Published in Anti-Heroin Chic (heroinchic.weebly.com).

Bryant Park, a weekend in May, and I’m far from home, wearing small-town nerd hard in ballet flats and a discount camel coat. My host, a writer, has an appointment and alone, I approach this tiny patch of New York like it’s a tea party I’ve been invited to.

But it’s not, and I haven’t.

I turn into a café, or try to, its shopfront a funhouse maze of 90-degree glass. I run up against a wall, not a door, and bounce back into a businessman. “Good job,” he sneers, and cuts ahead of me. Inside, I order a coffee and moments later, spill it on my new coat. I rush back in, find the bathroom, splash too much water on the stain while someone bangs on the door. I leave for the second time, head into the park, thread my way through crowds of people who don’t look down or at each other, who swarm like ants from a kicked-over hill.

The sunshine is a liar and I shiver, the wet spot on my coat spreading up my shoulder. I spot another bathroom and duck inside, relieved to see hand dryers. I just get to the front of the line, feel the rush of warm air, when an attendant in a uniform yells, voice shrill, “You can’t be doing that in here, Miss!” Heads turn to stare, heat rushes to my face and I back out of the small building like I’ve been caught bathing in the sink.

Outside, I see a pigeon whose foot is caught in a scrap of thin plastic netting. It can barely walk, the injured foot curling in on itself like a tiny fist. I stare, helpless. I have nothing to trap it with, nowhere to take it if I did. I tell a woman pushing a garbage can, point to the area where I saw the pigeon. She says thank you like it’s a question and keeps walking.

The park is filling but I find an empty chair and sit down, alone but so exposed, hoping to hide in plain sight, and cry without sound.

Next to me sits a fat, shirtless man whose entire upper body, bald head too, is covered by a tattooed treasure map. Dotted blue lines cross and recross his skin, landmarks labeled. I want to stare but look away, too late. He sees me.

“Hi,” he says, more of a grunt than a word. He folds his hands on his belly, and I wonder how he can be warm enough. But he seems happy, cat like, with an eye open and then closed again, almost dozing.

I sniff. “Hello,” I say. Then I look back to the grass in front of me, wipe at my eyes.

He doesn’t say anything else and I don’t try to, either. We sit like that for ten minutes, maybe more. Until I’m done crying. I don’t turn my head but I know he is there, breathing slowly. From the corner of my eye I see his belly rise and fall.

Then, face almost dry, coat still wet, I stand. He opens an eye and tips his head, the movement barely perceptible. The eye closes again and I walk away.

Published in Crab Fat Magazine, Issue #4, page 104.

1. Cir·cle Jerk \ ’sǝrkǝl, ‘jǝrk \ n: Not a traffic circle, like the one recently built at Routes 5
   and 20 in Irving, NY, right next to the Seneca Hawk smoke shop, gas station, and casual
   eatery (home of all-you-can-eat spaghetti).
2. Hand Job \ ‘hand, ’jäb \ n: Not a hand-operated tool or piece of machinery, i.e. “Eric, I’m
   already using the nail gun so it’ll have to be a hand job for you” is incorrect, misleading,
   and gross.
3. Dou·ble-team \ ‘dǝbǝl-tēm \ vb: Not when both dogs beg for one’s sandwich.
4. Blow Your Wad \ ‘blō, ‘yōr, ‘wäd \ vb, adj, n: Not when one spends all of his/her money
   on one item, and no, “blow your load” isn’t any better.
5. This Guy’s Jerk·ing Me Off \ ‘ this, ‘gīz, ‘jǝrk-iŋ, ‘mē, ‘ȯf \ pron, n+vb, vb, pron, adv: Not
   when the man selling his lawn mower in the Classifieds won’t accept one’s offer of half the
   asking price, (and no, telling him “because I already have six lawn mowers” doesn’t make
   him more inclined to accept the offer; if anything, it just makes him realize you are a
   hoarder and that you will, in fact, pay the asking price).
6. Get·ting F’d To Death \ ‘getiŋ, ‘eft, ‘tü, ‘deth \ vb, adj, prep, n: Not when one’s youngest
   children are swearing too profusely at the dinner table for one’s liking, and really, Dad, it
   was at the Seneca Hawk.

Published by Treehouse Magazine

***

Dear Ms. Bradigan,

It’s not that your efforts went unnoticed—the “private” journal only you would read, the soulful “Are-you-okays,” the invitations to visit the school counselor.

It’s that I was ten, or not quite, and my mother had just died, and I felt flayed open, peeled flesh exposed to stinging wind, and even before that, before I was half-orphaned, I was an introverted child.

When you insisted I see the counselor—because swallowed sadness hurts, you said—I talked about my yellow parakeet, who would later get cancer and be put to sleep by my older brother with a pillowcase and an exhaust pipe, which is not at all how my mother died, and for which I was at least prepared, though I loved the bird too, a little, which is why when that tumor grew on his face and he could no longer eat, I said “Do it” without stuttering or regretting the words.

I did not talk to the counselor about the parakeet as a substitute mother, or of you as a substitute mother, or whatever you had hoped I’d say. I did not call myself the parakeet’s mother, or it my baby, because, Ms. Bradigan, it was a parakeet, and because I didn’t understand, I could not measure, I’d not yet tossed a stone into the yawning black hole my dead mother left; I did not know that for the rest of my life I would throw parakeets and miniskirts and seven-dollar bottles of wine into it, never to hear anything bounce off a damp-sounding rock face or hit hard on a silty bottom.

I was not ungrateful then because I didn’t understand gratitude, but would not have thanked you if I did, or not sincerely, because sometimes when you see a potato bug curled into a ball you should just leave it there, let it take comfort in its protective roundness, or, if you must interfere, Ms. Bradigan, pull a curtain of lush green grass away from a stone step and drop the gray ball into the deep, loamy recess where it will be safe from crushing boot heels and predators’ beaks and too many questions about its feelings, which, at that point, Ms. Bradigan, it had not known how to articulate.

All my sincerity,
Rebecca Schwab

Published in Brevity: A Journal of Concise Literary Nonfiction (brevitymag.com).

Less than a year had passed since my mother died from a burst valve in a heart no one knew was faulty. That’s raw when you’re ten. And then Buttercup died.

Buttercup was an albino guinea pig with eyes like maraschino cherries. She wasn’t mine.

Samantha owned Buttercup, loved her. She gave the rodent a funeral, lined a shoebox with plaid and paisley fabric scraps filched from her grandma’s craft room and had her truck-driver daddy dig a deep hole out back beside the swing set. She sobbed as dirt covered the cardboard and filled the hole to the grassline.

For my mother’s funeral, I sat in my Easter dress in the front pew of Mt. Carmel church, my five siblings and stunned father beside me. August heat left a sweat mark on my stomach where the pastel sash pulled tight. I looked at the harsh red altar carpet, at the supplicating statue arms of Mary as she held them out to candle-lighters, at the stained glass windows with their bright and bubbled saints—anywhere but at the powder blue casket that held my mother, her body quiet and still as a wet leaf on a windless day.

Friday nights I went to Samantha’s house. Hers or someone else’s. Spending weekends at home gave me the hushed, anxious feeling of being inside an automatic carwash, everyone shuffling and subdued, the passing hours lurching us forward until Monday flashed a signal to move.

That Sunday afternoon, Samantha played Disney’s Beauty and the Beast soundtrack on repeat, singing along from her green bean bag chair. I sat on her bed and paged through an old magazine, Tiger Beat or Teen, wondering if home wasn’t so crappy after all. Then Samantha’s deep alto turned into a pinched sniffle. I looked at her. Tears thick as dish soap rolled over her freckles and into the scaly corners of her chapped mouth. “I miss Buttercup!” she shuddered.

Maybe it was the song’s mention of “beast” that did it. Maybe it was Angela Lansbury’s gentle crooning that dropped a stone into Samantha’s deep well of grief. She waited for me to respond. I didn’t. Her quiet sobs changed to full-throated wails. Her mother—her breathing, talking, warm-fleshed mother—came running. She knelt on the floor and held Samantha, petting her daughter’s tangled hair.

And then I felt something harden inside my chest. Tears weighted my eyes but did not spill. I blinked and stared at the carpet. My hands became fists, wrinkling the glossy, shadowless faces of the New Kids on the Block.

“Honey?” I heard. It was a frightened Honey, meant for me. Samantha snortled on. I didn’t look up. “Honey?” her mother tried again, louder. In my peripheral vision, I saw the petting and rocking stop. A hand reached out to me. I jerked backward, my sharp-angled body moving quicker than a threatened crayfish.

Samantha quieted, hearing alarm in her mother’s voice. The raised hand hovered near my elbow. If she touched me I would shatter. Explode. Bite. Half-orphans are half-feral. I clenched my body so tight to its frame that I vibrated.

“I’ll drive you home,” she said, withdrawing her hand. She kept space between us as she left the room.

I made my legs unfold, told them to stand and walk. I dropped the magazine near my feet. A ragged tear now separated Jordan Knight’s head from his body and bandmates. Samantha yelped at the damage. Ignoring her, I grabbed my overnight bag and went outside to the idling truck. The ride home was silent, but I mumbled “thank you” as I pulled the door handle and jumped down to my driveway.

Bluish lights from the television scattered ghost images on the walkway. Rock music leaked through the seams of a drafty upstairs window. I unzipped my sweatshirt to feel the chilly wind pluck at my collarbone and fought the urge to hug myself.

I opened the front door and went inside, turning on the porch light as I passed the switch. I dropped my bag, hung my sweatshirt on a hook in the hall. I cooked Spaghettios for dinner.