How to Play
Drag across adjacent letters—any direction—to spell words related to the theme, Weathering the Storm. Each letter will be used one time. Hunker down, find one word from each piece in the issue to complete the 30-letter grid, and feel good knowing you are capable of enduring whatever may come your way.
Header photograph and artwork by Jordan Keller-Wilson
After school on Tuesdays, Aspen goes to the skate park.
She parks her car in the back corner of the rec center’s parking lot and hops the fence, swinging her legs in a wide arc so the metal doesn’t snag her jeans. Aspen doesn’t have to talk to anyone if she enters the park from the back. She can pretend she’s always been here, never coming and never going, just a constant, haunting presence that other skaters learn to skate around rather than with.
Once she reaches cement, Aspen drops her board and starts to warm up. Her brother Joey used to stretch; he’d roll his ankles, touch his toes, sit butterfly-style with the soles of his shoes pressed against each other. His best friend Pete used to make fun of him. Pete said the only thing you needed to warm up was a bowl or a blunt. Sometimes Joey would smoke with him, but he’d still stretch afterward. Aspen usually stretched with him.
She doesn’t stretch anymore.
She glances around the rest of the park. Pete’s over by the mini-ramp with four other guys who never left town after they graduated; Aspen avoids eye contact. Next to them by the rails are three girls—Roxanne, Maggie, and Yua—who are all around Aspen’s age. Aspen watches as Maggie tries to 50-50 down the rail, her board slipping and sending her to the pavement. Yua helps her up, then points out where Maggie’s feet are sliding off the board, ollieing up to show her. Maggie tries again and makes it halfway before tumbling to the ground. She laughs, her blond hair splayed across the pavement, and Yua and Roxanne laugh, too. Yua looks up and catches Aspen’s eye. She waves.
Aspen waves back, then turns and skates to the other side of the park.
Aspen is eight years old. She’s on her way outside to play on the swing set, but Joey is on the floor, blocking the sliding glass door to their backyard with his brand-new skateboard in his lap.
“Can you move?” Aspen asks. “I wanna go outside.”
“In a minute.”
Joey’s fingers graze the rough stuff on top of the board. “Feel this,” he says. Aspen leans over and runs her hand down the length, like she’s petting a cat. It feels like the paper stick her mom uses to file her nails.
“Cool,” Aspen says.
“It’s called griptape. It’s what keeps your feet from falling off.”
“Cool.”
“That’s why you don’t put stickers on it,” Joey says. “You put stickers on the underside.”
This piques Aspen’s interest. “You can put stickers on it?”
“Yup,” Joey says. He flips the board over and spins one of the wheels with his finger. “I’m gonna learn how to do all kinds of tricks,” he says. “There’s a skate park by the rec center Mom says she’ll take me to.”
“Can I come?” Aspen hates when Joey leaves her behind.
“Mom said I had to be ten,” Joey says. “You’ve gotta wait just like I did.”
He gets up and moves away from the door, but Aspen isn’t interested in the swing set anymore.
Once Aspen is warmed up, she works on The Line.
It’s Joey’s line, in that it was his conception and also his white whale. He claimed it was the most technically difficult line possible without a ramp. That was impossible to prove, but Joey had done his research, and no one—not Joey, not Pete, not Aspen—had ever landed it.
The Line is four tricks: a shove-it kickflip, a backside tailslide into a kickflip, an inward heelflip, and a 50-50 into a boardslide. Pete used to argue that the second kickflip and the boardslide technically made it six tricks, but Joey said that if you didn’t put your foot on the ground in between, it was only four. Pete also argued that none of these tricks were really that difficult.
“If it’s so easy, you do it,” Joey would say, and Pete would hem and haw for a while before dropping his board. He would inevitably wipe out, usually on the kickflip after the tailslide. Sometimes he’d land that kickflip and get so excited he’d flub the inward heelflip, which Joey said was the whole point.
“The point is staying calm,” he’d say while Pete picked gravel out of his knees. (Served him right for not wearing knee pads.) “You can’t get too excited, or you mess up.”
“I think the point is looking sick and chill,” Pete would grumble, but he never fought Joey too hard on it. Hours later, he’d convince Joey to give up and freestyle with him, and Aspen would watch Joey’s brow unfurrow and his mouth crack open.
Now, Aspen drops her board. She pushes off and ollies up for the shove-it kickflip, but lands primo and falls over, elbows rough on concrete.
She gets up, flips her board, and tries again.
Aspen is ten years old. Her helmet is sky blue and slightly too small for her head. She’s standing with the toes of her light-up sneakers at the edge of the ramp, staring down at the bottom with her chin flat against her chest.
Joey is standing to her right, his board under his foot. He’s technically grounded from skating because his report card was so bad, but they told their mom they were going to Pete’s house and snuck their boards out anyway. Aspen can’t tell what’s making her more nervous: going down the ramp, or their mom finding out where they are.
“What if I fall?” she asks. “Will there be a lot of blood?”
“You’re not gonna fall,” Joey says. “Well, you might fall. But you’re not gonna bleed, don’t worry.”
“What if I do?”
“You won’t.”
Joey rolls his board to the edge and adjusts it so only the back end is touching, both sets of wheels extending over the abyss. He nudges Aspen’s leg with his until she moves her foot to hold the back end of the board to the ground.
“What if I fall off the edge?” she asks.
“It’s not called the edge, it’s called the coping,” Joey says. “And don’t worry about that. Worrying makes you hesitate, and that’s what gets you into trouble.”
Aspen looks down again.
“Here,” Joey says. “Take your right foot and put it on the front bolts, then shift your weight so you fall forward. Keep your knees bent a little bit and keep your weight on the front leg until you reach the bottom, then even it out. Just ride back and forth until you run out of momentum, don’t worry about trying to get back on the deck.”
“That sounds hard, Joey.”
“It’s not, I promise.”
Joey takes his foot off the board. Aspen doesn’t move.
“If you try it, I’ll let you put stickers on my deck,” Joey says.
Aspen turns to look at him. “Pinkie Pie and Rainbow Dash?”
“Whatever you want.”
Aspen turns back around. Ever so slowly, she moves her right foot to the front of the board and leans forward. Her stomach lurches.
Aspen can’t land the heelflip.
She should be proud of herself—usually it’s the tailslide that trips her up. Today, she’s landing that just fine, but she’s been flubbing the heelflip for almost half an hour. While that’s far from the most time Joey ever spent trying to land The Line, Aspen’s knees are aching, and her palms are scuffed from catching herself on the pavement. She didn’t bring her pads today. Her mom used to yell at her and Joey to grab their pads before they left. Aspen can’t remember the last time she told her mom she was going to the park. She can’t remember the last time her mom yelled her name without also yelling Joey’s.
“Aspen!”
Aspen jumps and wheels around. It’s Yua, yelling at her from the ramp. Aspen holds her hand over her eyes to see Yua better.
“Yeah?”
“Come here a second!”
Aspen drops her board and skates over. She wants to be annoyed at the interruption, but really, she’s grateful for the break.
“Hey,” she says once she’s closer. “What’s up?”
Yua looks beautiful, like always. She’s tall, taller even than Aspen, and she’s wearing a black t-shirt and cargo shorts. Her long black hair is in two braids, and there’s a sheen of sweat on her forehead that she wipes away with the back of her hand.
“You looked good over there,” Yua says, and Aspen feels her face flush.
“Thanks,” she almost whispers.
“What were you doing?”
For a moment, Aspen considers explaining The Line. Maybe if she asked, Yua would help her with it. Yua was the better skater. If anyone could do it, it would be her.
“Just fooling around,” Aspen says. “I was trying…I kept wiping out on an inward heelflip, whatever.”
“It looked dope, whatever it was,” Yua says. “We were gonna try some stuff on the ramp, and I know you do a lot of inverts. Wanna help us out?”
Aspen does do a lot of inverts, mostly because they feel less scary to her than aerials.
“I’m not sure how much help I would be,” she says. “Inverts are pretty simple.”
“I can’t ever land them,” Maggie pipes up. “I get scared I’ll crush my fingers.”
“That’s not the issue,” Aspen says. “The issue is getting your whole weight directly over your hand. You’re gonna land too low on the ramp to crush your fingers.”
Yua gestures dramatically towards the ramp. “You wanna give us a demonstration?”
Aspen rolls her eyes good-naturedly—or at least what she hopes is good-naturedly—and reaches out to Yua. “Can I borrow your pads? I left mine at home.”
Yua grins, stripping her elbow and knee pads from her limbs. Aspen slips them on, feeling Yua’s sweat on her sweat, and tries to act natural as she heads for the ramp. She ignores the pull of her muscles as she climbs the ladder, her board tucked under one arm. When she reaches the top, she drops it to her feet, hooking the back wheels under the edge of the coping.
Aspen takes a deep breath, then puts her front foot on her front bolts and leans forward, her stomach lurching as she drops in. The wind blows her ponytail off her shoulder as she skates across the flat bottom and up the opposite vert. When she reaches the top, she grabs the coping with one hand and the deck of her board with the other, her wheels pointing to the sky. She holds it for just a second before letting her feet fall underneath her, letting go of the coping just as her front wheels hit the ramp.
When she reaches the other side, she pulls her board up with one hand and lands with both feet on the deck. Despite this being her thousandth invert, her heart is pounding, and she presses her hand to her chest, feeling it pulse through the fabric of her T-shirt.
Yua, Roxanne, and Maggie are all clapping. Aspen holds her board up with two hands, like it’s a trophy, waiting for her heart to slow before she climbs back down.
Aspen is twelve years old. She’s trying out her new board while her brother and Pete compete in a two-man freestyle competition. Aspen watches from the rails, where she’s waiting her turn behind three older kids. When they skate away, she drops her board and ollies up to try a nosegrind, but her front truck misses the rail and she goes crashing down.
“You okay?” she hears Joey yell from across the park. She sits up and adjusts her helmet. “I’m fine,” she yells back, but Joey comes to check on her anyway.
“You sure? You bleeding?”
“No,” she says, but she hasn’t checked. She kind of doesn’t want to know. “I just missed the rail. Can I come freestyle with you guys?”
Joey shakes his head. “Not until you nail this. I know you can do it.”
Aspen stands up and walks over to pick up her board.
“I’m not very good at this,” she says off-handedly.
“But you’ll get better,” Joey says. “Probably.”
Aspen gives him a look. “Probably,” she says, matching his tone.
He rolls his eyes at her. “You’ll never know if you don’t try,” he says.
“Isn’t that what Mom said to you about math?” Aspen asks. Joey’s face gets dark.
“Shut the fuck up,” he says. “This is different.”
“How?”
“It’s skating. It’s more important.”
“More important than math?”
Joey glares at her, and she shuts up.
“Keep going until you get it right,” he says.
Aspen pops her board into her hand. “I’m telling Mom you said fuck.”
She’s not, and they both know it.
Aspen climbs down the ladder, strips off the borrowed pads, then shakes off Yua and the other girls.
“You sure you don’t wanna show us again?” Yua asks when Aspen says she needs to go.
“Nah,” Aspen says. “It’d take forever to pass your pads back and forth.”
“I don’t mind,” Yua says. “We can share if you want.”
“I have to get back,” Aspen says. “I wanna get more practice in before it gets dark.”
Yua rolls her board under her foot. “Is it a line?” she asks. “How many tricks?”
Six, Aspen thinks, but out loud she says, “Four. But they’re pretty hard. Joey and Pete can’t get it, either.”
The look of pity on Yua’s face is brief, but Aspen still catches it. She knows to look for it—has seen all its variations. Two years later, the looks are shorter, but still there.
“Want to show me?” Yua asks. “I’m sure no one’s seen you try it in a while.”
Aspen and Pete stopped speaking almost a year ago. After the police wound down the investigation, they had nothing left to say to each other.
“Maybe later,” Aspen says. “Thanks.”
Yua nods, and Aspen skates back over to the other side of the park. She goes immediately into the shove-it kickflip and flubs it.
Aspen is fourteen years old, and there are other girls at the skatepark. She’s been watching them for the last half hour; they don’t seem like new skaters. They know how to ollie and grind and kickflip. But she’s never seen them before, and she’s trying to figure out how that’s possible.
“Joey,” she says.
“In a minute,” Joey says from over by the rails. “I’m trying to land a shove-it kickflip.”
“Oh my god, just call it a varial like everyone else,” Pete moans from a few feet away.
“But it’s not,” Joey says. “If it was a varial you’d be turning the board with your hand.”
“But everyone calls it a varial!”
“But that’s not what it is!”
“Joey!”
He turns to look at her. “What?”
“There are girls over there.”
Joey skates over and squints into the sun. “Okay,” he says, “girls spotted. So?”
“I’ve never seen other girls here. Where did they come from?”
“The south side of town, probably,” Pete says. “That park just closed.”
“Really?” Aspen asks. The blond girl is pushing the black-haired girl around with her feet straddling two boards. “Why?”
“I think the city just couldn’t pay to fix it anymore,” Pete says. “It was hella unsafe. Massive splits and cracks and shit. Those girls probably go to Centennial.” That was the neighboring high school in town.
“I don’t get what the big deal is,” Joey says. “It’s not like we’re here to make friends.”
“Maybe I am,” Aspen says. “Most people are.”
“Not us,” Joey says, and Pete rolls his eyes.
“Right,” Pete says. “We’re here to do the impossible.”
“Exactly.”
“I meant make skating boring,” Pete says. “That kind of impossible.”
Joey flips him off.
Aspen glances back at the other girls. “I’m going to go say hello.”
Joey groans. “Fine,” he says. “Waste your time.”
“It’ll take ten minutes,” Aspen says, and she shoves off across the park.
There are three girls, all about her age. They’re easily the loudest people at the park; for a moment, Aspen considers riding away. She spends so much time with Joey that she rarely talks to girls at school. But these girls are skaters. Maybe this will be easier.
“Hi!” one of the girls yells over at her. Aspen freezes, her board still under her feet.
“Hi,” she says, too quiet for them to hear.
The girl skates over. She has bouncy, curly brown hair and brown skin. “I’m Roxanne,” she says. “I don’t think we’ve met.”
“She probably goes to North,” the blond girl says, skating over to join them.
“Do you go to North?” Roxanne asks. “This is Maggie.”
Aspen opens her mouth, but no sound comes out.
“Guys, give her some breathing room,” the black-haired girl says. She has her board in her hand instead of under her feet. “I’m Yua,” she says. “What’s your name?”
“Aspen,” Aspen says. “I do go to North.”
“Thought so,” Roxanne says. “We go to Centennial, but that park just closed. Do you skate here a lot?”
Aspen nods. “With my brother,” she says.
“Oh, that’s cute,” Maggie says. “Where is he?”
Aspen points at Joey and Pete. She expects them to be skating, but only Pete has his board on the ground. Joey is just watching her, board in hand. When she points, he waves her over.
“I think he wants me to come back,” Aspen says.
“You could skate with us,” Yua says. “We don’t bite, I promise.”
“I should get back,” Aspen says. “I’ll see you guys around.”
Aspen skates back over to Joey. He’s giving her a look she can’t quite decipher.
“Do they go to Centennial?”
Aspen nods. “They seem nice,” she says. “They asked me to skate with them.”
“You won’t get good if you skate with them,” Joey says. “They won’t take it as seriously as we do.”
“How do you know?”
“I just do.”
Joey drops his board. “Come on,” he says. “Try The Line again. I think if I watch someone else do it, I’ll figure out where I’m messing up.”
Aspen flubs the inward heelflip. Joey narrows his eyes.
“Try again,” he says.
The streetlights kick on, which is when Aspen realizes she hasn’t been able to see cracks in the pavement for the last half hour. That’s probably why she’s been wiping out.
She glances around the park, taking stock of who’s still there. There are some kids by the ramp getting picked up by their parents, three of them piling into a minivan, helmets and pads still on. There are some kids a bit older than Aspen freestyling, although they look like they’re about to call it quits and go smoke, based on the way their pads are half off. Yua and the others are sitting in the grass with their boards in their laps. Aspen can’t tell if they’re taking a break or waiting for a ride.
She grits her teeth, pushes off, wipes out on the boardslide, and nearly screams. It’s the closest she’s been in months. Her legs ache as she stands up, and she pops her board into her hand. There are still traces of Pinkie Pie on the deck.
The other three girls have stood up. Yua seems to be leaning in the direction of the ramp, but Maggie and Roxanne are heading toward the gap in the fence. Or maybe Aspen just wants them to be.
She flubs, flubs, and flubs again. She lands primo—the long side of her board hitting the ground—and falls over, scraping her face on the cement. She should’ve worn pads. She should’ve brought gauze. Her legs feel like they’re going to fall off.
She picks herself up and assesses the damage. There are tears in her jeans that weren’t there this morning. Her palms sting. It’s completely dark now. The older boys have disappeared, and the kids have been picked up. Even Yua and the others seem to be gone.
Aspen drops her board and pushes off. Shove-it kickflip. Backside tailslide. Kickflip. Inward heelflip. 50-50.
A deafening crack.
The first thing Aspen realizes is she’s on her back. Her head doesn’t hurt, which means she must’ve fallen ass-first. She processes as she lies there, remembering the slip, the fall, the crash. Her board is at her feet, upside-down, wheels still spinning.
The other half lies a few feet away.
Aspen is sixteen years old. She’s lying on the couch in her living room, headphones in, watching skating videos on her phone. Joey and her mother are screaming at each other.
Joey’s never liked school. He thinks it’s boring and dumb, and he’s not good at it. He wants to compete in the X Games and become a professional skateboarder. Their mom says skateboarders don’t make any money, but Joey says that’s not true, that Tony Hawk bought a house when he was his age, that skateboarding is in the Olympics now. Joey’s only getting older, and he’s done waiting around.
Joey can’t drop out without parental consent until he’s eighteen, and he’s young for his class. He won’t turn eighteen until after graduation. Their mom won’t sign the form. She wants him to get his diploma.
“I’ll just fail, then!” he screams. Aspen turns up the volume on her phone, watching a video of a guy land a Christ Air.
“You wouldn’t if you just tried, Joey!” their mom yells back. “Why won’t you try?”
“This shit doesn’t matter!” Joey’s face is red, and his eyes are bulging out of his skull. “Why won’t you let me do what I’m good at!”
“Because there’s more to life than skateboarding!” their mom yells.
Joey balls his hands into fists and heads towards the door. “I’m going out.”
“Like hell you are.”
Joey slams the door behind him. Their mom grabs a pillow from the couch and screams into it. The video stopped playing a while ago, but Aspen didn’t notice.
“I can’t with him,” her mom says. “I can’t fucking…I’m sorry, Aspen.”
Aspen just nods.
“You know I’m right, right?” her mom says. “He can’t leave school. He needs to graduate.”
Aspen nods again.
“I can’t get through to him,” her mom says. “I don’t speak skateboarding. He needs to hear it from someone who understands.”
Aspen takes out her earbuds. “I’ll talk to him when he gets home,” she says, although she doubts Joey will listen. Aspen’s heard his argument a million times–his best case scenario is summer school. At worst, he’ll have to repeat senior year. To Joey, all of it is wasted time. It’s his best years slipping away.
Aspen’s mom takes a few deep breaths, then heads towards the stairs. “I’m going to bed,” she says. “You’ll stay up until Joey gets back?”
Aspen stays up as long as she can, going through playlist after playlist of X Games supercuts, but eventually she falls asleep on the couch.
Joey never comes home.
Aspen is still on her back, staring up at the streetlights. They’re making her eyes water. She squints until the bulbs blur in her vision and her eyes stop stinging. She does not sit up. She does not look at Joey’s board. If she doesn’t look at it, it isn’t broken. It’s still there, whole, waiting for her. It can still land The Line.
She doesn’t realize she’s crying until a tear makes its way into her ear canal. She sits up, wipes her eyes, and switches her view from the sky to the ground. She thinks she might live here now, at the skate park, until her body decays on the pavement, unable to compost into the earth beneath it.
“Aspen?”
She looks up. Yua is standing in front of her, one braid undone, blocking the light from shining into Aspen’s eyes. She’s so tall, Aspen thinks, and then immediately looks back down at the ground.
“Hi,” she says, her voice hoarse.
“Are you okay?”
Aspen rubs at her eyes again, feeling small and young and fragile. “Yeah,” she says. “I wiped pretty hard, that’s all.”
Yua’s silent for a moment, and then Aspen hears a very quiet “oh, no.”
“It’s fine,” she says. “It was an old board. It was bound to break sooner or later.”
She feels Yua sit next to her on the concrete. Aspen is still crying, but she’s trying not to let Yua see. She can’t tell how successful she is. It’s possible Yua is pretending not to notice.
“Do you know why he left?” Yua asks after a moment.
Aspen freezes. “What?”
“I’m sorry,” Yua says, but she doesn’t sound sorry. “We’ve just always wondered.”
Aspen looks over at her, shocked. “Is that what this is?” she asks. “You came over here so you guys could laugh later about what a loser my brother was?”
Yua’s eyes widen. “No!” she says. “No, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean it like that. I was trying to make conversation. If you wanted to talk about it.”
“I don’t.”
“Okay.”
Yua doesn’t get up. Aspen doesn’t move for the board. There’s another beat of silence.
“He was flunking out of school,” Aspen says. “He wanted to go pro, but our mom wouldn’t let him drop out.”
“So he ran away instead?”
“Yeah.”
“And you haven’t heard from him since?”
“No,” Aspen says. “There was an investigation, but they couldn’t find him. They think he’s dead.”
“Do you think he’s dead?”
Aspen buries her head in her knees.
“Right,” she hears Yua say. “Sorry. Stupid question.”
They’re quiet for another moment.
“Do you like skateboarding?” Yua asks.
“What the fuck?” Aspen whips her head up, more surprised than angry. “Of course I do, Jesus Christ.”
“Do you?” Yua asks. “Because you never skate with us, even when we ask.”
“I’m usually working on The Line.”
“Those four tricks from earlier?” Yua asks.
Aspen bites her lip. “It’s six, kind of,” she says. “Joey said it was the hardest line in skateboarding. He could never land it. I’ve never landed it.”
“Is that all you’ve done since he left?” Yua asks. “Worked on that line?”
“Well,” Aspen says, thinking. Surely she’s done something else. Surely she’s fucked around on ramps or tried to break her consecutive kickflip record or something else. “Yeah,” she says, finally. “I guess.”
Yua’s quiet for a moment, then asks, “What would happen if you landed it?”
“I don’t know,” Aspen says.
“Would you keep skating?”
“I don’t know.”
Yua hums. “What are the tricks?”
“A shove-it kickflip…”
“What’s that?”
“It’s a varial, but Joey called it a shove-it kickflip. Because if it was a varial, you’d turn the board with your hand.”
Yua nods.
“A shove-it kickflip,” Aspen says again, “a backside tailslide into a kickflip, an inward heelflip, and a 50-50 into a boardslide.” She’s been staring straight ahead, so she doesn’t realize Yua’s pulled out her phone until she glances over. Yua is typing intently.
“Are we sold on these directions?” Yua asks. “Has to be backside? Has to be inward?”
“What are you doing?” Aspen asks.
“Writing this down,” Yua says. “Is there any flexibility here?”
Aspen shakes her head. “Joey said the backside tailslide is harder,” she says. “So is the inward heelflip.”
Yua nods again. “Okay,” she says, putting her phone in her pocket. “Do you wanna get Taco Bell?”
Aspen’s brain turns to white noise. “Why would we get Taco Bell?”
“Because it’s dark,” Yua says. “And your board is broken. Do you have another board?”
“I have four other boards.”
“Good,” Yua says. “You can bring one on Saturday.”
Yua stands up. “You should also bring pads,” she says, “although I’m really not opposed to sharing.”
“What is happening right now?”
“We’re gonna go to Taco Bell,” Yua says. “And then on Saturday, we’re gonna work on The Line. And also do other things. Because I don’t know how you’ve only skated one line, unsuccessfully, for two years.”
“Why?”
Yua shrugs. “I’m sorry your brother disappeared.”
“I don’t want your pity.”
“I’m not giving it to you. I’m trying to land the hardest line in skateboarding.”
Aspen looks up again. The light from the streetlamp behind Yua is giving her an ethereal glow. Aspen’s stomach is growling.
Her palms are raw and bloody, but when Yua offers her a hand, she takes it.
Jamie Hawley is a writer from the American Great Plains. She has a BA and MA from the University of Kansas and is currently a PhD student in English at Ohio University. Her work has previously appeared in Electric Spec, manywor(l)ds, and is forthcoming in The Colored Lens.
Header photography and artwork by Jordan Keller-Wilson
It is Tuesday, which means I will be working from home. Daylight hits my eyes through a crack in the curtains. I get up, splash water on my face, and move to the kitchen. Finn, my stepson, is making a bagel. The smell of the toaster is in the air. I pour water into the kettle and wait for it to heat. When it is ready, I fill my cup and drop in two tea bags. The morning has the texture of every other morning. Bethanie, my wife, is teaching an online class somewhere in the house. I carry my tea to the loveseat in the living room and pull out my phone.
My mother has texted about a cone collar for Juniper, my sister’s cat, who had surgery yesterday to remove a hair tie from her intestine. I make a mental note to drop the cone off for Juni later. Then I see my brother Alex’s name.
I go still.
It has been more than a year since his name appeared on my phone with a call or message. Every attempt to contact him only met with silence. The last time we had any real back and forth, anything resembling ease between us, was almost five years ago. I went to his house once and he said through the closed door that he didn’t want a confrontation. I stood on his porch and felt the word land wrong and drove home with it.
But his name is on my phone, and I open the message.
He has sent me a link to a YouTube video. Alan Watts. In the End. Watch it sometime. And then: I didn’t forget about you.
I read it again. I didn’t forget about you.
Something loosens in my chest. Something I had been holding without knowing I was holding it. Alex reached out. He thought of me, and he reached out and there is his name on my phone and the words are right there. I let myself feel it, the warmth, the hint of ease, the possibility. Maybe this is the thing that opens a door. Maybe this is how it starts, a link to a video, a small gesture across the distance, and then something more. I sit with it. The morning is quiet and Finn is making a bagel and Bethanie is teaching a class and my brother has not forgotten me.
Then my phone rings.
It is my mother.
I pick up and say hello and her voice is wrong. I have heard it before, that register of anguish, in the years when my father was still in the picture and she cried about things he had done. I haven’t heard it in decades. I know immediately that something is deeply wrong. And then she says it.
“Alex is gone.”
I hear the sounds. I know they are words. I say, “What,” and I mean it, I genuinely mean it. I am asking her to tell me what the sounds mean. Alex is gone. I turn the words over. Alex. Gone. My brother’s name and a word that means away, means absent, means not here, and I am still holding the ease from thirty seconds ago, am still inside the loosened feeling, still in the morning that has the texture of every other morning.
“Gone where?”
She says, “Get over here now. Now!” And her voice breaks on the second now and something in me understands and my body stands up from the loveseat before my mind has agreed to anything. I am moving. I am asking what happened and she says he shot himself and I hear it and I hear it and I hear it and still the meaning does not crack open.
I am moving through the house. I pass Finn in the hallway and he asks what’s happening and I gasp, “My brother.” Just that, my brother, because they are the only words I have. I am calling for Bethanie. I am searching for her and the words come out of me, “He shot himself,” and she says, “Don’t drive,” and I don’t, I let her. I am in the passenger seat, and we are moving, too slowly, and I am trying to breathe.
But I am also still back there. Some part of me is still on the loveseat with the phone in my hand and his name on the screen. I didn’t forget about you. The words are still there in the way that words stay, the warmth still present the way heat rises from a cup of tea left sitting. I am in the car and we are on the freeway and I am heaving air in a way I have never done before, like I have forgotten how, and still some part of me is reading his text for the first time and feeling the loosening and not knowing yet what it cost him to send it, not knowing yet what it meant that he sent it that morning, not knowing what I was receiving when I let myself feel the warmth of it and thought maybe this is how it starts.
My sister calls. I tell her and she screams, “What,” just as I did, the same word, and I know exactly where she is, I know the place she is standing right now where only the sounds have arrived, and I cannot tell her what is waiting on the other side of the word because I am not there yet myself, I am still in the gap, still in the place between gone and what gone means, still grasping the warmth from his message like a wisp of steam.
We pull up to his house. A police officer is arriving at the same moment. I am out on the road before Bethanie has fully stopped her car and my mother is coming out of the wooded area across the street, moving toward the officer, and I run to her and hold her and then I look to my right.
He is lying flat near a large tree.
And there it is, cracking open. Not with a sound, or a word, not with anything my mother said or my sister screamed but because I can see him, because he is there and he is not there, because his body is on the ground in the dirt near a large tree and the morning that had the texture of every other morning is gone now too, simply gone. I am standing in what is left, with my mother in shock and my sister sobbing and the warmth from his text still lingering in the air.
Christopher Wiley-Smith is a librarian in Oregon who writes reflective, character-driven pieces on grief, loss, and the quiet bonds that shape a life. His work draws on a background in philosophy and theology, emphasizing clarity, moral responsibility, and emotional nuance. He values learning, environmental stewardship, and telling stories that help others feel less alone. His recent work, In His Absence, is a memoir about the life and loss of his brother.
Header photography and artwork by Jordan Keller-Wilson
When I lived in Alaska, in the drifting years of my early twenties, I heard about a cabin somewhere across the bay. It was empty, but the kitchen was stocked, they said. The place had red curtains and a simple table bathed in forest light. The owners left it unlocked. All of this had been prepared for visitors, for strangers. This was the proof I was seeking, what I’d traveled thousands of miles to find—a sign that the world was magical, and giving.
I got hold of a map, drawn in pencil. In the roadless interior, beyond any paths, sat the X that showed the location of the cabin. It lay on the far side of a stream, several miles inland. A water taxi dropped me off on the beach at the nearest access point, and I set off along the trail, going east. I came to a glacial river, blue with silt, the crossing nothing more than a rope and pulley system with a dangling swingset seat. Water churned eons below my legs.
On the other side, the trail narrowed. No hikers appeared through the trees—no voices or flashes of colored jackets. I turned off the trail at the marked stream, passed near bear scat as I followed the bank inland toward the next landmark on the map, a Y-shaped tree. When I found the tree, I pulled on my waders. The forest was silent. A shiver ran up my back. I felt that I was not alone. In the middle of the stream, ice-cold water up to my hips, something brushed against me. I looked down to see the brown-and-gold rocks on the streambed resolve into salmon hovering at the depth of my knees, making a tapestry under clear water.
On the other side of the stream, where the map said the cabin would be, I found nothing but a sparse grove of trees growing up from untouched ground.
When I waded back across the stream and followed the water toward the ocean, I noticed silver ribbons draped over the roots of the trees along the bank. I realized they were the husks of salmon. What a feast, a banquet table for the bears, I thought, and as I rounded each bend of the stream I worried I’d surprise one, who’d look at me, open-jawed, and charge—I was an interloper; a giant, crashing guest in a place so vast, so intricate, I could only begin to glimpse its edges with my dim and shifting human sight.
After hiking back to the beach, I slept in the lean-to. When morning came, I sat on a driftwood log half-buried in the sand a few feet from the tideline. The bay was flat, almost forbidding in the early light. I felt that I’d made a mistake in journeying here alone. But then three seals appeared, their heads bobbing above the waves. They looked at me, their expressions curious, observant, as if they recognized me as a fellow wanderer, poised between sea and land, one place and another.
In the end, I was gone a day, a night, and a day. But I never forgot what it felt like to stand in that slow-moving water, scores of salmon so still around me, having traveled back to their birthplace to wait for death. Eventually I’d leave Alaska, move back to the Lower 48, shuck off the stubborn bite of loneliness that had spurred me to travel halfway around the globe, so far from where I’d sprung up to start with.
A life emerges and then dissolves back through the belly of the bear, but I clung tight to the kernel of heat, of warmth, that made me. It would take many years to learn from the salmon hovering in my memory, their faces and flanks whitened and gray, loose, decomposing, as if it were easy to go back where they came from.
JR Fenn’s work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Georgia Review, Witness, Boston Review, Gulf Coast, and more. She’s the author of the fiction chapbook, Tiny Vessels, now available from Red Mare Press. Recognitions include the New Millennium Award for Flash Fiction, the Robert Colley Prize for Fiction, Pushcart and Best Small Fictions nominations, and appearances in the Bath, Bristol, and Oxford Award Anthologies. She lives in Western New York with her family.
Header photography and artwork by Jordan Keller-Wilson
My grandmother kept her dead husband’s teeth
in a velvet box beneath her bed.
Not the dentures—his real teeth,
lost one by one in the war,
but saved in a tin that smelled of tobacco
and the particular rot of old metal.
She would take them out on anniversaries,
arrange them on her good tablecloth
like a smile that had outlived its face.
She said it was important to keep what you could,
to not let the earth have everything.
I understand this now, the way we hoard
the evidence of having been loved.
The voicemails I can’t delete.
The shirt that still smells like your sleep.
The way I keep returning to the places
where we were happy—the diner on Route 9
where you always stole the cherries from my drink,
the motel above the lake where we watched
a storm move across the water—as if the happiness
might still be there, waiting.
Last month I found a baby bird
on the sidewalk, still feathered, still warm,
already gone. I dug a hole in the garden
with my hands, buried it beside
the tulips that never bloom.
My grandmother would have kept the bones,
washed them in bleach until they were white
as the inside of her palms, white as the lie
she told about his death being peaceful.
Instead I watered the earth
and waited for something to grow.
Instead I am learning to let go
of what I cannot keep, which is everything,
which is the only lesson worth learning,
which I will forget by morning.
McLord Selasi is a Ghanaian writer, poet, and performing artist. His work has appeared in Panorama, Apricot Press, The Shallow Tales Review, Shoegaze Literary, Trampoline, Rough Diamond, Isele Magazine, Subliminal Surgery, Eunoia Review, Poetry Journal, Graveside Press, and elsewhere.
Header photography and artwork by Jordan Keller-Wilson
Sometimes they sneak up on us.
Sometimes we see them coming,
the horizon black and still.
This last one was a doozy.
Flying debris,
lightning like shattered glass,
deafening thunder right behind it,
and rain that seemed it might drag
everything away.
When it finally ended
there were tree limbs on the ground,
roof tiles missing,
the basement flooded.
I don’t know how many more storms like that
this old place can take,
but it’s been weathering them for decades
and it’s still standing.
We did have some work done on it
years ago and maybe that helped,
but it seems more likely
it was just built well from the start
on a solid foundation.
And, after,
it is usually me who does most of the cleanup,
as it should be.
For it is usually me who is to blame.
Brian Gotta is a San Diego-based poet and author with a BA in English Literature from Indiana University. His poems have appeared or will appear in Third Wednesday, Pink Ochre, Watertower Press, The Soliloquist, AC/DC Lit Magazine, The Big ?, Effable Press, Fresh Words Magazine, the San Diego Poetry Annual, MockingOwl Roost: Sprigs of Peace, and Literary Cocktail Magazine. His previous work includes a young adult novel, four children’s sports novels, a youth baseball coaching guide, and Congratulations! You’re a Millionaire!, published by Possibility Press. BrianGotta.com | @booksbygotta
Header photography and artwork by Jordan Keller-Wilson
