Issue 2: Fall 2016
Creative NonFiction
Lipstick
Brittany Rogers
“Make me look purdy,” my grandmother says in the bright glow of a crisp September morning. The word “purdy” falls off her lips in the same nonchalant way that Pap-Paw used to expel a plug of Red Man into the spittoon next to his easy chair. We’re sitting in her Pepto-pink bedroom surrounded by a collection of medical contraptions: a bedside commode, a nebulizer that she calls her “peace pipe,” and a humming, spitting oxygen tank that has become comfortable background noise in the old bungalow that Pap-Paw built at the mouth of the holler after the war.
Ha-Ha is eighty-six and bedbound, all of ninety-five pounds of her, ravaged by rheumatoid arthritis and COPD. It’s been years since Pap-Paw died—four, to be exact—and although she can’t remember much now, she’s never lost count of the days since he passed. Once, in a Steno pad, I found a note she scribbled after he died: “You been gone eight months. I cry every night. We was so happy all them years.”
For forty years Ha-Ha’s robust frame—built strong and certain like the old blue-green mountains just outside her window—has been disfigured by arthritis. It started with her finger, turned “as crooked as a jay bird,” then her knees and spine. When I’m far away and thinking about Ha-Ha, I see her as she lives in my memories: silver-haired, stringing beans and watching Days of Our Lives in a chair next to the woodstove. She is mangled but beautiful—an ancient, twisting oak in the forest—and like all old things that live in the mountains, she’s learned to adapt. When she’s done with her work, she stops to pull a tube of lipstick out of her blue-zippered makeup bag. Using the mirror from a compact of pressed powder, she dabs it on her lips, contorting her face in a way that makes me giggle. She hands me the lipstick and I dot it on my lips, too. “You look purdy, Sis,” she says, and we sit silently together in that room, unaware of the time that’s slowly ticking away, bound together by the idea that we’ll always be just as we are right now: grandmother and granddaughter, watching our soap operas in red lipstick. Pap-Paw walks in the room wearing work boots and a crisp cotton button-up, and he kisses Ha-Ha on the forehead. “Look at you, old girl,” he says to her. My grandfather is reserved, but when it comes to Ha-Ha, he’s unable to conceal the pleasure that flickers in his cheeks.
These days, Ha-Ha gazes at the old black and white picture that hangs on the wall at the end of her bed. In it, she’s wearing red lipstick, a polka-dot dress, and pumps that expose the tips of her toes. Pap-Paw stands by her side in his Air Force blues. The Appalachian foothills rise up around them, a cloak that shields them from the world. They aren’t yet aware of time, of the inevitable. They are young and healthy and in love, and as far as they know, she’ll always be Garcie, and he’ll always be Gene, and they’ll always be this version of themselves at the mouth of the holler off Hallburg Road.
Now, sixty-some years later, she wants to look pretty again. In preparation for today, she asked my aunt to buy her mascara and blue eyeshadow. Her whiskers have started to bother her, so I reluctantly packed up my wax pot and drove down route 77 from Ohio while a knot formed in my stomach. The truth is, after almost thirty years of loving my grandmother, I’m not ready to touch her face.
I sit on the edge of her bed and take a look at her in the electric light of the morning sun. “It’s not good, is it?” She asks, wide-eyed, as she waits for me to proceed.
I can’t breathe. Here she is, my Ha-Ha, all of her, right in front of me: the deep wrinkles in her soft yellow skin; her hazel eyes reflecting the tree limbs from just outside the window; the coarse hair poking out like wild ramps under her chin. I think of the corn in Stan Campbell’s garden down the road. It grows unnoticed every summer until one day I look at the jungle it has become and say to myself, “Wow, where has the time gone?” I stare at Ha-Ha’s face and take in the changes that I’ve refused to acknowledge. As I run my fingers across her skin, I’m lost in the intensity of now. I hear the familiar sounds of a cardinal chirping from its perch on the windowsill and a semi’s engine brake screeching down the interstate that was carved out of this quiet valley forty years ago. On deep black nights, I watch far-away headlights flicker with the fireflies as people from all over the country blindly whiz by this sacred place where my grandparents hoed roes, hung clothes, hauled water, and bathed babies. The place where they canned ’maters and ’taters, woke up at 5 a.m. for Sunday school, loved, and somehow, between all the tasks that made up a day, got old. The place where Pap-Paw, riddled with tumors, took off his work boots one day, kissed Ha-Ha on the forehead, and lay down to submit to the inevitable. Now, I feel myself succumbing as well.
I work on Ha-Ha’s face with conviction. I reach for the wax and start spreading. She closes her eyes as I start pulling hairs, moving swiftly across the velvety folds of her skin. After each pull, I look at the hair caught in the wax, the roots glimmering black like soil-covered radishes fresh from the ground, still warm and moist from the nourishment they received while planted in her body.
“You okay?” I ask.
She opens her eyes and laughs. “I guess,” she says. “I’m tough.”
When I’m done waxing, I pour toner on a cotton pad and smooth it over skin. She reaches both hands up and feels her face. “It it really me?” she asks.
Then, she pulls out the old, familiar blue makeup bag. Somehow, I know this will be the last time. “Don’t make me look like Tammy Faye,” she says with a deep, guttural laugh. Her lungs are filling with fluid again.
I line her eyes in black and smooth navy-blue eyeshadow over her paper-thin lids. The mascara is difficult to apply; as she looks up, I coat the ends of her short brown lashes with the thick black liquid. The whites of her eyes shine against her well-worn face. I tell her to grin so I can brush rouge on her cheeks.
“Don’t forget the lipstick,” she says as she passes her tube into my hands.
I feel my throat catch. “Wait a second,” I say. I go to the bathroom and find my makeup bag. I pull out my lipstick, purchased for way too much money at a department store cosmetics counter. Every morning, I pucker my lips in front of the bathroom mirror and apply it before I leave for work. On the best days, my husband kisses me on the cheek and tells me how pretty I am. I go back in Ha-Ha’s room and sit down on the bed. “Pucker up,” I say. She does, making the silliest face she can, and we both laugh. Carefully, I dot color on her lips—the top first, then the bottom, momentarily restoring all that’s been lost through time. Instinctively, she rubs her lips together, remembering after all these years the vestigial motions of primping. I pull out a mirror and hold it in front of her face.
“Well golly,” she says, her eyes moistening over. “I guess I’m still me.”
I toss my lipstick into her makeup bag. “Keep it,” I say. “You’ll need a touchup one of these days.” The pain burns my throat. I know I’m lying to myself, but I leave it anyway.
One month later, I receive a call in the middle of the night. Ha-Ha’s sick. The words “sepsis” and “heart attack” and “hospice” are tossed around like the leaves outside my house as autumn finally commences. I know I could stay here, let her live on in my mind like the lipstick I left in her bag. But this time I’ll accept the inevitable. I’ll pack my suitcase, drive back to the mountains, sit on the edge of Ha-Ha’s bed, feel her soft, warm hands in mine, and embrace time as it slips away.
Brittany Rogers lives and writes in Northeast Ohio, although her heart belongs to the hills of West Virginia. She has an MFA in Creative Writing from the Northeast Ohio Master of Fine Arts (NEOMFA) program at Kent State University and teaches at Herzing University in Akron, Ohio. Her work has appeared in Still: The Journal and the ECC Literary Anthology. She was nominated for a Best of the Net award.
Three Days
Lauren Jonik
“Read the directions again,” my mom pleaded. She navigated our blue Buick around the twisting, country roads. The heater’s fan hummed beneath her words.
“Turn left up here,” I responded while simultaneously looking at the folded white scrap of paper and trying to look for landmarks through the windshield. The familiar sensation of wanting to arrive coupled with resentment for needing to go welled up from my stomach. A forced deep breath managed to escape my throat. “I feel nervous.”
“I know. We’ve just got to get there. Can you see what that sign says up on the right?”
“Wolfgang Smith, MD.” I knew the doctor’s first name, but it made me chuckle when I pictured him like Mozart in the movie Amadeus—complete with the silly, high-pitched laugh. I was in my late teens, but a part of my sense of humor hadn’t matured past age fourteen. The clock stopped at the moment of impact at the onset of Lyme Disease. Laughter was how I distracted myself. Moments later I would sit in another waiting room, filling out another long form, wishing I were somewhere else, wishing I were living someone else’s life. Consulting doctors went from something routine I did as a child for annual check-ups and immunizations to something that filled me with dread. By the time I was 19, my collection of negative experiences with the medical community had grown to a heavy weight. Misdiagnoses, botched tests, misplaced results, disbelief when I told my symptoms, accusations of malingering when I didn’t get well, being spoken about instead of to when my parents were in the exam room with me and being interrupted when answering questions posed by the doctors themselves swirled in my mind. I began to suspect that this all was normal. I didn’t want this version of normal.
The myriad of drugs I had been prescribed tore my gut to shreds, stole my sleep and caused me to get hives as soon as I went out in the sunlight. I had done everything I was told like the obedient straight A “good girl” that I had cultivated during childhood. And, it pushed me so far into illness that it nearly killed me. My teenage rebellion was not a loud, raucous running away into the world, but a determined, deliberate turning inward. I knew there was something I needed to hear in the stillness. I had to listen. My life depended on it.
What started as casual observations progressed into a game of connecting the dots. At 15, I noticed that eating red meat worsened my joint pain and increased my cognitive problems. Huh, I had a hamburger for dinner last night and now walking up the stairs from the family room to the living room hurts. That happened last time too. By 16, I had gradually transitioned into becoming vegetarian. Next, I read that vitamin C helps the immune system and began taking it. I didn’t catch as many colds that winter. Little by little, my interest in natural medicine, how the body worked and complementary healing options grew. I began browsing through health magazines. I took out books about nutrition from the library. I experimented with different over the counter supplements like vitamin E, Echinacea and Pau D’arco. I started keeping a symptoms/supplement/food diary. If something could be quantified and analyzed, perhaps it could be better understood. I had to try. Seeing on paper daily data I gathered about my body proved to be more useful than blood tests, urine tests and spinal taps. While diagnostic tests helped me to understand what I was dealing with, the daily minutiae of symptomology and remedies was teaching me how to deal with it. More muscle aches might mean I needed an extra dose of magnesium. Fluctuations in my basal body temperature might have meant that my unpredictable menstrual cycle was entering a different phase. That might explain the twinge in my abdomen and lower energy levels. The more I understood about my body, the less I feared.
In the 1990s, conventionally trained medical doctors received very little training in natural medicine, nutrition or supplements. Each doctor I saw was made aware of everything I was taking—I hid nothing. When I asked questions related to how Lyme disease and Chronic Fatigue Syndrome could be addressed with vitamins and herbs, I usually was met with a blank stare.
Every time my mom picked up a magazine at the health food store that listed local holistic practitioners, I hoped there would be one added nearby. Living in a semi-rural suburb had its advantages, but a plethora of complementary health care practitioners was not one of them. It was nearly impossible to find a local acupuncturist or yoga studio until the late 1990s. When we heard about Dr. Smith around 1995, I had come close to giving up on doctors, but decided to give him a try. I had heard his wife was a midwife. I imagined myself years from then having a baby with a midwife’s assistance. Already, I was projecting a future that didn’t include the conventional medical system. It would take years—and the evolution of the health care system—for me to understand that it would be possible to have the best of both worlds. But, at the time, I barely had even a sliver of one of these worlds at my fingertips.
Dr. Smith’s waiting room was less austere, less sterile than what I was used to. The form the receptionist asked me to fill out included questions like “Do you ever feel fatigued after you eat? How many hours per night do you sleep? How often do you exercise? List any supplements you take.” I had never been asked these questions before on paper. “Write down all of your current symptoms.” My mind stood still at this question every time I read it at a doctor’s office. Do I list everything? Or, do I pick the most pronounced symptoms? If I tell the truth, are they to just think I’m crazy or making something up like other doctors inferred? My brain feels like it is on fire. How do I explain that? Putting the experience of my body into words to present to people who would evaluate the information felt like a cry for help, plus a personal failure, plus an admission of guilt—even though the only thing I truly felt guilty of was getting sick with a misunderstood illness long before science would catch up and begin to understand.
A slender, tall man with thinning hair and fiercely intelligent eyes, Dr. Smith was quick in his manner, but kind. He asked questions and wrote down my responses and whatever other notes he had. I always wondered what doctors actually wrote when they were busily scribbling away. He answered my questions and those that my mom posed with directness and clarity. If he didn’t know something, he said so.
“I think you should go on a fast. It will be medically supervised. Your system is clearly overburdened from having had so many antibiotics. Fasting helps to give the digestive system a break,” he explained.
“What do you mean? How does it work?” I asked. I wasn’t expecting to be told not to eat.
“You gradually reduce your meals over three days until you get to the point where you don’t consume food for three days. Instead you will have a liquid protein supplement that aids in the detoxification of the body. The gut and the skin are linked. The reason you’re having eczema problems goes back to the gut. Fasting should help.”
"So I only drink a supplement but not eat?” I wasn’t thrilled about this.
“Yes.”
“How do I go without eating?”
Dr. Smith smiled and nodded. “It is only for three days.” He seemed confident that I could do this—more confident than I was. Three days seemed like a long time, longer than the years I had already endured.
“Okay. . .” I reluctantly agreed, unsure about what would come next.
“Marcia up front will give you a print out with specific instructions on what to do in case you forget. You drink the supplement for each of your meals. The goal is to cleanse gently and heal the body. The supplement will provide the nutrition you need in an easily digestible form.”
He handed me a paper to give to the receptionist with a diagnosis code checked off of a long list of ailments. As my mom and I walked back into the waiting room and to the reception window, Dr. Smith followed close behind. My mom turned and jokingly said, “So, there’s hope yet for her?” I knew she wasn’t completely joking. She too needed reassurance.
Dr. Smith looked nothing like Mozart, but when he smiled there was a twinkle his eye. He looked directly at me and responded, “There is always hope.”
I walked out of the building and back to the car. My hand touched the cold metal of the car door handle in anticipation. As my mom unlocked the door, I realized that I had just been given a
new kind of medicine.
Lauren Jonik is a writer and photographer in Brooklyn, NY. Her work has appeared in 12th Street Journal, Artemis, Calliope, Two Cities Review, The Oleander Review, Panoplyzine and Ravishly.com Follow her on Twitter: @laurenjonik
Going Back
Mahdis Marzooghian
At Myrtle Beach, colorful resorts and hotels line the shore like pastel-colored candy tucked neatly in Easter baskets; neon signs light up the balmy night sky, crashing brilliantly against night’s endless deep-violet. The salty perfume of the ocean never changes over the years – it is the signature scent of summer at the beach. I have also tasted the sun. The omnipotent rays seep through closed lips and jerk the tongue to life with a slight tang of lemon pie; a perfect balance of sweet and sour. That’s what I like to imagine the sun tastes like. Nostalgia rises from this familiar earth, covering me in a transparent layer, and my senses are lovesick guides that take me back and try to help me wed my mortal body with the eternal bodies of the universe. My senses have hopelessly courted these beautiful, infinite bodies for years to no avail. Or so I think.
For the one week that we were at Myrtle, as my family lazily rose to tend to their individual morning rituals, I was always dressed and ready an hour before them. I usually headed out the door the same time my brother groggily headed for the bathroom. “The beach isn’t going anywhere,” my father said between yawns. “But the sun is!” I retorted, trying to rub sunblock over that one spot on my back I could never reach. I was armed with my enormous, sand-filled beach bag containing only my towel, iPhone, snacks, and a couple of frozen water bottles to keep my baking body hydrated.
I would only return to the hotel room for a bite of lunch and then it was back to the beach for tanning round two until sunset. No matter how much sunblock I would rub onto my skin every couple of hours, sunburn was inevitable after a whole day of sunbathing. It felt good to stick my hands inside the hotel ice bucket and place them on my feverish skin, burning hot from the sun’s rays captured inside my flesh. I pictured a molten, bright yellow liquid mixing with my blood and lighting up my veins like electroluminescent wire. When I turned off all the lights later that night, I was almost expecting my skin to radiate an eerie golden glow. I was half-disappointed when I didn’t glimmer like some golden god and wondered what it would feel like to carry that immense power inside me and momentarily smolder like the sun.
By morning, my flesh cooled down and was itching for another round of sun-fever. In the hotel hallway, I waited impatiently for the sluggish elevator with its load of people sporting vibrant bathing suits. The children seemed to vibrate with anticipation, plastic shovels and buckets in hand, as if going off to dig at a secret excavation site. Once the elevator doors opened with a cheery ding, everyone poured out, relieved that the uncomfortable ride was over. I stepped into the scintillating sunlight and the faint taste of lemon pie coated my tongue. The ocean’s eau de parfum filled my nostrils, the salty taste blending with the sweet and sour.
After a few hours of baking under the sun, I decided to cool off in the water. I pinned down my towel to the shifting, sinking sand as best I could with my bag and flip flops and hopped over to the water’s elusive edge, burning my bare feet on the sand. My ears were tuned to the sound of the waves – the sound of inconceivable, immortal might. The kind of sound that assured me I was fully alive and conscious and beholding a reality that left me reeling. It is the kind of sound that cannot be forgotten – archived in the primary auditory cortex and replayed clearly even when far away from the beach and sitting in the living room. It is the soundtrack to a day at the beach, where the water roars and crashes against the shore like the frothing mouth of a massive blue beast, coughing up the remnants of its shellfish lunch. It was exhilarating and overwhelming all at the same time and I took caution not to go too far, aware of its wild power. The night soundtrack, however, is much different; at night the water is calmer – purring and lapping along the shoreline like the smooth, salivating tongue of a massive black beast, ready to swallow me whole for dinner. It is soothing and alarming all at the same time – more dangerous. A cool invitation. The moon hangs overhead like a silvery ball ready to splash back into the water.
Now with the sun sizzling like an enormous egg yolk in the saucepan sky, I faced the ocean, only a few steps separating me from that watery hammock. The water was deliciously warm as I waded in. I felt like I had been given a large dose of anesthesia as every muscle in my body went limp. I was a puppet on watery strings. I was in the mouth of the blue beast, feeling small and helpless, trying to stay afloat and exist inside something that was so much greater than me. Is that why we are so attracted to the ocean? Do we love the danger and unpredictability? Does the idea that we could drown at any moment thrill us? Or is it a much deeper, older desire? I want to lay my ear upon the beast’s sand-encrusted heart and hear the rumblings of her ancient secrets.
I want to become lost in something that knows no time. Maybe we want to run away from time and tumble into something timeless. Or, are we just merely going back to where we once came from? There is a scientific theory that millions of years ago, the common ancestors of human beings adapted to ocean life. Do our origins trace back to the ocean? There is no denying that we share certain qualities with it. We carry the same salt in our bodies that the ocean carries; most of our bodily fluids, such as tears, blood, and sweat, contain salt. While this may all be purely coincidental, there is again no denying that we are drawn to the ocean and its ever-moving, salt-soaked mysteries.
I was about eight years old when my family vacationed at Myrtle for the first time. I spent the entire first day in the ocean, refusing to come out even for dinner. Back then, I wasn’t so interested in the tanning part – I only wanted to play in the water and find seashells. When my parents finally coaxed me out with the promise of pizza, my skin was so wrinkled that I shrieked with laughter and kept yelling that I was an old lady. My hunger finally caught up with me and I decided I was too starved to shower, so my mother helped me into my clothes and we drove over to the restaurant. Pretty soon the salt that I had marinated in all day started itching and stinging my skin. I started nagging my mother that I wanted to go back to our hotel to shower and wash the salty residue off me.
Back then, I could joke about being old and not be bothered by it, as if old age was a myth and something that couldn’t possibly happen to me. Back then, the ocean’s ageless salts seeped into my young skin, mingling with my own, and all I wanted to do was wash it off, unaware of what it meant to carry a small part of an eternal force in my flesh like fairy dust. Unaware that I already carried something similar inside my body since the day I was born – within the ever-moving blood flowing in my veins like ocean currents. But, unlike the ocean, I wasn’t an eternal being. The ocean is both young and old and I guess that’s the best way to describe something that is ageless. Even if it one day dries up and ceases to exist, it will still outlive me by several million years and that’s close enough to eternity for me. Now that I am older, all I want is to preserve a bit of the sun and the ocean within my expiring vessel and feel their timeless presence surging. I want to become one with these powerful, permanent bodies of the planet. But aren’t we already a part of this universe? Why is it that we feel like momentary visitors? Why do we rely on our senses and memories to take us back and help us belong to something we may already be a part of?
My family and I drove to a campsite on our last evening at Myrtle and as soon as the familiar smoky scent of firewood hit my nostrils, it triggered the vivid memory of a September night when I was around ten and went camping with my cousins. I had never seen so many stars in a single night sky before. The smell of firewood always makes me think of stars. It brings rushing back exactly what I felt in that moment on that September night fifteen years ago, when I looked up at the night sky pierced with those winking little lights, thinking that God himself had taken a giant silver needle to the sky and punctured countless holes into it for the light of heaven to peek through. I thought of the full moon as his thimble while he meticulously worked with that needle.
I remember wishing I could rise up into the air like the smoke from the dying flames and mingle with the ageless stars. But maybe I already have, because according to another well-known scientific theory, human beings carry within them the same elements that make up stars; the carbon, nitrogen, and oxygen atoms in our bodies were created in previous star generations around 4.5 million years ago. If this theory holds some truth, then mingling with stars wouldn’t seem like such an impossible task. I’d like to have faith in these theories; they help convince me that I am part of something bigger. The South Carolina night sky was also punctured generously with stars and I gazed up at them, placing a hand on my midsection and thinking how amazing indeed that I could be carrying inside me the same elements that make up those twinkling lights millions of miles away. Somehow, they didn’t feel so far and out of reach.
On our final day of vacation, we checked out of our hotel and spent the morning on the beach before heading home. “Take some pictures! You don’t want to forget these moments!” my mother commanded from behind her half-eaten watermelon crescent, handing me her camera with sticky fingers. I want to always remember her like this – sitting carelessly on the beach, laughing and eating a watermelon, her bare legs half-buried in the hot sand of the beach as if she is part of it. I imagine she is a mermaid, visiting the shore for the first time. But she will decide to stay on land forever, loving the feel of the earth’s solidity and the warm, dry sand on her body. Maybe that’s what our ancestors did millions of years ago – they visited the shore one day and decided to stay permanently. But that love for the ocean has never really gone away. It is deep within us and has soaked our memories, beckoning us to go back – if only for a little while – and allow our aging salts to mix with the ocean’s ageless salts. “I won’t forget,” I murmured to no one in particular and still half-heartedly snapped a few pictures to keep my giggling mermaid-mother happy.
But what can I resort to when old age wears out my mind and I do forget? It’s bound to happen, even if the blind arrogance and temporary invincibility of youth convince me otherwise. Can I then find temporary refuge in my muddled memories? Will I eventually come to terms with old age and death when my senses fail me and I no longer have my memories to escape into for a little while? When I can no longer remember those comforting theories? After all, our memories die with us. Is that when I can finally tumble into something timeless? In death, I will be buried in the ground where my flesh and bones will become one with the earth. My salts and stardust will mingle with the soil. In death, I will go back to the familiar earth.
Mahdis Marzooghian is the managing editor of Five on the Fifth literary magazine. She recently graduated from Towson University with a Master’s Degree in Professional Writing. She earned her Bachelor of Arts Degree in English (Writing), Journalism and French from Towson University, as well. She hopes to go on for a PhD in writing someday. Mahdis currently works as a PRWeb editor at Cision. She had a short essay published in the series anthology, “Miso for Life: A Melting Pot of Thoughts” and more recently, a short prose piece published in the literary magazine, “Ambiguity”. As an undergrad, Mahdis had two poems published in Mary Baldwin College’s literary magazine, “Outrageous Fortune” as well as an article in the online literary magazine, “20 Something”. She hopes to get a novel published in the near future. Mahdis is also fluent in Farsi and French. She loves to travel.