Porter Norton McDonald, Stones | L*STS

      

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Stones

Porter Norton McDonald

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L*STS: an Essay Daily Happening | About & Contents

 Lists | Lasts | Losts | Lusts | Lests | Other

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The word for pebble in Hebrew is tz’zor. It is also the word for bond. In Jewish tradition it is customary to leave a pebble or stone atop a grave to show that you were there, that you remembered. This custom ties back to sitting shiva, the seven day mourning period associated with Jewish funerals. Like a stone, the mourner sits, while friends and family visit and help with the prayers, with the grief.
     Cemeteries, like church, never held much importance to me as a child. I don’t remember ever visiting a family grave. I never laid flowers, never whispered in quiet conversation with the dead. Our dead were cremated. Their ashes were sown into the sea or sprinkled beneath apple trees. No stones. Death in my family was fine and fleeting, meant to be released, meant to be taken by winds and scattered, and, given time, meant to be forgotten. But I like stones. Stones are good at sitting.
     No one ever spoke of our Jewish heritage. Like a handful of ash, this side of the family was scattered by the gusty winds of Wall Street or maybe swept under a carpet of some Upper West Side apartment. We only found out about the Wertheimer’s after my older sister stumbled upon their graves while doing some internet sleuthing. We were all surprised, but my Mom most of all. How had no one told us that we were Jewish? Who was it that decided to intentionally erase this vibrant part of our family story? Like a game of Clue, the mystery became a wild period of pointing fingers. “It was your Grandma Anne in her sailboat with a bottle of gin!” “No, it was your great-grandmother Dorothy on 5th Avenue with a D.A.R. membership card!” One thing we all agreed upon was that this was some WASP-y bullshit
     I needed to place stones on my ancestor’s graves. I needed the weight of my stones to pin Dorothy Sprague to her lie. J’accuse! I needed our lost dead to know that they were found. They were purposefully forgotten, but here is my stone. You are known. You will be remembered. I wanted my stones to hold them down in time like a paperweight so they wouldn’t blow away again. I wanted my stones to pile up like cairns, like markers to guide distant cousins to me. I’m here! I’m right here! Do you see me?

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I don’t have an obsession with death, per se, just my own death. To be more specific, I have an obsession with my funeral. Funerals are ceremonies wasted on the living. My fixation on planning my end of times started well before my fixation on being Jewish, but both topics elicit heavy eyerolls from my friends and family.
     “Load my body into the back of your car and drive out to the desert,” I say. “When nobody’s looking, pop the trunk and hit the gas. Bob’s your uncle.”
     I had just outlined my current postmortem scheme to Mike and Lisa, my good friends and hosts in Teaneck, New Jersey, where I’d be staying for the New York City leg of my ancestry research trip. We were well into our first (or maybe third) cocktail. Okay, by we I mean me, but I was drinking rye whiskey, and since my third-great grandfather was a distiller, this was “research.
     “Look, all I’m saying is keep it simple.”
     As I expected, the room went quiet. And then came the comments.
     “Yeah, Porter…I’m pretty sure that’s illegal.”
     “That’s not a funeral. That’s a body dump.”
     “Yeah, I’m not doing that.”
     There are so many ways to handle the dead body of a loved one. You can embalm and entomb it, preserving the flesh and pomp for eternity (or close to it). You can stick it in a sack with some soil and the root ball of a sapling. As previously mentioned, you can burn it up until only dust remains. Perhaps more should be said here about the reality of cremains, because it isn’t a can of ethereal fluff. Cremains are lumpy. And there are bone bits (nobody ever mentions the bone bits). Cremains will kill a sapling in less than a year. When our dog Roscoe died, my wife and I buried his ashes under a beautiful (and expensive) Ruby Red Grapefruit tree. Within three months, the leaves dropped and the once-vibrant branches dried and browned. So we dug up the tree, now cursing the ghost of our dog. Then we shot the hole with a deluge of hose water in an attempt to wash Roscoe out of the hole. We mixed in “Happy Frog” compost. We planted a new tree into the now-steaming mud wound, a Blood Orange. The new tree died within two months.
     Don’t plant a tree over your cremains.
     But fear not. Today there are many companies that have developed crafty ways of dealing with your beloved’s ashes. Here are a few:

• You can melt and mix them into stained glass.
• You can mix them in clay and make a little pot. 
• You can mix them into a glaze for said little pot.
• You can melt, mix and press them into a vinyl record.
• You can melt, mix and squirt them through a 3-D printer.
• You can even melt, mix and compress them into a diamond and wear Gramma around your neck.

As I scrolled through the copious crematory options, I was amazed at the connection between human ashes and ballistics: 

• You can shoot them out of a cannon (if you’re Hunter S. Thompson).
• You can shoot them into space (if you’re rich enough).
• You can shoot them off in a fireworks display (if you’re not rich enough). 
• You can compress them into bullets and then shoot them off (if vengeance is your thing).

I want none of that.
     Roll me into the desert and let the scavengers have their fill. Farm to table.

*

My obsession with death began at an early age, probably at the moment of birth. My mom’s father Richard died of nephritis in 1950. He was only twenty-six. My mom grew up never knowing her father, and had to scavenge for the few stories of his flash-in-the-pan life. Just like our Jewish heritage, her family let go of his life, letting it blow away in the wind off Long Island Sound. The few stories she had were repeated like litany, how he would mime eating a juicy peach, how he drove over a land mine in France and thought he was blind (it was mud on his glasses), how his arms looked just like mine with only a whisper of blonde hair. My mother longed for stories of her father and this longing was passed down to me. What comes of a life when its stories are no longer told?
     My mother had an older brother, also Richard, but we all called him Dick. When I was nine, Uncle Dick suddenly died of a staff infection. He was only forty-one years old. He went to the dentist on Thursday with a high fever and was dead by Saturday. I remember my mom coming into my room when she found out he was in the hospital dying. I remember her waking me up crying and holding me and telling me that she needed to leave for a few days. I remember this was the first time I had really seen my mother weep, seen her knocked off her foundation, and I remember it frightened me a little.
     We all drove up to Maine for his memorial service. I remember adults milling around speaking in hushed tones. I remember muted colors and a blanket of gray clouds, but maybe that’s just me projecting “somber”. I remember wondering if the men in my family were cursed to die young. I remember wondering what age I would die and how I would be remembered. Most of all I remember two objects.
     The first object was Uncle Dick’s old Stetson cowboy hat, which I asked for and received. This hat would follow me through many adventures, but that’s the subject of another essay. The second object was a mix tape. Two actually. These two tapes, like the hat, would play a fundamental role in who I became and how I thought about death.
     Dick was an audiophile. His record collection was a treasure, and when he died, my mom and his best friend went through his vinyl, pulling choice tracks and recording them onto two cassette tapes. 

These songs and that hat would fuel a trajectory of folk music, guitar picking, and blues crooning that—much to my teenage daughters’ dismay—I am still on today. “But let me tell you why this song was so important….”
     I used to think that Dick’s music was him reaching back through time to shepherd me through my early teenhood, but really it was my Mom. Maybe she was making sure he wasn’t forgotten by inserting a little banjo and Delta blues into my formative years. 

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My wife is usually the one on the receiving end of my funereal preoccupation.
     “Steal my body.”
     “What?!”
     “Steal my body…from the funeral home. Like Gram Parsons. His friends stole his body and burned it on a funeral pyre in Joshua Tree. Or Ed Abbey, his friends boosted his corpse and buried it out in the desert.”
     “I’m not stealing your body!”
     “It’s a thing.”
     “I’m not going to jail for your funeral.”
     “This really limits my options.”
     In addition to bearing the responsibility of actualizing my funeral ideas—one scheme involved an exploding casket that would shower raw meat upon the mourners (that was a hard no)—my poor wife has also been plagued with trying to remember all the songs I want played at my funeral. Eventually she forced me to just write them down. I was recently surprised that, considering my unhealthy obsession with my own death, the Funeral Songs playlist in my Spotify account only has eight songs on it. And these eight songs aren’t all winners. Perhaps I forgot about the list when I came up with the body dump idea? Currently, my Funeral Songs playlist consists of the following tracks. I tried to arrange them in order starting with a few sad and pensive numbers to play as folks are seated, wiping eyes behind black veils, etc. Cue the sad music.

• “Dress Sexy at my Funeral” —Smog
• “Hard Drive” —Evan Dando
• “My Blue Heaven” —Gene Austin

And then come the pallbearers. Oh yeah, we’re in a church. Yeah, I know. I’m not religious, but so what? Six handsome men in black suits come dancing out with my coffin to tune of:

• “Goin’ Down Slow”- Bobby Blue Bland

This song is my piece de resistance. There is a version of this song on Dick’s medley by Geoff Mulduar titled “I Have Had my Fun,” which is essentially the same song, but there’s an incredible cathartic build in Bland’s version. Even though I’m pretty sure it’s about a guy dying of an STD, I still think it fits.
     Back to my funeral. The pallbearers have reached the altar (is that the correct direction for the body to travel?). We’re right at the end of the song, and there are horns and backup vocals and electric lead guitar, and we’re building to a climax here, when suddenly my coffin blows open! And like Dracula rising from the dead, out pops a life-like mannequin of my body. BOOM! Jump scare! I look fabulous, of course. I’m dressed in a suit covered in silver sequins. Cue the next track:

• “96 Tears” —? and the Mysterions

“Too many teardrops for one heartache…” Aretha Franklin’s version is on Tape 2 Side B, but I prefer the bouncy organ and wild 1960s garage band zeal of ? and the Mysterions. In the church, now the sounds of laughter overpower the weeping. Too many teardrops, baby. It’s time to boogie! The church turns into a dance party like that scene in Blues Brothers. Maybe my coffin is full of ice cold beer? 

• “Fantastic Man” —William Onyeabor

Because only a fantastic man would plan a party like this, right?

• “Pressure Drop” —Toots & the Maytalls

Sweet relief.

• “Sweet Talkin’ Lady” —Electric Light Orchestra

Yeah, I’m not sure how this got onto my funeral playlist, but it’s a damn good song, and I can’t seem to remove it. Don’t be hatin’ on ELO.

When I get into my funeral planning mode it can last awhile. I usually lose my friends and family in the process. My eyes get glassy. I get out of breath. My wife has to wait until I eventually lose steam and then, with a polite but pointed, “Remember, funerals are for the living,” she brings me back. And damn, she’s right. But what I wouldn’t give to attend my own funeral.

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I never wanted a gravestone. I never wanted to take up any additional space on this earth. I still don’t, to some degree. But then I started visiting cemeteries. Troy Hill was first on my research trip. It was also my first journey among the steep slopes of Pittsburgh. Up, up, up. One-and-a-half lane streets, hairpin turns. I love the ever-present geography here, the ridges and rivers always asking something of their inhabitants, both uniting and dividing a population, allowing for each neighborhood to evolve its own endemic history, ethnicity and personality. Sara Petyk, my Pittsburgh host, told me she used to lead bike tours up to Troy Hill. My thighs balk just thinking about the trek. Apparently, Troy Hill used to be a German neighborhood and just about every family there would grow their own hops, brew their own beer, and store their homebrew in the many caves that dimple the hillside. But I wasn’t there to search for centuries-old pilsner. I was there to visit the grave of Bella Wertheimer, and to do that, I had to drive up to the top of Troy Hill to the first Jewish burial ground in Pittsburgh.
     Two days prior, I spent a morning in the basement archive room of Rodef Shalom reading through the 1875-1906 meeting notes of the Bes Almon Association, the oldest Jewish organization in Pittsburgh, of which my family were active members. It was mostly yellowed pages, slanted ink, but also some insight into the work it takes to keep community and tradition alive in a rapidly changing United States. Much of the first few pages of the notebook were filled with notes on how to obtain land for a burial ground, which was important because there are many rules about how to deal with the dead. First and foremost, according to Halacha or Jewish law, the Jewish community must own the cemetery, and the deceased must own the plot, deed in dead hand. While that might be an exaggeration, it does create a memorable image. The members of Bes Almon had to purchase land, keep accurate records of who purchased which plot, and maintain the long and somewhat treacherous road up, up, up to the top of Troy Hill.
     Second rule of a Jewish cemetery is that those buried in it must be Jewish. This seems obvious, I suppose, but it does get a little tricky when Jews start marrying gentiles and gentiles convert to Judaism. Could I be buried in a Jewish cemetery? According to Jewish law, I think so? “Ah,” say those that have noticed the tattoos adorning my skin. “You are far too inked to be buried with your Hebraic ancestors.” This is a myth. Traditionally, true. Nowadays, not so much. The idea goes back to keuod ha-met or “treating the dead and dead bodies with respect.” Cremations are still forbidden in Jewish burial practices and, I imagine, so too is rolling a corpse out the back of a car. Autopsies and organ donations, while traditionally forbidden, are now generally tolerated. Amputees are okay, too, especially if you can bury the severed limb in a clearly delineated and properly deeded plot with a promise of reunion once you shuck your mortal coil.
     The cemetery up on Troy Hill was small. About the amount of land you’d need for a couple of small houses with enough yard for a swing set and charcoal grill. My unit of measurement came easy since small houses and yards with swing sets and charcoal grills were what surrounded the graveyard, enveloped it. I parked as close to the remarkably unmarked gate as I could without blocking people into their driveway. Or maybe I was in a driveway? The single-story home directly abutting the cemetery was missing its aluminum siding, exposing Tyvek like a fresh scrape. The site was on the side of a hill, not quite on the top, so I hefted my cameras and notebooks up to the top and began to methodically wind my way down, looking for Bella Wertheimer.
     A jay was screaming itself hoarse from somewhere inside a bent pine. It was cloudy and gray. Perfect graveyard weather. The headstones seemed ancient. Some had tipped forward and now lay face down in the earth, collapsed as if exhausted from the weight of marking a life. I walked slowly, respectfully, reading names like a mantra, feeling the syllables roll out my mouth, wondering if anyone kept their stories. Some headstones—the inexpensive ones, I imagine—were blank, the names washed away by almost two hundred years of rain and snow and the acidic excretions of moss and lichen. What happens when your name is no longer legible? Is that the last step? Are you officially forgotten? And why does that terrify me?
     Bella’s grave was obvious in the end, and stood out with somewhat ostentatious pride. It was immense compared to every grave around it (how did I not notice it at once?). It was shaped like a bed, or maybe a lounge chair you might find by a pool, but made of stone. It reminded me of the kind of grave in a Hammer film upon which you’d find a sexy vampiress sprawling seductively. It was the only one of its kind. Clearly the Werthheimers had money. Was that the message? I had forgotten a pebble, so I pinched a piece of gravel from the driveway near my car. Was this a fancy enough stone for Bella Wertheimer? It was rough, grayish green, and slightly pyramidal. I rubbed at a smudge of asphalt on the corner before gently placing it on her headstone and returning to my car for the long drive down Troy Hill.

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The essay, “Stones”, is the result of two phenomena from my past. The first, an obsession with my own death—specifically my funeral—derived from the early deaths of many of the men in my family. The second was the intentional erasure of my Jewish heritage, not by state-sponsored genocide, but an equally insidious form of antisemitism: capitalism. The above tragedies left lacunas in the lives of my family, holes that I have attempted to fill in with research, holes that I now mark with the stones of my artwork. 

Porter Norton McDonald is an interdisciplinary artist exploring narrative and the interplay between image and text. His work includes illustration, sequential art, book art, poetry and performance. By exposing the methods and structures used to create narrative, the mechanisms lurking in the shadows off stage, Porter draws attention to the craft of storytelling, the role of the narrator and the blurry the line between truth and fiction. Porter’s art has been shown internationally at the Czong Institute for Contemporary Art in Kimpo-si, Korea and the Museo de Arte de Sonora in Hermosillo, Mexico.  His work has also appeared in Tucson, Arizona at the Steinfeld Gallery, Pidgin Palace Arts, the Lionel Rombach Gallery and the Mexican Consulate. He has performed excerpts from his current book On Dogs on TV at Wave Archive, Desierto Books (Tucson) and the Poetry Lounge (Pittsburgh).  Porter is an MFA graduate in Illustration/Design/Animation at the University of Arizona (2027).

Paige Lalain, The Things I've Swallowed | L*STS

   

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The Things I’ve Swallowed

Paige Lalain

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L*STS: an Essay Daily Happening | About & Contents

 Lists | Lasts | Losts | Lusts | Other

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My grandpa telling me I need to lose weight on the morning of my grandma’s funeral, explaining, “It’s OK for boys to be husky, but not girls,” and him meaning well. The embedded knowledge by eight years old that licking a lollipop could draw men’s eyes, and the instinct to perform when I was given one. Boys in second grade inventing songs about my body, the lyrics of which I’ve forgotten in mind but not nervous system. Two dipshits named Alex and Grant ruling that my boobs were apples on a scale from grapes to melons. All three of my fifth-grade best friends moving away at once—England, Arizona, Ohio—how overjoyed I was when one of them moved back home, and her telling me I’d gotten plump while thwapping me with a lunchbox (what?). 
     A girl named Chandler changing my name to “fat bitch” in middle school, and that catching like a stomach bug. The cream cheese and sausage sandwiches I’d pound after school while watching episodes of A Haunting; blanketing myself past my forehead and sleeping like the dead, my arms a railroad crossing sign over my heart. Being shooed into an armoire in my basement while two boys fought over who got to kiss my friend; peering through the white slats like a fence my body couldn’t cross. The early-aughts computer game where I perfected a doll version of myself, and meeting my “late teens” “boyfriend” there as a child. The photos he eventually wanted. The nickname he gave me: pobrecita, “poor little girl,” “little vulnerable one.”
     A boy in sophomore English touching me during class (let me explain: I’d lost weight, my Miss Me jeans were tight, and my bras were neon pink) and my awkward giggles, the teacher telling us to please quiet down, equal parts of me enjoying the attention but hating the scolding. A boy junior year convincing me that being good with my tongue was a greater honor than being loved back (let me explain: I’d gained weight). A kiwi skin-haired, Rothko-eyed guy at Mizzou asking me if I wanted to make out before I went down on him, and that being my first kiss. Tech9ne, a Missouri rapper named after a pistol, booming in his dorm room. Him firing in my mouth. Him saying, “You’re a natural,” to the sucking, not the smooching. A man I sold newspaper ads to taking me to the back of his store and saying he’d like to place a seed in me through this partnership, the way it hung in the air like a wink.   
     The offer of a one-thousand-dollar shopping spree if I lost “the weight.” Nutrisystem chicken cacciatore. Smart for Life bars grief-thick and cork-dry. 100 Calorie Packs Oreo thin crisps, just lousy black crackers with flecks of white dust. Being hailed as an inspiration, a force of ironfisted will. Zero-Weight Watchers-points frozen grapes and dill pickles and yellow mustard. The cartilaginous chunks in Blue Ribbon “Naked Nuggets,” the texture of flesh erasers. A beauty pageant invitation in my mailbox, like a message from a new land. Green Tea Fat Burning pills from Costco. Phentermine and Vyvanse. Diuretics and laxatives. That potato chip at a party like an opioid on my taste buds. Two fingernails on the epiglottis. A spoon down the throat. A whole lot of nothing. A whole bunch of everything. The fossil smell of rubber as I toppled tractor tires. The taste of guillotined grass as I slammed football tackle dummies into the earth. The salt-slime of sweat after a run where I’d covered myself in plastic, like my body was a kill room. 
     My reflection puffing and swelling like a marshmallow in the microwave. My reflection prying my smile open so big and wide my head split in half, and a river poured from it.
     Neither of those observations being real.
     News from a doctor that my heart had taken a beating. Several sloshing bags of intravenous fluids. A Tang-orange potassium solution. A heart monitor. A fall risk bracelet. Two months in a program where I was met in the parking lot each morning by the statue of a saint. Fear foods— nachos with liquid cheese, a root beer float, a brownie, a slice of cake—sipped and chewed like needles in my gums, injecting a kind of medicine. The gulp of learning the word “fat” is a descriptor, not a blow to the back of the knees. The realization that when all of this started, I had committed no crime. I had simply bloomed, plush and petaled, in a world full of buds.
     When I vomited up everything I’d stomached, the contents were stark and boundless as melanoma. I fed my emptied belly something delicious. 

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While drafting my memoir, I’ve been exploring the timeline of my body and feeling the nerve endings of my struggle with eating disorders. While there are probably countless formative moments—some imperceptible, even—I sat down and briefly listed what first came to mind. When I read the list back, I saw a young girl examined, admired, and crushed within a culture that rewards or punishes based on the palatability of our bodies. But I also saw the beginnings of release.  

Paige Lalain is a Best of the Net-nominated essayist living in Chicago. She is the former Head Creative Nonfiction Editor at Nightingale and Sparrow and a former Creative Nonfiction Reader at Atlas and Alice. She has a degree in creative writing with a specialization in literary nonfiction from Oakland University. She is working on a memoir. 

Jon Reinhardt, a List of Lests | L*STS

      

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A List of Lests

Jon Reinhardt

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L*STS: an Essay Daily Happening | About & Contents

 Lists | Lasts | Losts | Lusts | Lests | Other

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• I've passed on another drink I really could have used, 
• lest I should suffer a hangover..
• I've passed on the jalapeño pizza,
• lest I should get heartburn...
• I've skipped dessert, 
• lest I should get fat...
• I've passed on joints, or only pretended to inhale,
• lest it make me paranoid...
• I've left before a party really got going, sometimes with an Irish goodbye,
• lest I should make a drunken fool of myself...
• I've deleted social media from my phone, 
• lest it suck away all my time...
• I've deleted a really witty but mean reply before posting it
• lest I should get into a pointless argument with a random stranger...
• I've made up an email address to get access to an article
• lest I should receive unwanted email spam...
• I've made up a phone number to get a discount code
• lest I should receive unwanted phone spam...
• I've set my alarm on both my phone and on my watch, as well as ordered a wake-up call
• lest I should wake up late...
• I've made list of things I could easily have memorized, made up weird mnemonics to remember things, and scribbled things down in the middle of the night after being awaken by them,
• lest I should forget them...
• I've worn a mask, gloves, and protective eyewear, a hat (including ill-fitting ones), a coat or extra layer, a back brace, aknee wrap, and an elbow wrap
• lest I should become sick, scratched, maimed, sunburned, cold, or hurt...
• I've bought trip insurance
• lest I should have to cancel a trip...
• I've packed a backup pair of glasses, an extra eye mask, earplugs, extra sleeping drugs, and extra adapters, dongles, and cords (though still sometimes the wrong ones) in my carry-on
• lest my checked bag be lost...
• I've changed my flight to a longer layover
• lest my first flight be late...
• I've put secret treat stashes around the house for the cat
• lest the catsitter forget to come and the cat starve...
• I've woken up my cat to say goodbye
• lest she forget me...
• I've gotten to the airport way too early
• lest there be traffic or long security lines...
• I've texted a heart to my partner just before putting my phone into airplane mode
• lest he forget that I love him...
• I've texted 'landed' or the little landing plane icon to my partner immediately after touching down
• lest he worry...
• I've not put my phone into airplane mode, 
• lest I should have to send a final 'I will always love you' message, and the plane should go down, and we should pass a random cell tower that might catch it and relay it to him, so he would always know...

*

The conjunction 'lest', which means 'in case something undesirable happens', is increasingly considered archaic. This is unfortunate because it has a power we are losing in late modern English by triggering the subjunctive mood, reserved for talking about hypotheticals, desires, suggestions, and alternate universes without resorting to the clunky indicative mood. Just by adding a modal like 'should', or by dropping the third person singular -s, we are brought into a space for imagining the best--our unrealized desires and hopes and imagined worlds, or the worst--a safe place to be obsessive, paranoid, or anxious. Nowadays, however, we say things like 'If I was rich', as if we already were, deluding ourselves with the indicative, because let's face it, we'll probably never be rich as we are imagining ourselves, as it were. When we speak, the subjunctive reminds us and whoever hears us that we realize what we're saying is not true, though it might have been, or it might yet be. Imagine the best and the worst, but no worries, it's safely contained grammatically. Long live the subjunctive!

Jon Reinhardt is a middle-aged grammar professor who travels a lot, doesn't take unnecessary risks, and tries not to think about statistical probability, because he is generally lucky. For this reason, he is a big fan of the subjunctive mood and wishes it were not forgotten. He is the Head of the English Department at the University of Arizona. 

Quandra Prettyman, MEMO From: Mommy Date: September 13, 1987 Subject: Some Very Traditional Advice | L*STS

    

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MEMO From: Mommy Date: September 13, 1987 Subject: Some Very Traditional Advice 

Quandra Prettyman

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L*STS: an Essay Daily Happening | About & Contents

 Lists | Lasts | Losts | Lusts | Lests | Other

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Money 

• Never lend more than you can give. You can give a stranger five bucks. 
• Don’t lend a friend any amount which the failure to pay would cause a lapse in your friendship. 
• In splitting checks, be willing, if you are in a generous mood, to merely divide the check. Among friends, this usually evens out. 
• But if fellow diners (or users of a mutually bought object) feel specific, then be specific. Don't say "all right, that's your bill" and then pay the tip yourself. 
   

Drink 

• Avoid any liquor without food. 
• Avoid sweet drinks if you get a "feel like drinking" mood;
  you’ll probably consume less. 
  
  

Sex 

• A man who is unconcerned about your becoming pregnant is a man who is unconcerned about you. 
• Use contraceptives. Abandon the notion that a nice woman only has sex when she is out-of-control of her body. 
  
  

Religion (or ethics and moral judgment) 

• A person who does not respect yours is a person who does not respect you. A person who does not respect you is not a friend. 
• When among people who cannot understand what you mean by "no," or a courteous "I'd rather not," find a graceful way to excuse yourself, if possible. Blame the potential of your mother's heart attack, if it will help. Run away, if necessary. 
  
  

Grades 

• Of course, grades matter. But grades really are not, to me, the most important concerns. 
• This is how grades matter to me. It will cause me quite a bit of distress if you fail. I mean fail with a certain specificity, that is, get an F. That's because if your work falls so far short of the expectations held for your peers, it is a signal that something is wrong, seriously wrong, wrong enough to require intervention. 
• D's--you should treat as a very serious warning. 
• This is how grades don't matter to me. From C up is acceptable to me. C's won't get you summa cum laude; if you want to be summa cum laude, that's your cross to bear, not mine. 
• There will be times when you do not do as well as you thought you would or hoped you would. When that happens try not to sweat over it. If you think the teacher really made a mistake, discuss it with the teacher. If you think you didn't understand what was required, ask the teacher to show you a more satisfactory response. Don't waste your time (and the teacher's) by nit-picking. Try to see in what way the other work was better. If you don't think it was, try to see how the teacher may have perceived it as better. 
• There will be times when you feel that you did not do as well as you might have because of peculiar circumstances. Some will be petty--you had a cold, you stayed up too late the night before. Don't let that interfere with your next assignment. 
• There will be times when you were not in full control of the circumstances and made a compassionate decision, e. g., a friend was troubled. When you make such a decision, and I think you ought to do so, be prepared for the consequences. 
  
  

Health 

• Your health has become your responsibility in a special way. True, I have been saying how do you feel, etc. But I have also been around to say that if that's how you feel I'm going to call the doctor. You have to call the doctor now. You have to decide to take an extra day off to recover. You will bear the responsibility for your decision. I hope you will go back to Grades and make a sensible decision; the body you have has to last a lifetime. 
  
  

Mother's Worries 

•  I will worry more about your well-being than about your grades. 
•  I will worry more about your safety than about your choice of friends. 
  
  

Anger 

• These things will make me very angry:
  your failure to tell me that you sick your failure to tell me that you are doing well
  your failure to tell me that you are engaged in some political activity for which there may be serious consequences
  your failure to tell me that you are involved in a relationship of which you think I would not approve.
• I cannot promise you that if you tell me these things that my response will be "OK, so what else is new?" 

*

In keeping with her activities as a collector and informal archivist, Quandra Prettyman was a list aficionado. Her freezer always had a typed list of its rotating contents; her papers include chronologies of yearly activities, and lists of what to buy (with descriptions of the staff) at her favorite stores. Even one of her poems, “Facing Forty Facts,” takes the form of a list. Her intellectual and pedagogical rigor, coupled with her innate hospitality, care, and deep belief in the power of community, made her a safe harbor and model for countless students, particularly Barnard College’s Black community. They remember lessons on effective writing offered in the classroom and life lessons from class dinners in her book-filled apartment with its brilliantly yellow Kitchen.

This memo written by a single mother to her daughter in 1986 is typical of the practical, caring and wry advice she was known for. The Memo form gives the advice an official feel, perhaps softening the blow of letting go and losing daily mother-daughter contact. Now it is a generational document, as her daughter and friends have passed on copies of the letter to other college-bound women.

The late Quandra Prettyman was a poet, an editor, literary critic, reviewer, book collector, teacher, and scholar. Born and raised in Baltimore, Maryland, Prettyman studied history at Antioch College (1950-54) and English at the University of Michigan (1955-57), where she studied 17th century and modernist literature. She joined the Barnard College Department of English in 1971 where, like many women of her generation, she squeezed writing in the spaces between professional life and motherhood. Prettyman edited Out of Our Lives: A Selection of Contemporary Black Fiction in 1975, featuring writers such as Amiri Baraka, Ann Petry, Ernest Gaines, Sherley Anne Williams, and Louise Meriwether. She also authored one of the earliest academic articles on African American cookbooks, “Come Eat at My Table: Lives with Recipes” (1992). Her poems have appeared in multiple collections, including Black Out Loud: An Anthology Poem (1970), The Poetry of Black America (1973), and Black World.

When Prettyman passed away in 2021, she had taught at the College for 50 years and left behind voluminous unpublished works. Most recently, her poems “Late Crape for My Mother” and “Carousel” were posthumously published in Callaloo (Spring 2026).

The Quandra’s Table editorial collective is a group of friends, family, and former students, all connected by fierce affection for the late Professor Quandra Prettyman. The Collective is currently compiling a volume of Prettyman’s unpublished writings, including her poetry sequence, A Safe House. For inquiries, please email Professor Kim F. Hall (quandraprettyman [at] gmail [dot] com) or contact Isabelle Robinson (https://www.isabelle-robinson.com)

Eshani Surya, Many Children Have Thoughts That Bother Them | L*STS

    

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Many Children Have Thoughts that Bother Them

Eshani Surya

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L*STS: an Essay Daily Happening | About & Contents

 Lists | Lasts | Losts | Lusts | Lests | Other

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—The tightness on my third-grade teacher’s face, I didn’t understand it until I barreled off the school bus and into my mother’s ramrod center. She kept her arms slack, didn’t hug me when I told her about my day, such a great day. She answered like I should’ve already known, there’s been an accident, though it hadn’t been accident, it’d been four planes. After, there was the footage of the gray smoke, billowing like the skirt of the woman who’d jumped from one of the top-floor windows, as if that was better than burning to death. After, there were conspiracy theories. There were chairs in circles at school, which we sat in to use simple, fragmented language to talk about what happened. There was the footage of the long lines of cars, headlights on, as people tried to escape the city. There was the ritual of throwing my closet open when I was sent upstairs for bed at my father’s house. It was every weekend. It was dark on the tall stairs, dark in the hallway. Quick, I moved quick, to turn on my bedroom’s light, to cast a glow on the white, impassive, double-door closet. Every night I debated with myself, suggested not looking inside. No reason a killer would choose our house to make terror it. No way for him to get in. No chance he would hide in that closet without murdering us first. But then, also, no reason he wouldn’t choose our house, if he had to choose a house at all. No way I shouldn’t scream and alert the rest of our house. No chance I’d succeed, but—

—Twenty-four (or three times eight, or six times four), thirty-six (or six times six, or four times nine), favorite numbers because there were two ways to get there. Favorites, because they repeated. Favorites, because they became so familiar compared to lesser known digits. Favorites, because they stayed. When I was eight, I was fast at the timed multiplication tests slapped down on our desks, but my favorite teacher told my mother that didn’t mean I was good at them. I hadn’t memorized every x times y, just a few key equations. From there, I added and subtracted. It isn’t right, she said. My mother said, What does it matter, if she gets there in the end? They were both wrong. Right was the numbers, waiting for me. Right was their friendship, new, obsessional, in the way I’ve always craved, like girls who can’t talk to each other about anything but their melancholy— 

—Something my therapist and I work on is understanding that fairness isn’t always possible; that what I think is fair might not be fair to another; that fair might not be as fair today as tomorrow; that the way the universe is a loop, not a line, means some things become fair later on, when you least expect it; that the constant sum of fairness would be boring, expected, rote like the end of the alphabet, which is—don’t I know, as a writer—more engrossing when it makes words, or sentences, or paragraphs, or speeches, or poems, or advertisements, or proclamations, or proposals, or abstracts, or eulogies. These are things that weigh heavy in my mouth. My mouth, which I used to think of in two. When the left got a taste, a chew, so too did the right. When the right did, so too did the left. Equal, except when I ran out of bites. Then, in the lack, in the empty space, was apologies, which took the whole mouth to say. My therapist and I work on those too, apologies. I give them too easily, or not at all, depending on whose turn it is to beg, but—

—There were chairs in circles at school, which we sat in to use simple, fragmented language to talk about what happened. There was the footage of the long lines of cars, headlights on, as people tried to escape the—

—Writing came early, as I think it does for most people who still do it regularly, feverishly, into adulthood. What if this, that? What if the story could unspool into whatever direction it wanted to? What if I was allowed to tell a lie, because it was called fiction? What if I was even praised for it? Writing, it was a coping mechanism. It was an act of reclamation. It was terrors, slanted. My mother read every sentence, and she had ideas too. When she suggested a reshaping of a plot, a retooling of a scene, I clamped down, stared off, somewhere away. They were usually good suggestions, but they weren’t mine. What did stolen ideas make my genius? Pale? That isn’t a thing to be known for. My mother talked. I refused to listen. When we were the car, I concentrated my mind out the window, at the blurring pines. When we were at home, it went with the backyard trees that beat with the wind against the sky—

—When I was eight, I was fast at the timed multiplication tests slapped down on our desks, but my favorite teacher told my mother that didn’t mean I was good at them. I hadn’t memorized every x times y, just a few key equations—

—that what I think is fair might not be fair to another; that fair might not be as fair today as tomorrow; that the way the universe is a loop, not a line, means some things become fair later on, when you least expect it—

—I’ve never decided how to pass a knife. As in, in the kitchen, dinner boiling over, if your harried mother, your exacting father, asks you to hand them a knife, does you point it up toward their eyes or down toward their stomach? My wrist is stiff either way. Got it? I say, and don’t let go. Medical advice says to keep the blade lodged in the person who is gored if you hope to save their life. In any case, I’m not the only one who agonizes over violence. When you believe in reincarnation, you discuss generations past, what happened to them. I was told there were two sisters, as close as my mother and I are, in our family. They were murdered, cut to slivers, but they found each other again, through me, through my mother. Safe, now. That’s the story I remember being told, though the details feel misaligned. Do people even say these kinds of things to children? Maybe not, but my mind is good at constructing memories—

—it was a coping mechanism. It was an act of reclamation. It was terrors, slanted. My mother read every sentence, and she had ideas too—

—But they found each other again, through me, through my mother. Safe, now. That’s the story I remember being told, though—

—In my father’s house, I was moved from the upstairs to the basement. My half-siblings were coming, and my family needed my room for them. Below, it was furnished and quiet. No one knew how long I stayed up alone in the swell of night. There, I thought of closets and doors. There, I thought of the fire that overwhelmed my childhood home, when I was four, or five, or the date is somewhat unknown to me, but it happened. To save the rest of the condominium complex, my mother ran back in. I tried to run after her. My father held me back, as he was supposed to. But down here, in the basement, if there were flames, it would be harder to reach the front door. I calculated my routes, imagined the direction of the destruction, how I would respond. Thought about it until I didn’t. Until the basement held too much life for me to manage. There were the new babies. There were the classes, full of despicable, stunning knowledge. There were the friendships and rivalries I’d made, and the politics that came with both. There were the crushes, and their texts, and their shaping of all I thought love could be. There were the lists of schools I dreamed to escape to, then their rejections and acceptances. All at once everything went wrong. All at once everything went right. My hands were full, but never with what I thought they would hold. I hated it. I relished it. Everything was burning already, and there I was—

—There was the footage, as people tried to escape—

—I was fast, but that didn’t mean I was good—

—the universe is a loop, not a line, some things become, when you least expect it—

—an act of reclamation. terrors, slanted—

—Safe, now. That’s the story—

—No one knew how long I stayed up, alone, in the swell of the night—

—The car flipped over. The car backed into a child chalking the driveway. The car drifted into the wrong lane when you fell asleep at the wheel. Driver’s education was meant to enlighten the inexperienced, but I’ve always known that a car is a weapon. Even today, I can’t drive. Behind the wheel, I get headaches. After a practice round of the neighborhood, I weep. I could never drive cross-country on my own. Never off-road. Never summit a mountain. But, once, a therapist was affronted when I told her I wasn’t brave. This, after a series of sessions about confronting the unknown, the uncertain, and knowing I was making the choice to do it. I’m afraid of it, you know, the twelve possibilities of time converging together, the universe’s mystical, violet swirl of moments. But it turns out, that the stars are just benches to rest on, but you can’t sit forever, not if they’re going to metamorphose into black holes. Space is where you’re meant to skid on for most of your days. Space it where you’re meant to live to tell the tale, like it or not—

*

On the Johns Hopkins page about OCD in children, they state, "While many children experience intrusive thoughts or habitual behaviors from time to time, these behaviors are cause for concern when they begin to cause distress for children and their families." From there came this essay: a list of those very obsessive thoughts that should have caused the adults in my life concern, that might have caused it had I talked about them to anyone. When I was diagnosed with OCD in 2022, I found myself desperate to map it onto my childhood self, not as an exploration but as an explanation that I'd obviously always had OCD and thus my diagnosis must be real. My therapist noted that weaponing understanding to prove my OCD was becoming an obsession in itself, as I couldn't handle the uncertainty of what would happen should I learn my intrusive thoughts were actually realities and not symptoms of a mental illness. Today, I feel more able to examine my childhood with curiosity. 

Eshani Surya is the author of Ravishing, which was a Chicago Review of Books and Debutiful Best Debut of 2025, and received starred reviews from Publishers Weekly and Booklist. Eshani is a Publishers Weekly Writer to Watch, a Finalist for the A.C. Bose Grant for South Asian Speculative Literature, a Mae Fellowship recipient, and a Semi-Finalist for the Key West Literary Seminar’s Marianne Russo Award for Novel In-Progress. Her writing has been supported by the Sachs Program for Arts Innovation, the Asian Women Writer’s Workshop and the Kenyon Review Writer’s Workshop. Her work has appeared in Electric Literature, The Rumpus, DIAGRAM, [PANK], Catapult, and Joyland, the anthology, Tiny Nightmares, and elsewhere. Eshani serves as a board member and instructor at the literary non-profit Blue Stoop in Philadelphia. Find her online @eshanisurya or http://eshani-surya.com. 

Samiha Matin, The Last List | L*STS

     

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The Last List

Samiha Matin

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L*STS: an Essay Daily Happening | About & Contents

 Lists | Lasts | Losts | Lusts | Lests | Other

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I know the old geezer who’s about to receive my list of grievances isn’t going to be pleased. You see, there had been a long line all day, full of many clients who arrived with all sorts of grievances, each one superseding the last, no matter how you measured it, and he’d had to go without coffee since noon after the machine collapsed into itself. (I promise you I had nothing to do with it, even as I stood staring at him and the machine for the whole nine hours.) It’s bad enough a job as it is. One room, one desk, no windows.

“Just one sheet?” he says, grabbing my list from my hand as soon as I approach the desk, even before I’ve opened my mouth to say hello. 

“Yup,” I say. “I wrote everything on it.”

“Anything you want to summarize for me before I file it away?” he asks brusquely. “You’ve probably heard from everyone by now. The usual complaints, in the usual order: parents; partners; neighbors; co-workers; bosses. Politicians, of course.”

He turns extra chatty: “They come up all the time, you know, but nowhere near as much as Amazon deliverymen. That’s up everyone’s ass. I had a five-year-old complaining about same-day Prime the other day.”

He suddenly withdraws into himself and mutters, “The old geezer’s never gonna catch a break now.” 

“No, it’s impossible for me to summarize my list,” I say. “I can’t say anything else right now. I must go.”

“What? Why?” he snaps, placing the list squarely in front of him without looking at it. “What makes you so goddamn special that you’ll say nothing to anyone and just leave like that?”

“Because—because—I don’t want to bother anyone—”

“Because you think you’re so much better than everyone?” he says at the same time, staring up at me with watery-blue eyes. He narrows them, and they suddenly disappear. “Is it the irrepressible work ethic and sanctimonious attitude that keep you at bay? Is that it, sweetheart? Rest assured, everyone’s playing that trump card these days. My book’s full of the same old shit about how every person in here imagines they’re the last person in the universe who can be blamed.”

“No. No! Why don’t you take a good look at the list first, you old fool, before preaching your horse manure to me? Alright?”

After he finishes reading the one glaring word on there, I make a grand gesture with both hands. It mimics an explosion. A supernova. Gravity clenching my fingers. Tearing my hands apart. As far from each other as possible.

“What the hell does that mean?” he says. “And this?” He’s waving the paper like a flag.

“Everything. Everything,” I respond. “Everything’s a grievance right now.”

And then I reach across the desk and take the list back from his ancient hands and put the whole thing into my mouth. I start biting down as hard as I can. The paper tears itself into smaller and smaller and even smaller bits, until it’s all dust and atoms and silvery star powder inside my mouth once again. 

*

I was very interested in writing lists, even if mine ended up contrarian: just a word, encompassing everything and nothing at once. I’m not sure how to interpret the story myself. This might be the first draft of a larger short story I can write. I’ve been bogged down in bureaucratic quagmires for a while, so that was obviously an inspiration. I was also looking at an old draft of a villanelle about parallel worlds and listening to N.W.A., so in extremely odd ways, as usual, this list (or anti-list) came about.

Samiha Matin is a full-time writer of literary and popular fiction, with proficiency in poetry, non-fiction, and scholarly essays. She holds degrees from the University of Michigan, the University of Arizona, and the University of North Texas, where she is working on her PhD in Creative Writing. Her favorite place in the world is the Laniakea Supercluster.

Sharon Wahl, Cats of the Alameda Colony | L*STS

    

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Cats of the Alameda Colony

Sharon Wahl

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L*STS: an Essay Daily Happening | About & Contents

 Lists | Lasts | Losts | Lusts | Lests | Other

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In the summer of 2010 we rented a house on Alameda Street, in Tucson. Driving down the alley behind the house, the day we moved in, we saw five kittens. The following spring, these kittens and their mother produced 31 more kittens. 31 kittens! One morning I woke up at dawn and the kittens were in our back yard, climbing the mesquite and palo verde trees, napping on the hammock, chasing each other everywhere, in a pastel early-morning light that made it all look like a fairy tale. 

Harlequin was the original mother. The kitten mothers were Powder Blue, Tidbit, Hisser, and Gray Ghost. 

Tidbit gave birth in Jonathan's editing studio. We had a film in the Tribeca Film Festival that spring, but Jonathan said if the kittens weren't born by then, he wouldn't go. The kittens came just in time: Ziggy, Ewok, and Bear. 

Ewok was adopted by a deaf woman. Bear was adopted by friends who moved with her to Washington, D.C. Ziggy Marley Stardust became Jonathan's studio cat. 

So many kittens. Lady Grey, Thomas, Cigarette, Commander Shadow, Marilyn, The Dudes, Tiny Orange, Coco, Shy Kitty. . . 

Brother, the brother of the mothers, was an orange cat who was great friends with cream and white Shy Kitty. The two of them walked side by side, leaning into each other, with the tips of their tails intertwined. Really, they did. 

Buffalo came to mate with the females, the only male who stayed. Descendent of mountain lions, his headbutts knocked you over. But he always made sure all the others ate first. 

They napped in the shade, in the sparse shadows of palo verde, mesquite, and Texas sage. They were the shadow kitties. 

They played with rocks. Rocks of a particular shape, round, smooth, almost flat, about three inches in diameter. A cat would lie on its back with a rock on its stomach and attack it, furiously, with all four paws. 

In the fall, we caught and spayed or neutered all the cats. All but one, Grey Ghost, who escaped every trap we set for her, and died in childbirth the following spring. 

Our third year renting that house, the landlord decided to replace the roof. This took several days, and on one of those days, while the roof was open to the sky, Hisser went in to explore. When the workers finished the job, Hisser was still inside. We knew she was inside because we heard her howling to get out. We called our landlord and told him we wanted to hack a hole in the wall where we thought we heard her. He agreed. We hacked a hole in the wall, but Hisser didn't come out. She was trapped in the attic. So we went into the attic crawlspace, hacked a hole in the insulation, placed bowls of water and tuna next to it, inside a Have-a-heart trap, and we got her. Yay! But within a week, she died. I could speculate, but I don't know what killed her. 

Powder Blue, a calico with pale blue eyes, was the colony's High Priestess. When we moved across the street, four years later, we carried her over and showed her the fenced-in patio, the unkempt back yard. She never went back. The others followed. 

Our new neighbor complained that the cats pooped in his garden. So we closed them in. We built a wood and chicken-wire enclosure alongside the house, with a chicken-wire tunnel onto our porch. 

In summer, the cats took turns napping by the front door. The door wasn't fitted properly into the door frame, and there was a space under it wide enough for the A/C to escape onto the backs of cats pressed against it, two at a time, tail to tail. Kitty A/C, we called it. 

That February, a scrawny black cat showed up. We didn't think he was one of ours, one of the two black kittens who'd gone off to conquer their own territories years ago, but he showed up as though he was coming home. He slept alongside the colony enclosure for a week before we let him in, getting beat up each night, his head covered in cuts old and new. Leo was named for Leonard Nimoy, Mr. Spock, one of my childhood mentors, who died that month, on February 27, 2015. 

Now, in 2026, there are three cats remaining: three elderly cats, Powder Blue, who came inside of her own volition during the summer of 2017, and is now, at this very moment, sleeping in our bed; and two of her kittens, who live outside, Coco (one of the untouchables) and Shy Kitty (a total lush, who, every morning when we go out to feed her, would rather be petted than eat). 

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(Powder Blue)

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When we rented the house on Alameda Street, the landlord asked if we would feed a group of five feral cats he'd been feeding for a couple years. If you feed these cats, he told us, other cats won't come into the yard. Ha! The mother of the five kittens next door knew when we put out food each day, and she taught her kittens where the food was, and her five kittens taught their thirty-one kittens. What surprises me most, thinking back on this time, is how easily, how unquestioningly we accepted responsibility for this large group of creatures. There they were, in our yard. They were hungry. So we fed them. Some we tamed, others, in 16 years, we never touched. One of us was a cat person, one of us preferred dogs. But there they were. We didn't seek them out, they just showed up. We never questioned that they were ours.  

Sharon Wahl's collection Everything Flirts: Philosophical Romances (Iowa, 2024) won the John Simmons Short Fiction Award and was longlisted for the 2025 Carol Shields Prize for Fiction. Her writing has appeared in many publications, including Harper's (Readings), The Iowa Review, the Chicago Tribune, Wigleaf, JMWW, Harvard Review, and the Florida Review. She lives in Tucson, Arizona, and is online at sharonwahl.com and @swahl922. "Cats of the Alameda Colony" will surely find a place in her book-in-progress, Character Flaws.