The streets were empty, eerie even. No children played in their yards, no laughter filled the air, nothing. Things are not like they used to be. But as I roll down the road, bass bumping and the volume on high, the neighborhood fades away and I find myself elsewhere.
I’m still in my car, but the outside world has all but disappeared, drowned out by the noise of my past. I clutch the steering wheel as memories flicker by like frames on a film reel, unable to comprehend the blur of years past. Deep breaths. Count to ten. My hand instinctively reaches for the radio, nothing a little music won’t cure.
Country. A twangy guitar comes over the stereo, accompanied by a sad story sung by a hurt man.…
Mama, you’ve been in this bed— the covers molding to your chin—for weeks and brother wants a bottle but I can’t reach the cups and your face flushes when I stand on the kitchen counter and your tears are up to the ceiling and I don’t want to drown.
Papa has left again with the wallet from your purse and the last-standing television and I’ve wept for weeks and can’t swallow anymore. And I wonder if the ceiling changes the longer you stare at it—if you’re lifting yourself up and out from here, far over
the broken furnace, the empty fridge, the pawnshop wedding rings and into a city where the sun always hits the backs of your arms, transforms you into someone worth saving, a golden girl. …
I’ve never told anybody about those kids before. Probably because if they asked questions I might break down and blab the whole story and that would just start trouble, knowing my family. Isn’t it weird how people think they know their own mother when she’s carried this secret for over seventy years?
My daughter-in-law spends time with me now and then when my son, Georgie, brings her down from Pennsylvania where their house is. He runs a business here in New Jersey and stays with me during the week while she’s usually alone at home in the mountains with woods all around and a lake in front. They have bears and coyotes and fisher-cats and all kinds of critters there, but she says she isn’t scared when Georgie is gone.…
Ellen Birkett Morris is the author of Lost Girls, a collection of short stories. Her fiction has appeared in Shenandoah, Antioch Review, Notre Dame Review, South Carolina Review, and Santa Fe Literary Review, among other journals. She is a winner of the Bevel Summers Prize for short fiction, as well as a recipient of an Al Smith Fellowship from the Kentucky Arts Council.
In this episode of ‘Cover to Cover with . . .,’ Morris speaks with Editor-in-Chief Jordan Blum about the inspirations, processes, and reception of her books, as well as modern feminism, the impact of COVID-19, and more!
………….The firewood we can point to is consumed. That’s how the flame passes ………….on. And who knows where it all ends?
………….—Zhuangzi III, 6
…………..In the back, Archaeopteryx …………..hangs, limestone relief in half-darkness, Her cervical vertebrae bent backward, ……………………….she remains inert,
…………..a shepherd’s crook to the coming birds: …………..feathers with sauroid claws, she blurred the furcula in her breathwhile, as if Darwin ……………………….had drawn her from afar.
…………..Should I swallow my breath in this …………..monster graveyard? Do her bones miss flesh wrapping them like gifts? Does the air lay ……………………….lazily on her ribs
…………..to hear heartbeats?—All this flux froze …………..for a moment as keen genes honed transposons: fire, form and not, whipping up ……………………….…
This train has a lavatory like an airplane and uniformed women in red tunics serve snacks and beer. I close my eyes and think of those boyhood subway rides through the Bronx. My father jumped the turnstile and told me to crawl underneath so we could save the 50-cent fare. I couldn’t wait to be tall like my father and hurl myself over the turnstile, a sort of working-class Olympic event. The turnstiles are different today, more like revolving doors with fortified steel gates. My father and his New York are long gone, lost to America’s restless rusting. My father never left the U.S., even when he served in the Army. With my eyes still closed I see him sitting beside me now: on a high-speed train pumping through the veins of our Italian homeland with my wife, who sips a Prosecco and me a Peroni while I read Richard Blanco, and I hear my father’s voice asking not how we paid our fare but, rather, if.…
Valleys green from big rains slowly yellow and brown back into the usual. The occasional adonis with the most toned of calves huffs uphill past us. Signs warn of snakes.
An ecologist friend quietly told my dad all these wildfires are not a bad thing but simply part of nature’s bigger project, an exhalation, an ousting of the smothering dead to make way for life. Quietly because it’s unpopular to be pro-fire amidst those who lost everything. The big picture makes us look like real jerks.
Dusty hiking trails get dustier, easier to slip on as Spring dries out. Illegally off-leash dogs get up in my pit’s face often enough that I muzzle her. She looks like Hannibal Lecter, and prematurely guilty.…
