Issue 8.1

PERSONAL ESSAY

• Another Life, by Christopher Locke

•  Purple Bear, by Cole Chamberlain

• Let it Go, by Danielle J. Clark

• Sister, by Rachel Rueckert

• Elegy to Twilight, by Rebecca Ruth Gould

  
  

NON-FICTION

•  Piano Crucifixion, by Dian Parker

• My Dad and I sneak on the HMS Bounty, by Miranda Morris

•  Second Sinking, by Sarah Disney

• Hot Bath, Wishing Big, by Sherre Vernon

• Stars on Fire, by Diane Thiel

Editorial Team: Jose Palacios, Aimee Campos, Monica Aleman

Advisors: Juana Moriel-Payne, Thomas Cook

from orphans to street boys in embryo

by Olude Peter

Olude Peter Sunday is an Hyper-realistic Pencil Artist, Writer and Poet from Nigeria. His has his Arts, Stories and Poems published/forthcoming in magazines including: Caffeinated Journal Anthology, Hayden’s Ferry review, The Shallow Tales Review, Native Skin Mag, Kalahari Review, Erogospel magazine, African writers, Parousia magazine, Poemify, Madswirl, Eskimo pie and elsewhere. He won the third place prize in the Endsars National poetry contest held in October 2020.When he isn’t writing, he is painting pure portraits with pencils and Photoshop. Find him on twitter @peterolude, IG @cee_tawpson

PERSONAL ESSAY

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 Another Life

by Christopher Locke

When I was 19, my mother and I were going to murder each other if I didn’t move out. However, standing on the front porch hugging her and my stepfather after I packed, I cried. Sobbed, actually. I knew nothing could ever be the same. And even if someday I did return, if I flamed out gloriously and crawled back humiliated and broken, I knew I was gone for good.

My girlfriend’s Toyota Tercel was packed tight with the essentials: clothes I’d lumped into plastic bags; my extensive collection of punk rock albums, (which would later all be stolen); a journal I’d never written in given to me by my sister; an “Old Ghosts” skateboard, (also soon stolen); a 13-inch black and white TV; and a smudged baseball signed by every member of the 1978 Red Sox—in a fit of lamentable buffoonery, I added my own signature in blue ink when I was 9.

The weather that day was fittingly overcast. Early November. I looked back as I drove up the hill, my parents waving from the steps. I wiped my eyes and tried to avoid potholes, the Tercel’s  suspension unforgiving.

I arrived at my girlfriend’s place on the seacoast and was shown my room: Evelyn was 18 and lived with her mom in a Victorian sprawl shaded by a legion of doting maple trees. Her mom had been divorced for years and clearly liked me; when she’d take Evelyn and me out to dinner, she’d smile across the table and say things like: “Oh, Chris, in 30 years you’re going to be such looker.” I was like, Wait, what’s wrong with me now? I didn’t realize how deep her affection ran. She once burst through the front door as Evelyn and I were having sex on the couch, but she walked in with her back turned, pretending to be calling the cat until Evelyn and I could disentangle and snap our trunks back up, out of breath and fumbling with the TV remote.

Besides that, for the first month at least, things seemed good: I got a job as a waiter at a fancy breakfast joint in the center of town. At night, Evelyn and I would meet up with our friends Brianna and Karen and go driving around, smoking clove cigarettes and cranking New Order on the tape deck. We’d roll up to out-of-the-way convenience stores and ask frustrated middle-aged men to buy us beer. Later, creeping about the cemetery in Portsmouth we’d tell ghost stories while ducking behind carved angels resplendent with moss. I’d chug my fourth or fifth Coors Light until my head percolated. And at some point I’d look up at the black and mottled sky and literally breathe a sigh of relief that I didn’t need to hurry home because I was breaking curfew again, setting the stage for another midnight confrontation with my mother.

Everything changed in March when Evelyn had a breakdown and was taken to the hospital by ambulance; Evelyn had been on and off different antidepressants for years, and always seemed to vacillate somewhere between radiant joy and the darkest hollows. But I loved her, or thought I did, and I would just wait for her to come back around—which she always would—and everything again felt like normal.

This time was different. I was eating dinner with Evelyn and her mother at the dining room table when Evelyn abruptly excused herself and went upstairs. We heard her yelling a few minutes later. I found Evelyn hiding under her bed in tears, covering her face. As I reached for her, trying to console her and saying her name gently, she yelled “No!” over and over, swiping at my hand. Finally, her mother called 911 and she was removed from the house. I could only look on helplessly as the ambulance doors whumped closed.

After visiting Evelyn in the hospital almost every day for two weeks, I was met by her mother on the porch in her bathrobe. She was waiting for me. Wild-eyed, she pointed and said things like “You did this to her! This is your fault! You caused all of Evelyn’s…suffering!” She spit that last word out at me. Suffering. And I was dumbfounded, almost furious, because I didn’t understand at the time that some parents who lose their children will grasp at anything to keep themselves from going under too.

I threw Evelyn’s car keys on the porch and walked away. Big hero. Now what, I thought.

I went to my one room apartment a couple of blocks away; staying at Evelyn’s had always been just a stop gap until I found my own place. Apparently, I found it at a boarding house with five other dudes on Ham Street. We all shared a bathroom down the hall next to a toaster oven. We paid the same $60 per week, utilities included, for single rooms that came furnished with a dresser, desk, and double bed.

I sat on the edge of my mattress and finished some Thai weed my buddy Scott had gifted me. I blew the smoke out the window and tried to think of a plan. All I could think about were hot meals and a bed that didn’t smell like someone else’s perspiration. I put Morrissey’s new album on and laid back down, reading the lyric sheet:

Hide on the promenade Etch a postcard: "How I Dearly Wish I Was Not Here" In the seaside town That they forgot to bomb Come, come, come, nuclear bomb

I played the album over and over. Partly because I believed Morrissey sang my truths, but mostly because I didn’t own anything else; my albums got snatched off the porch as I was moving in a month prior.

I turned back to the open window and felt the first real spring day give way to evening and its strange perfumes, the soft patter of cars knocking up and down the street as their headlights blinded the back fence and a few withered snowbanks. I didn’t know what I wanted to do, but I knew it wasn’t this. The idea of college was still a mystery. I wanted to go home but I didn’t know where home was.  

I stood up and flipped the album over. I was worried about Evelyn. Almost every time I had driven up to the hospital, I saw figures silhouetted in the windows staring down at me. After I’d park the car and lock the door, I’d look back up and think those people probably hoped I was someone they knew; someone who once loved them in another life.

END

****

Christopher Locke’s essays have appeared in such magazines as The North American Review, Parents, The Sun, Poets & Writers, The Rumpus, Slice, Atticus Review, Jet Fuel Review, and New Hampshire Magazine, among others. He won the 2018 Black River Chapbook Award (Black Lawrence Press) for his collection of short stories 25 Trumbulls Road, and his latest book of poems, Music for Ghosts, is forthcoming in 2022 from NYQ Books. Locke received the Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Award, and state grants in poetry from the Massachusetts Cultural Council and the New Hampshire State Council on the Arts. He has been nominated for Best of the Net and The Pushcart Prize many times. Chris lives in the Adirondacks where he teaches English at North Country Community College.

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 Purple Bear

by Cole Chamberlain

“When she died, she bled inside,” Momma says, leaning toward Purple Bear, palms pressed against the glass. The bear doesn’t look like she’s filled with blood. “Internal damage,” Momma whispers. “Beautiful, even then. She was a real princess. Maybe the only one.”

Momma loves the Beanie Babies, says they’ll really be worth something someday, and so will we. When I’m older, she’ll cry because the entire collection will perish in a flood, despite being stored in what are supposed to be airtight totes. “They were going to be worth a fortune,” she will say.” I will know she is wrong, but I won’t correct her.

Purple Bear is Diana to Momma. She sits in the china cabinet propped up against a coffee-table book that says Diana in big silver letters. The real Diana’s face never looks me in the eye. Her black and white eyes look up and to the side, right at Momma.

“They spelled Whales wrong,” I say, reading the glimmering cover.

“No, it’s different.

“Why?”

“I don’t know.” 

Diana is a mystery, but I don’t mind. She looks far off, not like she’d ever break into song or clean house with squirrels. Not like a real princess. So I try to leave her behind on that high shelf, focus on the Beanie Dorothy and Scarecrow that sit lower, but Momma won’t let her be. Whenever we’re all in the hallway at the same time, Momma and Purple Bear exchange glances I don’t understand. It happens one too many times, and I can’t ignore it. “She needed love, and no one saw,” Momma says in a voice like it’s all too much for her.

I go searching for Diana on the new desktop. When I finally spell her name correctly, endless videos flood the screen, and there she is—the quiet woman with a gentle spirit and startling eyes is nothing like Cinderella or Belle. She sits crookedly as she talks divorce, depression, and bulimia. A half-hour’s obsession, and I feel dirty. I find a video that speaks about the princess’s death. “She died because we wanted to know her. We all did. We wanted inside that limo and inside that mind.” I don’t understand what I’m being accused of, but I hit the red X and try to forget.

The attempt is unsuccessful; several days later, I say to Mother, “did you know the Princess used to cut her own arms?”

“What? No, she did not. That’s an ugly thing to say.”

When I explain bulimia, Momma explains slander. I move onto depression, a word I find elusive. She sighs, “of course she was depressed. Anyone would be.”

I decide not to bring up the divorce part of the interviews because Mom is on her third. My righteous anger at being called a liar soon dissipates, replaced by a profound sense of pride. Mother does not know about the cutting-herself and the puking-herself; Mother is not one of the people who want inside Diana’s limo and mind. Mother is not guilty. She is happy not to know, happy to only look at the beautiful asymmetrical princess. 

I am not like my mom. I want to know, regardless of the damage done to myself or the subject of my knowledge.

#

Years later, Momma will be in and out of the hospital with numerous issues. None of us, including the doctors, will understand. With the liver and pancreas of a chronic alcoholic, she will tell us she never abused any substances, not to listen to doctors.

“Has your mother always been thin?” A nurse will ask me as my mom sleeps.

“Yeah. Well, she’s maybe lost ten pounds.”

“Ten pounds isn’t much.” The nurse will flinch at what I don’t see. My mother’s sleeping body, tiny and breakable, will reveal itself to me—a miraculously animated corpse, slowly losing its magic.

“Has she ever—”

“Ten pounds is a lot,” my mother will interrupt, not even fully conscious.

I will wonder, when was the last time my mother felt like eating? Not for days. Wonder, when was the last time my mother finished a meal? Not for years. Not since before I was born.

I will wonder what I would find if I watch those Diana interviews again, wonder why I am scared to.

When I tell Mother Beanie Babies could never make us rich, she shakes her head and refuses to know. I wonder if it works.

****

Cole Chamberlain is a writer and social worker living in St. Louis with his cat, Burden. His work has appeared in the Toho Review, Months To Years, and The Ponder Review. When Cole isn't working he is at the local ice rink, teaching himself to stop without the wall.

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Let it Go

by Danielle J. Clark

It was a typical Sunday in November. Sunny. Fifty-five degrees. Trees hanging onto their tan hued leaves and others bare, having already shed them.

The phone rang around 10am, “Hey Dad. How are you?”

“I’m great. Are we still going to see your Grandma today?”

“You bet. Come on over,” I said.

It always amazed me how full of life Dad was in the morning. Why couldn’t he stay like this? Stay sober. When I spotted the best version of my Dad, like I did during our call, I always felt guilty for never trying to speak up about his addictions, for never offering to get him help.

When Dad showed up, the first thing out of his mouth was, “You’ve gained weight.”

My eyebrows furrowed, “You never have anything nice to say. Have you ever called me smart? Or pretty?”

A few days after my dad visited, a new movie trailer aired on TV. It had a cartoon girl named Anna who reminded me of myself when I was younger – she was witty, feisty, playful. I have to see this movie – Frozen. I couldn’t explain why, but the pull to Frozen was deeper than seeing myself in Anna. Perhaps it was the silly snowman’s goofy personality showing me the laughs I desperately needed in my life, or maybe I thought the fairytale storyline would bring me back to my youth when princesses like Ariel and Belle gave me hope for finding the acceptance from my dad I yearned for.

Later that day, I called my sister, “Let’s take the kids to Frozen.”

“Well uh, okay. But since when do you care about Disney movies?”

My breath caught. She was right, I didn’t care about Disney movies, not since I was nine years old. There was no time for fantasy when my reality consumed me; Dad not around to help with homework, to ask how my day was, to cook a warm meal for me. But for some reason, after seeing the Norwegian-inspired kingdom of Arendelle and the cast of characters living there, I cared about the magic I had lost decades ago.

I remember every detail about the day we saw Frozen. I wore a red peacoat. We browsed a craft fair beforehand, perusing handmade ornaments. My sister had hot chocolate wrapped in her hands and I walked around with fingers bare to the cold. Deep within my soul I knew this was a special day, but I couldn’t say why. Family time was important but spending an afternoon together wasn’t new.

We went to the Woburn Showcase Cinema, the same one Dad used to take us to when we were kids. After my parents divorced, Dad had custody every other weekend. He’d always take us to the movies, sometimes for one, but usually two.

When Elsa sang “Let It Go” on top of North Mountain, I felt like I was in the cinema alone, an audience of one. She sang to me. Okay, I will stop trying to be that perfect girl, a perfect daughter. I won’t worry about what others say, what Dad says. I will let it go. I WILL let it go. My eyes welled up. I did the best I could to conceal my tears the same way Dad used to when we watched a sappy movie. He’d peer over to make sure I wasn’t looking, but I always saw him.

Afterwards, I skipped out of the movie theatre with my family, singing any lyrics we could remember. I vowed to be more like Anna again. To joke. To laugh. To sing. To be Elsa. To let it go.

For the following few weeks, the wintry scenes and soundtrack continued to fill me with joy. My intuition kept tugging at me, letting me know there was more to learn from Frozen, I just didn’t know what.

A month after I saw Frozen, Dad passed away from a massive heart attack after a heavy night of smoking and drinking. While at the hospital, I replayed our last face-to-face conversation in my mind; him calling me overweight and me calling him out on it. Guilt washed over me. Was I the best daughter I could have been for him? Could I have done more to save him from his alcoholism? Did my inaction cause his death?

As I walked through the front door of my house, I sang Let it Go in my head. In that moment, I understood why my intuition led me to Frozen.

****

Dr. Danielle J. Clark is a Life/Spirituality Teacher & Coach, Intuitive Empath, Business Professor, and Writer living in Tampa Bay, Florida. Learn more about her at drdanielleclark.com.

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Sister

by Rachel Rueckert

Do you remember the night it rained? When we were teens and I had just stepped out of the shower? You announced you were going outside, and I obediently followed, even though you were younger. You always possessed that air (your mother called you Bossy Boots). We pranced into the torrential downpour. You twirled, your palms towards the ripped-open sky. I laughed and opened my towel and felt the water smack my bare chest, and you scolded me because what if the neighbors saw, because this was a suburban street, but no one could see in this rain, then you giggled too and we ran barefoot down the dark road and felt the flood lapping at our ankles, and it was then, around this time, that I considered you my sister, that I loved you. We never said “step.” Just sister.

You never liked my dad. I remember how you cried about your sweater, the baggy blue one that matched the color scheme of our first family picture in front of the fireplace. My dad, your mom, my three siblings, your two. Back then, we could cram the whole family of nine into the Ford Expedition. And we were a family, I told myself. I needed to believe we were a family after my unstable mother cut me out. But you saw through what the adults told us. And how could I have known you were right? I’m not sure I would have wanted to know how everyone would scatter.

You hated strawberries. You liked to gossip. You let me drag my mattress into your bedroom when your older sister bullied me. My dad said you were a copycat, that you transferred to my high school to be like me, that you took up photography to be like me. Who knows if that was true, but it is a fact that I envied you. You followed me to college, where you dressed me up and took my portrait. You said you had more clothes than God. I touched those silky blouses and chiffon skirts, draped your gold necklaces around my throat. I never knew how to dress and spent all my cash on plane tickets, on escaping. I looked to you. How beautiful you were becoming. Red lips, sapphire eyes, and hair that could flash platinum, red, chestnut, pink, lavender.

Perhaps you too were itching to escape. The two of us were the first kids to get out of Utah after our parents split. I went east, you west. You changed your first name, much to your mother’s dismay. Then you changed your last name, married a man in your early twenties who promised to travel the world with you. I remember you shaking at the front of the church as you held the groom’s hand, how you wept through your vows. You remarried a year ago in Paris to a good man. I sent a card. You were not at mine.

You phoned last year around this time, out of the blue. You said you might move to New York, and wouldn’t it be nice to be closer? I moved to New York but didn’t reach out. I might have been afraid, even jealous. How large you loomed in my mind. My camera remained buried in the closet. You were still more confident, maybe the stronger soul, the one who deserved this thundering city of possibility. Why did it take so long to call? I cannot say.

Maybe you were a reminder of a painful life I wanted to leave behind. I can be such a coward.

Last we spoke, you told me a story of your mother mailing a shredded box of all your childhood possessions, how the deliverers left the ruddy package out on the sidewalk where rain drowned it. The soggy sides tore off. How you found broken frames, warped photos, and empty wine bottles from her furious, drunken packing. Everything was destroyed, you said. I too have lost all the artifacts from my childhood, thrown out by my own mother. I too know the weight of this watery inheritance. There is so much to miss. But I am not yet used to losing everyone. Not yet. Perhaps there is still time for us.

Do you remember the night it rained?

A night when two motherless girls laughed back at the storm.

****

Rachel Rueckert is a writer based in New York. She is pursuing an MFA in nonfiction at Columbia University, where she also teaches essay writing. she has also studied at Vermont College of Fine Arts. Her work has appeared in River Teeth, The Literary Review, Hippocampus, Tupelo Quarterly, Sweet, The Carolina Quarterly, The Columbia Journal, and others.

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 Elegy to Twilight

by Rebecca Ruth Gould

I have nothing against sleep. As Blanchot said, sleep transforms night into possibility. But in order to appreciate the possibilities created by sleep, it is necessary to be awake. So I love being awake even more than I love being asleep. Not awake any time, but specifically at that time when, according to the opinion of the world, I should be sleeping. I love the peace that overtakes my apartment in the stillness of the night, when the streets are empty and everyone is absorbed in dreams.

The surreal quiet in the middle of the night echoes the peace of early morning, near the break of dawn, with a difference. The break of dawn marks the end of peace, but the silence of the night marks its beginning. I prefer beginnings to ends. I love the horizons they expose, showing us that anything can happen and nothing is foretold. With its workaday routines and its drumbeat of inevitability, morning brings this illusion to an end.

In my preference for evenings over mornings and for twilights over daybreaks, I often feel alone. Even medical science would seem to contradict me. Time and again, we read about the health benefits of getting up early and going to sleep early. We are informed that those who stay awake until dawn are liable to experience all kinds of morbidities: hyperglycemia, heart disease, even diabetes. The scientific studies that warn of the increased risk of these diseases for night owls may be right, but they don't say everything that needs to be said about my body, let alone my soul. Contrary to what science informs me, my energy levels are highest late at night, between one and three AM. Why do those who preach against the night ignore the psychological costs of being deprived—through sleep—of this most intense and intellectually fertile interval in every circadian cycle? The armistice between twilight and dawn cannot be compared to any other mode of existence. It is, put simply, the best time to be alive, the epitome of freedom, a gift.

Even though I lack the backing of medical science when I assert that the depths of the night are the key to my sanity and health, I do have the backing of Persian language, which comprehends poetry perhaps better than any other. Persian does not rely on clichés like “night owl” to describe the physical condition of those who stay up late because they are in love with the night. Instead, the language says exactly what needs to be said: the person who stays up late at night by habit is shab zindeh dar—one who keeps the night alive—in contrast to sahar khiz— the one who awakens the dawn. Hafez connects the eyes of a person who loves to stay up late with the eyes of a lover:

                                                                                I made a thousand efforts to make you love me,

                                                                                to comfort my restless heart,

                                                                                to become the light of my eyes, giving life to the night (shab-zendeh-dar),

                                                                                to be the companion of my hopeful mind.

The seventeenth century poet Sa’eb put it even more beautifully, also locating the impulse to stay awake late at night in the eyes:

Be shab-zendeh-dar (literally: “give life to the night”) because the night is bright day

in open eyes, for eyes that are give life to the night (shab-zendeh-dar).

I keep the night alive when I stay up late, refusing to partake of the oblivion that all my neighbors are inhabiting at this very moment. I refuse, not because I don’t love this oblivion—I need sleep just as much as anyone else—but because my body needs to diverge from the norm. I need to live according to my own rhythm.

Among modern poets, perhaps Marina Tsvetaeva understood the lure of the night better than anyone. In her poem cycle, “Insomnia,” she wrote:

Вот опять окно,

Где опять не спят.

Может — пьют вино,

Может — так сидят. […]

В каждом доме, друг,

Есть окно такое.

Here again is the window

where again they don't sleep.

Maybe—they are drinking,

Maybe—they just sit like that. […]

In every home, friend,

there is such a window.

I feel that Tsvetaeva is peering into my window. She sees me alone, not drinking, just sitting and watching the blizzard of stars make the night radioactive.

In the end, we are headed in the same destination. I sleep just as much as the next person. I just like to delay that descent into oblivion longer than others do.

I have yet to meet anyone who relishes the physical pleasure of staying up all night as I do, not because of nightlong party or other celebration, but simply because this is when I am grateful to be alive. But when I read Tsvetaeva, I realize that I am not alone. There is an entire community of lovers of the night, most of whom are now mixing with the stars.

The middle of the night is when I most feel like dancing. To be alive yet invisible—to have no fear of being watched—is ecstasy.

We must catch up on the sleep we miss during these days of torment and anxiety, marked by pandemics and senseless deaths. We must take care of our bodies, just as we would look after our souls. The best way of doing this is to break the rhythms that are imposed on us by everyday existence. Sometimes, staying up late at night can be a necessary act of resistance to the quotidian world. Nights deserve to be lived, rather than slept through. We ought to vary the rhythm of our lives at least once in a while. It might teach us how to be at home in the world.

****

Rebecca Ruth Gould is the author of the poetry collection Beautiful English (forthcoming 2021) and the award-winning monograph Writers & Rebels (2016). She has translated many books from Persian and Georgian. A two-time Pushcart Prize nominee, she was awarded the Creative Writing New Zealand Flash Fiction Competition prize in 2019.

NON-FICTION

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 Piano Crucifixion

by Dian Parker

Ten small tables encircled by four dimly lit, green plastic columns ‒ the only lighting ‒ along with smooth Italian tenors singing in the background, makes for a romantic setting. On the burgundy walls hang diminutive oil paintings from the owner’s family home in Sicily; delicate studies of blooming young girls on velvet cushions, with tiny white dogs on their laps, or soothing bucolic landscapes with soft skies, a peaceful stone farmhouse in the distance.

At the back of the restaurant in a dark corner, propped on an easel, is an oil painting, and completely out of place. The shocking painting depicts a young naked woman bound to a cross by ropes, crucified.

I asked the owner, Eugenio, about it. He told me that after his parents died and before he moved to the States, the generations-old family house had to be cleared out and sold. In his grandmother’s upright piano, that took six men to move, they found the crucifix painting nailed into the piano’s back panel. He said no one in his family had ever seen the painting before. His grandmother had been extremely religious.

Studying the painting with a magnifying glass, I found a barely discernible square stamp in the corner with a squiggle inside. I looked it up but found nothing. I tried to buy the painting but Eugenio said he would never sell. Every time I go to his restaurant, which is once a week, I beg to buy the painting and every time he refuses.

There are a number of reasons why it is imperative I have this painting. The first and foremost is because it is stunningly beautiful, masterfully painted, and obviously very old. The woman’s long luxurious black hair falls across a serene face and slightly over her ample breasts, the skin pale and translucent. The naked body is backlit in pale yellow, with the rest of the painting in dark olive green. The oil on canvas is crackled, giving the painting an ancient look, like a Renaissance painting.

Another reason I need this painting is because it represents for me the female program that I’ve so diligently tried to rid myself. A woman, not nailed to a cross but bound in rope to the wood, accepting her tragic fate without protest. I’d like to give it to my mom. We’d sit in front of the painting, sipping wine, and discuss our lives as women in a male dominated family in a male dominated world, without a voice. I’ve never discussed this topic with my mom. I need to. I think she does too. The painting would help break the ice.

The third reason. The painting was nailed inside the back of a piano, hidden for centuries. A crucified woman nailed to the inside of a piano. I can definitely relate to that. The whole time I was growing up my dad, a fantastic jazz pianist, played a 1918 Steinway grand piano that his aunt had once given him. I also played and the piano was the center of our household. My solace in a tyrannical household. After my dad couldn’t play anymore because his fingers grew arthritic, he gave the piano to me.

When I left home, my mom and dad eventually moved to an assisted living community. Dad said he’d ship the piano to me but there was no way I could keep one in a drafty yurt with a wood stove in rainy Washington State. I told him to sell it and keep the money. We both cried, separately I might add. And, my dad made a fraction of what the piano was worth.

A few months later, I had a job homeschooling a family’s three kids. They asked if I’d help them pick out a piano, knowing I played. At the piano store, the oldest girl wanted to buy a particular piano because she liked the blond wood. I said it wasn’t a good piano and recommended some better ones. She had a temper tantrum in the store, eventually getting her way. In the car, I wept. The incident triggered my mourning for the most beautiful and well-made piano, for me, in the whole world. Our Steinway grand. And here was some spoiled brat choosing a piano because, she insisted, “It’s just so pretty!”

When I met my husband, he owned a white grand piano and played classical piano like a dream (and hated jazz). When we moved, our new house was too small to fit a grand piano so we bought a restored Yamaha upright. It’s in our bedroom as there’s nowhere else in our small house. The first time I played, I wept.

I’m a painter now, working in oils on canvas. I’ve tried to paint my memory of Eugenio’s painting but always come up short. How did that painter manage to show such beauty and life amidst so much torture and approaching death? Thick rope tightly binds her hands and feet onto a splintered wooden cross, yet her face remains calm, as if focused on another world. I’ve tried that, but always seem to fail.

When I lost my Steinway, it felt like a crucifixion. Our new piano doesn’t exactly crucify me, but my out of practice playing does. My dad is dead now but the tyranny continues, inside of me. As you can see, the female crucifixion painting covers a lot. The woman is nailed to the cross and to a piano! I really must figure out a way to get Eugenio to sell it to me.

****

Dian Parker’s essays and short stories have been published in The Rupture, Critical Read, Event, Anomaly, Upstreet, 3 AM Magazine, Bookends Review, Deep Wild, Cold Lake Anthology, among others. She’s been awarded an Artist Development Grant from the Vermont Arts Council, a fellowship to the Vermont Studio Center, and nominated for several Pushcart Prizes.

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 My Dad and I sneak on the HMS Bounty

by Miranda Morris

Dad surprises me with a call. He’s on his way to the city for the day, so do I want to meet up for a visit?

It’s not what you think– Dad didn’t plan this visit as a fun daddy-daughter activity day. He was heading down anyway to check out a used van he found on Craigslist, then going to watch a football game with my uncle or something. My company is an afterthought- a convenient space filler, a way to kill two birds with one stone. He expects my availability, which irks me even though I’m woefully unengaged. I’m between jobs right now and even when I am working, I always end up making time for these spontaneous swoops, because my parents live three hours away and because I don’t have the gumption to deny Dad or set boundaries about planning in advance. I want to say that I’m an adult now, that I have a rich life full of social and professional engagements and it’s disrespectful of him to expect me to drop everything to see him just because he needs to kill an hour or two. But I don’t. I grit my teeth as I feed him directions on the phone, repeating myself over the cranked stereo strains of Bob Seger or George Thorogood on his end. Turning it down for ease of comprehension is an alien concept. Relentless classic rock is Dad’s white noise.

He expects me to offer up a plan. I have no idea. He’s the one who sprung this on me out of the blue. Then I remember that the tall ships are in town and today’s the last day. Dad’s a sailor without a sailboat now. He loves the nautical, the heroic. When I was a kid we had a 22-foot ketch for a while, aboard which I was a reluctant mate, clinging to the lifeline or hiding in the cabin with an Animorphs book. I felt dizzy and sick when we heeled over, never fully trusting in the keel physics Dad assured me would right the hull. Every time the deck tilted and pitched toward the whitecaps, I saw death’s jaws yawning open below.

He’s stoked about the tall ships idea. The HMS Bounty will be there- an icon and one of Dad’s favourite narratives. The serendipity of this situation, with no foresight on his part, is typical. I can’t be too annoyed though. After the initial pettiness wears off, I find myself anticipating the potential for a genuine bonding experience with Dad like we haven’t had in over a decade. I cross my fingers that it will go smoothly.

Dad and I have always had a tumultuous affiliation. The cumulative hours of electric shouting and millilitres of shed tears over the course of my adolescence could artifice a squall to rival the maritime drama of The Perfect Storm– another of his go-tos. Countless times I’ve watched him yearn through the screen for the tragic stakes of mortal peril on the high seas, desperately fantasizing his way out of a riskless existence as an unemployed stay-at-home parent. When he was young he hitchhiked and slept by waterfalls and climbed a mountain in the Rockies that no one else had climbed, and was allowed to name it. (It’s not labelled on any map.) Now he was living off disability in a rural town devoid of ambition or intrigue. The existential frustration ricocheted around his innards like a wayward pinball, like a fork of lightning reeling out for the closest point of contact to discharge into. I was that point of contact. The conduction rod grew taller with me, the incoming bolts fiercer. Whenever I discovered a new hole in the sleeping bag of contrived reality that Dad had zipped over my childhood, I couldn’t help poking a finger through it, stretching it wider, demanding its acknowledgment. Every inaccuracy in his elaborate cosmology was a betrayal of my juvenile trust. By the time I took off for university, I’d installed breakwaters high enough to shelter the inlet of my mind from the slightest ripple of deceit.

It’s mid August and the city heat floods every public space with claustrophobic angst. I live in a dilapidated brick house with four other people and two cats and sheets tacked to the living room windows to keep out the sunlight so my vampire housemates can play Skyrim all day. We’re one of the last slumlord rental spots in the neighbourhood, whose rapid gentrification has made an island of our low-rent hovel. There’s nowhere nearby that I could take Dad, even if he were willing to come pick me up, which he isn’t because he hates city driving. Instead, I have to take two subways and a streetcar to the harbourfront, then wait half an hour in a parking lot for him. By the time he pulls up, it’s nearly five and the souvenir shops are closing. Turns out he took the wrong exit, because Bob Seger doesn’t know the downtown core as well as his daughter does.

He combs his moustache in the rearview mirror and puts SPF on his nose and I try to tactfully relay a sense of urgency when I point out that the tall ships probably won’t be open for tours much longer. Urgency is something Dad simply cannot abide, unless it’s his own. Luckily, in this case, we’re bound by a shared interest.

We walk the pier, flanked by the vast spiderweb riggings of sleeping giants that creak and knock along the wharf. Their structures feel predatorial, encroaching. The air is full of the treacherous smell of contaminated urban water. It’s not the air we knew. Dad complains about the guy selling the Craigslist van. Other people don’t know how to take care of their stuff. He bemoans his bad back, public smokers, the price of gas, the incompetence of other drivers and of my generation in general. He doesn’t ask me about my friends or my job and I don’t bother volunteering anything. He’s not in a listening mood. Under the late afternoon sun’s ruthless glare, I feel tired and deflated and coated in the thin sadness of missed opportunity. When we get to the Bounty, a young guy in a polo shirt is cordoning off the boarding ramp, because tours are over. Because of course they are. The tall ships leave tomorrow. Dad tries to plead with him, underscoring that he drove four hours to see the Bounty. Polo Shirt puts his hands up in a helpless gesture, then chuckles nervously and scurries off. Historically, I’d be embarrassed by the attempt at bartering with a low-level employee in the face of plainly stated policy. Dad’s always seen rules and schedules as constructs meant for other people. This time, though, I feel a protective sorrow. I see the light of playful appeal in his grey eyes dissolve into weary acceptance. The pulsing ache of age is worse than anger. It tenderizes all past transgressions.

Then Dad looks up the closed ramp, and back at me. I feel a stomach flutter familiar to the risk-averse, but suppress it when Dad’s crow’s feet uncoil the secret code for mischief. I don’t know which of us says the words.

“Let’s go!”

In ten seconds we’ve hopped the chain, clambered up the gangway and alighted on the deck of the HMS Bounty. This isn’t the original vessel, but a larger replica constructed for the 1962 movie, designed to accommodate two engines and a film crew. It was meant to be set on fire in the South Pacific, but Marlon Brando refused to finish shooting unless it was spared. It was too beautiful to burn.

We skip and stumble across the deck, two tipsy mutineers, poking our heads in hatches and clutching the epic wheel, all with the fevered rush of borrowed time. I feel lightness in my feet and I’m giggling like I just guzzled a jug of smuggled rum. Our joyride is over a moment later with the reappearance of Polo Shirt, who looks thoroughly agitated. We walk the plank back to reality, a vigilant security escort behind us. Dad apologizes and we run all the way back to the parking lot.

Two years later when I read the news about the shipwreck off the coast of North Carolina, I feel torn. It’s strange and sad, the way it was bungled and swallowed by Hurricane Sandy’s Atlantic, even taking a woman who claimed to have been a descendent of Fletcher Christian himself. She was a volunteer deckhand, a former beauty queen, new to sailing. She’d joined the crew because of that blood connection. I wonder if her faith in physics was upset when the terrible waves broke over the bow and the Bounty swooned into the sea. Or maybe she grinned into her fate. Maybe she felt cradled by her kinship to myth.

****

Miranda Morris is a writer, illustrator, and multi-instrumentalist currently based in Hamilton, Ontario. Pre-Covid, she played trombone in the New Orleans-based funk band TV Pole Shine. Her non-fiction has been published in Critical Read and she was recently shortlisted for the 2021 CBC Literary Prize for Short Fiction with her story "Stump".

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 Second Sinking

by Sarah Disney

When you want to send someone a message, a sign of how deep and permanent the rift between you has become, consider smashing a six-foot-long paper model of the historic ocean liner Titanic across his bed. Better still, destroy the paper model of the Titanic you spent years building together with Exacto knives, cutting board, and tacky glue. Perhaps you even used needle and thread to hang tiny lifeboats along the promenade of the unsinkable vessel. For greatest impact, dismantle upon his bed a man-length paper boat you spent years building together, which you have heard him describe as a favorite possession.

Revenge is an art form.

In the smashing, when your heart thunders and your words revert to primal screams, you will not consider the times he read just one more chapter of a book aloud to you and your sisters at bedtime, because you begged him to. You will not reflect on the hours adding up to months, or even years, where he waited at the dance studio, through a piano recital, or in the parking lot of basketball camp. All the Saturday morning donuts and Sunday afternoon hikes won’t register. You will not weigh the times he hoisted you onto tired shoulders so your little legs could rest. You will not revisit the worn-out tale of how he introduced you—his firstborn—to extended family, through a transparent hospital bassinet, and you broke his heart open by squeezing his pointer finger in your tiny newborn fist.

Now you are after his heart again.

Be warned, when you stand and survey your damage—the shipwreck sprawling corner-to-corner over the bed—you may feel a moment’s panic. You may wonder what you have done and whether you can ever return to distant shores of good daughterhood.

But take heart; reflect on what brought you to this.

You will recall how he failed to notice his wife of thirty years could no longer write her name. He did not seem alarmed when she was unable to rise without toppling, walk without assistance, or speak without slurring. At the intervention, for what you thought was her drug addiction, his exact words were, “too much of a burden for me.” You will reflect on how he resisted bringing her personal items to the nightmare called inpatient rehab. When her symptoms worsened and turned out to be metastatic cancer—a swift, terminal form—you will remember how he sat beside her hospice bed giggling like an adolescent at text messages from his crush. How he told your sister, the morning of the funeral, about his anticipated first date. How he spent the limousine ride to the cemetery asking when he should stop wearing his wedding band, and then declaring it his choice anyway.

You will remember when he came to visit you and your newborn in the hospital, weeks after your mother passed, how he bragged about his new relationship instead of the miracle of your healthy, heavenly baby. How your sister called a month later, panicked, because she saw him wearing a leather medical bracelet inscribed with the girlfriend’s name and number. All your efforts to be kind and generous had failed. No amount of conversation could help him understand why his daughters were not ready to meet Michelle. When you asked him for space to process what was happening, how you believed he would give you time.

You will relive your surprise at the group text where he floated the idea of listing the house, your childhood home. When his weekend plans prevented him from taking your calls, you left your five-month-old baby with her daddy to drive to the house—your mother’s perfectly curated domain and the last place on Earth with her powdery-sweet scent. You will remember the shock of the For Sale sign in the yard. How your quick online search returned a real-estate listing full of staged, professional photos. The future you dreaded was a present reality.

You will realize he was getting creative in his revenge on those who had not embraced his new life. You had been wrong about who he was capable of being. He would not stop acting out until he’d smashed some hearts; not only yours, but your sisters’ as well. You will not be able to protect them from hurt, from him. And you cannot bear it.

Grief is an art form. Especially when your loss is titanic.

****

Sarah Disney is a writer/wife/mother living in Louisville, KY. She used to go for answers—now she craves mystery. She’s into dogs but currently houses a cat. Sarah is back to creative writing after a decade hiatus. This is her creative non-fiction debut. More from Sarah at www.thatsarahdisney.com

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Ho

by Sherre Vernon

I leave my husband and toddler cuddled on the bed watching some high-pitched, bright-colored show that squeaks and flashes a spectacular cover and walk as quietly as I can into the bathroom. On an exhale, I light a candle, circle the tub faucet to the hottest temperature I can stand, and open a can of sparkling water. Inside this small alcove, inside this body that is just mine, I pull the shower curtain closed and sink into the scalding water. I congratulate myself again on getting a curved curtain rod, for that little extra space it provides. Eucalyptus and menthol steam the room.

I’ve have had my eyes closed for perhaps two nanoseconds when my Almost-Three slides the bathroom door open and appears between the shower curtain and the tub. Sometimes she comes to blow the candle out from too far away. Tonight, she’s there in supplication, her little fists folded together in a gesture I’ve never seen on anyone else, but that makes me think of desperate prayer; her head tilted to the side like a lonely puppy; a bounce in her heel-toe-heel-toe wiggle: Mama, please, I has hot bath? I love hot bath. Hot bath my favorite! Please.

Once she starts, she doesn’t stop. She’s Alexa on loop. She’s me, repeating, repeating. I tell her it’s very hot, make a sizzle gesture with my fingertips in the water. I let her feel it with her own little hands. I remind her that no, in fact, she does not love hot baths.

Please, mama! Please! I need it! I need hot bath!

So I yield. Candles, eucalyptus steam, cold bubbles to drink and a toddler.

She strips down with an efficiency that betrays her eagerness and reaches for me to lift her in. I start with her humpty-dumpty on the edge of the tub. She says, ah, feels good, when her toes hover above the water. After a few minutes, I move her over to sit on the turtle-shell of my belly.

Mama, so hot. I need cold bath, Mama. Cold bath better. All pleases and gesticulations.

The steel tub has already cooled the water significantly, and she’s dangling her feet over the edge of me into the luxury hot springs of my alone time. She sings me the song of cold bath until she’s comfortable standing in the tub, until she’s splashing and laughing. I’m proud of my stubbornness. At her next asking for cold bath, mama I tell her she can get out any time she pleases.

Mama! Out first! I swim a little.

What? I clarify for her this is my no-longer-hot-bath and that she is a guest. She doesn’t think I understand. She sighs like someone who’s had to explain herself too many times to an unhearing audience. She adds pantomime to her instructions. Towel. Dry, dry, dry. Dry leg. Dry body. Dry hair. She moves the shower curtain to show me the towel.  This child, all patience and generosity. She doesn’t mind helping me when I’m confused.

We go back and forth a bit about who should get out first and I unfold my body, willing it to take up as much of the tub as I possibly can and relegating her instructional demonstration to a corner by the faucet.  Though this feels a bit like victory, it’s a cold bath victory, and one that I no longer mind giving over to her.  I yield. I’ll get out first. She can swim a little.

I don’t even have the towel completely wrapped around my body before I hear I out, too, mama! I out, too! 

 Wishing Big

by Sherre Vernon

She wants big teeth now! and using half her body for emphasis, attempts to pull out the teeny teeth she spent the last three years growing. She reaches next for mine, perhaps thinking of exchange. She wants big arms, too. And big legs, and big toes. She caresses the parts of her body she is wishing larger as she names them. This isn't the first or only time she's asked me for these things in her almost-three voice, with her soft, square hands, miniatures of mine. And always, too, there's this asking me permission. She needs me to consent to her transformation. And I do. Despite all the pull against it, I do. I do not tell her what it has been for me to have a big forehead or big belly or what she's wishing for when she asks for big boobs, too, giant ones! I tell her only that yes, when she's grown, she will have all these things, as though they are mine to gift. She squeals her delight at me, at the abundance she can barely wait for, at my generosity for all my big body gave her: thank you, mommy, thank you!

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Sherre Vernon is an educator, a seeker of a mystical grammar, and a 2019 recipient of the Parent-Writer Fellowship at MVICW. She has two award-winning chapbooks: Green Ink Wings (prose) and The Name is Perilous (poetry). Readers describe Sherre’s work as heartbreaking, richly layered, lyrical and intelligent. To read more of her work visit www.sherrevernon.com/publications