Writer’s Note: The unseen forces that surround us and shape our lives are so fascinating—and I mean the literal ones, like magnetism or gravity, not just the metaphysical ones, though I also have doubts about how different those really are.  If the spiritual and metaphysical are anywhere, then they’re here, they’re now, they’re ordinary and constant.  They’re in humankind and they’re also in the magnetic doorstop.

Magnetic Doorstop

You can feel the magnet in the wall reach
to clutch the magnet in the door, pulling,
straining. When they come close
enough, they spring at one another,
plunge together, drawn by just one
of the endless unseen forces
of this house: lightning hovering
and coursing in the walls, awaiting the mage-
touch on the switch; the spiral radula
of each screw biting and biting,
holding one beam or one stud to the next,
defying the strangest magic of all, the draw
of the earth toward its core, down
and down. Everything pulling at everything
else. Almost as if the whole universe runs
on love. Only you don’t know what power
drags one thing toward another: whether
love, or the impulse to devour.

⧫

Catherine Carter is the author of three full-length collections of poetry. The most recent is Larvae of the Nearest Stars (LSU Press, 2019). In addition to the Delmarva Review, her poetry has appeared in Best American Poetry, Orion, Poetry, Ecotone, RHINO, and Ploughshares, among other publications. Raised on the Eastern Shore of Maryland, she now lives with her husband in Cullowhee, North Carolina, and is professor of English at Western Carolina University. Website: CatherinCarterPoetry.com. 

Delmarva Review publishes evocative new prose and poetry selected from thousands of submissions annually. Designed to encourage outstanding writing, it is an independent, nonprofit literary publication. Financial support comes from tax-deductible contributions, sales, and a grant from the Talbot County Arts Council with funds from the Maryland State Arts Council. Website: DelmarvaReview.org.

 

Editor’s Note: “Querencia,” from the Delmarva Review’s 14th annual edition, has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize in nonfiction.

Author’s Note:  When I first began writing memoir, I wrote a lot about growing up in Brooklyn. I began “Querencia” while wrestling with the question of whether my current living space still met my needs. Eventually I realized that what I really wanted to explore was the idea of “home.” What draws us to certain places? Where do we feel most like ourselves, or at home? A collage format provided the flexibility to mingle my Brooklyn memories with recollections of other places I’ve lived contrasted with the journey of the hermit crab in her perpetual search for the perfect home.

Querencia

Margaret: You know, Klinger, I envy you.
Klinger: Me? What for?
Margaret …the way your face lights up when you talk

about Toledo. 

                                             – MASH, Season 10, Episode 11

August 2019—I’m eating breakfast on my screened porch on one of those summer mornings that feels more like fall than summer. Sparrows flit from tree to rooftop and back. Across the way, Milo, my neighbor’s cat, patrols the rose bushes. My dog, Blue, snoozes on a lounge chair. On mornings like this, the house feels just right. On mornings like this, I don’t think about moving. On mornings like this, the house is not too big, too old, too far from the beach, too something. On mornings like this, I feel at home. 

Where is home? Is it where you live? Where you want to live? Is it a place you used to live where you’re yearning to return? Or is it not a place at all? Is it how you feel about yourself when you’re there? An I’ll-know-it-when-I-feel-it feeling? 

July 2019—I write a short story for an anthology with the theme “beach dreams.” My narrator, Nancy, like me, lives in a house that was her vacation/weekend retreat before it became her permanent home. As her grandchildren grow up, family members visit less often. She loves living in a beach community but says, “The house feels too big, as if I’m swimming around in one of my mother’s dresses.” Nancy drives around seeking her dream house in her dream neighborhood. She fantasizes about a small, slightly run-down bungalow on a side street in an older neighborhood. But there’s a bike on the porch and a truck in the driveway. Why is she falling in love with a house that’s not available? 

Maybe I thought if I could move my fictional character into her dream house, I’d be able to find mine. 

The hermit crab has many homes in its lifetime. The hermit is not a true crab—it has a smaller, softer underbelly. It must defend itself from predators and dehydration by making a “home” out of a stray snail shell it finds on the beach. As the hermit grows, it must continually seek out larger shells. 

Pros and cons—My house is both too big and too small—too many bedrooms and bathrooms but not enough living space. My dining room is only seven feet wide. Imagine five or six people around the table. Someone will have to get up to let someone else use the bathroom. 

The house’s location, three miles from the beach and walking distance to supermarkets, was once a plus. But thanks to a building and buying boom in the last few years, newer communities now surround our older one. The left turn onto the secondary road toward town or nearby stores is an iffy proposition. 

I cherish the memories made in this house: grandchildren racing up and down the stairs, gathering towels, sunscreen, beach toys; cartoon music blaring from the upstairs den (adults pleading, “turn it down”); the aroma of bacon and French toast summoning guests downstairs; the crackle of potato chip bags as teenagers enjoy a post-midnight snack; my daughter, Michele, and I preparing Thanksgiving dinner—the same recipes each year. 

Things change. My grandchildren became adults; their visits tapered off. That was expected. Michele died six years ago. That was not supposed to happen. 

August 2020. Notes from the pandemic—I’ve been “sheltering in place” since March 15. Six months and no end in sight. I have not seen my family since Christmas. My son is a voice on the phone. I have not been to the movies or eaten a meal in a restaurant or hugged another person. 

Every ten days or so, I shop at the supermarket. Twice a week, I visit friends in their backyards, or they visit me, and we “socially distance” on my porch. 

My home—a two-story four-bedroom townhouse—is now my cage. And a cage is a prison even if it has four bathrooms, a screened porch, and a well-stocked refrigerator. 

Warm evening in July. Vacationers stroll the boardwalk in the small beach town where I live. While these temporary residents consider T-shirts, hats, shell necklaces, I peer into the window of a typical souvenir shop at our town’s other transient tenants—the hermit crabs. Most appear to be dozing harmlessly. But each would kill for the right home. Shopkeepers are careful to scatter extra shells around the inside of the habitat to prevent fights that can lead to loss of limbs or even death. 

In the wild, hermit crabs rely on scarce empty shells that wash up on shore. Not any old shell. A Goldilocks shell: the perfect size and shape. Sometimes the hermit will carry around a spare “tryout” home until she’s sure nothing better is available. 

October 1951—I’m not in Brooklyn anymore. My friend Jerry and I stand outside the New Jersey garden apartment where he lives now. The suburbs. The place seems as foreign to me as some faraway country that exists only on a map in my fifth-grade classroom. We stand in a grassy area surrounded by brick buildings with balconies. 

Where is everything? Where is the corner where your mother sends you for bagels or a quart of milk? Where’s the candy store where you buy comic books, loose-leaf paper for school, and ice cream cones? Where’s the movie theater, the savings bank, the cafeteria? Where’s the West End, the subway line that took us everywhere else we needed to go—downtown shopping or in the opposite direction to Coney Island. Most importantly, where is the water—the park by Gravesend Bay, where on clear days you could see the Statue of Liberty in one direction and Coney Island’s Parachute Jump in the other? 

We walk to the playground, but in the two months since Jerry and his family moved from the apartment above us, we’ve become strangers. We don’t dare each other to swing from the top of the monkey bars or pretend we’re cowboys on the seesaw. “Let’s go in,” Jerry says. “My mom has cake.” 

March 2018—Bulldozers level most of the trees in the wooded area that borders our small community. A skimpy strip of leafless trees remains to separate our homes from a wasteland of tree trunks and stumps, soon to become streets, sidewalks and new homes. Neighbors, who put out food for the foxes and squirrels and other animals that sheltered in that small forest, worry about the destruction of their habitat. Is this another reason for me to move? I’d always dreamed of living near the beach. How can I fault others for wanting to live here, too? 

April 2018—Through the thin border of trees, I now enjoy the sunset each evening—an unexpected (and literal) bright side to the destruction of our forest. Random pink streaks in the sky deepen gradually to a rich, rosy glow. Soon, the lower portion of the sky gleams gold and russet and orange. The sparse trees seem etched against the sky, each branch sharp and distinct, as in an Ansel Adams photograph. 

It seems to me that until now, I went where the waves took me, never really choosing a place as much as washing up there—in Long Branch, the New Jersey beach town where my son was born, then south to the DC suburbs as each career advance for my husband required a transfer. The suburbs and the rest of my life loomed, pre-packaged like a TV dinner or an egg salad sandwich from the Automat. 

April 2020—Everything is shut down except for grocery stores and other “essential” businesses. I can fill my car with gas but I have no place to go. Every day feels the same. Every day feels different in its sameness. The good news: neighbors have become more neighborly. One brings sugar cookies with a Happy to know you post-it attached. Another delivers three daffodils to my door. Each day my dog Blue and I circle the community. He pauses and howls outside the doors of his favorite neighbors—those who keep treats in their garage for him and the other neighborhood pets. At the sound of a garage door opening, Blue’s ears perk up and he pulls at his leash. “It’s OK,” Jim calls with a wave—my signal to let Blue run off to claim his reward. 

June 1968—To live in a house—a real house—once seemed like an incredible luxury to me. When I was younger, I’d imagined that the large Victorian homes on our Brooklyn street were full of intriguing rooms and stairways, places to hide away to read a book or to daydream. 

We buy a house in the Maryland suburbs because that’s what families with young children did in those days. I’m 27 years old and this is my first single family home—a small brick rambler on a corner lot. In this house my children climb the willow tree in the side yard, play touch football in the street, bike around the neighborhood with their friends. In this house I learn the difference between flower and weed, annual and perennial, maple tree and oak. I see my first red-winged blackbird, collect rocks from the side of the road to build a rock garden, throw a surprise 40th birthday party for my husband. We swim in the community pool but feel guilty about its “whites only” policy. I finish graduate school, quit teaching, take a job in the city. My husband quits his job to attend graduate school. 

Every man, every woman, carries in heart and mind the image of the ideal place, the right place, the one true home, known or unknown, actual or visionary. A houseboat in Kashmir, a view down Atlantic Avenue in Brooklyn, a gray gothic farmhouse two stories high at the end of a red dog road in the Allegheny Mountains, a cabin on the shore of a blue lake in spruce and fir country, a greasy alley near the Hoboken waterfront, or even, possibly, for those of a less demanding sensibility, the world to be seen from a comfortable apartment high in the tender, velvety smog of Manhattan, Chicago, Paris, Tokyo, Rio or Rome — there’s no limit to the human capacity for the homing sentiment. Theologians, sky pilots, astronauts have even felt the appeal of home calling to them from up above, in the cold black outback of interstellar space.

– Desert Solitaire: A Season in the Wilderness, 

Edward Abbey 

Whenever I travel, I imagine myself living in that place—a condo in Kauai, a tiny apartment in Los Angeles walking distance to Canter’s Delicatessen, a flat over a trattoria in Positano—a list that reveals my priorities as clearly as if I’d taken a magazine quiz called “Find Your Perfect Home”—close to an ocean; interesting places to eat. By those standards I’m doing OK. 

The Canadian village of Three Pines exists only in the novels of Louise Penny. Almost everyone who reads this author’s mystery series about Chief Inspector Armand Gamache wants to live here. As befitting novels where murders and other crimes occur, Three Pines is a mysterious place. The village cannot be found on any map. Cell phone service and Wi-Fi are unpredictable. People arrive by accident, lost on their way to somewhere else. The place reminds them of something they once had but lost or never had but craved. They become permanent residents. 

In many respects, it’s a normal enough town. It has a bakery, a bookstore, a bistro, a B&B. Children play on the village green. There’s an annual art show. 

I read these books, not to find out who committed the crime at the heart of the story, but to observe and to feel part of this community. To experience a potluck dinner at the Gamache’s attended by Myrna, a social worker turned bookstore owner, Clara, an artist who paints remarkable portraits, Ruth, an elderly poet who may be mad, is usually drunk and who will not be separated from her pet duck. I sense their ease with each other as they meet at the bistro, drop into and out of each other’s homes for drinks, dinner. Someone always has a pot of soup on the stove. Someone else pops down to the bakery for a baguette. A green salad appears. 

I can see myself living here, part of this different kind of family. 

A house is a Goldilocks house until it isn’t. Until you have more kids or an in-law moves in. Until one or more of your children grows up and leaves home or reverses the journey and returns. Until you look at the dining room chandelier and realize you never liked it. Actually, you hate it. Until your husband starts staying out late, returning home with flimsy excuses. Until the trees in the wooded backyard that once delighted you appear to be moving closer to the house. Until it becomes a place to leave. 

What was it about that place—Bensonhurst, Brooklyn? Why do I keep going back there in my dreams as if I’ve lost something I need to recover to get on with my life? It could not have been the apartment where the four of us slept in the one bedroom. It was not the view of other windows overlooking an alley. It was not our fractured family life—my mother sending me out to play so she could take a nap to get through the day. 

Still, it was a place where a five or six-year-old could ask a stranger to see her safely across the street. Where you could leave a sleeping infant outside the grocery store and return to find a grandmotherly woman rocking the carriage or adjusting a blanket. And it seemed to me that the thirty-two families in our apartment house formed a kind of village. People could, and did, go visiting in pajamas or housecoats—to borrow an egg or have a cup of coffee. Moms watched each other’s kids. I was often sent to Mrs. G., the Super’s wife, who let me play with Susie, her cocker spaniel. Noticing my grimy knees one day, Mrs. G. pulled out a jar of cold cream and rubbed away several layers of dirt. 

Have I romanticized these memories? Are they a photo album version of reality where everyone is always smiling and wearing their best clothes? But who doesn’t love to idealize home? Isn’t there truth at the heart of most popular clichés—no place like home; home is where the heart is; home sweet home? And what about Home is the place that when you have to go there, they have to take you in? Don’t we all long to believe that the place Robert Frost describes exists? 

Maybe there’s something about a previous home that imprints itself on you like a first kiss. Perhaps we judge each stopover by the number of ways it reminds us of “home.” 

May 1979—Our second house, larger than the first, sits on a hill on a wooded lot in Northern Virginia. This is the house everyone will leave. 

Except me. 

We move in on Mother’s Day when the trees outside our bedroom window are that shade of new green you see only in spring. In this house the trees alert us to the changing seasons. In this house our daughter graduates from high school and starts college. Our son and his friends form a rock band that practices in our basement. My husband receives his PhD. I work by day and start law school at night. I throw my husband a surprise party for his 50th birthday. He throws a party to celebrate my graduation from law school. My daughter marries her high school sweetheart. My son decides to try life in California. 

In this house in the summer of 1989 my husband and I separate, and I am living alone for the first time in my life. 

How long does that Goldilocks feeling last? For the young hermit crab the new shell fits until she grows a bit, and the search for a new home begins. You could say the crab’s life is an unending search for the right home. 

January 2002—I am sixty years old and finally choosing a place to live by myself. I look for this place the way I might have once sought a mate. I want to fall in love. 

I find a condo in an Olney, Maryland community overenthusiastically named “Waterview.” The apartment backs up to a small lake (okay, a pond) on which geese swim and from which a bull frog sings (okay, croaks) all night. My grandchildren can ride their bikes the two miles to my home from theirs. 

The place is half the size of the multi-level home I’m leaving. Downsizing consumes two months of planning, trips to drop off stuff at thrift shops and trips to the dump for the rest. But I love looking through the patio door to the shimmering water beyond. The landscape feels lighter and so do I. 

Olney functions like a small town. Minivans fill parking lots outside strip malls. Visiting the supermarket, bank, or library, I almost always meet someone who knows me only as “Rachel’s Grandma.” This both pleases and disturbs me. In this town, where the primary business is running a nuclear family, I feel invisible. 

Leaving Olney means leaving two grandchildren, a daughter I’d grown closer to as we both grew up. A new life in Rehoboth Beach, Delaware is calling to me—new friends, a community of writers, seeing the ocean every day. The debate I have with myself about where to live becomes an essay entitled No Place like Here. It wins second prize in a writing contest. Still, I don’t decide. Until I do. 

This, then, is home. What is home? Is it a sort of lap of location, that exists only if certain conditions are in place? Is it the intersection of rigidity and comfort—a junction of familiarity that you curl into? Is it a feeling? I don’t know, but I’m being hugged hard against it, and I can’t tell when I’ll be let go.

– Priestdaddy by Patricia Lockwood 

July 2020—Four mornings a week I visit our community pool. Seven or eight regulars lounge on floats in the water or on chairs spaced six feet apart. Each person hails me by name with a “hello,” “how are you?” or “where were you yesterday?” Once I might have found these multiple greetings intrusive, when what I really wanted was to swim, exercise a bit and then recline in a chair and read. Now, I’m happy to tread water in the deep end while making small talk with others about what we’ve ordered from Amazon, best places to get takeout and what to watch on Netflix. 

May 2009—This time, I fall in love with the place, not the house. A place where I can be Sarah, not Grandma or Mom. A place where I can see the ocean every day, mark its moods, allow it to temper my own. A place where I can be myself. 

After three years of using the Rehoboth Beach house for weekends, holidays and summer breaks with family and friends, I make it my permanent home. It might sound absurd but some things about Rehoboth Beach remind me of Brooklyn. Maybe it’s the proximity to the ocean, or the large homes with generous porches on some of the town’s shady streets. Maybe “free writing” with a small group of writers once or twice a week— sharing stories about growing up, our families and yes, our quirks and neuroses—fosters the formation of easy friendships. 

It takes a while for me to feel “at home” here. A few months until I can greet most neighbors by name, a year or so to experience the happy surprise of almost always meeting someone I know in the supermarket, the library, or on the boardwalk. It takes having people in my home for book club and inviting friends to visit for the film and jazz festivals. It takes reading my work in public, thinking, Is this me? Spilling family secrets? Mocking my foibles? It takes other writers telling me my work is funny, that it reminds them of something in their childhood, that my mother sounds like their mother. 

People think of home as a single fixed place, but when I went traveling, I found the community of extended family I’d never had. Later, I learned there’s a Spanish word for this: “querencia.” It refers to that place in the ring where a bull feels strongest, safest, where it returns again and again to renew its strength. It’s the place we’re most comfortable, where we know who we are—where we feel our most authentic selves.”

– Everything Here is Beautiful, Mira T. Lee 

Summer 2020—Inertia sets in. I weigh the hassle of downsizing and moving vs. the possible gains. A smaller space, an easier drive. But what about the stuff? In the garage—eight beach chairs, two boogie boards, a scooter. Upstairs in one of the bedrooms—a deflated football and basketball in a box with a couple of Frisbees. Games in the closet—Scrabble, Boggle, Who- nu? Apples to Apples. In another closet—several cartons filled with family photo albums and piles of loose pictures. In the upstairs master bedroom, I find a memo pad in Michele’s desk: a to-do list, three pages of Hangman games, and a note in childish printing: Dear Mom, I’m reelly (sic) sorry about what happened. Love you. Good night. 

October 2020—One happy result of the pandemic, is that I’ve made peace, at least temporarily, with my house. My dining room is the perfect size for dinner for one. The table doubles as my writing desk. Even the rarely used upper level has become a retreat of sorts. Upstairs I revisit the family photos that line the hallway; I stand by a window to watch for the mailman or enjoy a bird’s-eye view of the neighborhood. The den has a comfortable couch for reading and napping in the afternoon. Blue dozes on the floor next to me. I was happy for the extra space when, a few months ago, my granddaughter Rachel phoned to ask if she and a friend could stay with me. It was late, they’d been in Ocean City and were too tired to drive home. 

The summer crowds are gone. I can walk Blue on the boardwalk. His unusual appearance—black coat, intelligent blue eyes—draws comments from passersby. Someone always stops to ask what kind of dog he is or if they can pet him. I explain he’s a mutt from the shelter who loves attention. Shelter, I think, another word for home. 

After a while we head down to the beach and walk along the shoreline for a mile or so. I keep my eyes on the ocean, watching it form and reform itself continuously into something new. 

♦

Sarah Barnett has had careers as a teacher, librarian, and lawyer before retiring to Delaware. She is Vice President of the Rehoboth Beach Writers Guild and enjoys leading Free Writes, teaching writing classes, and composing essays and short fiction while walking her dog on the beach. Her work has appeared in Hippocampus, Brevity Blog, Delmarva Review, Delaware Beach Life, and other publications. 

Delmarva Review publishes evocative new prose and poetry selected from thousands of submissions annually. Designed to encourage outstanding writing, the literary journal is nonprofit and independent. Financial support comes from tax-deductible contributions, sales, and a grant from the Talbot County Arts Council with funds from the Maryland State Arts Council. Website: DelmarvaReview.org.

 

 

Author’s Note: Sometimes poets have epiphanies—sometimes we simply turn on the radio. I was listening to NPR when I heard the delightful tidbit that inspired this poem. I took words cut from magazines and arranged them in a playful way like you would arrange a set of poetry magnets. That’s how I ended up with the first line, this idea of subscribing to shooting stars. From there, the poem took off. No pun intended.

Away We Go

“On Wednesday, for the second time in six weeks, an unidentified
person was seen flying using a jetpack near Los Angeles International Airport.”
NPR, October 15, 2020

It’s time to subscribe
to more shooting stars.
To love, a passage of peace.
Press pause, take this outside
to pucker and crush as
we untangle our identities
and bird around the world,
glued-hip experts above
the peaceful rain forest.
Twinkling little flowers,
overflowing, magnifying,
warm and earthy,
we glow back, they glow
back at me. I witness new
know-how, frozen corn
confidence, glittering
infamy, Milky Way
footprints, celestial
breadcrumbs, the rush
of breath and wind,
blinking light beauty,
the ants, the fireflies,
the grace of instant small,
the granular goodness.
I fly and fly.

⧫

Jessica Gregg is a Maryland writer and former journalist whose poetry has appeared in Broadkill Review, Canary, Yellow Arrow Journal, Global Poemic, Tiny Seed Literary Journal, and Art in the Time of Covid-19 from the American Writers Review. Her chapbook, News from This Lonesome City, was published in 2019.
Delmarva Review publishes evocative new prose and poetry selected from thousands of submissions annually. Designed to encourage outstanding writing, the literary journal is nonprofit and independent. Financial support comes from tax-deductible contributions, sales, and a grant from the Talbot County Arts Council with funds from the Maryland State Arts Council. Website: DelmarvaReview.org.

Author’s Note: “Something, Somehow, Somewhere” tells the story of a young Brooklyn farmer who travels across the country to meet her estranged father and his seemingly perfect family while a hurricane threatens to destroy everything she was hoping to return to. It is set in the same near-future world as my forthcoming novel Fragile, but earlier in time, focusing on a transformative moment in the life of one of the novel’s protagonists. 

Something, Somehow, Somewhere

IT WAS MY LAST FLIGHT OUT OF JFK, but I couldn’t have known that at the time. 

It was also the last time I saw my father, and I didn’t know that, either. But my father had always been an enigma to me. Rich, famous, and entirely out of reach, he’d been an absence in my life who only showed up in my mother’s occasional rants. So, I could only guess when he invited me to meet his family on the other side of the country, it was somehow related to Mom’s recent death in the riots, which I felt responsible for, though he never said anything to that effect. Only that he was sorry for my loss or something equally generic. 

Whatever the reason, he had invited me to visit his big house in Palo Alto, filled with the half-brother and sisters whose faces I had only ever seen in pictures and on screens. And, unlike Mom, I’d given in. Perhaps I was curious to finally meet my father as an adult and understand why my mother had ruined her whole life for him. Perhaps I was still too numb to think things through. Or perhaps I just wanted to find out why he wanted to see me, now that Mom was gone. Whatever the reason, I went. 

My father belonged to a different world. He’d booked a transcontinental flight to San Francisco for me like it was nothing. After boarding the plane, I found myself staring at my seat number and the corresponding seat. I asked the flight attendant to scan my fingerprints again and confirm that, yes, this was indeed my seat reservation, as were the 3-D entertainment system, earphones, face mask, and personal sanitation kit that came with it. For the first ever flight of my life, I sat in Business. Wearing my usual jeans and bright red tank top, I looked like I was making a deliberate statement against the uniform gray, black, and blue of the suits surrounding me. But for once, I wasn’t interested in political gestures. 

Feeling incongruous and overwhelmed, I studied the drinks on the menu. Knowing what was ahead of me, I contented myself with the complimentary champagne offered by the impeccable flight attendant who seemed to know everything, including the fact that I’d just turned twenty-one. I sipped carefully, my gaze on the world beyond the cabin window, where the waterline lapped right up against the airport perimeter fence. Behind it, the waterlogged houses of Brooklyn’s permanent evacuation zone gave me a perverse kind of comfort. 

Once we were airborne, the plane tipped to the right and turned westward to San Francisco, granting me a panoramic view of the place I was leaving. There was a beauty to it from up here, the blazing morning sun turning the flooded streets of Howard Beach into long channels of silver and gold. As we approached the East River, I craned my neck to see whether I could make out our farm on one of the roofs below. But the bird’s-eye view was too unfamiliar and, truth be told, a few dozen containers of struggling veggies probably weren’t enough to produce the bright splash of green I was hoping for. 

I will always be grateful for that moment, that memory. For how peaceful and quiet it all looked from above, just a few months after the riots, and just a few days before the storm. And I find it quite ironic that I owe that memory to my father. 

Until that trip, the only other noteworthy memory I had of my father—my only memory of him—was a scorching summer day many years earlier when he bought me a giant cone of ice cream. It wasn’t long after the Second Pandemic, so I must have been seven at the time. I knew that the tall, slim man with the megawatt smile on Mom’s old phone was my father. But he didn’t look, or speak, or feel like a father as he towered above me in his white doctor’s coat and shook my hand before splashing his own with a generous amount of Purell. He must have noticed my stare, his squinting eyes suggesting that behind his mask he was smiling. And then he took the bottle from his pocket again, offering. Mechanically, I reached out my hands. My mom, always the nurse, mumbled something about this being sensible, and then her hands got disinfected as well, even though she hadn’t even touched him. 

We took a walk in Central Park, and it seemed endless to me, umbrellas and trees protecting us from the sun but not from the heat. I felt it rise from below and was worried about the soles of my only pair of sneakers. My father asked me about school and such things in between offering money for me to Mom, sounding more annoyed every time she refused with a voice barely audible and eyes that seemed to be looking for something lost on the ground. Her whole demeanor was oddly diminished, like it belonged to a lesser woman and not the mother I feared and admired and loved for the limitless passion she brought to everything. Now she was quiet and evasive, so intent on keeping her distance from him that she stepped onto the brown grass while he walked right in the middle of the path, oblivious or indifferent to her inconvenience. Confused and overwhelmed by all this strangeness, I tried to answer my father’s questions and to coax Mom into being just a little less adamant in her quiet refusal. I wasn’t sure whether I perhaps did want to get some money from him to buy another pair of sneakers, although what I was really hoping for was some ice cream. 

He seemed to understand. Just before we were ready to leave, he stopped at one of the green ice cream carts. He asked me what flavor I wanted, and for some reason I said vanilla and chocolate and hazelnut and a bunch of other things, ignoring the alarm in my mother’s eyes as well as her warnings and protests. He looked rich, and I wasn’t getting ice cream often, and never this kind. So, I took my chance, determined to finish the whole giant thing even though I felt the sickness coming on after half of it. 

By the time my guts started cramping in earnest around the unfamiliar cold mass of the first-ever dairy in my life, I was already in the backseat of my father’s fancy car. My mom was livid, calling him careless for feeding cow’s milk to a vegan child. He said I was old enough to make my own choices and stepped on the accelerator. I had been in a car before, but never in one that darted forward and stopped dead, then suddenly lunged again at the random will of its driver, so I was terrified. The cars I knew were well-behaved self-driving things, their movements so smooth you barely noticed them until you looked outside. But not this creature. It was fierce and furious, acting in concert with my father’s movements and in response to my mom’s yelling. I could see the other, better-behaved cars stopping and swerving to avoid a collision. But it was when one of them honked, a distress signal I had never heard before, that I started, and my bowels could no longer hold the liquid that had formed in them. By the time we reached the hospital where my parents worked, the air was foul despite the open windows, and my embarrassment so complete that I was glad I’d never have to see that man again. 

And now, almost fifteen years later, he had paid for my ticket. Not long after takeoff, I was presented with a three-course meal preordered with my booking. And what a meal it was. I lifted the top of the first container and stared at the colorful array of veggies, dal, and rice, not a single substitute, the real deal. Amazed, I ate all of it while watching reports on the new storm that was barreling toward the East Coast. 

Tara had called in the morning to warn me once again that I might not be able to come back in time for the Grand Opening of our makeshift community farm, that my red eye back to New York might get canceled. 

“It’s only a long weekend,” I’d said to her on the phone, surprised that she seemed so worried about this. The opening wasn’t until Friday next week. 

There’d been a long silence on the other end of the line, prompting me to ask whether she was still there. “You will come back, right?” Tara had asked instead of answering. 

I’d laughed then and was smiling now. Tara didn’t worry easily, and it seemed so absurd to question my return. When I told my father about the storm, he just said he would buy me a return ticket on the transcontinental bullet train if everything else failed. Nursing our scrawny crops in the small, battered world of Brooklyn, I hadn’t even known there was such a train. 

I switched off the screen and looked out the window again. Gliding like this, lighter than air and high above the clouds, you could easily think there were no storms or heatwaves or blackouts or rationings at all, that life was bountiful, and things down below were going just splendidly. I wondered whether this was a permanent state for him, fancy drinks with lunch and daily desserts, glossy mags, and in-flight entertainment. It all seemed so unreal. 

Somehow, his family looked even less real to me when I finally met them. Nicole, the wife, was the one who opened the door, all white teeth, blue eyes, and blond tresses. She looked young, much younger than my mom had looked before she died, although I knew Nicole was almost ten years older. Everything about her seemed weirdly perfect, perfected in a way Mom never had been, and I wasn’t, either. 

“There you are,” she said with a happy smile, like it was the most natural thing for me to show up here. Before I could retreat, she hugged me, her skin pale and smooth against mine, the golden bangles jingling. She asked about my trip as she led me past their virus testing unit like I truly was family. But then again, she knew I had been tested before boarding the plane. “I hope you like window seats?” she asked, concerned, like that was important. And “Did you get the right meal?” As I dutifully answered her questions, it dawned on me that she, not my father, had arranged my travel. I wondered whether, behind the façade, she resented me as I followed her through the cool, light-suffused house to the outdoor terrace. 

My father was standing by the pool, looking almost exactly the way I remembered him from the park, and just as towering, though I was almost his height now. He wasn’t wearing a mask this time, and a blue shirt and shorts had replaced the white coat. There was no welcome hug from him, just his blinding smile, and he gestured toward the table that had been set up in the breeze of two outdoor aircon units. 

“You must be starving.” 

I wasn’t hungry after my extended meal on the plane, but Nicole went inside and returned with three people, well- nourished and gorgeous, who I knew were my half-siblings. Joe and Sarah I recognized immediately, but Meryl had been so young when I last saw a picture of her that I could only guess. Apparently, it was the same for Meryl, but for different reasons. 

“You’re so thin,” she almost screamed, looking at me in shock and admiration. 

I hid my hands behind my back, as if that made a difference, and didn’t know what to say. Everyone was looking at me, measuring the degree of our misery by the lack of pounds on my bones. 

“Let’s eat,” Nicole said simply, helping me out, and we all sat down for a feast that was even more opulent than what I’d had on the plane. The hour that followed felt like an amiable grand jury interrogation. If there was any resentment toward me, my half-siblings hid it as well as Nicole. Their wholesome faces lit up with kind curiosity as I politely replied to their constant flow of questions. They wanted to know what I did and couldn’t believe I was serious when I said I was an urban farmer. They wanted to see the farm and could barely suppress their laughter when I showed them pictures of the tattered old filing cabinets we used as planters. They were curious about our situation in Brooklyn, about the rationings, the protests, the curfews, the riots, and the supply shortages that had caused it all. They wanted to know whether it had been as bad as it was on the West Coast. 

Once again, I didn’t know what to say. All I knew was how many months we’d gone without proper food and medical care after the supply chains broke down. How many weeks we were cut off from Manhattan after the riots started and the National Guard sealed off bridges and tunnels. How many hours it had taken me to get my bleeding mother to a functioning hospital. 

Too many. 

But I didn’t want to talk about any of this. It seemed so out of place in this outrageous palace filled with food and flowers and ocean breeze, and no more than a whiff of the wildfires ablaze farther east and down south. So instead of answering whether it had been as bad, I asked: “Well, how bad is it here?” 

That did the trick. They leapt into a barrage of complaints about how it had been all downhill for the past ten years, something they seemed comfortable with. And I could finally be silent and wonder whether my father, a doctor, a medical surgeon, had any sense of what I had gone through. How he felt about the dark irony of Mom’s death, about the fact that she had worked day and night to take care of the wounded only to get hit by a stray bullet on the way home. About the fact that she had instructed her own daughter how to keep her alive until the ambulance arrived. And about the fact that I had failed, in part because the ambulance never came. But I didn’t know how he remembered her. Perhaps as the pretty young thing she’d been when he started his career in New York and not as the drained and overworked woman she’d become by the time she died. On the day he bought me that ice cream in Central Park, she’d never looked at him, not even when she started yelling at him in the car. As if looking into his eyes might infect her in some way that couldn’t be wiped clean with his Purell. 

Now that I was finally facing him again, I, too, was avoiding his gaze. I could feel him looking at me across the table, assessing me, the illegitimate daughter from a reckless extramarital affair with one of his nurses. Comparing me, perhaps, either to Mom or to his real family, the contrast so stark. Not once did he ask or say anything to me during that first meal. And not much changed after Nicole called in the maid to clear the table and led me to a guest room so I could unpack and relax. He left it to his wife to navigate our conversations, show me compassion as well as the house. And since I’d asked about the state of affairs on the West Coast, he deputed his children to give me a tour of the parts of the Great Bay that were still safe and above water. 

They drove me around, Joe behind the wheel of his Tesla, Sarah in the passenger seat and Meryl next to me in the back, chatting me up and still expressing her unending amazement about how skinny I was compared to my pictures. Deeply relieved that, unlike his father, Joe was perfectly happy to leave the driving to his car, I didn’t mind Meryl’s tactless chatter. She was two years older than I was, yet still a girl who didn’t know any better. We drove down Market Street, to our left the glittering facades of San Francisco’s Financial District, to our right roadblocks and military checkpoints that looked like the ones I had to pass whenever I wanted to cross over to Manhattan. They seemed open. 

“Can we go in?” I asked when we drove past another one. 

A long moment of silence told me that we really shouldn’t. But then Joe told the car to slow down and turn around. I reached for my ID card, but we didn’t even get stopped. A nod and a slight wave, and we had cleared the checkpoint. I wondered whether it was the license plate or the expensive car that made it so effortless, passing from one world to another, from the dazzling perfection of downtown San Francisco into one of the city’s many broken parts. I looked at Meryl, but she was busy searching her purse. In front of us, Joe and Sarah seemed taut and more erect in their seats. “At least it’s daylight,” Sarah said. 

It all looked familiar to me. The boarded windows, the layered flood marks, the hawker stalls, rooftop gardens, pop-up restaurants, and makeshift stores. Signs of precarious living, always on the move, always on the run, always waiting for the next flood or storm. Inescapable facts of life ever since an earthquake had breached the Mission Bay seawall. So yes, I thought, I could now answer my siblings’ earlier question. It was as bad here as it was in Brooklyn. I stared at the faces of the people outside when the car stopped at a red light. Eyes alert, jaws clenched, chins doggedly raised to meet the next challenge. Strugglers. Survivors. I was one of them, inside this luxury ride, looking out through tinted windows. 

“Do you ever come here?” I asked. 

“Sometimes,” Meryl said, the flickering in her eyes suggesting that the data glasses, which she had finally retrieved from her purse, were now projecting something more entertaining into her vision field. “When it’s open and safe, they’ve got some kick-ass ethnic food.” 

We left through the next checkpoint and drove on to their favorite spot, an elusive bar perched on top of a cliff with a stunning view of the sunset over the Pacific. It looked peaceful from here, vast and blue and beautiful, until you walked to the banister and looked down where the water was lapping around the foundations of abandoned houses, another familiar sight. We ordered drinks, and I thought this was exactly fitting, this was their life. Hovering high above the disaster, drinking margaritas. 

“Will you stay here?” Joe suddenly asked and caught me so unprepared that I very nearly spat my drink across the table. He looked worried, like my stay was a legitimate concern. 

“No,” I returned after I’d managed to swallow. “I have to go home.” 

The relief he felt must have been so profound he couldn’t keep it out of his face. That was the only time that any of them came near admitting that I was more than a casual visitor in need of entertainment. We never spoke about their father’s betrayal or about how and when they’d learned about my existence. The ease and self-control with which we all navigated what should have been an impossible situation still amazes me. 

My father seemed strangely content with it all, presiding over our meals, taking pictures of us to share with the world. Whenever I felt I could risk it, I studied him. I tried to see in him what his other children did, a real father. But I had no idea what that might look like. I tried to see him with my mother’s eyes when she first met him, on that fateful day when the rising star of the Cardiology Center laid his eyes on her, brilliant as surgical lights. He and Mom seemed so utterly incompatible to me. She devoted, lonely, and eternally miffed, always there for me when I needed her but only a sentence away from telling me exactly how I had failed her. He so dazzling, aloof, and self-possessed, stepping into every place like he owned it. She knew he was married, of course, she’d admitted to me one late Sunday evening when I was seventeen and pressing the issue. It was not what I’d wanted to hear. “He was a surgeon,” Mom had said, as if that explained everything. 

Now, watching his family and myself dancing pirouettes to my father’s tune, I remembered my mom’s weary footsteps on the grass that day in the park, her demonstrative distance, her quiet refusal. And his car’s reckless fury, the way it bullied its way to its destination. 

By Sunday morning, it still wasn’t clear why he had brought me over. He hadn’t taken any time off from the hospital for the duration of my visit, so I only saw him in the mornings and evenings, when we went out for extravagant dinners. The only time we spoke alone was Sunday morning, when we ran into each other in the kitchen, he returning from an early run, I on the hunt for another cup of their amazing coffee. 

“So, can I ask you—what is it really you do over there?” he asked as he walked past me and opened the fridge. “You and your farmer friends?” 

It startled me, his sudden interest. We were alone in the kitchen. He had flown me across the country so we could meet. That hadn’t made any difference over the last three days, but now here he was, looking at me, his steel gray eyes demanding an answer. 

“We’re building a community farm,” I said, as I had said before to his children. I wanted to say more, but I felt frozen, transfixed by his gaze. 

“A community farm,” he repeated slowly, closing the fridge. 

“Yes. We’re putting community needs at the forefront of reverse gentrification and the fight against climate change.” That was taken almost verbatim from the website Tara and I had created for the farm. “We’re growing local, organic produce,” I stumbled on, “and we educate community members about creating a thriving farm ecosystem.” I was terrible at this. 

My father nodded, slowly. “And where’s that gonna get you?” he asked. 

“Get me?” I asked back, my voice laced with irritation. “It’s not about getting me anywhere. It’s about creating a better future for the community. It’s about resilience.” 

He threw his head back and laughed out loud, two rows of impossibly white teeth still on display when he returned his gaze to me. “You remind me of her,” he said. “Just as pretty and just as full of surprises. Same misplaced idealism, too.” 

At the mention of my mother, something near my sternum became dislodged. I wanted to ask if I was the product of Mom’s misplaced idealism. Instead, I made myself breathe evenly. 

“I’ve observed you,” my father continued. “You’re weird but smart. So use your brains to get somewhere. You need an education, and I can help you with that. Your stubborn mother would never let me, but things are different now. I can pay for your education.” 

So, there it was, the reason he had invited me. One hundred grand sitting right there, an imaginary heap on the kitchen counter, waiting for me to say yes, change the course of my life. I knew what Mom would have wanted me to say, but she was gone, drained away from me on Williamsburg Bridge, two hundred feet from the checkpoint to Manhattan.

I tried to think as I watched him place a container of milk on the counter. “Med school would be good,” he continued, his voice flat and practical, his eyes now on the spaceship of a blender he was filling with copious amounts of nuts and fruit. “It’s the only guaranteed career nowadays unless you want to go into the funeral business. You’ll go to school over here. Nicole will find you a place to stay in the city.” He must have noticed my silence because, looking up momentarily from his blender, he added: “Don’t worry, you’ll get in. I got everyone else in, I just need to let them know you’re one of mine.” 

With that, he picked up a container of protein powder while I was trying to formulate a response that would conceal the flood of feelings I could barely contain. He cut me off before I could open my mouth. “You can deal with blood, right?” he asked, the spoonful of powder suspended above the blender. “You don’t faint or anything, do you? We can’t have fainters, but your mother never did, so I guess we’re good there.” 

I hated him then. It was sudden, a flare shooting up from my sternum as the vortex of his words sucked me back in time, back to Williamsburg Bridge, back to the warm, sticky flood drenching my mom and me as I improvised pressure bandages out of my own clothes to cover her wounds according to her instructions. I could deal with blood, all right, but not with this shit. I stood there in his ballroom of a kitchen and knew I was going to be sick again, but this time dairy had nothing to do with it. It was pure rage and revulsion. Before he could say another word, I was off to the bathroom to puke my guts out. 

We talked very little for the remainder of my visit, helped by the fact that he spent most of Sunday at the hospital. My half- siblings had gone off to some barbeque in Marine County, so it was only Nicole and me, the screen wall in their living room offering a welcome distraction. We spent the day staring at the floor-to-ceiling spectacle of a coming hurricane, now a Cat 4, churning up the East Coast. Nicole, her face even paler than usual, suggested that I stay with them for another week. But that option sounded more disastrous to me than anything that could happen on my way back to New York. 

I called Tara to see how they were doing on the farm. She was in a rush, talking to me while carrying containers down from the roof to the third floor of the abandoned office building we were squatting in. It was coming our way, she said, breathless. And it would be bad. 

“There’s no way we’re going to have that opening on Friday, so stay where you are, okay?” she said. “We’ll be lucky if Brooklyn is still around once this is over.” A door slammed somewhere behind her and then she was cursing. “I gotta go. Stay, all right? Just stay there.” 

I felt the rage returning that had overwhelmed me that morning, but this time it was directed at myself. For being here, trapped in my father’s obscene kingdom, when I was needed at home. I imagined Tara running up and down the stairs, schlepping our improvised planters, cursing but undeterred. Tara, who had held me upright when the ground was shifting below, who found her way to me that harrowing night on Williamsburg Bridge. Lenny and Judy, who’d given me a home, however temporary, when I couldn’t bring myself to return to the tiny apartment I had shared with Mom. And all the other people who had come on board the daring little farming project we decided to call Roots. People written off, counted out, mocked as misplaced idealists by men like my father. And yet, against everyone’s expectations, still hanging on. Stubborn people, precarious farmers, who had it in their minds that they would help feed other people hit by disaster. There was nothing more terrifying than the thought that they might finally meet their match and I wasn’t there. My red eye still hadn’t been cancelled, and I was determined to board, hoping the plane would be faster than the beast above the Atlantic. Nicole tried to talk me out of it, but I was adamant. 

My father didn’t return in time for my departure, a relief because I had no idea what to say to him. It was once again Nicole who took care of me. She was silent on the way to the airport, looking out the side window as the car did the driving. I thought she had finally exhausted her reservoir of friendliness, and so I spent the time texting Tara, trying to somehow be of help, somehow be part of what they were about to go through. 

“We had a prenup,” Nicole said suddenly. “That’s why I didn’t leave him after what happened with your mother. You must have been wondering about that.” 

Maybe I had, but now my mind was elsewhere. 

“We had a prenup, and I didn’t have much when I married him. And seeing what was happening to the world, I wasn’t going to do that to my children, the things you are going through now. I didn’t want them to have to live like that.” 

“It’s not that bad,” I returned sharply, realizing instantly that this was exactly what my mom would have said. It was the first time I had ever said it, and it was preposterous to boot, given that our sorry existence was about to be washed away for good. 

And yet, I immediately knew it was true. It was hard, the constant living with disaster, but the only thing that mattered to me was that the others survived this ordeal. Then we would go on and, against all odds, rebuild something, somehow, somewhere. 

“Why does he want to pay for my education?” I asked Nicole since, clearly, we were done pretending. 

“To give you a future,” she said. “He doesn’t like you digging around in the dirt like that with a bunch of have-nots. It’s embarrassing for him.” 

“For him?” I echoed. 

She turned to me, features frozen. “You are his child after all, that’s what he has decided. And you should be grateful for his generous offer. It’s your only way out.” 

“There is no way out,” I snapped. “And I’m not going to be one of his possessions. If he really wants to help me, he can go to our website. We accept donations.” 

She stared at me. I couldn’t tell whether it was envy or spite, but it was the end of our conversation. Soon after, she dropped me off at the terminal. Her goodbye sounded as relieved as mine when the car closed the door between us. 

Given the news from the East Coast, it seemed impossible that the plane would even take off, but eventually, it did. As we left the ground, I felt a pang of satisfaction, like I had accomplished some arduous task. I waited until they had dimmed the lights before allowing myself to cry, mourning the loss of my obstinate, resilient, wonderful mother—whom I had, for once, not failed—and scared of the losses to come. 

It was when I went to the bathroom to wash my face that the captain announced we would be rerouted to Boston due to severe weather conditions in New York. I looked into my swollen eyes in the mirror and heard him say the name that would turn my life upside down once again: Hurricane Shelby. 

Tara was right. I didn’t make it home that night. Or even by the end of the week. In fact, no plane would ever touch down at JFK again. It remained permanently closed, like the flooded beachfront communities along Jamaica Bay. 

But our farm survived, beaten and bruised around the edges, and so did we. 

⧫

Alexa Weik von Mossner  is a writer and ecocritical literary scholar living in Austria. On the fiction side, she has written 163 episodes of the German TV drama series FABRIXX. Her first short story was published earlier in 2021, in Orca literary journal. Website: www.alexaweikvonmossner.com 

Delmarva Review publishes the best of new prose and poetry selected from thousands of submissions. Designed to encourage outstanding writing, the literary journal is nonprofit and independent. Financial support comes from sales, tax-deductible contributions, and a grant from the Talbot County Arts Council with funds from the Maryland State Arts Council. Website: DelmarvaReview.org.

 

Author’s Note: “Sometimes when I sit quietly and pay attention, the story tells itself. Watching the pelicans, I began to contemplate the way life balances itself out: sometimes together, sometimes alone. We need both. I recently returned to the spot that inspired this poem. There’s a little restaurant there now. I ordered fish tacos in honor of the pelicans. They are still doing cartwheels. And so am I.”

Pelicans

Today at sunset
on a block of stone
once used to step up
from the beach to the terrace

of this abandoned restaurant
alone again
I watch a pair of pelicans
bomb for fish.

Wings spread like freedom
grace and courage in unison
they glide above the roil
where the waves break

single-minded in their pursuit
until one dives with abandon
in a breakneck cartwheel flop.
How reckless hunger makes us!

His neck stretched long in triumph
throat bulging, he swallows his prey
wholly forgets his mate left bobbing
disappearing behind a crest of wave.

Now the orange horizon hosts a half sun
fluorescent in its descent and I step up
into the abandoned space, arms spread
wide, contemplating cartwheels.

♦

Shirley Hilton’s writing has appeared or is forthcoming in Rattle, Briefly Write, Backchannels, and The Edison Literary Review, among others. Her poems “Dance” and “Maria Arena” were set to music by jazz musician Ryan Middagh. Writing from Iowa, she is a personal coach and blogs about work and life at: shirleyhilton.com. She is currently completing her first novel.

Delmarva Review is a nonprofit literary journal publishing the best of new poetry and prose selected from thousands of submissions annually. Financial support comes from tax-deductible contributions, sales, and a grant from the Talbot County Arts Council with funds from the Maryland State Arts Council. Website: DelmarvaReview.org.

Author’s Note: “Keenly aware of the transient beauty along the dirt roads in County Claire, Ireland, I began this poem as a way to notice, savor, and hold these precious images close. But I ask: Am I paying attention? Will I remember? And after writing the poem I wonder: What is memory when I am no longer here to remember?”

Old Woman Walking

Remember this fine mist that forms a scrim
between the hills that lead to the vast
flat white that hides the neighboring sea.
Remember the comfort of the ordered stones
that cradle this one-lane road—each a headstone
for the nameless hands that hauled and split
and arranged them into balance.
Never forget how spiderwebs appear and appear
the closer you lean in, till the whole wall shimmers
with glistening silk, and fragile hammocks
hang from rock to rock and sparkle,
even beneath this shrouded sun.
Will you remember the insistent
gravitational force that pulls you away from the wall,
across the path, past the chuckling birds that lace their way
through blackthorn, past even the blazing campanula,
to a small protected field where two cows lie in ruminant silence,
their calves leaning against them?

⧫

Katherine J. Williams, associate professor emerita at George Washington University, is an art therapist/clinical psychologist. Her book Still Life will be out in October. Her poems have been published in journals and anthologies including Poet Lore, The Northern Virginia Review, 3rd Wednesday, Voices, Passager, The Poet’s Cookbook, The Widows Handbook, and the anthology How to Love the World, Poems of Gratitude and Hope, edited by James Crews. Her poetry has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize.

Delmarva Review publishes evocative new prose and poetry selected from thousands of submissions annually. Designed to encourage outstanding writing, the journal is nonprofit and independent. Financial support comes from sales, tax-deductible contributions, and a grant from the Talbot County Arts Council with funds from the Maryland State Arts Council. Website: DelmarvaReview.org.

Author’s Note: “We can’t see dark energy or dark matter. We can’t see infrared, or ultraviolet light, yet we investigated and discovered they are real. What else exists beyond the limitations of our 5 senses? The energy of consciousness? The frequency of love? Perhaps life continues in a form currently beyond our ability to perceive it. My mother was dying. I asked her to send me a sign if she could.”

Devotion, A Ghost Story

MY 95-YEAR-OLD MOTHER and I have a secret word she’ll use to communicate with me after she dies. In anticipation of grief, I wanted a sign to prove we continue to exist after death (and I don’t mean as stardust or memory, but in a personal, recognizable way). 

We came up with this code nearly six years ago. It was spring, so I’d brought her purple lilacs in a silver vase. Because they were her favorite flower, I’d brought my mother lilacs every spring of my life. When I was very young and we had none in our yard, I’d pilfer a neighbor’s burgeoning hedge. It’s likely my mother knew she’d received stolen goods, but inhaling their heady scent, she asked me nothing I’d have to deny. When the inevitable day comes, my two older sisters and I will plant lilacs on her grave and pray the midwestern prairie to which we return her gets enough annual rainfall to produce an abundance of blossoms. 

The word we have chosen is not hard to remember, but as her mind fogs with dementia, I feel the need to review. “What’s the word, Mom?” I ask. From the Early American sofa in her assisted living apartment, she stares at the floor in good-natured concentration, as if the word might be found on the rug. “Potato!” she cries out with sudden satisfaction. 

No.

“Book!”

Closer. I can see how she’s filed the word by syllable and first letter and hope her wits are restored at the time of her death. I also hope the sudden appearance of that word will comfort me when the time comes, though it may only echo the injury, like pressing a bruise. 

The worst thing about my mother is her chronic anxiety. Her capacity for predicting the worst has meant I can never share my own worry. The best thing is harder to specify. When I confided a terrifying, recurrent nightmare at the age of six, she rocked me in her arms and said, “Next time, just imagine I am standing in front of you. Nothing bad can get past me, now or ever.” This is how I will know you still love me, I think to myself, and I whisper the word in her ear again and again. 

With Dad, proof that life exceeds death manifested abruptly and unexpectedly. He’d been dead for two decades. And then he showed up. 

Over a glass of pinot noir at The Charthouse, a friend had confided she’d met a medium at a dinner party whose messages were stunningly accurate. “She’s amazing,” Vicki said. It was happy hour on a Friday evening. I leaned forward to hear through the cacophony of laughter and conversation bubbling around us. “She warned me there was something wrong with my eyes, and the ophthalmologist found there was!” 

“How does she do it?” I asked. 

“She communicates with dead people—relatives of yours— people in spirit who care about you.” 

People in spirit care about me? 

Utterly charmed by that possibility, I made a note to get this woman’s name. I had some risky decisions to make and was paralyzed by fear and ambivalence. If any kind spirits cared to weigh in, a cosmic perspective was welcomed. 

On an April afternoon a few weeks later, I arrived at the modest townhouse of an evidentiary medium named Allyson. Blush-pink tulips brightened her front step. No weird statuary. Wearing jeans and a blousy-flowered top, Allyson was clearly surprised as she held open the door—she’d been expecting a regular client with a near-identical name. A bonus in the credibility department, I thought, shaking hands. Without the right name, she can’t have done any research online. 

We settled in on either side of a wide desk in her walkout basement office. Natural light spilled in through her sliding glass doors. I sipped sweet iced tea while Allyson got her bearings. She was a large woman with silky brown hair, blunt cut in a clean bob and a gentle demeanor. Barely perceptible music played from a console behind her as I obsessively checked my cell phone to confirm it was recording. 

I gave her my birthdate, and she began to explain the havoc Pluto was wracking on Pisces, while Jupiter magnified the ensuing mess all out of proportion. This, I could have guessed. Then she looked up abruptly, as if someone had entered the room. “Your father has passed, hasn’t he?” she asked, gazing intently to my left. I nodded warily. Dad was not on the list of benign spirit- helpers I’d mentally conjured in preparation for the appointment. 

“Well. He’s right here.” 

This was disconcerting news. My father had stashed vodka bottles behind Domino sugar bags in the pantry when I was a child and was frequently and mysteriously gone overnight. His drinking and infidelity comprised my first and second secrets, their weight staggering for a first grader who believed she carried those burdens for her mother. He had a belt that he used for more than holding up his trousers, and his favorite pastime was target practice—shooting water snakes from the end of the pier as they zigzagged from the saltmarsh to the river at dusk. When I was in fifth grade, my young mother and I sat on that very same pier, swinging our bare feet over the side, when she stopped, turned, and said, “I have something to tell you.” Dad left for good the next day and married someone else the day after that, but looking back, I think the alcohol anesthetized wounds no one could see and that his failings were no greater than many. I also think he must have been one hell of a shot. 

“Your dad’s making my heart hurt,” Allyson said, who, had she been guessing, could just as easily have reported, “I know you were close. He misses you.” Instead, she pressed her palm to her chest and continued, “He’s filled with remorse. He says he’s sorry you didn’t have his love and attention. He gets it now— what he cost you.” She paused as if listening. 

“Can I trust him?” I whispered. “He was a scary man.” 

“Not anymore,” she replied in a no-nonsense voice. She dropped her hand from her heart. “He says he’s still no saint, but he wants to make this up to you and he’s got plenty to say about what’s going on.” 

Later, as I was leaving, I asked, “Does Dad have any signs he uses to communicate with me?” He’d been dead twenty-six years and I was thinking of the months in which I’d been separated from my husband. One in ten thousand three-leaf clovers has a mutation that produces four leaves, but for that entire year, they were simply strewn in my path. I’d become a four-leaf clover savant. Walking the dog, I’d spot one along the curb without stooping. Once, running beside a train track in New Zealand, I’d spotted a four-leaf clover merely pausing to catch my breath. It was utterly bizarre. They were all over my office, pressed and dried. 

“Something about stars,” Allyson said. “He says five-point gold stars.” 

The next morning, during my early-hours quiet time, I walked over to my bookcase and, on impulse, picked up a small cabinet my father built as a high school woodworking project. It has two four-inch doors that swing open, one drawer in the bottom, and the top flips up to reveal another compartment in which to stow stamps and the like. I had examined this box thoroughly on multiple occasions with the idea I might paint it someday. I pushed up the lid to the top compartment and stared in stunned disbelief at two five-point gold stars. The kind you give a child for good behavior, or for an exemplary grade, to indicate the approval I imagined other girls routinely received from their dads. 

Do I think my father’s disembodied spirit manufactured gold stars and placed them in that box while I slept? No. Do I think the stars were always there and that his spirit, his energy, prompted me to look? Quite possibly. 

I wanted to tell someone—someone open to the idea that we don’t know everything about the way the universe works. Someone curious and uncertain, who might not dismiss out of hand that there may be dimensions to reality we can’t yet see, measure, or prove. I told my sisters. 

We can’t see infrared or ultraviolet light, I said, but by investigating the possibility, we learned wavelengths exist beyond the limitations of our senses. What else does? We can’t see dark energy or dark matter. We don’t even know what they are. Is it such a stretch, I asked, to think we do not know what happens to the energy of human consciousness when we die? Our dad still exists, I said. And I think he loves us better now. They were characteristically kind but politely detached, as if I’d shared a weather update. 

Last May, we flew from Maryland to Illinois with our mother’s ashes. She died in January, but this was the soonest we could make the trip. I had not seen or heard our secret word in any significant way in the intervening months of loss. It had not appeared in a magazine, or on someone’s license plate. It had not arrived in the mailbox on a promotional advertisement. As we boarded our flight, I was wearing a locket my father gave my mother when they were freshmen at Western Illinois University—back when she was the pretty co-ed working at the college library and he drove a yellow sports car he’d named “Bold Adventure.” Back when they were so in love, they eloped to be secretly married on a preacher’s porch in the Smokey Mountains and returned to finish college without their rings, none the wiser. The locket contains their pictures, tiny and faded. A recently added five-point gold star is pressed between them. 

AT THE AMERICAN AIRLINES GATE in Charlotte, my sisters and I sit with about forty other bored passengers waiting for our connection to St. Louis, where we will ultimately rent a car and drive to Illinois. There, we will bury our mother’s ashes in the country cemetery where her headstone awaits, and where a nursery we have hired has planted lilacs. It’s the cemetery her father mowed in the Depression to earn extra cash. It is the gentle rise where she played as a child, waiting for the first man who loved her to take her home. 

Passengers stare at their cell phones. A few lean toward each other, elbows on chair arms, and quietly converse. Others gaze in a disinterested stupor at the television monitor hanging overhead. I watch the news scrawl, thinking it would be cool if our secret word appeared. I’ll accept any version of the correct word. I’ll take it as a noun, I’ll accept it as an adverb, but I won’t invent what isn’t there. 

Abruptly and unmistakably, the scent of lilacs fills the air. “Do you smell that?” I exclaim to my sisters. “Lilacs! Lilacs!” They look up from their reading, agree, smile, then go back to their magazines. I glance around quickly to see who has sprayed perfume, who is slipping a 3.4-ounce security-screened bottle back in her carry-on, who has just walked by trailing a waft of floral scent. 

But there is no movement at all. No one rushing along on the concourse near us, no one either lifting or stowing a handbag. 

After a few minutes, the scent disappears, and only love, in ways we cannot yet imagine it, lives on. 

♦ 

Laura J. Oliver, M.F.A., is an award-winning writer, developmental book editor, and private writing coach who has taught writing at the University of Maryland, St. John’s College, and The Writer’s Center, in Bethesda. She is the author of The Story Within (Penguin Random House), a widely praised book on writing. Her short stories and essays have been published in magazines, newspapers, and literary journals. Website: www.thestorywithin.com.

Delmarva Review publishes the best of new prose and poetry selected from thousands of submissions. Designed to encourage outstanding writing, the literary journal is nonprofit and independent. Financial support comes from sales, tax-deductible contributions, and a grant from the Talbot County Arts Council with funds from the Maryland State Arts Council. Website: DelmarvaReview.org.

#  #  #

Author’s Note: “The history of the human race sadly seems also to be the history of warfare. In this poem I imagine what it would be like to be living on the edge of a war zone as fighting starts to break out, as is happening right now in Ukraine. The character in my poem is someone who lives, as I do, a secluded life in the country. He is perhaps Japanese; he is a sort of hermit.”

At the Edge

As he feeds his chickens, cooks rice,
aaaaaaassweeps out the shack,
ahe hears the droning of enemy planes.

He lies dreaming of temples and waterfalls
aaaaaaasaaaaaaasand wakes to
the thwack-thwack-thwack of helicopter blades.

aaaComes the thud of a mortar,
the man fills a thermos, latches his door,
and creeps up the slope in moon-dark,
aaaaaaasaaaaahis dog sticking close.

aaaaaaaUp near the top of the ridge,
the dog makes a low sound in her throat,
aaaaaasmelling before he does, diesel,
aathe unwashed bodies of soldiers,
aaaaaaasthe stink of hastily dug latrines.

His dog sneezes, and he clamps his hand
aaaaaaasaaaaaaover her nose.

I can evade them, he thinks.
aaaaaaasaaI can survive out here,
aI know how to hide.

But what of the town-dwellers?
What of the scholars,
aawhose knowledge they want to erase,
aaaaaaaswhose books they will burn?

What of the women
aaaaaaaswho live alone on farms?

The clanking of tank treads,
the rising dust of an army on the move.
Dawn must be
aaaaaaascloser than he has
allowed himself to understand.

⧫

Richard Tillinghast’s poems have appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The Best American Poetry, American Poetry Review, Paris Review, and elsewhere. He is the author of twelve books of poetry and five of creative non-fiction. His thirteenth book of poetry, Blue If Only I Could Tell You, is forthcoming in 2022 (White Pine Press). He has received grants from the Guggenheim Foundation, the NEA, the British Council, and the Irish Arts Council. A native of Memphis, he has lived in Ireland and now divides his time between Hawaii and Sewanee, Tennessee. 

Delmarva Review publishes evocative new prose and poetry selected from thousands of submissions. Designed to encourage outstanding writing, the literary journal is nonprofit and independent. Financial support comes from sales, tax-deductible contributions, and a grant from the Talbot County Arts Council with funds from the Maryland State Arts Council. Website: DelmarvaReview.org.

#  #  #

Author’s Note: “I spent the first six months of the pandemic with my parents, helping to care for my dementia-afflicted mother. In therapy they encourage you to personify your anxiety, and so I came to see death as an obnoxious pest with whom I squabble constantly, while holding fast to love and beauty. Writing this story was therapeutic for me – but the character of Brett is pure fiction!”

Orange

DEATH IS NOT A GRIM REAPER. You know because you are watching it now across the table. It is an orange sponge, and it floats to the right of your mother, leaching small things at first. Phone number recall. Range of motion in the fourth finger. An aversion to oversalting. These absences occur on the margins. But over time, greater things go missing. Bearings. Empathy. Nouns. The sponge swells. Sometimes it teases you by releasing a damp spot, a trickle. Death winks at you through your confusion. Death says, You didn’t know I could breathe? 

You would think Death would be a straight line, but it is a squiggle. It forces you around curves and spirals. Here you are, dancing with your mother to Mighty Sparrow. She is swinging her hips to Jean and Dinah, and today, for the first time all week, she is recalling the lyrics you feared she had forgotten. Her dimples deepen as she sings out the punchline: “De Yankees gone and Sparrow tek ova now.” Death watches from the broom corner, tapping off-rhythm. You see, you say, over your mother’s shoulder. We’re winning. Stay back. Death denies you the courtesy of a rebuttal. 

Your mother is 78. Five years ago, she was driving, julienning. Now her memory is seconds long and she does not recognize herself in photographs. But her father lived to be 90, her mother to 98. Both minds intact until the end. 

You’re early, you say to Death. Wrong genetic code. 

Death shrugs. Take it up with the one who made the manifest. 

Everything your mother used to be remains within her, sealed off behind a wall of amyloid plaque. Alzheimer’s is a progressive condition, the neurologist has explained. It swallows the brain like a fog, or a creeper vine. 

It swallows the brain like amyloid plaque, Death says. I’m not big on metaphors. 

Brick by brick, the plaque wall goes up. 

You scramble to erect a wall on the other side, a wall to seal Death out. Everything you can lay hands on. Donepezil. Coconut oil. Beethoven for the Brain. Steelpan and maracas. Daily walks and stationary bikes. Journals. Legos. Photo albums. Family Zooms. Each achievement, brick by brick, your wall goes up. 

If we can’t have her, you can’t either, you scream. Death looks on, impressed. 

Between the two walls flows the essence of your mother, the parts of her that neither side can win or tame. Aphasia may have stolen her words, but it has not dulled the wit with which she forms her cheeky asides, even in moth-eaten sentences. 

You watch with Death as your mother addresses her reflection in the bedroom mirror, thinking that it is another person. 

“How are you?” she smiles at the face in the mirror. “You got a…a naughty?” 

When the face does not respond, she drops her voice conspiratorially. 

“Tell me,” she coaxes, in a near-whisper. “Our secret.” 

You debate whether to answer for the reflection, just to keep up the conversation. You find yourself jealous of the face in the mirror. 

In the middle of the night, as you sit in the dark on the toilet, Death tells you: I am an angel of mercy. That was my formal training. 

You say: Let me pee in peace. You don’t know the meaning of the word. 

But you know that things could be worse. In your weekly Alzheimer’s caregivers’ support group, other members speak of loved ones wandering off or turning violent, stabbing themselves with forks or altering wills under the influence of perfumed home aides. People forget how to sit, how to swallow. They forget the names of their children. Your mother calls you Spooks, your childhood nickname, but laughs when you say you are her daughter. This is mercy. 

The support group has moved online because of the pandemic. Some of the members, including Brett, your favorite group member, have parents in nursing homes. The nursing home where Brett’s father lives has made news for its high death rate, and Brett has not been able to visit in months. On the chat, Brett looks gaunt and bloated at the same time. When he breaks down mid-testimonial, his Zoom square freezes, and his upper lip stays curled in anguish like a Kara Walker figure. The other members listen helplessly to his wheezing sobs. The group leader sighs. Your hand instinctively reaches for the tissue box that would normally sit at the center of the group circle. 

Of course, it is a mercy that your mother is not in a nursing home. She is here, in her own house, a house she no longer knows. She follows as you march her through a tour of her own walk-in closet, stuffed with the evidence of her past life, items she chose back when she could choose. She looks dispassionately at the once-favorite earrings you show her, at the rows of shoes that rouse no recollection. The gowns and purses and hair ornaments pass beneath her gaze like artifacts in a diorama. 

Do you get what you’re hoping for? When you look behind you, there’s no open door. 

The closet is humid with Death’s low-slung cloud. It is here that you feel your mother’s absence most, standing next to her amid the orderly wreckage of a life joyfully lived and summarily abandoned after the stroke. You hold her hand, straddle the gulf between the two, and breathe deep. Your mother looks at you like a puppy awaiting command. She does not register the despair in your eyes. 

What are you hoping for? Do you know? 

You clear your nostrils and think of a Megan Thee Stallion song as you guide your mother back downstairs. 

Megan lost her mother young, Death remarks, apropos of fuck all. 

Downstairs in the kitchen, your father is extricating corn kernels and cherry tomatoes from your mother’s store-bought salad. He slices open each tomato, scoops out the seeds, and puts the hollowed-out tomato back in the bowl. Doctors have confirmed that kernels and seeds are not hazardous to your mother’s intestines, and you yourself have repeatedly pointed out to him that salads can be ordered without corn or tomatoes. But salad surgery has become an essential ritual for your father. It is as productive for him as the closet tours are futile for you. 

All day, the COVID casualties mount on cable news. Old and young, black and brown, fit and immunocompromised, the body bags pile up in double-parked freezer trucks. 

Busy season, you quip bitterly.

The scale of it exhausts me, Death replies.

Late that night, instead of sleeping, you check on Brett, your favorite support group member. Brett is Caribbean (Jamaican), like you (Bajan), divorced, like you. Unlike you, Brett has not moved back home to quarantine with his parents. He has remained in the city, in the apartment where his wife and sons left him last year, an apartment that now suffocates him. Like you, Brett has trouble sleeping, and so you text each other late at night and trade stories of the way your mother and his father used to be. You talk about the other members of the group, of the steadiness of your group leader. 

You talk about sex. Missing it, having it, possibly with each other, post-pandemic. Before lockdown, your talks had been veering in that direction. You had started to notice how Brett lingered, how he would time the buttoning of his coat to coincide with your picking up of your bag. You would walk to the elevator together, chat in the lobby. Pause, hold each other’s gaze.

Now the pandemic has foreshortened this delicate pas deux, and here you are, stuffing your phone down your pajamas. 

What is the point, you hear Death intone as the flash goes off under the comforter.

Go away, you hiss. Your phone vibrates. You examine the dick pic Brett has just sent, the first penis your eyes have beheld in months. It is an object of glory, luminously hued, masterfully proportioned. Instantly you regret the weeks you both have wasted in Victorian lash-batting and cuff-straightening. 

He leans to the left! you gush. 

So what, Death replies. There’s a pandemic. Who knows when you’ll be able to even touch it, let alone ride it. 

Fuck! 

Brett sends a tongue emoji in response to your pussy shot, but the moment drains away. Death hovers thick breathed over the floral bedding, over your tangled desires, over the pair of genitalia photos stacked diagonally on your screen, boxed off from each other, borders unbreached. You make up an excuse about checking on your mother and end the chat. 

The days slosh by like stale frying oil. Coagulating in spots, pooling in others. With the world on pause there is no sense of falling behind, only of being constrained together. Stuffed together into a cannon with an unlit fuse, waiting in the dark. 

Again, with the metaphors, says Death. I take it you find them useful. 

You ignore the taunt as you slip your mother’s walking shoes onto her feet. 

“Look how pretty today is,” you say to her. “Let’s go and see what the neighbors are up to.” 

Your mother’s smile lights up the breakfast room. It is still possible to tap into her sense of adventure. The excitement in your voice lifts her. 

“Let’s go,” she giggles. 

You stroll the tree-lined walkways together, arm in arm, making up gossip about each home you pass. Your mother laughs breezily and lands her comebacks with effort. As the spring sun warms your faces, it occurs to you that your mother’s days have not been sloshing like old frying oil; they have maintained their structure and rhythm. She is unaware of the pandemic, unaware that you have been lodging here for months. Moments are the meter of her life. A chain of good moments adds up to a good day, only she is not keeping score. All that matters for her is the quality of now. 

Her life is not viscous frying oil. It is glints of sunlight and moonlight on the surface of the sea. Your life, and the lives of those around you, stuffed into a cannon, your mother, in her world of now, regular as the glinting tides. 

Nature, too, has kept its pace. It has reclaimed the neighborhood lawns. Baby bunnies watch without wariness as you pass: with the world on lockdown, they have not learned fear. You keep a steady gait so as not to startle them. Robins trill in the trees. Even the earthworms look cheerful as they turn the soil along the path. A monarch butterfly poses on a blade of grass. 

All this as you roam the quiet subdivision with your mother, her collarbone gleaming, your Afro big and bushy. Life as a Kerry James Marshall painting. 

Fancy, Death says. I was going to say Disney cartoon. Bambi or Jungle Book. 

Now who’s dropping metaphors?

You laugh, you and Death, the birdsong warping in your ear. 

Your mother starts to sing nonsense syllables to a familiar tune. She waves at a masked couple pushing a stroller on the opposite sidewalk. Your mother is strong, an extrovert who loves children; you pray she does not use the bicep power you have only recently discovered in her to drag you across the street within six feet of these strangers. You distract her by launching into an off-key version of the song she has been singing. She stares at you, astonished, then bursts out laughing. 

A bunny, a baby, a birdsong, a bad song. The daisy chain of a happy afternoon. You lean on your mother’s toned arm and take a deep breath, feeling the living world expand with your lungs. 

That night, in the small hours, an idea stirs you awake: you must form a COVID pod with Brett. Past time to fall in line with nature. To slough off the rankness of this pandemic that itches like an unwashed shroud. Nature commands that you touch and be touched. That you fuck like the rabbits and writhe like the earthworms. 

And don’t you start, you spit at Death, crouched in the predawn indigo. 

Your parents. His father.

Is that a threat?

You give me too much credit sometimes. Other times not enough.

Stay out of this. 

You text Brett before you lose your nerve. Your phone buzzes before you can put it back down: God, yes. When? How? 

With fevered urgency, the pair of you start to plan. Brett will close his place and drive down from the city. You locate an Airbnb across the park from your parents’ subdivision, within running distance. He’ll quarantine. You’ll each test twice: first when he arrives, and again five days later. After that, you’ll see each other for two hours each morning, early, before your house awakens, before your mother’s night nurse leaves. Your morning workout time. For the next few months, your morning workouts will be each other.

In group session that week, you and Brett smize conspiratorially at each other’s Zoom squares. You sext each other on WhatsApp while other members reveal their pain. One woman has been laid off from her third job, which she had taken to fund her mother’s care. The group leader has lost a godson in Ohio. Somebody’s someone is in a ward they cannot visit. The pandemic has invaded the sanctuary of solace that has held your group apart from the world. Grief crushes in from all sides, mingling with your peculiar, protracted mourning. 

You listen, your inner sunniness out of place amid all this ash. You cough to lift the ash that is starting to settle in your chest. 

“Are you okay?” someone asks, with barely veiled alarm. “I think so,” you reply.

“Was that a cough or a sneeze?”

“Sneezing’s not a symptom,” someone else says. 

“Who knows anymore. They change it every damn day.” “Are you implying she has coronavirus?”

“Why you say it like that? Ain’t no stigma. She got it, she got it.”

“What’s gotten into you?”

“Friends, let’s focus,” the group leader tries.

“So, we’re catching it through screens now. Okay.”

“I don’t have COVID, guys,” you say.

You text Brett a facepalm emoji. His reply is a face with a water droplet.

“This is all just… a lot,” you hear him say quietly. “It’s a lot.”

There is a silence, and the group resets. You try to read his expression. You cannot be sure if the droplet is meant to be sweat or tears. 

Days later, the two of you stand two car widths apart in the parking lot of the clinic where you will take the first test. You are masked, almost shy, as you take each other in. Brett has lost weight, to an extent that in Barbados would be considered “falling away.” But you tell him he looks good enough to eat, because he does. 

“It’s your appetite talking. I’m hungry, too,” he says, remnants of his Jamaican accent flattening the word into hungrih. Right away, your fog-proof face shield starts to fog. You have trouble telling whether his eyes are sparkling, or the sunlight is glancing off his glasses. 

You take the earlier appointment and leave immediately afterward. You and Brett have agreed to keep your distance until you can talk horizontally. At the stoplight on the way home, you apply abundant sanitizer and flick your fingers dry in a semicircle, casting a spell of protection. 

That afternoon, you prance while your mother plays low G on her steelpan for 40 minutes. You praise her like a parent at a recital. She brightens when you recount her musical achievements on the pan, the piano, the shak-shak, the flute, all fictitious, no matter. 

“You had people twirling in the streets. Remember, Mum?” 

“Mm…mm-hmm.”

“Everything you play sounds sweet,” you say, peppering her forehead with kisses. 

“Where you get all that talent? How come none ain’t rub off on me? I jealous. Teach me, nuh.” 

Your mother laughs, beginning in a low rumble. Her belly starts to quake. Then she throws her head back and peals. Your father runs in to see what the commotion is. When he finds her cackling with the pan stick in her hand, you feel the atmospheric pressure of the house recalibrate. 

Your buoyancy over the next four days is medicinal. Mere proximity to dick has turned you into a joy machine. It has improved your sleep hygiene and raised your oxygen levels. You wallow less, check in on friends more. You bring uncharacteristic focus to your work. In the evenings, you make vegan dulce de leche for your parents with coconut milk, lucuma powder, and pureed cashews. Everyone’s sugar goes down. Your father starts choosing Netflix comedies over crime shows. The ripple effects of sex you are yet to have prompt dreams of miracles to come. 

The first test comes back negative, and you exchange thumbs-up emoji. When you go for the second, Brett is not there because you have scheduled the appointments separately. As soon as the second test results come back negative, you send him a tongue-out emoji. He replies with a checkered flag. 

You are still panting from your run when Brett opens the door in shorts and pulls you in. True to his word, the man is as hungrih as you. The mechanics of how he lifts you in a single motion straight out of your running shoes and tights and panties and wraps you around his waist and carries you over to the couch and places you down and unsheathes the magnificent left-leaning dick and kisses you while sliding on the condom and drops to his knees and buries his beard in your bush and teases your clitoris with his tongue for the ten seconds it takes you to come and then penetrates you as you fling your right thigh over the back of the couch and writhe like earthworms for the seventeen seconds it takes him to come and holds you as you tumble onto the floor still joined at the crotch and cry-laugh and clean up in the bathroom and switch condoms and go at it again on the sink and then the dining table before you check the time and haul on your panties and tights and shoes and kiss him goodbye until tomorrow is something that does not enter your thoughts until you have panted your way back home, after which you think of nothing else for the balance of the day. 

Good sex lights in you an undousable flame. Your elation runneth over. Loading the dryer while your mother naps upstairs, you notice a pair of squirrels having sex in the tree outside the laundry room. They fuck with clinical efficiency, separating and recoupling in brief bursts. Perfunctory. Titterless. Zero evidence that either party is into it. Mating season is here for the rabbits, the earthworms, the squirrels and, now, for you. But perhaps nature has given you the edge. 

“Life is Good.” You read out the slogan on your father’s T- shirt as you toss it into the dryer, and you laugh long and loud so that Death, wherever it has disappeared to, can hear. 

Yet it is not triumph that you feel. You have not bested COVID because you happen to have arranged a workaround. The pandemic has spread to the middle of the country. People are starting to die deaths of caustic irony. Doctors who publicly declare the virus a hoax are gone in weeks. Big, defiant weddings turn into superspreader events. The president and his men end up in the hospital. Observing these developments in the light of your new routine, you feel all the more dwarfed by the grand turbine of life as you thrash and flail through its cycles, grateful for every day you manage to avoid the blades of its motor. 

Brett feels this way too. You surmise this from his constant weeping. When he buries his face between your breasts, his tears dry a different grade of salt from your sweat. Whether he is laughing or ejaculating or squinting to read the time on the microwave clock, his eyes are never not brimming. At first this unnerves you, but, as with much of life under a pandemic, you make room for the discomfort. Besides, grief and depression have been your common currency from the start, even before COVID. You have never experienced each other in any other state. You have never seen each other happy. 

“How is your father?” you ask one day as you lie in bed, playing in each other’s hair. You have been missing his dad updates since you no longer talk on the phone overnight and the two-hour morning trysts have proven tight. You miss the chats and also do not want him to feel objectified, to imagine that he is to you but a heaving, left-leaning scratching post. 

He sighs a quivering sigh. A tear escapes onto the pillow. 

“You have absolutely no idea how tough it’s been,” he says. 

“I know.”

“You don’t,” he whispers. “When you leave here, you run home to your mother and father. You get to see them every day.” 

You caress his cheek. “One day,” you whisper. “Is he okay?”

“The only way I know he’s alive is they don’t call me yet to say he’s dead.”

“They don’t check in with you?”

“They’re overworked. No time. Of course, he can’t make heads or tails of his cellphone. I just can’t find a reliable way to get to him. And COVID is rampaging through that place. Might as well be a morgue with a waiting room.” 

He shakes his head, spilling more tears. You watch him with an aching heart. 

Happy?! you scream at Death. Angel of fucking mercy? 

Death wafts up from the pillow in evaporated saline, too scant to catch a punch. 

“Baby,” you whisper. You draw Brett close. You have to leave in nine minutes. You consider initiating a consolation blow job, but that feels wrong. Your hand travels down and gives his soccer-toned behind a squeeze. 

Into your clavicle, he says, “The whole world is a morgue with a waiting room. You’re either dead or pre-dead.” 

The phrase chills you. Still, you reply: “We’ll get through. We’ll make it.” 

He draws back. His watery reddish eyes scan yours. 

“That is metaphysically impossible,” he says with the weariness of a dentist imploring a patient to floss. “You. Me. Everyone in the group has spent years watching our parents waste away. People who used to be able to do the things you and I do here. They won’t get through or make it. None of us will. Absolutely nothing lasts in this world. Not us, not health, love, vows, nothing. Don’t matter what you do.” 

In another time, before COVID, before your mother’s diagnosis, watching a lover disintegrate before you like this would have melted you. Lately you have begun to wonder whether you have lost the ability to cry. You try in vain to remember the last time. Can it be that you are depleted, so early into middle age? Some sorrows run deeper than the bottom of the well. 

You take Brett’s face in your hands, kiss his salty beard, and press his cheek against yours. He is crying again. You pull him close one more time, but there will be no graceful winding down. Time is up. You have to go. 

He pads to the bathroom as you make your way to the front door. It is a misty morning, the kind one might have enjoyed spending in bed with a man like Brett. It has been only a week or so since your arrangement began, but already you are settling into a cozy familiarity. So, what if he drips like a rainforest. You can accept that. You know from your time in group that trying to cheer the despondent can be a form of selfishness in disguise: it is one’s own discomfort, not theirs, that one is often seeking to cure. You allow yourself to look forward to the day when it is safe for you and Brett to return to the city and see what this might become. 

You hear the shower start up as you slip on your socks. Like you, Brett has been working remotely, but how he spends the rest of his days is unclear. You think about the carefully choreographed day ahead: home to shower and make breakfast, then to supervise your mother’s reading while you work, then a quick session on her stationary bike, then one of your father’s doctored salads for lunch, followed by a nap, and so on. Steelpan in the evening. Baked cod for dinner. A Nollywood drama with your dad once the night nurse puts your mother to bed. You wonder what it is like for Brett to fill these hours. 

You are lacing up your shoes when Brett’s phone vibrates on the entry table next to you. Instinctively, you glance at the screen: 

HI BRETT, LOOKS LIKE YOU’VE MISSED YOUR COVID+ CONSULTATION. REMEMBER, NOTIFYING CLOSE CONTACTS OF THEIR EXPOSURE TO COVID-19 CAN HELP LIMIT THE SPREAD IN YOUR COMMUNITY. REPLY ‘YES’ TO LEARN HOW TO MANAGE YOUR DIAGNOSIS. 

The blood rushes to your eardrums. You snatch the phone and scroll up the text thread: 

HI BRETT, LOOKS LIKE YOU’VE MISSED YOUR COVID+ CONSULTATION. REMEMBER …
HI BRETT, LOOKS LIKE YOU’VE MISSED YOUR COVID+ … 

HI BRETT, LOOKS LIKE YOU’VE MISSED … 

HELP
YOUR COVID PCR TEST IS: POSITIVE. REPLY ‘HELP’ TO ARRANGE A CONSULTATION. 

You barge through the bathroom door and find Brett balled up on the floor of the tub, clutching a bar of soap under the shower stream. Orange-scented suds froth down his knuckles. 

“You have it?!” you scream. “You fucking have COVID?!” 

He does not register your presence.

“Answer me!” you yell. You fling the phone at him. It dings off the metal frame of the tub door and lands on the bathmat. Brett lifts his wet head from his knees without looking at you. 

“Have it, don’t have it, it’s the same,” he says. “Heavy same way.” 

“You asshole! You know I live with two elderly parents, right?” 

“This nah living,” he mutters. “Long time me and you stop live.” 

It is enough. You lunge forward to throttle him where he sits, but it crosses your mind that he is infected now. Instead, you start to throw everything you can lay hands on: a basket of beach shells, a toothbrush, a tub of hair gel, the wastebasket, the plunger. He protects his head with his arms as the missiles land. 

“Speak for your asshole self!” you shout, as you lay waste. “You can be pre-dead all you want, but I am alive, and I plan to stay that way!” 

You kick the tub door as hard as you can, causing him to flinch. The door fails to crack. 

“I’m pressing charges,” you inform his bowed head. “Reckless endangerment. Feel free to kill yourself.” 

You hear a gasp as you storm off. 

It is only when you are out of the house that your knees start to buckle. You make it to the park and sink onto the sidewalk, hyperventilating. Your head throbs. 

Get up, you command. Now.

You fumble for your phone.

Your father answers groggily. “Morning, sweetheart.” 

“Dad,” you begin. “Dad, you and Mum need to go get tested right away. As soon as the clinic opens. I’ve been…exposed.” 

“What? When? How?” 

His confusion cracks your chest wall. You slap your forehead to shake out the words. 

“A…I just got a notification for contact tracing,” you say wildly. “A cashier from, like, the sup— the liquor store, or something. They must have got my number from the…” 

The story trails off.

“What?” repeats your father.

A line of ants proceeds along the sidewalk crack under your shoe. Their disgust is palpable.

“I don’t know,” you say. “Maybe it’s nothing. I’m going to isolate in the basement. Just in case. Don’t touch anything. Watch Mum.” 

You hang up before his next question, and an old photo of your mother fills the screen. She is about your age, luminous and smiling, hair glossy, skin plump, the very embodiment of health. No pandemic to navigate, not then, not now. Whereas you, reckless contaminant that you are, have shrunk your chances of ever again being worthy of serving as a screensaver. 

Take these ants instead, you plead with Death, as it settles in mist on the back of your neck and the base of your tights. If it’s all the same to you. 

Breathe, Death replies, massaging your pressure points. 

Please. I took precaution. Don’t punish us for living. It’s our job to grasp at life. The rabbits and the earthworms. 

Death says, Do you know the lifespan of a suburban rabbit? All the animals you saw are dead. 

I don’t believe you! 

You begin to cry as you rise to your feet, tears merging with mist. 

⧫

Andie Davis is a Barbadian-Antiguan writer and global development advisor for the United Nations. The story “Orange,” in the 14th annual Delmarva Review, is semi-autobiographical. Her writing began as an exercise in coping with the dual grief of the pandemic and her mother’s worsening dementia.

Delmarva Review publishes evocative new prose and poetry selected from thousands of submissions. Designed to encourage outstanding writing, the literary journal is nonprofit and independent. Financial support comes from sales, tax-deductible contributions, and a grant from the Talbot County Arts Council with funds from the Maryland State Arts Council. Website: DelmarvaReview.org.

 

Author’s Note: “In his late thirties, my youngest brother, a big guy who owned a bar in a southern college town, decided to study nursing. Eventually, he became a nurse practitioner in Cleveland, Ohio. He loved the work, especially with veterans and seniors. We were both crazy-busy with our careers and families and only checked in with one another for a birthday, on the fly between bringing our kids from one event to another, and then, the pandemic hit. He was, and is, on the medical front lines. Our phone calls changed from quick and superficial to something else. These calls made me think about what was essential in life. Sometimes little brothers are useful.”

Desideratum: Something Desired as Essential

Flash Nonfiction 

OXYGEN
I suppose I should start with the basics: water, food, shelter. My youngest brother would say oxygen. He has been positioning patients who must be lain prone—on their stomachs, so they can breathe. This is before they are put on ventilators, which is a last option. He explains this all as the night hums around me. His break is over. He has to hang up, yet he says: Stay on the phone with me for one more moment. Don’t leave. 

SEX
To long for, desiderare, is the Italian or Latin. I inch toward his side of the bed, toward his back, a salt lick. Now ill, he wishes only for the gods to intervene, for a deus ex machina in our queen- sized bed, and begs off any touch. I desire only desire. 

MUSIC
If there wasn’t her clarinet playing, we’d live in a house of silence. She insists on practicing, willing the music from her lips. She stomps around the house. Swings her clarinet. My daughter is fifteen and has had one season of high school marching band. The football team lost every game, but the band roared, filled the stands—the crowds were there as much for the halftime as for the sport. Off and on, for hours, she plays. I don’t know if it’s good or bad; I can’t even carry a tune. Notes collide, a cacophony, a crescendo, a concert of one. She wants to march for the rest of her life. She wants to be first chair. She wants to be surrounded by music and, even more, leading the music—a drum major, a conductor—the music should follow her, not the other way around. The notes cut the last of the umbilical cord. 

BOOKS
I often imagine what it would be like if I could have only one book to read for the rest of my life. I would choose The Complete Works of Sherlock Holmes bound in red leather. When I was sixteen, it was given to me by one of my best friends. Before her, no one had ever given me a book as a gift—owning books wasn’t practical, certainly not essential, not in my family. Now, she’s a video artist in San Francisco—I deduce this from my sleuthing on social media. She’s adopted a name different from the one I knew her by when we were sixteen, when we would coax one another down the sidewalks of street players, guitarists, and saxophonists; of marijuana whiffs; of the baby-baby-baby of Saturday night crowds on Bleecker Street in Greenwich Village. Let’s be honest, what I am desiring is my sixteen-year-old self. 

JUSTICE
I desire this for others as much as for myself. A just world. Just that: Justice. 

WORK
I am not an essential worker—what writer is? I teach, so that helps someone, me, more than the students, on some days. I could be more essential. I could be a nurse like my youngest brother. He came to nursing late in life. One day, he announced he was going to nursing school. I asked, Why? He replied, ’Cause I’m tired of corporate. I thought for a moment he said ‘corporeal,’ implying, in some leap of poetics, he was tired of being who he was. At his core, he’s a sensitive, motherless boy who was shuttled between relatives for years. He should have been given a lot more love growing up, but then, maybe that could be said of most of us. As a nurse, he got what he wanted—to be needed, to have purpose, to be essential, which sometimes is as good as love. 

FAMILY
Gravid clouds crowd the night sky. It’s a cold night in March. I desire spring, but it is long in coming this year. I’m still on the phone with my youngest brother. I tell him: I’m staying here with you. 

Oxygen. Sex. Music. Books. Justice. Work. Family. I desire nothing else. 

⧫

Caroline Bock is the author of CARRY HER HOME, winner of the 2018 Fiction Award from the Washington Writers’ Publishing House, and the young adult novels: LIE and BEFORE MY EYES from St. Martin’s Press. In 2021, she co-edited THIS IS WHAT AMERICA LOOKS LIKE: Poetry and Fiction from DC, Maryland, and Virginia She earned an MFA in fiction from the City College of New York. Find her often on Twitter @cabockwrites. 

Delmarva Review publishes evocative new prose and poetry selected from thousands of submissions annually. Designed to encourage outstanding writing, the literary journal is nonprofit and independent. It welcomes submissions in English from all writers.