“Love Poem for Lois” by Regan Green is our Poem of the Week.

Regan Green grew up in Columbia, Tennessee, and now lives in Baltimore. She is a junior lecturer in the Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University and the Assistant Editor of Birmingham Poetry Review. Other poems of hers have appeared in Best New Poets 2023 and The Southern Anthology, Volume X.
 

Love Poem for Lois

Lois of the yellow
duplex up the street,
your pierced frenulum winked
when you lifted your tongue to say
lump crab, lady parts, light
as in do you have a,
the tongue skewered.
You said, Angel bite.
My mother said, White trash,
but the crystal flashed back—
the joy of a dirty joke
in the back pew.

I loved to watch you
talk, loved the astrological
compatibilities of your lovers,
the crystal antebellum
punch bowl and Pall Malls
you brought to the potluck,
loved that third, silvery eye
batting at me while the other two
lingered on my parents
across the casseroles,
talking about the man at church
who sold pirated DVDs.

Ms. Atheist Down the Block,
Ms. Rings on Wrong Fingers,
a neighbor said you were ill,
and I was sent to your door with pot pie.
How could I say mom won’t let me
when you took my hand
among the chloroformed beetles
and sexless mannequins,
fingered through
the book of stars—
here is the fate line,
here is the heart.

How could I where you go I’ll
watch when you were woman
in ways I’d never known,
walking from room to room
in men’s boxers and an open
kimono? I slunk home
to my mother dehydrating deer jerky
in the garage. All summer
at the community pool
I watched you from under water,
your headless body
kicking against something
I couldn’t see.
 

Author’s Note

I only met Lois once when I was a kid. Everything else in this poem is fiction, but the piercing under her tongue was real, and I was thrilled by the secret of it (my parents never noticed). Maybe this isn’t a love poem. I didn’t love her any more than any little girl loves a woman who makes adulthood look sparkly and seductive. She never held my hand or invited me into her half of the yellow duplex. I never watched her swim. But I loved that she looked unlike any woman I had ever known in that small town, that she was feminine in a way I didn’t know was feminine. The image of her piercing stuck in the back of my teeth for a long time. I don’t know where she is now, but I like to imagine she lives on a road called Red Red Lane, wherever that may be, and swims in the summers.

BLAST, TMR’s online-only prose anthology, features prose too vibrant to be confined between the covers of a print journal. “The Red Button” takes place in Southern California in 1974, when Jim Steck spent a year as a psychiatry resident at the University of California, San Diego. Part of Steck’s training involved a stint in the ER, where he found he had a natural aptitude for handling emergencies. A portrait of the doctor as a young man, “The Red Button” is an essay about the serendipitous and sometimes fateful process of discovering one’s true calling.

The Red Button

Jim Steck

 

In September 1974 I drove into La Jolla for the first time, in a rental car. I came from inland, from the Mojave Desert. Unlike most people, whose first day in the desert makes them worry about dying from thirst, I loved the Mojave right away. I loved the spaciousness and the regular arrangement of plants, like squares on a quilt. I loved the dry smell of mesquite. I stopped for lunch in Palmdale, and I commented to the teenage waitress how lucky she was to live in such gorgeous country. She looked at me as if I were insane and said, “It’s a godforsaken desert.”

When I crested the Torrey Hills, because I’d traversed dry country, the shore was all the more beautiful. Palm trees—the icons of the Biblical paradise—red-tiled roofs, and the tin-sparkling ocean. I had seen the village of La Jolla on maps, and I’d heard about “La Hoya,” the site of the University of California, San Diego, but it wasn’t until I arrived there for the start of my psychiatry residency that I realized the two places were the same.

I’d studied philosophy in college. I spent many hours debating the existence of God, of free will, and even of that most accessible of college objects, the chair. If only I’d first read Dr. Samuel Johnson, who, to disprove immaterialism, kicked a large stone and said, “I refute it thus.”

I gravitated towards psychiatry in medical school, partly to find out why I had been so fascinated by philosophy. The invention of psychoactive drugs was another reason I gravitated that way. This was the height of the hippie era, and we really did take drugs for spiritual reasons. During one winter vacation a friend and I went cross-country skiing in the Santa Fe National Forest, on psilocybin, and the juniper trees spoke to me, and I wasn’t surprised. I simply assumed I was communicating with some sort of Buddhist god.

 

I had always wanted to be young someplace warm. Orientation for the psych residency was held in a large conference room furnished with pastel stack chairs that held smudges nicely and flimsy tables that folded up like burning insects. Three walls were decorated with bland scenes of nature but the fourth had floor-to-ceiling windows looking out on a rooftop volleyball court, the Pacific Ocean, and patches of mist that came and went like guardian angels. I turned my chair towards the view and only half listened to the speaker, Dr. Nathaniel Hoffman, a short guy with a sharp chin and elfin ears.

“With the right combination of medicines,” he began, “You can be anyone you like. Personality is the sum of neurotransmitters, and every day modern psychiatry is discovering new transmitters and how to manipulate them. For example, I notice you there”—he indicated Dennis, one of the new residents—“you’re twirling your hair. You may imagine that you’re doing so voluntarily, but the truth is that twirling your hair, like cracking your knuckles and sewing-machine legs, is the result of excess dopamine. I could give you a dopamine antagonist like Haldol and stop your hair-twirling in its tracks.”

Dennis seemed miffed that he’s been singled out as a victim of his neurotransmitters. He was young-looking, with curly brown hair. His clothes—khakis, a tie, and a striped button-down shirt—were suitable for a high school graduation. He was the sort who was eager to be first to answer a question in class.

During Hoffman’s talk, half a dozen psychiatric patients wandered out to the volleyball court. Because it was a locked ward, the rooftop court was surrounded by a chain link fence, and there was netting over the top. The patients’ first volley lasted only until one of the players retreated into his own thoughts and ignored the ball.

“During your residency you will be making patients take many psychoactive medicines,” Hoffman was saying. “It’s only fair, therefore, that you see what these medicines are like. So, I’m going to distribute a different medicine to each of you, so that you can appreciate their effects.”

We residents looked at each other. We’d never heard of such an experiment, even in rumor.

“Of course, any of you have the right to refuse,” Hoffman said. I recognized, though, that Hoffman’s suggestion, like many activities in the residency, was mandatory.

I got Thorazine. Dr. Hoffman handed it to me in a little beige envelope, like a party favor. For about twenty minutes nothing happened. I got up to walk around, but when that seemed like too much trouble, I sat down in another stack chair a few feet away. I noted that the original chair was light blue and the second, yellow. At moments I began to worry about various things, primarily about having taken an unfamiliar medicine, but each time I started on a spiral of worry, my train of thought immediately cut off. I could almost hear a click, like the sound of a circuit breaker.

I headed toward the outdoor court, slowly, because now I felt as if I were walking through syrup. Six of the inpatients had managed a semblance of a game. They immediately struck a deferential pose; two of them muttered, “Doc.” A frazzled woman sidled up to me. She was evidently on a gradual withdrawal from “downers,” and asked if I could raise her dose. “They calculated the dose wrong,” she said.

I was handed the volleyball and I served. The ball went fitfully back and forth. When I rotated to the front I got it into my head that I would block a shot. When the opportunity arose, I tried to jump. My legs buckled, and I barreled into the patient across the net, who spent the rest of his hospital stay limping. I was singularly unconcerned. I hoped it was the effect of the Thorazine. “Our point,” I said.

 

I found a place to stay in downtown La Jolla, three blocks from Marine Street Beach. I didn’t have a car, and so every morning I walked to a bakery where I bought three croissants from a hippie who got up at four AM, served myself coffee in a Styrofoam cup, extracted an LA Times from a newspaper box, and took the bus up Torrey Pines Road to the campus. I didn’t at first realize how eccentric bus transportation was in Southern California, nor how unreliable.

My first patient, Anne, was a depressive, a fiftyish woman, a practicing Catholic, whose children had left home and who had been spending her days lying in bed, smoking and reading old magazines.

I admitted Anne to the ward and then discussed her with my supervisor, Dr. Matt Blankin. Dr. Blankin was a rival to Dr. Hoffman. He was a psychoanalyst, a Freudian, who had spent years in New York City listening to recumbent patients whine in an office with a clanking radiator and steamed-up windows, and he was having trouble adjusting to a more casual city. We met in his small office, which smelled of pine freshener and was decorated with posters by Klee and Magritte.

“I’m an analyst,” he announced. “That explains my perianal beard.”

I wished he hadn’t said that, because from then on I couldn’t think of anything else when I found myself staring at his goatee and mustache combination.

“What did you tell Anne?” he asked.

“I started her on Elavil,” I said.

“Antidepressants!” he said. “Chemicals! We have to get to the root cause.”

“I think it’s ‘empty nest syndrome,’” I said. “I suggested that one day a week she volunteer at the church’s daycare. I know that Catholic churches have opportunities like that.”

“What were her parents like?”

“I don’t know. They’re dead.”

The rest of our consultation continued along the same parallel tracks, though he did helpfully point out, in regard to Anne, that depressed people hate to be cheered up.

The next Monday the Torrey Pines Road bus was late. This was the sort of thing that happened randomly in Southern California, a reminder of the randomness of life. I arrived at the very end of medication rounds. Afterwards, Dennis, wearing one of his striped button-down shirts, took me aside.

“You weren’t here to prescribe Anne the prednisone for her asthma. I did it for you.”

Anne had chronic asthma, and I had put her on a week of prednisone for an exacerbation.

“Thanks, Dennis. My bus was late.”

“You come here on a bus? Who would do that?”

I shrugged. “Prednisone doesn’t need exact timing.”

“Sure. And if it was delayed enough, she’d be dead.”

That afternoon I met with my supervisor, Dr. Blankin, again. We first discussed Anne, but he seemed distracted. At length he put his palms down on his desk and said, “I received a complaint about you today.”

“Yes?” I said.

“Another resident noted that you were late.”

I could see that he’d made a mistake naming the complainant.

“My bus was late…. Sorry.”

“I have an assignment for you. I want you to read the chapter of my textbook entitled ‘Passive-Aggression.’”

“Okay.”

 

After two weeks, to tell the truth, Anne had not improved much. Enough time had passed for the antidepressants to kick in, and, following Blankin’s advice, I had avoided cheering her up. She sat unmoving in the common room, facing away from the television, responding to questioners only with a polite smile, as if she were a teenager dying to get away from a formal dinner. I’d been unable to find anything wrong with her parents, her weening from breast milk, her toilet training, or her eighth-grade confirmation party.

While I was detailing her plight to my supervisor, Dr. Hoffman knocked and came into the office.

“Sorry, Matt,” he said. “I thought you were alone.”

“We were discussing Anne Wright.”

“That prim, mopey woman whose children left her?”

“That’s the patient, yes.”

“Jeez, Matt. Just buzz her…. I’ll catch you later.”

“Buzz her?” I said to Blankin, after Hoffman left.

“‘Shock therapy.’ Electroconvulsive therapy. Dr. Hoffman’s big on it.”

Blankin eventually conceded Hoffman’s suggestion about Anne. It was the first time I’d administered shock therapy. I asked Dennis for his advice, thinking that his meticulousness would be advantageous in this setting.

“Just push the red button,” he said.

At ten AM on a Monday the anesthesiologist showed up on the ward to assist in the procedure. He started the IV and prepared the sedatives without fuss, except to ask me, “Does that front door lock from the inside?”

“Yes, of course,” I said. “A nurse will let you out.”

“Which nurse?” he said.

“Any one.”

At Anne’s bedside a young nurse, Lindsay, did most of the work. She swaddled the patient in a blanket and applied electrodes, like headphones, over Anne’s head and kindly brushed her hand against Anne’s cheek.

I noticed that there was indeed a red button on the console.

“Ready?” I asked Lindsay and the anesthesiologist.

“Yes, please, let’s get on with it,” he said.

I pushed the button. Anne stiffened and her eyes darted from side to side like a doll’s. Then she relaxed and after ten seconds moaned and tried to sit up.

The anesthesiologist quickly excused himself.

“Good job,” Lindsay said. I couldn’t tell if she were being ironic or not. “I’ll take care of her now,” she added.

When I left, I glanced at her from behind and noted that she had the sort of corn-fed figure that boys from the snowy Midwest dream about.

Electroshock therapy has had a bad reputation ever since Randle McMurphy underwent it, but orthodox psychiatrists are much in favor of it when antidepressants fail. They maintain that it causes no more memory loss than the depression itself does. Ernest Hemingway resented shock therapy, but David Foster Wallace and vice presidential candidate Thomas Eagleton didn’t mind. In Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Robert Pirsig decried electroshock, claiming that it wiped out his personality, but in real life he appreciated it.

 

I picked up another inpatient, a young woman in her twenties named Allison. The police had arrested Allison after she shoplifted a cheap umbrella. They were about to take her to jail until she explained that she needed the umbrella because there was a radiation beam aimed at her.

She was a skinny brunette whose looks may well have not changed since eighth grade. She was dressed in a tan midi dress with puffy sleeves, fashionable but un-San Diegan. She had attended an all-woman’s college in North Carolina for two years and then quit and relocated on her own to San Diego.

Her drug test came back negative. I asked her about the radiation beam.

“Oh,” she said. “I didn’t mean that.” Her voice was juvenile too.

“You made it up?”

She looked at me as if it were a trick question. “It was nothing,” she said. “It’s in the past.”

“What made you move to San Diego?” I asked.

“I wanted to learn to surf.”

“Me too,” I said. “I’m here because of the Beach Boys.”

She smiled uncertainly.

“I live right near the ocean,” I said. “I noticed some really big waves this morning.”

I didn’t know what to make of Allison. She seemed spookily solitary. I described her to my supervisor.

“Sounds like a borderline personality,” he said. “The mini-psychosis is typical.”

I knew Blankin would say something like that. “Borderline personality” was a newly described syndrome, characterized by “chronic feelings of emptiness, shifting self-image, fear of abandonment” and other traits that, as Dr. Hoffman pointed out, couldn’t be seen. Dr. Hoffman didn’t believe the syndrome existed.

 

I bought a car, a 1968 Austin America whose original cranberry tint had turned the color of dead leaves. The reverse gear gave out completely after a month, and so from then on I had to carefully plan which way I was going.

It was lucky that I’d bought a car, though, because after the holidays I was assigned to County Hospital, just north of Balboa Park. Like all county hospitals, its original progressive architecture—balconies, a big atrium with curved lines—had steadily deteriorated, resulting in rusted railings and cigarette stains on the windowsills.

My first week there I ran into Lindsay, the young nurse, again. For a few moments I watched her from a distance, humming and efficiently fashioning hospital corners on a patient’s bed. I tried to think of something clever to say to her, but she suddenly stood up straight and caught sight of me in that always-puzzling trick of peripheral vision. She wore green surgical scrubs that were a size too small for her.

She waved me over and said, “Come with me. I’ve got something to tell you.” She led me to the supply closet, flicked on the bare bulb, and closed the door. She seemed unaware that this would become a clichéd scene a decade later in shows like St. Elsewhere. I studied the rows of metal baskets holding syringes, rubber tourniquets, IV bottles, and gauze pads.

“I don’t know you very well,” she said, “but you seem like a nice guy, and I’ve got a proposal for you.”

“Sure.”

“Well, the head of our nursing program, she’s sort of old-fashioned, and maybe a little bit of a perv, but anyway she’s offering a hundred dollars for the first nurse to, you know, ‘get together’ with a doctor, and I want that money.”

“Well, sure, that sounds like something…. Here?”

“No, silly. I have to get to know you first. Over dinner at The Prado. Your treat. Saturday.”

I finally smiled. “Okay.”

She handed me a packet of gauze with her phone number written on it and the proposed time: 7:00.

I couldn’t tell how serious Lindsay was. Nothing like this had happened to me before, but I knew that she was from LA, and I had the idea that being from LA made a person more sophisticated—or rather, more advanced, more attuned to the future.

 

Blankin excitedly announced that Dr. Jack Nathan was coming out from New York to lead our next grand rounds. Dr. Nathan was a psychoanalyst and a national authority on the treatment of male homosexuality.

The subject patient was a short guy in his thirties. He had a pointed chin, jug ears, and a sallow complexion. He worked as a dishwasher. He looked like someone who’d been continually bullied in his youth, back when that was allowed. He came to the authorities’ attention when he stopped cars in front of his restaurant to warn the drivers about some unspecified threat. The police arrived, breathalyzed him for alcohol, and when they detected none took him to the ER.

All this happened before laws about medical privacy, and all of us residents knew the salacious details of this patient’s story; in particular, that in lieu of rent he provided some sort of homosexual services to the man whose house he stayed at, with both participants covered with a bedsheet. We heard that he attributed his behavior the night of his arrest to adulterated marijuana.

The patient sat in the middle of a particularly big circle because everyone wanted to see this expert analyst in action. Dr. Nathan began by nodding and smiling at the patient and then paused for so long that the squeaking and scraping of our chairs took over our consciousness.

“Tell me about your childhood,” Nathan said at last.

The patient grew up in a poor neighborhood in LA. His father was a long-distance trucker but perfectly fatherly when he was home. When the patient was four, his mother moved for a few months to Las Vegas to work as a card dealer and he was left in the care of his grandmother.

Nathan sat forward and seized on this revelation. “Did your mother phone you when she was in Las Vegas?” he asked.

“Naw. Maybe once or twice. It was long distance. Too expensive.”

“When she returned, did she have a gift for you?”

“I don’t remember. I was four years old.”

Nathan leaned forward even more. “Were you angry with your mother?”

“I don’t know. Probably. I was four years old. Probably I stayed mad for a day.”

Nathan smiled to himself. “Let’s move on to another topic. What do your regard as your sexual orientation?”

“My what?”

“Your sexual orientation. Do you have sex with women or men, or are you bisexual?”

“I’m trisexual. I’ll try anything.” He looked around to see if anyone appreciated the joke. A couple of people smiled.

“This sex under a blanket? Or bedsheet. Or whatever. You’d better get that behavior treated or you’re going to find yourself doing stranger and stranger things.”

The patient shrugged, unembarrassed.

Nathan blathered on about the interruption of the Oedipus Triangle and the patient’s early developmental arrest. Then Blankin asked the patient to return to his room and said they’d be discussing how best to help him.

Nathan said, “I welcome any questions from the residents at this time.”

One of the residents raised his hand and spoke: “So the patient wasn’t able to cathect the mother fully, and his bisexuality indicates he has an infantile libido?”

“Yes,” Dr. Nathan beamed. “You have it exactly.”

I raised my hand. I don’t know why I felt it was important for me to say what I was about to say, but it was like Samuel Johnson kicking the rock. I felt as if I were pointing out some obvious detail, like the windows being open during a rainstorm.

“Might this not,” I said, “be simply an example of the landlord exploiting the patient? I mean, he’s not paying any rent.”

Nathan surveyed the room, as if afraid that he was the object of a joke. Then he said, “I suppose. If you’re not looking at the case very closely.”

After grand rounds Dennis took me aside. I flinched because Dennis, who was becoming the star resident, usually contacted me only to criticize me. He grabbed my hand with both of his and said, “Thank you. I don’t think that patient could help being gay, and I don’t think it was his mother’s fault.” Then he abruptly walked away.

I considered what had just happened—being a psych resident I was always considering what just happened. To be honest, I hadn’t meant to make a statement of sexual politics. I had spoken up mainly because I didn’t like Nathan and I didn’t like authorities. Maybe I should have read that chapter about passive-aggression after all.

 

Anne continued to receive shock treatments at the other hospital, with someone else pushing the red button. One Sunday morning she showed up unexpectedly at County while I was on call. She wore a long brown dress with a subtle shamrock pattern. She brought along her two teenage daughters, also in long dresses. All three wore white gloves and little white hats pinned to their hair.

“I came by to thank you,” she said. She smiled. I’d never seen her smile before. I wanted to ask whether she thought it was the shock treatments that cured her, but then I feared that if I asked, she wouldn’t remember.

She sensed my dilemma and laughed. “Yes, it was probably the shock treatments, but it was you who decided to give me them.” The two daughters nodded in agreement.

Allison, the alleged “borderline,” was more problematic. We met back at University in Blankin’s office. She wore the same tan midi dress she wore when she was admitted to the ward. Her eyes went immediately to the Magritte poster.

“His head is an apple,” she said.

I glanced at the poster. “Yes,” I said. “So, how have you been doing?”

“That must be difficult,” she said. “How does he eat?”

“Uh, it’s just a picture. Someone made it up.”

“Oh.” She smiled benignly. “I’ve been doing about the same.”

We talked about La Jolla Shores, where she spent most of her days. She must have used a lot of sunscreen, because her face was as pale as the moon, so pale that occasionally I doubted that she really went to the beach. For some reason my conversation with her often veered towards earth science: the tides, the state of the morning fog, the cloud cover. She listened like a child whose parent was explaining why the sky was blue.

At one point she excused herself briefly to use the “ladies’ room.” When she returned her face was even paler. “What happened to that woman?” she asked.

She described a woman who’d just had shock treatment.

“She doesn’t know anything,” Allison said.

We talked about other things, but from time to time Allison shook her head, still thinking about the woman.

As if to cheer herself up, she announced, “I’ve got a boyfriend now.” Her voice was melodramatic, like that of an actress badly failing a screen test.

“Tell me about him.”

“He was with a bunch of his friends at the beach and he looked over at me and winked.”

I waited to hear more and then I said, “So, what’s his name?”

“Charles…. I think.”

“It must be early in the relationship.”

“Yes, that’s it.”

 

The Saturday of my date with Lindsay arrived. I parked several blocks away from The Prado so she wouldn’t spot my car. As I walked to the restaurant it occurred to me that her proposal might be a trick, and I waited outside until she actually showed up. I didn’t want to sit alone at a table, crunching tortilla chips and looking around for her.

Lindsay arrived wearing a black mini skirt, white keyhole blouse, and big hoop earrings. “I love this place,” she said, as if it were her vacation home. The Prado was indeed impressive, a white castellar building with a lot of filigree, perhaps the brainchild of a haciendado who’d inherited a thousand cattle. We sat outside under a red umbrella and took in the smell of butter and shellfish.

“Relax,” she said, “I’m not going to bite you…. What ever happened to that woman Anne who you buzzed?”

“Anne? Oh, that really straight woman. She got a lot better. She didn’t even complain about her memory. She stopped by with her daughters to thank me…. You seem to like psych.”

“I just like being a nurse.”

“Why did you choose…”

The waiter brought some sculpted vegetables as an appetizer.

“My father gave me three choices. I could be a secretary, but my spelling wasn’t great. I could be a schoolteacher, like my sister, but I just hated babysitting. So I chose nursing. I liked the uniform ever since I was a little girl.”

We talked about medicine, San Diego, and LA. It was fascinating to talk to someone who regarded LA life as normal—the smog, the traffic, the anomie. Lindsay was either insensitive or she’d achieved a Zennish tranquility.

We had a good dinner—paella—and then at Lindsay’s suggestion walked to her apartment, about seven blocks away. We walked alongside some undeveloped land that smelled of sage and it occurred to me that I was finally in the West of my adolescence, the West of Red River, Bonanza, and Riders of the Purple Sage.

“Birth control?” Lindsay said.

“Uh.”

She pointed to a 7-Eleven across the street. I scurried across and bought a pack of condoms, vainly hoping that the impassive clerk would regard me as a player.

Lindsay’s bedroom had a king-size bed with Christmas lights and plastic ivy strung along the backboard. We had wonderful sex. When we were done, she set a Polaroid camera with a timer on the dresser, posed us in bed with the sheet drawn up below our bare shoulders, and took a picture.

“That ought to do it,” she said.

“Do we share the money?”

She smiled. “I don’t think so. But we can do it again free.”

 

Like all psych residents I spent two months in the ER, where, after an initial orientation, I was to be treated like a physician from any specialty. I had to sew up lacerations, diagnose biliary colic, treat heart attacks, and stop kids from convulsing. The idea was that we psychiatrists should know enough general medicine not to mistake somatic illnesses for psychiatric ones. I supposed I was more up to the challenge than other residents, though not as prepared as “hand-up-in-the-air-to-answer-the-question” Dennis.

The ER was bedlam. There were gurneys in the halls and patients on the gurneys with their gowns askew, leaning over side rails to vomit. Cardiac monitors buzzed and dinged, and there were continual overhead pages, punctuated by “stat.” The place smelled like bodily effluvia and coffee. Nurses and doctors rushed to and fro, calling loudly to each other as if in a crowd at a football game.

I sat in the workroom waiting to be told what to do. One doctor strode in and said to no one in particular, “Where’s the record book?”

Another doctor pointed to a high shelf without looking up from his paperwork. A third doctor, standing at the light box and studying a chest X-ray, said, “Hey, do you think there’s a pneumonia here?” The paperwork doctor turned momentarily and said, “Right lower lobe.”

The first doctor took down a stained black composition notebook and turned to a page in the middle. “Hey, I think I’ve got a new glucose record. One thousand fifty-one.”

The overhead speaker interrupted, “Code Blue, ICU. Bed fourteen.” All the doctors paused, like crows on a road. Paperwork doctor said, “I knew it. That’s the guy I sent up with septic shock. I knew he was circling the drain.”

He noticed me for the first time. “You’re the new guy,” he said. “Psych?” He pointed the fingers of one hand at me and wiggled them—the traditional sign for psychoanalysis. “Let’s get you a patient.” He ducked out the door of the work room and picked up two hinged metal charts. When he stood up I noticed that he was tall and thin and had the carefully balanced posture of a heron. He glanced at the first chart and put it aside. “Not that one. She’s got hemodynia.”

“Hemodynia?”

“Pain wherever the blood goes…. Take the other one.”

I walked into the room in full imposter syndrome mode, but my white coat did the trick. The patient apparently believed that I was competent, maybe because I had taped over the phrase “Psychiatry Department” on my name tag.

The patient, a burly man with a military haircut left over from World War II, complained of abdominal pain but, as was customary with males, noted that “The wife made me come in.” I listened to him at some length—what else would I have learned in psychiatry? When it came to examining his belly I remembered a trick from one of my medical school professors: You don’t have to press hard, he said. I tapped on the patient’s belly lightly and discovered that he was exquisitely tender in the right lower quadrant.

I went back to the workroom to report to the paperwork doctor, Dr. Morrison.

“What’s he got?” he said when I finished reciting.

“Appendicitis, I think.”

“Call surgery,” he said and returned to his writing.

The surgeon on call didn’t notice that I was an imposter.

“Send him up to the OR in an hour,” she said.

This isn’t too bad, I thought.

 

My first weeks in the ER my supervisor was Dr. Morrison, a fifth-year surgical resident. He asked a few hesitant questions about psychiatry, but I could tell that he was puzzled by the existence of my specialty. More than once I presented a patient with a vague complaint, one that made no scientific sense, and he said, “Sounds supratentorial,” meaning that its origin was above the membrane that supported the brain, i.e., in the patient’s imagination.

At the end of my first week, however, I rose in his estimation. He was about to sew a laceration on a baby’s face, and he’d ordered a shot of a narcotic to pacify the kid. I passed by the patient’s room and the mother tentatively signaled me through the glass window.

I detoured into their room.

“Is my baby all right?” she asked. “I think there’s something wrong with her breathing.”

I didn’t know much about babies, and this one at first glance didn’t seem distressed. She was sleeping, the cut on her chin wasn’t bleeding. Maybe her cheeks were pale, but because the mother seemed like the sort of person who “didn’t want to bother anyone,” I accepted her observation. I stepped into the hall and gestured to Morrison. He came into the patient’s room and glanced at the infant.

Addressing me rather than the mother, he said, “It’s the Demerol. They always look pale like that.” And he hurried away.

I started to elaborate what Morrison said and I noticed that the kid’s lips and fingertips had turned a cerulean blue. My mind snapped into a detached but sharp-witted state. I pressed the red emergency button by the intercom. I unwound the oxygen tubing, applied the plastic mask to the child’s face, and started the oxygen.

I heard people running. Two nurses arrived, politely took the infant from the mother’s arms, lay her on the bed, and set about starting an IV on either arm. Morrison arrived and immediately ordered a third nurse to draw up Narcan, the antidote for Demerol.

The baby didn’t react to the nurse’s sticks. She was at an age when IVs are difficult, and both nurses failed at their first tries. One of them made a disappointed clucking sound.

“What’s the oxygen at?” Morrison asked. The third nurse returned with the Narcan. The only sound was the oxygen hissing. The mother stood at the bedside with her hands over her face.

I remembered another trivia from medical school: Narcan can be administered intranasally. “You can squirt the Narcan up the kid’s nose,” I said.

“What?” Morrison said.

I repeated what I’d said.

“Okay,” Morrison said to the third nurse. “Do it.”

She did, and within ten seconds the infant woke up and started crying.

In my hyper-perceptive state I heard several sighs of relief. The rest of the hospital people filed out.

“We’ll figure out some other anesthesia,” Morrison remarked on his way out.

“Thank you,” the mother mouthed to me, as if she didn’t want anyone else to hear.

Later, in the workroom, Morrison, without looking up from his charts, said, “Thanks. No one likes a dead kid.”

 

Allison was still troublesome. Most of our sessions were devoted to practicalities: how to find a job, how to meet people, how to keep occupied. Her purported boyfriend came up in conversation, and I asked her whether she still saw him and she said, “On the beach. He’s very shy.” One time she told me that she was thinking of having sex with her dog. My reaction was embarrassment rather than anything therapeutic. I mentioned this to Dr. Blankin and he said, “Crazy people say all kinds of things.”

Another time she said she’d seen me downtown. “You were at Alberto’s with your wife.”

“My wife?”

“A pretty woman with long, curly blonde hair.”

It was Lindsay. “Oh, that was a friend of mine,” I said.

Learning about this chance encounter, my supervisor talked about “transference.” “This is positive transference,” he said. “You remind her of a male whom she feels close to. Play up the transference to get her to take your advice.”

 

One of the psych residents arranged a party in the rec room of his apartment complex. It was a sizable room with big white and black linoleum squares and the odor of laundry detergent. The host served fruit punch and homemade canapés based on Ritz crackers. All the psych residents were male but several of us brought female companions.

“Who are you seeing?” a short fellow in a gray cardigan asked me.

I nodded toward Lindsay, who was twenty feet away. She wore a blue halter top fashioned from five cowboy bandanas.

“No, no,” he said. “I mean, for therapy.”

“Uh, no one.”

“Robinson’s good, if you haven’t picked anyone yet.”

The host put on a dance tape and two couples hesitantly began dancing.

“Well,” the short resident said, “we hope to see you around more.”

Several people watched our conversation. I got the impression that the short resident was an emissary from the psych department. I hadn’t been aware of how estranged I was. Lindsay and I circulated, overhearing phrases like “You’re just projecting” and “She’s so OCD.” Lindsay rolled her eyes. I don’t know why I had departed from our usual habit of eating well, having sex, and taking a walk in Balboa Park in order to attend this party.

Near the end of the party I was having another inane conversation with a psych resident. The music had been turned up and become more danceable: “Brown Sugar,” “My Sharona,” “Maggie May.” Someone grabbed my right hand and pulled me onto the dance floor. Dennis. He led me into a jitterbug whirl with a look that said, Please go through with this. And I did. Dennis, after all, was the one resident I’d had much contact with, and I’d felt embarrassed for him when we hosted that “expert” in homosexuality. Besides, dancing with him gave me that Hollywood liberal feeling, the same feeling you get from liking the movie Green Book or Driving Miss Daisy.

 

I settled into the ER. I liked it that patients talked fast rather than rambling and whining. I didn’t mind that their stories were scrambled, because I was a good listener and could organize their observations while they talked. It was as if the chaotic environment—the overhead pages, the groans and yells, the excitable machines—made me concentrate better.

I was allowed to see patients with less supervision. We were primarily triage doctors and diagnosticians. We enjoyed solving medical puzzles without the responsibility of making sure that patients came out all right.

Emergency physicians made no distinction between holidays and weekdays or between days and nights. Fluorescent lights were our sun. I worked several night shifts and the only difference from days was that my supervisor was maybe in the sleeping room and the cafeteria was closed, though the vending machines, whose arrangement of items I can recall even now, were still open.

One night around one AM we got a ring down from an ambulance about an old man who’d fallen off a ladder and was now unconscious. “What was he doing on a ladder in the middle of the night?” the nurse said.

The patient was a Mexican man whose driver’s license said he was in his seventies but who looked quite fit. He wore a blue western shirt with pearl buttons. The paramedics had put him in a plastic neck brace. The hair on the right side of his head was matted with blood and yellow paint. I dug my knuckles into his breastbone, as I was supposed to do. No reaction. I pried open his eyelids on each side and found that his gaze was as empty as an abandoned gas station.

I shone a pen light into each eye and discovered something. His left pupil was huge and didn’t react at all to the light.

“Jeez,” I said to the nurse. “Better wake up Dr. Chu. And call neurosurgery.”

The patient had a “blown pupil.” A blood clot was expanding next to his brain, and it was tilting his brain against the tentorium, the inflexible membrane beneath it, and strangling the nerve that ran along the bottom of the brain, the nerve that operated the pupil. Before the era of CT scans a blown pupil was the first sign of a major brain injury—and generally the last sign of life.

I skipped sharp-wittedness and went straight to fright. I went into the workroom to take the call back from the neurosurgeon. I kept wrapping and unwrapping the phone cord around my forearm while I described the situation.

“By the time I have coffee and drive to the hospital,” the neurosurgeon said, “he’ll probably be dead. You’re going to have to drill a burr hole.”

“I’ve never done that.”

“Have you ever seen it done?”

“Yes. Once.”

“You’ll be fine.”

The nurse came into the workroom. I held the phone and asked for a cranial drill. Her eyes opened wide. “The neurosurgeon said I could do it,” I said.

Dr. Chu, who was in his last year of internal medicine, appeared, rubbing his eyes, and I told him the situation. “I don’t do that procedure,” he said. “I’m going back to bed.”

Over the phone the neurosurgeon explained the procedure, step by step. He explained that the drill would automatically stop when it punched through the skull, and he advised me not to let up on pushing the drill, because if I did, the drill would get stuck in the bone. When he finished, I asked him what I should do with the circle of bone that the drill excised.

“I don’t know,” he said. “Throw it in the waste basket.”

I did it. I succeeded. I drilled a hole in the patient’s temple and the congealed blood oozed out like strawberry jelly from a broken jelly jar. I stood at the bedside holding the drill up like a trophy. The patient stirred, which under the circumstances was a positive sign.

 

My next shift, Morrison supervised. “I heard you saved a guy with a burr hole,” he said.

I admitted that I had.

“You ought to seriously consider emergency medicine for a career,” he said.

I took up Dr. Morrison on his recommendation. In May I sent a resignation letter to the psych department. I met no resistance.

One of my final tasks was handing over three outpatients. Dennis was assigned to replace me. Two outpatients were no problem, but Allison was troublesome. I’d been seeing her since late October and I can’t say I’d made any progress. She still spent most of her days hanging out on the beach. Her imaginary romance with Charles wasn’t going anywhere.

Allison, Dennis, and I met in Blankin’s office. I explained that I was leaving and that Dennis was actually the most accomplished resident.

“It smells like a pine tree in here,” she said.

Dennis listened politely to Allison’s account of her life, an account I’d heard a hundred times. I had to force myself not to glance at my watch.

 

A few days afterwards a fellow resident summoned me from the ER. “Dr. Blankin wants you to go to the M & M conference tomorrow,” he said. The “M & M,” or Morbidity and Mortality conference, was where doctors reviewed their mistakes.

Dr. Blankin presided. “Last night,” he said, “a patient, A. D., wrapped a pillow around her head and shot herself fatally in the brain. She’d been an outpatient on our service for several months and carried the diagnosis of borderline personality. Reviewing her recent visits, it’s evident that she was showing symptoms of depression: hypersomnia, feelings of emptiness, trouble making decisions.”

I knew immediately who it was.

“Was she on antidepressants?” a doctor asked.

“No. It was felt that she, being a borderline, wouldn’t have benefited,” Blankin said.

Another doctor asked, “What is the significance of the pillow?”

After the conference Dennis came up to me. “I’m so sorry,” he said. “I’ve already told the family.”

I’d been completely mistaken. I’d been regarding Allison in one way, and the truth was different. She had not been a colorful character, but a young woman playing dress up, and I had looked away, the way you look away when firewood bursts into flames.

I think about Allison two or three times a year now. At first I thought of her death as a product of my incompetence at psychiatry. Later I learned that it’s typical for a young psychiatrist to lose an occasional patient and that Dr. Blankin’s bland report wasn’t merely a rationalization but reflected the way that hardened professionals spoke. When I imagine Allison’s life now, as I somehow failed to do then, I could indeed detect “symptoms of depression.”

Now I see, to use a term from the era, that Allison was collateral damage. In 1974 I was a nomad, but by the next year I had found a place to be. In 1974 I was a floundering intellectual, but by 1975 (and ever afterwards in the ER) I’d achieved a clumsy compassion, whereby I behaved as if I were on a quiz show and my emergency patients would benefit, sometimes by staying alive. I found myself but I lost Allison.

***

Jim Steck graduated from Stanford’s writing program a long time ago. Since then he’s published dozens of reviews and essays. This is an excerpt from his first long work, a memoir of his working life as an ER doctor, tentatively entitled People Who Are Trying to Die.

“Gray” by Melissa Ginsburg is our Poem of the Week.

Melissa Ginsburg is the author of the poetry collections Doll Apollo (winner of the Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters Poetry Award) and Dear Weather Ghost, the novels The House Uptown and Sunset City, and three poetry chapbooks: Arbor, Double Blind, and Apollo. Her poems have appeared in the New Yorker, Image, Guernica, Kenyon Review, Fence, Southwest Review, and other magazines. Originally from Houston, Texas, Melissa studied poetry at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. She is Associate Professor of Creative Writing and Literature at the University of Mississippi, and serves as Associate Editor of Tupelo Quarterly. She lives in Oxford, Mississippi.

 

Author’s Note

This poem began with contemplation of the particular color, texture, and sheen of something inconsequential, the marker tray on a classroom whiteboard. While I attempted to focus my attention on this surface and describe it as accurately as possible, storms entered the poem, along with objects lost to those storms. The objects brought with them their owners—the women in my family along the Gulf Coast. Their bodies entered, and the rooms they inhabited. This particular gray is the color of water damaged generations, of aging, of grief, of certain spatial qualities of time.
 

 

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Image credit: Tenola Plaxico

“Pharmacy Museum Tour Guide, New Orleans” by Andy Young is our Poem of the Week.

Andy Young’s second full-length collection, Museum of the Soon to Depart, is forthcoming from Carnegie Mellon University Press. Her work has appeared or will soon in the Michigan Quarterly Review, Pidgeonholes, and Drunken Boat. A graduate of Warren Wilson’s Program for Writers, she teaches at New Orleans Center for Creative Arts. With Khaled Hegazzi, she translates poetry from Arabic, published in Los Angeles Review of Books and the Norton anthology Language for a New Century.

 

Pharmacy Museum Tour Guide, New Orleans

In the glass cases
you’ll see the scarifier, the phleem, the jar of leeches.

Note the self-trepanation gadgets,
       the lead needles with bent tips,
       pigrib toothbrushes invented by a prisoner.

Those globes of liquid in the window front
were dyed to warn:
       red for epidemic,
       yellow for yellow fever.

Imagine the smells with no sewer system,
       wigs held on with lard. Tar-covered bonfires
       and cannon shots for the miasma,
              the spirits afflicting the city.

              Those red and white stripes
                     on barber poles?
                     Bloody rags. Barbers were the ones
                                   to lance and amputate.

       Eighth-century Baghdad had pharmacies,
       and native people here had herbal cures and ceremonies,
              but the first licensed pharmacy in the U.S. was this one,
              opened in 1816 by Dr. Louis Joseph Dufilho.

Customers sat down at that soda fountain
and had cocaine in their soda—coke—
or maybe a 7-Up:
              Lithium Takes the Ouch Out of Grouch!

              Mercury? For the raging syphilis:
              a night with Venus a lifetime with Mercury—

Don’t miss the tonsil guillotine
       —with its little tonsil bucket!
       which made it nice and quick.

Over here the opium tampons
(ladies always let out a sigh when I get to those),
       Belladonna Plaster, Godrey’s Cordial,
              laudanum and treacle for the baby.

Just like now, people came from far and wide,
some visiting, some, in town,
you know, on business—
              around the corner, where the Omni Hotel is now,
              “slaves” were bought at the biggest auction in the South….

Of course you want to see more!
       Here’s the blister beetle, Cantharis—
              what you might know as Spanish Fly.

              The compounding station, behind the curtain,
              was hidden to increase the mystery of the good doctor,
                                   who they say even learned a thing or two
                                   from the vodou priestesses next door….

Ladies came for potions, too!
       Love Potion Number 9
       Draw Him to Me
       The Essence of Bend Over

and the wealthy had special ways.
They liked their pills coated
       in chocolate or precious metals,
              so they took their strychnine and liver pills
                     again and again, the gold ball tracing
                     each intestinal canyon….

       and white ladies liked being a tinge blue
       a little salve of nux vomica on the diaphragm,
                                   all the rage—
              or they powdered their skin
              with the dust of the morpho butterfly,
       painted veins on their face
                     for that paler, consumptive look.

Those stairs over there?
              Might they have led to experiments
              conducted on enslaved bodies?
       Sit down if you feel faint—some say they hear
       muffled screams through the thick wood…
                                   oh but that’s not the tour
                                          you signed up for—
 

Author’s Note

I am a fan of unusual museums, and this poem is from a collection that explores this fascination. It is also about one of my favorite places in the world, full of oddities, history, and atmosphere. What surprised me about writing this poem is that it is the only one that came to me from someone else’s voice. I don’t just mean that it is a persona poem, of which I have written many; I mean that the voice of the poem springs from a real-live person, Owen Ever (https://owenever.com), an artist who “seek(s) to understand the psycho/social impacts of sickness, the construct of wellness in an unwell world, and the redemptive nature of wonder.” I love their vision and work, but I did not actually know them at all when I wrote this piece. I had been on their tour many years before writing this poem, and the power of their presentation, complicating and illuminating history, remained with me through the years. I reconstructed it, albeit with some exaggeration, along with the many notes I took that day. Through serendipity, I recently connected with them through a friend and shared the poem. The result of that connection further influenced the poem as they helped me work through some questions about the poem’s ending.

BLAST, TMR’s online-only prose anthology, features prose too vibrant to be confined between the covers of a print journal. In Brynne Jones’s “The Troop Leader,” the adult chaperone of a girl scout troop goes inexplicably missing during a camping trip, and the scouts are left to fend for themselves. What ensues is a wilderness powerplay reminiscent of William Golding’s Lord of the Flies and HBO’s Yellowjackets. Jones’s short story is a darkly humorous reflection on what it looks and feels like to inherit a futureless world, a world depleted by the generations that have gone before and abandoned their progeny to a chaos instructive in cruelty and cunning—perhaps the only merit badges that matter in the end.

The Troop Leader

Brynne Jones

 

The troop leader has been missing for an hour, and our predicament is clear. We are lost. We should not be out here on this backpacking trip by ourselves. After all, we are not adults. We are not even seniors. We are only cadettes. Which is not to say that we are unequipped. These merit badges, pricked into our regulation-khaki vests, prove our preparedness.

You will have heard of us because of the cookies, boxes of drizzled coconut Os and minty hard-snap biscuits we peddle on your doorstep. Such industry in young girls, you might say as you take out your wallet, gives me hope for the future. But what you won’t have heard about are the boot camps and battle tactics. The formations we drill to win cookie sales and friendship bracelets. Our fury may be muted by our neon scrunchies and sparkly hairclips, but, trust us, it is always there.

At first, we try to downplay the troop leader’s absence. A mistake, we call it. A brief setback. But the sun is only the breadth of three fingers above the horizon, and we are still a mile from the mountaintop. We cannot wait for her return. Onward we trudge. Pitching camp, starting fire, signaling smoke: these are the things we’ve spent our middle-school years learning how to do. We even think we know where we’re going—until we reach a clearing, some campsite where we have never been before.

We gather in a friendship circle, crossing our right arms over our left. A breeze stirs the thirsty leaves on the trees around us as we wait for Aurielle to speak. The first among us to wear a training bra, Aurielle is cool and curvaceous. Short but mouthy. Her cropped hair is a mottled, bottled blonde, and this year she is our alpha. We’ve had other alphas over the years, of course: Edith, Madhuri, Zara. All of them have been decommissioned, all of them forced out by puberty’s shifting chain of command. Soon after her breasts came in, Aurielle claimed the record for most Tagalongs sold. Then, when the troop bridged from juniors to cadettes, Aurielle was the first to cross. As the troop leader draped the sash over her swelling chest, Aurielle had this look. It was the look of a general. Like she truly believed that duty outranked death. A wartime look, you might say, but then, we are always at war.

In the circle, Aurielle says, “Listen up, y’all! I know we’re tired, but we’ve got to face facts. Ms. Littlejohn has the compass, the water, the travel binder. Without her—”

A whiny voice cuts her off. “My mom says the best thing to do when you’re lost is to stay in one place! That’s the only way to be found!”

Aurielle makes the quiet sign, and Janet, the interrupter, falls silent. Janet’s red hair is pulled back in a dorky French braid, her glasses are thick and goggly, and her pale skin is so translucent it looks larval. Her sick sticky mouth is smeared in lip gloss. Her sleeping bag smells like pee. We all know that she will do whatever it takes, shoulder any humiliation, to get back to her mommy and daddy.

“Sure. We could stay in one place,” Aurielle says, resisting the urge to bite off Janet’s head. “Or we could try to find a bar of service to call and explain where we are. Whatever we decide, we need to act fast. Before it gets dark. Did anyone actually see where we lost Ms. Littlejohn?”

“I saw her sometime after we crossed the river,” says Rachel N. “She told Rachel T she left the marshmallows on the bus. Right, Rachel T?”

“Right, Rachel N.”

“Oh, that’s it. She went back for the marshmallows,” says Aurielle, squeezing the hands of the Rachels. One Rachel is tall, the other is muscular. Athletic in different ways, they are Aurielle’s deputies and forever flank her.

“But she’s been gone for almost two hours. The parking lot isn’t that far.” This comes from Marion, the new girl who moved here last year from Florida, after her parents split up. We make Marion sit on the bus with Janet, even though her shiny, black hair smells like coconut and we all envy her handwriting. How she dots the i in her name with a jagged little heart.

“Don’t be dumb,” Aurielle says, pulling a face that shows us the limits of Marion’s intellect. “Obviously, Ms. Littlejohn is at the campsite. We’re the ones in the wrong place. We need to figure out a way to tell her where we are.”

Magnified by her glasses, Janet’s eyes dart around the murky treetops, scanning the dusk-filled branches. “Are we safe here?” she asks.

“As safe as anywhere,” says Aurielle, though her tone is a question. Soon it will be dark, and none of us have our Night Owl badge yet. None of us knows what lives in these woods.

Whispers circuit the clearing. Perhaps the troop leader intended for us to follow her back down the mountain, Thanh tells Ivy. Perhaps she took a wrong turn and she is the one who is lost, says Larissa. Maybe she slipped on a log and smashed her phone. Maybe she slipped on a log and smashed her head. Her appendix ruptured. Her heart exploded. She wandered off-trail and was eaten by a bear.

Again, Aurielle makes the quiet sign, and the whispers sputter and fizzle. “Okay,” she says. “Say something really bad happened. Say Ms. Littlejohn hurt herself somewhere in the—” But at that moment the sun sinks below the horizon, and darkness wolfs Aurielle’s confidence in a single gulp.

We cry out for light, fighting to remain calm enough to recall our training. Above us, in the center of the clearing, we thread a guyline through the handle of an oil lantern, suspending it between two trees. The lantern’s metal body is painted a deep, flaking crimson, its glass sconce is chipped like a tooth, and we have been carrying it with us for as long as our foremothers have been coming to this mountain. Every year the sconce is a little more broken—blackened more by flame, beaten further by weather. We call it the torch, because it is a memento from the Great Before. Before smartphone flashlights, before electricity. Before wildfire razed the once-forested peaks all around this campsite.

The troop leader liked to hold the torch up by the handle, her face shadow-painted and unhinged as she told us tales of what happens to little girls lost in the woods. The woods aren’t really our enemy, though we make them sound like they are. It’s what they contain. Wolves, axe murderers, frat boys. Men with hooks for hands waiting for you to wander off alone, betrayed by your bladder. Without the troop leader, we don’t know where to concentrate our fear. It doesn’t help that some of us have mothers petrified by all the wrong things: taxes, vaccines, the feastings of Hollywood elites. The flat earth’s sharp edge.

*

Together, we’ve been through a lot. We’ve seen baby teeth wrenched out of mouths by doorknobs, hairs sprouted like cactus needles, titties morphed from buds to bazookas. We’ve felt the sting of snapped bra straps, heard the heckles and high fives of our brothers. We’ve learned how to stilt in heels and where boyhands go when you slow dance. We’ve been catcalled and crotch-taunted by grown men while waiting for the school bus.

All of this, we’ve survived.

But the world is melting all around us, and we fear we’ll melt with it before we get our time. Where we live is all drained swimming pools and Astroturf. Some of us have never taken a bath. This summer, it hasn’t rained in weeks, and all around us the woods are brown and crackling.

*

“Before we do anything else, we should send a search party,” Aurielle says, her voice low and conspiratorial even though we hear nothing but wind in the trees. “To see what’s out there. Maybe we’ll even find Ms. Littlejohn.”

We deem this a good idea. Even if the search party does not find the troop leader, they will be able to survey the area and report back if any nearby campsites are occupied. A call goes out for volunteers. For several minutes, no one moves. Then, Thanh twitches. She rubs her ear against her shoulder, unable to resist an itch. She is smaller than the rest of us, and we look at her all at once, a collective head swiveling on its neck. We wonder how long she can ignore our eyes. How long she can bear the weight of this communal looking. Not long, we think, and we are right. She steps forward, shattering the circle.

“Fine,” she says, with a sigh.

We pretend that she doesn’t have to. We tell her that she is a valued member of the troop, that her good turn is appreciated. That we will not soon forget her brave willingness to charge into the sunless unknown.

“It’s whatever,” she says. “I don’t know how to start a fire.”

A good point, we concur. Anyone with a Level V Camping Skills badge should stay behind, as their expertise will be required at camp. This criterion divides us neatly into two factions: the older girls and the younger. Aurielle, whose birthday is in October, is especially pleased by this show of pragmatism. The terms are ratified, and the six younger scouts step away from the circle, their earth-toned uniforms and determined faces dissolving into shadow.

“Keep your ringers on and watch your backs,” Aurielle calls after them, as the remaining eight of us clump together to begin the work of fire-building. “And leave no trace!”

*

You may think of us as an institution, an American way of life. Perhaps we remind you of your own childhood, the scout you once were. Perhaps this is why you relish stories about groups of savvy, entrepreneurial children defeating the odds. Why, when you become parents yourselves, you pride yourselves on our thirteen-hour days of pushing cookies. Our hard sell. You tell us that you see the future in us, though why that is, we cannot understand.

We do not see our future in you.

The thing is we only have so many predictable seasons left—only a handful of good years until there is no camping. Before you object, we ask you to recall the hottest summer of your youth, the longest drought you faced. How many days of school you missed for bomb cyclones and thundersnow. What the air tasted like before wildfire smoke smothered us in its blanket of everlasting night.

*

An hour goes by, and still the search party has not returned. The tents are up. The lightning bugs are out. The fire crackles and pops like breakfast cereal, making our stomachs riot with emptiness. Our sleeping bags are piled in a great blob next to the fire, our dwindling road-trip snacks stockpiled in the middle. We try to ration, but we make ourselves sick, chasing handfuls of gummy bears and Skittles with shotgunned Pixy Stix. Our molars, already corroded by orange soda from a canteen, are caked in grit.

“What do you think happened to them?” asks Rachel T, picking licorice sinews from her braces.

“Maybe they went to the ranger station,” says Rachel N. Her fingertips are dip-dusted a neon orange that she sucks and smears on her khaki shorts.

This is fair, we reason. Success may have delayed their return. Perhaps they even found the troop leader. We continue to wait, burritoing ourselves in sleeping bags zipped to the chin. Some of us zip our heads inside too, where the air is stale and sweatdamp. We listen to the forest’s rustle. Blood beats loud in our chests, and the dark hums all around us like a massive cicada. Every minute is the minute of their return, until it too ticks by.

Finally, Aurielle says, “Maybe they’re lost now, too. A pair of us should go and check.”

“And then what?” says a voice. We poke our heads out of our sleeping bags.

Marion rises from her crouch by the fire, sharp-eyed and straight-backed. There is danger in her posture. “We send two more and they go missing? You send us out two by two until there’s no one left?”

“Don’t be a baby,” says Aurielle.

Only then do we see what’s wrong. There is nothing babyish about Marion. She is bolder than the rest of us, her straight hair smooth in its bun. Because she is the new girl, the lowest ranking member of our troop, this upsets the order of things.

“Baby,” Marion scoffs, blowing on the coals. “Please. I have more badges than anyone here.” Her face is defiant, beaked nose held high, as she faces Aurielle. “And I’m telling you, this fire isn’t high enough for the rangers to see our smoke signals. We need it higher—as high as we can get it.”

Still in her sleeping bag, Aurielle wiggleworms to a standing position. “No, it’s too dry and windy to risk it. Besides, the search party will find Ms. Littlejohn soon.”

“What makes you so sure she’s still out there to be found?” Marion asks, crossing her arms. “I heard that, in order to bridge from cadette to senior, Ms. Littlejohn just dumps you in the woods with a compass. You have to find your way back on your own.”

“What? That can’t be right,” says Aurielle, her eyebrows pinched low.

“It isn’t right, but it’s the truth.”

Something caterwauls in the woods. Coyotes. Werewolves. Zombies. We’re all thinking it, but only Janet lets out a whimper. Her face is all scrunched, like she’s broken a rule. “I want to go home,” she says. “I want my mother.”

Shut up, Janet, we say.

Marion steps towards Aurielle, foregrounding the difference in their heights. The torch looms over them both. In its light, Marion’s irises merge with her pupils—a void we all might fall into.

“Don’t you get it?” Marion says. “Ms. Littlejohn isn’t coming back.”

“We’re sticking to the plan,” Aurielle says. She squares her ample chest until Marion backs away.

“Stick to the plan,” Marion says, walking backwards. “And we die on this mountain.”

*

For the record, we are not fickle. Our loyalties do not shift quickly or easily. When Marion first foments rebellion, we shun her. We shame her for defying our alpha. When she stokes the fire, we call her “beaky” and “birdbrain.” When she asks for help gathering wood, we pretend that we cannot hear her. That she is invisible. That she is dead. We hoard all the jawbreakers and hide the last stick of cinnamon gum, and finally, when she comes back from peeing in the woods, we hide ourselves.

“She isn’t missing! She isn’t coming back!” Marion calls out, over and over, as she tends the fire by herself. We huddle behind a fallen fir, careful not to give away our position. On the front line, Aurielle floats her phone’s camera lens above the log like a periscope, recording Marion’s solitary craze. We bite our fists to stifle our giggles.

“What a weirdo,” whispers Rachel T.

“Seriously,” says Rachel N. “I bet this is the real reason she left her old troop. Who would want to be friends with someone so—?” She twirls a finger around her ear. We snigger. Marion whirls around, searching for the laughter’s source.

“Think about it,” Marion shouts at the woods. “What does Ms. Littlejohn care? Cookie season is over. We’ve made as much money as we’re ever going to make for her. She’s probably home in bed right now! Do you all really want to die out here, waiting for some selfish adult who isn’t coming back?”

We don’t answer her, but we don’t laugh either. From the way our eyes avoid each other, it’s clear that some of us are starting to listen. Some of this is starting to make sense.

“My troop in Florida used to go camping all the time,” Marion continues shouting. “Did you know that, for a camping group this size, you’re supposed to have at least two chaperones? Why are there no adults here when there are supposed to be two?”

“Is that true?” Janet whines at Aurielle.

Aurielle scoffs. “She’s crazy.”

Janet tugs Aurielle’s vest. “Why don’t we have two chaperones?”

“Get off me,” Aurielle snaps, tugging her vest free of Janet’s clutches.

“Marion, you’re right!” Janet gasps. She staggers out from behind the log, no longer interested in hiding. “My mom wanted to come, and Ms. Littlejohn said no!”

Locating the voice, Marion turns slowly, her neck twisting like a possessed doll. There is no flinch in her depthless gaze as she considers Janet, the deserter. “You,” she says to Janet. “Why is it always you?”

Sensing danger, Janet shrinks back. “Marion?” she asks, her voice cracking as she searches for any remnant of her bus buddy in this deranged-looking thing.

“God, I’m so sick of you,” Marion says.

Janet can’t help it. Terror is as visible on her face as her glasses. She bites her lip. She peels a hangnail until it bleeds. When her right eyelid twitches like a rabbit, that’s when Marion springs and the hostilities begin.

Janet darts into the forest, relying on the wooded darkness to even things out. She crouches behind bushes and ducks behind trees. She shimmies halfway up the trunk of an ancient oak before she notices Marion climbing up after her. Janet’s quicksilver pulse throbs in her neck. In her panic, she loses her grip. Marion yanks Janet’s braid from behind and drags her by the hair down to the dirt. On the ground, Janet curls into a ball, battening her hatches like a roly poly. It’s no use. Suddenly, she is sprawled on her stomach, as Marion pins her down with one hand and clenches her French braid in the other.

“You know what you are?” Marion says as she fondles Janet’s braid in her fist. “A scaredy-cat. And do you know what scaredy-cats do? They meow.” Janet squirms as Marion produces her Swiss Army knife from the pocket of her khakis and flicks it open, resting the blade at the base of Janet’s scalp. “Go on, Janet. Meow.”

Aurielle crawls out from behind the log, now more interested in observing this altercation than hiding from Marion. Following our alpha, we emerge from our hiding place. We circle Janet, who cowers on the ground like the sympathizer she is.

Her back pretzeled and arched, Janet looks up at Marion in disbelief. Marion doesn’t blink, and her tone leaves no room for confusion. She is not joking. Her words show themselves for what they are: a command. “I said meow,” Marion says. The blade glints in the firelight as she pushes it to the rust-colored root of Janet’s hair. It is against our code to cut the hair of another girl scout, another sister, but we suppose what tonight proves is that our code only extends so far. And where it stops is on this mountain.

“Meow, you stupid scaredy-cat,” says Aurielle.

“Finally someone has the guts to say it,” says Rachel T.

Janet’s face crumples. Her lip quivers and she pulls her knees to her chest. “Why do you always pick on me?” she asks, her grimace baring her bottom teeth.

Do as you’re told, we say. Meow, Janet, meow.

It starts as a high-pitched whine, little more than a gargle in the back of Janet’s throat, gathering dimension and depth as it moves forward into her mouth: “Meeeeeeyowwwww!”

Marion slackens her hold on Janet’s hair. “That’s it! Such a good little kitty,” she says. “Keep meowing!”

There are tears in Janet’s eyes, as she curls and uncurls her spine like a cat stretching on a ledge. When Marion finally releases her, she throws her head back and mewls at the moon winking above the treeline. We laugh and clap. Huzzah, we cry.

But after a while, the spectacle of Janet on all fours, meowing at the top of her lungs and scratching in the dirt, returns Aurielle to herself. “Okay, that’s enough,” she says. “We’ve made our point.” But we don’t react, our attention still captured by Janet’s metamorphosis.

Meow, we chant. Meow, meow.

Janet obeys. She meows again and again. She licks her paws and rubs them over her eyes. She kneads her claws on the log’s satisfying bark. She chases the beam of light shining from Marion’s phone. It’s a game, we know. One that Janet demeans herself to play. We won’t admit it out loud, but a part of us is excited. It excites us that we can barely see our fellow scout in this wretched, meowing creature. That we don’t know what she might do. How far she might go to satisfy the troop.

“Who’s my pretty kitty?” says Marion as she bounces the light around the clearing, sending Janet scurrying this way and that.

“I said that’s enough!” says Aurielle. She tries to block the beam with her body, but Marion ignores her until Aurielle leers in her face. “Listen to me, you pathetic weirdo!” Aurielle shouts at Marion. Her face is so close to Marion’s that her breath stirs the babyhairs on Marion’s cheeks. It feels like the prelude to a movie kiss, and we all watch, spellbound.

“You’re not the boss of me,” says Marion. She stares through Aurielle, resolute and unflappable as a beefeater. No one moves. No one except Janet, who prowls the edge of the clearing, sly and timid.

“You’re worse than Janet,” says Aurielle. The focus back on her, Janet sidles up behind Aurielle, believing herself again under the alpha’s protection. Believing herself saved. Until Marion’s gaze settles Janet in her crosshairs.

“We’ll see about that,” says Marion as she darts around Aurielle to get to Janet.

It ends in tragedy. All it takes is one good flick of Marion’s Swiss army knife to sever years of growth. We gasp as the braid tumbles in the leaves. Shell-shocked, Janet feels below her nape, her hands groping at the now-empty air and exposed skin. Her neck is naked, blotchy, and undignified. Her face is covered in snot. But she is different now. Forever changed. She sinks to the ground, lifts up the amputated braid, and drops it on the campfire. The braid flares, igniting into flame. The coyotes are quiet, and so are we, mesmerized by this burning.

We try resting our hands on Janet’s shoulder—the regretful, respectful scouts in us briefly restored—but Janet recoils. She is tight-jawed and hard-eyed, her buglike gaze locked on the fire. Watching her braid shrivel into ash, she swears to us that she will never again grow out her hair.

When the pyre is nothing but smolder, Janet again ascends the oak tree. This time, she does not come down. She does not answer our calls, our pleas for peace. She withdraws from the troop a fallen soldier.

*

This is why we say you expect too much. Under duress, our time here can only be what it is, bloody and imperfect. After all, how can we be more than you who raised us?

*

After Janet’s defeat, Marion’s rank drops lower still, and her malice returns. “This is all your fault,” she spits at Aurielle. She flashes her eyes and bares her teeth, looming at our alpha.

“You are such a freak show,” says Aurielle.

Above them, the torch sways in the wind, pivoting like a lighthouse beam, patrolling the campsite. Unlike us, it silently awaits vengeance. We grow louder and louder. Some of us, overcome by lawlessness, light branches on the dying pyre and trail them through the air like sparklers.

“Seriously. Stop it,” says Aurielle. She glances sidelong at the rest of us—but no one rallies. No one backs her up. Not while Marion circles and leers, flaring her nostrils as she considers angles of attack.

Aurielle’s hair is too short to pull, so Marion lunges at her bra straps. Marion tugs and pulls and snaps wherever she can, while Aurielle twists and writhes. Aurielle’s shirt rides up, as she tries to shield her midsection from Marion’s snatches. Instead, her bra unclasps, and out tumble two wads of crumpled-up tissue. We gasp as Marion skitters to pick up the trash. Then, she turns and holds it aloft for all of us to see: the lie that changes everything.

“I knew it!” she shouts at Aurielle, insane with glee. “You stuff! Do you even need a bra?”

Litterbug, litterbug, we chant, the spasm jumping from scout to scout.

Aurielle collapses on the ground, no longer queen. We join our laughter with Marion’s. We jeer at Aurielle’s flattened chest. Her manipulations and lies.

All at once, Aurielle seizes Marion’s bun from behind. Again, we hear ourselves cheer, slipping into something like psychosis—a violent fantasy that ends in all our deaths. We see the campsite cordoned off by yellow tape, bloody braids and severed pigtails strewn across the clearing. Our troop canonized in hushed tones on the evening news.

“Quiet!” a voice screeches from above. It is Janet. She perches on a treelimb, her head tilted a fraction. She seems to be thinking. Or listening. We are loud, we realize, so loud the whole forest echoes with our uproar. Janet makes the quiet sign. Then, we hear it, too.

A gentle whirring, like wings. A helicopter hovers over us at an impossible angle, as though leaning against the wind.

We abandon Aurielle on the ground. Following Janet’s eyeline, we peer upward at the torch. The helicopter. The sky beyond it. We are shouting again—for rescue or bloodshed, we don’t really know which—as the helicopter circles overhead. From her perch, Janet unknots and yanks the guyline that dangles the torch. It falls in the dirt with a thunk but does not break. Janet drags the torch up into her oak by its line and knots it around the lamp’s handle. Then, she dangles the torch and begins to swing, her glasses steaming up from the effort. At the top of her arc, she lets go and launches the torch into the highest branches of a neighboring tree. There is a savage shatter of glass.

We wait. We look for flames. We sniff for smoke. We hear a cracking noise, followed by a kind of thrum. Bright orange flames lick through the treetops.

Minds snarled, bodies swarming, we charge at the forest with our fiery branches and throw everything we have on the flame. The parched leaves go up like kindling and illuminate the dark woods. This summer’s historic drought means that, within minutes, a wildfire is raging and unstoppable.

This heat is our inheritance. We belong to it, every one of us riled and shrieking.

Marion empties a full canteen of soda on a woolen blanket and throws it on a fiery bush. The sodden blanket puffs out great white loops of smoke that Aurielle and the Rachels fan with their vests. Janet, still perched in her tree, shouts with all the air in her lungs, until smoke fills them and she seizes her chest, coughing terribly.

The rest of us are coughing now, too. There’s another loud crack and someone screams. We are certain the helicopter has fallen out of the sky. Maybe, despite all our badges—our preparations and our bright futures—we just can’t handle the pressures of survival. Through the thickening smoke, we squint, searching for the wreckage. We squint harder, still coughing. Finally, we see them. Silhouettes walking slowly—so slowly, they’re barely moving—their mouths and noses covered, carrying something. The rangers have come for us. Or is it the search party? Perhaps it is the troop leader, walking toward us with a bag of marshmallows cradled to her chest. All around us, the forest is engulfed in flame. Someone shines a flashlight on us, on our tangled, matted hair and our screwed-up faces. On the women we’re becoming.

***

Brynne Jones is a writer from east Tennessee. Her work is forthcoming in the Iowa Review and has been named a finalist in 2023 for the Disquiet Prize, the swamp pink Fiction Prize, and New Letters‘s Robert Day Award for Fiction. She lives in Austin, where she recently earned her MFA in Fiction & Screenwriting from the Michener Center for Writers.

 

 

 

 

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Header image: Ringing (1928), Paul Klee

“Prayer Meeting” by Michelle Bitting is our Poem of the Week.

Michelle Bitting was short-listed for the 2023 CRAFT Character Sketch Challenge, the 2020 Montreal International Poetry Prize, and a finalist for the 2021 Coniston Prize and 2020 Reed Magazine Edwin Markham Prize. She is the author of six poetry collections, including Nightmares & Miracles (Two Sylvias Press, 2022), winner of the Wilder Prize and recently named one of Kirkus Reviews 2022 Best of Indie. Her chapbook Dummy Ventriloquist is forthcoming in 2024. Bitting is writing a hybrid novel about her great-grandmother, stage and screen actor Beryl Mercer, and is a Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing and Literature at Loyola Marymount University.
 

Prayer Meeting

an ars poetica with a line by Terrance Hayes
 
I wanted to start with the orange light
and end with the lemon tree. The old
Ford was a lemon, and I wanted
the dashboard’s flashing emergency
to dénouement into a poet’s stately
haiku. Ripe fruit resting at the end
of a heavily winnowed branch. Looking
to be plucked or simply contemplated,
depending on if you are here to appreciate
miracles or slice them open, drizzle
honey and suck the dueling notes
of sweet & sour until you’re a fusion
of flavored smoke inside the beekeeper’s
billow. I have been that unafraid and I have
welcomed the inspection of my hives.
How often they make no sense while
admitting a chemical order. The poem
as life as moment propped on a stem
of green nutrients unveiling its sting.
Pieces of puzzle made into keys
for unlocking bones of the inscrutable
self. Or hole in the mirror. Which is reason to
search my glove compartment for
a manual to fix anything. So we can
get somewhere. Pages rifled that connect signs
& sounds with a feeling inside
like a psalm taking flight over the weeping fields
where blackbirds are sleeping. A poem
the bible or muse open to interpretation.
Scripture as invention that comes in handy say
my relatives from the cleave in the middle of
the country. A new view like a miracle they
say can happen. And I can agree
in the same way I know gods might appear
out of nowhere. Even this small flock
of neon green parrots flashing early along
winter skies. Boisterous & flamboyant
as emerald matadors shaking sequined
sleeves across an eternity of air. Or the wet
& trembling jewels of late November rain.
Ecstasy and a man surprising himself naked
& wild leaping from the tub where the gold
of unknowing is more precious than its
mineral value, with the weight of what’s
suppressed in the waiting. After your theatrical
set the audience erupting. How it was then
that the Volta made her dramatic essence known
inside a buzzing cacophony of praise & fluster.
Noise falling away like ready lemons from
a limb. Time stopping as when a haiku breathes
or spreads its momentary feathers. How
your face pivoted my direction inside
the adoring cloud like a bird or knife
in flight looking to land and my warning
lights flushed red. My comportments
opened. Instruction pages laying themselves
bare, holy as apparitions. In the end, it was
the beginning, and the good word was you
out of nowhere turning to ask, Is there somewhere
I’m supposed to be? And me not hesitating
to answer, Where is it you’d like to go?
 

Author’s Note

I was at a literary luncheon in Los Angeles, and after we finished eating, we made a circle. The leaders passed around notebooks with a haiku by Victoria Chang about a lemon tree as a prompt, to get our generative juices flowing. We took some minutes to reflect and scribble our thoughts in response. Someone mentioned the unexpected warning light of her engine that morning. As if on cue, two of us lobbed the old bane about cars and sour fruit. I gave myself the challenge of writing a piece that would begin with worry and end with calm, but with all sorts of epic shit in between. Of course, that’s not exactly what happened. I started the poem, and a few days later, after attending the Southern California Poetry Festival at Beyond Baroque, I was inspired in a new and unexpected way and proceeded to “finish” it.
 

 

 

 

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Image credit: Alexis Rhone Fancher

In Rohini Sunderam’s “Vegetable Stories,” first published in TMR issue 45.3 (Fall 2022), an unconsummated romance buds, flourishes, withers, and endures in dormant form for two people who communicate their feelings for each other through vegetables, stories, and art.

Vegetable Stories

Rohini Sunderam

 

Gurgaon in the 1980s still had an air of innocence. The roads were dusty and potholed. The trees were young, their new leaves touched with gold. Stray dogs, pigs, and cats, the occasional peacock, and families of monkeys lived alongside the ironing man and vegetable sellers, kerbside tailors, the families of retired servicemen, rich and poor and middle class.

She was thirteen years old when she first went to the street vendors to buy vegetables for her mother. With all that thirteen means: borderline woman, still a child, angry chin thrust forward in defiance of age and wisdom and, in her case, suspicion, born from having had a father snatched by unfeeling Fate.

To him, all of fifteen and trying to look older, she was almost a goddess. He squatted on the pavement with his straw mat and balance scale, awaiting his first customer on his first day at the market. She walked straight to his stall to buy vegetables, and he was ensnared. Her almond eyes were ringed with lashes black as pepper; her creamy skin was like tea made with milk, and her lips were almost as pink as the skin on the onions he sold.

“How much?” she asked peremptorily, her defiant chin bobbing upward.

He quoted a reasonable price.

“Too much. Tell me the right, right price,” she demanded, her eyes large and brown as nutmegs.

His heart shrivelled in the hot breath of her scorn. He lowered the price and lost his profit; he had much to learn. All day he was mortified, the bitter-gourd taste of defeat in his throat.

Determined not to lose out again, he listened to the other vegetable and fruit sellers quote their prices and quickly learnt how to play his clientele.

A few days later, he said in mock sorrow, “Things are expensive. But for you, miss, I can make it a few paisa less.” He then offered a marginally lower price, having started with a much higher one. “Besides,” he added, “my vegetables are special.”

“How so?” A tiny ploughshare of worry made her eyebrows furrow just so.

He took a deep breath—he would not let that luminous beauty of her face distract him—and looked askance at her feet.

“They’re from my father’s farm,” he lied. “Specially watered with sugar water. If you brown the onions on a low flame, they impart a special sweetness to the curry. Tell your cook-woman that’s how to use them.”

“We don’t have a cook-woman. My mother cooks.”

“Tell her, then.” He looked up, challenging her presumed superiority.

Her pink onionskin lips compressed, and she raised a single regal eyebrow. But she met his gaze and didn’t look over his head or down at the vegetables spread out on his mat. Brown eyes met brown eyes.

She was startled by his light skin and curly mass of hair, his fine nose and dark eyebrows. From her standing position, she could look down at him as he sat on the pavement. His eyelashes curled, thick and large, with a hint of a brown cinnamon colour. Girls would die to have those, she thought.

She dropped the rupees into his proffered cap, creamy white gone sour in the dust of the place. When he returned it, she collected her change carefully. Her hands were lotus buds deftly scooping up the money, which she tied into one corner of her long scarf. Her shopping bag filled, she rushed home, limping with the weight. She pushed the gate open with her slender foot encased in a rubber flip-flop and ran through as it began its backward swing and clanged shut behind her. A warning knell: “Stay out.”

He watched her every day. An hour or so after shopping, she’d take a cycle rickshaw to school. Her satchel hung heavy on her tiny shoulders, her white salwar was neatly pressed, her purple kurta, the colour of eggplants, reached her knees. Her friends, who shared her rickshaw, chatted like myna birds at dawn. Her face was always buried in a book.

Winter came and went. Summer followed, hot as the salvo from a tandoor furnace in which the naan breads were baked down in the bazaar. Then the monsoon. The scent after the first downpour sent his pulse racing at the thought of her coming for the vegetables in the morning rain. He had in the meantime built a small platform with an awning constructed of discarded clothes knotted together and covered over with a plastic sheet to hold against the rain. Would she be as alluring as a Bollywood star, her clothes clinging and revealing? He was a mere vegetable seller; he could only imagine and keep his thoughts to himself.

She came. Carrying an umbrella. Her clothes were dry. Her flip-flops squelched in the mud. Her eyes danced at the raindrops. But when she reached him and his little stall with his growing selection of choice vegetables, her eyes turned sullen as the clouds, and she asked, “How much?” following it with her usual morning litany, “Too much. Tell me the right, right price.”

The world was perfect.

He learnt, through chatting with the colony’s watchman, that her mother was a widow and took care of her ailing father. The girl was her only child.

Summer, winter flew by like the birds above. Through the searing heat and the bitter cold, he graduated from sitting on the pavement and bought a handcart. He wheeled it to the corner of the street closer to the big houses so his patrons wouldn’t have to walk that far. He also got a better view of her house. Smelt the food cooking in the kitchen beyond. The distinct scent of basmati rice. The mouthwatering smell of onions as they slowly caramelized in ghee. He’d have been a cook if he’d had the opportunity. As a Muslim, he cooked and ate meat, but she seemed to exclusively buy vegetables. Must be Hindu, he thought, as the subtle divide between them grew wider in his mind but not his heart.

Now, his selection of vegetables was enhanced with fruit. Mangoes, when they were in season. Apples from the Shimla hills. Bananas and oranges. Cape gooseberries in the winter and, very occasionally, expensive strawberries. But when she didn’t buy those, he excluded them from his selection. Perhaps their circumstances were strained. He decided he wouldn’t tempt her with what she couldn’t afford.

She was going to college now. Her mother had bought her a scooter. She wore a helmet, and her scarf flew in the wind. Strapped to the pillion were art canvases and brushes, different sizes almost every day.

Her cheeks were pale peaches with a mere hint of a blush on them. Her neck was cream with a cloud of tea, and her breasts he dared not think of as he arranged the mangoes artistically on his handcart that now stood next to a bricked platform. Business had been good. He had purchased the rights for the space from the temple behind him. He’d spun his tales of vegetables and fruit acquired from far and near to all who’d listen. He invented stories about the delivery truck from his father’s farm and the difficulties it faced on its journey. He created myths about the special seeds or cuttings acquired from Kashmir, replanted in the rich Haryana soil that had done so well.

His clients increased, but still he looked only for her in the crowd.

There were mornings when she still came, with her “How much?” and “Tell me the right, right price.”

His stories grew more elaborate. “These mangoes,” he said, the first time he offered them. “My grandfather planted the trees and, like the old Kashmiri farmers, sang ghazals to them. Now they are producing these sweeter than anything in the market. Go try the others if you don’t believe me.”

She still said her usual piece, but now she sometimes added a soft “How are you?”

One day she arrived at the vegetable handcart, and he wasn’t there. Her heart missed a beat. “Who are you?” she demanded of the youth who was manning the cart.

“His cousin,” he replied. “I’m helping him for a month.”

“Where is he?” Her words came out hard and angry.

“Gone to the village,” the cousin replied.

“What happened? Why?”

“To get married.”

She gasped. Her heart shrivelled. He’s only a vegetable seller, she thought. I just like hearing his stories. It had to happen … it had to happen. What am I thinking?

She ordered her vegetables in a dull monotone. The cousin didn’t tell her stories about the okra and how they had to save it from the birds by placing an earthenware pot on a stick with a face painted so black and scary that even she would be afraid. He said nothing about why the peas they sold were especially fresh and sweet, succulent and snappy, and how she should tell her mother that all they needed was a bit of ginger, sautéed with a single onion delicately sliced into the finest rings with nothing more than salt and pepper and then tossed on a high flame, switched off as soon as the bright green reached its maximum. Thereafter they were to be eaten instantly with chapati or, if one was feeling particularly grand, naan and a dollop of thick cream.

The month he was away dragged by, slow as the gur molasses her mother sometimes made.

Her heart and eyes lit up when he returned. “Mubarak!” she greeted him. “I heard you got married.” The words were almost too hard to say, and her chest constricted, but she wanted to see his reaction.

He blushed. “She’s in the village.” His cheeks were beetroots in the glinting sun. His hands were fists drawn so tight he could have crushed walnuts.

A strange melancholy tugged at her heart all day.

“You’re not paying attention, Lata,” her art teacher scolded her.

Her cheeks flamed a dusky pink like the little radishes they used for salad.

It shouldn’t, it doesn’t matter, she thought. I don’t even know his name.

When she returned home, an itch in her fingers wouldn’t leave her until she’d completed a canvas. “It’s just that I’ve known him so long, and time is slipping away for me, too.”

Winter. Summer. Came and went. The clouds swept by. Monsoon rains brought relief from the pulsating heat.

She graduated from college, majoring in fine art.

“How will that help us?” her mother had berated her when she’d shared her decision. “Art is not going to get us more food! Things are expensive.”

She said it again when the girl’s grandfather died. He was gnarled and dry like gingerroot forgotten in the basket. “The funeral expenses are more than I can handle,” she sobbed, clutching her stomach and rocking on her chair.

“We can rent out his room,” Lata suggested.

“Who will marry you, then?” her mother shouted. “People suspect tenants and the girls who share their roofs.”

And so they’d eked out an existence on her father’s pension and her grandfather’s savings, such as they were.

She drew and painted. Canvas was expensive, and not many folk bought art. Her paintings were of fruit and vegetables, flowers and birds. The style was like the old masters: realistic, not impressionistic. The only portraits she’d done were of her grandfather supine in bed in his many moods. They gave one to the doctor who paid house calls.

The others were of her mother, cooking in the kitchen, stark pen and ink. Only the vegetables were in full colour and fine detail. The gentle curve of the eggplant, the saucy firmness of the tomatoes, the erotic fullness of the bananas, voluptuous apples and mangoes that only seemed to take on these attributes in the portraits, especially the portraits she made of the vegetable seller. They were titled, Vegetable Seller, Study One, Study Two, and so on. Even he was in pen and ink, a mere suggestion of his cap and curly hair in one, his piercing eyes in another, the strong sinews of his arm, the tight curl of his eyelashes.

She had an exhibition in Delhi, and almost all the portraits sold. She came home exhilarated. “Maa! The art you hated, it’s bringing us money!” The tears that had danced in her eyes all the way home in the taxi spilled out in pure pleasure and pride.

“You are talented, darling, but it’s not a steady living.” Her mother held her close like no one ever had.

An offer of marriage came through an aunt who was her mother’s cousin. The boy suggested seemed nice, an air force man like her father. Her heart leapt. She could continue to paint. That was all she’d ever wanted to do.

She went to buy vegetables for the marriage feast. It had been some time since she’d been to buy vegetables or indeed even thought of going to the sector market.

When had his cart changed into the store nearby? In her heart, she was sure it was his store. She stood and stared at it. At last she knew his name: “Aftab’s Fresh Vejetables & Froot” the sign declared. She smiled at the spelling.

There he was, sitting cross-legged on the raised dais. He’d filled out and looked even more handsome. He exuded a quiet confidence.

“It’s been a long time.” He leaned forward in greeting and smiled, his eyes crinkled at the corner. Something new. His hair was as thick and curly and wild as ever. He sported a beard and typical Kashmiri cap.

“Well,” she laughed, the combative air that had always been a part of her connection with him finally settled into a truce, “I am getting married.” She declared this and watched his face.

He turned away so she wouldn’t see his pain as he scrambled off his dais. “Mubarak!” He continued looking away from her and forcing his facial muscles to relax, although his heart shrank. He came down to the floor level to greet her. “What do you need? I am expanding the store. We have dry goods as well now. Flour, dal, spices, cooking oil.”

“From your father’s farm?” she teased him.

“That was a long time ago.” He blushed. “There are new stories. The vegetables have journeyed from my village by truck. Through the dust and the night, the lorry driver had a difficult time. He had to avoid a ditch as another oncoming lorry had so many lights on top and around that he was blinded.”

Once again, she was a young girl-woman, listening to vegetable stories.

By the time she’d ordered all that they needed and his little helper had carried the basket loads to her home, his heart twisted inside as the old pain of his love for her spread like a cloud of ink in water.

A few nights later, he heard the drums and the festive sounds of the wedding. He caught a glimpse of the groom on his pale white horse. An air force officer. She would be happy, and that was all that mattered. His fruit and vegetables smelt fecund and overripe. He needed air, went up on the terrace of his building, and tried to see what he could of the wedding, the moon, and the stars. He saw nothing, as a shower of rain poured out through his eyes. “I have no right,” he wept.

The following summer was particularly hot. Illness and disease ran rampant. With the monsoon, there was an outbreak of malaria.

The girl’s mother was alone now. A woman came and cleaned and cooked for her. Somehow, the food smells weren’t quite as alluring as they’d once been. Or, he wondered, had his nose been deadened by the dust and pollution, the black diesel smoke of the auto rickshaws that threatened to spoil the crisp freshness of his fruit and vegetables?

With the dawn of the first day of winter, a wailing greeted him in his room above the store. It was so close. His dream of yellow flowers in mustard fields and her smiling through them at him was shattered. He rushed across to investigate and learnt that the old lady had succumbed to malaria.

The wails from the cleaning woman were peacock-raucous.

He banged at the neighbour’s gate. “The daughter needs to be informed.”

The cleaning woman-cum-cook was incoherent with distress. She sat on the floor, beating it with her hands. “What will become of me? Who will tell the daughter? Where will I go?”

In all these years, it was the first time he’d been inside the house.

The neighbour looked through the old lady’s phone book and found a number. Calls were made. He agreed to meet her at Delhi airport in his small pickup truck.

The funeral was a blur. He was in and out of the house. His son came from the village to look after the store. He helped her with the arrangements but didn’t accompany her to the cremation.

“In the end,” she wept, “you are my only support. I cannot thank you enough.”

“I don’t need thanks. But what about him, couldn’t he come?” The word “husband” was too hard for him to use directly. It would burn his tongue to say it.

“He’s on duty, in the air force. He can’t leave.” Her tears subsided.

“Call me if you need anything.”

A few days later, she came to the store. “I have to sell the house. Do you know anyone who can help me sell it?”

“How much do you want?” he asked. It was the first time that question had come from him. “Tell me the right, right price.” His eyes crinkled.

For all the tears that hung in her eyes, she smiled. “I have a story, if you want to buy. It’s about a girl who loved shopping for vegetables.”

She left, taking all that had belonged to her mother. “There are still some things in the house. You can keep them if you want.”

He moved in a few weeks later and walked slowly through each empty room, breathing in her perfume that still hung in the air. In the smallest bedroom there were some canvases wrapped in plastic. He ripped through the covering, his fingers impatient. There were three paintings. The vegetables were rich and full and sensuous, the colours alive. The sepia tint of the ink in one showed a head full of curly hair. Another in a deep brown ink showed an arm with sinews traced in intense detail. In the third one he met his own eyes. Nut brown, edged with thick, curly lashes that stared back at him, reflecting a life of love that couldn’t be.

He stared at it until the lines blurred.

***

Rohini Sunderam, a Canadian of Indian origin, calls both Halifax, Nova Scotia, and Bahrain home. A semiretired copywriter, she has published prose and poetry in the Poet; the Statesman, India; OAPSchat; Globe & Mail; and Halifax Herald. When not writing, she enjoys tending to the plants on her tiny balcony and long phone conversations with her children.

 

 

 

 

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Header image: Rudolf II of Habsurg or Vertumnus (1591), Giuseppe Arcimboldo

“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.

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.

***

 

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