AQR 2025, AQR Vol. 41, No. 1 & 2, Winter/Spring 2025, Stories, Geoffrey Becker, B Usman Perviaz AQR 2025, AQR Vol. 41, No. 1 & 2, Winter/Spring 2025, Stories, Geoffrey Becker, B Usman Perviaz

LIBERTY PANCAKES by Geoffrey Becker

I was hyper-aware of everything: my dad’s thick black beard; the uncomfortable, Danish modern chairs with black cushion seats that exhaled audibly when you settled onto them; the dark oil painting of a man in a hat and suit, some ancestor, staring at us from over the sideboard. I hadn’t thought ahead to dinner and now here we were. My mother was telling us about the trip her Feminist Forum group might take.
“Seneca Falls,” she said. “Or maybe Florida.”
We’d been to Florida once when I was little, but I had no memory. All I knew was that every winter, a box of grapefruits arrived from my great-grandparents, who vacationed there. Indian River, it said on the side, with a picture of a canoe.
“A trip,” said my dad. He was forty, a historian, expert on WWI, a quiet, conflict-averse man who took excellent care of his shoes. My mother, who had earned a PhD and now had nothing to use it for, was one week older. An aspiring writer, she stayed up all night typing at things: plays, poems, stories. She got up late, drank black coffee, left lipstick on the white cup. Many years ago, she’d been in a college production of A Doll’s House. I’d seen pictures. In a few weeks it would be 1974. She expected liberation.
I excused myself. I was four hours into my own trip. Through the kitchen, down four steps to the family room-TV area, then down a short hallway and left into the tiny powder room across from the door that accessed our two-car garage. I stood, hands gripping the sink, grateful for the silence. I was flickering like a bad bulb. Ed and I had each swallowed one purple barrel after school, right before band practice at Montcalm’s. Ed was fifteen, a year older than me, played bass, had shoulder-length hair and a girlfriend, Linda, with whom he had regular sex. He’d tripped before. I said I had, too, when I was hitching with Charly Sand back in August, but it wasn’t true. I lied about many things, including my age. I looked a lot older, and because of this I’d been skipped a grade in middle school (I was already in a multi-age classroom). Most people – if they didn’t know otherwise – assumed I was sixteen or seventeen.
The stages so far: Apprehension (the walk to Montcalm’s); Hilarity (rehearsal); Electric Mind Fog (the walk back home through town with my pulse racing and Ed saying “fuck me” over and over for no reason); and now, Interminable Bad Movie (possibly foreign). Band practice had been the funniest thing ever, like the room was filled with nitrous. We were in tears. “Wait,” Montcalm said, at one point, wiping his own eyes. “Are you guys high?”
“Nope,” Ed said. “What a crazy insinuation.”
Montcalm was as giggly as us just from proximity.
We all took a deep breath, the only sound for a moment the 60- cycle hum of Montcalm’s amp. “You still dating that Janis chick?” he asked me.
My face in the mirror was red, almost sunburnt; I looked like an Italian Renaissance portrait of someone with a skin disease. The walls were pink, as was the sink and the toilet paper roll. I washed my hands, dried them with a light-blue hand towel while looking at the small drawing of Provincetown that hung on the wall to my right, the work of my great aunt. There were people in the drawing enjoying themselves on a sunny day, rough sketches of them, jagged lines that somehow came together enough that you could understand what you were looking at, and in the distance the Pilgrim Monument.
I returned to the dinner table, where my sister was talking about something wrong with her horse. I had never seen this horse – it lived in the country, and she got driven out to take care of it a few afternoons a week.
“Thrush,” she said. “They will have to clean his hooves every day with an iodine solution.”
“That’s a shame,” said my dad.
“Thrust,” said my mother. “Lust.”
“Plush,” I added. We liked words.
The horse had been a gift from our grandfather in Connecticut. The main thing I knew about horses was that they were expensive to keep, and I was sure we were living beyond our means, with our new house, our new car. Our other animal was also my sister’s, a grey cat, Simon, who lived in her room when he wasn’t hunting birds in the yard. For a few months when I was ten, I’d had a puppy, but my mother had let him out in the front yard of our old house unattended and with no tether, so he wandered into the street and got hit by a car. He was a long-haired dachshund, from a kennel with papers and everything, and the rules were that when I was at school, he stayed in my room. But he’d barked and barked, and she got tired of the noise.
“Iodine shouldn’t cost much,” I said.
“He can’t be ridden for at least two weeks,” my sister said, enjoying the authority that came with knowing bad news.
“Is there garlic in this?” my father asked.
The red, green, and yellow stew on my plate vibrated in the candlelight.
“There’s shit in it,” said my mother. “How about that?”
I focused my eyes on the weave of my dark blue placemat, which ended in knots at the edge. We’d eaten off these mats my entire life, it seemed. I remembered playing with one when I was small, pretending it was a flying carpet.
“Could be some rain coming through,” said my dad. He took a swallow of iced tea. “It’s uncertain at this point. And of course, if it gets cold enough, that could turn to snow.”

After dinner, as usual, we all headed to our separate areas. Our new house was a split-level with a decent yard, built fifteen years earlier, and much larger than the bungalow we’d lived in before, with its cramped bedrooms and creepy basement where centipedes regularly invaded the carpet. My room was downstairs adjacent to the front door, small, wood-paneled, with a front-facing window. I could slip in and out without people knowing.
My sister and I settled in front of the television and watched a show about a magician that starred Bill Bixby. I couldn’t follow the plot, but I enjoyed the colors – we had our first color TV, now, too, a Sony Trinitron, and even stupid shows made for interesting viewing. I thought I was myself in another, equally unfunny show about aliens taking over the bodies of a suburban family. When it was over, my sister went upstairs to her bedroom and I retreated to mine, closed both doors, and did pushups until my arms hurt. I lay on the bed and opened my paperback anthology of science fiction short stories and tried to read, but the sentences bounced meaninglessly off my eyes and back onto the page. “Cabot stepped down from the transport.” “All religions had long ago faded from memory.” “My first voyage to Mars was as a stowaway.” I looked down at the floor. The carpet – a fake Persian – had shapes I saw as scary portals. I stared at the drapes, which were Colonial-themed, with liberty bells and cannons. My dad’s idea. They were something he’d have enjoyed in his room back when he was a kid, so he’d bought them for me. The dresser and night table were Colonial as well and smelled of wood stain.
I dug out my February 1970 copy of Debonair and flipped through the familiar photo spreads, the redhead posed in various ways around a ladder in an unfurnished room with paint cans and drop cloths, the blonde with the enormous breasts lounging next to a swimming pool. Nothing. The pictures might as well have been of cornfields. It’s speedy acid, the mutton-chopped senior who’d sold me barrels had said, and now it occurred to me that he hadn’t meant you’d feel it quickly, but that it had actual speed in it. So, I’d probably done two new drugs. I tried thinking about Janis, the strawberry smell of her hair, her taste when we kissed last Wednesday after school in this very room while supposedly doing homework together, the way her right breast had felt when I’d slipped my hand under her shirt at the matinee of Gone with the Wind the previous weekend. I want you, she’d whispered, and I’d been replaying the words ever since.
I turned on my radio, an ancient brown Zenith from my father’s college days, and waited for it to warm up. The rock station out of Philadelphia was getting interference tonight, possibly from Comet Kohoutek. I closed my eyes and watched patterns behind my lids leap and rearrange themselves.

***

I had a hard time getting through the next day on almost no sleep. There was also an incident in a stairway between classes where a greaser named Jonny Tkacs called me a freak and kicked me from behind, sending me stumbling into the wall. High school came with an almost constant threat of violence. With my center-parted pup tent of dark, frizzy hair, army jacket, red eyes, and general aroma of smoke, I was an obvious target. Six feet tall and 130 pounds, I looked, not unintentionally, like an R. Crumb character. I had a nickname, too, one I’d chosen for myself, Lucky, after the cigarette brand.
I walked to Nicole’s house, and we smoked her hash out of a zebrawood pipe. Nicole was the fattest person I’d ever met. Her dad was a policeman. My eyes kept shutting as I watched Oscar the beagle repeatedly lick his paw. Nicole and I had been friends since last summer when she’d cast me as the Tin Man in the Youth Theater League’s production of The Wizard of Oz. Charly Sand was the Wizard. I was looking for any excuse to get out of the house, even if it meant being in a play. We had gotten high together a lot, the three of us, in the parking lot behind the building where YTL held rehearsals. Sometimes, Nicole led us through Beatles tunes. She was a good singer and knew about harmony. That’s how I had first gotten to know Charly Sand, singing “This Boy” with him.
“Your parents still going to the shore Friday?” I asked.
“They are.”
“I need a place for me and Janis.”
“Cheerleader Janis? Go-o-o team!” Nicole took another hit, exhaled, coughed uncontrollably for twenty seconds, then rubbed her eyes and blew her nose into a Kleenex. “What do I get?” Nicole had dropped out of her first semester of college in St. Louis and was now biding her time until she could enroll locally at Rider, where she would study theater.
“What do you want?” I picked up the hand grenade cigarette lighter from the coffee table and flicked up a two-inch flame. I could never get over partying in a policeman’s house. The album finished, leaving us in silence.
“Why do you look half dead, anyway? And what happened to your lip?”
“I fell. And I was up most of the night tripping.”
“Get lost. Can you get me some? What are they?”
“Purple barrels. They have speed in them.”
She wore dramatic eye makeup and fake lashes, probably to draw attention to her face and away from her body. Her outfits were always the same: oversized, white, button-front shirts, and blue jeans. “Get me some,” she said, “and you can use the house. It will, in fact, be an honor. Mi casa es su casa. Think of it! Your first time!”

***

Charly Sand and I had run into each other downtown around noon on a humid Thursday in August, the last weekend before school was to start. An hour earlier, my mother had thrown open the door to my bedroom and yelled at me for practicing guitar, screaming, “Stop that noise. It sounds like dying mosquitoes.” She was still in her robe and without makeup.
“Why don’t you leave me the fuck alone,” I muttered. I stood and tossed the guitar – a $35 classical I’d been given when I was eleven – onto the bed and picked a random paperback off the bookcase and paged through it, making a point of ignoring her. Infuriated, she slapped me across the cheek. She’d hit me before, but I surprised us both this time by slapping her back. I did it with the hand that had the book, so what hit her was a copy of Steal This Book by Abbie Hoffman, which I had obediently stolen from a drugstore rack. Her eyes grew wide and there was a red mark on her right cheek. She started to laugh. Then, I replaced the book, pushed past her, and left the house, slamming the front door as hard as I could behind me. I didn’t know where I was going, and I didn’t care. Downtown for a slice of pizza made sense. It was lunchtime, after all.
Charly had just finished his own slice. He was headed west, he said, Gonna hitch. Wanna come? I didn’t even ask where west. I got my slice to go, on a white paper plate. The Wizard and the Tin Man, hitting the road.
Hitching proved miraculous. You stuck out your thumb and people stopped. Certain people, at any rate. We smoked fat, ragged joints with strangers in the back of a VW Microbus to the distorted sound of Crosby Stills and Nash playing through cheap, nailed-up speakers. We went to a showing of Beneath the Planet of the Apes, then slept on the floor of an unlocked church in Frenchtown, New Jersey, because Charly, whose dad was a minister, said it was always okay to go into a church. We made up obscene song lyrics and sang them at the cars that passed, talked about the rock opera we would write together. We didn’t even have a map. Our destination was St. Louis, to visit Nicole. A bearded guy in a pickup truck left us on a rural road that paralleled I-80 outside of Hazelton, Pennsylvania. “Best I can do,” he announced. “This is where you get out.”
“It’s cool, man,” said Charly.
And it was. We goofed around. We sang “This Boy.” We tried to do “Niagara Falls” (“Slowly, I turned, step by step!”). But I was tired, and this was a terrible spot. The few cars that passed by didn’t even slow down, and sometimes no cars appeared at all for as long as ten minutes. After three hours of holding up the cardboard sign we’d made still yielded nothing, I said we should turn around. I said I needed to be back for school.
“School?” Charly said. “You can miss a couple of days of school.”
“That and we don’t have money. And no one wants to pick us up.”
“Loser,” Charly said, and I could tell he meant it. “Chickenshit.” But unlike me he had no immediate place he had to be. He had either graduated or been kicked out of Landon Academy, a school in the area that catered to problem kids – I wasn’t sure which. Also, it had become clear that he had not told Nicole he was coming.
“We’re stuck in mud,” I said. “We don’t even know where we are.”
“Like that matters,” he said.
At a gas station phone booth, I made a collect call home and got my dad, who wanted to know where I was. “Pennsylvania,” I told him. “I’m headed home, though.”
“I’ll come get you,” he said. “We called the police. We’re worried.”
“I’m fine,” I told him. “I’ll be back in a day.”
We walked until it grew dark, then knocked on the door of a farmhouse where the family – a mom, a dad, two young daughters – fed us dinner and let us stay the night. They didn’t ask us questions. They even had a spare room with two twin beds. There was a picture of Jesus on the wall and one of those little girls with the enormous eyes. The air smelled vaguely of mothballs. Before we went to sleep, the mother knocked and brought us two glasses of milk and two oatmeal raisin cookies. We thanked her and ate them in silence.
“I’ll bet you wish you had a toothbrush,” Charly said, finally, like it was another failing on my part.
“I can use my finger,” I said.
In the morning, we had corn flakes and the father drove us to an access spot for the interstate eastbound.
“Don’t know how the hitching will be on a Sunday,” he said, “but good luck.” He shook both of our hands.
“‘For some have entertained angels unawares’,” said Charly in his Wizard voice.
We made it home in two rides, the first a real estate agent from Port Jervis in a yellow Ford Capri, and the second a swimming pool installer from Trenton in a blue Impala. He talked about Terry Bradshaw for a while, then put on country music and whistled to it. “I’ll drive you right into town,” he said. “I don’t care.” He dropped us off twenty yards from where we’d met up three days earlier, and we thanked him. I walked the mile or so back to our house. It was after dinner already. My mother stayed in her office. My dad said he was glad to see me. He said he wished I wouldn’t do this sort of thing. I took a hot shower and went to bed.
I didn’t see Charly after that. But a week later, he set out again, this time in a car he’d “borrowed” from his parents. He drove to New York – to buy drugs was the story I heard – and smashed into the back side of a parked maintenance vehicle on the Goethals Bridge. After three weeks in a New York hospital, he was transferred closer to home. Supposedly, he was out now. Nicole had been to see him at the rehab place. She’d quit school after less than a month. “It wasn’t for me,” she said. I’m a Jersey girl.”

***

Headachy from Nicole’s hash, I rode my bike uptown, picked up my papers and delivered them. As an experiment, I had recently stopped wearing underwear. The result was a certain feeling of freedom, but also considerable chafing.
I had the worst paper route in town, with only 30 customers, almost a third of whom didn’t answer the door when I rang to try and collect, so that not only was I out of the running for the incentive prizes offered to paperboys, I owed the company fourteen bucks. When I finished my route, I continued riding. I’d taken this job because I thought it would please my parents to see me working and being responsible, and to make up for the scare I’d given them. They seemed unimpressed. The Trenton Times was a bad paper, so maybe they were embarrassed, but there weren’t any delivery routes for the New York Review of Books. It was cold out and I’d lost my gloves. There was something else, too, an almost religious feeling left over from the acid, like I’d been scraped and repainted inside, like I’d been reborn.
I returned to the first house on my route and saw that the paper had been taken in. Same at the next. I continued cycling; I didn’t want to go home yet.
The business district downtown: Carousel Diner, Vito’s Pizza, Thrift Drug, the bank, the paint store, the Hobby Shop, the toy store where I’d bought my chess set with the badly made board. I saw everything as if for the first time. I passed Montcalm’s father’s office over T&C Meats. Mark Rosen was an architect. Rosen was Montcalm’s real last name, but Montcalm, whom I knew from Hebrew school and who had let me and Ed join his band, had invented himself a new name that he liked better. In the shop below, a muscular bald man in an apron wielded a cleaver against an ancient wood chopping block.
Through the front window of Liberty Pancakes, with its painted outline of a cracked bell, I saw Janis and Montcalm sharing a plate of pancakes, their faces pasty in the restaurant’s overhead lighting. They hadn’t seen me. They had sodas, too. Wholesome, like a date from Archie comics. Liberty pancakes weren’t good pancakes, but you could get them any time of day. I stood for a while, ghostlike, watching. Montcalm seemed to be doing most of the talking. The bus to New York rumbled past on the other side of the street, picking up speed with its loud, diesel breath. I thought how I could just as easily be on it, right now, reading a novel in the yellow light, or just watching the passing landscape, my nose against the window.

***

I saw Janis at school the next day, but she was with friends and in a hurry. I called in the evening after dinner and her father answered. “Janis?” he repeated, suspiciously. “Just a minute.”
My parents were upstairs screaming at each other, possibly about money. The phone was in the kitchen, but it had one of those extralong cords on it, so I could get all the way down the four steps to the family room and take the receiver to a relatively quiet corner, next to the sliding glass door that led to the back yard.
I waited. My reflection in the door anticipated me. It raised one arm and so did I. It stuck out a leg and I did, too.
“Hey,” said an unfamiliar voice. “What’s up?”
“Nothing,” I said.
“Me, neither.”
“Okay.”
“Not at all,” said the voice. “Dull, dull. Yawn.”
This was followed by a long pause, then the sound of something falling. “Hello?”
“Hello?” I asked. “What . . .?”
“Nothing,” the person said, and this time it was Janis. “It’s okay.”
“My friend’s house is cool for Friday.”
“All right,” she said. “Yes. That will be fine.”
She had to be careful, of course – perhaps her father was standing there. I gave her the address and told her eight o’clock. Then I snuck the phone back to its place on the kitchen wall. So what if she’d eaten pancakes with Montcalm? I was the one she’d made out with at the movies; I was the one she wanted. My dad’s voice upstairs was louder now, and it had an anguished tone, a way I’d only heard him once before, when he slipped on the front steps and dislocated his knee and an ambulance had to come for him. “That is bullshit!” he shouted. A door slammed. When they divorced, who would stay in the house? Would anyone? I took my cigarettes and slipped out the back door into the yard.
Another cloudy, grayish sky – nothing visible. Comet Kohoutek was officially a joke, all that buildup and then nothing. Sly and the Family Stone played through a window from the Hastings’ house next door. I pictured Hannah Hastings, now back from her first semester at college, the way I always did, in her bright yellow bikini, the way I’d seen her over the summer, through the gaps in our wood fence, lying out by their pool, her long legs extended and shiny with oil.

When I got home from school on Friday, my mom was angry for some reason and I worried she might attempt to ground me. I assumed she’d snooped and found something – the bag of weed I kept hidden inside the Polaroid Swinger camera her mother had sent me for my birthday, maybe, or the magazines under my mattress. I had two more purple barrels from the senior, purchased at lunchtime with money I’d stolen from her purse. I did that a lot – she never noticed. “Last of the batch,” he’d said. “Four-way windowpane coming next week. Stay tuned.”
I examined the flat people in the New York Times on the kitchen table, grayscale adults. Another crossword begun and abandoned. A dried circular stain from her coffee cup. International, I read. Doris Day. The silence was a string drawn taut. She put away the groceries, and in doing so accidentally dropped a head of iceberg lettuce that then rolled along the floor.
“Jesus goddamn Christ,” she said.
The escaped vegetable was somehow my fault.
I picked up the lettuce and carried it to the counter. It was surprisingly heavy, although not, perhaps, as heavy as an actual head.
“I got an A on my English paper,” I offered. “The one on Tortilla Flat.” It was true. I had Fs in Math and Latin, a D in Chemistry, and a B in Choir, but I was acing English. “I wrote about parallels to Arthurian legend and the Knights of the Round Table.” My mom only nodded, her hazel eyes plastic buttons. I knew she took pills because I’d stolen some. I wasn’t sure what they were for, but I’d memorized their names: Nembutal, Placidyl, Librium. Last week, working over her blue bathroom sink, I had carefully emptied the contents of two fat green Placidyl caps into a pill bottle, then refilled the caps as best I could with flour and replaced them. I’d sold this powder to a tough character named Mike Russo at school for three dollars. He tossed it back into his mouth in the boys’ bathroom, scooped some tap water with his hand as a chaser. Seconds later, his grin turned to an expression of panic and he hurried into a stall and puked operatically for thirty seconds. I’d had to give Mike Russo, who was eighteen and owned a motorcycle, his money back. Placidyl appeared to be a made-up name, a combination of “placid” and “idyll.” I wondered if I was the only person ever to have noticed this.
“Go to your room,” she said. “I can’t cook with you here.”
“Why not?”
“Because.”
“What am I doing?”
“Being here.”
I didn’t want to be around, anyway, but now I could pretend that what I wanted wasn’t what I wanted, and that I was just leaving to make her – my insane mother – happy.
As I headed downstairs, she shouted after me. “I’m not insane.”

After dinner – tuna casserole – I reminded my parents that I was spending the night at Ed’s house. “We’re going to rehearse.”
“Your performance is Saturday,” said my dad, rearranging the glasses in the top rack of the dishwasher.
“Exactly. We need more work.”
He extracted a coffee mug, peered into it, then put it back. “And these are middle-schoolers?”
“Thompson Park Middle. We’re even getting paid.”
“Very nice,” he said. “Paid is good.”
I biked to Nicole’s, checked to make sure her parents’ car was gone from the driveway, then rang the bell. A light-up plastic Santa was affixed to the door and there were plastic angels in the small front yard. I gave her one of the barrels, which she swallowed immediately. Then we smoked a bowl in the living room and went outside and scanned the cloudy skies.
“Is that it?” she said, pointing in the direction of a neighbor’s oak. “I think I see it!”
“Could be.”
She grabbed my hand and the two of us stood looking up for a bit. The truth was, I didn’t see anything. But I didn’t want to tell her that.
“I’ve got snacks and root beer and there’s a bottle of Popov. We have another TV in the basement. You won’t even know I’m here.”
Back inside, we listened to records. At 8:20 pm, Nicole pointed to the phone on the kitchen wall. “Call,” she said. “What have you got to lose?”
“And if her dad answers? What do I say?”
“Hang up.”
“I’ll wait a while longer.” In my jeans pocket I had one bluepackaged Trojan, stolen from the top drawer of my dad’s dresser. He kept a box of them right next to his stack of laundered handkerchiefs. When I was ten, because I had bad allergies half the year, he had tried to turn me into a handkerchief person, but there was no way I wanted to put one of those things back in my pocket after using it.
Nicole got chattier and chattier as the acid came on, pointing out that Janus the Roman god was two-faced, which didn’t necessarily reflect on Janis the high school girl. “Transitions, doorways, beginnings, borders,” she said. “January looks both forward and backward, right?”
At 9 pm, we turned on the Friday Night Movie, which was about a runaway train with a bunch of skiers on it, all convinced they were going to die.
“Oh, my god, this is the funniest movie ever,” she said, holding her pigtails straight out from the sides of her head like handlebars.
I got up to go to the bathroom. I noticed, not for the first time, how dirty things were: soap scum on the shower curtain and around the sink, battered-looking toothbrushes leaning against the inside of a plastic Flintstones cup like people on a hot air balloon ride, their brushy faces peering over the side.
Coming back down the hall, I stepped into Nicole’s room, which she had prepared for me with beige sheets that smelled of fabric softener. I lay down on the waterbed and stared up at her ceiling, the surface shifting noticeably around me. White squares, a water stain by the outer wall. A Mickey Mouse stencil over the doorway. I heard a rippling sound, like I was on a raft adrift on a lake. A cheaply framed photo of Charly Sand in his wizard costume sat atop the dresser.
I rejoined Nicole on the sofa. “Jeepers,” she said. “This movie is so bad. Fricking-A. What do you think, Oscar?”
Hearing his name, the dog got up off his towel and rolled onto his back.
We had a glass of root beer with Popov in it.
“I’m going,” I said. It was after 10:00 pm.
“You can’t. Come on. Pizza Bites? You know you want some. I’ll heat the oven.”
“I’m tired.”
“Her dad could have forced her to stay home. He could have figured it out. It might not be her fault. Or she’s working on a new cheer. If you go home, what will you tell your parents?”
“Nothing. They won’t care.” My mother would be upstairs by now, typing; my dad was probably grading papers.
“You gotta stay. I need a spirit guide.” She took my hand. “Check this out.” Nicole led me into her parents’ bedroom, where she lifted a pillow, revealing a revolver with dark metal and a wood handle. “Smith & Wesson, five-shot.” She pointed it at me. “Don’t worry.” She lowered the weapon. “He loads it at night, after he brushes his teeth. In the morning, he unloads it. The bullets are in the dresser, on top of his underwear.” She put the gun to her head, then returned it to its spot under the pillow.
We listened to her Bette Midler album. Side One ended with “Am I Blue,” and she sang along – she knew all the words.
“Nice,” I said. She could sing. “Did you quit school because of Charly Sand?” I asked.
“No. Why would you think that? I don’t give a sour grape about Charly Sand.”
“Me either. I mean, I’m happy he didn’t die.”
We sat there in silence, me imagining what it must have felt like to be in that accident and whether you’d even remember it at all, and her tapping her foot to whatever was going on in her brain.
“Jeepers. Fricking-A. Just go home,” she said.

***

Montcalm and Janis arrived for our holiday dance gig together, dropped off by Montcalm’s mom. Janis greeted me with a cheek-kiss. She was on a pure Montcalm high and it made her transcendently beautiful. She wore a very short red leather skirt and black boots that came to her knees. Montcalm wore a black shirt unbuttoned to midchest, a leather thong around his neck with a sea-shell pendant.
“Sorry, man,” he said with an apologetic smile.
The drummer Montcalm had found for us was a junior named Melvin with an Afro and freckles, and his T-shirt had a big blue star in the center. His younger brother, Reid, with shorter hair and darker skin, had brought his saxophone. These guys were good, and I was self-conscious about my guitar ability, since I’d only been playing a year and a half. Montcalm sang “Wake Me Shake Me” and “I Saw Her Standing There” and “Can’t You Hear Me Knocking.” At first, no one danced, but someone turned out the lights and a few brave kids ventured forward.
At the break, Montcalm and Janis disappeared together. Each had an arm around the other, and each had a hand in the other’s back pocket.
“I got herb,” said Ed, helpfully, patting the Sucrets can he kept in his front shirt pocket.
“No, thanks. I’m going to have a cigarette,” I said.
I went outside and then around the back of the building to avoid being spotted by the parents who were monitoring this event.
In the tiny playground area behind the building, I stood under a slide. After a minute a thin girl with long, straight hair parted in the middle and no coat on joined me. She wore a lowcut, sparkly black top and bell bottom jeans. “Got another?” she asked. One of her eyes was elaborately made-up, Clockwork Orange style. I recognized her as Julie Tedesco, Janis’s 13-year-old sister.
I gave her a Lucky and some matches, and after three tries she lit it, taking in a deep drag, then exhaling. Her ears, which stuck out noticeably, were pointed on top, like an elf’s.
“These are disgusting,” she said. “No filter?”
“They’re ‘toasted’. Whatever that means.”
She pulled tobacco off her tongue and flicked it. “I’ve heard a lot of bands. Kingston Road Blues? And Downtown Sheiks?”
“Yeah,” I said, although I’d only seen their posters.
“What’s ‘Beggar’s Velvet’?”
“You know the dust balls you find under your bed? It’s another word for that.” I’d found the name, which I was proud of, in the Dictionary of American Slang my parents had bought me for my twelfth birthday.
“Not under my bed. My bed sits on the floor.”
Julie Tedesco was telling me about her bed.
“If your bed is up off the floor,” I explained, “then dust accumulates under there. That’s the velvet. Aren’t you cold?”
She shrugged, then took another drag and blew a perfect smoke ring. “Blech. Sounds like ‘Beggar’s Banquet.’”
I’d never thought of this and found it embarrassing. The band name I’d come up with was almost identical to the name of a Rolling Stones record.
She moved closer. It had started to rain lightly, the drops tapping out a samba on the metal above us.
“Don’t feel bad,” she said. “My sister’s not cool. Not at all.” She dropped her cigarette and ground it out under her sneaker. “We can kiss if you want.”
Her mouth tasted of hot smoke. We stayed pressed tightly against each other, the rain stopping and starting on the metal overhead, for a full two minutes, stopping occasionally only to catch our breath. I figured the traitor Montcalm was kissing Janis, too, somewhere not that far away.
We took a break. Julie located a piece of gum in her pocket, unwrapped it, and popped it into her mouth.
“So, can I buy some acid? Frankenstein said you were holding.”
“Frankenstein?”
“Charly Sand? That’s what everyone’s calling him.”
I had one more of the barrels in my wallet, wrapped in tin foil, but I didn’t say so.
“I’ll pay you back, I promise. Three bucks? Four bucks?”
“No,” I said.
“Seriously?”
“I don’t. I promise.”
“I don’t believe you, but whatever. What songs are you going to play next?”
“The same ones we already did.”
She stared off into the distance, then turned and punched me in the chest.
“Ouch,” I said. “What was that for?”
“Bit of the old ultraviolence.”
She was an alternate, more volatile version of her sister, I thought, her own bright comet, skimming past Earth. “Should I call you?”
“You can try. My dad dominates the telephone. But give it a shot. Let it ring once, then hang up. Wait fifteen seconds, then call again. That way, I’ll know it’s you.”
We held hands for a few yards, before separating. The rain had stopped. She walked a few steps, then turned and looked back at me. “I play guitar, too.” She mimed playing for just a moment, then turned and jogged off. A group of other girls opened and assimilated her like some biological organism.
Beggars Velvet reconvened and re-played most of our songs, including “Jumpin’ Jack Flash” because it was requested for a dance contest. The real contest was between the dancers and us. My hands felt like they’d been run over from playing the same four-note riff over and over.
The gym lights came on. 9:45 p.m. We stopped, said goodnight, started to pack up. Worried parents rounded up their kids. Go Eagles, read the banner beside the ancient clock on the wall that peers out like a jaundiced eye from behind the cranked-back basketball hoop. The painted, chipping yellow brick walls echoed with voices and laughter. I looked around for Julie but she was gone.
I called home from the payphone across the street. After a while, my dad answered, sounding tired, and said he’d come get me. I waited outside with my guitar case and amp.
“Rock and roll!” a voice shouted nearly in my ear. It was Charly Sand, along with Mike Russo and another guy with a moustache I didn’t know. They carried beers and seemed wasted, although in his case it wasn’t just that. He was different. Charly Sand wore a long military surplus coat and had a cane in his hand. His movements were awkward and robotic, like important wires between his brain and body had been disconnected. “Didja get laid las’ night?” he said, loudly. “Hey, got a cigarette, Tin Man?”
I gave him one. Charly lit it with the vintage Zippo he always carried.
“Got anything else?”
“No.”
“That’s not what I heard. From our mutual friend.” He poked me in the same place Julie had given me the punch.
“Ow. Well, I don’t.”
“Check this out,” he said. He pulled a sword out of the cane and swung it a couple of times, the lit cigarette dangling from his mouth. “Errol Fucking Flynn.” He slid the sword back into the cane. “See ya ’round.” Charly and his friends continued walking in the direction of uptown.
It was colder now, the air damp and smelling like snow. I had to be up early in the morning for my Sunday route. I remembered the meal the family had served us in Pennsylvania: hamburgers, and fresh corn, and big, beefsteak tomatoes cut in thick slices as a first course, how we all had to join hands first. Charly had grinned at me from the opposite side of the table as if he were no longer mad, as if to say, Yeah, man, the adventure continues! Good people had opened their doors to strangers, fed them. There was grace in the world, and love. I had never eaten a tomato that way, and was surprised at how delicious it was, and how simple, a big red circle with salt sprinkled over it like stars.

Geoffrey Becker is the author of the novels Bluestown (St. Martin’s Press, 1996) and Hot Springs (Tin House Books, 2010), as well as the story collections Dangerous Men (University of Pittsburgh Press, 1995) and Black Elvis (University of Georgia Press, 2009). His stories have appeared in Beloit Fiction Review, North American Review, Ploughshares, Gettysburg Review, and The Best American Short Stories.

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AQR 2025, AQR Vol. 41, No. 1 & 2, Winter/Spring 2025, Essays, Jason Brown, B Usman Perviaz AQR 2025, AQR Vol. 41, No. 1 & 2, Winter/Spring 2025, Essays, Jason Brown, B Usman Perviaz

ANIMAL STORIES by Jason Brown

To reach the cabin where we would spend my sabbatical from teaching, we had to drive along the twisting two-lane road that followed the river at the bottom of the canyon north of a scruffy old ranching community with sofas and rusty trucks in the front yards. The red canyon walls rose on either side of us. Tectonic plates had slipped under the surface of the continent 80 million years ago and pushed up to form these mountains. If the land was still slowly rising, it was also slowly falling as the wind and ice eroded the peaks into the valleys. The remains of prehistoric crocodiles were lodged in the striated rock in the jagged landscape undisturbed by the scars of human presence except for the contrails tracing the sky above. I tried to imagine the planet before there were so many people living on it, before the culture in which I had been raised, the culture that had metastasized over the globe, had forged the myth that man should dominate nature. Humans would wreak more havoc on the planet, but in the end, we were just another animal. We wouldn’t have the last say.
We turned off the pavement onto a narrow dirt road and started the climb to the top of the mesa and the cabin. Little if any work had been done on my mother-in-law’s place for more than twenty years. The wood siding was brittle and perforated by the wind and sun. I could break it off between my fingers. The wind poured in around the window frames, the bent metal chimney had never been cleaned, and the well water coughed out of the faucet in orange spatter. In a high wind the tin roof flapped because the screws had never been tightened. During storms the whole place shook as from an earthquake. Probably in part because the place needed saving, I loved it. If I didn’t get to work right away, we would never make it through the winter. We had to secure the roof, cut firewood, get a sled so we could hike groceries in from the main road in the winter.
We were miles from a ski area and beyond the absurdly wealthy enclaves that surround skiing in the west. None of us – Nicola, me, or Nicola’s mother – were wealthy, but because Nicola’s mother had bought this place years ago, our family now had the opportunity to spend time apart from the human world while I was on sabbatical from my teaching job. We had a chance to spend time with our twoyear-old daughter, Bella. The absence of people was a shock and a relief. Except for the boundary lines on the county property website, life on the mesa was governed by laws that preceded human dominion.
To be in a place where human presence was tolerated provisionally and to sit in the dry grass as Bella learned to run across the field chasing our dogs filled me with a sense of vertigo. I wanted to stay here forever watching Bella wheel away from me on her springy two-year-old legs only to stop and turn around to make sure I was still there. “Papa,” she would say, her voice cutting through the constantly blowing wind. Our Australian shepherds had been bred with a similar radar. They would race through the grass until they were twenty or thirty yards away, then arc toward us to touch base before racing away again. Nicola, Bella, the dogs, and I, we never tired of this ancient ritual of pulling away and circling back, of periodic contact: Bella’s hand against my arm before she ran into the field again, a wet nose grazing my palm or rising up to brush my cheek before following a scent into the scrub oak.
I reminded myself that the relief I felt at living apart from people shouldn’t be confused with thinking of the wilderness as paradise. I had to keep an eye on Bella at all times. Several years before, my mother-in-law, getting ready to leave the cabin, placed her hand on the handle of the glass front door, but realized she had forgotten her coffee mug and walked back through the kitchen. When she returned to the door, she found a mountain lion sitting on its haunches on the other side of the glass. Two years before, while on a visit from Eugene, I was walking our two dogs and my mother-in-law’s Lab a hundred yards south of the cabin when we came around a scrub oak to face a bear cub. The Lab chased the cub into the bushes to our left. The mother bear appeared ten yards to our right and rose onto her hind legs. Franny, a little more than a year old, started barking. I grabbed her, turned in place, and ran west through the scrub – exactly what you’re not supposed to do, I was later told. Cheever led the way as the branches scraped against my face and arms. I heard crashing behind me and kept running until I tripped on a stump and flew headfirst into the grass. There was nothing behind us except the twisted oaks and the sky.

***

We had left my mother back in Eugene, Oregon. She lived in a small apartment two miles from our house, which we had rented to one of my former students. Though she was in her late seventies now, she was still physically agile and strong. She hadn’t had a drink in many years. Signs of dementia had just started to emerge, but she was still able to care for herself – as well, that is, as she ever had. Age was not the problem.
I’d been sober for over twenty years, and many years had passed since my mother had been jailed for grand theft larceny in Arizona, many years since I had rescued her from homelessness. My sister and I paid her rent in Eugene, and I tried my best to keep an eye on her and to make sure she had enough food and went to the doctor once in a while. I worried what would happen while I was away.
When I called her to check in, I thought I recognized the same old force inside of her driving her to tear everything down. I recognized a similar force inside of me. Some kind of mental illness, it was hard to deny. The phrase mental illness flashed in my head like a roadside construction sign. I had spent most of my life in fear of becoming like my mother.
I knew I had made some progress. In Eugene, Nicola and I had bought a small house on the hill above the university and worked overtime to fix it in the years before Bella was born. I tore up shag, laid down wood floors, rebuilt the carpeted staircase with cherry, skimcoated over the popcorn-finish drywall, and built a deck off our bedroom. I labored with the awareness that we were striving for what many people had striven for over time: a place to raise a family. I loved the work and loved working together with Nicola to give shape to our future together.
On our hikes and walks in Eugene, Nicola and I had started to talk about becoming parents. We didn’t have forever to think about it, and I was afraid of what it might mean. In speaking with Nicola about my apprehensions, I leaned on my own limitations by telling her that I might not be a good father. I really feared that there was something wrong with me that couldn’t be fixed. Nicola had never seen me drinking or depressed. She’d never met the man who dodged every responsibility, careened into fights, drove headlong into fire hydrants, and wanted to curl up in a ball and hide. That person was dormant but not gone. In short, when the subject of children arose, I worried about all that could go wrong.
“Things can always go wrong,” she said, and I knew she was talking about her father dying from injuries sustained in a car accident and her half-brother dying of a heroin overdose. She herself had struggled with depression, especially after her father’s death. She didn’t like her job, which didn’t pay very well. I didn’t make enough to support us all in the long run; she didn’t want to rely on me anyway. At night before bed, we sat at the kitchen table and schemed about our future. We weren’t young anymore, but we both felt a kind of youthful restlessness. We were as hungry for life as kids in their twenties, and like overgrown kids we conceived of dreams that didn’t quite make sense for two middle-aged people about to have a child: moving to Alaska to homestead, retraining me as a cabinet/furniture-making carpenter (a persistent dream of mine), or, in Nicola’s case, training as a helicopter pilot. One day we drove to a Coast Guard recruiting office and sat in the car talking about who would feed our baby while she flew into storms to rescue fishermen from sinking ships. I think we both knew that our dreams would evolve as soon as we were responsible for a new life.

***

While we were in Colorado, three things happened at more or less the same time – our tenant in Eugene moved out earlier than we thought he would, my mother’s landlord wanted her out (her lease had expired), and the world was beset by a global pandemic. We could have pushed to keep my mother in her apartment, at least for a while, but even if the landlord had agreed, he was going to raise the rent as much as he could. My sister and I couldn’t go any higher. When I called my mother to see what she thought of living in our house until we returned, at which point I would build her an apartment in our oversized garage, she was silent.
“What if I don’t want to live up there with all those fancy people?”
“There are no fancy people,” I said. “It’s Eugene.” After half an hour of persuading her that our neighborhood was not a right-wing stronghold, she grew lukewarm to the idea and finished off the conversation with, “I don’t know, we’ll see.”
When I suggested to Nicola that my mother move into our house for the rest of my sabbatical and into a garage apartment thereafter, she studied me for a while as if I had just returned from a long and perilous journey to the moon.
“Are you crazy?” she eventually said. Bella looked up at me as if she also expected me to answer this question.
I had to wait until after Bella fell asleep to pitch my idea a second time. I had formed a presentation with clear points: we would save money on paying my mother’s rent, we could use the savings for childcare, maybe my mother could provide some “supervised” childcare, the “apartment” I built in the garage would add to the value of our house . . .
“And as an added bonus, every time I leave the house with Bella, I will run into your mom sitting in a lawn chair outside our garage ready to yell at me because you haven’t met her needs,” Nicola said.
“I will build a separate entrance on the other side of the garage. She won’t be able to get in through the gate to our front door.”
“A gate? Your mother is a criminal mastermind. Within a week, she would be living in the house, and we would be living in the garage.”
“That seems extreme.”
“Does it? When are you going to build this apartment in the garage with new windows, doors, floors, a bathroom and kitchenette?”
Bella came into the room with all three of her stuffed white unicorns somehow loaded in her arms – Papa Woodrow (the size of a German shepherd), which I had bought on sale at Lowe’s, Mama Woodrow (about the size of a corgi), and Baby Woodrow (the size of a kitten). She kept repeating the phrase “Baby Woodrow booboo” because Baby Woodrow’s horn was coming off. She was looking at me with her huge blue eyes because I was the one who knew how to sew.

***

My mother had more than a month’s warning that I was returning. On the phone she had said she was packing and getting ready to move. She complained that it was hard to find boxes, so I talked her through a plan to pick up boxes. She complained that she had no packing tape, and I explained that there were places called stores that sold packing tape. I decided to hang up and call back fifteen minutes later. Sometimes that worked the way it did with restarting my computer to get rid of a glitch. When she answered, she said, “Yesssss,” and I mentioned that the previous conversation hadn’t gone very well. She agreed. I asked her if she didn’t want to move into our house.
“What choice do I have? When Stalin commands, you do what Stalin says!”
I tried to explain in my strained calm voice that she did have a choice, of course, but when I thought about it, I wasn’t so sure how much this was true. Her landlord wanted her out so he could repair the damage she had caused to her apartment. We could fight him under the new Covid regulations, but that was a temporary solution. I would be lucky if he didn’t come after me for thousands of dollars of damages to the apartment – my name was on the lease. She didn’t have a social worker because she refused to work with one, she wasn’t on a list for public housing because that was beneath her. She was dependent on me, and she hated to be dependent. She hated to be a burden.
I drove 1,200 miles back to Eugene and arrived at my mother’s place to discover that she hadn’t packed one single thing. Not even a fork. Since I had last visited her apartment, before we left for Colorado, she’d added quite a bit of raw material. There was an earth-tone La-Z-Boy that had spent most of its life outdoors and what my mother generously called a “love seat,” which someone named Hank had helped her drag in from the curb. One corner of the room was occupied with a rusty bike, two suitcases, some tools, and what looked like several trash bags of clothing. I guessed that the bike and tools belonged to the guy named Hank and his cronies who had hauled in the filthy love seat so he could watch movies on my mother’s big screen TV, which was also new. My mother informed me that the TV was probably “hot.” We stood looking at each other.
“I thought maybe you would have packed or cleaned a bit,” I said.
“I did,” she said and gestured to the room.
Mounds of garbage stretched back to the bedroom. Everything smelled of urine. When I touched a seat cushion and the mattress, my fingers came back wet. I asked her what was going on, and she said she was having a problem. I shouldn’t worry, though, because she was wearing rubber pants now.
“Have you gone to the doctor?”
“You’re going to really like Hank,” my mother said. “He’s a fascinating man. He lives right over there.” She pointed out the window. I cleaned the pane with the sleeve of my shirt and squinted at a grey apartment building – Section 8 housing for downtown Eugene.
“What floor does he live on?” I asked. If he wasn’t too many flights up, maybe my mother could live with him. I had tried to persuade my mother to sign up for Section 8 housing.
“No, he lives in front of the building.” There was nothing in front of the building except a rusty, old Ford F-150 with a demolished front end and what looked like a self-fashioned tarp home in the truck bed. “He has a generator in there,” my mother said and nodded approvingly.
“I bet he does.”
It wasn’t long, of course, before I met Hank. Reeking of whiskey and not wearing a mask, he stopped by to say how sorry he was that he couldn’t help with the move. After he left, my mother watched him limp down the street toward his truck. He pulled back the tarp and crawled in over the tailgate.
“Poor Hank,” she said, “someone is going to steal his generator. He’s very excited about my moving to your house. He knows the neighborhood very well and loves it up there.”
I asked my mother to please take a seat in one of the many chairs and sofas I would have to move on my own. Every time I turned around, there was a new piece of furniture aimed at the TV. Several pieces of luggage, different size shoes, drug paraphernalia – a bong and a bag of needles. Two different TVs, probably stolen, other than the one she’d been using.
“You know,” I said, “with Covid, it’s not safe to have the whole park population in to watch movies.”
“They don’t have Covid, they live outside.”
“That’s not how Covid works.”
I tried to add up how long it would take me to disassemble the apartment. Most of it would go to the dump. It would be much saner to hire someone to help me, but I had sailed beyond sane the minute I had set foot in her apartment.
My mother offered me some apple juice, which I declined, though I used the mention of a cold beverage as an opportunity to open the refrigerator door and check on the state of things. As a whirling comet of gangrenous rotten food crashed onto my Muck boots, I leaned over and dry heaved. I had neglected to eat for the last six hours. Evidence, maybe, that part of me was still sane.
“Are you okay?” my mother said.
I replied that I was not. When I recovered enough to stand upright, I decided to triage the situation and returned to the more important subject of Hank. The man named Hank, I explained to my mother, would not be visiting my house while I was not there. Nicola wouldn’t stand for it, and it was her house as much as mine. It wasn’t a big house, it wasn’t a fancy house, but it was all Nicola and I had. I told her I was setting up cameras in the house that would be connected to my iPhone – not to spy on her, but to make sure everything was okay – and that I would know right away if Hank crossed the threshold. I had not planned to set up cameras – the idea had only just occurred to me as I spoke.
As my mother’s brow furrowed and her shoulders slumped, I felt my chest tighten with shame.
“You’re a monster,” she said. “What do you think those people at the university you want to impress would think of what you’re saying?”
“I have a kid, I have to think of her,” I said.
“That’s what everyone like you says.”
My thoughts spun with arguments for why I had security and she did not. I had worked hard, I wasn’t beyond thinking, if not saying, and I made the right decisions while others – Hank, for instance, and my mother – had not. Seeing through one’s own thinking is no defense against believing in it. My mother knew, and, more importantly, I knew, that I needed to believe that I had earned a place for my family in a middle-class neighborhood while she had not. She lived in a urine-soaked apartment with a rock-bottom alcoholic. Why was this? she had asked many times.
As I moved furniture out to the lawn and bags of trash to the dumpster behind the apartment, she set up one of her kitchen chairs in front of the building. Whether she knew the person or not, every time someone walked up the street while I was carting her stuff, she pointed at me and shouted, “That’s my son, the monster!” Several of her neighbors said they hadn’t known she was moving. “Off to the gulag! The Stasi have come for me,” she said. When I was young, she had suffered from hallucinations, imagined voices, and a conviction that people in blue shirts were stalking her. We weren’t there yet at least.
I briefly wondered if I should reverse course and find another solution. As long as she was living somewhere else, in her own apartment, I could step away from her to some extent. If I moved her to our house, she would become more my responsibility than ever.
I took eight trips to the dump in the Subaru, straining my back in the process. Whatever she couldn’t part with, I loaded into our garage for storage, and finally I moved her into what would be Bella’s room.
“There,” I said, when she emerged from the room to join me in the kitchen. “Isn’t this better than where you were?”
She looked out the large windows facing the woods and at the art on our walls.
“Yes, I can die in peace now that I have moved to bourgeois heaven.”
We spent several days in the house discussing how she could get her food, where she should walk for exercise. We sat in front of the fireplace and discussed the apartment we would build in the garage. I’d set up an appointment at the doctor. It turned out she had seen another doctor about her incontinence, and he had prescribed medication, which she had refused to take. We went to the Walgreens and the grocery store. I had a modest sense that we were gaining control of the situation. Just in case, I bought plastic covers for the bed and a blanket for the sofa.
By the time I was ready to drive back to Colorado, my mother had reluctantly agreed to my conditions: cameras in the living room and kitchen connected to my iPhone, no Hank, no leaving the doors open and wandering around the neighborhood, no messing with the complicated thermostat, which I had set for her on a timer. She had a friend who drove a cab who would take her to the grocery store. She said her car was broken, and in any case, it wasn’t registered or insured, and she had no license. I had the car towed to the driveway, and she agreed not to drive it.
I presented the situation to her as I saw it. We’d build her a nice place, she would be in a nice middle-class neighborhood twenty feet from a hundred-acre park, she wouldn’t have to worry about all the pesky problems with maintaining an apartment and utilities. I would take care of that, and she would be close to her granddaughter, close to us. We could help her as she got older. She wouldn’t be so alone. I didn’t point out that I would feel less guilty. She seemed aware that I was somewhat satisfied with myself.
“It’s a good argument,” she conceded and scowled at me. “Those are very reasonable points.”
When I drove off, I thought we were on decent terms. In other words, I thought I had won. She was in the house, not in the apartment. The garbage was at the dump, not in the house.

***

As soon as I arrived back in Colorado, I started to feel more guilty for setting up the cameras in the living room and the kitchen. Nicola joked that I was like the NSA, but I hadn’t told her everything about what had happened on my trip to Eugene. If she’d known about Hank and the urine and the state of my mother’s apartment, she wouldn’t have been joking. Our friends Marjorie and Brian, two of the writers I worked with at the university, thought I was kidding when I told them over the phone. “You set up cameras to spy on your elderly mother?”
I was about to call my mother and tell her to unplug them when I decided I would, just once more, open the app on my phone and see what was going on in the living room. There was a blazing fire with no screen in front of the fireplace. Light from the flames flickered off a large pile of bags, an old rusty bike, and a broken keyboard stacked against the wall. Four candles burned on various wooden bookshelves around the living room, the flames dancing inches away from the books. In the kitchen on camera #2, a tall, bald man, standing center frame, prepared what looked like an appetizing vegetarian stir fry on our stove. Hank.
My mother appeared on camera #1 in the living room, settled herself in front of the fire, and put her feet up on the coffee table I had made for Nicola. Hank appeared momentarily with two plates and some silverware. I immediately called my mother. She pulled out her phone, squinted at the number, and set it down on the coffee table. When I called again, she reached over and turned the phone off.
Maybe, I thought, I’m being unreasonable here. They were just having supper. Hank was a friend of my mother’s. He was a homeless active alcoholic – I’d known plenty of those as a member of AA – who was looking for a place to crash all winter. Why couldn’t I be generous? Maybe what was wrong with me in this case was the same thing that was wrong with the world.
It didn’t help to know that Hank was not exactly a victim. My mother had told me that he had many options for places to live, all of which required him to stop drinking. He’d stopped drinking many times, according to my mother. He just didn’t want to. The question of agency was thorny business with an alcoholic. To even have a chance of staying sober, they had to at least want to stop drinking. It also didn’t help that my mother had told me, as a way of establishing the normalcy of her own condition, that Hank regularly pissed himself in his sleep when he drank too much. Based on the contents of my mother’s former apartment, it was also clear that he had a habit of helping himself to things that didn’t belong to him.
“What’s wrong?” Nicola asked. Bella was asleep upstairs, and we were sitting by the woodstove sipping tea. I must have looked tense. I told her nothing was wrong as I tucked my phone under my leg.
“There’s this guy named Hank,” I said eventually, “and he’s moved into our house.” I confessed everything I knew about what was happening in Eugene, everything I had seen in my mother’s apartment, everything I knew about Hank. My mother’s old friends, the Go Bernies, seemed to have been replaced by the riverside addict community. She had always been tight with the homeless community wherever she lived and was always trying to help them.
“When were you going to tell me this?” she said.
“I knew I had to tell you,” I said. “But I was hoping that after I left . . . she promised not to have him over. I thought it might fix itself.”
“Did you hear what you just said?”
“Sort of.”
“So now that he knows where we live, all the other people who were hanging out at your mother’s apartment know where we live. They’ll be over soon.”
I nodded. It seemed inevitable.
“Shooting drugs in our daughter’s bedroom.”
I hadn’t thought of it this way, but the answer was yes.
Nicola squinted at me. “We can’t have strangers using drugs and getting drunk in our home.”
I nodded but at the same time I wasn’t sure. When it came to my mother, I had always felt that I had to do whatever it took to rescue her.
Out on the porch an hour later, I checked the cameras again – empty except for a mountain of dirty dishes in the kitchen. No one coming or going. I called my neighbor Jamie, who picked up right away. His house, designed by his architect partner, had large glass panels looking out at our dead-end road. I asked him if he had happened to see my mother in her car.
“As a matter of fact,” he said, “I just saw her drive away with some bald guy in the passenger seat. I thought you told me that car no longer worked.”
“It didn’t, or at least I thought it didn’t.” My mother had lied to me about the car being broken. The car was in my name, but I had removed the insurance because it was not registered and didn’t run – so I had thought.
“Seems to work fine,” Jamie said, “except it’s night and she doesn’t have the headlights on.”
When I finally got my mother to answer the phone, I gently broached the subject of not driving and not bringing Hank – or any other active addicts – over to the house.
“I’m gonna have to talk to Moose about that one.”
“Moose?”
“My therapist. He’s training to be a death doula. Do you have a therapist?”
“What? No. What’s a death doula?”
“You should. You are very angry.”
She looked at her watch. I could see her looking at her watch on my phone.
“I have to go,” she said. “This conversation is over.” She hung up and exited stage left.
I waited five minutes and called my neighbor Jamie again.
“Yep,” he said. “She just peeled out in the Focus.”
A half an hour later she and Hank were back on-screen bobbing around the kitchen making dinner again. Hank did a little jig in front of the camera with a bottle in his hand, gave me the finger, and swatted his fist right at me. His fist was replaced by the message: Video Disabled.
While Nicola helped Bella assemble an octopus puzzle, I reluctantly brought her up to speed on the latest developments. She nodded patiently and responded in a remarkably calm tone.
“So, she’s driving around without a license in an uninsured car titled in our name and living in our house with an active alcoholic who has no place to live? And soon there will be a party of others there carting off all our things to sell at the Saturday market. And this is just Act I of this drama, am I right?”
I hadn’t mentioned all the burning candles my mother had set up on the bookshelf.
“I understand why you had to try this idea out,” she said. “But you can’t just lift your mother out of her life into our own. Whitebird (an organization that helps the vulnerable in Eugene) can’t save your mother, DHS can’t save your mother and this guy – what’s his name?”
“Hank.”
“You can’t save them. You can’t. We’ve tried to bring her inside the wire, and it’s not going to work. Even if you build this apartment on or in the garage with the spare time you don’t have – instead of spending time with your daughter – all of this will continue right next to us with Bella there. What does that lead to? You talk about not wanting to repeat the past. In this case – in this instance – you have to make a choice.”
Nicola had understood all along that this wouldn’t work, but she had been generous enough to let me run the experiment for myself one last time. I had felt as if I had left my mother behind, alone in a dirty apartment on the other side of town. I didn’t want her to live that way, but she was determined to live the way she wanted to live, even if it caused her pain and misery and isolation. I understood that people wanted to make their own decisions and live on their own terms. I’d seen it in AA. Several of the guys I had worked with over the years had died young rather than change. This didn’t mean I couldn’t help my mother or others. It just meant I was no one’s savior.
“Now we know,” Nicola said. “And we are not going to try this again. Do you understand? If you want to return to Eugene and live with your mother, you can do it without us. Bella and I will come later after you’ve solved this problem. Not today, obviously, but soon. Before Act II.”
Nicola wasn’t threatening me. She was careful to point that out. She was simply stating that she had limits. The thought of losing Nicola and Bella had never crossed my mind, and I had to sit down on the floor. Nicola was calm and direct, as always, but her eyes were watering. I could see she was serious and upset.
Bella stopped playing with her puzzle and looked at me. In saying no for the first time to my mother – for the sake of my family, if not myself – I was learning what I had never learned as a child.
I told Nicola she was right.
“I know I’m right,” she said without looking away from Bella. “I think it’s time to call the police.”
I must have looked anguished. Nicola eased up on her outrage and touched my arm. I said I didn’t know and found my face awash before I knew what I was feeling. I couldn’t cut my mother out of my life any more than I wanted her to cut Hank or others out of her life. None of us could afford to cut people off by deciding they were hopeless and didn’t matter. Not without inviting the kind of sickness we think we can escape by running away. I had come to see that the question of what role I should play in my mother’s life – the question, from one point of view, of what I owed her – was really a question of what we all owed each other. All our troubles begin when we seek to separate ourselves from others, and yet (always a yet) here I was on the verge of trying to separate my small family from my mother and the chaos we feared.
I tried to explain how I was feeling to Nicola.
“You’re not trying to cut her out of our lives,” she said. “We’re taking steps to make sure they don’t destroy our home.”
When it came to my mother, I would have to listen to Nicola and Bella and trust them to show me the way forward. In marrying Nicola and having Bella, I had chosen life. Protecting that life, protecting our lives together, had to be the most important thing, but it was no simple thing
After my mother and Hank finished their supper, I called the Eugene police to explain the situation about Hank trespassing at the house. I didn’t want a big scene and I didn’t want them to arrest Hank. I just wanted them to send a message, if possible, that he shouldn’t be there. The police showed up a short time later and knocked on the door. My mother shut off the light. She and Hank crouched by the window and tried to peer around the blinds. When the police kept knocking, my mother finally answered the door. The police were kind, they didn’t pull Hank out or make threats, but they let him know that he wasn’t supposed to be there. My mother later told me that after the police left, things unraveled. Hank got drunk and became abusive. In the midst of the ruckus, he destroyed my second camera. He took a piss on our mattress. He threatened to really hurt my mother. She thought he might kill her. He called her names she wouldn’t repeat. Names that no one had ever called her before. She phoned her cabby friend – a guy who also knew Hank – and the cabby dragged Hank and all his belongings back downtown to his nonfunctional truck.

***

On the phone several weeks later, I told her I was sorry for setting Hank off by bringing the police into it.
“He scared me,” my mother said of Hank. “I didn’t know he had that other side to him.”
I didn’t want to mention her father. “Alcoholics often have that other side,” I said.
“I don’t understand what it is with me and these alcoholic men. It’s like an addiction.”
“It’s not like an addiction,” I said. “It is one.”
“You’re so right. I wish you weren’t right. But you are.”
“You can’t save them,” I said. “And they’re dangerous.”
“I’m sorry I drove the car. I don’t know what I was thinking.”
Bella and I were sitting in a window seat I had built on the second floor of the cabin that looked west over the rolling fields of the mesa toward the San Juan Mountains. My mother was in our house in Eugene and was trying, she reported, to make a fire in the fireplace without the help of Hank, who was sticking to his truck these days.
“Listen,” I said, “I know things weren’t easy when you were young. With your mother and stepfather or with your father – on the farm.”
“And it wasn’t always easy for you either,” she said.
“But it was worse for you, I know that.”
“It was worse for my brothers, I think,” she said quickly. “But I don’t know.”
“The point is that I understand. I’m going to do whatever I can. You know that. You’re not alone, so you can relax a bit.”
She was silent for a few seconds. “Thank you,” she said. “I just don’t – I don’t know. . . . Sometimes I don’t know what I’m doing.”
“You don’t have to explain.”
Bella stood on the bench and leaned her nose against the doublepane glass as Cheever jumped up with us and looked through the window. A purple monsoon cloud sweeping toward us from the west fired bolts of lightning into the mesa.
My mother asked how I was doing, and I said, “I don’t know.”
My inability to protect my mother from herself brought my daughter to mind. I had no idea how to hold her close without holding her too close. I didn’t always know when I should intercede and try to protect. Sometimes Bella caught me looking at her, and she would tilt her head and smile. Sometimes leap in the air and spin in a circle. I was often astonished by her joy – the joy of a child who was loved and safe – and I felt an immediate bond with all those parents for whom nothing could be more important than watching their children thrive. The idea of not being able to protect her from harm was too painful to imagine, yet I understood that far too many parents all over the world and all throughout history had had to watch their children suffer. A single person is nothing in the history of the world, but when that person is your child, then they are the whole universe.
I knew the day would come when Bella would look over her shoulder at me before running into the world. I would call to warn her of the dangers she couldn’t see, and she would take off through the grass. I could already feel the thrill and terror of watching her go.
What if, I wondered, everything we would lose and all that would cause us pain was not a threat but rather the very shape of who we were? Our days not empty because they would end and be forgotten but extraordinary because we were here for such a short time. A fairweather thought, at best, which quickly slipped away.
I pictured the mesa at night. When I let Cheever out to pee before bed, his ears twitched, and he was often reluctant to leave the deck. If I shut off the lights, the sky ignited with distant stars, other worlds, and I imagined the animals around us – mountain lions, bears, elk, and coyotes – wandering among the spindly shadows of aspen groves. For thousands of years, humans had shared parallel lives with all that walked and grew, yet we still didn’t understand their language. Bella tapped on the window with her finger and said, “Grrr.”
“Was that Bella?” my mother asked. “What is she saying?”
Bella tapped on the window again and looked at me. Out on the mesa, half a mile west of us, a large brown bear loped across an open field. The muscles along its back and flank churned under its thick coat. When my mother asked me what was happening, I did my best to describe what we were seeing: the thunderheads approaching, the fourteen-thousand-foot peaks in the distance, the enormous bear traversing the field, probably headed toward the creek.
“You’re so lucky you get to see that,” my mother said. “Do you know how lucky you are to be there with Bella and to see what you’re seeing?” I didn’t know how to answer.
Cheever growled at the window and Bella told the bear to “come here right now.” She’d never met an animal she didn’t want to pat.
The bear stopped before reaching the tree line and looked over its shoulder. Bella’s eyes widened. She rested her hand on my back without looking away from the window, and together we waited to see what the bear would do.

Jason Brown is the author of the novel Outermark (Paul Dry Books, 2024), and three collections of short stories: Driving the Heart (W.W. Norton, 1999); Why the Devil Chose New England for His Work (Open City Books, 2007); and A Faithful but Melancholy Account of Several Barbarities Lately Committed (Missouri Review Books, 2019). “Animal Stories” is part of his memoir in essays, Character Witness (University of Nebraska Press, 2025). Other sections of the book have appeared in The New Yorker, The Best American Essays, Harvard Review, and The Florida Review.

Read More
AQR 2025, AQR Vol. 41, No. 1 & 2, Winter/Spring 2025, Poems, Ira Sadoff, Triin Paja, John Bargowski, Michael Mark, Owen McLeod, Jessica Greenbaum, Farah Peterson, Richard Spilman, Elizabeth Bradfield, John Morgan, Jane Lott, Ben Gucciardi, D.S. Waldman, Robert Wrigley, John Willson, Qag˙g˙un Chelsey Zibell, Doug Ramspeck, Daniel Halpern, James Davis May, Amber Flora Thomas, David Starkey, W.J. Herbert, Robin Rosen Chang, Martha Silano, Maura Stanton, S, C, H, T, M, R, Z, W, G, L, B, P Usman Perviaz AQR 2025, AQR Vol. 41, No. 1 & 2, Winter/Spring 2025, Poems, Ira Sadoff, Triin Paja, John Bargowski, Michael Mark, Owen McLeod, Jessica Greenbaum, Farah Peterson, Richard Spilman, Elizabeth Bradfield, John Morgan, Jane Lott, Ben Gucciardi, D.S. Waldman, Robert Wrigley, John Willson, Qag˙g˙un Chelsey Zibell, Doug Ramspeck, Daniel Halpern, James Davis May, Amber Flora Thomas, David Starkey, W.J. Herbert, Robin Rosen Chang, Martha Silano, Maura Stanton, S, C, H, T, M, R, Z, W, G, L, B, P Usman Perviaz

POEMS

THE FABULOUS SZIGETIS by Ira Sadoff

The Fabulous Szigetis play the violin for a living. In every great city, on every boulevard that sidles up to great rivers, in cities with thriving markets of fruits and flowers, in tiny wine shops where obscure Dolcetto d’Albas are savored, you won’t find a single Szigeti. The Szigetis lock themselves in their hotel rooms to practice a Stravinsky melody, if you can call it a melody. You could say they are blessed with a calling, a mission. Oh yes, they are driven, as we sometimes wish we were driven. And their music is so metrical, uplifting, transcendent, it crowds out your dark thoughts, the crudest of your desires, your many shaggy disappointments.

Some might find an entire family playing violins exotic, ethereal, distressing. And we can imagine what disdain discarded Szigetis must suffer. The untalented Szigeti, the rebellious Szigeti, the disabled Szigeti, Szigetis who ring doorbells as Seventh-day Adventists. And the shame for any one of them if a wrong note is played, for then they must proceed as if their performance still had its halo around it.

They might remind a few of Josef Szigeti, the patriarch who fiddled through the last century. But these Szigetis have no ancestors, no attachments: they don’t come from Budapest, they never knew Bartok, they never coughed up blood in a Swiss sanitarium. No Nazis ever chased them to southern California. No, these Szigetis serve no god, savor no recollections: they are unscathed and unwearied.

Whereas we of the laundromat and stacks of paper work, we who open our hearts so foolishly and so often, who are surrounded by car horns, children shrieking, and a few pecking sparrows under the park bench, we who only dream of becoming Szigetis, wouldn’t we miss stumbling upon a blooming amaryllis in a neighbor’s window, attending the funeral of our beloved uncle Phil, falling in love with the wrong person?

Ira Sadoff is the author of the novel Uncoupling (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 1982), many uncollected stories, and eight collections of poems, most recently Country Living (Alice James, 2020). His poems have appeared widely in magazines including The New Yorker, Poetry, Field, The Paris Review, Iowa Review, and American Poetry Review.

RIVER IS ANOTHER WORD FOR PRAYER by Triin Paja

a lynx’s underbelly grows ragged
crossing a field at dawn
when the flora is quarter dew

and wild strawberries grow
where a forest was cut,
as if the earth wants to comfort us.

light falls on hay bales.
I want to look at the light and not speak.

now a line of geese sails above,
known only by sound
for they are so far,
small like eyelashes taken from death.

the river is one field away.

I ask you, as from a beloved,
to come to the river, a place that does not need
to be protected from you,

for you are a beloved
and the river is another word for prayer.
I want us to look at the river and not speak.

now the cranes howl, widening the sky,
and the moon, a simple egg,
lowers into an empty stork nest.

there is no visible cup of life to drink from –
there are wings, wings.

Triin Paja is the author of three collections of poetry in Estonian and a chapbook in English, Sleeping in a Field (Wolfson Press, 2025). Her poems have appeared in The Cincinnati Review, Black Warrior Review, Poetry Ireland Review, Thrush, Rattle, and The Pushcart Prize: Best of the Small Presses.

PRIMORDIAL by Charlotte Pence

Your first memory is of water
colors. A failed painting.
The red couldn’t be stopped.
The yellow wanted
the blue. And the water
softened the paper into
a hole.
You learned early:
There is never a single cause
for why things go wrong.
Why wouldn’t you fear
the thunder, the night,
the ocean?
After all, a tiny mosquito
is deadlier than a great white.
There exists a jellyfish
that is also a box
and more painful than fangs.
The ways of ruin are everywhere.
When a breakage occurs – a dam
or levee – you notice
how the water,
once contained and named
into assured shapes onto maps,
becomes nameless, amorphous
as it grows. Becomes multiple
names of who it killed. How many.
You cannot paint this,
then or now, so you swirl the water
a hurricane brown. No pure color.
No single cause.
There is, though,
your first memory, fat
as the paintbrush, wanting to be
dipped into the pan of dried color,
ready for transfiguration.

Charlotte Pence is the author of two collections of poems from Black Lawrence Press, Many Small Fires (2015) and Code (2020), and two chapbooks. Her work has appeared in Epoch, Harvard Review, North American Review, Denver Quarterly, Rattle, Prairie Schooner, and Poetry.

LUNA by John Bargowski

In his room looking up
the names of bugs we’d collected
with our long-handled net
in the fields along Ravine Road,
my friend told me about a sister
he wasn’t allowed to talk about.
We’d caught a jar full that day,
all still alive, trying to climb
the glass sides, or flapping wings
against the hole-punched lid
for more air and light as we flipped
through his field guide.
She lived with a bunch of other kids
in a hospital on an island
they crossed a bridge to get to
on Sundays, he whispered, and once,
as they walked through the gate
back to their car he saw
something he’d never seen before
under a floodlight clinging
to the brick wall that surrounded
the grounds, a beauty he wanted
to bring home to show me,
with long pale wings
tinted the color of moonlight
and a fringe of gold powder
that rubbed off onto his palms
when he cupped his hands
and tried to capture it
before it flew away.

John Bargowski is the author of Driving West on the Pulaski Skyway (Bordighere, 2012) and American Chestnut (Stephen F. Austin State University Press, 2022). His poems have appeared in The Gettysburg Review, Southern Poetry Review, Tar River Poetry, Poetry, and Ploughshares.

THE ROUTINE by Michael Mark

I lift what’s left
of the bantam weight champ.
Air Corps, Korea, 1949. Once

from the kitchen linoleum, once
slumping off the couch next to me – once
eyes closed holding the bath towel bar
while the glaucoma drops sink in.

Champ, I call him, and he says,
Of what? and I say, Falling
and he says, Undefeated.

It’s a routine.

Sometimes, when I get him somewhat
steady, we dance. Make light
of his uncharted dips, sags, collapses –

his 96-pound body obeying
malicious gravity.
I am flying back home.

Tomorrow.
Early.
He knows

he can’t come. You wouldn’t want me to,
he said once, when I asked. I didn’t fight.
He can still spot a weak feint. I sweep

his floors, vacuum the carpet’s don’t-ask
where-those-came-from stains, dry
and stack the dishes, dust, leave.

They’ll just keep knocking me down
anyway, he’ll say out of nowhere, reliving
the bouts, each round, blow

after blow. The numbing. His heart
shouting, No! Stay on your feet!
somewhere between falling and dreaming.

Michael Mark is the author of the chapbook Visiting Her in Queens Is More Enlightening than a Month in a Monastery in Tibet (The Rattle Foundation, 2022). His poems have appeared in Copper Nickel, Pleiades, Ploughshares, The Sun, 32 Poems, and Verse Daily.

A THEORY OF PERSONAL IDENTITY by Owen McLeod

It’s been one year since my mother
was uploaded to the cloud. According
to John Locke, we’re not material bodies
or immaterial souls, but unified streams
of consciousness, which would also mean
I didn’t actually get a new phone last week
if my phone isn’t a physical object but a set
of photos, videos, texts, songs, and apps
that simply migrated to this new device –
sort of like Samsa in Kafka’s Metamorphosis.
If we preserve her data, maybe my mother
can migrate to a new device. My father
still charges her phone once a week. She
was attached to that phone, particularly
toward the end when she couldn’t garden,
needlepoint, do crossword puzzles, walk,
or speak – but she could text, more or less,
even if it was a just a handful of basic emojis.
Mostly smileys and hearts, but at some point
she shifted to praying hands only. We knew
what she was saying: I want to be uploaded.
Hospice came in, took care of all that,
and her body went out in a bag. My new
device takes amazing pics. I shot some
this morning while walking in the woods
and sent them to my mother’s phone.
She loved walking in the woods, especially
in the snow, so I used an app that adds
realistic-looking snowfall to pics. I’m not
a fool. I know the little hearts attached
to those pics are from my dad. I know
my mother is never coming back.
I just wish it had been real snow.

Owen McLeod is author of the poetry collections Dream Kitchen (University of North Texas Press, 2019) and Before After (Saturnalia, 2023). His poems have appeared in Field, Massachusetts Review, Mississippi Review, The Missouri Review, New England Review, Ploughshares, and The Yale Review.

DEPARTMENT STORE ESCALATOR by Jessica Greenbaum

After Szymborska’s “Puddle”

I remember that childhood fear well.

If I stepped on the down escalator

which bowed outward over thin air between floors

to a destination I couldn’t see at my height

and, sadly, would never reach

the moving teeth would casually drop me into space

as it had almost done each time before

while mannequins stood blank-faced in their checked raincoats

a clerk fussed with a clothes rack

gay shoppers passed me rising, looking upward, without a care

this time no different: the tug of my mother’s hand

again, the most shocking.

Jessica Greenbaum is the author of three poetry collections: Inventing Difficulty (Silverfish Review Press, 1998); The Two Yvonnes (Princeton University Press, 2012); and Spilled and Gone (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2019). Her poems have appeared in The New Yorker, Poetry, The Yale Review, Plume, The Paris Review, The Pushcart Prize: Best of the Small Presses, and The Best American Poetry.

CARDS by Farah Peterson

It’s all I can do to
keep my peace when

my son announces
he has a good hand I wince

when he lets cards
tip as, well

as carelessly as a child
unschooled

of course I look
I can’t help that

I’m just passing an evening
the way he asked and

don’t I win meekly, with none of that
slapping down hilarity

or even the quiet, cruel collection
with one knuckle snap and a half smile

none of the good old fun that
went with my learning to

keep cards close and
expect dissembling

but the result is, all I have for him
is a muzzled company

and all of the ghosts
they crowd me and crowd me

Farah Peterson’s poetry has appeared in The Florida Review, Rattle, and Salamander.

LEAP OF FAITH by Richard Spilman

The new age descends like an axe.
There has come a revolution:
rooted things have learned to run,

though the crackling of underbrush
betrays their flight and the blade
descends where the rustling ends.

And you, neither new nor old,
balance at cliff’s edge, future
awash in the whitecaps below.

What lies there may be scree
or rapids or just a soft breech into
the slipstream of the imminent,

but it’s an answer, a way not
so much out as into a now
whose chaos is yours by choice.

You could make your way back,
but to what? Ruin and rubble,
and the stale taste of fear.

Instead, you make a steeple
of your raised hands, tense
and leap. It’s death one way

or another, drowning or rising
to shake your hair and follow
the current wherever it goes.

Richard Spilman is the author of the poetry collection In the Night Speaking (Sacramento Poetry Center Press, 2009); two chapbooks, Suspension (New American Press, 2006) and Dig (Kelsay Books, 2023); and two story collections, Hot Fudge (Poseidon Press, 1990) and The Estate Sale (Texas Review Press, 2011).

ALLEGIANCE by Elizabeth Bradfield

Each morning before light, in
season, Billy’s F-150 fires
up, grumbles in his drive,
heads for the pier. I hear it
through the small window above
my bed, and when I’m out,
I watch for him – Billy at the Race,
Billy off the Peaked Hills, Billy steaming
home around the point. Billy. Thick
glasses, accent, hands, wizard
of fiberglass and steam box, torch
and epoxy, whose loft holds all
the tools, any clamp or nail you’d
need, any saw or grinder. Who
coaches us as we fix our skiff in his
garage and doesn’t laugh
in a mean way when we
fuck up. How’s my favorite
whale hugger? calls Billy
as I drive my Prius past his house.
We call him The Boat Fairy. To his face.
He and his wife call us The Girls. We
avoid politics beyond weather
and fish, which we get into
big time, elbows out windows,
idling. We want to make him
a T-shirt, a badge, a sticker
for his truck. We tell him so. Listen:
there are silences between us. We
all know what whispers there. It’s ok
to not speak them here.

Elizabeth Bradfield is the author of seven books, including Interpretive Work (Arktoi Books/Red Hen Press, 2008); Toward Antarctica (Boreal Books/Red Hen Press, 2019); and Cascadia Field Guide: Art, Ecology, Poetry (Mountaineers Books, 2023). She is a contributing editor to Alaska Quarterly Review.

HER SHAME by John Morgan

Mist rolls above the river like a second river
and the piles of snow darken as she drives
toward town and sees an old woman,
dressed in a light vest and no parka, slumped
on the metal railing where the road winds down.

Thinking that the woman might be lost,
maybe senile, she pulls over, opens
the window, and says, “Do you need help?”

But as the woman stands she sees instead
that it’s a man. Short, with shaggy hair
and a stubble beard, he comes to the window
and says, “I’m looking for a ride to town.”

In these rough times it’s her rule
never to pick up strangers, so she says,
“Oh, sorry, I’m not going there just now,”
and pulls away, confused at how
her good intentions went awry,

and at the bottom of the hill
shame overtakes her like a massive truck
looming in the rearview mirror as night comes on.

John Morgan is the author of a collection of essays and eight poetry collections, most recently The Hungers of the World: New and Later Collected Poems (Salmon Poetry, 2023). His work has appeared in The New Yorker, Poetry, The American Poetry Review, The Paris Review, and Kenyon Review.

NEAR ESTER, ALASKA by Jane Lott

Just under the sternum
there are so many words
for love I discovered
bitter-sweet
in the dictionary
resting on her knee
a solid sense of self
so many words for sea
so many words for bear.
But nowhere a word
for that time
when all that was left of daylight
lay pink and purple across the snow.

Jane Lott’s work has appeared in The Los Angeles Quarterly, Poetry Flash, Sonoma Magazine, and in the anthology Veterans of War, Veterans of Peace edited by Maxine Hong Kingston.

OBATA AT TENAYA PEAK by Ben Gucciardi

A whole year looking for the mountain
inside the mountain
before he tried to paint it.
And even then,
only when the light
off the granite
was tangible,
and with a brush made of mink
whiskers, the line
so fine it was hardly visible.

Ben Gucciardi is the author of West Portal (University of Utah Press, 2021). He is also the author of the chapbooks I Ask My Sister’s Ghost (DIAGRAM/New Michigan Press, 2020) and Timeless Tips for Simple Sabotage (Quarterly West, 2021). His poems have appeared in 32 Poems, AGNI, American Poetry Review, Harvard Review, and Poetry.

POTTED MAPLES by D.S. Waldman

The moon is a bone the shape of a hole.
She tries explaining this to you –

Boxes, on the ground, of her mother’s things,
a window open
in another part of the house.

Her legs are up the wall.

You are someone, then she sets her glass of water
on the floor,

and you are someone else – breath
let out the nose,

ghost pipe in the wall.

One is red with light bark, the other
a shade, entirely, of what you want to call maroon.

They take water on Sundays.
And in a month or two you’ll need

to put them in the ground.

D.S. Waldman’s poems have appeared in Los Angeles Review of Books, Kenyon Review, Poetry Society of America, Narrative, and Copper Nickel.

YELLOWJACKET TRAP ATTRACTANT by Robert Wrigley

You know a sliver of lamb bone with a bit of gristle’s
way better than the cloying sweet commercial stuff
dribbled on a cotton ball. After half a day
the transparent trap’s so full the bastards have to eat their own
to make room for themselves in the death chamber.

May San Francesco and Father Walt forgive you,
but you relish what looks like yellowjacket panic.
From the porch’s other end the engine hum of them dying.
You take a seat and watch them crawl in legions
through the six bottom holes none ever leaves by.

Nor bonhomie among them anywhere. Here’s one
crawling round and round the crowded cylinder,
hauling another’s head and fighting off
the fellows that would seize it. Meanwhile,
among the dead, tiny nuggets, desiccate gristles of lamb.

Upon your bare toes they light and commence
to chiseling away a divot of flesh, having it half
piranhaed off before you feel their sawtooth razory jaws.
Yes, they feed on certain destructive fruit moths
and flies, and they seem almost brilliantly rugged, as they must be.

But eventually you have to empty the traps and rebait,
and always a few have miraculously survived
among hundreds of cadavers – does that surprise you?
Such a fierce life force in carrion eaters. May it never end.
The morning’s dumped survivors, I crush beneath a boot.

Robert Wrigley is the author of twelve collections of poems, including Beautiful Country (Penguin, 2010); Anatomy of Melancholy & Other Poems (Penguin, 2013); The True Account of Myself as a Bird (Penguin, 2022); and a collection of essays, Nemerov’s Door (Tupelo Press, 2021).

ONE OF THE LAND MINE BANDS by John Willson

Ta Prohm Temple, Siem Reap, Cambodia

Named for its likeness to a crocodile’s head,
the zither’s hollow body rested
on two cut sections from a tree trunk.
The fingers of the player’s left hand

pressed ivory frets—
the crocodile’s teeth.
Fronting the band, a low blue table,
a brass bowl holding currency,

a tray with a sign, CD 10$:
at home, I listen to the sweet music,
hand cymbals, gongs, bamboo reeds,
the xylophone’s wood keys, struck brightly.

They performed beside the straight wide path
toward the temple where strangler vines
clutched blocks of stone,
pulled down ancient columns.

Below his knee, the crocodile player’s
left leg was plastic, hollow.
One of his bandmates sawed an upright
fiddle, its body a coconut shell.

He gripped the bow
in the fold between forearm and bicep.

All seven players missed limbs or their sight.
In this photo, blue shade cast by a tarp

suspends them between one chord
and the next,
like the moment each stepped
on something planted that bloomed.

John Willson is the author of the poetry collection Call This Room a Station (MoonPath Press, 2020). His poems have also appeared in Bellevue Literary Review, Kyoto Journal, Northwest Review, Notre Dame Review, Sycamore Review, Cascadia Field Guide: Art, Ecology, Poetry, and Terrain.org.

SONG OF A STORYTELLER by Qag˙g˙un Chelsey Zibell

A man will journey the river
in a kayak, armed with magic akutuq1 mother made,
looking for uncle and answers, coming out
of strange happenings in order
for his human way of knowing to understand
that uncle’s bones are planted in the tundra.
He will be seduced by a woman with teeth gnashing between
her legs
and will not be consumed.
He will be pursued by a foolish man made of copper
and will set him afire.
He will catch a mermaid
and become an aŋatkuq2 ,
He will hear the bird speak
and become a prophet.

1 akutuq: [uh-koo-took] “a mixture of fat and berries,” Kobuk River Iñupiaq
2 aŋatkuq: [uh-ngut-kook] “shaman,” Kobuk River Iñupiaq

CANNED PEACHES by Qag˙g˙un Chelsey Zibell

Dad told you
Opa used to count out
his peas
one
by
one
just so he’d eat vegetables.

Once a year, the barge
came to town
and unloaded a year’s supply of goods.
Auntie said
“whether something was expired or not
before the next barge came, we had to buy it.”

Dehydrated potatoes
Flour
Hard candy
Eggs
Cans
and cans and
cans.

”Your dad doesn’t even
like the taste of frozen veggies now,”
Mom said.

Now you love the softness of pears in a can:
slightly grainy interior,
disintegrating in the mouth,
giving way with each bite.

Canned peaches, on the other hand,
have a slight bite,
a sharp taste of sunshine
coated in syrup.

They were in the small
compartment of your school lunch tray.
Saved for last,
while you made sure
to sit with others of the same gender.

You lost your taste for them
some time after that.
And switched back to pears.

“Song of a Storyteller” and “Canned Peaches” are Qag˙g˙un Chelsey Zibell’s debut poetry publications.

TOMATO DIVINATION by Doug Ramspeck

Like a thumb smudging across the wet ink of her mind,
the doctor said. And in the weeks after that,
a cardinal began battering with territorial insistence

at our kitchen window, leaving behind, sometimes,
small offerings of blood. That this was connected
to my mother seemed to me, at age seven, as clear

as the white robes of sky. I pictured what was happening
inside her as like the mute erasure of winter snow,
or I imagined that her voice was now the dead wisteria

at the yard’s edge with its poisonous seedpods, or like
the yellowjackets flying in and out of an open fissure
in the ground. And I remember my mother telling me

once before she lost herself that everything that stank
was holy: the goat droppings and goat urine in her garden,
the rake making prayerful scrapes amid manure.

And last night she returned to me out of the sky’s rain,
knocking on some unseen door inside a dream – knocking
like that cardinal pecking at our window – her voice like concentric

circles inside the yellow kitchen I’d forgotten. And in her palm
was a tomato still clinging to the nub of a vine. And reaching it
toward me, she said, These aren’t store bought . . . taste.

Doug Ramspeck is the author of two collections of short stories, a novella, and nine poetry collections, most recently Blur (The Word Works, 2023). His poems have appeared in The Southern Review, The Missouri Review, Kenyon Review, Slate, The Sun, and The Georgia Review.

LATE FRUIT by Daniel Halpern

I thought you were an anchor in the drift of the world;
but no: there isn’t an anchor anywhere.
— William Bronk

I should have foreseen
this defeat of the heart,

but I insisted
on believing that it would beat

forever, and never
cease bearing fruit.

I was a believer.
I thought there was a territory,

a lingua di terra of febrile soil
that survived the harvest,

whose fruit was sweet with a juice
whose color and scent were perennial.

I was a believer. I believed.
I grow older, I bear the weight,

I carry home the sack of that late harvest.

HER DREAM by Daniel Halpern

Susan’s, a found poem

I woke from a dream this morning
We were dating

We weren’t dancing
But there was rhythm

You asked me to live with you
You were so thoughtful

You made a place for me
Where you lived

A collection of my memories
Were placed on three shelves

They remained there
In a kind of permanence

We kissed
I had red lipstick on.

Daniel Halpern has written nine books of poetry and edited more than 15 books and anthologies. He founded the National Poetry Series, Antaeus, and the Ecco Press, now an imprint of HarperCollins.

AN OLD FEAR by James Davis May

The snake you saw that was at first just a thick strand
squiggling from the frayed kitchen rug is a problem
because it slid so soundlessly beneath the fridge
before your wife could see it and you both know
what concussions can do, even decades later,
that your brain can make you see what’s not there,
and feel what you shouldn’t, and that’s before
factoring in the illness that lives in it somewhere
like a queen wasp dormant all winter and the medication
that is supposed to save you from yourself
but can also make you act and think “unusually” –
so many chemicals go into the making of reality,
after all – and when you roll the fridge back
and find no snake but see instead the small hole
for the waterline that could have allowed the snake,
if there was a snake, a route to escape, you know
you’ve entered at least a month of ambient terror,
where every room will be a potential haunting
and you won’t know whether to sigh or gasp
when the drawer you open shimmers
with your face patterned over the quivering knives.

James Davis May is the author of two poetry collections, both published by Louisiana State University Press: Unquiet Things (2016) and Unusually Grand Ideas (2023). His poems and essays have appeared in 32 Poems, The Georgia Review, Literary Hub, New England Review, and The Sun.

ETHERIZE by Amber Flora Thomas

My mother says the wrong word.
The place that has held her tongue coasts,
relieves unthinkable territory: space and hollow
under the curds of night, invisible and endless.
She’ll take her old dog there when it’s time.

If we remember,
we know what she means: after the body,
in the cool stretch of stale air in a white room;
put out away from us, not even ash, but a sphere above the flame,

the mind when we step outside and look at the stars
so the dog can do her business, the ear training itself
to listen in the trees for what might be
another creature smelling us on the air,
but farther out.

So, I don’t correct her.
No needles or cremation estimates. Only the ethereal.
Temporary forces between us and floating off into space
when we walk out somewhere.

Farther still.

Amber Flora Thomas is the author of Eye of Water (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2005); The Rabbits Could Sing (University of Alaska Press, 2012); and Red Channel in the Rupture (Red Hen Press, 2018). Her work has appeared in Georgia Review, Colorado Review, ZYZZYVA, Callaloo, Orion Magazine, Queer Nature: A Poetry Anthology, and Ecotone.

LUNKERS by David Starkey

On the big, once blank wall
of his room in assisted living,
I have mounted his largemouth bass.

The smallest weighed five pounds,
the largest was thirteen,
“Big Mama” he called her,

leaving the chartreuse spinnerbait
hooked in her taxidermied
lip. The centerpiece:

a twenty-pound steelhead
with bright orange paint
for the scar on its flank.

The only time he makes sense
these days is remembering
when and where and how

they were caught. He exaggerates
and changes details with the aplomb
of a politician, but that was ever

his way. Turn the conversation
to the recent past,
however, and his language

quickly falls apart,
like a plastic worm that’s been struck
too often, or a wooden lure

long snagged underwater
then discovered during a drought:
pinch its sides and . . . mush.

Soon, the nurses say, he’ll have to
downsize yet again – no room
in Memory Care for fiberglass fish.

On the day we wheel my father
into his final quarters,
the rest of him will be lost,

like the twenty-pound lunker
he claimed almost
to have netted before the line

snapped and, as he leaned over
the boat’s hull, it vanished

into his wavering reflection.

David Starkey is the author of eleven poetry collections, most recently Cutting It Loose (Pine Row Press, 2022). His poems have appeared in American Scholar, Georgia Review, Prairie Schooner, and Southern Review.

WHEN KNOWING IS THE SAME AS LATE WINTER WAITING by W.J. Herbert

Why is the body
still working, if it knows
what’s to come –

isn’t it cowed?
Sometimes, I think the blood
thinks,

the way these robins
must wonder whether the liquid

amber will leaf again
as they sit with their light-bulb
breasts glowing,

orange suns
among skeleton branches,
clots

in the deep-veined tree.
They flutter, as I imagine

my heart does,
just to see if it can feel
itself alive in the quiet

darkness of stiff ribs.
Regreening – that’s what the robins
want

but they can’t know what’s coming.
They wait,

as we do,
deaths tucked into a pocket of sky.

W.J. Herbert is the author of Dear Specimen: Poems (Beacon Press, 2021). Her poems have appeared in The Atlantic, Boulevard, The Georgia Review, The Hudson Review, The Southern Review, and The Best American Poetry.

GRACE by Robin Rosen Chang

The man plunged
into the muddy pond,
cradled the dog’s limp
but still warm body.
On land, he cupped his mouth
over the dog’s snout
and exhaled into it.
Over and over, a man
breathing into a dog,

his humid breath
like a zephyr,
its overblown promise
of a spring that won’t come.

And I think about my mother,
her emaciated body
in her pink nightgown
drowning in the ocean
of her bed, and how
I struggled to hold her hand.

I can’t imagine I’d have the grace
to swaddle another’s mouth
inside mine, offering life
to one whose wind was gone,
filling its lungs
with my trembling breath.

Robin Rosen Chang is the author of The Curator’s Notes (Terrapin Books, 2021). Her poems have appeared in Michigan Quarterly Review, Diode, The Journal, Cortland Review, American Literary Review, and Verse Daily.

ABECEDARIAN WITH ALS by Martha Silano

A little bit sane (a little bit not).
Blackbirds that turned out to be boat-tailed grackles.
Crows that cannot covert their fury of feathers.
Don’t say Relyvrio reminds you of hemlock.
Every wave reassuringly governed by the moon, but what about riptides?
F*ck a duck!
Glad there’s a joyful edge, though narrower than a Willet’s beak.
Hail in the forecast. A bitter taste:
it enables animals to avoid exposure to toxins.
Jaw stiffens, then relaxes. What will my body do next?
Kindness, we decide, is what we want to broadcast,
letting someone pull out in front of you in traffic,
make their turn, because the universe isn’t elegant,
no one’s really going anywhere important,
or running late to spin or vinyasa or
pilates. The neutral neutrons of the nucleus.
Quarks that are up, down, charm, strange, top, and bottom, though
rehab in the CD, a lunch date in Leschi, PT in Madrona – it happens.
Socrates died of centripetal paralysis, a prominent loss of sensation.
Terminal: I wish it was more like waiting out a storm with an $18.00 glass of
Pinot.
Unbound bound.
Very much looking forward to overcooked orzo and finely chopped squash.
What was that you assured me – when we die we wake from a dream?
X marks the rear of the theatre – one shove of poison – into a pure realm.
You know we’re all getting off at the same exit, right?
Zooey’s wish: to pray without ceasing.

Martha Silano is the author of six poetry collections, most recently Gravity Assist (Saturnalia Books, 2019) and This One We Call Ours (Lynx House Press, 2024). Her poems have appeared in Poetry, Paris Review, American Poetry Review, and The Missouri Review.

HORSEHAIR ON HELMETS by Maura Stanton

An old-fashioned wooden storm window
placed across sawhorses in a backyard –
nearby a paint can – but the little girl
crawling under this delightful play space
did not see glass panes, only blue sky
She stood up. She shrieked. I saw it all,
for I was high on the swing set next door,
moving through the air in big swoops
like a flag unfurling in a gust of wind.
Adults rushed from the house, running, shouting,
brushing glitter from the girl’s dark curls,
scolding her, bandaging her forehead,
while I kept swinging, swinging through the sky
An older brother got a rake and raked
sharp shimmery pieces from the grass,
the rake tines dragging out daggers of glass
that might have injured a bare foot, but flew
instead into my memory – for today
slits of sun between some fence rails
crisscrossing the snow like light swords
call up that scene – the broken window,
agitated figures, blood, then clean-up.
I held tight to the chains of the swing,
watching it all from a terrified distance
as if I were driving a team of wild horses
into battle, horsehair streaming from my helmet.

PENELOPE’S CHAIR by Maura Stanton

In Urgent Care the TV’s always turned
to HGTV, and today the House Flippers
chat about house staging as I wait here
with groaning patients, and fidgeting family,
my husband called to an exam room.
The topic’s house staging – the lovely room
flashing across the screen’s an illusion
created by designers. A tall young woman
points out a curved white sectional sofa,
and, she says, “here’s a Penelope chair.”
Penelope’s chair? But I’ve missed it.
The camera’s moved on to the staged bedroom.

What’s a chair? A seat with four legs
and a back for one person, like this chair,
where I’m sitting near other chairs in rows
filled with hunched seniors, or Moms or Dads
rocking children on their laps, jackets
wadded behind them like pillows as they text,
no one watching the cheerful TV folk
as they chatter about their California mansions.
I shift my legs, straighten my aching back,
recalling facts about Penelope’s chair
from The Odyssey. Ikmalios carved it all,
chair and footstool, from one piece of wood.
inlaid it with silver and ivory. At night
her hands aching from a day of weaving,
the suitors still noisily drinking her wine,
Penelope spread a thick fleece over the chair
and sat back. Like me, she was waiting
for her husband. And to pass the time,
on my iPad, I Google “Penelope’s Chair,”
expecting Wikipedia or quotes from Homer,
but instead, bewildering visions of chairs
scroll across the screen – Penelope Chairs! –
each one different, offering style or comfort,
Penelope dining chairs in synthetic leather,
stacking chairs framed in bright chrome tubes
or clear molded acrylic with steel legs.
Penelope’s armchair comes in fleur-de-lis
upholstery with claw-like feet, but there’s
a designer version shaped like a puzzle piece
with a bulbous protrusion for Penelope’s head.
Penelope’s beautiful chair’s ubiquitous –
If you don’t stand, walk, or lie down flat,
you’ve got to sit, so why not choose the best?
Get it in Lucite, satin, or soft grey plush?
And what about this swivel version,
or Penelope’s rattan lounger with matching footstool?

The woman next to me groans and rises
when her name’s called. She grabs her coat.
A sighing bearded man lowers himself
slowly into her place, pulls out his phone.
I roll my coat behind my back, my fleece,
thinking of Penelope on her special chair,
her eyes closed as she dreamed of Odysseus.
Those raucous nights her chair became her boat.
She’d float off through the foam-flecked seas
rowed by invisible gods until she reached
that place beyond the sunset where he lingered.
But every morning she woke up alone.
And then I hear a familiar cough and voice
coming from the desk. It’s my Odysseus
arriving back from that uncertain voyage
clutching his chart, and his new prescription,
grinning at me, ready to come home.

Maura Stanton is the author of a novel, three collections of stories, and seven collections of poems including Snow on Snow (Yale University Press, 1975); Cries of Swimmers (University of Utah Press, 1984); Glacier Wine (Carnegie-Mellon, 2001); Immortal Sofa (University of Illinois Press, 2008); and Interiors (Finishing Line Press, 2022). Her poems have appeared in Plume, Ploughshares, The Hudson Review, Poetry East, Gettysburg Review, Southern Poetry Review, and Able Muse.

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