Time Machine

October 2024 | nonfiction

It doesn’t track or alter time, and it’s not a machine. It has no moving parts.

It’s a clear plastic contraption about six inches high with seven plastic disks in pastel colors. Each disk is labeled with a day of the week and has an a.m. and a p.m. side, marked with sun and moon respectively.

It’s a pill holder for my prescription meds and supplements.

Once a week I line the disks up on my kitchen table and snap them open. I take the pill bottles out of the cupboard and, one at a time, shake out my week’s supply and deposit them in the correct slots. I snap them shut and insert them back into their holder, ready for the next week.

I used to keep a cobalt blue ceramic bowl on the table in which I dumped random quantities of each pill. Every morning and evening I’d pick out what I needed to take at that time. It worked fine—the pills were handy, and I rarely forgot to take them. I’d add more as they ran low. I’d never have bought a special gizmo to hold my pills—it was a free perk through my health insurance plan.

I’m aware of the passage of time when I turn calendar pages—September already, summer’s over—and on my October birthday: Whoosh, there goes another one. I see the signs when I look in the mirror, when my race pace gets a little slower on each 10K, when my daughter is suddenly middle-aged. We all recall how time seemed to drag torturously when we were kids—would school never end? Would Christmas ever come? And then how it started to rocket by, faster and faster, as we got older. But that’s to be expected—we live with it, laugh it off. C’est la vie.

But now. Once a week. Every week. I consider the seven empty disks. And I think, no, it can’t be. Another week already? Didn’t I just fill them the other day? Where has the time gone?

“I have measured out my life in coffee spoons.” T.S. Eliot’s Prufrock was ruminating on the passage of time and the meaning of life.

I could re-employ the blue bowl. Toss the pill holder in the recycling bin. Or repurpose the disks—store paper clips, safety pins, thumb tacks. But there’s no going back. I’ll still hear the days ticking away. I’m measuring out my life seven pills at a time.

Alice Lowe

Alice Lowe’s flash nonfiction has been published this past year in Tangled Locks, Bridge VIII, Skipjack Review, Change Seven, Bluebird Word, Eunoia, and MORIA. She has been twice cited in Best American Essays. Alice writes about life, literature, food, and family in San Diego, California. Read and reach her at www.aliceloweblogs.wordpress.com.

Because the Night

October 2024 | nonfiction

That was when Paul McCartney sang Venus and Mars are all right tonight, and we yelled, “Wings suck!” and punched chrome buttons to change the station on the Dodge Dart’s radio. But some nights we were all right, driving on a dark desert highway, cool wind in our hair, except it was Florida in August and you could swim through the humidity, and the smell of boiling oranges oozed from the Tropicana plant.

That was when we rigged an 8-track under the Dart’s dash, and blasted our own music—screaming along with Patti Smith singing “Gloria,” as we thundered down I-75 from Gainesville to Tampa, to the theater where Patti had fallen off the stage the year before and broken her back, but this night she refused to stop singing and howling and flinging her marionette body around, even as the lights came up and the loudspeaker complained that we should all exit the building immediately.

That was when we drove back through shadowed cow fields, headlights dangerously dimming because an alternator belt had broken. We fired accusations: “What’s wrong with your stupid car?” “Why don’t you help me figure out what to do, instead of giving me shit?” We found an all-night truck stop that could help us out. The radio behind the greasy checkout counter moaned, don’t it make my brown eyes blue?

That was when we returned to the hovel in the student ghetto, to the bed with tangled sheets that never got washed. We put on “Aqualung,” drying in the cold sun, watching as the frilly panties run sounding wrong and dirty and hot. Then, one of us said it. It just slipped out.  And the next album dropped with a flat clunk down the record changer, and the needle hissed as it hit the first grooves.

That was when 10cc sang, I’m not in love.

Kit Carlson

Kit Carlson is an Episcopal priest and a life-long writer with work appearing in publications as diverse as Seventeen Magazine and Anglican Theological Review. She has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and Best of Short Fictions. She has recently published in EcoTheo Review, River Teeth, Rooted 2: An Anthology of the Best Arboreal Nonfiction, Wrong Turn Lit, and Burningword Literary Journal, among others. She lives in East Lansing, Michigan, with her husband Wendell, and Lola, a nervous rescue dog. Find her at kitcarlson.org.

Not Required for Class

July 2024 | nonfiction

I will miss school, not because of the parties, but because it’s a Thursday morning in this freezing lecture hall with a big bag of balls, in a hundred different colors, and we’re grabbing a bunch of them, and putting them back, which is all fine and dandy but what’s the chance—think about it—that you draw exactly a hundred balls, and they’re exactly a hundred different colors, which is to say that everything—just everything—about the balls are different, and it’s definitely not required for class, but after frantic scribbling, he says, the probability is nine-point-three-times-ten—and then he runs out of space, so he squiggles, alludes in the last bit off to the side—to-the-power-of–minus-forty-three, which is—which is!—hands flailing for meaning now, scrambling up right beside me—the chance that—and here he’s out in a sprint to the wall—the chance that if I continue running—and we all want him to—I’ll come out on the other side. And that’s all, he says nonchalantly, not required for class, but I’m already on the other side of the wall and damn if it isn’t magical, those colors.

Jonah Sheen Tan

Jonah Sheen Tan is a recent Columbia University graduate from Singapore who lives in Hong Kong. His writing has appeared in X-R-A-Y Literary Magazine and Pithead Chapel, where it was nominated for a Pushcart Prize.

What I Found Today

July 2024 | nonfiction

Even since my mother-in-law died last year and we had to clean out her cottage at Nottingham Village retirement center, I have been trying to get rid of things. Maybe so my kids won’t have to go through boxes of stuff neither wants, or maybe so it will be easier when my wife and I move back to California.

My goal: two plastic bins and a small wooden filing cabinet.

The filing cabinet was, as expected, mostly papers. The first folder held the adoption papers for my two Pekingese, Kung-pao and Mushu, and eleven-years’ worth of vaccination forms. Kept their adoption papers and the most recent rabies certificate, recycled the rest. Under the folder, lying alone on the bottom of the drawer, was a dog collar with a license and rabies tag from 2003. It was Eggroll’s, my first Pekingese, adopted when I was twenty and lived alone, and the only thing I brought home from the vet that last time. The keep pile.

A folder of old publications, roughly a hundred book reviews I wrote for Public News, Houston’s underground newspaper, long defunct. Maybe I shouldn’t get rid of things when I’m depressed about my career—the last time I threw away the diplomas for my B.A., M.A., and Ph.D. Trash, without even skimming them. The next folder contained twenty-year-old publication contracts for poems and my two critical books. I only save tax returns for three years, so I can’t see any need to retain these. Trash. The books and journals remain on my shelf.

After my daughter was born, my mother sent me a manila envelope of cards I had made when I was in grade school. In each, I drew a picture and wrote a poem—not a real poem, just sentences that rhymed. The drawings were atrocious as well. The world has enough bad poetry and art—trash—although I did keep a Christmas plate I made for my parents in first grade. I’ll let my kids laugh at my lack of artistic talent when they discard it.

A photograph of Larry. It was loose, alone in a folder and not in the envelope of Royal Ranger pictures with “Do Not Open” emblazoned on it. That should have been an easy call: fire. He’s smiling and doesn’t look like a sexual predator. I repressed those events for twenty years; my mother sent that envelope when I was trying to recover those blanks with my therapist. I’ve never mentioned any of this to my children. Maybe I’m trying to keep the worst parts of humanity a little further from them. The photo goes in the envelope with the warning, stashed in the back of the filing cabinet. What disposal is appropriate for such a record?

In one of the bins, my varsity letters from Pasadena Christian Junior High and Maranatha High School. I was mediocre at best, but managed to earn letters despite spending most of the games on the bench. My foray into athletics did not make me socially acceptable; everyone knew me as the paradigmatic math/science nerd. Trash. My high school Science and Math Award plaque from Bank of America and my pin from the California Math League return to the bin—my son, who will major in astrophysics, might appreciate those.

The final container represents my inheritance from my father’s parents. On top is my grandmother’s 1941 diploma from Dawson Springs High School in Kentucky—that meant more to her than any of mine did to me. I should frame it and put it on the wall in place of my PhD. A lot of pictures, candids from the Civil Air Patrol and the mission field, a couple of African newspapers mentioning my grandfather’s revival services. Beneath are faded portraits of unnamed ancestors, some dressed up and others in overalls. There’s no point in passing these on to my kids: they have no stories or dates. My family history is complicated enough with the relatives I can identify, religious colonialism and zealotry. As the oldest son of an oldest son of an oldest son, I am the unwitting repository of the Hardin family photo archive. I’ll cull this bin by half tomorrow.

One bag goes to the street as garbage and one to the Salvation Army. The dog collar stays on my desk—it can’t be buried in a folder.

Michael Hardin

Originally from Los Angeles, Michael Hardin lives in rural Pennsylvania. He is the author of a poetry chapbook, Born Again, from Moonstone Press (2019), has had poems and flash CNF published in Seneca Review, Wisconsin Review, North American Review, Quarterly West, Moon City Review, among others, and has been nominated for a Pushcart.

The Mothers

July 2024 | nonfiction

I notice the mothers as my four-year-old son and I harvest garlic. The plants are almost as tall as he is, topped by slender, green leaves that are just beginning to yellow at their tips. I grasp the base of a stalk and heave upward. The earth muffles the pop of breaking roots, and then the bulb emerges, soil clinging to its skin. I toss the plant into the pile behind me and reach for the next.

That’s when I see a brown spider skittering between stalks on long, tapered legs.

“Look,” I tell my son. “A wolf spider.”

He kneels to get a closer view. The spider is large—about the size of a plum, with bristly hairs on her abdomen and legs.

“See that white ball attached to the back of her?” I ask him. “She’s carrying her egg sack.”

Gardens are good places for wolf spiders. And wolf spiders—with their appetites for aphids, beetles, and wasps—are good for gardens.

This mother spider is not the first we see that day. There are others too. They duck into the shade of the mint, disappear into the shadows beneath the broad leaves of burdock. In their spinnerets, they carry sacks spun from silk—the work of motherhood. They are able to use their bodies in this way because wolf spiders are not web weavers. They are hunters who lie in wait and ambush their prey.

Days later, I return to the garden to finish the garlic harvest. I sit on a log at the end of a row of upturned earth. My one-year-old daughter rests in my lap, my left nipple in her mouth. With gloved hands, I trim the roots and peel away the outermost layer of each head of garlic. A stack of clean, white bulbs topped by wilted leaves grows next to me—ready to be braided and hung to dry from the beams of our back porch.

I think of the mothers all around me. Soon, when the time is right, each one will use her mouthparts to puncture the sack she’s been carrying. A hundred or more spiderlings will crawl out and scale her body. For a week, maybe two, she will carry them all. She will wear a mantle of seed-sized spiders, their translucent legs clutching her frame. Eight hundred eyes will watch as she hunts and hides. And in this way, she will teach her young to be garden spiders.

Sometimes, the work is hard. All that climbing and clinging. The tired limbs and aching joints. Rarely getting through a meal without having my lap occupied by at least one child. And while a fierce love accompanies this attachment—so does a longing for freedom.

But here, in the garden, I am in good company. And I am glad to have it.

If all of us get our way, then maybe our young will be good company to each other. Garden spiders and garden children. Allies. Companions. Kin.

Lucy Bryan

Lucy Bryan is a writer, adventurer, mother, teacher, and seeker. She lives on a wooded ridge above the Tuscarawas River in Coshocton County, Ohio. Her award-winning essays have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and listed as ‘notable’ in Best American Essays. Her place-based nonfiction has appeared in Earth Island Journal, Terrain.org, The Fourth River, and Quarterly West, among others. Her essay collection, In Between Places: A Memoir in Essays (Homebound Publications, June 2022), won a silver Nautilus Award.