FALL 2015

I killed my boy on a trip down the stairs.

Dave, poor bastard, keeps saying not your fault Mia, come on, but from where I am, inside this blue-foggy place, I see only the tiny face that would have suckled at my breast right now, right here on this sofa, had I stayed careful. Dave doesn’t tell me we’ll make another one.

He and I haven’t been doing it lately. All this lard, I wear it like a blanket, to wrap myself in. The other part is I can’t stand it, to have something enter me, deposit a life and then for me to go and lose it, have it fall out.

Three years I tried, let Dave laugh at the way I kept a calendar of my temperature, made him do it on the right days with a bolster under my hips, lay in the right posture afterwards, for the right amount of time. And then Dave found me, knocked out and bleeding. If not for him, I’d have bled out all the way.

The last two months, I live on the sofa next to the foot of the stairs. I refuse to run away from what I’ve done. I live in front of the TV, walk out during ad breaks to pee, or scrounge in the refrigerator. Catch a nap at dawn and wake up to the morning bulletin. I lower the volume at nights so Dave can sleep, because I’m afraid I’ll stop living if the TV stops talking. I need noise to drown out what would have been my son’s heartbeat.

Last night I woke up and stared out of the window, and then I knew. It was the bear, the bear who sat beside me on the sofa, his paw the size of a dinner plate on my shoulder, soft and padded, claws hidden. The bear had taken my son. Not a grumpy bear, this one. He had a half-smile, like he knew lots of secrets he wasn’t telling.

This morning, I tried to tell Dave.

“I can’t sleep these days,” he said, “Without you beside me I can’t relax, you know that, and now you come to me with weird tales about your dreams.”

“You’re not listening.”

“Bear with me. We’re paying a professional to listen to you, Mia.”

I stared at him, his rumpled hair, his tousled clothes and how very like a grizzly he looked. I wanted to hug him. And then I didn’t.

“I can come with you for the session, if you like.”

He stripped on the way to his shower, and I couldn’t stand how toned he looked, fitter than five years ago, when I married him. Nah, no bear looked like that. I went back to the sofa to catch up on sleep.

I wake up past noon, to silence. Has Dave left me and gone?

I switch on the TV next—why had he switched it off? He’s left me the usual note, stuck on the TV remote: Food in the refrigerator. Get brunch when you wake up. Will call you. Want to go out this evening?

The air-conditioning whirs, but my t-shirt is moist with sweat. I feel filthy with the smell of stale food, sweat, alcohol. I brush my teeth and head to the kitchen, pour my cereal. Two foods I like these days, cereals and pizza: anything else makes my stomach protest.

Moving about the kitchen, I feel the first stitches of pain in my lower back, the fullness in my pelvis. It is coming, the cramping reminder that I don’t need folic acid any more, can booze as much as I want. My breasts have hurt for the last three days. My nipples feel tender against my t-shirt, but no tiny mouth would suckle them.

When I get back to the sofa, I find the bear, looking at me with a smile that is not a smile. I shiver, but I wouldn’t give in. Won’t let a stupid bear scare me away from my own sofa.

He’s sitting at my spot. I shove at him. My lard is good for something—it gives me presence, authority. The bear does not budge, keeps smiling in that way he has. I can see his teeth. They are large, not white. His breath smells of old fruits, honey, fir cones, blood, figs. He looks too big to bother with, so I sit next to him, invading his personal space as much as I can without touching.

He puts his paw on my shoulder, and just sits there. I don’t know if he watches me eat, and I don’t care. I switch channels, show him I’m busy, quite capable of being absorbed in what I witness on the screen. I try to find a wildlife channel where they show grizzlies going extinct, or polar bears hanging on to an ice float in the middle of an ocean, or orphaned moon bears looking lost.

I wake up again, and this time, the bear cuddles me, the fur soft against my skin, paws toasty like heat pack on my tummy. “Go back to sleep,” it says in Dave’s gruff voice, and I do.

When I open my eyes, the bear’s gone. I miss the warmth of him, the tickle of his breath in my hair, but not his weight.  I know what he’s done. Pushed me down the stairs, the bastard. I want to tell Dave all about it when he comes home.

I switch off the TV, I need the silence to think. 4 p.m. Two more hours and Dave would return.

I gather myself up, go to the kitchen, and pick up the knife. Its heft feels solid in my hand, it reassures me. I’ll give the bear something to think about when he returns.

Hugging me in its giant limbs, it wouldn’t know. I’ll part the cuddlesoft fur under its arm and sink the blade quietly in.

Damyanti Biswas‘s short fiction appears in Griffith Review, Australia, Lunch Ticket magazine, The First Line, Ducts.org by New York Writer’s Workshop, and other journals in USA, Singapore and India. She’s featured in print anthologies by Twelve Winters Press, USA, and by major publishers in Malaysia and Singapore. When not lost in a book or scribbling away, she can be found tending to her plants or fish, or baking up a storm.

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Mom gets that sour look on her face, just as the best man is doing the toast.  We raise our glasses, our faces hopeful, expectant.  All except Rory, that is, who is already drinking in loud slurpy abandon. Mom glares at Rory. “Can you not wait a second?” she hisses. “Just like your father.”

Rory elbows me in my left side.  “Here we go.”

I pretend not to notice any of it – Mom’s narrow-eyed disgust, Rory’s feigned innocence.  I will not get in the middle of them.

Instead I listen to the toast without remembering it, nodding along like a good student.  When the time is right, I raise my glass of house red a little higher.  Here, here.  To Samantha and Lyle.  I have nobody to clink glasses with.  Rory’s glass stands empty.  He has left the table in pursuit of more wine.  Mom is too mortified to be graceful.   I venture an appropriate sip.  I feel Mom’s approval as cats feel the sun.  Near my left shoulder, the space that Rory occupied turns cold.  He will have a hard time breaking back into it.

***

They are passing out the cake and I cannot help but notice, but I will not have any.  Not the slightest taste.  I’ve already had six peanuts from the dish at the bar, not to mention the olive in my martini.  Not to mention the martini.  I draw the line at cake.

It was magnificent, before it was cut.  A replica of the apartment house where Samantha met her Lyle.  Circular.  The chefs somehow made the frosting look like weathered brick, even added the fire escape, a little graffiti.  Aunt Viv called it an abomination.  “That, a wedding cake?”  But everyone else liked it.

I knew it would be chocolate.  Samantha would have no other.  And the bricks look like regular buttercream.  The wait staff brings pieces and sets them next to everyone’s coffee cup.  Regular or decaf?  Funny, they ask about coffee, but you have no choice about cake.  I lift my fork.  Noah raises his eyebrow at me.

 ***

Two more minutes and I will break away from my shame and this song and what my stupid cock is doing without my permission.  I stand hard and dry against Aunt Jillian’s thighs.  She pushes her fat middle against me as we dance until I feel excited and sick.  I cannot will myself to relax.  With every movement she makes, I throb even more.  Soon I will come all over myself and will have to stay locked in Aunt Jillian’s embrace forever.  Sweat is popping out of my pores like popcorn.  Pimples are probably sprouting on my face and back.  I am one volcanic 14-year-old freak, exploding by the second.  I glance at Gina Rossano swaying all alone in the corner of the room, a sleepy look on her face, her breasts spilling out over the top of her dress. I bite my lip so hard I taste salt.  Just then Aunt Jillian raises her head and gives me a snaky smile, all slit eyes and wiggle tongue.  A powdery smell wafts up from her armpits and slaps me across the face.  I choke and catch a little stream of vomit in my cupped hand.  “Excuse me.  Oh, God.”  I run to the bathroom.

 ***

Lydia is the maid of honor, which I am not the least bit surprised about.  What surprises me is that she still wants my man.  They dance under the star ball as if they are in high school.  Alastair’s hand encircles hers.  His other hand presses the small of her back.  She looks up into his face, smiling, talking, her teeth gleaming like underwater fluorescent fish.

The bridesmaid’s dress is hideous, but you’d never know.  Alastair doesn’t even see the bronzy-moss sheen, the fake paper mache flower he is crushing at her waist.  He looks down her top while pretending to nod politely to what she says.  She knows it and talks all the more.  He knows she knows and nods and twinkles and looks.

I cannot look another second.  I know, too.

 ***

The band is playing fast songs and my cousins and I dance in one big circle.  Georgie makes exaggerated cool-faces as he thrashes his arms and pulls first Violet, then me into the circle to dance.  Violet looks ridiculous, staring at her feet and moving in the same side-to-side shuffle like a robot.  When I take her spot, I thrash my arms, too, and my cousins clap to the music.  Georgie and I thrash together and soon the craziness moves from my arms to my waist to my hips to my legs.  I am going nuts and bouncing and sweating and my cousins are hooting at me, even when my glasses get knocked off by Georgie somehow, even when I accidentally kick them.

Then Dad is there and within two seconds he has my upper arm in an iron grip and pulls me out of the circle, back to the table.  He hands me my bent glasses and I put them on.  “You’re in big trouble,” he says with a smile on his face.

 ***

The good Lord giveth and the good Lord taketh away.  Why the hell would I say that during a wedding sermon?  I was in remote-control, discombobulated.  It was all Olivia’s fault.  If she wouldn’t have burnt my eggs, forgotten to polish my shoes, decided to wash windows and set up all the cleaning paraphernalia known to man in the front hall for me to trip over.

My pettiness settles like hands around my throat and I shake my neck to get free.  Then I drink a little wine.

Olivia is Olivia.  She is a housekeeper.  She is not perfect, nor am I.  It is not Olivia’s fault I went into remote-control, certainly not her fault I could barely remember the groom’s name.  It is not Olivia’s fault I said the good Lord taketh away.

The whole place gasped, as if I were cursing the two.

Was I?  Who knows.  I don’t even know them.  Will they be happy?

I watch them dance, sparkly and light.  Her head leans toward his, listening to something he’s saying.  He speaks to her through a smile, teeth and gums anyway.  Maybe they will make it.  The good Lord giveth.  I should have quit while I was ahead.

 ***

This bartender is A-o-kay, a cut-up, a pal.  He sure knows how to pour one, anyway.  The J&B is nicely iced and I shake the glass to rock the cubes, to punctuate my punch line, to get the dude to refill.  I tell jokes to a plump blonde staring into her glass.  She cracks a smile every so often so I keep going.  I tell them all – the limp dishrag one, the three guys in a boat one, the raincoat one.  I start in on the feather duster one and realize it’s a dumb blonde number so switch it to an Irish joke, but it doesn’t quite make it and she gives me a pruney look.  Well, fuck that.  “Hey,” I say to my bud.  “Lemme have it.”  I suck the dregs from my cubes, rattle my glass high for him to see.

Gary is behind me all of a sudden with his usual frown.  Buzz kill.  He is giving me his haven’t-you-had-enough look.  “Open bar, right?” I say.  “Free country, too.”

The blonde gets up and Gary takes her seat.  “Oh, nice,” I tell him.  “And I was just getting somewhere with her.”

 ***

 Josh rushes up to me, out of breath.  “Your mom,” he says.

“Oh, God, what?”  I search the room for her.  There are a lot of people, maybe two hundred.  But she’s got that ridiculous turquoise dress.

“No, no,” he says, squeezing my wrist.  “She’s okay.  It’s just she’s—”

“What?”

Josh presses the heel of his hand against his forehead.  “She’s stealing again.”

“God fucking damn.”  I whirl away, storm straight through everyone.  Josh is behind me.  “Is it coats?”  I ask.  “Is she going through pockets?”

“No, no, just table stuff.”

And then I see her, gangly in her clingy nylon dress, sliding sugar packets, netted bags of Jordan almonds, aluminum rectangles of butter into her tote.  I stomp up to her and yank the bag out of her hands.  Her mouth drops.  “Susannah.  I’m just . . . I’m not. . .”

I open the bag and paw through the contents.  She has dumped a container or two of bar nuts into the mix and everything is greasy from the butter and salty from the nuts.  At the bottom of the mess, I see them – at least four, no five, sets of keys.  My heart weighs me down to the bottom of some ocean.

“Mom.”

“Susannah.”  Mom wrings her hands like she’s knitting.  She flutters her eyelids.  “It’s not what you think.”

 ***

I watch Samantha and Lyle dance and my imagination puts me in the wedding gown and Freddie in the tux.  It’s hard to picture Freddie’s body, so I just make it the same as Lyle’s, which would be fine, all tall and athletic.  I’ve seen Freddie’s pictures, of course, but they are only head shots, even though match.com recommends at least some full-body shots (especially for out-of-state-attachments).  Even though I’ve asked Freddie for them, he always forgets or is too caught up exclaiming about my pix and what he would, no will, do when he finally gets his hands on me, when we can finally be together.

He was supposed to come tonight, but his jerk-of-a-boss wouldn’t give him the weekend off after all.  He asked six weeks ago and the guy pulls it away like a magic tablecloth.  Freddie was inconsolable so I didn’t let on how disappointed I was.  He will make it up to me, he will make it up to me a thousand times over.

Yesterday he sent me a link to a jewelry store and when I clicked on it, up popped a picture of an engagement ring!  I think he is trying to tell me something.  It was a gorgeous ring, and was even on sale for $28,000.  Freddie must be pretty well-off.  I did a little mental calculation – they say you should spend two months’ salary – and came up with $168,000 a year.  Not bad for a machine-shop guy.  If he will contribute that kind of money to our family income, I should seriously consider using my IRAs for a down payment on a house.  For us.  No more dawdling, Princess, as Freddie says.  It’s time to make a commitment.

 ***

He needs everything special – salt-free entrée, extra water for his medication, sauce on the side, dressing on the side.  More bread.  More butter.  Parmesan cheese.  I don’t make eye contact with him anymore, pretend not to hear his bellows – “Sir?  Sir?” – every time I get close.  Finally his wife calls me, a prim little thing with lavender hair.  I go to her and she doesn’t say a word, just taps her coffee cup with her manicured nail and gives me a long-chinned look.

“Make mine decaf,” he says, also tapping his cup.

I nod, make my way to the kitchen.  The decaf pot is dead and I rummage around for a new pouch, but the box is empty.  The coffee boxes are stored way in the back room, through the prep area.  I grab the regular and head back to her.  She smiles as I fill her cup.

“Leave room for cream,” he instructs.  “She likes lots of cream.”

“Yes, Sir.”

“I’ll have decaf,” he reminds me.

“I know.”

“You could have brought both pots at once, you know.  Saved a little time.”

I nod again and go back to the kitchen.  I look left and right.  I pour some regular into the decaf pot and head back out.  He beams at me from across the room and I smile back.  He thinks he is winding me in like a big, fat fish.

I pour.

He asks for another pitcher of cream.

 ***

 It’s the mother’s dance and I am shaking.  Lyle smiles at me.  “Are you crying?”

I blink my eyes, sniff.  “A little.”

“Ah, Mom.”  He holds me a little tighter and I cannot believe how our roles have flipped, how he is giving me comfort instead of the other way around.

Samantha is a lovely girl.  Woman.  She is 26 years old.  At her age I was already a wife and a mother!  And, yet, she seems so young.  They both do.  Was I young at 26?

Chuck is off to the side, watching.  He catches my eye and I give him a sad smile.  The divorce was hard on the kids, but Chuck and I managed to remain civil.  Seeing him now, all smarted up, makes me wonder if we couldn’t have done more, if we couldn’t have tried harder.  Suddenly, the latest 30-year-old is next to him, nuzzling his cheek and he is suddenly the one to give me the sad smile.

“So,” Lyle says, spinning me out of eye-shot of his dad.  “Do you like Samantha?  I mean really?”

I stare straight into those gorgeous green eyes, the eyes I have known longer than anyone on earth has.  “Yes, Sweetie, I do.  Samantha is just wonderful.”

He sighs and I am sure he has flicked his eyes back to the spot where Chuck and his fawn used to be standing.

 ***

I spy Samantha go into the ladies room.  Here’s my chance.  I pull myself up on the walker and do my push shuffle across the space that divides the table area from the lounge.  Just as I am almost to the door, she bursts out and strides to her right – out of my path, in any case.

I call to her and she instantly turns, the same strong chin as Ellen, the same shiny chestnut hair piled up on her head and festooned with little pearls and whatnots, those innocent gray eyes always opened wide as if caught in mid-surprise.  “Gram,” she breathes and she comes and presses her moist cheek against mine.  Perfume rises from the rustle of her gown and my eyes mist.  This won’t be easy.

“Your mother,” I begin.

“I know,” she says and I’m chagrined because already I’ve caused the tears I swore to avoid.

“You look so beautiful,” I manage, “She would have . . .”

“Oh, Gram.”  Samantha’s arms encircle my waist.  “I miss her, too,” she says.

After a few minutes, we shuffle to a secluded velvet bench in the lounge area and sit together.  I tell her that I want to give her the same motherly advice I got from my mother, the same advice I told Ellen.

She smiles indulgently, reminds me that she and Lyle have been living together for two years.

I am speechless.  Does she think I don’t know that?  Does she think this is about sex?  I want to tell her it is about love.  I want to explain how any fool can figure out sex enough for success, but that there are landfills of broken hearts out there.  I want to give her the key to marital longevity, the recipe, the template.

Her warm bejeweled fingers clasp mine as she waits for me to speak.

I open, but then close, my foolish old mouth and smile, suddenly not exactly sure what it is I want to say about the recipe, the template, all my ideas floating away like dandelion seed.

 ***

The bartender grins at me as he places another chocolate martini on the tray already crammed with them.  Ten bucks a pop.  I can’t watch.  There are strangers at the bar sucking drinks like there’s no tomorrow.  Coffee was supposed to be on an asked-for-only basis.  Those waitresses are pushing it down everyone’s throats – $2 a cup.  Cake was supposed to be served here.  I distinctly remember them saying there was a $1.25 per slice boxing charge.  Every special dietary request costs an extra $8.50 per person.  The band decided not to take a break – they’ll just add an extra 45 minutes to the bill.  Why was nobody taking a valet ticket – we thought you were covering it, Sir.  Coat check?  That I did want to cover and there’s no attendant – people have been rummaging around in there, I just know it.

Samantha is talking with Gwenevere.  They sit on a little bench away from the bar, close to the doors.  Tonight, especially, Samantha looks so much like her mother.  Like her mother did.

I can’t breathe.  It’s been twelve years.  You’d think I’d be over this.

I raise my finger to the bartender.  “Hey,” I say, pointing to those chocolate martinis.  “I want to take a few of these.  Okay?”

“Whatever you want, Sir.  I’ll make more for the tray.”

I nod.  I hold the three glasses pushed together like a physics problem.  I bring them to Gwenevere and Samantha.

“Dad!”

“Frank!”

And we drink toasts – me, my mother-in-law and my daughter.  To Ellen!  To Samantha and Lyle!

“To you, Dad.”

My heart cracks.  She’s so beautiful.  Just like . . .

My chin quivers and Gwenevere pats my arm.

Debra Brenegan teaches at Mount Mary University in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Her work has been published in Calyx, Tampa Review, Natural Bridge, The Laurel Review, Cimarron Review, Phoebe, RE:AL, The Southern Women’s Review, Knee-Jerk, Literary Orphans, and elsewhere. Her novel, Shame the Devil, was named a finalist for Foreword Reviews 2011 Book of the Year Award for Historical Fiction.

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A lighthouse keeper stands on a narrow metal walkway. High above the churning sea, he grips the cold railing, the steel worn smooth beneath his palms. Rolling waves curl in upon themselves and break over rocks at the base of the lighthouse. The giant boulders shed water in sheets and streams and beads. A north wind carries the spray up the white walls, where it buffets the lighthouse keeper, leaves droplets on his face like sweat. Gulls circle the tower, rising and falling like the waves.

From inside his coat, he retrieves a spyglass and scans the seascape, searching for a sign of the supply boat. It is five days late, and his stores are running low. On the line where sea meets sky, imprinted on a backdrop of reds and purples, sits the long, black silhouette of a ship, stark against the fading light. He watches for a distress signal–a flashing light, a flare. Lightning illuminates the underbelly of a late autumn storm. The ocean spreads out in a fan, gray fading to black at the rim of the world. Closer, a single whale tail breaks the surface. Water cascades off the black wedge, sparkling in the low light like mermaid scales. The tail submerges and does not rise again. The sky darkens. A heavy, dense rain begins to fall.

The keeper walks the parapet. A wide channel slips between the barrier island and the rocky beach of the mainland. Beyond, low-limbed trees dig roots into a gravel soil. Folded dark hills rise in the distance. Long shadows stretch across the earth. Dark clouds churn toward him. He sniffs, smells smoke before the wind clears the air.

He steps back through the hatchway and latches the door. The wind pitches through the cracks. He climbs the curved staircase to the lamp-room above. Inside, he opens the fuel valve and lights the wick. The flame burns hot and white and refracts off the bullseye lens behind it, sending a beam over the open water, through the curtain of rain. He sets the lens turning. The beam, like steel, rings the lighthouse, falls on the breaking waves, the rising dunes, the sloping shore.

In the cool of the spiral stairwell, the lighthouse keeper leans against the rough plaster wall. A draft rises from the base of the lighthouse, flows over him. He shivers, drags himself to the ground floor, and outside. The frigid air presses against him. The rain needles his face. He blows warmth into his palms. The ship looms larger, but he cannot tell if it is just a trick of the eye. The sky turns black, the ship dissolving into the night. He turns away and enters the supply shed. In the dim light, he marks his stocks.

When finished, he makes his way back to the small building pressed against the lighthouse and through a narrow hall to two small rooms that make up his living quarters. From the pantry, he takes dry and cracked carrots, potatoes sprouting thin tendrils from their eyes, and the last egg-sized chunk of pork. He cuts them and dumps the pieces into a large pot along with lard and pepper and fresh water from a ceramic jug. He opens the damper and lights the stove. The fire gutters, then catches hold. The burning wood crackles. He sets the pot on the flat hood and when the stew is finished, ladles a bowl and eats.

Out of his pocket, he pulls a leather pouch and a long, curved pipe with a bowl like dirty ivory. He opens the pouch, punches the pipe into the tobacco, and dredges out a plug of leaf. Tamping the spill with his forefinger, he clenches the stem in the corner of his mouth. He flicks a match, and sucks in deep, powerful breaths. The bowl glows. Snarls of smoke ascend to the ceiling, where they spread out flat and curl into corners. Out the small porthole, the light turns. He snuffs the lamp.  In the darkness, he smokes his pipe and listens to the storm until he drifts off. The fury of the storm deepens. Waves thunder, wind keens. A hard cone of light cuts the darkness. Rain falls in thick slabs.

Dawn is two hours away when the keeper wakes, a black dream disappearing with his sleep. He finds his pipe on his chest and a hole the size of a nail-head burned through his shirt and beneath that a raw, red, itching sore.

The storm has blown itself out and silence is cast over the night. He lights the lamp and kneels in front of the woodstove. Embers glow orange and red, and he tosses in two split logs of soft pine. He boils a pot of coffee before climbing the stairs to the watch-room. On the walkway, one hand on the railing, he sips from his mug, twists his fist back and forth. The storm has drifted on, leaving the air bitter and raw and stagnant. A thin line of dark blue appears on the horizon. It swells, stretches up into the sky. Stars wink out. The sun flares. Traces of storm clouds streak across the sky in ribbons. Ocean smells waft around him, a stale, salty decay. The keeper shades his eyes. Closer this morning, the ship shimmers against pale blue. The sun creeps higher and burns cold.

A small host of gulls on the far end of the island screech and burst into flight. The lighthouse beam falls on the figure of a man rising from the water. The keeper takes out his spyglass and sees the man stagger and slump over, knees in the ocean, hands in the sand. The keeper rushes down the staircase. From the bedroom, he grabs a wool blanket. He runs across the island, squinting against the wind. When he reaches the drowned man, he finds him lying face down, waves slapping against his head. The keeper kneels beside the man, digs his hands beneath his body, and flips him onto his back. Sand clumps in the man’s hair and on his face. The keeper brushes it away, the small waves wash it away.  He leans over, listens for breath, but doesn’t find any. The keeper tilts the man’s head back, presses their lips together, and fills the man’s lungs with air. He repeats this until the man chokes and spits water. The keeper props the man up. The man slumps against him, heavy and delirious. The keeper wraps the blanket around him.

“Can you hear me?” the keeper asks.

The man’s eyes swirl in their sockets.

The keeper lifts the man’s arms over his shoulders, hauls him onto his back, and half-drags, half-carries him down the beach, to the lighthouse. The man stumbles, and they both fall to the sand, but the keeper rises, hefts the man to his feet, and continues. Once inside, he lays the man in bed and covers him with two heavy blankets. The man groans, then is quiet. The keeper stokes the fire in the woodstove. Twice, the drowned man calls out, incoherent.

The keeper takes the stairs up to the lamp-room two at a time. The sun blazes low in the sky, casting a shadow of the ship across the water.  He steps inside, climbs to the lamp-room, cuts the fuel. The light burns, sputters, then dies. He halts the spinning lens. From his perch, he looks down to see the island blanketed in the gray and white of gulls. The long spit of sand at the far end is clear, as are the dunes behind it, but on the near, rocky end, the island is seething. He descends the stairs and wades into the mass. Their heads turn, their black eyes watch him. They are silent and stir only enough to move from his path. None fly away. He sprints through the mob, and they leap into the air with a flurry of wings, only to settle behind him. The smell of them is wet and foul.

Work consumes him for the remainder of the morning. He scrubs the windows that enclose the lamp-room and burnishes the lens with a soft leather cloth. He lugs oil and wicks up the stairs. While scrubbing windows, he peers through the tall, glass panes at the ship in the distance. With his back to the sea, polishing the lens, it floats in his mind. As the day passes on, the ship moves closer. He opens the foghorn, sending the somber, droning sound into the heavy air. The ship does not respond.

At dusk, he watches the sun slide away, the ship vanishing with the light. He cooks a small meal and attempts to wake the drowned man, whose eyes twitch beneath their lids. The keeper makes up a sleeping pallet on the floor, goes to bed early, sleeps, but wakes even earlier than the previous morning. In the light of the flickering lamp, he pulls a book from the shelf, but can do no more than thumb through the pages. He puts the book down and watches the covered body of the drowned man. The blankets rise and fall with the drowned man’s breath. The keeper shakes him, but still the man does not awaken.

The keeper goes to the kitchen, moves a chair to the window, and sits. Frost creeps out like tentacles from the corners. The ocean sways before him and for a moment, for the first time, he feels faint. Remnants of a dream combined with ocean swells. He scratches at the burn on his chest, and it oozes a clear liquid.

He climbs the stairs to douse the lamp. Out on the walkway, he walks circles around the lighthouse, following the beam, waiting for the dawn to become full day. There is no wind, but his cheeks are taut from the cold. He buries his face in the upturned collar of his coat and lights his pipe. He swirls the smoke in his mouth. The ship floats on the surface of the sea, closer. Still dark against the sky, the keeper can now see its sharp contours.

He escapes to the shed. Inside, he tallies supplies. The pork in the previous night’s stew was the last of the meat. Of the vegetables, only knotty potatoes remain. Two loaves of moldy bread rest on a high shelf. He fills his arms and steps back into the light. The gulls gather near the roots of the lighthouse, packed so tight they seem to be a single organism. Some have died or been killed and their brethren tear away hunks of ashen flesh.

Back in the kitchen, he finds the drowned man sitting at the table, a wool blanket wrapped around his shoulders. He shivers, but his eyes are focused and sharp. The keeper puts the supplies away.

“You’re all right?” the keeper asks.

“I saw the light and swam.”

“From where? Why here?”

“Looking for someplace safe.” The drowned man looks down and pulls the blanket tight around him.

The keeper separates ingredients for a weak stew.

“I don’t have much, but I’ll share what I’ve got.” He cuts the vegetables into small squares and puts them in the pot with water. He sets the pot on the flat hood and stirs while the stew cooks. The man sits in silence and the keeper doesn’t press him. When the stew is finished, the keeper ladles two bowls full and places a plate with a slice of bread on the table.

“I’m sorry there isn’t more. The supply boat is late,” he says.

“The supply boat’s not coming,” the drowned man says.

“What do you mean?” the keeper asks. The drowned man sops up the stew with a slice of bread and doesn’t answer.

“What do you mean?” the keeper asks again, desperate, but again gets no reply. They finish the meal without speaking.

The keeper wakes in the heavy darkness, sweaty, gasping for air. The sore on his chest burns. The drowned man is asleep in the bed. It is long before daybreak. The keeper dresses, grabs a pail and a lantern, and stumbles outside. His light bobs through the darkness, illuminating the gray and white backs of the gulls. They have moved into tighter packs, moved away from the water, toward the center of the island. Some wake and call out.

A thin arc of sand extending into the deep is clear of gulls. A nightbird arrows past his head. The lantern light falls on the shell of a crab. He chases it, crushes it beneath a thick-soled boot. He bends to pick up the crab and drops its broken body into the pail. He kills twenty crabs this way.

He climbs the tallest of the dunes. At the crown, he stops, stares out to sea. He cannot see the ship, but it is there. The stars reflect in the dark water, and the axis of the world flips, making it impossible to tell sea from sky. He sets the bucket down and lies on his back in the dune-grass. At slow intervals, the lighthouse beam flashes over him. A waning moon cuts a sliver in the night. Jutting from the far end, the lighthouse gleams like whalebone.

A streak slices across the sky, then another. The lighthouse beam whisks by. A shower of comet tails burns through the heavens. Stars fall. The gulls shriek. A thrumming vibrates in the air. He sits up, pulls his knees to his chest, presses his hands over his ears. The torrent blazes through the sky. When it slows, he looks for missing constellations, searches out empty spaces in the firmament. Single slashes of light pass over, one by one now, closer, louder, until a last meteor sweeps over his head, burning and roaring, before it crashes beyond the shore in a bright flash of light. He flinches, brings his forearms over his head. When the sound dies down, he jumps up, spilling his bucket, and runs back to the lighthouse, feet dredging sand, lantern shooting out light in erratic pulses.

The next morning, the keeper leaves the drowned man in the kitchen and goes to retrieve the bucket, hoping for a breakfast of crabmeat. It lies where he left it, but the meat inside is rotted. It is low tide, so he makes his way to the mussel beds in the lee of the island to harvest. The gulls open a corridor as he walks. At the beds, he kneels and buries his hands into the water up to the elbow. He rips a mussel from the rocky bottom, cracks it open. A rank, rotten odor spills out. He opens another, and another. All leak the same putrid smell. He throws some to the gulls, who squawk and flap their wings, but leave the mussel flesh lying on the rocks. The keeper scrubs his hands in saltwater and, booting the gulls to the side, makes his way to the short, wooden pier extending from the coastal side of the island.

He untethers his rowboat, and with long, smooth pulls, rows out into the strait. There he casts a heavy line into the sparkling water. He tosses the bait–lard rolled into a tight, little ball–as far as he can. He rests the fishing pole between his knees, follows the line and its sharp angle into the water. From his pocket, he takes a thick knot of scrimshaw. With a short, curved knife, he cuts flakes like snow. A tiny hand forms, then a slender arm. He pokes eyes with the point of the knife, shaves cheekbones, a child’s face. The sore on his chest pulses. Cold drops thick against the water. Not a breath of wind. The water is flat and silver, as still as the air. Reflections of the lighthouse, the sky, himself, float like portraits on glass.

On the island, he sees the drowned man walking back and forth among the gulls. The keeper lifts his hand in a wave, but gets no response. The drowned man wanders down toward the far end of the island until he disappears from sight.

The line twitches, then he feels a tug. He drops his carving and the knife, clutches the pole. Another tug, then a jerk, and the pole arches over in a stiff parabola. He fights back, pushes his feet against the planks, but can get no leverage. Muscles in his arms strain and the cords in his neck pop. The boat tips to one side. He holds the reel handle tight, but it slips from his hand. The reel whirs, buzzes from the speed. He grasps the line with his hands to slow it, but it slashes a shallow, bloody cut in his hand. The line spools out to its end and snaps from the reel. The pole snaps back, whips him in the face, leaving a long, thin welt. A pointed black dorsal fin gashes the surface, vanishes.

The keeper drops the pole, sits cross-legged in the bottom of the boat, rests his head against the gunwale. He tears cloth from his shirt and wraps his hand. He runs a finger along the raised mark on his face. The boat rocks back and forth, sending ripples across the mirrored surface. The carving tumbles with the motion, knocking against the wood. He picks it and the knife from the sloping bottom. He scrapes the blade against the carving, grimaces, flexes his hand, sheathes his knife.

Across the strait, a shimmer of motion. On the beach two figures run single file. He opens his spyglass and peers through. Two men, bare-chested, barefoot, bared teeth. The man behind loops an arm around the other’s waist and tackles him to the ground. He punches a lean, hard fist into the back of the other man’s head. The man on his back wails, lifts a rock from the shore, smashes it into his assailant’s nose. The lighthouse keeper sees the face cave in. He lowers the spyglass, but continues to watch. The victor shoves his opponent off, kneels next to him with his back facing the keeper, then rushes off into the grove of trees, howling. The keeper takes deep breaths, fumbles for his pipe. Once lit, he takes long draws. The smoke hovers around his head. He grips the carving in his fist.

On the shore, the crumpled body lays in a heap. The keeper digs his oars into the water and rows toward it. When the boat runs aground, he steps into the shin-deep water and takes slow, crouched steps until he stands over the corpse. From the neck down, it is pristine. No evidence of violence. Not a single drop of blood on the skin.

The face is ruined, blood matted in the eyebrows and in clumps of hair. The mouth lies open, cracked teeth protrude from the gums. The nose is smashed flat against a cheek. Purple bruises ring the eyes, stretch back to the ears. Eye sockets have fallen in on themselves.

He sits down on the rocks, hangs his head. He reaches a hand under his shirt, caresses the burn on his chest, and brings out fingers stained with blood. A howl rises from within the darkness beneath the trees. The keeper leaves the body as it is and rows back to the island.

The drowned man sits on the pier. His legs dangle over the water. His arms are folded under the wool blanket. He stares into the deep. The keeper rows the boat to the wooden pilings and rings a rope around them. He climbs on the pier and stands next to the drowned man, who doesn’t look up.

“Did you see those men?” the keeper asks.

“I’ve seen worse.”

“What’s happening over there?”

“What have you heard?”

“Nothing. Haven’t heard anything since the last supplies came, more than a month ago.”

“Some people say disease, some say war, some say Judgment.” The drowned man looks up at the keeper. “Things are falling apart. And as it gets worse, more will come, looking for safety or plunder.”

“They’ll find nothing here.”

“They don’t know that yet.”

The keeper leaves the drowned man sitting at the edge of the pier. Inside his living quarters, he smokes his pipe, and goes through his pantry, counting supplies. He heads back to the mussel beds, harvests a handful, boils them with salt. He offers a plate to the drowned man, who refuses. The keeper eats, and they taste bitter, rancid, but he finishes them all. He wakes in the night thrashing and empties his stomach into the washroom sink. He stands at the window for hours, unable to sleep. The lighthouse beam orbits the island. A low, steady wind slides through fissures and cracks in the concrete. The drowned man lies on the floor, flat on his back. His eyes twitch in his sleep, but his body does not move. The keeper stokes the fire, pulls a chair close to the stove, sits, shivers. Out the window, he sees the ship in the moonlight, fixed in the hard night.

In the morning, he stands on the parapet. The ship is close enough for him to make out the planks in the hull. Sails flap in the breeze. Not a soul walks the deck. He looks down on the island to see the drowned man stepping into the grounded flock of gulls. He reaches down, grabs one by the neck. It squawks and flaps its wings. The drowned man twists the head back, the gull goes limp, and he walks back into the lighthouse.

The keeper finds him sitting at the table, tearing hunks of gull with his teeth. The drowned man breaks open the bones and sucks the marrow. He offers some to the keeper.

“Tastes terrible, but we won’t go hungry,” the drowned man says.

The keeper leaves the drowned man to his meal. He spends the rest of the morning preparing the lighthouse. Polishes the lens. Refills the oil. Refits the wick. Scrubs the windows. When the drowned man walks to the other end of the island, the keeper takes the remaining food from the pantry and fills jars with fresh water. He carries food, water, wool blankets to the pier and loads them into the rowboat. He unties the boat from its moorings and lowers himself to the cross-plank. The gulls chatter, attack one another, press their bodies together. The keeper looks to the far end of the island, sees a small flock take flight, then land. He pushes away with an oar and turns the bow toward open sea. The boat rides on a thin sheen, and all the depths of the sky wait below. More gulls take flight. The drowned man appears behind them, running toward the lighthouse, the pier, the boat, the keeper.

The keeper digs his oars into the clean surface. The pointed prow cleaves through, breaking water into shards. On his left, the island, the gulls, the drowned man slip by. He doesn’t look to his right where the ship looms against a dark blue sky. Day fades to twilight, then to night, and the lighthouse stands dark, blotting out the stars.

Absolom L. Hagg received his MFA from Boise State University, where he won the Glenn Balch Award in Fiction. He was a finalist in Glimmer Train’s Fiction Open and has been a two-time attendee of the Tin House Writer’s Workshop. He works as a science editor and recently read about the fluid mechanics of bird flocks. He lives in Portland, OR, a city that turned him into a soccer fan. Please feel free to contact him on Twitter (@ajnumber17).

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Two years ago, I found pictures of my mother, still in negative form, in an old yellow lunch box I had used to gather together the photos, developed and undeveloped, and left behind in my father’s collection after he had died.

I sent the negatives off to be developed in a specialist camera shop that still works with old technology.  My skin prickled at the sight of them.  My skin prickles now as I write about them.

I cannot look at these images without an awareness of my father behind the camera’s lens.  My father set my mother in this pose.  He told her how to sit, how to tilt her head, how to pull the thin dressing gown down around her shoulders so that all we can see are the lines of her arms above her body, her deep cleavage visible above the full corset she wore in those days.  The tags of her suspender belt that hold up her stockings peek out on top of her thighs.  The floral cotton of her gown covers her torso and flows in folds down to her knees.

In one of the photos my father must have instructed my mother to abandon the dressing gown altogether and she sits with her hands crossed one over the other on top of her thighs, the straps of her brassiere pulled down her shoulders, her belly covered by corset.  Hardly pornography by today’s standards, but by my childhood standards they still have the power to shock me.  Even now and my skin prickles afresh.

Behind my mother, the bed with its dark high backed mahogany headstand is rumpled.  The oval mirror in the middle of the bed head matches the mirror in the dressing table and from the photographs I can see the rounded back of a chair onto which my mother once sat to put on her make up, her compact powder and lipstick, nothing more.  My mother was never one for mascara, as these days I am not one for lipstick.  Lipstick has the feel of sticky tape on my lips.  It gags me.  The room is lined on every side with clothes laid out, one on top of the other: shirts, dresses trousers.  It is as if my mother were trying on outfits for a photo shoot, or is it possible that these clothes have accumulated over the week and wait now in piles for the weekly wash.

My mother does not look unhappy in these photographs.  I expect her to be unhappy behind her slight smile, but I cannot know.  I imagine my mother felt as I felt when I was eleven years old underneath the hot glare of my father’s photographic lights in the lounge room having to tilt my chin to expose my smile and my decaying teeth, but by then my mother had borne nine children to my father.  She must have known him well.  Perhaps he was not drunk when he took these photographs.  Perhaps he treated her kindly during these photo shoots, my mother the model, my father the photographer, the artist and his muse at work.

My mother has always fancied herself as a beauty.  I know this by the attention she pays to her image even now when she puts on lipstick at the mirror, or by the way she holds herself fixed in a particular pose, her head at a tilt, a small smile across her lips when she knows that someone wants to take her photograph, even now when she is over ninety years of age.

When I was little I saw my mother as a movie star, dark wavy hair, bright red lips glossy with colour, olive skin that tanned well in summer, despite her European origins.  My father was handsome, too, but in a bookish way.    He wore spectacles, round and horn rimmed.  His face was long.  His hair the colour of sand. Whenever  my  father  spoke  it was as if his  mouth  were  full  of  gravel,  his  accent  thick  with  heavy  Germanic  gutturals.  But I did not know my father then except as a drunk.  I resist the term alcoholic.  It has a diagnostic ring.  It is too inclusive.  It assumes we know things about the man, which we do not.

I was eleven years old when my mother first told me that my father was an alcoholic, as if that explained everything; as if that made up for everything; as if that might help her and us to account for the man who pissed into empty wine bottles at night while everyone was asleep; as if that might make up for the man who at the height of summer sat in his chair in the lounge room and one by one removed every item of his clothing, until he sat naked in front of the television in the middle of the day.  People who walked by along the street outside, alongside the roaring traffic of Canterbury Road, might peer in through the curtains, but my father showed no shame, as he sat there in his nakedness.

To my eleven year old self this seemed all wrong.  Other fathers did not take off their clothes in the middle of the day.  Other fathers did not take out their camera and photograph themselves naked, seated on the edge of their beds, as my did mine.  My mother called it his hobby, my father’s passion for photography.  He bought all the necessary equipment and set up lights in the lounge room, bright lights on metal stalks that reflected back every stain in the carpet, every dust mote in the air.  Not only did he photograph himself.  We were his subjects, too, we children and we lined up along the corridor outside the lounge room waiting for our turn.

‘You,’ he said to me, ‘sit up straight.  Tilt your chin to the right.’  I wanted to tilt it to the left.  ‘Smile,’ he said.  ‘Show us your teeth.’  I wanted to hide them.  I did not want history to record the colour of my teeth, of my two front incisors, which were turning grey from the holes behind them.  My father did not see, or if he did, he did not care.  ‘Smile wide now.’

At the end of the day my father took the rolls of film into his dark room, which had once been the pantry in our Camberwell house and now served as a hidden place that smelled of chemicals and secrets.  The first proofs he lined up in strips of negatives from pegs on the shower screen holder above the bath.  From these he selected the best shots for further development.  Shots that moved out of their tiny frames and into full sized pictures, in black and white, my sisters, my brothers and me, spread eagled along the sides of the bathtub as our images began to dry.

There are those who might consider my efforts at writing my story here obscene and even more so than my father’s photographic exploits.  At least he kept them to himself.  He was both voyeur and exhibitionist.  Am I the same?  I think about this often.  This need as a writer to find an audience.  This need to show off my wares, rather like my mother displaying her body for the camera’s eye.  Or am I like my father, peeling off one item after another of clothing to sit naked on my seat in the middle of the room, for all to see?

Have I no modesty, no shame? If I were to hide under a fiction writer’s label then at least I could say I made it all up, but I am an avowed autobiographer.  I use my own life experience, not only as fodder for my stories; my life experience is the stuff of my stories.  I probe it to find its centre.  I niggle at it again and again trying to tease out some sort of essence.  I cannot call it the absolute truth, but some sort of essence, some sort of emotional truth that lies within.

More than this, my curiosity about human nature led me as a fourteen-year-old to the idea of pursuing social work as a career.  I had wanted to rescue people like me from families like mine.  After I succeeded in this aim – a social worker at the Prince Henry’s Hospital in St Kilda Road Melbourne – I discovered after four years at university that my view of social work had been inflated.  At least, the social workers employed in hospitals in the 1970s were considered little more than form-fillers and handmaidens to the doctors.  So I shifted into psychotherapy training along psychoanalytic lines.  I wanted to work directly with people; to have an impact on their lives.  It is a long story but my aim by then was to follow my fantasy of Sigmund Freud and his follower’s.  To this end, I trained for another four years and became a psychoanalytic psychologist, hoping again to help people from families like mine.  People like me who are struggling to make sense of themselves and their place in the world.  Over the years my aspirations have developed just as psychoanalytic practice has evolved, just as my perspective on my parent’s sexuality has changed.

Yet to this day I am troubled by my mother’s demeanor in these photographs.  I think of her as abused, threatened by my father to conform to his wishes, the way I felt when I was a child on Saturday afternoons after my mother had taken herself off to their bedroom with my father.  I believed then she did so to spare us her children from him.

When I step back as an adult and reflect on my memories I want to challenge my child’s view.  It was not like that perhaps, that is just my reading of it.  How can I separate my adult perspective from that of my child?  I must also respect my child’s view.  To this day the idea of sex in the middle of the day troubles me, not for the sex, but for the timing.  It has an indecent ring as if my father were committing indecent acts on my mother behind closed doors and I cannot stop it.

Freud might have put it down to Oedipal desires, but as an adult now I know better.  I know that Sandor Ferenzci, Freud’s disciple, fell foul of his father-like mentor, because he refused to deny the high incidence of child sexual abuse as a factor in the difficulties of those troubled souls who frequented their Viennese consulting rooms.

The epistemological instinct, a term that used to send shudders through me until I learned to get my tongue around it, the urge to understand, the urge to know things, the basis of curiosity.  How much is it linked to my position as a psychotherapist? How much is it linked to my need to understand more now as an adult about the ways my parents lived their lives?

I asked my mother once what went on between her and my father on those Saturday afternoons.  ‘The things he did to me…’ She would not elaborate and I had not the heart to push her on the point.  Yet her answer has left me only more curious.  My little girl self baulks at the thought; my adult self wants to know more.  Bear in mind my mother was a religious woman, somewhat inhibited as far as I could see in all things sexual.  Did my father go to sexual extremes or was he merely asking her to offer favours that my mother found abhorrent?  One woman’s sexual pleasure might be another’s horror.  Perversions can take many forms, including exhibiting ourselves or getting sexual pleasure out of looking.

One night when I was young I had taken myself off to bed.  I can see myself still lying there, the blankets pulled up to my chin.  I waited then for my other sisters to come to bed.  The lights were on in the room, or perhaps I had turned them off.  I must have turned them off for I remember looking across to the window on one wall in our room and there in the darkness I saw the white orb of a face, a man’s face, I was sure.  I froze and although I stared at this face, the eyes scanned the room, not me, not then, but I wondered what he was looking for.

The face disappeared and I leapt from my bed into the lounge room where my mother sat with my older brothers watching television.  My father was asleep in his bedroom.

‘There’s a man looking through my window,’ I said and my brothers fled out the back door of our house down the side laneway and up Alexandra Avenue in his  pursuit.  They did not find the man, though they insisted to me later they had seen him in the distance.

A peeping Tom, one brother said.  At the time I had no doubt that I had seen him, too.  A peeping Tom, a voyeur, a man I now recognise as one who gets sexual pleasure out of looking, a man who is too fearful of intimacy to commit himself to close and real encounters.  Writing about it here I am left curious about my memory.  Did I create such a man in my fantasy to help me to cope with my father’s curiosity about sexuality, which he directed not only towards his wife but also towards his older daughter?  Could this have been my way of externalising the danger?

It was not the first time I experienced the world as a place filled with strange and sexually disturbed and disturbing men.  There was also the man I met down at the rubbish tip, a cutting under the Canterbury Road bridge into which people threw their unwanted stuff.  It was once the site of an abandoned railway line now filled with junk that we as children combed through in search of useful things.  On this day I had gone with a younger sister and an older brother.  Every time my brother went off over a hill or behind a clump of bushes to explore I noticed this man in the distance.  He had been fossicking nearby, or so I imagined until he flashed a silver coin at me and alternated the waving of this coin with a shaking of his penis.  My sister urged me to stay away but I assumed the man was offering me money and I wanted it.  Eight years old, and I walked over to the man.

‘Hold this and watch the cream come out,’ he said.  I do not remember the sensation of holding this man’s erect penis, then, or my thoughts as I watched him ejaculate into an empty paint tin, but afterwards, when he had handed me the money, I sensed my wrong doing such that I refused to tell my brother where the money had come from.

Days later when I told my mother about the man and the money she told me to take it to confession, and thereby confirmed my sinfulness.  My curiosity had won the better of me.

What would my brothers have done had they caught up with my peeping Tom?  The world seems safer far from the vantage point of time, however exhibitionist or voyeuristic it might seem.  After all these are only words on the page, or even photographs of bodies that no longer exist beyond their photographed form.  They might offend.  They might incite, but in themselves they can do no harm.

Time catches up with me.  My mother at ninety-two is slowly fading from heart failure.  I visit her in her retirement village room and make her a small cup of tea, which she may or may not drink, and then I rub down her legs with Sorbolene cream, a practice I took up several months ago after my mother’s legs began to break down into ulcers that at first would not heal.  ‘Keep her legs moisturised,’ one of the nurses had said and so we began this at first daily practice of rubbing the smooth white moisturiser into the old woman’s legs.

I sit with my mother in her room and listen yet again as she boasts about her age.  ‘I’m 92 years old.  I don’t get sick.  It’s amazing.  But other people here, all the other people here are coughing and spluttering.  So many have the flu, but me, not a sniffle.’

‘That’s good’ I say.  ‘But if you get so much as a sniffle, or a tickle in your throat you must tell the doctor straight away.’  It feels like a threat.  My mother towards the end of her life refuses to recognise her heart failure and the possibility of her death any day now, and I am not far behind reluctant to acknowledge the same.

In my family we boast about our good health, our genes, our immunity.  I spread the Sorbolene cream over my mother’s legs and pull back once again at the stale smell that wafts out whenever I take off her slippers.  They are all she wears on her feet these days, special slippers, with Velcro strips that adhere together to make for easy wearing.  She cannot otherwise get her slippers on and off.  They smell of the vinegar of old age and dead skin.  She knows it, I suspect.  My mother knows that her feet let off this sad stale stench but she says nothing.  I say nothing but spread the cream up and down her ankles and calves as if they were my own.

There is a dark spot like a blood blister that I had not noticed before.  I rub it with the tip of my finger.  It is smooth to touch.

‘I noticed that too,’ my mother says.  ‘It wasn’t there before.’

‘The mark of death,’ I want to say.  ‘Your skin is breaking down.’  But no.  ‘It’s probably just a blood blister,’ I say.  ‘I get them all the time, ever since I had babies.’

‘Nothing to worry about then,’ my mother says.

‘Maybe mention it to the doctor next time you see him.’

All this emphasis on our bodies.  All this effort to reduce our skin and bones into efficient machines that might go on forever, if only to keep out the cold.  These days once a week the Sorbolene cream on my mother’s legs is enough.  It is the ritual we enjoy.  The laying on of the hands, as a physiotherapist friend calls it, the gentleness of touch.  When you are 92 and both your husbands are long dead and your many children live far away and visit occasionally and will offer only a peremptory kiss on the cheek, there is not much on offer by way of touch.

Yet touch frightens me.  It bespeaks the possibility of invasion, of fingers poking around where they do not belong, and I am once again a little girl, fearful of my father’s visits in the night, my father’s visits when he climbs into bed with my older sister, a bed away from mine and I am fearful that my turn will be next.

‘If he touches you scream,’ my older sister said to me many years later when she had finally managed to escape the house but she had never screamed herself not until it was too late.  Nor did I scream and nor did he touch me, not really I believe, only in my imagination, but I avoided him.

I come back to these memories often when I write as if I am worrying at a sore that will not heal.  I know that I should leave it alone, but it becomes the source of so much of my wish to make sense of my life and to turn the damage around.

My father’s words rattle across the room like bullets from a machine gun.  In my imagination, I am still inside the room.  I am the fly on the wall, the recorder of events, the Hansard reporter.  Can I hear my father calling to me?  I cannot remember the sound of his voice, only as an idea, not an experience.  What am I doing back here again, always back here?  My father/myself.  Why?

I sit at the kitchen table in Camberwell in the evening after school taking notes from my textbook, taking notes on tiny sheets of pink paper that I hide within the pages of my book.  On these pink slips of paper I transcribe my father’s words.  My father’s words are the words of a mad man, but my father is not unhinged by psychopathy, he is unhinged by drink and by grief.  The grief that comes from a troubled childhood in a family filled with secrets and lies, the grief that comes from fighting in a war that he can never speak about afterwards.  And no one else will speak to him about what it was like.

He was not always mad, my mother says.  He was not always like that.  He did not always drink.  But there were times, just a few, when she said something or did something that seemed to upset him in ways she could not understand and for days on end he refused to speak to her.  He would leave for work in the morning without saying goodbye.  He would lie in bed beside her in the nighttime without saying a word.  He would sit at the breakfast table behind his newspaper and ignore her.  She had become invisible and she learned to stop pleading with him at these times to speak to her because she knew somehow in time it would pass.

Secrets, lies and silence are the daily nourishment of families.  We speak on the surface, say words that feel safe and protect each other and ourselves from the explosive force of what we really think and feel.  The secrets get under my skin while the memories hold fast beneath the surface.

I look now at a photograph of my father when he was a boy, maybe six, maybe seven.  He sits on the floor cross-legged, one in a row of seven children who sit in the first row in front of the adults at what looks to be a wedding shot.  My grandparents are there too, in the corner first row standing behind the seated adults, which include the wedding couple.  I guess they are a married couple because the woman in white carries a bouquet but she has no veil.  The photo could have been taken in Freud’s time though not in the Vienna of his fame but in Haarlem, Holland where my father lived during his childhood, and where he met my mother and from where he took her to Australia before I was born.

I do not know why there are tears behind my eyes when I look at these photographs, something about my inability to make sense of these times and these people, especially of my father and my father’s father and his mother.  The mystery of these people.  My father’s head is lowered but he lifts his eyes towards the camera as if he mistrusts the person taking the photo and his arms are folded.  Some of the other children in the photo fold their arms as well.  A technique of the photographer in those days to keep the children still perhaps.  No one smiles as is the custom in these old photos, several are caught at that moment with eyes closed including my paternal grandfather, the one who looks to me as though he could not be a relative of mine.  My grandmother, on the other hand, looks familiar.  She looks like my father.  She looks like me, the same long face, the angular chin.

My great grandparents are in this photo, too.  They sit on the side of the bride and I can only assume that this photo was taken at the wedding of my father’s aunt.  Apart from my father I know none of these people unless I am to include my aunt Nell who might well be the baby in the photo seated on my great grandmother’s knee.  Nell I have met.  Nell who was named after my grandmother, Petronella and after whom by rights I should have been named  but by the time I was born my mother tells me, my grandmother Nell was ‘in disgrace’.

‘What did she do?’ I asked even as I knew the answer.  Asking my mother questions such as these plunges her into a fug of memory to which she does not want to return.  I can see it in her eyes.  That glazed look.  A look that says, must we go there again?  She cannot bear to think on it.  She only wants to think about the good times.

My mother is 92.  I should leave her in peace.  I should not trouble her about these things but I cannot stop myself.  I worry at these thoughts like a dog at a bone.  I worry at these thoughts as if I am scratching at a wound whose scab is dry and ready to shear off but I know I should leave it to scale off without help from me. And yet I persist.

‘We know your Oma was imprisoned for embezzlement but there was more to it than that.’  Your father had nothing to do with it, my mother says yet again as she has told me before.  An inspector came to their house.  An inspector with brass buttons on  his coat, brass buttons that my mother tells me were signs of his authority. He told my mother she had nothing to worry about.  My father had left home well before the events that led to his parents’ imprisonment took place.

‘But what did they do to wind up in jail?’

‘Something sexual,’ my mother said.  ‘Something with the children.  The girls I think.  Your father saw nothing.’

‘How can you be so sure?’ I ask my mother as I peel back another layer from her denial.  How can you be so sure given what he did to us?  To my sister?  Even as I write this now I agonize over the name I might offer my older sister.  It is against the law in courts of law to name the victims of incest in the public domain.  It has something to do with protecting the innocence of victims.  I have never understood this.  How can victims be held responsible for what was done to them as children and yet in concealing their names it is as if we blame them in some way?

Perhaps it comes down to shame.  To be sexually abused is to be publicly shamed.  I do not want to shame my sister.  She has told me many times that I must write as I see fit, but she asks that I not identify her by name.

Years later we buried my father in the Cheltenham cemetery in a long rectangular grave covered in white pebbles from Healesville.  For his twenty years in Australia, his Dutch accent had clogged his communications, his many business ventures failed, he had nine children and turned to drink.  The graveyard slopes down into a valley and runs alongside a golf course.  My father’s name is inscribed in gold letters on a shiny piece of granite.

I still cannot make sense of my father or of his desires, of my mother and hers.  Their pictures, freeze dried in time, offer hints only of what these desires might have been.  And for the rest, for my desires, my curiosity, I can only rely on old photographs and on my ever-evolving memories.

Elisabeth Hanscombe is a psychologist and writer who completed her doctorate in 2011 on the topic ‘Life writing and the desire for revenge’.  She has published a number of short stories and essays in the areas of autobiography, psychoanalysis, testimony, trauma and creative non-fiction in Meanjin, Island, Tirra Lirra, Quadrant and Griffith Review as well as in the journals, Life Writing and Life Writing Annual: Biographical and autobiographical studies and in psychotherapy journals and magazines throughout Australia and in the United States. She is winner of the 2014 Lane Cove Literary awards for her short memoir, ‘A trip to the beach’ and was short listed for the Australian Book Review’s 2009 Calibre essay prize, long listed in 2011 and 2014, with book chapters in Stories of Complicated grief: a critical anthology, edited by Eric Miller PhD and published by NASW press in 2014, and in Eavesdropping: the psychotherapist in film and television, edited by Lucy Husskinson and Terrie Waddell and published by Routledge in 2015. She has pieces accepted for publication in the forthcoming Anthology of Loss, edited by Gina Mercer and Terry Whitebeach, a letter in 100 Love Letters from Women to Women, edited by Francesca Rendle-Short and Laurel Fantauzzo, and an essay in Sharon Farber’s edited book, Celebrate the Wounded Healer to be published by Routledge.  Elisabeth Hanscombe is an adjunct research associate at the Swinburne Institute for Social Research and blogs at http://sixthinline.blogspot.com.au

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SUPPLIES YOU WILL NEED:

• a voice recorder (a digital one is best, but an old cassette recorder can work)

• paper, clipboard, and a fast-writing pen

• Sweet Parle Gluco biscuits to nibble on when your nervous stomach needs to be soothed

• facts about the 1947 Partition of India, “the largest forced migration in history”

• a list of questions you can ask without starting to cry

• the flexibility and agility to add or delete questions

• the insensitivity to keep asking questions even when your mother seems troubled

• forty minutes of uninterrupted time alone with her when your father is not in the room correcting and clarifying everything she says

TO BEGIN:

OPTION ONE

While standing across the kitchen counter from your mother as she peels potatoes for her famous aloo ki tikki and asks you about your income and savings (she only wants to know you’re doing okay), take the conversation in another direction, the one you want it to go in.  Conceal the voice recorder behind the bag of potatoes.   A small, digital recorder will be easy to hide—until she gets to the last potato.

Forget the paper and pen.  She shouldn’t see you writing, or she might not tell you the sad stories.  Lean on the cool kitchen counter, pick up a peeler, and offer to help your mother.  Smile at her as you steel yourself to begin.

OPTION TWO

Forget option one.  Forget the whole project.  You were delusional to think you could talk with your mother about this.  You cry when you read novels about the Partition, especially novels in which children are separated from their parents or witness their parents being hurt.  You can’t do this.  Put aside the recorder, take the package of Gluco biscuits, go out to the backyard, and eat the whole pack.

OPTION THREE

Give yourself a pep talk.

Gather your supplies, and invite your mother to sit down to chat with you; let her see all your equipment.  Tell her it is an interview for a writing project, but be prepared for her to take phone calls or to get up to check the potatoes boiling on the stove.  During the phone call, she will tell your aunt in Sindhi that you are “taking an interview” with her.  She will sound proud.  She likes that you are a writer, that your work is published (though she really wishes you would publish a book).  Hide your surprise when it becomes clear that she is pleased you are going to ask her questions.  Expect that she will take all other phone calls as well.

HOW TO CHOOSE QUESTIONS:

Consider what you really want to know.

• What did she miss most about Karachi?

• Were any of her friends on the ship that brought her from Karachi to Bombay?

• How did she say goodbye to her father as she boarded the ship with the rest of the family?

• When she left her home in Karachi in 1947 when she was twelve, did she know she would never return?

But you know that talking about the Partition makes her sad, so just ask her briefly, “What do you remember about Karachi?”  And hope she will tell you the rest.

“In Karachi, I had my own room.” Your mother smiles.  “With a desk and an armchair!  I used to study there.”

Picture your mother reading in the armchair, her pretty hair tidy, her legs crossed.  Think of her next permanent home, your Naani’s home, a two-room house in the Sion Sindhi Colony in Bombay, which had no armchairs at all.  The beds served as settees during the day.

Notice that your mother is still smiling.  “And my uncle, who was a manager at a bank, he had a car with a driver.  He used to pick us up and take us for drives.  It was fun.”

“Where did you go?”  You did not know any of this before.

“I remember he took us to the zoo.  The driver would spread a bedcover in the back of  the car, and all of us would get in and sit there.”  She is smiling.

“Did you have a favorite animal at the zoo?”

Her smile widens.  “Giraffes!”

Make a note that your mother likes giraffes.  Picture her at the zoo, looking up in delight.

A little later, when she describes the first place they stayed after the voyage to Bombay, note that she looks far away: “All the families were in a big shed. We had to put our trunks like dividers on the sides to make a kind of room. But there were no walls.  Everybody could see.  Our people in Delhi asked Naani to send me to them.   Not good for a young girl to be in a place like that, they said.  I said, ‘no.’ I didn’t want to go.  Naani didn’t force me.”

Try to picture your twenty-nine-year-old Naani managing four children in a cavernous shed in a strange city:  your pretty, proper mother, the eldest; your Aunty Maya, who played marbles with the boys and got her knees dirty; your handsome, generous Uncle Mohan, quick-tempered and loving; and the youngest, sweet Nimu, whom you never met because she was killed crossing the train tracks to get to school.

About fifteen minutes into the interview, when your mother tells you about waiting in lines for the latrines at the camp where they lived after the time in the shed, do not tear up when you see her shudder.  Above all, do not let her see you cry.  Crying will jeopardize the interview.

You have already taken notes about your mother and father meeting as twelve-year-olds at the camp and about the long walk to the station where they caught the train to school early in the morning.  Your parents have chuckled about their friend who would dry his only shirt by holding it out of the train window on the way to school.  Now take notes about the rationed food at the camp.  Write down that your mother took food for your father each day because he did not get enough at home.

About twenty-five minutes into the interview, your father will call to ask if your mother needs him to pick up anything at the Indian grocery store.

She will smile.

When she gets off the phone, she will move to the stove to make tea.

The interview will be over.

Umeeta Sadarangani, who received her Ph.D. from the Pennsylvania State University, is a Professor of English at Parkland College in Champaign, Illinois, where she teaches courses on writing, literature, and South Asian cultures.  Her childhood in India and Kuwait, her lesbian identity, and her experiences as an immigrant in the United States all influence her writing and her visual art. Umeeta’s blog, Transplanted on the Prairie (transplantedontheprairie.blogspot.com), reflects these influences.  Her previous publications have been in academic journals such as American Studies International and Modern Language Studies (MLS).

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He hadn’t started drinking yet—or
if he had he hid it well, deep
in the back room of the basement
with the wooden crates, dim boxes.
Music had begun to slide away
from pulse and fingers, hands on keys
a helpless shake and slip and skip
as his hair grayed within the mirror
only his wife kept clean. He didn’t
say too much when then phone stopped ringing,
just bought more and more cigarettes to hide,
pretending the back lawn needed mowing
or the dog had to go outside. Maybe
he had already started drinking
and that’s why the band let him go.
Sleeping till noon, wife running their business
alone, too loving to know.

Katharyn Howd Machan, Professor of Writing at Ithaca College, holds degrees from the College of Saint Rose, the University of Iowa, and Northwestern University. Her poems have appeared in numerous magazines; in anthologies/textbooks such as The Bedford Introduction to Literature, The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2013, Early Ripening: American Women’s Poetry Now, Literature, Sound and Sense, Writing Poems; and in 32 collections, most recently H (Gribble Press, 2014) and Wild Grapes: Poems of Fox (Finishing Line Press, 2014). Former director of the Feminist Women’s Writing Workshops, Inc., in 2012 she edited Adrienne Rich: A Tribute Anthology (Split Oak Press).

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an orange beach towel covers    a white bathing-suited woman
wraps her legs    hoods her head            & allows her to stand
facing the afternoon sun    it doesn’t stop off-shore cold winds
her sand-brown shadow            collapses beside the raised hand
shielding her eyes from the pale clear sky    other bathers gather
shells            as brush strokes of cirrus clouds tier a sky    that
won’t warm them     on the strand    fallen cottonwood leaves
skate    over undulations of dunes            as if a shifting season’s
loose change    out past stands of willow     the land levels &
farmers cut cornstalks for silage           vintners gather sweet late
grapes    & in orchards    last apples    from ground & branch
await the cider press            one morning snow arrives & drifts
as if an ocean of white-caps    flattening to dun & linen beaches
where monochromatic seagulls            held aloft by brisking
headwinds    flap in place    a tied string of origami marionettes

Robert Miltner is the author of Hotel Utopia (New Rivers Press Many Voices Poetry Prize), ten poetry chapbooks including Against the Simple (Wick award) and Eurydice Rising (Red Berry Editions award), and And Your Bird Can Sing: Short Fiction (Bottom Dog Press). He teaches at Kent State University and is on the poetry and fiction faculties of the NEOMFA.

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The days seem to be ending
even as they begin—

do you know what I mean,
when you’re driving and the sun hacks

through leafless trunks
their shadows seem like an attack

or does the light
just hit the eye at the most defenseless angle

aggressive yellow not just a color but an ending
indicator, a preliminary warning

not of caution so much
as an obligatory direness, tired as a fist held too long

not warm as in goldleaf,
honey or even the cold daffodils of last spring

and after defending against such glare
the loneliest feeling comes?

Jessica Purdy holds a MFA in Creative Writing from Emerson College. She teaches Poetry Workshops at Southern New Hampshire University. She was nominated for Best New Poets and Best of the Net in 2014. She has poems in The Telephone Game, Bluestem Magazine, The Tower Journal, The Cafe Review, Off the Coast, The Foundling Review, and Flycatcher 3. Previously, her poems have appeared in Literary Mama, Halfway Down the Stairs, ‘What is Home’, (the 2007 Portsmouth Poet Laureate program’s publication), Analecta, and The Beacon Street Review.  Her chapbook, “Learning the Names”, came out in March 2015 from Finishing Line Press.

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Kristina Pfleegor is a writing tutor and freelance editor in eastern Washington. Originally from Portland, Oregon, she has spent parts of her life in Kenya, Minnesota, and Hawai`i. She holds an MFA in creative writing from Eastern Washington University, and her poetry appears in Rock & Sling, Gambling the Aisle, and ASCENT.

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A father comes home and excitedly announces to his wife and young children, “We’re going to Disneyland!” It should be a moment of joy and elation, but it is nothing of the sort. The father is unemployed, mentally ill, violently abusive; his wife and children are starving. The children’s mother tells them being hungry is “a good thing. We’re fasting, a prayer God listens to more.” The prayer is answered with theme park tickets, and the moment is one in a long line of stunning heartbreaks that burn like stars on the pages of Tawnysha Greene’s beautifully crafted novel.

The story is told through the point of view of the couple’s oldest daughter, a girl of ten who has to deal with all the normal issues faced by a child on the edge of puberty made infinitely more problematic—and harrowing—by her upbringing. Curious about the pretty bras she sees in a store, she asks her mother about them only to be told “‘Jezebels wear them.’ That’s her word for women who have fallen from God.” Her mother once took the children out of church because “the pastor’s wife stood up to pray, something Momma said a woman had no right to do.” “‘I don’t want to expose them to that,’” Momma explains to her own mother, who retorts, “‘To what? … To a woman speaking?’”

If the girl’s father had his way—and he is frequently enabled to get his way—neither wife nor children would speak, would communicate in any form at all. The youngest daughter is hearing impaired, yet Momma and the narrator can only sign to her secretly, when Daddy isn’t looking. His own mother was hearing impaired; signing reminds him of her, and while vague hints are dropped about the woman’s own mental illness and abusiveness, none of the adults ever want to talk about it. No one is allowed to talk about anything that will upset Daddy; any attempt to protest, even to defend each other, is seen as “disrespect.” For disrespecting Daddy, the whole family is lined up and viciously beaten. After one such incident, prompted only by the youngest daughter screaming “Stop it!”, the narrator apologizes—not to Daddy, but to her sister, who was the first to be beaten. “I should have gone first,” she signs.

This moment—when a little girl is sorry not because she did something that resulted in a beating but because she feels like she should have been the first to be punished instead of her more vulnerable sister—is just about heart-stopping. It is one of many such moments. Greene’s prose is spare, seamless, and pitch-perfect. The young girl’s point of view is completely believable from start to finish, and that makes this less a sensationalistic story of a dysfunctional family and far more the story of an individual’s struggle to understand who she is and what she is capable of doing.

It is frustrating at times reading about characters whose motives seem so unfathomable and—it’s hard not to be judgmental—just plain wrong. Her children are starved and beaten, as is she, and every last bit of money she tries to save is taken by her husband and spent on useless trinkets, yet Momma still misses him, still prays for his return. “She tells Daddy she’s sorry and asks him to forgive her, and it sounds like the prayer Momma makes us say when we’ve done something wrong, and we must ask God to make us clean again.” In showing these events from a child’s eyes, Greene eschews complex psychological analysis and instead presents the stark reality of these lives. We are never given any specific details about the mental illness of Daddy or Daddy’s mother, nor are we given more than hints as to why Momma clings to this man. “She thinks she’s being brave” is as close as the children’s grandmother can get to understanding her daughter’s stubborn devotion.

This frustration is necessary because it allows the reader to get an unfiltered view of this girl’s world. The narrator doesn’t understand any better than we do why these people, adults who are supposed to guide and protect them, act no more maturely and responsibly than children—dangerous children. Because of this, she learns how to see the world from her own eyes—and, importantly, to take action to get out of this world and into a new one of her own making. The “house” in the novel’s title refers at first to one of the constellations, Cepheus, who in Greek mythology was a king who sacrificed his daughter. Indeed, it could very easily seem to this child that her father rules the family with absolute authority over her life. Yet she describes the constellation as looking like “a house tilted over on its side”—not sturdy or powerful—and ultimately she rejects it. “I trace a new house of stars, except upright in a way I’ve never seen in the sky,” she says at a critical moment late in the story. “There is no king here … I stand alone, hands out, so they reach up and touch the walls of my house of stars, holding it up, so that it is strong.”

Letitia L. Moffitt is the author of two novels, Sidewalk Dancing (Atticus Books) and Trace (Cantraip Press; Book 1 of the TraceWorld Series). She lives in Champaign-Urbana.

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One winter afternoon, before it all went to shit, I took a photograph of Jane on a sidewalk at sunset.  I framed her on the left third, letting traffic work the depth behind her.  I bent my knees to get a low-angle, made her look tall, imposing, dark hair wild in the wind.  I was about to take the photo when a giant white box-truck passed along-side us.  For a second, sunbeams bounced off the truck’s aluminum siding and reflected a warm fill-light against Jane’s cheek.  She gleamed, pale face glowing like a starlet, all gold and amber.  I had my finger on the button, but I hesitated, and as soon as I realized how perfect the light had been, the truck was gone.

Danny Caporaletti is a writer/filmmaker based in Richmond, Virginia and New Orleans, Louisiana. His short stories have been published in Poictesme and Sink/Swim, and his creative nonfiction has been published in New Orleans & Me. He is currently an MFA candidate in fiction writing at the University of New Orleans, as well as the assistant editor for UNO’s national literary journal, Bayou Magazine. In addition, he teaches cinema/photography and performs stand-up comedy (poorly). Follow him on Twitter @dannycaps

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The morning my sister aborted her surely inviable baby, I herded a flock of blackbirds across town.

They were loud and occupying two trees as I turned off my street on foot.  The leaves were buds.  The leaves were birds.  Easy to see.

My glowing green 5k shirt.  My pounding feet.  Rise!  I thought.  All at once a dozen branches’ worth scattered skyward and rounded a corner out of sight – I was a heartbeat behind.

My sister labored at a disabled adults work center through her twenties.  An ideal mother for a challenged child everyone said.

I approached the newly-seized limbs.  Go forth!  Birds burst up and went where I willed them.

She said no, she’s not the perfect mom for a disabled kid.  She’d seen one at age fifty masturbate in Wal-Mart.  The best of her flock compulsively poked a pencil at his penis through his pants.  Women raped in group homes.  Parents deceased, siblings saddled with hard decisions.  Couldn’t do that to her pre-existing angels.

The birds hung a block-length ahead.  My powers drove them over a mile before they steered left toward taller trees.

It was her call and she didn’t waver.

Anne Kniggendorf is a regular contributor to Kansas City Star and has also been published in The Saturday Evening Post.  She has an MFA in fiction from the University of Missouri-Kansas City and is a Navy veteran.

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They crowd out the other plants,
bloom wildly after small
encouragement.  Bee-cluster
blossoms, full of magenta
gingerly held closed,
fermata, just long enough.
Too early, and the right
water will flow on by,
too late, and no water,
only strangers, only bears.
Only one couple left
camping after the long weekend,
and miles and miles of river gorge.

Sarah Ann Winn‘s poems have appeared in Cider Press Review, Codex, Hobart (online), Massachusetts Review, Quarterly West, and in her chapbook, Portage (Sundress, 2015). Her second chapbook, Haunting the Last House on Holland Island, is upcoming from Porkbelly. Visit her at http://bluebirdwords.com or follow her @blueaisling on Twitter.

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