Author’s Note:  The end of a long friendship is not unlike a death in the family: Suddenly, someone who was always there is gone. “When Friendship Dies” tells the story of two college classmates whose friendship survived marriage, children, geographical separation, and the death of a spouse. Then—unexpectedly but not without warning—it was over. It was my need to understand how this particular friendship was formed and what led to its demise that compelled me to write this memoir.

When Friendship Dies 

Memoir 

SO MUCH SNOW FELL DURING THE WINTER OF 1970-71 in Lincoln, Vermont, that when I looked out the window in the morning, I often thought my car had been stolen. Or that I’d forgotten to set the emergency brake, and it had rolled back down the steep mountain road where I was living in a charming but dilapidated farmhouse with another young woman who had just graduated from Middlebury College. It was so cold during the month of January that our pipes remained frozen for weeks, and we had to haul water for flushing the toilet and brushing our teeth by chopping a hole in the ice covering the river that ran through the backyard—something we often did in the pitch dark, in parkas over flannel nightgowns, with bare feet in unlaced boots. She was a teacher in a two-room schoolhouse; I was marking time as a legal secretary between summers at The Bread Loaf School of English, where I was studying for my M.A. We hadn’t been that close in college, but we both needed a place to live and wanted to stay in Vermont. The harsh confines of that winter turned us from survivors into friends—and, by the time the ice on the river began to buckle and the faucets ran freely again, into something more like sisters. 

We both married Middlebury men, had daughters eight months apart, and pursued careers that involved teaching and writing—she in upstate New York, Hawaii, and North Carolina, while I settled in southeastern Connecticut. But distance never mattered. For twenty-three summers we spent two weeks in July with our kids at her cabin in Maine. When she and her husband were living in Hawaii during the Kilauea eruptions of the early 1980s, my husband and I flew down to visit and from their deck watched the lava fountain and tumble, hissing, into the sea. During the more than three decades I lived in Mystic, Connecticut, we saw each other whenever she visited her mother in Newport, Rhode Island, where we cruised the shops on Bannister’s Wharf and drank wine in the bar at the Viking Hotel. Eventually we both gravitated back to Vermont: I bought a small cottage for weekends and vacations just over the mountain from Middlebury, while she and her husband found what would become their retirement home just north of town. Our friendship was a given. It would endure as long as we did. 

DECEMBER 2018

“You’re not really going to East Middlebury today, are you?” my husband asked, staring out the window of our Vermont cottage, watching as rain spread a gauze of ice over the snowy street. 

I hesitated before admitting why I was determined to drive to The Waybury Inn, thirteen treacherous mountain miles to the west, for lunch. “It’s taken me this long to pin her down,” I told him. “If I cancel now, I may never find out why she did it.” 

“She” was the friend of forty-eight years I’ll call Jane, and “it” was not to invite me to her second wedding, which had taken place six months earlier; in fact, she never even told me she was going to remarry. After her first husband, whom I’ll call John, died in 2013, I thought she was headed for a prolonged period of mourning. To my surprise, she flung herself almost immediately into an affair with a man she’d known for years, who took full advantage of her weakened emotional—and robust financial— condition. It didn’t last long, but she shared enough—how he persuaded her to buy an expensive boat so that he could sail it, how she discovered he was still involved with another woman— to make me feel relieved it was over. Then, just as it seemed she might be ready to explore the complicated grief she had postponed—for a husband who suffered from depression and had long since ceased to make her happy, but whom she had steadfastly refused to divorce—she met another man, a New England blueblood, the kind of man her mother might have chosen for her when she was a young Newport debutante. He was well dressed, well-mannered, and a former commodore of the New York Yacht Club. We socialized with them a number of times during their two-year courtship, but I was completely blindsided by her blunt text, “We got hitched.” Who, with adult children and grandchildren to please and provide for, gets married at our age? Given the fact that he had been divorced twice, I assumed they had opted for a quiet civil ceremony. 

I was wrong. When I asked for details, she admitted they’d had a church wedding in Middlebury with thirty-five guests. She sent me a few photos the next day, and I could make out the faces of several mutual acquaintances and former classmates. Why was I—the maid of honor at her first wedding and, I thought, her closest woman friend—not among them? The rejection and bewilderment I felt were visceral. 

After vacillating between hurt and anger for several days, I wrote her a long and very frank email describing my reaction and asking what I had done to provoke such treatment. Had I said something to upset her? Had I excluded her from some facet of my own life? Was she afraid I would judge her for re-marrying so soon after her husband’s death or probe her motivations too deeply? Perhaps I let my anger get the best of me, because all I received was a curt reply informing me that no explanation would be forthcoming. We both fell silent after that, but six months later she invited us to her annual Christmas party as if nothing had changed. “What should I say?” I asked my husband when the invitation arrived. “Say we’re not coming” was his advice. But I couldn’t do that—not without asking her face-to-face why she hadn’t told me about her wedding until it was over. 

She was already seated when I arrived at the Waybury, her arms folded tightly over a voluminous wool scarf. She didn’t move to embrace me. 

As we waited for the waitress to bring our food, Jane fired questions at me about everyone in my immediate and extended family. As an only child, she’d always been interested in the lives of my four siblings and their offspring. I gave brief answers— relieved, I suppose, not to have to broach “the subject” any sooner than was absolutely necessary. But when our food arrived and the questions kept coming, I wondered if she had any idea why I’d asked to have lunch with her. “Jane,” I said, when she stopped talking long enough to blow on her soup, “I have to know why you didn’t invite me to your wedding.” 

I was braced for a spirited self-defense. Instead, she declared flatly, “It’s not about you”—a common enough phrase whose full meaning I had yet to grasp. She went on to explain that her wedding had been an “extremely emotional” occasion—the implication being, I suppose, that it was too emotional to share with me. I wanted to interrupt with, But haven’t we shared dozens of ‘extremely emotional’ experiences over the years? Wasn’t I the first friend you told when your husband found out he had myelofibrosis? Weren’t you the one I called before dawn when my mother died? And didn’t you call me, weeping, from the highway when you didn’t reach your father’s bedside in time? Weren’t you still at the hospital when you called me to say your husband was gone? Haven’t we, in fact, shared almost every extremely emotional experience we’ve been through since our early twenties? I understood that a marriage ceremony is about two people, but when you have a church wedding with a few dozen guests, it would seem that you have chosen to let others share that very personal moment. Objections swirled in my head, but words deserted me. 

It’s not about you—she kept falling back on this phrase as I continued my probing and her side of the conversation floundered. It was typical of Jane to hide behind an all-purpose scrap of language when a more honest response required too much introspection. Another favorite was “Of course you do”—a phrase that could easily be modified to suit almost any context. A few years earlier, when I dropped what I thought would be a bombshell—that my husband was interviewing for a job in another state—her comment was “Of course he is,” the implication being that she had foreseen this turn of events and needed no further details. She often employed such conversational drop shots, if only to mask her unwillingness to engage at any greater depth. So, at first, I assumed that It’s not about you meant “It’s not about anything you did to upset me.” But when I asked her, with some embarrassment, about one of the faces I’d glimpsed in the wedding photographs she’d sent me—a woman I knew was only a casual friend—Jane blurted out that she’d run into her at the grocery store the day before and had invited her on the spur of the moment. I couldn’t help but think, You invited someone you ran into by chance, but not a friend who has stood by you for forty-seven years? Again, I was too incredulous to say anything. 

It wasn’t until we were waiting for the check that I realized “It’s not about you”—which Jane had said at least a dozen times in response to my repeated attempts to unearth her motivations— meant neither “You didn’t do anything to provoke me” nor “Stop trying to draw attention to your own hurt feelings.” She meant it quite literally: Sharing her decision to remarry—let alone inviting me to the wedding—had simply never crossed her mind. I had seen her cut people off before—most recently her stepbrother, after a dispute involving the distribution of family heirlooms. I had seen how quickly she put her forty-year marriage behind her. Did she associate our friendship with those decades she’d spent married to a man who had been a hero to both of us in our twenties but with whom she’d ended up locked in a relationship characterized by competition and conflict—a man she would never leave but who, mercifully, set her free by dying at sixty- two? 

I interrupted her rambling about how happy she was in the new life on which she had embarked. “So, what you’re telling me is that you want to leave everything and everyone associated with your old life behind, and that includes me?” She hesitated for just a moment. “Yes. Basically.” 

So that was it: I was part of the skin she was trying to shed. 

MAY 2013

This wasn’t the first time Jane had shut me out. The day her husband died, she called me from the hospital, sobbing. “Can you find me that poem that ends with the line about ‘your one wild and precious life’?” I immediately went to the Mary Oliver books on my shelf and copied “The Summer Day” into an email. 

A couple of weeks later, as we talked on the phone about plans for a memorial service, Jane said, “I want you to write a poem.” I cringed inwardly: I’d been asked to write poems for such occasions before, and I knew how impossible the task could be. “Why don’t I read that Mary Oliver poem?” I suggested. But Jane was adamant. “I want you to write a poem about John,” she insisted, “about how much he loved his kids and our land in Vermont. And I want it to say that although he was a lawyer, all he ever wanted was to be a farmer. And don’t forget to mention how he could fix anything mechanical. And you should say something about his orchard—he was so proud of those trees.” She went on and on, while I furiously took notes. Of course, I would do it, but I had only six weeks to pull something together. 

I began setting aside a couple of hours each day to work on my assignment. Periodically Jane would call, asking me how the poem was coming along but never pressing me for details. She wanted to hear it for the first time at the service. She was trusting me to do a good job. 

The result was a villanelle—a nineteen-line poem whose first and third lines alternated at the end of each subsequent three- line stanza and then reappeared as a concluding couplet. By varying the two repeated lines but keeping the end-rhymes, I was able to cover everything on Jane’s list. The poem began: 

He could fix what was broken, make anything grow,
was good with animals, feathered and furred,
liked churning rivers and winter’s blue snow,

could expound on a rare strain of apple or rose
while tuning an engine or tending a small herd
of cattle. The crops he’d always wanted to grow 

needed land to expand on, as all farmers know,
so he left his career as a lawyer behind and adjourned
to this place of white water and snow, 

where he and his life’s mate could both
have what they wanted: an orchard for him, and for her
a house that didn’t need fixing, where they could grow

older together, perhaps even old… 

I tinkered and tweaked, spending more and more time on the poem as the deadline approached. When Jane called a few days before the memorial service, I told her it was done. She didn’t ask to read it but only whether I thought it should be included at the beginning or the end of the service. I told her I thought the poem would be more appropriate as a final tribute. 

When I arrived at her house the day of the outdoor event, Jane didn’t mention the poem, but she must have seen the blue folder with the Middlebury College seal that I was carrying. I sat in the row behind her, holding it on my lap for almost two hours while John’s friends, their daughter, and John’s brother delivered their eulogies. I could feel tears welling and practiced some of the breathing exercises I’d learned in yoga. As a poet who was accustomed to public readings, I had perfected a number of techniques to keep my voice steady. I reminded myself that I was speaking for Jane, who was too overwhelmed by loss to speak for herself. I sat there with the folder pressed beneath my clasped hands, awaiting my turn. I felt as though I had a doorknob lodged in my throat. 

Then, suddenly, it was over. The minister who was officiating invited us all to join the family for a traditional Hawaiian pig roast in the field beyond the house. My husband gave me a startled look. Had there been a mistake? I tried to catch Jane’s eye, but she was already engulfed by family and friends. 

I was shocked. But I was also embarrassed, because I knew that there were times during the service when, instead of listening to the heartfelt reflections of others, I had been priming myself for my own performance. Perhaps I deserved to be ignored; after all, I’d been thinking about how my own words would be received when I should have been thinking about my friend. But that didn’t explain why it had happened. 

My husband and I ate quickly and told Jane we didn’t want to drive over the mountain in the dark. I left the blue folder on her desk. 

I had planned to stay in Vermont for the rest of the week while my husband returned to his job in Connecticut, assuming that Jane might need me to get through her first several days as a widow. When I didn’t hear from her, I called and invited her for dinner. We drank a great deal of wine and talked late into the night, but she never mentioned the poem. So after clearing the dishes I said, as gently as I could, “Jane, can you tell me why I wasn’t asked to read the poem?” 

She blushed furiously. “It was the kids’ decision. They only wanted their dad’s friends to speak at the service, and they regard you as one of my friends.” I was unprepared for this explanation. Although I knew that the marriage had been a contentious one, I hadn’t given much thought to how Jane’s children—whom I’d known since birth—might view me and my friendship with their mother. But I quickly came to the conclusion that if those two kids, now in their thirties, viewed their parents as being so at odds with one another that even their parents’ friends were relegated to opposing camps, then Jane had more serious issues to deal with than my injured ego. I wished that she had given me a heads-up when I first arrived at the service, but she was a grieving widow and couldn’t possibly be held to normal standards of etiquette. I told her that I understood. 

“Don’t worry,” she assured me. “On the anniversary of John’s death, I’m going to invite all of our Vermont friends to help scatter his ashes over the orchard and around the sugar- house. Afterward, we’ll have a huge bonfire and you can read the poem.” But when that first anniversary rolled around, Jane was in France with her new lover. She never once alluded to the significance of the date. 

Four years later, however, caught off guard by the news of Jane’s wedding, this incident came back to haunt me. In some intimate negotiation she’d had with her own nature, I’d once again been the loser. 

MT. CYANIDE, 2012

It was during her husband’s hospitalization for a bone marrow transplant that I first became aware of the fissures forming in our friendship. I had known that they were facing a crisis since his diagnosis seven years earlier, and I was fully prepared to support Jane in whatever way I could. I stepped up the frequency of my phone calls and emailed her almost daily. I visited her in the apartment she was renting in New York City, near Mt. Sinai Medical Center—which she misspelled so regularly in her emails that my husband began calling it Mt. Cyanide. But she didn’t seem to need the kind of one-on-one support I stood ready to provide, and I found the group emails she sent out—sprinkled with vague references to white cell counts and peripheral blasts but curiously devoid of any real information about her husband’s prognosis or her own emotional state—frustrating. They almost always ended with a request to “hold us in the light,” a Quaker commonplace although Jane was no Quaker. I suppose she meant “Keep us in your prayers,” but as a poet, my resistance to anything approaching a cliché or New Age platitude ran deep. Those emails left me feeling more like a casual friend than a close one—that I was merely part of the audience she’d assembled to witness her unfolding tragedy. 

I remember a phone call with Jane, following an email indicating that John had entered a critical phase in his treatment. I wanted to know more; I wanted to understand what he was going through and what it would take to emerge at the other end of this ordeal. I did some internet research and had a list of very specific questions to ask. But all she wanted to talk about was her budding friendship with a wealthy, socially prominent New York City woman married to a Middlebury alum—an Impressionist scholar and former curator at the Met. He, too, was being treated at Mt. Sinai, but I never found out the exact nature of his disease. All I heard about was their elegant New York City apartment, at which Jane had become a regular visitor. 

Was I jealous of this new friendship? Did I resent the fact that she’d spurned my attempt to show a more granular interest in her husband’s treatment? Both of these are possible, but all I felt at the time was disappointed by how easily Jane had let herself be distracted. 

VERMONT, 1970
The common wisdom is that shared values are what holds a marriage together, and I suppose that a friendship is not all that different. But aside from our Middlebury education, Jane and I defied that wisdom. She was the only child of wealthy parents and grandparents in Rhode Island, who spent Thanksgiving at the Agawam Hunt Club and had Christmas Eve dinner at Harbour Court, the New York Yacht Club’s waterfront mansion in Newport. I was the second of five children, and holiday dinners meant my mother standing in an apron over a six-burner stove and cousins, aunts, and uncles massed around a dining room table with three extra leaves. Jane’s parents divorced when she was in boarding school, and her father never let her forget how much he’d wanted a son. She responded by grasping every opportunity to prove her own worth: After earning a Ph.D. in education, she applied to law school and was accepted, although she had no intention of actually enrolling. Her mother compensated for her ex-husband’s disparagement by treating their daughter’s every achievement as if it were a Nobel Prize. I suppose Jane was as fascinated by my childhood tales of competing for food and my parents’ attention as I was eager to accept her invitations to Harbour Court. We each longed for more of what the other had grown up taking for granted. But was this the only basis for our friendship? 

My husband, who had known us both since we were in college, often asked why I put up with Jane’s treatment of me, which over the years had often been less than considerate. My stock response— “Because she’s the only woman I can be naked with”—was true. During my summer visits to Maine, we would frequently end up sharing the one small bathroom. I would step into the shower as she got out, so as not to waste the precious warmth and steam that were the only cure for a swim in the frigid cove. But there was more to our friendship, at least in the beginning, than a comforting lack of modesty. 

When we lived together in that Lincoln, Vermont farmhouse after graduating from Middlebury, I came home from work one day to find Jane dragging bales of hay from the back of a pickup truck to the house, whose fieldstone foundation she had already wrapped in plastic sheeting secured with furring strips. “Insulation,” she told me when I asked what she was doing. On another occasion that same winter, I was puzzled the first time I turned on the kitchen faucet and no water came out. It was Jane who took a hairdryer down to the basement to thaw out the pipes—and, when that failed, who threw on her parka and ventured out on the frozen river with an axe and a bucket. It seemed to me that there was no situation she was not equipped to handle. I was the one who had grown up in a big family, but it was Jane who knew how to survive. 

AS I DROVE BACK OVER THE MOUNTAIN following my lunch with Jane on that icy December day in 2018, I knew that our friendship was over—that, like the snow-laden barn next to the farmhouse we’d shared forty-seven winters ago, it had finally collapsed under the weight of too many slights. I passed the dirt road that led to that house and could see Jane in her Bean boots, barn jacket, and Nordic hat with tasseled earflaps, hauling those bales of hay and wrestling them in close to the foundation. I thought of the winter days when, after shoveling out her own car to get to work, she would trudge over to the shapeless mound where mine was parked and start scooping snow from the roof with her mittens. I thought of the day we went into a skid in Jane’s Volvo on a snow-covered back road and ended up with our right front fender submerged in a mountain stream. “Here, give me your hand,” she said, having already climbed out the driver’s side window and reaching back into the car to help me escape. I was so shaken that I had trouble clambering up the steep bank, but she had already flagged down a passing car that would take us home. I recalled the night in 1971 when snow sifted into her room through a window that, although closed, had plenty of gaps. She stood over my bed just before dawn, her blonde hair and the yoke of her flannel nightgown dusted with white. “Do you want to come in with me?” I asked, holding back the covers. Of course she did. 

Sue Ellen Thompson is the Featured Writer for Nonfiction in the new edition of the Delmarva Review (Volume 13). Her fifth book of poems, They, was published in 2014. An instructor at The Writer’s Center in Bethesda since 2007, she has previously taught at Middlebury College, Binghamton University, University of Delaware, and Central Connecticut State University. She received a Pushcart Prize, the Pablo Neruda Prize, two Pulitzer Prize nominations, and an Individual Artist Award from the state of Connecticut. In 2010, she won the Maryland Author Award from the Maryland Library Association. Website: sueellenthompson.com.

Delmarva Review is an independent literary journal publishing the best of new prose and poetry selected from thousands of submissions nationwide, and beyond. It’s thirteenth annual edition, released this month, features the new work of sixty-four authors. It receives partial financial support from individual tax-deductible contributions and a grant from the Talbot County Arts Council with funds from the Maryland State Arts Council. The review is available from Amazon.com and specialty booksellers like Mystery Loves Company, in Oxford. For more information, see the website: www.DelmarvaReview.org. 

#  #  #

Author’s Note: “Bread” arrived as part of a sonnet sequence, and a consolation, after much mulling over privation and constraint. Work and all life’s effort appeared, somehow, not to add up to the needed relationships or fulfillment. Some lines might suggest it, but there was no premonition of public calamities when I wrote the poem. It would seem, though, that the poem knew more than its author as it found its place (as sonnet IX.) eventually as part of a poem sequence about the COVID pandemic, titled “Virus Regulation” (https://newworldwriting.net/alamgir-hashmi-virus-regulation/). Retrospectively, thus, perhaps “Bread” telescoped into the future that many of us in the COVID-19 world must live with.

Bread

Warm bread from the oven,
your hands smell of dough,
baking, the science of hunger
or satisfaction. You only say
we are out of cinnamon
just as yesterday.
Another mile to go for spring water,
more herbs, and nuts for the buns. 

Year-round
it’s been
plowing or gathering,
prayers for good weather.
Is it this we live for?
One waiting, the other away. 

Alamgir Hashmi is the author of numerous books of poetry, including My Second in Kentucky (Vision) and A Choice of Hashmi’s Verse (Oxford), as well as volumes of literary criticism. His recent work appears in anthologies and journals including Poetry Review, Prairie Schooner, Poet Lore, New Letters, The New Quarterly, Chicago Review, Poetry London, Paris Voices, and Connecticut Review. Hashmi is a Rockefeller Fellow and Pushcart Prize nominee. As a professor he has taught English and literature in North America, Europe, and Asia. Web: www.alamgirhashmi.com

Delmarva Review is an independent, nonprofit literary journal published annually to encourage outstanding writing. It is supported in part by individual contributions and a grant from the Talbot County Arts Council with funds from the Maryland State Arts Council. Copies are available at Amazon and a number of regional bookstores. Website: DelmarvaReview.org.

 

Author’s Comment: This poem was triggered by the difficulty of witnessing the dying and ultimate death of my dear aunt, listening to her regrets and feeling a sense of guilt for gathering her belongings, furniture, and clothes and disposing of them.

My maiden aunt lies in that uneasy truce
between living and dying, cradled in the calm
of hospice on the health care wing. Each day,

another small loss. We falter through shards
of conversation—what about the good times? Tell me
about those family dinners, vacations in the Catskills…

but she dwells on the loneliness of being left behind,
her four sisters dead, nieces and nephews who play dead
all year long. On the dresser, a black and white

photo of the tight Italian family. Better times. Each day,
my aunt grows smaller, yet she is a giant in the shadow
of her misery. Her apartment is now bare,

prepared for new tenants: rose-colored sofa and chairs,
mahogany hutch, old hope chest, all sent to auction.
Last week, I donated her clothes. She smiled

when I told her the shop ladies were thrilled
with her tailored black wool coat and the turquoise silk
dress and matching jacket. I told her the ladies admired

her impeccable taste. We are near the end.
Each day, another small loss, and truth becomes the intruder.
She will never know how I crammed her things

into jumbo plastic bags, then dropped them off
at the shop’s back door. Just some women’s clothes, I said.
I don’t need a receipt.

♦

Irene Fick’s poem was published in the Delmarva Review, Volume 12. Her second collection of poetry, The Wild Side of the Window, was published by Main Street Rag (2018) and received a first-place award from The National Federation of Press Women, as did her first book, The Stories We Tell (The Broadkill Press, 2014). Her poems have been published in Poet Lore, Gargoyle, the Broadkill Review, Philadelphia Stories and (forthcoming) The Blue Mountain Review.

Delmarva Review’s thirteenth annual edition will publish on November 1 with the best of original new poetry and prose, from sixty-four writers, chosen from thousands of submissions during the year. For more information, see the website: www.DelmarvaReview.org.

Author’s Note:  The poem draws largely from my first visit to El Salvador in 1986.  While much has changed in the ensuing years, much remains the same, and today everywhere you look evidence abounds of a country disfigured by years of war, political intrigue and national unrest.  And yet there is something special, heroic even, in the national character of the campesino who bears it all with a simple dignity that makes of life an enduring song. 

Marvin Jonathan Flores is a first generation American whose parents emigrated from El Salvador during the Salvadoran civil war.  He began writing at the age of nineteen, shortly after his best friend died in a car accident. Flores currently resides near Washington D.C. in Falls Church, Virginia, where many of his stories and poems take place. 

Delmarva Review was pleased to publish “El Salvador” in its 2019 edition.  Authors like Flores give discerning readers a human perspective of a country’s culture often  missing from the headlines. Delmarva Review’s thirteenth annual edition will publish on November 1 with the best of original new poetry and prose, from sixty-four writers, chosen from thousands of submissions during the year. For more information, see the website: www.DelmarvaReview.org. 

Author’s note: This story arose from a period in my life when I was thinking about relationships between women within families, especially intergenerational relationships⎯between mothers, daughter, grandmothers. It led to the discovery of several secrets from past female antecedents that question identity and relationships today. The confluence of all of this was the arrival in my head of the title character’s voice⎯clear and distinctly unique⎯musing on these very topics.

A Rose by Any Other Name

What’s in a name? That which we call a rose

By any other name would smell as sweet

    Romeo and Juliet, Act II Scene II, William Shakespeare 

I GUESS YOU’RE WONDERING WHO I AM. I’ve been wondering that myself. My birth certificate arrived in the post today. Annabel Shoshana Smith. Born: April 3, 1982. Mother: Rosemary Shoshana Smith. As expected, the box for my father’s name is blank. 

Rose—my grandmother—said my mother didn’t want my father (whose first name was Ron, I found out later) to have any claim on me if he came back. Not that he ever did, not even after my mother died. “A no-hoper,” Rose said. I’ve always called my grandmother Rose. She said it made her feel younger, that being reminded she was a grandmother depressed her. 

Anyway, back to the task at hand. Now that my birth certificate has arrived, I can fill in the forms that have been sitting on my kitchen bench for a week. Change-of-name forms. 

You see, I’m recently divorced. Currently, I’m Annabel Butterfield. A lovely name, Butterfield. In hindsight, I think perhaps it was the name I fell for, not the man. Pity. Now that he’s remarried and has little twin Butterfields on the way, it seems rather lame to keep it. 

The question is, though, which name to change back to? This is not my first divorce. Butterfield is my second husband’s name. My first husband’s surname was Pritchard—very English and proper. Like him. I certainly don’t want to revisit that. 

But I balk at going back to Smith. So ordinary. It reminds me of roll call and nicknames. Smithy, Smitho, Smelly-belly- smith. I don’t want to be that braces-wearing, pigeon-toed girl again. I’ve left that all behind. The funny thing is, a year or two following my first divorce, after some careful cajoling on my part and a couple of shots of Irish whiskey, I found out my father’s surname from my grandmother. She laughed as she told me.

“Ron bloody Smyth,” she chortled. “Smyth with a y!”

How unfair is that?

My girlfriends were less than helpful. My attempts at a discussion on the matter at my impromptu divorce party two weeks ago largely failed, probably on account of the quantity of champagne being imbibed. 

“Take a famous actress’s name—from the past,” Stacy said. 

“No, make one up,” said Ash. “Like Daylight, or Seagull.” 

They started giggling. Stacy slopped champagne down the front of her blouse.

“How about Butthead?” she said, spilling more champagne on the floor. “Or…”

Angela interrupted her. “Just go without a surname—like Madonna, or Pink.” She reached for the champagne bottle and refilled Stacy’s glass. 

Only Lucy, my best friend, could see I was serious. She pulled me aside, out of earshot of the others. 

“Have you considered taking an old family name? There must be one you like.” 

I’d been pondering that idea the morning after the party when Jane, my flatmate, made a comment that stopped me in my tracks. I’d said I was considering O’Reilly, my grandmother’s maiden name, given that she’d raised me from the age of three. 

“And,” I added, “it was her mother’s name, not her father’s. I like the strong female vibe of taking a female ancestor’s name.” 

Jane was leaning against the kitchen bench, eating yogurt from the tub.

“True, though…” She paused and licked the spoon. “There’s an argument that all surnames are male. Your grandmother’s name, O’Reilly, her mother’s name—it’s actually her father’s name, isn’t it? Your great-grandmother’s father’s name?” 

Damn. She’s right. All surnames are male. Passed on to women by fathers or husbands. There are no female surnames, at least not in this culture, unless you make one up. So, I put the forms away, and now I’m back at square one. I check the time. A quarter to twelve. Time to get to the hospital. I’m running late. I leave the forms on the bench and grab my keys. Perhaps Rose has some suggestions. 

SHE IS SLEEPING AS I ENTER HER ROOM. I pause just inside the doorway, taking stock as I do each day. There is her spare bathrobe, slung over the chair. Her overnight bag, full of clothes for me to take home to wash, her toiletries bag, hairbrush and glasses on the table by her bed. Today, though, I see something different. A leather satchel, a little smaller than A4 size, lies on the floor by the bedside cabinet. It is old and looks homemade, the leather lacing cracking around the edges. It looks strangely familiar, but I cannot place it. Then I remember, I have seen it before, in the bottom drawer of the wardrobe in Rose’s bedroom in her house, where she keeps her sewing kit and through which I’d occasionally rifle looking for old buttons or bits of ribbon. For a moment, I am disoriented. I shake the feeling off and slip back out to the tearoom, where I make a coffee from the automatic espresso machine. It’s awful, and at first, I only drank it for something to do, but lately I seem to have become addicted to its curiously metallic taste. 

As I walk back into the room, Rose opens her eyes. Her skin is parchment pale. I can see the blue veins underneath. 

She smiles.

“Annabel,” she says. “I have something to show you.”

The exertion of speaking sparks a coughing fit. A nurse 

glides in. I can’t watch. It’s a problem I have, confronting unpleasant truths. Probably why I’m twice divorced. I want things to be OK; otherwise, I’d rather not know. 

You live in the clouds, Rose would say when I was little. You have to learn to face up to things, or they’ll knock you down. 

“I’m all right now, Annabel—you can look.” 

She hasn’t lost her sense of humor. That’s good, but as I turn back to face her, it’s clear she’s more tired than yesterday. She pats the bed and I half-sit on the edge, not wanting my weight to impact her in any way. 

“Have you come to any conclusions?” she says, not without effort. “About a name?” 

I try not to let my anxiety at her frailty show on my face. She doesn’t like to see that kind of concern; it offends her in some way. Poor man’s pride, she once said to me after I’d done something she didn’t like, something that made her feel small. That admission was her way of apologizing. I look away and fiddle with the corner of her bedsheet. 

“I thought perhaps O’Reilly?”

She looks at me, an eyebrow raised.

“By all means, though—if you’re going to the trouble of choosing a name, make sure it means something. Don’t pick one by default—that’s just being lazy.” 

“It’s your name,” I say. 

“Yes—well,” she says, leaning forward. “Speaking of which…” 

She coughs again, a long, drawn-out spasm. This time I stay put, perched awkwardly on the bed. After she recovers, she looks at me for a moment and then says, “I’ve made a discovery, albeit one rather late in the day.” 

“My satchel,” she says, pointing down to the floor beside the bed. 

I reach down and pick it up. It smells of stale boot polish and old newspapers and dust. I stifle a sneeze. The latch is stiff, and I tear a thumbnail opening it. It is full of old documents and letters, tea-colored with age. 

“The envelope with the airmail pattern,” she says.

I place the satchel on my knees and take out the envelope. It is not sealed. Inside are three folded sheets. The first is a marriage certificate. November 1943. London. Bride: Mary O’Reilly. Groom: Jozsef Telmann. 

“That’s my father,” she says. 

The second is a birth certificate. Rose pushes herself up higher in the bed and leans closer. 

“Look,” she says. “Look at what it says.” She waves her finger at the document. “Shoshana Telmann, born May 17, 1944. That’s me. I never knew. My mother said Shoshana was an old family name, so I gave it to…” 

Her eyes fill with tears. 

“…your mother as her second name. Then Rosemary gave it to you, as yours. She liked the way it sounded.” 

She sits forward, her hands animated. 

“I didn’t know. Shoshana is me. I’m not Rose O’Reilly. I’m Shoshana Telmann.” 

She lies back down again, her breathing more pronounced. After a moment, she says, “So strange to find this out now, at the end, that the name you have—that the who you thought you were—is wrong. That it’s a lie.” 

She points at the satchel still open on my lap. 

“Letters. From Mary and Jozsef. I couldn’t read them. You can, if you’re interested. I find I’m not. The time to find out has passed for me. All those years wondering. Now it’s too late.” 

She closes her eyes and rests her head against the pillow. 

“I’m tired. Come back tomorrow and we’ll talk.” 

SHE WAS TOO WEAK TO TALK THE NEXT DAY, and for some days after that. 

“She’s deteriorating,” the doctors said. “It won’t be much longer now.” 

Each time they’d said that before, she’d rally, but even I can’t pretend now. 

Sitting by her bed, I reexamine the papers. The third document is a divorce certificate. 1949. Rose would have been five. Pinned to it is a newspaper cutting. An obituary. Jozsef Telmann—1962. The year before my mother was born. 

Among the papers are some letters tied up with twine. I open one and begin to read. 

When I get home that night, I search online for Jozsef’s grave. I find it listed in the Jewish cemetery at Rookwood. Mary O’Reilly is there, too, in the Catholic section. I’m not sure why, but I decide I have to see them for myself. 

ROOKWOOD CEMETERY IS HUGE, and I’m terrible with maps. I wander around for most of the morning, my energy fading, until I locate the Jewish section. There is a simple headstone: Jozsef Telmann, 1919–1962. Beneath this, a Star of David and an inscription in a language I can’t read, then—“Beloved Husband of Rina, Father of Ruth and Isaac.” So, he married again. There are plastic flowers in the vase. I’m relieved my grandmother cannot see it. That she has a half brother and sister won’t matter to her now. She’s right. It’s too late. 

It’s a long walk to the Catholic section. Mary’s grave is in the lawn cemetery. 1984. The year before my mother died. I feel a curious sense of déjà vu. A memory of being carried. With Rose and my mother. I must have been very small, less than three. I glance at the grave next to Mary’s. It’s my mother’s. How come I didn’t know it was here? I hear my grandmother’s voice inside my head. 

Because you avoid everything unpleasant, Annabel. I’ve warned you, it comes back to bite you. 

I drive home in a daze. How is it I’ve never given any real thought to my mother’s death? About where she was buried? Or, come to think of it, much about her life? Something like shame passes through me. 

My phone rings. It’s the ward sister.

“You should come in,” she says.

At the hospital, I hover outside my grandmother’s room 

while they attend to her. She’s drifting in and out of consciousness.

“How long?” I say to the doctor.

She’s noncommittal. She touches my arm, a light but firm touch. Her eyes are kind.

“If you need to say anything to her—anything particular—now is the time. She’ll need sedation soon. Once we start that, she won’t be able to respond.” 

IT’S EARLY WHEN ROSE WAKES. I’m not sure if she knows I’m here. Her voice is surprisingly clear. 

“I saw him once; I remember now. My mother took me to see him. He was in a park. I must have been about ten. He was thin and tall, with a beard. My mother said he was an uncle, but it was him. Something about him was familiar.” 

I lean in close so she can hear me. 

“They divorced,” I say, ‘but they loved each other. The letters…” 

She’s drifted off again. I sit down, the letters crumpled in my hand. 

I’ve read them all, night after night, waiting for Rose to die. I’ve been practicing saying it: She will die. I’ve watched how the nurses answer the questions anxious relatives ask at the end. Yes, he/she will die. They’ve learned the art of not flinching when the time for platitudes is over. 

I know Mary and Jozsef’s story now, as much as anyone can from the bits and pieces left behind. She was an Irish girl, working as a nurse in London. He was a Hungarian refugee who escaped to England just before the war broke out. He joined the British Army and served in the Jewish Brigade. They met while he was recovering from a minor shrapnel wound to his leg. She became pregnant and they married. They immigrated to Sydney after the war—for some reason separately—Jozsef in 1947, then Mary and the baby a year later. From the tone of their letters, they had hope then. I can’t tell what changed, but there are hints. Mary mentions deciding not to convert. Jozsef writes of his renewed faith in God. Then nothing, just the divorce papers, and a letter transferring their house into her name. The grounds for divorce are listed as drunkenness and desertion. 

There is another letter. This one is still sealed and is more recent, dated 1984. It’s addressed to Rose. On the envelope after the name Rose is the word Shoshana in brackets. I turn it over in my hands, then tear it open. 

My dear Rose,
I hope you are reading this in a forgiving frame of mind. It’s not in my nature to ask for it, but impending death has a way of changing one’s habits. There are a few things you should know. I loved the man who was your father, but we were not compatible. For more reasons than mere religion. The divorce papers state he was a drunkard and left us, but it is not true. I left him. It was the only way to procure a divorce. He was very kind. I changed our names back to O’Reilly. An Irish name was easier than a Jewish one in Sydney then, though barely. I’m sorry you could not see him again. I know he loved you. He named you Shoshana, after his mother. It means Rose. And you are. A beautiful rose. I know I have not been a mother comfortable with endearments, but there it is. I love you, my darling, my Rose.
Your mother, Mary O’Reilly. 

I wonder how it can be that Rose hasn’t read this. That she hasn’t even opened it. 

In the morning, she stirs. I take her hand. 

“I have something to tell you,” I whisper. She murmurs something inaudible. 

“I’ll read it to you.” 

And I do. I don’t know if she understands or can even hear me. When I finish reading, I kiss her cheek. 

“I love you,” I whisper. “I love you, Shoshana Rose.”

I brush away tears. I never allow myself to cry, but today is different. She doesn’t release my hand, and for a moment I’m convinced she has squeezed it. Then the sensation is gone. Her breathing becomes labored. A nurse appears. Her eyes are gentle, but steady. 

“You don’t have to stay,” she says. “I’ll stay.” 

WHEN IT’S OVER, I head home. Jane is out. There’s no one to greet me, not even a cat. Perhaps I should get a cat. 

Lucy has left a message on the answering machine.

“Have you decided? On your new name?”

The name-change forms are still on the bench. I’ve filled in everything except the desired name. I like that description. Desired. I pick up the pen and write in my name. 

Rose. That’s it. I now know who I am. 

I am Annabel Shoshanna Rose. 

Alison Thompson is an award-winning writer from New South Wales, Australia. She was selected for an Art Omi: Writers Residency (Spring 2019) and is a member of the Kitchen Table Poets. Her chapbooks Slow Skipping (2008) and In A Day It Changes (2018) were published by PressPress. Her poetry and stories have appeared in journals and anthologies internationally. Website: alisonthompsonpoetry.wordpress.com.

Delmarva Review publishes evocative new prose and poetry selected from thousands of submissions annually. Designed to encourage outstanding writing, the literary journal is nonprofit and independent, supported in part by a grant from the Talbot County Arts Council with funds from the Maryland State Arts Council. The submission period for the next issue opens on November 1. See the website: www.DelmarvaReview.org.

 

Author’s note: This poem grew out of conversations about the concept of time—entirely a human construction—and how mindfulness can help whoever and whatever we bring to our hearts and minds. Later this narrative came to me, asking what molecule of someone’s life then and our life now might be altered by prayer or meditation.

Would It Change a Thing

praying for someone past? Because God, a crone begging
coins tells her, has no need for time.

Imagine a kindness tossed behind us, stirring up winter’s
leaves the year that spring stalled and fieldstone
caught the jaws of her father’s plow.

Let it summon one gritty pause in his day of churning
rock from soil and furrows for seeds, debts creasing
his brow. Redeem him

and the burden of burlap tales trailing her still
with their upturned faces, hungry for chaste
morsels of regret.

Pray the sun through those spring shy limbs,
let moss and mud grin up between her toes.

What if some far future soul is praying for us now?

⎯

Maryland author Sylvia Karman tells us she hikes whenever and wherever possible. “Like the loons,” she and her husband return every spring to the Adirondacks to hike and kayak until mid-autumn. Retired from a career in public policy, she is completing her first novel. Her poems in the twelfth edition of Delmarva Review are her first poems in publication. She lives in Ellicott City.

Delmarva Review welcomes the best new poetry, fiction, and nonfiction writing from all authors, based on competitive selection. The submission period opens from November 1 until March 31 for the 14th annual edition. See the website for more information and for submissions. Designed to encourage outstanding writing, the literary journal is nonprofit, independent, and supported in part by a grant from the Talbot County Arts Council with funds from the Maryland State Arts Council. Website: DelmarvaReview.org.

 

Editor’s note: In this stirring personal essay, from the Review’s twelfth edition, a college professor revisits an adolescent adventure from grad school days. During a trip to the Kiribati Islands, the world’s easternmost nation rising just two meters above sea level, he writes a stunning metaphor: “The first people to see tomorrow will be the first to lose their entire country to climate change.”

MOST OF THE PEOPLE I MET IN KIRIBATI got their first tattoo when they were thirteen or fourteen years old. The tattoos were small— often just a friend’s name in bleeding blue, hand-written with a needle and ink. 

Etiaroi’s were cleaner, more complex. Her first was an armband of barbwire for her father when she was twelve, she told me, “because he is in jail.” The second was an armband of Samoan symbols, “for my first love, a Samoan boy when I was very young.” 

Even without them, it would be easy to tell that Etiaroi wasn’t from here. Her voice boomed louder than anyone around, and she walked like she was too big for a rural island of 2,500 people.

ETIAROI AND I MET on the basketball courts during my third week on Christmas Island. I was twenty-six, on a grant to visit several of the Republic of Kiribati’s thirty-three islands by freighter and write about the impacts of climate change. I was also in the social hole that is graduate school, where debt and uncertain job prospects encourage adolescent relationships. I was more focused on intellectual pursuits. 

In fact, it was a metaphor that drew me to Kiribati. With an average altitude of only two meters, most of Kiribati’s islands will be uninhabitable or underwater within fifty years. Kiribati is also the world’s easternmost nation, pressed against the international dateline in the middle of the Pacific, making them the first people to welcome the new day. 

It’s a stunning metaphor: the first people to see tomorrow will be the first to lose their entire country to climate change. I knew I needed to see it, so I hopped a plane to Christmas Island, ready to spend the summer soaking up as much as I could. 

Etiaroi barely said a word the day we met. She was the only woman in a three-on-three basketball game, pushing and playing in a place where it was rare to see women older than sixteen unmarried, let alone playing sports. 

I’d stopped to say hi to a friend when one of the players came over. 

“Do you play?” he asked.

“Sure,” I said.

I don’t, but I rarely say no while traveling. Besides, at six feet tall, I had a good four inches on anyone out there. How hard could it be? 

Etiaroi lined up against me. She was the tallest of her teammates and had short-cropped hair and long, athletic limbs. She stared me down with big brown eyes and was as beautiful as she was intimidating. She was all business, while my default is a quick smile. I knew I was in trouble. 

I tried to flirt, hoping she’d ease up, but she ran circles around me and left me defeated without a word. The game wasn’t even close. 

“Come dance tonight,” Alice said the next day. Alice worked at the Communications Office, the only place that offered internet or phones on the island. “There is someone I want you to meet.” 

I was wary. Alice was nineteen and unmarried. Her parents had arranged a marriage for her at fifteen and while she’d talked them out of it then, American missionaries from Georgia were trying to arrange one now between her and their twenty-one-year- old son. Alice’s family seemed unlikely to let her say no again, but she was struggling with the decision. Kiribati offered women very few choices, she told me, and she desperately wanted to go to the U.S., “but I don’t love him,” she said. “I hoped it would be you, but maybe it is him.” 

I’d been trying to be friends with Alice, but after that conversation I realized it might not be possible. I determined to only see her in the office. 

“No dancing for me,” I said. “I’m not much of a dancer.” But she wouldn’t relent. 

The dance was in the town maneaba, a large grass hut in the middle of the village. It was a family event—bright lights and no booze—not like the bars on the outskirts of town where proper young Kiribati women weren’t supposed to go. 

“Come with me. Let me introduce you,” Alice said, walking me over to Etiaroi. “Maybe you like her instead of me.” 

Etiaroi and I talked on the outskirts of the party all night. She was twenty-one, from Tarawa Island, Kiribati’s capital 2,000 miles to the west. She was bartending at The Bay of Sharks, one of those outskirt bars, saving money while waiting for a visa. She was staying with her cousin Tuutana, and they planned to visit family in Honolulu once the visas came in. They’d been waiting for a year, but this was a place where the mail only comes every few months. 

“Maybe I can find work in Hawaii,” Etiaroi said. “Maybe we can stay.” 

“You don’t like Tarawa?” I asked. I’d assumed Kiribati’s capital was more cosmopolitan, in part because of Etiaroi. “Why do you want to leave?” 

She scrunched her nose like I’d asked a stupid question. “There is so much more in America. There is so much more I can do. Here, there is nothing.” 

“Christmas Island is quiet,” I agreed. 

“No. I like Christmas,” she said. “It is nicer here, but very traditional. Tarawa is fine, but it is dirty. And small. There is so much more out there for me.” 

For the next two weeks, we spent almost every moment together—picnicking on secluded beaches, walking tropical lagoon flats, and dancing to Australian and Fijian pop at The Bay of Sharks. We talked music and dreams, and she told me she wanted to go to nursing school in the U.S. “I just want to help people,” she said. 

She was more secure in her desires, and I found her confidence intoxicating. 

None of it felt romantic, not really. My flirtations were often ignored, and it became my day’s goal to make her smile. Mostly we talked about our own plans, as if we were young friends dreaming of our own possibilities—her as a nurse in Hawaii, me as a professor in Colorado. 

Occasionally she’d sneak into my room late at night. In bed she was timid, hesitant, and she’d sneak out before sunrise, looking both ways as she implored me to whisper like we were kids at summer camp. I made a joke of it one night, and she squeezed my arm hard. “You don’t know what it would be like if people knew. You don’t understand.” 

When the freight ship that would take me to the other islands arrived, I thought I saw tears in her eyes. 

“I’ll be back in a month,” I said.

They couldn’t be tears, I thought. I was the soft one.

THE FREIGHTER BOUNCED BETWEEN ISLANDS for the next month unloading rice, flour, and sugar. Kiribati is one of the most cash- poor countries in the world, with only 20 percent of its 140,000 people participating in a cash economy. The rest live off whatever the land and ocean provide, so the freighter only visits four times a year, bringing basic items and picking up dried coconut meat and seaweed, their few exports. 

With no hotels on the outer islands, I stayed with families along the way. I explored Tabuaeron Island by bicycle with an ex-Navy Seal who had married a Kiribati woman and become one of three foreigners living on an island of 1,500 people. On even more remote Teraina, I drove a Kiribati Minister of Parliament from village to village by scooter so he could tell people what had been going on in the world over the past three months. In almost every village, I was asked if I was single. In several, I was thanked for my country’s role in World War II when the U.S. ended Japan’s occupation of Kiribati. 

I asked about the rising oceans as I traveled. Most people understood it was happening—they saw it, and they were building seawalls by hand to fight it, but the reasons were less understood or too overwhelming to focus on. Most cared more about food or schools or roads than where their kids would have to live in fifty years, or how their tiny nation could fight something so large. 

I collected experiences I would later write about, and while I occasionally thought about Etiaroi, she was quickly becoming a memory to carry through later life. 

When I returned to Christmas a month later, Etiaroi shrugged her hello. I was excited to see her, if only for a few days before my flight home, but I felt myself checking my excitement to match hers. 

We danced that night at The Bay of Sharks and then drove to the beach, laying a blanket among the stars. As we kissed, her long dress flipped up and I saw a new tattoo—a dozen hearts, hand-done in bleeding blue, wrapped around her right ankle. 

“When did you get that?” I asked. 

She covered it with her other foot, curling toes around swollen skin. 

“One month ago. Tuutana did it.”

“What for?” I asked.

The question escaped before I could stop it. I closed my eyes, hoping they’d suck the words back in, wishing I could instead pull her close for our last few days together. 

Etiaroi stared silently at the ocean, past our feet, then up at me. The blood emptied from my face.

“Because,” she said, looking away. “I—I have a lot of love.” 

She didn’t say anything more. Neither did I. I tried to cuddle as if nothing had happened, but the night was over. Her face went as quiet and distant as it was when we were among other people. 

I left three days later, catching a plane back to Colorado. 

I never saw her again.

IT’S BEEN OVER TEN YEARS, and I’ve told many stories of Kiribati. The metaphor of this sinking land only becomes more real through time. A few years ago, Kiribati bought 6,000 acres of land in Fiji. While it was purchased for farming, their president warned that the land might become Kiribati’s permanent home if the world didn’t start addressing climate change. 

“In a worst-case scenario, and if all else fails, you will not be refugees,” the Fijian president told the Kiribati people. “The spirit of the people of Kiribati will not be extinguished.”

I tell these stories, but I still don’t know how to tell the story of Etiaroi. 

I am now a college professor in Manhattan, happily engaged to a wonderful woman. Being engaged has caused me to pause on past failures to make sure I don’t repeat them, but I still don’t know what to make of Etiaroi. 

A part of me wonders if I’d become the thing I was there to investigate, taking advantage of my power in the world without considering the consequences of my actions. I’d treated our time casually, as if it were a vacation—a word that implies the ability to step away from reality, a word that holds little meaning to most people in this world. 

I was a deeply in debt graduate student, sure, but my options were wide open based entirely on where I was born. I could fumble through possibilities. I could treat relationships and experiences as collectible or discardable. I could walk away. 

I was there to question the consequences of our disposable culture—to explore a nation sinking because of habits led by my own culture, and I couldn’t help but fall into the trap myself. I didn’t know how not to. 

At the same time, I hesitate to turn Etiaroi into a metaphor. I hesitate to oversimplify. We’d been together without promises or pretense, after all, and relationships lead us in different ways. I don’t know how she felt. I don’t know when she felt it. 

I write and tell stories about that beautiful and disappearing place, but I have avoided telling this story. I can never make sense of what happened. Not really. 

I avoid it, but it’s there, imprinted on me forever. 

Brice Particelli will be a 2020-2021 Steinbeck Fellow at San José State University in narrative nonfiction. He earned his Ph.D. from Columbia University and has been a teacher at Pace University, in New York. His writing has been published in Harper’s, Guernica, and Salmagundi, among others. He is a 2017 NYSCA/NYFA Artist Fellow in Nonfiction with the New York Foundation for the Arts and the co-editor of America Street: A Multicultural Anthology of Stories (Persea Books, 2019). Website: www.briceparticelli.com.

Delmarva Review publishes evocative new prose and poetry selected from thousands of submissions annually. Designed to encourage outstanding writing, the literary journal is nonprofit and independent, supported in part by a grant from the Talbot County Arts Council with funds from the Maryland State Arts Council. The submission period for the next issue opens on November 1. See the website: www.DelmarvaReview.org.

 

Author’s note:  Early in my graduate studies I did academic work on the phenomenology of memory. During this period, I spent time in a huge library, writing fiction to procrastinate. These procrastination stories gave me new perspectives not just on the research, but also on my life and its recollection. “Was” is one such story, and I hope any reader who encounters it experiences a similar (or different) perspectival shift.

Was

SADIE AND I ARE TALKING ABOUT BEING NOW. I say the problem with being is that anytime you say what being is, you presuppose being. The trouble is the “is.” Sadie barks. She has been dying any number of days, and she looks at me in her usual way. She hasn’t read Heidegger. She doesn’t know these ideas are Nazi ideas, and plagiarized. Except in her eyes, I see she knows her being, whatever it is, is coming to an end. 

The highway is full of the kind of trucks that terrify me. They have additional vehicles stacked on top of them. Mass graves moving at high speeds. I think of them falling all over me, burying us both. 

The sky is clear and blue and radiant with refracting light, and the snow on the ground reflects it too. Up at the sun I’m looking backward into time, about eight minutes. Every second that passes was an earlier second far away. In the water droplets of the sky and the snow on the ground, time bends around us. Do you see, Sadie? If you look far enough in any direction, you can see your whole life. 

Sadie is curled in a ball, and her lumps fall against each other under the skin on her neck where I picked her up to adopt her. She peed then; she was so scared. Four or so feet in the air, her pee dribbled onto the carpet. 

She peed again just now, before I told her about being. I don’t think she was scared. I think she just knew I won’t waste time being angry with her. Sadie has always understood me. She pierces the heart of my meaning. The smell of her urine is what takes me back to holding her by the neck as a puppy. I think of her always-twitching nose. The many memories it conjures for her, second by second, in the part of our brains we share. 

The exit for the veterinarian’s office is only a mile away. My iPhone alerts me again and again, and each time a bell chimes, I think, already? 

This vet uses gas. Sadie will drift off to sleep forever. It will be painless, painless. Like a hole at the bottom of her leaky brain, and her light dripping out until she’s gone. Weeks ago, I shared a Facebook post about how a little girl told her mother dogs only live fourteen years because they don’t worry so much, and they don’t need so long as people to figure out how to be. Well, isn’t that nice, my mother commented. Must make you feel better. 

She’s heavy in my arms. I carry her through the glass doors held open by a girl in white. 

Cameron Blais earned degrees from Pratt Institute and Harvard Divinity School. He  writes and teaches writing in Laramie, Wyoming. Originally, he is from Lincoln, Rhode Island.

Delmarva Review publishes evocative new prose and poetry selected from thousands of submissions annually. Designed to encourage outstanding writing, the literary journal is nonprofit and independent, supported in part by a grant from the Talbot County Arts Council with funds from the Maryland State Arts Council. Website: www.DelmarvaReview.org 

 

 

Author’s note: I’ve written about the death of my mother, and most recently, my father. Yet so often, I keep most of my vulnerability “just beneath the surface,” like a grave is just beneath the cemetery ground. This poem is an attempt to contrast humans’ desire for permanence with the idea of letting nature take its course. It’s a call to celebrate our return to the earth.

Just Beneath the Surface

The cemetery carries bones
in its pockets,
and you trapeze its perimeter
head down, afraid
of what pulls your swing.

Your grip, even tighter
over cold blocks of granite,
their careful carvings failing
to explain why your father
stopped and you did not.

You once arranged silk flowers
to stand at attention
above his head, a salute
to manmade permanence, as if God
never knew forever.

Forget what the ground
feels like on your knees.
The sole of your loafer,
like a coffin’s seal,
protects you from rain.

Crepe myrtles in their pushback
to death drop notes in your path,
softly, and too quietly for you
to hear the rattle of change
just beyond your grasp.

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Beth Oast Williams is a student with the Muse Writers Center, in Norfolk, Virginia. Her poetry has appeared in or is upcoming in Lou Lit, West Texas Literary Review, Wisconsin Review and Glass Mountain. Her poetry was nominated for a Pushcart Prize in 2019.

Delmarva Review is designed to encourage ongoing literary excellence from writers when many commercial publications are closing their doors. It selects the best of evocative poetry and prose from thousands of new submissions annually. The journal is supported in part by a grant from the Talbot County Arts Council with funds from the Maryland State Arts Council. Website: www.DelmarvaReview.org.