—Jesmyn Ward
NONFICTION:
But eventually, when you’re sorting through sixty years of your Depression-era parents’ lives, exhaustion overtakes you. You have jobs and families to return to. You’ve already made three runs to the Goodwill drop-off center ten miles away that day. The people from the auction house are coming in two days, and the realtor needs a clean and empty house to list. And so a number of those photo albums, and a lot of other things, ended up in a twenty-foot dumpster parked in the house’s driveway. Including, I fear, my mother’s last sewing machine.
I am eight years old when my father saves himself the first time, by moving us from a rambling Craftsman in a leafy Pittsburgh suburb to the squat clapboard box three hours north on the edge of the Allegheny National Forest....
Through all our adventures in the muddy woods, I can’t help but notice the stone and metal ruins that seem to lurk everywhere beneath the fern-carpeted understory, evidence of some sort of mysterious earlier civilization.
FICTION:
Erin tosses the brochure on the floor of the passenger seat, where she sits prisoner to a hangover and the mercy of a friend. “Each New Day—sounds like a cult or an ashram where the Swami is actually some orange-turbaned guy named Phil from New Jersey.”
Meg keeps her eyes on the road. “It’s not a cult or an ashram.”
.... I let my eyes travel slowly around the restaurant. They paused at an older woman sitting with a man at a table near the door, and through the clutter of bodies in that crowded space, she seemed to be staring directly at me. It took a long moment for me to recognize her after all the years that had passed. Like mine, her hair was much shorter and had gone gray, but there was no mistaking the face and that hard, even glare I’d grown accustomed to at the end.
Wen-siung had laughed, and his parents had been angry when he told them he was leaving the family tea business. They accused him of being irresponsible, but he didn't care. He had packed his gramophone, his 78s, his books and clothes and moved to Tainan, which lay beneath the Tropic of Cancer, was fiercely hot in summer, and where the food was so much sweeter because of the fields of sugar cane.
• The Land Where Her Ancestors Live
The small temple where she waited had been built next to the banyan tree that was now hugging the makeshift building in its deathly embrace. A long time ago, when her family first arrived from FuJian, they had erected this structure, placing the ashes of their ancestors within. The aroma of incense clung to the walls, dark from centuries of prayers and offerings, ghost money swallowed by the flames for the afterlife, rising as dancing black sparks on the upward current and falling as ash.
FICTION:
My foster father, Mr. Holiday, dreamed of fishing lures and sinkers. Of the ones who spit the hook, he said. He collected bucktail jigs for striped bass and feather hooks for mackerel. On weekdays, depending on the tide, he went fishing in the middle of the night. To fish on the pier alone and smell the slate-laden air was a pilgrimage for him.
I watch the pink baby gorge at my mother’s breast. His beautiful cradle sits in the center of the room, an altar. I run to Mama and claim the other breast.
“No,” she tells me, kind at first, then stern. She pushes me away, her gaze turning to him, Milord-baby. “Now you must suck from the nanny goat,” she says and leads me outside to the tan and black goat. I cry.
“Send it,” the spotter lying next to Mike said.
The lieutenant crouching low several feet behind Mike said, “Shoot the fucker.”
Seven hundred yards away, the center of mass moved. The target’s heart slipped in and out of Mike’s crosshairs, partly obscured by a bicycle the target was trying to repair on the far side of the dirt road. Mike pressed his finger pad against the trigger, felt the warm smoothness in its curve, but he didn’t fire. Instead, he watched the target through his scope.
I drew back the curtains to take in Matt’s whole life, encompassed in one tawdry rented room, a life ended by painkillers. It was typical of Matt that he somehow overdosed on over-the-counter flu remedies. “We’re treating it as an accident, love,” a sympathetic policeman had told me. “It happens. People swallow them like sweeties.” That figured. Matt was always impatient, wanting immediate results.
POETRY:
Call the moon earth’s bald accountant
tallying cheap lunacies while turning
a blind eye to secret purchases made of
those we profess to love, and you’ll never
reach for it, life too crazy and unfair.
i • How to Stop a Glockenspiel
In order to dad dance one needs a modicum of awkwardness, a modicum of awkwardness not feigned. Were I of sentiment grammatically and anatomically correct and incorrect respectively, i.e., were I an isotope, I'd celebrate my half-life every second day. I'd cross the time line, lights and bells be damned.
• 13 Ways of Describing a Car Wreck
I. Permit. Gravel lot.
The Oldsmobile loomed large as
the Oak before her.
II. Her sister screaming
as she white knuckled the Dodge
around the raccoon.
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