Weird in a Normal World

October 2023 | nonfiction

The table is long, filled with empty plates, glasses, and a steaming pitcher of coffee. Everyone is smiling, and grandpa has an eyebrow cocked in a sassy way at the camera. The plates are red, and they nearly blend in with the teak table. A light on the wall shines behind the family, just above grandpa. A stone fireplace sits to the right of grandpa, and his daughter, my boyfriend’s mother, sits in front of the fireplace, snuggled up close to her father– grandpa. In front of her sits my future brother-in-law, his blonde hair parted in the middle to look straight out of the 90s. The swinging door to the kitchen is far behind everyone, slightly skewed to the left. In front of the door and to the left of grandpa sits grandma, her body hunched just slightly. She leans into my boyfriend, her youngest grandchild, just as his mother leans into grandpa. Closest to the camera is my boyfriend, soon fiancé. Everyone is smiling, probably because they are full of breakfast foods, but more likely because they are enjoying the company. It’s grandpa’s 93rd birthday, and he’s going strong. I’ve heard stories about him, about the farm he owns and continues to run. My boyfriend told me all about it, about the times he worked on the farm. I can listen to stories, but that is it. There’s an empty chair at the table, and I wonder if I could ever fill it. I imagine coming with my boyfriend, or maybe fiancé, or maybe even husband one day to visit his grandparents. I want them to smile at me, offer me a hug, and eat breakfast with me. I want to sit at that table. But I know I can’t. I can’t because they are old and can’t handle change. I can’t because their grandson, my boyfriend, is the normal one, the one not married to a man, but in reality, he is. He is in a relationship with someone who looks like a man at face value but was born a woman. If he told his grandparents? Who knows. He wants to keep them safe in their old age and keep life simple. But my life, and now his life, is not simple. We are two men in a happy relationship. I have a vagina, but strangers don’t see that. We’re nearly engaged, we’ve bought the rings, and we have started the process to have a child. Yet his grandparents will never know this, never know me. And so, at night, as I’m alone in my bed, I find myself hoping my life wasn’t so complicated, that I could be normal, that I could sit at the table and enjoy breakfast.

Aarron Sholar

Aarron Sholar’s book, The Body of a Frog: A Memoir on Self-Loathing, Self-Love, and Transgender Pregnancy,is forthcoming from Atmosphere Press, and his essays have been nominated for The Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net. He holds an MFA from MSU, Mankato, and a BA from Salisbury University. He serves as the Prose Editor for Beaver Magazine.

The Everything Life

October 2023 | nonfiction

It was after a single glass of Gruner that I decided to throw it all away. I opened the “everything drawer” in my kitchen. Everyone has an everything drawer, right? A drawer crammed with the innumerable yet unremarkable artifacts of life.

From a young age, or maybe after a long therapeutic stint, (the timeline is murky), I learned to look life in the eye. Confrontation, it turned out, could be invigorating. Freeing even. This was one such moment. I towered over the jumble of odds and ends that had inexplicably taken up residence in this drawer; things I thought I may need one day, things that had taken mastery over me, things I was scared to touch.

The lone AA battery, its charge status forever a mystery.  The fragile, doll-sized sewing kit from some bargain basement store–I don’t sew, but it’s there just in case. A coin from an Indian sojourn a decade ago–a talisman for a return trip that may never come. A rubber cock ring–all promise and little payoff, but preserved nonetheless. Keys with forgotten purposes, still stashed away just in case they hold the answer to a future locked door. Bereft-of-bounce hair ties that remain as a last-ditch option for a bad hair day. A weathered Chapstick, survivor of the washing-machine, harboring hope of someday coming to the rescue of desperate lips. Stubby pencils gnawed down by past worries. Orphaned pens caps. The remnants of burnt birthday candles, wishes blown. A cluster of Lego’s that once pinched under my unexpecting feet–they stay, for they might complete an unfinished castle someday.

I grab things, my hand making generous swoops into their tiny cosmos, and consign them to their new home—a mint-scented Glad garbage bag beneath the kitchen sink. No sorting. No recycling. I grasp for control. The rest of my life I can’t control. The “everything life” can’t be dealt with so decisively.

My mounting parking tickets; the ceaseless rhythm of school drop-offs; looming dentist appointments; cancer; my brother’s depression; my unregistered Jeep that exists somewhere beyond the DMV’s recognition; my cat who’s always hungry; the lone survivor of my chicken coop (curse those raccoons!); the continuous piles of unfolded laundry; the never-ending grocery list; the unopened texts from an ex; my fiancé; my newborn; planning a wedding my father might not be alive for; my addiction to cigarettes; my overachieving attitude—these things are not so easily discarded.

They must be faced. But this drawer, this ludicrous, cantankerous drawer that can’t even close, I can control this. I can throw all of this away.

Until later on tonight when my four-year-old walks into the kitchen, tears in his eyes because his Narwhale night light has died. And I find myself elbow-deep in the trash bin, sifting for that AA battery. I find it, scrub the remnants of spaghetti from it, and bring the little whale back to life. My son returns to his bed, his world right again.

And there I am, alone in the kitchen, surrounded by the unshakable, unthrowawayable things. My heart heavy with the need for these things. I rescue the misfits from the garbage and refill the “everything drawer,” ready for the day I might need them.

Anaïs La Rocca

Anaïs La Rocca is a writer, film director, and member of the Directors Guild. Her writing can be found in Shots Creative, Mother Egg Review, and The New York Times Tiny Love Column. Her film Good Bones, a collaboration with acclaimed poet Maggie Smith, won an International Motion Arts Award. She is the co-founder and editor of Litt Magazine.

When Haven’t I

October 2023 | nonfiction

The first human cremains I should have seen? What kind of question is that? I have an answer — my mom’s. I did not see them because when they were done (is that the right way to put it?) I was living 300 miles away. I had them overnighted to her mother, 1,200 miles away. The first human cremains I actually saw were on the east bank of the Susquehanna River in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. Heavy-duty plastic bag, from a distance like sand. But then, label, name, death date, crematorium address. The name was Duka. I thought it was a cremated dog, like a female Duke. I regret this assumption but I volunteer at the dog shelter and they aren’t no-kill, so.

The next morning I returned, re-read the label, saw a surname. A person. Two coins by the bag. Fare for Charon? A straight shot to one of the islands, the afterlife. It’s a wide river.

I searched for an obituary, found none. Do I often search for obituaries? I’m not going to answer that. Saw references to the ethnicity. Nepalese. The city had accepted Nepalese earthquake refugees. They lit funeral pyres on holy rivers, part of the passage to reincarnation. I guessed that waterborne funeral pyres were not allowed in central Pennsylvania. I could picture elderly Nepalese doing the next best thing, ferrying ashes to the river’s edge, just setting them there. And the coins not for Charon, but maybe Lakshmi coins. Wealth.

I went back day after day and crouched by the bag, curious and sad. Who else visited? Is that a question you’re really asking?

I had this question: Why ashes? Cremains look like smashed coral. When have I seen smashed coral? When haven’t I. I kept thinking of the scene in Cheryl Strayed’s Wild where she tastes her mom’s ashes. I could not imagine putting this fine gravel of bone against my lips. I could envision reincarnation, however. Even Charon, I could imagine him.

What happened to the cremains? A flood, rafts of branches pummeled the bank, broke the bag. When the river level dropped to shallow, I could see a white swirl embedded in the mud, like a shred of a shroud. Wouldn’t the flood have taken it all away?

I hate your questions. Why not ask what compelled me to return and look.

Jen Hirt

Jen Hirt is the author of the memoir Under Glass: The Girl with a Thousand Christmas Trees, the essay collection Hear Me Ohio, and the poetry chapbook Too Many Questions About Strawberries. She is the co-editor of two anthologies of creative nonfiction. She is the editor at the Journal of Creative Writing Studies. Her work has won a Pushcart Prize, has been listed as “notable” in Best American Essays, and was nominated by Terrain for the John Burroughs Nature Writing Award. She is an associate professor at Penn State Harrisburg. Read more of her work at jenhirt.ink

Someone Special

July 2023 | nonfiction

In the video, you’re riding a brown horse around a dusty cement arena somewhere in Mexico, the place you told me not to visit because you were enjoying your solitude, so I didn’t bother learning the city’s name. The horse trots and you bounce like a child on his uncle’s knee. As the horse makes its rounds, jogging you up and down, you laugh – a laugh I know well enough to know it isn’t from joy but to mask your lower back pain from an old skateboarding injury.

Anyone else watching this video would think you’re having fun, but as grainy as the video is, I see suffering. In November, just seven months ago, I drove you to the hospital in Tuscaloosa at dawn, sat in the waiting room for hours for your outpatient lumbar surgery. When the nurse called my name to meet you, I was in the bathroom. You were afraid I’d left. Call her again, you slurred, heavy-lidded from anesthesia, not realizing I’d walked in behind you. Two days shy of your 44^th birthday, you slouched in a wheelchair, sipping apple juice from a Styrofoam cup. Your relief when I said, I’m here, mirrored my own elation decades earlier when I was a sobbing child separated from my mother in JCPenney, just to realize she’d been behind me the whole time.

When we got back to your apartment, I helped you into bed, then tucked myself in beside you. You curled your arm around my waist and said your biggest fear was my cancer coming back. I whispered, That’s my fear to have, not yours. As you shuddered into sleep, you said you loved me for the first time. You didn’t remember it the next day.

Seven months ago. That’s not so long.

In the video, your sunglasses hide your grimace, but as the horse speeds up, your mouth opens slightly and you let out a sound I’ve heard before, halfway between a laugh and a cry, and my own spine throbs. Your groan is not unlike the sound you made so often in bed, the soft moan as you turned me on my side after sex, staying inside me, our bodies slick with each other’s sweat.

You post this video on Facebook after three days of radio silence. After nearly a year of daily communication. After hundreds of messages claiming I am everything you ever wanted.

In the video, someone is offscreen, recording. A woman. She giggles each time you trot by. In her giggle, I hear everything you haven’t told me—why you didn’t want me to buy a plane ticket, the precise way you have been enjoying your solitude. You post this video three days before sending me an email you didn’t have to send. The video is enough. Still, you feel compelled to tell me: I’ve met someone special.

Sara Pirkle

Sara Pirkle is a Southern poet, an identical twin, a breast cancer survivor, and a board game enthusiast. Her first book, The Disappearing Act (Mercer University Press, 2018), won the Adrienne Bond Award for Poetry. She also dabbles in songwriting and co-wrote a song on Remy Le Boeuf’s album, Architecture of Storms, which was nominated for a 2023 GRAMMY in the Best Large Jazz Ensemble Album category. She is an Associate Director of Creative Writing at The University of Alabama.

Consideration of Tasks

July 2023 | nonfiction

Before I wrote color essays for an arts magazine, I was curator of a gallery. Before I became a curator, I was moving 3000 miles across the United States. Before the 3000 miles, I was meditating six hours a day in the snow. Before the stillness and cold, I was a marriage counselor causing many a divorce. Truth telling breaks up static. Before the truth, I gave shiatsu massages where I had to do pushups with my thumbs to keep them strong. Before weak thumbs, I memorized Shakespeare while training my voice to project on stage without a mike by repeating daily manalathavaza and other voice exercises, using a bone prop propped between my lips to keep vowels open and consonants sharp. Before those three years, I modeled flannel nightgowns in NYC and waited on tables, and before that flunked junior year of high school but managed to fake my way to graduate on time. Before that I was stuck in the middle of three brothers in the middle of the United States. And then I was born. In between all this, I hitchhiked for two years through the Middle East.

Hitchhiking on trucks, sitting in smoke-drenched cafes with only men, following a stranger to a dark hallway in Aleppo to change money for a better exchange rate, riding through Damascus in a beat-up Fiat instructed to remain silent lest the government hear us while 16-year-old boys with machine guns guard the streets– it’s impossible to know what my boundaries are. How much to assert myself. How much to speak. It’s difficult to know what is cultural and how much is individual bias. I drink four tiny cups of Turkish coffee with a Bedouin family and it is one too many; tradition deeming three as hospitable and four you’ve outstayed your welcome. Being a woman I tend towards remaining quiet and later question whether I should have spoken up. Invited to dinner ends up sitting on the floor with eight men, eating with our fingers while a woman’s hand keeps passing plates of food through a curtain. One of the men says, while casting sidelong smirks my way, “Women change with the moon or rather the moon changes women and money changes the man.”

I write this on a table of weathered wood, the turquoise paint peeling into the knot beneath my notebook. My past settles behind me and the future is now. My heart expands and my forehead softens and the sea is turquoise beyond the blond sand. Through the open window the sun lies gentle on my face. I don’t want religion. I want to experiment with other realities, but not with drugs. It must be possible.

If society is narrow then I must be wider. The world is in me. I am the world. A colorful shawl, some warm tights, a pair of wool socks and I’m on my way. I move less as I move. It is a consideration of tasks.

Dian Parker

Dian Parker’s essays have been published in 3:AM Magazine, The Rupture, Anomaly, Epiphany, Tiny Molecules, Channel, Event, Burningword Literary, Westerly, Critical Read, After the Art, among others, and nominated for several Pushcart Prizes and Best of the Net. Her art writing is with Art & Object, Fine Books & Collections, Art & Antiques, Art New England, London Observer, and others.