fiction

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.

Chemo ride…

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 11 Comments

… took a bitch turn. Dreaded day 5 passed (thank goodness for the amazing anti-nausea meds), but with the last bag of this poison/healing fluid, a fist immediately grabbed my chest and squeezed my breath. My cheeks coursed with blood.Terror, say the word, terror. So much back and forth, oxygen and treatments and more liquids through this purple spaghetti plastic that drip, drip, drips near my heart. I shook fiercely – rigors – the nurses said. I was stuck on the word as my molars hammered, rigors!, where is this hard ride taking me? The fluid was stopped with a promise not to start again until I knew.

In and out of a fog, a dream of a herringbone jacket with a pleated flair my youngest wore as a two-year-old. In the evening, a nurse sits with me. As the drip-drops begin again, she talks, right beside me, watching me, close eye, about this disease, about infection and rest, about what I will need to do and avoid – do not knick your fingers with a knife, no dirt, no cat litter, no flowers, no illness. I ease from tension and realize, yes, yes, I am still breathing, I am still taking in this toxin that quite possibly will save my life. I glance up at the round analog clock on the wall that reminds me and my brother of school days. These are the moments Burlington’s Phoenix Books is hosting the Almanac intro in an online event. In my haze, I imagine the Almanac editors and reading and answering questions, this book filled with farm dirt and blooming flowers, hay chaff and sneezing, insects and sheep, and stories – so many stories – of people working on this northern place on the globe. In my half-dream, exchanging novels to read with this steady stranger, I feel my place in the world opening up, both descending into the long trek of illness and healing and, miraculously, an upward course, too, as this illness strips me down. Your bone marrow, the stranger says, marrow, a word I love and have been content to let lie, bone marrow doing its bone marrow thing. All this is changing, too, from nature, from medicine, from my fierce intent to reclaim my body.

All of you who have traveled or will travel this journey, bone marrow and rigors and fear, how simultaneously far and yet close this feels, all of us.

….. Everyday, a dear friend texts me a poem read in her clear strong voice. Here’s Rilke’s “Let Darkness Be a Bell Tower”

Quiet friend who has come so far,

feel how your breathing makes more space around you.
Let this darkness be a bell tower
and you the bell. As you ring,

what batters you becomes your strength.
Move back and forth into the change.
What is it like, such intensity of pain?
If the drink is bitter, turn yourself to wine.

In this uncontainable night,
be the mystery at the crossroads of your senses,
the meaning discovered there.

And if the world has ceased to hear you,
say to the silent earth: I flow.
To the rushing water, speak: I am.

Sonnets to Orpheus II, 29

Human chaos, the desert.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 6 Comments
Galisteo, New Mexico

My daughter sends word of rain and more rain in our Vermont world. Meanwhile, on the other side of the continent, visiting my father in New Mexico, we’re amazed by the hues of green. The desert’s rainy this year, too. In the afternoon, I work outside while a storm blows in. In New Mexico’s wide skies, sooty clouds may lower and threaten and yield not a drop of water, blowing elsewhere, breaking or not.

In this quiet, edge-of-the-greenbelt place, news comes to us, the President now ill, an election teetering any which way. We do the everyday familiar things — drink coffee and eat dinner, play cards, talk about my mother’s recent death, about each one of us. After dark, the two girls and I stand outside in the dark in the cool rain, breathing in that ineffably sweet fragrance of the rain-damp desert. Wind shakes the junipers. Here, at fifty, I seem to be carrying a goblet of my life, the wind in the junipers one of the very first sounds I remember as a little girl, so many trips crisscross between Vermont and the desert, the enthusiasm of these young women with me who have seen so much of this world already, so eager they are for more, more of life. Later, when the girls are whispering and laughing in bed, the rain falling, the breeze blowing through the window, I feel that endless ancient desert around me, the calling coyotes, dwarfing for this moment even our human chaos.

Growth.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 1 Comment

In these days of long light, my daughter and I are drinking tea and talking on our glassed-in porch when she spies a fox walking along the lilacs that fence us from the road. The red fox, a real beauty, turns and looks at us.

June has been a season of the wild pushing in — the prolific groundhogs (and my thoughts will come to naught about this, but I’m wishing for a more even ratio of groundhog to fox, for my garden’s sake), the multiplicity of birds, raccoon and possum, the circling turkey vultures. This year, too, my garden grows half-wild, the amaranth reseeding around the Brussels sprouts, coreopsis sailing over the fence. One morning, I straighten and pause, brushing dirt from my fingers, when I spy a fox staring at me through the layers of hydrangea and pin cherry trees. For a time without borders, we hold each other’s gaze. What passes between us is a wordless language, with no clear question or agreement. Maybe simply curiosity.

There’s plenty of the human chatter around me these days, much of it rippling up in chaotic waves. But then, this, too. Last night, poetry at a rural arts center, with all the best things of Vermont June: wildflowers and the pleasure of company, the beauty of words stitched finely together.

…. Last, never least, here’s some words about the unsurpassable Vermont novelist Jeffrey Lent, in need of a little lift…

Child

How you’ve grown, child

of mine—pearl from my oyster,

you sparkle like snow. 

— Mary Elder Jacobsen

The true religion, the religion of snow…

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 8 Comments

I stand at my kitchen’s glass door devouring blood oranges and watching the sifting snow. Blood oranges — could I choose a less local delight? I open the door and cast out the peels for the birds.

The cat Acer sits on my feet, listening to the morning radio news, too. Just over the river, my home state New Hampshire revels in the Presidential primary. Meanwhile, Vermont prepares for its March Town Meeting Day, with the calculations and passion of budgets and petitions. Close an elementary school? Pledge to become a pollinator-friendly town? So much of January in my state is devoted to public meetings and discussion/debate, to a reckoning of the way forward, a jostling for who’s running for what seat — and what seats might remain empty.

Meanwhile, snowy winter has finally arrived, spare and elegant. Fearsome and enchanting. As the days deepen in cold, the light hours increase: no stasis in this world.

A fan of local chicken, bacon, milk, my cat stares at my orange-sticky fingers with disdain. I crunch the orange seeds, too, devouring this sunlight sweet.

Here’s Billy Collins’ poem about shoveling snow with the Buddha:

[Shoveling snow] is so much better than a sermon in church,
I say out loud, but Buddha keeps on shoveling.
This is the true religion, the religion of snow,
and sunlight and winter geese barking in the sky,
I say, but he is too busy to hear me.

What we can’t know.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 4 Comments

The cold hammers down around us in the way we’ve known Januarys before — nothing fierce, but sharp. January is a season that draws us up against our own mortality. Stumble and you’ll break a bone. Sleep outside, ill-prepared, seriously down on your luck, and you could perish.

Wednesday morning on the early side, I’m drinking coffee and staring at the snowflakes that have appeared in the downtown again, a memory for an absent person. News has wound my way of the death of a person distant from me by numerous steps, the fate we’ll all meet, one way or another, the great leveler. In the afternoon, when I return from work, the window washers are carefully removing the lacy paper, setting the delicate flakes to one side, and then re-taping them on the windows. A gentle, wordless act of care. A piece of our human puzzle.

These winter days, I’m devouring Paul Lynch, about as good as anything can be.

“I believe it is worth writing to remind ourselves of what we can’t know. To remind ourselves that certainty is dangerous. That factual knowledge of the world casts only a small light. Fiction is necessary because it seems to me that only fiction can accommodate the total strangeness that is life. To remind us that truth is actually impossible.”