A Memoir by Lee Zacharias

For fifteen years my mother fell. Off curbs, out of chairs, standing up, sitting down, getting out of bed, getting back in. Sometimes she fell while doing nothing at all. She would not hear of assisted living or allow an aide to come in, would not wear a Life Alert, would not use the platform cane or walker I bought her. “People will think I’m old,” she said. If I tried to help her down a flight of stairs, it wasn’t because she wobbled, it was because I thought she was stupid. She didn’t need anyone’s help, no matter how often she lost her balance. Once she broke her foot. What else, I don’t know. I lived a thousand miles away, and not only did she lie, she always had some excuse: she never fell, something tripped her, something tangled, things got in her way. 

She fell for the last time six days before her ninety-eighth birthday, sometime during the night of April 2, 2016. I know the date because when I arrived Wednesday evening, April 6, the Sunday Northwest Indiana Times was still on her stoop, fliers spilling from the top of her mailbox. Even before I let myself in, the house gave off a smell of abandonment. Inside it was putrid. “Mom?” I called as I dropped my luggage. There was a chair overturned in the hallway, a stripe of light beneath her bedroom door. A heavy sewing table had toppled behind it, and I had to break in. I found her on the floor with her head near the foot of her bed, helplessly waving her arms, eyes darting, naked from the waist down, lying in her own feces, conscious but unable to speak as I bent to ask what had happened. Whether she recognized me or not I can’t say.

I called an ambulance, and she died in six days later, less than twenty-four hours into her Hospice stay, April 12, 3:25 a.m., perhaps the very same hour she had fallen. The hospice nurse had estimated it would be another seventy-two hours, and so after a long day—a series of long days in ER, ICU, and finally the wing of the hospital where she was sent to wait for a bed at the Hospice Residence Center to open—I had gone home to get some sleep, even though I suspected it would be her last night. During her first days in the hospital she had briefly regained some ability to speak (though not her coherence), but she was long past words now. Still I told her where she was and that her passing would be peaceful. “I kept my promise,” I said. “I didn’t send you to a nursing home.” I assured her that she would be with her beloved dog Lobo, that she would be with Roy, the boyfriend who had died years before, with her father, her brothers, and sisters again. Most of all I promised that she would finally have the chance to know her mother, who had died before my mother was old enough to remember her. I teared up as I read “The Rainbow Bridge,” wept through the Twenty-third Psalm, kissed her forehead, told her I loved her, and said goodbye.

When I returned at 4 a.m., the nurse let me sit with her for a while, then came in to tell me the remover had arrived. “You’ll want to step out of the room,” he said, but I shook my head. I hadn’t been there to hold my mother’s hand as she took her last breath, but I intended to see her off.  I watched as he loaded her onto the gurney, zipped her into the body bag, and wheeled her down the hall to the Cadillac SUV waiting in the garage. The aide pushed the button to raise the door, and as the vehicle pulled out, I waved and called, “That’s a mighty fancy ride you’ve got up to heaven, Mom.”

And then I came home, to her house that is, a house I had hated for the entire 61 years I spent living in it as a child or visiting as an adult. And yet in the near week it had taken my mother to die, I somehow felt more comfortable, more at home than I ever had before, for I realized I had something I’d never experienced there in all those decades, privacy. If I poured myself a glass of wine, no one asked what I was doing; if I went to the bathroom, no one demanded to know where I had gone. And now it was mine, mine and my brother’s, though the job of cleaning it out would fall to me, for he had been in the hospital himself, waiting on a new pacemaker, when my mother fell, and was still under orders not to drive. I went back to bed, but couldn’t sleep. There was work to do. My mother had come through the Depression, and like so many of her generation, she never threw anything away. Who knew when you might need a dozen pair of dry-rotted drapes still brandishing their hooks, six thousand margarine tubs, or that broken appliance? 

Some of the evil little things that get to you fresh in your grief: a nasty funeral director you’re dealing with by phone because at least fifty years before your mother prepaid her cremation through the Chicago Memorial Trust, and he is so angry that she lived and died in Indiana but is being cremated in Illinois, the first thing he says is not the perfunctory “I’m sorry,” but “You’re not going to be able to get death certificates.”  Or perhaps he’s angry to have to fire up his oven for so much less than the going rate. Whichever, he is snappish. Half an hour later his secretary calls to say that your credit card has been denied, not because you live in North Carolina, were in California the night your mother fell, and are now in the Midwest without having notified the bank, but because the funeral home entered the wrong security code. Or maybe it’s phoning the Lake County Board of Health for assistance with the death certificates only to be told that the funeral home has to take care of that and having the clerk ring off with a disheartening “Good luck.” Most of all it’s getting a jump on the cleaning out by beginning to haul away the junk you know no one will want, and when you reach the top of the basement steps with a hideous plastic floral arrangement in petrified green Styrofoam, the Styrofoam block explodes, showering you and everything around you with toxic green dust, and stupidly you sit on the kitchen floor and weep, because you are not crying over your mother’s death but the mess you have to clean up. Except it is your mother’s death, which keeps coming at you sideways.

And then this moment of grace. You have been posting on Facebook throughout your mother’s ordeal because you are alone, your husband is back home, taking care of your sick dog, and your phone is the only link you have to the outside world, though you’ve paid little attention to it, you have not wished anyone a happy birthday or scrolled down through your friends’ posts, because death is self-centered, it hears of nothing but itself, you have only glanced at the first to pop up when you open your page and not bothered to read it. But tonight that first post catches your eye. A former student is worried about a robin’s nest in her yard, wondering why the mother has abandoned her eggs. Probably it was touched by a human, her friends suggest, and instantly I remember that when I was a child I stole a robin’s nest. My kindergarten had been hatching chicks and I must have meant to tend the little blue eggs until they opened and then take care of my very own baby robins. My mother climbed the neighbor’s tree to replace it. I was too young to remember, or perhaps even notice, whether the mother robin ever came back, but suddenly on this day of her death I have my mother back. She is young and agile, her hair thick and dark. The pale gray hem of her dress sways as she balances the nest, moving higher and higher, but nothing tangles, nothing trips, nothing gets in her way. My mother is climbing a tree.

                                                              *   *   *

Lee Zacharias is the author of four novels, a collection of short stories, and two collections of essays. Her most recent book is Remember Me (Unicorn Press, 2024). She has twice won the North Carolina Sir Walter Raleigh Award for Fiction and silver medals from the Independent Press Awards in both literary fiction and nonfiction. Her third novel, Across the Great Lake, won the Phillip H. McMath Book Award and was named a 2019 Notable Michigan Book by the Library of Michigan. She is the recipient of grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and the North Carolina Arts Council. Her essays have been cited as notable numerous times by the annual Best American Essays, which reprinted her essay “Buzzards” in the 2008 edition.

By Barbara Westwood Diehl

Wanda likes to think of herself as a citizen on patrol. From her bedroom window, she watches one of the McGuire kids. A tiny girl in a Dora the Explorer t-shirt, flower barrettes clipped all over her head, poking around the trash cans in the Lemmon Street alley. Looking for who knows what. A tough little thing, this McGuire. Like a blue chicory flower in the concrete. Pops out of nowhere.

Wanda raises the Venetian blinds, opens the window, and props it up with a volume of Britannica so it won’t come crashing down. Through her binoculars, she watches the child wander up and down the alley, tugging the plastic handle of a pull-toy behind her, one of those toys with popping balls, like the Pop-O-Matic board game Wanda played with her kids when they were little. Trouble, that was the name of it. 

Every few feet, the pull-toy hits a bump in the concrete and falls on its side. The little girl pops it right back up again. Keeps those balls popping. Like yellow ragwort, purple thistle, up from the cracks. 

Wanda swings her binoculars up and down the alley. Not one adult in sight. Neglect is what it is. Criminal. But she remembers what Jo Dean always says. She owns half the little box houses on the alley, so she should know. What Jo Dean says about their lives—you may have the best of intentions, but people don’t take kindly to being fixed. A citizen on patrol doesn’t fix people. But the Pop-O-Matic pull-toy pops something loose in Wanda. Trouble. That game of pressing a plastic bubble and moving the pieces around the board toward home. Home. She wants the girl to go home. 

She hears the crunch of tires rounding the corner from Carey Street onto Lemmon. It’s a convertible, a big one, yellow hood the length of a house, with music pulsing so loudly the driver couldn’t possibly hear the Pop-O-Matic or see a chicory-sized kid in the sun glare of metal cans.

Wanda sticks her head out through the Britannica-propped window and screams, “Stop. You’ll hit the baby.” But the driver doesn’t stop. 

She pushes away from the chair, binoculars swinging from the strap around her neck, and      runs down the carpeted stairs. Her hand glides along the polished rail and she rounds the landing—pushing away the image of a tiny body against a car grill—to the stairs to the first floor to the foyer and on through the house. She bursts through the kitchen door and runs along the brick walk and out through the gate onto Lemmon Street.

The car has stopped. The music is still pulsing loudly enough to rattle the aluminum trash can lids, and Wanda feels her heart pressing in on her. About to pop. The driver is slouched sideways in his seat with an arm slung over his door. A McGuire. Although Wanda is only a hood’s length from them, he doesn’t seem to see her.

Where is the child? That child with barrettes in her dandelion hair? Wanda’s eyes sweep the front of the car and the alley. No child. With her heart still fighting the music, she bends down and looks under the car. Not there. 

Then she hears it. The Pop-O-Matic popping. The toy emerges from behind a mattress leaning against a house, popping blue, red, and yellow balls. Then the child herself.

Wanda exhales. Her heart still isn’t right, and her vision is a cloud of blue, red, and yellow. The binoculars strap around her neck is choking her. She lifts them up and over her head, and they fall from her hand onto the hood of the car, where they leave a dent like closed eyes.

The man in the convertible rises above the windshield and the damage and all her good intentions and raises a hand toward Wanda. Flash of metal in his fingers. Pop. Now she has his attention. Pop.

*   *   *

Barbara Westwood Diehl is senior editor of The Baltimore Review. Her fiction and poetry appear in a variety of journals, including Fractured Lit, South Florida Poetry Journal, Poetry South, Painted Bride Quarterly, Five South, Allium, Split Rock Review, Blink-Ink, Midway, Free State Review, Ghost Parachute, Pithead Chapel, and New World Writing Quarterly.

By JB Lowe

The sun is low and mean, casting long shadows across the busted asphalt. The hoop leans just slightly to the left, and the backboard is cracked but still standing. The rim—crooked, rusted—endures. The net’s long gone.

Score’s 20 to 20. This isn’t just a game. It’s ritual.
One-on-one. First to 21. No subs. No fans. No mercy. Just that final point.

He’s dribbling slow, deliberate. Palming the ball like it’s made of glass, watching me with that grin that says he’s got a trick loaded and ready to fire. The heat rolls off the blacktop in waves, warping the air between us.

We’re both drenched in sweat. My shirt is plastered to me. My legs are jelly. My hands feel numb. My knees—traitorous at best. But none of it matters.

This isn’t just a game. It’s the game. 

One-on-one. First to 21. For pride. For pain. For peace.

“You look tired,” he says.

“You look slow,” I shoot back.

He chuckles. Fakes left. Drives hard right.

I follow…. late. A step, maybe two. He’s at the rim. He goes up for the layup.

I launch.

Time slows. I feel my fingers brush leather…just enough. The ball kisses the backboard, spins off the rim.

He curses. I hit the ground hard, ribs jolting. The ball rolls free.

Still alive.

I scramble up, snag the ball, start dribbling. Left hand. Slow. My pulse is thunder. My legs ache.

He’s bent at the waist, hands on his knees, chest heaving. Still smiling.

We circle. Just the two of us. No fans. No music. Just breath and sneakers and the distant hum of the generator.

I drive left. He bites.

Step back. Rise.

“Don’t do it,” he says, voice low, pointing at me. He already knows.

I do it anyway.

The ball leaves my hand—perfect backspin, clean release, rising into the heat.

“YES—”

The ball hangs in the air—

“9-LINE INCOMING!”

—then the war called it down.

The voice rips across the compound, sharp and certain.

We freeze.

The ball bounces away into nothing. Forgotten.

The front gate opens. Headlights cut through the dust.

“Litters inbound!” someone yells.

Boots thunder past us.

He doesn’t speak. Neither do I.

We run.

Moments later, chaos meets us under the light of the trauma tent. It smells like blood and diesel and fear. The kind of fear that’s silent. 

Four patients. Two conscious. Two not. One missing half a leg. Another has a hole in his chest you could fit a clenched fist inside.

We’ve done this dance too many times.

I grab another tourniquet and cinch it tight, just above the one failing to hold. The blood pulses once…high and red…then halts like a switch was flipped. His eyes lock onto mine, wide and unblinking, pleading without sound.

“You’re gonna be okay,” I lie. My voice is calm. Steady. Practiced. 

My hands are already slick with someone else’s life.

Across from me, my opponent—my almost-vanquished foe—is cutting into someone’s chest, sliding a tube between collapsed lungs. His sleeves are still soaked from the game. He doesn’t even notice.

The game has changed. But it’s still about winning. 

“Get that line started!” I shout. “Bag’s dry. We need another unit, now!”

I look down the row of NATO litters at my 4 patients.

Someone vomits. Someone screams. Someone doesn’t make a sound at all.

And so it goes.

Hours later, when the last patient is loaded onto a bird bound for further stabilization and surgery, when the blood is rinsed off the floor and the adrenaline wears off, we sit outside the tent. Two overturned crates. One shared box of cigars.

The court is empty now. Just shadows. Just the rim, crooked in the dark.

“You missed,” he says, ember glowing at the end of his cigar.

I shrug. “Maybe.”

Smoke curls from my lips. “Hell of a shot, though.”

I think of the way the ball arced through the sky. The silence just before the shout. The weightlessness of the moment before the world called us back.

“We’ll never know,” he says.

And we won’t.

But maybe that’s okay.

Because when the world breaks open, when the screaming fades into routine, it’s the moments like these that matter. Moments of joy. Stolen, small, and sacred. The laughter, the game, the illusion of something normal—those are the true miracles.

Even if it only lasts to 20.

                                                               *   *   *

JB Lowe is a physician, veteran, and author whose fiction explores the intersections of trauma, duty, and what it means to survive. He served over two decades in the U.S. military as both a combat medic and emergency physician, deploying to multiple regions and working in both field hospitals and civilian trauma centers. His experience lends visceral authenticity to stories that examine moral injury, memory, and the quiet aftermath of war. He writes fiction under a pseudonym to maintain separation from his professional identity and continues to serve in the military.

By Allison Whittenberg

Carla led the life of an actress, which mostly meant waiting tables and auditioning for roles that never came. The rejections piled up like takeout containers in her cramped studio apartment. Such was the quiet tragedy she’d become.

She often thought about giving up—leaving L.A., getting a real job, buying a house, and living a life that didn’t feel like a holding pattern. But two years passed, and she hadn’t done any of those things.

One afternoon, while scrolling through emails, a subject line caught her eye:

Immediate Casting Opportunity — Confidential

She almost deleted it, thinking it was a scam. But then she saw the same message again, farther down her inbox. Her curiosity piqued. Still, she resisted, kept browsing through social media.

Then she saw it a third time.

This time, she clicked.

The email was from a director named Stan Staged?—someone she’d never heard 

of—requesting her immediate presence for “a private audition. No résumé needed.”

This sounds sketchy, she thought, but she kept reading.

You’ve already been chosen. Just show up.

“This has to be a ruse,” she muttered in her low, smoky voice.

Her curiosity—or maybe desperation—won out. She took the subway to the edge of the city, to an abandoned soundstage beneath a flickering fluorescent light.

A woman in a green A-line dress greeted her. She was holding a clipboard and wearing a smile that didn’t quite reach her eyes.

“The actress who cried,” the woman said. “Cry on cue. Cry on demand. You’re perfect. Welcome to Cry-Sys.”

“Cry, Sis?”

“It’s short for Crisis Systems. We manufacture perception.”

“Perception of what?”

The woman didn’t answer. “Do you want the job or not?”

“Well…I’d like a job.”

“Right this way.”

A curtain slid open, revealing what looked like a war zone—only it wasn’t a set. It was real, or at least it looked real. Debris littered the ground. Dust filled the air. People screamed. 

Extras ran around in chaos.

Someone handed Carla a tattered coat and smeared soot across her cheeks.

“You’re Grieving Civilian Number 5,” the woman said flatly.

“I’m what?”

But there was no time to protest. The director shouted for quiet. Drones hovered overhead. Cameras moved in. A man whispered into a headset.

Then someone handed her a child—more prop than person. A toddler, limp in her arms, disturbingly lifelike.

“Listen, sweetheart,” a production assistant whispered. “Cry when the smoke hits.”

The smoke hit.

Carla cried.

It came out raw, from somewhere real. “That’s real,” she gasped, coughing through the smoke.

Later that night, she watched the footage on the news. Civilian caught in a blast, the anchor reported, gravely. Among them—her.

Carla tried to quit.

But every time she made the decision, another “assignment” appeared—always with her already in it.

A flood took out a backroad in some unnamed town. She stood chest-deep in water, holding a different child—also not real—crying tears that weren’t hers.

Then a courthouse shooting. Then riots in a foreign land.

Each time, she awoke in the middle of it, dazed, in a new costume, cameras already rolling.

Another call. Another crisis.

She couldn’t remember getting there, but she was always there.

Finally, she tried to reach her agent. Four times, before her agent actually picked up.

“Carla, you’re not seeing the big picture,” the woman sighed. “You’ve been in a rut. What’s it been—two years? All your roles dried up. You’re not getting any younger. You needed something new.”

“But this isn’t film. This is… something else.”

“It’s work.”

“I don’t want to be in one crisis after another. This is… wrong.”

“Carla,” her agent said gently, “beggars can’t be choosers. Listen—this is a Netflix world now.”

“This is on Netflix?”

“I’m telling you: whatever they’re filming, people are seeing it. The thing you shot yesterday—it’s in the paper today. Looks like real news. Just you and a bunch of ‘grieving civilians’ standing in smoke. It looks good.”

Carla’s voice cracked. “I don’t think this is legal. I thought the news was supposed to be true.”

“Don’t be naïve. Look, everyone compromises. Some people take off their clothes and don’t want to, but they do it for the role.”

“I have a no-nudity clause.”

“Exactly. And this is your niche. Crying, chaos, realism—this is what you do. You’re finally getting seen.”

She went quiet.

Her agent continued, “It’s on TV. It’s in the papers. Isn’t that where you wanted to be? 

You’re just… cutting out the middleman.”

“I don’t know,” Carla whispered. “I don’t know. I need to stop. These roles are taking over my life.”

“Too late. You signed the contract.”

That woman in the green A-line dress. Those men in gray pantsuits. The clipboard. The fake smile. The endless flickering lights.

“You signed,” her agent repeated. “Didn’t you?”

Carla said nothing.

She woke up again—this time in a marketplace. Smoke drifted. Sirens wailed. 

Something had exploded. She was already mid-scream.

She blinked, confused, tears already streaming.

Reality had slipped.

She wasn’t acting anymore. She was living these scripts.

Later, in her coat pocket, she found a note:

Congratulations. You’ve become indispensable to our production.

There was no escape.

She memorized her crisis lines.

And she just kept crying.

                                                                      *   *   *

Allison Whittenberg is an award winning novelist and playwright. Her poetry has appeared in Columbia Review, Obisidian, Feminist Studies,J Journal, and NewOrleans Review. Whittenberg is a ten-time Pushcart Prize nominee. They Were Horrible Cooks is her collection of poetry. Killing the Father of Our Country is her latest novel.

By Nolo Segundo 

At one of his 7 mansions [appraised at $77.5 million], the one close to the world famous hospital, he lay on the custom made hospital bed [$36,500] with IV’s in each arm. Classical music was playing on low volume on a stereophile’s dream of an audio system [quad speakers: $182,400; CD player: $ 7,800; pre-amp: $12,000; 300 watt-amp, $9150; a custom built turntable, $23,700, with a diamond needle, $4,250; hand-made cables, $8,400; custom built cabinet handmade from rare woods from Brazil, Sri Lanka, and Hungary, $62, 000]. 

The attendant nurse sat in a 17^th century French armchair [$ 45,000] quietly scrolling through her text messages and feeling a little sad that her patient was dying on his very expensive death bed. She was making over three times what she would get anywhere else as a hospice nurse and she couldn’t help wishing he would live a few months longer, long enough at least so she could get that luxury car she had long dreamt of. But the doctor had just said he did not have long now, a few hours at most. She sighed and thought to count her blessings. 

He had fought the disease with all the money in the world, it seemed– well, he would have spent the tens of billions he had made through a life of high finance if money would have done the trick– but money was useless against his disease, powerless before the caprices of nature. He remembered a poem he once read by some underpaid and probably by now forgotten poet [he had a secret weakness for poetry] about Death smiling at the brave soldier on a deadly battlefield, or shrugging at the preacher in his pulpit moments before an earthquake leveled his church, or laughing uproariously at the rich man who thought he, Death, could be bought off. 

He realized now his folly in thinking that as a rich man he could bribe Death if he only saw the right doctors, spent enough money in the right hospitals. But it was all a waste– he was told it would be in the beginning, by the young pathologist who said he had six months at most, it didn’t matter what he did or did not do. Almost six months to the day, he thought—I shouldn’t have yelled at the kid. I was a jerk when I was poor, and I’m a jerk now I’m rich. 

But he was not a man given to regrets, so he didn’t think about the six wives he had had, how he would grow tired of one after another every few years. Each of them accepted the pre-nups but never seemed to think it would apply to her.

He looked at his hand holding the buzzer– he was not even 50 yet– how could he be dying? He wanted to shout it out the window but the nearest neighbor was 2 miles away. Of course his chauffeur, 4 maids, a butler, gardener, and 2 cooks would hear, since he required all of them to live on the estate. 

But none of them would answer him. Besides, they were all wondering where they could get their next job, and if they’d be left anything in his will. None of them were hopeful.

Then suddenly, with a bitterness he hadn’t felt much since his childhood, he remembered he had never gotten around to making a will! He felt like laughing at his own stupidity, but now even a good belly laugh might finish him off, he feared. Why didn’t he ever respond when his lawyer reminded him every few years he should draw up a will, or else the state would? ‘Do it for those you love’ his lawyer would tell him, and the rich man would smile his tight little smile, knowing he did not love anyone in the world, and no one in the world loved him.

That tight little smile was on his lips as death entered his body and so it froze. Afterwards his servants, nurses, doctors, all wondered why he was smiling at the end.

  *   *   *

Nolo Segundo is the pen name of a retired teacher who became published in his 8^th decade in over 240 literary journals in 21 countries on 4 continents and has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, thrice for Best of the Net. Cyberwit.net has published 3 poetry collections in softcover, the latest titled ‘Soul Songs’.