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In the Golden Hour, Cormorants

We first noticed the cormorant late afternoon,

the golden hour just before dusk,

black feathers and kinked neck,

a thin hooked bill, perched

on a piling facing the house as though

watching the oxygen tanks unloaded

from the back of a truck, the wheelchair

we carried up the front stairs.

 

The next day there were more,

diving deep beneath the docks, feeding

for hours before coming to rest

one after another on pilings

until every one was taken.

A silent chorus, in their black robes,

and as the time we’d been given

shortened to a few days they offered comfort,

 

a belief that as long as they stayed

she wouldn’t die, even as she refused

pudding, sweet tea, turned her face to the wall

as we moistened her lips with a wet cloth.

The last day was quiet, the water still

until her final breath when wind

suddenly kicked up. I watched

as they rose in unison, heading south

as though ushering her away.

 

I wished them safe harbor.

I wish them safe return.

Poet, teacher, and editor, Cheryl Baldi is the author of The Shapelessness of Water and a former Pennsylvania Poet Laureate. A finalist for the Robert Fraser Award for Poetry and the Francis Locke Memorial Award, she is widely published, most recently in ONE ART: a journal for poetry. She volunteers for the Bucks County Poet Laureate Program and the Arts and Cultural Council and lives in Doylestown, PA and along the coast in New Jersey.

An Interview with Michael Brix, Executive Director of Tree House Books

From left to right, Jonathan Kemmerer-Scovner poses with Michael Brix,
Executive Director of Tree House Books.

by Jonathan Kemmerer-Scovner

I came to the edge of Broad Street, Temple University at my back, then crossed from one world to the next. It was an unseasonably hot and sunny afternoon. Down Susquehanna Avenue, a group of people were browsing through a small cart filled with books and I knew I was headed in the right direction.

I walked through the front door and into a small space overflowing with books, tall shelves which lined the walls. Salman Rushdie and Philip Roth immediately jumped out at me and I flipped through Goodbye, Columbus while in the room next door, a teacher helped children with their reading.

I put the book back just as Michael Brix, Executive Director of Tree House Books, came down to meet me.

Do you remember the first book you read that made you love reading?

The Chronicles of Narnia. My mom read that to us before bedtime. That’s always my go-to answer for that question.

I also loved the Beverly Cleary series with Beezus and Ramona, as I was also a pest. And I read a not insignificant amount of Hardy Boys mysteries that had been my father’s.

Coming down here, I realized I still think of you primarily as the head of the Yes! And… theater camp, even though that’s been five years ago now.

Yeah, that was actually the second nonprofit I’d founded. The first was The Simple Way, a community in Kensington that deals with direct relief, taking people to the hospital, providing food and clothing… It was out of that organization that the idea for a theater camp grew, because we’d partnered with UrbanPromise in Camden and a few other organizations to run a summer theater program for kids. So Yes! And…, as we called it, spun off into its own nonprofit, and that’s what I did for the next 20 years.

The entire time, however, I knew that if Yes! And… was going to continue, it needed to have different leadership that would allow it to grow beyond its founders. That was always the hope. So we worked at raising someone up internally, while at the same time I’d begun looking for different opportunities.

That’s when I found Tree House, which fit my skillset perfectly.

In what way?

All the work I’ve done in my life has had social justice as its focus. The Simple Way did it one way, Yes! And… did it a different way, and with Tree House Books, literacy is the focus. All of those things are very much connected, and that was the core reason why I felt comfortable coming here, because it spoke to that passion. The passion for social justice, and the passion for community.

For example, when we talk about expansion opportunities, we’re not talking about taking the Tree House model and bringing it to West Philly or some other neighborhood. No, we’re talking about how to grow deeper roots right here in this community, here in North Philly. That idea resonated with the leadership here, so, like it or not, that’s what they were getting with me.

How long was Tree House Books around before you came on board?

Since 2005. It was the brainchild of folks from the Church of the Advocate, a community staple here in North Philly. At the time, the Church of the Advocate had a Community Development Corp given to it by the city of Philadelphia. They wanted to use it to invest specifically in this corridor of Susquehanna Avenue.

So at the beginning, it was just a used bookstore, but then neighborhood kids started coming in and hanging out, and they developed an after-school program. They purchased the building next door and outfitted that storefront, which is where we now do our K-8 and teen programs, and all of our summer camps.

The Church of the Advocate had quickly realized that a used bookstore just wasn’t the economic engine they thought it would be. It would have closed really quickly if they’d kept it going, so they wisely pivoted to this nonprofit model, and all the classes and other activities grew organically out of the relationships between the bookstore and the people in the neighborhood.

But it’s still such a great space for a used bookstore, I see a lot of my favorite writers. I can tell just from a glance that you manage the selection seriously.

 Absolutely. We have books for children, teens and adults, and back behind us, there’s a section focused on African-American literacy – black authors, black characters, black stories – because that’s what serves this neighborhood. We want to make sure that we’re constantly stocking and featuring those titles. That’s something that we feel sets us apart.

That, and also the fact that all the books are free.

And when did you… Wait, what?

All the books in here that you see, everything on our shelves, it’s all free.

People can just come in here and take whatever books they want?

Absolutely. All told, we distribute about 88,000 free books a year. But that’s not just through this space. We also have bookshelves in area rec centers, apartment complexes and other places. We then go around on a regular basis, restocking and refreshing as needed.

Then there’s our bookmobile, the Traveling Tree House, which makes over 20 stops a week at daycares and festivals, Smith playground… they just park somewhere and put up a sign that says FREE BOOKS!

We have so many different programs, like Words on Wheels, wherein we deliver new books right to kid’s homes three times throughout the summer. Then there’s our online Book of the Month Club that people can sign up and read along with Kai. Last month, she was able to do an Instagram live interview with the author of the book, so it’s really fun and engaging.

Also, once a year, we have an event that we call Philadelphia Literacy Day, which is a whole street festival. We close down the block, invite a bunch of authors to come out and sign their books, which we then give away.

So this whole neighborhood is just overflowing with books.

One of the coolest things about this organization is that it grows just by listening to the needs of the neighborhood, but our primary mission is to ensure that people have books in their homes.

I often reference this 2019 article from Social Science Research Journal entitled “Scholarly culture: How books in adolescence enhance adult literacy, numeracy and technology skills in 31 societies.” It shows that, globally, children who are around books show an increase in their overall literacy rates, which then impacts other learning metrics.

So there have to be books in the homes that kids are interacting with. In this neighborhood, that just wasn’t necessarily the case. The impetus then became to make that happen.

Where do the books come from?

All sorts of sources, book drives, individuals, organizations, local authors… People can buy new books from our wish lists at local bookstores, kids’ books at Harriett’s and adult books from Uncle Bobbie’s. Books and Stuff, which used to have a brick and mortar store in Germantown, has also been a good partner, as well as Hachette and Quirk Books, which also bears fruit in the form of book donations. We always try to stay local, though, and away from Amazon.

We’re a part of Read by 4th, which is the overarching literacy collective in Philly, but we’re most closely related to the Book Bank, and they’re awesome. They get a lot of books out to teachers and other professionals, to help build their classrooms. They operate out of Martin Luther King Jr. High School, and Anne’s been doing that work for years, it’s a passion project of hers. I love what they do and how they do it.

So once we get the books, we then weed out any badly treated ones. As I said, we’re careful about curating books that our community needs and wants. For example, when the Traveling Tree House goes to neighborhoods that are primarily Spanish-speaking, then we need to be able to feature Spanish language books.

That’s great that you’re partnering with so many local bookstores. It seems like some of them might be upset that you’re essentially giving away the merchandise.

It’s definitely something that I stress out about, but in general, I think book lovers are a special breed of people and they get what we’re doing. We’re part of the Philly Bookstore Map Project, and I told them, we’re not really like the rest of you, but almost all of them understand that we’re mostly serving just this neighborhood. We’re not out to undercut anyone, and sometimes we can even help out.

For example, if people want to buy us new books, we have a special online-store set up through Harriet’s. She holds on to those books, which we then pick up and give away. That’s a way we can divest from Amazon and support a local business at the same time.

Wow, that’s really smart.

A lot of the stuff we do is organic. It really comes from the passions of the staff. The Book Swap festivals, for example, were my Managing Director of Programming’s brainchild. We do four of those a year, people bring books to swap, and there’s a DJ, sidewalk games, vendors… It started out as just this great pilot idea, and now it’s a major part of what we do.

But ultimately, as I said, what makes us really unique is that we’re here in North Philly. We may have all these connections and support initiatives all throughout the city, but our community outreach is located right here.

Are there plans to keep expanding?

I can’t reveal too much, but we’re looking to renovate a property in this neighborhood that we’ll be able to move into, and our hope is that we’ll then be able to serve as many as three times the amount of people than we do now.

The people I’m working with in terms of fundraising are telling me that we’re in our silent phase, which is ridiculous, because I can’t stop talking about it.

Tree House Books is located at 1430 W. Susquehanna Ave. They can be reached at 215-236-1760 and info@treehousebooks.org. Click here to donate!

The Care and Keeping of Roomba

We did not set out to be overtaken by robots.

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

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

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

 

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

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

“Fine, but what if it gets the dog?”

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

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

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

“Why can’t we just sweep the house?”

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

“I’ll give it a week,” he conceded.

 

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

“Do you hear that?!” I whispered.

“Holy shit someone’s in the house.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Goddamnit,” said Zach.

 

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

“No…” I implored. “… It didn’t.”

“Oh, it most certainly did.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Coming Loose

After running errands all morning, I collapse with a hundred grocery bags in front of the fridge like one of those deflated wind socks at a car dealership. All I’ve eaten today is coffee. My husband texts me, “Just paid the credit card bill. We didn’t save any money this month because of you.” He’s already done five cases today. I’m throwing out spoiled leftovers, juggling cartons of broth, wondering if I have time to return those silky dresses I bought impulsively when I broke my mom-parole last week. I look around at the kitchen. Soggy Cheerios and Pokemon cards with gnawed corners, junk mail, a blizzard of paper cutouts under stools, stained tulip petals arching their backs in a vase, poised to fall.

I shed my coat, unpeel my scarf like a bandage that’s holding my head in place. I radiate with static electricity and eight years of power-mothering. My whole life feels like static cling. My kids, my husband, the house. I just want to douse it. I want to bathe and wake up new. A Bond babe exiting the ocean. Glistening, refreshed. To need nothing. Just a bikini. My life, reduced to triangles.

Am I invisible if I never talk to anyone? If I go days conversing only with my kids and Debbie at the hardware store? Am I the sum total of my past experiences or the heartbeat of my burning desires? Where do I stuff all the longing?

I catch my reflection in the oven hood. I see a dried artichoke. Or one of those clothing storage bags where you vacuum out the air. I should have done hard labor, something with chemical steam or bamboo hacking, plucking of body hair, chicken sexing, the moving of boulders in a quarry. I’m well-suited for that kind of work. I don’t mind gross, heavy, practically impossible. Meanwhile, the years pile up. I survive on toast nubs and apple skins. I French braid my daughter’s hair with a toothbrush in my mouth and a compost bucket dangling from my wrist. I sit with my kids during every piano lesson. My vagina dries up from underuse. I have this determination, this grit, this maniacal worker-bee mentality. I mean, my kids are worth it for sure, but what’s the point? I must love it, right?

I lie down belly-up on the kitchen floor with an oven mitt over my face. When I close my eyes all I see is a jellyfish. One of those Portuguese Man-o-wars. I see its sail— this turquoise bubble, no bigger than a dumpling in the vast blue. It’s completely weighted down with poisonous ribbons and coils. Half of it lives on the surface, looking at the sky and wanting to be free, the other half submerged in water with these zooids and polyps that feed it and help it reproduce and colonize inside it. It can’t escape, it’s tethered, even though it wants to fly away like a teal balloon.

When I was younger, my parents said I could do anything. Anything.

The beep of the dishwasher snaps life back into focus. I stand up, gather my high voltage hair into a bun to get serious about chores, but hang on a minute, there’s something in my hair, something dry and spongy. What is that? A chunk of hair? I grab hold of it, run to the bathroom mirror. It’s a dreadlock, a mat—like the kind our childhood dog Jake the Newfie would get in the summer, and we’d have to pound at him with a metal rake. All that time he spent under the deck in the dark. Poor mutt actually liked the attention, the cool metal through his fur. I go cross-eyed trying to examine the knot, try to pull it apart like taffy. No way in hell. It’s half my head. It has its own weather system. A thick tornado of hair with a hard, unforgiving lanyard texture that has birthed itself at the base of my scalp. How did this happen?

I jump in the shower with a bottle of Pantene Conditioner and a comb. I rip and tease and brush and pull and tear and slather, but the knot’s not coming loose. In fact, I think it’s getting tighter and closer to my scalp. It’s more than hair at this point. It’s a relentless bundle of needs. It’s a flaxen rope that auto-braided and won’t stop. It’s a bundle of jellyfish tentacles coiling and reaching two hundred feet into the depth of the sea. After twenty minutes I get out, dripping and hunched in the cavern of our bathroom. I google “shaved head haircuts for women.” Smother the knot in coconut oil. Google “How to get a matt out.” Attack it with satay skewers. I break all of them. Google “hair extensions, Philadelphia.” I grab a scissor, poised, ready. Its jaws open wide. Stop. Stop. Wait. Think.

I toss the scissors into the sink with a clatter. Google “therapist on the Main Line, Philadelphia.” Soggy and defeated, I suddenly remember this hairdresser Megan told me about. Kyle. Yes. She has his cell number. Maybe he can help? He can help! He wants a picture. I turn around and take a selfie of my back with the nest of hair. “Help! I’m tangled.”

“Yea sure. Come in Sunday morning. Nice back,” he says. Wink emoji.

I review the picture I sent him. Did I just send a half-nude picture to a stranger? It’s my bare back. I’m horrified. But also delighted? A straight hairdresser? Cha-ching! I always secretly liked my posterior deltoid.

Sunday. I beg my husband to watch the kids even though he’s on call and passive-aggressive-work-texting while I spin around the kitchen like a top wiping down counters. “Our kids can’t have their mom walking around bald, right?” I say to him. “Yea ok, go, but keep your phone on at all times,” he says. “Of course,” I reply. The kids whine, Can we watch TV? They’re heavy breathing and squealing as they build a couch fort with seven hundred blankets.

That’s my cue. I’m so excited to ditch today. I feel like I haven’t left the house alone since my kids were born, plus the Covid years, so basically a decade. Sometimes I can sneak off to CVS alone or get a relaxing bikini wax if my husband is between calls. And while the kids are at school, I can take exercise classes or sub at the elementary school, write a poem between 2pm and 3pm, but other than that, I always have between one and three humans with me. I know what you’re thinking. Get a nanny! A million nannies, right? But I’m a masochist, like I told you. Or I fell so far down a well of homemaking I can’t climb my way out. I’m out of practice. I wear the same shirt three days in a row. I’m what they call “too far gone” or as my husband says, I’m “doing great.” I can’t justify my free-time over mom-time or imagine anyone else driving my daughter to violin, positioning her fingers on the bow, cooking them all dinner, even if it’s eggs. I can’t imagine missing the exchange of all the subtleties of kid-talk at the kitchen counter. I want to take care of them. I love them. I just can’t find anything to grab hold of in this churning ocean (except for wine) and my surgeon husband might as well live on another planet. I step on the gas, blast electronic dance music, and try to become someone cool and relaxed. I pop on my shades and change lanes and change lanes again.

I show up at Kyle’s salon and it’s silent, save for a vague rush of wind. Kyle’s svelte assistant Suki takes my coat. I’m on the twelfth floor of a skyscraper in downtown Philadelphia and everything is sleek and minimal, concrete, white. I hear my own footsteps. The most delicious sound. No one else is here. Did he come in specially for me? I sit in front of the vanity mirror and for some reason the marquee light bulbs around the mirror make even me look gorgeous right now, like I’m the guest of honor at the Great Gatsby’s party and not a housewife from Gladwyne smelling of pancakes. I’m already feeling great about coming. Kyle emerges. “Woah, what did you do?” he chuckles, starts tousling the hair that isn’t a nebula. I feel his fingers on my scalp. My hair in his hands. I go limp, immediately get goosebumps.

“Don’t worry, I’ll get this out.”

“You will?”

“Yea babe, you’re gonna be fine. Lauren? Nice to meet you.”

“You too,” I say.

I silence my phone, take a deep breath, sink into the leather of the chair.

“Lookin’ good mama,” he says, making eye contact with me in the mirror and fastening the cape around me. Is he really talking to me? Babe? Mama? The jellyfish inside me reels something up with a tentacle, drops it down again to dangle. Kyle. His eyes are black and his body movements, so fluid. He’s covered in tattoos, long hair. Something inside me ungulates with a warm current. He’s holding my hair in his hands. He smells like cigarettes, expensive soap, leather. One of the tattoos visible through his ripped v-neck seems to reach for me like a crown of thorns blooming into roses. I’ve completely forgotten about the knot and possible baldness. I’m seeing lightning bolts. I’m imagining his hands all over my body. I’m imagining how we will have to break the news to our families about how we’ve fallen in love and are running off to Bali together. I’m imagining finishing my novel in a bikini with him kissing my bare neck from behind. I’m imagining beads of ocean water on my bare stomach and my life as a perfume ad. He is the opposite of my husband and the suburbs and everything I hate about getting old, used, flattened, forgotten.

“Bourbon?” He asks. You seem tense.”

“This early?” I laugh.

“Why not mama?”

“Ok,” I say, “Sure.” Suki brings it to me. I take a sip and it coats all of my ravines instantly in honey and smoke.

Two hours later. We’ve talked about everything. New York apartments we had, dive bars we got wasted in, leather jackets we loved, bookstores that got bulldozed, how we ended up where we are in life against our will with lots of hand gesturing. Polish poets and borscht in Greenpoint, 917 area codes we’ll take to the grave. That Moroccan club Le Souk on 3rd and B. We miss Barneys, American Apparel, Schillers. We hate bankers, lawyers, doctors, Mormons, cops, Facebook. Life. We miss the Nokia age. We love food. Bloody steaks and strong cocktails. We love sex. We get really worked up and jaded and it feels amazing. His shoes dance around my body like I’m a trophy. His voice is gravel-y and seductive. His hands are fast and strong, his eyes are intense. The little nicks on the inside of his pointer fingers-the unexpected stab of a scissor point-excite me. He picks and pulls my hair with the patience of a monk. The knot is coming loose. It smells like all the coconut.

It’s love at first sight, right? Has to be. I can’t believe how perfect we are for each other. I don’t know how Kyle’s gonna to break it to his gorgeous Italian wife that he is in love with one of his clients and I can’t wait for the sexting to come. What to do about the kids? We’ll have to alternate weekends or… But it doesn’t matter. I’m so exhilarated I start chewing on the ice cubes to calm me down. His apartment probably has a view of the skyline and is dark and chocolatey and he will undress me on his Italian sofa. We will eat brunch lazily all the next day and walk arm in arm and his tattoos and my hair flip will get us into every restaurant and club. This could be good for me. My husband won’t have to know. He won’t even suspect! I’m somehow certain that leading a double life is the answer to my problems. I nurse the fantasy, sucking it up like the last drops of the Bulleit bourbon. The knot is almost loose.

Thirty minutes later, Kyle is done. The knot is out. My heart is cruising down a slip n slide.

“Wow, thank you so much,” I say, and he rips the cape off me like a matador. I stand up, hike up my pants, stretch and arch my spine.

“I’ll check you out over here,” he says. I follow his ass and his Kurt Cobain mane across the room and away to a smoky bar, an exotic island, between my legs— and I decide I’m going to go buy him a present. To thank him. To keep this going. To sting him with one of my Man-o-war tentacles and reduce him to a scaly husk.

“Hey, I need to run to the Chase to grab a better tip for you. Stay here, will you?” I say. I can’t wait to see him waiting for me in one of the spinny chairs. Lit up only by the lights of skyscrapers. Suki will have gone home by then and I’ll have him all to myself.

“Hey, all good Laur, you don’t have to. Next time,” he says with his sultry actor voice. “Or Venmo.”

“No, but I want to Kyle. I’ll be right back. Wait for me, k?” I text my husband: He still needs another hour at least. Sorry. Be home soon.

Twenty minutes later, I pop out of the elevator with gold-dusted rocks glasses in a gift bag and a bottle of bourbon, a blank note. I’m out of breath. I skip towards the salon door and all the pleasure and excitement. I can hear my heart beating. I lick my lips and turn the corner, reach out to delicious diversion. To something outside my boring life, to someone who thinks I’m hot, cool, interesting, worth untangling a hair-knot for with a single-tooth comb for hours, all that stroking and yanking and laughing. Hang on excitement! Here I come life!

The salon is pitch black. Door locked. Very locked.

All I hear is the hum of a distant light bulb, impossible to locate or silence in the vast hallway. My heart sinks into my boots. I think about all the pillow talk. I see myself in the glass. I get a text that my parking is about to expire. The jellyfish sail deflates briefly to dodge a flotilla of water bottles, then back into the ultraviolet and endlessness.

I think about leaving the gift bag at the door with a note. Hey Kyle!— but I don’t have a pen and I. Just can’t. I get it now.

I touch the place where the knot lived. It aches. As if it’s still there and always will be, this thick rope of hair with children and minivans attached to it— my husband, me at the bottom of the well holding them up as I climb, trying to vacuum the well at the same time. I feel its nucleus pulsating, tender at my skull base now. Is it combed out or is it back? Has it entered into my brain vessels now?

What do you want to give the kids for dinner tonight? My husband texts.

I don’t even know anymore I write, then delete.

I look into the dark salon for hidden shapes…a few more seconds…I smell all the exotic products and silkiness. I could bring the booze home? But I don’t really want my husband asking questions about bourbon and fancy glasses, money wasted. I bolt. Press down on the elevator.

Downstairs is a dazed doorman in front of six TV screens. “Here,” I say. “Want this?” I let go of the gift bag into his hands, keep walking.

The glasses rubbing together in the bag is the most embarrassing noise I’ve ever heard.

**

I drive home in the icy slap of winter in Gladwyne, PA. For the first time ever, I wish for traffic, but there is none. I’m home.

I try to come in quietly, but there’s no point. The house is loud and bright, the kitchen full of squeals and spoons clanking, pencils being sharpened. A paper airplane hits me in the head. My husband’s made lentil soup and the kids are slurping it up like cats. The smell of parsley gives me some freshly-hacked hope. The kitchen is a familiar disaster. “Hi Mommy!” everyone says, including my husband. I watch him swirl around a storm of lentils hectically fighting against the current, then dropping to the bottom of the pot. A glass of wine appears.

“How’s your hair babe? You look beautiful,” He ladles me soup, surprisingly chipper.

“My hair is good,” I tell everyone, letting my daughter touch its silkiness with broth hands as I take a seat at the counter and try the soup. My husband gives me a napkin and a kiss, a tiny kiss that’s kind of stupid and tight-lipped like a butthole, but I tell myself it’s a step in the right direction. I think about the stupid bourbon glasses I bought and the conversation with Kyle, the butterflies I felt and get a dreamy and agonized look in my eye while I slurp. My husband smiles at me and I tell him the soup is hot and that’s why I’m tearing up. I let him hug me, look at me, coat me with his gaze. His brown eyes plant roots that reach out through my entire body like firing synapses, blood, sweat and the past ten years. It’s true, he’s an idiot— clueless, messy, self-absorbed—all men are— but his eyes have always leveled me with a single gaze. Maybe I do love him? I could try again? After winter comes spring kinda thing? I take a deep breath, blow the soup, and taste it, letting the fantasy of today trickle down my throat and get absorbed into the mom chronicles. I’ll delete Kyle’s number I tell myself. Tomorrow.

Cassie writes poetry, fiction, and essays. Her work has appeared in Rattle, Cleaver, New Ohio Review, Cagibi, Sad Girls and The Good Life Review, among others. She studies with the poet Phil Schultz at the Writers Studio, based in New York.

All the Places I’ll Never See

I was a townie. She was a college girl picking up weekend shifts at the diner. She told me I wouldn’t believe what textbooks cost. She told me about her semester abroad, the cathedrals and battlefields. A dig where she unearthed a coin from the days of Augustus. Histories so deep she felt them. “Right here,” she said, a hand laid over her heart. Our first kiss behind the alley dumpster after we lugged out the night’s trash. Her watermelon gum pinched from between her lips and stuck to the dumpster’s metal. She smiled, then—as she drew closer—another expression, one that made me forget the cold. I’d been kissed before, but only by town girls. Kisses that didn’t taste like watermelon. Kisses that—beneath their wetness and curiosity—carried a hint of the earth we shared. Our tangled roots. The graveyards littered with the stones of our kin.

“Show me the things I’ve never seen,” she said. So, we hiked to the cave where another generation’s bootleggers hid their stash. I introduced her to the Grange’s demolition derby, which she loved, and the rod-and-gun club’s tripe, which she didn’t. Along the river’s muddy bank, we dug for arrowheads. We never found any, but she didn’t mind. The thrill, she said, was in the searching. In the forgetting of a hundred thousand disappointments—and in the belief something beautiful might be waiting just beyond her next breath.

The windows in her attic apartment rattled when the winds blew in from the fields. Cocooned beneath every blanket she owned, feeling more weight than warmth, we wove hazy narratives of a life beyond this town. The places she wanted to see. Pompeii. Easter Island. Machu Picchu. The languages she spoke and the others she was learning. The parents who’d always bail her out with a plane ticket home. Sometimes, as she slept, I flipped through her books. History. World religions. The blur of margin notes and highlighted passages. And sometimes I wrapped a blanket over my shoulders and sat by the window. My forehead resting against the cold glass while the snow buried everything I knew.

She left of course. That’s what travelers do. They board planes. They drive into the sunset, and when they look back, their windows become frames, pictures of what once was. I’ve been with other girls since, but in my unclaimed moments, I think of her, a paper doll posed before a thousand imagined lives, each shinier than mine.

Summer brings its heat and storms and the county fair, and come August, as the nights’ thrum ebbs from the cicadas to the crickets, the students return. The highlight of that first weekend is the freshman walk. The cops block off Main Street, and the shops hand out their merch, and the guides stop at their designated spots to share local folklore. The band plays the alma mater and the fight song, and the drumline’s jagged pulse echoes along the brick and glass.

I laze by the diner window, watching the girls, my eyes losing focus the way they do when I sit along the sun-dappled river. The manager tells me to quit my daydreaming and take out the trash. Heat from the alley’s macadam, the rush of flies when I open the dumpster’s lid, but after I toss in my bags, I pause. On the dumpster’s side, her gum, a fossil dulled by sun and rain, and when I touch its ridges, I think about all the places I’ll never see. And I think about a first kiss and a taste I believed was watermelon, but which was really goodbye.

Curtis Smith grew up in Ardmore. He has published over 125 stories and essays and thirteen books. His latest novel, The Magpie’s Return, was named a Kirkus Indie pick of the year in 2020. His next novel, The Lost and the Blind, will be released this fall.