#133: "Shift" by Sheila Squillante

~~This essay was previously published as “Love, Loss and Another Day at Work” in Glamour Magazine (2003)

I wake at 5:25 in the morning. It's winter and New Haven is dark and crystalline. Not with snow--it's too cold for snow, but a showy hoarfrost coats the slick black pavement of Whitney Avenue, the shivering ivy and sneering granite gargoyles of Yale University, and the clear-paned window of the brick-faced coffeehouse I work at downtown. I rise slowly but shower and dress quickly, my feet bare against the tile floor of my basement apartment. By 6AM, I will have taken the five-minute drive, traffic lights still blinking yellow, parked my car against the curb outside the café and lurched my key inside the freezing lock. By eight o'clock, when my shift partner arrives and the business crowd--the lawyers, city planners and professors--stretch their yawning, expectant line from register to door, I will have been working for two full hours.

And I do mean full hours. By our seven o'clock opening, I will have dragged the filthy, heavy black industrial mats onto the floor. I will have turned on the espresso machine, filled the hopper with oily, pungent, dark beans and ground a bit of decaf espresso for the odd customer. I will have measured out and brewed only six ounces of "Flavor”--hazelnut or French vanilla (remembering that Mike-the-architect hates coconut-macadamia)--and six ounces of "Special"-Ethiopian Yirgacheffe or Kenya AA-because these are the least popular with my morning crowd, which wants a no-frills cup. I will have made umpteen trips down the stairs to the kitchen for crates of milk: two half gallons of whole, two of half-and-half, six each of one percent and skim, because the lower the milk fat, the higher the froth, and so, the prettier the cappuccino. I will have shouldered full trays of food up the stairs as well: banana-walnut and pumpkin bread; blueberry, lemon-poppy seed and cappuccino muffins; chocolate-chip, oatmeal-raisin and peanut butter cookies. I will have begun brewing sharp-strong Sumatra Mandheling and sturdy-mellow Colombian Mocha Java, our house blend. I will have accepted the day's delivery of bagels--still warm-in brown, hip-high paper sacks. I will have taken the chairs down from the mismatched dining room tabletops and arranged the chenille pillows on the couch, angling them over the accumulated stains. I will have stocked the service bar with napkins, "Java Jackets," wooden stirring sticks and to-go lids. I will have reached beneath the counter to choose a CD. Anything classical is allowed in the morning, and I likely will have chosen the bright, open pulse of Bach's Concerto No.1 in A Minor to rise like warm bakery steam above the first cappuccino order of the day. It's Emily's: double skinny decaf to go--what we call a "double why bother?"--with more milk than foam and steamed to 150 degrees.

 "Good morning!" she says. ''What's your story today?"

#132: "The Burning Bus Club" by Leonard Kress

 

~~This story previously appeared in Passages North (2007)

                        Leah, a grad student in psychology, was telling Kuncewicz that his daughter was a survivor, moreover a victim of posttraumatic stress disorder.

            “She’s only five and half,” he told her, “she’s a perfectly normal kid.”

            “Age has nothing to do with it," she responded.

            He knew Leah was right. What else could explain this burning-bus obsession his daughter had? She was on the yellow school bus when the fire started. Bus 18. The modern flat-faced bus, now out-of-commission, that transported her to kindergarten. She insisted it was a diesel and was probably right. She had already befriended most of the drivers.

            Most of what Kuncewicz knew about the fire came from the local weekly. A photo, too, with caption, though the bus looked undamaged to him. His daughter, whom he and his soon-to-be ex-wife called Jiffy, made him read it to her every night for three weeks straight. The details were sketchy, but this is what they knew:  The bus was en route to the high school and it was early in the morning, still dark. To add to the confusion, a thick fog had rolled in from Lake Erie and refused to burn off. The driver smelled something and quickly evacuated the bus. There were only about twelve high schoolers (Jiffy was the only kindergartner that day--a significant detail the reporter missed), and most of them had to be shaken out of their slumber and dragged out. They didn’t use the emergency exit because no one could locate it in the dark. Actual flames only appeared after they were all lined up on the soft shoulder. The fact that no one could see anyone else because of the fog kept the students in line. Only one student, a senior girl who left her backpack full of homework assignments on the bus, cried. 

#131: Two Poems by Cheryl Stiles

The Shrimper’s New Wife

~This poem previously appeared in Poet Lore (2002).

For months I’d go to the docks after work

to see the shrimp boats come in at low tide,

their outriggers balancing and diesel engines humming.

On the Southern Sylkie there was one

particular man, a striker.

He was redheaded and red-chested.

I’d watch him hold the door ropes taut,

the sugarline still out. One day I felt my legs stiffen.

Something in my heart, too long underwater,

began to soften.

I watched the solid curve of his shoulders

as he loosened the bag knots and spooled

in the nets. Flecks of fin and scale

refracted light onto his face.

He sifted the catch, then shoveled

back the rest. The gulls, pelicans, and terns

spun in their ravenous dance.

Now each day he comes home at dusk,

tosses gear and deck boots on the floor.

I open my dress to his rough hands.

He pulls me toward him, to the wave

he carries within his body,

through that other ocean and toward that other dock—

the one I’ve been missing.

*****

#130: "Knot and Pull" by Kimberly Groninga

~This essay first appeared in North American Review (2008).

            Knit. Click click. Purl two. Click click. Knit. Click click. Purl two. Click click. When the tiny metal tapping grew louder than Lydia’s voice, I knew I needed to pull back to my larger surroundings, settle into my whole self. My eyes moved beyond the metallic needles to Lydia’s hands—bumpy and aged, busy—then to the red garment growing in her lap, a gift for the bishop’s grandchild, she’d said. Looking, finally, to Lydia’s face, I realized two things: One, her lips were moving. And two, it was a good thing I was taping this interview.

            I swallowed hard and darkened my eyes with their lids. The bishop’s wife offered coffee. Today I sipped water, instead, recording stray words—rice, classes, pray—while checking off bullets on my list of prepared questions.

            Lydia spoke of her home in Jerusalem—of daily checkpoints, poverty, and blindness. But Lydia herself drew my attention more than her words. Especially her hands. The way they could knot and pull and click and twist and tie one long string into a continued set of loops that was something. They did this independent of her retelling of the string of events that looped her life. While her mind and speech relived a past kindness, her hands created a physical object with an actual purpose. While retelling the childhood story of her own fading sight, two inches of fabric emerged from the machine of her hands. Clearly her fingertips could see the yarn. Pointed index fingers trapped and released its red body, pinned it to the metal, and then let it go. In rhythm. Knit. Click click. Purl two. Click click. “Our cupboard was empty (click click) and I brought from home my rice (click click) but I was not needed (click click) to cook my rice, for neighbors (click click) brought us enough rice and sugar (click click) for all the girls.”

#129: Intruders by Jo-Anne Rosen

 

~This story was previously published in The Florida Review (1989).

Every morning at six, weather permitting, Herr and Frau Leopold climbed the wooded hill next to their inn and descended to a clearing, ringed on the north with tall firs and opening on the south to the lake. They deposited deck chairs and baskets, stripped to their bathing suits, donned plastic caps and ran without a word into the water. Franz Josef cut effortlessly across the surface. In the water he did not feel his seventy years. Karla preferred to float on her back and look up at the circling gulls. If she tilted her head she could see the snowcaps on the Alps.

Then they returned to the clearing, and as the day progressed, moved their deckchairs around it in a semi‑circle, following the sun.

Early in the morning Franz Josef read the newspaper from beginning to end. As the sun rose, his eyelids grew heavy. He adjusted his chair to a semi‑reclining posi­tion and took out a volume of Schiller to read between naps.

Karla busied herself knitting scarves for her husband and son. At least that was her intention. Anything might distract her — a bird, a squirrel, a cloud. While Franz Josef dozed, she would swim again or stroll along the shore and look at the sunbathers. She would have liked to speak to some of these people, but of course it was not possible to sit down half‑naked and insinuate herself into a conversation. From a distance, then, she wondered who they were and where they came from.

By late morning, the Leopolds might be joined by a few guests from their inn. No one so invited was gauche enough to play a radio or tape‑recorder. No one wished to sit in the shade. Thus they all moved in quiet stages together around the clearing. When it had filled completely with shadow, Franz Josef and Karla returned to the inn for dinner.

#128: "What Didn't Happen" by Anika Fajardo

~This essay was originally published in Dos Passos Review (2011).

          I was born in Colombia. This is true. I was born in a Spanish-style whitewashed hospital that was later leveled by an earthquake and rebuilt in its likeness. I was born in a small city in the southwestern Colombian mountains, and my father congratulated himself with tragos while my mother swore and labored, screamed and pushed.

            I began my life in Spanish. This is true. Zapato and leche were my first words. I crawled on wooden floorboards and encountered tropical insects as big as soup bowls. I teethed on mango seeds, masticating the sweet yellow flesh until my tiny pearls appeared in pink gums. This is true.

          And if my mother had never taken me back the U.S., if my parents had never parted, never fought over me, never fallen out of love, if I would have grown up in that rented house in Colombia, I would have heard the peals of the iglesia’s iron bells. When my amigas went to mass with their abuelas, my hippie parents—a mezcla of American progressive values and Colombian pride—would have kept me at home, my mother reading aloud chapters from a dog-eared copy of Winnie-the-Pooh.

#127: A Night at Sea by A.H. Wald

~This story was previously published in Green Mountains Review (2005).            

Nine days into the heat, Simon walked up the hill at the edge of Bird Cove. At the top of the lane, a patch of wildflowers caught his eye. That might help. Catherine liked the yellow ones the best, or maybe it was the blue ones.  He could never remember.  To be safe he picked some of both, and then for good measure, tramped into the scrub and broke off a few stems from a struggling wild rose bush.  That would do it, if they didn't wilt on the long walk home.

Like everyone else, he was unaccustomed to such thick, wet heat that made glue of the air and turned the ocean warm; a heat so powerful it could pull water from the skin even during sleep. The shimmering haze erased the contrast between shadow and light, and bleached out the colors of the land, so he could barely make out the cottages on the other side of the cove.  On the beaches, the smooth stones steamed like bedwarmers and the barefooted children scampered over them with small cries.  The seabirds stopped flying and floated on the calm harbors.  Farmers worried about the newly planted hay. Grass wilted, hens were put off their eggs, cows gave less milk and the milk they gave soured quickly.

              The heat had come after a deep spring cold had held on well into June, making the herring run late and weak.  Then, it swelled rapidly, just as the month turned, until no one could imagine how August would take it away. Simon thought that one day the people along the Nova Scotia coast would come to understand how exotic the heat had been, how long and how strong its grip, and they would call it "the heat wave of '09", but right in the midst of it, without the telescoping effect of time, everyone just called it "the heat".

            Last night he had slept poorly again. Catherine had been the one who wanted to live so far out of town, in the cottage where her grandfather Robinson had lived with his second wife.  Simon would have been happy to rent a room in the village until they could afford a real house.  But she wanted her own place, even if it was nothing more than a two story shanty on a rise that caught every breeze and gust coming through. In the winter, he'd ignore the draft and Catherine's prodding as long as he could, then he would run his fingers over the sills and doors, and stuff the gaps with rags and newspapers.  In the summer, it held the day's warmth firm throughout the night.  When the weather was seasonable, it was pleasant.  But in the past week, it had become an oven, gathering the pulsating heat through the thin boards and baking them without mercy.