July 2020 | nonfiction
The car idled in the middle of the street. With the glint of white sky reflecting on the windshield, I could not see a driver. Detour or continue? How suspicious I’d become. Murder, drugs, kidnapping. So much mayhem in my town at the edge of the Alaskan wilderness. I was headed to the woods to forget all that, and more.
I edged to the side of the road and kept going. Closer, level with the driver’s side, I peered into the window. A young man sat at the wheel, a boy really. Dark hair, a hockey emblem on his jacket, maybe on his way home from the local high school. He faced away from me, studying something on the opposite side of the street. I followed his gaze to a weathered wooden fence a few paces away. There, atop a post, a dark shape, foreign yet familiar. My brain struggled to explain what my eyes beheld.
The boy opened his window and leaned toward me. His skin was smooth and clear.
“Hasn’t moved,” he whispered. “At first I thought it was a juvenile bald, but maybe it’s a golden.”
A boy who stops to parse eagles.
Up close, the size and power of the bird stunned and unsettled me. Standing on the ground, it would surely reach my waist. Its beak curved sharply into a deadly tip that could rip my flesh just as easily as a hare’s. It seemed indifferent to us, focused on whatever lie inside the bounds of the fence. Cat? Chickens? Small dog?
A slight breeze rippled the rich brown feathers along its back, revealing the paler juvenile tones beneath. Surely a bald eagle, since we were far from the mountainous haunts of the golden. Last summer while driving to town I spied the unmistakable white head of an adult bald eagle perched on a power pole above the marsh. Maybe this was an offspring, here in late November when it should have moved south. With winters turned so mild these past few years, if food was plentiful in a neighborhood with easy prey, why leave?
“I’ve never been this close,” he said, eyes wide.
No one passed. For minutes we shared the street. The boy, the bird, the jaded woman.
At last, the eagle raised its head and glanced back at us as if to say, “What are you doing here?” Silently, it spread its magnificent wings and lifted off.
The boy and I stretched our necks to watch it soar over the neighborhood.
“Wow,” he said.
He put the car in gear and inched forward.
Yes. Wow.
“Have a great day.” he said finally.
As he pulled away I waved and followed the eagle into the forest.
Susan Pope
Susan Pope’s work has appeared in Pilgrimage, Under the Sun, The Southeast Review Online, Cirque: A Literary Journal of the Pacific Rim, Hippocampus, Under the Gum Tree, Burrow Press Review, BioStories, and Writers’ Workshop Review, among others. Her writing reflects intimate connections to home and family in Alaska as well as a restless exploration of faraway places. Her essay entitled, “Canyon,” which appeared in Bluestem, was nominated for a Pushcart Prize in 2012.
July 2020 | fiction
It had happened before.
The first time, she was ten. It was an accident, riding her bike. She didn’t remember the hurt of it, not
even in dreams. Only the sticky cream
of blood on her chest. The limbo aftermath of being road-killed. The sound of a child, hospital bound,
crying in an endless, sputtering, roar.
God, it was
strange. The second time, at twenty, she meant to do it. It was easy enough with a handful of pills and a
locked bathroom door.
The chemicals diffused in her arteries like incense. A ceremony. At peace.
Until consequence shattered it all.
She awoke to the whispering. The stares. No one trusted her unguarded, alone. But couldn’t they see
the danger was over? She’d come back, like a cat with nine lives. Self-vaccinated, for another
decade. Brick by brick, word by word
by dinner and diaper and bridal concern,
she’d built herself back. But this self she had built–she wanted a new one. Not this wilted age, white
flower turned brown at the edge.
Her birthday was in June. This third time was due soon.
And she looked forward to it.
Samantha Pilecki
Samantha Pilecki’s work has appeared in Five 2 One, Kansas City Voices, New Lit Salon Press, Timberline Review (forthcoming), Yemassee, and other publications. She’s the winner of the Haunted Waters Press short story competition, the Writing District’s monthly contest, and was a finalist in both the New Millennium Writings Contest and the Writer’s Digest short story contest.
July 2020 | fiction
After he closes the doors and tells the driver “Okay,” the man asks Curtis, “What brings us out here this time?” He’s flipping through papers on a clipboard. “Has anything changed with your wife since…?” He’s tracing his finger down a list. Curtis’ face is already buried in the sports page. He lowers the paper and looks at the man and then back at the sports page.
I tell the man it’s the lump between my shoulder blades.
I’d show him, but I can’t even turn over in here. Not the way they have me strapped down. Not with all this equipment and Curtis and the man crammed back here, too.
I say I can’t describe the lump other than it’s a lump because I can’t see it. I could never turn the right way in the mirror in the bathroom because I can hardly turn around in there. Curtis has looked and probed but always says it’s nothing. “No thing,” he says.
I can see the silhouette of his head nodding behind the sports page.
I tell the man Curtis says it’s nothing, but I know it’s there. I have dreams about it. It has a pulse. It’s growing. Why wouldn’t it? It gets watered a few times a week. If I lie on my back at night I can feel it against the mattress. Hot. Itchy. If I go to sleep like that I dream about the lump. I hate calling it that. Lump. A generic term for something that could be festering a sac of pus that could burst subdermally and poison my system. I’ve told Curtis this. How many times? Ask him. He doesn’t deal with it. But my dreams. Almost always the lump has grown out of control overnight except I know in my mind in my dream that it hasn’t. It has been growing all along but I had hidden it under an Ace bandage or a bulky sweater or sweatshirt. “Don’t touch me, Curtis,” I’d said for days in my memory in my dreams. Which I’d never say to Curtis because I love him going on eighteen years.
Curtis rustles his paper, but he doesn’t respond.
I say in my dream I’m denying to myself and the world that the mass is a thing that has to be dealt with because it’s like I’m barely a thing if I am even a thing to be dealt with and then I’m growing something off me that requires a greater degree of dealing with, like here’s a sequel to me and everybody shows more interest in it than they do in me.
The man lights up a cigarette. He pats down his shiny pompadour and adjusts the rings on his fingers. He leans in to me. I feel his hand between my shoulder blades. He says, “Yeah. We need to cut that bad boy outta there.” His cigarette bounces up and down between his lips with each word. “You got insurance?”
I tell him no.
“It’s gonna cost you. And that bad boy is huge. Or keep it. Hell, maybe it’ll shrink.”
Curtis looks at the man over his paper and says, “Don’t. For chrissake, what’s wrong with you people?”
I tell Curtis this is what you get when you don’t have insurance. I keep telling you. This is what you get when you don’t deal with things.
Curtis asks the man for a cigarette. Now they’re both smoking. I’m going to choke to death back here. Curtis asks, “Can’t you give her the orange pills?”
The man says, “We can’t do shit until she’s admitted.”
I shoot Curtis my dirtiest look. He shrinks down behind his paper. I’m not really mad because at least we’re back to dealing with things for right now.
Jeff Burd
Jeff Burd spends a lot of time writing and thinking about writing, and worrying about not writing and thinking about writing. He graduated the Northwestern University writing program and works as a Reading Specialist at Zion-Benton Township High School in Zion, IL.
