July 2021 | nonfiction
Tucked under a pile of wool sweaters, under the wedding dress that I didn’t let you help me pick out, under the little white sailor outfit that I bought on Etsy for your grandson’s baptism that you missed because you were dead, deep in a corner of the cedar chest that grandma wanted me to have even though what I really wanted was her piano, are your ashes (some of them anyway) in a black velvet bag.
That you wanted to be burned, instead of locked in a box to not-rot under the dirt, was the only thing we knew for certain. We split you up between the three of us, each with our portion, and made our own plans. I used to tell myself that I would scatter your ashes from the roadside overlook where dad took your picture on the way to our wedding, but I kept waiting for the right moment: when I got pregnant, when I had the baby, when he was old enough to come with me. When. I want to stop grieving you.
But there you are, buried in the dark at the bottom of your own mother’s cedar chest, trapped in the smallest room of my house, where dad sleeps when he comes to visit.
Dad told me he can’t find his bag, his share of your burned up bones and flesh. Maybe you got yourself lost? Perhaps I’ll get you out, tell him I found you, and set that part of you (of us) free.
Desi Allevato
Desi Allevato lives with her husband in central Virginia, where they are raising one child, two cats, and a hundred tree saplings in a suburban backyard. She has a brain tumor and an unfinished dissertation about Russian history. Her recent work is published in Longridge Review and mac(ro)mic. Follow her on Twitter, @desirosie.
April 2021 | nonfiction
My husband climbs the stairs, slow and defeated. His eyes brim with tears threatening to spill onto the kitchen floor. “What is it?” I ask, even though I know. This is not the weight of work or the isolation of this pandemic. This is about our first baby girl. He breathes into my embrace, and I feel warm salty droplets seep into my sweater.
His exhaustion has compounded these past six months. Tentative and still holding him, I articulate what we both know, “I think this is depression, Ryan.” He nods. His shoulders tremble. “I have been where you are.” Once there, the mind fogs over as if having been injected with a paralyzing venom. “You are not in this alone,” I whisper, like he has whispered to me so many times before.
This is his season. We have exchanged places. I now carry faith and hope through our desert. “We have three good and beautiful children,” I tell him. Our thirteen-year-old will make it through to el otro lado. One day this barbed wire fence between him and her will be dismantled and tossed onto a heap of remembrance.
Julie Sonnek
Julie Sonnek is a writer and language teacher living in Minneapolis, Minnesota with her husband and three children. She writes creative non-fiction and poetry about family, place, and faith. She writes primarily in English, with sprinklings of Spanish. Her writing has appeared in Literary Mama. She has self-published a book of poetry and photography available through Blurb.com titled: Una Vista Brillante: Reflections of Colombia.
April 2021 | nonfiction
She hoped the couple beside them in the park wasn’t listening to their fight. They, the other couple, were so obviously into each other and so obviously on a first date. They were speaking English, so there was a decent chance they didn’t understand German—so many people don’t in Berlin. They used to be like them—a couple with nothing on the record but hope. This is what they were adding to their record today: A fight, filled with disproportionate rage given the subject matter—surfing.
“Have you ever noticed how many couples you see arguing in the park on sunny days?” She is directing this question towards the man she is on a second date with on her second day in Berlin. Really, it’s a first-and-a-half date. They’d met the previous evening, not even twenty-four hours ago. She’d forgotten what it was like to feel this kind of hope. It surprised her. She no longer went into dates expecting to find a spark—the kind that left you falling asleep imagining what it’d be like to have someone around again. Someone really around, not just as an occasional guest appearance in your life. She’d spent that morning, her first morning in the city, walking around aimlessly, wondering what he’d say about everything she was seeing. He was the only person she knew in Berlin.
When she asked him about the couple’s argument, he used it as an excuse to lean closer to her and translate. “It’s about surfing and whether the best waves are more dependent on the phase of the moon or the time of year.” Then he kissed her.
Laney Lenox
Laney Lenox is a PhD candidate at Ulster University’s School of Applied Policy and Social Sciences. Her research examines the role of archives documenting incarceration in societies affected by conflict. She conducted fieldwork in Berlin, Germany, working with memorial and archival spaces as well as interviewing former political prisoners incarcerated in the GDR. Her work falls broadly into critical theory with an anthropological approach to fieldwork. She’s particularly interested in viewing linear time as a social construct and in understanding how this relates to power structures when discussing ‘dealing with the past’ and democratization processes in conflict-affected sites.
April 2021 | nonfiction, Pushcart nominee
If right now everything stops, and there is no longer re- but only de- (decay),
Autolysis: self-devouring. Your cells deplete themselves from the inside out. Within seventy-two hours, your swollen heart desists. Orange peels decompose six months later. Cotton socks decamp within a year. Wool sweaters and milk cartons depart in five. (Every carton of milk you drank in elementary school is already gone without a trace, and isn’t that surprising?) Twenty-five years later, your leather shoes defect. Tin cans and tissue (the kind which makes you soft to hold) take fifty to degenerate. Bones and batteries, a hundred years defiant.
Plastic, that twentieth-century debutant, carries on through the 2500s. Only the sun will touch it, photodegrade those polymers into microscopic morsels. Half a millennium to demolish the great graveyards of Dasani, Fiji, Pellegrino, Aquafina, Poland Spring, oh, La Vie. Half a millennium despoiled by every diaper you ever shat. And the ocean breaks down its microplastic detritus last.
Your teeth do not decay for tens of thousands of years. That is not as long as it takes to depose the skyscrapers, debris fields crumbling down to quartz for the wind or the water to disperse. Anthropic fossils press patterns into stone: earth’s interior design. There are mosquitoes deposited in resin, resins deposited in rock, rocks deposited in water. Pirates’ gold fillings do not depreciate, and neither do the diamonds of the brides. Glass bottles, those stubborn webs of silicon, take a million years to deteriorate to sand.
Then finally it is the deathless age of Styrofoam. A quiet planet blanketed with desiccated snow.
And a plaque on the moon still bears dear Richard Nixon’s name.
Hannah Story Brown
Hannah Story Brown is a writer and dramaturge based in New York, dreaming about green cities. She graduated magna cum laude from Columbia University in 2019, and her work has been published in The Seattle Times, the Columbia Journal of Literary Criticism, and the Columbia Daily Spectator.
April 2021 | Best of Net nominee, nonfiction
Grace in Four Parts
I
My mother enrolled me in a tap-dance class when I was five; I hated it. The little outfits hung awkwardly on me, the sequins always falling off. The shoes hurt my feet. My steps were uncoordinated and always three beats behind everyone else’s. I couldn’t twirl without stumbling. Everyone else got that lovely tap sound as they danced across the floor. “She’s very pretty with those blonde curls,” the teacher told my mother. “But she has no grace.”
II
Grace was my only friend in sixth grade. I was hers. We sat alone at our lunch table. We laughed together. If one of us had money we bought a candy bar to share. We exchanged books. One day I invited her home after school. My mother bought cookies. Her parents didn’t want her to go, but she came anyway. We were happy walking home as I told her about my games and chemistry set, but when we got to our apartment my mother sent Grace home. I didn’t understand. My mother said, “I’m sure she is a lovely girl, but she’s colored. She belongs with her own kind.” “She is my kind: we read the same books, laugh at the same things, like the same cookies,” I insisted, but my mother walked away.. Grace’s mother told her that she couldn’t have anything to do with me. The rest of the year I sat alone at lunch; no Grace.
III
My grace period for paying my student loan was up. The credit mafia made threatening calls, sent threatening letters, even knocked at my door. “But I pay everything I can at the end of the month. I’m supporting two kids,” I told the man on the phone. “Sometimes I give you ten dollars, sometimes twenty-five but I always pay” The man scoffed; “Your money problems aren’t ours.” A friend who was a lawyer worked out a credit plan with them, but I was broke halfway through every month and lost any line of credit for seven years.
“Grace period is over,” they repeated to my lawyer. “No grace left.”
IV
“Forgiveness is an act of grace,” My husband told me when he broke my jaw after a disagreement about nothing important, something I can’t even remember. “Just let it go. I’ll never do it again,” he insisted. Then he repeated, “Forgiveness is an act of grace.”
I laughed and told him, “Everyone knows I have no grace.”
Michelle Cacho-Negrete
Michelle Cacho-Negrete is a retired social worker who lives in Portland Maine. She is the author of Stealing: Life in America. She has 80+ publications, 4 of which are among the most notable, 5 in anthologies, 1 won Best of The Net and another won the Hope Award.
April 2021 | nonfiction
—which shouldn’t need translation—this button (faded, pale green with white lettering) dates back to the ‘80s, when I was a student at San Diego State University, and Aesop’s Tables, in the corner of a strip mall just off campus, was where an assortment of left-wing literati and hangers-on gathered over glasses of Retsina and plates of hummus, pita, and olives until the restaurant got booted to make way for new construction, and the owners had these buttons made up so we could commiserate and rail at social injustice.
—the seminar leader passed out small gray buttons with white lettering, all caps, no apostrophe, to stress the futility of wishful thinking in lieu of action or acceptance—“
fonly I’d married Bert instead of Bart,
fonly I’d started saving when I was 20—her topic was fundraising (
fonly someone would donate a million dollars) and she also handed out toe tags to remind people to look alive, and though I don’t remember anything she said, the button is a talisman.
—I don’t recall the origin of this one with the universal no (non/nyet/nein) symbol, a circle with a diagonal red line through it, and though I’m not inclined toward whining and wailing, this is one of just three buttons I’ve kept out of hundreds—a collection from decades of progressive activism: Bread Not Roses, Draft beer not boys, This is what a feminist looks like, Voice for Choice, U.S. Out of Nicaragua, Jane Wyman was Right—and now I find a timeless thread running through these residual relics: shit happens, we can’t wish it away, and there’s no use grumbling.
Alice Lowe
Alice Lowe is proud to have her third published piece in Burningword. Her flash prose has also appeared this past year in Hobart, JMWW, Door Is a Jar, Sleet, Anti-Heroin Chic, and Headlight Review. She’s had citations in Best American Essays and nominations for Pushcart Prizes and Best of the Net. Alice writes about life and literature, food and family in San Diego, California and at www.aliceloweblogs.wordpress.com.
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