![]() When I was a kid, I felt guilty whenever my grandfather would talk to me about God and His miracles, because I didn’t believe in Him, and didn’t think that miracles were written in the dictionary of the remotely plausible. In my case, I’ve found that everything rests in the tumbling of dice or the dancing of tops. I still feel guilty when he tells me that the Lord is watching him, unseen but always present, and thanks Heaven that he has so much faith, because if he didn’t, he’d be trapped in a cage of his own design, brutalized by doubt and chilly facts. In other words, he’d be like me. I sometimes envy the miracles he holds dear because he never lets them slip through the cracks in his fists. Every day is a miracle, he declares, even the day you die, because nature is a miracle, too, and so is the soul. In response, I think of the nothingness I expect to experience when I have my final breath, and the lack of anything that could be considered a miracle. But he expects one anyway. And even if the otherworldly miracle of Heaven turns out not to exist, he can at least count the many he’s already had for himself, and that would be a miracle in itself. My grandmother’s recovery from cancer was a miracle, he says, and those tears, those agonies wrote him a tome of memories that recount more miracles than he has seen in all the years he has witnessed the days turn, the seas wax and ebb, the leaves of the Earth fall and swell and fall again. But I saw my grandmother’s recovery as effective chemotherapy for corrupted tissue and the skill of surgeons unable to tell a miracle from an unexpectedly good prognosis. But those doctors were miracles, too, he says, because they let him keep the miracle he could not live or love without. He says his age is a miracle, that he should have died long ago, yet he has lived to see me grow, and that has been the only miracle he could have ever asked for. Maybe he will live to see a miracle in a decade, he says, when my college degree hangs from an office wall, when my own children scamper through my house, when I discover and foster other miracles of my very own. Maybe with advances in medicine it will happen, I tell him. He says it would be a miracle if it did. I often wonder if he fashions these miracles with his own liver-spotted hands, or if he simply finds miracles buried beneath his feet, in piles of neglected dreams, and unearths them and repaints them and places them on his bedside shelf, where they can live forever, because miracles cannot expire like people can. When he dies, I imagine he’ll compliment the flower bouquets arranged around his resting bed and say it is a miracle that they bloomed just for him. And maybe, by then, I’ll be able to say it was a miracle that he was with me long enough to tell me all of these things, even if it was by chance that the sun rose and set a certain way, on a single day, however many years ago, and breathed us into life. ![]() Andrew Jason Jacono is a proud Manhattan native who has been writing ever since he could hold a pen. His work has previously appeared or is forthcoming in Cleaver Magazine, Maudlin House, Riggwelter, Gone Lawn, and Thin Air Magazine, among others. If you'd like to learn more about him, you can visit his website: www.andrewjacono.com.
0 Comments
![]() Spring means warbler migration. I change out the marimba CD in my car for an auditory field guide. I memorize the intro track, the narrator’s perky voice that I can’t believe belongs to a real man. I attend lectures about bicycle Big Years and song variation of veery across Appalachia. I read the Peterjohn guide to Ohio breeding birds and dog-ear pages for rare warblers. Birdsongs are like languages. They identify. They project. They entice. Birds use song to draw the borders of their territory, to warn of predators, to boast about their fitness to prospective mates. Birdsong adapts. Near highways, chickadees adapt their voices to sing above the noise. Some birds are given unique names by their parents. They sing their names to prospective mates and build whole family lines based on these names. Song defines species, and many good birders know the key to identification isn’t field marks and habitats, but song. In some species, the song is innate. For others song is learned, practiced, copied. In the catacombs of YouTube, I find hours of birdsong, recorded so that captive birds can learn to sing. And of course, there are the infamous mimics—thrashers and mockingbirds—which learn the songs of other birds and sometimes deceive even the most experienced of birders. Like a mockingbird, I spend hours listening and then trying to mimic the calls of warblers and owls. I learn through imitation. The simpler songs are often easiest to pair with mnemonics. Cardinals say “cheer, cheer” and goldfinches frantically repeat their “potato-chip” wherever they fly. Other calls are easy to learn because they are so spectacular. The bobolink has this kind of song. Bobolink song is complex and meandering, hard to process, but spring mornings and all summer long, bobs call out their unique name above the prairie as they have done for hundreds of years. Every community of bobolinks looks the same. The males are black with vanilla caps and white shoulders. Females and young birds are chestnut and brown, sparrow-like, with light eye lines and honeyed chests. Females are attracted by color and flight, but mostly by song. Male Bobs learn their songs from their community. This means that, although apparently the same, each population of bobs sings a slightly different version of the same song. Other birds display this behavior. Certain populations of veery favor one song type over another. But veery song is simple, usually only four notes, and the differences in rhythm and pattern are obvious once I know to listen for them. I begin to refer to some birds by their calls instead of their names. Carolina wren becomes tea-kettler. White-throated sparrow is poor-Sam-Peabody. I listen to recordings of bobolinks and compare them to my local flock. I like to imagine I could pick out one of my birds in their winter territory just by the unique cadence of his song. And that maybe they can recognize me, too. Christina Stump is a recent graduate of Bowling Green State University’s MFA program. She writes about nature and place-making, especially through the lens of speculative fiction and creative nonfiction. When not writing, Christina can be found in Ohio’s wetlands and forests, looking (and listening) for her nemesis: the Swainson’s Warbler.
This is the woods in April: It is cold, the kind of morning when the world is coated with a layer of frost and trees clench fistfuls of fresh buds against white-washed stems. Cold perseveres. Our carolina wren sings from the emaciated branches of the flowering dogwood. It is a weekday, and morning besides, so I am the only human in the woods. Before: Ohio was forest and wetlands and prairie. Bison shaped the land like elephants built the savannah. There were horses here, once. Not the wild horses we know now, but American horses. There were mastodons, cave lions, giant sloths, short-faced bears. All hunted or undone by time. Now: Ohio is defanged. The wolves and bears that come here are newspaper headlines and campfire stories, only half believed. The swamps, and the cranes that nested there, are reduced to hunting preserves and sewage treatment plants. A pair of sandhill cranes dance in the shadows of an oil refinery built for a pipeline that stretches like an ugly brown snake around the girth of the world. In the woods, I pretend that a human is just another animal, I pretend we have not built cities, launched spaceships, sparked wars. I pretend Earth recognizes me, accepts me. I am not a stranger here, I tell myself. But these trails are only decades, not centuries, old. This woods is curated, a living diorama. I am just a few miles from my car, from warmth and shelter and safety. Yet I say I belong here. I say I could live out here forever. I can’t even start a fire without help. I can only identify three edible plants: raspberry, strawberry, jewel-weed. Trees are yet unnamed to me, just clustered of tessellated fall leaves on the trail ahead of me. I do not live here. I am a visitor only. The woods knows this. Does not surrender its secrets. In an hour or two, I will regress, return to the car, drive thirty miles through darkness to a house built on the bones of conquerors and conquered. This town is the remnant of a fort. A reminder that a war was fought and lost and forgotten here. And before that: a town by a river. And before that there was only the river. And before that? Christina Stump is a recent graduate of Bowling Green State University’s MFA program. She writes about nature and place-making, especially through the lens of speculative fiction and creative nonfiction. When not writing, Christina can be found in Ohio’s wetlands and forests, looking (and listening) for her nemesis: the Swainson’s Warbler.
Christina Stump is a recent graduate of Bowling Green State University’s MFA program. She writes about nature and place-making, especially through the lens of speculative fiction and creative nonfiction. When not writing, Christina can be found in Ohio’s wetlands and forests, looking (and listening) for her nemesis: the Swainson’s Warbler.
Lithopedion: a rare medical phenomenon in which a dead fetus calcifies in the womb of the mother. ![]() First I try baking. It doesn’t matter. The baking cannot save me. I bake cookies moist and delicious. I bake cookies dry and flat. I bake cookies until I sweat and ache, dusted in flour, sticky with sugar. But the panic, still there, gnaws at me. I shove a whole cookie into my mouth. I chew hard and swallow. Another cookie follows fast. Another. I chew the warm, sugary cookies and gulp them down in large, painful boluses. I swallow and am shoving more into my mouth. I am out of control. I repeat until my belly is distended and painful, but the distraction of eating does not numb me out. I lock the bathroom door behind me even though there is no one at the house. I kneel before the toilet in my bulimic rush. My right hand forces its way deep into my throat. My teeth press against my gritty, sugary hands, cutting the first and third knuckles, classic Reye’s syndrome. I heave and brown stinking slop comes up and splatters into the toilet. Gasping, I force the hand down again, and I cut the same knuckles, the sting stronger the second time. Overcome with disgust, I no longer need my hand to purge. I heave again and again until I am empty. I am breathless. The brown vomit stares up at me from the toilet, but everything is gone with the flush. My empty belly relaxes and a certain relief, a numbness washes over me, and I become a fraction removed from my panic. A bit hardened. Dear God, I pray, make me a stone. I remember teaching my eighth grade English class the word lithopedion. “Lith,” I had explained, “is a root meaning stone. P-e-d means child. In Latin, it literally means ‘stone baby.’ It happens when a late term miscarriage occurs, and because the fetus is too big to be expelled by the mother’s body, the body works to calcify it, so that the mother is protected from the dead fetus.” But now I am stuck, I am the word, and cannot be any other word. They found you, my twin, my one same, lying naked on the bed with a plastic bag over your head. A one-page suicide letter, hastily scrawled, lay on the floor. Empty pill bottles and a half-bottle of wine on the nightstand. I thought of us inside our mother’s pregnant womb. We were an egg split: cells divided into two embryos which implanted and nestled in the uterine lining. Mother’s body created the lavish placenta we shared; networks of arteries and veins formed and connected us, the rich whoosh-whooshing blood singing its lullaby. There is no mother here as my legs grow cold on these hard bathroom tiles. In your absence, I will seek out addiction, bulimia, alcohol, and anything that will keep me numb, dead, in my safe cocoon. ![]() Natalie Coufal is a nonfiction and fiction writer from rural Central Texas. She won the Charles Gordone Nonfiction Award at Texas A&M in 2018 and the Paul Ruffin Award at Sam Houston in 2019. She is currently seeking her MFA in Creative Writing, Editing, and Publishing at Sam Houston State University in Huntsville, Texas. |
FLASH GLASS: A MONTHLY PUBLICATION OF FLASH FICTION, PROSE POETRY, & MICRO ESSAYS
Categories
All
COVER IMAGe:"Ice Crystals"
|
Glassworks is a publication of Rowan University's Master of Arts in Writing 260 Victoria Street • Glassboro, New Jersey 08028 [email protected] |
All Content on this Site (c) 2024 Glassworks
|