Non-fiction Contributor
Margaret King enjoys penning poetry, flash fic, and micro essays. Her recent work has appeared in MoonPark Review, Sledgehammer, and Moist Poetry Journal. In 2021, she was nominated for a Pushcart for her eco-flash fiction story “The Sky Is Blue.” She teaches tai chi in Wisconsin. She is also the author of the poetry collection, Isthmus.
An autistic reflects on friendship with trees, lakes and certain birds
Non-fiction Contributor
Daniel A. Rabuzzi has had two novels, five short stories and twenty poems published (www.danielarabuzzi.com). He lived eight years in Norway, Germany and France, and earned degrees in the study of folklore and mythology, and European history. He lives in New York City with his artistic partner & spouse, the woodcarver Deborah A. Mills (www.deborahmillswoodcarving.com), and the requisite cat. Tweets @TheChoirBoats.
A Flowing Drop Suspended In Time, Still Flowing
Non-fiction Contributor
K. Gene Friedman is a queer, invisibly disabled high school dropout working in sexual and reproductive health. Her words appear in Maudlin House, Entropy, Expat Press, and Queen Mob’s Tea House. Future Tense Books will publish her chapbook Foreign Body in November, 2022. You can find her on Twitter @ValleyGirlLift.
Margaret King
“Cantankerous and untrusting of people, he preferred the company of his cows, feeding them apples by hand and sleeping next to them….Woodward once had an ox named Old Duke who he taught to shake hands and roll over like a dog. ‘I loved him,’ Hall wrote, ‘and I could feel his affection for me.’” — Steve Edwards, “Misunderstanding Thoreau: Reading Neurodiversity in Literature and in Life”
“When people were able to see trees or the sky, or hear birds, feelings of loneliness fell by 28%.” — “Contact with nature in cities reduces loneliness, study shows,” The Guardian, 12/20/21
The lakeshore is beautiful in all seasons, even in the depths of winter. Even on the cloudy and rainy and stormy and especially the snowy days, it is beautiful because it is wild. Sometimes autistics have been thought of as feral people who have never been fully domesticated into our society.[i]
Mid-December, inching towards solstice, we walk back toward the light. Although I’m hundreds of feet above them, their voices carried at least half a mile offshore. I walked to the edge of the steep bluff, and there they were, far below–50 or so geese bobbing on the waves, talking. Were they complaining about the weather? Or were they, like me, worshiping the sun that day?
How few people were out that day making their endless noise, or breathing fresh air, or listening to the crashing waves. A few small children screeched at a nearby playground, but their shrieks did not grate. Joyful sounds felt acceptable, and mingled with the waves and the geese. Although, there was a man walking a dog on that splendid Sunday, blasting a football game out of a radio as he walked. And there was another man, half a mile up, sitting on a bench overlooking the lake broadcasting angry, ranting talk radio, which seemed a poor choice and a profaning of the day. And then there was me, speech-to-texting this essay with the waves crashing below and the wind whipping all around, trying not to bother anybody, but perhaps, even I was committing some oblivious human blunder, disturbing a sleeping wood butterfly perhaps, with my musings.
If I tell people I consider certain trees, hummingbirds, the lakeshore, certain birds my friends, they might wonder if I have enough human friends–maybe, maybe not. All I know is that these living creatures are also my friends, and I feel close to them. Fellow humans might point out that friendship involves some sort of give and take. So what are trees and lakeshores and hummingbirds asking of me? It’s obvious they ask what any living thing asks for. To be noticed. To be seen and not judged. To be appreciated. I cannot think of a better definition of friendship, anyway.
Fellow humans may ask, “how do you know these creatures feel the same way about you?” I do not know for sure how they feel about me: but do you know for sure how the humans in your life feel about you? Studies show many of the people we consider our friends do not feel the same level of affection or attachment for us. Sometimes they don’t even feel reciprocal friendship for us at all.
I’m sure we’ve all been on both sides of that equation.
Instinct tells me that the odds are as good with nature as they are with humans. Perhaps better.
It’s a risk I am willing to take.
—
[i] See, for example, “Staying Autistic, Staying Feral” by Amy Gaeta
Daniel Rabuzzi
“The point is that all that is intermediate in the ordinary run of things is made immediate; which is what we mean when we say that breathing becomes breathless, hope becomes terror, or time stands still, but without any cessation, in any of these cases, of life, faith, or motion, and with an access of inward, of mutual verisimilitude.”
— R.P. Blackmur, “The Sacred Fount” (originally published 1942; reprinted in Blackmur, Studies in Henry James, edited with an introduction by Veronica A. Makowsky, New Directions 1983, page 60).
Decades ago: a Green Heron hunts / hunted / is hunting in a half-strangled stream – a dwindled thread at the bottom of a drainage ditch – mere yards from a major intersection in Boston, Massachusetts. The blazing yoke of its eye! The striations of its throat plumage (it must have been an immature), the delicate fronding of the feathers on its back as it leaned forward, coppery green plumes overlapping with the rusty brown, quiet subtle blazonry, imprinting themselves on the space between us. Crouching down among the reeds and minor willows crowding the culvert, my errand evaporated, I tracked the heron as it tracked fish, for many minutes…ten, fifteen, more, I did not know, so cannot remember the specific count, just the unbounded wholeness of the durée. The heron had been there always, picking its way over pebbles and twigs, when I appeared. I had always been there at the intersection as trucks roared by, when the heron manifested. The tableau of heron hunting flowed past me along a helical stream-bed. I became the moment, the heron, in the bedraggled stream; its “light, color, depth… awakens an echo in my body,” as Merleau-Ponty said about the workings of the eye and the mind.[i] The heron’s eye was / is / will be my eye, its minnow-hunger lodged also in my belly.
I have not lived in Boston for many years but I visit often and have, on occasion, passed that intersection. I always pause and look, hoping to catch another glimpse of a Green Heron there, professionally going about its business. I never have (not there, though often enough elsewhere), but I see always the palest tint of a shadow stalking down the little stream; I luxuriate in its “sense of presence and achronological pungency,” as Reinhart Koselleck described another multivalent episode.[ii] I smile and am for one prolongated moment in the past, while simultaneously also in the past-as-I-recreate-it, the present, the present-as-I-imagine-it-for-the-future, the future, and the future-in-which-I-am-remembering-my-recollection-of-the-original-event. A gaze, a gasp, a gesture that anchors itself in a place in the world, in the mind, in the world-as-the-mind-constructs-it, the heron was / is / will be ever-present in the water-tables of my mind. Time drops, unspools, concatenates. Drop-Time: when the Green Heron walks with delicate ferocity through my memory, picking a path in the present, already present in the future. Drop-Time: when my mind is the Green Heron’s, a study in patience, a shape of hunting. Drop-Time: a surprise and an awakening, time hollowed out from the regular river, elongated and linked across the long stretches of current, directly tied like a bundle of leaves (or feathers) floating and bobbing and dipping in the stream. Drop-Time: in-collapsing and bursting outward at the same time, an imperfect progressive tense (the progressive implausible, the progressive heteroclite?), the aorist essence, passado no acabado, entanglements falling under the heading of what Carlo Rovelli calls “the inadequacy of grammar.”[iii] The heron in the ditch by the intersection made / makes real the words of T. S. Eliot: “Time present and time past /Are both perhaps present in time future,/And time future contained in time past.” [iv] Unaware of Rovelli, of Eliot, uncaring of ontology or entropy, indifferent to chronotopes, the little Green Heron continues the hunt for darters along a tiny brook, then and now embodying and in our future embodied.
—–
[i] Maurice Merleau-Ponty, “Eye and Mind,” in The Merleau-Ponty Aesthetics Reader, ed. Galen Johnson; translation by Carleton Dallery from 1961 original (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1993), page 125.
[ii] Reinhart Koselleck, Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time, translation by Keith Tribe from 1979 original (Cambridge, MA: MIT University Press, 1990), page 5.
[iii] Carlo Rovelli, The Order of Time, translation by Erica Segre and Simon Carnell from 2017 original (NYC: Riverhead Books, 2018), pages 105-115.
[iv] T.S. Eliot, “Burnt Norton” in his Four Quartets (1936).
K. Gene Friedman
Curbside, daytime hazard lights delimit a polished log loitering parallel to parked cars, a personal injury lawsuit in repose; metal threaded through its pliant core like graphite bloating the gut of an analog pencil. The evenness and imagination of a lonesome Tinker Toy, I squat bedside to interrogate its destiny: a dry-cleaning ticket stapled to its spiral of years à la Paddington Bear’s duffle coat, wine cork toggles fastening, cardstock luggage tag dangling… Please look after…
Brierfield, Alabama—its origin, embryology, infancy. 2/50—its order, as if second in a run of fifty fine art prints, separated at birth, limited edition. PECO—its owner, a fledgling utility pole it is to be raised by a provider of electricity that falters in the sweat of droning accordion window units and slushy popsicles. Be mindful of your refrigerator door, your outlets to the external; conserve the pockets of cold you harbor.
Under late-stage capitalism, the A/S/L of West Philly’s Facebook group:
49th and Larchwood: lights flickering.
51st and Spruce: power back on.
The scattershot shuffle of resource redistribution:
Anyone got space for me to store my insulin at?
Ready to dive!? Whole Foods employees hauling cases of freezer food out back.
An improbable journey—spanning seven states—to support an elevated highway of power lines. I envision the bedraggled tree: dismantled, decapitated, dismembered, filed to fit the geometry of the pencil box truck; claws clenching the sapped Southern soil. Its forty-nine siblings: stapled, seat belted into place. Flakey scales of grout brown and burnt sienna stripped off like guilty fingerprints; mummified corpses laid to rest along grimy West Philadelphian sidewalks.
The cultural anthropologist I’m dating, who will not be defined by labels, is taken by Pinus palustris, otherwise known as the longleaf pine—a species of evergreen distinguished by needles in bundles of three, its grisly history. Used as tar, pitch, and turpentine for naval ships; now, lumber for suburban development. Its once dominant community supplanted in shoulder-to-shoulder forests where wildfires cannot sweep to clear out competition.
Together, we locate Brierfield on his laptop screen, plus- and minus-sign in and out of the region, straddle a Google Earth satellite and soar. Our summer limbs stuck to the tattered sleeping bag sheeting his hand-me-down floor mattress. In the swampy, second-story bedroom where he will not avail of A/C. Out of deference to bug mating calls, the harmonic convergence of male and female mosquito flight tones.
Below: a bounty of Baptist churches, forests identified as plantations, a coal mine museum catalogued in the Register of Landmarks & Heritage. Clouds of Pine canopies looming on slanted thickets like crooked rain. The dense grids of wooden pegs, planted to be plucked from the land, reminding of the solitaire boards that occupied me as an only child at a family-style restaurant in Nowhereville, Pennsylvania. Where the owners had likely tired of replenishing snapped crayons, tear-off placemats: probably also of Alabama—their embryology, infancy.
Ceri Morgan
Trigger Warning: Drug use/addiction
Borrow. Copy. Steal. The woman undressed a thousand times. On stage and on the page. On screen. She’d seen the photos of carnie girls who stripped in small-town fairs. Josée Yvon had her dancers work in Montreal’s Red Light, make-up tight against neon signs. Sharing a token backstage, one dreamed of buying a smallholding. Another was fighting for custody of her son, c-section scar defiant in a sequined bikini.
Void. Vape. Vamp.
Blood on the washroom walls: my best friend warned me that the previous day, she had heard two young women shoot up in one of the stalls.
Being young and gorgeous in downtown Montreal – the French one, naturally. Brunch at la Brioche lyonnaise served reluctantly by aloof, slender waitresses, a treat supper at l’Express, with its famous checkered floor. I’d heard the project to create a second, French-speaking, city centre had failed, most students only popping out of the metro station at Berri-UQÀM to attend classes before disappearing once more underground. But that was before the grande bibliothèque was built on the site of the enormous second-hand bookstore. I used to go to le Fou du livre to buy Quebec classics for a dollar, loading them into my basket as the wheels from the indoor skatepark rumbled overhead.
Relive certain memories. Forget others. Take the metro to Old Montreal. Hum the trains’ 3-note refrain. Buy a coffee and brioche at the pâtisserie Saint-Louis de France. Long for its Easter pastries with their white iced crosses. Wonder if it really was Dany Laferrière I used to see at Sherbrooke metro all those summers ago. I was working on How to Make Love… and didn’t dare speak to the tall man standing in the cool gloom of the station.
Bold and beautiful in vest-tops and tattoos. Crossing rue Ontario, Yvon’s eyes closed for a second in time with the camera shutter. Sigh, swoon, sleep. Seep. Screw up your face and pose for the photographer. Put on a clingy top and fake eyelashes. Stay home or go out and dance until dawn. Dress again the next morning in your everyday uniform: jeans, t-shirt, boots. A rose on your left shoulder underneath your black sweater.
Absence, presence and substitution. Compulsion. Addiction. I placed a part of myself elsewhere, but there was still too much of me around. I put a pebble in my heart to stop from falling.
A man came up to me in UQÀM. ‘You have…’. Thinking he was going to ask the time, I looked at my wrist. ‘You have class.’ I was polite, but he persisted, sliding precipitously from ‘vous’ to ‘tu’. ‘You’re very beautiful. Do you want to give me your phone number?’ I preferred the offer made by a homeless man a few days previously: ‘you don’t want to be my girlfriend? Just for an hour. I need tenderness.’ That, at least, had some poetry.
Lin Lentine
My daughter’s case worker sits with her by the old bathtub where we will plant our strawberries, explaining how to breathe. Cady is six, and rips fistfuls of grass from the ground around her.
Take a breath with each of your senses, the case worker says.
Count it down: five things you can see, four things you can touch, three things you can hear, two things you can smell, and one thing you can taste.
What if I don’t have anything to taste, Cady wonders.
Imagine your favorite taste in the world, she replies.
Breathe.
One.
My daughter picks the new wild violets in the backyard, bringing individual flowers to my face to see the colors. Dark purple, light purple, white with purple streaks down the center, pure white.
Two.
Her eyes are hazel. Deep forest green speckled with golden sunlight. When she laughs, her face scrunches up with so much joy that they disappear.
Three.
I braid her honey-brown hair in the morning and tie it with a bright green scrunchie. It matches her shorts. She picks out a lilac shirt and tells me she looks like a flower today.
Four.
Cady draws a picture during her zoom class. A unicorn, all black, stenciled in thick crayon. She says it is a nightmare unicorn. She says her brain likes dark things, sometimes.
Five.
Together we create a calm space in her room, in the corner, next to the dresser. I put her round, pink pillow on the floor there. She hangs a drawing of a rainbow.
Breathe.
One.
When I get a package in the mail, we share the bubble wrap. I run my fingers across the smooth bumps and methodically snap them, while she crackles the plastic in both fists with madcap impulsivity.
Two.
I smooth a soft blanket over her at bedtime and tuck it under her feet. The other side of the blanket is fluffy and white, but she prefers the pink velvet against her skin.
Three.
A lockbox arrives from the case worker’s office. I put every cold knife from our kitchen inside and close the sharply cornered lid. The key is heavy as I push it into the lock.
Four.
Our hands in the damp soil, churning it up, making room for searching roots. Place the delicate thing and cover it, to protect the parts that are growing.
Breathe.
One.
Birds trilling, invisible in the still-bare trees by our house, chattering about the newness of spring, reassuring each other.
Two.
She says, Sometimes my brain just gets upset, and I have bad dreams, and I feel like I’m not safe.
Three.
Snow piles against us for three weeks. We go out on the first warm day, sick of inside voices, and decide to have a good yell. We turn our faces upward and scream, and Cady’s voice is the one that echoes.
Breathe.
One.
She brings the outdoors in with her: the sharp scent of mud on her boots, the violets wilting in a jar on her desk, the salty sweat dampening her braid after running back and forth between the porch and the big tree.
Two.
When we water the tender leaves and runners taking root in the old bathtub, they become fragrant, sweet and sharp. The tallest plant is just starting to bloom.
Breathe.
The strawberries we will harvest, as I imagine them: startlingly red against the leaves, firm, bursting with sweet juice on our tongues as we eat them warm from the stem, our toes in the dirt, messy and alive.
Baby Don’t Hurt Me
A. S. Callaghan
The plan was to go out to dinner as a family, one last meal together before we went our separate ways again — David, the kids and I back to Los Angeles, my mom and dad back to Germany.
We were returning from a 10-day vacation on Lake Balaton in Hungary, the country my mother had been born and raised in before she emigrated to Germany and married my dad.
She was unusually quiet during dinner. My dad, faced with an unfamiliar role, tried to make conversation with his limited English, the language we used to communicate since my husband didn’t speak German. The soccer game was on the TV above the bar, Austria versus Germany, old rivals.
“No good,” my dad said to my husband when Austria scored the first goal.
The day had started with a fight. On the surface it had been a disagreement about whether we should rent paddle boats. It turned into a referendum on life choices.
I left Germany at age 23 to study abroad and met David while in graduate school in Bloomington, Indiana. One of our first dates included a trip to a drive-thru Wendy’s. I thought it was bizarre, sitting in a car while a stranger handed us a paper bag with burgers and fries. Afterwards, David stuffed all the trash back into the bag and threw it away, as if the meal had never happened. It looked so easy.
Now we had two boys, ages nine and three, who devoured their French fries with the appetite of two lumberjacks.
“American,” my father said with a chuckle, pointing at his grandsons.
“Yes, they love them,” David replied.
“Big and strong,” my dad added, this time talking to our younger son, who offered my dad a French fry.
“No, no! Full!” my dad replied, laughing, pointing to his stomach. My German Spätzle-loving father wouldn’t be caught dead eating a French fry.
After dinner, my mom suggested we go on a boat cruise. I understood this was supposed to make up for the botched paddle boat ride this morning — a peace offering.
“Are you sure that’s a good idea,” David said. “It’s late, and we have to get up at the crack of dawn.” He glanced at our younger son who was busy devouring a fistful of fries while nestled into his stroller. “You know how he gets without enough sleep”
“He can sleep on the boat,” I replied. “I’ll hold him.”
The so-called “Disco Cruise” was supposed to leave in 15 minutes. My mom bought tickets, haggling with the seller in Hungarian. It was still light out, a reminder how much further North we were compared to Los Angeles.
While we waited, my mother took out a small tablet from her oversized purse and showed me a picture of herself in a rowboat, on this very lake, taken more than forty years ago. She was wearing a white bikini, surrounded by classmates from the Young Pioneer summer camp.
“They made us work all day, picking peaches. All in the name of communism. No pay. In the evenings, we were allowed to take a dip in the lake.” My mother angled the tablet towards me so I could take a closer look. “But we thought it was wonderful, we didn’t know any better.” She zoomed in on the scanned black-and-white snapshot. “Look how thin I used to be,” she said, a look of genuine disbelief spreading over her face. Then she stuffed the tablet back into her bag.
A voice from a speaker announced the crew was ready for boarding. David struggled with the stroller’s folding mechanism. After a few failed attempts he managed to drag it up the narrow stairs to the upper deck, followed by my father, who paused on each step, tightly gripping the railing. A crew member took a photo. I made no attempt to pose, we weren’t going to buy it.
We found seats on the passenger deck. I squinted into the setting sun. The sky was the color of a melting creamsicle, like the one my dad had bought for his grandson the other day, which then promptly slipped out of the boy’s little fingers and onto the hot asphalt of the restaurant’s parking lot. David bought him a new one.
“He won’t learn to be careful,” my mother said.
The sun slid into the lake with alarming speed, I barely had time to fish my phone out of my pocket to photograph the sunset. I then asked a stranger to take a picture of us all, sitting lined up on the bench encircling the upper deck – David, our boys, my mom and dad. This was the first and last photo of all of us together this entire week, I realized.
I thought it would make my parents happy to go on vacation together, especially my mom, since Hungary was her home turf. Now I was no longer certain this had been a good idea.
“It’s not your fault,” David had said, the night before. “They can visit us in L.A. anytime.”
But my parents were getting older. My dad couldn’t walk long distances anymore, let alone make it through a transatlantic flight. He had brought a folding bicycle on this trip. At night when we walked into town, my father followed us on his bike, pedaling ahead and then falling back again, slowly circling around the moving caravan of his family like a sheep dog, his unzipped windbreaker flapping behind him like a cape. My mother was out front, leading our little group, clutching her purse, marching resolutely in her sensible shoes, passing sidewalk cafes and restaurants and souvenir shops. The town had become a tourist spot. Some of the bars even had Go-Go dancers out front. The lake had changed, it was no longer the idyll frozen in my mother’s memories.
During the day, Lake Balaton’s glimmering crystal surface lay calm, like a cool blanket. The water teemed with bathers, children and adults alike, swimming, laughing, shouting in Hungarian, a complex language that remained closed to outsiders. Once the sun had sunk behind the horizon the waves darkened and the yellows and oranges and pinks of the sunset intensified.
On the boat, couples and groups of friends were now all taking pictures in front of the evening sky, posing against the railing, behind them an explosion of color.
I studied their faces, their smiles frozen by the pre-flash which briefly illuminated their features and gave their pupils a chance to adjust before the camera took the picture. Each couple, each group of friends had a history of their own, versions of lives that unfolded according to their own logic. Was one set of choices better than another? How could anyone tell?
*
When David and I first met at Indiana University he took me to watch a space shuttle launch during spring break. We left campus in the middle of an April snowstorm and arrived in sunny Cocoa Beach, Florida two days later.
On the day of the launch, we got up early and went to the strip of beach in front of the hotel where we stayed. A small crowd had already gathered. David brought the digital video camera he had purchased for the trip. I was scanning the horizon, afraid we might somehow miss the big event, a fear that turned out to be comical. When the launch finally happened, half the sky exploded in a rising fireball of epic proportions.
David, who had pointed the camera in the wrong direction, whipped the viewfinder around to capture the spectacle, and accidentally shot a few close-ups of my unruly hair. Between spiky wisps the stratosphere erupted in a flash of light with a white-hot center surrounded by iridescent smoke. We marveled at the multi-color clouds that seemed to linger forever, despite the breeze that sent shivers through our thin t-shirts.
*
At a quarter to nine our ship left the dock, passing buildings and trees and a statue of a saint who was supposed to protect the harbor.
“Maybe this will be fun,” David said.
It was almost completely dark now, the last traces of light drained from the sky. The crew walked around with trays of plastic cups filled with cheap red wine and lemonade. Dance music came out of the enormous black speakers surrounding the upper deck which doubled as a dance floor. Nobody moved.
Above was the night sky. The buildings on the opposite shore had become dots of light. Strings of colored bulbs illuminated the ship, which had become a floating, pulsating lantern.
The crew was playing dance hits in English and Hungarian. What is love, baby don’t hurt me, don’t hurt me, no more. The dance floor started to fill. We all watched, including the boys. The 9-year-old was sipping from a plastic cup of neon yellow lemonade. The 3-year-old was looking for a comfortable position to sleep on the narrow wooden bench. The sun had disappeared into the lake, yet the heat hadn’t broken yet
Someone turned up the volume, bit by bit. Songs that seemed mildly annoying but tolerable at the beginning of the journey morphed first into a nuisance and then an orchestrated assault. There is a point when music ceases to be music and becomes noise, background noise at first, the kind that interferes with a conversation and pixelates words until their meaning is lost. Once language is drowned out, sound of a certain magnitude becomes a physical deterrent, a repellant, like a citronella candle warding off mosquitos. Noise at this level saturates the air and dulls all other sensations. Maybe that’s the whole point of dance music, the narrowing down of all sensory input to a single dominant channel. When sound becomes louder still it turns into pain, pain that starts from the ear and radiates out, rhythmic and inescapable. There is a reason why playing loud music is one of the most popular forms of torture. It is as debilitating as it is difficult to trace, not leaving any outward wounds.
Despite or because of all of this, our younger son fell asleep, his cheeks flushed, his mouth half open, one leg slung across David’s lap, the other one dangling off the wooden bench he sat on. Slumped over sideways, his head had come to rest against my mother’s arm. He looked like a weary airline passenger, awkwardly snoozing on the shoulder of a stranger. Something in my mother’s posture had shifted. She stroked her grandson’s sweat-soaked hair with her free hand, careful not to move.
Easy To Love
Christi Krug
First time I saw you, you were climbing the old cherry tree and your pink elf ears matched the blossoms. I was riding back of Gran’s sky-blue Skylark. We pulled up, I stepped out with my white quilted suitcase. You skittered down the tree, crossed the driveway, and thumped the chest of your collared shirt. “I’m Chippy Timmons!” You said it whistly, through missing teeth. Your shorts were grass-stained, and your tube socks slopped around your chubby ankles. Your face was doused with freckles. “Do you think we could play?”
Gran’s neighborhood had no other children. Saturdays, you’d stand at the curb on the quiet, empty street and watch for the sky-blue Skylark. We’d meet between houses, where impatiens bloomed patiently. You’d smile so hard your chipmunk cheeks would nearly squeeze your eyes shut. “Christy. You’re here!”
“Yep.”
“We have this 3,000-piece puzzle. A 747 jet plane. You can come over and help on it.”
“If you want.”
The floor of your house was wood. Your toys were wood trucks, old-fashioned, with big wheels that didn’t make noise. The sun came in everywhere, and the house smelled like salad.
You sat at the table, chin in hand, reached for a puzzle piece, and set it in an airplane window, snap. Your freckled fingers were gentle with everything, okay with everything, and you always smiled.
I picked up a puzzle piece. The body was bunchy-armed, the nose pointy: a weird fish. I laid it on the airplane, tried it different ways.
You placed another piece, snap, and another, snap.
I tried my fish piece all around the white, blue, gray sky. I pushed it into bunchy-armed silhouettes. It resisted every time.
Those were the years I had to move every few months, or stay with this relative or that. Mother was sick in a way that didn’t involve coughing or sneezing or headaches. My visits gave her a break.
I never knew where I’d land.
You were a boy, and younger. You didn’t care where I came from.
“This doesn’t fit anywhere,” I told you. “Let’s play something else.”
We never had an argument; we moved in sync. You outgrew your chubby ankles and most of your freckles but kept the pink elf ears and chipmunk cheeks. I stopped caring what you knew about my family or didn’t. Gran would say things—“Christy’s mother is nervous,” or “She has a condition.” It was all right. You wouldn’t change your mind about me.
“Let’s climb the plum tree,” I said one Saturday.
“Which one’s the plum tree?”
“With the green and purple fruits. They look like butts.”
You laughed.
“Let’s spy on the neighbors,” I went on.
“Okay.”
It was easy to love you. You did everything I said.
Over by the chain link fence, we slipped into leaf shadow, watching the Waverleys splash in their pool. Those rich, grown-up Waverleys. They had six hundred friends over, all with Dorothy Hamill haircuts. I would have done anything for a Dorothy Hamill haircut. “I hope Blaire Waverley belly flops,” I said.
You nodded.
“I hope her mascara runs,” I added. “I can’t believe her mother lets her wear makeup.” My mother was too nervous for makeup. Hers or mine.
Blaire Waverly pulled her sleek body from the pool. She sauntered to the diving board in blue bikini, white bows at each hip.
Straight brown hair fell in your eyes. “I could shoot my cap gun,” you said. “I could scare her.” You opened the silver barrel, checking the strip of red paper coiled inside.
“Okay,” I said. You held your gun in the air. Blaire Waverly raised her arms. She bent her knees.
The screen door squeaked.
Blaire Waverly straightened and peered into the rhododendrons. Our chance was lost.
Gran was standing on the porch, waving her Kodak. “How about a picture?” She seated you and me in red director’s chairs. She walked backwards, studying her viewfinder. We sat with arms dangling over the wood chair arms, unimpressed movie directors. The scene should always play our way.
“Well, I have news,” Gran said one Saturday, driving over the Queen Anne Bridge in her sky-blue Skylark. “The Timmonses are moving. ”
“Why?”
“A bigger house. More kids in that neighborhood. That’s the way with a growing family.” She sighed. Our own family could do anything but grow. Mother was having episodes again. I felt the weight of Gran’s thoughts, wet blossoms sagging on the ground.
“I’m sorry you didn’t get to play with Chippy,” she said, “one last time.”
One year later, one late winter Saturday, Gran drove me to the state hospital, the psychiatric ward. I stared out at soggy fields, broken-down fences, slouching barns.
We climbed concrete steps, sat on a tan vinyl couch, and watched people wander in and out of a fake living room. I figured it was fake because it wasn’t a room for living.
Gran spoke to the desk person. A middle-aged woman held a baby doll. A tall, skinny guy toddled around with a smile that gave me the creeps.
A black-haired man resembled the cop on Adam- 12. Except he was looking at the plants, saying, “The plants can’t survive without the water.” Then he laughed. Then he was quiet again. Then he said, loud to the plants: “The water feeds the plants!” like it was something he just figured out. A pause and then: “The plants have to have water,” and another small laugh.
A young woman with thick eyeliner sat at a table, smoking and staring, a zombie from The Twilight Zone. There was an old man resting his head against the wall, eyes closed, drool trailing from his mouth. Any second, a heavy bead of drool would drop to his shirt.
Then Mother came walking toward us, smiling. Gran was brisk with questions. “Do you like your doctors? Are you involved in activities?”
Mother looked far away. She held my hand.
Before we left, Mother pushed something across the table to Gran. It was a handcraft, a wooden apple she had made by gluing pieces of balsa wood. When we got home, Gran hung up her coat. She shut the apple in a drawer.
I was getting used to shutting things away, and people too. It’s what a person had to do.
I moved in with Gran full time. After winter break, I went to my new school, joining a class of fourth and fifth grades combined. Mrs. Lacey called roll. I glanced left. There in the front row: chipmunk cheeks, elf ears.
You flushed when you heard my name. I threw my Dorothy Hamill hair over my face. I opened Prince Caspian and looked down, swallowing my horror.
You’d been around my family; you knew things. What you didn’t know, you were smart enough to figure out. You could piece together any puzzle.
Mrs. Lacey called out a Martin, then a Nguyen, then me, then a Petersen.
I imagined you running up to me and wondering out loud in your honest-puppy way about my grandmother, my mother, my sick and nervous mother.
The mother nobody in the world should know about.
Mrs. Lacey got to the T’s. Timmons.
Me, I didn’t know anyone with your name.
You twisted your elf self around in your chair and scanned the room, and I looked down, away, inspecting my desk, getting up for a drink at the water fountain. So it went for days.
Friday you ran up to my desk, unable to contain yourself any longer. You smiled, bunching your chipmunk cheeks. “Hey, Christy!” Your voice was soft and happy, ready as a puppy who just knows how good you’re going to love him.
I turned a page in Prince Caspian.
“Christy. It’s me, Chippy Timmons.” You put your small white palm on the corner of my desk.
You watched me not watching you. Your voice dipped. “Don’t you . . .?”
I forced my face paper-flat. I looked up. All the feelings that would make a face on me were wiped clean.
I blinked at you. I couldn’t do harmony, gentleness. I didn’t know how to get along, or smile all the time, or keep a friend. I had too many secrets. “What do you want?”
“Nevermind,” you whispered.
You turned away, leaving a damp, shimmering handprint.
I didn’t have a plum tree to climb, but I had to pretend to be far, far above you. It was all right, though. You knew what I was telling you to do.
“I talked to Mrs. Timmons the other day,” Gran said. “She said you’re in Chippy’s class. But you don’t remember him. It breaks his heart that you don’t remember.”
The next time Mrs. Lacey called my name, you stabbed your pencil hard and never looked back for me again.