Issue 10.1

NON-FICTION

• Pressure, by Alicia Andrzejewski

• Memories of a Mexican Boy Growing Up in El Paso: Señorita Brown, by Daniel Acosta

• The Gift, by Marc Simon

• Volunteering, by Diana Daniele

PERSONAL ESSAY

• Show Me, by Don Tassone

• Strange, Norrel, and Mom, by Frances McCann

• Generation Gap, by Diane de Anda

• Twice Thing, by George Choundas

Editorial Team: Jose Palacios, Aimee Campos, Monica Aleman

Advisors: Juana Moriel-Payne, Thomas Cook

Art by Edward Michael Supranowicz.

Edward Michael Supranowicz is the grandson of Irish and Russian/Ukrainian immigrants. He grew up on a small farm in Appalachia. He has a grad background in painting and printmaking. Some of his artwork has recently or will soon appear in Fish Food, Streetlight, Another Chicago Magazine, Door Is A Jar, The Phoenix, and The Harvard Advocate. Edward is also a published poet.

NON-FICTION

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Pressure

by Alicia Andrzejewski

I grab my daughter’s hand and pull her away from the road, jerking my head to look for cars. Another close call, I think, perturbed. As we begin to walk, I suddenly feel her tiny thumb press into my trapezium, gliding up to trace the other bones in my hand. She clenches her fingers around mine and moves them in little circles, following me towards the front door.

I suck in a breath, thinking I’m about to chuckle. Then I pause, swallow, and realize I’m about to cry. 

If my daughter is attentive, and she usually is, I’ve taught her it’s normal to stare at a screen for hours—that coffee is an integral part of existence. I’ve taught her eating before dinner is optional, but pop tarts are a sufficient breakfast otherwise. I’ve taught her how to make passive-aggressive comments instead of asking for what she needs. I’ve taught her to wince when she sees her reflection, to chew on the skin around her nails.

In this moment, though, I realize I’ve also taught her how to run her fingers along bones buried in flesh, to marvel at bodily intimacy. I’ve taught her how to be present for the person whose hand is clasped in hers, how to press the pads of her fingers into this hand to offer comfort. I’ve taught her that bodies can come together in ways that are full of delight—and that she can relish in this pressure.

I pause and look down at her, smiling as I circle and press my own thumb into the back of her hand. As I always do.

****

Alicia Andrzejewski is an assistant professor in William & Mary’s English department. Her work has appeared in The Chronicle, Literary Hub, American Theater, The Boston Globe, and other publications. Her current book project, Queer Pregnancy in Shakespeare’s Plays, argues for the transgressive force of pregnancy in his oeuvre and the expansive ways in which early modern people thought about the pregnant body.

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Memories of a Mexican Boy Growing Up in El Paso: Señorita Brown

by Daniel Acosta

                

 Señorita Brown was a middle-aged spinster when I first met her as my nineth-grade Spanish teacher at Austin High School in the fall of 1959.  I always ask myself why I took four years of Spanish with her when I had other choices of teachers who were considerably less demanding than her quest for excellence and perfection in the learning of Spanish by her students.  In the beginning, my illogical reason for choosing her was that her classroom was the best one at AHS in terms of physical layout.  It was a spacious and open classroom with sunny-bright large windows which looked out to a tiny patch of grass and an array of small green shrubs. A student could daydream by looking west at the dirt-brown Franklin Mountains looming above the city.   It was situated as a corner room at the end of a long corridor, which ran north to south down the main floor of the school, away from the traffic, noise, and chaos of rowdy and rude teenagers who fortunately reached their lockers and classrooms before they could approach Señorita Brown's secretly hidden gem. 

She was not that attractive, but she had a presence that demanded one's attention and generated fear and intimidation when you walked into her classroom for the first time.   You knew instantly that she was a special and unique teacher.  On that first day of class, she stood in the middle of the classroom and purposely turned sideways so you could see her profile and prominent nose.  She told the class that she was very proud of her Roman, aquiline nose, referencing those nasal features of historically famous Romans, notably, members of the Caesar family.  As a corollary to her nose, she revealed that her hands had webbed fingers, holding her hands high up in the air so the class could see the thin, transparent membranous skin between the fingers.  However, her somewhat inelegant attire detracted a bit from her commanding presence in the classroom:  bulky and witchlike shoes with large square heels (like those worn by the Wicked Witch of the East in the Wizard of Oz) and loose-fitting skirts that fell below her knees and covered part of her strong-looking legs with bulging calves.  But, but...I was simply in awe of this sophisticated and refreshingly outspoken woman.

Senñrita Brown was my only teacher at AHS who introduced her students to cultural and artistic activities, such as leading the class to afterschool visits to the El Paso Museum of Art and highlighting the many countries that she had visited with her sister during the summer.  I remember to this day Senorita Brown's commentaries on Goya and El Greco when the class visited the museum, especially her observations on how El Greco painted the hands of his subjects with exquisitely long fingers. She used at least one class period to present travel slides on her journeys to such countries as Egypt and Spain.  One amusing tale that I remember was her description of meeting the son of the founder of Folger's Coffee on a sea cruise to South America and hearing her giddy comments on his distinguished and dignified appearance and manners.  She informed the class that to be cultivated and courteous to others should be traits that all of us should acquire.

But there were moments when I experienced the wrath of Señorita Brown.  I had been elected President of the National Spanish Honor Society, and she proudly gave me her neatly handwritten list of the Society members and their phone numbers and told me to copy the list for my use and return it promptly the following day.  I forgot and the next day in class she immediately went into a 5-minute tirade about my lack of responsibility and so on and so on.  I whispered holy shit to the girl sitting in front of me and asked when she would stop.  This sweet girl who I rarely talked to after class was supportive and said it would blow over.  She was right.

During my formative years as a teenager, I read constantly without much advice or guidance from my teachers.  At the El Paso Public Library, I gravitated towards the classics, starting with the letter A and working my way down the alphabet—Austen, Balzac, Conrad, Dickens, Dostoevsky, Dumas, Faulkner, Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Hardy, Hugo, Kafka, Lewis, London, Melville, Montaigne, Maugham, Orwell, Steinbeck, Swift, Tolstoy, Twain, Zola, and several others.  However, Señorita Brown noticed my library books and challenged me often about my readings, which opened me up to other authors not known to me.

--Danny (she innocently asked me one day), who was the author of the "Lady of the       Camellias", the fils or pere?

Because I had read Balzac's "Pere Goriot", at least I knew the French word for father and guessed the other one meant to be the son.  I had read "The Three Musketeers" and "The Count of Monte Cristo" by Alexander Dumas but did not know that he had a son who also was a novelist.  I took an educated guess and replied "fils".  She slyly smiled and continued with our Spanish lesson for the day.  I now had to read the son’s novel. 

Another example of Señorita Brown testing my reading repertoire was when she took a select group of her best students to a luncheon meeting with a Juarez group of businessmen and city leaders across the international border.  After lunch she took us to a small mercado to stroll around the booths and engage in Spanish chit-chat with the vendors to work on our speaking skills.  At one of the book stalls, she found a Spanish translation of one of A.J. Cronin's novels.

--Danny, what is the English translation of the Spanish word for "fortaleza", besides       fortress? 

I had read Cronin’s “The Keys of the Kingdom” and saw on the book’s cover that he had written “The Citadel” earlier in his career.  I quickly responded, "The Citadel".  I so happened to have read The Keys of the Kingdom in the summer before school started.  Here is another book I had to read immediately before she would ask me questions about the plot.  I was beginning to realize that I was not really that smart but that I had a knack for facts, data, and good recall of my readings.  Later in life I would use those skills to get through graduate school and earn a doctorate in pharmacology and toxicology.

She often invited the class to her home for talks by noted professionals, and one particularly stimulating talk was given by the architect of the Chapel at the Loretta Academy, a private prep school in El Paso for girls from around the country and world.  The Chapel reminded me somewhat of the Sidney Opera House with its walls like sails.  It was the first time I had seen an expert using 2x2 slides to present a seminar to an audience, something I would do many times as a scientist at national and international conferences. 

At that gathering at her home, I casually walked through her living room and noticed her collection of books; she saw what I was doing and said I should read Edith Hamilton's "The Greek Way".  Because of her suggestion, I became enthralled with the Greek playwrights and read many of the plays by Sophocles, Aeschylus, Euripides, and Aristophanes.  These plays and the writings of Edith Hamilton led me to the works of Aristotle, Plato, and Homer and on to the Romans and their writings. 

Señorita Brown awakened my pride in what it meant to be a Mexican in a city where whites dominated politics, the business world, and the educational system, even though the population of El Paso had significantly more people of Mexican heritage than people of an Anglo background.  I had grown up, refusing to speak Spanish at home or at school, believing that I would be accepted more by my white classmates and teachers. There was always the tension of my not speaking Spanish well and I tried to hide that inadequacy from my teachers and my classmates.  But no one growing up in Texas with a Mexican background can hide his true heritage from Anglos even though I was fair-skinned and was not as brown as my Mexican classmates. 

Throughout my grade school and high school years I did not have any Mexican teachers to serve as role models.  In essence, she became my unrecognized mentor.    It took me a lifetime to grasp the spell that she had over me throughout my education and my long career as a professor, scientist, and administrator.  Through her influence, I enjoy reading literature, history, and nonfiction; in my retirement her inspiration has led me to write personal narratives on growing up on the border.  Señorita Brown was the hidden gem at Austin High School.

****

Dan Acosta is a second-generation Mexican American, whose grandparents emigrated from Mexico. He is a former professor, research scientist, and administrator. He started writing two years ago when he retired at 74 and lives in Austin. He plans to write about his experiences as a Mexican boy trying to make it in white America.

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The Gift

by Marc Simon

It was a year and a month after the accident. It was her fifth birthday party. She walked into the living room with a slight limp and wore a long blue dress to cover bandages from a recent skin graft. Her smile stayed frozen on her face, even as her relatives descended upon her. They were loud and sweaty, these aunts and uncles with varying degrees of obesity, all trying to outdo each other with their sympathy toward her, and so they all talked at once, and then they told each other to shut up, you’re frightening her. Her smile remained, as if frozen in time.

They’d had to use The Jaws of Life to cut Ronna from the wreckage. For the rest of her family—her father and two sisters, ages eight and six—it was The Jaws of Death.

The air was close and cloying on that hot June afternoon, smelling of half-sour dill pickles and pastrami left out too long in the heat. One of the uncles, Louis I think declared that they should eat already, and then the lot of them hurried to the long table like pigs to a trough. Maybe that’s harsh, but that’s how I remember it. One of the aunts handed a plate of food to Ronna. She put it on a folding chair.

I stood by myself in a corner of the living room, keeping my distance. I wanted nothing to do with this side of my family, my father’s. I was fifteen, sensitive and secretive. I resisted their attempts to communicate with monosyllabic languor: How is school, Marky? Fine. You still playing baseball? Uh huh. Gotta girlfriend? No.

While they were feeding they pretty much left my cousin alone. I walked as softly as I could as I approached her, thinking she was as fragile as a china doll, not knowing what to say other than how are you, which seemed incredibly stupid, because how would she be given her injuries and her tragedy and this suffocating family gathering.

She kept her eyes and her smile on me. I squatted down. I asked if she remembered me, if she knew who I was. She said, “You’re my cousin Marc.”

The tears gathered in my eyes as I told her I loved her. She said, “I know.” And I think she did, on some fundamental level. I asked if maybe sometime she wanted to go to the Highland Park Zoo with me; not right now, but sometime. She said, “I have to ask Aunt Edie first.”

We looked at each other until an obese aunt blocked our line of sight. The noise began all over again and reached its crescendo when they sang Happy Birthday. I stayed out on the porch, smoking a stolen Camel, keeping an eye out for my father.

I didn’t see her again until thirty years later, at a family reunion. I hadn’t planned to attend. I felt no need to reunite, since I’d never felt united. When I politely R.S.V.P.’d that I couldn’t make it, my oldest cousin Shelly called me, said it was too bad, Cousin Ronna was coming in from Fiji.

“Fiji?”

Shelly explained. Ronna went to the University of Maryland. Got a job with the FBI. Became an F.B.I. agent. Was transferred to San Francisco. Went to Fiji on a vacation. Fell in love with the resort manager. Quit the bureau, never came back. Works as a communications consultant at the U.S. embassy in Suva. “If you kept in touch with your family you would know this.”

I chose to ignore the bait. “What’s a communications expert?”

“Ask her yourself.” It was a not so subtle challenge. I booked a flight to Pittsburgh that night.

A placard in the lobby of the Italian restaurant read Simon Family Reunion, with an arrow pointing toward a private function room. Some relatives greeted me warmly. Some warily. Some of them, I think, weren’t quite sure what I was doing there, since I’d never shown any interest in attending family functions, like weddings, bar mitzvahs, or funerals.

My brother sat at a table by himself. What we had to say to each other could have been said in a two-minute phone call.

My fat relatives were still fat. The loud ones were still loud. In addition to yelling at each other, some of my cousins had children to yell at, too. The food was deli-style. I wondered if it was left over from Ronna’s fifth birthday party. I mentioned it to my cousin Bert. He looked at me as if I had two heads.

I caught sight of Ronna before she saw me. She looked vibrant. Bobbed blonde hair, slender, white puka shell bracelet, Fiji-gold tan. A slight limp. We hugged a long-lost hug.

We sat at the head of the table on either side of our oldest relative, Uncle Red. He never said it, but we knew we were his favorites. Maybe it was because Ronna and I both had lost parents at an early age; my father, Red’s youngest brother, at age forty-seven, cerebral hemorrhage; Ronna’s mother, his youngest sister, age thirty, cancer, a year before the accident.

Ronna and I took turns bringing Red food and whiskey, since he was in a wheelchair. He once was a powerful man. One time I saw him lift a shop anvil by himself. Diabetes had stolen his strength and his right leg up to the hip. After a half hour or so, the transport service came to take him back to the Hebrew Home for the Aged. It would be the last time I saw him alive.

The waitress set a Maker’s Mark in front of me. I asked Ronna what she’d done at the FBI.

“Surveillance.”

On who?

“People.”

Bad guys?

“People.”

I said this sounded like dialogue from that movie, Uncle Buck. I asked her if she’d seen the movie. She laughed. I asked her if she’d ever killed anyone.

She laughed again. I couldn’t tell if it was a yes laugh or a no laugh.

“Can’t you tell me anything else?

“O.K. I had a station wagon, a credit card and a sidearm.”

Before I could follow up my cousin Shelly sat down between us. She had a photo album and she told us that it had belonged to our Aunt Anne, who’d died a few years earlier. I think I knew that. At least I said I did.

The first photos were black and white. Shelly asked me if I remembered these people. The best I could say was, “Sort of.”

She said, “Oh. Well this one is your grandmother. You would recognize her if you didn’t live in a state of family denial.”

She flipped a page and there was a bride and groom photo—Ronna’s parents. I froze. I wanted to ask Shelly how she could have been so insensitive, to show Ronna a photo of her dead parents. I wanted to slap her.

Ronna smiled her fifth birthday smile. I don’t pretend to know what went on behind her green eyes. Maybe she didn’t remember them at all since she was so young when they died. Or maybe she did, with love. At any rate, we moved past it.

Ronna and I met a few years later, when she came to Boston to visit us. It was April, and the weather was springtime chilly. She wore my wife’s fur coat the entire visit. Every time we went into a restaurant she checked the exits with an FBI gaze.

Before she left for home—she still lived in Fiji—she said she had a gift for me. She handed an envelope to me and asked me not to open it until she was on the airplane, so I waited.

Inside the envelope was a yellowed photo of her mother and my father, teenaged brother and sister, sitting on the hood of a car with their arms around each other’s waste. Her note said, “Weren’t they pretty?”

I watched her plane climb away.

****

Marc Simon’s short fiction has appeared in several literary magazines, including The Wilderness House Review, Flashquake, Poetica Magazine, The Writing Disorder, Jewish Fiction.net, Slush Pile Magazine, Everyday Fiction, The Adelaide Literary Review, Burningword Literary Magazine, Microfiction Monday Magazine and most recently, Ginosko Literary Journal. His one-act plays have been winners in New Works competitions in the Etc. Readers Theater, Naples Florida, The Hand-to-Mouth Players Playwrights/Directors Workshop in Westchester, New York, and the 2020/2021 Pittsburgh New Works Festival. His debut novel, The Leap Year Boy was published in December, 2012. In a former life Marc was a comedian in a sketch comedy group. Marc lives in Naples, Florida. View his work at marcsimonwriter.com

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Volunteering

by Diana Daniele

The astringent smell of Lysol, no doubt used as much to mask the urine odor as to keep the place clean, assaulted my senses as I stepped inside the rehab center. A small chime announced my entry, but the woman at the front desk, who was poring over some kind of flow chart, didn’t even look up. I grinned in her direction, anyway, hoping a smile would hide my substantial fear of being in this place. It reminded me of the nursing homes I’d visited as a Christmas-caroling Girl Scout. This was a place where, given their druthers, no one would choose to be.

But I had. My psychiatrist had told me I was ready to work, not as the paid professional publicist I’d once been, but as a volunteer reader. Designed to get me out of the house so I could rejoin the world in a safe and meaningful way, this volunteer opportunity was a form of occupational therapy. I had chosen to work with senior citizens because of the kinship we shared, specifically, the pathos of our experience with invisibility. Mental illness is an invisible disease, and, in my ongoing struggles with depression and anxiety, I often felt invisible. Likewise, the elderly often feel unseen and unheard, particularly when they are living in care facilities. Sometimes the old and infirm are too weak or uninterested to vote. What’s more, they no longer engage in travel planning, fashion trends or any real consumer spending. These activities are an integral part of the American lifestyle and at the heart of its zeitgeist. Belonging is a basic and crucial human need, and many of the elderly and I had ceased to belong to The World in the way we once had.

This was all good theoretically, but the truth was I didn’t really want to leave my safe house, or the sanctity of my bed, to read to postoperative seniors at a rehab facility. For starters, I couldn’t fathom allowing myself the luxury of getting ready. Indeed, I actually feared the shower, which to most people sounds crazy. But if your existence is defined by self-loathing, such anxiety is a natural outcome. The hot water pouring from the shower head would eventually feel good -even relax me- and given I felt unworthy of such rewarding, spa-like luxuries, my avoiding the shower made perfect sense. The same held true for styling my hair or putting on make-up; I didn’t deserve to be pretty. With vanity goes sanity my therapist often chirped, fruitlessly encouraging me to take pains with my appearance. The topic of self-care was a recurrent theme in our weekly sessions, no doubt top of mind for her because of the way I presented - not a stitch of make-up, and dirty bangs that fell in clumps.

But there was something I did want to be: well.

So today I’d ignored my racing heart and swirling, negative thoughts. I’d taken a shower, made a half-hearted attempt at blow-drying my hair and applying make-up, and arrived on the facility’s tree-lined residential street with time to spare. That was fortunate, because I’d stayed in my white Honda Pilot for a good 15 minutes before I was able to summon the courage to open the door and get out.

Now that I was inside, I had to fight the urge to turn around and leave. Not only because I was afraid to be the reader, with all eyes on me, but because the antiseptic hospital smell that greeted me reminded me of my self-imposed stay on the psych ward at UCLA. Perhaps most importantly, I wanted to walk out because I could, while the stooped, white-haired patients dotting the long hallway in front me, either on walkers or in wheelchairs, decidedly could not. No one there seemed under 75 years old, and some could have been decades older. There were vacant looks on many of the worn and saggy faces. Bespectacled women outnumbered men three to one. Translucent skin showed blue veins and liver spots, and a few patients had neglected to put in their dentures.

I shook my head, as if to dislodge the panicked thoughts, and started to make my way down the long hallway. Up ahead, I spied a nurse wearing navy scrubs and scuffed white sneakers bustling out of a patient’s room. She was olive-skinned and petite, dark hair pulled back in a severe ponytail. Balancing a half-eaten breakfast tray in one hand and pushing a vitals caddy with the other, she communicated competence and efficiency. Regret stabbed me in the chest. She is as I used to be, I thought wistfully.

“Looking for a family member?” the nurse asked crisply, as she came closer. I inhaled and opened my mouth, but just as in a nightmare, no words came out. Clearing my throat, I began again. “I-I’m looking for Margaret, the Activities Director?” The nurse smiled in recognition and pointed toward a doorway a few feet down the opposite wall.

 “Good morning, my beautiful people,” boomed Margaret. I recognized her charming Irish lilt immediately from our phone interview. She was at the front of the room in what was called the Activities Lounge, according to the placard on the wall. Margaret was a smiling, commanding woman, stout and in her early 60s. She had impressive voice projection skills, a necessity for dealing with the elderly. She was young for this crowd and had great energy; I liked her immediately. To Margaret’s left was a large whiteboard, upon which were printed the activities for the day in bold block letters. “Here is Diana, my friends, our new volunteer,” she announced, gesturing toward me, and signaling for me to join her at the front. “She will be reading to you during our story hour this morning.”

With the Margaret-pre-approved biography of JFK tucked under one arm, I made my way up and sat down on the stool she pushed toward me. I looked out at the sea of wrinkled faces and took a deep breath. I said a prayer that my voice would be steady -not-squeaky- and that I would successfully pump up the volume, all while remembering to enunciate. As I started to read from the life story of a great American who had been President of the United States when my audience had been in their prime, I knew I had taken my first step to belonging.

            One woman had come up to me as I was gathering up my things and admired my Louis Vuitton purse. “I used to have one of these,” she said, her shaking fingers stroking the leather strap of my shoulder bag. “I worked at the White House during the Bush Administration.” I looked int her lined face, and took in her high cheekbones and pert, turned-up nose. It was not hard to picture this woman in her attractive, competent years, a vital part of The World, serving at the pleasure of the President.

As I walked out the door and into the hallway, I ran into the same nurse, pushing a patient’s wheelchair. The woman inside had been at story hour, and I smiled at her. “You remind me of my daughter,” she told me in a quavery voice. I took this as a compliment until she said, more querulously, “She never calls me. I don’t even know where she is. She used to live in New York. She --” My heart ached, until the nurse interrupted, pressing down on her patient’s shoulder.

“          Helen, your daughter was just here last week. She brought you that lovely hydrangea in your room.” The nurse gave me a look, and I realized the woman must suffer from dementia.

Driving home afterward, I was filled with relief and, yes, a bit of joy. I had done what I’d set out to do. But just as I was mentally high fiving myself, I heard another voice, nagging and judgmental. “Why are you acting like this is such a big deal? Compared with what normal, working people do, what you did was nothing.” Shame bubbled up inside me from the infinite cauldron that lived inside my chest. But I fought back, reminding myself that today had been both an answered prayer and a merciful reminder that there was hope; my mental health journey was beginning to be punctuated by feelings of joy that could miraculously find me amid the pain. I had rejoined the land of the living; I was visible.

 In the same way depression creeps in, it recedes.

The moments of joy working as a volunteer were the first cracks of light that appeared in my otherwise dark and lonely existence. I’d been often told, over the years, that I am an “old soul.” So, it was fitting that my experience with the elderly would become the first, important step on my journey back to my old -and hopefully improved- self, hollowed out, as I had been, by the humbling struggles along the way.

****

Diana Daniele is a writer and literary publicist living in Los Angeles. “Volunteering" is an excerpt from her memoir-in-progress entitled Out of the Dark: A Memoir of Migraine and Madness. Daniele is also an advocate for the destigmatization of migraine and mental health. In June 2021 she served as an influencer for the international social media campaign “Shades for Migraine.”

PERSONAL ESSAY

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Show Me

by Don Tassone

It was four in the morning, but Mother didn’t have to work hard to wake me. As soon as she whispered my name, I knew what day it was. It was the day Daddy would take my younger brother and me fishing, a once-a-summer adventure.

 We jumped out of bed and got dressed in the dark. When we got to the dining room, Mother had breakfast waiting. As we ate, she packed our lunches in the kitchen and filled Dad-dy’s tall, red plaid Thermos with hot coffee.

 Daddy appeared, clean-shaven and smelling like Mennen Skin Bracer.

 “Ready?” he said.

 Daddy was a man of action.

 He had stowed our fishing gear in the trunk of our Dodge Dart the night before. We tossed in our sack lunches, and Daddy carefully laid in his Thermos. Mother kissed us all goodbye, and we were off.

 We drove through the darkness. At last we arrived at Springdale Lake. It was a pay lake, so we went directly to a small white building to pay the fee and buy worms.

 An older lady was the only one there. She was sitting in a chair when we came in. A metal shoe horn clanged against the glass door as we opened it, and the noise woke her up. I suppose we were her first customers.

 After we settled up, we set out to find a good fishing spot. The lake was large, and we walked around the bank for a long time until Daddy found a place he liked.

 My brother and I had bamboo poles. Daddy had a rod and reel that looked like it had been designed by NASA engineers. We watched in awe as he set our lines.

 Before we could get our lines in the water, though, we encountered a problem. Daddy was putting his wallet and his loose change in his tackle box. I guess he didn’t want to risk losing his money while we were fishing. He looked at the receipt from his transaction that morning and realized the woman had given him too much change.

 “We have to go back,” he said.

 So we left our gear and followed Daddy back around the lake to the small white building. It was still dark.

 The woman seemed surprised to see us again. Daddy ex-plained she’d given him too much change. She said it was okay, but Daddy insisted on making it right.

 We then walked all the way back around the lake, watched the sun rise and fished the whole glorious day.

#

 Early this year, my father lay dying in a hospice facili-ty. We were relieved he could spend his last days in such a place because my siblings and I could be with him. For much of the last year of his life, Daddy lived alone, quarantined in his retirement community because of the pandemic.

 Now, though, my brother and I sat at the sides of his bed, holding his hands. Daddy could no longer see or speak, but he could hear. I recounted the story about fishing at Springdale Lake and told him everything I ever learned about integrity I learned from watching him that day. Daddy smiled and squeezed our hands.

 My father was a man of few words. In fact, I don’t re-member much of what he said to me. But I remember everything he did around me, and what he did inspired and shaped me.

 Some people tell us what to do. Others show us.

****

Don Tassone is the author of two novels and five short story collections. He lives in Loveland, Ohio. Visit him at https://www.dontassone.com

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Strange, Norrel, and Mom

by Frances McCann

Today, which has existed for all of three hours and 16 minutes upon time of writing, I have been terribly preoccupied with my mother, or I suppose preoccupied by her absence. I stopped by my father’s house this past weeked to drop off my brother following his three day stay with me. While at my father’s house, I fingered the spines of books my parents had acquired throughout my youth which previously I could not have even pretended to care about, when two novels caught my eye: one with a striking green and yellow spine, and the other whose spine was familiar to me.

The former novel, Boy, Snow, Bird, I read in about three days. It reminded me of Passing by Nella Larsen. The latter novel was Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrel by Susanna Clarke. I remember this book from my teen years quite well despite my never actually having read it. There was a period of time, the exact span of which I cannot say for children are dreadfully terrible time-keepers, in which wherever my mother was, this thick black book would appear. The book would sleep next to her at night, and help prepare my brother’s and my breakfast in the morning, before dropping us off at school. I would forget the book ever existed until I saw it again answering Trebek’s Daily Double with us in the evening.

Now, as I stated earlier, I really couldn’t care about the books my parents read, but this novel was peculiar to me because it didn’t allow me to read it. The book was and is very thick due to its 900+ page count and of course my little hands couldn’t fit around its girth. And when I would truly convince myself the book wasn’t worth my time, I would hear my mother groan and wail from another room, complaining about the writing in the novel or its characters or its plot. I was always surprised to see her turn to the next page as soon as the last syllable of her lamenting left her mouth, her glasses firmly pushed up her nose and her eyes darting back and forth as she read every word. It seemed as if she was going to make the book better through sheer force of will. She always did say that’s how she kept planes in the sky, by forcing them to obey her as she would force her children to brush their teeth and eat their vegetables.

I cannot remember if my mother had read the book once and decided to read it again or if this was the first time she met Strange and Norrel. Either way, her makeshift bookmark sits almost in the exact middle of the novel to this day. I don’t think this was the last book she ever read, or the book she read in her hospital bed, if she even had the strength to read at all, but the likelihood of my mother never finishing a book is equal to the likelihood of my mother dying. To my knowledge, she always finished books, and movies, and comics, and tv shows. To my knowledge she was always going to just be.

I pause here to contemplate my next line and my cursor blinks at me and I don’t know why but it infuriates me but calms me too, like it wants me to keep writing but knows I need a little time.

This book is strange to me. I have only read the first page and I don’t know if I want to read the rest. To me, it always existed as a black-jacketed, hardcover resting somewhere in my house; more of a symbol of my mother or maybe a part of her. I never thought of it as something I could read and I think I want to preserve what it was to me. If I read it, and the 100 or so words I’ve read so far make for an intriguing introduction, then the book will change meaning. Instead of seeing it in my mother’s hands or on her nightstand I’ll see it at my desk at work or in my own hands that are much different than hers. Are objects like videotapes or records? One imbues them with something that means something to them but if someone else gets in possession of the object, they can damage it, causing skips and scratches and its missing pieces of information. And what happens when the new owner records something over the previous data? Where does the original information go?

But I suppose that original information, my mother’s relationship with this book never goes away. My experiences with it are tacked on and added to its history. I will continue to read and I know I will pause again when I reach the halfway point at which she stopped, and when I do I will remember she is not gone.

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Frances McCann is a fourth-year at Louisiana State University majoring in English lit and creative writing with a minor in women's, gender, and sexuality studies. Her hopes are to go to graduate school and become a creative writing professor.

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Generation Gap

by Diane de Anda

Los Angeles, 1953

In my great grandfather's Mexican village, animals always served a purpose. Dogs guarded and protected the family; horses and burros provided transportation; chickens, goats, and cows earned their feed in exchange for eggs or milk. Other animals earned their supper by becoming supper for the family and were joined by the egg layers and milk providers when they no longer had goods to exchange. There were occasional companion animals; my grandmother was allowed to have a canary, a male, of course, because he could sing for his supper. As a child, I only became aware of this perspective over time through a number of hard lessons.

Under unclear circumstances (because owning farm animals was illegal in Los

Angeles city limits), my cousin Mitchie, who lived with my grandmother, Nacha, acquired a baby goat. Equally small and rambunctious, we cousins and the goat enjoyed romping together in my grandmother's back yard, kid and kids chasing each other and occasionally butting heads. As the goat grew, however, his frolicking mischief on my grandmother's lawn and in her flower beds began to lose its charm. As with many pets in the family who had outworn their welcome, he was taken to my great grandfather's house to be placed in a pen in his large, dusty back yard. Here all the cousins came once or twice a week to visit and play with Chivo in his pen or on a tether. But, while we stayed playful, good-natured children, he grew ill-tempered as he matured, with long threatening horns he used with no restraint to keep us out of his new territory. This led to new games, playing "toro" with discarded dishtowels or "dare you" in a dash across the pen. But he could be faster and more agile than we calculated and occasionally snagged us with his horns before we scrambled over the fence. These interactions fueled our disappointment, that the pet which we thought returned our genuine affection would treat us with such callous disregard and real danger, and over time our visits to his pen became less and less frequent.

One evening, after my cousin Mitchie had spent the day at our house, Grama Nacha entered carrying a very large covered baking pan. Expecting her arrival, my mother had already placed warm tortillas, beans, rice, and place settings on the table. We scrambled around the table as Grama Nacha opened the lid and a uniquely tantalizing scent filled the air. She told us to take our seats, and she would make us tacos de birria. "What is birria," I asked. She hesitated, "It's goat meat." It took us a few minutes to put it all together, and then we began to groan in unison. "Not Chivo." "How could Abuelo do it?" "He was our pet." We continued mumbling amongst ourselves, trying to deal with such an unexpected turn of events. Then she handed us our tacos, the delicate juices of the moist meat dripping slightly, the savory scent wafting towards us. We looked at each other: "He was a mean and rotten goat." "He wanted to kill us with his horns." He was juicy and delicious, and we felt justified.

In our innocence, we assumed that Abuelo had killed Chivo because he was a bad goat, and this was his way of protecting his great grandchildren. So a few years later, I had no hesitation when my mother suggested I let Abuelo keep my rabbit in a hutch at his house where he would have more room than in the small cage I kept in my bedroom. My rabbit was a small, shy creature weighing only about four or five pounds. His fur was a striking golden color that felt silky to the touch as I stroked him when he cuddled in

my arms. Since we visited my great grandparents twice a week, I felt that I would have ample time to spend with my pet, and he would have the advantage of the large cage and the fresh air.

A month or so after my rabbit had moved to my great grandparents' house, we came for our regular visit. My sister and I exchanged welcoming abrazos with the abuelos and then headed for the back of the house. Just as I was about to open the back door I looked down. There on the floor in front of the door was a new rug. It was very small and irregular in shape...and golden. My sister and I looked at each other in silent horror, tears welling in our eyes.

We never confronted our great grandfather; I'm not sure he would have understood our perspective; we certainly didn't understand his. We just kept quiet and were glad that no one offered us tacos that day.

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Diane de Anda, Ph.D., a retired UCLA professor and third generation Latina, has edited four books on multicultural populations and published numerous articles in scholarly journals, along with short stories, poetry, and essays in Rosebud, Straylight, Storyteller, Pacific Review, Bilingual Review, Frogpond, Modern Haiku, Bottle Rockets, Presence, Ruminate, Third Wednesday and others, thirteen children’s books (plus 2 in press) which have won multiple awards, satires on a regular basis in Humor Times, and a collection of 40 flash fiction stories, L.A. Flash.

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Twice Thing

by George Choundas

 Art is a twice thing. For every piece in the world, there actually are two works of art: what the artist made, and what the artist set out to make.

 This second—in fact first—art, this ur-art: it forms traveling sweet through the head, a vapor going where it will, more intimate even than another’s body inside your body because it is breath. Next it beads into a glittering lymph. It trickles promises down the gullet and clumps with intention and drops like a fat fruit. Then the urt swells in the trunk, swells, until it shoves the humped parts every artist feels inside while arting and the wounded parts and the champion parts up against a wall of want, a pure blank aching urge to make nothing short of sky itself, which it happens is impossible.

 So art is made instead.

 Worlds, meanwhile, are finite things, lumps of stuff provisional. Gods and simulation code decide which worlds are worth the trouble, which worlds will be allowed to wither and blink out and which to persist, based strictly on one thing: the state of the half of the art in that world that is not. Meaning: the art that was dreamed, and hoped at, and ventured, but that never came to be. Did you know this? It’s true. Worlds, in short, are judged by their urt. The spidering progressions the ensemble composer loved deeply like a haunting but surrendered, finally, for the base sake of finishing. The shadow-frayed angle the sculptor saw, felt, but could not compel with the stupid chisel borrowed from a housemate because the distractingly gorgeous housemate’s stupid shit chisel would not conduce. On these the fate of a world depends.

 Some of a world’s urt will run livelier than its actual art with the tart mix of arbitrarity and conviction we call truth. Some not. Some of its urt will rate a beam of ringing steel to art’s cheese-smelling tatter of carpet. But art can surpass urt, often does. And only where the art exceeds the urt can a civilization justify itself. Because where the real art, the finished art, falls short of the urt, is verifiably lesser than the urt, those civilizations are done already. Where even the artists have stopped dreaming and spend their days feeding on compromise, that world is dead already.

 The above is what I wrote when I set out to write about my mother. Her brother, my Tío Omar, who taught me his swatter-free secret for killing flying insects and called me Torito, died three weeks ago. My mother told a friend that losing him was like a knot in the heart. This other one, thinks she’s smart, she said, Not a knot, a knot is dense and present, but loss means emptiness, so a hole, not a knot. And my mother said, Have you ever seen a nest, abandoned, in a tree without leaves in winter? It looks like a knot in a jumble of string. It looks just like a knot.

 Sometimes art because the other we cannot, and sometimes because we just can’t. Maybe you know this already. That the above is what I wrote when I set out to write about Tío.

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George Choundas work has appeared in over fifty publications, including The Best Small Fictions, Alaska Quarterly Review, Boulevard, Harvard Review, The Southern Review, and Subtropics. My story collection, The Making Sense of Things (FC2), was awarded the Ronald Sukenick Innovative Fiction Prize, as well as shortlisted for the Robert C. Jones Prize for Short Prose, the St. Lawrence Book Award for Fiction, and the Katherine Anne Porter Prize in Short Fiction. He is a winner of the New Millennium Award for Fiction, a former FBI agent, and a Cuban- and Greek-American.