekipferl, pfeffernüse—were made in absentia. However, since then the generations of cookies have been patted and sprinkled by successive children with aprons wrapped twice round as they cozied up to the kitchen counter, lightness incarnate.

But even with the cookie baking it’s still too dark. We have already lost a valuable hour of afternoon light with the seasonal switch to Eastern Standard Time, and we won’t get it back until March 8. It’s dark when our classes end, when we come home from work, when we dash to the store for more powdered sugar for the cookies, and a precious bottle of pure vanilla extract.

It’s dark—figuratively if not literally—when, after a year of assaults on our environment, our Constitution, and our democracy—we try to drive the cold winter away-o by catching up with old friends via the annual Christmas letter, intended to convey managed news of a wonderful life. I know that such letters have a bad rap; I was once told by a relatively famous novelist that “real writers don’t send Christmas cards,” the ultimate put-down. But just today I received, from a very good poet and elegant friend, a handwritten card illustrated with Vanessa Bell’s “Snow at Tilton,” an evocative painting full of winter lights and encroaching shadows. Indeed, until this year sending and receiving significant Christmas mail has been for me a happy way to override the shadows at this darkest time of the year. For decades I’ve hoped that a lightness of message and beauty of design in the cards and more recently the e-letters which we send will brighten human spirits involved in this exchange, as they are supposed to do in song and legend, merry and bright.

But this year’s mail is different. Every day’s mail tells of falls—not, fortunately, from grace—but down stairs, off porches, in driveways. Every day’s mail brings notice of someone who made a difference in this world and in our lives, gone. But today, at solstice, a brief reply to my e-letter from one of the smartest, wittiest men I have ever known disclosed an absence even more devastating, the string of nonsense words so startling that I had to reread it several times in order to understand its fearsome meaning. Does no communication at all from lifelong friends imply an even more fearsome meaning?

A philosophical neighbor and I have scheduled our weekly walk—today on Solstice—for 3 pm, to get a good hour in before darkness falls. We know in advance that we will reflect on her own darkest night of the year, which descended two days ago with the doctor’s pronouncement, “I’ve ordered hospice for your husband, starting immediately.” We walked, our route a mile loop around the neighborhood. In the course of pondering the inevitable, I was looking not for false hope, a futility, but for some brightness to penetrate the gloom. Another loop, of contemplative conversation, both of us teary-eyed. With the third mile came illumination as I recalled my unforgettable visit to the Children’s Memorial at Yad Vashem, Israel’s official memorial to the Holocaust victims. In the pitch dark of the memorial’s vast second room, five hundred angled mirrors reflect and refract the light of five memorial candles to convey the impression of millions of stars in the heavens, “millions of flames extending into infinity,” explains the memorial’s architect, Moshe Safdie, “symbolizing the souls of the lost children.” He says, “It was like a miracle. As if thrown into space, floating between galaxies, each twitch in movement of the flame multiplied to the right, to the left, a strange dance of the souls” (qtd in Hansen-Glucklich, 175-76) against the infinite dark, lights flaming for eternity.

Work Cited

Hansen-Glucklich,Jennifer. Holocaust Memory Reframed: Museums and the Challenges of Representation. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers UP, 2014.

Lynn Z. Bloom is Board of Trustees Distinguished Professor Emerita at the University of Connecticut, where she held the Aetna Chair of Writing 1988-2015. She learned from great writing teachers: Dr. Seuss, fun; Strunk and E.B. White, elegant simplicity; Benjamin Spock, precision: “If you don’t write clearly, someone could die,” he advised when she was writing Doctor Spock: Biography of a Conservative Radical. These precepts have informed the heart, soul, and human voice of her teaching and writing: creative nonfiction, auto/biography, composition studies research, pedagogy, poetry.

DAVID LEGAULT

Dec 21

NOTE TO ESSAY DAILY: The only bit of formatting is that I included a link to a short video in the essay below. If you could embed the video in your layout that would be great, but otherwise the link is fine.

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It’s not yet 8 am and I’m on an early train to Germany, to the Christmas markets in Dresden, the oldest Christmas market in the world. They’ve been running, more or less uninterrupted, since the 1430s. Dresden, at 50 degrees North latitude, makes for a shorter solstice than most. The sun will set at 4 pm exactly.

In this part of the world, these markets are a big deal. People (my family included) travel internationally to attend. The markets themselves are a confusing mix: obviously commercialized in the way all Christmas is, but at the same time not. They are a celebration of folk art and history more than anything...you can’t even find a toy here unless it’s an old-country marionette, or perhaps a snow globe if we’re stretching the definition of toy to its limit. Mostly it is stands selling candles, German food, wood and leather crafts. Dresden takes it to another level entirely: eight separate markets are set up throughout the city, some with amusement park rides, others with three-story sculptures of wooden soldiers. The small market stalls are adorned with animatronic sculptures: Santa’s arm moving up and down rhythmically, a mouse on a bicycle going back and forth across a tightrope. There are commemorative mugs that will get you cheap refills on spiced wine for the duration of your trip, and people will show up with their mugs going back decades, showing off their own sense of history and their ability to collect and preserve.

I’m on the train with my wife and kids, and this early in the morning, already there’s an unexpected surprise. The tickets Michelle reserved are in a special “travelers with kids” compartment: a small glassed off compartment with exactly four seats. We travel by train often, but I’ve never even seen a compartment of this type, and it’s perfect: a fold out table, space for a stroller we don’t have that doubles as a play area, an almost suspicious sense of calm. I love traveling by train, but even then it’s your typical public transit. This car has the feeling of luxury one expects in a 1940’s movie about train travel—an idealized sophistication, a sense of luxury. On a morning like this—an almost complete lack of sleep due to my daughter’s medical complications, the stress that comes with taking two kids ages six and four on an international day-trip, the low-key social anxiety that comes with every interaction when my Czech and German skills are so limited—to have a private, quiet space is a gift.

Out the window, the Czech countryside ticks by. A fog is lifting, either literally and figuratively. It could be that I’ve been averaging 4 hours of sleep for the past two weeks due to medical complications, it could be the end-of-semester stress that comes with a teacher’s schedule. It could be that it’s a season of life where depression has been pushing through the cracks. But here on this train the clouds have just parted, and the warmth of the sun is genuine. The unexpected surprise of this morning has me wondering exactly how long it’s been since I’ve felt this good, and how fortuitous that the day I’ve committed to recording will be the happiest I’ve felt in memory.

Why is it so hard to write about joy? As someone who primarily works in essays, I have a difficult time getting personal in my work, and most of that stems from the fact that my life is mostly good. I find myself creating conflict where none exists; I look of the macabre in the ordinary in order to make it sound more interesting than it is. The effect of this is a scratch in the lens I use to view (and write) the world: this idea that I must be sad in order to be interesting. This is something I am overly conscious of doing, especially in the season of depression I’ve been navigating, and in my efforts to write about a happier, more positive world, I’ve ended up not writing much of anything lately.

All this to say that this solstice did not make for a great story, but it did make for a great day. My kids were, miraculously, perfect travelers across train, tram, and bus. We got lost but ended up finding a funicular outside the city that gave us an unexpected view of the city. I am buzzed on spiced wine in the middle of the afternoon: it is already dark and it is great.

Outside of Christmas markets, Dresden always brings me back to Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five, to living through the firebombing of the city. I don’t hear enough about Vonnegut anymore, feel compelled to look for one of his books while I’m here. Prague, where I live, was spared from bombing during the war. I’m told Hitler planned to live there after the war had ended; he purposely left troops out of the city itself so there’d be no reason for the city to be destroyed. In the span of this day I’ve seen the old and untouched put up against a city completely rebuilt in the last 70 years. In East German fashion, whole sections of the city are Communist Brutalist identical cubes: every building a piece in a giant gray puzzle. Dresden’s markets are older than anything I can fathom from a historical view, and their distinct color, shape, and light are especially poignant against the boring architecture.

It is evening and the city is awash in the glow of Christmas decoration. am thinking of Vonnegut’s Unwavering Band of Light. It is 4:30 and the sky is black. There was a time before electricity when the world was limited to the light of a candle. Now my eyes cannot adjust between the dark of the sky and the glow of the world. A stall selling Christmas ornaments is topped with an animatronic otter, sweeping imaginary dust off the roof. It should be dark and it is not. I should be cold but it is not. I shouldn’t be enjoying this, and yet I am.

There is a difference between exploring and being lost. When exploring, it is expected that you don’t know where you are, that there is a calm in that uncertainty. Today was a day of exploration, and there’s a joy in that too. Back at the bus depot, a man dressed as Santa Claus circles the main terminal on rollerblades; a security guard chases, helplessly. Nothing’s going to bring me down today! Our bus will be delayed but we’ll be rewarded with free coffee. My son falls asleep and I get to play games on my phone for like an hour straight. My wife tells me about a witch who lives in a Czech village, how the villagers know she’s a witch because she still has all her baby teeth. She says I should write about it, and so I do. I decide I will be happy and so I am. I am here in the dark, but know that the days will be getting longer and warmer and...

David LeGault is the author of One Million Maniacs, an essay collection available from Outpost19. He can be found online at www.onemillionmaniacs.com, and on Twitter @legaultd. He can be found in the real world in Prague, Czech Republic.

Check back tomorrow to read more about What Happened on December 21, 2019. —Ander and Will

Thursday, January 2, 2020

What Happened on 12/21/19: Alex Kazemi, Terese Svoboda, Jacqueline Doyle, Anne McGrath, Courtney Kersten

ALEX KAZEMI

Solstice

This day, as for all my current days, I am at the bottom of the world. At least that is how it would appear to you from where you sit, I suspect. So if you were to dig straight through the centre of the Earth—both impossible and unwise—from where you are, or more accurately from some beautiful village with white washed houses and hanging red chillies in Andalusia, then you would eventually emerge again in this part of our world. A part that is often excised from its place on the very edge of the world map for reasons perhaps of oversight, geo-political or artistic. The part where deep tectonic plates, far older than any map, grind relentlessly against each other, where the earth beneath us often trembles and cracks to bring fire close to our feet, where volcanos lie smouldering and where I am reminded that the brief passage of this exact day is indiscernible in the vast geologic timescale of the world.
So it is that here, in New Zealand, it should be the longest day, not the shortest. I have discovered already today that the obliquity of the Earth to its ecliptic plane is 23.4367 degrees and declining, a number that brings us—us here at the bottom of the world—now closest to the bright Sun. And that the celestial equator, which forms this angle—the obliquity of the ecliptic—to the orbital plane, is just the continued projection of the Earth’s actual equator into a giant imaginary celestial sphere of our making, as if we were not just a speck of dust drifting through an indifferent cosmos.
Disappointingly, I discover also that today is not the actual summer solstice. That falls tomorrow in this particular year, due to the oscillations and perturbations that are a constant feature of how we teeter through the heavens.

Morning

The words at the front of my mind as I wake are the same ones that I read just before drifting off to sleep last night—“We tell ourselves stories in order to live”, writes Joan Didion. I reflect on how a simple sentence can curl its words slowly around your mind until it embeds in such an insistent way that it seems like a fundamental truth, as if it could not have been written any other way.
I wake, still tired from days spent working at the hospital, into the lingering mist of dreams of volcanos and phone calls. I resolve that there is a limit to how long one can spend at a time trying to map and mend the fraying threads that bind our bodies together. Today is a day to bathe in the ordinary. The knotted stiffness across my shoulders and lower back on rising begins this immersion into the commonplace.
On emerging into the kitchen, the children are already sitting at breakfast and the first question I am faced with from my son Noah is why can’t you travel faster than the speed of light? Still rubbing my eyes, I stumble over the explanation, stating simply that no-one can travel faster than light because otherwise you would be travelling backwards in time. This is an unsatisfactory explanation both in my own mind and for Noah. But no amount of further thought allows me to clarify this and I pour myself a black coffee and look out of the window at the light on the trees and the pale blue sky beyond them.
As I go to get the newspaper from the mailbox, I pause at the door to the study because the early morning sun casts flickering shadows of the trees outside on the grey carpet, a gentle dancing mirage that I watch for a moment or two.
On the way up the garden path I notice that a large white hydrangea flower lies half in soft sunlight, half in deep shadow, against dark green leaves. I pause, thinking about the art of presence, and why nothing can exist now if it is not photographed, but I go back in anyway and get my camera to take a photo of the flower. Perhaps as atonement I stand near the entrance of the beehive and let the coming and going of the bees envelop me for a while before I finally return to the kitchen with a newspaper which I will never read in the course of this long day.

Mid-morning

My wife has taken the two older children to a school holiday theatre performance. I take our youngest son Gabriel out into the back garden. The sun is hot but the wind is cool and bends the tree tops towards the east. Gabriel is nearly two but does not speak any words. He understands, though, and is in turn understood. Rain dries on the deck. Our old cat sleeps curled on the beanbag. I crouch to look in the netted butterfly enclosure, counting 21 monarch caterpillars and one chrysalis. The caterpillars start to move as the morning warms and I watch their heads bob as they eat the milkweed I have cut for them, the leaves slowly disappearing with crescent shaped bites. Briefly Gabriel and I are sitting side by side on the deck, knees touching, in a warm patch of sunlight filtered through the wattle tree. I look at the flowers in the pots—morning hues of crimson, magenta, saffron—and revel in this temporary stillness with only the hum of traffic, distant, and bees, nearer, and the breath of moving air swept this way and that through leaves.
Then Gabriel runs down the garden to the trampoline pausing only to point out the police helicopter overhead. He makes his sign for butterfly—an opening and closing of his hand like flapping wings. Like all language it is now extended beyond its original meaning and I recognise it as his sign for flying. I walk down to the vegetable patch and attend to tying the apices of the growing tomato plants to their stakes whilst Gabriel jumps on the trampoline. Somewhere via the swirling wind I hear the sound of piano scales that seems like the music of time past. I watch the unspoilt joy that Gabriel has in jumping on the trampoline and recognise the same lit up smile as when I throw him into the air and catch him repeatedly, his long hair falling around his shoulders.
We sit on the beanbag reading stories before his morning nap. The sun beats in through the pergola and turns to shimmering heat. Gabriel points out the passing police helicopter again. After I have put him to bed, I tread quietly back up the cool, dark central corridor of the old villa looking at our photographs on the wall and wondering about the previous lives of this house of dust and shadows. Somehow makes me think of the first time we came here during an open home, as potential buyers, how the master bedroom had smelt of foot odour and how my wife and I stood at the kitchen window staring out to the tall trees in the back garden and whispered excitedly to each other “This is the one”.

Lunchtime

I am looking absently out of the kitchen window.
“What are you dreaming about?” says my wife.
I smile. “I am dreaming I have a hat. It looks very good on me” I say without pause.
“You also have a hat. It looks very good on you too” she says.
These lines are well rehearsed, from the book We Found a Hat, which we have read innumerable times to Gabriel and are enough to bring me into the present.
I look up the tide chart.
“Why don’t we take the kids to Point Chevalier Beach this afternoon?” I suggest.
My wife agrees.
At about this time of day our shadows are the shortest they will be during the year and the children and I stand on the deck looking down at our shadow selves trapped right under our feet.

High tide 3:15 p.m.

When I first came to Auckland, I argued with my wife about why isn’t Point Chevalier pronounced as it is in French, rhymes with day, but no she said it is pronounced Cheval-ier, as in the English, rhymes with here, this is how it is.
We zig zag down the path to the beach past the old brick house with no right angles and its jacaranda that has burst into the deepest purple flowers and down where the pohutakawa branches spill eagerly over each other until they meet the very edge of the water. The pohutakawas at this time of year are splashed with bright red flowers and the path is a red carpet of their fallen stamens. Looking up I see a child’s kite stuck high up in a tree—its yellow plastic flapping in the wind, trapped amongst crimson inflorescence. The beach is thin as it is dead high tide and people lie on the grass and on what sand there is, in front of the muddy turquoise water, like Seurat’s bathers.
A man sits in a deckchair drinking a beer while his children play in the sand. Gabriel runs off with one of their spades. The man says sure, it's okay, he can play with it. Gabriel ruins one of their sandcastles. The man does not look happy.
Millie and Noah make the palisade of a pā out of foraged driftwood. Millie asks me to take a photo of it on my phone, but I say no we don’t need to photo everything—just remember how it looked in your mind.
The drive back home is the normal mixture of backseat yelling, ice cream and tears. We have fish and chips for dinner.

Evening

I sit in the formal lounge, the oldest room of the house with its thick beamed ceiling as it was a hundred years ago. The evening sun streams diffusely in through the high windows, past the leaves of the cherry tree, casting the same shimmering soft shadows on the pastels of the cushions. I am sitting next to our Christmas tree, watched over by the scarlet angel that balances crookedly at its very top. The room is quiet and smells of pine needles.
Gradually, as I sit still, thinking, the sun approaches the horizon turning trees into silhouettes. Somewhere in the distance I can hear a helicopter flying through the same thin blue sky that swathes all of this slanted world, yours and mine, north and south. Our home, which is both calamitous and resplendent, filled with the ordinary and the ethereal, at once tangible and fathomless.

The speed of light is an unsurpassable constant

If you were wondering, I believe the reason you can’t exceed the speed of light is to do with special relativity. For were you to approach this speed your mass would increase so vastly you would cease to accelerate and time would slow to an eventual and relative stop.
Obviously.

Alex Kazemi is an Intensive Care doctor and aspiring writer. He lives in Auckland, New Zealand with his wife and three children. He writes more occasionally than he would like, in the small gaps between work and home and not usually on the day following either solstice. He has had work published in Thin Air magazine. He sometimes peruses Twitter as @kazemialex

TERESE SVOBODA

December 21, 2019

On Thanksgiving, my two sons declared that humans were doomed and the end was only a decade or so off. Every maternal instinct I harbor kicked into gear and I immediately enrolled all of us in an Urban Survival class which happened to be scheduled for the 21st. The guys collectively groaned with skepticism and of course regretted voicing their dismay, yet the 37 year old met the leader early and my 27 year old ghosted up behind me like a ninja just before we made it to the 10 a.m. appointment at Central Park. It was thirty degrees but the sun was out and the wind light.
Shane, our leader, has been featured in the NY Times, CNN, the New Yorker, and he'd worked with FEMA, NYPD and Special Forces and had a sideline as a stunt man. A small guy, he was half Native American and at one point casually collected a stray piece of bark from the park and turned it into rope. Shane started off by making it clear what happened to whiners: honey all over them, and left strapped to a tree. He said FEMA is not interested in saving people, that in case of emergency try to get out of town as quickly as possible. Since I had once walked out of Manhattan for a Vogue assignment, strolling along for eight hours and twenty-five miles, I knew which bridge was best. Shane told us we had to be prepared to walk for twenty-four hours. Wear the right shoes, with silk liners. I'd also spent nearly a year in South Sudan a long time ago, but when Shane asked how many of us knew how to make a fire, I realized in Sudan a fire was always lit, or some child brought a coal over from another one in his bare hands. What luxury!
After an hour of mind-boggling instruction in the cold, we went to sit in a coffeeshop. A father/daughter or May/December couple had joined us and she was the one, after another two hours, who put down her pencil (we were all taking notes), and said maybe a cyanide capsule is just easier. Shane side-tracked, telling about how some Native American groups had decided not to procreate, though some decided to have as many children as possible. He talked about where to get medicinal oils and about the healthful benefits of bear fat. Did he veer into conspiracy theories? Not too far. He did say to have copies of your net worth with you because FEMA was going to discriminate. He talked for five hours, two hours overtime. He also teaches a class in shadow tracking, enabling you to disappear in plain sight, and a class in fire-making, both of which were of interest to my sons. Afterwards, they had more important things to do than walk through Central Park with us and after a few Wows, peeled off into Manhattan.
My husband and I decompressed at a coffee shop on the other side of the park, splitting a sandwich that was surely was made of bark, some kind of waffle. There are only seven safe places in the world, we repeated, and here is not one of them. En route to the subway, we were lured into Cooper Hewitt where the exhibits were full of brilliant ideas for easing us out of our petroleum-based culture: algae-based plastic, bio-cement, and seaweed yarn. I couldn't help but think about how glitzy it all looked, how far away these solutions were to real change.
Would I buy a 22 caliber pistol? The collapsible bow? What about that nice wrist GPS? I forgot to ask about rain coats, but what about toilet paper for my go-bag? How can I collapse that? Isn't it egotistical of me to try to stay alive, to assume that my DNA (forget my genes, they're on their own) are worth saving? I'm old. Palliatives, how important are they in the equation?
After the museum, my feet were killing me.
All this apocalyptic talk was ripe for a long serious discussion. Instead we watched Dolomite is My Name. Halfway through, my friend in faraway Victoria B.C. called to say she'd “kicked the tires” on the houseboat we're trying to buy in Fisherman's Wharf. It's called “Noah.”

Author of 19 books of fiction, poetry, memoir, biography, and a book of Nuer oral poetry, Terese Svoboda published Great American Desert (stories) in 2019, and Theatrix: Play Poems is forthcoming from Anhinga Press in 2021.

JACQUELINE DOYLE

December 21, 2019

Castro Valley, CA

The shortest day of the year felt pretty long to me, probably because my husband and I went out and socialized with people we don’t know well in the evening, which is not something we do all that often.

As usual, the neighbor’s dog woke me at 6:30 am, yapping from across the street. I checked my email before returning to bed and got absorbed in an exchange with someone in my online writing group (very international, very good writers, mostly women I’ve never met in person—I’ve only met the two others in California). She asked why I was so frustrated with my hybrid work-in-progress The Lunatics’ Ball and it turned out that articulating my problems with the nonfiction voice was very useful.

I went back to bed and didn’t get up until 10:30. I read an article in the local newspaper about “turtle stranding season” in Cape Cod over breakfast—a bowl of cereal and a cup of Irish Breakfast tea. Rising sea levels because of global warming are making it worse. After breakfast I worked a bit on a “Top Ten Things in 2019” that a lit mag asked me to do. I wanted something personal, maybe even funny, but mine’s turning out to be about climate change and I’m looking up all these statistics, which is making it less and less personal, more and more depressing. Our son majored in Environmental Science and Public Policy, which means it’s something we talk about a lot in our household, especially when he comes home on Sundays to do his laundry and have dinner with us.

I finally opened the box for a steamer I bought for new linen curtains months ago and never used. Steamed our Christmas tablecloth, which has cranberry and gravy stains but which I like because it was my aunt’s and she always made a big deal over Christmas. I wrote the first two sentences of this paragraph before I’d actually steamed the wrinkles out of the tablecloth, which I didn’t really feel like doing, but then felt compelled to do because I’d written it down. This might work better than “to do” lists in the future. Write down an accomplishment as if it’s already occurred to make it happen. Or is that too much like those New Age motivational speakers who say you only have to imagine something for it to come true?

I used to teach the English department’s nineteenth-century American literature survey and I’ve always been suspicious of the famous “Build, therefore, your own world” passage in Emerson’s “Nature.” At least that line’s famous, maybe not the rest: “As fast as you conform your life to the pure idea in your mind, that will unfold its great proportions. A correspondent revolution in things will attend the influx of the spirit. So fast will disagreeable appearances, swine, spiders, snakes, pests, madhouses, prisons, enemies, vanish; they are temporary and shall no more be seen.” I’m tempted to quote more and start lecturing, but you get it. He wants to imagine his own version of the world and get rid of things he dislikes, with very little sense of nature as an ecosystem that requires pests, for example, to nourish birds, and very little sense of the limits of human will power. Maybe that’s inspiring, but it annoyed me. Even more annoying was his advice in “Self Reliance” to shut your door on “emphatic trifles” and follow your genius. (Though I’ll admit I love the phrase “emphatic trifles,” that entire sentence really.) “At times the whole world seems to be in conspiracy to importune you with emphatic trifles. Friend, client, child, sickness, fear, want, charity, all knock at once at thy closet door, and say,—‘Come out unto us.’ But keep thy state; come not into their confusion.” That’s quite a list, and includes things you can’t shut your door on. You can bet someone’s on the other side of the door taking care of it all, and she’s a woman.

To be fair, it’s not so different from Woolf’s advice to kill the Angel in the House and claim a room of one’s own, but of course it is different, because he wanted all those angels in the house, wives and daughters and maids, taking care of the children and “emphatic trifles” so he could write. (I haven’t mentioned my husband, who deals with more than his share of our “emphatic trifles” so that both of us can write. I appreciate that.) I put the tablecloth on the dining room table, and polished two silver candlesticks. Just two candlesticks felt like a chore, and I thought of all those nineteenth-century Concord women regularly polishing silver and how their days must have been filled with tedious tasks. And my nineteenth-century Irish and Irish-American female forebears, working for women like those Concord women, and how their days must have been filled with even more arduous tasks. (It’s possible they wouldn’t envy me sitting at my computer all day either, but I feel privileged to have a room of my own and a door I can shut.)

I returned to my study and waded through more email. There’s a lot I should unsubscribe from, but I can’t get rid of the university. The recurrent bulletins we’ve been getting from IT make no sense at all. “ITS is requiring all users of H: drives to migrate their data to the ‘My Drive’ folder Google Drive by year end. If you don't have the ‘Google Drive File Stream’ (GDFS) client installed on your workstation …” The what? For what? If I don’t know whether I have it, do I even need it? Several pages of this, every couple of weeks. What will happen in ten days to those of us who’ve ignored these cryptic missives?

I suddenly remembered a “learning activity” that the university’s requiring me to take, and I might actually get in trouble for not doing it, so I scrolled back through more emails trying to find it, and decided to do it before I forgot. I got “CSU’s Discrimination Harassment Prevention Program for Non-Supervisors” to open, after some problems with a pop-up blocker, and the activity (a series of videos and power points and quizzes) took almost an hour to complete. How could I have imagined that nineteenth-century women had lives filled with more tedious tasks than this?

I wrote some more of this account of my day, eating a yoghurt at my desk, and then settled down to read Carole Seymour-Jones’ biography of Vivienne Eliot for a couple of hours. Took some notes, as I’m writing about her in The Lunatics’ Ball. (Another sad story, another woman who died in a mental asylum. Would Emerson just imagine these madwomen out of existence? Madhouses were on his list.)

A couple of minutes on twitter turned into half an hour before I showered to go out. I don’t count that as wasted time because I read other flash writers and they read me. Checked my email one last time and found a rejection from the CutBank flash nonfiction contest. “We enjoyed reading it and … hope you’ll submit again in the future.” Wondered briefly whether that was an actual soft reject, or just what any contest would say because they want lots of writers to submit to their next contest. It’s a flash I like, kind of funny, so I’ll send it somewhere else.

It was good to get out for the evening, a cheery dinner party for twelve at the home of a French student of my husband’s (a former U.N. interpreter) and her husband (who traveled the world working for the United Nations doing I can’t remember what—something to do with animals?—it’s too late to ask, as we’ve been to dinner parties of theirs before, and I’m supposed to know). More talk about food, books, and travel than politics. Some talk of Hong Kong, the strikes in France, nothing about the impeachment, which I’m tired of talking about too. Stories about this year’s California wildfires, how close they came, what people packed in their cars in case they were evacuated, whose power was turned off, for how many days.

On the way home, I noticed that the Safeway in our small town has a bunch of gala banners fluttering in the breeze outside, brightly lit in the dark: “Re-Grand Opening.” Since the Safeway has been on Castro Valley Boulevard as long as I can remember, and we’ve lived in this town for twenty years, I have no idea what this could be. I guess since nothing much happens here, we might as well repeat good stuff that happened a long time ago.

Jacqueline Doyle’s flash chapbook The Missing Girl is available from Black Lawrence Press. She had her fifth Notable Essay listing in Best American Essays this year, and has essays forthcoming in Passages North, Sonora Review, and Fourth Genre. Find her online at www.jacquelinedoyle.com and on twitter at @doylejacq.

ANNE MCGRATH

I check my left foot, first thing upon waking. The area around the knuckle —or, more specifically, the medial cuneiform bone on the top, near the inner edge—is silvery blue and swollen. A reminder of my mortality. Two days ago I’d been working on an art collage and, unable to find the Exacto knife, had decided to use one of the spare blades that came in the little vial of five double honed blades. I dropped the vial. Sharp blades fell in all directions. One sliced my right middle finger and the another lodged itself, upright, in my left foot. Seeing a two-inch blade protruding from my foot, was surreal. I felt no pain as I pulled it out from where it had sliced down about a half-inch. Lots of blood squirt to form a dark puddle on the floor, but no visible cut. The blood stopped with pressure but then it started to pool, like a blue stone, under my skin. A puncture wound is no joke. Google it, if you want to know.

Daily foot checks have become a necessity because the package of blades contained the following information: Our Edge Makes the Difference. Warning! All blades have sharp edges. This product contains chemicals known to the State of California to cause cancer, birth defects, or other reproductive harm. I can’t imagine what chemicals might be found on a doubled honed blade, but whatever they are, they’ve now entered my blood stream where they will feed a lifelong fear (second only to blindness) of developing an incurable cancer.

I look in the mirror and am more than a little joyed to see that I’m having the first outstanding hair day in a least a month. It’s no accident. I had a reading last night in a café and did a full wash, blow-dry, scrunch to prepare.

I’m letting Steve sleep in because it’s his birthday. I throw on boots fitted with ice grippers over my pjs and take our tiny black poodle out for a frosty business-walk. We’ve always had larger dogs that didn’t need a human with them in the yard, but I’ve seen the way the red-tailed hawks look at Ollie.

Our yard and driveway are a shiny frontier of white ice, except for one small patch of bubble-gum pink, where I spray-painted the mailbox last week. Ollie hates sliding around on the slippery snow. I feel sturdy in my traction cleats and show off a bit with a sprint. Ollie can’t get his groove on. He squats and pees, looking around like he’s afraid of being eaten. He needs to do more, but there’s nothing to sniff in the cold. No dirt or grass to scratch. We end up in the woods and he circles several spots, only to deem them unacceptable. A forlorn whistle calls from a train rolling along the Hudson toward New York City. After about ten minutes I get grouchy.

Come on, Ollie! Songbirds and squirrels scatter. I feel monstrous and give up, settling for just pee. If someone invented a way to get small dogs to pee and poop quickly in the bitter cold, us small dog owners would line up to pay whatever price. I stick Ollie inside and fill the bird feeder until it overflows with their favorite seeds, nuts, and berries. I apologize for my earlier outburst as I sprinkle a path of seeds to our door.

Back inside our warm house I make a fire in the woodstove and feed Ollie. I give him his anti-seizure med rolled up in a piece of leftover chicken. He spits out three times, and three times I stick it back into an additional piece of chicken, before it finally goes down his throat. Love takes consistency.

I look under the Christmas tree for a birthday gift for Steve. December 21st is an inconvenient birthday, especially for someone who craves full birthday adoration. Steve’s friend Norm, a devastatingly good baker, had offered to make a scratch carrot cake, but I’m not counting on it. It’s everybody’s busy season. I’ve never made a carrot cake. I wonder if I have enough carrots.

I look out my kitchen window and catch my breath. Between the white snow and the blue sky lies a horizontal strip of saturated rose-pink edged in pale-gold. I’ve read that light knows when we’re looking at it and behaves differently because of it. This feels like solid truth. I put my grippy boots back on and walk out into the soft, golden light to what we’ve always called the root cellar, a mysterious stone chamber built into our hillside—ten-feet wide by six-feet high. A reminder that much is hidden.

Recent research I’ve undertaken for an essay suggests our root cellar might not be where previous homeowners stored their carrots and onions after all. This doesn’t surprise me. I’ve been curious, slightly enchanted by the structure nestled into the crest on the woods since we moved into our hundred-year-old house in the Hudson Valley twenty-years ago. I think my deceased mother tried to communicate with me near the structure several years ago when I was walking the dog.

The stone chamber might be: something to do with the winter solstice sunrise alignment, a portal to another dimension, a Native American ceremonial cave, something to do with aliens. Though not exactly sure what I’m looking for, I’ve been waiting for this solstice to see what happens with the light in the cellar. I’ve rabbit holed the topic and ended up studying Stonehenge, the prehistoric European monument. I approach the cellar and find that it looks disappointingly the same as always, except I do notice some previously undetected faint blue paint around the door opening.

By the time I get back inside and look out, the sky no longer looks like grapefruit sorbet. It’s more silvery-blue. While savoring my warm croissant and espresso, I watch the trailer for Greta Gerwig’s adaptation of Little Women. I’m charmed to read that she was inspired to recreate the golden light of childhood she found in Winslow Homer’s paintings.

Steve is now up and agrees we can see Greta’s film on Christmas day. My boys, now men, think they’re too cool for it and won’t be joining us. Steve is happy that his sons will be playing music, jamming and recording, with him at a friend’s house studio today. I plan to write and grocery shop while they’re out. I’m also hoping to sneak a nap, something Greta would probably never do.

As I drive out of our driveway to shop, I admire our pink mailbox, festooned with bright blue polka-dots, making it impossible to miss. It replaces our previous pink mailbox that fell apart after twenty years of abuse. Steve and the boys return from their practice and I give Steve his gift. It’s a linen shirt that turns out to be too small. Our eighteen-year-old son ends up taking it. Who ever imagined the boy I could cradle in one arm could grow so tall? I send the boy out to the local camping store to buy Steve a set of his own ice cleats as a consolation gift. Now he too can sprint on ice.

My older son and his girlfriend gather with us for dinner at the nicest restaurant in town. We order two different kinds of oysters as an appetizer and are having a lovely time, greeting neighbors we see through the window and toasting our waters. Steve has been sober for a year, so we toast to that too.

Just like that, my son orders wine. The mood all changes, but nobody says anything to acknowledge it. He’s buying dinner for us. He’s twenty-six. There’s a slippery line between right and wrong. He orders a second glass and becomes progressively moodier, annoyed by small things—the cold from the front door, the speed of our servers, the free birthday dessert. Then things get worse. I’m not going to talk about that. I no longer want to pay close attention. I want to remember a time before anything went wrong.

It’s Steve’s birthday. It’s the winter solstice. We may or may not have a portal to another dimension in our backyard. No matter what else happens, I don’t have a blade sticking out of my foot and, for a few moments in the morning, I saw a sliver of sky that was the color of pink grapefruit.

Anne McGrath's work has appeared in River Teeth, Ruminate, Lunch Ticket, and other publications. Her audio stories have aired on National Public Radio and the Brevity Podcast. Anne is an assistant contest editor at Narrative Magazine and a reader at Fourth Genre. She is a graduate of the MFA program at Vermont College of Fine Arts and a Virginia Center for Creative Arts Fellow.

COURTNEY KERSTEN

Leinenkugel’s brewing down the block and they’re tryin’ to recreate San Luis Obispo on Main Street. This city is stogies stubbed on car tires, bile dried on sidewalks, and homemade tattoos plotted in the Gordy’s parking lot. But they got white walls and plants that don’t require sun and organic jelly splat on the countertops—this place is full’a shit and I know it.

Last time we were here, I watched my ice cream cone careen into the Chippewa and now I wonder if that meant something.

Maybe if it had been like this while I lived here, I would’a never left.

The crumbs mark time since her death. I sweep them away, but they come back. I sweep them away but sometimes there’s broken glass, and I worry about sticking all that in a bag. I sweep them away, but still ruminate on the risk of bare skin.

I sweep them away, and I’m helping him fake it. We get thirteen hours of pretending the ficus never died. The towel rack’s still nailed to the wall. Nobody’s ever collapsed on the floor and ridden its stagnant wave.

He tells me I’m soft, and I think about the broom. The ice cream cone falling into the river. The fact that the only reason I know that place downtown is full’a shit is because I left. I think about those times we flipped the bird at one another, and a body withered on the couch, and I wonder if he sees all that too.

Courtney Kersten is the author of Daughter in Retrograde (University of Wisconsin Press, 2018).

Check back tomorrow to read more about What Happened on December 21, 2019. —Ander and Will

Wednesday, January 1, 2020

What Happened on 12/21/19: Margo Steines, Ethan Weinstein, Randy Osborne, Roland LeMay, Cymelle Leah Edwards

MARGO STEINES

Morningtime: I wake up in the jungle at the foot of the Ko‘olau mountains on windward O‘ahu. I find two fat racks of bananas hanging off two intertwined trees next to the built-out school bus I slept in.

I slip my hand inside the deep v neck of my shirt to measure the weight of my breasts. First the right, then the left. Heavy, both, full like small bags of liquid, and sore like bruises.

I piss in a jar, dump it out the window of the bus, and slip back through the seam in the mosquito netting cocooning my bed. I try to listen to the sounds of the jungle before I look at my phone: bird, pig, waterfall, more bird.

I pour boiled water over coarse ground coffee beans and watch it trickle brown into my glass jar.

***

My friend Elko, the owner of my Air BnBus, is a fish farmer. In his kitchen, at the top of his jungly farm, he has orange capped syringes and vials of chorionic gonadotropin. Tomorrow he will inject his female catfish with this hormone, which he purchases at the feed store for less than the price of a nice lunch. If you want them to ovulate at 3pm, you can make that happen, he tells me, and my eyes gleam. We are old friends, and mutually distrustful of the systems we refer to as “Big ___” (Big Ag, Big Pharma, Big Science, Big State, etc). Catfish won’t ovulate in captivity. They sense, somehow, that they are not safe, that they are not wild, and they hold their eggs tight. With the injections, they let them down, made fecund against the wills of their bodies. We talk about biohacking and Big Pharma and fertility as he prepares the vials for his fish. We have had all these conversations before, except this time I am biting my tongue to stop myself from asking him to inject me with his catfish drugs, because I know if I ask sincerely enough, he will do it for me.

***

Afternoontime: I drive the twisty highway that cuts O‘ahu diagonally in half, the wind so high and rough that my small truck keeps getting buffeted from either edge of my lane, bigger trucks with better suspension whizzing close and fast. I am grateful that I took the time to lash my surfboard to the tailgate.

I stand at the shoreline and watch the angry soup ocean bustle and froth. I feel the wind blow kernels of coarse West Side sand into the folds of my ears. I have so few days to surf that I almost say fuck it and paddle out into the windstorm, but common sense takes over and I sit, read my book, scroll Instagram looking at livefeed videos of other waves.

I squat over the public toilet at the surf spot to pee and when I wipe, front to back, I think I see some blood. Not blood blood, just, like, a tinge of something pink, but I have already reflexively tossed the little wad of toilet paper by the time the thought registers, and before I can take a moment to understand or double check anything, the words OH NO have escaped my lips, low and honest.

***

One of Elko’s friends, also a friend of mine, just delivered her seventh baby. She is a birth worker and an activist and is raising a magnificent tribe of remarkably sweet, happy, well adjusted children. It feels like if you have seven of them you’d hardly notice one more or one less. It feels like there is no fairness to a world that deals cards like a Vegas dealer, seven for you, none for you, no odds, bad odds, the house always sweeping the table.

***

Eveningtime: I meet an old acquaintance-friend and she tells me she is pregnant, twenty weeks, and that her work is letting her work remotely and she and her husband are buying a house. I understand this woman to be someone incapable of navigating basic daily life so it is odd to see her, feeling very settled and sane, in one of those neck-and-arms-plus-shawl sweaters gently pregnant women like to wear, sipping a green smoothie and talking about how well she feels and that she has been swimming a lot.

I eat one kalo and vegetable patty, made by one of Elko’s workers, crisped in a cast iron pan, and begin cultivating anxiety about tomorrow morning’s workout, whether I should do it to full capacity or whether I should go easy on my body right now, spare it anything that jars or shocks.

I miss a video call from my boyfriend and I call him back two minutes later and he doesn’t answer and I realize that I miss him so much that I feel ill, my hands restlessly picking at their cuticles for want of touching his big shoulders and wild curly hair.

I want to go to sleep on the soft queen sized bed in the bus without a shower but I force myself to strip and stumble in the jungle dark to the outdoor shower, which has hot water and a marvelously hinged door made of pallet wood thanks to Elko, mastermind and builder of my Hawaiian farm home.

***

Something twinges deep in my side belly as I am falling asleep, hot and loud. I have been vaguely hypochondriac for my entire life, and much of my considerable anxiety is funneled into obsessions about if and how my various organs are functioning. From this, I assume that I know which parts feel like what, and that I can identify sensation, but this one is both acute and diffuse, a shadow dancing pinpoint, and I am like a cat chasing a laser as I nervously palpate my abdomen. I fall asleep curled around my pain, full of worries known and unnamable, here in my favorite place, nestled in the jungle that I think about every day that I cannot be in it. It strikes me that this body is a vehicle and a prison, both.

Margo Steines is a native New Yorker and journeyman ironworker. She lives and writes in Tucson, Arizona.

ETHAN WEINSTEIN

(Me, age 21, traveling for the first time without my family, inside the Museum der Moderne, Salzburg, Austria)

The day got stuck around 3 in the afternoon.

I found Carson waiting for me in the museum lobby hunched with elbows on knees, her mouth frozen agape, eyebrows raised, a shocked face she deferred until I was there to see it.

She relayed to me the phone call from her mother minutes prior that began, “You want to hear a crazy, karmic story?” The man she hated most in the world had burned alive inside his home.

I knew who she referred to. He was the man who had shimmied into the gap between Carson and her mother created by a first semester at college, which grew like a hole in a sweater until she couldn’t tell which hole to put her head through. A man, now dead, who used a façade of authority and stability to claim victory in every he-said-she-said until he’d permanently tarnished her home.

I sat silently. Carson showed no sign of relief, let alone celebration, which had been my predicted emotional responses. I had no precedents for reacting to this situation. This brand of craziness had never entered my life, and I reminded myself that it still hadn’t, it had entered hers, her life adjacent to mine, or more like overlapping.

Carson has trained her brain to find silver linings in death. When brought into the light of consciousness, this mechanism casts its violent shadow. Carson’s dad died when she was seven.

The well-trained mind runs its algorithms always, and in this man’s death, Carson’s found an error. His death was all silver—at least at first glance. But Carson knows the feeling of losing a father and wouldn’t wish it on anyone. She tried to illustrate the inside of her head—his blackened body in the burnt down home, his children receiving the news, their lack of closure. She paced between me and the museum gift shop. I watched her thoughts sync with her steps, their emotional waves overlapping until the combined force amplified exponentially.

Carson says death follows her and her family, or at least she feels like it does. I don’t consider myself superstitious, but I got stuck wondering if death would follow her to me. I pushed this thought into a corner in favor of an equally absurd, anxious narrative. I have never experienced death, and I often worry that any attempt to offer advice or condolences will betray some emotional immaturity. I know I can’t get stuck with this feeling, how unfair that would be to make myself the center of attention as someone grieves. I’m sorry, I just feel worthless because I’ve never experienced the horrible thing you’re experiencing, and I worry you’ll find me insufficient and immature because I don’t know what it feels like. To voice this would’ve been self-fulfilling, but holding onto it only made me frustrated with the both of us.

Our loops persisted, never intersecting.

Ethan Weinstein is thankful that the days are getting longer. His nonfiction has been published by 3:AM Magazine, Junction Magazine, and is forthcoming in Lunch Review. Twitter: EA_Weinstein

RANDY OSBORNE

It’s our wedding anniversary—two kids, three grandchildren—and the solstice jokes still echo from that day 40 years ago. “He chose the date on purpose, longest night of the year, haha!” “Yeah, longest night for her, haha!”

We have nothing special planned to celebrate, as we've been divorced for three decades and can’t stand being in the same room with each other.

To start again: Dec. 21, 2019, dawns cool, gray and wet. Rare for Atlanta, ideal for me. Thus it will stay through the farmer's market load-up, and the Trader Joe's run, and to the end of the seasonally evanescent afternoon.

Moe-ming time! Leela chirps. Her mother, Joyce, rolls over. Her father, me, sits up and blinks at Saturday.

Leela shifts from foot to foot. Her diaper sags. She’s finishing her third year of existence with aplomb and, increasingly, words.

She asks for and I toast her a frozen “foffle.” Pour on the pecan oil first—she dips a finger—then maple syrup. Hoist her into the high chair.

“You watch me?”

I watch her eat as I gulp my ritual, first-thing liter of electrolyte water. “Do airplane! Do firetruck!” I do them one after the other, each delivering its foffle payload into the hangar, the garage of her wee mouth.

She likes cars, airplanes, trains, conveyances of any kind. Also construction equipment, among which her favorite is the “ossibater.” Excavator.

Leela’s my kid and she’s not my kid. I had no real interest in more children. Joyce also turned away from parenthood, though long ago when we started dating I sensed—and eventually confirmed—that refusing to leave open the possibility would have been a deal-breaker.

So in the moment I said OK, maybe, and then somewhere along the line we mutually nixed the idea, and then Leela showed up.

That one-line account won’t do. Leela showed up, rings brisk. It fails to represent the actual pace of events, slower if tumultuous and utterly without agency on the girl’s part.

To start again: Leela was born about four years ago to people with drug problems on Joyce's side—a methadone baby. Rather than let the foster system take over, Joyce’s parents acted fast and adopted her. But they're getting up in years, as people in north Georgia say. Nobody else in the family could bring aboard Leela.

So here we are.

The goat-cheese vendor at the farmer’s market has brought three goats in a show of holiday spirit and hopes to sell more feta. Clad in ridiculous red-and-green holiday getups, the goats circle each other. They stick out their noses from the roped-off tent to invite rubs on their knobby heads. Leela’s delighted and wary. Those eyes.

TJ’s is packed, of course. Leela insists on walking (big girls don't ride in the cart) and thankfully has forgotten about the stuffed dog which if found on the shelves—this could take weeks—means a lollipop. She wants to play catch with the avocadoes. She wants to buy “kee-weeds” (kiwis).

Home, and brunch at the Mexican joint downstairs. Kids’ plate for Leela. Joyce and I order our usuals: sopes with a side of chorizo for me, shrimp tacos for her. I slather my food with extra salsa, knowing the heavy meal will make me drowsy later and even less dad-efficient than usual.

It does. We play on the floor with Paw Patrol action figures. Leela’s appalled when I confuse Tracker with Skye. Marshall is easy. My back hurts. On the matter of “getting up in years,” reader, you may by this point have tried some piecemeal arithmetic regarding your narrator’s age, which next will be disclosed. I’m almost 64.

Leela joins us on the sofa. Sleepy, she riffles my chest hair, sifting absently with her worm fingers. We’re bound for naps. I’m tired often. Joyce, too, though she's 20 years younger.

But some days I wake with more energy than seemed possible even as a teenager, before my history lay in ruins around me.

Time, it turns out, does not bring ultimate wisdom. One night I find myself searching the pattern of Leela’s toys in the drained bathtub for big answers. Any answers.

Leela howls in pajama protest. She wants a story. I read to her with as much theatrical dash as I can muster. The wafer-thin book finishes quickly.

I’m ready for what she’s going to demand next—the same that most of us want at the end of a good story, or even an average narrative, if only as a way of delaying the night.

To start again.

Randy Osborne's essay collection, Over the River and Stabbed to Death, recently won the Beverly Prize for literature and will be published by Eyewear/Black Spring in the U.K. His work, widely published in small magazines, has appeared in four print anthologies and mentioned several times in the Notables section of Best American Essays.

ROLAND LEMAY

Roland LeMay is a multimedia artist. His work has been featured in Territory, Terrain, and on the walls and refrigerator of his parents' house.

CYMELLE LEAH EDWARDS

The buying and selling of legs

It has been three days since my last shower and those days are here somewhere. I drive from the forest, three hours down the mountain to the grande, grandpa needs help moving from the sofa into his wheel chair and I wash some dishes in the sink. Mom insists I get a new phone, I think the one I have is just fine, I like it better than the new ones anyway. An upgrade would mean an adapter for my headphones, no charging and listening to music privately at the same time, I rage into my front seat and drive us both to AT&T. She looks over from the passenger side, “I wouldn’t care as much if you weren’t traveling the way you do, up and down that mountain all the time, I need to be able to connect with you, don’t you agree?”

Yes.

New phone in hand I walk through Walmart with my sister’s boyfriend so he can buy her a gift. It’s the Saturday before Christmas: men stand with yellow legal paper in their hands and white streaks down their faces; aunties and uncles fight over the last Patti LaBelle sweet potato pie on display; Ken asks if I think my sis wants a large body mirror or new pots and pans; we checkout of the garden center with an 18-piece non-stick cookware set and two pacifiers for their daughter. I dodge friends from high school on the way out, one of whom was my roommate in undergrad, she’s filling the display case with faux eyelashes and laughing with a coworker.

Grandma’s knee is nearly gone, they worry about the meniscus but conclude it’s arthritis, still, she wants freshly cut potatoes and homemade biscuits for breakfast. I catch her kneeling to grab a pot from underneath the oven and then convince her to let me do it. She sticks around to make sure I peel the potatoes correctly, and then watches how I slice them, curved fingers tucked thumb over-the-top, index finger flattened on spine while the blade cuts through to the board. She doesn’t like this. She shows me how to hold the potato in my left hand, start the knife at the tip and follow it through to the palm of my right. This is how her mother and grandmother did it. I prove I can do it once and she goes to lay down, and I return to what I think is the safest way.

Felix is the chaplain from hospice, a job my grandpa had when he could still walk. Felix asks if he can pray, I stay chopping in the kitchen, hear him say amen. He sticks his head in to see me, tells me to keep up the good work in school then leaves, and I wonder what school he thinks I’m in. I think about the two French braids I am wearing, the stepstool I’m standing on, and the colorfully stripped socks warming my shins. I am always curious about how young people must think I am.

That morning I drop my car at Giddens to get my oil changed, something I do whenever I come back home. Dal, the owner, asks how my grandfather is doing, he is the one, after all, who used to do this for all of his grandchildren, drive their cars to Giddens for an oil change, exchange stories with Dal, and walk next door to Fry’s to grab a gallon of milk and a 2-pack of Hostess SnoBalls for grandma. His name is still on my account, I tell them “2012 Ford Fusion, under Clarence” when I drop it off, then jog back home. It is early but not so early that the lights strung on Florence Blvd. have completely fluttered off. And that’s when I help grandpa from the sofa.

“Take me to see the tree,” he says with a mouthful of biscuit moistened by orange juice. I stand to his right, count to three, heave him up. “Twist, twist, twist,” I say until his hips are parallel to the chair and he sits back into it. I de-brake the wheels, move his feet onto the plates, grab his black and white checkered blanket and cover him neck to shoe. We roll backwards from the den into the living room and I turn him around to face the tree. I ask if he wants me to plug it in and he nods yes. The tree is lit and he is sitting numbfull of pancreatic cancer. He no longer shares a bed with my grandmother, we give her a twin and place it next to the insurance-provided hospice bed. I stand behind him, also looking at the tree, also looking out the window past the tree, right outside where my car is parked and a translucent Giddens sticker is reversed onto the windshield reminding me to return in 5,000 miles. “Alright” he says, “take me back.” And I want to.

We undo the steps from before, roll back / blanket / up-2-3 / twist twist twist / down / easy / rest.
I grab two towels from the hall closet and ask my grandmother if I can use their shower.

Cymelle Leah Edwards is an MFA Candidate at Northern Arizona University. Her poems have appeared in or are forthcoming from Glassworks Magazine, Contra Viento, Elm Leaves Journal, WKTLO, and elsewhere. She currently works as a freelance research assistant in the Special Collections department at Cline Library and helps turn out horses in her free time.

Check back tomorrow to read more about What Happened on December 21, 2019. —Ander and Will