Author’s Note: “When our children were young, we would spend our summers on Virginia’s Eastern Shore — a much different world from our suburban Delaware existence. Of course, children grow up and away. That is the plan. Writing about this magical time together helps me feel closer to these far-away adults and reminds me to be grateful. Grateful for past adventures and future possibilities.”

Skimmers: A Love Story in Three Parts

I.

WE FIRST MET THESE BIRDS at the end of a hot summer day. Coastal Virginia hot, when it feels like you’re breathing through and wearing a wet wool blanket. We’ve been outside for most of the day. Laughing. Swimming. Fishing. A little sunburnt. Sure, we used sunscreen, but how can you protect so many freckles? Have we had dinner? I hope so, because salt and crumbs are the sole survivors in our Ziploc snack bags. We are quieter now, moving toward stillness and the evening. We take longer breaths. 

The sun is low and dipping behind the water. That time of day when sunglasses make the world a little too dark, yet without them, we all squint. Look at these colors. Everything washed with a pearl finish. Pearly green water meets pearly blue sky. A thin, nearly invisible line marks the horizon between the two. 

The birds are busy. Ospreys high and terns lower, both diving for supper. The noisy gulls provide our summer soundtrack. We sort of miss them when they are silent. Sort of. 

Then we see them. Something different. Steady horizontal flight. Black backs on a white body contrast with this pearly scene. Flying so close to the water their bill drags through it. Rhythmic. Focused. Truly skimming this thin line between sky and bay. And that crazy bill. Red with black. They turn together, ignoring the people, the boats, the gulls. Skimming the surface, riding the in-between. One two three four strokes and turn. One two three birds. 

We inhale. We stare. We hold our breath.

I look at our son and daughter. The dusk glow gives them rosy halos. They are following the flight, and I am following them. 

We exhale, widen our eyes, raise our eyebrows, and look at each other. We remain quiet, our expressions asking the questions—Did you see what I just saw? Did you see those birds? 

We are smitten with these creatures. 

Related to gulls and terns, black skimmers (Rynchops niger) are found exclusively in the Americas and nest on Virginia’s sandy shoreline. 

Resting on the shore, their size (medium) and coloration (black and white) combine to blend them into the shorebird background scenery. They might be easy to miss. Look a little closer, though, and the bill emerges as a differentiating feature. Awkward. Heavy. This is definitely not a gull. (The genus name, Rynchops, is derived from ancient Greek for bill and face.) With a pair of binoculars, you may get a good look at the eyes. Large pupils help maneuver during low light. Keep the binoculars steady, and if you’re lucky, you might see the eyes close vertically to slits to protect from the harsh sun. They are ready for whatever light they encounter. 

Once on the move, no binoculars are needed to witness awkward anatomy morph into graceful flight. The skimmer’s strong wings are set high on the body. Long upstrokes and short downstrokes keep the bird merely inches from the water. Now we begin to understand that bill. A skimmer flies so close to the water that its larger lower mandible drags the surface. Once the skimmer feels a fish, the upper mandible clamps shut. Small groups of skimmers will often fly in lines, turning in unison, back and forth over the same area. Many scientists believe that this rhythmic patterning actually lures in fish. Skimmers are considered crepuscular, meaning they are most active at twilight. Bright light isn’t needed for their technique, and evening fishing usually promises calmer water and more surface prey. Fishing by feel. A uniquely skimmer approach. No other birds behave in this way. 

The urge to dive must be strong. I respect the courage of the tern and the power of the osprey. They need to know exactly where to go and then commit to it with their full body. The skimmer, however, seems more accepting of the present moment, more likely to say—Let’s enjoy the water. The air. The in- between. Let’s just see what will happen. 

II .

ASSATEAGUE. WALLOPS. ASSAWOMAN. Metompkin. Cedar. Parramore. Hog. Cobb. Wreck. Shipshoal. Myrtle. Smith. Fisherman. 

These islands form a seventy-mile outer barrier along Virginia’s Eastern Shore from the Maryland-Virginia line south to the mouth of the Chesapeake Bay. South of Wallops, there is no road access; boat travel is the only way to visit. The islands are harsh natural environments. Homes and other structures that were built by hopeful settlers have long ago succumbed to wind and waves. The narrow sandy stretches earn their “barrier” title by absorbing storm waves and tides, protecting the marshes and mainland behind them. 

These islands and their accompanying bays became our family’s summer escape—our wildness, our adventure. 

During the school year, we lived in suburban Delaware— famous for tax-free shopping and now Joe Biden. Good schools and generous employers made it a wise choice, a safe choice for our family—albeit a little stiff, a little stale. 

Summers always offer an awakening, a welcome respite from routine. Wherever it happens. However, the time is spent. Summer takes the lid off most pots, relieving some built-up pressure and hopefully stirring some stuck routines. Our summers did that and more as we headed south for a season of adventure and possibilities on Virginia’s Eastern Shore. 

True, there is nothing on television. Grouchy reception allows us one or two stations at best, and only if it isn’t windy. And yes, school friends are four hours away. Soon enough, that will matter. But not yet, not now. We had all we needed and wanted—books and boats and time. Time to stay up late, and time to sleep in. Time to explore, to get muddy and messy. 

Sometime before our two beautiful children grew into adults that moved away, before they became teenagers that pushed away, lived the sweet spot of Shell Beach. 

Who wants to go to Shell Beach today? While the short answer is always a quick “yes,” the longer response involves variations on the theme of “have you seen my stuff?” and “can you help me find it?” Hats, sunglasses, and sweatshirts enjoy their own summer adventure by hiding from us. 

With more than three years and several inches in height over her brother, our daughter often assumes a natural leadership role and today helps him collect what is needed. I know we are almost ready when she asks, “Is it the last minute yet? I’m going to the bathroom at the last minute.” 

Bags finally packed with towels, buckets, and extra clothes, we trailer our small gray skiff to Gargatha Landing, always with a stop for our traditional Fig Newtons. 

The sun bakes the parking lot, and there are no trees to shade us. We are patient but uncomfortable as the ritual of launching the boat unfolds. Put the plug in. Undo the straps. Bags in the boat. Hand signals to back up the truck—not too much, a little more, a little more, you’re good now. 

It’s low tide, so once in the boat, we are looking up at the tall green marsh grasses. Each time we launch, the creek looks a little different. Today, we are riding low on Gargatha Creek, taking the turns wide. As we pick up speed, the kids and I yell into the wind and try to match the engine’s noise. The boat bounces us, and anything not secured might fly away. Our daughter’s thick mane of red hair whips around her face. A gust snatches her hat, but she catches it just in time. Our son sees this and quickly removes his Michigan hat. “No way I’m losing this,” he mutters. It’s a beloved accessory, especially after weeks of folding the brim to create the perfect angled look. 

We pull up on the creek side of the island, close to the inlet. Just a low stretch of sand here. One anchor in the sand and one in the water. We tease and tug and adjust until it is just right. Just enough slack. Just enough tension. 

We’ve arrived. 

Metompkin Island will always be Shell Beach to us. On our first visit a few years back, we discovered it was impossible to walk there without stepping on seashells. Sometimes angel wings, sometimes sand dollars. Often jingle shells, limpets, moon snails, scallops, and slipper shells. And always whelk shells. So many whelks. Knobbed and channeled, from thumbnail to nearly forearm length, their colors all the more beautiful because they are muted. You have to look closely to appreciate the pale mauves and peaches swirled with creams and grays. 

Our first few trips there, we wanted them all. We quickly filled buckets with whelk shells, emptied them into the boat, then filled again. It took a full summer of frenzied collection to exhaust the urge to own the beach. Now we limit ourselves to one or two perfect treasures each. Today’s contest has our son and daughter scouring the beach for both the smallest and the largest whelks they can find. 

We leave our shoes and bags near the boat and begin to walk toward the inlet. Dad drops his fishing bucket in the sand and scouts a good place to cast. He tells us he’ll catch up with us later. The kids and I walk along the inlet and turn towards the ocean beach. 

The Atlantic Flyway is an important north–south highway for migrating birds and it passes right over Virginia’s coast. The shape of the Delmarva peninsula, in general, and Virginia’s barrier islands, in particular, create a unique funneling section of the flyway. In the spring and fall, over one hundred thousand birds, from the largest hawks to the smallest songbirds, pass through for a quick rest-and-recovery feed stop. 

But it is summer now, and migration is over. Local birds have settled in to court, mate, nest, and create families. Plovers like to nest on Shell Beach, along with oystercatchers, terns, knots, and, oh yes, our beloved skimmers. So many birds. Being such a critical nesting habitat, the dunes on Shell Beach are closed to foot traffic during nesting season. That’s no problem for us. We walk along the edge of the surf and keep our feet wet. 

Our son is the first to hear a strange buzzing. “What’s that? Listen, guys.” 

We pause our shell scavenging. Initially, the sound is faint, but with just a few steps toward drier sand, it quickly crescendos into a din. Mostly higher pitches, but with lots of different calls. Somewhere in that cacophony is a lower tone. Sounds like a hacking cough to me. Those must be our skimmers. Their strange barking cry has earned them the nickname “seadogs” in some regions. 

We walk just a few steps toward this rowdy avian orchestra, being careful not to get close to any protected areas. We know better. We don’t want to disturb these shorebirds during their vulnerable nesting time. 

And then, finally, we see them. So many birds. There must be hundreds of them. Most are standing sentry on sand. A few are taking short flight above the dunes. Even without binoculars, we can identify some of the larger species: laughing gulls, oystercatchers, and, oh yes, our beautiful black skimmers. 

Skimmers seem to follow the “strength in numbers” motto. They nest in large social groups, often near tern colonies. Terns— island bullies who are small and yet quite aggressive—help protect their nesting neighbors from predators. And the bullies are here in force today. A handful quickly take flight together while we watch our skimmers. They separate from the mob of birds and fly a little closer to us. 

These are least terns, identified by their compact size, yellow bill, black cap, and white forehead. They are hovering near us, almost hummingbird-like, watching us watch them. 

They begin making a strange chirp-like noise, sounding like a frustrated teacher reprimanding the class with a tsk-tsk. 

How cute, I mistakenly think. 

Their reprimands quickly become louder, however, and the tsk-tsk chirping even more insistent, more annoyed. They move in and hover even closer to us. 

I see my son’s worried face and my daughter’s raised eyebrows. 

Before the kids even get a chance to ask, “Are we okay?” the terns begin to repeatedly dive-bomb the sand near us, and with each dive, they move in that much closer. The air around us swirls with buzzing and diving small bodies. 

Reflex kicks in, and our bodies react. 

“Aaaah!” we all scream, covering our heads with our hands and sprinting away from the tern attack. We run toward the inlet and don’t slow until we no longer hear the tsk-tsk reprimands. By the time we stop, we’re winded from running and laughing. The terns are nowhere in sight. We feel equally triumphant, silly, and safe. 

The children’s patience for birding, however, is now understandably gone. It’s hard to follow up the tern debacle with simply standing still and watching skimmers from a distance. 

It’s a short walk to Dad and his fishing gear. The kids move on, but I remain. They are drawn to flight, and I am drawn to the nest. 

I wait, and I watch. Once the terns settle down again, I can get a better look at the adult skimmers. They seem to be standing, guarding their nests, but even with binoculars, I can’t see much detail. Skimmer eggs and nests are nearly impossible to spot. Look for them, and you won’t find any traditional nests here made of twigs, protected high in a tree. On barrier islands, vegetation is scarce, and trees are notably absent. So skimmers nest directly on the sand: vulnerable, exposed. Males scrape saucer-shaped depressions that typically hold four brown-spotted cream eggs. Both parents tend to the eggs, and after about three to four weeks of incubation, the hatchlings emerge. 

Don’t be fooled by a baby skimmer’s appearance of maturity. Despite the hatchlings’ open eyes, and their ability to immediately stand, these down-covered chicks are quite dependent on their parents. Both parents work together to feed and protect their babies for about a month. After four weeks, the young skimmers begin to fly, and after about five weeks, they can fly well enough to fish for themselves. Family units stay together for the season, with the young birds growing stronger and sharpening their fishing skills. 

As I watch, four adult skimmers fly to the surf. Strong black wings. Rhythmic, graceful flight. Up down, up down, and turn. They stay in a line, working the water for a few minutes before returning to their hungry hatchlings. A brief pause on the sand, then they’re off again. I understand this parental imperative. 

The sun is high now, and I’m getting uncomfortably hot. I turn from my vigil and head toward the inlet to find the kids fishing with their dad. 

Everyone is looking a little weary. Time to go home. 

It’s a short walk along the creek side of the island to where we anchored. We load our bags, then climb back into the boat. Our son wins the contest for largest whelk. Our daughter, the smallest. All is well. 

Anchors and lines stowed, we head back. The tide is up now; we ride higher and can see farther where we are going. The wind has picked up, too. We’ve got a bit of chop. Our daughter bounces on the front bench, and our son gets sprayed in the back. Both sensations are welcome, so there is no haggling over seating arrangements. We are subdued, the fast turns provide a breezy refreshment we enjoy privately. Quietly. 

Back at the landing, our ritual unfolds in reverse with hand signals and tie-downs. We load our bags into the truck, and try to wipe sand from our feet before getting in. We’re tired, though, and there’s just too much stuck between our toes. Good enough. 

Soon our children will be pulled into migration mode—off to college, to jobs, to kids of their own. But not yet. Not today. 

We return. Back to our shelter. Our home. 

For us, it is still nesting time. 

III.  

BEAUTIFUL FLIGHT. Rhythmic wing beats.

Up down. Up down and turn.

Up down and keep going.

Migration pulls our Virginia skimmers south, to overwinter and fatten on the southeastern coasts, from Florida all the way to Central and South America. Global habitat loss is a pervasive and powerful threat to all wildlife, and despite Virginia’s protected nesting grounds, skimmers are not immune. Vulnerable, but not considered endangered, skimmers are classified by the Commonwealth of Virginia as a “species of greatest conservation need” and by the United States Fish and Wildlife Service as a “species of high concern.” Both are curious but rather benign designations with little accompanying policy protection. Labels that seem to translate loosely to “let’s just keep an eye on them.” 

Better than nothing, I suppose. 

Migration pulled our children from home as well. Which is as it should be. 

Our daughter followed the Atlantic Flyway a few hundred miles north for love and work and family. Her nurturing role continues—for her spouse, her children, and her students. Middle schoolers can challenge even the most experienced educators, but she offers her classroom a successful and dynamic mix of empathy, respect, and humor. 

Our son flew against the prevailing westerlies to establish his nest, finding love and purpose three thousand miles away. The Michigan hat is long gone, but his deep compassion remains and is now fully matched with self-confidence. A powerful mix. He is drawn to union organizing and is fully committed to helping workers find and strengthen their voices. 

True, neither of them is endangered, but they will always remain my “species of concern.” 

I see them all much less often now, kids and skimmers alike. 

Behind our current home, our floating dock lazily rides the three-foot tidal pulse of Mattawoman Creek, a small finger-like extension of Chesapeake Bay. At high water, we have just enough depth to launch our small Whaler. Low tide reveals mud flats and secrets that were covered only hours ago: oyster clumps, raccoon tracks, and fiddler crab holes. We watch great blue herons and great egrets feeding in the shallows. Our skimmers are nowhere in sight. They much prefer to keep their feet clean and out of this soft marshy muck. 

Certainly, memories loom larger as visits become less frequent. It’s been many years since our last Shell Beach adventure. I can always close my eyes, though, and see freckled faces warmed by the sun. Kids exploring and splashing. Skimmers feeding with that meditative movement—up down, up down, and turn. Skimming versus diving. 

Diving requires a goal that is clearly defined and aggressively pursued. I would like to say my diving days are over, but that isn’t fully true. I’m learning to let go, but I still feel the seductive pull of a well-crafted list and the inflated satisfaction of items ticked off. 

Increasingly, though, my lists shorten. Skimming makes ever more sense. Recognizing the tension between possibilities. Enjoying the transitions. Sea and air. Land and sea. Pulling tight and letting go. Nesting and migrating. Childhood and adulthood. Adulthood and elderhood. Skimming the in-between. Up down, up down, and turn. Let’s see where this will take us today. 

⧫

Patty McLaughlin is a retired educator, currently living on the Eastern Shore of Virginia. Delmarva Review is pleased to publish her first essay in its 15th anniversary edition. 

Delmarva Review selects the best of new poetry, fiction, and nonfiction from thousands of submissions during the year. Designed to encourage outstanding writing from authors everywhere, the literary journal is a nonprofit and independent publication. Support comes from tax-deductible contributions and a grant from Talbot Arts with funds from the Maryland State Arts Council. Website: www.DelmarvaReview.org

 

 

Author’s Note: “I believe I started writing ‘The Bricks of Baltimore’ after I read an article in The Baltimore Sun on the 10th of March 2021 about the deconstruction of Baltimore through the removal of bricks from Sparrow’s Point and a variety of other sites in our city. I was especially moved by the fact that the bricks were then taken to Washington and used for purely decorative purposes in expensive condominiums. I was further astounded by the fact that one could ‘source’ the bricks to different neighborhoods through a variety of colors and striations. By the end of October the poem had undergone six major revisions and was accepted for publication by The Delmarva Review.”

The Bricks of Baltimore

Forty miles to Washington on Route 95,
the bricks go south a truck at a time
in a funeral procession to their final rest
in the false facades of other peoples’ homes,
their faces power-washed and dried by hand.

In the apartment blocks of the rich the bricks
of Baltimore are more than a painful metaphor
of how a city of wasps has sucked out the wealth
from its darker sister like a carnivorous insect.

The city’s ruination began when Beth Steel closed
its giant plant at Sparrow’s Point
and thirty-five thousand good-paying jobs left us
a town of spavined rowhouses with marble stoops
and neighborhoods emptied of workers.

You can guess their origin by a brick’s color and heft:
orange examples from a dumpster on Chase,
the oldest looking born on Federal Street and a few
with vertical stripes from Fenwick Avenue.

The folks in the DC condos are deaf to any rumors
of a past, our old bricks serving for surface decoration
don’t carry the weight of the walls as they did
when the national wealth was more equally spread
when the sixth largest city always had more, not less.

⧫

Michael Salcman is a retired physician and teacher of art history in Baltimore. He is past chair of neurosurgery at University of Maryland and past president of Baltimore’s Contemporary Museum. He is a child of the Holocaust and a survivor of polio. His poems appear in Barrow Street, Cafe Review, Harvard Review, Hudson Review and Smartish Pace. Collections include The Clock Made of Confetti, A Prague Spring, Before & After (Sinclair Prize), Shades & Graces (inaugural winner Daniel Hoffman Legacy Book Prize), and Necessary Speech: New & Selected Poems (Spuyten Duyvil, 2022). Website: www.msalcman.com

Delmarva Review selects the best new poetry, fiction, and nonfiction from thousands of original submissions during the year. Designed to encourage outstanding writing from authors everywhere, the literary journal is a nonprofit and independent publication. Support comes from tax-deductible contributions and a grant from Talbot Arts with funds from the Maryland State Arts Council. Website: www.DelmarvaReview.org

Author’s Note: “The Accidental Lion tells the story of two childhood friends who took very different paths. Now, they have to understand who they are, who they wish to be, and whether they have the ability to transform. The story is inspired by Nietzsche’s construct that used the lion and the lamb to argue that ethics and morality are created by the weak to protect them from the strong. In my own experience, I found that most people perambulate between positions of strength and weakness. In a way, we can all become lions when the circumstances require.”

The Accidental Lion

WHEN BOBBY CALLED to pitch his brilliant idea, I should have turned him down on the spot. From third grade onward, this man was responsible for two dozen groundings, a three-day suspension, and the eternal hatred of my teen crush Hannah upon discovering a pickled frog in her coat pocket. 

But this was Bobby of shared secrets, of coded words. My co-discoverer of personhood. So, I just cringed. 

“Gil, man, c’mon, live a little,” he said in his raspy voice, and I was glad this wasn’t a video call, so I could hide among strewn boxes. Six months in Philly, and I still lived like a vagabond. 

“You nuts? That’s halfway around the world!” I said.

“So? It’s not like you have to paddle.”

Past graduation, our friendship had entered a parabolic orbit. College for me, army for him, then a decade of ever-sparser texts, calls, and one awkward Thanksgiving with my mother and her creepy new boyfriend. 

“Well?” he asked with the insistence of a four-year-old.

I clasped my phone a little harder. An intercontinental trip seemed an unlikely solution to arrest our decay. But what was the alternative? A muggy summer in the apartment with the silent doorbell?

I reached for my credit card and conjured a lame excuse to serve my office manager in the morning.

Two weeks later, I touched down in Tel Aviv with my heart thumping. The cheeky grin that greeted me on the other side of the baggage claim dampened my trepidation. For one, I was glad to see him. For another, he had shed his army uniform for blue jeans and a loose linen shirt. 

I wish I could blame military tradition for his career choice, or even flag worship. But Bobby was that kid: the one who knocked a tooth off the playground bully, the cub who growled when told he was too young to fly to Haiti after the earthquake. I, on the other hand, tended to watch in horror from behind the couch. 

I pointed to his buzz cut. “Blind barber?” 

“You’re one to talk. You look like General Zod after he lost the fight.” 

I ran two fingers down my rather stylish—I thought—goatee. “Asshole.” 

We hugged and headed for the bus terminal, dragging our roller bags with giggles and elbow nudges. Boys, Dad would say if he was still alive. 

We filled the hour-long ride to Jerusalem with “remember when” stories and the short walk to our hotel with a silence imposed by the bustle of the ancient city. 

Jet-lagged and sore, I voted for a nap, maybe a visit to the Shuk afterward: sample street food, see exotic sights, meet someone. Despite the searing July heat, the city was awash in tourists—and I was newly single. But Bobby was hell-bent on visiting the Holy Sepulchre. I was surprised by his insistence: surely three combat tours had scrubbed off any vestiges of his mother’s Catholic fervor. 

I cocked my head. “You know it’s not true, right?” 

“What’s not true?”

“This church, dummy. It’s not where Jesus died. It’s all a gimmick.”

He huffed. “Gil, man, when did you get so cynical?”

After Dad died too soon and Mom shacked up with David. After Sylvia walked out on me, fed up with “all that sadness.” 

“You go ahead, I’m too tired.” 

His stare lingered. Then: “Okay. Meet up later, yeah?” 

We settled on three o’clock by the Lion’s Gate. He arrived a good thirty minutes late, gave me a shrug while radiating a quiet glow. 

“All done hanging out with Jesus?” 

He grinned, and the tiny scar above his eyebrow reddened. My fault that one, I had dared him to climb to the top of the giant oak behind his parents’ house. 

We strolled down the medieval market streets. Tall and narrow, humming with conversations in a dozen languages, Jerusalem offered us refuge from the real world. 

We sat at a coffee shop, took in bitter coffee and cheese- wrapped pastries dipped in honey. He whipped out his phone. Two thumb scrolls later, he beamed. “All right! My man Asaf came through! We’re all set for a day trip to an Umayyad palace.” 

“A what?” 

He shook his head. “So glad you went to college, Gil. Worth every penny.” He returned to his phone. “There’s a famous mural there. Eighth-century classic, man.” 

I let him brag; he was just parroting the contents of the email. 

“Who’s Asaf, anyway?” I asked his gleeful face.

“Army vet. Met in Peshawar on my last tour.”

His eyes turned dark, and I chose not to probe any further. 

THE FOLLOWING DAY, we boarded a minivan along with an elderly couple who offered commentary in broken English and a pair of honeymooners who exuded coconut sunscreen and kept to themselves. 

A bumpy two hours later, we stood in a city of ancient ruins. Hisham’s Palace, the metal sign said. 

Clutching a guide map, we gawped at a stone rosette the size of a jet turbine before entering the palace proper. The courtyard took our breath away. Flanked by arcaded galleries, an area ten times the size of my apartment was paved with geometric mosaic carpets so vivid, I struggled to accept they were millennia old. I told as much to Bobby. He grinned, took to catwalking, like when we drew a smile with our sneakers on his mom’s freshly mopped kitchen floor. 

But when we crossed into a side room, his gaze fell to the raised platform, and his shoulders stiffened. A mosaic depicted a fruit-laden tree in full foliage with three gazelles beneath. Two were nibbling on shrubbery. The third was being devoured by a lion. The Tree of Life, the guidebook explained. 

“Positively pastoral,” I said, pointing at the sharp claws gouging the poor animal’s back. 

He clenched his fists, eyes fixed on the lion. 

I extended a finger toward the fruit farther up the tree. “You think these are apples?” 

“Huh?” 

“I bet you they’re actually pomegranates,” I carried on, a little too fast. “You know, the seeds are symbols of prosperity. Also…” I launched into a cocktail of stuff Dad told me about strength and servitude, mixed in with rubbish I made up on the spot. 

We strolled about for another hour. He remained sullen. It wasn’t until dinnertime back in Jerusalem when he finally shook off whatever demon had been needling him. But even then, his braggadocio seemed designed to meet my phantom expectations. 

We spent the next day drifting around shops, bars, tourist traps. When I spotted an embroidered carpet with the Tree of Life hanging on a window, I took a sharp turn left toward an alley that smelled of sandalwood. We found a gift shop. I convinced him to try on a yarmulke. 

“I’m not Jewish!” he protested, but he bought one, nonetheless. 

On our last night, we found ourselves lounging at a seaside bar at the old Jaffa Port. 

I sipped my wine, leaned back, relaxed in the music and spices from the restaurants lining the mazy hill above and the salty air blowing in from the Mediterranean. Across the table, Bobby had taken to sending long stares into the void once more. 

“You all right?” I asked.

He shook his head. “Those fucking gazelles.”

I searched his face, expecting a punch line. “What do you have against gazelles?”

“They’re anti-God.”

“They skipped Communion again?”

He turned his face toward the sea, calm in the moonless 

night, black like an oil slick. “It bothers me, Gil, it fucking bothers me. What kind of God allows a lion to kill an innocent gazelle? I mean…can you imagine the pain? The fear?” 

I set my glass down slowly on the concrete ledge. “You expect the lion to starve?” 

“No…but how is that not murder?”

I shrugged. “Isn’t that the lion’s purpose?”

“To dish out pain and suffering…”

My chest tightened. “Or weed out the weak gazelles. The sickly ones.” Mom had claimed Dad died peacefully, but my sister confirmed my suspicions: bone metastases were excruciating. 

“A mercy executioner. That’s the poor animal’s role…” He let his gaze drift to the sea once more. When he refocused on me, his eyes looked poisoned. “Shipping out in two weeks.” His shoulders slumped. “Iraq, this time.” 

“I thought you were coming back to Fort Bragg.” 

He downed his wine in one large gulp. “Can’t do this shit no more, Gil. Just can’t.” 

DURING THE FLIGHT HOME, and for days after, I kept thinking about Bobby and his gazelles. And Dad. The last time I saw him, he was slouched at the kitchen table, moaning like a medieval ghost. He had straightened up when he caught sight of me, blurted something about insomnia, and warmed up leftover pizza. 

Bobby texted a few times, sent me a selfie atop a tank, his helmet underarm to show off the yarmulke. I replied with a laughing emoji.

I let the next few weeks drift outside my office window. 

Come mid-September, I started dating a woman named Lizzy: perky, bright-eyed, worked on the eighth floor. She had a ticklish laugh and twirled her hair when she got nervous. As the leaves turned, I toyed with the idea of inviting her to spend Thanksgiving with Mom and Dave the Creep. I postponed any decision. Plenty of time, I told myself. 

But on a drizzly October morning right before Halloween, I forgot all about letting Lizzy into my house of horrors. Frozen among rows of marble fangs in the Baltimore National Cemetery, I found myself staring at a hole in the ground. 

When Bobby’s tank skidded off a bridge near Fallujah, the Euphrates River carried him downstream. They didn’t recover his body. The army paid for a casket, nonetheless: brown and lacquered, with brass handles and a “Robert (Bobby) Willer” embossed plaque. 

Back at their house, I traded memories with his mother, shared a long, hard hug with his father, shook a dozen hands. I knew most of the guests: aunts and uncles, neighbors. His cousin, Jessica, showed up with a casserole but fled as soon as his mom ushered her to the living room. The giant picture on the mantel must have pushed her over the edge: Bobby in full-dress uniform, a row of six medal ribbons on his breast, a beaming smile on his face. Now he stared out at us beside a folded flag: a soul stuffed in a piece of cotton, like those triangular cheese pastries in Jerusalem. 

Shake it off, dude, the picture said and nudged me to the liquor cabinet. 

Enemy action, maybe I could accept. Patriotism et cetera. But a tank accident on a bridge halfway around the world? What for? 

I downed two shots of bourbon in quick succession, rushed outside in search of air. 

Thank God my sister, the Saint, had flown across the country for this day.

“Whatcha doing out there?” she called out from the edge of the porch.

Transfixed at the oak tree that gave Bobby the scar, I only responded to her voice when her palm pressed my shoulder. 

“Marion, do you know if lions can swim?”

She frowned.

“Guess not, right? They’re cats. Cats hate the water.” 

“Dunno, Gil.” 

“But gazelles can. I looked it up. Gazelles are excellent swimmers.” 

She rubbed my shoulders. “C’mon. Let’s go back inside. It’s getting chilly.” 

I MANAGED TO AVOID BALTIMORE for four months. Instead, I finally unpacked the last two boxes, hung an old map of the US above my couch, considered joining a cooking class with Lizzy. I did call the Willers on Christmas Day. Was nice. Jessica had just visited them. Come Valentine’s, I sent a potted orchid to Bobby’s mom. She called me back with an “oh-Gil- you-shouldn’t-have” mixed with soft sobs. I promised I would drive down soon, real soon. 

I didn’t. So, on a cold Wednesday in March, when my screen lit Willer again, I prepped my guilt-ridden excuses. But the voice was his dad’s. “Gil, son, glad I caught you!” 

“Mr. Willer, hi, everything all right?”

“Any chance you can come down this Saturday?”

“You sure everything’s okay?”

“Yes, yes, everything’s fine.” His breath whistled. “Would mean a lot to us. I know it’s short notice…”

I had promised to take Lizzy to the movies. Maybe I should bring her along. 

“What are you scared of?” she asked, but I was too busy looking for my car keys. 

I traveled down the interstate alone.

Shivering beneath my duffle coat, I cursed the late snow covering the footpath between the driveway and the front door. Beside the porch hung a giant American flag, limp from the icicles forming along the bottom edge. 

A man I vaguely recognized as Bobby’s dad greeted me at the front door. Gone were the potbelly and heavy shoulders. Gone was the glint in the eye, that shine that carried both playfulness and the authority of the paterfamilias. 

“Gil!” He wrapped his arms around me. 

He ushered me to the living room, where pictures of Bobby had spread like mold on the plastered walls. Along the mantel, the two of us were grinning in those stupid high school uniforms, while on the table by the bay window, he stood in front of his uncle’s boat holding a four-foot fish aloft. 

“Mrs. Willer at work?” I asked. 

His lips dripped a melancholy I couldn’t read. “Oh, she’s upstairs.” He took a long pause. “With Bobby.” 

I shuddered. “They recovered his body?” 

“No, son.” He gripped my shoulder, sat me down on the couch. “They found him alive.” 

I blinked, replayed his words. I gasped, probably in stages. 

While my heart thumped in my chest, he rested his hand on my shoulder, told me about the raid in some cave, the hostage rescue, the flight to Germany, the phone call in the night. 

“When?” I heard myself ask. 

Mr. Willer shuttered his eyes. “Two weeks ago.” He tightened his grip. “Ain’t gonna lie. It’s been tough, Gil. Doctors told us to take it slow.” 

He stood, motioned me to follow him, and I shuddered. 

Over the years, the pine staircase had served as a slide, an escape chute, a creaky trap set by light-sleeping parents. Today, I could have sworn the railing was lacquered with pungent tar. 

But I grappled the banister and carried my feet up the twelve steps while fighting my breath. 

“Look who’s here!” Mr. Willer said as he swung Bobby’s bedroom door open.

My spine froze. My arms contorted. My heart stopped beating, and my stomach turned. 

I smiled. 

Beside the bedroom window, Bobby was slumped in a black wheelchair. A knee-length stump was all that remained of his right leg, while a cast covered his right arm from wrist to shoulder. When he turned his head, I summoned every ounce of courage not to wince. His skeletal face was half burned, the rest plowed by a scythe that had taken his right eye and left behind two angry scars, maroon and blue around white stitches. Most of all, he looked desiccated, as if his soul had leeched out of him into the Euphrates River. 

“Bobby…” I said from the doorway. “Heeey.” 

He glared. His face contorted, pulling at his stitches. He howled. 

“It’s all right, man, it’s me!” 

He shrieked louder, grunted, shook in his wheelchair. Mrs. Willer vaulted from the bed to press her hands against his shoulders. “Shhh, it’s all right, it’s just Gil,” to no avail. 

Mr. Willer nudged me toward the hallway with a feather touch and a slouch filled with unfathomable pain. “Let’s give him some time, eh?” 

I took the trip from the kitchen to Bobby’s room six times, each with the same result, more or less: growls, shaking, and in the end, tears. Last time I had seen Bobby cry we were twelve, and his head was gushing blood onto the roots of the oak tree. 

COME DUSK, I drove home. Between my tears, ghostly silhouettes glided along the woods lining the interstate. I saw deer hiding. And in the thicker brush, I’m sure soldiers were crouching, their hands pounding their helmets. 

Lizzy showed up at my doorstep holding a plastic bag, a response to a text I sent her on a whim moments after I crashed on my crappy couch. “Chicken biryani!” she announced.  

“I hope it’s really spicy.” I hugged her, shivered, let go. 

While chasing an errant raisin with my fork, I told her about my visit. About the army raid, the explosion of a munitions pile. About the mangled heap of Bobby, the howls. 

“When did all this happen?” 

I shook my head. “Took a while to identify him. Whoever captured him ripped off his dog tags and burned his fingertips.” 

“But he’s alive!” 

I let the fork clang, sank back into my chair. “More or less…” 

She leaped to me, buried my head in her chest. I wrapped my claws around her back and shoulders. I kissed her lips: rough, desperate. She kissed me back, pulled me to the floor. I made love to her with the ferocity of a wounded beast. 

“When are you going back down?” she asked me softly afterward, while her fingers caressed my side. 

“Next weekend, maybe. Dunno.”

“I wanna come.”

I pecked her cheek. “It’s okay.” I swallowed. “Everything’ll be okay.”

She sat up on her elbow. “Some days I feel like I only live in one of your rooms. Where’s the rest?”

I smirked. “Nothing to see. Just a giant old mess.”

Her eyes darkened, but she focused on pulling aside a stray tuft of hair from my forehead. “Whenever you’re ready,” she whispered and leaned forward. Her lips tasted sweet. Mine were bitter, of this I’m certain. 

LIKE A METRONOME tracking an old sad tune, I journeyed down to Baltimore every other Saturday morning, returned in the evening. I spent my time next to his wheelchair or when the fits took him, recounting Bobby stories with his mother. She made hot cocoa, like when we were kids. His dad retreated to the garage, restoring an old truck. Between each trip, I watched the Willers age another decade. 

The first of May was Silver Star Service banner day. It didn’t fall on a Saturday, but I took the day off to drive down, nonetheless. I didn’t tell Lizzy I was going, but I changed my mind when I hit the interstate. I texted her, received a heart emoji. 

I found the Willers assembled around Bobby’s chair. All dressed up, they looked like a wedding party. Bobby’s old commander had sent a letter. Onto the breach, dear friends, once more. It didn’t really say that when Mr. Willer read it with aplomb. We also celebrated the arm brace removal with chocolate cake—Bobby swallowed a few morsels with grimaces and grunts. We cheered. Mr. Willer slapped my back. I didn’t wince. 

The following week, on FaceTime, Bobby rotated his right hand and clutched a pencil. 

“I think that’s great,” Lizzy said from the far corner of my bedroom the moment I shut my laptop. She walked across, rested her hand on my shoulder. “That’s really great.” I pulled her to me, kissed her hard so I wouldn’t cry. 

I skipped visiting for a couple of weeks, planned instead for a weekend away to New York. Guilt needled me, until I imagined how Lizzy and I would cross Rockefeller Center with hands entwined, find scalped tickets to Wicked. All just before Memorial Day. I gritted my teeth. What shall we celebrate this year? Unassisted urination? 

I had just booked a Manhattan hotel when the phone buzzed. Jessica’s name on the screen gave me pause. Before Bobby shipped out, we had gone out a couple of times. But with no chemistry, the whole effort proved to be both awkward and futile—much to our Bobby’s disappointment. 

She spoke in terse, hoarse sentences. I knocked over the cereal bowl, cursed, called Lizzy, canceled the hotel reservation. A hundred-odd miles later, I burst through the front door of the Baltimore Veteran’s Hospital wearing a moth-eaten shirt and dirty jeans. 

Past a woman at the reception with impossibly long, stenciled fingernails, I navigated an orderly wheeling a double amputee out of the elevator and a shift nurse with a silver “John” name tag who failed to intercept my dash to room 316. 

From the armchair, Mrs. Willer dropped her book, gave me a bleary-eyed smile, and rose for a hug. A doctor stood between her and Bobby’s bed, pressing a clipboard against his chest. 

I kissed her cheek. “What happened?” 

She shook her head, stared at her shoes. Before I could ask any more questions, the doctor took a hasty leave with a lip purse and a pat on my shoulder. 

Bobby was asleep. No bandages on his wrists, no tube down his throat. Good. Probably. 

Between his mom and Jessica—who arrived fifteen minutes later armed with carnations—I pieced together the last two weeks. Bobby had gotten food lodged in his throat. Septic pneumonia ensued. The ambulance screamed him in while he choked; they slammed his IV with antibiotics. Once the fever dropped, he could look forward to a feeding tube. 

“And then?” 

My words lingered in the antiseptic-filled air as Mrs. Willer’s head slumped. 

DUSK DESCENDED, bringing an end to visiting hours.

I pulled up my chair closer to Bobby, cracked a smile. “Hey, man, they’re kicking me out. But I’ll be back tomorrow, okay?” 

He looked at me through half-open eyelids, balled his fist. 

“I know. It’ll be all right,” I heard myself say. Maybe I meant it.

He pointed to the notepad on the foot of the bed.

I helped him close his fingers around the pencil, held the paper with sweaty palms.

He pressed down, grunted, tore a hole. We tried again on a fresh page. Steadier this time, he drew four letters. Imperfect, jagged, acidic. They spelled: “Lion.” 

“I don’t understand.” 

He pointed at my chest, back to the paper. He clutched his IV and stared at me with an intensity that buckled my knees. His face lit red with effort. “Lion,” he said, or something to that effect. 

I shook my head. 

His eyes fell to his mother, asleep on the reclining chair. “You. Lion,” he repeated. 

My hands trembled. “You can’t ask me that…” 

No more fits, or grunts, or notes. He just stared at me, and all I could do was count the scuffs on the linoleum floor tiles. I was half relieved when the orderly shooed me out, even though Bobby’s eye bore a hole in my back that threatened to burn clean through me. 

I took to the streets in the vague direction of my hotel. I had rented a room near the Inner Harbor. Was always fun, that place, with music and people and paddleboats that looked like ducks and dragons. 

But I had forgotten how gloomy nights could be in Baltimore. The damp air, the yellow streetlights, the faint whirr of the water taxis, all conspired to dress the redbrick buildings in melancholy. The ducks and dragons were all chained too. 

I sat on a park bench, tracked a pair of beggars shuffling along the sidewalk, dog tags dangling over their camouflage jackets. One was unshod, his right foot an open sore. “Damn it, Bobby,” I said. “Goddamn it.” 

I thought of Mr. and Mrs. Willer, of Dad, of the trip to Jerusalem, of the twenty-five years from when Bobby and I met at the playground. I thought of the poor gazelles. My phone buzzed in my pocket. I wriggled it out, stared at the screen that said Lizzy. I turned it off. 

Bypassing the drip machine’s fail-safe to flood him with morphine was impossible; smothering him with a pillow felt grotesque. When Dad got sick, I read this article how injecting a whole bunch of air into the IV would do the trick—instant heart attack. We never discussed the topic. Marion might have gone along, but Mom carried enough religion to consider such acts anathema. 

All I needed was a syringe. 

I stood, chest pounding, and headed to the pharmacy around the corner. Outside the swinging doors, I called Lizzy. 

She answered on the first ring. “Hey, been worried about you!” 

“I’m at the VA in Baltimore. Bobby took a turn for the worse.” 

“Shit. Sorry! How you holding up?” 

“I need to stay for a couple of days.” Long pause. “Listen… I was thinking…how do you feel about spending July Fourth at my mom’s?” 

The line went silent. Then: “That’s a great idea.” More silence. “Are you sure, though?” 

I was sure. I hung up, inhaled the cold autumn air, and went inside the store. I should be roaring, I thought. Maybe I did, inside my chest. 

⧫

Nicholas Katsanis’s short stories and poetry have been published in The Delmarva Review, The Umbrella Factory, Literally Stories, Flash Fiction Magazine and The New Verse News, amongst others. One story was the lead in a #1 Amazon ranked dystopian anthology. He enjoys traveling and has visited half the planet. Laptop and notebook underarm, he hopes to visit the other half while editing his debut novel. Website: nicholaskatsanis.com

Delmarva Review publishes the most  evocative new  fiction, nonfiction, and poetry from thousands of original submissions during the year. Designed to encourage outstanding writing from authors in the region—and beyond—the literary journal is nonprofit and independent. Support comes from tax-deductible contributions and a grant from Talbot Arts with funds from the Maryland State Arts Council. Website: www.DelmarvaReview.org 

Author’s Note: Tradition is like a mighty river; no matter how vast its depths, no matter how calm or turbulent its waters, the river always has a beginning and an end. Provoked by questions over my need for over-priced ice cream, “Dippin’ Dots” is a conscious dive upstream, an attempt to traverse through memory and time to find the beginning of the river, to find truth in the mountain’s snow, and to understand why change feels so much like a waterfall.

Dippin’ Dots

Every time I go to a theme park, or game,
I get chocolate in the largest size, those
melting marbles of sweet tradition,
dancing across my tongue through
a temporal gate to those summer nights
at Harbor Park, when the Norfolk Tides
still played AAA for the New York Mets,
and their all-star catcher Mike Piazza
was in town because of a pulled groin;
those nights when I was a true fan,
armed with a blazing smile, leaning
on the seat’s edge, and sandwiched
between my parents, as Number 31
stepped through my first baseball card
found in a box of Cocoa Pebbles,
into the flesh and blood of Waterside
District, granting this eight-year-old’s wish
like Robin Williams playing the Genie,
while my hands held onto a blue bowl
shaped like a helmet, full of dippin’ dots,
in a time when baseball was pure
as spoons of ice cream and family,
together, gave the night its spark;
a time before the Tides changed teams
and Piazza retired his mitt, a time before
the Genie hung himself, and my wish
for only one Christmas melted away. 

⧫

A.J. Granger is a graduate and former Centennial Scholar of James Madison University with a BA in Media Arts and Design. His poems have appeared in Red Weather, Gardy Loo, and Black Fox Literary Magazine. Currently, he lives in Norfolk, Virginia where he dabbles with photography and voice- over while vigorously at work on his first collection of poems. 

Over its 15-year history, Delmarva Review has published new literary prose and poetry from 490 authors from 42 states, the District of Columbia, and 16 foreign countries. Forty-six percent are from the Chesapeake and Delmarva region. Financial support comes from tax-deductible contributions and a grant from Talbot Arts with funds from the Maryland State Arts Council. Both print and digital editions are available from Amazon and other major online booksellers. The print edition is also available from regional specialty bookstores. Website: www.DelmarvaReview.org

 

#  #  #

 

Editor’s Note: Catherine Carter is the featured writer for poetry in Delmarva Review’s 15th anniversary issue. Four of her poems are presented in the current edition, introduced with an interview by poetry editor Anne Colwell.

Author’s Note: “People of privilege often claim that others don’t ‘follow the rules’, or achieve ‘the right way’, without recognizing that those rules change every time someone by whom we feel threatened succeeds…as in the 2018 furor about Serena Williams’ catsuit.  So there’s not much point trying to appease people who feel only affirmed by Tom Brady but constantly pick holes in Serena Williams’ glory–as Williams herself must have learned long ago.”

Catherine Carter was raised on Maryland’s Eastern Shore. She now lives with her husband in Cullowhee, NC, near Western Carolina University, where she is a professor in the English education program. Her most recent full-length collection is Larvae of the Nearest Stars (LSU Press, 2019). In addition to the Delmarva Review, her work has appeared in Best American Poetry 2009, Orion, Poetry, North Carolina Literary Review, Asheville Poetry Review, and Ploughshares, among others. On a good day, she says she can re-queen a hive of honeybees and roll a whitewater kayak. On less good days, she collects stings, rockburn, and multiple contusions.

Over its 15-year history, Delmarva Review has published new literary prose and poetry from 490 authors from 42 states, the District of Columbia, and 16 foreign countries. Forty-six percent are from the Chesapeake and Delmarva region. Financial support comes from tax-deductible contributions and a grant from Talbot Arts with funds from the Maryland State Arts Council. Both print and digital editions are available from Amazon and other major online booksellers. The print edition is also available from regional specialty bookstores. Website: www.DelmarvaReview.org

Author’s Note: “To spend more time with my seven-year-old daughter, I started learning the piano with her. This process of learning filled me with childlike joy and prompted ‘Love of Learning.’” 

Love of Learning

Here I am,
at thirty-nine, learning
to read
again. 

Line by line,
black and white lights
fill spaces with music
in my mind. 

It takes time
to learn a new lexicon:

Adagio, slowly.

Legato, I am walking.

Staccato, I am jumping
in puddles
again. 

⧫

Esther Lim Palmer is the author of two chapbooks, Stellar (Finishing Line Press, 2021) and Janus (Finishing Line Press, 2020). Her work has appeared in California Quarterly, Plainsongs, White Wall Review, Poetry in the Time of Coronavirus (Volume 2), The Hungry Chimera, Brief Wilderness, and Oberon’s Seventeenth Annual Issue—selected to be archived in EBSCO’s Humanities’ database for universities and cultural entities interested in contemporary literary work. 

Delmarva Review publishes compelling poetry, fiction, and nonfiction selected from thousands of submissions annually. Designed to encourage outstanding new writing, the literary journal is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit. Financial support comes from tax-deductible contributions and a grant from Talbot Arts with funds from the Maryland State Arts Council. Website: www.DelmarvaReview.org

Editor’s Note: The author is the Featured Student Writer for the 15th anniversary issue. She is the first recipient of the Talbot Arts and Delmarva Review Talbot County High School Mentorship Scholarship award.

Author’s Note: “As an only child, siblinghood has always been a mystery. I’ve always wondered what it would be like to have a person who looked similar to you, who shared a predetermined, yet unique bond with you. E Duo Unum was an extension of my questions. For the brother who suffers the loss of his twin in this story, his grieving is especially intense. How do you deal with being a walking reminder of your loss?”

E Duo Unum

HE’LL DESCRIBE IT AS A FREE FALL, later, when people ask. The innocent question will hang in the air. By then, he will have swallowed a jumble of words, never finding one quite like the rancid, bitter taste that still lingers, seeping its way into half- hearted kisses, favorite foods, and even his blood whenever he bites too hard on the spongy inside of his mouth. Desperate to give it a name, he finally hit on the phrase: free fall. A free fall, he chants, and feels the same dizzying, disorienting pull of gravity. He welcomes it. 

He takes long showers now, hoping to scrub away the uninvited memories and to delay the inevitable rendezvous with his mirror. The tiles reflect his sobs, echoing them until it sounds like a hundred wailing boys wrapping around him. He shuts off the water to mute their cries, but the heavy steam still whispers. He steps from the shower, water pooling in his protruding collarbones. He turns to face the matching sink, empty now. He stares at the abandoned electric toothbrush—a red version of his blue one, white toothpaste crusted along its edges. The room seems deathly still without its usual buzzing harmony of early mornings and bedtime routines. 

His eyes finally meet themselves in the mirror, yet they do not belong to him. When he crinkles his eyes, he sees the eyes of lazy summers and inside jokes. When he widens them, they become portals to another time and place, where mischievous boys are sneaking out to go meet pretty girls and then, tiptoeing back, folding themselves into beds that cramp their lanky frames. 

Last summer, on one of their excursions, he and his brother discovered the water tower in town. They were drawn to the forbidden, ballooning dome that proudly displayed the town’s name. Soon, their climb became a ritual. They would race to the top, their arms and legs stretching toward that crested crown. That’s when they were eagles, their chests puffed to the sky, their legs dangling off a ledge of clouds. 

The mirror is unwavering in its reflection. He sees those same eyes staring back, the pair that fell in love with that shining jewel of a dome, the pair that tried to be like an eagle’s. Once bright eyes now locked beneath closed lids, turned to glass inside a pale, waxy jail. 

His fist cuts through the steamy air, striking those eyes and smashing them into glittery fragments. The jagged pieces arrange themselves into a kaleidoscope of lidless eyes that haunts him from broken fragments. He glances at the vanity that has been left untouched since the day his brother ended their race to the top. Had he even tried to stop the unforgiving earth? He feels the rest of his fall—he’s felt it over and over—but never the moment of impact. 

When he’s falling, he hopelessly tries to grab onto his own memories. His vision blurs with old photographs and scrapbooks until he cannot remember who is who. He somersaults through the air, chasing his brother. They cling to each other, two halves briefly coming whole. They tumble not as Geminis or twin flames or cooing toddlers in matching pajamas, but as one. One young man, now desperate for his family to see them both again. 

He shakes the memory. It doesn’t belong to him, and he is tired of them nettling his mind, a cruelness of their biologies, his own memories now eclipsed by the endlessly looping free fall. As he reaches for the door, he wonders if his mother will notice the broken mirror or the purple bruises collecting in the grooves of his knuckles. He knows she won’t. 

He stands at the bottom of the stairs, silently watching his family in the kitchen. 

At first, whenever he would speak or walk into a room, he could feel their stupid hope. In the beginning, he was happy he could briefly alter reality as if he were born for such a role. But the burden pressed down on him like the unrelenting demand of gravity. His mother started holding his face and murmuring sighs into his hair. At first, it made him sick to pretend, but after a while, it wasn’t so hard to slip into someone else’s place. Or to let someone slip into his. But with every comfort he accepted, every warm reminiscence, he felt himself fading. In his place, someone new and different: out of two smiling babies, with rubber ducks and bibs in a neatly framed fridge photograph, emerges one. 

He barely flinches in the kitchen when his mother calls him by the wrong name. He doesn’t care that his mother only cooks his favorite meal. He shovels up every bite of that red, bloody steak, and almost has to stop himself from licking the plate. He almost craves it now, breathing life into his brother in a way no one else can. He is special. They are special. 

He’s felt his brother’s free fall and now his own, his limbs splayed toward a mass of sky. He’s cycled through all stages of grief twice, and now he fears for the end. He asks his brother: Did you even brace yourself against the crunch of your bones? Did you lie there covering your heart until the rest of the world faded? Did you have time to spit the dirt out of your mouth and crawl away? 

There’s only one thing left for him to do. He lets himself fuse with his brother’s lost self, their destinies intertwined, and spirits bowed like swans. He’s making room for two, the way only a twin could. He savors the weight of their body as they near the bottom. But he’s learned to control it now. He slows their descent, hovering before touching onto the pillowy ground. Now, he understands how easy it is to fall, to succumb to gravity. 

That’s what he’ll say when people ask. 

⧫

Maxine Poe-Jensen, a senior at St. Michaels High School, is the 2022 recipient of the Delmarva Review Youth Writing Mentorship and Scholarship Award. The joint initiative is funded by a grant from Talbot Arts and supported by Talbot County Schools. The awarded student collaborates with one of the review’s editors to finalize the original prose for publication. The high school scholarship and mentoring initiative encourages outstanding writing among students in regional schools. Maxine is from Easton, Maryland. 

 

Delmarva Review publishes compelling fiction, nonfiction, and poetry selected from thousands of submissions annually. Designed to encourage outstanding new writing, the literary journal is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit. Financial support comes from tax-deductible contributions and a grant from Talbot Arts with funds from the Maryland State Arts Council. Website: www.DelmarvaReview.org

 

#  #  #

 

Author’s Note: “The most precious artifacts in this world are the things that belonged to someone we loved and no longer with us. We can do our best to preserve these items, to tuck them away and save them from ruin… but on a long enough time scale, nothing is permanent. We come into this world with nothing. And we take nothing with us when we leave.”

Hard Drive

TWO DAYS BEFORE, I didn’t even know this hard drive existed. 

Losing its contents was like watching him die all over again. 

My friend Ana handed me the hard drive at a wedding. It had been years. Years since I last saw her. Years since I had moved out of Baltimore. Years since she had moved out of Baltimore, out of the house she shared with Rust. 

“I don’t know why I kept it. It’s for a Mac. I don’t have a Mac, so I’ve never been able to see what’s on it.” 

I looked at the metal brick in my hands. 

“I’ve carried it with me, from house to house—it’s amazing I still have it. I don’t even know if it still works.” 

People die. Their entire existence breaks up into thousands of little pieces that fall into loved ones’ hands and living rooms. The parts of themselves they injected into the world, perhaps without even realizing: their handwriting on a whiteboard. The way they folded the corners of the pages of a book. 

And over time, these pieces scatter throughout the universe and disappear. Pieces of a star exploding in slow-motion into the nothingness of space. The whiteboard is eventually erased. The pages of the book are smoothed out. Even the memories in our heads fade from overuse. 

I remember the day after Rust died, taking careful stock of his room and the way he had left his things. I remember seeing the heart he had traced with a finger into the dust on his TV screen. I remember finding my hat sitting on his desk, because I had left it at his house the last time I was there, and he set it aside for me. 

I was left with a lot of his things that suddenly became artifacts. A T-shirt he had lent me after I showered at his place. A dream catcher he had made me while sitting in his tent at a festival. The injector machine he taught me to use so I could roll him cigarettes while he drove on long road trips together. 

His family took some things from his room and left the rest. The roommates were traumatized by what had happened—the way the CPR didn’t work, the way the first responders laughed and called him a junkie. They could only be in the room with me for short increments of time to divide and conquer the cleanup. 

While people squabbled over certain pieces of him — his screen-printed artwork, or his handmade braided whips, for example — there were other pieces of him that were a burden to find a home for. The couch he died on, for instance. 

We ended up smashing it with a sledgehammer. The splintered mess was carried down four flights of stairs to the dumpster in the alleyway. 

WHEN I CAME HOME from the wedding, I mentally prepared myself to see what was on the hard drive. Math assignments he had been working on for school? Spreadsheets to keep track of his expenses that he had proudly shown me once? (And of course— the thought that it was simply porn didn’t escape me either.) 

I found hundreds of pictures and videos from the trip he had made to Japan in 2011. He backpacked across dozens of islands to eighty-eight different shrines with his best friend Eddie. I remembered that specific number, for some reason, from when he had told me the story. 

I went through every photo and video on the hard drive. I watched him walk down long roads on the edge of the ocean. I watched him write letters on the bus. I watched him laugh as he fed pigeons from his hand, looking like a scarecrow with his arms adorned with birds. 

One video, in particular, I watched over and over again. Something had glitched so that the end of the last video bled into the beginning of this one. The first couple of seconds revealed sunshine leaking through a bus window. Suddenly the pixels scattered, and Rust’s face came into focus as he walked alongside the camera through the snow. He was laughing. 

“Yeah, it’s kind of sad,” he said. 

Eddie, his friend holding the camera, turned away from him and toward the empty graveyard ahead. He started to run, the camera jostling. 

“You’re going to slip,” Rust chided.

“I’m not going to slip,” Eddie yelled back.

Then suddenly, the video fizzled out again, looping back to the beginning. Rust laughed again. “Yeah, it’s kind of sad,” he said. 

SEVEN YEARS AFTER HE DIED, do I think about him all the time? I would be lying if I said I did. Most of the time it’s just like the scar on the back of my arm—not bleeding, not even stinging anymore. But sometimes I absent-mindedly draw my finger across it, and I feel the raise in my skin. I feel the way my flesh had to stitch together over the emptiness, and I am reminded of the way my life had to build around the absence. 

The contents of the hard drive made me realize that I had forgotten, really, what he was like. What it was like to see him and hear him and talk to him. He wasn’t just appearing in my mind like a recording of a recording of a recording like he usually did, almost like a myth—something with a shape, but no defined edges. 

But now I remembered him. I remembered the way he spoke to you when he was looking at you and smiling. I remembered the way he could focus his entire energy so completely on a project he could get lost in it. I remembered the way he drove, with one hand on the steering wheel, the other hand out the window with a freshly rolled cigarette between his fingers. 

I remembered him in his entirety, including all the ways he was flawed — with the details I probably glossed over when I usually conjured his memory. The way he yelled too loudly when he drank. (“Jerry Garcia is dead!”) The way he never got along with my boyfriends. (“They can tell I have a crush on you.”) The way he wasn’t good at keeping even cacti alive. (“I’m less nurturing than a desert.”) 

It was almost as if he were standing there in front of me, and all I had to do was reach my hands through the screen and feel the warmth radiate off him. 

Of course, it was then that the hard drive went kaput. An old hard drive plugged into an old computer—I should’ve guessed something like this would happen. All of a sudden, just as quickly as they had appeared, the photos, the videos—everything was gone. 

In the past year I’ve lost friends—good friends—to fires, drunk drivers, heart attacks, COVID-19. I’ve sat at my desk and written victim impact statements, eulogies, and endless emails to friends and family members. 

You know it’s bad when your coworkers are sending you books called It’s Okay That You’re Not Okay. Friends talk to you in quiet, pitying tones when you tell them what you’ve been going through, their eyebrows slanted in a very obvious sad expression, like a clown. I want to shake them and tell them that the fact that I’ve lost so many people is not some rare, freak accident sort of thing—that on a long enough timeline, everybody’s survival rate hits 0 percent, and every person they know and love will perish too, maybe years from now, maybe tomorrow. 

I sent the hard drive to a data recovery center, hoping the issue was small. It was just an old hard drive. It wasn’t crushed by a collapsing house. It wasn’t burnt to a crisp in a grease fire. It wasn’t run over by a car. It was just a piece of hardware that belonged to a man who died seven years ago. 

The price of recovering the data was thousands more than I thought it would be. 

“Maybe if a hundred of us chipped in twenty dollars, we could cover it,” Ana said sadly. 

I wrote back and told them I couldn’t afford it. The data specialist told me that they were willing to negotiate on price. 

I don’t want to undervalue your service,” I responded. “The files on that hard drive are not worth any money. They are just some of the last little pieces of my best friend who passed away seven years ago.” 

A day passed. I wondered how often people came to data recovery centers with the crumbled fragments of a person’s faded life. Maybe they had a whole category of tickets they lumped these requests into. Maybe they gave discounts for “bereaving, broke best friends.” 

The data specialist wrote back and told me I needed to send him thirty dollars to get it back or he would destroy it. 

I USED TO ADMIRE STRENGTH MORE. But now I wonder if strength simply isn’t a choice. You have to endure. You have to accept. You have to stand up, or you get pulverized. 

Last year my friend Mark died of a heart attack twelve hours after I saw him. I spent that week dissecting our last interaction, from the moment I had seen him pull up in the car, until the last second I had hugged him goodbye. Had I noticed anything different? Was there something I could have done to prevent it from happening? 

At the end of the week, we all went to the funeral—masked of course. Only a limited amount of people were allowed in the viewing room at the time. I watched my Mark’s almost-four- year-old daughter—now fatherless—look at the still body on the table. She didn’t cry. She turned away with an expression I could only guess was a mix of curiosity and confusion and sat on the ground. Her mother knelt down and asked, “Do you have any questions?” But how could she—or anyone—explain to a child that her father, though lying there just a foot away, will never again hold her, kiss her, tuck her in at night? 

His other child was barely one year old. I had watched this child grow up in Mark’s arms every Monday night when we video-called throughout the quarantine. This child, taking up more and more space on a computer screen every day. But whatever memories the child had of his father bouncing him in his lap will inevitably evaporate. And every day he wakes up is one more day without a dad. 

“HONESTLY, the whole situation, that’s just like Rust,” Ana told me comfortingly. “I’m glad you got a chance to see his trip to Japan. It’s what he would’ve wanted. It was meant to be.” 

I agreed that the whole situation, albeit tragic, weirdly matched Rust’s personality. Poetic and mischievous. Rust ran so hard after dreams he didn’t even realize he had left the ground. He told me he would do things—unbelievable things—and then I would watch, stunned, as he did them with such nonchalance. I watched him piece together a circus community out of detached Baltimore misfits. I watched him convert our friend’s Dundalk warehouse into an aerial silks studio. I even watched him install a stripper pole in his room. 

I used to tell him that I had no doubts anymore—whatever he said he was going to do, he was going to do it. He told me he was going to start his own screen-printing business. He told me he was going to take all of us to Burning Man to perform in the conclave. He told me he was going to create his own Burning Man festival here on the East Coast. And I was 100 percent convinced that he was going to do all of that. 

But then he died, and those dreams were cut down with him. In all the ways he brought people together, they just as quickly scattered. Traumatized, the roommates split. The troupe, without a clear direction, disbanded. And the remaining bits and pieces of his dreams faded completely from view. I saw his dreams like the fire he breathed on the shore of Ferry Bar Park, late at night when we had nowhere else to go — like a flash of light, reflected on the water, burst into the infinite darkness. It was like watching a flower grow, but in reverse. 

I LIVE MY LIFE like it could all disappear any second.

Not a day goes by that I don’t look at my boyfriend as we lie together in bed, about to turn off the light, and think, “I could lose him tomorrow.” I memorize the way his shoes crowd the doorway. I stare at him for too long sometimes, too scared to blink. Will this moment become just another memory that I will strain to immortalize, replaying it over and over in my head until the colors are all wrong and the definition fades? Can I absorb every detail if I imprint it in my mind today? Can I download the way his shirt smells when it’s fresh from the laundry, or the way he knits his brow when he reads a book?

But even if I managed to compile the bits of him that make him a person and save it on a hard drive, even the hard drive wouldn’t last. Maybe someone would get one last chance to look at its contents, just in time to watch the files get corrupted and disappear forever. We cling helplessly to these memories even as they disintegrate in our hands. 

TODAY I take stock of the pieces of Rust I still have. Some of them haven’t lasted. I left the dream catcher with a friend for safekeeping while living abroad and never saw it again. One of his handmade whips is in a box, although the cracker doesn’t really work anymore. The texts that we exchanged — which we religiously kept to haiku form — disappeared with my old phone long ago. 

But his shirt is still in my closet. His books are still on my shelf. 

And somehow the one plant that had survived his total lack of a green thumb — a small palm tree — is still alive. Although every day I count the dwindling leaves and wonder how long it has left. 

And my most treasured possession — for a reason I can’t quite explain — his cigarette injector machine. I remember feeling panic right after he died, standing in his room, thinking that it was probably still in his pocket, carried with the body into the incinerator. I started picking up random cans of tobacco lying around the floor and shaking them, the way he used to in the car with me on long road trips, until I heard the familiar rattle. I opened the can, and I found the machine couched on a bed of tobacco fluff. I clutched it in both of my hands and told no one— but I don’t think anyone would have understood, even if I had. 

And—I have this hard drive, which was sent back to me after paying the data specialist the stupid thirty dollars he asked for, right before he immediately asked me to fill out a customer survey. (I didn’t.) I hadn’t managed to save anything from the hard drive before the contents spilled out into the ether—except for that one video, the one that fascinated me, the way it had glitched and looped back onto itself. 

“Yeah, it’s kind of sad,” Rust laughed, snow peppered in his dark hair.

I’D LIKE TO THINK there was some deeper meaning, and that maybe Rust really was behind it all—the magical rediscovery of the hard drive, the reawakening it stirred in me, and then the almost immediate tragic loss of its contents—as if he had really meant for me to see it and no one else. 

But deep down I know, it’s all just matter, misplaced throughout the universe. Molecules exploding, scattering, and fading from view. 

⧫

Thalia Patrinos, from Washington, D.C., is a science writer by day, fire dancer by night. During mornings and afternoons (and yes, many weekends), Thalia strategizes communications for NASA Headquarters via Mori Associates. When the sun sets, Thalia puts together elaborate circus performances under the stage name Tippy Ki Yay. And in the little bit of spare time in between, she works on her latest project: The Spacecraft Tarot. You can find it here: tippykiyay.com 

Over its 15-year history, Delmarva Review has published new literary prose and poetry from 490 authors from 42 states, the District of Columbia, and 16 foreign countries. Forty-six percent are from the Chesapeake and Delmarva region. Financial support comes from tax-deductible contributions and a grant from Talbot Arts with funds from the Maryland State Arts Council. Website: www.DelmarvaReview.org

 

Author’s Note: “To learn about myself, I study my parents, both the stories they told of their childhoods and the stories I witnessed. I was a player as well as a spectator to the theatre of my parents’ marriage. Their partnership was not idyllic but found an equilibrium in dispute. Can the telling, the receiving of stories transmit wisdom between generations? Whether versed in the language of water or war, whether believed or not, stories hopefully serve as a bonding current that flows beyond the boundaries of lives.”

Learning to Swim

The tide is out, and Atlantic Beach is barren,
barren of my father who loved the ocean
and its beatings as if his body deserved them.
My mother had to cross an ocean to meet him.
She never learned to swim. My father could never
teach her. In 1938 she’d fallen into Suwalki’s Czarna River.
Her brother fished her out with a limb.
Indigo dye dribbled down her legs and trailed tails of inky bruises.
That night, her father’s belt smacked deep into her pale skin
for ruining her dress, staining their name.
The tangle of violet tattoos grew into my parents’ knotted bond.
My father did teach my mother to drive—shouts, slams, cries—
in the 1958 blue-mist Buick Riviera. I learned to keep my head down
and buried in the aquamarine velveteen of the expansive backseat.
Above, beyond, the waves of battering sound. 

⧫

Ellen Sazzman, from Maryland, has been published in Another Chicago, Poetry South, PANK, Ekphrastic Review, WSQ, Sow’s Ear, Lilith, Beltway Quarterly, and CALYX, among others. She received an honorable mention in the 2019 Allen Ginsberg contest, was shortlisted for the 2018 O’Donoghue Prize, and won first place in Poetica Magazine’s 2016 Rosenberg competition. She was also a 2012 Pushcart Prize nominee. Her collection The Shomer (Finishing Line Press) was a finalist for the 2020 Blue Lynx Prize and a semifinalist for the Elixir Antivenom Award and the Codhill Press Award. 

Delmarva Review, now in its 15th year,  publishes compelling poetry,  fiction, and  nonfiction selected from thousands of submissions annually. Designed to encourage  outstanding new writing, the literary journal is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit. It is available  from Amazon.com, most online booksellers, and regional specialty bookstores. Financial support includes tax-deductible contributions and a grant from the Talbot Arts with funds from the Maryland State Arts Council. Website: www.DelmarvaReview.org

 

Editor’s Note: “Butchery,” from the 15th edition of the Delmarva Review, has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize in fiction.

Author’s Note: “When you’re a scientist doing fieldwork in another part of the world, uncertainty comes with the territory. That includes the other scientists on your team. How will they act, especially if things go wrong? I set out intending to tell the tale of a field season soured by recklessness. Instead, “Butchery” reveals how misplaced priorities can destroy careers . . . and even cost lives.”

Butchery

AT DINNER, Sondersohn told Kate they’d reach the site by late afternoon. But when they arrived at the river crossing the next day around noon, the ferry was missing. 

The two-track road they’d rattled down all morning wound back through tan scrub into haze. On the bank, four men squatted beneath the weak shade of an acacia. The only sounds were buzzing flies and the wet chewing of the men’s jaws as they worked khat. Decorative scars covered their bare chests, their split earlobes hung pendulously. Each wore an AK-47 slung over his shoulder. A pungent odor filled Kate’s nostrils. Goat. 

Birhanu, their driver and guide, wrinkled his nose. “Mursi.” 

“The stalwart guardians of our ferry,” quipped Sondersohn. 

Birhanu stepped toward the acacia. Three dogs crouched beside the men: tough little things, by the look of them, covered in bites and scratches, missing chunks of ear and, in one of them, an eye. They growled but, undaunted, Birhanu began speaking to the men in a language that sounded nothing like Amharic. 

That’s why he’s here, Kate thought. Why she was here, well . . . once they reached the site, that’s when her skills would come into play. But it was taking a long time. Too long, Sondersohn said, and she agreed. Nearly two weeks in-country so far. First Addis: an interminable blizzard of Amharic negotiations, with many piles of birr exchanging hands. Then five dawn-to-dusk days lurching along progressively worsening roads in their field vehicle, a white Toyota SUV overloaded with field tools, camp supplies, and extra fuel and water. At the site, she’d be in her element. Until then, she was just one more piece of cargo.

Birhanu turned to Sondersohn. “Doctor, the Mursi say we go across. The toll is 250 birr for each, 2,000 for the truck.” 

Sondersohn wiped sweat from his eyes. Stocky and pale, with short straight hair and a pudgy boyish face, he gave off more the impression of an overgrown schoolboy than of a star scholar of ancient human prehistory. “Where is the ferry? Ask them where’s Bulaba? He’s the one we negotiated with last year.” 

Birhanu turned back to the Mursi. Sondersohn gave Kate a Can you believe this shit? look. She’s seen it often since they met for the first time—she’d known him only by reputation and her adviser’s recommendation—in the Bole Airport. 

As the two farenji, they were set apart. Alone together, Kate thought, like the book. The staring, the begging, the kids chanting “you, you, you” everywhere they went, only amplified the aloneness. So what happened at dinner last night — which really wasn’t much of anything, just a brush of the fingers — was about companionship, not anything more. 

“Bulaba not here, they say,” Birhanu informed Sondersohn. 

“Really?” Sondersohn glared. “Thanks for helping figure that out.” 

Whereas Sondersohn treated Birhanu with absent condescension right from the beginning, Kate had wanted very much to like him. At first, she thought it would be easy. A compact man with wispy white hair and crooked teeth, he gave off a grandfatherly vibe. The slender National Tour Operators cap he wore made him resemble a train conductor, and she imagined him conducting them out to the site in an orderly yet caring manner. 

Once they set off, however, he grated on her. He ignored Kate completely and spoke to Sondersohn only when necessary. This despite his excellent English and propensity to argue or negotiate with nearly everyone they came across. Vendors, government officials, police, managers of the restaurants and hotels they stopped at on the road; Birhanu spoke with them all, sometimes at great length, but to what end she never knew. The conversations went untranslated and unexplained. 

And, for a so-called tour operator, he wasn’t much of a guide. As they drove through the lush, hilly countryside— nothing like the arid scrub she’d seen in photos of the site or here by the ferry crossing—hours would pass without his saying a word. One afternoon in the midst of his silence, he’d made a sudden remark: it sounded like a swear word. She spent the rest of the day wondering if something had upset him. But that evening, when curiosity got the best of her and she asked Sondersohn, he explained with a laugh that Birhanu was merely pointing out a bustard near the road. 

“Tell them,” Sondersohn said, “there’s nothing more to talk about until we know the whereabouts of the ferry.” Reluctantly, Birhanu reengaged the Mursi, who—faced with the prospect of their leaving without parting with any money—suddenly had a lot to say. 

They had spent last night in Jinka, the nearest town of any consequence. After dinner, the inevitable beg wot the only choice at the hotel’s dingy restaurant, Sondersohn ordered another beer. Heading to her room to swat cockroaches off the walls and lament the lack of running water was distinctly unappealing, so Kate joined him. 

When the Bedeles arrived, they clinked them together. “May be our last cold beers for a while. About time, huh?” Then he added, eyes gleaming, “Afar, 1993, 2.2 million years old.” 

This was a reference to why they were here, to the scientific record they seemed poised to break. During last season’s excavations, Sondersohn unearthed ibex bones with suspicious cut marks. The site was old, older than 2.2 million years. So were the bones. He’d recognized the possible significance but wisely left them in situ when the rains drove him back to Addis. He needed an expert evaluation, and through a convoluted set of referrals, here sat Kate, a mere doctoral student yet one of the world’s top experts on an incredibly obscure, hyperspecialized topic that almost no one cared about. Except for the few who cared passionately. 

“The Leakeys,” she replied. Their hands crept closer to one another across the battered tabletop. “The cover of Science magazine.” 

If this worked out, it would be a find of staggering significance. She imagined a Science cover with their names on it, rather than the Leakeys. The media appearances. The professional society accolades. Even … tenure. It would make her career. Their fingers brushed. 

If it worked out. Kate slowly withdrew her hand. 

Now she glanced sidelong at Sondersohn, intently watching Birhanu parlay with the Mursi though he couldn’t understand any more of the back-and-forth than she could. 

That brief touch last night, she hoped they were both clear on what it was … and wasn’t. 

She turned her gaze across the coffee-colored river. A glint on the opposite bank drew her eye. Not one but several large pieces of sun-roasted metal protruded from the tan mud. A termite mound rose, like a stalagmite, from the dust-caked edge of one. 

She pointed and Sondersohn scowled. “Birhanu!” 

“Doctor, the Mursi say they will give us a bargain. Only 1,000 for the truck.” 

Sondersohn blinked. “Have you been haggling over price? The ferry’s on the other side of the river. It’s in pieces. Let’s go.” Flushed, he strode toward the Toyota. Kate followed. 

At the truck, Sondersohn turned back toward the Mursi and unleashed a torrent of verbal abuse. She’d seen flashes of his temper before, but nothing like this. 

Though they couldn’t understand the words, it was surely clear to the Mursi that their payday had evaporated. The dogs growled again, baring their fangs. One of the men, broad chested and muscular, rose to his feet and shoved Birhanu, who’d been standing mutely during Sondersohn’s tirade. He went sprawling, his NTO cap landing beside him in the dust. The other Mursi men stood up. One slipped the rifle off his shoulder. 

“Erik!” Kate yelled. She stepped forward, but Sondersohn stopped her with a hand. 

Birhanu retrieved his cap, then inched back and rose awkwardly to his feet. He was covered in dust. The Mursi shouted what Kate was sure were taunts. 

“I said, let’s go,” Sondersohn chided him.

Teeth gritted, Birhanu limped to the driver’s side. 

THE ONLY OPTION now was to cross the river at the nearest bridge and approach the site from the north. This was a terrible option. They’d need to drive most of the way back to Addis to reach the bridge and would then face a longer journey on the western side of the river. Just how long they didn’t know, as even Birhanu had never been that way before. Every day on the road ate into their precious time at the site. 

The next morning, back in Jinka, Birhanu took the Toyota to be serviced, leaving Kate and Sondersohn with some hours to kill. The center of the town was a large grassy field that served as both an airstrip and grazing for goats. Corrugated metal-roofed shacks — homes and shops in an undifferentiated jumble — lined the dusty road bordering the field. Bright-colored Amharic signage everywhere advertised she had no idea what. Diesel fuel and woodsmoke ripened the air as they strolled past wandering chickens and goats, women hauling wood and water, and kids who called to them. Sondersohn kept up a low-level chatter, complaining about the ferry, the Mursi, and the added time. Kate, overwhelmed by the surroundings, listened with half an ear. 

At a small roadside market, old ladies sat beside pyramids of produce: tomatoes and mangos, potatoes and garlic. A stocky man managed piles of brightly colored spices and a rickety balance. Heaping bags of brown grain, which Kate surmised was teff, rested next to stacks of spongy, freshly made injera discs. There were jerry cans and water jugs. Washbasins and buckets. Candy and tinned fish. Cheap digital watches and tired clothes of the sort that, in the US, would remain unsold at the end of a big Sunday tag sale. 

Many of the vendors called out aggressively. Sondersohn ignored them while Kate muttered, “Just looking,” unsure they could even understand. An adolescent offered to be their guide for the day. “No,” Sondersohn told him firmly, while Kate— remembering Sondersohn’s outburst the previous day—pressed a few consolatory birr into his hand. A small girl tried to take her hand, and Kate looked around for the parents. They’d quickly gained a following: an uncomfortably large group of children, toddlers to teenagers, dressed in dirty t-shirts and tribal cloth. One little one slowly hobbled after them on a crutch. 

She glanced at them uneasily, and Sondersohn said, “They’re just bored.” He pointed to a nearby storefront. “Here’s something you’ll like. Come on.” 

The metallic scent of blood hit her nostrils upon stepping inside. Flies buzzed through the fetid air. As her eyes adjusted to the dimness, she made out four goat carcasses, skinless and splayed open, hanging from hooks. Two men worked at a table, taking a carcass apart with cleavers. One was short and stout, the other tall and slender, both wearing dirty aprons stained with gore. The men looked up at the two strangers but then went back to work. 

While not every chop or slice would leave marks on a goat’s skeleton, many would. Kate watched with practiced eyes, having witnessed the butchery of numerous animals. Were she to look at the bones under a microscope, she could reconstruct the angle, force, even the order of every strike. She’d know they were using metal tools, not stone. Most importantly, she’d know that the animal was butchered by human beings: not hunted by lions, scavenged by jackals, or merely scraped up by postmortem wind, sun, and dust. 

To do this work was painstaking, subtle, and anything but glamorous. Great for chatting about at cocktail parties or, more often in Kate’s case, house parties. Maybe not so great for making a living . . . at least not so far, though her fortunes might be about to change. 

What had drawn her to study such a crazy topic? More than the thrill of investigation and discovery, more than the physics or the forensics, what drew her in most was its intimacy. With the butchered animal but, much more, with the people who did the butchering. To reconstruct their actions was in a small way to know their thoughts. This brief communion—a half-step into impossibly remote minds from vastly different cultures and times—this was the draw for her. 

The men finished with the carcass. One called out, and a moment later a boy led a live goat into the shed. Kate appreciated this, too: the connection between a living organism, its death, and our sustenance. How far removed from the typical modern American experience: the supermarket’s sterile meat department, where a single drop of blood—or, more precisely, myoglobin—staining the pristine white packaging was cause for squeamishness. 

The boy pushed the goat down onto the earthen floor. It chewed placidly as the taller man sharpened the straight-edged knife he’d use to kill it. What a mercy: the beast’s ignorance of death. She envied it. 

“Tonight’s wot at the hotel,” Sondersohn whispered, and she suppressed a chuckle. 

The other man, the stout one, grabbed the goat, which bleated and pulled away, finally realizing something was wrong. The stout butcher slipped, landing on the goat. Something snapped. The goat began thrashing, and the man with the knife yelled angrily. 

The stout man strained to hold the goat as the one with the knife went for its throat with the blade, missing again as the goat bleated and writhed. Kate recoiled. Finally, after too many seconds, the blade struck home, and the goat’s bleating ceased. 

“Interesting method,” observed Sondersohn. “About on par for efficiency with everything else in this country.” 

Revolted, Kate left the shack. She squinted in the sunlight, drinking in the open air and the scents of the market. 

Most of their youthful following had dispersed, but the boy with the crutch lingered. No more than six years old, his underfed body was draped in rags. One of his legs was stunted and twisted at an impossible angle, while on the side of his head was a large patch of gnarled skin. Not a birth defect, she noted analytically, but likely the result of an accident of some kind. 

He shambled toward her: eyes large and clear and a smile full of perfect little white teeth. “Farenji,” he said, but in an affectionate murmur rather than the yelling she was becoming accustomed to. Never one for maternal instincts—career-killers those—she nonetheless resisted an urge to embrace him. 

But who was she to feel that? His crutch was well-crafted, pieces of dark weathered wood smoothly jointed together. Effort and skill had gone into its making. Who was she to surmise he wasn’t already deeply loved? 

Sondersohn wandered out, his expression sheepish. She hoped he realized his quip had irked her. “Birhanu might be back by now,” he said, checking his watch. He glanced at the boy. “No. Go away.” 

Kate removed a stack of small bills from the pocket where she kept her birr. 

“Don’t,” Sondersohn advised. “He’ll just . . .” 

She handed the boy the whole wad, not sure how much it was but hoping it was enough to make a difference. 

SONDERSOHN wore the growing strain everywhere . . . his face, body movements, and words. After six more days of travel, they were all grubby—Kate genuinely looked forward to a bath in the muddy, crocodile-infested river when they finally reached the site—but Sondersohn was as rough as the road. Each day that passed, the tension grew. There it was, in his red-rimmed eyes, the set of his jaw, the sweat on his brow. The clock was his enemy. Precious days they’d been relying upon for fieldwork were spent instead on the road. And each day they lost now meant another for the return journey before the rains got too severe. 

They shook and rocked at a snail’s pace along unmaintained roads through hilly forest, misty in the mornings and hazy in the afternoons. Tightly encircled by trees, their track wound up and down, with occasional vistas when they reached the tops of rises. 

Birhanu drove all day, day after day, and he did not complain, though surely this was not what he’d signed up for. Sondersohn nonetheless began arguing with him about where they were and how far they still had to go. Sometime today, Sondersohn insisted, they should reach the hilltop village of Maji and then tomorrow begin their descent into the dry river valley where, somewhere, is their site. 

They must be getting close, though it didn’t feel like it to Kate. 

There was nowhere to pull off the narrow track, so at lunchtime, Birhanu simply stopped the Toyota, and they opened cans of sardines, ham, and fruit salad. Not exactly appetizing, but nothing about sitting in the truck made Kate hungry. Besides, this was the kind of food they’d subsist on at the site. She’d best get used to it. 

They leaned against the vehicle, eating in silence. Still chewing, Sondersohn wandered off down the road, restless, scouting. Maji might be just over the next rise. Uneasy, Kate glanced at Birhanu, but he, as usual, ignored her. 

The afternoon passed, and at dusk they were still nowhere. Once the sun sunk behind the hills, it grew dimmer by the minute. Birhanu turned on the headlights. 

At the top of the next rise was a small clearing where they caught a glimpse of the surrounding landscape. No light anywhere. 

“We stop here,” Birhanu said. “Maji tomorrow.” 

“No, Birhanu, Maji tonight,” Sondersohn replied. 

“Erik,” Kate said, “We’re obviously not close. And it is getting hard to see.” The dark out here was not the dark of home. It was something to be reckoned with. 

Birhanu added, “This is a good place to camp.” 

“You said we’d reach Maji today,” Sondersohn pressed. Kate bit her tongue at this falsehood. Birhanu said nothing. “You’re our expert guide. So tell us: how far are we from Maji, and how much longer will it take to get there?” 

“I do not know, Doctor.”

“Erik, come on,” Kate chided.

“We are not stopping here,” Sondersohn insisted. “We’re going to Maji, even if it takes all night.”

“But it is dangerous!” Birhanu exclaimed. He seemed truly panicked, though Kate had observed that he also sometimes spoke to them with elevated emotions, as though to toddlers, to get his point across. “We must stop.” 

“We are not stopping here,” Sondersohn repeated with finality, then settled back in his seat. 

Birhanu, agitated, shifted into gear. They rolled forward barely a hundred feet before the truck lurched to the left. A pothole Birhanu hadn’t seen. He stopped again. “Doctor, I must insist. We will start at dawn and . . .”

“Keep driving!” Sondersohn snarled, suddenly so fierce that, like his tantrum at the ferry crossing, it shocked Kate. 

Birhanu sat rigid. Then, hands shaking, he turned off the motor. 

All three of them silently absorbed his act of rebellion before Sondersohn stiffly declared, “Fine then. I’ll drive.” 

“No, Doctor, that is not allowable . . .”

Kate interjected. “I agree with Birhanu. Let’s stop. We can’t see a thing out here. And we could all use some rest.”

Sondersohn swiveled to face her and raised his voice. “For all we know, Maji could be over the next hill. I thought this work was important to you.” 

Kate, growing angry herself, didn’t bother keeping the acid out of her reply. “I want to get there in one piece. That’s why we should stop.” 

Ignoring that, Sondersohn turned back to Birhanu. “Either you drive, or I do.” 

The two of them—silhouettes to Kate—faced each other down. Then Birhanu surprised her by handing Sondersohn the keys. Silently, they got out and switched seats. Once in the driver’s seat, Sondersohn shifted into gear, and the truck jerked forward. Birhanu slumped in the passenger seat. Kate checked her seat belt. 

It was slow going. The road wound back and forth in steep switchbacks as they descended, ascended, then down and up again. Deep ruts gouged the road where rainwater had run down the hilltops across the track. Kate could easily have kept pace with the truck if she got out and walked alongside it. She wished she could, despite the darkness and what might be lurking in the gloom in this strange place. 

Fieldwork often lent itself to “we’ll laugh about it later” situations: annoying, scary, or downright awful circumstances that didn’t seem so bad later, back in the lab, or merely after a hot shower and a cold beer. But something about the atmosphere in the truck made her doubt this was one of those times. 

An hour passed, then two. They drove through deep forest, nearly pitch black in the night, with vegetation pressing up against the road as they slowly climbed. They each craned forward to see what was ahead. Even as she anxiously scanned the road, Kate tried distracting herself by thinking about the procedure she would follow at the site. 

The first step would be to locate and uncover the bones. Measure and photograph in situ. Then extract, take additional measurements, and begin analysis of the cut marks. There was only so much she could do under field conditions. The bones would be brought back to a lab where she could investigate them under microscopy. Ideally with a scanning electron microscope, but that wouldn’t be possible in Addis, and taking the bones out of the country was not allowed. Anticipating this, she’d brought special materials to make high-quality molds and casts that would capture the surface of the bones in exquisite detail. The final analysis would be completed at home. 

How long would the field part take? A week? Two? Surely, even with all the delays, they’d have that amount of time. 

At the top of the rise, Birhanu sprang to life. “Light!” 

The forest melted away. More lights appeared as the road leveled and smoothened. Sondersohn accelerated. 

“Maji,” he announced triumphantly, and sped up even more. The vegetation whizzed by, dark on dark. 

Kate barely registered the shadow in the road before something heavy thudded off the bumper. Sondersohn cursed, and they rolled to a stop. “Fuck. A goat. I must have hit a goat.” 

Kate flashed back to the time, when she was a teenager, that her dad hit a deer. They’d gone to pick up dinner and were cruising down a mostly residential street in Stamford. “My God!” he’d exclaimed, “Katie, are you all right?” He pulled over and they’d both stepped out to examine the damage on the hood. 

Now suddenly there were lights and noises behind them. A dozen people stood in the road, with torches and lanterns, crowded around something. Then a woman screamed. 

Kate held her breath. Birhanu emitted an anguished cry. 

The Toyota began rolling forward. “The truck seems fine, thank god.” Sondersohn accelerated. 

“No, no, no,” Birhanu said. “We must stop. We must go back.” 

“Are you crazy? They’ll kill us.” 

Kate told herself there were many unknowns, maybe it wasn’t so bad. Though with that wailing, how could it not be? “We have to stop.” 

“We cannot leave here,” Birhanu urged. 

Even in the darkness, Kate thought she could discern how tightly Sondersohn gripped the steering wheel. 

They drove into the center of the village. After all the build- up, Maji was nothing — a few square shacks around a small square — and shortly they were on its far side, among scattered huts, the dark forest looming ahead. The road descended, gravelly and rutted, the grade even steeper than on the way up. Sondersohn was forced to slow the truck to a crawl. 

Kate sat transfixed by the darkness before them, the road revealed by the headlights a few feet at a time. The child must be dead or maimed for life like the boy in Jinka. 

With effort, she shifted her gaze from the road to Sondersohn’s vague outline peering over the steering wheel. Like a rupture in her brain, the implications of what he’d done exploded and cascaded on and on: the long shadow stretching far out into their futures. She slumped back into her seat. 

The hours passed as the truck wound its way down and down. The adrenaline shot from Maji dissipated. Despite what had happened and the dangers of the dark road, Kate struggled to remain awake. None of the stories about fieldwork adventures, not those told in the safe cradle of the lab nor by beer-sozzled colleagues at conferences, were like this. 

Her head pitched forward, a big bump jarring her awake. The truck stopped. 

“Fuck,” said Sondersohn. The headlights revealed a dry channel across the road, two feet deep or more. He pounded his fist on the steering wheel. “Fuck!” 

After a moment, Birhanu spoke up. “I will get us across.” 

“You will?” Sondersohn asked, as surprised as Kate. “You can?” 

Birhanu got out and walked to the front of the truck. He gestured in displeasure at what he saw there. The collision must have done damage, left signs. Or worse. Kate shuddered. 

Birhanu contemplated the channel. Sondersohn slid over as Birhanu got into the driver’s seat. He put the truck in gear and navigated to a spot on the edge of the road where the banks were gentler. The down and up were jarring, but they were past the channel in less than a minute. The dark and rough road continued on, and without a word, Birhanu drove on. 

A short time later, he stopped again. A large tree lay across the road. It would take many hours to clear, if they could clear it at all. 

Defeated, Sondersohn suggested, “Let’s sleep for a few hours until it gets light.” 

Without a word, Birhanu turned off the headlights and shut the engine. 

Sondersohn’s soft snoring began almost immediately. 

Kate’s stomach gurgled. They hadn’t eaten since lunch the previous day. The forest rustled. Her mind churned. She dreaded tomorrow. And yet, within moments, she drifted off. 

A LOUD KNOCK rocketed her out of sleep. Six men—clad in grubby t-shirts and checkered wraps, their faces etched with anger—stood in the dim dawn light. It was obvious what had woken her: the butt of a rifle whacked forcefully on the truck’s hood. 

The oldest of the men began yelling in Amharic, punctuating his points by hammering his rifle on Birhanu’s door. Birhanu answered, voice wavering. The man repeated the same words over and over; Birhanu shook his head and gestured toward Sondersohn. Six angry pairs of eyes moved to Sondersohn, then back to Birhanu. Sondersohn sat quietly in his seat, staring straight ahead. Kate wanted to hope this wasn’t what it looked like, that these were only road bandits, and this was just a robbery. 

The men’s leader grunted. Birhanu, sobbing and shaking his head, began furiously rolling up his window. The man yanked the door open, and the others rushed in, prying Birhanu’s hands off the steering wheel and pulled him out of the vehicle. 

“Say something!” Kate urged Sondersohn. 

They hauled Birhanu, howling, to the front of the vehicle. The leader pointed at the hood—to the sign of impact—and slapped his face hard. 

“Wait!” Kate’s arm shook as she removed the pile of birr from her pocket and opened her door. “It wasn’t him! It wasn’t him!” Two of the men raised their rifles at her, the black holes of the barrels like the blank eye sockets of skulls. She held out the birr. “Take our money,” she said. “Take all of it. We’re so sorry. It wasn’t him!” 

The rest of the men began dragging Birhanu into the forest. He yelled and writhed, but his struggles barely slowed their progress. 

“No!” Tears began streaming down Kate’s face. “It was him!” She screamed it, pointing at Sondersohn, who remained quiet and motionless in his seat. “It was him!” 

Birhanu’s cries grew fainter as they pulled him into the brush. Deep in the surrounding woods, a bird called. The two remaining men kept their guns trained on Kate. It grew brighter each second, and as it did, she thought she could discern more of the emotion in their eyes. Rage. Wonder. Fear. Determination. 

Or maybe she had no idea what was in their heads. 

A single loud pop echoed off the hillside, then died away. One of the men grabbed the money out of her hand, then they wordlessly disappeared into the forest. She heaved huge loud sobs, sounding to her own ears too much like the woman on the road the night before. 

In the gathering light of the new day, she saw the road behind them: a series of long switchbacks on the hillside. They’d covered very little distance last night. No wonder the men so easily caught up. 

Scraping and clinking nearby drew her attention. Filthy and unshaven, sweat stains blooming under his armpits, Sondersohn rummaged through the back of the Toyota like some kind of scavenging beast. He pulled out a small ax and dropped it on the ground. Then he grabbed cans of ham and fruit salad and began prying them open. 

“We need to eat, then clear this tree.” 

“What about Birhanu?” she asked. “We can’t leave him here.” 

He answered without a word, pointing past the downed tree in the direction of the site, the work, the discovery. Their future, her future. Then he climbed into the driver’s seat, where Birhanu sat moments before, to eat. 

“Come up front.” Sondersohn spoke through a mouthful of food, not turning around. 

Instead, she began walking away, uphill, back up the road the way they’d come. 

⧫

Josh Trapani is a scientist turned policy wonk who writes fiction and humor. He is senior editor at Issues in Science and Technology. Josh’s work has appeared in The Writing Disorder, The Del Sol Review, The Big Jewel, and other venues. He’s reviewed books for the Washington Independent Review of Books and peer-reviewed journals, including the publication Science. For more information see: www.linkedin.com/in/joshtrapani

Delmarva Review is a national literary review with strong local roots. Over its 15-year history, it  has published original prose and poetry from 490 authors in 42 states, the District of Columbia, and 16 foreign countries. Forty-six percent are from the Chesapeake and Delmarva region. Financial support includes tax-deductible contributions and a public grant from Talbot Arts with funds from the Maryland State Arts Council. The review is available worldwide in print and digital editions from Amazon.com and other major online booksellers, as well as regional specialty bookstores. Website: www.DelmarvaReview.org

 

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