Fiction Selections
I feel very fortunate to celebrate the work of Beth Alvarado and David Ryan, both of whose work I’ve been quietly astounded by for years, in this West Branch Wired Feature. Also, I was surprised and delighted to discover the uncanny links between these two stories, which almost seem to be in conversation with each other. Both, in my opinion, are concerned with storytelling and narrative itself—namely, with what a short story can contain and what it fails to. The stories share a kinetic arc, too: both speed up and get louder, and as they do they seem to give way to life’s grandiosity, complexity and confusion. You can track that trajectory from one sentence to the next—when Beth writes, for example, “She read Conan novels by Robert E. Howard because they were the only books in the house.,” and then, in the very next sentence, “She spent hours crying in the closet.” I love stories that do this: stories that, through surprising transitions or other subtle innovations, call attention to—and thus, revitalize my faith in—the form itself.
I think the best writing makes you feel lucky to read it, and that’s how I feel about these two stories and their writers: amazed by their work and thankful to know it. I hope you enjoy these two stories as much as I did.
— C. B.
Christopher Boucher is the author of the novels How to Keep Your Volkswagen Alive, Golden Delicious and Big Giant Floating Head (a 2019 Massachusetts Book Award Finalist). He’s also a Professor of the Practice of English at Boston College and the managing editor of Post Road Magazine.
Portrait #1
Beth Alvarado
She has come to the old manor on a lake in Ireland, a house full of other writers and artists and musicians—and ghosts, some say—to write about being a young mother because an editor has asked her to do so. We’re looking for dispatches from the heart of postpartum life in the spirit of the late-night texts and email exchanges that are a lifeline during early parenthood.
True, she is between projects and has been casting around for ideas. But motherhood? She’s just turned seventy, is a grandmother four times over. She’s never written much about the days when her children were small. She can remember them, of course, but in broad strokes. Rarely in detail. There are reasons, she thinks, that there are more dogs in literature than babies. Why revisit the most conflicted times of her life? The times she felt most inadequate?
Outside her window, there’s an expanse of very green lawn, circular, then below, a small lake, and on the other side of the lake, a tree-covered hill. Along the crest of the hill, a few fir trees stand, distinct from one another, their branches silhouetted against the sky behind them. But what distracts her is the reflection of the hill in the water. Every time she looks up, it’s changed, and so she has to take a new photo with her phone. This very moment, the reflection is nearly as detailed as the hill itself, even the gradations of green, even the skeletons of those trees on the ridge.
Now light begins sparkling on the water, now ripples erase half of the reflection, now ripples extend to this shore. Now, dark water. If she were a painter, she thinks, she would have to do constant revision. And how could she hold one image clearly in her mind long enough to paint it? This must be why some artists paint from photographs, she thinks. To still time. She’s never before considered that painting might be about time, the way it moves. Like light.
Now a person is walking along the shore. A woman, wearing a skirt—it must be Mirona—swinging her arms out to her sides in circles, just as she had been swinging hers an hour or so ago as she walked along that path, imagining someone watching her from the house.
Now Mirona is behind a small stand of trees to the left. She takes off her jacket, bends over, perhaps looking at something small so she can draw it. Or perhaps she is going to go swimming for the sun is bright now and directly overhead—and hadn’t Mirona and the others all been swimming the other day, just as she arrived?
“Mirona—as in from the verb mirar?” she had asked when they were introduced. “Yes,” Mirona said, “but in my language, in Romanian, it means to hold up a mirror to others.”
This is something she can imagine writing about: a woman carries a mirror from village to village so people can see themselves. Unlike Narcissus, she does not fall into her own reflection. Her gaze is outward, unflinching. She, therefore, is dangerous. And perhaps in danger. No one wants to see themselves through someone else’s eyes.
We want your actual notes: fragments, impressions, scraps, the incomprehensible ramblings that cross a writer-mother’s mind at 4am and then are lost. Anything in your iMessage thread with your sister, an old Word doc, your Notes app, or the back page of Goodnight Moon? Send us your raw material that already exists, those scattered lines you haven’t found a home for elsewhere.
She had kept no journals back then—just as she does not keep journals now. But, also, obviously, she had no copies of old text messages, no old Word docs, no notes in any app—
They didn’t even have a phone when they lived in that small house. She didn’t know anyone else who had just had a child, so there was no one with whom to commiserate. She lived with her late husband and two of his younger brothers, both of them out of work—this was during the Great Inflation of the mid-70s—so at least there were always arms to hold the baby while she hung diapers on the line, while she put something on for dinner.
It was a perfect square, that house, two bedrooms, one bath, a rather long and narrow living room. In the kitchen, which was large enough for a table, there was a big window that looked up to the mountains just to the north of the desert. The white wall around the yard was of the same painted block as the house and, in the spring, it was covered with jasmine. It was quiet, there, in that once-rural neighborhood. When she sat up at night nursing the baby, all she could hear was her husband’s breathing, maybe the TV in the living room, a few cats yowling outside. The sound of the cats disconcerted her and so, even though she was not Catholic, she hung crosses all over the baby’s crib.
From this distance of years, she can see that she was not doing so well. Her mother—she is sure this was her idea—often sent her younger sister over to clean and, in exchange, she would write her sister’s papers for her classes at the university. Her husband’s mother and sisters would come over to help with the baby. She remembers the oldest sister sitting with him in her lap, going yes yes yes while nodding her head up and down, and then no no no, shaking her head from side to side.
Oh, she’d thought, please don’t teach him to say No.
In the few pictures she has from those early days, she looks as miserable as she was.
They said she was sad because the baby was no longer inside her body, but this did not make sense to her. She had not liked being pregnant. Maybe she was simply over-whelmed. But that was not logical either. She didn’t write then. Didn’t work outside the home. Didn’t work inside the home. Didn’t cook, really. Didn’t clean. She sat in bed with the baby at her breast and ate mint chocolate chip ice cream out of the carton. She read Conan novels by Robert E. Howard because they were the only books in the house. She spent hours crying in the closet.
She heard her husband, when he came home from work, asking where she was. “Probably crying in the closet again”—that was always the brothers’ answer, and they were always right. She was always crying in the closet. She was ashamed. She didn’t understand it was a hormonal thing, outside of her control. She just thought there was something wrong with her. She loved the baby, so why was she crying?
Her husband was the only one with work, but then he hurt his back lifting an air compressor out of the back of a pick-up truck. The other man, the one on the other side of the compressor, had lost hold and, rather than let go, her husband had wrenched his back trying to keep the compressor from falling. It was an expensive machine. But, of course, his employer failed to fill out the paperwork for the disability claim, which meant her husband could not collect. They lived, as he said, in a hand to mouth economy.
Being poor is not interesting. This is the first sentence she writes. Nevertheless, I’ll fill in the blanks.
She remembers applying for Aid for Dependent Children, which because they had only one child, amounted to about $200 a month. Their mortgage payment was $150. At least that’s what she remembers. There were five of them living in that house, five if you included the baby.
“Is the child your husband’s?” The woman at Welfare wanted to know.
“Yes,” she said.
“How did that happen?” the woman wanted to know.
“How do you think?” she asked.
Annoyed. She was annoyed. Her husband was Mexican American, and she was white. Is that why the woman asked? Maybe, she thinks, the woman was required to ask that question of all the young mothers. She has no way of knowing. Even now. She remembers signing the mortgage papers. According to deed restrictions her husband was not allowed to own or rent or even live in their house. Whites only. No Mexicans. No Indians. No Blacks. No Jews or Asians. She remembers pointing that out and being told, essentially, not to worry: those deed restrictions were no longer enforced. But they could be, she’d thought. Nothing said the world would never go backwards.
During the second meeting, the woman at Welfare decided to charge them an extra $5 a month for their food stamps because, at the end of the month, after allowable expenses, they had $5 left over.
“But we need dish soap,” she said, “laundry soap. Soap soap. Toilet paper.” Not to mention toothpaste, shampoo, plus A&D ointment for diaper rash (and her poor cracked nipples).
How were they to get by? They were already washing the baby’s diapers in the bathtub to save the expense of going to the laundromat. They hung the diapers on make-shift lines that they ran across the living room because that’s where the fireplace was. At night, she and her husband and the baby and the brothers all dragged their mattresses out under the drying diapers so they could sleep in front of the fireplace. They couldn’t afford to use the furnace, a huge boiler contraption that pumped hot water through pipes in the walls and under the bathroom floor, totally impractical in the desert as it took days to heat the house and eventually made the linoleum floor in the bath so hot she couldn’t stand barefoot while she brushed her teeth.
Did she look, to the woman at Welfare, like the entitled middle-class child she was before she married? She wonders this only now. There she’d sat before the woman’s desk in old bell-bottoms, a gauze shirt, the only one she owned that buttoned up—so much easier when one was nursing—and the black wool cardigan she’d bought in London. She’d cut up a diaper and folded the pieces into squares and stuffed them into her bra—those disposable nursing pads were so expensive! and she could never predict when her milk might come down. Lumpy breasts, lumpy soggy breasts, and she smelled like mother’s milk and spit up, she was sure. Eau de motherhood, she used to call it. What shoes? Probably those old macrame sandals. She loved them and wore them even in winter. She longed for a leather purse like her sister’s but carried a vinyl diaper bag. Her hair was long, then, even though she’d cut it to shoulder length just after the baby was born. Was the baby on her lap as she sat in Welfare? Wrapped in a quilt she’d made? But maybe she hadn’t taken him with her.
“What about gas for the car?” she asked the woman.
“Take the bus,” the woman said.
“The bus doesn’t go out to the construction sites,” she said. “How do you expect him to look for work?”
“Use tokens,” the woman said, closing their folder. And then she paused and then, as if it were an afterthought, she said, “You will have to keep his brothers’ food separate from your own. If we come out to the house and all the food is in one cupboard, you will be disqualified —”
It’s warm in the study now. The sun is lower, the light coming directly in the window. “Disqualified” is probably not the correct word, she thinks. Ineligible. Maybe that’s the word the woman from Welfare used. Ineligible for benefits. Ineligible for food. Ineligible for shelter.
She gets up to close the shutters to block the sun and looks over at the stand of trees. Is Mirona still there? Or perhaps she has gone back to her studio and is working. Large squares of paper on the walls. She is drawing with charcoal and uses white bread, the cheapest, the plainest of white bread, to erase.
Beth Alvarado is the author of four books. Anxious Attachments won the 2020 Oregon Book Award for Creative Nonfiction and was long listed for the PEN Art of the Essay Award, and Jillian in the Borderlands: a cycle of rather dark tales marries the social justice novel with magical realism. “Portrait #1” is from a work-in-progress.
And Now You Must See Me Here
David Ryan
The summer before I left home for good, I got a job doing lawn work for a condo development. I was sixteen, it was late May, but already the days were in the 100s. The guy I replaced was still hospitalized from heat stroke. We ate candied salt tablets kept in an open plastic jar in the crew garage, beside a large water tank and the boss, Duke’s, canvas folding chair with DIRECTOR printed on the back.
Sometimes, by noon, that heat, and the monotony and lawnmower fumes caught my mind up in little hallucinations projected into my future and I would finish mowing many lawns without understanding how that had been accomplished. When my shift ended, I’d walk miles home with a cooling head, yet my realism was still misinformed. The future’s intentions had only the hazed present as advocate. And the present is just a dream that—like sleeping dreams—lies compulsively.
The lawn boss, Duke, was in his late sixties. Big and thick, his slight accent, possibly European, was so quiet it might have been a slight speech impediment. He didn’t talk much, anyway. Years of working under the sun had burned a permanent ochre-burgundy tan in his deeply lined face. His pure white brush cut was grown out as if slightly electrified. I wondered what it meant to work so hard your whole life that you no longer felt pain. To have the idea of pain toiled out of your body.
Duke called them sectors, the areas of the condo complex he divvied off for mowing. Calling them sectors seemed, like his haircut, vaguely military. There were only a few of us, and the condo complex was large enough that finishing all the lawns could fill the week. And then we’d start again. The repetition seemed to bode my worst fears about life, having, at sixteen, so little to go on.
Everyone else but Duke was in their twenties and thirties. Don was applying for a job with the CIA at the end of the summer. He studied each night for a CIA test after his shift. He was so clean-cut and articulate. I didn’t understand what he was doing in this crew. Another man, Doug, finished his sectors a couple of hours before anyone else. But he only mowed a long S in each lawn. Duke left him alone. Another guy I only remember as Jesus called everyone ‘my friend’. He arrived gentle and serene in sandals that he took off to mow barefoot. End of shift, he’d put the sandals back on his green feet. His placid smile, shining and suffering even on the hottest days. I sometimes wondered if Jesus was a hallucination, as I could wonder if I was a hallucination late afternoons when my body floated above, substantiating in pieces of light.
Rainy mornings, a small man-made brook flooded and streaked the lawn with little red crayfish risen from the banks. We’d leave that sector alone until the sun baked the grass and the crayfish vanished. Another sector, Dog Crap Alley, was a vast sector at the edge of the condos. People never picked up after their dogs there until it became a natural aspect of the lot. Duke sent you to Dog Crap Alley when he was angry with you. Beyond, surreal wildflowers blasted in riots from a failed demolition site, poked up from broke concrete and rebar-rusted stony puddles. The Chicago Transit Authority tracks rose beyond as if evolved from the crumbled waste.
After a couple of weeks, I started calling in sick or just not showing up. I’d work one day, miss a couple. I understood that my absences reflected badly on me. I didn’t care. I’d convinced myself that it said something beyond my constitution: I hadn’t given in yet. Duke often sent me to Dog Crap Alley, first.
Duke sent everyone else out to the sectors one morning. Hold on, he said to me. We need to talk.
I sat down beside the water tank, and he sat facing me in his DIRECTOR chair.
I guess you know what this is about, he said.
I figured I did.
Do you know where I was when I was your age?
I heard his accent, stronger now.
I was in a foxhole. World War II in the trenches, in trenches for months. Too young to be conscripted. But now it was very late in the war. I want to tell you about one day when I was your age. Today, my anniversary, your age but long ago. For you to think over in your sectors. This day in this foxhole. Cote de Hot, in Normandy, only a few meters before the cliffs fell into the Channel. It was a very cool day for June, a bad storm came the day before but the air cleared and I recall the chill in the cavities of my head from a sinus infection that went untreated such that my head sometimes felt shapes like stones, stones of emptiness as on this day, when earlier, we had been hit very hard, blasted, bombed, battered such that much of this meager trench turned pitted and holding many dead friends around me, where beyond, two large bombs, one then the other exploded such that my eyes had felt the impact when really my ears had burst and left my mind roaring and dizzy amidst a smoking quiet risen up beyond the roaring cavities of my skull, and I looked around me and saw that everyone appeared to have died, that I was alone now, and this smoking quiet went on for a time, this very loud and smoking quiet, you see, because it allowed my ears to rise up and howl, realizing that I was so alone, so alive among so many who were not alive and how much time passed I do not know as I lay wishing someone would come and shoot me in this ditch or take me to a prison. A tank, this Panzer ambling far away, was coming toward me; I could see a smeared black ring around its upper hatch, that is, the cordite smoke had made an exploded stain as if a grenade had been dropped into it, the Panzer likely coming from Carentan, the nearest village, the Panzer division stationed there and earlier we’d heard the bombing first there in Carentan, the village, I thought as I watched this Panzer moving dizzy like a confused beetle, and the way in which it came towards me reinforced my thinking that the crew—of five most often—had been blow up inside, imploded I mean, the driver as I imagined it lived long enough to bring the tank here to the cliffs, and had perhaps then he died inside, fallen onto the accelerator, this was all I could imagine because the Panzer approached now weaving a mindless serpentine to the left of the trenches, slithering as a snake might, mindlessly toward the cliff until it reached the cliff’s edge and dropped away and was gone and yet I did not hear the impact of its fall because my ears were howling and so the impression was that of a hallucination—and as I said, everyone around me appeared to be dead. Beyond my howling ears, the radioman, our intelligence officer, the source of any information, was gone with his shortwave blasted up, the metal encasement curled like sharp knifing fingers, and what was I to do in this place, and I thought this, I thought, there is nothing here, nothing more for you to do but to try to save yourself, as here, this is certainly hopeless, as I climbed from the trench in the yellow haze and staggered regaining my legs and left the field for the nearby road over which I traversed several hours, I walked and walked the flat, empty fields which seemed would never end before seeing Carentan there in the distance, seeing closer now that it had absorbed quite a shock from the attack though it was a town enough, as I noted, coming closer still, so hungry and tired, within in Carentan I’d find a place to vanish into a bed, some food, and I will tell you, too, that this crossed my mind again, the thought: perhaps someone will find me and they will shoot me as I sleep with a full stomach, which, considering all was not entirely badthinking on this day when I was, as you are now, of this certain age, when I reached Carentan and passed down a corridor between the backs of row houses where at the end I saw a lush garden with June flowers blooming despite the ruin everywhere, the tulips and lilies, but with the terrible smell of offal, the odor growing stronger as I approached a family of dogs, closer to this garden, and emerged from the shadowed corridor into the light , the smell worse, closer now among these dogs rooting and tearing at something (you must understand that one had come to regard stray dogs differently, which were often dangerous in this wasted land, dogs as hungry as everyone else) and so I passed them carefully, guarded toward a cathedral beyond the nearby square, which with the cathedral appeared perfectly composed from the front, yet the red cathedral doors, having passed through the square, I saw were bolted shut, braced I assume during the campaign against the town hours earlier, and so I went around back of the cathedral where now I saw it had been blasted away, a section of it blown out, the front façade perfectly preserved and yet here I entered the cathedral by climbing over the fallen wall, the broken stone and wooden beams and plaster where an immense beauty opened to the sky, the sublime beauty of some approximated Absolute, as so often those old, gothic spaces reach with their extraordinary excess of design toward, their extravagance in the name of God which had often to me felt like a sacrilege of ambition, but here, where so much had been blown into a different terrible beauty, the sacrilege had been corrected, this I noted, as well as noting, for instance, many of the pipes of an enormous organ had exploded and bent, and even parts of the brass had melted and now I saw there on the floor beside the largest brass pipes, the stained glass windows beyond, a priest was alive, crouched over a puzzle of stained glass shattered and fallen around him, noting too—because it was impossible not to—the priest’s gown fallen open, exposing his burned, naked backside, though he seemed unaware of his exposure as much as he was unaware of me, even as I demanded to know where the stores were kept and pleaded my hunger, describing the cliffs, the bombing of the trenches and yet this priest didn’t even look up at me, seemed unwilling to acknowledge my being there, and so I left him and found a pantry beside the rectory’s kitchen where there were still provisions—and I pried open tinned strawberries and currents, waxed bags of dried prawns, extraordinarily salty sacramental wafers—we’d been deprived of salt for a time, and to my tastes these were so strong, these that I ate and with which I drank a bottle of old sour wine, I drank it sour, cut with water, and I lay in the corner on the floor, I had learned to sleep anywhere, any surface, and a relatively clean, hard oak floor was far better than I’d had in some time, and soon fell asleep and dreamt of deep exhaustion in the foxhole, a dream exhaustion and dream foxhole, even with such reality behind the dream, as I was sleeping so truthfully and deeply on this floor where a dream battle raged and as I dreamt reality, a voice spoke, narrating war machinations and outcomes, a kind of intelligence brief but with dream logic, this speaking voice, this narrator, which I supposed now was God who narrated his dream of a war which was my dream of a war as I slept in this cathedral, and God said: The war is over and now you will spend the rest of your life in comfort, as a celebrated hero…. And I woke and thought to myself: Now the war is over, and you are a hero; you will be remembered this way forever. You will be remembered as a hero is remembered.
Duke’s eyelids blinked rapidly a few times as if he’d just come back to this garage.
That waking realization, he said, was the greatest moment of my life.
He stared at me, glaring inside me or beyond. His hair, a glowing white aura above his shimmering blue eyes.
And that is where I was when I was your age, he said.
One of the mower engines kicked in far off, and then the other little lawnmower engines gathered up like a chorus of flies singing.
I sat and waited. But he just glared. I got up from my beach chair. I poured a big red plastic cup of water from the water tank. I took a salt tablet from the plastic jar, then pushed my mower out of the garage.
I mowed the rest of the day. When the shift ended, Duke didn’t say goodbye. He had gone back to being the guy who didn’t talk.
I walked home. I showered and at dinner I ate without saying much to my mom and my brothers.
I slept a dreamless sleep that night and in the morning didn’t even call in sick. I knew I’d never go in again. Already, my plans had formed. As if in my silent dreaming overnight I had learned a new theory: that consequence comes whether you do anything to deserve it. That the future was just a vast, black baffle of chance, disguised each new day as something you determine inside yourself. It made it easier for me to leave. And so I left home shortly after this.
I heard nothing about Duke–how much longer he lived, or if anything in his life changed from those days. I heard nothing and haven’t for all these years now, though I don’t know why I would have.
David Ryan is the author of the story collection Alligator (C4G Books) and Animals in Motion: Stories. There’s more about him at davidwryan.com.