And, worse, so many of them were interesting, thoughtful, one-of-a-kind.  So how did we choose which ones to publish? We were, in our pre-retirement life, a professor. Every professor knows that there’s really only one bad week in teaching—the week when you’re grading final papers or exams. That’s the week when the professorial media feeds are full of the kinds of bad jokes that only dads and academics make, like: when you throw all the bluebooks down the stairs, do the best grades go to the ones nearest the top or the bottom?   

Given the number of submissions, the stairway method was tempting; but, we live in an apartment and did not relish being caught in the public stairwell with Short Takes scattered from the 30th floor to the 29th.

We eventually settled on a fairer method. First, we put to one side any that had been sent to the wrong email address or failed to include the writer’s address or a headshot or bio. Next, we noted that a number of entries weren’t about legacies, and those too we put aside, even the reflections on death. As a topic, it is very close, even overlapping, but not quite the same. Finally, we grouped the essays that told similar stories, and chose just one of each. This still left a host of fine entries, which we read and re-read, until we had identified a few, a selected few, that had something special that set them apart.

We are confident you will find that special spark in each Short Take we are publishing in this issue. And we regret every entry that we could not include, because there is a spark in each of them as well.

Perhaps that is the legacy that each generation of editors hands down to the next—the experience of hard choices, of mistakes even, of regrets, but all of it in the service of creating something to be read and treasured and enjoyed.

Portrait of the Artist as Alice in Won Da Land, partially glazed stoneware, by Alice Sherman Simpson.

CAI EMMONS…with Flowers/Grasses

for Cai Emmons (1951-2023)
 
 
While we on earth are emailing
a writer who hovers
between life and death
whose words we’re still digesting
and which exhort us onwards,
give us a sign
from the brink of another side –
 
and another when you arrive.
A friendly beetle, for example,
that shows up in a garden unexpected
after having explored
your buried self,
ready to dictate (in absentia)
your next blog.
 
Let us know what it’s really like
from the inside out,
when you’re ready for your next birth,
and, Cai,
tell us why
we are still living this one
and what’s the best use for it.

After school, we sisters play hide-go-seek, quietly, with inside voices. The standup bar in the rec room has two stools that twirl, where you can sit and stare into mirror tiles veined with gold and kick your feet against the base of the bar made of white vinyl tufted with brass buttons. Behind, it’s unfinished plywood. Crouching, I can fit between the wooden braces. I run my fingers along the wood, and, at the seam, a piece lifts. A secret door. Something white glows in the space. I pick it out of cobwebs, recognize the plastic toy bone, and put it in my mouth. Where is Pebbles Flintstone, my favorite baby doll? Where’d she go?

My mother drives an hour to tell her mother how well she knows her children. I am the one who whines with thirst. As we speed down the highway, I unscrew the Barbie thermos and tip milk into the pink cup. I swallow fast, in surprise. The milk is so warm it coats my tongue, as if I’ve licked a seeding dandelion. I’d better not spill milk in her car. I’m the clumsy one.

In kindergarten, you keep your head down and quietly prick holes in a white page, following an outline of the alphabet. Don’t prick your finger with the darning needle. If you cry the teacher will carry a portable wooden screen out from the cloakroom and put it around your desk. A pink curtained screen for crying girls, a blue one for crying boys. Stare at her fat blue-veined legs until she says, Heads Down, pray for her dear departed husband. Shiver in grade three when you hear she’s been fired for going home and leaving a little boy locked in the cloak closet.

After every birth, the same nightmare. I’m in a school’s deserted hallway, rows of metal lockers on both sides. I peer in the small square window of a locked door, looking for a baby. A baby I set down and lost. I have forgotten which classroom I left the baby in. Through this window I see short counters, each with a sink, a Bunsen burner, and two bar stools. On the wall, posters of internal organs and a chalkboard covered in formulations. A shelf with jars of white pig fetuses in formaldehyde. No lost baby in the science room. I run to the next door.
 

Portrait of the Artist as Marie Antoinette, partially glazed stoneware, by Alice Sherman Simpson.

“Tell me what it means, Vati,” I would ask my clever young father when I was nine, ten, thirteen, twenty; and he would carefully explicate the word jumbles that were my early poems—like sorting buttons from the button jar, making something lost and unconnected into an ordered whole. And while I didn’t do quite the same for him, he did share some of his own poems over the years, mostly written in his native German. I would sit with a dictionary and a thesaurus and try to translate his work into English. I’ve recently come across some of these early attempts and none of them are very good. To be a really good translator you need to get inside the head of the original poet, and I was simply too inexperienced to do his words justice.

Then I began collecting experience and stopped writing. Mostly. Except for the few blips when I sorted button words and sewed them into a pattern to fit the holes that could pull the fabric of my life into a snug meaning. My Vati, my father, stopped writing too. Mostly. And it seemed that we both gave up on the shared dream of sharing our thoughts with the world.

Gradually he began to change. He was no longer interested in the shiny buttons of other people or other places but fingered the same well-worn objects over and over. We could  talk about the weather, football, his home improvement projects, his views on politics. I mourned the loss of my clever young father. Deeply.

Then he developed cancer as I developed a new desire to write.

I did not write about death, but I did write several poems about transformation and the spirit. I thought they might sound good in German. I thought I could translate them. I thought I would need help with the translations. I thought I should ask Vati, my clever father, for help with the translations. I asked him to look at what I had done, highlighting the areas I was having trouble with. He was delighted to help. For a few weeks I had my clever young father back. He polished my rough patches into things of beauty—although this time I knew what I wanted to say and let my English and poor German lead the way for his interpretation.

One of the English poems was accepted for publication. I asked the editor if she would be interested in publishing the German translation with it. She said yes. I immediately called Vati, my clever father, and told him that we were going to be published together. He told me he would pass along his collected writings when I came to visit in a couple weeks. The button jar never looked so good.

He died three days later.

But it doesn’t end there. One year later I published the English translation of a short poem Vati, my clever father, wrote in 1983, alongside his original German poem. More translations are in the works.

She was named Melanie but seemed much braver. Her boyfriend was known as talented, but a drunk. The courtyard smelled bridal, but beyond it the street blared and tires squealed. Kids played beneath the two mock orange trees, the ground half dust, half scalp and frizzle. Melanie would walk into the desert for solace, but not very far. She had to hear traffic to keep her bearings. Melanie was absolutely right about something: everything is about everything else but you can only take one breath at a time, one red ocotillo bloom, one cry from beneath the mock orange, one small brown hand clutching a pebble “See, Mama?” See?
 

For a while after you died I couldn’t listen to music at all. The sounds didn’t make sense. Once so formal, so structured, they slopped over me in scalding currents. As though I were adrift in a lava field, or had fallen into a pan of soup.

It’s still like that when I listen to your music. Most of the random things that play on the radio are fine; the lava soup has cooled into a set of stable shapes, rocks I can rest my back on. Rocks like the ones we used to climb together, making our slow way up into the sky, the domain of birds.

Before you killed yourself, we’d sometimes sit in the studio in the evening, and you’d play me what you’d made that day, fine tuning, polishing. We’d throw wide the French windows and let the notes drift out and mingle with the birdsong as the sky darkened. The rugosas that waved their thorny fingers in the air would give out a sweet scent at twilight. They’ve finished blooming now. Even the rosebay willowherb has died back, those pretty widow’s weeds you left me with.

When someone dies, people expect you to be sad. They utter useless platitudes. They don’t understand the bitter rage you feel, the sense of abandonment, the urge to rebel against everything they want you to be.

It’ll be winter soon. Cold storage. I’m looking forward to that: all these overheated emotions wrapped in clingfilm and stacked neatly in freezer drawers, each labelled with their use-by dates, so I can remember to take them out and thaw them, use them up before they turn rancid. Loneliness. Frustration. Anger. Guilt.

One day the archaeologists of some future age will dig you up and wonder why I buried you with that rope around your neck. The anchoring rope from your rucksack. The one you used. In the end, you loved that rope more than you loved your work, more than you loved the world. More than you loved me. So I slipped it back over your head before they nailed down your coffin lid, so that you’d have a companion.  Something you kept to tether you to life, even though, in the end, it ushered you out of it. If the fibers survive along with your bones, those archaeologists will think they’ve found a human sacrifice.  And they’ll be right.

Unless the sacrifice is supposed to be me.

It’s nighttime now. The pink moon is slipping down the summer sky and it will soon be dawn. Tomorrow I’ll put on my best black dress and wear a hat—with a sprig of the last of the willowherb in the brim—and I’ll attend your memorial service. They’ll talk about your artistic legacy. They’ll hymn your achievements in the church where we married.  They’ll sing your praises and they’ll smother me in their civilized sympathy. And then, God help me, they’ll play your music.
 

Portrait of the Artist as the Contralto, stoneware with original milk paint, by Alice Sherman Simpson.

My mother hid Harlequin romance novels in the linen closet under the towels. My two older sisters and I called the books mush. A typical exchange: (sidling up to mom in the kitchen) “Got any mush?” “Linen closet,” she’d say. Or “basement,” or anywhere she’d secretly deposited the contraband. It was my first experience reading banned books. It was my father, whose owl-like glasses glinted in any light, who banned those  books. Proudly, he read Solzhenitsyn and commanded us to do the same. We did not. We were solidly in league with our mother, who pretended to read Readers Digest Condensed Books but did not. They gathered dust while my Mom bought romance novels by the box at garage sales or borrowed shitloads from her nurse co-workers. The novels were hidden but literally everywhere, and we feasted on them like  vampires after blood.

As brawny, heavy-breathing men clasped slender, always confused, women to their manly chests, the hours flew by. Sometimes all four of us sat reading in the living room or on the deck in the summer drinking iced tea. The origins of the books may have been a secret but we were not covert about the act of devouring them. Heterosexual love drenched our house, drenched me, but I knew in my heart of hearts I wanted the girls.

I was fifteen when I found a queer romance novel in my aunt’s attic during a thunderstorm in Wisconsin. The two characters, Betty and Jane, were flight attendants who got on and off planes and each other. It was revelatory. Murmur of women’s voices in the kitchen below, thunder outside, and I’m reading and reading, crouched in the half-dark as the foundations of my life shake. Betty and Jane were women and they were in love. There was no man in the picture. There would never be a man in the picture. The apartment they shared was a lust lab. They were very experimental. They desired each other. There was an amazing amount of kissing. The book excited me, terrified me. When my mom and I left my aunt’s house later that night, I was changed.

The first time I kissed a woman, she covered my face with soft, butterfly kisses—so unlike the probing, tongue in my mouth kisses of the man before her. I thought, “This is what I am.”
 

As daunting as the five-plus-hour winter drive from Naperville to Des Moines seemed, Naina made the trip. Her aunt had about six weeks to live, the doctor’s verdict.

That last day in Aunt’s bedroom, when Naina bent to kiss her goodbye, Aunt pressed a burgundy velvet box into her hand. The family heirloom, her maternal grandmother’s diamond necklace, which Aunt wanted to pass down to her, not to any of Naina’s sisters. Naina knew Aunt was fond of her—but this, she didn’t expect.

Then Aunt said, “Don’t tell anyone I gave it to you.”

Mausi, you too?

Her aunt hadn’t been like her nuclear family members, who were loving to Naina only in private interactions. In family gatherings, what Naina said never mattered. With put-down comments, they labeled her trials as complaints, mocked her triumphs as cockiness. As though it were a collective decision to be dismissive of her, to treat her as less than. She couldn’t understand why. But she disagreed with her friend’s notion that perhaps they envied her independence, her career success. How could they? They were her blood.

“She’s saying something in her squeaky little voice,” her mother had said, laughing, when Naina made a remark about a character in a movie their family watched on television. Her siblings laughed. Naina was seven then.

What she said didn’t matter. Even now.

No one disliked her, she could tell. Yet they liked her only when others weren’t present. One-on-one affection. One-on-one conversations. One-on-one appreciation.

And their one-upmanship game she was tired of had already distanced her from most of them. Although there were no severed connections, she felt estranged from her family.

She now held the box her aunt had handed her, the velvety softness prickling in her palm.

Like her mother’s words from a few years ago. “Why would you need diamond ear studs?” Why would you say that, Ma, she hadn’t asked. Was it because she was a divorcée?

But that was about her mother’s ear studs. Not her grandmother’s necklace. Yet. When could she wear the necklace? When she was unseen? Unheard?

Jewelry wasn’t her thing, thank goodness.

What she treasured most were memories of her father. His words, his wisdom. “Let go. Be the bigger person,” he’d said to her. Always being the grownup wasn’t easy. It drained her at times.

She lacked her father’s patience, his ways of resolving life’s challenges. But willpower was a trait she inherited from him. And that kept her going. Determined. Strong.

A thick layer of snow covered the ground when Naina drove back north on I-80. Buried somewhere beneath the whiteness were dark memories, deep hurts. And the image of the shining diamond necklace in the burgundy velvet box she left behind on her aunt’s nightstand.
 

Portrait of the Artist as Carmen Miranda, stoneware and mixed medium, by Alice Sherman Simpson.

I grew up in a Southern, mostly African American community. I don’t like eating or drinking when I’m walking down the street. And yes, I admonished my sons’ high-school friends for wearing caps inside our house, and I don’t allow said male children to sit around the meal table wearing “beaters,”—or being shirtless. Where my family’s notions of propriety came from is a mystery to me. All I know is that some people in this world were raised with no home training, while mine was so ingrained that I don’t go out to pick up the morning newspaper from my own front yard unless I am fully dressed and my night-time head scarf is folded and put away.

I don’t consciously think of these things anymore, though the maxims sort of creep up on me. Like when I saw an older Black woman walking along my Northern suburban street wearing what I grew up calling a housecoat. I thought, “Mama Ida would never have walked out in the street in her house-clothes!” There was nothing at all improper or indecent about the flowered cotton dress with front snaps; it was probably cool and comfortable. She walked very deliberately along the sidewalk, as if it was something to be conquered. I somehow got the vibe that she was a woman from another country and culture. Maybe the house dress was her attempt to impose the feeling of home on this foreign American place.

She reminded me too of my Grandma Lillian, who wore a clean apron and a hairnet in her New Orleans house every day. No matter what time we arrived, Grandma was rocking those accessories. When I was a girl, it was fun to double tie a grownup’s apron around myself to help cook. By the time I grew up, few women wore aprons anymore, but I did. Wearing one seemed to give some kind of gravitas to the preparing of food, elevating the never-ending task of providing sustenance for the family to a sort of art.

But now my aprons hang shapeless and lonesome on the back of my kitchen door. I wonder how my grandmother would react to seeing my flour-spattered jeans and roughly tied-back locks when I’m in the middle of holiday baking? I can hear her clucking from beyond, shaking her head.

I haven’t tossed away all my home training, though. I’m well past sixty, and I still get the strongest urge to offer my seat on a train or bus to a “women of a certain age.” It’s a reflex. Then comes the shocking thought: who’s actually the Elder—her, or me?
 

An obelisk of modest monument protocol, mottled ochre planes and roughened point, resides in a patch of grass and purple blossoms. Inconspicuous according to my monumental sense, dull angles point toward the sky. How high need an edifice be to shout of glory? Without inscription, what remembrance?

A frog resting below sees a tower too tall to fathom and gasps in astonishment. I could rest my chin on the abraded peak, look down and say to the frog, “Glory is relative, my friend; I know less than you do.”
 

When Richard died suddenly 17 years ago, he failed to take with him the thousands of items he’d collected. These cherished items included, but were not limited to, 500 boxes of wooden Q-tips he’d saved from obscurity by cleaning out eBay, parts to five or six out-of-production Panasonic coffee makers that ground beans and woke us each morning to the aroma of freshly brewed Joe, a houseful of mid-century furnishings, and countless pieces of tribal art and ancient textiles from all over the world. He left them all to me.

I moved this treasure trove from his three-story house into my two-bedroom condominium, and for all these years I have lived surrounded by his legacy. My closets are stuffed with it. My walls are covered with it. My ears are cleaned with it. It has kept him close to me as I traveled to many of the places the tribal art came from to understand its context.

Recently, as I noticed the supply of Q-tips dwindling and my age increasing, I started thinking about what to do with all this. My daughter doesn’t want it. His daughters don’t want it. Museums want some of it, but I have no information about its provenance. Many of the dealers who sold him objects during surreptitious middle of the night visits have moved on. Others want to take things on consignment, but I fear things will disappear when either they or I die. Auction houses are another option but again, provenance is an issue. Am I just looking for excuses not to part with him?

A few weeks ago, a dealer I know and like suggested taking a number of pieces of African and Pre-Colombian art to show and sell at an open house for tribal art dealers and buyers at his home. I thought I was ready to do this, so he came by to select and pack up the pieces he thought might be good to show. The next Sunday, I attended the event and had a panic attack. The house was so packed with people (relics, themselves) and with art and jewelry and textiles across tables, on walls, in drawers, atop bureaus and bookcases, that I feared I would lose track of what I’d brought. So, the next day I went back and retrieved everything. I put it all back on the walls, in the closets and on the bookcases at my condo. I could breathe again.

Then, someone I knew from years before and had spoken with at the open house called me and offered to come by and look through Richard’s collection with me; specifically, precious items I kept in boxes hidden away. Things he knew well. He had sold them to Richard. We spent hours reminiscing and touching pieces and honoring the love Richard had for these things. This kind man then purchased them back from me, leaving me feeling Richard’s legacy was in the good hands of someone who cared.

A Year Without Men

Stories of Experience and Imagination.

by I.D. Kapur

It’s 2054 A.D., and the world needs a rest from men. Women have developed a novel solution, and the men can’t wait to leave. When my taxi driver tells me he has bullet wounds from the Russian police, speaks five languages, and is teaching at Harvard, I start taking notes. After the funeral, a widow loses all her married friends. Then karma sends flowers. “Indra Kapur writes with clear insight and an acute sense of humor. The stories in A Year Without Men are varied, clever, and often delightfully surprising! Cue me rubbing my hands together with glee.” — Katherine Longshore, author of the Gilt series. “The stories in A Year Without Men create a powerful sense of place with rich sensory and emotional detail. Characters are appealing in their humor and the compassion they inspire. I want to meet these people and be there with them! Some endings surprise us, and others give us a satisfying sense of the inevitable playing out. The stories have a depth of reality that makes them unforgettable.” — Ann Saxton Reh, author of the David Markam Mysteries “Mickee Voodoo is a very entertaining parody of a “hardboiled” detective story in the mode of Chandler, Hammett, and, more recently, Robert B. Parker…witty banter ensues with the detective cracking wise in a colorful idiom both in dialogue and narrative…delights in wordplay…very clever, and is quite funny…Kapur is a talented and skillful fiction writer.” — John DeChancie, author of The Skyway Trilogy and The Castle Perilous series. Available from Amazon or on order from your independent bookstore.

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