Pieces — The Headlight Review (2024)

I don’t think I’ve ever done anything so desperate for eight dollars. Then I again, in grade school I delivered newspapers in raging snow storms at 4:30 in the morning...for the princely sum of two cents a paper.

It’s 1982 and I’m in my first quarter as a freshman at the University of Georgia located in the college town of Athens. I don’t have a work-study job yet, or any other job...so I decide to sell my blood plasma.

The Plasma Donation Center is about a mile off the UGA campus, straight down Baxter Street. I can walk there. On the way I pass high-rise dormitories like Russell Hall, the all-girls dorm called Brumby and the grocery store where I buy cheap food.

As I get further away from campus the buildings and people seem to become more run down. I don’t see many other students wandering this far away from campus. There are men, mostly older, both black and white, smoking, hanging out by a liquor store and loitering on the sidewalk in the hot Georgia morning sun. I find it interesting to see these down-on-their-luck fellows so close to the university, so close to bright young people with futures. They seem to have been abandoned as if the world packed up, left, and forgot to tell them.

It is here way off campus that I find The Plasma Center, a small one-story building with the blinds down on the windows and a glass front door. It’s nondescript looking — as if it’s trying to hide in plain sight. I peer in the glass door, squinting until my eyes adjust from the bright morning sun. I see a young woman in a nurse’s uniform sitting at the front desk. She looks nice enough, but sort of out of place in this part of town. I’ve never given blood before in my life and I’m kind of worried. Will I be okay after they’ve taken my plasma out? How do they get the plasma out of my blood? Will it take so long that I’ll miss my 11:30 AM art history class? I’ve heard that people who give blood sometimes get a cookie, maybe even orange juice. Will I get a cookie too? My stomach rumbles. The generic crackers and banana I had for breakfast a few hours ago are already digested. I need more money to buy food because I’m always hungry.

I’ve been at the University of Georgia for a couple of weeks and have used up the one hundred-sixty-five dollars I brought with me for books, essentials, and my Greyhound bus ticket to get here. Now that I’m eighteen, and according to my parents an adult, I’m paying for everything, including college. Luckily I’ve picked a college in the south. It’s a lot cheaper down here than in Massachusetts where I grew up. My dad always reminds me he put himself through college, saying it made him a better person. He also claims our family is poor, so he can’t give me or my two sisters a red cent towards college. My parents do send a care package of food to me my first week here. After noticing cobwebs in a box of spaghetti and eating stale Ritz Crackers I realize they must’ve cleaned out their kitchen cabinets and sent all their expired food to me.

I’m too proud to call and beg my folks for cash...not if I have a pint of blood plasma left in me to sell. I pull open the Plasma Center door and go inside.

The young woman smiles and says, “Good morning! I haven’t seen you before.”

“No, I’ve never been here. I’ve never even donated blood. It doesn’t hurt, does it?”

“Don’t worry, it’s a piece of cake,” she assures me, then gives me forms to fill out.

I take a seat in the shaded front room. There are a few men in here also filling out papers. None of them look like students. They look like the guys on the sidewalk outside, in grungy overalls, dungarees and t-shirts with sweat stains. Stale cigarette odor is coming from the sunburnt man next to me. He looks at me with bloodshot eyes like, why are you here? My nose twitches. There’s another odor coming from the man, but I’m not sure what it is.

I fill out my name, phone number and address in Creswell Hall on campus and blood type — O positive. I find out about this “job” in The Red and Black, our university newspaper. There’s a small ad in the back offering cash to students willing to sell their blood plasma for eight dollars. There’s also an ad for male students willing to sell their sperm for twenty dollars. I’m actually upset I can’t sell sperm. How come men get twenty dollars for sperm? And I only get eight dollars for a whole pint of blood plasma? What do people want with some man’s sperm? Meanwhile, my plasma could save someone’s life!

After handing in my papers I’m directed to go inside the donation room. I enter a large open space where along the walls are about twenty off-white barcaloungers, filled with men, most much older than me. I do spy a young college-age guy. He looks out of place but I look even more out of place. Thank goodness all five nurses are women, otherwise I’d feel like I was the entertainment hired for an Elks Club dinner. All the men are hooked up with IVs coming out of their arms. A few have Reader’s Digest magazines lying on their laps, but their eyes are shut. Others just stare out. A few glance at me in a curious manner. A young nurse directs me to sit in a barcalounger in the middle of the room. “You wanna magazine?” she asks me.

“Um, okay,” I reply. I lay back and she plops a Reader's Digest on my belly.

“Okay hon’, let me see your veins,” she asks all friendly, yet business like.

I hold out both arms and watch her press on my inner elbows.

“Hmmm, this your first time? I don’t see any scars honey.”

“Yeah.”

“Well, I’ll try ta be real gentle then.”

This scares me more that she’s said this. Is it that she’ll be gentle for my first time, and she’ll be rough and mean the next time? I want to be brave, but even more I want the eight dollars.

“Thanks,” I tell her.

“Look away honey, cuz I’m gonna stick ya,” she says.

“Most folks don’t wanna see me put the needle in.”

“I hate surprises,” I claim as I watch her every move. Some men peer over half-interested, but a few actually turn away. Wow, if they can’t take watching what’s gonna happen, what does this mean? My body stiffens as I brace myself.

A moment later I feel a pop and some pressure when I see the needle go under my skin. Thank goodness I’m not squeamish. I loll my head to one side and watch the blood drain away from me. How odd. It was inside of me just seconds ago and now I can watch it travel through a long tube, then collect into a clear rubber bag.

“See, we take your blood out,” the young nurse explains. “And then we centrifuge it to separate the plasma from the red cells”. She points to a hulking white machine next to me and says, “That thing there separates the plasma from your blood. Then we put your red cells back in ta ya with a saline solution into your other arm. It takes about an hour-and-a-half if it all goes well.”

I’m not quite sure what she means by all this. I just know it means eight dollars for me when it’s all done — and I be out in time for my class.

I feel like an adult suddenly, like I’m making blood money just like these guys. I don’t need my parent’s money, even if they had some to give to me. I can make my own, no matter what it takes. I sneak peeks at the men filling the other seats and hooked up to machines. I wonder what they’ll use their eight dollars for? Some of these guys, if they’re lucky enough to have a rare blood type will even get thirty dollars today. I wonder if they know they can get twenty dollars for their sperm? I assume they probably don’t read The Red and Black student newspaper. Maybe they found The Plasma Center because it’s in the part of town where they hang out. I would tell them how they could make twenty more dollars, but I can’t discuss sperm donation with strangers. I couldn’t even do this with men I know. I cringe at the thought of them well, doing whatever it is they do that leads to a sperm donation. Yeesh.

The guys reclining here remind me of a few men I rode with on the Greyhound bus from Massachusetts to Georgia just a few weeks ago. These men got a one-way bus ticket and an ill-fitting new suit because they just left prison. I know this because they tell me. They also tell me they need to go to a new place and find someone willing to take a chance on hiring them for a job.

Then I think, well, no one has hired me for work-study yet. I applied for it when I got here in the first week of September. But I’ve heard nothing and it’s been over ten days.

I lean back with the Readers Digest on my belly, imagining the food I can buy with the eight dollars. I’m hungry all the time. I’m lucky that my roommate, a rich debutant from Atlanta is helping me — her poor Yankee roommate. She smuggles food for me from Bolton Dining Hall which is right across from our dorm. She’s on the meal plan so she gets a kick out of secreting bananas, dinner rolls and donuts in her Ralph Lauren blouse, or filling the pockets of her pastel pink capri pants with trail mix. I need more food but I can’t ask her to hide peanut butter sandwiches and sliced cheese in her matching Pink Bermuda bag. She’s already pushing her luck. I don’t know what’ll happen if she gets caught stealing food for me.

Unlike most freshman I’m not gaining weight. I’m losing it. During art history class my stomach growls like a trapped animal. I’ve been a vegetarian almost all my life and cheap peanut butter is about the only protein I’ve been getting lately. I have to wonder what donating blood plasma twice a week will do to me? I glance at the men around me. They look like hell. Most could use a shave and a bath. The only other person who seems to be a UGA student is studying a textbook as if he’s in the library right now with an IV needle stuck in his arm. Maybe I will bring my drawing pad next time and work on my charcoal sketches for my studio class. I’m an art major and like many a great artist I am starving. I’m a cliche like all the anguished, misery-filled artistes who came before me. Van Gogh might have cut off his ear, and Edvard Munch suffered from anxiety, but I have a suffering all my own...selling my blood plasma for cash.

About an hour-and-a-half later I’m almost done, my blood has been removed, centrifuged, and the red cells returned to me into my other arm with a cold saline solution. I can feel it slither back into my vein, marking its journey through my body with a cool snake-like feel.

One of the nurses pulls out the needle. “You’re done honey. Look at you. You survived your first plasma donation.” She has me raise my arm way up over my head, then has me use my other hand to clamp over my inner elbow. After a minute she wraps it in a stretchy bandage. I’m wondering if I’ll get a cookie now? It’s been a long time since I’ve had a cookie — not since I left Massachusetts a few weeks ago. Boy, I’d love one now...maybe an Oreo, or a Chips Ahoy, or even a boring old Fig Newton.

When I get up I’m light headed. My heart flips for a moment. I force a smile while a nurse walks me to the front desk. Both she and the nurse at the desk ask me how I am. I assure them I’m fine, struggling to seem “okay” so I can collect my payment. I try to not sound like I’m begging when I ask, “Do I get a cookie or something?”

“Nope, just the cash,” the nurse tells me. “Now you can buy yourself a cookie.”

I’m handed eight ragged one-dollar bills. While I clutch the money in one hand, I’m told I don’t need to make an appointment for my next donation. It’s by drop-in only and there must be two days between them so my body can resupply my blood plasma.

I walk out into the blinding sunshine, holding the door while two men make their way in. The acrid stench of alcohol is coming off of them. I realize that’s what I had smelled on that other man earlier. Liquor! That man I filled out forms with must have been drinking before coming to get money for his blood plasma. It’s only eleven in the morning. How can they smell like they just stepped out of a bar? There must still be alcohol circulating in their blood. I’m sure they’ll be turned away. Then again, they didn’t turn away the man I noticed earlier who smelled like this.

I use some of my blood money to buy a granola bar from a vending machine on campus before I go to my art history class. It’s not a cookie, but it almost tastes like one and is healthier. Thank goodness eight dollars goes a lot further here in Georgia. After classes I stop at the grocery store near my dorm to buy generic food. These are the no-frills grocery items packaged in plain white boxes or white labeled cans. Bold black lettering on the labels tells me what I’m buying. There is nothing extra written claiming it’s tasty or appetizing and no bright colored pictures on the packages making the food inside seem like it might be delicious. I don’t know if it’s just my imagination but the generic food doesn’t taste as good as the name-brand food. The generic peanut butter has the consistency of brown wall spackle. The phony Saltines don’t have much salt and seem less crispy. The fake Kraft macaroni and cheese is the worst. The noodles are gummy and the powdered cheese smells like feet, but at least it fills my belly for hours.

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One day between plasma donations I have no money and I’m hungry. I go to the supermarket across from the dorms on Baxter Street...just to window shop. I’m in the produce section when I’m tempted to swipe an apple. It’s just sitting there, all red, shiny and not wrapped in plain white paper with bold black print. My hand hovers over it. What if I just took one bite and put it back? Would that be like stealing? I pick it up. Real food, only a few inches from my mouth. I just want something that’s not fake, not powdered or gummy like the generic macaroni noodles. I breath in deep, close my eyes…and put the apple back. I just can’t steal, but now I understand why some people do. I turn my head, walk away and out the supermarket door. Outside I hold up my fist and make a silent vow. “As God is my witness I hope there comes a day when I’ll never eat generic food ever again!!”

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I’ve been selling my blood plasma for almost eight weeks now. I enter a whole other world when I leave campus and head to The Plasma Center for my bi-weekly donations. Having eight dollars in my pocket after all this makes a huge difference in my eating habits. I’m not so hungry now, but I’m sure bored with tasteless generic food. And worst of all, all this suffering doesn’t seem to be helping my art. My seemingly well-fed classmates are getting better grades on their charcoal sketches than I am.

One day while walking back to campus after going to The Plasma Center I notice a warm sticky feeling on my inner elbow. I glance down and notice the stretchy bandage is soaked. I’ve started bleeding again. I hold my arm up and apply direct pressure. It won’t stop. I run all the way back with my arm in the air and my other hand clamped over it. A nurse puts another gauze bandage on it, saying this happens from time-to-time, and not worry. She tells me I’m not getting enough vitamin K so my blood isn’t clotting like it should. “Remember,” she says, “you should eat more fresh spinach and broccoli.”

I tell her I will, but deep down I know I just don’t have the money for fancy fresh vegetables.

*************************

By the middle of November I’m called by the work-study program. I will interview for a job with Miss Arbor at Bolton Dining Hall — the place where my roommate has been smuggling food for me.

I had no idea how big Bolton was on the inside. I stroll through the dining area and gape at students with plates full of delicious looking food...broccoli smothered in cheddar sauce, corn-on-the-cob with butter, giant cookies with M&M’s pressed into them and tall glasses of ice cold milk. I enter the back kitchen area to meet Miss Arbor in her small office. When I walk in an older, short-haired, worried-looking woman has a phone receiver between her cheek and her shoulder. She points to a chair. Once I’m seated she covers the mouthpiece and asks me who I am and why I’m here. I tell her, “I’m Coree Spencer and I’m here to interview for the work-study job.”

She nods and whispers to me, “Oh, yes.” Then she speaks into the receiver. “You can call me back in a few minutes.” She hangs up and eyes me suspiciously. Does she know about the purloined food I’ve been receiving from her dining hall? Or is it my Yankee accent? She looks at me sideways the whole time she asks me about my schedule and if I’ve ever worked in food service before. It’s very unnerving. I need this job. I’ve never worked in food service, but I know a lot about food — mostly how to eat it. If I get a job here I’ll be surrounded by food and I will get to eat all I want during my four-hour work-study shifts. After the short interview I thank her just as her phone rings. She gives me one more sideways glance before turning to answer her phone.

A week later I still haven’t heard back from Miss Arbor. I return to the student center to check out more jobs. I don’t think I can work these other ones and be fed at the same time. There are other work-study positions such as science lab equipment cleaner, or library assistant. I think I’ll hold out a while longer to see if I get the call to work at the dining hall. My dream is to work around food.

I continue going to The Plasma Center. I’m stuck in the arm with a needle by young nurses who seem to be starting out their medical careers. The men, few other UGA students and I are like guinea pigs they can practice their skills on. One day these nurses will be at fancy hospitals sticking people with needles like experts every time. Occasionally they miss my vein and I have deep purple bruises that eventually turn green, then yellow on my pale white skin.

One day while I’m giving blood plasma I think about drawing in my sketch book. Instead I look at the men across from me. The Plasma Center seems to turn away completely inebriated men, but even I can tell many of these guys have tippled before coming here. I wonder about the patients who might receive their blood plasma. Will they wake up from a transfusion or surgery suddenly craving cigarettes and cheap Ripple wine? These men seem like they gave up years ago. Wild Irish Rose, Thunderbird and Colt 45 have given them a reason to go on one more day. I never really talk to these men, other than saying; good morning, good afternoon, or thank you for holding the door. They all seem polite. A few pass the time by flirting with the nurses. I listen to them make remarks like; “you sure is too pretty to be sticking needles into people’s arms” or, “what’s a nice girl like you doing in a place like this”, and “how can you be single with a figure like that”. The nurses laugh it off. These attempts at flirting are so ridiculous that it’s obviously one big joke. I think some of these sad sack guys might really mean it, but mostly they seem to be going through the motions.

I feel an odd kinship with these men. All of us are desperate for money. Sometimes I feel closer to them than my fellow UGA students. I have more in common with them even though I’m an eighteen-year-old girl from the North, and they’re older fellas from the Deep South. I’m addicted to filling my belly with macaroni and fake cheese and they’re addicted to liver damaging liquor.

I confess to only a few college friends that I get my grocery money by selling my plasma. I tell my roommate and a girl from Queens, New York who lives across the hall from me. I can’t imagine sharing this with all the southern belles on my dorm floor. Most of them have never had to work. I spent the last couple of summers working in a greeting card factory back in Massachusetts. I also babysat, cleaned a neighbor lady’s house and had two paper routes. Most of these girls have everything paid for by their parents, including receiving weekly checks for “mad money”. I wonder if these girls would understand my spending time with alcoholic men, hooked up to machines, centrifuging our blood to extract the plasma for cash. These girls spend eight dollars like it’s nothing at all. These girls write checks at the small dormitory convenience store for gum and Diet co*ke. Once my roommate even bounces a check at this convenience store after purchasing two packs of Bubble-Yum grape bubble gum. When she gives me a piece of her ill-gotten Bubble-Yum I savor it like I’m a death row prisoner and this juicy piece of gum is my last meal.

Now that I go to The Plasma Center I count every penny I make because it’s literally blood money. I wonder how long I can do this? I wonder how long the men have been doing this? If I do get a work study job I will actually miss seeing these guys, these misfits, and I will miss the nurses who call me honey like they’re waitresses at The Waffle House and I’m a regular customer.

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On December 2nd, the day before the University of Georgia closes for Christmas break I head off to The Plasma Center. I will be leaving on a Greyhound bus back to Massachusetts in two days. I’ll need eight dollars for some cheese crackers and soda I’ll buy at bus stations on the 36 hour journey. I know I’ll eat real good when I get home to Massachusetts. I didn’t think I’d ever miss my mom’s cooking, but eating generic food for three months has driven me to miss her BisQuick pizza, powdered mashed potatoes and boiled spinach with vinegar and margarine. I have tried to make my parents feel guilty by telling them I’m forced to sell my blood plasma for grocery money. But they think it’s great, especially my dad. He would probably have had my two sisters and I selling our blood plasma years ago if it was legal.

At The Plasma Center the donation room is decorated for Christmas and the nurses have Santa Claus buttons pinned to their uniforms. It’s festive and I’m in a warm, generous mood as I look at the men here. With a needle stuck in my arm I imagine being back in the bosom of my family in about four days. I wonder, what will these men do to celebrate the season? Will they purchase better booze? Will they buy a Slim Jim to eat along with their fortified wine called Night Train? I’m smiling while I ponder these lovely holiday thoughts.

Suddenly all the nurses move with great purpose. They start unhooking everyone methodically. A few appear teary-eyed.

“What’s going on?” I ask as they pull my needle out. “I’m not done yet.”

“Everyone is done,” the young nurse explains as she bandages my arm.

“Wait, what?” I ask. The men around me are asking the same thing. They are even more frantic.

“Everyone has to leave,” another nurse announces. She’s from the front desk. She has a clip board and her face trembles.

Something is very wrong.

A couple of men don’t even get up after they’ve been unhooked. They remain reclined and want the needle put right back in. I gather my knapsack and head to the front desk with some of the men.

“Are we still getting our eight bucks? Even if we didn’t finish?” one of the men asks. I’m glad he did and so are the others as we gather like a small mob in front of the desk where we get our payment.

A young nurse, her face bubbling with tears, opens the old strongbox then starts handing us our cash while telling us, “This is your last eight dollars. You can’t come back. We’re closing after today.”

“Why, ma’am?” another man asks.

“Yeah, why, please,” I repeat.

“Can I come back in a couple days?” Asks a man who smells like he hasn’t bathed in some time.

“You don’t understand,” she explains, choking back tears. “No one can come back. We’re closing for good.”

“But where’ll we get our cash from now on?” I hear some man behind me.

“I don’t know. I’m so sorry. Now please go, we have to close up,” she begs us.

We start to leave, all of us a bit stunned until a man breaks the silent shuffle out and says, “I’d really like to know why, ma’am?”

The young nurse comes from behind the desk and starts to herd us all out, stammering when she says, “Ahhh…there’s this thing called AIDS. They say it might be gotten from needles and maybe through blood. We can’t let y’all do this anymore. Now y’all please have a Merry Christmas.”

After we get outside I hear the glass door shut. I turn back and see her locking up while a few men head towards the liquor store. Some men loiter outside The Plasma Center. They seem in palpable pain at the loss of their income and are unable to say goodbye to their money source. All I can think is thank goodness I’ve got enough generic Saltines and peanut butter to last me until I leave for home.

I take one last look at the men, with their heads down as if the answer to their problems is hidden in the cracks of the sidewalk. I say goodbye, but it comes out as a faint whisper. Only a few men hear. They lift their heads and nod at me.

I start walking, stunned. What is AIDS? And why does it mean I can’t give blood plasma for money anymore? I get back to campus knowing I likely will never see these men again now that The Plasma Center is closed. I’ll never have any reason to walk back to that part of town.

I enter my art class thinking, “Dear God, I sure hope I get a real job and never have to sell my plasma or any other part of my body for money ever again.”

The day before I get on the Greyhound bus bound for Massachusetts I receive a phone call telling me I can start working at Bolton dining hall when I return to UGA in January. Maybe God was listening to me. Now instead of giving up my blood plasma twice a week for cash I will be paid to come in five days a week to eat all the most delicious food I can during my work-study shift.

On the bus ride home a middle-aged man nods before slumping into the aisle seat next to me. The faint scent of beer and cigarettes wafts off his damp winter coat. I smile at him before turning and leaning my forehead on the dirty bus window. I’m waiting to catch my first glimpse of snow while heading back north. Passing billboard after billboard hawking refreshing Coca-Cola, Cracker Barrel Restaurants and Camel cigarettes I mull over one thing — I wonder what the men from The Plasma Center will do from now on to get their liquor and cigarette money?

Objects are often tied to memories – they strengthen each other in the elaborate pathways of the mind. Songs, smells, tastes: the list is endless. Nostalgia and reminiscence can become fused instantly; sometimes, the bond breaks like a weak weld, and other times becomes permanent.

For me, rings are wrapped around specific memories adorning the space of my lifetime. Maybe it’s

their intricacy

their uniqueness

their fragility.

No one else worldwide is wearing the same set simultaneously – my stylistic decisions make me irreplaceable. I value the concept that rings are constantly with me, right in view, closing around my fingers like tiny armor plates.

Maybe it’s the way they’re like temporary tattoos – meaning can also be far subtler than more permanent avenues of self-expression. Rings have the arcane ability to signify far more than meets the eye – silent statements that shout in their own way. Or maybe it’s because they can be

lost and found

lost and forgotten

lost and mourned.

Delicate rings are often prone to wander, even in the care of a vigilant wearer.

There’s a part of me that’s convinced that I’m overly sentimental and unduly attached to inanimate jewelry pieces. I hope the truth of it all is simply that I love wearing tiny metal objects.

All these feelings are genuine and unshakable: they define me far more profoundly than I previously realized. Looking into my jewelry box, a swirl of memories rises like a cloud.

I imagine the rings as tiny slivers of silver linings.

I revel in their diversity and the evolution of my taste and personality.

I see snapshots in time of places and people who were with me when I got them.

Sometimes, memories haven’t been discovered in ages, and experiencing them brings waves of poignant longing. Other times, it’s only been a few days since I smiled or laughed or cried at that moment when…

I think of the rings I was wearing as I held Grandpa’s hand in his last hours. There is an image that shines brighter than the others in my memory. It portrays a quiet moment when Grandma stepped outside his hospice room for an emotional respite.

My hands were clasped around his, and the light from the open door reflected off my beloved tiny metal objects.

On my right middle finger was the fishbone ring that caught on everything until I framed it with two other silver bands. That fish was a personal reminder to stand tall, straighten your backbone, and be strong, no matter the situation. It may seem like an odd association with a line of bones – of mortality, but it braced me through those fleeting final moments shared with Grandpa.

Next to the fish on my pointer finger was a ring comprised of many twisted golden layers; it was connected throughout the spiral but not on the ends like I’d expected rings to be. I wondered how it stayed on, but it did. Now I suppose that’s a metaphor for the worst life brings; 3 whatever the situation or circ*mstance, I will endure.

There was the silver left-hand pinky ring I’d slid around my finger last minute, only barely being held on by the joint as my finger’s volume shrank in the coldness of that palliative care room. I’m sure it was as comfortable as possible for my grandfather, but it was sterile and frigid for me. The Indiana winter yet to melt into spring was no match for that feeling of perpetual frostbite – I realized that was how death felt on the outside, to those only witnessing it.

Polishing the image has proven pointless. I’ve lost count of the other rings I see in that cerebral picture – simple tiny gold- and silver-filled bands stacked together like longtime friends. The differences in surface patterns could only be seen upon a very close inspection. Their variegation was meant for me; I knew where I’d gotten them and why I cared. Sitting there with Grandpa’s fading lifeforce, those moments of bliss were forgotten, slipping away just like him.

I shudder at the uncanny way those rings held the warmth of my hands, vividly scalding me as Grandpa’s own became cold. His fingers slowly transitioned in hue from red to blue, like a subtle watercolor wash or tide rolling in at nightfall. Looking down at those pieces of metal filling up my fingers, I realized that after he was gone, they would be there; they couldn’t leave me so easily. My hands were holding Grandpa’s, needing his firm, reassuring squeezes. To this day, I don’t know if those motions were more to calm my soul or his. It vexes my brain to try and answer that question still burning through it each time the memory loops back into salience. Perhaps actions truly do speak louder than words.

I remember his last breath and his strong grip on my hands suddenly slipping away. Searing realization of knowing he’d never squeeze my hands again and tell me I wore too many rings, that I’d be going off in metal detectors forever unfurled inside my soul. Silently, I promised Grandpa that I would never forget how life is transient, how it’s something to be guarded far more than traditional items of wealth. Over four years later, the sentiment still exists.

After moments lost in the vacant space of a heart no longer able to beat, Grandma removed the wedding band from Grandpa’s finger and closed her palm around it. With a stifled breath, she whispered the words of the vow that the piece of jewelry represented for almost sixty years. Grandma spent a few agonizing seconds trying to fit his ring onto any of her fingers and ultimately failing. With another ragged gasp, she held it to her heart and slipped it into her pocket.

Unsure what to do next, I rotated those many rings around my fingers. Mazed in a stormy sea of grief, I physically was unable to do anything other than fiddle with those tiny metal objects. I didn’t want to leave Grandma alone with her heartbreak and the body of the man she loved, but what more could I do? How could I provide tangible, empathetic comfort when all I felt was palpable emptiness?

After a time that seemed like seconds and years, I whispered to Grandma that I’d be outside. I knew she’d need some time to say her goodbyes privately. I’d imagined my own inside the room for days, not wanting to miss his last moment. But I paused in that physical threshold and whispered my final farewell, feeling as if one more was needed. The same cold of that hospice room followed me to the family waiting room and settled into my soul for weeks. I knew it wasn’t the rings on my fingers causing the sensation, but my hands felt chilled to the bone, like Grandpa’s as he took his last breath in this world.

The memory of that fated day still evokes pain; it slices through my heart and makes me shiver like unheated steel. I’ve learned that it’s stainless; the sting refuses to dull. Being a witness to the transition between this world and the next changed me; it forced me to consider in what ways youth is often wasted on the young. I wondered for months if my last remaining slice of childhood died with him. I felt older at that moment, far older than I’d ever felt while blowing out candles and making wishes.

It’s easy to see now that I had put on all those pieces of jewelry as physical reminders to strengthen my soul for the road ahead on the path of bereavement. The rings I wore the day Grandpa traded this life for the next told a story of all I’d survived until that point; all I hoped to overcome that day and whatever would follow after he was gone.

During my thesis defense – a week after his passing – I wore only the set of three rings with the fishbones at their center, futilely trying to curb the nervous habit I’d developed of playing with the plethora of rings on my fingers. I also worried twisting around the metal would be distracting for my committee, a deleterious habit that stemmed from the guilt of missing Grandpa’s burial and the chance to support Grandma simply to graduate. The sensation was as piercing as wearing too small rings, which make deep dents in the skin and feel like they’re squeezing the fingers into a permanent numbness.

Those rings etched into my memory of holding Grandpa’s hand are now lost; I had to take them off at work one day for manufacturing safety compliance, and they were never found. I mourned for days and couldn’t understand why at the time. Weren’t they just worn metal bands, some even desperately needing polishing? I see now it wasn’t the lack of physical accessories that deeply wounded me – it was the feeling of a complete loss. My last proverbial piece of Grandpa vanished along with them. Like his spirit, they’re somewhere else, perpetually out of reach. Now I think of his memory and must rely on my mind’s images alone. In a gold-plated moment mixed with grief and hollowness,

I got the fishbone ring remade.

It’s not the same.

It feels blasphemous to wear it.

Perhaps this is the reason I still wonder why I so ardently adore tiny metal objects. A month before the day that marked four years after Grandpa’s expiry, I knew which set of sixteen rings would be with me. My jewelry pieces weren’t hidden on a chain close to my heart like Grandma’s newfound home for their wedding bands. They were all in full view, showing me that I have many more memories to be made and experiences to be felt. And I am more than my experiences. I am as strong as carbon steel, unique as tooled gold, and extraordinary as polished diamonds.

On Grandpa’s Remembrance Day, I gazed into my jewelry box and considered what makes me select specific rings each morning. Was there something driving those visual decisions? While the concept of them becoming tactual shielding was important, the choosing of the rings is more subconscious than I could explain. I found I often start at my pinky fingers and work my way to the pointers, selecting rings I think together are aesthetically pleasing. Present-day favorites or newly acquired pieces always seem to make the miscellany, whether that was my intention or not.

It wasn’t long ago that I realized I still perform that unconscious exercise I did before holding Grandpa’s hand on his last day with us. I stack on the metal; I apply ring after ring when I want to remember I’m stronger than I feel at that particular heartbeat. Another compelling element discovered was that I always remove the rings when I return home – the action is one of the first I perform. I don’t need steeling in my sanctuary: I am content with letting the memories lie in wait for another dawn.

Serenity is a vital concept when considering my jewelry choices. Not all my retrospections tied to inanimate artisanal designs are laced with melancholy, sharp like metal improperly buffed. Quite a few are glimmering through my mind, like light reflecting off a diamond – sweet bursts of stars. Memories come in many sizes and finishes, after all.

I smile at the irony of the class ring I was so excited to get and couldn’t afford. I think of it now and wonder if it’s too late to purchase one, if it’s too ridiculous of a notion. My undergraduate college experiences have been tarnished by the marching of time – over five years have passed, bittersweet echoes blending into the realm of hazy nostalgia. I’m not even the person I was back then; I certainly don’t look like her anymore. Each day seemingly brings new waves of sterling silver hairs overtaking the auburn in my curls. But the concept of belonging to the class still gleams around the corners of my mind, unforgotten.

These days, my right ring finger is often filled with another object of adornment that would have to be evicted. The specific ring that would have to be laid to rest inside my jewelry box is a dainty silver bow, a reminder delicately tied around a finger encouraging the wearer – encouraging me – not to forget. And forgetting is something I never want to do. That delicate ring invites me to remember that I am loved, strong, and not nearly as fragile as I may seem. For a reason I can’t quite comprehend, I often need reassurances from tiny metal objects.

When I look back on those undergraduate years, I recognize that I filled that void of fitting in with the class of 2017 with other items of personal adornment. While not accessories directly tied to individual accomplishments, the rings I was wearing when I graduated shone like the pride I felt for myself and my peers. I remember their sparkle, their celebratory clinking as we repeatedly clapped to commemorate our achievements. To this day, I love applauding with fingers filled with metal. The twinkly sounds make the emotions sweeter, like the sound of clinking together champagne glasses in a shimmering toast. The sounds made me wonder if others feel a similar attachment to personal adornments; mercifully, the idea was something on which I did not long have to muse.

I reflect on the class ring I found in Grandpa’s things that wasn’t his. Grandma doesn’t know where he found it. Maybe it was on that Florida beach trip when he was mildly obsessed with metal detecting; maybe it was left in the space he used to open his model boat business. Grandpa kept it safe in the drawer where he kept his most valuable personal possessions, but he never told Grandma it was there. A secret unearthed after his body literally returned to the ground. Even though the ring was well-worn, places made smooth by unknown adventures; the green center stone still shone as if lit from inside its core. Enough of the engraving was left to determine the school and give my search a starting place. Although they were rather mundane designs like buildings and letters, the worn nature of the surface appeared more like mythical ruins and long-forgotten runes. Careful cleaning revealed more secrets to help decipher the ring’s original wearer.

Soon enough, the hunt led to a tangible clue. I found its owner through the initials on the band, KFS. Over fifty years had passed since he lost it, and he couldn’t remember where. None of Grandma’s ideas jogged his memory. He tearfully reminisced about the sadness of losing his class ring and the extreme wonderment of seeing it in his mailbox after so long. It was like welcoming an old friend after years apart, scarred yet familiar, mysterious in their transformation, yet instantly recognizable. Maybe this concept is why Odysseus has remained vital throughout history – his journey reveals how time and tide craft their own devices in the lives of mortals. Odysseus seems to be a metaphor for wanderlust, personal growth, and returning home. Perhaps Homer also kept or held onto objects as corporal ties to ephemeral milestones.

I envision the ring I hope to receive one day that will be tied to a new life chapter shared especially with another. A physical promise to be carried over the vein directly leading to my heart. Hopelessly romantic, perhaps, but the concept sparkles; maturity has yet to tarnish the idea. It will be built on a simple foundation of a golden band and platinum prongs, celebrating diversity through this mixing of metals. It will have three diamonds; the center stone will be slightly included, showcasing that perfection is overrated and impossible to achieve (yet still shamelessly trying to attain it).

Most importantly, it must match the other rings I’ll be wearing, the memories that shaped the woman receiving such a specific piece of jewelry – that shaped me. It must celebrate growth while respecting the process; it’s a lot to consider for such a tiny metal object. I understand I could purchase one of those unique adornments myself; it’s just a beautifully crafted thing, after all. But then, the concept of indelible promise is lost. The action

seems strange,

silly; unnecessary –

so very desperate.

The materials fashioning my future engagement ring will be timeless; unlike the wearer, they will lack an end date – I suppose all dreams should follow their inherent resolve. While a little verbose for the circumference, I think Grandpa would’ve found the sentiment the ideal inscription on his wedding band – a personal promise that life continues after the sand stops falling. He would’ve probably chuckled and said it’s an apropos pun that life fits along a circular track. Temporal time would be rather dull indeed without the luster laughter brings.

I laugh when I clean my rings and watch the gloomy hues become resplendent. They have been given new life: they’re ready for more adventures. Their cleansing makes them sparkle yet never removes the wear of time. My tiny metal objects frequently excite me for more experiences that will create mental souvenirs of their own right, in their own time. The future is bright, twinkling – incredible.

Memories come and go through the intricate passageways of the mind. Many are paired with stronger emotions than others and refuse to become worn or decayed. Metal is no different. Rings hold a sense of completion; start to finish. Combinations of physicality and abstraction are crafted to guarantee that all will be fulfilled. Some will even surprise their wearer and end up right back where they began

At least ten years ago now, I was sitting in Cafe Roma, one of the nicest restaurants in Cleveland, TN, waiting for one of my literature colleagues. We were hosting a visiting writer for the university where we taught, and the others of us were already there. I was the only one sitting facing the door, and I was paying close attention to when Susan would arrive. We were making that basic conversation one makes with somebody one is trying to make welcome, while also knowing we’ll never really see each other ever again, when Susan walked in. Since I was the only one facing the door, I was the only one who saw her fall.

Susan had been struggling with speech and mobility issues over the previous couple of years. When she first told our department about it, she pointed out that it wasn’t noticeable to anyone other than her. There was a momentary lapse between what her brain wanted to say and its coming out of her mouth. Not long after she told us about this development, though, we could all see that delay, in addition to the way it was spreading throughout her body. It took several years for her to get the diagnosis that she had ALS, Lou Gehrig’s disease, but, by then, we all knew whatever she had was awful, taking away an erudite woman’s voice, then her life. At the time, though, we weren’t sure what was happening to her, just that she was slowly losing the ability to do what she loved.

When I saw her fall, I calmly excused myself from the table and went to help her up. While I made my exit from the table as if nothing was wrong, I moved quickly from that point on. I was hoping to be able to help Susan get up before anybody noticed, as, somehow, nobody in the restaurant had seen it happen. The setup of the restaurant is strange in that customers enter through a side door, but there were still enough people facing that direction that I was surprised none of them had seen her fall. Or perhaps some people did, and they just didn’t want to draw attention to her. That was certainly my focus. Having been raised in the South, just like Susan, I knew that causing a scene is one of the many-more-than-seven deadly sins of Southern life.

I got to her quickly, knelt down, and began pulling her up. Even though she was having trouble speaking, I could clearly understand the one word she said: Wait. I didn’t, and I kept trying to get her up. She said it again. Then again. Then I listened. I stopped tugging at her and simply knelt there and did what she asked. I waited.

Susan was never one to rush anything. Though I was never able to see her teach, I heard from people who had that she could ask questions, then wait patiently for students to think deeply enough to come up with a more-than-superficial answer than they would give if she hurried them. She was the rare teacher who was comfortable with silence: her own and others’. Another professor told me a story about team-teaching with her early in his career. He described how she could stand in front of class and look for a passage, calmly turning pages until she finally found it. I remember being surprised by that ability, as I knew that I never did that. If I couldn’t find something after a few seconds, I would just explain to the students what I was looking for, then move on to something else. I felt like the energy of the class would flag if I didn’t keep the ideas flowing.

In the same way, Susan took her time getting up that evening. Even when the owner of the restaurant realized what had happened and came around to help, Susan continued moving at her own pace. It would be easy for someone who didn’t know Susan to attribute that to the disease that was taking away her ability to move quickly, as I’m sure the restaurant owner did. It was clear Susan couldn’t move as quickly as she once did, and it was clear something was wrong with her. However, Susan would have chosen to move at the necessary pace regardless of her health.

Unlike most of us, Susan was comfortable with who she was. She knew herself, and she lived her life according to that knowledge. It’s not that she didn’t continue to try to grow and push herself, but she did so from a deep awareness of who she was supposed to be. Most of us spend our lives striving to be somebody we’re not. Most of us chafe against the restrictions life has put on us. Most of us can’t honestly admit who we are, faults and all. Susan knew all of that about herself, and she lived her life trying to be the best version of that person she could.

Early in my time working with her, I was sitting near her during a faculty meeting. A professor who had taught at the school for decades was retiring, and he addressed the faculty. He made a number of comments I disagreed with, and it was clear there were at least a few of us in the room that was true for. When he finished, though, everybody gave him a standing ovation, celebrating his four decades of teaching there. I stood up, even though I didn’t want to. I told myself it was because I was new, and I didn’t want to draw attention to how out of place I felt there, a feeling that would become clearer with each passing year I stayed. Susan didn’t stand, nor did she applaud. She didn’t draw attention to herself, but she also didn’t join in. She just sat there with her self-knowledge, unwilling to stand, unwilling to let anybody else pull her to her feet.

When Rod mentioned Aimelie, which seldom occurred, people who didn't know her, which was most of the people he knew, thought he was saying “Emily”. Fair enough—that's what he'd thought when he first heard her name spoken. By then, he was already smitten. Not that he ever let on or said anything to her—or to anyone else—about his feelings for her. He was old enough to be her grandfather, for crissakes, and never for a moment considered alienating her and her family by declaring his feelings.

The problem—was it a problem? It could become a problem. Call it a problem—arose from an exceptional combination of characteristics: Aimelie was beautiful—Rod noticed that immediately, and, even though he recognized that an individual’s appearance has nothing to do with the person’s value as a human being, he could not help responding emotionally to beauty, whether in a person, a sunrise, a waterfall, a horse, a mountain, or anything else. Rod was a sucker for beauty.

Aimelie was not just beautiful, she was exceptionally intelligent—he'd discovered that over the ensuing two years and delighted in the quality her intelligence lent to their exchanges. But that was not all: Aimelie was also exceptionally thoughtful and . . . good, a wonderful person. Rod had learned early to share relationships beautiful women and with intelligent women and with nice women. He even learned to deal with those less common women who possessed two of those traits. A woman—or, for that matter, a man—possessing all three appeared so rarely, that he never got enough practice to keep from being overwhelmed, even if the woman was a teenager.

Rod had met Aimelie—at an equestrian event in which Rod's daughter and Aimelie's sister were riding—and been struck by her foudroyant beauty. Despite his intellectual recognition that beauty has nothing to do with a person's worth, he couldn't prevent himself from responding to Aimelie’s emotions. Aimelie's face, not in classical proportions but perfect in Rod's eyes, her almost-blonde light brown hair, her gorgeous eyes, her irresistible smile all stirred feelings in him that went far beyond mere lust.

Over the next two years, Rod encountered Aimelie in a variety of situations—equestrian, social, and academic—and grew to appreciate her other charms. He recognized early and appreciated her articulate and witty conversations. Later, he felt impressed by her extensive knowledge and wide-ranging interests, from the sciences to literature, the arts to caring for her family's many animals, politics to music.

People who knew Rod and his family called them “homeschoolers”. Rod didn't much like that term because school was the last thing he wanted to impose on his children. He thought of them—the kids, of course, but, for that matter, the whole family—as home learners. Rod observed that he learned as much as his children did in almost every activity they undertook together—not the same things, of course, but equally important. He learned about himself, about his kids, about kids in general, about ways of learning, and even about different ways of looking at topics he already knew well.

Both Rod and Ingrid, his wife, put a great deal of time and energy into helping their kids learn. Every one of the children surpassed the standard curriculum's expectations for their ages, the two older ones achieving excellent results more than a year ahead of their age cohorts. Nobody ever called them bookworms, though, because they all participated enthusiastically in many outside interests. Transporting the kids from their rural home to the various activities led Rod to refer to himself often as a full-time chauffeur

Because Rod genuinely—albeit covertly—cared about Aimelie, he adopted the habit of mentally throwing a protective blanket of love over the hill where Aimelie's family lived, every time he drove or rode past. He imagined casting a sort of imaginary cape over the hill to keep Aimelie safe and ensure she always felt, and was, loved. A scientist by inclination as well as training, Rod never took his behavior seriously but thought the whole idea nothing more than a fantasy. He was in love, though, and figured the fantasy couldn't do anyone any harm, so he kept on casting his imaginary magic cloak.

Rod didn't know, couldn’t know, that the magic seemed to work. Even after major family scenes or when both her parents rebuked her, which happened about as often as it does in other families, Aimelie never felt completely rejected. She always drifted off to sleep feeling loved and safe. And she was.

When Aimelie fell from a ladder because one of the rungs broke, she landed on the family's dog instead of the garage's concrete floor. The event left both her and the dog sore and unhappy but essentially uninjured. Had the dog not broken her fall, Aimelie would have suffered a broken hip or worse. OK, dogs like to hang out with their humans, so maybe his presence didn't mean anything—but he tended to share his presence equally among family members. That represents a one-in-seven chance or about fourteen percent or at least six-to-one odds against the dog's being there at that moment.

Or the time an enormous branch fell from a tree and crushed the tent in which Aimelie had been sleeping—she'd been in that spot almost nine hours and had gone into the house for less than five minutes. That looks like more than one hundred to one or about 0.9%. There were many other examples, but the odds of those two both occurring run about one in a thousand or 0.0013%—not impossible, but twenty times worse than the chance of a win at roulette. A rational observer might insist, perhaps correctly, on chalking those and many other episodes up to coincidence. Even so, calamity avoided Aimelie. She seemed to live a charmed life.

Not so, Rod. Oh, he avoided serious injury and illness, probably largely due to his cautious nature, as his children mostly did, too, and he enjoyed great relationships with all of them. The rest of his domestic environment, however, produced an enormous amount of stress for him and the kids. His relationship with his wife was volatile from the beginning, but he loved Ingrid and hung in for the long haul. After twelve years, the reason for the volatility came to light, when their family doctor referred Ingrid to a psychiatrist who returned a diagnosis of BPD. Or MDP, or cyclothymia—the formal term seemed to vary with nomenclature fashion or from practitioner to practitioner—“with comorbid anxiety and eating disorders”.

Over the ensuing six years, a series of MDs and psychologists prescribed benzodiazepines, Modafinil, valproate, Divalproex (under the name Epival), Olanzapine (under the name Zyprexa), Seroquel (under the name Quetiapine), armodafinil, Risperidone (under the name Risperdal), lamotrigine (usually under the brand name Lamictal), and occasionally Topiramate as an adjunct to other drugs. The one that worked most consistently, though, was lithium. Rod researched all the drugs prescribed for Ingrid and felt concerned about the listed side effects of every one of them. Because of the lithium's effectiveness, the doctors favored it over alternatives, but Rod worried about its possible long term adverse effects on Ingrid's thyroid and kidneys.

In response to Rod's concerns, one doctor prescribed a combination of lithium and lamotrigine, which seemed to be the most effective of all in helping Ingrid to keep herself stable. Fortunately, the doctor initiated the lamotrigine very gradually and thereby avoided causing the rash that can be a serious side effect. Even with the best of medications, though, their domestic life fell far short of any sort of ideal. Ingrid still subjected her family to explosive episodes, but they became less intense and less violent. Between those episodes, she often went around in a zombie-like state, always tired and not interested in anything.

The emotional closeness Rod sought and nurtured in their first years together, still tried to nurture but with less effect, seemed to recede ever further. Sharing—thoughts, ideas, cuddles, opinions, observations, activities—never seemed as important to Ingrid as they did to Rod, but now their sharing seemed mostly to revolve around which brand of chicken feed to buy for Ingrid's hundred-odd exotic show chickens or who was going to pick up which kid when. They never indulged in as much sexual sharing as Rod’s appetite preferred, and the medications did not help in that regard. Rod would have liked to share the joys and pleasures of intercourse at least daily, but Ingrid seemed to prefer a schedule—and she did like schedules—of ten or twelve times a year. Only Rod's enduring love for Ingrid kept him from finding another lover.

Did Rod love Ingrid more than he loved Aimelie? Difficult to say. He wondered about that himself sometimes but shied away from digging deep enough to find a definitive answer. He loved them both, it's safe to say, and his kids, too. People who knew Rod said he embodied a lot of energy, and he did. He embodied a lot of love, too, and usually expressed it. In the course of a quarter of a century, he figured out that, after the well-being of his children—and not unrelated to that—the two dominant motifs of his life were sharing and making people feel better.

Rod liked making people happy—the members of his family, his friends, his neighbors, acquaintances, total strangers—he felt gratified, felt he justified his existence when he made someone feel good. If someone felt sad, he wanted to—and usually managed to—make them feel better; if someone felt happy, he wanted to make them feel even happier. All of that mattered most to Rod in the context of Ingrid and their children.

Sharing seemed to Rod to be the essential reason for existing. The reason for a conversation: sharing. For making music: sharing. For making love: sharing. For writing stories: sharing. For making beautiful paintings or photographs: sharing. Why do we do what we do, Rod thought: sharing. He didn't share his disappointment at the decrease in physical and emotional closeness between him and Ingrid, but only because he didn't want to make her feel worse.

When Ingrid packed up and returned to her native Utrecht—not the city but an outlying community called Kerckebosch—Rod didn't want to add to her stress by trying to talk her into staying. At the same time, he wanted her to stay and didn't want her to think he wanted her to go. The conflict left him stressed and confused, almost disoriented, trying to figure out what to do, what to say. In the end, he told her about once a day but being careful to say it as gently and pressure-free as possible. His telling her made no difference: Ingrid’s mind remained set on returning to her childhood home.

The first few weeks after Ingrid's departure dragged slowly and painfully for the remaining members of the family. For the kids' sake, Rod pulled himself together—at least on the surface—after the first few days, although he still felt bereft and worried about both Ingrid and the kids. Betty, their eldest daughter, recovered first, even before her dad. She felt abandoned but knew intellectually that her mom's departure stemmed from Ingrid's own issues and was not about Betty. She recognized and accepted her grief and resentment but elected to accept the new situation and move on. Rod made the transition from pretending to be OK to actually feeling OK at least most of the time after about ten months. He recognized that his feelings included an element of relief.

Rod and Betty helped the others deal with their sadness and anger for the next several months until she left to matriculate at the state university. By then, the other kids were doing OK, and Rod was learning to be both dad and mom. He managed to carry on his usual work and other tasks and also to do most of the cleaning and laundry and meal preparation and all the shopping.

When Rod ran into Aimelie in the supermarket in town, he realized with a shock that he hadn't thought of her in weeks. Despite Aimelie's smile and friendly greeting, dismay smacked Rod in the face when he saw that a sling supported her left arm.

“Omigosh! What happened to you?” he asked.

“Rocket's girth snapped, and I fell off and broke my arm.”

Rod felt a chill run through him, although he hid it and offered conventional condolences. For the first time in four years, he had neglected to throw his mental cloak of protection over Aimelie and her home, and for the first time in four years, she suffered a serious injury. Coincidence? Probably, but Rod felt upset and guilty.

His love for Ingrid and pain at her departure notwithstanding, Rod loved Aimelie and wanted to protect her. From their meeting in the supermarket onward, he made a point of driving by her family's front gate, whenever it wasn't significantly out of his way, and casting his—imaginary?—mental cloak over their land and home any time he went anywhere.

Almost two years elapsed with Rod working hard at being both mom and dad to his kids while still earning a living for them all. He saw Aimelie and various members of her family a couple times a month and continued to cast his imaginary spell over their place. Rod felt relieved and gratified, and a little sheepish about those feelings, that she suffered no further significant accidents or illnesses.

Aimelie's impressive intelligence presaged her matriculation at a worthy university. In a conversation with her and her dad at an equestrian event, Rod learned that she and her family had begun making such plans weeks earlier. She applied to the “local” university—in the nearest city, only four hours’ drive away from their remote rural community—and to two prestigious universities overseas. Although more prosperous than most families in the area, Aimelie's parents thought they needed to base their choice at least in part on the availability of scholarship money.

Aimelie told Rod she didn’t have any strong opinions about any of the three universities and felt comfortable basing her choice on financial aid offers. Because Aimelie rarely put a great deal of effort into her schoolwork, her grades, while very good, did not place her at the top of her class. Fortunately, her SAT scores made admissions officers sit up and take notice, and all three of her chosen universities accepted her.

All three also offered her full-tuition scholarships, but only the relatively local one offered scholarship funding for accommodation and books. The choice occasioned many long conversations involving Aimelie and her parents, which Rod heard about in chance meetings with various members of the family. After a month of discussion, she decided, with her parents’ encouragement, to enroll at the one university she didn’t have to buy an airplane ticket to reach.

Rod learned of Aimelie's decision directly from her: he bumped into her in town early one afternoon and took her out for a smoothie. They surprised themselves by enjoying a delightful conversation that lasted more than an hour. As they parted, Rod permitted himself to tell Aimelie he’d miss her. She told Rod she’d miss him, too, but hoped to see him when she came home for visits.

He didn’t get to see Aimelie on her first visit home—he was swamped with work, and she spent almost the whole time with her parents and siblings—but hoped he might on her next visit. Mid-way through the second term, Rod heard from a friend of a friend that Aimelie had been admitted to a hospital in the city. He ’phoned Aimelie's parents in a panic and learned a taxi driver cut a corner too sharply, mounted the curb where Aimelie waited for the traffic light to change, and knocked her down. According to Aimelie's parents, she suffered only a broken arm but the doctors wanted to keep her overnight for observation in case of a head injury.

Thinking back two years, Rod experienced what Yogi Berra called “deja vu all over again”. Was this just another coincidence, he wondered. Could there possibly be anything real about the imaginary cloak of love and protection he cast over her home so many times? She seemed safe from all harm as long as he cast his imaginary magic spell over her.

Ron cursed himself for a fool, but felt an urgent need to move to—or at least near—the city in order to protect the woman he loved. Without explaining his real motivation for the move, he discussed it with his children. He told them they would eventually return to their rural retreat and persuaded them he could find a place near the city that they could enjoy almost as much. Rod’s skills made finding work easy for him, so arranging a contract consulting job in the city took little time. Before Aimelie returned to the university at the end of the mid-year break, Rod leased an older house on an acre two miles outside the edge of the urban area.

When he saw Aimelie in the course of her visit home, he told her about his family’s move and said he hoped he could take her out for a smoothie in city. She said she’d like that and gave him her address and ’phone number. After that, Rod drove past her dormitory at least once a week and cast what he thought of as his non-magic spell. He also took Aimelie out for a smoothie and lunch on the Wednesday of the third week of the term and two or three times a month thereafter.

Three-and-a-half years later, his bank account considerably enlarged by his working in the city for such an extended period, he sat next to Aimelie's parents at her graduation ceremony. In the meantime, she had attended the high school graduation—a short train ride from the university—of Rod’s daughter with whom Aimelie's sister used to ride in horse events. In the last several lunches Rod shared with Aimelie, they discussed graduate schools and her post-graduation plans. She said she intended to take a year off and travel before continuing to grad school.

Rod went into panic mode. My gawd, he thought, am I going to have to propose to her so I can be near her and keep her safe? He didn’t do that, of course, but he did worry. Should he tell her why he moved to the city? No, that sounded too ridiculous. But if he followed her overseas, she might think he was stalking her. What the hell could he do?

After almost four years of steady and lucrative consulting work, Rod could afford to take his kids on an extended overseas vacation—maybe even visit their mother, which she’d been asking him to do. If he bumped into Aimelie, though, she would probably think he was some kind of creepy wierdo. The alternative, skulking around as if he really were stalking her, did not seem an acceptable option. At his wits’ end, Rod decided to move himself and his children back to their rural home and then discuss the possibility of a vacation overseas with them.

Over the course of the summer, Rod got to take Aimelie to lunch-and-a-smoothie five times. The last time, he offered to drive her to the city, if her parents couldn’t get away. She thanked him but said they planned to take her. Two days before her departure, however, her grandmother—her dad’s mom—became gravely ill, and Aimelie's parents asked if she could get one of her friends to take her to the airport. She rang Rod, and they arranged for him to deliver her to the airport three hours before flight time to avoid any last-minute problems and allow time for him to take her to the other terminal for a bite to eat at the only decent restaurant there.

Rod persuaded Betty to look after the younger kids for the day and made a point of getting to sleep early the night before the trip. He picked Aimelie up before dawn, accepted her parents’ thanks, and set out on the four-and-a-half-hour drive to the airport. Once they reached the main highway, they made good time and enjoyed their usual wide-ranging conversation. As he drove and chatted, Rod wove an imaginary suit of love and protective armor around Aimelie.

An hour from the city, they came up behind a line of stopped cars—so long they couldn’t see the front of it. Having allowed a two-plus hour cushion, Ron didn’t feel especially worried. He turned off the motor, got out to ask what was happening, and learned that a fatal multi-vehicle accident three hundred yards before the next exit had led the police to close the city-bound lanes for at least an hour, maybe two. Knowing six miles of stopped vehicles sat between him and the accident severely compromised Rod's equanimity. He contemplated making a U-turn and heading back up the freeway to the nearest exit. He knew that from there he could take the old road to the next interchange and get back on the freeway beyond the accident. The concrete centre barrier meant he would have to drive twelve miles going the wrong direction on the city-bound side, so he and Aimelie waited.

The police opened the road ninety minutes later, and Rod proceeded as fast as the backed-up traffic allowed. Once the traffic thinned, he urged his companion to keep a sharp eye out for police and stayed ten clicks above the speed limit. They reached the outskirts of the city—not far, coincidentally, from where Rod and his kids lived while Aimelie attended college—with barely enough time to reach the airport before her scheduled departure. How they could manage the check-in, they didn’t know. As he drove, Rod suggested Aimelie ’phone the airline and see what they could do.

“I didn’t bring my cellphone,” she said, “’cause I can’t use it overseas anyway.”

“Here, use mine,” he said, handing the ’phone to her. “Explain the situation and see what they say.”

Getting through to a real, live human passenger agent at the airport took fifteen minutes, but that passenger agent proved as accommodating as possible in the circ*mstances. She suggested Aimelie ring her as they approached the airport and provided a direct number to call. The agent also told Aimelie how to find her and offered to escort Aimelie to the gate with her luggage—because all the other luggage would already have been loaded.

Rod drove directly into the expensive valet parking area nearest the departure counters and raced into the terminal with Aimelie. True to her word, the passenger agent spotted them and walked quickly with them to the security barrier

“We may be too late,” she said, “but we’ll get you out to the gate as fast as we can. They might still be keeping the doors open for you.”

Rod and Aimelie exchanged a quick hug before she passed through the scanners. He felt an almost overpowering urge to tell her of his love but instead said the same thing he had said for years to Ingrid and his children, whenever any of them went anywhere without him: “Please be careful.”

Aimelie held him in her embrace longer than he expected, then stroked his beard and looked as if she was about to say something. The obvious fidgeting of the passenger agent commandeered the moment and stole the opportunity, so Aimelie hurried to the scanner and stepped through. Rod waved to her, and Aimeilie waved back and blew him a kiss as she disappeared along the corridor with the passenger agent. Wanting to watch Aimelie's flight take off, Rod climbed the stairs to the observation deck.

Rod watched a tug pushing the huge ’plane away from the terminal building unaware Aimelie had reached the gate with the passenger agent only to find the aircraft’s doors already closed. He didn't know she, too, now stood watching the tug push the huge ’plane out onto the apron as she listened to the passenger agent’s apologies.

Rod stood by the glass walls upstairs in the observation area and watched the big bird taxi, hurtle down the runway, lift off, and retract its landing gear. Moments later, it looked like a miniature toy airplane climbing through the morning sky three miles away, when it suddenly disappeared in a bright flash. Rod thought perhaps the rising sun glinting off the fuselage had dazzled his eyes, but search, as he might the ’plane, seemed to have vanished. Fifteen seconds later the muffled “boom” of a distant explosion rattled the airport’s windows.

I returned, and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift, not the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favour to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all. - Ecclesiastes 9:11

It is raining outside. It is nighttime. I hear the droplets hitting the windows. I do not want to look outside. I could lose myself, probably would lose myself, in the pattern of rain droplets on the parking lot and window. Here and there and there…spelling out a new theory of interpretation of Macbeth or a more efficient electric motor armature configuration. Instead, I sit at the table in this large wardroom, surrounded on three sides by grated windows. Even sitting here, head bowed, the sound of the drops is tapping out the structure of a new anesthetic. But I ignore it by humming to myself to mask the patter of droplets. Sometimes I would like to leave, not this room tonight, but the hospital. But that would not be a good idea. They would not let me leave anyway and that is to the best.

There are certain distinct moments in my life. Pregnant pauses, perhaps, or pivot points of possibility. Instants and instances of deep sight and deeper insight, flashed slices of ephemera in which the interconnectedness of things is revealed to me. After that is the consuming madness as I scribble and scramble to record it all.

I have tried to breach that mania but every attempt has failed. Once viewed the new truth must be recorded, in whole, before I can rest again. I become obsessive. Inside I move in a mist but to others I operate with a frightening focus that will not be denied. The last incident – a week ago - was the rocket nozzle – a new shape that only took three hours and some minutes to itemize. No food; no sleep; no urination; just tabulation and enumeration until the design is complete and recorded.

So long ago…I was twenty and walking a path beside Lake Ontario on a winter night. The lake was frozen over and the ice was snow covered in white that faded with distance away to black. And it started snowing, slowly at first, but quickly increasing. Big fluffy flakes fell with languorous grace, thousands, perhaps millions fading into the darkness over the lake. It was entrancing and hypnotizing. A man could stare at these flakes as he stepped off a cliff to his death. And yet, and yet, at the edge of understanding, just beyond intellect, the falling flakes spoke of a thousand truths, written in a foreign language, an Incan knot language, unreadable yet elegant. I shook my head and walked on.

I was thirty-five and sitting on a bench waiting for a bus. It was early morning and a school bus turned onto the main road I waited beside – the same as it had done yesterday. The same man walked by as the day before, carrying a cup of coffee, as before. Next would be a woman carrying an umbrella. That had not happened yesterday but it would today. Three cars go by. The next car is yellow. A small bird – a sparrow? – lands for seven seconds on the bus stop sign. I see my bus turn out of the university complex and back onto the main road. I stand and gather my packages.

I read once that of course the cure for cancer was encoded in the structure of the piece of cake you ate this morning. But you didn’t have the alphabet to read it. Imagine if you could. That is what happened to me. I imagined that I could and then I could. Now I see patterns everywhere and most reveal deep truths.

I cannot stop myself. I have tried. Once I see a pattern I am compelled to record it. This is a gift and a curse, a gift of knowledge to the human race and a curse on me. I live terrified of the theory that will be so detailed and extensive that I will die while writing it down. And that is why I am here. The staff in this ward will not allow that, should it come to pass. They will restrain and force feed me, if need be.

But that need has not arisen and perhaps it never will. The summaries and notes and pages of text contain shorthand and codes and these seem to indicate that no recording would ever take so long as to be fatal. But that risk is an existential danger and one I need not bear, and so here I am.

My evening medications are brought to me by Sarah. She is a pleasant nurse of early middle age with a kind demeanor and pleasant aspect. The medications are in a small cup and are mostly to help me sleep. I dare not look into the cup. I swallow it in one gulp. Sarah also brings me a small glass of orange juice and a snack. She changes the snack. Sometimes it is a piece of cake, or a small tart, or even a fruit cup. She helps me to keep a small mystery in this existence of perfect yet useless knowledge.

The snack always has a featureless surface. Texture and pattern are dangerous for me. I see light and dark and difference and I start decoding. I need a smooth surface. White icing works well. No chips or raisins in cookies. Monotonous and isotropic are the watchwords of my life.

The rain keeps on. I consider requesting the quiet room but I think I will be okay. A few minutes later I turn out the ward lights and retire to my private bedroom. The raindrops are muted here. The walls are plain and bland and cream colored. The sheets and blankets are monochrome. There are no varying colors and no patterns. For me patterns are dangerous.

I am a voluntary inmate. A foundation has been established that receives my notes and presents the insights and inventions for development. Frederick Banting led the project that discerned and purified insulin. He won the Nobel Prize. The purification of insulin turned juvenile diabetes from a terminal illness into a manageable condition. Imagine that – a death sentence commuted, life rich and full again - and long.

Banting wanted his treatment for diabetes to be available to all so he and his partners sold their patents to the University of Toronto for one dollar. I want the same. My notes are given in trust to various developers, business people and foundations. The charter states that they may make a profit but not profiteer. If I am able to improve the world it will not be for the bottom line profit / loss of a corporation but instead for the good of all.

I blow my nose and drop the toilet paper into the toilet bowl. I should have looked away. An insight lies in the swirls and curves of the wet toilet paper in the bowl but this one does not require pen and paper. The ultimate answer is 42. But what is the ultimate question? If we assume it has to do with existence, what is this all about, what is the meaning to life, why are we here, then 42 are makes sense.

The asterisk character, *, is used in various computer languages and applications as a wildcard placeholder. The asterisk wildcard is still used today in UNIX and Perl. Way back in MS-DOS, if one typed *.*, this would list all files on the selected media. However, c*.* would only list files that began with the letter c. Similarly, *a*.* would only list files that had an embedded ‘a’ character in their name, and so on. Therefore the wildcard character * meant, whatever is selected, or chosen or found – whatever is wanted. The asterisk is a user defined operator – as wished – whatever works. The asterisk is therefore the universal answer to any and all questions – whatever you want. And the number 42 is the ASCII code for the asterisk.

Carol visits me the next day. I struggle to stay focused and not be distracted. She has worn a single color blouse. The shades on the windows have been drawn. The lights have been turned down and everything is dim. There is minimal visual stimulus. All is very quiet. This is the way the world ends, not with a bang but a whimper.

She still waits for me to leave the ward. She waits for me to come home. She still doesn’t understand that I never will. I have told her but not forcefully. As much as our shared life is over, I am weak and would be bitterly alone if she did not visit. So in my own way I string her along to keep her coming.

She stays several hours. We chat and visit and it is so good to see her. Sarah brings a featureless snack and a wan smile. We do not say it but I think we both know it is over. These visits are ghosts rising from the grave of our past life together. I stare at her, an idiot smile plastered on my face, it is so good to see her. I should let her go, drive her from me if need be, but it is so good to see her.

A few days ago I was visited by a military man so impressive that he had a staff that sat at a nearby table while we met. I do not know uniforms. I do not know which branch of the forces he was from. But he was obviously quite senior and privy to the fact of my existence by dint of his authorized classified status. And he used that knowledge and status to bring himself through the gates and metal detectors and to this locked ward to see me.

He sat glaring at me. His demeanor was hostile and he became aggressive. He had brought coffee and doughnuts instead of a cooperative attitude. The coffee was good. The doughnuts looked sugary. He did not ask for a cure for ovarian cancer; he demanded one. It doesn’t work that way. I told him that. This is not a vending machine. I do not get a choice of answers. I cannot pull a lever or press a button to select a solution. I see a pattern and I lose myself in the understanding of it until it is fully explicated. I do not get to choose.

“I don’t either!” he said.

“I can’t help you. I’m sorry.”

“I’m sorry, too.”

He reached into his jacket, festooned with colors and medals, and pulled out an effective looking handgun. I don’t really know anything about guns but this one was sleek, dark grays and blacks, and compact yet imposing. It looked like a battleship or armored vehicle, an efficient machine for dealing death, a snug method of force. I burst out laughing.

He looked surprised. He was puzzled and a bit frustrated. His tool of intimidation had failed. I don’t think he was fundamentally a bully. I think he was desperate. I didn’t know what was going to happen but I didn’t really care. We don’t get to choose, General, or is it Admiral? Time and chance to all. All you get is now, this moment, right now, while your daughter lies dying.

Will you throw that away, be arrested, carted off to jail for killing a man who has done you no harm? You are my time and chance. I cannot stop you pulling the trigger. I cannot give you what you want. Be my hurricane, tornado my house to wooden splinters, a destructive force that leavens all.

His men at the other table are rising, realizing there’s a problem, moving closer. He points the gun at me. I don’t care. You, General or Admiral, have the comfort of grief. Mine is a life suspended, placed on hold, consigned to limbo because I cannot walk down a street without seeing patterns and patterns everywhere and everywhere and always.

But then I see that the muzzle of the gun is not open. There is only a tiny hole. His men have rallied to his side. He tucks it back inside his jacket, this realistic water gun. And his hand emerges with sugar packets. He tears them open, scattering the white grains onto the dark brown tabletop. I try to look away but it is too late.

“This won’t work!” I say through gritted teeth.

More sugar, scattered again, stars in his pocket like grains of sand, burning hotly, velvet white, on the vast dark tabletop of night, I see nothing, I refuse to see, I will not try. I will not be manipulated, galaxies scattering across the cosmos of the endless universal inevitable. And then, despite myself, there it is, a lock and key, an enormous polypeptide, a protein chain thousands of amino acids long. This will empty the wards, sending the mentally unwell home, clearing out the hospitals. This is a curative prion, one that will take a folded and spindled and mutilated brain and make it flat and new and creaseless again. I reach for paper and begin to write.

Chains and chains of amino acids. I write out the single letter codes. No J, U, V or X and Z. Every other word can be made, CODEC and KODAK. No RUBISCO but definitely NABISCO. I laugh as I scribble. The naming of that plant enzyme by a senior researcher in 1979 was done in very cognizance of Nabisco. No JUICY but very ICY. Without thinking I group the letters into words in those cases where they read as words. Not often, only occasionally, but words do jump out.

STENDEC, the last Morse message sent from the passenger plane Avro Lancastrian Star Dust before it crashed in 1947 in the Andes. For fifty years the fate of the airplane was unknown, until 1998, when two hikers near Mount Tupungato came upon the wreckage. Ever since the Star Dust disappeared people have puzzled over that last message. Perhaps one day I will look into an angry ocean or turbulent windy day and know the answer. Until then, STENDEC, in three letter amino acid codes, Ser Thr Glu Asn Asp Glu Cys.

The fugue begins. I do not lose consciousness but I become dissociated. I am detached and disinterested. I see all that transpires but I am disengaged. I do not care. After a great deal of time I see Patton and his minions rise and leave. I am scribbling away. My hand aches but I do not care. In a way, I do not exist right now. The scribbling goes on and on. I could not stop if I tried.

And finally, hours later, it is over. It is dark outside. The creases of my fingers bleed from where I held the pen. I feel the usual exhaustion. I can barely keep my eyes open. But it is not fully over – not yet. This is when I come back to myself. I look at what I have written, thirty-one sheets of letters, several hundred per page, describing three prionic proteins.

The first protein is quite short, a mere page and a half of amino acids. The other two are approximately equal in length and both quite long. The first one will prevent and even cure early stage Alzheimer’s. It can be taken by anyone without harm. Injecting one dose of this protein at age thirty will prevent Alzheimer’s from ever developing. It will be a universal preventive measure.

Once the dementia crosses a critical threshold, however, this proteinaceous prion will have no effect. The window of prevention will be permanently closed. Thus, anyone already significantly suffering is not helped.

The second one will cure Schizophrenia. Of the current cases, ninety-seven percent will be cleared by three doses of this protein, spaced ten days apart. This may be taken anytime in one’s life and twenty days later, hours after the third dose, the symptoms will start to clear and be totally gone eight days later.

However, it will not cure everyone. Three in one hundred will be unaffected. Again, like the prion that will cure Alzheimer’s, not everyone can be helped. But the odds are greatly in favor, so much so that there is no risk in trying it. Is this a good thing? I will improve the quality of life for many. Many more will be out of work, as their jobs in nursing homes and hospitals and other care facilities disappear. Is this a good thing?

I do not know what the third one will do for the average person. Perhaps nothing. Perhaps it is a poison. But for me, if I take it, a single dose, I will lose this ability, this blessing and cursing, and be able to live a normal life. I can go home. I can announce myself magically cured and go home, to normal life and to Carol.

And the world can go hang. I have done enough for a hundred lifetimes, I have been Banting and Haber and Bohr again and again. The very small royalty paid into my account would support fifty families at the height of luxury. That is more than enough for Carol and I to live a quiet and comfortable life.

I expect that in a week or two the first samples of these proteins will have been synthesized. I will explain what they are and what they will do, telling lies about the third, and in half a month I will have the option to be normal. But I will not take it. I will remain here, for the good of all, as long as Carol keeps visiting.

“How about this?” Julia holds up an impressive stiletto—golden quarter with sheeny turquoise vamp, the heel at least four inches tall—and smiles mischievously.

“Hah!” Lina says. “You trying to kill me, bitch?” They giggle together.

“I know, right? I couldn’t even handle these.” Julia sets the shoe down and they amble to the next display.

It’s late morning in a small boutique on Fifth Avenue in Midtown. The store has a half dozen or so women in it at the moment, not counting the three saleswomen, one of whom happens to be the famous actress who owns the place and occasionally makes an appearance to chat with the clientele and introduce them to her new shoe designs. The two friends whisper to each other while splitting their gazes between the elegant merchandise and the other customers being helped.

“Just go up to her after she’s done with that lady,” Julia says. “I bet she’ll remember you. Everyone does, right?”

“Ugh, when you say it like that.”

“Oh, please. That supercrip thing is gold and you know it. I’m just living in your reflected glory, queenie.”

They laugh again, louder this time. Lina’s long, blonde hair jounces slightly. Her upper lip lifts and her pink, beetling gums with their nicely rowed teeth debouch into the world proudly. She edges past Julia to approach a kaleidoscopic wall of rear-facing heels. She walks toward the wall unsteadily yet with hard-earned assurance. She is pigeon-toed, the bottom half of her legs splayed like supportive rafters to steady her torso that cants forward while her rear juts backward just enough to reach equipoise. Her arms sway as needed for balance, akimbo in the air, her hands hanging like tassels. When she steps, the ball of her pensile left foot usually hits the ground first, brushing along briefly before finding its grip. Her gait is singular in a way that prompts the other customers to glance in her direction before tactfully pulling their eyes away.

Lina scans the display wall, chooses a shoe, then puts it back. She reaches for another near the top. A middle-aged woman browsing sequined flats on the next shelf turns and gives her the grandest of smiles. She asks, “Do you need help reaching anything, honey?”

“Thank you, but I’ve got it,” Lina smiles.

Julia suddenly appears on her other side. “Check out this bad boy.” She holds up a blackstrapped peep toe heel. “Don’t tell me you wouldn’t slay in this tonight.”

“Ooh, that’s sexy. You think I can stay vertical in it all night, though?” Julia sighs emphatically. “You told me to come with you so you wouldn’t puss* out, remember? So here I am. Besides, what’s all that sh*t you’ve been talkin’ about that special CP Pilates class you’re in? Telling anyone who’ll listen how your core’s all strong now. Wearing bikinis and everything.”

“Yeah, I know,” she squints. “I don’t think I’ve fallen down in like a year. Haven’t sprained my ankle since that time at the High Line.” She takes the shoe from Julia, admiring its silky profile. “But look at this heel, it’s at least three inches. I don’t know...”

They stop talking as the shop’s proprietress walks over to greet them, her face brightening when she catches Lina’s eyes. “Well, welcome back!” she exclaims. “I helped you a couple months ago, right? With those lace-up oxfords?”

Lina beams. “Oh my gosh, yes! I can’t believe you remember!”

“Of course! So how are you liking them?”

“I love them. I’ve been out on, like, five date nights with my husband in them.”

“That’s so good to hear!” The three of them stand smiling at each other for an awkward moment before the actress speaks again. “I’m sorry, sweetie, but I don’t remember your name.”

“Oh, no, no, that’s fine. It’s Lina. Lina. And this is my friend, Julia.”

Julia waves slightly and nods. “Nice to meet you. I’m a big fan. Lived here for almost ten years and I think you’re now officially the most famous person I’ve actually met.”

“Ooh, who have I dethroned?” she asks with mock intrigue.

“I ran into Mary Kate or Ashley down in SoHo once. Still not sure which one it was.”

“I still can’t tell them apart!” They all laugh, eyes gleaming. “So what brings you in today, Lina?”

Lina explains that she’s hoping to find a new pair of shoes to wear to a gala fundraiser that evening. “It’s for a non-profit I’m involved with,” she continues, “for kids with cerebral palsy. Very fancy affair: red carpet, big name emcee, silent auction and all that. Gotta look my best, right?”

“Of course,” the actress agrees. “I remember you mentioning last time that you worked with some charities. That is just so lovely, so important. To see someone like you, who’s overcome so much, out there just working it. So inspiring. And what an example for those precious kids!” She leads them to a beige loveseat, watching Lina’s easy, tottering shamble with a solicitous smile that seems to hold out invisible hands for her, just in case.

Lina sets herself down heedfully toward the edge of the seat and Julia sits next to her on a clear acrylic vanity stool with a thick cushion. One of the saleswomen joins them and the actress makes introductions. “Adrianne, this is Lina. She’s got a big soiree tonight and wants to be the belle of the ball. Let’s see what we can do for her.”

Adrianne had seen her when she came in. She smiles profusely and gently takes Lina’s hand. “So nice to meet you, Lina. So, what do you have in mind? I suppose we should start with your outfit; what will you be wearing?”

Lina looks at Julia. “Do you still have that picture from last week?”

Julia scrolls her phone for a few seconds and then holds up the screen. “Pretty killer, right, ladies?” They ooh and aah.

“We have some nice flats that would go marvelously with that dress,” Adrianne motions to a table nearby. “Or even a few kitten heels you might like.” She looks at the actress. “Maybe Divine? Or Spy?”

“Just what I was thinking.” She hears her name being called and looks across the store. “Excuse me, I have to go talk to them real quick. But I’ll come back and check on you, ok?” She grips Lina’s shoulder and pats it a couple times before leaving.

Adrianne asks for Lina’s size and goes to the back of the store. Lina turns to Julia, narrowing her eyes. “Shut up,” she says. “I’ll tell her when she comes back.”

“You better. ‘Cause you know I will if you don’t.” Julia punches her friend’s arm. “You gotta speak up for yourself!”

Adrianne returns with two boxes, sets them down and begins to open the first. Julia clears her throat and widens her eyes. Lina starts, meekly, “Um, these are beautiful, but I already have nice flats. I was hoping to maybe try some... some taller heels. Nothing too crazy, my balance obviously isn’t the best, but I like those Mary Janes right behind you.” She points to a little single-strapped number with an oval buckle sitting on the display table, shimmering there in silvery iridescence. “Could I maybe try those?”

“Ah, the Tartt. It’s one of our most popular. And it has a nice, thick block heel, so it should help with your…” she hesitates.

Lina smiles kindly, assuaging the other’s discomfort. “It’s ok to say it, I don’t mind. I mean, c’mon, it’s not like it’s hard to notice. I have cerebral palsy, in case you’re wondering. I’m trying to be more open about it, so it’s actually nice when it comes up like this.”

“That’s wonderful,” Adrianne gushes. “And so brave, I have to tell you.” Lina tries not to notice Julia’s slackened eyebrows and open-mouthed sneer. She keeps looking at the saleswoman kneeling in front of her. “I think you’re right about the block heel, too; more stability definitely won’t hurt.”

“Well, let me go grab them for you, then.”

As soon as she’s gone, Julia starts sounding off in whispers about ableism and paternalistic bullsh*t. Her sibilant rant ends midstream, though, when Adrianne returns. The attentive young woman kneels with her legs tucked under her and puts the shoes on Lina’s feet. Lina takes the hand that’s offered to her and is helped up.

“Let’s see what they look like in motion,” Julia prods from her stool.

Lina steps cautiously at first, testing her inner gyroscope. Finding it sound, she walks across the store, then back. Julia catcalls her with a slow whistle, making Lina laugh and even sashay a little, taken up in the moment. The actress returns jubilant with her arms thrown out.

“Lina, look at you! And those shoes! You go, girl.” By now most of the patrons have dispensed with discretion and moved their attention plainly to the uplifting scene. Lina hasn’t noticed the shift.

She lowers herself back onto the loveseat as her attendants take care of the shoes. They ask her what she thinks, if these are the ones. Flushed and satisfied, she says, “I love them, yes. I’m gonna get them.” She looks at Julia and continues with excitement, “And while I’m here, I want to try those red ones over there, too.” She points at the wall of heels across from them.

The actress and Adrianne look over for a second, then to each other. “You mean… the stilettos?” the actress asks. Her eyes go to Julia, then back to Lina. The gears in her face stop moving for a moment—“Are you… sure?” she asks—before her delicacy and expression return. “Pardon me, of course. Those are… lovely. Let’s, let’s give it a shot.” She runs to fetch them, Adrianne right behind her.

Julia leans over with an amused look. “‘Let’s give it a shot?’ You’re giving that poor little celebrity a heart attack, you know. She’s probably gonna make you sign a liability waiver!” “Shh-shh-shh,” Lina pleads under a faint titter. “Not so loud!”

They return in a procession with the box. The actress sets it down and takes a knee in front of Lina. She fixes the sleek, v-shaped stilettoes onto her feet, intent in the task. The others in the boutique have become sanguine onlookers, watching the event quietly. Lina glances around and some give her nods or reassuring smiles when their eyes meet hers. Two young women near the register whisper to each other.

“Do you need some help up, sweetie?”

“Thanks, but I think I’ve got it.” Lina stands erect, wavering only a moment, and begins walking several inches off the ground. Her dangling left foot skids gently as usual and manages to find its place with each step. Her bent arms extend out slightly more than before to shift some mass away from the newly reduced pivot point. The adjustments are minor and straightforward, but her ungainly, marionettish frame appears teetering to the audience, more precarious than before. They watch her like she’s a funambulist over a chasm and the wind has picked up. She jokes to Julia as she turns to come back, “Whew, this feels dangerous. Might get a nosebleed up here. But I think I got it.”

“Of course you do, babe. Never a doubt.”

Lina strides past and continues toward the door. She’s focused on the endeavor and doesn’t notice that all other activity has ceased; everyone’s eyes are on her. When she swivels at the door and starts back, the actress calls out, “Way to go, Lina! Nothing can stop you!” Adrianne lets out a small woo-hoo, pumping her fist in the air. Someone begins to clap, then another joins, and another.

Lina suddenly reddens and shrivels under the vitiating applause. In trying to hurry back to her seat, she shifts her center of gravity a touch too quickly and catches her toe on one of her last steps. Her ankle buckles. She jolts forward as though shoved from behind by a malicious classmate, collapsing onto the waiting sofa.

The spectators stop rubbernecking at once. They look to each other, or to the floor. The actress and Adrianne rush over as Lina pushes herself upright. Julia watches for a signal to help—she’s been there for numerous falls, she knows the drill—but, as usual, there’s no entreaty in Lina’s expression or bearing: only a serene, Good Lord, head-shaking private chuckle of selfdeprecation that follows after the reflexive flash of white hot dignity. She shakes her head calmly with eyes closed, then looks up at everyone. Finally, she burlesques a seated bow, “Ta-da!” They all exhale simultaneously and quasi-laugh along with her. “For my next trick in the show, I’ll be biting the head off a chicken. Stick around, y’all.”

The actress looks concerned. “Are you sure you’re ok, honey?”

“Yeah, I’m fine,” Lina says. “Happens all the time. I was pushing my luck with these beauties anyway. Guess they’re not meant to be.” She removes the stilettos and holds up one of the block-heeled Mary Janes, rotating it in the light. “But I love these ones. So sparkly. They’re gonna be perfect tonight.”

“I think so, too,” the actress says. An ushering, vaguely rushed quality enters her voice. “I’ll get them wrapped up and Renée over there can check you out. It was so nice seeing you again, Lina. You keep letting that light shine for the world to see, all right?”

They say their goodbyes, take a selfie together, and then Lina and Julia walk slowly to the register, half browsing a display case of purses along the way. “Never a dull moment with you,” Julia teases. “Maybe she’ll give you a part in something next time, huh?”

“Shut up,” Lina elbows her. “I’m just glad I tried them.”

“Me, too, Lina-bean.” Julia puts an arm around her and leans in, squeezing.

Lina pays for the shoes and is almost free before she’s hit with a parting shot. The cashier wears the familiar look—benevolent, charitable, obliterating—as she hands her an overfull bag. Seeing the extra box inside, Lina squirms and shrinks privately. She starts to protest, to claw back what is hers, but she’s silenced at once, pinned down by the kindness.

“Complements of the store,” the cashier smiles with all the sincerity in the world, nodding over at her boss. “She insisted.”

Lina lifts the lid off the box enough to poke aside the tissue paper and see the hard, red gloss underneath. She manages the feeblest of “thanks,” pivots carefully on her tender ankle, and pushes Julia out the door. .

Ms. Stewart, our best fourth grade teacher, rushed to my office at Pebble Elementary School in the Bronx and stood in the doorway, a disturbed look on her face. “Ms. Zimmerman, I need to tell you something very important.”

The last time I saw her like this was four years ago when she learned that one of her student’s and the girl’s family had perished in their apartment. I looked up from my computer and gave Ms. Stewart my full attention. “What’s wrong?” I asked.

“Several of my students just told me that Ms. Raymond tried to get them to change their answers on the math test.”

I opened my desk drawer and took out the binder where I keep notes of conversations with staff and turned to a blank page. “Please sit down,” I said, motioning to a chair opposite me at my desk. “Tell me everything.”

“This morning when I went to my classroom, Ms. Raymond was there. I didn’t know why the other assistant principal was there. She told me that the principal had told her to oversee my students while they took the state math test. He’d also put in that teacher’s aide who always falls asleep as the second proctor. Got me out of my classroom by having me write answers for a student with a broken arm in Ms. Smith’s class. As you know, students usually test with their classroom teachers whenever possible because this helps reduce their anxiety, so I found my removal highly unusual, but I obliged, nonetheless.

“When the test was over and I returned to my room, my students were out of control, frantic to speak to me. Everyone began talking at once,” Ms. Stewart said, clicking the retractable pen in her hand. “I passed out paper and told them to write down what happened. Ifthey didn’t see anything, I said to write that. I wanted to hear from every student. In the meantime, I interviewed four of my most responsible students, one at a time, outside my classroom.”

I stopped writing and looked up at Ms. Stewart. “What did your students say?”

“Mohamed said Ms. Raymond told him to change question number four to C,” she said, pushing away her blonde shoulder-length hair from her face and reading from the notes on her yellow legal pad. “He said he didn’t do it because he knew his answer was correct. He said Ms. Raymond returned to his desk a few minutes later and again checked his answers. She pointed to additional answers and told him to change them, too.”

“Did Mohamed say Ms. Raymond told him which answers to bubble in?” I asked.

“Yes,” he said, “She did.”

“What did Mohamed do?” I asked, turning the page in my binder, and continuing to write.

“Mohamed told me he didn’t listen to her because he had checked his answers and knew they were correct. He’s an excellent math student. Always gets at least a ninety-five percent on all my classroom tests,” she said, proudly, as if he were her own son.

“Who else did you talk to?”

“I spoke to Samantha. This child is very smart, but she lacks confidence in her abilities. She said Ms. Raymond stopped in the aisle between her desk and Miguel’s, looked back and forth at both their answer sheets and pointed out three answers she said Samantha should change.” Ms. Stewart looked down and checked her notes. “Samantha said she was uncomfortable with Ms. Raymond’s help and re-checked her answers but didn’t change them.” When Ms. Stewart looked up at me, I could see the pain for her students in her bright blue eyes.

“Can you believe this? she asked.

“Did you speak to Miguel?”

“I did.” Ms. Stewart began to laugh. “I’m sorry, Ms. Zimmerman, but I found Miguel’s response quite amusing. He said he began to solve a problem in front of Ms. Raymond and explained his thinking, step-by-step. Ms. Raymond interrupted him and announced to the class that she hears talking, then reminded them that they’re in the middle of an examination and there should be absolute silence. Then Miguel resumed his verbal explanation, and Ms. Raymond put her finger to her lips to silence him.”

When Ms. Stewart finished, I shook my head. “As you know, this is quite serious. You’ve just brought an allegation of cheating against an assistant principal,” I said, standing up, trying to hide how upset I was, and walking her to the door. “Please leave the statements with me. I want to read all of them. I’ll speak to the teacher’s aide and get her testimony, too. Thanks for reporting this to me.”

After Ms. Stewart left, I reflected on what I had just heard. I don’t believe it! Cheating on a standardized test. This has never happened at Pebble Elementary before. There’s obviously no limit to what this assistant principal will do to see that our students score well. Now I know why the students at her former school were known for getting high scores on the state exams. Thank God Ms. Stewart has a conscience.

A few minutes later, the teachers’ union representative came in. I’ve known her for over fifteen years, when she was the union rep at my former school. Not only is she an excellent teacher and highly trustworthy, but she’s got a big heart, and advocates for the teachers and aides. She looked at me from behind her round tortoiseshell glasses, and I could tell from her facial expression that she was concerned about what she had to say. I watched her sit down in the chair in the corner, lean her head back and rest it against the wall.

“Ms. Stewart,” she said, “just told me what happened in her classroom during the math test. Wanted to know if she is going to be in trouble for reporting the incident to you. She’s worried about retaliation from the principal. I tried to reassure her that she did absolutely nothing wrong. Told her she followed protocol. You’re her assistant principal.”

“Well, we know Mr. Antonio’s going to be outraged that his name and school will now be under investigation,” I said.

“Since none of us are on the in with him, when he finds out we’re not letting this cheating allegation go away, I’m sure he’ll try to make our lives difficult,” the rep said. She reached into her shoulder bag and pulled out a bottle of water, unscrewed the cap and took a few sips. “I just got off the phone with the teachers’ union district representative. Said she’d inform the superintendent. He’s probably spoken to Mr. Antonio by now.”

No more Mr. Golden Boy

“Now what?” the rep asked.

“I’ll report the incident to the testing coordinator at the district. She’ll either tell Mr. Antonio to do an internal investigation, or she’ll report the incident to the Office of Special Investigations at the Department of Education, and they’ll investigate. But first, I must inform the principal. I’m going to his office now.”

As I walked down the stairs, Mr. Antonio came charging up with Ms. Raymond behind him. We nearly collided.

“Let’s go to my office, Ms. Zimmerman,” he said, turning around and touching Ms. Raymond on her forearm. “I’ll catch up with you later,” he said and continued down the stairs with me following close behind.

When we entered his office, Mr. Antonio firmly slammed the door behind me as if he were closing the cell door on a prisoner. He removed his grey suit jacket, loosened his tie, and rolled up his shirt sleeves. Then he sat down behind his desk and motioned for me to take a seat. He looked into my eyes, hard and cold.

“I heard you and Ms. Stewart spoke,” he said. “I talked to her, too. The incident ends here. Are we clear?”

“You know I’m obligated to inform the district testing coordinator of any alleged improprieties.”

Mr. Antonio sat up tall, elbows on his desk, hands clasped together hiding his mouth, and glared at me. “Maybe you didn’t hear me the first time? I am the principal. I said, do not call the district. Ms. Raymond said she didn’t tell the students to change their answers, and she doesn’t know why they made up those lies.” He stood up, walked around his desk to the door and opened it. “We’re done.”

When I returned to my office, I put a “Do Not Disturb” sign on my door. Then I sat in my chair and closed my eyes. This is huge. Why did the superintendent bring Mr. Antonio to this district? He has no experience in administration and only one year of teaching kindergarten. Wants Pebble Elementary to become a showcase school but has no idea how to make this happen, except through unethical means. Does the superintendent know this? Is he planning to coach him in every aspect of running a school?

A few minutes later, I got up, walked to the bookcase at the back of my office anddistractedly rearranged the framed pictures of my husband and children. Mr. Antonio’s only been at Pebble Elementary for four months and he’s already ingratiated himself with various groups from the school body. Got a lot of people to like him. Probably thinks if they like him, they’ll do whatever he wants. They don’t know what really goes on here. Have no idea how he’s segregated the staff and the administration into the “in” and “out” groups. Ugh.”

~

Later that afternoon, after dismissal, Ms. Stewart and the teachers’ union rep returned to my office to report that Mr. Antonio had spoken to Ms. Stewart’s class. “He told them he heard about what they said happened during the math exam,” Ms. Stewart said, reaching for the squishy ball on my desk. She squeezed it a few times. “He told them that sometimes people make up stories to get others in trouble because they’re mad at them for something. Reminded my students that Ms. Raymond recently gave many of them detention, and she had spoken to some of their parents because of the fights and bullying during recess. Told them that the things they said about Ms. Raymond could get her into serious trouble.” Ms. Stewart took a deep breath and continued: “He tried to suggest that the students didn’t really see what they claimed they saw.”

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“Mr. Antonio said he thinks it’s likely that Ms. Raymond pointed to their answers because she was trying to let them know that they skipped a question or bubbled in two answer choices for the same question.” She paused. “Of course, he shouldn’t have done that, either.”

At that moment, the rep stood up and hit the dome-shaped gadget on my desk. The robotic voice blurted out, ‘that was stupid.’ She hit it again. Ms. Stewart and I laughed, and Ms.Stewart continued: “Mr. Antonio told the students he knows that no one wants to see Ms. Raymond lose her job. Asked them to rewrite their statements and make sure to write the truth.” Ms. Stewart got up and started pacing. “It infuriates me how he tried to blame my students, to make them feel guilty for being responsible.”

“I understand completely,” I said, feeling sick at the wrongness of this. “I shouldn’t be saying this to either of you about a fellow administrator,” I said, looking first to Ms. Stewart and then to the rep, “but what he did was inappropriate, totally unethical. I’m sure he and Ms. Raymond discussed that if he put her in your classroom, allegedly to oversee the test-taking, she could give students the correct answers. Figured if she could get a whole class of high scores, the percentage of top scores for the fourth grade would increase and his school would look good.”

“I’m thinking the same thing,” the rep said. “Afterall, the state looks at the fourth-grade scores to determine a school’s status.” She stood up, took a cup, and helped herself to some water from my cooler. “I wish this was stronger,” she laughed. When she sat down again, she asked, “What did the teacher’s aide say?”

“Claims she saw nothing unusual. Said Ms. Raymond was walking around and making sure the students weren’t looking at each other’s papers. The aide did admit that she dozed off for a bit.”

“You know the teacher’s aide is one of his people, right?” the rep asked, pushing up her glasses.

“Of course. She was on the committee that interviewed him for his position,” I said. “She was very pro Mr. Antonio. And I think I remember that she also came from his old school.”

“He came to us with a lot of baggage,” the rep said. “The teachers tell me that the three teachers he brought with him can’t teach, and our teachers are afraid to speak up during teacher or staff development meetings because they think his teachers are Mr. Antonio’s eyes and ears. Everything goes back to him,” she said, fondling her wedding ring.

“I feel the same way about Ms. Raymond,” Ms. Stewart said. “She’s always in his office. I’m afraid to say anything to her myself because I worry she’ll distort what I say.”

“He’s duplicitous,” the rep said, then turned to Ms. Stewart, co*cked her head, and suddenly became very animated. “You should call the district testing coordinator. Tell her you reported the incident to the assistant principal in charge of testing at your school, but you thought you should inform her, too. Can you do that?”

“I don’t want to get fired,” Ms. Stewart said, clicking her pen. “Mr. Antonio intimidates me.” She was quiet. Then, “I’ll do it. I must. Afterall, Ms. Raymond wanted my kids to cheat on a state test.”

The rep got up and hit the gadget again, trying to reduce the tension in my office. ‘That was stupid.’ We all laughed

“What Ms. Raymond did goes against everything I’ve been teaching my students this year about being honest and taking responsibility for their actions. I’d be a hypocrite if I didn’t do what I tell them to do.” She clicked her pen again.

“Thank you,” the rep and I said, in unison.

“By the way, what did the district testing coordinator tell you to do?” the rep asked.

I looked straight into the rep’s hazel eyes. “Mr. Antonio forbade me to call her. Said he’d take care of everything.”

~

The next day, during her preparation period, Ms. Stewart entered my office and sunk into my couch.

“Mr. Antonio got to them,” she said, her head down so all I could see was her hair. “My students changed their statements. All but six.”

“Are those the statements?” I asked, gesturing to the papers in her lap. “May I see them?”

Ms. Stewart stood up and handed them to me.

“The six are on the bottom.” she said.

I flipped through the students’ testimonies. “I didn’t see anything,” one student wrote. Another: “I am telling the truth. I didn’t see anything.” “Some kids said Ms. Raymond told them the answers, but they just want to get her in trouble. I didn’t see her do nothing bad,” wrote another. I read aloud a portion of Miguel’s statement: “During the math test, Ms. Raymond told me to change some of my answers, but I didn’t. I knew mine were correct. I tried to explain to her how I got the answer to a question, but she told me to be quiet. I’m surprised she doesn’t remember you gotta solve what’s in the parentheses first, when doing order of operations. That’s why she got the wrong answer.”

I read aloud a portion of Samantha’s statement: “Ms. Raymond stood between mine and Miguel’s desks during the math test. She told us to change some answers. I rechecked the ones she pointed to on my answer sheet, but I didn’t change them because I knew I chose the right answers.”

I started to laugh. “Ms. Raymond wanted to give the students the correct answers, but she actually pointed to the wrong ones, and she didn’t even know it.”

“She’s not too bright. Mr. Antonio brought her from their previous school,” Ms. Stewart said.

I shook my head. “The dumb and dumber duo.”

~

The following morning after the Pledge of Allegiance and the announcements, the math and literacy coaches, the grade leaders--teachers representing each grade from kindergarten through fifth—and I assembled in Mr. Antonio’s office for a meeting. He sat down behind his desk and stared ahead, a despondent look on his face. He was wearing the same white shirt and gray slacks he wore yesterday and had not shaved.

I have some very disturbing news,” Mr. Antonio said, running his hands through his greasy spiked black hair. “The superintendent called me early this morning. The Office of Special Investigations will conduct a thorough investigation of the cheating allegation. Many staff members will likely be called in for questioning. Unfortunately, Ms. Raymond has been reassigned to the district office for the duration of the investigation. Until further notice, I will supervise the teachers of upper grades. Ms. Zimmerman will be responsible for kindergarten through second grade

At that moment, surprised by the news, the teachers whom I supervise turned to look at me questioningly.

Mr. Antonio looked past me with that same despondent stare. “Ms. Zimmerman’s office will be across the yard in the mini-building with the kindergarten classes,” he said.

I briefly caught his eyes, glared at him, and shook my head, as if to say, what gives? The teachers and I now understood what was happening. Retaliation. Not only am I being isolated from the school community, but I now need to run back and forth between two buildings to service the grades I supervise.

~

I heard Mr. Antonio stayed in his office for several hours that afternoon. Maybe he was strategizing. If Ms. Raymond was removed from her administrative position and assigned to the district office so quickly, certainly he knows he is next in line. Even though he initially had the support of the superintendent, I’m sure the superintendent told Mr. Antonio he couldn’t risk losing his own job. I know Mr. Antonio has a wife, young children, and a house on Long Island. Surely, he’s worried about losing his job and license. He should be.”

At the end of the day, Mr. Antonio sent home a letter to the parents informing them of the alleged testing improprieties, assuring them that the allegations against Ms. Raymond are false, and telling them that this incident will not affect their children’s high-quality education.

~

I settled into my new office and soon acquired respect for the kindergarten teachers’ pedagogical skills. Although I didn’t know the curriculum for kindergarten, I quickly familiarized myself with the state learning expectations for the grade. I purchased a few stuffed animals so that the children who were brought to my office would feel comfortable.

The atmosphere in the main building at Pebble Elementary was very tense during the next week. Whenever I went there to visit my first and second grade classes and passed Mr. Antonio in the halls, he lowered his head. He excluded me from staff meetings, but Ms. Stewart and the rep visited me during their lunch periods and kept me abreast of everything.

“Everyone’s so on edge in the main building!” they’d exclaim whenever they came over.

“The teachers’ patience has become short, and they’re snapping at their students,” the rep said. “The dean’s office is filled with students whom the teachers would ordinarily not send to him.”

Ms. Stewart added, “Cliques are springing up everywhere, and no one talks in the hallways, anymore. Mr. Antonio comes to my classroom every day, stays nearly thirty minutes, and is always taking notes.”

“Does he discuss with you what he observes?” I asked, trying to determine if he was rating her teaching ability.

“Nope. Doesn’t talk to my students, either. Just plops down in a seat in the back and writes. It’s nerve-wracking.”

“I’m sure that’s his intention,” I said. “Retaliation.”

~

In the coming weeks, all of the staff members and students involved in the investigation and I were assigned attorneys and our statements taken. The rep told me everyone was nervous and fearful about what to expect at the hearing. She also said Mr. Antonio told her to inform the staff that he continues to believe in Ms. Raymond’s innocence and vowed to stick up for her in court.

On the day of the hearing, the courtroom was filled with students and parents, district personnel, and Pebble Elementary School staff eager to hear the outcome of the charges against Ms. Raymond. The Office of Special Investigations found the students’ testimonies credible, and the judge deemed Ms. Raymond’s actions egregious. During the cross-examination, the teacher’s aide who was in the classroom with Ms. Raymond admitted that she napped on and off, and the few character witnesses who testified on Ms. Raymond’s behalf could not provide substantive testimony. Ms. Raymond lost her administrative license and was banned from ever again working for the New York City Department of Education.

To everyone’s surprise, Mr. Antonio was nowhere to be seen, and a few days later, the superintendent reported that Mr. Antonio had resigned from the New York City Department of Education. I was not surprised when I encountered one of his friends at a meeting, and he informed me that Mr. Antonio had taken a job as principal at a Long Island school. It seemed to me that Mr. Antonio knew what was in store for him and decided to bolt before the probe began. The Office of Special Investigations cited Mr. Antonio’s resignation in its written decision and noted that he, too, is banned from ever again working for the New York City Department of Education.

With the support of the superintendent, I accepted the principalship at Pebble Elementary, and Ms. Stewart became my assistant principal. Mr. Antonio’s three teachers and the math coach transferred to different schools, and Ms. Stewart and I worked hard to rebuild and raise the school morale. Together, we analyzed the results of the state reading and math scores and devised ways to address the students’ deficiencies. Within three years, Pebble Elementary became a showcase school and we were proud of it.

I could talk about the past like anyone else
about surfing the winds of childhood
to get here and the things I remember
as if the limbs of earth can be owned
by reminiscence
but that’s someone else

I don’t have a story to go back to
or a scenario to play out Everything
I’m from was made up by the Shaw Brothers
and their starlets under dramatic lighting
cat-eyes tinted lips mansions co*cktails

Those were not the days and I didn’t live
through them as much as I slewed
across the surface of their rotten skin
because the decayed hand of the past reaches
for everyone not one finger of truth

Don’t lie. Don’t lie. My memory speaks in sleep. But be
creative and quick about it. Soak in the salt
of the world’s illusion. Deliquesce. Be true.

I can reassemble the dismembered limbs
of the past by ingesting them
then making a new body of history
and pining for it like a farmer weeping
for her country lost to flood and fire

I have total recall of the Belle Epoque the Age
of Innocence the Age of Anxiety the turn
of the century the Ways of the Swanns
by demarcating the borders reconfiguring the atoms
of my birth I’m born again
and again

In the movies in the library I watched and read read
and watched until I was entombed
with recollection molecules degrading in travel
in moves
from East to West village to city town to town

The spaces between I lit with candlelight of nostalgia
to illuminate the path of sequined shifts beaded gowns
satin shoes I wore them over my tattered t-shirt dirty feet

Once I moved on a flat space a blank topography
a village for squatters the homeless
not worth visiting or revisiting
in the dark in my telling it transforms
becomes the enchanted forest apples snakes gardenias
a place I find myself time and time
again then again In my telling (tell and retell)
I redraw the geography of slanted truth
and an ending happy
enough to last forever and ever
after that

Pacific reaches for the valley.
In side glancessee-throughs
in fuchsia dawns and hell fire dusks
with a latent thrust of impudence:
outer space beckons to the sea trench.

This once was her isle -
with quenching guava scrub,
manioc, taro fields, mango orchards,
decorous breadfruit trees -
glugging the sky
between Capricorn and Equator.

She delivers the shadows of her house to me.
Looks me up and down until
I ebb into remoteness.
Ninety years have streamlined
her down to timelessness.

Crowned with island rose and ivory.
Porpoise teeth inter-woven with buds
gleaming like mortuary relics.
Glory still nestles in the furrows
of her face smoked in tattoos,
a Brueghel blue of soot and thunder
from head to toe.

Her voice, a blast of surf,
a dark inclusion in a storm’s crystal.
I can see her as then,
draped in royal tapa,
one splendid smooth arm
fanning the dormant air.

Then my own time topples
when, suddenly clairvoyant,
she predicts that money
will devastate the world.

Last weekend, a friend asked to go for a walk—
somewhere without people, she said
She doesn’t want to see people:
hiking trails are packed,
so I suggest our town’s cemetery.

There are people, you know, but not really.
She agrees.
We meet at the entrance.
What a beautiful place to be put to rest—
overlooking the pacific.

We walk up and down the hills,
reading tombstones, sharing stories.
It’s all too familiar. I spent my childhood there:
my Austrian mother obsessed with death.

My friend spoke of her mother’s passing,
and her ashes are in the closet
under a fake candle, and how each day,
she whispers good night.

No wind in this cemetery; trees are still.
Something in the distance beside a gravestone
caught our eye—a balloon on a stick in ground,
gently swaying back and forth. flowers beside.

We glance at one another and walk in its direction.
We arrive to gravestone of Jose Garcia:
January 13, 1989 - April 1, 2016.
A photo of his truck in the lower corner:
gone but never forgotten. joined the twenty-seven club.

I glance at my watch.
It’s his birthday.
He called us to sing to him and we did:
we wished him a peaceful journey

I still ask if a cemetery
is really an empty place.

The following is a transcription from an in-depth interview with the poet and professor, Chioma Urama, and Co- Editorial Director Tyra Douyon. Some portions have been excised from the transcript at Tyra’s discretion, or condensed for clarity and content.

Chioma Urama is a storyteller of Igbo and African American heritage. She creates and grounds channels through painting, poetry, prose, and oral storytelling. Using these mediums she creates pieces that question what has been shattered, exploded, and transformed in the cultural traditions of African American and Indigenous people. Her creations are the result of a deeply meditative process, connecting people, patterns, and ideas in efforts to heal herself and the collective.

A Body of Water is Chioma Urama's debut collection of poetry. Her poetry and fiction have been published in the Southern Humanities Review, Pleiades, Blackbird, Paper Darts, the Normal School, and Prairie Schooner. She received a Fred Shaw Fiction Prize and an honorable mention from the Lindenwood Review Lyric Essay Contest. Urama is a Benjamin A. Gilman International Scholarship alumna and a graduate of the University of Miami MFA program, where she was a Michener Fellow. She taught creative writing and English composition at the University of New Orleans. Her writing has been described as intuitive, intentional, and heart connected. Please visit her website https://www.chiomaurama.com for more information.

Tyra: When did you start writing A Body of Water and how long did it take you?

Chioma: So I started writing the poems around 2016 when I was still in my MFA. I was in my last year of my MFA, but a lot of the different poems that are in this collection have been answering questions that have been circling me my entire life. I started organizing the book around 2017 after I left Miami. I did my MFA in Miami and I moved to New Orleans which is a place where I have no connections and I didn't know anyone. I started writing because I wanted a better understanding of where I was heading. Most of my family stayed— I’m from the DMV area, from Virginia and a lot of my family is from Maryland and D.C. as well— and they stayed in that area for the majority of their lives. But I continued to move and leave and go to different states. I wasn’t really sure what I was searching for or what was missing, but I know that a lot of wisdom can be mined from the past, so I started looking back on my own past to examine where I was in the present.

Tyra: Okay, so you started it in 2016 and then it was published a few years later in 2021?

Chioma: Yes, I received the award in 2020 and then it was published in 2021.

Tyra: Okay. I think a lot of people go in with this idea that to write a book, if you really dedicate yourself, it can take 6 months to a year. You can get it out and published. But it’s a process too and you have to live while you write through it and you might take breaks. I think it's important for our readers to know that because sometimes you can go in with the mindset that you should just be rushing this or by the time you graduate you should have something published. I know people push that narrative a lot.

Chioma: Yeah, yeah, to publish around graduation for sure. My intention with this collection wasn’t publishing. For me it was to better understand myself and my own life. And I was thinking wouldn’t it be wonderful if this was organized in some cohesive way that I could look at my entire life and for any generations that are coming after me, they wouldn’t have to do this kind of searching to find certain ancestors or certain recipes, or places, people… we’ll have one place where our information is collected. So that was why I started organizing it. It’s important to think about why you want to put a book together. And not just because it’s a thing that you feel like you have to do, but what is causing you to want to arrange these things in a specific way? And I think that can really support you in creating something that is your authentic self and really something that you’re excited about creating. I think a lot of times you can get so caught up in doing what you feel like you need to or or what you’re supposed to do. You don’t actually care about what you’re creating. And so that’s something that gets lost in the artistry a lot.

Tyra: Absolutely. Like you said… [people] can get so caught up in wanting to publish and being known. Just to pause and ask yourself ‘hey, what are you doing and why are you doing this’ is so important. A second question off of that. You had all these individual poems written and then you found a cohesive theme and that’s how you put together the collection?

Chioma: Yeah, I had all these poems that I put together. I was trying to better understand myself by understanding my family, my lineage, and my heritage. And so that’s why I started organizing these pieces. I know a lot of time with Black or African-American families you get told different things in pieces. You get pieces of stories. Pieces of things. As I moved to New Orleans I started doing a lot of ancestral work. Working with my ancestors and learning how to hear them and how to channel their voices. I wanted to organize this information. I wanted to figure out what it looked like when I wrote it down and put it in one place and how that can create meaning for where I am in my life.

Tyra: I know when I read A Body of Water I could feel that energy in the pages.

Chioma: (laughs, goodnaturedly) I’m so glad.

Tyra: A Body of Water includes poems that celebrate your African American heritage and others that reflect on traumatic experiences such as the history of enslavement. What inspired you to include these difficult topics in your collection?

Chioma: So, one of the things that I understand now from creating this collection is how connected we all are. When my grandmother was pregnant with my mother she's not only creating my mother but she was also creating the cells that would later become who I am. So everything that happened to my grandmother, the good and the bad, before and after conception I was also a recipient of in some way. And I knew I needed to look at that history in order to better understand the way that they lived and I lived. The way that I loved. The way that I leave things. And how I behave. And so that’s what inspired me to include a lot of those ideas.

Tyra: I think we don’t realize how much of who we are is a part of other people. It goes from your mom, to your grandmother, to your great-grandparents, father… all of these people that build that puzzle then there’s a column of just you that you pass on to your next generation. That interconnectedness is so prevalent. Sometimes people think they’re walking through this world alone, but they really aren’t. Even if you don’t think they have a strong connection with your family they are still very much with you in the way you think and do things and you might not even realize it.

Chiome: You said it perfectly. All those things are woven into who we are and we have to look back to unpack it or we’ll continue to carry these things without really understanding why we are behaving or moving in certain ways.

Tyra: So unpacking… writing about these traumas in your family and in African American history… why specifically did you want to have poems about that and not make it a celebration of joy? I know that’s something more people are saying– ‘We want black joy, Black boy joy, Black girl magic…’ What does it mean for you to include things that we don’t want to talk about as much, especially right now.

Chioma: That’s a good question. I was talking to a friend earlier this week and they were saying how with their depression comes joy. And it’s like their joy is like this guardian of some of their lower states of consciousness right? It’s pointing to where their attention needs to be given and how joy can better flow, right? If we tend to these sadder, more traumatic moments. So for me, getting to my joy, like writing this collection, was a big part of moving to my joy and learning what I do know, what is pleasurable and what is good for me. Sometimes we want to skip over the difficult part and that is something I never found to be realistic or practical or healthy for me. It’s important to dive into those heavy emotions because the more that we’re able to feel that sadness, the more pleasure we’re able to open up to and actually feel, right?

Tyra: Yeah

Chioma: You can’t selectively numb an emotion. You numb yourself to sadness, you’re also numbing yourself to certain parts of pleasure and joy. And that’s one thing I learned through this process of writing.

Tyra: Yeah, that’s a really great point. We stop ourselves sometimes from going in that direction. It’s like that quote, you won’t know true joy unless you know true pain… unless you embrace that part that you want to hide from. I totally get that. What is your writing process—do you have a certain environment that helps you access memory, a certain routine?

Chioma: My writing process is deeply informed by Maureen Seaton who is one of my beloved professors and mentors and she’s such a beautiful teacher. One of the things she had us do is to take an unruled notebook and within that unruled notebook you kind of have the freedom to be yourself on the page. You can add stickers or pieces of magazines or just like words you’ve heard, dreams… I have so many things. Just phrases that I enjoy, songs that I enjoy. I’m also an artist so sometimes I just start sketching something or illustrating something that I want to be on the page. So, I really give myself a lot of freedom to play within my writing process. I flip the book upside down. Nothing is linear, everything is all over the place. Completely chaotic.

Tyra & Chioma: (laughing, good naturedly)

Chioma: But when you really zoom out and look at it, it really begins to make sense in a really interesting way. You start to notice different patterns in your own writing. So this process allows you to see ‘What are my patterns? Why are things that I care about? What are words that keep coming back to me? What are places I continue to revisit?’ A large part of my process is being outside and putting my feet in the grass, you know, sitting beneath the trees and communing with them. Being present with flowers and things like that. Just being out in nature and allowing myself to receive. It easily puts me in a state of receptivity.

Tyra: Yeah, Yeah Chioma: That’s what it looks like for me. Nothing linear. Lots of freedom. And lots of play.

Tyra: Yeah, I love that. [As you were sharing] I was thinking about my own writing process too because I’m a poet. I wanted to create a memory box. I’m working on poems about my grandmother and my family as well. To fill it up with pictures… and a lot of things are food related because my family is all about food and dancing and different types of laughter. The sound of dominoes clinking together… all these different memories… and I was thinking, how do I put this all together? So, I like the concept of doodling in a journal. I also like tangible things too. That might be a cool concept to get into.

Chioma: Yeah, a memory box sounds super special. I haven’t made one of those in a long time.

Tyra: (laughs, goodnaturedly)

Chioma: That sounds like a lot of fun and I think that a lot of writers, the younger generation, they aren't writing with their hands anymore which I think is really interesting because you think in a different way when you have a pen in your hand versus when you’re typing on a computer.

Tyra: Sure, sure.

Chioma: So, you know whatever that means to each individual, like that's what it means to you, but I think it’s something to consider. You think differently when you have a pen in your hand, when you have a crayon in your hand, when you have something tangible. When you’re touching physical objects and items. For me it’s important to get back to those practices.

Tyra: I love that. The world is so increasingly digital. I personally write, you know, my poems on a computer (laughs), but getting back to the paper and pen definitely is like a new experience for sure. You talked about being in nature and finding inspiration from the things that are around you. I think that’s so important too… to just get outside of your usual place. Some people really thrive on routines like [they say], ‘I wake up everyday at 5 AM and write for an hour.’ It doesn’t seem like you work within the confines of that. You’re kind of like, ‘I take from here and I take from here. I go outside. I sit by the window…’ and you let it come to you. I really like that approach. You never know what is going to inspire you. It can lead to something really beautiful.

Chioma: Uhh humm, yeah like I take my notebook everywhere. Like I don’t adhere to that 5 AM practice at all.

Chioma & Tyra: (laughing)

Chioma: It’s like if somebody's talking and I’m enjoying what they’re saying, sometimes I whip out my notebook and start doodling or writing what they’re saying.

Tyra: Yeah?

Chioma: Because you know, I feel like writing is about living. And I think it’s important to get back to that. To make sure you are living and having experiences to write about.

Tyra: I think with poetry it’s a totally different beast, right? I did the 5 AM thing when I was working on a novel.

Chioma: Me too. (laughs)

Tyra: I think it works really well for fiction or nonfiction, but poetry lives and breathes in such a different way. You really have to be outside of yourself because you’re really telling the truth, right? From beginning to end… so it’s like how can you say your truth… I don’t know, just for me… how can you say your truth within the confines of a schedule or a system? It’s almost like the truth doesn’t want to live within that. You have to be a little bit more free so you can see it from different angles. Poetry is just… different.

Chioma: I like how you said that. Poetry does need more room to move and breath. I agree.

Tyra: So, we kinda talked about this a little bit already. Family is a prevalent theme throughout the collection; what drew you to this subject matter?

Chioma: I think, especially in the U.S., we’re encouraged to believe that the past doesn’t matter. That’s the whole idea of the American Dream, that you can start here and it’s a fresh start and nothing else matters. But that couldn’t be further from the truth. I see my life as a point on a timeline that extends both forwards and backwards and we talked about this, but all the events that have happened to my family have shaped everything about me. And until we consciously engage with those events they’ll continue to shape the choices that we make, the behaviors that we have and we can respond from a place of trauma or reactivity versus actually being present with what’s happening. And that’s not to say that every choice my family has made has been an ill one, but I do recognize that was family has lived through the trauma of war and famine and enslavement and displacement and if we don’t address these truths within ourselves and examine how they impact our behavior we’ll continue to pass on these patterns that no longer serve us.

Tyra: Absolutely. Everyone has been talking about generational trauma and childhood trauma and how do we address that, how do we overcome it? So, I love the conversations that people are having and how it’s being pushed more to the forefront. Your collection really talks about that and gets to the root of that. Have you ever been hesitant to talk about your family and talk about the things you weren’t present for, like someone else’s story?

Chioma: Yeah, that’s a good question. So, when I was initially writing this, I was writing for myself and I wasn’t really thinking of publishing at all. I did my MFA in fiction. And so I wrote poetry, but I never saw myself as a poet. These were completely for myself, so I think I had a lot of freedom in that aspect of the writing. I was never thinking about an audience other than myself and maybe like one other person in the future that would come across it. And what was the second question that you had?

Tyra: Umm, how… were you ever hesitant to write about someone else’s story? You said the audience wasn’t on your mind and these poems were just for yourself, but what about the poems that you weren’t present for, you weren’t alive for. Did you ever feel weird about writing someone else’s life?

Chioma: Yeah! Yeah, I think you always want to make sure that you get it right, but I think as I began to, umm, as I began to like commune with my ancestors more deeply and understand some of the things that they live through, I think it’s important to give voice to things. Things are meant to be said and we’re never going to get rid of the lens that is ourself. So, whatever I say is always going to be filtered through me and I’m going to touch those things. Uhh, there’s no way to sanitize myself out of that experience and I don’t think I wanted to. So, I did come to a point where I did feel comfortable with working with different voices and telling different stories.

Tyra: I wanted to speak about that specifically because I’ve been grappling with that myself like ‘How much can you say? Do you want their name [in the poem]? Should you change their name? Should you have a conversation before you try and publish?’... things like that. So I always try and ask people how they approach that in their own work.

Chioma: Yeah, so another thing I want to say to that point is, when doing ancestral work, I think a lot of times we forget we can ask for permission directly. There have been a lot of poems I’ve written, not about my ancestors… sometimes you just know things… and umm there’s a difference between knowing information and having the permission to share that information. So, I would just go direct and ask if it’s okay for me to share this information? Is this something you want me to lend my voice to? Because there’s a lot of things we know knowledge of but it’s important to ask. I think that can be lost a lot of the time in western culture— asking permission. Especially asking for permission from our ancestors, consulting them and letting them know this is my intention. My intention is pure, my heat is pure, is it okay for me to tell this story?

Tyra: Have you ever been told no?

Chioma: Yes. But that one poem it wasn’t my ancestor, this was just information that I had and I wanted to share this poem in a certain way. And it was a really good poem, but it was like ‘You need to stop telling this poem. You need to stop reading that. You know it’s not for you.’ And I was like, ‘Oh, okay!’ (laughs, goodnaturedly)

Tyra: I love that practice and I think that is so important. It will make you feel better as an artist, but also [you need to ask yourself]... Why are you saying this? Why are you bringing this up? It comes back to that reason you were talking about earlier… Why are you doing this? Why are you writing?

Chioma: Uhh huh, intention is important.

Tyra: Yeah, it is. Okay, let me ask some specific questions. The collection is split into three parts: Bridge, Groom, and Witness. What was the reason behind this separation and the titles?

Chioma: So, I was examining my family through the lens of my grandparents' marriage. My grandmother was a 15-year-old bride and my grandfather was a 19-year-old groom and I felt I needed to understand the experience of both of these blood lines to situate myself. So, in each section I’m examining their unique bloodlines, their unique experiences. And then in the section “Witness” I focus on the experiences of the children that were the result of these unions. So, I included pieces about my brothers and sisters and myself. And how the dissolution of my own parents' marriage made an impact on me.

Tyra: I love that separation. I know in other collections [authors] separate it just based on time or the progression of things… like summer, fall, winter… or how they got through things [referring to how Rupi Kaur separates her poems in her two published collections Milk and Honey and the sun and her flowers]. But to have two separate people and the result [of their union] coming down the middle? That definitely caught my intention. I was like ‘Oh she’s doing something different here.’ That was pretty unique.

Chioma: Thank you! It started with my grandmother and asking questions about her experience. She started having children when she was 14 and she wasn’t able to raise that child. Then she got married at 15 right away. So I began to ask her questions and that is what gave the entire collection shape.

Tyra: Yeah, having those stories is a goldmine. You know, being able to speak with your grandparents about their life and how things were. I mean, it's priceless information.

Chioma: Both of my grandparents, all of my grandparents are passed so it was a little bit trickier to get some of the facts, but it was a really enjoyable experience to learn how to communicate with them. For me I don’t see death as a final destination. I see death as a transition, so if it is a transition to another form, [I’ve asked] ‘How can I still communicate?’

Tyra: Yeah, I know with some things that I’ve done— my grandmother is alive, but she doesn’t speak English— and she’s lived with me my entire life. She speaks Creole. I’m Haitian and—

Chioma: (excitedly) Ohhh! I love Haitian people. I have so much respect for Haiti.

Tyra: (smiles, laughs goodnaturedly) Thank you! So, all my life— I write that in my poems— that we speak in laughter, clapping hands… I talk about how we communicated over time and it’s not with words most of the time and I let that live in the poems and just write about her and the things I’ve been approaching. I have to go through my dad and then go through her. So, I get what you mean when you have to figure out how to get the information and how to get the language because you want to be authentic in your work and you want to tell the story as truthfully as possible. I just understand that. Your poem “A Google Search for my Ancestor “John Best,” “Plantation,” and “North Carolina” reminded me of the recent news story about a cabin that once housed slaves that was turned into an AirBnB. What significance did you hope to draw upon for your reader by including a poem about the missing sanctity of southern plantations?Airbnb Removed ‘Slave Cabin’ Listing In Mississippi Following Viral TikTok Takedown.

Chioma: That’s a good question. So, John Best was one of the names that I came across. He’s an ancestor born in 1867, right after the abolition of slavery. So, when I saw his name I was so excited. I thought there would be some record of him doing something, or him living somewhere. So I thought, let me Google him. I went to Google and I naively put in that name thinking I was going to find my ancestral line and what came back to me were those search results. And in that moment I just cried; I was so upset. And I think it’s important to allow ourselves the space to cry for the things our ancestors have moved through and the constant erasure they’ve experienced in America— in American history and in America’s present. It’s very painful and it’s hard that we don’t always have the names of our loved ones or even a place that we can go to to pay our respects. At that moment, that absence just really just broke me open. I think now though that absence of a specific place allows me to be present with my ancestors wherever they are. Whenever I need them it allows me to go in nature and connect with them on a daily basis. But, I’m not surprised at the way America treats plantations. I’m definitely upset and enraged about it at times, but that disregard is present in all that they do. You can see that disharmony in every aspect of our society. We live in a society that is largely unwell. And if we were to pause and take a moment and trace it back… you can’t disregard the history, the genocide, and enslavement and expect a nation to thrive.

Tyra: Yes

Chioma: It’s not realistic. It’s not going to happen and we see that. Those atrocities impact the direction of your entire life so no matter how much you want to wipe that slate clean and pretend that we can stand on a place where none of that existed is just not true. And it’s not only African American people that are affected by it, but everyone in this nation. Everyone in this nation is touched by that history and they’re touched by that disconnection and disharmony. I don’t hold onto it anymore. It definitely still makes me angry, but I see that there is nothing I need to hold onto because the impacts are alive and well. And they will be alive and well until people are ready to address that history.

Tyra: There’s so much that has happened. When the Black Lives Matter protests started again in the quarantine and distinctly when the backlash of that happened in schools… what they wanted to take out of the curriculum, who they were targeting, why they were targeting these people… people don’t even realize the full scope of the effect of that. And I just remember when I saw that Tik Tok [video] I wasn’t surprised. I don’t know why anyone was surprised that they did that because like you said American history, true American history, African American history, is not taught in schools. It’s not revered anywhere. I mean, you have the African American Museum in Washington, D.C., specific things like that, but it’s just not talked about. And there’s always some kind of backlash when you do want to bring it to the forefront and you just want to say, ‘We’re talking about Black history today. We’re talking about Black people.’ It’s always an issue. It’s always, ‘What can we do to stop this’? I wasn’t surprised by that video.

Editor’s Note: In her statement above, Tyra is referring to the formation of special interest groups and passing laws that targeted the educational sector following the BLM protests in 2020. These groups (in collaboration with politicians around the country) have tried to ban over 2,000 books from American schools in several states. Over 40% of those books featured people of color as the protagonists and these books included topics about race, racism, discrimination, equity, and the LGBTQIA+ community. Additionally, numerous U.S. states have tried to outlaw an educational pedagogy called Critical Race Theory that has never been legally sanctioned (or widely used by educators) for use in K-12 public schools. The ideas around banning CRT escalated from banning teachers from discussing racism as a modern societal construct permeating American society (i.e., institutionalized racism, generational wealth gaps, and mass incarceration of Black and brown people), to try to ban the teaching of racism and the effect this has had on Black and brown communities in the past and in the present.

For additional sources please read the following articles:

https://www.propublica.org/article/georgia-dei-crt-schools-parents

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/whos-behind-the-push-to-ban-books-in-schools-180980818/

https://www.brookings.edu/blog/fixgov/2021/07/02/why-are-states-banning-critical-race-theory/

https://worldpopulationreview.com/state-rankings/states-that-have-banned-critical-race-theory

https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2022/05/09/florida-banned-textbooks-math-desantis/

https://www.npr.org/2022/04/28/1095042273/ron-desantis-florida-textbooks-social-emotional-learning

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/04/22/us/florida-rejected-textbooks.html

Chioma: Yeah, it’s important for us to keep talking about our own history and not to minimize our own experience. Even in the way that our history is talked about it still feels minimized, to me in a lot of respects. Sometimes I feel that we should be sobbing. I remember in my MFA experience, especially in a lot of these literature courses, I was just angry… pissed off. And there was no regard for the sadness and anger that comes to brew. And a lot of the work that I’m doing now is about creating the spaces where we can move through those emotions together. Because it’s one thing to talk about those situations and intellectualize it and another to [work through it] together in a group setting. Being in a group and allowing someone to witness you [can help you to] move through those emotions a lot easier.

Tyra: I really commend you for even approaching these topics because I have tried to do that before and it was just an angry poem. (laughs). Maybe that’s it. Maybe the title is just “Angry Poem” and you keep going but I felt like, even though the anger is justified, there has to be a different way to talk about it and maybe I’m not the one. Anyone that approaches these topics I commend them for that because it’s a lot of work and emotional labor.

Chioma: Yeah, it is a lot of work and I think it’s interesting because you said you wrote an angry poem, but why can’t we be angry? You know? Why can’t we be angry? Why can’t we be sad?

Tyra: Yeah… yeah

Chioma: There is space for those severe emotions as well and honestly those are the emotions that are begging to be seen and heard and validated. And like I said, we talked about this at the beginning, but there’s so much joy, there’s so much pleasure available but we can not get there if we continue to minimize our anger, minimize our saddness, and minimize our depression. Those are valid too. So yeah, I think ya know, you said you’re writing the angry piece, those pieces are so important to the entire picture of this experience.

Tyra: Yeah, I agree with you because the concept of moving forward and having harmony is great, but not everyone is quite there. And some people are there and also at the same time they have this duplicity of feeling this full range of emotions and that should be championed as well, just right along beside it.

Chioma: Yeahhh

Tyra: Here’s the next question. You use many poetic techniques in your collection. From lyrical free verse, to prose, and erasures; how does the formatting for each piece work to tell another narrative or reinforce your central theme?

Chioma: So, working with different forms I wanted the freedom to bring in the different voices and the different experiences of my ancestors and also a lot of the different voices that I hear culturally. And a lot of the different voices that I’m experiencing when [I’m] walking down the street or talking with my friends. I realized I would need a lot of freedom when I’m dealing with form because all of those people express [themselves] in different ways. And so when I was working with different forms I was thinking, ‘What is the best way to bring forth this voice? How do they want to be represented on this page?’ And so I think it was a lot of fun as well. I think sometimes when you’re working on projects things can start to feel stale but it never really felt stale for me because I was jumping in and out from all these different voices and experimenting with different forms as well.

Tyra: I think that’s great. So you just let the voice tell you how it wants to be written? Because I know some people get stuck [and ask themselves] ‘Should this be prose? Should I rhyme here? Should I do some lyrics?’ You kind of, again, feel from your ancestors and that’s a main part of your creative process when it comes to the content and when it comes to the actual technique of writing it. It seems like you just have a lot of inspiration from others in your work.

Chioma: Yeah, for sure! I think with the way that I write as well, in the journal… on the pages with no lines, a lot of the pieces came out exactly the way that they were written on the page. And I think writing in that way is a lot of fun as well. When I went back and was looking at those different voices, it was interesting to see the way that they came in on different ideas. What was interacting on each page. Whether it was an image that I drew or a certain shape the words were taking and thinking about what that means for each piece and how I might continue to explore that. Tyra: Hmmm, yes, that’s great… That's amazing.

Tyra: You reference your Nigerian Igbo heritage in several poems such as “Recipe for Jollof Rice” and “Ka Chi Fo!”. Why were adding those parts of your identity so pivotal to the collections theme?

Chioma: So, those are also pieces of who I am. I am Nigerian and African American and both of those cultural experiences shape who I am, how I write, and how I move. And in this collection, I was collecting a lot of the things that have been lost. The dissolution of my parents' marriage led me to lose connection with a lot of the Nigerian side of my family so through those pieces I was going back and acknowledging what was lost and what I found. For me knowing how to make Jollof rice and knowing how to make it well is a very important part of Nigerian culture so when I learned how to make it I wanted to add it to this so it wouldn’t be forgotten by me or anyone else. I was taking a breathwork class recently and the instructor in this course was talking about how we need to revisit the moments of trauma to regain our breath and in that traumatic moment that’s where our breath gets stuck.

Tyra: Right!

Chioma: And we continue to breathe from that moment. A lot of the time it’s a shallow breath because our breath gets stuck. So, you have to revisit that moment and breathe life into it. And so that’s what these poems were doing for me. Going back and breathing life into these moments.

Tyra: I love that! And it can be hard to go back to that place where you felt the most low and everything was falling apart. Even sometimes when [you’re] thinking about it like– ‘Oh my gosh, I could never even think about approaching that situation again.’ You kind of dance around it. Maybe you go down the street, but you’re never right in that exact space so doing that work is so important. And I love what you said about learning how to cook Jollof rice. Food is such a big part of our culture and how we commune together.

Chioma: Yes!

Tyra: I’ve been doing that too. I recently texted my mom. I was like ‘Please send me some family recipes.’ My mom is from Nevis which is right next to St.Kitts in the Caribbean. [I said] please send me some recipes because as I’m writing I want to go back to that place and feel those emotions. I recently found the recipe for Haitian spaghetti that my grandma used to make. I wanted to learn how to make it myself after all this time.

Chioma: Yes, it’s so special and so important to be able to make that food because that's how we nourish ourselves. Including that brings a different layer to a collection. When you’re including pieces that [explain] this is how you nourish yourself, this is how you take care of yourself, this is how you treat yourself and others. And the Haitian spaghetti is very good!

Tyra & Chioma: (laughing)

Tyra: Yes, absolutely. And I think when you don’t have the words or when your or your ancestors don’t have the words, they have the food. They have the songs. They have dance. They communicate in so many other ways and take that because they might not be able to sit down and tell you everything that they went through, but they’ll show you what they ate when they were a child. They’ll show you what they danced to, what they listened to growing up. They’ll show you how they sang. Those things are so important too.

Chioma: Yes, for a lot of women food was the art. They didn’t have paintbrushes or maybe even pencils and pens, but you were in that kitchen and what you were creating, that was your art form. And you’re passing it down. I’m glad that you’re including it in your work as well.

Tyra: (enthusiastically) Yeahhh, I love that; ‘food is the art’. Yeah, for sure. Tyra: I appreciate your poems that question and push back against religion and conservatism. The poem “Jehovah’s People” includes the powerful lines “...there would be no hymns, no ecstasy, no healing touch, only organized religion wrestling my child body into an unnatural quiet…” What is the message you are trying to convey to the reader in these poems? Why was that important to include in A Body of Water?

Chioma: I was raised as a Jehovah’s Witness and I was the first generation in my family to be raised that way. In reflecting and questioning my family, I began to examine my own experience with religion. And growing up in that faith was always challenging for me from a young age. I knew that experience wasn’t for me because of how controlled it felt. And I intuitively knew that that level of control had nothing to do with God and everything to do with something else. And so as I grew up I started going to churches and temples with my friends and seeing what their faith was and what they believed… and seeing how they lived and what they practiced. And I was a little jealous going into different sects of Christianity and seeing the ecstasy and the fainting and the shouting and the dramatics, all of which were influenced by the Africans who were practicing Christianity. And I felt like if I had those religious experiences I would have felt more at home at church and in my body as well. I feel like now I know that’s not true. But that’s how I felt when exploring some of those different faiths. It was important to include spirituality because faith felt so restrictive to me. And it was chosen by my family because it felt like safety and it felt like love and it provided a contrast from the terror and the trauma that they experienced in the home. That allowed me to understand a bigger picture. Understanding how a religion that was so restrictive for me could feel like safety to someone else. And so through that process of understanding how that religion would be chosen I think I gained a greater respect for the different religious choices that people make.

Tyra: That’s really profound. Just the fact that for you it can be one thing and for someone who is so close to you, your mom, the rest of your family, it can mean something completely different. I totally understand that. While I’m not a Jehovah’s Witness I grew up Seventh-Day Adventist and it’s extremely restrictive as well.

Chioma: I heard they branched off of each other.

Tyra: Yeah, they are really closely related. We are kindred spirits here.

Chioma and Tyra: (laughing)

Tyra: So, when I read that in A Body of Water, I was like ‘I have to talk to her about this. This is— I just understood so much of what you were saying. The restrictive part but also seeing it as a home in some ways or a routine, a habit, whatever. You know it’s a part of you that needs to be rooted out, but it’s also so engrained at the same time. With Christianity, with some of the denominations, people are discouraged from questioning. You go a lot of your life having these small moments of wanting to question things, but you’re not “supposed” to do that. It’s very interesting and it’s hard to even come to terms with how you feel about it when your family is within that religion and you have all these thoughts, but who do you speak with if the person you are speaking to is saying, ‘Don’t have these thoughts because if you questions things too much than you’ll lose your faith.”

Chioma: Yeah, it’s very conflicting and a challenging way to grow up. I don’t know, and I was trying to think with some friends who were also raised as Jehovah's Witnesses, as a child I just knew. I don’t know if it was an angel or what, I just knew this is not right. And there was something in my brain and my body that shut me off to what people were saying within that space. I think those experiences within the Jehovah’s Witness faith, those were my first experiences with disassociation because I knew something was not connecting. And I knew this wasn’t for me. And I knew this was not right. And so I just began to disassociate from those experiences a little bit and ummm yeah, dissociation is something challenging to work through. To be present in my body now and I can also see how it served its purpose.

Tyra: Yes.

Chioma: From protecting me from certain ideas and individuals probably as well.

Tyra: The fact that you can call back and know this is the time that I started to think something was different and then to go so far as… ‘Let me see how other people do it. How do they worship?’ … and trying to glean some information from them… I think people push away from religion and Christianity but they never really come back and say, ‘Is there another way? How are my friends doing it or even looking at different faiths?’ I think that’s exceptional because a lot of people don’t take that approach. I know for me I went to a mosque with my friend one time when we were in a different country and it was Ramadan. She wanted to go and she needed someone to go with. And it just opened my eyes completely. [I said to myself], Wow, this is totally different from anything I had growing up. [I started to think] there really is another way. You understand and you know there are other religions, but it’s different]when you’re invited in. It was a total switch for me.

Chioma: Yeah, it’s really beautiful to witness other faiths as well.

Tyra: We’re all connected. We’re all connected at some point.

Chioma: Yes, on some level.

Tyra: There is a connection between African American enslavement and the Black church. Are poems like “Jehovah’s People” meant to question the rigidity of the church and/or call for reform?

Chioma: So, I needed to question the rigidity of religion to understand how that could feel safe for someone else. If you’re growing up in a household where you feel unsafe, where you’re experiencing abuse or assault– whether that spiritually, physically, emotionally– a rigid religion might feel like a breath of fresh air, right? Because you go to church and you know exactly what’s going to happen. This book has the songs and we’re going to sing at these times and this is when church starts and stops.

Tyra: Yeah.

Chioma: I know some churches are orderly about time. I know that some other Christians have different experiences around time, but umm, yeah, you get information on who you can talk to, who you can befriend and that rigidity can feel like safety to someone who is coming from a disorganized or chaotic environment. I can understand why it can feel good to some members of my family. I don’t think we can really reform anything if we don’t understand the choices that we’re making. A lot of time, more than reform, what we need is respect. And I say that knowing how challenging that can feel, but I think that religion is exactly perfect for some members of my family. It answers questions that arise from their experience. It meets needs for them that are important for them and I can respect that. I can also acknowledge and respect that that religion is not in alignment with my soul and my experiences and my unique sets of needs. So, it’s something that is definitely still challenging for me. I don’t want to say that I just move with so much respect for this faith because I’ve had traumatic experiences within it [too], but I know that in the larger picture– especially when we look at what’s happening with religion around the world, wars being created over religion– I think it’s really important to move with a lot more respect and understanding.

Tyra: Yeah, that’s really important and a mature way to think about it especially if it doesn’t align with who you are and you’re not going to continue with it. Just to realize that some people need a map. Some people like to know this is where I can go and this is where I can’t go. This is the time that I should be there and the time I should not be here. Just realizing hey it might not be for you, but it’s for someone else and that’s okay and as long as they’re not causing horrible harms– and I know like you said there are still things about Christianity that are harmful, about all religions that are harmful– but if they are acting with pure intentions and aren’t causing psychological or physically harm intentionally to anyone I think that you leave it.

Chioma: I think needing to know who you can talk to and who you can’t [for example]... that safety is also an illusion, right?

Tyra: Yeah

Chioma: That’s not real safety. It’s the illusion of safety, but I understand how that can be confronting to believe that… this is a safe environment and this is okay. And we see that happen all the time in different religions. People are giving their trust to individuals who don’t necessarily deserve it, but they’re within the same faith. I think it’s about understanding and respecting the choice which leads someone there. It doesn’t necessarily mean that I agree with what's happening there or that everyone there has pure intentions. I don’t think I always have pure intentions, right? We’re human, but… religion tries to create control around that human experience. But you can’t control what everyone is going to do and how they are going to behave in certain situations. But I understand how people can be confronted moving in certain spaces where everyone is holding the same ideas as them.

Tyra: Right, because that pattern, that rigidity maybe is not so rigid to someone that thinks, ‘Well this is just my life and this is how it goes.’ And that’s okay in some situations, but I get what you’re saying. What are you working on now? Can you give us a glimpse into your next project?

Chioma: Yes! I’m not a fan of labels, but I’m wearing the label of storyteller and I feel like that gives me the space to create what I want to create. Umm, so within that label I feel like I can do the things that I do naturally which is prose, poetry, painting… Right now I’m thinking more about oral storytelling and how sound is important in expression. There are certain things that are only available sonically that are important to a message. So, I’ve been thinking a lot about oral storytelling and how to tell some of those stories within our communities where we don’t often hear and how do we hone in on voices that we’re not cognizant of or always listening to. I just finished a studio artist residency in July and in that residency I was exploring Ibo art more deeply and looking at symbolism and different things like that. There are a lot of things that I’m balancing right now. I think my main priority is nourishment as we talked about and really making sure that my body is really present and grounded and available for life. I think in the stretch of the last two years my body has been pushed to the limits of stress, so it’s really important for me to go back and make sure I’m really nourishing myself with the things that I’m eating. With the relationships that I’m in, with the places that I spend time in. So, I’ve been writing a lot less– which is not to say that I’m still not writing a lot— but umm, it’s more so venting, journaling, like this needs to get out vs like consciously creative writing, but who knows? Sometimes that venting turns into something creative.

Tyra: Yes, yes, you’re doing the living right now. There’s this quote that I read a couple of years ago. And it said sometimes you write and sometimes you’re doing the living to do the art. It’s an eb and flow. Some people, ya know, live and do the art at the same time and that’s their process, but for some [they] need a moment or two, years, to just live and feel things and do things. Then [they] come back around. I’m trying to figure that out myself. Like what kind of artist am I? Do I live and do my art at the same time or do I live and come back to it. It sounds like you’re in the living phase. (laughs)

Chioma: Definitely in the living phase, being present phase. Umm, but yeah, as I was thinking about these different questions I was saying, ‘I want to write again. I want to have this experience again. I know I’m working my way back to writing more poetry again.”

Tyra: Yes, and we want to hear from you! We’re looking for that next publication. Your loyal fans, your readers, I’m one of them! (laughs, goodnaturedly)

Chioma: Aww, thank you so much! I think the next thing that I’m putting out for sure is umm I don’t want to call it a podcast, but essentially it is a podcast, but that’s something I’m potentially putting out soon.

Tyra: I can’t wait to see that. I’ll definitely be listening!

Chioma: Awesome!

Tyra: Well, that is the end of my question set. Chioma, thank you so much for coming to this interview. We really appreciate it and I’m excited to get this posted.

Chioma: Awesome and thank you for your beautiful questions. This was a really good experience.

Tyra: I’m so glad!

Chioma: Thank you so much, Tyra.

Tyra: Have a good rest of your day.

Thank you for reading!

Artist’s Statement:

The piece titled “Journey” is an abstract narrative painting created by me over the course of several years. It is done in acrylic on canvas and displays a series of figures arranged in a composition along with elements that suggest a voyage or great adventure. One interpretation of the imagery could be that of spiritual perspective. The diving man, the boat, angel or elephant could represent biblical references And illustrate the connection between heaven and Earth. My inspiration is not limited to one particular idea. Just as the boat in the background carries a “roll with the punches theme,” knowledge changes, inspiration changes.

If you were to step inside Mary’s home, you would think to yourself that she is a person broken. Not that it was disorderly, not that it reeked of non-maintenance, not that there was rotting food and unclean clothes—but there might as well have been. No furniture in Mary’s house looked to be non-store-bought, no carpet made of non-synthetic fibers, no room any less than a perfect square. If you were to step inside Mary’s house, you would be dizzied by how geometrical it felt—every room the inside of a perfect box, edges sharp and defined. Each stair on the steps seemed capable of cutting cloth at its lip. The walls were decorated with paints and textures which seemed to come from an anonymous, clean factory somewhere far away. She couldn’t save herself from occasionally hearing the floorboards creak, a fact which infuriated her, but in all other measures, her house was made as if from a perfect plastic mold.

Mary once read somewhere that her developer had built hundreds of homes across the country with an identical frame and floor plan as this one. But out of all those hundreds of copies, Mary told herself that hers must be the most appealing. She lived in a neighborhood somewhere in the middle of Illinois whose name was decided upon by a marketing company, and somewhere hidden away upon each decorative item in her house, you’d find a serial number.

Mary worked at a health insurance firm and lived alone. She watched TV dramas about police officers while tucked beneath bedsheets she had ordered from a magazine delivered in the mail. Her brother was a police officer in the city, and she worried about him. That added to the thrill of her shows, in a way: that trace of something real. Every morning, she went to a gym whose CEO lived somewhere in Texas—not that she knew that or even knew his face or name. She did Pilates there and bought smoothies with appealing names like Berry Blast.

When she watched her crime shows and grew fearful, she’d remember the shotgun in her safe, given to her by her grandfather when she turned 15. She once read a story online about protests happening in the city, and she took it out just to feel safer. You could see the twisting fibers of a once-growing tree in its wooden frame, smell a liquor on it which her grandfather used to drink, which to this day she isn’t able to identify. He’d sit on a leather recliner called Grandpa’s Chair after Thanksgiving dinner, sipping it as he grumbled curses at the news.

This very house would become the scene of a crime—or, at the least, she called it a crime because it was the exact sort of thing they talked about on the news. Here, there would be a robbery.

Maggie Orlin was a 23-year-old gambling addict who lived in the city. Maggie owed $5,000 to a woman who lived a couple floors above her, a woman who usually wouldn’t demand it back if it wasn’t for the fact her daughter had to stay overnight at the hospital after an unexpected bee sting revealed a serious allergy. Ms. Taylor was now in debt herself and demanded the money back from Maggie.

Maggie once stole from a boy she was dating.

When the fight reached that fragile, unspeakable line of a breakup, she had bravely said, “I can’t date you right now because I’m not a good person. I lie, I steal, I will cheat on you. I will be a good person one day, but I can’t be one now. It’s not worth it to date me, but one day it will be.”

He accused her of throwing herself a pity party and left. This was three weeks before.

But she did mean it. She would be a good person. She would quit and never steal another dollar again. While taking exit 76, turning onto a road that would eventually reach a suburb, she wrung the steering wheel in her hands passionately, as she listened to songs from a playlist she entitled Crying Music.

She couldn’t steal from anyone she knew. Her first step on a long moral path would be doing the risky and more just thing: taking from someone far away instead, someone who could afford it. She was willing to risk her safety—in truth, her very life—to save those who might be most devastatingly hurt by her actions, by this disease she had been given. She thought it a small moral victory, and when the quiet, tinny music played from her phone, banked within the car console’s stained cup holder, she let herself think for a moment with a rage that this boy would miss her and regret the breakup once he saw how much she had changed.

The neighborhood was called Pleasant Prairies, and only a house or two had been constructed along its singular road. The developer seemed to have only recently cleared out the land to make a residential area. Maggie was looking for a place like this—expensive, but where people would be isolated from one another in case this robbery was to end poorly. This was her third time breaking into a place where people lived, but her first time breaking into a house. She didn’t feel guilty about stealing the money, but she confessed that she hated the possibility that she might cause even a single nightmare in another human being.

Oh well, she said to herself. I will be a shocking story for them, told at dinner parties.

She drove around at two in the morning in search of a house in Pleasant Prairies that looked like it didn’t have children within it. Out here where no crimes could ever happen, where no morsel of land is untouched by funding of one kind or another, people park their cars in their driveways, out in the open next to a white garage door. She thought she could tell something about these people within the great houses made of cream-colored wood based on their cars. From her perch parked down the street, she saw a pink punch buggy parked in a driveway with concrete that looked designer-made. The squares of concrete in the driveway had subtle, curved bezels and a smooth texture. Out here, it was still 1991, so she knew this had to be a woman’s car based on its color. If this woman had parked out in the driveway, then certainly any husband would have as well. But no other car was in sight. This, she thought, is how she would pay Ms. Taylor back.

There was a soccer field’s length of earth between this house and the second nearest, bulldozed to make preparations for houses yet to be built so that the grass had died and left a muddy heap stretching in all directions once the smooth grass of the lawn reached an edge. Maggie knew about the people out here. They wouldn’t traverse that mud unless absolutely necessary, even if things did go poorly, and even if they heard anything from that distance.

Before entering the home, she couldn’t resist giving three gentle knocks to the white wood on the outside, just to see if she was right. She felt like a woodpecker or a squirrel.

“How about that,” she whispered. The wood was fake.

She took some electronics, some trinkets, things that seemed expensive but non-sentimental. She carried a backpack that once went with her every day to high school, which now held pink and white decorative cutlery, a painting of a sunflower, a hair dryer that seemed expensive, some door knobs, a signed poster of a movie about Italian gangsters—odds and ends. She would only have about a thousand dollars total at this rate, and her bag was beginning to grow full.

She had three choices. A jewelry box with but two or three diamonds could lightly and quickly put her over the edge—but certainly such a prize rested in the master bedroom, where the owner of the house slept. Her second choice was to leave and steal again from someone else, but her conscience couldn’t cut it.

If you’re serious about quitting, she told herself, this has to be the last time, and this way, only one person will face any consequences.

That left option number three: the car. This would mean stealing the keys which hung on a key rack in the first-floor kitchen, driving the car away to someplace safe, walking back to where she had parked her own car, leaving, then Ubering back to the hidden pink car to bring it someplace where she could sell it for, easily, five-thousand dollars or more. No car alarm would go off, no sentimental thing would be stolen, and Ms. Taylor would no longer be in debt because of Maggie.

She held the key in her hand. The smell of dinner still lingered in the dark air, olive oil and garlic. There in the pitch-black kitchen, she felt, for the first time, perverse. The key was attached to a small, black plastic square that was lukewarm to touch, whose lock button had been smoothed and left paintless by someone else’s finger. A thing like a car key—a thing which this person carried with her in her pocket every day—had too much of another person’s life on it to steal.

~

Mary had often thought about what it would one day feel like to point a gun at another human being. She had, almost as if by accident, seen this moment so many times in her head that, when the fantasy finally came true, she was surprised at how non-glorious it felt to order this intruder to stand absolutely still.

Here was a girl who hadn’t showered in at least a week, with tattoos and piercings and all of these other things Mary had always expected a criminal to have. Held up against her cheek, she smelled the gun in her hands and thought of how proud people would be of her for this. Mary had often imagined—with an embarrassing kind of excitement—that in this moment the criminal would try to run, lunge at her, pull out a gun or a knife, and that she would be forced, tragically, to fire. But Maggie did no such thing. Instead, she tried to explain herself.

“I don’t have a weapon. Please lower it,” Maggie said. “Please. I’ll drop everything and leave. This is the last time I’ll ever try to steal. I don’t need this money for me. Someone I know, their kid got sick, and they couldn’t afford it.”

Mary wondered if she should still fire, since it was legal to do so—she wouldn’t need to feel any guilt—but she had no desire to kill anything. It’s just that she imagined this moment feeling different, and she wondered if firing the gun would fix that. She always imagined that she would be forced to fire, and a harrowing scene would follow as she wept for having taken a life lost. But still, how proud her coworkers would be when they heard, how thrilled her family would be, how wide the smile of her grandfather shining down on her from heaven. But she had always imagined that she, herself, would feel pride too during this moment—that she would be able to feel all the strength and justice she’d wanted to see in the world manifest in the texture of that hair trigger. But she felt no such thing. Something about this intrusion needed to be fixed.

“Drop the bag and turn your pockets inside out,” Mary said.

Maggie complied, petrified. Maggie’s cell phone screen turned on when it hit the floor, dully illuminating the room. This woman pointing a gun at her should be trembling too, flushed with adrenaline and emotion, but she seemed to have the distant and intellectual look of a person solving a puzzle.

Mary was embarrassed—the weight of the gun was beginning to fatigue the muscles in her shoulder. It hurt, and that frustrated her. But she had to keep the criminal still until the police came. She knew that if she lowered her gun to pull out her phone and call 911, this girl would take her chance while the gun was lowered and lunge at her. But she wasn’t strong enough to hold this twenty-pound gun with one hand—and if any injustice did happen, Mary wouldn’t have been able to bear it.

“I have an attic,” Mary said. “With one of those swing-down ladders from the ceiling. It’s at the top of the stairs. You’ll walk up there with me behind you the whole time. Then I’ll close you up there, and then I’ll call the police. You’ll stay up there until they arrive.”

Maggie was in tears but nodded and stayed silent. There was no escape now.

She had always imagined building a relationship with someone she loved during her twenties. She thought about characters in TV shows with lives like the one this woman lived; how they talked about being anxious about letting even one year slip by in which life wasn’t lived to the fullest. She knew a couple people in prisons, but no one close to her, so that when they went, they vanished to Maggie, plucked from the face of the earth as if they were figments of her imagination who never truly existed at all.

Once locked in the attic, she swallowed a horrible thought. Maggie wanted to hate something, but she couldn’t bring herself to hate this woman. Maggie let herself hate her parents, her high school, her boss, but more than anything she wanted to hate this woman and yet she couldn’t bring herself to do it. Envious and desperate, she couldn’t let herself hate this woman because all the stories she had ever heard told her that she was utterly guilty and deserved this fate.

Mary locked the attic and let her arms rest. She sat crisscrossed on the carpeted ground of the second floor like a child as she stared up at the attic door. And when she looked down at her brother’s contact information on her phone—the policeman—she realized that calling him would feel wrong. The police escorting this girl out of her house, dispassionately delving out justice on her behalf, would feel wrong. The image of this girl somewhere in some jail petrified Mary. The idea that she would wake up every day wondering about where the girl was, what she was doing, eating, what conversations she was having, love she was building, letters writing, lies telling: and Mary would know none of it.

Now, Mary cried. Crisscrossed on the carpet, she shook and put down her phone, ran her hands across her shotgun like she was petting an animal, as the uncertainty weighed heavy against her spine. She didn’t know what this girl was doing up there in her attic, and it terrified her. Mary was a person broken, every muscle of her body seeming to grow rigid and immovable as she looked up at the attic door on the ceiling. Face red, she could hardly remember to breathe.

Mary looked up the average sentence for a home burglary. Depending, it could be anywhere between one year and thirty.

~

At first, Mary said she would only keep this girl up in her attic for as long as it would take for her to find an answer that felt right. She read blog posts about people who were victims of home invasion like her, about how they felt when the criminal was caught and locked away. She would consider calling her brother every day, but upon each attempt, a brief and sharp pain that lasted no more than a handful of seconds prevented her from making the call. Mary spent hours upon hours of hard labor preparing to transform the attic with Maggie inside, and despite how much energy was expended in keeping her, none of the energy stung sharply like calling the police would.

It first started the day after the burglary, when Maggie saw a piece of notebook paper wiggle its way between the attic door’s cracks. In letters which looped and swirled.

Do you have any dietary restrictions?

Maggie was starved. She had fallen asleep in the attic expecting the police to wake her up. In their place, she received this message.

The thought was too horrible. It had to be that the police were delayed. It had to be that not as much time had passed as Maggie had thought. It had to be something else.

Later that day, Mary came up with the gun and put Maggie in handcuffs. Maggie watched as Mary, first, brought up an elegant plate of food—which Maggie ate. Next, a small bed that could be wiggled through the attic’s door piece-by-piece. Then a television, for entertainment. She brought up plants to filter the air, lighting to make the space sparkle, books, a carpet, an air freshener, toiletries and sanitation products, a large litter box, a notebook, packs and packs of bottled water, shampoo, soap, and conditioner, sound-proofing tiles, art supplies, and a chair. By the end of it, after a process of multiple weeks of renovations, the room was truly beautiful: walls painted, well-decorated, and adorned with as many pass-times as could be included, given that they wouldn’t make it possible for Maggie to escape. After a distraught first week in which Maggie lived in decent but less-than-ideal conditions—a necessary road bump which nevertheless upset Mary—Maggie’s room looked, in one word, expensive. Maggie remained bound when Mary was transforming the attic, but before and after this, Maggie moved as she pleased. Whenever Mary entered the attic to perform maintenance, she would bring her grandfather’s shotgun.

Mary never interacted with Maggie. She was left to her own devices. The two never made contact with one another, spoke, exchanged pleasantries, nor did they discuss their lives. After a month, Mary realized that, although she had asked for Maggie’s name, Mary had never shared her own. She thought that this wasn’t something to fret over.

Mary felt so safe once Maggie was secured in her attic, aware via the creaking of the ceiling above of every movement she made. It wasn’t perfect, but it was closer to perfect than calling her brother.

Even so, although she found the arrangement just, Mary didn’t find it fair that Maggie couldn’t speak to her family or loved ones, if she had such things. As such, after a month, Mary spoke with Maggie for the first time since her capture.

“I’ve come up with a system,” Mary said, annunciating. “No, please don’t try to speak to me. Just let me explain. Please let me explain. Please don’t try to speak to me. Maggie, you will want to hear what I have to say. Yes. I wanted to tell you that I’ve come up with a system. It isn’t fair that you’re unable to communicate with the outside world. If you write messages on this notebook paper, I’ll review them to ensure they’re appropriate, and send them to wherever you’d like. I’ve chosen the return address, and it isn’t this residence, of course, but I’ll check that return address in case you get any messages in the mail. I’m sorry for not allowing you to make contact with the outside world—that was unfair of me.”

Maggie felt ill at the suggestion. To write such a letter would feel like submitting to this woman’s depravity. If it truly did upset Mary that she wasn’t able to communicate with the outside world, perhaps she could refuse to write any letters in protest.

Maggie came up with a plan. She would write letters detailing the genuine and chasmic pain she felt as a result of being separated from those she loved, but she would fail to include an address for it to be sent off to. Mary might read it and somehow remember what she was doing to Maggie.

Mary prepared the first couple of paragraphs of the letter, detailing a false story about running away to a commune somewhere in rural Nebraska. Mary was preparing Maggie’s dinner upon a speckled, black-granite countertop as she read the letter. She purchased organic food and experimented with new recipes weekly. As opposed to a passive chore, she saw preparing Maggie’s meals as an activity that required utter concentration and craftsmanship. Plates would be decorated, spices measured, broths sampled, meats temperature-checked, fruits and vegetables locally sourced, menus designed with care; and calories would never be counted, as Mary was certain that no girl in all of Illinois ate as fully and as well as Maggie.

In the spiced, warm clouds of dinner preparation, there on the granite countertop, Mary sipped broth, stirred a gravy, and licked her fingers in between reading paragraphs of Maggie’s writing.

Dear Mom and Dad,

It’s been a couple of years since we’ve spoken. I wish my apology didn’t have to take this form. I wish I didn’t have to send it under these conditions. I should be saying these words to you, out loud, in our kitchen. You should hear these words and we should make dinner afterward and watch Star Trek together like we did a million years ago together. I wish I could explain more of my situation, but while I’m in it, I know that you reading these words, even if the circ*mstances are so far from ideal, is better than me having never written them.

Dad, you got addicted. Maybe you still are. And then slowly but surely, I did too, but in a different way. And Mom, you had to live with us and love us. Every day I think about how you never deserved any of this, Mom. You don’t deserve to have a daughter who doesn’t speak to you. You didn’t deserve to live in a house with the two of us. I’ve heard you say a million times how you wanted better for me than what I got. But you deserve someone who tells you: I wanted better for you. I want better for you every day.

Dad, I’ve never had a teacher, coach, or boss talk to me one-on-one if they weren’t telling me how I’m failing at something. I’m so angry at you for everything you did. I don’t even know if you’re sorry, but I’m writing this because the older I get the more I’m realizing that I’m not like Mom. I’m like you. I’ve fought with you so many times in my head. And when I did, I couldn’t admit it to myself, but I knew the parts of you I would fight with—the parts of you I hated the most—are the same parts you passed down to me. I feel awful for everything I’ve done, and if I’m really like you, you do too. The older I get the more I realize that everyone around you would rather see you die than fail, because you could be replaced, but a failure can’t be undone. You weren’t measured by who you were but by your distance from failure. And then you failed. I know it might be hard to believe, but I know a shred of how awful that feels. I need forgiveness so badly. So please let me tell you: no matter what happens, I forgive you.

We didn’t deserve this. We don’t deserve this. We deserved to talk to one another every day. We deserved to build a life together. We deserved to go out to dinners together, talk about who I’m dating, invite friends over during Thanksgiving. Neither of you deserved this. I will always miss you.

I love you, Maggie.

Mary had to read the letter over to ensure it was safe to send, but she was not inhuman. She felt feelings, which were real, when she read it. She served Maggie dinner that day, and for the second time, she spoke to her. Maggie hadn’t included a delivery address, and if it wasn’t for that, Mary wouldn’t have opened her mouth as she set the steaming plate down with one hand, shotgun in the other.

Mary said, “That was a nice note. Put the delivery address on it, and I’ll send it out.”

This time, as she closed the attic door, more softly, behind her, Mary heard the voice of a child screaming, as if from another world, I don’t deserve this. Maggie demanded the voice to be quiet, and silence did follow, but afterward, she was petrified by a new uncertainty. She wasn’t sure if the sound of that voice truly came from the attic.

~

One day, Mary received a call from her brother Mike, the police officer. He asked if he could stop by her house for dinner.

“No,” Mary said, “I’d like to go out to eat tonight. It’s been too long. I’d like to see you too, but we should go out to eat elsewhere.”

“Last year we would talk to one another almost every day. I miss that.”

“I miss it too.”

“And your cooking is second to none, Mary. It’s been ages since I’ve visited. I like to see where you’re living, how things are going—and all.”

“I have no groceries,” she said. “It might be a hassle to prepare it all.”

“I’ll just order whatever you need ahead of time, that’s no worry.”

She thought that it was so silly that if she were to be caught, she would go to jail. But then again, her brother was always so much like Mary herself. Maybe he would understand.

“Okay,” Mary said. “Sure, stop by. How about this, I’ll go grab groceries now, and then I’ll pick you up from the jail on my way back. You have to go back there tonight, right?”

“That’s right.”

“I’ll pick you up, we’ll have dinner, and then I’ll drop you back off at the jail.”

“Perfect,” he said.

“Can I come in?”

“Into the jail?”

“I’ve never seen where you work before,” Mary said. “I visited a jail once when I was a child. It’s been ages. I like to see where you’re working.”

“Sure, come take a peek,” he said. “It’s interesting.”

~

She was escorted in by her brother and another officer. She touched her hands to the bulletproof glass of Mike’s office, entranced by her view of the jail. The glass was warm and plasticky. As Mike changed into civilian clothing, stored away his gun, hung up his baton, took off his badge, Mary gazed at the rows and rows of identical cells. She looked at a four-story, cavernous expanse of white bars and concrete floors, patrolled by watchful guardians that looked to her like angels circling the mouth of the inferno. She wanted to hold a baton. She wanted to orbit the cages, like these angels circling these halls of just consequence. She didn’t know who among them, but she knew that someone in her field of view, someone in one of these cells, had certainly broken into a home before. She felt something perfect, blissful, the closest she’s ever felt to being in love, when she realized that everyone in here deserves this. She loved this place, just like her brother.

GONE BUT NEVER FORGOTTEN

• • •

A tombstone is heavier than one might think.

Turning right on Broadus co*ker Street—the sunglint blindness splays across the windshield—casting a sightless void into which shadowed recollections of his past begin to purge. It comes to him stealthily, no, sneakily, no, cunningly.

Weathered Army-store combat boots charging into the oblique night. Blind hands drag the monument loose off its footing, with a dull grind of stone on stone. Then the heaving. Fingers tucking under into the paste of dew and milled granite. The slab’s wet pressure on the chest. Those first feeling steps forward into the gloom.

Only in this part of Livingston, seldom-visited and Georgia-clay poor, may this long-interred memory be brought to light, a memory elsewhere ever unremembered. He can’t think it away, for undoubtedly he will be nearing Superba Street . . . and the house . . . the one he abandoned it in.

His mind’s eye blurs into myriad questions: Was it a prank? An excuse to indulge in the taboo? Or was it just random evil? Sin as if by chance might’ve beckoned to him, like a long unseen ex-lover calling up unexpectedly and asking for a place to stay; first the kittenish coyness, then the stray’s intimacy. Despite this interrogative ambiguity, these declaratives are clear: He wasn’t dared or goaded. It wasn’t planned. It was as compulsive as compulsory. It came to him on such a ruinous whim, and he’s borne the deadweight of ever-unremembrance over this past quarter century. Why did he have to see this through?

IN LOVING MEMORY

• • •

Summer 1994. He was living in the dank basem*nt of his drummer’s house, a then necrose Craftsman built in the twenties on what would become the further ungentrified Superba Street; a place he ingeniously fled to from his middle-class upbringing in the suburbia of Northridge Estates. The basem*nt in which he stayed stood partially finished, or somewhat less than partially, as did most of the rest of the house. His only source of electricity was from a plug in a light-socket adapter; the shower was made from painted roofing tin; mushrooms grew out of the carpet. But he didn’t care because he lived unsupervised for the first time, which gave way to his sense of right and wrong, or rather, the amorality of youth.

Despite his unreconstructed side of town feeling so hazardous that he kept a shotgun tucked in the rafters above the couch he made his bed, he decided that the ideal graveyard for possible larceny was in the even more dangerous segment, Rock Black Bottom. For Rock Black Bottom residents, he surmised, wouldn’t be so civic-minded as to watch over the yard of the last plots of land one owns, making the stealing of a headstone go likely unnoticed or even disregarded. With a plan hatched, his drummer drove them out in his pickup, he did the deed, and they hauled it, all 120 pounds of it, back home.

Surreal is the only way to describe the scene of a fourteen-year-old girl’s headstone sitting on a living room floor. The fact that this basem*nt living room doubles as a bedroom and kitchen only enhances the stark uncanniness. There—among the band equipment, the couch/makeshift bed, the antique microwave, the mandatory empty liquor bottle collection, the clock stopped at 4:20, and the stacks of Ramen noodles—it lay with a combination of eeriness yet attraction, like a cursed artifact to a skeptic, totemistic yet a mere object. Alva Freeman was her name. She died in 1901. He had no sense at the time of the significance of that last name, of what he had done.

A LIFE MEASURED IN MEMORIES

• • •

Continuing down Broadus co*ker, he passes through the intersection of Flannery Street, the reflection of his 7-Series glides down the windowed wall of Sporty’s Barber Shop. It's there the nausea of it all hits. In the unmoored morals of youth, such an event as grave robbery is almost trivial, and though he has since skirted the line that divides sin from sainthood several times under the pressure of getting ahead, he has found himself to be an overall decent middle-aged man. Not quite righteous but definitely not base. Educated. Successful. Accomplished. Married with children with an American-Dream home. It sickens him to think about what he did that night. The middle-aged perspective indeed damns what were mere follies of youth. But, worst of all, there is . . . how he simply abandoned that girl's headstone to that condemned house on Superba . . . in hopes his acts would be forgotten and discarded . . . carted off with the trash.

Stopping his sedan at the five points with the Hop ‘N Shop, he seizes up. Being late, he has chosen this rarely-taken shortcut, all while knowing that from the five points, right and two streets up, lies Superba Street. Go left at the five points . . . down Myrtle . . . take the quick cutoff to the boulevard and his errand at Ledbetter’s Jewelry . . . he won’t even have to see the Superba street sign. But he is drawn to the right of the five points, to Superba. Something wants to at least glance down Superba. The turn signal signals, the car turns, slows, stops at the old address. It still stands.

He blushes red from white guilt as he peers out of his BMW at the elderly black man on the porch swing and at a home that he expected to be a vacant lot. Pansies grow in window boxes, and the palette of the shutters and trim goes well with the siding. This man has resurrected the domicile from doom. As he focuses from the broad tableau back to the man’s face, the man looks at him with only slightly squinted eyes, an expression akin to half-recognizing an old acquaintance, or clandestinely noting the presence of a potential enemy. Hidden inside the dark tint of the Beemer’s window, he cringes into his seat from envisioning the scene of what he is about to do, of what he feels compelled to do. How does one begin to ask about such a thing?

Deep breaths breathed deeply. Deep breaths breathed deeply. The mantra repeats and repeats. Calmer, he finds the resolve to ask after the whereabouts of the tombstone.

The man from the porch swing meets him at the fence gate and with a broad hand on an outstretched arm greets him.

“Reverend Luther Pines, but people call me ‘Pine Box,’ for I’ve laid so many down low,” the preacher calls to him.

When he responds with his name said aloud, it sounds impotent in comparison. After the handshake, his gaze adverts down to his shuffling shoes, noticing the four matching brogues of his and those of the preacher’s steady shoes; then, his gaze returns to the preacher in time for him to say. And there really is no way to say what he must say next. But he’ll say it nonetheless.

“Is there a tombstone in your basem*nt?”

A cycle of expressions courses through the preacher’s face: the church-door smile solidifies into funeral solemnity; then, with a co*ck and upward tilt of the head that makes the eyes look on askance, the expression morphs to one judicial but piteous. Finally, with eyebrows rising and with a slap of his thigh, the preacher bellows joyfully up into the air.

“I knew you’d one day come! I knew a man wouldn’t live his whole life long having done what you did and not seek penance! Holy is the rod and the staff!”

The preacher runs his thumbs under his suspenders and leans back, his tie bowing around a heaving chest, as if he is about to announce an altar call, right here at thefence line. Will anyone answer it? Instead, he says rather softly as his head levels and his eyebrows lower to a concerned ridge:

“Come with me.”

The gate is opened for him. Must he go to the pastor’s study for a devotional?

UNTIL WE MEET AGAIN . . .

• • •

The basem*nt is not the same; he is not the same. The tombstone is the same. Its permanence equal to its heft, immutable among the many seasons. The two stand before it.

“I can’t believe you kept it so long.”

The pastor looks up to the ceiling. “Let’s just say that I prophesied that someone would return. I knew someone would have to want to make this right again.” He turns abruptly. “But, tell me, why did you steal it?”

Shrug. “I don’t know. I’ve never been able to tell.” Shrug.

“Hm-mm. It is a question that I have pondered for some time.”

He nods his head, as a child eager to learn the Sunday school lesson.

“In my line of work, I often think of things in terms of how they affect others,” interlacing his fingers, “for don’t we all wish so badly for neighbors to treat neighbors as themselves?” The hands spread apart as if to embrace.

Another childishly eager nod.

“When you did it, how did you think it would affect others?”

“I didn’t care about others. It was all . . . internal . . . I guess . . . I wanted to rebel . . . Rebel, against myself in a way.”

Nearing him, “But nonetheless, how did it affect others?”

“I mean, it didn’t really affect anyone.” He raises his hand in a sign of surrender and innocence. “The graveyard was overgrown; the church was shuttered long ago.”

Bowing his head slightly, as if to equalize the difference in height, “Would you say, then, that you thought no one would care?”

Nod.

More softly spoken, “After all these years, did you prove it to yourself . . . that no one cared?”

Nod. Tear.

Hand-on-shoulder, “Now, that’s how you treated your neighbor. Did you treat yourself that way . . . feel that no one cared about you?”

Nod. Tears.

Eye-to-eye, “You proved that as little as you mattered, so did this awful act.”

Nod. Tears. The first gasp of a sob; then, the onrush of a bawl. “I’ve been.” Gasp. “I’ve been looking for an answer for so long.” Gasp. “Oh, thank you, thank you, thank you.”

A moment for composure is allowed. Then the hand on the shoulder. He clenches. “But . . .”

“But what?”

The clench releases. Stepping away, beginning to pace, “But what you must realize is that this little teenage prank mattered. It had a larger impact in a larger system. It’s not just about you and your own self-forgiveness. It’s about your neighbor’s forgiveness.”

“But . . . but I didn’t harm anyone.”

“No one? Let me ask you this: why did you choose this graveyard, among these neighbors?”

“I . . . I . . . I don’t know. Because it was the roughest part of town. I thought no one would care.” As he says the words while standing in such a part of town, the irony of his flippancy begins to creep in. Sucking up a sniffle, “Listen, I know where you're going with this. It's . . . it's not what you think." The childish nod becomes an indignant shake.

Turning to face him and standing erect, “It’s not about just you or what you’ve personally experienced. It’s about how it affects others too. Others you don’t even know. The church shuttering, the overgrowth of the graves, the plight of the neighborhood—those were the actions of a system. A system you supported with this deed.”

Waving off the implications with his hands, “I wasn’t thinking like that at all. I wasn’t even thinking at all. I’m not a racist.” His face hardens. “I’m not a racist.”

The baritone resonates, elbows cross, “You have to be honest. We’re in the small-town South. You chose the blackest part of town. In doing so, you chose to steal the only marker of this Freeman girl. Free-man: the first free-born daughter of a freed slave from the oldest black church in the county. Not only is our history condemned; it is literally taken piece by piece. You erased the only memory of her. You contributed heftily to—" The preacher catches himself, realizing he is beginning to sermonize.

The head shake ceased, he gives only a glare.

A tone bittersweet with resignation, arms by his side, “Look, whether you believe this personal or systemic, spiritual or moral, a penance or a pardon, there’s nothing you can say, but there’s what you can do, my neighbor.” A breezy sigh with relaxed shoulders, “Let’s pray over it first.” In the dimming sunset streaming through the hopper window, the whispered words echo with quick decay on the basem*nt blocks.

BELOVED FATHER AND HUSBAND

• • •

DISPATCH: 371, we have multiple reports of suspicious activity in Freedom Memorial Church Graveyard. Gray, late model, BMW, parked with driver out of car.

Car 371: 10-4. That’s that restored church on Pennington?

DISPATCH: 10-4

Car 371: En route.

REST IN PEACE

• • •

The trunk of a 7-series could easily fit several tombstones, and it pops from a button on the fob. The figure of his cemetery streetlamp shadow looks surrealistic with a rectangle in place of the normal tubby torso, like a phantasmagoric sketch in dark charcoal. The stone feels parched from its years kept unweathered, and an eerie chill pervades its surface.

Just as he begins to lumber, the silhouette of his labor in the yellow glow of the streetlamp is abruptly scattered by brightly flashing blue. The sound of two car doors opening. Footsteps. How to explain this inexplicable act?

The blue strobing leaves traces of images in the intermittent dimness, traces of the figures before him, traces of the object in his hands. These glimmers of the outward world shuffle to an array of inner ones, a slideshow terrible and ominous: BLUE FLASH. BLUE FLASH.—The degrading mugshot—Blue Flash. Blue Flash.—The licensure board meeting—Blue flash. Blue flash.—The last time locking the practice—Blue flash. Blue flash.— Gale packing—Blue flash. Blue flash.—Grocery store—Blue Flash. Blue Flash.—ALONE.—Blue Flash.— PORCH.—Blue—BOTTLE.—Flash.

Pistols pointed at him. “Put down the headstone and show me your hands! Do it now! Do it now!”

Utterly entranced now by the strobe, he teeters, trembling. He’s never fallen as an adult.

No slips, trips, or trust falls. The strange sensations of a backward collapse. The smack of pavement. The slab’s smoosh. Crushing rib cage on compressing heart. The forced expiration of final breath with the shock of intense weight. The flickers of blue swelling to flickers of white, interposing on the blackness, he sees himself from the outside for the first and final time. The tombstone is still heavier than one might think.

HIS DUTY DONE, HIS HONOR WON.

• • •

You moved next door the first year I got left back, a month after someone clocked me in the eye with a rock. Someone called my name, and when I turned, half the world went dark. My little brother from another, I still see you in that bright half. Though three years apart, we fixed into orbit around each other like binary stars. It wasn’t long before we were wailing on each other. You’d sock me in the cheek just below my eyepatch, and I’d wrench you into headlock. I’d throw haymakers after a shove, the bullied becoming the bully. Before you,

I was the ragdoll of the block, there to absorb the rage of bigger boys. Unable to sever fists from love, I hit you harder than I meant to, and you went sobbing to your mom. Like an avenging gunslinger, she cut me off at the pass, that small space between sidewalk and the steps to my porch. This was in the days

of belts and the backs of hands, wet washcloths, and even extension cords drawing welt lines across ours backs and asses. I readied myself for all four. You know how far a kid neck had to crane just to see her face, so high up she may as well have been Christ on his cross—an oak to a blade of grass. I didn’t cry. The pain to come was my pain to take because pain is what I deserved. Instead,

she took a knee to look me in the eye, squeezed me by the shoulders to hold me in place, and said big brothers don’t hit little brothers. She waited until recognition dawned in my face. It did, then she kissed me on the forehead. I never laid hands on you again. Not even if you puffed up and stepped to me. Not even after you left-crossed me in my bad eye after your alchy pops disappeared for good. You swung, I blocked. You kicked, so I dodged. Then we played wallball. Remember

those Christmas times? You always came over to see the lights my pops put up, rainbowed blinking from front door to back? He was a beater, not a drinker. You didn’t want to play, just wanted to look. Sometimes you’d sleep over and bust on me because I wouldn’t let you turn off the lamp in my room. I’d try to describe how the dark wasn’t just on the outside but inside, too. I didn’t have the words, so all you saw was a boy too old for a nightlight.

I wasn’t there when you killed that dude. I had moved away before your teen growl set in. What thought flashed in the flash of the shot as you squeezed that single second into forever? The last time I saw you,

you were fifteen. You seemed to be waiting for some words I didn’t have. I could’ve told you about the time I went looking for Bobby Moran with a sharpened screwdriver. He sucker-punched me in the back of the head while sitting in the bleachers at Hetzel’s Field. Me and the crew I ran with stalked the neighborhood looking for him. Visions of the shiv

disappearing into his belly clawed my insides out. Somewhere between here and there, George, my only friend in that place, leaned to my ear and whispered, Dude, jet! We spotted Bobby alone in Newt’s Playground. I took off in the other direction instead, and they chased until I got too far away. If I had reached to pull you back, little brother,

would you have taken my hand? Your moms tried, sending you every summer to your granny. Your brother tried, too, before vanishing into his girl and college. There’s some things only your boys can do. Thirty-years too late, I stare at the lamp in my twilit room. All night it’s on, brother. All night.