Maria stretched her little fingers to the top of my desk, pawing over papers and picture frames until she caught hold of the leather strap and tugged my purse to the floor. I watched her dig into the unzipped pocket like a puppy as I crossed the room, straddling building blocks and five-year-olds.

“Maria, what are you doing?”

She looked up at me, big eyes bulging from her brown skin. She dropped the purse’s handle and darted to the reading corner where she plucked The Rainbow Fish from the shelf and dropped cross-legged onto the rug.

I sighed and zipped my purse—after checking that all my credit cards were present. This was happening too often. Her mother had assured me she would see to it. “It’s only a phase,” she’d said. “Maria thinks it’s a game.”

The game was becoming less fun for me.

While the kids were having naptime I called her mom—no answer. I tried the father. Between his thick, Mexican accent and the loud clanging in the background, I could barely understand him.

“I know Maria usually rides the bus, but do you think you could pick her up from school today?”

“I’ll come,” he said.

After naptime and alphabet and snack and drawing, the parents began to arrive. Maria didn’t seem to notice when she was the only one left. She sat in the corner with her book, running her fingers over the fish’s colorful scales. She couldn’t read yet, but she loved the pictures. I spoke to her several times, but she acted as though she couldn’t hear me until I gave up and started paperwork at my desk.

Her father came in smelling like fast food and burnt grease. Maria ran to him shouting, “Papá!,” and clung to his leg.

“Hello, señorita. Have a good day?”

I brought over her Dora the Explorer backpack. “Hi, I’m Mrs. Sally.”

“Rico,” he said, extending a hand. Maria leapt at his forearm like a grasshopper. “I’m sorry I’m so late. I had to leave work early.”

“That’s all right, I appreciate you doing that. I just wanted to talk about a little habit of Maria’s.” When the little girl heard her name and the tone in my voice, she sank behind her father’s leg. “She’s taken to stealing. I’ve caught her with other students’ lunch money, Game Boys, house keys. A few days ago my purse was turned over on the floor, and when I checked her pockets I found one of my credit cards. She grabbed my purse off my desk again today.”

The man’s thick brows furrowed. He knelt down to his daughter. “Maria, do you steal things?”

She shook her head.

“Maria…”

“Mamá told me to.”

The girl raised her thumb to her lower lip. She didn’t suck it, but she wanted to. Her father put a hand on her little shoulder. “Qué Mamá te dijo?”

“She said I couldn’t come home.”

“You couldn’t come home? Por qué?”

“Without a prize.”

She wrapped her arms around her daddy’s neck. He flinched like it hurt.

“Your mamá told you to steal?”

She didn’t answer, but she had already been clear enough. Rico rose with his daughter still wrapped around his neck and the pink backpack slung over his arm. He shook his head. “I am so sorry. I will be talking about this with my wife.”

“I don’t mean to pry,” I said, “but do you know why your wife would have said such a thing?”

I didn’t need to ask. The answer was in the smell of cheap burgers clinging to his skin. It was in the exhaustion weighing down his eyes. It was in the small hole near the hem of his shirt. But I asked anyway. I needed him to say what I knew he would.

“I don’t know. She must have misunderstood something. Gracias, for calling.”

I nodded and watched him carry his daughter out the door. I stayed in the classroom an extra thirty minutes because I had plenty of work to finish—not because I wanted to pretend he got in a car and drove away, instead of walking to the trailer park across the street.

When my work was done, I walked to my Honda, purse tucked under my arm, keys jangling. I drove home and thought no more about Maria, did not wonder what she had to eat tonight. I had made the phone call. I had done my part. If they had truly needed help, her father could have told me, standing in the classroom between walls painted with giraffes and sunsets. I asked. I did all I could.

I will put my purse on a high shelf tomorrow.

---

VICTORIA GRIFFIN is an East Tennessee native, currently studying English and playing softball at Campbell University. She writes between study sessions, practices, and mouthfuls of peanut butter. Her short fiction has appeared recently in Synaesthesia Magazine and FLARE: The Flagler Review, among others. Find her here.

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.

 

Outside, it sounds like the whole world is exploding. There are people laughing, people cheering. Everyone is happy because the war is over. The ceasefire was announced on the public broadcast channel an hour ago, and already bottles of beer and wine are appearing as if by magic. Families are spilling into their yards, carrying boxes of fireworks pulled from sheds and cellars, setting them off in the middle of the street in vibrant shocks that set the sky ablaze in blues and reds, yellows and greens. I must admit it looks beautiful.

I sit curled up in the window seat of the loft, my legs drawn up to my chest. There is a photograph in my hands, one I’ve looked at many times. In the bursts of colored light, I look down at my boyfriend’s face and smile. He is a little younger in this picture; it was taken two years ago, when we were both stationed in London during the war. Shortly after that picture was taken, a rifle blast to the thigh ended my military career. His continued.

Dangling over the corner of the frame are his dog tags, which have been cleaned and given to me. I wear his spare one, the one that came with his enlistment papers. It hangs on a long silver chain beside my own, from when I was Fleet Commander. When you serve, even if you’re discharged, you never feel right without them on. I never take mine off. The chain bears these well-worn tags, and my engagement ring.

Another burst outside the window momentarily pulls my attention away. He loved fireworks, because they hadn’t set them off where he came from. It was part and parcel of another culture, and the idea of things blowing up in the sky, naturally, appealed to a military man.

I can still hear him saying, “Look honey! Aren’t they beautiful? They look like burning flowers.” He was right. I still think so, even if the sight of them causes a sudden, painful jerk within my chest. It feels like every beat is a stab wound. Eventually, this pain should have been enough to kill me. But miraculously, I’m still here. I’m still waiting, stupid me, for him to walk through that door. Drop his duffel bag on the floor. Run to hold me in his arms. But he doesn’t.

I look at the heavy black steel door on the other end of the room, and I wait. I wonder. I hope. But all I hear are the sounds of merrymaking outside. The shrieks of happy children playing in the streets. Tomorrow, their family will be whole again. Everyone will be together. I hear glasses clinking in the hallway, the sound of running feet. Knocking on doors and calls of, “Ceasefire! They’ve called a ceasefire!” But there is no way for me to lay down my arms and surrender. I survived.

---

SIERRA NITSCHKE graduated from Northern Kentucky University with a Bachelor of Arts in English Literature. She also earned the 2012 Japanese Student Award. She has has been an avid reader of fiction and poetry since she was very young, and draws much of her inspiration from Arthur Conan Doyle, her favorite author. She is hard at work on several writing projects, including a novel, and her first poetry chapbook. She lives in Northern Kentucky with her boyfriend, and their two spoiled cats. Sierra‘s unpublished works and thoughts can be read on her Tumblr Blog here.

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.

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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.

All my lovers haunt me, especially my father’s. They loom in the scents of strangers walking by: a passing male with strong body odor, another who uses the same cologne. Even the moist smell that warns rain brings me back to first kisses and the flail of my naive heart.

Their images burn behind my retinas as certain songs- our songs-play on the radio.  Teen-aged boys in Summer; careless youth, soft skinned faces and bright eyes looking out for the prettiest girl tanning. The Winter evenings turning early morning in bars, alcohol lacing an ugly scene.  The worst though, the place they came without disguise was through my dreams. In there they prodded, pleaded and flirted, hounding me, all the while I knew better, yet nothing had changed. They remained fancy thorns, puckering towards my innocence. I still had no control.

I’m older now. I’ve been seasoned within the subject of boys and men. I no longer flirt to float nor return a gaze to later falter.

Like most women, I have my line of firsts, the ones who set the bar, and the others who I wished I’d never let go, and the ones who stained me, changed me, made me question myself.

There was Thom one night in my college dorm alone: “Don’t make me rape you,” he whispered as seductively as if he’d just revealed his love to me.  I didn’t let him rape me.  Instead I turned it into my own idea and learned to play the seductress. I hate myself for this.

The boy with one eye. Vaughn.  He who pushed me into a bathroom stall as the music in the bar blared so loud, I knew no one would hear me anyway.  He wanted to keep flirting after that, but I was too far gone, hiding within a crowd who believed I was something I was not.

My first love turned crazy, landing himself in a mental institution. He didn’t know how safe he was as I tried to make my way down streets in a small town that whispered condemnatory phrases in my direction.  “Witch,” or was it bitch?

To be cheated, lied to or treated wrongly should have only happened once. Too many of these beguiling lovers embedded themselves quite close to my heart. They lay grinning under this category.  I blame my father for this.

Before I’d grown breasts, noticed the opposite sex or even felt the tug of attraction, he came knocking on my bedroom door. My mother did dishes. Folded laundry. She went out with her girlfriends for appetizers and bubbly drinks that glazed her pretty eyes and made her laugh in a way that was faraway.  In the meantime, her husband taught me how to roll over and numb myself dead.  His lessons became my blueprint for how I’d feel for someone, especially a man.

This morning I spoke to a girl almost two decades younger than I. She hadn’t birthed, survived nor racked up her experiences just yet to a ripe time of contemplation. She had years to go before she would come to understand tight smiles, resting frowns or the consequences of decisions, seemingly meaningless in their moment.  She said to me, “I write down all these things so that I don’t screw something up.  My boyfriend thinks it’s weird.”

I remembered doing much the same, yet it hadn’t prepared me for shit.

She had chosen me for whatever reason and I tried my best to pick my words to precisely convey a truth I had learned.  A truth I struggled within.  First I smiled, hoping it came off as kind.  Then I looked out into the distance of my past.

“You gotta feel good about you and follow what your heart feels it wants to find home in.  Then it’s near impossible to screw up.”

She started to cry. I asked her why. She only shook her head, leaving the space between us, one woman and one girl; a convoluted mix of knowing and naivety up for debate. I spoke again, maybe a poor decision, yet how can there be a filter when tears have already surfaced?  “Every decision I’ve made has stemmed into what I feel.” I looked down to her boots, studying their small silver clasps, and at the same time not really seeing them at all.  “If I could go back, I would have done everything I wanted to: education, lovers, friends, my relationship with myself. No one can tell you what’s right for you. They don’t know or feel what your experience is from your perspective.”

We parted some time after. I saw her twice more. She said she’d been writing about me and wanted to know how I spell my name. I drove away each time, wondering how I could hold so much wisdom for another, yet none for myself. My sweet husband was home and I failed to see what he saw of me. All my lovers crowded my sight and I found myself fearing a man my heart loved.  After so many situations, adorning roles to make the scene less depleting, I no longer trusted who I was.

I wish to rest my lovers, slay my father’s being. Sometimes more than I want to live contently.

The girl, two decades years younger, ceased to exist.  My words to her were just words to myself.  Similar to looking back through old photographs, being able to recognize the beautiful elements of that time to realize they were over. I sit up.  My hands stop shaking and begin to grasp a tangible reality. I close the ghosts of my past, tired versions of myself as well, the bodies I folded myself into, between covers of an old story I’m finished reading.

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S. WINTERS, pulled by the motion still symbols evoke, can usually be found among the old growth giants of Vancouver Island working on her novel. Her work can be found in The Portal, Vancouver Island University’s literary magazine.