A Field Guide to the North American Family

Guilt

By Daniel Whatley

image uploaded by Rebecca Smeyne

All was in his hands. She had been unwell a long time. Things had gotten to the point where action had to be taken. When it came time, she complied, which was a minor surprise. Confinement in a medical institution had become necessary.

The confinement, predictably, produced layers of ordeal on top of and beyond the root cause of the confinement. The confinement clouded precise identification of the root cause, which was nonetheless related to age, physical debility and the uncertain realm of dementia.

What she had been afraid of, and this extended back forever, past that infinity that existed before he existed, was being thought of as crazy. That word exactly. Not that she couldn’t accept that judgment of herself, made by herself. She was insanely afraid of being labeled as crazy by others.

And his was the sole responsibility, granted by her and by the doctors. There was no other.

She gave him full discretion. And she reserved for herself all manner of reaction to the choices made. The choices HE would make. That he would be forced to make.

And consequences he would be forced to live with.

The doctors were pliable.

She was exact in certain wishes. None of which were remotely attainable. Part of her knew this, part refused to accept it. That part held him responsible. The first part ceded him authority.

The doctors would do whatever he wished.

For so many years, long decades even, she wished for everything to be over. Her life consisted of waiting. What she wished for produced anxiety in direct proportion to the nearness of its arrival. He was mindful of the conundrum of halved distances: on a line, if you cut the distance in half, then cut it again, and again, even to infinity, you will not get there.

Until, of course, you were there.

Two separate things become one.

She could be sedated.

Sedation worsened her symptoms.

To not sedate intensified the misery she was in. Accented the pain of the debility.

She had asked him to ask God to take her.

She wanted sedation to take her there.

Under sedation she was crazy. Her misery would increase when the sedation no longer sedated. Whether this crazy or that crazy was his to say.

His to choose.

And his to forever regret.

Habits, Bad

By Gene Kwak

image uploaded by Jon Feinstein

Doris knew today was the day. Just get out of the car. Leave the comfort of steel and glass. Walk up the steps to the church. Enter. Dip her fingertips in the holy water and mimic the Stations of the Cross. Crane her eyes skyward to the emaciated Jesus, even higher still to the gorgeous fresco swathed along the vaulted apse. Cherubic angels and well-muscled saints, their naughty bits covered in nimbus clouds. Walk to the front aisle. Make eye contact with Juanita. Grip the hand of her son, Jerry, who was once so young himself, a baby swaddled in blankets at this very church. See the wide face of a grinning baby, russet-toned and dimpled with fat, the face she never agreed with but relegated herself to love.

Gravity

By Edward Champion

image uploaded by David Shulman

The reincarnation had served his time with these bozos for six summers too many. His three masters were growing up: the two knobby-kneed loafers, backs flat to the knoll; the oldest repeatedly throwing him to the gales, where he was then forced to hail a hale disposition to move leaf-like from Point A to Point B in that swift manner that legs and an eye for yellow hacks and hansoms had worked for him in the previous life.

His leash-like string shackled him, and he had to endure one of his moral superiors flying unfettered above. She was a fine plane who, so he understood from a loquacious and bored scrap of newspaper that had flopped about during a particularly gusty day, had earned her upgrade by way of alternating ontological patterns. He had chosen marketing; she had chosen philanthropy. And while he had the money and the pecuniary comforts and the three miserable marriages and damnable divorces, she had passion, poverty, and a pulmonary condition she couldn’t get fixed because she was uninsured.

When his masters grew up, he would be thrown into a dusty attic. But she would continue to transport ebullient humans in the air, soaring through clouds and smiling against turbulence! She had instinctively known that there was worth in helping others or trying to accomplish idiosyncratic things as others had laughed at her. But he had taken the easy choice of willfully capitulating to gravity and the solipsism that came with it. But their next lives had seen gravity applied in its truest form.

Privacy

By Nicole Hefner

image uploaded by Aron Gent

Once she got used to shaving her legs, she moved onto other things: her cat, her piano, her arms. The whole world can be smooth, she yelled, but the trees weren’t having it. Exhausted she sat on her stoop with her pink plastic Daisy and wept.

Material

By Nicole Hefner

Mama Heaton never left home without her gloves, but that’s a lie, of course, Mama Heaton didn’t even have gloves! She had a tin of peach snuff, a Bible, and—some said—thousands and thousands of dollars stuffed between the mattresses. I wish we were rich. I wish I had a daddy. I wish we could go to the swimming pool. One of us was always wishing something. Wish in one hand, Mama Heaton said. Shit in the other. See which gets full faster.

Irony

By Nicole Hefner

image uploaded by Alexis Pike

For years my husband misused the word irony. Isn’t that ironic, he’d say about shelled peas or a broken jack or the way a cloud just looked like a cloud floating through the sky. No, I’d tell him, it’s not. He scratched his head and walked away.

Freedom

By Nicole Hefner

One thousand three hundred feathers, sixteen packs of Juicy Fruit and a dozen rolls of single-ply toilet paper: my Aunt Jeannie’s eight-foot wings were a sight to behold. She had all sorts of theories—the fling-thyself-from-the-back-of-a-pickup-truck-and-say-a-little-prayer-to-Jesus being my favorite—but even those didn’t save her. I sometimes wonder why she even bothered with the wings at all, what with gravity the way it was in our little North Carolina town, most days we couldn’t even make it off the porch.

Angst

By Nicole Hefner

image uploaded by Rebecca Smeyne

Back then if a boy didn’t carve your initials into his knuckles with a Swiss Army knife, you were sure he didn’t love you, and if later, in his room—his parents on the other side of the yellow wall watching Wheel of Fortune and eating salt and vinegar chips—he asked you to put a pillow (blue) over his head and kill him, and you just cried and wiped your snot with the back of your hand and said no over and over again, he was sure you didn’t love him either.

Afro

By Sundi Lofty

The neighbor came to visit with Aliyah, her six year-old daughter. She was a neighborly neighbor, the kind that dropped by unannounced with a cake or her kid. It was Thursday, Grey’s Anatomy night. Erin slouched on her chaise in front of the TV, watching McDreamy profess his love for Meredith.

She tried not to frown when she greeted them. They bounded in, bundled up in matching coats and scarves, stomping flakes of snow from their feet. The adults chatted during a commercial break. After a moment, when Erin realized her neighbors made no attempt to leave, she offered them both a seat.

The little girl wandered over to where Erin sat on her chaise. She ate from her bowl of popcorn, and then fished an un-popped kernel from the back of her teeth. Aliyah was the friendly type, like her mother. She was the sort of precocious child that would engage a complete stranger in conversation. She had done that with Erin, when she had first moved to Brooklyn, less than a year before.

“Erin is a boy’s name,” Aliyah had proclaimed. The child’s curiosity compelled Erin to explain the various spellings, to clarify that Erin with an E was an Irish name, that it was the Gaelic word for peace.

“Are you from Ireland?” the child had persisted.

By then, Erin had lost patience. “No,” she sighed. “I’m from Cleveland.”

It was especially warm in Erin’s apartment. Her landlord was old, crotchety, and he controlled the heat. In the twenty minutes since her neighbors had arrived, Aliyah hadn’t uttered a word. Erin looked at her now. She had removed her coat, but kept her hood drawn over her head. The string was tied tight under her chin so that the hood looked like a mask and the coat draped behind her like a cape.

Curious, Erin asked, “What’s the matter?”

Aliyah stared at her blankly. Her eyes drooped and perspiration had started to fall along the sides of her face.

Her mother answered for her. “She’s mad at me.” She cupped her hand over her mouth and whispered, though Erin was sure the child could hear. “She doesn’t like her hair. This morning I combed it in a different style and a classmate called her a name.”

“Is that all?” Erin turned to Aliyah. “I bet you it’s not that bad. May I see it?”

Aliyah shook her head no.

Erin had an idea. “What if I give you a present?” she coaxed. “Could I have a look then?”

The child smiled. Her eyes widened. Erin went to her bedroom closet and retrieved the coloring book and markers she had bought for her niece. Slowly, Aliyah untied her hood. She pulled it back a slither to expose her shiny, cropped afro.

Aliyah shrugged. “See,” she said, “It’s nappy,” and swept the hood back over her head.