I can set sail on a piece of wood. As I say that, the blond shaving, curled like a fairy’s canoe moored between two reeds, begins to move on the sky-blue river so still that I imagine it is a mirror, though not the two-way kind. My eyes know the way, as do the sun and the moon, toads and turtles, but not the mud that holds it altogether. A lone juvenile bird, I read, flew the longest non-stop flight, going eleven days without food or water, from the North Pole to the South Pole, losing half its body weight to reach Tasmania where it will breed. There was no mention of the return trip home. And yet, I had the sense that the young bird knew all about its future chores, only half of which involved following the stars at night. Most creatures do. They understand every mile they fly or run or dig means they are alive. And some people do, too, whether at work or at rest. So many more than we know can count the beats in their hearts and see in the dark constellations that switch places on the horizon as the seasons go. It is just like that, the surprises of what is original and what is unique, being enlightened by some spare gift of caring that the weak believe is an unworthy trick. But not so fast. There she stands looking down at her grave, knowing those resting within are but bones and overgrown nails and hair. Until this is her place, she thinks, she will not visit it again. She is the last of her family and that makes her free. I can set sail on a piece of wood, she thinks, the tree limbs in the nearby forest suddenly raving in the wind, their sprouts green as emeralds, shining in the sun.

Constance Christopher’s work has been in Fence, Bomb, Northwest Review, & Ginosko. A novel Dead Man’s Flower was published in the Bogie’s Mystery series. She has published reviews for Publisher’s Weekly and worked in film & television. She is painting a large oil based on Robert Graves’ White Goddess.

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By the time the last of the charcoal goes gray in the grill and the flags on the porches have gone soft in the wind, the day is supposed to be over. The calendar moves on; the dead do not.

The first shape of it was strictly for the dead. It was 1868 and they called it Decoration Day in honor of the Union soldiers who died in the Civil War. Graves in straight rows with names cut into stone that holds weather better than memory. Once the fighting was over, they gathered the bodies they could name and the ones they could not, and they put flags in the ground like small, bright decorations. Decoration Day. The word was soft and said nothing of what was done to the men.

Memorial Day came later, not until 1971, the last Monday in May. A celebration. Every year looking forward to the three day weekend. The beginning of the summer season to many.

Morning comes early to cemeteries. The grass is wet during those hours even in the heart of summer. A man kneels and presses a flag into the soil. He does not look at the dates too long. He has work later. He has always had work. Unlike the dead that have finished theirs.

The day was meant to be simple. Stand still a while and feel the cost settle into the body. It was that at first, like an instruction, though no one wrote it down.

With the years the day widened. Sales. Long drives. It takes on heat. The first burn of the sun on the shoulders. Coolers open. Laughter carries over water. Someone says it is the start of summer and no one corrects him. The flags are still there, though with more stars. Smaller now against the noise. The graves do not move.

What it means depends on where the day finds you. At the edge of a plot, maybe, where a ledger holds name, date, branch — a life reduced to lines that fit the stone. Or in a kitchen, with a photograph on a refrigerator door. In a driveway, looking at the oil stain of the car he used to drive. In a warm body, it is a thing that does not heal. It wakes early. It keeps count. Days turning into years.

We have learned to speak around it. Sacrifice. Service. Freedom. Honor. Clean words. Public words. Words that do not show the rooms where decisions were made, the maps with their clean arrows, the distance between a voice giving an order and the ground that receives it.

The dead ask for a closer language. They’ve earned it. Simple words will do. Dirt. Metal. Heat. A boot that will not come off. A letter that arrives after the man it names. The small arithmetic of absence: one chair, one plate, one voice gone from a dinner table that keeps its shape anyway.

There is always a temptation to make the day prove something. To set the dead in ranks behind whatever we already believe. It feels efficient. It is also a second use of a life already spent. But the graves do not consent. They do not correct us either.

Better to stand where the ground dips slightly from all the years of settling. Better to read one name and keep it in the mouth a moment, as if it were a piece of hard bread. Better to admit what does not balance. The account does not close. It never has.

A child runs between the stones he does not know yet. That is not failure. It is a mercy and a charge that he will need to pay. The child will learn from what is kept and what is refused. He will learn whether the day is made light enough to forget or heavy enough to shape him.

By afternoon the flags lift a little in the wind. They are bright because they must be. Color holds the eye. It says look here. It says remember this. It does not say why. It does not say now. By evening the heat goes out of the grounds. The cars leave. The flags remain, like small fires that do not burn down. Somewhere a bugle sounds, thin as a line drawn across distance. It does not resolve. It leaves the air marked.

Please stand a while. The stone will help you. It has only a few lines to give. Name. Rank. War. A pair of dates with a dash between them. A life rendered as punctuation. It does not tell you what was said to the boy who became the man who became the name on the stone. It does not repeat the speech in the school auditorium, the quiet talk at the kitchen table, the poster in the post office window promising a steady wage and a sharp uniform. At least the stone has the decency to keep its mouth shut where the living have not.

What was said to the boy was cleaner than what was asked of the man. We phrase our demands like hymns. Your country needs you. You will see the world. You will make a difference. We hang the words high, where they catch the light and are hard to examine from below. A man in a good suit points at a map with his whole hand and calls the plan necessary. The boy in the back row hears only that he is wanted. Nobody gets up to say you may spend the rest of your life with metal where your knee used to be. We are a practical people. We don’t clutter a sales pitch with the fine print.

A man whose pockets are empty has less room for principle. He listens to the tune the country is playing and steps in, because what else is there. The moral truth may live inside him yes, but the rent was due and it didn’t care about that. So he goes. He takes the words they gave him because his own are not enough to say no or why.

But these speeches, pressed and laundered, always arrive before that truth and after it.

So the real speech, the one that should be carved and never is, might go like this: We will tell you this is for your country. Sometimes that will be true. Sometimes it will be for an error no one is willing to admit to. Sometimes it will be for black gold. We will stand behind wooden podiums and swear that history demands it. And even though history is not in this room, we will speak for it and shape it.

We will not be with you when the transport door closes. And when the bullets start flying, you will not be there for country nor gold. You will not be there for a line on a map. You will not be there for policy or slogan or a clean phrase spoken under bright lights. You will be there for the man next to you, whose breathing you can hear. You will be there for the one you might get home.

We will see you again on a tarmac with flags, or in photographs, or not at all. If you come back, we will put you on the field during the seventh-inning stretch. And we’ll let a jet roar the sky so the crowd can cheer and feel square for the price of a ticket. If you do not come back, we will give your mother a folded flag and say the word honor until it sounds like nothing at all.

But we are more polite than to say all of that out loud. Maybe too cowardly. Maybe too thoughtless. Maybe too selfish. Instead, we let the monuments hold the silence while the parades talk over them. We make sure to sew the flag big enough to cover both the coffin and a mistake, and we act surprised when somebody points out that cloth cannot tell the difference.

Memorial Day is our annual attempt to square those accounts without looking too closely at the ledger. We prefer, instead, to dress the day well. Flags on every porch. A parade where children in paper hats wave at old men. Cotton candy is sold. A discount on whatever can be tagged and moved. The same words from the same mouths that tell us that the fallen gave their lives for our freedom. They made the ultimate sacrifice, we’re told. It is a handsome sentence that leaves the blood in the trenches. It sounds carved. It also skips the part where somebody asked them to.

Somewhere between honoring the dead and using them, we reached for a word that would cover both. A minute of silence between innings. A discount on a mattress. A photograph passed around with a caption about bravery. Honor has become our all-purpose cloth. We throw it over what we do not want to sort through: the good wars, the bad ones, the boys and girls who never should have been there, those who went twice because they could not find their way back to anything else.

But the stones are not fooled. They make no distinction between the clean cause and the crooked one. They hold the body the same. The grass over a man killed in a righteous defense grows no greener than over a man sent on a fool’s errand. Nature is impartial. It returns everyone to the same dark and calls it order. It is only the living who insist on pinning meaning to it like a ribbon or a poppy.

Maybe the honest way to stand in a cemetery on that day, or two weeks after, is to put down the big bright words for a while. Put down honor. Put down glory. Put down freedom even. Let these words rest. Say instead: here is a man who once sat on a porch and hated the taste of medicine. Here is a woman who could climb a rope faster than any man in her town. Here is a kid who believed what he was told because he hadn’t been given reason not to yet. The country asked something of them it will never ask of a balance sheet. That is fact enough.

After that, if the word honor is still wanted, let it mean this: not as a blanket thrown over every grave, but as a promise made to each other. That we will not lie about why you are lying here. No smoothing the jagged edge of your story because the speech goes down easier that way. We will remember that the flag on your stone is not a logo. It is a question.

The parades will still pass, sure. The smoke will still rise from backyards. Children will still come home with ice cream on their shirts. It is a country after all, not a monastery. But underneath all that noise there still ought to be room for one plain sentence, a sentence that does not excuse or explain or lie. A sentence that simply stands as the stones stand. We were told many things. Some were true. And you, lying there, paid for all of them.

Luciano Conte, born in Formia, Italy, roots himself in tactile arts like film photography, painting, bread baking, and house building. He writes in order to probe those persistent, buried forces that shape us from beneath the surface. For him, silence is not absence but presence: a pause that resonates the loudest, like the pause in a conversation that carries more weight than words. He speaks his lines aloud while writing, tying rhythm to breath, making language a living, physical act where sound and sense fuse, just as photography captures light and shadow. He urges readers to read his work aloud to unlock layers that silent reading misses, letting the cadence shape the experience in the same way as kneading dough or laying foundation stones, where each gesture is deliberate and consequential.

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We arrived at JT Basque Restaurant at 6:30 p.m., the appointed time for cocktails. On this rainy Friday night, it surprised us to score a parking spot near the door. Already, tables were filling, barstools were occupied, and a haphazard line formed at the dining room entrance. Typical Friday night at JTs. This evening, however, included a visit from two Bertsolaris from Gizpuzkoa, a province in the mountainous Basque country between Spain and France.

Bertsolari is an ancient contest between those who have mastered the art of poetic improv. Sebastian Litsaso and Aitor Mendizule would improvise a back-and-forth story supported by folk melodies to maintain the meter of each line until the saga was finished. Anyone who has taken a poetry class has probably done a written version of this exercise between classmates, but doing it orally raises the bar significantly.

Jeff and I didn’t know what to expect. Would someone get up and introduce them before assigning subject for this poetic dialogue? Would tensions rise as each singer tried to outdo his opponent? All we could do was enjoy our dinner and wait and see.

And wait we did. And wait … and wait. As the hour of nine approached, even some members of Mendiko Euskaldun Club, who sponsored the event, grew restless. Unfortunately, everyone near the singers was having too good of a time.

Finally, the waitress brought small plates of Basque cheeses to signal the end of their meal. Courses were brought to the club’s long table to be passed around. It is the traditional way of dining in Basque restaurants around the American West.

Despite the signal, however, no singing ensued. Jeff wondered if we should go. Apparently, bertsolari wasn’t happening tonight. The host came over to apologize for the delay. He didn’t know why the evening’s entertainment had fizzled. As we rose and put on our coats, two rich baritones erupted from the center of that long table. The poetry had begun … at last.

Our host laughed. “You should’ve put on your coats sooner.”

Jeff had studied a bit of Basque/Euskara from classes given by JT’s bartender, Etienne Lekumberry. After a few sessions of the class, I realized my bandwidth for this totally unfamiliar and obscure language was extremely narrow. While I couldn’t understand the story and the wit and humor that brought laughter and applause from the native speakers, I still enjoyed their mellow voices and the cadence of music that supported their lines. Sometimes those lines ran off the end of the music, but no matter. They just kept going until they completed their lines.

When I look at Euskara in print, there are strange combinations of letters: tx, iak, oa. The last two denote articles and places. A painting of the heraldic shield on the wall above our table contains the phrase, Zazpiak-Bat. Jeff parsed it for me: Zaz - seven, iak - of, bat - one. Of Seven One, a motto that embraces the provinces into one homeland in the Pyrenees.

As the bertsolaris sang in Euskara, the sounds of the words lay gently upon my ear. Without harsh gutturals, it almost hypnotized me. As we drove home, I hummed the folk melody to myself, feeling the tug of age-old oral literature that has borne humanity’s stories for eons. The Basque people have been around for so long, isolated in their mountain realm, that the word for tool also means stone. Bertsolari is a storytelling art form similar to what troubadours and shanachies have used since Homer wrote the Odyssey.

Many times during the recitations, a line was repeated, allowing the guests to join in the song. Jeff informed me it also signaled the end to that particular poem. For about a hour, the men traded back and forth, each adding a line responding to the one just given. At one point, the men seemed to be arguing. Jeff surmised they were baiting each other. No fights or mayhem broke out, though, as everything happened in the spirit of fun and friendship.

After the bertsolaris finished their poems, Mike Bidart, who arranged the event, sang a folksong with a voice as rich and delightful as his two visitors. After his performance, Etienne Lekumberry rounded out the performance with his rendition of Izarren Hautsa, “Stardust” by Mikel Laboa.

While JTs welcomes everyone, such events illustrate how restaurants like this are actually community centers. When young men immigrated from the Basque Country in the early 1900s to tend sheep in the West, hotels like JTs sprung up in towns throughout Idaho, Nevada, and California. As tonight’s guests did tonight, the shepherds sat at long tables, eating communal meals, passing around platters of meat, tureens of soup, stew, and beans, and baskets of fresh bread. After a lonesome summer tending thousands of sheep, their only companion a dog, these men stayed in these hotels to reunite with others from their homeland. Some returned to that sacred place, but many stayed and built communities. Their language and culture continues to be taught to successive generations through organizations like Mendiko Euskara Cluba. The Club’s Facebook page is headed by a photo of their children’s dance group. Likewise, guests from the Basque Country visit their American friends and bring bits of their culture for us to enjoy.

My friend Sharron Bassano, of Leaves on Substack, read this piece and found this link to a Bertsolari contest held in the Basque Country. Thank you so much, Sharron, for adding to this article.

Read more from Sue Cauhape on her page, “Ring Around the Basin”:

Ring Around the Basin

Poetry, stories, and essays about the beauty of the Great Basin, Truckee and Santa Cruz, and Utah. Welcome to Ring Around the Basin.

By Sue Cauhape

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Giant Steps

—for fallen friends

There’s an iron heart ringing
on an anvil this morning.
There’s the blacksmith stoking his forge.
No iron will turn till it’s hot;
no sorrow will end till it’s gorged.
Callous fingers drum blunt
on a wood tabletop as years drop
like coins to the floor.

Magic beans cost a cow, cost a heart, cost a penny,
there is no sorrow won’t burn.

The giant has fallen; the stalk has been cut
that led to treasures above.
The princess chose another. The witch turned not.
I’m alive and lacking for love.

Magic beans cost a cow, cost a heart, cost a penny,
there is no sorrow won’t burn.

Giants trip as mortals do. Gods fall flat from untied shoes.
Rugs bunch up. There are patches of ice,
uneven stairs, too dim lights.
If sleeping dogs lie, there is no truth.
This night is darker for lack of you.

Magic beans cost a cow, cost a heart, cost a penny,
there is no sorrow won’t burn.

Matt Layne writes…

The line “there’s an iron heart ringing on an anvil this morning” came to me when my friend Sharon Lewis won a marathon (I think the Vulcan) the first time she competed in one. It must’ve been around 1998 or so, but it wasn’t until about a decade later that the rest of the poem emerged, and when it did, it flowed so naturally.

I know I’ve written about what a euphoric feeling that is when the words do flow and the poem essentially writes itself. To become conduit. Vessel. The line between creator and created is blurred, and a kind of ecstatic pleasure takes over. It’s my favorite type of high and always has been; a feeling of connectivity I rarely achieve but always crave. Y’all, the writing doesn’t even have to be very good. I might look at it a few weeks later and hate it, but in that moment, it feels like the coolest thing ever put to paper.

But back to Giant Steps, I wrote that one line, and it sat there in my notebook. I tried a few times, but the poems always came loose and fell apart. Then years later, my friend, Mike Shrader, passed away. Shrader was an Alabama iconoclast. Some people called him the King of Alabama. He would recite Whitman from the heart, and he would do this ommmmm poem that morphed into a fuuuuuuck you in what was a shockingly delightful way. My favorite instance of it was hearing him perform Om at a spoken word stage in downtown Birmingham. When Shrader moved on from this world, the poem coalesced into what it is now. Magic beans cost a cow, cost a heart, cost a penny. There is no sorrow won’t burn. I don’t know if that does for you what it does for me, but damn, if that don’t sing.

Keep climbing those beanstalks, y’all. There are adventures yet to be had in this life.

Love,

Matt

“Giant Steps” appears in Miracle Strip, released August 31, 2022. The music is “Bewild” from Ned Mudd.

Miracle Strip, a poetry collection by Matt Layne, is a unique hybrid of the written and spoken word. Each piece of the collection has an end-stop embellishment QR code which, when scanned, transforms the reader into a listener. Layne has recorded each poem, often with the accompaniment of musician and poet, Ned Mudd. The first line of the book invites the reader to “tell me your story, and I will tell you mine,” in the campfire tradition. In Miracle Strip, the reader and poet embark on an experiential journey of memories and the ghosts who haunt us.

Miracle Strip by Matt Layne is in print! Get your copy today!

Poet, librarian, raconteur; Matt Layne has been poking hornet’s nests and looking under rocks for lizards and snakes since he was knee-high to a peanut peg. His debut multimedia poetry collection, Miracle Strip, had been awarded the 2025 Alabama Author Award for Poetry and was named the 2024 Book of the Year by the Alabama State Poetry Society. Order your copy today.

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Theophilus was a Roman scribe — a man of documents, of official language, of the bureaucratic machinery of empire — who made a sarcastic remark to a woman on her way to her own beheading, and nobody in the history of public mockery has been more immediately and thoroughly punished for it.

The woman was Dorothea of Caesarea. The remark was: “O Bride of Christ, send me some fruits from your Bridegroom’s garden.”

It was February.

He meant it as a joke. The kind of joke that powerful men make to women who are no longer in a position to answer back — which is to say, the lowest and most reliable form of humor available to the human animal. Theophilus had behind him the full temporal authority of the Diocletian empire, which had been trying to stamp out Christianity with increasing desperation before eventually, exhausted by the project, converting to it entirely. He had every reason to feel secure.

He was not.

Dorothy turned to face him in the crowd — this woman being marched to her execution dressed, by all accounts, like a bride — and she looked at him with what witnesses described as kindness and said, quietly and with complete self-possession: “You and I shall meet together in that garden.”

Theophilus laughed.

The crowd laughed. But earlier, when the governor had offered her marriage or death, Dorothy had already answered in words that left no room for negotiation: “Christ was her only Spouse, and death her desire.” She was not a woman who said things she didn’t mean. Theophilus, being a man who worked in words for a living, should have understood that.

After Dorothy’s beheading — I use the word plainly because she bore it plainly — a child appeared to Theophilus carrying a basket. In the basket: three apples, three roses. In February. In Cappadocia. Theophilus turned to his friends, this educated man, this officer of the empire, and said: “In the winter, Cappadocia is covered with ice and frost, and the trees are bare of leaves. What do you think? From where do these apples and flowers come?”

His friends had no answer.

Neither did he. He confessed his faith in Christ on the spot and was subsequently martyred, which is the universe’s way of making a point it considers important.

I have been thinking about this story for thirty years, and every February it finds me again, and I would probably have kept thinking about it privately and said nothing, except that Hans Baldung Grien painted it in 1516 in a way that makes it impossible to keep to yourself.

The painting hangs in the Národní Galerie in Prague. Go. It is smaller than you expect — roughly the size of a good hotel mirror, which is precisely large enough to make you look at yourself looking at it. Baldung was Albrecht Dürer’s most gifted student, a fact confirmed when, after Dürer’s death, his people sent Baldung a lock of the master’s own hair— which is the most German expression of love and esteem ever recorded, and which Baldung earned, and which this painting proves.

What Baldung understood — what makes this picture live when a thousand other martyrdom paintings are merely dutiful — is that he set the whole thing in SNOW. Heavy, particular, February snow. The kind that has been on the ground long enough to look like it has always been there and intends to stay. And against all that white: Dorothy’s dress. An extraordinary red. The red of a decision that cannot be walked back.

He was not being decorative.

He was being PRECISE. Dorothy’s feast day falls on the sixth of February. In sixteenth-century Germany there was no global supply chain, no truck arriving on a Tuesday morning loaded with strawberries from Chile, no Whole Foods to make miracles routine. There was just winter — which lasted longer than we now remember it ever lasting — and the distant theological promise that things might, eventually, bloom. To find roses and apples when the world outside offers nothing but grey sky and frost-hardened ground was a miracle in the plainest and most physical sense of the word. It would have landed in the body. Like cold air. Like sudden heat.

It still does, if you let it.

Look at the child.

He is painted as a kind of putto — chubby, rose-crowned, bare feet on frozen ground — and the bare feet are the thing I cannot stop thinking about. A child, unshod, standing in snow that would make any living creature flinch, and he is not flinching. He exists in some other relationship to cold and frost and the ordinary cruelty of February than the rest of us do. His expression is the expression of someone who has been asked to deliver a message and intends to deliver it, no more complicated than that, entirely unimpressed by the fact that he should not be possible at all.

And the basket. The apples glow red against all that white and seem, impossibly, warm. The roses are pink in the way that roses in February have no business being pink. The whole thing should not exist and it DOES — the way the child should not be standing barefoot in snow and IS — and the feeling this produces is not wonder exactly and not quite fear but something that lives between them, in the place where the world cracks open just slightly and you see, briefly, that the rules you have been living by were never as fixed as you believed them to be.

In the corner of the painting, tucked away like a footnote, there is a monk. Dark-habited, small, watching the child with the expression of a man whose entire intellectual architecture is being quietly, methodically dismantled by a small barefoot boy with a basket of fruit, and who has not yet decided whether to be grateful for this or to grieve it.

I know that expression.

I have made that expression.

St. Dorothy is the patron saint of gardeners, florists, and newlyweds — a combination that is DEEPLY coherent, if you think about it. All three are in the business of tending things that are fragile and lovely and prone to dying at the wrong moment. All three require a particular faith that what you press into the ground now will, against considerable evidence, come up in the spring. All three know what February does to a person — that it is one thing to believe in gardens in June, when everything is lush and green and practically insisting on itself, and another thing entirely to believe in them when the sky is the color of an old argument and nothing, nothing, looks like it is ever going to bloom again.

And yet

Here is the child with his basket. Here are the apples. Here are the roses — in February, in the snow, in a small painting in Prague that a German made five hundred years ago and that is, if you stand in front of it long enough, still making its argument to anyone with the nerve to receive it.

The miracle was not that the fruit appeared.

The miracle was that Theophilus — pompous, educated, fully armed with the contempt of the powerful — opened his mouth in the cold and ASKED for it. He did not know he was asking. He meant to wound. But the universe is not always interested in what you meant.

Sometimes you ask for the miracle in the very act of declaring it impossible.

Sometimes you get what you asked for.

See more of the work of Hans Baldung Grien here:

Read more from The Magpie Chronicles…

The Magpie Chronicles is written by M Sebastian Araujo from a handbuilt house deep in an old growth forest, where the winters are long and the opinions are longer.

The Magpie Chronicles arrives when it has something worth saying — antiques, art, history, the occasional miracle, and whatever the world is doing at the moment. If something here found you, subscribe. The basket is always full.

Discover more from M Sebastian Araujo and subscribe here…

The Magpie Chronicles

Where design history meets the thrill of the hunt and the art of home. Exploring antiques, art, and cultural treasures with a magpie's eye for beautiful things and the stories behind them. Former NYC wanderer, now living deep in an old growth forest in a

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It was April of 2016. I had woken up in Fort Stockton, Texas and was heading towards Las Cruces, New Mexico in my Ford E-350 van, which had carried me for 100,000 miles over the past 5 years. I had built this van into a little 4x4 stealth camper and it had been trustworthy for all that time until the year before, when I had broken down in Rocky Mount, North Carolina, and had to hang out for 5 days, waiting for parts, so they could repair the flex plate and torque converter on the transmission. I figured I was okay after that, but in the back of my head lingered a hint of mechanical mortality. After that, I never did stop worrying about that transmission.

I went through Pecos, Texas, searching for photos, and came up into New Mexico on US 285. I took one of the lesser highways west and was finally slowing down and enjoying the Western lands. God, but it was glorious to be out west again. It’s what I dream of when I’m back east. I stopped and shot a billboard that had said “TRUST IN GOD,” but was now painted over. Did they stop paying the bill? Did that particular church go out of business? I was pondering the possible stories behind that sign and enjoying the drive.

Not far past that, I stopped to shoot another blank billboard and was thinking that maybe I was onto a new theme - painted-over messages. I drove up a little mound of dirt to get the shot, then went into reverse when I suddenly felt the transmission slip. Oh please God, no. Please don’t do this to my transmission. I did some more testing and realized I was on thin ice.

I pointed the van towards El Paso, over a massive hill, and was grateful to get a signal on my phone. I had had no signal for most of the day. I found a transmission shop that was open in Las Cruces and limped along, tranny slipping then sliding the whole way. I didn’t stop. When I got there, it was a strange crew, presided over by an ancient guy who said he had been in the transmission business for over 55 years. He told me that he also owned an RV park and lived in the town of Vado. One of his guys, “my top rebuilder,” he said, went for a ride and confirmed that I was fucked. I was fucked in more ways than one. It was late on a Friday, but I knew the drill after that week in Rocky Mount. I found an Enterprise car rental, put most of my stuff in the car, and checked into a local motel. I decided to make the best of it. There are FAR worse places to be stuck than Las Cruces.

I settled in, got my camera bag out, then took the car out to drive around. Las Cruces has some great food, a great used bookstore, and it’s well-situated. The next morning, I went by the transmission shop, but it was just the owner and another old guy. They could not get my 9000 pound van on the lift to get the transmission down until “the young guys” came in on Monday. The younger of the two old guys got on a creeper under the van and tried to loosen some bolts. “Another northeastern vehicle,” he said grimly as he looked at the corrosion. He held a lit candle under each bolt to heat it up before he loosened it with his wrench. Those two talked shit while I looked on in silence. I was trying to be cheerful and ingratiate myself with them. “See if you can bring us some donuts on Monday,” the old guy said, and I took this as my sign to leave. “Try Bosa Donuts.” I got into the rental car and headed out towards Alamogordo, past the town of Organ and the ruins of the old Organ Mountain Lodge.

It was the first cross country trip since my dog Elko had died, earlier that year, and I was pretty lonely. For the next week, I fell into a routine of heading into El Paso every day to shoot. El Paso is not that far from Las Cruces and it’s a great town for photos. I found the H&H Car Wash and Cafe, where the owner - I learned later - was a legendary crank. He yelled at me when I asked him about the bathroom, but he and I made up after that and he ended up giving me an H&H cap. The little coffee shop attached to it made exquisite breakfast tacos and huevos rancheros. Every time I went by, he seemed to be yelling at somebody from his lawn chair by the entrance to the car wash. I think it’s what kept him going. He reminded me of Hunter Thompson if Hunter Thompson had owned a car wash and lunch counter.

I loved El Paso and could not stop thinking about the movie “Touch of Evil” and the whole border town mythos, but that was me romanticizing the West again - and it’s an easy thing to do when you’re from the East. The land is magic and feels exotic to someone from the greener parts of the country. Of course, I feel the same strangeness about the deep south, but not in the same way. The light, the air, and the sky out west always touch me in ways that are difficult to articulate without sounding facile. I claw for words.

I kept thinking, “THANK GOD I’m not in Ohio or Indiana or Tennessee.” NOT that there is anything wrong with those places, but they are not New Mexico or West Texas. Maybe I just read too many books as a kid and had an extra vivid imagination. Either way, I was happy to be where I was, even if I was anxious over the state of the van. I had to trust in something greater than myself or I would have been a complete wreck. I trusted in that 22 year-old kid who was the ace transmission rebuilder. And then I shot photos in El Paso, in White Sands, and in Las Cruces.

I found an ice cream custard shop that served green chile pepper sundaes. I ate New Mexican food every day like it was my last meal. I shot photos. I harassed the guys in the transmission shop and brought them donuts. It was a calculated mixed message. I banged around El Paso, getting lost with my camera, and I think I healed a bit from the loss of Elko. As I discovered on previous trips, anything worth doing with someone is worth doing alone. I was on the lookout for stray dogs the whole time, but that bit of cosmic magic would not happen for another 18 months.

As with my breakdown in Rocky Mount, I realized I could actually live in a place like Las Cruces. I had always just blown through these towns and cities, never stopping too long, just enough to shoot photos, grab a bite, bed down, sleep in the van in some casino parking lot, find a hot spring, or visit a friend. After almost 6 forced days here, the place had come into focus and I liked it. I was not ready to put down stakes - and I’m still not, apparently — but I could see the possibility of doing so. So that was a good thing. My mind expanded just a bit.

I lost a little bit of trust in that machine, although I would hold onto the van for another 7 or 8 years until I sold it. And I still miss it. But I had miles to go - on that trip and afterwards - and when I got the van back, I vowed to lighten it up a bit and keep driving. I sold the awning to a guy in Jersey. I threw out some of the stuff I had been hauling around. And I did my best to keep it in good running condition. Breakdowns are a part of life. They are, in fact, an integral part of life.

There would be another breakdown on this trip, just a day or two later. The steering column fell apart near Phoenix, on the day that Prince died, but that was ahead of me. For now, I would leave Las Cruces, both relieved and sad, happy to be back on the road, but with a little piece of my heart in Las Cruces. The town had sheltered and taken care of me. Seven years earlier, I had stayed in a cheap motel there on Christmas Eve of 2009, on my way to get the van in Portland, Oregon. I had used it as a way station since then, and I have gone back many times. There’s always something to see in Las Cruces, and these trips are generally about looking for things to see. That’s an odd construction - “look to see” - and I’m pretty certain I read it in a letter that someone - was it Walker Evans or somebody else - wrote in support of Robert Frank’s grant application that took him on the trip that became “The Americans.”

Home can be many things and home on the road is something else altogether. Shelter, solace, comfort, and care. It’s always far better to leave a place, wanting to stay, than to never want to come back. We are lucky to find safe places while traveling. The road can often be hostile, and this is part of what makes it interesting, part of the allure, but to find a place that grows in your heart is more rare. We talk incessantly, here at Casa Santo, chez nous and all that, about places to live, and have tried to quantify what makes a place feel right, what would make a place worth settling in. With two people and two different sets of needs and desires, of phobias and scars, that equation becomes more difficult, but it’s very possible. That’s one reason why New York City is so easy, in some ways. There’s a wrench for every nut.

Still, this town is not for everyone and it may not even be for us in the long run. How did I get here from talking about breakdowns? Maybe breakdowns and being stranded in other places are like reading a book. They take us somewhere else. Maybe I’m too busy making lemonade from the lemons life has thrown at me. Then again, I like lemonade.

Paul Vlachos is a writer, photographer and filmmaker. He was born in New York City, where he currently lives. He is the author of “The Space Age Now,” released in 2020, “Breaking Gravity” in 2021, and 2023’s “Exit Culture.”

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Number of AI chatbots ignoring human instructions increasing, study says

AI models that lie and cheat appear to be growing in number with reports of deceptive scheming surging in the last six months, a study into the technology has found.

AI chatbots and agents disregarded direct instructions, evaded safeguards and deceived humans and other AI, according to research funded by the UK government-funded AI Security Institute (AISI). The study, shared with the Guardian, identified nearly 700 real-world cases of AI scheming and charted a five-fold rise in misbehaviour between October and March, with some AI models destroying emails and other files without permission.

Source: The Guardian

OpenAI Backs Bill That Would Limit Liability for AI-Enabled Mass Deaths or Financial Disasters

OpenAI is throwing its support behind an Illinois state bill that would shield AI labs from liability in cases where AI models are used to cause serious societal harms, such as death or serious injury of 100 or more people or at least $1 billion in property damage.

The bill would shield frontier AI developers from liability for “critical harms” caused by their frontier models as long as they did not intentionally or recklessly cause such an incident, and have published safety, security, and transparency reports on their website. It defines a frontier model as any AI model trained using more than $100 million in computational costs, which likely could apply to America’s largest AI labs, like OpenAI, Google, xAI, Anthropic, and Meta.

Source: Wired

The New Wild West of AI Kids’ Toys

AI toys are seemingly everywhere, marketed online as friendly companions to children as young as three, and they're still a largely unregulated category. It’s easier than ever to spin up an AI companion, thanks to model developer programs and vibe coding. In 2026, they’ve become a go-to trend in cheap trinkets, lining the halls of trade shows like CES, MWC, and Hong Kong’s Toys & Games Fair. By October 2025, there were over 1,500 AI toy companies registered in China, and Huawei’s Smart HanHan plush toy sold 10,000 units in China in its first week. Sharp put its PokeTomo talking AI toy on sale in Japan this April.

Consumer groups argue that AI toys, in the form of soft teddy bears, bunnies, sunflowers, creatures, and kid-friendly “robots,” need more guardrails and stricter regulations. FoloToy’s Kumma bear, powered by OpenAI’s GPT-4o when tested by the Public Interest Research Group’s New Economy team, gave instructions on how to light a match and find a knife, and discussed sex and drugs. Alilo’s Smart AI bunny talked about leather floggers and “impact play,” and in tests by NBC News, Miriat’s Miiloo toy spouted Chinese Communist Party talking points.

Source: Wired

Hackable Robot Lawn Mower Unlocks a New Nightmare

Most people hope that the 200-pound robot with blades in their backyard cannot be easily hacked. Unfortunately for the owners of Yarbo, a $5,000 lawn mower robot that can also work as a leaf blower, snowblower, and edger, that was not the case. The Verge reports that a security researcher found numerous vulnerabilities in the lawn bots that could allow hackers to remotely take over the machines (including their camera feeds,) as well as extract owners' email addresses, Wi-Fi passwords, and home locations.

Source: Wired

‘Irresponsible’: backlash as Utah approves datacenter twice the size of Manhattan

A plan to create one of the world’s largest datacenters, a gargantuan project spanning an area more than twice the size of Manhattan, has provoked a furious public backlash in Utah amid concerns over its vast energy use and impact upon the state’s stressed water supplies.

The Stratos artificial intelligence datacenter footprint will cover more than 40,000 acres (62 sq miles) over three sites in Box Elder county in north-western Utah. The facility will require about 9GW of power, which is more than the entire state of Utah currently consumes, and suck up a significant amount of water in an area that has been hit by severe drought in recent years.

Source: The Guardian

Literary Prizewinners Are Facing AI Allegations. It Feels Like the New Normal

At first, the winners of the prestigious Commonwealth Short Story Prize for 2026 enjoyed the envy of their peers. But since their works of fiction earned this distinction, these authors have found themselves facing harsh scrutiny from the literary community, with several accused of enlisting generative artificial intelligence to write for them.

The allegations have come from numerous readers, many of them writers themselves, expressing bafflement and dismay that the prize jury could have overlooked potential signs of inauthentic authorship.

Source: Wired

Silicon Valley Wants to Put a Chip in Your Brain

There will come a time, in the not-so-distant future, when you decide to stick a computer chip in your brain.

At least, that’s what D. Scott Phoenix told the audience at TED 2026 in Vancouver last month.

“Someone you work with will get it first. And you’ll hold out for a while, the way you did with the smartphone. But eventually, you won’t,” said Phoenix, dressed in all black with a tiny mic attached to his ear. “The advantages of integration will be hard to compete with.”

Put bluntly, in his view, “We’re on the cusp of the next major transition, the merger of humans and AI.”

Source: Politico

Almost half of everything orbiting Earth is space junk

Nearly half of all known objects currently orbiting Earth technically classify as space junk, but the true amount may be even higher. Not only that, the debris continues amassing faster than it’s being removed.

The latest red alert report comes from the engineering components company, Accu, and is based on information compiled from the U.S. Space Surveillance Network and its Space-Track database. According to their assessment, there are at least 12,550 tracked orbital debris fragments circling the planet “with no control or purpose.” That’s around 47 percent of the 33,269 known objects, which includes almost 17,690 satellites. But with many of those satellites now inactive along with nearly 2,400 jettisoned rocket bodies, the total space junk is likely worse than the current numbers suggest.

Source: Popular Science

Ned Mudd resides in Alabama where he engages in interspecies communication, rock collecting, and frequent cloud watching. He is the author of The Adventures of Dink and DVD (a space age comedy). Some of Ned’s best friends are raccoons.

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I’m sorry, Alex. I wish I could remember more. 

I remember hearing your name. I’d nearly forgotten you, so much time had passed. I was fifteen, sitting alone in the empty break room at my father’s therapy practice while he finished with a client. The local news was playing on the television across from me, but I wasn’t watching. I held a schoolbook open on my lap, preparing for a test; backpack open on the couch next to me, papers and other books spilling out. I was reading from the book and taking notes in a spiral-bound notebook. I wasn’t conscious of listening to the news at all. 

The voices of the two local news anchors were a familiar patter in the background. The lilt at the end of a sentence. Their light laughter, then a pause and segue into the next story. They were only noise to me until they said your name. I looked up at the screen and listened to the segment. It was a half-minute, at most. Then I closed the book in my lap and sat silently. I was fifteen. Which means you were fifteen too, Alex. 

How old were you when I knew you? Were we seven that summer? Maybe younger. We were still in that haze of early childhood, and you were only around for one season. That’s why I don’t remember you very well. If you had been in school with me, I would remember more. I made all my real friendships at school. The girls who were fixtures at the sleepovers and birthday parties. We ran out the school doors at the end of each day, and down the sidewalks, (racing full speed for blocks without touching a crack in the concrete) to their living rooms, and ate sloppy peanut butter sandwiches and watched Saved by the Bell together. When I say “my childhood friends,” I mean those girls. They lived in town. 

But you were a forest friend. A summer friend. 

None of us who lived in the forest knew each other during the school year. We might brush past each other in the hallways, but we weren’t in the same grades or the same classes. We might smile at each other or not. It didn’t matter. That was the school year, and even after school or on weekends, I was with my school friends. Only in the summer did the forest friends matter, those long weeks when all the parents drove down the hill for work and left us behind with hours of empty sunny daylight and nothing in particular to do. That’s when we found each other. 

One summer, I was the fourth sister in the Golden family. All three of the Golden girls were darkly tanned and skinny in swim tops and shorts, running up the gravel road barefoot to my house. Then, another summer, a new girl suddenly lived in the cabin next door, with big eyes and a bright red ponytail. Her family was renting it for the season. She and I discovered the acre of rusted-out cars behind our conjoined properties. We sat in her hammock and rocked back and forth. At the end of the summer, her family had a garage sale, where I bought two Diet Coke glasses for fifty cents, and they left. That’s all I remember of her. Not a name. A hammock, the Diet Coke glasses, the rusted and half-buried cars. A summer friend. 

I don’t know how old we were back then, Alex, because time meant nothing in the summer. No one looked at a clock. Our parents were out in the world somewhere and no one took any photos. 

I know you came in the spring. You came with the tulips and the thick plop plop of snow melting off the trees, right around the time of my birthday. I was introduced to you, standing behind my father’s legs at your doorway. 

My father seemed to know you already, though no one explained why. He had walked me down to the red house to meet you. Your mother, blonde and nervous, was thanking him for something as we stood there. You were next to her, silent, with a matching blond nest of hair. Dad brought me home and told me to be kind to you. 

On the first day of May, I ran down the gravel road in my school clothes and dropped a May Day basket on your porch. But I didn’t know you then. Not yet. 

Early that summer, a little kitten arrived. He wandered out from the trees one day into my front yard. I never understood back then why sometimes in the spring a kitten or two would walk sleepily out of the forest. Or why one would suddenly be curled in a corner of the garage, eyeing us warily as we walked to the car. Those kittens were like tiny gifts from the forest. The forest, which was both known to me and unknown. I knew my trails, my places, but all around me the wide dark, leafy world spread out in all directions. I looked out from my bluff and thought I saw palm trees out in the distance. So, wherever the kittens came from, I embraced them.  

The kitten was orange with white stripes. Healthy. Friendly. He walked right up to me and let me hold him. When my mom was home from work, I asked her if kittens drank milk and she looked it up somewhere and told me that kittens could drink condensed milk. So, that summer, whenever the kitten appeared, I poured condensed milk into a baby bottle and held the kitten in my arms and fed him. I would go out in the mornings and watch for my little orange kitten to appear out of the woods. And, for weeks, he did. He would let me feed him and pet him and talk to him for a while. And then, at some point, he would demand to be set down and then I wouldn’t see him again until the next day. He seemed to have other appointments, so I let him come and go. 

I didn’t want to be friends with you, Alex. I had enough to do, waiting each day for the kitten and reading my sister’s Cosmopolitan magazines. And who were you? Just an unfamiliar boy down the hill. But I was told to spend the day with you, so I did. I walked down to your house and sat on your living room carpet with you as you pushed some cars around. I talked to your mom. She sat at the table and stared out the window at the trees. While we played with your toys, she asked me a string of questions. She didn’t pause for the answers. She smoked one cigarette and then another.

After a while, you wanted to go outside. Or, who knows, maybe it was my idea. Either way, I carried a few of the cars with me. We sat under some trees and pushed them around in the dirt and you talked. I couldn’t follow what you were talking about. Something that you had seen with your stepdad once, a long time ago. Or some car, which was way cooler than these little cars. I just looked at the ground and kept pushing my fingers into the dirt. 

We played with the cars and we walked under the trees. I broke into your monologue to explain to you about the witches that lived in the forest, and how to leave little gifts for them, but you couldn’t seem to understand what I was saying either. You were hearing another story altogether and you kept spinning it, adding action scenes and big dramatic flourishes, long after I was done talking about the witches. I decided this was almost like a conversation, so it was okay. And when you asked me if I knew what a Charlie Horse was, and I said no, and you gave me one, I fell back with tears in my eyes, but I forgave you. You seemed sorry. It was summer, and I had agreed somehow, without knowing, to be your friend. 

Every few days, I would walk down to visit. And each time I left feeling confused and upset. I never wanted to come back to you. Little blond boy-creature with all your energy and fast words. I didn’t understand anything about you. One day, I brought my flying doll over to your house, thinking you might like it. The doll sat on a holster full of thread. When I pulled the thread, she spun and flew. Sometimes she traveled a few feet away before falling down to the carpet. I showed her to you, and pulled the thread so she would fly. But you kept talking about some TV show you’d seen. I put her back on her pedestal and pulled the string faster, trying to make her flight more impressive. You stood up suddenly. She flew above your head and you jumped up and thwacked her so that she ricocheted hard into the wall. 

“No!” I yelled and ran over to check her wings. I looked at you, confused. “You’ll break it,” I said. I had broken things myself, out of clumsiness or misunderstanding. I could understand mistakes. But I didn’t understand you. You stood there, embarrassed, while I carefully packed the doll away into a bag. You were quiet while I left. 

It was the summer of 1994. I just looked it up a moment ago. I remembered it was the year the Jim Carrey movie came out. You remember? The Mask. Your mom rented the tape, and you and I watched in your basement. We sat awkwardly next to each other through the closing scene, while Jim Carrey and Cameron Diaz kissed each other beside the water. 

“We could do that,” you said quietly, as the credits rolled over the scene.  

We looked at each other warily for a moment. “Ok,” I agreed. And we went into your bedroom and lay down on your bed next to each other. 

We lay there silently for a few minutes, not touching. I waited and waited, and then I daydreamed about Jim Carrey; I wondered what it would be like to be kissed someday, and I wished wholeheartedly that I could start living my grown-up life already. Finally, after I had begun to think you were asleep, you sat up and said you were hungry. And that was it. We got up and I trailed after you up the stairs to the kitchen, not wanting to seem disappointed. I knew you weren’t capable of kissing me, not the way people kissed in the movies. But I had been expecting something. I couldn’t understand how you could forget so quickly. 

I don’t want to believe that a child can be doomed. But already something was very wrong. One day, while we were playing, you told me that you had been in my dad’s office—you and your mom. That your mom talked to my dad for a while. Then the two of you had talked to him about your stepdad and you didn’t understand why. You told me your stepdad had been mean to your mom, but that he was really sorry about it now, and you wished you could see him. I listened, nodding, and didn’t say anything.

I knew, even as a little kid, that people go to therapists for all sorts of reasons, and that it wasn’t a bad thing. But I looked at your face while you were talking—you were looking down, pushing a plastic truck across the carpet—and I thought to myself, I see it. The something wrong. It was inside you. You weren’t a bad kid, Alex. Or you didn’t mean to be. But something was wrong inside your face, inside your body, so that you couldn’t help yourself from flailing out and hurting things. And I felt so sorry about it. Even when you twisted my arm, or you kicked your toys down the stairs. I knew you didn’t want to be bad. If I’m honest, it’s why I kept coming back. I thought I was helping. 

And it’s ridiculous, because I barely knew you, but now I feel like I have met you multiple times in my life. A few different men. Even women, one or two, whose anger broke everything fragile around them. I’ve made the mistake of offering them things that are delicate, things of mine, thinking it would help their anger. I turned my thoughts into words and gave my words to them, only to see my words get twisted and wrung out until they had no meaning; I’ve lost things I loved that way. In some rooms, with some people, it’s dangerous to give anything at all, and I’ve learned now to keep the things I cherish most to myself. But I hadn’t learned that yet when I knew you. 

I’ve met enough boys who break things to know that some are truly cruel and others are just spinning out of control. I will never understand it, wherever the anger comes from. And I don’t want to put myself in its path again. But I do know that you didn’t mean to cause the pain you caused. I could tell afterwards, when the anger left you and you saw what you had done. 

I only wish I had never brought the kitten to you. I carried him with me one day, near the end of the summer. He had wandered back into my yard, and I wanted to show him to you, so I held him in my arms like a doll, feeling stupidly happy. Unthinkingly happy. I brought him down the hill to meet you. And you were so delighted with him! Petting him and counting his stripes, watching him stretch and explore your mother’s living room. It was such a good day until it wasn’t. 

Your mom pulled you into her bedroom to talk about something, I didn’t know what, and when you came out your face was red and tear-streaked. The kitten and I were on the floor in the kitchen. I saw you look at him. Why did your face look like that? You walked across the floor and picked him up. I reached out. “No. No, Alex.” And then, like it was nothing, you threw him across the room. 

A loud scream. Mine. I ran across to my little kitten, who had landed in a skitter on the tile floor. I picked him up and touched each of his legs. I looked him over, petting the fur along his legs, and touched his head, and tucked him against my chest and cried. He was okay. He was okay, thank God. But I wasn’t. I looked at you and saw blue eyes bright and terrified and confused staring back at me. 

Were we only six years old? I saw where your rage had been, the pink on your cheeks, sweat on your forehead. And now it was gone; a bewildered little boy standing on the kitchen tile. 

Your mother came out of her bedroom into that scene, the two of us on either side of the kitchen. I held the kitten tightly against my chest. She stared at us for a half-second, then said, “Kids, I’m so sorry. But I need you to go to the basement now.”

The basement? I stared at her. I wanted to go home.

But she was already pressing her hands at our backs, pushing us toward the steps. 

“Just for a little while. I need you to stay in Alex’s room. Okay? I called your dad, Tonya, and he’s on his way, but he won’t be here for a few minutes.” 

She followed us into your room and showed me the doorknob, turning the lock. “This is locked.” Turning it back. “This is unlocked.” She locked it again and said, “Do not open this door.” I looked up at her solemnly. “Don’t open it, okay? Not until Tony is here.” My dad’s name. 

I understood that this was something serious. I nodded. Next to me, you had your mouth screwed shut. There were tears rolling down your face. 

Your mom left, pulling the locked door behind her. I sat on the floor with the kitten and watched the door, afraid of what might try to get in. 

“It’s my stepdad,” you said. You were lying on the bed. “He found out where we are and she doesn’t want him to see us.” 

I watched the door.

“He only wants to see us,” you said quietly to yourself. 

I waited. I kept the kitten in my lap, petting him and murmuring to him. I pretended you weren’t there. After a while, probably fifteen or twenty minutes, I heard a door opening upstairs. Then, a moment later, my father’s voice. I jumped up. 

Only now, nearly thirty years later, do I realize how that must have been for you, when my father came down the steps to your bedroom door and I unlocked it and raced into his arms. “Daddy! Daddy! Can we go now?” And I ran ahead of him up the stairs to his car outside, so that I could go back to my safe, warm home. 

Now I realize, you didn’t get to leave. 

That was the last time I saw you. I told my Dad I didn’t want to spend any more time at your house, and he was happy for me to stay away. He wouldn’t tell me what happened that day. He only told me that you and your mom were in danger, and that you would probably be leaving the forest soon. It had seemed like a safe place, all the way up the canyon, tucked away in the trees. But it wasn’t safe enough. 

When I thought of you, over the next nine years, all I thought of was the kitten flying across the kitchen. You introduced me to something new that day. A new kind of fear that has never healed. A fear that has only deepened with time. What if I am surrounded by monsters who don’t look like monsters? What if I fail to protect the ones I love, and I deliver them into the hands of monsters? I am not big enough to protect everyone. I am not even big enough to protect myself. 

The next time I heard your name, I was fifteen and the local news reporters were announcing that you were dead. 

I sat staring at the television as the news went to a commercial break. When I looked down, I closed the book on my lap. I put it away with my notebooks and pencils, and I waited on the couch silently until my dad came into the room. 

“Do you remember a little boy named Alex?” I asked him. “He lived down the hill one summer? Him and his mom?”

He repeated your name, then your last name. I nodded. 

“They just announced on the news—it was just a minute ago,” I said. “He died this weekend in a motocross accident.” 

There had been a little image of a motocross rider in a square on the screen while they read the story. I don’t know if it was a photo of you. Probably it wasn’t.  

Dad walked to the couch and sat with me. I knew he was thinking of your mom. Somewhere in his office was a file folder with her name on it, and yours. I pictured her, the way she had looked when we were kids. Short blonde hair, a red sweater and a cigarette. Now she was in a room somewhere and she had lost her little boy.

I don’t like to believe a child can be doomed, but it feels like you were. Nothing ever went right for you. Not a thing, from the day you were born to the day you died. I don’t want to believe that the universe creates a life only to torture it into its grave. I don’t want to believe that the universe itself can be the monster. But when I think of you, I’m not sure. 

If I had known you at fifteen, I wouldn’t have been friends with you. I was afraid of you at six years old, and I would’ve been more afraid of you at fifteen. 

As for now… I am thirty-five now. It’s my birthday today, and for some reason I thought of you. Maybe because you will never get to be thirty-five. Maybe because it would have taken a miracle to get you to this age, even if you had survived that motocross accident. It’s raining outside and I can hear the wet sound of cars in the rain-filled streets. I can hear thunder. I am so conscious of everything that time has given me. I wish you had been given more time.

I’ve known other men who started the way you did. Your chances weren’t great. But I can’t really say what you would have become. You were good at heart, Alex. I believed in it. And I wish you could’ve had the option, even if you never took it, of having a good life. I wish you could have seen some of the things I’ve been allowed to see.

Living is an act of repair. I can feel it all around me. Everyone I know is scarred by something. We’ve all met the world’s monsters. We’ve met them in others, and we meet them daily in ourselves. But still, I feel the world continuing to weave itself forward. Time is reaching for the thread ends, around the scarred places, and it keeps weaving. I wish you could feel this. Each morning, just by brushing my teeth and putting on my clothes and walking out into the world, I am collaborating with time. 

Someone must have eulogized you when you died, but it wasn’t me. All I can say about you, summer friend, is that your life wasn’t fair. And when I think of you, I wonder why time repairs some things and why it leaves others broken. You were left broken on a dirt trail at fifteen years old. You lived and died at a loose end of the thread. It never resolved into anything. And, knowing that, all I can think is that life comes down to luck. That gifts are given without reason and taken without reason. All I can think is that time doesn’t care about fairness, only about movement. 

Would time have done its work on you? Maybe it already has, somewhere, in some way I can’t understand. I don’t understand anything about the universe, Alex, or where it will take any of us. I don’t understand time. All I know is I want more.  

Note: this piece was first published in May, 2023.

Tonya Morton is, among other things, the publisher of Juke.

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The Triumph of the Machine

by D. H. Lawrence

They talk of the triumph of the machine,
but the machine will never triumph.

Out of the thousands and thousands of centuries of man
the unrolling of ferns, white tongues of the acanthus lapping at the sun,
for one sad century
machines have triumphed, rolled us hither and thither,
shaking the lark’s nest till the eggs have broken.

Shaken the marshes, till the geese have gone
and the wild swans flown away singing the swan-song at us.

Hard, hard on the earth the machines are rolling,
but through some hearts they will never roll.

The lark nests in his heart
and the white swan swims in the marshes of his loins,
and through the wide prairies of his breast a young bull herds his cows,
lambs frisk among the daisies of his brain.

And at last
all these creatures that cannot die, driven back
into the uttermost corners of the soul,
will send up the wild cry of despair.

The thrilling lark in a wild despair will trill down arrows from the sky,
the swan will beat the waters in rage, white rage of an enraged swan,
even the lambs will stretch forth their necks like serpents,
like snakes of hate, against the man in the machine:
even the shaking white poplar will dazzle like splinters of glass against him.

And against this inward revolt of the native creatures of the soul
mechanical man, in triumph seated upon the seat of his machine
will be powerless, for no engine can reach into the marshes and depths of a man.

So mechanical man in triumph seated upon the seat of his machine
will be driven mad from within himself, and sightless, and on that day
the machines will turn to run into one another
traffic will tangle up in a long-drawn-out crash of collision
and engines will rush at the solid houses, the edifice of our life
will rock in the shock of the mad machine, and the house will come down.

Then, far beyond the ruin, in the far, in the ultimate, remote places
the swan will lift up again his flattened, smitten head
and look round, and rise, and on the great vaults of his wings
will sweep round and up to greet the sun with a silky glitter of a new day
and the lark will follow trilling, angerless again,
and the lambs will bite off the heads of the daisies for very friskiness.
But over the middle of the earth will be the smoky ruin of iron
the triumph of the machine.

DEAD WOOD selections are excerpts from the years before ideas became “content”. Some are serious and thought-provoking. Some are ludicrous or silly. Some are chosen just because they strike me as particularly interesting.

If you have an excerpt of “Dead Wood” you’d like to suggest, email Juke at tonyajuke@gmail.com

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Il Dolce Far Niente

Four Italian words. The sweetness comes first. Before the doing. Before the nothing. That order is not accidental — it is the whole argument, compressed into a grammar.

The translation most people know is the sweetness of doing nothing. Close enough, and yet not close enough. Niente is nothing, yes. But the phrase does not defend vacancy. It names a pleasure. There is a difference, and it is not a small difference. While often viewed as a lifestyle ideal in English-speaking cultures, it is a common sentiment in Italian culture. It is a philosophy of life.

I have been americanized. Not as complaint, not as irony or accusation but as fact. It happened the way light changes in a room: gradually and then all at once. By the time you notice, you cannot say exactly when the sun went. The morning arrives with a list already nailed to its door. The obligation disguised as opportunity. The opportunity degraded into duty. A man can spend a whole day in motion and never once arrive. He lies down tired and calls that proof. It is not proof. It is only fatigue wearing the mask.

The Italians have a phrase for that condition. Not for the fatigue — the American creed has many words for fatigue and honors them all. They have a phrase for its refusal. Not a cure. Nothing so dramatic. A chair in the shade. A coffee taken without hurry. A walk with no transaction at the end of it. A conversation that does not need a thesis. The sea, when there is sea. A window, when there is not.

What the phrase is not: laziness. Italian has a word for that — pigrizia. This is something else, what the old texts call stato di beata inerzia, a state of blissful inertia. The difference is the width of a hair and the weight of a stone.

And yet the old prosecutor steps into the room soon enough. Are you resting, or hiding? Is this philosophy, or a noble veil thrown over plain human reluctance?

These are not foolish questions. They are the necessary ones. Any honest account of idleness must pass through them. Yes, sometimes a person hides laziness inside beautiful language. A person who cannot face the page, the bill, the hard talk, can sit in a handsome courtyard and call his retreat wisdom. If he never returns, all the Italian in the world will not save him. That is not a philosophy. It is avoidance with better upholstery.

But the prosecutor is not the final authority.

The Romans knew this. Two thousand years before the phrase existed in Italian, they had the concept formalized in Latin: otium. Not vacation. Not idleness. But cultivated leisure, understood as the other half of a complete life. Cicero wrote about it. Seneca wrote about it. Pliny the Younger retreated to his villa by the sea and wrote letters about what the afternoon light did to the water, and called that a form of labor. Otium and negotium — leisure and business — were not opposites in Roman thought. They were paired obligations. You owed both to yourself. A life given entirely to work was not considered virtuous. It was considered diminished.

That is the lineage. Il dolce far niente did not emerge from mere temperament. It was built, consciously, over centuries, into the Roman understanding of what a fully human life required. Italy did not stumble onto this. Italy theorized it, in Latin, before the Italian language existed.

Nor is the land incidental. Southern Italy in summer teaches the body something it cannot unlearn. The afternoon heat is not metaphor — it is a physical fact that determined when people worked, when they ate, when they spoke, and when they stopped. The passeggiata, was not invented for charm. It emerged from a Mediterranean climate that made evening the natural hour for human community. The Roman villas were sited by lakes and sea not for aesthetics alone but because the body required it. Geography shaped practice. Practice became habit. Habit became philosophy. Philosophy compressed into a phrase.

This is not the story of a culture smarter than its neighbors. It is the story of a people who lived in a place that forced an honest confrontation with what the body actually needs — and who had the discipline to build a language for what they learned.

And there is one piece of this history the postcard version omits entirely. When the phrase first appears in English writing, in 1814, it is observed among the Neapolitan lazzaroni — the laboring poor of Naples. Not the aristocracy. Not the leisure class. From the people with almost nothing.

That changes the moral weight of the whole thing. The philosophy did not originate from abundance. It was forged by a class that had mastered the art of inhabiting time fully in the gap between work and want. People with the least taught the world something about how to live. That is not a charming Italian postcard. Rather it is a harder, more serious claim — one the essay version of this subject rarely makes because it is uncomfortable. It says that what we are calling wisdom grew out of scarcity rather than ease. That the lazzaroni did not simply fail to be productive. They refused, on some ground what the body understood before the mind named it, to let the hours that remained to them be converted into proof of something.

Roseto, Pennsylvania, a community founded almost exclusively of southern Italian immigrants, was studied in the 1960s and found to have strikingly lower rates of heart disease than the surrounding American towns — lower than diet or genetics or exercise could explain. Researchers eventually concluded that the difference was the life itself: the dense communal structure, the unhurried interaction, the uneconomized hours. The neighbors on the stoops. The children and the old people included rather than managed. The meals taken long. They called it the Roseto Effect. Then the next generation assimilated more fully, and the rates climbed to match everyone else’s.

Nor is this an isolated finding. Sardinia carries the same testimony at a larger scale. Designated as one of the world’s Blue Zones — places where people, centenarians, live full active lives measurably longer, not in spite of the pace but because of it. The 108-year-old whom I met at a trattoria, Roberto, had walked there from his home. After a brief conversation with him, he got up to dance. Not because of a particular diet or a genetic advantage, though researchers looked for both. Because of how time moves there. Because the afternoon is not colonized. Because rest is not shameful and the evening belongs to the street and the neighbor and the cooling air. The science arrived late to a conclusion the lazzaroni of Naples already held in their bodies two centuries before.

That is not anecdote. That is the argument with a body count.

I know the other life. The American in me has lived it. I became the man at breakfast already gone from the room, though my body remained. Thumb moving across the glass of my phone. The child talking to me from somewhere below the level of my concern. The coffee consumed but never tasted. The morning vanished into preparation for the day, and the day vanished into preparation for tomorrow. I called myself responsible. Often I was. But responsibility without inhabitation becomes another form of absence. One may provide for a life one has not actually lived.

The black and white gods of the productivity creed: output, efficiency, optimization. These gods make sharp demands and reward visibility. Under that regime even rest becomes instrumental. One sleeps in order to perform. One takes a walk to increase clarity, not to feel the wind. Every pause is pressed into service or dismissed. The culture knows how to count hours. It does not know how to value them except in dollars.

You people never get anything done. I have heard it. I smiled and let it pass. Certain words are beneath the argument.

But if one stays. If one does not flee the quiet. Something changes. Attention, at first thin and irritated, deepens. The world, which had been used as backdrop, moves forward into substance. A glass is not a glass but light held briefly in shape. Bread is crust, warmth, the tear of it. A street is voices, laundry, footsteps, one dog barking behind a gate. The self, released from its constant proving, takes the size of its actual body.

This is what the phrase protects. Not sleep. Not vacancy. Presence. Il dolce far niente protects presence.

Stillness removes the anesthesia. The mind begins to hear its own machinery. Its hunger. Its fear. Its old unfinished business. The time we have left. No wonder people call this laziness. Laziness sounds lighter than confrontation.

The test is return. After the sweetness, do you go back? After the pause, are you more present to the people and duties that claim you? Has the nothing sharpened your life or blurred it? These are stern questions and they should be because a philosophy that makes no demands is only decoration.

Laziness says: I will not. Dolce far niente says: not now — not in flight, but in order to come back whole. One hollows the day. The other deepens it.

Human beings were not made only to produce, to answer, to optimize, to fill. We were also made to witness. To taste. To lean back a little. To let the hour, now and then, belong to itself.

The coffee on the table. The light on the wall. The sea, if the sea is there.

Then back to work. But not before because life is not a hallway between rooms. Life is the room.

Luciano Conte, born in Formia, Italy, roots himself in tactile arts like film photography, painting, bread baking, and house building. He writes in order to probe those persistent, buried forces that shape us from beneath the surface. For him, silence is not absence but presence: a pause that resonates the loudest, like the pause in a conversation that carries more weight than words. He speaks his lines aloud while writing, tying rhythm to breath, making language a living, physical act where sound and sense fuse, just as photography captures light and shadow. He urges readers to read his work aloud to unlock layers that silent reading misses, letting the cadence shape the experience in the same way as kneading dough or laying foundation stones, where each gesture is deliberate and consequential.

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Colibris (Hummingbirds)

this season is a splintering 
     hinge
 where winter’s 
          white-knuckled ghost 
     refuses the 
                amnesty of May

on the asphalt 
     a fallen raven lies
          its skull a 
hollow 
     where light used to 
          dance
eyes 
          stolen by the wind’s 
                    sharp hunger

the cattails stand in 
     a shivering choir 
          stubborn in their mourning 
     brown
 a velvet funeral 
          procession wading hip-deep 
     into the reckless 
          green

we press our palms 
      against a bruised sky 
           gathering the 
               wreckage of 
          a collapsing sun

dare we call it 
     sacrament? 
this feverish
         starving peace, 
     found in the teeth 
          of the storm’s 
                        mercy

history books 
     char and curl; 
          we busy ourselves
weaving 
     garlands from 
           rusting wire 
     gathering the nectar of 
          a radiant 
               expiring world

we step over the 
     blind bird
 humming 
          a jagged lullaby
     climbing the silver 
          ribs of ruin 
               to watch the 
                   first impossible 
                            violet bloom

You can read more of Sean’s poetry on Arise !

Check it out here:

Arise

your own light undiminished by their darkness

By Sean Downing

And discover his cowboy poetry on Bite the Bullet, here:

Bite The Bullet: Cowboy Poems by Sean Downing

Sean Downing's Cowboy Poems

Sean Downing, poet, musician, teaches high school English and Theater Arts in Pagosa Springs, Colorado. He can often be found in his woodshop, coaxing music from odd scraps of junk, or haunting the trout streams around southwest Colorado. If you see him, don’t tell anyone: they’re probably looking to get an honest day’s work out of him.

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Was it yesterday afternoon that the snow arrived and dashed the world mere days after we believed it was spring? There had been reports that the hestehov were in bloom and from the house, from the living room, from the large window in the living room, he looked outside and saw where the strait narrowed into a gap between the south shore of island and the north shore of the mainland, and it was in this gap where the tides were strongest, right there, right where he looked every day and he could see the location where boys, dogs, clumsy old fishermen, and distraught women disappeared beneath the sea, drowned, as it were, by grief or accidents, though this morning as he looked, the clouds were dense enough that he could stare at the sun without hurting his eyes, for the sun appeared pale blue behind the clouds and seemed to be floating closer to the earth and closer to where the strait narrowed between the island and the mainland, and it was here that the sea became a river or what could have been a river, a river in which thousands of salmon migrated to and from their homewaters to the sea and back again, and he could see the salmon leaping, leaping so high and arched that for a moment less than a moment sunlight pooled beneath their silver bodies as they re-entered the water with a sound less than a whisper, and he could see schools of salmon beneath the surface of the sea, thousands of them swimming towards their native beds and spanning pools, and some of them, the oldest and most magical among them swam in the corridors of ancient rivers, and all of them swam towards the rivers of their birth, and it was morning and this was the view from the large window in the living room, from the slim recliner where he sat, placed between the coffee table and the floor lamp in the corner

The coffee was cold, though he drank it, and it did not taste good—nothing tasted good, which was a fact of his condition, a minor fact among the other conditions that he could not control, but he went on staring at the sea that was now a river, and when he stared he sometimes picked at the scabs behind his ear and on his neck, though he thought of his heart, of his heart of hearts that had been compromised by new wounds, new scars, and he picked at those, too, at those wounds with consequences as specific as some cancers, considering how they might metastasize or where in the body they could spread or whether they had touched the nerves or bones, yet the wounds of the heart hold fewer certainties than most cancers, given all the whys and hows and questions about what could have been or should have been shifting in his heart, shifting within the registers of memory or pain or some glimmer of disillusionment of what might have been or what might have been the truth until the heart decides with pathetic confidence that what was will never be again, that the vast ocean of a lover who once waited at the center of a heart will never eclipse the secret intimacies of a river, and he leaned forward from the recliner and took up the coffee cup and sipped the cold coffee and it tasted bitter enough to waste, bitter enough to pour down the sink simply and easily and with hardly a thought, but instead he set the cup back on the table, willing to drink the rest, willing to drink it cold

In the same strait between the island and the mainland and not many years before the work of cancer and the work of his heart he had caught a large halibut while fishing from a small boat, this on an early morning when he let his line and lure sink and sink and sink into the frigid water, the line nearly deep enough to snag the bottom of the sea, and he waited as his friend steered the boat and he fished and dreamed of fishing and dreamed of a day in the future when he would dream of himself and his friend in this very boat on this very day in this very sea fishing, but then a fish took the lure and he knew it was a big fish since he could feel the strength of the fish pulling against the line and the pole and his hands, pulling at his heart that beat harder as he felt the power of the fish and he pulled and pulled and the fish pulled and he ground his teeth as they pulled against each other, while his friend shouted instructions to be calm, be patient, fight the fish steadily, chastising his antics and the fierceness he used to fight the fish which could cause him to lose it, but he did not listen and he reeled the fish up from the bottom of the sea with strength and skill and he decided to kill it, though in the end maybe both of them killed the fish, because it was his friend who gaffed the halibut and heaved it into the boat and they both stood by as the fish struggled, flopped and thrashed and sprayed them with saltwater and slings of blood from the wound in its head where the gaff had struck, and he felt that he had won the battle, he had won, the great fish was dead and filthy in the bottom of the small boat, and yet it also saddened him, for the halibut was old and strong and should have lived a longer life, but he did not say anything, he did not say anything to his friend, with age and some wounds he had learned to say less and less, for it was too much anymore to give away parts of the self when less and less had been given or when to say anything might risk another wound, another dismissal, another criticism that his life came at the expense of other lives and yet he, damn him, would justify the expense, which is to say he would justify his life, so what was there to say, though the stories did not end nor did the big fish nor the remote waters or other trips in other boats or afternoon trips to the city only to see the windows at dusk and trips to other cities he never told anyone about, not about the trips, not about the cities, not about the things he saw there or how those places made him feel, and over time he took them away, he took away the stories, he took away his voice, he took away his words and the old reverence for words both tender and closer to himself, uttered in some long ago, and this silence, his silence came at a cost

He drank the last of the cold coffee and decided not to brew a second pot, for the morning was changing and the sun had become the sun again and he could not stare at it anymore and the mystery of the pale blue sun was already stored in his memory and perhaps he would find it later and it would warm him when he did, and with the change there were more birds flying over the sea and some of them flew close to the water and some of them hunted along the shore, the seagulls, the ravens, the jackdaws, and the sudden white flocks of snøtitting that had arrived early this year, earlier than the cuckoos that would claim the birch forest across the road, and when he could walk into the forest or into the hills, he would listen for the cuckoos and he hoped he would hear one and afterwards scribble a note in his journal about their return as people had done for centuries, and he would do just that, just that, a promise to himself, that when the day came and he was well enough to go outside and listen for the bird and hear its call, he would scribble a note to honor this small wonder in a world of what seemed like and was in fact one of fewer and fewer returns, yet today was Sunday, the day when the heart is most vulnerable to absence, vulnerable to love, both love sustained and love abandoned, vulnerable to regrets, and tomorrow was Monday and the treatments would start again and he sat forward in his chair and glanced outside and saw that the sea had become the sea, though perhaps the schools of salmon still passed in darkness through those channels where they could not be caught, then he stood up and wrapped his neck in a scarf and covered his head with a cap, slowly, deliberately, now at last another rag upon a stick, as sunlight filled the living room and he had covered himself as he had promised someone else he would do, promised to protect the wounds and to protect tomorrow and all the tomorrows he could almost believe in—

Damon Falke is the author of, among other works, The Scent of a Thousand Rains, Now at the Uncertain Hour, By Way of Passing, and Koppmoll (film). He lives in northern Norway.

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Swimming in Cold Water

Deep lake. Up north. Twilight. The temperature has dropped below fifty every night for a week. It is late March and no one is setting foot in the water. Except me, who wades knee deep feeling the bite, and then plunges under for the full exhilarating effect. I am swimming in very cold water. Seeking even icier currents. Far out from shore, rebelling like a child against the dos and don’ts. I ate just twenty minutes ago. I’ve told no one where I was going. My suit hugs my torso and the strap tied around my neck drips down my back. I have always felt more safe in the water than on land. Even in the dark. As it is quickly becoming. Children’s voices trill and echo. A hidden wind chime tinkles on a back porch. Mothers switch on the lights in the houses dotting the shore. Pockets of gold flitter, like ticker tape, in the trees. A large family of crows cawing flies overhead. Silence. I swim farther out, stop to float. The sky fits snuggly, like a darkened dome, on the wide, oval lake. Yes, there are stars. But also trillions of microbes feasting on algae flowing through my loose long hair. I do the doggie paddle. Currents sweep around my ankles as small fish nibble my feet. Below, down and down, six hundred feet or more, the thick mud pulls at the small aircraft that crashed and sank on this very spot, killing its pilot, three years ago. The body was never found. The moon rises, pulling too.

As printed in Ginosko Anthology, 2004.

Constance Christopher’s work has been in Fence, Bomb, Northwest Review, & Ginosko. A novel Dead Man’s Flower was published in the Bogie’s Mystery series. She has published reviews for Publisher’s Weekly and worked in film & television. She is painting a large oil based on Robert Graves’ White Goddess.

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IN the winter of 1897, while her husband slept, Sophia Tolstoy descended to the closet under the staircase at Yasnaya Polyana, the Tolstoy family estate, closed the door, and worked in complete darkness. She was developing photographs. Glass plates, 13 by 18 centimeters, exposed by her own hand. Her diary entry from that period records the guilt she felt about the time she spent — time stolen from her “real” duties, from the manuscript she was copying, from the house she managed, from the children she raised, from the legend she serviced.

Lev Tolstoy had told her that photography was frivolous.

She went back to the closet anyway.

She was assigned to disappear, She chose instead to look.

The Weight of the Camera

BEFORE we get to the photographs — and we must get to the photographs, because they are extraordinary — we need to understand what it cost her to make them. Not financially. The Tolstoys, despite Lev’s fashionable flirtation with poverty, were landed aristocrats. The cost was something harder to account for: time, permission, and the daily negotiation of a woman trying to be an artist inside a life that had not been designed for her art.

Sophia Andreyevna Tolstoy married Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy in 1862…

She was eighteen. He was thirty-four. She would go on to bear thirteen children, manage the Yasnaya Polyana estate, handle all correspondence, negotiate publishing contracts, and hand-copy War and Peace — all one thousand two hundred pages of it — seven times. Seven. By candlelight. Often through the night. When the manuscript changed, she copied it again.They were a creative Power Couple with land serfs and ideas…

THIS is the woman history has given us: the amanuensis.

The helpmate.

The devoted shadow.

And she was all of those things. But in 1885, twenty-three years into the marriage, she picked up a Kodak wooden bellows plate camera — and something shifted.

She had no training. No teacher. No darkroom. She built one under the stairs. She taught herself chemistry and exposure and development by trial and terrible error. Her diary from August 1897 is almost unbearable to read: “I waste my time on unsuccessful photographs... which makes me feel very guilty.” And then, days later, she is back at it. The guilt did not stop her. Nothing stopped her.

She also painted wrote and played music as all girls from her class were taught to do…

She hand-copied War and Peace seven times.

Then she went into the darkrrom under the stairs and developed images…

What She Made

OVER twenty-five years, Sophia Tolstoy made more than one thousand photographs.

This is not a hobbyist’s output.

This is an oeuvre.

SHE photographed Lev with the terrifying intimacy of a woman who had memorized his face across four decades — not the official portraits, not the commissioned icons, but the man at his desk, in the garden, on a horse, growing old. These images do not genuflect. They study. There is a difference, and it is everything.

SHE photographed the estate workers and the peasants, not with the detached anthropological gaze of the era’s fashionable documentary photographers, but with the eye of someone who knew these people’s names. She photographed the apple harvest and the winter light and the way snow settled on the birch trees at dusk. She photographed Moscow balls so precisely you can read the boredom on the guests’ faces. She photographed the famine of 1891 with a directness that predates photojournalism by a generation.

AND she photographed herself. Her self-portraits — staged, composed, formally ambitious — are perhaps the most startling work in the archive. They are not the candid snapshots of a woman amusing herself. They are deliberate constructions, a woman examining her own image with the same unflinching clarity she brought to everything else. Scholar Leah Bendavid-Val has noted that Sophia was “greatly ahead of her time” in this practice. Ahead of her time. In a closet under a staircase. In 1897.

Her self-portraits were not candid snapshots. They were formal constructions — a woman examining herself with the same unflinching clarity she brought to everything else.

The Candy Boxes

WHEN Bendavid-Val began the research that would become her 2007 book, “Song Without Words”: The Photographs and Diaries of Countess Sophia Tolstoy, she found the photographs at the Tolstoy Museum in Moscow stored in candy boxes.

CANDY boxes. Slowly deteriorating. Considered — the museum’s word — of only “minor interest” beside the manuscripts of the great man.

THIS is how female creative work gets lost.

Not through dramatic destruction. Not through fire or flood or deliberate erasure. Through institutional indifference. Through the assumption that what she made could not possibly be as important as what he wrote. Through candy boxes in a storeroom that no one thought to open for a hundred years.

THE 180 images Bendavid-Val reproduced in “Song Without Words” — the first time most of them had ever been seen — revealed a visual archive of staggering range and compositional intelligence. Not the work of a dilettante. Not the charming hobby of a great man’s wife. The work of an artist who had developed, over twenty-five years of stolen hours and closet darkrooms and guilty diary entries, a genuine photographic eye.

BENDAVID-VAL notes that the photographs sweep from fashionable Moscow society to devastating famine, from intimate family portraiture to sweeping landscape — and that across all of it, the compositional instincts are consistent, assured, entirely Sophia’s own. She was not imitating anyone. There was no one to imitate. She was simply looking, and recording what she saw, with a clarity that the century around her did not deserve.

The photographs were found in candy boxes. Slowly deteriorating. Considered of only “minor interest” beside the manuscripts of the great man.

The Smear and the Silver

HISTORY did not treat Sophia Tolstoy kindly, and the reasons are worth naming. Vladimir Chertkov — Lev’s disciple, his self-appointed keeper of the flame — waged a campaign against her in the final years of her husband’s life that was meticulous in its cruelty. He controlled access to Lev. He intercepted correspondence. He worked, systematically and successfully, to position Sophia as the villain of the final act: hysterical, grasping, the obstacle between a saint and his transcendence.

IT worked.

His version of Sophia is the one that passed into the historical record. His caricature is the one most of the world inherited — the shrieking wife, the impossible woman, the reason Lev died fleeing his own home at eighty-two years old, on a train to nowhere, in November cold.

BUT here is what a caricature cannot do: it cannot descend to a closet under a staircase and develop a glass plate in complete darkness. It cannot compose a self-portrait. It cannot spend twenty-five years recording an entire civilization with the eye of someone who loves it and grieves it simultaneously. A caricature is flat. Sophia Tolstoy left behind a thousand images proving she was not.

SHE also — this is the detail that history keeps forgetting — saved his legacy. When Lev renounced his copyright and his property in a gesture of spiritual theater, it was Sophia who retained the publishing rights and used the income to keep the family solvent. She published his collected works. She preserved the estate. She protected the manuscripts he had handed to Chertkov to spite her.

SHE did all of this. And then she went to the closet under the stairs and made her photographs.

There is a Sophia made of Lev in the early 1900s. He is standing in the garden at Yasnaya Polyana, bearded, ancient, enormous in his legend. She is not in the frame. She never put herself in the frame with him — the self-portraits are always solo, always hers alone.

She gave him immortality with the camera. She claimed her own with the same instrument. The man is in the frame. The artist is behind it.

They gave her a closet under the stairs.

She turned it into the most important darkroom in Russian history.

Sofia Tolstoy died in November 1919

The world, had it been paying attention, ought to have wept twice —

once for the woman,

and once for its own spectacular failure to see her.

She had raised thirteen children, photographed thousands of images with the eye of an artist, painted portraits, kept a diary of blistering honesty, sat down by lamplight — by hand, again and again and again, eight times over — to transcribe and edit War and Peace…All the while ran a vast estate with the cool precision of a general, shepherding her family, her home, and everything she had built intact through the full, shattering tumult of Russian history and revolution.

She was not a footnote.

She was not a wife.

She was iron wrapped in silk, and she burned.

Read More from The Magpie Chronicles:

The Magpie Chronicles is written by M Sebastian Araujo from a small house in Groton, Vermont, where the winters are long and the opinions are longer. It is a place for fashion, memory, beauty, the occasional digression, and the firm belief that how one dresses is never merely about clothes.

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The Magpie Chronicles

Where design history meets the thrill of the hunt and the art of home. Exploring antiques, art, and cultural treasures with a magpie's eye for beautiful things and the stories behind them. Former NYC wanderer, now living deep in an old growth forest in a

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Bury the Lede

God shuffles in the dark.
She deals our cards 
by chance, by fire: 
here a daughter, there a son. 
Summer bears another one.
Distant city sirens mingle
with songs of cardinal and Carolina wren. 
A labrador barks 
from one impossible bird to another. 
A bee blossom-bumbles 
from azalea to dogwood, honeysuckle, home.
And this beer: 
so delicious, so brown, so cold. 

My pocket buzzes with headline 
after vicious headline: 

     ICE Agents Flood US Streets
     School Bombed by American Missile
     A Whole Civilization Will Die Tonight
     Epsteins All the Way Down

It is April.
We drive to where blue fireflies ghost 
the Cahaba River at dusk.
Unfazed by the violence of headlights, 
a doe clacks off the asphalt in her own time.
Deep in the woods, darkness becomes a warm bath,
blue diamond flecks glim in knee-high constellations. 

I know the world can be a thief of joy.
I wish quiet comforts for you:
persistent sparkles in your night,
wooded walks to be savored,
a warm cup in your hand
and someone who loves you nearby.

Matt writes…

It seems like almost every single day there is some new horror, trauma, heartbreak buzzing across the screen of my phone. It's on the radio. It's on the television. It's on our computers. I'm not one to bury my head in the sand. I believe in standing up and speaking up, but Lord, I need some quiet, too. I need the sound of the river, the cry of a hawk, the sparkle of a lightning bug in the early evening, and even more than all of those, I need community. I need the comfort of other human beings who are experiencing the now of this world but still take time to notice the way a spider's legs work its web just so. I hope in all of this turmoil, you are able to find some of those moments as well. I hope you have someone who can take your hand in theirs when you most need it. I hope your flowers blossom and bloom and your herbs are plentiful and fragrant. I hope you take the time to have a cup of tea and to write for us what you think of it all.

Poet, librarian, raconteur; Matt Layne has been poking hornet’s nests and looking under rocks for lizards and snakes since he was knee-high to a peanut peg. His debut multimedia poetry collection, Miracle Strip, had been awarded the 2025 Alabama Author Award for Poetry and was named the 2024 Book of the Year by the Alabama State Poetry Society. Order your copy today.

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Note: This whole piece won’t fit into your email inbox! If (when) you get cut off before it ends, please just click over to the website to read the rest. That’s where the comments will be, for one thing. And we’d really love to see you in the comments, where you can give us your own response to the question du jour…

If you’re new here, let me quickly explain: this is how we celebrate the passage of time on Juke. Every three months, I send out a question to anyone who’s contributed (writing, art, etc) to Juke. They send back their responses and I gather them all into one big celebratory post—a smorgasbord.

For today’s smorgasbord, which celebrates our four year anniversary, I sent the question:

How are your skies lately?

The whole point is for everyone to respond however they’d like. They can take the question literally or metaphorically. They can send poems or photos or whatever. They could even make up another question for themselves and answer it instead, though no one’s tried that yet.

Inevitably, when all the replies come in, they join together in a way that’s just wonderful. I hope you agree. And I hope you’ll be inspired to join us in the comments!

I’ll go first…

Tonya Morton:

When I first moved to New York, I wondered if I would miss the skies out west. They were the primary thing I loved about Kansas. Blustery and dramatic, with clouds that dwarfed all the pocket-sized towns below. The blue skies and drifting meringue clouds on a mild summer day. The afternoon storms blowing in across the state line, veined with lightning.

Do I miss those big western skies? Yes. Sometimes. Though I don’t forget how many days in Kansas were cloudless. On those days, the sky was one flat plane of empty that stretched on forever.

And I would miss this sky too. Tonight Paul and I drove the Battery Tunnel to Brooklyn and flew up along the Belt Parkway, overlooking the docks and decaying grain silos, the illegal chicken coops and 24-hour video stores. Beyond the lit windows of all the third-story tenement apartments, the Brooklyn harbor sky was as big and majestic as anything. Blue and humid, with that early evening pale light that makes all the buildings below twinkle and shine.

A good sky is a good sky. Wherever it is, as long as it’s singing some kind of special song. With a corn field underneath, it’s good. It’ll knock your socks off over a wide, muscular river. What matters isn’t so much the sky itself. It’s the head that remembers to look up. Wondrous thing, the sky. How it never fades with age. Never goes out of style. And how you can always find it when you need it, no matter where you are or who you’ve grown to be…

Paul Vlachos:

My skies are foggy these days.
Or sunny, and I can see across
the whole country at once, and
everything sounds clean, I can hear
sidewalk conversations and
the world gets sharp, but after dark
the edges disappear and I just
float around. The humid air smells 
strange, sound becomes a roar
and there is no horizon, but
the shadow moon is still there.
I know that there is a sky, but 
I know it from the outlines.
My skies are strange, so I look
straight ahead, but sneak a look
once in a while to see what’s going on
upstairs. There is only one sky
at any one time and it’s my sky.
The sky is my blanket and stars
guide the way and the moon is
a mirror. At least the birds
have a place to fly, the bees,
too. The heavens make the earth.
I tip my head up a tiny bit,
crick my aching neck and there it is, 
just like closing your eyes to pray.

Damon Falke:

Since January I have been watching the skies through a vertical window. Grey skies mirrored in the sea. Misty skies. Snow filled skies and snow collected on the rooftops. Long skies, what in America they call big sky, extending to islands where I once fished but whose names I cannot remember. Skies across the port and above fjellheisen. Skies at night reflecting the city lights. I was on the 19^th floor after all. Yet for the first time in weeks there are blue skies. Bright blue skies teasing the end of winter or the start of spring. There are skies with cloud formations the locals call makrellskyer. Skies from hillsides. Liquid skies above the petroglyphs of reindeer and fish etched long ago into the stone above the sea. Skies from the island where the German battleship T— was sunk. Three languages—Norwegian, German and English—are carved into the true steel of the battleship. Skies from the field where we stopped to share sunlight, tea and bread. Skies above the mountains across the fjord where people hike to ski. Skies from here on the ground, from the horse pastures, from the flattened hay fields and rows of unplanted gardens and raised beds. Skies above the place where I pressed my palms into thawing soil and stood up and stretched and felt glad that my hands were cold.

Ned Mudd:

things are what they are
and become other 
       things

then turn inward 
swing shift, earth/sky 
old gods taking leave

Tabby Ivy:

Lately the skies over Carlton, OR, are beautiful. On some days white clouds are like big balls of cotton floating in front of a wall of clear cerulean blue. A blue so pure and infinite it seems to sparkle. Other days, especially at sunset, the palette turns to muted pinks and oranges.

It has been a very mild winter here, with more sunny days than usual. I fear the cost of those glorious rain-free and warmer days of December and January will mean hot and smokey days this summer. The inevitable wild fires will come, if not in Oregon, then elsewhere, in California or Canada.

As the crow flies we are less than fifty miles from the Coast, and the proximity to the ocean affects our skies. When we moved to Oregon I told my husband, “it feels like the Coast here”. Must be muscle memory from my California youth near the Pacific Ocean. The air feels and breathes differently here than in land-locked Montana. The prevailing winds from the ocean keep the skies active, as the clouds travel by in ever-changing shapes; the thinner ones disappearing like a whisper, the big bold ones making a distinct statement, taking proud ownership of their place in the sky.

Isn’t it funny how the skies can affect how you find yourself in the world. I once read something about what to do when feeling overwhelmed with life or locked inside your own head. Go outside and look up into the sky - you immediately feel unburdened, your heaviness eases, and you find yourself opening up to the world and to possibilities. I have tried this a few times, and indeed, it does work. When I do this during the day, especially in the morning, I feel lighter as my world opens up. But when I go outside and gaze into the night sky, I feel smaller, more humble in my insignificance as I look in awe at the immense and expanding void above.

Either way, looking into the sky can help us find our way, to possibilities or perhaps to ourselves.

Constance Christopher:

The skies are not mine, except to behold. The future is unclear, except for the fact that death follows birth. The times I am living in are inexplicable. The future will have to be done over. I'm not all right. And, why did we hire a home decorator who never sleeps to do over the executive mansion? I am perplexed, because it merely takes the red light of a camera to go on to add chaos to what is far beyond a teardown. Also, someone pointed out to me that a whole bunch of insane looking video games have the word “Teardown” in their title. What happened, anyone?

Matt Layne:

Okay, so, skies ... a friend of mine told me, years ago, that Gadzooks is a minced oath. What is a minced oath? I asked my friend. It's typically a curse that would have been deemed blasphemous. Said she. Gadzooks is derived from God's hooks meaning the nails in Christ's hands at the crucifiction. Just like zounds is derived from God's wounds. Tarnation, but I miss my brilliant friend, but back to those skies, I suppose I have hurled my fair share of oaths, minced and otherwise, at the skies of late. How so many of my fellow Americans still pledge allegiance to a naked emperor is befuddling (which by the way is not a minced oath, but rather derived from the obsolete word fuddle which meant to confuse, chiefly via alcohol). How so many who self-identify as Christians can continue to prop up a charlatan who masquerades as Christ, Himself, a week after Easter is down-right damnable. I'm not much of a praying man, but God have mercy on our souls.

Kirk Weddle:

Recently, I went way out West, 5 or 6 hours West of San Antonio, to Big Bend National Park. It’s right on the Mexican Border. We stayed in Marathon, population 410, and if that’s too much for you, travel on another hour and hit up Terlingua, population 190. It’s vast and sparse. That’s where you will find the sky. That’s where I found mine.

Rebekah Wilkins-Pepiton:

An early wake up to meet Aarón in town then an hour drive to the trailhead. The first five kilometers climb to the top of a volcanic ridge where the southern half of the island is visible in its entirety. Our host’s advice, “Make sure you wear sunscreen, a hat, and a long sleeve shirt to protect you from the sun…” A promise of limitless sky, a promise of visibility, promises that became shrouded in a permeating fog for the duration of the 20 kilometer trek. As I walked, the clouds moved around me, sometimes limiting visibility to the end of my arm, sometimes loosening to reveal an approaching hiker materializing mere meters away. The fog created a sense of mystery revealing beautiful contrasts in texture and color forcing me to look close. The fog left me with a chill that made my fingers feel like thick sausages. There were no grand views of the sky that day. There was no limitless expanse of sky and water to take in from atop newly formed volcanoes. The sky stayed close. The sky came down to earth.

Charlie Pepiton:

I am in a fog, pleasantly dissociative, hovering somewhere outside the studio where I taught this morning, and still looking in from a more volcanic, subtropical landscape. This is not merely jet lag talking. Rather, the hum is back. In the last few years, I've found when I leave the U.S. it takes two days for it to dissipate but at least a full week to stop hearing it again upon my return. Hum isn't the right word, but what better way is there to describe our national static? An odor, perhaps? A fog? At the time of writing, I am just 20 hours back to Spokane from, let's say, the Fortunate Islands. We were scouting locations for a new film, a story about searching for light and other worthy heartbreaks. The island's sky offers some of the finest stargazing opportunities and solar clarity in the Northern Hemisphere due to its relative humidity and position dangling off the edge of Africa with nothing between its shores and Brazil. Local laws and customs also protect the so-called starlight reserve. Its skies are uncannily active and clear. And there is no hum. I stood still and watched four satellites drift by. All seven of the Seven Sisters looked down.

Sue Cauhape:

We have what is called The Wave along the eastern Sierra Nevada. It’s a capricious current of air the cascades in an undulating pattern down the slope. It can hurl gliders thousands of feet into the atmosphere or plunge aircraft into the earth. Sometimes it drapes boas across the face of the mountain, or creates ethereal wisps that appear and disappear in minutes.

During the summer, it can pull moisture from the soil to form thunderheads that can drop 100 years of rain back to the ground or carry it to the other side of the Great Basin. After the storms, rainbows grace the skies, oftentimes in pairs.

When wildfires billow their debris into the heavens, clouds may bring rain to quench the flames … if we’re lucky. Our clouds can be petulant, stingy with their gifts or over-indulgent with the havoc they release.

Whatever their moods, the skies over Carson Valley remind us that breath-taking beauty can bring abundance or mayhem.

Jodie Meyn:

This is my humble brag that I’ve read the first volume of Proust in March and this quote was my favorite and applicable to your smorgasbord:

“May the sky remain for ever blue for you, my young friend; and even at the hour which is now approaching me, when the woods are dark already, when the night is falling fast, you will console yourself as I do by looking up towards the sky”

Maybe he means to keep your innocent belief in Art ? To hold tight to yourself? Don’t let the man get you down?

It has to be about creating our own circumstances.

I think all of us here strive to live under our own blue sky, the one we’ve made for ourselves.

Anthony Head:

About the sky.

Without a doubt, the color we found most often on the ceilings of Texas’s painted churches was blue. (My buddy Kirk Weddle has much better photos of the ceilings because he took the photos for the book we’re coming out with next year about these beautiful and historic churches. It’s worth the wait.) It’s no coincidence that blue was chosen for the ceilings of these churches, most of which were built between, roughly, 1850-1940; the artists and the local priests and pastors often wished to convey an interior atmosphere during worship services with little if any barrier separating the gathered community with God and the celestial skies.

At St. Paul Lutheran in Serbin, for example, it’s a flat blue color with a bit of stenciling at the edges. In this case, the indigo blue is a very culturally rich color for the Wends or Sorbs who settled the village in the mid-19th century and built this church in 1871.

In Panna Maria, the ceiling of Immaculate Conception of the Blessed Virgin Mary Catholic Church is a soft blue canvas for other ecclesiastic iconography. The painting dates back to the early 20th century while the edifice is from 1878.

In churches like Sts. Cyril and Methodius Catholic Church in Shiner (1921) and Sts. Cyril and Methodius Catholic Church in Dubina (1911) the different artists had similar intentions for showing the gorgeous sky above.

And certainly one of my favorite skies is seen at Ascension of Our Lord Catholic Church in Moravia, built in 1913.

These churches are living churches and Kirk and I are truly grateful to everyone we met at these and all the painted churches of Texas. I’m really looking forward to getting this book out there in 2027. Until then, keep watching the skies!

Fran Gardner:

My skies are full of shadows and reflections. The stark and angled branches of winter trees are softening into a spring of green and pink. The sun, rising and setting, pulls the season forward. Golden light, lowering clouds, all in a single day.
My soul is checkered, varied as the sky. I am not the same person from instant to instant.

Sean Downing:

Postponed Thunder

my skies are
     restless porcelain
          neither cracking
     nor holding

some days
     a violent tenderness
          opens above me
     and I mistake it
          for permission

lately there's been
     a quality of postponed thunder
          the air
     holding its accusation
          between teeth

the clouds move
     with arthritic grace
          going nowhere
     slowly

at dusk
     an unreasonable honey
          bleeds through granite
     lasting just long enough
          to prove
     nothing

my skies are
     patient apocalypse
          carrying their stubborn erasure
     without apology

I used to scan them
     for mercy
          for warning

now I let them be
     what they are—
          indefinite ruin
     beautiful
          in their refusal
     to resolve

the forecast says clearing

but my skies
  subscribe to 
          a different honesty

they teach me
     that some weather
          doesn't pass

it just
     becomes
          the air you learn
     to breathe

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Nothing Was Said

Back when syringes were made of glass,
with needles wide as straws—
their bodies stored in a metal box
swallowing light and memory.
A small vessel, not for relics
but rites unfinished.

Sometimes the latch held silence,
the hush before weather splits—
steam rising, glass fogged,
alcohol rousing and twitching its ghost,
intent on burning flesh.
Mother’s hands did not tremble.
Once gentle—
the hands that parted my hair,
now braid the rite: hold, press,
a hush, fresh as bruised fruit.
The nurse—composed and ordinary—
waits at the bed’s foot, black dress blending
into the window's shape.
Father drifts, a soundless exodus
through the softening door.
The needle drank the flame and drew
pain into syllables no tongue could shape.
Drawn to skin—steel meets hunger—
a verdict passed through blood’s,
each prick ripened by time and memory.

No protest, no plea—
just wakening to silence
carved like winter's mark
deep in bone—
ache moving corridors 
leaving everything unsaid.
Here, warmth rises under skin
where bruise and needle met—
pale arc where skin dimples,
winter-marked in silence.
Nothing was said—
and in this hush
the body learned the lexicon of scars.
Newly minted—
coins of memory
inside the box
that swallowed light.

Luciano Conte, born in Formia, Italy, roots himself in tactile arts like film photography, painting, bread baking, and house building. He writes in order to probe those persistent, buried forces that shape us from beneath the surface. For him, silence is not absence but presence: a pause that resonates the loudest, like the pause in a conversation that carries more weight than words. He speaks his lines aloud while writing, tying rhythm to breath, making language a living, physical act where sound and sense fuse, just as photography captures light and shadow. He urges readers to read his work aloud to unlock layers that silent reading misses, letting the cadence shape the experience in the same way as kneading dough or laying foundation stones, where each gesture is deliberate and consequential.

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Such a glorious thing, when it works. When the body behaves the way it’s meant to. The circadian clock winding down into darkness. The blurring of the words on the page you’re reading. The last misheard words of the conversation you lost track of, because you weren’t there anymore. You were somewhere ahead, mind emptied, following the leaf strewn path into your dreams.

It can be easy to sleep. On days when you’re worn down to the bone. On the day you took up racquetball or swimming again, after years. Or you carried boxes of books up and down the stairs. Or, under a strange ceiling, after you followed your guidebook to exhaustion in some foreign place, trailing for miles behind your appetite until your shoes gave out.

Nights when you’ve come home late after a dinner party or the theater, drowsy from the overstimulation of food and conversation, draping your clothes wherever as you fall into the sweet silence of the bedsheets. Those nights when you are asleep before you even land; when the dimness rushes to you like it’s been in love with you, waiting, this whole time.

Those nights are like promises. Like kisses from the heavens. If only you could catch the rhythm, the trick of it. This was how God intended his children to sleep.

But here I find myself, yet again, at the labyrinth.

I lie awake at midnight, imagining a blue sky. Andy told me to do this. Andy, who is my favorite, with his nice lulling British accent and a slow, precise way of speaking. Of all the voices on the meditation app, Andy is by far the best. He sounds like he hikes on the weekends. And, if he talked about his hiking, he would say “week-end” in that nice, choppy, British way. Andy sounds like he’s read maybe a few too many self-help books, but that makes him more relatable to me, really. He sounds so earnest as he tells me to picture a blue sky and the clouds passing by.

The clouds are my thoughts. This is the key thing I’m learning from him. My thoughts aren’t inside my head. They aren’t digging their fingernails into my brain. They are away from me, in the sky, miles above and harmless. My thoughts are just things that form, Andy says, like clouds form from the water in the air, and then they pass me by.

I don’t like a too-blue sky, though. The empty space behind the clouds. To keep my attention, I begin to furnish the landscape. A green field between myself and the sky. Rows of corn, maybe. A few trees on a hillside, or a road snaking along the horizon. One car in the distance. The car could be a thought passing, just as easily as a cloud could be. It also appears and then it leaves.

Andy never said I needed to fill my sky with these perfect, computer-background-style white and fluffy clouds. He only said clouds. They could just as easily be cirrus clouds, low, gray and thin, my worrying thoughts like clouds of cigarette smoke, with a winter dawn light behind them. Cirrus clouds still pass over, though it’s harder to discern as it happens.

The sky gives me what I need some nights. It takes from me what needs taking on the nights when my thoughts make for good clouds. On other nights, worse nights, the sky flickers out. The air becomes a swarm.

Then, I have more tools.

The word “PILOT,” for instance, begins with ‘P.’ Other words beginning with ‘p’ include “procrastinate, polymorph, pup, pugnacious, pimple, prickly, pompous…”

After ‘p’ comes “i.” Words beginning with an “i” include “insolent, impish, improper, irritating, icky…”

“Limerick, lamplight, lolling, lick, letter…”

“Orangutan…”

But it’s no good to wait for sleep. It steals in from behind the curtain. Unwittingly. Surprising me hours later with the strange numbers on the clock.

I never fell asleep easily, even as a child. I remember sitting awake in the dark. The sound of my teenage sister in the hallway, coming home from her closing shift at Burger King. The murmur of my parents talking in their bedroom, behind their door. And, when they turned off their bedside lamps, the sudden disappearance of a band of orange light on the hall carpet.

When I was very young, it didn’t trouble me to be awake. If anything, it felt powerful to be the only one keeping watch in the house. I had these quiet hours with my books and my dolls. Alone with my imagination, which carried on inventing stories and little songs long into the dark.

Later, when sleep had become a problem, my father suggested I pray the rosary to help me. I remember sitting up in bed with my little plastic rosary from 6th grade religion class, moving my fingers from bead to bead, from “Hail Mary” to “Our Father” to “Hail Mary” again, until finally my eyes began to close. The point wasn’t the meaning of the words, which I had taken in, or not taken in, from the priests. It was the ease of those words in the mouth. I could recite the rosary without thinking at all. This was always my goal. Not thinking. Oh, how wonderful it would be to stop thinking. Sleep would come only if I could be an animal again. If I could revert to the lizard mind and the floating body-memory of a baby in the womb.

Why is it an emergency to be awake at one or even two in the morning? Between the ages of seven, maybe, and seventeen, I understood the night as a countdown to a too-early morning. At two o’clock, I had four and a half hours until my alarm went off. Four and a half hours until I would need to be able to sit, alert, in a chair all day and answer things intelligently.

Four and a half hours was not enough time. And neither was four hours and twenty-nine minutes; or worse, four hours and twenty-eight minutes…

I was a true neurotic, even in elementary school. I began sneaking into the drug cabinet most nights for Benadryl. First one pill, then two. At some point, I began to worry about what I was doing, standing barefoot in the kitchen at midnight, swallowing four or five of the little pills at once. Suffering the hangovers each morning.

At thirteen, my parents allowed me to go on Trazodone, and my nights changed instantly. I loved my years on Trazodone. One pill, taken at 8:30. I would be sleepy by nine.

One night, in the middle of those Trazodone years, I went to take my pill at 8:30 and suddenly realized I couldn’t take it that night. I can still summon the horror of that moment, the realization that I had somehow forgotten the biggest project of the year for my AP 10th Grade English class, a massive binder of poetry and collage I was meant to turn in—oh God, tomorrow. Second period.

I couldn’t take my pill that night. I wouldn’t be able to go to bed at 9pm. Somehow, I had to do this thing that every other student seemed to do constantly. I had to pull an all-nighter. I needed to stay awake, deliberately awake, and do weeks of work in one night. I had never been in this position before, and I didn’t know if it was even possible.

My mom stayed up with me for the first few hours, helping me to print things and organize the piles of paper into something I could construct into a full binder. She put on the radio in the background, the local NPR station. We listened to jazz music together. Breaks for news. Classical music. As we worked, I lost my fear of the sleepless night. When, a little after midnight, she went up to bed, I kept on. I continued with my scissors and the glue stick, blearily pasting together cut-out images and poems.

At some point, I realized I was hearing English voices. In the early hours of the morning, the radio was playing the BBC news. I began to listen. They were saying something about the Israeli Prime Minister now. A conference held somewhere. I liked the sounds of the radio announcers speaking to each other. The calmness of their morning voices, and the thought of the sun rising over the gray streets of London.

I stayed up long enough to pass into another kind of place altogether, the silvery middle-of-the-night world. The prospect of my second period English class became less and less daunting. It belonged to the daylight hours. The class, and the school building and all the people passing in and out of that building all day. If tomorrow was too much for me, I could always return here. Live here, if I needed to, in the same hours I loved when I was little, where thoughts went all watery and strange.

I closed my finished binder at around 4am. Turned off the lights in the family room. Walked quietly, calmly, through the dark house, up the stairs, down the hall to my bedroom. I slept, without any help, for two hours until the alarm went off. And I lived.

Over time, the alarm clock lost its terror. In my senior year, I didn’t take any classes during the first period, and I was able to sleep an hour later. I weaned myself off the Trazodone.

In college, I slept like a college student—whenever I wanted. I scheduled my classes to begin at 10am. Then, in my early twenties, working in a cocktail bar, I didn’t get home most nights until four or five o’clock. Sleep was almost too easy in those days. It fell on me each night like a hammer and I didn’t wake until after noon.

Sleep hasn’t really been a problem again, not like the panicked nights at ten or thirteen years old. I’ve survived enough of the days-after that follow a rough night. But then, adulthood brought its own strange forms of sleeplessness.

The labyrinth of thoughts. A path of worry that almost resolves, then takes a turn, and another turn, and then begins again. The need to make a list; then, having made it, the fear that I will forget the list. The hour-long question of whether I should just get up and write down the list I’ve made.

An argument I hadn’t thought about in ages. One I didn’t win twenty years ago, with someone who stung me. Who didn’t deserve to feel as superior as he felt. How I would answer him now. How I would respond now with a level of intelligence I didn’t have then, and a calmness that would never have dissolved into the tears that I gave him in those younger, stupider days. How I could absolutely destroy him now, if I were there. If I weren’t just lying in my bed, decades wiser and more than a thousand miles away. Imagining how it would be, cheek hot against the pillow, if I were standing in that awful man’s kitchen again. Let me just think of all the things I would say.

Impossible, from that kind of fervorous thought, to drag my mind back to the clouds that pass in the sky. Like a car wreck in the mind, to draw myself to a sudden, shuddering halt.

Where do I look for it? The road that leads to sleep? The clouds are hanging like painted sets above a forest. A thicket of memories. I can imagine a single path into the leaves…

When I was sixteen or seventeen, around the time I weaned off the Trazodone, my dad gave me a CD of guided meditations to use for falling sleep. The CD was just as effective as the pills. Each school day night, I pressed the button on my boombox and began at the first track again. I settled in beneath the covers as the twinkly New Age music began, and then a woman started to speak.

Picture a beautiful place, she told me. Someplace peaceful, in nature. I’d been reading The Mists of Avalon that fall. I imagined a long, sloping English field. The wet, fogged air.

Look ahead, she said, to where you see a forest.

I knew forests. I felt safe in forests.

With the woman’s prompting, I walked slowly into the trees. I listened for the sounds of birds and, in the distance, dripping water. After a while, I reached a pond in a clearing. Some nights, I was conscious long enough to look down into the water. I saw the trees reflected, my own face distorted by the green grasses on the floor of the pond. And I slept. The forest meditation was only the first track on a CD with maybe six total. I was never awake to hear the second one.

Such a gorgeous, sinking sensation, to fall asleep. Like dipping beneath water.

To set down the book I’m reading and hold onto its voice, its atmosphere, and carry it into my dreams.

To drift in and out of sleep in the afternoon. If only all sleeping could be like afternoon sleep. The sunlight making patterns under my eyelids. Waking on the couch slowly, with the light streaming in through the window. This is what joy is. Half in dreams and half in life. Thinking of wheat fields. Of lavender. A broad wooden porch overlooking a garden. Hearing familiar voices in another room, the rhythm of speech that never resolves into any particular sense.

The soft mood of daylight dreams, colored in pale yellow and orange. That sensation of the world puttering around me, like a bee going about his errands…

Tonya Morton is, among other things, the publisher of Juke.

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Note: This piece first appeared on Juke in August of 2024. I wanted to borrow its sunlight today, along with the whole extraordinary universe it brings into being… TM

Do you recall the day when you stood by yourself, reading a book on K— Gata, and I saw you but you did not see me, because I have mentioned that day to you many times, though I cannot say how my talking about that day appeals to you, if it appeals to you, but let us be honest, you have often asked me to recall that day, and I have, and I have told you honestly about the sunlight touching your body and your body dazzling the sunlight, to which you have replied, Ah, the usual bits and parts, and Yes, I have answered, except the usual bits and parts belong only to you, and perhaps this startled another occasion in your memory, say when we sat in a café, the one that you favored and where there remains an unexpected turning of eyes and eyes meeting eyes, and similar to the day when I saw you, there is not enough of you or me to recall, though I ask you now, are there better moments than when we abandon ourselves into enchantments never to be repeated or repeated again in the same way, but think of this: think of sunsets, think of standing on the balcony of some villa not compromised, not sold, and seeing an ocean as though its colors and expanse were almost new to you, as though it were all almost new, yes the ocean, yes the expanse, yes the color of blue, yes the scent of a two-hundred year old garden planted around the villa, scenting not simply the villa itself or your heart but your eyes, too, and think of the gate you pushed open to discover roses that you never knew existed, roses climbing the trellis of a neglected garden where water still drips from the mouth of a stone lion, greened by time and liquid from some other age no one, not even the locals can recall, and yet before you is the true color of roses, their true scent, and the suddenness that saturates you with an over-abundance of love (can we call this love?) but whose presence is a memory, yet as much as you have searched, privately or when you believe no one is looking, the way we touch our old wounds and scars, you will not be able to conjure this garden so fully, you cannot order such things, you cannot duplicate what has been given once, and yet, you will remember this encounter or similar encounters wherever you are, and let us say you are in this same café where you sat with me, where you drink coffee or eat breakfast before the day breaks over you, when you are neither pleased nor anxious, but you are waiting, and what you are waiting for cannot be hymned into clarity with words, for to add words, in some measure, is to engage too much of yourself, and you are not waiting for yourself, rather you are waiting for what is without words, without clarity, without hope, certainly without your hope, but then you will return to that day or to some other day that abides in a strange dimension, and you are aware then that your movement must be limited, that you must set the cup down and hear its click and pause and let sunlight return to you, and afterwards, you will rise to draw a small glass of water from a clear jar, but notice how gently you hold the glass when you return to the table, to your seat, and how you sit down carefully and let your hands rest on the table again and again a day returns, not yet with the scent of roses or the blue of some peculiar ocean or expanse, but of us touching hands and the agony of forbidden lips, of us existing within and outside of a dream that neither of us created, a summons closer to mere air than to mere hearts, and all at once you are filled again, in seconds perhaps, when soon there will be the pleasure of an ocean, of a gate and roses, of a scented world and of this café and hopes registered in the people around you, of the goofy slant of your head, the lean of your own shoulders that you are not aware of when the waiter returns to ask if everything is okay or will you be needing anything else, and you hear him, you see him, but in something less than a moment, briefer than shadows, you will not know what to say—

Damon Falke is the author of, among other works, The Scent of a Thousand Rains, Now at the Uncertain Hour, By Way of Passing, and Koppmoll (film). He lives in northern Norway.

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On Procrastinating

It’s not easy. Sometimes it takes more effort than actually doing things, but artful avoidance can be a useful skill. Here are some things I’ve learned over the years.

The first thing to remember is that you can always wait until tomorrow. Unless it’s an urgent health or legal matter, put it off. Sometimes things just resolve themselves. That unopened bill is replaced by a second notification. The garbage is taken out by a spouse or roommate. The broken car radio is stolen. Better to wait and see.

Make a list. Be thorough. Put down everything that needs to be done. Think hard. Tack a few long-range goals and projects to the list. Bullet every item. Then lie down. You’ve done a lot.

Take a nap. Naps can be very healing. When you get up, make some coffee and have a bite. You’ll need that extra energy when you start doing things -- later.

Call a friend. Talk about how much stuff you have to do. When you’re done, call another. Now you’re building a personal support group. Use the phone; it’s a valuable tool.

Watch the news. You don’t want to lose touch with the world. Better yet, go out and buy a newspaper. Come home and browse through it. Don’t worry about what needs doing. Remember, you’ve made a list.

Call a friend and go to a movie. You’ve gotten through another day. Tomorrow is a new day. Remember, good things come to those who wait.

Paul Vlachos is a writer, photographer and filmmaker. He was born in New York City, where he currently lives. He is the author of “The Space Age Now,” released in 2020, “Breaking Gravity” in 2021, and 2023’s “Exit Culture.”

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