Why She Cried

Larry Pankey

My mom cries at our kitchen table, our only piece of household furniture. One of those Formica-topped tables with chrome legs for support: matching chrome chairs covered with red vinyl seats embedded with tiny particles of sparkling glitter. A lone toilet paper roll substitutes for tissue beside her burning cigarette and ashtray. Her tumbler of scotch over ice sweats onto a folded paper napkin. Our house’s walls are round corrugated metal bending up off a concrete floor – – a Quonset hut home of semicircular corrugated metal. She dabs at her running mascara – – tears turn wadded toilet paper gray, then black.

When I was four, my single Native American mom took me away from the Fort Berthold Indian Reservation so she could go to college at the University of North Dakota. She studied to be a schoolteacher. I am a half-breed, born of a Native American (Hidatsa) mother and a White father. Off and on, I lived with my White grandparents (Geiser) and then with my Native grandparents (Fox). At UND, we lived in a trailer park, but after we were evicted, we moved to a Quonset hut in married housing. Once meant to house soldiers during wartime, the huts were repurposed for married couples attending college. Mom lied; my White dad was never around.

I remember her college textbooks. Words and pictures etch into your mind, never to be forgotten. Book covers, paintings, and portraits of long-dead Native Americans, and inside, words in tiny type impossible to read at my “See Spot Run” reading level. But still, I know these books are important: textbooks on our tribe’s history, myths, and religion. Images that small minds shouldn’t see until later.

She gave me history lessons and pointed out a book with a speech given by our famous Chief Four Bears while he died of smallpox. I imagine pus-filled sores and bleeding scabs covering his face. Another book has the Treaty of Fort Laramie, in which the White man promised us food in exchange for our land. Freezing Natives wrapped in dirty, tattered blankets huddle around a small fire, starving to death (Freedman, 26–29, 38–40). Those photos are juxtaposed with those of dead buffalo carcasses newly skinned only for their hides, the meat unused and left to rot. Then, White men pose atop piles of buffalo skulls, and train cars overflow with buffalo skins (Robinson 2016). Finally, a photo of an unarmed dead Indian named Spotted Elk, frozen prostrate in the snow with his hands up following the Wounded Knee Massacre, with yet more White men hanging around in the background (Rickert 2021).

And that word lawyer is there; all these books say lawyers write treaties and become presidents. Mom says lawyers fight with their words using pen and paper. If only I could be a lawyer and learn to fight back.

Somehow, I ended up going to college and then law school. I guess I always knew what I wanted to do without knowing what lawyers do. And one day in law school, while taking a course on Native American law, I saw a new concept: intergenerational trauma. Native “children may vicariously experience events via stories heard about the experiences of their parents or grandparents and, consequently, suffer from associated psychological problems” (Wohlers 2015). Or that traumatic events for Native parents “may lead to poor parental mental health or poor parenting styles, which, in turn, may increase stress in children” (Evans-Campbell, 328). And I started to piece together the broken parts of my mom, her parents, grandparents, and our people.

Sometimes, her history lessons turn drunken, angry, or sad. If you have ever been around an alcoholic, you know they like to talk. They talk so much they repeat themselves—drunken late-night conversations. I hear or overhear these things. She drinks and talks to her family and friends. Or she gets on the phone for hours, talking and crying to anyone who will listen. The phone company will cut off service by the end of the month when she cannot pay the long-distance bill.

She is drunk; she cries. She feels sorry for herself. She does not know how she will pay the rent.

*

I want to be a good mom, but it is so hard. Never rely on anyone else, Larry Allen. You must do it by yourself. You must be better and stronger than everyone else. Get your education. That is something they can never take from you. Be tough. You have to stick up for yourself. Your dad does not love us; he will not help take care of you. He is drunk in a bar somewhere, shacking up with some woman.

I am so ashamed, Larry Allen. I will have to take you home to Grandpa Geiser. I have failed you as a mom. I am so sorry. 

1851 Treaty of Fort Laramie

The Hidatsa live on the Fort Berthold Indian Reservation in North Dakota. Before the White man arrived in the Americas, Indigenous people were estimated to number from 50 million to 100 million (Taylor, 40). “The discovery of America was followed by possibly the greatest demographic disaster in the history of the world” (Dennevan). Native populations plummeted by 90 to 95 percent following the arrival of the White man (Jones, 9).

On November 4, 1804, the Lewis and Clark expedition stopped in North Dakota and picked up a pregnant Hidatsa woman named Sakakawea. She helped them navigate the Rocky Mountains to the Pacific Ocean and gave birth along the way on February 11, 1805 (Lewis). By all accounts, Sakakawea saved the expedition on many occasions. She was a tough Indian woman who gathered up food supplies when the boats capsized.

The first significant recorded event in Hidatsa history is the coming of smallpox. The 1837 Great Plains smallpox epidemic came from an American Fur Company steamboat, the SS St. Peter’s, which brought smallpox up along the Missouri River (Jones, 72, 108–22). On July 30, 1837, one of our chiefs, Four Bears, lived through the smallpox epidemic and, on the day he died, described its effect:

I have Never Called a White Man a Dog, but today, I do. . . . They have deceived Me, them that I always considered as Brothers, has turned out to be My Worst enemies. . . . I do not fear Death my friends. You Know it, but to die with my face rotten, that even the Wolves will shrink with horror at seeing Me, and say to themselves, that is the 4 Bears, the Friend of the Whites – Listen well what I have to say, as it will be the last time you will hear Me. Think of your Wives, Children, Brothers, Sisters, Friends, and in fact all that you hold dear, are all Dead, or Dying, with their faces all rotten, caused by those dogs the whites, think of all that My friends, and rise all together and Not leave one of them alive. (Chardon, 124–25)

Over half of the Hidatsa died, many killing themselves after seeing their reflected pockmarked faces. The United States said they should all band together with the Mandan and Arikara for mutual protection. So was born the Three Affiliated Tribes (TAT), or the Mandan, Hidatsa, and Arikara Nation (Bowers, 36–37).

In the 1851 Treaty of Fort Laramie, the US wanted peace and invited the Hidatsa and other tribes to meet with their lawyers in Fort Laramie, Wyoming. In Article III of the Treaty, the US promised “to protect the aforesaid Indian nations against the commission of all depredations by the people of the said United States”; it stated that all the land covered by the Treaty was Indian territory and that the US would never claim any part of it. In Article VII, the Treaty promised “provisions, merchandize, domestic animals and agricultural implement . . . to be distributed in proportion to the population of the aforesaid Indian nations” (National Park Service 2021).

However, the ink was barely dry when the US unilaterally changed the Treaty’s terms to ten years. The original Treaty promised approximately 12,500,000 acres for the reservation, but by 1910, that number was whittled to less than 640,000 acres. According to Congressman Ben Reifel, “Since their first treaty at Fort Laramie . . . they have relinquished title to an area greater than that of the states of Massachusetts and New Hampshire combined” (Reifel, 4).

*

When I was little, my mom and my Fox grandparents would take me to town, and we would drive up to an old warehouse building where they would give us food—dry and canned goods called commodities or commods. The warehouse was once painted white, but weather and time had stripped off the paint and aged the wood to a metallic silver. We would wait our turn and then drive into the warehouse, where people checked our names off a clipboard and loaded cardboard boxes of food—flour, sugar, salt, and canned goods—into our pickup.

I asked my mom why we got this food. She said it was because of the treaties. The Whites promised to give us food if we would stop fighting and stay on the reservation. Commods are just for Indians and not White people.

Some of the food was great, like the US Department of Agriculture cheese in big five-pound blocks—packaged in a cardboard box block printed with the label Pasteurized Process American Cheese (Blakemore 2018). The cheese was old; the outside edge of the block had turned a hard, dark orange, but cutting it off revealed the edible bright-yellow inside. Everything you make tastes better with commod cheese.

Years later, I played hide and seek at a White friend’s house. I went through his kitchen and into the pantry to hide. I saw all this commodity food stacked up.

I confronted the kid’s mom and asked her, “Why do you have that? That is for the Indians. You’re not supposed to have that.” 

“Larry, what are you talking about? We get that food because we are poor.”

Garrison Dam

I play outside in the snow when Mom yells at me to come in for dinner. Impervious to the cold in my full-body snowsuit, I make snow forts and tunnels out of the snowdrifts piling up on the rounded walls of our Quonset hut. Mom drinks scotch from a tall glass wrapped in a paper towel as she prepares dinner. She talks on the phone with one of her siblings while smoking a cigarette.

Grandma Fox is in the hospital with complications from diabetes. Mom blames the Whites for diabetes. “It’s those damn commodities. They gave her sugar diabetes.” Before she ate, Grandma Fox would measure insulin and give herself a shot in the stomach. It is dinnertime, and I think of her preparing insulin. She points the needle up and taps it to remove any air bubbles. A tiny spray of insulin shows it is ready.

Mom made my favorite meal: grilled cheese. She pulls the slicer across the block, and a slice carves out. The yellow rotary phone’s coiled rubber cord pulled tightly across the room, her tilted head pressing the phone into her neck as she flips a grilled cheese sandwich—spatula in one hand while taking a drag or a drink of scotch with the other.

I am hungry, so I try to get needle shots to the stomach out of my mind as I take a bite of my commod cheese sandwich. Diabetes was scary to me as a kid. Other relatives were in wheelchairs, some with amputations and others blind. And Mom is in a bad mood about Grandma.

Watch what you eat, Larry Allen, or you will get sugar diabetes.

After the White man stole our land and put us on the reservation, they decided to build a dam, but the White farmers didn’t want to flood their land.

And then they built the Garrison Dam, which flooded all our good farmland. Our people lived in a town called Elbowoods. We had schools, businesses, and hospitals. Our communities were together. We lost everything because of White people’s greed. My parents divorced because of that dam.

And the Whites were jealous of us because the Hidatsa made farming look easy. We had good food; we grew the Three Sisters: corn, squash, and beans. Our people had never even heard about diabetes. Now, we take shots with every meal. People go blind and have their legs amputated.

And it broke our people. Our men no longer had pride; they felt they could not provide for their family, they felt hopeless. And women can’t rely on these useless, broken men with their drinking.

My parents drank and fought, and now I drink and fight with your dad. I am so sorry, Larry Allen. I wanted better for you.

*

The Missouri River is natural and untamed. Depending on rain and snowpack, come springtime, the icy river overflows its banks for weeks at a time. Native people learned to live with the inconvenience. Like, don’t build your house on a flood plain or next to the river—common sense living. And why was the land fertile to begin with? Flooding brings new soils and nutrients back to the ground (VanDevelder, 26–28). But downstream, the white man built cities and farms right next to the river that flooded every spring. So, Congress passed the Flood Control Act of 1944 to tame the Missouri River. Various plans came from different constituencies, and a compromise was reached—the final version of the project planned for a series of dams (VanDevelder, 26–27, 98, 142). But where to put these dams?

Natives then and now have no political voice. They are an afterthought. Populations were so small that, by 1940, the US Census estimated the total number of Americans in the continental US was 131,669,275. Still, only 334,000 Native Americans remained—less than .0025% of the total US population (Truesdell, 4). But Natives owned the land. The 1851 Treaty of Fort Laramie promised them their land forever—that is until the White men decided to break the treaty (VanDevelder, 98).

The US built the Garrison Dam on the Fort Berthold Indian Reservation, thereby flooding Native farms and ranches along the Missouri. Every single piece of farmland used by the Three Affiliated Tribes went underwater. Of all the flooded tribes, the “most devastating effects suffered by a single reservation were experienced by the TAT . . . whose tribal life was almost totally destroyed by the army’s Garrison Dam” (Lawson, xix, 25).

When the Garrison Dam started to backfill the Missouri River, it displaced approximately 2,000 people, or 357 families, of the TAT. Of the remaining 583,000 acres on the Reservation, 153,000 went underwater, and the other 430,000 acres were fractured into five different segments (Reifel, 3–4). No longer simply separated by the river, the Reservation segments had miles of water between them with no bridges. The sense of community was gone.

The Garrison Dam became the fifth-largest earthen dam globally. Lake Sakakawea filled up with a surface area of 368,000 acres and became the second-largest reservoir in the United States (Army Corps of Engineers 2021). By 1953, the US loaded all the homes and buildings onto truck trailers and moved them up onto the arid plains, away from the river. Natives knew better than to live up there. It was too cold and too windy, and nothing would grow.

My mom was born on July 8, 1946, in Elbowoods, North Dakota—a child of the White man’s flood. They uprooted her home and trucked it to a new town called Mandaree, North Dakota—a portmanteau of the Three Affiliated Tribes: MANdan, hiDAtsa, and REE, another name for the Arikara. At seven years of age, she was a flood survivor. Adding to her misery, her parents divorced in 1954. With ten children and the school destroyed, her family had little choice but to send her away to boarding school.

Boarding School:

When I was just a little girl, they sent me to boarding school, Larry Allen. They took me from my parents and put me on a bus. I had a piece of cardboard with my name on it with a string around my neck telling people who I was. I got off the bus, and the nuns were waiting for me.

They put me in the car and drove me out to their school. They took my clothes and threw them away. They gave us baths, and my skin burned from the lye soap. They cut my hair and poured white powder on my head. They said it was to kill lice. I didn’t have lice; I was a clean person, Larry Allen. How could they do that to me?

The nuns would not let me speak Hidatsa anymore. If I did, they spanked me. One time I did not fold my dress neatly, so I had to clean the entire hallway with a toothbrush. I scrubbed and scrubbed for hours, and my fingers started to bleed. 

Imagine that little girl, Larry Allen. Cleaning an entire hallway with a toothbrush, they were being cruel. I was just a little girl.

I cried; I was so homesick. I kept asking myself, Why do I have to be here? Why are they doing this to me?

*

In 1892, Captain Richard Henry Pratt gave a speech in which he uttered the now infamous words, “Kill the Indian in him, and save the man” (Pratt, 47). His address described the US policy of assimilation of Native Americans. Pratt’s speech set out his ideas about the Carlisle Indian School for civilizing all Native Americans (Pratt, 46-49). Within twenty years of Custer’s Last Stand, the US settled on a strategy of destruction and assimilation. “Of all the malignancies embodied in twentieth-century U.S./Canadian Indian policy, the schools were arguably the worst. . . . Their destructive effects upon Native people, both individually and collectively . . . was and remains by any reasonable estimation incalculable” (Churchill, xlv).

The adult savage is not susceptible to the influence of civilization, and we must therefore turn to his children, that they might be taught to abandon the pathway of barbarism and walk with a sure step along the pleasant highway of Christian civilization. . . . They must be withdrawn, in tender years, entirely from the camp and taught to eat, to sleep, to dress, to play, to work, to think after the manner of white man – Commissioner of Indian Affairs, 1866 (Dept. of Health and Human Services, 2).

Eventually, these underlying policies formed the mantra on how to deal with Native Americans: kill the Indian, save the man. 

Native Americans are barely mentioned in the US Constitution and, under its original provisions, are not even citizens. Indeed, Article 1, Section II of the Constitution excluded “Indians not taxed” from inclusion in the census count. In other words, Indians do not count. Native Americans were not even granted citizenship until Congress passed the Indian Citizenship Act of 1924. “The right to vote, however, was governed by state law; until 1957, some states barred Native Americans from voting.” (Congress 2024) Even Adolf Hitler praised US policies, stating in a 1928 speech that Americans “gunned down the millions of Redskins to a few hundred thousand, and now keep the modest remnant under observation in a cage” (Whitman, 9).

At boarding school, Native students endured extreme hardships. When they arrived, they would have their mouths washed out with soap for speaking their Native language. They were given a haircut, a uniform, and a new White name (Adams, 108–31). The boarding schools also doused them with DDT to kill lice, whether real or perceived (Haaland 2021a). The students were forbidden from speaking their language or practicing their culture, and the schools meted out harsh punishment to anyone who broke these rules (Adams, 131–35).

If the Native kids survived and got to go back home, their people thought the school made a White person out of them (Zitkala-Sa, 47–80). As was said to one father, “Your son who calls himself Rafael has lived with the White men. He has been far away. . . . He has not . . . learned the things that Indian boys should learn. He has no hair. . . . He cannot even speak our language. . . . He is not one of us” (Josephy, 434–36). These returning boarding school Native Americans were now neither Indian nor White. For almost one hundred years, the US shipped off tens of thousands of Native children to these boarding schools. By 1926, 83 percent of Native children were in the system (Haaland 2021a).  

My family attended the Carlisle Indian Industrial School. My great-grandparents, Ed Bracklin and Minnie Blackhawk, met at Carlisle and married on June 4, 1914. My grandmother, Julia Bracklin (Fox), was born on October 30, 1915. Great-grandpa Bracklin played football for the Carlisle Indians alongside legendary player Jim Thorpe and Coach Pop Warner (Line 1913). He was also captain of the lacrosse team (The Red Man 1910).

Great-Grandma Minnie’s father, Blackhawk, was a famous chief of our people (Black Hawk 2007). He had multiple wives, but White people said he could keep only one. So, he picked his youngest wife, and our family line breaks away from Blackhawk through our Great-Grandma Mink Woman, who, by all accounts, was the older and meaner of Blackhawk’s wives.

My grandparents, Albert Bad Brave and Julia Bracklin, married in 1932, divorced in 1946, and remarried in 1954. They had ten children together. My Grandpa Albert’s birth father, David Bad Brave, died before Grandpa was born. Grandpa Albert’s mother, Hannah Levings (Mink Woman), famously modeled as Sakakawea with a baby on her back for a photograph. She was Sakakawea’s granddaughter. The picture is of my Grandpa Albert as an infant (State Historical Society of SD 2022).

The Fox family adopted Albert as one of their own. My mom was born in 1946, and out of ten children, she was the only one who went to college. As a young girl, she went to these boarding schools. She often spoke of the poor treatment and abuse she endured at them—when she was drinking when she let her guard down.

The historical treatment of young Native American students is something the US is only now fully understanding. As recently as June 22, 2021, the US Secretary of the Interior started the process of apologizing for and recognizing their past assimilation policies:

The United States enacted laws and implemented policies establishing and supporting Indian boarding schools across the nation. The purpose of Indian boarding schools was to culturally assimilate Indigenous children by forcibly relocating them from their families and communities to distant residential facilities where their American Indian, Alaska Native, and Native Hawaiian identities, languages, and beliefs were to be forcibly suppressed. For over 150 years, hundreds of thousands of Indigenous children were taken from their communities (Haaland 2021b).

My mom worked for the U.S. Department of Interior–Office of Indian Education in Washington, DC. As an education specialist, she helped individual tribes with their paperwork for their local reservation schools. She worked on a new model of Native American education that helped reservations across the US educate Native children at home and on their reservations (Dept. of Education 1993). She did not live to see these recent apologies or recognition, but she always knew that taking children away from their families was wrong.

*

The phone rings in the middle of the night. She is drunk, crying, and wants to talk. 

I am mad at her; I am impatient. I forget about intergenerational trauma or showing compassion. She is a terrible grandmother. She has no interest in my four kids or their lives, but they are the most important thing in my life.

I tell her that I have court tomorrow, that the kids have school, and that it is four in the morning.

I tell her that I have heard all of this before, many times when she was in her 40s, 50s, and then 60s. Sometimes, she gets mad at my rudeness and hangs up on me, and sometimes, she just wants to talk.

I regret being rude to her to this day. I wish I could go back and appreciate her middle-of-the-night calls. They are one of those things we cannot undo and carry around with us for the remainder of our lives.

What are you doing, baby? I just wanted to tell you I love you, Larry Allen. Do you remember when we lived in that Quonset? Do you remember when you used to play outside in the snow tunnels that you made while I studied for college? You would come inside frozen after playing outside all day in your snowsuit, and I would make you a grilled cheese sandwich. We made it, Larry Allen.

It was just you and me, baby, do you remember?

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Whitman, J. 2017. Hitler’s American Model: The United States and the Making of Nazi Race Law. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press.

Zitkala-Sa. 1921. “The School Days of an Indian Girl.” In American Indian Stories, 47–80. Washington: Hayworth Publishing House. Accessed December 29, 2021. http://digital.library.upenn.edu/women/zitkala-sa/stories/school.html.

What inspired you to write “Don Juan,” “soiled,” and “Midnight Mass”?

These poems came out of a transitional time in my life. I’d spent a few years caught in the grind of city living—working hard, staying out late—and eventually found myself needing to step away from that pace. I returned to the South to read and write. While I don’t regret that earlier time, it was too chaotic to reflect much. Writing these poems became a way of revisiting those years with a bit more clarity and care.

Of the three, “Don Juan” probably speaks most directly to that moment of shift. It’s about the strange tension of outgrowing something while also feeling like you’ve been outgrown. “soiled” and “Midnight Mass” circle similar territory—the former leans more toward regret, the latter toward cynicism—but they all reflect how emotionally layered change can be.

Was there anything unique or striking about the writing or research process?

I have a bad habit—one I’m still trying to decide whether I like—of drafting a poem and then abandoning it for years. That was the case with these. I sketched them out a long while ago, and it took me years to return and finish them. Maybe I just procrastinate. But sometimes I also just need time to figure out what I really think or feel about a subject. That could take a couple weeks. Sometimes a couple years.

Have you read anything recently that you’d like to recommend to readers?

Always. One of my favorite poets is Frank Stanford, and I recommend his comprehensive collection What About This to everyone. But also, the great C.D. Wright—who was one of Stanford’s early champions and a powerful voice in her own right—has a comprehensive collection coming out soon, The Essential C.D. Wright. Everyone should read her too.

Where can we learn more about you and your work?

You can visit my site at JavierSandoval.me, or find me on Instagram at @JavierWantsCandy, where I post writing tips, reading recs, and the occasional rant about language or snacks.

A reading of “The Loaves,” by Phoebe Baker Hyde

We Don’t Joke About Such Things

By Neil Serven

I’ve been working on my grace. By that I don’t mean religion; if you ask me, there’s not much that’s graceful about religion, apart from the hymns. 

Don’t get me wrong, there’s a lot to like about religion. For one thing, I like its sense of having always been there, evidenced in its Gothicky architecture, its medieval suffixes. I dig its hardwood nouns like sacristy and missal and vespers. And I can find beauty in stained glass. But in terms of the vulgar wars, the guilt and panic, the glory—nothing graceful there. 

You live in a hot dorm with Catholics and you learn a lot.  

I guess by grace I mean how you envisioned things coming together once you became an adult. How your shoes shine. The way you receive a compliment. 

Take care not to let doors slam, don’t let yourself be driven by envy, never give the impression you’re in a hurry to leave. 

I mean grace. 

I’ve been thinking about this a lot because I’m almost twenty. It won’t be long before I’ve outlived all the martyrs, and I’m running out of time to show my best self. 

*

I was pulling off a glorious trifecta, failing three classes in my major, economics. The only class I was acing was ethics, which I was taking as an elective. Ethics was a breeze because there weren’t any quizzes. Instead we read Aristotle and Kant and tossed around questions like who’s to blame when a child conceived in a test tube grows up to be a prick. 

I had my laptop open during a differentials lecture when Apollonia appeared in chat to tell me that Kyle, my best friend since childhood, was dead. 

Her profile picture showed her and Kyle and their two-year-old son, Cooper. Each message appeared with a tiny pop, surrounded by a gray bubble made to look as though the words were coming from their mouths. 

The bubbles kept coming. I tried to process. 

it happened yesterday

Then, pop, a teardrop emoji. 

I waited a moment, then typed: who found him

It might have been a gigantic presumption on my part, but you don’t just die in your twenties and not get found. 

I waited while Apollonia typed the words. It was Rae, she said. In the laundry room. 

junie called down the stairs but kyle woldnt ansewer and junie cant do the stairs bc of her emphezima so rae went down there

Rae was Kyle’s kid sister. Growing up, she would tag along, sketching pictures while Kyle and I shot hoops or skated in the park. It pained me to think of young Rae finding her brother dead—having to manage the paramedics, having to spell out to Junie what was going on. 

will there be a service, I typed. Apollonia replied that the arrangements were still being made but that it would probably be held later in the week. 

I tried to think of something else to say. What I didn’t say was sorry. What did sorry mean on the internet? Sorry about your kid’s father dying? Sorry I was a jerk when you came into the picture? Sorry I doubted you, you sorry soul? 

Sorry is a handshake. If you don’t say sorry, you don’t accept the bargain. 

So I didn’t say sorry. 

I typed the words, Ill be there, then backspaced. Ill try to get there. 

Three dots, pop, thumbs-up emoji.

I stood and slung my bag over my shoulder and walked loudly out of the auditorium, sensing the other students trying not to be disturbed. The door closed behind me, echoing through the hall. 

*

I decided to drive the six and a half hours from Chicago to Pittsburgh. It was Monday night when I entered my parents’ kitchen. Donna Summer was playing. My father was freshly retired, with renewed vigor by all accounts, and had taken up mixology. On the kitchen counter stood a city of bottles and mixing implements. 

I found my parents dancing in the living room, the coffee table pushed out of the way. It was the first time I had seen my parents in several months, and they were drunk. In spite of my reluctance to come home, I held no grudges against my parents as people, and on any other day it would have amused me to see them living it up. “We have a gentleman visitor!” my mother said on seeing me, clasping her hands. She wore a smirk like a debt had at last come due.

“Kyle’s dead,” I said, my voice straining over the music. I dropped my bag on the floor. I had managed not to cry during the drive, but at that moment I let go. “He’s dead, Mom!” She set her glass on the breakfast bar and reached up to hug me. 

“Oh! Oh no. Oh, my boy.” She held my head in her hands, which were cold from the glass. “What happened?”

“He OD’d,” I said. “He was ruined.”

“No! Oh, Marty. I didn’t know he was doing that stuff.”

My father turned off the music. I stood wrapped in my mother’s arms as she filled him in. “When’s the service?” I heard him say.

“I don’t know yet,” I said. “Nobody knows anything. I’m not sure what I’m here to do.”

“It’s all right,” Mom said. She reached to stroke my hair, as she used to do. But I had grown taller and it felt strange. “You’ll find out. It’s gonna be okay.”

Then my father put his hand on my back and told me I’d have to sleep in the basement because my bedroom wasn’t mine anymore. They’d redone it over the summer, making it into a reading/craft room for the two of them. Between the emails about color palettes, it never sank in that the room I grew up in had vanished. 

I was hungry. I said this out loud, wanting to be taken care of. My drunk mother squeezed my hand, then went in the kitchen and made me a grilled cheese and bacon sandwich. I took it down to the basement and ate it on a futon in the dim light of a workshop lamp. 

*

Apollonia had dropped out early in senior year, and a few months later gave birth to Cooper. I had been swamped with college essays and SAT prep, and I only learned that she was pregnant as I swiped around on social media, between breaths, like anyone in her signal range. 

I don’t remember how I responded. I didn’t say congratulations, because you don’t congratulate tragedy. It’s a tragedy when people fail to surprise you. 

Naturally, I didn’t see much of Kyle that summer. My freshman year came and went. I applied for overseas internships and dropped hints of opportunities falling my way—the World Bank, conventions in Geneva or Tianjin where I could fetch coffee and bump shoulders with the movers and shakers of the world economy.

In the meantime, I won money off stoners at caroms in the student union, chased ass, and made an ass of myself. I spent the money I won on blues records and foreign cigarettes. I tried to get with Pamela, hoping she might find my resentments attractive. I read Bertrand Russell and scoffed at the Catholics on campus. They listened patiently, then told me to check out Pascal. I read Pensées under trees where I knew Pamela would be walking by. By that spring, I had won Pamela and lost Pascal’s wager. 

*

Kyle had been apprenticing as a welder, working on things like railroad signals and rooftop solar arrays. One day he fell off some scaffolding, putting his ankle in a cast. He posted a photo on Facebook. I commented, Ouch! Feel better man! It was like the thirtieth comment down; I didn’t recognize the other names. 

I got the idea to send him books to give him something to do while he was laid up. Vendors were always selling used editions for cheap on the quad. I sent him The Stranger. I sent The Call of the Wild. By his own admission, Kyle never had much of a head for reading, but I thought if I chose the right titles he might cultivate a sense of wonder about parts of the world he was never going to see by staying in Pittsburgh, welding sheet metal and bottle-feeding a kid. It might have been hostile, the message I was sending. I spaced the packages out every few weeks, like a subscription deal, and I inscribed the books with my fountain pen, which felt cosmopolitan but also made them harder to resell. He’d text a thanks, saying he was excited to crack them open, but he never told me if he finished them. 

For my part, I was hoping the books might give us something to talk about. He knew I couldn’t bring myself to care about parenthood, and there was only so much I could tell him about school or Pamela. It was getting harder to keep up the act that things were going well on either front. When the internships fell through, I didn’t let Kyle or anyone back home know. 

*

I practically grew up in Junie’s house, and as I entered the neighborhood, familiar sights leapt out, like the tennis court where Kyle and I would set off bottle rockets. For a long time the pavement was cracked and the net in shreds, but it had been fixed up while I was away. People were actually playing tennis. I passed the corner store where the Vietnamese clerks would sell us cigarettes in middle school. We said they were for Junie, but they never cared. 

I walked around to the back patio and the screen door where friends and family were welcomed. Junie lit up when she saw me. 

“There’s the Snuffleupagus!” She smiled through wet eyes. 

Something that looked like a rope was trailing behind her. It was an oxygen tube. She wrapped me in a body hug, and I could hear the oxygen hissing into her nostrils. The tube went on forever, trailing into the house, through the kitchen, to wherever the tank was stored.

“I’m glad you’re here, kiddo.”

“I couldn’t believe the news,” I said. 

“My boy got too far away, Marty,” she said before letting go. 

Apollonia and Rae were in the kitchen. Apollonia’s hair was different: once mahogany, it had gone blonde at some point and was growing out, so it looked like a paintbrush that had been rinsed. She wore a sweatshirt in our high school’s green and gold. 

Rae had wised up her look: a senior now, taller and thinner, wearing a stylish sweater, her blonde hair tucked beneath a maroon rebel beret. I hugged her, then gave a one-armed hug to Apollonia, who had the boy in her arms. 

“I’m so sorry, A,” I said. She sighed into my ear. She looked at Cooper and I said, “This is your little guy.” Cooper’s shirt said I’m the one they call heartbreaker.

“This is Cooper. Can we say hi to Marty, Coop?”

With his sea-gray eyes, the boy sized me up warily, then, as though embarrassed, buried his face in Apollonia’s neck.

“We’re a little shy around strangers,” she said. And then, to me: “Thanks for coming, Marty. I know this is taking you away from a busy schedule. Classes and all that.”

I couldn’t help but think, And now it starts. It shouldn’t have surprised me that Apollonia would be passive-aggressive even in mourning. “He was my best friend,” I said. 

I held back on saying, I knew him longer than you. 

Junie was moving around the kitchen with her oxygen tether. “A Cherry Coke, Marty?”

Cherry Coke was a treat I had long associated with Junie’s house, since my parents never let me drink soda at home. At college, pour-over coffee had become my go-to morning beverage. Cherry Coke felt like a strange, childish decadence before noon. 

 “For old time’s sake,” she said, and proceeded to crack out some ice. The cubes clinked into a glass and the soda gurgled over them. With one sip, everything came back. 

*

The furniture in the living room had been rearranged, which I suspected was to let Junie move around with her tube. None of the seats faced in a direction that made sense. Cooper’s play mat lay in the middle of the floor. A talk show was blaring, and nobody moved to turn it off.

Junie settled into her chair with a grunt. On her side table stood a village of pill bottles amid a rubble pile of junk mail and scratch tickets. “Excuse our blessed mess, Marty,” Junie said as I surveyed the room for a place to sit. “Been a hectic couple of days.” 

The blessed mess was more than a couple of days old. The couch and chairs were piled with newspapers, toys, board books, and motorcycle magazines. There were cereal and cracker boxes and soda bottles on the floor. The scatter made me anxious even though I lived in a dormitory.

“I can help with some of it,” I said, trying not to sound judgmental. I looked for a coaster to set down my glass.

“Anywhere’s fine, Marty.” Apollonia said, almost with a sigh. She motioned me downward. “You didn’t come here to clean.” 

“I’m here for whatever you want,” I said. I parked myself on the floor by the sofa. Apollonia set Cooper down on the play mat and stood over him. 

“What I want is to go downstairs,” Junie said firmly. “It’s my house. I want to see his room.” I sensed she was picking up a conversation that had started before I got there.

“We can’t go down there, Nana,” Apollonia said wearily. “What’s that going to do?” 

“The cops said, Ma,” said Rae, hidden from my line of vision by Junie’s chair.

Junie said, “See what happens when you get sick, Marty? The people who love you leash you up like a dog.”

Apollonia explained that Junie’s emphysema kept her confined to the first floor, doctor’s orders. “As you see,” Apollonia said, “we’re still adjusting.” 

This was a new trick, Apollonia talking like she was the head of the household. Everything phrased with that we that moms use. Junie was “Nana” now because that’s who she was to Cooper. 

“We just had a nap,” Apollonia said tiredly. She meant Cooper. He kept running back and forth past Junie, who had to jump rope her oxygen tube over his head so the boy wouldn’t trip. “And now we’re full of beans. Aren’t we, Coop?”

I moved to join Apollonia on the play mat as she tried to settle down the kid. He seemed perplexed that I was there. One thing I didn’t say was how much Cooper reminded me of Kyle: the gray bug eyes, the clumsiness. He was tumbling around on the same floor where Kyle and I would build cities out of Legos. Now the Legos were gone and in place of my best friend was this new miniature Kyle, slick and alien and without a vocabulary. 

*

I tried making eye contact with Apollonia, nod toward the kitchen—you, me, five minutes?—but her attention was focused squarely on the kid. The TV was unnerving me, the talk-show audience applauding into my ear. 

Rae spoke up from behind Junie. 

“Marty,” she said. “Weren’t you in Geneva or something last year?”

I should have expected that the bullshit I had been feeding Kyle would have trickled out. “It was for this work-study thing,” I said. “There were only a few slots.”

I could sense a follow-up question coming. 

“I stayed in Chicago,” I said. “I had some things going on.”

“Oh, right, your girlfriend!” Junie said. “Kyle mentioned a girlfriend.” 

Rae said, “Nobody has girlfriends in college, Ma.”

“Since when? You don’t date? Is that true, Marty?”

I tried to explain but could hear it coming out ridiculous: I had a girlfriend, one that I dated in the way that college students date, as I gathered Rae understood: not about movies or dinner but where you’re in each other’s room all the time, like dorm spouses. 

My relationship with Pamela strained over the summer when our crowd had thinned. Fall semester got underway and I knew my grades were beyond help, and we had an ugly, public argument in the library. Shushes rained down from the balcony. 

“I don’t know how much longer I’ll be at school, to be honest,” I said.  

Rae said, “For real?” 

“I am getting an A in ethics,” I said. 

“That’s not surprising,” Junie said. “You’ve always been an ethical kid.”

I felt like I should be doing something to help and needed to get away from the TV, so I offered to get lunch for everyone. I once heard that grief makes people forget to feed themselves. 

“Oh, that’s sweet, Marty,” Junie said. “But I don’t think anyone’s hungry right now.”

Rae offered an alternative. “If you want to help, you can take us to the laundromat.”

Junie hummed like it was a good idea. I tried to puzzle out why it was needed.

“We’ll need clothes for the funeral,” Rae said. “We can’t do laundry downstairs, because it’s technically a crime scene.”

*

What Rae really wanted was a cigarette. The oxygen had made smoking in the house a no-go. Apollonia didn’t say a word as Rae and I lugged the baskets out to my car. I couldn’t remember the last time the two of us had been in the same place alone.

 “Can’t listen to it anymore,” she said, exhaling smoke in the car.

 “It’s so loud in there.” 

“I mean the denial. It’s boring,” she said. “Hectic couple of days. Sure, Ma, let’s not overstate it.”

“Your mother’s in shock, I imagine.”

“She wants to replay what happened so she can blame herself. We had no way to get her down there. She thought she could just yell at him. I’m like, no, Ma, he’s unresponsive. We need 911.”

“When did this happen?”

“Sunday morning. I was making omelets and Ma called downstairs to ask if Kyle wanted one. There’s no answer, so I go down, and he’s sitting there on the fucking dryer, eyes half open, like one of those old dolls with the glass eyes. You know the ones I mean?”

“Jesus, Rae, that’s rough.”

“And Apollonia was useless. She couldn’t dial three numbers on the fucking phone. I had to do that part, too. All while arguing with my mother.”

“Oh, no.”

“I made them carry him out the bulkhead. I told the paramedics, you have to understand, my mother cannot see her dead son being rolled through her kitchen under a sheet. They got it, at least. They saw she was a handful. She wanted to see his body. ‘He can’t leave! He can’t leave!’ I’m like, Ma, he’s blue. You don’t want to see him now. Wait for the funeral.”

“When is the funeral? 

“Reverend Colin’s supposed to come by and go over things this afternoon. You might want to bail. Apollonia’s gonna wig.”

“Why?”

“Why else? Because it won’t be about her.”

*

The laundromat had been in a run-down neighborhood, but in the time I’d been gone it had been gentrified—cocktail bars, a hipster bike shop, a café that sold nothing but soup. Even the laundromat had been converted into something extra. The washers and dryers were retro-designed, seafoam green and trimmed in chrome. There were arcade games, swing music, and a counter where a girl in a hoop skirt served root beer floats. The place was packed.

I helped Rae sort. The baskets were filled with gymwear and pajama pants, not items you’d wear to a funeral. In her itch to leave, Rae had grabbed whatever she could from the hamper. There was the Tintin T-shirt that I had bought for Kyle at a comics expo. I didn’t see the point of washing Kyle’s clothes, but it felt cruel to say this.

While the washers were filling, the pinball machine became available, so I ordered two floats while Rae got more quarters. She popped in two and the music started up. It was a Rocky and Bullwinkle machine. I stood at the side and watched the ball dither at the top of the columns before it fell through and the bumpers took over. 

I asked why Apollonia had been so quiet. 

“What’d you expect her to say?” Rae talked over the bells. 

“I don’t know. She’s got to be wondering what’s next, right?”

“Marty, none of us know what’s next. Her kid’s without a father now. My nephew. We haven’t talked about that. We haven’t talked about anything. I’m missing school while we’re waiting for someone to come and tell us what to do.”

Rae was playing with serious attention while she talked. She lit up the WABAC machine on her first ball. 

“Where’s he been getting the stuff?” I said, forgetting to change my tenses. 

“Guys at his work, we think. You know how you fall in with people?”

“His new crowd then.” 

“They were his buds.”

“Because I wasn’t around.”

There was a pause, then Rae said, “Not because, Marty. You just weren’t around. Shit.” She had taken her eye off the ball to look at me and it fell through the flippers. 

I switched with her to play the next one.   

“I’m confused,” I said. “From what Apollonia posted, it sounded like they were doing all right.”

“Why would you believe anything Apollonia posts?”

“Well, I’ve never known her to lie.” 

“She doesn’t lie; she performs. What else is she going to do? Gets pinned to my brother, gets knocked up, then Ma gets sick. She sees an opening and moves in. That shit she posts is the Apollonia Show. ‘Here’s Cooper out with Nana! We’re eating ice cream! We’re having fun at the splash pad! Our daddy’s an addict and we’re living a lie!’”

I couldn’t help it: I laughed. Rae had it all down: the we I noticed before, the singsongy tone of Apollonia’s posts. Phony as they were, they were pretty much all I heard about Kyle.  

“Then she’ll complain about how exhausting it is to raise a toddler. ‘We were up at five a.m. today! We had a tantrum and knocked our cereal on the floor!’ All so the other moms can throw their support. It’s a cult. You see it’s bullshit. That’s why she won’t talk to you. She knows you know.”

“Seems like so much work,” I said absently as I lost my ball. “It’s got to feel lonely.” 

Rae took back over and said, “I don’t have time for people’s feelings, Marty.” She released the plunger. “I’m in high school.”

*

We took our floats outside and lit cigarettes. Rae said, “Do you remember Mr. Gus?”

“Of course.”

Mr. Gus was the longtime art teacher at the high school. He had a last name nobody could pronounce, so he was Mr. Gus. Barely five feet tall, he would slink behind you like he was evading a police spotlight, then stab a finger on your charcoal drawing, smudging the line. Then he’d say, “I love what you’re doing there. Keep going.” Everybody loved Mr. Gus. 

“He’s helping me apply to art schools,” she said. “I’m thinking about Chicago.”

“Holy shit,” I said. “That’s ambitious.”

I meant it as a compliment, but Rae’s expression showed she didn’t interpret it that way. I had seen her paintings on Instagram—uncanny figures with yellow eyes and green faces—and envied her talent. I was pretty sure Kyle had modeled for some. There were a few of Cooper, too.

Rae said, “You’re right, Marty, what was I thinking?” 

“That’s not what I meant. I’m just down on school right now.”

“Are you really flunking out? What are you doing out there? You’re supposed to be the smart one.” She was mocking me in a fake mutter. I shrugged, hoping she would keep going. 

“You made college sound awesome,” she said. “Reading books, the shows, the Geneva thing. Real conversations. I wanted to follow you. I’ve got to get out of here.”

“You’ll do great. I don’t know who I am anymore.”

“So, what’s wrong with that? You go through and come out the other end and you’re different from when you left. Isn’t that what’s supposed to happen? I always admired that you weren’t scared.” She looked upset and I was starting to catch on. 

“Who said I wasn’t scared?”

“Well, you never came back to tell us! So we figured things were going swell. I know that’s what Kyle thought. Don’t come back and act surprised that people still care about you.”

Then she said, “I’m not going to wait for something to happen to me like Apollonia did. If things go right, then I’m going to Chicago. Be nice if I knew someone there.”

I drew the schematics in my head. “Who looks after your mom, then?” 

Her face fell again. “Don’t do that to me,” she said. “Don’t you dare.”

*

There was a Prius in the driveway. Rae and I hefted the laundry in from the curb. At the kitchen table, Apollonia sat with Cooper on her lap, talking to Junie and Reverend Colin. On the table sat one half of a marble cake. 

“Kyle’s best friend,” was how Junie introduced me. I felt a weight of responsibility tossed my way. “Since they were babies. He drove all the way from Chicago.”

“Sir,” I said. Fourteen months around clergy and I still didn’t know how to address them. On campus they walked alongside you; they chatted you up about any secular topic at the waffle bar while they avoided dripping batter on their frock sleeves. 

Reverend Colin rose and shook my hand and held onto it in that discomfiting way that people of the cloth have. “I feel I’ve heard a lot about you, Marty,” he said. 

He wasn’t wearing a collar. His relaxed look reminded me of the TAs at school: selvedge jeans, a red turtleneck shirt, wool socks, and slip-ons. I didn’t know how old you had to be to become a pastor, but Colin had to be barely over the threshold. 

Kyle had never mentioned church, probably keen on my suspicions. Given his troubles, it was comforting to think that he had a place to look for answers. “This must be an extreme loss for you,” Reverend Colin said, looking at me intently. “Our childhood friends are our first friends. They know us in our purest form, before we’re discolored by adulthood. Marty, I’m terribly sorry.”

Without asking, Junie poured more Cherry Coke for Rae and myself and cut us each a slice of cake. Cooper squirmed off his mother’s lap and ran to his play mat. Reverend Colin invited me to join them, but there were only four chairs, and since I figured they’d be discussing family matters, I brought my cake into the living room. The TV had been muted and was playing local news. 

Cooper was playing with blocks—the big, chunky kind they give kids who are too young for Legos. I said, “Whatcha building there, Coop?” 

I felt like a cedar tree blocking his sunlight. He ignored me at first, but after a few moments he looked at me and spat out a word: om, or maybe it was home. It was the first sound he’d uttered since I had arrived. 

I looked back to see if the others heard it, but they were deep in conversation. Stepping over the oxygen, I moved to the doorway to listen. Reverend Colin was handing out sheets from a folder. “It’s a bit of a standard choice, but I was looking over this one from Isaiah. ‘He will swallow up death forever.’”

“Like a black hole?” Rae said. 

“In a way. It’s about a feast, essentially.” 

The room was quiet as they read to themselves. 

“I like the part about the food and the wine,” Apollonia said. I could hear her sniffling.

“‘Rich food filled with marrow, of well-aged wines strained clear.’ I agree, Apollonia, there’s some evocative language there. My thinking is this, Junie. There’s going to be this giant elephant in the room. Everyone who loved Kyle knew he wasn’t getting fed what he needed. This shouldn’t be about his tragedy. A eulogy is how we tell a person’s story, and I know each of us at the table has a story about Kyle they think should be told, about the complicated person we knew and how he lived. How he showed his love even as he suffered.”

I felt the dread that descends partway through a lecture when you realize you read the wrong chapter, and nothing anyone is saying sounds like what you thought you knew.  

I decided to leave them alone. I finished my cake and set the plate on the coffee table. The door to the basement was in the hallway. I slunk along the wall so the family couldn’t see me, opened the door, and slipped downstairs. 

<

*

The basement was where Kyle, Rae, and I hung out as kids—afternoons of Xbox, pizza rolls, board games, movie marathons, bug juice. It had a black leather couch massive enough for three teenagers to stretch out with space left over. 

But the couch was gone. In its place was Kyle and Apollonia’s bed, a mattress and box spring stacked on the floor. Next to it, a makeshift crib had been set up for Cooper. The door to the laundry room was closed with no light coming through the slats. 

Detritus filled the space—clothes, toys, shopping bags, pizza boxes, receipts, comic books. Things from our high school days—posters, Kyle’s old wrestling trophies. There was a book on Kyle’s night table, and as I moved closer I saw it was the Camus I had sent him. He hadn’t finished it, but I could tell that someone had been reading it—there was a Walgreens receipt from two months ago where part one ended, right after Meursault kills the Arab. 

I could hear voices overhead becoming upset. Chair legs scraped the floor. The heavy sounds told me that Junie was moving around the room.  

Rae’s voice was rising: “He did this to us, Ma! You and me and A and Cooper.” There were words I couldn’t make out in the cross talk, then Rae again: “It’s right there and we’re gonna pretend it’s not?”

I put down the book and went upstairs. Junie was looking out at the backyard. “It’s my son’s service,” she said. “He doesn’t need to be analyzed.” 

“We’re insulting him if we don’t talk about it,” Rae said. She looked at me like she was expecting me to back her up. But Junie had opened the screen door and stepped onto the porch. 

Reverend Colin rotated his head as though trying to corral Junie and the others back to the table with his eyes. “We are talking about an addiction here. It’s a sickness. It traps you. Kyle was trapped by his sickness. And to feel rage at the beast that confined him is a normal, loving act.”

The room was quiet. I felt like I shouldn’t move. Apollonia had her face in her hands, tissues squeezed in her fists. Rae, still tense with anger, collected the cake dishes and brought them to the sink. She turned on the water and began to wash them as though needing to scrub something away.

“It’s okay to feel angry, and it’s okay to direct that anger at God,” Reverend Colin said. “But I think you should ask yourselves if that’s how you want this to—”

There was a thunk in the living room, something falling over. Apollonia said, “Is that Coop?” She pushed back her chair and shoved past me. 

Rae turned off the water and glared at me. “Where were you?” she mouthed.  

I ignored her and followed Apollonia. Cooper was on the floor. The oxygen tube was coiled around his neck like a python. 

“Marty!” Apollonia said. “You were watching him!”

“I went downstairs for a second. I’m sorry!”

“No one’s supposed to be down there!” 

Cooper started to cry. In order to free him, Rae had to coax Junie back into the kitchen to give the tube more slack. Then Apollonia pulled it over the boy’s head. 

Junie asked, “Is he okay?”

Apollonia said, “We’re fine, Nana.”

She was furious. When Cooper was freed, he got up and started running around again. Apollonia flung the tube to the floor like it was a spiderweb stuck to her hand.

“Hey, I’m sorry,” I said again. 

“Marty didn’t know,” said Junie. “He’s not used to watching kids.”

“It’s not that, Nana.” Apollonia was wiping tears away, following Cooper with her eyes through her fingers. “Probably not his idea of fun, coming back to our scumhole.”

Cooper circled back and buried his face into Apollonia’s leg.

By that point everyone was looking at me, including Junie, who had lumbered back into the living room, and Reverend Colin, whose folded arms suggested that he had seen enough dysfunction in families to let it play out. 

It occurred to me that grace had two kinds of opposites, like the way easy and soft were both the opposite of hard. You could be graceless, or you could be disgraceful. 

“What does that mean, A?” I said. “I don’t get it.”

“I mean you’ve been holding your nose the whole time you’ve been here, Marty. I’m not sure why you even came.”

“I came to help,” I said. 

“We don’t need you to do our laundry,” she said. “Really, we’re okay!”

“I can do the whole house, A,” I said. “I’ll scrub it till it shines.”

Everyone looked at me. After a moment, Junie came over and hugged me. The oxygen hissed in my ear. “No, no, Marty,” she said quietly. “We don’t say those things. We don’t joke about such things, not at all.”

*

I found my parents in the kitchen. There was music on and they were making a salad. Mom asked if I was staying.

“For good, you mean?” 

She looked at me, knife in hand. “I meant for dinner. But if there’s a problem, Marty.”

My father was eating cherry tomatoes, a saltshaker in one hand. “Hey! How’s the family holding up?” he asked, as though he had just been reminded why I was there.

“Pretty sure I made things worse,” I said. They waited for me to explain, but I let it go. 

“Probably not as bad as you think,” my father finally said, in his way. 

He offered to make me a cocktail if I promised to stay the night. He got out the bourbon, the mixing glass, the jigger. I watched carefully as he measured, thinking I might soon need to learn a trade. 

He made me a simple Manhattan with a maraschino cherry nestled at the bottom. I sipped it slowly. Then he made one for himself and one for my mother, and we toasted to Kyle. 

Then he said, “Come see what we’ve done with your room,” and I followed him upstairs to where I once had my dreams.  

What inspired you to write The Dive Reflex?

This essay was formed in response to a prompt Mark Doty gave while I was attending the Writing by Writers Tomales Bay workshop. Part one of the prompt was to recall a significant location and write a description of it for five minutes, relying on all five senses; part two was to write about an entirely different topic that associatively connects to the first. I wrote about the Waukesha public pool because it was the first place I learned how to swim, and water has always been this charged space of mystery and belonging, safety and power for me. The second topic I wrote about was wearing an eyepatch as a kid to strengthen my vision, which on the surface seems totally random, but relates to underlying questions of perception and vulnerability I was trying to grapple with throughout the essay.

Was there anything unique or striking about the writing or research process?

It’s always a thrill to look back and notice where intuition takes over during the writing process–I’ve found the most significant memories and moments of understanding shine through when I give myself permission to wander. This can sometimes be nerve wracking during the initial drafting because it’s not always clear what material will be useful and what might be interesting, but doesn’t serve the project. There’s a bit of a push and pull going on between the subconscious and the intentions a writer lays out.

I was shocked, for example, when my mother found a way into this essay. When I wrote the first draft a few years ago, I’d been exploring themes of childhood/family at length in my writing, and actively wanted to shift focus. I wanted to write a love story about my then-boyfriend (now-husband), and this essay is certainly that, but it’s also about risk, fear, and the wisdom I inherited from my mother, who inherited wisdom from her mother in turn. When considering how women pass along knowledge in a family–especially innate, non-rational knowledge–this essay becomes another kind of love story, one about heritage. I couldn’t tell one without mentioning the other, even briefly.

Have you read anything recently that you’d like to recommend to readers?

Recently I’ve been reading a lot of coming-of-age novels for inspiration while I work on my first book. Beautyland by Marie-Helene Bertino, Now Is Not the Time to Panic by Kevin Wilson, The Knockout Queen by Rufi Thorpe are a few recent favorites.

Where can we learn more about you and your work?

Website: kayleighnorgord.com
Instagram: @kayleighnorgord

What inspired you to write “Trigger Warning, “Nostalgia and other risks” and “between us?” And was there anything unique or striking about the writing or research process? 

Of these three, “between us” has the clearest origin story: a trip to the zoo with my siblings. Time with my siblings often prompts me to write because they are simultaneously the humans I communicate best with and the humans I communicate worst with. And I love writing in response to zoos and museums; we go to these places to encounter animals or artifacts, but what we actually encounter is often our distance from those animals and artifacts–arranged and choreographed into an experience that we move through. Any time I can combine fact-learning and people-watching, a poem is likely to result. 

Have you read anything recently that you’d like to recommend to readers? 

I’ve just reread (for maybe the 10th time) Stolen Air (Christian Wiman’s versions of Osip Mandelstam’s poems)

Where we can learn more about you and your work?

www.ceridwenhall.com