creative nonfiction

In Memory of Troy Bernardo

Portrait image of a man smiling into the camera.

The Tampa Review editorial team was saddened to hear of the passing of Troy Bernardo, a recent Tampa Review contributor. Troy’s obituary can be found here. We wanted to express our heartfelt condolences and share Troy Bernardo’s nonfiction piece, “Raw,” published in Tampa Review 63/64.

Raw

Troy Bernardo

When you first start eating raw oysters, you can’t taste any difference between them. The Penn Cove Selects, Belons, Olys, Kumos, they all taste the same to newcomers and casual eaters. People say it’s like learning to taste wine, in the fact that you need to learn the subtle nuances over years through hard, dedicated drinking. But I’ve been drinking wine since I was sixteen and I still can’t tell the difference between a Cab from a cardboard box and a twenty-five-dollar glass of Malbec from The Golden Steer. Oysters though? They make sense to me. Some are briny, others are kind of crunchy, some are the color of pennies, and sometimes they’re clean and crisp.

Ordering them is like a low-stakes Russian Roulette. Every so often, I’ll get half a dozen, and it’s like eating straight out of a chum bucket. Other times though, when I’m at the beach on a sunny afternoon, drinking a beer, and dressing one up with horseradish and cocktail sauce, before I slurp it out of the shell, I know it’s worth the potential Hepatitis. That all changed though on New Year’s Eve, 2018.

That year my wife and I had a lot to celebrate. We had moved to San Diego, a lifetime goal for both of us, my younger brother had just gotten married days before, and I had published my first novel. We were back in my hometown of Port Orange, Florida, and spending nights at the pool halls I grew up sneaking into and relaxing with family to wrap up an exciting year. That night we were going to my favorite restaurant, Our Deck. It’s a stereotypical beach bar and grill that looks like a large shack underneath the Dunlawton Bridge. The draw for kids is you can throw your leftovers into the mouths of dozens of catfish in the intercoastal that splash over each other for scraps. As I got older, I found it morbid that we were feeding our uneaten fish sandwiches to living fish, but when I got even older than that, I realized that’s all they really eat.

To celebrate, my wife and I decided to get a few necessities for the evening. The first item on our list was to get some good champagne. We’re not fancy, so when I say, “good,” I mean not Andre. That along with a bag of BBQ Fritos (a chip the Midwest and the West Coast don’t get for some reason) and some sweet tea. But, the pièce de résistance, and what we really wanted, were my wife’s new favorite delicacy: raw oysters. She had grown fond of them out in California where I had convinced her to try some months before. Ever since that day, whenever we saw a raw bar or we were at a nice seafood restaurant, Laura would ask if we could split a dozen. I usually ate most of them, but I didn’t mind. 

By late afternoon, we had picked up most of our supplies, but we were still missing the oysters. On the way home from the liquor store we stopped at Gaff’s, the local butcher. I went in alone, knowing my wife wouldn’t appreciate the smell. Gaff’s is, what I would call, more of the blue-collar butcher in my small town. The meat is high quality and reasonably priced, but the stink of drained blood and the stench of dozens of kinds of meat can be overwhelming, especially to a city girl.

Truthfully, I felt intimidated grabbing a number and waiting there by the glass case of meats. Sure, I had bought steaks before and even some pork chops from Gaff’s but I had never bought oysters from anywhere other than a restaurant. Doing something for the first time in front of a crowd makes me feel nervous. I’m worried I’ll say the wrong thing or make an ass out of myself, even when that thing is as simple as buying oysters.

“Number seventy-six,” the meat guy said.  

I walked up to the counter, the other men buying their steaks were watching me, waiting to see what I would get. They were judging me. I was sure of it. I tried to ignore them and stared at the three types of oysters they had. Living on the West Coast, I had been buying Baja and Pacific Northwest oysters, but now, I didn’t recognize any of these gulf ones. 

“I-uhhh,” I paused. My hands got sweaty, and I shifted my weight from side to side. 

The meat man became instantly impatient, crossing his arms and glaring at me. My eyes darted to the closest ones. I pointed and said, “Half dozen of the Gulf Coast Oysters, please.”  

The meat man counted them out and put them into a plastic bag. He slapped a sticker on it and said, “Refrigerate these right when you get home, ok?” He talked condescendingly to me, and it made me mad. But I deserved it. I had no idea what I was doing, “and” he emphasized, “make sure you keep the bag open so they can breathe. Got it?”

“Of course,” I said, like he was the idiot. But I knew absolutely nothing of what he was talking about.

When I got back to the car, I put the bag of oysters in between Laura and me. While inside the store, even over the strong smell of the other meats, that stench of raw fish overpowered everything. Inside the car, it was stronger, so I tried to open the windows to help. Laura immediately noticed, and picked up the bag, peering inside. 

“Can we close this?” she asked. “It smells like fish in here.”

“We can’t.”

“Why not?”

“Because they need to breathe,” I said, full of confidence. 

There was an awkward pause. Even though I was watching the road, I could tell Laura was staring at me. 

“Wait, but they’re dead, right?” she asked.

“I mean, I think so. Oysters live in the water. They can’t breathe air.”

Laura reached into her purse, and out of the corner of my eye I could see her frantically Googling. When I got to a stoplight I glanced over and saw what she was looking up. “Can oysters breathe air?” and “When we eat oysters are they alive?”

Laura isn’t a vegetarian. But her love for animals has become more serious as we’ve grown older. She stopped her car in the middle of the road to be with a squirrel in its dying moments after some heartless driver had struck it and kept going. She befriended a mouse in our walls, naming him Mickey, and refusing to set up traps to catch him even after he had chewed through several bags of chips. She has picked up alley cats and cooed them gently in her arms when the streets were dark and quiet after a long night of drinking. 

“Ah!” she gasped. “This website says they’re alive when you eat them!”

“I feel like after you shuck them open though, they’re probably dead.”

She kept scrolling and gasping and scrolling and gasping over and over. 

“Some websites say that they’re dead after you open them up, but other ones say they don’t know and there’s no way to prove they’re dead after you shuck them.”

After ten minutes of more dramatic gasping, I was turning down the road my parents live on. I finally got a chance to look at Laura. She wasn’t crying, but her eyes were misty, and she was rattled by the fact that she may have been eating animals alive. For me, this wasn’t a big deal. I’m not a hunter, but I am an avid outdoorsman, and I do fish. While I respect animals, I understand the reality of the situation. The lamb chops in the grocery store don’t grow on trees, and unless I get meat by three in the afternoon, I feel sluggish and I can’t concentrate. 

“What do you want me to do?” I asked her, pulling into the driveway. “They won’t take the oysters back.”

“We have to do something,” she said, pleading with me. 

We sat there for a minute, both of us thinking of something to say. After a while, I got out and grabbed the champagne and the bag of oysters, before heading inside. I put it all in the fridge, where the meatman had recommended they go right away, and opened up a beer. Laura continued to search the internet, scouring for anything that would let us know when the oysters were actually, truly dead.

“Wait,” Laura said, a lightbulb going off, “what kind of oysters are they?”

“Gulf Coast Oysters,” I said, in between sips of Jai Alai. 

“Like the Gulf of Mexico?”

“Yeah. Why?”

“Isn’t that where we are now?” she asked.

“What do you mean?”

“The Gulf of Mexico is next to Florida, isn’t it?”

“The Gulf is on the west side, hun,” I said. “We’re on the Atlantic side.”

“But the Gulf Stream goes by here.”

My parents, realizing we were home, came out into the kitchen with us. They could tell Laura was upset, but didn’t know about what.

“What are you getting at?” I asked.

“I’m saying, let’s release them.”

“How?”

“We’re going to Our Deck tonight, right? That’s on the water. Let’s take the oysters and set them free.”

It wouldn’t be the ocean per se. It was under the Daytona Beach Bridge, and it was the intercoastal where the water was murky and dirty. 

“Hun, they’ll probably die if we throw them in there,” I said.   

“Well, they’ll definitely die if we eat them.”

My parents were starting to realize what was happening, and while they weren’t making fun of Laura, they exchanged confused glances. My dad had already started laughing.

“So,” Dad said, “you’re going to throw the oysters you just bought into the water during dinner?”

“Well, we don’t have to do that,” Laura said. “Troy could still eat the oysters if he wants to.”

Laura and I hadn’t been married that long, but I knew better than to fall for this trap. 

“No, that’s ok,” I said. “You’ve kind of killed the overall experience anyways.”

Later that night, we pulled into the restaurant under the bridge. It’s just a gravel parking lot that has a short, old fishing dock next to a marina. Laura, me, my parents, and my youngest brother, all walked down the dock together. The moon was a small waning crescent, but the lights on the bridge and from across the intercoastal made the water glint with both artificial and natural light. The only sounds were catfish jumping and passing cars overhead. 

Laura reached into the bag first and picked one of the oysters out. She looked at it, examining its curves in the near dark. “Do you think they’ll really die?” she asked.

“Yeah,” I said, “but I really don’t know.”

Without hesitating, she cocked her arm back and threw it as far as she could into the channel. I grabbed one and did the same, and even though I asked my parents and brother if they wanted to throw one as well, they didn’t want any part of it. 

Laura threw the last one and stared out at the water until the ripples faded and only the small waves from the wind were there. I turned to my wife and she was smiling in the weak light, and she deserved to smile. She had done something that was, at least to me, very brave. That day, it was more important for her to try and do the right thing and look silly than sell out and be what everyone else expected. 

We all went to Our Deck for dinner. There were no guilt trips from Laura or teasing from my family. I did point out the irony of how we ate pounds of seafood, but that night I passed on the oysters.

Maria Ivkovic Manuccia

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BALKAN SHEEP

by Maria Ivkovic Manuccia

There are plenty of ways to feel like an outsider; for me it was that I was a Balkan girl growing up among the lily white. Not all white is white-white, which we Eastern Europeans, particularly the Balkans, understand. Growing up, I attended Catholic elementary school in a Chicago suburb. My classmates were all Catholic like me, but they were overwhelmingly Irish, with names like O’Connor or Connolly or Sullivan or Smith, and I am sure none of them had met a Balkan before.

At first they thought I was one of them. As children, our features did not vary widely. We all had cute, small noses and foreheads and craniums—important because the Balkan adult has a large, square cranium—usually a giveaway. We also dressed identically in Catholic school uniforms.

However, there were names to consider. My first name, Maria, was close enough to Mary that nobody paid much attention. But the Irish-American schoolchildren had not encountered a surname like mine, with its “-ic” ending. I tried to explain: “You pronounce the ‘i-c’ as ‘eetch,’” but they insisted on pronouncing those letters as “itch.” I knew even then that “itch” rhymed with bitch and witch, and this was not a good thing.

Adding to the difficulty, Balkan surnames have a way of pairing difficult consonants. Mine paired “v” and “k” to form Ivkovic. I explained that the “v” was practically silent, more like a quick “f” sound, resulting in “eef-ko-veetch.” Instead, they insisted on “ick-a-vitch,” which sounded like “ick I itch” or “ick a witch.”

I told my father over dinner. He sat hunched over the kitchen table eating fish. Its white flesh stuck to his fingers when he pulled it from the bone. He said, “They need to practice. Tell them to try saying ‘Na vrh brda vrba mrda.’” A tongue twister meaning, “On the top of a mountain the willow sways.”

I did not follow my dad’s advice. Instead, I lowered my eyes whenever “ick a bitch” elicited giggles and my classmates left me standing alone on the chalked-up patch of pavement where we had been playing hopscotch. Or maybe there was no hopscotch, but this is how I remember it.

Then the day came, during a time we were learning to write in cursive, that my teacher, Miss Walsh, asked the students to gather on the floor in a circle and share with the class what it was our fathers did. “Go on and sit Indian style, everyone,” she said.

Each student took his turn. They all seemed to have firefighter fathers named Bob or Tim. Straightforward professions, straightforward names. I wanted to disappear into the grey carpeting of the classroom.

“And Mary, what does your father do?” Miss Walsh said.

“My father’s a doctor,” I said with finality, and then looked at the girl sitting next to me, to indicate it was now her turn.

“What is his name?” Miss Walsh said.

I felt the blood rush to my face as I said his name softly: “Dragan.” I made sure to pronounce it as differently as possible from the fire-breathing figure familiar to my classmates.

But one of them blurted, hot-faced, “Dragon? What kind of name is that?” Giggles followed. I did not correct them this time. Instead, I said he had a dragon tattoo, hoping the class would be afraid.

“Mary, tell the class where you are from,” Miss Walsh said.

I searched my brain for the word that represented where we came from. “Yugoslavia.”

“So you are Yugo-slav-ian,” she said.

I remembered what my parents had told me, and recited: “No. I’m Croatian, but I’m from Yugoslavia.” I hoped they wouldn’t ask me what I meant. It was all so complicated.

I wondered if the children told their parents about “the girl from Yugoslavia.” Perhaps they asked their parents if such a country did in fact exist, or if this was a mythical place where dragons came from. It seemed to me that even then, before Yugoslavia became associated with concentration camps and shelled out buildings, the children treated me as someone not to be trusted.

During lunch they exchanged Fruit Roll-Up flavors with each other, but turned away from me when I reached into the crinkled skin of my paper bag. It may have been that they knew I wouldn’t have Fruit Roll-Ups. Instead I had strange meats and bread far darker than the white Wonder Bread they were used to.

After a while I convinced my mother that buying me strawberry Fruit Roll-Ups was a matter of survival, as if I could barter for trust. But the Fruit Roll-Up trick did not work. Nobody took them from me, and I didn’t enjoy how they stuck to the roof of my mouth.

 

Instead, their distrust of me deepened in the summer, when I disappeared to Yugoslavia and came back brown-skinned and shorn. During those first days back, the children would sit at their desks excitedly, the girls with their long ponytails as blonde as halo light. I would enter the classroom as late as possible, knowing it was impossible to hide my skin but wearing a hat to hide the mullet cut my Croatian Aunt Gizela had given me weeks before. The teachers would say, “Run along Mary and find a seat,” and it always seemed to take a very long time to find one, or maybe it only felt like a long time because I walked among whispers.

I remember the musky smell of Gizela and the swish of her long skirt along the floor of her salon. I sat in the black plastic swivel chair across from the mirror, watching her gather her tools. She told me that punks are cool in America. The word she used was not punk, but “punkeritsa,” which roughly translates to “little punk girl.” I couldn’t bring myself to disagree—I wouldn’t tell any adult they were wrong—and I let her snip away. As a last defense, I widened my eyes in horror as my long dark hair fell into a heap on the floor.

 

My mother—who was known in her seaside town in Yugoslavia for her wind-swept and bare beauty—was a different woman in America. It appeared that she, like me, only wanted to fit in. She mimicked the American women by wearing the same sporty outfits and lining her eyes with a blue pencil. She chewed bubblegum too.

My mother learned from a neighbor that the girls and boys in the neighborhood would sometimes sleep at each others’ homes, and that in America these social events were called “sleepovers.” Although my mother found the whole thing peculiar, she thought it would be “good for Maria” if she organized a sleepover.

We invited seven girls and three girls came. They were timid coming into the Balkan home, but our dog Targa won them over because Targa—a German Shepard with a fat neck—would let them hold up her front paws while she danced like a bear. My father played good music too; it might have been the Rolling Stones.

I thought during the sleepover how happy I was to have friends like Annie and Sue and Molly, who danced with Targa, and I didn’t want anything to ruin it. So I stole away into the kitchen and let my mother know that American children ate donuts in the morning, and if we didn’t have frosted and fried dough shaped into rings with sprinkles on top, we could forget future sleepovers.

In the morning my mother peeked her head into the room where we slept like logs along the floor. I saw from where I lay that she held a pink cardboard box, and I sprang up to give her a hug. The other girls padded behind us into the kitchen, and we chose among the colored food. The dough tasted too sweet for morning, but after a few mouthfuls I tasted the flour and oil more than the sugar and I liked it very much.

This simple pleasure did not last. My father, who was a healthful man, happened upon the kitchen and lifted the donut box, and for a second it made me think of the school priest Father Murray who lifted the Bible, but my father did not bow his head.

“Isuse Boze,” he said, and I knew that meant Jesus Christ in Croatian. He was not yelling but he was very serious. “Junk. Smeca. Garbage. What is this pizdurija? Dunkin? Junk. Junkin Jonuts. You will not eat garbage in my house.”

The girls looked at each other with pink faces and then scurried out of the room like mice. I heard them giggling “ick a witch” when they had gone out of sight.

Word spread of the “Junkin Jonuts.” It was clear that Annie and Sue and Molly were not my friends. Sometimes I would pass them in the hall, and they would cup a hand to each other’s ears and make hissing sounds. If I ever saw one of them alone I would stare at her until she looked a little ashamed.

And then the week came in gym class when we were supposed to do gymnastics. I gave my father a chance to repent for making me a laughingstock, when I asked him to teach me how to do a cartwheel. My father kept calling them zvjezde or “stars.” He had been a gymnast in Yugoslavia so I hoped I could make stars as he had.

He stood with his arms crossed as my colt-like arms reached down to the grass outside. I tried many times but my feet would not swing into a swift and graceful circle above my head. I remember seeing my father’s eyes moisten before he walked away in his sporty outfit. The gymnast blood I could have inherited from Yugoslavia—had there been a more merciful God—was not running through my veins.

When the war came to Yugoslavia and filled our television screens with rubble and ribcages, my teachers spoke of the tragedy as we all sat in a circle, Indian style. I would turn red even though I had nothing to do with it, and the other children kept more distance from me than usual. The teachers asked, “Mary, can you explain why people in Yugoslavia hate each other so?” They explained how that sort of savage bloodshed would never happen in this country, heavens no it wouldn’t, and here, thank God, we had a system that would prevent such monstrosities. I thought of monsters and dragons and how the other children probably had long ago thought of Yugoslavia as a dangerous place and that this war that was a horror to me was probably no surprise to them.

After school I would run home to my parents, who sat ashen in front of the television. They told me they would take me back to this place they now called Croatia, and we would sit in a café by the sea even if grenades fell like snow in the hills.

As my hair grew out and my skin paled, I had a sense I was losing something without knowing what. Maybe it was that I knew that something greater than abandoned hopscotch was happening to a place I almost called home. That the home, that could have felt like home, was now itself a freak: darkened, shorn, devastated by monsters.

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Maria Ivkovic ManucciaMaria Ivkovic Manuccia lives in Alexandria, VA. This is her first publication.

Amanda Leduc

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FREQUENT FLYERS

by Amanda Leduc

PLEASE PRESERVE MY TESTICLES FOR THE QUEEN.

The nurses get this note from the King of England just before the doctors discharge him to the street. He’s been in and out of the ward for the past two days. “Malingering,” the doctor says. To exaggerate mental or physical symptoms for attention, or other secondary gain.

He’s tall, this kid. Lean and angry. He wants to be admitted to the hospital. He lives at the YMCA. “I’m crazy!” he shouts at the doctors. “I’m the King of fucking England!” He won’t be told no—when they discharge him, he goes out to the ER waiting room, lies down on the floor, and starts screaming. The nurses bring him back.

“I’ll fucking kill you! I’ll fucking kill you all!”

He’s been admitted to the hospital before, and it doesn’t help. So the doctors assess him, and then he’s discharged. Again. He stops in front of my reception window before he leaves the ward.

“I’ll see you in hell. Goodbye, motherfuckers.”

No one’s ever called me a motherfucker before. Not even in passing.

“He’ll be back,” the nurses tell me. “Let’s just hope it’s not today.”

*

I had not wanted to work at the hospital. I had moved home—from Scotland back to Canada, from independence back to Mum and Dad—only because my visa had expired and there was nowhere else to go. No job. No money. Not even a driver’s license. I spent six months unemployed and scrambling for work, spending money that I didn’t have on interviews in Toronto, until finally, one day my mother called me from the hospital where she worked and said, “How would you like a job?”

I held the receiver to my ear and cried, there on the other end of the line. Then I said yes.

First I worked in the Outpatient Department as a data entry clerk in the blood laboratory. Patients handed me their lab requisitions, I entered their blood work into the computer, and then I gave the labels to the nurses. It was hectic in the morning, but by the end of the day there was nothing to do, so I drafted a YA novel in those open, un-busy moments at work. It was a novel about bisexual fairies, and it was ridiculous. But for a while I thought it just might make me rich. I figured I’d self-publish it under a different name. Amanda Hocking had just started to crest on fame then, and I was desperate.

Eventually I found myself wanting to make the YA novel better than it was, though, so I stopped. I did not want to be an author of books about bisexual fairies; I just wanted to move out of my parents’ house. I wanted to write essays. I wanted to start working on another novel, one that I actually cared about. I wanted my own life back. That was all.

Toward the end of that first year at the hospital, the woman whose position I’d been covering came back from sick leave, and I found myself unemployed again. Things stayed that way for two months. When another position at the hospital came up, in the emergency psychiatry ward, I applied. I’d grown to like the money. The duties: photocopying, filing, and registering patients. Faxer and coffee girl extraordinaire. The manager spent most of the interview asking about my time in Scotland. A few weeks later, she called to say I had the job.

“It will probably be quieter than the blood lab,” she said. “Bring a book, if you want. That might help. Nothing much happens here.”

*

Facebook Boy comes to the ward halfway through the summer. He’s eighteen, but looks about twelve. He comes in with two police officers. They found him teetering on the edge of a ravine, threatening to jump. After he’s been sitting in the waiting room for half an hour or so, he politely asks me if he can use the phone. He calls his mother.

“I need you to go on the computer. Can you go on Facebook and check and see if Amber and I are still together? We had a fight.” Pause. “Please, Mom? Please? It’s really important.”

Next—I’m assuming she hangs up—he calls a friend. “Look man, Amber and I had a fight. Can you go on Faceboo—oh. Okay. Well, maybe you can call me when you’re near a computer? I’m at the hospital. Just call here, to this phone.”

Then he calls his mom again. “Mom. Please. I’m so worried. I love her! Just check for me? Right now?”

Eventually, the police officers pull him away from the phone. “Next time he asks,” they tell me, “just say no.”

He gets angry and flings the officers’ hands away. “But I love her! You don’t understand. When you love someone, you need to know if they feel the same way about you! Just let me go on Facebook! Please!”

The officers tell him to sit down. Instead, he tosses a chair at the wall.

“Please let me go on Facebook! Please!”

The nurses put him in seclusion. No Facebook there, either. He spends most of the night banging on the walls and crying. “I need to go on FACEBOOK! YOU DON’T UNDERSTAND!”

“Situational crisis,” says the ER physician. Eventually they send him home.

*

I trained for two weeks—the ins and outs of data entry, the intricacies of the fax machine—and then started working by myself. I pointed people in the direction of the nurses. I joked with the medical residents. Sometimes patients would walk into the ward on their own; more often than not they were sedated or strapped to stretchers, or they came in shuffling, flanked by police, their eyes focused on the floor. I photocopied things when I was asked and answered the phone when it rang. I played Scrabble on my computer. I wrote stories.

Answering the phone was the hardest part. Family members would call me and cry. They’d ask about their sons and daughters—how they were, when they’d be able to leave. Sometimes I’d get calls from parents whose children had yet to show up on the ward, terrified parents who didn’t know what to do.

“He says he wants to kill himself,” one mother whispered, after I’d been on the ward for less than a week. “What am I supposed to tell him? What am I supposed to say?”

After I’d been at the hospital for about two months, I had my first run-in with a parent. She’d brought her son into the emergency room because he’d been put on suicide watch. The ward was busy that day and her son sat with the nurses for seven hours before a doctor came in to assess him. Every twenty minutes the mother would come to my window and ask me what was going on.

“Why is it taking so long?” she said. “Don’t they realize he’s in crisis?”

I told her, “No, the assessments take a long time. The nurses are with him. He’s being taken care of. I promise.”

“But he needs to see a psychiatrist!” she snapped. “He’s on suicide watch! Don’t you know what you’re doing? I want to talk to someone who knows what’s going on!”

Eventually, the nurses heard the shouting and came out to speak with her. They called security and had her escorted from the floor. When she left, she was in tears. “But what am I supposed to do?” she wailed. “If you won’t help him, where are we supposed to go?”

Next time, the nurses told me, I was to call for security right away. “That’s emotional abuse,” they said, “and you don’t have to take it from anybody.” They were tough and brisk—so cliché, but true—and sometimes downright rude.

But rudeness in a hospital is survival, an entirely different kind of animal. I didn’t understand this when I first started working there; I understand it now. Even empathy has a timeline. Even compassion needs to be replenished.

I’m too soft for this kind of work. I worry too much about what everybody thinks when they knock on my window. If there’s no information to give them, somehow it’s my fault. I fumble for speech and come up empty. I do not know what to say here. Words mean nothing.

*

A few weeks after his first visit, Facebook Boy comes back. This time he wants to talk to his girlfriend on the phone. She called the police because he held a knife to his throat after they had a fight. The police bring him here in handcuffs. When they arrive, Facebook Boy is panicking because he’s not sure, again, if he and his girlfriend are still together. He really needs to know.

“When you love someone,” he tells the nurses, “really love them, you want to make sure that they feel the same way.”

But his girlfriend won’t pick up the phone, and so he punches a security guard. When they put him in seclusion, he pounds on the door for as long and as hard as he can. “Fuck you!” he tells the nurses. “Fucking LET ME OUT OF HERE!”

The officers are tired. They sit in reception and play Angry Birds. They can’t leave until he’s no longer a threat, and he’ll be a threat as long as he keeps pounding on the door.

“You wouldn’t believe,” one officer tells me, “how many calls we get each day because of Facebook.”

A few minutes later, the banging stops. “I’m sorry,” he tells the nurses. “I’m really sorry. I’m just so sad. Can you let me out? Can I go on the computer? Can I check Facebook? Please? I need to check Facebook. I don’t know what I’ll do if she leaves me.”

Facebook Boy’s mother tells us that he says this all the time. “I’m not worried,” she says. She is bored, nonchalant on the other side of the phone. “He wants to kill himself every day. I doubt he’ll act on it.”

Later, after the police have left and Facebook Boy has eaten his dinner, after he’s calmed down and stopped swearing, the residents go in to see him. He says he’s feeling better; he wants to go home. The residents organize his follow-up appointment. He’s allowed to use the phone. His girlfriend still loves him. He leaves happy.

The next day his family doctor calls our office, furious. Facebook Boy is there at his desk, his eyes downcast, contrite. He and his girlfriend have had another fight. “What,” says the doctor, “is your department supposed to do, exactly?”

*

My sister also works at the hospital, in another psychiatry ward. She’s a nurse. She always says, “The ‘H’ on the door doesn’t stand for hotel!” But people come back all the time. They eat the hospital dinners. They sleep in the suites. One day a patient leaves bed bugs on the mattress—the suite is blocked off, the mattress burned. A few days later he comes back, and they do it all again.

The doctors call them frequent flyers. Some people come here to get help; others come because they don’t know what else to do. They don’t take their medications, or their medications aren’t enough, or they’re frustrated at the therapy they’ve been sentenced to. “It’s just a bunch of spoiled kids in a circle,” one patient tells the nurses. “Nothing’s going to get done in here.”

Still others come because they just don’t fit in with the rest of the world. One patient, a woman in her forties, comes here at least three times a week. She’s on a first name basis with every officer in the city. She has bipolar disorder, borderline personality disorder, learning disabilities. She loves her cats. She’s smart enough to know that the hospital can help, but her disabilities keep her young enough to think that the disease will go away.

“I didn’t ask for this,” she tells the charge nurse. Two days earlier, the social worker had sat her down in the foyer and planned her birthday party; she’d hugged everyone on the ward; she was that excited. “I don’t want this stupid disease.”

“No one wants it.” The charge nurse is unmoved. “But lots of other people have this disease, too. They make it work. So can you.”

*

On the good nights, when there’s no one on the ward, the nurses play solitaire. Or they read out loud from the communal copy of Fifty Shades of Grey and giggle. When I have nothing else to do, I get them coffee. Extra large Earl Grey, one milk. French vanilla cappuccino. Medium double-double. The girls at the coffee kiosk know me by name.

I spend long stretches of time here doing nothing. I let the Internet distract me. The Rumpus. The New Yorker. Maisonneuve. Friends at home are continually surprised by how much I’ve been reading.

“Where do you find the time?” they say.

I just shrug. “I’ll do anything to keep from writing.”

They always laugh.

But the truth is, sometimes I feel the emotions here so strongly that I don’t know what to do. No one pays attention to me; I’m just the fax girl, the data entry clerk, the coffee person. Parents sit on the other side of my window and weep because their children are falling apart. Spouses pace the halls and think about leaving. “I can’t do this anymore,” one husband said to me. “I love her, but I just can’t.”

Once, I watched a ninety-year old mother weep in our hallway chair because her daughter, who is in her sixties, had tried to hang herself in her kitchen. Had the daughter done something like this before? I’m not sure. The mother was German—her English was lilting and soft, impeccable. She sat in our hall and cried for hours—silently, without moving. Later that night, her daughter was transferred to another floor; the mother left after speaking with the nurses, tissues balled in the hollows of her fists.

*

The Barker comes to the ward a few days after Ronald Poppo has his nose chewed off in the States. The Barker sits in an interview room, again with the police, and barks nonstop for three hours. I lock the window at reception and wonder if a different man has come to us now, ill and raving like an animal, ready to gnaw at random flesh. Every now and then I check to make sure that the officers still have their noses. All I can think is, This is it, the zombie apocalypse has arrived.

The Barker is another frequent flyer, but I don’t know that until a few days later. He’s a few years older than Facebook Boy, but has the mental make-up of a child. He comes to the ward three or four times a month. His voice is higher than you’d expect from someone so tall.

Today he comes to us because he’s upset with his mother and wants to kill himself. He’s barking because he was having a panic attack in the waiting room, and one of the nurses tried to calm him down by asking him what animal noises he could make. He barks at the officers until they ignore him, and then he barks at the nurses. Eventually, he stops barking altogether, but only because he’s tired and wants to go home. The nurses bring him dinner; the ER doctor says he’s stable and ready to go. The police see him out. When the nurses bring me his discharge paperwork, they’re laughing.

“There,” they say. “Another story for your notebook.”

Three days later, he comes back. He’s in the middle of a divorce, he says. How can he live without his wife or his children? How can anyone expect him to go on?

The Barker isn’t married. He doesn’t have children, either. When the doctors remind him of this, gently, he nods and then continues on with the story. His wife is leaving him. His kids are going to grow up without a dad.

The nurses talk him down, eventually. He’s fed. He’s discharged.

The next day he takes half a bottle of Tylenol and ends up back in the ER.

*

“There’s a fine history of writers working in mental institutions.” This is what a friend’s husband said to me the first time I talked about my job. “Imagine where Ken Kesey would be if he’d never worked at Menlo Park.”

Imagine that. Ken Kesey working the night shift at a laundromat instead, or maybe the midnight shift at some greasy San Francisco diner. Getting his drugs on the street instead of as the guinea pig. Would One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest have ended up on the street then, too? Who knows? I like to think about Kesey, secure in the grip of LSD, wandering the halls and joking with the patients. Sometimes I fantasize about him sitting down to a long grey table, late at night, chicken-scratching into a notebook the way William Faulkner did, all those years ago when he worked the night shift at the factory.

You don’t really joke with the patients in Emergency Psych. Patients come here so the doctors can determine where else they need to go. They’re manic or sobbing or incandescent with fury. Sometimes they’re intoxicated. Sometimes they have their stomachs pumped in the ER before they’re brought over to the ward. They scream. They yell so loud that their voices disappear.

Still, I’m surprised at how much I laugh here. There’s another patient who visits us at least once or twice a month. He’s from Toronto, and we think he has a man-crush on one of the doctors. Every time he’s in he’ll ask me for a few sandwiches, a glass of juice.

“You don’t have any nice coffee back there, do you?” he’ll ask. As though we are Starbucks. “I’d really love some nice coffee.”

Once I got a call from the Patient Booking Department. “I just had a call from one of your patients,” the clerk said, sounding bewildered. “She’s in the ward right now, with you, but she said that the nurses have taken her purse, and she wants me to help her get it back. How did she get this number?”

When asked, the patient said she’d been calling her lawyer. Apparently she just punched a random bunch of numbers into the hospital phone. “She’ll get it back,” she muttered. “She must get it back. That’s her job. What else would I pay a lawyer for?”

*

One day a patient tries to escape from the ward. I’m carrying patient charts back to my office when she muscles past me into the hall.

“Lock the door!” the nurses shout. “Lock the door!”

But I don’t have to lock the door, because security tackles her before she gets there. They bring her down in front of my workstation—two men, tall and strong in their padded uniforms—and lean their weight against her buckled knees, her hunched and angry elbows. One man holds a hand against her head. They are gentle.

“Let’s go back into your suite,” one of the guards says. “The nurses can clean you up, and we can talk.”

“You’re hurting my arm,” she mumbles. “Get off my fucking arm!”

“If I let go,” he says, “will you try to run away?”

“This is prison,” the woman says. Her hair is broken, frizzed and grayish-yellow. The police brought her in earlier in the day because she called 911 when she was drunk. “I don’t want to be here! You have no right!”

“You’ll stay until the doctor can see you,” the nurse says, not flinching. She is young, closer to my age. We went to the same high school a few years apart. She’s normally so sweet and quiet; it feels strange to watch her now, hunched over the patient, her voice so flat and hard.

“We’re trying to help you,” the other security guard says. “I know it’s hard to imagine, but—”

“I don’t want your fucking help!” she screams. “I don’t want any of it!”

They wrestle her back to the room and lock her in. Eventually she calms down; the doctor goes in to see her and changes her meds. And then she goes home.

A few days later the police bring her back. This time she doesn’t run.

*

The nurses frightened me for a long time when I first started. They were all so brisk, so short. So frustrated as I shuffled my papers around. It took a long time for me to get their humour, to understand that you have to be tough here, that there is no room for pity. Sometimes there’s no room in the hospital either. You can be sorry for them all but that won’t do a thing.

One night a man with a great brown beard comes to my window.

“My name is Carter,” he says. “I’m hearing voices, and I want to know if I’m crazy, or if I should go to the police.”

Carter is polite, but like so many patients, does not want to wait in the ER. I direct him to the waiting room but a few minutes later he comes back.

“I don’t want to see someone if they can’t help,” he says. And then again, faster. His voice is rising, his hands cutting swiftly through the air. “Idon’twanttoseesomeoneiftheycan’thelp. Idon’twanttoseesomeoneiftheycan’thelp.”

What would you do right now, says a little voice in my head, if he pulled out a gun?

When he leaves, I think about him back out on the street with all those voices in his head, and I start crying. I cry for the rest of the night. I calm down and wash my face. Then I think of him, tall and lonely in his beard, no end to those voices in his head that no one else can hear, and I cry again.

*

I have some experience with depression. Not much. I was depressed for a few months during my third year of university, and then again just before I hit thirty, when I was living with my parents. Situational depression, brought on by stress and debt. Each time, that’s what it was.

I slept a lot. Nothing interested me. I went to school, and then later to work, only because I knew that the alternative to not going to school and not working was to lie in bed and let that crush me. I cried in the middle of campus, on the bus, and for long, uninterrupted periods in the shower. During my second bout, when my life was boxed up in my parents’ basement and I slept on the bed in the guest room, I’d wake up at night already sobbing. One night I stumbled to the kitchen and stared at the pills in my father’s medicine cabinet—he suffers terrible migraines, and that night I stood in the hollow moonlit glow of the kitchen and wondered what would happen if I took his Fioronal pills all at once. No more debt. No more anything.

But I did not take the pills, because even then, I knew that things would get better. I would get a job, and eventually I would move out, and sooner or later I’d be living on my own again and things would be okay. Eventually my verve would come back. Wasn’t that how it worked? Didn’t things always swing up, in one way or another?

The people who come to the ward—it’s different for them. This is sadness and anger and sickness twenty-four hours a day. This is a ten-year-old child, sobbing in her mother’s arms, and parents who’ve dealt with her mood since she was eight. This is the twenty-two-year-old man who’s tried to kill himself three times in the past two weeks. This is the kid with recurring psychosis who can’t hold a job and comes to the ward because the shelters don’t have room for him anymore.

“Thank you,” he says each time. To me, to the nurses, to the doctor. “Thank you for your help.”

This is the fifteen-year-old girl who comes to our ward late at night, gets discharged by the doctor, then hangs herself in her bedroom soon after she gets home. Sometimes even the doctors miss the signs.

Sometimes things do not swing up—sometimes it’s just that simple.

*

Ken Kesey, as it happened, liked his job at Menlo Park a great deal. He didn’t think that the people he spoke with were insane—he thought that they’d been pushed to the fringes of the world. If he were here in the ward with me today, I think he’d argue that we are all complicit; though we might cheer for the usurpers in movies and in books, in real life, we want what makes sense. We might root for McMurphy, but at the end of the day we want Nurse Ratched in charge.

One day at the end of my shift, a patient drinks three bottles of hand sanitizer, then smears shit all over his room. The security guards don disposable blue booties and walk into his room wearing masks. Chemical restraint, says the doctor’s order. They sedate him and transfer him back to the regular emergency area for monitoring.

He’ll come back. So many of them always do.

*

The King of England jumps off a bridge one day late in October. We hear about this the day after it happens—the hospital administrators come through and speak to the nurses, fill out all their paperwork. Everyone’s in shock.

“He was a pain in the ass,” one nurse says to me. She’s almost crying. “But I never thought he’d do something like that. He didn’t seem the type.”

He is just a name now, a jumble of letters on the page. That night, I copy flyers and make them into little booklets, then fan the booklets out in the foyer. It doesn’t take long, so I copy more. Fold and press. Fold and press. Depression, anxiety, mental health. More jumbled letters. How to Get Help.

The King of England was twenty-two when he asked to have his testicles preserved. Now he is dead.

Tomorrow someone else will come, and there will be another note. Facebook Boy. The Barker. Someone else whose face I don’t yet know. In a week’s time I’ll leave my shift and walk to the street in time to see our cat-loving patient run out in front of a car.

She’ll survive. When she comes back to the ward, the nurses will be gentle with her, like she’s the finest piece of porcelain they’ve ever seen.

 

Please note that names and certain identifying details have been changed to protect the privacy of individuals involved.

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Amanda LeducAmanda Leduc is a Canadian writer whose essays and stories have appeared or are forthcoming in Crossed Genres, Big Truths, The Rumpus, ELLE Canada, PRISM International, Prairie Fire, filling Station, Existere Journal, Conclave, and other publications across Canada, the US, and the UK. Her novel, The Miracles of Ordinary Men, was published in 2013 by Toronto’s ECW Press.

Tricia Louvar

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BEDTIME ENCYCLOPEDIA

by Tricia Louvar

Imagine if we unraveled your brain—hooked a dendrite or axon onto a crochet needle to pull it out of your skull. We could then attach the pathway to a plane’s wing and fly around the globe almost four times without ever having to stop, unless you count the refueling needs, which have nothing to do with your brain’s capability or pursuit for knowing, remembering, or releasing. It is just how much circuitry we have laid down for you inside your skull, with all the fish oil and the Bach and the nursing and the playing with your fingers and toes at all hours of the day and night. At the end of the plane’s journey would be your brain laid out as pipeline for the world to see, to touch, to know. What if we could attach a carabiner and slide our way from one side of the world to the other and back home again along your brain’s pathway without ever getting lost?

*

Years have passed now and you read to yourself and come tell me the best parts about anything discovered from a book—planetary rotation, dinosaurs, chess strategies, Russell Wilson statistics, code breaking. The funny parts, too, you share, narrowly escaping tears and a saliva rush from making yourself crack up so hard.

*

My head is pillow propped in your sister’s bedroom, where I am reading a bedtime story and then stop to explain the definition of “-ish” and how one would use it. You hear this from your bedroom and the word game beckons you in. Peevish, football-ish, apple-ish, and so on we try out new words with the ending. You play along with the passion of a professor without notes.

*

The patchouli soap bar on your clock radio (an odd place, but it is your room) you use more like a candle without a wick than for its sudsy dousing nature next to your sink. You covet the smell, like some kids covet toy cars. The soap maker, in her booth under the canopy at the folk festival, offered it to you in a wax paper baggy with a little cup of coffee beans. You thought, what an odd mix: what kind of science experiment was this? Then you learned the relationship between the beans and aromatics. Ah-ha: another notch in your cap of smart.

*

There are a few other things to remember, I think, as to not get you down, which are rarely ever considered fact, but which I learned: If you make space for friendship, don’t be afraid to let it go when it has run its course. Friends often come into your life just to illuminate a corner of who you want to become or who you are or where you do not want to go. They are mirrors of your best self or worst self. Beyond them is a real silence that is the company of solitude by being alone with your own thoughts and sense of self. Find it, take it in, and know that it is the real source of happiness and authenticity.

*

Breathe in fire, let out light: drift immaculate clouds in animal patterns.

Move your arms to talk to wild horses that you may meet one day while backpacking the Sierra Nevada range without me. Remember to pack your emergency shot and double, even triple up, on your medications in the event . . .

Don’t go to a dolphin; let it come to you when you surf again in the ocean of your childhood, the one where we spent every summer Wednesday and you slept in the car on the way home from sun exhaustion and hunger. And then, begged for pizza in our home with drapes and balcony shades drawn tight to keep the afternoon blaze at bay. You and your sister sat so close on the sofa, legs intertwined always, and watched PBS in collapse and in near tears as I scrambled to quickly fix something to eat.

Travel to London to see the Rosetta Stone for yourself and stand before it to crack the code with your notebook of symbols and dull pencil.

If you ever come up against a Gordian knot, remember to use lateral thinking to undo it. And maybe anything else daddy has ever shown you that might work.

*

There is an earthworm in your near future. A cow’s eyeball, too. For the incision and then dissection, be gentle and respectful. Don’t make fun of it. Or pretend it is nothing to you or to this life. It has a purpose, which is to make you a scientist to see all that is inside all of us and beyond. The connections may be very dim at first, but then magically, one day while driving your own car a small constellation of brightness will appear and life will reveal itself in an infinitesimal flash. Don’t go lonely over it. Or worried. You will return to the stars again one day as dust. We all do. In fact, we still are; we just look different right now. You, my love, are still as bright and mysterious as all previous lives. It is cumulative.

*

Someday there will be a girl who will make you a deli sandwich with shredded lettuce while wearing plastic-lined gloves. You will tell her over the glass counter about her brain before she places cucumbers and pickles on a honey oat bun. Tell her that you are back to visit your parents, and you will say, with an open heart and with nectar rhythms, it is not good to spend one’s entire life in the same place. Days thereafter, after visiting your father and me, telling us all your discoveries and hypotheses, you will return to the science lab with your name on it.

*


Run marathons against all odds your body has put you and us through. You will be the first person in history to cure your rare condition. At night on the balcony, before daddy and I intertwine our toes under the flannel bed sheets and we fall into a silent conversation of a golden age, I remember all the times I did not look fast enough to see all the shooting stars you have seen in an instant. But I keep scanning with tilted head and neck gone cold from the crisp mountain air. A treasure chest in another galaxy holds your wishes, which brims over and echoes into the orbitals of other organisms.

*

Before I lift the covers and tuck them under your chin—you are never too old for this—let patchouli and cinnamon toothpaste ignite us in an everlasting spinal tap of our heart’s openings. We are a globular cluster no matter the distance you go to keep records and discern the combination of life through eyepieces with varying focal lengths or magnifications. Such vision, you have, to witness the signals on Perseus’s Arm or create structures that may grow into tiny organs in jars for tomorrow’s kids.  As we say, anything is possible.

*

There you go, with Daddy, Sis, and me as the winter sun breaks through the fog to cast off the millions of frosty flakes the size of piranha teeth from the pine needles and wilted grasses in the wilderness of alpine country. All of us are shining in the sun, whirling and falling in all directions, but we are doing it together. For a thousand more years. And then all over again.

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LouvarTricia Louvar’s creative work has appeared in Best of the Web (Dzanc Books), Zyzzyva, Superstition Review, Prick of the Spindle, Brevity, Vestal Review, Bound Off, among other online, print, and multimedia literary outlets. She writes, trains, draws, and lives in the scenic Cascade Range of Oregon with her husband, their children, and dog. See more at www.tricialouvar.com.

Cassie Hottenstein

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THE PARABLE OF THE MADMAN

by Cassie Hottenstein

Are you not the madman who lit a lantern in the bright morning hours, ran to the market place, and cried incessantly, “Do I dare?” and, “Do I dare?” There will be time, there will be time: We will now discuss in a little more detail the struggle for existence, and I will show you something different from your shadow at morning striding behind you. The term human anatomy comprises a consideration of the various structures which make up the human organism. In a restricted sense it deals merely with the parts which form the fully developed individual and which can be rendered evident to the naked eye by various methods of dissection.[1] I should premise that I use this term in a large and metaphorical sense, including dependence of one being on another, and including (which is more important) not only the life of the individual, but success in leaving progeny.

I have known the arms already, known them both, arms of the patient etherized upon a table.[2] The phalanges are fourteen in number, three for each finger, and two for the thumb. Each consists of a body and two extremities.[3] The dorsal digital veins pass along the sides of the fingers and are joined to one another by oblique communicating branches. Those from the adjacent sides of the fingers unite to form three dorsal metacarpal veins, which end in a dorsal venous network opposite the middle of the metacarpus.[4] Somewhere I have never travelled, beyond any experience, nothing which we are to perceive in this world equals the power of the patient’s intense fragility.

I will show you, madman, fear in a handful of dust, and nobody, not even the rain, has such small hands.[5]

~

In the room the women come and go talking of Michelangelo. There are so many of those creeping women, and they creep so fast. I wonder if they all come out of the wallpaper as I did? The subject of the “uncanny” is a province of this kind. It undoubtedly belongs to all that is terrible—to all that arouses dread and creeping horror; it is equally certain, too, that the word is not always used in a clearly definable sense, so that it tends to coincide with whatever excites dread.[6] A hand cut off at the wrist: as we already know, this kind of uncanniness springs from its association with the castration-complex. There will be time to murder and create the etherized patient. We have killed him, you and I. Both of us are his murderers. But how did we do this? How could we drink up the seas? This is just to say, forgive me; they were delicious.[7]

Hurry up, please, it’s time. My nerves are bad tonight. A special variety of nerve-ending exists in the subcutaneous tissue of the human finger; they are principally situated at the junction of the corium with the subcutaneous tissue. They are oval in shape and consist of strong connective-tissue sheaths, inside which the nerve fibers divide into numerous branches, which show varicosities and end in small free knobs. Reflect how over a month ago he had cut his finger with a knife and only the day before yesterday this injury had still hurt him badly enough. He found himself transformed into some kind of monstrous vermin.[8] His fingers stood up before his eyes like pillars, enormous, blurry, and seeming to vibrate, but unmistakably four. But there had been a moment of luminous certainty, when each new suggestion had filled up a patch of emptiness and become absolute truth, and when two and two could have been three as easily as five.[9] Do we not feel the breath of empty space? Has it not become so sweet, and so cold?

Among other things, you’ll find that you’re not the first madman who was ever confused and frightened and even sickened by human anatomy. You’re by no means alone on that score, you’ll be excited and stimulated to know. Many, many men have been just as troubled morally and spiritually as you are right now. They speak bitterly about guys who find release by shooting off their own toes or fingers. So easy: squeeze the trigger and blow away a finger. They imagine the quick, sweet pain, then a hospital with cold tables.  And in the middle of them, with filthy body, matted hair, and unwiped nose, you weep for the end of innocence, the darkness of man’s heart, and the fall of the true, wise patient.[10] He, too, decomposes. He is dead. He remains dead. And we have killed him.

 

Texts used, in order of appearance

Friedrich Nietzsche, “The Parable of the Madman,” from The Gay Science.

T.S. Eliot, “The Love Story of J. Alfred Prufrock.”

Charles Darwin, On the Origin of Species.

T.S. Eliot, “The Waste Land.”

Henry Gray, Anatomy of the Human Body.

E.E. Cummings, “somewhere i have never travelled,gladly beyond.”

Charlotte Perkins Gilman, “The Yellow Wallpaper.”

Sigmund Freud, “The ‘Uncanny.’”

William Carlos Williams, “This is Just to Say.”

Franz Kafka, “The Metamorphosis.”

George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four.

J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye.

Tim O’Brien, “The Things They Carried.”

William Golding, Lord of the Flies.

 

[1] “We need to look for pieces,” Mom explains. Saturday morning, I’m in my Poppop’s garage on my hands and knees. There are pieces missing. I don’t know how many yet.

[2] Poppop is meticulous, as always. The handsaw sways back and forth from its hook; a stained rag lays neatly folded, freshly wet; the sink tap still drips dry. Behind this careful organization, handprints trail from the once-white walls to the workbench, drying into the paint. I find desperate smears clotting in the sink: he’s washed his hands of any evidence, wiped away this mistake with the rag.

[3] There’s a fingertip wedged between the garage door and the wall. I imagine Poppop shaking the tension cord with his free hand, cursing under his breath, careful not to scream, “Let go, goddammit, let go.”

[4] There’s another fingertip on top of the bloody ladder – he must have misplaced it during his rush to the sink. Wash it away, it’ll be okay, no one has to know.

[5] It takes two extra minutes to find the third clinging by its flesh to the freshly cut tension cord. Unsalvageable.

[6] I slide on my back underneath his shiny silver Civic. At least he was careful not to smudge the car’s paint. Dad packs the cooler; I hear a ziploc baggie slosh with ice and ripped nerves.

[7] There’s the overwhelming stench of blood and WD-40. I taste metal from the back of my nose to the tip of my tongue, so I put my hands over my face to mask the scent. It grows stronger – my face is sticky. His blood was on my hands.

[8] He is perfect, perfect. In those trembling moments, when he bit his lip and tried not to scream, he took care to hang the handsaw just so on its hook: swing swing, nothing is wrong. One perfect hand and one with three missing fingertips folded a rag, shh, if I’m quiet it won’t stain. Soap will wash it away. Shh, if I’m quiet I’ll be okay.

[9] I’m counting my fingers over and over because I’m not too sure they’re still attached: one two three four five, one two three four five. Sometimes they’re there, and sometimes they’re not. His fingertips fit perfectly into my palm.

[10] Mom is trying to discuss stubbornness and assisted living and Alzheimer’s and he’s lucky to be alive the cord could have hit his face after all. My throat is full of bile; all I can retch is a wet “no.” I want to say, “We haven’t found all the pieces.”

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Cassie HottensteinCassie Hottenstein was born in Pennsylvania and raised in South Carolina before finally settling in Florida. She is a teaching assistant, writing tutor, and full-time student at the University of North Florida. She hopes to graduate in Spring of 2013 with a major in English and a minor in creative writing. In her spare time, she writes poetry, rewatches episodes of Hannibal, and obsessively collects figurines of owls. “The Parable of a Madman” is her first publication.