Non-Fiction – Philadelphia Stories

If All We Did Was Sweat

The man standing across from me has a long, barbed scar cutting straight down his chest. He’s leaning against the wall’s wooden slats, sweating heavily and breathing hard.

Beside me, a younger man points to his own chest, his own matching scar. “When did you get yours?” he asks.

They meet each other’s eyes, then begin to talk. They compare surgeries, both double-bypass, open-heart. They count blessings and trade tips for the future. “No more ice cream,” the older man says, and we all laugh.

It may sound like we’re in a medical unit of some sort, a hospital wing or rehab facility. In fact, we’re in my favorite spot in Philadelphia: the sauna of my local YMCA.

I started coming here less than a year ago. It’s only recently that I’ve begun to understand how meaningful it is to have this space in my life. This is a space to sweat, obviously, and a visitor won’t be in there long before their whole body is drenched. But it’s so much more than that.

The main “much more” are the people. I almost wrote “characters.” But to call them characters would flatten us all, add a quality of shallowness and goofiness to the enterprise, when in reality it’s anything but. Here is a space where people with worlds of differences in everything from age, race, religion, strength, health, agility and body type come together in temperatures soaring past 100 degrees, for as long as we can comfortably stand it. Sometimes we talk; sometimes we sit in amicable silence. If the others are like me, then when they’re in the dim wood-paneled room by themselves, they close their eyes and meditate, or pray.

I suppose this is what it means to be part of a religious community–one’s local church, temple or mosque. For many who have such a space, perhaps it’s not uncommon to find oneself surrounded each week by people from different backgrounds but with one shared goal. In the case of the sauna, that shared goal is good health. Thus, there is little talk of politics or the news. Our job is to help one another stay strong and heal, not tumble into conversational landmines. Our job is to help make each other well.

Growing up, I never had any religious group. My older brother went to Hebrew School in preparation for a Bar Mitzvah. Did he find community there? Was it a kind of second home for him? If so, he never said. When it was my turn to consider doing the same, my mother shook her head. “The only reason you should have a Bat Mitzvah,” she told me, “is to get money.” I did want to get money, yet even at age eleven had the good sense to know this was not the way to go about it.

Religious rituals in my world seemed random and muddy. My father’s mother lit candles Friday night in her home, but no one told me why. My mother gathered us to light the menorah, sometimes, and we got gifts, I think, though the only one I remember is a plain brown towel that was so rough and hideous I wonder to this day if it was meant to be some kind of joke, the kind without a punchline.

In my twenties, I thought about joining a temple. I wanted community. I wanted to meet people, to feel surrounded by families, food, something bigger than myself. I also, truthfully, thought it could be a good place to pick up clients for my budding freelance copywriting business.

At the Friday night service, I was so thoroughly confused that at one point I turned to the young woman sitting next to me and told her there was a problem with my prayer book. It appeared to have been printed backwards. “The Siddur is read from right to left,” she told me. I felt my face turn scarlet and mumbled my way through the rest of the evening. Though she was wonderfully kind, and there was indeed a joyful dinner afterward, the learning curve felt too steep. I never went back.

This past winter, I decided to celebrate Hannukah for the first time in my adult life. I made the decision because my partner’s mother had mailed us a plastic Christmas tree. Since we decided to decorate the tree, it seemed only right to also light the menorah.

It embarrasses me to say this, but it is the truth: I had to Google what Hannukah actually is. Either I couldn’t remember what I’d learned or I never fully knew. Something about oil, eight days, burning, light. I purchased a menorah at T.J. Maxx. When we lit the candles, I didn’t know what to say. I looked at my daughter, bowed my head and told her, “Namaste.”

It’s a strange position to be in, to understand oneself as Jewish and yet feel no sincere connection to the religion. My father, who passed away this past spring, is part of the last generation to be physically touched by World War Two. He was born in a Jewish ghetto in Japan-occupied Shanghai and later lived in a refugee camp in Cyprus, then in Israel, before coming to the U.S. at age eleven.

He rejected all religious practices, had an uncertain view of God. He called himself a “cultural Jew.” Maybe this was true for him, a taxi driver in New York City during the height of Woody Allen movies and Lenny Bruce comedy. But the phrase holds no meaning for me, a woman whose early cultural life was shaped by hip hop, sitcoms, and John Hughes movies.

“You should write more about being Jewish,” my father always told me. “You have such a unique perspective as a third generation of survivors.”

“I don’t know what it means to be Jewish,” I always replied. “I don’t relate to being Jewish at all. I never even think about it.”

“Exactly,” he would say. “That’s the perspective.”

So, then, where to go?

These days, the sauna is my temple, sweating my personal purification ritual. It is the perfect place for a woman like me. Faithful, without a faith.

And the truth? One thing I love most about this space is its freedom from doctrine, its neutrality, its existence as a place where no conversation drives too vigorously down any particular lane. The woman who sat beside me two weeks ago told me firmly that she believes in home-schooling, that she’s worried about what could happen if the internet shuts down, that “times are changing fast.” That was as specific as she got. Times are changing fast. A sentiment few would disagree with.

The two men who sat on the lower bench last week talked about how great the neighborhoods around here used to be, how everyone used to get along. They lamented how the city had changed. They stopped themselves before getting into specifics. They wiped the sweat off their brow with their forearms, nodded, laughed, drank their water.

As I listen to it all, I wonder, is this not unlike religious ceremony? We use careful words.

We find common ground in injuries, arthritis. Popping knees and slipped discs. Bee pollen as a cure for asthma. Peppermint oil for cardiovascular health. The “silver sneakers” crew talk about the temperature of the swimming pool, who was late to class, who is always late to class, and the small hot room fills with the wild laughter of seventy-year-olds sounding as delighted as naughty children.

In this way, we seek to protect one another from certain outside harms—the world’s harsh divisions, its spitting animosity. We make space for what is here, a shelter that, though we don’t acknowledge it as such, we all surely feel on some level is protected territory. We gather for a sacred bond, however brief, among people who are different from ourselves, yet so alike.

Let me not romanticize what the space is. There are phones and gadgets. People staring at screens. Young guys who don’t know how to modulate their voices for small, quiet spaces. There is the noisy crinkle of water bottles; the tinny echo of loud music through headphones; someone talking on their cell.

Nonetheless, it is what I have, the only temple I do have. So please, let me find glory here. Let me tell you that sometimes we sit together, and we say nothing at all. We see the scars on one another’s bodies. We match them to our own, or else we choose not to ask, decide not to tell. We allow the heat to work on us, allow our pores to open. We come here as strangers, in search of what is higher than ourselves. We seek ways to become more purely ourselves.

It is in this space that we find our way both into our bodies and out of them, a way to live comfortably in our own skins and perhaps touch on something just beyond. We close our eyes. We breathe. And if all we did was sweat, in the end, it would be enough.

Becky Tuch is a fiction and nonfiction writer, based in South Philly. Her stories have won awards and fellowships from Moment Magazine, The MacDowell Colony and The Somerville, MA Arts Council. Additional writing has appeared in a variety of venues including Salon, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, Tikkun Magazine, Gulf Coast, Post Road, and Best of the Net. She is also the Founder of Lit Mag News, a bestselling Substack dedicated to demystifying literary magazines. Learn more at www.BeckyTuch.com.

Finding Parking, a Purple Couch, and a Home in Philadelphia

Antonio and I arrived in Philadelphia on August 5, 2014. I’d driven the entire two-day trip from Georgia because he didn’t have a US driver’s license yet, and I was worried if he got pulled over the consequences might be death or deportation. Me, on the other hand, they’d probably just wave on. We made the trip in a new Toyota Prius, which I bought from a salesman who had been reluctant to sell me a car over the phone. “But don’t you want to come by and see it?” he’d asked.

“I live in Oaxaca,” I said, trying to explain my situation.

“Oaxaca. Where’s that?” he interrupted.

“In Mexico…it’s, I just don’t have time to go back to Georgia just to buy a car,” I finished.

“Well, do you know which car you want?” he asked.

No negotiating. I’d already viewed every Prius for sale on Toyota’s website, and I knew which one was the cheapest. “The Prius Hybrid, the silver one because it’s $5,000 less than the others.”

“All righty, how’d you like to make the down payment?”

I read the salesman my credit card number over the phone. For the next few months, I gave no more thought to it until I needed to drive it off the lot. Instead, I focused on Antonio’s US residency paperwork and finding a place to live.

In our new apartment, also rented sight unseen, we plopped down our four duffel bags, our only worldly possessions, and looked around. It wasn’t the first time in my 34 years I’d start over from nothing, but I hoped it’d be the last. We’d ended up there because the owner was the only landlord who’d rent to us without having me sign the lease in person. Of the twenty or so others I called, only he understood the logistical constraints of our situation. The others thought I’d crafted an ingenious scam by transferring an entire month’s deposit and the first and last month’s rent into their bank account.

In anticipation of our arrival, I’d ordered a mattress online, but we’d missed its delivery. As we scurried across town in our Prius, Antonio asked how we could possibly pick it up in such a small car—living in Mexico had caused us to miss the foam mattress revolution. Back in the apartment, after releasing this squishy item from its packaging, in hopes it would become a mattress, we headed to Walmart. Filling two carts with sheets, pillows, toilet paper, a frying pan, and a spatula—life’s essential items—the total rang into the hundreds of dollars. I gulped, counting the days until my first paycheck arrived. Unfortunately, the cashier made an error and could not check us out. Oddly frustrated with us for buying too much stuff, she made us move everything to a different register and wait as she hastily rescanned every item. Exhausted, I rolled my eyes at Antonio and gave a grimaced grin to the cashier to avoid another “error.”

Until I moved to Philadelphia, I never understood how a TV show could be made about parking, only parking. That evening, standing on the sidewalk in front of our apartment, staring at the numerous street signs, I tried to make sense of the parking rules. Now, I can identify non-Philadelphians by how long they stand on the sidewalk staring up at a parking sign. Between Googling and staring, I concluded that we’d need a residential parking pass to leave our car indefinitely on the street in front of the house, which could only be attained in person at the Philadelphia Parking Authority or what all Philadelphians call the PPA.

“You can’t get a residential parking pass for a car plated in Georgia. You’ll need new Pennsylvania plates,” the woman behind plexiglass window #4 explained.

While my heart sank into a dark place, I held close to my carefully copied lease and insurance card, which had taken me over an hour to print that morning. “Okay, how can I do that?” I answered with a high voice, raised eyebrows, and no sudden movements.

“At PennDOT or one of their licensed agents,” she said just before yelling, “Next!” to the person behind me.

I nodded and left, wounded but not defeated, wondering if PennDOT was the equivalent of the DMV. Using the bad Comcast free internet at our apartment, I realized I’d also need a Pennsylvania driver’s license before transferring the title to Pennsylvania.

My wherewithal for dealing with government agencies waned. I was still traumatized by my interactions with the USCIS for Antonio’s temporary residency, which had included an across-the-country trip to Ciudad Juárez, thousands of dollars in application fees, and hours of translating our private Facebook messages from Spanish to English by hand to prove the authenticity of our relationship. Everyone told me it’d take years to get his residency. Hire a lawyer, someone had said, it’s probably only $5,000. Nearly all the money we had. I did the paperwork myself. I pored over every entry about Mexicans applying for US residency on visajourney.com. I repeatedly read the form instructions on the USCIS website to ensure I didn’t miss something and cause us to be separated by national borders. Less than a year later, Antonio’s immigrant entrance package arrived at Oaxaca’s DHL office with DO NOT OPEN printed outside. We were to carry it to the airport to show he had permission to board the plane. After landing in Atlanta, we’d hand it to the immigration officer, allowing Antonio legal entry into the United States of America.

For the next week, trying to jump through the tag, license, and parking pass hoops in the Philadelphia Blackhole of Parking, Antonio and I took turns moving the car every two hours, perpendicular to the prior parking space, all around the neighborhood. At first, we stayed up until midnight, when the metered parking ended, and woke at 7:00 AM, when the metered parking began, to do our last and first park of the day. Then, we figured out that if you parked at 10:00 PM, your two hours ran out at midnight, and the unmetered parking began, and if you were parked in a metered spot at 7:00 AM, then your two hours also began, giving you until 9:00 AM. All of this was confounded by our inability to parallel park. I grew up in the country and Antonio grew up without a car, so we’d never needed or desired to learn this life skill.

Several years before moving to Philadelphia, when Antonio and I were dating and I was living in Georgia, I visited him in Villahermosa, Tabasco, where he was an architect on an airport redesign contract. When I arrived, he drove me to his domicile—the word I’ll use for it—a concrete room with glassless windows, a curtain for a bathroom door, and an inflatable mattress, which no longer inflated, for a bed. “I’m not sleeping here,” I said, and we headed for the cheapest hotel in the city.

One afternoon during that first week in Philly, Antonio said he was giving up and would just move back to Mexico because it was easier to survive there than find parking in Philadelphia. I somewhat agreed. But I couldn’t leave. I had nowhere else to go. Nearly all my money had been put into the apartment. And my job at Rowan University started in three weeks, our only source of income. Besides, I never give up easily and wasn’t about to let the PPA take me down. We had to try and make it. And if he left the US now, he’d be abandoning his temporary US residency. In a way, the day we got our residential parking pass saved our marriage.

Over the next two weeks, we’d get a kitchen table from Ikea, a TV from Best Buy, and a yellow dresser from a guy with a broken leg selling antiques on Craigslist. All items that somehow we—which really means Antonio—got into the trunk of the Prius. But I just couldn’t bring myself to buy a couch. Somehow, somewhere between Oaxaca and Philadelphia, my heart had set itself on a purple couch. It’s ridiculous. Who buys a car without having driven it? And rents an apartment without having seen it? But won’t accept anything but the perfect purple couch?

Me.

The only time I’d ever bought a new couch in my adult life was when I moved to Oaxaca, and it had been big, fluffy, and a lovely burnt orange color. I hated selling it when we moved to the States. All the other couches in my adulthood had been hand-me-downs from recently deceased relatives, smelling of mothballs, or cheap finds on Craigslist, smelling of the unidentifiable. The heart wants what the heart wants, and mine wanted a new purple couch. On my laptop, trying a variety of synonyms for purple – lavender, violet, and plum, weeks passed as I searched the internet for the perfect couch. The results were either out of my price range or looked like they belonged in an ornate palace, so I resorted to foraging the nearby furniture stores.

Meanwhile, Antonio, the Mexican MacGyver, constructed a couch-like object from the box the foam mattress had come in. He saves everything, always telling me that what I perceive as garbage is still useful. But even Antonio, the man who can sleep anywhere, tired of sitting on our make-shift furniture and insisted I choose a couch or he would pick one out himself. After another unsuccessful trip to Ikea, we decided to check out the furniture store next door, Raymour & Flanigan. Greeted immediately in Spanish by the salesman, who I later found out was Puerto Rican, he painstakingly showed us nearly every couch in the warehouse and offered a financing option of 0% interest for 12 months. We tried to translate “ottoman” to Spanish, thinking the online translator’s suggestion of “otomano” just couldn’t be right. After looking for more than an hour at couches that were not any shade of purple, I thought all hope was lost as we headed to the exit. Our new salesman hung his head, and I, feeling guilty for not buying anything, confessed my heart’s desire, “It’s just…es solo que…quiero un sofá morado.”

“A purple one?” he replied, “Come with me.”

Slinking between all the living room setups, we arrived at a little room on the side of the warehouse. “Like this one?” he asked, “It’s the last one we have.”

A velvety, dark purple, there was my couch, as if it had been waiting for me. A dozen signatures later, my purple couch would be delivered in just a few days. Thinking back, my irrational desire to only accept the perfect purple couch seemed to be a small refusal to accept whatever life would give me. It was my way of exerting a little agency upon a world that wouldn’t let me park my car.

Parking would never be easy in Philly. Over the next couple of years, the PPA towed my car numerous times, once from right outside my door. Gazing up and down our sidewalk, the street was empty of cars as far as I could see. An oddity in Philadelphia, I thought the rapture had happened, and everyone had taken their cars with them. Knowing there was no way God would have left me behind, I called the PPA, again. They’d towed it, they said, and it should be within a five-block radius of where it was initially parked. Antonio took one key, I took the other, and we started in different directions. Holding the keys over our heads and as far into the street as possible, we walked our neighborhood, repeatedly clicking the lock/unlock button and listening for our car’s beeped response.

Two years later, when I was nearly eight months pregnant, we’d bought a rowhome in East Passyunk. In the smallest U-Haul available, we moved our purple couch and the few other things we had accumulated, less than three miles across the city, to our new home, just a little bit bigger than our apartment. Antonio removed the front door to get the purple couch into the house. Then he couldn’t get the door back onto the frame without more tools, so that night, we pushed our purple couch up against the front door to hold it in place to protect us from the outside world. As my belly expanded beyond what I thought humanly possible, I could no longer sleep on our mattress, so the purple couch became my bed. Propped up with nearly every pillow in the house, I’d tuck a heating pad under my back each night, hoping for relief from painful sciatica burning down my legs.

As I write, people walk north toward the United States. They, too, carry all they have with them. A few might find a new home in a place they’ve never seen before. Their experience isn’t a new one, and neither is ours. Humans have been moving for as long as there have been humans, even before we were humans. Sometimes we move because we want to. Sometimes because we have to. And it’s always been hard. I count ourselves lucky, blessed, and privileged to have found some parking, a purple couch, and a home in Philadelphia. I wish the same for everyone, everywhere.

Our baby turns seven soon. He loves to sit in Dickinson Square Park, eating chocolate ice cream with sprinkles in a cone that he got from the laundromat, which, I swear, is the best chocolate ice cream in the city. Turns out that August 5, 2014, would be the last time we’d arrive at a home without having seen it with almost no material possessions to our name. When we bought our home in East Passyunk, I told the real estate agent we didn’t have enough stuff to fill a basement. Now it’s full of toys my son won’t let me give away, mismatched tools Antonio refuses to organize, and the mattress we picked up in a Prius. We upgraded the car to a RAV4, another funny story, and my son cried as the new owner drove our Prius away. Despite the residential parking pass, we still join the war of Philadelphia parking after 5:00 PM.

Nearly ten years have passed since that August day we arrived in Philadelphia, and the arms of my purple couch are worn and turning a light lavender. I wonder how long I’ll wait to replace it. Will it have to be purple again? My heart doesn’t yet know. But I did just Google purple couch — and I don’t like any of them.

Stephanie Abraham is a professor of education at Rowan University who dreams of growing up to be a creative nonfiction writer. She writes about her childhood in Georgia, working as an elementary school teacher, learning Spanish as an adult, falling in love in Mexico, and finally finding a home and starting a family in Philadelphia. She’s published in various academic outlets. Still, most proudly, her writing has found a home in The AutoEthnographer: A Literacy & Arts Magazine, Five Minutes, and The Font: A Literary Journal for Language Teachers.

The City of Brotherly Love

Philadelphia, a city of blue glass that shines bright against the clear sky like a fish’s scales in a river, sits perched between two metropolitan behemoths: New York and Washington D. C. Known more for its attitude and aggressive sports fans than its kindness, it can be difficult to see the attraction of the “underdog” city; however, for those who have spent time here and have grown to appreciate its gruff nature, there’s a uniqueness to Philadelphia that separates it from other cities. “We are what we are, don’t care what others think, and can rightfully stand on our own just fine without needing to convince others of some sort of magic that exists here,” my friend Nate said after returning to Philadelphia, having spent two years in Mexico. It may not sound glamorous, but it’s real. It’s more than just a symbol of prosperity and potential the way all cities are. Philadelphia just has this vibe. Even before I lived here, I knew it was different. Even before I lived here, it felt like home. My friend, Claire, said it perfectly, “It truly is a thriving city with so much personality and character with the charm of community I sense I would not feel in a larger city like New York. Philadelphia is known for being the City of Brotherly Love, the more time you spend living here the more you truly understand that motto.”

***

On my third day in Philadelphia, I laced up my running shoes early. It was July and without the cover of the lush trees of the Schuylkill River Bike Trail that I had grown accustomed to, it was likely to be a sweaty run. The air outside was dense. I could feel the particles of moisture move around my body as I walked down the front steps of my new brownstone building, but I didn’t care. The city—my city—was just starting to wake up. Cars choked the stretch of Broad Street on their way to work. People walked the streets with their newspapers and podcasts. As I started my music and began the run that I had mapped out, I thought about how good it felt to be a part of something larger than myself again. How, after a year in isolation with only my father and grandfather, I was one of the masses. A Philadelphian.

Running in the city is like trail running in nightmare mode. Not only do you have to make sure you don’t run into any potholes or rusting bulkheads, but you also have to weave in between people, bikes, and the dreaded cars. I had been running for a few months at that point, clocking fifteen miles a week on a good week, but I had to readjust my expectations for that morning. Head on a swivel, I darted between slower pedestrians and looked both ways before crossing streets. It was a higher risk, but fun. It made the time go by fast and, of course, further fed into the idea that I belonged to this new place that I had decided to make my home.

***

“In Mexico,” Nate continued, “Everything felt like a dream or adventure. And most people there are happily participating in that dream and adventure. But that makes taking life seriously difficult. As I started to focus more on my work and professional development, that environment became counterproductive, and I didn’t quite fit in anymore. So, I began to miss the normalcy of Philadelphia and the ‘corporate America’ environment. Normal people with normal jobs, careers, goals.” That’s what Philadelphia is, a working-class city full of people just living their lives. Dreams do not come true here. We do not make promises we cannot keep, and it’s this authenticity that attracts people, or, sometimes, repels them.

***

Three miles. That was my goal. A nice, easy run to get myself into the mindset of running in the city. It was a good run for the most part, albeit hot and the cement was tough under my feet. I felt confident and capable as I charged down Passayunk, vibing to my music and thinking of how good the shower would feel when I reached my apartment a mere half mile away. Crossing the slanted intersection at Dickinson, I saw a beat-up red pickup truck out of the corner of my eye. They’ll stop, I thought, continuing through the intersection. He’ll stop, I thought again as the truck approached. By the time I realized the driver wasn’t going to stop, it was too late. The truck hit my right shoulder, sending me hurtling towards the ground. The intersection froze. My AirPods skittered across the road. It wasn’t even eight o’clock in the morning.

***

“We are nice but not necessarily friendly,” Claire said. “We help each other out but will also quickly curse each other out should the occasion arise.” Picking myself up and dusting myself off after an elderly man with crazy white hair bonked me with his car, I could commiserate.

“Are you okay?” he asked, somewhat perplexed. I murmured a weak “no” as I hobbled to the curb, scared that I would cry if I said anything else. The man, Joe, pulled his truck over and sat with me until the police arrived and we could file a report. As we sat, we talked through what happened. How the stop signs were askew and where I thought he had yet to stop, he already had and had begun driving again. We also talked about life and health. He gave me his insurance information as well as his phone number. He would check in on me three times in the following weeks just to see how I was doing.

Waiting at the urgent care for my shoulder to be x-rayed, I thought about the events of the day. Embarrassment burned the back of my neck. It was only my third day in the city, and it was rejecting me. The one dream I had been working toward for years, the thing that kept me sane during the pandemic shutdown, had been smashed before my eyes like my left AirPod which had been run over after the accident. What was I to do now?

When I told the nurse what had happened, he nodded his head. “You’d be surprised how often people get hit by a car running or biking.” “Really?” I asked, rolling up my sleeve to show him my budding bruise. “Oh yeah, it’s super common,” he continued before welcoming me to the city.

***

It’s our experiences that make us. This was the first of many experiences that would shape me over the next three years including heartbreaks, publications, diagnoses, and friendships. Even though it was a little painful, I feel strong now, aware. When I charge up the same stretch of Broad Street that I ran just three years before, I know I’ve earned my confidence. What felt like a rejection at first has shown itself to be a baptism into the city. I think about this as I walk to my local coffee shop on Saturday mornings or sit in Columbus Park and watch my neighbors come and go. As my friend Nate once said, “I cut my teeth in Philly figuring out who I was.”

Jillian S. Benedict is a creative writer living in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. In her free time, she enjoys yoga, reading, and listening to music while people watching from her stoop. Her work can be found in Feels Blind Literary, Schuylkill Valley Journal, Roi Fainéant, and on Instagram @writerwithoutacause.

The Care and Keeping of Roomba

We did not set out to be overtaken by robots.

I’d just returned from my friend’s cluttered Oakland apartment, where I’d been sent home with a promising gadget: a second-hand robotic vacuum, complete with accessories. Its gray plastic glinted newly beneath a layer of dust. “It needs floorspace to roam,” she’d said, wistful. Though less cluttered, my own apartment was far from pristine, our tile floors perpetually gritty with crumbs and dog hair. Maybe Roomba was the miracle I was looking for.

“Zach’s not going to like this,” I said.

“Oh, he’ll be fine.” I hoped she was right.

“Won’t they sell our floorplan to the government or something?” My husband, while hardly a technophobe, was raised by a conspiracy theorist. My reassurances that we were too boring to monitor did little to assuage him.

“It’s not even Wi-Fi compatible. Think of it as a naked Furby.”

“Fine, but what if it gets the dog?”

“It has sensors! If it bumps into him it’ll back right up. No harm, no foul.”

“Okay, but what if we trip over it and die in the night?”

“It has a charging dock and knows how to find its way back!” He looked mortified. “No, no that’s a good thing; otherwise we’d be losing it constantly.”

“Why can’t we just sweep the house?”

“I mean, we can. But I won’t.” He nodded, defeated. “And if we hate it, we can give it back.”

“I’ll give it a week,” he conceded.

That night, we were startled awake by an ominous WHIRRRRR in the living room.

“Do you hear that?!” I whispered.

“Holy shit someone’s in the house.”

“It sounds mechanical, like the washer is overflowing or—” I sat up, struck by a sudden realization. “ROOMBA.”

“ROOMBA?” said Zach, propping himself up on his elbows.

“I guess they had it on a timer or something!”

“Oh, for chrissake,” said Zach. The whirring continued, interrupted periodically by the sound of it gently clunking into and reversing out of corners.

“Well, whatever,” I said, catching my breath. “It’ll just tire itself out and go home.” He rested his head on my shoulder and closed his eyes.

But the whirring only got louder, closer. WHIRRRRR. CLUNK. WHIRRRRRR. CLUNK. Roomba slowly careened down the hallway toward our bedroom, navigating the alien terrain of our railroad-style apartment. It knocked against our door, which immediately swung open.

“It hungers,” I said. We stared at each other in the dim ambient light. Roomba made a beeline for the bed, our eyes widening with horror as it barreled forth.

“So, this is it,” he said. “This is how we die.”

I clung to him as Roomba slipped under the bed and began feasting on our prized collection of dust bunnies. After gorging itself on cast-off skin cells and loose dog hair, Roomba steered back toward the door.

“I guess it’s done,” I said, prematurely. Roomba scooted around the back of the door, slamming it shut and trapping all three of us, four if you count the dog snoring undisturbed at our feet, in the bedroom.

“Goddamnit,” said Zach.

We did not die that night. Or the next. With time, we grew accustomed to our electric boarder. Roomba was, overall, self-sufficient, but was clearly no threat to our survival. We’d find it desperately humping the threshold between the hallway’s tile and the bedroom’s faux wood for minutes on end, eventually passing out mid-coitus and establishing itself as a tripping hazard. “Please. Charge. Roomba,” it pleaded.

When its external sensors, little plastic lighthouses we set up to keep it from wandering into the laundry room, ran out of batteries, I inevitably failed to replace them. They hadn’t really worked anyway. We wandered around trying to find our automated son, only to (literally) stumble across it gagging on a fallen sock. “Move. Roomba. To a new. Location. Then press ‘Clean.’ To restart,” it demanded. A quick tug freed the offending sock from its rollers, but by the end of the day, Roomba would be back in the forbidden room slurping up fallen garments or a Truman Capote postcard. Periodically, we’d notice that the spinning trio of bristles had ceased to twirl, which meant Roomba had been just running back and forth across the apartment for days without sweeping anything new into its robo-maw. Still—after cutting loose the clump of hair tangling its mechanisms, it whirred back to life, resilient and hungry as ever.

The floors got cleaner. I tracked fewer crumbs into bed. Zach had not only accepted our new Jetson-ian lifestyle, but he begrudgingly began to enjoy it. We moved to Philadelphia and Roomba was assigned its own box. When we got the keys to our new house, a row home trashed by its former residents and a story of its own, Roomba helped us deal with the cat hair, pizza residue, and rodent excrement. When we adopted our second dog, a gleeful, but clumsy pit-mix, Roomba helped us manage the uptick in shedding. Frank the pit, taking Charlie the chihuahua’s cue, quickly learned to ignore our roving roommate, apathetic as it bounced off his sleeping form on its daily commute around the first floor. Roomba rebounded from its past love and developed a new relationship with a wooden threshold, collapsing in the liminal space between the entryway and living room when its sensors gave up on dislodging the permanent fixture. All was well.

I was in my cubicle when my phone buzzed. It was Zach.

“Hey, babe, what’s up?” I asked, expecting one of his midday reports about drama at work or a confusing bill we’d received, or a shift in plans for the evening.

“Hey, so,” he said, his voice simultaneously nervous and tired, “have you ever seen that meme about Roomba and the dog—”

I had seen the meme. In it, a blurry cell phone photo reveals the shit-encrusted underbelly of a robot vacuum, accompanied by a hand-drawn chart of the brown, zig-zagging path it’d taken throughout their home.

“No…” I implored. “… It didn’t.”

“Oh, it most certainly did.”

Frank, bless his heart, was still adjusting to living indoors. We mostly got to his accidents quickly, scooping the offending pile into a grocery bag and spraying down the site with enzymatic cleaners to eliminate any lingering odor. But the night before, Frank had walked downstairs on his own after we’d fallen asleep, only to find a closed door. With no yard in sight, he did what had to be done, in the kitchen. Roomba, on its never-ending quest, tried to help, but the load proved too much for its meager jaws. The turd was half-ingested, gunking up the brushes and rollers and distributing itself evenly across the house, a foul stowaway on the S.S. Roomba.

Kindly, Zach dealt with the most urgent sites, scraping and mopping the floors and airing out the stench. Roomba was set on the porch for a timeout, a child waiting for its father to come home and deliver on its mother’s threats. We debated throwing it out entirely, but something inside me refused. Perhaps it was the intergenerational trauma of my grandmother’s depression-era childhood, or maybe it was my own unique neuroses, but it felt both wasteful and cruel to dispense of our pet vacuum in its time of need. YouTube University came to the rescue with a video aptly titled “How to clean poop out of your Roomba.” The support was twofold: a friendly woman named Victoria taught me how to disassemble the device while wearing dish gloves, and 108 commenters below reassured me that I wasn’t the first or last person to encounter this dilemma.

Approximately one hour, 47 Q-tips, and a ruined toothbrush later, Roomba had been purified and was recovering on its charger. Roomba lived out the remainder of its days in relative peace, following us to a suburban rental where it had more room than ever to roam, freely gobbling up dog hair and the occasional tidy mouse dropping. Eventually, its bristled propellers stopped working entirely, and I was faced with a decision: to replace the parts and hope it would start functioning again, or to surrender and stop pouring time and money into a near-decade-old model. I packed Roomba, its charger, and its useless external sensors into a box and placed it at the end of our driveway. It was gone by the end of the day, hopefully taken in by some good-hearted tinkerer.

Roomba’s absence was painfully obvious. Within days, we were overwhelmed by dirt and dander. I’d wake up every morning congested and allergic. The afternoon light pouring through our windows illuminated every particle of filth on our floorboards. We swept constantly, or at least, as often as we could, but it was no use. Even at its most decrepit, Roomba had been the one thing standing between our livable home and total chaos.

In February, I caved and bought a refurbished Eufy RoboVac 25C for $90 on eBay. It’s Wi-Fi compatible, which worried Zach, but I promised to never connect it to our network, lest it sell our floorplan to Amazon for some unknown nefarious purpose. Without connecting it to the app, the only way to control the device is with an external remote, which has a plethora of fun buttons and allows you to drive it like a toy car, albeit an extremely slow one. It gets stuck under our couch and beneath our radiator covers, it chokes on the occasional piece of string, and it has an incurable urge to hump the metal edging that lines the linoleum portion of our kitchen, which I find nostalgic. Despite its flaws, our floors are cleaner than ever. As we say at Passover each year, “dayenu,” which means “it would have been enough.”

I know its name is Eufy Robovac, but I’ve been calling it Roomba as a sentimental tribute to the fallen. Unlike its predecessor, it cannot speak, emitting simple beeps in a sequence decoded in the handbook I haven’t read. It’s the only member of my family that never answers when I call its name—Dayenu.

Julian Shendelman lives with his husband and two dogs near Philadelphia. After pursuing—and ultimately abandoning—an academic career as a queer/trans theorist, Julian turned his attention to re-establishing his writing practice and community. His poetry chapbook, “Dead Dad Club,” was published by Nomadic Press in 2017 and his creative nonfiction has appeared in Bat City Review. He’s been a fellow at the Lambda Lit Retreat for Emerging LGBTQ+ Writers (2012) and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts (2022). When he’s not freelancing, he’s running Collective Lit.

Smoke Rings – ONLINE BONUS

My grandmother chose Benson and Hedges in the gold package until she saw an ad campaign for Eve and switched because it made her feel more feminine. She liked to think she was glamorous and had a drawer just for belts, three wigs to cover her thinning hair, and some poor-quality diamonds that her nasty mother had accidentally left her in an un-updated will.

I was always told my grandmother was beautiful, but I never saw it. Perhaps that’s because by the time I spent most of my weekend days with her, she was depressed and living in a housecoat and fake gold slippers. Or perhaps it’s because she was old, and, loving her as I did, I sat too close and could see every pore on her nose.

I sat so close to her and clung onto her thin neck so tightly she used to whisper in her smoker’s voice, “You will love it when you get your first boyfriend.”

“Why Nana?” I’d ask, holding her with both arms and swinging around to see her face.

“So you can love him so.” And she’d draw deep on her Eve cigarette, careful not to burn me.

I was never inspired to actually smoke, though I did convince her to teach me to blow smoke rings when I was seven. It was one of those lazy days as she and I sat on the couch. The suited anchorman named Walter Cronkite was talking, and for all I knew he could be speaking Russian because news was like a foreign language to me. No matter how hard I tried to listen, it always became mish-mash. One thing I did know for a fact: he was able to see me and he was looking. I had to be careful what I did when I was directly in front of the TV. I couldn’t change into my jammies, for example. Nor could I hit my brother, as the anchorman would be a witness. Basically, my only options were coloring in the coloring books Nana kept in the dining room china cabinet, practicing my dancing, about which he seemed oddly disinterested, or sitting with Nana on the couch. All shady business had to be undertaken out of his range.

I was unable to sit still for long, so both Nana and the couch became a de facto jungle gym. Invariably, I ended up sitting on the cushions behind her, giving her a bruising back rub or putting her hair in hair clips—one of man’s greatest inventions. Clip, they’re open, Clip they’re closed. Clip, they’re open, Clip my finger is stuck inside.

She was sitting, right leg crossed tightly over left, left forearm folded across her body (hand hanging down), right elbow anchored on her right knee serving as a hinge that opened and closed to bring the cigarette close in for a puff, dangling foot circling at the ankle. This was her pose. I thought it was handsome, so I copied her. I practiced it. I even practiced shredding the skin around my thumb with my index finger with the hanging down hand, which was her activity of choice when she wasn’t holding a tissue.

“Hey Nana, I want to blow a smoke ring.” I announced, snapping a clip in the pin curl I made in her hair. She pretended not to hear, so I poked her bony back and leaned forward to whisper in her ear. “I won’t tell,” I said.

“Oh Kathy, I can’t do that,” she said. I slid off my perch behind her, hooked my left arm around her neck and kissed her soft, powdery cheek. It was Saturday. My grandfather was at the hardware store where he worked because he couldn’t stand to be retired anymore. Drew, my brother who usually visited with me, was at Indian Guides where girls weren’t allowed. And my parents were at home raising my two baby brothers. Now was the time.

“Children don’t smoke,” she said.

“I won’t smoke,” I said. “I just want to blow a smoke ring.”

I felt her body sigh under my arm again. She was not looking at me.

“I love you,” I whispered, and even then I knew that bordered on the unethical.

Slowly she uncrossed her legs and leaned forward. Sometimes she moved like she was a million years old and sometimes she moved like a hummingbird. She grabbed her cigarettes from off of the gold painted coffee table.

“Hand me that, will ya.” She pointed to her metal flip-top lighter that was just out of reach. I jumped up and grabbed it. I was a veteran at lighting that lighter. I especially liked the smell and I’d sniff it until I was sick.

I flipped the lid open with my thumb, put the thumb on the serrated spinning wheel, snapped a grinding turn, saw a spark, spun it again and up popped the blue flame.

Nana hit her pack slowly against her hand a few times and pulled out a single cigarette. She put it in the corner of her mouth while she tucked the pack in the sleeve of her house dress, then grabbed the cigarette and leaned forward so I could light it.

“This is a terrible idea,” she said, blowing the smoke out of the side of her mouth away from me.

She paused, staring past me for a while, cigarette aloft, and I thought I lost her. I waited, still. Then the light turned on in her the way it did sometimes, and only then I’d realize it had been off. She’d sit up, her eyes would shine and a wickedness would come over her. The kind of wickedness that would prompt her to confide to my seven-year-old self on one of our sleepovers that she would have slept with John F. Kennedy if he asked her.

“Don’t inhale this,” she said, flipping the cigarette around, filter side to me. “Just pull the smoke into your mouth.”

She put the cigarette to my lips, her house dress sleeve sliding down to reveal her thin, veiny forearm. “And promise me you will never smoke.”

“I promise,” I said, maybe intending to keep it.

I pulled the smoke into my mouth. The cigarette’s tip glowed. The smoke burned my eyes, but I forced them open. Nana drew smoke in her mouth and formed a tight O with her lips. We looked at each other like we were under water. Lifting up her hand, she tapped, gently making a popping noise on the hollow of her cheek. Out floated a perfect circle. I put my finger through it, then tapped my cheek. Smoke came out of my mouth, but not in a circle. We blew out our smoke.

“Tap quickly, like this.” She formed my mouth into an O and tapped her finger on my cheek.

This time she handed me the cigarette. I had taken enough tokes on so many unlit cigarettes and pretzel sticks, had watched her and my grandfather and everyone else I knew smoke that I knew exactly how to hold it, how to draw, what I should look like.

I put the Eve cigarette between my middle and index finger and sucked more smoke into my mouth. I leaned forward and tapped the shaft with my finger to knock the ashes into the ashtray. Then I handed the cigarette to her, filter side forward.

We had smoke ring school periodically from that day on. There were certain conditions that had to be met of course. First, we had to be alone. Second, Nana had to be in that mood, so I learned to watch and wait for the light. Third, I had to promise never to light a cigarette when she wasn’t around or practice on one of hers when she wasn’t looking. After a few weeks, I had mastered the cheek tap smoke rings. It took a while longer to get the hang of the jaw pop smoke ring, but those were the holy grail of smoke rings and it was worth the month or two of practice that it took to perfect them.

With both types under my belt, I could begin to work on smoke ring gymnastics. I could blow a large and expanding jaw pop smoke ring, then repeat-fire a string of tight cheek tap rings through its center as it moved away. Nana could blow a jaw popper toward me and I’d send the cheek tappers through the bullseye of its center.

I never did pick up smoking. Both she and my grandfather died young of emphysema and lung cancer, devastating me and turning me against the habit with a vengeance. But every now and then, when I catch a whiff of an Eve cigarette on a city street, or see it’s discarded slim packaging lying in the gutter, I remember the days when Nana and I would have cheek tapper contests and blow rings at each other until we ended up laughing in a cloud of smoke.

Kathy Smith has published both fiction and creative non-fiction in Philadelphia Stories, poetry in Apiary, and twice won Glimmer Train’s Honorable Mention, once for Short Story, and once for Very Short Story. Most recently, she won Gotham’s Josie Rubio Scholarship Award, and was a finalist in Gotham’s Greatest Gift award. She received her B.S. in Economics from the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania, and an MBA from the Haas School of Business at the University of California at Berkeley. She lives in Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania.

The Dilworthtown Oak

The first book assigned by my new book club in Hong Kong, meeting half a world away from the action it described, detailed the life and career of the Marquis de Lafayette: he who, at the age of 19, had left France to join the Continental Army of George Washington.

But I didn’t need the book club’s assignment to teach me about General Lafayette: I had grown up in the shadow of the great man’s influence. Just a few roads away from my childhood home, a fieldstone covered with white stucco, stood the venerable Dilworthtown Oak. My parents had told me this extraordinary tree had already been full-grown at the time of the Battle of the Brandywine in September 1777, when American troops had been routed by British forces under General Howe.

The Marquis de Lafayette, wounded, had sat in the shade of the Dilworthtown Oak to recover, tended to by a local Quaker woman whose name was not recorded.

The redcoats went on to set the city of Philadelphia ablaze. The Continental Army fled to nearby Valley Forge, where they spent a horrific winter of suffering and deprivation—a dark time, when they could not yet see the future, and did not yet know that they would ultimately prevail.

I learned somewhere that the General’s reputation during the American Revolution had been so great that one of the first acts of the US Postal Service after the war was to call a moratorium on towns naming themselves Lafayette. Thus do we find, today, the map of the Eastern United States dotted with place names like Fayetteville, Lafayetteburg, and Fayettetown.

By the time I arrived on the scene as a little girl, almost two centuries later, what I found most interesting about the Dilworthtown Oak was the fact that although it still stood, it was rotted out inside, hollow. Its sides were strong, and every fall it rained down acorns, meaning that a lawn keeper had to ruthlessly root out oak seedlings from the surrounding area each spring. At some point in the previous twenty years, the local historical society had put up a bronze plaque, confirming what we locals already knew of the mighty Dilworthtown Oak’s glorious history. They installed a screen on the hollowed-out front to prevent irreverent and blasphemous teenagers from throwing trash into the dark oaken cavity on Mischief Night.

For years, my older brother told me stories about creepy things that lived behind that screen and would come out at night, mostly to prey upon little girls who messed with their older brother’s baseball cards or comic books.

Whenever someone from the city came out to visit us at our little stone house in the country, we would take a walk to the top of the hill to see the Quaker Meetinghouse, built in the 1600s, and the one-room Octagonal Schoolhouse, unused for decades. Behind the meetinghouse, in the Birmingham-Lafayette Cemetery, lies a mass grave of the men and boys who died in the Battle of the Brandywine two hundred years earlier. While the mass grave itself was marked, the names of the individual soldiers—British and Yankee, lying together—were not. As our visitors pondered this sobering fact, we would tell them proudly that not far from here, you could see the Dilworthtown Oak, where Lafayette had sat, wounded—an implausibly young general, a teenager, really, no doubt wondering if he would live to see his native France again. Later, at home, my brother would show the city visitors his collection of musket balls. Even then, a few would turn up every spring when the fields on the other side of the creek from our house were plowed.

For the bicentennial of the Battle of the Brandywine in 1977, a re-enactment was held. Local history buffs converged on the upper hayfield, sweating in the late summer sun, to wear tri-cornered hats and play with fake muskets. A month earlier, my father had mown a path through the hay, using the sickle-bar on his tractor, so that I could visit the little boy about my age who lived on the other side of the field, without getting ticks and burrs on my way. We all laughed when the “Revolutionary Army,” a little unclear on what had actually happened during the battle, marched boldly up the pathway my father had sheared, towards Coley’s house, as the man playing the part of some officer—a local guy who had a horse—tried ineffectively to turn them back toward the actual field of battle.

My mother told me that confusion and muddle like this were probably a more accurate representation of the battle than what we read about in the local hagiographies. (She probably didn’t use the word hagiography, since I was only four at the time, but her point was clear.)

My brother, who loved dressing up in costumes, begged to be allowed to join the “troops.” Drummer boys, he insisted, could certainly have been as young as seven, and anyway, General Lafayette was only 19 himself—and our parents finally relented. My brother was NOT to wear the dusty, half-rotted tricorner hat from the attic that some ancestor of ours had left around, no matter how appropriate it might have been. But he could dress up in a little soldier’s outfit and follow the “army” up to Coley’s house if he wished. While he was scampering through the hay and ragweed, a documentary filmmaker on the scene for the day asked if my brother would like to be in his movie. This, my mother absolutely forbade. It was a source of dinner table conversation for years afterwards: had my brother been saved from a horrible pervert or denied a glorious film career?

I learned the word “Bicentennial” that year. Bi – like the two wheels on the bicycle I had not yet learned to ride; and cent – like the 100 cents in a dollar, and a century, which was 100 years. For the first time, in contemplation of this new word, I saw the vastness of centuries opening before and behind me. One hundred years later, I learned, would be the tri-centennial. The hayfield, the creek, the sunny hill, and the mass grave, shaded by maple and yew trees, might still be there. But out of my whole family, I myself would be the most likely to survive that long. I might arrive at the tri-centennial re-enactment, a 104-year-old woman with white hair, and tell them what I had seen, and be interviewed on the radio.

As for the Dilworthtown Oak, I never doubted it would still be around. For years, whenever I drew a picture of a tree, it was always an oak, with its characteristic hand-shaped leaves, surrounded by acorns, and a mysterious, dark hole, covered up with a screen. Sometimes I drew Lafayette languishing beneath the tree.

Thus, it was an enormous shock to hear from my mother, in a letter she wrote to me when I was at college, that the Dilworthtown Oak had fallen. Not to old age, nor to the pernicious rot that was eating its insides for so many years, but to a cataclysmic bolt of lightning during a violent summer storm. The great natural monument had cracked in two, and although part of it might have been able to hang on for a few months longer, the local historical society had pronounced the Dilworthtown Oak dead on the scene.

Once again, just as I had when I was a tiny child, I saw the immeasurable stretch of years before and behind me. But this time, the sense of permanence and continuity was gone. If the Dilworthtown Oak could fall, what else might happen? Would the plaque be removed? Or changed, to say, “Here once stood …”? Would the screen be tossed into the old scrap metal heap by the creek? Would my parents one day move away from the Brandywine Battlefield? What would Lafayette have thought?

Out of curiosity, in 2019, when I was about to order the book, Lafayette – A Hero of Two Worlds, for my new book club, I looked up the Dilworthtown Oak on Google. I wasn’t expecting much; a local curiosity is nothing in the grand expanse of global history. Still, I thought, there might be a few references to Lafayette.

After filtering through page after page of listings for “charming homes” on quarter-acre lots in Dilworthtown Oak Estates, I finally found two references to the actual Dilworthtown Oak.

The first one said the oak was famous for the legend of three rapists from the British army of General Howe, who had been hanged from its branches in the period of chaos and looting that followed the Battle of the Brandywine, and that the tree had fallen in a windstorm. The page asserted authoritatively that the oak was known to one and all as the Haunted Hangman’s Tree, and that ghosts had been spotted there as late as the 1980s. The information was taken from a self-published book by someone called Phyllis Recca, wholly unknown to me. Confused, I looked at the other reference.

There, the great Dilworthtown Oak was relegated to a single phrase: “a Penn oak” (in other words, an oak that had been alive when William Penn founded the colony of Pennsylvania in the 1600s) “that had failed to make it to the 21st century.” The main article, a review of famous trees in the area, spent most of its effort glorifying the so-called Lafayette Sycamore, a tree that “towers 100 feet on the west side of Route 1, about 50 yards north of the entrance to the Brandywine Battlefield State Park.” The article enthused, “According to legend, the Marquis de Lafayette rested during the Battle of the Brandywine under this very sycamore,” but “Historians dispute this, pointing out that there is no way of confirming if Lafayette was anywhere near this tree during the battle.”

By this time, my own son was nearly the age Lafayette had been when the great man either was or wasn’t wounded, and either did or didn’t sit under a tree, which, for all I knew by this point, might as well have been a sassafras or a poplar. I knew that my son’s memories of stories I told him when he was very young were not strictly accurate. Were my own memories just as muddled? All the same, I felt as if a final door had been shut on my childhood. My parents had moved to the Allegheny Mountains for their retirement, my brother had made his career in New York City, and I had spent more of my life in a skyscraper in Hong Kong than in a stone house next to a hayfield.

The other stories of famous oaks and sycamores were just legends themselves, I rationalized at last. Why should the story I thought I heard not bear just as much credence as those? Each year, in any case, the story of how my brother was almost a movie star gained more and more details, and the provenance of the tricorner hat became more and more established, at least in my father’s mind.

No, the Dilworthtown Oak was better remembered as a place where a kind but nameless Quaker woman, despite the roar of the surrounding battle, tended to a desperate teenager burdened with enormous responsibility but frightened out of his wits, freeing him to fulfill his destiny as the hero of a great revolution and the namesake of 100 podunk towns.

I took up my phone and typed happily in the WhatsApp group, which was self-mockingly named, “Serious Book Club HK.”

“Lafayette?” I typed. “Cool! You know, I grew up right around a place where he fought. When he was wounded, he sat under this oak tree to recover, and it was still around when I was a child.”

My version of the story would live on, not as dry history, but as a personal treasure. Like a musket ball or a dusty old hat to show to friends and family—both on the old battlefield itself, and halfway around the world.

Genevieve Hilton was born and raised in Chester County, Pennsylvania, on the site of the Brandywine Battlefield. She has lived in Hong Kong since 2000, and writes science fiction novels and stories as well as political and business stories.

Floating (CNF BONUS)

For weeks I sat on the edge of the pool, dangling my feet in the overchlorinated water. I watched as screaming kids executed cannonballs and underwater handstands. My body ached with envy, but I couldn’t bring myself to jump in. At seven years old, I felt it was already too late for me to learn to swim. Seven-year-olds, at least the strong, brave, competent ones, had been swimming for years. My shame kept me firmly cemented on the ledge.

Each day, during those weeks, Dad would spread out a towel on the hot concrete and sit down next to me. He would drape his muscular arm around my bony shoulder and whisper, “Are you ready?” Every day I would shake my head no. But one particularly humid day, for some reason, I reluctantly nodded my head, yes. That is when dad scooped me up and walked us slowly down the wide steps with the long silver banister into the shallow end of the pool at the Dolphin Swim Club. I wrapped my goose-pimpled arms tightly around his neck and tied my skinny legs to his torso.

“We are going to start by learning to float on your back,” he said with a gentle smile. “If you ever get into trouble or you get too tired you can always just flip over and float.”

Flip over and float. He made it sound so easy. Stubborn with fear, I refused to let go.

“It’s okay, today we are just floating,” he whispered in my ear as he carried me through the water.

I clung tighter.

Dad lumbered around the pool with me glued to the trunk of his body for a long while. He bobbed up and down, back and forth. When I finally relaxed my shoulders and loosened my grip ever so slightly, he cupped the base of my head in one hand and gently lowered it into the cool water. He placed his other hand firmly on the small of my back.

“Now, just lie back,” he said calmly. “That’s all you have to do. That’s it, there you go, you are floating. That is all you have to do.”

Dad’s voice was faint but soothing through the water. I closed my eyes and felt the sun on my cheeks. My thin wisps of brown hair fanned out around my face.

“Ahhhhh, what a mechaye,” he said, repeating the Yiddish word for joy.

I could feel his smile through his words and instinctively knew their meaning. He didn’t do that thing that many parents do—let you go unexpectedly and making a big show of how you are doing it all by yourself. Instead, dad kept a feather touch on my lower back with just enough pressure, so I knew he was still with me if I needed him.

Just when I felt like I could float like that forever, a sudden splash of water smacked at my face. I panicked and flailed my arms and legs at the same time. I felt my body slip away from dad’s hand and start to sink. The water splashed over my mouth and nose. Dad scooped me back up in an instant. But those seconds left me sobbing and gasping for air.

“Shhh, shhh, shhh,” Dad said caressing my head. “You are okay, you are okay, Peanut. That little boy over there just jumped into the water and splashed you.”

He pointed to a boy with white-blond curls and a mischievous grin. I glared at the boy still sniffling.

“Don’t worry about him,” Dad said, “all you have to do is keep floating and you will be safe.”

I buried my face in the crook of dad’s neck for a long while. He didn’t take me out of the pool. He didn’t suggest we try again. He just kept bobbing along with me until I calmed down. Then I said, “Okay, let’s try again.”

Dad smiled. He looked proud. “Okay. Remember, no matter what happens just keep floating—don’t worry about what is behind you or in front of you. Just float. I will be here the whole time.”

Within weeks I was swimming freestyle, cannonballing, and even working on my underwater handstand, while Dad watched from the edge of the pool—there if I needed him.

Most importantly, that summer I learned to float.

***

Thirty summers after dad taught me to float, I was living a life I convinced myself was perfect. I was married to a man with whom I was deeply in love. I had a beautiful baby boy and a job as a lawyer in a successful Philadelphia law firm. And then within three months, I had stepped on a trifecta of landmines that left me flailing and gasping for air. My marriage began to unravel. I suffered a health crisis that I could have never seen coming. And I experienced a professional failure that left me wondering whether I chose the right career path. In short, my life imploded.

During those sticky months, I somehow managed to get through my workdays and complete the maternal checklist of dinner, bath, book, and bedtime. Then I would collapse into grief—lying on my couch, scrolling mindlessly through Facebook, crying, and eating the most comforting food Grubhub had to offer. I wasn’t ready to talk to anyone about what was happening to me. My old friend, Shame, was silencing me and holding my pain firmly in place. I went on like that for weeks.

Then, one night in late August, after I put my son to bed, I stared at myself in the bathroom mirror. I poked at the puffy red circles under my eyes. I was so sick of crying. I closed my eyes, hoping to open them to a different reality. But when I did, there I was, stuck with myself. “How did I get here?” I said out loud to my image in the mirror. The identity I had spent so much of my life erecting had crumbled in such a short amount of time. I didn’t know who I would be without the perfect marriage, the perfect job, and a healthy, functioning body. I splashed some cool water on my face, walked into my bedroom, and threw on the grey sweatpants and white t-shirt that had become my night-time uniform. The pants slipped from my hip bones. Despite the Grubhub, I was somehow losing weight.

I had always learned that Jews don’t kneel but for some reason, that night, I found myself on my knees at the edge of my bed with my hands cupped in front of me, the way I had seen little kids pray on television.

“Please,” I whispered to a God I had never spoken to before. “Please take this all from me. Please help me, God.”

I stayed there on my knees for a long while. I was waiting for an answer, a sign, some instructions about how to move forward. There was no answer, no sign, no instructions. God said nothing. Still, I felt calmer for having spoken the words, lighter somehow. I got back into bed and just kept whispering to myself, “You are okay, you are okay, you are okay.”

After that night, kneeling before my bed and asking for God’s help became my ritual. It wasn’t that I believed God was going to put the pieces of my life back together. I just felt less alone getting on my knees and asking for help. I began to use the words, “You are okay,” as my refrain. I repeated them to myself each time my thoughts pulled me into regret, shame, or overwhelm. I repeated them when I felt rage rise in my chest and when I felt terrified of what was to come.

By September, I was sleeping better, crying less, and reading more. I was singing to my baby boy again. One Saturday morning, at the end of that month, I was pushing my son around the perimeter of Rittenhouse Square Park when he suddenly began to cry. I lifted him from his stroller. His body was stiff. He let out a scream—a gas pain maybe. Clumsily, I held his rigid body in one arm and navigated his empty stroller into the park. I held him on a bench near his favorite statue—The Billy Goat. His body softened in my arms. He stopped crying as suddenly as he had started. He stared up at me with his big brown eyes. It was a cool, sunny day and the light breeze blew thin wisps of golden-brown hair off his forehead. Sunlight streamed through the trees and landed on my bare arms and his soft cheeks. I massaged his protruding belly with the palm of my hand. He looked up at me and giggled.

It was a mechaye. We were floating.

Tammi Markowitz Inscho is a Philadelphia native who recently left the practice of law to pursue her love of creative writing. Tammi is a creative writing instructor who leads writing workshops for youth in the Philadelphia area. She is currently working on her first novel. Her personal essays have been featured in the Philadelphia Inquirer and in the online magazine, Manifest-Station. Tammi lives in Center City Philadelphia with her husband and eleven-year-old son.

Migratory Patterns

In Florida, birds are a constant. They are a morning chirp, a subtle squawk, an elegant V formation cutting the pink sky at dusk. It is a given that the birds will be there year-round, thanks to their seasonal movement. Migration is instinctual, a longing in their little bird hearts for the warm climate and lush trees. They find their way down to Florida through celestial cues, watching sunsets, creating mental maps. The birds never quite settle permanently, always waiting to explore better branches, thicker air. They know something about trusting their gut, trusting when it might be the right time to leave.

I did not realize I’d miss seeing all the birds until I flew away myself, in the opposite direction, up to colder climates and much less year-round chirping, in this new habitat I’ve created in Philadelphia. I moved six months ago for the man I found through a podcast, after spending a year flying quickly to each other on the weekends, I agreed to trade Florida’s humidity for the steel and bustle of Philadelphia.

My gut trusted this counter-intuitive migration pattern, which the birds abandon in winter: winter in Philadelphia is harsh cold winds, all gray skies and brittle trees, cracked sidewalks and brick buildings, and honking horns and subway grates. I need to discover if any birds stick around in winter.

On a chilly February morning, I find a park to explore, to see who else is sticking out the season. Matthias Baldwin Park, just north of Center City Philadelphia, is described online as a green urban oasis with perennial gardens. I know, I know, it will not be a green oasis in February, but I want to go anyway. It’s less than a mile away, and I’ve found that to be my limit of walking distance since moving to Philadelphia. The more famous and expansive Fairmount Park borders the city on the left, with over 2,000 acres and a walking trail along the Schuylkill river, but it is 3 miles away, tripling my walking threshold for winter.

February is too cold for a walk, but I’ve missed the chirping; I’ve missed walking for walking’s sake. Plus, I notice there’s a coffee shop around the corner from the park, so that’ll be my reward because there is no more walking for walking’s sake in February; it requires a purpose for leaving a cozy apartment and slumbering boyfriend on a chilly Sunday morning.

I start the journey out of my neighborhood of brick condos, factories now defunct, and public schools. As I walk, I remember the pit stops I used to take in Florida, driving home from work. I’d park my car at Econlockhatchee River trail just after five PM and enjoy another hour or two of sunlight. The river trail was convenient, easy, just off the main road, a 3-mile loop. It was part of a larger 5,000-acre ecosystem of the Econ State Forest, home to 150 bird species. I’d walk the loop and keep my eyes always on the sparkling blue water, the lush green trees, the herons dipping their beaks into the riverbed, and the occasional alligator’s long snout visible breaking through the surface. My trail was only a slice of the entire acreage of the park, a peek into an expansive ecosystem that freely and wildly took up space.

After a frigid ten minutes, I see the much smaller two-acre park hidden behind a high-rise, one that I imagine glimmers in the summer’s sun. As it comes into view, I can see the terraces of once-filled flowerbeds that are now dreadfully empty. I have to remember they are perennial; they will return. Surrounding the terraces are reedy grass and low-maintenance shrubs. A loop path lined with benches weaves through the flowerbed terraces.

I enter the looped path and take in the gravel path crunching under my feet, rock piles masquerading as art, empty trees on patchy knolls that the dog walkers make use of, a homeless man on a bench telling me I’m beautiful. I remember that a block transformed into a park is still a block that’s part of a larger Philly ecosystem.

As I loop around the forgotten flower beds, I think of the best-case scenario in which they might bloom. Maybe two months? Sixty days until I can delight in the full potential of the park. Maybe Spring is just patience plus time, an endurance. Perennial.

After a few loops, I can see how the park has succumbed to winter, and so have I. A warm coffee shop, and an attempt at writing, are better uses of my time. But it’s not enough; I want more. I wonder if the migratory birds know something that I don’t. Are nature and my gut and the celestial patterns telling me something else? Did I fly all this way for the right reasons?

Then, I see them on the trees, small little things. I walk closer, and I hear the short, sharp chirps. The chickadees are perched on the bare limbs, and I watch them hop lightly on the small branches to keep warm. They’re only visible because of the naked branches, their leafy mask removed. They’re doing what they can to survive, too: in the winter, chickadees grow extra feathers. They hop constantly and stay close together to share heat.

As I watch the dozens of chickadees dance around and sing, I think about how I am more chickadee than seagull now. I have grown my extra feathers; I have found my other chickadee for warmth. That was the reason I migrated here, wasn’t it? Didn’t I trust my gut for the chance to build a nest with someone else, intertwining our lives and enduring this winter together?

I take in the chirping, hopping birds for a few more minutes, and I remind myself that all of this is perennial, and it will return. My bias often blinds me; not all the birds have left. They are enduring too, hidden in their urban pockets, begging to be found. Their chirps offer me a comfort and a hope – hope for tomorrow to be just a bit warmer, for flowers to peek through soon, for the words that I will write at that coffee shop just around the corner. I have to trust the flight pattern that led me here, in all its unwavering endurance.

Rachel Kolman is a writer, editor, and instructor. Her nonfiction has been published in Bustle, Good Housekeeping, AutoFocus, Her Story, The Bookends Review, and others. She has an MFA in nonfiction from Rosemont College. She was the Summer 2022 Writer-in-Residence at theJack Kerouac House in Orlando, FL. She is writing a collection of essays that explore the corners of the world we often escape to, including her own years of working, writing, and living in Philadelphia.

Three Dead Mice

The twilight gloom buries me, its weight landing heavier on me than on my husband or our three young children. We climb from the car and plod up the asphalt path, wielding a shovel and two garden spades. Now I hold the shovel and the hand of our toddler daughter while my husband gently empties a plastic bag of carcasses into the hole he has just dug in a lightly wooded hill. We stand next to him, silent witnesses on the blacktop outside my third-grade classroom. Our older two, seven and not quite four years old, are on guard, ready to scoop the displaced dirt into the hole with the spades when sufficient time or maybe a few reverent words have passed. If anybody can think of some.

It felt like a lucky day, this first April Sunday of daylight savings time. The gift of time, an extra hour, was suddenly squandered in panic and hasty planning as we jumped up from the dinner table, grabbed tools and a flashlight, and headed to school. On the ride, my oldest soothed me with words of hope, reminding me I might be worried for nothing. All would be well. Maybe I remembered just in time.

Not so, we discovered, upon unlocking the classroom door and being flooded with the scent of decomposition in the air. Not so.

Until dinner, I had enjoyed day ten of an eleven-day spring hiatus, almost refreshed. Tumbling into the break, I was exhausted—tires flattened, no steam left in my engine, out of gas, and no longer finding fumes to run on. So for the first time in my career, I pledged to take the word “break” literally. I hit pause on planning, on preparatory reading, on school-related emails, and even on laying out the year’s final, ambitious projects. For eleven days my focus would be my own three children, my own family, and my own home. With any luck, I might spare a thought for myself.

Even that final weekend felt celebratory. The Sunday stone-in-the-pit-of-your-stomach feeling that perhaps every teacher knows, even those who love our work and cherish the children for whom we labor, was missing. We chattered around the dinner table, discussing what games or movies we might relax into that night.

Privately, though, with only one day left in my self-imposed “clean break,” I was slipping away. As we talked I began a mental inventory of my classroom. I would arrive on Tuesday an hour earlier than usual, set up the book display for a new project, review the notes from our most recent math work, replace the art hanging in the room with more recent examples, and of course, feed the…

Oh…oh…no!

Dinner screeched to a halt. Eyes on me. My eyes were wide and brimming with tears and I stumbled through an explanation. “I locked the door…I thought…I have eleven days, I’m taking eleven days…I even left my bag. My bag with all my stuff…so I wouldn’t do work…but I forgot…I forgot the mice!”

They know the saga of the mice—the mother in my class who donated rodents to the group, the class trip to the abundantly kind small animal vet when one of the mice experienced seizures, and the arrival of additional mice when nature had taken its course and they grew from three mice to…a lot more.

Three dead mice. Three dead mice. Or thirty. Or thirteen. I can’t bring myself to remember the number. What is certain is that a young mother mouse, captive to a class of eight and nine-year-olds, was desperate enough to devour every one of her litter before succumbing herself. Her cannibalism was not a capricious act driven by natural impulse, but the direct result of my forgetfulness and negligence.

It is the result of the insurmountable exhaustion to which I succumbed. It is the natural consequence of unmet basic needs.

We complete the burial, our still presence the only ritual we can bring to the moment. We do our duty in somber silence. Quiet compassion replaces assurances.

I have never felt so guilty. Or so loved.

As planned, I arrive at my classroom an hour early. I wander through routine tasks and brace myself for the morning check-in circle. Yesterday I wrote a letter for the children to take home, the same explanation of the demise of the mice I offer them this morning—the unvarnished truth, minus any description of the wholly missing and partially consumed remains that we saw when we entered the room that Sunday.

My children—my classroom children—and I hold a ritual for our furry friends. They prepare a short reading, some final words, planned and impromptu, and a moment of silence. With that, we added a sticks-and-stones marker to the burial spot.

When a small group of children asks with heartfelt curiosity whether they might dig up the remains to have a look at the decomposing mice for themselves, I decline. I am not squeamish about such things, but this time I side with those who can’t bear the thought over the natural interest of those other few.

The demise of the mice leads to difficult conversations with a few class families and I spend the rest of the year working to heal relationships, to restore trust with the children. The demise of the mice starts conversations with my own family as well. It takes another year and twice daily use of a nebulizer in response to worsening stress-induced asthma, but I finally act.

I devise a plan to meet my basic needs, to escape the consequences of ignoring them for so long. I resign my position to build a teaching life that I can survive. For the next fourteen years, that means homeschooling with my own three and teaching other people’s children only on a part-time, occasional basis. Unlike that poor mother mouse, I realize I was called to this work. I am not held captive by it. Tormented by my choice to leave the classroom—until about 20 minutes into my new life—I begin to breathe freely again. After two months, the nebulizer gathers dust on a shelf in the closet.

Diane Webber loves to learn. From the suburbs of Philadelphia, she has learned alongside young children, young adults, and every age between for decades. Diane continues to teach, coach teachers and families, and learn for a living, but now pours more of her energy into writing essays as well as nonfiction and historical fiction for young readers. She is a current student in Spalding University’s cross-genre MFA program.

Her Body Lines

You should have stayed friends with her. You shouldn’t have learned about her death through social media when your yoga teacher posted a picture of her smiling on the yoga mat, looking pale and dreamy as the sun hit her face. Rest in peace.

You made a beeline to the bathroom at work and hyperventilated in the corner stall. You didn’t have permission to feel the way you did; you were the one who cut her out of your life. All of those friendships after her, you strived to find someone like her to get that close again. You had yet to match it.

Grief has a way of making things feel like yesterday. Memories that were inaccessible in the subconscious become unlocked and flood your mind. Suddenly, you were eighteen again when she took you to your first yoga class. She drove you to class in her tan Chevy Malibu that resembled a grandmother’s car and trembled when the ignition turned on. She liked to drive with the sun visor down, not to protect her eyes from the glare, but she slid the mirror open to look at herself as she drove, finding her own vanity hilarious. You bent and flexed your bodies together and trembled in the poses.

She got better at yoga. Her body could withstand the demands of the poses and the heat. Her moves were untouchable, and she made everyone stare. You watched the yoga teacher give her more adjustments in class, and you craved the touch she received, or maybe you wanted her all to yourself.

You would give her a ride to the train station for her Vinyasa training. She’d wear leotards with high-waisted leggings and leg warmers into the city.

“On the train, I feel like Nina in Black Swan,” she said as she refreshed her makeup in your rearview mirror. “Remember that movie?”

You remembered. You’d watched Black Swan together. She envied the ribs that protruded out of the ballerina’s leotard, and you remember the throb radiating between your legs when Natalie Portman and Mila Kunis had sex. You didn’t know you could get so turned on from watching women together. You wouldn’t know that you were bisexual until much later.

Once, after a few drinks, she kissed you outside of a bar. Her long and devilish tongue hooked into the roof of your mouth. You grabbed her thick hair in your hands and pulled her close.

“Do you remember last night?” You whispered the next morning with your bodies interlocked on the single mattress in your parents’ house. You could hear your blood pulse.

“Nothing,” she had said as she rolled off the bed, out of your reach.

***

A psychic had warned you, after all. He had told you someone you loved would die in an accident. You were angry at the news. This psychic had broken a code. You were a trained clairvoyant, and you would never reveal such detrimental information during a reading. You only read the good things or harmless things like past lives and forcefully tuned out the bad. What good was it to tell someone that death was coming? Death was coming for all of us.

***

You ran into her mother at the grocery store.

“Do you still keep in touch?” she asked with an arm full of produce.

“No, unfortunately.” We had a falling out. Her Chevy Malibu broke down, and she would come over to your house but then ask for a ride to her boyfriend’s house. The habit kept reoccurring: each time she arrived, only for you to drop her off with disappointment. You eventually told her you couldn’t do it anymore. You couldn’t keep watching her leave. You wanted her to stay, and that’s what ended things. But you never told her you loved her. You never knew if that would have changed anything or everything.

“She moved to Philly to teach yoga. She followed her dreams,” her mother said with a proud smile.

Eventually, you moved into the city, too. You meant to go to her yoga class to reconnect, but you never did.

Now, you can’t stop thinking about her body lines as she hung onto the man’s back on his motorcycle. He didn’t have an extra helmet for her, so her long black hair danced in the wet summer night. You wondered what the stars looked like that night when the storm rolled in after a dry summer day and made the streets wet and slippery. When the biker made a turn, she ejected into the sky. The lines her body made in the road when she landed, forever marking her end in asphalt unworthy of her perfection.

Leah Mele-Bazaz is a proud Philadelphian and the author of Laila: Held for a Moment. Excerpts from her memoir were shortlisted for the Eunice Williams Nonfiction Prize (2021) and a finalist for The Southampton Review Nonfiction Prize (2020). Her writing has appeared in Schuylkill Valley Journal Online, Barren Magazine, and elsewhere. In 2021, she won Barren Magazine’s December Instagram Poetry Contest. She earned her MFA in Creative Writing at Drexel University, where she also teaches Rhetoric and Composition. You can often find her at one of her two favorite places in Philly: the Schuylkill River Trail or her local library.

Website: www.leahmelebazaz.com