Creative Nonfiction

Being Depressed
By Stephen Faulkner

I speak from an experience which is still ongoing when I say that depression, or the not so simple state of just being depressed, is an eminently fickle thing. For me it strikes when I am alone and have little or nothing to occupy my time or my mind. Lately it will come upon me during one of those limbo periods that we all occasionally have when there is just nothing at all to do. 

This has only been a recent thing for me, though, perhaps coming on me in this past year or so. Before that my depression was not so intense or periodic. It was a constant of non-caring and an absence of interest in fun, sex, food, playing, joy, people, loved ones, life – nothing, just trudging through all the positive properties and qualities of living with a blank look in the eye that for long periods would let the world outside know that there was no one (or, at least, no one of interest) at home. And then there was the non-feeling; no hate or love or anger or joy – just a pall hanging over me and with me always. At that period of my life it was like a black cloud hovering just inches from the top of my head with tendrils of its dark, foglike substance hanging down, enveloping me as if preparing to draw me up into its colorless interior of eternal non-caring nothingness. 

Evidence of what my depression had done to me finally hit home when, after being told by my wife that something I had done (or not done, I forget which) had hurt her very deeply. She asked me then how that made me feel. I decided to forgo the immediate retort that I usually resort to of bullshitting my way through by telling her that it hurt me to hear her say that and that yes I certainly would try my best to be more supportive and caring in the future. This time, I instead opted to tell her the truth in hopes that it would help to clear the air. “I don’t feel anything,” is what I told her, thereby bringing that particular conversation to a sudden and stinging halt. It was the truth of the moment, but certainly not what she expected, nor wanted, to hear. 

Now, though, depression, as if it were an enemy with which I have been at war, has changed its tactics. Instead of hanging over me like a cloud ready to either pull me up into its evil interior or else drop down to envelope me with much the same result, it now comes at me as if in a blitzkrieg of debilitating crying and an intense bundle of negative feelings that seem to have no reason for being and which drag me through a maze of fragmented thoughts of finding a means – any means – of stopping these horrible feelings from continuing within me. I knew that I had a sizeable supply of hydrocodone on hand from when I had had my hip replaced and when my wife had had gastric bypass surgery. I put the idea of using them right out of my head. At that point, it seems, my depression made a quick retreat and I was back to my old non-caring self again. 

At this point I fully understood the phrase used in articles about Robin Williams’ suicide which stated that he had been “battling depression for some time.” What battle, I asked myself at the time. How do you battle an emotion that culminates in your wanting, or needing, to end the horrible feeling by killing yourself? That’s not a battle or a war. It’s something else altogether. The problem in this was that I could not determine the definition of what that particular “something,” actually was. 

Of course now I know what it is; simply put, it is a battle for my very life. 

This all beggars the question, however, of exactly what depression is, of what it feels like to be in its midst, of what it does to the way the depressed person feels and thinks and reacts to the usual, normal situations of life. 

If left unchecked, a true depression grows in exponential waves, from a gut feeling that something is indefinably wrong to a long period of pursuing a hermitlike existence, wandering through life without feeling, hope or joy, allowing feelings to sink into the mire of the non-caringness of being, telling all who will listen that nothing matters anymore, or relying on the more simplistic, fall back, catch-all answer to any question posed: “Who the hell cares?” For me it suddenly ballooned from there into periodic crying jags, first at the sound of a formerly beloved song or the sight of a picture of myself when I was a smiling, happy-go-lucky six year old. Then, later, the triggers for my weepy sessions came from nothing concrete, nothing seen or heard, but from the memories of my parents, now deceased, and how wonderful it was when I and the rest of my family were when we all were together at home. When the full force of the depression hits, I cry at the thought of just about anything: memories of plays seen, friends from high school and college, immediate family members, as well as aunts, uncles and cousins, music I remember and even unfamiliar songs that I hear as long as the lyrics connect with my memories in some direct or even an obtuse manner. Cry, cry, cry me a river and wonder from where the waters of this sad stream of tears flow. Cry and the world cries with you – what a crock of horse poop that thought is. We are alone in this free form sadness that has turned my mind into a bowl of jelly, my suddenly renewed negative feelings coming to the surface, intensified to the point that they are a physical pain that needs to be stopped, pinned dead in its tracks. RIGHT NOW! Before any of this goes any further. 

Here is where I step into the realm of wanting the thoughts, and the pain that they bring, to stop. Now is the time that I look into the medicine chest in the bathroom, searching for something, something to put an end to this crying, this feeling, feeling, feeling all of the things that had been bottled up inside me and have now come out in full force from somewhere near the center of my being, the very heart of who I am, from the very epicenter of my soul. This is the time I again find the bottles of hydrocodone from my and my wife’s operations several years ago; this is the time I go onto the internet and type into the Google search line, “What dose of hydrocodone is necessary to kill a human being?” The answer quickly becomes available: nine 10 milligram caplets would be enough, but ten of them would definitely give me the results that I sought. 

Here is where I step into the realm of wanting the thoughts, and the pain that they bring, to stop. Now is the time that I look in the medicine chest in the bathroom, searching for something, some anything to put an end to this crying, this feeling, feeling, feeling all the things that had been bottled up inside me and have now come out in full force from somewhere near the center of my being, the very heart of who I am, from the very epicenter of my soul. This is the time I again find the bottles of hydrocodone from my and my wife’s operations from several years back; this is the time I go onto the internet and type into the Google search line, “What dose of hydrocodone is necessary to kill a human being?” The answer quickly becomes available; nine 10 milligram caplets would be enough, it tells me, but then I reason that ten of them would definitely give the result that is sought. 

Something, though, seemed wrong in all of this. I remembered that there are ways of dealing with these feelings and thoughts without relying on such a radical solution as the one I had devised. Back on the internet I searched for the telephone number to a suicide prevention hotline. When a person finally answered and asked what she can do for me, I asked, very simply, for her to give me one good reason why I shouldn’t kill myself. I asked this even though I really didn’t even have a good reason myself, save the cessation of the pain, of going through with it. The idea of complete oblivion, after all, was not something that appealed to even the most desperate of individuals. And the woman told me, “Every breath that you take finds a reason for the next one to follow and that finds reasons for the next, and the next, and the next, and so on. As long as you keep breathing, you keep living. As long as you keep living, there is always hope for things to get better….” 

After this, as she began to ask me the usual set of mundane questions of name, phone number, age, address and the like, I hung up the telephone. The crying had stopped as had the thoughts of committing the act that a few moments ago had seemed the only alternative to what life had recently thrown at me. I went about the little errands that I had listed out the night before to help me fill my day. The phone rang several times. Once I looked at the number on the caller ID screen and, finding that it came from the hotline, I did not answer. Another time I was too busy with some chore or other to take the call and the third one I just ignored. The fourth time the call was attempted I picked up the phone and talked to the woman who had been quite worried about me and my state of mind. I told her that I was all right and thanked her for her concern. Then I answered her list of questions and, after further assurances to her that all was well, she and I got to go about the business of our individual lives. 

The next day while I was on a break at work I talked to my wife on the phone and told her what had happened the day before. The admission of what I had almost done didn’t seem to worry her until I told her to please go into the bathroom and throw out all the hydrocodone pills that she could find in the medicine chest. It was then that the gravity of the situation seemed to hit her full force and she made me promise that I would call the psychiatrist with whom I already had an appointment a week away and let him know what I had just gone through. After that, she was very commiserative and supportive of me and my state of mind – something I wish she had been all along when I kept insisting to her that I wasn’t just being lazy all the time I had been insisting that my problem was depression, that it was an unusually formless kind with no real cause to which I could point out with any amount of certainty, for her, myself, or anyone else. Now that she knew what I had been telling her for months was true; now she understood. Now I would begin to find the help that I so unquestionably needed. 

I recall once either hearing about or reading a quote (that I can no longer locate) from some existentialist or other that said (and I paraphrase) “the only sane decision a person can make is when to commit suicide.” I would say that if you rely only on others for showing you the way to finding your self-esteem and not having done the legwork of finding it for yourself, then that quote might have some validity to it. Otherwise, as I have said before in this essay – what a crock of horse-poop that is! 
​
Stephen Faulkner is a native New Yorker, transplanted with his wife Joyce to Atlanta, Georgia. Steve is now semi-retired from his most recent job as an administrator at a small college and is back to one of his first loves – writing. He has recently had the good fortune to get stories published in such publications as Aphelion Webzine, Hellfire Crossroads, The Satirist, Liquid Imagination, Dreams Eternal, Sanitarium Magazine and Impendulum Magazine. He and Joyce have five cats and a busy life working, volunteering at different non-profit organizations and going to the theater as often as they can find the time.

* * * 

Simon
By Laura Grassman

Simon is a survivor.  He walked down the steep Auburn hill to my home eleven years ago and never left.  At the top of the hill lived his owner, Teddy, Simon’s twin brother, Solomon, and two border collies, Rosy and Finn.  Teddy was a crotchety old man from New Jersey who resided in the granny cottage of his daughter’s home.  A home that marked the 99th mile of the Western States 100 Mile Endurance Run.


A feral orange tabby, Simon’s adoption hiccupped to completion.  Teddy waivered on whether Simon should stay.  Simon knew that staying was the only option to avoid the boisterous New Jersey barrage of commands to “shut-up” barked at the dogs, the canines’ incessant yelping, and the drumming engine of the maroon Toyota mini-van.  


Teddy visited early one morning before his trip to the dog park to inspect Simon’s new yard, his food dish and water, and to finalize Simon’s release to my family.  “Just promise you’ll take good care of him,” he whispered with a catch in his voice.  “Of course, Teddy.  You can come by any time to see him.”  He didn’t.  Simon was fine with this arrangement.


Simon weighs six pounds during the dry summer months and a bulky eight pounds during the Sierra foothills’ winters.  The cycle of weight gain not too different than my pre-menopausal figure.  For the first eleven years, Simon lived outside, hunting rats and robins, sleeping on the roof of the neighbor’s shed, and entering through the garage vent with the raccoons to eat his Friskies.  


I learned to peak around the garage door to ensure that Simon wasn’t crouching in wait.  Simon lacks patience when hungry and is quick to release the right front claw.  The claw cuts like a rusty fisherman knife used to fillet sea bass.  


                                                                       Transition


I was scared to move from my home thinking that Simon would not adjust after such a long period of time.  With his eyesight deteriorating, Simon required a step to perceptually navigate the jump to his food dish.  How would he acclimate to a new neighborhood’s terrain?  A host of scenarios ran through my mind.  He would be hit by a car, be devoured by a black bear or coyote, or would attempt to jump across the irrigation canal and drown.  With my divorce final for close to two years, I knew it was time for a fresh start.  I needed to move on emotionally and physically and the cat needed to move on as well.


My fear that Simon would die manifested in a projection of insecurity of uprooting my daughter, Frieda, from her only home since birth nine years ago and the thought of change that unsettled my teenage son, Hans, every time it happened.  To my children’s defense, they perceived that there had been nothing but change the last two years.  


I bought a small ranch style home a mile from our former house.  Simon stayed inside his new abode for the first two weeks to acclimate to his surroundings. He slept for long hours on the chocolate leather sofa and the orange throw on my bed.  We relaxed in a home filled with love, let our guards down, and released stress.  No one pounced while we rested. 


I gradually let Simon out to explore.  The second day of his release from inside he climbed the chain link fence.   Simon crept along the canal, across Brook Road toward Terrace Street, meandered through Teddy’s old property, and returned down the Virginia Street hill to our old home.  There, he was the orange ghost in the new owner’s yard.  Sightings reported in the Oleander tree, under the Japanese maple, and behind the bushes next to the trash bin.  Locations texted to me for assurance that Simon was alive.  


After several failed rescue attempts, I found him waiting for the new owners to remove the garage vent grill so he could eat.  I climbed into the bushes to talk with him about home, to remind him that he was a member of the family, and we were not leaving him.  I loaded my grief, fear, and hope on his bony back.  He then turned his backside toward me and waited.  Did he want me to pick him up?  Was this a test to ensure that I truly wanted him?  And I did.  “Come on, Simon, time to go.”  Cradling him in my arms, I gently placed his shaking body in the back seat of my small car and drove.   He would never leave home again.





                                                                     Adaptation


Months later, we settled into a new routine.  In the middle of the night, Simon climbs up behind the blinds above my desk.  He sits in the window seat and howls at the moon with a deep guttural cry.  The wail bounces off the walls, down the hallway, and lands in his empty food dish.  He is trapped like my memories.  Instinct smothered in a cage of the mind.  The past locked from the present and somehow needing to find a way to adapt and be released.


Simon has an Indy 500 raceway he travels in the middle of the night.  He starts in the bedroom on the windowsill, races down the hallway, slides the hall carpet runner, returns to leap on the bed, and lands next to my head.  His soft paw gently pats my face with the aroma of kitty litter.  Simon punches at other objects, though, like the bed skirt ruffle to ensure they’re not predators waiting to attack.  His vision left to shapes, memories, and the scent of his home.  His cataracts robbing his sight---the closest he comes to hunting for prey are the creatures that pass outside the window at night or the blue jays under the Oak tree in the morning.  


During his laps around the house, he peppers me with pit bull kisses, little nibbles that don’t break skin but incrementally become sharper if I ignore him.   His feral spirit, like my memories, awakens compassion, pain, and tears.  And ultimately adaptation and transformation.  Ideas plucked from the creative canal in the middle of the night.  If I ignore the calling and roll over, the thought continues to flow in the current. I have learned to listen.  Not always the opportune time, like these moments with Simon.  The memory arrives, wakes me, and the universe speaks.


At 2:00 am, Simon hooked the back of my calf while I was sleeping. His right claw pierced my flesh, shaking me to consciousness, and then followed with a bite below the wound.  As I laid there in pain, I heard the thought murmur, the “edge of your dream lands where the relationship to the present walks to the edge of possibility.”  We each found what we needed.  Like Simon, I embrace the courage to be wild, raw in emotion, and even when I can’t see, trust my instinct.  

Laura Grassmann, a single mom of two, resides in Auburn, California. A former school administrator, Laura returned to the classroom as a special education teacher. She learns to honor her dreams through brave and thoughtful actions. In Laura’s new home, a daddy long leg resides at the corner step of the garage. Every weekend, Laura uses the shop-vac to clean his cobweb and every workweek he rebuilds. Attempts to keep the entrance tidy weaken as Laura sheds her armor of perfection. Laura walks through doors that are messy, painful, and filled with joy---all of them important to discover unimagined possibilities.. 

* * * 

Falling
By Shannon Magee
 
The most significant fall of my life occurred when I was thirteen, the summer my brother and I sailed a two person racing boat called a 420. It was my first summer sailing that kind of boat, but for this fall I blame the trap—a trapeze contraption made of bungee and lines knotted on either side of the boat so the crew can throw on a harness, clip herself to the bungee, and stand on the rail of the boat, throwing all her weight out to counteract the weight of the wind in the sails and keep the boat upright. The only problem is that sometimes when the crew throws all of her weight out of the boat, she also throws herself out of the boat.
 
On the day of the fall, the sky was swirling shades of gunmetal and feather grey. The trickle of the rain increased in pressure and intensity as the wind picked up, carrying us deeper into the channel. The water welcomed both wind and rain, adding its own temper to the mix, becoming ridged and rippled and speckled with white caps. The wake the 420 made as we tacked sloshed up on the rail, over the side, and filled the boat. Beneath our feet, the auto-bailer slurped and gurgled, competing with the rumble of the waves on the other side of the fiberglass. Since there wasn’t any lightning and the wind was tangling sail lines and hair with a malicious glee, it was a perfect day for trapping. So I found myself tied down and clipped up in the trap harness, which was thick and padded with straps over each shoulder and a metal bar spanning the front like a belt, a rounded, open hook where the belt clip would be. It felt like wearing an industrial, heavy-duty diaper and being strapped into a roller coaster ride at the same time.
 
One moment I was standing on that rail, boots planted and hand gripping the trap through salty, squishy gloves. The next, we flew over a particularly large wave, were airborne for a hundredth of a section, and landed with a wet, hard thud back onto the tumultuous surface of the water. I lost grip and slipped. The minute I was actually flying, suspended in the air before gravity kicked in, lasted about as long as it took me to realize the boat rail was no longer under my feet. Blink—I was in water, clumsily trying to balance a life jacket and a heavy trap harness, watching my brother speed off into the grey. He tacked around, annoyed I’d fallen and that we’d be slowed down while I tried to clamber over the side of the boat. My arms were up, hands ready, when the slick vessel aimed its blunt nose in my direction. But the sides were slippery with salt water and rain. My prune-y, gloved fingers had no grip on that squeaky surface. To complicate this problem, the bar built into the waist of the trap harness added unnecessary weight and jutted out to stall any effort I made to hoist myself over the side of a boat, especially a boat moving very quickly. Blinking the sea and rain water out of my eyes, I lost my grip on the boat and my brother, cursing, zoomed away once more.
 
The second time my brother tacked my way, he misjudged the distance. One moment, I was staring at the bow of the boat, blinking water out of my eyes and putting my hands out to catch the boat. The next, the boat was over me and I was using my hands to push my body away from the 420 so the centerboard and rudder extending from the bottom of the boat wouldn’t get anywhere near me (there are reasons those two parts of the boat are collectively called “the blades”). The water felt thicker—heavier and colder as I sank deeper, and my mind was very calm—thoughts seemed to seep out of it as I drifted down in slow motion. It thought: what if I don’t come up? Maybe I’ll just stay here for a while. Everything slowed down.
***
When I was little, my mom and I used to play a game when no one else was home. This game was my introduction to playing with perception. We would lie on the big armchair with our legs up and our torsos curving down the seat of the chair so our heads were inches from the ground. We’d look up and pretend to be walking on the ceiling. A room is completely changed when seen upside-down. The faces in the pictures look too large, with too small features and distortions around the eyes and mouths so, even though I knew it was my mother’s or brother’s or father’s face in the frame, it was just wrong. There always seemed to be more space in the room when we were walking on the ceiling. We could never stay up there for too long, and when we flipped the world back to normal my stomach rolled a bit. I felt like I imagine astronauts do when they walk on the moon. Everything looks a little different when you picture it from the sky.
 
Just before I fell from the 420, my perception was flipped the same way it was with the ceiling game. I saw the sea from the sky.
 
The entire boat was tipping, the wake from the wind and the current was climbing up the opposite rail, itching to grab the canvas sails and hold fast. Standing on the other rail, I kept zooming my gaze further and further back, imagining how it looked from above, from afar: I was standing on the highest point on the boat. If the 420 rolled, I’d plummet right on top of it, possibly into the sail. I caught myself leaning into the boat as I saw that blue-green line breaking up the white of the boat and the sails. I imagined falling straight under the boom, right into that hungry ocean, the sails settling on top of me like a thick comforter. It’s happened to sailors before; sometimes they can’t find the edge of that canvas blanket and it tucks them in for good. But I fell out instead of in. Before, I had always told people I was afraid of heights because it seemed easier than to explain that it wasn’t the height I was afraid of, I was scared of falling from that height, of being surrounded by nothing until my body smashed against whatever surface waited at the bottom of that fall.
***
You know that feeling you get in the pit of your stomach when you fall? It’s the feeling that someone just launched a golf ball down your throat and it rocketed right to your gut with enough force that you’re sure it’s ready to explode right out of your stomach. And even when that ball of nervous/excited anticipation is gone, the ghost of it ripples through your system like shockwaves for several moments afterward. It is very difficult to forget the feeling of falling. Like a tongue salivating in preparation for a certain taste before the food enters a mouth, only stronger a body anticipates the sensation of a fall before the actual fall occurs. It’s the same feeling you can get when you’re reading a really great story—when the action picks up and you’re mentally and emotionally invested in whatever drama the characters are facing, so much that you start becoming physically invested too. Maybe your heart rate picks up or an angry flush splotches your face or you have to blink double-time to keep your eyes clear enough of tears that you can keep reading. Maybe you become so frustrated with the story you throw the book as far from you as possible. Even after you finish the book, you remember the way you felt while you read it. Those feelings mark how immersed you were in another time and place, those offered by the story.
 
Some days it isn’t about sorting out what is up and what is down or where any direction is. Directions and positions peel away from the world. Sometimes the world narrows to a space too tight or too immediate for language and intelligence and emotion. Sometimes all you know is that all around you is movement, but no one action is distinguished from or greater than another. Sometimes you’re caught in the middle of that tide and you don’t know if what you’re feeling is anger or excitement, joy or frustration, but you feel the energy crackling through your nerves, charging your movements in shockwaves. The day I fell was such a day, and I found myself jolted the energy and movement of it all. It was like falling into the outer bounds of space; I was surrounded by the ocean on all sides, but nothing was stable. The water slowed everything: my fall, my thoughts, and my concept of time, and I was able to experience the moment fully, unhampered by the distractions of the world above the water. It was like being caught up in a story, with all of the possible outcomes of the story revolving through my head, but the story was mine. I was stuck on that page, suspended in time, in that moment.
 
Most readers have probably felt the way I did when my brother ran me over. It felt like reading a really good book. Everything around the reader seems to stop—real life pauses so the story can rise from the pages and reach out, opening a window in the reader’s mind, a view with a new perspective. This makes the story another kind of real, the kind that sticks in the reader’s mind and shifts the way she sees the world. She surfaces from the pages with blurred vision in glassy eyes, forgetting the time and place in which she’s reading. Maybe she even forgets herself for a moment. Even through everything is pretty much the same, something changes. She’s back in the world above the water, but she always has that memory of the world she experienced while submerged.
***
Years ago I saw a bumper sticker that said, “Eve did it to us.” Blame Eve for the Fall and blame the Fall for humanity’s faults. This is one of the earliest ways that the idea of falling has received a bad rap. People fall out of favor with others, fall from grace, fall from their high horses, and how about the archetype of “the fallen woman?” For the most part, the idea of falling carries a negative connotation. Still, people fall in love, they can become so immersed in a story they feel like they’re falling into it, and if they fall at just the right time or in the right way their perception may shift just enough to see “falling” as more than a stumbling act, like mine did when I fell from the 420 that summer. Then, falling becomes a positive idea, a way of seeing and experiencing the world with a widened perspective.
 
When you fall into a story, becoming so engrossed in it you forget where you are, who you are, when you are, the experience of the story becomes yours. No one can take the world you create for the story from you. It creates active power in a moment that is absolutely yours, unique. If you let it, falling into the ocean or through the air can be the same way. Falling into an idea or a conversation or a moment can make time fall away. This is the fall Eve also offered us: a fall that opened up the way people perceive the world, with the power to choose how we experience a moment.
 
 Shannon Magee is a graduate of Wake Forest University in North Carolina, where she livened up campus life by running around in a cow onesie and sharing Irish poetry with the community. A passionate writer of both poetry and prose, she is pursuing a career in writing, editing, and publishing. ​

* * * 
​
Fertile Hope
By Ani Tascian
 
I was one month from turning 36 and in a small waiting room. I had my first appointment with Dr. Grief, my surgeon, my point-person. Magazines were stacked on the worn brown coffee table, which looked like it had retired to this office from one of the doctors’ homes. Kyle and I were sitting side by side, our legs touching. A large art book filled with drawings by people with cancer laid on top of the National Geographics and Cancer Todays. I opened the art book and stared at a self-portrait by a cancer patient, limbs bent, face disfigured. I shut the book.
A very pregnant woman came out of the doctor’s office. She was crying. Her husband followed her out calmly and I wondered how he could be so professional—he was probably screaming inside.

“Ani, come in.” Dr. Greif popped out, hand outstretched.

He was white haired and balding, just like I wanted my doctors. I took his hand as if he was throwing me a life preserver, with both hands.

He sat behind a brown desk that divided us from him, pictures of his grown children behind him. Kyle and I faced the window, which looked out toward gray medical buildings in Oakland. The landscape was the color of cement.

Dr. Greif pulled up an x-ray image of my breast on his computer. I saw the bright lumps, a gang of four.  I started rubbing my sweaty palms over and over, back and forth, on my blue corduroy skirt. Kyle and Dr. Greif pretended not to notice that I looked insane.
“Here they are,” he said like he was showing me old friends.

“Uh huh,” I nod, rolling back and forth.
“Let me pull up a scan of another patient of mine with the triple negative diagnosis,” and in a blink, I am looking at another woman’s lump. A light-filled mass occupied more than half her breast. I stared at it and thought, My lumps are smaller than hers.
“Her story is sad. She didn’t have insurance and it took her a long time to begin treatment.” Dr. Greif said this in a way that made me believe he helped her personally. I noted the present tense. She was still alive.

Dr. Greif brought out more papers. Papers that had results of the needle biopsy, the one that made me feel like I was being stabbed in the chest despite the numbing medicine. I had asked the nurse what the specimen looked like.

“Pink,” she said, through pursed lips. The nurses didn’t have poker faces.

Dr. Greif gave me a run down of the proposed treatment. He recommended that I  get everything modern science could give me for my type of tumor: Taxol infusions for six months weekly for two months, then Carboplatin every three weeks; lumpectomy to remove margins and any cancer not destroyed by the chemo; radiation every day for eight weeks. Ten total months of treatment.

*

Taxol came first in weekly infusions through a surgically implanted port in my chest that made me feel robotic. The nurse leaned over me and impaled me with the I.V. Dad received his infusions the old fashioned way, through a vein in his left arm. The trouble with that method was that veins could collapse, making it nearly impossible to find a viable thoroughfare for the chemo. The first surgery in my life would be placement of a circular-sized port right below my left collar bone. It stuck out from under my skin like a button on a robot.

But it was the Carboplatin that almost broke me. The weekly Taxol was a pleasant vacation in comparison. Carbo infusions were every three weeks, a clinical trial, not the usual treatment for Triple Negative breast cancer.  A round of Carboplatin made it certain that I would be in bed for a week. By the time I felt like I could make the walk around my block, I was scheduled for another infusion. By December, a month away from the end of chemo, after having caught cold after cold back to back, a cough that sounded like a call to seals on a harbor, I would want to give up.

*

“What does chemo feel like?” I asked Dr. Greif.
“Like the flu.”
Dr. Greif and I talked about the impending loss of my menstrual periods, a side effect. My cycle may not rebound. Greif reached behind my shoulder for a pamphlet in one of the many clear plastic file holders hanging on the walls of his office.

He handed it to me. It read: “Fertile Hope.”
“Have you thought about having more children? The therapy can put you into an early menopause.”
This was an afterthought for him, I could tell. He was in the business of prolonging lives, not making them. But he said I should seriously think about it before he let me go. I looked to Kyle. He looked at the floor.
“Whatever you want,” Kyle said. He meant it.

*

Two days later, I was in Orinda at Reproductive Science Center. Fertile Hope, a program that helped young cancer patients keep the hope that they would be fertile, was subsidizing about half of the cost, which was upwards of $20, 000. Kyle was at his contract job at Kodak, so I was handling this on my own. My friends all had young children; we formed an army to corral the kids that we unoriginally called Mommies Group. They were watching Ian at a nearby park. I never met the woman who organized the group. She died of ovarian cancer the same year we formed.

This waiting room had green tea and Pepperidge Farm cookies. The fashion magazines were current, filled with women who didn’t have cancer. A young couple was led out by the receptionist, but I was otherwise sitting by myself on white pleather. I pretended I was here on a regular visit. Some fertility problems. No big deal. It wasn’t cancer, for God’s sake. The office was sunlit and warm. A thick Harper’s Bazaar sat on my lap and I let myself wonder if our second baby would look like Ian.

Dr. Willman’s desk was at a diagonal, the wall-to-wall window at my left when I entered. She stood for a moment at her desk, near the window. Tall green pine trees swayed in the wind behind her.

“I just want to tell you that you aren’t alone. I see two women like you a month,” she told me as she sat down.

Wow,” I replied. I mentally added the other faceless young woman into my cancer-world, which was growing daily.
“Do you have kids?” she asked me. Her eyes were soft and brown.
“Yes, one.” I smiled back.

When I wondered aloud if I could bring him, her tone changed.

“Seeing children can make the patients here upset.” She strongly suggested that I not bring him.  She looked at a fleck of dust that had settled on her desk for a long minute. I scanned the room and didn’t see any pictures of children in her office. This was just one more place where Ian got left behind.

She sent me home with hormone injections and an ugly plastic box the color of rusty blood to discard the needles. I would have to come in for blood work weekly to gauge my hormone levels, to see if my eggs were ready to be fertilized.

“Inject yourself every day about the same time.”

She gave me more details, and I nodded my head dutifully, pretended to understand about levels and hormones. She showed me how to grab my belly fat and inject myself and, for the first time, I was grateful for the extra pounds I gained with Ian. 

At home, I flicked the syringe like a pro with my middle finger to get rid of the air pocket. Standing with my pants around my thighs in our pink-tiled bathroom, I laughed inexplicably. My belly became bruised from the shots, battle wounds from round one. Me taking charge: 1. Cancer: 0.

I thought of a friend from the Mommies Group, who went through two years of this, the process of fertilizing the egg then the short surgery to implant an embryo back inside her. The treatments didn’t work. She had two beautiful girls through open adoption now. With a flat, “Congratulations,” my friend disappeared from the email list for weeks at a time whenever one of the moms announced she was pregnant again.

Two weeks after the meeting with Dr. Willman, Dr. Greif phoned me.

“Where are you in the fertility process?” His tone was insistent.
I think we’re getting close to egg retrieval.” The fertility process had been a welcome interlude to the impending cancer treatments.
“Good. We need to start treatment as soon as possible. Time is ticking.” The last time he examined the lump by hand, it had grown larger.
 
Most women get at least two or three eggs from the fertility process. In the end, I had one to save for after treatment. If I wanted more children. If I couldn’t have one on my own. If I lived.
I called the fertilized egg, “She.” She was in this paper on my desk, but that was the only thing I was sure of. Bills came from the local storage facility for a while and we paid dutifully.
​
Then my father died. And the bills that came afterward were placed on this desk. Then the bills stopped coming. Nothing. The truth was, I didn’t know where She was right now and I couldn’t bear to make the phone call. I couldn’t play another game of probabilities. I folded the old bill neatly and put it back into the file folder for the time being. She would have to wait.

​Ani Tascian writes from a green bungalow on a farm table built by her father. A VONA/Voices alum and recent Vermont Studio Resident, she has her MFA in Creative Writing from Saint Mary's College of California. You can find her work at Citron Review, Cahoodadoodaling, MARY, A New Journal of Writing, Buddhist Poetry Review, Bird’s Thumb and Raising Mothers. 

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The Routine
By Darryl Graff

“Hey, boss, how was your weekend?” the man said as he picked over the pile of bananas on the fruit vendor’s cart. He quickly squeezed each one until he settled on three, and then put the bananas in his briefcase.

“Okay, doing okay,” the fruit vendor replied to the businessman in his brown suit, and the businessman hurried down Park Avenue.

Whenever I see a businessman with a briefcase, I often immediately think of my father.
Our family never spent our summers in the City– we always went upstate, to the Catskills, spending our entire summer in a small house on the edge of a small lake. On Fridays after work, my father would drive up in his white Buick. At the house at the lake, my father had a routine: Every Saturday morning, with the house smelling of bacon and coffee, he sat down at the small table in the living room, placed his briefcase on the table and, with his left and right thumb, slid open the metal latch and unlocked the case. This would make a loud, snapping “unlocking” noise. When my father finished catching up on his paperwork, he would close the briefcase and with a satisfied smile, place the briefcase on the floor next to the front door.

Over the years, I would come to know many “unlocking” sounds: the sound of a key unlocking an apartment door;  a gang box lock on my job site, or the sound my bike lock makes as I unlock it  before my Sunday bike ride. Yet, none of those sounds ever make me think of anything.  But every time I hear the unlocking of a briefcase it brings me back to   that small house on  the lake,  the house that smelled of bacon and coffee, and  watching my father open and close his briefcase.

One summer, during my mother’s chemotherapy treatments, we had to come back into New York City in the middle of August.  What I remember most about that time was how hot our apartment was:  My father had all the lights turned off and all the windows opened, and when I opened the refrigerator, there was no food, only a bottle of beer and an empty jar of mustard.
I sometimes think about my father, sitting in that hot apartment with all the lights turned out and all the windows open, drinking beer every night, alone.

Each  morning before work,  I  buy  a cup of coffee from the coffee cart,  and then  I sit on the  wooden bench– the one that faces City Hall where my wife,  Regina,  and I  got married all those years ago.   We were very young, and it showed in our wedding outfits. We looked ridiculous; a friend who saw the pictures then said our wedding photo looked exactly like an album cover.  I wonder, still, sometimes: What album cover?  What band?  Maybe our wedding photo reminded him of Jim Carroll’s album, Catholic Boy – with his parents, both in raincoats, his father in a beat-up fedora and his mother, clutching her heavy black pocketbook.

Before I start down the subway stairs, I always buy a newspaper with the dollar change from the coffee cart vendor.  The newspaper vendor has a small cardboard box that he’s filled with neatly folded dollar bills from all the people with their own routines.   Every day on the subway, I think to myself: Everyone has a routine. Otherwise, the subway would never be crowded.

When I stop at the coffee shop on 83rd Street and Third Avenue, there’s always a guy there, drinking coffee and reading a book. Every now and then, he sets the book down on the small glass table in front of him and stares up at the tin ceiling of the shop, and he smiles. That’s his routine.  

On weekends, we go to our beach house at Rockaway. In the mornings, Regina and I always go to the beach for a swim, and I always go in the ocean first, with a fast running dive.  Regina likes to wade slowly into the water.  I always turn and look over my shoulder to make sure she’s all right.
 
Later in the day, I’ll put my briefcase on the kitchen table, open the Velcro tabs, and catch
up on some paperwork. Just like my father used to do.  That was his routine, and now it’s
mine.   Although I never will have the same satisfied smile on my face  that my father
somehow always had, after I close my briefcase,  I place it on the floor by the front door.
 
Darryl Graff is a New York City construction worker and writer.
His stories have been published in Akashic Books,Heart and Mind Zine,Hippocampus, Bio Stories and Gravel.

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What More Is There Possibly To Ask For?
By Lisa Mae DeMasi
​ 
Lots of people talk to animals. Not very many listen, though. That’s the problem.
—Benjamin Hoff
 
 
It's Friday night and I am sitting down to dinner. I want to relax, delve into an episode of Breaking Bad and savor my meal in peace. My beloved cat Jontue is gone. The salmon on my plate is safe. The soft tissue interior of my nose is not in danger of being ripped by her ferocious forepaw. My cheek won’t be swatted either. And no one is staring at me with the intensity that could move a mountain. I miss that someone. That “fur person” as May Sarton said.  
 
I first spotted Jontue in a pet store, a small kitty in a huge enclosure all by her lonesome, crying out for my attention as I shopped for cat food. I already had four at home. But this one’s eyes were pleading take me; I need love. Those eyes also said, I can love you too. Of course you can, little cat.
 
A strange looking thing, Jontue was six months old and resembled a prehistoric creature with her brindled coat, fangs, and wiry tail. Exotic or not, no one wanted her. I understood this all too well. So I paid an extraordinary amount of money for the pure breed Cornish Rex because she needed a home, someone to take care of her.
 
She entered my life when I was particularly vulnerable and lonely; she captured my heart and I like to think I captured hers. Over the years, I’d come to know Jontue so well. She was a cat driven by instinct and visibly affected by subtle shifts of energy. She was small and silky-haired and stuck close to me at all times. She was also needy, affable. She liked to hold my head in a firm grip with her paws and lick the tip of my nose.
            
Jontue was my last live connection to the desert, another planet called Tucson, the barren landscape where I lived a few difficult years of my youth in personal chaos. She was the fifth cat I adopted during those years when I was living by my lonesome and she was like all others in this one way: they were all abandoned and unwanted. That is, until I came along and laid claim. I adored all five of my cats. Jontue held an especially beloved place in my heart.
 
She was my protector, my nurse and deeply in tune with how I was feeling. When I’d cry myself silly or stare off into space feeling blue, she’d whack my cheek as if I was in a diabetic stupor. Mama, snap out of it. Caring for her and the other cats gave me the reason to drag myself out of bed at times when I was overcome with illness and depression, those heavy burdens of being human. When these feelings took over Jontue knew and she came and offered all she could: her soft coat to pet, her warm body and a purr, her kind eyes holding mine for a moment before looking away.
 
I've met many irresponsible people in my life but never an irresponsible cat.
—Rita Mae Brown, author of Pawing Through the Past: A Mrs. Murphy Mystery
 
Jontue even made living in Tucson at times fun. She got frisky when she had a productive #2 and frolicked out of the litter box and across the kitchen tile floor like a filly with a belly full of bedsprings. A supreme hunter, she dismantled geckos in the apartment, danced about with flesh-colored scorpions, and swatted down flying insects with incredible precision (inside the apartment). Outside, she could leap six-foot fences in a single bound. Nimble, she was!
 
The Rex Club of the UK says this about Jontue’s breed (my comments are in parentheses):
 
Cornish Rex cats make excellent pets (if you don’t mind being treated like prey). Aristocratic in appearance (hmmm, not this one), they are charming (huh?), acutely intelligent (vibrational), very affectionate (suck you dry of the sentiment) and gentle (uh-uh) whilst full of mischief (yes), never seeming to grow old (she was the last of the fivesome). Their long toes are a distinctive feature which enables them to use their paws like little hands (“I slap my mama in the face”). The breed is adaptable to new environments (she yowled the entire 2,300-mile drive from Tucson to Boston) elegant (?), agile (incredibly so) and active, demanding constant companionship and closeness (as in Velcro). In some cases, they crave closeness so much that when their owner is out at work all day their Cornish Rex will go visit with a neighbor! (Segue: The Doberman story.)
 
Jontue once scaled a six-foot stockade fence and landed on all fours in my neighbor’s Doberman pen. In the early evenings when the desert cooled off, I had a habit of letting my cats out into my “yard,” an eighteen-foot square dirt floor absent of vegetation and enclosed by a fence. The cats would roam about, sniffing, digging, grooming and sprawling themselves on the warm earth without any concern for what lay beyond the fence. Watching them relaxed me; I wanted to learn their carefree nature.
Why that night? Why jump? I’ll never know. In the blink of an eye, Jontue was over the fence. The first otherworldly wail shot the remaining four cats through the screen and into the house. My adrenaline soared and I froze. Fence. Dobermans. Cat. Screeching. What could I do?
 
I cupped my hands over my ears and darted into the house. Leaning up against the closed door, my heart pounded. My flesh churned out perspiration. I was in a sort of paralyzed shock. Then the mama bear stepped in and I moved!
 
Back into the yard. I am a grizzly and begin tearing down the fence one picket at a time. Crashing through it with the fiercest mothering instincts I will save my young or be shredded by the hounds of hell while trying.
 
That’s my cat, Dobes!
 
The crazed attack dogs are in full view. I’m in their territory now and I don’t see Jontue. There’s no flesh dangling from their teeth—I take note of this—but their focus has turned to me, canines barred, hackles raised. I’m about to be torn to pieces.
 
But where’s the cat?
 
The enclosure is barren with the exception of a cinder block here and there, and a sizable pile of 2x4s, sticks and brush off to my right.
          
How could that flimsy form of refuge protect her?
 
I don’t spend too much time on the question. I fall to my knees before the brush pile. The dogs are going to eat me rear-end first!
 
Out of my periphery, I see a woman approaching, running, arms flailing. Her mouth moves, I hear nothing; it has no effect on my mission. I am feeling recklessly enthusiastic and plunge my hands into a desert den that would make even Crocodile Hunter Steve Irwin hesitate (and we all know what happened to him). Colors and textures pan before my eyes; I’m chucking sticks and 2x4s over my shoulder. The woman is dodging the debris, unsteadily pulling back the frothing beasts while fragments of my terrycloth dress catch in their teeth.
 
Jontue is there, I’ve unearthed her. She is balled up, disoriented and trembling; her coat is slick with dog saliva. She does not look, as the Rex Club would describe, “charming” or “elegant.”
 
I grab the cat, secure her to my chest; I turn my back on the beasts and my neighbor, and swiftly attempt to retreat through the makeshift opening in the fence.  I can’t make traction. I take a giant step forward then snap back to the fence like an elastic band. “Wait, wait, I’ll help you!” my neighbor says, but now just as crazed as the dogs, I bulldoze forward and my dress rips even more. A long and twisting fragment of white terrycloth remains caught up on the nail, an ironic white flag signaling—a little late—for peace. Jontue’s claws dig deeper into my chest, I’m bloodied yet free.
 
Dumping Jontue inside, I collapse flat on the kitchen floor and gaze at the geckos scurrying across the ceiling; wait for my respiration and heart rate to fall back into normal range. The other spooked cats tiptoe around and come in close; Jontue eventually perches on my thigh. She has fared much better than me—she doesn’t have a scratch on her. She is safe. I would do it all again; I would have done just about anything for this cat.
 
Many years have passed since then. I left the desert and eventually lost Jontue’s sisters to renal failure, ketosis, and lymphoma. Not one of them lived past thirteen years. But Jontue did, she moved residences a total of ten times with me in a span of eighteen years.
 
Her life, dictated by mine, changed dramatically and often—fluctuations in places, people, animals and my emotions. Four months into our latest move, Jontue’s health deteriorated in a matter of days. Just three of them. She wasn’t well; at times she suffered from blindness and would curl up in her heated bed and stare into the space in front of her. I could read her eyes, her body; I could hear her thoughts--I feel terrible, I don’t understand what’s wrong, the pain won’t go away.
          
The day after Thanksgiving, I made her pain go away.
          
Jontue. She was my last live connection to the desert, to that painful time of soul searching. But the pain made me a writer and I soothed this sorrow by bringing home cats. One after another and particularly the ones nobody wanted. And those felines repaid me—by making me laugh, making me play, giving me the strength to tear down a stockade fence when I thought I was broken and weak.
 
These unwanted animals are the best ones to love, they become the dearest companions because animals know when you have saved them. Our pets remember. In return they nurture us, protect us, see our truths, and they love us. What more is there possibly to ask?
          
There are two means of refuge from the miseries of life: music and cats.
—Albert Schweitzer
 
 
Dear Jontue: It took me so long to write this little memorial for you, weeks and weeks, and I needed to distance myself from home, miles and miles. I couldn’t bring myself to write it, you see, where we shared an abode, where your bed has been taken over by the bunnies, knew it would force me to mourn your passing. I pretend that a big piece of my life as I know it, isn’t gone, that the vibe of the house is still in check. That you’ll still be there when I return home, come squawking on your tippy toes to greet me, wrap around my leg and rub your butt on my shin. The last few moments of your life haunt me—you did not struggle, lay right down quietly and slipped away. In the end, it turns out, you were oh so “elegant.” Thank you for coming into my life when I needed you most, trying the various people and places on for size right alongside of me, and being my true companion for all these years.

Lisa’s work has been featured in East Bay Review, Shark Reef, HuffPost, Midlife Boulevard, Elephant Journal, Rebelle Society and her personal blog, Nurture is My Nature. When she’s not writing, she practices Reiki specializing in unblocking creatives in all mediums and moving them (with humor and love) to the highest vision of themselves as artists. 

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