Author’s Note: For the last few years I have had the honor of working with children in special education. It has been a humbling and educational experience. Every time I think I understand, I realize how little I know. Christopher, the protagonist of this nonfiction story who has now graduated high school, is one such student who taught me much more than I expected.

Meditative Ducks

WEEKDAY MORNINGS, when it is an A day at the high school where I work, I often end up spending the first hour of my shift hunting for Christopher. 

Christopher does not like algebra fundamentals, and I can’t say I blame him. He prefers to walk, climb and discover. 

Christopher tromps through the sports fields, watches the leaves in the trees, and stands like a sentinel on the top of the bleachers. Sometimes he watches worms—helping them traverse the black top for the safety of the grass beyond. He also transplants ants from the classroom to the outside and is the best friend of a dog named Denali. 

He had told me weeks ago that he had been feeding ducks. When I asked where these ducks were, he said in the grass. It was all I could get from him. 

There exists on the east side of the high school a small pond that was a project of the natural resources classes. It was here I thought he and the ducks must be communing. But he and they eluded me each time I went looking. 

Then, finally, I discovered them.

Christopher and a mallard.

Somehow, I had been overlooking a different, larger pond in the courtyard between the English and science wings of the north building. 

Christopher was perched on large rocks on one side of the pond, quietly watching the mallard in the pond. 

Christopher is tall, probably 6’2′′ or 6’3′′ and I doubt if he weighs more than 160lbs. True to his lean, birdlike frame, he moves much like a crane⎯somewhat mechanically and slowly, but also with a sort of beauty. 

To see Christopher perched on the rock was like seeing a great heron along a bank. Serene. Waiting. 

When I approached, I disturbed the peaceful scene. The mallard left the pond to move farther from me, and Christopher left his rocky perch, probably anticipating that I’d make him go to math. 

I chose to make amends by not rushing the necessary, but by making conversation. 

Christopher rarely talks, but when it is a topic of interest he will talk long, carefully, and with great specificity. He will even make eye contact. 

The female duck he told me, was not to be found this morning. But she had been limping. We considered why. 

We watched the mallard grow more comfortable with my presence and eventually return to the pond. Christopher explained to me how to tell if a duck was nervous—by its soft chattering noise. Then he said something that both tickled me at the time and stuck with me. 

The duck he said, “was meditating.” 

I’ve been studying meditation for much of my adult life; to think of an animal as meditating was both silly and profound. It made sense. 

When you see a cat staring out a window or a lizard in the sun, a wolf on a hillside or a horse looking across the field, a deer at a brook or a duck circling a pond, what else would they be doing? 

Animals, after all, are perfectly in harmony with the rhythms and nuances of nature. They are, in the moments mentioned above, without worry and at peace. Aren’t these the very ideas of meditation? 

I am reminded, too, of biblical poetry that speaks of nature worshiping even, and especially, when we fail to. Rocks crying out and trees clapping their hands. Sparrows that trust. 

Christopher, in many ways, is far wiser than I, and I often wonder what he’d be like if he weren’t inhibited by his autism. But I also consider that his wisdom is likely a product of it. He can see what others cannot: meditative ducks. 

♦ 

Tara Gilson Fraga grew up in a rural logging town and started writing when she first learned to hold a pencil. She likes to spend her time with her family in Oregon, when not writing. Tara believes stories have the power to change lives. “I hope my humble piece might help shed some light on ASD…and also on the varied ways we view the world and our place in it.” 

Delmarva Review selects the best of new prose and poetry from thousands of submissions annually. As a 501(c)(3) nonprofit, it receives partial financial support from individual contributions and a grant from the Talbot County Arts Council with funds from the Maryland State Arts Council. The review is available worldwide from Amazon.com and other major online booksellers and specialty regional bookstores. For information about the authors, see the website: www.DelmarvaReview.org

 

Author’s note: Let’s not pretend all long-term relationships are a place lust dies, where neither party finds another person attractive ever again. Fantasy allows for a moment of escape in what is otherwise a committed coupling, and this poem explores how romantic fantasies are born and the ways in which they exert influence in real life. 

Background Image 

Look, baby, it’s not that I don’t love you, but
you are too close to star in my fantasy.
When my computer flicks on, I swallow more coffee,
and the beach scene desktop wallpaper forces the memory
of another man down on top of me like an unexpected wave.

I feel a swell of regret for having turned
away from his waiting lips.
I resisted, and he worked so hard, baby,
you have no idea.
His stare made my hips pay attention
to the way they carried my body from one destination
to another, and every wild and bad idea I’d ever had fit
into the deep crease of his smile. Everything
that you are not: Blood of Fish inked across his rigid calves,
skull tattooed inside his bottom lip, well aware
of how little time he has left, just enough danger.
His fast hands needed no guidance from me. 

Now, years later, I wake up from a daytime reverie
of his strange mouth on my neck,
face pressed against my sea-dampened hair,
and wonder how I ever stood on the edge without falling. 

You see, sweetheart, his eyes were the kind of blue
reserved for screensavers and background images,
mountains and shorelines, places people dream
of going when they need a change of scenery
but don’t have the heart to leave home. 

♦ 

Frannie McMillan is a National Board Certified secondary librarian, mother of three, and book reviewer from Richmond, Virginia. Her poetry has appeared in The Coachella Review, K’in Literary Journal, isacoustic, The Indianapolis Review, and others. Follow her on Twitter @franniemaq, but please don’t ever call her Fran. 

Delmarva Review publishes compelling new prose and poetry selected from thousands of submissions annually. As a 501(c)(3) nonprofit, it receives partial financial support from individual contributions and a grant from the Talbot County Arts Council with funds from the Maryland State Arts Council. The review is available worldwide from Amazon.com and other major online booksellers and specialty regional bookstores. For more information, see the website: www.DelmarvaReview.org

 

#  #  #

Author’s Note: In my short story, Professor, I wanted to explore the complex nuance of sex, power, and choice. The protagonist is a middle-aged divorced mother who is pursued by her professor. She is flattered by the attention, feels powerful, and thinks she is making her own choices in their relationship. In the end though, it becomes clear how little choice she actually had and that her agency and power were an illusion.  

Professor

CLARE STOOD AT THE ENTRANCE TO THE NATURE PRESERVE east of campus, wondering if she’d been forgotten. It wouldn’t have surprised her; the professor didn’t seem to pay much attention to his calendar. During the past winter, while she was in his fiction workshop, he’d missed one of their three out-of-class conferences. Now, three months later, they were meeting to discuss the first fifty pages of her novel, which she’d revised following his suggestions. So far, he was thirteen minutes late, but she waited until it was twenty to text him. 

“Was in my calendar the wrong way,” he responded. “Be right there.” 

She’d been surprised when he suggested meeting here rather than in his office but didn’t question it. He said it had been such a cold, wet spring, and the weather looked to be beautiful, and the dogwoods and lilacs were still in bloom, and he wanted to take some photos before they disappeared. Clare was always impressed when people knew the names of trees and flowers, a facet of knowledge she herself lacked. 

At 10:45, nearly an hour late, he walked up to her, smiled wordlessly, and held his arms open for a hug. 

His body—his weight—always surprised her. Her hands couldn’t touch behind his back; she’d noted this fact the first time they’d hugged, which had also been in public, on campus. She’d been on her way to the English department to drop off pages of her novel in his faculty mailbox, and he was walking toward her on the diagonal path across the quad. He was impossible to miss, one of the few black faces in a sea of pale white and Asian ones, and though not tall, he was wide. He and Clare were almost the same height—she was tall for a woman and he slightly short for a man—but he was three times as wide as she. He’d been looking down at his phone—he was always looking at his phone—and Clare lay in his path. 

“Ah, what a sight for sore eyes,” he’d said when he sensed her presence and looked up. Then, holding out the phone, he said, “I just got some bad news here. Can I get a hug?” 

Now, at the nature preserve, Clare wondered where her novel pages were; the professor carried only his camera and the handkerchief he was using to wipe sweat from his face. 

“This book is goin’ to win awards,” he said when they started walking on the gravel path into the woods. “You’re an amazin’ writer.” His accent, from London’s East End where he’d grown up with his black father and white mother, prevented him from pronouncing “g” at the end of words. Clare loved the sound of his voice and the way he spoke—words, the way he said them, were imbued with softness and ease. He said “writer” as if it ended in an “a.” 

He went on to mention other writers he’d worked with: a Pulitzer Prize winner, National Book Award finalists. “I judge some of these awards,” he said, “and trust me, this is just as good.” He wiped some sweat from his forehead. “Your pages are in my car; I have nothing but good things to say. You just need to keep writin’.” 

Clare was speechless. 

“My editor will love it,” he went on. “I’m goin’ to email her today.” 

“But it’s not finished,” Clare said. 

“It doesn’t matter⎯we should get this out there.” He stopped walking, held the camera up to his eye, focused on a tree awash in white blossoms, and pressed the shutter several times. Birds rushed up out of the tree, and white petals fluttered to the ground. “Listen,” he said, “don’t sell yourself short.” 

“I just feel like I’m already so behind,” Clare said. She had three young children and had been divorced for a year. Life was daunting. 

“Toni Morrison was forty-five before she published her first novel. It’s goin’ to happen,” he said. 

They walked for about an hour, falling silent each time he stopped to take a photo. He asked her about her children, her divorce. He told her how he wished his own mother had divorced his dad, how it was a brave thing to do. He talked about some of the other MFA students she knew, how some of them were just “piss poor.” At the time, she didn’t question this derision of her classmates, didn’t think it was inappropriate at all. What she thought was that she was winning. 

She asked him to be her thesis advisor.

“I’d be honored,” he said.

When they got back to the parking lot, after he’d handed her the fifty pages of her novel and driven away, Clare sat in her car and looked through her manuscript. He’d made no detailed comments, provided only effusive, generalized praise. She felt her face flush at the thought that maybe he hadn’t even read it. But that couldn’t be true. He wouldn’t have offered to contact his editor if he hadn’t read her work. 

She would remember that walk and think how he’d lied. She didn’t write like any of those writers he mentioned. Years later, she would think to herself, You were delusional for believing him. 

HIS HAD NOT BEEN A TYPICAL WORKSHOP, this particular professor’s, this award-laden head of the creative writing department, author of eleven novels and books of poetry, this TED talker whose speech “On Our Common Humanity” had hundreds of thousands of views. 

On the first day of class, he’d stood at the chalkboard, wooden mala beads around his neck, a lapis lazuli Ganesh resting on his belly, and drew two intersecting lines on the blackboard with an abstract symbol in each quadrant. They were told to copy what he’d drawn onto a piece of paper and then complete a larger drawing in each square using the symbols provided. He then gathered the sheets of paper and analyzed each student in front of the class based on what they’d drawn. 

Standing at the front of the classroom, he’d said about Clare, “You hide your emotions. You need to be more vulnerable if you are going to be a real writer,” leaving no doubt as to who was the real writer and who was the aspiring one. Clare didn’t yet recognize that all writers, real or not, were always aspiring. 

After he’d analyzed each student, the professor told them it was a psychological profile test he’d learned from a friend of his who worked for MI6. 

Two other things that stood out later about his workshop: his tearing up the manuscript pages of a fellow student as she sat crying, and the time he’d asked Clare what love meant to her. She’d answered, “Freedom.” 

He’d tapped his pencil to her pages then and said, “But this character cares about what she can get from the people she loves.” 

“In the beginning, yes,” Clare said, “but you haven’t read the whole book.” 

He nodded. “Okay.” 

A FEW MONTHS AFTER THEIR WALK in the nature preserve, the professor spoke to a sold-out auditorium at a citywide humanities festival. Clare was in the audience with her boyfriend, a man she’d been dating since her divorce. Afterward, the professor signed books. Clare bought the only book of his she didn’t yet own—a poetry collection he’d written with artwork by one of his writing mentors, a professor at another university. In it he wrote, For my beautiful friend whose heart is a song. Grace! 

The working title of Clare’s novel was The Sight of the Sky. That evening, after the book signing, the professor texted her a photo he’d taken of a recent sunrise—all cumulus clouds and pools of light scattered across a shadowed lake. “Is this the cover for my novel?” she wrote back with the winking emoji. “It’s whatever you want it to be,” he replied with the heart eye emoji. A gust of excitement swept through her. 

Her boyfriend, sitting across the table from her at dinner, asked who she was texting. 

“Maybe the three of us should go to dinner,” he said. 

“Why?”

“He’s a genius. His speech was incredible. Can’t I be friends with him, too?”

Clare wanted to say, Make your own friends, but instead she said, “I’m sure he’s too busy for that.”

From then on, she would get texts from the professor, and if she didn’t hear from him for a day or two, she would think of a reason to text him herself. 

“We should hang out more,” he texted one day around Thanksgiving. 

She told her boyfriend she thought they should take a break. 

THE PROFESSOR’S HOUSE was a shabby, squat bungalow tucked between two mansions on a dark, dead-end street near campus. When he had invited Clare for dinner, he told her to cancel a previous engagement with the woman who translated his novels into French. Clare felt flattered. 

Tentatively she pulled into the sloped, snow-covered driveway, put the car in park, and checked herself in the rearview mirror. She twisted and retwisted her long blond hair into a loose bun at the nape of her neck. She tipped the mirror down, applied a nude lip gloss, and rubbed her lips together. “This will be fine,” she said, out loud, to herself. There was no going back, anyway. Going back would make everything a bigger deal than it actually was. 

Standing at the door, its brown paint peeling and cracked, Clare held her breath and rang the bell. The house was quiet and dark, and for a moment she wondered, again, if he’d forgotten. But blessedly he answered, and as soon as the door was shut behind her, his thick arms enveloped her. 

She felt him warm against her body. Yet, pressed against him, she felt oddly distant. That’s what his weight did, she thought, created distance. He’d been hurt as a child, as a young adult. You only had to read anything he wrote to know. The weight was his way of having protection, that’s what she decided now. It made her feel sorry for him. 

He released her and she sat on the bench in his foyer to take off her motorcycle boots. 

“I like those,” he said. “I have a thing for shoes.” He opened the hall closet to reveal floor-to-ceiling shelves filled with shoes organized by genre—sandals, athletic sneakers, loafers, boots. Clare thought then of something he’d once said in workshop— how material things are a way to cover up pain. 

“That’s quite a collection, but I prefer you barefoot,” she said, looking at his clean, smooth, well-groomed feet, the toes lined up in a perfect slant. Then, looking up at his face, she smiled. “And I don’t usually like feet.” 

It was below zero outside, but he was wearing thn cotton lounge pants and a white, short-sleeve T-shirt that showed off his tattooed arms. By the end of the night, Clare thought, I might know whether they’re all over his body. 

Clare pulled a bottle of Cabernet out of her bag. He’d told her to bring alcohol if she wanted it—he only drank Coke and coffee. Coffee with spoonfuls of sugar and cream. She felt slightly ashamed that she needed the wine—but she did need it— and he took the bottle into the kitchen, opened it, and poured her a glass. 

They sat down in his living room, she in the corner of his black leather sectional and he on a lounge chair. In the compact room, it was the farthest place from her he could have chosen to sit. The TV above the fireplace was playing a reality show. He muted it. Bookshelves flanked the fireplace and two orb-like speakers sat on either side of the hearth. Abstract paintings in black and red and gray hung on the walls. A small Christmas tree sat on a table by the window, decorated with colored lights and tinsel. A single stocking hung from the mantel, and Clare felt that he must be lonely. Behind the sofa was another room he said was his study, and she could see a familiar photograph of James Baldwin hanging above the desk. 

Whenever she thought about that night, she imagined Baldwin gazing down at her from the wall, impassive, while she hunches inside the doorframe of the study, watching herself, ashamed. 

“SO, WHAT ARE WE DOING?” Clare asked. She felt the need to name it upfront, thinking maybe naming it might be a way to get a handle on it and have some control. 

“We’re hangin’ out,” he said, peering at her over the top of his glasses. His fingers rubbed the silver whiskers on his chin. 

“You are my thesis advisor,” she said, “but then again, I’m almost forty and not an undergrad.” She’d made a list in her mind of the dynamics between them, trying to find an even score. Did the fact she was an adult matter when he was her professor and she was his student? She hadn’t quite worked out which was more important and had decided it was worth proceeding, come what may. The adult won out; whatever happened, it would be her mistake. 

“And we’re both adults,” he said, as if reading her mind. “And you have three kids, and I’ve never wanted kids.” 

Clare laughed. “We haven’t even had dinner, and you’re talking about my kids?” She remembered now, during the first day of class back in January during introductions, when she’d mentioned her children, he’d said, “You’re much too elegant to be a mother.” At the time she took it as a compliment, but now she saw it might have been a slight, negating a part of her he didn’t respect. 

“We’re both single, that’s another thing,” Clare said. 

“What about the friend you brought to my lecture?” 

“We broke up.” 

He raised an eyebrow. “Didn’t you leave your husband for him?” 

“My marriage being over had nothing to do with him. He was just the catalyst getting me to leave.” She winked. In workshop, he’d been insistent on this point—every story had one protagonist, one antagonist, and one catalyst. If you didn’t know who was who, you didn’t have a story. 

“I need to be clear about my situation,” he said.

Clare held her breath, felt a hollowing-out in her chest. 

“Me and this other person I was dating over the summer, we’re seein’ each other for two weeks over Christmas. To see if it can work.” 

“This other person” was a woman who, a few weeks before, he’d told Clare he’d broken up with. 

“Okay,” Clare said. “Not sure what you want me to say.” 

“I just want to be honest with you.”

“Why invite me over?”

“Because I like you. You’re irresistible.” 

SHE OFTEN WONDERED why she didn’t leave then or simply say no. Simply say, I think you should figure things out with her before we do anything. Simply say, I think we should keep this a professional relationship. But she’d never been good at saying no. Years later, the only explanation she could think of for why she didn’t say no was that she thought she might lose something if she did. 

“LET’S WATCH A MOVIE,” he said. He heaved himself up from his chair, walked the three steps to the fireplace, and pulled a stack of DVDs off the mantel. 

Clare looked through them and noticed several were not yet released outside of theaters: Carol, Spotlight, The Martian, Room, Joy. “How’d you get all these?” she asked. 

“I vote on Best Screenplay for the Academy.”

He lay down next to her on his sectional. Before they started Trumbo, a film Clare hadn’t heard of but the only one he hadn’t yet watched, they ordered out for Indian. She was worried he would get too much food, wondered how much he really ate, if she would somehow need to keep up, but he only ordered chicken tikka masala, saag paneer, and one serving of naan. He must do most of his eating alone, she thought, and again felt sorry for him. 

Before the initial credits came on, he turned toward her and put his hand to the back of her head, pulled her mouth to his. At first she thought they’d just kiss for a bit and go back to the movie, but almost immediately he unbuttoned her jeans and started pulling her sweater up. “Let’s move to the bed,” he said. 

His bedroom was sparse, like a clinic. A beige cotton duvet, a wooden dresser, two bedside tables. A lamp, casting fluorescent light across the bed, stood on one side table. He set his glasses down on the table and left the light on. 

She liked his body, the size of it. Nothing about it repulsed her, as she’d feared it might. The one friend she’d told about going to his house had Googled him. “How on earth are you going to fuck?” she’d asked. 

Clare had laughed. “I highly doubt that will happen, it’s just dinner.” 

Her friend had rolled her eyes. “Yeah, dinner at his house. You know he’s using you, right?” 

“What on earth for?” Clare didn’t see what she had to offer him. 

Now he lay on his back, and Clare kissed his mouth, kissed his ink-black nipples, traced his ear with her tongue. He grabbed her hips and, pulling her onto him, pushed his penis into her. Holding her hips, he thrust himself into her but kept slipping out. He flipped her onto her back in what felt like frustration and, kneeling above her, pulled her legs up over his shoulders. She wished for the bedside lamp to be off. 

He leaned forward and, with Clare’s knees now next to her ears, the professor put one hand against the wooden headboard and the other on her neck. His eyes went hard. “Do you like that?” he asked. The palm of his hand pressed on her throat. She had no idea what to answer, no idea what the right answer was. His eyes, not his hand, scared her, and what she thought was: He could actually kill me. She also thought: In his novels, women are often abused or killed. 

Then the doorbell rang. It was the food delivery. He took his hand from her throat. “I’d better get that,” he said and pulled away. She sat up, retwisted her hair into a bun, and gathered her clothes and got dressed. They sat on the sofa and ate from the coffee table and talked about his tattoos (they were on his upper arms and back as well) and what each of them meant to him. After they finished eating, she said she had to get home to the sitter. He kissed her good-bye at the door, dryly, and she thought it was done. 

Later that night, as she was driving home, she got a text. “Please let me know when you’re home, sweetness. Loved being with you tonight.” 

When she got home, she immediately wrote down what had happened in his bedroom with his hand on her throat. Already she didn’t trust her memory. Perhaps he’d just been tracing her collarbone, feeling the contours of her neck. She remembered something he’d said in workshop: “We’re always too busy lookin’ at the blood to look at the wound.” 

She realized then they hadn’t talked that night about writing at all. 

HE ASKED HER OVER to his house again. In the intervening days, he’d had surgery on his mouth to fix some teeth. “I want to see you,” he texted, “but I’m not in great shape.” 

Clare brought him dinner and, seated next to him on the sofa, leaned over to kiss him. He laughed a bit. “The kissin’ feels good,” he said, “maybe because of the pain as well.” 

She thought it a puzzling thing to say. He started to undo her jeans. “I have my period,” she said. “But I don’t mind if you don’t.” The fact that their sex felt incomplete and he hadn’t come before, hadn’t even been close, bothered her. She wanted to redeem herself. 

“Ah, blood magic, probably not the best idea,” he said and tapped her on the nose. “It would bond us too much.” 

She rubbed the front of his sweatpants and felt that he was hard. “I’d like to do something for you.” 

He smiled. “I’m not gonna protest.” He lifted his hips so she could slide his pants down. She knelt between his legs and started licking his penis. 

After several minutes, she felt him starting to go soft and looked up. He was looking not at her but toward the window, one arm propped behind his head. 

“Is this not okay?” she asked. 

“No, no, it feels good.” He reached down and rubbed her hair. “It’s just my spiritual practice. I have a lot of control.” He grabbed her arm and pulled her up toward him. “Just sit here next to me.” He patted the sofa and pulled up his pants. 

For the next hour, Clare listened to stories about his family. How he missed his dead mother. How he hated his dead father. 

Later, as she was leaving, he opened a shoebox near his front door. It contained a pair of running shoes, glittery. “These aren’t what I ordered,” he said. “They look like disco balls.” 

The next day he left for California and posted a picture on Instagram of two round points of light on his wooden floor with the caption “strange lights on wood floor.” She, the woman he was going to visit, commented, “disco balls?” 

Clare Googled the phrase, discovering it was a sexual reference. She felt a bit sick. 

OVER CHRISTMAS WEEK, between meals and presents and trying to keep her children from going stir crazy, Clare stalked him and the girlfriend—a brilliant younger poet and wunderkind who’d performed at the White House—on social media. Pictures of palm trees and bright blue skies taken though the passenger side mirror of her car. A tattoo of a hummingbird on the front of her shoulder. 

He texted Clare every couple of days, “hi” or “miss you.” Once she answered, “Thinking about having you in bed and everything I want to do with you.” He wrote back, “Like what?” She wrote, “Anything you want.” He didn’t respond. 

She finished her novel manuscript while her children were skiing in Montana with their father over New Year’s week and sent the professor a text: “I think I’ve made it to the end.” 

“Congrats!” he wrote back. “Can you bring me a hard copy when I return?” 

“Of course,” she said, always obliging. 

ANOTHER DARK, SNOWY NIGHT, a couple of weeks later. Clare pulled into the small, sloped driveway, this time with no hesitation. 

“Me and the woman in California, we’re goin’ to try to make it work,” he said once the small talk was out of the way. 

“I know.” Clare knew this already from Instagram. She knew this because the girlfriend had taken a photo of her completed poetry manuscripts on his bed with the caption “Manuscript 1 & 2. Done and done. Thank you, cheefee.” 

Chief, Guru, Sensei, Maestro, Sifu—all words Clare had seen or heard used to describe him. 

She didn’t get mad or cry. She didn’t ask him why he’d even acted as if there was anything. Didn’t ask him why he wanted to have sex if he wasn’t interested in coming. Instead, she said, “We’re still friends, right?” 

“Always.”

“And you’ll still help me with my novel, right?” 

“Of course I will.” 

She drove home to her empty house, drank two glasses of whiskey, and texted her ex-boyfriend. He still had a key, and she waited in bed for him. 

He came into the dark bedroom, got undressed, and slid into bed, kissed her frantically, desperately. 

“Calm down,” she said. 

He pushed Clare’s hair back and kissed her, more slowly now. She turned away from him and pushed herself backward onto him, used her own fingers, slippery, on herself. 

Afterward she told him to leave. “That was the last time, you know,” she said as he dressed. 

“Why do you have to say that?”

“I just thought you should know.”

After he left, she got out of bed and drank one more whiskey, crying silently in her kitchen. 

THE PROFESSOR TEXTED HER to meet him in his office to go over her manuscript. He had the corner office on the elevated ground floor of the most iconic building on campus, the office anyone would choose. It was early evening, still winter, and already dark. As she walked across the quad, Clare was transfixed by his office windows shining pale yellow with light. I will never have an office like that, she thought. 

His heavy wooden door was closed, and when Clare knocked, there was no answer. Knocked again. Silence. She turned the knob and tentatively peeked around the door. 

He looked up from his massive mahogany desk. “Oh, hi. Sorry, did you knock?” 

She nodded. “Sorry, is this still an okay time?” 

“Yes, of course, come in.” He didn’t stand to greet her. The wall behind him was plastered with framed covers of his books— in English but also in translation. When she’d first come to his office during the previous winter, he’d motioned to them with a flick of his wrist and said, “To remind anyone who thinks I don’t belong here.” 

Now he paged through her manuscript, not looking at her as he spoke. 

“Pages eighty to one-ten feel rote.” “Chapters fifteen to nineteen, no heart.” “Three quarters of the way in, I’m not feelin’ like I’m learning anythin’ new.” “A lot of these scenes are falling flat, Clare. You have to ask yourself, what purpose is this scene here for, what is it tryin’ to show.” 

Clare dug her nails into her palms and stared at the sea of novel covers behind him. Willing the tears to stay in her eyes, she thought, I will never have a wall like that. 

When he finally looked at her, he leaned back in his chair and sighed. “I’m sorry, is this difficult for you?” 

“Why are you acting like you don’t even know me?” She didn’t look directly at him but fixed her stare on the cover of his latest novel, which hung above his left shoulder. The blurb across the top, by an even more famous writer, was one she’d memorized long ago: “A luminous, white-hot, earth-shattering talent.” She thought of how utterly pathetic she must look to him, and there was absolutely nothing she could do about it. 

Now the luminous talent stood up and walked around to the front of his desk, pulled Clare up from her chair, and embraced her. “Mmmmm,” he said as he pressed against her. “Do you feel that? We are dangerous.” 

“You have a girlfriend.” Clare pulled away. “And I need to get back to my kids.” 

Driving home that night, she remembered something he’d said about people. “Once they’re out of my life, they’re gone. I don’t ever think about them again. It’s like I don’t remember.” And as she drove Clare thought: You played a game you were never going to win. 

IT WAS YEARS LATER that Clare attended a writing conference and sat across the table from the editor the professor had mentioned that day during their walk in the nature preserve, the one he said he’d show her work to. 

Clare tells the editor that the professor had been her thesis advisor and helped her revise the novel—the first ten pages of which the editor now holds loosely, as if they were trash. 

The editor answers, “He sends me a lot of work from his students. He’s never sent yours.” 

As she walks away from the table, Clare remembers again what he’d said about blood and wounds and knows that no matter what she’d done, whether she’d said yes or no, the outcome for her would have been the same. 

♦

Erin Branning is a fiction editor for TriQuarterly, Northwestern University’s literary journal, where she has published interviews with Ben Fountain and Lily King. Her work has also been published in Manifest-Station, LitBreak and Delmarva Review. She holds an MFA from Northwestern University, a Bachelor of Arts in economics from the University of Pennsylvania, and a Master of Public Policy from the University of Chicago. She lives in Chicago with her four children and is currently working on a memoir with Megan Stielstra through Catapult.

Delmarva Review publishes compelling new prose and poetry selected from thousands of submissions annually. As a 501(c)(3) nonprofit, it receives partial financial support from individual contributions and a grant from the Talbot County Arts Council with funds from the Maryland State Arts Council. The review is available worldwide from Amazon.com and other major online booksellers and specialty regional bookstores. For more information about the authors, see the website: www.DelmarvaReview.org.

#  #  #

 

Editor’s Note: Each word leads to the discovery of unexpected sweetness from the “loco” motion of a powerful love, left to our interpretation, unaffected and unbound from any sense of order.

Writer’s Note: This poem is part of a series of love poems called “Something About the Way,” just out from Kelsay Publishers, first published in Delmarva review, Vol. 13.

Crazy (E) Motion
I found an unwrapped candy
under a hotel bed,
translucent, gelatinous,
pressed from a locomotive mold.
How delightful “loco”
begins locomotive.
Crazy motion!
Whereas I always welcome
unbidden sweetness, this is
Boulder, Colorado, I am
afraid the candy is infused
with tetrahydrocannabinol
and I don’t want to cloud
my love for you. I am a child
who just learned the alphabet.
I want to keep the glittering
letters lined up.
I don’t even want to
string them into words.

⧫

Peter Waldor’s poems have appeared in American Poetry Review, Ploughshares, Iowa Review, Colorado Review, Poetry Daily, Verse Daily, Mothering Magazine, and other journals. He is the author of Door to a Noisy Room (Alice James Books), The Wilderness Poetry of Wu Xing (Pinyon Publishing), Who Touches Everything (Settlement House), which won the National Jewish Book Award, The Unattended Harp (Settlement House), State of the Union (Kelsay Books) and Gate Posts with No Gate (Shanti Arts). Website: peterwaldor.com.

Delmarva Review publishes the most compelling new prose and poetry selected from thousands of submissions annually. As a 501(c)(3) nonprofit, it receives partial financial support from individual contributions and a grant from the Talbot County Arts Council with funds from the Maryland State Arts Council. The review is available worldwide from Amazon.com and other major online booksellers and specialty regional bookstores. For more information about the authors, see the website: www.DelmarvaReview.org

 

 

Author’s Note: “Ribbon Room” not only chronicles a trip into the Iowa countryside to buy groceries, it is a record of a trip back in time for my inner child who is simultaneously in the fatherly care of myself. “I bought a bag/of licorice pipes from their candy counter,/a grown man thinking he was seven again…” May we all make such gentle journeys with ourselves.

Ribbon Room

At the Amish Store there is a room filled
with fabric and ribbons. Some women still sew
clothes from scratch, meaning they cut
the fabric and manufacture right in their own homes
while tea water boils and someone lifts
the lid off a jar of potpourri, heavy
on the rose and cinnamon oil. I drove
to the store in my car down a ribbon
of pavement. I looked in my rear view
and I could see the 21st century recede.
I did not own a relativity cube,
so I could not leap dimensions like some of the Amish
do in their buggies. But the smell of their store
took me back five decades, no small
accomplishment. I bought a bag
of licorice pipes from their candy counter,
a grown man thinking he was seven again,
accompanied by my own body,
which served as a surrogate father
who paid for what I wanted at the cash register.
I passed through the ribbon room
looking for what, for whom? My grandmother
would buy fabric and make me pajamas,
for example, but I did not find my grandmother
in the ribbon room. I had a long chat
with my father on the drive back
to the 21st century, meaning I muttered
things to myself as the landscape darkened
and deer started to mill about
on the shoulder of the highway
and search for the brightest point.

♦

Rustin Larson’s poetry has appeared in The New Yorker, The Iowa Review, and North American Review. He won 1st Editor’s Prize from Rhino and was a prize winner in The National Poet Hunt and The Chester H. Jones Foundation contests. A graduate of the Vermont College MFA in Writing, Larson was an Iowa Poet at The Des Moines National Poetry Festival, and a featured poet at the Poetry at Round Top Festival. Website: RustinLarson.wordpress.com.

Delmarva Review publishes compelling new prose and poetry selected from thousands of submissions annually. As a 501(c)(3) nonprofit, it receives partial financial support from individual contributions and a grant from the Talbot County Arts Council with funds from the Maryland State Arts Council. The review is available worldwide from Amazon.com and other major online booksellers and specialty regional bookstores. For more information about the authors, see the website: www.DelmarvaReview.org

# # #

Author’s note: “This poem began as a simple list playing with the idea that beachcombing can be a metaphor for living one’s life. But I love the pantoum, especially when describing the sea’s endless rhythm, which the repetitive form mimics and enhances. When I rewrote the poem as a pantoum it became much more powerful, a way of understanding how we are all inevitably broken by the relentless tides of life but there is beauty in that brokenness.”

Rules for Beachcombing

First, you must forgive yourself
for all that you will miss.
Agree to go empty-handed.
Nothing is here for you, per se.

For all that you will miss,
the horizon is treasure enough.
Nothing is here for you
but what the restless water brings.

The horizon is treasure enough.
Still you call the names,
what the restless water brings
from the deep—olive, moon, murex—

you call their names—
triton, tellin, limpet.
From the deep—olive, moon, murex—
comes tidewrack’s wreckage—

triton, tellin, limpet—
the unusual color, the odd shape.
In tidewrack’s wreckage
the beauty of ruin tumbles,

the unusual color, the odd shape.
The fluted column of shattered whelk
tumbles in its beautiful ruin.
Allow for the broken,

the fluted column of shattered whelk.
Fall to your knees, your skin sand-gritted,
amid so many broken.
A million lives begin and end here.

Fall to your knees, your skin sand-gritted,
and agree to go empty-handed.
A million lives begin and end here.
First, you must forgive yourself.

◆

Wendy Mitman Clarke’s writing has been featured in numerous publications, especially in the Chesapeake Bay region. She won the Pat Nielsen Poetry Prize in 2015 and 2017, and her poem “The Kiss” (in Delmarva Review) was nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Her nonfiction has been published in River Teeth and Smithsonian. Her novel Still Water Bending was released in October 2017. Website: WendyMitmanClarke.com.

Delmarva Review is a literary journal publishing the most compelling new prose and poetry from thousands of submissions annually. As a 501(c)(3) nonprofit, partial financial support comes from individual contributions and a grant from the Talbot County Arts Council with funds from the Maryland State Arts Council. The review is available worldwide from the major online booksellers and specialty regional bookstores. For more information, please see the website: www.DelmarvaReview.org

Author’s Note: “For years now, I’ve been drawn to storied resurrections, narratives that allow us to bring back what’s been lost and sit a spell in visitation. These storied resurrections help revitalize conversations that continue after death, metaphorical or real. Ultimately, these tales are not about rumination, but rather liberation. Through storied resurrections we speak the unspoken, release the unreleased, and forgive the unforgiven.”

Custodian of Our Story

WHEN HE LEFT, I BECAME THE CUSTODIAN of our story, and I can’t even remember the first line. Shouldn’t the custodian remember the first line of a love story? But the last line, that one I know. Because I wrote it.

As I age, some details get sketchy. Others remain blindingly radiant, like light beams dancing across my eyes. He and I met right before I left my Appalachian hometown for a six-month stay in India. As if testing my resolve to leave, friends introduced me to him, a bear of a man, tall, dark hair, and quiet, but from poetic musings or judgmental ruminations, I couldn’t tell—not then, not later. I packed up thoughts of him, and I lugged them with me across India, filling pages of my travel journals with romantic and sexual fantasies of him.

The first line of our love story is lost to me, but the first exclamation point remains with me to this day. It popped into my head, a plump reddish-hued punctuation mark, when he’d cupped the back of my neck with his large hand, gently but insistently.

That had come the day after my return from India. At a hometown pool hall, I’d gathered with friends, stealing glances at him all the while, analyzing his every movement, desperate to ascertain if he had any interest in me. Then, that touch, his palm and fingers across my nape, warmth spreading through me along with certainty. Under his skin, I lost track of everything except him. The chaos of the pool hall receded, including the clatter of balls breaking—or maybe that was the sound of rules being broken. He and I did that. We broke all sorts of rules. And that touch was no exception. To me, it became the nonverbal equivalent of an out-of-place exclamation point, one that emphasized our irreverence when it came to us following the rules of courtship.

Because of that touch, I followed him into the restroom. That was hours later. After we left the pool hall in favor of a dark restaurant where we plowed through baskets of chips, bowls of salsa, and way too many drinks. He got up to use the bathroom, and I followed, waiting outside the stall. When he emerged, the metal door croaked like a bullfrog’s mating song, and his eyes landed on me. I smiled, my grin whispering, “Yes, please.” Towering over me, he had to bend low to reach my lips, no matter how much I lifted my face to his, no matter how much I rose toward him on the tips of my toes.

From that night on, we coauthored our love story with a passion that neither of us had previously displayed.

Having little money and few job prospects, we lived in our parents’ houses, him in the rolling countryside, me in a suburban neighborhood, miles apart. We found pathways to one another, though. On trails through ancient forests, we explored one another’s southern wilds. On the side of nighttime roads, we parked our cars, our inhalations and exhalations mixing with the rumbling of human travels. On top of a mountain, we gathered dandelions and blew their seeds, watching our feathery dreams float over the edge, the place where clouds dipped, planting wet kisses on the swollen land. Those dandelion seeds are like the moments that make up our story, some withering, others flowering and spreading beyond our imagination.

After two years of dating, we wrote vows and, on an October afternoon, we exchanged them, along with custom-made rings, circles of gold forged with scrap jewelry. Nearly fifteen years later, he would leave his ring before walking out the door. Of course, back then, I knew none of what would come. Back then, I didn’t know that I alone would write the last line of our story.

On an autumn day, he and I stood before rows of witnesses. We clasped hands and stared at one another, almost shyly, as if we hadn’t already spent hundreds of nights weaving together our bodies. I wore a poofy white dress—a cliché that satisfied my mother. He wore a red bowtie, too tight, and he hated it, but I loved it.

At our beginning, we anchored ourselves to one another to prevent us from drifting apart. We enjoyed sunny days, long spells of optimism and warmth. There were beach trips and beach walks. There were candlelight dinners and baby talk. Then came the darkness, and over time, it settled in and stayed, an unwanted visitor who became an unwanted member of the family.

“I HAVE SOMETHING TO TELL YOU,” he said. This is one of those memories that are blinding in detail. I see myself sitting on the ratty couch beside him in our townhouse in Georgia, my stomach seizing as I prepare for the gut-punch that I sense is coming. He continued, his eyes darting away from mine. “I haven’t been going to class.”

Months earlier, he had been admitted into a prestigious graduate program, and we had relocated to a college town, deeper south, away from our beloved Appalachian Mountains but closer to a brighter future, so we’d convinced ourselves. At first the move had been good, a time for him to live out his dreams, but then, increasingly, he had disappeared inside himself, our conversations stopping, our lovemaking too.

“How long?” I whispered, terrified of the answer he would give to my question. By then, I had learned to bite back my emotions, or he might storm out, or throw things, or sink into brooding silences that lasted hours, days, weeks, sometimes more.

“A month. I drop you at work, then I come home.”

Tens of thousands of dollars in debt, and my husband had secretly stopped working on his master’s degree. Then and there, I found myself in a story I didn’t understand. I didn’t understand the plot or the plot twists. I didn’t understand the main characters, myself included. Still, I reassured myself, we would persevere. We would make this experience a footnote in our love story, nothing more. He flunked out of the graduate program, but with each move, each new job, each new undertaking, his darkness dissipated, or seemed to. I completed a PhD program and got a position at a Georgia university. He became a technical writer in Atlanta, and everything made sense again, especially when, a few years later, we relocated back to Appalachia, allowing me to teach in the mountains of the South again.

I ended that chapter of our life with promises that those times of secrecy and shame were behind us, that this part of our love story would be dazzling and full of joy.

“YOU BOUNCED CHECKS AGAIN,” I’d said. We stood in the stairwell, the artery that connected the heart of our home, the upstairs living area, to the bowels, the dark, unfinished basement. He had always had difficulties managing money. This time, though, he had hundreds of dollars in fees from bounced checks. Plus, there were his debts from his credit card and student loans, not to mention his new car that he’d surprised me with.

“I’m trying not to hurt myself,” he’d shot back. “I’ve been down here,” in the basement, “thinking up ways to hurt myself.”

I nearly collapsed on the steps. Instead, I drove him to the emergency room, and that began his first of many inpatient psychiatric stays.

No matter what we did, no matter the diagnoses or treatments, the darkness continued spreading through him; it grew until it engulfed us both. Eventually, we dwelled inside a gloomy world—no matter where we moved or however many jobs he got or lost. The gloominess became a perpetual fog that I stopped noticing. Consciously and unconsciously, I adapted to the swirling grayness, muffled love, and muted laughter.

HE LEFT LONG BEFORE HE LEFT FOR GOOD. He left in protracted silences. He left me upstairs in the sunlit living room while he haunted the dank, unfinished basement. He left our reality for virtual reality, finding pleasure in being an avatar instead of a spouse, partner, and parent. He left for extended stays in inpatient psychiatric facilities, each offering him an oasis, quenching his needs, but only temporarily.

Even as I write this, I understand that I’m oversimplifying him. That is a weight I carry as the custodian of our story. Do I write about the time he taught himself the ukulele and played it while I danced around the living room? Do I write about his attempt at woodworking and how he handcrafted for me a lamppost and a letterbox? Do I write about the poetry he penned, often gifts to me, those precious sheets of paper framed and hung on the walls of the home we shared?

Truthfully, I want to write about the beautiful gestures of love, but if I do, I must also thread into our story that his offerings were often made after missteps, mishaps, and misrepresentations. His offerings were often revisions of a story routinely fractured by his secrecy and shame, mainly about his past and his illnesses.

Darkness consumed him, drawing him deep within until he became little more than a ghost in our home. Then, one day, his darkness commanded that he leave our southeastern home and drive westward on a mission known only to him. He’d kissed me goodbye that morning, and I had waited until late evening before calling his boss and family in search of him, all the while lying to our young son to explain away his disappearance. Finally, standing in my kitchen and facing the police officer, I started the process of filing a missing-persons report. I wanted to explain to the officer that my husband had been missing for years, that this time, his body was gone, too.

Eventually, he returned, and I learned that he’d skipped work and had driven hundreds of miles to Oklahoma because a voice had told him to. In a note he’d written to me upon his return, he scrawled in blue ink on white college-ruled paper, “It’s not my fault.” He wrote other words, but those four were the ones that caused my hope to wilt; as I saw it, he had finally abdicated his co-authorship of our love story.

Even as I write this, I wonder exactly when the spine of our story got broken, when the first page spilled out. After a time, so many spilled out that I couldn’t put them back in order. Or maybe I stopped trying.

At last, I came to accept that I had to author another tale, and I began the work of separating my plotline from his.

In a letter I dropped at his latest inpatient facility, I told him he could not return to our home. In that memory, sometimes I see my emergence as a villain, a coldly calculating wife who severs her connection to her husband at his most vulnerable. Other times, I witness a desperate woman’s fatigue over having become a minor character in her own life.

AUTHORING MY STANDALONE STORY was painful in ways that I hadn’t anticipated. Grief and longing bent me over, literally, and I spilled him out of me in streams of tears and snot. Also, with the passing of time, I spilled out of me his origin tale, the one I’d been clinging to, reciting like a holy mantra, especially during our gloomiest of days.

His birth father had brutally carved him into creation. His mother had molded him out of love, heartbreak, and trauma. But he had conceived his own survival.

In my solitude, I came to accept that his origin story had captivated me to the point that my own story had been held captive.

Reluctantly, I closed the first part of our book, saying goodbye to those intimacies in the wilderness, those roadside fumblings in our cars, and those blown dandelion seeds on a mountaintop. I consoled myself with promises that the second part of our story would be fulfilling in its own way. It would be about us parenting our son together while living apart. That didn’t happen.

He left without a final goodbye. He left me to write the final line.

I will never know what, when, or why. I have fragments that I’m tempted to assemble, but I know that I would be dragged into a lifetime of piecing, sorting, and reconfiguring. Instead, I’ve reconciled myself to being custodian of a narrative about perpetual doubt.

Over 550 days after our separation and around seven months after our divorce, he left for good. Setting his wedding ring on the kitchen counter in his apartment where he lived alone, he disappeared through a door. He descended into a basement. Should I be grateful that he exited through another basement, and not the one that he used to haunt in our home? And, like the bowtie he had slipped on for our marriage ceremony, he slipped a noose around his neck, and he left his story in my hands.

The rope I’m holding is attached to a narrative that I don’t understand and never will. But in some ways that rope connects us as we were never connected before.

HE LEFT WITHOUT A FINAL GOODBYE, a final poem, so I’m offering one, his anniversary gift to me:

Let This Be Our Measure
We are a clock without a face.
Our time is measured in heartbeats
and breaths.

We say:
“This is the day we married.”
“This is the day you were born.” 
“This is the day you crossed the world 
to be with me.”

But these sweet measures are just words.
They are not us.
We are, because we remember what we were. 
We are, because we imagine what we will be.

No sweeping minute hand
can tell us how long we have been
or how long we will remain.
The sun has risen and set on us
thousands of times.
And we have shared a bed
at almost every day’s end.
Let that be our measure. 

—MTB (October 1, 2006)

I am the custodian of our story. I am the keeper of his words. I am the memory well beyond his leaving.

This is our love story, and this is the last line.

♦

Kelly A. Dorgan’s personal essay is from the 13th edition of the Delmarva Review. She writes about taboo topics, including sex, race, and illness. A writer, speaker, scholar, and college communications professor, she has published nearly 40 nonfiction stories, essays, and research articles. Her writings appear in online magazines, research journals including Women & Health, and scholarly books including Performing Motherhood. Dr. Kelly is a professor at East Tennessee State University. Website: www.kellydorgan.com. 

Delmarva Review is a nonprofit literary journal publishing evocative new prose and poetry selected from thousands of submissions annually. Partial financial support comes from individual contributions and a grant from the Talbot County Arts Council with funds from the Maryland State Arts Council. The review is available worldwide from major online booksellers and specialty regional bookstores. For more information, please see the website: www.DelmarvaReview.org.

 

Author’s Note: “This might be a story about loss, about acceptance, or about grace. It all depends on the reader. Each person sees what they need to see in a story, or on a street.” 

Odd Fellows

I THINK MY VISION IS GOING. I used to be able to read street signs from three intersections away. Now, I see a narrow green blur with a halo of haze around it, astral, as if seen thru a telescope. Earth to the Milky Way. The streets here are marked by letters. This could be Q Street. Or maybe that’s an O. 

From this angle, the sidewalk on the other side of the street seems crowded. I see dark clusters of people huddled together, clots of coats and earmuffs and probably thick hats. I can’t really see them; rather, I assume they are what I am seeing. I am taking a walk, doctor’s orders. I am wearing two coats: the pretty little parka my sister bought me for Christmas years ago, and then my husband’s functional winter parka with the fur hood hanging down my back. I push the button and wait for the light to change, watching the cars fleeting past and kicking up wind that lifts my hair from my scalp. 

The cars are slowing. I wait for the little white man to appear in the traffic box before moving my feet. My winter boots are anvils, anchoring me to the earth. The effort to lift each foot is enormous. 

On the median ahead of me, a young woman in a full fur coat is pushing a double stroller through the intersection. Closer, I see she is not young. At least fifty, I’d guess. I can’t imagine taking care of a baby at this age, much less two. We cross, nod our acknowledgement. I look into the stroller, assuming twins. I am all the way wrong. The stroller contains a load of mismatched shopping bags and a scruffy small dog who yips at me as we pass. 

The light has started to blink its warning, counting down from eight, seven, six. Who calibrates these signals? I refuse to speed myself up. If anything, I feel my legs slowing down. Challenging the god of pedestrian traffic to a duel. Me versus the little orange man blinking relentlessly. 

The vagrant who works this corner has a sign that reads: Vet Homeless Blind Please Help. “Ham and cheese?” he asks as my legs move past him. 

“Don’t you usually say egg and cheese?” I say.

“That’s for breakfast,” he says. “It’s lunchtime now.”

The sidewalk is completely empty. I see now that the shapes I saw as people are really man-made things: parking meters and bus shelters, an electrical box for the traffic lights. We are alone in space, which is fine with me. I am used to being alone. 

An odd light starbursts behind the vagrant, in the windows of the building that used to be a reading room. Christian Science, or maybe LDS. I can’t remember. Whoever is in there now has darkened the street-level windows so you only see yourself in the glass. I am an over-large figure without a hat standing over a mound. Shadowy images, a misrepresentation of size and stature. I might be a tall man or an ogre, he might be defecating or praying. 

“Odd fellows,” the vagrant says, pointing low and long at the window. 

“Huh?” I follow his finger to the handwritten sign taped to the edge of the glass. Squinting, I move closer. Independent Order of Odd Fellows. 

“I thought you were blind,” I say. 

“Night blind,” he tells me, stretching out his legs. “What’s it to you?” 

“Nothing.” I shouldn’t have said anything. 

“You want to say something?” He leans back against the wall of the Odd Fellows building and sets his head on an angle, and I know he is offering not a challenge but an offer. 

And so, I tell him. I tell him that I no longer perceive colors, that my world is a watery palette of beige and gray and weak yellows that remind me of diluted urine. I tell him that I still sleep all the way over on my side of the bed and that your towel is still hanging over the shower door. I tell him that the washing machine is making that squeaking sound again, that I can’t find the fly swatter, that I may or may not have forgotten to pay the utility bill. I tell him I have gained eight pounds, mostly around my waist, and that your mother sent a birthday card even though it is no one’s birthday. 

He might not even be listening, but I tell him all these things anyway, mainly because there is no one else around and because we are sharing a moment in front of the Independent Order of Odd Fellows, whatever that is. I tell him because I need to say these things and he is the only person around to tell. 

And then, the door opens and warm air cascades over my face, and I see the man standing in the doorway. He is not wearing a coat. He is talking, but his eyes are on the vagrant and me. I see a cell phone pressed to his head. He holds the door ajar with the toe of his shoe and signals to the vagrant and me, come inside. I am thinking, what a nice gesture, to welcome a homeless person a bit of warmth and shelter. I am thinking there will be hot coffee inside, maybe cookies or sprinkle donuts. I am sure the vagrant will welcome the chance to get off the freezing cold street, if only for a while. 

But he is leaving. On his feet and moving into the street. He stops at the median, and I think for a moment he is going to reconsider, turn back and head inside, but instead he bends forward and coughs up a length of mucus that splats on the pavement, and proceeds across the intersection, crossing Q Street, kicking away a random piece of trash that blows against the curb and disappearing around the corner. 

♦

Lisa K. Friedman is a writer and essayist from Washington, D.C.  Her fiction has been featured in literary journals and anthologies. She is the author of two novels, Nothing to Lose (2000) and Cruise to Retribution (2011). Her nonfiction writing has been published in the New York Times, Smithsonian, and the Huffington Post, where she maintains a humor column. Her story “Odd Fellows” was published in the thirteenth edition of Delmarva Review. Website: www.lisakfriedman.com. 

Delmarva Review is an independent, nonprofit 501(c)(3) literary journal publishing evocative new prose and poetry selected from thousands of submissions. Partial financial support comes from individual contributions and a grant from the Talbot County Arts Council with funds from the Maryland State Arts Council. The review is available worldwide at Amazon.com and other major online booksellers, and from specialty regional booksellers like Mystery Loves Company, in Oxford. For more information, please see the website: www.DelmarvaReview.org.

#  #  #

Author’s note: “The story of Tahlequah carrying her dead calf for 17 days rivets and shatters me. Anthropogenic factors including pollution and depletion of chinook salmon have put this group of whales on the Endangered Species list. Every birth is vital. Tahlequah’s calf lived just half an hour. Each time she surfaced to breathe, she was trying to revive the daughter we had helped kill. As a mother, I can’t bear the grief; as a human, I can’t tolerate our complicity.”

Two Million Breaths

       For Tahlequah—
      who carried her dead calf seventeen days,
      a thousand miles, through the Salish Sea

You carry your pain like a warrior
carries her dead, the strange cradle

of your face obscured by the body
limp as a child pulled from the rubble

of your world. You surface to breathe
and the rainbowed spray belies

your labor of witness, two million breaths
you shared as one. When the moment came

to give birth did you feel that startled
regret of separation, some subtle thief

who sliced out your heart still
beating? Rising, falling, unrelenting

metronome of breath to carry
this loss that belongs to us all now—

we unforgiven—this abyss of knowing
your name, the shattered light

of your passage. When you lift
your dead hope, you are a broken

bone splintering the skin of water,
a white spear through the sea.

♦

Wendy Mitman Clarke’s poetry, fiction, and nonfiction writing has been featured in numerous publications, including River Teeth and Smithsonian. She won the Pat Nielsen Poetry Prize in 2015 and 2017, and her poem “The Kiss” (Delmarva Review, Vol. 8) was nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Still Water Bending, her novel, was published in October 2017. Website: www.WendyMitmanClarke.com.

Delmarva Review is an independent, nonprofit literary journal publishing the best of new prose and poetry selected from thousands of submissions. Partial financial support comes from individual contributions and a grant from the Talbot County Arts Council with funds from the Maryland State Arts Council. The review is available worldwide from major online booksellers and specialty regional bookstores. For more information, please see the website: www.DelmarvaReview.org.

Author’s Note: “When my son was three, we’d walk around the neighborhood, on the way to a park, running errands, or sometimes just to have something to do. During these little adventures, he’d often pick up a twig and insist on stopping at each tree to tap the bark around the trunk. He called this ‘nectarine-ing.’ We couldn’t move on until he was done giving each the little care it needed.”

Nectarine

It’s good to not know what you’re doing,
a reminder you’re just visiting from somewhere.

When my 3-year-old says he’s nectarine-ing
the oak, don’t ask how nectarines figure in.

Let him delight in picking the perfect twig.
Follow as he rounds the trunk tapping its bark.

You’re visiting from somewhere you can’t describe,
why rush to the next place, then the next?

Stop and let the tree need this from him
like the bloom needs the bee’s casual brush.

Good to know the fruit, but not the tree.
Let nectarine pass through the dictionary of air.

♦

Jason Gebhardt’s poems have appeared in many journals, including the The Southern Review, Poet Lore, Tinderbox Poetry Journal, and Iron Horse Literary Review. His chapbook Good Housekeeping won the 2016 Cathy Smith Bowers Prize. He lives in Washington, DC and is the recipient of multiple Artist Fellowships awarded by the D.C. Commission on the Arts and Humanities.

Delmarva Review is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit, independent literary journal publishing the best of new prose and poetry selected from thousands of submissions. Partial financial support comes from individual contributions and a grant from the Talbot County Arts Council with funds from the Maryland State Arts Council. The review is available worldwide from Amazon.com and other major online booksellers, and from specialty regional booksellers like Mystery Loves Company, in Oxford. For more information, please see the website: www.DelmarvaReview.org.

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