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Amory Rowe Salem | Longreads | January 9, 2024 | 2,909 words (10 minutes)

Chances are Ruth Bader Ginsburg was sick long before the rest of us discovered her illness. When we did, the news hit us like a boxer’s mitt to the heart. Not just because her tiny frame seemed so completely incapable of carrying the weight of a serious diagnosis, but also because of the unfairness of it all. The injustice.

Ruth was small but feisty, often taking on adversaries of twice her heft. She was our David in an arena of Goliaths. Though she wasn’t spoiling for fights, she was skilled at ending them, rarely failing to punctuate her victories with a small show of rhetorical force. Ruth was unrelenting, vigilant, and inquisitive. We loved her for all of those traits. And because she laid blue eggs.

Only two of our chickens—Ruth and her flockmate Michelle Obama—laid blue eggs. The rest of our feathered badass lady gang—Simone Biles, Megan Rapinoe, Scarlett Johansson, Kamala Harris, and Aliphine Tuliamuk—all laid brown eggs, which were lovely and appreciated. But finding a blue egg in the nesting box surfaced memories of unearthing that rare piece of blue sea glass on the windswept winter beaches of my childhood. It felt like a treasure.

So when the tide of blue eggs ebbed, a sure sign of chicken illness, my children and I loaded Ruth and Michelle into the family van and drove them 45 minutes out of the city to the Tufts Hospital for Small Animals in Grafton, Massachusetts, the only place within 50 miles that will provide care to a chicken.

We were not veteran chicken keepers. We’d stumbled upon the delight of raising chickens entirely by accident when we traded a 50 lb. bag of flour and a jar of sourdough starter for a bucket of day-old chicks. It was the sort of barter people were making in the early days of the pandemic, when the unthinkable and the absurd upstaged the logical and the predictable.

We had no prior experience with poultry; we didn’t have a coop or a brooder lamp or the faintest idea of how to raise a palmful of down into an egg-laying hen. We needed to learn. Not just for the sake of the birds, but for our own sakes: we craved a learning curve. The world was going two-dimensional on us—all screens and games and apps—but those tiny feathered bodies, each one housing a beating heart the size of an infant’s thumbnail, demanded our attention. We became dedicated keepers of those hearts; and the flock, in turn, shocked our family’s flatlining system, giving us back the gift of emotional amplitude that had been compressed by our escalating attention to the glossy artifice of the staged and surface-level.

The coop was its own classroom. Our early chicken lessons were learned on the fly as we tried to stay a half-step ahead of our growing flock, keeping them fed, clean, warm, and safe. In that way, my children were initiated in parenting: balancing birthday parties and playdates with regular feedings and weekly “house cleanings,” summoning an uncommon vigilance over their brood.

Over time, we extracted bespoke wisdom from our gallinaceous charges. My son, whose outsized capacity for empathy was at odds with his narrow 10 years of experience, divined that a chicken was a fair barometer for human character. “If you can’t figure out how to hold a chicken right, you’re not a very kind person,” he’d concluded. He wasn’t wrong. You hold a chicken much the same way you hold an infant, with your forearm tucked under the length of its body so it feels supported. If you’re in the business of vetting people, there are worse metrics. At least one would-be boyfriend of his oldest half-sister has been summarily dismissed based on failing the chicken-cradling exam.

My daughter, an introvert with a preternatural instinct for hibernation, admired the chickens’ unerring sense of home. For weeks after we moved their coop from the muddy corner of the yard to slightly higher ground, the birds would return to the site of their original coop at sundown, standing with their prehistoric feet sunk in the muck as if their house was just about to materialize around them. What adolescent girl hasn’t stood, Dorothy-like in the Oz of the schoolyard, silently intoning: “There’s no place like home, there’s no place like home, there’s no place like home”?

For my part, I watched with recognition as our rasorial creatures bent their heads to the ground and brought the full force of their attention to a single square inch of grass. They were excellent excavators of the granular, masters of the microscopic, capable of quarrying the tiniest insects and grubs. But they paid a price for their ground-level monomania, sometimes missing a juicy worm just a few feet away—or a predator overhead—because they simply weren’t seeing the bigger picture. As a mother, a teacher, a citizen, I also knew the opportunity cost of becoming mired in the details. It behooves all of us, every now and then, to turn our faces to the sun lest we lose sight of the magnitude of the stage on which we are playing.

Our first year of chicken-keeping had been full of tiny wonders and short on heartache. But as we rounded the bend into year two, with a flock of a dozen, the poultry actuarial tables were turning and the parade of covetable “firsts”—first flight feathers, first dust bath, first eggs—changed tenor. We had our first sick chicken.

In Grafton, the fourth-year veterinary student gave us a diagnosis for Ruth within 15 minutes of our arrival.

“It’s the first thing we check in backyard chickens,” she told me over the phone from deep inside the hospital, while the kids and I waited in the parking lot. 

Ruth was suffering from lead poisoning. Michelle, too—and likely the entire flock. But Ruth was presenting as the most ill because she was our smallest chicken and our best forager. I learned then that what is true for so many of us is also true for chickens: we are often drawn to what is not good for us. Even to what can kill us. The vet explained that lead tastes good to chickens: it tastes sweet. So if a hen finds an industrial-era cache buried just below the surface of our urban backyard, she’ll return to it again and again, sampling until the lead has permeated every muscle, organ, bone, and feather.

“Ruth’s lead levels were too high to read,” the vet explained. “She’s probably been sick for a long time. Chickens are very good at hiding their illness.”

My daughter, sitting cross-legged in the passenger seat of our idling van, cocked an ear in my direction. As a middle school-age girl she, too, knew something about hiding weaknesses for fear of having them exploited. Recently I had found her crumpled deep in the covers of her bed. Despite the fact that it was spring in New England, the sun still shockingly high in the sky for the late afternoon hour, she had burrowed into the darkest corner of her room the way a hen seeks the dim, still seclusion of the nesting box to endure her daily egg-laying effort.

Her story had come out in messy exhaled fragments hyphenated by tears. A classmate rebuked by a teacher for an outfit deemed inappropriate for school. The predictable adolescent backlash. A girl-led campaign to wear crop tops and short shorts to school in rebellion. My daughter’s discomfort and refusal. Her choice not to sign the offender’s dress code petition. A parade of protesting peers observed from a careful and conservatively clothed distance. The fallout. She had been exiled from the flock, hen-pecked in hallways and corridors of the internet—her pandemic cohort, recently reunited, now fumbling with the fizzy power of sudden togetherness.

Lead lodged deep in a body is easier to extract than loneliness. Many times over the next two weeks, as my daughter and I corralled our flock twice daily to inject each chicken with a chelating agent, I wished for as straightforward a solution as a hypodermic needle sunk into soft muscle to cure my adolescent girl’s unhappiness. A pinch of pain every 12 hours seemed a small price to pay to restore balance.

Every parent of double-digit-age children craves a return to the obvious fixes of infancy and toddlerhood when tears could be quelled with a diaper change, a snack, or a nap. But the grand bargain of parenting holds that as our children grow wondrously more complicated, so do their problems. Those simple early solutions get shelved with the board books and Duplos, as obsolete as last year’s ice skates. So I was surprised—as the late spring days lengthened and we extracted the last of the medication from its glass vials and injected it into Ruth and her flockmates—to see that both the birds and my daughter were improving.

Maybe it was just time. Maybe some other tween-age scandal moved onto the front page of her classmates’ attention. But I like to think that the caretaking of other hearts was its own slow-working salve for her adolescent injuries. My daughter needed something—affection, attention, patience—so she gave those things away. And in return, she got better.

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A month after our first visit to Tufts, we boomeranged back to Grafton to have the flock’s lead levels rechecked. Ruth’s numbers were much improved—as were the rest of the birds’—but the vet palpated a mass in Aliphine’s coelom and suggested she take a closer look. Aliphine, a tall Lavender Orpington with a gentle manner and eyes more elephantine than reptilian, was named after distance-running phenom Aliphine Tuliamuk, winner of the 2020 US Olympic Marathon Trials. Befitting her namesake, our Aliphine went on to endure an odyssey of diagnostics in the subsequent weeks: blood draws, X-rays, ultrasounds, and a fine-needle biopsy. The news was neither encouraging nor conclusive.

By the time the last of the tests was done, Aliphine was spending most of her days perched quietly in a corner of the run, an introvert in a flock of socialites. Unlike her fellow chickens, who were always busy scratching in the dirt, squabbling over the prime nesting box, and preening in the afternoon sun, she kept to herself. Short of invasive surgery, which the vet wasn’t sure she’d survive, our best option was to keep her comfortable and to try to catch the falling knife of divining precisely when she stopped behaving like a happy chicken and started behaving like an animal in pain.

That day came in late summer, when Aliphine failed to defend herself from a flurry of unwarranted pecks delivered by a cranky flockmate. Her will—and maybe her capacity for self-preservation—had waned. I called the vet.

It was an awful errand. Every prior trip to Grafton had been undertaken with the hope of a diagnosis or at least some new measure of understanding. But there was no avoiding the fact that this was a different journey altogether. My children, then 10 and 12, were not unaccustomed to loss. In roughly a decade they had lost two grandparents and 18 months of their childhoods, ideas made abstract by distance and time. Aliphine was theirs, though: a feathered beating heart for which they felt deeply responsible.

No parent wishes pain upon their child; but every parent wants the next generation to be able to bear up under its inevitable burden. I wanted so much for my children to avoid being among those who spent their lives carving routes around difficult emotional obstacles. While I wasn’t a trained educator capable of making cetaceans and early American history and square roots come alive for them, I was still a person equipped to teach my children about the living and, when necessary, the dying.

Before we left the house I sat the children down and laid out the path: we would take Aliphine to Grafton; the veterinary staff would bring us into a private room; we’d have a chance to say goodbye; and then the doctor would put her to sleep. There were several exits off the road ahead, I explained to the kids. They didn’t have to go to Grafton at all. Or they could keep Aliphine company on the drive to Grafton and not go into the hospital. Or they could say their goodbyes in the room itself. It was important to me that they made and owned their choices in this process, that they looked at this moment directly and felt it for what it was: a loss.

“We want to go,” my daughter said.

“But we’ll decide when we get there if we go into the hospital,” my son added.

While my daughter walked out to the coop to retrieve Aliphine, my son packed an ear of corn, a wedge of watermelon, and a fistful of blueberries—all of the chicken’s favorite foods—and carried them to the van. Aliphine sat quietly in my daughter’s lap for the drive, each one seemingly happy to feel the warmth of the other. As we made our way west, my daughter’s eyes welled with tears, emptied, filled again. Every few minutes Aliphine vocalized a chicken syllable or two, a sweet low sound that made each of us turn our gaze to her, and then to one another. It was hard not to hear those notes as questions.

When we exited the Mass Pike and began to slalom through the small town rotaries and farmland adjacent to Grafton, I felt that familiar tug, a nearly irrepressible urge to yank the wheel and change the direction of our distressed quartet. It felt so heavy, the weight of what we were carrying. The temptation to cast it off, even if only for a day or a week, to distract ourselves with the fleeting giddiness that comes from shirking responsibility, was overwhelming. But there was no outrunning this particular outcome and the inevitable impact it was going to have on each of us. We’d all done so much looking away: from grown men being choked to death on city streets, from riots and mass shootings, from atrocities at home and across oceans. The way forward had to be with open eyes and with hearts exposed to injury. We’d seen the price we paid when we failed to bear witness.

Once at the hospital, I pulled the van into a parking spot near the entrance. Aliphine perked up and preened a feather or two, seemingly animated, as infants are, by the transition from automotive movement to stillness. Without explicitly asking my children what their choice was—to enter the hospital or not—I simply opened the sliding door, an invitation. Each of my children stepped out onto the curb, my daughter still holding Aliphine and my son carrying her bag of treats.

As we began our slow procession up the walkway, my son reached for my hand. Thinking he was seeking a small physical reassurance, I turned my open palm toward him, but instead of slipping his hand into mine, he dropped into my palm a tiny ivory-colored tooth, still wet and rimmed with blood. Before I could ask the question, he bared his teeth at me: less smile, more grimace. There, in the front, on the bottom, I could see the newly vacated gap. I noted the loss, slipped the tooth into the pocket of my overalls, and walked on with my boy, my girl, and our chicken.

I said many things to my children in the low light of the room where Aliphine was euthanized. And my children said many things to her as they fed her corn and blueberries and watermelon for the last time. The vet spoke to all of us, told us we were making the right choice, that it was time. She spoke to Aliphine, too, as she pushed the Pentobarbital into the catheter she’d inserted into her leg bone. I watched closely, a hand on her feathered breast, as Aliphine’s body bucked once, twice, and then went limp. Of all of the words exhaled in that room, though, the ones that stick with me form what I think of now as our family’s most intimate catechism.

“We were lucky to love her,” I said to my children.

“And she was lucky to be loved,” my daughter replied.

“That’s not nothing,” my son added.

All true. Maybe the most important truths we can know.

The hospital was good at grief. There was no price or paperwork for the dead. Within minutes of Aliphine’s death we pulled out of the parking lot and onto the road that would take us back to the city. As the emptiness of the van settled around us, the still and chirpless space yawning wide, I watched out of the corner of my eye as my son’s face twitched and then contorted. At first I thought he might be fighting back tears. But then I realized he was poking his tongue into the space where his tooth used to be, gently exploring the vacancy where something familiar had been and was no longer.

I saw him wince. I imagine it hurt. I imagine, too, that in that tiny moment he learned he could bear the pain. Then the pain ebbed. And he learned the shape of pain, its tidal behavior. And that understanding made him someone wiser and more durable. And I knew, over time, and his countless recoveries from those small waves of hurt, he would feel something new break the surface.

Amory Rowe Salem reads, writes, coaches, parents, and tends to her flock in Cambridge, Massachusetts. You can read her work at amoryrowesalem.com.

Editor: Cheri Lucas Rowlands
Copyeditor: Krista Stevens

My wife and I are covering the mortgage for a house on which my mother placed a seven-figure down payment, while I’m taking my mother to appointments, hauling out her garbage, and doing her internet troubleshooting. In exchange, we’re living in a space and a long-gentrified neighbourhood we love, one we couldn’t otherwise afford. We also get free child care that consists of trips for dim sum and lightly supervised iPad time for my eight-year-old daughter.

And yet that narrative still gets steamrolled by the stigma. At an appointment at the kidney clinic, my mom will tell the nurse that we live together. I am always quick to blurt out my qualifiers: WITH MY WIFE! AND MY CHILD! (WHOM I CONCEIVED DOING ADULT THINGS!) ON SEPARATE LEVELS!

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Harrison Scott Key| Longreads | December 6, 2023 | 17 minutes (4,850 words)

I have enjoyed many happy Christmases and plenty of disappointing ones, like the one I spent eating alone at a Waffle House due to an ice storm, or the Christmas my father accused all the unmarried relatives of being gay. But of all the sad Yuletides of my life, the one I spent guarding $100,000 worth of explosives on the surface of the moon tops the list. The year was 1996. I was 21 years old and, in a way, quite homeless. Home is one of the enduring themes of Christmas, the joy of being in its midst and the thundering melancholy of longing for it, wondering if you can ever really get that feeling of belonging back—if you ever had it in the first place.

At the time, I was a college student in Jackson, Mississippi, and rarely went home. I would only fight with Pop about why I stopped going to church or entertain questions from Mom about my sudden hair loss and what this did or did not mean about radon poisoning. I did love my family, or at least the idea of them, and took great pride in our being rednecks who lived far off in the Piney Woods, a lawless land where nobody would deliver a pizza. So many of my college friends came from civilized places with public parks and museums. When somebody asked where I was from, I would pull out the atlas to poke my finger at the unmarked point on a map of Mississippi, between Brandon and a subatomic little village called Puckett. “Traveling circuses wintered there,” I’d say, a detail I learned from the Rankin County News as a boy.

It was a nonplace, really. The boonies. The sort of place you only went if you were searching for an escaped convict or a coonskin cap. It did not feel like home. Nowhere did. Mom was from the Delta, Pop from the Hill Country up near Coldwater. “Mama and thems,” he called it, in a county where all the cemeteries had tombstones full of Scotts and Keys, which are two of my names. It felt nice to be in a place where so many of my family members had been embalmed. 

As a young man, my father declined an offer to take over the family farm and split for Memphis to seek his fortune like a character in an old country song, though he never found it there. Memphis is where I was born. Was that my home? When I was nine, Pop’s work brought us down to the Piney Woods near Puckett, some three hours south, where we had no kin. In a place like Mississippi, where kin matters, we might as well have moved to Tierre del Fuego. But I had my first kiss here, and hit my first homerun. Maybe this was home. 

It was, I suppose, until a week before Thanksgiving in my senior year of college. I’d come back to do a little laundry when Pop strode into the kitchen and gravely informed me that they were selling the house and moving again, due to a land dispute with a choleric farmer up the road who hated everyone but his cows.

“Where are you moving?” I asked.

“Up to town,” Pop said.

He meant the Ross Barnett Reservoir, an artificial lake with weedy marinas surrounded by forgettable subdivisions, which would allow my father to carry on his illicit affair with the largemouth bass. It was hardly 30 minutes away, but the people up there were all new.

“You coming up to mama and thems to hunt?” Pop asked as I folded laundry.

I didn’t want to spend Christmas with my family at a farm that never would feel like home, staring backward into a past that only made you sad. I wanted to stare forward. I wanted something new. I needed money, for one. My parents sure didn’t have any. “You have to come,” Mom said. “It’s Christmas.”

“Maybe,” I said, walking out of my last childhood home for the last time. I would never come back to this place. We had no people here. Why would I come back? Where would I stay?

I hadn’t been to church in years but still read my Bible often, with all those horrid battles and beasts and skin diseases that reminded me so much of my Mississippi childhood. The elusiveness of home is one of the Bible’s great themes. God himself was mostly homeless. “The foxes have holes, and the birds of the air have nests,” he says, “but the Son of Man hath nowhere to lay his head,” Jesus says, a little passive-aggressively. 

God doesn’t seem to care too much about where you’re from, and when you’re from a place, he likes making you go somewhere else, usually worse. The whole book is a fever dream of exile and real estate development, beginning in a garden and ending 1,200 chapters later in something even better than New York in autumn, a hermit’s grand hallucination of a city almost impossible in its beauty and cleanliness and tax revenue. 

I remembered my Bible, and all those hymns, too, so many songs about looking for a home you can’t quite put your hands on. In “We’re Marching to Zion,” we sang about the “beautiful city” that awaited us, reached via “The Gloryland Way,” a spiritual highway leading into a metaphorical Canaan’s Land where there exists a habitation on a hilltop for peoples of every nation with no war or passport requirements. Until then, we slouched through arid and inhospitable lands, filled with stumps and snakes. The message was clear: you could find a home—you just have to die first.

I drove through woods and up into town toward Jackson, wondering if God had a home for me out there, somewhere. He’d led the Israelites to theirs with a pillar of smoke by day and fire by night, but driving back to campus in the dark, I saw no burning signs pointing the way. All I saw was a great big billboard off the interstate, bathed in spotlight. In a blaze of fluorescent fire, the sign shouted with holy ghost power: fireworks!

And I got to thinking.

There are places that matter, sites of consecration and meaning, both natural and human, that possess, through the alchemy of time and memory, a holiness: very old churches, ancient baseball stadiums, certain groves of trees on certain campuses. The Romans called it genius loci, the spirit that inhabits the earth and air of a place. 

There are places and there are also nonplaces, forgotten or ignored or transformed by human progress into blind spots of experience where nobody wants to be, like the landscaping in front of a Burger King. The expansive lot with the fireworks billboard off the interstate was a nonplace, which is perhaps why I felt so irresistibly drawn to it. 

The billboard stood high on a pole, just off I-55, alongside US Highway 80. Once known as the Dixie Overland Highway, it stretched from the briny waters of the Atlantic near Savannah, Georgia, to the raging tempests of the Pacific near San Diego, California, and through a now-forgettable piece of Jackson over the brown sad water of the Pearl River. As I drove by this nonplace, I beheld a magnificent wasteland below the billboard, once a truckstop, now a field of gravel featuring the sort of tattered sheet metal structures where they chain hostages to the floor. 

The fireworks sign stayed up all year, because every June and December, a capacious candy-striped circus tent filled with all manner of fiery delights materialized in this post-industrial apocalypse as if by some strange wood-elf magic. It seemed like the perfect place for a boy from nowhere to spend the upcoming holiday. I don’t know what prompted me to call the telephone company and find the phone number of the company that operated this fireworks tent, but that’s exactly what I did.

“Absolutely not,” Mom said, when I explained over the phone that I’d found holiday employment with Boom City, LLC, a subsidiary of The Hunan Group, Inc., managing Central Mississippi’s largest fireworks tent on a dark patch of highway just over the river from the Murder Capital of the New South. Death was rampant in the area: stabbings, execution-style shootings at the river or the strip clubs just over the hill.

“You’ll be robbed,” Mom said. “What kind of company hires a child to sell explosives?”

Something possessed me, a hunger to escape, to hurry up and exile myself and get it over with. Missing Christmas would be a hard stop, a clean death for the past. 

A few days later, during finals week, my father made a rare appearance on campus. Most of the students were gone already. 

“I brought you some things,” Pop said, opening the trunk of the car to reveal gun cases, ammo, and a machete wrapped in an army blanket.

“Your momma’s worried, son. The machete will make her feel better. I sharpened it,” he said, thumbing the blade.

Pop had brought along my old 12-gauge pump, my .30-.06 rifle, and three preloaded clips with 220-grain shot, in case the fireworks tent was attacked by a team of bison.

“And some pistols,” he said, handing me a bag of pistols.

“Thanks, Pop,” I said, transferring the arsenal to my trunk, a few parking spaces over.

Sometimes, when I think about my life, I think about the quiet moments that may have shaped me more than I could’ve known, like the time my father handed me a sack of guns in a dormitory parking lot because he didn’t want me to die. 

I reported for duty on Wednesday, December 18, 1996. I brought long johns, a hunting coat, bedroll, cookstove, radio, books, and the weapons; along with sufficient foodstuffs for the long dark winter: boxes of ramen, several gallons of Dinty Moore Beef Stew—enough survival gear to stage a delicious, hearty coup. 

The lot was hemmed in on two sides by interstate overpasses and a vast junkyard to the rear. In between the tent and the interstate sat a midcentury motor lodge for travelers using this highway, back when travelers used this highway. The place was still open, rot be damned. A sign announced: telephone in every room. Presumably, so you could call and say goodbye to your loved ones as you bled out on the floor.

The enormous circus tent had gone up overnight. A tractor-trailer the color of dry mustard backed up to one corner, but otherwise, the site was empty—a moonscape. Here I was to meet a man called Donny, who’d show me where the execution-style murders would take place.

Donny was maybe 30 years old with a .44 Magnum on his hip and ran all the Boom City tents in this part of the state. Orientation began in the tent proper, big enough for a church revival, strings of naked bulbs draped across the expanse of it. He opened the trailer, the merchandise stacked to the ceiling. 

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“It’s a hundred grand worth of fireworks,” he said. “I hope you got a gun.”

“I have enough guns to start a new government,” I said.

Behind the trailer, tucked away in the back, were my sleeping quarters, a tiny trailer the color and shape of a Grade B egg.

“There’s a hot plate in there,” he said. “But don’t use it.”

“Got it.”

“You get caught leaving, you’ll be fired,” he said.

“Got it.”

He looked around the empty tent and went to a dark place inside himself. 

“People will want to steal everything,” he said. “But don’t go calling the cops just because. Don’t be jumpy like the last dude.”

“What happened to the last dude?” I said.

“He got jumpy.” 

“What if I need to shower?”

“Use the motel,” he said, of the sex workers’ encampment across the lot. “They’ll give you a shower for five dollars.”

“Have you ever been inside it?” I asked.

“Hell no,” he said. 

Donny had me sign papers that relieved Boom City of any liability in the event of my dismemberment and said he’d see me in a week to empty the cash box and bury my remains.

Alone now on the surface of this godless asteroid, I tossed my bag and bedding into the egg. I’d brought a single sheet and a pair of heavy, careworn quilts made by my great-grandmother, Mama Bessie—my mother’s mother’s mother—tough as old boot leather and the size of an emaciated gnome. Mama Bessie raised six children alone and came from a time when men were men and women were also men, due to all the men dying. She made her home near Possumneck, another nonplace, east of West and west of Ethel. I could not shake the strangeness of life—how one day, you’re a boy, hoping Santa Claus answers your letters, and the next, you’re living inside a fiberglass egg with a loaded rifle and a pair of heirloom quilts from a village that Santa will never again visit, for it no longer exists.

I worked myself ragged that first day, through the early sunset and into the blue-black chill of night. My overnight security would be arriving sometime before midnight. Donny had let me hire my own night watchman, and I’d selected my big brother, Bird, the only human I knew— besides my father—who seemed capable of manslaughter. He was in town for a few days and sleeping at the new house over at the reservoir, the one I hadn’t even been to yet.

When Bird finally showed up, my body was already covered in a fine layer of gunpowder. 

“What’s the new house like?” I said.

“It’s a house,” he said.

“I’m going to bed,” I said.

“What do you want me to do all night?” he said, surveying the ridiculous tent.

“Keep us both alive.” I handed him one of the pistols.

“I brought my own.”

“If something bad happens, wake me up,” I said.

“Just come out if you hear shooting,” Bird said.

That first morning, my big brother woke me with a vigorous rap on the door of the egg. I unfolded myself, thanked him, and he drove away, to return 16 hours later, as he would every night that holiday. Even when it turned steely cold, I found the solitary work hypnotic and absorbing, a way to vanquish the dread regime of time. For 18 hours, I unboxed and priced Roman candles, M-60s, Black Cats, Saturn missiles, my body covered in combustible dirt. At sunset, I walked the lot with a price gun in one hand and a pistol in the other. I warmed a bowl of Dinty Moore on the forbidden hot plate and watched holiday programming on a small TV on the counter.

When the weather turned cold and unexpected flurries began, I donned a woolen poncho and took my smoke breaks mere steps from the explosives, using the tractor-trailer as a windbreak. I must have looked a sight to the customers and dealers who came and went with some frequency from the Sex Lodge. Sometimes I read Shakespeare. I had a Complete Works the shape and size of a Bible, tiny print on cigarette paper. I had given some thought to becoming an actor, traveling the countryside with a troupe. Who needs a home when you’ve got a stage?

A hundred yards behind the tent, out in the scrubby desert of disemboweled cars, sat a cinderblock shed where a man with a wispy white mullet lived, sexton of the junkyard. I saw him only once a day when he tootled around the lot on a small dune buggy. One day after lunch, I walked across the gravel to introduce myself. Nobody answered and I walked away. Then a voice rang out.

“Ho, there!” 

I turned and there he was, in overalls and T-shirt, waving me back.

“I’m Otto,” he said.

“I’m working the tent,” I said. 

“I do like a sparkler from time to time,” he said, his mind wandering to a happier youth. 

“I’ve seen you out here on your dune buggy,” I said.

“That ain’t me,” he said. 

“Oh,” I said, though it was obviously him.

“That’s the other Otto.”

I wanted to ask him what it was like to live with dissociative identity disorder and which Otto would be slitting my throat later. But this Otto seemed pleasant. 

Customers were scarce—a few truck drivers, attorneys who drove over the bridge from downtown. One afternoon, a local TV reporter stopped by and asked to interview me for a segment on fireworks safety and I made up some important facts about fireworks safety. I must have looked like something dragged out of a bog, the scruffy character in the holiday movie who teaches life lessons.

I called Mom from the landline that ran into the tent from a nearby pole, to give her the number and offer proof of life.

“Could you come to the farm Christmas day, at least?” she said.

“I can’t,” I said.

“I left you a turkey breast, if you get a chance to go to the house,” she said.

“I can’t, I’m not allowed to leave.”

“I just hate this,” she said. “It’s Christmas.”

Isolation works a number on you. I almost wanted criminals to stop by. In the long stretch of dark between sundown and the arrival of my brother, I took to dragging a chair out in the middle of the lot, beyond the glow of the tent, under the great black ceiling of stars, staring up into the cold. I felt like Abraham when God told him to leave home and go find another one and that his family would grow as many as the stars above. I felt like Jacob, his grandson, who sleeps on the ground at night and demands a blessing and God puts him in a scissor hold and gives him a hip injury that lasts all his days. It always seemed odd to me that God would appear to Jacob and all Jacob wanted to do was wrestle. But after a week out on the moonscape, I understood. If God had shown up, I’d have wanted to wrestle, too. 

The night of Christmas Eve, I sat out in front of the tent looking at the stars, the faint wash of interstate traffic a distant waterfall. Where were all the people going? Back home or madly away? My school friends were spread across the country. Other friends were over beyond the gelid swamp rot at Martin’s, a seedy downtown lounge always lively in the homecoming days before Christmas, filled with a neon haze of cigarette smoke and the beautiful stench of whisky and ash. The thought of all that happiness made me sad. I didn’t want to be sad but you can’t help what you think about. All those people, at least the ones I knew, had homes to go back to, right there in town, warm childhood beds in leafy neighborhoods where they’d grown up and could probably keep coming back to for the rest of their lives, if they wanted. 

The idea of having a place to go back to—a house, a village, where you would know people and they would know you—seemed a priceless luxury beyond imagination. Pop had a place like that, at the Coldwater farm. He was there now, asleep next to Mom in a bed in his parents’ house, on the land he called home and always would. I had an egg on wheels.

When Bird showed up that night to let me sleep, I’d made up my mind.

“I’m going to the new house,” I said. 

“Thought you wasn’t supposed to leave,” he said.

“If Donny shows up, tell him I’m over at the motel.”

I careened through better parts of town, everything closed for Christmas Eve but shop windows gleaming yet with light. I wanted a shower. It would be a gift to myself, a small luxury, a humanizing act, a blessing to wrest from the grip of God. I pulled into the neighborhood, tucked away on a forgettable street among a series of forgettable subdivisions, each with its own forgettable boat ramp. The design of the homes was derivative at best, another subdivision without history, all those Frankenstein facades, a Victorian gable here, a Tudor chimney there, shallow porches, hollow columns. The new house was dark, just another brick ranch with shutters that wouldn’t close. 

As soon as I saw it, I laughed aloud: I’d once gone out with a girl who lived here, two or three years before. Uncanny. The girl, Libby, was so pretty, so kind, so tall, so blond—like a captain for the Finnish national volleyball team—and I remember feeling envy that she lived here, in a house, in a place where you could get pizza delivered right to your door. Life is weird.

Pop’s boat was backed into the open carport. Through the window, I caught the unmistakable glow of our lighted Christmas tree, though the house was empty. I found the key Pop had handed me a month before and tried the side door, but it didn’t work, and neither did any other key, and neither would the windows budge nor the locks be jimmied with a credit card. I kicked the shrubberies. I cursed the name of God. I whispered fuck very loudly. 

I climbed up into the bass boat, into the only good seat available, and smoked. 

Libby! Where had her family gone? The brass knocker on the front door still had her family’s surname on it. She’d lived here all her life, she said. Why’d they leave? Divorce? Promotion? A sudden turn of ill fortune? Where did she sleep now and was she sad about that? 

I guess it was in that moment that I must have first begun to see, through a glass, darkly, that all of us lose home eventually. Otto hadn’t been born in that cinderblock shed. Mom had no family farm. She had nothing but us, her children. No wonder she called the fireworks tent every night. When I took this ridiculous job and then hired her firstborn to risk his life so that I might sleep a little, I’d done more than cancel my own Christmas. I’d canceled everybody else’s, too. 

I threw my head back and exhaled a cloud of breath and smoke and overhead saw a perfect square cut into the carport ceiling. Maybe Christmas didn’t have to be annulled. Maybe I could climb through the ceiling and sit by the tree and just enjoy it, for an hour or two.

I found a ladder in the garage and climbed into the attic, crawling on hands and knees across ceiling joists with a lighter to show me the way. I would take a shower and make a delicious turkey sandwich. It would make Mom so happy to know she’d fed me. Maybe I would make a fire, sit by the tree, and watch It’s a Wonderful Life, remembering happier Christmases. Maybe even pray for a few more, down the road. I would make Bird a sandwich, too. 

Up in the rafters now, above what I reasoned was the kitchen, I kicked at every hole in the ceiling that looked like it might be an attic door, but nothing would give. I kicked and cursed like a failed St. Nick, with no gifts and no magic and no way into a house that would never be a home. No room in this inn. Not tonight.

I climbed out and drove back to the emptiness on US 80, where I half-expected to find Bird dead, all the money and fireworks gone, but he sat there, perfectly unharmed, a rifle across his lap, watching a snowy feed on the television. 

Later, Bird and I sat there together in the dark beyond the light of the tent and smoked. From the interstate, the warm red light of the striped canvas must have looked inviting in the blackness. The Bible says Jesus is just like that, a tent you can crawl inside. “Behold, the tabernacle of God is with men, and he will dwell with them, and they shall be his people, and God himself shall be with them, and be their God,” writes John in the Book of Revelation. 

“Merry Fucking Christmas, little brother,” Bird said.

“So merry,” I said, fingering the safety of my rifle.

We looked at the stars and told stories. I did not want to leave him alone and I think he did not want me to go to sleep. Whatever sadness I felt was as much my fault as anybody’s. I’d made my choices. Home was out there, somewhere. All the hymns said so. Maybe it would be a city or maybe it would be a church or a wife and children or a house on a beautiful street, or maybe it would just be peace in the invisible tabernacle that was Jesus. Who could know.

A few days later, the world descended upon the house of explosives and bought almost everything. Nobody died, I saw no drug deals gone wrong, nobody shot anybody, and Otto didn’t show himself again and neither did the other Otto. I hired a few friends to help out on New Year’s Eve, and it was nice to have company. 

After midnight, when the crowd finally thinned and the traffic slowed, out beyond the glow of the tent, my friends fired off bottle rockets and multi-shot aerials, which burst in bright bouquets of color and light over the junkyard and far across the darkness of the river, and it was fun to see them having fun, but my mind was already down the road, toward some new future where I might never have to be alone again at the most wonderful time of the year. A family. A wife. A place to sleep without wheels. My last night on the lot, in the trailer shaped like an egg, I felt ready to hatch and fly toward some new home. 

These days, I don’t know what to tell people when they ask where I’m from. I have lived in Tennessee, Texas, Louisiana, Alabama, Illinois, North Carolina, and Wyoming, and I’ve lived in Savannah, Georgia, now for 17 years—longer than I’ve ever lived anywhere. My mother lives here and my father is buried here, under soft green grass five minutes from my house. I have a wife, too, who moved as a child even more than I did. We have three girls. One will be off to college next fall and the other two after that. I like the idea of staying here so that our children can be from somewhere, even when they leave. It’s nice to know where you’re from.

When people ask where I’m from, I still say “Mississippi.”

And people say, “Whereabouts?”

Sometimes I say, “The Piney Woods.”

Sometimes, “Brandon,” where I had my first kiss.

Or “Star,” where I went to high school.

Or “Puckett,” where I hit that homerun. 

Mostly I just say “You haven’t heard of it. I haven’t even heard of it.”

I still think about that big circus tent. Strangely enough, I now live mere blocks from the very origins of the old Dixie Overland Highway, US 80. They call it Victory Drive here in Savannah, Georgia, but it’s the very same road that runs right by the tent where I worked that December, some 600 miles to the east. I ride my bike across this road to go to work. Crossing that road is like fording a river of time that runs back through the weird history of my little life and all the places I’ve lived and left. Sometimes I think the only home any of us have is in the tabernacle of memory, though I do own a pretty brick house on a leafy street, which feels as close to paradise as I’ll ever get, at least on this side of the Gloryland Way.

The year after I worked the tent, I heard that my successor had been robbed of all his money in the middle of the night and stripped naked, gagged, and bound to a pole. Discovered hours later he was believed to be dead but was only asleep. They say he was fine. I still drive over that piece of interstate every few years when I come back to Mississippi, and I always look off toward the moonscape with fondness; that desolation where I spent the loneliest Christmas of my life. The motel is still there, and so is Otto’s cottage. I don’t know if the tent goes up anymore. In place of the large fireworks sign is a great big banner promising romantic adventures. I have often considered stopping, to have a closer look and stand there amid the wasteland and feel the sweet pang of lost youth, but having no weapon, I drive on.

Harrison Scott Key is the author of three nonfiction books, including How to Stay Married: The Most Insane Love Story Ever Told, Congratulations Who Are You Again, and The World’s Largest Man. He lives in Savannah, Georgia.

Editor: Carolyn Wells
Copyeditor: Krista Stevens

I felt caught in a peculiar quandary. If I repeated details that G had already written down, was I relying on a primary source or appropriating what my peers in creative-writing workshops would call her “lived experience”? The tautology maddened me. I had lived the experience, too, yet I felt like either a mimic, reciting my family’s recollections, or a fabulist, mistaking my imagination for fact. My ignorance isolated me from G and our mom. I had a sense that I was hammering on a bolted door, begging them to admit me to an awful place. And why would I want to get in? Well, because they were there.

First, a young queen flies two to three kilometres from her hive. It’s a rare moment of solitude—the only time in her life she’s alone. Aside from this flight and to swarm, she never leaves the hive. If she dies, her hive risks dying too, each generation depending on her to reproduce; aside from a few exceptions, the queen is the only reproductive female bee in the hive. Once she reaches the drone gathering area, usually open airspace above a visibly-distinct landmark (perhaps a boulder or a steeple) she mates with ten to twenty drones, or male bees. With this act, the queen packs a lifetime of sperm into her spermatheca — a small pearl-shaped organ located just above her poison sac and stinger. She never has to mate again and, over her two-to-five-year lifespan, will lay 150,000 eggs from spring to fall, hatching into about 1,500 bees per day. During sex, the drone’s phallus explodes, killing him immediately. His purpose singular and disposable, his role complete.

I don’t want sperm delivered like UberEats or bartered for a bottle of rosé on local trade groups — but I do wonder about creating a more collective model of sperm and egg donation. Like my own potential family, honeybees also select one individual to reproduce on the families’ behalf — millenia has taught bees that it is advantageous to divide up this labour. The queen becomes a queen by being fed extra royal jelly: a protein-rich secretion made from digested pollen and honey. These extra delicious helpings let her reproductive system fully form, unlike worker bees, which don’t have complete reproductive systems. They share the rest of the labour. In Canada, queer men are prohibited from donating sperm in the same way that they were banned from donating blood — no dice unless you’ve been abstinent for three months, even if you’re in a long-term monogamous relationship. This denial seems like a missed opportunity — there is a long history of queer people helping each other start families, a sense of reciprocity and generosity that goes beyond heteropatriarchal norms.

Pain is easier to bear than anguish, I’ve learned. I poke at the blossoms of purple that splatter my thighs and savor the pain. I’m not alone. We all show off our swollen fingers and compare scars. We reshape our muscles. We rewire our thinking. We’re turning from daughters and nurses and chaplains and wives into warriors.

I imagine the front door swinging open and I stride inside, swollen with confidence, transformed into someone who won’t take shit any longer. A mom who can shield her children from chaos and only let their father’s love filter through. Because he loves them, I know this to my core, as much as he can care for anyone. I don’t yet understand the bruises even love inflicts.

I was 12 when I learned. My mother and I were sitting at the kitchen table when I wondered aloud what I’d do if I ever had a disabled child. This provided her with an opening.

Her name is Adele.

My grandmother told my mother that she instantly knew something was different when Adele was born. Her cry wasn’t like other babies’. She was inconsolable, had to be carried everywhere. Her family doctor said nonsense, Adele was fine. For an entire year, he maintained that she was fine, even though, at the age of 1, she couldn’t hold a bottle and didn’t respond to the stimuli that other toddlers do. I can’t imagine what this casual brush-off must have done to my grandmother, who knew, in some back cavern of her heart, that her daughter was not the same as other children. But it was 1952, the summer that Adele turned 1. What male doctor took a working-class woman without a college education seriously in 1952?

Only when my mother and her family went to the Catskills that same summer did a doctor finally offer a very different diagnosis. My grandmother had gone to see this local fellow not because Adele was sick, but because she was; Adele had merely come along. But whatever ailed my grandmother didn’t capture this man’s attention. Her daughter did. He took one look at her and demanded to know whether my aunt was getting the care she required.

In March of 1953, my grandparents took Adele, all of 21 months, to Willowbrook State School. It would be many years before I learned exactly what that name meant, years before I learned what kind of gothic mansion of horrors it was. And my mother, who didn’t know how to explain what on earth had happened, began telling people that she was an only child.

Before a person dies, you talk to them. They die, and you still want to talk to them. But their body is gone. When my sister would come home from college, I would sometimes go into her room and just sit there, hoping she would ask me about what felt at the time to me like the major dramas of my life (I would have been four­teen, fifteen). I was too shy to raise them with her. Now she was drifting away and I was in that same room, holding a book of hers from those same years, her notes inside, and all I could do was read to myself.

The touchingly literal conceit of the Olds poem is that death is like this: a problem of a body having gone missing. You face some­body when you talk to them; if their body is gone, and you wish to go on talking, you must search for a new way of facing them. The poem elaborates this hypothesis, testing it out. The speaker turns to a “new rose,” only to realize that at night we can’t see color, leav­ing the lawn “grey,” the rose “glowing white.” Has the poem found a new way of seeing in the dark, or has grief drained all color from the world?

The desire to talk to the dead requires the “as if” of figurative language: a descent from the world of the living to an underworld. As the poet addresses the absent grandmother, she conjures her into the poem, and yet what appears is a person who had already, even in life, turned toward the darkened state of death: not knitting, not reading. The only unbroken lines in the poem are its final ones, in which the speaker seems to have reconciled herself to having noth­ing more than the imperfect, residual knowledge that death allows.

At the heart of the poem, though, lies a terrible doubt. “Are the dead there / if we do not speak to them?” If our speech is what has seemed to grant others their presence in the first place, have we been fooling ourselves all along? Have we mistaken the projection of our own imagination, reflected back to us at night, for a dim impres­sion of the person whom we miss? “Why do I tell you these things?” John Ashbery asks at the end of one poem. “You are not even here.”

I was meant to visit him three weeks after he left that message, but on the morning of my flight to Juneau, Alaska, I tested positive for COVID-19. I’d contracted the virus while working on a story in New Mexico—my first profile for the magazine I hoped to impress by flying halfway around the world to interview a novelist. While listening to old messages from my uncle, I dwelled bitterly on two unfulfilled promises I had made when calling to say I couldn’t make it home in January: the first was that I would get to Alaska and see him again soon; the second was that he was going to love the profile I had been working on in New Mexico. It ended up being published ten days after he died.

They thought it best to leave town for a bit, and they asked Haley where she wanted to go. Her favorite thing she had ever seen in her short life was the Gateway Arch, which they’d visited on a family vacation, so they decided to take a short trip to St. Louis. During the drive up, Haley told them for the first time—told anyone for the first time—about her “imaginary friend,” Alecia.

From the moment Alecia first appeared in the story, Haley insisted on that slightly unorthodox spelling, although she did not yet perfectly know how to read. She also insisted on other specific details. Alecia was four years old. She had long, dark hair tied in pigtails. She wore a red shirt with purple sleeves, bell-bottom pants, and white sneakers. She had a flashlight. She guided Haley to the river.

“I never had imaginary friends before this experience,” Haley told me, “and I never had any after. And I never saw this particular imaginary friend again.” She did not think at any time that Alecia was a real child. “I was fully aware that this was a non-corporeal being that was with me. And she was a little girl, and we had conversations, we told stories, we played patty-cake, and she was just a very comforting presence. But I knew I was alone.” The hallucinations started later, after she’d already made it to the river. Alecia was not a vision of this sort. “I one hundred percent did not think there was another child with me. I knew, physically, I was alone.” But she also says that Alecia guided her to the river, which she didn’t know was there.

There is a phenomenon called third man syndrome, or third man factor: when some sort of unseen or incorporeal conscious presence seems to accompany people—often a person alone—going through a long, difficult, and frightening experience they do not know they will survive. It is not well understood. It may be some sort of emergency coping mechanism. It was most famously experienced by Sir Ernest Shackleton during one of his expeditions to the Antarctic; the mountaineer Reinhold Messner has also reported experiencing the phenomenon, as have the explorers Peter Hillary and Ann Bancroft. “During that long and racking march of thirty-six hours over the unnamed mountains and glaciers of South Georgia,” Shackleton wrote in his 1919 memoir, South, “it seemed to me often that we were four, not three.”