With library shelves being emptied of books and that challenge certain ideologies and doctrines, WordCity Literary Journal is seeking works on the theme of censorship, the right to read and write, and the power of empathy in societies that are turning inwards on themselves.
We invite fiction, non-fiction, poetry and book reviews, and both loose and expansive interpretations of this theme.
As ever, we at WCLJ thank each of our contributors, readers and supporters as we write and publish our way to a more open an inclusive world.
In February 2012, just more than a year after the publication of my first collection of short stories, I broke my back.
That is the easiest way to say it.
Except that the break wasn’t a fracture.
Instead, the bilateral rupture of my sacroiliac joints was due to adenomyosis, a gynecological condition that goes undiagnosed in far too many women, and often takes decades to finally name and treat.
Gradually, and then all at once, the stress from my uterine ligament twisted my sacrum like a jam jar until the joints, finally had to give.
I can say that my doctor at the time tried to manage my pain. I can say that he sent me to see every possible specialist while tossing out diagnostic darts at my chart.
I can also say that the prescriptions he gave me, both discrete and combined, were a sustained act of malpractice. There is a consensus that my brain should have stopped telling my lungs to breathe.
After two years, much of it spend on my hands and knees, silent screaming into the carpet on my bedroom floor, a pain specialist in Vancouver diagnosed and began to knit my joints back together with prolotherapy. A gynecologist performed a complete hysterectomy.
I tapered off the fentanyl. Off Dilauded, Ativan and Zopiclone.
I tapered off Cyclobenzaprine and Lyrica, too, while prescription NSAIDs left my stomach lining damaged, resulting in a year in spasms, while vomiting my way in and out of emergency rooms.
I’m telling you this because of Kirstie Millar’s The Strange Egg, and the review written for this issue by our own contributing editor, Sue Burge.
The view is all fig trees. No figs yet, but very soon. I can smell it when figs are on the trees.
A man stumbles out of the public house. I see that he is the gaslight man. Soon he will begin his shift.
The fig trees have spread so much just this summer alone. We’re in the middle of Camden but there are more leaves than sash windows. I can’t see Camden from this square at all, even from a second floor balcony.
Today, the sun is bright. It penetrates even the densest foliage. On a day like this, it feels warm. But you know that if you stand in the shade, you’d freeze. The intensity of the sun makes you look hard, the other way, towards the shade. Even the pavement is pink from the light.
TWO SCREECHING CATS slice the late morning silence. They circle each other, backs hunched. Chickens scatter to safer pecking grounds.
A priest approaches. Sunlight on his black robe bastes his body. His sandaled feet kick up dust as he rushes past the beige stucco house with faded blue wooden shutters. They open. A stream of water douses the priest and cats.
“Oh! Père Chaumont,” Madame Bonnet says. One spotted hand holds a rusted pail. The other covers her mouth.
The wet cats slink away.
“I’ll dry quickly in this heat.” He wants to call her stupid. Instead, he makes the sign of the cross and hurries off. He must be at his church by noon. He almost runs down rue Jean Jaures, up Avenue de la République and past the two angels flanking the church entrance.
Brandt Colson watches his frenetic daughter as she flits around the room in her usual style. She is talking about ten different things at once, fussing over details and generally majoring in the minor. Brandt notices the bored and frowning, mostly grown grandson as he leans against the wall at the apartment entry. The boy takes no pains to hide his brooding impatience.
The daughter stops talking and pauses in front of the chair. Brandt looks up. “There is plenty to eat and all laid out. Your list is on the counter. Are you sure you feel up to it, Dad?”
“I feel fine,” he says. The stroke is a jumbled memory now.
She looks doubtful, “don’t over-do.”
This daughter is an impulsive, disorganized and frenzied worrier. The years of West Coast living, three husbands and many fiancés, has not changed that about her. Now she is back, living in his house, free of charge, with her son and a new husband. She is here to bring a whirlwind of fuss and worry over her sick old man.
Farley Creighton had been working far too hard. Tax accounting could be a real bitch in April. While most people welcome spring with open arms and a certain sense of renewal, not so with Farley. It was the time of year when he could expect clients like Mike Marashenko, who ran his own small contracting firm, to walk through the front door with a large cardboard box brimming with everything from receipts to bills both paid and unpaid and copies of invoices either sent or not. It was poor Farley’s job to straighten out the whole mess and make sure, at risk of certain reproach, that Mike didn’t pay a cent more income tax than he had the previous year. And it would have probably been okay with the beleaguered accountant had Marashenko Contracting Ltd. been a one-off, but no, he was pretty much typical of Creighton Tax Service’s entire client base. In the early years he’d felt thankful the larger firms in town had referred clients to him, but after a few years he realized that they were simply offloading their dregs on him.
By the end of June, Farley could look forward to a break in the pressure cooker tedium and start sending out a few invoices of his own. But now it was mid-April, just weeks from tax filing deadlines, and he tanked, bottomed out, flatlined. Call it what you will but Farley was done. Fourteen tax seasons in this dispiriting business that had promised big rewards never realized. In that time, Farley had seen clients start with nothing and end up millionaires while his business floundered, just shy of being a certifiable failure. Farley was an okay tax accountant, but a terrible businessman. He had grown silently bitter with those who’d “outgrown” his services and moved on, seeking the advanced resources of big firms with initials like “LLP” behind their names, retaining those pricey lawyers whose singular purpose in life was to ferret out loopholes in the tax laws.
Two Readings, Three Authors: On the Pleasures of Listening to Women Talking
I haven’t attended a lecture or author reading since COVID. The pandemic was reason enough not to go anywhere crowded, and since — well, since then I’ve had to overcome certain habits of mind, as well as a tendency to prioritize tasks that invariably arise from my work as an instructor at two postsecondary institutions. As I approached the end of the Winter 2023 term and shifted to marking mostly, I decided to treat myself at last to two author readings. The first took place at York University’s Glendon campus on April 11, under the auspices of the Department of Hispanic Studies. The second reading and Q&A was held at the Keele Campus on April 17, the fruit of the Department of English and its inaugural Writer-in-Residence program. The two presentations were one week apart, and so I still had a vivid recollection of the first talk, given by Spanish philologist and novelist Irene Vallejo, when I attended the second. At the latter event, I listened to Miriam Toews read a segment from her latest novel, Fight Night (2021), and then field questions from Karen Solie, York University’s first writer-in-residence, a renowned poet and recently named recipient of a Guggenheim fellowship. These were different presentations in terms of the subject matter and authorial aims: the first was delivered by a historian in the capacity of a scholar, a native of Spain; the second featured a celebrated Canadian writer of fiction, known for drawing profusely on her own lived experience as a woman who once belonged to a Steinbach Mennonite community in southern Manitoba. I’ll say right now that both readings were marvellous; they were thought-provoking and moving. They were dissimilar nearly in every way, and yet, afterwards, once I contemplated the subtler leitmotifs and implications of things said or divulged on a personal note, I was struck by how much these talks had in common.
On the last day of my final exams in the third grade, I excitedly anticipated joining my father, a courier and a Kulbar (porter). This is someone who takes items across the Iran-Iraq border, thereby putting themselves at great risk. Kulbars have little means of survival other than depending entirely on transporting a variety of items across the borders to support their families.
On holidays, we had nothing to do in the village as we had no electricity with which to watch TV, and no playground or a centre that held activities. I begged my father to let me travel to help him. At first, he said that the journey of more than eight hours was too risky for a child, but he later agreed, and I was overjoyed. For me, it was the beginning of several years of living dangerously. There were several reasons. Scores of people were killed by the Iranian RevolutionaryGuards; people were tortured by Kurdish militias, looted by robbers, or even mauled by wild animals. Couriers also frequently had to endure the harsh weather.
Literary Spotlight with Sue Burge: Poet Roy McFarlane Leads Us through Troubled Waters
Sue Burge: I’m very excited to be interviewing Roy McFarlane for this issue of WordCity Literary Journal. Roy is primarily a poet, although he turns his considerable talents to other genres too. He is a spellbinding performer of his poetry and uses his wordsmithery to explore the big issues of our time to great effect.
Roy, in your bio you say that “in a former life” you were a Community Youth and Play Worker. How did you incorporate writing into this life and did your work influence your writing at this stage? I suppose what I’m asking is how you became a poet and at what point you thought “I’m a poet”!
Roy McFarlane: I’ve always been a holder/giver of words, from a young boy being led by my mother to read and recite Psalms, to a young man dabbling with love poems inspired by the lyrics of George Benson, to being a young minister of the gospel developing my craft by listening to recorded sermons and the speeches of Martin Luther King Jr and Malcolm X. But the turning point of actually writing poetry was working with young people, who were excluded or on the point of joining local gangs, who lived and devoured the texts of Tupac and Biggie, who revelled in the misogynist and violent banter. In response to that schooling we encouraged them to write positive lyrics, write their lived reality through poetry and put music to it. This is where I began writing poetry. A few years later I was studying Black theology, or Black Liberation theology, famously coined by the African American theologian James H. Cone (simply put, whether God is on the side of the oppressed or the oppressor). In this sanctuary of studying, I wrote my first poem Are you looking at me? A normal day in the life of a black man who seemed to have people looking at him wherever he goes; a poem I later performed with the New October Poets, led by the enigmatic Dreadlock Alien where a band of diverse poets from Birmingham and the surrounding area formed a spoken word community, creating a space to hone our craft and opportunities to tour across the UK
This sounds like an amazing apprenticeship to becoming a wordsmith! What advice would you give to poets just starting out? Do you have a particular process when you write?
Write, write, write, sometimes the blank page can be so daunting, we overthink things, we imagine what we’re writing has no relevance, or, more damning, it’s no good, but until we put pen to paper, fingers to keyboard and release the words, we become captives to hesitation and doubt.
I write for the joy and love of it, the spark that troubles you in the midnight hour, the thought that follows you into a dream, the ache that wakes you up, the inspiration that makes you write on the margins of a newspaper.
The Strange Egg – Kirstie Millar Illustrations by Hannah Mumby (The Emma Press 2023) Paperback ISBN: 9781915628022 £10
“’Doctor, I had a terrible dream. In my dream I saw my own body, and I saw what you will do to it.‘
A woman is faced, month after month, with the birth of a strange egg. Her doctor asks that she take notes on her symptoms, documenting black blood clots as big as pennies, winking stars in her eyes, and relentless pain. As the woman waits for aid from her doctor, she begins to have strange premonitions of what will be done to her body. The egg, meanwhile, is watchful and demanding. Impatient.
The Strange Egg is as gorgeous as it is horrifying. Highly original, it challenges long-held beliefs that people of marginalised genders are unreliable and irrational witnesses to our own bodies.”
Kirstie Millar’s surreal pamphlet-length prose poem is so much more than the sum of its parts; it is indefinable, genre defying. Hannah Mumby’s illustrations act as a powerful vehicle to both enhance and underpin Millar’s visceral prose.
In 2017 Millar founded Ache, an intersectional feminist press publishing writing and art on illness, health, bodies and pain. Millar has endometriosis and The Strange Egg is an innovative way of expressing this illness/diagnosis creatively. This surreal exploration of illness contrasts strongly with the everyday rationalism health professionals require from their patients. It took Millar nine years to get a diagnosis and this pamphlet, written after her third surgery, uses the idea of the strange egg as an allegorical presence. It is the elephant in the room, the accumulation of years of shame, pain, anger and trauma and a representation of how endometriosis can cause a disturbing, pregnancy-like stomach swelling. The structure of the piece cleverly reflects the content: it’s written in 28 sections, to imitate the menstrual cycle.
“Doctor: There’s a good girl. Now, would you like to see your egg?
Circle Tour is a like a reflection in lake water; something so beautiful that you wish you could hold on to it, mercurial as it may be.
On these pages Eva Tihanyi offers a bounteous continuation of the language and imagery of the Romantics; and hers is a potent lyrical poetry. At the same time, this collection, is quite literally, one woman’s observations and introspections during the pandemic.
We are shown histories, celebrations, the new normal. The darkness and the growing light that penetrates after it exhausts itself. Meditations, incantations, contemplations. Every one of them beyond wonderful. Each written in such a way that the book insists we hold it, consider its pages, and stay. Once I did close the covers, I felt a lingering desire to return to the words that are drawn so strikingly between them. I felt acutely, the pull and float of a spiral, its way of positioning us in that which is universal. Within hope. Within optimism. Within every aspect of love. Because, at the cellular level Tihanyi’s collection is experiential. Her language, precisely focused.
Books Referenced: If Not for You & Other Stories, Niles Reddick (Big Table Publishing 2023) Moon of the Crusted Snow, Waubgeshig Rice (ECW 2018) Who by Fire, Matti Friedman (Penguin Random House 2022) Inspiring Canadians, Mark Bulgutch (Douglas & MacIntyre 2022) A Book of Days, Patti Smith (Knopf Canada, 2022) Common Tones, Alan Licht, ed. (Blank Forms Editions 2021) This Strange Invisible Air, Sharon Butala (Freehand Books 2021) Unmask Alice, Rick Emerson (BenBella Books 2022) A Lab of One’s Own, Rita Colwell (Simon & Shuster 2020) Making History, Richard Cohen (Simon & Schuster, 2022) Poetica Dystopia, Stephen Roxborough & Karl Blau (2022) Report from The Betts Society/Report from The Reid Society Report from The Ross Society/Report from The Brockwell Society/ Report from The Hall Society (above/ground press 2022)
*
There’s been a trend now for some seasons to slim down short stories to little more than postcards from vacation moments, where a brief series of events and interactions is presented as emblematic of life in general. Characters are called onto stage but given few lines. The complexities of conflict and collisions of ambition are mapped onto postage stamp collections to be flipped through admiringly at one’s armchair ease.
And one can certainly admire author Niles Reddick’s adoption of this literary mode. Not to put too fine a point on it, he makes it work for him. There is an admirable efficiency to the glimpses he gives of small town and rural life, usually of a blue collar hue, as they struggle with the apparent emptiness of their existence and the quiet traumas of decaying bodies and brains.
Time and again he manages to make his snapshots resound into the moments and days beyond reading, reaching the entangled empathy to which all fiction aspires with an ease that belies the myth of effort. These are fictions that can be accessed as the evening meal prepares itself elsewhere or in the many spare moments that parse out the day. As a collection it is as useful as it is pleasurable. A book for public transit as well as the private armchair.
Claudia Serea’s Self-Ironic Surrealism in Immigrant Sociopolitical Poetry
Writing on the Walls at Night (Unsolicited Press, 2022)
History is what we take in, Mom says, the small bites of the present. Eat up, dear. It’s all on the table in front of you. (31)
Claudia Serea’s excellent new collection of poetry, Writing on the Walls at Night, showcases rich imagery, ever-surprising details from the everyday life, frank sociopolitical statements, and raw emotional honesty, in addition to an impressive stylistic freedom. The book includes prose poems, poems with very short lines, and even a few political jokes, ranging from naturalism to surrealism.
Moreover, its motto inscribes it under the sign of fairy tales and childhood innocence, which inform its vision and aesthetics: “You should never hesitate to trade your cow / for a handful of magic beans” (Tom Robbins). The “Prologue” places the readers in “Grandma’s kingdom,” where the blades of wheat and the sky beg the speaker to stop and listen to their stories until she agrees, only to discover that she has already passed grandma’s house. Poetry then replaces the magic beans, there are none, Serea warns us in the first section’s title, and leads us on a journey toward ourselves instead of the castle of an unfriendly giant. Indeed, the book’s final piece, “What Happens in the Poem / Stays in the Poem,” a surrealist letter to the readers, invites us to take “a dream vacation,” to our pain, a luxurious place with “five-star hotels, fine dining” and “penny slot machines” whose prizes are “pound after pound of shiny poems.”
as if behind their eyes were mounted an ancient algorithm tickling testily for me to write my own microtonal subroutine of extinction. As if human life were not the larval stage of the evolution of intelligence in this universe. As if they’ve found the categorical torture in this pseudo-euphoria but cannot articulate through their newly minted syntax the absurdity of this squishy-sac glitch-life I inhabit. So, my cellular processors jump to the next energy level, instill their shrieking bullet train in the bucolic setting of this puff-pastry daze human love has disgorged. And yes, in its neonatal sanctuary the emptiness of infinity is unclothed, only to re-bundle in the clockish hum, the turning of a planet. Does the lightspeed rush of this face confirm its person? Optics bend the sourceless starlight of nostalgia, but the Proustian hot-fudge-sundae’s flavors draw toward the Big Crunch of spearmint wonder, organic sentience spilling out on the tongue. The fudge’s heat, the ice-cream’s cold, my quiescent polar selves meeting as strangers paddling the slow caramel of revelation. If only for a few trillion cesium-disintegrations longer, I could pretend the past is already here.
Nowruz 2023
For "Women, Life, Freedom"
Hyacinths need the full Sun
that comes late winter
or early spring.
What flowers will make
this year attractive to Nowruz?
Enshroud with the tattered leaves,
clusters of fragrant,
schooner stiff, upright stalks,
as the growth of your hands.
Your hands will bring Nowruz this year.
You, who went to the street to bring the full Sun
in a night that still wanders between
its scarlet sky of sunset and dawn.
The night that your blood uncovered it.
A dumpling does what a dumpling does
It floats, it bobs, it tumbles to the floor.
On the inside—hollow, nothing but air
And some soft squishy dough
Fill it with onion, chives,
some minced pork; all mashed
up in a thick filling,
the same way Umma
used to do.
Green lands of Nso
Nature commemorates the advent of the dry season with extreme beauty in the green lands of Nso.
As we wandered down the hills from Netnab, nature with extreme beauty humbled us with pump and pageantry. Was it a Biblical scene of prophets in the countryside or a paint of Jesus’ scenes in the salvation campaign?
A tall silver-like cross on the top of the apex of the hill range
A picturesque of windswept escarpments and gentle slopes, punctuated by U and V shaped valleys, drilled with interlocking spurs wired the white streams from the black walls down the vast basin
Waterfalls from the sides on the steep slopes dropped silently to the pools
SEA PETALS
Spring breath
between sunsets by the heart
a new verse blossoms
between the waves of my gaze.
Scent of whiteness
I collect at the Horizon
and dew of love
from the ink by the sea
plays beauty looks
that gather elegance
lappings of great hope.
Petals of Love
they dissolve terror
disserting new Life:
Infinite rebirth
Lakeside Bird Feeder, Squirrels
Now if I had ambition I’d be
this kung fu squirrel, this lighter one,
this Jackie Chan, scaling stucco
to ledge to chimney to the hovering skid
of the evil whiz kid’s waffling chopper,
perpetual motion my only gear,
my sidekick wacky as this blacker one,
who tries but can’t quite nab his half
of the substantial stash. Their
choreography is manic, their fight scenes
replete with wall-walking, roof leaping,
jumps across gaps and gorges—all
their own improv’d stunts, every feat
a fleeting, one-take opportunity. It’s
those reflexes that make the difference:
A Place Inside
There is a place inside that we keep secret.
A place of darkness, bleakness
And madness and leaden attitudes toward others,
A place that feels like molten iron,
Burning us inside,
Crying to escape,
A place that is desperately lonely,
That wants the reassurance of mother’s milk.
A NEW SONG
A horrifying THUNK.
Like someone threw
a bag of guts
at the picture window.
We peer out: it’s not pretty.
A crumpled rag
of a robin lies lifeless
beside the house.
We will have to fetch
the shovel and throw him
on the slop pile—
that decomposing heap
of the Unclean and Unwanted;
the offal of our lives.
A patriot in a bulletproof vest
Asian tigress,
and a brave Kazakh kitty,
purrs quietly sneak up,
meanwhile fear of enemies
as the holiday approaches.
Body armor factory
fragile girl built
national glory and honor
You, Madina, deserve it.
Boketto: The Act of Gazing Into the Distance
tap-dancing into the sea,
gazing into and between
the here and there,
the formless formlessness,
the never-ending horizon,
edgeless perfection
of nothing and everything,
perfect emptiness.
floating into the timeless sky
graced by a single lotus,
white translucent pearls
in the sky.
SWEETNESS OF LIFE
I can taste the sweetness of life
Just like the scent of the blooming lilac bushes
decorating the sides of the roads
I feel the warmth from within,
Evoked by the generosity and kindness of people
Just like the Oslo sun touching my skin after a long, cold winter
I now hear the beauty of the world singing in my ears,
Brought to me by the river flowing downstream while swirling around rocks,
By the life-giving rain after a long period of drought,
and by the melody chirped by the numerous birds of my neighbourhood
I Age
Arthritis and aging make it hard,
I walk gingerly, with a cane, and walk
slow, bent forward, fear threats,
falls, fear denouement─
I turn pages, my family albums
become a task.
But I can still bake and shake,
sugar cookies, sweet potato,
lemon meringue pies.
Alone, most of my time,
but never on Sundays,
friends and communion,
United Church of Canada.
Found Poems
--thanks to Leonard Cohen
*
so long, Marianne
in February sunset
Cohen dances to the end
*
take this waltz
everyone knows
first we take Manhattan
*
the slow thaw
Lake Ontario echoes
a thousand kisses deep
*
closing time
tower of song
happens to the heart
*
birds on the wire
waiting for the miracle
coming back to you
*
here it is
the presence of you
alive in the air
Infinity Reservoir
each time a glass is raised to mouth & drank
each time it’s clear water’s the last to go take
a river under forever dry ground or a waterfall
bounding from nothing if the sky was ocean
we’d drink it falling filling another cup to restore our
blood where to place this treasury as
we live we break the faucet
MIRAGE OF GREATNESS
Oh Putin, how sad you must feel,
humiliated and beaten back in Kyiv, which
you boasted would be taken in three days.
The embarrassment of all those tanks,
strung out, unable to move forward,
unable to escape, all proudly marked
with your own nazified Zed— how
you must dread having to look at all
those pictures of impotence and loss.
Remember when you jovially counselled Ukraine
to submit and enjoy what was about to take place,
twinkly eyed boasting about a metaphorical
rape that Ukraine might as well roll over and enjoy.
And in your failure, you instead raped mothers,
sometimes in front of their children,
sometimes both at the same time.
What are you? Are you the Devil?
Floating Clouds
One day
I encountered
The floating clouds
Upon which they asked.
“Your life
Floats like ours
Are you not furious?
For the wind that sweeps you away.”
I replied,
“I love wandering
As a voyager to see the world
Changing shapes for my composure.”
LIFE
This life is
soaked with tears
and the words are too small
to pronounce
all life in an instant
and my love
hidden in the corners of solitude.
This life is
soaked with tears
and the pain of the past
is stronger
than the impending ecstasy
in the kiss of the night
and my escape is stronger
then the strength of your will.
This life is
soaked with tears
and the joy gets crushed
by the sorrow of the
desperate and disbelief in a
new longing.
This life is
soaked with tears
but today there is a smile
in my eyes
so don't walk away
from my smile.
Don't let the grief
to put out these embers
at least sometimes
when I forget
that this life is soaked with a tear.
I won’t give you pathos for flowers
(For James Coburn, a tribute on his birthday)
Steeped in the lost idyll of ancient times,
The drumroll began to toll,
As he sat withdrawn on a cobblestone,
Beneath strokes from a belfry tower.
"I won't give you pathos for flowers,"
A lad said to him.
His gaze pierced the shroud of the ethereal,
Like a spirit dallying across the great hinge.
Desolate Coburn, weary from calling,
Does the winding phase bring relief,
Sequestered from the vale of grief?
Echoed the prying lad.
Books Referenced: If Not for You & Other Stories, Niles Reddick (Big Table Publishing 2023) Moon of the Crusted Snow, Waubgeshig Rice (ECW 2018) Who by Fire, Matti Friedman (Penguin Random House 2022) Inspiring Canadians, Mark Bulgutch (Douglas & MacIntyre 2022) A Book of Days, Patti Smith (Knopf Canada, 2022) Common Tones, Alan Licht, ed. (Blank Forms Editions 2021) This Strange Invisible Air, Sharon Butala (Freehand Books 2021) Unmask Alice, Rick Emerson (BenBella Books 2022) A Lab of One’s Own, Rita Colwell (Simon & Shuster 2020) Making History, Richard Cohen (Simon & Schuster, 2022) Poetica Dystopia, Stephen Roxborough & Karl Blau (2022) Report from The Betts Society/Report from The Reid Society Report from The Ross Society/Report from The Brockwell Society/ Report from The Hall Society (above/ground press 2022)
WordCity Literary Journal is provided free to readers from all around the world, and there is no cost to writers submitting their work. Substantial time and expertise goes into each issue, and if you would like to contribute to those efforts, and the costs associated with maintaining this site, we thank you for your support.
In February 2012, just more than a year after the publication of my first collection of short stories, I broke my back.
That is the easiest way to say it.
Except that the break wasn’t a fracture.
Instead, the bilateral rupture of my sacroiliac joints was due to adenomyosis, a gynecological condition that goes undiagnosed in far too many women, and often takes decades to finally name and treat.
Gradually, and then all at once, the stress from my uterine ligament twisted my sacrum like a jam jar until the joints, finally had to give.
I can say that my doctor at the time tried to manage my pain. I can say that he sent me to see every possible specialist while tossing out diagnostic darts at my chart.
I can also say that the prescriptions he gave me, both discrete and combined, were a sustained act of malpractice. There is a consensus that my brain should have stopped telling my lungs to breathe.
After two years, much of it spend on my hands and knees, silent screaming into the carpet on my bedroom floor, a pain specialist in Vancouver diagnosed and began to knit my joints back together with prolotherapy. A gynecologist performed a complete hysterectomy.
I tapered off the fentanyl. Off Dilauded, Ativan and Zopiclone.
I tapered off Cyclobenzaprine and Lyrica, too, while prescription NSAIDs left my stomach lining damaged, resulting in a year in spasms, while vomiting my way in and out of emergency rooms.
I’m telling you this because of Kirstie Millar’s The Strange Egg, and the review written for this issue by our own contributing editor, Sue Burge.
Kirstie Millar has endometriosis, a disease that is the twin of adenomyosis, and in her pamphlet-length prose poem, published by The Emma Press, Kirstie gives voice to the pain and dysfunction so many women learn to suffer in silence, for the explicit reason that our medical systems are not listening. And years of women’s lives are being lost to agony and lack of treatment. Lack of understanding. Lack of interest in what only concerns half of the human experience.
Every time I assemble an issue of WordCity Literary Journal, I can’t help but sit at my desk in awe of the contributions we receive. The voices speaking to each other from all around the world, in the nexus of this space. This is a space where people come to see and be seen. And very often, the pieces we publish speak right into our souls with a need for solidarity and change. With The Strange Egg, Kirstie Millar and Sue Burge have opened new ground once again, and I am grateful for being spoken to, for seeing and being seen, so specifically in Kirstie’s poem and Sue’s review.
WordCity Literary Journal is provided free to readers from all around the world, and there is no cost to writers submitting their work. Substantial time and expertise goes into each issue, and if you would like to contribute to those efforts, and the costs associated with maintaining this site, we thank you for your support.
I step onto the balcony. The first time today, although it’s getting late. I want to step outside at least once a day. Otherwise, I feel like a trapped man. It was your idea for us to move here. I’m getting used to it. I light my cigarette.
The view is all fig trees. No figs yet, but very soon. I can smell it when figs are on the trees.
A man stumbles out of the public house. I see that he is the gaslight man. Soon he will begin his shift.
The fig trees have spread so much just this summer alone. We’re in the middle of Camden but there are more leaves than sash windows. I can’t see Camden from this square at all, even from a second floor balcony.
Today, the sun is bright. It penetrates even the densest foliage. On a day like this, it feels warm. But you know that if you stand in the shade, you’d freeze. The intensity of the sun makes you look hard, the other way, towards the shade. Even the pavement is pink from the light.
I lean forward. Put my hands on the cast iron handrail, so black it’s blue. It’s warm from the sun, uneven as bread. It has been painted too many times. Landlord’s paint.
A horse clip-clops on the street. The carriage wheels squeak under strain. Methodically, three revolutions per minute. Nearby, I can hear church bells and the shuffly sounds of children playing hopscotch.
I wave but you don’t see me. You’re far away but I know it’s you. You don’t notice if someone close has put on weight, until they are far. I can see you’ve put on weight. I like the dress. Is it new? I’m going to ask you later but you won’t like it because you’d think I should’ve noticed before.
You’re walking.
I’ve painted you before. Many times. But not this view of you. I haven’t sold many paintings this year. Across the garden wall and beyond the trees, cast iron drainpipes bounce light. Only on the darkest days, everything is clear. I blow cigarette smoke at the distant view. It smells acrid, crisp, like a rotten lemon. I cough, choked momentarily by the view. I seem to have developed a cough since the move.
You’ve seen me and you return my wave. When I met you, you were a dancing girl in Paris. You’re not dancing now. You hide your shopping parcels behind your skirt. Boxy. New shoes perhaps. You disappear from view as you enter the building.
I wait.
In seconds I will open the door. I shut the glazed balcony doors. I look at the fig trees, not the door handle. I don’t need to look at it. It’s like shaking hands with someone. You never look at his hand.
I know you leave the shopping parcels on the stair landing outside the flat. I never ask where they go. When you come in your hands are empty, ready for embrace. You ask me the time. I take my father’s gold watch out from my pocket, its chain broken by a drunk in a music hall last year. I put the watch back carefully. My poor father, who had laboured all his life, had nothing to give me when he died but this watch. He drank everything else away. You want to know if I have been painting all day. Not artistically, I reply, only the walls and skirtings. I point vaguely at the air. You smile and nod. Your peachy skirt rustles as you enter the kitchen. What will we have tonight? You ask.
We’ll go out, I reply.
Where? You ask.
We’ll take a walk to Kentish Town. Find that bar we’ve been meaning to.
Meaning to? You ask.
Meaning to find, I say. When you say things like that I am reminded that you are foreign.
*****
I glance around but I don’t see the shopping parcels on the landing as we depart. Perhaps they have been moved. Either by you, when I have been getting ready, or Mrs Phelps across the corridor. She doesn’t like things being left lying around. I don’t ask you about it.
We cross the shadows of the figs. The pinkish pavement is now a virginal blue from the gaslit street lamps. Birds flap by. I don’t see them, but I feel the gush of their quickness. The fig leaves move, above my head, under my feet.
Another cigarette. I offer you one as we walk, but you decline. The tip of my cigarette glows.
The bar is crowded although it is a Thursday night. There are lit oil lamps on each table. On the thick red wallpaper, the candelabras are unlit. The candles on them look like apple cores. We have some wine. I see an artist I don’t want to meet. He has a new studio in Hampstead.
Do you like our new flat? You ask.
The light is good, I say. Yes, I like it.
Are you going to start painting? You ask.
Darling, I haven’t stopped.
I want to say, ‘I will move back to Italy in six months.’ And there is more: if you will not come, I will still go. I paint much, much more there. Also I am ill with this cough. We are not married and all I wanted to do was paint you. And now I have. This is what I will tell you. I have thought about it.
But you have bigger news.
I sip wine while I think about what you’re saying. I look at the tablecloth. It’s white, but as we are sitting near the window, it looks lime green, from the reflection on the glass.
When is it due? I ask.
April, I think. I hope we are still living in Camden then, you say.
I shrug, or perhaps I shake my head like I have crumbs falling off me.
I want our child to grow up here, you say.
You nibble at the French bread. You cut a slice of cheese. You are thinking of something else now. You remind me that you used to paint too. And dance. And sing. You smile as you remember.
I cough, shaking my head.
I down the remainder of wine in my glass. You say you can see my teeth, just then, through the glass. I imagine it must look grotesque – a distorted view of lips spread, teeth all bared like an animal. The thought makes a little wine trickle down my chin. Instantly, you wipe it with a napkin, where it forms tiny red flower-shapes. I need to get some more canvasses, I say. I can paint small pieces on the balcony. Until the weather gets worse.
That’s good, you say, folding the napkin. I know you are not listening. Your eyes are sea-blue and they look as far away as China.
The other artist leaves the bar. He has not seen me.
*****
You and I walk home. It is dark. Somewhere a tiny insect hums in monotone. I look side to side, watchful for urchins. We get to the square. There is light coming from only two windows. Mrs Phelps’ is dark. No streetlight penetrates the trees. My cigarette glows but doesn’t throw any light. The insect hum is louder under the trees. The sound of horses’ feet is muffled by the thickness of the trees.
I cough in spasms, as though the coughing lights our way. I kick around to feel my way through the leaves. They crunch and sigh underfoot. Your skirt sweeps an invisible path in the leaves. Even without any light, I can see that your skirt is peach-coloured. It is the one colour which looks the same whatever the time, wherever the place. Isn’t that strange? I ask you. Although I can’t see you, I know you are smiling.
Kick-kick-kick. We look down as we walk, as though looking for things. It still seems odd that we are in the middle of town.
I take hold of your hand and rub it as we walk. I can feel your pulse. Cigarette smoke forms white twirls, our eyes follow it until it disappears. You can only see it clearly in the dark, the genie of my lamp.
I feel a shove from my back. My cigarette drops. I turn around. It is a boy. He smells of vinegar and milk. He tries to put his hand in my pocket. It all happens quick as a grunt. I swivel away from him, tightening my hold on your hand. It’s like we’re drunken and dancing again, in Paris. The urchin runs away. His little feet are light but his heart is pounding.
You start to weep. We won’t cut through the square again, I say. My voice is not all right. I check my pockets surreptitiously, so that you don’t notice.
We walk fast. Under the fig trees, it’s so black, it’s blue.
Ivy Ngeow was born and raised in Johor Bahru, Malaysia. She holds an MA in Writing from Middlesex University, where she won the 2005 Middlesex University Literary Press Prize out of almost 1500 entrants worldwide. Her debut, Cry of the Flying Rhino (2017), was awarded the International Proverse Prize in Hong Kong. Her novels include Heart of Glass (2018), Overboard (2020) and White Crane Strikes (2022). She is the commissioning editor of the Asian Anthology New Writing series. The American Boyfriend, which will be published by Penguin, Southeast Asia in July 2023 was longlisted for the Avon x Mushens Entertainment Prize for Commercial Fiction Writers of Colour 2022. She lives in London.
TWITTER: @ivyngeow
WordCity Literary Journal is provided free to readers from all around the world, and there is no cost to writers submitting their work. Substantial time and expertise goes into each issue, and if you would like to contribute to those efforts, and the costs associated with maintaining this site, we thank you for your support.
TWO SCREECHING CATS slice the late morning silence. They circle each other, backs hunched. Chickens scatter to safer pecking grounds.
A priest approaches. Sunlight on his black robe bastes his body. His sandaled feet kick up dust as he rushes past the beige stucco house with faded blue wooden shutters. They open. A stream of water douses the priest and cats.
“Oh! Père Chaumont,” Madame Bonnet says. One spotted hand holds a rusted pail. The other covers her mouth.
The wet cats slink away.
“I’ll dry quickly in this heat.” He wants to call her stupid. Instead, he makes the sign of the cross and hurries off. He must be at his church by noon. He almost runs down rue Jean Jaures, up Avenue de la République and past the two angels flanking the church entrance.
The church’s interior feels like a cold slap. The incense smell from centuries has impregnated the foot-thick stone walls. His eyes, although helped by the half-light of flickering long, white candles, take time to adjust to the dark.
Good. Each taper means more souls are working their way out of purgatory.
Eventually, he focuses on the gold-leafed altar and makes out his beloved Virgin’s face staring at the suffering Christ.
While Madame Bonnet’s water had felt almost refreshing in the sun, he now shivers. Stupid, stupid woman.
He kneels. The cane footstool feels rough through his robe. The Bishop, during his last visit two years before, suggested changing the cane for softer cushions. Père Chaumont had nodded but has postponed action. Discomfort during prayer is good for the soul, he thinks.
Dust flickers in light rays penetrating the slit windows. Although Père Chaumont has only been priest in the church twenty of its seven-hundred-and-ten-year history, he considers it his church. If the responsibility for each soul, each stone, each candle weighs heavily, he accepts the pounds as his mission assigned by God.
It’s time. He crosses himself. Twelve clear, clear bongs ring out the hour — reminding people time is fleeting — singing of the glory of God. He inhales, shuts his eyes and listens as he does every noonday as he kneels on the same cane stool.
Bong. Then an overlapping bong followed by a ng sound.
Where was the pristine sound he so loved?
Why an echo? A nasty echo?
Bong-ng. Bong-ng. Bong-ng.
There was something wrong, horribly wrong.
Bong-ng. Bong-ng. Bong-ng.
He rushes to the empty street. All the residents are inside eating. Why haven’t they noticed? Why haven’t they come running?
Bong-ng. Bong-ng. Bong-ng.
He looks at the steeple. Black birds float above the sandy-brick tower, a contrast to the unreal blue sky.
His grey bell hangs motionless.
*
“You’ve scarcely eaten, Père,” his housekeeper says twenty minutes later. A white fish, in onion sauce, congeals on his plate. The table lamp casts a ruby reflection though a full wine glass unto the bleached oak table. The baguette, brown from the wood oven, is untouched.
“I’m sorry.” He toys with his fork, puts it down, glances at his watch. He goes to the window and opens the shutters.
“Don’t let in the heat,” the housekeeper says.
“Just for a minute,” he says.
Bong-ng.
*
As the town slumbers after lunch, Père Chaumont climbs the belfry’s uneven stone steps. Their centers are worn from the centuries of ringers mounting the stairs to ring the three bells before they were automated.
When he first arrived at the church, Père Chaumont had to ring the bells himself. He didn’t trust anyone else to do it until he wrote a specialist in bell tones. The expert journeyed from Geneva first to install the mechanism then to show the priest how to reset the mechanism in fall and spring when the clocks changed and how to override it for marriages and funerals. The Swiss had departed the next day, saying he disliked the stink of small villages, perfumed by smells of the fertilized fields flanking the village.
The priest touches the bell, which is as tall as he is. The grey metal almost burns his fingers. He checks and rechecks the mechanism. Everything seems correct.
It’s almost two. The first bong nearly deafens him, but he still hears the echo and the ng. It’s coming from the bottom of the mountain rising outside the village.
It’s not the hot wind blowing off the Pyrenees that disturbs the priest’s sleep. Nor is it his mattress, although he feels each of the seven wooden slats under it, reminding him of the seven deadly sins. It’s the hourly echo and ng per bong.
Somewhere between four and five, sleep wins. He dreams of demons sneaking up to the belfry where Satan, stinking of burning flesh, make him choose: the bells or his soul.
He wakes, more tired than when he’d gone to bed. In the kitchen, he boils coffee and tears some bread from the previous evening’s baguette. He can’t find the honey. His annoyance that his housekeeper thought her dentist appointment more important than his breakfast, bubbles under the surface.
He won’t say anything that might rock the uneasy truce forged five years ago: he lacks the energy to train a new housekeeper to his whims.
From his place at the table, he looks out the kitchen window. The back of the rectory has a small garden with bright red tomatoes and pole beans. The housekeeper takes care of the garden, another reason to accept her dereliction of duty this morning.
Where does the rival chime come from? Villefranche? Les Roches? Prades? All too far. He must find out.
He stops at the greengrocer, who is lugging a basket of peaches to the front of his shop. Père Chaumont has been expecting Monsieur Perez to come to confession for a long time.
Madame LeRoyer had confessed to committing adultery with Perez last summer. He’d given her fifty Hail Marys and insisted she darn the altar cloth. Most of his penances include something not just for the soul, but for the hands. If penances benefit the church, so much the better.
He has to be careful, because wagging tongues might guess the nature of the sin if Monsieur Perez is seen sweeping the church steps the same time Madame LeRoyer mends the altar cloth. His fears were for nothing, because the greengrocer had not appeared at the confessional, despite, Père’s hints he should drop by.
“Bonjour, Père Chaumont.” The greengrocer smile and offers a banana. Since Madame Le Royer had confessed, Monsieur Perez has offered a free peach, apple, even a kiwi each time the priest passes.
Père Chaumont refuses the banana. Grocer Perez can’t buy his way out of Hell with fruit. Père Chaumont is no Eve tempted by a snake.
The priest doesn’t smile. “Have you noticed a new bell sound?”
“Don’t pay attention to no bells,” the grocer tells the priest.
Next the butcher’s wife — now there’s a woman who will pay attention, he thinks. Her shop window features pork chops decorated with parsley, a plate of meatballs in tomato sauce.
As he pushes his way through the brown bead curtains at the door, the butcher’s wife is beating something in a copper bowl with a whisk. Chickens and rabbits hang by their feet behind the counter.
“Bonjour, Père. Fresh mayonnaise, almost done.”
Her confessions are so boring he dreads hearing her voice when he slides the confessional door open. She’d yelled at her children, accidentally weighed an order for the old folks’ home incorrectly. She’d thought badly of her neighbor, whom Père Chaumont considers a bitch also. Yet, those confessions, the ones where souls merely toy with danger, are preferable to those of his parishioners drowning in sin.
He asks about the bells.
She puts down the bowl, places both hands on the counter and leans toward him. “It’s the old convent. That’s where they come from.”
“The old convent?”
“You know. The one in the foothills. Les étrangers bought it.”
He didn’t know. Père Chaumont hurries to the rectory. On his office wall is a two-hundred-year-old map. Buildings are sketched in faded brown ink. Paper clips, elastic bands, staples and pencils fly in all directions until he finds his magnifying glass at the back of his bottom desk drawer.
He peers at the map and sees his church and surrounding houses. Little has changed.
There’s a convent hidden in the forest about five kilometers outside the village, not quite up the mountain.
He has never walked that far. He seldom walks beyond the edge of the village. Somewhere there has to be a commandment that priests shouldn’t hike. He looks at his sandals, which were not designed for trails. He finds rubber boots in his antique wardrobe. They’ll be better than sandals.
The forest smells of pine and damp. He passes an ant hill almost at knee level. Streams of ants march to the top.
The convent is in a cleared area. Trees are cut into piles of fresh firewood. Grapevines, with still small and hard light green fruit are planted to the left. Instead of nuns, young people in shorts pull weeds between rows of onions. Immodest women brandish nipples through t-shirts.
“Bonjour Père,” one of the girls says. Her hair is braided. She wipes her sweaty forehead with the back of her arm. Her American accent is broad, nasal, grating.
At that moment his church bell sounds in the distance overlapped by the convent bell.
Père Chaumont couldn’t speak. How dare these foreigners ruin the purity of his bells tolling. He imagines taking a hammer to bash the smirking faces of the infidels desecrating this convent.
“Get the priest some water,” the girl calls. “Restez-vous ici.” She guides the red-faced priest to a bench between the vegetable garden and the vineyard. “Find Paul.”
The priest hears a metal screak as another woman, her rear end hanging from her shorts, works the pump handle siphoning water into a tin cup. Her arm muscles are as defined as any man’s.
Despite his thirst, he knocks the cup from her hand. “Stop your bell.” The order sounds more like a gasp.
A man, maybe in his mid-twenties, blond and blue-eyed and bronzed to questionable racial status, comes from inside the building. “Pourrais-je vous aidez?” May I help you Père? His accent is worse than the young woman’s.
The priest stands so fast the bench topples. He points his finger at the young man. “Stop your bell.” Not trusting himself not to hit these foreigners, he turns to stomp home, shaking most of the way.
*
Into the fall, the bells ring almost simultaneously: bong-ng, bong-ng. The priest demands that the mayor revoke the carte de sejour of the Americans.
The mayor shakes his head. “Not in my jurisdiction, Père.” The priest thinks he sees the mayor smirk, but decides it was his imagination.
In bed in late September, when it is still smotheringly hot, the priest has an idea. He will starve them out.
The butcher and the baker agree.
Monsieur Perez, who still hasn’t confessed his adultery, refuses.
“Maybe Madam LeRoyer can change your mind.”
Monsieur Perez looks behind him where his wife is stocking lemons. Because she did not respond, the priest assumes she hasn’t heard. He debates repeating it but decides he could always use the information later.
The days grow shorter. Grapes are harvested. Orange nets are placed under olive trees to gather the shaken fruit which will be carted off to the cooperative and turned into oil. Sounds of guns shots echo through the woods as the hunt starts and finishes.
The boycott fails. Each hour there are bong-ngs.
Père Chaumont preaches against the immorality of people living under their very noses, how it can corrupt the village youth. When Madame LeRoyer doesn’t squirm, he thinks that she has stopped sinning. At the end of Mass, he isn’t sure anyone knows that he’d been talking about the sins committed at the convent daily or those he imagines.
He demands Maître Cordelier write a letter asking the Americans to discontinue their bells. The convent’s lawyer writes back saying no law was broken. Cordelier delivers the response with an I-told-you-so look.
Père Chaumont loses weight from not eating. His face, always marked with frown lines, is haggard from lack of sleep because he wakes each hour to listen to the bong-ng.
*
Dark comes a little before five in December. The smell of chimney smoke hovers over the village. Bûches de Noël, decorated with ceramic bunnies and squirrels, adorn half the baker’s shelves. A boar hangs outside the butcher’s window. Each day there’s a bit less as people take roasts and chops home for the holiday meal.
Père Chaumont can’t contemplate celebrating Christ’s birth while his bell is being ruined by the ng after his bell bonged.
After Christmas Eve Mass, the priest prays for guidance. He stares at the Virgin and is sure he heard her whisper, “Destroy the bell.”
As soon as he can return to the rectory for his heavy coat against the cold Tramantane wind. Leaves whip around him. The sky is as black as his robe. The weather matches his anger.
Once at the convent, he hides behind the water pump. The infidels have enlarged the windows, so he can see into the refractory. Eight people, half men, half women, none over 30, all dressed in jeans and sweaters, seem to have designated roles: ladling what looks like soup, opening wine, cutting bread, laying the table, playing the piano, which he can’t hear through the thick stone walls. The fireplace, big enough to stand in, is burning a giant log. The air smells smokey from the fire.
He watches them laugh.
A Christmas tree, decorated with paper birds, butterflies and fish, is in one corner.
Those poor nuns, he thinks, the ones who lived there almost a century ago, must be turning in their graves.
The young people eat and wash up. Two women begin to play cards. Three men sit in wooden rockers with books. The rest chat. As the priest shivers, one by one they drifted off to where the priest can’t see.
From this distance he hears his bells strike the hours and the ugly override of the convent’s. The sound is worse in proximity.
When all the lights go out, he stands. Every muscle complains as he sneaks into the tower.
At the top of the stairs, he touches their bell. No wonder it made such a sick ng with its sniveling size. The damned thing is a less than a foot at its largest point. He can’t find a timing mechanism, only a computer. He’s afraid if he smashes it everyone will wake. Better steal it.
Despite pulling and tugging while grasping the clapper, it holds firm. Whether it was his concentration or the wind howling, he doesn’t hear footsteps.
“What’s going on?” the blond leader asks. The man’s flashlight illuminates the belfry. “Come down! Now!”
The leader, helped by a slightly larger man, grabs the priest. Holding his arms behind his back, he wrestles him down the worn stone steps and across the yard. The priest breaks free and runs toward the tower only to be tackled. Struggling to his feet, he thrashes out at whoever is in reach, hitting a woman. Within seconds, he is pinned to the ground. Gravel presses into his cheek.
The young man offers his hand to the priest, who refuses the help and struggles to his feet.
“Come inside,” the leader says. Lights from inside brighten the small courtyard.
The priest shakes his head. He’s the order giver not the order taker.
“You’ll catch cold,” the leader says.
“Stop your bell. You’re ruining mine.” The priest screams into the wind.
“How can we ruin yours?” a young woman asks.
The priest turns and heads back to the village as the bells bong-nged eleven times. He shakes with rage through Midnight Mass. For the week between Christmas and New Year’s he suffers a cold and stays in bed.
His housekeeper brings his meals on a tray. “Those foreigners, you know, the ones at the convent, came to the church. They brought you an apple tart.”
Why was God punishing him with this terrible cold for trying to preserve his beautiful bell? Père Chaumont blows his nose. Now the … the …the … he couldn’t quite find the word: sinners, heathen, devil’s spawn were desecrating his village and now his kitchen.
He huddles under the covers, ignoring the hot milk and honey that his housekeeper brought him. It’s almost noon. He waits for bells, the symbol of his failure.
“Bong, bong, bong…” He jumps out of bed and throws open the window. His bell alone, clear, pure rang twelve times. He’d won. God had triumphed. He does a mini-dance around the bedroom not feeling the cold stone against his bare feet. Halfway in mid spin, he hears another bell, a bell that had a dirty ng sound at the end. It rang twelve times too.
The rest of the day as each hour produced his clear bell tones, a few seconds of silence are followed by the convent bell’s counterpoint. He wants to ask the leader why, but he can’t bring himself to return to the convent.
The Americans never came back to the church. The priest never went back to the convent. The residents never noticed the bells. They didn’t think anything about it, but the priest does every day until he retires.
D-L Nelson is an American born, Swiss Canadian. She has written 19 novels and two non fiction books. She lives in Switzerland and Southern France with her husband Rick, an airline journalist, and her dog Sherlock.
WordCity Literary Journal is provided free to readers from all around the world, and there is no cost to writers submitting their work. Substantial time and expertise goes into each issue, and if you would like to contribute to those efforts, and the costs associated with maintaining this site, we thank you for your support.
Brandt Colson watches his frenetic daughter as she flits around the room in her usual style. She is talking about ten different things at once, fussing over details and generally majoring in the minor. Brandt notices the bored and frowning, mostly grown grandson as he leans against the wall at the apartment entry. The boy takes no pains to hide his brooding impatience.
The daughter stops talking and pauses in front of the chair. Brandt looks up. “There is plenty to eat and all laid out. Your list is on the counter. Are you sure you feel up to it, Dad?”
“I feel fine,” he says. The stroke is a jumbled memory now.
She looks doubtful, “don’t over-do.”
This daughter is an impulsive, disorganized and frenzied worrier. The years of West Coast living, three husbands and many fiancés, has not changed that about her. Now she is back, living in his house, free of charge, with her son and a new husband. She is here to bring a whirlwind of fuss and worry over her sick old man.
Brandt is glad to have her back, even if it does mean all of the drama that goes with it. He doesn’t care about moving into the apartment over the garage and letting her have the main house. The big place is too much for him now.
“You have my numbers. Call if you need me. Jeff is asleep, wake him if you have to, but he goes in to work tonight, if he isn’t too sick. So call me instead. Unless it’s an emergency. Then call Jeff, and 911, but me first.”
The boy speaks from the doorway, “he might go to work if he isn’t too drunk.”
She turns and stares at him then pecks her father on the cheek.
“We’ll be fine” Brandt says.
She stops at her sullen child and pats him on the arm. “Don’t over-do” she admonishes and leaves.
The boy looks away. “Did you get all of that?”
There is a ticking silence in the room as the grandson looks around and Brandt watches him. He doesn’t know this boy and hasn’t seen him for years until the move back to Indiana. But the kid looks like his mother with the same big bones, chestnut hair and crinkle around the eyes. He is her without the ninety mile an hour pace.
“We have our instructions” Brandt says. The boy shrugs. “Grounded, huh? Isn’t almost eighteen a little old for that?”
“Yeah well, she has to get it in while she still can,” the boy slumps against the wall.
“So your punishment is to cart me around.”
“Huh” the boy says. “It’s better than sitting in the house watching him sober up.”
“OK bud, you might as well have a seat. There’s no hurry to get anywhere.” Brandt motions to a chair opposite him.
In time the boy pushes himself from the wall, sits down, brushes hair from his forehead, then rests his forearms on his knees, leans forward and brings his head up. He looks around the room until his eyes at last meet with Brandt. “OK, get this…” he pauses a few seconds. “I don’t do bud, or buddy, or pal, or champ, or kid, or sport. I won’t call you Old Man and you won’t call me all the cutesy kid things.”
Brandt smiles, “Bravo, very impressive. Do you do surly S.O.B.?”
The kid grins “it’s better than champ.”
“Or Kevin, since it is your name” Brandt says.
“Not Kev. Never Kevvy. What about you? Brandt isn’t even your name,” Kevin asks.
“My middle name. But you can call me Grandfather, Grandpa or like that. Not Gramps or Pawpaw, or any cutesy names.” Brandt sits back and studies this serious boy. “Or Brandt, if you prefer.”
“Surly S.O.B?” Kevin asks.
“That would fit.”
“Get this,” the kid says “we almost didn’t even come here. They had some big fight over your Jesus Freak religious conversion thing. At least that’s what he called it. What’s all that about?
“It isn’t about religion,” Brandt says.
“So what is it?”
“If you really want to know it’s a life change. I left my way of thinking and looking at things and started a new life based solely on the teachings in the Hebrew and Greek scriptures” Brandt says.
“Sounds brainy.”
“There is an intellectual element. There has to be.” Brandt says
“Intellectual, that’s what I meant. You aren’t going to preach or, like, save me or anything are you? Cause, I don’t do church or any of that crap.”
“I don’t do churches either. Churches don’t have the answer, that’s why there are so many of them.”
“Cool. I think I’m through talking about this,” the boy says. “Why do you go by your middle name?”
“Simple,” Brandt says “when I started writing there was a writer of Western paperbacks named Rick Colson, I didn’t want readers thinking that Richard Colson was the same person.”
Kevin nods “you haven’t written that many books. How long have you been writing?”
“Long time. First published the year I got out of the Army.”
“That Peterson guy has written like a hundred books.”
“Different kind of writer. Different audience” Brandt says.
“Anyway, I’ve never read either one of you. Seen some of your movies.”
“Not my movies” Brandt says.
“That make you mad?” Kevin says.
“Billions of people have never read my books. If I got upset about it, I wouldn’t have time for anything else” Brandt says.
The boy is silent a moment. “Does a stroke hurt?” he asks.
Brandt says “I don’t remember it hurting. Don’t remember much about actually having the stroke. I remember afterwards in bits and pieces until I started recovering. It was tiring and confusing. I remember feeling like I couldn’t move, couldn’t do or say anything. Time moved back and forth and kind of …” he pauses “…went away.”
“Really?”
“Yesterday was like it just happened and like it never happened all at the same time. Today was like yesterday and like….” Brandt says.
Kevin gets up and saunters to the bookshelf. “Mom says you won all kinds of awards I never heard of” he brushes a forefinger over the book spines. “Which book is the best?”
Brandt doesn’t hesitate“the one that didn’t win anything.”
“I don’t know one from the other” Kevin looks at him
“End, second shelf. The Last First Friday.”
The boy picks out the book and leafs through it. “What’s that mean? The Last First Friday?”
“Read it and find out.”
Kevin snorts “I don’t read books.”
“Can’t or don’t?”
“Don’t” Kevin says with emphasis. He saunters to the chair and casually lays the book on the side table next to the door. “What’s so special about it?”
Brandt answered, “sold the least. Written after my crazy Jesus Freak conversion. Ignored by the all knowing critics. Publisher didn’t promote it.”
“Is it that preachy religious Christian fiction stuff?” The boy asks.
“Not at all. It’s about life changes and other things.”
There is another ticking silence as they study one another. “What about you?” Brandt asks.
Kevin says “She tell you why I’m grounded?”
“No.”
“Want to know? I’m bad news, a real troubled kid.”
“That’s between you and her.”
They are silent again.
“Any friends yet?” Brandt asks.
“Sort of,” he says.
“Girls?”
“Maybe I don’t like females,” Kevin looks at him and the older man shrugs. “I do” Kevin smiles.
“So do I.” Brandt smiles.
“Grandma’s been gone a long time. I don’t remember her” Kevin gets no reaction from this. “Are you ready?” Kevin asks and they stand
In the car, Kevin gets directions to the Doctor’s office and they are silent. “OK, did you always want to be a writer?” he asks at last.
“Hmm,” Brandt thinks for a moment “no. Not really. I never liked to read. Writing came later.”
“Yeah?”
“I went to college about your age…” Brandt is abruptly cut off.
“Oh, here we go. I walked into that one” Kevin says.
“I don’t get it” Brandt says.
“Mom’s been on me about college and now here you go. College made you realize you wanted to be a writer. Blah, blah. Forget I asked.”
Brandt sighs “I was going to say I went to college and dropped out my first year and joined the Army. It made my father furious, which is probably one reason I did it. The other is I couldn’t see that it was going to get me anywhere since I didn’t know what I wanted to begin with.”
Kevin looks at the road “oh.”
“After a while I moved up in rank and the Army decided I was a smart guy. They assigned me to a remote place in the foothills of South Dakota. A one man building a few miles outside a little nowhere town. It had a one man office and living quarters. I couldn’t see or hear another person from there; the main road was some distance. They did not want me wearing a uniform.”
“Sounds strange. What did you do?”
“Not a lot. At irregular intervals I would get a call saying a delivery was coming. Sooner or later a van would pull up and a couple of guys in regular clothes would get out, show me their credentials and unload some metal file crates which we would stack in the office and they would leave. In a day or so I would get another call about a pick up. I would write down some information on a form and wait. Guys in regular clothes with credentials would show up and get the crates. Once a week I would go into town and mail my forms. I did that for over two years.”
“Wow, no one else ever came around. Like an officer or something?” Kevin asks.
“No one. I never saw anyone in a uniform until I left there and went to a base for a briefing.”
“Weird. What was in the boxes?” Kevin asks.
“I don’t know” Brandt says “I was told not to open them and they would know if I did.”
Kevin risks taking his eyes off the road and looks at the old man “you never found out what was in the crates?”
“Never. Watch the road, will you?”
“Weren’t you curious?” Kevin asks.
“Of course, I asked once and was told to keep my mind on my work” Brandt says. “Anyhow, I got bored quickly. Only so much television and radio you can stand. The town was small and didn’t offer much but they did have a junk, antique flea market with second hand books. I decided to try reading and picked up a book that was supposed to be some kind of prize winning thing, highly acclaimed, bestseller and all of that. I read it and said, ‘wow this stinks’. I bought another one, then another, etc. Finally I said, ‘I can do at least this bad and I started writing. I got up the nerve to send some short things off to magazines, a few got in. I wrote my first novel and got it published the year I left the service.”
“Highway 36, turn here?” Kevin asks.
“Yes.”
“Then you came back to Indiana and met Grandma and she had a pile of money” Kevin says.
“Not exactly. She worked with her father and took over the business. I kept writing and did pretty well. She gave the business to your mother and uncle when she got ill.”
“And my father almost ruined the business, Mom ditched him and moved to California with me and got married and engaged a bunch of times, stayed there most of my life, and now we are back with my latest Daddy-man because he’s a drunk and Uncle Dan had to find him a job. I’m supposed to be all screwed up over everything” Kevin adds.
“I’d like to think she came back for me” Brandt says.
“Oh Right.”
“It is the ugly brown and glass office building on the left. 5480” Brandt says
Kevin pulls the car into a parking space. “We’re early” he says.
“You wanted to leave” Brandt says. He motions to a nearby coffee shop “coffee?”
Kevin says “ok but I’m through with the talk.”
“Good” Brandt says.
Brandt is tired when they return in late afternoon.
“Another appointment tomorrow? Two days in a row?” Kevin asks as he sets the keys on the counter. “I’ll get your groceries out of the car.”
“A different doctor” Brandt says.
“Do you need all that, the doctors?” Kevin asks.
“No, but it keeps my agent off my back. I’m under contract for another book” Brandt says.
“What’s this one about?”
Brandt considers for a moment as he sits in his chair “I guess it wouldn’t hurt to tell you. A government employee stuck in a useless and non productive job that everyone has forgotten about.”
Kevin saunters to the door “huh.”
Brandt settles into the chair and closes his eyes. He suddenly feels as though he can’t stay awake.
Kevin unloads the car and puts things away. He is concerned when the old man doesn’t move from the chair. “You alright?”
“Sure. I’m going to sit here a minute then see what your mother left me for dinner. I’ll watch the Pacer game later” Brandt says.
“Want me to get dinner?”
“No. You’ve run me around all day. I’m fine.” Brandt keeps his eyes closed.
“Maybe tomorrow you can tell me what The Last First Friday means” Kevin says.
“Fat chance,” Brandt mumbles with eyes closed.
“See you early.” Kevin hesitates in the doorway then leaves.
Brandt opens his eyes. His copy of The Last First Friday is gone from the side table. He closes his eyes.
Kevin has the book in hand when he returns the next morning. He can see his grandfather sitting in the chair with his feet on the ottoman. Kevin enters talking “I did it. I read it. Well most of it. I stayed up late.” His Grandfather looks at him and blinks. Kevin shuts the door still talking “you know what I found out? I’m a fast reader. I’m almost done.” He holds the book out.
Brandt blinks again.
“You don’t look ready to go. Want something to eat or coffee?” The boy asks and places the book on the side table. He sits on the ottoman and studies his Grandfather. “Hey, no,” Kevin says after a moment “no, you can’t. See I know now” he stares into his grandfather’s face. “Not now Grandpa, I know what it means. I know what The Last First Friday means.”
Yesterday is like it just happened and like it never happened at the same time. Today is like yesterday and time moves back and forth and slips away. Brandt looks at his grandson.
William Baker has 15 short fiction publications to date and several more upcoming by June 2023. He doesn’t lack for story ideas and has never experienced writer’s block.
He is currently working on numerous short stories and stage plays. He enjoys studying scripture, photography, amateur homesteading, and community theater. He lives a positive and purposeful life with his family in Indiana.
WordCity Literary Journal is provided free to readers from all around the world, and there is no cost to writers submitting their work. Substantial time and expertise goes into each issue, and if you would like to contribute to those efforts, and the costs associated with maintaining this site, we thank you for your support.
Farley Creighton had been working far too hard. Tax accounting could be a real bitch in April. While most people welcome spring with open arms and a certain sense of renewal, not so with Farley. It was the time of year when he could expect clients like Mike Marashenko, who ran his own small contracting firm, to walk through the front door with a large cardboard box brimming with everything from receipts to bills both paid and unpaid and copies of invoices either sent or not. It was poor Farley’s job to straighten out the whole mess and make sure, at risk of certain reproach, that Mike didn’t pay a cent more income tax than he had the previous year. And it would have probably been okay with the beleaguered accountant had Marashenko Contracting Ltd. been a one-off, but no, he was pretty much typical of Creighton Tax Service’s entire client base. In the early years he’d felt thankful the larger firms in town had referred clients to him, but after a few years he realized that they were simply offloading their dregs on him.
By the end of June, Farley could look forward to a break in the pressure cooker tedium and start sending out a few invoices of his own. But now it was mid-April, just weeks from tax filing deadlines, and he tanked, bottomed out, flatlined. Call it what you will but Farley was done. Fourteen tax seasons in this dispiriting business that had promised big rewards never realized. In that time, Farley had seen clients start with nothing and end up millionaires while his business floundered, just shy of being a certifiable failure. Farley was an okay tax accountant, but a terrible businessman. He had grown silently bitter with those who’d “outgrown” his services and moved on, seeking the advanced resources of big firms with initials like “LLP” behind their names, retaining those pricey lawyers whose singular purpose in life was to ferret out loopholes in the tax laws.
On top of all that, Cecilia was taking their two boys and leaving him; moving in with some freak who spent most of his worthless life at Ernie’s Gaslight Roadhouse, that seedy shithole down on the east end of town. She’d be wanting half of what little actual value remained of their sorry union and probably some child support to boot.
Fuck ‘em. Fuck ‘em all.
So, Farley Creighton went for a walk.
He remembered the woods from his childhood days. He remembered that when he’d been troubled it was the one place where he could find solace. Pulling on his old Columbia hiking pants which were now fitting a bit snugger around the waist, he slipped his feet into his comfortable ten-year-old Vasques. They were one of the few expensive indulgences he’d allowed himself since the children had come along. Unfortunately, the tough, all-leather hiking boots with Vibrum soles had seen far less use than Farley had hoped for when he bought them. Stuffing a few granola bars, three bottles of Evian and a pullover windbreaker into his light day hiker pack, he slipped out the front door, climbed into his taupe 1998 Hyundai Accent and drove less than a quarter mile out of the city. There he found a little-used roadside turnout that ran about a hundred yards into a forest of mixed jack pines and tamaracks.
This wasn’t entirely new territory for Farley, though he wasn’t familiar with this particular spot. As a young boy he and his pals had spent practically every summer weekend in these woods. There had always been something to do; build lean-to ‘forts’, explore, or swim ‘bare balls’ in the bone chilling creek that meandered down through a deep ravine. He smiled to himself at these nearly forgotten memories. Later, just before he met and married Cecilia, he’d frequently hiked here on his own, until an encounter with a black bear mamma and her cub convinced him that doing this sort of thing solo might shorten his life. After that, he’d limited his hikes to the fringes of the forest, not venturing in too deeply.
Today, though, he really didn’t give a shit if a bear was there or not. His growing depression had made him, if not suicidal, at least carelessly fatalistic.
For about fifty or so yards, he followed what looked to be a trail through the thickening trees, then cut off and made his own way through the heavy undergrowth, tripping occasionally on the uneven terrain. Finding himself in a thicket of heavy ground willow and very much alone, Farley looked up through the pines and began to laugh almost maniacally. He hadn’t felt this sort of freedom in years and no, he knew he wasn’t losing his mind. This forest, this wonderful sanctuary, was pulling him magically back from an emotional precipice.
Farley continued on, deeper into the trees, and had anyone been there to view his progress, the transformation could not possibly have gone unnoticed; a slight, contented smile replaced a grim, set jaw and was accompanied by a brisker step and a remarkable improvement in posture.
Fifteen more minutes of hiking brought him to a small clearing. A trickle of a creek was almost unnoticeable in the tall grasses and wild shrubbery as it gurgled its way down one edge. Immediately noticeable, though, was the red vinyl and chrome 1950’s vintage kitchen chair at the opposite edge, its four legs nestled among laid over dead grass and short bits of greener forest underbrush. The red vinyl was somewhat weathered and faded, but the sun glinted off its unaffected chrome. Had Farley been under any illusion that he’d been breaking new ground in hitherto untrammeled virgin forest, that notion was dashed in a nanosecond.
The hike had tired him, and he was thirsty. He viewed the chair with bemusement as he pulled off his pack and withdrew an Evian from its side pocket. He drank deeply then splashed a bit of the now lukewarm water over his upturned face.
“Would you care to sit for a while, sir?”
It was a soft, soothing male voice, but its presence startled Farley to the point of rectal constriction. His panicked eyes darted three-sixty around the clearing but there was no one, and besides, the voice sounded as though it had actually been very close to him. Now, slightly more curious than alarmed, Farley decided to play along with what he determined might just be some elaborate practical joke. In his accountants’ world of serious rationality, chairs don’t talk, but then, who would set up a practical joke in the middle of a forest clearing not likely visited by anyone?
“Are you okay with me sitting on you?” Farley asked with a smirk on his face.
“Well of course you can,” Chair replied. “That’s my job.”
Tossing the day pack carelessly beside the chair, Farley then knelt down beside it to fetch one of his granola bars. This gave him the opportunity to take a quick sidelong glance under the seat, checking for the presence of any sort of speaker device. There was none; nor was one attached anywhere on the chair back.
He cautiously sat down, gently slouched back then stretched his tired legs out in front of him and crossed them at the ankles. Unwrapping his granola, he took a bite and surveyed his surroundings, waiting for further communication from the chair. Only silence.
Farley was not known for being much of a conversationalist, but this extended quietness was a bit unnerving and compelled him to take the initiative.
“So, what are you doing way out here in the middle of nowhere?” he asked.
“Well, it’s a long, rambling story, and I wouldn’t want to bore you with it, but suffice it to say, I’ve been out here for a while now. I like it, too… well parts of it anyway. Truth is, I’ve always been a bit of a loner; never really fit in as a piece of kitchen furniture.”
Farley couldn’t resist commenting on the obvious.
“If you don’t mind me saying, you do look rather out of place here though, what with your chrome and red vinyl and all. I mean, look around you. You stand out like a sore thumb in the middle of all this wilderness.”
Why on earth am I talking to this chair? Have I completely lost my mind?
“Yeah, well, I guess we’re all entitled to our opinions. Didn’t see you going over to sit on that old, rotted log over there. Good thing, too. It’s loaded with red ants. They came over and checked me out when I first got here, but decided I was a bit uninhabitable. Anyway, it wasn’t my decision to be here. When I first arrived—completely against my will, I might add—I wasn’t a big fan of not having a roof over my head. I’m sure you can understand. Sitting out here in the rain and wind, cold and miserable, watching all these smart-ass trees around me soaking it all up like a warm bath.”
“Sorry,” Farley replied. “Obviously hit a nerve. I didn’t mean to hurt your feelings or anything, it’s just that this whole area is about, y’know, lush greenery, trees, grass and shrubs, that whole ‘nature’ thing. It’s the only reason I’m hiking around here; clearing my head and getting back to nature. My job in the city is incredibly stressful and the scene there, particularly this time of year, is a real gong show. To make matters worse, my wife’s left me, taken my two kids, and set up housekeeping with some alcoholic asshole. I came here to get away from all that and sort things out. Used to come here a lot when I was a kid, and it always made me feel alive.”
Now I’m pouring my heart out to this chair. What’s wrong with me?
“So, you decided this was the place to be,” the chair replied. “Do you own any of this property?”
“No. This really isn’t private property. It’s public land, so we’ve all got a right to be here. Nature is for all of us to enjoy, isn’t it?”
The chair stifled a cynical laugh.
“So here you are, in the middle of all this beauty, sitting quite comfortably on me, chrome and vinyl, while we have this little chat. I hope you’re not missing the irony of it.”
Farley had to mull that one over for a bit.
“Okay, okay, I guess I do get the irony. In spite of the fact that you find all this quite amusing and me a bit hypocritical, I really get the sense that you think you belong here, that you actually fit in.”
Chair was quick to respond.
“Well, perhaps not right at this moment. But as I told you before, ‘fitting in’ has never really been a biggie for me. Kind of a human thing, wouldn’t you agree? Some of the locals were a little startled when I first got here; avoided me like the plague. Now they just ignore me. A few deer come around now and then and there are squirrels and chipmunks galore, but I haven’t seen a bear or cougar around these parts in nearly three years.”
“Well, that’s a relief,” Farley replied.
Ignoring that comment completely, Chair continued, noticeably more upbeat.
“My day will come. Look around you. You don’t really think those trees are here forever, do you? That little stream over there, definitely on borrowed time. Look at me, though. I’m plastic. I’m chrome. Hell, I’m practically indestructible. In time I think I’ll be fitting in quite nicely.
“When I first got here, they called this area a forest. A forest, sir! Three years ago, they decided to reclassify it a ‘nature preserve’. In five more they’ll be calling it a park, and in ten they’ll decide it should be zoned transitional. I don’t think I have to tell you what comes after ‘transitional’ do I? Makes you think, doesn’t it?”
“I’m not entirely sure whether you’re being an optimist or pessimist, Chair.”
“Pragmatist, my friend.”
With a show of finality Farley stood up and stretched his back, then reached down and picked up his day bag.
“It’s been great chatting with you, Chair, but I really must be on my way. I’ll be keeping our little conversation to myself. You do understand, I’m sure.”
There was no reply.
Re-shouldering his backpack, he bade the chair farewell with a weak wave and left the little clearing. He tried to convince himself that the whole experience was some stress induced fantasy. In truth, he knew better. What had occurred was more an epiphany.
Farley settled into the driver’s seat of his Hyundai and sat for a moment with the ignition keys in his hand. He could think of nothing but the conversation he’d just had. As exhausted as he was, he stuck the keys back in his pocket, left the day pack on the front seat and made the half hour trek back to the clearing. He picked up the chair and hiked back to the car where he laid it gently across the back seat. He would likely not hear it utter another word for the rest of his life, and that was okay.
Farley Creighton also knew he had spent his last day as a tax accountant. Going forward his life would have new purpose and focus. Wherever he was in the world, preaching his gospel of environmental stewardship and conservation, the chair would be there with him.
On more than one occasion he’d been asked, “Why is that chair always by your side?” to which he would reply with no further explanation, “We brought each other in from the cold.”
* * * *
The ex-accountant’s life had, indeed, changed. So had the world he lived in. For nearly three decades he’d been a tireless and successful advocate for environmental reform, whether that involved rallying the public, lobbying for changes in the laws or holding to account those who flaunted them. His was a respected voice of reason, and people listened. His legacy was the creation of the highly influential Creighton Foundation, ensuring that his work would continue well into the future.
Twenty-seven years later, upon Farley’s passing and in accordance with his final wishes, a small group of his like-minded friends quietly carried the old chair into the forest on the outskirts of their mentor’s hometown. Through his tireless efforts it was, remarkably, still a forest, protected by law from urban incursion. They knew not why, but they sat the chair reverently at the edge of a clearing deep in the woods near a tiny stream, stood in silence for a moment, then departed with no further fanfare.
In time there would be another Farley Creighton by this way.
Rick Gillis has enjoyed a 40+ year career as a journalist and publisher. Over the past eight years he has refocused his attention on the creation of fiction. His first self-published novel, The Boy Who Couldn’t Die, was chosen finalist in the Indie Excellence Book Awards the year it was published. This was followed by his second novel, Buckskin Girl and Blackheart. During the time he was creating his first two full-length novels, he was also penning several short stories. These were gathered into an anthology titled The Chair. A brief hiatus was followed by the author’s current novel, The Astonishing Legend of Johnny P’tuu.
WordCity Literary Journal is provided free to readers from all around the world, and there is no cost to writers submitting their work. Substantial time and expertise goes into each issue, and if you would like to contribute to those efforts, and the costs associated with maintaining this site, we thank you for your support.
Two Readings, Three Authors: On the Pleasures of Listening to Women Talking
I haven’t attended a lecture or author reading since COVID. The pandemic was reason enough not to go anywhere crowded, and since — well, since then I’ve had to overcome certain habits of mind, as well as a tendency to prioritize tasks that invariably arise from my work as an instructor at two postsecondary institutions. As I approached the end of the Winter 2023 term and shifted to marking mostly, I decided to treat myself at last to two author readings. The first took place at York University’s Glendon campus on April 11, under the auspices of the Department of Hispanic Studies. The second reading and Q&A was held at the Keele Campus on April 17, the fruit of the Department of English and its inaugural Writer-in-Residence program. The two presentations were one week apart, and so I still had a vivid recollection of the first talk, given by Spanish philologist and novelist Irene Vallejo, when I attended the second. At the latter event, I listened to Miriam Toews read a segment from her latest novel, Fight Night (2021), and then field questions from Karen Solie, York University’s first writer-in-residence, a renowned poet and recently named recipient of a Guggenheim fellowship. These were different presentations in terms of the subject matter and authorial aims: the first was delivered by a historian in the capacity of a scholar, a native of Spain; the second featured a celebrated Canadian writer of fiction, known for drawing profusely on her own lived experience as a woman who once belonged to a Steinbach Mennonite community in southern Manitoba. I’ll say right now that both readings were marvellous; they were thought-provoking and moving. They were dissimilar nearly in every way, and yet, afterwards, once I contemplated the subtler leitmotifs and implications of things said or divulged on a personal note, I was struck by how much these talks had in common.
The screen behind the podium where Dr. Vallejo spoke about her work displayed a banner to the effect that books are unique survivors. This is true enough if we contemplate just the last two decades of digital culture, never mind three millennia during which the invention and production of books hinged entirely on the development of a practicable alphabet (Ionic Greek), the discovery and “manufacture” of a durable and transferable material for storing written content (the papyrus roll), and the creation of libraries whose emergence could be assured only by individuals (at first few in number) with a learned respect for the writing they contained. Indeed, the invention and survival of books depended on a confluence of necessary conditions — civilizational achievements really, which only seem, when glossed over, not to have been largely contingent.
Irene Vallejo
Irene Vallejo’s Papyrus: The Invention of Books in the Ancient World (published by Penguin Random House in 2022) can be described as public or narrative history, or historiography; the latter label is appropriate because an expansive study of the evolution of the book as an object made and used to preserve, share, or enshrine ideas and laws is historiographical in essence. Can a delineation of the breakthroughs which ensured the dissemination of philosophy, religion, art — knowledge in all its forms — get more historiographical, in fact? Didn’t books create cultures, entire civilizations to be exact? And isn’t it equally the case that books were primed by their social, ideological, and aesthetic matrices? Without belabouring the point, Papyrus is a history of book making (as material artefacts). At the same time, it is a comprehensive series of highly engaging, eminently readable accounts of, among other things, the conditions that enabled and informed the writing of histories. What would our understanding of the world be like today, it prompts us to ask, if circumstances had been different: if the Bible had never been written down, let’s say, or the piercing insights of Herodotus, Thucydides, or Cicero, Livy, Josephus, Tacitus, and Plutarch had been lost to us for lack of requisite materials or the proper care and attention of archivists?
Not surprisingly, Papyrus crystallizes the role of libraries in the ancient world, as privileged spaces for learning and the conservation of scrolls. Of note is that even then libraries only existed because they were funded by enlightened rulers of kingdoms or empires in the ancient Near/Middle East. The Ptolemaic pharaohs of Egypt were persuaded by Athenian expats to finance the building of and curatorial activities of the Great Library of Alexandria (by no means the first library, though by far the largest in its time) between the last quarter of the fourth century BCE and the first quarter of the third century BCE. Vallejo’s Papyrus offers lively narratives, drawn from an array of sources (historical records, Greek plays, archeological findings, and surviving art). These help us imagine ancient Alexandria as a dynamic cultural hub. The Great Library transformed Alexandria, making the city and its environs more populous, diverse, commercialized, prosperous, and exciting, much as a modern metropolis excites us today.
The slides above the podium where Dr. Vallejo was speaking transitioned from images of cuneiform tablets, to ancient scrolls (made of papyrus or leather, the latter in use as early 8th century BCE), to wax tablets or cerae (in use as far back as the 13th century BCE), to Roman codices, some small enough to be considered pocket-sized. The codex, achieved a currency equal to that of the scroll by 300 AD, and vastly outnumbered it by the 6th century. Codices, as Dr. Vallejo explained, were compact, unlike scrolls; they could be easily hidden, read and disseminated surreptitiously. Dr. Vallejo compared this new context, which became crucial to the transmission of Christian beliefs to reading a book in the dark with the aid of a small flashlight; such reading was forbidden, but it happened nonetheless. One can easily imagine how, with their novel and appealing form, codices made it both possible and compelling to read the story of Jesus.
Other intriguing historical tidbits leavened Dr. Vallejo’s narrativizing, helping to make the ancient past tangible. She explained for example that the shift from papyrus to vellum or parchment for scrolls and codices became expedient when Egypt, the sole exporter of papyrus in the ancient world, made the price of papyrus exorbitant. Egypt had a monopoly on the production of writing material, and controlled its availability and cost, much as oil-producing countries today conspire to control the price per barrel of oil. The Ptolemaic rulers of Egypt, some more rapacious than others, would periodically raise prices or restrict exports. Dr. Vallejo pointed out that by the start of the second century BCE, the Attalid kingdom of Pergamon (in Asia Minor or modern-day Turkey) dealt with the papyrus scarcity by introducing and manufacturing vellum or parchment as an alternative. After Dr. Vallejo’s presentation, as I researched Egypt’s long-lasting monopoly on papyrus, I discovered that the Attalid King Eumenes II (197-159 BCE) had built his own large library in Pergamon. Modelled after the Library of Alexandria, it housed some 200,000 scrolls and became a centre of learning in its own right (hence the need in Pergamon for a steady supply of ‘paper’). The Ptolemies furnished their library with papyrus for free or at a nominal price, thereby guaranteeing that the Library of Alexandria would remain the largest and most sought after by scholars. According to Gustave Glotz, Ptolemy VIII, also known as Euergetes II or Physcon (182 BCE – 116 BCE), grew jealous of the Pergamon library’s high repute, and capriciously prohibited the export of papyrus altogether. He went so far as to destroy papyrus farms to control supply. I have to assume that this was the first instance of interlibrary rivalry.
Papyrus: The Invention of Books in the Ancient World complements a particular trend in scholarship related to book history. This trend reflects a “democratization” or widening of the scope of inquiry, and is associated with a more inclusive approach to studying book production. The aim is to accommodate both a broader range of texts and a larger number of actors (some previously overlooked) involved in producing them. In “Everywhere and Nowhere: The Sociology of Literature After ‘the Sociology of Literature’” (2010), James English explains this newer sociological branch and its intention to shed light on “the hidden or forgotten producers of culture.” Such scholarship addresses what John Sutherland, in “Publishing History: A Hole at the Centre of Literary Sociology” (1988), described as literary sociology’s “scholarly ignorance about book trade and publishing technicalities” (Sutherland quoted in English viii – ix). Yet Papyrus, in its orientation toward new social history and narrative history, goes considerably further. It informs and entertains. It draws on previously overlooked sources, many of them unanticipated. It highlights the socio-economic and technological transformations that altered bookmaking, writing, and readerships. It does all of this in a style (distinctly literary) and manner (nonacademic) that makes this book appealing to any reader interested in cultural history.
The titles of the two parts in Papyrus speak volumes about the extensive mesh of activity surrounding and enabling book production and consumption. No less significant are the contributions women made to the evolution of the book. Papyrus is divided into two parts. Some of the chapters in Part I are titled as follows (note that there are many more that I’m not mentioning): “Voices from the Mist, Uncertain Times,” “A Man with a Prodigious Memory and a Group of Avant-Garde Girls,” “Women, Weavers of Stories,” “The Drama of Laughter: Our Debt to Rubbish Dumps.” Part two of Papyrus has these chapters: “Poor Writers, Rich Readers,” “Public Libraries in Palaces of Water,” “What Is a Classic,” “Shards of Women’s Voices,” “Dare to Remember.” Fittingly, Papyrus ends with “Epilogue: Forgotten Men, Anonymous Women.” I hope readers will purchase Papyrus or borrow a copy from a library to see for themselves that Irene Vallejo is a vibrant weaver of stories, and furthermore, that her genealogy of the book recovers voices, thoughtfully recuperating them from the mists of bygone eras.
* * *
Miriam Toews began by reading from the opening section of her latest novel, Fight Night. The narrator, nine-year-old Swiv, is for all intents and purposes being home-schooled. Swiv is foul-mouthed, quick-witted, and too aware for her age. She stays at home, where she’s being educated by her octogenarian, irreverent Mennonite grandmother, and her smart and acerbic mother, who is pregnant and single. Swiv’s grandmother answers her inquiry about her father’s whereabouts, “Men…They come and they —.”
Men aren’t a big part of the picture in Fight Night. The novel mostly features three women from three generations of the same family. They manage to fend for themselves by dint of their intelligence, quick wit, and unconditional trust in each other. The female protagonists in Fight Night do a great deal of talking, as well as laughing, chaffing other folks and each other. That sort of spirit — found in smart, questioning women who refuse to keep quiet about what they think and feel — is by now a familiar part of Toews’ s fiction. One might say that it’s characteristic of Toews’s oeuvre as whole.
After her reading, Toews told Solie that Fight Night was inspired by actual interactions with members of her family. Her house in Toronto is a multigenerational home she shares with her mother, Elvira, and other members of the family. Fight Night’s protagonists are outspoken and quirky. So is Toews. She confessed, when prodded at the start of the Q&A, that with age, she has become less inhibited, less hesitant about being herself with her children and grandchildren.
Miriam Toews, Canadian writer, Milano, Italy, September 2012. (Photo by Leonardo Cendamo/Getty Images)
The author’s family never abandoned their sense of humour, despite turmoil and tragedy. According to Toews, Mennonites on the whole rely on humour, much as other cultural or ethnic groups do. Their wit tends to be wry, she explained. When asked by Solie, she conceded that she views humour as useful on a deeper level, which is something I understand fully as a Jewish woman with a penchant for self-deprecation. Later, when I read Alexandra Schwarz’s lengthy profile of Toews (published by the The New Yorker in March, 2019), I saw that Toews taps a particular brand of wit; it’s one that combines sly, quick repartee with irreverence. In “A Beloved Canadian Novelist Reckons with Her Mennonite Past: How Miriam Toews left the church and freed her voice,” Schwarz elaborates: “There is a Plautdietsch term [that is, in the Low German spoken by Mennonites], schputting, for irreverence directed at serious or sacred things….Toews is a schputter; she likes to puncture anything that has a whiff of pretension or self-importance about it.”
Karen Solie has a tremendous knack for steering conversations, without constraining them. Her next question delicately touched on religion. It was appropriate, given that Toews hails from a community whose religious practice is fundamentalist. When Toews was growing up, religion informed every dimension of its members’ lives. Consequently, faith enters into each and every one of Toews’s books, albeit often in ways that aren’t positive. With her third novel, A Complicated Kindness (2004), Toews took aim at the Mennonite community she came from, its rigidly patriarchal structure, the hypocrisy of its elders, and the intolerance shown toward anyone considered not deferential enough to its rules. Toews appears to have been writing books in part as a challenge to the entrenched authority she saw affecting every member of her family. In this respect, she has made herself part of a long tradition of book writing and publishing — one that contests institutional power. That she did this as a Mennonite woman from a community that has religiously worked to control, diminish, and silence women, makes her literary achievements that much more remarkable and important. I’ve been told by several women of Mennonite descent that Toews has helped pave the way for their writing, the kind that pulls no punches concerning their own experience of oppression.
During the Q&A, Toews denied being religious herself, but she made an interesting point about Elvira. Her mother has faith. Toews stated that she doesn’t understand how it works for her, but she admires her mother for it. She admitted that she herself is fortified by her mother’s strength, the strength Elvira derives from her personal faith and certain aspects of Mennonite culture.
Elvira takes pride in her heritage. In Schwarz’s profile, Elvira talks about her family’s line of descent, its genealogy. The Mennonites were from Friesland originally, but moved to Russia to avoid persecution, and then escaped being massacred by the Bolsheviks during the Communist Revolution. Elvira’s ancestors lived through many dangerous periods. Reading Schwarz’s profile one week after the Q&A, it occurs to me that the Steinbach community and their “book,” the Dordrecht Confession of Faith, which codified Mennonite beliefs in 1632, also represent stories of survival, the kind that animate Irene Vallejo’s Papyrus.
In Solie’s question there is an underlying reference to the human capacity to keep going, sometimes despite tragedy. Toews depicts this resolve to survive, rebuild lives over and over again in her novel, All My Puny Sorrows. Elvira appears there in the guise of the fictional narrator’s mother, Lottie. In fiction and in real life, Elvira survived her husband’s suicide, her older daughter’s repeated attempts to end her life, her sister’s unexpected death after open-heart surgery (this too appears in All My Puny Sorrows), and, ultimately, her daughter’s passing. In All My Puny Sorrows, Lottie keeps going, with her faith and humour intact. In Fight Club, Swiv’s grandmother does schputting of her own, if we are to trust the version of Elvira that appears there. Writing a pretend letter to her absent father, Swiv says of her grandmother: “She said she misses Grandpa. She said that by the time she gets to heaven he’ll probably have left.”
The illness and death Toews lived through after losing her older sister Marjorie, was crushing. She mentioned this during the Q&A. Yet she also acknowledged that her resolve to send letters to Marjorie was one of the reasons she started writing in the first place. She hoped to bolster her ailing sister. Marjorie Toews, as many Canadian readers know by now, ended her life in 2010, in the same way her father did 12 years earlier. Melvin C. Toews was bipolar. Both Mel and Marjorie spent decades battling depression. Miriam Toews wants to foster a better understanding of mental illness. She dedicated her one book of non-fiction to Mel. Swing Low: A Life is a memoir Toews wrote in her father’s voice.
There were other factors motivating Toews to write, however. In 2010, she read about the serial rape of more than 130 women, some of them mere children, in a Plautdietsch Mennonite community in Bolivia. These rapes occurred over the course of five years. Nine men were eventually arrested, and later received lengthy jail sentences, including the man who supplied the anesthetic gas (used by farmers on large livestock) that knocked out their victims, preventing them from knowing what had happened and who was responsible. The novel, Women Talking, uses findings from the police investigation. Its film adaptation, the intense, impassioned movie made by Sarah Polley, won an Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay on March 12. When the Q&A veered toward the recognition the film and Polley received, Toews said that she was very pleased for Polley. She was also happy that as a consequence of the Oscar these women’s story was getting public attention. As for the writing of Women Talking — a fictionalized account of women who were violated in the worst way, and, afterwards, pressured by the men in their community to not duly punish the perpetrators — that, Toews confessed, nearly killed her.
Women Talking is a novel about actual victims of mass rape. The novel imagines the Bolivian Mennonite women’s predicament, their terror, pain, and fury. Toews said that writing it was extremely hard on her; it caused heart pains. She kept writing because she felt she had to give these women voices, to speak their rage for them. That was something she knew didn’t happen in the real ultraconservative Mennonite colony in Bolivia. Women Talking is a kind of testimony, then, written by an author who has seen enough to know that crimes of this nature could be perpetrated against women in Mennonite communities and later swept under the proverbial rug. Toews mentioned that after completing Women Talking, she craved a project with some levity. That’s how Fight Club with its young and funny protagonist was conceived. It was an antidote of sorts to the exhaustion that came with writing Women Talking.
After the Q&A, someone in the audience asked Toews how she felt about the screen adaptations of her novels. Toews responded by pointing out that Women Talking and All My Puny Sorrows are very different productions, budget-wise, directorially and thematically. She added that she grasps fully that the texts of novels and films shouldn’t be compared, and that she has kept herself open-minded. In fact, she added that she’s often pleasantly surprised by the new meanings the film versions generate.
Several nights after Solie and Toews’s Q&A, I set down to watch All My Puny Sorrows. The film, available on Crave, turned out to be wonderful — intelligently scripted and superbly acted. Toward the end of film, we see Yoli (Alison Pill) and Lottie (Mare Winningham) in the home the now deceased Elf or Elfrieda (Sarah Gadon) shared with her husband. They’re speaking with Nic to try and understand how it happened. He explains that he left Elf alone because she had asked him to go to the library for her. Lottie responds, “Libraries and civilization….She believed Libraries were the bedrock of civilization.”
Later still, after Elf’s funeral, Yoli and Lottie recollect that Jake, Lottie’s husband and Yoli’s and Elf’s father, had tried to start a library in their town. The Mennonite elders objected. “But he persisted,” Lottie recounts, and “completely out of character, refused to back down, insist[ing] that it was important to the community.” Ultimately, he founded the East Village Public Library. “He was so proud,” Yoli remembers. “It makes me want to cry even now just thinking about it.”
References
English, James F. “Everywhere and Nowhere: The Sociology of Literature After ‘the Sociology of Literature.’” New Literary History, vol. 41, no. 2, 2010, pp. v–xxiii, https://doi.org/10.1353/nlh.2010.0005.
Sutherland, John. “Publishing History: A Hole at the Centre of Literary Sociology.” Critical Inquiry, vol. 14, no. 3, 1988, pp. 574–89. https://doi.org/10.1086/448457.
Olga Stein holds a PhD in English, and is a university and college instructor. She has taught writing, communications, modern and contemporary Canadian and American literature. Her research focuses on the sociology of literary prizes. A manuscript of her book, The Scotiabank Giller Prize: How Canadian is now with Wilfrid Laurier University Press. Stein is working on her next book, tentatively titled, Wordly Fiction: Literary Transnationalismin Canada. Before embarking on a PhD, Stein served as the chief editor of the literary review magazine, Books in Canada, and from 2001 to 2008 managed the amazon.com-Books in Canada First Novel Award (now administered by Walrus magazine). Stein herself contributed some 150 reviews, 60 editorials, and numerous author interviews to Books in Canada (the online version is available at http://www.booksincanada.com). A literary editor and academic, Stein has relationships with writers and scholars from diverse communities across Canada, as well as in the US. Stein is interested in World Literature, and authors who address the concerns that are now central to this literary category: the plight of migrants, exiles, and the displaced, and the ‘unbelonging’ of Indigenous peoples and immigrants. More specifically, Stein is interested in literary dissidents, and the voices of dissent, those who challenge the current political, social, and economic status quo. Stein is the editor of the memoir, Playing Under The Gun: An Athlete’s Tale of Survival in 1970s Chile by Hernán E. Humaña.
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On the last day of my final exams in the third grade, I excitedly anticipated joining my father, a courier and a Kulbar (porter). This is someone who takes items across the Iran-Iraq border, thereby putting themselves at great risk. Kulbars have little means of survival other than depending entirely on transporting a variety of items across the borders to support their families.
On holidays, we had nothing to do in the village as we had no electricity with which to watch TV, and no playground or a centre that held activities. I begged my father to let me travel to help him. At first, he said that the journey of more than eight hours was too risky for a child, but he later agreed, and I was overjoyed. For me, it was the beginning of several years of living dangerously. There were several reasons. Scores of people were killed by the Iranian RevolutionaryGuards; people were tortured by Kurdish militias, looted by robbers, or even mauled by wild animals. Couriers also frequently had to endure the harsh weather.
It was 1995, and I was just 11. My family lived in a village called Bardabal, at the foot of Mount Soreen, 65 kilometres east of Sulymanieh or Sulymani province in Iraqi Kurdistan. Bardabal was one of 5000 villages bombed and destroyed in 1978 by the former Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein. He had forced villagers into camps, preventing them from returning to their homes. But in 1991 the Kurds overthrew Hussein’s regime and elected their own independent government, enabling the people, full of hope and expectation, to return to their villages. They expected the Kurdish government to rebuild remnants of the almost destroyed villages. Ultimately their dreams and hopes were realized.
The 1990s became the most challenging decade for the Kurdish population in economically sanctioned Iraq due to civil wars between Kurdish parties, adverse weather conditions that affected agriculture, the spread of diseases and severe poverty. Moreover, the population bore the brunt of the international sanctions imposed on Iraqis. Additionally, the Iraqi regime also imposed internal sanctions on its Kurdish population in the north as a response to their aspiration for freedom and self-governance.
During this period, some of the Kurd leaders formed their militias, looting the nation’s wealth and selling it to Iran. Thus, people had no other option except to work at the borders, jeopardizing their lives just to survive.
Before the 1990s, the courier and Kulbar “business” suffered because of the Iran/Iraq war of 1980 – 1988. After 1991, however, Kurdish residents along the border began to re-engage in a grey economy conducted across villages on different sides of the border (Iranian/Kurdistan also called Rozhalat, which is east of Kurdistan). They transported a variety of items: car parts, contraband goods, and various electronic items such as light bulbs, fridges, heaters and sometimes also alcohol.
My father had two mules, and it was hard for him to manage them along with his other responsibilities, which included farming and building mud/stone houses for the family. He was always so exhausted, which is the first reason I wanted to help him. Another motive was that my courier friends told me about Ameen’s delicious Iranian drink called Nushabe, local for Pepsi. He was nicknamed Ameen Nushabe. Ameen sold beverages and cake. He became the only person I was truly eager to meet. Seeing Ameen was more important than seeing Maradona or Brad Pitt. I wanted to take on this dangerous journey to drink Nushabe for the first time in my life!
Once my father gave me permission, I slept a little and woke up very early, in the quiet of dawn, to pack the necessary things. I had so many high hopes for the outcome of this trip with my father; maybe I would become a hero in my village, or perhaps make vast amounts of money and quit school, or maybe even buy another mule. I just wanted to prove to my father that I was useful and capable of making this journey.
I took some snacks and went out to the area where the men loaded the mules. I yanked the reins of one of them, leading it to the house where father had already made a deal for the mule with a trader. On seeing me the man put both hands on his waist and said, “Did you bring your milk bottle little boy?” When I did not respond he jokingly continued, “Hey baby, didn’t you go to kindergarten today?” By then I was annoyed by his remarks. My father told him that he didn’t think I was old enough for this work, but that he believed in my ability to manage it nevertheless.
After loading the mules, my father handed me a stick, which he usually used to beat off snakes or simply to avoid losing his balance and slipping off the mule on ground that was sloping. This stick was hefty and much bigger and longer than I was. The terrain the mules travelled on caused the sound of their shoes to make a rhythmic clip-clop, clip-clop, clip-clop as their hooves stuck the ground. As we proceeded, I noticed my father kept observing me. For the first hour, I managed the walk very well, but there were three more hours to go. The route we had taken passed through a ridge of grey rocks over which we had to climb.
I recall the weird smell of the horses’ urine and the long dusty path, which made me dizzy. Sand got into my shoes, my clothes became stained with dust and, to make matters worse, black flies bit us incessantly. I was drenched with sweat from head to toe, and as I wasn’t wearing socks, my plastic shoes kept making rude sounds. This made everyone look at me and laugh at my embarrassment.
After a while, we took a short break in total silence, when suddenly my gut started making noises. Someone joked that my stomach rumbling wasn’t coming from my shoes this time. I felt humiliated; my drab, stained clothes and downcast eyes must have added to my depressed look. Still, I didn’t want to give up. I only thought about sipping a fantastic Nushabe.
I ate some snacks and felt much better. We reached the peak of the scenic mountain ranges, where the sound of birds singing, the smell of wet grass, the vibrant, colourful flowers, the remnants of snow in the shaded places and the fabulous blue skies filled me with awe and wonder. For the first time during the trip, I enjoyed the feel, sound, and smell of nature.
We eventually arrived at the terminal, where we had to submit the loads. It was around midday. All brokers, traders, couriers, and Kulbars spoke Kurdish with the same accents, sharing the same culture and soil. But we had become strangers, divided by a border between Iraq and Iran, since 1921. This was the vital issue. We were dispossessed of our land, our values, and our culture.
I was surprised at the large crowds of people trading. Kulbars were working, bargaining, shouting, laughing and eating together. I seemed to be the only one searching for one of my main reasons for being there, to try Nushabe from my icon, Ameen. My father gave me enough money to buy it and pointed me in the direction where I could find it.
Finally, I thought I’d get to try it. But Ameen hadn’t come to the trading centre that day. Luck wasn’t my side. I was furious; I wanted to boast to my friends when I was back in the village. I returned downcast to my father for a lunch of rice with salad, which I could not enjoy at all. I talked to myself. Why didn’t Ameen show up? What would I tell my friends? I wanted to lie and tell my friends that I saw Ameen and had tried his Nushabe, but I worried that someone would tell my friends the truth.
When we returned home I stayed in bed for two days. I was terribly disappointed as well as tired. My dream of drinking Nushabe had been shattered, and my father kept teasing me, saying that I was his recovering champion.
Just days after my first trip, I set out on my second. The travelling this time felt easier. I was prepared for the difficulties, and the trading was successful. Most importantly, I drank Nushabe. My eyes watered after the first sip and I started coughing.
My father said teasingly, “I am happy you enjoyed your Nushabe.”
However, just a few kilometers after we left the trading terminal in Rozhalat, a horrible event occurred. We could hear commotion, and we fled and hid. We heard the Iranian Revolutionary Guards coming. We detoured from the main trail to avoid them. The guards were shooting at mules, horses, and donkeys. My friend, who was detained, later informed me that the guards callously kicked youths, tortured elders, and mercilessly arrested children. They sent a man who had mental issues to bring them clean water from kilometers away. They forced another to sing a song while they laughed at him.
“If you come back again, I will kill you,” a guard told him. The couriers vowed not to return to Rozhalat, but they had no other options.
Day by day, business got worse. The Iranian guards controlled the border. They planted hundreds of mines along the route. For two months the couriers hoped to be able to start again, but the guards closed the border completely. The couriers were desperate.
By spring of 1996, the couriers reinitiated their work, using a new narrow path, which took longer to cross. They had to walk some 10 hours. When I made my first trip on the new route, we walked through a dense forest inside Rozhalat. My father told me we would arrive at a spring — Kani Hafe — to take lunch. I was relieved. Suddenly, four men surrounded us and ordered us not to move. They wore grey clothes and black masks. One of them shouted and shot in the air. He told us to put all our money and possessions on the ground, then ordered us to put both hands behind our backs. The couriers did what he ordered, after which they collected all the money and belongings. They slapped a courier because he had nothing to give. They left as hastily as they came, and we didn’t get to see in which direction they disappeared. My father informed me that they were robbers. During this same period, the Kurdish militias, who belonged to several parties, sometimes forced couriers to pay them for their protection. We did not know whether the robbers were part of the Militias or their opponents.
Land mines were another grave concern. Years earlier, my two older cousins had lost their legs from land mines in the same area. On another trip, a man informed us that an Iranian-Kurdish courier, Aubaid, lost his leg when he stepped on a land mine. In these remote areas, far into the mountain, the chances of people surviving a mine explosion were very low given that there were no vehicles, let alone medicine. Sadly, he died before the volunteers who came to carry him to safety reached the hospital. The borders had been planted with mines during and after the Iraq-Iran war. In the 1980s, Iranian guards replanted them. This became our collective fate, as many more couriers before and later lost legs, and others their lives.
This savagery was not the only problem we had to face. The dangerous possibility of a snowstorm and an avalanche were concerns too, especially during the freezing winters. The air was crisp and dry. There was limited visibility, and there were risks of hypothermia for those who weren’t dressed appropriately. We had to step over the terrain slowly, the snow crunching under our shoes; I put both my hands into my pockets to keep them warm, and I slipped many times. My father would rub my hand, and guide the caravan as he jumped to stay above the snow. He encouraged me to keep going. He seemed to me like a polar bear in the Arctic.
I recall an incident where one of our courier neighbors called Taha, of whom I was very fond, was trapped for several days alone on the edge of q mountain and froze to death. Taha was handsome, calm, and an honest, reliable person. Many other people, after ordeals, recounted their experiences of being snowed in and stuck in the mountains.
Besides this, we were also at risk from wild animals, such as bears, wolves, wild dogs, and snakes. These were common throughout these treacherous mountain ranges. There were risks during each season and many ways to die.
When I started the awful and tedious work of being a courier, I didn’t realize the extent of the risks involved. I worked there from 1995 to 2003, until the Americans invaded Iraq. People had hoped the Americans would change their lives so that they no longer needed to take the risks associated with being couriers. After a few years, our border work stopped altogether; the Kurdish government vowed to provide other jobs. During this period, I quit the job. Then I left my village, and finally my country to study in India.
The memories of these events traumatized me. I’ve had nightmares for years. I used to imagine Kurdish militias detaining my father and torturing him. I also envisaged the Iranian guards placing their guns against my forehead, or having robbers steal our belongings. I’ve had visions of bears attacking me. My thoughts, feelings, memories, imagination and dreams were never those of an average child.
I now live thousands of miles away from the country where I was born. I still hear the same sad stories about border crossings, and I am filled with immense sadness. Recently, I heard, yet again, about the death of a group of couriers and Kulbers who were shot by Iranian guards. I wonder whether I’d known them. These stories still haunt and affect me profoundly as I too have experienced similar horrific conditions. I always tell myself that I was fortunate to have survived.
Diary Marif is an Iraqi Kurdish journalist and non-fiction writer based in Vancouver, Canada.
Diary earned a Master’s degree in History from Pune University, India in 2013. He is an author at New Canadian Media. He wrote in Kurdish for several years His writing has appeared in the Awene weekly, Livin, and on KNNC TV, where he contributes as a documentary researcher. He moved to Vancouver in 2017, where he has been focusing on nonfiction writing. He shared his stories with several writers’ groups and wrote the draft of his first nonfiction/memoir. He can be found on Twitter and Facebook.
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