Chain Pickerel

by Susan April

The wooden rowboat was soft gray with rusted oar locks. It held two plank seats: a long one in the stern and a shorter one in the middle. There was also a small, flat triangle of wood at the tip of the bow. At three-and-a-half years old, I could squish my body under that triangle, if we were out on the water and it started to rain, only it never rained, especially not that mid-July week when we took our camp on Long-Sought-For Pond. It was always sunny, with airy mornings, comfortable afternoons, and music-filled nights. 

By music, I mean a campfire and my father’s harmonica.

Fishing was serious business for my father, and for the chain of fathers before him. In Canada, they made a poor living on cod and eel but when those fisheries crashed, they moved to Massachusetts and became cobblers. Why? I don’t know. Everyone wears shoes, I suppose. Back then, you didn’t buy a new pair, just fixed up the old. Still, they fished the ponds. Men fished and women cooked the catch. 

No need to teach a girl how to fish.

“Can I go with you?” I surprised him one morning at sunrise, as he quietly laid his fishing gear in the gray rowboat. 

“What are you doing up?” He was annoyed. “Get back to bed.” 

“Can’t sleep. Please, can I go with you?”

He hesitated, then looked to the camp’s screened porch, hoping my mother, sister, or aunt would fill the door frame and call me back. But they were asleep. I’d been out fishing with him before, but with a brother or two. He was teaching them how to fish. 

Sometimes, I handled the worms. He was impressed that I wasn’t squeamish about the night crawlers, especially after they’d been sliced in gooey halves. Maybe that’s why he caved. 

“All right. But get a coat.”

It was my proudest moment.

Dad was tearing strips from an old t-shirt when I returned. He draped them over the side of the boat, then fished for a green-and-orange tin of sewing machine oil in his tackle box. He squirted long arcs of oil onto the t-shirt ribbons, then tied those ribbons with flat knots around the oars before placing them in the oar locks.

“Don’t want to wake up the fishes,” he said. “Not yet, anyway.”

We pushed off from shore. The boat unstuck itself with a soft whoosh. Dad rowed with noiseless strokes, until the cabin we’d left by the shore looked like a plastic house on a model railroad siding. When we reached the middle, he turned away from the rising sun and headed towards the shadow-listed and reedy outlet of the lake. He called it the foot of the pond. There were fewer camps and more flying bugs. The reeds grew tall and bore spikes of purple flowers. The shallows held cattails and lily pads. It owned its own kind of quiet. He paused in the rowing to lower the brim of his cap. 

For a long time, I was confused about rowboats: how they moved away from where the rower was looking. Everything seemed backwards. There was a kind of trust involved that I was too young to understand. Did dad steer the boat through my eyes? I didn’t know how it worked. In case my eyes were needed, I looked straight ahead. The sun felt warm on my back. Swirls of water passed from my father’s dip-and-pull strokes to me, like links in a chain. I trailed my hand in the chains.

“Watch out they don’t bite you,” he said. He meant the fishes. 

“I’d like that,” I said.

“You wouldn’t like it if Mr. Pickerel nibbled your fingers. He’s got teeth.”

So we were after pickerel! Dad had caught bass, perch, eel, and horned pout that July, but hadn’t yet caught a pickerel. He’d fished the sand bars on the opposite shore, the pods of glacial boulders at the head of the lake, and the fishing line-dripping tunnels under the spruces. I’d watch as he set out on his pickerel hunts—tiny human in a miniature boat—rowing himself smaller. I’d run down to the sandy beach to keep him in sight, afraid he’d disappear and nothing would remain, not even the swirl of an oar.

But here we were in the boat. If my father melted into the foot-of-the-pond’s dragonfly and sewing needle-filled world, I would too. We’d both disappear.

He raised the oars.

He laid them wet on the keel.

The boat drifted, then stopped.

There were pale pink flowers that smelled like vanilla.

A buzz-hum surrounded us, like a dentist’s drill in another room.

The tackle box opened.

A lure was placed on the line.

Dad chose the shiny silver one that looked like a hammered dime and said, “Hand me a bobber.”

I gave him a red and white globe.

The boat tilted and lurched, almost spitting us out when we shifted seats.

Dad cast the line into a narrow channel with a slight current and no weeds.

I sat on the triangle seat in the bow.

“No worms?” I asked him.

“No worms,” he said.

That was our conversation for an hour, two hours, forever.

I am still there.

*

Thoreau famously wrote about winter pickerel fishing in Walden: “Early in the morning, while all things are crisp with frost, men come with fishing-reels and slender lunch, and let down their fine lines through the snowy field to take pickerel and perch.” Walden Pond and Long-Sought-For Pond are Great Ponds. That doesn’t mean that they’re as huge as Lake Winnepesaukee. A Great Pond is a legal construct under English common law, defined as an inland body of water greater than ten acres in size, and held in trust by the state for the public to enjoy. You can’t run a chain-link fence around a Great Pond or block the people from boating or fishing. Well, some do, but that’s a different essay. 

Essay means “to try.” Each essay tries to make sense of a difficult something by piecing together ideas and images that explore and craft out the meaning of an experience. Sometimes, it’s a crooked path. You follow it.

Chain pickerel has a golden body, with a dark green chain-like pattern on its flanks. Thoreau in his Journal wrote about its stunning beauty. He remarked on the unusual black tear drop that falls from its eye to its outshot jaw. He noted how the cheek and the gill are completely covered with scales. He admired the pickerel’s cunning ability to remain as still as a stick in the strongest of currents, waiting for the unwary minnow or passing frog. He once cut a pickerel open and found it had swallowed another smaller pickerel, the undigested tail of its younger kin fresh in its mouth. He’d thus caught two pickerels on one hook.

Anglers know pickerel are an aggressive fish and put up a nice fight. Their favorite haunts are weed beds, logs, brush, boulders, and the edges of sand bars or drop-offs, particularly in mid-summer. The Illustrated Manual of Massachusetts Freshwater Fishes suggests the red and white spoon—commonly known as a daredevil—is deadly on pickerel. According to the Manual, anglers for pickerel should “Drift fish the weedy shorelines or edges of other cover, casting this lure right up to the edge, or wherever possible, into the cover.” 

The Massachusetts state record for chain pickerel is 9 pounds, 5 ounces, caught in Laurel Lake in the town of Lee in 1954 by a Mrs. James Martin.

That July morning, I knew none of this. I only knew that I loved my father, my father was fishing for pickerel, and I was on board.

*

How many times did dad cast the lure? I didn’t count. Did he cast it overhand or from the side? Always from the side. Did it catch in the weeds? Never. Did he break for a cigarette? Yes, but he sat on the plank seat by the transom and held the smoking cigarette out over the water when he wasn’t puffing. I worried he might fall in. He spit in the water. Dad was big on spitting. I didn’t know why.

I sat on the triangle seat, a hand on each gunwale for balance. The boat rocked whenever dad cast the spinner. He sighed. He spit. He spit. He sighed. My stomach growled. People in the few nearby cabins began to wake up and fry bacon, and it smelled delicious. It could have been that I looked in their direction and stretched out my neck to see what kind of breakfasts were happening. But I didn’t whine. 

Still, a dad can tell when their child is hungry. 

“Guess I ran out of luck today,” he said and sounded sad. I didn’t know what to say but said something anyway.

“Can we row the long way back?” I loved to mosey along and follow the shore. Often, I’d find treasure: cast-off bobbers and floating popsicle sticks. Also, how often did I get dad to myself?

“You’re not hungry and in a hurry to get home?”

“No.”

“Okay, if you want to,” he said. Then we switched seats and started to pull away from the pickerel reeds and the dragonflies. Dad rigged his fishing pole so the line would trail out behind us. I was to watch the bobber and say if it looked like a fish had struck. Dad guessed we might catch a guppy or a sunfish on our way home.

We had barely begun.

“Oh-oh, Dad. I think the line is caught on the weeds.”

“Well, jiggle it a little.”

I lifted the rod out of its holder and raised the bobber and lure straight out the water, but there were no stringy weeds on the hook. 

“That looks fine,” he said. “Now, dip it back in.”

Just then, something flew up and lunged at the lure. It struck and quickly plunged back into the lake, caught up on the hook. It yanked the pole and me with it. Instantly, dad grabbed my jacket. A part of the gray boat hit my forehead. Dad held on to me and I held on to the rod. The oars crashed into the water. I wasn’t thinking, “I caught a fish.” I was thinking, “If I drop dad’s pole in the lake, he’ll kill me!”

So I held on.

I can’t say exactly how we landed the pickerel, but we did. I got a gash on my forehead, the tackle box tackle spilled everywhere, and dad’s cigarettes floated to kingdom come, like so many miniature logs. 

The oars were retrieved.

Dad dipped his handkerchief into the lake and pressed it to my forehead. 

The fish got unhooked and was very pretty and undamaged.

Dad scooped a metal bucket into the lake and set the pickerel in it.

We rowed not the long way around but directly back to camp.

Dad whistled and repeated under his breath “You son-of-a-gun.”

He meant me.

*

Baxley McQuaig Jr. holds the world record for chain pickerel, a 9-pound, 6-ounce fish caught in 1961 in Homerville, Georgia. A single ounce larger than Mrs. Martin’s, which itself was not without controversy. Seems Mrs. Martin had been ice fishing and her pickerel was caught with a tip-up jig. Did that satisfy the rules? This was taken under advisement by the Fishing Contest Editor for Field and Stream. Also, Mrs. Martin first said the pickerel had come out of Pontoosuc Lake, a fib apparently. Later, she admitted that the record catch came from Laurel Lake, but she was afraid the entire pickerel fishing universe would descend on Laurel and fish it out, so she fibbed. 

Fishing and fibbing go together like that.

*

If I said the family welcomed us back with hip-hip-hoorays, I’d be lying. As always, walking into the camp kitchen was like entering a train station and I was the small luggage: a make-up bag, or a clutch purse, left on the ticket counter and hardly missed until one reached for a lipstick to refresh one’s lips. Gone. Where? Oh, well.

Breakfast smells billowed out the flung open windows like fluttering muslin. Aunts, uncles, cousins, friends of friends, and strangers congregated. There were no chairs. The table was pushed to a wall, the whole of it covered with bowls of boiled eggs and plates of cooked bacon, two kinds: crispy burnt ones and barely cooked ones with hanging shreds of chewy fat. Boxes of cereal, all sizes, all types, lined the wall like books in a library. Four or five open boxes of Hostess donuts teetered at the edge of the table. The white powdered ones were always first to go, the plain donuts remained.

I grabbed a plain donut.

Dad had placed the pickerel in its metal bucket in a shallow corner of the beach, under a spruce tree that offered both shade and raindrops of resin.

Although the bucket was metal, it was printed on the outside to look like wood. But it didn’t look much like wood and it was white on the inside. The lake water was clear. Something beautiful and golden swam in the bucket. It swam around and around in a circle. No one noticed the golden pickerel in the fake wood bucket under the spruce tree, or me, feeding it bits of my donut. The screen door of the camp porch creaked and opened, creaked and slammed shut. Kids gathered swimming stuff. Soon the beach would be filled with beach balls and inner tubes.

“Wait half an hour!” Aunt Annabelle called from the porch. 

That was so you’d digest your food. You couldn’t drown if you waited a half hour before you went swimming. But if you went into the lake, say above your waist, before the full half hour had passed, you would immediately be seized with leg cramps or an underwater monster would drag you under and in any case you would certainly drown. Everyone waited the half hour. During this time, the young ones would sit with their beach shovels and dig. Older kids fiddled with snorkeling gear. 

I watched my pickerel. He, with his black teardrop, watched me.

*

Long-Sought-For Pond. My father pronounced it: Lon-soffer Pond. We did too. We didn’t know the words. 

“It’s almost July, Dad. When are we going to Lon-soffer?”

As a city firefighter, he got one week of paid vacation a year, which was so unusual at the time that the local paper did announcements. Lowell Fire Department. Annual Vacation List. The following firefighters will be on paid leave for their annual vacation, July 12 through 18: Engine 7, Charles April. 

When he made Lieutenant, he got two weeks.

By then, we’d stopped going to Lon-soffer and begun tent camping. I have no memories of rowboat fishing while tent camping. Only rain, flooded tents, my mother swearing, and once, having to pee in the night, unzipping the tent and meeting a skunk. 

We missed the Lon-soffer vacations.

“What do you remember about fishing with dad from the rowboat at Lon-soffer?” I asked my younger brother Chuck recently. 

“Fishing? Not a thing.”

“Dad took you fishing all the time,” I insisted.

“You’re dreaming. I’ll tell you what I remember about dad and that rowboat. When I was like maybe three he threw me overboard and said it was time I learned how to swim.”

“No.”

“Yes. And I sunk like a stone.”

“But you’re here.”

“No thanks to Charlie.”

*

In the fake wood bucket, my pickerel was not as long as dad’s eels. He was not short and stocky like the sunfish. He did not have big stingers that poked up from his snout and out from his jaw like horned pout—they swam so mad and brooding. The eels wouldn’t swim; instead, they’d sink and curl themselves up like licorice twirls. Sunfish were silly and flopped around, very dramatic-like, even though they were in a nice bit of water. 

My chain pickerel darted and paced. He measured the prison. He planned an escape. The teardrop under his eye pointed backwards. The donut bits floated.

The half hour having passed, everyone jumped in the lake.

My pickerel was thirsty, I decided. He needed more water. Big idea: kick off my flip-flops and use them to scoop water and ladle it into the pail. Well, that turned into a splashy mess. Another idea: use my flip-flops to generate a tidal wave and force the pond water into the bucket. Yup, another splashy mess. 

Funny, I didn’t think of simply using my cupped hands.

My pickerel stopped moving—not dead, more like sleeping. His fins swayed softly, back and forth, like weeping willow leaves in a breeze. His mouth yawned and I saw his back-facing teeth. For shade, I laid spruce boughs over the bucket. 

I’d never had a pet. Mom was afraid of dogs. Dad had an odd relationship with cats—don’t know how to explain, except we sometimes had cats, but they’d always disappear. 

The point of catching a pickerel was to eat it, right? I believe we ate all of the fish that my dad caught. But how do you eat eels? Horned pout? Yick. The pickerel was my first pet, because I loved him. If I loved him, I was not going to eat him. Nor would anyone else. I’d have to set him free.

I looked around. Everyone was busy with other things. I moved the spruce boughs away and placed the flip-flops on my hands like a pair of mittens. I reached in. My pickerel woke with a darting surprise and swam mad in a circle. 

I said, “I’m trying to help you, not hurt you!” 

He didn’t recognize my hands. 

Still, another fail. Here was my last big idea: dig the sand away on one side, so the bucket would sink and pond water flood in and lift my pickerel to safety. I got to work. I dug the sand with my hands and pulled the diggings away with my flip-flops. 

I’d finally found a use for them. 

The bucket tilted. 

Some pond water went in.

But the pickerel stayed in the pail.

I dug deeper. 

The bucket sank deeper. 

But the pickerel stayed.

I made splashing sounds and urged him: come on pretty pickerel.

Don’t you want to leave? 

Don’t you want to go back to the reeds and not be eaten? 

I pushed at the bucket with my feet. Stupid fake wooden bucket. I banged on its sides and threw a tantrum—I’d only had a half a donut to eat all day, a plain one at that. The bucket ended up half-in, half-out of the lake and tilted, like some cheap pirate ship in an aquarium.

Was my pickerel gone? Did he leave? No. I looked and saw green chains on a golden body. He’d backed himself into a corner of the bucket—if a bucket has corners—and looked: confused? scared?

I gave up. 

When something’s meant to be, it’s meant to be. That was my lesson. 

Also this: my father, no matter how long I stare or follow him to the beach, was going to row himself smaller and eventually disappear.

When I think of how I’d like to leave this world—when my time comes—for death to approach me in a welcoming way, it is at the foot of Long-Sought-For Pond, in the belonging of pickerel weeds, my father rows the gray boat, and the pickerel catches me.

*

“I feel there’s not a lot going on, it’s all character development,” a reader of mine once wrote on one of my essays. I know, I know. I struggle to finish the seam. In this essay, the Singer sewing machine tin at the beginning is giving me trouble. I don’t understand its significance of my memory of dad and the torn t-shirts.

Flat knot. 

Also called a water knot. 

My father tied this knot many times.

He tied it when fishing.

He tied it when quieting the creaky oars.

He tied it when he made a body harness to lower himself down to the bridge jumpers he was called on to rescue when he tied it to save them, to lift them up from the jagged rocks of the Merrimack River.

Engine 7. Lowell Fire Department. Please respond.

*

keer-keer

keer-keer-keer

keer-keer

Having given up on saving my pickerel, I’d fallen asleep and woke to blue jays squabbling in the spruce tree.

The sun was dim like a dish cloth draped on a bulb.

There was a smell of rain, but far away and not near. Someone else’s rain. 

I looked and the bucket was gone.

Near the camp, dad had started the campfire. Everyone had collected: brothers, sisters, cousins, Aunt Annabelle, all sitting on lawn chairs, threading marshmallows on sticks.

I saw a cast iron pan and ran to my father’s side.

“Is that for the pickerel?”

“Funny thing,” he said, poking the fire. “While you were sleeping, someone—I don’t know who or how—shifted that pail and it was half underwater. But when I looked, wouldn’t you know it, that son-of-a-gun fish was still there.”

Dad spit into the fire. 

“But the minute I lifted the pail, that fish jumped and you’d think it was a flying fish the way he sailed away.”

“So my pickerel’s gone?”

“Never was here.”

*

On Saipan, after the shooting was over, there was no surrender. The remaining Japanese soldiers and women and children threw themselves off Marpi Point.

My father arrived at the end, mid-July. His first action. New dungarees. Second Marines. A patrol boat off the Point. He was handed a gun. Ordered to shoot. Shoot the mothers before they throw in a child. Kill to save. He was never the same. 

Dad never talked about the war. After he passed, my three brothers each told me that was the one story he shared with them. 

Was that why he rowed at sunrise? Not for the pickerel, but for the darning needles to sew his eyes shut. To stop seeing Marpi Point? 

Alcohol helped, for a while. 

Drowning cats in brown paper bags helped, for a while. 

Starving, because his esophagus was so narrowed and scarred he couldn’t swallow even his own spit, and a doctor would force it open with a sequence of metal tubes—that also helped, for a while.

I remember different camps in different years. The screen door of each creaked and opened, creaked and slammed shut. The last camp was at the head of the lake. By then, he’d stopped fishing. He rowed alone. I’d watch him push off from shore and head the rowboat to the pickerel weeds and darning needles. He rowed towards the outlet.

I couldn’t free the pickerel.

Couldn’t help my father.

Essays like this feel like I’m trying to drown a cat.

Only it never does drown.

Chain. Pickerel.

---

Susan April has published essays in The Lowell Review, A Tether to this World: Stories and Poems About Recovery, and When Home is Not Safe, among other places. She earned her MFA from Norwich University (Vermont College). Born in Massachusetts, she now lives in Maryland. Her father, a Marine Corps Veteran of World War II, saw action at Saipan, Iwo Jima, Tinian, and Okinawa.

She writes, “‘Chain Pickerel’ is, on its surface, a fishing story, but speaks more to the undiagnosed PTSD and survivor’s guilt that my father suffered from. This trauma transferred in odd and unpredictable ways to the family unit. Like many veterans of his generation, he shared little about the war, but rowed to another shore. In this essay, I accompany him.

Unalone

by Rebecca Evans

It started when I asked Gabe, my training partner, to snag some ecstasy. If you knew me—then or now—you’d know drugs were not, are not, my culture. I strap my seatbelt in the garage, even before starting my car. Before taking medication, I read the warnings. All of them. 

Rules keep me out of trouble. Rules keep me out of pain.

I had heard how open people felt on E, free and relieved. By this time, my PTSD presented, mainly through nightmares and door-locking and avoiding the news. I could no longer rinse my bad dreams away; instead, they consumed me. 

Maybe E can help me, I thought. Help me return to an earlier version of myself. A return to my childhood: erase the bad, embrace the good. Or perhaps a return to a feeling, one of youth. One of innocence. Like a self-induced past life regression. Regardless, I didn’t bother researching the potential consequences, maybe in an effort to fool myself. 

*

Gabe and I met around 1999, when I felt on top of my game. I unknowingly soared through life, oblivious how far off course I’d traveled. 

“E is for kids. At 26, I’m considered old. You’re over 30, nearly a hag,” he smiled. “No offense.”

On this day, we sat in the aerobics studio in an Idaho Gold’s Gym, taking a break from our four-hours-a-day training regime. We’d qualified for Nationals in SportAerobics, a sport on the rise as an event for gymnastics at the Olympic level. Think floor dance infused with acrobatics.

“I don’t look my age. I blend,” I told him, spreading my legs into a wide V, laying my chest on the ground in the center. 

“You don’t act your age. That has nothing to do with looks.” Gabe stretched his legs, tucking his heels and pushing his toes until they touched the ground. His curved arch would’ve made any ballerina jealous. His gold-kissed skin contrasted his bleached hair and reminded me of a satin wave lapping the beach.  

“I’m hot. I’m toned. I look ten years younger,” I said.

“You have ten percent body fat. And you come across like a cop.”

“It’s pathetic that you train with a girl who beats you at everything.”

“Not in the looks department.”

“Who cares how pretty you are if someone can beat you?”

“You gotta be on ‘roids. You’re stronger than me and half my size.”

True. I was tougher than Gabe. 

“You’re far more a diva than me,” I said, and then, “Maybe you could get us into a rave?” I said rave in a familiar way. 

*

Later, I smoothed my spandex black skirt over my narrow hips and tugged on a tank. I opted out of hose. This looks young. I slipped into stilettos, then tied on tennis shoes instead. I poured a glass of wine, brought it to my lips, took a sip. Probably shouldn’t mix drugs with alcohol. I set it aside, leaned into the mirror. My eyes crinkled, too lived-in. 

*

Downtown Boise and Gabe approached a waif-like girl, her hair in uneven pig tails. Her socks, stretched above her knees, clashed against her pumps. Her brown eyes took up most of her face. Gabe whispered to her. They hugged. She departed.

“Who was that? Does she know about the rave?” I asked Gabe.

He grabbed my shoulders, turned me to face him, brows furrowed. 

“This is probably the stupidest thing you’ve ever done. You don’t even snort dope. You think you want a hit of the love drug. Is this some way to heal your childhood?”

I shook my head. Looking back now, I can see how I wanted to escape my loneliness, my history. The way I wanted to feel special. Feel good. Feel. 

“Okay. The rave is in that warehouse,” he pointed. “They’re screening, and we look…ancient. And suspicious.” I stood with my arms crossing my chest. I probably tapped my foot. 

“Stop,” Gabe said. “Stop looking so damn old. Twirl your hair. Be cutesy. Like this,” and he demonstrated. I tried to imitate him and then I puked. Just a little. I wiped my mouth.

“I’m okay,” I said.

“Gawd.” He grabbed my arm. “The girl said we need to go around.”

We approached the back door and Pig Tails waved us inside. Gabe handed her money. Once in, glow sticks and fluorescent lipstick sparkled through darkness. I inhaled mildew and breath mints and an odor resembling the taste of rotten eggs. I wanted to scrape my tongue, remove the stench. I could hear Pig Tails more than I could see her walking beside me, her heels clicking the cement floor. As my eyes adjusted, bodies moved everywhere—vertical outlines swaying to some rhythm, almost in unison. The music vibrated, wiry and loud. Someone had written on the walls in illuminated paint, Simply Disappear. Pig Tails and Gabe and I found our way to an open space along the wall. Pig Tails placed her back against it, slid, legs flopping from under her as she landed.

I inched myself down next to her.

“Can we get some E?” I asked. 

Her eyes widened, if possible, then she turned and crawled, hands and knees, into the blackness.

“Silly girl,” Gabe said.

“I know. Why’d she bolt like that?” 

“Not her. You,” he nudged me. “She slipped me E outside. That’s why I gave her money.”

I felt like an idiot. Gabe handed me a little pill. 

I nodded. This is fine. 

I coached myself. Once I ingest this, I’ll feel better. I might even like myself. 

The tablet glimmered a shade of lilac under flashing beams. I swallowed quickly so I couldn’t change my mind. I closed my eyes, waiting for the drug to take effect. 

What if a cop shows? 

What if this isn’t E? 

Maybe it’s a vitamin.

If I was caught, I’d say that I thought someone gave me aspirin. 

Maybe I can find the bathroom, force myself to vomit before the drug kicks in, get it out of me before it’s too late. 

I remembered reading on a bottle of bleach to NOT INDUCE VOMITING. Apparently bringing the substance back up was more harmful than keeping it inside. 

I tasted bile. 

Then, sound. Music. Beats pulsing like electricity, pushing through the room. Pushing through me. When Gabe talked, he had to yell. I was unsure if a few minutes had passed or an hour. After what felt like a long time, I could no longer hear him.

And then I lost him.

I stood and bumped into the other shadows, most of them barely dressed. Most of them half my age. I hadn’t noticed—the angular jaw lines, the high-curved brows, the full lips. Everyone seemed beautiful now. The air held taste and it was clean. Cleaner than water. I kissed someone, and it felt like kissing for the first time. I couldn’t tell if I tongued a boy or a girl, I only knew that I didn’t want to stop. I danced, no, I bobbed, and I felt part of something bigger. Then I noticed Pig Tails, leaning over a bar stool, her shorts off and lace panties drooping from her hips. I sat on the stool next to her, gently lifted her face. Her tears spilled into my palm and I cried with her, though I wasn’t sure why. 

I slid from the stool onto the concrete and lay, splaying my body as if I were a snow angel. Wetness of god-knows-what puddled beneath me and I wondered if I soiled myself. I tried to press my head into the floor. Pig Tails joined me, and we grasped hands. Two snow angels, side by side, as the glow-in-the-dark necklaces on those moving shadows melted into one light and then separated into fireflies and I imagined this was how fireflies saw one another. How they saw the world. Mouths outlined in fluorescent gloss moved in slow motion, singing to the indistinguishable sounds that was once music, like someone somewhere began orchestrating a scene from Fantasia and I was now the floor. 

I was only the floor. 

At least I’m stable.

And in my stillness, I forgot there was a floor. Forgot there was a me. There were only walls beckoning me. Begging me to disappear. And I wondered what else the walls wanted to tell me. I imagined their stories of parties and boys and girls. Of boys taking girls. Then I remembered. I remembered the walls in my childhood room. The room I shared with my adopted sister, Tina. The stories within those walls. Pale blue like a time somewhere before sunrise, they almost dripped with tears.

Did you notice your sister’s sacrifice? they asked.

You won’t understand her sacrifice now, not at your young age. You will later cry for her. Cry for her loss. Cry for her protection of you.

Maybe this was why I cried with Pig Tails. 

I remembered.

My sister was my wall.

*

Do you remember 
the early years
when I pushed my bed 
between yours
and our bedroom door,

between Daddy and you,
night after night? 
I was ten, maybe eleven. 
He’d take me first, 

while you laid 
quiet in your twin,
listening to me 
beg, Please stop.
You’d still be next, 

though I believed him 
less angry if I bore 
the brunt of his brutality. 
Once he left, I’d pry 
your fingers from your 

blanket, pull our beds
together, both of us still 
smelling of Old Spice 
and his spoiled-milk-
breath. I curled you 

like a mother would, 
smoothing wet bangs 
from your face. I did 
it for you, Beckala. You 
were only five and I knew 
our hearts, our bodies, 
were irreparable.

*

Do you remember
when I first became 
your big sister,
a ward straight 
from the state, 
my body pocked 
with cigarette burns

and you asked why 
someone thought 
me an ashtray? 

I first noticed
your missing front 
tooth and the way
your body, small, 
fragile, trembled 

when I hugged 
you. I’d whisper, 
You can squeeze
back, and you did.

 I thought you’d 
never let go. 

*

You once asked 
about Mother Mary.
I didn’t know 
how to explain 

“virgin.” Every word 
too large, too 
grown for your 
young heart.
Vagina. 
Penetration. 
Rape. 
Penis.

And I knew each 
would lead to more 
questions. I kissed 
your forehead, replied, 
an unloved woman. 

Your brows crinkled, 
heavy in consideration.
That’s me, right? 
You asked, Unloved?

No. Oh no.

My face tightened 
as I spilled,
I love you, Beckala 
and I wanted, 
but couldn’t, tell you—
not then, not now— 
Neither of us 
are virgins. 
Not anymore.

*

Do you remember 
when I filled the bath-
tub cup with luke-
warm water and washed
your white-washed hair? 
You said my caramel-
strands reminded you
of silk toffee. I’d shield 
your eyes with the edge 
of my hand? It seemed 
we lived on the edge 
of it all, in those simple 

lone moments, the only
moments I could protect
you, cover your eyes,
keep you safe 
from the sting of soap.

*

Remember how we hid 
in Mother’s walk-in, 
air swollen with stale
moth balls and sweet 
lemon oil? We became 

something else, someone
else, in that quiet land 
of little girls pretending. 
Mother’s shoes, toes facing
forward, lined along-
side each other
like soldiers prepped 

for war. Fake leather. 
Embossed patterns
of synthetic snakeskin. 
Baby-breath sky
blue. Yellow so creamy 
it reminded me of butter. 
Crimson dimmed black 
in the creases, like

violent bruising. 
We both felt bad
for those shoes. 
Beckala, you’d choose
flamingo pink, slipping 
in your tiny feet, 

filling only half. 
We stood at attention 
and jutted our hips
just like grown-ups.

*

In our after time, 
I’d wrap you, Sweet Baby
Sister, curve you 
in my arms, wait ‘til 
your heart slowed
and your eyes slid low. 

Then I’d sing. 
You’d tell me
my breath reminded 
you of buttered corn 
and I’d pray my essence 
stay and linger with you.

*

I leaned close to Pig Tails. I wanted to protect her, like Tina tried to protect me. And, like my sister, it was too late. Pig Tails stood, turned, left.  

I made my way to the dance floor and began to move, like a dancer, choreography alive in my body. I kicked my leg above my head, grabbed my ankle, maintained a vertical split. I tried to rotate. I stumbled, crashing into those around me. A hand squeezed my shoulder.

“Take it easy, you’re going to rip something,” a man said. He was my height, stocky, his age undeterminable. He coaxed me from the floor and, after a moment, I realized that he was a bouncer.

“You might want a break. You’re off balance, stoned, and about to take an eye out,” he laughed. 

“I’m a dancer. I’m really good,” my words slurred.

“I’m sure you are, just not tonight.”

“I’m ranked,” I said.

“I bet you are.”

“I can’t find my friend. He’s my ride. I lost him.”

“A rave doesn’t seem your type of thing—fit and everything,” he said.

I knew I needed Gabe. I remembered that I’d left my phone at home. I didn’t know Gabe’s number. It was on speed dial. I needed to leave. I did. I slipped away and, guided by the green exit signs, found myself in the back streets of Boise.

I wandered onto 5th and Main and entered a lounge. A familiar guy, his name could have been Alex, waved my way. More than anything, I wanted to kiss him. I hugged him Hi and breathed in fresh-dryer scent off his shirt. I kissed him, wondering if his name was Alex. 

“You okay?” he asked. I was glad he cared so much.

“I’m fine,” I said. “I lost Gabe. I lost my purse. Shit! I have no way home.”

“It’s okay. Come on. I’ll help you.” 

“I’m on E,” I said, unsure why I was telling him. My body felt good. Better than ever, not even sore from training. His hand, warm and comfortable, held mine.

He led me to a back room which doubled as a closed-off restaurant. Streetlights streamed rays through half-shut blinds. Dust floated, spinning like ballerinas. 

Alex sat in a booth and pushed the table a few inches. He pulled me to him, hiked my skirt to my waist, spread my thighs, and sat me on his lap. He tore my panties.

“Not a good idea,” I said. “Please don’t,” but I kissed him anyway.

“It’s okay.”

“No.” I didn’t move his hands. I didn’t shove him away. I kept kissing him because kissing felt wonderful. I wanted to kiss him. I just didn’t want him to fuck me. What is wrong with me? Maybe I secretly want him to fuck me? I didn’t feel frisky. I didn’t feel anything. Then I didn’t care. Just like that. It no longer mattered. At least he wanted me. I felt pretty. I felt young. 

If you asked me now, I’d tell you that I had hoped I could go back, find a place in my timeline before I was damaged and pre-bandage my wounds. Step into my now-life padded from the fall-out of pain. 

He barely penetrated when the lights flipped on and a man, probably the owner, told us to get out.

Alex bolted. I adjusted my clothes and walked away as if nothing had happened. 

Is it even rape if you don’t fight back? 

I sat on the curb outside, cradling my face, feeling small.

A cab stopped. The driver leaned across the seat. He looked maybe sixty, bald, and speckled in age spots.

“Need a ride?” he asked.

“I lost my wallet. I can pay you once I’m home.”

We rode through the empty streets, trees spreading like ink blots against deep blue canvas, the sun peaking along the horizon. The cab’s tires spun across asphalt as I squished my face to the window. The cool glass distorted my view, like a kaleidoscope carrying a few colors—hazy green and deep purple—the patterns mismatched.

He parked at my condo.

“I’ll go get some cash,” I said, opening the door. He reached over the seat, grabbing my arm.

“Are you okay?” 

What did the cabbie want? Sex? A blow job? Why is everyone taking me like they can? 

“No problem. Give me a second. I’ll sit in front with you.” I knew I couldn’t go through with it. The guy was repulsive. I needed out. I bent near the floorboard and thrust my finger into my throat. It didn’t take much to bring up nothing. I gagged loudly, acting out vomiting, hoping to disgust him.

“Go on,” he sighed.

I opened the door and, somehow, sun filled the sky.

I carried my shoes. My panties were gone and I couldn’t find my key. I tried my bedroom window—the only accessible window—but it was locked. I hiked around the complex, mostly landscaped with sharp tiny rocks and evergreens. The stones punctured the soft belly of my arches. I closed my eyes, pretending I was a native firewalker or a tightrope acrobat. 

I am a professionally trained athlete. 

My mind is a powerful tool. 

If you think you can, you will.

I repeated this, perhaps out loud. I found a shovel on the ground near a Big Wheel, grabbed it, and wove my way back home. I walked, crossing my steps, laying my feet softly. 

I wish someone would come help me. 

Someone I knew. 

Someone who wouldn’t take a piece of me. 

I no longer wanted to be alone. 

This is not the way to be unalone.

I swung the shovel over my shoulder, took a breath, and bashed it through my bedroom window as if to shatter every person who ever did me wrong. The first blow broke through sufficiently enough to unlatch it, but I didn’t stop swinging. I couldn’t. I hammered until shards of glass were the size of pebbles, and then began on the wooden frame, splintering it until I grew too tired to lift the shovel. I removed my skirt and lined the windowpane to avoid cutting myself. I hoisted through, stumbling onto my bed. I sat crisscrossed, naked from the waist down, examining my feet, the skin shredded in small places, the blood already drying. 

How will I dance on these feet tomorrow? 

I wondered if I’d tell Gabe what had happened. It’s probably my fault that I lost him. I was certainly to blame for almost-sex with Alex. I knew my feet should hurt, but in that moment, I felt nothing. 

No.

Oh no.

Not true. 

In this moment I felt everything—my fallen arches from track, the bee sting on top of my foot, the drill hitting a root near my gum, my stepfather’s fist crunching my face, the nostril-sting of “pretend” mustard gas during chem warfare training, the entry of my stepfather into my innocence, the ripping of me, the ripping of me, the ripping. My ripping.

I felt emptied of fuel in the middle of a fast flight.

I felt as though I’d crashed, smeared my entire being across miles.

I sat, cradling my torn feet, my torn-ness, spilling tears, shattering memories I’d long buried much like surprise-smashing that window and I began. I began pulling through an opening, a small cavity somewhere within, somewhere that allowed me to sit naked with myself, see my wounds, touch my scars, and feel.

---

Rebecca Evans’ poems and essays have appeared in The Rumpus, Entropy Literary Magazine, War, Literature & the Arts, The Limberlost Review, Tiferet Journal, and The Normal School, to name a few. Her work has been included in several anthologies. She’s also served on the editorial staff of The Sierra Nevada Review. With an MFA in creative nonfiction and another in poetry from Sierra Nevada University, she’s completed her full-length poetry collection, Tangled by Blood, and is editing her essay collection, Body Language, and memoir, Navigation. Evans served eight years in the United States Air Force and is a decorated Gulf War veteran. She’s hosted and co-produced Our Voice and Idaho Living television shows, advocating personal stories, and now co-hosts a radio show, Writer to Writer. She currently mentors teens in the juvenile system and lives in Idaho with her three sons, Newfoundland, Chiweenie, and Calico Cat.

About this particular essay, Evans writes, “I first penned “Unalone” in my attempt to resolve shame after I attended a rave. As a veteran, I was trained to follow the rules and, when I couldn’t, I fell apart. My poetry and narratives reflect fractured relationships, especially the relationship with self, in the hope of discovering, or perhaps recovering, pieces of me. I hope to start conversations that create awareness and tolerance, informing in a new way, what it means to navigate life through a broken body and spirit.”

Tracing the Image of Eve

by Allison Palmer

Once, at the height of a strange morning, her scream tore open the air around me. It was something like the unfolding of a narrative; there she was, the image of primordial Eve in agonized splendor, a Native American woman of lithe stature, perhaps in her twenties, screaming at (and into) all four of us, as we leaned into the slope of a hillside strewn with leaves.

As officers of the park, we were obliged to investigate the scene of her unauthorized camp, a tent and some scattered belongings strewn at the bottom of an embankment, each item lodged unobtrusively under a tree. Interestingly, the blighted eucalyptus at the center of things was also an enigma, a being just as vulnerable and oddly situated as its tenant, the woman who identified herself as Eve. And with a surname not listed in any official database, she, and the site of her habitation, quickly became the subject of a mystery. 

With the woman’s invented persona in hand, we began the task of discovering her true identity (a feat we never managed to accomplish) and returning her to a lawful involvement with the land. As romantic as it seems to live outdoors, in a state of natural bliss, reality for city dwellers is a far different matter, urban land being quite dangerous in the hours of darkness. For this reason, we executed our duty with great care, knowing that our subject needed to be in a homeless shelter. But what was her opinion on the matter? This aspect of the story was more straightforward; after a bit of conversation, it became obvious that Eve was not entirely fit to determine her own best interests. But in the course of our encounter, something else emerged: another life, that of her child. 

Again, it was something like a narrative unfolding before our eyes, each subsequent moment yielding more distressing details with deeper mysteries to explore. After giving birth, Eve had elected to forage on public land and seek shelter under trees, thus confronting us with a daunting social service issue, a complex set of questions relevant to individual rights, the stewardship of urban parks, and child safety. It was quite a strange puzzle. A two-month-old, alive and well in the care of her mother—at odds in a dangerous setting, a place filled with transient uncertainty, suffering and secret instances of violence—was not what we had expected to discover on an ordinary day. 

Of course, aside from our surroundings, the midmorning crowds and tour buses, the trees and museum facades, nothing about the day was ordinary. With each passing moment, the situation managed to grow more complex, as we attempted to help two extremely vulnerable people survive unfavorable odds, a task the woman had accomplished quite well on her own, prior to our arrival. Even now, as I look back, Eve’s strange survival talents astound me, a mystery somehow related to her ability to retain secrets. In the hours that followed, amid questions of how to care for mother and daughter, the difficult problem of names and legality resurfaced, and still refused to be resolved. With uncanny resilience, her secrets endured despite our best attempts to reveal them. 

Much to our frustration, Eve’s stated surname was unknown to official records. It had become an obstacle that countered all attempts to discover her true identity and status. Was she wanted for any crimes? Did she have a history of mental health challenges? Were there any hospital records pertaining to her daughter? We simply had no answers. It seemed as though she had been self-christened and declared the citizen of some principality beyond our influence. In point of fact, she had proudly declared herself to be a sovereign citizen, immune to the ways and means of government agents, free to roam the land as she pleased—and so she was. There, on a hillside, believing that we had come to take her daughter, she screamed her indignation into the very fabric of the morning, and resisted every method we undertook to save her from herself. So powerful was her resistance, that it made me think back upon the image of primordial Eve, mother of the ages, a woman at liberty to roam creation and determine the fate of her children, rebellious to the male authority that ultimately falters and gives way in her presence. But what about the image of the woman we discovered, the soft contours of her form traced across shadows of the morning? Here, The Unknown Masterpiece by Honoré de Balzac comes to mind. As a piece often associated with the Book of Genesis, it fits well with our own story of Eve. 

We move, now, from the idea of a written narrative, to the surface of a painting, the visual expression of Eve and her world. In Balzac’s tale, Frenhofer, the old master, has produced his final work after ten years of labor, the delicate lines of a woman’s foot, emerging from an eruption of color. In conflict with the perils and beauty of her environment, the woman is, nonetheless, moving forward into her own means of expression, slowly advancing upon the gaze of viewers, a creature held captive but captivating, as well, much as I imagine this Eve to be. And like the painted image, this Eve—our lady of the urban park—hovers somewhere in the midst of things, powerful in her powerless situation, the subject of endless questions, the one who holds and releases answers at her own discretion. Remarkably, although she must face the dangers of the urban night alone, and provide for her child by her wits, she always seems to evade the grasp of predator and authority figure alike. In her captivity, this Eve has found an undeniable form of freedom. And with this in mind, all that remains is for us to arrive at our depiction of this woman, perhaps taking Balzac’s story as a point of departure. What might our own creation resemble, taking all the complexities of Eve into consideration? 

To trace her image, with accuracy and fairness, is to think back upon the fragrance and sunlight of the morning in question, to recall the sound of Eve’s bare feet gliding over fallen leaves, to see the face of her baby, and to feel the power of her scream tearing through me on that hillside. 

---

Allison Palmer is an urban park ranger, writer, and artist living in Southern California, with work appearing in Nonconformist Magazine, The Templeman Review, Belle Ombre and other publications. Inroads: An Urban Park Anthology, released in 2020, is the author’s first book.

About this essay, she writes, “I found it poignant that a woman, who had chosen to live on the margins of our city—along with her baby—had the name of our primordial mother. Her complexities and resolve deeply reflect the nature of urban park life in San Diego.”

Tinnitus

by Ken Rodgers

For 50 years, tinnitus has inhabited me like an alter ego. Some days it swells the inside of my head. Cicada song, millions hymning. The roar of F-4 phantoms overhead. Sometimes subtle, like a whispered password; the creak of web gear in the thick mist. The hiss of a distant flare on a dark night.

When young, I squatted in a red mud trench for seventy days below the loud-mouthed barrels of 105 mm howitzers. Their snouts, when belching death at my enemies, wounded me; ten penny nails hammered into my head. I never knew when the guns would boom until they did, and then pain ricocheted, and still does. 

Defense proved impossible. Not plugs. Not fingers jammed in the ears. 

Just long, sharp nails. Loud, associated with the sallow faces of dead boys sprawled in the mud. The thrum of savagery running through the air, blood spurting from a severed limb, or spouting like little red wells erupting from the chest. 

The tinnitus continues. Unrelenting. Like long-tongued guns. Like war. 

---

A veteran of the Marine Corps who survived the seventy-seven day Siege of Khe Sanh, Ken Rodgers writes poetry and prose from Boise, Idaho. His work has been published in a number of fine journals. Along with his wife Betty, Ken has made two documentary films about combat-related issues titled, Bravo! Common Men, Uncommon Valor, and I Married the War.

“Tinnitus” reflects upon one of the numerous long term effects of combat.

808-422-0015

by Jennifer Sinor

Avocado and mustard, also cream. 

Your family often waited days for AT&T to set up the new phone service, having moved, once again, from one military station to the next. Sometimes, you could choose the color. Most often your mom insisted on white to match the military-issue walls, the military-issue range, the military-issue linoleum that squared every room into formation. The arrival of the phone rooted you to what would never feel like home, for you could now be reached. Even toward tiny islands that had been flung like beads across the Pacific, phone lines burrowed beneath the sea, tethering you to what had been left behind. 

The grime that ringed the earpiece and mouthpiece and stained the rotary dial documented the length of each tour of duty. Sometimes not even long enough for dirt to find you.

When the phone rang, the whole body vibrated, yours and the phone’s, electrified, the first by the knowledge that someone was reaching for you, the second by a bell, bronze (you once opened the shell to touch what seemed like a heart nestled amid a tangle of red and blue vessels), a bell that shivered inside the cover, shook like a dog fresh from water.

Because it was rare, that bell. Almost anyone who wanted to reach you would have to pay by the minute for their words (not unlike early letter writers who wrote in two directions on every page in careful consideration of the message’s cost), so when the phone rang it heralded intimacy. The Lover spiraling toward the Beloved, the circle growing tighter up the line, until voice whispered into ear.

To pick up, you lifted the handset from its cradle, where moments before it had been sleeping, a deep sleep, for hours, if not days, and then, all of a sudden, bright clarion of bell that broke the tropical air. Handset to ear, to mouth, phone held close to your body, sometimes wrapping the long cord around you as you spun ever nearer to that which you could not touch but recognized upon answer. On the soap operas that bored you but were the only options on weekdays when school was out, the women removed their earrings before speaking. Nothing could get in the way of sealing ear to cup.

The bell rarely called for you. You were, after all, only seven or eight or twelve, but that didn’t stop you from racing to the sound that chimed for not-you-but-close-enough.

“Sinor residence, Jennifer speaking.”

And then, phone to belly as you called for your mother, handset pressed tight to body, sending the caller into the muffled sounds of digestion, the burbles and the creaks, or maybe handset to counter as you walked through the house and then out to the lanai, looking for your mother who was never simply sitting but instead watering, folding, sweeping, putting away groceries, polishing the brass that grew green in the cabinets, ironing your father’s dress whites, pressing the same seam into the same polyester every other day for years. The phone remained on the counter, untended, and narrated for the Lover the shush of a day far away from where the Lover stood, cupping phone to ear, hand wrapped around handset, in a midwestern kitchen abandoned by the sun, maybe your grandmother calling for her daughter. When will you come back?

The handset was heavy, the release to cradle, certain and satisfying. The phone now dormant once again, marking, in its refusal to ring, the distance you were from any sense of home, marking just how far you were from it all.

Except for the time in Virginia, when your father was stationed at the Pentagon, and your family had the choice of avocado or burnt orange or toast and selected white once again because the color felt familiar in a way the oaks surrounding the house did not. That night, at dinner, a storm rolled in. You and your brothers sat with your parents at a table that, by then, had traveled further than most Americans would in their entire lives. Outside, the winds blew savage; acorns and leaves riddled the air. Rain slashed against the picture window and thunder shook the glass. All at once, lightning struck the house and traveled through the phone lines—veins, hands reaching out—and exploded the phone that hung on the wall, sending the body to the floor, singeing the hole left behind. No one left the table to answer that call. Instead, the wind outside wailed a reply.

---

Jennifer Sinor is the author of several books of literary nonfiction, most recently Sky Songs: Meditations on Loving a Broken World (University of Nebraska Press). Her other books include Letters Like the Day: On Reading Georgia O’Keeffe (University of New Mexico Press) and the memoir Ordinary Trauma (University of Utah Press). The recipient of the Stipend in American Modernism as well as a nomination for the National Magazine Award, Jennifer teaches creative writing at Utah State University where she is a professor of English.

About “808-422-0015” Sinor writes, “Deep in the pandemic, surrounded by suffering and loss, I found myself on a run one morning wanting to write about something simple and ordinary. I thought of the phone and the materiality of the phones from my childhood. They had a physicality and a weight that cell phones just don't have. The phone for a military family becomes one of the only constants, one of the only means for connection. I wanted to see what happened if I began with the heft of the phones from my past.”