fiction

Holy Nightsky.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 10 Comments

10 degrees on a starry night, my daughter phones me while I’m cramming more wood in the stove. She’s on a dark-soaked back road, the northern lights resplendent, and urges me to go in search. Up Bridgeman Hill, she tells me, with the ridgeline view.

So, bundled in coat and hat, I drive through the little village and up the hill where the town lights cannot touch. In my headlights, wind scatters snow gathered from the wide hayfields, winter dormant. I pull over at the hill’s crest where two farms join. I get out of my car and walk down the road. The limitless sky gleams ruby and emerald, an immense shaft of white light luminescent. In the east, the black spreads profoundly, the stars so radiant I imagine I could reach out and grasp these gems.

John Donne wrote that illness is a “holy room.” My oncologist taught me that we are all the ailing; if not now, to come. Mortality’s cut makes zero discrimination. A cancer diagnosis gained me admission to inner chambers. Unwanted—let me reiterate again, I did not request admission. But I hung up my coat in the anteroom and set my hiking boots against the wall, and I walked barefoot and thirsty into the nexus, me and that fiercely multiplying lymphoma. The lymphoma and me — one of us was not going to survive this go-round.

In the night’s darkness, the rushing wind tore at my cheeks and hurled ice in my eyes. In the distance, a cow barn glowed with light, a scatter of houses in the valley. Around me, that immense and mysterious beauty over small human beings, at whatever mundane chore or decency or devilment we conjure, be it the evening milking or washing supper dishes or plotting a wrong against another.

The sharp-clawed cold shoves me back towards my car, back towards the village and my hot woodstove, my little house in the great holy room of this planet, this universe, this precise moment.

“It seemed like I was doing something ludicrous, trying to build a permanent work of literature out of broken little whimpering bits about the most ephemeral experiences when I was still mostly broken and half-ephemeral myself.”
― Anne Boyer

Call It Madness

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 26 Comments

My newest novel’s advance copies arrived in a great big box at the post office that I hefted on my shoulder. The postmistress said, “You wrote another book? How cool is that.” Indeed. Then she wondered if I could carry out this box that she described as nearly large as myself. I laid the box on the passenger seat and then walked across the street to the co-op where I bought an orange and peeled it and ate the sweet sticky fruit in a drippy wet snow.

Call It Madness? A novel about a young woman who realizes her mother had spun lies all her life—a grandfather who hadn’t died, a beloved house that hadn’t sold, only tumbled apart with rot and rodents. How does she get out of the madness-making of family and salvage some shreds of happiness?

June 30 the book will be released from Regal House Publishing. You can find it at my beloved local bookstore, the Galaxy Bookshop, or from the big A here.

Here’s the opening page….

White Quartz

2016

I didn’t know what made my parents drive from Bellingham to faraway Vermont the summer I turned four. I had never met my great-grand-father Opa until that afternoon my mother rolled our station wagon down Breadseed Lane. Earlier that day, a stranger had helped my parents change a flat tire on the New York turnpike, but the spare was a misfit. For hours, our car had been thumping while I stared through the backseat windows at the trees and fields passing by, pondering the puzzle of that strange word breadseed. Could seeds blossom into loaves?

We hadn’t stopped for lunch, and I was hungry. Was this Opa character cooking us dinner? Turned out, he was not.

In a rain that was just beginning to let up, the old man stooped in his yard beneath an enormous pine tree, fists curled behind his suspender buckles. I was not quite yet four, remember, and I knew suspenders only from picture books. In a strange coincidence, I had asked my mother for a pair the last Christmas. She had laughed and said suspenders only existed in fairy tales about grandfathers who were woodcutters and chased away starving wolves.

I loved that trip so much that the next summer I begged to return to Opa and his house that smelled of sugary rotting apples. I whined, Please, Mama, please. Which apartment we lived in then I’ve long forgot-ten, but in my memory, I’m sitting on the floor. At the end of the galley kitchen, a glass door streams in cloudy light. I’m watching the hem of my mother’s skirt graze her bare knees. The polyester skirt is one she wore for years, zigzag black lines over white. The hem has opened and hangs down, its frayed edge unraveling into threads. She’s smoking, the cigarette held impatiently in her teeth, and ashes drift down in the murky light. That morning, my mother tells me that Opa died soon after we left. The house was sold.

Making Effort

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 15 Comments

Under the waxing full moon, January’s hungry Wolf Moon, I hurry along in the few degrees above zero. I’ve forgotten my scarf, so when I turn and lean into the wind, I cover my cheeks and lips with my mittens and breathe in the scent of wool. It’s too cold for wetness, yet my mittens are redolent with sheep.

The wide sky and the fierce cold winnow me to shivering bones. Nonetheless, I walk further than I’d planned, thinking through a piece of writing, and then, so cold, words abandon me for images, then those, too, vanish, and it’s me in my boots and that good down jacket and the mittens just beneath my fluttering eyelashes, and intermittent pickups passing, their drivers lifting their hands silently.

My life flickers as a candle flame in my curved ribs. What great fortune to be walking along the earth’s curve as the planet bends into twilight, the ancient moon electrifying the new snow. By the time I return to the village, it’s not long after five and the darkness has settled in for the long go of the night. Nonetheless, it seems to me these wintry days are gradually lengthening. I mail a letter at the post office and then talk with an acquaintance for a few minutes in the co-op, a waxed bag of curry power in one mitten, an onion in the other. At the last moment, I remember to buy milk for the morning’s coffee.

Winter. This starkly elegant season, straight-forward, no fussing around. A librarian friend passed me Andrew Miller’s The Land in Winter, a novel I’d longed to hold and read. A book of my soul. My cat Acer, eight-years-old, has discovered the pleasure of purring. We lie stacked on the couch—me, this tabby, library book—content. Who knew this was possible, my slow learner cat, my slow learner self?

“And though he was not much given to thinking about love, did not much care for the word… it struck him that in the end it might just mean a willingness to imagine another’s life. To do that. To make the effort.”
― Andrew Miller

Keep Reaching.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 1 Comment

Dark as a pocket or the inner chambers of my heart — so goes these December nights. The nights descend earlier, more afternoon than evening. I randomly meet friends on Main Street with the darkness kicking around my ankles. We step into a community center, pulling off our coats and hats and talking about random things — the price of gas, the upcoming holidays. For those who don’t live in a northern climate, a public building in Vermont sometimes has a curtain just the inside the door to stave off winter’s wind and snow. I push aside the curtain, and we step into a well-lit room.

It’s a simple/not simple thing. We eat bowls of hot soup and chunks of fresh bread at a long narrow table. A couple I’ve never met sits beside me with a brand-new infant, gustily sucking. I refrain from bending my head and breathing in the child’s milky scent.

Darkness presses against the windows as we talk and keep talking, and eventually the three of us are all leaning our elbows on the table, our heads propped on hands, spent. People appear, say hello, offer a hug, disappear, and still we’re talking about what might happen with the schools and our old parents and the persistence of memory from early childhood. How do we reconcile our stories? Escape or rewrite our stories?

Eventually, sodden with sleepiness, I pull on my boots and step out. The weather has turned, and the sidewalk is slick. I head out of the village. The wet air is not so much clean but fresh, a mystery of fomenting things both lovely and fearsome. But for now at least, I carry these gems of companionship in my heart. A pleasure, a warm joy.

…. and a poem from a friend….

Keep Reaching

The trick is to keep reaching

for the light you will never touch,

and to be nourished by the stretch

toward impossible things.

The trick is to bloom where you are,

not calling it a failure because

you wanted a different outcome.

Live each day devoted to awe, 

so that when a monarch lands 

on the tip of a coneflower, seeming 

to swell with that sudden infusion 

of sweetness, you don’t miss it. 

So that, while you watch, a pair 

of hard-won wings seems to open 

and close, and open again in you.~ James Crews

Among Lilacs-Gone-to-Sticks…

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 6 Comments

Late afternoon in Vermont December is twilight; I’m hustling along my road, a glass container of hot soup wrapped in a pink cloth in my hands, and I stop for a moment and talk to the neighbor boys who are sledding. The light is dim enough that I squint to count the three children, shadowy figures in snowsuits. The cold is fierce on my face. This day has been sprint from one thing to another, more yet to come, but I pause, that glass steaming in my mittens, the sunset sprawling over the great sky, the stars already emerging in the east’s darkness. A small moment, a tiny exchange of hellos. Such luck to be in this ordinary afternoon.

I walk through the parting in the lilacs-gone-to-sticks for the winter, study the bird feeder hung in the mock orange, the seeds sprinkled in the new snow. Behind me, the boys call to each other. In their lit kitchen window, I see the boys’ parents. Dinnertime nears. The cold is so mighty a body without shelter could and would perish. In the snow that gleams with the last of the day’s light, my boot prints lead to me, my lit window and cat, the upstairs bedroom dark where I stood a year ago and wondered if I would die. Wrong question. Not if but when. For this moment, however (a great big however), I remain in this simple-not-simple equation of laughing children, hot soup, the night swooping in. I study my bootprints with satisfaction and then head towards my own kitchen door.

“The Way It Is”

There’s a thread you follow. It goes among
things that change. But it doesn’t change.
People wonder about what you are pursuing.
You have to explain about the thread.
But it is hard for others to see.
While you hold it you can’t get lost.
Tragedies happen; people get hurt
or die; and you suffer and get old.
Nothing you do can stop time’s unfolding.
You don’t ever let go of the thread. ~ William Stafford

Stopping in the Snowy Forest.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 8 Comments

In the woods, I hear voices and pause, thinking a cluster of children might emerge over the hill. Instead, a flock of clangorous geese wings low overhead, then a second V, a third. Town traffic sounds filter into the woods. I am not in the deep wilderness, not so far from high school and road and village, but for this hour, it’s just me and the sweep of wind and drifting snow and the human and dog prints of whoever walked here before me.

As a kid, my father was never one to be daunted by adversity. Evenings, he often set down his coffee cup and took us on walks to the library or around the block, and around the block often meant across a thin-grass soccer field to the woods. Who owned those woods, I never knew. We jumped across the stream and along worn logging roads, past the piles of New Hampshire boulders and stone walls in the forest where fields had dominated not so many years ago. The woods were alive with rabbits and deer, birds and ferns. We wondered about the Natives who lived here and the colonists who cut down the trees, and then the trees grew up again.

On this twilight Monday, I lean against a hemlock, snow in my eyelashes, remembering when my daughters filled their snowsuit pockets with tiny hemlock cones. Intentionally or not, my father instilled love and not fear of the forest in his kids, the understanding that our feet could carry us to unexpected and miraculous places.

Here’s that classic New Hampshire poem threading through my childhood, my daughters’, and so many others:

Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening

By Robert Frost

Whose woods these are I think I know.   

His house is in the village though;   

He will not see me stopping here   

To watch his woods fill up with snow.   

My little horse must think it queer   

To stop without a farmhouse near   

Between the woods and frozen lake   

The darkest evening of the year.   

He gives his harness bells a shake   

To ask if there is some mistake.   

The only other sound’s the sweep   

Of easy wind and downy flake.   

The woods are lovely, dark and deep,   

But I have promises to keep,   

And miles to go before I sleep,   

And miles to go before I sleep.