Chemical Reaction

October 2022 | nonfiction

You find yourself in your junior high milk room-turned-dark room on a Saturday morning being taught to process film by your 8^th grade science teacher. (His suggestion.)

You are crying because the prior afternoon your dad cuffed you so hard that the space before your eyes became a black-and-white checkerboard of spots. You willed yourself not to faint, kept your head up, eyes forward, and walked to your room, where you closed the door and laid down until morning.

You are enveloped in the pungent odor of metallic solution emanating from a silver tray. You are, instead of comforted, given your first French kiss by this balding man. His hands slide beneath your lavender tee as his wife and two eldest children come into focus in the developing fluid. Apparitions entering into black and white, the Mrs., so young then, sits on a park bench, toddler at one knee, baby clasped in a white blanket in her arms, and smiles into the lens, into her future.

Janine Harrison

Janine Harrison wrote the memoir/guidebook, Turning 50 on El Camino de Santiago: A Solo Woman’s Travel Adventure(Rivette Press, 2021), poetry collection, Weight of Silence (Wordpool Press, 2019), and chapbook, If We Were Birds(Locofo Chaps, 2017). Her work has appeared in Haiku for Hikers, Veils, Halos, and Shackles: International Poetry on the Oppression and Empowerment of Women, Not Like the Rest of Us: An Anthology of Contemporary Indiana Writers, A&U, Gyroscope Review, and other publications. She teaches creative writing at Calumet College of St. Joseph and serves as a Highland Arts Council member. Formerly, Janine was a Highland Poet Laureate, an Indiana Writers’ Consortium leader, and a poetry reviewer for The Florida Review.

Still Life

October 2022 | nonfiction

I sometimes lie on a hammock in my garden. My “yard” I call it because I’m American now. And I look up at the trees above the hammock and at the house and the windows. I feel quite alone at these times. I mean not alone as in “lonely” but cut off from the world around me, in my own world. Undisturbed. And while lying there, I sometimes listen to an audio book. Today it was a book of short stories by an old friend, Christine Schutt. We haven’t been in touch for years. Two stories stayed with me. One was about a woman who lives in the suburbs with her husband and teenage son. At the beginning of the story, she has just come back from a day shopping in the city. She is waiting on the deserted station platform. It’s dark. But neither her son nor the husband is there to meet her and no one picks up the phone when she calls home. There are no taxis. So she decides to walk. Decides it really isn’t too far even though she is carrying bags full of clothes she bought for her husband’s birthday. The story is just about her walk. It ends before she arrives home.

In the winter, I often sit in the family room with the lights off listening to books. This winter, I listened to Maggie Gyllenhaal read Anna Karenina. Her voice is relaxing. Often so relaxing that it put me to sleep. I was sorry when it was over. Maggie Gyllenhaal’s face is familiar to me from films, so it was easy for me to picture her in her studio speaking into a microphone, the book open on a device like a kindle or on her computer screen. I imagined her leaning forward slightly.

A still life is a painting of things not people. But the term makes me think of people too. For instance, I think of myself as a still life because I’m still alive. Funny how the word “still” can mean different things.

Today, as I sit alone in a dark corner, I look out at the trees in my garden.

Still life.

Nigel Paton

Nigel Paton is a teacher at a high school in New Jersey. Nigel’s writing has appeared in Tiferet: Journal – Fostering Peace Through Literature and Art. He can be seen and heard at poetryarchive.org. He spent part of this summer, 2022, at the Edinburgh Festival, happily revisiting the fringe where his play about Mervyn Peake was once performed.