fiction

Bare soil.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 18 Comments

Midnight, I’m sitting outside the local hospital in the balmy night, a few mosquitoes drifting in the streetlights. There’s no one around, save for the young woman in reception poking her phone, the peepers chattering in the wetland down the road. The night is so warm I’m reminded of summer’s open-ended days and nights, the pleasure I’ve taken these last few years sitting outside in the dark, listening to the nightsounds of rustlings and callings, human and wild.

The person who drew my blood just a few hours ago told my sister and me about the local library in nearby Johnson, Vermont. This evening, the library will be moved from where it was built and recently flooded to safer and higher ground near the elementary school. The town will shut down as the brick building is wheeled down Main Street and over a bridge spanning the Lamoille River. In the velvety darkness, I imagine the scene: the floodlights, the crews, the townspeople who will come out to admire and cheer. A small but certainly mighty miracle.

Around the building, I hear the rattle of my Subaru’s loosening heat shield. Then my sister appears in the driver’s seat. Along empty roads, she drives us home. In Wolcott village, I spy a fox rushing across the road. The animal pauses at the weedy edge, head turned towards us, perhaps wondering what we’re up to, too, this creature, like us, in no rush at all. Home again, the cats press against the kitchen glass doors, as if expecting a reckoning from me, an accounting of my absence.

What can I say to these tabbies? When a nurse apologized for dropping a plastic cap on my shoulder, I mused aloud that it wasn’t heavy — and isn’t that a line from Phish? Things are falling down on me, Heavy things I could not see… The nurse knew these lines, too. The heavy falling things are taking a pause, perhaps, in spring, as the earth reorients herself, through peeper song, unfurling leaf, the heady scent of rain on bare soil.

Is that church door open?

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 18 Comments

About a year before my mother died, I visited my parents in northern New Mexico. My mother was on 24/7 oxygen then, which she understandably chaffed against, and I took her on long drives so she could leave the house. One afternoon, I drove the rural roads to the Lamy train station. Take the Amtrak to Santa Fe, which I’ve done, and you don’t disembark in the quaint plaza town. 20 miles outside the adobe city, there’s the small Lamy station and an old saloon named the Legal Tender, and not much else. I parked at an old church that appeared to be abandoned and told my mother I’d be right back. I called over my shoulder that I wanted to see if the door was open, as church doors often are. When I looked back, my mother had her car door open, one foot on the earth, determined to follow me. She said cheerily, “I’ll come, too.” She was attached to a heavy oxygen tank on tiny wheels. The terrain was rocky, and there was no way I could navigate my mother to that door.

Somehow, I talked her into staying in the car. That was my mother, usually up for an adventure, willing to rattle a locked door, peer through a window, maniacally curious. It’s me, too.

In these brown-grass April days, as I begin to walk again, further and further each day, I think of my mother, how she would search for daffodil buds and admire the blooming snowdrops. Robert Frost is famous for his line, “In three words I can sum up everything I’ve learned about life: it goes on.” Bitter, perhaps, or maybe not so. Having faced my own (blessedly at this moment passed over) demise this winter, I’m beyond happy to immerse myself in the stream of life going on…. This life.

I woke this morning with a dream that I’d never had cancer. In the dream, I’d overslept and was late to work…. I was sweating, nightmarish. The dream haunted me all morning, trailing me, while my dear friend visited and brought me birthday presents that reminded me of my mother, and then fetched my library books so I could lie on the couch these afternoons and recover from this last cancer dose. When she’d left, I slept again. When I woke, the dream had broken and lay on the floor like broken glass: rubbish.

Such a labyrinthine world – mothers and daughters and granddaughters – disease, too. In these still days, waiting for spring’s rushing green, I embrace what I know, and that I never will.

… we are all

the dead, I am not apart from you,

for long, except for breath, except for 

everything.

~ Sharon Olds

“When the electricity shuts off, you boil water, you crack ice.”

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 15 Comments

In addition to showing up at Dartmouth-Hitchcock for chemo and consults to save my life, which thankfully appears to be going nicely, I also joined a writing group the hospital offers. Because writing saves lives, too.

Here’s a poem I read in this class, too good not to pass along.

“Chickens” by Kate Gale

I come from hay and barns, raising  
chickens. In spring, lambs come.  

You got to get up, fly early, do the orphan run  
sleep till dawn, start the feeding.  

When the electricity shuts off, you boil water, you crack ice.  
You keep the animals watered.  

You walk through the barn, through the hay smell, 
your hair brittle where you chopped it with scissors  

same ones you use for everything. Your sweater has holes.  
When you feed the ram lambs, you say goodbye.  

Summer, choke cherries; your mouth’s dry. Apples, cider.  
Corn picking. Canning for weeks that feel like years.  

Chopping heads off quail, rabbits, chickens.  
You can pluck a chicken, gut it fast.  

You find unformed eggs, unformed chicks.  
They start chirping day nineteen.  

You make biscuits and gravy for hundred kids  
serve them up good. You’re the chick  

who never got past day nineteen, never found your chick voice.  
You make iced tea. They say, you’re a soldier in the king’s army.  

At night, you say to yourself, Kathy, someday.  
We go walking. We go talking. We find a big story.  

A cracking egg story. A walking girl story.  
A walking out of the woods story. A not slapped silly story.  

A not Jesus story. Hush, Kathy you say, we get out of here.  
We find out where chicks go when they learn to fly.

Calendar (and actual) spring…

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 15 Comments

In my rinse-and-repeat pattern of this long winter, driving back from Dartmouth in the late morning, sunlight sprawling over the brown fields, the tree limbers along the interstate beginning the season’s cutting, I notice the Connecticut River has thawed. Unmutable sign the back of this mighty winter has cracked.

Home, my yard half-buried yet in twig-strewn snow, the ash buckets mark their winter resting place, a chaos of cinders that touch the edge of the quartz-pebbled rose garden my youngest and I made, years ago.

Later, a friend stops by with good cheer and belated and welcome Christmas presents. The sun is yet bright. We walk, slowly, slowly, on the short stretch of dead-end road before my house. I point to a robin perched in a pin cherry. She spies last summer’s hornet nest spun into the lilacs, a nest on the neighbor’s windowsill.

We were once neighbors ourselves. In mud season, we walked with our little kids up and down our back road, taking our time as the kids searched for frog eggs in the roadside ditches and tender green folds pushing up through matted brown leaves in the forest: the first spring beauties and trout lilies, bloodroot. Now, during my last hospitalization, her son repaired my daughter’s car, stayed for dinner and conversation.

Too snowy and wet to sit down, I lean against my car’s bumper. A robin chirps in the neighbors’ sugar maple, an expanse of curved trunk and branch and twig. Such a meager peep peep this rust-bellied hand-sized creature makes, prying winter away, thrusting our world towards nest building, egg laying, song.

“Against Panic” by Molly Fisk

You recall those times, I know you do, when the sun  

lifted its weight over a small rise to warm your face,   

when a parched day finally broke open, real rain   

sluicing down the sidewalk, rattling city maples   

and you so sure the end was here, life a house of cards   

tipped over, falling, hope’s last breath extinguished   

in a bitter wind. Oh, friend, search your memory again —   

beauty and relief are still there, only sleeping. 

Finding Jesus with the star sunglasses…

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 10 Comments

Home again and somewhat shocked to see an ice floe leering off my back roof, not exactly the size of A23a Iceberg, but approximating it….

I’m under strict orders to drink broth, eat saltines, lie on the couch and read — the last two I’ve been perfecting for months now. As for the rest of the order (this is the only thing you should be doing, Brett), I’ve been quietly breaking rules for years. Now, intimate with cancer and my mortality, I push myself to obey the orders, stick with the plan, follow the course precisely.

The winter thaws. The iceberg chips, shifts. I step outside and lean against my house in my down jacket that is now limp and beaten down, a sad thing that, this quarantined winter, I’ve used so little. How will my thousand words a day fit into these orders? A grant deadline looms. When will I put on my clean shoes and that linen sweater I knitted and return to work? A cardinal perches on the railing.

In those 48 hours I spent in the Dartmouth ER, in a beige isolation room, an upbeat nurse with amazing eyelashes occasionally stopped in to cheer me and whoever of my daughters was there. On the TV, which we never turned on, she pointed out a tiny orange plastic duck, and told us someone had placed small figurines all over the hospital. “I found Jesus,” she said. “I know that’s weird, to go around a hospital saying I’ve found the Man, but really…” She reached in her pocket and pulled out an inch-high plastic Jesus in a long robe, black curls, gold star sunglasses. He smiled so widely his teeth gleamed.

In that same room, I spied a second duck, brought the ducks home with me and lined them up on the bathroom mirror beside the wooden blue elephant from the Metropolitan Museum my daughter gave me. Two tiny things that arrived in my pocket, after a week of manifold things, after months of many manifold more. All day, it will rain, the warmth softening that iceberg on my roof, falling on the deck and breaking the wood, or not. If it’s broken, we’ll repair it this summer. If not, we’ll move on to the next thing.

And utterly seasonally inappropriate, here’s a Galway Kinnell poem I’ve been loving:

Blackberry Eating

I love to go out in late September
among the fat, overripe, icy, black blackberries
to eat blackberries for breakfast,
the stalks very prickly, a penalty
they earn for knowing the black art
of blackberry-making; and as I stand among them
lifting the stalks to my mouth, the ripest berries
fall almost unbidden to my tongue,
as words sometimes do, certain peculiar words
like strengths or squinched,
many-lettered, one-syllabled lumps,
which I squeeze, squinch open, and splurge well
in the silent, startled, icy, black language
of blackberry-eating in late September.

Mirth in the mirthless. A great mercy.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 19 Comments

Mirth in messiness… another night drive to the ER, so cold, what were we leaning into? Five degrees, maybe six? The stars above the river ice a mockery of light. Kindness and Dilaudid, another scan, a hurry-up-and-wait, the three of us talking about nothing in particular save for a hike we once took in a thunderstorm and an orange water bottle confiscated (gone, forever) at the Albuquerque airport.

It’s the small hospital not far from our house, not the cancer complex with its soaring blue-green glass. On this zero-degree night, my daughter presses her feet against the room’s wall heater. There’s hardly any patients, save for a man we never see who insists that he must be heard. In the night of dim small lamps, I sleep and wake, talk with a woman from the high plateau country of the upper midwest. She remarks wistfully that Vermont is too tiny and cramped for the sweep of the midwestern sky. Maybe it’s just the Dilaudid, but when sleep folds over me, I dream of those childhood summers my siblings and cousins and I chased fireflies while the grownups drank bourbon and ate our leftover birthday cake and kept at their two-week conversation. The dew washed our bare feet.

The hospital morning flicks on before the sun has dulled the night’s darkness. Mirthless, indeed, I become, crabby with human lack and inhuman fate. Words, words, mine and others’, in a repeating loop. I text my nurse friend. On her lunch break, she appears, and then there’s laughter from nurses in my room. People come and go. I sign for more billing. (How much is this going to cost me, anyway?) The chaplain appears who’s read my book and wants to talk Flannery O’Connor and death. I’m not about to be funeral planning for myself anytime soon, but I plunge right into that death question. Indeed, this wretched cancer, my uninvited guest, perhaps the truest teacher of my life.

He asks, To know to savor every day?

Oh sure. But the disease has whittled me down to a glittering core, to ignore the petty fluff that not so long ago stung my eyes, and certainly my heart, too. What remains is real, both beautiful as those fireflies winking in the sultry midwest night, and ineffably, unbearably sorrowful.

I intend to live a long life; I’ll at least go on for some while, which is all any of us can say. In the meantime, this rarefied illness journey? Not lacking for writing material.

From Flannery O’Connor, The Habit of Being (1988):

In a sense sickness is a place, more instructive than a long trip to Europe, and it’s always a place where there’s no company, where nobody can follow. Sickness before death is a very appropriate thing and I think those who don’t have it miss one of God’s mercies.