October 2019 | nonfiction
I wore my secondhand Ann Taylor dress for the occasion, a clean navy A-line with a futuristic geometric collar. That morning, underneath a colorful illustration of Dolly Parton, my cat inhaled food from his bowl and I didn’t think of you then because I was trying to get out the door.
You weren’t on my mind during my commute or when I was busy crunching numbers for my new boss. You weren’t there when I walked from 5th Avenue to Madison on my break, forgoing all the overpriced lunch places and instead deciding to enter a bank. When I shook the hand of a banker and told her I was there to open my first business account, you weren’t around. But when I spotted the “private client” sign on her desk, that’s when you entered my head.
You in your office with that unreasonably large computer screen and that framed letter J Edgar Hoover wrote to your mom’s dad. Hoover died almost fifteen years before you were a single cell ready to divide but even before you had a pulse, you had contacts.
You in your daily uniform of custom Brooks Brother suit, polished wingtip shoes, and a haircut that ages you by decades. You’re a young move maker motivated by a corporate spirit. While people your age are running companies that celebrate jeans, you prefer your female employees teetering in heels.
You come from people who know people so pictures of you shaking impressive hands are your favorite kind of art. The office’s only décor is framed pictures of you wearing the same smile and holding the same grip. There you are with the leader who is known for sexual assault and that other leader who filled that mass grave and there is that pin loving secretary of state. It’s been a few years since I’ve seen your office but I’m sure there are new frames of you shaking an Oscar-winning lady, a certain Vice President, and that daughter who grew up in the Senate.
As my smiling banker asked me questions, I remembered how on my last day you could barely shake my hand. At the elevator you looked like a kid playing grown-up, trying to look me in the eyes as you offered to help me in the future, considering yourself extraordinarily generous for giving me one week’s pay for severance.
As I transferred most of my small savings into my business account, I thought how luxurious it must have been for you to start a company that only presented a risk to your reputation. As my banker asked me to sign some papers I thought of your family Rolodex, Union Club membership, personal trainer wake up calls, and the thrill of starting my own business began to feel a lot like regret. My plans started to cracked, my mission and vision blurred, and I was about to tell my banker to stop when I really remembered.
I have that letter you signed, the one you asked me to help you print. The letter that says your company didn’t need me anymore because after two years of running matters of compliance, I was suddenly too qualified. I remembered that out of all the smart people you hired to hold you up, I was the only one to have her position dissolved. And that’s when you left my head and I went on with my business.
Angela Santillo
Angela Santillo is a playwright based in New York City. Her plays have been produced and developed in New York, San Francisco, and Chicago. Her first nonfiction story, “Everything I Could Dump Into a Prologue” was published by Exposition Review and has been nominated for a 2020 Pushcart Prize. She is producer and host of the podcast And Then Suddenly. She has her BA in English and Theater from Saint Mary’s College of California and an MFA in Theater from Sarah Lawrence College. www.angelasantillo.com
October 2019 | nonfiction
I was to be sedated due to overwhelming anxiety and a horrific gag reflex. A pill, an injection into my right arm, and inhaled gas. Seemed like a lot for a skinny eleven-year-old, yet I gulped the gas in fear. The dentist tilted the chair until I was lying flat. Within minutes, I was asleep. Slumbering in a soporific dream. But though asleep, I was able to observe, kind of like when you suddenly die and you’re floating toward the white light but can see everything happening to your body as the doctor tries to restart your heart. It was that vivid and clear. Like sitting in the front row of a movie theater. Anyway, I could hear the dentist telling me everything would be fine, to relax, that he was going to remove those “dirty little cavities.” I heard the click of the door lock. He turned on a radio, loud. Then, unexpectedly, he unbuttoned my trousers and pulled them to my knees. Then my underwear. He placed a white towel on my lap and a wet washcloth on his instrument table. He touched my penis, barehanded. I felt warm and flushed, my heart slapping hard in my chest. He moved his fingers faster and faster. Then I felt a sudden shiver of my body, almost like a seizure, but a good seizure, then pure exhaustion.
I awoke to the sound of Frank Sinatra, or maybe it was Dean Martin, I don’t remember. The dentist snorted a laugh and handed me a mirror to look at my teeth. Two gray fillings sat planted in the back. He told me I was good to go, but to brush daily, and see him in six months. My mouth was still numb, but I tried to thank him: Thankf youff. He winked. I slid from the chair, stumbled a bit, and opened the door to the foyer where my grandmother waited. Another young boy, seated with his mother, fidgeted nervously.
As we drove home, I noticed a damp spot on my pants, near the bottom of my zipper. I turned toward the car window so my grandmother couldn’t see and touched it with my finger. It was a texture I recognized from the times I secreted a Playboy to the bathroom and locked the door. I rolled the window down and rested my chin. The storefronts passed and the wind tousled my hair.
##
I’ve never been able to love. I’ve tried but failed, miserably. Over and over. I’ve struggled to understand why, scouring the years of my life for an answer, yet finding none. However, I’ve noticed that when love begins to emerge from the solace of aloneness, I recoil, the festering memory of the dentist’s chair rising like shards of glass tumbling in a broken heart. It’s a gaping wound that can’t be stitched. So now, in the closing years of life, I’ve resigned that finding love is at hopeless end, and my remaining days a fated time of lonely solitude.
Paul Rousseau
Semi-retired physician and writer, published in medical journals and a smattering of literary journals, including The Healing Muse, Blood and Thunder, Intima. A Journal of Narrative Medicine, Months To Years, Cleaning up Glitter, Prometheus Dreaming, Hektoen, Hospital Drive, JAMA, Annals of Internal Medicine, Canadian Medical Association Journal, Tendon, and others. Currently working on a collection of essays. Lives in Charleston, SC, longs to return to the west. Lover of dogs.
October 2019 | nonfiction
It’s noon at the assisted living. My father-in-law is splayed on the couch. It’s been months since Gerry remembered how to turn on the television. Instead he sits there staring into space. My husband Michael takes a long hard look. Then in a fake peppy voice, he throws out an invitation.
Heh, Pops! It’s lunchtime! Let’s go out to lunch!
Gerry glances up. His face is blank, the words still computing. So Michael speaks louder as if his father were deaf. I’m hungry! You hungry? Is anybody hungry?
But hearing isn’t the issue. Gerry looks down at his legs as if they were strangers. He has forgotten how to get up from the couch, a simple series of movements we take for granted. I read the panic in his eyes as they dart from his feet to the floor and the floor to his feet. So gently, I bring his long legs to the edge of the sofa. Then I wrap my arm around his shoulders. There you go Dad, I say. Now we’re getting up.
Our outing continues along these lines. Gerry silently asks for help while his son sits there just as helplessly. My father-in-law gazes at the menu before him like it looks vaguely familiar. What do you want to eat, Dad? asks Michael. Once again, Gerry has that deer-in-the-headlights look. What do you want to eat? Michael says again.
I turn to Gerry and hold his hand to make sure he looks at me. Then I run through the list of his favorite foods. Cue him. Grilled cheese today, Dad? How about a tuna sandwich or pastrami?
When the French toast comes, he starts eating with his fingers. Michael by this time is crunched up in a ball in the corner of our booth counting the minutes until our visit ends. He is averting his eyes. I take my utensils and cut Gerry’s food into bite-sized pieces. He quickly grabs his fork and hungrily gobbles down his meal, compliant as a child.
Finally, it’s time to drop Gerry off. Then Michael looks at me and says, I don’t know how you do it. The way you figure him out.
Every week we have the identical talk, and every week my reply is the same. It’s just ESP, I say. I just guess what he wants and sometimes I’m lucky.
Then as sure as the sun sets, the moment we get home Michael heads to bed. His limbs are limp, his shoulders slumped. He takes a long nap, exhausted. And when he finally emerges, the silence will be thick enough to taste. No words will be spoken until the next Saturday, when armed with our jackets and our sweaters, we head to the assisted living once more.
Marlene Olin
Marlene Olin was born in Brooklyn, raised in Miami, and educated at the University of Michigan. Her short stories have been featured or are forthcoming in publications such as The Massachusetts Review, Arts and Letters, Catapult, and The American Literary Review. She is the winner of the 2015 Rick DeMarinis Short Fiction Award, the 2018 So To Speak Fiction Prize, and a nominee for both the Pushcart and the Best of the Net prizes.
October 2019 | nonfiction
On the porch of the house on Thelma Street, you hold my hand and your wife holds my other. She’s my mom but what matters is that she’s your wife, who will leave you in a year and take me with her.
In this one, soon after, more hands. You wear a suit (your sister’s funeral) and smile helplessly. As does your wife and, in the middle, me. Binding us together for now.
Your father takes me into the dark backyard, points to a star and says, “That’s your aunt Shirley, she’s winking at you. She loved you so much.” This goes on for years. I hear in Gramps’ creaky voice how he misses a woman I don’t remember, the one – you will tell me – that he wishes you had died instead of.
Later, in this one: you and Gramps and me on the sofa. Shoulder to shoulder, some awkward holiday. Secrets pump through us, a closed circuit. I hear him again: “She loved you so much,” and in my head I bend the phrase so that he’s talking to you, Dad, about your wife, and with the same small trick – like turning over a card – I can make him say, “I loved you, too,” but I can’t make you believe it.
Randy Osborne
Randy Osborne’s writing is listed in the Notables section of Best American Essays for 2015, 2016, and 2018. His work has been published in four print anthologies and nominated three times for the Pushcart Prize, as well as Best of the Net. It has appeared in Salon, The Rumpus, Full Grown People, The Lascaux Review, Flyleaf Journal, 3:AM Magazine, Empty Mirror, Fiction Attic, Identity Theory, 3Elements Review, Bodega, SLAB, Lumina Journal, Loose Change, SunStruck, Green Mountains Review, 34th Parallel, Spry Literary Journal, Scene Missing, Thread, and other small magazines, as well as the Chicago Tribune, Atlanta Journal Constitution, San Francisco Bay Guardian, and St. Louis Post-Dispatch. He lives in Atlanta, where he recently finished a book-length collection of essays.
July 2019 | nonfiction
Six knives hang above my butcher’s block but the bread knife is my favorite. I love its heft and the way the black handle marries my hand. Wrist stiff, I saw a two-foot long ciabatta loaf into thick slices to bag and freeze. Back and forth, enjoying the rhythm and the crackle as serrated teeth shatter the bread’s exoskeleton. Watching tiny shards of crust tumble to the scrubbed pine board. The sweet relief when the blade sinks into the dough’s soft meat. The last cut that scars the wood when the slices separate.
Jack rolls orange sleeves over firm biceps. He’s missing a lower molar. “I’m a murderer,” he says after my prison writing workshop, not in a way that might intimidate, but more to provide an explanation.
“Oh, really?” I don’t know what else to say.
He’s done nineteen years locked down for most of each day. But that morning, he’d been pounding armored Arizona dirt with a pick-axe in the garden, knee-deep in lantanas that he’d coaxed to flower red and purple.
“Yes, but that wasn’t why I got thirty-two years. The judge didn’t like that I cut the body into eight pieces.”
I like Jack. He fishes for life. Although he lives in a place where men hoard the scent of weakness to hone into shanks, his smile radiates possibility. Every few weeks, he rips little pieces from the worst list of his life and records them on paper ruled with blue lines as faint as scars.
“The body was dead!” he says. “Why did the judge think that was worse than murder?”
In the windowless corridor where even shadows have shadows, sweat slicks our skins in the sweltering heat. He carries my clear plastic tub of books.
We reach the courtyard and the sun’s glare. Troubled that I don’t know the answer to his question, I tell him to revise his poem. Writers have to examine their motives.
After I’m waved through the gate, Jack spreads his legs. A guard bends low to probe Jack’s groin, he slides two hands down each long thigh as though smearing ointment. I don’t hear the joke Jack shares while fingers explore his armpits but I’ve heard his jokes before. They’re silly. Fit for the Sunday Times comic page.
Outside the final gate, the desert is parched to gristle. Mesquite leaves rustle like old fish scales. It feels good to exit that last prison gate and breathe untainted air. But I’m not cleansed. Jack’s story is stuck beneath my tongue. I hope the murder was quick. I wonder where the eight cuts fell, I wonder whether they were chosen to facilitate stackable lengths.
My kitchen knives are old and blunt. They need replacing. When I slice a ripe tomato, the soft flesh bulges before it surrenders to the knife. Before the skin splits to reveal soft flesh, the color of gums. Before the sacs of tiny seeds rupture and squirt thin juice to moisten the front of my shirt.
Gillian Haines
Gillian Haines is an Australian who lives beside Sonoran saguaros and rufous hummingbirds. She has volunteered in Tucson’s federal and state prisons for eleven years because inmates only know the desert’s thirst. Her work has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize. Her narrative nonfiction is published in various magazines including The Santa Clara Review, Bridge Eight, Biostories, The Cherry Tree, and the Tishman Review.
July 2019 | nonfiction
A teenage boy has never worked a day in his life. He drives a brand new Mercedes to school each day. The parking lot at school is full of shiny new cars, driven by children who have never known a day of hunger and can choose not to work. Ever.
BMW told us if you buy one of their cars, you can end hunger. Really. It was in their commercials. “Drive to end hunger.”
More than half the population of the greatest country on earth is made up of the impoverished, the poor and low-income citizens. The percentage is about the same as Indonesia.
For a hundred dollars and up – way up – you can go to an NFL game, where they dress the coaches and staff in military garb and denigrate anyone who dares to protest injustice.
There are about 645,000 homeless people in America The Beautiful.
Jeff Bezos rakes in one hundred ninety-one thousand dollars per minute. His philanthropy is an affront to altruism and a pittance of his assets worth one hundred sixty-three billion dollars. He’s not alone.
Grocers in the Land of the Free throw away tons of perfectly good meats and vegetables every day. The waste is ten percent of all the food we produce. When I asked them why they didn’t give it to food banks, they said they could be sued. Many of those grocers sit on the boards of directors of food banks.
For $440 per month, you can buy individual health insurance through the ACA. Of the developed nations, the Greatest Country On Earth is one of the few without universal healthcare.
Our military budget for 2019 is 716 billion dollars. That’s more than the entire GDP of 177 of the 195 countries on earth. Bombs and bullets, murder and mayhem drive our economic engine.
We spend those billions of dollars in part by bombing schools, hospitals and mosques, murdering tens of thousands of men, women and children, in hopes there is a terrorist in their midst. Then we bomb the funerals. Don’t be ridiculous. We’re not terrorists.
With our approval and assistance, the Saudis have murdered hundreds of thousands of Yemenis, including the starvation of eighty-five thousand children. We’re focused on the murder of one Saudi journalist.
In 1990, the US ranked sixth in the world in healthcare and education. We’re 27th overall now, and 38th in math. We’re way behind Cuba, if anyone’s counting.
With 2.3 million prisoners, the United States has the highest incarceration rate in the world. Wave the flag. We’re number one.
Our prisoner tally boasts of 14,000 unaccompanied immigrant children. Our Department of Health and Human Services says we’re keeping them safe from harm.
We’re obsessed with Russian meddling in our 2016 elections. Like this was their first experiment. We don’t just interfere with elections around the world. We overthrow governments.
We elected a racist, xenophobic, homophobic, narcissistic, incompetent megalomaniac to the office of President of the United States.
That, my fellow Americans, is a small sample of what makes us great.
All is well…all is well. We’re the best there ever was.
William Lanford
Outdoor Writer and Photographer, Novelist and Story-teller. Fisherman, Outdoor addict. Official Oldfart. Student of sunsets, campfires and dawns. Companion of dogs. Highly appreciative of fine food and drink. Fond of napping. Comforted by silence.
