From the National Book Foundation’s 5 Under 35 program to the New Yorker’s 20 Under 40 list, many organizations make a point of recognizing young, gifted authors at the start of their literary careers. In the November/December 2017 issue of Poets & Writers Magazine, we feature our second annual 5 Over 50—a selection of five debut authors over the age of fifty whose first books came out this past year. This year’s 5 Over 50 are Jimin Han, Laura Hulthen Thomas, Karen E. Osborne, Tina Carlson, and Peg Alford Pursell. Here, we feature excerpts from their debut books.

A Small Revolution (Little A, May) by Jimin Han
States of Motion (Wayne State University Press, May) by Laura Hulthen Thomas
Getting It Right (Akashic Books, June) by Karen E. Osborne
Ground, Wind, This Body (University of New Mexico Press, March) by Tina Carlson
Show Her a Flower, a Bird, a Shadow (ELJ Editions, March) by Peg Alford Pursell
 

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A Small Revolution
By Jimin Han

1

A woman is running in a field of fallen leaves, and a man is running behind her. It’s early enough in the morning for the sky to be gray and the trees to be black, early enough for me to hear only the sound of her breathing and his breathing, except for that moment when he gains on her, makes contact, and tackles her, and she lets out a high-pitched sound cut short as she hits the ground. This is the view I have from my open dorm window into the quadrangle of Weston College in the middle of Pennsylvania.

2

You told me once about a neighbor who had a border collie named Pirate. One day, you were outside early in the morning and saw two wild rabbits in your neighbor’s yard, two small brown ones, and then you heard the back screen door slam and watched Pirate charge across the grass toward those rabbits. One took off for the bushes on the periphery, and Pirate pursued it while the other stayed absolutely still, like a statue, so still you questioned your own eyes. Was it a sculpture of a rabbit in the neighbor’s yard? Pirate trotted out of the bushes, having given up the chase. He had never paid much attention to you before. But you walked toward the dog, calling him by name, reward­ing him with long petting strokes, and backed away as slowly as you could, leading him away. When you looked up again, the statue was gone.

3

I remain at the dorm window. I stay, even when I see him stand her up and drag her stumbling by the back of her coat. He turns, retracing his steps, searching the ground, and then picks up something he had dropped earlier. He hoists it up and begins to walk forward again, keep­ing his other hand on the woman’s coat and yanking her along. I stay, even when I know he is coming for me, even when I can see clearly that it is your friend Lloyd. I stay because the woman is someone I know well, and in his hand is a shotgun.

4

The screams in the hallway launch me toward the phone. I dial 911, and someone on the other end says, “What’s your emergency?”

I think I’m saying, Come now, please, but a voice on the other end says, “Is someone there? I can’t hear you. Can you tell me what’s happening?”

“Yoona!” It’s Daiyu shrieking in the hall. I drop the phone and run to the door and open it.

There are mud splats on her face. Her black hair a squashed nest. Daiyu Chu is a friend of mine from a dorm across campus. There are grass stains on the knees of her pink flannel pajamas. Her blue sweatshirt with the round Weston College logo is smeared with damp patches. Lloyd appears beside her. He’s got a leer on his face, and his hair is wet, as if he has been caught in the rain.

“Yoona, he’s crazy,” Daiyu sobs. I can’t help but step back, and he pushes her into the room. Daiyu scrambles toward the wall by my bed, moving as far from him as she can get, and hides her face in her hands. “What’s—” is the only word I can say as Lloyd turns, still in the doorway, and raises a shotgun into the hall. More screams, and people scatter, and I hear Heather’s voice. “Yoona, you okay?”

Heather Connelly has a room next to mine. Instead of fleeing, she’s coming. “Don’t!” I call out but Lloyd grabs her by the sleeve of her terry-cloth robe, and Heather reaches for Faye Taverson to save herself as if she is falling off a pier, and Faye is caught off guard, and Heather and Faye are reeled into the room.

Lloyd kicks the door closed. And someone pounds on it from the other side. A voice comes through, calling for me. It’s Joanna, the resi­dent adviser.

GO AWAY I’LL KILL THEM ALL, Lloyd explodes. He shoots the gun. His shoulder jerks back. And it’s as if a grenade went off in the room. I crouch on the floor, my arms over my head. There’s ringing in my ears.

There’s no more pounding on the door after that. I’m aware of Daiyu wailing from the corner behind me and Faye huddled on the bed to my left saying, “Oh my god, oh my god,” over and over again and Heather telling everyone to be quiet from somewhere to my right. I’ve heard gunfire before, but something about this room, this space, is louder than anything I’ve heard.

The sirens, when they come, loop as if they’re fading and then growing louder. Are they coming to rescue us, or is it for someone else?

STOP. Lloyd shouts as if his words are coming out of a body that is itself a gun. STOP. STOP. WHATEVER YOU’RE THINKING, STOP. I’LL MAKE ALL OF YOU STOP.

5

“Wait, Lloyd? My friend Lloyd?” you would say. “What’s Lloyd got to do with this? He wouldn’t have a gun. He wouldn’t do this. I know Lloyd, our Lloyd from Korea? Lloyd, my friend Lloyd?” You wouldn’t believe it. You’d refuse.

And I’d tell you I’m sorry. I’m sorry, I’m sorry.

“How’d he get to your college? What’s he doing in your room?” you would say.

I’m trying to tell you.

Listen.

6

My life was simple when I was a child. I walked to school with my older sister. I joined after-school clubs. I went home and did my homework. Some days, after dinner, my father beat my mother. Not often. But there were days when that happened, and in between were the days it was about to.

7

My mother said, “Don’t trust a man, ever.” My sister said, “Don’t trust anyone.” My father said, “No one understands me in this house.”

8

You understood me. You understood Lloyd and me. If you were here in this room, you’d know what to do. What am I forgetting? You said I was good at making lists. To-do lists, to-see lists, to-make-us-remember lists, to-figure-out-how-we-got-here lists. To-tell-you-why-I-could-never-see-you-again lists.

9

The sirens keep coming. Heather holds the palm of her hand to her cheek, and when she takes it away, there’s blood. Behind her in the wall is a four-inch gash as if someone pounded a clawed hammer into it with five circular punctures below it. Buckshot pellets. I know this because my father collects guns.

“Does it hurt?” I say, and she says, “Is it bad?” I remove a pillow from its case and hand it to her. Lloyd is kicking the door in a rhythmic way, shuffling and pacing and kicking, hugging the shotgun to his chest. Is anyone going to come through that door and rescue us?

“Jesus, he’s going to kill us,” Faye says.

He runs at her, the shotgun raised like an axe. WHAT ARE YOU PLANNING BEHIND MY BACK?

I stand up. “Lloyd, what are you doing? The police are here now.”

He whirls at me. OH, SO NOW YOU’LL TALK TO ME. NOW IT’S DIFFERENT, IS IT?

“Lloyd, you don’t have to do this, please don’t do this.”

I’VE GOT PROOF, YOONA. HE’S ALIVE. YOU CAN’T GO THROUGH WITH IT NOW. ADMIT IT.

He means you, and my heart drops every time I’m reminded that you’re dead.

“I don’t understand,” Daiyu whimpers. “What’s happening?”

I can’t explain. I don’t even know myself how Lloyd turned into this. Or is it I who turned into someone who could make him do this?

“What proof do you have?” I say.

I WON’T LET YOU LIE ANYMORE. I LOVED YOU.  

Don’t listen to him. It’s not what you imagine love is. I never chose him over you. Don’t think I forgot about you. I didn’t. He doesn’t mean that kind of love, the one you and I had. He means something else. Something he imagined into being.

“Lloyd, you’ve got to accept it’s over,” I repeat. He acts as if he doesn’t hear me and points the shotgun at Daiyu. I hold my breath. And then he lowers the gun and takes a thick roll of gray duct tape out of his coat pocket. He waves it in Heather’s direction. AROUND HER WRISTS AND FEET. DO IT NOW.

When he throws the tape at Daiyu, she misses it. It hits the floor and rolls, and I bend to retrieve it.

He lunges at me, snatches the tape out of my hands, and shoves it into Daiyu’s. DO IT. NOW. He backs away, raising the shotgun at Daiyu’s head. Tears pour down her cheeks as Heather holds out her arms and says, “Do what he wants. It’s okay, it’s just for now, it’ll be okay, Daiyu.” I meet Heather’s eyes, and she looks over at Faye, and I see that Faye has moved toward the door. Lloyd is intent on Daiyu, watching her fumble, her fingers pulling the end of the tape. Faye maneuvers a little closer to the door.

“I’ll listen to you, whatever it is. Let the girls go and we’ll talk. Put the gun away. If you have proof, show me, and we’ll explain to the police,” I tell him.

He looks at me with hate, and I flinch. Without looking at Faye, he steps sideways and nabs Faye’s ponytailed hair. WHERE ARE YOU GOING?

10

I read a statistic that women who were abused as children have a higher likelihood of being in abusive adult relationships. Physical, sexual, all of it. This didn’t make sense to me. I thought it would be the opposite. I thought it was like what Willa’s friend Albert said about his sister, how she’d been raped and so she never sat on a couch with other people after that. She always chose a chair. A single chair, where no one could sit next to her. After the rape, she couldn’t stand to have a man close to her. Which was why, he said, she wasn’t married now and probably wouldn’t ever be in a relationship again. I thought about that. Did this apply to those who witnessed abuse too?

11

Daiyu has finished taping Heather’s and Faye’s wrists. They’re sitting on the edge of my bed. She’s working on Heather’s ankles. Lloyd has barricaded the door with my desk and chair. “You don’t mean to do this, Lloyd. Think about it for a second. This isn’t going to help Jaesung or you. How can you help Jaesung when you’re in jail?”

YOU SHUT UP. He grabs the tape from Daiyu and throws it at me. I catch it, an instinct to keep it from hitting me in the face. It’s a fat new reel, and it stings my hands. I put it on the desk. If I push it aside and then move the chair, I can open the door and escape. Except he will shoot me in the back. Except my friends will be left with him.

I SAID YOUR ANKLES.

I pick up the tape and loosen the end. It smells like plastic and gasoline.

“I’m not going anywhere, Lloyd,” I tell him.

IF I DIDN’T BRING DAIYU HERE, YOU WOULD NEVER HAVE LET ME IN. TAPE YOUR FUCKING FEET OR—

He takes a handgun out of his other pocket. What else does he have in that long wool coat? The handgun is a black square-nosed thing. He pushes the muzzle into Daiyu’s head.

“Yoona,” she whimpers.

I sit beside Faye and Heather. I tape my ankles together, but not completely, only the front where he can see. He sends Daiyu over to wrap my wrists. The sound of sirens is all around us. Still coming and fading, and now not fading anymore. With so many police cars outside, in a few minutes we’ll be free, won’t we? All I have to do is buy us some time. I hold out my wrists to Daiyu, who has not stopped crying. The tears will keep the tape from sticking, I think, and move my hands so her tears land on the sticky part of the tape, but she doesn’t understand and presses the tape down. I shake my head. “I’m so sorry, Yoona,” she sobs.

YOU’RE JOINING THEM. Lloyd pushes Daiyu next to me. In one swish he has bound Daiyu’s hands, and he hauls her to her feet and puts her on the other side of Heather. He hasn’t taped her ankles. My heart lingers on that small fact. The way she curls up, he won’t notice. Will that help us out of this situation somehow?

Then he returns to my side. And my heart sinks. We’re all in a row. Ducks in a row. And he’s too close. I can smell his sweat like rancid milk. He holds the handgun up in front of my face. TAKE A GOOD LOOK AT IT. YOU COULD HAVE BEEN WITH ME, ON THIS SIDE, THE WAY WE PLANNED. YOU’RE MAKING ME DO THIS. ALL YOUR LIES. I GAVE YOU A CHANCE.

The sirens suddenly stop. He runs to the window overlooking the parking lot, slams the window closed, yanks the left and then the right panel of the curtains. They’re the dark-blue blackout sort. Weston splurged this year. Suddenly it’s dark except for a sliver of light that Lloyd allows by pulling back an edge with a finger so he can see the parking lot. It’s quieter now in the room. I can make out the muffled sound of car doors slamming and low voices speaking. Someone whis­tles as if signaling to someone else. Gravel crunches underfoot. More cars drive up, and engines are cut off.

The phone rings, and Lloyd snatches the receiver and holds it up to his ear but doesn’t let it touch his head, as if he thinks the police can send poisonous gas through it.

THEY’RE FINE. UNLESS YOU DO SOMETHING STUPID. UNDERSTAND?

He thrusts the phone at me. TELL HIM I HAVEN’T HURT ANYONE.

I speak into the mouthpiece. “He hasn’t, but hurry.” Daiyu and Faye join in with their own “Hurry.” Lloyd snatches the phone away, and I can feel his breath on my cheek as he holds the phone between us. SHUT UP OR I’LL TAPE YOUR MOUTHS TOO. They stop.

A man’s voice is on the other end of the phone. He says his name is Detective Sax, he asks if we’re okay, and I look to Lloyd, who nods, so I tell him we’re four of us, four girls. “It’s going to be okay, I promise,” Sax says with such composure I think I might be dreaming this whole thing. “How many gunmen, did you say?” he asks.

“One.”

“Try to stay calm, we’re working on getting you out of there, I promise. If he has a list of demands, tell him to write them down, and I’ll try to get them for him, relax,” he continues.

 “His name is Lloyd, Lloyd Kang,” I reply, and Lloyd removes the phone and slams it into its cradle. I DIDN’T TELL YOU TO TELL HIM MY NAME, he howls and holds the butt of the shotgun above my head.

Daiyu and Faye gasp.

“Don’t, Lloyd. If you hurt us, you won’t get anything you want,” I tell him, looking up at him.

He stares at me, and I can see his eyes are rimmed in red as if he’s rubbed them too hard. YOU DON’T EVEN CARE IF HE DIES IN A NORTH KOREAN SHITHOLE.  

“But he’s not alive, Lloyd,” I remind him. I can’t make myself call you dead. “The accident in Korea, you remember, he’s gone. There’s no one to save.”

YOU LIE, he spits, lowering the shotgun. Where’s the handgun? Is it close to me on the bed? YOU DON’T EVEN LOVE HIM. I CAN PROVE HE’S ALIVE. WHAT ARE YOU GOING TO DO THEN? HOW ARE YOU GOING TO EXPLAIN TO HIM WHAT YOU WERE GOING TO DO UNTIL I STOPPED YOU?

He waves the shotgun at all of us. YOU’RE GOING TO FREE HIM. HE’S WORTH A HUNDRED OF YOU.

12

Once, in my high school gym, I stepped off the bleachers from the top row, expecting to make my way down as everyone else was doing at the end of a school rally. As soon as my foot found air, I knew something was wrong. Instead of finding a foothold on the level below me, I was falling, and I told myself, I’m falling: I must have time because I’m aware of this, and here is air around me, space and air, I’m falling, I can move my arms, I can put out my hands and brace my fall. So move, now, I told myself, move your arms, get your hands ready. My mind told my hands, my arms, even my legs to adjust, and I was convinced I could still make this happen even as my shoulder slammed onto the polished wooden basketball court, even as my head followed suit, making contact with the surface—I believed I had a chance to affect the way I landed. Stunned, I couldn’t believe how fast the floor had risen to greet me. Hard, unforgiv­ingly hard, and my body ached. I lifted my head. What had happened to my chance? My sister looked down at me from the fifth row, where I’d been moments before, and said, “You fell like a rock.”

13

We sit and wait. Why isn’t Detective Sax calling again? Faye leans into me, and I lean into her. Heather, on the other side of Faye, sits up tall. Daiyu leans into Heather. Lloyd paces, twitching and mumbling at something on his shoulder. From outside, in the direction of the parking lot, come sounds of car doors slamming shut and tires crunching gravel. Loud voices call to each other. I HAVE PROOF. I HAVE PROOF, Lloyd mut­ters as he paces. He jerks the gun around his body. He and the shotgun are one unit, and we are stuck in our places. I hold my breath. He levels the gun with his other hand, pointing it at each of us one by one. I‘LL KILL THEM. I WILL. YOU KNOW I CAN, he shouts at the ceiling.

It’s Heather who talks to him. “The police aren’t going to let you just kill us. They’ll come in any minute. Give up right now and save yourself.” 

Excerpted from A Small Revolution by Jimin Han. Copyright © 2017 by Jimin Han. Published by Little A, 2017. All Rights Reserved.

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States of Motion
by Laura Hulthen Thomas


Sole Suspect

The body in the road had become a reliable kindness. Tucked nimbly in the sharp dip on Judd Road just past the hairpin curve out of town, the body could be a trick, a blink, exhaustion’s shadow. A chalky moon lit the curve. Beyond the light’s rim, darkness poured into the hollow’s bleak drop. Just in time again, Perry swerved off the road. He parked under the near-headless birch and aspen, canopies shorn wide for the power lines. The shoulder was choked so tightly with brush that Perry’s rusted truck bed jutting into the lane became the obstacle the next motorist might see too late. Perry’s door swung open almost to the head, which didn’t, at first, flinch. Maybe this was the night someone else had finally hit the body.

A harsh wind cut through the bare branches. No buffer now against the chill. Perry’s jacket might as well be his skin. Had the lying in begun before the cold set and the leaves dropped? Perry couldn’t recall when he’d first come upon this body. After the girls had been discovered last month, this he knew. But he couldn’t say when exactly these encounters became routine, and then, necessary.

The body wasn’t waiting for him in that hollow every night. Perry never asked the questions he should ask; that if the body appeared on some nights, why not every night? What erratic calculus of despair determined a night’s decision to lie in wait for collision’s bliss?

#

Perry was awaiting positive identification, which the authorities told him might come tomorrow. A foregone conclusion, since he and the Other Family had immediately identified the girls’ clothes. Remarkably well preserved after twenty years underwater. Elsa’s dressy blouse was laid out on the authorities’ steel table, sleeves thrown out at right angles as if frozen in one of her impulsive hugs. Her denim cutoffs lay below the blouse, a strip of steel gleaming in the gap between hem and waistband like a prosthetic belly. The blouse’s frilly scallops were fringed with mud. Dirt blotted the sleeves. Mud stains dotted the pearly buttons. Not a single button was missing. Not a speck of the mud on the blouse or cut-offs turned out to be aged blood, so the authorities finally knew to rule out foul play. A technician would have removed this blouse delicately from his daughter’s skeleton. The cut-offs would have been pulled cautiously from her hips to avoid dislodging joints, shattering evidence. The silver glittering sandals with the Roman straps, now lake-bed brown with the buckles flaking rust, would have been carefully guided from each foot’s frail boney accordion.

The clothes were pinned and air-dried to stiff, unnatural shapes before Perry and the Other Family were summoned. The living knew that, like the DNA testing that would be compared against samples from their own bodies, identifying the clothes was a formality. The car, a ‘71 Mustang hauled up from the shriveled lake, was well known as the car Perry had given Elsa for her sixteenth birthday. The water level hadn’t dipped so low in a century. Drought had dried up the wells on his out of town properties but had given Perry his daughter back.

He didn’t know how the Other Family felt about closure but he wasn’t about to hand over last hope on a platter to the authorities. He’d studied the items as if he’d never seen these clothes, as if the unearthed car wasn’t his well-known ‘71 Mustang with two female bodies strapped in the front seats, a mangled rear tire that must have blown and hurtled the car off the bridge. He told the authorities he couldn’t positively identify this clothing. Hadn’t too much time passed to be certain? Some items were missing, too. Intimate things. Were the authorities keeping Elsa’s undergarments from his sight out of delicacy? The authorities hadn’t recovered her cheap silver earrings either, but Perry didn’t notice the baubles weren’t among these personal remains.

He was not present when the Other Family identified their daughter’s clothing so he never would know if they’d given up their hope easily, even gratefully.

#

Perry slammed the car door. The body stirred at the sound. Alive, still a man. Perry helped him to his feet. Wrapped his coat around the man’s gaunt shoulders, tucked him gently into the passenger seat. Hurrying for no good reason. If the man was in a hurry to live, he’d have risen on his own. If the man was in a hurry to die, he wouldn’t choose to lie on a road rarely driven after dark. But Perry felt the urgency of their time together. Moving the truck out of the next motorist’s way. Protecting the man from the cold and the country night’s sticky ink. Perry thought that regard for this man’s welfare made him hurry, but the rush was meant to beat the clock on Perry’s dead heart. He could kill this man as easily as he could rescue him, because, given time, didn’t reputation always become character?

This man was not yet Perry’s age, but not young enough to be reckless, to have not thought things through. But, too, not ready to die. He would take to Perry’s care, is how Perry knew. Put his fingers to the dashboard vents. Thaw out, smile a bit, relax into Perry’s coat. He would never begin a conversation and he didn’t tonight, either. Decisions could be made about what to find out and what to leave be.

Perry pulled onto Judd Road. The old F150’s engine rattled now like a lingering cough, but there wasn’t a thing wrong with it. Tonight the man couldn’t seem to get warm. He was fidgety, fretful. He kept rubbing his hands in front of the heater vents, then sticking his fingers between the seat cushions, or in his lap. His smile was one of those Perry envied, radiant and straight. A few facts, released stingily, during their first rides together. The man lived with his parents. They did not know of the roadway roulette. The man would prefer Perry run him over than take him back home.

Perry nursed assumptions: an alcoholic, an unstable, a man diverted from the course of reason. But he did not reek of poisons, did not appear drugged. Perhaps he was one of those users who thrived on fooling his family. Once Perry had looked up the Marion Road address to find the number unlisted, no name attached to the property. He’d poked a bit for the man’s identity. Hadn’t been too diligent. There were certain benefits to the man remaining a stranger.

Perry usually accepted the man’s silences, which he interpreted as invitations to fill, but there came a point when he wanted to crowbar some answers.

--If you want to die, why not choose a busier road?

--I don’t drive, the man told him.

--What’s that got to do with it?

The man blew air into his cupped palms as if about to whistle.

--Out here, where else could I walk to?

The wind picked up, whistled through the F150’s aging window seals. Moonlight shimmered on the pavement like an early frost. The man pointed out the way home even though Perry knew the route, a left down Marion, one of those narrow, single lane dirt roads. There the jarring washboards chiseled by long-ago summer rains would fragment their conversation, save Perry the burden of finding out why this man sought to die.

#

Denise was the other girl’s name. Perry didn’t know what she was wearing the night the girls disappeared. He’d barely spoken to Elsa on her way out, which was why, he told the authorities, he couldn’t say for certain about the clothes. Back when the authorities had questioned him—closely, Perry was the sole suspect—he described Elsa’s glittery sandals, which he remembered flashing on the drab living room carpet. He didn’t tell the authorities how he’d frowned over the cut-offs and dressy blouse. The clingy denim rode too high on her thighs. The Sunday Best top seemed like an insult to Sunday paired with those shorts, and she’d buttoned the blouse up tight to her slender neck. Not a trace of flesh until those long legs, as if she was low-balling the flirtation and he didn’t like her going to a teen party at the gravel pit in the first place. She was wearing earrings, silver dangling baubles that flashed like grins as she told him goodbye.

Should have driven the girls himself, he’d always suffer this guilt. A straight shot down Judd Road, across the bridge over the lake that had taken their lives. He’d have watched them walk up the gravel path to the ridge where the other kids were stoking the bonfire and pulling on beers, shadows against flames on a hot starless night. He’d have noted what Denise was wearing so he could keep tabs on both girls. Parked down the road within sight of the fire. All the way down the path, Elsa’s silver sandals would have twinkled on her slender ankles. He’d craved this vision over the years, her glittering feet like sparklers’ tails tethered to his vigilance. This vision sometimes relieved him from his doomed wonder about why she’d left, and where she’d gone, and when she might return to forgive him for some offense he wouldn’t know to call a crime.

Maybe Denise knew, and that’s why they’d grown close that year. Perry had known Denise only a bit, mostly by the loud laughing voice that overtopped Elsa’s quiet murmur. He’d wondered afterwards whether Elsa’s soft voice was not her natural tone after all, but muted so he wouldn’t hear what the girls were planning on that hot summer’s night. Pretend to go to a party and just keep driving down Judd, which bisected Moon, which doubled back to Michigan Avenue to I-94. Once on the interstate, the girls could vanish before anyone knew to look for them. It was a good plan. It could be done.

Over time, Perry grew to love Elsa’s flight as he loved her. So what if she’d never called? Showed her pluck. She’d made it to a better place, a place he wasn’t meant to find.

The Other Family was convinced that a killer had snatched the girls on Judd Road. After Perry’s arrest, the Other Family was convinced this killer was Perry. Maybe they’d thought him guilty right up until the moment the wheels unexpectedly crested the lake’s murky surface, so near the places that had been searched so methodically, and then hopelessly. Maybe they needed to identify Denise’s clothes and confirm the DNA match to see in Perry the father who had lost what they had lost, who suffered nightmares, spun wild stories, prayed and raged and wept dry as they had. He wondered whether they preferred their beliefs about Perry to the truth, as he preferred the fates he’d concocted for Elsa. Perhaps he would turn out to have been their last hope. Perhaps his killing of the girls would be seen, now, as more sensible than this discovery; the girls’ cruel suspension in gloomy waters, near to the bridge, near to their families, close and unfound until a freak disruption in the rainfall’s seasonal pattern had revealed them.

The grieving should crave closure. The grieving should be grateful the drought offered up to the light their dear ones belted dutifully in their last pose.

Perry’s daughter was thirty-six when she was found, had been dead longer than she’d been alive, and he did not want that corpse, he didn’t.

Excerpted from States of Motion by Laura Hulthen Thomas. Copyright © 2017 by Laura Hulthen Thomas. Used with permission of Wayne State University Press. 

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Getting It Right
By Karen E. Osborne
 

Alex was trying to understand. A love child, like in some sleazy romance novel? “Tell me.”

Her father shifted, the bedsheets caught between his legs. “It was years ago. Your mother didn’t like to travel and traveling was all I did. I mean, there were no kids, she wasn’t working.”

He sounded accusatory, the way he often did when he spoke about her mother.

“Anyway, in those days DC was one of my regular stops.”

His cough came back full force. Alex searched for something to help him, locating a cup of water with a straw and placing the tip against his lower lip. Several sips later, the coughing subsided, but a sour smell took its place.

He mopped his eyes. “The long and short of it is, I met someone and we fell in love.”

With his peripheral vision, he peered at Alex, who was trying hard to keep her expression neutral. This was not the sort of thing a child, even a grown one, should hear.

“I didn’t go looking, kitten. It just kinda happened.”

She gave him an understanding smile—it was fake, but it did the job.

“She was young and not sophisticated, not well-traveled, I guess I mean. But she was also smart, funny, the kind of pretty that grew on you. We laughed all the time . . .” He trailed off. “Not that I didn’t love your mother. I did. I do.”

Alex squirmed and plucked the corners of the sheet.

“She got pregnant, and she wouldn’t have an abortion.”

Again, he peered at Alex out of the corner of his eye, but she lowered hers.

“I begged her, but she was adamant—a church-going woman.” A mini shrug. “Adoption seemed like the next best choice.”

The silence felt awkward.

“Find her for me, Alex.”

She finally looked up. “Who, exactly?” The woman? Both of them?

“The girl.” His voice dropped an octave. “My other daughter.”

An unintended groan escaped.

“I know this is a lot to ask.” He made it sound as if it weren’t, as if he were waiting for her to deny the craziness of the request. “The last address I have is her grandmother’s in the Bronx.”

Find some kid he conceived while cheating on her mother? A childhood rage welled up. What she couldn’t understand then, and still couldn’t, was why her parents did this to her. What about her needs? What about Vanessa and Pigeon? How was he going to make it right for them? She pushed these thoughts down, swallowing an all-too-familiar bitter brew. New thought: her mother would go apeshit if she knew. If Alex helped him, she would have to keep it under her mother’s exceptional radar.

Her father sank back and closed his eyes. Alex contemplated what she’d just heard. Her mother had accused him of cheating with the regularity of the seasons, and apparently she was right.

* * *

Alex vividly remembered the first time her mother had threatened to kill herself. How old was Alex then, ten? Vanessa must have been six and Monica—known as Pigeon—would have been three.

A trip to France had stretched into weeks, and her mother was sure there was another woman . . . again. Wrapped in an old terry-cloth robe, her small hands peeked out of oversized sleeves.

Screaming into the phone, she held a serrated knife to her wrist. “I’ll do it right in front of your precious daughters—don’t think I won’t.” Blood oozed from beneath the knife’s teeth. “I know you’re with some whore. You think your girls don’t know? You think Alexandra is too young to understand your mongrel ways? Tell him, Alex.” She thrust the phone in her daughter’s face. “Tell him you’re with me and that I’ve cut myself.”

With shaking hands, Alex had taken the phone. “Mommy’s hurt,” she whispered tearfully. “Please come home, Daddy.”

“Don’t cry, kitten.” His voice sounded tired and sad. “I’m on my way. Mommy’s going to be fine.”

“She’s bleeding.”

“Call Aunt Peggy, and take care of the girls until she gets there. Okay, kitten? Can you be a brave girl for Daddy?”

Alex said yes and gave the phone back to her mother.

With a dish towel, her mother staunched the blood flow. Tears creased her makeup. She slipped to the floor, stringy hair damp with perspiration falling into her eyes, the knife and phone clattering on the tiles. That’s when Pigeon walked in.

“Why’s Mommy crying?” Her teddy bear tucked under her arm, she pulled a frayed blanket behind her.

“Everything’s okay, baby girl,” ten-year-old Alex had said. She gave Pigeon a hug, picked up the phone, and dialed Aunt Peggy.

Aunty Peggy and Alex were a tag team.

Almost a year later, Vanessa, who even back then seemed weary of the family dramas, had interrupted Alex studying in her room: “Mommy’s using bad words and littering.”

Alex composed her calmest expression and strode into her parents’ bedroom. The scene was comical today, but not at the time. Her mother stood in her silk nightgown with Pigeon by her side, frosty air rippling the curtains. Mouth agape, Alex watched her mother tear through her husband’s suits with a butcher knife, cutting off the arms of the jackets, slicing the legs and crotches of the pants, and then launching them out the window. Between each thrust, her mother lifted her thumb-sucking youngest daughter, and together they watched the garments sail down to the lawn below.

After her mother hand flung the last shreds, Alex grabbed Pigeon, hustled her sisters out of the room, put them to bed, and once again called Aunt Peggy. By the time Peggy arrived, dressed in a mink coat over a size-sixteen nightgown, Alex and her mother were sitting at the kitchen table pretending to eat canned tomato soup gone cold. Peggy nodded her head toward Alex and joined them—she neither asked a question nor offered a remedy.

Worth’s cough brought Alex out of her memories. She wasn’t ten or eleven anymore; she was thirty, with her own almost-successful marketing company. Saying no was an option.

“What’s this person’s name?” she asked.

“Kara Lawrence.” He lifted his body up on his elbows. “I don’t know her adopted name.”

He gave her our name?

“It shouldn’t be too hard to find her.”

Why should she do this?

“I told Martin Dawes to expect your call.” Mr. Dawes was the very proper family lawyer: hooded eyes, tight-collared shirts, subdued ties, sparse dark hair clipped short. “He can give you her grandmother’s name and address.”

“Why can’t he find her?”

“I need you to. I want her to be receptive, to know that I’m sincere. That I care.”

“I have to think about this, Daddy.”

Another coughing spasm wracked his chest. “Better not take too long.”

Alex walked out of the CCU, her head down and shoulders slumped.

“Well?” Her mother approached her. “What did he want?” She was already suspicious.

“To see you.” In truth, he had drifted into a fitful sleep, but Alex needed to speak with Aunt Peggy alone.

The moment her mother was out of earshot, Alex asked, “Did you know he had another child?”

Aunt Peggy’s lower lip quivered. “I knew.” She tugged at her suit jacket. “What did he tell you?”

“That he has an illegitimate child out there somewhere. He sounded sad and ashamed—well, maybe ashamed. In a way, I think he blames Mom.” Alex heaved her shoulders. “I think he was more embarrassed to tell me than about what he did.” She looked at Peggy for confirmation but she said nothing. “She was adopted and now,” her voice rose, “he wants me to find her.”

“I never heard any of this from your father. You’d think he would have told me something so important.”

“He was probably trying to protect you.”

Peggy snorted in disbelief.

“He made a mistake and did what he thought best. It’s not like he could bring her home to Mom.” As a kid, Alex envied her friends whose fathers were home every evening, who did what her dad did on those rare times he was around: kissed their children goodnight, read them stories, listened to their prayers.

“Wait, if Daddy never told you, how did you find out?”

“From your mother, of course.”

“Mom knows?” Alex was incredulous. She had thought her mother had no boundaries when it came to complaining to Alex about her father, but obviously she had kept something hidden.

“She said he paid child support for years. That’s how she discovered his grand deception.” Peggy pulled out a hankie and patted her throat. Specks of linen caught in the creases. “Evidently, she found e-mails between your father and that lawyer, Dawes somebody, trying to find evidence of some new misdeed, no doubt.”

“She never said anything to me.”

“Remember when she took a whole bottle of vitamin pills and ended up in the hospital with acute diarrhea?”

Alex closed her eyes for a second.

“You remember, you were maybe six. She had run out of Valium and tried to kill herself on One A Days.”

Alex sat down next to Peggy. She chuckled, but soon it blossomed into a full-throated, hysterical roar. She didn’t remember the vitamin suicide, but it sounded just like something her mother would do. “Oh, Aunt Peggy, what a mess we are.”

“Not so much.”

“A hot mess. Why can’t we be a normal family?”

“I’m not sure there is such a thing.”

“He wants me to find her, this other daughter, before he dies.” She quickly added, “Of course, he’s not going to die.”

“Absolutely not.”

“I don’t want to search for her.”

The two women sat in silence for several minutes. Every few seconds, Peggy patted Alex’s leg or rubbed her back. Then something else occurred to Alex. She peered at her father’s only sibling. “Did you say he paid child support for years?”

“A good deal of money.”

“I thought they put her up for adoption.”

“Oh, that was much later. No, he did the responsible thing and sent the woman money for the child’s education and upkeep. Your mother found the e-mails and called that lawyer.”

“Martin Dawes. He’s supposed to help me find her.”

“He was the one who explained everything.”

“But why adoption after . . . how many years?”

“The woman died.”

“Her mother died and Daddy thought adoption was best?”

“When you say it like that . . .”

“How else could I say it? Jeez, Aunt Peggy.” Alex stood up and paced. “What do you know about her, the kid?” From the expression on her aunt’s face, Alex knew she sounded angry again. “Sorry, I didn’t mean to yell at you. This is just so upsetting.”

“Of course it is. Shameful. Anyway, I don’t know anything more.”

“All he told me is that her name is Kara and she was born in DC. You have to know something else about her.”

“Your mother never gave me any details.” Peggy pushed her glasses up the bridge of her nose. “It’s not like he didn’t have tons of affairs from the day they were married.”

“Tons?”

“I’m sorry, Alex.”

Other women from day one? Alex sat down. Did he ever even love her mother?

“I do know that the child was born the same year you were, and that infuriated your mother even more than the affair.”

How much worse could this story get?

Peggy pursed her lips and continued: “She’s black—African American, I guess I’m supposed to say, you know, to be politically correct.” She made air-quotes around the words.

Alex cringed. Both Aunt Peggy and her mother had a list of people they didn’t like. When Alex brought home friends from school who were Asian, Latina, or black, she lived in dread that either would say something stupid, and they usually did. After a while, Alex stopped inviting friends over.

The photograph in the desk drawer flashed into Alex’s mind; the one of the black woman and the little girl with honeyed skin and long braids. “Did Daddy visit them? Did he ever take me?”

“I wouldn’t know.”

That woman seemed happy in the picture, and her father was laughing. There was something familiar about the girl: her wide-set eyes, shaped like Alex’s, just a different color—Alex’s were violet like her father’s, Kara’s were brownish-gold. Even her eyebrows arched like Alex’s, and the high cheekbones were definitely a Lawrence trait, as if someone had snuck into a Native American’s bed back in the day.

Peggy cocked her head to one side. “What are you going to do?”

“Find her, I guess,” Alex replied, surprising herself. Then she realized her response was no surprise at all. “He’s counting on me.”

Excerpted from Getting It Right by Karen E. Osborne. Copyright © 2017 by Karen E. Osborne. Used with permission of Akashic Books (akashicbooks.com [3]) and Open Lens.

50over50_carlson.jpg [4]

Ground, Wind, This Body
By Tina Carlson

The Burial

My father buries the bird
in a bland field: a crow still glossy
with its memory of flight
and release. How he finds himself there in that brief
digging, fingering the dirt
of his children’s field, the small nest he
quarries there,
how gently he lays that
blackbird down as if it is the heart
he once carried in his own boy’s chest
before the war
and shock of his life
shot him down and placed him here,
burying what used to fly
in the fall weeds
and grave of ground.

Instead of Light

1.
The night is fat with cold and cloud,
the den a holy cave, gleaming
teeth and eyes, a hungry place,
a mouth. I arrive with my father
in my yellow pajamas. It is one a.m.
though my father’s eyes shine
blue like a dome of morning
sky. I was dreaming of birds
falling from a sky of milk—

The pornographer prays to the gods of stupor
and submission. Loves to open what has never
been opened, turned on by the camera’s endless click,
the sacred theft. Our child bodies lie on little
green tables with the metal taste
of a gun in our mouths. The small meat of our bodies
shared by the pack of parents and assistants—

I watch through a grimy window
the mirrored light of the moon, believe
a lamp. It shines back at me, across
the broad diameter of night where I am
the pain of not-enough-air.
TV commercials blare in the next room, the heater clicks.
The moistened mouth of a woman tells me I am nothing,
silence is my only currency. She is a bear
standing over my small perch where I learn
to unstitch myself from the harrow of bone and skin.
This becomes a definition of home: the infinite mouth of night,
air made of feathers.

Outside, snow falls quiet as a moth.
Settles over the town its cold white gift
of cover-up. My father pockets the money
he gains, spent by morning on milk and bread.

2.
Tiny rivers of blood in my ears
a pulsing tide, icy feet, mind made
of song and the sugary taste of words.
Like pale, crisp, luminous. Blood is a rose
on the morning snow. I shine an orange light
over the syllables, then play
with their shadows on the walls.
Glint, curve, ashen.
Hunger becomes soup, cold a warm bath.
The grime of my father’s hands, a milky solace.
I stand behind the innocent child he wanted to be.
Limbic, shorn, silent.

3.
Each night I die there again
on the little green table, fear the beds whose skins
I peel back to rest, the predatory breath
of night. Trees shudder their dry leaves
in a breeze. I dream the moon is a wide lit face,
floats to the ground and waits outside
our home. A man who loves plants opens the door
of her mouth and gathers up the child you were,
years ago, places you in my arms
like a bouquet.

4.
You too knew the teeth of that place.
You become a running star, the fastest legs
in town. You will race from your home to mine
and we will hide in a cave of tree branches,
sugar our mouths with licorice and the
green stalks of weeds. Speed is your balm,
you are mine, my first love, my mirror.
We never speak of the captive nights but fill
ourselves with sweets in the day’s free heat.
When you are grown, ready for your final
escape, you will remember the gun, harbor it
in your college dorm room for weeks. They will find you fetal,
wrapped around its unexploded body like a cocoon.
An empty bottle of pills under your last pillow.
No note, but I understand your message,
Only I can write that gun out of my own mad mouth.

5.
I love to lie on the ground
for her ballast of living green and holiness of dirt.
A valence of quiet, the undertow of magma
pulsing through. Her body is the dense memory of our histories.
Every moon of thought, every motion of kindness
and cruelty, transmuted.
I am buoyant lying there, on her whirling
heft, her lap a curve and horizon. Sum of loam
and fracture, we breathe in unison on cracked ground,
sea bottoms. I am a canyon cut deep, a list of fault lines.
She tames me with her touch.

I Wish You Were Here

The river is a woman singing of heartbreak
surrounded by birds and smooth
pockets of stone. I wish you were here
instead of blowing across the dry field
as dust. In the sleek fur of my dreams
you rustle up stories about
children who live in the sun.
I love everything
I remember and don’t remember
about you. In the wood of your chairs
live savannahs we might
have seen, full of animal scents
and the lovely emptiness of years
between my life now
and your hands, pointing the way.

Excerpted from Ground, Wind, This Body: Poems by Tina Carlson. Copyright © 2017 by Tina Carlson. Used with permission of University of New Mexico Press.