“Gone For Always” by James Braun

“Gone For Always” by James Braun is our Poem of the Week.

James Braun’s work has appeared and is forthcoming in Fiction International, Puerto del Sol, DIAGRAM, Bayou Magazine, filling Station, and elsewhere. James is currently a second-year fiction candidate at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where he recently won the John Logan Poetry Prize.
 

Gone for Always

under a straw hat that crimps when knocked
from headrest to steering wheel     our father
hellbent on an anywhere     steers this shitbox
breakneck on doglegs     down switchbacks
headlong through guardrails over cliffsides
our treads pressed in furrows of cornfields
with piled in back     us backseat brothers
along with our father and his all-over drive

sometimes the woods we drive by are rivers
are buttes of coulees     sometimes black ice
stands in for heat you can touch a fever
rising up from the blacktop     sometimes
we backtrack so we become where we began
sometimes our faces are that of busses full
of schoolchildren who wear hangdog faces
that peer out at these parts of us already gone

our father not long into all this kicks out
the windshield with a bootheel     from then
on we peer out of goggles against mosquitoes
we snap our mouths shut lest we get our teeth
black with bugs     we have to quiet ourselves
as our father drives on with gardening gloves
a scarecrow at the helm     a row of pinestraw
between his canines     he who drives nonstop

southbound     northbound     a gooseneck lane
with hubcaps loosed by potholes along ditches
a gas gauge low-sitting like a backwater skiff
our ramshackle car     a tumbledown house
topping out at most at eighty-nine     ninety
now without our teardrop trailer since a mile
or two back we lost to a jackknife     no rest
for us     no pitstop     no filling station in sight

we make of this living the best brothers can
we siphon out of each other a drip of mud
rivers inside us that keep our shitbox alive
we trail out the window a kite     a trotline
cast to the wind for fish     a crab a catfish
my brother with a trowel he starts a garden
on the dash     he plants a row of parsnips
on off days we scrounge our seats for dimes

an abyss the size of a nickel     and up front
our father nods off     to the sound of distant
thunderheads that signal a car wash coming
his fingers     they stutter     against the wheel
spillover coffee on his cuffs     hairpin lines
across his cheeks     his face a jailed thing
our father a dreamer     our tires catch a curb
only the rumble strips bring him back awake

his dreaming makes of us     two brothers
uneasy under starlight’s stippling over this
causeway bridge     both of us sweat through
as if our shirts were swatches of cheesecloth
as if we were always underwater     so when
our father busts through the rail into the river
below it is hardly any different     I only tell
my brother at this rate we’ll never get home

 

Author’s Note

“Gone For Always” arose from a number of my obsessions—with longform narrative poetry, with brothers and fathers, and with the poetics of a child speaker. The child as a vessel of the surreal. How in youth one can look at the moon and still see awe in it, having seen it before for only so many days on Earth. Only a child can find amazement in the terrible—in this case a dangerous cross-country car ride with an errant father—and discover something more-than in the experience, if only in the imagination.

This poem also exists as part of a larger project of mine, that of a book-length poem titled “On Comes the Light.” In each section, I aim to make use of situation and setting to provide movement and imagery. Road trips seemingly work well for this (I’m thinking of Elizabeth Bishop’s poem “The Moose”). The speaker can merely look out the window and say what they see, increasing the tangibility of the poem. When rendered through the eyes of a child engaged in play, the language (hopefully) takes flight.

An Interview with Genevieve Abravanel

Recently, TMR intern Shayla Malone interviewed Genevieve Abravanel about “Wilderness Survival,” which tells the story of a recently widowed mom and her young daughter, who becomes an avid follower of a YouTube survivalist, Joe Wilderness, as a way of coping with the loss of her father. First published in TMR issue 46.3 (Fall 2023), Abravanel’s effervescent story considers the bewildering process of shared healing. You can read it here.

 
Shayla Malone: What inspired you to write “Wilderness Survival”?

Genevieve Abravanel: I would say a combination of factors: one is, obliquely, my childhood; another is seeing my kids grow up with the scripted reality of YouTube, so different from my own childhood watching sitcoms and soap operas. My children don’t watch any television. They only watch YouTube. And these YouTube personalities are significant to them. Maybe not to the extent that Joe Wilderness is to Candy, who reaches out to the Internet in a sort of unconscious reckoning with her own grief, as though it were an oracle.

SM: The narrator in your story realizes how difficult it is to raise her daughter, Candy, after the death of Candy’s father. How have your own relationships with mothers and/or motherhood affected how you write about mothering?

GA: Sometimes I feel everything I write is about motherhood! I am obsessed with writing about motherhood in particular and parents and children in general: fathers and mothers, sons and daughters. I was worried about this until I heard T Kira Madden speak about writerly obsessions as something to accept and even foster. That was helpful for me because, although I do enjoy exploring other topics, I am repeatedly drawn back to this primal relationship and its variations, its complexities, and the deep way that it lives within us.

Becoming a mother was fully transformative for me, as I know it is for so many others, and I think I’m still interrogating that. The realization that another being is entirely dependent on you for their survival provokes such a radical decentering of the self. This is actually what made me a fiction writer. I had not been publishing fiction prior to becoming a parent. Which, if I think about it, is a kind of backwards way to do things, because I now have essentially zero time to do the work. However, this is just how it has gone for me.

SM: What caused you to pick wilderness survival as Candy’s method for dealing with loss?

GA: I’ve always been intrigued by wilderness survival and, particularly as a child, was interested in survival narratives of various types, whether that be in the wilderness or in an urban setting. I remember this children’s book that I loved—I can’t recall the title but it was about a boy who lived under the subway and had to survive on his wits. That said, I don’t think I personally could survive in the wilderness without someone like Candy to guide me.

I also think there’s an insecurity that comes with losing a parent or having a significant disruption as a child. Although I don’t know if I went into the story thinking this outright, it makes sense to me that with such loss or disruption, the question of material survival and independence, even preadolescent independence, becomes primary. If childhood is this uneasy balancing act, this continual negotiation between dependence and independence, I was really interested to see that happen at age ten for Candy. At ten, Candy is prior to puberty and still in that child mode but, at the same time, old enough to be capable. It’s a really interesting age.

SM: Candy’s obsession with wilderness survival is inspired by a YouTube channel starring Joe Wilderness. What is your relationship with the wilderness? Is it mediated by television or video, as it is for Candy?

GA: I do like to get out in nature, go for a hike—there’s a lot of beautiful hiking in Pennsylvania— but then I like to come home again and go to sleep in my bed. I wouldn’t say my experience of nature is especially mediated by television, but I did have a morbid fascination with some of the wilderness survival reality television out there, including one with Bear Grylls, the British wilderness survival personality. Although Joe Wilderness is definitely his own man, I do see various wilderness personalities in his make-up.

SM: Are you working on any future projects we can look forward to?

GA: Yes, I’m working on a novel. I’m not ready to talk about it yet, but I’m really excited about it. I also have a couple of pieces of short fiction in the works, one forthcoming from Story and another from Ecotone, and I’m excited about these as well.

***

 

Genevieve Abravanel’s short fiction is available or forthcoming in American Short Fiction, The Missouri Review, Story, Ecotone, and elsewhere. She has published a scholarly book with Oxford University Press (Chinese translation with The Commercial Press of Beijing) and received support from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the American Association of University Women. She teaches English in Lancaster, PA, where she lives with her family, and is currently working on a novel.

***

Shayla Malone is a 2024 spring intern at the Missouri Review. She is a senior at the University of Missouri-Columbia, where she is majoring in English and minoring in Business.

“Pete Pete’s Putt Putt Palace” by Adam Straus

BLAST, TMR’s online-only prose anthology, features prose too vibrant to be confined between the covers of a print journal. In “Pete Pete’s Putt Putt Palace,” Adam Straus tells the story of a young soon-to-be Marine who spends the summer before boot camp working at a minigolf course. He’s ready for his new life to begin but also dragging his feet at the threshold of manhood—which means the same thing, in this story set in 2017, during a period of heated war in Syria and Iraq, as dragging his feet at the threshold of violence and possible death. Soon enough he’ll be changed forever, and despite his youth he knows it, but for at least this strange yet perfect summer, he’s got his whole life ahead of him, the world like a golf ball in his open palm.

Pete Pete’s Putt Putt Palace

Adam Straus

 

Phil almost flunks his phone interview for the job at Pete Pete’s Putt Putt Palace. The flyer his mom shows him says: help wanted! does your name start with the letter p? do you want to work hard, have fun, and get paid in cash this summer? did you answer yes to the previous two questions? then call (609) 560-2412 today and come work work at pete pete’s!!!

But when Phil calls (609) 560-2412, the voice on the other end says he isn’t qualified, because while Phil technically starts with the letter P, it doesn’t start with a P sound, which is what the ad means, even if it doesn’t specifically say so.

Phil’s mom stands over him, drumming her burn-scarred fingers on the Formica kitchen countertop, mouthing Marine Corps! Mention the Marine Corps! Through the prefab wall, Phil can hear his little brother playing Call of Duty in the bedroom they share, audible above the sound of the TV blaring news from the living room.

“I understand, sir, but I’m really hoping you can make an exception to your policy. I’m leaving for boot camp in September, and…”

The voice brightens. The voice’s uncle was in the Coast Guard. The voice has a tremendous amount of respect for our men and women in uniform, and the voice was going to serve if not for an unfortunate series of events involving excessive eczema, a bum knee, and a job offer that seemed irresistible at the time, though it turned out to be a crock of shit. However, it’s all worked out for the best, because now the voice is Pete Tommaso, owner of Pete Pete’s Putt Putt Palace, and he would love for Phil to be part of the Pete Pete’s Putt Putt Family.

*

Pete Pete’s Putt Putt Palace’s First Annual New Employee Orientation is on Monday, May 22, 2017. A week before Memorial Day. Phil plugs the address into Google Maps, sees that Pete Pete’s Putt Putt Palace is right where Tee Bone Mini Golf used to be, and closes Google Maps. The morning is cool and humid, a prelude to the hot and humid summer waiting offstage for its cue.

Phil crosses the Bay Bridge thirty minutes later and inches down Surf Haven’s main street. There are stoplights at every corner, leaving him plenty of time to admire the ramshackle barrier island beach town where he’s spent all eighteen of his summers. It’s a carbon copy of any other shore town, including the insistence on individuality: This is our overrated ice cream place, our actually good ice cream place, our three pizzerias on the same block, our upscale seafood place. These are our clapboard buildings, our raised white colonials, our boxy new rentals everyone complains about.

And this is our minigolf place. Parking his hand-me-down Camry across the street from Pete Pete’s Putt Putt Palace, the first change Phil notices is the massive circus big top erected over the entire course. The holes look more or less the way he remembers Tee Bone, but Phil hasn’t played minigolf since he was twelve, so they might have been updated in the interim. The office is still a tarpaper-roofed kiosk, against which a middle-aged man leans.

“You must be Phil,” the middle-aged man says. “I’m Pete.”

He extends his hand and nearly crushes Phil’s knuckles in a vice grip. Pete has a stringy mustache, a thick head of gray hair, and skinny arms that belie his budding beer belly.

“Before we begin conducting business, I’d like you to join me in prayer.” Pete bows his head and starts praying. Phil looks down at the astroturf between his feet.

“Lord, I just ask you to take some consideration for this venture on which we are about to embark. Please watch over your faithful servants Pete and Phil as we operate this minigolf facility. Please guide our friends and neighbors and tourists to this spot so they can have fun and my business can prosper. Please bless us with inclement weather that is favorable for the beautiful tent with which you’ve already blessed us and unfavorable for Mulligan’s Nine Hole, which does not have a tent. In Jesus’ name we pray. Amen.”

Phil already misses his old summer job with Mike’s landscaping crew. The novel Spanish curse words and the endless prank wars (fake snakes hidden in Mauricio’s backpack, tipping a porta-shitter with Big Jeff inside, sending Hector in search of blinker fluid for the truck on his first day). The simple swagger that came from being part of a group of dudes like that. The well-earned exhaustion at the end of every day.

Phil’s mom broke up with Mike over the winter. Handed Phil a mug of hot chocolate and explained they’d grown apart over the previous three years and blah and blah and blah. All Phil could say was What does the hot chocolate have to do with this? but he didn’t argue when she handed Phil the flyer that brought him here.

“Where’s everyone else?” Phil asks after the prayer.

Pete laughs. While the tent flaps overhead in the salt-air breeze, he explains patiently that a business’s profits are calculated by taking what it makes and subtracting what it spends. To maximize profit (which is the goal of a business), you want to increase what you make and reduce what you spend. The main thing a minigolf course spends money on is employees.

“I’m gonna work the desk myself, so I don’t have to pay out an extra salary.”

“What about me?”

“You’re gonna be The Ringer.”

This is one of Pete’s big business ideas. His first stroke of genius was to put a tent over the course so people can play while it rains. His second was to call the place Pete Pete’s Putt Putt Palace, because the repetition makes people twice as likely to remember the name. The third is having a Ringer.

The Ringer’s job is to stand underneath a hand-painted sign that says the ringer. Guests can challenge him to a round of minigolf. If anyone in the party beats The Ringer, their rounds are free. If they lose, the challenger pays an additional $20.

“Of that $20, you can pocket $5 as a tip, in addition to your hourly $5 wage. So if you can win a round an hour, you’ll clear $10, all cash.”

“I haven’t really played that much minigolf before. What if people keep beating me?”

“Then you gotta get better, son! You think this minigolf course just handed itself to me?” Pete spreads his arms wide to encompass all eighteen holes, the artificial stream running through the course, and the big plywood windmill on the final hole. “I prayed for this every day. I took out a loan from my own aged father so I could fix this place up. Now you just gotta channel the same energy. You’re gonna be in the Army, right?”

“The Marine Corps.”

“Exactly! You gotta work hard. Train hard!”

Phil plays through the course twice as practice, then heads home for the day. Driving back over the bridge, he sees Surf Haven as a tiny spit of sand separating the bay from the ocean. With his back to the vast Atlantic, Phil feels hungry for adventure. He wants this summer to be an orgy of everything before he enters the crucible of manhood. He wants his life to be circumscribed only by what is possible. He has no self-restraint, nor does he want any. He’s willing to try any drug, although he doesn’t know how to get his hands on any. He’s had sex with every woman who’s ever expressed interest in him, which to date is exactly zero. He’s not shy; he’s just never figured out how to make friends without spending time with them first. He wants to do something, anything crazy before he gives himself to the Marine Corps. He can’t escape the feeling that his chance to do so is dwindling one day at a time.

*

First hole: Straight shot; line it up with the trunk of the fake palm tree behind the gravel. Second hole: Ricochet off the discolored paving stone. Third hole: Put it in the furthest tube, it rolls from there into the hole. Fourth hole: Trick shot, whack the ball across the gravel and into the water; the stream will drop the ball off right next to the hole. Fifth hole: Hit it hard up the slope; ride the curve. Sixth hole: Tap it to the left, then shoot around the sand trap. Seventh hole: Focus to get the ball across the narrow bridge.

Eighth hole: Trick shot again, there’s a tube behind the waterfall that drops into the hole. The tube’s made of PVC piping; it would snow little plastic slivers if cut to shape with Mike’s hand saw, the one with a Misfits bumper sticker on the handle.

Ninth hole: The leftmost plank gives the best angle. Tenth hole: Bank shot off the dolphin’s tail. Eleventh hole: Straight through the hole at the base of the lighthouse. Twelfth hole: Trick shot, hit it hard and flat to skip across the water; guests love that one. Thirteenth hole: Hit it into the log, guaranteed hole in one. Fourteenth hole: Looks like a straight shot, but the hole is raised; tap it close, then tap it in. Fifteenth hole: Weird twists and turns, minimum three shots, don’t get greedy. Sixteenth hole: First shot goes under the second wagon, second shot angles back through the fourth wagon and onto the lower green.

Seventeenth hole: Don’t even try hitting it under the pirate ship, just tap it around. Stare down at the ship and remember the blocky DK Eyewitness Book about pirates. Skip the pages about treasure, linger on the pages about weapons, fall asleep staring at the page that shows the crew in their hammocks belowdecks, swaying gently together.

Eighteenth hole: Backswing right when one blade of the windmill passes the opening. Timing should be perfect.

*

It’s always the men, Phil realizes after a month. It’s objectively stupid to look at someone standing under a sign that announces i’m good at minigolf and still decide to challenge them. But every day, there are three or four men who decide this particular carnival game might not be rigged. Or maybe they know it is and that means they have nothing to lose by losing. Except $20. Sometimes it’s a dad trying to embarrass his family, sometimes a boyfriend hamming it up for his girlfriend. Sometimes the imperceptible currents of a male friend group drift towards the conclusion, Yes, let’s see how good this kid is. But it’s always the men.

Even when it’s not the men, it’s the men. Like the family whose daughter plays golf at UVA. When her dad announces this, she laughs a bit too hard. They smell like they’ve been drinking together, the tan dad and the tan mom and the tan son and the tan son’s tan girlfriend and the tan daughter. The tan daughter looks and acts the way Phil imagines a college athlete. All confidence and calves. She asks Phil what the trick is on each hole, he’s too dumbstruck not to tell her, his ball caroms off the lighthouse on the eleventh hole, she nails every shot, he mistimes the windmill for good measure.

Pete’s ticked off because that’s five refunds.

“What, you wake up in the morning and piss out $75 at a time?”

But Pete doesn’t stay mad; they’re still up big on the summer. The weather’s been dogshit, and it turns out the tent was a great investment. There’s a steady stream of putt putters puttering through the palace. Phil’s getting challenged a few times a day and winning just about every time.

The hours are long (12-10 every day) and the pay sucks, but the hours are long enough to make up for the shitty pay. Phil’s got some cash in his pocket, and he should be doing something wild. He should be getting drunk somewhere and getting laid by someone, but instead he’s getting nervous. Because he’s watching videos about boot camp on his phone, and it looks miserable. All screaming and no sleep. Physical punishment and psychological torture meant to destroy the person Phil’s been since he was born. His recruiter says to stay on top of the PT and not sweat it too much. It’s like a kick in the nuts; you’re not supposed to be ready for it.

Phil’s also watching the news, and he sees Americans and Iraqis and Syrians fighting to recapture Mosul and Raqqa. He sees the faces of two soldiers who die on the roads outside of Kabul.

And it’s fucked up because Phil knows the dead are what make the whole thing special. He knows that’s what lends this whole thing its romantic air, why he thought he needed to blow it out this summer, why he’s now angling every fiber of his being towards being as ready as he can. But he might be in way over his head. He might be having the moment he’s seen on others’ faces, when Phil nails three holes in one to start the course and they understand they just threw away $20.

So Phil sets an alarm on his phone to ring every hour, reminding him to drop down for a set of push-ups. Between this, three max sets of pull-ups a day on the bar that’s slowly peeling his room’s door jamb from the wall, and five three-mile runs a week, Phil gets in the best shape of his life. His skinny frame trends towards wiry. He buzzes his long hair short, easing toward the bald head he knows awaits him at boot camp. And while the haircut doesn’t look particularly good, it turns out the forehead acne he grew out his hair to cover was actually coming from his oily hair itself. After a self-conscious two weeks, Phil’s skin clears for the first time since sixth grade.

Phil snags a few mornings on the beach with his mom and brother, stays up late a few nights playing Overwatch and NBA 2K online with Elliott and Zach. That’s it for fun. The Clam Jammer is right across the street from Pete Pete’s, and even though he can hear people drinking there and stomping around to whatever cover band is playing on the back patio, Phil never even tries to sneak in. He’s working sixty hours a week; he’s fucking tired.

Of course, Phil still feels a pang every time a group remotely close to his age rolls through Pete Pete’s. They’ve got stolen booze, they’ve got somewhere to be tonight, they’ve got something Phil’s given up. He thinks of an old Smashing Pumpkins song Mike used to play in the truck, screaming along out of key, smacking his palm on the steering wheel: Someone will say what is lost can never be saved.

So Phil finds solace in routine. His alarm goes off every hour. The eighteen holes are always in the same order. The trick shots always elicit the same surprise from the guests. The ball return bucket fills; he swaps it for the empty bucket at the start of the course. That bucket fills up; he swaps them again. Phil does 100, then 200, then 300 push-ups a day. He runs a 21-minute three-mile, then a 20:30, then a 19:55. He ekes out a set of 20 pull-ups, but his brother says they don’t count because his legs were swinging.

His mom stops by one day after her shift waiting tables at Michael’s Diner, near a wealthy college town up north. She drops $20 of her tip money to challenge Phil. After Phil nails the trick shot on the twelfth hole, he sees his mom is crying. Like any good teenage son, he asks Mom, what the fuck? Are you ok? She is, she’s sniffling, she’s trying to get the words out.

“You’re so good at this,” she says, tears tracing the high cheekbones they share. “I can’t believe it. You’ve been working so hard here, Philly.”

Phil’s embarrassed, but she’s right: He’s good at minigolf. Like, insanely good. After the UVA girl, no one beats him for two weeks. A month. The rest of the summer.

*

Pete’s been praying, and his prayers are answered for Labor Day Weekend. It starts pouring rain as the first early birds drive over the bridge on Friday afternoon, and by Sunday evening, there haven’t been more than ten cumulative minutes of sunshine over the past forty-eight hours. Pete Pete’s is packed; everyone’s desperate to escape the house, sick of the three movies showing at Flix Theater, hungry for something that says vacation.

Phil’s already ringered three groups by 2 PM. The ball return bucket fills up almost as quickly as he can change it out. Rain pounds down on the tent. It’s so overcast Phil can hardly tell when day gives way to twilight. He can best discern the passage of time from the guests’ progressively increasing drunkenness. Suddenly the fluorescent lights lining each hole click on, bathing the course in reds, whites, and blues. It’s the last night of summer.

Shortly after nine, a couple walks up to Phil.

“So we beat you and it’s free?” the guy asks. He’s got a well-groomed beard, a slightly too-tight t-shirt, and sunglasses on the back of his head even though it’s been a minute since anyone in Surf Haven needed sunglasses. He either looks young for 35 or old for 25.

“It’s twenty bucks to take the challenge, and if either of you beat me, you get your $20 back and both your rounds refunded.”

The girl says they should do it. Phil’s doing the awkward eighteen-year-old thing where he tries not to look at her, but his brain has already made the binary determination attractive female present, and now he’s hyper-aware that he’s either looking at her (too much?) or not looking at her (also weird). Then the wind blows, pressing the fabric of her sundress against her skin, and Phil realizes she’s close to his age and he’s staring.

They play the first two holes in convivial silence. Phil picks up snatches of conversation and learns the couple might’ve drank too much this afternoon, they could both go for a cigarette but have agreed to stop chain-smoking every time they touch a beer, someone named Becca is having a party tonight, and while they’re excited to head back to college for their senior year, they’re sad to see the end of the long, debauched, and boozy summer they’ve enjoyed together.

Neither of them seems to be any good at minigolf, nor do they seem to give a shit. Either they gave up when Phil led off with back-to-back holes in one, or they never really cared to begin with. Phil tracks all three scores. The guy carries the couple’s pencil stubs behind his ears. Their scorecards sit unused in his back pocket.

“By the way, what’s your name, dude?” the guy asks as he gets ready to start the third hole. A car whooshes by on the rain-slick street. Underneath the big top, it smells like plastic and fresh mud.

“I’m Phil.”

“Cool. I’m Greg.”

“And I’m Caroline.”

“You in school?” Greg asks.

“I just graduated high school. I’m leaving for boot camp in a few weeks.”

“Marine Corps?”

“Yeah.”

“No shit. I just got out a few years ago. You’re gonna need some of this.” Greg reaches into his pocket and hands Phil a hip flask. Phil’s only thought is a voice saying yes, yes, yes.

“Oh my god, Greg, you’re corrupting him. He’s at work.” Caroline laughs and shakes her head, making it clear she thinks this is great.

Phil ducks behind a boulder to be sure he’s out of sight from the kiosk. The cheap whiskey makes his eyes water. He coughs and burps. The burp tastes so bad he coughs again. Greg and Caroline double over laughing. Hysterical drunk laughing. Phil forces a smile, caps the flask, and hands it back to Greg.

“That’s Wild Turkey,” Greg says. “You’ll get used to it.”

Greg’s right. The second pull hurts as bad as the first. The third goes down a bit smoother. The ninth time Greg hands him the flask, Phil squats behind the teal dolphin on the tenth hole and the whiskey tastes fine. A little bit sweet and a little bit spicy, like when his mom used to make oatmeal with cinnamon, nutmeg, and lots and lots of cloves. And just like those winter mornings, there’s a warmth rising in Phil’s chest, fending off the cool nighttime breeze blowing from the ocean.

Phil isn’t quite sure how to ask Greg about the Marine Corps, but it’s fine because Greg starts reminiscing. He fixed helicopter engines in Camp Lejeune, he met his best friends at his first unit, one of his buddies dumped a cup of piss off the barracks catwalk (on purpose) and onto a Lieutenant’s head (by accident) and then pretended he pissed himself while having a seizure so he wouldn’t get in trouble. Greg spent nine months in Iraq.

“I was just at TQ, never left the wire or anything. But it was still cool being there.”

Phil nods along and makes a mental note to look up TQ Iraq later.

After every hole, Greg taps Caroline’s ass with his putter and says good game. It becomes a joke; she scrambles away from him, he chases after her and says I’m just trying to congratulate you. She turns and swings at his ass and hits him in the kidney by mistake. He dramatically arches his back and yelps. She says I’m just trying to congratulate you through tears of laughter.

Phil’s drunk, and he’s only been drunk twice before (both times stolen vodka, both times Elliott’s basement). This is his first time learning he’s a sappy drunk. Phil hopes someday he has a girlfriend with a cute splash of freckles on her nose and a laugh like an NJ Transit train sliding into the station. He hopes they play minigolf together and smack each other on the ass and say good game.

Then, when Phil nails the trick shot across the water on hole 12, and Greg and Caroline go nuts with delirious cheers, Phil thinks about the faces he saw on the news. The dead guys. And he thinks about summer being over. Playing minigolf isn’t sad, unless you start worrying it might be your last time ever playing minigolf. Then it gets really sad.

Phil hangs his head as they walk over the wooden bridge to hole 13. He doesn’t want to go this way. He wants to go back to hole 11, then hole 10, then back to the beginning of the summer and just live this on repeat. Again and again until he’s doing 500 push-ups a day and running an 18-minute three-mile. Again and again and again until he’s fucking bulletproof. Because he’s not ready yet.

Greg takes a nip and offers the flask to Phil. Phil demurs.

“I don’t wanna wipe you out.”

Greg holds up one finger, reaches into his back pocket, and pulls out another flask. It’s the funniest thing Phil’s ever seen. Could be in spite of how low he’s feeling, could be because of it. Could be that the whole point of being drunk is to melt those extremes together into one overwhelming happysad emotional lump. But it’s the funniest thing Phil’s ever seen. He’s laughing, his stomach hurts, his abs are cramping. Caroline’s cackling, Greg’s saying, I keep that fuckin thang on me, you know I keep that mothafuckin thang on me.

They have six holes to go and it’s almost 10:30. They’re the last people on the course, and they’re not even on the course. They’re stopped on the arched bridge between holes, leaning on the railing to catch their breath. Passing the flask around again, and one more time. The pirate ship looms behind them, standing sentry, watching their backs. Phil can hear bass thumping somewhere in the distance. As he cranes his neck to see where the noise is coming from, he looks towards the kiosk and finds Pete illuminated in the window, glaring at them.

“Ah fuck, I think my boss is pissed.”

“The summer’s over, man. What’s he gonna do, make you join the Marine Corps? Send me back to Iraq?”

Phil thinks it’s beyond cool, how Greg can just joke about Iraq like that. It’s the coolest fucking thing he’s ever seen, the casual mention of Iraq. Actually, everything about Greg is the coolest fucking thing Phil’s ever seen. He’s going to college for free on the GI Bill and he’s dating Caroline. Maybe Greg’s face is the face Phil needs to picture, instead of the guys on the news. Maybe this carnival game isn’t rigged, either.

“If he doesn’t want us to play minigolf,” Caroline slurs, “then we should go to the driving range.”

Greg smiles. “For sure.”

Phil pretends he understands what’s going on.

Caroline steps back onto the twelfth hole green, throws her ball in the air, and swings at it like a baseball player hitting fungoes. She misses, spinning halfway around with the force of her swing. On her second try, she launches her royal purple golf ball into the night sky. It bounces loudly on the street and disappears into the Clam Jammer’s bushes.

hey!” Pete screams from the kiosk. “hey!”

“Oh shit,” Greg says. “Hide the evidence!” He throws his putter javelin-style onto the thirteenth hole. It comes to rest against the log through which Phil has sent hundreds of golf balls. “Let’s run.”

Greg scrambles off the bridge and grabs Caroline’s hand. They half-hurdle, half-fall over the retaining wall that separates Pete Pete’s Putt Putt Palace from the surrounding sidewalk.

hey!” Pete yells again, storming across the course now. “there’s a three-dollar lost ball fee! hey! phil, get them back here!”

“Let’s go, dude!” Greg shouts to Phil.

i’m calling the police! phil, i’m calling your mom!

Pete’s first threat rings hollow; the dozen or so police officers lucky enough to call Surf Haven their beat are unlikely to assist in collecting a three-dollar lost ball fee. It’s the second one that gives Phil pause. I’m calling your mom is a kid’s threat. Boot camp starts in twelve days, but it hasn’t started yet. Phil can wave goodbye to Greg and Caroline, crawl back home like he’s snoozing an alarm to stay under the covers for just ten more minutes, still a kid, kicking against a cage, warmed by the righteous anger Phil’s clung to since his mom handed him that mug of hot chocolate.

When Phil asked why, she said the flame between them just went out. He asked why again, and that was when she said they’d grown apart. Because Phil actually remembers this happening, it hurts worse than when Phil’s real dad died, T-boned by a drunk driver on his way home from the fire house. Phil was three years old. All he remembers is a bristly mustache on his cheek. But even that might be a fake memory born instead from the picture on Phil’s wall of his dad holding him on the beach at Surf Haven, their faces smushed together.

A real memory: Phil’s eighth birthday. Mike, wearing one of the two dress shirts he owns, hands Phil a giftwrapped aircraft carrier, easily four feet long, complete with mini planes, sailors, and Phil’s favorite, a Marine figurine in green camo with a tiny black rifle. His mom would never let Phil play with toy guns or “war stuff.” She made an exception for the aircraft carrier. There’s a home video of Phil sitting in the grass, completely silent for a full minute, staring at his aircraft carrier. It was the best gift he ever got.

Now, of the three parents Phil’s had, his dad’s gone, Mike’s gone, and Phil’s leaving his mom. Joining the Marine Corps. Has joined the Marine Corps. No backing out, the contract’s signed. The choice is made; now’s about living with it. Living up to it. Living it up.

Phil drops his putter and leaps over the retaining wall. With Greg and Caroline, he runs, laughing and listening to their feet slap against the sidewalk. Phil knows there’s something bad on the horizon, as sure as he’ll be hungover tomorrow. Phil will have to figure out a way home at some point, he’ll have to face Pete in less than twelve hours or walk away from his last two weeks of pay.

But right now? Right now, Phil’s fucking hammered. Right now, Caroline’s saying she’s sure Becca won’t mind if Phil comes over with them, and she’s also saying Phil shouldn’t get his hopes up because it’s just gonna be ten or twenty people playing beer pong. But Phil’s hopes are up. They’re up like a ball tossed in the air, nearing the weightless moment at the top of its arc. Gravity will win soon, but right now, the only way is up, and Phil’s wondering how high he might go.

***

Adam Straus is a Marine veteran. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Iowa Review, The Hopkins Review, trampset, JMWW, Pithead Chapel, and elsewhere. Adam holds an MFA from Rutgers-Camden. You can find him on Twitter @AdamStraus29 or at adamstrauswriter.com.

“Snarge” by Brianna Steidle

“Snarge” by Brianna Steidle is our Poem of the Week.

Brianna Steidle is a poet, translator, and dog trainer. She holds an MFA from The Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University, where she teaches poetry and fiction. Her work has appeared in Plume and elsewhere.
 

Snarge

So this is how a starling looks
emerging from the left turbine
of a dredged-up Electra.

The personal effects, still dripping,
have been catalogued and sent away.
The wreck-site ornithologist

recalls that starlings recognize
songs by chains of sound
not unlike syllables.

Human speech is infinite.
The birds are considered invasive
in many places. Always,

the scientist tells her apprentices,
trust that you will know a feather
when you see it
. Her analysis

is only as good as her specimens.

From time to time a passing jet
startles a bird of prey
into unlocking its talons,
and its catch is sucked into the engine.

Like this, Nostradamus told his secretary
he was dying. The legions of ill
at Aix and Lyon had taken their toll.
The Centuries flew out of him.

As a bird snaps open
       its wings, it doubles

in space. Pay attention.
       There, on the scan the dark

is air or the hollow large intestine.
       The white is a mass

of highly saturated crystals,
       also called a cloud.

A tangle like downed phone lines
       signals a teratoma. We classify it

with the language of children:
       mature or immature.

Don’t say malignant. Instead
       what comes to mind is

Sturnus vulgaris. A cell of starlings
       lifting off in the shadow of a jet.

It doesn’t take a prophet—
the ornithologist must confirm
her suspicions with a microscope

and a European starling
from the Smithsonian collection.
Who knows when its feet withered.

Tucked so, they conjure in her
long days bent over
maps of the aortic branches.

The ornithologist recommends
long-range acoustic devices
to douse the tarmac

in starling distress calls.
The speakers pump fear,
steady and wide, over the runways.

Among birds,
there is no mistaking it.
 

Author’s Note

“Snarge” refers to avian debris near a plane or airport—the same word for a feather on the tarmac or a whole bird. It’s hazardous in the turbines but also in us. I wrote this poem while in limbo between a routine MRI scan that turned back startling news and the follow-up testing that would give me direction. As I waited, the poem searched—for form, fact, and closure. Nothing was straightforward then, not even a clear-cut metaphor of the body, my body, as debris. I haven’t touched the poem since the surgery. Snarge is dangerous because it reminds us of our imitation. We burn thousands of gallons of fuel to stay aloft. We do what it takes.

“Wash” by Kieron Walquist

“Wash” by Kieron Walquist is our Poem of the Week.

Kieron Walquist (he/they) is a queer poet and visual artist from mid-Missouri. Author of the chapbook Love Locks (Quarterly West, 2023), their other work is found / forthcoming in Best New Poets 2022, Hayden’s Ferry Review, IHLR, Oxford American, and elsewhere. A 2022-23 Fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, he holds an MFA from Washington University in St. Louis and was awarded the Missouri Review 2022 Poem of the Year.
 

Wash

                                You blueprint a body | cookie-cut an acre | pour concrete |
       raise lumber | but forget about winter | our labor in limbo | the wind a bullet |
the half-built a whole lot of holes | target paper|
                                       yeah | I was Sunday-slow | mixed Phillips + hex
                     screwdrivers | was no help | was obscene + obnoxious | my Walkman
       loud | like a pinball machine | I’d stim + shadowbox | across plywood + drywall
scraps | kick up sawdust | power cords |
                                       + yeah | you were right | I was lost | in my own world |
                     may never learn | you’d knock a door off | its hinges | saddle it
       to two sawhorses | palm the DeWalt sander | mustard-yellow |
                                                                                     but y’know what | my world
                     included you | of course it did | you were there | father | with me |
       hey look | here’s you plugging in the sander | it pulls power | flickers the light
                 | the whirr
when you sand | cyclone | kick up sawdust |
                                     hey listen | once you’re done we can hear Van Halen |
                on KCMQ | CLASSIC ROCK | our radio paint-splattered | + precarious |
       on an overturned bucket | here we varnish | dip the sleeve of an old t-shirt
                 into the stain |
walnut | dark as Folger’s coffee |
                                      Jesus Christ | the fumes | the force | burrowing a hole
                     in the head | hey listen | we’re laughing | washing the woodgrain |
       its calligraphy | we count the lines | the years out loud | leave it to gloss | leave
                 to wash
at the well | our breath in the cold | sanding | cyclones |
                                                   I’m here | right here | learning | you teach me|
                            to get varnish off your hands | you must wash them|
                                                                                                                       in gasoline
 

Author’s Note

I was at a residency in Provincetown and missing my father. In the morning, I’d wake to the sound of saws and sanders—a neighbor was rebuilding after a storm—and with it, I was back in Missouri, on a small farm, watching my father work on our home. I wrote “Wash” little by little, as I remembered it: the cold, the dust, the radio, the varnish. We loved each other quietly, and still do.

“Salt and Corruption” by Ben Kissam

BLAST, TMR’s online-only prose anthology, features prose too vibrant to be confined between the covers of a print journal. Once a multi-billion-dollar industry in today’s money, the illicit business of “crimping” thrived in nineteenth and early twentieth-century port cities on the West Coast. “Crimping” names the practice of kidnapping able-bodied men for forced labor on lengthy sea voyages. In language that captures the briny, shady spirit of the times, Ben Kissam’s “Salt and Corruption” offers a fascinating account of a once widespread, now little-known form of human trafficking that ruined numerous American lives.

Salt and Corruption

Ben Kissam

 

Henry Short had a family who cared enough to notice he was missing—and this made him unique. After his disappearance in 1901, his parents no doubt questioned their decision to raise their son, who had just turned 15, in the still-wild Pacific Northwest. At the time, Seattle was home to just over 80,000 people—and home, too, to a booming black market that prayed on young men like Henry.

The Shorts filed a missing person report at the local police station, but in their hearts, they knew it’d do no good. In fact, the uniformed officers across from them might have helped make their son disappear. Still, Henry’s parents told the police their suspicion: they believed he had been shanghaied.

It’s a shame Henry’s height or weight wasn’t documented by the police that day. If we knew that he was tall or fat, we could say with more confidence that he was probably dead by the time his parents realized he was missing. The dose of opium or laudanum he was given would have been more likely to stop his heart: bigger men needed large doses to knock them out for sixteen hours, and the crimps, whose business it was to get teens like Henry to swallow the drugs unknowingly, weren’t exactly anesthesiologists.

“Crimp” was a term used in Seattle at the time to refer to a person who was, more or less, a sea pimp. Crimps took many forms: landlords, boardinghouse owners, barkeeps, prostitutes, or anyone whose line of work brought them to the docks or the seedy establishments frequented by sailors and desperate men.

Many people wanted to be a crimp. There was big money in it if you did it well. Drugging a man, beating him up, and dragging him on board a ship for months of forced labor was worth $30 to $50 in the eyes of a ship captain—roughly $1,100 to $1,800 today.

Crimping originated in London in eighteenth-century Napoleonic times and remained a reason to keep your head on a swivel at the docks in Liverpool, New York, and Sydney for the next hundred years. But at the turn of the twentieth century, everyone knew the most dangerous docks in the world were located on the upper West Coast in cities like Seattle, Portland, and San Francisco. Had Henry been shanghaied in Portland, he might have been drugged in a bar and held in an underground tunnel until dawn, possibly even dropped through a trapdoor in the floor, before being dumped on a ship. In San Francisco, Henry might have come face-to-face with Johnny Devine, also known as The Shanghai Chicken. Seattle didn’t have tunnels or a kingpin with a cool nickname, but residents knew that any bar south of Yesler Way was a place to avoid. Crimping took place to “an alarming extent” in these areas, the Seattle Star reported.

At the time, the port city of Shanghai was one of the largest and busiest in the world. It took about sixty days to get there by boat and no direct route back home existed, so a sailor would have to sojourn along the West Indies and through the Middle East to Alexandria and London before returning to America. A direct route from London to West Coast port cities like Seattle did exist, but the Panama Canal did not—so ships had to travel south and around Cape Horn at the tip of Chile—some 18,000 miles total. It could easily be two years before you returned home.

As a result, sailors avoided working these routes. But captains still needed sailors. In those days, a sailor was paid his 20 percent advance before the ship left, but never in cash. Captains set up lines of credit at local shops that provided crews with clothes, food, shelter, tobacco, and alcohol. The sailor would only receive the remaining 80 percent of his earnings if he completed his voyage, months or even years later. For a ship captain, the decision to pay crimps for their service was purely economic. When a man got shanghaied, the captain simply gave the 20 percent advance to his captor—a great deal for the captain and the most reprehensible sort of finder’s fee you’ve ever heard of.

Captains also had plenty of tricks up their torn, salty sleeves to avoid paying the final 80 percent. When a boat got stuck in the port waiting to unload—which could take months—sailors were not permitted to leave the vessel, even with land in sight. Budget-conscious captains used this delay to their advantage. They fed their crews rotten meat, distributed dirty water, and supplied inadequate clothing, all in an effort to get them to quit. Months and sometimes years of work would get wiped away if a sailor broke his contract. It was far cheaper to get sailors to whom you owed money to jump ship, then pay the crimps at the docks to shanghai a new crew. Occasionally, a man would jump ship sans pay after months at sea on the same boat, only to get drugged a few nights later and end up back on the same boat under the same captain.

In 1890, eleven years before Henry Short was shanghaied, a broker in San Francisco named James Laflin recorded over $71,000 in advances for 1,168 crimped sailors—over $60 each—paid out to his network of crimps. Today, that would be a sum of $233 million. Apply that figure to more than 100,000 crimped men from 1850 to the turn of the century, when Henry disappeared, and you’ve got a black-market industry easily worth billions.

As is often the case, with good business came corruption, and in 1901, crimping was still soaring to new heights in North America. This is when an already brutal practice got darker.

*

Nine years after Henry vanished, the New York Times ran an article about crimping titled “Why Sailors Prefer the Old to the New Method.” Five years later, crimping would be outlawed for good.

For fifty years, loggers, farmers, and boozehounds were the type of Americans who got drugged and tossed on ships. While these men came from different backgrounds, they had common qualities that made them shanghaiable:

Strengths… Vitality and resilience.
Interests… Money, women, and free liquor.
Location… The wide-open West Coast.

Despite their foul mouths and often modest educations, sailors weren’t stupid. They were, in fact, incredibly street-smart. So much so that roughly every twelve months, crimps had to change their methods and adapt their ruses as word about them spread.

When the men grew privy to what led to their capture—drinking drugged liquor—they started refusing free drinks. As a result, one shanghaier in San Francisco partnered with a cigar bar owner to give away free samples—which had been laced with opium.

When the shanghaiable became aware of who was shanghaiing them, the crimps stopped showing their faces at the docks. They instead hired a team of runners, usually other young poor boys, and overpowering sailors with brute force became the new method. Runners were encouraged to build rapport with boys from good families like Henry Short or play the fool with unsuspecting Native Americans and immigrants from Mexico and Central America who started showing up in town.

Once again, the sailors adjusted. They quickly learned to ignore any kids who approached them. Hell, ignore anyone you don’t know.

Everything changed when the crimps started paying off the police.

Cops were already known to occasionally shanghai a man out of convenience. A drunkard who acted up near the docks or bothered women in saloons might be handcuffed and dragged to the next departing boat. Crimps were known to slip an officer a cool $20 bill for his trouble. But once the police were officially on the take, the threshold for “crimes” committed loosened greatly, and news spread that young men were being falsely arrested and forced on ships. As a result, San Francisco police officers who patrolled the docks were required to carry not only a revolver and baton, but a twelve-inch knife, as many men decided that maiming or even killing a police officer was their best chance to escape.

Over and over, the pipeline of shanghaiable men dwindled, but the demand for sailors did not. Eventually, barkeeps and landlords were backstabbed—and many who crimped others got crimped themselves. In one instance in San Francisco, a pastor was summoned to a ship about to leave port and asked to “bless” a supposedly dying man on board. The last image of land he ever saw was of two people exchanging cash on the docks.

Eventually, the crimps realized they had a business problem. Crimping one man at a time was too expensive. So the crimps did what any struggling business owner would do: scale. And they did so to devastating effect.

*

All day, there had been a buzz around San Francisco. A wealthy man was throwing a birthday party for himself on a yacht? Everyone’s invited? Young boys and prostitutes dressed in street clothes handed out flyers all day.

“Free booze!” they shouted. “Free liquor! Get it while it’s still there!”

Several hours later, one hundred men lay unconscious on the deck of a rented yacht. A team of runners worked until dawn, dragging carcasses off the rented boat in fishing nets and distributing them among the captains.

After a decade or two of turning a blind eye to the disaster by the docks—crimping was heavily reported in newspapers—politicians got in bed with the crimps, too. In exchange for a cut of the action, they squashed any talk of lawsuits or unionization before it left city hall. Word was then passed down by lawmakers to the crimps: “Do what you have to do.”

Runners stopped looking for a man to shanghai. Now they looked for men. Early in the evening, they would enter bars and casually learn the name of every man inside. Hours later, after the men were drunk, the runners marched into the saloon with a police force at their sides, telling the men to get on a boat or go to jail for breaching their contracts.

“We didn’t sign any contracts!” the men argued.

A contract with their name (often misspelled) and an unfamiliar signature was brandished, and off they went.

Crimping started to die off in New York, but you could still get away with it in cities that were raw and growing—Seattle, Portland, and San Francisco. Every day, new faces showed up in need of work.

Henry Short was drugged or beaten. Whether he was part of a group or a more expensive solo catch, there’s no doubt about the method of his capture. Ship captains didn’t pay full price for conscious men, since they knew they’d either have to knock the man out themselves or drug him to prevent him from jumping overboard.

But what became of a boy like Henry after that?

Say he was sent to Shanghai and made it there in sixty days. Everything went right—as right it could—and after two long years, Henry made his way back to Seattle and his family. Only, his parents no longer lived at 308 Union Street. His neighbors, now speaking to a shaggy man missing several teeth, tell him they left abruptly when their son went missing. They moved to Philadelphia. Or maybe it was Chicago.

Having spent every cent he earned getting home, a boy like Henry wouldn’t know how to proceed. Seattle would have changed greatly in his absence, with more right angles and clean lines and far fewer muddy roads—much different from the cold, damp, swaying existence he was used to.

So Henry walks to the saloon he sometimes visited as a boy. It’s under new ownership now. A strange man, disgusted at Henry’s musk and appearance, spits at his feet. No matter—he’s now quite used to being treated like scum. He knows a place like this is the only kind of bar that extends credit to people like him, so he orders a whiskey to plot his next move.

A boy with a dirty face approaches. He’s wearing a cravat.

“Need a job, mister?”

Henry looks up from his drink. “What’s it entail?” he asks.

“The job?” the boy says. “Bit o’ everything, really.”

“You’ll be my boss?” Henry laughs.

“No, sir,” the boy says earnestly. “My father runs a logging business in town. Dollar fifty a day.”

Henry considers. Something feels off. “No, thanks,” he says.

The boy disappears without another glance, confirming Henry’s instinct. The bartender hands him another drink.

“On the house,” Henry says.

“Cheers.” He doesn’t make eye contact.

Henry stares into the heart of his whiskey, scanning for irregularity, wondering if he should have taken the kid up on that job after all. He takes a long sip, figuring what the hell.

Some time later, he wakes to a familiar scent of rusted metal and sea salt. The subtle red behind his eyelids is the same color as the ocean at dawn. His core muscles instinctively find traction, flexing to the deck against the gentle sway of the ocean.

Henry isn’t as mad about getting crimped a second time. No longer a boy, he doesn’t have a resume or references or even enough vitamin C to keep his immune system healthy. What he does have are scars on his forearms from rope burns and on his knuckles from fighting. Until society comes to the defense of shanghaied men, which won’t happen for another thirteen years, he’s got no chance at a normal, free life. Outside this floating prison cell, he hasn’t got a pot to piss in. You see? He’s even got a sailor’s mouth.

***

Ben Kissam is a writer and marketing strategist. He’s the author of two books, including the bestselling satirical self-help book I Am Not Your Guru (Yet), which at one time had a small and strange cult following. His essays and stories can be found in the Boston Globe, Red Bull, and Slackjaw. His writing can be found at benkissam.com.

“On Renting” by Sara Fetherolf

“On Renting” by Sara Fetherolf is our Poem of the Week.

Sara O. Fetherolf (she/they) is the author of Via Combusta, selected by Quan Barry for the New American Poetry Prize and published by New American Press in 2022. They won the 2021 Iron Horse Long Story award and they have written text for song cycles and short operas that have been performed around the country. Her writing appears in publications like Best Microfiction 2023, Gulf Coast, CALYX, Storm Cellar, and Gigantic Sequins. They have an MFA from Hunter College and a PhD from University of Southern California. Find her work at sarafetherolf.com.
 

On Renting

This 10AM, the landlord
walks by my bedroom window,
showing the city utility worker
to the gas meter.
I would prefer that he not

know I’m asleep this late, his footsteps
and shadow filtering through
the blinds. I would prefer he not know
the extravagant heating bill we’ve racked up
this rainy January.

I’d prefer he not see the tall weeds
growing around the meter and take it
upon himself to chop
them to the quick. I’d prefer
to not feel Protestantly guilty

for how in my privacy I am
weedy & extravagant, a late sleeper.
Once, I was taught the Lord
owns my life, spreads the sky
like a ceiling over my head, grants money

to those he favors, lightning otherwise.
I suppose the landlord is
a small, frumpy incarnation of that
Lord, taking it upon himself
to trudge past my window

and inspect the meter, talk
to the lime-vested employee
who is calculating our bill
and not his. In the last days
of my faith, I came to think of the Lord

as an enormous grub,
pillowy & pale as curdled milk.
He eats rot into this earth
like a maggot into a potato
but it is human meat

He craves. He wants to make us
in His image by consuming
us down to the bone.
Then I decided I was being unfair
to the grubs, who are, after

all, only naïve
and hungry. I do not believe
the landlord is acting on instinct
when he wriggles through my
morning, but rather some assumed

righteousness. Please don’t catch me,
I think, a blanket at my throat.
Let me send the old gods
after him: Hermes, the thief,
who adores the delicate skins

of true maggots and their instinct
for taking what they need.
Let me send a banshee
to howl at his mailbox
each time he opens a rent check.

Let me send the gods that are grubs
to consume him. It is not even,
honestly, that he is an unkind man.
I should be Protestantly grateful
he loaned us buckets

when the rain came through
and faithfully called the cheapest
workmen to come fix the roof.
In the letter about raising our rent,
he left a polite paragraph

insisting he ought to raise it more, only
he knows times are hard.
Praise be, I guess.
But I am not one who trusts
righteousness, and the old

gods whisper to me:
Let the weeds grow high.
Let blood and rain and bone meal
feed them. Let the maggots eat
the bills. Once upon a time,

they tell me, it will be
your footsteps you hear
outside your bedroom window.
In that country there will be
no gas meter, only

cooking fires & newborn wolves & stars
maggoty overhead.
The wilderness that is to come
is not yours, but it sure as hell
is no one else’s either.

It is biding its time.
It wants blood, not money.
There is no one, they say,
on earth who can escape
its appetite.
 

Author’s Note

Last year, I made a pledge to draft a new poem every day. Most of these drafts were not very good. But even in the bad drafts, I found myself circling the same images and incidents day after day, as if my subconscious were looking for something I couldn’t name yet. About once every two weeks, I would come up with a draft that finally resolved for me an idea I’d been chasing after. “On Renting” began as such a draft, after two weeks of writing rant-y poems about my busybody landlord and my contradictory desires to have a home that I own and to abolish all forms of private land ownership. Hermes, the thief god, kept showing up in my poems around this time, and I think the turn toward the old gods helped me to find a deeper resolution than I had in previous drafts.

In general, it was a useful revelation to know that I could write bad poems day after day and trust that I was working toward something I couldn’t see yet. It has reshaped how I approach my writing life, and I am glad the first of these poems is entering the world here.

“Song Night” by Robert Long Foreman

Parents often worry, “Am I doing this right?”—a question that takes on humorous complexity in Robert Long Foreman’s “Song Night,” which tells the story of a pot-smoking father who discovers his teenage daughter has been following in his footsteps. Beset with concerns no less pressing for being commonplace—about the quality of his parenting, about the strength of his marriage—the narrator learns from his daughter and her friend how to loosen up. First published in TMR issue 46.4 (Winter 2023), “Song Night” is a tender, funny account of what it looks like to bend to contingency—to be along for the ride, to be a river, broad and strong but also helpless in its outflow.

Song Night

Robert Long Foreman

I thought about calling this “What We Do in the Basement,” because there are several things we do in our basement.

It’s a good basement. It’s furnished. It has a fireplace, a couch, a TV we rarely use, and some comfortable chairs. The carpet is ugly, but so are most carpets. It came with the house, so I guess it has other people’s eyelashes mashed between the fibers. There’s a desk and a chair, where I sit and work all day. I have a record cabinet with all my records and a turntable on top. Sometimes I remember that I live in the twenty-first century, so I plug my phone into the receiver and play a song from an online streaming service. What a world. What a basement.

Clara, my wife, keeps her workout stuff there: a yoga mat and weights. She’s not huge, but she’s toned. Some people like to spend their time defining words. Clara spends a portion of every day defining her biceps and calves. She does it in the morning, before I wake up.

When I wake up, I make breakfast, eat breakfast, and take Clara’s place. I go to work as an in-house editor for an investment firm. I don’t tone muscles, I tone documents. I don’t bulk them up; there’s no writing involved; I only further define them, streamline sentences, cut paragraphs in half. It’s like yoga for reports and prospectuses down there.

The basement is also where Kristin and I have Song Night every Wednesday night. She’s our only child, because one is more than enough.

I never thought I’d have a daughter named Kristin. I had a bad girlfriend once named Kristin. She even spelled it with those same two i’s. She wasn’t the meanest woman I dated in my twenties, but she was harsh. I’d rather not get into how.

It was Clara’s idea to name our daughter that. She insisted. And it’s fine, because since then our Kristin has all but washed away the memory of that other one who was mean. I hardly recall what her face looked like.

When she was six years old, Kristin and I started having basement parties. They weren’t real parties. No booze was involved, though I have been smoking cannabis in the backyard every night for almost as long as Kristin has been alive.

Cannabis is okay. It’s not a drug that obliterates me like alcohol does. It slows my mind in a pleasant way. It allows me to focus on one thing at a time, like the songs Kristin wants me to listen to on Song Night.

When we had our first parties, way back when she was six, Kristin wanted to play board games, not listen to songs. She and I played Sorry! and Trouble until nine thirty every Wednesday night, when she had to go to bed. After the board game phase, we played video games: Knights and Bikes, Heave Ho. She turned ten, eventually, and got obsessed with The Sims. She wanted to find out what would happen if she led a Sim into a room and removed all the doors. It’s what Edgar Allan Poe would have done if he’d had access to a Sim.

We found out what would happen. The Sim starved to death.

Kristin laughed. I didn’t.

Okay, I did. I laughed a lot, actually—mostly because Kristin was laughing so hard it was infectious.

For about five years in there, our parties were suspended. Kristin was caught in the throes of puberty, a phenomenon that occurs among many teenagers. She went from being a little girl to being a stranger who hated me and Clara and wanted us to be miserable from the moment we woke up to when we went to bed.

But Kristin’s was a regularly scheduled animosity: puberty is an evil spirit that visits all children as soon as they’re no longer children. When it came to our house and brought its discord, no one was surprised. We were just hurt. For years. Like we’d never been hurt before.

We get along better now. Kristin and I have parties again, but they’re not like they once were. They’re shorter now, and they’re not really parties; they’re Song Night.

I was surprised when she said she wanted to resume our parties. At fifteen, she told me she’d always hated our parties, even when she was six. She’d only agreed to attend them because she felt sorry for me, because I didn’t have friends and she could tell how pathetic I was.

It wasn’t true. I have friends. I’ve always had at least one friend. But I am insecure about everything, and Kristin had found some exposed flesh. She dug the knife in and twisted it like her hormones told her to do, for I was her father, and I had to be diminished.

Now on Song Night, Kristin sits on the basement floor with her loser dad. We take turns playing songs for one another. I’m glad we didn’t do this when she was younger. Her taste in music isn’t perfect, just as mine isn’t, but it’s better than when she listened to songs made for people whose brains hadn’t fully developed yet.

Now she listens to MIA. It was one of the first revelations of Song Night. I knew some MIA songs—but not “Bingo,” until Kristin played it for me. It is one of the woman’s best tracks, and I never knew. When I asked where she found it, she said, “Greta showed it to me.”

Greta is her best friend. They’ve known each other since they were eight.

But at our most recent Song Night, I had to ask Kristin a different question: Where did she get the idea that she should smoke marijuana?

I knew the answer. It’s the same answer the kid gave his dad in an antidrug commercial I saw on TV forty times a day in the 1980s: “From you, Dad. I learned it from watching you.”

I had noticed that Kristin’s eyes looked red. I asked her why that was. She said she had been scratching them. Her eyes were itchy. That was all.

I kept watching her. I observed that when we talked, she appeared to be on a one-second delay.

I asked Kristin point-blank if she was high. She shrugged and said yes. Then I asked her my question: What had possessed her to take up smoking marijuana?

She said, “Why are you calling it that?”

“Because that’s what it’s called. It’s what it is.”

“But when you talk about it when you’re not mad, you call it ‘cannabis.'”

“Kristin.”

“Dad.”

“When did this start? You doing this?”

“Six months ago. I learned it from you.”

There it was.

“Don’t say you learned it from me,” I said. “Please.”

“It’s okay, Dad.”

“No, it is not. Not at all.”

“But then, what? It’s okay when you do it?”

“I’m middle-aged. No one cares what happens to my brain. It’s too late for me and my brain. Yours is fresh. You still have a chance.”

We were silent for a half-minute, Kristin leaning back against my record collection.

What was I feeling? Shame? It was something like shame, but I also knew this wasn’t such a big deal. Teenagers get high. They’ve been doing it since at least the 1960s. They probably did it in the 1860s. And why shouldn’t they? Sure, they should take care of their internal organs, but then, everything causes cancer, now that the world is a trash heap. Even the water we drink causes cancer, as does the air we have no choice but to breathe. And it’s not like teenagers have urgent business to attend to that being stoned would prevent them from addressing properly. They should probably be high all the time, since in the years ahead, there’s nothing but dullness awaiting them and people they won’t like having to deal with but who are somehow in charge of whether they keep their jobs and how much money they’ll make.

She said, “Do you want to hear my song or not?”

I grunted. She took it as a yes.

She played a song she’d discovered on Spotify called “Run Cried the Crawling” by Agnes Obel. It was atmospheric, with piano and strings and Obel’s breathy Scandinavian vocals all mixed in the same aural pot.

It’s a song that walks around you in a circle, never coming close enough that you can touch it, always out of reach.

“It’s a great song to hear when you’re lit,” Kristin said when it ended.

“Come on,” I said. “Don’t talk like that.”

“Am I wrong?”

“I don’t care if you’re wrong, Krissy. I don’t want to hear you say those kinds of words.”

“What kind of words?”

“‘Lit,'” I sneered.

She laughed.

“I have failed,” I said. “I’m the worst father in the world.”

I felt like such a fool. The song I’d played for her prior to her song was “The Shore” by Corrina Repp. It’s another song that’s even better when you’re high, with those vocals that sound like they emerged from the Marianas Trench—like she’s channeling something ultrahuman—and her guitar tone that has bounced off asteroids on its way to your sad little ears.

To be fair, all songs sound better when you’ve been smoking. It’s like what Ralph Ellison’s unnamed and unseen narrator says at the start of Invisible Man, when he describes listening to Louis Armstrong after smoking a marijuana cigarette.

I ended Song Night early. I was high and felt sleepy, and I was mad at Kristin for doing something I had to admit I’d been doing for a long time, often in her vicinity, which meant I had normalized it for her and it was all but inevitable that she’d take up the habit herself.

The next morning, Kristin was in the kitchen, ready to go to high school. The daily shit show. I came up and looked in her eyes.

She said, “What?”

“You know what.”

Clara was taking a shower. Kristin was standing, eating toast, taking small bites like she always has. Her mouth is pretty small.

She said, “Are you checking to see if I’m high?”

“Are you?” I asked. “High?”

“No.”

“Are you going to get high with Greta before school?”

“No.”

“I don’t believe you.”

“We’re not getting high before school. We tried it once, and she hated it.”

“But you didn’t hate it.”

“No. I did not.” She bit toast and said, munching, “School is terrible.”

“I know it is. It’s school.”

“And getting high makes it easier to deal with how bad it is.”

“You’re a straight-A student.”

“I know. Exactly. It’s fine.”

We heard Greta’s car horn. Kristin shoved the rest of the toast in her small mouth and fled.

I wasted no more time. I went to the bedroom and swung open the bathroom door.

Clara jumped. She yelped. “What,” she cried, “the fuck, John?”

She was naked, putting lotion on herself, her skin like cream and the lotion literally cream. She has perfect legs, a flat stomach. Clavicles straight from heaven.

Clara wasn’t mad that I could see her naked. We’ve been together twenty-one years. She was mad that I’d scared the shit out of her by banging the door open. I hadn’t surprised her that way in a long time.

But my god, Clara looks good without clothes. My freaking god.

She said, “What do you want, John?”

I said, “Kristin gets high.”

“What?”

“Kristin. She smokes marijuana.”

“You mean cannabis. That’s what you usually call it. You always say they only ever called it ‘marijuana’ because they wanted it to sound foreign and dangerous.”

I didn’t know what to say.

Applying a different lotion now to her naked face, which jostled her breasts, because her arms moved a certain way, Clara said, “Are you trying to make our daughter sound foreign and dangerous?”

I said, “Aren’t you mad about it?”

“I’m not happy about it.” She squinted at herself. “I don’t know if I’m mad.”

“Well, what are you, then?”

“I’m your gorgeous, aging wife. Oh, come on. Don’t look at me that way.”

“I just don’t understand how you’re so—”

“So what?”

“You don’t seem to care.”

“I care! I do. It’s just—I don’t know. I smoked pot when I was fourteen. I’ve told you that. Do you have an erection?”

“I do. Yes. You’re beautiful.”

“Well, shut the door. I can’t help you with that right now.”

In the kitchen, both of us clothed, neither of us still lugging an engorged sex organ, we had our second cups of coffee.

“You look worried,” I said.

She said, “I’m not worried.” After a pause: “Okay, I am. I don’t know. This isn’t great.”

“It’s not great,” I agreed. “But how bad is it?”

“It’s not that bad.”

“At least Krissy’s not doing heroin. That we know of.”

“I’m pretty sure she is not into heroin.”

“Or meth. That would be bad.”

“I tried meth when I was seventeen.”

“You did?”

“Yeah.” Clara shrugged. “A few times.”

“Well, no. No. You tried it once. After that, you weren’t just trying it anymore.”

“We need to have a conversation with her about this.”

“I already had one with her.”

“We need to have a better conversation. A real one. You know what I mean; don’t give me that look.”

I knew what she meant. Clara knew how to really talk, especially to Kristin.

So we worked all day, or most of the day. We work from home. We have office jobs without the offices. It’s great.

We cleared our late-afternoon schedules so we could intercept Kristin when she returned home. She walked in with her headphones on and found us sitting in the living room.

She stopped when she saw us and said, “You’re kidding me.”

“What is that supposed to mean?” Clara asked.

I said, standing, “Do you smoke crystal meth? Kristin. Tell us the truth.”

Greta came around the corner behind Kristin. “What’s up, guys?” she said.

I hadn’t expected her to be there. Neither had Clara.

Clara said, “Kristin, why are you wearing headphones when Greta’s here with you?”

Greta said, “We don’t like the same music. She keeps her headphones on in my car so she doesn’t have to hear mine.”

“You don’t talk to each other?”

Greta said, “Not with my music playing.”

“I’ve never even seen meth,” Kristin said, finally answering my question.

“I’ve seen meth,” said Greta. “Didn’t try it, though; they didn’t offer me any.”

“Greta,” I said, “you’re not even supposed to look at meth. Do you want some coffee?”

She did want some coffee. And I wanted to leave Clara and Kristin alone. They had to talk.

I went to the kitchen. Greta followed. I got a whole pot of coffee going. I mean, why not? I asked Greta how her day had gone.

“It was fine,” she said. “Is Kris in trouble?”

“Sort of. It’s complicated.”

“You know about the weed, then.”

“I guess you do it, too? Do your parents know?”

“No way. They’re not nearly as cool as you guys. They’re absolute freaks—in an uptight way, I mean. They get passionate about organizing closets.”

I wondered two things: How did Kristin talk about me and Clara when we weren’t around, and how did I not assume by now that Greta was getting my daughter high every morning before school? She had on a hemp necklace. She had a look in her eye that told you that even if she wasn’t stoned right then, she would be in the next forty-eight hours. Well, let’s be honest: the next four hours.

But wait a second.

I said, “How many times have you and Kristin smoked before school in the morning?”

“Just once.”

“Did she tell you to say that?”

“No. Did she say she would tell me to say that?”

“Greta, no. If she was going to tell you that, why would she tell me first?”

Greta shrugged.

I said, “Did you get Krissy started with this?”

“With smoking? No. She started on her own, with your stuff.”

I nodded. My head felt heavy. “She learned it from watching me. How long have you been doing it?”

“Shoot. Uh. Two years?”

“Has Kristin been doing it that long?”

“No. For her it’s been, like, less than a year. She doesn’t really do it that much.”

“She shouldn’t do it at all.”

“Probably not. It’s better than drinking, though. Our classmate died from drunk driving.”

“I remember.”

“And we don’t drive high. We’re really safe about it. What are you most afraid of, Mr. York?”

“What am I most afraid of?” I sighed.

“Yeah. You can tell me.”

Could I? Really?

Why not.

“I’m afraid,” I said, pouring Greta and myself mugs of coffee, “that my wife is only pretending to still love me.” It may seem strange, my sharing this with Greta, but I’m an open book, always. “I’m afraid that as soon as Kristin’s gone to college or she sees a different opportunity, Clara will drop me completely. Move out of the house or kick me out. And I’ll be all alone because it’s too late for me to go on dates, I’ve only looked worse every year since we met. And Kristin will blame me for the breakup, even if it’s not my fault. She’ll never talk to me again. It could happen literally any day.”

I sipped the coffee I had poured for myself.

“I meant,” said Greta, “what are you most afraid is going to happen to Kristin? Because of the weed thing.”

“Oh.”

“Are you really scared about all that? Are you okay?”

“I’m fine, Greta.”

“It’s so bleak.”

“I know it is. It’s my greatest fear. I thought that’s what you were asking me.”

I sipped more coffee. Greta sipped hers.

“Really, though,” she said, “what’s your worst-case scenario? For Kris?”

“There isn’t one. Or, that’s not true. I don’t want her getting into anything more serious than weed. I don’t want her smoking crack—or doing cocaine.”

“She’s not smoking crack. And no one does cocaine anymore.”

“My friend Jim does cocaine. He makes a lot of money, too. A lot more than I do.”

Before I followed that thought to its natural conclusion—that I should get my hands on some cocaine—Clara and Kristin entered the kitchen. Their eyes were puffed. They had been crying.

I said, “Is everything okay?”

Kristin gave me a big hug, the likes of which she hadn’t given me in a long time. She said, “I’m sorry, Daddy.”

I said, “It’s okay.” I patted her back. “I just want you to be safe. And make lots of money.”

“Fuck that,” she said, pulling back to wipe tears from her eyes.

It really was okay, though. I had already known it was more or less okay—”it” being our whole situation, or life, or whatever.

But that must have been the precise moment when I knew, definitively, that I didn’t care if Kristin smoked cannabis like her father and mother did. Yes, Clara smokes it, too, just not as often as I do.

As long as it didn’t interfere with other aspects of life, what difference did it make? As long as Kristin wasn’t high all the time, what was the harm?

Greta was right. Smoking cannabis was far better than drinking, which was a problem in my family and in Clara’s family. It killed her father and his parents, killed my aunt and uncle, nearly killed my sister before she quit and got religious. It’s far more dangerous to drink than it is to smoke weed. Whether they’re driving or operating heavy machinery, or just hanging out and trying not to break anything, I’d rather have a stoned person do it than a drunk one.

Anyway. That whole episode ended without anything really changing, but with everyone feeling better about the status quo. Kristin didn’t quit smoking, nor did I, nor did Clara. Nor did Greta, I guess.

We didn’t punish Kristin, because she outgrew punishments long ago. They never even worked in the first place. She was always the same impossible child after she was punished as she was before it.

The following week, we had another Song Night. It was better. I felt certain Kristin was high that time, again, but so was I.

She played for me “The Magic Number” by De La Soul, which I’d heard before, though I pretended I hadn’t. I played for her the first song from The Low End Theory by A Tribe Called Quest, and she liked it. She hadn’t heard it. Or she pretended not to have heard it, like I had with “The Magic Number,” the song that says three is the magic number because De La Soul has three guys in it.

Two nights later, that Friday, Kristin and Greta were in Kristin’s room for a while. When they emerged, Greta was holding something made of glass. It was purple, and at first I thought it was a sex toy, which made me feel like I was about to have a panic attack.

Then I saw it was a thing made for smoking stuff out of. Like tobacco.

“Hello?” Clara said, looking up from her phone.

We were watching Succession, but when the TV is on, no matter what we’re watching, Clara looks at her phone.

Kristin said, biting her lip, “Greta thinks we have to get high together.”

“I think it’s the only way,” Greta said.

“The only way to what?” asked Clara.

“To fix everything. Kris told me how tense you’ve all been since the other day.”

“What are you talking about?” I asked. “No one’s tense. We’ve been normal.”

“Exactly,” said Greta. “You’re tense people. I can feel it just standing here.”

Clara said, “Greta, do you talk to all your friends’ parents like this?”

“No,” she said. “You guys are cooler than other parents. Mine especially.”

I knew she was flattering us. I also knew it was true. Most parents are fucking idiots.

“Why,” asked Clara, “do you think us getting high together would be a good thing?”

“I just think it’ll, I don’t know, make things clearer? When you smoke with someone, you’re vulnerable with them. You let yourself be your realest self. You have to.”

She kept talking, but I didn’t pay attention.

I wouldn’t have the best memory of what she said even if I had been listening, because when she finally shut her mouth we all went to the back porch and smoked out of the thing she’d been holding on to.

It was, she said, a steamroller. I’d heard of them but never used one. The way it works is, there’s a hole at the end of the pipe. First you light the weed, cover the hole, and inhale. Then you uncover it and keep inhaling so that all the smoke that’s collected in the body of the steamroller rushes past your mouth into your lungs.

If you’d asked me last year if I would ever smoke weed with my daughter, wife, and daughter’s best friend, I would have said no. But Clara and I had been planning to share a joint halfway through Succession anyway. And it wasn’t like Kristin’s smoking was a secret anymore.

Once we were all sufficiently high, we went back inside and resumed Succession. Greta and Kristin sat with us, not on the couch but on the floor nearby.

“What is this show even about?” Kristin asked.

“Rich people who hate each other,” Clara said.

I said, “It’s like a highbrow version of those reality shows you watch. About wealthy people from the same family who all have massive problems. It’s funny.”

“It doesn’t seem funny,” said Greta.

“It just looks dark,” said Clara, “so it doesn’t seem funny at first. It takes a couple episodes to catch on.”

“It’s like Arrested Development,” I said, “but with a different tone.”

“What’s Arrested Development?” Greta asked.

Clara paused Succession. “Are you kidding me, Greta?”

“About what?”

It turned out, we actually were the worst parents ever, because we’d been raising Kristin for seventeen years and she hadn’t seen Arrested Development. Greta hadn’t either, obviously. So we switched over to Netflix, and Clara found the episode where Michael thinks his brother’s Colombian girlfriend is cheating on him with a guy named Hermano.

The show was as funny as the first time we watched it because for two of the people in our crew, it was the first time they’d seen it. Plus we were high, so for that reason it felt new. It was a good time, and it wasn’t weird like it was a week later, when Greta returned to our house.

She’d been to our house several times in the interim. She comes over a lot.

Clara went to answer the doorbell, saying, “I bet I know who that is”—and found, when she opened the door, that it wasn’t only the Greta she expected, but also the man and woman who had brought her into the world. Greta’s parents.

They really aren’t cool parents.

I mean, I’m not cool. Not at all. Every truly cool person in the world would agree that Clara and I are, despite the flora we smoke, pretty square. But those two are at a whole other level. A squarer one. Like, if we are squares, then they are cubes. Jake and Susan.

They’re tall, like Greta, and blond like Greta. Jake smiles a lot, Susan doesn’t. She wears braces and possibly doesn’t like to smile because she’s shy about wearing braces at age forty-six or whatever.

Like me and Clara, they are products of the Midwest, but unlike us they never left. They have blue eyes and look like they shop for clothes at a little-known boutique called Casual Church Picnic.

Clara said, “Oh!” when she saw all three of them standing there. Three.

The magic number.

“Hello,” said Jake, Greta’s dad, as he walked in. “Greta said you had something to tell us.” Jake is a direct person. He is friendly and good-natured. Direct, though. When he comes to the house, he just walks in.

He didn’t sound upset. He sounded curious to know what Greta had been talking about. Which Clara was, too, just like I was, as I walked into the living room to join them all, having no clue what was going on.

Clara turned to me as I approached and said, “Do I have something to tell them?” brushing her hair back with one hand like Helen Hunt.

“Actually,” Greta said, “Mom? Dad? I’m the one who has something to tell you.” She closed her eyes, took a deep breath, opened her eyes. “I didn’t make those chocolates I gave you on the way here. I lied about that.”

“Okay,” said Jake. “Who made them?”

“What are you talking about?” asked Susan.

“I don’t know who made them,” Greta said. “Like, I don’t know what guy it was. Or lady. My friend got them at the dispensary.”

Susan squinted. “What dispensary? What is that?”

Oh, no, I thought. Oh, fucking no.

I said, though I didn’t want to say it, “A dispensary is where you buy cannabis products. Now that it’s legal.”

Susan said, “What are you saying?”

Jake said, “Did you feed us drugs?”

Clara said, “We didn’t know about this. We had no idea. Greta, my god, what were you thinking?”

“We got stoned here last week,” said Greta. “All four of us. We watched this crazy old show.”

Arrested Development is not old,” I said, and then thought maybe it was.

Jake’s face was bright red now that he’d had a second to process his situation. He took Greta by the arm and said, “We are going home.”

“No, we’re not,” she said, pulling away. “You can’t drive with twenty-five milligrams of THC in your system.”

I said, “Jesus Christ, Greta. Twenty-five?”

She nodded.

“Each?”

She kept nodding.

Susan’s face was white. “Is that a lot?” she asked.

“Yes,” Clara said. “It’s way too much.”

Jake said, “I don’t feel anything. Is this a practical joke?”

“It takes a while to take effect,” said Clara. “You can’t drive home. It’ll hit you soon. Oh, god. Come sit. I’ll get you water.”

Jake said, “I’m fine. I’m not staying here. Greta, come on. Let’s go.”

I said, “It really is dangerous, to drive when you’re high.”

“I’m not high!”

“Jake, I’m sorry. You’re going to be high soon.”

“I don’t do drugs,” he said, looking at Susan. “We don’t do drugs.”

“You do now,” Greta said.

Was she trying to get herself killed?

“Is this something you people do?” Jake asked.

“Drug people?” I said. “Without their consent? Absolutely not.”

“He means,” said Clara, “do we use cannabis.”

“Oh,” I said. “Yeah, we do that a lot. It’s great.”

“I’m scared,” said Susan.

“Don’t be scared,” said Greta. “It’s beautiful. You’re about to have the time of your life.”

“Bullshit,” Jake barked.

“It’s really not going to be any fun,” I said. “You’ll be lucky if you’re not comatose in twenty minutes.”

“He’s exaggerating,” Clara said, “and that’s not helpful, John. You’ll be fine, you just have to ride this out.”

Susan asked, “How do you know so much about marijuana?”

“We don’t know that much,” I said.

Clara said, “We’ve been smoking for a long time.”

Jake sat on the couch and shook his head.

Was he feeling it yet?

It was strange. These parents were older than us by several years, but they had no experience with this controlled substance that when I was growing up was a rite of passage. Everyone smoked weed at some point, even if it was to try it and find out they didn’t like it.

Where the hell had these two been? Had they never in their lives gone to a party?

No, I thought. Probably not.

They looked frightened and angry. Susan sat with her hands clenched between her knees. Her eyes darted around the room like we might have on one of our walls a blacklight poster of a languid wizard holding a long pipe out of which he’s smoking some uncertain substance, with a dragon standing behind him, also smoking a pipe. Weed art, I mean, the likes of which you’d expect to see on the walls of college dorm rooms.

But we didn’t have any art on our walls. We did have a clock.

“It’s going to be all right,” I said, sitting in the chair nearest to them while Clara brought them glasses of water. “It’ll be intense, but it’s like having too much to drink. It messes with your mood, and you feel bad. Then it’s over. You’re back to normal. It’s easy to forget that once it’s over, you’ll get your life back.”

Jake looked at me like he didn’t know what to say.

“It might even be kind of fun,” I said, “before it gets bad.”

Clara said, “I can drive you home once you level off. I just don’t think you should be in a car when it hits you.”

“Why not?” asked Susan.

“Oh, I don’t know,” Clara said. “You might throw up.”

“Cars are the worst place to throw up,” I said. “I’ve done it.”

“I don’t think they need to hear details about that,” Clara said, which was smart because I was about to offer details. “The best thing is to go home and sleep through it.”

“You’ll probably wake up feeling normal,” I said, “and you’ll have had the best night’s sleep of your life.”

Then I had an idea. I asked if they’d ever watched Arrested Development.

“Of course,” said Susan. “What does that have to do with anything?” After she said that, she gazed into the middle distance, as if she could watch the words she’d spoken float across the room.

It was happening. She was beginning to be high.

It was good to learn that we all had one thing in common. We hadn’t tried the same drugs, and they might vote for all the wrong people, but at least we’d watched one of the same TV shows. I said, “It helps to have something to focus on.” I went to Netflix again, found the show again. “I mean, there’s a reason why when people get stoned, they veg out on the couch. Weed and TV are a grand combination.”

Jake was glaring at Greta. “I still don’t feel anything,” he said.

“I feel something,” Susan said, watching her own hand.

As the show began, I remembered something.

“Do we still have those CBD tablets?” I asked Clara. “The ones your sister gave you?”

She said, “I think so. Why?”

“Because CBD helps.”

“How would it help?”

“It’s one of the active chemicals in cannabis,” I told everyone, like I was giving a public service announcement. “THC makes you high, CBD makes you sleepy. It calms you, and when you add it to your system, it kind of neutralizes the THC.”

Clara said, “I don’t have any idea what you’re talking about.”

I said, “I don’t really, either. I just know that the weed strains they put in chocolates like the ones you had are all THC, and if you want to not be as high as you’re about to be, you take CBD. Or chew peppercorns.

“It’s true. Neil Young says so, anyway. If you get too high, chew peppercorns. Scientists say CBD is better, but honestly, in the world of weed wisdom, Neil Young outranks all scientists. It’s never worked for me, though. It just made me taste pepper.”

Susan said, “You mean I have to take more of this stuff if I want to feel normal?”

I said, “Oh, no. You won’t be feeling normal for a while. I just mean, take CBD if you want to be able to stand up in an hour.”

“John,” said Clara, “why don’t you go find the CBD capsules?”

I went to the basement and found the bottle of CBD capsules. When I brought it upstairs, I could feel the tension in the room. I tried to melt it with a joke. I said, “I just got off the phone with High Times. They want you two on their next cover, isn’t that crazy?”

But no one found my joke funny. I didn’t know how much CBD to give them, so I gave them each a capsule.

I think it helped. In the half hour that followed—which we all spent watching Arrested Development with less mirth than the last time we’d watched it—neither of them had a stroke or whatever happens when you take enough THC to give an elephant bloodshot eyes. They merely sat still and didn’t say anything.

Greta asked if the rest of us should get high, in solidarity with her parents.

Jake growled to indicate that he did not want her to do that.

Heather Graham was on the TV when Greta turned to me and asked, “Did you talk to Clara about her leaving you?”

Clara was sitting between me and Greta. “What did you say?” she asked.

“It’s nothing,” I said.

“It’s not nothing,” said Greta. “I think you should talk about it.”

“Greta,” I said, “what the hell has gotten into you?”

“She’s always like this,” Kristin said. “What is she talking about?”

“Yeah,” said Clara, “what is this about, John? What did you do?”

“Nothing,” I said. “I did nothing.”

Greta turned to Clara and said, “He’s scared you’re going to leave him. It’s his greatest fear.”

“How do you know that?”

“He told me,” she said. “I thought you would have talked about it by now.”

“Why would we talk about it?” I said.

“Because you have to. It festers if you don’t. Like a dead animal.”

“It’s true,” said Susan, eyes glued to the screen. “You have to talk about stuff. Or it’s dead animals.”

Greta laughed. “Oh, man,” she said.

“Why are you afraid I’ll leave you?” Clara asked me. “What did you do?”

“Yeah, Dad,” Kristin said. “What did you do?”

“Nothing,” I said. “I did nothing. I’m just scared you’ll leave.”

“Why, though?”

“Because it’s what people do.”

Jake was looking at me. “Not everyone does it,” he said.

“I know that.”

“Oh, god,” he said. “Oh, god.”

I said, “What?”

“Does my voice always sound this way? Am I like this all the time?”

“No,” Clara said. “Well, yes. But you’re going to be fine.” To me, she said, “John, I’m not going to leave you. Why would I do that?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “Things are changing all the time. Kristin is growing up. She’s going to leave soon. People split up when that happens. And I’m scared.”

“Well, I’m scared, too,” she said, and she reached across Greta and held my hand. “We’re scared together, like always. I don’t want that to change. Kristin can leave or stay; it won’t affect how I feel about you.”

I nodded. “Okay,” I said and felt something welling up in me.

“See?” said Greta, patting my shoulder. “It helps to talk about things.”

“Greta,” I said, sweeping a hand through my hair in frustration.

“You really need to learn boundaries,” said Clara.

“Maybe I do,” Greta said, “but I got you two talking, didn’t I?”

The episode ended. Only Susan had been paying attention. It was time for us to drive these people home.

Jake and Susan had eyes as red as stop signs, and when they stood, they did it slowly. The CBD must have helped, because they weren’t lying on the floor, drooling, speaking in tongues, or doing all three at once.

Clara would drive them back in their car. I would follow in my car and bring Clara home. Clara, I was certain, would apologize to them all the way that they’d had to go through this. She might help them into their house. If they let her, she’d help them into their bed, where they’d sink into the mattress and leave behind their waking nightmare for a series of literal nightmares that would play out behind their eyes until they awoke together, groggy but otherwise okay.

Kristin said she’d ride in the car with me.

“Why?” I said. “You hate my car.”

“Because,” she said, “it’s Wednesday night.”

“Far out, Krissy. Just stay here.”

“It’s Song Night, Dad.”

“You want to have Song Night in the car?”

“I don’t know. Yeah.”

I shrugged. “All right,” I said. It was good enough for me.

We got in my 2008 Honda Accord—it’s really an awful car; I don’t blame Kristin for how she feels about it—and she plugged the aux cable into her phone.

A few seconds later, as we pulled away, I heard fuzzy white noise—then a drum, a guitar, a keyboard, and someone going, “Bu-bu-da-dum” over and over again.

It was, I learned later, “I Am the River” by Lael Neale. I hadn’t heard it before.

She sang that she was the river. She sang some other things. And the song was like the fastest, saddest, most desperate anthem of all time. She cried out that like a river, we were all moving.

I wasn’t high, but the music moved through me as if I were. And the car was moving, too, so the song was moving with the car, and everything was moving.

By the third verse, I had a feeling I have had but which I almost never have. It was the feeling of knowing you’re hearing a song that’s telling you about the time you’re living in, that shows you where you are on the map of your unfinished life. It sticks a pin in the world and says, “Look. Pay attention.”

Lael Neale reminded me of something: that people are not the same right now as they were five minutes ago or five seconds ago. There’s no such thing as static electricity. There’s no such thing as a static person. Everyone is changing every moment of every day. They’re hearing songs that make their minds turn on a dime. They’re getting dosed with recreational drugs by young women who only exist because of them.

People leave each other. They stay together. No matter what they do, they’re never the same as they were. They are always moving downstream.

Would I have preferred it if none of this had happened? Would I have liked it more if Kristin didn’t smoke weed? If she’d never taken up the habit?

Of course I would have preferred that. The whole situation was weird. Everything was strange. I would have liked for my little girl to never touch the stuff I smoked. I would have preferred that she get into fitness and nutrition. But I’m nothing like that, myself. I hate fitness and nutrition. Why would she be into that stuff? Being into that stuff sucks ass.

And wishing Kristin could go back to not smoking weed is like how I wish she could be a baby again, for just a few minutes sometimes. I would hold her like I did when she was three months old and on the day she was born. I would feed her mushy peas and press my thumb against the bridge of her nose. But there’s no going back to that. It’s all gone.

Kristin was gone, even though she was right beside me.

She cried so hard when she entered the living world. I stood by as she was born, one of the first to lay eyes on the crown of her little bald head. Starting that instant, I wanted to spend all the time I had left reassuring her that life would be okay, even when it wasn’t, even if she would have to keep moving all the time and never stop, like the woman who insists she is a river and has written a song that proves it.

“What do you think?” asked Kristin. “Wait. Shit. Why are you crying, Dad?”

I shook my head. “A lot of things are too much. All the time.”

“What?”

“It’s a good song.”

“It’s not that good.”

“Do you know how I used to go out a lot? Like, to have coffee and read books? I don’t do that anymore. I can’t anymore.”

“Like, as of right now?”

“No. Never mind.”

I didn’t even know what I was talking about.

I hadn’t gone to read in a coffee shop in a long time. I used to love to have coffee among people I didn’t know and read books I liked. But I hadn’t done it lately, I hadn’t wanted to, and I understood that little change to be a sign of how I’m always changing, despite how I stay mostly the same, across the years, plus or minus some extra pounds I’ve gained and the lines that have crept across my face.

Now I had to play a song for Kristin. That was the deal.

I didn’t have one prepared, and I couldn’t think. So I held the phone up to my mouth and told it to play “Stars and Stripes Forever” by John Philip Sousa.

I turned the volume up loud. Kristin looked at me like I’d lost my mind. And somehow, despite everything that was wrong and could never be fixed, I felt great. I was great. I was a river, one that could never be dammed or contained.

***

Robert Long Foreman wrote the novel Weird Pig and the short story collection I Am Here to Make Friends. His work has been in AGNI, Electric Literature, Cincinnati Review, and other magazines. He lives in Kansas City and at www.robertlongforeman.com.

“Although the Moon Is Not Made of Cheese, Cheese Is, in Its Small Way, Made of Moon” by Matt Prater

“Although the Moon Is Not Made of Cheese, Cheese Is, in Its Small Way, Made of Moon” by Matt Prater is our Poem of the Week.

Matt Prater is a writer from Saltville, VA. His poems have appeared in Spillway, Poet Lore, and the recent Virginia volume of The Southern Poetry Anthology, among other publications.
 

Although the Moon Is Not Made of Cheese, Cheese Is, in Its Small Way, Made of Moon

Keep looking for the gold formula, the grand slam, the grail keeper, home,
        any of that, and we risk overlooking the secrets of an alchemy

we might actually learn—how a towel becomes a teacup,
        or an anvil a griddle, or mud a scone, or the two one.

How does a towel become a teacup? By dunking it in a bowl of tea,
        then holding it over your mouth and squeezing it. How else?

How does an anvil become a griddle? By setting it near a hot fire
        and pouring oil over the surface until the surface is hot and slick

and then dropping on a cheese sandwich or a hunk of onion
        or whatever you will. How does mud become a scone? First,

there is a thunderstorm. Then there is a sprig of wheat.
        Then there is a field tedder. Then there is a millstone. Then

there is a bag. Then there is a sleepy teenager on the last hour of shift,
        stocking the bags while listening to Culture II on earbuds.

Then there is a kitchen counter. Then there is butter.
        Then there is the oven. Then there is the scone.

How do the two become one? If mineral, by heating.
        If vegetable, by grafting. If animal, by bow-chicka-bowwow.

Don’t laugh. Or laugh if you want. But if you laugh, don’t miss this fact:
        there is nothing we really know on earth except change,

and even the parts of change that can’t be controlled can be realized,
        and in that realization a kind of control almost comes into view.

Moreover, it’s taught that in the Garden of Gethsemane,
        Jesus wept tears with the force—perhaps the substance—of blood.

I don’t like to imagine that. But if I can imagine it, I would imagine this:
        that some first flower was the first to drink the blood. One drop

of blood, in one spring flower, in one small garden, in one small city,
        in one small province of one small empire, on one large continent

of a very small planet, in the orbit of one small star, in one small arm
        of a middling galaxy, just one galaxy among a cluster of such,

and all of them as numerous as drops of water
        in that one small planet’s oceans—oceans which are,

in their own way, its blood, and a kind of liquid gold.
        There is something key about becoming that small.

There is something about the opening of the dew to the flax.
        There is something in that even Caesar cannot tax. & somewhere,

perhaps down towards Biloxi on the Little Pearl, goes the Jesus fish,
        what floats through the waters of the world with gold on its tongue.

I sometimes wonder whether that fish’s daughter, or great grandson,
        ever swam all the great length to Ireland to meet Fionn

as the Salmon of Wisdom. Stories transmigrate, like metals,
        through the layers of the tongue. Every word we know

is augured from some older one. So, it’s possible. Perhaps the cow
        that bowed to the King, offering her trough for a room,

went on to birth the progeny who looed and jumped over the moon.
        If we want to know what Caesar requires, we can wash

behind our ears—the ones Jesus admonished, at the end of his tales,
        let those who have them hear. I get in the way of that hearing so often

by talking when I should shut up. Part of the practice—
        of course, of course—lies in knowing when we’ve said enough.
 

Author’s Note

Sometimes beautiful, sometimes disastrous, and often strange, rivers are thin lines that turn and contain everything. During the years of the Covid situation, I found myself back home with family, often sitting outside at a small rivulet near my late grandparents’ farm. That small turn of water, which fed under a fence into an old abandoned mine work, is a natural connection between my town and the cities of Chattanooga, Memphis, and New Orleans. Somehow, that connection was the turn of these lines, their source, as with all poems, otherwise difficult to explain.

“Third Person” by Lydia C. Buchanan

BLAST, TMR’s online-only prose anthology, features prose too vibrant to be confined between the covers of a print journal. The titular “third person” of Lydia C. Buchanan’s essay is a “part-time being”—an anonymous figure made almost ghostly by her part-time work as an adjunct English professor at two universities. Buchanan’s satire gives dissociated voice to adjuncts everywhere, a growing underclass of hyperqualified contingent workers who teach over 60% of college courses nationwide. Though surely broken, the university system in the US is still a place to make connections and spark curiosity—which “Third Person” acknowledges with cautious optimism.

Third Person

Lydia C. Buchanan

 

The part-time professor is alone today. Today she taught two seminar classes and then retreated to her office to prepare for tomorrow’s classes and look at emails. In her office, there are no windows. In her office, there are posters from campus readings that occurred fifteen years ago, the old books of previous part-time professors: two garish orange and black John le Carré novels, The Jesuits by a Jesuit, something called For the Love of Mike, something called The Secret World, and a collection of dated scholarly magazines: PMLA from 2012, Victorian Times, Victorian Times, Victorian Times. In her office, there are the old personal belongings of previous part-time professors: on a shelf, a mesh wire tray of dusty paperclips, a pair of pink plastic screen readers, and a black and blue mug from Target. It is the kind of mug this part-time professor hates the most: square at the base, round at the lip. She thinks it abomination, to shift geometries in media res. There is no way to hold such a thing, no words for such a thing but cheap and ugly. She wants to rid the office of it—throw it out the window she doesn’t have, pitch it into a foreign trash can, microwave it until it explodes—but she is afraid that one day whoever owns it will show up, frantic for their horrid mug. She knows they will never show up. This is everyone and no one’s office. This is the place assigned to people who aren’t expected to come back.

Sometimes, when she has just stepped into this office, after climbing four flights of stairs and navigating the populated wings of the English department to arrive at this gray and deserted hallway, the part-time professor considers trying to put her own spin on the space. If only there was a window, she could get a plant. If only she had more money, she could get a rug—a cheap one with a bright pattern—and maybe a floor lamp for warm lighting. If only the walls were hers alone, she could put new art on them, something with color, something that has the same effect as a window: a frame to stare through when she wants to forget she’s in this office, with no sunlight and no things to talk to but the horrid mug and its predecessor’s trash.

The adjunct professor is lonely. It is 2:30 PM, and today she has only talked to students—first-years, barely settled into their dorms—and only to help them resolve technical issues. No, this morning she also yelled at her cat for yelling at her while she showered. The cat is afraid of running water but does not like to be left alone while the part-time professor is taking a shower. So, in revision, the part-time professor has talked to two types of beings today, none of which could be considered compatriots. This is the third day this week that this has happened, and it is the third day of the week. When she goes home, she will desperately want to talk to her husband—an adult, a friend, an equal—but find that she has nothing to say, save of students. She does not want to spend her evening hours talking of students, of work, of people and things that do not think about her in their off-hours. What kind of a life is that?

Down the hall from her office, she hears a voice.

“Would you like a cookie?” it asks another voice.

For a glorious moment, she considers leaving her desk, materializing in the hallway, and requesting a cookie, too, but she does not know the voice. It is far from her desk to the door and then down the hall to where the voice came from. At this point in the afternoon, with all the silence and class management, she is weary. The cookie voice falls away, and she surrenders herself to the solitude of the afternoon.

The part-time professor is a part-time professor twice over. On other days, maybe days when someone else is in this office, she is part-time professor at a different school, with different students. There, her office is not in a dark wing of the English department, but in the basement of the oldest building on campus. The middle layers of this building are beautiful: marble-tiled floors that echo against a heeled shoe and great panels of trimmed oak on the walls, office suites with large windows that look out over a sprawling hillside, signs outside every door explaining who works inside: University President, Dean of Students, Dean of Faculty, Provost. In those halls, every door is open and behind it, at a large, organized desk, sits an assistant. You never see the University President or the Dean of Students or the Dean of Faculty, only their assistants, ready to redirect the unexpected. On her basement floor, the floors are cheap linoleum, the lights are flickering fluorescent squares, each warbling in its own meter. There are no name plates next to the doors, though some, like her, have printed and taped their names and office hours to the wall.

In the part-time professor’s office in the basement of this building, there is a pleather rolling chair that seems to be disintegrating: if she reaches underneath it to pull a lever—up-down, up-down she imagines she could go—her hand gets scratched and returns to her covered in black dust. It is not mold; it is plastic, dissolving. Almost every day that she comes here, she forgets about the decamping plastic, tries to find the lever without looking, and contaminates her hand. She pulls it out from under the chair, and she imagines it shaking slowly in front of her face. In her imagination, she tries to wipe her hand clean, but instead of falling to the floor, the black dust begins to spread—first to the second hand, the hand that brushed, then down her wrists, forearms, past her elbows and up and down her shoulders. As it reaches her chest, she raises her hands to the sky—the fluorescent ceiling—and a scream breaks loose, shattering all the windows she doesn’t have. She cracks, swarms, implodes into a vapor of black dust. She has been released; she has become an ancient and unshakeable curse.

Outside of her imagination, she brushes the plastic dust off her hands, sprinkling the floor with whatever.

One fall she returns from summer break to realize that someone else has set foot in this office: the floors are clean of black powder, and there is a different, empty wooden desk into which someone carved, many moons ago: I HATE THIS SCHOOL. This makes her chuckle. That fall, too, a black minifridge appears in the office. For weeks of every-other-morning, the part-time professor opens this fridge to see if another part-time being has left proof of their existence inside. The part-time professor imagines that she, too, might leave a sign of life, or a note, or eat the other being’s leftovers, just to make contact. But there is never anything in the fridge. When she gives up on discovering something inside it, she considers unplugging the fridge to save energy, but as its entire existence is a mystery, she does nothing. This office was assigned to her by a Dean’s Assistant, so someone might know it was she who unplugged the refrigerator all the other part-time professors were counting on. She does nothing but teach, sit in the basement, and leave.

Always the part time professor feels that she should do something. Something about the gray state of her offices, the gray state of her life in them. She would like to find someone to talk to, just for five minutes, when she is alone in these hallways. Perhaps another part-time professor. Perhaps the Dean’s Assistant, who works three floors above her but knows when she is here because these are the hours the Dean’s Assistant assigned to her to sit in this office. Perhaps a supervisor who could advise and mentor her, the supervisor’s very presence a reminder of a better life, a better way of teaching. But the part-time professor knows that her supervisors don’t really want to advise and mentor her. They have graduate students to fill these holes in their hearts, and these graduate students pay money to the institution, money that funds her supervisor’s salary. The part-time professor does not pay money to the institution. She has not been a graduate student in what feels like a long time. She remembers what it felt like to be a graduate student—chosen, expectant—and a weariness settles into her joints.

Some days, when she feels the need to do something, she considers attempting to befriend her supervisor—they are, after all, in a sense, co-workers—but feels certain that along with graduate students her supervisor has real friends: full-time, tenured, faculty whom she has known and worked with for years. Permanent, ordinary co-workers. The part-time professor knows that her job is to be part time, transitory, to fill scheduling needs and require nothing that will drain department resources: not insurance, not PTO, not retirement, not professional development, not companionship. She is not to draw attention to herself or her status; she is not to tell students she has limited availability in her office hours because she also teaches elsewhere. When these students appear at the door of her drab, part-time office, she is to pretend this is just, exactly, how she dreamed her faculty office would be. This is all exactly as it should be.

Always the part-time professor feels that she should do something. She was raised without television. She was raised to make and fix and share things, not consume them. She feels, often, that she has been doing this for so long that her soul is turning gray. She feels, often, that she should find another line of work. She tries, often, to find another line of work. She dreams of real co-workers. Not sit-com style office rivals and romances, but ordinary co-workers, the kind that notice when someone starts to part their hair on the other side or buys a new dress shirt or goes on a diet, the kind that make meaningless morning and afternoon drivel in the lunchroom, the kind that gripe about the office temperature together. Some days, she thinks it would be glorious to have these kinds of co-workers, that she would give it all—her college schedule, her lack of benefits, the stacks of papers she grades—to have these kinds of regular co-workers to share her daily life with. But to do this kind of thing would be to give up her hope of ever being a full-time professor, a teaching writer whose work is valued enough that she gets an office near other people, near a window. She knows this hope is a far and distant and dimming possibility. She has not been a graduate student for many years. But she was born to do things, to last, to believe that hard work pays off, and so she cannot quite give in to her dream of someone to talk to at the watercooler. She knows that this is her curse and that her employers know that this is her curse: to work hard, without whisper of advancement, without hope of what the institution promised her when she was a graduate student: a semi-satisfying, full-time career.

She will do something. If she wants to fill her life, she must do something. She knows this. She has a husband, but she does not have a house or children or more than one car or a retirement account. Being a part-time professor is not so lucrative as to allow for any of these things. She didn’t consider this in her 20s when she agreed to become a part-time professor. Back then, she had no sense of how time works, that it keeps going, that some people do things in their time, move their lives left, right, and forwards and backwards, and that some don’t. She knows that, for her life to move in any direction, she must do something. But she does not know how. She has worked hard, very hard, at being a part-time professor, and nothing has moved. She cannot imagine working hard at something else, starting over, with no guarantee of success. She is afraid. Or rather, she is very, very tired. She has papers to grade.

At the end of her office hours, the part-time professor stands up from the chair with the cursed bottom, or the chair with the mesh seat in the office with the John le Carré novels, and shuts her laptop, puts it in her bag. Years ago, all the classroom computers were removed. Now, to use the projector when she teaches, she must provide half the equipment. Compensation for the use of her personal laptop for work, the heavy wear and constant carrying, switching on and off and sliding around on her back, in her car, is not part of her contract. She puts her personal laptop into her bag, slugs the bag onto her shoulder, switches the light off, and walks out of her office. The door locks behind her.

Outside, the sun is setting. Outside, the students are sitting on the quad, leaning arms and backs against each other, reading beneath trees and letting the light, the dying sunshine of autumn, rest its cheek on their shoulder. Under the leaves, their skin flickers golden.

This evening she is not sure if she wants to see them, all those hopes glowing in the fading light. If she looks too long, she might remember—the grass tickling her ankles, the bark rough against her back, the pages, melting under the sun. Time was nothing. If she looks too long, she might remember, and she isn’t sure what good nostalgia would do her now.

But someone—say, a girl from last semester who sat in the back corner of the classroom, who submitted tight, intense essays, who rarely spoke but analyzed, relentlessly, when given the chance—looks up at the sound of the part-time professor’s footsteps ticking down the sidewalk. In a flash, their eyes meet. In a flash, both are uncomfortable, startled at this unexpected recognition, this person they know and do not know appearing just when the light begins to blur realities. Both drop their gazes to the ground and then, upon reflection, back to meet the other.

***

Lydia C. Buchanan’s essays have appeared in the Ilanot Review, Cartridge Lit, Meat for Tea, and other publications. Her essay “Maximalism” was named Notable in the Best American Essays 2022. She has an MFA in creative nonfiction from the University of North Carolina at Wilmington and currently lives in Boston. Her website is lydiacbuchanan.com.