A month after his death, my father arrives in the middle of the night. When I open my door in response to his insistent two a.m. knocking, and he stands there whole, smiling.

I’ve been sitting up for hours, trying to read and losing concentration, expecting something without knowing what, and then he’s there, much younger than when I saw him last—about my age, with more hair, less paunch. His hairline has flowed back in like a returning tide, his broad shoulders straightened; he leans casually against the porch railing, as if he’d just bounded easily up the steps, not even winded. My heart jumps, but I only say, “I’ve been expecting you,” because I suddenly realize I have.

“I didn’t hear you unlock the door,” he says.

“I forgot to lock it.”

“You should lock your door,” his brows furrow with worry. “It’s important. You’re leaving yourself completely unprotected. Anyone could just wander in. It didn’t have to be me, you know.”

But it did have to be him.

“This isn’t real, is it?” I ask him, “I mean you aren’t really here?”

“That depends on what you mean by real,” he answers. “Some things are more real than reality. You get a different perspective when you’re dead. Think of this as a visit from beyond. Your fantasy or mine—it doesn’t really matter. I’m here. That’s real enough.” His smile spreads, as it always did, across the whole of his face.

My heart hurts. I hold my breath, not wanting to break whatever spell brought him here. I concentrate on remembering him into whatever kind of real this is. “So you’re still dead?” I ask.

“Of course,” he says impatiently, then adds, “You forgot the most important part.”

“Of what?” I ask. He would often do this, begin a conversation in the middle.

“The story, of course. Now listen, because this is important. Are you listening?”

I nod.

“You wrote you didn’t remember what I said.”

“When?” I can’t imagine what he means.

“In that thing you were writing,” he continues impatiently. “You said you couldn’t remember what I said the last time we talked. That was important, Meggy.”

“I’m sorry,” I tell him. I notice he is still standing on the porch in the dark, exposed to the night air. “Come in,” I tell him. “Let’s come in the living room where there is more light.”

He moves with ease, with large strides. I’m taken aback—I’d grown accustomed to the awkward shuffling gait of his old age. I remember he was an athlete, playing basketball into his sixties. He folds his height into the largest chair, leans back and stretches out his long legs. He seems comfortable, at ease in the messy room, ignoring the socks my son left curled in tiny balls on the carpet in front of him.

“Can I get you something to drink?” I ask.

“Meggy, I’m dead. Remember?”

“Oh, yeah. Sorry.”

He smiles indulgently, acknowledging the awkwardness of the situation, then remembering his purpose, continues, “But let’s get back to that story, because it was important. It was the last thing I said to you, and you forgot? Really?”

“There were so many things to remember. It was hard, you know—your dying.” I pause, then add, “I know we should have expected it.”

“I wasn’t ready either, and hell, if I wasn’t expecting it, I can certainly forgive you,” he sighs. “To be honest, I was scared.  I couldn’t conceive of being dead. Failure of the imagination, I suppose. You were always better at that than I was. Dying shouldn’t have surprised me—most people my age are dead.” He flashes another winning smile, as if the joke were on him.

“It’s okay,” I tell him.

“But about the story—it was important—especially for you, being a teacher, so listen this time.” He checks to see he has my full attention before continuing. “It’s about a teacher, this story. I was never much of a student—second from the bottom of my class. I got mostly Ds—just enough to pass, at least most of the time.”

He chuckles, remembering the crazier escapades of his youth, then catches himself and continues. “But I had this teacher, Miss McQueeney—teachers couldn’t be married in those days, so they were all Miss. She’s long dead now, but I never forgot her. I wasn’t any better in her class than any other, but she saw something in me nobody else saw.  She called me in after school. I came into her classroom and sat at one of the desks.” He stares off past me into the kitchen, as if into that faraway classroom.

“‘Now Peterson,’ she said, (we used last names back then) ‘Most people don’t think you’re a very good student, but I know you can do a lot better.’ She had this crafty grin like she saw right through me. ‘Well, I guess you might be right,’ I told her—that was the way to get teachers to just let me go about my business. After I agreed with them, I’d promise to do better.” He pauses and adds, smiling, “Never would though.”

I return his smile, as if sharing the joke.

“But she was different,” he says. “‘No’, she told me, ‘I’m serious. You could do great things in your life.’ Those were her exact words: ‘You could do great things in your life’—not just I could do better in school (I knew that) but I could do great things. No one had ever said that to me before. I stopped and thought about it. I didn’t believe her, but since she was being so nice, I thought the least I could do was try. So I started to work in her class and I started getting Bs (You didn’t get As in those days). I still got Ds everywhere else, but others started to notice and expect more of me. I started doing better in other classes too, and slowly moving up in the ranks—not to the top—I’d started out too low for that, but into the top half—barely, but I made it.” He pauses, checks to see he still has my attention.

He does.

“I don’t know where I would have been if it weren’t for her.” His voice cracks with emotion, and he gazes beyond the picture window out to some distant streetlight, as if gathering the strength to continue. In this moment, nothing seems to move.

“Of course she’s dead now, but I saw her at a couple high school reunions, and once she came to a rally in Nashua where I was campaigning.  I was glad she could see I was still trying to do something with my life. I wish I could thank her.” His voice chokes again, then he smiles. “By the way, it isn’t true about all us dead folks getting together, having a good time and talking to each other.” He seems to be finished, but adds, “I can’t believe you didn’t remember the story.”

“I do remember,” I tell him. I remember how his voice broke the first time he told me.

We sit in the absolute stillness of the early morning dark. I breathe it in. He is beyond breathing. I let his story fill the space, probing it for clues to why he told me this with such urgency, why he had to come back to tell it again.

“You know,” I tell him. “I’ve sometimes wondered what it would be like to hang out with you, if we were the same age. I mean, would we have things in common?”

“What do you think?” he asks me.

“I don’t know. We might talk about baseball, or politics, or education. We have some common interests. We might get along.” I say, watching his face for reaction. Something I see there saddens me. “But, it’s impossible, isn’t it?” I say, and I notice he’s already fading, his outline a bit blurry.  I desperately want to keep him here.

“Hey,” I tell him. “This isn’t fair. Maybe I have something urgent to tell you too.”

He seems to hover in the air, waiting, shimmering.

I try to come up with a perfect question: “Why did you have to die?” or “Did you love me?” After rejecting those, all I can think of are trivial queries about the finer points of baseball rules. I’m afraid he’ll be gone again before I can speak at all.

“How did you know what to do with your life?” I ask, the question surprising even me.

He starts to answer, but then stops and says, “Weren’t you listening to that story this time?”

His outline begins to flicker, and I reach out to grab hold of him. He eludes my grasp as deftly as a wisp of smoke hovering in the air.

“Wait!” I say. “What if I have more questions? There are things I want to tell you too. Will you come back?”

“It doesn’t work that way,” he says, dimming before my eyes.

---

MEG PETERSEN is currently a Fulbright scholar working with the Ministry of Education in the Dominican Republic on teaching writing. She is the Director of the National Writing Project in New Hampshire and a professor of English at Plymouth State University. Her poems have won prizes with the New England Association of Teachers of English and the Seacoast Writers Association. She was named as a feature poet by the New Hampshire Arts Council. Her poems have appeared in Concrete Wolf, Entelechy International: A Journal of Contemporary Ideas, Garden Lane, English Journal, The Leaflet, The International Journal for Teaching Writing and other publications. She is a founding editor of the Plymouth Writers Group Anthologies of Teachers’ Writing.

 

Clearwater Institute’s bleached walls stare in on the Giggling Girl lying in the middle of the room. She counts her toes to see if any new ones have appeared.  She laughs to herself, saddened, but begins counting again.

At night she dreams of the cracks swallowing her whole into the dark place where the shadows roam like sharks in the ocean. The Giggling Girl, tired of counting, rises into a sitting position and begins to rock muttering words under her breath.

As a key scrapes into a lock the decrepit tumblers turn over with the sound of old joints popping. The splintering wooden door, with its rusted hinges, opens with a creak. The girl giggles as she looks up to see the Good Doctor walk in with the Nurse in White Heels.

They stop and the nurse stands exactly three feet behind the doctor, a conditioned response created from admonishing stares and bereft rebukes from the Good Doctor. Now she obeys instantly, only questions when absolutely necessary and never speaks unless spoken to. The Girl giggles again when she looks at them.

The Good Doctor pulls a pen from the inside of his coat, clicking its ink into the world and wetting it with his tongue before he scribbles notes on a clipboard. The pharmaceutical nurse takes ten minutes every day to decode his prescriptions.

When he finishes he licks the wrinkled and pale skin of his thumb flashing the Giggling Girl his yellowing teeth. He uses his wet thumb to separate the page as he rips it violently and tosses it to the Nurse. With a clumsy hand she catches it, nearly falling on her six inch heels, and moving back to her position of attention. The doctor snorts his approval through his big hawkish nose and looks towards the girl.

The Girl stops giggling. The shadows in the walls catch her attention, as one of the shadows jumps from the cracks into the doctor’s shadow. The joy withers from her eyes when she sees this. She can see his gray hair glow with a new sheen, his steely grey eyes are new with luster. She knows that he doesn’t think she saw it so she pretends that she didn’t. She pretends that she doesn’t know that he’s slowly becoming the building.

“How are we today?” his voice is misleading. It holds nothing but kindness. The Good Doctor especially took time to craft this voice to give it the power to pull on people’s heartstrings. The voice is what always gets him what he wants, but the Girl refuses its draw.

“Dr. Clearwater,” she can hear the shadows in the walls dancing, chanting his true name. The Giggling Girl feels their soulless joy spread through the room as she repeats his true name. She speaks it to show that she has no fear, but hates to feel the power that it holds as it crosses her tongue.

The Good Doctor hears the party of the shadows himself and he glares at the Nurse to admonish her. “Now, now, we’ve been trying to make this distinction for quite a while. The facility is named Clearwater, not me. I assure you we are not one in the same,” he says. Each day the good doctor slowly sinks deeper into the ocean of shadows. Soon, the giggling girl knows, his graying skin would turn to the stone of Clearwater.

“Sleeping child dead in the night, by the morn she’d lost her sight,” the Giggling Girl speaks the words like a silent prayer turning from the doctor and staring at the cracks in the walls. “Once the air has left the balloons cut them from her ribb’d tomb.”

The Good Doctor’s patience is fading, she can see that. He’s heard enough to know her prayer by heart. At night he hears it as he passes her room.

When he sighs the nurse moves without needing instruction and opens the door looking out into the hallway. “Cooper?” she calls to the custodian as a young girl calls to her pet. Her head spins in both directions as she tries to find him until the Giggling Girl sees her eyes light up as she looks left. The Nurse glances over her shoulder to make sure the doctor isn’t looking while she hikes up her dress.

The Nurse wears a white dress that stops right above her knees and white high heels. The dress code mandates that they be flats. This is her only outward sign of rebellion. The Nurse takes great pride in her physical appearance and loves to show off to the men in the asylum. The Giggling Girl sees her shamelessly flirting when no one else is watching.

The Nurse’s hair is the color of charcoal and has the sheen of polished marble. Her skin is tanned, the color of wet sand, beautifully unmarred, and her eyes were the color of a clear lake. Each time the Giggling Girl looks at her she searches for the fish beneath the surface.

She loves fish.

“Yes, Nurse?” The Giggling Girl smiles as Cooper appears. He always takes care of her and, unlike the other staff, Cooper’s power is not of the shadows. She knew no fear of the glow of his coffee skin or when she speaks his true name.

The Nurse beams her white teeth at Cooper in an attempt to use her powers to grab his attention. The Giggling Girl laughs at the way she casts those eyes at him and try to captivate him. The Nurse’s power came from her eyes, but always failed to win over Cooper.

“Be a dear and get the sedative for our uncooperative patient today.” She smiles at Cooper as she speaks in her singsong voice. Cooper, his waves unaffected by her voices tidal power, looked at the Giggling Girl with compassion before going to get the sedative.

The Nurse’s smile made the Giggling Girl retreat into her favorite corner. This corner had the fewest cracks and the shadows here protected her from the others. She took comfort in their gentle cooing over the loud booming of the shadows that had infected the Good Doctor. The shadows in the Nurse’s eyes were of a different thread, but cut from the same cloth.

The Good Doctor’s yellow fake smile comes as no surprise to the Giggling Girl as Cooper returns with a sedative and a wheelchair. “Thank you, Cooper. Please take care of her. Nurse, let’s attend to some of our more receptive patients.” His white wing tipped shoes clacked against the surface of the floor in step with the Nurse’s white heels.

When their backs turn as they walk away, the Girl watches the needle slips into the cracks. She follows it with glee. Slowly Cooper lifts her, cradles her in his arms before finally setting her in the wheelchair that he had brought.

“Thank you Cooper,” she whispered, her eyes wide and alert.

---

JEROME C. KEITH is currently a junior at Loyola University of New Orleans pursuing a degree in English with a concentration in Film and Digital Media. As a senior in high school, he received a silver key from the Scholastic Art & Writing Awards for his short script.

A: Yeah, once.

A: It was when I was sixteen, and I was living right near the confluence of the Mississippi and the Wisconsin. Well into the Driftless.

A: No, we moved there when I was twelve. It was all around the Midwest for us: Omaha for a while, Michigan City after, St. Louis, Peoria.

A: [laughs] The Army wouldn’t have taken him. He was a poet with far more talent than renown. Hope that doesn’t sound pretentious — he wasn’t. He managed to get two-year teaching appointments at little universities, and he’d get an office without a window and a used typewriter, and he’d teach and host a Christmas party and then our lease was up and it was off to the next city.

A: Yeah. It’s a December night, mid to late December. The snow is melting in a frigid rain.

        I’m driving on a road between the hills, and it’s around eleven on a weeknight, the kind of night when I have to drive because the memories are getting life back into them, rising up in a clatter. There’s mist coming off the snow.

        And I’m trying to focus on the mist and the shadows and the rain slicing across the valley, and none of it is working. The nerves are back, and it’s physical, too, like something is wrapped around my torso and won’t let up.

        And I see him. He’s walking on the shoulder. I can barely even tell it’s a person at first – just a blurred mass, lurching.

        I get closer, and it’s a man coming towards me, I think, a tall man with a strange stoop in his back. He’s holding a coat against the rain.

        I slow down, and I turn the wipers on high so I can get a better look at him. He’s got his thumb out.

        I take a few breaths, and I grit my teeth, and I pull over to let him in.

A: Scared isn’t the right word for it. Reluctant dread is more like it, I think. I guess it was that— It was that I didn’t want someone else knocking around inside my brain. Not just in the moment, but for my life. I didn’t need another story.

        But I picked him up anyway, because the rain was frigid.

        It was one of my dad’s coworkers. He was another adjunct getting paid by the student. Seemed nice enough the times I’d met him. I’d never noticed the weird gait or the hunchback before.

        So, I roll down my window, and I say hi, yeah, I’m Prof. Kendall’s daughter, we met at the Christmas party last week, and he just looks at me with an expression of absolute heartbreaking warmth.

        “Could you take me home?” he asks.

        “Sure,” I say, and ask where he lives. He gives me an address near the edge of town.

        He gets in the back seat and leaves the door open while he shakes the rain off his coat.

        “I really must say, I’ve had the most incredible experience,” he says.

        I ask what it was.

        “I’ve been asleep for years,” he says. “Years and years, tumbling through half-dreams and flashes of light and Hell, and it seems I’ve just woken up.”

        And I assume he’s had an epiphany, right? Because he’s a poet. That’s how poets talk. So, I ask what he’s woken up from.

        “Nightmares,” he says. “Bad omens. Places beyond.” He pauses for a second and slouches down in the seat. “But now I’m here. In the world. I can feel the flesh beneath my skin and I can smell the green mist coming from the trees.”

        I look back in the rearview mirror and beneath the fogged-up back window I can see that there’s just this pure love to his face as he stares out at the blurry landscape.

        “It’s snowing, isn’t it?” he asks me half a minute later.

        “I think it’s rain,” I say.

        “In my dreams, I couldn’t bring the snow,” he says, a little despair in his voice. “I could bring sun and rain and fire, every element but snow.”

        And then, with wonder: “Dear Lord, it is beautiful out tonight.”

        That’s when he starts convulsing. I notice in the mirror first. His head jerks to the side, and he grips his arms around his chest and starts lurching back and forth in his seat, against the seat belt. And he screams, softly, but with great pain.

        “Are you alright?” I ask. He moans.

        “Do you need to go to the hospital?” I ask, louder, to more moaning.

        I pull over, of course. I turn the key and look around and he’s still going at it, moaning and screaming and pulling at his hair, and the muscles on his face are achingly tense to keep his eyes horribly shut.

        Then, as suddenly as it began, without warning it just ends, full-stop. He sits upright. He loosens his arms. He opens his eyes, and they are wet with tears of innocence.

        “Who are you?” he asks.

        “I’m Professor Kendall’s daughter,” I say.

        “Can you take me home?” he asks.

        “I can take you home,” I say.

        “I must tell you,” he says, “I’ve had the most exceptional experience.”

        “What was it?” I ask.

        “I was asleep— Lord knows how long. I went away— Lord knows where. And it seems I’ve just woken up.”

A: I never found out. I suppose it probably was. Dad never mentioned it, but when I’d go visit him at work, I’d walk past where the guy’s office used to be and I’d see that they’d taken his name off of the plaque on the door. I can only assume he got help.

A: No, I didn’t. I was sixteen and terrified. Mom and Dad would know I’d picked up a hitchhiker if I dropped him off at the hospital. I just dropped him off at home the way he’d told me to.

A: Three or four more times throughout the ride. It was on a four-minute cycle. He’d be cogent for about the length of a radio single, and then he’d start again. I made sure to wait until the convulsions had stopped before I dropped him off. I made sure he went inside. I think he had a family — has a family.

A: Yeah, has. I’ve got no reason to think he isn’t still alive.

A: Painful. Yeah, I’m sure it was, for a while.

A: No. You’re wrong on that one. Honestly, I think it was just living, the kind of living anyone else does, compressed. Tension and release. Birth and death. Light and dark; pain and joy; a universe and a God made of cruelty and beauty, the same object, each only real because the other exists; chiaroscuro: that’s all there is, anyway.

A: You know, I cried in my car for a few minutes afterward. I don’t cry. It’s not my scene. But after that, I cried.

A: Pity and envy? Both. Neither. Something beyond either of those, honestly.

A: That’s all I’ve got.

        One more thing: after I got home, after I’d locked the car and slipped quietly into the house, and after I’d gone up to my room and tried to sleep, I heard a fluttering sound on the window, and another, and another.  And I opened my window, and the full moon was burning a hole through the snowing clouds.

---

THOMAS SINGER is a sophomore  at Middlebury College, where he’s studying Political Science. He has been writing  for a while now but this is his first publication. He was born in Chicago but raised in Palmyra, New York, which, fun fact #1, is where Joseph Smith (the founder of Mormonism) is from, and, fun fact #2, is about eight billion times smaller than Chicago.

 

It sits in the corner where he used to sit, pulling me towards it daily. I draw the curtains back from the window seat alcove in our bedroom, my bedroom, and curl up next to the package. He had mailed it to me about a week before he died, two hundred and thirty three days ago.

I could never bring myself to take a scissor and tear through the tape he’d wrapped around the brown box, and I’d grown accustomed to its spot on the satin blue cushion. Brown and blue looked so nice together.

They had been our colors.

That sounds funny, a couple having a set of colors, but it became true across the span of our two-year-although-it-felt-like-all-our-lives relationship. Tiny instances of the colors always conjured themselves. This was after they became our favorite colors. Mine blue, his brown. I remembered questioning him, in disgust. Brown as in the color of poop?

Brown as in the color of the earth we first camped on. Brown as in the tree bark our initials are carved into. Brown as in your hair, your eyes, your skin.

My reasons in retrospect are far less romantic. Blue as in not pink. I’d been oddly defiant of gender roles since day one.

The brown package on the blue satin called to my soul. I reached out the fingers that used to interlock with his, but for the two hundredth and thirty third time, I stopped short of it’s roughed edges that the rain had worn the night before I’d received it. The world had cried with me at the loss of Alex.

I’d spent enough time psychoanalyzing myself to know my reasons. Learning about him would be over once it was opened, and I wasn’t ready for that yet. So I let my unhealthy obsession continue. Maybe tomorrow, I’d touch it.
And I did. I touched it and I cried I opened it and I cried I held the journal he had left me and I cried and I cried and I cried. I felt a sweet relief, realizing I’d finally be given an answer as to why he’d left me on this now too empty earth.

I also felt a hollow moan in my chest, understanding the grieving process was just about to begin. Opening the package was not the end, it was the beginning. I was ready.

---

KAILEY NELSON was born in Singapore, raised in Shanghai and is currently residing in the United States earning her Bachelors Degree. An aspiring writer, Kailey has a passion for poetry and short stories. She can always be found with a pen in her hand and a love for travel in her eyes, searching for the unfamiliar.