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by Lisa Underwood

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I lie down too tired to brush my teeth, staring
at an eighth-grade picture of you, your mouth
brilliant with metal, your green eyes begging
love me love me. I shut it in the drawer, out of
sight, out of mind, like all the things I keep in
frames, on shelves, in closets, the boxes of
trading cards and action figures, trophies I
haven’t thrown away, thinking maybe you’d
want them someday like your cat, only a shadow
now. I know I should put her down but I don’t,
though she’s bony and toothless, stone deaf,
roaming the house howling for what I don’t know.
Calling, calling like your father on Sundays, like
his own father would do, alone and confused,
always looking for something he’d lost. Calling,
calling until we dreaded picking up the phone,
dreaded even his voice on the answering machine:
It’s PawPaw give me a call I’m homeIt’s PawPaw
It’sPawPawgivemeacallI’mhomeIt’sPawPaw
itsPawPaw…I hear your father talking now to your
unanswered phone: It’s Dad. Give us a call,
we’re home, and I try to remember to scold him
for making us sound so old.

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Lisa C. Underwood received her Master of Arts in journalism from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and her Master of Fine Arts in creative writing from Queens University. She has written for newspapers and magazines and worked in public relations for corporations and educational institutions. Her creative writing has appeared in journals and anthologies. Lisa’s first book of poetry is The Bone Picker (Finishing Line Press, due out in 2026). She lives in Greensboro, NC.

by Valerie Thompson

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I learned about sex the night I beat up Billy Sims for picking on my younger brother.

I was eleven and was spending the summer with my grandparents in Porterdale, KY, a coalmining town in the foothills of the Appalachians. It was such a small town that children had to find ways to entertain themselves. Sometimes my brother and I sat on the porch swing and counted the wooden planks in the floor. Other times we leapt over the boxwoods surrounding the porch, hoping we’d break a leg and get to wear a cast to school in the Fall. But by far, our favorite activity was chasing fireflies.

In the evenings, while my mother and grandparents sat inside and discussed oil profits, Coca Cola stock, and my cousin Denise’s Neiman-Marcus wedding, we waited breathlessly with the other neighborhood kids for the lightning bugs to arrive.

Fireflies would sweep through town in swarms and follow the same illuminated path each night through the old town cemetery into the hills. We pursued them amongst tilted tombstones and sun-bleached plastic flowers. The legend was that whoever caught the most would be granted one wish, so we caught as many as we could. We’d put the captured bugs in a glass jar and spend half the night watching them, hoping they lived until the following evening, when we would open the lid and watch them join the swarms overhead until our world was streaked with beams of yellow light.

On that night thirty-two years ago, I felt obligated to beat up Billy Sims, even though both my parents told me repeatedly that a little lady does not fight under any circumstances. Little lady was something I was supposed to be, although I bore no resemblance with my frizzy hair, pale skin, buck teeth, and legs covered in chigger bites. Those same features made me a prime target for bullies. Whenever they struck, I’d go toe-to-toe with them, losing almost every fight.

I was a tomboy through and through, something neither of my parents understood or appreciated. They worried about my future marketability if I didn’t shed my tomboy ways.

My mother was a beautiful only child, so she found it hard to relate to her only daughter. If I had resembled her more, instead of hitting me, the neighborhood boys would have popped wheelies on their bikes in front of my grandparents’ house, or they would have bought me soda fountain cokes at the Big Sandy Pharmacy.

On that night so many years ago, Billy, the meanest boy in Porterdale, hit my brother on the back of the head for no reason. I saw Billy do it, so I jumped up and punched him in the kidney. Unfazed, Billy reeled around and kicked my leg, then he ran away while I grabbed my throbbing shin and hopped on one foot. I didn’t catch him until we reached Mrs. Harris’s front yard. By then, both of us were holding our sides, gasping for air, too exhausted to run farther. We flailed at each other with skinny arms until I managed to trip him and push him to the ground.

I envisioned myself standing on the ropes of a wrestling ring, then I launched into the air and landed on Billy’s stomach with the full force of my seventy-five pounds. Even though it knocked the wind out of him, he still tried to hit me in the face — I slipped his punch and bit him in the armpit, a wound that later got infected, required stitches, and got me in a heap of trouble.

Immediately after I bit Billy, Mrs. Harris walked onto her porch and caught me stuffing clumps of grass into his mouth. She was squinting, and I hoped she couldn’t see what I was doing, but I knew she did when she nudged her glasses high on her nose and shook her index finger at us.

“Lord have mercy, I never thought I’d see a girl in a fist fight in my own front yard. You two, get out of here. Go home or I’ll call the police.”

My brother and the other kids scattered like BBs from a BB gun. I ran past the old Methodist church with broken windows and past the Porterdale National Bank. My right side burned and felt like Billy had ripped out one of my lungs. I stopped in the cemetery and realized my nose was bleeding and my best jeans were ripped, bloody, and muddy. My mother was going to kill me. She thought I was on the porch playing with dolls.

My legs didn’t stop until I got to the bridge over Porters Creek. My parents had forbidden me to cross that bridge. On the other side was where the coal miners lived.

In the safety of our moving car, whenever we passed a coal miner, my mother would call him a “dirt magnet,” or she’d laugh and say, “I wonder what the poor people are doing.”

Unlike my mother, I didn’t think coal miners were funny. Sometimes I would sit by the creek and watch them trudge home from work. Except for the white of their eyes, the miners were hunched over, soot-ridden figures. Their children played in dirt streets, and the sight of their wretched lives pierced the sunny walls of my imaginary world.

When I was nine, a coal miner’s daughter named Doris crossed the bridge each night to play fireflies with us. Doris was skinny even for a kid. She could sprint short distances but couldn’t run far, and she was always hungry. I’d sneak Colonel Sanders chicken out of our house and give it to her, because I liked her.

That night, even though I hadn’t seen Doris in two years, I remembered where her house was. I tentatively crossed the bridge. Dogs with ribs that pressed against their skin ignored me while they dug through a capsized garbage can. Trash was strewn everywhere, probably by the dogs, and a group of kids played in the dirt in front of Doris’s house. Eyes bored into me as I walked past a rusty car on cinder blocks in the driveway. I knocked on the door. Minutes passed. I looked back at the kids, who had stopped playing and were still staring at me. Finally, the door creaked, and Doris poked her head through the crack. Blowing cigarette smoke from her mouth, she stared at me for a few seconds, then she flung the door open.

“Lord have mercy. What are you doing here?”

I shrugged my shoulders. “Just thought I’d stop by while I was in town.”

“It’s a little late, ain’t it?” Dressed in a worn cotton housecoat, pink house slippers and wearing what looked like a crown of pink foam rollers in her hair, Doris said, “I was hoping it was John Luke, or maybe a prince, but I guess you’ll do.” She motioned for me to step inside.

When I stepped through the door, she pointed at my nose. “Who did that?”

“Billy Sims.”

“Billy Sims is a big, fat turd. I hate him. I hope you kicked his butt.” Doris took another drag off her cigarette and blew smoke from the side of her mouth.

 “I knocked him down and bit him, and I think I was winning. Then Mrs. Harris came out and said she was gonna call the cops, so I ran.”

Doris laughed. “So … you’re here cuz you’re gonna get a whupping when you go home. Well, come on back. Look out for that hole.” She pointed at a rotten place in the floorboard. We walked through a narrow hallway to her bedroom.

Fashion magazines were strewn haphazardly throughout the room. A flimsy mirror hung crookedly on a fake wood panel wall. A large porcelain doll in a wedding gown was toppled over on the bed; Doris picked it up and set it upright. Even though Doris was two years older than me, this was the first time I was aware of our age difference.

She patted the end of the bed. “Sit down,” she said. “What’ve you been doing with yourself?”

“Nothing.”

“Do you still live in Atlanta?”

“Yeah,” I replied, looking down at my feet.

“I wish I lived in Atlanta,” she said wistfully.

 “Why?”

“More boys!” Doris exclaimed. She picked up a magazine and flipped through the pages until she stopped at one and thrust the magazine at me. “I wish I looked like that and had clothes like that.”

I grimaced. “Gross. That’s the kind of stuff my mother wears.”

“Your mother has clothes like that?”

“Yeah.” I answered vaguely, distracted. I looked around the room because I sensed something was off. “Why don’t you play fireflies anymore?”

“That’s a kid’s game,” Doris replied scornfully. Neither of us said anything for a few minutes. “You’d look better if you had a tan,” she said.

I glanced at my arm. It looked fine to me. Doris stood and hovered over me. “How’d you like to do it in a bed like this?” she asked, pointing at the bed.

“Do what?”

She laughed. “Don’t tell me a rich girl like you don’t know about doing it?”

Not again, I thought, sighing loudly. I’m always the last to know. I yanked a loose thread from my torn jeans and rolled it into a ball.

“Have you ever seen a boy dog jump on the back of a girl dog?” Doris asked.

 “Of course. Everybody’s seen that. So what?” I didn’t understand why she mentioned  dogs.

“So that’s what people do, dummy.”

“No way! People don’t do that!”

“Yeah, they do. You’ve seen your brother’s thing, right? What do you think that’s for?” She cupped her hand over my ear and whispered. “Think about it.”

On my way out the door I didn’t stop to look at dogs, kids, or trash on the ground. My sole objective was to get across the bridge as fast as possible.

Once I did, my pace slowed considerably. My thoughts were consumed by what Doris had told me and what my mother would say, so I dawdled. I peered into the dark windows of downtown shops, but my stomach started to churn when I saw the empty lunch counter at the Five & Dime. Hunched over, I wondered if I might pass out.

I’ll never do it, so what does it matter? I asked myself.

Yet it did matter. A lot. As much as I tried to convince myself it was inconsequential, it mattered.

When the dizziness passed, I picked up my pace slightly and before long, I ambled into my grandparents’ front yard. I didn’t know if anyone had called my mother yet. Leaning against the oak tree in front, I slid to the ground and absent-mindedly shredded a piece of grass. I thought about the time my brother and I almost ran over a tiny dog obscured in a pile of leaves in the woods. She had just given birth to four puppies. She lay on her side, panting, and her stomach rippled madly, like fish in a net. Suddenly she stood up and we were stunned to see a bloody sack move out of her bottom. She ripped the sack open with her teeth and licked it until a tiny puppy materialized.

My attention jolted back to the present when I felt bugs crawling up my back. Not more bug bites, I thought. Tears welled up in my eyes, and with a new self-consciousness, I looked in all directions before I yanked off my shirt.

Only the day before, I had walked downstairs in my bathing suit, and my mother had pointed at me and said, “Look at her! You wonder why I want her to behave like other girls and tell me to give her time. If I give her much more time, she’ll never get a date because she’ll have so many scars from bug bites.”

“I don’t want dates! Why don’t you leave me alone?” I yelled as I slammed the back door. But at the pool, I glanced at the other girls’ legs and realized they didn’t have hard, red dots on them, and I felt ashamed.

I knew I couldn’t stall much longer, so I plodded up the porch steps. From the corner of my eye I saw something move, and the gauze curtain in the front window shifted to one side. My brother pressed his face against the windowpane and grinned when he saw me. Seconds later, he opened the front door.

“Shhhh,” he whispered, putting his finger to his lips to indicate I should be quiet, which was unnecessary. I had every intention of sneaking into the house undetected.

We tip-toed up the stairs to his room. He locked the door behind us – it hardly made a sound – then he laid on his stomach and slid halfway under the bed. He shuffled through my grandfather’s Playboy magazines and pulled out a mason jar filled with lightning bugs.

“I’m gonna stay up late, ‘til mom’s asleep, and let them loose in the room,” he said solemnly. He handed the jar to me. I grasped it firmly and checked the lid for air holes.

“Do you think they can breathe?”

“Sure,” he answered with certainty in his voice. “We can turn on the air conditioner, so nobody hears us. If someone comes in, we can pretend like we’re asleep.”

I froze, remembering the red sheets on Doris’s bed.

“No, we can’t do that anymore,” I said flatly.

“Why not?”

“Cuz.” I said, not knowing what else to say. For years we had been bulwarks for one another, a forcefield against our unreasonable parents. We often goofed off until late at night in our bedrooms.

“I’ll open the jar in your room if you want.”

He handed the jar to me. I looked at the shimmering lights for a long time before I passed the jar back to him. Then I shook my head no. His face blew up like a red balloon and he started to cry. “I don’t understand,” he said, gasping between sobs.

I felt like crying, too, but fought the urge. It would only make things worse. I rubbed my torn palm in his curly hair. “See you in the morning,” I said, then turned and left.

The next evening, I watched as my brother took the jar outside and removed the lid. Only a few fireflies flew out. He gazed into the container’s darkness, then turned it upside down and shook it. Lightning bug carcasses tumbled to the ground. That was the last time I played fireflies.

The following summer I spent my days drenched in baby oil in search of a tan, but all I got was a sunburn.

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Valerie Thompson is a Southern writer who spent much of her misguided youth wiping grits off the pages of whatever book she had at the breakfast table. In this story, the quirky protagonist must outfox her mother’s attempts to mold her into a little lady. 

Valerie graduated from the University of Georgia with degrees in English and newspaper journalism. After that, she worked for several years as a crime reporter. Valerie took a thirty-year hiatus and now is at a point in her life where she can pursue her love of writing.

An active member of the South Carolina Writers Association, Valerie considers the members of the Columbia 1 and Short Fiction groups to be her writing mentors. She plans to further develop her craft by taking creative writing classes at the University of South Carolina Aiken beginning in the Fall.

By Amy Singleton

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The second time my mama had brain surgery, in the fall of 1989, her tumor had returned, resurrected from the dead. All it had needed to grow was one tiny, vicious, tumor seed left behind from the first surgery, tucked away in the folds of her brain, lying dormant and waiting to wreak havoc once more. The tumor, now the size of a small tangerine, wasn’t malignant, but in theory, it might as well have been. Deadly. As it grew, it wrapped its strangling vines and tendrils tighter around the major blood vessels, choking the flow of blood to the sagittal sinus that runs through the middle of the brain, a major highway, a crucial lifeline for a brain’s function. After a lengthy consult with her neurologist, my Mama and Daddy agreed to the surgery even though it was high risk.

“A little recuperating and the proper physical therapy and you’ll be good as new,” I told Mama.  Or for her, I hoped, to the level of good she was at sixty-seven years old, which I don’t consider old. As I write this, I will turn sixty-four tomorrow. Mama had overcome her disabilities and managed to live a fulfilling and simple life and now, this. Undeserved. We, Daddy and I, tried to be optimistic that the cards hadn’t dealt her a losing hand this time. But we understood Mama couldn’t live a normal life with the tumor, nor could she live without the surgery.  The beast in her head would continue to grow and total disability and death would eventually set in. There were still no recommendations for post-surgery interventions or treatment such as chemotherapy or radiation. They were not effective. The surgeon told us he would do the best he could to remove as much tumor possible, so she didn’t lose any brain function or cognition.

I was allowed to accompany Mama for her prep before surgery at the Medical University of South Carolina, in Charleston. I followed the nurse as Mama was wheeled into one of the smaller preoperative rooms in the operating suite the night before. She sat motionless, in silence, in a stainless-steel chair, an apron wrapped barber style encircling her neck. The light, dim from a surgical lamp in the corner, reflected off the standard cold, hard, green tile walls, offered no warmth as the nurse prepped to shave her head.  My heart hurt for her. With the first scissor cut of hair, blond locks landing on her shoulders, we cried in tandem. Gently brushing the curls on to the floor, the nurse asked if she was okay to continue. She replied “yes” in her sweet voice, and “don’t want to keep the hair.” She opted not to keep the collected locks, as they were considered personal property. Electric clippers buzzed the tiny spikes of coarse hair for final removal, and she was closely shaved with foam and a hand razor, and her now bald head bathed in an antibacterial solution. The last bit of her dignity lay on the floor.

Back in her room, we talked and loved on each other. I kissed her good night, and I held her until she drifted off to sleep from the sleeping pill the nurse had given her.

The next day, surgery day, around 3 p.m., we were finally greeted by Mama’s surgeon in the OR waiting room.

“We’re sorry” were the first words spoken to Daddy and me by the surgeon.

Her surgeon began to tell us how he and the anesthesia staff believed Mama had had a severe reaction to a medication of some kind. They didn’t know when it happened but discovered it after the surgery was over and they removed all the surgical drapes.  She had severe swelling of the throat and tongue. The blood supply was cut off and they had no idea the extent of her damage until the swelling subsided and she could awake up and have her breathing tube removed. As if that wasn’t a gut punch, he then went on to say, hesitantly, they could not put all of her skull back together and had to contain it in the lab for safe keeping until her brain stopped swelling. They would place the missing piece of her puzzled skull later when she recovered. Occupational Therapy would make her a helmet to wear to protect her brain until that time. He ended the conversation with another “I’m sorry,” and that we could see her when the staff got her settled in the neurosurgical intensive care unit. And then he was gone, that surgeon.

My world as I knew it suddenly tilted off its axis. Thinking to myself, how do I even begin to process this information? I needed immediate comfort. Daddy, not a hugger, needed nothing from me. He only needed Mama, and so did I. A quiet man, he simply stood, silent, picked up his walking stick, one of his favorites he fashioned himself out of deer horn for a handle and a small hickory tree limb, and walked away. I watched him hobble along; his gait aided by his stick like a third leg. He mixed and meshed amongst a blur of hospital staff, patients, and visitors, until no longer in my view. I knew he would be back, so I sat, deflated, and waited for his return. Left alone, and with my own thoughts, I cannot remember everything I pondered. All of the unknowns in our future, most likely.

Reunited, Daddy and I made our way upstairs to the neuro ICU and waited for the nurse to open the secured metal doors that protected this sacred place for healing brains. Upon entering the unit, I sensed all my previous work experiences in the operating room as a surgical technologist hadn’t prepared me for what I was about to encounter.

Pale, swollen, and fragile, the beautiful, blond, blue-eyed woman, with baby soft skin, the one I knew and loved as Mama, was unrecognizable. Yards and yards of white gauze, expected after her surgery, shrouded three-fourths of her head. Tubes and lines and beeps and alarms were relentless. And then I saw her tongue, protruding beyond her cracked lips. Bruised, red and purple, angry, it was at least five times larger than normal, or it seemed. The tracheal tube down her throat was the only thing keeping her from suffocating. The allergic reaction she had during the surgery caused so much swelling in the throat the tongue tissue was simply destroyed when the blood supply was cut off. Feeling helpless, I knew the path to her healing and a recovery would be uncertain, but we held space for that hope.

The first time my mama had brain surgery was in the summer of 1983, eighteen months after the onset of her having seizures. These were not the typical textbook seizures. She did not lose consciousness. No convulsions, eye rolls, or drooling.  No biting her tongue.  She was fully aware and awake each time. She would tell my Daddy she felt like she was having leg and body cramps, like having multiple Charlie horses over and over again until the seizure subsided. Her cries were not only of the painfulness, but fear. Complete exhaustion set in for a day or two after the devil of episodes finally subsided. My daddy was the only witness. Feeling completely helpless, watching the love of his life in distress, he did what he could to protect and comfort her until the bitter end. The seizures did not occur every day or week, even. Doctors passed them off as needing more potassium in her diet and to go home and drink some Gatorade every day. One Conway, South Carolina Hospital emergency department doctor diagnosed her as having problems at home. It was all confusing.

A second-year medical school student in our family, gravely concerned after hearing Mama’s symptoms, suggested she may have a neurological issue, and was actually experiencing seizures. After a series of calls, he was able to get her an appointment with a neurologist at the Medical University of South Carolina, in Charleston. A diagnosis of a meningioma, a tumor that rises from the meninges, the covering of the brain, was the culprit. Surgery was scheduled immediately, and after her several months of recovery and therapy, she resumed a somewhat normal retirement life, spending time sewing, traveling with Daddy, and meeting with her church friends. And cooking for whoever came to visit. Meningiomas are benign, and no further treatment was needed. Still, they are life altering and often life-threatening because of where they decide to randomly attack in the brain. The surgeon told Daddy and me they hoped they got all of the tumor.

Mama had been through her fair share of life altering events. As a young child in the 1930’s, she spent the better part of two years in the Shriners Children’s Hospital in Greenville, South Carolina, to heal her leg that fractured after a fall while climbing a streetlight pole with her brothers when she was nine-years old. Infection had settled in her bones. She had an open incision for months to allow the wound to drain. The doctors saved her leg from amputation, although her ankle bones were fused together, and she was never able to flex it or put her foot flat on the ground as she stood or walked.  It didn’t slow her down. Two of her brothers wheeled her to school each day in a wagon until she was able to walk on her own without discomfort. She continued as a Shriners outpatient until she was fifteen years old. I never heard her complain and she was able to wear fancy wedge shoes to compensate for her shortened leg. I have often wondered if her exposure to excessive radiation from x-rays as a child patient may have contributed to her brain tumor.

Working fulltime after having three children, Mama birthed me ten years after her third child, and still managed to do all the things she loved: tending her flock, being a dedicated wife and partner, keeping a tidy house, dabbling in the dirt and fussing over her favorite pure white Shasta daisies and prized purple irises, and enjoying being a leader of my Girl Scout Troop, 191. Two of her greatest loves, sewing and cooking, topped her list. She sewed beautifully from a young age, making dresses for herself, sister, and working as an assistant to her neighbor who was also a seamstress.  She had a good eye and could work without a pattern when necessary. As for me, I don’t remember wearing a storebought dress as a child, particularly for Easter or a piano recital.

And then, there was her cooking. Nothing was exceptionally fancy, but everything was meticulously prepared. (except for maybe the time she hand-rolled two hundred fancy eggrolls for my wedding reception) She loved to throw together a chuck roast beef stew on a cold day. There was always a pot of plain rice and homemade biscuits sitting on the stove.  Occasionally she would fry up liver and onions, but fortunately only enough for herself and Daddy. Brown oven rice baked with Campbell’s soups and Sunbeam brown and serve rolls, the ones you could peel apart in layers and top with a pat of Parkway margarine before baking, and her chocolate cream cheese ribbon brownies with chocolate frosting were some of her easy go-to foods. I didn’t mind that they were all on repeat, along with curled elbow macaroni salad or macaroni and cheese made with lots of milk, eggs, and cheddar, usually hand grated by me because I could do it quickly. It was layered with vermicelli noodles instead of the traditional macaroni. I still make that occasionally.  Oh, and potato salad. Always potato salad.

The kitchen and dining room in my house were separated by a swinging restaurant style door, one without a window to peer through, so it stayed open most of the time and we could spill into the dining room when needed.  Mama’s folding Singer sewing machine cabinet sat in the corner. The dining table served as her fabric cutting board.

Mama’s real domain, the kitchen, was where we all spent a lot of happy times. Double windows over the sink allowed her to gaze out through the glassed-in back porch, viewing the yard and anyone strolling up the sidewalk to visit.  Honey colored knotty pine cabinets flanked the walls on two sides. The refrigerator sat on the opposite wall all to itself. A tiny pantry and broom closet occupied the spaces in each corner. Avocado green and old gold were fashionable colors, and in vogue in the 70’s, and we followed suit with sheer curtains embroidered with tiny flowers of green and yellow. A tin filled with strained bacon grease sat beside the stove. A cast iron skillet, always at the ready, covered one eye. Warm aromas lingered from the previous meal she made for us.

One of my favorite photos of Mama is one where she’s wearing her green and white flowered apron, taken on a Sunday in her kitchen, a big smile on her sweet face. To this day, it sits framed in my own kitchen as a reminder of happy times and how we are connected by food we share with loved ones.

On a typical Sunday, she would rise up early before church and finish cooking the Sunday dinner she had started prepping the day before. I say dinner, because we ate dinner for lunch and supper for dinner. Lunch was what you had at school or work. It may be a roast, or a side of pork, or fried chicken. Said chicken, a yardbird chicken, she plucked out of our backyard on Saturday and prepped out for cooking on Sunday. She always chose the back and neck of the chicken to eat herself. She said they were her favorite pieces, but we all knew she nibbled on them so others could have the choice pieces to eat.

In summer, fresh corn and tomatoes often flanked our plates. A sweet, such as butter pound cake or a tangy lemon meringue pie, sat on the buffet, and there was potato salad. Always potato salad.  The best. Here is where I insert an old cliché: No one makes potato salad like my Mama.The making usually started the day before, particularly if it was for Sunday dinner. That allowed time for all the ingredients to meld together. Five pounds or so of white potatoes were first scrubbed as clean as a shiny nickel. Dropped into a large pot of cold water, she brought them to a gentle, rolling boil until ice pick tender, drained them, and left them to cool for a few hours before hand peeling them with a paring knife. Sometimes we would pull one out and eat it warm with butter or margarine for supper.  Meticulous for sure. Eggs were boiled in a separate pot and mashed with a fork. Celery, onion, spices, and dressings were added when everything was cooled. If you mixed it all together when the potatoes were warm, it ended up being mashed potato salad. Not perfect little bite sized pieces. This made an abundance of potato salad to fill her white Pyrex bowl. The white one with the turquoise Amish Butterprint pattern. I didn’t do much cooking growing up, but I watched everything she did. That’s how I learned. The kitchen was a happy space for Mama and our family.

There were many days going forward the doctors and staff told us we would all have to wait and see. As therapy and healing began, the dead tissue on her tongue began to slough off. Mama had a feeding tube to keep her nourished, but she could not form words well enough to be understood. Her tongue was now less than half the size of normal. She lay in bed most days for therapy because her legs just didn’t work as before. Beads of sweat would roll out from underneath the helmet she wore to protect the brain where the piece of her skull was missing. She had use of her arms and hands. Enough so to wipe her own face and neck with a washcloth. And she could write. One of the therapists purchased a blue spiral bound classroom notebook with MUSC printed on the cover for her to write in so she could communicate her needs with staff and have brief conversations with family. I still have this notebook.

The notebook was soon filled with sweet notes to the nurses who took care of her, asking for backrubs or ice chips or sips of water or some lotion for her delicate skin. A sponge bath was a luxury. She and Daddy exchanged questions about things back home, the children, grandchildren, and the weather outside. The notebook read more like a personal journal or diary because her thoughts and questions were perceived and answered verbally, not written in the notebook. Whenever I visited, we just shared moments of silence and tender space. She didn’t need to ask me much, and I would tend to personal needs she was too proud to ask the staff to do and tell her what she wanted to hear about life and her granddaughter, my daughter, Marybeth, her namesake. My mama’s name is Mary Alice.

As the days and weeks moved on with Mama growing weaker, there was little to no talk of Mama returning to surgery to replace the portion of her missing skull. It all went by the wayside. According to her neurologist, she was not strong enough to undergo another surgical procedure under lengthy anesthesia, and there was still a small amount of swelling in the brain. It was just the facts. The most we hoped for was that she could get strong enough to go home to be cared for. Thanksgiving Day came around and we spent as much time with her as she could tolerate. She was essentially living her day-to-day life in a private room in the hospital. They had given her one of the spacious “suites” on the upper floors at MUSC Hospital. Family and visitors were allowed to come and go at will. The staff was gracious, as they loved her as much as she loved them.

Daddy received a call from the hospital a few days after that Thanksgiving visit, telling him Mama had experienced a cardiac arrest. Resuscitation was successful in getting her heart started again, but her brain had taken a beating and sustained more damage from lack of oxygen for a minimum of twenty minutes, maybe longer. They were not sure how long she had been unconscious because she was not on a cardiac monitor. She was now intubated again and on life support. There had been no “Do not resuscitate” order because we never expected her not to recover enough to leave the hospital. While her body experienced involuntary movement at times, it was doubtful she could hear, and brain activity was really nonexistent. Doctors were just prolonging the inevitable until we could all visit.  One of her very last entries she wrote in her notebook before this episode was, “I’ve had love, gave all that I could, and don’t feel I have left anything undone.” Mama was tired and she was letting us know she would be okay in her next life.

Five days before Christmas, Mama died. She was sixty-seven. I was twenty-nine. Daddy and mama’s brother drove down to Charleston to see her, and while there, agreed to a palliative extubation, a gentle way of saying “pull the plug.”  Two hours after Daddy arrived home and told me what had occurred, Mama took her last breath, around midnight. She was never a night owl, but perhaps got her bird wings that night. She died alone. I didn’t get a chance to be with her, touch her, tell her I loved her, and that it was okay to let go of this life, but I had twenty-nine years of memories and that would have to do.

Mama loved her church, First United Methodist, the big white one on the corner of Fifth Avenue and Main Street in Conway, as some townsfolk would refer to it, and it was where she was funeralized on December 22, 1989. She had been a member since she was a little girl. The sanctuary was all decked out for the season of Advent. Advent, the four weeks Christians observe leading up to Christmas Day. Traditional potted red poinsettias wrapped in gold paper, lined up in rows like soldiers, took space behind the alter. Two massively tall, sticky, cedar Christmas trees from Booth’s Christmas Tree Farm hugged each corner on either side of the alter railing. You needed a ten-foot-tall step ladder to reach the top. One tree was dressed in traditional red bows and white doves, descending, wings spread wide. The other, adorned with gold and white Chrismon ornaments, (the word Christ and monogram combined) symbols that visually tell the story of Jesus: stars, crosses, fish, Greek symbols, etc. A visual reminder of faith. Mama had faith and it was always good.

We buried her fragile body in Hillcrest Cemetery in a plot Daddy purchased years before in the veteran’s section for the two of them to rest side-by-side one day, hopefully in peace. The sky, a glorious Carolina clear blue that day and not a cloud in sight. The air, blustery and cold. I rode in the front seat of the funeral car, my Granny’s handkerchief waded up in the palm of my tight fist. I don’t remember much after that. I guess we went home and ate some more funeral food. There was probably potato salad and fried chicken that day lovingly prepared by a church lady friend.

  In the midst of all the glitter and trappings of the Christmas season, I felt alone. Sadly alone.   I feel I was never allowed the time and space to grieve properly. That period in my life was overshadowed by the holidays and a flurry of activities around motherhood in general. My daughter Marybeth was two. Suddenly, I was that motherless child in my circle of friends with excited children and parents. But I wasn’t one of those parents. It was Christmas and children needed Christmas everything, I suppose. But having a very young child eased that burden for me: one of surprise and Santa and a perfect day because Marybeth most likely wouldn’t understand what the fuss over Christmas was all about anyway. There were cookie parties and drop-ins, and life didn’t miss a beat. For others, that is. There was no time for grieving anymore.

Years later, not taking time to properly grieve caught up with me and I finally processed most of the grief over a period of ten years, but sometimes I was not a happy, pleasant person to be around. I would save my tears for the shower. Pound out my anger on the tile walls. People would tell me over and over again that Mama was in a better place. Better than what, I don’t know. I only know she was gone from me. I grieved over loss, time I never had with her, my hate for Mother’s Day because I had no mother, but most of all, grief over the fact my daughters (the second born four years later) never knew this wonderful woman who gave thought to all the ingredients of life, simple as they were, and mashed them all up together, fixin’ a life that was simply beautiful. How would I keep the memory of her alive in my daughter and any future children? I owed it to them to be in the present as their mother. Not just my Mama’s grieving daughter. Older now, and a grandmother, I have often heard that grief is the price you pay for loving someone and I would never choose to not love. But grief is hard, very hard. Now, I take solace in those precious memories and create new ones as often as I can with my little family.

As I write this, it is the year 2025 and I am in graduate school. Occasionally, I visit one particular dining hall for lunch while on campus. Making my way through the line to the salad bar one day, I spotted a lovely tray of potato salad, obviously not poured out of a giant tub from a deli or institutional food service. It was perfect, if potato salad can be perfect. Perfect in its presentation sitting in the cold stainless-steel rectangular tub. Was it homemade? I wondered to myself. There it sat, perfectly rounded amongst the bulk of mixed lettuces and salad fixings, and it beckoned to me to taste it. I relented. Meticulously, delicately, I scooped a small amount — a tad really — onto a plate because my recent bloodwork told me I should not eat large amounts of potatoes at one sitting. With the first bite I knew it was homemade. I thought to myself: who is the precious soul who made this potato salad. It’s just like my mama’s.

Finishing my lunch, I went back for more, and there stood Diane, tending the salad bar. At the time, I didn’t know her name, but I knew her. Her. As in, she was that precious soul. The potato salad maker. I had a sense. We exchanged greetings and I told her I came back for another helping that it was so, so good. So super good. “I made it,” she said. But I already knew she did.  I told her how much it tasted like my mama’s. It was at that moment I knew she had been making it long before she made it for all these athletes and students. I knew, that in her own kitchen at home, she added all the ingredients of love and cups of care, adding dashes and sprinkles of joy as she did so.

I touched her arm when I thanked her. It was soft. Brown. I wanted to hug her. To grab her and hold her as if she was my own mama. To feel her arms around me and feel her soft body pressing into mine, holding me tight like a mama would. I wanted time to stop. I wanted to go home with her and watch her make potato salad. I wanted her to be my mama if only for a moment. I wanted to breathe in the lingering aromas of past meals in her kitchen. I wanted to sit at her table and talk about old times.

Back to center, I decided to throw caution to the wind and filled a small melamine white plate with as much potato salad as my eyes-bigger-than-my-stomach could fill. I didn’t at all experience gluttony guilt. My blood sugar would spike, I would feel euphoric, and all would be right in the world for those few brief moments. I didn’t care about my blood sugar. I needed affirmation.

Refilling my water glass, plate in hand, I walked back to the café table, sat, and sighed deeply. Lifting my fork, I took in the first bite as if it were my last. I savored each one. Every seasoning of life. Every ingredient: The Irish potatoes from my mother’s childhood. The eggs plucked from under the fickle hens in our chicken coop. Crisp, green celery, purchased at the Piggly Wiggly, perfectly and evenly chopped into the tiniest of blocks. Sweet onions, grated for their depth of flavor and all the layers. The perfect shake of Worcestershire sauce and Texas Pete and just the right size squeeze of French’s yellow mustard.  Relish ground from homemade bread and butter pickles. Peppercorns finely crushed. The turn of the wrist by the salt of the earth, Mama, as dollops of Duke’s mayonnaise and Miracle Whip salad dressings swirled it all together.

Sitting in the midst of noisy, chatty college students, close to my age when my mother had her first surgery, I began to weep, tears rolling down my cheeks into the plate of potato salad. I wept for my mama. I wept for myself and my children who never knew my mama, the saint she was. I wept for those with no mama. Most of all, I wept for Diane and all the mamas who tend their flock and feed them potato salad, have had love, gave all that they could, and feel they have left nothing undone in this life. I wept for the joyous fact my mama lives on in the spirit of women, like Diane, who labor for those they love, because no one can make potato salad like my mama.

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Amy Alexandra Singleton is a writer of nonfiction, middle grade/young adult fiction, and poetry. Raised in rural South Carolina, she embraces her sense of place by sharing personal stories, with the promise and hope of inspiring others to value their own storytelling as a vehicle for preserving history and leaving a legacy.

Amy holds a BA and a Master of Arts in Writing from Coastal Carolina University, where she was nonfiction editor of Waccamaw literary journal. Her photography has appeared in Archarios, a literary and art publication on campus. Locally, she facilitated workshops in Duke University’s “Transform Your Health: Write to Heal,” and aspires to teach composition and writing in higher academia.

by Grace Stroup

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                                                                        Seeing

There must have been so much I just wasn’t seeing. At the end of August, I began nannying for a sweet and stout fifteen-month-old who goes by the silly name of Bird. So now, I begin my Monday and Tuesday mornings reading at my kitchen table, usually some kind of historical fiction, with a mug of hot lemon water and my espresso before hopping in my car and driving over to Wagener Terrace to muse at the birds, and kick a soccer ball, and hold eggplant delicately between our fingers. We throw sand around and all over, hop on swings that’re likely far too big for him, and walk down the same side streets, him babbling along in the stroller, while I mumble about all that we are seeing. And there is actually a great deal that I see every week with Bird.

They recently moved down here from Brooklyn, and their choice of house to rent proves it: it’s tiny. With a small entry way turned living room turned playroom, the house kind of just starts and melts until you reach the back. There’s a breezeway that serves as a dining room, with a small circular faux porcelain table on the right-hand side, three foldable wicker chairs and a highchair shoved into the corner. On the left-hand side, there are toys shoved into a dresser pawned off Facebook Marketplace, and cardboard boxes stacked up tall, still full of books. The Mom was a poet – is a poet – who did all the work to get her MFA, and then decided not to go. She’s been asking about my readings, and my work, and what I write about, in those little, small talk conversations we have right before I take baby Bird and give her the morning back.

The kitchen sort of just appears, potentially an addition to the house in a previous iteration, with a dinky gas range and linoleum counter tops, and spaces where nothing realistically can fit, so they’re empty. Ladles dangle above the stove, and on the back left-handed burner sits a cast iron, with remnants of butter, the caramelized milk-solids like bread-crumbs in the pan. They have gorgeous ceramic bowls and mugs, but they’re stored high up – almost as if they’re keeping a bit of life at bay, a reminder of how children stop us in our tracks and demand new sorts of routines, new lives, new mugs at eye-level that are silicone, things they can’t break.

 Every week, something else is unpacked; last week it was a rug, two weeks before it was all of her daughters’ clothes, hung up in the hallway connecting the living room to the two bedrooms in the house. The backyard needs to be mowed, has the potential to be a nice spot to stare at the sky, and is just about the same length as the house from end-to-end. The neighbors to the right have a tree house in their backyard, something I imagine the children will grow up visiting, at least, I would want to.

It’s different over there than on James Island, bigger homes and more manicured lawns, with great views of the Ashley River, close proximity to Hampton Park, the Harbinger Café, and Leon’s, and lots of strollers and sidewalks. I arrive just after 8 in the morning, wrangle a mini-MMA fighter into his stroller, and then we begin. With us, we bring mineral baby sunscreen (did you know they made such a thing?), bug spray, (also safe for kids), water bottles (one for him and one for me), a rogue apple with a couple bites gone, a soccer ball, sometimes a book (though he really can’t stand to listen to me read to him), and often, his hat.

Getting started is a feat in itself, though. His Mom and I delicately play musical chairs. Some mornings when she’s still there, she places him in the stroller, I sometimes pretend to leave, she turns the stroller around so I’m out of view, and then I swoop in and take control. Sometimes, there is a protest. Sometimes he doesn’t seem to notice the switch, other days, he doesn’t seem to care that it’s me. But most days, he often tries to rip the buckle apart with his hand, shouting at me, as we take off and begin.

First, we start with the tree stump a couple paces down the block that is covered in plastic rabbits that look like baby bunnies. We stop, and stare, I pat the same one every time (we’re learning how to be gentle) and he points and speaks to me. And he is speaking – just not in a language I can understand. Soon, we will be stringing together sentences to one another. Perhaps just before Christmas he will be able to say my name.

“Grace,” I say.

“Mama” he says back.

“You’re just nearly there” I respond.

After we get past the bunnies, we hang a left, down towards Corrine Jones Park, but we don’t stay, we can’t, not yet at least. We must go further, must plunge ourselves fully into the day that begins just beyond the park, down towards Sans Souci, to walk by the house that just won “Yard of the Month” with the men who are pruning the crepe myrtles on tall ladders. He’s recently figured out what squirrels are and is yelling and pointing at each jump in the trees, each skirt and skid from these timid animals.

“Squirrel” I tell him, sounding out the consonants clearly, so slow that the word begins to sound made up.

“Squirrel, can you say that? Probably not.”

He says nothing, as he often does.

There’s a lot of that, me talking to him like an adult, and then a child again, and then again, almost kind of to myself.

He’s beginning to figure out how to say the word plane, and has come to recognize the sound of them in the sky, so every couple of minutes, especially when he’s started crying, we look up, trying to find the planes that are making their way to the airport. We remark on the shapes of the clouds, the blue of the sky, the mourning doves sitting idly on the electric lines. Or I talk, and he sits. Though I do like to think that he can understand at least a bit of what I’m saying.  He’s learned recently that saying “hi” is associated with waving, and he likes dogs (at least from afar) so we wave to nearly every dog that passes.

As we head towards Clemson Street, he begins to lose his patience, because we passed the park and the stained glass door at the church up the road, and I’ve led him astray once again, so we stop to look at the recent Halloween decorations hanging from young palm trees. They’re skeletons – something I’m sure he’s never seen – just swaying and sagging in this soupy September. He looks at me, as if he’s trying to negotiate how to feel. I don’t know what to tell him. I’ve never been much for Halloween.

We plow along, past the live oak whose roots have mangled the sidewalk next to it, creating a little hill that we climb over and gracefully down, until we reach the edge of the park. He squeals, delighting in the fact that I’ve brought him back to a place he’s come to know, and it makes me curious about the formation of memory, and association, how all that works for babies, and I try to remember to remind myself to look into it later. I won’t remember, but it’s a nice thought, at least.

We bypass the tennis courts (not made for babies), and I try to avoid the basketball court for the first forty-five minutes (he dove head first into the concrete the first day I watched him), and we settle on the field. I park the stroller, and pull him out, a bundle of joy weighing in around eighteen to twenty-one pounds if I had to guess, slightly damp (the sweat), and sometimes happy to be getting out, sometimes not. He’s often in linen or cotton outfits, with no shorts, and stubby legs with no shoes, which I believe is a new decision – I can’t imagine his parents were letting him traverse the sidewalks of Brooklyn sans shoes, but really who knows? He’s going to be a southern boy though, after all. Living at the beach, sinking into the sand, jumping in puddles, the whole shebang. I get it.

He doesn’t seem to mind, though, likely because he doesn’t know any different. It makes me jealous sometimes, how gravel doesn’t seem to bother him, how he can walk through itchy wet grass to only dump himself into a sandbox, the mix of textures and touch not making him grimace. And then again, I’m thinking about babies and humans, and how we grow into bigger humans with complex opinions and ideologies about the right way to do certain things – to live – when really, we all started out as beings who were merely curious.

If he’s in a decent mood, and one where I can sway him one way or another, we start on the field with the ball and the grass, and the planes in the sky, and all of the dogs who come to play fetch. I kick the ball up in the air, high enough that it nearly grazes tree limbs, and then he runs (sometimes) to get it and kick it back to me. Other days, he just stares at me, before slowly trudging over, like Charlie Brown when he thinks he’s killed the Christmas tree, as if getting the ball is a chore, an annoyance. Even so, there’s never a day when he doesn’t trip on his own feet, falling aimlessly onto his stomach into the morning grass full of dew. There’s always a brief pause where he stops and almost decides if he’s hurt or not. He peers back at me, as if to check if his reaction was appropriate or not (it is) and I just tell him to get back up and kick it back to me.

Eventually, though, he remembers that we’re standing right next to this huge community garden, full of vegetables prime for the picking. We can’t pick them, of course, (the rules for this garden are only printed out and written on five different flyers) so we just gently pat them. We start by the mulch at the front gate, bang the gate back and forth in its latch a couple of times (for fun), before moving on to this rock that’s been painted with the words “Don’t Give Up!” on it. He loves this rock – probably because it’s something he knows I won’t let him take home – so we pick the rock up, and put it back down, pat it a couple times, walk away, point at it, walk back to it, and look at each other, grinning.

“Let’s go, Bird. Come on. There are eggplants we have to touch.” I remind him, to coax him away. He doesn’t seem to care. He doesn’t even know what an eggplant is just by its name. He knows what it looks like – a deep violet tear drop, full of water, hanging like a water balloon in the morning sun. He loves them so dearly, so much so that he wants to try and tug every single one out of every single plot in the ground. He’s come to know we can’t pick the vegetables, though he tries his hardest. It’s becoming a game between us. He takes off, diving hands first into a jalapeno plant, tugging on the ripe peppers, laughing to himself, with an edge to his sounds, notes of mischief floating off his tongue, while I run after him, quickly pulling him back into me. And then we’re with the monarchs – sunset orange with splotches of buttercup yellow darting from one patch of wildflowers to the next. He is perplexed by the butterflies and is desperate for them to land on his finger, but he’s too boisterous, too loud, so they keep their distance. And then all of a sudden, he hates being held – can’t stand it— so he’s like a fish out of water in my arms, flailing and bucking, lurching his head back violently, nearly taking my chin out in the process.

So, down we go, again. But this time, we’re headed towards the rain barrel. We hit it hard with our palms, listening in response for its echo, how the water bounces off the walls, how it towers over him, how it towers over me. He bores of this, quickly, as do I, so we head to the other side of the garden and exit there after banging on the gate a couple times for good measure (for fun, again) with our sights set on the playground, which admittedly is my least favorite part of the morning. He’s too young for this jungle gym, but he doesn’t know that, nor does he believe that. There are steep steps, a climbing wall, a metal pole to slide down,(haven’t we graduated past these by now?), and a slide. I have to walk with him up into the cavity with four exit points to make sure he doesn’t fling himself through any of them, before telling him to wait, hoping and wishing and sometimes even praying, that he listens – that he’s come to know what the word “wait” even means –before bounding down the stairs and racing towards the slide to make sure his legs don’t get stuck under his knees and he falls face first, or that he weighs so little that he will fly through the air and so far into the field. But he does wait for me, sitting so quietly, so perfectly, not moving an inch, almost like that plastic bunny sitting on a tree stump, just waiting to be held.

He remembers again why he’s waiting – to go down – so down he goes, and then we are done with the slide, finally, at least until tomorrow. He doesn’t want to be done, but we are – I’ve only got one ride down the slide in me—so I must find a lone shovel in the mulch, or a plane in the sky, a dog walking by, anything to move us into the next moment.

Luckily today, the geese have started migrating south. They’re hanging low, just above the trees, shouting at each other in a marvelous song, and we can always hear them before we see them. They’re early today, but for us, they’re right on time. We saw them for the first time two weeks ago, so he’s come to recognize what the noise means, what it promises, and he begins looking up to the clouds, pointing, shouting, and we wait with bated breath for the V in the sky. I hadn’t considered it until recently – how wonderful it must be to see these birds for the first time as they float through the sky towards something warmer, always on the cusp of something new, a brighter morning and longer evening. And they really are near perfect in their uniformity, how they glide, the angle at which they’re holding steady, how fast they pass right on by, and it makes me wonder how they choose where to end each evening, and why not right here, on this huge field. It also makes me realize how little I know about geese, how my education on them really starts and stops with the movie, “Fly Away Home” which makes me then think about how that movie is actually slightly disturbing, and insane. It is confusing for him though, that these are birds, but he is also Bird. So I try to identify them by their names: geese, doves, warblers, night herons, ospreys, tufted titmice, chickadees, blue birds, crows, hawks. He doesn’t care or seem to know what I’m talking about, but I do, so it’s all right.

But then I’m back to the sky, and the perfect morning, the delight in seeing, the joy in today. He always yearns for the geese to last a second more, pointing and calling out to them long after they’ve passed, and then I’m realizing that I too wish they could linger, sit in our sliver of the sky a second longer, and then miraculously realizing that babies long for things to last too, somehow.

But now we’re past the playground (thank god) and onto the sand box, which is a nice spot to relax for both of us. I sit on the edge while he flings sand in every direction. I don’t feel like I need to tell him not to throw it yet, because he isn’t throwing it at anyone. Some days once we’ve reached the sand box he’s tired of noise, so we just sit quietly, and I watch him, and catch bluejays in my periphery darting from sycamores, the whir of electric leaf blowers in neighboring yards, the huge storm water trucks clearing out drains, bees hopping from one flower to another, palm fronds rustling, the warmth of the sun, the pulse of a day. It’s different: spending my mid mornings like this after two years spent behind the veil of a computer screen, grey emails and monotony, waiting for the day to pass only to do it all again, months on end. There’s just so much I wasn’t seeing, so much I yearned for.

And then it’s high time we should be getting back to the field, so I resort to picking him up and carrying him back towards our stroller, which he usually welcomes – he’s tired by now. This though, is my favorite part. If we’re lucky, there’s a slight breeze, even the odd gush of wind will do the trick. He knows it’s coming before I even begin. I place him down in the grass, softly, and he has to remember to extend his legs, like a horse learning to walk for the first time, knees slightly buckling, his body swaying, teetering and off balance. And then I extend my arms from edge to edge, stretching my scapula, creating space in my body that wasn’t there prior, before angling my chin up, turning my eyes towards the sky, quickly exhaling and opening my mouth, and letting whatever’s stuck in there: out.

He joins me and then we’re laughing, and shouting, running around, rejoicing in the morning, in movement, in all that we’re seeing. And I’m sure it looks somewhat odd, a nearly grown woman with this baby, shouting and laughing, spinning in circles, with their eyes towards the sky. Or maybe it looks endearing. Maybe it looks a million different ways. But I’ve never been much for caring what people think about me, and I’d like for Bird to feel the same way, at least somehow, someday, and though that isn’t my job, or my role in his life, it feels important to me.  It also just feels good to release, to reset, and to start again. Which, really, when I think about it, is all that we’re doing.

But the moment passes, and now it’s time for something new. More moments to find and things to see. So, we’re back to the stroller, back to the protest, back to the compromise – if holding and squeezing the sunscreen out of the bottle means that he will sit long enough for me to strap him in, so be it. He’s often ready to go home by now, but we have to retrace our steps, to visit the skeletons and pass the houses, wave to the dogs, and I’d rather spend more time outside than in. I find that on the second pass through I’m more reserved, more introspective, perhaps too busy focusing on what I’ll do once I leave, and Bird is full of sounds, with much to say about what he’s spent his Tuesday morning doing. It’s a nice balance – we aren’t simply mirrors of each other. He talks and I listen, and then vice versa. As we make our way onwards and back towards the house, I can feel the day surging, the warmth of this coastal town coming to fruition, sweat gathering on my upper lip.

And as we bound the corner straight towards home, he starts getting antsy, frustrated even, and as I go to unlock him from the stroller, he all the sudden wants nothing more than to sit in the stroller, to last in this moment for a second longer. But we can’t, he needs to eat, and we only have so much time until he starts really losing it, so tired that he won’t want to do anything, so I kind of just pull him out, moving him to my left hip, water bottles in my right hand, him putting his hands in my face, pulling at my lips and nose, trying to tell me something about his displeasure. But march on we must, so I create some distance, and somehow move us inside.

Once we’re inside, he remembers where we are, why we’re here, and is more than delighted to eat his apple in his highchair. There are leftovers from his breakfast flung all over the table and the floor, books on the couch from last night, or perhaps earlier this morning. We sit in a comfortable silence now, and my mind begins to wonder – to what else I am doing today, where I need to stop on the drive back over to James Island, what the rest of the week looks like. Babies must not think that far ahead, and I’m not even sure they can, and what a joy that must be: to live fully for the present, to only know the moment right in front of you. I’m jolted back to where we are as the apple lands right in my lap, he’s thrown it at me, so now we’re done with this midmorning snack (I’m not one who takes well to getting food thrown at me) and he’s tired. So, into the sleep sack he goes – a blanket with a zipper basically, that I guess makes it easier for babies to fall asleep – before I place him in the crib. Today, he doesn’t cry. He just kind of whimpers, once or twice, and then realizes how nice his sheets feel, how tired he is just laying there on his stomach, his stuffed animals keeping him company, and waits for me to leave. I close the door, he cries out, and then he’s quiet, and I quickly rearrange the house, folding clothes and wiping counters, giving his mom any slight edge I can before she comes home and is thrown into the chaos again.

And then I just sit, with my book, in this tiny house, waiting for the next thing, musing on all that we did, on all that we saw, all that we will do the next time I’m here. By next week he might know new words, or jump at the sight of me (doubtful, but I’m holding out hope) or maybe he will be his exact same jovial self. And we will go see the rabbits, and see all the squirrels, maybe a duck, as the world turns and the sky gets muted, cooler blues and brighter whites, the sun and the stars pulling back, the day turning into my favorite season of the year. It’s a stark reminder of the passing of time, how last year at this time was nothing like this, I was different entirely, but still in this body, just not seeing much of anything, or taking stock of any of it. But we are not there anymore, we are here, today, right now. There’s much to go see.

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Grace Stroup is a writer from Virginia. She lives in Charleston, S.C., with her fiancé and their dog, Bodhi. Her work has appeared in Rowayat, Short Edition, Bright Flash Literary Review, Rainy Day, Spare Parts, Typishly, and hopefully many more in the coming years. She writes about family, land, tradition, and loss. She is working on her first novel. 

by Glenn Miles

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North Augusta, SC

Patriotic bunting
and tricolored tinsel decor
hang from the ceiling
and the black vents above;

Green, then red,
then shimmering white
plastic against white ceiling.
White against red clay-colored
plaster walls,

Mother Mary
in a frame
strung with festive
LEDs,

Other paintings too,
of feather-capped warriors
and narrow village
streets.

I order Chile Colorado
in English,
too uncertain to try out
quiero or maybe
pido; afraid of sounding
like Peggy Hill.

It’s out in three
minutes: pork in sauce,
rice and beans,
and the namesake peppers
shoveled into tortillas
and then my mouth.

I use the pickled onions,
take pity and eat
a cucumber slice.
I squeeze the lime,

use white plastic spoons
to dip the green
and red sauces.
The green burns my mouth,
unclogs my nose.

As taco rises
to meet bared teeth,
the commentator on the TV
in the corner yells
like a tornado siren
and only stops|
to start again.

Goal!
I assume he says.

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Glenn Miles is an eighteen-year-old studying English and Theatre at the University of South Carolina Aiken. In his free time, he enjoys reading, writing, and acting. He hails from North Augusta, SC.

by Abby Short

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“Do you remember your dreams? I don’t recall mine either. The Eater-Eater probably got to them. You know, the Eater-Eater? He just eats. And eats. And eats. And eats, and yet can never seem to get quite enough. A single sugar grain, even an imagined one, is enough to trigger the inner workings of his brain, and he must consume. Gorging himself on little sweets in crinkly wrappers and then entire bags of candy, he goes on to find much greater confections, more delicious than anyone should handle. You seriously don’t know the Eater-Eater?”

The boy didn’t respond. His lips wouldn’t do much more than allow a string of drool to pass by them and slide down his cheek to his pillow. He could wiggle his toes as much as he could wiggle his fingers, which is to say none at all. Breathing had become more difficult than it ought to be, and that, the boy decided, was probably the demon’s fault, who was sitting on his chest.

This demon, with hair that crawled into her eyes like spider legs—eyes that were sunken or glowing, the boy could never tell—with a narrow waist and prickly legs, had visited him many times before in the early morning hours.

If the boy could, he would groan as the demon went on and on about how the Eater-Eater was consuming the figments of people’s subconscious, and maybe one day would devour the world. The boy had listened to this exposition for weeks now, had become bored by it, and said no when the demon asked, “Will you help me stop him? Normally, corrupting dreams is my shtick,  but I can’t do that if the dreams are eaten first.”

If he could get his mouth to move alongside his brain, the boy would tell the demon that she should find a different lucid dreamer, because why would he want to hunt down this Eater-Eater just because he was hungry?

Removing her hands from either side of the boy’s head and leaning back, the demon contemplated before asking, “What would it take for you to come with me this time? Drugs? Money?” The demon crossed her arms. “A cute hookup? A puppy? What?”

But the boy simply shut his eyes, willing the demon to go away as she always did when she grew tired of waiting. This time, however, the demon didn’t. Straddling his chest and crushing him under her weight to ensure he wouldn’t fall asleep that night, especially when she started to whistle and drum on his forehead with pointed nails.

After a long day with no rest, the boy was disheartened when the demon came back the following night, inquiring if he would come and defeat the Eater-Eater. The boy said no again, and again the demon stayed, stealing another night’s worth of sleep.

The night after, the demon pulled the boy from a dream of his teeth falling out, and asked him the same question. The boy gave the same answer: “No.”

He had the pleasure of spending the night’s remainder staring up at the monstrous creature above him, who glared back with impatience.

 Their meetings persisted for nearly a week, much longer than the demon expected it to take, before the boy’s willpower had all but dissolved as his sleep deficit grew. That night, when she shook the boy awake, he said yes.

The demon clapped her hands like a small child and told the boy to prepare himself for the dream of a lifetime. Instead of hauling the boy through the folding doors of his closet to a monster land or dragging him under the bed by his foot as he cried for help (the quintessential night terror thing to do), the demon pressed her mouth to the boy’s face. Finally, his eyes eased shut and he was able to fall away into a dark slumber.

At school, which was sitting in about three feet of water—a fact that everyone ignored as they trod through it—the boy realized he had forgotten to do his homework. Naturally, this meant he was going to die. His teacher, a blurry-faced woman with a bob and broad fingers, would punish him in front of the entire class. The boy didn’t want to stick around and see if she would drown him, flagellate him, or resort to a more unique form of discipline, so he ran out of the classroom, sloshing through the water until he found a bathroom. He locked himself in the stall furthest from the day, sucking in deep breaths (as he wondered if he was awake).

Before he could decide, the bathroom door creaked open and someone else entered. Instead of footsteps, the boy heard splashing. The water lapped more intensely at his shins as the person came nearer, pausing at every stall until they reached his. Then the splashing stopped, and the water became still again.

Through the crack in the stall door, the boy saw an eye that sat under a cruel brow, peeking back at him. Despite the boy locking it, the stall door opened the wrong way, revealing a girl in a skirt too short for the dress code with a cafeteria tray in hand.

“Do you really think the Eater-Eater would come here for this?” she said before chucking the tray at him. It hit him in the chin, and the different food slobs slid down his chest in chunks.

“Hey! Are you the demon that’s been pestering me?” the boy asked, cowering in the corner next to the toilet.

“Obviously,” this girl said with hair neatly trimmed into a lego-esque shape and bright eyes, before grabbing his hand.

Together, they ran out through the hallway. While shoving past students (with familiar-ish faces, the boy thought), the demon berated the boy, telling him that he needed to dream better: “The Eater-Eater finds academic stress dreams boring. Give him something he would actually want.”

They slammed into the main doors of the school and were let into a new plane of space: a race track for trains. All the trains had giddy faces and big doll eyes as they chased each other in the circle, and the sky was black, so everything was lit only by the gentle glow of the track laid with rainbow brick.

The boy could feel that the demon wasn’t pleased with this, but instead of arguing with him, she simply seized him and they floated away into the grey void between dreams.

After a few seconds, they emerged from the dark vacuum of no thoughts and drifted over a flower patch. As they sauntered closer to the ground, the boy noticed that the yellow, pink, and red dots were all small flower-headed women running about. “I’ve resorted to using your neighbor’s dream until you can figure yourself out. He’s currently reading Lolita,” the demon informed him, still dressed as a schoolgirl.

Maybe if we were having a picnic, the boy thought, the Eater-Eater would like to come. A checkered blanket bloomed up from the ground, and trays of dainty pastries and jams sprang up with it.

The two sat on the blanket, and the little flower women careened around them, a few settling on their laps as they waited. No one seemed to come, but when the boy looked back at the arrangement of sandwiches and goods, and saw that they were all gone.

“Aha!” the demon cried, jumping to her feet and tumbling a pink-headed flower child from her lap. “It’s working.”

The boy wanted to ask more, but the demon grabbed his hand and carried him away again.

From the void darkness, they appeared in a sort of candyland—a real, proper one, from the roads paved with Toblerone squares to the sky made of different colored cotton candy knitted together. The candy people had peppermint faces and laffy-taffy waists and were trouncing around all merry-like in their sugary utopia.

The boy was about to dip his hand into a pile of marshmallow fluff left on the curb of one of the houses like a trash bag when it was all violently snatched from him, and he fell down a purply-black abyss.

He jumped awake, back in his room. “What happened?” he asked the demon who was lying beside him in bed.

“The Eater-Eater, obviously,” the demon told him. Not only had the Eater-Eater guzzled the candy, but the entire dream too.

“Oh,” was all the boy could say before the demon knocked him out again.

This time, he was riding a unicorn around a carousel. The demon sat behind him on a mutated-looking giraffe steed. They took a few spins round and round with the fairground shining bright around them like a twisted Christmas come early.

The boy noticed that a bunch of tall figures with face-splitting smiles and gangly limbs started gathering around them. They were laughing so hard that their tongues lolled like socks from their mouths, and their eyes rolled so far back they were swallowed by their sockets. They’re laughing at me, the boy thought, and took to the sky on his unicorn, which now had chicken wings. The demon followed him on her bat-winged ride.

The fairground rides twisted from their foundations in the air like tendrils, as they tried to knock them to the ground, and the stench of fried food was everywhere. “Mmmm, elephant ears,” a deep voice crooned beneath them, and just as they were about to reach the eye of the Ferris wheel, the dream went dark.

“He’s following us now,” the demon said, excitement making her face all hot and rosy as she pulled the boy into new spaces with increasing succession. The boy witnessed different worlds of color and horror until they went black again, but his eyes couldn’t focus on anything because it was too hazy and vivid at the same time. It was like watching a movie with missing frames every few seconds and an ill-sequenced plot. However, it wasn’t a silent film type, and the boy wished to cover his ears to block the crunching sounds and yelping when he wasn’t swallowed by the pauses between dreams. He thought he saw a bulbous man in the distance, peeling back the corners of people’s suppressed thoughts to reveal nothing beneath, but he wasn’t sure. 

“How am I supposed to stop this?” the boy called to the demon.

“Just take us back to a candyland one more time. Picture it in your mind’s eye, but make everything a little more sour,” the demon yelled back over her shoulder as the subconscious jumping ran her ragged.

And there they were in another candyland of sorts. The sugar scenery looked old, like a forgotten window display in a rundown bakery. The candy people’s faces had been melted to remain in a frowning expression, with their eyelids pulled down to reveal too much of their insides and their lips downturned like hooks pulled on the corners of their lips.

Spent, the demon flung herself onto a birthday cake cushion, only for it to expel clusters of fiery ants. They started biting her all over, and when one bit the boy with its sharp jaw, a rumbling took to the earth with such force that everything started bouncing like it was on a trampoline.

“He’s nearly here,” the demon announced, her voice uncontrollably vibrating as she remained on the ground.

The candy people began screaming when they heard that and tried to hide in their houses, which collapsed into piles of crumbs since they were composed of soggy graham crackers.

The scene frightened the boy so much, he tried waking himself up to escape from this ensuing nightmare of the Eater-Eater’s making, but the demon grasped his ankle and wouldn’t let him go.

The Eater-Eater arrived, rising from the muddy chocolate lake like a hippo. However, he was not what the boy expected to see.

“He kind of looks like you,” the demon said, nudging him.

The boy looked at the Eater-Eater again, who had started sucking on the hairline of a particularly small candy child. When the Eater-Eater bit into the child’s brains and red mush splattered in all directions, the boy cried, “No, he does not!”

The boy had envisioned the Eater-Eater as a ginormous mound of a man that looks like tons of lard encased in sausage lining to make up the rolls of his body, but had been completely wrong. The Eater-Eater was no bigger than the child he had just swallowed. When the child’s little Peep feet disappeared down his gullet like she had gone headfirst down a slide, the Eater-Eater remained a mere wisp of a person with a pitted stomach and big, sad eyes.

The demon shrugged and told the boy to make the Eater-Eater go away.

The boy concentrated, trying to snuff out the Eater-Eater’s existence like a small flame or throw him down the garbage disposal of thought like he was a bad apple. But that didn’t work, and the Eater-Eater drank the entire chocolate lake in one gulp, even though it was of the 90% cacao variety.

The demon kicked the boy. “Try again.”

The boy closed his eyes and wished for the Eater-Eater to suddenly become full and fall back into a peaceful slumber he would never wake from.

In response, the Eater-Eater moved on from eating people and their things to the fondant foundation of the world beneath them.

Not knowing what else to do with the demon rolling her eyes and the candy people begging him to do something useful, the boy started taunting the Eater-Eater. “Greedy-greedy!” the boy called through cupped hands. “Everyone, look how greedy-greedy the Eater-Eater is!”

The candy people paused their panic and analyzed the Eater-Eater who had started mowing down the sour sugar grass better than any lawn mower they had ever seen. They found themselves agreeing with the boy and started pointing and laughing at the Eater-Eater.

The boy laughed and pointed too as they all chanted how greedy the Eater-Eater was being, but then the candy people began calling the Eater-Eater other names that were so hurtful the boy could no longer join in with them.

“Wait! You’re going too far!” the boy tried telling the candy people, but they couldn’t hear him over their glee as they formed a tight circle around the Eater-Eater. “Hey! Stop! He’s starting to cry now. This isn’t fun anymore.”

Big, fat tears rolled from the Eater-Eater’s eyes, and what he had eaten from all the dream worlds fell with them. Sweet dreams and midnight snacking exploded out from his face, and the demon used the boy as a shield so that it all hit him with full force instead. The boy was drowning in the waves of the Eater-Eater’s longing and despair amongst the glucose, and he found himself regretting taunting the Eater-Eater as some of it ran up his nose. He’s only a kid, like me, he realized.

Though the Eater-Eater didn’t stop crying, he had disappeared. Whether he had sprinted over the horizon with his hands covering his face or hid behind a building, no one knew. Yet, the sound of his crying remained even as the candy people cheered, bolstering the boy on their shoulders.

“Is this what you wanted?” the boy yelled at the demon as he was celebrated for his heroic fight against the Eater-Eater.

The demon only smiled and walked away.

The boy suddenly awoke and found himself standing at the fridge, eating peanut butter by the spoonful.  

---

Abby Short is an undergraduate at the University of South Carolina Honors College with a background in painting. With a passion for storytelling, she expanded from her painting major to combine visual art and short fiction to create experimental graphic novels that explore themes of origin and self-creation.

by Lorien Lucero

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Drew climbs out of the truck and whistles as heat blankets him, sweat misting his forehead in moments.  He wipes it away. At least the sloped shoulder where he parked is shaded, though he wonders if the trees on either side only trap the sweltering air. He peers up and down the two-lane road, wary of traffic. There is none. Of course, there wouldn’t be. Evening is coming on, and this is no place to be caught after dark.

He would not be here for anything, save that it’s what Ray wants. Drew doesn’t even think he believes in ghosts, but if it will help his brother forget, he will oblige. For now.

A deep breath, then he plunges into the woods. He ducks under hanging vines, strays from the path to avoid ground still muddy from flooding last month. Dwarf palmettos nod in a breeze. He takes a last look over his shoulder, back at the truck. A single tress of Spanish moss wavers over the cab, gilt by fading sunbeams. He shakes his head and walks onward.

Ray had better be there already, Drew thinks. He doesn’t want to wait. Especially not by the marsh at the path’s end where, Ray told him on the phone this morning, you can see the old Marjorie Rutledge Home where the woman still roams the creekside, searching for lost love. He sighs. The whole thing seems a fool’s errand.

It hasn’t always been like this, Ray’s obsession with the paranormal. Though it’s understandable, considering what he has lost. It’s hard not to worry about him, but Drew calms his thoughts. It’s the first time he’s agreed to come on one of his brother’s “investigations,” but then again it’s the first time Ray has gone out on a forest trail, in pure darkness, in the middle of the sticks. He couldn’t let him go alone.

Why does Drew have to be the stable one? It’s a role he resents. He misses the way things were when they were young, both of them bold and reckless. Yes, it’s been worse since the accident. And no, his brother hasn’t been the same since Julia. But Ray, though older, has forced him to be sober and sane for them both.

Drew jumps as something unseen caresses his face. He laughs: only an orb-weaver’s web, likely the only ghost they will find tonight. A mosquito shrills in his ear, but its voice seems far away. As if the sound itself is a haunting.

Far ahead a flashlight beam waves. He can’t see the marsh yet, but Ray has seen him.

When blue hour comes the forest cools, though Drew’s body is still damp with sweat. Ray trudges beside him now, jittery—from coffee or excitement? Hard to tell. He’s had more late nights in recent months than Drew has ever known him to, so it could be both. 

Ray stops, stares off to the right where the roots of a fallen pine stretch, hopeless arms reaching in vain for heaven. “There,” he whispers. He leans toward his brother and points. “Straight past that is a shortcut to the best spot to see the house from. We can’t go on the grounds itself; it’s privately owned. Across the creek is the closest we can get.”

“I don’t think we should leave the path,” Drew frowns. “It’s going to be dark in under an hour.”

His brother waves him off. “It’s fine,” he says. “I have flashlights, and GPS if we get lost. Plus, I already came out here yesterday to check things out.”

This is new information. At night, or in daylight? Drew isn’t sure their excursion is entirely legal, since he doesn’t know who owns this land. There were private driveways on the road, but no houses to be seen, though none near the mile where they’ve parked. He shakes his head, imagines what Emma would say if she could see them now.

“Who’s this ghost we’re hunting now?” he asks.

“The Rutledge woman. I told you.” 

“Tell me again.”

Ray sighs. “Fine. Marjorie Rutledge. Lived before the Civil War. Had a secret affair with one of her neighbors, I think, who’d just moved in from Beaufort. Her father thought he had slave blood in his veins, though you couldn’t tell by looking at him. So Marjorie kept their love a secret. When her father found out, he had the man sent to the peninsula on an errand, but…he never returned.”

Drew waits, knowing his brother enjoys the drama of these stories. He cringes as a narrow vine catches on him, unseen in the gloaming. He swears below his breath.

Ray doesn’t notice. “So Marjorie, she went out to the creek to watch for him—back then they traveled by boat more than by road. She laid in bed for days, claiming to see his image in her fever, begging his forgiveness.”

“And?”

“And a few days later, she’s dead.”

Drew peers at his brother, frowns. There is no hint of grief or pain in his voice, talking this way about death. That’s a good thing, isn’t it? But it doesn’t feel right.

Would Ray be so detached if Drew were to mention Julia? He doesn’t think so. His tongue curls to shape the name, as if her memory wants to be given voice. For a moment its will seems irresistible, but he masters it.

The unspoken name still hovers in the air, though. Ray turns sharply and stares at him as if hearing it.

“What was that?” he says at last. Drew shakes his head. Ray does not break eye contact.

He crouches, brings out a small black device with a screen and lots of options. He presses the small red RECORD button.

“I didn’t hear a thing—” Drew answers. Ray hushes him. At last he puts the device away, apparently satisfied.

Not ten minutes later they reach the path again and soon see the darkened form of a house. It looks lonely from where they stand here, across the creek and the plain of golden marsh. White siding, black-shuttered windows; or the kind of green that’s almost black. An old plantation home. Late antebellum, maybe. Emma would know.

“Okay,” Ray says. “Let’s see if we can reach her.”

Three small flashlights emerge from his bag. Cheap ones, the kind you can find at a dollar store. He unscrews the handle of each just enough to get the battery loose, and flips the switches on.

“Hello? Is anyone here with us?”

Drew can barely see the flashlights on the forest floor, but he squints down at them anyway, wondering what to expect.

“If you’re here, you can turn on these lights by touching them. Two flashes for yes, one for no.”

Nothing happens. Drew waits, wonders what Ray is thinking. He begins to let his thought drift off, remembering how they’d kayaked creeks like this nearer to home with their parents. How once, when both were younger, Ray had rowed so far ahead that Drew could not see them past a bend in the marsh, and for what had seemed like hours (probably no more than minutes) they had sat in stillness watching a white bird stand still as a statue. “Hello, Mr. Egret,” Drew had sung out. The way he’d formed the words sounded like Mister Regret. Drew smiles, remembering how Ray had laughed at that for days after.

A slow yawn sneaks his breath away. He clears his throat, wonders how long they will stay here and wait—when the first bulb ignites. One, then another. The third, for whatever reason, remains off.

He watches, mouth gaping. Ray smiles and nods, reaches again into his bag.

“Are you looking for something?” he asks. “Or maybe someone?”

The light flashes twice.

“Did someone important to you disappear?”

Twice again.

Ray grins. His breathing quickens. He holds another device up and numbers blink on its pale screen. Drew doesn’t know what they are, but the numbers make him shiver.

“Hold this,” his brother commands, and Drew accepts a small camera. He watches a psychedelic array of yellows and oranges and purples form and shift, till he recognizes the shapes of trees and then Ray himself.

“It’s a thermal camera,” Ray sputters. “Measures heat differences. See if you can see anything in it.”

Drew squints into the mess of color as Ray queries on. “Have you been here long? Since the eighteen-hundreds?” Two flashes. Still nothing on the camera but the cold creek and marsh, a stray crab or two climbing in the stalks.

He looks up. The world is dim around them. Dark has fallen; he hasn’t noticed when. Something snaps in the marsh grass. He can see movement there, but no shape. His throat closes. A chill creeps over his sweat-damp back.

“Did you die of lost love?” One flash. Ray frowns. “Maybe it’s not her.” Another flash, weaker this time.

“Do you see anything on the camera? Point it at the flashlights.”

There is nothing to see on the screen, not even the now flickering beams.

“Damn,” Ray swears. “Nothing on the EMF, either.”

Nothing else happens after this. Ray makes a few recordings, takes more readings with his instruments. He doesn’t seem disappointed. He tells Drew this is how things usually go. A lot of work and little to show for it. But it’s the hunt that matters, he says.

Drew doesn’t see it. He’s never been a hunter. Nor has Ray, for that matter—not before his girlfriend died. He remembers his brother’s face when Julia’s father called him to let him know she was gone. The broken look that had swam in his eyes.

It’s gone now, that look, but something else has taken its place. Drew isn’t sure what just yet. This sort of chase, the relentless search his brother is caught up in—something about it unnerves Drew, though he doesn’t know why.

He walks Ray back to his sedan, a hundred feet or so ahead of where his own truck is parked. The road is still empty, but now it looks smaller, more remote. Its own little world in the dark, no street light at all. It’s an intimate loneliness. Does Ray feel it, too?

Ray climbs into his car. “Give you a ride back to your truck?” he asks. Drew shakes his head.

“What’s that?” he asks, catching sight of something red on his brother’s arm. Ray blinks, studies his inner wrist: a small constellation of red mounds.

“Damn bloodsuckers,” he says.

A phone call wakes Drew in the morning, a full hour before he’d planned to rise. He throws off sheets raveled around him, grabs the glowing screen, presses the glass to his stubbled cheek. “Hello,” he murmurs.

“Drew? Is that you?”

He sits up, eyes wide and alert. “Emma! I forgot to call yesterday.”

“I knew you would,” her voice creaks in that way he loves. “It’s fine. I had a great time Friday night.” She hesitates. “It’s been too long, Drew.”

He agrees. He thinks of her often. Even when they’re broken up, which is not infrequent, he wonders if she will come back soon. They know each other too well, after all, good and bad. He winces, catching an angle of sunlight glaring in through his window. It blinds him like her own image would if she were here now, her black hair, olive skin, darkened eyes.

“How did the thing go?” she asks.

“Thing?” He knows what she means, but makes her say it.

“With Ray. The ghost thing.”

“Mm. About what I thought. Tripping through the woods in pitch dark like a couple of moonshiners.”

Emma snickers. He pictures the tilt of her head, the smile lines that form when she laughs. He can nearly see it.

“I almost wish I’d been there for that,” she says. “I’m glad you went with him. How did he seem?”

He draws a breath to answer, but it sticks in his throat. He isn’t quite sure what to say. He’d seemed like Ray, for one thing—for one of the first times he can remember in a good while. And there’d been a light in his eyes that was new. A light Drew has never seen there before. It pulls at his mind, nagging.

“I mean,” Emma says, “These ghosts of his—”

“There was no ghost, Emma. The cake is a lie.”

She’s silent a moment. He wonders if his tone was harsher than he’d meant. “I’m just worried about him,” she says. “I mean, this isn’t something you just get over. They were made for each other. That’s rare.”

He seems to hear a wistfulness in her voice, one he almost resents. Then resents himself for feeling it. “I am too, babe. But I really think he’s fine. Or will be. Give him a while. It’s been, what, a few months? He’s coping in his own way.”

“That’s what I’m worried about. He’s not coping. What he’s doing, what y’all were doing—that’s not coping. It’s running away from things.”

Drew frowns. He knows that she is right, but doesn’t want to admit it. He remembers vividly how alive and present Ray was. Nevertheless. “Maybe,” he allows. “Maybe he is. I’ll talk to him.”

“Drew,” she murmurs. “Just look out for him, is all I’m saying.”

Her words stick in his head the rest of the morning. He wolfs down cold pizza, showers quickly, and sits under the fan on full-hurricane-blast at his computer. Pulls up Google, types:

ghost hunting debunked

172,000 results. He swears.

But Drew is patient. He can’t get these worries out of his head, nor the memory of last night. He sees lights flashing in his mind’s eye. Have you been here for long? Did you die of lost love?

An hour later he’s satisfied. He’d felt anxious before, but it’s amazing how quickly that fades when you have answers. It all came down to thermodynamics. Flashlights generate light and heat, heat causes expansion, breaking the circuit and cooling the insides. Cooling causes contraction, which pulls the insides together, forming a circuit again—and on and on. Basic physics. Not ghosts.

His phone vibrates. A text from Ray.

come rn

u need 2 c this

Drew stops for a cold-brew on the way, reveling as the caffeine enters his bloodstream. He would offer to buy Ray something, but the guy is probably jacked up enough. Traffic slows on the way over. His fingers thrum the wheel, then stop. He stares at them. Is he nervous? But what is there to be nervous about?

No one answers when he knocks at Ray’s apartment, so he lets himself in. Signs of neglect abound. It hadn’t been this bad when he was last here, a week ago maybe. Books lay stacked or left open, spines up, around the sofa. Empty beer bottles line shelves and tables. A smell wafts out from the kitchen: unwashed dishes, mingling with the vapor from his brother’s e-cig, faint and sickly sweet. He cringes.

“Oh, hey,” Ray stumbles out from the hallway. He seems surprised to see Drew.

“Bit distracted lately?”

“No, no. Just have a lot of things running through my mind.” His eyes flit here and there across the apartment, but if the mess embarrasses him it doesn’t show.

“I know what you mean. I forgot to call Emma yesterday.”

Ray shoots him a look. “Emma Flores? Y’all are back together again?”

“Yeah, we went out Friday night. Didn’t I tell you?”

His brother seems unsure for a moment. His eyes glaze over, his lips part. “Yeah. Yeah, I guess maybe you did.” He gives a playful smirk, and again he is the same familiar Ray. “Well, good luck to you.”

“Ray,” Drew warns.

“What? I didn’t say a thing.”

Drew sighs. “So what is it I need to see?”

“Well…hear, actually. Let me pull it up.”

Ray grabs his laptop from the coffee table and turns it on. “Okay, here it is. Listen closely.”

Drew listens. There isn’t much to hear. The laptop’s speaker sings the droning of insects, the faraway rasping of frogs. A breeze whispers, sounding like static. Then Drew hears his own voice. “I didn’t hear a thing—” Then the frantic hiss of his brother.

Ray closes the laptop. “Tell me you heard it.”

“I heard you and me, and some marsh sounds, but…” He shakes his head.

“What? No, no. There’s a voice! I’ll play it again.” He does.

Again Drew shakes his head, shrugs. “I don’t hear any voice but ours, Ray.”

Ray sighs, exasperated. “It’s there. You just have to listen. It says, ‘He will return’.”

Drew sits on the sofa’s arm. His lips tighten. “Listen, I’ve been reading about all this,” he begins. “They have different names for it. Matrixing, apophenia. It’s when the brain imposes order and meaning on something where there’s nothing there. And then there’s confirmation bias, when you cling to anything that fits your expectations, but reject anything that doesn’t as irrelevant.”

Ray’s features harden. “You don’t believe me.”

“I don’t hear anything, Ray. I didn’t hear anything that night, either.”

“But you saw—” He screws his eyes closed, touches his temples. “Confirmation bias, right? Isn’t it possible you’re doing the same thing?”

Drew looks away. He surveys the apartment again and suddenly blinks. “Where’s your Les Paul?”

He remembers it clearly, the ocean-blue electric guitar his brother had saved for for years, setting aside what he could from late-night coffee shop or bar gigs he’d scraped together, long before his graveyard shift job as night auditor at the inn. Drew had been one of the few to see him play it the first time. He and Julia and Emma. Normally it hung over the mantel, between a bookshelf and a potted cactus, but the space was empty now. 

“Sold it,” Ray grunts. “How else do you think I can afford all this equipment?”

It feels like a punch in the gut. Drew’s eyes flutter closed and he draws a breath, wishing this wasn’t happening. He glances at the mantle again, studies a photo of Ray and Julia smiling, her small hand pressed against his chest. Drew stands.

“I’m sorry, Ray,” he murmurs. “I’m not going to help you with this anymore. I can’t. I just can’t.”

Ray’s gaze rises toward his brother, pulling Drew’s own attention back to him. Neither speaks. A long span of time slips by before Drew takes the first step away, breaking the eye contact, and leaves his brother alone.

He feels guilty as soon as his brother’s door shuts, but there’s no help for that. Ray is set on a course Drew cannot stop, is living in a world he cannot reach. Nor had he ever had much luck in swaying his brother’s mind. When Ray is set on something, you either climb aboard or jump ship.

It’s fine, he tells himself. This ghost thing will lose its appeal and he’ll run out of steam eventually. And when he does, I’ll be there.

He shakes the thought from his head, turns on the radio. Traffic is heavy, more than usual. It’s going to be a long drive home.

For the next week or so he passes by Ray’s apartment when he can, and monitors his social media, which tends to be inactive. This isn’t unusual. Ray is more concerned with living life than documenting it, a trait Drew both admires and envies. Again he asks himself: why does he get to be impulsive, the free spirit? Why should I color inside the lines just because he never can?

His concern only grows when he speaks of Ray to Emma on Thursday night in his car, on their way to tacos at Santi’s.

“I saw him at the library yesterday,” he says, “but he didn’t even acknowledge my wave. He looked right through me. I don’t think he even saw me.”

Emma smiles. “I’m sure he’s just in his own head.”

“He’s been that way more and more. I don’t know, Em. Do you think I was wrong? Maybe I should fight harder for him, help him with whatever he needs me for.”

She studies him as his Nissan slows for a red light. “You’re his brother,” she says. “If you don’t stick close to him, who will?”

Drew doesn’t respond. His brow furrows, laden with the weight of his thoughts. “He’s never been like this. Unfocused, imbalanced.”

“No. Not before Julia. They were so happy.”

“And healthy. At the library, he was covered in bites again, more than last time. I think he’s been going back out into the woods without me.”

Emma is silent at this. It feels like she wants to speak, but no words come.

“Don’t worry,” he rushes, “I won’t let it happen again.”

“Drew, I’m not sure I want you out there, either. You could contract zika, either one of you. There’s been what, forty-some cases in the state this year? Up in Myrtle, then in Florence, even as far as the Upstate. It’s definitely spreading.”

Drew makes the turn onto Meeting. They are nearly there. He smiles. “Aww, that’s sweet, babe, but I don’t think you need to worry about that. It’s just a mild flu.”

“Unless we’re pregnant.”

He brakes, harder than he needs to, as they pull into a parking spot at the restaurant. He searches her face, half stunned. “Are you?”

“No,” she shakes her head. “But what if we wanted to?”

“Do we?”

She bites her lip. Thinks for a long time.

“Babe, I want to tell you something. Something I’ve never told anyone else. I don’t think even Ray knows. I don’t think she had the chance to tell him.”

He frowns, confused. “Okay.”

“Julia… When she died on that highway, she…” Emma swallows. “Drew, Julia was pregnant.”

It takes Drew a few days to find some pretext to visit again. In the end, he can’t think of one, and it is Ray who comes to him.

“Hey,” Drew greets his brother, finding him parked by his truck in the lot outside work. “I didn’t expect to see you any time soon.”

“You’re my brother,” Ray smiles faintly. “I’m not going to cut you off just because you ditched me. Besides, I need you out there. We have to go again—out to the marsh.”

Drew laughs, but feels no humor.

“Listen, I know we don’t see eye-to-eye on everything. But I’ve taken a page from your book. I’ve done some research. And I’ve found something.”

“You’ve found something,” he repeats dumbly.

Ray smiles. Drew can see the glow in his eyes even behind the Aviators. “A connection. Something real. It’s even documented.”

Drew is intrigued. He’s certain whatever his brother has dug up won’t convince him, but he shrugs. “Okay, let’s see it.”

Ray fishes a library book from the passenger side of his car, an old cloth-bound green tome with thoroughly yellowed pages and crabbed type. He flips through, finds the gas station receipt he’d used as a bookmark, and points halfway down the left-hand page. “Here,” he taps the book and hands it to Drew, who reads:

Drew reads on, but finds no further mention of Marjorie Rutledge. He sighs. “I’m not going to guess, Ray. What the hell does this prove?”

Ray shakes his head, grins. “She died of malaria,” he says. He waits a moment. “Don’t you see? It was her! The ghost. I thought it wasn’t, since she said she didn’t die of lost love. One flash when I asked, remember? But she didn’t. She was telling us the truth the whole time.”

“Telling us?” Drew’s eyebrow raises. “Ray, that’s a stretch.”

“Okay, maybe, but you saw. You were there, Drew.”

“Ray, I didn’t see anything. You know I don’t believe—”

“Don’t believe what?” There is a manic look in his eyes.

Drew throws up his hands. He doesn’t want to do this a second time. It’s not why he’s here, having this conversation when he could have been halfway home by now. No, he’s here for Ray.

He thinks: Malaria, huh? And now we have zika. With all the ways people have advanced in the centuries since Marjorie’s death, mosquitoes are still wreaking havoc on us. Only zika won’t kill you.

“You want to go out there again?” he asks. “Okay. But this time we’re bringing bug spray.”

They ride together this time, in Drew’s truck, with all of Ray’s things in the back of the cab. There is more traffic today, and the hour is earlier. It’s a concession Ray has made. “There’s no reason,” Drew had argued the day before, “why ghosts would be more active at night. And if they’re shadowy and pale like people say, why would you look when there’s no light to see by?”

Ray can see the reason in this. He sits back, lost in the hypnotic sight of tree after tree slipping by as they drive the narrow road. Drew glances at him, wonders.

Should he tell Ray? Emma didn’t say not to. Surely he has a right to know.

Then again, the loss of Julia has been painful enough. Is it right to add to Ray’s grief with the loss of his child as well?

Why is it Ray is obsessed with ghosts? Drew realizes he has never stopped to ask himself the question. Not to find proof of an afterlife, he thinks. Ray has faith in that already, though he seldom talks about it. It has to be something else. Something more.

They arrive at the path, and Drew parks beneath the oaks again. Their feet make muted sounds as they crush dead leaves and mats of orange needles. The air all but clings to them, full of damp fingers whose heat they can feel in their skin. They pass a palmetto, shaded and mournful, its trunk scarred.

Ray glances at him with appraising eyes and Drew smiles, reassuring him. Whatever it is he believes or doesn’t believe in, he believes in his brother. Or wants to. Is he doing the wrong thing? Is he helping at all, being here?

A black smear drifts across his face, and he ducks. A mosquito, bigger than the kind he’s used to seeing. He’s heard of them before, though he’s never seen one, these zebra-striped, feather-legged things. They’re subtle and mean, relentless.

Except when Raid is part of the equation. He smirks as he sprays and the insect falls away.

They are quiet as they make their way to the marsh. Ray stops every now and then, checks his EMF detector, makes a note in his Moleskine. Drew watches him. He doesn’t know what to say, how to contribute. He’s just happy, he realizes, to be here with his brother. To not have lost him when Ray has lost so much.

The marsh lies close ahead, brimming with scents of mud and silt and the effluence of life. The shrimp are snapping in the water. Frogs sing unknowable songs in their alien voices. Ray takes his voice recorder out, switches it on.

“Are you here?” he begins. The air is stifled, silent.

“Marjorie,” Ray tries again. “We’re waiting for you. We’re here to listen if you want to talk.”

Drew yawns. Then a motion catches his eye. At first he can’t see it. The air itself seems to move, but it isn’t the air, it’s a cloud of insects. Mosquitos. They gather in the space between Drew and Ray and take on a shape: a flowing, billowy shape, a figure half forgotten by the past. They hover there, holding their form. An arm swarms upward and gestures to Ray, who has just spotted it.

His mouth opens, wordless. He steps toward the shape. A single mosquito flees the beckoning finger, lands on his outstretched hand. Drew is just close enough to see it bite him, then fly away.

The swarm wavers. Ray steps closer. A breeze flits under the shade of the live oaks and strokes Drew’s brow. It seems to make the shape’s long hair flutter.

“Marjorie,” Ray whispers.

“Ray,” Drew warns. “Listen to me.”

The shape trembles again, then scatters. The insects vanish into the forest, drunk with their burdens of blood. “No,” Ray calls after them. “Marjorie. Don’t leave!”

Drew wants to reach out, to place his hand on his brother’s shoulder, but the shoulder is gone.

“Ray! Ray, no! Stop!”

His brother’s footsteps clatter off into the woods, ringing in Drew’s ears. And somehow Drew cannot move.

Then he does. He runs, spotting a flash of his brother’s orange shirt. His pace quickens. He can see motion now, ahead through the press of pines and palms, but no color. He is catching up, though. “Ray!” he shouts. “Stay with me! Ray, wait!”

Drew dodges a low-hanging oak branch, leaps over a ditch dulled with standing water. He halts. This is it. The place where Ray had been. He should be here.

Trees surround him. Trees and orb weavers and the slow singing of cicadas. But Ray is gone.

“Ray!” he gives a mournful shout.

Drew shivers with energy, and with something else as well. He is surprised at how cool the afternoon has grown. The heat has broken. He stops, calls again after his brother. “Ray!” There is no answer.

---

Lorien Lucero is a trans writer living in Charleston, South Carolina with her two dogs and her best friend. She has a BA in English Language and Literature from, with a double minor in Geology and Southern Studies from the College of Charleston.