Issue 18 — Fall 2024

Creative NonFiction

The Tree in The Middle Of The Road: Sentinel of The Prairie

Mary Lucille Hays

Following Kirby Avenue, one of the Illinois gridline roads, “the country way” of our childhood, went straight through farmland. We would stop at the crossing each mile to look both ways in summer when the corn was high or check for traffic and then breeze through the intersections when it wasn't. To get to the farm, you go straight until you come to "the tree in the middle of the road," a lone Hedge Apple standing on a corner where the lane takes a little jog at the county line where the grid doesn’t match up. A Sentinel of the Prairie, it surely marked the corner of an ancient hedgerow. And here we turn left. Soon we come to a cow pasture, Camp Creek winding through it. Scrubby little trees grow along the banks and black cows wander, keeping the meadow well grazed. A right turn takes us into White Heath, and then it's an easy way through town and onto the farm. The simple directions with only two well-marked turns made this way a favorite for family trips to our home place, and we kids would try to be the first one to spot the tree-in-the-middle-of-the-road. As a child, I didn't worry about the species when the tree itself had its own name, so it was not until I was an adult and living at the farm myself, that I realized it was another Osage Orange. Would it matter if I tell you now that the tree was majestic, lording it over the corn and beans? Was. I took it for granted, along with everybody else in the county. My cousin, Adam, used to photograph it for a class, and everyone knew where to go when you said to turn left at the tree-in-the-middle-of-the-road. Most know where to go when you tell them to turn left where the tree-in-the-middle-of-the-road used to be. But what happened to our tree?

One day, driving home after work at dusk, I saw a strange, boxy shape looming in front of me. I was almost to the corner before I realized someone had topped our beloved tree, hacked off the limbs. Only a stricken trunk remaining. At first, I didn't know what I was looking at. I felt disoriented. Did I somehow take a wrong turn? As I got closer, I knew. And I felt sick. I stopped the car on the road and stared for a long while. The trunk was two and a half or three feet in diameter and twisted a little. Stumps where its great limbs had been (themselves a foot and a half across) seemed to be reaching up in surrender. I felt rage bubble up in me and I started crying, mourning an old friend. Then I took my left turn toward home.

When had it happened? WHY had it happened? A few days later I found my answer. I began taking the country way to town every day, trying to steel myself against the loss. One morning I caught workers clearing the wood away. They had a backhoe and chains and had somehow uprooted the trunk which lay precariously across the bucket. I stopped my car and rolled down my window. The road commissioner came over and introduced himself, leaning his elbow casually on my open window to talk to me. I knew I sounded plaintive when I asked him about the tree, and he nodded sympathetically. "Rot," he said. "I didn't want to cut it either, but we thought we'd better take it down before it hurt somebody." The nearest house was over a mile away. The road was not well traveled. If a tree falls on a lonely Prairie road, and nobody is driving by, is it really a danger? The backhoe was crawling toward the flatbed truck, the giant wooden torso rocking just a little across the bucket. I could see a small darkness in the heart of the great trunk. I didn't say what I was thinking: that Osage Orange wood is like iron, and that it would be many years before that little bit of rot could spread enough to cause that tree to fall on an unlucky traveler on this lonely road. My tears or rage or letters to the editor might have stopped the killing if I'd known what they were planning, but now it was a moot point. The road commissioner rejoined the other workers, and I watched them lower the tree onto the bed of the truck and chain it down. Then I went ahead on to town. When I told my sister later, she said, "Well, now I won't be able to take the country way to come see you. I won't know where to turn." What does it do to a community when the landmarks are erased? How will we find our way home?

Mary Lucille Hays teaches writing at the University of Illinois. In 2015 she was the Jesse Stuart Fellow at Murray State University, Kentucky. Hays’s work has appeared in journals, including Quiddity, Another Chicago Magazine, Broad!, The Mid-America Poetry Review, Blue Violin. In 2007, her poem, “Tippet Hill” garnered the Gwendolyn Brooks Award. She was a founding editor of New Stone Circle. She and raises chickens on her grandmother’s farm.

Mourning Doves

Elizabeth Lerman

You are woken up early by a woman in white. Rub your sleep sealed eyes, adjust to the sun and see the same, sacred kaleidoscope of light land against the wall, where, just the other day, she stood pressed, desperate to be cast in color. You dress, save the socks for last, as if they are shoes, then glide down a hall where the floors are waxed and waiting. You walk past the round tables and wave to three wild-haired women with their mouths full of fruit. One smiles, one screams, one says sit down. You are not hungry, but your stomach still growls. You curl up in a chair by the window and think about eating the book you began last night. You don’t belong here, but you do. There is cooing coming from the edge of the only unspiked sill. You shut your lids tight, see that light again, and listen to two sky born souls share something like a song. Something too, like a sob. You open your eyes, watch the gentle pair of them and try, very hard, to remember the moment morning doves became mourning doves.

Elizabeth Lerman is a creative writer who loves woods, waves, wildlife, bookshelves, bayous, horror, highways and alliteration. In her work she enjoys exploring the significance of small moments, investigating the uncanny and addressing feelings of displacement and deja vu. Her writing has appeared in Curlew New York, Coffin Bell Journal, Blood Tree Literature and Ruminate Magazine, among others. To read more of Elizabeth's work visit her website, elizabethlermanwriting.com.

Home Away

Eileen Nittler

She was in my belly when we bought the house, the size of a pea, maybe, or a walnut. He was in my arms, not yet walking, the size of an infant.

Two small children, a new job in a new city. We bought the first house we toured with a real estate agent we picked off the newly available internet. It was 1997, and we were moving to Eugene.

She was born in the back room of a three-bedroom house, already remodeled from two. Over the years, this room was a bedroom, a family room, and then a bedroom again.

They had bunkbeds for a while when they shared a room, filled with the energy and the detritus of young children.

Then he had a lofted bed, though he preferred to sleep on the floor. We painted ocean scenes on the wall­—fish, octopi, crawdads, jellyfish. We pasted stars and planets on the ceiling. When it was demoted, he stood on top of a desk to pull the paper Pluto down, never to be called a planet again.

She wanted to paint her room when she was eight. Stick figures and pumpkins adorned the closet. At fifteen, she wanted a change, so we spent time painting graduated blues up the wall, rows of tiny mountains along the baseboards, mismatched ceiling lights.

We buried one dog, two cats, and a guinea pig in the back yard. We buried the ashes of loved ones, a treasure chest of Polly Pocket toys, and a handful of marbles. We planted fruit trees, and rhododendrons, and cucumbers they ate off the vine. We planted flowers that looked like six-foot-tall fried eggs.

We built a sidewalk, and they drew their names in the concrete, in English and in Japanese. She said it was her name, but I don’t speak Japanese and can’t prove it.

We built a fence to keep them safe. We built a swing set and a tree house. We built a shop and learned to build furniture, weld, and work on trucks. We built a home.

He moved to California. She moved to Montana. He died and we mourned, quit our jobs, neglected the yard, ignored the leak that peeled some of the ocean scene off his walls, until we were ready to breathe again and ready to repair.

And she asked us to be closer to her, to the home she is building with someone new, with their own trees and paint colors and fences. And we said yes, of course we can.

Twenty-seven years after we bought the house in Eugene, we are selling it. I walk through the rooms, one after the other, and think of the lives it helped nourish.

I wonder about the next family. What will people think of the fried-egg flowers? Is that Japanese word really an insult? I want to tell them all the stories. A small part of me feels embarrassed by the paint colors, eight faded planets on the ceiling, warning the new family where they made find the bones of a Rhodesian Ridgeback. A large part of me wants to strip the paint off the walls and bring it with me, dig up the old dog and inter him in Montana, hold these tangible things close to me, so that I never, ever forget the home and the life that we built.

Eileen Nittler is a social worker, an autodidact, and a curious person who has been published in Oregon Humanities, MUTHA and Epistemic Lit.

Real In My Life

Amy Smith

I remember piles of clothes on your floor and teen mag photos of Devon Sawa taped to the walls. Plastic makeup bins and tangled cords of curling irons of varying widths by the full-length mirror leaning against the wall. I remember smashing big, hairy spiders into the carpet with our shoes and the time you sucked one up with the vacuum (which was brilliant).

Before the remodel, I remember piles of papers on your dining room table. We ate at the kitchen bar. I remember when your parents painted the walls dark red. The house became a country cave tucked away in the tropics.

I remember your stepdad. Tall with leathery skin and kind eyes. I photographed him for my college photography class and developed the film in the art department’s lab. I thought that the texture of his skin and his crow’s feet would be beautiful in grainy analog. I sent your family a print. Did you see it?

I guess I caught the photography bug early. Until this past Christmas, when my mom texted me the incriminating photo, I had forgotten that New Year’s Eve when you and your sister stole empty bottles of wine, and we posed with them in a moment of teenage inspiration.

…

My earliest memories of you are in my preteens. I’d never met someone so mature and immature at the same time. Someone who knew what it meant to feel horny (your word) and had an extensive repertoire of fart sounds produced via mouth, armpit, and back of the knee.

I remember you telling me about all the boys you wanted to hump. Again, your word, not mine. Quote: “I want to hump him so bad.” As if sex was as animal an activity as sneezing (both of which were hilarious to us).

Can we stop and celebrate how immense an achievement that was? How boldly you pursued adulthood while preserving the silliness of a teenage girl? How that silliness reverberated in our bodies in the form of uncontrollable laughter while adulthood was hiding around the corner?

I still giggle when I hear the word “hump.” It’s so irresistibly juvenile. I only use it in my mind, and only to conjure your sense of humor. Yes: the word “hump” is reserved in my mind just for you.

…

I studied at the dining room table after dinner, fueled by Mountain Dew and nachos (microwaved with shredded cheddar cheese until it became a gooey mass). You got in trouble for bad grades (and consumed an equally disconcerting amount of Mountain Dew and nachos). It’s possible that our parents paired us for this very reason. I was the good influence. You were the one who would bring me out of my shell. But we were made of the same ingredients.

I remember how you’d make a fart face with your mouth and grab your boobs at the same time to get a laugh out of me (it always did). Or maybe you did those things separately. When I close my eyes, I see multiple exposures of you on a single negative.

You taught me how to tweeze my eyebrows into thin lines and flat-iron my hair. You convinced me to wear a crop top and dark lipstick. Any boldness or sexiness in my physical appearance today (which isn’t much, to be clear) bears your influence.

At the county fair every year, you were always on a mission to find boys to go on rides with you and feel you up. I didn’t understand why you wanted to do this, but I was your devoted disciple. You were teaching me how to be wanted. I didn’t understand why I should want to be wanted then, other than it was obviously good to be wanted. I had faith in you. I still wonder what you knew that I didn’t.

…

Your love of country music was infectious. The hours spent in your bedroom while you belted out LeAnn Rimes songs are forever sparking neural connections when I hear a country song in the grocery store. Laying on my stomach on your unmade bed, I was an audience of one to your magical displays of teenage catharsis.

Almost half of the words in the song “How Do I Live Without You” are captured in that one repeating phrase. We were the same age as LeAnn Rimes when this song hit the charts. I was honored to be your audience. To witness your duet with another 14-year-old, one who became world famous (or infamous, depending on whether or not you were a parent of a minor at the time) for waxing about having her heart broken by a lover. A 14-year old who, like you, wanted and was wanted.

Whenever I hear the pre-chorus of “How Do I Live Without You”, I want to replace “real” with “good”, because having all the good taken away in one's life is much less terrifying than having everything real taken away.

What does it mean for reality to be gone? I never had a chance to ask you.

…

When I went to college, we lost touch. There was no such thing as social media, and talking on the phone wasn’t really our thing. When I went home to visit family during my first year in Miami, I found you.

I remember a nondescript apartment building near the Walmart and sitting on a dirty couch in an otherwise unfurnished living room. I didn’t stay long. I remember you were suddenly thin. Your chipmunk cheeks were gone.

I was going through my own transformation. The top of my class in high school, I was lost in a sea of students who were better educated and richer than me. I was in an extended state of shock. When I returned home, I hardly recognized you. It was as if I’d not just gone to college but to another dimension.

I wonder what would have happened if I’d stayed. I wonder what would have happened if you’d escaped.

When you had your motorcycle accident, I heard that you lost part of your calf muscle and that they had to graft your skin. I heard you were in pain. By the time I had my own near-death experience, we’d lost touch. You were one of the few people in my life who might have understood how a single experience can divide your life in half. But we were too far apart by then.

…

To this day, my mom is friends with yours. I learned about the accident from my mom. She sent me a link to your small business weaving strands of shimmery threads into people’s hair (I think it’s called “mermaid hair”). When you had a baby, she told me. I learned from my mom that the baby was taken away. When you were found dead in your apartment, my mom sent me the news.

On a trip home after I’d moved to California, your mom came over with your daughter and your sister’s daughter. I feel awful that I can’t remember if you were still alive then. She held custody of both girls at the time. Your baby stumbled around the living room and picked things up to put in her mouth. Every now and then the girls would get into a spat. Your mom would look at them, sigh, and go back to the story she was telling.

How does one quantify the labor of being both mother and grandmother? I don’t know enough to say. But I do know that I felt powerless in a room of mothers (my own and yours) whose authority I had no right to impede upon. That mothering is such a personal thing, that non-mothers have no right to tell mothers how to mother.

…

Before I could drive, my mom would chauffeur me to your house and catch up with your mom, then leave me to stay overnight. When we got out of the car, we’d be greeted by labrador retrievers. “Outside dogs” that had ticks and fleas. They’d disappear into the property once they were bored of us. We never explored the property much, though I remember vignettes from a few of our walks – the horse’s neck drawing the wire fence taught, a shed with cobwebs and rusty tractor parts. A campfire.

When I imagine you now, I don’t picture the woman you must have been when they found you, or the one who had a baby, or the one who got in a terrible accident. I still see the boy-crazy teenager who captivated me: jet black hair, pencil-thin eyebrows, lip liner, halter top, and that beautiful chipmunk-cheek smile. When we drift, when our lives diverge, when we become new people, do we still know each other? Do we lose each other?

The answer is yes. Yes we do.

Amy Smith is a writer and researcher living in San Francisco, California. She was born and raised in Florida. Her writing has previously appeared in Cobra Milk, Haight Ashbury Literary Journal, Cathexis Northwest Press, Sparkle & Blink, and the Bold Italic.

Palms Upturned

Angela Townsend

Palm Sunday, and I am not thinking about Jesus. Do I take my Lord for granted? Of course I do. This has been our core competency since the first meat stuck to our ribs. I comfort myself by saying “our.” I hide myself among the leaves of better books.

My first-grade teacher is thinking of Jesus. She is thinking of me. She has not seen me since you could wrap two hands around my waist and have fingertips to spare. Back then, my only vainglory was hair long enough to sit on. I knew nothing of the feather boa you wear at forty. Now I pet my own neck. I trust my sweetness. I fancy myself a legend. Not everyone’s first-grade teacher remembers them.

But my first-grade teacher is thinking of Jesus. Her felt-tip pen is purple for Lent. Ninety-three years have not turned her letters craggy. She asks if I will greet my mother. She asks if I will be busy with my church this Holy Week. My mother, my church. I have only one of these.

She has enclosed another bookmark, Jeremiah 29 this time. God will give me a hope and a future. It would not occur to her that I do not give the best part of my day to Jesus. She sees me in a pink armchair with my New Testament and my prayer journal. She knows I went to seminary. I have a concordance for a pillow.

My first-grade teacher asks if I still work at the animal shelter. She asks this every other Easter. She alternates with questions about my mother. I wonder if she keeps spreadsheets. Maybe pivot tables ensure she will not forget any ex-child. She does not proselytize. Some little girls receive cards with three-dimensional chicks, fuzzy to the touch. The neighbor boy who went to Dartmouth gets bookmarks with Pysanky eggs. But she knows I went to seminary, so I get the lilies and the cross.

I tell myself I think of Jesus so fluently, I forget I am thinking of Jesus. I am thinking of Jesus when I salt my spinach. I am thinking of Jesus when I read my mother’s poetry. I am thinking of Jesus when I dust the Art Nouveau cat pressed into my arms by the dying shelter volunteer. “This has been with me for longer than you’ve been alive.” I am thinking of Jesus when my blood glucose is 353.

I was thinking of Jesus in fourth grade, drawing a diamond and writing His names in the facets. Wonderful Counselor. Prince of Peace. Daystar. The pastor said I might be getting “the tap on the shoulder.” All my beta cells died. My mother said Jesus put diabetes in my book, although we couldn’t know why.

I thanked Jesus for backyard toads and aspartame. I prayed over decisions like cutting my hair. The stylist cried and gave my mother my ponytail. My first-grade teacher saw me in the hallway and said I looked like Mary Tyler Moore. Her church and our church had Soup Wednesdays together all Lent. She brought me palm fronds braided into parcels as dense as cakes.

I used to respond to her letters. I told her I was infatuated with a Dutch priest who believed everyone is loved. I wrote that I was binging on Bonhoeffer and singing shape-note hymns at the 9am service. She saw my name change and change back. She did not see me gallop through churches where I thought I was Jesus. She may not know what happens when you think you are Jesus.

She did not see my churches. Little boys still fence with palm fronds, stabbing with intention. She did not ask why my name changed back, but she wrote Ms. instead of Mrs. in felt-tip pen.  Now I just tell her that my life is “zany and lovely.” I send her pictures of my shelter.

I always read two books at once, something fibrous and something I want to read. I pay my dues with those who name-drop all three Persons of the Trinity. Only then am I allowed to read about thriving after divorce, or how the constellations got their names. I pray when it suits me, apologizing for slipping in and out of my cassock like a seal. I thank Jesus for Diet Coke and the cat’s hazel eyes. I forget that Jesus chose to have bones that hurt.

Palm Sunday, and I drink coffee and write lethargic poems. I forgot. The other seminarians were ordained. My Master of Divinity hangs like an open locket around my neck. The picture fell out, but I don’t know where I was when it happened. A pastor friend texts me: “Don’t let the rocks cry out on your behalf!” I look at the cat on my desk and say, “Hosanna. Jesus loves you.”

I tell myself I think of Jesus the way a jazz pianist thinks of scales. Once you know the basics, you get to improvise. I tell myself that there were “basics” back there. I forgot that it’s Palm Sunday, so I write to my saddest aunt and press a leaf in The Complete Works of Emily Dickinson. I leap around my condo, forty and unseen. I jump up and down until I am breathless. I stop thinking about myself, my kidneys, and my end of the bargain that Jesus will let my mother outlive me.

My first-grade teacher will wash feet in four days. She will caress old heels slick with Gold Bond, soaping ankles that stink of Ben-Gay. She is practiced in the presence of God, so she flows from servant to child and back, mercy’s Möbius strip. She will laugh when Mrs. Oldfield unintentionally tickles. They are fluent in humor, God’s jazz.

I tell myself that I did not forget Palm Sunday, but I did. My hair is long again, and I am small. I like my cheeks pink as strawberries. I remember faces turned kaleidoscopic in the stained glass. I am counting on being remembered.

Angela Townsend graduated from Princeton Seminary and Vassar College. She is a four time Best of the Net nominee and the 2024 winner of West Trade Review’s 704 Prize for Flash Fiction. Her work appears or is forthcoming in Arts & Letters, CutBank, Pleiades, SmokeLong, and Terrain, among others. Angela has lived with Type 1 diabetes for 34 years, laughs with her poet mother every morning, and loves life affectionately.