Non-Fiction – Page 6 – Philadelphia Stories

Leavened by Doris Ferleger

Doris Ferleger’s appropriately named new book Leavened speaks of the devotion of family. The book explores the familiar themes in Ferleger’s work of her and her family’s Jewish identity as survivors of the Holocaust. She does this through weaving recurring threads of ceremony, sacrifice and food. The collection’s title and its cover painting by writer and artist Natalie Goldberg contrast the adjective “leavened” against the rush of unleavened of Biblical significance. These elements speak to the time and attention Ferleger has given these characters, voices and stories. Each poem is a meditation that seems to resolutely set a new place at the table of the feast of her work.

The subject of survival is a familiar one, but these poems stun the reader with their sharpened craft and honesty. There are so many poems told in the voices of long-dead relatives that could have been overwrought, or worse, caricatures. Instead, Ferleger tempers every potentially sentimentalized story with starkly heartbreaking details. There is a powerful section in the first third of the book that explores the importance of different foods to two generations of family. The poems “Sitting on a Suitcase” (about an uncle guarding thousands of pieces of stale bread inside a suitcase instead of consuming them), “First Supper,” “Salt,” “Lucky” (about Momma licking salt from a train’s windows to survive), “Salami” and “Raspberry” (about confronting an aunt’s suicidal wish) form a masterful progression. Her lines, in “Inheritance,” describing Poppa’s lack of visible scars after the war, “unless you counted/his vigilant eyes, screams in the night/in his native tongue, though terror/sounds the same in any language” made this reviewer burst into tears.

Not every poem in this collection is sad. There are the poems in the latter half that reflect on the family’s current generation and the different productive ways that a brother and sister process their parents’ grief. Ferleger compares her family’s growth to Aspen roots cropping up in unexpected places. The final poems “Another Creation Story” and “Leavened” (of the title) are widely encompassing poems that, placed next to each other, are tinged with the losses and lessons she and her family have learned. They are the microscope and telescope of the collection. Ferleger’s unflinching treatment of these stories forces readers to see. There is a new refugee crisis today; especially in this time of mounting human suffering and need, this is a fiercely important book because it dares to show the smallest ways in which the world’s problems become the fears, fixations and hopes of one family.

Without His Fingers

The day was hot and humid, typical of a Philly summer. Bernie and John couldn’t wait for their ocean swim. They always took a dip before a concert, no matter what the weather. It was their ritual, a way to release tension and diffuse the jitters that accompanied a performance. But with sweat already clinging to their shirts, they were even more eager than usual.

The concert would be held at the Metropolitan Opera House or perhaps the Academy of Music on Broad and Locust at 8 p.m. that evening. So it must have been around noon, after a morning practice, when they felt as ready as they’d ever be, that they hopped a bus for Atlantic City, arriving an hour or two later.

I can see them during the ride, jibing each other, laughing, joking. And I hear Bernie asking John to pinch him, still in disbelief that he was a violinist in The Philadelphia Orchestra. Perhaps that night, Leopold Stokowski was conducting, the innovator who encouraged “free bowing” and was helping to create a unique, Philadelphia sound. The New York Times had just praised the Orchestra as possessing “uncommon excellence,” and Stokowski had no small part in its evolution. Would the program include Mendelssohn’s Violin Concerto in E Minor? I like to think so, like to believe that Bernie was anticipating playing one of his favorite pieces, the last great work of the Romantic composer, with its immediate entrance of the soloist, who, if Bernie worked hard enough, he would surely one day be.

In Atlantic City, the sand must have felt good under their feet. Soon, hard shoes and stiff tuxes would bind them, but now they were as free as their bows, imbibing the sea air, running toward the waves, admiring the female bathers. It was 1923, early in the decade, and they, too, were in their early twenties, embodiments of the period’s youthful exuberance. They dove into the surf, perhaps hearing in the rush of water the concerto’s frenetic, final coda.

After an hour or so, Bernie swam back to shore. Time to go. Their towels were where they left them, in a heap. In the water, he and John had drifted apart, one doing a fast crawl, the other lazily floating. Bernie must have been drying himself off, looking casually to the placid blue surface for his friend. There had been a light current, a bit of an undertow, but nothing out of the ordinary. He spotted a curly blond head that he at first thought was John, but no. He glanced toward the dressing stalls, their established meeting place, but John wasn’t there either. Bernie returned to the water’s edge, getting his feet and then legs wet again. With his hand blocking the sun, he gazed more carefully now, out, far out, and up and down the coast. And then, the first inkling that something was wrong. His stomach must have tightened, his breathing grown rapid. Time passed, and then the real panic set in. Rushing to a lifeguard. Shouting down the beach, questioning everyone he saw. Thirty minutes, sixty. Longer.

That night, the string section was surely a little off. Someone had to fill in for the missing player, and if Bernie played at all, it must have been out of key. The search continued for weeks, but John was never found, drowning listed as the official cause of death. Soon thereafter, one of Bernie’s fingers began to ache.

Bernie, Bernard Greenberg, was my great uncle, and before I tell the rest of that story, here are a few things you might want to know: Bernie grew up lower-middle class in the Logan area of Philadelphia, the second child of four in a secular Jewish family. His parents owned two delicatessens in Strawberry Mansion. He was a happy, loving kid, known for being a prankster, often dangerously so. Once, pretending he was Zorro, he carved a Z into my aunt’s arm with a pocketknife, and that was tame in comparison to some of his other antics. My grandmother Rosella, married to Oscar Kahn, brother of noted architect Louis, was his sister. The family was close and Bernie, despite his mischievous nature, was a favored member. He was handsome and athletic, known for his nasty English, both on a ball and in speech. And then, of course, there was the music, the combination of passion and talent, charged with that ineffable something that separated him from the crowd. His pranks were infamous, but everyone knew that his violin would make him famous.

His left ring finger was the first to suffer. Why that one, I don’t know, maybe because Bernie never had the chance to marry, even though, before he got sick, he had a girl in mind. Soon all of his fingers turned cold, went white, then blue. For a while he could play through the soreness, but soon the pain became unbearable. One, then another and another, until he was forced to quit the orchestra and seek medical help.

The family thought his symptoms were related to the shock of losing his friend. And maybe in part they were. But on what I can only envision as a gray winter’s day, with snow beginning to fall, Bernie was diagnosed with Beurger’s disease, a circulatory disorder where the body essentially attacks its own blood vessels. All organs can be involved but the limbs and digits are especially affected. Pathologist and namesake, Leo Beurger, first identified the disease in 1908, and Bernie was one of the first patients to undergo Beurger’s trial and error treatments at Mt. Sinai hospital in New York.

I could describe in graphic detail his twenty-two years in and out of hospitals, the freezing and boiling baths, the nerve surgeries, the eventual amputations. I could tell you of the constant agony, of pain so excruciating that my uncle became addicted to morphine. And I could, and should, tell you that cigarette smoking was related to the disease, and that, despite being told that he would lose his toes as well as his fingers if he didn’t quit, Bernie continued to smoke. That was before the tobacco industry even knew enough to lie about how addictive their products were. I could tell you about this nightmare. Yes, I could tell about when the music stopped. But I’d rather tell you about when it began again, when spring finally returned.

By the time I came into consciousness, the disease had burned itself out. I wasn’t there when Bernie swore there were bats flying in his hospital room or when he stood over my parent’s bed, begging my father, a physician, for a fix. By my time, Bernie was in his forties, living with my great-grandmother in L.A. He had gone cold turkey off all drugs and was a frequent visitor in our home. The only remnants of his illness were his constantly perspiring forehead, and of course, the mangled stubs where his shapely, violinist fingers used to be. I grew up with those stubs and thought nothing of them. It took others’ reactions to make me understand that they could be disturbing. Nor did it strike me odd at all when, after taking a year of piano lessons with a mediocre instructor, Bernie became my teacher.

I don’t recall how the deal was struck, but I’ll never forget those sessions. I was young, only nine when they started and seventeen at the end. Bernie was patient, but also demanding. He wouldn’t tolerate a sluggish trill, too heavy of a pedal. Every note was to be defined, every passage a delicate balance of restraint and force. Often, it was too much for me. Sometimes I’d run out the room, screaming and crying. I’d tell him I hated him. But there were other times, when we were in a groove, when his stubs would sway over me like a conductor’s baton, and the music came to life. All those scales, those repetitions until I thought I’d go mad, suddenly paid off, and my hands flew over the keyboard, smooth and clear. At those moments, I cared for nothing else. My mother might call us to dinner, and I’d shoo her away. We were in a world of our own, one that, without his fingers, my uncle had made possible.

Soon, word spread. “Ona’s pretty good at the piano. Who’s her teacher?” “Bernie, her Uncle Bernie.”

“But he doesn’t have…”

That must have often been the reaction. But it didn’t prevent anyone from pursuing him as a teacher. First to sign up was a friend of mine down the street, and then another around the corner. As his fingers had once fallen, one by one, his list of students, for violin as well as piano, grew, until he had more than he could handle. It was the autumn of his life, but he was in high demand.

Now he was Bernard Green, music teacher. He’d dropped the “berg” to make his Jewish identity less certain, although the Yiddish obscenities that peppered his talk were a bit of a giveaway. He lived, as did we, in an area where vague and sometimes overt anti-Semitic sentiment was common. The change was purely a business decision, and it may have contributed to him getting his foot (minus his toes) in the door. He frightened some initially, more with his expectations than his deformity, but everyone recognized his gift. He breathed music, and the air entered our lungs, traveled to our brains, and sent a special message to our fingers.

A few other things about Bernie:

He had a cockatoo that stood on his head and ordered him, by name, to wake up.

He was an animal whisperer before the term was known.

His room was crowded with National Geographics and smelled like Old Spice.

He repeatedly dropped cigarette ashes into our Steinway.

He feared my Beatlemania.

He pretended to hate my mother’s meatloaf.

He drank up my father’s scotch.

He could have done stand-up comedy.

It is lately, as I approach the age when he died, that I think not only about what Bernie might have been, but what he was. To say that he overcame adversity is an understatement. Like many artists, he created beauty out of anguish. But also, in his quiet way, he transformed lives. When children asked him in horror what had happened to him, he would say that he didn’t listen to his mother when she told him not to play in the street. When adults stared, he smiled back. Without his fingers, he touched everyone he met. Still, I like to think of him that summer day back in ‘23, before the drowning, with John alive, and all possibility before him, running toward the waves, with his hands outstretched, reaching for the horizon.

Ona Russell is an educator, mediator and widely published writer whose story, “The (O)ther Kahn,” was published in Philadelphia Stories and included in the first Best of Philadelphia Stories anthology. She has just completed her third historical mystery, which will be out next year.

Judging a Story by Its Title

I confess that I frequently judge books by their titles. In some cases, this kind of snap decision works every time. Like, if the paperback features a woman wearing a hoop skirt with a plunging neckline pressed up next to a man wearing a white blouse with a sword at his side, I know I’m going to love it! Just kidding. It means I know I will not be reading The Pirate’s Bride, because that book falls into the bodice-ripper genre and I haven’t read any romances since I stumbled on a collection of them as a kid during a vacation at my aunt’s house. Those paperbacks pretty much ruined my expectations for how sex would unfold, though they did improve my vocabulary so that I was able to spell and define the word “tumescence” should anyone ask. But that’s a tale for another day.

Similarly, I find that when I’m reading stories submitted for publication to Philadelphia Stories I often have a quick reaction based solely on the title of a story. This does not mean that I don’t read the whole thing, only that I am put on guard when the title is “The Day I Died.” (Side note: please do not kill off your main character in a short story, particularly if you’re telling a first-person narrative. Don’t make me ponder how the story got told by a dead guy.)

Good titles are difficult to create, but the title of your piece is the first thing an editor sees when she’s looking at your work, and therefore a bad title can set your story on the path toward rejection. Bad titles make the reader suspicious that the writer doesn’t know what he is doing. For example, any title that seems completely obvious, like “Returning Home,” or melodramatic, like “Feelings of Sadness,” or too weird, as in “Sebastian and the Ginkledork Cherry Blossom Pie Aliens,” has me on the defensive before I even read the first sentence, “Today was the day that Sebastian felt the saddest even though he was on his way back home.”

When in doubt, keep the title simple. Lorrie Moore, in her latest collection of short fiction (Bark: Stories), has stories called “Bark,” “Foes,” and “The Juniper Tree.” Those are straightforward nouns that don’t confuse or give too much away. Stories in some of Moore’s other collections have titles such as “Thank You for Having Me,” “You’re Ugly, Too,” and “People Like That Are the Only People Here.” The common thread among these examples is that they turn out to have more than one interpretation. In this way, the best titles do the same thing that good stories do. They have both a surface meaning and a deeper one. For example, the title of Jhumpa Lahiri’s story “A Temporary Matter” refers to the fact that the electricity in a house will be cut off for a short time and also reflects the state of the marriage the story explores. Often, a reader will fully appreciate a story’s title only after reading the entire piece. And a really good title will connect with the ending in a way that feels justified but isn’t easily anticipated.

If you’re having trouble coming up with a title, try going back into the story and looking for key words or phrases that you like and see if they can hold the weight of the story. The title doesn’t have to do all of the work—it doesn’t have to explain the whole story, nor should it—but it does need to be well thought out. You have so few words in a short story—make the title count.

A Neighbor Like David

I live across the street from a forty-year-old man with Down syndrome. Every morning, a bus takes him to—well, until this winter, I didn’t know where the bus took him. I knew only that his name was David (same as my dad’s), that he lived with his parents (as I did), and that the insignia on his hats and jackets marked him as a sports fan. We regularly said hello from our respective curbs, but that was about it.

As usual, one morning in December, when my mom and I were leaving for work, David stood across the street, waiting for his bus, his construction worker-style lunchbox at his feet. He smiled and waved at every car that passed—his routine. “Hi, Dave!” he called when he saw us. Dad was out of sight, waiting in the car. But my mother and I brightened to realize our neighbor had expanded “Dave” into an all-purpose name for our family.

“Hi, David!” we called back.

“I love you!” he shouted, still waving.

There is nothing like a spontaneous declaration of love to start your day. I want to say “I love you” all the time—to the security guard who tells me stories about her son, to the waiter who accommodates my food allergies, to the homeless girl and her kitten on the corner near my office in Center City. People would think me odd, though, so I don’t. Here was a man uninhibited by the conventions that limit the rest of us. Tears came into my mom’s eyes, and mine.

Growing up in South Jersey, my best friend’s sister Alexa had Downs, but she couldn’t be left alone or feed herself, and the sounds that came out of her mouth weren’t so much words as repeated syllables. I used to look into her eyes and wonder what she was trying to tell us. When I was five and Alexa three, I said to her mother, “When Alexa learns to talk—” and she corrected me: “If Alexa learns to talk.” Alexa didn’t learn, though as a teenager she used to sneak away to listen to Power 99 FM. Emotions would play over Alexa’s face, but she couldn’t articulate them, and I limited my words to her even though, at the time, I practically lived at her house. That morning when David declared his love felt like the breakthrough that Alexa and I had never had.

A few weeks later, in January, Mom was taking a sick day from work when David appeared at the front door with a piece of paper in hand. He had written “DAVID” in block caps on the top line—denoting himself or my dad, we weren’t sure—with his phone number in the middle line, and on the bottom, “7:30 PM.” He was inviting us for dinner, he said, to see their Christmas tree.

“What day?” Mom asked.

“Oh. Um, tomorrow.”

Mom grabbed an amaryllis plant and a holiday card and scrawled our phone number on it, asking him to bring the gift to his mother, Dorothy, whom we’d never formally met. Not long after he left, Dorothy called to say thank you. Mom asked if she knew her son had invited us over for dinner.

“No! Oh, I’m so embarrassed,” Dorothy said. “This happens all the time at our Shore house. Every summer on his birthday, David invites the lifeguards over without telling us.”

But that Saturday, David got his wish. His parents called back and officially invited us, along with our next-door neighbors. Ambling downstairs in athletic shorts, David gave handshakes all around, introducing himself as “the manager.” We saw the Christmas tree that was still up and followed him to his “office,” a den with an entertainment center in the corner and a calendar on the coffee table. “SmackDown, SmackDown, SmackDown,” he said as he ran his finger down each Friday on the calendar, talking me through his hand-written schedule of wrestling TV shows. We looked at his Special Olympics medals on the wall. That’s when we learned that the bus takes him to his job at an abilities center, where he lifts boxes like a pro. As we left, David’s father told us to look in The Philadelphia Inquirer on Tuesday for an article about David’s athletic accomplishments.

At work the next week, we looked up David online. There on the screen was a picture of our neighbor gripping a barbell. We beamed at the video of him power-lifting at the gym. I appreciated the quote from his mother: “He’s such a good-natured fellow.” But in the next paragraph, the writer claimed, “Although he is unable to read or write…”

Not so, I thought, and I had proof in the form of an invitation David wrote without his parents knowing. Had the article come out just a few weeks earlier, I wouldn’t have known the truth; it would have been like reading about a stranger. But as it happened, our neighbor had invited us into his life. Once he did, his early morning waves and smiles became my wake-up call. These days, when I get to work, I may not say “I love you” to the security guards who greet me with smiles–I’m not up to David’s level yet–but he convinced me that it makes a difference to grin back and at least think those three little words.

Not long ago, I saw David trudging through a snowstorm to his bus. While wind pelted flakes at his face, he carried two large recycling bins, his lunchbox, and a tall water bottle—all at once. His weightlifting had paid off. David was also engaged in another form of strength training: Every day, he exercises his bravery by operating in a world that doesn’t often celebrate differences. Articulating our love may be something the rest of us wrestle with, but this guy says what he means.

Elizabeth A. Larsson grew up in New Jersey, now works in Philadelphia, and spent most of the interim living up and down the East Coast. Her writing has appeared in New Moon Girls magazine’s series of advice books and Cicada, among other places. She keeps David’s hand-written invitation on her bulletin board.

A Broken Arm, a Mended Heart

From the get-go I thought, “this guy is dangerous.” By day, Kris was the web geek at the first magazine I worked for. But in his free time, he was an adrenaline junkie. He climbed 14,000-foot-tall mountains, skateboarded in empty swimming pools and, on a fat-tired bicycle, careened down steep, rocky hillsides. Each Monday, he arrived at work with a new bruise or glistening red wound from the weekend’s folly.

One winter, he took a six-week sabbatical from work so that he could bike across Siberia’s Lake Baikal, the oldest, deepest lake in the world. Of course, in winter, it’s not really a lake at all, but a 400-mile-long swath of ice sandwiched between jagged rocks. On his list of gear to pack were studded bicycle tires, a sleeping bag rated to -40F, and a screwdriver in case the ice broke and he fell into the churning, subfreezing water (he’d use the screwdriver to claw his way out). Another time, he nearly plunged 1,500 vertical feet off the face of Oregon’s Mount Hood. By luck — or divine intervention — the tip of his mountaineer’s axe caught in a fissure of ice and stopped him mid-slide. He went on to summit the mountain, triumphant.

Kris was also dangerous in the sense that he was fiercely attractive. At the office, he fastened his long, wild, curly hair into a ponytail. He wore short-sleeved button-down shirts that complemented his broad shoulders and climber’s biceps. Behind his glasses shone ocean blue eyes that could slice through your soul.

Adventure was his lifeblood. He had grown up a free-range kid on 300 acres in central Wisconsin, where he’d learned to hunt, climb and ice fish. He loved the cold, and insisted he’d teach me – a timid girl from Atlanta – how to snowboard. One January night, after he hosted a happy hour for several coworkers, I lingered. He set me up with boots that were two sizes too big, strapped me to the waxed fiberglass board, gave me a few pointers, and nudged me down the hill behind his apartment building. I thought snowboarding was easy and fun…until we got to the real slope in Vermont a few days later. During my inaugural run on the bunny hill, I tumbled and broke my arm.

That was our first date.

I could have cut my losses and walked away right then. Bones heal, after all. I wasn’t so sure about my heart.

Avoiding pain had been my personal mission since I was five. My childhood home was dominated by brokenness and heartache, beginning in the early 1970s with my older brother, who was born severely developmentally disabled. He had seizures and threw violent fits and had to be monitored around the clock. My brother couldn’t help who he was, but that didn’t stop my parents from grieving. Back then, having a disabled child was a disease, and my parents didn’t have a cure. They had me, and later, a “normal” son. But we weren’t enough. Dashed hopes had already metastasized into resentment, lies and fury.

Dad eventually moved out.

After that, my mother was on a quest to fill the emptiness in her heart and beat back the depression that was engulfing her (and us). The men she pursued – some married, others womanizers – had no interest in the mother-of-three package deal, especially when it included a special needs kid. Even so young, I knew there was no way for these relationships to end well. My role was to keep the peace, to buffer her pain by shouldering some of the parenting load while she disappeared into the night. When she collapsed on the bathroom floor sobbing after yet another breakup, I was also her therapist. I told her what she wanted to hear, that everything would be all right, that her Prince Charming was still out there, somewhere. Meanwhile, I vowed never to follow in her footsteps. I resolved not to treat my heart so recklessly.

When it came time for me to date, I chose buttoned-up, glowing Southern boys who vowed to keep me chaste until our wedding day. What these conservative gents lacked in passion and adventure, they made up for in piety. I was allured by how steadfast they were as much as by their stable, two-parent upbringings. In so many ways, I was still five years old and pining for a whole and happy family.

When the relationships ended (never dramatically, but more with a cartoonish wah wah wah of unreturned phone calls or it’s not you, it’s me), I was sad, but not heartbroken. A heart can’t break when it’s shuttered away. I was so determined to live in opposition to my mother that I discounted the most important element of romance: attraction.

Now here was Kris. I couldn’t get enough of him, and it terrified me. His voice was infused with passion and kindness and a yearning for life, and I just wanted to be around him and hear him speak more. In the beginning, that’s all we did. We talked, sometimes until three in the morning, sitting in the passenger seat of his Jeep with the heat cranked and my legs sweating. Or sprawled on the futon in my apartment after cooking elaborate, messy dinners together – me with my one good arm. We discussed books and travel and movies and music and all that we dreamed of doing, of being.

For all his risk taking, it was weeks before Kris ventured to kiss me. He waited until my arm had healed and we could properly embrace. The moment was like throwing gasoline on a smoldering coal.

It wasn’t long before I started joining him on adventures. We flew to London on a whim one weekend because an airline was selling round-trip tickets for $199. He’d seen the advertisement and said, “I’ve never been. Wanna go?” His optimism and spontaneity were infectious. We went camping in three feet of snow just for the hell of it, and stayed up all night, cocooned in our down sleeping bags. The stars were so thick against the black winter sky, like nothing I’d ever seen before. I gazed up and saw for the first time a future that didn’t have to be defined by my past.

Eventually, we moved into a 150-year-old farmhouse in eastern Pennsylvania. The house sat on eight acres and was bordered by an organic farm on one side, a tree farm on another, and a Mennonite family farm across the road. Kris continued to chase his next adrenaline fix – scaling mountains, adventure racing, backpacking — but now he had a home base, with me. We loved to bicycle, and from our front door we could piece together 50-mile undulating loops that toured the patchwork quilt of Dutch Country and never once crossed a busy street. On Sunday mornings, we awoke to the clip-clop of horse-drawn carriages, our neighbors heading off to church. We bought eggs, bread, and organic produce from the neighboring farms and cultivated our own salsa garden full of tomatoes, peppers, onions and cilantro.

Kris loved it because it reminded him of where he’d grown up. I loved it because it was the exact opposite of how I’d grown up. He begged me to sleep with the windows open. His body craved the smell of grass, trees, dirt. But I resisted. My childhood home had been burglarized several times, once in the middle of the night while we were home, cowering under our beds.

“Don’t you know I’ll protect you, city girl?” he asked me with a warm smile as he slid open the rickety old windows and let the cool breeze pour in. I looked into his face, so genuine and loving, and knew he’d do anything to keep me safe. It took a while, but I leaned into this man, and I began to see that risk does not equal recklessness. He took chances in life, but not with my heart.

Kris likened our relationship to a tandem mountain bike ride on a sinuous trail. A journey not without steep climbs and rocky patches. But the smooth parts? The white-knuckle downhill stretches of trail that make you giddy, that take your breath away? Pure bliss.

So it seemed fitting that one day just as I was descending the rockiest trail I’d ever dared to ride, feeling the panic-thrill that comes from suspending caution and reaping the reward, I found Kris at the bottom of the hill by a mountain stream, down on one knee. He was caked in dirt and grinning ear-to-ear. My knight on a silver bicycle.

“You’ve been my adventure partner, my best friend, my anchor,” he said. “I want you to be my wife.”

My heart pounded from exertion and the realization that he was sincere, that I could have it all – safety, adventure, and passion – for the rest of my life. I peeled the sweaty leather glove off my left hand and let him slip a ring onto my finger.

We rode away and never looked back.

Gina DeMillo Wagner began her career as an editor for Rodale Inc. in Emmaus, Penn. She now writes for magazines including Forbes Travel Guide, Backpacker, Outside, Wired, and Experience Life. Her personal essays have appeared in Role/Reboot, Elephant Journal, Mama Moderne, and more. She is at work on a memoir and lives with her husband Kris and their two children in Arizona.

Letter from the Contest Coordinator

“This story embodies, dramatizes, and transports osmosis and the permeable movement through boundaries and borders formally, in its content, and with its characters. The story is about betwixt and between, and its author handles all of the transgressions, transitions, and transmogrifications with grace and grit.”

The author of the first-place story receives a $2,000 cash prize and publication. Che Yeun will also be honored at an awards dinner, to be held at Rosemont College on Friday, October 11, 2013.

[img_assist|nid=10797|title=Anna|desc=|link=node|align=left|width=100|height=75]The second-place winner is Annam Manthiram, who wins for her story ”The Rules of Mending.” Martone says of this story: “I like the ambition here, the sweep of time and place, all figuratively and literally stitched together by the rhetoric of advice and the X-Acto knife of collage.”

You can enjoy both of these winning stories in this issue, thanks to the hard work of our dedicated readers, who evaluated more than 450 stories, our Editorial Director Carla Spataro, who screened the resulting top 50 stories, and our judge, Michael Martone.

I extend my thanks to Christine and Carla for allowing me to serve for another year as Contest Coordinator for a publication that continues to shine the spotlight on rising authors; to every one of our readers who spent their summers reading submissions; to our judge, Michael Martone, for choosing our fabulous winners; and to the McGlinn and Hansma families, who make it all possible year after year—thank you. Cheers also to Marguerite, who brings us together each year to celebrate great writing and the remarkable beauty of the short story.

Nicole Marie Pasquarello-Mancuso
Contest Coordinator

Essay: Ariel in Flames

The fan whirs above our heads. It is strong, but the heat still creeps up our legs as we sit in my room. Ally is sixteen this year. She keeps telling me that I need to treat her like an adult, that I should trust her with the same things I trust Belinda with, we are sisters after all.

She looks at me, begging for something to call her own. A secret that even the almighty Belinda doesn’t know yet. Belinda and I have shared a room and secrets for 19 years; she is only two years younger than me. I dig. I dig deep for something to tell Ally. She has always been so young; I never considered entrusting her with my life. Six years can be a world of difference if you let it.
And I let it. I always thought it would be too difficult to trust both of them. But now, with Belinda gone for the summer, Ally and I have been spending more time together. I want to feel as close to her as I do to Belinda.

The heat is unforgiving. It bangs on the windows outside, reminding us that even in the nighttime we can still sweat.. The fan overhead wobbles from overuse. I’m sweating. Sweat falls in tendrils around my eyes.

My bedroom is full of secrets, most of which Belinda knows. She was a part of most of them. They’re her secrets too. Ally sits on the floor near the door. When she was little, Belinda and I made her sit in the doorway to watch us play pretend. We never let her play. Just watch. From that spot in the doorway. There, but not really there. Somehow she is still on the outside of things.

There, but not really there.

I glance around my room and spot it. The Little Mermaid doll still locked in her plastic prison. I have had that doll since I was thirteen, too old to get a doll as a gift, but too young to realize it. The Ariel doll stares at me, her eyes wide and her hair a fiery mess. I stare back at her. Janine gave me that doll. She handed it to me and said, For my new daughter. I just know we are all going to get along so well. After whispering these words so only I could hear them, Janine walked over to my dad and entwined her fingers into his. A smile crept across her pale face. Her eyes blue as the ocean, blue as Ariel’s, watched me.

The doll is still here; Janine isn’t.

Ally waits. Her legs are crossed and her hands sit in her lap. I clear my throat. The noise sounds awkward as it swims through the thick heat towards Ally.

“Okay, I got one,” I say.

“Well?”

I can tell she is getting impatient. She is not going to sit in my doorway forever, and I don’t blame her.

“See that doll?” I point to Ariel.

“Yep.”

“Janine gave her to me.”

“Why the hell do you still have it?” Ally looks at me, shock and disgust in her eyes. I can hear her thinking, You kept something that nasty woman gave you? The woman who tortured us? The woman who made it a point to hurt us every day?

“Look, I really never thought about it till today. I guess I kept it as a reminder. The day she gave it to me is the day she moved in.”

“Yeah, so?”

“So, I guess it holds some kind of spell on me. Metaphorically speaking of course.”

I add that last part on fast. The idea of Janine casting a spell on us isn’t so farfetched. For years she kept a shrine in our basement. Pentagrams, candles, strands of people’s hair, knives for sacrifice, and even crystals she claimed healed people’s wounds. Janine didn’t know Belinda and I had found that shrine. Hidden in a cabinet, there but not really there. We didn’t tell anyone until we knew Janine would be out of our lives forever. We were scared that we’d be the next lock of hair, tied neatly in a bow, resting next to the knives.

“It’s been so many years. You haven’t even opened it.”

“I’m afraid.” And there it is; my secret. I’m 22 years old and still scared of Janine.

“Of what?”

“Janine.”

“Me too.”

We sit in silence a while. The heat, choking the words in our throats, makes it hard to talk. Ally stands up and crosses the room. She stops directly in front of Ariel. She grabs the plastic case and holds it towards me.

“Let’s burn her.”

“What?”

“Let’s. Burn. Her.” Ally looks at me, waiting for me to comprehend.

“Al, no…”

“Come on, Jo. It will be our secret.” The emphasis she put on the word our makes me want to burn it. Ally wants to share a secret with me and I want to share one with her. I stand up and search through my purse. It sits dead on my nightstand. I probe it, sliding my fingers across the inside lining until

I feel the smooth, cold plastic of my lighter.

“Okay, don’t tell anyone. It’s our secret.” I emphasize the word our just like she did and smile. The idea of setting fire to something Janine gave me makes my stomach flop. It is the kind of flop you get before doing something exciting, but terrifying.

“It will be like we’re burning Janine out of our lives. Like we’re burning her soul.” Ally’s eyes narrow and for a second I’m scared of her, too. “If she even had a soul,” she finishes the thought.

I laugh. I think Ally’s making a joke, but I can see that she truly believes that Janine is at least part-devil. And again, I don’t blame her. Janine shaved off all Ally’s hair when she was nine years old. She told Ally that she was ugly. I tried to stop it, but Janine was more powerful. She’d also cast her spell over my father.

We tip-toe down the hallway. Dad is snoring into his pillows, so we close the door quietly behind us. The night sky is clear, the air heavy. The moon hovers over us as we grab lighter fluid from next to Dad’s grill.

I drop the doll onto the grass. Even in the dark you can see the decaying brownness of the blades, the unforgiving heat. Ally grabs the doll back up and begins to tear her out of the package.

“What are you doing?”

“What she did to me.”

Now I see the scissors poking out of Ally’s back pocket. They glisten in the white moonlight. She grabs Ariel and cuts the doll’s red hair. It falls to the ground in clumps. When she’s done, she throws down the doll. Ariel lands upon her cut off hair as if it is a bed.
I douse the doll in lighter fluid. I see her drown in it. Ally hands me a piece of paper. Janine, is scrawled across it. I light it and the flames start to spread from the bottom corner. I drop the paper onto the doll. We watch ashes float up toward the sky.
The smell of burning plastic surrounds us. We cover our noses, but we don’t move.

Ariel’s face begins to melt. It is barely a face now. No more blue eyes, no more red hair, no more Ariel. The Little Mermaid has drowned in flames that dance around the pool of plastic. Elated at being freed into the night, the flames slither across the lawn, turning brown whatever green grass we had left.

Ally grabs my hand.

She is smiling.

I hug her as the heat of the fire pokes at our legs.

Jorie Rao is a graduate student at Rowan University in the Writing Arts Master’s Program, where she wrote this memoir. The story takes place in her father’s backyard about two years ago. Janine is not her stepmother’s real name.

Liberty

I was Bonnie Blair, the Olympic speed skater. I skated, head down, torso forward, right hand tucked behind my back, left hand gracefully sweeping my long, sloping driveway, back and forth. The rapid steady rhythm of my roller skates hitting the asphalt punctuated the freedom I felt when I skated, the same freedom whenever I played outside, no matter what I did. Freedom from homework, my older sister’s right hook, or my mom’s torturous math drills. As I imagined myself racing against Olympic skaters, my fingertips tingling as I gained speed, I forgot about being the only brown girl at an almost all white school. Instead, I felt the freedom to be me: a sixth-grade girl with unabashed glee sporting a Dorothy Hamill haircut far longer than any Indian girl with coarse curly hair should have. No medals to win, no records to break.

When I didn’t roller skate, I swung on the rope swing that hung from the tulip tree branches that leaned precariously over the road. My friends and I took turns doing stupid stunts, feeling the thrill swell in our bellies as we pushed off the ground and teetered above the street. Or, I rode my yellow banana seat bike on the 2.5-mile loop around my neighborhood, hands-and-helmet-free. As the wind whipped my face and my not-so-white tassels fluttered from the handlebars, free of my little sister’s whining, my thoughts centered on when I would get to ride my older sister’s red-three-speed.

***

The Dorothy Hamill haircut, gone. Roller skates, thrown away. The banana-seat bike, donated. A different kind of freedom flourished in college. Between lectures on Chemistry and Calculus and lounging on dingy sectionals with friends, I searched for an identity, far different from whom I’d been at home and the person my parents wanted me to be. Packs of students shuffled to class, sure of their journeys, while I faltered on my path to becoming a doctor, cherishing literature and composition instead. On sunny days, the outside beckoned me away from homework with the promise that a quick run around the short loop that circled the campus would clear my mind. The exercise offered freedom from decisions about careers, from finicky roommates, and from the nagging fear of spending the rest of my life as a spinster.

***

Newly wed and harboring an insatiable lust for a non-coin-operated washer and dryer, my husband and I settled in a leafy section of Baltimore in a boring cookie-cutter apartment. I didn’t want “old bones,” otherwise known as drafty windows and poor heating. I wanted central air and same-day service for a broken water heater. Among the large trees that shaded the streets of our neighborhood and threatened to uproot the sidewalks with every violent storm, I ran and trained for various races, most often too focused on timing to feel again that long-forgotten freedom. Occasionally, I let go and enjoyed the staccato of running on pavement as I bounded over a curb, feeling free, if only for a minute. Freedom from laminate desks and metal file cabinets, freedom from reams of paper and proofreading, meetings about nothing, management and managing. Freedom from rent and bills.

***

My husband’s new job in Philadelphia prompted a welcome change of scenery. I left my office job for the freedom or fetter of freelance writing. We traded rent for the shackles of a 30-year mortgage and home ownership. Walking or running the path along Kelly Drive-an escape from our tiny twin in East Falls-rendered me member of a sorority of inner-city athletes determined to find recreational release along the Schuylkill. There, between the shadows cast by the bridges that spanned the river, I fought to clear my mind and allow those elusive endorphins to work their magic. Instead, as my feet pounded the pavement, I yearned for freedom. Freedom from the engines roaring along Kelly. Freedom from the “Heard of sharing the path?” and “Don’t bother moving for us!” sarcastic remarks spewed by passing cyclists at every pedestrian. Freedom from mortgage payments. Freedom from paint chips and long lists of repairs. Freedom from months of ovulation calendars, basal thermometer charting, and fertility testing. Freedom from websites of forlorn-looking children in distant lands waiting to be adopted.

***

With a Bjorn baby carrier in front, then a double jogging stroller, and finally, a double jogging stroller and Bjorn, I persisted running or walking on cold days, my baby’s tiny fingers and toes safely bundled from the whistling wind, sippy cups safely stowed in the upright position. On some days, the river’s stench overpowered any thought except how-to-clean-the-house-after-the-last-fort-building-fiasco and the next carefully choreographed tango between music, tumbling, dance, art, or other brain-boosting activities and the sacred naptime. Enviously I watched the rowers moving smoothly along the Schuylkill’s surface, their rhythm belted out by the coxswain. Nothing on my postpartum body moved that smoothly anymore. I pretended I sat cradled in the boat with them, rowing in cadence, marking our movements in unison. Maybe in a boat in the middle of the river, I would feel freedom from the mean mommy cliques, freedom from Fakebook friends’ status updates, freedom from another parenting article about tantrum-free children.

***

My helmet too snug with my ponytail, I bike the streets of Swarthmore with my young sons riding next to me. They negotiate each turn, wobbling without training wheels on uneven sidewalks or sticks in the road, passing the town library and their friends’ houses. My thoughts race from how they will clear the next street, with cars parked on both sides, without snagging a side view mirror, to which of them I should let cross the busy street first while I block oncoming traffic. We have one hour of freedom between soccer practices, play dates, and bouncy birthday parties, but this hour is ours. We climb a hill, then start to coast down, not a car in sight. I take a deep breath and watch my sons relax their hands on their brakes. That old feeling of freedom resurfaces. Their gap-toothed smiles and dimples reveal unabashed glee on their first bike ride with me.

Sonia Elabd grew up in a suburb of Baltimore, Maryland and now lives in Swarthmore with her husband and three children. She received her MA in Writing from Johns Hopkins University and works as a medical writer. Her essays have appeared in several smaller publications and online. She is currently working on a young adult novel.

My Face Before I Was Born

The Battle of Hastings was fought in 1066.

My father would say that, and my mother would glance at him sideways, and then down, with a smile that suggested she had some kind of secret.

The Battle of Hastings was fought in 1066.

It was the kind of fact my mother learned from TV quiz shows and wrote down on little slips of paper. I’d find them tucked into the Reader’s Digest or wedged between the cushion and the arm of her nubby blue chair. She had a diploma from a small town high school in the coal regions, and a certificate from a music school in Pottsville. She was a first-rate private secretary and an accomplished violinist, but she did not possess a college degree. She felt that lack all of her life, especially when she met my father, whose master’s degree from the University of Pennsylvania must have both impressed and intimidated her.

Who fought in the Battle of Hastings?

Such a question could send my parents into peals of laughter. I looked it up once, in the Encyclopedia Americana that was in a bookcase in the back bedroom. The battle had involved the French and the English. We were Irish and Russian. And it was 900 years ago. Probably nobody we knew had been there.

Once on a family vacation we drove past a sign for a town called Hastings.

"Is that where the battle was fought?" I asked.

"My goodness no!" my father said. "The Battle of Hastings was fought in 1066!"

"Everybody knows that," my mother said. She gave my father a poke, and then that smile again.

As I grew up, I would encounter random references to the Battle of Hastings. In history class, the chapter heading “The Battle of Hastings” would elicit in my mind “was fought in 1066” as surely as Dominus vobiscum would call forth et cum spiritu tuo. Studying linguistics, I learned about the importance of the Battle of Hastings in shaping the English language. That the battle was fought in 1066 seemed only to be a side note.

In adulthood, I developed an interest in crewel embroidery, and studied the Bayeux Tapestry. “It depicts the events leading up to the Battle of Hastings,” said a lecturer one night. I finished her sentence under my breath: which was fought in 1066.

My father died in 1985, the day before my parents’ thirty-ninth wedding anniversary. My mother gave away or sold his clothes, his books, their house in Florida, their furniture, and drove their almost new Crown Victoria back to Pennsylvania, where she lived her remaining eight years in the spare bedroom of her sister’s house. It fell to me then to sort and arrange the few things she had kept.

Among them was the wedding snapshot that had always stood on her bureau. It shows my parents on the lawn of the house my mother lived in then, the house I would be carried to nine months later. The train of her white satin gown trails off to the left, and a breeze seems to be lifting the dangling ribbons of her bouquet. Her face is framed by her fingertip veil and the candlelight pearls my father has given her. My father beside her looks not at the camera, but at her.

The silver plate frame that had held it for so many years was bent and corroded, and the glass had cracked long ago. I got a new frame for it, and as I removed the velvet back of the old frame I found, tucked between the photo and the cardboard spacers, a receipt from the Taft Hotel in New York City. It showed that my parents had spent their wedding night and four nights more there.

They had occupied Room 1066.

What face did you have before you were born? a Zen master might ask. I look at this picture and know that I am there. In my mother’s womb on this fine June morning the egg that is half of me waits, and somewhere in my father the other half waits too.

The Battle of Hastings is about to begin.

Margaret DeAngelis is working on a novel set in Schuykill County. She has been awarded fellowships to the Jentel Artist Residency in Wyoming and the Vermont Studio Center and has attended the Sewanee Writers’ Conference.

Atop the Camel’s Hump

Island is a word that calls to mind countless pictures. Common images, ones we all share through vacations, photographs, or what we see on television: azure waves, pristine white beaches, palm fronds sighing in a humid breeze. Islands are places of peace, sanctums of serenity.

Well, not my island.

My island is ugly. Bare and bleak. It rises from the earth, fifteen feet high and dimpled like a camel’s hump, ringed by acres and acres of corn; an ocean of sweet Indian gold. Its muddy slopes are sharp and steep, treacherous in the rain. No soft carpet of grass adorns my island, no bed of furry moss. Instead, jagged thorns tear at flesh and snag on clothes. The island’s only thriving flora, an ancient white oak, watches the world and casts a long black shadow.

It is a truly unwelcoming place, and not very lovely to behold.

Yet I love it.

The Camel’s Hump I named it, upon staking my claim, believing I was the one person in the world to acknowledge this little plot of land, this poor wretched isle.

In the summer, when the country steams and sweats, the corn circling the Camel’s Hump grows tall enough to scratch the sky. Miles of corn, all green and gold in the haze of morning, the stalks glittering like diamonds under a layer of dew. Mice feast on kernels until they are too fat to flee the foxes, and foxes feast on mice until they are nearly too fat to flee the farmer. (I think he lets them get away.)

Several signs along the road that divides the farm and the adjacent neighborhood, read “No Trespassing” but for the moment I am blissfully illiterate. I’m only visiting, after all. The farmer will not fault one girl just for exploring. Corn swallows me like a gaping yellow maw. I run through it eagerly, losing myself among the stalks, the blonde hairs of the corn tangling with my brown hair. There is no north or south, no east or west; only corn, yellow and bright, rising up against a blue sky.

The earth trembles.

From somewhere out of sight comes a roar, followed by a great mechanical groan. The harvester coughing to life. For a moment I see myself racing through rows and rows of corn, desperate to find the road, but I am lost in the maze and the farmer’s tractor hunts me down before I can escape. My bones are ground to dust, my blood and organs and sinew squeezed out of me as out of a tube of toothpaste as the farmer drives on, oblivious that his bountiful summer harvest is now two ears richer… and two eyes richer, and ten toes richer, and a nose richer, too.

But then I see my island. The Camel’s Hump.

I can just make out the peak; the rest is obscured by towering stalks. The old oak stands sure and still, my lighthouse in the yellow sea. Its bark is ash-gray and splintered, its leaves fiercely green. I make it my target, throwing myself up the island’s steep banks, clinging to roots and rocks while the tractor wheezes by, flattening the yellow sea in its wake. Well, thank God I’m not down there.

I am the tallest girl on the planet—emerald meadows and farms and dusty roads unfold before me. I am in the heart of the Garden State. I wait for the farmer to finish reaping his field, with only the splintered old oak for company. Its roots, as thick around as one of my thighs, erupt from the dirt as though the tree tried to break free of the earth and walk the world. Ants travel up and down its bark, which is scarred by time’s passing. The lowest hanging branches are still too high for a girl to climb, but the birds make good use of them. A red-tailed hawk, sharp of eye and sharper of talon, scrutinizes me from the safety of his perch. His tongue flutters from his beak like a trembling pink worm.

“It’s hot today,” I agree, and the hawk wheels away toward the summer sun. I wonder, when the black canvas of night descends, will he return to the oak? Or will some slow-witted owl claim the tree in his absence?

Around me, the earth rumbles.

Puffy white clouds fashion the shapes of fantastic creatures, dragons and dwarves and dinosaurs.

I love this place. Despite the rocky soil and vicious brambles (and my near brush with death) I am at peace, sheltered by the old oak. No one knows I’m here. Not the farmer or the drivers racing past on the nearby road. Only the red-tailed hawk—and who would he tell?

When the tractor sputters to a stop, spewing oily black smoke from its rusty exhaust pipe, I bid farewell to my island, carefully slide down to solid ground, and cross the flattened field of corn. Crushed vegetation cushions my feet and softens my footsteps. I feel exposed and naked—the wonder of the yellow sea trampled to a bitter green pulp. There’s a shout behind me, likely the farmer, and I’m spurred to a sprint.

Over the field, across the road, and into my car.

The Camel’s Hump looks bigger when not flanked by so much corn, yet somehow more vulnerable, a secret revealed.

It is winter before I visit again.

Snow powders the earth and cruel winds sweep across the land. Branches, weakened by frost, splinter and snap, loud as a bullwhip in the eerie stillness of December. The animals have all gone: birds to warmer southern states, rabbits to their warrens. Humans venture into the world only once properly bundled up against the elements.

The oak looms in silent vigil, its naked arms reaching toward the blue-gray sky. The corn is a summer dream, but the Camel’s Hump remains.

Before I cross the snowy field I wonder how many winters the old white oak has seen. Twenty? Fifty? Has it ever seen a winter free of people? A winter before Hartford Road trundled along its left or Centerton Road to its right? A winter before the homes and farms and businesses? A winter before time? What ancient wonders, I meditate. What stories it could tell had the little seedling sprouted a mouth instead of roots.

I study the island from across the road. It looks as though an enormous camel fell asleep in the middle of a snowstorm.

Every season has its scents, I reflect, trampling across the unbroken snow. Spring smells like wet earth, summer like salty surf. Autumn has pumpkins and spices and rotten leaves. But winter freezes in your nostrils until your snot dribbles down your chin.

The old oak looks bigger. A handful of stubborn red leaves still cling to its branches, and a few are tugged free in the frigid winter gusts.

Carefully I make my ascent, pulling myself upward with one of the oak’s massive roots.

There are a few animal droppings here, but otherwise the Camel’s Hump has been left undisturbed. White snow, frozen earth. The gunmetal superstructure of the Cornfield Cruiser, an old US Air Force Space Command site, is visible from atop the island. The building belches steam, hot steam. Suddenly I’m aware of shivers rocking my body. My skin is raw and red, my lips split.

I have to do this quickly.

I take the Swiss Army knife from my pocket, a relic of the days when my brother and I were kids. Where once the blade had flashed polished steel, it now glinted dully, the victim of rust and mud and many gutted fish. Yet it would serve my purpose.

Normally I am not one for defacing nature, but this oak struck something in me. I want this tree to be mine. The sharpest edge of the Swiss Army Knife hacks through the bark with all the grace of a poacher chopping his way through the Amazon. Small slivers of wood peel away under the blade, pepper the ground.

In minutes I’m done. On one of the white oak’s roots I’ve carved my name: CASEY 2008. The letters are shallow on the root’s girth, a root like an anaconda with a tiny tattoo.

As I make the short walk back to my car, I wonder who would come along after me. Two lovers, perhaps, drawn by the solitude. Children who dream of monsters and adventures. Who would see my name? Would someone add his or her own? And in fifty years, when the world is all sterile and steel, will the white oak with my name still live?

So many will hurry by without a second glance. Who could be bothered to marvel at a gnarled old tree and an ugly hill plagued by thorns? Not many, truly. An island in the Bahamas would better serve them. But someday, someone will see the world as I did: from atop the Camel’s Hump.

Casey Otto just graduated from Rowan University with a degree in Writing Arts. She is a science fiction and fantasy enthusiast with a passion for writing about our natural world, specifically locations around New Jersey that have made a huge impact on her life. This story won Rowan’s 2012 Denise Gess Literary Award for Creative Nonfiction at Rowan.