My wife, Holly, and I get home at the same time. We ride in the elevator together. She says nothing. Inside, she goes to the bathroom. She closes the door. We don’t usually close the door when we go to the bathroom.

I sit on the couch, and put a pillow in my lap. She sits on the other end of the couch. She looks at me. I start to talk. Our story unspools rapidly and not in chronological order. I can’t remember when you met my son, Avery, and how often you hung out with Avery and when I told you I loved you and when we stopped using condoms and when I started thinking your drug use was out of control, and the stories keep coming, and I keep unraveling, and Holly is quiet until she starts to cry, and I keep talking until I have nothing left to say.

Help me, I say. You’re the only one who can help me.

Help you what?, she asks.

Write him. Tell him I’m sorry. Tell him that I didn’t mean to hurt him. You know me best of all, Holly. You and he know me. You can get through to him. He will listen to you. You can tell him what being in a relationship with me is like.

I know I’m asking her something I have no right to ask her, but I don’t know what else to do.

I know he loves me, I say. I love him.

She is still crying.

I will think about it, she says. I give her your e-mail address and phone number.

We have to get divorced, she says, not because you fell in love with someone else, but because you deserve to have the next man who wants to marry you, or who you want to marry, work out.

Would you consider staying married until after our child is born?, I ask.

Yes, she says.

I think I am in shock. I think Holly is in shock.

She goes to the bathroom. I know she is going to the bathroom to cry. She doesn’t want me to see how hurt she is. When she comes out, she has taken off her engagement and wedding rings. She has never taken off her wedding ring, not even when Avery was born. She has taken off her engagement ring plenty of times when she has been angry at me. I see she has taken off her rings, and I take off my wedding ring. Even though I had taken off my ring when I was with you, my finger now feels strange without my ring, or maybe I feel strange sitting with Holly without our rings on.

What did he know about me?, she asks.

I never told him we were married.

She walks into our bedroom and sits on the bed. She comes back into the living room, sits at the computer, and composes an e-mail to you. I don’t have to ask to know what she is doing. She loves me, probably more than I deserve, and because she loves me, and because she wants me to be happy, she is doing what no other wife would do.

Holly leaves to see a friend. You have not responded to the e-mail. Before I get Avery from daycare, I call the Hawthorne Hotel and cancel our reservation. I can’t return the swan boat tickets. On my way to Avery’s daycare, I stop at a Walgreens. I go inside, not for anything specific, but in the sleep-aid aisle I pick up a box of Motrin PM. I am tired. I need to sleep. I think the cashier knows what I am going to do later with the pills I hadn’t known I went into Walgreens to buy.

I get Avery. I hug him tightly. He says, daddy, down, down, daddy down. I put him down. He holds my hand as we walk across the parking lot to my car. Ummies daddy?, he asks. I have some crackers in my car, and I give them to him. At home, I put macaroni and cheese on a plate and put it on the kitchen table. I put cookies and crackers on a table in the living room. I fill three sippy cups with juice, and I leave them where Avery can reach. I lock the top lock of the front door so Avery can’t get out. I fill a small glass with some white wine. I open the Motrin PM box. I put the box in the bag I carry to work. I don’t want Holly to see the box in the garbage can. I open the bottle, look at the pills, tilt the bottle toward my mouth, and I dump in as many pills as I can fit in my mouth. I swallow them with a little white wine. I swallow the rest of the pills in the bottle, and I finish the white wine I have in the cup.

I check Facebook. You and your friends have blocked me. I have no Facebook friends. They had all been your friends. Using Holly’s account, I look for your profile. You have changed your relationship status to single. I send an e-mail to your mother. I thank her for caring for me and for Avery. I apologize for hurting you. I tell her I hadn’t meant to hurt you. I tell her I wish I had gotten the chance to know her better. I send an e-mail to one of your friends I had met at the party. She, I had thought, was the nicest. I tell her I hadn’t meant to hurt you. I tell her I wish I had had the chance to know her better.

I lay on the couch. I look at our text message history. Nearly 27,000 text messages. These texts are our history, everything we had been. I delete the chain of text messages. How easy to delete our life together. Less than a minute after hitting delete, everything is gone. I cannot delete the pictures of you, and of you and Avery, and even the few I have of me with you or of the three of us. I cannot delete our AIM history, because that is how we first communicated, and that is how you told me you needed to talk to me the night you asked me to date it out. Deleting everything means you are totally gone.

The Motrin PM won’t be enough, I think. I get the Melatonin out of the bathroom, and I take what is left, about 30 pills or so. I just don’t want to feel. I want to never feel again.

I go into the bathroom, turn on the faucet at the sink, and begin to shave, but the razor is mostly dull from Holly using it to shave her legs. I shave in awkward strokes. I cut myself. I cannot feel my hands. When I am done, I know there are patches of hair left, but I need to sit down. Someone else will finish, I think.

I call my brother, mostly to say goodbye, but also because he has called and texted several times. What’s going on?, he asks. When you blocked me on Facebook, you also blocked him.

I tell him what happened. While I talk to him, I feel myself begin to fade. I feel myself disappear at the edges. I cannot feel my head. I feel the phone drop out of my hand. I cannot reach for it. I still hear Avery playing with his cars. I wonder if he will remember me, or if he will only remember me as the man in the pictures with him.

I think you have already moved on. I think you have already slept with someone. Maybe more than one someone. I think you have already traded necklaces with someone, and asked them to go steady.

I call Holly. I need you to come home, I say.

Later, she says. I’ll be home later.

I sleep. Holly finds me on the couch. Avery is asleep on top of me. She changes his diaper and puts him to bed. Are you OK?, she asks.

I’m fine, I say. I am slurring. I just need to sleep, I say. I am so tired. Let me sleep.

What did you take?, she asks.

Just some Melatonin, I say.

How much?, she asks.

Just three pills, I say.

She looks for the bottle, but I have hidden it since it is empty. You took more than three pills, she says.

Maybe four, I say.

You need to go to the hospital, she says.

No, I say, I’m fine. I’m going to be fine. Just let me sleep.

She tries to get me to agree to go to the hospital. I tell her I am fine. I lay down. She goes to bed in the bed we used to share. I think that I will probably wake up later. I don’t want to wake up later.

In the morning, I think I have failed. I cannot even kill myself. I do not feel like myself. Everything today is different. I have been changed in the night. I am not the same this morning as I was yesterday morning. But if I’m not the same, then who am I? A great question. Who am I?

I am unsteady on my feet. In the bathroom, I finish shaving. I tell Holly I cannot go to work. I call my boss and tell her I am sick.

Holly, Avery, and I spend the day together mostly in silence. Holly doesn’t want to talk to me, and I don’t know what to say to get her to understand. She talks to her parents, but does it in the bathroom. She texts several friends. The word is spreading. There is no containing what I have done. I have now been outed. There is no retreating into the world Holly and I once occupied. I am gay. No take backs.

I think I could try pills again, but decide that later, after Holly and Avery are asleep, I will sneak out – as I have grown expert at doing – and I will drive to a nearby bridge and jump off. Jumping off this bridge makes perfect sense. All I have to do is leap. I’ve spent the last six-and-a-half months leaping away from everything I’ve known, and leaping toward everything I’ve wanted to know. Leaping off of a bridge should be easy. Only later do I think that neither suicide attempt was because of you. I was afraid of what living as an openly gay man meant. I was afraid of losing Avery. I was afraid of never feeling for another man how much I felt when I was with you.

Holly takes Avery out into the hall to play. While they are gone, I record a suicide video. Of course I record a suicide video. Everyone records a suicide video. A way to say goodbye. A way to explain.

I had been taught at an early age to hate myself. Don’t be gay, I heard over and over. Gay men aren’t happy. Gay men can’t have children. Gay men aren’t faithful. Over and over. Taught to hate myself. Never knew how to like myself. Never knew that I was looking for someone to like me, to teach me how to love myself.

I thought you were the one.

You told me you were the one. You told me I was the one.

I promised to love you unconditionally. But I guess I lied. I only wanted you to get sober. How could I tie myself to a man who gets high every night, and then lies to me about it? How could you expect that that was the future in which I wanted to invest?

I eat a piece of your birthday cake for dinner. I had not eaten yesterday. From the couch in the living room, I watch the sun set. I think this sunset will be my last. Sunsets are wonderful, when you’re feeling sad.

I’m tired, Holly says. Will you be safe if I go to sleep?

Can I sleep in bed with you and Avery tonight?, I ask.

Yes, she says.

I will stay on my side, I say.

I watch Avery struggle to fall asleep, and then he falls to sleep. Holly eventually falls to sleep too. I whisper her name. She doesn’t respond. I put on my shoes. There is no other way, I think. My head hurts. I just need to stop hurting. I never thought about the end during our beginning. I never thought our beginning would end.

Outside, I look at the sky and the stars, and as I had thought on the Fourth of July, I think you are also under these stars, probably with someone, probably high. I think in time you will be consoled, because everyone, eventually, is consoled. I hope in time you are happy to have known and loved me.

Once I’m dead — because I cannot think about the actual act of dying — but once I’m dead, I can sleep. I will not know another day without you. I will not have to see the way Holly looks at me: Disappointment. Sadness. Hate. Pity.

On the bridge, I look for the best place to stop. I turn off my engine. I put on my hazards. I open the driver’s side door and get out. I see headlights behind me. Another car. I get back in the car, wait for the car to pass, drive a few feet further, get out again, and this time I close the door behind me. The bridge feels unsteady under my feet. The bridge sways. Gravity holds me to the bridge. I am trying to fight gravity. I no longer want to fight gravity. You had pulled me out of my orbit. I no longer know which end is up. I think that love is like falling, and falling is like this, and my heart feels like it is gone, and all I have to do is jump, and then I will fall, and then everything will be done.

What is left behind seems so broken. I cannot think of myself as a person. Our when-not-if future will not happen. I have been erased. I am going out altogether like a candle. I wonder what I will be like then. I have not seen what the flame of a candle looks like after the candle is blown out.

More headlights. More cars. I get back in my car and keep driving and then I’m past the point where I think the fall will kill me, and I decide I will turn around and jump from the other side. I pass the Charles River and the playground where you and I had played with Avery five days ago. I don’t want to die, but I don’t know how to live anymore. I’m crying. I call Holly. I need help, I say.

Where are you?, she asks.

I’m at the Tobin Bridge. I was going to jump. I don’t want to die.

Come home, she says. We can get you help. Come home.

OK, I say. I’m coming home.

Do you need me to stay on the line with you until you get here?

No, I say. I’m still crying.

Just come home, she says. Everything is going to be OK.

And she was right.

© 2012 William Henderson

I may have been too fat in my one-piece bathing suit but I thought I looked like Joan Baez, with my long straight brown hair and wise face. That pleased me, to look like a famous singer who represented moral passion and a dedication to music while expressing our moods and transforming our spirits. It was the Seventies.

Patty, Ingrid and Barb—virtually nude in bikinis—hadn’t assumed poses of the renowned and talented. Sunbathing with me on the lower terrace of my San Diego backyard, they sat at their ease watching the play in the swimming pool as if their children were the cherubs of the gods. My friends’ company usually cheered me, but I couldn’t feel part of their cohort that day.

Some days at the pool I taught the older youngsters to dive properly, but that day I couldn’t be bothered to teach let alone enjoy children’s antics. “Marco!” somebody shouted. “Polo!” somebody answered, and the pool came alive with shouting. Their noisy play didn’t interest me. I adjusted my sunglasses and gazed at the empty flower-pots lining the fence around the pool. It certainly didn’t occur to me to hum Joan Baez tunes.

As soon as I’d settled myself, my four-year-old daughter joined me, clinging to my leg. Her warm body seemed menacing, like she might bite me. I’m not sure why I let that fantastic notion take hold, but I often felt little Maggie could hurt me. She needed my attention every minute, pulling at me with a neediness that seemed a threat to my life.

“Tyler ran away again,” Patty announced, clapping a torn straw hat on her blond head. “Yesterday at the beach it took me forty-five minutes to find that kid. When I caught up with him he wasn’t hurt or even missing us. Sometimes I think he’s smarter than I am.”

“Teach him to read,” I suggested. “He’ll get into Proust while you play volleyball. God knows you’ve got enough books. He’s nearly four. He can do it.” Patty loved books. She shed them like a molting bird. They fell from her tote-bag, cluttered her car, lay open and spattered on her kitchen counter. She imbibed books like strong drink and knew arcane facts about the Supreme Court and arms treaties. Come to think of it, she also had a handsome, well-read husband who inspired my fantasies.

Patty didn’t look like a mommy. Her thin athletic frame was more suited to cross-country running. I was the one who looked like a mother: tall, full-breasted, a classic matron. The Fates, however, had not willed me the pregnancy I’d dreamed of; I was infertile. The three goddesses had instead blessed skinny Patty, who had three boys.

Five years ago I’d given up my teaching at the high school to be a mother of adopted infants. Babies were easily available to adopt in those days, and we thought they could be molded into our version of perfection if we were model parents. I’d intended to form my children—like a potter with clay—into agreeable, well-adjusted, clever people. Being a mother seemed the perfect challenge. I’d need to be patient and loving, an ideal tutor. The role would improve my character, and I’d become, well, motherly, a totem figure worthy of worship.

I’d be as good at parenting as I’d been at teaching. How hard could it be? Very hard, I learned. The loneliness at home with my daughter and her five-year-old brother was intolerable. Our son now went to kindergarten, but I spent every day at home with a little girl who resisted any directions, had little to say, and demanded my company. It felt like everything had ended with the adoptions of the babies, and I missed my classes and colleagues every day. I wished I’d run off with the basketball coach. He’d made a tempting offer.

Perhaps the changes we’d brought about in the Sixties made us think we could influence, even create, human beings. After all, we’d burned away entrenched values in the same way the sun burned away the water on our skin. We’d undermined the established culture by confronting restrictive laws, protesting policies of discrimination and war. We could do anything. Except I couldn’t. Nothing worked for me as it should have. My daughter balked at our wonderful progressive preschool. She didn’t enjoy the carefully chosen books I found for her or the educational excursions I planned.

I secured a pair of “floaties” around Maggie’s arms and watched her happily enter the shallow end of the pool by herself, her sun-bleached thick hair bobbing in two pony-tails. She kicked and splashed in the silken water—a California waterbaby—her tanned body sturdy and smooth. Following her movements, our spaniel, Daisy, crept along the poolside as if she could protect the child by intense scrutiny. I knew my friends also watched my daughter. I knew they thought I was too concerned about Maggie, too worried that something was wrong with her.

Patty sat up and faced me, frowning under her floppy hat. “Elaine, look at Maggie. She’s beautiful! She’ll be swimming and taking that slide in a week. If she grows up to marry Tyler, they’ll start a new race.” Patty liked to make pronouncements.

My athletic friend was trying to make me stop obsessing about Maggie’s disturbing ways that frightened me. She often screamed with rage and wouldn’t eat. She fought with the other children. Worst of all, she wouldn’t talk much. Doctors—I’d taken her to three so far—reassured me there was nothing wrong with her. I didn’t believe them and concluded that Maggie had “fetal alcohol syndrome,” resulting from her birth mother’s drinking. I’d read books about it. Patty—with her handsome husband, healthy boys, and literate soul—couldn’t know what I was going through with my daughter.

“Mark likes to wander too,” Ingrid sighed, observing her son wade tentatively into the pool, a tube around his waist. Relocated to California from Germany with her American husband, Ingrid had defied our long-haired look, preferring a short haircut. Today she’d even put a ridiculous hanky on her head as a sun-screen. With her German accent and unshaven armpits and legs, she looked the foreigner among us. “If I don’t catch him he pees in public,” she added, following little Mark’s every move. Two boys jumped off the side of the pool, holding their noses, and splashed Mark deliberately. The timid little boy and his wary mother, outsiders here in our California paradise, seemed tragic figures to me that day, human sacrifices to ridiculous disorderly chaos.

“If any place can help Maggie find herself, it’s our pre-school,” Ingrid said as she moved to the edge of the pool to be closer to her son. She sat and dangled her feet, rippling the ice blue surface. Ingrid could be counted on to mention our little school at the Unitarian Church, forever promoting it as a center of innovative child-care. We four mothers volunteered there and supported its progressive philosophy. For Ingrid, a teacher at the preschool, the place was celestial, model of enlightenment. She went on, “I think Maggie will get over her problems and will like school one of these days. It’s a readiness thing.”

Ingrid’s wisdom reached beyond faith in the preschool. Her European spirit seemed ancient, rising out of hidden places. I sensed a beneficent perceptiveness in her like fresh spring water enlivening the dry earth. One day years later I’d go to her with the truth about my marriage, but not that day. That day I needed to stay with my anguish and my anger, holding on as if to keep from drowning.

School? You think she’ll be fine if she adjusts to preschool? Who are you people?

“Yeah, these kids are wonderful.” Barb spoke up from the bench where she combed her straight black hair, like locks of a prehistoric maiden. “I think Maggie is especially darling.” Barb wore her black bikini easily, showing off her enviable small breasts and a flat stomach. “She’s an intense, thoughtful little girl, Elaine.”

She’s a barbarian! There’s something wrong with Maggie! Can’t she see it?

“I wonder,” I said, slipping into the pool next to my daughter and giving Maggie a hard push sending her skimming through the water. She giggled. Maggie liked to test herself, liked to risk, as if she felt most alive when in danger. How could a toddler be so fearless? “Maggie’s got her own ideas about things. It’s her way or no way.” No one spoke. Finally I added, “Why doesn’t she talk to me?” speaking louder than I intended. “Something’s wrong with me that I can’t inspire this child to do more than demand food!” I thought of Maggie’s self-portrait she’d drawn in preschool, an outline of a head scrawled in the palest yellow, a face with no mouth. The picture had been transferred—by a conscientious teacher—on to a plastic plate that now hung on my kitchen wall, and the soundless image watched me with a baffling stare, like a face on an aboriginal cave painting.

“Maggie’s waiting for something to say,” Barb said. “I’ve heard of kids who don’t talk until five or six and then speak in complete sentences.” She pushed her wonderful hair back into an elastic band and spread a towel on the deck.

I considered pushing Barb’s slim body into the pool. Damn them all. Barb’s too naïve for words; Patty’s in total denial; Ingrid thinks preschool can save the world. I leaned back in my chair, adjusted my glasses again, and wished for a vanilla milkshake.

After ten silent minutes, I lifted Maggie out of the water, dried her with a striped towel, and she walked away from me, her arms held out from her sides by the florescent orange floaties. Who is this independent child? Has she the genes of some warrior tribe? Some street gang? I ran my fingers through my Joan Baez hair to rid myself of nasty thoughts. Daisy regarded me with her usual worried look, her spaniel soul aware of my discontent.

In time, the sun cast long shadows of late afternoon, and the three bikinied mothers called to their children, “Five more minutes!” gathering their towels and totes. When they started their journey down the driveway to their cars, they looked like sleek princesses of a naked tribe trailed by their primitive children. Soon there’d be nothing left but dark footprints.

Patty stopped on her way and stooped to poke at the dirt-strip on the edge of the asphalt. She called to me, “I’ll bring you some pansies next week. You need something here.”

I didn’t want pansies. I wanted Maggie to talk. I wanted Maggie to progress like the other children. I wanted Maggie to play without hitting. I wanted my daughter to validate my mothering and make me happy.

I trudged up the stairs and into my empty house, Maggie trailing behind me. Inside, she put her wet bottom on the seat of her Big-Wheel—a toy cycle parked in the middle of the family room—and drove it into the furniture while I went to my bedroom to change clothes.

* * *

Patty planted the pansies and they flourished. Within the year, red bougainvillea draped the fence, and pink and white impatiens enhanced the flower pots around the pool. Time altered more than the look of things, though, as I watched Maggie master the pool-slide, as predicted, and heard her speak when she felt like it. She defied and fought, hating school, but anyone could see she didn’t have fetal alcohol syndrome. Every crisis shook my world, but we survived together and her provocations forced me to act. She taught me to dive, you could say, to find the resources I needed.

Eventually, like a mermaid emerging from the water to seek the sunlight, I moved out of my despair. I can’t report that I started singing like Joan Baez, but I can say I spoke truthful words and heard them. After cutting my long hair and exchanging the dark glasses of a sunbather for the clarity of bifocals, I divorced my husband and took the children with me to make a life in a small house across the street from a church. We had few flowers, and no pools, but we did have a healthy avocado tree and we ate the green fruit year-round.

© 2011 Elaine Greensmith Jordan

My mother planned our vacations and because she was not quite normal, neither were our vacations. While I dreamt of cheesy Disney cruises and relaxing all-inclusives, sipping virgin daiquiris at the pool bar like my vacationing teenage peers, part of my mother’s mid-life crisis meant an insatiable desire to shrug off our tourist identities and become one with our Central American neighbors. My mother the psychologist taught us early that it was impossible to enjoy a country without getting into the minds of the people who lived there. To understand and communicate with the people of these countries, the first step was to speak the language.

My little sister, my mother, and I had all learned Spanish in the classroom and my sister and I liked to keep it there. In the classroom, safe behind desks, among kids who chewed gum like cud. Balancing on the cliff of womanhood, we both had enough things to obsess about in our own language without worrying about our inability to roll our r’s. We felt every mispronunciation like a pimple, humiliation oozing from our teenage pores. My mother, on the other hand, had been swept off her feet by Zoloft a few years earlier and had lost the chemical compounds for shame in the process. On previous vacations, she had made it her unofficial job to practice her pitiful español on anyone who stood still long enough to feel obligated to listen. This usually meant hotel maids, waiters, cab drivers, gardeners, etc. Every trip had its own cast of characters, roped into our lives by my mother. She poked and prodded her characters, the bored, white lady who never tired of playing with dolls.

Don’t get me wrong. My mother speaks Spanish. She knows the difference between the preterite and imperfect, the masculine and feminine, and her phrase bank extends far past the necessary hotel “la cuenta, por favor”. However, despite a lifetime of classes and a college semester in Spain, she somehow manages to be nearly incomprehensible and mind-numbingly embarrassing whenever she speaks. She sounds like she learned Spanish from a Southern rodeo clown drunk on tequila. I think it was her eagerness that was the most painful to watch, the bug-eyed, craned-neck exuberance with which she spoke and how she was completely unaware of the sniggers waiting around the corner, just out of earshot. Having shriveled my dignity to the size of a pinhead on previous vacations, the next logical step was, of course, to stay with a family in Nicaragua and attend Spanish language school for six hours every day. In other words, drunk Southern rodeo clown all day every day for two weeks.

My mother was most excited to meet our host family, to show off her beautiful daughters and to bond with our madre and her hijos, to find people who appreciated (read: were paid to appreciate) the way she massacred her way through the Spanish language. It was going to be the ultimate adventure: my mother and her two girls, the three señoritas. When we arrived at the house, feeling sweaty and extremely American, hauling our rolling suitcases across the dirt street, we realized that we were not the only ones moving in. There was a van out front, with a life slowly being unpacked: mattresses, picture frames, cans of condensed milk, a child’s tricycle. My mother seemed oblivious to the moving crew, while I squeezed my sister’s hand as we both noticed the woman in black watching us as our host mother, Raquel, welcomed us inside. Her eyes darted between the three of us, the woman in the corner, and the steady stream of furniture weaving through the house.

“Bienvenidos,” she said. It looked like there were tiny men pulling the corners of her mouth into a smile. My mother motioned to the family rubble exploding silently around us. “Que es esto?” The woman in the corner let a sob escape and quickly covered her mouth as if keep the army of wails inside of her from leaving their loved ones and joining the front line. She left the room and Raquel explained in Spanish, quickly and without emotion.

The woman is my sister her husband died two days ago hit by a car the funeral was yesterday he earned the money so she and her family had to sell their house and move out she has a teenage daughter and a little boy they won’t disturb you the three of them will be living in one room you still have two rooms just like you reserved welcome to Nicaragua here are the towels.

For once, my mother had nothing to say. She looked old all of a sudden, the eagerness bleeding out of her face. Here we were, with fat suitcases and Spanish dictionaries, pencils sharpened, on the heels of a funeral procession. Raquel was as kind as she could be but we crowded every room. We were like three thick tongues, thrashing around in a mouth too small to fit us. Mealtime, which was when we were supposed to be swapping stories and collecting new words, was humid with silence. Our stay had all the makings of a great travel story. We swam in our own sweat, beneath mosquito nets. There were chickens shitting everywhere. Nine of us shared one bathroom. We ate plantains in as many forms as Forrest Gump could cook shrimp. But for evert detail we added to our emails (“The kitchen is outside!” “We eat our eggs straight from the chicken!”), there were a few we left out. Like the way the teenage girl stared at us from across the table, daring us to smile when she and her family were hit by the cold reality of their loss every time they opened their eyes in the morning. Or the way the little boy asked when his father would come back from the store with his Superman action figure and their perrito. We soon realized that this was not our adventure anymore. This was their lives, and we were more than tourists. We were intruders. We discussed our next step as a family, weighing the options on our way to and from the language school. If we stayed, that meant money, money that they needed. But if we left, that meant room, or what they needed even more, space. My mother eventually decided that it wouldn’t be fair to either of our families if we stayed.

While we were waiting at the front door to leave, my mother looked tired. I wanted to tie her loose shoelace and kiss her eyelids and pad her heart with something thicker than mud. Her eyes were deep as secrets and I could see the fire slapping at her bones. I realized that I had absentmindedly reached for her hand, my arm slung around my sister’s shoulder. I looked back and saw the teenage girl. Her eyes were not angry and threatening, staring unblinkingly to the back of my skull. She was looking at our hands, clasped and wet with each other’s sweat, and the easy way my sister leaned her head against my shoulder. Mi familia. Solid. Whole. Unbroken. As we left, my mother spoke for the three of us. “Adios, y lo siento,” she said. I don’t remember harsh shards of syllables, words like jagged glass. Her voice was warm and viscous, flowing into the cracks in their home like glue. My mother understood a language I had not yet mastered and she spoke it with a perfect accent.

© 2011 Emma Shakarshy

Feb. 15, 2011, CNN.com

© 2011 Steve Castro

Greetings…..

Until Then,
Carl Palmer

P.S. Today is the 33rd day since this all began and I didn’t hit the lottery. Maybe those 3s weren’t so lucky after all.

© 2011 Carl Palmer

Maybe I bumped her elbow. It could’ve been something as simple as that: the catalyst. And when she turned around to see me, her response was habitual – not calculated. She saw my face and then looked down my body and back up again with disdain, then disgust, and then she finished with a small laugh of gleeful pity. The entire assessment and pronouncement lasted a full second – not more than two.

Could I have imagined the disdain – or has there been some past interaction between us to prompt her disrespect? No, I am anonymous – and I have spent a lifetime cataloguing glances such as these. I know the difference between a pullback that implies I’m taking too much space, and a step-aside that extends respect for someone who needs to walk past. I’ve been thinner too – and I know these glances suddenly disappear. (They are replaced by different glances, but that’s another story.) Those who don’t experience them often dismiss the social sanctions that take place in mere moments. Imaginations, paranoia. To those who know them, they are as real as the furniture.

To be fair, she had been drinking. To be fair, it was late at night and I was on her turf. That is, anyplace where the body is put into motion. I can sometimes get her respect in the classroom, or behind a desk, a place where my body is secondary to my mind. The hour and alcohol would only serve to drop the decorum she might use at, say, the post office. She would note my body shape and size, attire and demeanor at the post office too, but the schoolgirl glee at my perceived defeat is reserved for late night. For slight intoxication. For a place where she believes I am unarmed, unwelcome.

We had just left the dance floor and I think I bumped her arm. We’d been out dancing and the music was ending for the night. We were coming back to ourselves – the selves that are no longer ecstatically moving, bodies pulsing rhythm. We were coming back to the selves that have to find meaning in our own lives, make decisions about who we are, how we project ourselves onto the bright canvas of culture. The bracketed existence of dance floor anonymity was finished. And though I don’t know the woman who gave me “the look,” I know how much she needs me.

What causes one to offer disdain toward another and think it is warranted? The fact that it will be excused, or lauded, for starters. What causes a person to dismiss the humanity of another? A need to elevate oneself, for one example. And that’s why the slender girl on the dance floor needs me to be fat. She needs it, and while she thinks she doesn’t want me around, she wouldn’t know how to live without me. And her fear that she could be me, but isn’t, adds the gleeful chuckle of dismissal to the end of her affront. I give her life purpose.

By the bar, late at night – this is not the time for conversation, but I catch her eye and look for a moment with real compassion. This does not even take a second, maybe half a beat. I am so out of place in this interaction – not doing my job. And indeed, I know how to do my job – to avert my eyes and show her the shame that I feel. I felt it as a child, and still do at times when someone like her catches me unaware, the shame of forgetting that I am not credible, followed by the hot rage of unspoken justice. But not this time – and not usually anymore. I just look at her with compassion – so different from pity. I am not afraid I could be her. I know I could be her. And I know that my ability to practice kindness toward her will help us both – and probably others whom we haven’t even met.

I just stand and stare at her, thinking: I know how much you need me. Without me, you’d have to do something with your life in order to feel good about yourself. You couldn’t just gloat about not being me. You couldn’t use me as the ballast that keeps your head from floating away thinking of all of those on the dance floor who are prettier or thinner or shapelier than you. Without me, you’d have to make someone else your scapegoat, and it might not be so easy, if there weren’t obvious physical criteria involved. Barring replacing me, you’d have to focus on who you want to be within yourself – not just in comparison to others. I want to ask the kind of rhetorical questions that prompt reflection in a quiet moment: What must you think of yourself to elevate the size and shape of your body – perhaps what you do to make it so — to traits worthy of virtue? How little must you think of yourself to look at me that way and take pleasure in it?

Her glance also makes me know that she doesn’t know me at all. Does my demeanor say it: Maybe you didn’t know, but any fat woman you meet in a social setting – especially one who’s doing something that uses her body: working at a job, dancing, buying clothes, eating a meal – she has character and fortitude to spare for surviving a world that uses her as you’ve just done. Fat people may scapegoat others to find their self-worth, surely. If she thinks she’s so different than me, then she doesn’t know me at all.

I don’t say any of that, but for our similarities, I seem to know something she doesn’t see. She doesn’t actually need to DO anything in order to be worthy of respect and positive attention in the world – neither do I. It’s already done. We are already fine people, just as we are. Even as she puts me down, she does not deserve my put-down. How much lower can we agree to feel? No lower. No more.

I didn’t speak at all, standing on the edge of the dance floor, late at night. But if I could read her painful need in her quick behavior, perhaps she could read my truth in a simple stare as well. Perhaps she heard me say:

“Gentle, darling. No one deserves your derision. Not even you.”

© 2011 Kimberly Dark

© 2011 Kate Hutchinson

As such it was easy for her to zip her fly and turn her back on the lot of us when we were pre-pubescent children, abdicating in search of greener pastures with my father’s then best friend…This ended the friendship, needless to say.

But back to the baby book thing. Of all the evidence of my mother’s lack of interest this one hurt the most, especially when my brother and sisters would take their books out, which I remember as frequently. All three had one: bound in gender appropriate ribbons with gilt pages and pre-printed headings for a lock of hair or birth certificate. They compared tiny, ink-smudged footprints and progressively less detailed observations of their newborn selves, removed grainy black and white Polaroid’s from the little holders in the old albums–as I looked on, learning what it was to covet for the first time.

I turned my back on my family when I could, at fifteen, looking for a more welcoming place in pop culture. Would you believe there wasn’t one song—not one—dedicated to a girl with my name? Of all the ballads to Rosanne and Sara, and plaints to Caroline, Diana, and of all names Rhiannon, they (and by they I mean the music industry at large) never bemoaned my passing and/or leaving even once in song? Vexing, I tell you. That’s what it was, and my quest to stand out turned academic.

Though my associates took as long as a masters to earn, it did supply the missing link.  During the course of astronomy class—I needed earth science units to graduate; finished third in my class, too—when the professor inevitably came to the topic of Pluto and the moons that orbit the icy planet–it was still a planet back then–he pronounced one of them—the biggest one–exactly like my name:

Karen

Which gratified my nomad self to no end. Upon further inquiry, I learned the moon’s moniker could be pronounced Sharon or Karen, and either would be correct.

At last.

This was where I fit in. In the cosmos. Why didn’t I think of it before? I always felt so above it all—if you’ll pardon the cliché—so what better to identify with than a celestial body? Such were my thoughts at the time and if it seems a bit overwrought to say I was suffused with belongingness let me just tell you, you’re dealing with an unstable person. I look for signs in everything.

I happily changed my online handle to Charon, then at aol.com, but now at cox.net—I have a tendency to jump around, looking for the best deal—and fired off an e-mail to my father, excited to share my discovery. My father was an atomic physicist—and how handy was that, to have a resource like him at my fingertips, when studying such a hard subject, though this isn’t about that. Dad and I had exchanged daily e-mails throughout the term, the perennially stalled lines of communication at last reopened, but since I was literally over the moon at the time, I thought nothing of his failure to return my e-mail immediately.

Thought nothing too, of answering my cell a few days later, only to have my brother tell me—a shade too excitedly—that Dad had died suddenly and irrevocably of a massive heart attack, and all I could say was ‘so that’s why he didn’t reply!’. Days later I worked it out that my screen name was changed on the exact same day he passed, but I’ll get to the reason for that in a little bit.

I fell to my knees after that of course, but it was almost as if I were standing outside myself, watching this woman do the appropriate grief-stricken thing. It was just so unreal. I stayed up all night, doing blow and drinking, thinking if I could somehow hold back the dawn, a day would never break on this ludicrous and unacceptable new reality. How could Dad die when I hadn’t made my peace with him yet? When I was just rediscovering him? When I still didn’t belong?

But a new day did come, and a week passed in a xanaxed out haze—twenty of ‘em, which is impressive, if you consider the fact they were the big, fat blue kind—and I shivered and sweated for days upon returning to my job as a bartender. It sucked too, because people were really checking me out. My boyfriend said they were just being solicitous when I complained, but I felt scrutinized.

I hated being looked at right then. These days, too, but it wasn’t always this way. I can look back now, and see that was the turning point. I liked the attention back when I was younger. Too many years ago now everybody, and I do mean everybody—guys and girls alike—gave me the head-to-toe. Not to brag, but I was that good-looking. I should have been, too, because that’s all I was doing. Being good-looking and looking for my reflection in other people. Not anymore though. Either thing. My ticket to ride has been downgraded to coach, that’s for sure, that’s what I experience these days.

But I digress.

Over the course of the next month or so, I found out that charon actually has a dual meaning, the secondary one—or the primary—being the name of the demon that paddles the boat across the river Styx. Oooh, you might scoff and fine, you’re welcome to that opinion. It just creeps me out that I coincidentally—and I use that word with a great deal of Freudian connotation—happened to change my moniker to the same as Hell’s ferryman on the day of my father’s death. You can see where that might be rife with portent for a person of a…shall we say…delicate temperament?

I’ve kept the moniker. I’m superstitious about it now in an undefined way.

When my oldest sister—Zjabberwock—shot herself three months after Dad’s heart attack, I left bartending for good. I had some money—Dad’s money—and I lived well on it for a year, and not so well the next, so I took a job as a part time cook for a widower and his son in the suburbs. I isolated. I saw no one but my boyfriend and bane for the last thirteen years–and if you said oooh, and scoffed here, you’re entitled to that, too–anyway no one but him, my boss, his son and the functionary characters that made my life work.

I liked this.

For a long time.

Two years.

Why did you withdraw, you might ask and I’ll tell you. When Diane killed herself—that’s Zjabberwock; someone must have beat her to the punch you know, the Z thing—anyway, when she shot herself, we were communicating for the first time in years, in a meaningful way, on an almost daily…eventually daily…basis, and I was trying to help her.

She was devastated.

She was drunk.

She was on drugs, but so was I, so I didn’t say anything other than ‘thank you’, when she gave me the web address of a Canadian website where all that was needed to order pills was a credit card number. ‘Thank you’ is what I said. Not: you shouldn’t be doing things like that Diane—or—I’m coming, I’m getting on a plane, hang in there. No, just ‘thanks’, and, ‘I’ll have to call you back; I’m running out of minutes’.

And I had lied. Lied about the time left on my cellular plan, lied about my feelings, and lied to myself that this was just her usual dramatics. Did I mention that I fretted for a long time–each time–after hanging up? Let me do that now. I did cry, but I’m not sure for whom anymore. Probably myself.

And Diane had died. Early the next morning by her own hand. I didn’t find out till two days later she’d used a gun–I just naturally assumed it was the pills and the reality of that is the real knee cruncher in this story. And by that I mean: I really fell to my knees, without watching myself for effect.

Zjabberwock. I think of her like that a lot, it was her online moniker, but more than that, it was the last form of communication I ever received from her. The day after her death I had checked my Inbox and felt like I’d been touched by another world when I saw the sole correspondence there was from–

Zjabberwock. How was it possible?—I’d wondered, full of excitement. Somehow I’d been granted a reprieve from this tragedy—her, too—and here was the missive telling me it had all been a grotesque practical joke, some monstrous misunderstanding to weakly laugh about when I’d read the details. Not funny ha-ha, but funny oops. Like someone threw acid in my eyes, funny. Joke’s on me.

I’d double-clicked but she hadn’t come zooming out of my PC as the fantastical author of her moniker might have had her do, or the wishful thinking that shaped my own thoughts. I was so disappointed I can’t tell you and I won’t make a metaphor of it, though that’s the best way for me to think of things. As something other than they are.

And so the Jabberwock’s toves will remain forever slithy and I, Charon, bearer of the damned across the river of fire, will help no one. But I would like to tell you, Zjabberwock that I am sorry–sorry every day that I didn’t help you from falling into the abyss. I want you to know too, that I’m lonely without you, and if you’d stuck around, we could have grown close and belonged to each other.

© 2011 Karen Robiscoe

© 2011 Jessica Barksdale

Dear Readers,
Thank you to all the writers who submitted their work for this month’s issue. For the last two months, I have been humbled, amazed, and blessed by your wonderfully crafted essays and stories. As I first began reading through what had come in, I immediately recognized that while the experience of reading and analyzing this incredible work from fantastically talented writers would be tremendously gratifying, I gauged just as quickly that the task of selecting just four would be painstaking, if not dumbfounding. It is with this collective and creative spirit that I congratulate the four submissions selected. These writers submitted pieces which stood out not only in terms of their artistic worth, but also in their connection to the theme of origins; and did so in ways which were unique and unforgettable. To each and every of you, thank you again. I hope you enjoy this month’s issue, and by all means, keep the good fires burning.

all the best,

-Rick Marlatt

From “Lifelines: Letters from Nebraska Soldiers during World War II,” by Nathan Piper.

“I believe this is my last letter for sure, darling. So keep your chin up a little longer and don’t give up hope. Gee, honey, I can hardly wait because I’ve been waiting so long for this day. It’s sure going to be great to get home again and stay-that’s what makes it all worthwhile. Darling, I want to be with you before the baby arrives…that’s what I’ve dreamed of ever since the day you told me about it. I can’t promise I’ll get there in time. If I don’t get there in time, you just make it easier on yourself by not worrying about me or anything else. I will be with you even though there may be miles between us. Darling, just close your eyes and see if I’m not there. In closing, I send all my love and kisses, hoping my darlings are well and that I am with you real soon. Love always your darling husband and daddy, Bob…”

War letters from Nebraska soldiers contribute importantly to the maturation of studies concerned with Nebraska history during World War II. The words and experiences found in these letters create for scholars and readers alike a valuable narrative. In them, the voices of Nebraska soldiers make vividly evident the sacrifices and contributions made by Nebraska servicemen during the war. They create a better understanding for modern audiences the influences World War II had on regions like the state of Nebraska as well as allowing us to understand the essential nature of war-time correspondence. War is complex and bitter. Its conclusion leaves for those who survive it a complex legacy. But left with that legacy are the stories, and relics, that make our understanding of the period more complete-stories which are found in the letters from a solder keeping faith to his sweetheart back home, in letters from a son reassuring his parents that he survived being in harm’s way, in letters from a father who fears he may not live to see his daughter grow up, in the last letters from a soldier to his hometown friend and Army buddy. And these items-these letters-become for a modern audience precisely what they were for the soldiers who wrote them and their loved ones. They are lifelines, a means of connecting us to the lives of Nebraska soldiers during World War II.

The concept of origins is interpreted widely and in different contexts. In his brilliant essay, Nebraska educator and historian Nathan Piper examines the cultural importance and impact of correspondence between servicemen and their loved ones. Piper’s work is a detailed analysis featuring preserved letters written to loved ones by soldiers, namely, his own grandfather, Robert Sinkler. This particularly moving letter from Sinkler comes toward the end of Piper’s work and details the final days of the war.

By showcasing these letters throughout, Piper is able to expose the reader to the tremendous emotion channeled from Sinkler to his wife. Moreover, these recordings allow Piper to go a step further and contextualize his research. That is, Piper’s own origins are embodied in the letter as his mother will be one of the six children brought into the world by this couple. What makes Piper’s analysis so powerful is that it not only provides a moving war time perspective from the frontlines and the home-front, but it also examines the societal and cultural results of these heroes’ sacrifices, as well as redefine their legacies in current terms. All the while, Piper is engaging in a deeply contemplative investigation of his own origins through a mixture of academic and creative nonfiction. His writing is bold, brave, and important. Shouldn’t all of our endeavors be so?

© 2011 Rick Marlatt