The Essays

I have spent this year entrenched in newness. New jobs, new people, new places. New ambitions to accompany a new life untethered to an academic institution. New challenges that tested the tenets of my identity—new growth in their wake. This year, as I’ve endured the discomfort of self-discovery, traipsing through the newness of life, I found solace in the following essays. These authors bear the most vulnerable aspects of their lives on the page—they claim ownership of their anger and their grief; they center remorse that unravels a life and entwine the unsaid beauty and pain of queerness; they ask us how imposed expectations distort a community’s synergy, why our names hold a heavy significance, and what our reactions to the world reveal about ourselves. The essays exhibit undeniable proof that their authors, too, have lived through turbulence that changes lives. Proof that we need not manage this ever-present newness of life alone. Proof that the fear, the hurt, the guilt, and the anger brewed by newness will not dissipate, but rather take root in our souls. And yet, we will survive. I hope you handle these essays with the same care you would your heart outside your chest, nestled in your cupped hands, still beating, still alive: their authors deserve that much.

—Brian Borchard
Creative Nonfiction Editor

Brian and I read well over 200 pieces for this issue: every single piece of writing that came through our inbox was discussed in detail over Monday morning coffee, and often again later, in emails, and add-on meetings—all virtually conducted, Brian from New Jersey and me from Scotland. Even from the depths of the Submittable queue, across an ocean over a Zoom call, we searched through deeply personal and delightfully clever writing for works that did something essential for us—though when we began we weren’t quite sure what exactly that essential thing was. Over months of reviewing, we found ourselves most compelled by the pieces which discovered something, which reached, insistently and openly, for a way back to the self, or to other people. Narratives and essays and musings in which the writer placed themselves vulnerably in front of the reader, and were sincere about the ways in which they observed and met others, and how these collisions of humanity startled them, and taught them something new. From Alaskan baseball fields to the passenger seat of a car, from prison cells to quiet gardens, the works of creative nonfiction collected in this issue in some way mirror the experience all of us are continuously evolving through amongst an ongoing pandemic, a climate crisis, social and political and technological upheavals—figuring out ways to be with each other once again after long periods of isolation, after essential moments of introspection, as individuals, as communities, as nations. We are searching for something essential, for something human, for a way to be ourselves, together again. 

—Meredith MacLeod Davidson
Creative Nonfiction Editorial Intern

 The Dogtown Pirates

Daniel Skarzynski

We get tourists through, and they joke from the back of my van, “Gee, this would be a great place to hide out during the apocalypse.” 

“No,” I say, maybe too quickly. “It’s too cold up here. Too dry. Hardly any fish in the rivers, hardly any moose in the hills. Not like down around Fairbanks—or even better, down around Anchorage. They got all kinds of moose down there. Moose on the roads, moose in the grocery stores—live ones. That’s why we can’t have automatic doors in Alaska. It’s like putting screen doors on a submarine. Moose down there are like gas. They expand to fill every available space. Up here, we could have automatic doors. Wouldn’t make a difference, except that the mosquitos might trigger them. No, you wouldn’t want to be up here during the apocalypse. If you didn’t starve, you’d freeze the first winter.”

“Oh,” they say, disappointed I’ve taken their joke so seriously. 

“And it’s really dark half the time, and the other half there’s mosquitos and bears and wandering lunatics and man—oh, man, I won’t get into it, but this would be a terrible place to be.”

Then I stop, glance up at the rearview, see if I’m laying it on too thick. 

“So you still want to come up here?” I ask to break the silence. 

“I guess it does sound pretty bad.”

“Terrible,” I say. “Tell your friends.”

Then I change the subject.

I avoid telling them that they’re right, and that’s speaking from experience. Or as close to experience as you can get when it comes to the end of the world, and there was a minute back there where we thought it might actually go this time. Even the truckers wore masks back then, believe it or not, until we realized only some people were going to die, and that settled everyone down. 

But before that, back when they called off the NBA season and closed down Las Vegas, back when half of Americans were worried they’d die and the other half were hoping they would, back when the streets were on fire and strains of antebellum ardor hung in the smoke, back then, in the tempest of panic, isolation, and grief—back then, we were playing wiffle ball on the big dirt lot between the RV hook-ups and the inn. We could usually put together teams of four or five, which kept us out of arguments about ghost runners. Sure, the mosquitos could get pretty bad sometimes, but as long as you kept moving in little circles, they didn’t swarm up on you too hard. The only time they’d really get you was on base. Wallace got out that way one time. In the middle of a long at-bat, I looked up to see his lanky, bearded frame stalking away from second. He never came back. Later, he said it fell under the mercy rule. 

In a regular summer, we never would have been able to get so many guys off work to play, but of course, it wasn’t a regular summer. A lot of days, not a single vehicle came through the truck stop. It was just us, a cluster of rusty trailers, and several million acres of open wilderness. 

But I don’t tell the tourists that, don’t want them getting any ideas the next time shit hits the fan. I don’t tell them about the mayor of Dogtown, or the Pirates, or the Spills, or the voyage to Bettles. Instead I say: 

“You know, a bear mauled a guy last summer—just right down the road forty miles. Chewed his face off. Oh, no, don’t worry. He survived. But the bear got his face.”

“I don’t have a lot of sympathy for that,” says Pat, puffing on his huge silver vape. He’s quitting cigarettes again, and we’re all sitting out in the sun beside the Big Tent, some of the guys drinking beers. The topic is quarantine and what it does to people. 

“You never have sympathy for anything,” Chuck says, but Pat just waves him off.

“Look, you want to talk about soul searching, spend a winter in Deadhorse after your girlfriend leaves you for some other guy. Oh, you have to wear a mask at the grocery store? I would have killed to go to a grocery store, just to see something different. I mean—”

Wallace laughs through his beard, seeing the joke ahead of Pat. “Right, right, that’s like a normal winter in Coldfoot. Fuck, I stare into my soul for months at a time. I get ten dollars an hour to do that shit. I’d do fine in quarantine. I already know I’m a worthless piece of shit.”

Everyone gets quiet for a moment, wondering why we do this to ourselves. 

“We should play some baseball,” says Ryan. 

And so we all order old mitts off eBay. 

Camp—that’s what we call the truck stop, the inn, the café, everything. It’s all the same outfit, a dilapidated island in the wilds, and here, the pandemic only exists in the café. That’s the outer edge of our bubble, the only place you might see a stranger, the only place anyone ever wears a mask. The chairs are all up, the lights are all off, and the host stand is fortified with a ring of tables, because some of the truckers have taken to leaning in, maskless, to prove a point. 

Fitz, our sixty-something morning host from New Jersey, is a man on his second life and doesn’t need the fortifications. He has long made a practice of playing offense with visitors, shouting his greeting of “How can I help you!” loudly enough to make customers really consider the question. Sometimes he succeeds in blowing them back out the door. So when one trucker he knew tried to lean in on him, Fitz told him, “You can do what you want, but I have diabetes, and if I’m dying, that last thing I’ll do is come fucking kill you.”

His trucker friend thought that was pretty good, and kept his distance afterward. 

One morning I come in to find Fitz, all six foot five of him, creeping around the café with a bandana over his mouth and a rolled-up bush mailer in his hand. Mosquitos have evidently gotten inside. I watch him creep along for a minute before he notices me. He stops, caught: bush mailer still aloft, bandana sitting snug under his glasses. Finally, he says in a stage whisper, “I’m the great white hunter,” and goes back to his business. 

When all you have to worry about is maybe the end of the world, it takes the edge off of life. Plans for the future kind of float away, leaving you with only plans for the present. Pretty soon all you care about is killing mosquitos in the café and playing pick-up wiffle ball next to the RV hook-ups. 

It was not lost on us that by some trick of fate, no women were working in camp that summer. This hit no one harder than Chuck, who had come up that spring on the tails of a failed engagement. 

Chuck, with his wavy brown hair and soft, puppy-dog eyes, is a man who thrives on company. Pat, his best friend since their decade-gone college days, is not so gregarious. He’s been our breakfast cook for ten years and wears his cynicism like a wooden leg. “Chuck doesn’t just chat. He gets into conversations. He loves going to bars just to talk to strangers. We’d go out for a drink and next thing I know he’s inviting some random dude from the bar back to smoke weed at our place, and then I’m stuck having to be around this person all night. And then—then, when the guy finally leaves, Chuck’ll say something like, ‘Man, that guy really rubbed me the wrong way.’ What the fuck, Charlie! Then why was he in our house!”

Chuck self-identifies as a barfly, says he knows the secret handshake. “It’s important to me to be able to walk into any bar, anywhere, and pick out a kindred spirit. I make sure to let them know I’m not just a tourist. You can’t say that, you know, you have to communicate it. But once you do, they treat you like you’re home.”

Chuck doesn’t babble. He asks questions, remembers your answers, pulls you in until you feel like you’ve known each other for years. Like a con man, maybe, except all he wants is to get to know you. He can’t help himself. That’s why he ends up talking to people he doesn’t really like for hours. To him, conversing is not a deliberate choice. “Your Good Buddy Chuck”—that’s what he calls himself. 

With women, this presents a problem. They come too naturally to him. Instead of bringing a stranger home to smoke a bowl, he’s six months into a relationship before he realizes—or she does—that it’s a mistake. But the next one comes too fast for him to contemplate the lesson, and the cycle goes on.

But that summer, after Chuck was jilted by the love of his life, there were no women in camp to distract him. Instead of washing away his sorrows in a string of fleeting romances, he was forced to stare into the abyss of his solitude and realize that he was turning thirty-five, and try as he might, did not have a wife or child. 

So he started thinking a lot about baseball.

There is a helicopter crew staying in camp, slinging loads to some copper prospect, and every few days Chuck and I go into their rooms to clean toilets, change sheets, and vacuum. The rooms are from the seventies, wood-paneled man-camp modules strung together into a single long hallway. One of the doors reads “Alyeska Office,” a holdover from the pipeline days. Now that room is full of old bedding, linens, and stacks of dusty Gideon Bibles. 

Chuck tells me, “A guy I went to school with went pro. He played for the Braves. I wonder about that sometimes.”

He leaves to the next room, to start on the bathroom. I finish up, putting tight hospital corners on the bed before sliding on the fitted quilt. The day is overcast, muggy, and the screen wears a fuzz of mosquitos. I close the sash before moving on.

Stepping into the next room, I find Chuck in the shower, masked against the chemical fumes of our yellow cleaner. He turns down his music as I walk in. It’s loud in the small shower, and he has something to say.

“I loved working with kids, man. That was a great job.”

“At the school?”

“At the school, coaching baseball. Me and Pat ran a daycare for a while. Made more sense at the time. This is back when he was on track to be a youth minister. You’ve seen his agape tattoo? He was going to settle down. I liked the school more because I got to be one-on-one with the kids, really get to know them. Mostly we’d just hang out. I was like a mentor.”

“So why’d you leave?”

“I didn’t want to go back to school. It seemed so expected of me, you know? That’s how it was with baseball. I was good, I was varsity. I hit ninety a few times. But everyone played baseball, you had to play baseball and fuck that, you know? But I wonder if I stuck with it. A guy from my team ended up on the Braves. Maybe I should have stuck with it.” He shrugs. “I could have kept my job if I wanted, but everyone else had degrees. I felt like they expected it.”

“Did they say that?”

“I could feel it.” 

“I have a degree and people still expect things. That’s just what some people do. Like my grandfather, he’s always telling me how much I could make. He’s not wrong. I studied geology—I could be on that helicopter crew instead of changing their sheets. But then what? Then you just need more. But my grandfather, he’s old school. His dad was a ditch digger off the boat. To him, a good job means good pay.”

Chuck’s scrubbing a stubborn bloodstain on the bathroom floor, and I’m not sure he’s listening. But then he stops and nods.

“Sometimes I wonder if it’s too late and I should just embrace it. Someone’s got to do it, right? That’s what keeps this whole system going.”

“Someone’s got to do what?”

Instead of replying, he stands up and points out the window. On the gravel RV lot, I see two figures approaching. One is carrying a yellow bat. 

“Let’s get a win today, huh?” Chuck says, peeling off his mask. “Pat throws pretty good junk. Keep an eye on him.”

Aside from Willie Marsh who we swapped back and forth, the rosters were set all summer long. I don’t know how it worked out the way it did—underlying natural law, I guess—because though we picked with schoolyard flip, the resulting division was ironclad. On one side you had the “home” team, perennial just-missers, captained by Your Good Buddy Chuck; we were the Dogtown Pirates. The Dogtown part of it had to do with Chuck living out in the old sled dog lot, and how we joked that that, amongst other things, made him the Chief of all Dogs, the Mayor of Dogtown. The Pirates were our mascot because we thought it was funny. 

Then you had our big-money rivals, the Alyeska Oil Spills, just the ’Spills to their fans. And while their corporate sponsorship was imagined, their talent was real, and they won so often that it verged on moral right. Plenty of times we had the lead, and we always had the optimism, but without fail, we’d collapse or they’d go on a tear, which would bring us to Chuck’s inevitable mantra of “We’ll get ’em next time.”

After the game that day, as we sit on the deck eating dinner and looking out over the empty truck lot, Ryan says, “We should challenge Bettles. I bet we could get Sean to fly us standby on one of the mail planes. How sick would that be? The Coldfoot-Bettles invitational?”

Outside, Ryan is a two-time high school dropout, but in Coldfoot he’s the boss. To him, that’s the bigger achievement. “Everyone graduates high school. Morons graduate high school. So what?” Not someone who’d been picked first in schoolyard games, Ryan’s spot in the lineup here is guaranteed; in Coldfoot, he’s not someone who gets picked last. 

But in that moment, teams are put aside. With the exception of an old Goldrush town a few miles north, Bettles is our nearest neighbor. Downriver along the Koyukuk about sixty miles, accessible only by plane or ice road, none of us have ever been there. The ballgame sounds fun, sure, but we’ve been marooned in camp for a long time by now—I haven’t been the 250 miles down to Fairbanks in almost a year—and the simple prospect of going inside a building we haven’t seen before is thrilling.

Ryan’s scheme is grandiose so he can’t reveal all the details with everyone around. Later on, he takes me aside. “We’re going to float down to Bettles and scout out the game. I’m thinking you, me, Chuck, Wallace. We’ll bring a bunch of beer, I’ll put together some meals, and we’ll take a few days to get down there. Probably toward the end of July. What do you think?”

I don’t hesitate at his proposal. Floating three days through the wilderness to come out at another speck of civilization, eating good along the way? 

“It’s like sailing to Tortuga,” I say. 

He gives me a blank stare, which can mean anything with him.

“Hey, I’m in.”

But the high times never last, do they? By the middle of July, we were getting tourists again, and by August, when a big pipeline crew booked with us for two months, we had to face the fact that societal collapse was not imminent. They were putting a heater on the pipeline, hoping to keep it running another fifty years. Thus the future reared its ugly head, and away went our plans for a squalid black-spruce palisade hung with human skulls and out-of-state plates. We’d been hoping to wear stained furs and do some honest-to-goodness killing, some cold-blooded murder, but instead, we had to go around wearing masks and chapping our hands with all the washing. Boy, were we disappointed.

The increased traffic also meant guys were back to work. Gone were one-ticket days in the kitchen and vacant rooms in the inn. Overnight, we were understaffed. 

“Let’s shoot for Friday,” someone would say.

Then Friday would come and go, finding shortstops cleaning, catchers cooking, and sluggers dishing. And the days kept rolling.

 “We just need one more game,” Chuck insisted. “I got it figured out.”

“How’s that?”

He gave a vague answer, something about WHIP and RAR and “the squeeze,” but confirmed, in the end, that with just one more game, we could finally take a win. 

Still, the days went by, and the game didn’t come. Talk of the Coldfoot-Bettles Invitational died away until I bit the bullet and asked Ryan. 

He shook his head. 

“But we’re still going to float down,” he said adamantly. “I’ve already made the plans. I can get away from camp for four days. We can do it in four.”

Things were so busy we even started adding dinner specials to take pressure off the line. I was back to driving tour vans. Annoyed with all the bickering retirees, I offered to cook a few nights. 

“I’ll call my grandfather. He makes some real good meatballs and braciola.”

He was thrilled with my question because he loved nothing more than to cook. It made him think of the old country, the house on Green Street, fig trees in the yard, his mother. 

“Just use top round,” he told me. “It’s cheaper.”

He had his own questions, the usual ones: “What are you doing up there? Do you have a girlfriend? Why don’t you get a job with your degree? Aren’t there mining jobs up there?”

“I’m getting paid,” I told him. “And I like what I’m doing.”

“Are you being careful?” I asked him.

“Marcia always makes me wear that thing. One of my friends has it. We go out for coffee sometimes.”

Later on, I saw Ryan. “Money doesn’t matter,” he said and ordered flank steak, basil, hot and sweet Italian sausages. 

It’s the day before the trip to Bettles, and I’m sitting on one of the rolling hills out behind camp. On the open tundra, the sun is shining, and I’m the only human in sight. “God’s Country,” Wallace calls these hills, and when you walk up there alone in the smoky otherworld of August, eating berries along the way, there’s no question as to why. 

I’d talked to my grandfather again that morning before I set out. He was short on breath and told me the hamburgers in the hospital tasted like shoe leather. I told him about my hike.

“You’re going up the mountains and I’m going down.”

“No,” I said, not sure what else to say. “You’ll be fine.”

Back in camp that evening, I break the news to Ryan.

“I don’t think I can come to Bettles. I have some family stuff.”

“You don’t have to tell me,” he says.

I shrug because I probably do. I tell him I want to be around where I can get phone calls. 

“I know it’s the only chance to go.”

“We’ll go again sometime,” he says.

“Yeah.”

Later on, I run into Chuck in the kitchen.

“I heard you can’t come. I’m sorry, buddy. We’ll miss having you along.”

“It’s all right,” I tell him. “It is what it is.”

A few days later they’re gone down the river, and I’m setting out to climb another mountain: one with a sharp peak behind a long ridge. As I walk the ridge toward it, I look at the clouds hanging on the dome, and they make it enormous.

I'm hiking so fast my legs stiffen to iron rods, but I can't turn back. I run out of mountain too soon, surprised when I scramble over a crag and find myself already at the top. The clouds have cleared, and atop the dome is a field of chipped golden schist, beaten flat by the Arctic sky. It is broken only by a sharp set of sheep tracks crossing from one side to the other, disappearing over the precipice beyond. I can hardly see ten miles in the smoke, and I sit down, unwrap the foil from my sandwich, and look at it. 

It's the first day in my life I don't have a grandfather, and I'm mad about it—and there’s something about eating that sandwich alone up in those last empty mountains that brings it all home. All summer I’d been a kid again, we all had, and suddenly everything is up to me. No one is going to ask what the hell I’m doing up here, when I’m going to get a real job, or when I’m going to come home. My parents are too gentle to ask those questions, but my grandfather never was. And now, I think about him as a young man coming back from Korea, starting a family, having kids, spending his days selling stuffy annuities and nights crooning Sinatra in a smoky club, trying to provide just a bit more than he’d received. He was about my age. 

But me, I don’t even have someone to share my sandwich with. My friends are all in Bettles, and my family is in another world. 

“He never even saw the ballfield,” Ryan tells me when they return. “He saw the bar, and we couldn’t get him to leave after that. There was some rich girl there waiting on a charter flight, and he talked to her the whole time. Me and Wallace walked all around town, but he wouldn’t budge.”

“I don’t like rich women like that,” Chuck confides separately. “They judge you if you don’t work in an office. But the float was perfect weather. You couldn’t have asked for better weather.”

“Where’s Ryan?” Chuck asks.

“He’s helping on the line. He should be out soon.” 

We’re out in the van lot, not at our usual field. We need to be close to the café because some of the guys are technically at work. I cooked the special that night—braciola, meatballs, and sausage, but by then it was all gone. It’s the last week of August, and hunters are starting to crop up. The café was packed at the dinner rush, and the next few weeks are booked solid. But through careful maneuvering and an alignment of the stars, we’ve managed to throw together one last game.

“I gotta get to bed soon if I’m going to make my shift,” says Pat, grinding out his cigarette. “Let’s just start. Ryan can join when he comes out.”

It’s my best day at the plate. I’ve never been a clutch player, always folding under the pressure, but that day I get on base every at-bat. Without Ryan, the Pirates have only three players, and I knock home a ghost version of myself more than once. 

It’s the seventh when Ryan finally comes out, the front of his shirt wet from dishing. He stops in the doorway, staring at us. It only takes a moment for him to realize what’s happened, and he stands there, a high school dropout who didn’t make the team. 

“Fuck you guys.”

“No, we got a spot for you, come on!”

“Fuck you guys,” he says again and goes back inside. 

“I told you we should have waited,” says Chuck.

Pat just shrugs.

We all feel pretty bad, but we’d done what we’d done, and that was that. The game must go on. Before we know it, it’s the bottom of the ninth, two outs, and the Pirates are down by one. We have a ghost on third, Chuck on second, Wallace on first. I’m up to bat. 

As I step up to the plate, I think for the first time that day about what a game I’m having. My best all season, probably the best of my life, and I think suddenly of my grandfather. He’d been a great athlete when he was alive, even up into his fifties, batting clean-up for the company softball team. That’s because he was the type of guy who never overthought things. 

He liked to say, “Lead, follow, or get the hell out of the way.”

They taught him that in the army.

So I step up to the plate with the abrupt knowledge that he’s guiding my bat that day. I realize I can’t fail. 

The first pitch Pat brings in way outside, but I see it hanging there, step in, and smack it—a line drive foul, clunking off one of our parked tour vans. The next pitch he gives me more of the same, even farther out. This time I let it sail by, past our strike zone lawn chair to bounce off the back wall of the café. The next one is fast and low and outside, but I can see it so well I chop it—another foul, but straighter, good for at least two runs if fair. 

I can’t miss—I just can’t. I know it, they all know it, and as I raise the yellow plastic bat to my shoulder, I can see the fear in their eyes. I step in so close I’m practically in the strike zone, grind my back foot into the dirt—and watch as Pat rolls a nasty junk pitch under my bent elbows and into the chair. 

By the time I look at that last strike, Chuck is already at my shoulder. 

“I knew he was going to do that. I’m sorry, buddy.”

“That’s how it goes,” I say, still looking at the ball.

The Pirates never did beat the ’Spills that summer. We ended the season at a perfect oh and twelve, but a perfect record’s a perfect record, and don’t let anyone tell you different. That’s Adam Smith talking, and you better believe he’s full of shit. After all, nobody can go twelve and oh without the oh. Behind every great man is at least a dozen dedicated losers. 

Three years later, Ryan’s gone off to cook at some dude ranch, but I’ve heard rumors he quit. Pat’s about to finish up nursing school—a real job, he swears—and Your Good Buddy Chuck still drifts through camp from time to time. 

“It kind of feels like home, coming back after a while.”

One of many, because he knows the secret handshake. 

Me, I’m still up here. I’m the Mayor of Dogtown now, and I’ve got fifteen huskies to answer to. I live out there with them, sleeping in a wall tent year-round because they respect it. If there’s a bear in camp, I sit out there daytime too, watching to make sure it doesn’t eat too many of them. But if the watch draws out for more than a few days, and I’m alone too long, close enough to hear the sounds of camp but unable to join in, I eventually find myself puzzled. 

The summer of the Pirates, we split off from the world, somehow fell out of step, and when I go back south to visit, I can see the changes that no one else seems to notice. I wonder and wonder, and sometimes I get close to an answer, but I might as well keep that to myself. I’m just a Pirate, and my opinion is worth about as much. 

THE END

 Henry

Eileen Nittler

I held my son in my arms. Seven pounds, four ounces at birth. Now, nineteen years later, he weighed almost the same, in a box, in my arms.

I buckled my son into the backseat of the car and refused to leave it unattended lest somebody kidnap him. I drove six hours in the rain from California after claiming his body, sobbing as a passenger, and listening to my husband sob as I drove.

I put my son into my hope chest and placed his favorite beat-up sandals beside him. He called them his dress shoes: he preferred to go barefoot. On top of the box were the sympathy cards and copies of his obituary.

I got his birthdate wrong on the obituary. I suppose I hadn’t had enough experience with grief to ask someone else to proofread the words that came across my phone. I didn’t know how far out of my mind I was.

The first time I opened the box of his ashes, several months later, I cried so hard I threw up. I sewed a bag specially lined to carry him, one tablespoon at a time, to scatter him in places we thought he would like, to allow him to travel with us.

The tenth time I opened the box, it wasn’t hard at all. By this point, the bag I had sewn had torn. Now, he was transported in a test tube and left in all kinds of places around the world. If I were mad at him that day, I’d sprinkle some ashes where a seagull had pooped. If I felt motherly, I’d build a shrine of leaves and sticks and arrange a tiny bit of it into the shape of a heart.

He's been to Germany, Mexico, and Belize. To baseball games, mountaintops, and majestic rivers. His ashes are in the glass jewelry we wear, blown by an artist in New England. He's in deserts and churchyards. Friends' potted plants. He's spilled in the glovebox of the truck.

An ounce at a time, he is disappearing from the box, from my arms. It's been years–can we run out of him? And what will the pain be like if we do?

Violent Offender: Chapter One

Kashawn Taylor

“Whoa, whoa, breathe. Sit down”

The voice came from what I believed was behind me. I wasn’t entirely sure; my consciousness flickered. The room around me spun like I was on some poorly constructed tilt-a-whirl at a janky fair off the side of the road. But I was dead sober. Save for nicotine, I hadn’t ingested any mind-altering substances since the night before when I drank a beer bought for me by my Aunt Donna, with whom I was living at the time. 

Sweat poured down my forehead, my cheeks. Or was I crying? My ass found the thin cushion of the chair behind me, but the room continued to spin. Where am I again? Who am I?  What the fuck is going on?

Since my crash, I'd started using breathing exercises to calm my galloping heart. In the year and a half awaiting my trial, I'd turned to them on the nights I numbed the worry by sniffing cocaine and drinking with friends, or more frequently, alone.  Nonetheless, the breathing exercise worked, and I grounded myself in reality.

The spinning ceased, but my surroundings suffocated me. The courtroom became a familiar arena but was full of strangers, apart from Uncle Randy, Uncle Ringo, Aunt Donna, and my father. My grandmother, now in her late eighties, couldn’t make my sentencing date. I tried to focus, to listen, to at least appear present like I wasn’t lost inside my head, like a child who’d wandered into the woods at dusk, never to return.  

“This is one of the most remarkable PSIs I have ever seen. Fifth in his high school class, advanced degree, no prior offenses…”  The prosecutor rattled off other things the pre-sentence investigation had uncovered, but her voice sounded slushy and detached, as though I were listening through a wall of water.

“I’ve reviewed the PSI,” said Judge Ianotti, “and despite the remarkable aspects, one could argue that he should have known better with all that schooling.”

They discussed me as though I wasn’t there, like I wasn’t damn near hyperventilating twenty feet away.

The prosecutor pointed out that however remarkable the PSI, the crimes to which I’d pled guilty were severe, first offense or not.  

I am responsible for another person’s death.

There is no other way to say it – no way to swim around it.  I could say it was an accident, but that would imply something out of my control.  Like many of us, I’d been slipping slowly downhill for all of 2020, making choices that brought me closer and closer to trouble.  That night, I made choices that turned slippage into an all-out tumble.

It’s the day after Christmas, and I’m sad. I’m not sure why I’m sad. I’ve never enjoyed the holidays, but they’ve never dampened my spirits. Today is particularly rough.

In the early afternoon, I hang out with my friend Kyle. We drink and sniff cocaine, an activity that has become an increasingly big problem for me in the last few months. I think about seeking professional help, but not until the new year. Right now, what matters is removing the boulder that’s been crushing me all day.

After getting a decent buzz on, I go home. I don’t feel any better, of course, and want to be alone. Kyle is annoying; the world is annoying; it’s all disappointing. Can’t everything just go away for a bit? Just turn off, like a game system so I can recharge without the constant babble of connectedness.  

Today, I remember, is my friend Alisha’s birthday. She’s having a party. She begs me to come. “It’ll be fun to get out of your funk. Come and just hang out for a bit.” Never one to stand up to even the slightest bit of peer pressure, I agree.

Although the party is not for several more hours, I begin getting ready.  I need time to choose the right outfit, think of the right gift. Plus, I want to work off the buzz I’d been so desperate to get earlier.  

These friendships are still fledgling and I want these people to like me. That approval, I think, will fix everything today.

Later, powered by nostalgia, curiosity, and a hint of desperation, I climb up the stairs of a house across the street from where I grew up. There is a bottle of wine in my hand: a gift I bought for Alisha with the help of her boyfriend Luis. I pray she likes it.

The living room is filled with pot smoke. My eyes water at the smoke’s insistence. The first person I see is Leo, looking solemn with a cup in his hand. He’d asked me for a ride tonight, but at the last minute rode with another friend. The dark red gash on the bridge of his nose is still visible, and the dried blood stains on his favorite red and white windbreaker look like some sick splatter painting.  

About two weeks earlier, after an argument with his girlfriend, she asked to be let out of my car. Leo refused to leave the area and I couldn’t let him stay alone. We paid the price for his stubbornness: a group of men and women came from the direction that his girlfriend ran and attacked him. Without hesitation, I jumped in to defend him, slipping on dirty packed snow plowed to the curb earlier that week. I threw many punches, unsure of how many landed but definitely ate way more. While he was down, a woman pepper-sprayed Leo. Then the group retreated into the darkness of the side streets. The next morning, Leo told me that he rubbed his eyes then reached for his dick, and the lingering pepper spray burned his penis.

Looking at Leo’s battle scars, I remember my first and only fight not simulated while playing Tekken, and I shudder. I push those crimson thoughts from my head and resolve to enjoy myself despite feeling a bit uncomfortable.

The party is what I expect of a party. People drink. People smoke. Very few people dance. I take a few hits of a blunt and have a couple of drinks to loosen up. I feel worse; the weed gives me anxiety—the impending doom kind—and drinking more would make me nauseous. Feeling rigid, I force smiles, mingle, and make small talk with strangers. Act natural, I tell myself. Play it cool.

My social battery drains quickly. I want to go home and recharge. After making my goodbye rounds through the small apartment, I head to the front door and notice Leo to my right, sitting alone on the couch. His deep brown eyes are glassy and distant, looking at nothing. A red cup is in his hand as if proffered to anyone for the taking.

“Do you need a ride home?” I ask. His ride has left him, I notice, maybe hours ago. He agrees to the ride, and I take his cup and throw back whatever concoction resided in it. “Let’s go.”

As I drive through the empty streets in the early morning, he asks to stop at a gas station. He goes in and I fiddle with my phone until he returns.  

Leo takes a small baggy of cocaine from his pocket, intending to rail it in the car. I want some, badly, but I say, “Don’t do that here.” He puts up a small fight, and I take the cocaine from him, slipping it into my wallet with the intention of giving it back once we arrive at our destination. “Do you want to go home or sleep over?” I ask, hoping he will choose the latter so we can do his drugs.

“Your house,” he says, and I turn the key in the ignition and drive off.

After leaving the gas station, my sea of memory becomes hazy.

It is dark. The streets are mostly empty, save for the occasional Wendy’s wrapper drifting listlessly in the wind.  I drive past the parking garage for the magnet school downtown.  After that, black, as if someone drags me, kicking and screaming, into the darkest depths of the ocean.  

My eyes open. I’m in my Jeep, but I am unsure where I am and less sure how I got here. My head is pounding, hammers bashing the nerves behind my eyes.  

How odd, I think, that I fell asleep. A sword of panic strikes me. My first, fleeting thought: seizure. I’d had one before and the disorientation is eerily familiar. Wherever I am, I reason, I need to get home, or maybe to a hospital.

I turn the key, which is dangling from the ignition. The vehicle sputters and whines like a recalcitrant child, but it won’t start.

Weird, I tell myself. Still out of it, I decide that this little problem can wait. Right now, I am tired—drained, really—and my head is killing me and my chest feels like it might explode. Nothing a little nap can’t fix. I rest my head on the steering wheel and close my eyes.

Lights. Shouting.

“Get them out of the car!”

“Cuff him!”

I’m suddenly being dragged from the Jeep. I’m cuffed and thrown into the back of what I deduce is a police cruiser.

My vision is blurry and my brain is still foggy, but I piece together some bits of what is happening. The police have me in their car. Lights—lots of them—strobe to the beat pounding in my head. Or maybe, it’s the other way around. What time is it? What the fuck is going on?

I look around. To my right, I see Leo through the window of the cruiser. He’s on a stretcher, yelling something unintelligible as paramedics push him out of my line of sight, into the cold, vast darkness behind me.

The police drive me to the hospital, where they take blood, perform tests, and ask questions. Though I should ask them questions, I remain quiet, letting them prod and poke.

After I assume the tests are completed, I ask the officer in the room with me what is going on. My wrist is cuffed to the bed—I think I deserve some answers. He gives me none.

As I come slowly and fully back to the world I notice there no clocks on the walls. I don’t have my phone. Or wallet. I pull with my arm shackled to the bed and the officer jerks, then relaxes again. The situation solidifies around me, and my anxiety, which had previously settled at a dull simmer, starts to boil. My head begins throbbing again, and my heartbeat quickens like an incipient crescendo in a grand symphony’s last song.

“Garbage,” I say, sitting up, suddenly sweaty-hot and itchy.

“What?” says the officer.

“Gar. Bage.”

He grabs the bin from the floor and holds it near. I lean over, my stomach convulsing and contracting, ready to release a tsunami from my gut. I heave and heave. Eventually, a weak but determined rivulet of some slimy, black, grainy gook dribbles from my mouth.

The officer’s eyes meet mine.

I ask: “What was that?”

He says: “I don’t know.”

What feels like hours pass in torturous silence before the police bring me to the station.

I overhear a conversation:

“We’re not arresting him?”

“No, just bring him in.”

In a small room in the station, two plain-clothes cops ask me questions about my day. I answer earnestly because I know something is wrong but still don’t know what. I tell them everything I can remember, and they prod. “Are you sure?” The officers seem nice enough—they offer me water—and when the interrogation ends, one officer types what I don’t realize is an official statement and asks me to review and sign it.  

Then he tells me what happened.

“You had an accident and hit someone.” His voice is flat, unemotive. I expect more from him, anger or something. “They’re in critical condition. Are you sure you don’t remember anything else?”

Yes, I am sure.

My jaw hangs slack and all the air rushes from my lungs. A chunk of memory is missing like a doctored videotape. I have no recollection of an accident, but also no recollection of anything else. Darkness, as though someone recorded the inside of their pocket. 

Before this bombshell, I felt physically better. Now, the world is threatening to slide off-kilter again. I still don’t know what time it is, but that’s okay because I am dreaming. I must be.

Or maybe I had more to drink than I remember. I don’t feel hungover, and I haven’t been blackout drunk since my days as a spunky undergrad.

Something is very, very wrong.

The police, realizing that I am of no more help to them, take me home.

Registering I don’t have my keys, I bang on the front door, hoping to wake my grandmother. When she doesn’t answer, I go to the back of the house and knock on the sliding glass doors on our back porch that separate the master bedroom from the outside. This is my uncle’s room.

It takes a while for Uncle Randy to wake up. As I wait, the sun begins to rise, the clouds glowing with heavenly early light. The world is quiet, peaceful, as if everything is okay. Nothing is okay.

Once inside, I tell Uncle Randy and Grandma Rose what happened through tears and shrieks.

“Oh my God, Kashawn,” Grandma Rose says. It seems all she can muster. 

I amble to my room, pull shut my blackout curtains, and cry until my eyes hurt and my tear ducts are gasping for moisture.

A month after the crash the lead detective called me to ask if I remembered anything more about that night. I didn’t. Almost casually, he asked if he’d already told me the victim passed. He didn’t, and I am certain he knew that. After that call, I cried, shaking with guilt and shame for minutes or hours. Time was irrelevant.  

My actions stole someone’s life.

And with that, my life, too, was over.

A year later Leo told me what really happened that night. After his girlfriend’s friends ambushed us, Leo admitted he turned to pills and had been crushing them into his drinks. I pushed for more information, but he refused to elaborate on the type or quantity of pills, or who he got them from. 

When I told my public defender, she looked me square in the eye and told me it didn’t matter. And she was right. The police had gotten the results for my blood-alcohol level and it was more than twice the legal limit. Though the pills explained the loss of time, they don’t excuse the choices I made before getting in the vehicle. I had hoped that maybe, just maybe, the fact that he told me this and the fact that paramedics revived him with Narcan at the scene would lead to further tests or investigation. And somehow, that would help me. But it just didn’t matter.  

It took some convincing, but Leo promised to speak at my sentencing date and admit to spiking his drink, not knowing that I would take it and down it. In early July, however, Leo disappeared. Police found him two days after Independence Day, parked outside a cheap motel where we used to party, dead inside the car. He’d committed suicide, succumbing to his own demons that had been plaguing him for a long time. He had placed his ID on the dashboard of the car.

That courtroom became a blindingly bright operating room where I dissected how royally I had fucked up my life. My grandma raised me well; I had almost everything I ever wanted. Sneakers. Clothes. Videogames. I excelled in school, earning a full-tuition scholarship to college. After graduating early, I worked steadily at decent-paying jobs, although pecuniary astuteness was never something I mastered.

I did everything right—I was the first of my friends to buy a car and did it at eighteen. I paid for everything when we went out. All that meant I was successful. Right?

In many ways, I think I was always fated to captivity, destined for disaster. My parents were drug addicts. After the warrant came in, my uncle drove me to the police station and dropped a bomb: “You know you were born with drugs in your system, right?”

I had not known.

Addiction runs in my family. It’s embedded in my genes.

I got lucky. Like some seraphic dove, my paternal grandmother swooped in and took me under her wing. Even she got lucky; my mother never showed up to the custody hearing.

I think my unconscious drive to be so different from my parents—and several aunts and uncles, for that matter—is what made me so attracted to dangerous situations and people unlike me in the wrong ways. Always striving for perfection growing up instead of allowing myself the room to experiment and mess up manifested in seeking out trouble as an adult without knowing what I was doing. My friends became decent people with affinities for worse and worse things. One can only stand in the path of a tornado for so long before its force pulls you in, like a hapless bale of hay whose sole purpose is to be decimated. 

But in my desire to know about the world of my parents from which I so vehemently ran, I landed myself in a situation from which there was no escape. By falling into what Grandma Rose saved me from, I ruined everything she worked so hard to build for me, that I built for myself on top of her foundation. Curiosity had skewered the fucking cat.

And though I finally knew the truth about that night, I also knew for certain, that through action and inaction, decisions small and large, the only person responsible for my predicament was myself. 

Feelings of guilt, remorse, and worthlessness crashed over me as I listened to Judge Ianotti ask me the required questions about the deal my state-appointed attorney had brokered for me with the prosecutor.

For more than a moment, asking for the death penalty in an impassioned outburst seemed the most reasonable course of action. Why do I deserve to live as opposed to the innocent man I mowed down on that night eighteen months earlier?

I didn’t.

I told the judge the requisite answers to his questions: Yes, no, I do, I understand.

“I sentence you,” he said, his judicious voice sounding as though we were still underwater, “to eight years suspended after serving three, with three years’ probation to follow. With good time and other DOC programs, you may not serve the full three years. Good luck.”

The marshal cuffed me and led me out of the courtroom, onto an elevator, and into a bullpen under the courthouse.

Encounters XI: Invisible and Invincible

Susan Johnson

The neighborhood kids shush me when I walk by and wave hi. They’re hiding from another neighborhood kid. It’s that game where you duck down behind the one in front of you who ducks behind a tree, and there’s no way anyone can see you, as long as you don’t move or giggle. I almost want to join them. The older I get the younger I seem, to myself. I’m not that sixty-year-old neighbor walking by; I’m one of these kids, tucked down low, pressed against bark and leaves, hiding from the world, residing in that kid-world where you’re invisible and invincible.  

I switch up my morning walk because the pond is too buggy. They always aim for my eyes, unless they want my ears. The back of my neck is popular as well. I cautiously continue along the busy road where the shoulder is narrow and often there’s poison ivy. But there’s also two old farm houses I love: one perched on a hill, one nestled in a hollow. Both are reached by driving through a column of trees that stretch back centuries when farmers were certainly pestered by biting bugs—and kept on farming, as I keep on walking.  

A guy is out painting on this already-humid early morning. Walking by I say, “Hi.” He responds, “Good morning,” as if genuinely happy to see me. “Good morning to you,” I say in return. It’s odd how gratifying this feels. I wanted to acknowledge him because he’s working but it’s him who ends up engaging with me, a simple pedestrian who prefers to be in the background. A pedestrian pedestrian.

Today two men are painting the gazebo. Each bend forward with a brush in one hand, can in the other, and a cigarette pinched between pursed lips. Both in suspenders, they move in synchrony tracing the edge of a baluster, the way a caterpillar would. They could be characters in a Samuel Beckett play. I watch the ash accumulate at the end of each cig and think: they could use a third hand. Will the ash fall in the paint? Will they mistakenly put the brush to their lips? I had a professor in college who, during lectures, would raise the chalk to his lips, hoping for a deep draw of pleasure but instead tasting dry powder. He too seemed an actor in some play, one where the know-it-all makes a grand exit, and then walks into a closet.

The guy in shorts year-round. The guy who crosses the street barefoot. The one with blue hair wearing a skirt. They look like cast members, these men I can’t help but notice at the women’s college across the street. Who obviously want to be noticed. I wonder if, in a role reversal, they’re office workers and need some way to stand out as opposed to my typical stance of looking on from the sidelines.

I can’t say I’ve ever been completely comfortable in my role as an academic. In a conference once in New Orleans, I stepped into a session and told the woman next to me I had just walked to the river. “What river?” she asked. What river? In New Orleans? I couldn’t believe it. Who were these people? Do they not go outside?

It’s busy on the trail today. A couple with a dog, a couple without a dog, a sullen teenager who’d rather be anywhere else. We take turns stepping aside for each other. Then, a woman awkwardly stops and stands in the middle of the path. I get it right away. That’s her husband, I’m guessing, trying to hide as he pees behind a tree. It’s a golden rule thing: look away as you would want others to look away.

Stopping to chat with neighbors, I tell them I once dropped the F-bomb on their son when he was little and their dog was a puppy. I had paused to pat the puppy and it had wound itself around my legs then peed on my boots. I couldn’t extract myself and their son, holding onto the leash, was helpless as well, so out it came. “Oh, he’s heard it plenty,” they say. Still, I feel bad. I mean, a kid with a puppy. It’s like he was a Norman Rockwell painting and I was throwing rocks at the canvas.

Coming in from my two-hour morning walk, I say “Good Morning” to the cat. “I can’t hear you,” you say from the basement. “I was talking to the cat,” I say. “I can’t hear you,” you repeat. I stand at the top of the cellar stairs and say, “It’s nothing.” And it is nothing. You don’t have to hear everything I say; I’m just glad you’re still listening.

My husband and I pedal up a steep hill on our old Raleigh three speeds. A woman coming toward us actually says, “It’s easier going down.” Oh really. I never would have expected that. Similarly at a trailhead one winter, a guy pushing his stuck Jeep turned to me and said, “This ice is slippery.” Gosh, you don’t say. It isn’t that I’m always profound, but is there any need to say the obvious? I think the need is to just say something, to avoid silence.  

After two days of watching the air drain out of a tire in a car parked off-road, I watch a man blow it up with a bicycle pump. Up and down, up and down. I didn’t know you could get enough pressure with a bike pump for a car tire. We usually do the opposite—use an air compressor for our bikes. By the time I get to the end of the road, he’s pumped the tire enough to drive by me. How far will he get? Why not put on the spare? Not that I’m an expert. I used to carry a spare tube when I cycled, along with a small hand pump, but I never mastered it. And I always hated it. Getting a flat always seemed bigger than it was, an unnecessary interruption to my day.   

Two days in a row, in the same spot downtown, a car comes to a complete halt in front of me, signals right, then turns left. It’s like they got caught in some vortex that makes people drive terribly. I should be sympathetic to confused out-of-staters, but I’m too impatient for that. Go away, I say to a car blocking the road. Just go away.

Frames without paintings, paintings without frames all lie piled along the road—the aftermath of tag sales. We tire of our surroundings, I think, but want others to find our taste interesting, so we offer it for sale. But no one wants bad, discarded art. Sometimes all we want is a blank wall. 

In a bookstore where I used to work, we discuss another bookstore where I used to work. The owner would come in at closing, grab a twenty from the till, buy a bottle of Jameson, and then sit and write poems on paper bags. They were his favorite blank canvases he loved to fill. “I’m going to send this to the New Yorker,” he’d say. Right. It was often quiet in the store until he showed up with his “literature in action” display. A drunk man’s idea of literature in action. He liked to think of himself as a tortured artist. In reality, he was a tortured bookstore owner who wanted a life beyond retail.

I don’t wish for a life beyond hiking, yet I do aspire to be more coordinated. If and when I do trip, I always make sure to return and walk by the evil place and then continue on, to show that I am in control, unscathed. As if the place “scathed” me. Once inside a grocery store, wearing sunglasses to cover a black eye I received from a clumsy fall, a woman approached me and said, “I get nauseous from the bright lights and see you do as well.” “Actually, I have a black eye and don’t want to freak people out,” I told her. Then a man approached and said, “I just thought you were famous.” “I am famous,” I answered and left it at that.

On my morning walk, I was grateful no one pointed to my black eye and asked, “What happened?” I want their concern but I don’t need people pointing out the ugliness of a bruise. No one wants that. A week later the bruise drifted down and my cheek turned green. “Where will it end?” I wondered.

At sixty, I have the same scabbed knees I had at six. But the key is to keep going. Like the sculls on the river this morning that silently glide, slicing the calm surface. None of the back-and-forth chop of paddling a kayak. They appear to ride on rails of light. I picture myself doing the same, leaving nothing disturbed. 

Though I was camping by the ocean weeks ago, the open water is still in me, in my lungs, eyes, and skin, as if I’ve absorbed the sharp salt and piercing light, the metallic sound of gulls, and the sight of seals periscoping to look out over waves, to look at me. How the waves never stop arriving, then retreating, back to the horizon. Every day different and every day the same.

 Grey Gardens

Cynthia Belmont

I lay on the white-planked table smoking my first-ever cigarette, alone because everyone else was on a delivery and I had been left to watch the store. Dazed, I stared at the foggy, sun-charmed glass roof, everything wet around me in the euphoric air of petrichor and potted geranium, the terrible burning of pristine lungs and nauseous whirl, the bougainvillea’s draggy magenta flowers dripping from the steel beams, its arms and fingers reaching from the huge winding trunk at the center of the main greenhouse like the tree of knowledge, spreading pink everywhere. It was a new smoker’s high—you only get that once.

I’d been working there for a couple of weeks. I was just a student and I’d never worked retail before, but my mother had connections and had scored me this summer job because she organized chamber concerts and Grey Gardens, a chaotic but sterling operation, did the floral arrangements for her events. I don’t remember where I got the smokes; they could have been anyone’s. Everyone smoked then. It was 1985 and glass bar ashtrays, clay saucers, and Moroccan brass bowls overflowing with ancient soggy butts were stashed all over the greenhouses like Easter eggs.

Seventeen and unsure but suspecting I was gay, I was in love with a girl, my best friend, though I wouldn’t have said this aloud or even held it as a whole thought. I just wrote oblique odes to her various parts—clavicles, ankles, her quizzical blonde eyebrows, the golden down on the back of her neck. It was overwhelming, and there was nothing for it but to pine. It was difficult to find distractions, and Grey Gardens was a good one. I had worked on a landscaping crew and I understood gardening in volume, how to sweat all day in the Kansas City heat and keep things alive; now, I could learn the art part bit by bit, planting pansy pots, cutting and soaking Oasis blocks, trimming rose stems, watching the owners build towering whimsical old-money confections of lily, hydrangea, gladiolus.

Grey and John were gentle, sinewy lovers, settling into their forties after a disco-era West Coast youth. Their house was a slim Victorian featuring burnout-velvet settees and marble-topped tables, peeling in high style among the other pre-gentrification historical properties in their downtown neighborhood. Ornate gilded mirrors, mahogany cathedral chairs, Majolica vases, beat-up Persian rugs—I was there to pick up décor for a party and walked through slowly, trying to take it in.

Grey was delicate, charismatic, nimble, otter-eyed. He sang what he spoke and sometimes just sang, filling the greenhouses with inspired smoker’s arias. He had purplish sores on his forearms and forehead and often napped in the shack next to the dumping area outside the far greenhouse. It was Grey’s place, his vision, his beauty and humor, titling his namesake business after the Edith Bouvier Beale legacy, but also it really was like that, mossy at the seams and vined with overtaking green, decrepit and gorgeous, unimpeachably genteel, from the cracked handmade tile floors to the dusty Murano glassware lining the shelves in the office.

John was tall and somber with black shaggy hair and a dominant gaze. Though they were careful never to touch intimately in public, I could imagine him dancing with Grey, enfolding him. He was wound tight, carrying the defensiveness, the frustration, for them both.

Grey’s sister Janet helped out with large orders and did the books. I loved to work with her, loved her freckles, the gap between buttons of her faded denim work shirt, thin gold chains, long auburn hair, cracked pale lips, her tan veiny feet in weathered work sandals, silver toe ring, eyes that were both ice-blue and kind.

Grey, John, and Janet treated me like one of them. They expected me to work hard and get their jokes, invited me to join them after work at the blues club where I watched them shake the ice around in gin they’d ordered by brand name, City Light Orchestra swinging around us, effortless.

By August I knew how to pair plants in urns and hanging baskets. I’d developed opinions—sophisticated asparagus fern over low-rent leatherleaf and baby’s breath. I knew something was wrong with Grey, though no one ever mentioned it. No one talked about what was happening.

I knew there were half-empty jugs of Carlo Rossi hidden under the work benches and that they were John’s. I knew that Grey’s shack next door held a terrible sadness. I went over there once while Grey and John were away for a few days, tasked to retrieve something for Janet, and I saw a counter piled high with old newspapers and crusted cups and dishes, buckets scummy with rotted plant matter in gelatinous brown water, a rumpled cot in the corner. I closed the door behind me and tried not to think about it later when I watched Grey’s twiggy masterful bruised hands at work in the flowers.

I knew how to smoke with panache—how to hold a cigarette casually between my lips while elbow-deep in dirt or freezing water, how to exhale through my nose. I knew what love looked like outside the public flaunt of heterosexuality. It looked real. It looked possible.

When I went to college, I brought a little clay planter shaped like a sleeping cat with a cutting from Grey Gardens’ mother asparagus, duchess among ferns, lacy and thorned, sinuous and soft. Still thriving after Grey died two years later, after John followed him, after the greenhouse closed, it lived, sometimes ripe with small green berries, root-bound, stems twining whip-thin, fox-tailed, for twenty years.

 Empirical Research on Angry Women

Joy Curtis

An invisible hand burst into my chest, gripped my heart, and squeezed it in chaotic pulses (Herrald & Tomaka, 2002). I pressed wrinkles into my forehead, stringed fine lines under my eyes, and stretched my lips thin (Malatesta & Izard, 1984). My locked jaw makes my face brutish (Manfredini et al., 2011) and lead poured from my head into my bones (Lundberg, 1999).

They told me not to be angry; they wrote it in a book and published it for me to read (King James Version, 1994, Proverbs 21:19). It was not just me— they told women for centuries not to be angry (Aristotle, 2011). But I was still angry (Thomas, 1993).

I know it would be better to never express my anger (Brescoll & Uhlmann, 2008). I would have more friends (Tiedens, 2001). I would make more money (Raver, 2004). I would be more successful in school (Graziano et al., 2007). I would be more established at work (Sloan, 2012). I would be more loved in my marriage (Gottman & Levenson, 1992). It does depend on how you define more, but I'm not a fool; women without anger do better (Heilman, 2001).

I express anger like a woman (Wood & Eagly, 2012). It must rot inside me like an apple, leading an unseen thread through a labyrinth (Eagly & Carli, 2007). Over the years, it would layer like the sticky dust that doesn't just brush off with a finger (Harburg et al., 2003). Maybe it would slip like a noose around my neck and tighten yearly until I stopped breathing (Kiecolt-Glaser et al., 2002). Or in an instant, I could slip off the three-legged stool I have as “my seat at the table” and snap my neck (Suls & Bunde, 2005).

In truth, society says I can get angry (Lerner et al., 2006). I'm just not supposed to be angry; there is a difference (Shields, 2002). To prevent myself from being angry all the time, I am developing good coping strategies (Gianakos, 2000). But it seems the more aware I am, the more angry I become (Kring & Gordon, 1998). Domestic violence is masked as normal (World Health Organization, 2024). Solving world hunger is a joke (Trumbic, 2020). Poverty is so common we have levels to it (National Women's Law Center, 2019). And even if there was more money, (Leibbrandt & List, 2015) the opposite of poverty isn’t wealth, it is justice (National Women's Law Center, 2019). Problems make me angry, but when I think of the injustice of it all I am irate (O'Leary et al., 2009).

I'm really not that virtuous, my anger is not always about social justice because usually it is personal and even selfish sometimes (American Psychological Association, 2019). I'm angry that my mom ate oatmeal sandwiches and ketchup soup the year after her mom died because her dad kicked her out of the house (U.S. Census Bureau, 2020). I'm angry that I only exist because the king raped my great-grandmother (McDonald, 1985). I researched my gynecologist to make sure he was not a sex offender (Pintas & Mullins Law Firm, 2024). There is a chance the doctor might end my surgery by making me infertile (Utah Department of Public Safety, n.d). Someone told me to calm down (Frost & Averill, 1982).

As a little girl, I wanted to be a fairy with freshly grown flowers popping up from my footprints (Harris & Wagg, 2019). There was a time when I wasn’t angry at all; I was afraid (Ziegler & Lake, 1979). Now, all I imagine is standing on the cusp of society, screaming as flames flurry from my mouth, scourging everything in their path (Fischer & Evers, 2009). With each scream, the glass windows melt, and buildings collapse like dominos (Ekman et al., 1983). But still, no one hears me (Fishman, 1978). 

There was a point when the Bible frightened me with images of the second coming engulfing the earth in flame, but now I'm content (Quran, 39:68). If I'm too wicked for God to allow me to participate in the rapture, I could sit at my office window, sipping my morning tea, and watch the entire earth melt into ash with each passing second (Levenson, 1992). I lay awake at night, dreaming of being the flame that ushers in the new birth (Stemmler et al., 2001).

If God touched me, I'd be the spark that ignited it all (Ax, 1953). I'd evacuate everyone before I did it, ensuring everyone was among the stars and above the mushroom clouds I dropped for peace (Alperovitz, 1995). After the eruption, I'd run my hands through the tephra (Shoji et al., 1993), ash rolling through my fingers into a soil bed (Vitousek & Farrington, 1997). When I blink, everyone returns from heaven to cultivate the earth (Easwaran, 2007).

Anger brings change (Goodwin & Jasper, 2004). Wins championships (Lazenby, 2014). Sparks activism (Ali & Durham, 2004). Builds nations (Friend, 2003). Resolves injustices (Womack, 1968). Advocates for nature (Suzuki, 2009). Leads revolts (Reynolds, 2005). Establishes economies (Vogel, 2011). Writes alphabets (Kim, 2008). Paints murals (Herrera, 1986). Publishes music (Midnight Oil, 1987). Designs clothes (Stewart, 2001). Founds schools (Douglass, 1845). They don't care if I am angry (Scott, 1990). My emotions are not necessary to them at all (Piven & Cloward,1977); They don't want to be uncomfortable when things change (Gilligan, 1982).

I wasn't born this way and will not even give the world credit for making me angry (Doniger, 1981). One sleepless night, something snapped, like I was a glowstick that got bent in half and shaken (Lutwak et al., 2003). At that moment, I chose anger (Hercus, 1999). I woke up (Tavris, 1989). I stepped outside (Martin et al., 2020).

They told me I looked angry (Hess et al., 2004).

So, I told them they were right. (Brody, 1993).

I am angry (Simon & Nath, 2004).

I want change (Tiedens, 2001).

References

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 A NO NAME

Kathy Nguyen

Two years after your passing, our family friend, whom I’ve always called Bác Hai, passed away. I positioned myself in the dark concerning your and Má’s history, and this wasn’t any different. Stories you once told marked your history with Bác Hai: he was a former lính bộ binh, which transliterally means an infantry soldier, and became a lifelong friend at one point. Your last reunion with him was during Four’s wedding banquet and even then, you were distant to him and his family. A few words were exchanged but we could hear subtle overtures that audibly pointed out how far removed you were from the world outside of your home. Since your first stroke, you had acted more aloof, isolating yourself from your friends and the people you once were intimately familiar with as you retreated elsewhere, into your own space. Years before your stroke, you frequently hosted your friends from the Vietnamese community. You shared a long history with Bác Hai; as Má later shared, your family escaped with Bác Hai’s family. Perhaps the disease symptomatically prompted a lonely unfamiliarity only you understood, allowing you to feel secure in seclusion while also breaking away from any hostile impositions expected of you.

Bác Hai’s funeral was a long all-day event with Buddhist monks, one dressed like Đường Tam Tạng from Tây Du Ký—Journey to the West—all hired to recite and chant Buddhist scriptures that only Má was familiar with. Má and I were there for two days. I sat away from Má as she sat next to and comforted his wife, Bác Gái. I observed her family waiting and lining up in perfect formation to take photographs as a way to commemorate Bác Hai’s funeral into a framed memory.

It’s been said before and I’m merely one of the many shadowy echoes at this point, but funerals are more about living amidst death than any tragedies surrounding the departed. Funerals provide a mark, a timestamp, for the dead but continue moving onward to celebrate the living. I’m never going to understand it nor will I attempt to. But it’s comparable to how we insist that grief has no limit, is indeterminate, and there’s no expiration date; funeral arrangements are likely the same way. The existing afterward, or what I see as the aftermath of a person’s death, is when the days and times bleed into each other. Times that are difficult to control and beyond our comprehension as we attempt to move forward while feeling the—your—absence.

We left after the funeral procession when Bác Hai’s body was taken to the retort to be cremated.

You were also cremated but we didn’t want to witness it either. After saying our last farewells to you, with Four, Five, and me kissing your forehead for the last time, we watched your body be zipped in a thick, black post-mortem bag, and taken away to a funeral home. It was a terrible sight to exit the hospital to see the bag that held your body be placed in a van, knowing that you’ll be cremated in a few days. It remains difficult for me—the living—to see your body—your physical existence—reduced to granular ashed bones.

The ride home after Bác Hai’s funeral was quiet, almost too silent. Má always talked, every waking moment and everywhere. That day, she remained quiet, perhaps out of respect for the departed; only the melodic notes and singing from that one Vietnamese CD I burned years before served as background noise for the somber ride home back to Fayetteville.

Breaking the silence, I asked Má, “Do monks often sound like they’re singing folk-like operatic cải lương when they’re reciting Buddhist scriptures or do I not possess the ears to closely listen to Vietnamese Buddhist texts and am not listening to them correctly?” I didn’t know what I meant when I inquired about how to correctly listen to Buddhist scriptures. The only time I heard scriptures being chanted was in films and movies dubbed in Vietnamese and ironically, cải lương, which I preferred not to watch. Listening to Vietnamese felt like a linguistic detachment, all of the words and sounds escaping my ears as comprehension can be difficult when colloquial and cultural references felt more like an elusive encounter than something that riveted together. But what was I listening for when all I heard was a medley of reverbs being displaced in a room when I felt linguistically displaced myself? 

Some nights that bleed into the early mornings, I wake up to Má loudly whispering Buddhist scriptures, her head lowered to the point her chin might be in contact with her chest as her palms are pressed together. I haven’t heard her reciting scriptures since you recovered from your second stroke and returned home.

I expected Má, in her warning tone, to reprimand me for being disrespectful but instead, she laughed. “They’re not supposed to sound like that,” she informed me. “I can’t understand what they were saying half of the time.” We went silent after. We didn’t voice anything about possible dialects that might produce opposing pronunciations to what Má was used to hearing. Some things are just known and unspoken. Maybe your absence was too palpable at this point, after attending another funeral, because there are times when I imagine your reactions in a present without you. I can only imagine your response, spoken in your soft but steady register, your face thoughtful as you considered, “There’s no incorrect way to read scriptures.” 

Three or four tracks later, with the CD continuing to play on a loop to what felt like an undeviating linear drive, I initiated a conversation as Má stared blankly ahead due to my curiosity. “Má, why was there another name printed below Bác Hai’s birth name on his funeral poster? I noticed the word pháp danh. Does it mean that everyone is given a Buddhist name after death?” What I left unverbalized was if Buddhist names symbolized the material body leaving the physical realm and entering the state of nothingness, leaving everything behind. Maybe for reincarnation. Or maybe names, like the body itself, disappear and post-death is just that: death, decay, and then nothingness. Only that nothingness becomes fragments of our memory.

Má’s sighed as she explained that a person’s pháp danh is their given Buddhist name. She was unsure about the process or legalities for Vietnamese diasporic citizens living in the United States, but she recalled from the memories she holds about Việt Nam that a person has to visit a Buddhist temple. A monk, likely the abbot, would give the person a Buddhist name and print their name onto a document, stamped with a Buddhist seal to officiate it. A Buddhist person can inhabit two separate names in a body, their pháp danh and their nhũ danh—their birth name.

Sealed or not, names aren’t arbitrary.  

You probably don’t remember, but I wheeled you out late one night, a recurrence when sleep evaded you, so you could sit at the dining table to watch an episode of Animaniacs on my laptop while eating a bag of Halloween candy. Ollie, our family’s plumped, territorial bunny hopped around your wheelchair, never straying far from your moist feet. You were still smiling then. Your smile stretching out a little bit more whenever I placed Ollie on the table.

The day you were discharged from rehab, you sat on the reclining chair, the faux leather fabric torn with tape strewn over to cover the wears and tears because of Ollie’s tremendous bunny teeth. As you reached down to the carpet to pet Ollie, he lay beside the chair and his nose moved up and down at an unknowing accelerated speed.

You never knew Ollie’s plumped body gradually became thinner as he rapidly lost weight and his two black eyes were damaged by visible cataracts that created a white gloss over the entirety of his eyes; these were symptoms triggered by an unknown prognosis of E. Cuniculi. His energetic jumps and rapid binkies became consciously careful and much slower as his eyesight faded. What was left was his sense of smell and ability to navigate the house and his indoor enclosure by sheer memory. He passed away a year after you did; a large tumor was growing behind one of his eyes and there was a chance he would die on the operating table; a year ago, he took longer than usual to wake up from the anesthesia. Má believed he slowly died from a broken heart as he felt your absence. When we returned home from the hospital after your body was transported to the funeral home, I let Ollie out, and he hopped in front of your room, the door closed, and laid there for hours.

That night, your eyes looked focused, intent on watching the episode of Animaniacs, featuring Slappy Squirrel speaking with her discernible apathetic New York accent. I sat next to you, reading xxxHOLiC, a manga series by CLAMP, while forcing my eyes to remain open and ignoring the subtle but sensed cluster headaches creating invisible dents and lesions in my head. Reading wasn’t the best nightly activity to induce insomnia but for me, reading kept my mind concentrated and conscious. As you once remembered, reading is one of the few activities that make me stay up all night and into the early mornings because I have a habit of not sleeping until I finish a novel, regardless of length. One of my favorite manga characters, Ichihara Yūko, from xxxHOLic, philosophically expressed: “Names have power. With living things or inanimate, depending on the names we give them, a thing can have the same power as that for which it is named.” Má doesn’t share this sentiment. For her, without a Buddhist seal, a person’s Buddhist name felt arbitrary. But do names have to be official for a person to formally exist?

“So, would a person pass on as their Buddhist name or birth name?” I asked; I’m unsure why names were significant to me, especially once a person passed away. I wasn’t sure if I asked that question correctly.

“Does it even matter? It’s the same person. Both names are printed. They know,” Má answered.

“Do you and did Ba have one?”

You two don’t; Má said there was neither a need nor urgent obligation to do so. I don’t remember Bác Hai’s pháp danh. Sometimes his full name also escapes me because I’ve only ever referred to him with a reverential title since I knew him. You and Má would respectfully refer to him and Bác Gái as anh hai and chị hai. Names weren’t used to identify but were a hierarchical familial branching that felt reverential yet enforced and distant.

Your name sounded complete, full. All those years after your resettlement, your name was still written as it was on your birth certificate; it was official and as you remembered. 

There was a time you liked to retell stories: a day at lunch when we were eating soft tacos and enchiladas that I ordered, which you drenched in salsa, you shared the history of your and your brother’s names. You always mentioned that your brother’s name was Kiếm while yours was Khách. Two separate people coalesced in names to become Kiếm Khách—Swordsman. I giggled and thought of the only reference I could connect to your name: Trung Nguyên Kiếm Khách—The Righteous Guards—a wuxia series with a discernible cheap budget that was made to remember and relive the peak of the Shaw Brothers’ nostalgic film period, when agile and ridiculous but amazing wire stunts and fighting sequences were a thrill to watch on screen. Many young, noisy summers were spent rewatching that series. Six and I listened to how fake metal, somehow flexuous swords clashed against each other, creating friction followed by a tenor of desperation to win and survive. Those times when you placed those tapes in the VHS and replayed it for us, Six and I watched it repeatedly, in awe of both the sword fighting and the garish, floaty costumes that only heightened the stylized wuxia worldbuilding that you once loved.

You also laughed fondly every time you repeated your family bit, about how a sword couldn’t exist without a wielder. You couldn’t exist without your brother and he couldn’t exist without you since your names were entwined. I still don’t know anything about your brother nor had I ever asked about him when you were still alive. I only have his name to distantly identify with, never a face. Your name identified you and your face, for several of us.

You made your name into a running gag in the family. Whenever “Con Đường Xưa Em Đi,” one of the many romantic pre-1975 war songs you listened to in high frequency, was playing in the house and regardless of the rendition, you still listened to this particular, unchanging lyric, searching for that exact lyric in the song’s intro:

Anh làm thơ vu quy,

Khách qua đường lắng nghe chuyện tình ta đã ghi

and you would point at yourself, clearly and proudly enunciating the word Khách, even though the lyrical context signified not your name, but an unknown guest or a fleeting visitor passing by.

When I came to visit from Denton, you repeated the same action when we rewatched TVB’s 1989 serial adaptation of one of Kim Dung’s wuxia novels, Hiệp Khách Hành. When the character Tạ Yên Khách appeared on-screen or whenever a character references his name, you would point at yourself. It never got old then; now, it’s a passing memory, like a guest, fittingly remembered because of their initial impact.

That one night, that unexpected night a few months after you recovered from your second stroke, where nothing was supposed to happen, your body went into respiratory failure and the night extended itself even further than possible. Má called out to you, pronouncing your name in a shaky monosyllable. That was the first and final time I heard Má calling you by your first name, repeating it out of panic.

Later, she would tell me calling your name out repeatedly called you back from the dead. That was the night she thought you were gone only to painfully return. There are times when I see and hear the word khách and I can no longer hear your voice nor can I remember the facetious inflections your voice carried when you said your name. But I can still hear Má’s trembling elocution. 

With Má, names were different. I’ve never heard you referring to Má by her name before. But I distantly remembered a time when you called Má out by her maiden name, middle name, followed by an exaggerated emphasis of the ahh sound in jest. For years, I thought her birth name was an unremarkable A letter with an assumed pronunciation of that aah sound you made, forever mulling over how to pronounce it correctly since we would tell everyone that her name was just the letter A. Sometimes people used a long intonation that devolved into a hyperbolic enunciation of the ahh sound or whatever derivatives their tongues felt comfortable rolling with. Sometimes you can also hear disbelief in their tones each time they repeated Má’s non-name, questioning its origins or their accuracy in pronunciation. In America, I only knew to call Má as A, as her A no name. 

Americans pronounced your name as catch with an intent to phonate a caw sound, making it sound more like Caw-tch; Mr. and Mrs. Webb, one of the many sponsors you and Má used to keep in touch with, often pronounced it like that. I’ve also heard people simply calling you Cat. That never failed to elicit an unimpressed chortle from you.

I didn’t know her real name was An, a common Vietnamese name that was unknown to me. To me, A was a distinct Vietnamese name; here, in the English language, it’s the second most commonly used vowel. Something as simple as alphabetical letters, like words, can mean a lot until they lose meaning.

Although Má believes her ears have gotten used to people referring to her A no name, her family in Việt Nam continue to call her An; that’s what they know her as. For Má, her two names do not fracture her identity. She allows two names, including that one letter that she used to repel from, to reside in contention within her identity.

So used to Má being identified as A by her coworkers and whenever translating and interpreting for her, I asked Má if she occasionally gets confused with the two names.

“Why would I be?” she questioned back, more confused than I was upon learning about her dual names.

“I guess I’m asking if you would ever be confused if someone called you An here. Has anyone referred to you by your real name here? Wouldn’t you at least be a bit confused or startled if you heard someone calling you by your actual name since you’ve been called the unfortunate A no name for decades now?”

With what felt like residual resentment emitting from her body from something related to the history of her A no name, Má must have considered the question, allowing it to hang in the air all the while glaring at me when I implored her with that last question. As is customary when conversing with Má, she again counters with a story, revealing the brief history of her name and the origins of her A no name, a narrative retelling you’ve likely heard multiple times before.

A moment back in time, in South Việt Nam, she relayed how every citizen was legally required to procure a government-issued ID once they turned eighteen. She traveled with her Bà Ngoại to Long Xuyên, which you and Má reminded me is the capital of An Giang, the province where Má was born, to apply for her government ID. They waited at one of the capital’s government offices to submit the required paperwork.

Sadly, as you once recalled, living and surviving in an unstable country fragmented and divided by war, unpredictable violent attacks occurred in tragic quotidian. A combination of being misprinted and misspelled, her A no name carries an unexpected violent legacy.

Waiting became the only inert activity to pass the time as Má and her Bà Ngoại prolonged their stay during those three days when it was mandatory to retrieve Má’s government ID. Mailboxes weren’t installed in rural villages so they traveled for days and remained in near proximity to the office by staying at a family friend’s house.

Returning to the government office to fill out paperwork, an explosion occurred, inciting chaotic disruption to what felt like a ubiquitous day. Enveloped in smoke-induced clouds and clamor, people ran and screamed about an attack. One of the government employees rushed to Má and handed her stamped government documents to file at another office branch; she was expected to travel to the next office to fulfill the final criteria for obtaining her government ID. He then frantically told her to run before she got killed.

The sight of blood splattering everywhere she was running away from was deeply ingrained in her memory. Those years, Má reminisced, were peaceful compared to the previous years when she survived incessant bombings and gunfire aimed at her village and family house. To hear explosions and see the presence of blood drenching the ground’s soil at the capital felt like she was reliving the same nightmare again, forcing her heartbeat to become erratic as her body was once more driven into survival mode. She left that area behind, scared and haunted for days.

With the ringing aftermath of the days before still pulsating in the ears, Má and her Bà Ngoại sat outside the other office branch they were directed to, still waiting but disturbed. They waited for Má’s name to be called by someone so she could finally retrieve her government ID. Hours went by until they both heard someone calling an unusual name that didn’t sound Vietnamese. Whoever was pronouncing that name, Má described, sounded as if a bird was cawing at something.

Calls for an Ahh continued until an office employee noticed that Má and her Bà Ngoại were the only ones left waiting outside. That was the moment they both knew that the significant letter N that completed Má’s name was lost, her real name officially changed to the designated singular A.

Má’s Bà Ngoại was enraged because they had to witness horrific violence while waiting only for her name to be misprinted. Má’s Bà Ngoại wanted the office to rectify the error but the employee informed them that the copies and the paperwork were already mailed to the main office in Sài Gòn; rectification would take several additional days to months for any amendments to occur. Waiting was a laborious process; they wanted to return home and forget the violence. Má was forced to live with being An to her family, neighbors, and friends while being recognized and identified as A by the South Vietnamese government.

Fragments of the truth were revealed days after the explosion. An unnamed family of six, whose names Má didn’t know, who lived in a spacious two-storied house, was targeted. Everyone in the family but a child perished from the explosion; the child sustained major injuries but was expected to survive.

Everyone instantly blamed the Việt Cộng for the explosion and murders; it wasn’t days later until someone disclosed the perpetrator was a South Vietnamese soldier. No one wanted to believe that a soldier protecting their country would murder their own, but war changed that perception.

A conflict existed between the unnamed soldier and the unnamed family patriarch. The unnamed soldier demanded the family to give him their chickens but the unnamed patriarch refused to allow his chickens to become entertainment commodities for brutal chicken fights. In an act of senseless retaliation and contempt that intersects with an abuse of power and authority, the unnamed soldier planted two grenades at the patriarch’s house.

Hot anger permeated throughout her body for a time after that infraction. For three days, they remained in Long Xuyên and waited for Má’s printed ID. All that waiting only for that letter N to disappear from a part of her identity and be left unprinted in her official South Vietnamese documents, leaving her, in a sense, substantially undocumented.

Her name was forcefully truncated into her A no name and now akin to a foreign word in the Vietnamese language, pronounced without any legitimate dialectical Vietnamese intonation. But that initial anger quelled the moment she realized violence and chaos caused an employee to leave the letter N off out of fright and the right to survive.

Was An Giang, her birthplace, the reason behind her real name? Names are a mesh of geographical origins and history, all of which serve as references to a person’s life. For Má and a common contention of life: a point of geographical origin is remembered more than a person born with the same common name. A person with an incorrect no name will become a footnote or an obscure marginal annotation only if their existence is allowed to be remembered and memorialized.

Má was born as An but it was violence and multiple deaths that led to her A no name’s birth as a weighted scarlet letter.

Hearing and listening to mispronunciations are forever recurring, something you witnessed in your lifetime. During another failed interview for a postdoc position, one of the faculty members on the hiring committee asked if our surname was pronounced Nu-Guy-In, a common mispronunciation we’ve heard since grade school. I corrected them and said a simple Win would work. They still insisted on pronouncing it as Nu-Guy-In and for thirty minutes, I was Dr. Nu-Guy-In. Somehow, a confident polysyllabic butchering of what should be a simple monosyllabic Win became common here. Was it my corrective tone that made them repeat it in the same manner without considering my preferred pronunciation of a family surname? Or did their tongue not assimilate to the Viet-lish sounds quickly enough?

We have a long history with Nu-Guy-In. It’s likely a relationship at this stage since we’ve been living here forever. 

Unfortunately, Má has to live with more aliases than her A no name allows. When you were both working for Campbell Soup Company, later renamed to Vlasic, only be to be renamed to Pinnacle, your coworkers and Má’s would call Má Nugie—pronounced as Nu-Gee—or Nugin—pronounced Nu-Gin—which is consistent with their non-phonetic perception of our surname.

When a beautiful Christmas card addressed to Má from her former coworker arrived at our house, Five and I went hysterical when we saw how Nugie was spelled for the first time. All these years we’ve heard the cacophonous mispronunciations but seeing it spelled phonetically was different. It was jarring to see how letters were randomly thrown together to further misspell a person’s name.  

Employees elect how they refer to each other. Má explained that her coworkers often called each other by their surnames, which didn’t seem consistent to me because I heard Má referring to people by what seemed to be common first names. Since becoming an employee at the factory, her coworkers called her Nugin or Nugie because they thought Nguyen was too difficult to attempt—a very fair admission. For weeks, she couldn’t get used to Nugin or Nugie and would unintentionally ignore anyone calling for her. Very few people called Má by her A no name anyway; years of assimilating to the dissonant sounds of the Nu-names gradually became more familiar and they became acceptable forms of identification for her.

When coworkers pressed about her A no name, a story she shared during lunch, and demanded to know what happened to the letter N, Má would shrug and not reveal anything else, knowing they wouldn’t understand the politics or grasp the complications that tightly structure and frame them. Instead, she attempted a joke, “It’s lost somewhere. I don’t know, I lost my letter N in my pocket somewhere and got too lazy to find it.”

Má has a difficult gendered history with no names. Family friends would refer to you as Anh Khách or Chú Khách while Má is still referred to as Chị Khách or Thím Khách as if her identity doesn’t exist beyond family life and that marriage solely defines her as a wife, your wife. Her existence outside of that is flattened by the many names that categorize and fragment her. Justifications about how it’s an unchanging part of Vietnamese culture will be expressed, but Má deserves more than to be called various no names and rightfully identified as an individual—an individual name that proves her existence. Doesn’t a name become an impermanent marker for someone’s existence? Was this why Bác Hai has a Buddhist name? Did Buddhist names mark a closure or a conclusive break from his previous life as his Buddhist name follows him in death?  Even then, whose names do we remember after death?

When you were still alive, I was compelled to finally open my MSW diploma which I hadn’t opened for years. Like Má’s A no name, my middle name was misspelled and misprinted on my diploma; I went from being born as a Ngọc—being born as one of the many Ngọcs in the family like my sisters—meaning Jade—to a Nguc—meaning chest. You and Má were livid and demanded that I request a reprint.

I still haven’t requested a reprint yet. I can live with being a Nguc for now. And unlike Má, very few people know my middle name. Those who do pronounce it as Knock, a mispronunciation you used to laugh at.

At another recent failed interview for an assistant professor position as a recent PhD graduate in a perpetual job limbo, a faculty asserted that names are important when I thanked them for asking how our surname was pronounced. Names are important but we’re prone to hear anything but what and how we prefer our names to be pronounced.

It won’t be the last time our family name will be mispronounced as Nugin, Nuguyin, or Noog-man. Does perception complicate the pronunciation? Does seeing Nguyen printed on paper inwardly compel someone to hear Noog-man? We’re going to continually hear it in those variations, like an indoctrinated mantra that refuses to be challenged or corrected. An old common surname dissected into newer pronunciations. How unfortunate it is that we’re all no names at this point.