Reflecting on his time in Kraków, Poland, Michael Downs considers how war and sieges affect people, especially children. His essay “Report” recalls events laced with the brutal reality of pain while reminding readers of the hope and warmth that remains.

TMR’s online-only prose anthology, BLAST features prose too vibrant to be confined between the covers of a print journal.

Photo by Michael Downs

***

Report

we look at the face of hunger the face of fire the face of death
and the worst of them all—the face of treason

and only our dreams have not been humiliated

–Zbigniew Herbert, “Report from a Besieged City,” translation by Czesław Miłosz

What emerges from behind peeling paint is another painting—a painting of a girl. What has covered her, a surface coat of water-stained beige, flakes away from the wall in this Kraków courtyard. The girl, who is life-sized, holds a spot fifteen or twenty feet up, high enough that I raise my chin to study her. She wears a blouse buttoned at the collar, her torso and arms visible only to the elbow, and she grimaces. The skin of her face and arms is washed-out gray-blue, cool and unsettling because it lacks human warmth: unalive. But her eyes are vivid—intense, accusatory. I imagine that she has been wronged. The wall, which is windowless, ascends above her—several floors—to reach empty sky, and its scale makes the girl small, a blemish, inconsequential. Later, after I text a photo of the painting across the ocean to my wife in the United States, Sheri will write back that the girl looks unhappy. After that, I will think of her that way. Unhappy girl.

A friend uses the courtyard for his bicycle tour business, but he does not own the wall, which belongs to a neighboring hotel. When I first ask him about the girl, it’s late June 2025—summer solstice, the year’s longest day and shortest night. In Kraków the solstice comes with a folk tradition called Wianki. Everywhere girls wear floral wreaths as crowns. The sun climbs and climbs. A dangerous heat wave will arrive in a bit more than a week.

My friend tells me the girl appeared only a few months ago. He says that in communist times this courtyard was home to a wine bar, a rarity then. The communist government considered wine bourgeois, made it hard to get, so his grandparents and others of their generation brought empty glass jugs and bottles here to fill. He suggests the unhappy girl might have been part of the wine bar’s decor. In that context, I imagine her looking out through the window of a communist-era tenement. The flaking beige becomes a moth-eaten curtain.

I’m also aware that if this girl were painted during communist times, she might have been a protest meant to confound authorities. To live in Poland then was to live amidst private semiotics, secret codes, subversive language.

My friend’s shop adjoins the courtyard. People from all over the world take his bicycle tours. He’s expert in the history of this breathtaking, bewildering city—dating from the age of legends and royalty and tortured saints through to Nazi occupation and its Jewish genocide, then to martial law and the collapse of communism. He stores my bicycle during the months-long stretches between my visits to Kraków, which is kind.

When I suggest scraping to fully reveal the girl, he shrugs. Let rain and sun unveil her discontent. I understand his indifference. When your city has known occupation by Soviets, invasion from Austro-Hungarians, Swedes, and Mongols, and counts among its citizens Nobel-Prize-winning poets, Pope John Paul II, and Copernicus, a painting of a girl on a wall is even less than a historical footnote.

Except, this girl is right here with me. She is both history and now. Her unhappiness travels through time, feels palpable yet is enigmatic, beyond comfort or rescue because she is paint on a wall. All I know to do is to study her.

The artist painted her with a simple palette: chalky or baby-powder white contrasted with shades of blue-gray. She is Caucasian, this girl, her features drawn in the same dark blue as her skirt. She emerges from a background golden as honey. About her, I wonder everything. Solitary and silent, she gives no answers.

I take a few photos with my phone. Moments later, I’m bicycling around the medieval market square, tires bumping over cobblestones, ever-alert pigeons alighting at my approach. All about are tourists gawking at Gothic towers and the statue of a patriotic poet, and also about are people who cater to the whims of tourists. My heart wants sunlight and solstice magic, because I’ve only this day arrived in Kraków, and Kraków—for all its historic burdens and because of its historic burdens—is among my favorite places in the world. A second home. But.

She’s with me, that unhappy girl, caught inside my phone, secreted in a pants pocket. We’ll meet again.

***

A different girl comes to mind. A girl with a balloon, then without. A different unhappy girl.

This also happened in Kraków, in the same medieval market square, three years earlier.

In those days, my wife and I lived in Kraków—received mail there, racked our wet laundry to dry on our balcony like proper Poles, parked our bicycles in our apartment. We had arrived in Poland toward the end of the pandemic on a ten-month cultural exchange, and we stayed even as Putin renewed his mad war against Ukraine. The Ukraine–Poland border lies about a three-hour drive to the east. Consequently, Kraków’s population grew; estimates said that over several weeks, the city added some 200 thousand Ukrainians—about a third again its previous population. General orders from Ukraine’s government kept men home to fight the war. So most who fled were women and children.

In Kraków, store shelves emptied of toilet paper and granola. Lines grew long for street food. Hotels donated empty rooms as emergency housing. Poles dropped off household goods at one side of a soccer stadium, while Ukrainians left the other side with donations. School districts enrolled Ukrainian children and hired Ukrainian teachers to teach them. We marveled at all this effort and efficiency but weren’t surprised. Poles have learned through hard experience what must be done during wartime.

One day that spring, Sheri and I had returned from a long pedal through the city’s outskirts. She had gone into a shop for chewing gum. I stayed outside with our bicycles, to enjoy the warm easy air.

An older woman and a girl walked toward me. They held hands, the older woman leading—no, guiding. The girl pulled this way and that. If not tethered by the older woman’s hand, she might have wandered anywhere. The girl could have been maybe seven or even nine. In T-shirt and shorts, leggy and gangly. She scattered her attention: aimed it there, there, there. She held in her other hand the string of a helium balloon.

Then she let it go.

She did not intend to. But the line slipped from her grip and the balloon shot up, then floated west, even farther away from the war.

The girl wailed. Her knees buckled. She sprawled. For a moment, not having noticed the girl’s collapse, the older woman dragged the girl over the cobblestones. Then she bent over, cooed. But the girl didn’t stop wailing. Eventually, the woman forced the girl to stand, then marched her step-by-staggering-step, the girl thrashing with her arms as if needing release from the world’s tight fist.

By the time Sheri returned, the woman and girl had moved on. I told Sheri what I’d seen, then we bicycled for home. On the way I saw again that girl and woman. Now, the woman sat on a low stone wall beside a small, thousand-year-old church. The girl lay across the woman’s lap—too long for such a pose—and she kicked air and swung fists and sometimes hit the woman. She didn’t aim—only swung and struck. She made terrible sounds. Shrieks, wails, growls.

Nearby, a man sold balloons, so I turned my bicycle toward him. The price he asked would have been high for a typical Kraków resident—one balloon about the same as five pints of grocery-store beer. Clearly, he targeted wealthy tourists, not Ukrainians fleeing war. Perhaps the woman had splurged on a balloon for the girl but could only afford the one. I picked out a Mickey Mouse balloon, I think. Or Minnie.

The girl stopped her thrashing and wailing, and I knotted the line to her wrist. Her eyes were dry; she’d not cried, only raged. We spoke a bit with the woman, our meager Polish meeting her scant English. Yes, she told us, from Ukraine. This girl? Her granddaughter.

The woman thanked us, and we wished them well. Then we rode off into what remained of our day, of our lives.

***

What drew me to Kraków that summer solstice was to teach creative writing to American graduate students. One morning, because of a room-scheduling slipup, the students and I moved class outdoors to a park. We sat on grass. Wind-tossed seedlings settled on our shoulders and in our hair like confetti. I directed us to a spot near a bust of the famous poet Zbigniew Herbert where we could discuss his classic “Report from a Besieged City.” We’d read the poem as translated into English by Czesław Miłosz, also a Polish poet and winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature.

The Polish language makes do without articles—no the or a or an—so literally Herbert’s poem in English could be titled “Report from Besieged City.” Miłosz added the a. He did not choose the. The indefinite article means this report could come from any besieged city—not just Warsaw, where Herbert finished the poem and which was then, in 1982, like all of Poland, under the homegrown siege of martial law. Military vehicles in the streets. Dissidents jailed. Soldiers on street corners. Phones bugged. Publications censored.

Herbert’s poem depicts the spiritual and psychological cost of living under siege, a civilian population entangled with war. All sense of time vanishes; the siege, the poem’s speaker tells us, might have lasted centuries, or it might just have begun at dawn. Horrors become monotonous, recited as one recites the days of the week. Cemeteries grow.

And about the children? “With a certain pride,” the speaker announces,

. . . I wish to convey to the world
thanks to the war we raised a new species of children
our children don’t like fairy tales they play killing
day and night they dream of soup bread bones

***

After I’d posted a picture of that unhappy girl in the courtyard on a social media site, a friend who is a visual artist wrote, “I think it could be Diane Arbus’ photo of the boy with the toy hand grenade?”

Not a girl?

No. Not a girl. Definitely a rendering of the Diane Arbus photograph.

Child with Toy Hand Grenade in Central Park, N.Y.C., 1962 depicts one of Diane Arbus’s early grotesques, a boy who has become famous to many but for me was unfamiliar. A quick internet search confirmed the connection. What I took as a skirt is a boy’s jumper. Not the long hair of a girl, but an aura of chalky white added by the painter around the boy’s close-cropped blond head. There’s no aura in Arbus’s black-and-white photo, nor is the child’s skin tinted blue. So, not a copy of Arbus’s subject but a brushwork doppelganger.

Another difference: Arbus presents the boy from head-to-toe, suggesting vibrancy and movement: face in a playful growling rictus, mimicking the adrenaline rage of a soldier. Jaws clenched, the boy holds his skinny, coltish limbs so rigid you can almost see them trembling. He keeps his arms close to his sides, parallel lines. One hand holds nothing, but shapes a claw. In the other, he clutches a toy grenade.

He’s angry. He’s a boy. He’s goofing around. He’s the dawning of violence. He’s maniacal frustration. He’s a kid in a park. His world, and ours, is about to explode.

That boy grew up. Many journalists have written about him and about who he was then, aged seven, when he clutched the grenade. In real life, what the kid knew of war was the domestic sort. His Upper West Side parents had recently divorced, and, yes, he felt that conflict like shrapnel shredding his insides. That mayhem shows in the grimace, the rigidity, the awful angst in imitation of soldiers he’d seen on movie screens. Hype yourself up, toss the grenade, storm the hill.

For years to come, Arbus’s photo of the frantic boy and his toy grenade would be deployed by anarchists and by punk rock bands to illustrate their album covers and by peace activists as an anti-war visual.

And someone would paint a Polish counterpart—cousin or sibling to Arbus’s—on a wall in Kraków. Another child of violence with a psyche under siege.

Others would paint over it.

But the paint flecks away. These besieged children—our new and ancient breed of offspring—can’t be hidden from view.

***

In 2022, two weeks and one day after Putin launched his mud-and-blood assault on Ukraine, Sheri and I joined the aid effort at Kraków’s train depot. Anything we could do would be akin to nothing, but we wanted to do something.

Many of the women and children fleeing bombs and death came via train. Some continued beyond Kraków, others decamped into the city. Still others spread blankets in the depot and slept there.

“The trains keep coming,” Sheri noted. So many stunned and dazed faces. People with their lives in bags.

Local troops of Poland’s Harcerze, the Scouts of Poland—something like America’s Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts, though combined—had set up aid stations where, for a few hours, Sheri and I worked. Wearing a yellow vest that marked me as “helper” and standing in front of a table with urns, I poured probably a couple hundred cups of tea and instant coffee. I learned that the word for tea in Ukrainian is pronounced like chai. Sheri, also in yellow, filled a hundred soup bowls. Working the front counter were Laura, who told us she was Ukrainian, and a tall fellow who introduced himself as Dominik. Dominik decided that any cup of coffee I made, because I was from the United States, was an Americano. Uncountable yellow-vests came and went, resupplying, distributing goods, crowding the space so that we dodged each other’s arms and elbows. Laura and Dominik kept the chaos cheerful as Ukrainian women crowded the aid station to request soup, ramen, and toiletries.

Later, Sheri and I walked around the depot past dozens of families spread out on camping mattresses, their blankets smartly folded. We handed out donated boxes of milk. On the way to the station I had purchased fabric stickers of smiley-face emojis that I now helped kids affix to their coats. They gave back smiles. “Thank you very much,” one blond boy said. “Thank you very much,” over and over. “Thank you very much.”

***

What will become of them, these besieged children? What will become of them in Gaza, in South Sudan, in Mexico’s cartel—controlled towns, in the murderous streets of Baltimore where I live, in the hallways of American schools? What will become of those who now live in Kraków?

When my summer work finished, I stayed in Kraków for an extra day, long enough to snap more photos of that emerging artwork I now knew as a boy squeezing a toy grenade. The next morning, at an airport gate, a group of young woman wearing blue athletic gear drew my attention. They wore Ukraine’s golden trident on the right breast of their coats. Some looked very young, perhaps even fourteen. Others might have been a few years older.

They all carried overfilled backpacks from which dangled childish charms. A heart decorated like the Ukrainian flag, and beside it, a Stars and Stripes keychain. A small plush toy, a lamb. Pins from a variety of countries, and one from Florida, in rainbow colors, that read, “We are St. Pete.”

At boarding, I lined up near the team. “We’re Ukraine’s national softball team,” one told me. This surprised me. If I were to meet the American national softball team, I’d expect women, not girls, college-age at least, with some in their thirties. Having worked as a sportswriter for several years, I know what a national team looks like.

I tried to clarify. Were they a national age-group team, maybe the under-eighteens?

“No. The national team.”

So young, these girls, like no other national softball team. I did not ask, “Where are the older players?” I think I knew. War makes its demands on the able-bodied, the adults, the healthy. These girls in the airport, these children of a besieged country, were the players who could be spared, who ought to be spared.

They told me they were on their way to a tournament called the Canada Cup. Later, I learned they received funding from a Canadian team who raised money toward the Ukrainians’ travel costs. The funds came with a card that read, “Play ball, not war.”

Then we all found our seats, and everyone headed west, dozens of passengers and me—and these girls with their plush toys and charms. Does it matter that at the Canada Cup they would play seven games and win only one? Of course it does. No matter their age, they’re athletes, competitors. They didn’t travel across half the world to lose.

But their winning and losing doesn’t need to matter to me. What matters to me is to imagine them in British Columbia on a cool blue day. They’ve eaten energy bars or hot dogs. Guzzled sports drinks. Dived on basepaths and dirtied their uniforms. Their dreams are of the moment, their dreams are intact and possible: of a run batted in, of a double play turned. Those dreams won’t change reality; they’re still besieged girls. For a moment, though, and maybe forever, let them don batting helmets. Let them pound fists into their gloves. Let them grip softballs, and let them throw those—hard—across a diamond of mown grass.

***

Photo by Jane Siddall Thomas

Michael Downs is the author of three books, including most recently the novel The Strange and True Tale of Horace Wells, Surgeon Dentist. His awards include a literature fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts and a Fulbright Scholar Award through which he wrote and taught creative writing in Kraków, Poland. He lives in Baltimore, Maryland. 

Photo credit: “Siouxsie and Robert” by Tom Sheehan. Image copyright: Tom Sheehan. Not approved for duplication or download.

In his essay “Siouxsie, Susan, Robert, and Me,” Jaime Gill reflects on a life defined by music, how he grew alongside it, and how it serves as a means of connection. A touching chronology of vignettes, this essay asks how closely we can understand ourselves and those around us through song.

TMR’s online-only prose anthology, BLAST features prose too vibrant to be confined between the covers of a print journal.

***

Siouxsie, Susan, Robert, and Me

1983

I’m still a happy child, my mother’s still playing at happy housewife, and Robert Smith and Siouxsie Sioux are happy new bandmates. There’s a photograph of them taken together, looking like gleeful, decadent siblings. Smith’s kohl-lined eyes glow, perhaps relieved to have fled his doomy band The Cure for Sioux’s anarchic Banshees gang. He’s stifling a giggle while a fishwife-grinning Sioux grabs his face like she’s pinching a baby’s cheek. I’m seven and live deep in Northumberland’s interior, all rowdy rivers, sprawling farms, and forever fields. Me and my friends explore farmstead ruins we’ve been warned to avoid, build makeshift forts on riverine islands, and wriggle on our bellies through wheat fields, ruining crops as we create crushed path labyrinths. My mother’s waiting at home, the air full of her tobacco and music. The Banshees’ cover of “Dear Prudence” is on the tape deck constantly, jostling with Bowie’s oddity, Eurythmics’ icy electronica, and Soft Cell’s sleaze. My mother’s a twenty-nine-year-old rural mother of two but has the tastes of a subversive Soho teenager. Her stormy inner life is electrified by her music. It infects me, beautifully.

1984

Smith abandons the Banshees, sparking a lifelong feud with Sioux. He pilfers their sneaky pop playfulness, using it as the fuel for the reunited Cure’s unlikely ambush of the British charts. My parents also break up, also messily. My mother and I move to a small town, the first of a dozen upheavals dragging me ever further from childhood fields into dreary urbanity. My mother’s slow-motion unraveling begins.

1989

The Banshees tour their avant-garde hit “Peek-A-Boo,” while The Cure leap from British cult to global brand with their morose masterpiece album, Disintegration. As a nervous, unhappy thirteen-year-old, I devour it, obviously. My mother’s just divorced again, and we’ve washed up in a council estate stalked by poverty, addiction, and simmering menace. One day our house is burgled, stripped near-bare—later, the police charge our next-door neighbors. My mother fits in surprisingly well here, her drinking accelerated by unwise friendships. I don’t fit in—not here, not anywhere I know—so build my own private universes from songs taped off the radio. Music’s my religion and Pet Shop Boys, the Pixies, and Neneh Cherry are deities in my personal pantheon. I’m not sure who I am, and when I think of who I’ll become, I’m afraid.

1992

I watch The Cure at Newcastle Mayfair but despise their current hit and find the dimly lit show disappointingly dull. I see no glee in Smith now, his glum face buried under shadows and that magpie nest hairdo. Perhaps I’m itchy to leave old unhappiness behind, to return to the thrills I’m discovering on Newcastle’s gay scene. I’m finally living like a pop song—drugging, drinking, fucking, falling in love again and again. My mother’s been dead for four months, an unexpected earthquake for everyone but me—I felt the tremors early, the ground beneath my feet wobbling. I’m terribly broken and wonderfully free.

1999

I’m drunk-dancing to “Peek-A-Boo” in Duckie, London’s outcast nightclub, blood pumping with cheap speed and lager. It’s a revelation, this dingy cathedral where queers and pop stars gather to watch freakshow cabaret and hear Fleetwood Mac, the Chemical Brothers, and Madonna played in ramshackle succession. I forge friendships with alcohol-lubricated ease and improbably win a beautiful Slovak’s heart by mimicking Kate Bush’s “Wuthering Heights” dance routine. My mother would have loved this place. I’m plummeting through life, but there’s joy in the fall.

2004

The Banshees disintegrated two years ago but are trapped in amber on my new iPod. The Cure persist, still famous enough to bag a London-filmed MTV special. I’m clinging to my PR job by my fingernails, and a colleague gets me tickets but regrets it when I arrive, already slurring drunk. Marilyn Manson hosts and The Cure play a brief, ebullient set, though my alcohol-addled brain forgets the songs by next morning.

2012

The Cure are nominated for the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, but their stubborn longevity, prolificity, and popularity are sputtering—their last album flopped four long years ago. I’m sputtering, too, the pinballing hedonism of my twenties devolving into a thirtysomething’s plodding, zombie-like addiction. Friends don’t return calls, and I wake many mornings with a blank memory and mysterious bruises. In May, I lurch into an AA meeting, a wanted man handing himself into the joy police. I shiver and shake, just like the Cure song, convinced the best part of my life is over.

2024

The Cure break a sixteen-year silence to surprising jubilation, given the death-drenched despondency of their new album, recorded as Smith lost countless friends and family. I live in Cambodia now, writing at a desk with a view over the mighty Mekong River. My laptop’s flanked to its left by a framed photograph of my mother looking strangely Bjork-like, while the wall to my right is a pop collage. My pantheon is tangled with my mother’s. Her Bolan, Lennox, and Bowie vie with my Love, Ocean, and Del Rey—geniuses she never lived to know. Smith and Sioux are there, too, in that forty-two-year-old photograph. They never made peace with their turbulent past, but I have with mine, I think. I still dance joyfully to the Banshees and Cure, sometimes alone, sometimes with friends—grateful for sobriety, grateful for life.

I talk to my mother sometimes. Not often or for long. You’d love Suede, I say. You should have stuck around for Mulholland Drive, I say. Yeah, I know, you tried. I know this world is beautiful and wild as a Northumbrian field but the grass hides landmines and some of us are light or lucky enough to reach the other side intact while others aren’t. You did live, though, with all your messy passion. We danced together, remember—summer 1991, that last interlude of hope when you briefly sobered up. We strutted round the living room to T-Rex—laughing, magicked by music, as delighted in each other as Smith and Sioux in that brief moment made immortal.

***

Jaime Gill is a queer, British-born writer happily exiled in Cambodia, where he works and volunteers for nonprofits. He reads, runs, boxes, works, travels, writes, and occasionally socializes. His fiction has recently appeared in The Forge, Fractured Lit, Oyster River Pages, Trampset, f(r)iction, Phoebe, Waccamaw Journal, and more. His stories have won awards including a Bridport Prize, the 2025 Luminaire Prose Award, and the New Millennium Writers Award. He’s also a three-time Pushcart Prize nominee and currently working on a novel, a script, and many more short stories. More at jaimegill.com.

BLAST, TMR’s online-only prose anthology, features prose too vibrant to be confined between the covers of a print journal.

In this essay by Michael J. Cannistraci, a New York actor finds himself at the helm of a group of Jewish emigrants from the USSR as they navigate the American Museum of Natural History—and the challenges writ large of their new lives in America. Through sharing words, food, and histories, the English teacher and his students become the caretakers of one another and partake in the struggle to “do this life.”

***

A Day at the Museum

The security guards at the Museum of Natural History had pinned my student to the marble floor. Four overweight museum guards against one skinny guy from Uzbekistan—it didn’t seem fair. He was too drunk to start a fight, but then again, he shouldn’t have tried to dance with the dinosaur.

***

I wouldn’t have chosen to teach English as a second language. I never thought of myself as a teacher of anything. I never had a call to teach; I was just desperate for work. I hadn’t been able to find steady employment for four months. I’d been fired from my bartending job after giving away too many drinks to the regulars. I scraped together odd jobs as a dishwasher or day laborer to eat while being pounded by the fear of being homeless. My landlord was patient about my late rent payments, but the stinging humiliation of having to ask for more time each month made me feel worthless. I was skirting destitution. I dropped off resumes all over New York City, and no one was hiring.

It was April 1991 when I met with a social worker at the Actor’s Fund to see if I could get a grant or a loan, a kind of one-shot deal to help me pay my rent and utilities. She drafted me into a satellite teaching program for ESL. I completed a three-week training course. The program used a combination of aural/oral repetition of phrases and sentences, combined with an acting out of the sentence, a kind of linguistic pantomime, which is why they were hungry for actors. I was hired almost immediately.

Mikhail Gorbachev had offered visas to masses of Russian Jews to leave the USSR, and many of them took him up on his offer. Antisemitism was part of the day-to-day in Russia, and most of my students were glad to see the back of it. The passports they were given cited their nationality as Jewish, not Russian.

The school was housed in an imposing, modern building down in the financial district within walking distance of the stock exchange. The front of the building was all smoked glass and polished silver metal, more like an investment bank than a safe haven for the huddled masses. I walked in and was welcomed by the director of the school, a warm and energetic woman named Liz, who gave us a pep talk and welcome speech and then shuffled us off to our classrooms.

Despite years of performing, I had stage fright on my first day of teaching. My face and upper chest were flushed, and I felt sweat pooling at the nape of my neck. There were about twenty students in the classroom, mostly in their thirties and forties. Their clothing was clean but worn. I would be their teacher for the next four months, and then they would transition to a work-readiness program.

They were chattering away in Russian when I walked in the room, then suddenly became silent and shyly deferential.

I decided a frontal attack was best. During my teacher’s training, I was told I had to manage the class, show them my confidence.

“Hello,” I said.

“Hello,” came back a few whispered responses.

“Hello,” I said, writing hello on the board. “My name is Michael. Say: Hello Michael.”

I stared at a room with blank faces.

Then one man stood up and said loudly, grinning broadly, “Hello Michael!”

I took him in. He was a tall, skinny man with olive skin and a good-natured expression. He was missing three fingers on his left hand.

His name was Ziyo, Ziyo from Samarkand.

My teaching career got off to a bumpy start. The school wanted me to use a teaching method with a strict mode of repetition. I had trouble getting the hang of it. It didn’t help that I was assigned to Matt, a carping teaching mentor with a sadistic streak. He was tall, with flowing black hair that he would toss back like he was an orchestra conductor. He came twice a week and stood glowering in the corner, jumping on any student who missed a word in the repetition exercises, snapping at them like a seagull eating a clam. The students sensed the tension between us and sometimes became withdrawn. His day job was writing children’s musicals, but he had the personality of a prison guard. He loved coming in with his clipboard and tearing my teaching to shreds.

“Michael, we’re not here to make friends with these people. We are here to educate them and make them good Americans. Don’t be so easy on them. Make them repeat the sentences exactly,” he barked.

My students, having experienced the brutality of authoritarian types, would compliment me in front of him. “Misha, you are the best teacher. Thank you giving us words to speak.” Matt didn’t look convinced, scribbling on his clipboard and shaking his head.

The first six weeks of teaching were filled with hellish uncertainty. Despite spending five days together, week after week, with limited language it was difficult to know my students as people. I wrestled with a mix of compassion and resentment, not knowing if my students were really trying or lazy, intelligent or stupid. In class one day, most of them would understand the lesson, perfectly repeating each phrase, and the following day they would forget everything we had worked on. I seethed with frustration. I wasn’t sure if they weren’t able to learn or if I wasn’t able to teach.

The rigidity of the teaching program didn’t give them a chance to show their creativity or curiosity. However, around the fourth week, during class breaks some students would begin to ask about a word or expression they’d heard on a television show or on the street. I tried to explain in pantomime, like playing charades with the refugees. As they brought more words for me to decipher, I was able to get a glimmer of their intelligence.

Still, I was separated from my students by a gulf of language, never completely knowing them or their lives outside of class. What music did they like? What was it like to be a teenager in Kyiv, Murmansk, or Baku? When did they learn to swim? I had no language to ask these questions.

By the sixth week, I sensed a nimble canniness in them, some survival instinct that would help them learn English. At the same time, I began to think I couldn’t teach them. I didn’t really learn grammar in high school. I was too American to teach English.

So I kept drilling them and prayed they would learn by imitating me.

“Lyudmila, how are you today? Repeat.”

“Shtoh?”

“No shtoh. Shtoh that away. Repeat: How are you today?”

“How are you today?” Lyudmila said.

“Ask Grigor: How are you today?”

“Shtoh?”

I began to understand that, for most of them, I was the only American they had any contact with from day to day. All of them were living in subsidized housing, spread out over Brooklyn and Brighton Breach, living in enclaves with other Russians emigrated from all over the USSR. The staggering reality that I was the guide for these pilgrims, lighting the way in this strange new world, freaked me out. Sometimes it would become awkward. Svetlana, a refugee from Kyiv, thick waisted with calloused hands, asked me in the middle of class, “Misha, what is the lap dance? Is exercise for peoples?”

My students, despite leaving Mother Russia with little more than the clothes they were wearing, were so deeply generous and openhearted that I felt ashamed. I was often irritated in my private life about perceived slights and criticism, while they were humble and kind in the face of years of prejudice. Often, I would walk into the classroom and find that an offering had been arranged on my behalf: some delicacy from Murmansk, or a fish dish wrapped in sausage in some kind of gravy. I ate obediently as the women in my class stared at me expectantly. I always praised the food that was so foreign to my palate. I didn’t want to offend my students who had spent what little money they had to buy and cook food for me. They wanted to share their history, their life stories on a covered, chipped dinner plate.

It was true they needed money, and I needed money too, but there was an ocean of difference between an immigrant cast on the shores of New York, and a New York actor hustling for work. All of the teachers at the school were artists (a now-famous novelist had the class next to mine), so it was easy to get substitute teachers when I got cast on All My Children or some other well-paying gig.

My students became anxious if I was away for three days on a shoot. When I returned to class, they would bring me gifts: a beautiful carved jewelry box called a palekh, black lacquered with intricate hand-painted scenes from Russian folklore, or a matryoshka, a Russian nesting doll. I think they hoped I wouldn’t quit, leave the school, and abandon them.

I felt a worming shame when they handed me these gifts, their faces scanning mine for pleasure. Some of them told me terrible stories of persecution and struggle in Russia, of not being hired for work because they were Jewish or getting lower pay than non-Jews. They were giving some American actor a gift they had to scrounge to buy. I begged them to stop giving me gifts, but they stoically refused. At night in my apartment as I played with the doll, an existential question came up for me. What would be my identity if I weren’t acting? I opened each shell to reveal another doll and wondered if I was looking at myself.

The curriculum workbook I used in class focused on asking directions, how much things cost, and what each student did for a living in the Soviet Union.

“What was your job in Russia?” I asked each student to turn to their neighbor and ask.

“I work in factory,” one student said.

“I was farmer.”

“I am engineer in water plant.”

“I sell fish.”

My students rattled off descriptions of their past working lives with defeated sadness, and I stood there rooted like a tree in front of them, feeling chagrined. I was teaching these people with my stupid pantomime, asking them to repeat sentences like first graders. It didn’t seem enough to move them forward in this new world.

When we got to Ziyo, he said, “I work in cotton factory. That’s where I hurt hand.” He waved his two-fingered hand in a lighthearted wave, like he was saying hello.

“Uzbekistan has much cotton,” he said.

“Uzbekistan has a lot of cotton.”

“Yes, lot of cotton.”

After class one day, Ziyo lagged behind and slipped me a folded paper. It smelled like cigarette smoke and onions. He looked at me for a moment, then nodded his head and left.

I waited until I was in the teacher’s lounge to read it.

Mischa, thank you for reading letter. I have question but is difficult.

How do I live as me in America?

I read these few sentences, broken like Morse code, repeatedly. Every time, I tried to find something between the lines.

***

For most of them, their years in the Soviet Union had dimmed any connection to the Torah, or any spirituality for that matter. The experience of being Jewish had gone underground decades ago, generations of Russian Jews not participating in any religious life and never speaking or writing in Yiddish. Not all of my students were non-observant. Grigor, a tall, gentle man with stooped posture and a thick black beard, told me that he would sometimes attend clandestine Shabbos dinners. These dinners were cloaked in life-and-death secrecy because neighbors would report Jews for observing the Sabbath, and entire families would be arrested and disappear forever. Matzo was sold on the black market like guns or cocaine.

I would awkwardly teach lessons on Yom Kippur, Passover, and Chanukah. My Catholic catechism hadn’t prepared me for this new role, so I spent hours on the weekends cramming on Jewish religious traditions, trying to explain who the Maccabees were, and how a little oil could keep lamps lit for eight days. My students would become confused when the school was closed for an observance of a Jewish holiday like Sukkot, so I would try to explain why there was a straw hut in front of the school.

But no matter how hard I tried to bring them their heritage as Jews, I couldn’t bridge that gap. It was like I was telling them stories of strangers they had never met.

***

Around eight weeks in, the refugee organization paid for each class to take an educational field trip, either to the main branch of the New York Public Library on Fifth Ave. or the Museum of Natural History. All of my students voted for the museum.

“Misha, can we bring vodka?” Grigor asked.

“No vodka. None. Nyet vodka,” I said.

The class grumbled glumly.

The thought of herding twenty Russians around the museum was terrifying to me. I told my friend Doris about my anxiety. She was a book editor who had just finished doing back-to-back all-nighters editing a For Dummies book. She looked fresh as spring; the cocaine and espresso might have helped.

“If you’re so scared, I’ll go with you. I’ll be your Armenian chaperone. I’ve manhandled a couple of Russians back in the day,” she said. Doris spoke a little Russian as well.

I wasn’t sure this was a good idea. Doris liked to drink vodka too.

“Don’t be such a worrier,” she chided me. “I’ll behave myself.”

I reluctantly agreed to have her tag along.

The field trip was scheduled for Friday. I waited tensely at the subway station exit. In a rush, all of my students arrived en masse, and I scrambled to get them organized for the walk up to the museum. Suddenly, they all stopped to stare across the street, and I saw Doris waving at us. She was dressed in stylish black silk pants with a beaded vest, white ruffled shirt, and a black fedora. She looked like some silent movie star. She walked up laughing, saying a few sentences in Russian to my students, who were charmed immediately. Her entrance annoyed the hell out of me.

She led the men giggling up the street to the museum, while I somberly walked behind with the Russian matriarchs.

Doris and I led the students up Central Park West to the front entrance of the museum. My students gazed in awe at the stone cupolas and stunning architecture of the front façade, and the statue of Teddy Roosevelt with a Native American and an African American man standing in obedient deference on either side of his horse.

The students drifted off in the rotunda, ogling the gigantic fossil of the brontosaurus protecting its calf from a slightly less gigantic allosaurus. Two security guards were holding power drills while a machinist screwed in a brass-plated plaque about the scene.

Doris merrily led the students to the diorama of Peter Stuyvesant greeting a group of mostly naked Lenape Indians. She pointed out how realistic the male anatomy was in the Native American men. “Now ladies, tell me you wouldn’t want to spend the night in these boys’ tepees,” she crowed. All the women giggled and looked down at the floor.

“Okay, who wants to see the big blue whale?” I asked, trying to maintain some decorum.

I shepherded them through the museum, past the Hall of Asian Mammals, through the Hall of African Mammals, the lions, giraffes, and zebras staring out in glazed disinterest or fury, stuffed and painted to show the beauty of nature. The halls had a melancholy and macabre air, but my students seemed to revel in the wealth of the surroundings and the posing of each stuffed animal, trapped behind glass with a painted Serengeti in the background. Ziyo, Grigor, and a couple other male students giggled and posed, impersonating a lion attacking a gazelle and a bear roaring on its hind legs.

I was distracted with keeping my students together, afraid that one of them might wander off and get lost in the labyrinth of hallways. Doris was busy showing off her jewelry to some women and a couple of men. Her hands were festooned with rings made by her grandfather, a famous jeweler in Yerevan. All of the students were smitten by her carnelian and sapphire rings.

I was trying to describe how giraffes drink water with those long necks, in front of the watering hole diorama from Kenya, when I heard a loud crash. Ziyo had fallen to the ground, and two other students were helping him get up on his feet. I rushed over to him, panicked that he might have hurt himself, but he joked it off, saying he tripped looking at a stuffed tiger. He said he was okay. His eyes looked a little glassy, but I let it pass. I wanted to get this field trip over as quickly as possible.

We meandered past the big blue whale. My students stared in wonder at the size of it, then I began to wrangle them past a row of octopi and brightly colored Caribbean fish to the rotunda and the front doors of the museum. We got to the rotunda, and my students scattered like raindrops on a windshield. I tried to get them to huddle together but got distracted trying to help two of my women students put on their coats. Doris was giggling with Grigor and pointing at something on the ceiling. I thought too late that I should never have put her in a situation where her flirtatious nature could take over.

“Hey! Get your ass off there,” I heard someone shout.

I stared out and felt like I was falling down a dark hole. Four security guards were rushing to the brontosaurus platform, where Ziyo was doing some kind of swaying folk dance, inches in front of the huge fossil, his disfigured hand twisting in a gesture of seduction in front of its gaping mouth. I tried to shout out to him, but my voice came out in a strangled squeak. I was choked with fear, envisioning the huge fossil collapsing, the bones crashing on the marble floor like giant Lincoln Logs.

The security guards tackled Ziyo, and they all tumbled from the podium to the floor. Ziyo was carrying a dirty, ragged canvas bag with his belongings, and an old, dented plastic Mountain Dew liter bottle fell, spewing liquid all over the marble. The air was suddenly filled with the smell of vodka so strong it reeked like rubbing alcohol.

Ziyo was pinned to the floor like a butterfly in a display case. Each security guard had an arm or a leg. All four of them were barking orders at each other and pelting Ziyo with questions. He had no idea what they were saying. He was moaning and muttering something.

“I’m sorry. He’s my student. We’re on a field trip,” I said.

A pockmarked guard with chest hair sticking out of his collar turned to me, his face twisted with rage. “A field trip? I’ll give you a field trip. This shitbird is going on a field trip to Riker’s Island!”

Doris appeared like a genie. “Hey, Action Jackson, get the fuck off him! These people are refugees from Russia. They attend a school funded by some very powerful, very wealthy Jewish New Yorkers. Think Bloomberg. Think Tisch. You want to explain to your bosses why they’re being sued? That’ll look good on your resume, asshole. Now let him go!”

Her voice echoed in the rotunda, which was now eerily silent. The guards looked at each other, and with a nod of agreement, they got up and let him go. I put my arm around Ziyo, and we lurched out the door. Doris and the rest of my students followed close behind. I half dragged him to a bench and dropped him in a heap. The other students surrounded him, giving him water and soothing him. He was hunched over, muttering to himself, his head in his hands.

I stared at Doris. “How am I going to get him home?”

“I have an idea. I’ll call Julio Bueno in my building, He has a couple of livery cabs, and he owes me a favor.”

There was a phone booth on the corner. Doris called Julio, and he said he was on his way. By dumb luck, one of the women in the class lived near Ziyo and gave me his address.

“Are you alright?” Doris asked.

I couldn’t even muster a whisper. It was as if I had lost control of my bladder and was standing in a wet puddle of my own mortification. I couldn’t collect my thoughts or think about what to do for the students. All I wanted to do was to find a rock and crawl under it.

I looked at my students, all of whom were staring at me expectantly, waiting for some instruction. I had none to give.

“Hey, you take him home, get him to bed, and Julio will drive you back. I’ll get your students back to the subway and on the right train,” Doris said.

Julio pulled up, and a couple of my male students helped load Ziyo in the back. He slumped against the front seat. I turned to my students and told them to follow Doris; she would walk them to the subway. They looked ashamed, as if they had disappointed me.

I got in the back seat, and Ziyo plopped his head on my shoulder. Julio nodded hello to me. I stared at the fuzzy dice balls and silver crucifix hanging from his rearview mirror. A small, plastic statue of the Virgin Mary on the dashboard peered at me.

“Borracho?” he asked.

“Sí, muy borracho.”

Julio pulled into traffic, and we made the slow drive across the park, heading downtown to the Battery Tunnel. The sun was setting behind the skyscrapers, spreading shadow and light in the interior of the car.

I shifted Ziyo off my shoulder, leaning him against the back seat, gently lifting his head to put my jacket under it. Just before he passed out, he mumbled something I couldn’t understand. He curled his hands into his chest like a cat on a windowsill.

We crept along in rush hour traffic, sitting in silence. We were on the Belt Parkway when Ziyo jerked awake. He stared wildly around, gripping the seat, and let out a little cry. Then he saw me and stared, bewildered, silent for about a minute. I could see his eyes taking in the car, trying to remember how he got here. Then he remembered.

He slumped in the back seat and looked out the window at the cars passing. “Sorry,” he said.

“It’s okay. The dinosaur survived,” I said.

We sat quietly, staring out the window. Julio Bueno was humming a tune while he drove.

Ziyo tapped his head against the front seat, staring at his shoes. “Misha, I can’t do this life,” he said.

“What do you mean?”

He let out a hiss of air and turned to look at me, his eyes dimmed with mistrust. “This life too heavy here. In Russia, you told where to stand, where to sit— eat this bread, wear these clothes.

“Here, your life only yours. If you fail, you die or beg for bread.”

He brought his mangled hand within a few inches of my face. “With this hand I beg for bread.”

We stared at each other. The inside of the car had no air and felt heavy with sour sweat.

“America give hope to people who don’t need it,” Ziyo said.

I turned away from him and gazed out the window. I started to speak, to defend the dream and the life in America and all the gifts these shores shower on those strong enough to swim the great water to come here, but I came up empty. I reached over and took his mangled hand. His two fingers curled around my palm.

Julio Bueno navigated the streets of Brighton Beach as if he had lived here all his life instead of Washington Heights. It was almost dark, and the streetlights showed their orange. The sky was graded blue and purple, and the air smelled of salt air and low tide.

We pulled in front of a gray apartment building with a battered metal entrance door. I helped Ziyo out of the cab. He was still shaky from the vodka and leaned on me, tripping slightly over a rise in the sidewalk. He rang the buzzer, and we waited, my arm around his shoulders. After about a minute, a pretty young woman with her head covered in a scarf came to the door with two small children. Their eyes were like dark moons staring at me in wonder. I was holding their father so he wouldn’t fall to the ground.

Ziyo’s wife turned her head away, as if looking at him was painful; her eyes said that this wasn’t his first time coming home drunk. She took him by the arm, and he shuffled into the building. I walked back and got into the front seat with Julio. We drove back to Manhattan in silence.

Saturday morning, I called Doris to thank her. She picked up on the first ring.

“Perfect timing! The last of your students just left,” she said.

“Just left? Don’t tell me you took them back to your apartment?”

“Hell yeah, I made shalebour and lahmajoon, gave them some excellent Armenian cuisine. Man, those boys can drink! No wonder they won the revolution,” she said.

I hung up the phone. I had the whole weekend to think about being fired on Monday.

***

I walked into the school on Monday morning, and Liz, the school director, pulled me aside.

“Michael, come into my office. We need to talk,” she said.

I looked at the floor and followed her. She shut the door firmly behind her.

“This is a real mess,” she said.

“I know, I know. I’m sorry,” I said.

“You know? How do you know? I only got the call this morning. Matt, your mentor, has quit so he can produce his children’s musical, Bluebelle, the Fluffy Bunny. No notice, nothing.”

She looked at me and pleaded, “Michael, can you take two of his classes? It would be such a favor. All the students love you and you’re doing such a good job.”

I let out a slow stream of air and my shoulders dropped. I said of course; I’d be happy to take his classes.

I walked into my usual classroom, filled with a symphony of Russian accents. My students smiled as I walked to my desk and put down my lesson plan. I looked over at the back corner and there Ziyo sat, smiling sheepishly. He gave me a little wave.

“Ok, let’s review our lesson from last week,” I said.

***

The end of term came for my first class, and we had a graduation party. It was as much a graduation for me as for the students—I had made it through my first term without anyone getting arrested. We had a party in the cafeteria; it was a long narrow place like a train car going nowhere. I bought a cake and sodas, and the students brought dishes from their home cuisines. Svetlana made me a hand-painted thank-you card, and other students brought me carnations and Hallmark thank-you cards. All of them would transfer to a work readiness program after today. Everyone was talking and laughing, but unease filled the room at moments. They were leaving their first sanctuary, a safe and familiar place in this new world.

I gazed at them and wondered if I had helped them find their way, even a little. Would Dimitri, the engineer, find that plum job with his limited English? Would Grigor find work with his past life as a wheat farmer? I wished I could help them, to talk them through the tough days of struggle, and give them the words that would open the door to America.

As the class ended, my students came up one by one to thank me. Some of the students wore a haunted expression; this wasn’t their first goodbye to someone who had been kind to them. Ziyo walked up, his eyes downcast, and held my hand with both of his, then walked away.

The room emptied, and I was alone with silence. The carnations were spread on my desk and the thank-you notes had fallen on the floor, like leaves in October.

***

Photo Credit: Michelle Lemay

Michael Cannistraci began his creative journey as an actor; he worked for thirty years acting in theater and television. In midlife he answered a new calling and completed a master’s degree at the Hunter College School of Social Work. He currently works as a clinical social worker and psychotherapist. His essays have been published in the Southern Indiana Review, the TriQuarterly Review, Entropy Magazine, Briar Cliff Review, RavensPerch, Clockhouse, Little Patuxent Review, Chicago Story Press, the Dillydoun Review, the Bryant Literary Review, and Glacial Hills Review. He was a finalist for the Anne C. Barnhill Prize for Creative Nonfiction and Pen 2 Paper Creative Writing Competition. 

BLAST, TMR’s online-only prose anthology, features prose too vibrant to be confined between the covers of a print journal.

In her essay “Cockroach Bay,” Courtney Ann LaFaive recounts her experience of moving to St. Augustine, Florida, hoping for a vibrant new life. Instead, she finds herself crushed by loneliness and beset by cockroaches. In her search for any sign that she’s in the right place, or that she might escape, she comes face to face with old, deep grief and the stunning beauty of survival.

***

Cockroach Bay

Florida is the land where homesickness lives.

I’m not here for the sun, sand, or promise of an endless summer. I’ve come to Florida for a job. Because my prospects withered, and this job was all I could get. Because I thought a three-year binding contract sounded sexy and adult. I believed I could obliterate everything I had back in my home fourteen hundred miles north of here in rural Wisconsin—a lover, friends, a community—and it would all blossom for me again in a new land: St. Augustine, Florida, a city known for heritage tourism given its status as the “oldest” city in the United States.

Each morning, I wake before the humidity swarms and walk to my office. I am sequestered away from my colleagues, who all have offices four blocks away. I did not come to Florida for the promise of surfing or deep-fried alligator bites. But I still held expectations: fantasies about chats around the copy machine and maybe even drinks at a hotel bar, a kind of professional community. I thought the palm trees lining the border were not just a greeting to the tourists but to me as well. But when I showed up to my first day of work, no one was there to welcome me. Instead, I went to the security office where a guard handed me my office keys and asked for a $100 security deposit on my office equipment. As I wrote the check, I felt disappointment unfurl within me. I walked away from the security office wondering why I expected to be welcomed. Why did I feel entitled to such a thing? I soon learned that there are no copy machine chats or hotel bar drinks. Invitations, if extended, do not circulate my way. There was a group of people who interviewed me and then, seemingly, vanished. The only camaraderie I witness is among the tourists wobbling on the cobblestone streets, cackling amongst one another with piña coladas dripping in their unsteady hands.

Every day I stare at my computer for hours, opening and closing Excel documents, refreshing my email, pretending to work, and trying to ignore the peacocks screeching in the parking lot below. They live at the Fountain of Youth tourist attraction and routinely escape. I go to my window and watch as they strut and peck at car tires. Sometimes a male will display his feathers and charge across the blacktop toward nothing, his feathers looking just like a brooch my mother used to have, a brooch I inherited. I gape at the birds and feel that I am too old at thirty-four to be this lonely, this broken, by moving to a new place. My mother has been dead ten years. I should’ve learned by now how to survive on my own, to keep myself from despairing. I wonder if I am like the peacocks, running at invisible targets with feathers splayed, mindlessly poking for nourishment, uncertain of how to get home.

***

One day after work, I stop at a roadside stand off State Route 207 displaying stalls of fresh oranges and grapefruit. I approach the stalls to see that what I thought was fruit are actually concrete orbs painted orange and pink glued to the wooden fruit stands. There are rows of them. Dozens of concrete fruit mannequins. I go inside the adjacent gas station and ask the clerk where the fruit is. He tells me that this year’s crop was bad. Maybe I could try Publix on A1A for some mandarins. I leave with a fistful of lottery tickets, convinced that everything in Florida shifts the closer I get, the state a perpetual hologram.

After my first month in Florida, I long for a sign. An apparition, really. A sighting of someone or something that could convince me I have been led here for a reason. My mother, who was raised Catholic, had told me about them. Mother Mary would appear in a cave or on a hillside with her arms outstretched. There are ghost tours in St. Augustine: school buses painted black that roam the streets, take tourists past Tolomato Cemetery, and pipe true crime narratives through a speaker. But I am selfish in my apparitional longing. I want someone revealing themselves only for me: a personal appearance. I follow no particular faith—I do not know what an apparition could look like beyond what my mother had described to me. Yet, at night, when I arrive home to my empty studio apartment, all that drifts through me are the faces of everyone I’ve left, all the paths I could’ve taken, and all the ways I have been too narrowly focused, too driven by vocation, too trusting of the benevolence of others, and all I see are the cockroaches.

***

They arise like I envision an apparition would. Wordless, shimmying. Wiggling along the cabinets. Scattering by the dozen like a magic trick when I turn the lights on. I see them as alien, dropped here from outer space, and I decide to learn about their supernatural ways.

A cockroach can live without its head for up to a week; they can breathe through the holes in their body segments. In this instance, death befalls them not for lack of breath but for lack of a mouth with which to drink. A cockroach can run up to three miles per hour, live without food for one month, and breathe underwater for up to twenty minutes. Despite their aquatic abilities, they prefer to live in dried leaves, perfect camouflage for their armor. I begin to see fallen leaves as cockroach domain rather than autumnal. As if the leaves had grown, fallen, and crisped just for them.

I’d been in Florida for five weeks when, one night, I woke from sleep and stumbled into the bathroom to get a glass of water. I flipped the lights on, and as if summoned, they fumed from the sink. Startled, I recoiled, my right foot smashing into the door frame. I fell to the floor, grabbed my foot, and bawled. My foot swelled and grew hot within minutes. I couldn’t bear weight on it, but I shuffled to the kitchen, grabbed bleach and orange juice, and boiled a pot of hot water. I hauled it all into the bathroom and poured the liquids down the drain one after the other like a lunatic. Was the orange juice irrational? Perhaps. In the moment, I was thinking about acidity. In retrospect, it feels like a devotional offering. The liquids did nothing to quell the creatures. They still emerged each night. I set up my trail camera to watch them, count them, and know their precise quantity. I wanted to know who, in my aloneness, was living with me.

When I received the X-ray of my foot, I saw the break like a tiny river sprouted in my far-right metatarsal. When I think of water now, I only remember how a cockroach can live underwater for up to twenty minutes. It is how they came up the drain to wander my studio. It is how they could live in the river of my fracture if my foot were land.

***

The property management company sends someone from Baker’s Pest Control every six weeks to spray for cockroaches, earwigs, and whatever else might lurk, but I never notice any decline or rise in the cockroaches’ appearance in accordance with the spraying, and I never see an earwig in the first place.

The first time the pest guy visited, he introduced himself as “the pest guy.” I was ecstatic. I watched him spray outside the studio, put brown goop from a tube inside the cabinets, and count how many German roaches he found. I asked him about his life and how he got into pest control. I asked him when it would start to work. I wanted to know when the roaches would go away.

“I mean, really never,” he replied.

I didn’t understand.

“What do you mean ‘never?’ Like, aren’t you spraying for them?”

“Girl,” he replied, sighing. “You live on sand. Nothing ever goes away. Everything just retreats and comes back again.”

***

The sand grows soggy before the floods come. The ocean coughs up prawns in heaps, and the sanderlings rejoice. The city of St. Augustine puts up a Tiger Dam twenty-four-inch seawall that lines the bayfront. The spaghetti maps populate with most paths taking the hurricane right over the Atlantic coast, and the humidity vanishes as Hurricane Ian approaches.

I flee for higher ground two hours inland, watching the palm trees shudder along the drive, and when I return days later to St. Augustine, my studio walls weep. The holes where previous tenants had hung pictures drip brown and black. I stare at the mascara tears and think of the fanfare surrounding weeping statues and images of Mary. The dripping statue of Mary in Rottweil, Germany, in 1643. A moist statue in Pavia, Italy, in 1980 (where the statue owner applied “tears” with a water gun). Mother Mary’s hairline apparently dripping blood in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, in 2012. I think of my mother, on her deathbed at fifty-six, a tumor in her brain the size of a golf ball that manifested in a variety of symptoms, one of which was that she could not fully close her left eye. Once, when I sat next to her and held her hand in hospice, I saw a tear slide down her face. I wanted to believe that her crying was some expression of love for me. But it was only lubrication, her eye trying to stave off dryness. She didn’t know I was sitting next to her. She didn’t know who I was anymore. Couldn’t even say my name. So, I do not think sign or apparition when I see the weeping wall but water damage. Within days, I can smell it. Taste it. Feel it itch at me when I enter the studio. Something is growing behind the wall, under the buckling wood floors. I ask my neighbor who’s a firefighter in Jacksonville to come over and tell me what it smells like, and he says, “Black mold. Our house’s got it too.”

I tell the property manager, and he tells me to keep the air conditioner running.

I tell him the walls are weeping, and he tells me the building is just old.

I say the words “black mold,” and he asks me if I’m asthmatic.

I tell him no, and he tells me I should be fine.

Once the evacuation order lifts, St. Augustine pretends the hurricane never happened. As soon as the flood waters recede enough to walk on the sidewalk, the piña colada specials are back. Waterlogged couches line the streets where homes have flooded, and the carriage rides resume by early evening, horses’ hooves stomping in water. Tourists put their white sneakers on and smoke cigars on patios. Is this resilience? Or something else? No one talks about how the storms are bigger and the tropical cyclones are growing. How each year the flooded houses will grow thick with silverfish, mold, and “For Sale” signs. How the waters are rising five hours south in Miami. I hear no one say, Are they rising here?

Two days after the hurricane, my eighty-three-year-old neighbor picks up palm fronds in the alley. I stand outside looking at the dead rat that floated to my front door and contemplate what I should do with his body.

She calls to me from across the alley, “When are you buyin’ a home here?”

“What?” I say.

“When are you gonna buy a house here?”

I gape at her little white face with her little white perm and puka shell necklace and don’t know what to tell her. It all feels too big to say if she’s asking the question in the first place. That I will never buy a house here because I could never afford to buy a house here. That I will never buy a house here because there is a dead rat at my door, it’s always flooding, and my walls are weeping—and not because Mary or Jesus are visiting me—and I am so lonely it feels like there’s a hole in my chest, but maybe it’s the mold. Maybe she assumes we are so similar that such a question about buying a house here isn’t strange. Perhaps she does not see the chasm of differing finances, family ties, and futurity that I see between our realities. But I don’t have to answer her because a Toyota 4Runner drives through the alley, and she says, “Somebody new is here this weekend.”

It’s Thursday evening, so they’re right on time.

***

I live between two vacation rentals. Each weekend there are new couples or families that come. There’s “The Sunshine House!” and “St. Augustine Haven.” I don’t know who owns them or if they’re run by the same people, but both houses have problems with the locks, instructions, and widths of the parking spaces. So when guests show up with their luggage and bottles of Zing Zang mixer and can’t get in or find where they’re supposed to go, they knock on my door asking for help. The visitors are some combination of sweaty, angry, or tired. They put their luggage on my welcome mat, knock on my door, and when I open it, bark at me. They ask me if I’m the owner of their rental. I can see their complaints loaded in the back of their throats, ready to spit. Sometimes they do before I’ve even answered their question.

After they’ve stated their case and asked me where the hell they’re supposed to park, they realize I am not the owner. Maybe it is the sparseness of my studio or the boric acid tabs littered on the floor to try to keep the roaches away or the blotchiness of my face. Crying or a sunburn? they might wonder. Hard to tell. Usually both. It’s then that they soften. Often they apologize.

Sometimes I get excited—this is what I envisioned my life would be like: new friends at my door. Sometimes I am frustrated—this is actually what my life is like in Florida: these are the only people who ever come to my door besides the pest guy. Sometimes I wish I could ask them if we could hang out. Go to the tiki bar. Let me pretend to be their daughter for the weekend.

What I actually say is that I do not own their rental—if only!—and let them know they can park on the street because their truck is never going to fit back here, and the closest liquor store is on King Street about two blocks away.

Sometimes they ask me questions. Why am I here. Do I like it here. You don’t sound like you’re from here. Where can we get barbeque. Is there a drugstore open past midnight. Sometimes they project their fantasies onto me. You must love it here. You must be so happy not to be in Wisconsin where it snows. You must want to buy a condo here. We want to buy a condo here.

I lie to their faces. I say something nice about the beach. Sometimes I feel as though I am wearing the mascot head at Disney World and scowling behind it all.

***

The doctor gives me deadlines, and I miss every single one. The bruises will be gone in two weeks. You should be able to run in four weeks. In six weeks, the swelling will be gone. Ten weeks later, I shuffle back and stick my swollen foot toward him.

He turns my naked foot in his hand. I tell him I’m still in pain. I can’t put weight on the foot or stick it into a shoe. I’m not sure what to do. Everything I say is about my foot and not about my foot. I thought this would be better by now. I thought my pain would be gone. I thought I was doing all the right things.

He releases me and tells me that the bone is just newly healed. “Feet take time,” he says.

“Should I be wearing a walking boot?” I say.

“It’s too late for that now,” he says, holding out his hand to shake mine, trying to end my incessant questions. I should ask him why he never gave me a boot in the first place if my foot was broken. I should ask him if he could please take another X-ray because I’m concerned that I’m still in so much pain, but I stare at his pink face, his eyebrows so blonde they’re translucent, and feel my chest drop to my pelvis with the feeling of someone else’s hand in mine, the closest connection I’ve felt in months. “It’s too late,” I reply.

He seems confused by me saying it. He nods and opens the door to usher me out, but I am not confused by the sentiment. I drive home, right foot throbbing on the gas petal. The words ring through me, it’s too late to go home, it’s too late to start over, it’s too late baby now, it’s too late.

***

In desperation, I create profiles for several online dating websites.

I match with few people but learn many things, such as the abbreviation for “concealed carry:” CCW or CC. I learn the popular guns men and women carry in Florida, as listed on their profiles: Sig Sauer P365 X-Macro. Walther PDP. I discover the seemingly large percentage of men in North Florida who only want “polite,” “quiet,” or “well-behaved” women.

I swipe for an hour, throw myself onto my bed, and sob.

I eventually go on a date with a software engineer who is living in Florida to take care of his mother. He also does jujitsu. We walk the beach a few times and talk about California, where we once both lived at the same time in different cities, unbeknownst to one another. We express attraction but do not speak of romance. All of that feels too possibly regretful and committal in a place where I am already regretful and uncommitted, and I tell him as much. We do not make love. So, perhaps, it is not like dating, but something else: lonesomeness seeking refuge in another.

Instead, we roll around on my bed, and he teaches me jujitsu moves. Changing hold-downs. The lion killer choke. Scissors and naked choke hold, but not actually naked. He is gentle, doesn’t really choke me. Doesn’t pin me to win. I’m silk in his arms, bending and slipping. I wear a sock on my right foot to remind him it is tender. He tells me jujitsu is about attempting to wrangle your partner into submission. When you submit, you tap out.

“Tap out?” I ask.

“Tap out,” he repeats.

“Like a literal tap?”

“Yeah, you just tap them.”

He shows me, lightly tapping my arm. Then, I do it to him. I tap his arm over and over and laugh the most I’ve ever laughed in Florida. For days, I think of the move wherever I go—tapping out in the grocery store parking lot when I am behind a car with two confederate flags flying from the back. Tapping out when I see my swollen foot. Tapping out when I wander into a pile of vomit and broken Jack Daniels bottles in the alley behind my studio. All I want to do is tap out of Florida, tap out of my choices, tap back and make a different decision as if there was a different decision.

I ask my non-lover about it one evening, when he has me in a leg hold that doesn’t seem to have a name, my hips between his thighs, my back on the bed, my face staring at the ceiling. I’m being metaphorical with my question, but he takes it literally.

I ask if he thinks, when you tap out, it’s like going back to the beginning. Like, you get to start over. I want him to say, yes, to reassure me of the possibility of a complete redo.

He pauses.

“Well, yeah,” he says, releasing me. “You get to grapple again. But sometimes you get hurt. You get tired. You never really get to start over. You’re just submitting.”

I crawl back up toward him and bury my head in his chest. He had no idea about the answer I wanted, but his words buckle within me, nonetheless. He spoke the thing I fear to be true, that I have been injured by the struggle. That I can tap out, but I cannot get back what I have lost.

***

I learn to identify the cockroaches’ precise death smell. In the morning, I lie in bed and know with immediacy if there are dead carcasses waiting. The musk hangs in the air, a greasy plume. I stand and wander past my bed to find them belly-up on the floor, limbs splayed as if ready and waiting for their ascension to heaven.

I read that they die on their backs because they have encountered a pesticide that impairs their nervous system: their legs buckle, and they flip. But sometimes when I find them on their backs, they roll upright and run for dear life across the room from me. I watch them scuttle into some crevasse I will never find them in, plastic bag crinkling in my hand, the thing that was to be their mourning dress, and believe I understand nothing.

When I find them alive and upright, often resting on my shoes, I lasso them with a cardboard box and set them free in the leaves outside. I cannot bear to kill them. Cockroaches have been around for three hundred million years. They outlived the dinosaurs and Hiroshima’s nuclear blast. I feel a kind of reverence for them.

Sometimes when we encounter one another, they take their time. They totter beneath a floorboard or disappear under the fridge with a kind of laziness about it, as if I am their roommate, and we are sharing space. Sometimes, I watch them saunter and daydream about them opening their little mouths and saying, Follow me. Of course, in my fantasy, I do it. I trail them into a drawer where we crawl among cutlery. There, antennae wiggling, I imagine they’d whisper to me the wisdom of a million years of endurance, about what it was like to survive radiation and the Ice Age, about the moments where they felt they’d never surface to breathe, and how they eventually gasped for breath and crawled away.

***

The Virgin Mary came to Clearwater, Florida, once.

On December 17, 1996, she appeared, sixty feet tall and twenty feet wide, her image radiating in rainbow swirls on the glass building on the corner of US 19 and Drew Street. By that evening, five hundred people had gathered in the parking lot outside the building to visit the apparition. They called her “Our Lady of Clearwater.” They brought candles and flowers. Called it a “Christmas miracle.” Prayed and wailed. Vendors started selling merchandise: t-shirts, rosaries, and votives. A couple got married before her. A 1996 Tampa Bay Times article shows a photograph of a woman lying on the parking lot ground, spread like a starfish, as people gawk at her. She assured everyone she was okay, just overcome. More than six hundred thousand people would come to visit the Madonna. The Marian apparition clogged roads and parking lots. The city had to hire thirty more people to direct traffic and installed portable toilets and sidewalks to accommodate the visitors.

Glass experts were unconvinced. They called it a “stain” induced by sprinkler water. Yet, the architect who designed the building told the Tampa Bay Times that despite designing buildings for forty years, he had never seen such a thing before. He claimed divine intervention. The building would be sold to a religious organization that would eventually erect a crucifix outside and turn the second floor into a rosary factory. They placed white plastic lawn chairs in the parking lot: a make-shift space for meditation and prayer.

Seventeen years after she appeared, a young man took a slingshot and aimed it at the Virgin, shattering the top two windows and effectively decapitating her. An image from the St. Petersburg Times published after the beheading shows a young woman who worked for the religious organization. With the parking lot of empty white lawn chairs and scattered police officers behind her, the woman holds a shard in her hand, as if searching for a trace of Mary, as if wanting to believe that the vision she once had was still there.

***

The vision I had is gone.

I stop tracking the mold buckling under the wall. I stop fantasizing about workplace friendships. I stop noting the progress of my foot’s healing. There is a throbbing with each step, and I live with it. I position my trail camera outside to capture birds instead of cockroaches. I will not go to Clearwater, Florida, to pray at the feet of where Mary’s figure once stood, the bottom half now protected by bullet-proof glass. Instead, I will go to their kingdom: Cockroach Bay. An inlet on Florida’s Gulf Coast named for the horseshoe crabs that roamed the shores in such abundance the Spanish colonists thought they were the sea-going cousin of the cockroach. I do not expect to see cockroaches there, but I see my visiting as a kind of offering. A moment of surrender: I accept your presence. I admit that I am here, in this place, and cannot tap out.

On the morning of my pilgrimage, I decide to dress in all white: sneakers, jeans, T-shirt, and puka shell necklace, to look just like the tourists I see roaming the streets. No longer can I scoff at them; I am here just like they are. I drink a cup of orange juice as if it were a kind of Floridian communion and take a disposal camera for pictures of Cockroach Bay. When I get into my car, I shove a Jimmy Buffet cassette tape into the stereo and go. I rewind and replay “Cheeseburger in Paradise” all along I-95, the song dulling into a kind of kirtan-like drone.

I expect the bumper-to-bumper traffic as I approach Orlando. I am not the only out-of-state plate on the road—there’s Iowa, Illinois, Montana—but I am already rattled by all of it: the sunburnt high schoolers sitting in the back of a Ford F150 who wiggle their tongues through the “V” sign of their fingers at me, the Alligator Farm’s billboards featuring a gator’s exposed gums, the AK-47 bumper stickers on the same cars that have decals about loving shih tzus and beagles, the fact that Jimmy Buffet wrote a love song to a cheeseburger. None of it makes sense to me. I stare at my hands on the wheel, my own clothing glaring in the sunlight, the orange juice sour in my stomach. What am I doing? Am I really surrendering to anything, or am I forcing myself into some kind of manufactured embrace of this place? Am I engaging in some kind of masochism? Punishing myself for making what feels like the wrong choice?

The cassette moves to the next song, and I’ve forgotten that I’m driving. I should be scanning the road, watching the truck in the far-left lane with a tire that flakes rubber across the highway, and seeing how other drivers maneuver to avoid the floating rubber. Instead, I watch the boys who stuck their tongues out at me move one lane closer. I feel my heart quicken; there’s a bumper sticker that includes the word DIE on the back of their truck, and the disintegrating tire breaks free and flies like some kind of miracle into the sky.

I calculate nothing. I make no adjustments. I wonder if we are all watching it, as if this is something divine, as the tire descends toward me, smashes against my car hood, bounces onto the windshield, and shatters it into opacity as safety glass heaves across the dashboard. I am without vision. Without breath. The tire thuds against the roof of my car as it flies into a ditch where it rolls to stillness behind me. I punch my hazard button and slow to nearly nothing. Safety glass pinches my arms and face, but there’s no blood, so I don’t understand why it hurts, and I can only see outside of my driver’s side window. Someone honks. Someone else swerves around me, exhaust pipe wailing.

I tear my sunglasses off, cars whipping around me to get to the exit sooner. I can feel myself sweat through my bra, my shirt. I think of everything I could crash into or off of. Semis. Cars. Cliffs. The median line is the only thing guiding me. Someone honks and holds the horn behind me, as if scolding me for my slowness. Jimmy Buffet is singing about younger women, and I rip the cassette out of the stereo and hurl it in the backseat. A gas station sign looms in the distance, and I crawl toward it.

I roll into the gas station parking lot, throw the car into park, my car taking up nearly four parking spots, and I don’t even think to care. I hear a horn in the distance. A long trill. I press my forehead to the steering wheel as every other thing I could’ve done today comes to me. Gone to the beach. Visited the Humane Society. Cleaned the bathroom. Every question comes to me. How to get home. How much will this cost. Who could pick me up. Are there busses. Every expletive fumes.

I sit up and turn the engine off. The safety glass keeps dropping, heaving under the weight of the fracture, and like some pathetic gift, clouds cover the sun, so for a moment, my own outfit doesn’t blind me. A minivan screeches away from the pump as the wind hurls an empty Slurpee cup across the parking lot. I think of every colleague I have and realize I have none of their phone numbers. I think of every neighbor I have and realize the same thing. Jiujitsu man is visiting California. The word hitchhike comes to me. The word taxi arises, and I stare at the keys in my hand. I grow still, adrenaline waning, as I see the bottle opener keychain my brother made me keep when he gave me the car. The keychain had been my mother’s when he inherited the car from her after she died.

The metal is cold against my skin. I squeeze it and a memory surfaces: the last moment my brother and I were in this car together ten years ago. It was the day after our mother died, when the car was new to him. We decided to go to the Dairy Queen we had gone to as children. We must’ve thought it would be fun and nostalgic—something to distract us. Instead, we bought ice-cream cones and watched them drip down our hands while sitting in the car. We said nothing to one another, both of us lost in some kind of stupor. I thought about the “Signs of Approaching Death” checklist given to me by the hospice nurse. The list of symptoms ran through me like a prayer, the certainty I clung to. Loose bowels. Changes in temperature. Hallucinations. At that moment, I didn’t know how I would ever recover from watching my mother die, from her absence. I felt as if I was a plummeting wound. I couldn’t bring the ice-cream cone to my face and partake in something sweet. Neither could my brother. We threw our cones in the trash, wiped our hands on our jeans, and drove home.

A clerk comes out of the gas station, running toward me. I see him through the passenger window. He’s holding a cell phone. I almost laugh—I can’t remember that checklist. The memory of my brother and me in this car feels like a fable from my childhood, a story told that I never actually lived through.

He’s yelling toward me, asking if I am okay.

I throw the driver’s door open and stagger out.

I feel larval. Wet. Stiff. The clerk is red faced and hysterical, asking if he should call 911, saying I am not bleeding in a way that makes it seem like I am bleeding. Clouds shift, and the sun gleams like some kind of angelic yawn, an opening and closing of light across the hood of the car. I look down at myself, the safety glass lining my body like an exoskeleton, all glitter and husk, and I stare at him, the wind like hot breath against me, and I tell him I am alive. I am okay.

***

Photo Credit: Travis DeWitz

Courtney Ann LaFaive is an essayist, educator, and author of two books. Her second book, Follow the Signs: Searching for Linda Goodman, America’s Forgotten Astrology Queen, is forthcoming from the University of Iowa Press in 2026. She is also the author of the chapbook Address Unknown (New Letters, 2025) and the memoir Daughter in Retrograde (University of Wisconsin Press, 2018). Her work has garnered her a Fulbright Fellowship to Riga, Latvia, and support from the American-Scandinavian Foundation, Kunstnarhuset Messen (Ålvik, Norway), the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, USF Verftet (Bergen, Norway) and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. Courtney is an Assistant Professor of English at the University of North Dakota.

BLAST, TMR’s online-only prose anthology, features prose too vibrant to be confined between the covers of a print journal. In “The Stand-Up Stars of the Funeral Home Circuit,” Jenn Scheck-Kahn remembers coming to a new appreciation for her parents after they make surprise speeches at the funeral for a family member and Holocaust survivor. A portrait of Jewish community and family life, Scheck-Kahn’s essay is about the momentary beauty of seeing those closest to us through the eyes of others.

“The Stand-Up Stars of the Funeral Home Circuit”

Jenn Scheck-Kahn

The rabbi drew our attention to Psalm 23 on the back of the memorial pamphlet for cousin Mark, who had been taken by a brain tumor in his seventies. For an hour, I’d listened to songs and prayers with a throat cinched in grief, lost in the hypnotism of the service, which was being conducted in a large, packed funeral home. Mark’s was a life well lived and well celebrated, I felt, but Mom, stewing, felt otherwise.

“Excuse me!” She projected loudly across the silent pews, shattering the quiet. The smile she cast toward the rabbi was not sweet. It was rigid with determination, defiant. “I’d like to speak about my cousin Mark.”

Every pupil dilated in the direction of our pew, where she sat between Dad and me. Like a rabbit, I froze under their gaze, seeking invisibility.

“May I speak?” she asked again.

A murmur undulated from the updos and headscarves near the front. A vacant smile cut through the rabbi’s furrowed cheeks. “You absolutely may,” he said from the pulpit. We would not descend through the valley of the shadow of death just yet. He raised a hand, encouraging her to continue.

She stood. “Thank you,” she said, side-stepping across our row, then marching down the aisle past glammed-up Long Islanders in meticulous acrylics, flashy lips, furry lashes, and crunchy coifs. Even with youth on my side—I was a mousy late-twentysomething—I felt like a failure of femininity beside those women. The last thing I wanted was to be noticed by them. Mom’s inclination was exactly the opposite. At four feet, eleven inches tall, her hair a golden hive of pins and layered locks, she had never been more visible than she was as she ascended the pulpit.

All my life I’d watched Mom work a room. As a child, I’d peek into the mirrored living room to see the source of laughter: Mom playing the rebel feminist and Dad the easy-going jokester for the entertainment of a dinner party. Nothing centered her like an eager audience. Some friends remained devoted to her for years, while others rotated out, replaced by newer acquaintances who also held her in high regard.

If the rabbi was disturbed to find himself sharing the pulpit with Mom, he masked his feelings behind the call of duty. He pulled a handle on the bottom drawer of the podium to reveal a block of wood that served as a boxy step stool. Mom stepped on it in her patent leather pumps. She rested her arms comfortably on the podium.

“Mark was my favorite person, my only first cousin,” she said. “I loved him from the first moment I met him. You could say it was love at first sight.” Her voice sounded like a raised eyebrow. She leaned into the microphone and, in a deep alto, said, “He was maybe seventeen. I was eight.”

Giggles bobbed from the front row. Mom beamed at three smartly dressed girls and a suited-up boy—Mark’s grandchildren—and flapped her hand in a private wave. Beside them were Mark’s two sons and their wives, to whom Mom nodded, before blowing a kiss to Nusha, Mark’s fast-talking, spirited wife with a heavy Czech accent. Emblazoned on the thin skin of Nusha’s forearm was an Auschwitz tattoo.

Mark’s family turned to Mom, smiling, seemingly delighted by her feisty theatrics. What else could they do? They loved her. Because she hadn’t raised them, they could easily adorn her with the respect that she expected.

“Mark was dashing—European!” Mom said. “And he didn’t speak a word of English. But he loved my sister and me like the sisters he never had, like the brothers he lost.” She gazed meaningfully into the congregation as though we were the fourth-grade students she’d once taught, captive until we’d imbibed her lesson to her satisfaction. I glanced at my watch, hoping, against the odds, she’d notice. She didn’t.

“For years after the Holocaust, my dad searched for family and for years—nothing.” She grimaced. “No one responded to the ads he put in the European Jewish papers. He and my mom, they thought everyone they loved was dead, gone forever. And nearly all were, but one day someone wrote back—their nephew Mark.”

From all around me, I heard “mmmhmm” in acknowledgment—to my surprise. I checked the faces in my row and those behind it: relaxed smiles. Was no one else annoyed, outraged? Couldn’t they see she’d bullied the rabbi, and now she was hijacking the service?

Someone had cultivated a vision for how this memorial should go. They had considered what would be meaningful to Mark and his loved ones, what would get them through this terrible day. With the rabbi, they chose songs and prayers and listed them in a pamphlet printed by the funeral home. But, when Mom had to speak her mind, she eclipsed all else, flinging the scheduled programming from orbit. She made everything about her. Was I the only person horrified by her maneuvering?

I was.

No one can appreciate a Holocaust story with a hopeful twist more than a congregation of somber Jews. If her chutzpah hadn’t hooked them, her material had.

“Daddy did what anyone would do—what you would do,” Mom pointed to a bald man with a mustache in the fourth row. “He scrimped and saved for a steamship ticket,” she said like it was obvious, as Cher’s character in Moonstruck might. “Weeks later—Mark arrived.”

It was a story I knew well. To her parents, who were impoverished, depressed refugees, Mark’s rising from a continent that felt like a morgue gave life new meaning—the way a newborn can. He needed them, but they needed him, too. In time they’d learn how he lost his parents and siblings and how, as an orphan, he’d scraped by—hiding from the Nazis, avoiding the concentration camps—for nearly a decade.

“Picture it! A two-bedroom apartment in the Brooklyn projects, now for five people!” She flashed five fingers, her sudden gesture startling a sharp laugh from people a few rows behind me. “Mark slept on the sofa.” Her mouth gaped, aghast. “I had to tiptoe past this dapper European to use the bathroom in the middle of the night. Can you imagine?” The audience forgot itself and roared with laughter at her disgust.

I sunk into my pew and listened. Their mirth echoed off the walls of the funeral home. This was Mom’s crowd, and she knew it. Her story struck a pin in the ballooning tension we all felt that day. I felt the sound of joy against my rigid body, the edge of their relief.

Mom continued with stories about Mark—about the time he had learned to ride a bike, or how he’d gotten his first job, or how he met his beloved Nusha. I don’t remember the rest of what she said, beyond the effect of her words. Not her words—her performance. She was as at ease in a funeral home as she was at a deli counter. Her certainty was magnetic. Death made sense to that wise ball of fire in her sixties, and she’d help it make sense to us.

When she was done, she thanked the congregation and then turned to the rabbi. “Thank you, too.”

“You’re most certainly welcome,” he said. As she stepped off the box, he held out a hand, which she took politely, as any lady would. “Thank you for lifting our spirits with your comforting words,” he added as she descended the steps, making eye contact with strangers who nodded and smiled. Later, at the luncheon, middle-aged women would reach out to touch her shoulder or clasp her hands as she passed them.

The rabbi began again—“Let’s conclude our service with . . . ”—when another voice rose from the pews. This time it was Dad.

“Excuse me!” he asserted, standing abruptly. The crowd, primed by Mom’s outburst, found him towering over her empty seat and doubled over in hysterics. If Mom had been the warm-up act, they were ready for Dad, the closer.

By their own account, my parents had been meek, obedient children, but as adults, they unified to defy convention, and the older they’ve gotten, the more they’ve wanted others to take notice.

How did Dad regard Mom as he passed her on the way to the pulpit? Did they nod to each other, kiss, high-five? I have no memory beyond the sight of Dad in a classic suit, hair combed, face clean-shaven as always. To him, a tasteful appearance was like the offer of a handshake, the respect you extended to acknowledge a person’s dignity. A sign of good breeding.

He took the pulpit with an air of profound admiration. What did Dad say about Mark, his most treasured male role model, more revered than his own father, who had died five years before Mom and Dad met at a dental school fraternity party? Soon after, Mark had taken Dad under his wing. More than I can recall what he said, I recall Dad’s delivery, tender in comparison to Mom’s flash and flair. His glassy eyes. His dim smile. His voice hollowed and halted by emotion.

That day, Mom’s and Dad’s stories shared a time and place—a setting that was familiar and personal to all of us in that funeral home. The immigrant acculturation of European Jews to the United States after WWII was our beginning in a country that had granted us safety and the right to citizenship. Hearing Mark’s American origin story not only brought him back to life, it bestowed us with new memories of a time that was fundamental to our shared mythology. Everyone in the funeral home seemed to cherish what my parents had given them, I observed with astonishment. Who would have known they were capable of applying their storytelling skills for good? Certainly not me.

As a teen, I was their worst critic, but by the time of Mark’s funeral, I was an adult who had burnt through her teenage vitriol, which let me consider that maybe my parents didn’t feed off everyone who sought their companionship. Our differences, which had felt magnified and agitating when we lived in the same house, appeared to be nearly harmless now that we lived on opposite coasts. Distance had mellowed us; it had made us cautious. Through phone calls or short visits, we curated our behavior, dipping our toes carefully into the adult relationship that we were cultivating. But at the funeral, as I watched Mom derail the service and Dad steal the podium after her, the old resentment and embarrassment returned, then dissipated as I realized that this episode of the Mom-and-Dad show wasn’t subjugating mourners. Here were Mom and Dad doing the thing they were best at, only this time it was for the profound benefit of many.

Despite the tasteful makeup colors and hairstyles muted for the occasion, the air in the funeral home held the chemical smell of manufactured beauty. Mom had looked at the funeral congregation, the accounting colleagues of Mark’s son Richie and the law clients of his other son, Teddy, and sneered at the polish and prestige, all signs of success in every way we count. She wanted those people to know the truth about this family and about our cousin, who had survived hunger, destitution, fear, and isolation to become a powerhouse of gratitude. Mark used to greet me at family functions with his full attention, hands on either side of my face, telling me that I was smart and beautiful and other attributes I hoped I’d someday be.

Mom and Dad repeated one story of his like a prayer of mourning throughout the whole of my childhood.

Mom began, “He was so little, Mark was, already the littlest of the three sons as they boarded the train with their father, who was getting them out of Europe before it was too late.”

“But it was bustling, loud, chaos,” said Dad, throwing his hands in the air. “Everyone was trying to escape at once, and Mark, he started to cry.”

“‘Daddy, I need some water,’ Mark said in a tight compartment surrounded by all of their things, not many, just what they could carry, the essentials for crossing the continent and starting a life on a new one with a new language,” Mom said. “His father tried to shush him, persuade him—the train was leaving soon, there were people squeezed in every crevice—but Mark, he asked again and again for the water until his father relented.”

Dad interrupted. “Maybe his father knew that it would be a long uncomfortable journey and that it might be hours again before water would be so close by?”

“Mark’s father, he told the boys, ‘Stay together. I’ll be right back,’” Mom said. “But he wasn’t.”

“Did the train leave early? Did something happen to the father?” Dad asked.

“What we know is he didn’t return to them before the train took off. And the boys got separated. And Mark never saw his father or brothers again.”

This story haunted my parents. Coming from a person as unassuming as Mark, it carved their beliefs in family, loyalty, resilience, and a potent force targeted to destroy all three. They understood the gravity of being entrusted with his story. Their way of honoring him was to share it, making him as unforgettable to us as he was to them.

It’s easy to love the Mark we all knew. We belonged to him. How had he grown from that lost boy, nourished by tragedy, into the man who’d emerged from a steamship with a brimming heart, poised to cherish whatever he encountered? Mom and Dad missed the person who embodied that impossibility, the person who belonged nowhere and had nothing but his goodness, his emotional prosperity, which had been the source material for the legacy that he built with Nusha: a strong community grounded by sons who had vaulted from the Bronx projects toward social and financial security. Mom and Dad claimed that version of him, introduced the congregation to him, and centered him on the day we gathered to mourn.

Mark’s funeral came at a time when it looked like my relationship with my parents might turn out the way we had all hoped it would. Instead, we supported each other in conventional ways, with weekly phone calls and biannual visits, but there was little gravitational pull drawing us together, particularly between Mom and me. The funeral, though, felt like a possible turning point, because I recognized qualities in my parents that I genuinely admired and believed, for the first time, we might grow close.

Now, twenty years later, I cherish the memory of the funeral for its bittersweet singularity. It encapsulates my great fortune of witnessing my parents on their best day, as they counteracted the disorienting, existential loneliness of grief with a reminder of joy. No one can work a funeral like they could.

***

Jenn Scheck-Kahn’s writing has appeared in Ecotone, Creative Nonfiction, and The Washington Post, among a number of other publications. She lives in the Boston area with her family, where she runs Journal of the Month and engages in advocacy work, most recently in the disability space. You can find her complete biography at www.jennscheckkahn.com.

BLAST, TMR’s online-only prose anthology, features prose too vibrant to be confined between the covers of a print journal.

Hauntingly memorable, Renji Philip’s essay “Two Photographs” reflects on two brothers through two snapshots of their lives.

***

Two Photographs

Photo 1:

I have a photo of us, two brothers, in the basement. I was six, you were ten. We’re standing beside the ping pong table Dad had just brought home and set up on the concrete floor. The walls are bare and streaked with white where water had leached through. That single bulb hangs overhead, casting warm light over our basement world. Behind us, the small window well frames the falling snow—quiet and steady.

In the photo, I’m holding my paddle with both hands like some wild rabbit, my face flushed from the game. You stand just to the side, paddle resting against your leg, your head tilted slightly down as you look at me—not at the camera, but at me. And you’re smiling. Not in a goofy way, but with a quiet sense of pride. Like you’d just taught me something important—how to serve, how to keep the rally going, how to lunge forward when the ball hits the net and snatch it before it rolls off the table and bounces under the heater.

That look on your face—it says: I taught you something important. It says: This moment belongs to us.

Photo 2:

Years later, two brothers, both middle-aged, sit on a sun-bleached rock in Encinitas, overlooking the beach. Ahead, the sea sparkles and rolls, indifferent and endless. The older brother, bloated and weary now, speaks with calm conviction—the palms of his hands pressed against the hot stone, his eyes scanning the horizon as if what he’s saying is ordinary.

The younger brother listens, frozen mid-breath. His shoulders are hunched. His face is turned just slightly toward his brother, but his eyes have shifted inward, as if replaying every moment of the fragile friendship they’d rebuilt over the past two years—since his brother reappeared, newly diagnosed with schizophrenia, the long-mysterious source of his volatility and vanishing acts over the years.

“I’ve decided to stop taking the meds.”

In the distance, children shriek and giggle, but between these two brothers, the world has fallen quiet. This is the moment the younger one will remember as the turning point—when things began to slip beyond reach.

The older brother takes in the horizon and nods to himself with resolve. The younger one sits beside him, the sunlight sharp on his face, already mourning a future that hasn’t arrived yet—but will, when his brother is found dead in a park in just under a year.

***

There’s no photograph of what came after. No image of me receiving the phone call. No picture of the park bench, or the blue California sky above it, or the man who found you. Just these two stills—one lit by a basement bulb, the other by the sea you loved so much—each holding a version of you I carry every day.

I used to look at the first photo and feel ache, anger, regret, helplessness—as if I should have tried harder, never let time split us apart, no matter how rough things got. But now I see it differently. That quiet smile on your face—that sense of pride in teaching me something—it wasn’t a guarantee of who you’d always be. But it was a gift—what you taught me mattered.

I’ll never know the terrors that were in your head. But I know you gave me what you could.

That moment belongs to us.

***

Renji Philip is a writer and filmmaker who splits time between Los Angeles and the Georgia countryside. His nonfiction explores the emotional resonance of extraordinary moments and the hidden complexities that shape us. “Two Photographs” is his first literary publication. 

“Jumper Girl” is the 2025 Perkoff Prize runner-up in nonfiction. In this haunting essay, Bonnie Darves recalls her relationship with a persona who captured her imagination and stayed with her throughout her life—as a grief, a burden, and a guide.

BLAST, TMR’s online-only prose anthology, features prose too vibrant to be confined between the covers of a print journal.

***

JUMPER GIRL

In the 1970s, when I was twenty and living in San Francisco in an apartment that overlooked Noe Valley out the back and a sliver of distant bay in the front, I encountered a newspaper article that altered my life. It wasn’t much more than a photo and caption—four inches deep across a single column of a newspaper I was leafing through while loitering at a bodega waiting for the 24 Divisadero bus.

In the image, a pair of pewter-hued flat shoes, their leather scuffed and cracked, sat side by side at the very edge of the roof of a tall building in Texas from which, the day before, a young woman had jumped to her death. What struck me about the photo, besides its naked tragedy, was how the shoes’ toes turned up slightly, as if their wearer had walked around on tiptoe.

I purchased the newspaper, walked outside, and sat on a ledge a few doors down. And wept. When I had collected myself, I walked the mile to my apartment, clutching the newspaper to my chest as if it were a precious object someone was trying to wrest from me.

Thus began my relationship with the Jumper Girl, whose name I would never know, whose face I would never see, but whose short life would become interwoven with my own. In the months that followed, I periodically took the picture, which I’d clipped and pasted onto a piece of cardboard, out of my top dresser drawer. I sat and held it in my lap, looking down at it just once before putting it back.

Then I would weep, for everything—anything—that should or might have happened in the days or weeks before her death to alter her course but didn’t. It was as if, in keeping her close, I was trying to be the last person to hold her. More than that, I think I was trying to understand how and why, in those final moments of her life, she chose to remove her shoes and place them just so. What state of mind permitted that calculated yet gentle act?

***

At the time, I did not examine my disproportionate response to the photo or to the Jumper Girl. The “sessions” would just come on and I was powerless to interrupt the grief wave that engulfed me. Nor did I think about her parents or her siblings or her friends—a fact that is unconscionable to me now. Thinking about them came much later, long after she had lodged herself as my small, constant burden, as the companion she would become.

Unwittingly, I embroidered her persona and she began to take form. My Jumper Girl was a slight figure of medium height with large gray eyes and pale skin. Her thin blond hair, untended, fell just to her shoulders in erratic ringlets. Waiflike, she wore a slightly shabby mid-calf-length dress in some pale hue then in vogue, a dusty lavender or soft salmon, in lightweight cotton with a faint floral pattern. It was hot in Texas, my thought process must have gone, and if she did not dress for her death, perhaps she did at least dress for the weather that day in early June.

Her name was always something feminine, three syllables and slightly old-fashioned—Abigail, Louisa, Madeline.

It occurs to me now that I “befriended” Jumper Girl by way of making a bargain: I would keep her and care for her and prop up her memory if she would promise to haunt me less. And so it happened—over time, her destabilizing effect on my psyche diminished somewhat.

I lost the photo during one of my many moves about the city—I lived in five apartments in as many years. Yet she remained present, and it took no effort to conjure her. She arrived unbidden sometimes, when I was nosed between textbook pages or serving a Johnny Walker on the rocks to a blustering businessman at the Financial District watering hole where I worked.

She had an uncanny knack for showing up and ejecting me from even a pleasurable activity on a perfect day: when a salt-sharp breeze blew in off the bay and I had seconds before thought that I was in the most beautiful place on the planet at the most interesting time in history.

Her shoes, those saddening shoes, were never far from my mind. My fantasies ran to those, too, to what happened to them. I imagined the photographer who captured the scene, his finger trembling as he pressed the shutter button, his hands unsteady as he tucked the camera back in its case. I imagined the pair of law enforcement officers investigating the incident walking toward the roof’s edge. How did they retrieve the shoes, I wondered? Did one of them, belly-sliding his way across the warm, wavy tar, pluck them with a finger or a beat stick? Did he cry?

***

I kept Jumper Girl, as I’d promised, yet the prospect of deeply examining my motive for doing so disturbed me. Was it detached grief? Was it guilt for living on beyond her? Was it some outsized extrapolation from my fear of heights? Mere garden-variety obsession?

I should have chastised myself for remaining mired in a negative cycle and sought help as a way of moving on. But I didn’t. I feared that I’d be deemed unhinged, which I was but wouldn’t know until years later when a depression slithered into my veins, threaded its way to my brain and lodged there. Mostly, I felt that it would be disloyal to let her go—that if I did not continue to mourn her, no one would.

Later, as sadnesses stacked up in my life the way they do in any life, in any mind that permits a visceral response to events that move us deeply, I came to diagnose my affliction as grief once removed. As a form of empathy that involves a displacement or transference because the object of the empathy is not within reach. And I came to embrace it as an aspect of myself that didn’t need to be fixed.

***

It has been more than forty years since I began my relationship with Jumper Girl and I am less sad about her now than I once was. She comes to mind infrequently but remains a feature of my life in the way that a childhood memory or sensory association becomes inextricable from our notion of self.

She appears ephemerally when I read a life-too-short story, and she sometimes shows up when I am sad for reasons unrelated to tragedy. She stays awhile, always, when I am mired in a manifestation of collective grief.

In 1987, I lived again briefly in San Francisco while in the clutches of a deepening depression. As I staggered around the city on those blunt-bright October days, Jumper Girl followed patiently behind, a breeze tossing her tendrils while all around us men were dying young and thin and purple-pocked in darkened rooms.

A decade later, my twelve-year-old niece died of a rare cancer. During her final months when we, her far-flung family, startled every time the phone rang, Jumper Girl sat beside me, her hands folded in her lap while I uttered the clipped moans I later came to know as anticipatory grief.

In September 2001, on the day after the towers fell, I left my daughter at college in Santa Cruz. After we parted, I sat squinting and sobbing over the steering wheel while she walked away along a redwood-bounded path to where a makeshift memorial had been assembled and distant figures hunched over hundreds of tiny votives they were lighting against the gathering dusk.

As I drove northward through the night toward Oregon on the uncannily quiet interstate, my Jumper Girl sat above me, perched on the car’s hood and pointing toward the sky bright with stars as if to say, “Look, just look.”

***

Bonnie Darves is a Florida-based writer and editor whose work has appeared in numerous magazines and newspapers. Most mornings find her plying the waters of her beloved Gulf of Mexico, where her long swims reliably deliver a creative boost and soothe whatever ails her soul.

BLAST, TMR’s online-only prose anthology, features prose too vibrant to be confined between the covers of a print journal.

In her essay “Coup de foudre,” Allison Albino remembers a love affair that shaped her life.

***

COUP DE FOUDRE

Start the love story at the end. Bemelmans bar, his young wife at our table, whiskey sours. I hadn’t seen Romain in years, and this was my first time seeing him in New York, my home turf. I picked old New York classy: dim lights, wallpaper with rabbits sipping coffee in Central Park, Madeline and her classmates lining up for school, a man selling balloons. I felt safe inside a children’s book. Our table was facing the black baby grand where the pianist, in his tuxedo, sat down and sang like he was from another time. Let’s call the whole thing off. I got there early, wore a long blue dress with white flowers and red lipstick (because you must be pretty in front of the person who told you No so many years ago. When I was twenty-two, waiting for him in the rain, I told him: I love you, and he responded, You shouldn’t—Tu ne devrais pas).

I meet Romain during my junior year abroad in Paris. It is midway through the year and I decide to treat myself to a concert at the Louvre: Bach Cello Suites, my favorite. I wear a long black skirt, knee-high boots, red lipstick, and a gray bag my mother bought me specifically for Paris. Seated in the front row, the cello’s voice makes me feel like I am not just another American in Paris.

During intermission, I stand and notice this stunning man looking right at me: he is young, green eyes, beard, staring at me as if I were some sort of Mona Lisa. I return to my seat and realize he is just a few seats down. The lights darken and I see him leaning over, his hands clasped as if in prayer, his elbows resting on his knees as the Bach floats around the room, circling like ancient angels for someone at whom they could aim.

When the concert is over, I look back to see if he is looking for me too. He isn’t, so I say to myself, Oh, well, he’s not coming for me, and before I realize it, he is there. We are both looking forward, clueless as to what to say. Bonjour comes next. I keep walking because I don’t know what else to do. He asks me if I want to go for a drink, but I say, I don’t know you—Je ne vous connais pas. (I use vous because I think the formal distance keeps things safer, even though all I want is him closer.)

We find a café behind the Louvre and talk until past midnight. It is late and he offers to drive me home, so we walk back toward the museum. The courtyards are empty, but the pyramid is still illuminated, like liquid gold pointed at the night sky. He is nervously trying to find the entrance to the parking lot, but all the doors are locked. I say to myself—I’m wandering Paris at 1 a.m. with this beautiful stranger under the light of the Louvre. I am alive.

The French have an expression for love at first sight. They call it coup de foudre, to be struck by lightning. Sometimes, we learn the meaning of words and it has nothing to do with dictionaries; the kinds of meanings we learn because we must live them—these are the meanings that stay with us. Romain is so disoriented that he can’t remember where he parked the car. When we finally find it, he drops me off at my dorm and he immediately wants to know when and where we will see each other again.

Back to Bemelmans bar. His lovely wife is prattling on about her impressions of New York. This is her first time outside of France and she is just adoring New York—especially the gospel concert at the church in Harlem. She talks while I sit next to Romain and listen, our legs slightly touching under the table. I keep on drinking my whiskey sour, spacing off and allowing the piano music to be a comforting hand at my back. She has one question to ask me. I am scared that she is going to ask how Romain and I met, how did it end, but no. She asks me why American women wear leggings as pants. I had never thought about it, to be honest. I never thought about why women wear leggings as pants and I simply say, Je n’sais pas, and order another whiskey sour.

It’s a jewel: the wild romantic days of first love. You dive in headfirst and are blissfully unaware that there might be an end. After the Louvre, Romain and I meet almost every day in some café, talk, wander, kiss in doorways, and miss each other. I even meet his ninety-year-old grandmother who, like me, doesn’t mind an ice cube to make her white wine even colder. He and I love and ache, travel to Corsica where I ride on the back of his motorbike through the winding roads of Propriano. Sometimes, you get to be the star of your own movie.

We live a lot in three and a half months, including an excruciating goodbye at the airport where I sob the entire flight home. Before my departure, he gives me lyrics by Jacques Brel about couples saying goodbye at Orly Airport: La vie ne fait pas de cadeau. Life doesn’t give gifts.

I must return home because my mother is sick with lung cancer, and I have my last year of college to finish. On top of emailing every day, I write Romain five to six letters, first in English, which I then translate into French. I send him both versions, plus photographs, even the leaves from the sidewalk. I spend the whole semester writing, trying to recreate my body with words that I send in pieces back to Paris.

After several months of this, the long-distance relationship becomes untenable for him. I remember writing back with all my hurt: I’m not like your violin. I’m not going to wait in the corner until you are ready to play. I fly back to Paris to see it for myself and realize I have nothing to say. When the loss is so deep, words become poor.

At Bemelmans bar, I ask the pianist to play Bach—and he jazzes it up into a romantic virtuosity I don’t know is possible. Relaxed after my whiskey sours, I realize Romain and his wife won’t make it to JFK in time for their flight by subway. I call them an Uber. Grateful, Romain offers to take me out to a restaurant the next time I’m in Paris to pay me back for the car ride. I say of course. I put them both into the car, wishing them a bon voyage. I tell the driver to take good care of them as I shut the door. At that moment, I never want to see him again.

When I came home from Paris after that junior year, I did manage to graduate, but I had to lean on my parents with my broken heart. When you have such deep pain, all you want to do is go home. I remember crying on my Dad’s chest and him giving me a glass of orange juice so I would have something in my system. My mother worried about me and all of life’s dragon and fire, as she called it, and not being there to help me battle it. That same year, 9/11 happened and the whole city seemed to be covered in smoke and flames and people running. Two months later, my mother died. I was prepared for none of it.

I have a recurring dream where I’m at the airport and I’m flying to Paris by myself. I arrive in some strange city that’s not Paris, but it is Paris, and I’m supposed to find Romain. I wander through back alleys and into back-door kitchens through giant hotels whose hallways are endless and whose doors just open into other doors. I’m late and he’s waiting, and I don’t know where to go. It is the search for something that can never be closed. So much of life is about chasing the elusive.

After him, I had other boyfriends, and I would go back to Paris many times over the years. Romain and I would still write to each other and, when I was in town, we would meet at a café. I would wear my best dress and be the prettiest I could be, order une noisette, espresso with milk. We would exchange careful news about what we had been up to. Part of me was hoping he would see me across the table and coup de foudre again. Part of me hoped he would touch my hand, take me, pull me to a doorway and kiss me. Ask me to stay. None of it ever happened, and we always went our separate ways.

When I come home from Bemelmans Bar, my husband is waiting there with a warm embrace. He doesn’t ask me anything but makes me another whiskey sour without my having to ask for one. He lets me lay my head on his lap and he scratches my head until I fall asleep. His discretion is an act of love for me. David’s love is the real one.

It has been eight years since I have been married, and it has been eight years since I put Romain and his wife in that Uber. I still think of Romain, but he has become a shoebox of letters in the closet, on a shelf too high for me reach, next to other precious ones that become bricks for a life lived. Du vécu.

My father, certainly the first love of my life, died recently. I think about him every day. So much so that I almost feel like he’s still here. Daily, I conjure him into being, my mother too. I reach for them, my dearly departed, and they come out like genies, with smoke and stars. Having them back with me would be my greatest wish fulfilled. Having them gone is what I must carry. It is my quotidien—their absence is what makes me present in this life. Does it mean something different when the love lost is still alive, out in the world, an email away? Maybe it doesn’t matter—grief is grief no matter what side of the Atlantic you’re on, whatever Heaven you’re sent to. This is how lightning really strikes: it charges you with light, burns, reshapes who you are. Thankfully, we can build from it.

***

Allison Albino is a Filipina American poet and French teacher who lives and writes in Harlem. Her work has appeared in Narrative, The Indiana Review, Poetry Northwest, The Kenyon Review, Adroit, Poem-a-Day, and elsewhere. She has received fellowships from The Community of Writers, The Kenyon Review, and Tin House. She studied creative writing at Sarah Lawrence College and has an MA in French literature from NYU. She teaches at The Dalton School in New York City.
 

BLAST, TMR’s online-only prose anthology, features prose too vibrant to be confined between the covers of a print journal.

In her essay “Negotiations,” Sarah Frisch recalls a harrowing experience on a Belize river where the danger extended beyond the crocodiles.

***

NEGOTIATIONS

While in college I was invited on a boat ride up a rural river in Belize with a drug dealer. It didn’t occur to me to turn him down because of his drug dealing, given that I had already spent a few days hanging around with him, smoking what he sold. He drove us far up the river in the boat—which was nice enough, with a small wheelhouse and a deck that could just fit a man lying down—until the water was opaque and brown, no longer brackish, and there were no towns or houses in sight.

This was a summer in the mid-1990s. I was traveling with an American friend, her Guatemalan boyfriend, and a third American whom I hadn’t met before—a white guy from Wisconsin whose insistence on his position as decision-maker for our group and unrelenting opining on our surroundings I found intolerable. We had been in town for a week, sleeping under a house on stilts in rented hammocks next to the town’s main path. Mostly I made myself scarce from the group by way of the drug dealer, whose days seemed as unoccupied as mine. We wandered the town, got stoned on the beach. Nights we hung out in the open-air bar. When he proposed we spend the day on his boat, I readily agreed, as it didn’t seem much different from what we had been doing all along. I didn’t think to tell my traveling companions, and I had no way to reach them.

A couple hours up the river, the drug dealer turned off the boat and took off all his clothes—jean shorts and a tank I believe—and stood naked on the deck, grinning at me, expectant. I hadn’t found him attractive clothed, although up until that moment I had liked him well enough. Naked, he disgusted me.

I said, “Put your clothes back on.”

He said, “No.”

I said if he didn’t get dressed I was jumping off the boat.

“You can’t swim in there,” he said. “There’re crocodiles in there.” He looked very pleased with himself, so tricky and certain he had me trapped. He gave me a big smile. I remember his smile, because up until that moment I had admired his teeth.

I dove off the boat. I think the crocodiles were much less real to me—a Chicago girl—than his genitals and smug grin and attitude of insidious, coercive, forgone conclusivity.

Once I was in the water, he panicked. There were, it turned out, real crocodiles in the river. He had been fine getting naked and insisting I give him what he wanted, but he was not fine, it seemed, watching me get dragged under and ripped apart.

He started shouting at me to get back out. I shouted that I wouldn’t. “It’s not safe,” he shouted.

I swam off and he dove in, still naked, and swam after me. I swim fast but so did he, and I remember when he got to me and tried to grab me, I kicked him in the crotch—and that for a moment he seemed truly frightened, like he might cry because he was in pain and could not make me come to him.

He was Black and I am white, meaning in some way he was in danger, too, that what came his way might be something else altogether when it was discovered the person he had lost was a white woman. As a teenager, I was pulled over for drag racing down King Drive in the middle of the night in a car full of Black boys. When the cop stepped to the window, I knew instantly to take down my hood and show my white girl skin. I did so and watched it change everything—the cop looking shocked and then loosening, relieved, scolding us as teenagers before walking away. For as long as I can remember I’ve known that in certain situations my whiteness was bestowed with the power to save or doom, although for many years I preferred to think of it not as whiteness but as something charmed that lived inside me. There in Belize, I was a white girl, a wealthy American, a tourist—maybe somebody the drug dealer could coerce, harass, assault—but not somebody he could afford to lose, not to a crocodile, not off his boat.

I see all this now, but while he was swimming after me, I saw only that he was scared that something terrible would happen to me that was not the terrible thing he had planned for me.

I wasn’t scared, only livid—the way I am still livid when I remember how many times my anger has saved me. On first attempt at writing this, I wrote that I bit him on the shoulder to get him off me. But he was next to me in the water, not on top of me, and now I remember it was another time I bit a man to get him off me.

I realize now that I kicked him in the stomach, not the crotch. I know this because I can’t remember but would not have forgotten the feel of his submerged genitals on my foot. He pulled back, treading water, still frightened, begging me to get back on the boat. I told him to put his clothes on, and I’d get in the boat with him. But he had gone too far to turn back that easily. He told me again to get in. I told him I’d get in when he got dressed. We went back and forth, his panic rising because of the crocodiles, while he continued to uphold the principled stand he had taken to get naked with me in a boat. Finally he gave up and said he would get dressed if I got in, but only if I rubbed suntan lotion into his back.

These were our terms—not fair terms, but ones I could manage. He had been bargaining scared, saying over and over again: “It’s not safe in here, there’s no swimming in here. There are crocodiles.” Whereas I had insisted that I would rather be eaten by crocodiles than be with his naked body in a boat.

It seemed he was willing to risk being eaten by a crocodile to save me from being eaten by a crocodile, but he was also willing to increase by some incremental amount both our risks of being eaten by crocodiles so that he could negotiate a lesser humiliation than having to put his clothes back on without having first assaulted me. I found it easy to hold my ground (water), as I had no real concept of what it meant to be eaten by a crocodile, but by that time in my life, my early twenties, I had some idea of what it might be like to be raped.

He got back in the boat and put on his shorts, and I got back in the boat with my own soaked clothes still on—also shorts and a tank top. I did what I had agreed to do and rubbed suntan lotion into his back, which was covered in cystic acne. Then we took the forty-minute trip back to the river mouth and the carless town and houses on stilts and long beaches. We must have talked a little, but I can’t say about what.

Afterward we ate lunch at his sister’s house. I don’t remember why I went or what we ate; I was only doing the next thing presented to me. I do remember thinking she was kind. The house was concrete with blue painted walls—a place away from heat and light, hushed and cool with big square windows, their shutters open and white curtains blowing in on the breeze off the water. Inside the house I was very calm. Only later did I grow restless and wild knowing that I had not been raped or eaten by crocodiles—that I had escaped because of my whiteness or rage or ecological naivete or the appearance of his less egregious, more sporting intentions, or because a woman was a goal, a lozenge, a conquest, until you imagined a two-thousand-pound prehistoric reptile dragging her under and twisting her leg from its socket, at which point it became clear what she was but would soon no longer be: a living, breathing person.

I don’t remember anything of the sister’s house other than its cool blue sanctuary—the everyday bustle of people on the path filtering through the window—but even as I was there, I must have been thinking about what it was like to stand over him on the boat, rubbing in the lotion, reassuring him that he had secured at least this small victory in our struggle: his rounded shoulders and thin woven braids tight against his scalp, his back brown and red from the sun, mounded with acne, dripping wet, so that the water and lotion mixed, slicking over the painful bumps, soothing whatever was in there, under his skin, trying to get out.

***

Sarah Frisch’s work has been published in The Paris Review, the VQR, and The New England Review. She has been awarded a Wallace Stegner Fellowship, a Pushcart Prize, and an Elizabeth George Foundation Grant, and she’s been a finalist for the National Magazine Award for fiction. She is a Jones Lecturer at Stanford University, where she spent the last sixteen years collaboratively building a student-centered, anti-hierarchical undergraduate creative writing program. 

BLAST, TMR’s online-only prose anthology, features prose too vibrant to be confined between the covers of a print journal.

In “Making Plans with Friends,” a wry and vulnerable micro-memoir, Beth Ann Fennelly gives an unvarnished look into the arrangements that people negotiate with life, death, and each other.

MAKING PLANS WITH FRIENDS

In college, Lloyd was perfect boyfriend material—sweet, smart, funny, and handsome. But you never dated: no chemistry. Instead, you became friends. In those days, you were always buffeted about by love, alternating unsuitable boyfriends with unrequited crushes. Meanwhile, you watched your roommates happily pairing off. Your despair arose not so much from the prospect of being single forever as from the prospect of never having children. Even then, you stared at babies in the grocery store.

Lloyd, meanwhile, was enduring his own bad luck in love. You’d commiserate, exchange war stories. Lloyd also wanted a family and was beginning to doubt its likelihood. Which was crazy: anyone could see he’d make a great husband and father. At some point, one of you—and now it’s thirty-five years later, so neither of you can remember who—came up with the Plan. You’d continue putting yourselves out there, sure. But if you were losers and loveless at thirty—an age that seemed impossibly geriatric—you’d meet up and mess around until you had kids. You kept this plan from your roommates, but sometimes when you and Lloyd were alone, one of you would allude to it and the other would grin. Of course, in time, you both found great spouses and had three kids apiece. But for years the two of you—goal-oriented and type-A—took comfort from the Plan.

And now you’ve got an Updated Plan. Again, kept from your roomies. For the past several years, you and Lloyd have watched Alzheimer’s avalanche your mothers, have watched it bury them alive. When others ask how your mom is doing, you always say she’s fine, because the truth is too ugly. You reserve the ugly truth for Lloyd. You commiserate, exchange war stories. When he phoned last month to say his mom had finally died, he had the grace not to be shocked when these words tumbled from your mouth: “I’m jealous.” All he said was, “I know, honey. I know.”

So he remains your perfect collaborator. A hundred times, when talking about the drawn-out misery of these deaths, you’ve vowed to each other: Not me. Not like that. You’ve given serious consideration to alternatives, and both have communicated your wishes. Lloyd: gun. You: pills. But what if, when the time comes, his finger is too weak to pull the trigger? What if you can’t find the pills or remember to swallow them?

Relax: your former-future-baby-daddy, turned current-future-murderer, is on the case. It’s nice to make plans with friends.

Married Love: Addendum to “Making Plans with Friends”

You know it would never actually come to that, says your husband.

Why not? you ask. You don’t think Lloyd would murder me?

It’s not that. It’s that—well, if you needed murdering, I’d be the one to murder you.

Oh, sweetheart, you say. You could never murder me. You love me too much to murder me.

No, your husband says. I love you so much that I would murder you. It would have to be me, with you, at the very end, murdering you.

That’s the most romantic thing, you say, and mean it.

And then you both laugh for a long time.

***

Beth Ann Fennelly, a 2020 Academy of American Poets Laureate Fellow, was the poet laureate of Mississippi from 2016 to 2021 and teaches in the MFA Program at the University of Mississippi. She’s won grants and awards from the National Endowment for the Arts and the United States Artists, a Pushcart, and a Fulbright to Brazil. Fennelly has published three books of poetry and three of prose. Her seventh, The Irish Goodbye: Micro-Memoirs, is forthcoming from W. W. Norton. She lives with her husband, Tom Franklin, and their three children in Oxford, Mississippi. Learn more at bethannfennelly.com.