Aim
There was a man named Nizam,
He killed 99 people and couldn't calm.
He felt ashamed and wanted forgiveness,
He treated it as a challenging race. He went to a Sadhu to get a way,
But Sadhu disappointed him and Nizam found no way.
Nizam killed the Sadhu as he was angered,
And had gone to another Sadhu with a view to his need.
Nizam had to go a place Sadhu said at last,
Nizam tried going fast.
But the angel of death came and Nizam died,
Can Nizam see the path of light?
Now a divine angel want to take Nizam's soul,
Whereas hell's angel said it was not the divine angel's role.
The head of angels came to give a solution,
Angel said measure Nizam's destination.
It was more than the middle point
The divine angel took Nizam's soul,
Nizam was got rid off for his aim and goal.
+
Water for Children
and fresh Clean Sky
Ancient's thought Wander
Love won't have to try.
If Graves You are Building
to Remember this day
Remember the Children,
a Good Place to play.
Nature's Reward
to
Who Cares at all
Eternity's Bliss
Can Wander
Stand Tall
When You walk with Ancestors
and Fruits Life can send
A Gift to Your Children
Our future, My friend.
♡
...
by John Edward Culp
January 28, 2018
There and Back
On a nippy Monday in April, the storm of the previous evening having drifted east, Olga Petrovich scurries along the alley backing onto her Amherst Avenue two-storey. She can hear as far away as the Jefferson place her TV echoing off the living room walls. A gardening program, the gladiola. It’s left on day and night, the box. A house needs voices, even an empty one.
She’s off to The Grove this morning, the leafy retreat and community garden at the foot of Broderick Street, where, in her volunteer capacity, she disposes of the liquor bottles and glutinous condoms accumulating there over a typical weekend. Befitting a widow of Old Country custom, she’s attired austerely, with a dark shawl hugging her spare but spry frame. Curled at the bottom of the canvas bag swinging from her shoulder is a length of nylon rope, one end of which is braided into a noose. She’s already picked out the tree. Today she’ll select the bough.
The Grove’s Yoshino is one of the first cherry trees to blossom in the spring. Its height matches a telephone pole, the span can extend ten metres. Though too bitter for human consumption, the garlanding berries attract a crush of starlings. Lovers have chiselled their initials into the tree’s sturdy trunk, a rite of passage dating back to the young Sumerians of Mesopotamia.
It was in this newly minted housing development thirty minutes from the city centre that she and Florek raised the kids. As newlyweds they’d joined fellow residents lobbying the municipality to have the swampy woodlots to the south rezoned as a green space, a park in all but name. Campaign strategy was crafted by a former peacenik. “The best time to strike,” he’d persuaded the others, “is when the ball comes loose in the scrum.”
And he was right, as the bureaucrats stalling the initiative eventually caved, and The Grove today is a valued asset booked well in advance for birthdays, weddings, and school outings. Throughout the summer and early fall amateur musicians and comedians are welcomed to a plywood stage. Friday nights are reserved for karaoke.
Seniors gravitate to the pond at the rear of The Grove, where cedar plank benches are set back from a marshy shoreline. Though not much deeper than a bathtub, the pond was referred to by some jester as Africa’s Lake Tanganyika, the world’s largest freshwater lake, and the nickname has stuck. It’s sheltered by unruly bush and bramble, and comfortably distant from traffic fumes. There are welcoming faces most days, gossip and laughter; solitude, too, for those who choose it. When the mercury soars, carp surface from the murky depths to snatch a hapless dragonfly. Fowl come and go, a few grebes and mallards. The occasional loon, both avian and human.
Olga finds the winged creatures more convivial company than some neighbours, uncomplicated and less needy, and she worries about the birds’ decline. Likely suspects are the raccoons and coyotes, as their droppings are plentiful. Others blame the vandals convening nocturnally in smoky clumps along the forested penumbra. Cursing and scowling, boom boxes reverberant, a weapons-grade contempt for all things adult.
“This year they’ll smash your car window for kicks,” opines Mia Huntcliffe, a woman of generous circumference and contrary temperament. “Next year they’ll be poking a Smith & Wesson into your ribs.”
Guilty or not, the delinquents animate much discussion lakeside. When Mia stomps off—because Mia always stomps off—a squinting, middle-aged fellow beneath a BC Lions ball cap turns to Olga on the bench, and says, “She’s a piece of work, that one, but I agree with her: Those punks are on a pogo stick to hell.”
She stays clear of Maggie Horton, who resides with a deadbeat husband and a pride of rescued cats in a shabby bungalow on the south side of Kensington. Ratty tablecloths drape the living room window, the lawn is a jungle. Sopping heaps of junk mail jam the front entrance. “A rental,” sniff home-owning neighbours. “A stain.”
Social media sites and a popular TV station known for partial-truths have Maggie and others believing the Chinese are taking over the world, and that Moslems, “every last one of ’em,” are “murderous bastards.” Each sentence out of her mouth is exclamatory, as though the spittle accompanying the canards strengthen their veracity.
“They’re buyin’ up the whole country,” she harrumphs of the former, “and right under our effin’ noses!” She fails to add that it’s homeowners who freely agreed to have a For Sale sign hammered into their lawn, and that due to market demand they earned lottery-winning prices.
“If the price is right,” Florek says, “people forget their prejudices. They’ll sell to a Martian.”
Following one of Maggie’s exits, a prim and reserved Oriental slipped from her poncho to better advertise the printing on her T-shirt, which in bold white letters strung between her elfin shoulders read, Animals Welcome, People Tolerated.
One never knows what to expect at the pond. On any given day the retreat could be as festive as a pub crawl or as sombre as a wake. Earlier in the year Olga had overheard an elderly couple at the end of her bench discussing the arrival of two gay men, one of them flamboyantly effeminate. They’d been admiring a bed of tulips and snapping photos, bothering no one; a young girl clung to the hand of one of them. “How do you tell which is the mother?” the man asked his wife. “Norm,” she was quick to respond, “asking gay parents which one is the mother is like asking which chopstick is the fork.”
Olga remembers that as a new immigrant herself, a teen with limited English, most classmates were helpful, and greeted her warmly, though a small but hurtful group would lob slurs at her as she passed in the hall. “Bohunk,” they’d hiss. “Alien.” The family’s new neighbours, many of them foreign-born themselves, had also been welcoming. The kids—Olga had two older sisters and a younger brother—were playing with counterparts before their suitcases were unpacked. Within days her mother was exchanging recipes and child-rearing tips with the other housewives, and her father, who struggled mightily with the transition, had before long fallen into lively conversation with fellow paterfamilias about international football rankings.
One morning a girl of similar age came to the house and introduced herself to Olga as one of five kids who lived in the split-level a few doors away. “How about we be friends?” she said. “Doesn’t cost anything.” Her name was Celinka, and she’d arrived in the country the previous spring from a village in the Carpathian Mountains. Her fat face was the colour of a ripe strawberry.
“When I was a little girl,” she said apropos nothing, “an auntie told me that if I went into the hills alone I’d be eaten by giant shit monsters.”
“And did you do as she asked?”
“Of course not.”
“You must have defeated the shit monsters.”
“I’m here aren’t I.”
Olga’s family, especially her own kids, adopted over time the more liberal conventions and values of their new country, its long-standing celebrations, but she, like her parents before her, remained stubbornly faithful to many Old Country observances. Even now, all these years later, she doesn’t buy brand name clothing, as she believes trendy garments “will fill next year’s remainder bins.” She rarely visits a hairdresser, preferring the practicality of a simple bun or ponytail. On most social occasions she applies makeup lightly, if at all. “A woman’s external beauty erodes,” her mother had often said, “but the inner light glows on. Best accept it.” Florek, too, is guided by homeland traditions. He’d choose her homemade borscht over a Big Mac, golabki rather than a pizza.
Frugality is a high virtue, they taught the kids. The time-tested but waning practice of living within one’s means. Florek was always trying to reinforce the point, believing that toughening them up, teaching the value of sacrifice, prepared their spawn for the disappointments sure to come. “Some people are the bug, and some are the windshield.” It was one of his favourite sayings.
—
From the air, as seen by birds, drones, and gods, the long and narrow slice of real estate ceded for The Grove resembles a snake slithering through high grass. Central to the front of the parcel are about a dozen coffin-size planters from which locals coax tomatoes and Swiss chard, cucumbers and onions, a medley of lettuces. Kathryn, an agriculture major, has been awarded a grant to help first-timers manage the plots and mind their progress through to the harvest. Complimentary beverages encourage an audience for her encyclopedic talks on local flora and fauna. She’s a pretty thing, with chipmunk cheeks and chestnut brown hair snipped short. The seniors adore her.
“Who planted the cherry tree?” she was asked at one of the workshops. Olga remembers Kathryn explaining, “The Yoshino is native to Japan, so it might have arrived here the way many trees do, via bird shit.” She’s interrupted by neophyte green thumb Paul Barton, a gaseous oaf, who says, “My family came west some forty years ago. We arrived via a shitty Buick.” He laughed heartily.
The tree’s vase-shaped canopy during the humid summer months throws a comforting patch of afternoon shade. Its five-petal blossoms mature from white to pink over a period of two to three weeks. Before the autumn shedding, the green leaves convert to a yellow, then orange, and finally to the rusty hue of dried blood. The tree passes raw winters unadorned, a skeletal leviathan in sharp relief against the bleak skies.
—
The kids always said she was a clean freak, so when they were old enough to take care of themselves, Olga started a house-cleaning business. Her clients were mostly professionals or business types who worked hard and enjoyed active social lives. A few were of old money, a class of people an uncle back home, a communist, believed “lived idle lives gagging on silverware.” Though it was true many of her clients resided in posh homes concealed behind tall hedges, her experience didn’t square with her uncle’s characterization. “I didn’t see anyone gagging on anything,” she told Celinka. “They were always nice to me.” As for her clientele being wealthy, how could it be otherwise? The incomes of most eastside folks are meagre by comparison. “They’ve no choice but to mop up their own mess.”
Florek is strong-willed and taciturn, a man standing at a slight angle to the world. He’s second generation Canuck, a self-taught carpenter specializing in home renos. He played rugby on Sundays until his knees started bothering him, and votes Liberal federally, the party he judges most welcoming to immigrants. Based on their experience, both thought the antidote to a discomfort with newcomers, to people who look different and speak a foreign language, is not less newcomers, but more of them. Familiarity breeds friendships. Unfamiliarity? Suspicion. Fear.
After dinner they’d relax in the solarium he’d built onto the back of the house and watch the barn swallows descend on the yard. At the crocuses pushing up between the rocks, catkins bunching on the beech tree, monarch butterflies dropping their eggs in the milkweed. He loved a light spring rain, the solarium’s glass panels freckling with tears. If he wasn’t whittling something from a bar of soap or a block of softwood, a small animal of some sort typically, there’d be a mug of strong coffee with a dollop of cream steaming in his calloused hands, a pipe clacking between acrylic dentures. When addressed, muttering a barely audible “Uh-huh.”
The kids, two girls and a boy, took to schooling, which surprised Olga, as neither she nor Florek had much formal education, and never advocated its importance. Leena, the eldest, also enjoyed the popularity afforded to the prepossessing. She married an American entrepreneur, Jack; they live in Florida with their two young children. Olga reserved judgment on the union, never airing her distrust of her son-in-law’s braggadocio. Florek, too, was distrustful of anyone whose wealth depended on the turbulence of the stock market and the voltage of his smile. “Jack’s a back slapper. Watch your wallet.”
Judith, their second, teaches elementary school. She’s also attractive, but in a quieter way. The introvert to her sister’s extrovert, childless by choice. Lives in Toronto with her longtime beau, Brendan, a pleasant enough IT sort. “Dull,” was Florek’s evaluation, “but a straight shooter. “When Brendan says he’s going to do something, he does it. A lot like me.”
Julian is the baby of the litter. He has the reflective air of the artist. As a youngster he always seemed to be holding back something; his basement room as a teen was a no-fly zone. He’d inherited their father’s emerald orbs, making him, with those long lashes and hand cream complexion, more beautiful than handsome. He’d made money modelling for department store catalogues, which financed a backpacking trip to Europe, where, a decade later, he remains. Occasional collect calls suggest a nomadic life. She fears he might be homosexual; back home, a cousin had been killed for it. She’s troubled by thoughts of him loitering outside public washrooms, as she’s heard some do that.
—
Their love began the moment they first set eyes on each other. It was at the monthly high school sock hop, her first ever dance with a boy. She was drawn to those grass green eyes and his physicality as he swept her across the gym floor. She remembers the first song, too: “Johnny Angel,” and the singer, Shelley Fabares, which accounted for all she knew of her adopted homeland’s popular music. Florek was two years her senior, an admired multi-sport athlete. Despite his youth, he comported himself like someone much older. “Like someone who’d sailed rough seas,” she confided in Celinka. Her very own Johnny Angel.
She had thick brows and angular features, with a farm girl’s sinewy arms and muscular legs. Some of the boys at school considered her homely. Others, though, were intrigued by her exotic ways and serious cast, by the extraterrestrial accent. Several anonymous notes proposing profane behaviour had been stuffed into her locker. Lick my cock, DP bitch! Celinka, who knew about such things, demonstrated with a carrot.
Neither Florek nor Olga had dated anyone else, and their shared ancestral heritage pleased both sets of parents, the Petrovichs and the Kowalskis. In his senior year they’d hook up after basketball practice in a stand of woods behind the school. Tied the knot in the orthodox tradition a week after her matriculation, the seed that would be their Leena squirming in her womb. While friends were winging off to Hawaii and buying new cars, they, with family assistance, had already purchased the Amherst home and had begun paying down the loan.
They worked long hours and on weekends for low wages, endearing themselves to clients, but earning the ire of union members and those who wouldn’t. “We’re commoners,” he would say. “There’s only one way to go but up.” What they appreciated most about the true north strong and free was the liberal expression and absence of retribution for its exercise. “You can disagree here,” said Florek, “without being arrested or shot.”
Everything considered, they told themselves, theirs had been a good life—or, like all lives, good until something bad happens.
—
He was driving little Judith and two playmates to a birthday party. It was the middle of July, the afternoon a West Coast gorgeous. At a four-way stop, his turn to advance, the other motorists began pounding their horns, but his head had slumped over the steering wheel of the family’s Mazda station wagon. A quick-thinking pedestrian crossed the road and opened the driver’s
door, stopping the car from rolling into the intersection. Taken from them, Olga would say, “before the arrival of a single white bristle.” It was his heart, said the doctor. “Unforeseen.”
Acquaintances and parishioners from church mumbled canned Hallmark condolences or dropped cards through the mail slot, but the rote insincerity, the laziness of the phrase “I’m sorry for your loss,” disappointed her. “People hide behind words. A hug would have been nice.”
Celinka urged her not to give in to despair because “widows get used to living alone,” just as she had after a blood clot had claimed her Blazko, leaving her to raise two kids on her own. “They fade in your thoughts, like daylight.”
But Florek never did fade; Olga wouldn’t allow it. Years since his passing, she still chats with him on occasion while taking her tea in the solarium. His presence can seem so real sometimes that she smells the perspiration she could never dislodge from his work shirts. When she catches a whiff of his pipe smoke, she closes the doors and windows, locking it inside. Early one morning, talking aloud to herself, she’s certain she hears as clear as the door bell a spectral “Uh-huh.”
She never removed the hundred dollar wedding ring he slipped onto her finger those many years ago. It had been the cheapest band on offer at a dodgy jeweller’s on East Hastings. “I’ll tell you what I’ll do,” began the man’s pitch. Her favourite photo of them has a place on the mantel in the living room: Sunset at Spanish Banks. The incoming tide sweeping up the sand, chasing them to higher ground.
Early in widowhood she found comfort replaying the tales he told of the sprawling Petrovich family. As the oldest son, he was entrusted with keeping alive knowledge of the clan’s colourful history. Some had died fighting for the resistance. “How can young people plan a future,” he always said, “if they don’t know their past?”
She remembered a gathering in a relative’s backyard. The kids bunched around his size thirteen sandals as he talked of his Uncle Zyga, who, as a boy after the war, was put in charge of the family’s dairy cow. “Her name was Bronya, and she was the largest cow in the district.” Without her, he said, “many of you kids wouldn’t be here now.” Zyga swapped her milk in the village for potatoes and bread. “He bartered for beef, a luxury.”
With each telling Florek added or subtracted a little something, depending on his audience. He’d exaggerate where necessary with the older kids, many of whom were certain, as he’d been at that age, that there was little about the world they didn’t already know. “Passing on family lore,” he’d said, “means you sometimes have to pass over the truth.”
The country was lawless then, he’d tell them. Bandits came out in numbers after dark, and everyone needed milk, so the beast, the family jewel, was housed with the boys in the back room. “They had to cut a hole in the wall to get her inside.” He lowers the voice that had sung baritone in the church choir, asking the children, “Does anyone know why sleeping in the same room as Bronya was a problem?” A fair-haired niece of maybe ten years timidly raised a digit. “Because she was big, and might step on them?” A boy familiar with the narrative scoffed. “Because cows fart a lot, and Bronya’s were really stinky.”
He also spoke to the kids of his maternal grandparents, who, on arriving in Canada, had settled on the Prairies. They had four children; Florek’s mother had been the youngest. The family’s first home was a sod hut on a high plain. “There was no town nearby, no road, no trees. His mother, in a diary entry, described their days there as “living on the moon.”
They arrived just in time to seed the allotment. The kids were responsible for collecting enough brush and twigs to keep a fire alive. But when winter pushed in, the northerlies were biting and the snow fell for days. Morale was low, and many times after chores they’d squeeze around the paltry flames talking wistfully of home.
“No trees, no fire,” Florek said with a thespian’s pause. “No fire, no food.”
Each morning grandfather would venture out in search of a tree. “Even a stump would do.” On the second day he came upon a Jack pine tucked into a hollow. He dug it out of the frozen ground and hauled it home. Because the axe handle had split hacking through the ice, he couldn’t make kindling until it was repaired, so he left the door of the hut open just enough to insert one end of the tree into the mouth of the stove. “When it had turned to ash, he’d have the kids drag more inside.”
Florek liked to leave his young listeners with a lesson. “Wood warms three times: when you cut it down, when you drag it home, and when you burn it.”
—
Her beloved Yoshino has toppled overnight in the storm. Its corpse divides The Grove into an east and west, its immensity more fully appreciated when horizontal. The potting shed where Kathryn stores her tools has been clipped by one of the larger branches, as has a section of fencing surrounding the adjacent home, and from where its owner, a Mr. Devlin, peers disbelievingly from his fogged-up kitchen window. The spot where the tree for so many years had been imbedded in the loamy soil is now a gaping hole filled with rainwater. Exposed roots twitch like nerve endings in the morning chill.
She runs her hands over the tree’s scaly bark. The Yoshino was The Grove, its epicentre, the reason she’d decided to do it here. Early, at the first carolling of the birds, so the children wouldn’t find her. Yet she now views the tree’s demise as her reprieve, a stay of execution. She reaches into the shoulder bag, fingers the noose. When her plan had been hatched she’d been seized by an aching emptiness that had stretched interminably into days and then weeks. Each night she had the same dream: flinging the rope into the air, snagging on a limb, stepping off the edge of a picnic table.
She sits atop the deposed colossus, scrolls through the memories. To the tire swings and forts it had hosted, the robins’ nests and hummingbird feeders. The faces of long-ago children appear before her. Those who snapped an arm or leg in a careless plunge, the boys who shinnied up the knotty branches to better admire through a bedroom window an undressing teenage beauty. She remembers the girls weaving blossom necklaces and bracelets, fitting almond-fragranced crowns onto their heads. Her Julian, joining them.
She makes her way over pottery shards that crunch underfoot like dry cereal to where a heart stained pink with berry juice is etched into the tree’s glossy skin. To cupid’s arrow. To the initials FP and OK.
—
There’s no shortage of folks volunteering to help with the cleanup. A group of women gather Saturday at the pond to assign tasks. During a tea break, the ladies bunched around a warming fire, a Mrs. Woo introduces a tale of her late mother, who had lived in mainland China during a time of war and upheaval. A crafty raconteur, she opens with a reliable page-turner: “The streets were littered with body parts. There was gunfire throughout the night, people screaming.”
“It must have been frightening,” says one, and the others, wanting more, surround Mrs. Woo.
“The elders had a saying about fear: We were as scared as a long-tailed cat in a room full of rocking chairs.”
“We’ve never had anything like that happen here,” someone says.
“Not yet,” remarks another.
Mrs. Woo is a tiny, energetic woman with a warm way about her. A gold front tooth glitters when she faces the sun. “Once a week,” she says, “if the fighting had subsided, about ten to fifteen women, my mother one of them, would meet at what was left of the village square. From there they’d set off on a long walk.”
They’d visit the shops that hadn’t been destroyed in the bombings or follow the path along the river, which had become a means of disposal, as the graveyards were full. So many corpses would float by in a day that a new sighting would not be remarked upon. Villagers in such times liked to sit with a fortune teller, it calmed them, so the women would rest up and gossip as they waited their turn with the oracle. They’d help a farmer plant his crop. Visit a shrine, chat with the monks. Clear rubble from the streets.
“Every week was different,” says Mrs. Woo. “It took the edge off their troubles.”
A newcomer to the group, Mrs. Hansworth, a retired teacher, said, “Why don’t we do something like that? We can meet here, just as we have today.”
And so it was that once a week thereafter, like the ladies in China, the ladies of The Grove would set off on an excursion. It might be lunch at an ethnic eatery one day, a point of interest the next. It didn’t matter where, because they were mingling and chatting, escaping their silos. Sharing stories as they ambled along, the joys and heartbreaks of their years. Occasionally a gent might join them, a spouse or maybe a child or a dog, but the participants remained largely female, middle-aged and up. Ladies with some serious tread left on their footwear.
They’d explore new housing developments popping up beyond their own, or distribute sandwiches at one of the homeless encampments. They’d admire heritage homes and the landscaping surrounding them. Pose for group photos, weed each other’s spring gardens. A community TV station got wind of their activities and aired a feature. Mrs. Woo and a few of the girls were interviewed.
One day Mrs. Hansworth asked Mrs. Woo if her mother’s friends had a name for their day trips. Mrs. Woo and another Chinese woman wrestled with the translation. “We think that in English it would be called There and Back,” Mrs. Woo said. “A simple walk, and yet much more.”
When the group had visited just about everything worth seeing within a day’s slog, they begin picking a section of the city, hop a public bus, and explore its streets and alleyways, visiting landmarks, engaging the residents there. They stop and eat their bag lunches in one of its parks or at the community centre, resting up for the return journey. Olga remembers the Christmas they stopped at a construction site and sang carols to the framing crew.
After the TV feature, community newspapers began running items about their activities, which spurred others to form their own There and Back. They were soon hosting potlucks and leading tours of their respective neighbourhoods. In the winter months, when the streets are slippery, activities were moved inside, at someone’s home. There were musical recitals, poetry readings, cooking demos, board games. A city historian addressed them, and bottles of beer were juggled by an erstwhile circus clown, who afterwards speedily drained each of them.
Attendance eventually began to drop off, as all knew it must. The distances were becoming difficult for some, including Olga. “When I get home from our walks, my legs swell like sausages.” Mrs. Woo reported that she, too, could no longer partake. “I can usually make it there,” she said, “but not back.”
The next week the ladies went by Mrs. Woo’s home with a shopping cart borrowed from the market. It was lined with pillows and blankets. She was lifted into it and pushed by the two strapping sons of a group regular. Their destination was one of the city’s oldest parks, a lovely spot favoured by Mrs. Woo where weeping willows shaded the fish ponds and rhododendrons grew in clusters along its tree-lined trails. The ladies that day pitched horseshoes, and though signs advised against it, fed the squirrels. Someone played the accordion, someone else launched a kite. A few weeks later, Mrs. Woo passed.
—.
What hair remains is white and lifeless. Bones grind and groan. An older sister writes from California, where she’d settled after marrying; her brother calls from Halifax, talking again of a family holiday back to the motherland. Birthday greetings from the grandkids are brief and hurried. Stick-people drawings, “Merry Xmas, Grandma!” She waits, as will each of us, for a malfunction; a hemorrhage; for a defect or an irregularity; for a glitch; a blockage; a mysterious rash or lump; the troubling results of a blood test. Hoping the fateful date never arrives. Hoping it soon does, and swiftly.
One day after a light lunch she feels bloated. Then it’s a nagging back pain. She dismisses the discomforts as inconveniences to be accommodated. “Drink five ounces of barley tea every night before going to bed,” says Celinka, a self-certified expert. “It’ll make you poop.” Celinka believes most ailments are curable with a burst of stool.
She’s scrubbing dishes after dinner one night when she hears what sounds like a dripping faucet. Bending to inspect the sink trap, she notices the spotting pooled on the linoleum floor between her legs. At the clinic she chats with another patient, who says, “Whenever I talk of my illness, people tell me about everyone they know who’ve been sick, what they have, the symptoms. My advice? Keep it to yourself.” A lady she talks with in a lineup at the pharmacy refers to old age as “a massacre.”
Tests confirm her suspicions. The odds of meaningful survival are poor. From the moment she declines treatment, thoughts never before contemplated consume her waking moments. Is that it? Daily chores are rendered meaningless. Fill the vases with fresh flowers from the garden, eat healthy—why? Being told the estimated day of your departure, she tells Celinka, is “a purgatory. You’re not dead yet, but you’re not really alive, either. It’s like being told to sit in the waiting room, the doctor will see you shortly, for what remains of your life.”
A kindly specialist at the clinic urges her to reconsider treatment, tells her there’s always a chance, but it sounds to her like mumbo jumbo with a red bow on it. A woman comes to the house and explains alternate strategies like hypnosis and meditation and aromatherapy; like acupuncture; like yoga and tai chi, but these remedies, too, sound like mumbo jumbo. Mumbo jumbo with a scented candle perhaps, but wellness hooey just the same.
She remembers a family friend unwilling to surrender to a terminal illness. He’d flown to Mexico and paid a great deal of money for a “miraculous” potion made from shark marrow. At his funeral, the chaplain droning on, Florek had whispered into her ear, “Fish flop around before they die.”
On the bus ride home from the clinic one afternoon, she turns to Celinka, who’d sometimes come along to keep her company, and says, “Last night before bed I decided to accept it, and I could feel this heavy weight slide off my shoulders. It just jumped out of my head, I don’t know why. I’m done flopping around.”
What did ease her despair was not medicine, but weekly visits from the There and Back girls. They’d stomp across Olga’s yard on their way to somewhere and stand under the open window, serenading her with a piece of music they knew she admired. They’d show up alone to sip tea or unannounced, in small, hushed groups, with a fistful of flowers. As a few sat gossiping bedside, others would be washing dishes, vacuuming, hanging laundry. She could hear others mowing the lawn, sweeping the walks. On one such visit she was presented with a yellow T-shirt one of the members had designed. Where a woman’s breasts might rest were the words Broads of There and Back. Below them was a blow-up of a running shoe very much like the kind members laced up for an excursion. So threadbare, one of the girls commented, “you can almost smell the mileage.”
—
She can feel the disease spreading throughout her body, down her legs and along her wilting arms, worming its corrosive way into her plumbing. She doesn’t fear the end, it’s only sleeping, after all, but she does fear an agonizing passage of the kind she’d seen others suffer. Her vision narrows, the appetite shrinks, and so does she. A walk to the grocery store at the corner leaves her winded. She misses most of all Lake Tanganyika, its hard wooden benches. The lively conversation. The birds.
Celinka doesn’t like driving at night, especially when it’s raining, so most evenings Olga spends alone, plopped in front of the TV. She pays no heed to the news, all that killing and thieving, the lies and broken promises, but one night she comes across a program about MAID, which she learns stands for medical assistance in dying. It had apparently become legally available for the terminally ill, and more people every year are choosing “death on their own terms,” as its being called.
She squats inches from the screen. A man has allowed his death to be filmed. Led Zeppelin’s “Stairway to Heaven” sounds from some off-screen device. His wife is in bed with him, her arms lashed around his waist. Hoping to stall his departure, to make him miss his flight. The man signals the physician, and the needle slides smoothly into a vein. The patient’s colouring fades to a ghostly shade. His eyes roll, the mouth slackens.
—
She wears the cotton dress he’d always liked. Carnation pinks and marine blues; she’d made it herself. The ribbon clasping her hair is mauve. Celinka applies a few dabs of makeup. Family photos are spread across the bed; everyone is so much younger. On vacation, attending graduations, feting anniversaries, the lot of them bunched and clownishly shouting “cheese!” around some forgotten roadside attraction. A signed glossy from the There and Back broads propped up on the night stand. The framed snap of her and Florek at Spanish Banks.
Leena and Jack, his bombast tamed, are the first to arrive, having flown in from Miami; the grandchildren are left with in-laws. Judith and Brendan follow. They make room on the bed, lock hands. The doctor, a tiny man with rheumy eyes, waits quietly in the corner, the little black bag nestled like a sleeping kitten in his lap. “Pretend I’m not here.”
When it seems he’ll be a no-show, she nods, and the MD prepares the jab, but there’s a light knock at the door, and Celinka peels back the curtain. “It’s him!” He’s brought someone, a beautiful French boy, Alphonse. Judith plays “Johnny Angel” on her iPhone. Olga hums along, and the others join in. Midway through the second refrain, her eyes close.
Heads are bowed as Celinka reads from Genesis: “…you return to the ground, since from it you were taken; for dust you are, and to dust you will return.”
—
The annual Grove fundraiser, a Saturday evening early in the fall. The replacement Yoshino, now the height of a household broom, is shielded by traffic cones. Volunteers have built a bonfire, its glowing embers flit into the inky night. A rock musician who describes himself as “medium famous” volunteers his cover band, which proves a great draw with the teens, including the most menacing of the ruffians.
Kids have been washing cars at the Chevron station and flogging fifty-fifty tickets. Girl Scouts sell homemade pies at the curb, torches flare at Lake Tanganyika. Speeches are made thanking the volunteers, explaining how The Grove came into being. One of the speakers mentions the lady who for many years cleaned the grounds every Monday morning, but the sound system is faulty and most people didn’t hear. It’s an uncomfortable observation, but alas true, how swiftly we’re all forgotten.
For several years the severed limbs of the original Yoshino had been left stacked at the back of the property, but this year they’ve been bucked, bundled, and sold for firewood. The trunk has been diced into blocks and auctioned off as garden stools. The piece that raises the most is the stool bearing FP’s declaration of his undying love for OK.
The highest bidders are the bohemian couple who’d purchased the Amherst Avenue place, the well-kept bungalow with the solarium out back and the great garden. “Does anyone know who they were?” the wife asks of the anonymous paramours. The lady running the auction explains that the carving was likely done when the sweethearts were young and unmarried, before The Grove. “People have been guessing their identities for years. Maiden names aren’t commonly known.”
The husband, a fellow of mystical bent, drops onto the stool and runs his fingers over the engraved initials, thinking that by touch he might better channel the artist at work. He’d been smoking herb earlier, and imagines the blade gouging bark, sawdust flecking boots. Did their devotion endure? he wonders. He blows a lock of hair from his eyes, scratches the beard. To no one in particular he mumbles a barely audible “Uh-huh.”
AN EPIC WRITTEN ON CLOUDS
We fell in love, loved each other,
We know that the world is like heaven.
We saw two faces of people,
We realized that everywhere is like a dungeon!
The life of birds became interesting,
There was no sorrow, pain,
He would study all day long,
They loved each other from the heart!
We did not obey the riches of the Earth,
Two hearts united, we flew to the sky,
Away from everyone, to hardships,
We built a nest above the clouds.
We never got enough of seeing eye to eye,
We didn't get tired of wondering around,
We didn't get angry - we didn't reconcile and we didn't break up,
We could live a lifetime of love!
We wrote an epic on the clouds,
We spread love to all humanity,
We came down to earth and gain the honest,
We took the soul from the body and ascended to the sky.
Elmaya Jabbarova
01.07.2022
Elmaya Jabbarova was born in Azerbaijan. She is a poet, writer, reciter, translator. Her poems were published in the regional newspapers «Shargin sesi», «Ziya», «Hekari», literary collections «Turan», «Karabakh is Azerbaijan!», «Zafar», «Buta», foreign Anthologies «Silk Road Arabian Nights», «Nano poem for Africa», «Juntos por las Letras 1;2», «Kafiye.net» in Turkey, in the African’s CAJ magazine, Bangladesh’s Red Times magazine, «Prodigy Published» magazine. She performed her poems live on Bangladesh Uddan TV, at the II Spain Book Fair 1ra Feria Virtual del Libro Panama, Bolivia, Uruguay, France, Portugal, USA.
Stick to the script Bradley. Learn the damn lines, she thought to herself. She deplored actors who didn’t take the time, care enough to digest their assigned dialogue. Most fought tooth and nail to snag as many lines as possible, coveted them, persevered like hell to learn them.
As soon as Cynthia received her script from the Director, she consumed her lines, dedicated to absorbing them as quickly as possible. Once she received the script, she would immediately read aloud every single word of dialogue into an old-fashioned tape recorder from start to finish, whispering her own character’s lines faintly into the microphone, and then audibly read in full voice all the other characters’ lines. She listened to the recording at least twice a day during both the rehearsal and performance periods, inserting her own lines, in character, as prompted. If she had a major role in a production, she would listen to the tape three times each day outside of scheduled theater rehearsals. She recited her lines every chance she got, during her hour-long car commute to work, while walking on the beach, in the check-out line at Safeway and even in bed before sleeping.
Cynthia memorized her dialogue within a week after receiving the script, even when she was the lead in the play with hundreds of lines. Hell, it was an adventure – a challenge, a new mountain to climb each time she was cast. Directors and fellow actors were duly impressed at her speed at picking up the lines and her ability to transform herself into the character. She could “become” anybody if she put her mind and heart into it.
But at 40 years old, Cynthia’s theater activities had become a job to her; more tasks to accomplish, a burden of responsibility versus a passion or outlet for creativity. Rehearsals had become another place she had to be by a certain time several nights a week.
She drove to the theater for the first rehearsal of her latest romantic comedy. This is the last play I’m doing for a while, maybe forever. She was pleased that she had been chosen as the lead in the production. The Director had personally phoned her and asked her to do it. With only three characters in this tale of lust and murder, each actor in their own right was critical to the show’s success. Although disenchanted with the downside of theater, she was tickled about this particular role; a great note for her to end on. Twelve years ago, Cynthia had performed the same lead role in the same play with the same Director. Being asked to revive the character of ‘Loretta’ confirmed that she was not yet too old to play the attractive young wife of a car salesman who ventures into a reckless affair with the family dentist, and then plots with him to murder her spineless yet lovable husband.
As Cynthia parked the car on the street by the theater, she sat by herself for a moment in the dark. I’m cranky. Too much on my plate at work.
Just before they finished blocking Scene 1, Bradley, who played the dentist, stood behind her, reached his hands under her armpits and firmly cupped both of her boobs full-on. His hands pressed her nipples. She felt his hot breath on the base of her neck.
“Wahoo!” he shouted, and let go.
Yes, Bradley Fisher, the dope who struggled to learn his damn lines in every show she’d done with him, had now sexually molested her.
She looked down at Gary, the fully-bearded Director, his dark hair wild and disheveled. He sat on a tall wooden stool at the foot of the stage, a dog-eared script in hand. Cynthia was astounded to see that he showed no reaction. His failure to acknowledge what just happened was inconceivable to her. Had he chalked it up to acceptable comedic actor shenanigans? Or had he accidentally turned away for that specific moment, and completely missed the blatant sexual assault which took place only a few feet away? Dan, the actor playing Cynthia’s bumbling husband, one of the most decent guys she knew in theater, didn’t seem to react either. She thought she saw Dan raise his eyebrows before he turned and looked down at his script.
Did the event really even happen? She considered the possibility. More ridiculous to her was that she said nothing to Bradley or Gary in terms of her outrage, disgust, confusion, all the things she felt inside. She wanted to scream but instead she froze.
“Cynthia, can you move downstage for Scene 2, first two lines?” Gary said, looking up from his script. She hesitated, feeling like she was in an episode of ‘The Twilight Zone,’ yet nodded, marked the blocking note with a pencil on her script, and moved downstage to say the opening line. The rehearsal went on, all the blocking done. “It’s a wrap for tonight,” Gary said, tapping his pencil on his script.
When she stepped down from the stage, Gary tapped her shoulder and whispered, “Great job Cynthia.”
“Thanks,” she said, giving him a weak smile.
Bradley picked up his jacket from a front row theater seat and moved towards her, his blue eyes wide, his blonde hair slicked back, an impish grin on his face. He seemed to want to hug her good-night. She glared at him, pressed her lips tightly together and moved away quickly before he could reach her. She grabbed her purse and sweater from the seat on the aisle, and started to rush to the back.
“Good-night, Cynthia,” she heard Dan call out. She forced herself to respond. “Bye,” she said feeling fractured by his nonchalance and her humiliation. She pushed on the swinging door to exit the dimly-lit theater. Once outside on the street, around the corner and in her car, she dropped her head down on the steering wheel and wept.
Bradley never did anything inappropriate again for the remainder of the six-week rehearsal period. When she had to kiss him in a love scene, she wanted to puke, but kept her composure, hiding any hint of weakness. Bradley seemed devoid of self-awareness or regret, and actually invited Cynthia to be friends on Facebook two days following that first rehearsal. In disbelief, upset and angry inside, Cynthia considered calling his wife and spilling the beans. She daydreamed on how satisfying that would be. Cast members and stage crew had received the contact list, so Cynthia had his home phone number. Does Bradley’s wife know her husband’s a sexual predator?Has he done this before?How many victims?
Cynthia accepted Bradley’s Facebook invitation placing her only one click away from posting the sex violation for all his friends and family to see. That would help to settle the score. Some degree of vindication. But she did nothing about it. Nothing! She buried it, started to feel ashamed, awkward. The last thing she wanted was to rock the boat for the show, jeopardize the role she was so eager to do again, one last show; with performances sold out ahead of the three-week run.
On the night before their final performance, as she attempted to fall off to sleep, Cynthia felt restless, conflicted about not speaking up about Bradley. Her mind floated back in time to when she was 12 years old. It was a hot, muggy June day in the Bronx. Cynthia and her three best friends were in seventh grade, Sherry, Rebecca and Sally, and Cynthia had planned to board the Flushing Line and head to the World’s Fair at Flushing Meadow that afternoon because of teacher in-service training which meant school would end at noon.
Once they purchased train tokens and went through the turnstile, the girls giggled and chattered about their science teacher who was a dead ringer for Paul McCartney, each with a story about what he did or said in class during the past week. On the platform waiting for the train, they snickered about Miss Troskin, nicknamed “the Trashcan,” a doddering, red-rouged French teacher who could not see past her crooked nose. They reminisced about the hilarious time they had that morning in the back corner of French class, each of the four girls with their long hair pulled forward over their face, dark sunglasses over the hair, loudly popping their gum. To top off their prank, Sally hid a small radio under her desk and played Hungarian polka music at low volume. It drove the “the Trashcan” crazy as she paced the front of the room, spurting screechy phrases in French, her eyes darting right to left trying to figure out where the muffled music was coming from. They knew she could barely see to the back row of students. Once the bell rang, Sally, Sherry, Rebecca and Cynthia had rushed out of the classroom and bent over in hysterics.
It was close to 90 degrees that day – sticky, humid, and felt like a furnace in the jammed train car. Cynthia was used to the gross smells on the train, the bodies so close together, the putrid breath, the overly-scented perfumes, the stale food odors, not a slice of space to move or bend an elbow or raise a hand to cover a sneeze. New Yorkers accepted close quarters without complaint. As the car doors slid shut, the girls shook with laughter at some story Rebecca shared about Bobby Tuckman, the nerdiest kid in the 7th grade.
She felt a large hand lock onto her crotch. It seemed to come from in front of her but it was hard to tell. She looked down but couldn’t see beneath her chest with the bodies pressed so close against her. She tried to wedge her hand down to her thigh to push the grabbing hand away but couldn’t. She wriggled her shoulders to pivot her body, twist away but couldn’t move below her neck. Her friends talking loud and then laughing at some story. She pressed her lips together, turned up the corners of her mouth and pretended to listen to their chatter. She screamed inside her head. The rattling of the train on the tracks roared in her ears. Sweat dripped from her armpits. The hand took a tighter hold, thick fingers determined to pry into her gingham shorts clawing to pull away the fabric of her cotton underwear embossed with tiny pink flowers, the underwear which started to cut inside her. Even with all the noise in the crowded train car, she could hear heart thump, her head about to explode. The fingers seemed to give up getting inside her, but the grip of the hand grew tighter, wrapped from the front of her vagina to her butt, the hand determined to pry her thighs apart. She closed her eyes for a second. The hand released her. She let out a slow sigh of hot air. Time slowed. She turned her head to see if someone was watching her. To the left, she eyed the two men closest to her. They both looked bored, rocking back and forth with the motion of the train. The taller one stared down the jammed train car, squinted, his eyes almost shut, like he was falling off to sleep, one arm raised over a short plump frizzy red-haired woman, reaching to hold onto the leather strap. The other man was short, bald, his eyes focused on a Coppertone advertisement posted above the sliding door, the poster of a small dimpled, blonde-haired toddler, a tiny rambunctious dog at her back, his teeth playfully pulling down the girl’s underwear, half-exposing her butt. It was the ad that appeared everywhere in magazines, newspapers, on television, on the side of city buses, and in trains cars, the ad her mother routinely pointed out and said was so cute. Cynthia turned her head to her right, to her giggling friends. Sally was telling another ‘cute-boy’ story.
The train veered to the right, went into a dark tunnel, rose up on the tracks like a rollercoaster, then shot out of the tunnel back into daylight. They were in Queens. The tracks were raised up above the brick buildings. The train screeched to a stop. The doors opened. A few people got off but more rushed in pushing people even closer together. One more stop before they were at the World’s Fair. Oh God! The fat fingers were on her again, reaching into her shorts, in a frenzy. She felt the elastic being pulled away from her panties, the jagged edge of fingernails. The sound of the train seemed to get louder as it hurtled down the tracks. Her brain seemed to sway. The fingers crept up, almost inside her when the train jerked forward with the abrupt jolt of the stop. The fingers left her. She gasped. Her friends didn’t seem to notice. The sliding doors opened. She spotted the mosaic Flushing Meadow sign on the cement wall. She secretly hadn’t believed in God but in that moment, she did.
The crowd hurtled out of the train car. People pushed, yelled, laughed. Outside on the raised platform, the girls huddled together.
“You all have your entry tickets ready?” Sherry said.
Cynthia nodded, said nothing to her friends, nothing to anyone about the grabber. Inside her head she could hear Mom’s voice: “Just Pre-tend Noth-ing Bad Hap-pened.” Mom would say that same stinking phrase whenever Cynthia would cry or complain, like when Cynthia banged her head into a telephone pole in a snowstorm walking up the hill to their Bronx apartment and the football sized lump hurt like hell for days. “Just Pre-tend Noth-ing Bad Hap-pened!”Or when Mom took her three kids, and left Cynthia’s dad in the middle of the night when Cynthia was six. When Cynthia begged her mom, wishing she could see her dad again, she heard the same words. “Just Pre-tend Noth-ing Bad Hap-pened!” She detested the way Mom banged out each syllable, while she peered into her daughter’s pained eyes, beating the message into Cynthia.
On that hot muggy June day at the World’s Fair, Cynthia said the words inside her head. Pre-tend Noth-ing Bad Hap-pened! The four girls went on more than a dozen rides, visited all the exhibits, watched the “General Electric House of the Futureshow,” took photos in front of the giant globe, drank coca colas, and ate curly fries. Cynthia participated in all of it, repeating to herself over and over: Just Pre-tend Noth-ing Bad Hap-pened on that train.
Now, twenty-five years later, Cynthia felt the sting of that Flushing Line train ride to the World’s Fair all over again, wondering whether any of her friends on that stifling train had also been sexually violated but never said a word about it.
Damn it, I can’t sleep. After an hour staring up through the skylight above her bed in the dark, she reached over, pulled open the top drawer of her bedside table, and took an Ambien from the small plastic bottle. She had sworn off sleeping pills but her brain was racing, her hands clammy, her pillowcase damp with sweat. She had to get some sleep. Tomorrow was Saturday, a full day of tech rehearsals, and two script run-throughs, the show opening on Sunday evening.
The romantic comedy played to sold out houses in Santa Cruz. Each of the three actors portrayed their characters with great comedic flair, which is what the critic wrote in the local newspaper. Cynthia received kudos and flowers from friends, family and even roses from two theater-goers she didn’t know. Bradley missed some of his lines here and there during the run, but was still reviewed as hysterically funny. His two scene partners had successfully covered his flubs. Throughout the run, Cynthia never stopped wanting to slug Bradley, erase the perpetual grin from his face. But she didn’t do or say anything. Or maybe he secretly prayed that she wouldn’t expose him or make a fuss about his sexually offensive act? On closing night, when the actors took their final bows, Bradley turned to her, squeezed her hand and winked, a sly smirk on his face.
What he didn’t know was that she had been invited to have lunch with the producers of the show the very next day, both of them female. Cynthia had a story to tell and she wouldn’t hold back.
Linda S. Gunther is the author of six suspense novels: Ten Steps From The Hotel Inglaterra, Endangered Witness, Lost In The Wake, Finding Sandy Stonemeyer, Dream Beach and Death Is A Great Disguiser. Her personal essays and short stories have also been featured in a variety of literary publications.
BALM THAT BURNS
We for our today,
Uncertain of the future.
We wail, victims of smiles of friendship,
And answer carrying saviours from beyond.
These agents of change.
We become preys to the mighty,
Habouring friendly enemies,
And a spirit of gullible reception lives in us.
They put off the chameleon camouflage,
And wears the democratic Adolf Hitler;
When our lives are not determined by them.
They eat fine foods while we scatter dungs.
Their tongues are soothing to their tummies,
To our bodies they actually burn harder than petrol fire.
The computer
Computer is very important for us.
It is a great invention from the inventors
It helps us in many ways.
Scientists use it for many researches.
Satellite is a part of modern computers.
It helps the researchers,
To find cyclones.
X-ray is a great invention of modern computers.
It helps the doctors to find break bones.
Computer helps the doctors,
To find many sickness.
That is a great help,
For the patients.
Computer has made a great miracle,
In the research of space.
Scientists can explore,
Moons and Mars using these.
Computer has made easier,
The worldwide communication.
That is very useful for us.
Don Bormon is a student of grade 8 in Harimohan Government High School, Chapainawabganj, Bangladesh.
