July 2021 | nonfiction
We’re cousins. Six decades of weddings, graduations, and hospital bedsides are tucked under our belts. With enough time, a language develops. A sort of Morse code. A drumbeat of inference and innuendo punctuated by sighs.
“So what’s new?” I say.
Then holding the phone away from my ear, I prepare myself. My cousin talks in a shout. No matter where I find her– whether it’s a plane or a doctor’s office or an elevator– her voice booms.
“You shouldn’t know. Five trips to the bathroom just this morning. Today I’m like a sieve.”
No one does torment better.
“How’s by you?” she throws out.
When she asks how I’m doing, I’m already sucked into the cadence of calamity.
“Not so good,” I reply. “My knee…it could be better.”
We’re getting into a rhythm now. She doesn’t miss a beat.
“You’ve got a bad knee,” she answers. “I’ve got a bad back and a neck that’s killing me.”
It’s like a bizarre poker game where whoever’s sickest has the winning hand. An Olympics of suffering. My heartache trumps yours.
The reverse occurs when we speak about our children. No lie is too small. Like an archeological dig, the essence stays underneath. No matter how far we probe, there’s another layer buried.
“How’s Howie?” I ask.
Her son is thirty-five years old and still on the dole. He ping-pongs from one financial pipe dream to another.
“A great opportunity fell in his lap. The kind that makes millions.”
“Yeah?”
“You know from Kickstarter?” she says. ” Everybody wants in.”
“And Susie? Is Susie still with the boyfriend?”
Our children Facebook. This boyfriend will never commit in a million years.
“So devoted. Such a hard worker. He’s saving for a really big ring.”
She changes the subject quickly and tosses the glove to me. “Your son?”
“A star, ” I say. The rotten kid hasn’t called me in a week. “One promotion after another.”
I’m not exaggerating here. My son went to Ivy League schools and works at a bank. Her kids work at the family plumbing supply. The news is like a dagger in her heart.
“So you’ve got a bad knee,” she says. In the background, I hear a faucet running. She’s taking her sweet time with this one. She’s probably zipping her pants.
“You know what you do for a bad knee?” she asks.
I’m fumbling for an answer when I hear the toilet flush. “For a bad knee,” she shouts over the flush, “you need to lose some weight.”
It’s my turn. Wherever she is, my cousin’s patient. The water must be circling now. She watches and she waits.
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, PANK, Catapult, and The Baltimore Review. She is the winner of the 2015 Rick DeMarinis Short Fiction Award, the 2018 So To Speak Fiction Prize, and a nominee twice for both the Pushcart and the Best of the Net prizes.
July 2021 | nonfiction
For Martha
I stand on the shore on a Sunday in July while dark birds hover above, and I squint into the early sun that barely peeks through the mist. Martha and I drove several hours through a downpour to get to this wide lake in off-the-main-road Massachusetts.
It’s days before an operation on my weakening heart and I watch swimmers churn toward me, the Australian crawl, the lake chopping, moments near the end of a half-mile through foul brown water, the initial chunk of Martha’s first long-distance triathlon, and after this, a twenty-eight mile race-bike ride with a six-mile sprint to the finish, a three-legged action she’ll call “grueling” when she looks back years later. She’s the oldest competitor at fifty-four (instead of a race number an organizer scratched “54” in black marker on Martha’s right bicep and left calf), and yet she is 132 pounds at 5’11” after furious years in pools and on a road bicycle, and sweat-drenched runs on pitiless asphalt.
Martha’s grandfather, “Spider” Clute, is in the sports Hall of Fame at Cornell. The Yankees tried to sign him in 1913 but his fiancé said NO: It’s me or them, she said, me or those drunk godless ballplayers. Martha’s grandmother didn’t yearn for the life she’d have as the wife of a professional athlete. Even so, there’s a family black and white of Grampa Clute in a Cornell uniform stretching for a throw at first-base, the “Spider”-body a double for Martha’s, not an ounce wasted . . . pure elegance and grace.
I peer out and think I’ll never be able to find her in this broil of bodies, the dip and swirl of red-winged blackbirds. A few swimmers back I glimpse a pair of black arm-warmers like the ones she wears, elbows high, the body level, head down, no unnecessary motion, smooth, strong, steady. Is that her? Martha fears the swim the most. Though she splashed summers as a little girl, a swimsuit her all-day attire, each day, every day, in the lake at a family camp, she has never swum competitively. Never. She fears her upper body will give out. She’ll flounder. She’ll stray off course on the open water. She’ll drop behind and be the fool, she’s sure. She’s old. The youngsters will stomp her. She can’t beat them.
But those black arm-warmers . . . they must be her. And the woman I see isn’t the swimmer I remember from a year ago. That one thrashed, arms flailed, head bobbed high, body twisted side to side, too slow, too slow, nothing flowed. This swimmer glides . . . she skims the angry water, each stroke of the arms a mirror for the next. She’s efficiency and control and power. She’s feet away and rises out of the water, tanned body shimmery in the sudden sun, she’s smiling at me and I’m crying, tears streaming down my face and I couldn’t explain why . . . . She’s fifth out of the water.
Kent Jacobson
Kent Jacobson has been a teacher in prisons and a Massachusetts inner-city for nearly thirty years. His nonfiction appears (or will soon appear) in The Dewdrop, Hobart, Talking Writing, Backchannels, Under the Sun, Punctuate, Lucky Jefferson, and elsewhere. He lives in western Massachusetts with his wife, landscape architect Martha Lyon.
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.
