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Lemon Joy Tart

February 29, 2024

Zesty Lemon Joy Tart from Scratch

First, prepare your crust…

Day-to-Day Happiness, sifted through dry Autumn leaves – 1-1/4 cups
Baby giggles for sweetness – 1/2 cup
Seaside mornings, finely ground – 1 teaspoon
Cold toboggan crashes, cut into small cubes – 1/2 cup
Wedding Tears, collected in an Easter eggshell – 2 halves
Extract of a lover’s first touch – 1/2 teaspoon (optional)

Sift dry ingredients into a children’s punch bowl. With cupped fingers, create a hollow. Gently. Kiss your pastry cutter, then mix all ingredients. The mixture should feel silky and dry, like the back of a grandmother’s hand.

Form the dough into a ball, then flatten to a thick disc. Wrap in an heirloom dishtowel and refrigerate. Go outside. Play with your dog—kid—lover—spouse—parent—cat, make grass angels while counting clouds. Do this for at least one hour.

Preheat oven to 375F/190C and place rack in the center.

Roll out the dough. Place gently into a heart-shaped tart pan.

Press parchment paper against the crust, then fill with shiny pebbles collected at low tide, remembering to wash them first. Bake for twenty minutes. Transfer hot tart pan to a wire rack and remove pebbles and paper.

Then, prepare the Lemon Joy filling…

Happy tears shed for someone you love – 3 full measures
Dancing like a wild thing – 3/4 cup
Lemon peel from your Amalfi trip, grated fine – 1 tablespoon
Waking to a cold dog nose – 1/2 cup
Dawn Solitude – 2 tablespoons (optional)
Long-sought reunions, cut into small pieces 1/2 cup

Cook on moderate heat, whisking constantly, until the mixture thickens and warms to a sultry love song, about 170°F/75°C.

Fill the tart shell with joy curd. Refrigerate four hours. Serve with love and whipped cream if you like. The tart is rich, so share.

Keep this recipe at the front of your box. Even if not prepared, Lemon Joy Tart is a hedge against the sadder dishes life will inevitably prepare for you. Hold the recipe card to your heart, remember, and know that you will survive.

Marco Etheridge is a writer of prose, an occasional playwright, and a part-time poet. He lives and writes in Vienna, Austria. His work has been featured in over one hundred reviews and journals across Canada, Australia, the UK, and the USA. “The Wrong Name” is Marco’s latest collection of short fiction. When he isn’t crafting stories, Marco is a contributing editor for a new ‘Zine called Hotch Potch. Author website: https://www.marcoetheridgefiction.com/

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Guest Posts, Letting Go, Nature

Waterfalls

February 26, 2024

Across the river, I catch a glimpse of High Falls peeking through the trees, all one-hundred-and-fifty magnificent feet of her. White water cascades down her granite face before crashing into the pool at her feet. The water settles as it makes its way downstream to meet up with her more famous sister, Triple Falls—the most popular waterfall hike near Asheville and where the movies The Hunger Games and The Last of the Mohicans were filmed.

As my ten-year-old golden retriever, Hope, and I rest on a rock at the river’s edge, the summer sun warms my face. Hope pants softly as she watches hikers hopping boulder to boulder beneath the towering falls. We’re midway through our Saturday hike on an August morning that feels more like fall. The weather is sunny and seventy degrees with a welcoming breeze. This is one of my favorite places to hike with Hope. Popular enough I don’t have to worry about hiking alone and still doable for my aging girl. The sound of running water permeates the trail. It’s a soothing soundtrack for this solo outing with my dog. A chance to escape life and get lost in nature for a few hours. To ground myself. To remember why I left suburban, stucco Southern California and moved here, to the mountains of Western North Carolina.

* * *

I’ve always felt drawn to the mountains, often quipping they’re my happy place. I feel different when I’m surrounded by nature. Calmer. Like I belong. A feeling that often escapes me in life and around people. When my kids were young, family vacations meant trips to National Parks where we’d submerge our suburban selves into nature. Yosemite, Rocky Mountain, Glacier, Zion, and Bryce Canyon are among my favorites. Those vacations were like a cleansing for my soul. A much-needed break for a busy working mom who struggled to balance her career and motherhood. A chance to spend time with my kids and husband doing something we all enjoyed, together.

When we visited Glacier National Park in Montana, my son was ten years old and he had us in stitches the entire trip. On every trail—except the last day or two when he’d had his fill of hiking—he belted out, Alamo! I can still picture his young face with eyes wide, brows raised, and lips pursed as the word escaped his mouth and echoed across the trail. What was that? Why did he keep saying it? Whatever it was, he was having a good time. Maybe he was simply expressing joy. Happy to be on vacation, in the mountains, or at least out of school.

Twenty-one years later I can still hear his child-like voice in my head, belting out, Alamo! It makes me chuckle. I asked my husband if he remembered the trip and if he knew what our son was saying, “I think he was saying a la mode,” he replied.

“Like pie with ice cream?” I asked.

“Yeah,” he said.

I decided to text my son and ask him, “When we were hiking at Glacier and you kept yelling out Alamo, were you saying Alamo or A la mode (like ice cream on pie) or something else?”

“Alamo like the battle in Texas,” he replied.

“Do you remember why you were saying it?”

“No idea why I did it at the time. I think I just thought it was fun to say.”

Still curious, I decided to do some research. At ten years old, he would have just completed fourth grade. It turns out fourth graders study The Alamo. Mystery solved!

My silly fourth grader is now thirty-one. He lives on an island in the Pacific Northwest, in an old house, surrounded by pine trees. He, too, prefers the peace, quiet, and elbow room to the crowded, hustle and bustle of Southern California.

* * *

Like my son, my dog Hope was born and raised in suburbia, but as soon as we arrived in Western North Carolina she settled right in like she’d been a mountain dog her entire life. Perhaps like me, and my son, she realized where she was born was not where she belonged. I’m quite confident if she could talk she’d say, Thanks for bringing me home. The same words my soul speaks. And a sentiment that’s still difficult to explain when people ask why we moved here. I don’t understand it myself sometimes. How do you, how can you explain why you feel more at home in a place where you have no roots than in a place you lived your entire life?

Sitting here at the base of this roaring waterfall, with the pine and poplar trees soaring above me, their arms reaching high into the clear blue sky, I feel small. In a powerful, positive, humbling way. I felt that same smallness on those family vacations. Being surrounded by the immensity of nature provides perspective. Its beauty, grandeur, and steadiness are grounding, reassuring, and comforting.

As Hope sits next to me on our rock perch, the corners of her mouth are curled up in that quintessential golden retriever smile. The sun reflects off the water and onto her face, casting shadows that dance on her white muzzle, a feature that’s earned her the nickname Sugar Face. She, too, seems to enjoy this place. As I stroke the top of my old girl’s head, I contemplate the timeless beauty before us. I don’t know what it is about the enduring nature of nature that affects me so deeply. Perhaps there’s a sense of security in knowing it’s always there. Regardless of the ups and downs in life or the state of my psyche, nature is a constant. Always peaceful and beautiful. Always there to provide respite. And always ready to refuel my soul.

Perhaps that’s what drew me to these mountains five years ago. To a place where I don’t feel the weight of the world resting on my shoulders but that invites me to sit softly in her lap. With Mother Nature’s gracious arms wrapped around me, enveloping me, cradling me. Reminding me I don’t have to work so hard to make life happen.

I can let go, allow, and just be.

Debbie LaChusa called suburban Southern California home for fifty-six years before retiring and relocating to the mountains of Western North Carolina. She has written and self-published four books and is currently writing a memoir about the unexpected rewards and challenges of moving cross-country and leaving her family and hometown behind.

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Family, Guest Posts

Two Dads and a Lump of Clay

February 25, 2024

In the beginning, I couldn’t make anything. I sat at the wheel watching the spinning lump of clay, unsure of my next move. The creation of a thing requires two essential inputs: the raw material and the shaping of that material. When I first started to pot, both perplexed me. I know more now. Today, I want to challenge myself and make something special, something that will evoke the goodness of life.

I open the bag of clay and an odor redolent of summer rain on black soil envelops and comforts me. This ancient mixture of earth and water has been around since (at least) the third day of the world. The smell disperses into the air as I cut off a clammy chunk and knead it into a soft, three-pound ball with the objective of “throwing off the hump,” a technique of making two or more pots from a single lump of clay. This method of throwing reminds me of cell division and the miracle of creation. Of course, I am just a potter; I’m not creating life, but it gets me thinking: how do I—how am I formed?

I’ve had two fathers. I was three months old when I lost Eliahu, the father whose DNA I carry. My parents were separated by the time I was born, but I know Eliahu saw me a few times before deciding to open a bottle of Orange Crush, swallow several-hundred pills and break free from the turbulent orbit that had become his world.

My older sister Ruth and I could not ask our mother about Eliahu—neither his life nor his death. I told myself that I didn’t care to know, but Ruth did, and it was me that she turned to for solace when her questions went unanswered. Our mother’s reluctance to talk drove her to snooping. One day, when Ruth was fourteen, she found his suicide letter.

I was nine when my sister showed me that letter suffused with emotions I didn’t understand. Emptiness, despair, and self-loathing—his cup overflowed with pain, and he wanted only to empty it, to finish his suffering. It was titillating to be privy to such a secret, but the feeling dissipated, and I filed the information into deep storage, believing I had no right to pine after someone I couldn’t remember. Wanting to be an agreeable daughter, I accepted my mother’s silence and looked toward the future. When I was seventeen, I visited Israel for the first time and met Eliahu’s family. They poured their love and acceptance onto me, and I was stunned. As I was taken from house to house, each new relative stared at my dark thick hair, deep-set eyes, and shy smile, their hands covering gaping mouths. Hee kol kach doma lo! She looks so much like him, they all said.

I drop the ball of clay onto the pottery wheel, aiming for the middle. Getting and keeping the clay centered—still, smooth, free of tremors—is still my biggest challenge. The wheel turns at 250 revolutions per minute, humming and grinding. I brace my knees against the splash pan and anchor my arms, pressing at the base of the clay mound and pushing the bumpy surface inward until it submits to the resistance of my hands. Then, I cone the clay up into a torpedo and compress it down again. When I finish, the lump has transformed into a low dome. It looks centered, but I know from experience that this might be an illusion. Who knows what’s buried below the surface.

Around the time she became pregnant with me, my mother met the six-foot tall, outgoing poetry student who would become my stepfather. David was a fellow grad student at the university, and he and my mother hung out between classes, trying to out-wit each other with their literary puns and authorial affectations. Everyone, including Eliahu, assumed their friendship was platonic, but my mother and David were developing a stronger connection than anyone could have guessed. Two and a half years after Eliahu’s death, they married.

Whenever I think about David in those early years—a twenty-six-year-old Catholic choosing to leave behind his carefree artist’s life to marry a three-years-older traumatized Jewish widow with two children—I am astounded. No wonder my mother sometimes called him, “David the Saint.” But she was equally irresistible to him. Dazzling with her intelligence, humor, and sultry Elizabeth Taylor-like beauty, she drew him in. After their marriage, he adopted my sister and me, legally erasing our birth names and with them, Eliahu. My history-the story of my origins-was supplanted with a new narrative. The gregarious, partying poet with the stylish beard and classic Greek nose became my new father. My tall, elegant, and (mostly) stable stepfather.

My first memory of David is of a bedtime routine. I had a red frog made of Naugahyde. “Kiss Nauga!” I’d demand each night as he tucked me in. My perfect, handsome Daddy was my hero. But when I grew older and understood that we weren’t related, I pushed him aside, seeking instead the approval and love of my mother. If he made me mad, I comforted myself with the reminder that he wasn’t my real Daddy anyway.

I rest my palm on top of the spinning dome, thinking about the stories I’ve always had and the stories I’ve uncovered more recently. They are all I have to work with in the reconstruction of my beginning. I need to figure out how everything fits together.

The smooth, silky movement beneath my hand transports an image to my mind of a grand vessel constructed of two pieces, and I know what I will make: a chalice or kiddush cup. The dual-purpose goblet will consist of a bowl-like cup supported by a decorative stem.

I construct the cup first, pressing my fingers laterally into the dome just below the halfway point. Forming an hourglass shape, I begin throwing the top half. I push the thumb of one hand and middle finger of the other down through the center, opening the clay into a hollow form, then pull the walls toward me to enlarge the base. The promise of future sustenance compels me to pull wider; I want this part of the goblet big to contain all manner of goodness.

For decades, I knew little about Eliahu. My mother dispensed occasional morsels of information when I was growing up, hoping they would suffice: he was thirteen years older and a talented, though depressed opera singer; her modern attitudes on gender equality in marriage clashed with his traditional upbringing; and his family criticized him for moving from Israel to Canada. From his relatives I learned my hearing impairment was hereditary, which did not endear me to him. They might have told me more, but I wasn’t interested; I saw no point. I had no memory of him, and he didn’t fit into my life.

All this changed when, at age fifty-three, I heard his voice for the first time on a tape recording given to me by his niece. Hearing my father speak made him feel more real to me than he ever had before. It was then that I awoke, as if from a long sleep, to the realization that I did want to know more about him. But when I went to ask my mother, I was too late. Wandering bewildered in her barren desert of Alzheimer’s, my mother couldn’t conjure up Eliahu at all.

And so, I stole my parents’ letters from the cardboard box in my mother’s seniors’ residence. There were hundreds of them. Eliahu’s letters revealed a romantic man who was rational and pragmatic, and I realized these were also traits of mine. I looked up the names on those letters, hoping to find friends still living.

I found Miriam. She told me that Eliahu was full of surprises, and she described an evening following his return from a summer music school in Italy. “He asked me to go with him to our special singing spot in the mountain. I was leading the way up the path and as we sat down, I looked up. Hanging in the tree was a bottle of Chianti he had brought me from Siena!” Her face shone with the memory of his playfulness and generosity, still fresh after sixty years. Then, she turned and pointed to a wine bottle holding flowers in her hallway. She’d kept it as a vessel for her love.

Eliahu appeared fun-loving and untroubled to Miriam and his other friends, but inside he struggled with despair. The letters revealed that after moving to Canada, one catastrophe after another rained down on him—disappointment, death, betrayal—each blow adding to the last until he could no longer hide the damage.

As I open and shape the cup, I feel a disturbance within that is causing the walls to wobble. It’s an air bubble—an empty space trapped in the clay body. I wonder if it had always been there or if I’d done something wrong. This pocket of air has a big impact on the whole, knocking it completely off center. I stop the wheel, poke the bubble with a needle, then smooth and fill in the indentation. When I start the wheel back up, I pray the clay molecules will realign and repair the damage.

Two more pulls of the cup’s wall and the piece is back on center. I am relieved, as if I had recentered Eliahu, giving him the strength to persevere. Maybe I’m chasing a fantasy, trying to create something lasting from loss, but I believe in the restorative power of stories and art.

I press against the inside with a kidney-shaped tool to bowl out the cup and ease off as I near the top. I sit back to look. It is good. The delicate taper of the cup’s wall beckons the eye to the gentle curve of the inside. I smooth the lip before slicing off the cup from the hump of clay below.

It turned out David wasn’t such a saint. My mother knew he had a drinking problem, but in their early days together it only added to his appeal as a tortured poet. She probably hoped her love and a family routine would turn him sober. But it didn’t, not for a long time.

One day when I was twelve, he picked me up late from aikido class. During the silent drive home, he suddenly turned off our route, saying he had to make a quick stop.

“Wait here, I’ll be right back,” he said, parking behind some brick buildings. After a long time, I started to worry. I left the car to look for him. Just beyond the alleyway between the buildings was a pub and I looked inside the window. He was sitting at the bar, a big glass of beer in front of him, talking and laughing with another patron as if he had nothing else in the world to do. I returned to the car to sulk and cry. My daddy was flawed. The sudden realization rattled my sense of security.

When he returned, he slid into the driver’s seat and looked at me in the rear-view mirror. Seeing my scowl and crossed arms, he turned around. “What’s the matter, sweetie?” he said in the syrupy, slurred voice I hated.

“I know where you were.”

“Oh, dear,” he said.

I glared at him.

“Don’t tell your mother.”

“Of course, I won’t,” I said. I did not want to be the cause of an argument between them.

Sometime after, David quit drinking. But his alcoholism had already shaped me, and from then on, I viewed the drinking habits of the people I loved with an anxious wariness.

A bit less than half of the original ball of clay is left on the wheel. As I shape it into the goblet’s stem, I reflect on stories of my adoptive dad, hoping the details of these memories never fade. My musings guide my hands as they work to define the stem. It should be as graceful as the cup and its base should be wide enough to keep the cup steady, especially if I want a tall stem—tall like David was.

While the dome spins, I press in on the sides, giving the clay nowhere to go but up. It becomes a pillar with a clay skirt at the bottom, which serves as the stem’s base. I form a shallow cavity at the top that looks like a miniature rice bowl. This cavity will enclose the bottom of the cup when I’m ready to join the two pieces together. I pinch the stem at different heights to create three knops, mimicking the classic profiles of goblets I’ve seen online. When I’m finished, I assess the outcome. The stem will be stable, mostly. The knops, while handsome, are potential weak points and will require vigilance. I stand up and crouch down to look at the stem straight on. Overall, I’m satisfied. It too is good.

Reading the letters between and to my mother and Eliahu allowed me to learn more about him than I ever thought possible, each small detail darkening the hazy outline I’d carried all my life. Amongst those letters was an obscure document from 1963.

In the fall of that year, Eliahu was attending a community college to complete the high school coursework he needed to get into university. He was unemployed during the winter break and finances were tight, so he applied for unemployment insurance benefits. He was denied on the grounds that his unemployment would last for only one month. The 1963 letter was an appeal that he wrote, arguing that he shouldn’t be disqualified because he was both available and willing to work as required by the law, from which he quoted.

I recognized in his arguments my own dogged trust in reason and logic. I possess the same zeal for justice and directed this passion into a career as a worker advocate. My father used the government’s rules as his evidence and rationale, a strategy I also employed in my work. I always assumed the attributes that made me good at my job came from my mother, who was a professional writer and editor—but maybe they came from Eliahu?

Two years later, my father gave up fighting for himself and the things he cherished—a choice I vowed never to follow.

Despite being Catholic, David participated fully in our Jewish upbringing and even attended synagogue with us. “It’s the same God,” he always said. Once, as a teenager, I set out to challenge his religion, just for the fun of it. My mother always hoped he would convert and I, still focused on pleasing her, decided to be helpful by undermining one of the central tenets of Catholicism.

“Don’t you think that story about Jesus dying and coming back to life is pretty dumb? You know, the whole resurrection thing?” I waited for defensiveness and was startled by his comeback.

“No dumber than some guy talking to a burning bush,” he said, breaking into a big smile that opened the space between his mustache and beard, revealing all his not-so-white, but perfectly formed teeth.

“Ha, you got me!” I said, laughing. It took years for me to appreciate how his wisdom and respect for my intelligence nurtured my own open-minded, critical thinking. Once a parent myself, I stopped brushing him aside in favor of my mother. I could depend on him for non-judgmental advice and comfort. On visits and calls home, my former monosyllabic answers to his questions turned into genuine engagement. I came to love his kind, molten voice, which still had that slurred, dreamy quality.

I was forty-three when he received the lung cancer diagnosis. From that point on, each time I called, he reported the latest symptoms of the disease attacking his body, such as night sweats and falling out of bed. I begged him to let me come take care of him, knowing my mother wasn’t coping.

“Don’t be silly,” he said. “There’s nothing you can do.”

“I can sleep on the floor next to the bed and break your falls.”

“Oh, sweetie—thank you, but no.”

When he went into palliative care, I did go to him, and we were both glad. He asked me to read his favorite Psalm—#23. Then, he left me too.

The two pieces are leather-hard dry, and it is time to join them together. I return the cup upside down to the wheel for the final shaping of the surface. The protrusion of clay where the cup was cut from the host mound is facing up, ready to receive the stem. I add some goopy slip to its rough surface, then turn the stem upside down and fit the rice bowl-shaped cavity on to the protrusion, pressing until wet clay oozes out and the curve of the cavity hugs the cup. I check to make sure the stem is centered and plumb, then turn on the wheel, blending the wet into the harder clay to bind and smooth the area of attachment, creating a single structure.

It is me; it is them. The creators and the created.

When it is dry enough to handle, I wrap my hands around the cup and lift it to my lips, the taste and smell of the clay a reminder of its elemental origins. I breathe into the hollow of the cup, sanctifying the space with my gratitude. Setting it down, I marvel at the stability and beauty of the tall, elegant stem. From one lump to two forms, and back to one again. I’ve never made anything this good.

Michèle Dawson Haber is a Canadian writer, potter, and union advocate. She lives in Toronto and is working on a memoir about family secrets, identity, and step-adoption. Her essays have been published in the Modern Love column of The New York Times, Salon.com, Oldster Magazine, and The Brevity Blog. She also interviews memoirists for Hippocampus Magazine. Find her at @micheledhaber on most social media platforms.

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Grief, Guest Posts, parents

Death and Jeggings

February 21, 2024

I stared at the rack of enamel buttoned cardigans, hands numb, relaxed chinos everywhere. Nothing made sense. I looked around confused. Where was I? Was this…? Yes. Right. I was so lost, I walked into a Talbot’s.

I had just left my father at a Memory Care Center and I felt pretty crummy. Not crummier than the place I’d had to leave him at two months prior, but crummy none the less. We’d sat in the common room, people in wheelchairs were being spoon fed in rotation by a caregiver. A woman named Kathy sat at our table. She had big fish eyes and a yellow sweater and a flapsack over her walker in a homemade fabric that had Elvis all over it. Another attendant, a woman in her twenties with a faded tattoo over her eyebrow sat with us. Whatever was over the eyebrow was in the process of removal. Around her wrist, a delicate black rosary dripped on to her hand that my eyes kept returning to. Any illustration of faith was comforting in this liminal rec room off the 405. My dad didn’t say much. I tried not to micro manage but really got into it with Kathy about Elvis hoping the vibe could feel fun. I rambled about “King Creole,” my favorite Elvis movie. Going as far as to belt out “crawwwwwwwwfish.” Kathy frowned. I stopped. I overtry in these situations. Memory Care Center cheerleader. It’s awful. But it is better than the silence.

My dad ate slowly, elongating the time I had to stress out about leaving him there. The truth is, I don’t want to leave him anywhere. Ever. But a lot of him has left us at this point and we don’t have a choice. He gets angry, red faced, violent words he never used in my childhood spew. Last week on the front porch he told my brother and I that he’d cut our fingers off and feed em to us like in Viet Nam. We looked at each other and stifled a laugh; that is where we are. Lewy Body Dementia with a lifelong PTSD chaser. Memory Care people call it LBD. Which used to mean Little Black Dress to me. Halter, strapless, now extra protein in the brain that results in hallucinations, anxiety and paranoia.

He’d been my favorite person to talk to on any given Sunday. The man who made me laugh with wordplay and feel safe with his emotional IQ. But now, he needed full-time attention, twenty four hour tenderness from a professional equipped to not think about the finger eating comment for the next week/lifetime. He got kicked out of the first memory care home we’d placed him in after he lobbed a punch at his 94 year old roommate which I could only imagine looked like slow motion fighting. We were now here. Praying he wouldn’t have “behaviors.” Praying he was drugged properly. That is the objective now: drug him into a hazy soup of non aggressive jibber jabber. Soup in a fleece lined corduroy coat. No wonder I was looking for spirit in the hands of strangers.

Half of his plate eaten, he shook his head no as I spooned another bit of rice. We got up, took another walk around the empty grounds. When I left I told him I’d see him next week. He looked at me confused. On the way out I grabbed Lisa, the activities director and tried not to cry and told her he likes coloring and crafts. Can he have coloring and crafts? A few people were sitting at a table where she had unpacked some yarn. No one knows what to do with this yarn and I’m sure Lisa has a plan but I feel like a criminal leaving him there.

I promised myself I would move him in and go home. But away from the dribbly food, I had an appetite and remembered there was at Wahoo’s in Crystal Court. In high school, we would pile into a Toyota Forerunner and go to the original one on Placentia in Costa Mesa for lunch. Surf stickers and ahi rice felt like home. These were things I knew. This is mahi mahi, this is a guy grinding in Vans. Here is my father, buttoning a flannel as he leaves to run the scoreboard at the high school football game. Waving at me from the box while I grit my teeth through a cheer dance. Never sure why I was doing it, probably because of his wave. Here, here is a Volcom poster from the Pink Is Punk Party you went to senior year. Here. Here is salsa. Here is a fountain soda. Here, hear is a Prussian march cranked up in Dad’s Volvo. He got the collection at the car wash. “Best music and best birthday cards are from the car wash,” he said with whimsical authority. An attorney in child protective services, I’d imagined the brassy insanity strengthened him to go prosecute bad guys. Years later he told me a story about threatening a father on the phone and knowing it was time to change departments. That it was the saddest he had ever been to me. I eat my salad, but I don’t want to go home.

I, in fact, want to wander around Crystal Court. So I do. Every person I look at I want to touch. I want to tell them we are all going to disappear one day, as if they don’t know. That our honeycomb brains are going to crumble into fractured poorly edited movies playing in a loop while we sit at tables with strangers, lash out at invisible enemies, and shit in our pants. So buy something pretty while the show still makes sense and the undercarriage is rosy. I want to tell them I love them and their dumb sunglasses on their heads, and their self important conversations, I want to tell them I love all of it. I look at them lost. Sensitive as a sunburn, searching for something familiar, like my father. I could go home. Instead, I walked into Talbot’s. No LBDs of either variety here.

I had never stepped inside this store but there was a fair aisle sweater in the window that evoked pumpkin patches and PTA meetings and I liked it. I wandered around and felt shoppers and salespeople look at me, in a backless pencil skirted dress. Everyone in here might be pro-life but I didn’t want to leave. I didn’t know why. I just didn’t want to stop being in an in between place between my dad and my own life. I picked up a striped sweater that looked preserved from Annette Funicello’s Mickey Mouse Club wardrobe rack. A woman escorted me into a dressing room. I was tired from the night before but there’s something so soothing to me about a dressing room transformation. Different woman, different pain. Start with different top. Who am I now? Does me dress like the Mickey Mouse Club? Does me have no dad anymore?

The mirror said no sweater. As for dad, you had a feral thug who would be horrified that he was no longer splashed in Aramis cologne making the whole room laugh. At the first home, the ratio of women to men was extreme and he referred to it as “beaver island.” I appreciated the edgier material, but it wasn’t really him. The way the sweater wasn’t really me. What was I doing in this store?

I left and walked around, but for some reason, I made a freaking second trip into Talbot’s because the fall fantasy in the window called to me, again. This time I went for it, plus a weird MLFY cowl neck situation and why not, jeggings. A different woman intercepted me. Grayish shoulder length hair, not much make up, understated Talbot-y outfit. She put me in the dressing room and when I came out she stood there and gasped, “no one has ever made that sweater look sexy!” Looks like you just sold yourself a sweater, lady. Oh nooooo…I demured. She shook her head. I asked if she’d give her opinion on the other color. Absolutely, she nodded. I didn’t know this, but what I needed in that moment after leaving my dad, was laser sharp loving attention. Even if it was for mom knits. I showed her the other color, something in her face was so earnest, so heartfelt, I didn’t even care about figuring out the accuracy, her love had me by the shorthairs. It didn’t feel like selling love. It felt like kindness. Like pleasure. I tried on the fair aisle from the window. She shook her head, “it is also absolutely adorable!” We grinned, two basic lunatics in a Talbots. I was getting FREAKING SWEATERS. She looked around, made sure the coast was clear, and said, “I have a forty percent off coupon at the front. You were supposed to get it mailed, but I have one you can use.” I gasped. GET THE F OUT. Okay. We were getting jeggings and sweaters and looking towards a cozy future that hasn’t happened where I will be in knits and cuddled or meeting for a spicey cider thing not being up at 4 am making lists of VA hospitals with psych wards! I had crossed the rubicon into Talbot’s! Transformation complete!

She said, “wait, I have a Christmas one too!”

“What is your name?”

“Karen!” For real. Wow.

“Oh god, Karen,” I screamed at my new best friend, Karen from Talbots-“Bring me the Christmas one!!!!!!” This time last year I was wasting energy on cashmere to go out with a producer in Venice. But what my soul needed now, was the realest. What I needed was forty percent off coupons with Karen.

By the time I got up to the register (I passed on the Christmas one, only in petite it read real Susie Chapstick), I felt so easy with her that I had to say it:

“Karen, I was having a really rough day and this was just so lovely. Thank you.” She told me if I needed to return anything she’s always here. I think I could be here next week. This could be my thing. Dad. Then Talbots. In a month I’ll look like Nancy Reagan and the Orange County metamorphosis will be complete.

“Today was hard,” I continued, embarrassed but unable to stop. Recently someone (yes, a therapist) had told me my ‘work’ was to feel more and love myself for all those feelings (ugh). So here I was, tenderness and gratitude flying. I was on the autobahn of feelings, going a million miles an hour. It felt out of control, like I could crash, but I was going to do what I was told. Feel them, love myself for it, strangers in a mall be damned. “I dropped my dad off at a new memory care center so, thank you for this.” Just saying it choked me up. And before I uttered another word, Karen stopped what she was doing, looked me in the eye and said, “It is the hardest. I had to drop my mother off two years ago. She was so violent she threw a chair through a plate glass window at the other home and then she got kicked out.”

“My dad got kicked out!”

“We had to put her in a psych ward until we could a find a place in Cerritos. It was terrible. She had dementia. Brought on by alcoholism.” She said it with the same authenticity that had me buying a cowl neck. I felt compelled to share my personal theory. “I think agent orange!” I practically shouted.

We both nodded together.

“It is so hard,” she said. “I am so so so sorry.”

There was a force field between us as she looked at me from across the counter. She had packed my items, but the moment was easy. It was honest and painful, but easy.

“My mom died last year,” she said.

“I’m sorry.”

She shook her head. There was relief. I understood. This grieving, a water torture of sorts. Each shift in cognition, a drop on the forehead. The anxiety of anticipating which part will go next. Eroding my bearings, which led me to this mall. She told me about her hairdresser’s father who had LBD and wanted assisted suicide. I had been listening to my dad say he wanted to die for the past month. But as long as he could blink there’d be no assisting, my selfishness a surprise.

I almost walked away without the bag. I forgot that I was shopping. The woman at the other register next gave me an ‘are you okay?’ look. I recalibrated. Karen handed it to me. Yes. No. I didn’t know. But I was less lost than when I walked in.

Amy Turner has written for NBC, CBS, Freeform and the CW. It was this or ayahuasca.

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Activism, Guest Posts

Eating Animals: Confessions of a French Hypocrite

February 8, 2024

“The animals served here have been born, raised and butchered in France,” reads the hand-scrawled chalkboard on the wall opposite my cozy café table. I am reclining on the sofa of my favorite neighborhood bistro with my afternoon coffee.

What jarred me about this sign was the language, especially the last phrase that the animals are abbatus en France.” “Abbatus” means “slaughtered” but it stems from the word “battre”–to batter–in this case, to batter to death.

The owners of this establishment obviously do not expect their patrons to be discomfited by the reminder that the elegant meal on their plate had a painful death. And perhaps this is no wonder. On the street I live near Les Halles butcher shops exhibit entire rabbits sliced down the middle. They exhibit wracks of cow ribs the size of accordions. They exhibit chickens with their necks, heads, claws and feathers still attached. After all before becoming a shopping mall Les Halles was the food market of Paris—with rows of live animals displayed for human consumption.

If French people are often not squeamish about the sources of their food, I suspect many Americans are. I suspect that most of us set before a long-lashed, large-eyed, unblinking cow and asked if they wanted it killed and stuck between two patties, would decline. It is largely by disguising and distancing the process of killing that this process can continue.

200 million animals are slaughtered for food every day worldwide and yet normal persons living normal lives will never set foot on a factory farm. They will never witness so much as a family farm. They will never make an emotional connection between the ketchup-covered quarter pounder on their dinner plate and the ambling, meditative, peculiarly human animal on the field.

And even should they make the connection, they will persuade themselves—as I regularly persuade myself—that they are powerless to change the order of things. The cow, the sheep, the deer, the chicken, the rabbit is already dead; there is no bringing it back to life by depriving oneself of the pleasure of consuming it with a tasty condiment.

There was a single time in my life that I was consistently vegetarian. That was when I made my home, for some months, in a remote and rural village in Greece. I knew, there, that when I ordered a piece of mutton, the chef would repair to the back of his taverna, slit a lamb’s throat, skin it and stick it on the spit to grill. Perhaps he did not do it on the very same night but he certainly did it the day before and the day after. The chain of supply and demand was impossible to overlook. So for the time I lived in Greece the only thing I ate off a spit was grilled eggplant, grilled tomatoes and grilled peppers. And I might say they were delicious.

When I returned to “civilization” in Paris my behavior (by my own standards) deteriorated instantaneously; I returned to buying pre-packaged meats from the supermarket and ordering “steak tartare”, (raw ground beef with some spices and an egg on it.) After all, the deed was done; the creature was dead and I might as well eat it. What was the use of grandstanding, of proclaiming virtuous abstinence when there was nothing to be salvaged, nothing to be gained, basically, but an ego boost?

The paradoxical relationship between humans and animals is a subject that demands far more reflection than it has received. Almost everybody proclaims to love animals. In first-world countries certain animals are emperors. People pamper their pooches and groom their kittens often more than they pamper or groom themselves. Pet spas and suites are a booming business in the United States and elsewhere.

And yet the moment you are not the right species, all bets are off. No matter that most mammals share comparable sensitivities and intelligences, if you’re the wrong kind of mammal chances are you spend your short life imprisoned in cells hardly bigger than your body, that you are experimented upon, factory farmed, hunted, killed and eaten, as opposed to coddled and cuddled.

As a child it was always explained to me that animals were inferior to human beings and that therefore we had the right to kill them. Never mind that the opposite argument was made to me as well: animals killed each other so we—being animals too—had the right to do unto them what they did unto each other. On one hand we were equal to animals and so we could kill them with impunity; on the other hand we were superior to animals and so we could also kill them with impunity. Talking about self-serving logic.

Now that I am no longer a child but rather have a child of my own, a child who has been raised on stories of pigs and elephants (Wilbur of Charlotte’s Web and Dumbo of Disney), deer (as in Bambi) and monkeys (as in Curious George), rabbits (as in Thumper), bears (as in Winnie the Pooh), ducks (as in the Ugly Duckling) , mice as in Mickey Mouse and chickens (as in Chicken Little), I am paralyzed with fear of having to explain to her one day that all these animals she loves we routinely kill. Some of these animals she has already eaten. How many chicken wings has she happily gnawed on already, not knowing where they came from.

Nor does the tale end with storybooks; there are also stuffed animals, the fuzzy beasts my daughter goes to sleep with, around whom she throws her chubby arms and in whose soft embraces she drifts off into dreamland.

Why is it that human beings seem—for many practical and pedagogic purposes—to prefer animals of different species to animals of their own species—and simultaneously to butcher them? Why is it that for every Little Red Riding Hood there are a hundred Porky Pigs, for every Raggedy Ann there are a dozen furry cartoon rabbits–if not because we adore these animals—often better than we do our own kind?

But what message do we send children when we teach them to adore them as well—and simultaneously to accept their murder?

Is it really so incomprehensible that a certain number of children turn violent as they grow older, that many young adults become desensitized to the pain of the creatures they once considered their best friends? It is testimony to our ability to compartmentalize that we do not become even more cynical about loving relationships as we grow older. After all, many of us learned to love by learning to love our animals—be they in our cribs or on our doormats, in our storybooks or in our I-pad movies.

I wish I had the answers to all of these problems but the fact is I don’t. I myself have a carnivorous palate. If I consulted my taste buds alone I would live off of foie gras and steak tartare.

I would like to think, however that taste buds do not prevail over morals and that—as someone once memorably said— “I will not kill any animal that is afraid to die”—nor, either, will I accept to be complicitous in its killing.

I suspect that history will one day judge us for the destruction we have wreaked upon the animal world in a comparable way that history has judged slaveholders for holding slaves and Nazis for gassing Jews.

Indeed, the late Nobel-prize-winning Jewish author, Isaac Bashevis Singer has had the protagonist of his story, The Letter Writer, declare that “all people are Nazis” in relation to animals. “For the animals, every day is Treblinka,” Herman Gombiner asserts—he who (like Singer himself) has lost several family members in concentration camps.

France is not going to become a vegetarian oasis for some time. After all, it was only in 1976—considerably less than 50 years ago!–that animals were declared to be “sentient beings”—as opposed to machines or merchandise–by Article L214 -1 of the French rural code. (There is now an animal rights’ organization in France called “L214: Ethique et Animaux.” dedicated to eliminating the “worst” forms of treatment, transport and slaughter of animals and to move toward a vegetable-based diet. And yet if there are vegetarian restaurants in Paris they remain (as in most of the world) anomalies. And if there’s a meatless sausage in a natural foods store it’s still cause for remark—generally disdainful.

The last time I went to that local bistro of mine, however, the blackboard proclaiming the local “battery” of animals had been taken down. It may be an accident but I’m going to be optimistic. Perhaps it is progress. Perhaps Parisians are starting, slowly, to become sensitive to the quotidian cruelty of their culinary practices. Perhaps not only the French but the rest of us, too, will one day put principles before palates. I can’t help hoping.

Cristina Nehring has written both books and articles for the NYT, the WSJ, tha Atlantic, Harper’s, Oprah, Elle and NY Magazine. Her first of three books, A Vindication of Love, made it onto the cover of the New York Times Book Review. Find Cristina online at www.cristinanehring.com.

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Ode to the Motel

February 5, 2024

If, as John Cheever once noted, America’s train stations and air terminals are its true cathedrals, motels may be it’s shrines. And if not part of America’s soul, they are certainly part of its circulatory system. Or they were—but I’ll get to that later. The motel was one consequence of the mass-produced automobile, beginning with Henry Ford’s Model T, which gave average citizens the means to chuck—however temporarily—a mundane, shackled life and, as expressed by one of the most resonant phrases in American English, “hit the road.” By the nineteen-teens, many could use their vacations to motor into America’s tradition of nomadic independence, traveling well off the crowded and beaten tracks of mass transportation. Theoretically at least, they could go anywhere in their vast country, at any hour they pleased, for a week or so. Pile the family into the flivver, and it was Goodbye Grundy Center, hello St. Louie. They were pioneers, voyageurs, desperadoes. Escape from the humdrum—the true American Dream.

At first, people needed outdoor gear, for what came to be called “auto camping,” which involved simply pitching a tent by the roadside at night or, later , stopping at a public camp ground. The romantic term for this kind of travel was “gypsying” or “hoboing” (putting aside the fact that real hoboes preferred to take the train). But then, one fine day, at the end of 200 or so sweltering, noise polluted, kidney-tilting miles, behold: backlighted by a Horse Cave, Kentucky, sunset, there it was—Wigwam Village, a set of nine identical cabin-sized cones made of steel, wood, and canvas, arranged to look like a Native American campground, including rest rooms for “squaws” and “braves.” It was one of the earlier motels, built in 1933, when they were often known by such terms as “tourist cabins,” “auto courts,” or “motor hotels.” Scholars disagree on when the first motel appeared, but by 1935 America boasted nearly 10,000, and that was just for starters.

But what distinguished a motel from a hotel, besides the device known as “Magic Fingers,” which, as I recall from my childhood, would make the bed vibrate noisily for about 10 minutes, when it worked? So what if nothing even close to magic or even fingers was involved: it smacked of Scheherazade, and it only cost a quarter. In their heyday, over 250,000 Magic Fingers pulsated bedsprings along America’s highways. But motels involved more than a vibrating bed. Originally, a motel was a place where you could drive right off the highway and up to your room, without having to deal with snooty bellhops and valets. Add to those features the regular sound of trucks blasting by, headlight beams sweeping back and forth behind oilcloth drapes that would never quite close, and, after someone got the bright idea of joining all the cabins into one unit, walls that seemed thin enough to function as giant speaker diaphragms. If your lodging included all or most the above, you knew you were in a motel. The writer Denis Johnson has pinpointed the essence of motel room décor as that which makes the room still seem vacant when you’re inside. But if the décor was often stark and the architecture an afterthought (with some exceptions like those motels built in a style called “Streamline Modern”), most motels had their own identities, thanks to some little touches here and there—if only a weird paint job or a stuffed bird collection. And though many were named after their owners or fancy hotels—the Ritz, the Plaza—there evolved the uniquely motel name. Ever run across a hotel called The No-Tell? The Covert? The Air-O-Tel ? the Bo-Peep? The Lame Duck? Or, my favorite, The Purple Heart, with its dual suggestion of romantic passion and combat wounds? Not a chance. There was also the distinctive bouquet de motel of stale cigarette smoke, carpet mold, toilet sanitizer—and beneath that, a soupcon of diesel fumes and feet.

One other important distinction: The motel was usually near or outside the city limits and was constructed and operated to offer greater freedom and privacy than the busier, more supervised hotel. Consequently, it wasn’t long till the family-oriented ambience of the motel became mixed with something darker. “What better place to take my girl for some heavy petting?” some horny 1920’s college kid must have realized. “What better place to have an affair?” someone else thought. Then those others must have joined the brainstorming, the ones who asked, “What better place to take a break while fleeing an interstate police dragnet?” or to go where no one else has ever gone with rubber, leather, and handcuffs? Or to saw that cumbersome dead body into something suitcase-size?” And so, motels became, at least in the words of a young J. Edgar Hoover, “camps of crime,” or, more popularly and colorfully “hot pillow joints.” Add to the pot the traveling salesman’s discovery of this cheaper, more convenient place to stay and the motel’s distinctive profile is complete.

And wouldn’t you know the arts would stick their noses into the motel’s shadier aspects. Where did Gable and Colbert go in the film It Happened One Night to pull down what they called the “Walls of Jericho”? Where was Norman Bates inspired to make Mom proud and easy to store? Don’t forget that scene in Bonnie and Clyde, where Warren Beatty and Fay Dunaway reenact the real Barrow family’s tourist cabin shootout with the cops. And what do you recall goes on in the famous motel scene in Orson Wells’ Touch of Evil or in the cult classic Motel Hell? But it wasn’t just the movies. Humbert took Lolita to a motel (there were also two movies of that book). As for musical influences, just punch up “motel” on the All Music Guide web site, and you’ll find songs like “Motel Sex,” “Motel Party Baby,” “Motel Street Meltdown.” There’ve been enough similarly-titled poems about motels written in this country to make a genre. And don’t you get the feeling there’s something creepy going on just out side the frame in Edward Hopper’s painting of that woman sitting in a motel room with a Buick Road master staring in the window?

But despite, or perhaps partly because of the real and imagined dark sides, motels remained popular outposts for middle-class America’s escape onto the open road. If the people in the next room looked a little feral, so much heartier the adventure.

In 1954, my family and I experienced what turned into a total-motel vacation. We were going to drive to the Grand Canyon from our home in Omaha. However, being shut up 10 hours a day in a small compartment with his whole family became too much for my father. A mere one hundred miles from our destination, following through on a threat he’d uttered earlier, he turned back, completing the first half of a connect-the-dots, motel to motel foray, from The Big Chief to The Rio Siesta and on and on, including one my father described as being “as close to hell as I ever want to be.” And he’d been in the War. What vacation could be more American?

But for children, motel stops were often the highlight of vacation traveling. Grim as it might have been, the Cactus Motel-Camp could seem like an oasis after spending the day in the back seat rereading comic books and being told, alternately, to stop shoving little sister and stop kicking the back of Daddy’s seat. What former kid can’t recall the amusingly empty threat that “If you keep that up, I’m going to turn this car around right here, and we’ll go home!” Well, empty most of the time. But lets face it : to most kids, a dip in a brackish swimming pool after two bottles of orange Neha from a rusty, top-opening soda machine bested any number of so-called natural wonders. Add to that a snowy, flickering Lucy rerun on a rabbit-eared TV in a room rich in what was termed “refrigerated air,” then top it all off with a bedtime ride on the Magic Fingers magic carpet, and could Munchkins be far behind?

Of course if you’ve stayed in a motel lately, all of this must sound a little unfamiliar. That’s because of two developments, both of which began escalating in the early 1960’s: the interstate highway system and the Holiday Inn corporation. Remember the problem Norman Bates had at the beginning of Psycho? The Bates Motel was usually vacant.

Because almost all the traffic took the “new highway,” no doubt an interstate. Norman and the other independent moteliers were not only bypassed by the interstates but, due to limited-access regulations and, later, Lady Bird Johnson’s campaign against highway clutter, they were often prohibited from putting up signs to tell motorists where to find them. No problem, of course, for the wealthy and influential Holiday Inn and copy-cat mega-franchises, who have tamed the motel into something safe, clean, efficient, and, of course, standardized. Signs aplenty for them. Motels have been made part of what’s called “the hospitality industry,” and most of the ones common folk can afford to stay in are as boring and interchangeable as industrially carpeted cinder blocks, the last places you would associate with “gypsying.” And the line between hotels and motels has gone wobbly at best. You can now find a 10-or-more-story Holiday Inn in the middle of practically any American city. Most of the incorporated motels, which now cater mainly to corporate customers, don’t even use the m-word, preferring that substitute which offers an absolutely false implication of comfy intimacy among traveling strangers. Would Chaucer’s pilgrims have been so relaxed and chatty starting out from the Airport Comfort Inn?

So, though you can still find authentic motels in any of the 50 states, they’re disappearing into pop culture history, along with America’s most motel-friendly highway, our beloved Route 66. But don’t blame Lady Bird or Holiday Inn. We’re the ones who, even in the days of tourist cabins, kept choosing comfort, cleanliness, and reliability over a little roughness, grunge, and adventure. Now, on the interstate, it’s often hard to tell what state you’re in without looking at the small print on the standardized red-and-blue signs. Even the signs that tell you what gas stations restaurants, and motels, are ahead are standardized, as are most of the gas stations, restaurants, and motels. The day may come when you can pull your lozenge-shaped auto up to an interstate McDonalds anywhere in the country and be served by a red-haired, affable kid named, let’s say, Tim, who’ll give you the same polite howdy in Poukeepsie that he did in Minot. When he greets you by name and asks what it’ll be, all you’ll have to say is, “The usual, Tim.” He’ll be electric, of course. Maybe you’ll be, too. So farewell, Purple Heart. Adios, Wigwam Village. We wish we could have been better gypsies.

John Kucera was educated at Carlow University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. His work has appeared in New Reader Magazine, The Sandy River Review, Utopia Science Fiction, Slant, Connections Magazine and Friends Journal. He currently lives in Phoenix, Arizona, where he writes and teaches.

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Guest Posts, Relationships

This is where it ends

January 21, 2024

In February 2019, two days after my son’s bar mitzvah, my mother was diagnosed with stage four ovarian cancer. A year later, in March 2020, she left her house for the last time on her own two feet to attend my daughter’s bat mitzvah. Four months later, she died.

The progression seems straightforward: diagnosis, illness, death. But that doesn’t factor in seventeen months of treatment, surgery, emergency room visits, and the emotional impact of dealing with the disease. There is nothing simple about watching the person you love most in the world endure chemotherapy and their slow withdrawal from society. There is nothing simple about watching the person who gave you life die.

Eva Evelyn Ellis married Philip Sonny Matlin at the age of eighteen, had her first child at nineteen and two more by the time she was twenty-five. I came along six years later. Despite marrying into my father’s upper-class family, she remained down-to-earth and kept the frugal mindset of someone raised among modest means during the post-war years, even though her own father later found success as a tailor.

Eva, who went by Evelyn, or Evy, her entire adult life, was an excellent mother, filled with a kind of patience that as a teen I assumed was magically bestowed upon you when you had children. She was even-tempered, warm, and intelligent, with a wicked sense of humour and an armory of solid advice. It didn’t matter what kind of trouble my siblings got into, I rarely saw her lose her cool. She dealt with things calmly, never raising her voice. She was nurturing and loved to laugh. She appreciated a good joke and would sometimes surprise me with one of her own. During one of her many ER visits, a doctor told an offensive riddle (“What’s the difference between a bull and woman with PMS? Lipstick.”) and my mother, half-conscious and fevered, snapped back, “What’s similar about men and tile floors? Lay them right the first time and you can walk all over them for the rest of your life.”

But mostly, when I try to conjure up an image of my mother, I see her lying on the left side of the double bed she shared with my father for sixty-two years, a box of drugstore chocolates on her lap, beckoning me to join her so we could either watch TV together or she could listen to my latest drama.

On top of being a mother to four, she obtained a university degree in her thirties, returned to school to get certified as a forensic document examiner, then ran her own business while helping my father run his. And she did it all with seeming ease and a quiet grace.

It seems incredible, and it was, but unbeknownst to me at the time, she sacrificed large parts of herself to do it. She strove to be the ideal wife and mother then harboured some serious regrets about it. An unintentional result of her actions was setting an extraordinarily high bar for her children. It was implicitly understood that we, her children, were meant to behave in a certain way.

As warm and patient as she was, my mother could also be judgmental. She had a strict no smoking or drug policy, was never shy to remark on someone’s weight, and had zero tolerance when people did things she disagreed with–even when it had nothing to do with her. She once came close to ending a lifelong friendship because she disapproved of her friend’s choice of partner. For a teenager growing up in her home, all of this felt restrictive, an impediment to getting into the kind of trouble I was supposed to get into at that age.

As a result, I developed a dual personality early in life. There was the person I was, and then the person I was with my mother. I hid the parts of me I thought might disappoint her, like my much older friends, my mild promiscuity, and my experimentation with drugs and alcohol. Once, in eighth grade, my best friend’s mother found half a joint in the toilet and called a meeting for all our parents. We were a gang of five girls and my mother sat with the other mothers and listened in disbelief to what we’d been up to. She could not fathom that I would have had any part in it, to the point she stood up and said, “Julie doesn’t do any of those things.”

The joint wasn’t even ours–it belonged to my friend’s brother. But it gathered all those parents in one room to exchange stories, which succeeded in shattering the illusion of the perfect daughter for my mother. When she got home that night, the look on her face and the quiet disapproval was enough for me to quit smoking cigarettes on the spot. I told my friends I did it on a bet, but the truth was, I couldn’t bear having that mark against me in my mother’s book. (Although there was a bet, and I won ten bucks.) The irony isn’t lost on me that in her attempt to model a certain behaviour, I ended up emulating the wrong one. Instead of becoming the person she tried to present, I developed her habit of splitting myself in two.

Years ago, one of my siblings tried explaining to me that my mother wasn’t the perfect being I thought she was. The theory was that our mother lived in a state of conflict, torn between who she was and who she thought she should be. I couldn’t see it at the time. I saw my mother through a lens coloured with love and tinged with worship. It was only after her death that the pieces fell into place, and by that time, it was too late.

Seventeen months passed in the blink of an eye, despite spending several eternities in hospital waiting rooms. Knowing our time would be short, I assumed the role of primary caregiver. I wanted to spend every second possible with her. I lived and breathed doctors appointments, chemo sessions, blood tests, and runs to Walmart to ensure a steady supply of Ensure. My own well-being fell by the wayside as I abandoned home-cooked meals for the McDonalds drive-thru, developing a cheeseburger habit I still can’t kick to this day.

Life at home suffered. My daughter’s grades fell and I wasn’t there for my son, who was taking his bubby’s illness almost as hard as I was. So many times he reached out to me, coming down past midnight seeking comfort, and all I could do was cry along with him.

My mother landed in palliative care in June 2020, at the height of the first pandemic lockdown. Only four of us were allowed to visit her, and only two at a time. We were required to get into full gear–gowns, masks, face shields, latex gloves–and not allowed to touch her. I was there every day, save one, and over the course of less than two weeks, her decline was fast, stark, and cruel.

The last day I saw her, I knew she wasn’t going to see morning. She had stopped eating and was on oxygen, but clearly she’d had a stroke in the night. She could no longer speak or move, and when the nurse came in to try to adjust her pillow, she winced in pain.

I stayed longer that day, from early morning until past dinnertime. I held her hand and played her favourite music. I read her notes that people had sent for her. I recited a few of her favourite Sedaris essays, read from the book I was adapting into a screenplay, and rued that I hadn’t brought along any Chaucer, her favourite (“The lyf so short, the craft so long to lerne.”).

Before I left, I stopped at the side of her bed. All my life, there was always a place for me in my mother’s bed. Even in my forties, when she was home between chemo sessions, we’d lie there and watch Judge Judy. There was nothing I wanted in that moment more than to be able to climb in with her one last time, to seek comfort from the woman who always provided it so freely and with such skill. I wanted to cradle myself in the curve of her body, feel her arm come down around me and pull me in close, her chin resting on the top of my head. Be safe in that place where nothing else could touch me.

But it was just a fantasy. There was no way I could get in there without causing her enormous pain. The tables had irrevocably turned. It was no longer her job to comfort me, but mine to comfort her.

We never had an end of life conversation, but at that moment, I looked down at her and said, “Don’t worry, Mummy. We’re going to be fine. I’m going to be fine. And I am going to do great things. I promise you will be so proud of me.”

Two years later, I cringe to think that in my last moments with her I was still desperate for her approval. That instead of my being there being enough, I qualified myself and told her that I would make her proud. While it’s normal for a child to seek their parent’s approval, this was something I never outgrew. I used to ask, “Are you proud of me?” so often it became a family joke. Every accomplishment punctuated by a “We’re so proud,” every birthday card signed the same way.

Today, diagnosed and medicated, I can recognize that desperation as early manifestations of my anxiety, but what did we know from anxiety in the seventies and eighties? And by the time the nineties rolled around, the whole routine was already inscribed in our family DNA.

I never understood how deeply this affected the relationship I had with my mother; that because I never felt I was enough, I was chasing after her love and approval. Now, it’s so clear to me that I didn’t have to do anything to earn it. I simply had to be. I, as her daughter, was enough. It haunts me that I failed to grasp this during her lifetime, but at the same time, I’m angry that she was unable to show me that she was fallible, too. That she had made mistakes and had regrets and was human just like all of us. Just like I was.

Now I find myself in the painful position of having to tease apart the love I felt for her from the extraordinary weight of it. I have to own the perverse sense of relief I felt when she died, the knowledge that I was free to just be me, without fear of disappointing anyone.

Julie Matlin is writer based in Montreal, Canada with pieces appearing in the New York Times, The Washington Post, The Globe and Mail, Huffington Post, and other publications. She is working on an essay collection entitled Such a Nice Jewish Girl, which is being supported by a Canada Council for the Arts grant, as well as two screenplays which are currently in development. You can see my entire portfolio here: www.juliematlin.com.

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Fiction, Guest Posts

Firefly

December 26, 2023

Missy caught the firefly in mid-air, cupping her hands around it to form a tiny, dark cave. She could feel the insect’s delicate footsteps tickling her skin as it wandered across her palm, searching for a way out.

“Got you!” she whispered, victorious.

It was almost dark. The sunset was nothing but a burnt orange smear on the horizon. Usually, her backyard would be a brilliant starscape of twinkling golden lights at this hour. But tonight, there was just one lonely firefly hovering around the garden.

Missy lifted her hands to her face and opened them just enough to peek inside. A soft yellow glow spilled out, reflecting in her pupil like an ember.

“Hey, there,” she said. “How come you’re all by yourself? Are you lost?”

The light brightened, then dimmed.

Missy looked around her yard for something she could use to hold the firefly. A jar, maybe, or a glass that she could turn upside down on the table. Something she could keep her newfound friend in so that it wouldn’t fly away. She wanted to show it to her sister, Helena. She had to.

Helena was sick. She wore a silk scarf with an elaborate pattern of colorful swirls wound around her head and had a special plastic band on her wrist that told the doctors what medicine she could take. She had been in the hospital for a long time, but the doctors finally sent her home to rest. Once a day, a nurse came in to check on her. No more doctors, though. She didn’t need them anymore.

Missy wasn’t allowed in Helena’s room. It was too full of tubes and wires, and machines that hissed and beeped all night. Missy snuck in anyway. She would bring in flowers, or pretty speckled rocks, or whatever objects she could find that might brighten her sister’s day. She would leave them on the nightstand for her to find when she woke. If she woke. Sometimes, she slept all day.

Missy glanced over her shoulder at her house. The whole place was dark except for her sister’s room. Missy could see her mother inside, framed in the bright light of the window. Her face was in her hands. Her shoulders rose and fell in sorrowful waves.

Missy heard the back screen door squeak open. Her father’s face appeared in the dim circle of illumination cast by the porch light. His cheeks glistened.

“Missy? We need you to come in now, okay? We –” His voice hitched in his throat. “We need to talk.”

“Okay, Dad!” Missy called. “One second!”

The screen door squealed shut.

Missy opened her hand and looked at the firefly.

“You can go,” she said quietly. “I won’t keep you.”

The firefly walked to the tip of her finger and perched there for a moment as if considering whether to fly away. Its glow pulsed once in silent farewell.

Then it took flight, rising skyward until its light became one with the moon.

*This piece was originally published in 2020 on Furious Fiction.

Warren Benedetto writes dark fiction about horrible people, horrible places, and horrible things. He is an award-winning author and a full member of the SFWA. His stories have appeared in publications such as Dark Matter Magazine, The Dread Machine, and Haven Spec; on podcasts such as The NoSleep Podcast, Tales to Terrify, and The Creepy Podcast; and in anthologies from Apex Magazine, Scare Street, Eerie River Publishing, and more. He also works in the video game industry, where he holds 35+ game technology patents. For more information, visit warrenbenedetto.com and follow @warrenbenedetto on Twitter and Instagram.

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Guest Posts, writing

Fake It ’Til You Make It

December 16, 2023

For most of my twenties, I was a magical thinker. During this period of my life, I was reading a lot of self-help books, including the best-selling The Secret, and though I was in a Ph.D. program to study physiology for five years, The Secret had me believing I could do anything, have anything, be anything; all I had to do was ask the universe.

If becoming financially free was only a matter of making requests of the cosmos’ abundant piggy bank and holding my desires in my mind, why wouldn’t I ask to become a millionaire by thirty? Why stop there? Why couldn’t I write a commercial novel that would shoot to the top of bestsellers lists with the velocity of a Dan Brown thriller?

The spell began to break when my thirtieth birthday came and went and my wishes hadn’t been fulfilled: I wasn’t rich. My novel hadn’t attracted an agent; instead, I self-published. And like most of my friends, my talents were being exploited for profit in Corporate America. What had happened? How had I been so easily duped by The Secret’s tantalizing messages?

I later realized I was predisposed to the state of mind self-help books exploit.

When I was younger, my parents—especially my father—had a cliché for everything. For struggle, he claimed, “Where there’s a will, there’s a way;” for pain, “What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger;” for trauma, “Let the past be the past.” On birthdays, he’d announce half-kiddingly, “Today is the first day of the rest of your life.” His adages helped inform him, instruct him, and inspire him.

They did the same for me in adolescence and into early adulthood. Like my parents, I had a motto or cliché ready for most situations. For work: “A rolling stone gathers no moss.” For hardship: “Don’t worry; be happy.” For imposter syndrome: “Fake it ’til you make it.” To pay homage to my father, I collected his favorite axioms into a book, Life According to Dad, and gave it to him for Father’s Day.

Using clichés to guide my life worked until my late twenties, when they began to lose their potency. After graduating with a master’s degree, I became a marketing writer for businesses and nonprofits in Boston. I lived in the city, working on complex problems with smart people from diverse backgrounds, most of whom didn’t view the world through rose-colored glasses.

I’ve been an idea person throughout my career. Many of my ideas, which can often be categorized as “big picture,” have been implemented in anything from advertising campaigns and event themes to product names and product messaging. But whenever I used clichés to propose a solid idea in the workplace, others took me less seriously. Without acknowledging potential unintended consequences, I might come off as unrealistic, impractical, or too rosy.

I once helped build and drive the vision for a company’s blog, but I underestimated the time and technical resources needed to develop and maintain it. At lunch, I reflected on the process and dropped a quote from Napoleon Hill’s Think and Grow Rich: “Whatever the mind of man can conceive and believe, it can achieve.” My coworkers thought I was naïve, perhaps even delusional.

Clichés had helped structure my way of thinking, but they had become inadequate. They didn’t reflect the complex environments and circumstances of my adulthood. After a period of disillusionment, I knew I had to change. I started questioning the clichés and the way I dealt with reality.

Clichés, I realized, were too biased toward the positive at the expense of potential dark possibilities. When “times get tough,” it’s not always easy for the “tough” to “get going.” Sometimes, we’re just flat-out beat, and it’s wise to retreat, regroup, and reflect so we can “fight another day.” I was always told to “keep my head up,” but sometimes it’s tough not to lower it in defeat. While “smooth seas never made for skillful sailors,” storms hurt and can even break us.

Clichés no longer rang true for me because life wasn’t always easy or sunny. Reality didn’t always bend to my will. I pursued my goals, but they were tougher to achieve than I expected. I took wrong turns. Systems were unfair; folks were unkind. People let me down, insulted me, betrayed me.

In my late twenties and early thirties, I started accepting that life is as much disaster as triumph. We don’t always get into the school or program we seek. The job or career we want might not want us. Love can go unrequited. Financial setbacks happen. Accidents occur. Illness can strike. People lie. People die. By encouraging us to always stay positive, the clichés deny the reality we must face.

I eventually found a way to deliver my first death blow to the clichés that ran my life: therapy. My therapist was a social worker and a psychoanalytically-informed therapist not much older than me, so we were dealing with similar life-stage problems. His approach didn’t involve dispensing advice as a life coach might. Rather, he encouraged his patients to evaluate their reality objectively. To see themselves clearly. When people thought critically about themselves and their circumstances, they didn’t need advice, he reasoned, because they would know what to do.

Following his guidance, I realized my parents had raised me in a rather uncritical environment. Their philosophy was to “let sleeping dogs lie.” We avoided reflecting on pesky matters like what made us sad or mad lest we make things worse and cause new problems. For instance, if I had asked my parents about their divorce, they wouldn’t understand why I couldn’t leave well enough alone.

Such an uncritical environment ensures that nobody ever thinks about anything. And if someone doesn’t know what they think about something, they don’t know how they feel about it either. Using clichés is a way to avoid thinking. “Leave the past in the past” was the perfect countermeasure to talking about the trauma of my parents’ divorce. Clichés robbed us of the chance to acknowledge it. They robbed us of the chance to heal so the pain wouldn’t resurface in inexplicable ways, like overwork or substance abuse.

Despite the importance of thinking, therapy taught me that thinking is difficult, another reason some might want to avoid it. It takes time and energy to think through complicated matters, and people are always having to expand their vocabulary for puzzling issues.

Thinking is also messy. A person seldom comes to a complete understanding of the issues they face. Before therapy, whenever I might have reached the edge of my understanding, I’d employ a cliché that approximated my thoughts or feelings on the matter. But in therapy, I checked my clichés at the door. I was pushed to find words for how I thought or felt about events or people that troubled me. I rambled and talked nonsense, but insights came. Sometimes, we would unlock something that had been a mystery.

Living and working in rural New Hampshire, where my parents have spent their entire adult lives, is simpler. One can often get away with using clichés to navigate and interpret life in such rural settings. In the city, however, where I’ve worked in modern offices, life isn’t black and white but shades of gray. Negotiating city and corporate life requires more complex systems of thought. While rural life might lead to simplistic thinking, city life can lead folks to become critical and cynical.

I wanted to evolve past my uncritical origins, but I didn’t want to go too far in the other direction and become a coldhearted cynic or nihilist. I still wanted to believe I had some control over my life. I just needed to find values, systems, and worldviews that accepted that life was sometimes unfair, often indifferent to our wishes, and actively resistant to our desires.

Enter the second death blow to living a clichéd life: philosophy or the love of wisdom. In my thirties, I replaced new-age and self-help guides with philosophy. I read books on Eastern philosophy, like Lao Tzu’s Tao Te Ching and Confucius’s Analects, and on Western philosophy, like Plato’s Republic and Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations. I joined philosophy groups, watched documentaries, and read biographies on Friedrich Nietzsche, Viktor Frankl, and Jean-Paul Sartre, among others.

Stoic philosophy was undergoing a resurgence at the time, and the tradition helped me cope with day-to-day challenges. For example, stoics believe that events don’t harm people as much as their judgments of the events do. Marcus Aurelius, a Roman emperor, encourages readers not to worry about things outside their control; instead, they should act on things within their control. Stoics also recommend living in accordance with one’s nature. If someone is athletic, they should do athletic things. If they’re brainy, they should do intellectual things. Such philosophy equipped me for life while also allowing me to accept its complexities.

Philosophy also helped me manage the dread that started to creep in as I approached midlife: knowing I was going to die one day. Enter existentialism.

The philosophical tradition of existentialism has been described as less a school of thought and more a mood or attitude toward life. It deals with matters such as anxiety, death, authenticity, isolation, and the search for meaning in one’s existence. More than any other philosophical tradition, existentialism has helped me address the realization that life lacks intrinsic meaning.

“No why. Just here,” as the composer and philosopher, John Cage, put it when Life magazine asked him about the meaning of life.

Faced with this understanding, I had to invent meaning for my life to avoid despair. But how? Jean-Paul Sartre’s idea that humans are radically free was both terrifying and exhilarating. According to him, “existence precedes essence.” In other words, no one is born with innate character traits. Rather, we construct who we are with every choice we make.

Albert Camus also agreed that life has no intrinsic meaning and reasoned it was absurd to seek meaning from a universe indifferent to our desires. He urges us to rebel against life’s absurdity by finding meaning in our relationships, our families, and our projects. In his famous essay The Myth of Sisyphus, Camus compares life’s absurdity to the punishment of Sisyphus, a figure in Greek mythology who was condemned to spend eternity rolling a boulder up a mountain, only for it to roll back down whenever he neared the summit. While Sisyphus was punished to forever perform a meaningless activity, Camus suggests that perhaps Sisyphus could find some joy in the absurdity of rolling the boulder. Maybe Sisyphus could even learn to be happy in his fate.

Once I accepted that the only meaning my life would have was the meaning I gave it, I began to engage in meaningful activities I found enjoyable, like writing: the final death blow to living a clichéd life.

Back when I started writing in my late twenties, I fell into every possible cliché trap. Let’s say I was writing a fictional action sequence where the hero confronts the villain, his former mentor, in a dramatic climax. In their final duel, the hero might get off a perfect shot, fatally wounding the villain.

“Great shot,” the villain might say, holding a hand over his bleeding stomach.

In that moment, the hero would likely say something like, “I learned from the best.”

Alas, I couldn’t keep that. It’s a cliché! And they are off-limits for writers. Why? A cliché might once have conveyed a truth, but readers have encountered it so often in movies and books, it no longer has the impact it used to. Through study and practice, I’ve learned that all good writing is a never-ending war on clichés. A writer must always search for fresh language. If I accidentally employ a cliché—which happens often—I strike it out in revision. This practice of avoiding clichés on the page has found its way into my life.

When I reflect on my evolution from a magical to a critical thinker, I realize that using clichés for so long allowed me to rely on the wisdom of others while I figured out who I was and what I thought. They gave me something to hold on to during the painstaking process of updating how I viewed and thought about myself and the world.

Now, in my late thirties, I realize the cost of not relying on clichés. They allowed me to avoid the difficult task of thinking. They allowed me to deny reality, which can be difficult to see clearly. Ignorance was bliss. Without clichés, life is messier, more nuanced, and sometimes incomprehensible. But “the truth hurts,” right?

Dustin Grinnell is a writer based in Boston. He’s the author of the short story collection, The Healing Book (Finishing Line Press), and host of the podcast, Curiously. His creative nonfiction has appeared in The Los Angeles Review of Books, The Boston Globe, The Washington Post, New Scientist, Vice, Salon, Hektoen International, and Writer’s Digest, among others. This story appears in his collection of essays, Lost & Found, which forthcoming with The Peter Lang Group. See more of his work at his website.

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Statement on Black Lives Matter and support for social change

Guest Posts, Fiction

Jack-in-the-Box

December 10, 2023

The white car pulls up super close behind me at the light. Kind of a shit car, but hey, this ain’t utopia, we can’t all have fuel cell electric vehicles. It’s California. But in my California, cars space out at lights, often leaving room for a whole nother car between them, like they’re waiting in line at the doctor’s office or the bank and don’t want to intrude on, overhear the private details of whatever condition, slow burning contagion, almost negative balance, or end-of-life indicating pain in the side that has brought them to this crossroads. This guy must think he’s immortal. The driver’s head doesn’t move. What’s his problem? It’s a long light, no use in fighting it.

I open my window, smell cinnamon rolls on the breeze. A crow lands on a power line, inspecting us. There’s a lemon tree by the side of the road. Meyer lemon. The lemons, they look like breasts, they look like testacles, they look like grenades. The light changes. I power the window closed. Two lanes feeding the 101 ease to the left and down the highway entrance ramp. I’m in the right lane on a gradual acceleration. The white car doesn’t pass but stays locked on my bumper.

He’ll get bored with this game. Must be on his phone. Jackass. Maybe girl trouble or something. Or just trusting me not to run into something, keeping an eye on my bumper. Whatever. Yeah, probably girl or boy trouble. Lover trouble. Is it, the thrill is gone or raw jealousy? Poor guy either way. Like is it better to be settled and bored, or in-play and enraged by paranoid visions of infidelity? Apathetic or angry? Coward or paranoid? I’d like to think I don’t know which I am, that by intellectualizing it I can abstract myself from participating in this bullshit.

Still there. 45 mph and climbing. Could it be a woman, driving like that? But I can’t see him– them. It’s a basic white Kia with dark windows. Looks like they’ve got their seat reclined to full blowjob, ball cap on backwards, eyes just over the top of the steering wheel like a kid, like they’re in a swimming pool, raft deflated, or sitting in dad’s lap getting that first driving lesson. How big the steering wheel seemed.

I look ahead. 58 mph. Merge. Hit play. Tune them out. 60 mph now.

It’s a podcast called The 101 on the T-72. The T-72 is a Soviet Era tank still in use by the Russian Army, designed to be light and fast with an autoloader for the big artillery shells in the gun turret. It only takes three men to operate, where American tanks need four– the fourth guy loads the shells– no autoloader in an American tank. Slow American tanks.

I’m at 64 mph. I turn on the adaptive cruise control. Three lanes southbound through rolling brown hills. Other lanes passing. I’m taking my time. Is the moon stealing glances at us through the scattered clouds, or just appearing in the gaps like a zoned-out commuter in a bus window? The California sun heads for Hawaii.

I’ll probably catch the big truck in my lane in a couple of minutes and then draft behind the trailer, cutting my wind resistance, saving more fuel. Mindful driver. Slow exhale. I’d take the bus if it didn’t take three times as long.

The cabin fills with the smell of skunk. I swerve to miss the mangled corpse. Jackass hits it. I don’t know if I’m more annoyed by the lack of compassion, or the lack of self respect.

In the T-72, the autoloader holds the artillery shells in a big ring around the base of the turret. It’s like there’s a hoola-hoop sized necklace of explosives around the gunner’s neck. Talk about going commando, the shells are not separated from the crew by an armored locker like in US and German tanks. These boys have it all out in the open. If one of their own shells is hit when an enemy shot penetrates the Soviet era armor, the shell goes off inside the tank, inside the cabin where the three men are about to say whatever Russians say when they say Shit but don’t get a chance to because all of the shells go off and blow the turret off the top of the T-72. The Ukranians call it the Jack-in-the-Box.

The podcast says the burnout from all of the shells igniting basically vaporizes the Russian crew. Lots of Instagram posts of decapitated, burned out tanks these days. What does it feel like to vaporize someone? Can someone care that much, hate that much, that they could do that to another person with such passion and self-righteousness? Or do they even feel? What is the point of stealing land, of dominating local populations?

I’ve gotta wonder how many of these Russian soldiers are apathetic and would be just as happy to play chess, or drink vodka with their passionate Ukrainian peers instead of becoming steam and smoke and driving up the cost of gas in the world. Do they even know what’s going on? Is being a soldier just a job?

I check the mirror. Still there. My heart hits a bump and another and I put my hand on my chest and then it steadies. I’m not going to let this get to me. Maybe we should just have a vodka and a game of chess. Hah. We can talk about our romantic woes, or basketball, or some universal bullshit like that.

This guy, (it’s gotta be a guy, right?) doesn’t even know me. They can pass. I see the line of their eyes like they’re a tank driver looking through the “vision block,” the small rectangular window at the front of a tank. No mirrors, very little peripheral vision. What’s right in front of them. The target.

When you can control what’s in front of someone, you can control what they think about. It’s like that tank window is designed not to let your mind stray. The generals don’t want any sudden rushes of compassion. I wonder if there are women generals, women tank drivers in the Soviet army. I mean Russian. Are they measurably more or less compassionate than their male counterparts? Someone should do a study.

They pull out, come up next to me, pace me.

Don’t look over, I tell myself. Don’t look over. Pretend not to notice. Goddamn I’m getting sick of this jerk and their jealous rages! Take it out on someone else you fuck!

I flip the bird at the inside of my car door. Yeah, I wave it, wag it, and make that chicken sphincter grimace that says I really mean it. Adrenaline rush!

Then a sudden urge to side swipe, knock them into the next lane! He swipes me back and then I pin the Kia to the cement median, sparks and metal scraping, oh the movies in my head right now. My lips have moved from chicken sphincter to hissing cat, teeth bared and I’m elevated, elated, superhuman, so high on this feeling that I could slam into him. Do it! I look over, poised.

But there’s nothing to see through the blackout film of their passenger window. They probably didn’t hear me either. We’re all isolated in our steel and glass cocoons. I halfway wish it was just some miserable fuck in a Dodge Ram, who’d see me see him, flip me off vigoursly in return through the passenger window, mouthing the predictable prayers for my downfall, and leave me in a cloud of diesel soot. But this guy, I can’t even see. I don’t know what this is about. Why do I make up their story? What if there’s a kid in the back? God that would be a buzz-kill.

I slow down. Who cares. Let them pass. They do. Thank you Lord.

The podcast is saying that the Russian Army views its soldiers more collectively, as disposable when there’s a tactical advantage. Their tanks are faster, lighter, and they fire faster too. But at what cost? On some level you’ve gotta respect the warrior mentality that designed those tanks though. I mean, I’m basically a pacifist, but if you’re gonna invade, go all in. If your tank can shoot faster, roar across a field faster, it’s worth losing a few men in the short run. Not that that’s what’s happening in Ukraine. What are those guys thinking? Babies are dying, it goes without saying.

I’ve come to the narrows where the hills rise to a road cut at the border between two counties and the 101 drops to two lanes each direction. I merge over. The narrows condense and slow traffic as the hill climbs to the saddle. It’s where the worst jams happen. Funny to think of a tank in a traffic jam. Outta my way mothafuckas!

I pass, suspended from a green pole, a bell, a rusty bell. People used to walk this road. Ride horses. Herd cattle. It’s an old waypoint on the El Camino Real, and a reminder of the Mission era. Has our culture settled on these reminders, out of apathy, the way a person settles on a partner, or the way an invader settles the land? We embrace our aggressions, we make a culture of them. We know we are right, better than, entitled to.

Eventually people choose what’s in front of them in partnerships or in picking fights or invading a country. Because I can see you, I have a right to you and to your things. Settling is really kind of unsettling. Ring the bell. Cross the border. Get in someone’s face.

There are people who love these bells up and down California and there are people who don’t, and they’re at one another’s throats, the settlers and those who didn’t particularly want to be settled, and then there are those who are tired of thinking about it and just enjoy a fight. Do they justify their apathy by baiting the people who give a fuck?

I look at the speedometer and the car’s down to 58, but we’re still moving.

57mph.

56mph.

It’s the white Kia, in front of me now. Still there. Slowing without hitting the brakes. I lock my eyes on their back window. They’re just gradually easing off the gas, no one in front of them, and my car’s adaptive cruise control slowing me down, keeping me a safe following distance away. 56 mph. 54 mph. Everybody’s passing us in the left lane now.

55 was the national speed limit for a while. We saved a lot of gas by driving slower. And lives. Babies in back seats were saved, I remind myself. I’m in no rush. 53 mph. Say it again, I’m in no rush. I’m in no rush.

52 mph.

This fucker’s obsessed. I hope he hasn’t bred, the world doesn’t need his spawn.

The weird thing is that the Ukrainians have similar tanks from the Soviet era, but they don’t seem to be having the same trouble. That’s gotta piss off the Russians.

Do they expect me to tailgate them? That shit car probably doesn’t even have adaptive cruise control, or anti-lock brakes. I wonder if it even has airbags.

The Russians have lost more than 500 tanks in the invasion, Zelensky says more than 1000. Whatever the number, the Ukrainians have learned how to hit the T-72’s in their weak spot.

I’ve had it with this bullshit.

I watch the passing traffic for an opening, pull out, floor it: 60, 65, 70, 75

They’re speeding up too, staying ahead of me, not letting me pass. They cut me off but I swerve and go around them to the right, get past them.

I’m not saving gas anymore, I’m flying. 76, 77, 79 mph. I wonder how fast a T-72 can go. I’ll just burn like this for a while I tell myself, like everyone else, and leave old Jackass behind.

After a few minutes, we come out of the narrows. The road widens. I keep to the right lane and slow to 65, resetting the cruise control. I take a deep breath. A few cars pass and then the white car swerves right in front of me, breaking hard enough that a big red collision warning message lights up on my dashboard. It says BRAKE! I hit the brakes but ride their bumper, staying close now, they’re signaling for the exit ramp that’s right there. We’re close enough to be parallel parked at highway speeds.

I get this vision of myself from above as my cartoon rage head pops up through the sunroof like a jack-in-the-box, spinning eyes the size of grapefruits and a big drooly grin on my bobble-headed face.

I’m fully locked on. I’m all rage, and it feels freeing. What bliss to think about nothing else but this clear unambiguous purpose. I’m looking at their tail lights through a tank’s vision block. We go down the ramp and they lock their brakes in the shoulder gravel, sliding to a stop.

Even as I’m still rolling, I see myself opening the door, going to the trunk to pull out my softball bat. I hear the whoosh and crack of bones, the melony cartoon sounds of wood on head. I slide to a stop right behind them on the shoulder of the exit ramp, shift to park, hover my hand over the button to unlock the trunk, set the fantasy in motion. Their brake lights are still on, red as evil.

The podcast is describing the anonymity of much of the war, how the soldiers rarely ever see the enemy thanks to precision guided technology… I shut off my car and pop the trunk.

I climb out of the car and go for the bat. It’s like I’m a new man, twenty years younger, freed of the hesitancy, failures, ambiguities of experience. I.AM.CLEARLY.IN.THE.RIGHT.

Standing I can see the sunroof of the Kia is open– there’s a high-pitched buzzing sound and then a drone flies up and comes right at me. I swing and it feints, I miss. It comes at me again. What’s it gonna do with those tiny propellers, cut my hair? This time I connect, I can feel the heft of the battery pack bouncing off the bat as it tumbles through the air and flops in those scrubby roadside weeds that smell like licorice, the motors pulsing out a couple gasping spins before they die.

I stomp over to it and give it a couple of gratuitous whacks, then turn back and there’s a hand holding a cell phone through the sunroof, aimed at me. I assume the victory pose and let out a mighty roar, bat held high like one of those chimps with a bone at the beginning of 2001 A Space Odyssey.

Then the hand retracts, the brake lights go out, the front wheels spin in the gravel and the car launches itself down the exit ramp, running the stop sign and back up the entrance ramp onto the 101. All so fast, I’m still holding the bat in the air. What the actual fuck?

I get back in the car and just rest my forehead on the steering wheel for a while before driving on.

About a week later I get a text from a friend with a Twitter link– is this you?! It’s an anonymous account. There’s video of a middle aged guy bashing and bashing and bashing the dirt with a bat for like a full thirty seconds, then he’s doing the victory pose, and he’s got an ape face superimposed on him.

I text back, Ha Ha that can’t be me.

Jack Derby is just back from his first trip to the southern hemisphere and he’s kicking himself for not looking at the night sky, especially after David Crosby just died, because, you know, the “Southern Cross”. He did look at the stars at Bread Loaf, at Sewanee, and after class during his MFA at the University of San Francisco. Derby’s short film “Wishbone” received best short comedy and best actress in a short film at the Oregon Independent Film Festival. His most recent poem was in Zyzzyva, most recent book review in Kenyon Review Online.

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Our friends at Circe have launched an anti-advice column and it is fire!

Find details on how to ask Gina and Emily for advice and let us know what you think!

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Looking to jumpstart your writing? Need to reignite your creativity?

Paulina Pinsky has reopened enrollment for her year-long The Artist’s Way course.

Designed to transform your creativity from stuck and frustrated to unblocked and an endless source of inspiration, for any creative journey you can dream of.

Click below for more information and let Paulina know we sent you!

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