If Right Now Everything Stops

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.

Featured Author: Michelle Cacho-Negrete

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.

Fonly

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.

Clair du Lune

January 2021 | nonfiction

I regret that I am not going to be a student ever again. A real student I mean, with an assigned desk, a name tag, a government-issued pencil, composition books, wooden ruler.

Standing in line for my turn at the hand crank pencil sharpener mounted on the wall beside the globe we are not supposed to spin. Why not. Will we make the world too dizzy?

I regret that I am not going to be a real student again with hand-me-down, hard cover textbooks. All dog-eared and water-stained. Covers scuffed, ripped. Punctured by what, the dagger on the end of a silver compass? Names of the students before me listed inside the front cover where I add my name and erase it a hundred times because I can’t get my writing to look cool enough.

I regret that I won’t hear my name in attendance roles, that I can’t find my home room, my locker, the entrance to the gym, the cafeteria, the auditorium. Where is my bus, my lunch table, the idea that everything I did would lead me to some preordained and glorious destiny. To my unique place in this world, to my purpose in life. To what I will be when I grow up.

Here is what I regret the most. That day my best friend Lisa forgot how to make her fingers move inside the music room that reeked of motor oil. The only classroom in the basement. There were no windows. The door always closed to not disturb, whom exactly? Our voices walking to that classroom, past the boiler room and janitorial closets, like a cannon ball rolling around in huge metal tub, as if someone had melted the tuba to take a bath.

Lisa, her hands frozen in air over piano keys. A person in an oil painting, or rain clouds over a person in an oil painting. I, the page turner, seated beside her. We’d practiced, you see, at her house in her sunken living room with the white shag carpet and the baby blue velvet furniture.

I didn’t look at her. Her tears wetting the keys, the white ones, the black ones. I held my breathe.

The teacher folded herself at the waist like a playing card, brought drumsticks down hard and swift. Lisa’s fingers dipped and struck an awful music. She might have cried out.  I’m not sure. Two more hearty whacks, and we were back in our seats, Lisa’s hands red in her lap. Why wasn’t she rubbing them. She needed ice, but the door was closed.

Now someone was playing notes so easily, so clearly. I’ve heard them ever since. Why didn’t I get to my feet and shove that monster. Why didn’t I rise up, take my friend by the forearm and drag her out of that room.

Yes, yes, the obvious reasons. Blah. Blah. Blah. Teacher, Student. Adult, Child. Authority Figure.

I don’t buy it.

What are you going to be when you grow up.

A coward?

 

Virginia Watts

Virginia Watts is the author of poetry and stories found in Illuminations, The Florida Review, Burningword Literary Journal, The Moon City Review, Permafrost Magazine, Palooka Magazine, Streetlight Magazine, Sky Island Journal among others. Winner of the 2019 Florida Review Meek Award in nonfiction and nominee for Best of the Net Nonfiction 2019 and 2020, her poetry chapbooks “The Werewolves of Elk Creek” and “Shot Full of Holes” are upcoming for publication by The Moonstone Press. She has been nominated three times for a Pushcart Prize.

The Man inside the Effigy

January 2021 | nonfiction

Not until his funeral did I begin to realize how much of Dad’s life I had misjudged. I was too busy rebelling, even at age 37, which is how old I was when he died on his 61st birthday.

But I got a glimpse of the man I couldn’t see when several members of a Japanese-American family unexpectedly attended his funeral. We had no idea who they were or why they were there.

One of us Euro-American mourners approached them after the service, and we learned the Japanese-American family had owned a grocery store in our Portland, Oregon, neighborhood. But it had been more than 25 years since we had moved away from the area and 34 years since the incident that prompted their attendance at his funeral.

During World War II, they had been forced to relocate from Portland to an internment camp. (Imprisoning families of other ethnicities is a measure of our chronic barbarism.) After their release in 1945, Dad was the first to welcome them home. It seems a simple act, yet it had great meaning for them, and their gratitude lasted his lifetime.

This was the man the Japanese-American family saw, and it is to them that I owe the prompt for a larger view of his life.

 

Richard LeBlond

Richard LeBlond is a retired biologist living in North Carolina. His essays and photographs have appeared in many U.S. and international journals, including Montreal Review, Redux, Compose, Concis, Lowestoft Chronicle, Trampset, and Still Point Arts Quarterly. His work has been nominated for “Best American Travel Writing” and “Best of the Net.”

Twelve Strips of Bacon

January 2021 | nonfiction

When I was eight, a decision was made to send me on a train trip with my grandmother to visit “Mama Lizzie” my great-grandmother, who lived in Pine Bluff, Arkansas. She had visited up north, but this would be my first time down south. Grandma was perpetually good natured and laughed easily. And Mama Lizzie’s soft smiling eyes turned up at the corners whenever she spoke to me. She was the kindest, most generous, most loving, nonjudgmental person I’ve ever known. I had zero reservations about venturing on this vacation.

Shortly after the train got going, Grandma’s fried chicken and pound cake appeared. (Decades later, that remains one of my favorite comfort food combinations.) Napkins were arranged into placemats for our laps. Then we carefully removed the aluminum foil and wax paper from the fragrantly seasoned chicken and heavy moist cake. I was just starting to read Huckleberry Finn and as the train traversed the Mississippi River I looked out at the muddy, brown-green, meandering water highway, with willow trees hanging heavy over the river banks, convinced that at any moment Huck would appear on his raft just around the bend.

Arriving in Pine Bluff, it was obvious our impending visit had been widely publicized. Mama Lizzie was revered and a number of unrelated people had come with her to meet the train. Secretly loving all the attention, something told me this adulation was unlikely to follow me back home where my mother’s mission was making sure I didn’t get too full of myself.

And just when I thought it couldn’t get any better, it was as if the whole universe of unconditional love came spiraling down around me.

The first morning in my great-grandmother’s house, it was just me and her and Grandma. Grandma and I were sitting at the kitchen table when Mama Lizzie, standing at her stove, turned to me and asked “How many strips of bacon do you want, Honey?”

Now I don’t know how my mother’s imprinting failed at that instant, because she was a strong presence in my psyche no matter how near or far she was—but I didn’t skip a beat before replying “twelve.” Neither of my foremothers blinked an eye. And at every morning’s breakfast thereafter, for the whole two weeks of my stay, a plate was set before me heaped with twelve strips of thick country bacon, each strip bracketed by big curls of fat.

Not even Houdini could match the magic of two generations of matriarchs so intent on making a beloved heir happy.

What’s more, on our return home, when my mother complained about my weight gain, Grandma never said a word.

 

Renee Ozburn

Renée Ozburn left a long legal career in Michigan to devote her time to creative writing. In addition to her flash nonfiction piece, Twelve Strips of Bacon, she recently completed a novel. Her essay, A Redbone’s Reality, won the 2019 Los Angeles Review’s Creative Nonfiction Literary Award. losangelesreview.org She has been a fellow of the Paris American Academy’s Creative Writing Program. As her blog To Paris and Beyond portrays, as often as possible, she spends time in various venues around France and the US connecting with other writers.