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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The Signal to Noise Report collects headlines to illustrate humanity’s move into what is beginning to resemble a hybrid species: The Jetsons meets Blade Runner. The idea being that we have a proclivity to accept (with glee) whatever new techno gizmos are shoved at us, yet rarely question their purpose and/or their long-term effects on our health and sanity.

‘Flying Cars’ Will Take Off in American Skies This Summer

New kinds of aircraft, sorts of “flying cars” that can take off and land with little space like helicopters but function like airplanes, will start operating in US airspace as early as June, the US Department of Transportation announced on Monday.

Eight regions across the US, including New York and New Jersey, Texas, Florida, and Albuquerque, New Mexico, will take part in a three-year pilot program that will see new aircraft designs ferrying people and cargo around the country even before they formally receive full certifications from the Federal Aviation Administration.

Source: Wired

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.

The snapshot of scheming by AI agents “in the wild”, as opposed to in laboratory conditions, has sparked fresh calls for international monitoring of the increasingly capable models and come as Silicon Valley companies aggressively promote the technology as a economically transformative. Last week the UK chancellor also launched a drive to get millions more Britons using AI.

Source: The Guardian

Cascade of A.I. Fakes About War with Iran Causes Chaos Online

A torrent of fake videos and images generated by artificial intelligence have overrun social networks during the first weeks of the war in Iran.

The videos — showing huge explosions that never happened, decimated city streets that were never attacked or troops protesting the war who do not exist — have added a chaotic and confusing layer to the conflict online.

The New York Times identified over 110 unique A.I.-generated images and videos from the past two weeks about the war in the Middle East. The fakes covered every aspect of the fighting: They falsely depicted screaming Israelis cowering as explosions ripped through Tel Aviv, Iranians mourning their dead and American military vessels bombarded with missiles and torpedoes.

Collectively, they were seen millions of times online through networks like X, TikTok and Facebook, and countless more times within private messaging apps popular in the region and around the world.

Source: NY Times

Witness Caught Using Smartglasses in Court Blames it all on ChatGPT

Jakštys showed up the next day in the glasses again and the judge told him to turn them off. “Jakštys denied that he was using the smart glasses to receive the answers that he was to give in court to the questions being asked,” the judgement said. “He also denied that his smart glasses were linked to his mobile phone at the time that he was giving evidence before me.”

During the court appearance, Jakštys claimed his mobile phone had been stolen but couldn’t provide a police report for the incident. He also repeatedly received calls on his smartglasses-connected phone from a number listed as “abra kadabra.” The call log showed that many of the calls occurred when he was on the witness stand. The judge asked him about the identity of “abra kadabra” and Jakštys said it was a taxi driver.

“When he was pressed as to why all these calls were made…Mr. Jakštys stated that he was not able to remember. This was a reply which he also gave frequently during his evidence,” Judge Agnello said.

In the end, the Judge tossed out all of Jakštys’ testimony.

Source: 404 Media

CBP Tapped into the Online Advertising Ecosystem to Track Peoples’ Movements

Customs and Border Protection (CBP) bought data from the online advertising ecosystem to track peoples’ precise movements over time, in a process that often involves siphoning data from ordinary apps like video games, dating services, and fitness trackers, according to an internal Department of Homeland Security (DHS) document obtained by 404 Media.

The document shows in stark terms the power, and potential risk, of online advertising data and how it can be leveraged by government agencies for surveillance purposes. The news comes after Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) purchased similar tools that can monitor the movements of phones in entire neighbourhoods. ICE also recently said in public procurement documents it was interested in sourcing more “Ad Tech” data for its investigations.

Source: 404 Media

Cyberattack on vehicle breathalyzer company leaves drivers stranded across the US

The company, Intoxalock, says on its website that it is “currently experiencing downtime” after a cyberattack on March 14. Intoxalock sells breathalyzer devices that fit into vehicle ignition switches, and is used by people who are required to provide a negative alcohol breath sample to start their car.

News reports from across the United States show drivers are affected from New York to Minnesota, and drivers have been unable to drive because their vehicle-based breathalyzers cannot be immediately calibrated.

Intoxalock would not say what kind of cyberattack it was experiencing, such as ransomware or if there was a data breach, or whether it had received any communications from the hackers, including any ransom demands. The company’s technology is used in 46 states, its website says, and it claims to provide services to 150,000 drivers every year.

Source: TechCrunch

Kyoto University Researchers Introduce AI-Powered “Buddharoid” to Address Japan’s Aging Clergy

Researchers at Kyoto University have unveiled a humanoid robot monk, named “Buddharoid,” designed to offer spiritual guidance and engage in Buddhist dialogue as Japan faces a rapidly aging population and declining number of religious clergy.

The project, led by Seiji Kumagai at the university’s Institute for the Future of Human Society, seeks to explore how artificial intelligence might support religious communities experiencing demographic strain. Japan is home to more than 75,000 Buddhist temples, yet many struggle to maintain full-time clergy as rural populations shrink and younger generations pursue secular careers.

According to researchers, Buddharoid has been trained on a great number of Buddhist scriptures, including specialised texts, equipping it to answer personal and philosophical questions from a uniquely Buddhist point of view. By integrating advanced language models with a commercially available humanoid platform, the team has enabled the robot to speak, gesture, walk, and assume traditional prayer postures within temple spaces.

Source: BuddhistDoor Global

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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The river was not much to look at. Around these parts, they called it an afterthought by the Almighty. Slow, brown water looping behind the town, carrying bottles and branches and furniture no longer cared for. Long ago, four cows came down it distended and stiff, turning slow in the current, the way the dead do when the river has no opinion about them. You could smell them before you saw them, and they stayed that way in people’s mouths long after. Folks swore the river remembered things. The old ones said as much and meant it, especially those with a drink in their hand, then laughed afterward so nobody could say they’d gone soft in the head.

On the far bank, where the cottonwoods stooped over like they were listening, the Peterson place too leaned toward the water. Even the metal mailbox door hung open. Stuck. Like it had been waiting for a handout, or at least for a good letter, now that the war was over and the fighting boys were getting home.

Eli Peterson sat on the front steps with his muddy boots and his hat in his hands. He kept turning it the way you turn a question you’ve decided not to ask out loud. The notice was still in his pocket. He hadn’t taken it out since morning. Saying a thing made it real in a way the paper alone didn’t, and real was more than he could take just now. So he just looked at the river and the cottonwood tree.

“It’s a funny thing,” he said out loud, to the river or to the cottonwood or to God Almighty, “how the sky can look that blue and still have bad intentions.” He looked up and squinted at the thin line where green met blue, as if staring hard enough and long enough might change what was coming. As if refusal were the same as prevention.

Behind him, the screen door breathed open and shut and open again — once, twice — like the rusty squeeze box he carried a tune with as a kid. The squeeze box, too, ended up downriver. It was Maria. She didn’t know what to do with her hands, so she kept moving between the kitchen and the porch as if motion itself were a kind of prayer. She brought out a chipped plate with three biscuits. Sat it down. Picked it up. Carried it back inside untouched. He didn’t turn around. He heard the biscuits come and go and understood what that meant without needing to see it.

The children had gone quiet, which likely meant they were in trouble or something was wrong. They leaned over one another at the edge of the porch, counting bottles as they floated downriver, making up stories about the people who’d thrown them in.

Eli listened. When Rosie said, “That one there is from a man who had to leave in a hurry,” he smiled a little and ran his thumb along the brim of his hat.

He was still sitting there when the truck came down the road.

It was Deacon Purvis’s truck, which meant nothing good. Deacon Purvis drove his truck the way a man delivers news he’s been carrying too long — slow, deliberate, as if speed might make it worse or better and he’d given up believing in either. The truck eased to a stop at the edge of the dirt drive and sat there a moment with the engine running. Then the engine quit.

Eli didn’t move.

Purvis got out. He was a large man who moved like a smaller one, carefully, as if he’d learned somewhere along the way that his size made people nervous. He had his hat in his hand before he reached the gate, which told Eli everything the man’s face was working hard not to.

“Eli.”

“Deacon.”

Purvis stopped at the foot of the steps. He looked at his hat, then at the river, then at Eli. “You heard anything?”

“I heard plenty,” Eli said. “Mostly from my own pocket.”

Purvis nodded slowly. He turned his hat in his hands the same way Eli had been turning his, and for a moment the two men just sat with that — the same gesture, the same question, two different versions of the same dread.

“Raymond Holt got back this morning,” Purvis said. “Come in on the six o’clock from Baton Rouge.”

Eli said nothing.

“He asked about the boys.”

“What’d you tell him.”

“I told him I didn’t know anything for certain.”

“That’s honest,” Eli said.

Behind them, the screen door opened. Maria had heard the truck. She stood in the doorway with a dish towel in her hands, not drying anything, just holding it the way you hold something when you need your hands to be occupied with something that isn’t shaking. Eli heard her breathing change when she saw Purvis. He didn’t turn around. He didn’t need to.

“Mrs. Peterson,” Purvis said, looking past Eli’s shoulder.

“Mr. Purvis.” Her voice was even. Eli had always admired that about her. The way she could make her voice do one thing while the rest of her was doing another.

Purvis looked back at Eli. “Raymond said Daniel come through Bologna with him. Said they were together as late as April.” He paused and took a breath. “Said after that he didn’t know.”

The river went on. A bottle turned slowly in the current near the bank, catching the light once before it went under the shadow of the cottonwoods and didn’t come back out.

“Thomas,” Eli said. It wasn’t a question. He wasn’t asking about Daniel.

Purvis looked down and turned his hat once more. “Raymond didn’t say much about Thomas.”

“No,” Eli said. “I don’t expect he did.”

The children had stopped counting bottles. Rosie was watching Purvis with the particular attention children give to things they almost understand. The boy, who was five and understood nothing and therefore understood everything, had climbed down from the porch and was crouching at the edge of the yard pulling up grass in small fistfuls and letting it fall.

Eli reached into his pocket. He held the notice flat against his knee without unfolding it, feeling the paper’s particular stiffness, those straight government creases that never softened no matter how long you carried them. The way the government made everything stiff, even bad news. Then he folded it back on itself and returned it to his pocket.

“You want to come inside,” he said. It was not quite an invitation.

“I won’t trouble you,” Purvis said.

“You’re not troubling anybody.”

Purvis looked at the house the way a man looks at a church he’s not sure he deserves to enter. Then he came up the steps and Eli moved over on the step to give him room, and neither man said anything for a while.

Maria went back inside. They heard the sound of her in the kitchen. Water running. A drawer opening and not closing. Eli understood she needed to be in there the way she needed to keep moving. Just indoors now.

“His boy’s growing,” Purvis said, looking at the child pulling up grass.

“He is.”

“Looks like Thomas.”

Eli looked at the boy. He did look like Thomas. He’d been trying not to notice that for several months and here was Deacon Purvis noticing it out loud in the afternoon sun and there was nothing to be done about it.

“He does,” Eli said.

Rosie had gotten down from the porch and gone to stand near the boy, her brother, in the way older children stand near smaller ones when something is wrong — not touching him, just near, as if proximity were its own form of information. The boy kept pulling up grass. He didn’t know what he was waiting for. None of them did, exactly. They were all just waiting in their different ways, by the river that didn’t care, under the sky that did.

“Raymond said he was well,” Purvis said. “In Bologna. Said he seemed well.”

“April,” Eli said.

“April,” Purvis agreed.

The word settled between them, and neither man picked it up again.

After a while, Purvis stood and put his hat back on. He looked at the river. He said he’d let Eli know if he heard anything further, and Eli said he’d appreciate that, and they shook hands in the way men shake hands when they’ve agreed on something neither of them wanted to agree on. Then Purvis went back down the steps and across the yard and got in his truck and drove back the way he’d come. Slow. The same as arriving.

Eli sat back down on the steps. The notice was in his pocket. The river was going where it always went. He looked at the cottonwood, where the green met the blue.

After a while, Rosie came and sat next to him on the step, close enough that he could feel the warmth of her small arm against his.

“Where do you think the bottles go, Granddad?”

Eli looked at the water. “Further on,” he said.

She thought about that. “Is further on good or bad?”

He put his arm around her. “I don’t know, Rosie,” he said. “I honestly don’t know.”

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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The rhinoceros is always waiting for you 
Patiently abiding 
Swatting its tail on the other side
Of the zebra enclosure. 

The oddities await
In desolate barrooms 
In train stations and alleys
The drag queens are just backstage

The record player is in the corner
Words and worlds awaiting 
Pick up the lever and it spins 
Lay it down on the disk for more 

The same is true for Vincent Van Gogh 
That couple, always hiding behind birches
Or the mummies and incas 
Their golden history, under glass

The woods are quietly waiting
The ocean exists 
The deserts don their peachy hues
Even in Kentucky in February

A landlocked soul 
In a trailer in the holler sees the stars
Knows that the grass turns green
That the world gets wide

That a rhinoceros is waiting at the zoo.

Read more from Jodie at:

You are Here

Life and Letters of a Midwest Housewife, age 44

By Jodie Meyn

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Rock Springs, Wyoming - 2006

This was the first place I ever spent the night with my dog, Elko. We had each had a loaded day. I had started out in Winnemucca. He had arrived from another dimension or another galaxy, possibly both. After all the trials of the day, we just wanted to hunker down and get to know each other. I had planned to sack out in the town of Green River, Wyoming but, due to the latest oil boom, every motel room in town was booked. The one place I found that wasn’t booked not only wanted an outrageous rate for their filthy room, but they would not allow dogs. The desk clerk looked out her dirty window, somehow saw through the tinted glass of my Toyota Tacoma’s cab and spotted Elko standing triumphantly on top of the ice chest. She turned to me and said “We can’t take your little friend.” I asked her if she knew of any other places in town with rooms and she was kind enough to say “About 7 miles down the highway, there’s a place at the exit. Try them.”

I could tell a long story about that first night and the kindly woman who welcomed us at the Springs Motel, but I’ll save that for some other time.

Reno, Nevada - 2003

My friend Paul and I woke in Oregon at a hot springs lodge. We decided to head for Nevada and find a remote hot spring instead of soaking away the day in a new-age community. We left early and hauled ass. A good drive across central Nevada is glorious in its own right. We were getting close to our initial soak of the day when a buck jumped out of nowhere and hit the car. We were lucky to have no injuries. The vehicle, Paul’s Isuzu Trooper, which he dearly loved, was totaled, as was the deer.

We were stunned. Moments after this happened, a guy drove by in a small car - this was on what’s normally a deserted, high-desert road. This gentleman was wearing a purple fez and was returning home from a Shriner’s convention. I hitched a ride with him to Austin, Nevada, to look for help. At the Pony Canyon Lodge, I found the owner, whom I had gotten to know over the years as a fellow baseball fan. As soon as I explained what had happened, I got a call on my cell phone from a state trooper - I was shocked to get any service in Austin, Nevada in 2003, but I did. The trooper had driven up and they were waiting for a flatbed truck. Dean, the motel owner, agreed to drive me back to the accident scene. The front of Paul’s Trooper had chunks of fur stuck to it. The truck was winching it onto the bed as we drove up.

We ended up in Battle Mountain, Nevada. I wanted to stay in support of Paul, but I also didn’t want to miss my flight out of Reno that night. He walked me across Battle Mountain to catch the one Greyhound bus a day that comes through town. I left Paul to the vagaries of fortune in Battle Mountain, then had an interesting bus ride to Reno, where I walked around the downtown area. I pulled out my camera and discovered that it had suffered some damage, probably when they threw the bag from the Trooper into the tow truck. I tested the lens and took this photo. As soon as I clicked the shutter, the front element of the lens fell out and hit the ground. I got the shot, though, and had the lens repaired when I got home.

Indio, California - 1998

Indio keeps getting bigger and bigger. That’s my impression every time I pass through. I don’t remember snapping this photo. I usually remember taking a photo, even though my memory in other parts of life can be fuzzy. I don’t remember taking this shot, though. I can safely say that I used a tripod, as it was shot on slow film at night and I had to use a tripod in those days for a shot like this. My modus operandi then - and now - was to slowly roll through a town and find the old services strip before I got a room. I would then case it, driving up and down the length of it. If it was a good strip with good signs, I would stop and jump out of the car every few hundred yards with my tripod, then shoot. I imagine that’s how I ended up with this shot. I do not recall staying in Indio, but this photo looks pretty dark and I don’t like to drive late at night, so I may have slept here. Not that these details are crucial. More interesting to me is the name - did someone have a thing for Hawaii? That would be my bet. And the well-preserved sign. It probably has not been altered for 50 years. As always, the word “Kitchenettes” makes me happy.

Fallon, Nevada - 2002

The first time I went through Fallon, Nevada, I stayed in a nondescript, modern motel. It was fine. I was heading out on my road trip through the desert and anything was good enough. I hit the first place in town with a “Vacancy” sign. I don’t recall the Lariat Motel, although I surely drove past it as I rolled west out of town the next morning. I jumped onto Highway 50 and hit the salt flats not long after Fallon. Revelations would follow, one after the other, in short order, and that trip held a lot of catharsis and many miles of empty road.

I did not stay at the Lariat until my second trip through Fallon, when I came in from the east. I saw the sign moving in the dark - the neon cowboy endlessly throwing his lasso - and I could not resist, so I pulled in. It was an older place, but well-kept. The office had a short hallway that ran into the living quarters and I could smell the motelier’s dinner. It smelled like fish. A neat pile of old “Lariat Motel” postcards sat on the counter next to the desktop service bell.

A very old, very thin man with incredibly bright blue eyes walked to the desk. He was efficient as he went through the motions of checking me in. He was as professional as they come and he gave me a professional smile, but there was a real twinkle in his eye. He had clearly been doing this for a long time. I got the feeling that he had already sized me up.

Green River, Utah - 2016

There are many gifts you can get as a photographer, but one of the rarest and most rewarding is to roll into a town at dusk when a massive thunderstorm is approaching. All you can do is pull out your camera and shoot as fast as you can before the rain hits. These two photos are from the town of Green River, which once gave me haven in a terrible storm.

South Lake Tahoe, CA - 1998

There’s not a lot of neon in this photo, but there’s enough artificial incandescence to make up for it. At Doc’s, every day is a holiday. I don’t know if it’s still there. I made the run through this high altitude, mountain resort town with my friend, Peggy after a long day of driving. Doc’s was one of about 7 places I shot that night. This photo has alwas looked and felt to me like some joint out of a late ‘40s film noir. And, being in Tahoe, it might as well have been one. I can see Robert Ryan pulling up in an old coupe, desperately trying to find a room for the night so that he can straighten out his mind and then tend to the guy who got shot, the guy who’s bleeding all over the back seat of his Plymouth. Yeah, Doc’s has seen a lot of action.

These photos and the accompanying captions appeared in the book Breaking Gravity, available here.

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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Phantom

I sleep late
     then scour the dry woods 
          searching for answers
     for redemption as though
          I were looking for
               a lost doorway to
                    another world
watching the heat drain 
     into the electric sky
          with collective unspoken prayers
               from the valley, 
                    the riverside,
     their despondence rushing by me
          on dusky stiff-feathered wings

     and the evening wind comes
           stealing through 
                staining the pines a
                   ghostly blue 

I feel myself opening
     into the cooling air
           I'm a shadowy museum
      a corridor stretching back
          through a half century 
               of seeking
a phantom of stories
     stumbling across a
            monochrome mountainside

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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Mayor of the Lunch Counter

He sits with cane looped over his arm
turns to join a conversation 
from a nearby booth
he heard rattlesnake
launched an explanation
how a sidewinder chased his friend
how toxic they can be when young.
He tells me –
    sitting three stools away
    wondering why I order my BLT with toast
    that scrapes my gums –
how he lived in a canyon in Washington
where a bald eagle cruised the river
scooping a fish
only to have it stolen by an ospry.
He lingers in his chair,
whipped cream collapses on his chocolate shake.
His eyes fade with why he had to move here
and he tells me
there are things you miss.

This poem was published in Moonshine Ink, May 2007.

Sue writes…

About twenty-five years ago, I attended a writers’ conference in Carson City, NV. When we took a lunch break, I ate at a little mom and pop cafe. This incident happened during that hour break. When the lecturer in an afternoon poetry class asked us to write a poem, this is what flowed out of my pen.

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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I.

Into the Ring of Darkness

If one sought the spirit of the season in this fading city, one searched in vain upon the high streets, at least on the night of December 25. The downtown core felt empty and compressed and was ringed by a cold darkness now that the great hordes had stripped the stores of their wares and fled again to the outer boroughs with their junk. Under dark and thick clouds, the night closed over the inner city street-grid with no moonlight to cover the roofs, the sidewalks, or the streets.

Commonwealth Avenue was once a lovely residential street with wide sidewalks, only four blocks from the courthouse. Once stood a never-ending line of grand houses, where family generations lived beneath sturdy, well-built eaves. Back in the day, the street would be aglow this time of year, bright with eggnog toasts on the porches and children’s grateful love for Santa Claus still flickering in their beds upstairs.

Then the generations moved away so those sturdy structures could serve more aggressive ambitions—like those of lawyers and dentists and tax assessors. Later came lumberyards, new car showrooms, furniture showrooms, appliance showrooms, and drive-in burger stands at the corners.

Now Commonwealth Avenue is lined with sandwich shops, tattoo studios, and empty storefronts. There are liquor stores and discount shops stretching for miles in both directions and—one right after another—the hardware store, the gas-station, and even the barber-shop had earlier been emptied of whatever could fit inside a box or a bag or wrapped in paper and shoved under plastic trees in the outer boroughs.

Within this inner-canyon of defeated commerce, the night belonged not to carols being sung or fireplace kisses, but to the sharp wind from the north bringing rain. Above the sidewalks on the 100 block of Commonwealth three streetlights cast down their yellow vapor glow into the gutters, where cold drizzle fell. The pale amber light from above also fell upon overstuffed trashcans that would not be tended to for another few days.

In the middle of the block, Shepherd’s Bar was a brick storefront, housed on the ground floor of what used to be a two-story house. As far as the neighborhood was concerned, the bar had simply been there forever and had long outlasted the memories of the old home. The stubborn structure did not crumble like the sidewalk before it; it endured the weight of every passing year simply to increase its own stubbornness.

With slatted shades almost permanently lowered, looking through the front window was as useless as staring at a blank page. The bar’s front entrance was set in a recessed cove, a couple yards back from the sidewalk, under a faded blue-on-blue striped awning. Even with a neon sign fixed above the doorframe glowing OPEN, the old bar remained basically invisible to the rest of the fading city.

The cab pulled away from the curb. Two silhouettes push at the heavy wooden door.

Sitting on a barstool, the doorman was bundled tight against the wind-blasts that followed every person inside Shepherd’s Bar. He’s just finishing telling the story of that one terrible winter that was so cold he had to pour hot coffee on his boots all night to keep his feet from freezing.

“It’s like pissing your pants in a snowstorm,” he says, a wide grin on his ruddy face as he pauses before delivering the moral of his story. “It’s a warm feeling, but it ain’t gonna last.”

He will tell that tale at least three more times before Last Call.

II.

The Feast of Joy

A single string of oversized Christmas bulbs is draped informally over the backbar mirror and the old boxy brass cash register sitting next to the bottles of booze. The fat incandescent bulbs do not twinkle and a few have lost most of their paint but they still glow red, yellow, blue, green with persistence. They were first plugged in by a bartender sometime in the 1990s, who said that Shepherd’s had been called a “dive bar” on a local TV news story about the murder that happened across the street at Wehnke’s electronics. She said Christmas lights were a part of every dive bar she’d ever been in and Shepherd’s had apparently reached that status, even though it was only about 14 years old at that time.

The string of lights is all the holiday decoration that the owner allows because it was part of the bar before she bought Shepherd’s. The owner’s name is Christmas Young-sook Snow—she swears with her hand raised like she’s taking an oath every single time she tells someone new.

Nobody forgets her name. Either because of its uniqueness or because it belongs to a well-regarded person, a treasure of Commonwealth Avenue who’s just about seen it all. No one complains about the lack of Christmas decorations around the holidays. At least not twice.

And never on December 25.

“I’m all the Christmas this bar will ever need,” Christmas Snow always says, settling the issue and smiling with her hands turned up in a gesture that conveys this business is all mine and this business is all I’ll ever need.

Christmas Snow does not own the two-story building that Shepherd’s resides within, nor the land beneath it. Not yet anyway.

The long hand-crafted wooden bar, scratched by keys and rings and pocketknives, stretches from the front wall back to the popcorn machine, which is room enough to sit twelve; then it takes a sharp turn to the left and extends for another five bar stools. Follow the cracked red-leather booths on the other side of the room against the brick wall all the way back past the square tables and chairs to the back corner, where the jukebox and red-felt pool table have kept each other company for decades. Smoking’s allowed out the back door on the patio.

Christmas’s eyes constantly scan the room in search of empty glasses and overflowing ashtrays. She’d been looking for both items, in tandem, from her spot behind the bar ever since she’d started bartending at Shepherd’s in 1986. Smoking hasn’t been allowed in bars for well over a decade now, but she can’t stop looking for those little red plastic ashtrays. It became a habit and it’s been hard to shake.

Christmas is appreciated for her long pours of intoxicating spirits and prices that don’t set out to pick a customer’s pocket. She carries an adequate number of beer selections and some fine red wines from Spain, France, and Argentina. She can carry on several customer conversations while flirting with the beer-delivery driver. A couple of her regulars stopped drinking long ago but never quit Shepherd’s. Giving up booze turned out to be easier than sitting at the bar and talking with Christmas Snow.

Every seat in the house is taken and groups of threes and fours are huddling close together in the spaces in-between. Not because it’s cold inside; if anything, it may be a bit too warm and musty with all these bodies and wet jackets. It’s the steady thrum of five-dozen other conversations swelling and fading that tend to creep into whatever anyone is trying to say to anyone else at any given time. Whenever another familiar song comes on the jukebox—which most of them are—the sing-alongs tend to get louder.

The buttery perfume from the popcorn machine is only a faint note in the air tonight because Shepherd’s is awash with the aromas of honey-baked ham, sliced turkey, and spiced chicken wings. The spread is set out on porcelain platters in a “come and get it” buffet on the table in the back corner, beneath a wall covered with old photographs.

Every year it’s a mistake to do it this way. Everyone lines up to fill their paper plates with the free food and then they always linger to look at the old photos they’ve seen a million times before of the Little League teams the bar sponsored, and the bowling clubs, and shuffleboard teams, and midnight basketball squads. Every player in every photo has “Shepherd’s” spelled prominently on their jerseys. There is one picture, in a newer, slightly more ornate frame, showing the Shepherd’s Quidditch Team that took third in the city league championship 10 years ago. Christmas posed with the team because her granddaughter had played on it.

On December 25 of each year, this logjam for food and nostalgia just gets worse because at the next table where the complimentary wines and wineglasses are set out, the wall holds photographs of regulars who passed away. Isabel the artist in 1981. Toby in ’89. Grace and Shultzy in ‘95. Happy—that’s just what everyone called him—just a few hours into the new millennium. Many of the older pictures are framed with yellowing copies of newspaper obituaries, which never fail to mention that a gathering at Shepherd’s Bar at 136 Commonwealth Avenue after the funeral services was not only in good form, it was expected by the deceased.

Mrs. Henson, who lives in a rented room two blocks away, comes by the bar every year but only on this day. She fills her plate, looks at the photos. She doesn’t drink so she passes on the wine, but pauses in front of a picture of her late husband proudly holding aloft the tiniest softball trophy in the world with his teammates. He was so young, she thinks. After finishing her modest meal, she thanks Christmas and the two speak for a few moments more. She smiles and nods, and waves goodbye to the bartenders on her way out.

By the time most everyone has returned to their barstools and tables and booths their food is already half-eaten and cold, their wine glasses empty. A few are still wiping away tears. The conversations begin to swell again. The jukebox is playing a song by a local musician, who sits at the bar, staring straight ahead into the reflection of the backbar mirror with a slight smile. There are more stories to be shared. More laughter. More wine. More fellowship.

Both TV screens have the game on but not the sound, just like every other day of the year, and there are many eyes watching. Behind the bar, Sylvia and Russell make a few rounds of hot toddies and Irish coffees then call it a night on the specialty cocktails. “Just regular drinks now, folks. Everyone’s had a long year.”

Christmas brings the doorman, Robbie, a heaping plate of food she’s warmed up and a cup of coffee. “Not for your feet,” she says. Robbie sets the food and coffee on the bar. Sylvia slides him a shot of vodka with a smile. He feels the blast of cold wind on his back and he swivels around.

The Landlord has already taken several steps inside past Robbie and is following Christmas Snow back toward the empty buffet table. A trail of wet shoe print-puddles follows him.

III.

THE GHOSTS AND THE DOGS UPSTAIRS

Above Shepherd’s Bar, the building’s top floor held a queen-sized-bed, a long leather couch, a refrigerator, three tables, a television, a kick-ass stereo system, and a wall of vinyl albums. And Christmas Snow’s two dogs. The rest was used for bar storage and ghosts.

By the time the door’s lock has turned, both of the former city-pound mutts had loped from the couch to the foyer with their tails slowly twirling.

“Don’t smoke in here, you know that.” Christmas’s voice was direct but familiar.

“Of course,” says the Landlord, who drops his cigarette into the red plastic ashtray on the stairway railing at the top of the landing.

Christmas looks at the Landlord’s wet shoes. “Don’t worry about the floor, I guess.”

She leans toward the dogs, who are quite used to her comings-and-goings and bringing people inside.

They scuttle past her and after a cursory inspection of the Landlord’s wet shoes, pantlegs, and briefcase, they return sluggishly to the warmth of the couch in the next room.

“Has he been by yet?” asks the Landlord.

“I haven’t seen him. I don’t know why you think he’d be here? It’s just the usual crowd.”

The Landlord looked past Christmas into the next room where the TV was switched to one of the many log-burning-in-the-fireplace channels with the sound turned down.

Christmas believed the dogs preferred to listen through the floorboards to the sounds of the bar below and were especially comforted whenever they heard her voice. The beat of “Wooly Bully” by Sam the Sham and the Pharaohs was rising up now into the second story.

“I know he always comes here on Christmas.” The Landlord looked tired as he spoke.

“It never matters. I 86’d him years ago. He’s never stepping foot in my bar again.”

The Landlord walked to the other room and stared a moment at the fire on the TV and the dogs lounging on the couch and then he kept going to the window. He looked out and stared at Commonwealth Avenue. The wet street would be slick as glass by morning if the temperatures kept falling.

Christmas joined him at the window. “Is that yours?” She pointed to a small black sedan parked in front of the bar.

“Yeah. Christmas present.”

“From …”

“Yeah.”

“That’s nice. She’s good to you.”

“Yeah.” The Landlord turned and walked to the bedroom, flipped on a light, and looked around. Apparently satisfied, he flipped off the light and returned to the TV to stare at the fire.

“I thought you had three dogs.”

“Dreamy died in June.”

“Ah… that’s too bad, Chrissy.” The Landlord pivoted back to look at the bedroom. “Has he been here? I just want to know.”

“She was a great dog. She never wanted anything to do with the bar. She only went outside to race downstairs to the patio and pee and poop and then it was right back up here in the bed all day and all night if she should get away with it.” Christmas smiled. “I still feel her at night sometimes in bed.”

Christmas flipped the TV to a different fireplace channel. “I have not seen him in I don’t know how long. Is that all you’re here for … or are you here to not sell me my building again?”

The Landlord made a point of looking down at the briefcase in his hand and staring at it just a moment too long before looking back up into Christmas’s eyes. “You’ve got a good crowd tonight.”

Christmas dropped her shoulders, just slightly. “It’s just the regular crowd. I honestly don’t know where he is right now.” She turned and walked toward the door.

The Landlord followed.

The dogs leapt from the sofa in anticipation but were told to “wait” as Christmas closed the door behind her. She said the same thing to the Landlord as he descended the back staircase. The temperature was at that point where the drizzle could turn to sleet at any moment. She waited on the landing.

The bar’s patio had two tables with two large umbrellas, under which seven people sat smoking. The Landlord stepped toward one umbrella and asked to bum a cigarette. He lit it and took two deep drags, exhaling into the gray mass of clouds smeared overhead. He put the cigarette between his lips and walked back into the bar.

IV.

LAST CALL

It’s time for another round.

Someone jammed the jukebox with so many consecutive plays of “Wooly Bully” that Russell leaves the bar to unplug the machine in order to reset it. Nobody left will cop to being the knucklehead who did it, but most of those who have stuck around till closing have broken into their own horrible, ear-crippling rendition of the song.

Russell finally says, “The jukebox is ready to go again so you can all shut up now!”

He plays one of the two Christmas tunes allowed among the song selections because both exist on CD mixes burned especially for Shepherd’s. One was made before Christmas took over and one after. Russell chooses the song from the older CD, it’s that barking dog rendition of “Jingle Bells” that annoys everyone.

And just for fun, Russell plays it twice.

As it gets closer to 2 a.m. the crowd keeps thinning until Christmas says, “Last Call!”

But before anyone tends to the remaining customers the Shepherd’s Bar team gathers to hear how many times Robbie told his boring old hot-coffee story. Sylvia guessed the right number, five, and so she enjoys a shot of her choice, Calvados apple brandy.

Christmas flips off the outdoor neon O P E N sign. She puts her hand on Robbie’s shoulder and leans on him a little as she looks around for any forgotten scarves or gloves or keys. She notes that there are no red plastic ashtrays to empty.

Everyone finishes their drinks and thanks everyone else for the wonderful night.

“You’re all the Christmas we ever need,” says Arturo with a grin as he joins the line out the front door.

“See you tomorrow.”

The cold rainy night still presses down on Commonwealth Avenue.

The silhouettes scatter away on the wet sidewalks, passing shops that are dark, empty, and shuttered until sometime after the New Year.

At the intersections the stoplights are blinking red in all directions.

The last cab pulls from the curb, slipping away from the yellow glow of the streetlight above.

Christmas hands her staff fat envelopes of cash on top of their tips for the night. She tells them to get home safely and that she’ll see them tomorrow afternoon.

She performs her usual walkthrough, trusting that her staff did their jobs so she doesn’t need to check on the beer kegs or that the liquor stockroom is locked. She leaves an envelope on the bar for Lizzy, who’ll be in around 8 a.m. to clean up the rest of the mess and haul the trash to the curbside to wait.

A dog barks. That was Roxy. But she wasn’t upstairs.

The dogs must have been allowed outside and are on the patio.

Christmas allows some tension in her shoulders to release. She steps behind the bar and pulls a bottle of Spanish tempranillo. She picks up two stemmed-wineglasses and heads toward the back door, flipping off each light switch with her elbows as she walks until only the string of Christmas lights across the backbar mirror remains illuminated.

After punching in a final selection on the jukebox, the second Christmas song from the CD mix that came much later than the first, Christmas steps outside into the cold winter night.

THE END

Anthony Head mostly writes about Texas.

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Mary’s Lament at the Millenium

Each night the Holy Ghost chooses the best workers to visit
and lavish with fertile kisses,
and so each morning they rise,
slates wiped clean,
but for the slightest taste of dust at the back of the throat.

Each day another chance at promotion
is muffled by horns bleating at stoplights turned go-green.
A file drawer scolds open to another metal-upon-metal working day,
and that meeting with your boss is drawn and tight as your cubicle.
Soon your blood teems with daily injustices and becomes a wholly different substance.
Small stresses steep like tiny tea leaves until the black kettle shrieks,
and you’re out among the herd baaing back home.

Kneel and pray each night that every exhale
is followed by an inhale.
Let every breath breathed be miracle.
Should the Spirit one night leave you,
should you become only, only,
know that we, your co-workers, shall grieve you
and brass-plaque-remember you.
Especially, the dutiful way you arrived each day:
blessed,
dressed,
and ready for work.

Matt Layne writes…

Lord, it is hard to feel holy beneath the buzz of fluorescence and the whirr-whirr-hum of the copy machine in the next room. Mary’s Lament at the Millennium grew out of that tension, an attempt to marry divine visitation with quarterly reviews and cubicle dwelling.

I wrote the poem while working in the basement of a college building below the school’s basketball court. Summertime heat in Alabama has the tendency to turn every cinder block structure into a barbecue pit. The air was heavier than sackcloth, and every ballast in the ceiling flickered as if it were preparing to give up the proverbial ghost. The odors emanating from the damp locker rooms helped add to the sense that I was living in a 20th Century version of Hell. When I did occasionally surface from those depths each afternoon, a fiercely territorial mockingbird would dive at my head as though I had personally disparaged its religious beliefs.

One afternoon I watched a red-tailed hawk stalking a gray squirrel. The squirrel seemed acutely aware of the peril it was in. Instead of bolting, it flattened itself against the trunk of the pine tree while the hawk watched from twelve branches above. Inch by slow inch, the squirrel edged around the trunk, not away from the hawk but straight toward death, but somehow, beyond all probability, the squirrel managed to climb higher than its predator. The hawk, denied its easy lunch, lifted off in search of other prey.

Sometimes that is all we can do:

Flatten ourselves against the tree. March toward death. Merge into the bleating traffic. Wake up blessed, get dressed, and wander back into the work of another gray squirrel day.

Keep climbing, y’all.

“Mary’s Lament at the Millenium” appears in Miracle Strip, released August 31, 2022. The music is “Sparkle Nine” 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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There was something embarrassing about being named for a character in one of Bob Dylan’s songs. Although it was virtually impossible that anybody would make the connection, including the bard himself. Her parents had moved on and now considered themselves country music fans. But thanks to a brief foray into the Basement Tapes, they had named their first child Valerie. Which she had emphatically shortened to Val on her twelfth birthday.

She walked into the Jet Stream and took a seat by the windows. It was too early to read the paper due to yesterday’s headlines still rolling around in her head. Instead, she decided to watch the sun paint the sky over the mountains. It hadn’t rained in over a month and wasn’t about to start now, but a thin ribbon of clouds stretched over the peaks, a pink vein in the limitless realm of space.

When a coffee cup appeared on the table, she turned and saw Matrice heading back to the kitchen. “Be back in a minute, hon. I got eggs to fry.”

Val had seen an article concerning the American diet and was beginning to think twice about how many waffles she’d eaten over the past twenty years. According to her scales, she could stand to lose five pounds. She wasn’t that worried about carrying a little extra padding, but she’d seen what diabetes had done to her grandfather and didn’t want to go down that road, no matter how much her taste buds complained.

Matrice returned with a coffee pot and an empty cup and sat in the chair facing the café’s narrow interior. “I need to take a load off; had an early rush that pissed off my bursitis.”

“Matrice, you own the place. You can take a break whenever you want.”

“No, hon - the bank owns this place. I just work here.” Matrice had been the sole proprietor of the Jet Stream since Val was a little girl and was probably the reason the bank was still in business. “How you doing, Picasso?”

Val smiled. As far as she could tell, the only other MFA in the valley was a reclusive writer who hadn’t published anything since the Ice Age. The fact that she painted large format abstracts seemed to confuse most of her acquaintances. The default response was to mention Picasso.

“I have a show coming up in El Paso next month, so I’m pushing the brush 24/7.” El Paso was a world away, but the town had been good to her over the years.

Matrice nodded. “Probably more exciting than slinging hash browns. Hell, I haven’t been to El Paso since Pancho Villa roughed the place up. One day you’re thirty years old and the next you’re an old woman with bursitis.”

Val hid a smile behind her coffee cup. She hadn’t spent much time contemplating the future and wondered what sort of changes her body had in store for her. Too many people she knew had failed to age gracefully and Val had decided to absorb herself in work until something ordered her to do otherwise.

“You want the usual, hon?”

“I think an omelet sounds good,” Val said. “Maybe a couple of corn tortillas.” “You want cheese or ham?”

“Cheese works for me.”

Matrice stood, refilled Val’s cup. “Well, I’m glad to see you’re branching out. Waffles are like men - after a while they all go limp on you.”

Val stepped back and let her eyes wander over the canvas. Something about the colors were throwing the piece out of balance. She went to the big window and watched the afternoon tease its way across the landscape. She’d been observing the same scene for years and still couldn’t figure out how to get it on canvas.

Regardless of the many hours she’d devoted to her craft, Val had come to the tiring conclusion that no painter can persuade photons to do what they don’t want to do. The damned things had a mind of their own and all an artist could hope for was a simulacrum, an approximation that leaned towards the truth. She doubted that any painter was ever totally satisfied with their work; the prey was always one step ahead of the hunt.

She spotted a plume of dust and focused on a pickup truck moving across the basin. Her brother might be the most successful contractor in the county, but he was hell on pickup trucks. The beast swung up the drive and slid to a stop in front of her small porch.

“Hey, sis.”

“Don’t tell me you’ve taken a sudden interest in art.” Her brother’s idea of art went by the name of Remington and came in several lethal calibers.

“Uncle Theo had some kinda stroke. I don’t think he’s doing too good.”

Uncle Theo had been ill for so long, maybe leaving would be a quiet blessing. “I’ve been dreading this for a while,” she said, almost to herself. “Is he at Saint Paul’s?”

Bobby shook his head. “Hell no, the old buzzard won’t have any of it. He’s laid up at the farm under a buffalo robe. It’s fucking gothic.”

Val thought her brother might’ve been swinging hammers too long. Every year he sounded a little deeper into hillbilly vernacular. The fact that he’d taken up with a girl who used to be a pole dancer in Albuquerque accentuated the persona.

“Does mom know?”

“She’s driving down from Denver. Maybe tomorrow.”

Losing their father nine years ago had been a blow, but seeing their mother turn widowhood into a rodeo act had strained Val’s tenuous toehold on solid ground. These days she appeared and disappeared like a passing cold front.

“You want to come in? I have some tea in the fridge.” The last time Bobby had stepped in the studio, he’d tried unsuccessfully to stifle the wisecracks about her work in progress. By some happenstance, he’d developed the sensitivity of a stop sign.

“I gotta get back to my crew. The damn bank has us on a tight leash. Kinda takes the fun out of working.” He walked back to the truck, his boots kicking up little puffs of dust.

“Thanks for coming out,” she said, shielding her eyes against the sun.

“Tried to call, but your cell kept going to voicemail. Didn’t know when you’d get the message.” Her brother tended towards the right side of things, but he resented the passage of time, especially if he thought it was being wasted.

“I left my phone in the car,” she shrugged. She’d found that painting and cell phones didn’t work together.

“Figures; see you later, sis,” Bobby said and backed the truck around. When he had the thing aimed towards town, the battered GMC lurched forward and headed toward the rest of the world.

Val watched the plume of dust until it was just a thin line dividing the basin below.

Something about the picture kept her fixed in place, her eyes swallowing the light. The sun was making long shadows that walked across the earth like giant footprints.

She went inside and felt the breath in her chest, her lungs expanding to their own rhythm. There were things moving in the studio, angles realigning, shades of color in flux. The afternoon was making a slow transition, deteriorating into a fuzzy jigsaw puzzle. She thought about her uncle and what it was going to be like without him. He had been there for her and Bobby when the road ahead was too fuzzy to see. An old-timer with more heart than humor, more grit than grace.

Val let her gaze drift across the canvas and suddenly saw what had been bothering her about it. She had over-thought the thing, relying on precision when it needed visceral attention.

She walked back onto the porch and settled in a lawn chair with her sketch book. The valley was its own canvas, painted by the constant flow of shadow and light, a tapestry of unintended consequences. She let her hand move on its own, expressing impulses from neurons she only sensed were part of her anatomy. A camera might capture multiplicity in a series of reductions, but she allowed it all in, change being the impetus for some unnamable totality. It felt good having nothing to lose.

Val didn’t know how long she’d been sitting there when she realized the sun had slipped away behind the mountains, leaving a soft settling in its wake. For a long moment nothing was moving, as if the sun had pulled everything with it to the other side of the planet.

She walked inside and turned on a kerosene lamp, watched it sputter, shadows flickering across the surface of her canvas. The oversized painting would sell in El Paso. Somebody would hang it on their wall and try to make sense of its incomprehensible surface.

She held her sketch book up to the light and saw the valley like she remembered it. For the first time in memory she didn’t see any abstraction, just a simple line drawing with a hint of graphite shading. It spoke for itself; was more than enough. A silent revelation.

Val packed up her things and doused the lamp. It was a good half hour drive to her uncle’s place. The idea crossed her mind to pick up a bottle of mescal on the way. It wouldn’t hurt to have a little fortification if things went sideways during the night.

She didn’t know what had moved her, but it was there in the sketchbook. Nothing extra, no overdubs. She hoped her uncle was still capable of seeing what she’d done. He liked things to be in black and white.

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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nobody loses all the time

nobody loses all the time

i had an uncle named
Sol who was a born failure and
nearly everybody said he should have gone
into vaudeville perhaps because my Uncle Sol could
sing McCann He Was A Diver on Xmas Eve like Hell Itself which
may or may not account for the fact that my Uncle

Sol indulged in that possibly most inexcusable
of all to use a highfalootin phrase
luxuries that is or to
wit farming and be
it needlessly
added

my Uncle Sol’s farm
failed because the chickens
ate the vegetables so
my Uncle Sol had a
chicken farm till the
skunks ate the chickens when

my Uncle Sol
had a skunk farm but
the skunks caught cold and
died and so
my Uncle Sol imitated the
skunks in a subtle manner

or by drowning himself in the watertank
but somebody who’d given my Uncle Sol a Victor
Victrola and records while he lived presented to
him upon the auspicious occasion of his decease a
scrumptious not to mention splendiferous funeral with
tall boys in black gloves and flowers and everything and

i remember we all cried like the Missouri
when my Uncle Sol’s coffin lurched because
somebody pressed a button
(and down went
my Uncle
Sol

and started a worm farm)

Read more from e.e. cummings’ “is 5” collection at Project Gutenberg.

DEAD WOOD provides excerpts from the years before ideas became “content”. Some editions are serious and thought-provoking. Some are ludicrous or silly. Some are chosen just because they happened to strike us 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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I finished my scribbles and sketches of the road, the lake, and the countryside. The practice of scribbling and sketching is part of keeping memory. There were a couple of more sketches and a few more notes I wanted to complete before we headed back south. We were leaving on Sunday. We had two more days.

I packed up my journal and went back to the tent and slept. I woke up after an hour and read. Books are part of every trip. For this trip, one of the books I brought was Olav Hauge: Selected Poems. I read the collection and marked a poem called “Everyday.”

But it’s possible to live
in the everyday as well,
in the grey quiet day,
set potatoes, rake leaves,
carry brushwood.
There’s so much to think about here in the world,
one life is not enough for it all.
After work you can fry pork
and read Chinese poems.
Old Laertes cut briars,
dug round his fig tree,
and he let the heroes fight on at Troy.

Along with Hauge’s work, I brought Neil Theise’s book, Notes on Complexity. I underlined a paragraph about the passing of generations, about the passing of us:

Thus, we have yet another complementarity: each of us is, equally, an independent living human and also just one utterly minute, utterly brief unit of a single vast body that is life on Earth. From this point of view, the passing of human generation, in peace or turmoil, is nothing more than the shedding of cells from one’s skin.

The poet tells us to “fry pork/and read Chinese poems.” The scientist tells us that we are “utterly minute, utterly brief.” Perhaps the truth of one gives intention to the other. Yet, for some of us, there is Old Laertes. He cut briars. He sailed on the voyage for the Golden Fleece. He mourned and waited for his son.

I put the books away in my backpack. As I did, I recalled men I have watched in Greece. Men carrying groceries. Men untangling ropes or sharing a wooden bench, as they stared out at the sea. I thought about the “nothing more than the shedding of cells from one’s skin.” And I thought about “rake leaves, / carry brushwood.” Yes, we are brief. Yes, we are more than cells.

The day passed, and Dad stayed with me. It was strange that I had associated Dad with a volleyball game. He had been around fifty years old in the dream. We were living in Utah. But why volleyball? I could have seen him on his motorcycle. I could have seen him in his church office. I could have seen him reading in our home. Maybe it didn’t matter. Maybe I needed any image of Dad alive to replace the one I had of him dead. For two decades, Dad and I shared adventures together or, as my grandmother insisted, caused trouble. I was sick as a child, and I missed a lot of school. Many days I stayed at home. If I felt well enough, Dad took me on his ministerial visits. I went with him to see people in the hospital and to see people in what we used to call old folks homes. I went with him to meet other preachers, though he didn’t often meet other preachers. Once I went with him to the juvenile detention center in Beaumont, Texas. I must have been nine years old. I sat in the waiting area, while Dad had gone back to the holding area. After he came back, I asked Dad who he had seen. We were in the car by then. “A young woman,” Dad said.

“A young woman?”

“That’s right. A girl.”

“What’d she do?”

“I’m not sure I should tell you.”

“You can tell me.”

“Do you want to know?”

“Yes sir.”

“She and a group of her friends killed an old woman. The old woman had befriended them.”

“She killed an old woman?”

“She did. She and her friends.”

“Why did they kill her?”

He shrugged.

“People are mean.”

“That’s really mean.”

“After they killed her, she told me that they felt hungry. So they went into the old woman’s kitchen and made peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. The girl said she was disappointed there was nothing else to eat.”

I don’t remember what I said.

“They killed the old woman. Then they ate peanut butter and jelly sandwiches,” he repeated.

Again, I don’t recall saying anything. Perhaps I tried to imagine the girl and her friends, eating sandwiches, and the old woman dying in some room. It was a meanness, a terrible, terrible meanness.

Dad had invited me into his life. He spoke with people like that girl who had murdered an old woman. He ministered to people like her and to people who had done considerably less evil than her, though I am slow to rank degrees of evil, but Dad told them that Jesus had been put on earth to forgive them. They needed to accept Jesus’ forgiveness if they hoped to wake up to something better than this life. There wasn’t a person in the world that I loved more than my dad. And this was my first camping trip since Dad had died. I had been one of his caregivers. During that time of care, this man of stories, my Dad, sunk deeper into silence. In those last weeks, movies sometimes gave him a chuckle. He watched television with the sound off, but closer to death, he turned up the volume. Mom and I would help him get from his room to the living room multiple times a day. In the evenings, he would sometimes try to watch a movie with me and Mom, but he couldn’t settle, even if he enjoyed the movie. He got restless. Mom and I would be getting further into the plot of whatever movie we watched, then Dad would want to move. He insisted on going back to his bedroom. Mom and I moved him. We got him comfortable in his bed. We said our goodnights. Then ten minutes later, Dad wanted to be in the living room again. I must have lifted him off the floor fifty times. His mind wouldn’t tell his legs that they didn’t work anymore. He weighed one hundred forty pounds. He once weighed two hundred pounds. His body was finished with him, and he was finished with his body.

It was a hard time. It was a hard time for many reasons. I missed Dad’s stories. I missed them while staying with him, while seeing him to his death. I probably resented the silence he adopted, though I don’t like admitting this about myself, as doing so suggests that I am thinking more about my needs than his. What right do any of us have to tell another man how to die? But Dad’s vitality was in his stories. After he stopped sharing stories with people, he diminished. He became trapped within himself, and there was nowhere for him to go. There were no stories to connect him with others and in doing so, release him. To hear his stories, especially as he aged, was like finding hot coals in a fire bed. You scrape through all the ash and burnt wood until you find those red-black coals. When you find them, you can make a fire again. You add tinder, add some stabs of kindling, and then the fire comes back to life. It warms you, gives you a kindly place to sit, and protects you from whatever is on the outside of all that light and warmth. Five years prior to this summer, Dad was hospitalized with a heart attack. It wasn’t a severe heart attack, as the doctors informed my mother, but it was enough of a heart attack to land him in the hospital for a few days. At the time, my family and I lived outside of Longmont, Colorado. My sister lived outside of Denver. Mother called us to insist that we not to worry, not to drive down, and that Dad would be fine. We all drove the next morning. It was the first time in my life that I had seen Dad in the hospital. Dad had his share of health problems—prostate issues, diabetes, bad knees, and a poor heart—but he had never been placed in a hospital. Yet even then and for years prior, Dad had entered a time of silence. I don’t know why, but his capacity to engage with people grew smaller. He told fewer stories. That afternoon, as we walked into his hospital room, Dad said to us, “What are y’all doing here?” My sister said, “We’ve come to see you, Dad.” “What for?” “Because you’re in the hospital.” “What?” “You’re in the hospital.” “Oh.” “Don’t you know you’re in the hospital, Dad?” Dad nodded. He then shut his eyes and pretended to sleep. I rubbed Dad’s legs and asked him how he was doing. He opened his eyes. He looked at me. Then he saw me, and I saw Dad.

He said, “Let me tell you, there was this woman in one of my churches, and this was years ago, and she was an old woman by the time I knew her. Her circumstances were that she was the child of her father’s child. You understand? Her daddy had seeded his own daughter who in turn gave birth to her. The man was her granddaddy and her daddy.”

“Alright.”

“Incest, right?”

“Yes sir.”

“So she got older, this girl, this woman. She reached her teens maybe, and this man started having sex with her.”

“He started having sex with his daughter’s daughter, which is to say his granddaughter?”

“That’s right.”

“Damn.”

“Yeah. Damn. Anyway, this old man started having sex with his daughter slash granddaughter. And it was this daughter slash granddaughter who grew up to be the woman in my church.”

“Alright.”

“Do you want to guess what she did?”

“I hate to guess, but you can tell me.”

“It was one day or one night, I don’t know which it was, while her grandfather slash father was having sex with her, that she brought up a pistol she had hid in the room, and while the old man was having sex with her, she got ahold of that pistol and shot that old man right in the face. Blew him away. Blew his brains out.”

And much like the child I had been, I did not know what to say.

“That happened.”

“That’s quite a story, Dad.”

“You know what else?”

“What?”

“No one did a damn thing. No one. Not the sheriff. Not a judge. Not a lawyer. Not the coroner. She killed the old man and that was that.”

My Dad’s eyes were glowing with story.

“After that, she went on and lived a pretty normal life. She married the local mercantile owner. He was a little older than her, but they had a good life together.”

“A happy ending?”

“I mean, I would think so. Wouldn’t you? Except you tell people a story like that or you talk about the people I used to know, real people, you understand, who walked around and bred and grew gardens and just lived, they don’t believe you or they don’t want to believe you. They don’t believe such a world or such people could have existed, though they did, both of them did.”

In the moment of telling his story, lying in a hospital bed with his crippled heart, Dad came back to life. It was Dad. Dad as I had known him for most of my life. I wanted to believe those coals might stay warm.

I don’t know if I was awake or asleep when Tore came back to the tent. I may have been asleep. It was after seven o’clock, and I was surprised at the time. You lose time in an Arctic summer. Tore had a bucket of berries with him.

“Looks like you found the berries,” I said.

“This is nothing. I could have picked a hundred times more.”

“Are these the ones we saw a couple of days ago?”

“Not those berries. Those were not ripe.”

“Still?”

“Not yet. I walked to the valley by the sea, the farthest valley. There were thousands of berries. I didn’t even walk to the end the valley but look how many berries I found. Maybe it was warmer there or got more sunlight. I don’t know. Maybe the sea helped them grow.”

He tipped the bucket towards me.

“The girls will be happy,” he said.

Tore was talking about his two daughters.

“I imagine they will be.”

“What have you been doing?”

“I read a bit, sketched a bit. I slept more than I should have.”

“Maybe you needed the sleep.”

“Maybe.”

“If you had my watch it would tell you.”

“I’ll be okay.”

“I am going to get the table from the car. We can set it up outside. Then I can pack the berries in those freezer containers. It’s nice weather now. The wind has stopped.”

“Do you need help with the table?”

“No, no. I got it.”

We were soon sitting at the table Tore had brought. He had chairs for both of us. He set up the table between the tent and the lake. He got out the gas stove, and I set it up and brewed a cup of tea. Tore then carried out a block of cheese and a box of crackers from the tent. He talked about the ripened berries and was glad no one knew about them. He wondered if he could get another day of berry picking before we left. We looked out over the lake. The water was calm for the first time since we had made camp. Trout were rising.

“You should catch those trout,” Tore said.

I saw them.

“They’re all small fish,” I said. “See their rise rings?”

“A couple of them are larger.”

We watched the water. More fish rose and a couple of the rings were larger.

“You should try.”

“I don’t want to go through the hassle of rigging my rod to catch a fish that small.”

I held up my hands about five inches apart.

Tore shrugged. “Some of them are bigger.”

The trout continued to rise. There were a couple of bigger fish, like Tore said, but I wasn’t going to cast for them. I started to wonder why I wasn’t casting for them. It was true that the trout were small. Most of them were between four and six inches long from what I could see. The largest fish was maybe ten inches. But it was not the size of the fish that kept me from fishing. Rather, I did not want to make the effort to fish. After so many years of fishing, I lost the desire to prove myself a fisherman. I lost the desire to catch every fish in the water. I was, and I am, a good fly fisherman. If there is a fish to catch, then I stand a fair chance of catching it. Perhaps I had become confident enough as a fisherman that I did not need to catch fish, which, by certain measures, does not make sense. Or maybe something about fly fishing had gone out of me.

I don’t know, but I fished anyway.

I strung up my fly rod and tied on a caddis imitation. I didn’t see any caddis on the water, but the fish were taking bugs off the surface. The caddis fly pattern was buggy. On my first cast I caught a fish. I swung the fish over to Tore and asked him if he thought it was a good eating size. He thought it was the perfect size. “Pan size” is what we used to call fish between six and eight inches long. That was back when I guided, and clients kept more fish in those days. I made two more casts and caught another fish. The second fish was bigger than the previous fish. I swung the fish over to Tore. He took the fish from the hook and cracked its head with the back of his knife, killing it instantly. Two more fish, I decided. I wanted to catch two more, which would make two brace and enough for dinner. I moved and watched for risers. When you fly fish a lake, you need to move. The fish quit biting if you stay in one place. I skirted around the lake, hoping for a bigger fish to show itself. I waited. Made a cast. Waited. Made another cast. Before an hour had passed, I caught two more trout, including a røye.

We cleaned the fish in the outlet stream. It is a beautiful process to clean fish in a stream. You cut a fish from its vent to the top of its jaw. Then with your fingers peel out the gills and pull them downward along the cut you made. Then out comes the offal and sometimes eggs. You splash the fish in the water. If it’s a sunny day, the colors will sparkle. You use your thumb to push out the bloodline and wash the inside of the cavity, and the meat is clean and sometimes pink. It’s bloody colorful and doesn’t smell. Back at the table, Tore dashed the fish with salt and pepper. He cooked them in a pan over the gas stove. He cooked them in lots of butter. They tasted very fine, but part of why they tasted so good was because of the pan. That morning Tore had fried bacon in the same pan. He had fried the bacon and scorched the pan. There were bits of burnt bacon stuck to it, which made the trout extra delicious. We ate. We visited. We talked about fish and berries and warmer days and places to go. We talked about loss and where to find life after loss. I left my fly rod propped against the tent. It was ready to fish. I had tied a crisp new fly to the tippet. It was another caddis imitation. I did this sensing that I would not cast again that evening. But I liked seeing the fly rod there, leaning against the side of the tent and at the end of another story.

We washed our plates and the pan then went separately into the evening. Tore climbed up the hill behind camp to do a language lesson (he decided last year to learn French and Spanish) and to read his messages. I stayed beside the lake. It was good to fish and to catch fish. I had picked a good fly. I had made long, neat casts. I hooked every fish that took the fly. Then I stopped fishing after we had enough for a meal. I felt like something of my old life had returned. There was a sense of being on an adventure. A sense of being alone but capable. A sense that there was such a lot of world to see, as the song goes, and I did not feel judged or unloved or undesired for taking care, for needing to take care. I fished properly and caught fish, as the edges of this world filled my wounded, sometimes angry heart. There was, too, a sense of gratitude for being able to sit beside the lake, for being here, as it were, and for being with Tore, who let me travel into this, his country with him. I felt grateful for the four small trout and the taste of bacon and butter, for my fly rod propped against the tent, for the last dirt road at the end of the world. I thought of Dad and how he loved slow evenings. Dad had known I was a good fly fisherman. He would have allowed me more than that, but that is what dads do sometimes.

Camp was tidy. I had my sleeping bag spread over the cot. I had broken down the fly rod and return it to its tube. My fishing kit was inside the tent. Tore remained on the hill. I decided to walk the road, and I walked in the direction of the village. The sun was at the crest of the horizon, and what was left of it brought out the colors of the landscape. There were the mossy greens of the low grasses and the sharp, waxy greens of berry plants. The sunlight caused outcrops to look like ancient monoliths but preserved. I walked under the same sunlight, and it spoke of souls. Yet I could not think about that too much. The evening was too fragile to risk losing anything.

Read previous installments from Scrublands:

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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The Day Mom Fell Off the Wagon

I knew she could laugh
It just wasn’t very often
Most of the time, she lived
as if nailed in a coffin.

Sunday drives relieved us all
from our cares and chores
The smell of fresh air, the scenery
as we passed the great outdoors

of the Wasatch range and meadows.
Dad drove us to Evanston where
his father grew up on a ranch.
Once in town, we would hear

Dad say, If you throw a rock, 
you might hit a cousin.

We found a favorite restaurant
the Jolly Roger Bar and Grill
Steak and carafe of wine
with a fairly reasonable bill.

The rich red flavor of the cabernet
washed down an inch-thick slab
of meat lovingly seared and seasoned
with maybe an extra carafe on the tab.

Dad’s eyes gleamed with mischief
as he watched Mom quietly sip
one glass then another until
her countenance began to slip.

A giggle forced its way and then
she let loose a mighty guffaw
I enjoyed my mother’s company
more with every surprising faux pas.

At last, the time arrived for us
to weave our way to the car
Dad abetted her bumps and stumbles
as she struggled to leave the bar.

Still laughing at every misstep,
chairs pushing her into a spin
she finally settled into the car
never to lose control again.

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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*Note: Paul, Santo and I are currently on a winter road trip. We were in Florida for most of last month and now we’re in Louisiana. It’s a true luxury to drive south in the winter, just as weather turns brutal up north. We didn’t get to make this trip last year, and my memories of last February’s multiple consecutive ice storms are still painfully fresh.

So, because we were able to leave this year, we left. And I have to say, it was a sweet, sweet feeling when we hit the South Carolina border and I could take off my coat. Everything just feels a little easier when it’s warm outside. Even thinking, somehow. I’ve collected more road notes in the past two months than I did in all of last year.

The following notes are all from the last few months, jotted down at truck stops, in Waffle House parking lots, and while passing crawfish stands along lonely bayou roads.

I sincerely believe that some thoughts will only come to you if you’re riding along with the window open… TM

You always see those people at gas stations in their pajamas. Every time, I wonder what the story is. If they’ve been in the car since morning and they’ll be in the car until nightfall, then maybe the pajamas are a logical expedient. And who am I to judge? Especially today, which is Christmas Day. We’re at a Love’s truckstop outside of Dylan, South Carolina, and a young woman in fluffy pink pajama pants is wrestling with something in the backseat of a car. Her friend or maybe her mother is standing by the passenger window in skinny pants and high heels, looking in the side mirror to adjust her bright red ponytail. She’s satisfied with it now, so she’s just reached through the window and and now she’s eating something out of a paper bag. No one should really be observed at moments like this.

At another pump, a whole family just piled out of a Range Rover, mom, little girl and teenage boy all in slippers and flannel pajama pants. Dad got the gas going and the rest of them trotted into the station together looking like they were rushing into the kitchen for breakfast.

I wonder about these people, all of them traveling on Christmas Day. Are they driving somewhere to be with their families? Do they have families? Do they have a place to go? For our little family—Paul, the dog, and me— today is just the second day of the drive south. It isn’t really a holiday. Except that it’s warm here, which makes it a different kind of holiday.

Pale bark. Pale branches. Red grass.

We’re in Savannah for a couple nights, and I’m realizing, though I’ve stayed in this city more than once, I haven’t really been here. I haven’t landed, not yet, in the Savannah I’m looking for. I can begin to see how it would be, though. How it would feel to slow down here for a few weeks or a month. Walk to the grocery. Walk to a cafe. I am starting to recognize the streets where I could get comfortable, along the upper edge of Forsyth Park. Away from the action of the tourist strip by the river. There are a lot of places in America where I could never get comfortable, but I could see being comfortable for a little while in Savannah. On the right street. With the right trees overhead and the right bookstore nearby.

Why is hotel room art so awful? More importantly, why am I so upset with this particular painting? The pale, empty adirondack chair is casting its long afternoon shadow across the porch. The blooming annuals are overflowing their pots. Then, of course, the temptation of the white beach, past the bushy dunes, and the inevitable blue water.

I am frustrated with other things right now, but the painting is here. It is unavoidable.

It’s such a deathly place in this painting. It’s like a limbo, a pleasing blankness at the far corner of eternity. The flowers never fall. They never overflow their pots. The sun shines and keeps shining. The chair, the porch, the steps to the dunes, will never decay or even get dirty.

It’s worse because it’s a print, an even deader thing. An old, fading print in a cheap frame. An objet d’art meant to exist at the periphery of your consciousness. It isn’t meant to be stared at, which, unfortunately, is what I’ve been doing. It’s just meant to suggest, from the corner of your eye, that you are at the beach and not where you really are—two miles inland in the Florida suburbs. It’s meant to put the beach in your mind. But I don’t like to be told what to do or where to be. I keep looking at it, and it all tastes like sand.

A guy at a gas station in Orange Beach, Alabama just called over to Paul, “I bet you get a lot of compliments on that Lunar Rock.” Which is the official name for the shade of green paint on our car. Paul laughed and went on to tell him the story of how we bought this car in Buffalo, from the only Toyota dealership selling at below-MSRP prices during the pandemic. And somehow the guy at the other pump had bought his truck at that same dealership, in Buffalo, despite the fact that he lives in Alabama. And then the two of them proceeded to have a ten-minute long conversation about how great the dealership was, and how great Toyota cars are, and on and on. There was a whole bunch to do with engines, and which was the right engine to have and which was the wrong engine to have, and why both of them had chosen their engine so well.

This is the only way men have conversations with other men. They can talk about gear. Cars. Guitars. Cameras. Probably other things too, but that’s the gear that Paul tends to have on hand and so those are the conversations I’ve witnessed.

I thought about jumping into tonight’s conversation. I had a 1996 Toyota 4Runner for years when I was younger. I drove it until it had 398,000 miles on it. More than 398,000 miles, actually, but I can’t remember the exact number. And I still regret trading it for a truck I didn’t like and didn’t keep long. The 4Runner was running great, even at that mileage, and it probably ended up on a freighter with a bunch of other junk cars, headed for some overseas backwater. Anyway, I considered piping up and earning some cred in this completely male conversation, but it was more fun to just watch these two with each other. The shyness and the generosity of men with each other, knowing how it costs them something (time, vulnerability) to say anything.

On Magazine Street tonight a woman was digging through a box of clothes set out next to a telephone pole. It was obviously left out for people like her, to get some warm clothes, in advance of the cold snap coming this weekend. The woman held up a large sweatshirt, then threw it back down into the box. She said something, which I couldn’t quite hear from across the street, and began to walk away.

I saw her face as she looked up from the box. I connected to her, just for a moment, without really meaning to. My heart contracted. Her eyes were unfocused, her hair was a mess. She walked at an angle to the street. But I could see a flash of how she would have looked, if only the universe had never done whatever it did to her. She could have been pretty. I wish that my empathy weren’t this shallow, but it was worse to me that she was pretty. She’d thrown back the sweatshirt with a funny jerk to her head. Like, can you believe this shit? I had begun to care about her, just from that gesture. And then I felt much worse, knowing my care didn’t mean anything and it would go nowhere.

She was just one more face in my gallery of lost faces. Paul came out from the convenience store to say they didn’t have any milk. We’d find a grocery store instead. By the time I’d agreed and looked back to the window, she’d turned the corner and gone.

There is a small crowd in white robes standing on Orleans Street. It’s mid-afternoon. They’ve congregated outside a closed old movie theatre, beneath the marquee, looking like they all got lost on their way to the river to be baptized.

There are so many churches in New Orleans, it’d be impossible to keep track of them. The glorious cathedral in the quarter, all the other Catholic churches, the tidy old-school Protestant congregations, and then the endless proliferation of storefront offshoots. Just now, I caught sight of three different Missionary Baptist churches in as many blocks (somehow I imagine they all must hate each other.) On the map, I see the Israelites Baptist church, the New Zion Baptist church, the First Agape Baptist Church, the First Mount Cavalry Baptist Church, and the Ebenezer Baptist church, all within walking distance. Plus, if you get burned by the Baptists, there’s the unaffiliated Tabernacle of Prayer, the Morning Glory Fellowship and the House of Eternal.

Eternal what, of course, is the thought that comes to mind. But I guess it’s one of those, “If you have to ask…” situations.

I like to find the edges of places, where the land dwindles to nothing and the roads are like pencil lines on the map, fading into the water. Today we drove south to Houma. We found a surprise of a bookstore there and both Paul and I came out with a stack of books. They had a JM Coatzee book I’d never read. An Annie Dillard book. I noted a small section on Wicca and a shelf of LGBTQ+ books. As I checked out, I noticed they’d prominently displayed One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This on the counter.

I took my books and thanked the woman behind the desk, thinking she was pretty brave in this small town. I noted the store on my map, so I’d remember to detour for it again.

We traced Louisiana Highway 57 south, one of those pencil roads into the bayou. As we drove, I opened my window and thought about what it would be like to grow up here, along the road to Dulac, Louisiana. Was there a girl in one of these incredible trailers perched twenty feet into the air, reading her books and dreaming? If I were a little girl growing up here, I’d be at that bookstore in Houma every week. I’d be carrying the dust from its floor on every pair of pants.

Someday, if that little girl comes down from her family’s stilt house and makes it out into the world, she’ll find out that, thanks to this place, she’s something special. Her funny accent. Her strange kind of knowledge. The way she talks about snakes. Bird calls. Shrimp boats. The way she loves the smell of burning sugarcane. She’ll come out with funny stories at parties. Men will find her exotic, and it’ll never stop surprising her. After all, no one ever thought she was a great attraction back home. In order to be special, she’ll find out, you have to leave. Still, she’ll never quite belong to anyplace else.

She’ll carry around that stark bayou beauty the rest of her life, along with a hurt kind of sympathy that will surprise her whenever someone ignorant insults her people. Even if they never did feel like her people at the time. Especially.

I am nursing a little self-pity tonight, driving up Carrollton Avenue under the big, shiny Full Snow Moon. I saw a woman coming home a few blocks ago. She was carrying groceries from her car to her front door. I don’t know anything about her, but I imagined she was tired after a day of work. I imagined she had a family waiting inside. And then, at another house, I saw two couples sitting out on a front porch. They had a small firepit burning. They were just sitting there, talking, looking out at the cars passing.

I get this feeling when I travel. And it’s a little worse tonight, because I keep worrying about things back home. I start to think of all these people around me wrapped up in their lives, taking care of their babies and jobs. Sitting out on their porches drinking beer with the same friends they see every Friday night. They’re so cottoned up in the details of their lives, I know some of them are just sick of it. Some of them are itching to find an escape. They’re watching my car go by and thinking of where a long car ride could take them. And here I am, looking back. Not exactly envious of them. But wishing for something they have. I’d like to have a place in things. On the road, I can feel too much like a ghost.

I do have some good memories of Kansas. I woke up this morning thinking of one of them. Summer mornings, alone in bed. That scent of dew in the air and the quiet of the street below.

I remember waking up in Kansas to the sound of birds. On nights when it wasn’t too hot, we’d leave the windows open and the breeze would touch everything in the house through the night, carrying away all the old day’s air. By morning, the house was sweet and fresh. And outside, there were birds. Mourning doves and robins and meadowlarks. Sometimes a woodpecker pecking at the elm tree outside.

My then-husband woke up early every day, before six. He would go downstairs to make coffee. I was usually conscious of him waking up and gathering his things. I heard the creak of the stairs. But I didn’t open my eyes until I was alone. For an hour, I would doze and think about my day. In the summer, I would listen to the birds. I saw the sunlight catch the edge of the window frame, then stretch, slowly, along the floor toward me.

I woke up this morning in New Orleans, years removed from Kansas, remembering that feeling. Was it the sound of birds? We have crows nesting outside the little apartment we’ve rented for the month. I can hear them barking this morning, one to another.

It was something to do with sunlight. Something to do with summer. I wanted to smell the air, the way it smells in the summer, full of cut grass and flower petals. And, with every window open, how the house turned itself outward toward the new day.

We’ll go outside soon and there will be sunshine, though it’s cold sunshine. And I do love the decaying, mismatched sidewalks here. Some brick, some concrete, some flagstone. All cracked and deadly to your ankles, and relenting at frequent intervals to thick scruffs of grass. I like all the spooky old houses, all the romantic porches we pass on our walks. I especially appreciate that it isn’t 9 degrees here, which is the temperature in New York City right now. At home, the ferries have stopped crossing the East River due to all the ice clogging the water.

I should be happy to be here, where it is only just freezing and not thoroughly frozen. Instead, I woke up with my heart set on summer…

Sometimes I think about Wendell Berry on his farm in Kentucky. I think he leads a wise kind of life. And I can almost imagine how it might be, waking up each day to the same beloved place and your daily tasks and your own people. The sharper you hone the blade of your life, I can see how it would blossom, the way that time blossoms when you drive your attention down into the details. That single freckle on the flower petal. I can see how a sense of the infinite is there, in that kind of simplicity.

But where is the train whistle in that life? What happens when you hear the train passing by?

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

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