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land and water

Semi;Colon

Essays and Esther Williams

October 14, 2015
Re’Lynn Hansen

In structuring my art, I am always faced with the dilemma: should my words try to organize my thoughts, or should my words be sculpted into new forms, new poetics of the page, including images and video clips that would mimic the many digressions that exist in my mind? Should my paragraphs even look like paragraphs? Or couldn’t I embed video clips or photos in my essays?

These questions about form occurred again to me recently—on a day when I was writing about my experience with breast cancer. I realized that my day of researching new immunotherapies at Mayo and Cleveland Clinics had been interrupted by a few hours of watching television. There was an Esther Williams marathon on the TCM channel. I became entranced by the synchronized swimming schematics and the elaborate planning it must have taken to get one hundred women in a tank with Esther Williams who rose above them, somehow, on a rope, that winched her up to her diving platform. From this diving platform, she dove back into the circle of women—with her mermaid crown still on. Amazing. I abandoned cancer research for the day and began to Google everything I could about Esther Williams. I found she had broken her neck filming this scene. The mermaid crown was too heavy and had snapped her head back when she entered the water. But in that grand Hollywood tradition she had managed to continue swimming while the film ran. I decided that when I wrote about my experiences with cancer, it would have to include my day with Esther Williams. At first she was merely an escape. But as it turned out, she was a role model for crazy-style persistence.

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Essays

Marc Frazier

September 22, 2017

Land and Water

As a child I heard corn grow and now everything is noise.

Through the floor-to-ceiling glass here by the Atlantic, palms sway as they were made to. Blue Daze and Lantana creep onto pathways and the sun comes out from behind clouds.

How I got here: Transplants from a less open region, my ancestors could not fathom such endlessness. They were hypnotized by perpetually open space, wind sounds, the drone of insects, even silence. Prairie madness was a phenomenon some pioneers, mostly women, experienced.

I’ve known a land of corn and soybeans stretching up mile after mile, a land of horizon where someone must prove the world is not flat.

Like my parents, I was born and still live my life in Illinois, the Prairie State, where less than one percent of original grassland remains. Some has been, and is being, restored, but once an ocean of grasses spread below sky. A world without echo. The wildness of grassland needed to be domesticated.

We could not live with it.

The grasses have long ago been torn from earth, cracking and popping with the rip of blade. Before corn, there were miles of root structures attached to the grasses and flowers of the tall grass prairie—an ocean of bluegrass, wave upon wave as far as one could see.

We made the land habitable. Much of what makes us human is the struggle to understand how we do, or do not, fit in with our environment. Those with prairie madness could not make this space at home in their psyches. Each day they turned over the richest soil on earth with moldboard plows, and, later, John Deere’s.

The first fields of the world’s future breadbasket.

But the vastness and solitude were too wide for the inner self to manage.

My whole brood suffered from some form of prairie madness. Similar to the once-vast grassland, something in us needed to be domesticated. The Prairie State: a land of land where nothing lives for beauty except wildflowers—glimmers of hope on what is vast and flat—the colors of marigold, daisy, cornflower.

The lack of water in my youth was not my destiny after all. I discovered the great Atlantic. It is mostly sunny and warm here. Forms like iguanas and manatees replace miles of green crops.

Growing up in the landlocked fields of the Midwest, a river was the largest body of water. We would swim in hollowed-out gravel pits filled with water. Here there’s a tide that breathes freedom from the pit’s boundaries. I have discovered the ultimate dimension, the Big Mind, of water.

I sit on the long deck and watch boats and ships whiz by, sleek and contemporary, tall-mast and small, watch the giant drawbridge raise and lower, feel the heat I longed for in Northern winters.

Buddhism has taught me that waves are not the same as water, the ultimate dimension. I sit in meditation to connect with this dimension, another form of God, this element of water.

My exhausted mother used to ask, “What have I done to deserve all this?” I sit and breathe in “all this” and breathe out mindfulness or something close to it.

At my father’s wake, his sister and the funeral director got in a disagreement about which mystery of the rosary should be said. Should it be the sorrowful mystery or the joyful mystery? This signified to me how anyone looks at life, and death, as sorrowful or joyful.

Here they dim or shut off streetlights near the beach during turtle nesting season. On land or water you can find the concerned.

Marc Frazier has widely published poetry in journals including The Spoon River Poetry Review, ACM, Good Men Project, f(r)iction, The Gay and Lesbian Review (forthcoming), Slant, Permafrost, Plainsongs, and Poet Lore. He has had memoir from his book WITHOUT published in Gravel, The Good Men Project, decomP, Autre Cobalt Magazine and Evening Street Review and Punctuate (forthcoming). He is the recipient of an Illinois Arts Council Award for poetry and has been featured on Verse Daily. His book The Way Here and his two chapbooks are available on Amazon as well as his second full-length collection titled Each Thing Touches (Glass Lyre Press) that has garnered numerous favorable reviews. His website is www.marcfrazier.org

Essays

Karen Bell

May 16, 2020

Reclaiming the Body

 

Touch has a memory. O say, love, say,
What can I do to kill it and be free?

—John Keats 

Identifying Triggers

In a small gym in the hills of Pennsylvania, I stand barefoot on a filthy red mat with my arms folded, and watch sensei Nick, my crusty, tattooed, war-vet jujutsu instructor, demonstrate a sickle sweep on my tiny partner, Ruby, imagine a Scandinavian Audrey Hepburn with a metal rod in her back for scoliosis. A black belt in the art of aikido, Ruby can level a 200-pound man to the floor with a carefully timed pivot and a flick of the wrist.

Nick, who looks like he never left the service with his bulldog build, military fade, and the resting face of an Easter Island head, lounges on his back with Ruby standing over him.  He explains, “You want to have a good prop on your partner, with one foot on her hip.”

As a nervous green belt, I never remember anything he says. Thankfully, both Nick and Ruby are very patient. Mid demonstration, Nick launches into a story, one foot poised to take Ruby’s leg out from under her. During the lull, one of my other classmates, a tall, solid, lumbersexual young man, Quinn, throws his arms around my shoulders from behind. “Show me what you’ve got.”

In a clumsy response, I drop to my knees and try to roll him. He makes a compliant groan, rolls over top of me, then jumps back to his feet and returns to working with his partner.

Quinn’s unexpected touch pulls a submerged memory from the bottom of my brain. I take a deep breath to keep my body in the room. But the trigger sets off a chain reaction of physical responses. A tactile memory from three years ago diffuses through my organs like a drop of ink into a glass of water. My brain seizes, heart pounds, stomach cramps, and I feel the fear of those about to drown, a rush in my ears, an arm around my neck, teeth sinking into my face, a hand pulling at my waistband.

 

I look at Nick, who is on his feet, and I give a slight shake of the head.

He says, “Hey Quinn, I need to talk to you for a second.”

I flee leave the room to run cold water on my wrists until my vision clears, until the visceral memory of the other man’s touch leaves my skin, until I am back in my body standing in an empty gym bathroom.

I return to the mat where Nick is waiting with punching pads on his hands. “She’s back. Proud of you.”

By the end of class, I want to tell Nick I’m going to quit. I’m deep in the bones exhausted from frequent nightmares. There are faster, easier ways to ground than mindfully practicing martial arts. Some people drink, snort, smoke, split open, turn on themselves or others. My habit is to turn inward. I sit on the mat while Ruby shows us our last move of the day and struggle against the fantasy of releasing endorphins by carving lines into my wrist with a box-cutter.

 

Cognitive Processing Therapy for PTSD

I went to my first jujutsuclass with gentle encouragement from my therapist. All my other ideas for coping and recovery were terrible. Our conversation went something like this.

“What if I have sex with a bunch of men?” I asked, fixing my eyes on the Banksy poster on my therapist’s wall. “I read an article where someone tried hook-ups as empowerment.”

My therapist folded her hands in her lap and raised an eyebrow. “Definitely not; it sounds exhausting. Part of recovery is managing these physical and emotional flashbacks and being able to live in the present. Have you tried any of the other grounding exercises? Using rubber bands or grabbing ice cubes? That shock can help your brain reset.”

I nodded. “Can’t I get a lobotomy?”

My therapist shook her head.

The memory of assault frequently hijacked my brain, so we had been reviewing it in small pieces by going through the Cognitive Processing Therapy for PTSD manualby Patricia A. Resick, Candice M. Monson, and Kathleen M. Chard. This process involved examining my beliefs about five often overlapping areas impacted by trauma: trust, safety, esteem, power, and intimacy, and how I have gotten “stuck” in unhealthy thoughts that keep me from healing.

She said, “You mentioned wanting to feel empowered. Would you be willing to try martial arts? A class might help you work through those aspects of your life impacted by trauma.”

I didn’t like making eye contact with waiters, doctors, sometimes my own students. Hugs from behind gave me flashbacks, close proximity with men, even gentle men, made me uncomfortable. How could I survive a martial arts class?

 

Trust: Patient examines trust beliefs related to the self and others and works on developing a balance of trust and mistrust.

 

When I googled jujutsu, some of my fears were confirmed. Unfortunately, there are psychological and physical risks to looking for exposure therapy on the mat. The sport requires mutual vulnerability and trust. Students need to be able to fall over and over again, navigate between legs and arms and groins, and be able to wrap arms around each other’s waists and necks. Some students take advantage of this close proximity. According to Jiu-Jitsu TimesandLadies Only BJJ, sexual harassment is common in some martial arts classes. Women and men have reported being physically and verbally harassed, from inappropriate jokes to “accidental” groping.

Averi Clements, writing for the Jiu-Jitsu Times, describes how when female students come forward with stories of harassment, they are often told: “Stop being so sensitive,” “you should feel flattered by the attention,” or “boys will be boys.” If a coach is unwilling to help, Clements’ advice is to leave the gym; when an instructor isn’t willing to put student safety first, get out. Some schools do take the extra proactive steps to make women feel safe and supported. Clements visited Pride Lands BJJ Academy in Monaca, Pennsylvania where the black belt teacher, Lou Armezzani, arranged the gym so that women were never changing in front of men, and men were not allowed to be shirtless in front of female students.

It’s the instructor’s job to make sure students feel like they are able to voice concerns, and instructors should be clear where they stand on sexual harassment; behavior that dehumanizes others will not be accepted on the mat. Clements adds a piece of advice to potential perverts, “If you’re one of the people who thinks it’s okay to treat your training partners like pieces of meat, kindly get the **** out of this sport.”

 

I stepped on the mat to reclaim my body, to make what Bessel A. van der Kolk, M.D. describes as the brain-body connection. Subjection to further harassment in what would become one of my safe spaces would be incredibly damaging —if my classmates betrayed the trust I put in them, I would plunge down another self-mutilation spiral. But I needn’t have worried.

On my first day of class, I told Nick, a two-tour combat medic in Afghanistan, that I had no prior experience with martial arts, only an intense fear of being touched. I knew anxiety was normal for a white-belt, but I warned Nick and Ruby that my brain responded unpredictably to touch. Nick understood.

“I don’t need details,” he said. “You’re in safe hands.”

Nick introduced me to my classmates and affectionately described his students as “the island of lost toys,” a hodgepodge of “rednecks, wrestlers, knuckle-draggers,” lumberjacks, good people with twisted senses of humor, broken and bent in all the right ways. I learned later that everyone in the room had a reason to be there: one student was recovering from child abuse, one had deep physical trauma from illness, and the instructor was teaching to protect us from his own past, one of war and degradation.

As I sat on the mat and stared at the thin silver scars on my wrist, Nick explained that he takes his role very seriously, plans for the worst-case scenario with every lesson, and makes sure that students have a useful self-defense move after the first practice that’s a balance of efficiency and economy of motion.

After the class warmup, Nick broke students into pairs. I worked with Ruby, who showed me a basic wrist lock. While Ruby enflamed the tendons on my arm by turning my wrist one direction and my elbow another, Nick explained that, “The goal is to expose you to a variety of techniques to bring out your natural abilities. Everything we teach should be adaptable to every shape and size that walks through the door, and the body type that you will become. I started as a kid and now here I am with busted hips and a shoulder with a three-year life expectancy.”

“A broken old man!” cried his protégée student, Quinn, from the far corner of the mat.

Nick gave him the side eye. “Experience is all you will have left because everything else goes to shit.  Come here, Quinn. I want to show something.” Nick squared off with the young man and said, “We also want all the moves to be immediately practical. In a situation where confrontation is inevitable, get in, get out, and get home safe. Let’s say you leave here tonight and get jumped by some juggernaut.” He demonstrated a simple elbow lock on Quinn, getting the baseball grip on the wrist and putting his full weight on Quinn’s elbow for control. He took Quinn to the floor where the young man tapped out. Nick looked up at me. “I want you to leave here with something.”

After the first practice, the class claimed me.

 

I keep returning to the mat even though the process of mindful grounding is incredibly difficult, harder than graduate school, teaching freshman composition, or standing up in court to describe the man who attacked me. In the following months, Nick proved to be uniquely empathetic to my diagnosis of PTSD and sensitive to positions that I might find triggering. He never touched me without warning, and both he and Ruby developed an awareness of when I needed breaks from certain moves, sometimes even before I knew it myself (i.e. my glazed expression as a sign of internal collapse).

 

Safety: Patient examines beliefs about other people’s intentions to threaten or harm.

 

I didn’t start practicing martial arts because of Hollywood fight scenes, the prospect of winning competitions, or earning belts; I attended class because I wanted to sleep without nightmares, and I wanted to feel safer in my own skin. I was diagnosed with PTSD a few years ago after surviving, among other things, a sexual assault in southern India. I didn’t know I had changed until I came home and had a panic attack in my small hometown grocery store where I ran into a childhood friend’s mother. When she asked about India, I felt a wash of terror and a rush in my ears.

After that encounter, I started staying inside, cloistered. Avoidance of triggers that remind me of my trauma, feeling emotionally cauterized while simultaneously hyperalert, are common symptoms of PTSD. Because I was separately molested by a stranger and later by someone I trusted, I have deep fears that I will be attacked at any time by anyone, male or female, intimate friend or stranger; for a long time, these fears kept me from activities I once enjoyed, like travel and dancing in dive bars.

Many of my “stuck points” or unhealthy beliefs about my trauma, are related to my feelings of safety. My body often tells me I am unsafe, unsafe when a stranger sits next to me in a movie theater, unsafe with a student comes suddenly into my office to ask a question about grammar. I fear someone at an airport will bite me, someone will sneak into my house during the day and hide out in my attic to murder me at night, a catcaller escalating verbal harassment into sexual violence.

When I describe fears to my therapist, she always asks, “Those are all possible scenarios, but are they likely?”

We’ve discussed the likelihood of a man hiding in the attic all day; he would fall asleep on a pile of bat poop or get distracted by old memorabilia; we’ve imagined the likelihood of someone biting me in an airport, the place where everyone is suicidally exhausted.

Cognitive Processing Therapy for PTSD manual explains that because I grew up believing I was safe, the sudden disruption of this belief leads to social withdrawal, deep anxiety, persistent hyperarousal, and invasive fears of revictimization. Part of me believes the false statements that the world is dangerous everywhere and that all people will try to harm me, but jujutsuis teaching me how to resolve these beliefs, to accept that I can’t control future traumatic events, and to have confidence in my own abilities to manage my reactions.

 

I knew from attending therapy that there was no quick way to heal from trauma, but when I started attending jujutsuclasses, I was hopeful about the ability of martial arts training to lower the invasive impact of PTSD. Research backed up my optimism. University of Southern Florida researchers Alison Willing et. al. in 2019 conducted a study on veterans who trained at Tampa Jiu Jitsu. The researchers don’t claim jujutsucures, but they show that grappling on the mat is a way to manage symptoms; training might be a “complimentary treatment” to cognitive behavior therapy and medication. I look at practice as a supplement. Pills + therapy + jujutsuhelp me feel safer in my own body.

The recent study of Tampa Jiu Jitsu veteran-students echoes earlier studies published by University of Washington researchers David, Simpson, and Cotton, in their article for the Journal of Interpersonal Violence. They conducted a 36-hour “therapeutic self-defense curriculum” for 12 female veterans with PTSD. This crash course included elements of exposure and behavioral therapy. Six months later, the participants reported feeling less anxious and depressed. While the women’s hyperawareness and fear of re-traumatization didn’t change, the participants were better able to identify real threats.

 

From fall to winter, I made slow steady progress. I developed a higher tolerance for close encounters because I was forced to confront my avoidance coping mechanisms. When I first stepped on the mat with several loud, excited, young men, my gut reaction was to flee, but with repeated exposure therapy my brain adjusted to the guffawing, wrestling, intimate contact with people sweating enough to leave puddles on the floor.

A test to this feeling of safety came when Nick suggested that I start to work more with male students. No, I thought. Definitely not.

But during one class, Ruby was unable to get me to tap on an ankle lock, so Nick stepped in. “If I may?”

In a matter of a few seconds, his knee briefly slid near my groin as he adjusted into a scissor position. He took my leg and put it under his armpit while resting one foot on my hip to keep me from moving, his other foot under my thigh. With the blade of his forearm under my Achilles tendon, he rotated his body. But I was gone. I had the flash sensation of being on my back in a bed with broken springs. I didn’t tap out to signal him to stop the move until two pops exploded from my ankle. A spark of pain brought me back from that other place. I shouted “uncle” and started to laugh, delighted to be back in the room.

He pulled away from me and was on his feet, pacing. “What the fuck? Why didn’t you tap out?” He took a breath. “I need a cigarette.”

When he came back into the room, I was sitting on the floor in the corner watching the other students practice a stick drill.

Nick sat down next to me. “Hell. What a pair we make.”

“Trigger loop. You triggered me then I triggered you.”

“I felt your ankle give, and it gave me a flashback from the field.” He sighed and said quietly, “I hoped I wouldn’t trigger you, that you would feel safe with me.”

“Everyone triggers me. It’s not personal.”

“I know. It’s no more personal than what your ankle popping did to my brain. But I still hoped I’d be the exception. We’ll get through this together, though. You okay now?

Sharing this understanding of trauma with Nick, a man with fifty years of trauma, is comforting. Nick reminds me that PTSD has nothing to do with my size or gender.

I am triggered every class, but I never feel unsafe.

 

Esteem: Patient examines sense of worth. Being heard, valued, and taken seriously is basic to the development of self-esteem.

 

I learn in therapy that if individuals had positive beliefs about the self pre-trauma, they might struggle with shame and possible self-destructive behavior after a trauma. Sometimes my brain believes that I attracted trauma and that I deserve the resulting collateral damage to my sense of self. The good news is, jujutsuchallenges my sense of self every time I step on the mat.

When I finally execute a move I thought impossible to master, I’m slowly cultivating confidence in a body I often feel detached from.

 

My reasons for practicingjujutsuare similar to what inspired women during the Progressive Era. In the early 20thcentury, attacks against women increased as many shifted from the home to the workforce. Author and historian Wendy L. Rouse describes how immigrants and minorities were blamed for sexual violence as unfair scapegoats; women were and still are, often attacked by men they know. At the turn of the century, attacks were common in larger cities, but one woman, Wilma Berger, made the news for fighting back.

In 1909, 21-year-old Berger flipped a grown man over her shoulder and escaped from his choke-hold. Later, when the police doubted her story, she performed the move in the station for them. She believed all women should have the ability and the right to walk the streets unmolested, so she offered to teach others. Stories like Berger’s sparked the feminist origins of the self-defense movement.

As jujutsuclasses became more popular, first with the wealthy and then as an art that crossed class boundaries, critics grumbled. In her article, Rouse describes the many cultural and social objections to women studying martial arts: not only were women defying traditional gender stereotypes of the “weaker sex,” some critics said women “would become masculine through training” and that women’s bodies were not designed for aggression (although ju jitsu is Japanese for “the art of gentleness”). These objections were covers for the real concern that women’s physical independence might lead to demands for social and political freedoms. Despite these objections, women continued to practice self-defense for practical reasons. Many also felt a growing sense of confidence in their own physical power and right over their own bodies.

 

The process of rediscovering confidence in my body seems so slow that I am not always able to measure it. But during one class at the end of December, Nick told the class to line up. He presented me with a green belt and said, “I haven’t been this excited about a belt in a long time, probably more excited than you.”

I thought I didn’t care about leveling up, but the physical, vibrant representation of progress almost made me cry.

 

Power and Control: Patient examines beliefs of being able to meet challenges or control events.

 

My therapist explains that if I grew up believing that I had some control over events, the sudden shattering of that belief leads to internal emotional shutdown, repression, chronic passivity, depression, and self-destructive patterns. One false belief associated with this area is the idea that my trauma might not have happened if I had been in better control. Again, martial arts in an excellent way for me to learn that I don’t have total control, but I can have some control over my reaction to events.

 

Political and social dissonance in recent American politics regarding women’s bodies (#metoo movement and changing laws regarding abortion) has inspired more women than ever to practice martial arts as a way to feel what writer Catherine Lacey describes as the “empowerment principle.” She explains in one article for Voguethat women are on the mat not to lose weight but to find ways to cope with anxiety and depression. Lacey cites Sally Winston, Psy.D., a psychologist and codirector of the Anxiety and Stress Disorders Institute of Maryland, that martial arts offers women a chance to go “toward aggression rather than toward inhibition.” The mat is appealing, Lacey explains, because it’s a space for women to “enact a power they already possess.”

My trauma brain might try to convince me that I’m fragile, but the mat is a constructive place to act my persistent feelings of powerlessness. For example, when a man I hoped to never hear from again sent me a message on social media that triggered a chain reaction of rage and shame, I found peace in class. A year ago, I would have carved red lines into my wrist to stop flashbacks from hijacking my brain. But now stepping on the mat and throwing a few punches at broken-nose BOB (body opponent bag) helps. This freedom of sanctioned aggression in jujutsu, at least in my interior life, is liberating.

 

At the end of April, Ruby announced that she would be offering an aikido course in the fall. I didn’t know if the art would be a good fit for me. Her graceful fighting style requires a high level of precision that takes years to master. Nick said it might be “a little too flash and pop” for me. “You just want to punch people and throw them to the ground.”

I was able to attend a seminar with Ruby and other class members to watch her practice and to learn more about the peaceful philosophy behind aikido. It wasn’t until I attended that seminar that I developed a clearer idea of what I needed out of martial arts.

During the seminar, I sat on a bench in the host dojo to watch Ruby and another classmate train with the other seminar attendees. A framed quote by Morihei Ueshiba, author of aikido, hung on the wall of the dojo: “To injure an opponent is to injure yourself. To control aggression without inflicting injury is aikido.” The guest sensei for the seminar lit incense on the kamiza and lead the class in a quick mediation to connect with earth and air. The class warmed up; then she showed them a few moves with weapons. Partners bowed to their weapons each time the “blades” were passed back and forth. If the sensei paused from her rounds in the room to offer individual instruction, the rest of the class stopped what they were doing and dropped to their knees out of respect. This was a sharp contrast to Nick’s “dog pound school for miscreants,” as he affectionately called it.

When the seminar attendees took a morning break, I asked some of them why they chose aikido. One woman explained how karate kept her from responding to conflict by degrees. “It’s all punching, but aikido gives me a choice of how to respond. I don’t need to use the same level of force with everyone.”

Like jujutsu, aikido uses a “blending” technique between partners but doesn’t involve strikes. The art is almost like dancing and requires trusting your partner to lead and direct you across the mat. This ability to anticipate and react to a partner’s movement is called ukemi in Japanese. Good ukemi means the ability to receive directions, from being wind-milled across the floor by your partner’s arm or the ability to arc backwards into a fall.

Blending with an aggressor, turning physically and emotionally to see his or her point of view with self-restraint, almost sounds like empathy. This takes a leap of the imagination I’m not able to make yet. I do not want to blend.  At least not today. While I look forward to the point in my healing process when I’ll be able to study the art, I currently lack the discipline, balance, nuanced and impeccable timing, and the head space. Aikido is for the long haul, a lifestyle, an elegant and occasionally theoretical approach to self-defense, but I need something today to help me with my nightly flashbacks.

 

Intimacy: Patient examines beliefs related to emotional needs, works on the ability to monitor strong emotions without self-harming and develops emotional connections with new people.

 

In discussions with my therapist, I learned that this area goes deeper than just romantic or sexual relationships and relates to my fears of never being able to connect with anyone again. Stuck points related to intimacy also include fears of being alone and an inability to self-monitor emotions. This lack of internal control inspires me to look for outside comfort, like the “maladaptive coping mechanism” of self-harming.

My ability to “self-soothe” was often put to the test after difficult practices on the mat. Even after six months of training, the class was a constant balance of fight, flight, or collapse. When class started doing over-the-shoulder throws and choke-holds, my brain sent me back to the street in India. I left class with an incubus on my shoulder.

When I got home the night of Quinn’s surprise hug, I sat on the edge of my bed and debated the merits of cutting. Nick knew the practice had been difficult and sent me a message. “You’ve found a way to be courageous without turning into something frightening. It’s one of the bravest things I’ve ever seen.”

No blades or blood. I took a deep breath and went to sleep.

But later in the week, I cut line after line and watched red beads form.

Discouraged, I asked my therapist for advice. I told her that I hadn’t had such vivid nightmares since I got back from India.

I described the recurring nightmare as if observing the action from the back of an auditorium. “I am walking home at night. The man on the red Royal Enfield drives past. Around the corner…” I stopped, feeling sick but able to breath my brain back from that dark street and ground in the corner of my therapist’s office, which was bathed in warm light and smelled like vanilla spice.

“How often are you having this nightmare?” she asked.

“Every night for the last couple of weeks.”

“Sometimes our bodies hold memories we think we’ve healed from. You’re putting yourself in triggering positions, so it makes sense that your body might work through those memories when you’re sleeping.”

My therapist sent me home with notes on treating nightmares with imagery scripting. In other words, nightmares are learned behavior, which means we can unlearn them, create new dreams during the day, and rehearse them. I imagined other people waiting for me around that street corner, Ruby in a unicorn onesie or my two-year-old niece extending a half-eaten cheese stick. Eventually, the dreams shifted tone. Instead of sexual violence, I dreamed about being able to escape trauma.

 

My therapist also recommended The Body Keeps the Score by Bessel A. van der Kolk, M. D. The author takes a comprehensive look at the impact of trauma on the body and brain. I particularly related to the sections that focused on survivor disconnection with their own bodies after trauma. Survivors often become fixated on either “dulling” or “seeking” sensations, like cutting, to distract themselves from their pasts.

My therapist asked me to consider which moves were the most triggering for me, and instead of dashing off the mat or quitting class, to wait through the panic. “Maybe next time you’re in class, test your limits and see what you can stand.”

van der Kolk explains contemporary neuroscience has shed light on how “our sense of ourselves is anchored in a vital connection with our bodies.” If survivors are unable to filter physical sensations because we’re trapped in the fugue state of trauma, the “price you pay is that you lose awareness of what is going on inside your body, and, with that, the sense of being fully, sensually alive.”

 

I still wanted to quit class. Instead, the next time I was on the mat with Ruby’s arm wrapped around my neck, I waited for panic to permeate my body; my feet felt the ridges of the practice mat under me, I smelled the perfume she put on earlier that day for her job at a school. On the other side of the classroom, Nick folded his glasses and set them on the table by the door. “Come here Quinn. Let’s throw a wrench into the curriculum.” Nick’s prodigy squared off with him, and Nick had the young man face down on the mat with one sweep of the leg.

“You going to let Nick take you out like that?” asked one of the other older students.

From his horizontal position on the mat, Quinn said, “Nick has his moments. He doesn’t have many left, so I give it to him once and awhile.” He groaned as he sat up. “Who am I kidding? He’ll fucking haunt me from the afterlife one day.”

“You okay?” asked Ruby into my ear. “Do you remember what to do?”

I took a deep breath. The panic of being pulled underwater, running out of air, not being able to touch the ground, passed.

 

____________________
Karen Bell’s work is forthcoming in Catamaran and Verity La and is the recipient of Crab Orchard Review’s John Guyon Literary Nonfiction Prize.

Essays

Michelle Menting

March 10, 2020

Segues Sealed

 

It’s the holiday, but the bird is gone. Breadcrumb stuffing goes on to explore new stomach linings. After the table is cleared, plates scraped, plates stacked, I take the stairs, walk down to the basement floor.

Down there: photographs, webbed and mature, glass shards giving grotesque smiles to hands, knees, proud new car owners, pets in portraits, domesticated in frames—a world of squared wood living familiar with silver garland, heelless shoes, generations of rodent shit. I recognize the license plate my sister removed from her Dodge Daytona, the car that hit that doe the year I turned twelve, the summer my sister promised to take me camping with five of my friends. Intact but still wedged against the Wisconsin aluminum: a photo of silhouettes my sister took of me, those friends, the immense lake in the background. In the scene, mist lingers around lake rocks and tween limbs, the six of us balance-beaming tree logs in water.

We were masts and sails. We dreamt of sailing.

To get to that lake, we had to pile into one car instead of splitting in two (my sister’s car had already split that deer in two). Six friends and our chaperones (my two sisters) in the family Ford Escort, where I sat in back with our bags and played tic-tac-toe with Stacey.

Stacey, who would pile into another car, five years & five teenagers later. Stacey, who would sail through the windshield of that car with those teens that night that fall a mile from my house and weeks from Thanksgiving.

This November I sit in a basement room in the center of a kept world. Rest my chin on my knees. So full and digesting all of it: the boxes of decorations, the stacks of National Geographics my mother collected when she was alive, the jars of sea glass from Lake Superior, the snapshots, the silhouettes. Everything stored in a 12 x 14 cinderblock scrapbook. Like chambers of a clogged heart: all segues sealed at the seams, it seems, and in silence, bursting.

______________________
Michelle Menting’s creative nonfiction has appeared in New South, Bellingham Review, Ocean State Review, Thread, Superstition Review, and Quarter After Eight, among other places. Her most recent collection of poems is Leaves Surface Like Skin (Terrapin Books). She lives in Maine and teaches at the University of Southern Maine.

Essays

Michael Dean Clark

March 10, 2020

Precautionary Tales

One of the strangest side-effects of fatherhood is this: I often find myself in an awkward space where memories of my own childhood injuries mingle uncomfortably with those of my children. Through the prism of memory, mine are anecdotes crafted around the humor of surviving the slings and arrows of games we can no longer play on the playground and the dangers we invented when the adults weren’t looking. Did we really cheat death as a pastime before there were video cameras and social media to document it? It sure felt like it at times.

Conversely, each time I experience the blood and bruises of my children, all I find is a mingled sense of culpability and secondhand pain that feels first and foremost like fault. As a child, I was only responsible for—though rarely with—my own choices. As an adult, my task is to help my kids discover the dual reality that they must be safe but also weather the pain life will inevitably bring or they will end up hiding from what makes that life worth living. Written out, this is such a weirdly impossible task, the finding of some balance between laughing at our pain while validating the tears it creates. And yet, it’s an expectation, one complicated by the fact that childhood injuries hurt everyone involved, not least parents.

I do wonder, though, if there is something to be learned from the laissez-faire child rearing of the 70s and 80s beyond the nostalgia-drenched memes of how much better being a kid felt in those days. Maybe there’s a way of figuring out how today’s model of childhood became so restrictive. Maybe we can see the origins of our self-fulfilling prophetic thinking that made us to create a world where our kids can’t leave the house without a GPS-enabled phone for fear of their being snatched while riding their bikes around the neighborhood.

Or, maybe we’ll discover that regardless of the era, hurt will happen no matter how padded we make the playgrounds and some of us are just more fortunate than others with the fallout when they do. Maybe parenting kids is just another frame of reference through which we experience injury. Maybe we need to learn how to better negotiate those injuries if we’re going to help our children do the same.

*

In the late 70s, my family lived in a double-wide, not-so-mobile home that played the part of a Jiffy Pop in the Southern California heat and was the site of my most singularly ridiculous, self-inflicted injury. Really, it’s quite insignificant, the stuff of limited spatial recognition and fuel for light-hearted family mockery in the years since; a big moment for a four-year-old that became a dinnertime story to remind me of my humanity when I’d get to feeling too good about myself.

Dad pastored a tiny desert church in a tiny desert town called Borrego Springs for those playing at home. Mom worked as a teacher’s aide and drove the school bus to bolster Dad’s salary. We didn’t have much in the way of the material, not even air conditioning, just a swamp cooler exhaling moist air into the narrow hallway running the spine of the trailer. On the hottest nights, my brother, sister, and I would lay like cord wood on the floor directly under the vent, only slightly cooler for having done so. We’d also sleep like this in the back of our enormous brown Ford Gran Torino station wagon on long nighttime car trips. Seat belts were for suckers.

What we did have was a surplus of disposable time and 70’s levels of parental supervision. A caveat: my parents weren’t at all neglectful. They were busy scraping together a living in a town that left us, really, nowhere to go. So, we roamed—a blonde-headed group of kids often assumed to be older than we were—and found ways to amuse ourselves.

By three, I was swimming in the deep end of the pool in our trailer park on my own because learning the heat stroke was my least favorite swimming lesson. Dirt clod fights were common, lasting until someone *accidentally* threw a dust-wrapped rock and *accidentally* hit another kid in the face. Some older kids made a fort out of a small pit just outside the fence line of the park by putting a sheet of plywood over the top of it. This was cool until one guy slid inside and found a snake curled up in the fort, avoiding the same sun he’d hoped to get out from under.

Speaking of snakes, a sidewinder once slithered onto the path I walked from the bus stop to the park’s back gate and chased me all the way there. At least, it felt like that to my kindergarten brain. I’m not sure I’ve ever Usain Bolted faster and I still hate snakes.

Speaking of running, a friend of ours would walk barefoot across the asphalt paths of the trailer park in the dead of summer. Actually, stroll is a better term for what she did, unaffected like her soles were asbestos-coated or layered in callouses so thick they rendered her nerve endings useless. I tried to imitate her once, only to end up sprinting from the shadow of one bush to the next, leaving pieces of skin stuck to the path until I fell into the pool and cried.

Speaking of pain and tears and indigenous desert plant life, that brings me back to my injury. If every rose had its thorn for Brett Michaels, I guess my radio ballad would focus on a metaphorical cactus and its quills. But there’s little love anywhere in this song. And, to quote White Goodman, it’s a metaphor, but it actually happened.

*

“The boy. He fell down.”

I turned to look at Bronwyn, the four-year-old niece of a former high school basketball player I’d coached, and stood up immediately. Her face was slack with terror and the boy she was talking about was Holden. When I looked up across the section of bleachers where they’d been playing tag, I couldn’t find him.

“Where did he fall?”

She pointed to the top corner of the stands and I was running before her arm dropped. The game—alumni players against the current team—went on behind me and the squeal of shoes against the court seemed incredibly loud. At the top row, I turned right and made my way along the cinder block wall, roughly 21 feet air.

I expected to see my son, a small-for-his-age kid given to bursts of uncoordinated daring, lying in the space between the rows. Instead, I found a hole in the bleachers just big enough for a three-and-a-half-year-old to drop through, but only if he didn’t see it coming. Because I didn’t see it coming.

I crouched down and peered into the dark space below, calling his name. I couldn’t see or hear him. He’d been swallowed whole.

*

They really don’t tell cautionary tales these days like they did when I was a kid. Viral hoaxes like eating detergent pods and threats of a school shooting become equally fictional product recalls and even faker congressional committee hearings. In my day, just one kid had to get brain damage from huffing rubber cement fumes or suffocate in a refrigerator while playing hide-and-go-seek and it became an after-school TV movie played at school as a “special presentation,” a “very special” episode of Emergency, and a pithily-sloganed anti-drug campaign triggering systematic mass incarceration disproportionately targeting people of color. Say what you want, but the helicopter parenting of the 70s and 80s was swift, decisive, and most likely done by the Man, man.

Conspicuously absent from those warnings, however, was one regarding the dangers of that unassuming desert porcupine, the dome-shaped cactus. Specifically, the fishhook barrel cactus—ferocactus wislizeni to serious cactus lovers—primarily found in Mexico and from Texas to Arizona. Luckily for me, at least one found the Anza Borrego desert soil outside our trailer hospitable enough to call it home.

Its name is not ironic. Layered in thick spines with a barb-like hook at the end of each, these little bastards are usually left alone by animals looking for the water cacti store inside themselves…animals with more sense than smaller me, it would seem. We had a young, dome-shaped version in our small cactus garden. Yeah, we had a garden of hostile plants. You didn’t? We also had a pet rock on the kitchen counter and a giant wooden fork and spoon hanging from the dining room wall because these things were required in the 70s, along with radar dish-shaped wicker chairs and macramé houseplant hangers. In that spirit, did you really live in the desert if you had no domesticated cacti? Our garden was surrounded by railroad ties that likely would require a warning sign for passers-by in today’s liability climate. Probably should have put one up for me too, not that I’d have paid it much attention.

For most of the time we lived in Borrego, I maintained a generally ambivalent relationship with the various cacti there. Sure, sometimes I grabbed a flat, ear-shaped piece of prickly pear (opuntia) or a spiny grenade-round bulb of jumping cholla (cylindropuntia bigelovii) and threw it at a friend. Jokes that stung were the best kind. But those moments were rare and usually ended in a spanking, so I generally chose to abide by a live and let live philosophy with all quilled plants. I wish that fishhook barrel had paid me the same courtesy.

*

The access panel for the bleachers wasn’t where I remembered. I coached some of the first games played in the that building, years earlier, and was sure I knew where to find it until I got to the bottom of the stands and didn’t. Add that to the list of my failures that night. The gym was almost silent by that point, the game halted, and everyone in the building forming human brackets around the middle of the stands.

“Where’s the panel?!” I shouted to no one in particular and found the answer myself in a gap in the seats 20 feet from me. I had just reached it when my best friend Will, who’d been coaching the current squad in the game, lifted Holden through the open panel and set him prone onto the closest surface. He was dazed and dissolved into tears immediately when I knelt down next to him.

“He’s ok,” Will said. “I think he’s ok.”

I looked Holden over, trying and failing to find any marks or cuts. His pupils looked ok, but I’m not that kind of doctor. His irises were dark enough that their usual difference in color—they are hazel with one greening toward sage and the other a browner shortbread—was washed out. I ruffled his brown hair to see if there were any hidden marks or softness and moved his arms and legs gently. In general, he looked ok, but he was still crying. Hard.

“What hurts?” I asked.

“My back. I hit it. And now everyone’s looking.”

I glanced up to find what felt like every eye in the building trained on us. I also saw the EMT’s pushing through the gym doors. Holden saw them too and cried harder.

*

The punchline: I sat on a cactus shaped, oddly, like the bowl-cut hairstyle my parents were fond of getting ours cut into. I wish there was a cooler set up. Like I was trying to ride our neighbors moped and fell into it. But falling off Dottie’s motorized bike wouldn’t happen until I was six. Maybe I’d feel better if I’d been launched onto it one of the times my eight-years-older brother made it seem like he was going to shove me into something. But Paul was gentler with me than I had any right to expect, especially given that we shared a tiny room and he was often the one who put me back into my top bunk when I’d fall out at night.

Naw. I just wasn’t paying attention. It was hot. I’d been aggressively throwing rocks out into the open desert just beyond our trailer park—excuse me, mobile estates—and was tired. As I remember the moments before touchdown, I was vacillating between getting a drink from the hose and collapsing in the mid-morning sun so I could yell for Mom to bring me one. It must have been a Saturday or late afternoon if she was there to get yelled for.

Collapse won out and I went to sit on one of the railroad ties around the garden, misjudging the distance between me, my intended seat, and my would-be assailant. I often did this as growth spurts and their accompanying spells of clumsiness were common throughout my childhood. Simpler version, I overshot and sat directly on top of that fishhook barrel cactus with all of my four-year-old weight.

The pain was searing and immediate and caused my second mistake, well, third if you count being born, which created the possibility of sitting on a cactus in the first place. In the moment, it felt like my ass was on fire and I stood straight up, tearing several of the hooked quills out of the cactus but not my skin when I did because combining two sharp edges pointing in the opposite directions is a very effective design for keeping fishhooks and cactus spines anchored in the flesh they pierce.

*

Heather picked up on the third ring. She was having coffee with a friend less than a mile from the gym. She was also six months pregnant.

“Holden had an accident. But the good news is he’s conscious.”

“He’s conscious? What happened? Wait, were those sirens I just heard for him?”

Fear crackled in her words. I gave her a quick summary while I held Holden’s hand and the EMTs looked him over. They were more concerned than they might normally have been because a young girl had fallen to her death from a luxury box at a Lakers game earlier that week. I tried to reassure Heather but mostly made things worse.

“I’m on my way.”

By the time she arrived, the paramedics had come to the same conclusion I had. Holden looked ok, but who knew what kind of internal injuries he might have sustained falling from a height equal to more than seven of him. They’d just finished strapping him to a back board and were discussing which hospital would be best for getting x-rays and a second opinion.

“I’m sorry. I should have watched him.”

I looked down and found my daughter next to me. It was the first I’d thought of her since the fall. She was crying, quietly, and I hugged her.

“Oh honey, this isn’t your fault.”

“I’m supposed to help.”

I hugged her again, but I felt the same futile sense of responsibility for his fall. And I’m sure she could tell I did. Not even eight years old yet, and I’d taught her to carry guilt that wasn’t really hers to pick up in the first place.

A few minutes later, an EMT pulled Heather and I aside to ask which one of us would ride with Holden in the helicopter to the hospital.

“A helicopter? Really? Why not an ambulance down the street to Whittier Presbyterian?”

“We need a pediatric trauma center. There are three: L.A. Children’s, Orange County Children’s, and King/Drew. It’ll take a couple hours to get to any of them tonight.”

He was right about the traffic. It was the night before Thanksgiving, which made every freeway a clogged artery. There wasn’t really a discussion. Heather followed his stretcher to an ambulance in front of the building and, for a mere $1,200, they were driven 300 yards to the football field where a life flight landed, scooped them up, and lifted off.

“Where are they being taken?” I asked the same EMT.

“King/Drew.”

I thanked him, made a couple of brief calls to family members who were expecting us to arrive later that night, and then loaded my daughter in the van to head for a hospital known un-ironically as “Killer King,” a knot of dread in my throat.

*

On the list of best moments in my life, lying face down and pincushion up in warm bath water so my mother could pluck cactus quills from my body is conspicuously absent. The hurt and embarrassment merged in the way she kept shaking her head with a mixture of disapproval and lack of surprise at my finding a new and creative way to hurt myself. Every time she plucked out a quill, a shiver of pain ran up my spine and down the backs of my legs, drawing another head shake from her. At dinner that night, it hurt to sit, so I stood at the edge of the table while one of my siblings asked if I had hemorrhoids and everyone else laughed. It was the first of many jokes they’d pull out when the situation warranted, which was often if the frequency of their comments was any indicator.

The cactus, stripped slightly bald in one small section, was unmoved when I went out to look at it the next day. Within a week, I was able to laugh about it all, and in a couple more I’d moved on to only thinking of the episode with mild annoyance. Like most childhood injuries, the acuteness of the moment faded almost immediately while life presented perspective in new and unique pain. There isn’t even a scar to act as a memorial, just the story I’m the only one still telling because I’ve provided my family much better material in the years since.

*

When I was a young reporter just out of college, I carried a note in my wallet at all times. It read, “Under no circumstances am I to be taken to King/Drew for treatment.” As my daughter and I walked through the second set of metal detectors in the lobby of the hospital that night, I tried not to think about that note, or that County was where you went to have the wrong organ taken out or to be forgotten in a hallway while you waited for someone to come check on you. And yet, this is where they’d brought my son, whose condition was a complete unknown given the ban on cell phone use that prevented Heather from calling me.

By the time we reached the emergency room where they were treating Holden, he’d been examined, had an ultrasound that convinced him he was carrying a baby just like his mom, and was waiting for x-rays to confirm that, in fact, he had not been seriously injured in any of the many ways he might have been. A brief overview of those potential injuries avoided:

  • He fell straight down, missing every edge of a hole less than a foot wider than he was;
  • The section of steel bleacher skeleton under where he fell was the narrowest of the structure with bars on all sides creating a space about the size of the hole from fall to floor. He hit none;
  • He landed feet first without breaking a bone, tearing a ligament, or splitting his head open when he toppled over;
  • The fall was so surprising he didn’t tense up, his muscles and joints spreading the impact across his body and limiting damage to any specific place.

In essence, he dropped like a stone but landed like a pad had been placed beneath him, something so close to miraculous I often think of it that way. The kid fell 21 feet and walked away—literally—with a strained muscle in his back and a prescription for rest and painkiller. Of course, the trauma of that kind of fall isn’t always visible and can be more difficult to treat than physical pain.

*

If you look only at the bodily implications, these two incidents led to similar places, though only one had the potential to completely alter a life. This is why we don’t joke about Holden’s fall much, just remember the details and how thankful we are he wasn’t injured more severely. I also feel guilty. For his falling. For my failing.

Despite the fact that he was back to playing a few days after the accident, Holden was different, less sure and less quick to smile. Quieter and smaller, it seemed. Sometimes when I’d pick him up quickly, he’d stiffen against my arms and beg to be set down. I often wonder if his fall plays into the anxiety he carries to this day. Each time I do, the feeling of being unable to see him in the dark space under those bleachers wraps itself in the guilt I feel for all the ways I know I could have been a better parent for him in so many unrelated moments.

I wonder if my parents ever felt this way about my more serious mishaps as a kid. I assume they must have, but maybe not. It was a different time, after all, and parents had different scales to measure their adequacy against. Maybe someday I’ll ask. Holden’s almost 12 as I write this and when I ask him about falling, he tends to brush the subject off. But when he tells me the story, it always begins with these words:

“Do you remember when I fell?”

Those six words shift me from the self-centered act of keeping my own memories to validating some of his most important ones; to help hold present a concrete experience receding into the shadows of his past; to help him tell the story until it feels like it’s his to own. Maybe this is a part I can play in ushering him past the parts still lodged inside of him. Maybe I’m just lodging them more deeply. As a parent, I have no model for this. I’m the teller of my family’s stories and my folks were of the Walk It Off School when it came to getting hurt.

I can’t help but wonder what Holden’s story will include later in life. Will it be a key to his understanding himself or just a story he’s been told so many times he merely thinks he’s remembering it as his own? There’s really no way to know, even as these are the questions I think most parents end up asking themselves at one time or another.

 

_____________________
Michael Dean Clark is an author of fiction, literary essays, and occasionally poetry. Most recently his work has appeared in The Jabberwock Review, The Other Journal, Pleiades, Hoosier Lit, and Angel City Review, among others. Formerly an award-winning journalist, Clark is also the co-editor of the collections Creative Writing in the Digital Age and Creative Writing Innovations (Bloomsbury Academic). Follow him on Twitter at @MDeanClark or Instagram at @mdeanclark.

Essays

Kent Jacobson

December 16, 2019

I Set a Fire

 

I don’t know why I set the fire. I haven’t wanted to think about it since. Though I know what I joked for years afterward— “We had to find that baseball didn’t we?” Like I’d been one more dopey kid.

It was a brutal July day that summer of 1955, not far from the ocean, and a too long bike ride away from the center of our small Rhode Island mill-town. I was about to turn twelve and enter the seventh grade. There’d been a steamy haze that morning, but now the sun was out full and what air that moved came warm off the land. Nobody wanted to play baseball, nobody, especially not slow-moving Earl. “Too hot,” Earl said, “too hot,” and it was, and still I pushed him to the ballfield right across from Dr. Gongaware’s and my big house on the hill. Dad called me “a bull.”

The game I wanted to play was my game with two players (call it “catch”), a game almost as good as our regular five against five, our neighborhood too little for baseball’s usual nine on a side. I played shortstop and Earl played first, his back to the high grass that surrounded the field the Gongawares mowed for us kids.

I stood at short on the yellowing grass and faced first base as Earl got ready, the unlevel field sloping down behind me to the missing leftfielder. Was that smell honeysuckle? I waited in the hum of insects and the flash of redwing blackbirds, the smell of saltwater heavy in the air, a seagull drifting down to the backstop behind home plate. The heat. The quiet.

“Come on, Earl, let’s go. Roll me one.”

Earl was a class grade behind me though we were about the same size. He never hurried, unlike his father who worked a machine at Cottrell’s factory and was always in a rush to a new home-project: “Why are those goddamn boys never around when I need ‘em? Where’s that lazy Earl?” And despite the hurry and the anger, he’d look at me and smile: “Howya doin’ Butchy-boy?” (Butch, my family nickname). Did he hope my straight A’s would rub off on his sons?

Earl took his time, and finally rolled an easy grounder at me and I charged it in a low crouch, gloved the well-used ball, and fired a rocket back. Earl shook his gloved hand in pain.

“You have to throw that hard?”

I didn’t answer. My arm was my one baseball talent. I couldn’t hit, I wasn’t the best fielder, he’d have to stand the pain.  And even so, the problem was larger—I threw wild. We’d search for the ball in the high grass for forever.

“Jesus,” he whined. “Throw straighter why don’t chu. . . .”

I’d get better. I had to. I dreamed of being as good as the Yankees’ Phil Rizzuto, or maybe just better than I’d been the day before. I had to get better to be someone, to prove that I mattered, to prove I deserved respect on the field and was more than a “brain.” Work was the way. Dad said so: “Do every job right or don’t do it at all.”

I threw over Earl’s head the fifth time and he glared like I’d made him swallow puke.

I glared back. “Why don’t you learn how to catch?”

The pain in his hand, the searching, my pushing—ate at Earl. We were baking in the soggy late-afternoon sun and pouring sweat, t-shirts stuck to our backs, blue jeans gummy on our thighs, BVDs grabbing at our crotches.

Find the ball, find the ball, the only ball we had, the ball we’d used the whole summer. Why’d you lose it? kids’d say. How’d you lose it? Who’s gettin’ a new one?

Not me. And definitely not Earl. He didn’t like baseball that much. Anyway, who had the money? I’d saved two years from my paper route for the Dee Fondy first basemen’s glove he was using.

Earl tromped around in the grass in his black high tops. “Where’s that stupid thing? Come ahhhhnn. Come aaaahhhhnnnn . . . .”

He couldn’t stop groaning. “We should block out areas,” I said, “cover ground a small block at a time. Ball couldn’t have gone far.”

Earl ate early and he had to go soon or his father would yell when he came home from the mill and parked the rusted Chevy in their dirt yard: “Where are those damn boys?” His father’d moved the family out here by the saltwater to get Earl and his brothers away from the reform-school kids in town. No one fooled with his father.

Earl tromped into my block again.

“Hey, get out! What’re you doing? What’s wrong with you?”

The sun beat down, the dry grass scratchy on our arms as we moved around now on our knees. We’d lose the ball and the older kids’d rag, You crapheads never do anything right. You’re lucky we let you play.

I knelt in the grass and lit a match—why was I carrying matches?—and the fire took off in the off-shore air. The fire would burn the top of the grass and leave our ball buried below untouched, at least that’s what I hoped.

The flames spread, they flew, it was fire season, and they burned the dry brown grass all the way down to the ground. The fire’d scorch the ball and leave a black nothing, a black and brown nothing we couldn’t use, we wouldn’t use.

Earl slapped at the flames with my brand new first baseman’s mitt and I slapped with my old falling-apart infielder’s glove. Earl peeled off his clammy t-shirt and tried that. Nothing worked. Nothing. And I could see my house not far up the road. Dad ran the state forest service and wore a .32 for “those crazy sons-a-bitches” that set fires.

“Call the fire department,”I yelled, Earl’s house a good half-mile away and we didn’t have our bikes. “I’ll go get help.” Earl ran for home, and I ran for the house across the road, the Gongawares.

What would they say? We used their field with the bases and backstop, and drank from their freshwater spring, even ate apples from their trees when they weren’t looking and now I was torching their grass, their land, maybe their orchard, the blueberries, the lilacs, the rhododendrons, maybe their house . . . maybe mine.

No one outside. Was anybody even home? I pounded on the door, chest rising, chest falling, I couldn’t get breath. I pounded. No response. I pounded. The door opened, a woman my mother’s age—lean, a tight jaw. Her disapproving sister would be my English teacher in September.

“Fire. We’ve got a fire.” I didn’t say why, I didn’t say how big. She turned and disappeared into the house while I stood in the open door gasping. Was she phoning for the fire trucks?

She came back with two long, wooden brooms and handed me one, and nodded in the direction of the field. I ran, my left arm thrashing about with the broom, and she ran too and said nothing, back across the road to the field, her head down and broom thrashing about like mine, skirt churning around her legs, and . . . we were at the fire.

She bent from the waist and whacked the flames with the broom, her long hair falling into her face. She whacked and I whacked. Her house might go, my house might go, our field, her field, our world, her world, and my fault, I had to do it my way—for a game, for a ball, my bottomless wanting.

I beat the flames and she beat the flames. How did she know this would work? I could feel my arms and back, my wobbly legs, the rasp of my breathing, the broom, my eyes filled with sweat. Could we win? I lost track of time. . . .

And the fire seemed to diminish slightly, ever so slightly, grow smaller, to ease off and die away, a few flares, some last flickers.

Mrs. Gongaware and I straightened up and leaned on our brooms. A woman I didn’t know, my neighbor, side by side with her in a scorched field, and we examined our work in silence. The blackened grass, some scrub pines burned, some tiny shrubs burned. . . . But not the lilacs, not the blueberries, not the raspberries, not the goldenrod and honeysuckle, not the flowering purple and pink and white rhododendrons, not her house, her house still standing, and my house. . . . What will Dad and Mom say? And what is Mrs. Gongaware thinking—the field, the fire, us kids. Is this the end of baseball?

I heard sirens, trucks, fire trucks, men I knew, men who knew me, Swamp Yankee volunteers my father fought fires beside. What will I say?

 

___________________

Kent Jacobson taught for nearly 20 years in Bard College’s Clemente Course in the Humanities, a 2015 winner of the National Humanities Medal. His nonfiction has appeared or will appear in Hobart, Under the Sun, Thread, Brown Alumni Magazine, and Northwest Review, among others. He lives in Massachusetts with his wife, landscape architect Martha Lyon, and their English Setter puppy, Ben.

 

Essays

Kathleen McGookey

November 5, 2019

Errand

In the self-checkout lane, the man ahead of us couldn’t scan his milk and eggs.  He smelled like smoke.  The clerk tried to fix the jam, but he exploded, that fucking machine!  She repeated the insult under her breath as she hurried past.  She was shorter than me and her hair needed washing.  All we’d needed was a half-pint of fudge ripple. When she returned with a manager, I watched my daughter watching the three of them, running her tongue over wires and brackets that hadn’t been in her mouth an hour ago, the familiar landscape altered, painful and strange.  

 

Picture of a Young Elk

It weighs nothing, this picture of a young elk tangled in a barbed wire fence in Montana.  All four legs caught up at the ankle, eyes so glazed with shock it looks dead, and I almost don’t play the video you sent.  To spare myself.  Though now my pleasure weighs something, as I listen to you tell and retell how you found a rancher with wire cutters and gloves in his truck and nearly in one motion cut the fence and spun the elk toward the open field, across which, after it staggered and shook itself, it ran until it disappeared.

 

We had our share of beautiful days

It was only a squirrel that dashed in front of our car, it made only the smallest thump.  My faith in uncertainty never wavers.  Last night, as I watered the roses at dusk, a hummingbird hovered near the spray, waiting to enter the shower of drops.

 

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Kathleen McGookey has published four books of prose poems and three chapbooks, most recently Instructions for My Imposter (Press 53) and Nineteen Letters (BatCat Press). She has also published We’ll See, a book of translations of French poet Georges Godeau’s prose poems.  Her work has appeared in Copper Nickel, Crazyhorse, December, Field, Glassworks, Miramar, Ploughshares, Prairie Schooner, Quiddity, and Sweet. She has received grants from the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Sustainable Arts Foundation.