Category Archives: Postscript

by | November 21, 2024 · 4:05 pm

13.1 | Postscript

Kelly Facenda

Look, She’s Gone

This is what I said, mom.

I said look at her, she’s not

coming back. I said look,

she’s gone.

One more stop and one more

violent start, again.

They were very good at making

your wounded heart pump

and your chest

rise and fall with their tubes and lines

and drips but

you weren’t fooling me.

I said, look at her eyes, because

once, someone said

something eloquent about the eyes

being a window and that’s how I knew,

that behind the filmy glass of your

corneas, behind your stubborn

pupils, was an empty beach,

and no matter how many shells

we looked inside of or turned over,

you had taken your soul and dug deep

into the cool and quiet sand,

where the earth

held on and on and on.

 

I Gather the Fawns

I gather the fawns,

their spindly, uncertain legs,

their tawny fuzz,

spots like hopeful stars.

I gather the orphans, and the babies rejected

in a flurry of pushing, stomping hooves.

I gather the ones that get too close to the road,

eating grass, mother absent.

My father says that buzzards

stand guard over the farmers’ fields.

A doe can hide her baby in the tall growth,

only to lose it to harvesting.

I gather those fawns to my chest,

and I outrun the engine and blades and birds

that feast on the dead,

the hungry sound of swallowing and

slashing on my heels.

I put them in the farm of my heart,

soft babies, who will easily

forget the warm milk of their

mothers. They take the bottle eagerly

from my hand, heads thrusting back

and forth, tugging, pulling, alive.

Jupiter

I pray that the neighborhood skunk doesn’t find

her way to our side-yard at 3:14 a.m. when I let my

dog out. He pisses and roots around, nose to dirt, for smells

from the night. I sit down on my narrow

porch step and look up. Sometimes I wonder

where my mother is. It’s the best time to

ponder big things, before the noises

of the day increase with the slow climb of light

from the horizon. It’s August and I’m staring

at a small light in the sky. Brighter than a star,

my phone tells me it’s Jupiter. I know so little

about the planets. I only know it’s

Jupiter because my phone told me.

Sometimes I think of how little I know

about things and feel shame. But I do know my dog,

and I can see the shadow of him in the

corner by the arborvitae, and I know

insomnia. I am familiar with all

shades of black and gray. I am an expert

on my couch, its nubbed fabric and where the cushions

sink just so. I could give a short lecture on

sitting under the dark shawl of night while

others are sleeping or write a chapter on my racing brain.

I can discuss the aggressive hum of white noise, and the

feeling of resignation as I rise once again to

make coffee too early. But please, just don’t

ask me to name Jupiter’s moons, or how to go about

untethering oneself from grief’s sinking cinder block.

Kelly Facenda graduated from SUNY Geneseo with a degree in English. She took all the creative writing courses that she could. She eventually went back to school and got a nursing degree from Villanova. She thoroughly misses being surrounded by writers, however, and started playing with poetry and fiction again. Fantastic at starting things but truly terrible at finishing them, Kelly finally wrapped up a few of her poems. She hopes you enjoy them.

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by | May 3, 2024 · 11:49 am

12.2 | Postscript

Brielle Sarkisian

Brielle Sarkisian is a printmaker, papermaker, and illustrator with a BFA from SUNY New Paltz.

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by | December 4, 2023 · 1:49 pm

Griffen LaBianca

Little Eulogies

The funeral service was for my friend.

It lasted for nearly six grueling hours. Twelve if you counted the second day and the small eulogy given by the pastor of the church his family went to. I vaguely remembered him talking about his Sundays at church, as irregular and infrequent as many other middle class North Shore families on Long Island. In my family, church was a thing to laugh about, it was my brother whispering “Ooo hot,” as he dipped his finger in the small bowl of water that sits at the entryway of every Roman Catholic church. It was my father joking about being struck by lightning if any of us walked into a church on Christmas. “Bad Churchgoers,” my mother jokingly called us.

The house had been abandoned for as long as any of us could remember. It sat strangely on the corner of a neighborhood and reminded us of a haunted house from a Stephen King movie. Tall cypress tree with an abandoned tire swing and all. It was the summer of our freshmen year of high school, and the heat felt like you were sitting in a car with the windows up. Stagnant and windless. A pool sat in the backyard, pond scum overflowing the tarp that had slowly rotted away with age and changing seasons. Some of us joked about cleaning it up, skimming out the muck and coming here on our days off from whatever countless summer jobs we worked at. Deli counters, vet offices, pool lifeguards.

The boy who had scoped out the house, a friend of a friend, was a gambler driven by equal parts growing up poor around rich kids and growing up angry around poor kids. Six years later, his Instagram page reveals a man rounded out and softened up by time and work as a real estate agent. He’s married to his high school sweetheart who no doubt had a hand in flattening out the rough edges of his younger self.

Our friend group consisted of a hodgepodge of kids like this, athletes who didn’t take sports seriously enough to make it to college playing, honor students too stupid to stay in class when they could skip and sit in the cafeteria. Smart kids doing dumb stuff because the dumb kids did worse. Troublemakers who never did enough to get more than a wagging finger from a teacher instead of a suspension or a fine.

The kid had found a way into the house through a back glass door, less lockpicking and more jangling an old, rusted door frame until it snapped open. The first thing about the house was the smell: it was fresh, rather than the mold and rot that most of us expected. It was clean, as if it had been robbed rather than thoroughly scrubbed down. Kitchen cabinets and drawers were pulled out, silverware stripped clean from its holsters, the only things left were plastic plates and wooden spatulas. It felt more like the memory of a house than one that anyone had lived in.

The living room, connected to the kitchen, was open and an old leather couch was torn up and tossed over. Some of us marveled at the ceiling where a chandelier dangled high above, and the stairs snaked around the whole of the interior up into the second floor. It looked like a house from a movie, all glowing in the hot summer daylight. There were six of us, and we walked around the house with a tepid worship as if we were in a church, careful not to disturb the cobwebs and broken glass crowding the corners of the rooms. The only one who wasn’t careful was Mike. A broken leg earlier that year left him with a big black boot, so he stomped around the wooden floor of the house. Never mind the fact that he was a giant who had a knack for crowding up open places with all six foot four of himself; a height that is either accurate of how tall he actually was, or one clouded by the reverence of my younger self. It was hard in those days to tell what took up more of the room he was in, his body, or his laugh. Whenever he chose to laugh, it meant shaking the room you were in; it was a call, like those big Viking horns people used to blow through. It ordered everyone else in the room to laugh as well, not in intimidation, but because it felt wrong not to laugh along with him.

The funeral home was the biggest in our hometown, a necessity for the waves of people who came to pay their respects to Mike, and his family. At this time, it seemed to me that it would’ve been unusual for someone we knew not to be there. The line snaked around the halls of the building, people lined up, around tables and chairs, up the winding stairs that some of us joked reminded us of that old house we snuck into.

Anger shadows most of my memories of those two days. Anger at the adults, anger at our school, anger at ourselves, anger at Mike. It was a poison in me—more mist and fog than seething and red as it had been a week earlier. The first day was quiet. Those of us who were close to him had nothing left to say to each other, and those who felt they were close with him had no idea how to talk to us. It was nice in a way; misery was left to itself at the entrance of the big hall doors that lead into the room where his body would be. They were closed for the first hour, things getting set up, appearances getting ready. A part of me wonders now if that hour was more for us than it was for them, to prepare ourselves before we saw him for the first last time.

By the time I realized most of my friends had circled around me, leaving me alone and in the lead of the moshed crowd of people waiting, the doors had already begun to open. The man who opened them, a worker for the funeral home, was dressed in a tight collared penguin suit that looked a few sizes too big for him. At the time, I might’ve thought he was far older than any of us, but time and memory put him no older than any of us had been.

The few seconds before anyone made their way into the room were agony and lasted for an eternity. Everyone was breathing on top of each other, and despite the wilting summer heat of late August and the long sleeved tight buttoned suits we all wore, it somehow felt cold in the parlor. Eyes seemed to flicker between the door, to me, to the door, to me, to the door. Eventually, thought caught up with motion as I had already begun marching through the large double doors. Thoughts bled from me as panic churned in my guts. What came first? Respects to the family? Isn’t there something to sign when you walk in? What about those little cards with the prayer on the back of an old photo of the deceased? It was too late for decision making by the time I realized I was sitting down with the others in a small bisection of the room, in a corner seat, away from his family, their backs turned as they sat on a red and green flowered couch that would’ve matched the interior design of an eighty-year-old woman’s house.

Even as I think back on those grueling hours sitting and staring at the wood casket looming at the center of the room, I can’t remember the face of Mike in that wooden bed.

The next hour or so in the abandoned house was equal parts exploration and graverobbing. Or at least, that was how it felt to us the longer we walked around. The family’s history in the house became apparent, pieces of the inside were littered with the small memories of people who once lived there. As Mike and I were left to walk through the old turned-out bedrooms upstairs, the others looked through cabinets, closets, and the shed outside. Normally he was loud, not in an obnoxious way, but his voice used to carry a weight to it that seemed to absorb my attention.

A lot of us were smart, or at least good students, but Mike was on a whole different level. Academic awards were piled high on tables and on walls in the office he shared with his father, a fact that I and the others learned years later when we visited his family after he passed. The office felt small and cozy, and his computer was still set up next to his father’s. Posters of World of Warcraft and rap album covers were tacked up behind the monitor. It was the place where he spent hours playing Dota 2 with us online and yet in that moment it felt alien, a side of him that had been invisible between monitors and the static mic quality of TeamSpeak and Skype calls that lasted late into the warm hours past midnight on school nights.

In the old empty bedrooms upstairs in the abandoned house, books, toys, or anything not important enough to be carried away were left scattered across the floor or on top of empty open dressers. Mike had been quiet that day, a fact many of us never noticed until weeks later, he had been joking throughout our trip to the house, talking to Peter, a close friend who introduced me to Mike through our shared interest in Melee, a game we both attempted to play at tournaments. Only Mike’s attempt was loose and fast, more a hobby than my own obsession with it. A fact I would learn later about Mike, through Peter, was that if he wanted to master something, it was only if time let him. Whether it was a video game, a sport, or Quantum mechanics; the only thing seemingly inexplicable to Mike was himself.

Mike slowly, and carefully, grazed his fingers over the journals and loose photos that sat on a faded pink nightstand next to a dust covered mattress. Despite his size he was gentle with the memories, a light blue journal or diary, its contents still a mystery now, as Mike refused to let anyone else read it. His jaw clenched tight in the way that said “no” and left no room for rebuttal. He left it to sit alone forever on the windowsill of the room in the sunlight. The photos that were scattered loosely on the floor were of a young girl. I couldn’t place her age, possibly early high school, the same as us, but something about the pictures seemed ageless. The way the sunlight stained and discolored the photos, and the shirts and outfits of the girl and her friends in the photos couldn’t be put to time, memories left scattered behind on the wooden floorboard of an abandoned home.

Little eulogies were spelled out everywhere in that home. In the master bedroom, old copies of Hemingway rested dusted and lonely in a drawer. Old beaten-up sneakers sat mud stained at the front door, laces chewed through, aglets cracked and frayed from what must’ve been a particularly busy dog. Small notches were carved alongside dates and names in the doorway of a bathroom, ages of heights lost to the fading of sharpie ink against time. Posters of Justin Timberlake and Coldplay blanketed shoe boxes full of burned cd’s with “Cassie’s Mix” scribbled across the neon-colored plastic casings.

It was a house both left behind and completely forgotten by time. Only the sun and the rain and the dust left any measure of their age.

It took me nearly an hour to eventually get in line and give my respects to Mike’s family. An hour more of standing in nauseating, gut churning anxiety. And then another hour after sitting alone with my friends in what felt like bleacher chairs near the casket. Teachers who knew us, or knew Mike enough to know us, came up and gave their respects to us. We quietly, or silently gave our thanks and they either left, or stayed long enough to talk to other teachers. Either about how horrible it all was, or how horrible they all felt for us, or how horrible they felt for Mike’s family, or how horrible the ones closest to Mike must be feeling.

It was unique in a disappointing sort of way how people older than us spoke about death. Grief was never admitted, as if acknowledging your own pain was somehow selfish to the suffering of others. Perhaps that was the case, or perhaps the pain in which we felt lonely together was more than what the teachers or administrators or coaches felt. Or perhaps no one was ever really close enough to Mike to admit how upset they were. I didn’t cry at either of the services. Neither did my friends who were close with him. Part of me wonders if it was because we knew how long Mike had been hurting for. Or maybe, it was because none of us felt we had the right to cry for him, as if none of us ever truly knew him.

Eventually we were chased out of the house by a neighbor in a pickup truck. We scattered from the innards of the house like rats from a hole and spread out across the neighborhood, sprinting, the pickup truck spewing black smoke like some beast from hell out to punish us. This was the fervor and panic that could only accompany the thoughts of kids who weren’t really bad but had been bad enough to do something stupid. I ran alongside Mike, his big boot stomping and dragging through the pebbled, potholed street near my house. Eventually we made it to the front stoop of my house, both of our cellphones were dead, so we sat waiting for Mike’s sister to pick him up after he used my home phone to call.

I’ve owed Mike a eulogy for nearly six years now after the pastor asked if anyone had any words they’d like to say, and I stood there silently. Too nervous or too weak to say anything. After a pause that felt too long, and a few words spoken by the Pastor, they played the song “See You Again” on a speaker that had been wheeled out on an old plastic cart. Like the ones we used to have in grade school if we were about to watch a movie in class. In the awkward quiet of the funeral parlor, I laughed, only a chuckle loud enough for Peter to hear. Then he laughed as he felt it too. The tug of an old memory, both of us remembering Mike ranting and joking about how stupid he thought the song was late one night on a skype call.

The laugh felt easy, a little acknowledgment between us about our shared memory with him. It was a little memory, and as I remembered it, I began to remember the many hundreds we had made with him together. Easy memories that made me chuckle into the collar of my too-big dress shirt. quietly enough for no one else to hear. Memories of his laughing, or old jokes he made, or old arguments we had. Little memories that made me feel like a “bad churchgoer,” laughing at my own little eulogies.

My time with Mike was filled with moments like this, moments where we were alone together but not lonely together. Sitting, talking, joking, or even arguing, but rarely ever silent with each other. The sun was going down in the way that late summer makes lovely, all deep orange, pink and lavender. Or maybe it was just going down normally, the sieve of time diluting my memories of Mike into abstractions of beauty that I might’ve wished for quietly to myself. We sat in the silence of a suburban neighborhood in July, young kids squealing and laughing from somewhere unseen, trees shifting in the wind as the heat began to break for the cool comfort of night. Just together, waiting. A part of me puts my hand against his, or rests my head against his shoulders, or just blathers out all the ways I feel about him but can’t tell him.

The real me sits there quietly with him in the twilight before the dark sky rolls in with the night and all its stars scatter out like old memories against the floorboards.

Griffen LaBianca is an English (creative writing), environmental history alumni from SUNY Geneseo. He spent his time at Geneseo playing rugby, getting injured playing rugby, and writing sappy romance stories that, hopefully, will never see the light of day. He is currently working on publishing his first novel.

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by | December 9, 2022 · 11:43 am

11.1 | Post Script

Grace (Ge) Gilbert

I’m Going To Free Myself from the Shackles of Other People’s Expectations of Me

I write in the dark after all night dancing at the disco. It’s with friends, really, that I don’t want to bash my head against the constant rotating mill of needed income and adulthood and nice pleated trousers.

I rip the adhesive bra from Amazon off of my nipples and think, Thank god.

It leaves a crust and a feeling of inadequacy—they’ve always been too far apart, and it takes the strength of an industrial ropes course carabiner to bring them together in any sort of way that screams Sex or money.

I’m writing now because Jared was high (off half an edible) at a bar in the absolute gayborhood of Philadelphia and said grace, of anyone else—I believe the most in you. It made me sweat in the kindness sort of way, when I somehow can’t believe someone would be genuine to me and not just out of convenience or marijuana or transactional flattery. We went out to smoke a cigarette and I laughed when Jared crawled all the way up the stairs. Later we found a black Bic lighter on the sidewalk after ours ran out of juice and he said, You know it might be hard at first but then it will be just fine.

It’s the shirts with preset boobs that really bother me because I have enough awareness about roles I can and cannot fill.

I’ve had about twenty job interviews that haven’t gone anywhere and a lot of nodding that makes me embarrassed about who I really am as a person. Dancing takes about thirteen minutes to get into and in those thirteen minutes I feel as if I’m slowly choking and everyone else can drink water except for me.

I bought the Bug at twenty-one right after the worst day of my life which was college graduation.

I had just left an abusive situationship (with a woman, no less, so more difficult to explain to family) lost all our mutual friends and spent about twenty-four hours in the psych ward that made me familiar with every local homeless person in Rochester NY and there are quite a few.

My father took me to the dealership in a crude attempt at bonding.

We looked at cars he liked and I hated everything but the rogue gray Bug and he said are you sure ok you’re an adult I guess it’s your money.

It had 10,000 miles and was previously owned by a woman with Alzheimer’s who lived in rural New York.

When she forgot how to drive her husband would back it in and out of the driveway for five years until she finally forgot how to live.

They told me this as I signed the extended warranty paper not knowing what extended warranty meant and neither did my father. My first time alone in the car, I found a Peter Paul and Mary CD still left in the disc player.

Now at the end of an era the engine keeps coming up busted and I’m already mourning the time I’ve had freedom, peter paul mary, and a loan from the Key Bank.

It’s an anointed prison, ownership, and you just don’t know when you get to keep anything and when it’ll all just end.

It comes with no surprise that the thing I learned the most from my father is to pretend I know something when I don’t.

Sitting in the dealership he pretended to know cars. He wore a big trench coat and tried to match the sleazy newsboy tone of the dealer who saw right through him and I didn’t have the chops to critique his acting.

Instead I daisy-chained a list of things I’d accomplished rattling it all off to my father.

It was one of those things where I hated every word I said as I said it and the fluorescence of it all didn’t help. We stirred our Styrofoam cup black coffees with black stirrers that were the world’s most ineffective straws and it was silent except for the cars lights and expectation which all bothered me.

I’m proud of you, he said awkwardly, couldn’t be prouder, and I felt embarrassed that I’d seen him about three times in all of college and he felt the need to reassure me and I felt the need to need it.

And so after years of trying not to disappoint your family it’s in a boyfriend’s parents’ basement where you feel you have to confront yourself against a quilt that isn’t yours.

Laying dizzy tits out in a room with nothing familiar after passing twelve billboards that scream When you die you WILL meet god it gets hard to distinguish the carpet and family photos and stuffed bunnies from the guts inside your body.

Without the added distinction of expectation and disappointment you sip your water quietly and feel like nothing at all and a credit score thinking alas.

There is a Reformation dress and a dream for all of us.

Where is the outline of this person you keep trying to fill?

grace (ge) gilbert is a hybrid poet, essayist, and collage worker based in Brooklyn. They received their MFA in poetry from the University of Pittsburgh in 2022, and are a SUNY Geneseo alum. They are the author of the closeted diaries, an essay chapbook from Porkbelly Press (2022), and NOTIFICATIONS IN THE DARK, a poetry chapbook from Antenna Books (2023). They were the MCLA Under 27 Writer-in-Residence Fellow at Mass MoCA and have received support from City of Asylum as an emerging poet laureate of Allegheny County and from the Bread Loaf. Writers’ Conference. Their work can be found in the Indiana Review, Ninth Letter, the Offing, the Adroit Journal, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Diode, TYPO, ANMLY, and elsewhere. They currently teach hybrid collage and nonfiction courses at the Minnesota Center for Book Arts.

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by | May 4, 2022 · 11:33 am

Marianne Jay Erhardt

What the Dead Know by Act Three

“Just open your eyes, dear, that’s all.”
–Myrtle Webb in Thornton Wilder’s Our Town

“Mama, am I pretty?”

I’m Emily Webb, stringing invisible green beans in Grover’s Corners at the turn of the century. My voice? Trying to achieve the Downeast New England accent learned from a cassette played in my pink Casio tape deck. I’m not great. “Mama” makes me sound not South Maine but South South. My beans are worse than my accent. In my seventeen years I’ve never handled fresh green beans and so my pantomime looks more sorcery than kitchen chore. It’s not that my family doesn’t cook vegetables. We just prefer cut and frozen, stopped in time until we are hungry, Bird’s Eye.

What the dead know by Act Three is that the living lack perspective. They miss the gift of each moment as it happens. When I tell you that I have lost my blue hair ribbon, you know where it is. “Just open your eyes, dear, that’s all. I laid it out for you, special. On the dresser, there. If it were a snake it would bite you.” What is mundane for alive Emily overwhelms dead Emily. I can’t bear the love, the lack. I lift the pretend ribbon, tie it to the end of my braid.

My mind carries a map of my children’s objects. The ten-dollar bill that slipped out of Nolan’s birthday card is on the third shelf of the hutch under a blue pencil sharpener. The green balloon is on top of the refrigerator with the old Halloween candy after too much fighting. Two pairs of sneakers sat out in the rain last night beside the sandbox. One shoe has been carried a few feet away from the others. Some night animal.

My own mother lacked this map, or lost it through mothering seven children and their wreckage. If anything, she came to us for lost objects. Pens, certain serving spoons, potentially lucky mailings from Publisher’s Clearinghouse.

We weren’t big on hair ribbons, but ballet recital season gave us Sucrets tins full of bobby pins. My hair fell to my waist, heavy. Buns gave me terrible headaches, but they were worth the version of myself that my mother called beautiful. There is something to that. A mother’s hands in your hair and then her mouth saying those words.

One morning, no performance in sight, my mother dries my hair in the dining room. I am in second grade. Jealous of my older siblings who seem to have more purpose in life than me, I have started inventing elaborate homework assignments for myself. First, a book report on Ribsy where I simply retype several chapters. This morning, a telling-time assignment where I am required, I say, to draw an analog clock for every single hour and minute combination. I trace an upside-down jar of Skippy for the circle, use a short ruler to make the hands perfect. I have dozens of looseleaf pages going, pencil shavings sprinkled here and there when the tip gets dull. I tell my mother that these clocks are due today, and I am just too busy for the hair dryer. Although she is a nurse, my mother has her own theory of infectious disease which seems mostly tied to wet hair in winter, neglected. She dries my hair. She is tender and she is not tender. She is beginning to question this homework assignment, calls it ridiculous, but seems to admire my uncharacteristic diligence. She moves the hair dryer in figure eights, a magic wand. She doesn’t want to burn me. I sit at the dining room table and make clock after clock in the hot wind. The memory ends here. No way do I finish them all. Perhaps I confess that this work was make-believe. It’s the kind of lie I doubt she would understand.

You, Myrtle, are played by a kind but forgettable woman. I can’t conjure her face. But she sits beside me, wearing an apron, when I ask about my beauty. You are good with the green beans. You snap the end, zip the string off, toss what’s ready in the basket. Your goal, you’ve told Mrs. Gibbs, is “to put up forty quarts if it kills me.” But I’m the one who dies first. Childbirth. If the baby makes it, the play doesn’t say, but I leave a four-year-old son in the world of the living. When, from the grave, I get to choose a memory to return to, I pick my own childhood, not his. I pick my twelfth birthday and declare everybody beautiful.

In college, when I’m still doing plays but not yet writing poetry, I get my first real haircut. My mother has trimmed my hair about once a year since I was eleven, but I have never had the salon treatment. I don’t want anything fussy. I was raised to only care about clothes and makeup when getting on a stage. I tell the hairdresser to cut it to my shoulders. No layers. No face-framing, whatever that is. There is no reason to pay thirty dollars for a straight chop, but I do. It’s a mistake. When I see my mother over break, she tells me, “You look utterly nondescript.” I savor my hurt and I know she is wrong. I have huge eyes and bad acne. I have a conspicuously plain haircut and my hair is bright orange. My forehead is high, my gums show when I smile, and all of my pants are too long. I am descript as hell.

I don’t have any daughters to disappoint. All of my lovelys and beautifuls are given to my boys, not that they want them. “Stop,” they whine, “We’re not.” I suppose all of us are doomed to get it wrong, to keep filling the basket with the invisible. As George Gibbs tells me over strawberry phosphates at the soda shop, “I guess new people aren’t any better than old ones.”

You have a rule. No books at the table. You say you’d rather have your children healthy than bright. The implication, I suppose, is that your children will forget to eat, to stay alive, if they are caught up in some story. But the breakfast itself is a fabrication, nothing more than a tale we tell ourselves in the morning. I say goodbye to it, to food and coffee. To clocks ticking and to the sunflowers you grow in our garden. I say goodbye to sleeping and I say goodbye to waking up.

But not before you answer my question. When you do, you are as honest as the living can be. “You’re pretty enough for all normal purposes.”

Marianne Jay Erhardt (Upham) ’03 is a proud alum of SUNY Geneseo. Her writing appears or is forthcoming in Orion, The Kenyon Review, Oxford American, River Teeth, storySouth, and elsewhere. She is the winner of the 2021 VanderMey Nonfiction Prize by Ruminate Magazine, a 2019-2020 North Carolina Arts Council Fellowship, and a recent Pushcart nomination. She received her MFA from UW-Madison and teaches writing at Wake Forest University.

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by | April 26, 2021 · 6:12 pm

Nancy Keating

The Grammar of Paradise

 

In Tortola, when you go, they bury you

under a white concrete slab which,

for good measure, they top off with

two or three more slabs,

smaller but equally white:

an oblong ziggurat, topped

with a cross. Your visitors can sit

on you or one of your neighbors

and lunch on a roti or sandwich as they

remember and discuss you

and then move on to other topics,

looking across to low houses

and shops, their doors, roofs,

and window shutters in

gleeful toybox colors and

overhead, coconut palms and

the magenta blooms of bougainvillea.

The sun smiles down, as it does

most of the time. The sea surrounds

and laps at the rocks like a lover

at your feet. Slowly the sun shifts.

Slowly the sidereal nighttime sky rolls around,

the moon, planets, constellations.

Boats sway on their moorings.

Americans dream in their moving berths.

Back home, for weeks in the future, they will rock

in their timeless dreams, their beds afloat

on lapis and turquoise inside

their quiet-colored northern houses.

But if, as I say, you have come to rest

in the glowing blue and green of the islands,

your swaying and rocking time is over.

And it seems nobody has anything but time here

where, all day, roosters step down the road

and crow in the knowledge of announcing God.

 

Nancy Keating‘s poems have been published by New Letters, The Gettysburg Review, Carolina Quarterly, and elsewhere. She has an MFA from Stony Brook University (2019) and teaches at Farmingdale State College when she is not knitting.

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by | November 30, 2020 · 4:03 pm

Kathryn Waring

Searching for 360

In Google Maps, I still live in Rochester. Zoom in on my old apartment in Street View and you’ll see my silver Neon parked outside. It’s November 2015, and it looks like midday—the sun is high, my neighbors have gone to work, and there are barely any cars parked on our street. The park across from our house is empty.

Click on Rochester, NY in Google Maps and a link pops up with photos to explore. Many are just regular photographs, but there’s a growing number of 360 images, too. Among the first is a 360 of High Street. Here, in Google Maps, it’s October 2015, and we are in the Northeast quadrant. It’s a residential area of the city, not far from where I once worked. Zoom in and you’ll see a woman sitting on her front porch. Five pumpkins are arranged on the porch steps in descending size order. The woman stares at her hands—holding a phone, perhaps? You can’t zoom in far enough to see for sure. You wonder what she is thinking about—kids, a partner, a job—but Google doesn’t say. Down the street, a child rides a bike, feet permanently frozen on the pedals.

Not long after I move to Pennsylvania for graduate school, I start making 360 videos. At first, it’s for a class. A friend and I, partnered up by our professor, leave the city and drive an hour southeast through rural Pennsylvania. I’ve just moved to Pittsburgh; he’s grown up here. We stop at a middle-of-nowhere town, where the fire station doubles as a community center and bar. We’ve heard rumors of a UFO that crashed here back in the 1960s, and we want to use 360 to capture this place and the story that remains. We set out to learn more, camera in hand.

In Google Maps, I exist, but only in fragments.

Here, in Google Maps, outside my apartment in Rochester, it is November 2015 and I have not yet moved for graduate school. But when I type in the address of the office where I once worked, it is 2017 and I have already left. On South Ave, it is the summer before I leave, and I am at a bar with my friends, sitting around a fire out back. You can’t see it, but my roommate throws darts at a board nailed to a tree. Scroll down the street, however, and we flash forward to 2018. Here, in Google Maps, I still exist, scattered across a city I no longer call home. But each time the Google car drives by, bits and pieces of the life I used to live disappear.

When I try to explain to my family what a 360 video is, I tell them to picture themselves in Google Maps. Inserted into a string of still photos taken at street level by Google’s fleet of camera-equipped cars, you can walk around, toggle yourself left or right, up or down. Stroll through the street as if you are actually there.

But Google didn’t create virtual reality. The concept of VR predates the term: in the nineteenth century, artists painted 360-degree murals that filled the audience’s entire field of view. Robert Baker, an Irish artist, used the term panorama to describe his cylindrical paintings. Derived from the Greek pan (“all”) and horama (“view”), panoramic paintings allowed the viewer to feel present in the scene depicted—often, an historical event. They allowed the viewer to step into the past, even if just for a moment.

In Google Maps, I type in the address of my grandparents’ old home. Out front, it is 2013 and they have not yet sold their house. The red cardinal my grandmother painted onto the mailbox is still there; their last name handwritten on the sign above it. In Google Maps, I am relegated to the street, but if I zoom in close enough I can see a shadow standing by the first-floor window. In this version of reality, my grandparents still live at home. There are no assisted living facilities, doctors offices, or long-awaited phone calls to see which, if either, will remember me on any particular day. In Google Maps, their car is still parked in the driveway, a Christmas wreath hanging from the front door.

In the small Pennsylvania town I visit with my friend, in Google Maps, it is still 2008. The fire station has not yet turned into a bar, and the parking lot is empty. In real life, we talk to the bartender and locate the spot where the UFO supposedly crashed. As I drive past, my partner sticks the camera out the car window to record. We interview locals and add soundbites to the film. We want the viewer to explore the area alongside us; we want them to make their own decisions about what happened, and why, and how the community reacted. In 360, the audience becomes a participant. In 360, it seems like anything is possible. Nothing is out of reach.

In Google Maps, I visit the house of a friend who died of a drug overdose. I scroll down the street to my grandparents’ home; my childhood home; the first apartment I ever lived in. I visit the places I used to work, and the versions of myself I used to be.

But there’s more to Google Maps than just my own past. When I’m bored, at home, in the attic apartment I’ve recently moved into in Pittsburgh, I log onto Google Maps and explore the streets of cities I’ve never been and likely won’t ever go. I’m not sure why. Maybe, it’s the digital equivalent of being a fly on the wall of a room I don’t have access to or maybe, it’s a form of voyeurism. On the news, I hear the names of countries and cities I’ve never visited and I want to know more than what’s edited into soundbites. On TV the news is always bad but here, in Google Maps, life at least appears to keep moving.

In Aleppo, Syria, it is July 2017 and a user named Mahmoud Marshaha has uploaded a 360 inside of a children’s clothing store. A sign on the wall declares “no smoking!” in Turkish. The store looks brand new: the floors are shiny; ceiling lights reflect back at us. Someone has stacked dozens of shirts individually wrapped in plastic on the floor into neat piles. Tiny, brightly colored shirts hang off the racks mounted to the wall. One has an image of a smiley face emoji wearing a bowler hat, SMILE written in all caps underneath. A man in a blue button-down shirt stands behind the counter. I see outlines of people walking down the street through the store windows in front of me.

Google Street View could never produce an image like this: Google isn’t allowed inside of buildings or stores. But private citizens are. In recent years, Google Maps has given users the ability to upload their own 360 images. We’re no longer relegated to the street. Now, we can navigate restaurants and stores and the insides of people’s bedrooms. In Google Maps, there is life, splayed out on the internet for anyone to see.

In Google Maps, there are still mistakes. I type in the address of my first apartment in Pittsburgh, click on Street View, and am teleported to a different Portland Street in a different city. This street is not my street; that house was never my home. I’m on a highway staring up at a truck; I’m looking at a field where there should be houses. In Google Maps, I try to visit an apartment I once stayed at in Germany. I don’t remember the address, but I search for the mosque I remember next door. I find the mosque, click on Street View, and suddenly I’m in Istanbul. In Google Maps, the road we choose isn’t always the road we take.

After I start shooting in 360, I fall in love with the form. Because of its possibilities, and because of what I think is a controlled surrender: the ability to showcase a scene in its entirety, raw and unedited. But I am searching for a 360 that doesn’t exist, a medium that lets me tell a story that’s not in fragments. What I don’t understand is that a photo, even in 360, is just a stage. Behind every door there is a loaded gun; a crashed spaceship; a person casting a shadow. The most interesting part of a story is always just out of frame.

In Google Maps, lives are captured, but never fully. When I log into Google Maps, I see an archive of the places I’ve been. Every time I use the GPS on my phone to navigate somewhere new, it remembers. Coffee shops and stores and friends’ houses. Cities in other states and countries. But the list isn’t complete: there are homes I’ve navigated to without GPS; places I no longer need Google Maps to find. For now, I can go back in time and trace my life through Rochester, or visit cities I’ve never been to but would like to know. But these are just fragments of reality, digitized—never a whole life.

In my real life, it is 2020 and I am teaching college students from a desk in the corner of my bedroom. Outside, Pittsburgh brakes to a halt due to a pandemic that no one saw coming. But in Google Maps, time has not caught up: I scroll through the streets of Manhattan to Times Square, and a crowd of visitors line the big red steps; down the street, a double-decker tour bus stops at a traffic light. No one wears masks. In Google Maps, there is the recent past and the further past but nowhere is there the present: click here, and I am shooting darts at at board nailed to a tree in Rochester; click here, and I am walking past a mosque in Germany; here, and I am sitting around a fire with my friends.

In my real life, I press pause. I haven’t left my neighborhood in over a week. Instead, I  log onto Google Maps and think of all the places I’ll go once it’s safe. I’ve never been to California but here, in Google Maps, I can pretend. I am on a beach in Santa Monica; I am on a mountain at Yosemite; I am walking through downtown LA. In Google Maps, I watch the sun rise and set and rise again. In Google Maps, I don’t need a plane to travel.

Sometimes I wonder how many other people log onto Google Maps, just like I do when I’m bored at home sitting in my attic apartment. Do they explore the images others have uploaded? Do they search the maps of their lives, jumping from apartment to apartment, neighborhood to neighborhood, city to city? Do they consider all the places they will go once the pandemic is over? What do they see? What is remembered? And what—old homes, former selves, a shadow of a family member just out of frame—can never be traced?

Kathryn Waring is an essayist and multimedia writer based in Pittsburgh, PA. Her work has appeared in Essay Daily, The Normal School, and American Literary Review, among others. She is a proud SUNY Geneseo alumna (’15) and former managing editor of Gandy Dancer.

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by | May 1, 2020 · 11:59 am

Gabrielle Esposito

Resting Wings

On Valentine’s Day, it snows and you ask me to walk across campus to Narragansett Hall, because you want to see me even though we’re not dating. I must’ve lost my spine in the holiday rush, so I say I will and walk one mile through the windy cold to see you. I’m numb by the time I make it to the dorm, and when I text you to say that I’m standing outside waiting, you tell me you’re not there but you’re coming, that I should wait. I do—two words I used to want to say to you.

Fifteen minutes go by. Snow gathers on top of my head, melts, and gathers again. I’m shivering on a bench that grows wet underneath my body. I don’t go anywhere, because if I were strong enough to leave you, I would’ve done it two years ago, the first time you left me alone in your room while you went out on a Friday night, got drunk, and threw up in the recycling bin. We are semester-lovers, a convenience that distracts from the fact that we are far from home, and there is physically no one to say “I love you,” except us to each other. Words easily formed on mouths but so rarely meant nowadays, especially by me.

I tell myself I’ll leave if you don’t show up in the next five minutes, but of course you materialize. You have a strange habit of appearing when you sense my patience waning.

Hello, gorgeous, you say. Your smile isn’t as white as snow—it’s yellow like the tobacco you smoke. I taste THC on your tongue; on your lips, a hint of cocaine grit. A cocktail of drugs, though you prefer keg beer found in basements or that barn down on North Street, the one with the space heater near the entrance.

Hey, I say. And I know I’ll be around you for the next couple of hours, until I get hungry, or we disagree about something, or you want to go smoke. Then we’ll go our separate ways until you text me and I misplace my spine again.

I have something for you, you say. From the inside of your jacket, you pull out a yellow rose. I blush, returning heat to my face. I saw some Alpha Chi Omega girls selling roses in the college union when I went to get my mail this morning, and I secretly hoped you would buy me one, because I feel like you owe me that much.

Thank you, I say. I hug you because I know I should, but also because I want to. The idea that you thought of me today is enough to make me forget the times you left me alone to get high or drunk or meet friends who happen to be girls. All those cool girls you tell me about, the ones who smoke and drink while I stay inside during cold nights—I forget all of my petty jealousy, and perhaps my better judgement, as I hold the rose in my hand. The stem is strong and waxy on my fingertips, the petals unfurled in maturity. Something beautiful to act as candlelight in the places where you rest.

You’re welcome, you say. I stole it from a bouquet in the chemistry office.

Oh, is all I can think to say. The glow around your gift fades away fast. In the next few seconds, the cold finds a way to chill my bones even through my new winter jacket. As you pull me into Narragansett Hall, I look down at the rose and wonder if I want something that doesn’t belong to me.

The rose winds up hanging upside down on my wall with sticky blue tack, the kind kindergarten teachers use to hang up arts and crafts. A week passes, and the stem begins to collapse. Then the petals wilt and crinkle until they are nothing but a ball of dead yellow. The rose is better this way—present, but non-functioning. Not that a rose ever has any other purpose except for aesthetics.  Still, killing the rose makes me feel like I have some type of control over you, who conducts this relationship that’s not really a relationship, but used to be, back in the summer.

Now, we just hole ourselves up in your room for hours, doing nothing except lying on an uncomfortable mattress and watching comedy shows that are pungent with cruelty—your humor, not mine. Your arm wrapped around me and my head, a head filled with thoughts of being elsewhere, on your chest. Would if I could, go back two years, when I first met you outside Putnam Hall by chance, introduced by a guy in my dorm who happened to be showing me around campus. Back then, the light in your eyes had nothing to do with the sun but the way you saw life: a playground full of obstacles that you could overcome. Would if I could, go back to the night you held my hands and told me that life is a beautiful thing that needs to be shared with someone.

These days, your eyes are dulled by smoke. You’ve become jaded because being a senior chemistry student in college is harder than being a sophomore, and you’re constantly struggling with what you want to do—party—versus what you need to do—study. Your vices always win. You are a predictable creature of habit, but your temper is unexpected. When I see you, I never know who I’m going to meet: a figure made of smoke, or someone stressed because he didn’t do the assignment that was due two days ago.

When I’m with you, I feel the restlessness everywhere in my body. My muscles ache to move, but I’m afraid if I do you’ll get the impression that I don’t want to be with you. Even though this is true, I can’t tell you because you’re far away from home, too. Psych 101 has me thinking that your drinking and drugs is a way to express self-hatred. I’m afraid to pull away, afraid to give you a reason to try to find ways to numb the pain of a separation. Because if nothing else, I’ve become a habit to you, a semi-solid fixture of your life. And maybe I’m clinging to you because I’ve accepted you as a part of this college campus, and I’m afraid something would be missing without you. I’m as responsible for wallowing in our toxic nature as you are.

It’s the middle of March, and I’ve begun to hate you. I’ve started talking to someone else, a quiet and gentle person who loves writing but not reading, a sin I forgive because when he kisses me, he holds the back of my head as if he’s afraid to let me fall away. The first night we’re together, you’re at a party. When I saw you earlier, you’d taken a capsule full of powdered mushroom, and told me you wanted to begin a new world order without money so you can end homelessness.

I’m not thinking about this when I first kiss him. In fact, I don’t think about you at all, and when it’s over and I’m resting my head against his chest—so different from yours—I don’t feel any smudge of guilt. In the morning, I wonder if I’m sociopathic and realize I’m not. My emotions and patience are like a suicidal jump: an expansive, wind-rushing headspace until something snaps. Skull against ocean rock.

It’s been six months since the summer, and it’s hard to remember the way life was when it was warm. But I remember what the summer was like, waiting for a beheading, waiting for our relationship to die. We killed it together one night in July over FaceTime, decided we couldn’t keep screaming at each other—our throats were sore. I was stupid to see you the first day back on-campus of our fall senior semester. I should’ve pulled away when you went to kiss me in the elevator, but I was lonely, and starving for the gentle touch of a hand that wasn’t mine. To feel a heat that wasn’t mine, someone outside of myself. So now we exist in gray light, an afterlife. If nothing else, we persist because it is impossible to kill something already dead. It is impossible to say, I’m breaking up with you when there is nothing to break.

April comes and the cold weather starts to break just enough to remind me that I won’t be on this college campus forever, and neither will you. In May, you will graduate in a morning ceremony and I will graduate a couple hours later in a ceremony dedicated to the arts. Our separate ceremonies are just the beginning of a larger separation. As I begin to realize the temporary state of our relationship, I get more restless. You fall to the backburner as I begin to think about life outside of college, the next step.

It’s easy to see the distance between us when we were once so close. We worked to occupy each other’s space by laying on top of one another, sharing breath. You guess the reason. Your old intelligence shines through when you ask, Is there anyone else?

If I had less cushion between my bones, I would’ve said yes. Believe that I think about telling you, about ending this stupid merry-go-round of a relationship. Trust that I want to be honest with you, but think about the ways in which you could be cruel to me. I think about how small campus is, and the fact that this one mile stretch of academic buildings isn’t the real world, that you’ll know where I live because college is just an incubator for old teenagers and young adults, a stagnant place with moving fixtures. I think better about opening my mouth to tell you I’ve been visiting someone else in my head, heart, and body.

No, I say. I lie to you, a person I once let sit in the cavern of my ribs. I don’t feel bad about lying because you don’t believe me anyway; you just don’t have any evidence. I’ve been careful about keeping myself safe and guarded. At the end of the day, what right do you have to be mad at me? We both see the way girls teeter-totter to parties with their makeup glowing, dresses skin tight. We both know I don’t sleep over on Friday or Saturday nights when you go out, and we both know how promiscuous you are, and the way I haven’t been letting you in lately. That I’ve been pushing you away when you reach for me in the night, an action I can’t recall but feel a small swell of relief over when you tell me.

You use your suspicion against me, again and again. After we’re done playing pretend-relationship, as you’re leaving to go smoke, you say things like, “Are you going to suck his dick now?”

No, I’m going to be alone, is always my response, and it’s always what I do, after I take a shower to rinse off the feeling of your fingernails. There is nothing sweeter than to just have a moment to myself, a real breath without anyone wondering who I’m breathing for.

April ends, and May comes with seventy-degree weather and flowers, as if it’s apologizing for the colder months and just wants to make things right. I spend time with him while you’re out at parties on Fridays and Saturdays.

He comes to my dorm room, and we make ourselves drinks. I swallow mine fast and collapse onto the bed, where he circles my body. We fit together like filigree on lace.

I’d like to come back and see you, I say.

That would be nice, he says. When I graduate and leave, we’ll text a little, meet up once and then fall from each other’s contact lists. There is no budding relationship here, and I will come to resent him and myself for not trying harder to make something like our gentle moments last. But for now, I have hope that I will see him again and this makes it easier to leave you.

A few days before graduation, I want to press fast-forward but experience each nano-second of campus life because I know this phase of my life is about to end. The night before graduation, I let you sleep over out of respect for an old tradition. You come in at two o’clock in the morning and sit outside my dorm room composing a love letter that I will find three weeks later in a box of my books.

The letter makes me cry for old reasons because you sound so gentle in the words rounded by your hand. But I also cry at the irony of your wishes for me: find someone who respects you; remember that you are worth so much. I cry because I’m angry at a past self who stayed silent for too long, who couldn’t help you. I cry because the girl—the woman I am now– can hardly stand you. Yet, I almost feel like I should thank you. My reserve for trust is shallow, my patience crescent moon thin, except when it comes to myself. I’m patiently awaiting the moment I forgive myself for not walking away from you sooner. I trust that I won’t make the same mistake in trusting another person like you again.

We graduate, you in the morning and me in the afternoon. When I’m finished with my ceremony, I leave with my family in a caravan of cars. You text me: I want to take pictures with you. When you call me, I don’t answer.

I’m gone, I text. Sorry.

Only I’m not. With my leather folder in my hands and my graduation cap still on, I feel nothing except a glow inside my ribs where you once sat. I lose the rose you gave me in the move, a rose that was probably grown in a nursery and artificially pollinated by botanists and not insects—the winged ones who land on petals and then take off, some of the pollen sticking to their fur.

Flowers and insects.

Butterflies are sometimes tethered by scientists and placed in wind tunnels for observation. Flowers are used as sweet bait, an incentive for the butterflies to keep flying. The exhaustive lengths butterflies will fly for the chance to taste something that is more than food, something that is close to the essence of life.

I understand butterflies in wind tunnels following flowers. I understand the pointlessness of flapping in one place and still hoping to move. I know, I know, I know that I’m not the butterfly, or the wind, or the flower, but if I’ve learned anything from this sick experiment, it’s that being tethered happens to all of us.

Gabrielle Esposito is a recent graduate from SUNY Geneseo’s creative writing program. She was a fiction editor for Gandy Dancer in Fall 2018. Her work has been published in The Manhattanville Review, Aurora, and ZAUMXS. She is currently pursuing a Master’s degree in Library Science at SUNY Albany.

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by | November 25, 2019 · 12:08 pm

8.1 | Postscript

Jonathan Green

The Abyss

For the first time, Robbie would be collecting the firewood, laying it on the pit, lighting the kindling, and sleeping in his tent alone. For years he made the trip up to Acadia with Elijah and Foster: hitting the archery range, kayaking, mountain biking, and talking about climbing The Abyss. Elijah had always reserved Site Thirteen for the last week of August; this year he had reserved an extra weekend in September to get one more shot at the peak before the end of the season.

Elijah drowned on the first Monday of senior year. The funeral was held the following morning, three weeks before the boys planned to leave for Acadia.

Robbie came into the clearing where rain streaked down under the pale yellow glow of the outdoor floodlights and the light gray gravel of the parking lot was freckled with dark splotches. Twenty feet beyond the illuminated cabin deck of camp headquarters, known as The Meeting Place, stood a small wooden shack with the letters “QM” carved into the portico. He continued to the Quartermaster’s shed but found it padlocked with a sign directing visitors back to The Meeting Place for firewood and supplies. He looked to the edge of the clearing where the old Blue Dot Trail began. He hoped he would be able to follow the reflective blue dots without his Maglite, which he’d left in his tent.

Beneath the canopy of the pines, the rain slowed then ceased. The soft distant applause of water droplets falling through the low brush faded. Robbie’s eyes swept the ground, and he lifted his knees with each step, careful to avoid tripping over protruding roots as he scanned the trees for the blue dots. He reached at a familiar fork in the path and veered right.

He arrived at the old site, walking between the lean-tos and tent platforms toward the high reeds. Above him loomed the hallowed boulder, riddled with the same crevices he used to climb through with Elijah and Foster while still only dreaming of The Abyss. Some gaps were narrow enough to fit only a foot in, others were wide enough to walk through. Centered on the slope of the house-sized boulder was the painted target, a blue outer ring around a red inner ring and a yellow center, which marked the head of the archery trail at the rock’s peak.

Robbie eyed the old beast. Before the face, five feet of vertical granite receded into the slope where the target was painted. He felt shaky and wondered if he could still make the jump, as he had last year. He crouched low and bolted, planting his left foot hard, pushing off the ground, and flinging his body into the air. His feet landed at the incline’s base, and his hands slapped hard against the granite. He turned his back to the rock face and slid on his butt up to the center of the target that overlooked the old Site.

The plot looked smaller without the tents, the picnic tables, the rangers’ trucks, and without the familiar voices. The crickets were loud, and the wind whistled through the reeds. Robbie could smell the salt carried in from Bar Harbor. It all felt louder, more concentrated than before. His pocket vibrated; it was Foster calling. He didn’t answer.

Robbie wondered if Foster would ever lie on the rock again, if he would sit and watch the red efts emerge on rainy nights, smell the pines in the salt-tinged air, and listen for the eponymous call of the whip-poor-wills. He wondered if Foster would ever come back to Acadia, and if they would make a run at The Abyss together without Elijah. Robbie decided to make the climb in the morning; he would have to summit by himself.

The Abyss had a reputation for overwhelming novice climbers. It seemed that every time the boys were prepared to test out the trail, it was closed for an emergency rescue. From the base, they could see the hundred-foot drop-offs along the exposed foot-wide path, overlooking the coastal ridge. The boys had understood that The Abyss was not to be underestimated, and that they intended to one day conquer it together.

Robbie slid down the rock and returned to the clearing. He bypassed the Quartermaster’s shed and entered The Meeting Place.

A woman in a red flannel shirt with a bronze Acadia pin stood behind the counter. Robbie inquired about the firewood. She asked for his site permit and he rummaged through his pocket, finding it stuck to the Eagle Scout insignia of his leather wallet. Foster and Elijah each had one just like it. Robbie held the permit in the palm of his outstretched hand for the woman to see. “Expiration Time” was written on the beige slip in large bold print. It would be valid for two more days.

The woman nodded and went out the door behind the counter, returning with a bundle of chopped logs tied together with red nylon. Robbie thanked her and his stomach grumbled. He knew he should eat if he planned on finishing the climb in the morning, so he bought a hot dog and some fries, took a bite, and circled the room.

The cabin’s walls were lined with framed newspaper clippings about the beauty of Acadia. “Acadia National Park Generates $186 Million For Maine Economy,” “Finding Serenity: Acadia National Park,” and “Hidden Gems in The National Parks Service!” Thumb-tacked into the back wall, unframed and un-laminated, was a yellowed paper which read, “Acadia Hiker Dies in Abyss Fall.”

Bar Harbor and its satellite neighborhoods were swept by the news of Sonya Larson’s death four years ago. Robbie, Foster, and Elijah had heard that a young girl lost her life to The Abyss, but the article contained details the vague murmurs about the tragedy lacked. He pulled the tack out of the stiff parchment.

Sonya Larson had been a seasonal visitor, an experienced climber, and president of the University of Maine Climber’s Club. She was completing a section of iron-rung climbing when she fell seventy feet onto a rock ledge protruding from the cliff face. Twenty minutes after she dialed 9-1-1, the park rangers arrived. Larson had sustained severe bone fractures and internal bleeding. They couldn’t rescue her until an elaborate pulley system was set up to lift her to the top of the trail. After a two-hour operation, she was airlifted via helicopter to a hospital in Bangor, where she was declared dead.

Robbie heard from the rangers that the view from the summit was spectacular. He also heard that some of the campers referred to the area below as Larson’s Landing.

Robbie took a second bite of the hot dog. It tasted dry and bitter. He tried a fry, but it was too salty, so he tossed them into the trash. He hadn’t eaten since breakfast nearly twelve hours ago, and only had a cup of orange juice since then. He carried the log bundle out of the cabin and placed it on the deck. Pulling some twine from his back pocket, he lashed the bundle around his shoulders and across his chest to distribute its weight. The rope dug into his skin, but he was relieved to be back outside and away from the stale indoor air.

The sound of rain in the distance returned, and Robbie felt its gentle trickle as he stepped down from the deck. He took a deep breath and tilted his head toward the sky, rinsing his face and massaging his forehead.

His phone buzzed again. Rain soothed his skin and itchy scalp as he stood at the base of the steps.

“Hey, what’s up?”

“Hey man, how’s the site?”

“Fine, nothing special.”

Foster spoke softly, “How you feeling?” There was a pause, and Foster continued. “Making it okay up there?”

“I brought my bike—handles the mud—and the site’s good. Much closer to headquarters than Thirteen, latrine right near the lean-to, water pump, and plenty of hot dogs and chicken at The Meeting Place like always.”

“Cool, cool.” There was silence, like Foster was building the courage to ask a question. “You going up the trail?”

“Dunno, I’ll see.” The smell of wet garbage seeped across the gravel glade from the dumpsters opposite The Meeting Place. Robbie headed down the dark path between the high trees of the spruce-fir forest, back to Site Twenty-Four. His load felt heavy and his head hurt.

“Take a couple pictures okay? Especially if you make it to the top.”

“Sure thing.” Water began to drop from his nose onto his lips.

“Have you figured how long you’re staying? The whole weekend, or what?”

“Dunno. I haven’t really decided anything, but I’ll let you know once I figure it out. Maybe tomorrow, cool?”

“Yeah, gotcha. Your mom’s a little worried, so let me know whenever, as long as you’re good up there.”

“You can tell her I’ll be fine. I’ve been up here before.”

“Yeah, not alone though.”

“It’s not like you weren’t invited.”

“I know. I just didn’t really feel up for it.”

“Yeah.”

“I still don’t think you should be up there by yourself.”

Robbie bit his lip. “I’m just sticking to the plan.”

He arrived at the fence post for Site Twenty-Four and removed the bundle from his back. He placed the firewood at his feet and leaned against the outside of the open-air latrine beside him.

“Just don’t go doing anything stupid.”

“I can handle myself.”

“You wouldn’t be the first person to say that who got himself in deep shit.”

“I know. But I had to come up; I can’t be home right now.”

“Yeah, I get it. Just be careful.”

“I will. Later.”

“Later, man.”

He crumpled the site permit in his fist and flicked it off his palm. A breeze carried it to the edge of the trim grass, where it teetered on a fern and fell from its wide feathery fronds, rolling away into the dark woods. He cut the nylon with his pocketknife and tossed one log into the fire pit for the next day, then he went into his tent and let the fatigue do its work.

When Robbie woke up, his lips were sticky, and his mouth tasted like sour milk. An aluminum canteen, hanging from the polyester ceiling, glowed pink-orange from the sunlight shining through. He took a sip of water, seeing his arm tinted the same pink-orange. His head still hurt and the skin over his brow felt tight across his skull. He got up, changed into hiking clothes, washed his face, and started out for The Abyss. The early morning dew made the air damp with the smell of wet pinecones.

Robbie hiked the twenty-degree incline that set the trail off over the worn and slippery rock face. He sprinted up the forty-foot slope and reached the flats, then he hiked the next half-mile of forest under the cover of the spruce trees. The narrow path was littered with fall leaves, acorns, and the occasional heady raccoon dropping. He made his way over the bouldering section, running up and down the rises and falls of the trail and hopping the gaps between rocks as he ascended the cliff. He looked up. The sun was directly overhead. The trail hugged the cliff and opened beyond the trees so that the cool shades of green yielded to a hot red. It felt like navigating the desert, as he followed the curving trail into the unprotected clearing, his legs shook, and his head throbbed. He finished off what was left of the half-full canteen from the morning. He still hadn’t eaten since his two bites at The Meeting Place.

Robbie placed his right hand on the cliff wall for support. The tree line was just behind him now, and to his left was the open face looming over the trail’s base. There was a sign in the middle of the path that read, “WARNING: OPEN CLIFF FACE. BEWARE, NO RAILING AHEAD.” He remembered the sign from a picture in the article. This was where Sonya Larson had fallen. He removed his hand from the crusty rock face, his skin coated with a fresh layer of chalky, pale red dust. Curiosity drew him to the ledge. He took short steps—hands limp at his sides, shoulders sunken low—toward the edge of The Abyss Trail. The small sports bag on his back carrying his supplies pulled him downward and inward, toward the ground. He felt like it would pull him over the cliff, so he laid down and crawled to the end of the rock.

The town of Bar Harbor was set below him at the Atlantic’s rim, three miles beyond the base of the trail. He stared down at the hundred-foot drop to the trail’s start, and then at the spot where he used to gaze up in awe of the cliff with Elijah and Foster. He imagined the three of them, three twelve-year-olds with their brand-new pocketknives seeing the trail for the first time. Foster with his hands in his pockets, shuffling his feet and kicking up a cloud of dust. Himself, always a step closer to the cliff, staring with wild, blasphemous eyes at the towering slab of earth. And Elijah, nudging him forward, punching his shoulder, and slapping him excitedly across the back to psych him up for the climb.

With his chin resting on the hot sunbaked stone, Robbie searched for the protrusion that Sonya Larson had landed on. He spotted it off to his right, about two-thirds of the way to the cliff base. It looked to be ten-to-fifteen feet long and extended only five feet out from the rock, but it was hard to tell without proper perspective. Robbie wondered if Sonya had thought this ledge would break her fall; he wondered if she’d thought that it would save her life.

Robbie slid back; feet shaking, hands trembling, head pounding, heart racing. He pushed off the ground to stand up. His mouth was parched. He rose halfway upright and felt a soft breeze pass over his ears, whirring tenderly, and nudging him forwards to the ledge. He thought about Elijah, how his last moments could have felt just this way: soft breeze, quiet air, even the water below. Stillness.

The green spruce trees behind him, the gray and green stained rocks, the brown pinecones, the raccoon feces, the red, clay-dusted patches of cliff face, and the distant, dark blue Atlantic water fading into the light blue horizon on this hot fall day; all turned black. Robbie collapsed, knees hitting the ground and torso flopping flush against the flat rock of the trail several yards short of the highest point, on which Sonya Larson last stood.

Two hundred students were bussed from the high school to the funeral. Black was everywhere, dark coats and pants, shining black shoes. Elijah’s family stood beside the casket. Two brothers sung their favorite summer bonfire songs. They cried and choked, and Elijah’s cousin turned her head to vomit into the plastic ficus behind Elijah’s body.

Robbie woke up. He was lying flat on the ground and the first sight he glimpsed was the horizon beyond Larson’s Landing. The sun was still directly overhead. He was alone; nothing had changed. Reaching behind his back, he removed his second canteen and three granola bars. He sat up as slowly as he could and drank even slower. Halfway through his canteen, he started on his granola bar. Chocolate bits and brown crumbs rolled down his shirt, spilling over his pants and tumbling to the ground.

When he gathered enough strength to walk fifty feet to the nearest water pump marked on the trail map, Robbie refilled his canteens and soaked his hand towel with the cold water. He returned to his previous spot to sit down, drank another canteen-full of water, and wrapped the cool, soaked towel around his head.

Robbie rested for another hour, eating and drinking, eyes fixed on the horizon. Wispy clouds swirled in the sky, tinting the firmament assorted shades of blue. The drop was far, but the small masses of land off the Bar Harbor coast were lush and green, and the air was dotted with gulls and fishing osprey skimming the water’s surface. It was a sight teeming with life. In a week Robbie might forget about the new site, but he would remember the old days of hiking the Blue Dot Trail, the feel of the chalky boulders, the muffled sound of air brushing through the ferns, the smell of the North Atlantic, and how incredible the view was from the top of The Abyss.

He pulled his phone from his pack, pressed the call button, and waited to hear his friend’s voice on the other side.

Jonathan Green is a graduate of the MFA program at Stony Brook Southampton. He is an editor at The Baltimore Review, and was previously a research assistant in a Biomedical Engineering Lab at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, and a Wilderness Explorer Troop Leader at Walt Disney World. He doesn’t know what mapping audio-spatial fields of marmosets and teaching children about environmental conservation has to do with writing, but he hopes it sounds interesting.

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by | December 3, 2018 · 11:51 am

Caroline Beltz-Hosek

Intervals

First Unitarian Church of Rochester, 1988

Before the sermon begins, I puke
blood in a cramped hallway & leave without

cleaning up the mess.

What grace—

Am I Eve? Biblical pariah,

my girl body disturbs me: pink

collection plate. Sweat gathers

in hairless armpits, oocytes stir yet

their travel will, for another twenty years, produce

only cyclical absence.

Nascent breasts under loose tops,

I learn my empty slough is something

to hide in bathroom stalls, feminine

pad expel, expelled to a backpack or purse.

I learn to exaggerate the pain when I want to

skip gym class. Like all the Raggedy Anns.

What does my teacher—without knowing—conceal

& predict when he quickly averts his eyes?

He gives me sweaty permission

to read alone in the nurse’s office: thin membrane

curtain, foldaway clot, tart red

juice in a Styrofoam cup.

Mother of all my living, my living all

my mother, I was a chiasmus from the start

& go two months in utero until she’s onto

me. Her ovum is my ovum is my twin

daughters, delicate split moon,

who do not yet know their bodies are ritual gardens,

who do not yet know its clockwork catch & release,

who do not yet know God

is gone too soon from this place.

What wisdom is there in shedding?

Caroline Beltz-Hosek received her M.A. in Poetry from SUNY Brockport. A former assistant editor at Penguin Putnam, she has taught creative writing and literature at SUNY Geneseo since 2006. Her poems have been published in The Fourth River and Minetta Review. Additionally, she was awarded a 2018 Incentive Grant from the Geneseo Foundation for “The Long Diminishing Parade,” a poetry collection based in part on her maternal ancestors, which explores topics of motherhood, mental illness, alienation and the immigrant experience, and the role that place—real and imagined, personal and historical—plays in shaping identity and creative expression.

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