October 2024 | nonfiction
My wife sends a text: I love you. I’m sorry I take you for granted.
I text: Where are you?
Her text: Doctor’s office.
Fear. I call. She answers.
My wife mentions the call I received last night from my 99-year-old kindergarten teacher, Mrs. Merritt. She turns 100 in a week. She begs forgiveness for not doing something about my father. I touch an old scar on my chin as I listen. I stroke the seam on my cheek from the old fracture. I feel the bump on my nose. Old injuries yet still, sharp ticks of pain.
Times were different, Mrs. Merritt says. That’s what I say to myself. But I know now and I knew then. I should have told the sheriff.
Pause. I can hear her breathe. Labored breathing.
Alan, her voice quavers. Can you ever forgive me?
Of course I forgive you Mrs. Merritt, I say.
Silence. For a few moments I think the call dropped.
But? she prods.
Oh, Mrs. Merritt, I say. Don’t worry about it.
But? she repeats.
But inside me is a boy who will never forgive anyone. Never. Ever.
Mrs. Merritt cries.
Oh Mrs. Merritt, I say. Don’t cry. My brother and I love you.
She continues to cry. Oh that hurts, she says. So bad. Do you still love your father?
This horrible question. I grit my jaw hard. This question maddens. This question hurts. This question burns and wrecks.
Why, Mrs. Merritt? I say. Why does a child beaten and injured by a man remain attached to such a man? Because a child wants a father. But one day, a child wants a different father.
Oh, Mrs. Merritt cries. I know you do. I know your brother does too.
Alan? my wife says.
Yes, I say.
So, my wife says, a 99-year-old can have a crisis of conscience.
So? I say.
So. So I don’t want to let things slip away, then bite me that way. I don’t want take you for granted anymore.
No no no, I say. No. Please. Don’t say that. You always can take me for granted.
Alan Nelson
Alan Nelson, a writer and actor, received nominations for a Pushcart Prize, Best of Net, and Best Microfiction. He has work published or forthcoming in journals including New York Quarterly, Hong Kong Review, takahē, B O D Y, Blue Unicorn, Litro, Stand, Acumen, Maryland Literary Review, Main Street Rag, Texas Observer, Arc, California Quarterly, Connecticut River Review, Adirondack Review, Red Cedar Review, Wisconsin Review, South Carolina Review, Kairos, Ligeia, Strange Horizons, Illuminations, Review Americana, Whale Road Review, North Dakota Quarterly, and Eunoia Review. He played the lead in the viral video “Does This Cake Make Me Look Gay?” and the verbose “Silent Al” in the Emmy-winning SXSWestworld, and narrated New York Times videos on PEPFAR.
October 2024 | nonfiction
A single gleaming crow feather rises up in a tiny Danish vase on my mantle. It is there to remind me.
When she was too old to drive, whenever we got out of the car and my mother heard a crow calling, she would say, “There’s my crow!”
Crows shower despair in Van Gogh’s “Wheatfield with Crows”; did he hear them cawing before he cut off his ear? Were they scribing in the sky when he took his life? Did he feel their intent to mark his days? Did he count them and their cryptic messages? The sky writhes in blue; the wheat is not bread but tragic gold. The painting is quietly apocalyptic.
In Andrew Wyeth’s “Winter Fields,” a dead crow claims the foreground, lying in a sere and open field with winter’s neutral sky above it, a house and barn mere specks in a faraway background. Soft and black, the body embodies the silence winter will impose upon us all. Thin brown grasses, its only covering. According to McCartney, his blackbird singing in the dead of night signifies hope for a black girl in the mayhem of the sixties, but of course his gentle guitar and night singing bird reassure all of us who need that hopefulness in equal measure to shore up against Poe’s unsettling raven.
In the Old Testament, the prophet Elijah was fed by ravens who brought him “bread and meat” in the morning and again at night. According to legend, the hermetic Saint Kevin in the 600s prayed with his hand out the window and was gifted, or cursed, with a blackbird alighting on it and laying its eggs. In Seamus Heaney’s poem the good saint “Is moved to pity” holding out his hand “Until the young are hatched and fledged and flown.”
In photos, my young and still single mother in a short red-quilted jacket, smiles in front of a large caged enclosure. She has just fed a crow that cannot fly who she told me, “talked” to her in its curious crow speak; not the raspy caw-caw, but a series of multi-syllabic quiet chortles at excitement for its food, and she was sure, crow affection. She fed it raw hamburger until it was well enough to take off and fly. When I was little, I loved hearing this story and she was very good at mimicking what her corvid friend sounded like. The pictures are old and faded. My mother is gone.
The single crow feather on my mantle belonged to Cassidy Crow, as my daughter dubbed the side-hopping crow who recently descended in our driveway and stared into the sunroom windows, waiting. Of course I came out with some whole grain bread. She (yes, I am projecting my gender onto this bird) flew up into the locust tree then alighted near the bread as I returned to the house. She was there the next day and I did my research on what humans could feed crows: peanuts—who knew?! So now, it became a three month-long ritual to watch for her appearance, which was at least twice a day, then hurry out with shelled peanuts which she would eat. She was always alone and if other crows were seen or heard in the vicinity, she disappeared. We couldn’t figure out why she seemed to be used to being fed, or why she appeared to be a timid outcast among other crows who usually appear together, at least in twos. Another unsettling trouble arose: I had taken to calling her by cawing and saying her name. If she were close, she’d appear. But I was also signaling the squirrels who quickly learned that my cawing meant peanuts! It was upsetting to see that she would relinquish her food to these interlopers as if she were afraid of them. I wanted her to stand up for herself! But she remained timid.
Shortly after she appeared, I found one large sleek black feather near the peanuts and have kept it as the only token of her presence which I came to love, as she disappeared completely after three months. I still ponder the mystery surrounding her appearance and disappearance. Surely she was a sign, a marker that briefly inscribed itself on our lives. Surely, she could have been my mother’s crow, reappearing to let us know that hope is a thing with feathers that perches in the soul and often comes in the darkest of colors if only we will look and see it.
Raphael H Kosek
Raphael Kosek is the author of American Mythology (Brick Road Poetry Press) and two prize-winning chapbooks, Harmless Encounters (2022) and Rough Grace (2014). Her work has received 4 Pushcart nominations and was featured in The Writer’s Almanac and Verse Daily. She served as the 2019-2020 Dutchess County, NY Poet Laureate and teaches at Dutchess Community College. www.raphaelkosek.com
October 2024 | nonfiction
It doesn’t track or alter time, and it’s not a machine. It has no moving parts.
It’s a clear plastic contraption about six inches high with seven plastic disks in pastel colors. Each disk is labeled with a day of the week and has an a.m. and a p.m. side, marked with sun and moon respectively.
It’s a pill holder for my prescription meds and supplements.
Once a week I line the disks up on my kitchen table and snap them open. I take the pill bottles out of the cupboard and, one at a time, shake out my week’s supply and deposit them in the correct slots. I snap them shut and insert them back into their holder, ready for the next week.
I used to keep a cobalt blue ceramic bowl on the table in which I dumped random quantities of each pill. Every morning and evening I’d pick out what I needed to take at that time. It worked fine—the pills were handy, and I rarely forgot to take them. I’d add more as they ran low. I’d never have bought a special gizmo to hold my pills—it was a free perk through my health insurance plan.
I’m aware of the passage of time when I turn calendar pages—September already, summer’s over—and on my October birthday: Whoosh, there goes another one. I see the signs when I look in the mirror, when my race pace gets a little slower on each 10K, when my daughter is suddenly middle-aged. We all recall how time seemed to drag torturously when we were kids—would school never end? Would Christmas ever come? And then how it started to rocket by, faster and faster, as we got older. But that’s to be expected—we live with it, laugh it off. C’est la vie.
But now. Once a week. Every week. I consider the seven empty disks. And I think, no, it can’t be. Another week already? Didn’t I just fill them the other day? Where has the time gone?
“I have measured out my life in coffee spoons.” T.S. Eliot’s Prufrock was ruminating on the passage of time and the meaning of life.
I could re-employ the blue bowl. Toss the pill holder in the recycling bin. Or repurpose the disks—store paper clips, safety pins, thumb tacks. But there’s no going back. I’ll still hear the days ticking away. I’m measuring out my life seven pills at a time.
Alice Lowe
Alice Lowe’s flash nonfiction has been published this past year in Tangled Locks, Bridge VIII, Skipjack Review, Change Seven, Bluebird Word, Eunoia, and MORIA. She has been twice cited in Best American Essays. Alice writes about life, literature, food, and family in San Diego, California. Read and reach her at www.aliceloweblogs.wordpress.com.
October 2024 | nonfiction
That was when Paul McCartney sang Venus and Mars are all right tonight, and we yelled, “Wings suck!” and punched chrome buttons to change the station on the Dodge Dart’s radio. But some nights we were all right, driving on a dark desert highway, cool wind in our hair, except it was Florida in August and you could swim through the humidity, and the smell of boiling oranges oozed from the Tropicana plant.
That was when we rigged an 8-track under the Dart’s dash, and blasted our own music—screaming along with Patti Smith singing “Gloria,” as we thundered down I-75 from Gainesville to Tampa, to the theater where Patti had fallen off the stage the year before and broken her back, but this night she refused to stop singing and howling and flinging her marionette body around, even as the lights came up and the loudspeaker complained that we should all exit the building immediately.
That was when we drove back through shadowed cow fields, headlights dangerously dimming because an alternator belt had broken. We fired accusations: “What’s wrong with your stupid car?” “Why don’t you help me figure out what to do, instead of giving me shit?” We found an all-night truck stop that could help us out. The radio behind the greasy checkout counter moaned, don’t it make my brown eyes blue?
That was when we returned to the hovel in the student ghetto, to the bed with tangled sheets that never got washed. We put on “Aqualung,” drying in the cold sun, watching as the frilly panties run sounding wrong and dirty and hot. Then, one of us said it. It just slipped out. And the next album dropped with a flat clunk down the record changer, and the needle hissed as it hit the first grooves.
That was when 10cc sang, I’m not in love.
Kit Carlson
Kit Carlson is an Episcopal priest and a life-long writer with work appearing in publications as diverse as Seventeen Magazine and Anglican Theological Review. She has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and Best of Short Fictions. She has recently published in EcoTheo Review, River Teeth, Rooted 2: An Anthology of the Best Arboreal Nonfiction, Wrong Turn Lit, and Burningword Literary Journal, among others. She lives in East Lansing, Michigan, with her husband Wendell, and Lola, a nervous rescue dog. Find her at kitcarlson.org.
July 2024 | nonfiction
I will miss school, not because of the parties, but because it’s a Thursday morning in this freezing lecture hall with a big bag of balls, in a hundred different colors, and we’re grabbing a bunch of them, and putting them back, which is all fine and dandy but what’s the chance—think about it—that you draw exactly a hundred balls, and they’re exactly a hundred different colors, which is to say that everything—just everything—about the balls are different, and it’s definitely not required for class, but after frantic scribbling, he says, the probability is nine-point-three-times-ten—and then he runs out of space, so he squiggles, alludes in the last bit off to the side—to-the-power-of–minus-forty-three, which is—which is!—hands flailing for meaning now, scrambling up right beside me—the chance that—and here he’s out in a sprint to the wall—the chance that if I continue running—and we all want him to—I’ll come out on the other side. And that’s all, he says nonchalantly, not required for class, but I’m already on the other side of the wall and damn if it isn’t magical, those colors.
Jonah Sheen Tan
Jonah Sheen Tan is a recent Columbia University graduate from Singapore who lives in Hong Kong. His writing has appeared in X-R-A-Y Literary Magazine and Pithead Chapel, where it was nominated for a Pushcart Prize.
July 2024 | nonfiction
Even since my mother-in-law died last year and we had to clean out her cottage at Nottingham Village retirement center, I have been trying to get rid of things. Maybe so my kids won’t have to go through boxes of stuff neither wants, or maybe so it will be easier when my wife and I move back to California.
My goal: two plastic bins and a small wooden filing cabinet.
The filing cabinet was, as expected, mostly papers. The first folder held the adoption papers for my two Pekingese, Kung-pao and Mushu, and eleven-years’ worth of vaccination forms. Kept their adoption papers and the most recent rabies certificate, recycled the rest. Under the folder, lying alone on the bottom of the drawer, was a dog collar with a license and rabies tag from 2003. It was Eggroll’s, my first Pekingese, adopted when I was twenty and lived alone, and the only thing I brought home from the vet that last time. The keep pile.
A folder of old publications, roughly a hundred book reviews I wrote for Public News, Houston’s underground newspaper, long defunct. Maybe I shouldn’t get rid of things when I’m depressed about my career—the last time I threw away the diplomas for my B.A., M.A., and Ph.D. Trash, without even skimming them. The next folder contained twenty-year-old publication contracts for poems and my two critical books. I only save tax returns for three years, so I can’t see any need to retain these. Trash. The books and journals remain on my shelf.
After my daughter was born, my mother sent me a manila envelope of cards I had made when I was in grade school. In each, I drew a picture and wrote a poem—not a real poem, just sentences that rhymed. The drawings were atrocious as well. The world has enough bad poetry and art—trash—although I did keep a Christmas plate I made for my parents in first grade. I’ll let my kids laugh at my lack of artistic talent when they discard it.
A photograph of Larry. It was loose, alone in a folder and not in the envelope of Royal Ranger pictures with “Do Not Open” emblazoned on it. That should have been an easy call: fire. He’s smiling and doesn’t look like a sexual predator. I repressed those events for twenty years; my mother sent that envelope when I was trying to recover those blanks with my therapist. I’ve never mentioned any of this to my children. Maybe I’m trying to keep the worst parts of humanity a little further from them. The photo goes in the envelope with the warning, stashed in the back of the filing cabinet. What disposal is appropriate for such a record?
In one of the bins, my varsity letters from Pasadena Christian Junior High and Maranatha High School. I was mediocre at best, but managed to earn letters despite spending most of the games on the bench. My foray into athletics did not make me socially acceptable; everyone knew me as the paradigmatic math/science nerd. Trash. My high school Science and Math Award plaque from Bank of America and my pin from the California Math League return to the bin—my son, who will major in astrophysics, might appreciate those.
The final container represents my inheritance from my father’s parents. On top is my grandmother’s 1941 diploma from Dawson Springs High School in Kentucky—that meant more to her than any of mine did to me. I should frame it and put it on the wall in place of my PhD. A lot of pictures, candids from the Civil Air Patrol and the mission field, a couple of African newspapers mentioning my grandfather’s revival services. Beneath are faded portraits of unnamed ancestors, some dressed up and others in overalls. There’s no point in passing these on to my kids: they have no stories or dates. My family history is complicated enough with the relatives I can identify, religious colonialism and zealotry. As the oldest son of an oldest son of an oldest son, I am the unwitting repository of the Hardin family photo archive. I’ll cull this bin by half tomorrow.
One bag goes to the street as garbage and one to the Salvation Army. The dog collar stays on my desk—it can’t be buried in a folder.
Michael Hardin
Originally from Los Angeles, Michael Hardin lives in rural Pennsylvania. He is the author of a poetry chapbook, Born Again, from Moonstone Press (2019), has had poems and flash CNF published in Seneca Review, Wisconsin Review, North American Review, Quarterly West, Moon City Review, among others, and has been nominated for a Pushcart.
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