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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.

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.

Shannon tapped her pencil on the desk, trying to command my attention. Everything about her annoyed me—the way she sat, the way her hair fell into tangled strands across her face, and the way she incessantly tapped that goddamn pencil against the kidney bean-shaped desk in our sixth-grade classroom. We’d been assigned to work together by the teacher; it was not by choice. We kept as much distance from each other as possible, I at the tip of the bean, she on the outer curve.

Finally, when I was on the verge of ripping the pencil from her hand, I glared at her. With immense satisfaction, she tapped once more and shot her tongue out at me. Despite being the weird new girl, Shannon had a knack for playing offense, but she didn’t yet know my specialty in basketball was blocking. I was a defensive all-star.  In retaliation, I wrote on my paper and turned it so she could see: Shannon sucks. I looked at her with told-you-so eyes, sure my message would be enough to erase her stupid smirk. It wasn’t. She squinted back at me. Then she wrote the horror beyond all horrors on her notebook and nudged it across the kidney bean close enough for me to see: Gavin is ugly.

Gavin. As in my Gavin. Gavin Rossdale. The lead singer of the alternative-rock band Bush. Gavin. Whose poster I kissed every night before bed. Gavin. Whose face was printed on my t-shirt. Gavin. The recipient of my perfume-drenched love letters. Gavin. The epitome of all things lovely and good to adolescent girls everywhere with a disposition for head-banging to grunge music (behind the safety of closed bedroom doors). My face flushed and contorted with rage. She raised her eyebrows to ask if I had any other moves in my arsenal. Nope, my game was shot. I couldn’t block that one. She won The Battle on the Bean, but from that day forward, I started sharpening sticks and recruiting allies.

Earlier that year, Shannon had joined our class of eleven students in the small town of Port Republic, NJ. Her prospects for fitting in seemed bleak: thin, mouse-like demeanor, baggy clothes, pursed lips, and a small vocabulary. Her stupid purple sunglasses seemed to be her most prized possession. She didn’t talk much at first. When she finally did speak, it sounded like she was trapped inside a plastic tube. The words could barely escape her tiny mouth. Shannon’s speech impediment meant she had to get extra help with her school work, so she was automatically lumped into that group—you know, the “dummies,” the kids who dreaded report cards and parent-teacher conferences. With only twelve kids in our grade, the division between the “dummies” and the “smarties” was exacerbated twelve-fold.

I was a smarty: one of those know-it-all elitists whose worst nightmare involved a B+. Before the final bell had rung on her first day at our school, we smarties had already agreed upon Shannon’s status.  She was definitely not one of us.

Shannon was an ‘army brat,’ and her perpetual new-girl status had provided her a strong offensive game, but even that couldn’t have prepared her for the vengeance I plotted. In the name of Gavin Rossdale, Shannon had become enemy number one. Did she actually imagine that she was ever going to fit in? If you asked Shannon, probably not. She’d tell you that our class was Lord of the Flies, and I was Jack Merridew—the tyrant leader of the cruelest kind of soldiers: a pack of sixth-grade girls.

Soon after the Gavin incident, I appointed myself president the We Hate Shannon Club. Every day at recess, all of the sixth-grade girls except for Shannon met by a set of double doors at the far end of the school. No one ever used those doors, not even the teachers. A two-foot overhang and brick walls formed a small cave—where we hunted for wild pigs—where I became Jack Merridew, rallying the wildlings.

 We carved and scribbled our unoriginal insults into the bricks and on the doors. Shannon sucks. We hate Shannon. Whoever thought of the best Shannon-hate slogan was crowned winner for the day. The better the insult, the greater the reward—distributed in superficial flattery and cackles from the pack.

After several weeks in the cave, I hatched a more devious plan. At lunch, communicating only in whispers and hushed giggles, we waited for the right moment. Each morsel Shannon ate lasted an eternity. Finally, she stood up from the lunch table to buy ice cream. Casually, I stood up as well, walked to Shannon’s empty seat, snatched her beloved purple sunglasses, stuffed them in my pocket, and took my place behind Shannon in the line for ice cream.

 The pack watched from the table as I smiled, triumphant. Shannon stood in front of me, buying her ice cream, not yet knowing what I’d done.   Taking her seat, however, she realized immediately that her sunglasses were gone, her sunglasses, the mask that hid her reactions to our persecution and the wetness in her eyes. She got up and told the teacher on duty. Then I had no choice. I had to dispose of them.

During recess, out of sight of teachers and other kids, we, the pack, tossed the purple sunglasses around in a circle until they landed back in my hands. I threw them on the ground and stomped on them, cracking both the lenses and frames. Dust rose as I ground my foot into the glasses, thinking of my love for Gavin, which was then surpassed by my hate for Shannon, hate for things I didn’t understand, and most of all, hate for myself.

The other girls began stomping out their secrets too: divorces, illness, abuse, and other unspoken forms of hate that we’d filtered into Shannon. We hid our rage behind laughter, the way Shannon had hidden her tears behind the sunglasses.

We destroyed Shannon’s sunglasses, but the hate within us only grew stronger. We left the glasses in a drainage hole, but a pang of fear told me I couldn’t leave them there. Once the last bell rang, I snuck back into the school yard, found the glasses, and  threw them into the woods behind my house.  I smiled to myself, another smile of triumph, without a single feeling of regret or shame.

Later, when our principal questioned me about Shannon’s missing glasses, I knew he knew I had done it, but I also knew he had no proof. I played the clueless honors student who couldn’t fathom such a vicious crime. Only the beating of my heart could have given me away. He had nothing, and, with an unhappy sigh, he released me to return to class.  

Shannon was no dummy. She knew I had taken her sunglasses. She even tried to fight back, but the pack swarmed her like bees when their hive is threatened. She cried until her eyes were red and swollen from our stings. She cried without the protection of her sunglasses, but this only made us torment her more.

One day, at last, Mrs. Smith, our language arts teacher, asked all the girls in our class but Shannon to skip recess and return to her classroom. I felt another pang of fear, a stronger one. Sitting at our desks, we exchanged anxious looks. Did she know about the glasses? The cave? Would she tell our parents? Would we never be allowed to go to recess again?  When Mrs. Smith entered the room the tension thickened. She had something to say:

“What I saw over there, outside by the double doors, made me sick to my stomach.”

Something deeper than anger emanated from her words. She repeated what we’d  written in the cave, “We hate Shannon. Shannon sucks. Shannon is dumb. Die Shannon die.” Each word spread venomous gas around us. We couldn’t look at each other.

 “Do you know what that reminded me of?”

No one spoke. We couldn’t. We waited for an angry speech. Instead, Mrs. Smith said only two words:

“The Holocaust.”

The wildlings in the seats around her, me included, began to disappear and human beings, adolescent girls, my friends, took their places.  I felt sick.  Anger and hatred morphed into nausea, a knot hardening in my gut.

“Yes, the holocaust,” Mrs. Smith repeated. We, the pack, the sixth-grade girls, stared down at our desks.  “This is where it starts,” Mrs. Smith continued as I began to recognize the truth of what we’d done. What I had done. “This kind of disgusting, unwarranted hate is where it starts.”

Mrs. Smith stood in front of us, a mirror of truth, forcing us to see through our distortions, our anger, our intolerance. The flies of Hate Island swarmed over me. Yes, I’d been Jack Merridew.  I had sharpened the sticks and set out to hunt. I’d held the flag of victory after each slaughtering. And none of it could be undone.

Looking back, I realize Mrs. Smith reached us before our sacrificial rites escalated from plastic sunglasses to the physical self; before the fire on top of the mountain went out. Although, if you ask Shannon, she would probably not agree.  

 

*Editors note: The names of some of these people have been changed.

 

Samantha Brown was born in Atlantic City and grew up in the small town of Port Republic, NJ. She is a recent graduate of Rowan University and holds an M.A. in Writing. "Hate Island" tells the true story of an experience she had in middle school. Samantha also writes fiction and her award-winning poetry has been published in several smaller venues. Her poem "House on Moss Mill Road" was featured in Lines + Stars Winter 2012 issue. She lives in Clementon, NJ, with her husband and is writing a middle grade fantasy novel.

I’ve been on both sides of the speed-dating table at Push to Publish. As many of you begin to prepare for your own special ten-minute talk with an agent or editor, I thought I’d share what I’ve learned to do and what to avoid in order to get the most out of your ten minutes.

1.  Do come prepared. As an editor, I had ten minutes to read an author’s writing sample and offer suggestions. I couldn’t read a fifteen-page story and give feedback. Come with three pages of your short story. If you have a novel, have an elevator pitch (a one-minute description of the novel) and a few pages of the work. You want your work read, but you really want the discussion. Make sure the bulk of your ten minutes is devoted to talking to the editor or agent.

2. Research the editors/agents coming to the event. As a literary fiction editor for a magazine that does not accept genre, I had someone hand me a sci-fi fantasy piece. Again, you have ten minutes with this person. You want to make sure you are sitting across from someone who really can advise you. Keep in mind, you are signing up for these editors/agents at registration. Do your homework to choose the best editor or agent for your work, and make sure to have a couple of back-up people just in case that person’s time slots get filled. All of the bios are posted on the website well in advance of the conference.

3. Do not request a speed date with an agent if you are not ready. I know this is hard to hear. Most attendees want to meet with agents. However, during the speed dates, agents want to meet with authors who have polished, edited, revised material ready to pitch to a publishing house. Agents do not want to spend this time listening to ideas for novels or reading unfinished material.

This does not mean agents don’t want to meet you or hear your ideas—just not during the speed date session. Agents will be there most of the day, and they DO want to make connections with talented writers. Introduce yourself at lunch or say hello after the afternoon “Meet the Editors and Agents” panel. Get business cards. Follow up as appropriate. Review all agent bios and make a connection with someone you think might be a good connection when you are ready. Make a good impression by making the most of both of your time. 

Also, consider attending Friday’s “Spend the Day with an Agent” workshop. Agent Sheree Bykofsky offers insider tips for how to find an agent, and provides the opportunity to review individual query letters.

4.  Come with specific questions you want the editor/agent to answer for you. As an editor, I tried to make sure I left time for the person to ask me any additional questions. During this additional time, all of my speed date authors looked at me like I had lobsters crawling out of my nose. I was surprised no one thought to ask me anything else. While, yes, it is your time to discuss your work, you have an agent/editor sitting right there giving you her attention. Pick her brain. The goal is to help you feel ready to get your work published. Be your own advocate. 

5.  Put your best foot forward. Have your work printed, held in a folder, typed, Times New Roam 12 point font, and double spaced. Anything else will be very hard for your editor/agent to read. One of the authors I met with handed me a handwritten story. I wasted most of our ten minutes just trying to read the author’s handwriting, and the writer lost valuable time. 

6. Smile, and relax. Remember, the editor or agent in front of you is a person. As an editor, I was initially nervous when I had my first few “dates.” As a writer, I was also freaking out at first. Then, I smiled and cracked a joke. The tension dissipated, and we had a great conversation about my poem and my ability to be a poet. Basically, be yourself.

The bottom line is this: you are coming to this event to push yourself and your work into the publishing world. I have yet to meet a kinder and more welcoming community than at the Push to Publish conference each year. Relax and be prepared.

MM Wittle is a professor of writing with an MFA from Rosemont College in Creative Writing. MM’s work has appeared in Nailpolish Stories, Transient, The Bond Street Review, and is forthcoming in The Fox Chase Review, and Free Flash Fiction. For the past seven years, MM has been a fiction board member of Philadelphia Stories and is now a PS Books Poetry and Creative Nonfiction editor.

The first time you saw me naked, I was standing in front of the refrigerator. I’d gotten up in the middle of the night to get something to eat. It was pitch black except for the refrigerator light glaring out at me, illuminating my naked body as I hunched into the fridge to see what was inside. It was that tiny kitchen in West Philadelphia, with the cracked linoleum floors and the tin-topped kitchen table.

I thought you were sleeping, so I didn’t bother putting my clothes back on. Sure, we’d already had sex, but not so many times that I’d let you get a good look at me. Always, there’d been partial clothing or sheets or fast getaways. You, on the other hand, you couldn’t wait to be naked in front of me. I remember you stood next to our first pre-coital bed and tore off your underwear as you asked, “Is this okay?” You were naked and lying next me before I could answer.

This was back when I still went to your apartment with legs and armpits clean-shaven. I still surveyed the six or so moles on my body that grow very long hairs and dutifully kept them plucked clean for you. I protected you from my sulfurous morning breath and always darted to the bathroom to brush my teeth before we’d go again.

This was back when you were a bachelor whose bathroom window was a broken pane of glass. Your front door wouldn’t shut, much less lock. You dried oranges and other fruits in papers bags all around the apartment because there was no one there to object to the strangeness of it or the potential for mold.

When I heard your footsteps on that old wood floor in the hallway, I considered hiding behind the refrigerator door, but it seemed childish, and there wasn’t enough time anyway. Suddenly you were there, leaning against the door jamb, watching me.

I tried to pretend I was not at all bothered by your seeing me this way, and I went about my business as if there was nothing at all wrong with midnight snacking. (The idea of hiding my body or my eating habits from you seems ridiculous to me now. My body has performed most of its basest functions in your presence. I have retched out sobs and vomit at your feet.) But then, you looked at my naked body, its unruly ripples, my bulbous inner thighs. You looked at me, naked and holding a carton of milk, scavenging in the darkness for a bite of old cheese or a jar of peanut butter I could dip a finger into. You looked at this thing, my body, lit strangely by a small, dirty light bulb, and you began to smile that upside down smile of yours, where the corners of your mouth are turning down, but somehow it’s a smile anyway.

You looked at me as if I were the Pacific Ocean, or a newborn baby, or the goddamned pyramids in Egypt.

“You’re such a pretty girl,” you said. Like you could hardly believe it. Like you were somehow proud and thankful all at once to God and me and refrigerator lights.

I stood up straight to meet your eyes. And suddenly, I wasn’t hungry anymore.

[img_assist|nid=9453|title=Ali’s Garden by Jessica Taylor © 2012|desc=|link=node|align=left|width=400|height=308]

 

Kelly George is a
doctoral candidate at the School of Communications and Theater at Temple University.
She is now married to the man who appeared unexpectedly to watch as she
rummaged, nude, through his refrigerator.

“I see death’s door opening!”

That was my father’s greeting as I arrived at his room in Bryn Mawr Hospital after a frantic cross-country flight. My mother had tried to prepare me on the phone. She said, “The doctor says it’s kidney failure, and that it goes quickly. First, he’ll become euphoric, then disoriented, and then he’ll just … fall asleep.” 

So this must be euphoria, I thought. “What does it look like, Dad?” I asked. But he just stared at me with an unnaturally bright, unfocused gaze, as if to say, “It’s a good opening line – and it’s all I got.” 

That wasn’t unusual. Everyone knew that Jules Bogaev was a festival of one-liners. His explanation for why he, his brother and his father all became urologists: “Piss runs in the family.” His explanation for his infamously irascible bedside manner: “You know what? I hate people. But most of all, I hate sick people.” When patients called him at home he practically put them through a stand-up routine. “How’s your stream?” he’d yell down the line. “Did you void? Jesus Christ, I told you to void!” 

Somehow, he made it through the office hours, the endless rounds, the seasonal spawn of new medical students at Jefferson Hospital, by telling stories. We referred to his stories as the Ten Greatest Hits, including “The Nurse Washing the Dead Man’s Socks” and “The Thumb Through the Heart.”

“There we are, four hours into an operation to repair a ruptured kidney, and the patient goes into cardiac arrest. Russell and I look at each other, he’s the chief surgeon and I’m assisting, and we’re both thinking the same thing. See, this guy is old, he’s 76, and he’s not going to make it. It’s not worth taking extreme measures; he’s too weak. But just as we’re about to take off our gloves, the intern, Patek, a really nervous type, pushes us aside, grabs a retractor, uses it like a mallet to crack open the sternum, and reaches in with his hands to manually massage the heart back into rhythm. That’s how we did it back then. But you see, the tissue was so old and decrepit; it was rotted through… like wet paper. So before you know it, his thumb goes right through the guy’s heart. Russell and I just stand there, dumbstruck, looking at each other and then down at our patient, now deceased. And then I point at Patek and yell, “Murderer! You killed him!” 

My father would punctuate the last line by emphatically pointing his finger and stabbing the air, as if he were jabbing the invisible nervous intern in the chest. 

“Thumb Through the Heart” was a real crowd pleaser at cocktail parties. He said it slayed his audience every time. 

[img_assist|nid=9227|title=Discarded by Nina Sabatino © 2012|desc=|link=node|align=none|width=400|height=397]

In the hospital, weakened by diabetes, kidney and heart failure, my father didn’t have the energy for reprisals of the Greatest Hits, but his wit never left him. For hours he would lie in bed, asleep, or appearing to sleep, and then suddenly his eyes would pop open, he’d raise his head and look around the room, as if he were checking to see which side of death’s door he had landed on. Once, when his gaze arrived at me, sitting by the bed, I said with my usual genius for stating the obvious, “Hi. I’m still here.”   After a beat, he came back with, “The problem is, so am I.” 

One afternoon the podiatrist came in to check out my father’s gangrenous toes. He was a young guy, nervous, like the intern of “Thumb Through the Heart”. He prescribed dialysis, explaining that my father might be able to avoid amputation if he arrested the kidney failure. But my father had no intention of arresting anything. The podiatrist looked shaken as he argued that he had patients much older, much worse off, much less alert, who did fine with dialysis. He had tears in his eyes as he pleaded his case. He asked, “What do you want, anyway? It’s only going to get worse. You could stop it here. For God’s sake, where do you see yourself in two weeks?”

My father replied, “Where do I see myself in two weeks? I’ll tell you where I see myself. I see myself in the crematorium.” 

Damn, that was a good line.   

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On the fourth day of our bedside vigil, a nurse suggested that we offer our father something he really loved to eat, since it was likely he’d soon stop eating altogether. When my sister asked him what he’d like, he thought for a few moments, and then said, “I want a Dove Bar.” The diabetic wanted a Dove Bar. And my therapist sister, the former macrobiotic who lived for years on a diet of rice cakes and almond butter, grabbed her coat, dashed into a 7-Eleven for probably the first time in her life, and brought back the classic version, vanilla ice cream covered in rich, dark chocolate. 

When I returned from lunch I found my father delicately wielding the heaviest known ice cream novelty bar; his thumb and forefinger grasping the wooden stick and his pinkie finger aloft. Earlier that day he hadn’t had the strength to hold his plastic cup of ice; we’d been shaking the chips into his mouth. Now, not only did he eat nearly the whole thing, he ate it without getting a spot on him. He ate that bar with surgical precision, with complete control, even with a touch of dramatic flair.   Perhaps it crossed his mind that “The Dove Bar” might end up on another Top Ten list of family stories. After all, he hadn’t come out with any deathbed confessions, or any long-withheld revelations of any kind. Instead, the stories of “The Dove Bar” and “The Nervous Podiatrist” could be his legacy to us. 

He died two days later, in the middle of the night, alone.

After the hospital called, I thought about animals, how they go off and hide when they’re dying. But my father didn’t hide. I imagine for him it was more a matter of the rightness of things, of allowing himself to exit the stage only after the audience had left the theater, the lights had dimmed, and the cleaning crew had made its late night rounds.

The day of the Dove Bar incident, after my father had finished his last earthly meal, hand-delivered by his oldest daughter, and had then sunk back on the pillows to sleep off the glucose payload, I had the urge to leap up, point at my sister, and yell, “Murderer! You killed him!”

She wouldn’t have thought it was funny, so I didn’t do it. But I wish I had. I’m sure our father would have appreciated it. I’m sure, even in his deep, nearly final sleep, it would have cracked him up. I would have slayed with that one.

Barbara Bogaev is the host of "Soundprint," public radio’s national weekly documentary program. In more than twenty years in broadcasting, Bogaev has interviewed rock stars and war correspondents for NPR’s "Fresh Air with Terry Gross," talked with poet laureates and conscientious objectors for American Public Media’s "Weekend America," and hosted and produced science, news and arts programming for NPR member-stations WHYY and WXPN. A Philadelphia native, she began her radio career as the producer of the award-winning talk show, "Radio Times with Marty Moss-Coane." She blogs at alwaysmorequestions.com.

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When I look at my nine year- old son, I see my husband’s face. His square jaw, his chiseled cheekbones, his light brown hair, his delicate, perfectly
proportioned nose. When my son turns to the side, however, I see myself.
He has my ears. I have big ears. My father has big ears. Our ears don’t
stick out from the sides of our heads, they are not malformed, but they
are big.

I wonder if this physical trait is shared among us because we are all musicians: my father, a music teacher for 30 years, plays the saxophone, clarinet and flute; I teach the violin and piano; and my son has been dutifully taking piano lessons for four years now. It makes sense that for musicians, large ears would be an asset.

I think back to the first time I saw his oversized ears. Nine years ago I wasn’t concerned about piano lessons, I was just praying he’d survive. That’s because he was born prematurely, weighing only one pound, three ounces. I was just over five months pregnant when I was put on strict bed rest at Lankenau Hospital because of pre-term labor. After three weeks, the contractions couldn’t be stopped and my son came into the world sixteen weeks before he was due. I’d never seen a human being so small. It amazed me that his whole tiny body was already formed, from the wisps of hair on his head to his fragile little fingers and toes. Oh, and those precious ears.

Because he had arrived so early, my husband and I did not have a name ready for him. After four days the neonatologists were getting impatient. "We need a name for this baby," they told us. "The nurses can’t keep calling him ‘Baby Boy Number Seven’ when they talk to him through the incubator."

My husband and I scrambled. I’d been reading the Bible for solace and comfort during my weeks on bed rest, so we consulted the greatest story ever told to come up with a name.

"What about ‘Simon’?" my husband said, popping his head up from the Book of Acts. "There are a lot of ‘Simons’ in the Bible."

"It’s a good name." I said. "Simon was the man who helped Jesus carry the cross. Let’s go with that."

We proudly reported our son’s name to the head neonatologist.

"Simon says!" he answered, teasing us with a smile.

I hadn’t thought of that, but then again, in the game, Simon Says, Simon is always the boss. I wasn’t concerned about the potential teasing. I was glad to have a name to call my little guy who was so delicate yet strong.

"You’re gonna be OK, Simon," I whispered into the portholes on the sides of the incubator. "You’re doing a great job, little guy, just keep growing." Even then, when he was one pound, those ears must have been listening.

Soon after naming him, we researched the name ‘Simon’: "He Heard," from Hebrew. I wondered how this meaning would pertain to my son in his future. I found out a few months later. The doctors and nurses had warned us about the rollercoaster ride that was the life of a micro preemie; the medical staff was encouraging (and bordering on saintly), but they did not give us any false hope. My husband and I sighed with relief when Simon seemed to dodge each potential illness that the hospital staff anticipated: no brain bleeds, no chronic infections, and no life-threatening heart issues. We celebrated each milestone that Simon achieved: breathing without the ventilator, graduating from a feeding tube to a baby bottle, and the most visible accomplishment– gaining weight. After two and a half months, Simon was no longer dependent on oxygen to breathe and he had grown to five pounds. Then, one evening as we left the house for our nighttime NICU visit, the nurse on duty called us to say that the pediatric ophthalmologist would meet us there when we arrived. The eye doctor explained that, earlier that day, Simon’s eyes had been routinely checked for a condition called Retinopathy of Prematurity. The results were not good. Simon’s retinas had completely detached. He would be blind.

My husband and I felt the sharp dip of the roller coaster that we thought we had eluded. We insisted on a second opinion, and on this occasion my parents were present for the results. The doctor came to the same conclusion-that our little fighter would never see. My mother asked if she could donate her eyes to Simon. The doctor solemnly shook his head. Again, we scrambled. We scoured the Internet for information and we eventually found an extremely gifted retina surgeon in Detroit, Michigan. We were told that people came from all over the world to see this doctor. Once Simon came out of the NICU, we flew to Detroit every two weeks for surgeries and subsequent check-ups. After three surgeries, Simon was able to see light. This may not seem like much of an accomplishment, but in the blind world, being able to see light means a lot: it means that you can distinguish daytime from nighttime; that your circadian rhythm of sleeping and waking is not disturbed; and that light can be used to orient the space around you, whether it’s the light from windows in a room or fluorescent ceiling lights to guide you down a hallway.

Simon is now a healthy, chatty nine year- old with a sharp wit and long pianist’s fingers. He reads Braille and walks with a cane. He attends Saint Lucy Day School for Children with Visual Impairments in Juniata Park where he is mainstreamed with sighted students. And he’s still got those big ears. Those ears that my father gave to me and that I gave to Simon. Those ears that help him to distinguish the voices of his favorite radio sportscasters on 610 AM WIP. Those ears that detect the smallest sound when I think I’m silently gesturing to my husband. Those ears that fill my heart with joy when Simon tells me that he doesn’t need to see my face because he can hear me smile. I know that those big ears will serve him well throughout his life. He sees with those ears and I’m proud to share them with him. 

Maria Ceferatti was raised in South Philadelphia and now lives in
Delaware County. She teaches private violin and piano lessons, instructs
classroom music at Saint Lucy Day School for Children with Visual
Impairments, and is the music director of Acting Without Boundaries, a
theater group for young performers with physical disabilities. Her short
story "Olga’s Vision" will be published in the forthcoming issue of
Apiary Magazine.

I watched my old man’s face, hoping he wouldn’t notice my chubby fingers creeping toward the volume knob.

From the driver’s seat came a grunt that sounded like “No.” He hadn’t even taken his eyes off the road.

I backed off, realizing I wouldn’t win – this time, or maybe ever.

It was a game we played every time I rode shotgun in his old Ford Ranger – light green body with a forest green cap over the bed.

He listened to what he called his “hillbilly music” – cassettes by Loretta Lynn, George Jones, Tammy Wynette and other honky-tonk heroes, and I did my best to seize control of the stereo.

The picture is a little hazy – maybe it was all that secondhand smoke – but most of the details are still as clear and crisp as Loretta’s sweet voice.

I fought it for years, but now I realize my father handed down to me a love of country music. 

A forced inheritance at first, but now it’s one I’m keeping in the family.

My father had bought the truck from an old high-school friend who owned a used car lot in our hometown of Vineland, N.J., a city that’s equal parts green farm fields and shadowy urban areas, halfway between Philadelphia and Atlantic City.

The Ford’s engine always seemed to be coughing, spitting or just plain dying. Frequent, wallet busting trips to the mechanic left my father, a hard-nosed police detective, cursing the buddy who’d given him such a great “as is” deal. The most dependable parts of this green lemon seemed to be the cassette player and the tinny speakers – there was never a time when my father, also named Tim, wasn’t listening to music in the truck.

To this day, my old man is a hillbilly at heart, even though South Jersey is flat as a prairie and the only real time he ever spent in the South was during basic training at an Air Force base in Texas.

I blamed Elvis for my father’s musical tastes.

My father swore he could listen to Presley’s music all day, and he often did. My parents bickered constantly, but there was one thing they could agree on: The King.
Whenever Elvis’ music was on the stereo, there was détente in our house.
He could soothe people, even from beyond the grave.

Elvis’ own hillbilly bent led my father to seek out the mainstream country music that was popular in the late 1970s, a few years before the genre gussied itself up, “Urban Cowboy” style. 

I was nine or 10 years old, a chunky kid with straight blond hair hanging in my eyes, and a love of rock ’n’ roll inherited from my mother.

My father’s music seemed hokey to me, as old-fashioned and corny as the “Hee-Haw” episodes that seemed to be on whenever we visited my mother’s parents.
If I’d had veto power, the soundtrack for all those hours I rode in his truck would have been The Who, The Rolling Stones and Jimi Hendrix.

My younger brother, my cousin and I used to throw the Stones’ “Some Girls” LP on the stereo in my parents’ wood-paneled basement and play furious air guitar. We fought over which one of us was Keith Richards. No one wanted to be Mick. We were weird kids. And it was no coincidence that we’d always skip the one country song on the album, “Far Away Eyes.”

“My truck, my music.” Sounds like ad copy, but this was my old man’s standard reply when I complained.

And then he’d turn up Charley Pride’s hit, “Just Between You and Me” like it was the first time he’d ever heard it.

Trying to extract even a small victory, I’d reach for the knob on the air conditioner. The grumbling rose from the driver’s seat: “The air wastes gas. Roll down your window.”

Fine, but you don’t get much of a cross-breeze going 25 miles an hour.

As I sweated through my Fonzie T-shirt, I swore that when I was old enough, country music would be banned from any vehicle or domicile I was in.

It was bad enough I had to endure these hicks singing about broken hearts and busted dreams, but what made things even worse were the cheap Garcia-Vega cigars my father puffed on in the truck.

A quarter apiece, the stogies smelled like they cost even less. I couldn’t decide which was more foul – the sounds or the smoke.

Eventually, my father quit smoking, and I took up country music.

Some of those songs had insinuated themselves in my head, no matter how hard I’d tried to hate them. I knew every word to “I Will Always Love You” long before Whitney Houston had a monster hit with the song in 1992. My father played Dolly Parton’s original – and superior – version all the time. And to this day, “He’ll Have to Go” grabs me the second Jim Reeves croons that sad-but-hopeful opening line: “Put your sweet lips a little closer to the phone ….”

When I was a senior in high school – taller and leaner now, but with my bangs still flopping in my eyes – my parents bought me my first stereo, at Macy’s. The speakers were so bulky they barely fit in the trunk of our ’76 Grand Prix – a slightly more reliable vehicle than the Ford Ranger.

I set up the equipment in my bedroom, underneath a poster of U2 in which Bono had a mullet as grand as his band’s sound.  

Finally, my own stereo, to play whatever records I wanted, whenever I wanted (more about the “whenever” part in a minute.) I thought about having a sign made to hang alongside Bono’s mullet:  NO COUNTRY ALLOWED.

Back then, the main supplier for my music fix was a grocery store. I worked after school as a bagger at the local ShopRite, which had a small display aisle of LPs, located, God knows why, near the meat counter. The LPs were leftovers; I never figured out if the pork loin was, too.

I’d spend a good chunk of my meager paycheck on albums by The Stones, Dire Straits, The Cars and AC/DC. Then I’d lie on the floor in my room and spin those records through the night, until the banging started. My father was on the other side of the wall, a critic expressing himself with his fist.

It was a game of attrition: I’d lower the volume a few notches; he’d stop pounding on the wall. I’d crank the volume back up when I thought he’d given up. But, then the banging started again. Eventually I invested in a set of headphones that cost me a week’s paycheck. A small price to pay to save the plaster on our walls.

On to college, and my tastes shifted again.

R.E.M and the Replacements might have been winking a little when they did it, but even they embraced country music, which seemed as incongruous for college-rock bands in the mid-’80s as wearing a plaid tie with a checkered suit (although that’s how the Replacements normally dressed.).

Were these bands – whose every move I followed well before the Internet made it possible to find out at any given moment what color socks they were wearing  – saying it was okay to like country even if you loved punk rock? Maybe honky-tonk had seeped into their heads the same way it had wormed itself into mine, from hearing those old records played over and over again.

I started to think I should give country a chance, maybe sit down and have a drink or two with it, listen to what it had to say.

It took a little while longer for that meeting to happen, and it finally took place thanks to Steve Earle.

In 1995, Earle, recently released from jail on drug charges but now sober and on the comeback trail, was playing the Philadelphia Folk Festival. A local paper ran a feature in advance of his appearance. I had no idea who this tough-looking guy with the long hair and beard was, but the article mentioned that in the mid ’80s, he’d played shows with the Replacements.

That was all I needed to know. I hustled to my favorite music store and bought a copy of Earle’s new, acoustic album, “Train A’ Comin’.”  I figured I’d just ignore the “country” parts.

Earle’s attitude, which was just as punk as anything I listened to, grabbed me immediately. A true music fan, he wasn’t afraid to let other genres seep into his own music. On “Train A’ Comin’” there’s a song by the Beatles and reggae, and they seemed to get along together pretty well.

What did this album teach me? Not to be a musical segregationist, because a good song is good song, whether it’s a country weeper or a sparkling, three-minute pop tune.

So maybe this country stuff wasn’t rotgut after all. Around this time, Johnny Cash had a career resurgence with a series of albums that introduced – or in my case, reintroduced – his music to a lot of people who didn’t know him from Johnny Paycheck.

Hearing Cash’s music with different, older ears led me back to his earlier albums, like “At Folsom Prison.”

Like Earle’s music, Cash’ deep, ominous baritone straddled the divide I’d created in my mind between punk and country.

Was it possible my old man had much better taste in music than I’d ever thought?

After digging a little deeper, I decided Merle Haggard and Waylon Jennings were really rock ’n’ rollers in black cowboy hats.

This revelation was the end – or maybe it was the beginning – of a circuitous route, one started by my father. In that damned green truck, with the sour-smelling cigars.

“Daddy, play that ‘workin’ man’ song again.”

I almost had to ask my 7-year-old to repeat himself. On a road trip, we had been listening to Merle Haggard. When the song “Workin’ Man Blues” finished, Ryan, his blonde hair hanging in his eyes like mine used to, demanded an encore.

I’m not sure what made the song stick in his brain. It’s catchy for sure, and throughout the song, there’s repeated sound of a triangle, meant to replicate the clang of a laborer’s hammer.

It’s easy to connect with a song about blue-collar life when you’re an adult, but what does a kid know about drinking beer in taverns to wash away the memory of another hard shift at the factory?

Whatever it was, the song spoke to him in the same way Elvis’ music spoke to my father, and Steve Earle’s music spoke to me.

In the case of my father and I, Elvis and Earle’s songs spoke for us, with a confidence we couldn’t always muster on our own. After listening to Earle sing, “I wanna know what’s over that rainbow ….” for the thousandth time, I had to find out if there really was a world outside the place I grew up.

I’m still trying to figure that out. And now I have Waylon, Merle, Steve, and a bunch of their rowdy friends along for the ride.
Tim Zatzariny Jr., a lifelong resident of South Jersey, is a regional editor for Patch.com. He also teaches writing at his alma mater, Rowan University. His short story, "Nails," appears in the The Best of Philadelphia Stories: Volume 2. His fiction has also appeared in Thieves Jargon. Tim is at work on his first novel, set in his hometown of Vineland, N.J.

 

           "A ghost isn’t alive. Not in the way we think of something being alive." My son Evan stands in the middle of our kitchen as I rinse the dinner plates.

            "What’s it like then?" I ask. Our kitchen is small, and every trip to the stove, sink, or refrigerator requires sidestepping him. I slide a cellophane-wrapped bowl onto the fridge’s bottom shelf. Evan waits, planted in the room’s strategic center. His eyes are wide, his fingers twining. My knee complains when I stand up. "I mean if it’s not really alive but already dead, what is it?"

            "It’s more like an echo," he says. His fingers etch tremulous waves in the air. "An echo of the way the person was and what they did. But it’s an echo that moves and does things on its own."

            I return to the dishes. "Should I be scared if I see one?"

            "No. Most people are scared, but that’s just because they don’t understand."

            Another trip to the stove, but instead of brushing past, I pick up my son and sit him on the counter. He is eight, and sometimes I grow nostalgic for his toddler’s weight and our celling-scraping games of Superman. "So how are ghosts formed?" I ask.

            I return to the dishes. In the dark window above the sink, our faint reflections, mine close, my son’s over my shoulder. "Ghosts are born when you die." His sneakered heels tap the cabinet beneath. Evan raises his hands above his head. "And when you die, the chemicals in your brain fizzle out and make the ghost." He lowers his hands into his lap. "What do you think of that, Daddy?"

             The left behind. Few experiences approach its gut-punch intensity. Study the child not picked to play. Study the mother hugging the deploying soldier. Study the faces of the dying and those who love them. The left behind understand the weight of absence, an empty measure that defies physics but  burdens the heart. The water runs over the silverware clenched in my hand. I turn, and, from atop his counter perch, my son smiles expectantly Is his recent obsession with ghosts simply a boyish fascination with all things spooky and bizarre? Or is this his first grappling with the question of what happens when a soul is forsaken by its fleshy home?

            I turn off the water. "Daddy," he says, "do you think ghosts are real?"

            "I have my doubts." I dry my hands and pick up the day’s mail stack from the counter. "But I’m interested to hear what you think."

            I flip through the bills and catalogues until I come upon a letter for me. The[img_assist|nid=7831|title=Fall Hillside – Pennsylvania by B.J. Burton© 2011|desc=|link=node|align=right|width=250|height=335] past week has been a blur-work, my boy’s birthday party, Halloween shenanigans, hockey and karate practices-and only when I check the return address do I recall the awkward phone call that triggered the envelope’s arrival.

            I slide out the contents, a formal letter printed on hospital stationary and a pamphlet. On the pamphlet’s cover, a drawing of an oak branch, a ribbon tied at its base. I open the pamphlet and skim the details of what happens to a body donated to the hospital’s medical research program. My son launches into a monologue detailing the actions ghosts are and aren’t capable of.

*

            Evan and I sit on the living room floor. Before us, sheets of white paper, colorful sketches of planes and tanks, explosions rendered in dreamy hues. My knee momentarily locks as I reposition myself. "So how do ghosts behave?"

            His marker squeaks over his latest creation. "They behave like the people they were before. If you were a helpful person, your ghost will be helpful. If you were mean, your ghost will be mean."

            "Does everyone get a ghost?"

            "Only if they want." He examines the smeared colors on his fingers. "A ghost is a memorial your body gives itself." He shrugs and returns to his drawing, his nose inches from the paper. "At least that’s what I think."           

            I jog across the street to avoid the well-dressed crowd exiting a neighborhood church. Leaves skitter along the curb, the sky above gray. A cool mist hangs in the air. A few months ago, a doctor diagnosed my meniscus tear. Some days are better than others, but this morning, I’m hobbled, a choppy stride that mars what little grace I still possess. A young runner hustles by, and the gap between us quickly widens. I nod a pained hello to an old woman who clutches an umbrella in one hand and a bible in the other.

            The hospital’s signed forms wait on my desk. I could have mailed them yesterday or this morning, but I’ve hesitated. I always knew I didn’t want to be buried, the confinement of casket and grave as unsettling than death itself. Cremation, with its elements of fire and reduction, had always appealed to me on a practical and, more importantly, an aesthetic level. Breeze and water would carry my ashes, the carbon-laced flecks destined to mesh into the all and everything of this life. Then my father died, and I received a crash course in the business of dying. Cremation, even in its simplest form, cost thousands. Aesthetics yielded to practicality, and I could not justify wasting the manna of one life upon another.

            So I researched. I called. I filled out the necessary forms. Witnesses signed. Soon I will mail the letter; the notion has already achieved critical mass in my mind. I just need a day or two to make peace with the harvesting of my skin and eyes, with my ashes buried in a nameless plot. I think of my body-this sensual filter, the first-person frame for all I’ve known and been-laying gutted beneath harsh lights, a butchering by curious strangers, my bad knee poked over by tomorrow’s surgeons. It’s not so much these thoughts but their origins of vanity and possession and the fear of the left behind that vex me as I gimp to a stop in front of my house and catch my breath.

            "Do you believe in angels?" I ask.

            "No." My son strikes the pose of his latest karate kata. "I don’t believe in angels, devils, goblins, or elves." He executes his first gyrations of punches and blocks. "I’ve seen a ghost, you know."

            "Really? What was it like?"

            "It was tiny. Like a little white flare. It was in my room." Evan pivots and kicks. "I think it was a baby that didn’t get to be born."

*

            I’ve been reading the bible. I’m not a religious man, yet I desire to better understand what is important to so many. I’ve slogged my way through the archaic language, the detailed lineages, the Gospels’ redundancy. In return, I’ve been rewarded with an appreciation for both the book’s power and its status as a touchstone of literature. I feel for the plights of Pilate and Judas. My heart aches for Jesus’ sufferings and for his acceptance of what must be. I struggle with the raising of the dead, but I find solace in the metaphor of faith triumphant.

            Where I balk is with the notion of what follows one’s last breath. Paradise for the believer, the unquenchable fire for all others. If not believing is a sin, then I know which flock is mine. As one of the left behind, I will gaze upon the heaven-bound riding sunbeams into the sky. Despite my conviction that what awaits is, at best, beyond my comprehension, I experience the same hesitation I did picturing my picked-over carcass in a med school lab. When I die, I will be left behind in body, and if I am wrong about religion, also in spirit. Despite its logic-defying roots, this notion haunts me, leaving me with my own thoughts of ghosts and what may be.

            My wife helps dress our son. I don a sweatshirt, a knit cap. Cap gun in hand, my boy breaks free, a one-shoed romp to the kitchen and back. "Yippee!" he cries. The gun clicks with each trigger squeeze. My wife corrals him on his next pass, and Evan acquiesces to her demands to finish dressing.

            We set out for our nightly walk, a mile or so through hushed suburban streets. A few Halloween decorations remain, paper skeletons hanging on doors, pumpkins in various stages of rot. Stars shine above. From our mouths, the steam of warm air hitting cold. The envelope in hand, we navigate a slight deviation in our route, but the mailbox I’d expected is missing. For a moment, I question my memory; then I spot the four concrete footings in the grass. I wonder how long the box has been gone and why hadn’t I noticed before. Evan takes my hand. "Daddy, I’ve been thinking about ghosts again."

           

            My brother and I pick through our parents’ garage. On the way here, I finally mailed the letter, a journey that will put my name on a list, a plan of action that will remain dormant until my death. The day is bright and chilly. Outside the garage door leaves lift and swirl on a vortex of captured wind. Last night we turned back the clocks, and soon the early evening darkness, the beginning of the second winter since my father’s death.

            Three piles mark the oil-stained concrete-one for my brother, one for me, and by far the largest, the items destined to go. My father harbored a fondness for hardware and gadgets, and we come across lock deicers and circuit testers. Fuses in ancient tins. A floor jack. Assorted clamps. Pipe cutters. Sockets and light switches.

            I pick up a hand drill. The years have tarnished the metal, the wooden handle smoothed by my father’s grip. The drill fascinated me as a child. In our basement, I bored holes in scrap wood, pleased by the drill’s bite and the sawdust that scattered with a puff from my lips. I consider the drill a final time before dropping it in the scrap pile.

            Our mother appears. She offers us water and thanks us again. Earlier, she broached the subject of moving to a retirement community, and I imagine a near future where strangers will live in this house. Yes, we agree, sensing the loneliness she tries to suppress. She quietly dreads the approaching winter, the memories of last year’s blizzards and drifts still vivid. She misses my father in many ways, but perhaps none greater than as a sharer of burdens both mundane and overwhelming.

            Bundled in a hat and vest, my son joins us. I keep an eye on him, wary of the rusty razor blades that litter the shelves. Evan retrieves the hand drill. Kneeling, I explain how the tool works, the transfer of one type of motion to another. I open the chuck and allow him to insert a drill. His gyrations produce a creaky tune unsung all these years. By his side, I consider the shelves, the paint cans and spackling tubs, the tool kits unexplored. Too much has been left to sift through in one day. I picture the hour-long car ride ahead and the darkness that waits our return. I turn to my son. "Up for a game of kickball?"

            We’re joined by my wife and my brother, a playing field claimed in the leaf-speckled yard. Bases are fashioned with wrench-anchored plastic bags. The ball, red and rubbery, produces a happy twang with each kick. There are shouts, laughter, good-natured taunts. With only two to a side, the base paths become populated by imaginary runners, ghosts who help tally the score.

            I roll a pitch to my waiting son. I will never know what waits ahead; I will never know anything beyond the fact that one by one, we will leave each other. Evan kicks, and the ball sails into the air. My wife and brother cheer. Perhaps this is a taste of the believer’s heaven, a place of happiness, a place where one is surrounded by those he loves and is comfortable within his skin. I give chase to the ball, my knee’s pain a mere inconvenience today. My boy sprints by, whooping with joy, a blur upon the base path.

Curtis Smith is the author of the story collections Bad Monkey and The Species Crown and the novels Sound and Noise and Truth or Something Like It. His most recent book is Witness, a collection of essays.

[img_assist|nid=7423|title=Self-Contained by Suzanne Comer© 2011|desc=|link=node|align=right|width=250|height=321]“You guys are gonna be late,” Mom said as she cleared the dinner table. Neither Dad nor I answered even though we’d heard her just fine. We also knew our time constraints, just like we did for every Phillies home game. In all the years my dad and I had been going to games at the Vet, I don’t think we ever saw the first inning.

Instead, we always picked up the bass-drenched voice of Harry Kalas as we motored down Route 42 in one of the many assorted Ford Tauruses my dad drove as company cars over the years. We liked it that way.

I’d have my glove on my lap and we’d pop a couple pieces of Doublemint gum into our mouths and talk about how crappy Steve Jeltz had played the week before or how pathetic Steve Bedrosian looked coming out of the pen. We’d laugh as Whitey and Harry the “K” dropped playful banter over the airwaves. We’d plan our post-game festivities, usually a much-anticipated trip to Pop’s Water Ice where we’d double park along Oregon Avenue, me with a small chocolate and Dad with a cup of lemon (both of us munching on pretzel rods). And, we’d soak in the warmth of summer along with the last few drops of baseball for the evening.

At the park, we’d file in somewhere near the middle of the second inning and find our seats in section 325 next to my uncle. Then my father and uncle would teach me everything I ever wanted to know about the game. It was the most wonderful session of summer school you could imagine.

“See, Frank,” Dad would say. “Runner at the corners and no outs, the infield will play the corners in.”

“Corners in?” I’d ask quizzically, munching on peanuts and tossing the shells on the beer-stained pavement under our seats.

“Yep. That means the first and third basemen will play up and the middle infielders back.”

“How come?”

“Well, if it’s hit up the middle they’ll turn a double play. If it’s hit to the corners they’ll try to nab the guy at the plate.” I’d nod and stuff huge wads of blue cotton candy into my mouth. The lessons always sank in, whether I was busy eating or obsessing over catching foul balls.

On most occasions the entire game flew by without a foul ball coming anywhere near us. After all, our seats were pretty good. Right behind the plate, and in the lower level, which meant a pesky screen blocked just about any ball hit even remotely in our direction. Whatever did make it over the screen usually came in the form of a screaming line drive that was liable to take your head off. Dad found this out the hard way a few years prior when he stuck a bare hand in the path of one of those screamers and watched it ricochet a full fifteen rows in front of him as his paw ballooned to twice its normal size.

Regardless, I still found it necessary to bring my glove just in case the rare chance presented itself. One glorious night, my suspicions paid off. Darren Daulton was at the plate and we were lulled into comfort by the wondrous chatter inside Veteran’s Stadium –“You bum!”, “You guys suck!”– when an awkward crack of the bat brought us to our senses. A frozen rope shot back in our direction like a laser beam.

Nobody in our section had the presence of mind to react, except for a guy at the end of our row toting a six dollar beer. His presence of mind, however, may have been   stunted when it came to unhanding his brew.  The whizzing dart of a line drive slugged him directly in the beer mug. Suds splashed all over his shirt and the ball dashed down the row behind us with a few hollow thuds.

It camped under a cadre of old ladies who seemed afraid to react. Being the consummate gentleman, I did the only thing I could think of. I dove behind my seat and nabbed that baseball right out from under those geezers.  I held it up triumphantly as if I’d snagged the liner one-handed. Everyone cheered because I was a little kid and they thought my exuberance was cute. Otherwise they would have booed me right out of the stadium.

As I was enjoying my moment in the spotlight, a curious thing happened. I dropped the ball. It took one long bounce before it trickled two or three rows in front of me. I couldn’t believe it. I’d just ruined the first chance I’d ever had at a foul ball. Probably the only chance I’d ever have. Disgusted, I buried my face in my hands. I didn’t want to face the game or my father or my uncle or any of the fans in my section that I’d let down. But when I finally lifted my head from mourning, something even more amazing had occurred. There was Dad, smiling and holding the ball between his thumb and forefinger.

“You lose something?” he asked. 

That may have been the first time I dropped the ball, but it wasn’t the last time Dad was there to pick it up.

C.G. Morelli grew up in the Philadelphia area and now lives somewhere in the back woods of Carolina. His work has appeared in Highlights for Children (winner of a 2010 AEP Award), Chicken Soup for the Soul, Ghostlight Magazine, Land more. He is the author of a short story collection titled In the Pen (2007).