Category: Nonfiction

Adrift

Robin Anna Smith

Sunday, the day we go to visit Grandma—the day I dread all week. I ask my mother if I can go to a friend’s house or stay home. As always, she rejects my plea, states that we are the only family who visits, that Grandma’s lonely and looks forward to seeing us.

Grandma lives in a tiny apartment in a building that looks like a run-down motel. The gravel parking lot matches the tone of her voice—rough and uneven. Her apartment is hot and stagnant. It has a signature scent: cigarette smoke is the top note, floating above the heart note of a neighbor’s meal cooking, and the base note of cockroaches.

At thirteen years old, I’ve never known Grandma to be happy. Her smiles look like lies, her cackle unconvincing. As someone affected by depression, I recognize it plainly. Thin and frail, I rarely see her stand. Sunk into a nicotine-stained couch, she chain-smokes and sucks oxygen from a green tank that I’ve never seen her without. Her commitment to smoking speaks to her infidelity to life, to us.

When she’s taken to the hospital, family comes from all over. Outside the ICU, we sit and watch the clock as my relatives argue and assign blame.

After she passes, we take her ashes to scatter in the Gulf of Mexico. My family cries for our loss while I sob with relief for her escape.

beach baptism . . .
a seagull swings
from a sunray

Robin Anna Smith

The Inertia of Wings

Ray Ball

The past couple of weeks my work as a historian of the sixteenth and seventeenth-century Spanish empire has taken me from my home in Anchorage, Alaska to Palermo in Sicily. I’m here conducting archival research for a book about a duke and duchess. They were Spanish nobles, but they lived for most of the 1610s in what historians often refer to as Spanish Italy. I spend seven to eight hours a day in a former convent sifting through manuscripts and trying to piece together the patronage and information networks that this elite couple created in order to benefit the crown and themselves.

This is my first time in Palermo. It’s an enchanting city. Some might call it scruffy or in disrepair, but it has charmed me with its layers of architectural styles, its hundreds of churches – some lavish and others sparse, its narrow cobblestone streets, and its delicious food. My problem is not with the way traffic darts aggressively or the street life that carries what the Sicilians call la vucciria up to my window at night. It’s with my own ability to talk. I’m essentially fluent in Spanish and can read Italian fairly well, but my speaking is wretched. I want my words to soar. Instead, they trip off my tongue. I wonder if the stone lions that adorn the Teatro Massimo hear me mangle words. Their stone visages show no sign.

The first few days about half the people I speak to assume that I am Spanish and the rest think I’m an English speaker. The past week, that ratio has shifted so that almost everyone now concludes I’m American after I’ve spoken a few words. I’m not sure if that makes me feel better or worse about my language abilities. On the one hand, it might mean my grasp of certain words and phrases has improved and now I’m not lapsing into the more familiar tones and cadences of Castilian. On the other hand, there is something disappointing about their responses that I can’t quite put my finger on. Most people have been very nice. I try to take comfort in that I’m probably doing better than many foreigners. Maybe not the Dutch, but certainly better than most Americans. Yet, because I’m not here as a tourist but rather as a historian, I feel a pressure to be able to speak better than I do.

At the archives where I consult seventeenth-century tomes, the staff has kindly put up with my pidgin mix of Italian, accidental Spanish, and hand gestures. One day I am ill and can hardly manage to speak at all, but one of the archivists graciously offers to pack up my documents and reseal them with the complicated tying methods used in many European archives. I almost cry because of this kindness.

In spite of this graciousness or perhaps because of it, I wish I could articulate my thanks with greater sophistication. Since I was a child, I have considered Italian to be a beautiful language. The language of the operas my father loved. In fact, when I was in college, I took a semester of it. But the professor was so rude that it was a miserable class. You’ve probably heard of hate fucking? Well, I hate earned an A in that class. And after the climax, I swore I would never see the Sicilian woman who taught it ever again. I went on to take three semesters of German, which has since nearly completely atrophied due to lack of use.

Looking back, I’m not sure my instructor was all that mean. Demanding, sure. Rigid, yes. Still, with that perfect clarity that hindsight offers, I wish I had stuck with it and taken at least another semester. Maybe then I would be able to correctly conjugate some verbs in the past tense. Even as I think this, I know I wasn’t predisposed to the kind of emotional growth learning a foreign language demands. As you remake your vocabulary, a new you emerges. In the fall of 1999 I wasn’t capable of it. I was stuck in a quagmire of grief and depression. I wasn’t ready to claw myself out yet either.

My father had passed suddenly and unexpectedly away the previous winter. My mother had just started on a road to recovery from substance abuse. My sister and I barely knew how to communicate. I was devastated and pretending to hold it all together. No, I was far too vulnerable to be vulnerable, and that is what learning a language requires. It demands discipline but also a willingness to make mistakes. To make space for the embarrassment of when you accidentally utter something vulgar instead of simply saying “I am going for a run.” Back then I feared a single mistake would cause me to unspool.

Now I am making lots of mistakes. Even though I know the word in Italian, I can only think of the Spanish word for driving while I’m speaking to a taxi driver. I mix up tenses and use words that are outdated because I’ve been reading seventeenth-century letters, contracts, petitions, and wills all day long. My mouth struggles to mimic the accented vowels and rhythmic deliverance of the locals. But with each mistake I somehow feel lighter, less burdened. And there is progress, too. While standing awestruck before the glittering mosaics of Monreale, I understand almost everything a tour guide is saying in Italian. I manage to converse with a couple from Milan for the better part of an hour before my brain shatters. One evening another of the archivists and I go out for drink. We take turns speaking in Italian and English. His English is far better than my Italian, but I try not to mind. The next day I watch birds taking off from the domes of the churches and later look up the words for pigeon, raven, seagull, and dove. Falcon, I already know.

At night I dream vivid dreams of participating in a triathlon with only a bathing suit, or heading to the starting line of a marathon I haven’t trained for, or realizing I need to be at the airport while my clothes are in the washer at the laundry mat. Not very subtle. But then I also dream about being the recipient of a gift of silk from a noble or about conversing with friends in Spanish with a few Italian words mixed in. I wake smiling.

Ray Ball

Submersion

K.B. Carle

1.

My elevator has golden doors, rails covered in red velvet that feel like the hairs of a Rottweiler puppy I beg my father to buy. I am in a room of windows, rising into the clouds. To the darkness of space where my breath takes a form of its own in the etchings of the words I try to say. My elevator’s buttons are gone. I am floating until I’m not, body stolen from the floor to my elevator’s ceiling, waiting for the moment of impact. 

2.

My father betrays me from the stands encircled behind a wall made of windows to keep the chlorine and heat from seeping through. I am hoisted over the deep end by a swim instructor who insists today’s the day I tumble from the high dive. She dangles me in mid-air above another woman whose arms extend with promises to catch me. My frustrations of my father waving while I dangle in the air appear in the flailings of my helpless body falling into the open arms that await me. Arms that allow me to experience submersion before welcoming me back to the surface.

3.

I pace within my rising elevator, searching for starlight. For planets I know the names of in English and in Spanish but can’t say which falls closest to the Earth. I’ve never been one for Science. Logic steals from the stories I live in while my father is away and my mother’s body is framed under a single light at the desk someone built in our kitchen. I search for her amongst the stars, waiting by the phone, for a call from a job I don’t understand. But I fall away before I find her, my  fingertips grazing the velvet railing a moment too late.

4.

I disappear beneath the water to avoid the horde asking questions easily answered if these girls would only see me. Why do you always wear a swim cap? Because I can’t wash my hair like you do. The warmth of water does not cause the strands of my tight curls to fall limp, instead forming knots wound tight as your grandmothers’ yarn balls in protest. To wash my hair is a process that can take hours, depending how long I stay in the shower. Why can’t you just be like us? Because my skin is the color of an oak tree when cut down and left to fall in the forest.

5.

We are at a standoff. I refuse to approach and my elevator keeps its golden doors shut. For the first time, I am in a room with black floors that play smooth jazz with the shifting of my weight. My elevator’s revenge for my father’s stubbornness imprinted on me. I turn to leave. My elevator’s bell sounds. And we are falling together, my elevator and I, into the depths of a never ending pit to the sounds of what I would later know as Jr. Walker & The All Stars.

6.

I am a body of numbers when my senses start to fail. I am accustomed to the slow burn of chlorine. To the sounds of fathers coaching their daughters from the swimming pool’s edge. They are piranhas on leashes, my father included. All the girls wear swim caps forming rows of yellow, white and black buoys. I ignore the fact I can’t see beyond their caps, their figures outlines of the bodies they once were. A whistle blows. I’ll lose points for my inability to dive. Points I’ll make up for in speed, my body slipping beneath the water’s surface until I am ready to reappear.

7.

I pluck velveteen hairs from my elevator’s railing, waiting for my final descent. My words are stencils forming sentences along the windows that surround me. I know all the planets in English, that the Earth flirts with Venus and Mars. The ascension is taking longer than usual. My thoughts offend my elevator. There is no sound in space. Even when your throat extends to your stomach and your lungs collapse. Even when your screams shatter glass.

8.

I am Jaws, scouring the depths in search for my prey, my sinking pool ring. I rise with my victim in my clenched jaws, begging my father to swim with me. He refuses from his plastic recliner. I clutch my prey and spin. Feel its weight disappear from my grasp and wait for its splash and the ripple that will sway my body. Instead, there is a clatter and the sounds of my father’s feet pounding against tile. Can’t you see me? He asks. From my hiding place underwater I answer, no.

9.

My body is a prisoner surrounded by the glass, climbing above the clouds. To the skies where nothing exists. To space. To darkness. Then, we careen towards the earth together. My elevator and I.

10.

I trade my curls for long strands that form after soaking in chemical baths. I am a being on fire with chemical burns along my scalp seeking sanctuary in the frigid depths I’ve been expelled from. 

11.

I go inside my elevator willingly. List the planets in no particular order, pass between my parted lips and encircle me as I rise. The walls of my elevator part and the stars reveal themselves to me. A black hole comes and I accept their invitation to float through in hopes of discovering what lies beyond the gravitational wave. 

12.

How does a swimmer survive without water? My boyfriend asks from our sanctuary on the sand. I run his fingers through my damaged hair. He holds me close, whispers swim with me. I tell him I can’t see anymore. He kisses the surface of my eyelids. We jump through waves, form maelstroms made of salt and the incoming tide. I sink beneath the surface with a promise he won’t let go. The ocean is a fog I welcome while strands of my hair dance in obscured light.

K.B. Carle