[creative nonfiction]

When I am three years old, I feel the burn of a cigarette on my arm. It is followed by an instantaneous, “Shit,” flick of the butt, and a cadence of apologies while my head presses against his chest. Inside, I hear someone orchestrating a wild percussion.

This is the only memory I have of my father.

*     *     *

“Easy to misinterpret as hostility or—look!—as a person who wants out of the relationship.”

My boyfriend, Greg, and I lie belly-side down on our bed, front-page research displays before us on the laptop. I point at keywords on the screen while he lies next to me, the laptop’s light reflecting off the curves of our faces—his stoic and patient, mine hopeful and nervous.

“Unmotivated. This is how I feel when I wake up. It’s why our apartment looks the way it does. It’s why, despite the fact that I am graduating soon, I still haven’t figured out what comes next… .” I stop, avoiding the snowball that rolls down the well-known mountain of guilt and anxiety.

“Irritable. Well, I don’t need to explain there,” I laugh, trying to ease the pain of explaining me. I think about arguments in enclosed rooms and how I run outside of them; a swift movement of my hand turning the doorknob, my hand squeezing and thrusting the thickness of the door, a result of a shutting that slams—the infamous freight train conducted by the madwoman with wind in her hair. I think about a car ride I took after a fight I don’t remember anymore, the one where he stood on our third floor apartment patio and watched me flick him off from a half-cracked window while I drove too fast over parking lot speed bumps.

I think about how depression holds a magnifying glass over your problems and eliminates your blessings like ants beneath a beating sun. I think about public places like the pasta aisle of the neighborhood grocery store where we talked about genetically modified food labeling; debated about the political decisions of genetically modified food labeling; argued about genetically modified food labeling being a human right, verses the plausibility of those who label; exploding about the necessary labeling of genetically modified food, whether we can trust the labels or not. Then, the existence of contradicting feelings—one where the pasta aisle compresses around me, and the other where my anger is expanding my body larger, my incessant need to get out before I am crushed, and the incessant need to get out before I crush. The organized grocery aisles swirled past me and mixed together—frozen bags and boxes of vegetables and lasagnas, bottles of olive oils and salad dressings, packaged sliced breads and pre-made dessert cakes—until I found the front of the grocery store, where I sat pissed off and terrified on a gray padded bench, next to a man with soft wrinkles and dark liver spots wearing a jet-black Vietnam Vet hat, who looked at me and smiled.

*     *     *

Depression is a pissed-off bitch.

*     *     *

When I am five years old, I stand behind the plastic side railings of the hospital bed and I cannot cry, unlike my mother and brother who stand next to me. I look at the drawing I made of my father, his body a cerulean blue box with macaroni orange stick arms and a canary yellow halo. He stands with a crooked smile next to a similar crooked-smiling boxed man with long beaver brown hair and matching beard.

*     *     *

We are lying in our bed of navy cotton sheets. I feel his hand move across my inner leg, his warm breath and lips that kiss my shoulder.

“Not tonight, Greg.”

*     *     *

Depression is a dried-up lover.

*     *     *

My family has always lived in Cape Coral, Florida—a town described as “for the nearly dead and newlywed.” Small businesses freckle various streets of Cape Coral with palm trees, churches, schools, and gas stations in-between. Our mall, the next town over, is named after Thomas Edison. It slowly retrogresses to its social surroundings. Two Christmases ago when I visited my family, my younger brother came running out of his bedroom, saying he heard on the radio that a man in the Dillard’s fired thirty rounds from his semi-automatic gun.

On a home visit during Labor Day weekend my senior year of college, I went to dinner with a best friend from high school—a girl I rarely speak with and only reach out to when I reminisce the pubescent era on the drive home. What started out as a glass of red wine at a restaurant with easy lights and a piano player; turned into vodka, flickering neon lights, and blasts of classic rock at a strip club, then blackness.

My friend shook my arm, “Colleen, we are here. We are at your house. Do you need any help getting inside?” Fuck. I recalled the night as I grabbed the seat belt, untangled myself, and slammed her car door while I held my black flats and made movements like a pinball to my mother’s front door: colorful shots in plastic cups; sets of licking lips sitting around a lit-up stage; a girl in a pink G-string who looks seventeen sliding up and down pole number one; a woman in a red G-string who looks forty sliding upside down on pole number two. This is a place I most likely would have visited in my senior year of high school, even my sophomore year of college. I smell of things like stomach acid, ash, and sweat.

The next afternoon, my mother held my face up as the surface of my body tingled, like when a foot falls asleep, and twitched like an eye open for too long, in episodes of hyperventilating. My fingers became cryptic branches that poked out in unnatural ways. My mouth gaped open and closed the way a fish’s lips do when he is caught and above water. I had forgotten how to breathe, how to move, how to blink. I am shit. I thought I was better than this town. It looked at me, squinted in recognition, pinched me, and swallowed me whole.

She told me, “Breathe, sit up, and stay with me,” and I wondered if I could die this way, if it was possible to live after this if I don’t, if I would get “better” like last time, if I would get like this again, like this time.

*     *     *

Depression is a thirsty motherfucker.

*     *     *

When I am six years old, I am inside a hot yellow plastic tube on the playground at recess. Inside, I scream. I want to run away, but I want to stay, and I can’t understand why these feelings exist at the same time. I want the boy outside to go away. He has done nothing to me, but when he tries to come inside, I hit him anyway.

*     *     *

On our first date, Greg and I met one another nearby in downtown Orlando, Florida. Several weeks before, he had asked me to go downtown one night, which made me think all things uncomfortable—excessive drinking, loud music, and heels. I declined and filed him in a mental manila folder titled, “Downtown-at-Night Guys” next to the empty “Downtown-During-the-Day Guys,” a significant difference of don’t-take-me-seriously and take-me-seriously.

I continued to talk to him on the phone, a surprising flare of curiosity considering the guys I had been recently turning down in my single life. The more we spoke, the more I envisioned the both of us downtown in the daytime—a place I seemed to have subconsciously kept vacant. Like when he told me his reason for chartering a fraternity on campus was to reinvent the typical group of guys who congregate to bench weight, drink hard, and attract girls into an estab-lished group of respectful brothers who would be good enough to one day stand next to each other at their weddings. Or that he shamelessly told me when he was younger, the only dog he ever had was a toy—a stuffed German Shepherd he gave haircuts and named Peach.

He stuck out like a bookmark amidst the beige manila coloring. I wanted the Sunday farmers’ market of raw and organic produce, food trucks and their condensed aromas, pedestrian crossings that lead to hole-in-the-wall restaurants with innovative tacos and imported pineapple sodas, the rhythm from street guitarists, him.

During our walk, Greg tripped over uneven brick sidewalks and his gray shirt developed sweat stains in the shape of goose eggs—a terrible choice of color for Central Florida’s heavy atmosphere—all of which I had genuinely observed as adorable. We talked about our dreams and thoughts over raw fish wrapped in seaweed: his idea for a science fiction novel, my hopes to write and publish a memoir. We started topics of conversation, digressed to other welcomed topics, and each unfinished conversation left us in the midst of their peaks to live in a parallel world.

*     *     *

When my therapist talks about medication, he tells me they are, “simply pills that bring out the strength within.” I could comply and admit that they are, in fact, just tools to build a bridge that start after the smoke of a psychological trigger, internal thunder, aggressive silence, and end at happy trees, trotting unicorns, and a glistening Jesus.

When he talks about mental control, I could tell the counselor that he’s right, I do have it within me to be better—a trivial and repetitive fortune cookie message consistently vomited, dripping off of bumper stickers, elementary school posters, tattoos, Facebook statuses, high school posters, self-help books, Tweets, pamphlets, my counselor’s thin lips, my mother’s quivering lips, my boyfriend’s bitten lips.

But no. Depression is picky. She grabs a pan, sifts out gold, and keeps the dirt. She is an indistinguishably unmotivated, irritable and paralyzing prevalence. She is the catalyst to most, if not all, arguments. She teases, reaches for the flame of connection and pulls back before the swirls on her bony fingertips burn into a smooth plane; maintaining the value of her impetuous and tyrannical identity, an identity that lingers in freezing waters, layered beneath thick ice, clear enough to still see what exists on the other side, me before depression took hold.

*     *     *

Depression is the bitch I know the best. Depression is the me I know best.

*     *     *

I don’t know who I am. I know who I have been, who I could be, who I wish to be. She is intangible, but she exists. This “she” blurs in and out of my life but this “she” is the me who dreams confidently of being a writer. The me who makes love to her boyfriend because she wants to and not because she feels she has to. The me who can say no to things she doesn’t believe in anymore, like strip clubs and overindulgences of alcohol. The me who braces herself for the release of love she found hidden below, the little girl who lost her father when she was five. The me who can spit in Depression’s face and tell her to shut the fuck up when she takes control. The me who is a mixture of a bitch, a lover, and a good woman all at the same time, just because she is human.

The me who I will grab a hold of some day and plan the rest of my life with.

*     *     *

Together, we stand on a rock. Lower rock formations, shiny and slick, surround us in stacks. The trees are a color of bright green I’ve never seen before—except for adjusting the contrast on a color photo. Above us is the waterfall of the Rainbow Falls Trail I picked out, 2.7 miles of hiking down and 3.6 miles of driving to the hiking lodge, pointing with my finger at a spot on the plastic map ridged like a topography globe.

Rainbow Falls is the highest single-drop waterfall in the Smokies. Below us is a family of hikers standing next to a sign warning them not to climb on rocks near the waterfall, as several people have fallen to their deaths, and many others have suffered serious injuries over the years. The family looks up at us and walks on.

Rainbow Falls got its name from the rainbow it produces in its mist. At the highest rock, the mist tinges my neck and face and my pores contract, like eyes squinting with happiness. This is the first and only time I have hiked a mountain, seen a waterfall, and felt in that moment I knew who I was and who I would always be: a woman with the world at her feet.

I close my eyes. Greg says something but his words are obscure among my state of mind. I open them and our eyes meet, his brown and curious, mine hazel and wet.

“Greg, can you do something for me?”

“Of course.”

“Can you remind me of this place?”

Colleen Ladd is a recent graduate of the University of Central Florida with a Bachelor’s Degree in English and Creative Writing. She’s been published in The Feminist Wire and is currently working any chance she gets to save up to go to graduate school for a MFA in Creative Writing with a concentration in non-fiction. She wants most in life to be a part of something bigger than herself.

3:48am

Sleepless. Not just for a string of nights, but for several months. Is this what dying feels like? To be in a constant state of shuffling through the ether but going nowhere? Melodramatic, maybe, but there is something heavy pressing in around me. Katherine sleeps soundly on the other side of the bed, but I… cannot seem to force my pillow to make dreams. She sleeps on her side and I watch as her chest expands up and out with each rhythmic breath. If I catch her at the right moment, she will snore a little, but only enough to elicit a smile and never enough to keep me awake. She denies that she does this, but I hear it. I know it to be true.

The sheets are warm between us. Our collective body heat has sucked out the coolness found at the moment we slip beneath them. My pillows are the same, warm to the touch with no cool side to flip over and rest upon. I sit up against the headboard and stare out into the dark room. I know the furniture; I could walk this room blind and never touch a thing, but my eyes eventually adjust and I get up quietly so as not to wake her. I won’t be returning to bed anytime soon. Once I’m up, I’m up for the entire measure of the day.

I head down the hall to the guest bathroom and take care of my morning business. In the kitchen, I slide open the window above the sink, turn on the exhaust fan over the stove, and light a cigarette. I exhale through the window, the smoke from the cigarette disappears up into the vent. The first smoke of the day always makes me woozy in a way that makes me feel I exist.

I don’t know how to explain it better than that.

4:15am

Lift lid, add filter. Scoop three spoonfuls of coffee into filter. Fill pot with water, empty pot into reservoir. Turn on. Brew.

The smell of coffee fills the kitchen, mingles with the leftover tobacco. The paper has not arrived yet, so I’m alone with my thoughts. I rummage through the drawers, looking for nothing in particular. I open the linen drawer, lift each pot holder and hand towel, find a pair of orange-handled scissors. I place them on the kitchen table. In the living room, I come across some old magazines; pages of art and celebrities, political news and home furnishings. I take a stack of the periodicals and place them next to the scissors on the table.

Open cupboard, remove mug. Open fridge, remove creamer, fill mug a quarter of the way. Put creamer back into fridge. Pour coffee. Watch it swirl from black to vanilla brown.

The steam from the mug wafts up to my face, bathes me in smell. I sit at the table and flip open the first magazine, one filled with home improvement projects and how-to guides on making your home less cluttered. These simple bookshelves can be run along the walls of any finished basement or unused room as storage, a page reads. I wonder why someone wouldn’t just toss the stuff out if it’s clutter. I turn the page.

A wrap-around porch on a stout two-floor ranch home is spotlighted. The roof covers every foot of it and it seems obvious there is room for a dining set and a rolling barbecue grill beneath the eaves. Perfect for hosting!

Katherine and I wanted a house with a porch. We wanted one like in the magazine, big and comfortable in case the weather turned, but the houses themselves were either unaffordable or just too big. We settled on a place crammed next to others that looked the same, deep in wild suburbia where you could get lost in the maze of same-looking streets lined with same-looking families.

Wake up, go to work. Come home, have dinner, watch television. Lay in bed reading, fall asleep until whenever. We rarely talk anymore, Katherine and me.

Each day tastes the same flavor of beige. Even after the dawn started rising red.

5:27am

But it’s Saturday. Katherine will sleep in until I wake her with breakfast, something I have done every weekend since we married eleven years ago. Perhaps it has lost its sentimentality because she can count on it. Perhaps she still secretly loves that I do it, despite the quiet fracture that has come between us as of late. It’s early yet and I won’t start breakfast for another few hours.

I lean in closer, inhale. It smells like sky and rain, snow and lightning. It smells like everything and nothing all at once.

I go outside, shut the front door behind me gently. The morning sky is cloudy and the alarming color of deep maroon. Even the grass seems to be dew-kissed with little, glistening droplets of blood. Unnerving at first, this change in the weather and morning routine, but we adapted. It’s what we do, I suppose. Change our routine into something unexpected and we adjust to it accordingly. We thought the red skies would dissipate, that some scientific phenomenon had occurred, but they stuck around and we later heard they were man-made. The fear never really left, but it’s abated, tamped down, simmering just below and ready to come back out and play sometime. Maybe we’ve just adjusted to the fear, infused it to our daily living.

We’ve heard a thousand excuses for it all, never truly believing any of them. Solar flares, the earth moving closer to the sun (though we weren’t getting hotter), airborne pollutants mixing with atmospheric molecules, so on. I don’t claim to know much, but these all sounded like nonsense to me. One day the sky was perfect blue and the next? The next day looked like the world had been painted in blood by some new millennial angel of death. We felt like aliens on our own planet. Perhaps some still feel that way. It’s understandable.

I walk around the perimeter of the house and pull random weeds from the dying flowerbed. Without proper sunlight, our lawns have withered, but we keep on trying to play house. What else are we to do? Nightly news is one-note and depressing, but there’s always been work to be done around the house. We try to forget the red is what’s killing the flowers and work at the garden anyway. Doing something helps in the forgetting, but we know it’s a Sisyphean thing.

I often forget to put shoes on before coming out in the morning and today is no different. The grass feels lush between my bare toes. When this happens, I like to imagine I can feel the grass growing up and out, covering me like vines as it tickles its way across every inch of skin.

5:43am

I carry the weeds to the garbage cans on the side of the house. From the corner of my eye, I see an object in our backyard. The sun peeks up over the horizon and blinds my line of sight, burns corona images onto the back of my eyelids. It’s a large thing, squatting perfectly in the center of our backyard and rising several feet higher than the fence. I cannot remember it being there last night and I’ve heard no one make any noise near the house since waking. I place my hand over my eyes, try to block out the sun. No good.

I pass through the chain-link gate and shuffle through the grass. The dew feels especially nice, but my feet are covered in grass clippings now and start to itch. The object is massive. I walk around it twice, once clockwise and once counter-clockwise. I think I am just tired, just seeing things, perhaps hallucinating. It is a fluffed kind of round shape, but not perfectly so, and seems to hover just an inch or so above the lawn. I get down on my knees and press my face to the ground. I see right through to the back fence.

Cotton candy. The phrase screams in my head. It is a giant ball of cotton candy. Of course this can’t be right, but the texture, the look… I imagine burying my face into its gossamer surface, biting into it, and swallowing the tendrils of whatever it is made of. I imagine it tasting oversweet as it melts on my tongue.

I lean in closer, inhale. It smells like sky and rain, snow and lightning. It smells like everything and nothing all at once. It is a singularly unique smell that I cannot definitively place or name, but it is calming and reminiscent of quiet autumn evenings. I rub my hand across its surface, feeling it give softly beneath my touch. Spongy, springy. It rebounds slow when I take my hand off. The texture is incredibly plush, pillowy, a softness that I don’t believe man has ever achieved on his own.

6:01am

I could not be sure before, but I am now. It is a cloud, sitting fat and soft in my backyard. Tendrils of cloud fiber snake out into the morning air, lifted and moved by the first breezes of the day like medusa hair. I climb up the side of it, feeling my hands and bare feet dig into the spongy surface easily. I pull myself up over the edge. My first thought is that it is a large atmospheric cushion or pillow and I fall easily into slumber. The top layer gives beneath my weight, creating a large man-sized divot in its surface, and cocoons me in a feathersoft embrace.

8:45am

I awake to Katherine calling out to me, wondering where I’m at. She is on the ground below and, I’m sure, shocked at this new manifestation resting in our yard. I feel lighter, as if some unnamed burden has been lifted while I slept and my body tingles with a soft energy. I suppress a laugh; she won’t have expected me to have climbed up and fallen asleep here. I lean over the edge and wave. Hello, dear, I say. She gasps and gives me an unsure smile, waves limply.

What are you… what is… Jesus. What’s going on?

I shrug my shoulders. Come join me.

How?

Climb. I’ll take your hands. I’ll help you up.

She begins to climb and the oppressiveness of the morning seems to have gone away. I watch her struggle up the side of the cloud, tongue hanging out the left side of her mouth in concentration. She reaches up and our hands touch, clasp together, grip tight. Her face is lit up by the sun, seems to glow in a way I have not seen (noticed?) in years. I feel like I’m twelve years old and crushing again.

I don’t know how to explain it better than that.

9:17am

We lay next to each other. My hand rests on hers which rests on my chest. I can feel my heart thump through her. Or maybe it is her heart I feel thumping through her hand and our arrhythmias match.

Her face is nuzzled into my neck, her leg draped over mine. This cloud mattress has done something to us, something wonderful that neither of us wants to question for fear of losing the moment. We drown ourselves in the feeling, let it wash over every pore and slip into every orifice, let it fill us to the brim before overflowing.

I feel her breath along my neckline. It is warm and sweet and I breathe it all in. For the briefest of moments, I’m reminded of our courtship, of days spent laid out on shoddy quilts and blankets at the park, swapping secrets in whispers and napping with each other beneath a yellow sun in a blue sky. The memories are fuzzedwarm and comfortable. I slip into them easily, but find my way out of them less so.

9:18am

What do you think it means? she whispers.

I’ve no idea, but I like it so far.

You were up early again. 

He nods. Though, somehow I napped up here before you came out.

It’s like laying on a wish, she says, murmuring into his neck.

Do you remember the last time we did something like this? Just curled up together with no plans of doing anything?

Three years, two months, fifteen days, six hours, and twenty minutes ago. Far too long.

He runs his hand through her hair, feels her irregular scalp below, agrees. Far too long.

She opens her eyes and sees, across the red sky, bits of cloud breaking off, falling slow as if the entire city were caught in a molasses dream.

That one looks like an elephant, she says.

That one, an alligator with sunglasses.

A flower.

A bus full of children.

Popcorn.

A snow fort.

An ocean liner.

An angel.

A second chance.

They watch the tufts fall soundless from the sky, remaining wrapped up in each other on top of their own bit of grounded heaven. It is a strange storm falling in slow motion. The surfaces of buildings and cars become dusted with cumulus. Large chunks fall in backyards and intersections, parking lots and highway exit ramps, on playgrounds and sandboxes. The world stops and takes stock of itself for the first time in forever.

They lay next to each other. His hand rests on hers which rests on his chest. He can feel his heart thump through her. Or maybe it is her heart he feels thumping through her hand, and their arrhythmias match.

10:01am

Katherine vaguely remembers him waking that morning. His early risings had become small anomalies in her dream time, bumps in the road on the way to the subconscious. Her eyes would flutter open when he rose, but would calm again once he left the room.

His side. Her side. Wasn’t the bed supposed to be their side? Why had it taken this strange bit of skycandypillow to get them to curl up into each other, to feel each other from the inside out? For the life of her, she couldn’t remember what he sounded like when he slept beside her in the bed, but she knew she’d remember what it was like for them out here. She’d remember his breathing, the heat beneath his undershirt, the throbbing of his blood pumping out to every appendage, the un-showered smell of him, the feel of his fingers combing through her hair, the way her lips dry out against the skin of his neck, the soundfeelingmovement she feels through her skull when he swallows, the way she feels protected laying on top of him. Before she awoke in her (their) bed, she saw:

Confined in black. Not swimming, not moving, simply there. Feet planted in a nothing ground. From the black, a hand extends, gives her a bouquet of day-glo yellow daisies. The arm connected to the hand is sheathed in the same black and disappears off into nowhere. There is no face to the figure, no form. She presses her nose into the middle of the bouquet, feels the petals tickle her nose and cheeks, rubs them across her lips and feels their color melt on her face. Pollen colored lipstick drips down her chin. She looks up. The flowers are gone, the black nothing has been replaced. A once verdant valley stretches out for miles, now the color of brown burn and blackened char. She walks, feeling dead, flaky petals turn to ash beneath her arches, feeling the ash cake between her toes like thickening leather thongs. The ash becomes grey mud, sticks and dries to the top of her feet, hardens and cracks, becomes a thin layer of varying shades of blue scales that climb up her legs, her torso, her breasts, her neck, her face. She is a myriad blue, except for her lips, which remain yellow, though she doesn’t know how she knows this. The ground beneath her opens up, sucks her down into the slickery of ash-mud, begins to pile itself on top of her, the sludge slipping into the gaps between each blue tinted scale, covering her yellow lips and filling her mouth, her throat, her lungs.

When she wakes, she sits upright, breathless, gasping, alone in her (their) bed. She remembers flecks of moments spread across her memory. She cannot remember it all, but she is distraught, heavy, weighed down by a something she cannot put a name to, cannot wrap her brain around tight enough to squeeze out meaning.

She doesn’t know how to explain it better than that.

10:17am

Things that happened to others:

Herman Effen saw himself mirrored in the side of the cloud in his front yard. His reflection danced and laughed. He put two shotgun shells into the side of the fluffy interloper, but the reflection continued to dance.

Rita Jackson-Danforth was gardening when hers fell. It shamed and excited her, made her tingle beneath her sundress. She said it smelled like fresh laundry when she grinds her body against it like “a teenager again in the back of a car with some boy.”

James Ritter and his friends climbed on top of the one that fell in the forest near his home, turned it into a club house, a meeting place for their neighborhood “gang.” They imagined themselves as pirates and cutthroats before fighting and disbanding over ownership rights. James Ritter is, ultimately, brained with a rock by young Joel Martin from down the street.

Ethel Madison was crushed by one she could not escape from fast enough. It fell on her, around her, suffocated her within its ivory fluff. As she struggled to breathe, she felt the decades of dry twist in her bones dissipate.

Bethany Pilatas found herself unable to stop tearing off tufts of cloud and stuffing them down her mouth, not bothering to chew. She did this for an entire afternoon and swelled up, puffed out grotesquely. Her parents found her when they returned home from work, a fat smile played across her lips.

Roger Matthison cut large swathes of cloud off, replaced his mattress with the stuff. He fell asleep inhaling deeply the new surface. He woke up inhaling deeply the new surface. He spent a week doing nothing but inhaling deeply the new surface. He quickly withered into a shriveled version of himself and became folded deeply into the new surface.

The residents of the Oak Valley apartment complex found themselves crushed beneath the weight of a hundred clouds, all bearing down on the roof, which came crashing down on upper floor apartments, which crashed down on mid-floor apartments, which crashed down onto those living in the basement.

3:28pm

We hear the noise of exploration across the city, me and Katherine. We hear the excited screams of children having preconceived notions shattered and parents turning into children themselves. We hear the thunder of clouds falling and resting upon buildings and people, jostling birds and scaring the stars into submission.

We take an entire day of watching the clouds dissolve like cotton being slowly pulled apart, wispy curls frayed and stretching out as if begging to be put back together. It is a cotton-candy bombardment against which we have no defense. Katherine is mesmerized and I hear her questions through a muffled haze, a buffer. Her words are warped by the atmospheric spell cast upon me.

I turn to smile at her, to acknowledge her even if I can’t hear what she is saying. Her body is light, not weightless, but glowing faintly. Her veins are lit up with a pulsing white and her skin is translucent, melting into and becoming one with the cloud as I struggle to speak. Her face is wide with smile, her hair wafts below inside the clouded bed already. She is sinking into the ether of this thing and I am powerless to stop her descent.

I see it in her eyes; this is not bliss, but frightened improbability, impossibility. She fights the smile as I thrust my hand down into the cloud to scoop her out, to save her, to fly her back to the last few hours. My hand passes through her body as easily as it went through the cloud. She is ghostly now, pale and untouchable. Intangible and unreachable. Her hand reaches up and out, touches my chest.

My hand rests on hers. I can feel her heartbeat thrumming through her. Or maybe it is my heart I feel thumping through her hand and our arrhythmias match.

A breeze wafts over me, blows unshowered hair across my face, and she is gone. There is no face, no body, inside the cloud below. She has disappeared. I do not know how to explain it better than that.

Adam “Bucho” Rodenberger is a 34-year old writer from Kansas City living in San Francisco. He holds dual bachelor’s degrees in Philosophy & Creative Writing and completed his MFA in Writing at the University of San Francisco in 2011.

As of January 2013, he has been published in Alors, Et Tois?, Agua Magazine, Offbeatpulp, Up the Staircase, Gloom Cupboard, BrainBox Magazine, Cause & Effect Magazine, Santa Clara Review, Crack the Spine, Penduline Press, Bluestem Magazine, Aphelion, Glint Literary Journal, Fox & the Spirit’s “Girl at the End of the World” anthology, and Phoebe.

He blogs at triphoprisy.blogspot.com

[fiction]

My niece clutches the kitchen doorjamb, her brown eyes wide. Her face is streaked with something dark—mud, dirt, ash. Her thin hair is flyaway, thin, uncombed. “There’s monsters in the bushes.”

I put a plate in the dishwasher, wipe my hands. She’s a dark child, full of nightmares. I wish I weren’t taking care of her. “What bushes?”

“The shiny ones. At the bottom of the backyard.”

“The agapanthus.” I snap the door shut, plates rattling. “There are monsters in the agapanthus.”

Deena nods. She’s so slight, so tiny, I can actually see her swallow articulated in her throat. I’m not sure what a seven-year-old should weigh, but it’s got to be more than this, her arms like reeds, knees like tangerines, eyes that take in the entire world.

“Come on,” I say, holding out my hand, dried and chapped from so much hand-washing. “I’ll show you the monsters.”

The monsters rattle the agapanthus, moaning and growling like something from a Sci-Fi movie. In the cheesy film, the small things would spring out, covered in fur or scales but certainly with enormous teeth, biting one of the supporting cast. Deena shudders at my side as the tuberous mounds shake, the growls roaring to a crescendo.

Deena grabs my pants. I imagine her on a ship, the stowaway clinging to the sail during a sudden squall.

“Puppies,” I say. And just then, Marcel and Lulu pop out, Lulu first, and she tears off to the far side of the yard, Marcel at her heels. They are smaller than the noises they make but fast and very happy.

“Puppies?” Deena gasps.

“More fur tornado than monsters. My friend calls them a furnado,” I say, but Deena, rapt, walks toward the puppies wrestling in the far corner of the yard. I follow. Her sad sneakers are flat and worn. A tag sticks up from her small T-shirt.

“I didn’t know you had puppies,” she said as she crouches down, her hand hovering over Lulu’s head.

“I didn’t know I had you,” I want to say, but don’t. Instead, I say, “Twelve weeks old. Got them almost half a month ago.”

“Are they nice?”

“They have sharp teeth. But they don’t bite hard.”

Lulu stops her tussle, pants, looks at Deena, and then moves into Deena’s cupped palm. Lulu licks her, snuggles against Deena’s stick body, and then reaches up and licks her face. If Lulu were a cat, she’d be purring.

That’s when Deena finally cries.

When I was little, I thought every night was a horror show. Something was bound to get me. Monster, ghoul, vampire, devil.

I don’t know how to make food kids like. Mostly, I make what I want, and no one but me likes to live on bowls of fruit and yogurt. Or vegetables and hummus. Smoothies made of brown bananas, rice milk, and ice cubes. Everything served cold. So I tried to remember something my mother used to make us, her repertoire Midwest and bland. I settled on mac and cheese. And carrots. I know kids like carrots, the kind that don’t look like roots but severed thumbs. For dessert, I bought some popsicles, but I remembered the minute I left the store that you can make your own. With orange juice and such.

The fork looks enormous in Deena’s hand. There’s a snail’s trail streak of snot on her right cheek, but I don’t say anything. She’s not paying attention to her meal but to the puppies and my adult dogs, all slumped like sacks at her bare feet. That’s how I used to sit at the dinner table. After my mother died, no one was there to make us wash before dinner. We were raised by ourselves and neighbors. By wolves, my older sister Mara used to say, Mara who escaped the wolves. But maybe that’s why I like dogs so much. They remind me of home.

“They have long tongues,” Deena says, chewing. She’s missing a couple of bottom teeth, and I hope that’s normal.

“The better to lick you with.” I glance to see if she gets the reference, but she keeps eating.

“Are they the babies of your other dogs?”

I chew the slightly too-al dente macaroni and then swallow. “No, I got Rocky and Bullwinkle a while back. But they’re all real pound pups. Saw them advertised in the paper and went and got them.”

Deena blinks and then nods. “You’ve got a lot of dogs.”

My friends have said the same thing, most telling me I’m becoming the crazy dog lady. My friend Carrie threatened to stage an intervention.

“A puppy is like two dogs,” I say to Deena. “So that means I don’t have four—“

“Six!” Deena cries out.

“That’s right,” I say, oddly proud. “For about a year that’s what it will feel like around here. Six dogs.”

Deena watches me, and I can see her calculating how her time and this new dog time will mesh. She chews her food and then says, “You can buy six leashes and six bowls.”

“And six beds,” I say. “We can have a doggie bunk bed.”

“A doggie hotel!”

She looks as if she will say something else, ready to add more detail to our doggie world. But then she catches her breath, almost sinking down onto her chair, shrinking back to her true shape. Then it’s my turn to cry. Or at least feel like it. Only seven, and she knows how not to believe in hope.

My younger sister Lynn, Deena’s mother, is the pretty one. The youngest by ten years and spun of gold and bright blue and long leanness, she came wired for excitement. None of us three older ones liked her much. She was the last evidence of our parents’ connection, something we’d given up on years before she was born. But after my father disappeared and before our mother died, Lynn was the designated favorite, given all the treats we’d been trying to discover for years. By the time I left for college, I’d decided Lynn would either be a stripper or a dentist. All those big white teeth.

Deena clacks her fork against her bowl, spearing a raft of macaroni. After every two bites or so, she leans down to pat one of the dogs, Rocky licking her hand and wrist. I idly wonder about worms and other parasites but then decide to ignore the thought because the attention makes her smile. Besides, by the time the symptoms of either appear, Deena will likely be somewhere else.

“My mom never let us have a dog. Said they were too—something. Something that ends with a y.”

“Hmmm,” I say, thinking of Lynn “Y” words. Sexy, crazy, naughty, scary. Lynn took her time getting to neither dentistry nor sex work. Instead, she became the girl next to one powerful man after another. Well, if the married president of a lawn mower company or owner of a string of auto-body shops counts as power. Which one ended up Deena’s father, I never knew. But at some point just shy of forty, she got pregnant. Of course, she was the best looking pregnant woman ever. Glowing, lush-haired, still slim-hipped, she carried Deena as if born to breed, like one of those native women who pushed out her baby over a dirt-floored hut and then headed back to the harvest. It was just plain irritating.

My other siblings and I strung together rosaries of questions, all starting with What, How, Why, Where. Lynn never answered a one of them, disappearing sometime in her third-trimester and sending only yearly shots of her baby girl.

“Can I have some more?” she asks. My heart flickers as I scoop out a mound of mac and cheese.

“What next?” Sal asks me.

“Don’t know. Some lawyer will tell me, I’m sure.”

I slump against my headboard, staring out into the hallway and the half-open door of the guest room where Deena sleeps. When I was little, I thought every night was a horror show. Something was bound to get me. Monster, ghoul, vampire, devil.

I’m just waiting for her scream.

“I guess I can’t come over for a while.”

I sigh. It’s possible Deena was an answer to my prayers. Sal and I have needed to break up for months. She wants to travel the world, and I just want to stay home. She turns up the heater, and I’m in favor of blowing out the pilot light. Etc. On and on. Who knows what she would think of Deena.

“Let her settle in,” I say. “Give her time before we tell her that the wombat she’s living with is not only a wombat, but an old grizzled lesbian.”

“You’re hardly grizzled,” Sal laughs. “Well, maybe in some places.”

“She’s been through too much,” I say. “All she needs is more oddness.”

“Nothing gay is odd in California, you know. Deena’s got to know that, too.”

“She’s not happy,” I say.

“Why isn’t she with your brother? The one with the kids.”

“Hardly kids. They’re in college.”

“But still,” Sal says. “There’s got to be a bicycle or a ball hanging around. A twin bed. “

“Oh,” I say, standing up. “She’s calling for me. I’ll call you tomorrow.”

“Ti—“

But I hang up. The house is silent, except for the hum of the furnace, set at 68 degrees.

“Marcel and Bullwinkle fight a lot,” Deena says. Today it looks as though Deena’s been playing with someone’s lipstick, something I haven’t worn any since 1976. Back then, it was called lip-gloss.

“It’s a male thing. They’re establishing who’s boss.”

“Who is the boss?” Deena bites down on another strawberry and watches Marcel mount Bullwinkle’s left leg.

“That we don’t know yet,” I hand Deena a napkin.

“I think Marcel.” She watches them play. “He’s smart. He knows when you’re going to feed them before anybody.”

“He hears me thinking about dog kibble.”

“He hears you think about walking to the kitchen.”

I laugh. “He is smart, then.”

Deena puts down her bowl of berries and wanders out onto the lawn where the dogs tussle. I’ve heard a lot of things in my life, too, and none of them very good. I’d like to unhear a few dozen for sure. The way a foot in a shoe on a floor trying not to make a sound sounds. I know the way a hand on a blanket sounds. I know the way cries-that-aren’t-yet-cries sound. No one should hear things that aren’t hearable.

All at once, I hear the things Lynn must have heard. The whack of air right by her head. The crack of skull on tile. Breath leaves my body, air leaves the backyard.

“Maybe Lulu’s the boss,” Deena cries. “She’s smart, too. And she’s the cutest.”

Like Lynn, I think. It’s the cute ones that go first.

The social worker is a stereotype, though why we call things that are true and real a type, I don’t know. She’s soft and formless, and her glasses rest on the bridge of her nose. Her gray hair is bone fide grizzled, but full, a messy halo. Her bag could be Mary Poppins’, a carpetbag full of magic. Except, of course, she’s here on business. My brother Tom picked up Deena for a park and ice cream afternoon, and I’m left to answer the questions.

“She was brought here two nights ago.” Mrs. Beadle reads from her notes. “A friend of the mother’s dropped her off?”

I nod. “It was late. I was half asleep. Didn’t ask what I should have.”

“The next morning is when you found out.” Mrs. Beadle peers up over her glasses. “That’s when you got the call.”

I look down at my feet in their sensible gardening shoes, one shoelace puppy shredded. The night after Deena arrived, I’d spent a few hours disgusted with Lynn for her this and that, her wastrelness, her incapacity, her inability to see that her shine had dimmed. Couldn’t she grow up and take care of her child? I thought every bad thing I could and lined up some more to mull over in the morning. Then I’d paced the floor, emailed my siblings and Sal, worried how I could keep the child alive.

“Right,” I say. “The police. A neighbor called it in.”

“It happened the night before,” Mrs. Beadle says gently. “And the friend who dropped off Deena?”

I nod. “That’s the one. At least, they think so. It’s ongoing.”

Mrs. Beadle shakes her head as she writes. “Does Deena know?”

“No,” I say.

She looks at me, bites her lip, shrugs. “You’ve got to tell her soon. Otherwise, she’ll be upset about the wrong things.”

Hadn’t I known this my entire life? I’m the poster girl for being upset about the wrong things, Who Else Can I Blame my cri de couer.

“I was just waiting…”.

“She’ll blame her mother for this.”

And why not? Isn’t it Lynn’s fault, all of it? She put herself right in the middle of bad and stayed there. That friend of hers, the one at my doorstep with Deena in the middle of the night. I could see why Lynn hitched her star to his. I can’t totally fault her. Even as I stood there in my terrible bathrobe, bleary-eyed, foul-breathed, I saw his smile. The way he cocked his head. The tattoo on his bicep.

“Worse, she’ll blame herself.” Mrs. Beadle rummages in her bag. She pulls out pamphlets and papers. “There are support groups.”

“There’s not going to be time for support.” Whatever help Deena needs will come from the place she lands. Here? I can be popsicles and puppies. Mrs. Beadle looks up, her black eyes intense over her eyeglasses.

“You are going to keep her with you?” She leans forward, close enough I can see the soft dark hair on her upper lip. She smells like gingersnaps, like the witch in Hansel and Gretel, the one who charmed with sweets.

“I—.”

“After what she’s been through?” Mrs. Beadle flips through the file, thicker than I’d ever imagined it could be. Seven years old!

“I’m not cut out for this.”

She rolls her eyes. “No one’s specifically cut out for this. Who could be? Not a pattern anyone wants to repeat. Middle of the night and all with no warning. But she’s your niece. She needs something known right now.”

“But later—.”

“One day at a time,” Mrs. Beadle says, handing over the information. “Make that one minute at a time. Or less, if need be. Just do it.”

Then we sit in chairs as if dressed in those bomb suits, immobile, muffled, hot as hell.

Tom’s wife brought over real food, and tonight, Deena and I dine on lasagna. As she scoops up cheese and sauce, I study her head. She doesn’t remind me of Lynn much, not with her sparse hair and plaintive features. That was one thing Lynn never was. She never complained. Not when we were eating lentils for weeks or her shoes fell apart. No, Lynn found a way to get invited to live with the Robinsons down the street. We’d see her through the window eating chicken drumsticks and drinking Coke, just like she’d been put into the wrong family the first time. Found at last. She even convinced them to send food to us, leftovers and junk food we ate in a tear.

“When’s my mom coming?” Deena’s fork clatters to the table. Rocky whines, the puppies stir.

I look down at my plate, a massacre of red, a swirl of blobby cheese. “When did you last see your mom?”

“I already told the men that,” Deena’s voice is dime hard.

“Maybe so, but I didn’t hear.”

She sighs, her thin shoulders touching the back of her chair. She’s sitting on an old phonebook and Shakespeare’s collected plays. Her eyes are caverns I could get lost in, the way in frightening, the way out impossible.

“She put me to bed. Then Bobby woke me up.”

“How did he seem?”

For a second, she looks right at me and then shrugs.

“You didn’t see anything… her again that night?”

Deena shakes her head and then leans down to pet one creature or another. One time when I was parking near the ATM, I noticed a big white truck in the space next to me, red and black words spelling out “Crime Scene Cleanup.” I waited in my car for awhile, just to get a gander of the person who would perform the listed services: Homicide, Suicide, and Accidental Death Remediation: Cleaning, disinfecting, and removal of all contaminated items to restore the scene to a safe, non-biohazardous state.

Whoever did those kinds of things never showed up. But I had the picture. I got it. The brain matter on the wall. The pools of blood. The trail the dying person left as she clawed her way to the backdoor, trying to get to her car, forgetting about her child even as she died. Then the body, lifeless, stiffening fingers permanently clutching the carpet.

The puppies growl and tumble. Deena smiles.

“Ice cream?” I ask.

My parents were young and stupid when they got together, and stupid stuck. Here I am, a retired high school librarian, living in Oakland as quietly as I worked. No permanent relationship to my name other than four dogs and a handful of family. We keep our distance, circle the holidays as if they will explode on contact. Then we sit in chairs as if dressed in those bomb suits, immobile, muffled, hot as hell.

What else? Oh, Sal in the corner, still waiting. Deena asleep in her bed, only a few years away from the acting out that has to happen sometime. Memories, too. Guilt, boatloads of that. And monsters, still, at night, in the closet, under the bed. The old monsters I brought with me from my childhood. Now they live in the agapanthus with Deena’s.

There’s a summer school program with a reading focus. Testing. Counseling. A tutor. Tom’s wife arranges play dates. My friends bring over toys. Deena has her first physical. I go to support meetings and learn about “Talking about Violence” and “Talking about Death.” I hear stories that remind me of my own. And Deena’s. I come home and make things that are hot. Chicken coated in flour and baked in the oven. Boiled green beans from a neighbor’s garden. Sticky potatoes riddled with lumps but full of butter.

I break up with Sal, who is surprisingly calm. Later, I hear she’d already found another girlfriend and was hoping to let me down easy. Win-win, as my mother used to say.

The puppies grow, the days lengthen. Deena and I sit outside on the bench after planting nasturtium seeds. Wisps of fog roll in from San Francisco.

Marcel and Lulu race their superhighway through the agapanthus, but they’ve grown—gaining a pound a week—and their fighting seems real, though so far, no bloodshed. Rocky and Bullwinkle lie on the grass, waiting for calm. Deena has gained weight, too, though she still looks like she might fly away on a stiff wind.

“Your mother,” I begin. “The night you came here.”

“I heard it.” Deena stares out at the agapanthus. “She screamed.”

“What did you do?” I breathe out.

“I waited. There were other noises. And then Bobby came and got me. He put a blindfold on me. Told me it was a game. Hide from Mommy. He put me in his car, and we drove away.”

Something tears at my throat, and I cough. “Did he tell you what happened?”

“He said my mom didn’t love him. Or me. He said he knew how to make things better. That he was going to take me where I’d be safer.”

I only met Bobby the once, at the door. There he was, half murderer, half savior. “Do you feel safe here?”

Deena nods.

“Could you live here?”

Deena is silent, her eyes trained on the puppies’ path. A figure-eight, an X, a back and forth. Around and through, over and under, their growl and whine and moan rising and falling. We can see their every move and lunge and parry, no hiding spots left, the agapanthus thinned and ruined, flattened to the earth.

Jessica Barksdale is the author of twelve traditionally published novels, including “Her Daughter’s Eyes” and “When You Believe.” Her short stories, poems, and essays have appeared in or are forthcoming in Salt Hill Journal, The Coachella Review, Carve Magazine, Mason’s Road, and So to Speak. She is a professor of English at Diablo Valley College in Pleasant Hill, California and teaches online novel writing for UCLA Extension. You can read more at www.jessicabarksdaleinclan.com.

[creative nonfiction]

My mother moved in with me once icicles began to form like claws on my fingertips. She held my hand in her gloved palms and wept, the tears falling softly, moisture; wet, formless, lovely, freezing into tight ice with contact. Does it hurt? She had asked me, her eyes so full of motherly love that it should have been enough to warm me, but it wasn’t, nothing was. No, I told her. And I wasn’t lying, either. The cold killed most of my nerve sensors. Oh David, she said softly, still holding my icicle fingertips, like they were beautiful iridescent crystals, still crying her wet tears, rainwater into my icy hemisphere, oh David, David, David.

When the cold began, I hardly noticed it.

I am cold, I thought.

That’s how it started—a slight chill, a brief rising of arm hair, a tiny sensation running little feet up my back. I showed up to a summer night’s party in a grey cardigan, a spring cardigan, one might say. Light knit, low V-neck, breathable material that a decent breeze might even crawl through, but it was a very pleasant May night, no breeze. A comfortable seventy-five degrees, might even be considered cool for May in the desert of California. But when I left my apartment that day, I felt cold. It crept up my spine like a quick shock of electricity and settled right atop my shoulders, and I carried it there for the rest of the night.

I was cold, and then I met Abi. She was beautiful, standing there, alone, an exquisite wallflower in the corner of a very drone party, a very monotonous, warm-champagne-in-your-flute-glass type of party. I was walking towards the center of the room, where it was warmer, where the body heat inevitably finds itself in the eye of the human heat storm. I walked past her, intent on being warm, not even meaning to strike up a conversation. She looked so young, so fresh, a moist layer of sweat making her shine in her summer dress; fanning herself with a printed party plate, her bangs sticking slightly to  her forehead.

I like your sweater, she said. Her grandfather had one just like it, she used to wrap herself in it when she was a little girl, visiting him in his small house, reading books on his lap while he looked past her, watching reruns of Bonanza. The soft fabric of his sweater tickling her cheek, smelling vaguely of Vaseline, always draped over the arm of the couch before she went home that evening.

Bonanza, now that’s fun to say isn’t it? Kind of tickles your tongue, warms the tip of it if you say it fast enough.

We left the party together, me in my sweater, her in her bare arms, the moonlight reflecting off of her. On the way home, I put the heat on, just a little bit. But the windows were a little foggy, others driving home were probably doing the same thing and Abi only smiled.

By July, I was still chilly and still with Abi. Her hair used to wrap around me in bed like a scarf and I would dig my face into her neck, feel my hot breath trap beneath all that long dark hair, making my cheeks pink with perspiration. It was a lovely feeling, especially as that chill had stuck. My spine stung with a cold that kept going to my shoulders and began to reach down to my arms with icy tendrils, taking hold of me. Abi thought maybe it was a summer cold. She would wrap her long legs around me and her arms, smooth and soft and always smelling faintly of vanilla, would hold me tight into her chest, soft and beating beneath me with the heat rising from us.

As the summer continued, hot, hotter than it’s been in years, so hot the news anchors talked of records, I went around in a thermal shirt and thick white socks, long jeans. Abi hardly noticed anymore, but at any social gathering I felt eyes following me around the room, looks of surprise as I would zip up my sweater, or pull on the ends of my sleeves. I didn’t care, I was cold. I found myself ordering a hot tea instead of an iced one, or a soup at dinner instead of a summer salad. It was just a chill, hardly anything to talk about.

See a doctor, my mother said when she came to visit me in August. A doctor? What’s he going to prescribe? An insulated coat? I’m just a bit cold, I don’t feel ill Ma, I feel fine. In fact, with Abi, I feel great. She had come to meet her, it coincided with her annual trip from Omaha. One trip home there and I probably wouldn’t need a sweater ever again, Abi would joke. Over dinner that night, my mom and Abi eating sushi and ice cold beers, me sticking to sweet and sour soup and wontons. My mother told Abi that as an infant, I would scream and thrash my arms if she tried to swaddle me. Hated it, hated blankets, hated footsie pajamas, that boy’s feet sweat so bad he’d leave marks like a giant slug. It seemed my chill was fascinating, especially to Abi. But only because she kept trying to warm me up.

Ma, it’s not Cancer, I told her, trying to put her hundred dollar bill back in her white plastic purse.

Before my mother left she slipped a hundred dollar bill in my hand. In case it’s the money keeping you from seeing someone. What if it’s pneumonia, or cancer? It would have sounded ridiculous from anyone, but with my mother’s heavy southern accent and her pink cowboy boots with her orange sun dress and her wide-brimmed black visor hat, it sounded absurd. Cancer? Ma, it’s not Cancer, I told her, trying to put her hundred dollar bill back in her white plastic purse. But how do you know? That crazy disease does things to people’s bodies, crazy awful things, and cancer is always your last idea, but it’s always cancer. Always. I nodded. When a mother gets in her head that you have cancer, you go see an oncologist and get it written down on paper that you’re healthy as spinach.

Abi called her uncle down in LA. Lucky for me, he was an oncologist and was willing to do a physical and write me up a doctor’s note. He asked me, while I sat in the paper thin medical robe, why I thought I had cancer. I told him I am cold. Later, as I stood by the fax machine, listening to its bells and whistles as it prepared its delivery of my cancer-free note to my mother in Omaha, I listened to the oncologist as he marveled to Abi at seeing someone in thermal sweatpants and a sweatshirt during a heat wave in September. I don’t know what the hell is wrong with him, but it’s not cancer. Might I suggest a psychiatrist?

Abi booked an appointment with a psychiatrist.

The psychiatrist office kept the thermostat at an inhumanely low setting. I asked the receptionist if she didn’t mind raising the temperature. She looked at me like I was out of my mind and with raised eyebrows said, Sir, you do know that we are experiencing an unusual heat wave. People have died in their homes from the heat. I asked Abi to go down to my car and get me a thick scarf I kept in the trunk. When the doctor ushered me in, I felt her eyes rush to my neck. My thick grey wool scarf making her pull at her already loose blouse.

Any trouble sleeping?

Only sometimes, only if my toes are feeling really cold. I have to have warm feet when I sleep. I have specific socks I use, they’re made for skiing.

Skiing? You wear skiing socks to bed?

There was no denying that she was getting a whole load of strange information but upon conclusion to our session, she recommended a full physical. I told her I saw an oncologist, that my mother made me. After that, she recommended a second session to discuss my mother.

It was still hot in October, at least that was what people were saying, I was still cold. I had started to wear a jacket over my usual thermal and sweatshirt. At work, they told me I was making others uncomfortable, asking if this was some kind of joke. I shook my head, I told them I was just cold. They told me I was violating their policy on professional attire. I assured them that beneath my coat and sweater, I had a button-down shirt. They told me to get a plug-in heater at my desk and hang the coat and sweatshirt in the break room. I inquired about more formal sweater wear and they just nodded and waved me out.

I quit in November. The heater was not strong enough to keep me warm and I was still cold. My teeth chattered while I worked at my desk. I found it difficult to concentrate. Upper-management left copies of their policies on work attire on my desk each morning. My co-workers stopped sitting with me at lunch. And what was worse, my desk was situated by a window, one which didn’t properly seal and constantly allowed an irritating draft to sneak in. I decided it best to find a job where I could work at home. This way I could wear what I want and keep the heater up.

Abi took to wearing layered clothing. That way when she came over, she could take off her light jacket and sweater and wear a tank top. She shed her layers like animal skin, leaving traces of her self around my apartment, each article of clothing that I would pick up and rub to my cheek, still feeling a bit of her warm skin against it. She would always ask me how I was feeling as she would crawl into my lap, her arms draping around me, already beginning to chase away the cold, and always I would answer her, I am cold.

We had already seen two more doctors since her uncle and they all shook their heads and like the oncologist, pointed me towards psychiatric evaluation. By the end of November, I had already seen two additional psychiatrists and one psychologist, they each in turn directed me back to physical medicine. I gave up, resigned myself over to this cold and allowed it to come and settle.

By December, I could no longer travel outside my home. Abi brought me groceries and my mail when she came to visit. She cooked me soup and made me hot teas and helped me keep my down comforter around my shoulders as I moved from room to room but by January, we had our first episode.

Abi climbed into bed, a T-shirt and loose cotton pants. She slept in light pajamas as the heater made her sweat as she slept. I rolled towards her as always, craving the warmth of her touch, when she jumped back. David! I looked up at her. What? Her face looked surprised, her eyebrows slanted as she studied me. You’re freezing cold. I stared at her. I know Abi, I’ve been cold since May. She shook her head. No, I mean to the touch. You feel like you just stepped out of a deep freezer. I sat up in bed. What do I usually feel like? She shrugged her shoulders. Normal, I guess. I tried to move closer to her, but she scooted away. Don’t be upset, David. But you’re really really cold. Like touching an ice cube for too long. I nodded my head. I’m sorry. I don’t know what to say. She leaned over to kiss me. I knew it was affectionate, I knew her lips would be warm and taste of summer. I wanted that kiss, but her mouth tensed and when she pulled her lips off mine, they were blue. She touched them softly, her fingers to her mouth, and then she looked at me, a bit of fear printed on her cheeks. David, what’s happening to you?

That was the last night Abi slept with me. She still came by, did everything as usual, but when she wanted to hold my hand, she would take out a pair of gloves she kept in her pocketbook. And when I wanted to hold her, cuddle and feel her heat, she would put on one of my sweatshirts and sweatpants, wrap her neck in a scarf and remind me gently, not to touch her face.

February brought heart-shaped candy and singing teddy bears, but it also brought our first icicle. Abi was sitting next to me on the couch, reading a magazine. The sun was setting low and I was looking through a medical book on bizarre diagnoses, when a bit of shining light was thrown across the room. What is that? Abi looked around. What is what? I asked. She pointed her finger to the wall where a small flashing light was playing beneath a picture frame. Right, that over there, it looks like something is catching the sunlight. I looked around, moved my hand down and there it went, the light was gone. I moved my hand back up and there it was again. I turned my hand over and there it was, small, spectacular and on the tip of my index finger. A tiny little icicle. Ice, I said, completely dumbfounded. Abi looked at me, looked down at my icicle and then back at me and it felt clear I was beginning to lose her.

Less then a week later, my right hand was covered. Tiny bits of ice forming like measles or chicken pox. Abi called three doctors to come meet me at home. Each of them called another three and soon there was a steady stream of doctors wanting to get a glimpse of the man with the hand of ice. They brought me gifts. Heaters, insulated coats, exotic tea bags, thermoses, homemade chicken soup, a ski mask. They even created a discussion board, a website they named David and Goliath of Cold.

By the end of March, I asked them to stop coming. I didn’t want them to see my left hand, now beginning to sprout its first bud of ice. Abi kept coming though, she sat next to me and put aloe on the cuts incurred by my fingertips. She dressed them in bandages, careful to always wear her gloves. She’d gaze at me, as if she was missing me despite the alarming and physical fact that I was sitting there right in front of her. David, she said. Look. She pointed to the space in front of me and I saw it, the air of my breath hovering, cold and visible in front of my mouth. And then she cried, holding my freezing legs against her, a blanket between her cheek and my lap, the only thing preventing her from getting frostbite, from me feeling the heat off her skin.

In April, my mother came. Ma, I said, before opening the door. I need you to be ready for this. Okay? I heard her on the other side. I could hear the impatience in her shifting feet. Is it cancer, David? Is it? Tell me. I can take it. I sighed. I almost wished it was. No Ma, I told you already, it’s not cancer. It’s, well, it’s something else. Something entirely else. I looked at my apartment, at the frost on the windows, on the broken thermostat. Did you come as I instructed? I waited for her answer. She was quiet. She must be dressed for spring. Mother, what are you wearing? She knocked again on the door, pounded actually. David, I’m your mother. You open this door you hear me? No nonsense about what I’m wearing. Let me in there. I breathed deeply, my breath still and foggy in the air. I opened the door and it rushed at her and hit her hard on the face, the cold.

I wanted to help her into her coat, but I only made her colder. She changed right there in the hallway. Opening her suitcase, pulling on her pants under her dress, sweater, then sweatshirt, then coat. At least she had brought it all. Abi had called her, had told her to. She wouldn’t have listened to me. She kept shivering in my hall as the cold of my apartment rushed to escape. She kept saying, My lord. My lord, My lord, My lord! There was nothing to do but watch her layer on and layer on.

She sat near my bed those nights, staring at me, wondering at me. You know I love you no matter what? I nodded. My limbs were getting harder to move, but I didn’t want to tell her this yet. I was starting to suspect that my blood circulation was poor, that my bones were sprouting icicles of their own. She stayed with me as the frost took over, singing lullabies to me each evening. Covering me in electric blankets and ushering Abi’s hot soup into my shivering mouth. She kept me as warm as a mother could, but May came and the ice hardened. I felt myself burning cold all over. I pointed to the mirror on my closet door as best I could. No, no David, you don’t want to see this. You just let it come. Let the cold come. And it did.

Talya Jankovits earned her MFA in Creative Writing from Antioch University. Her work has appeared in The Citron Review, Recovering the Self: A Journal of Hope and Healing, and her short story “Undone” in Lunch Ticket was nominated for the 2013 Pushcart Prize. She lives in Chicago with her husband and two daughters and is working on her second novel while seeking representation for her first.

[creative nonfiction]

Tap into your Southern blood and blame Obama: A black president. A black nerd president. Anything is possible. These days, alien-space-Vikings seem as unreal as the Middle Passage.

Be the black man the radio hosts swear you are, take it out on your girlfriend. You can’t deal with her spending Friday night guilty about her freedom, starting every other sentence with “I know I can’t relate to them, but…”. Apologize for not having a girl who’s “down” when you tell the story to your friends back home. Forget that it takes a “down” girl to sit through two hours of Loki one-liners and thirteen minutes of closing credits so that you can spend the rest of the night giddy over a 30-second after-credits scene that won’t matter until 2017.

Look straight ahead as every other black face turns left while you walk down one more door. Tell yourself it’s no different than getting a classics degree or cheering for the Buffalo Bills. Ready your rebuttals. You paid money to see Pootie Tang. You share articles from The Root. Sometimes, you wake up early enough to watch the last segment of Melissa Harris-Perry.

Forgive the premise of a blond god protecting the earth from eternal blackness. Feel good when Idris Elba shows up in the movie. Everyone loves Idris Elba. Think of who wouldn’t want to support Idris Elba and start to feel more comfortable in your seat. Watch Idris Elba kill dark-alien-space-elves and remember Paul Mooney’s line in Hollywood Shuffle about how black actors won’t be Rambo until they stop playing Sambo. Idris Elba isn’t Rambo, but he’s Thor’s best black friend. Even the dark-alien-space-elf leader has a black best friend. The black dark elf is just evil; be proud he’s not wearing gold chains and dealing dark elf drugs in the space-Viking inner cities. Call that progress.

Think about black dark elves. Are they redundant? Are they extra evil? Do white dark elves let black dark elves play in the elvish basketball league, but start locking their doors when two black dark elves move into the neighborhood?

Remember that racial lines disappear in the Batman vs. Superman debate. Remind yourself that Blade saved this genre. Consider the $10 ticket an offering to Wesley Snipes.

Lie. Say you wanted a surprise. 12 Years a Slave won’t throw you a curveball and end up being 17 Years a Slave. You know that story. You know the story when your co-workers mistake you for a customer. You keep your credentials close. You make sure everyone knows you belong. You heard the stories of grandfather being called a boy for half his life. You deserve to be here, in this seat, wondering what’s so great about Natalie Portman, wondering how many white faces are in the theater next door.

Tell yourself you thought about going, just like your friends thought about giving blood or joining the service. Tell yourself you’ll go next weekend. Blame America when you go to the movies next weekend and find out they stopped showing 12 Years a Slave to make room for The Hunger Games. Make a Lenny Kravitz joke and go home.

Jason McCall is the author of Dear Hero, (winner of the 2012 Marsh Hawk Press Poetry Prize), Silver (Main Street Rag), I Can Explain (Finishing Line Press), and Mother, Less Child (winner of the 2013 Paper Nautilus Vella Chapbook Prize). He is from the great state of Alabama, where he currently teaches at the University of Alabama. He holds an MFA from the University of Miami, and his work has been featured in Cimarron Review, The Los Angeles Review, New Letters, The Rumpus, and other journals.

Fragments of a Shoreline Adolescence

Frankie and I protect our town,
on the scoreboard and at the town fair,
still wearing our jerseys, proud of our colors,

behind the movies against Johnny Ferrara
and the Hamden frats, and when the owner
calls the cops, at the BJ’s wholesale club
across the street.

All these places look different in the day,
when we’re not so helpless to ardent dawn,
so hopeful the street lights along Route 5 flicker
long enough to guide us home for curfew.

And all these places look so different, now,
and anything vanilla still smells like canned tobacco.
Frankie still loves to fight, and I still love to egg him on,
but more often than not we turn the other cheek.

Heroes Tunnel:
Confessions of a Working Class Slob.

Its winter and work has run dry like radiator heat.
Black Ice spreads like ivy between paver decks
and bleeds through the retaining walls I poured all year,
finds pockets of air in the mix and expands.

Its cold and the county is stark and we are broke,
but Frankie smiles, This is too easy.
Like we’ve cased these houses all summer.

We forage for metal through Greenwich mansions
where we’ve worked, the kind no one lives in
but the pool runs ‘till November and grass still gets cut each week.

I remember every front gate code,
which had guest homes with unlocked doors,
but Frankie does the legwork, drives and mans the Sawzall.

On the way home he never even toes the break.
He rides hard, head on a swivel for pigs,
while I swaddle the copper in the back of the van.

On the parkway he hits 80 and never lets off the whip,
pushing that lame horse down the last turn.
In Autumn, its two-lanes are swallowed by postcard foliage,

like driving into a flushing commode
when the sun’s shining behind the trees,
but winter is cruel for letting the flowers die.

We spill out into nothing but concrete and glass in Stratford.
Factory whistles sound beneath the bridge.
Men with sleep-tired eyes pass men with smokestack eyes
under a first shift hour that’s not quite day,

as the blackness of night fails and the sun still stretches its rays,
shades drawn, dressing in the dark
by the dim glow of pawn shop signs.

After the bridge we can see the tunnel,
aptly named for the weight it bears,
two eyes shining orange in the pale morning,
staring out at northbound traffic.

We hit its light like a wave and Frankie drives faster.

Charlene Comes Home From College, May 2012

Charlene is the eternal homecoming queen,
so I know she’ll be back eventually.

She can’t help it, sees high school cafeterias
in her dreams, the lights, the dollar store streamers,

all those other girls, their green eyes averted,
gnawing the strands of fallen up-dos.

Yes, Charlene will surely come home,
because she’s not as smart as she thinks she is

but there’ll be no reception.
She’ll have to announce herself

with uploads from the back seat of the family minivan,
every south of the border sign until they hit Virginia,

screenshots from her iTunes, whatever Indie
shit she found at school and selfies.
Ten or fifteen tasteful selfies.

I won’t check Twitter or open any of her Snapchats.
I won’t have to. I’ll have known for days. I’ll have felt it,

the weight in the air that’s just so hard to breathe,
and whether it’s the lack of oxygen to my brain,

or my general hopeless romanticism, I’ll ask her to dinner,
convinced that this time…

Christopher Eugene Grillo is an educational professional and second year MFA candidate at Southern Connecticut State University. He has previously been published in Noctua, The Elm City Review, Up the River, Referential, Drunk Monkeys, and Extracts. Christopher moonlights as a high school football coach at his alma mater North Haven High School.

My work is a reflection of past cultures, distorted by a mirror of aged antiquity, seen through a haze of modern neon lights…

Mohsin Hamid

Mohsin Hamid is the author of three novels: Moth Smoke, a finalist for thePEN/Hemingway Award; The Reluctant Fundamentalist, a New York Times bestseller that was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize and adapted for film; and, most recently, How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia. He is also a columnist for The New York Times Bookends.

Zainab Shah: You write in English in a country where most of the population doesn’t speak it. How has your writing, which has garnered critical acclaim globally, been received in Pakistan?

Mohsin Hamid: Pakistani college students read English writing mainly to access the world. I also find they are currently looking for representations of a contemporary alternative reality that is not talked about or written about much, but does exist; this much was clear to me with Moth Smoke, my first novel, and more recently at Lahores’ first Literature Festival, where hundreds of people turned up for my talk. A most telling moment for me was when I received a letter from a religious young man telling me how much he loved reading Moth Smoke—which is about sex, drugs and crime.

ZS: How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia is a short novel written in second person. Why did you chose this form to tell the story of your unnamed protagonist?

MH: What interested me most while I was writing this novel is a changing aesthetic of compression, or how to express big ambitions in a small space. The story of my unnamed protagonist is an age old one, common in lengthy Bollywood films, I wanted to elevate this Bollywood film trope by way of compression. I also drew inspiration from ghazals which again tend to be quite lengthy and about transcendence and longing for an unknown loved one, something you can find in the unnamed protagonist of How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia. Again I was interested in the representation of those same emotions, but in compressing them without diluting their intensity on the page.

[In writing,] there are no rules. And if you want them to be, make your own. Pick your own constraints. Catalyze the imagination of a reader by putting the minimum out there. Leave space for a reader to do their thing and use their imagination.

ZS: Do you have a process? And if so, what is it?

MH: I do and I don’t. It depends really. I almost always throw away the first couple drafts. I tend to write with my eyes and edit with my ears, always reading aloud what I’ve written. It has to sound like somebody is speaking, the character of that somebody should be clear. In that sense sometimes I feel like being an actor is a big part of being a writer. My plan for this novel was originally to assemble a collage of different voices, at least that’s what I was thinking when I wrote ‘Terminator: Attack of the Drone,’ published in The Guardian in 2011.

ZS: What are your recommendations for writers?

MH: There are no rules. And if you want them to be, make your own. Pick your own constraints. Catalyze the imagination of a reader by putting the minimum out there. Leave space for a reader to do their thing and use their imagination.

ZS: What kind of research do you do before or while writing a novel?

MH: No research. I do rely a lot on my powers of observation and the conversations I have with people around me.

ZS: What are you interested in writing about next?

MH: Women. And women’s points of view.

ZS: Why?

MH: I think the oppression of women in the form of honor killings in Pakistan exists ultimately because people are afraid of the potential power of women, an idea I’d like to explore. Also because now I have a three-year-old daughter, Dina.

Perhaps it’ll be a children’s story for her about being a woman. Every night I tell her a bedtime story but she has such an amazing imagination, she’s actually the one that ends up telling me the story she wants to hear by questioning what I’m telling her. She keeps me on my toes. It’s good exercise for any storyteller.

ZS: Is it safe to say that’s what your next novel will be about?

MH: I don’t know. I hate talking about it. There’s something precious in having a secret, and the desperation to share the secret keeps you writing like a long-distance relationship keeps you yearning.

ZS: One book you wish you wrote?

MH: None really… actually, maybe Charlotte’s Web, since it casts death as a natural, cyclical process—it’s sad, but not frightening.

ZS: What’s your unwinding process like?

MH: Can’t say in an interview (with a chuckle). I had a misspent youth, and continue to misspend my leisure time.

ZS: Parting words?

MH: Life is very significantly chance. Love is the only real valuable technique to deal with life and chance.

ZS: Favorite dinosaur?

MH: Pterodactyl.

_____________

From How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia:

Look, unless you’re writing one, a self-help book is an oxymoron. You read a self-help book so someone who isn’t yourself can help you, that someone being the author. This is true of the whole self-help genre. It’s true of how-to books, for example. And it’s true of personal improvement books too. Some might even say it’s true of religion books. But some others might say that those who say that should be pinned to the ground and bled dry with the slow slice of a blade across their throats. So it’s wisest simply to note a divergence of views on that subcategory and move swiftly on.

None of the foregoing means self-help books are useless. On the contrary, they can be useful indeed. But it does mean that the idea of self in the land of self-help is a slippery one. And slippery can be good. Slippery can be pleasurable. Slippery can provide access to what would chafe if entered dry.

This book is a self-help book. Its objective, as it says on the cover, is to show you how to get filthy rich in rising Asia. And to do that it has to find you, huddled, shivering, on the packed earth under your mother’s cot one cold, dewy morning. Your anguish is the anguish of a boy whose chocolate has been thrown away, whose remote controls are out of batteries, whose scooter is busted, whose new sneakers have been stolen. This is all the more remarkable since you’ve never in your life seen any of these things.

The whites of your eyes are yellow, a consequence of spiking bilirubin levels in your blood. The virus afflicting you is called hepatitis E. Its typical mode of transmission is fecal-oral. Yum. It kills only about one in fifty, so you’re likely to recover. But right now you feel like you’re going to die.

Your mother has encountered this condition many times, or conditions like it anyway. So maybe she doesn’t think you’re going to die. Then again, maybe she does. Maybe she fears it. Everyone is going to die, and when a mother like yours sees in a third-born child like you the pain that makes you whimper under her cot the way you do, maybe she feels your death push forward a few decades, take off its dark, dusty headscarf, and settle with open-haired familiarity and a lascivious smile into this, the single mud-walled room she shares with all of her surviving offspring.

What she says is, “Don’t leave us here.”

Zainab Shah is a Pakistani writer completing her MFA at Antioch. She lives in New York and can most often be found in parks.

Support indie bookstores and find a copy of How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia near you with IndieBound, or order it through The Independent Online Booksellers Association!

Click here to buy Hamid’s How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia on Amazon!

Closing the Bar

Backed up to our favorite piece of wall, we’re at Cedars the week before it closes and my friend says she’s been coming down since her bartender boyfriend snuck her in. So many Saturday nights of garage bands and traveling shows, lights and that sound that rattles the ribcage. Blues, grizzled harmonica player stepping up from the floor for a few numbers. Acoustic guitar by himself on the patio. Halloween costumes that took weeks to construct. All those conversations and cocktails. It’s going to reopen somewhere else in a month but everyone’s there, I haven’t seen you in years, cell phone cameras flashing. This was more than just a bar written on the wall. We danced here.

The patio is decked out in little white lights, my friends lovely in their jeans and boots and the music’s telling us to fall in love. I have a few memories here, a fundraiser for Sonny’s heart. One night my friend made me prove I could drive home so I walked the line in the parking lot singing Mull Of Kintyre O mist rolling in from the sea, even though Youngstown, Ohio, is landlocked, just a skinny river easing through the valley. And one Halloween I came down dressed as Flannery O’Connor. All night I said, A good man is hard to find, even though that isn’t true.

Enough to Stand On

Mud and streamers of dry grass
and candy wrappers dripped down
the porch columns, second and third attempt
at a robin’s nest. I watched her while
listening to you from Wisconsin,
your boss screaming. We’ve had rain and wind
every day, maybe the mud was too wet,
the ledge too slim, or open to storms.
When my boyfriend saw the scraps,
so much work by these small feet,
he cut plywood and widened the ledge,
said we’d fill the drilled holes later.
The robin’s been back and we’re waiting for
a glimpse of blue, little fluffs
with origami mouths. I guess
I’m telling you that sometimes much
is against us, and then here comes
a good thing we don’t even understand.
It’s luck, sure, and work, but
it’s not like we can overcome anything,
nor that we’re always sunk. If she stays,
the robin, I’ll send pictures.

Letter to Youngstown

Dear Youngstown, dear Mahoning River
Valley, dear Mill Creek, Brier Hill,
Cornersburg, North Heights, Austintown,
dear Poland and Liberty,
dear urban artists, suburban teenagers,
rural farmers, frackers, ichthyologists,
snappers, eagles, accidental brown bear
wandering in from Pennsylvania, dear deer
leaping into traffic, fawning surprise.

Dear kids of Connecticut Yankees,
Italians, Slovaks, Lebanese, Greeks,
Puerto Ricans, Russians, Southern Blacks,
Welsh, Indians, Appalachians, Hungarians,
Irish, eat your corned beef, pierogis,
latkes, meatballs, baklava, gyros,
falafel, greens, fish fry, tamales,
eat your wings, your ribs, your foot
long, pickled knuckles, blood
sausages, pasties, poppadums, gelato.

Let’s face it, dear, embrace it: rust+belt =
Rust Belt Brewery in the empty B&O station,
Rust Belt Artists sculpting scrap steel,
old bakery-turned-studios,
mirrors framed with wood
from fallen houses, dear potters,
your slip is showing.
Up the hill, Youngstown State U.,
dear old You Screwed Up, the dream’s
still for sale, at millennial prices.

Dear finance majors, musicians, physicists,
nurses, writers, political scientists, actors,
philosophers, first-in-the-family diploma
seekers, drop-outs, drop-ins, commuters,
scholars–forget knowing
where you came from. You know.
Remember the world is full
of places like Youngstown,
and places nothing like Youngstown.

Dear race, dear card-carrying hatred,
dear kids of the 1500 brought up
from the South to break the steel strike,
dear kids of the KKK elected to office,
black and white City Council, Wall Street
crash, demolitions list, gang symbols,
dear legal handguns, you’re killing us.

Dear urban farmer selling greens
from beds raised above the lead,
dear hoop houses, heaps of mulch
and compost, gladiolas spiking up
where there was scruff from an abandoned
lawn, wheelbarrows of urbanite off to
the landfill. Dear skinny kid packing
bags of Iron Roots spinach, you grew that,
you got your GED.

Dear Occupy Youngstown with your
OY sign in Christmas tree lights, Defend
Youngstown, Youngstown Neighborhood
Development Corporation painting curtains
on window boards to look like
someone’s home, Friends of the Mahoning,
Grow Youngstown filling my car
with organic apples and muddy potatoes,
Mahoning Valley Organizing Collaborative,
it ain’t over. The fat lady
isn’t even warming up. She isn’t even
on the census–walked away from that
nice house. Let’s buy it and fix it up.

 Karen Schubert is recipient of a 2012 Ohio Arts Council Individual Excellence Award and 2013 residency at Headlands Center for the Arts. Her third chapbook, I Left My Wings on a Chair (Kent State Press 2014) is a Wick Poetry Center selection. Her work appears or is forthcoming in terrain.org, Best American Poetry blog, MiPOesias, quickly, and Ohio Poetry Anthology. She received an MFA from the Northeast Ohio Master of Fine Arts.