fiction

Secret revealed.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 10 Comments

Freakishly, by chance, I discover my mother’s given first name is different from the name she used. I’d never heard a whisper of this secret. As a writer, the discovery is material manna. As a daughter… well, strange news, indeed.

In the inexplicable alignment of fate, I’m a month away from publication of my third book, Call It Madness, a novel about young woman Avah who unexpectedly realizes her mother lied two decades ago when she claimed Avah’s great-grandfather died, his beloved house sold. Now, I unearth this secret my mother kept so well. I carry my mother’s name that was at once her name and not her name.

Where is the dusky line between fiction and life? Impossible, this seems, impossible, that I’ve written about my life in reverse. Kierkegaard wrote, “It is really true what philosophy tells us, that life must be understood backwards. But with this, one forgets the second proposition, that it must be lived forwards. A proposition which, the more it is subjected to careful thought, the more it ends up concluding precisely that life at any given moment cannot really ever be fully understood; exactly because there is no single moment where time stops completely…”

How meagerly we know this world, the littleness of the stuff that structures our own stories. Stacking firewood on Sunday afternoon, I listen to a NYT story written by a sighted man about traveling with the unsighted. The upshot? How we understand the world in pieces. The whole is an impossibility for any one of us.

And yet, fiction aims to manifest a perfect miniature world, a shimmering sphere, a handful of secrets and mysteries revealed one-by-one, like a matryoshka doll. At its center, is there a grain of rice or a chip of coal? A folded fortune like a slip of paper in a sweet cookie, a koan to clench in a fist and ponder. A way to reflect the whole of life, this impossible life.

Dividing line: rivers running north and south.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 6 Comments

Lost, I spend a crazy amount of time on back roads, driving from here to there, searching for a house where I’ve never been. A porcupine ambles along a dirt road. I slow, the car windows rolled down, the sunroof open and dust drifting in. The quilled creature disappears into the roadside weeds. I follow the paved state highway north, a two-line twisting road that cuts through farm fields jeweled with blooming dandelions.

I find them, finally, this kind couple, and apologize for my lateness. Turns out, they’ve worried about me. We stand outside in the sunlight, with their little dog and their grown daughter who stops by, this witty and laughing family who has endured tragedy. We’re on a rise of land that overlooks a pond. We are at the dividing place, I learn, where water flows both south and north. As we talk on this old homestead, I sense the world’s expanse, how brooks and streams and thin rivers join immense lakes, powerful rivers, the mighty beast of the Atlantic Ocean. Around us rises the history of this homestead, how the house and family has grown and contracted and changed over the decades. Spread overhead, the gleaming night sky, the pinprick constellations.

Black flies chew my hairline. Post-chemo, my lost straight hair returned as ringlets. On my way again, I retrace my way through swamps dense with marsh marigold. On this sunny day, the trees push out new leaves, further, further, in these few hours. I return to a former school house, where the town is voting again that day on a failed school budget. People come and go, cheery with the spring weather. I stay late for a hearing and drive home under a blood-red sunset, the breeze through my car windows sweet with plowed earth and manure.

How furiously I labor to remain in this world. To savor the inevitability of lostness, the chance crossing of a porcupine on its solitary animal journey, the stunning May blossoms. Many months ago, I asked my brilliant oncologist what I did to invite lymphoma into my body. Vehemently, he replied that I’d done nothing, absolutely nothing, to cause this brutal disease.

This physician saved my ragged life, but do our philosophical planes align? Two years ago, as the cancer sunk its silent teeth into my flesh, those intertwined demons of fatigue and despair shook me, too. Always now, skimming beneath my days and nights, flickers that fear: relapse. I’d spent so much time, that winter of illness, in the Dartmouth ED that the nurses and MDs became familiar. They knew my daughters and I by name. The general surgery team appeared repeatedly in that huddle around my bed, and I began to understand the hues of that word restraint as they considered their surgeon thoughts. There was that dreadful evening when I informed the oncologist that I could endure no more, and he gently replied that I could. He would get me through. So I endured. Many years ago, when I was so young, 21 and naive and freshly falling in love, I whined to a professor that I could not finish my thesis; I’d done enough. He kindly informed me that someday I would write a book and I would fear I would never reach the end. All this, in fact, transpired.

Restraint and effusive joy. Sooty despair, the pleasure of a purring cat. As the night settled down through twilight, I drank tea on my back step, leaning against my house. A fox trotted across the violet-strewn grass, quickly, on its way. So much for monotone winter. Wild spring.

Dandelion 

The first of a year’s abundance of dandelions 

is this single kernel of bright yellow 

dropped on our path by the sun, sensing 

that we might need some marker to help us 

find our way through life, to find a path 

over the snow-flattened grass that was 

blade by blade unbending into green, 

on a morning early in April, this happening 

just at the moment I thought we were lost 

and I’d stopped to look around, hoping 

to see something I recognized. And there 

it was, a commonplace dandelion, right 

at my feet, the first to bloom, especially 

yellow, as if pleased to have been the one, 

chosen from all the others, to show us the way.

~ Ted Kooser

Map Revision

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 4 Comments

Fickle May, windy and wet, sweating and chilly, the green urgently shoving through last year’s dead brown. Every day, a different pleasure: marsh marigold blooming in bracken water, violets sprinkled under the apple trees with their tiny tufts of leaves.

Nights and early mornings, I lie on the couch and read Arthur Frank’s The Wounded Storyteller, “The voices that speak to us at particular moments in our lives, especially during transitions or crises, imprint themselves with a force that later voices never quite displace.”

Oh, the imprint of life.

A year ago, in yet another Dartmouth-Hitchcock hospital room—fourth floor, the best of the ten rooms where I stayed that winter, with a sunset view of the mountains and such a kind nursing staff—the surgeons stopped in yet again, the pack of them, head surgeon to med students. Listening, I stared through the window at the walking path that wraps around the medical complex. I supposed I could keep arguing against surgery, get someone to push me in a wheelchair to the elevator, hobble outside, and then return via the Emergency Entry. My daughters and I were pretty darn familiar with that entry by then. There was no other option; I said, okay, signed the consent, phoned my siblings and pleaded for fresh horses to arrive, to get me through.

On this dawn-rosy May morning, no fresh horses needed today. A year ago, my daughters arrived for Mother’s Day, and walked me outside beneath the just-opening apple blossoms. We visited the courtyard gardens that we had stared at through the winter of chemotherapy, snow blowing. The cherry trees were profusions of pink. I salvaged books from free carts, novels and histories that I would stock up, like pain meds, to ferry me through the next round of recovery.

This morning, the daylight flooding in, a year later, a wall’s been removed in my kitchen. The dishes and baking pans are piled in cardboard boxes, a sole knife and cutting board in my sink. Will this chaos keep me in the world? Will messiness root me here? Or is this simply my lifelong patterns of creation-destruction-creation, life’s paddlewheel, that I lean on now? Er, maybe that I’ve always stood upon?

“Stories have to repair the damage that illness has done to the ill person’s sense of where she is in life, and where she may be going. Stories are a way of redrawing maps and finding new destinations.” — Arthur Frank

Risking Delight with the Lion

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 4 Comments

Precisely a year ago, to the day, Isele Magazine published my essay “Red Devil, Survivor Herself.” I had written all through the godawful cancer treatments, AKA chemotherapy, and publishing this essay marked my tenacious determination to remain among the living—and to remain a fierce writer, too.

Over the summer and autumn, “Red Devil” morphed into a manuscript-in-process. Recently, three more chapters were picked up. The kind folks at Isele Magazine published “Risking Delight with the Lion.” The following two will be published in different journals later this spring.

Here’s the opening of “Risking Delight.”

In my winter of chemotherapy, I woke at night, quivering. Where was I? What was happening? Gasping, I reminded myself that I was in bed, I was okay, that whatever demons had sought me in sleep had been banished by my waking. I didn’t blink my eyes open into peace. My breathing never eased into contentment.

Cancer-and-chemotherapy is a path of suffering, an involuntary hairshirt. The first morning I met my oncologist Dr. Valera in that Dartmouth-Hitchcock hospital room, I was surfacing, bleary and exhausted after an emergency admission and an exploratory surgery that verged on plunging me into a sedated coma. My daughters had been summoned through a snowstorm. What remained of my vitality was vanishing. Me or the lymphoma would triumph. There was no middle ground. Yet, that first morning, Valera assured me, “I can cure you.” Not cocky, not boastful, merely stripped down to facts: the lay of my body and disease, his skill and treatment course.

I clutched his words desperately, but I never repeated aloud, “This physician makes a claim that I will live.”

What was the levy I would pay for remission?…

Last… with the 2050: Vermonters Take a Swipe at the Future project, I’ll be reading at the Tenney Memorial Library in Newbury, Vermont, this Saturday, 4 p.m. Come!

Bear, darker than midnight.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 16 Comments

I’m walking up a fourth-class road when I spy a black shape moving along the upper end of the nearby hayfield. Vermont divides its roads into categories, from the interstates to dirt roads to the little-used former farm or forest roads that are snowed-cover in winter, mud-rutted in spring. I stand beside a wild apple tree, the blue view of the Worcester Mountains over my shoulder, and admire this bear, darker than midnight against the field’s glossy emerald. When green kindles in Vermont spring, it flourishes.

This place I’ve never walked, although I’ve seen maps and heard stories. The road treks uphill through the forest and dips down where Caspian Lake gleams, realm of summer visitors, but for the time, still the territory of the locals.

I find what I’m seeking and also what I’m not: the labor-dense stone walls whose once-upon-a-time fields are gone to forest, moss-covered cellar holes, twisted rusty remains of farm equipment. Peepers chorus. An old farmhouse with an enormous veranda on a hill must have once had a royal view of the lake, and endured bitter winter winds. Someone has tried to cut the wild reclamation from the house and mostly failed.

In the sunlight, I linger, wondering who lived here, their stories silent. The two-story house has large dormers and many windows; it’s not a fly-by-night, tossed-up structure. On my way home, I pause where I saw the bear, searching, but of course the bear has moved on. Three ducks fly low over my head. The earth exhales its sweetness of thawing mud, the turning-over of last autumn’s leaves, this summer’s great promise.

“Deep in the forest a call was sounding, and as often as he heard this call, mysteriously thrilling and luring, he felt compelled to turn his back upon the fire and the beaten earth around it, and to plunge into the forest, and on and on, he knew not where or why; nor did he wonder where or why, the call sounding imperiously, deep in the forest.” — Jack London

Hell-bent robins.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 14 Comments

I arrive home from the local arts center, get out of my car, and a robin nearly flies into my head. Winged creatures are swooping from the apple trees to the hedge of lilacs that is just beginning to bud. My god, what a lovely day.

In my bag, I have an empty pint jar of water I’ve been drinking, and a ball of purple linen I’m knitting into a summer shift, and the books of the two authors whose reading I just attended — Helen Whybrow of The Salt Stones and Jody Gladding’s translation of Jean Giono’s The Serpent of Stars. I have a new book, too, a collection of stories by a Turkish author I’ve never read. Sitting with my book world friend, her publisher friend hands me a book, too. The afternoon and evening has gone this joyous way, like that hell-bent robin — strangers and friends and people I haven’t seen in ages — exuberant about literature and art and the unstoppable profusion of spring.

I like this art center so much I imagine curling up on a cushiony bench and sleeping beside the wide windows, the starlight on my face. An acquaintance I met at a Vermont Studio Center residency works here, too, and we plot some amusing possibilities. We’re beside the table heaped in lush mounds of delicacies, and I graze on stuffed mushrooms and empanadas and fresh tomatoes. I wrap lemon squares in napkins and hold these in my hands away from my books and knitting.

Outside on the stone patio, the wind is lifting over the meadow, the sun sinking and the cold creeping in. All around me looms that chilly darkness, the nearness of sunset, the hole in the night where dawn seems impossible. So much of my life I’ve teased and poked at this, and, conversely, pushed the vast cold away — through distraction and once-upon-a-time through drinking and work. Now, as the twilight drains away and night stakes in for its duration, I wander among the yet leafless apple trees, the garden with its green garlic nubs, drinking tea and listening to the birds settle down to sleep. My god, the myriad lessons of cancer. Note this, too: clench joy and fear in the same fist. See what happens.

Kitchen renovation paint considerations….