Atticus NFT Collection: 2.2
“The Deep Field”
by Steven Swiryn

With Art by Adriana Quezada

Wait for a clear, dark night. Hold a straight-pin between your finger and thumb. Now, stretch it to arm’s length so that the pinhead covers a tiny piece of the night sky, not over a star, but in the space between the stars. Imagine taking a snapshot of that dark spot. Opening the camera’s shutter for only the fraction of a second you would need to snap the snapdragons and nasturtiums in your sunny garden will reveal nothing. You need to gather more light.

The Hubble Space Telescope, during ten days in December, 1995, gathered all the faint, un-flickering1 light it could for 200 hours of just such a pinhead point of sky north of the Big Dipper. They named it the Deep Field, a nondescript, “empty” piece of sky, chosen not, as are almost all Hubble tasks, to image some known object like the Seven Sisters star cluster, or a dust cloud the shape of a horsehead, or that rugby-shirted brawler, Jupiter, but to see what, if anything, dazzled out there in the cold dim distance of space.

Hubble Deep Field-North, HDF-N, Jan. 15, 1996
R. Williams (STScI), the Hubble Deep Field Team and NASA

The result resembles a jeweler’s pad of black velvet with a spill of precious stones. The image2 shows only eight or nine foreground stars3 out of the 250 billion or so in our own Milky Way galaxy. Behind them—beyond them—are thousands of multi-colored jewels of myriad shapes and sizes, each one a galaxy, each one another entire Milky Way of billions of stars. The Milky Way is not just the elegant “cloudy” streak that we city dwellers, sadly, don’t get to see anymore because of light pollution. It’s the name for our entire galaxy. “Galaxy” comes from the Greek word for milk. Think “galactic” and its cognate, “lactation.”

The eight or nine local sparkles in the image of the Hubble Deep Field (HDF) are like the first raindrops on a windowpane at the furtive beginning of a summer shower, through which you have taken a photo of the distant purpled mountains. The presence of the raindrops on the window locates us inside our modest earthen home, looking out toward the distant majesty we cannot touch. In 1995 Robert Williams, former Director of the Space Telescope Science Institute,4 chose a location for the Deep Field to be as empty of nearby stars and interstellar dust as possible, as if you had avoided as much of the rain-dropped window as possible to see the farthest mountains. Three years later, a second Deep Field image, this time over the southern hemisphere in the constellation, Tucana, showed a similar plethora of distant galaxies.

That speck of night sky in Ursa Major or in Tucana is one of twenty-five million possible pinhead-sized specks (fields of view) that surround the earth and, if you gathered its light for 200 hours, each of these other sky-specks would reveal thousands of jewel-like whorls, blobs, or bars, each one a galaxy. In every direction, over every bit of our celestial sphere. Twenty-five million pieces of sky, each with thousands of galaxies, each galaxy with billions of stars. The numbers, we feel—we can’t think that high so we must feel—are too big.

If the numbers overwhelm, so, too, do the distances. If you glanced at the Deep Field photograph, instead of studying it, you might overlook the foreground stars. It’s the mountains, and not the raindrops on the window, that are the subject of the photo. The window is only a foot from your camera and the mountains twenty miles—distances with which we are familiar. But distances even to these foreground Milky Way stars are mostly hundreds or thousands of light years away! One light year is six trillion miles. Yes, but how far is that? You can try, “over two hundred billion marathons,” but that doesn’t help much. What about sixty-five thousand times as far as the sun? Or, about 150 thousand times the length of all the world’s highways. More than one tank of gas, even in your hybrid. The “mountain majesties” of the Deep Field, each a galaxy, are not twenty, or hundreds, but millions or even billions of light years away. It’s not just the number of objects, but the distances, that overwhelm.

Also overwhelming is the time. We are looking at a photograph of the past. Not of yesterday, when the nasturtiums bloomed, only to be snatched by my wife and thrown into the dinner salad; or of the mid-20th century, when my dad coached high school basketball (so did Edwin Hubble, a half century earlier); or of the Mesozoic Era of 100 million years ago in the time of dinosaurs; but billions of years ago. Toward the beginning of time.

You are always looking back in time. What you see is the light reflected, or, in the case of a firefly or a star, light created, and then traveling to your eye. That travel takes time. Light, though, moves so fast it can circle the earth seven-and-one-half times in a second. That’s why a light year is such a vast distance. The light reflected off the mail carrier on the front stoop hits your eye with imperceptibly brief delay. Still, the mail carrier slipped those bills and advertisements into the slot just before you saw her do it. When the distances are greater, the delay becomes perceptible. Light takes more than a second to arrive here from the moon; more than eight minutes from the sun. In a second, light moves 186,000 miles; in a year, the distance called a light year. Yes, a light year is not a measure of time, but a measure of distance.

Betelgeuse, the red giant at Orion’s eastern shoulder, and 700 light years from the earth, began to dim in late 2019, suggesting that it was ready to explode into a supernova—the death of a star. By early 2020, it appeared to stop dimming, and has been reprieved. If you did see Betelgeuse explode into a supernova tonight, you would be seeing what happened to that star seven hundred years ago, at the time of another great plague—the black death—because the light from such an explosion would take that long to get here. And if Betelgeuse exploded tonight, you wouldn’t get to see it at all, unless you have Methuselean genes. You and I have not been reprieved.

The more you appreciate how fast light travels, the more astounding become the distances to the bright stars. How do we measure how far away a star or galaxy is? You can’t pace it off like I learned to do in scouts. My eyes are set apart, not just to make space for my nose, but so I can perceive distance. Parallax, the perception that a nearby object seems to shift its position against its background if, observing from a slightly different angle, you look with one eye closed and then the other, was used to measure “nearby” distances, most famously, the distance from earth to the sun, taking advantage of the transit of Venus.5 However, the parallax method becomes unworkable at the large distances of most celestial objects; the distance between your two eyes, or opposite sides of tiny earth itself, or even opposite sides of the earth’s orbit around the sun with one observation in June and one in December, are all too narrow to measure the angle accurately.

What about brightness? Surely a closer star will, other things equal, be brighter than one farther away. When, as a child, I got a flashlight for my birthday, shining it down a long hallway at my big sister didn’t seem that bright to her. The next morning I brought it right next to her eyes and pulled up her eyelid to wake her. After seven decades, she still complains about how bright, as opposed to her dim little brother, the flashlight shone when it was close.

But the stars are not identical like sixty-watt lightbulbs; their brightness varies by a factor of thousands. Sirius, the Dog Star, which can be found by scanning southeast from Orion’s belt, is the brightest star in our sky, other than the sun. Sirius is “only” eight light years from us. Being so close, it appears bright. Polaris, the north star, is only the forty-eighth brightest, yet Polaris is 450 light years away. Its apparent brightness is only forty-eighth, but its absolute brightness is much greater than Sirius. From equal distances, Sirius would be twenty-five times as bright as our sun; Polaris, over two thousand times as bright.

Polaris is a variable star. It gets slightly brighter and dimmer every four days, that is, with a period of four days. In 1912, Miss Henrietta Leavitt, a “computer”6 at Harvard Observatory, discovered that for certain variable stars the period had a predictable mathematical relationship with absolute brightness. This led to the ability to compute distance. The observed period—the time between peaks of brightness—gives you absolute brightness. The apparent brightness, what you actually see, compared with absolute brightness calculated from the period, gives you distance. The prototype for such stars was not Polaris, but a star in the constellation Cepheus, the king of Ethiopia, spouse of Cassiopeia, daddy of Andromeda. These variable stars are called Cepheid variables.

Thanks in part to the computations of Henrietta Leavitt, Edwin Hubble made a name for himself, and a name for the Space Telescope, with two giant discoveries: first, that certain celestial objects called nebulae were not dust clouds within our Milky Way, but distant galaxies; second, that these galaxies are moving away from each other.

All of the objects one sees with the naked eye in the night sky, all the stars, including Betelgeuse, Polaris and Sirius, five planets and our moon, shooting stars, comets, and dust clouds, are a part of our Milky Way galaxy. Stargazing from the northern hemisphere, there are few exceptions; the brightest is the Andromeda galaxy. If you know where to look, halfway between Pegasus and Cassiopeia, and there is no moon glare or much light pollution, you can find the Andromeda galaxy as a “faint fuzzy,” bigger than the full moon, but dim and diffuse. Early in the twentieth century, astronomers argued whether this Andromeda “nebula” was a cloud of dust within the Milky Way or a huge object beyond our own galaxy. Charles Messier, who in 1764 catalogued the Andromeda galaxy as M31 in his list,7 thought it hovered only 16,000 light years distant, which would place it within the Milky Way. In 1923, Edwin Hubble confirmed the true distance by observing a Cepheid variable, “V1,” in the Andromeda “nebula.”8

Hubble, who as a teenager had set the Illinois state high school high jump record at a track meet held at Northwestern University, where I now teach, studied astronomy at the University of Chicago. Later, at Mt. Wilson in California, observing Cepheid variable V1 within the Andromeda nebula, Hubble could calculate that M31 lurked 2.5 million light years distant,9 more than ten times the farthest reaches of our Milky Way; a separate galaxy. Not at all part of the neighborhood you would invite to a Milky Way block party, though Andromeda is one of the closest of the galaxies. Again, we are looking back in time; the light Edwin Hubble collected at Mt. Wilson left the Andromeda Galaxy 2.5 million years ago, even before our ancestor, Homo erectus, evolved in Africa.

All those galaxies in the Deep Field are moving. When Amtrak rushes by, its roar changes from higher to lower pitch as it passes.10 This doppler effect results from the crowding of sound waves as the train approaches, and their stretching apart after it goes by. If we apply that understanding to starlight instead of sound, the spectrum created by a prism shows the same doppler effect. The visible light spectrum is blue-shifted—to higher frequencies—if the star is moving towards us and red-shifted—to lower frequencies, red being towards the low frequency end —if the star is moving away.

Hubble, calculating spectral shifts and comparing them with distance measurements from Cepheid variables, proved that in every direction galaxies were moving away from us, a red shift, as if all coming from the same focus.11 Hubble also proved that the farther away the galaxies were, the more extreme the red shift, that is, the faster they were moving away. The universe is expanding.

Picturing the oldest galaxies in a Deep Field as they were billions of years ago, we appreciate the earliest moments of the universe and changes that take place as it ages. Now there is an Ultra Deep Field and, more recently, built of ten years of Hubble exposures, an Extreme Deep Field—each one able to see dimmer galaxies, farther back, closer to the time of the Big Bang.

The James Webb Space Telescope has extended Deep Field observations since its launch on Christmas day, 2021. Larger than Hubble,12 with better resolution of the dim distance, the JWST collected a Deep Field as one of its first images. The JWST instruments are sensitive to light in the infrared range of the electromagnetic spectrum, with the advantage that infrared better penetrates interstellar dust—dust which otherwise hides the objects behind it. For events of the earliest period after the Big Bang, the red shift is extreme enough to have stretched the light from its original ultraviolet and visible ROYGBIV range to the longer wavelengths of infrared. JWST gets us farther back in time than we can see with Hubble.

So many, so far, so old! Does it make me feel insignificant? Distant? Short-lived? No, it somehow makes me feel grand. The wonders I can wander in; the delightful mystery stories I can spin with my grandchildren. Does it make me feel alone? Not a chance. With billions of stars in each of billions of galaxies, often circled by their own “exoplanets,”13 it is inconceivable that we earthlings are the only life in town.

The Hubble Deep Field, its image first published in 1996, is a spiritual statement. What surrounds us? Where have we come from? The world is not 6,000 years old; it’s closer to fourteen billion—we have seen its photograph. Does that mean that God does not exist? Of course not. Though I’m not a believer myself, any omnipotent God that you may believe in could easily have set all this in motion.

There is a chair where I sit and read, left on our glassed-in sunporch by the previous owner of our house. Once, I am certain, it was an energetic young chair with plush cushions, unfaded upholstery, and a fresh swivel that still allows me to ease my eyes to the backyard as blossoms celebrate the river birch and the crabapple. Now the chair sags a bit, tilts a bit, even squeaks, though so softly it evokes distance more than decay. I often lift my head from my book and, stretching my neck and shoulders, stare down at the garden and imagine. There are days when I see only the raindrops on the window. Others, I rest my book on my knee, set my glasses on the table near my now-cold coffee and listen for the doppler effect, to sense what’s coming at me and what’s receding. I have lived three quarters of the last century of the one hundred forty million centuries represented in an image of celestial history. The Deep Field is a long look back, yet also a look forward. Tonight, if the sky is clear, I will zip my soft green fleece against the chill of Chicago’s early spring to keep vigil as Betelgeuse sinks in the west. A poet has said, “Friend, tell me what to do, since I am a man in love with the setting stars.”14

Endnotes

1. The HST, being above the earth’s atmosphere, does not have to deal with the twinkle, twinkle of little stars.

2. https://hubblesite.org/contents/media/images/1996/01/388-Image.html?news=true

3. The foreground stars can be recognized by their “diffraction spikes,” making them look even more star-like.

4. This decision of Williams and his team to image an “empty” piece of sky, committing precious Hubble-time resources with the risk they would find only emptiness, was one of the most difficult in the project’s planning phase.

5. Twice every 243 years, eight years apart (the last time in 2004 and 2012) we can observe Venus from distant sites (“eyes”) on Earth as it passes directly between the Earth and the Sun, measure the parallax angle between the sites, and compute the distance from Earth to Sun. This distance has been known accurately since the transit of 1769 when one “eye” was the major scientific purpose of Captain Cook’s voyage to the South Pacific.

6. In 1912, only the men at the Harvard Observatory could call themselves “Astronomers.” The women worked in a separate building, cataloguing and measuring glass plate photographs and other data.

7. Messier was searching for comets, and when he found interesting objects that turned out not to be comets, he catalogued them as M1 through M110 so he wouldn’t get misled by them again. Finding all 110 objects in the night sky is a fun exercise for stargazers. Though it can be done in one night as a “Messier Marathon” if you are experienced, it took me more than two years of sporadic vacation observations away from city light pollution.

8. NASA has posted photos of Hubble’s V1 here:
https://science.nasa.gov/asset/hubble/cepheid-variable-star-v1-in-andromeda-galaxy/

9. Hubble’s actual estimate was 1.5 million light years, a million light years too low. But it was accurate enough to place the “nebula” well outside the Milky Way. It’s not that he was sloppy in his calculations, only that the amount of interstellar dust interposed between us and Andromeda, attenuating its apparent brightness, was not then known.

10. Amtrak may not deserve the word “rushes.” The earth spins on its axis at just over 1,000 mph—doesn’t it turn its 25,000 mile circumference back to its starting place in 24 hours?—and whirls around the sun at 66,000 mph. The sun, in turn, whips around the center of the Milky Way at more than 500,000 mph! You, too, are moving this rapidly, and by now have covered a startling amount of ground (space).

11. The “Big Bang”.

12. The primary mirror (the light-collecting “bucket”) of the JWST is twenty-two feet in diameter compared to eight feet for Hubble and it gathers about five times as much light.

13. An exoplanet is a planet outside our solar system, usually revolving around a star. However, though life must be out there somewhere, it may be so far away that we would never meet. Or, it destroyed itself long ago. Or, it found us boring and didn’t bother to stop by.

14. Robert Bly, from the title poem in The Night Abraham Called to the Stars.

Atticus NFT Collection: 2.1
“The Bread Winner”
by Meg Thompson

With Art by Adriana Quezada

The bread winner had a girl. She stared at the baby’s face all night, as if it were the moon in a dream.

She feels like she is still dreaming sometimes, even though that first baby just turned nine. The pediatrician asked at the annual exam if the girl had started her cycle yet. The bread winner’s son, sitting on her lap, asked, the cycle of what?

No, she told the pediatrician. Her daughter had not started her cycle yet.

As a matter of fact, she still carries her baby dolls to their blow-up pool and dresses herself up like Moana, pretending an orange, plastic rake is an oar. From the kitchen window, the bread winner watches her daughter standing upright in the middle of the pool. With her back to the bread winner, paddling with her oar, it looks like she is sailing away. In the midst of playing, her daughter slips one of the dresses from her dolls onto their dog that, at eight pounds, is fully grown. A newborn, forever.

//

When her children were quite small, not even school-age, the bread winner used to walk into the bathroom, kneel on the floor, put her face in her hands, and cry. She could hear them playing off in the living room, but she cried as silently as possible anyway. She kept it short, only a minute or two, knowing they would eventually toddle into the bathroom, looking for her.

Her mother-in-law texted her once while she was crying, as if she knew, and asked her how she was doing. The bread winner stared at her phone, understanding exactly what the question meant, but not knowing how to answer.

The bread winner always rubbed cold water on her eyes before she walked back out to the living room.

Lay down, Mommy, her children said. We need to hear your heart beef.

The bread winner lay down on the rug. Her son pounded on her chest with a plastic mallet. Her daughter pinched the tip of her nose with a pair of toy tweezers. Both children were breathless with laughter. The bread winner moved her head almost imperceptibly to look at the clock, something she only let herself do a few times a day. It was 8:30 in the morning. She closed her eyes.

//

The bread winner had always been a very specific sort of person, and she had crafted her life around this idea of herself. She never dreamed of being a mother. She never dreamed of being anything. The idea of naming a dream job felt like a dream itself, a hopeless wanting, or a classroom activity for a preschooler. Who do you want to be when you grow up, little girl? Her own husband tells her she is the least romantic person he knows, something the bread winner takes pride in. Once, at a job interview, one of her future colleagues asked if she wanted some coffee. Yes. Thank you.

How do you take it?

Black, someone answered for her. Look at her.

//

The bread winner helped her son brush his teeth before bed. He wiped his eyes, and she realized he was crying. When she asked him what was wrong, he said he didn’t want to go to bed.

Why not?

Because I’m going to miss you.

//

Someone is standing on the bread winner’s front porch with a clipboard in his hands. The bread winner wipes her hands on her apron.

When she opens the door, he comments on her Guns N’ Roses t-shirt. Wow, love that band so much. You look way too young to know who they are. You ever see them in concert?

The bread winner’s children loll on their iPads. She can feel the cookie dough starting to dry on her hands as the salesman points at her gutters. She nods, standing half in her living room, half on the porch, balancing the weight of the door against her hip.

The salesman clicks his pen. What’s a good phone number? Is your husband home? Would he be angry if we came back?

//

Her son starts first grade. Now both of her children are gone all day, in the shadowed halls of the elementary school down the street, leaving the bread winner at home. The bread winner didn’t cry until one of her friends texted her How are you doing.

She sits in the living room. She keeps thinking about the sound of the clock ticking, which seems so much louder than before.

//

What was it, the bread winner wondered, that I was actually supposed to do? She knew she never should have asked herself this, not even rhetorically, but she couldn’t help herself. Everywhere she looked, she saw landmines, full of critique, someone waiting to tell her what she should be doing.

Have you tried applesauce?

Try putting blueberries on her plate everyday. Eventually, she’ll eat them.

Just let her have an accident at school. She’ll get made fun of so much that she’ll figure it out.

//

The greatest loaf of bread is sourdough. Humble, unassuming, ancient in its traditions, sitting in a plastic bag at a bakery like a relic from a long-ago stone kitchen. The bread winner stares at it and dreams about being able to make her own. Or a rye, heavy and bright, almost tart with seeds, the kind she used to mound with cream cheese when she was a girl. Or a honey wheat, striking the mysterious balance between fluffy and chewy. Or maybe even Japanese milk bread, toasted, with butter, the kind she had with her sister, hungover, in Tokyo, arguably the best bread she ever tasted. The bread winner imagines pulling each separate loaf out of her oven and resting it on a cooling rack on her table next to a white dish of butter, salted and whipped up into a cone as light and soft as foam.

//

Mommy, can I ask you sumpin?

Yes.

Is your job to drive us around?

Yes.

Do you wike it?

Yes.

Did you ever have anudder job?

Yes.

Do you miss it?

Yes.

//

The bread winner listened to an interview with Terry Gross, illustrious host of NPR’s Fresh Air for over forty years, but this time Terry Gross was actually the one being interviewed. The interviewer asked her what it was like growing up, and Terry Gross explained that her mother had a job until she became a mother, and that, well, she doesn’t mean to be unfair to her mother or to the women she knew, but they “seemed to be living very circumscribed lives where it was just basically about staying home and cleaning, and raising the kids and being very protective of the kids, even when the kids wanted out. It just didn’t seem like the most fulfilling job in the world.”

//

The bread winner immersed herself in the world of platitudes when she started baking bread. The language soothed her, the way it must feel if you are entering a 12-step program, or a cult. One old chestnut that the bread winner really took to was that the most important ingredient is time. She found herself repeating it, like a mantra, when she would look down into the jar at the concrete-like blend of flour and water. TikTok assured her that maintaining a vigorous sourdough starter, much like weight loss and cleaning her entire house, was easy.

She felt her collar pull in toward her neck. She looked down at her son, tugging on her shirt. Mommy.

One of the bread winner’s friends gave her a sourdough starter which the bread winner promptly killed. For a year, the bread winner tried, and failed, to get her own starter going. She knew it was possible, she just had to acknowledge this addiction. Eventually, the bread winner changed her handle to Sourdoughender on Instagram. What does that mean, her sister asked.

//

The bread winner stares at a worksheet her son brought home from school. She has to force herself to remain calm when she helps him do his homework. She wanted to home school her children because of worksheets like these. They appear innocuous but are designed to smolder every last fiber of creativity that exists in the mind of a child. The language of the worksheet is ambiguous, but only to her, she knows, based on the way she can feel her husband looking at her, concerned, from across the living room. She sits at the kitchen table running her hands through her hair.

Write yes or no to answer each question below

Is a master usually very young?

Can an opinion be proven with evidence?

Would you describe a tiny blade of grass as magnificent?

//

The bread winner asked her daughter if she wanted to try a candy cane.

No, she said. I don’t like food that is bent.

//

Mommy?

Yes.

Can I tell you bout a dream I had?

Yes.

We were all standin outside and we were watchin dees whole bunch of animals that were runnin to us from far away. It was a stampede. You know dat word mommy.

Yes.

Day kept gettin cwoser and cwoser until day got wite up cwose to us! Day were deer.

Yes.

Day all stopped and wooked at us. Den, one of dem wooked at you and I knew you had to go. Day were takin you. Because you are good with nature. And I knew I would never see you again.

//

One of the bread winner’s friends had a baby girl. The friend has a high-powered position where she sits at a big desk in the city. She took leave just long enough to push her baby out, feed her with her own body, and watch her open and close her eyes. The husband posted a picture of his beautiful wife leaving for work one morning, kissing their baby. Look at this rock star! he wrote as the caption. Our baby will grow up with a mother that sets a great example for hard-working girls everywhere!!!

#girlboss

#girlpower

#whorunstheworld

#workingmoms

//

The bread winner understands anti-vaxxers in a new way after she takes both children in for their shots.

The screaming begins as soon as the car turns in an unfamiliar direction. Her daughter is hyper-aware, like her, but in a way that is robustly unnerving to be around. Her daughter remembers everything. A scraped knee when she toppled off her bike cresting an uneven ridge in the sidewalk. The house with the loud dog in the window. The bush with the snake. The hot pan. It breaks the bread winner’s heart that her daughter lives on the edge of fear that something bad will happen.

The bread winner’s son cries because his sister is crying. She has to heft both of them through the doors and practically sit on top of them in the waiting room to keep them from running away.

The crying borders on theatrical and rings in the bread winner’s ears for hours, even when they are sitting at McDonald’s afterwards, her children suspiciously content, almost jubilant, eating Happy Meals as if nothing has happened while the bread winner grips a black coffee and stares out the window.

The bread winner had to spread her body on top of her son while the nurse got the needle ready. The bread winner pretended that she wasn’t there, that she couldn’t hear her daughter wailing. She couldn’t hear her son begging for all of it to end. She was somewhere else, a nameless place that she refers to as Away. She repeated it: away, away, away. The bread winner floated there on a small cloud. She was still on the small cloud when she lifted herself off her son and pulled her daughter out from under the table and asked her to think about something happy.

The nurse had to call for back-up. Another nurse came in to hold down the lower half of her daughter while the bread winner held down the top half. The bread winner smoothed her daughter’s hair, the way she used to do when her daughter was a baby. She would pet her daughter in the same motion, over and over, until they both fell asleep.

As the needle went in, her daughter bellowed in long, ragged sobs, I’m thinking about a unicoooooooooooorn.

//

Mommy.

Yes.

Do you want to hear me spell yellow?

Yes.

Y. E. Eleven. O. W. Is that right?

//

The bread winner asked her mother-in-law to watch her children for a few hours one night so she could go out to dinner with her husband. When she told her son that his grandma was coming over to watch him and his sister, he looked at her. Watch me do what?

//

The bread winner developed a sourdough starter. It didn’t die. She dwelled on how long it took, a process of days, then weeks, which seeped into months, as she learned how to keep it alive. It is like raising children, the bread winner thought, standing alone in her quiet kitchen on a Tuesday morning, staring at a jar. All of a sudden, it happens.

When they aren’t in school, her children mill around the house, moving in and out of her line of sight, making little jokes about the starter, like asking her what she is going to feed it. They think that it eats dinner, like a person, like she will serve it a plate of food with a knife and fork and the starter will consume it. She named the starter Breadna.

The bread tasted like it did in her dreams. Blistered crust, delicate tang, she ate it all summer in the form of thickly-layered tomato sandwiches with mayo and crunchy French sea salt. Her sister, sitting in the kitchen with her, asked how she finally got it to work. The bread winner turned her head to look in the living room, where her son was swinging a plastic sword and watching SpongeBob. Then she looked the other way, out her back door, where her daughter was floating in her pool. The kitchen was very quiet, except for her and her sister.

That’s how.

//

On the way to pick up her children from school, the bread winner drove past the local fire station. Out front, they had a sign that said:

Smoke detectors work!!

So can you!

//

Mommy.

Yes.

Sometimes I try to think about nothing, but it’s hard. I can’t do it. Do you know what I mean?

Yes.

So when I can’t think about nothing, I just think about blankness. And when I can’t do that, I think about a tiger, running. And when I can’t do that, I think about the void.

Did you just say you think about the void?

Yes.

//

Like mist coming off a lake in the morning, her husband continued to rise in his company. She watched him go, up and up, and hoped he wouldn’t disappear into a management position. This has always been her fear, that she would have to share him even more with everybody else. In this way, she was Michelle Obama, who felt the same internal struggle about watching Barack in his early days. When the bread winner caught herself worrying about this, she thought about the Obamas. They seem to have done alright, she told herself.

The bread winner’s husband makes more money than she ever did. His health insurance is better, and he gets more vacation days. So when the bread winner left her job, it felt as if she were merely making her life more compact. Functional. She was picking up all the misfit clumps of Play-Doh and, cupping them in her hands, shaping them into one smooth, round ball. What’s the big deal? Why does everyone make such a fuss about this? She just left a job that she had a Master’s degree in, that gave her a rich sense of fulfillment, and that she traveled around the world doing.

What?

//

One night the bread winner and her husband couldn’t get either of their children to fall asleep. It was as if the children had agreed a few hours beforehand that tonight they would take turns, every thirty minutes or so, coming to one of their parents with a full-blown anxiety attack. At one point her daughter came to her, tears in her eyes, terrified there was a monster hiding in her room. The bread winner tried everything she could think of to convince her daughter there was nothing in her room that was trying to hurt her, but her daughter did not believe her, and kept pacing around their small house, clutching a stuffed rabbit, sobbing. Finally, the bread winner grabbed her by the shoulders and knelt in front of her. She launched into a long-winded rant about how daddy would sooner die than let anything bad happen to his family and that everything he does, in some way or another, is about protecting his home and the people inside it. The bread winner hated giving in to this patriarchal narrative, but it calmed her daughter. At the end, finally, when the bread winner said daddy’s job was to protect her, her daughter looked up and asked, I thought he was in sales?

//

The bread winner was reminded on a near constant basis when her children were very small that she would miss these days when they were gone.

No one tells her that anymore.

//

One day, while her children were at school, the bread winner prepared a bath.

For herself.

//

The bread winner’s children stared out the living room window, waiting for their grandparents. After they arrived, the children played on the living room floor while the adults perched on the furniture in unnatural seated positions. When the bread winner’s daughter spit into her own hand to clean off an errant marker smudge, her grandmother congratulated her for her savviness, telling her she was ready to be a mother. Her daughter smiled and walked over to fumble around in the toy chest. The bread winner felt her jaw tighten. She stared at the wall in front of her, practicing the language she learned in her overpriced meditation app. Her thoughts were interrupted when her daughter stopped what she was doing and looked back at her grandmother. By the way, she began, I’m not going to be a mom. I’m just going to be a person.

//

The bread winner’s daughter had a nightmare that they were all in the living room, watching daddy die on the floor. They were all screaming, trying to help, but his skin was falling off. Breaking, her daughter described it, like glass. And then, when he started to bleed, the blood arced into the air, like rainbows.

//

The bread winner scrolled through Instagram. She saw a post from one of her Peloton instructors, a gorgeous blond with a body so perfect even the Greeks would have been like, damn, someone sculpt that ass. She was wearing one of those long, pleated skirts that only look good on seven people whilst looking back at the camera and drinking an iced coffee in Brooklyn. This particular Peloton instructor’s key to success is that she is gorgeous and struggles with depression. This makes her relatable to other beautiful women that have nothing wrong with them except that they live in a world run by men. The Peloton instructor included a quote in her caption from Nayyirah Waheed. The quote did that thing to the bread winner’s head that Emily Dickinson said lets you know you are reading poetry. But when the bread winner googled Nayyirah Waheed, she saw that she was labeled as an Instagram Poet. For fuck’s sake, the bread winner thought. For fuck’s sake.

//

One afternoon while the bread winner was pumping gas, staring at the sky, her children asleep in the car, she thought she heard gunshots. Rapid fire. It’s coming from above, she thought, in an instant, it’s just like the Vegas shooter. But before she could debate hurling herself on top of her children to protect them versus having the time to drive away, she realized it was just a worker with a nail gun on the roof of the gas station.

//

The bread winner and her sister got their kids together at their mother’s house. While the kids played, the adults sat in the kitchen and drank coffee. During lunch, the bread winner’s niece came up to her and told her about her dreams, which she calls eye-stories. After she ran off to play, the bread winner’s mother said that she never dreams. Ever. She has never had one dream in her life.

//

The bread winner took her bread to the county fair and won Best of Class with her Herbal Crusty White.

She won four dollars.

//

In the kitchen of her home, the bread winner enjoys making dinner for her family. Look at this, she thinks sometimes. Look what I can fucking do. She and her family listen to music. She drinks wine. Her children dance around the table. Her husband reads on an iPad.

The song “Wild Heart” by Bleachers is playing. I love this song, her husband says. It reminds me of someone.

Her son stops dancing. Who?

Someone with a wild heart.

Who has a wild heart, daddy?

Your mother.

Atticus NFT Collection: 1.4
“Connie and Paula”

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Ignorant of the star’s arc, oblivious to the clock’s hands, time means nothing to them. Is it morning? Is it night? They get dressed. They get undressed. They get dressed again. They pace and bicker and question on loop. They hold hands. They try to occupy the same space on the same chair. They start. They start again.

Although they’re not aware, dusk does affect them. Their darkness of mind arrives before the darkness of night and with it comes a pressure, a squeeze, an urgency. They are not where they are supposed to be.

Paula, oh, Paula, four foot ten maybe, in her fancy pantsuit, carrying her empty change purse, says, “Sir! Sir!”

“Sir” is me, her nurse aide, K., and I know what she’s going to ask because she asks it every day.

“Sir! Are you going to Genesee?”

Genesee exists but not in the way she thinks it does. Her house is probably still there, but it’s not her home. Her children exist, but not in the way she thinks they do. They’re not five and eight and home waiting for her in Genesee. They’re fifty-seven and sixty with children and grandchildren and lives she has forgotten.

In her mind, she is a young mother with young children who have been abandoned.

She whistles, shouts, bangs the desk and pleads, pleads, pleads with every passerby.

“Please! My children!”

Connie, a few inches taller, wearing a purple sweatshirt backwards and carrying a huge purse full of unholy things like moldy food and used underwear, follows Paula every step of the way, echoing her pleas, trying doors.

Locked door. Locked door. Locked door.

Down the hall, locked. Around the corner, locked. In the dining room, locked.

I guide them to Paula’s room where a black-and-white photo jars her a bit. It’s one of those stylized, professional photos in which her mother and father are in stark relief against a black backdrop, ossified in space. Paula looks around and inspects her clothes, her shoes, her candy, her bible: familiar, unfamiliar, impossible things. This looks like where we stay, but it can’t be. This looks like our stuff, but it can’t be. It looks like we sleep here, but we don’t.

This situation always reminds me of that film Memento, as Connie and Paula are daily detectives of their own lives: What is this place? How did I get here? Who brought my stuff? Who’s paying for this? When do I get out?

The confusion gives me a chance.

Snacks? Coffee?

I lead them to the dining room and play the host and waiter, saying, “Find a seat, ladies, someone will be with you in a minute,” then I reappear to take their orders.

They buy in.

For a moment they really seem like two friends out to dinner, chatting and talking about what they want to eat, flirting with the waitstaff.

“It’s nice to have a big, strong man around,” Connie says.

“Sure is,” Paula says.

Coffee, tea, ice cream.

But as the boring view of the parking lot gets darker and darker, a restlessness creeps in, a nagging impatience, maybe a bit of lucidity: Night is falling and we should be going.

The children. My children. My young children. Are home without me.

Before Connie came, this was Paula, ceaselessly, without reprieve.

Connie arrived and took to Paula’s flow like a tadpole following a knot.

Paula had been on a perpetual loop: bedroom to common area to nurse’s station to dining room and back and Connie joined in like she knew the trail, as if they had always been treading that path together.

Connie with her big, revealing blue eyes, easy laugh, and assertiveness became a companion, a friend, a distraction, someone who pulls Paula out of her hellish mental prison, the endless cycle of failed escapes.

In ten years as a nurse aide, I’ve never seen two nursing home residents take to each other so quickly, so wholly. But I’ve received direct orders from the administrators to split them up.

It seems unthinkable. Maybe even impossible.

I’m expected to somehow take Paula’s hand out of Connie’s, to set them on different tracks, to train them not to follow each other like twins, to retune their internal compasses, to divorce the best dementia friends. How mean.

There is good reason, however, and it begins with the aforementioned clothes swapping. The act seems so harmless, so innocent, and frankly, so fun. My shirt for your pants, your sweater for my shoes, my scarf for your affection.

But Paula’s family doesn’t see it that way. Her daughter Amy in particular is tired of coming to visit and finding her mother’s fancy pantsuits on some woman she doesn’t even know and whom she gradually comes to despise.

Amy arrives at the facility like she’s holding her breath, ready to speed through and right the wrong, undo the mixing, and re-sort the closets.

Paula is not her mother as she remembers her. It’s horrible to say, but it’s true: Paula is like a living ghost of Amy’s mom. My Paula is not her Paula. Paula is not even Paula to herself, it seems.

But back to the clothes.

When Amy enters her mother’s bedroom a woman possessed, Connie gets angry. To her, a stranger has broken into her place and is stealing all her stuff. She responds accordingly by trying to take it back.

I hear a shout and run to find Amy and Connie in a physical struggle over a pair of jeans.

A good thing about having a rapport with these residents is that even though they don’t know who I am, they know I’m familiar. They know they can trust me. And when Connie sees me, she relents.

“She’s taking my stuff,” she says. But she quits fighting. She quits and follows me out the door.

A few days later, the grand experiment begins: Fill the empty bed in Connie’s room so Paula can’t sleep there. Give Paula a spot on the other side of the unit and hope the distance breaks the bond.

It’s 8 p.m. Most of the residents have gone to bed. The nurse turns the hall light off to encourage the rest to do the same. It’s so dark I have to use my cell phone light to see, a terrible system for fall risks. I open the shower room door to let some light in.

I walk Paula to her new room, Connie follows. There’s a different woman in the second bed and Paula immediately objects.

“But where will she sleep?” Paula says, gesturing toward Connie.

“She has her own room.”

“She can’t sleep in here with me?”

“Not for now.”

I walk Connie back to her room, Paula follows.

“I know where my room is,” Connie says.

The situation repeats itself.

“Why isn’t there a bed for Lisa?” Connie says, gesturing toward Paula.

These two don’t even know each other’s names but they’re inseparable. Connie calls Paula “Lisa” and Paula refers to Connie as “my friend” or “the woman I came with.”

I tell nightshift I did my best.

At 1 a.m., they find Connie and Paula asleep together in Connie’s bed for the first time.

The facility tried to drive them apart and brought them closer together.

It’s unbearably sweet.

But I am not prepared at all for what happens next.

“The room smelled of sex,” the nurse says. “And they were both standing there with their pants down.”

I don’t believe her. It’s only her third night on the unit. I’ve been taking care of Connie and Paula for a year and a half. Yes, I’ve seen them hold hands. Yes, I’ve seen them sit in the same chair, sleep on the same bed. But I’ve never even seen them kiss. Whoever this new employee is, she didn’t smell what she smelled. She didn’t see what she saw.

Boy, am I wrong.

A week later, Susan, a cranky-but-reliable nurse in her fifties, opens the door in the middle of the night and finds Paula topless fondling Connie’s breasts through her button-down.

The next morning, the duo ignores sunrise as always, missing lunchtime, waking in the early afternoon, hungry and ready to begin their loop.

Now one might think, with healthcare being the most regulated industry in the U.S., with rules upon rules and so many regulations one has to break one to follow another, the higher-ups would flip out and come up with something, maybe move Connie to a different unit or transfer Paula to another nursing home completely.

But no. In a moment of inspired assent, the facility says that if neither woman is in distress, let it be.

Wait. So, love wins? Really?

And whether it’s genuine consent or just fatigue, the family doesn’t even object. Maybe they see how futile it is to fight after the complete failure that was the room change.

I’m supervising the dining room during supper. Today, in one of the few times I can remember, Paula and Connie have forgotten each other. Paula took a nap in her real bed and Connie relaxed in the common room watching TV for an hour. Now they sit and eat meatloaf, completely oblivious that the other is there.

Nobody else even notices, but I’m secretly distraught. Is the connection gone?

The meal’s finished. I’m collecting trays. Residents begin to leave the room, and Connie looks around for what to do next. She spots Paula. Paula sees her, and the joy and familiarity burst through. The relief in their eyes says, “Oh, it’s you, old friend.”

(Names and details have been changed to protect the privacy of individuals.)

Atticus NFT Collection: 1.3
“A Misplaced Tropical Pond
Leads to a Feminist Daydream”

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Atticus NFT: 1.2
Title: “Benny and the Heart”
Collections: Purple, Turquoise, Orange, Violet Gold, Fuchsia 
Notes: Katie Zeigler’s book of flash fiction was the first runner-up in a chapbook contest at Flume Press, judged by Farnaz Fatemi. He says this: “With a freshness of point-of-view and a welcome oddness of language, The Last of the Cursive Writers notices and illuminates moments of change.”
About the Work: A charming, complex blend of satire and fantasy. The suspense revolves around futuristic heart science. What can a mother’s heart survive? What if it gets wet, crushed, or cold? What if it gets forgotten? So many questions. (Answers in the text.)
The Author: Katie M. Zeigler
Broader Strokes: It’s a hoot.

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Collect the NFT

When the CardiU app became available, communities of mothers were seen filing into cardiologist’s waiting rooms for the requisite tests. Some were tasked with wearing “The Queen of Hearts,” a small device that monitored their cardiac activity from afar for a ten-day period, sending clear signals of any abnormalities directly to the doctors themselves. Benny’s mother had not been given a Queen, which she attributed to good heart health, but she felt left out nonetheless. At graduation, several of her friends specifically chose dresses that showcased the small wires, a badge of honor peeking from behind a bra strap or sweeping neckline.

Benny’s mother was told that CardiU was designed like a dating app, although she tried not to take that comparison too far. Both parties, the rising first-year and parent, would need to “swipe right” to enter the program together. Benny’s mother fought hard against swiping right, not wanting to subject her child to anything that might make him stand out for the wrong reasons. But as she watched Benny cleaning the mouthpiece of his trumpet at the dining room table, his eyebrows furrowed below the cowlick he’d had since birth, she felt such a surge of love, such a desperate longing for her child, that she swiped toward what she hoped would be proof of her love, but not necessarily a binding contract.

 By swiping right, Benny and his mother instantly became members of the inaugural class, a designation they found thrilling and terrifying in the many conversations that followed. There was an escape clause, according to the email they both received, but they would need to cancel by June 15th at the latest. As the date approached, Benny’s mother assured him she would not be hurt at all, taking great pains to arrange her face in such a way that read “sincere” without tipping into “beseeching.” Benny remained characteristically quiet, but his mother could feel the wheels turning in his beautiful brain, not just about CardiU, but about the impending departure date for college itself. She took it upon herself to take countless virtual tours of the campus with him, pointing out beautiful spots under tall trees where she could imagine him sitting in a circle with equally brilliant children.

“Look, there’s the Quad!” she said, zooming in so that the screen showed magnified flower beds and a long, gravel pathway upon which students were frozen in enthusiastic conversations. She could hear how desperate her voice sounded, the lilting syllables and enunciated vowels, so she dampened her tone and asked, “What would you like to look at?”

“I’m good,” he said.

“Shall we go get a Starbucks?” she asked, and Benny’s eyes brightened.

While they waited in the drive-thru, Benny and his mother did not talk about the CardiU app or college. Instead, Benny created a queue of songs on Spotify that he played for her, introducing each of them with specific lyrics or chord progressions she should pay attention to. She listened, occasionally glimpsing Benny’s face through her peripheral vision. He seemed content, relaxed even. She fought the urge to place her hand at the nape of his neck; all the CardiU articles she’d read said that physical touch in the months leading up to college goodbyes can feel cloying to the children. So she gripped the steering wheel with one hand and the iced coffee, perspiration pooling on its surface, with the other.

When June 15th arrived, Benny’s mother woke with a combination of excitement and fear. Benny had spent most of the night in his room, which she took as a sign that he was deliberating. It was only when she received a notification at 11 a.m., in the middle of a Zoom meeting with one of her interior design clients, that she knew.

CardiU News for U!, the message read. Benny’s mother struggled to focus on the damask wallpaper she was trying, unsuccessfully, to convince her client to use in the guest bathroom. It was only when she was finally off the phone that she opened the message.

Your status has been changed to “Cross My Heart.”

Please click below to accept the terms and conditions of your status.

Benny’s mother knew what Cross My Heart meant and, for a brief second that she would never admit to anyone, she felt such a rush of joy that she had to stop herself from crying out. But then, the full picture of what her, their, new status meant, began to materialize. They had matched. Benny had swiped right.

From then on, there were so many logistics at play that neither had the chance to consider their decisions. Myriad checklists and forms, extra long bed sheets, shower shoes, small photographs of Benny’s cat printed out on glossy photo paper to hang on his future walls. It was a period of great excitement and unexpected sorrow, a two-sided coin that both Benny and his mother experienced in equal measure. They never told each other this, but each found themselves, on separate occasions, wishing Benny’s dad was still around, but only for short periods of time. Benny wondered what, if any, pearls of wisdom his father might offer his only son, and Benny’s mother, only once while sitting on the toilet, cried silently at all the milestones he’d missed. Driving lessons and chess tournaments and how handsome Benny had looked at the senior prom, holding hands with the girl he’d met at the debate tournament. They hadn’t dated—Benny’s mother wasn’t even sure if he’d had a good time—but they’d made a darling couple, and she still had their picture in the Favorites album on her phone. There was no time to wallow, what with all the errands and boxes, so Benny and his mother packed away those feelings, sealing them up with long, shiny rows of tape.       

The arrival was more practical than either of them pictured. Rows of upperclassmen lined the long drive onto campus, waving signs and making hearts with their fingers at the passing cars. Benny stared straight ahead, occasionally picking at his fingernails, and before his mother could think of anything to say, they were directed to a parking lot filled with what looked like rolling dumpsters, piled high with student luggage, lamps, desk chairs, and rugs. Students dressed in Hayes College T-shirts directed the cars into their respective spots, then bounded over to the waiting cars. From there, it was a flurry of activity; luggage in the rolling thing, and a lanyard with Benny’s photo placed around his neck with the solemnity of an Olympic medal. The small heart sticker on the photo caught the eye of one of the enthusiastic upperclassmen.

“Oh! You’re a CardiU!” Her voice was breathless, eternally youthful. “I can take you over to the health center. Hey, Brandon,” she called to a tall boy bending over the trunk of a Mercedes. “Will you take,” she paused, looking closely at Benny’s ID tag, “Benny’s luggage up to Galileo 223?”

Brandon nodded, sweating profusely as he lugged suitcase after suitcase from the trunk, placing them carefully on the gravel while a man, presumably the owner of the car, inspected the bags for signs of scuffing.

At the health center, Benny and his mother were separated by an official-looking older woman wearing a T-shirt that read “My Child and My Heart Go to Hayes.” She promised they would connect again in the late morning of the following day. Benny would be taken for a quick health scan and then directed to his dormitory where he would meet his roommate and then immediately depart by bus for an overnight in the neighboring national park for a series of bonding activities she referred to as “Hayes Days.”

“Time for a quick goodbye,” the woman said. “Then off you go!”

They’d stood awkwardly for a moment, then Benny lunged toward her, his arms tight around her torso.

“Now, there’s a good hug!” the woman chirped. “All right, let’s get moving.”

But Benny’s mother did not want to let go and, luckily, Benny moved first, loosening his grip on her and stepping back, his face already transitioning into embarrassment at the act of intimacy. Benny’s mother tried not to cry, but was unsuccessful and, as a sort of consolation prize, she was handed a CardiU Hydroflask. She held it, cradled it really, and watched as Benny was swept up in a small crowd of students. He did not turn back.

The nurses showed her where the hearts would be kept during their acclimation period, a sterile white room lined with glass cases, each with the name of the student etched on a small plaque. There, they would be subjected to a series of modifications, Benny’s mother couldn’t remember the names of them all, that would ensure their ability to survive on their own. A short video was shown to her surgery group, explaining the mechanics of it all. The heart would feel Benny’s emotions only within a distance of fifty feet. The distance would be increased in subsequent app updates, the smiling woman in the video said. She also explained that the heart would be given a mobility chip, meaning it could move on its own, but only within a small radius. Benny’s mother couldn’t imagine how that would work, and pictured the heart atop one of those remote-controlled cars that Benny loved as a child, zooming back and forth across the kitchen linoleum. But then the video showed an animated recreation of the movement, a smiling heart sliding slowly across a white surface like a starfish along a sea bed.

Once the video was over, the parents were taken to triage before being separated into groups of ten. These groups were escorted to the surgical sites and assigned one of the ten beds in each room, upon which sat a paper robe and booties. Nurses arrived to sweep the long curtains around each bed for privacy, instructing the parents to change into the robes and booties and lie down on the beds to await further instruction. There was a great rustling of paper and Benny’s mother placed her clothes in the supplied plastic bag, careful to hide her underwear between the folds of her capris. When the curtain was pulled back, a nurse who introduced herself as Carrie spoke softly to Benny’s mother as she connected her to the IV and told her to count down from twenty.  

The procedure had been quick, only requiring one overnight in the medical center, and she felt surprisingly well when she awoke from the anesthesia, the artificial heart pumping blood swiftly through her veins. The only memory she had of the surgery was a hazy image of her heart being placed in a plastic crib, not unlike the one Benny had been tucked into after his birth. She was sure she’d imagined the nurse placing a small pastel-colored hat atop the heart. The two memories merged in her mind. The following morning, released and given the go-ahead to travel, she was instructed to wait in yet another building, adjacent to the school library. A series of golf carts, decorated with heart balloons, were waiting outside, and Benny’s mom smiled at the other parents as she boarded the third cart in the long queue. The driver of their particular cart drove a bit too fast over one of the speed bumps in the parking lot, and all of the riders reacted with a similar pained expression, some touching their hands to where their artificial hearts now ticked and whirred under the skin.

As they rounded the corner to the Goodbye Tent, Benny’s mom could see her son, standing a bit apart from the other children, but could feel nothing. Not the familiar ache. Not the involuntary desire to commit some small act of violence against whomever had made her son feel excluded. She’d been warned about this. The absence of feeling. It would take a few hours for the hearts to sync, they said, and even then it might take a few weeks for maximal synergy to go into effect. It was off-putting, the space left devoid of emotion, not just for the lack of the ache, but, more devastating, the lack of sentiment, love, or grief at the goodbye that was conducted under the watchful eye of a physician who monitored the farewell hugs and kisses. Rumor had it a parent had died at the Goodbye Tent at Stanford, just fallen right over in front of her daughter, but there had been no official announcement, nothing in the news, so Benny’s mom had chalked it up to urban myth.

In the space of the next twenty-four hours, including the six-hour plane ride home, Benny’s mother, separated from her heart, anticipated the numbness of the Goodbye Tent, but when the flight attendant began to demonstrate safety precautions with her little fake seatbelt, the emotions came, roughshod, unadulterated, as if she were walking through a turnstile at great speed. Then nothing. The utter absence of emotion. This wild variation continued through the entire flight, the Uber home, and the following days. She’d called the support line, desperate to understand, and had been told that what she was experiencing was completely normal.

“No worries at all,” the lilting voice had explained. “You are still in what we call ‘Buffering.’ And you’re actually well ahead of schedule! So good job, Mom! At this rate, let me see, yes, at this rate you should begin to normalize in about three days. That means you’ll feel your normal everyday emotions, just like before, but you’ll also begin to communicate with your home unit when it is in range of your child.”

Benny’s mother had asked if that meant she could speak through the heart, send messages or receive them. The voice had laughed.

“Well, no. Wouldn’t that be something? No, what I mean by communicate is that you will begin to feel any emotion that your child is feeling, as long as the home unit, or original heart, is in range. Is there anything else I can help you with today?”

Benny’s mother thanked the voice and hung up, rather reluctantly. And for the next three days, she experienced so many varying emotions, she’d had to write them down in a little notebook she kept in her purse.  On the fourth day, she woke up feeling like she’d been returned to herself, the emotions familiar, evenly spaced. She was tired. Nervous about a client meeting later. Hungry and in need of caffeine. Like stepping into an old skin, she relished the ordinariness of it all. Until she was blow-drying her hair and her heart suddenly filled with a loneliness so tangible she had to sit down on the rim of the tub. Later, backing her car out of the driveway, she was so overcome with joy that her legs straightened against the gas pedal, as if she were leaping into the air, and she almost hit the neighbor’s cat. She prayed that this sensation, the joyful one, would last through her trip to the grocery store and then to the gynecologist, but it dissipated quietly until she was left with nothing but worries about the price of salmon and her tilted uterus.

What the voice and the brochures had not explained was the mystery of the emotions, the utter inexplicability of them. This was the syncing. She could feel what Benny was feeling, but could not access the sources of the joy or pain. She longed desperately to know what made her child fill with such elation that she lost her breath, just as much as she wanted to know why she spent the morning incapacitated in despair at the kitchen sink. Meanwhile, unaware of his mother’s experiences, Benny spent the first few weeks of college trying to manage his roommate’s general distaste and confusion regarding the heart.

“You’ll get used to it,” Benny said, but Mark’s face remained doubtful, his eyes following the heart as it slid under Benny’s desk, a waxy crimson trail in its wake. Benny regularly purchased packets of Spray ’n Wash from the laundry room’s vending machine, wiping desperately after the heart. But Benny could not keep up with the nearly constant trickle that still oozed as the heart made its way around the room.

“Couldn’t you keep it in the mini fridge?” Mark asked when the heart had first been introduced. “Don’t they keep heart transplants on ice?”

But Benny explained that it didn’t work like that and, eventually, it would just fade into the background. “You’ll forget it’s here,” Benny said.

To be fair, Benny didn’t believe a word of this. But he felt that to show his own contrasting feelings about the heart was unproductive, and potentially insulting. Benny’s understanding of what would be transmitted back to his mother was slightly unclear, so he tried to keep his language clean and avoid any unnecessarily caustic comments until he was out of earshot.

Benny’s secondary goal after arriving on campus was to suss out if any of his classmates had hearts with them. At parties, he clandestinely lifted paisley bedspreads, searching among the tennis shoes and Tupperware containers of winter sweaters. He was caught only once, looking in the bottom drawer of Violet Windhammer’s desk, but he easily played it off because Violet was pretty drunk and believed him when he said he was looking for a bottle opener.

Occasionally, he saw students lugging around extra bags, totes or canvas carry-alls, in addition to their backpacks and wondered if a heart lay at the bottom of them. One girl from his Introduction to Ethnic Studies class always carried a lavender-colored insulated lunch box, but he never saw her take any snacks out of it. Her name was Eliza and she seemed quiet and intellectual, always sporting a number-two pencil behind her ear. She smiled at Benny whenever they saw each other on the Quad, or in class, but Benny never got the nerve up to ask her what was in her extra bag. Something in the way she carried herself, an unspoken sensitivity or perhaps vulnerability, told Benny that her mother’s heart came to class with her, perhaps accompanied by a sparkling water or granola bar from the cafeteria. Then, one day, Eliza just disappeared. She never came to class again and he never saw her familiar stride across the Quad. There had been whispers, a particularly hushed conversation between their professor and a few of the other female students, but Benny never heard precisely what they were saying.

By the fifth week of school, the only heart he had officially come across belonged to Gary, a fellow first-year from San Francisco who hosted a trivia night in his dorm room. Benny had found the flier for the party shoved under his door. Trivial Pursuit Night. Prize for the Winner! Drinks! Snacks! it read, with a particularly lifelike caricature of a bag of Cheetos with legs drawn below.  Benny considered himself a bit of a trivia king, and was eager to meet others who could easily recall specific dates from the War of the Roses and obscure sports stats from 1970s professional bowling.

“I’m just going down for a minute,” he said to the heart, trying not to feel guilty as the heart slipped quietly back to the corner by his bedside table, where Benny had created a nest of towels. On the way to Gary’s dorm, Benny imagined what the Trivial Pursuit party would look like, perhaps a loud, competitive evening of intelligent coeds vying for the title of trivia champ. But when he got there, only Gary and another first-year named Felix were sitting quietly on the common room futon, a Trivial Pursuit board and a bag of Cheetos open on the coffee table between them.

“There should be more people coming,” Gary said, apologetically, but they never did, despite his endless checking of the door and his phone for messages. Benny didn’t really want to stay, but felt bad for Gary, and even worse for Felix, who seemed equally paralyzed by the social dilemma the situation posed. Eventually, Benny took a seat on the desk chair and popped a Cheeto into his mouth in solidarity.

No one else ever arrived, but the evening was surprisingly pleasant. Gary and Felix proved to be worthy trivia competitors, ultimately resulting in a head-to-head-to-head in the center square. Gary chose Arts & Entertainment for Benny, which was usually a cake-walk, but Benny had forgotten that Cher was married to Sonny before Greg Allman, and so lost to Felix, who easily answered a question about Julian of Norwich. The prize was heralded in large font on the flier as a 15- percent-off coupon to the campus bookstore. Benny knew each student had received one of these on their first day but didn’t say anything for fear of being seen as a sore loser. The prize reminded Benny that the flier also mentioned drinks.

“Could I grab something to drink?” Benny asked, standing up from the futon and pulling at the wedgie that had formed during the long game.

Gary hesitated briefly, and Benny saw something familiar in that pause. He wondered, but didn’t want to draw attention. Gary’s eyes, a deep brown, shivered slightly, as if watching an insect.

“Sure,” Gary said, pointing toward a small alcove near the mini fridge. There, Benny found a Costco-size variety pack of Snapples and an equally large supply of Top Ramen. As Benny twisted open the cap to the Snapple, he caught a movement just behind the packages of noodles and, leaning closer, he saw the heart, sitting in what looked like a plastic shower caddy.

This heart was much smaller than Benny’s mother’s, a paler shade of red. The aortic arch (Benny had excelled at anatomy in high school) appeared almost identical to his mother’s, but the ventricles were smaller, slightly gray in color. Benny had the instinctual desire to say hello, but didn’t want to call attention to it in front of the others. Instead, he waved, as if to a small child. The heart seemed to peer up at him momentarily,  then nestled back against the hard plastic of the caddy.

Gary’s eyes were on him as he turned and Benny felt that look as a wave, an undulation or shift. Some part of Benny wanted to speak to Gary about the heart, to swap stories or opinions, or even logistics of care, but before he had the chance, Gary’s roommate, a muscular football player named Flip, stormed into the room with a laughing girl in tow, announcing that Gary was “sexiled” for the night. Gary sighed and the girl giggled, saying, “C’mon, Gary. You know the drill.”

Before Benny could speak, Felix offered his room to Gary for the night, since his roommate was away at a Lacrosse tournament. Gary nodded appreciatively, and Flip’s eyes only briefly grazed the Trivial Pursuit game before he snatched what was left of the Cheetos, emptying the bag directly into his open mouth.

Benny wondered if Gary would take the heart with him to Felix’s room, or leave it in the alcove. By the looks of Flip and the girl, who was currently wound around Flip’s torso like a potato vine, the heart would undoubtedly be subjected to an evening of loud sexual exploration. Presumably, the heart was not immune from overhearing such things, but still Benny felt bad for it, stuck there behind the Top Ramen.

There had been a flurry of activity then, and Benny stood, unsure how to exit without seeming impolite. He grabbed a paper towel from a roll atop the mini fridge and began wiping down the coffee table, only managing to smear Cheeto dust across its surface.

“It’s OK,” Gary said, touching Benny’s arm. “Don’t worry about it.”

Benny smiled and Gary rolled his eyes toward Flip who burped loudly before blowing the Cheeto-scented breath right into his girlfriend’s face. She laughed and swatted him away playfully as Flip reached over, retrieving one of Gary’s Snapples from the stack in the alcove. He guzzled loudly from the bottle, his head tipped back to reveal a thick Adam’s apple that convulsed as he swallowed. Finishing the drink in one go, he threw the empty bottle behind him, knocking over several bottles so they clattered against the floor. Gary gasped audibly and he and Benny simultaneously dove for the alcove, their bodies moving in one fluid motion. Benny was the first to reach back and remove the bottles from atop the heart, which cowered away from him. He wasn’t sure what the protocols were, so he stepped back and allowed Gary to pick the heart up in its shower caddy, murmuring quietly to it.

“Oh, my God,” said the girl, her voice a mixture of hilarity and fascination. “Is that…” But before she could approach, Gary hugged the caddy tightly against his chest, his eyes avoiding everyone but Benny. The heart seemed to shrink within its plastic cocoon and Gary placed his hand, tenderly, against the left ventricle, rubbing it softly with his thumb.

“Hey, sorry man,” Flip said. “My bad.”

Without looking at Flip, Gary said, “It’s OK.” And Benny thought perhaps Flip was actually apologetic, but then he saw Flip turn to his girlfriend and mimic the act of vomiting. Benny wasn’t sure what to do. Confrontation had never been his strong suit. But he felt somehow at the edge of something important. Felix, on the other hand, quietly grabbed his coat and left the room, the heavy metal door clanging loudly behind him.

Something passed between Benny and Gary at that precise moment and, without speaking, the two left the room together. Neither spoke, no invitation was given, and yet they walked, quite close to one another, across the scantly lit pathway toward Benny’s dorm. Once inside his room, Benny announced to Mark, in a voice that felt unfamiliarly bold, that Gary would be sleeping on their futon. Mark, removing his AirPods from his ears and sighing dramatically, saw the heart in its box in Gary’s arms and said, “Ah, hell no,” before grabbing his phone and announcing that he would be sleeping at his girlfriend’s.

Once he was gone, the room felt small and dirty. Benny looked around at the empty pizza boxes and overflowing trash can with embarrassment, but Gary merely moved Mark’s bong off the futon and sat down, the heart tucked next to his hip. Benny felt strange breaking the silence between them so, instead, he walked into the bedroom and lifted the heart, snug in its towel nest, and placed it next to Gary’s shower caddy. Together, they watched as the two hearts seemed to draw toward one another, their surfaces trembling. Benny and Gary stayed like that until eventually they fell asleep, sitting up, and when Benny awoke early the next morning, his neck and shoulders sore, Gary and the heart in the shower caddy were gone.     

Since that night, Benny saw Gary around campus, but they did not speak. Benny wasn’t sure if he was relieved or disappointed by this, and would often find himself staring at Gary’s back as he walked past, his long legs loping across the grass. There were no more fliers stuck under his door and, as the days went on, his thoughts of Gary only increased. His feelings toward the heart shifted slightly as well. He would experience great surges of sympathy for his mother’s heart, an almost aching sense of irresponsibility and abandonment whenever he left for class or the dining hall. He made a conscious effort to engage with the heart more and began talking to it whenever Mark, whose bathroom rituals you could set a clock to, left the room for his evening shower. Benny would gather the heart, towel nest and all, and hold it, not unlike a swaddled infant, while looking out the window at the flickering street lights lining the pathway outside their dorm, the same pathway that led to Gary.

Things with Mark remained tense, but neither voiced their frustration with the other. Instead, they settled into an icy dynamic that mostly consisted of Mark avoiding the room whenever possible. This worked until Mark and his girlfriend broke up. Mark did not share this news with Benny, but he changed the screensaver on his computer from the two of them to a photo of the Grand Canyon. Mark also stopped listening to Pink Floyd, which Benny took as a sign. 

By October, it felt like a truce had formed between them and they would, to Benny’s surprise, sometimes send funny TikToks to one another and occasionally walk to dinner together. One afternoon, as they crossed the Quad after lunch, a surprising number of students were gathered on the wide expanse of lawn. Mark attributed it to the unseasonably warm weather, but as the days progressed, people were multiplying exponentially, until they filled the entire Quad. Neither of the boys asked any of the gathering group what they were doing there, but word soon spread throughout the classrooms and dormitories that a first-year had been assaulted at the Rho Delta house. The perpetrator, whose parents recently endowed a History Chair at Hayes, had yet to be arrested. He had been named by the young woman he assaulted, an act Benny found both brave and terrifying, but she had dropped out when she began receiving harassing messages by phone and text from anonymous sources.

Mark dismissed the protest as a waste of time, but Benny felt conflicting emotions. He wanted to support the young woman, but had never taken part in any sort of protest before. He wasn’t sure how the protestors maintained their grades when they seemed to never leave the lawn, or where they went to the bathroom.

One night, when Mark was at a party, Benny picked up the heart and brought it to the window, explaining to it in soft tones what was happening below. In the twilight, the protesters looked like one large organism, swaying slightly in a sea of black hoodies. A few were singing a song Benny couldn’t decipher, while others illuminated the darkness with their phones. They watched for some time, Benny and the heart, until he turned out the lights and went to bed. 

The uneasy peace between Benny and Mark continued and that Friday night, Mark even went so far as to share a pizza he’d ordered—not offering it verbally, but flipping the cardboard box open on the coffee table as an indication that Benny should dig in. Benny did, happily, hoping this marked some sort of development of their roommate energy, if not friendship. But when Mark opened his can of Coke, it spurted soda in a volcanic stream, landing on the heart that was resting next to Benny’s desk. The left ventricle of the heart shrank slightly as carbonation filled the pulmonary vein, bubbling softly.

“Oh shit,” Mark said, but made no attempt to move toward the heart. Benny would not forget that immobility as he lifted the heart up and ran to the bathroom to rinse it under cold water. In the unisex bathroom, two girls were putting on lipstick in the mirror, and another was turning the dial for a free tampon. Benny pushed one of the lipstick girls out of the way to get to the sink, and she backed into the tampon girl noisily.

“What is your fucking problem?” she asked, waving a long, pale blue fingernail in Benny’s face.

But then she saw the heart and her face was eclipsed by a look Benny would later recognize as pity. The girls were silent as Benny ran a gentle stream of water over the heart. None of them moved, creating a semicircle around Benny and watching as the water in the sink ran slightly pink. They stood wordlessly as Benny pulled his T-shirt out from his torso and, laying the heart in the pouch it created, opened the bathroom door and left, his sneakers squeaking noisily down the hallway.

Mark didn’t look up from his phone when Benny walked in, and the heart’s superior vena cava pulsated slightly against his hand as he tucked it into the small nook between his twin bed and bedside table. He gently laid the heart down in the bed of towels before turning to Mark.

“Please try to be more careful,” he said to the back of Mark’s head.

Mark did not reply, but turned, looking Benny in the eye and shrugging his shoulders before returning to the video of dogs dancing on his phone.

A shiver of courage flickered through Benny and he took out his own phone and texted Gary.

Hi.

This seemed to be enough for now and Benny climbed onto his bed, tucking his legs up until his knees touched his chest. He put in his AirPods and scrolled through his Spotify playlists before settling on a new one he’d called “Hayes & Confused.” Phoebe Bridgers began to sing and Benny tried not to look at his phone.

It wasn’t until Phoebe had been replaced by Maggie Rogers that Benny’s phone vibrated.

Hi back.

Benny smiled and, before thinking too hard about it, sent off an assortment of emojis: a shrimp, a flamenco dancer, and a wad of cash.

Immediately, three little dots began oscillating below and, within seconds, a cactus, a waxing moon, and a banjo appeared. Benny laughed out loud, his heart beating quickly.

Mark came into the bedroom, still bent over his phone, and Benny suddenly had the desire to be anywhere but his own room. He felt no compulsory urge to say goodbye to the heart and walked into the hallway, texting quickly before he lost his nerve.

Do you want to hang out?

Leaning against the window at the end of the corridor, Benny could see a few students walking along the dimly lit walkways. The large calico cat, known affectionately as Ada Lovelace,  that always seemed to linger around the mathematics building, dashed across the lawn like a spirit. Benny closed his eyes, and stuck his forehead against the glass, feeling the cool surface on his skin.

His phone buzzed.

Yogurt Yurt? Fifteen minutes?

Benny bit his lip and placed his palm against the glass, leaving a steamy print that he looked at for a few seconds, quite contentedly, before responding with a thumbs-up emoji, followed by an anchor for good measure.

After changing into a clean shirt, Benny crossed through the Quad toward the edge of Main Street. A few tents had been erected, and protesters were flinging sleeping bags onto the hard concrete. Benny estimated there were at least 200 of them, their arms wrapped around one another, some holding hands. Signs dotted the landscape. “Believe Survivors” and “End Victim Blaming.”  As he walked, Benny saw two students slowly unroll a giant banner on the side of the chemistry building, the words appearing one by one:

WE

STAND

WITH

ELIZA

“No means no!” someone yelled, but not before the face of Eliza, the girl who always smiled at him, who wore a pencil behind her left ear and carried a lavender bag to class, crossed his mind. Eliza who had stopped coming to class and who, now, had raised an entire crowd together in a sea of anger and sadness and hope for change. Their voices rose as Benny passed and his heart surged, a sensation so intense that he had to stop and catch his breath. Eliza had always smiled at him. Now Benny wondered if she really did have a heart with her as well; and if so, what that heart felt, what signals it had communicated back home. Thinking of his own mother’s heart, he joined in the chanting, cupping his hands around his mouth until he was screaming as loud as he could. Several of the black-hoodied protestors gave him a thumbs up in response. Benny’s phone buzzed. A text from Gary.

I’m here. Sitting outside.

When Benny arrived at Yogurt Yurt, Gary was wearing a vintage Mork and Mindy T-shirt and Benny gave him the “nanu nanu” hand signal, which made Gary laugh. They filled their compostable cups with brightly colored swirls of yogurt and toppings, each costing more than $10. Gary offered to treat and Benny said he’d get him next time. Together, they sat outside, the sky filling with the sounds of Friday nights, a combination of car engines and cumulative laughter.

They did not speak of their last interaction, but of their professors, how they were feeling about midterms, and their collective exhaustion with the dining hall’s insistence on baked chicken.

Benny was mid-bite when Gary cleared his throat, nervously.

“Do you ever wish you didn’t have it?” Gary asked, chewing thoughtfully on a gummy bear.

“Sometimes.” Benny felt a pang of guilt rise slowly through his abdomen. “Not all the time.”

Gary nodded, his brown eyes downcast under a canopy of dark lashes.  “Me too,” he said, just as a police car screamed past them, lights and siren blazing. Before Benny could ask his next question, another police car appeared, then another, all heading toward campus. People began to filter out of the Yogurt Yurt and the Burrito Brothers next door.

“What’s going on?” asked the teenager who had weighed their yogurts.

Several patrons began to walk quickly toward campus. Benny and Gary were just throwing away their cups when an ambulance raced past.

Benny’s mind filled with images of his dorm room on fire, his mother’s heart backing away from licking flames. Gary’s face was ashen and the two ran toward campus, joining a horde of downtown revelers all heading in the same direction. There was a distinct smell of pot and beer in the air, as the crowd rippled down Browning Street toward the main gates.

The police cars had blocked off the main entrance to campus, so Benny and Gary, followed by a few other Hayes students, ran around the science building toward the Quad. There, an ambulance was parked on the lawn and a wall of students, all recording the events on their phones, lined the walkway. It was hard to decipher what was happening, but Benny overheard a girl he recognized from his History of Antisemitism class say something about “an asshole” and “serves him right.”

For the next several minutes, Benny and Gary were able to gather enough information from the crowd to determine that one of the teammates of the perpetrator had gotten wasted on Everclear and Kool-Aid and tried to drive his pickup truck through the crowd of protestors. He’d destroyed the hard plastic bollards that were meant to keep vehicles out of the Quad and had driven into one of the stately elms that guarded the square. He was being taken away now, and several protestors were clambering aboard the ambulance, throwing themselves against the sides, as if to attack him through the hard metal of the vehicle.

“This is for Eliza!” one protestor shouted, banging his fists against the vehicle, and soon the entire population of the Quad was chanting. Their voices rose up against the splintered edges of the felled elm and collected in power as the ambulance struggled to make its way, sirenless, through the hoard.

“This is for Eliza,” Gary shouted, his mouth close enough that Benny could feel the hot breath against his ear.

“This is for Eliza,” Benny yelled, as they watched the ambulance lights disappear around the corner. The police announced from their bullhorns that the crowd should disperse, but the students stayed, still chanting, and a swell of solidarity lifted from them, so powerful that when Gary’s hand closed around Benny’s, he felt like he was holding hands with everyone, everywhere. And later, in Gary’s dorm room, when Benny pressed himself against Gary and the world began to spin, neither of the boys thought for one minute of the hearts that lay in their separate rooms.

But the heart tucked in its shower caddy in the alcove of Gary’s room could at least bear witness and, by extension, Gary’s mother felt a swell of joy so profound and unexpected that she swerved into oncoming traffic, narrowly missing a U-Haul van that honked angrily at her as she righted herself. She did not know the source of the pleasure, but it coursed through her own body , in a way she would later tell her friends felt almost sacred.

But Benny’s mother would not know this joy. In the towel bed in Benny’s dark, messy room in another dorm, his mother’s heart sat quietly unaware. Mark had left for a party, so the room was silent except for the occasional hum of the mini fridge and the sound of muffled laughter through the walls. The heart continued to beat, though, anticipating its next sensation. Sorrow? Disappointment? Elation? The heart could not know. Nor could Benny’s mother know. Unless he came home and told the heart where he’d been, what he’d done. He could do that, relay experiences to the heart and those would pass on to his mother, somewhat dimmed in the retelling, but present nonetheless. But would he?

Maybe not, but she was lucky. She knew this, for what emotions she had felt over these last three months! Each so distinct, so purely intended. Driving in the car. Sitting with a client going over upholstery swatches. Dancing at her Zumba class. Sensations pouring through her, but with no explanation.  The pamphlets and the physicians had not warned about this. There had been no mention of this particular side effect and the deep, almost unbearable, curiosity it aroused. Benny’s mother, and the others, merely felt. A physical reaction that, over time, they would attempt to contextualize, each in their own homes in their own ways. Benny’s mother kept the notebook, logging each sensation carefully, precisely, then trying to track or establish some sort of connection or rhythm between them. If her heart surged into joy each Monday around 10 a.m., and she cross referenced that with his class schedule, could she say with any certainty that it was because class was over? Or did he see someone every Monday at that precise time? Did he treat himself to a candy bar on Mondays at 10 a.m. from the care packages she sent every few weeks?

The happiness was easier to track, a pleasure to tabulate. The other emotions—grief, loneliness, fear, insecurity—these were more difficult. The online CardiU support groups she’d joined, mostly on Zoom given her busy schedule, did nothing to normalize or even minimize the sensations. Nor would she want them to, if she was being honest. She wanted to feel them all. If Benny felt, then she wanted to as well. Good or bad.

But she would never know the why. So they waited, the heart and the mother. Never knowing why and never knowing when. Such that when the door opened, and Benny stepped inside, his mind full of Gary and the intoxicating possibilities of each day forward, both the heart and the mother felt a simultaneous lifting. At once an ache, a surprise, a hoping.

Each time this happened, despite her worries that it might come across as too much, too cloying, too present, Benny’s mother texted him.

Just saying hello!

Or,

Just sending a hug!

Or,

Hope you’re having a great day!

And Benny, her beautiful boy, responded with a heart.

Atticus NFT: 1.1
Title: Puppet House
Collections: B+W, Green, Red, Yellow, Purple
Notes: John Reed’s sonnets caused a controversy when a series of them was banned from Youtube in 2013. ( In case you thought the sonnet was dead, or couldn’t offend people.)
About the Work: Puppet House is a sequence of sonnets on the theme of marionettes. John Reed explores control, free will, and the hellish lack of it in these love poems.
The Author: John Reed
Broader Strokes: Unhappy love never gets old.

View the NFTs | Read the Sonnets

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Literary NFT Collection 1.0: “Smoke”

Atticus NFT: 1.0
Title: Smoke
Collections: Green, Blue, B+W, Pink, Violet
Notes: “Smoke” originally appeared in Atticus Review in December, 2023. The PDF booklet includes two pieces of original woodblock art by Atticus Review editor Boo Trundle.
About the Work: sparse, unpretentious, tightly tethered to image as well as the emotions underneath
The Author: Melody Wilson
Broader Strokes: Habent sua fata libelli. (Little books have their own destiny.)

View the NFTs | Read the Poem

View the Minted Collection on jpg.store

is a survivor. It rises in question marks
as the bonfire dwindles like a love

that can’t quite remember how
it got here. It spoils your good coat

after the Irish bar, shimmies up walls,
across ceilings, settles over the beds

to choke the children. Better not sleep—
keep watching. It builds a gray

umbrella over the industrial park
in the distance, rushes whole villages

from their homes, rises in fat columns
then out into whorls whether scouts

roast marshmallows or scientists rub
atoms together. All this, and what I

think of first is how it wobbled
toward my finger in delicate rings

after leaving my father’s lips.

Poem: Melody Wilson
Woodblock Art: Boo Trundle

Smoke was originally published by Atticus Review on December 15th, 2023.