By Moira Keating

She realized she had become a bitter old woman at 3:30 p.m. on July 11. It was precisely at this moment that she knew she was a dried-up curmudgeon, a dusty relic, a bag of brittle bones disguised by skin. Her recent diagnoses -of chronic dry eye and acute sinusitis- due, of course, to her dried-up nasal passages only confirmed this revelation.

From her front door, she watched her son’s vibrant, sweet, innocent, young girlfriend delicately extract from the hatchback of her equally vibrant sports car an enormous, larger than life, bouquet of birthday balloons with a magnificent, glistening, blue 20 surrounded by a constellation of silver stars. (Twenty years, she thought, how did that happen?) And with a smile that lit up her face, the brilliant blonde ran toward him, giggling all the way with the larger-than-life balloons billowing behind her in the breeze. When she landed in his arms with hugs and kisses… giggling “Happy birthdays” floated into the bright summer sky. 

She watched the moment unfold in what seemed like a painfully slow Hallmark movie. An unrecognizable, guttural “Ugh” escaped her lips.  And with that… she turned away. 

*      *     *

Moira Keating is an Associate Professor of English in the Humanities and Social Sciences Department at New England Institute of Technology. She is currently working towards a Certificate of Professional Achievement in Narrative Medicine from Columbia University. “Dissecting Declan,” Moira’s poem about her middle son, was recently published in The Human Touch.

By Faye Wright

I am five years old. Sent home from school, I am lying in my mother’s bed. Aching all over, with a high fever, barely able to swallow when a doctor is called. The doctor thinks I may have polio and suggests my single working mother admit me into the hospital. My mother, defiant, is arguing I do not have polio, and I surely will get it in the hospital Polio Ward. 

It was around Christmas; I had drawn a classmate’s name to give a Christmas present. As the doctor and my mother continue to argue, I fret about how I will deliver my present of a Life Savers StoryBook to my classmate. Although I wanted the Life Savers, I had selected them for the classmate whose name I had drawn. The next thing I remember is riding in the back of an ambulance on the way to my grandparents’ home 3 hours away. 

I look back now and see many boxes ticked – my mother’s fear, denial and defensiveness, my feelings of responsibility and fretting. I wonder how willing my elderly grandparents were to change their comfortable, settled life by taking care of an ill child. If I had polio, could they be infected? If I did have polio, how would they manage me physically? What if I couldn’t walk or even move? How long would I be sick? The only memory I have of the time is discovering the chimney had been boarded up from the inside to keep the chilly wind out. How was Santa Claus coming down the chimney? After much questioning how Santa was going to get in, my grandparents decided to wear a sweater and open the chimney was an answer a five-year-old would understand. It was. When the boards were removed, and I saw all the bird nests, dirt and soot fall into the grate I wondered if Santa wouldn’t get terribly dirty coming down the chimney. Something told me I shouldn’t mention being worried about that. I do not remember what happened to the Life Saver Storybook gift. Christmas Eve did arrive, Santa made it down the chimney and I recovered enough to return to school after New Years.

Fortunately, I did not have polio, and managed not to contract it by the time I was ten, when a sugar cube vaccine became available. My favorite gift to give (and receive) at Christmas remains a Life Savers StoryBook. 

*       *     *

Faye Wright is a retired IT consultant. She is now pursuing her passion for writing. She is a regular participant in the Iowa Writers Summer Festival program. Daily grateful to complete a first draft, continually edit and still not be finished. 

a memoir by Grace Stroup

The end of the earth looks just like this. Soft cotton candy sky meets rough water seamlessly, going from separate to together, stretching out over itself, turning into that bit of sight where land and sky blur slightly. It’s that faraway place, the space that I have to squint deep at, looking far out trying to find where it ends and then begins again. The water goes bright green when the sun sprinkles itself in it, usually in the summer months, like an emerald, switching colors as the sun pokes spots in it, a canvas that I wade into and out of as I please, as a visitor, as an admirer. Gulls call out at random, warning us of something, and then nothing, perhaps screaming with joy, their song reduced to single notes. Porpoises dart across the surface of the water, only sometimes, looking like shadows against the summer skies, heading somewhere different and farther away, as pelicans dive bomb for fish, making big explosions of white water against the backdrop of that space where I can see nothing and everything.

In these late summer months, the temperature hovers right above the beginnings of fall at night before screaming back to summer in the day. We sleep with big covers blanketing our bodies, before pushing them off as the sun streams through the windows and wake up to a sweaty sheen on our foreheads. Sand finds its way in through the front door, finding a home under the couch cushions, in the corners of the kitchen, and even all the way at the bottom of the toilet bowl. Each day begins with a box of yeast and cake donuts over coffee and a big wooden table and ends in an outdoor shower, with an open roof with a view of a dwindling sunset, a breeze coming through and causing goosebumps.

Here at the end of the earth we can still enjoy simple things; like oysters on the half shell and corn lathered in butter and salt, tomatoes and mozzarella sprinkled with fresh basil and bright acid, farmers markets breads and seven layer dip with too much sour cream.  In fact, in our wooden houses we eat with little remorse, enjoying in meals only for here, right at the edge. We splurge on our meals, intricate little instances that break up the day into the morning and the afternoon, even sometimes foregoing an evening drink and chips and dip to break up that twilight hour between five and seven.

The month starts with a bang — full of us, people, strangers, all intricately related — with dinners stretched out over three separate tables, zero leftovers and conversations over plates lasting well into the night. There’s no room to breathe, to think, only time to converse about home life, transitions, children getting older and slowly all leaving. It’s a dance, finding space for separation and making sure other’s feel included, a delicate balance of sharing just enough information, keeping extended family at bay, telling them bits and pieces without saying much at all. Blood pressures rise and tensions tighten as old dynamics resurface between aunts and uncles over too much liquor and days that last well into the evening. The children all sit and watch, with bizarre wonderment, to muse on how strange it must have been to be young in this family, and there’s a silent compact understanding: we will never be like this. But of course, we will be, because everyone is: a wonderful repetition of the dynamics instated at birth and into adolescence. The same disagreements, jealousies, let downs and wonderful triumphs. Over and over, manifested into slightly different arguments, yet they always return to their small little beginnings.

They all leave slowly, separately and then all at once. We are the only ones left now, except for a few stragglers, the year-rounders, who place their stakes in the sand, and dutifully nod as we walk by as if to say ‘You’ve lasted longer than the others. Good job.’  The coast stretches without its people mulling all over it, just sand and salt and water reaching up the eastern seaboard. The bridge to the north blinks, dashes of bright red taking over the evening sky every four seconds, little remnants of a Fourth of July firework show, a glimpse into summer’s past.

People like to go out on paddle boards and kayaks in the early morning, bobbing on the top of the surf, but we never do. I can see them from my bedroom window as the sun peaks over the horizon in a six am splendor, just little ants gliding on the glassy water, moving one way and then the other. On a normal afternoon, we just sit quietly with a couple of chairs and maybe two towels, heads deep into the stories of others, only the sound of pages turning and the ocean growling and hissing as it kisses the shore.  There’s a bag of beach snacks on the tattered blanket, full of fruit gummies and individual packs of cheesy popped corn, an occasional banana, and mom’s peanut butter crackers.

The lifeguards sit on their posts like plastic army men, keeping watch, eyes swiveling from left to right as day visitors run into the waves with little hesitation, some not knowing how to swim, not aware of the dangers of the surf on a deceivingly calm day. They wear bright orange trunks that hover right around the middle of their thighs, their leg hairs gone blonde from the summer sun. They always look sun stained, slightly damp, and on their way to something else. I often wonder if they get lonely sitting above everyone, merely observers of family gatherings, what they could possibly get to thinking about come August after sitting in the same perches for nearly two and a half months.

The sun dips over the last house around 7:47 as September nears and the nights in our quaint cottage dwindle. I try to savor an evening in slightly damp sheets with the roar of the ocean and the low-hanging moon. I sleep in pants now, underneath the comforter and the sheets, and wake up to a cold nose and wet hair. My face is plastered with little dots of the sun right on the bridge of my nose and down past my cheeks. The season is slipping into its next iteration, and I can’t help but imagine what a night here in October would grant me; what stories would lend themselves to me, what an empty boardwalk in the fall says about the townspeople who stay, what the moon looks like in a night whose temperatures dip into the low fifties. The beds start to empty, as my brothers and sisters return to college, and the house becomes quiet, static almost, as if waiting again for the vibration of a family whole pulsing through it. The creaks become more profound, the card games lose participants, and we all go slightly silent, our conversations replaced with wandering minds of the school seasons approaching, the football games and trees turning color, as fall whips through in one cascading blow.

The end of the earth looks just like this. Violet skyscapes and sandcastles with missing towers, blue crabs dusted in bright red salty spices, family gatherings around plots in the sand, skin dusted by the sun and salt, hair gone bright blonde, sand in the headphone jack of phones, and children slinking towards adulthood, one at a time, limbs reaching out past space they’ve previously taken. We leave the end of the earth in quiet surrender, going slowly, leaving at dusk, and pushing our way through fields of corn and farms stacked full of chicken. The house is put back into place, the chairs pushed in, the beds stripped, and the windows shut, sitting stoically, empty, as the world turns into something new.

The end of the earth looks just like this, over and over, and year after year I squint harder and for longer, as my eyes go in search of that space of hereafter, the space where time blurs and things begin only to end. The chase for everything and nothing, the space of knowing and not knowing, as life strives on, in a dutiful march towards something, and everything.

*   *   *

Grace Stroup is a writer from Arlington, Virginia. She attended UNC Chapel Hill, where she majored in English and Religious Studies with a concentration in Creative Writing. During her time there, she began writing stories centered on family, history, loss, and land. Her work has been published in Typishly, Rowayat, Short Edition, Rainy Day, Spare Parts, and others. She is getting her MFA in Creative Writing at the College of Charleston.  When she isn’t writing, she’s hiking, practicing yoga, cooking new recipes, and jumping in the Atlantic.

   By Susan Isreal

 “I don’t get it,” the woman said. “Is this art?”

 “Well, of course it’s art or it wouldn’t be hanging on the wall here,” the man replied, his intonation suggesting he might have added would it, but thought better of it. 

 “I’m not seeing it.”

“Everything’s not water lilies and sunflowers, you know.” 

She frowned. “Would you want this hanging in your living room?”

He stepped closer to the painting.  “In our living room? No, because it would clash terribly with the orange and purple, but otherwise yeah, I could see it in a living room.”

“Maybe Rothko’s living room.”

“Rothko’s dead.”

“Probably killed himself after working on that day and night.”

He didn’t want to tell her she was partially right. He reached for her hand just as she folded her arms. “It’s only a painting.” A painting that’s worth millions, he thought. Why are we fighting over this?

“Could you imagine this in a bedroom?” She persisted.  “Can you imagine trying to sleep looking at that?”  

All that red. Color of blood. She shuddered. When was the last time she had her period? How late was it? The only red she wanted to see and there was no sign of it. Just a big blob of red on canvas. 

“Could you imagine it in a nursery?”

“No,” he shook his head emphatically. “No, I definitely can’t. But it’s not like we have to worry about that, is it?”

                                                                       *   *   *                          

Susan Israel’s work has recently been published in MacQueen’s Quinterly, 50 Word Stories, Flash Boulevard, and is forthcoming in The Dribble Drabble Review and Blink-Ink. She lives in Connecticut and likes visiting art galleries.

By Don Tassone

I’d been congested and coughing all day when my wife suggested I take a Covid test.

“Nobody tests anymore,” I said.

“But if you’ve got it, you’ll spread it,” she said.

I knew she was right.  I had a week full of meetings and events ahead.  I didn’t want to cancel anything, but I didn’t want to infect anyone either.

So I took the test.  It was positive.

I cancelled my appointments for the week.  Suddenly, I was homebound with an open calendar.  I wasn’t sure what I was going to do.

Then an idea came to mind.  A few days earlier, I’d heard Don McLeans’s “Starry, Starry Night” on the radio.  It was still playing in my head.  It made me think of van Gogh’s famous painting.  And that made me think of the paint by numbers I did as a kid.  Maybe I should do one now to pass the time, I thought.

So I went online, found a paint by number of “The Starry Night” and ordered it.  It arrived in a long, thin box the following day.

I cleared the dining room table and opened the box.  Tucked inside were a 16 by 20-inch rolled-up canvas, instructions, strips of little plastic paint pots, several brushes and a little poster of the finished painting to use as a guide.

I was surprised there were so many numbered sections:  1,205.  I hadn’t noticed that online.  This was a lot more involved and advanced than the paint by numbers I did as a kid.  Maybe this wasn’t such a good idea, I thought.

I read the instructions.  They laid out the process in a simple, orderly fashion:  paint in sections, top to bottom, left to right, light colors to dark.  They also included “pro tips.”

The first tip was to tape down the edges of the canvas on a flat surface.  I grabbed a roll of masking tape and did that.  Seeing the whole gamut of tiny numbered sections made my task seem even more daunting.

For a moment, I felt an urge to stuff everything back in the box and return it.  But then what would I do all week?

I popped open the little paint cup stamped “1.”  White.  I checked out all the “1” sections in the upper left corner of the canvas, selected the smallest-tipped brush and dipped it in.  Then I slowly lowered the tip of the brush to a small section near the corner and began to fill it in.

I tried to stay inside the lines.  But after only a few strokes, my brush strayed into a different section.

In that moment, I was transported back to my childhood and an experience I had nearly forgotten.

When I was six years old, my mother bought me a paint-by-number kit.  It was an autumn scene filled with trees bursting with color. 

She set up a card table in my bedroom, laid out the contents of the kit and brought in a small glass of water so I could clean my brush between colors.  She told me what to do, then left me to paint on my own.

But as soon as I started painting, I screwed up.  I couldn’t stay inside the lines, and the colors began to run together.  

I pounded my fist on the table and stood up fast, knocking my chair over.  Through tears, I glared down at my awful handiwork.

“I can’t do this!” I yelled.

I grabbed the cardboard canvas, tore it in half and stuffed it in my trash can.

My mother must have heard all the commotion because she came back into my room.  I was sitting on my bed, crying.

She sat down next to me.

“What’s wrong?” she said.

“I can’t paint!”

“Why do you say that?”

I told her what had happened.  I thought she’d be upset.  Instead, she said, “You don’t have to stay inside the lines, you know.  Artists blend colors.  They blend everything.  That’s what makes their paintings so beautiful.”

If I’d been older, I might have thought she was just saying that to make me feel better.  But I took her words to heart.

“Do you want to try another painting sometime?” she said.

“Maybe,” I said, sniffing.

“Well, whenever you’d like, we can go to the store and pick one out.”

A few days later, we went to Kmart, and I picked out a new paint-by-number kit:  a spring scene with lots of blossoms and flowers.

When we got home, my mother helped me get set up again.  Then, once again, she left my room.

I sat down and began to paint.  This time, though, I didn’t get flustered when my brush strayed outside the lines.  

A few days later, I finished that painting, which I proudly showed my family.  My mother framed it, and together we hung it on my bedroom wall.

*

Now I scanned the nearly blank canvas on my dining room table, then studied the poster of the finished painting.

I remembered reading a story about van Gogh painting “The Starry Night” after looking out the window from his room in an asylum and seeing a large morning star.  He wasn’t allowed to paint in his room, so he began painting the star he’d seen in a studio, without the view for reference.  The result was a dream-like image, a combination of elements real and imagined.

I thought about my life.  I never imagined I’d be so successful in the corporate world.  Many of my colleagues have been smarter than me.  But unlike most of them, I’ve always been able to navigate ambiguity, and that has made all the difference.

“Artists blend everything.”  All my life, I’ve heard my mother’s voice and felt her loving presence.

I finished all the “1” sections, with white paint bleeding beyond many of the lines, and moved onto “2.”  Blue, my mother’s favorite color.

                                                                  *   *   *

Don Tassone is the author of two novels and eight short story collections.  He lives in Loveland, Ohio.

By Chris Cochran

We sit on the curb and watch the fluids from two crumpled cars pool together on the cool asphalt. Sirens blare in the distance. A woman screams at us in Spanish from across the street. The reflection of the traffic light above diffuses amongst the wreckage. It changes from green to yellow to red.

I met him two hours ago. I know a little about his job, about his family. He seems honest, but a little insecure.

“It was green, right?” he asks, and my breath catches sharply. I squeeze back tears and tell him what he needs to hear.

*   *   *

Chris Cochran is a high school English teacher who writes first drafts on an old typewriter in a small nook beneath his basement steps. He lives in Michigan with his wife and son, where he spends most evenings drinking tea and falling asleep to comedy podcasts.

By Alison Sanders

I never wanted her as a playmate. Our moms – best friends – would send us outside together. “You kids go play,” they’d say. But Emma was too timid, her hands too small, as we scampered through the woods behind our houses. She was not very good at climbing trees, and I was annoyed by her little-girl voice from below, warning me that I was going too high.

In high school I didn’t want her as a prom date. “There’s always Emma,” my mother suggested, and I thought my parents might make me take her. But I asked another girl, whose aerosol hair crunched against the headrest of my dad’s car. I saw her, though, at prom – Emma. She was standing against the wall, and the colored lights danced over her face. Her dress was too big, and the shallow plane of her chest was so pale I felt an urge to cover her. I said Hey Em, and she rolled her eyes with a tiny curl of her lip. She kept tugging it up, her dress.

I never wanted to sleep with Emma, not ever.  Once, the summer after high school graduation, we sat in the moonlight in her backyard while our parents laughed inside the house. They seemed very far away. Without thinking about it, I reached over and wrapped my fingers around her wrist and the tip of my thumb touched the tip of my pinky. I don’t remember why I did that. I called her scrawny and she seemed to shrink a bit when I said it, which I didn’t intend. Just joking, I said. Her wrist was cool under my hand, and bird bone delicate. We talked until very late that night, our shoulders touching lightly as the dew fell. I didn’t want anything more than that. 

A few years later, I was in a noisy bar when Emma walked in. I was holding a beer, and playing pool with a group of guys I didn’t really know. The music made the floors hum under my feet. I didn’t expect to see Emma there. She had gone off to college by then, and I’d started climbing poles for the phone company. And so I was surprised to see her. She looked around with her big, curious eyes, and when she saw me she came right over. She called me Andy, though I was Andrew to everyone by then. “You’re back,” I said and I heard relief in my voice. She looked like her mother in that moment, but also like her – Emma – when she was just a little girl. Someone jostled her from behind, and I thought she didn’t belong there, in that bar with sticky humming floors. I felt ashamed of my beer buzz and the worksite dirt under my nails. I didn’t want to see her there. 

I didn’t want to marry her. Of course our parents had always hoped we’d wind up together – especially our mothers. But, no. I married Sarah, with her big laugh, and I don’t even remember Emma at our wedding though I know she was there. Emma married a college guy. When I met him at their wedding reception he called me “Andy” too, and I wanted to say, “That’s not yours.” But that’s silly and I knew it. She looked happy that day, and I was glad. They moved up the coast, Emma and her husband, and over the years when I checked the weather every morning, I checked Emma’s town too. Funny the things we do. 

Over the years, we became Facebook friends, which I liked very much. In photos, her children smiled with closed lips and warm eyes just like their mother. I recall a picture of her kneeling on the beach with her arms wrapped around her children. The sun caught a strand of Emma’s hair blowing across her face, and it made me feel content somehow that her children leaned into her that way, that someone – her husband I suppose – saw that moment and captured it, that the sun was warm on the top of her head. I never commented; I had nothing to say in that place. Though it did make me happy to see.

When my mother died, I didn’t want anyone. The world felt suddenly cruel and cold, and I wanted to be alone in it for a while. But Emma sent me a card. Dear Andy, it said. Inside was a long note in her perfect chalkboard cursive and she recalled things about my mother that I had forgotten, or never noticed at all. I looked at that note for a long time after I finished reading it. I tucked it in my desk drawer, beneath the stamps and the scotch tape, and I wondered why I would do such a thing. But it made me feel less alone, that note.

But, today. Today my wife is gone, along with my mother and my father and one of my sweet boys, and I know it’s my time soon. I can feel the machinery winding down inside me like my father’s wristwatch used to do at the end of the day. The air around me is filled with the smell of soap and the whispers of nurses and grandchildren I do not recognize. Today’s date, I suddenly realize, will be carved into my gravestone, remembered every year, and I don’t know what today’s date is. I feel that is something I should know, and it worries me though I can’t form the words to ask. And today, I want Emma. Her half smile. The calm in her eyes – eyes which have seen me all of my days. I try to say her name but it comes out wrong, and someone holds a cup of water to my lips instead. I take a sip, and I close my eyes in thanks. And then – I know it before I even open my eyes—she’s here. I knew she would be. Her fingers are cool on my wrist, her voice soft like home. It was always Emma.

*   *   *

Alison is a mother and an attorney living in Santa Cruz, California. Her writing has appeared in Stanford Magazine, Cleaver, Seaside Gothic, Bluebird Word, Flash Fiction Magazine, and the 2023 Swan Song anthology. She was a finalist in Bellingham Review’s 2021 Tobias Wolff Award for Fiction and the WOW! Women on Writing Winter 2023 Flash Fiction Contest, and her work was shortlisted for the SmokeLong Quarterly Award for Flash Fiction and the Retreat West Short Story Contest. She is working on her first novel.

What You Took With You For The Rest of Your Life 

made no sense at all. With the dog at your heels, you ran back and forth into the house emerging with a broken espresso machine, your laptop, cell phone, a sleeping bag, two armfuls of loose clothing, two guitars in cases, a bag of potato chips and flip-flops. In less than fifteen minutes, you peeled away. The dog was inconsolable. What you didn’t take was your passport, warm clothing, family photos and your cellphone charger. The blanket I knit for you was tangled in the sheets and pillows of your bed which I didn’t make because the dog was curled like a button deep within the woolly folds. She cries in her dreams every night until I wrap my arms around her. Awake, she doesn’t leave my side. Her purple collar is missing. I hope you have it as a compass to guide you home when you’re no longer lost.

                                                                         *    *    *

By Lissa Staples

Lissa Staples is a classical singer and an emerging writer. She has been a student at The Writers Studio since 2014 and recently won Synkroniciti’s short story contest with her piece, The Month of Drowning, which was published September 2023 and subsequently nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Her work can be read at Corvus Review, Synkroniciti, Heartwood Review, The Stickman Review, Emerge and The Write Launch among others.

By Sylvia Schwartz

You ask if the “she” in the manuscript is me. I tell you, she is not. But, of course, parts of me spill onto the pages. How can it not? 

You say her eventual suicide, along with the last chapter, when she disappears for days, not responding to texts or calls or emails or even knocks on her door, is the basis of your fear. However, I respond to you, don’t I? Yes, I turn off my phone, don’t listen to messages, want to be alone. But I’m fine. When I eventually call, you hear me. Hear my laugh. No need to worry. Really.

You must realize the character who slips into “a blissful forever where the last brilliant light severed and seared her into constellations” is merely lofty imagery painted with plain letter-making words—nothing more. You ask where these dark thoughts come from, and I tell you everyone has them. Okay. Not you. But most people, will you grant me that? 

I tell you, feelings are slippery, a hard thing to wrangle. Getting caught in the throat, constricting the gut, and terrorizing the brain when on a mind-numbing loop. So how can you expect them not to be tangled and twisted when they finally escape, bursting out in fits and spurts—like my conflicted feelings for you?

I know you just want one thing: me to be happy. And you’re afraid when I’m not. But putting pen to pain is my panacea. The brooding girl you espied our first night, proving opposites attract, didn’t prove attachments last.

You ask why I don’t write comedy. You tell me I can be funny. That funny is sexy, too. I say, don’t dig too far beneath a standup’s surface unless you’re willing to uncover trauma.

When I tell you my next book is a love story, you are ecstatic. Thankful the unsteady dark side “you put up with”—your phrase, not mine—will finally lift. You stay excited until you learn my novel is also a tragedy. While neither lover dies, they won’t get what they want. 

I wish life were simpler. Do I love you? I do. Is it enough? I think not. Someday, when you read the last page where the lovers part, I hope you’ll understand we each got what we needed.

                                                                     *   *   *

Sylvia Schwartz’s stories have appeared in several anthologies and have been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. She has been published in LitBreak, Five on the Fifth, The Write Launch, Bright Flash Literary Review, Ariel Chart International Literary Journal, Bluebird’s Scribe Review, and more. She is an assistant editor at Narrative Magazine. http://www.sylviaschwartz.com, @Aivlys99

Nonfiction by Christopher L. Morrow

The gentle exhalation of air from the husky near my feet catches my attention.  One might be tempted to call it a sigh, but the soft sound contains none of the associated adolescent angst or the adult aggravation. This sound is one of contentment, of relaxing fully into one’s repose, of shedding the world rather than being trapped within it. As I shift my weight to look at her, the vinyl creak of my office chair triggers an instinctual and learned vigilance for Opal.   

Without moving, she opens her eyes, and the dark pupils search my face expectantly. Her rest disturbed, she tries to anticipate my attention, silently asking what I want from her. I remain still, staring back, and focusing on the tiny white lashes around her eyes – lashes which are almost invisible against the downy white fur of her face.      

Scientists believe that huskies’ distinctive blue eyes come from a duplication of canine chromosome 18. According to popular folklore, the Chukchi people of north-east Asia who are credited with developing the husky have a different explanation.  For them, some dogs stared out into the limitless, cold, and frozen ocean.  Their eyes — reflecting ice and sea-water — take on that color, and they become protectors.  They stand facing out into the wild and maintain a vigilant watch for their family.  Other huskies peered into the fire at the center of the hearth.  Flames representing warmth, safety, and comfort lent their eyes a soft brown color. Those dogs focus on caring for and nurturing their pack. 

Opal’s soft brown eyes project the comfort and warmth of this legend but also hold a latent wariness. Not receiving an answer from my gaze, her tail, lying flat against the tile floor, drifts back and forth.  The long black and white fur makes an almost imperceptible shooshing sound against the ceramic.  She is escalating our silent conversation – trying to goad me into a response.

Our first such conversations were quite different.  She came to us with no hearth and constantly beset by the coldness around her.  Her eyes revealed a belief that the world had no comfort left.  She had been found nearly hairless, ravaged by two types of mange.  Her skin — normally protected by the thick double coat of canine fur worn by northern breeds – was exposed to the elements.  Its once healthy pink hue reddened and chafed by the wind.  

We didn’t talk directly at first.  She would lay across the room — as far as architecturally possible. She kept her attention trained on me and tried intently to read my face.  Then, I was not a fire of comfort for her; I was the frozen ocean.  Though her stare remained direct, I had to address her with eyes askance — anything more assumed as aggression.  Coiled into a canine cirque, she peered over the tail which covered her muzzle as a last line of defense. 

For weeks, Opal maintained her icy blue vigilance.   We talked during her vigils.  Well, I talked.  I praised her for her strength and told her she was safe. But, no matter how soothing and calm my words sounded, they only spelled danger.  She watched and listened but remained alert for perceived threats – ready to flinch away or scurry into another room. 

Over the weeks, her fur returned and her outer coat, with its aptly named guard hairs, kept growing longer, fuller, and softer.  She also started lying closer and closer to me and, in the depths of a good nap, her body would unfold from its tight protective spiral.  Her tail, initially flattened protectively against the backs of her legs, slowly released its grip and returned to its proud position arching up and curving toward her head until it’s tip lightly brushed against her back.  The long guard hairs at the apex of the curve, unable to support their own weight, water fell down. Eventually, she began taking treats directly from my hand and allowing me to scratch behind her ears.  Though time and patience thawed her eyes, she has never told me what her time on the tundra cost her.  I think she prefers it that way.  

Today, my lack of an answer prompts her to get up and pad silently across the cold tile to me.  The long white hairs which now emerge from her ears curve back like handlebar ribbons.  She lays her head on my knee and looks up into my eyes.  After a brief pause, she twitches her head to the left, pushing her cold black and pink nose into the edge of my palm.  She no longer wonders what I want; she has chosen nurture — for both of us.  

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Christopher L. Morrow is a professor of English and dean of Arts and Humanities at the University of Texas Permian Basin. His creative works have been previously published by Under the Gum Tree and Texas Ballot Poetry. He lives in West Texas, where folks take solace in it being a “dry” heat.