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Graffiti | By Joshua Rivkin

June 19, 2013 by
Categories: NER Digital, Secret Americas


According to the Racine Country Military Record Archive, a John J. Kroes enlisted as a private in the Air Corps on October 30, 1942, in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. What stands out in his inscription are the commas. Between John Kroes’s first name and his father’s name, between his father’s name and his mother’s home are a series of half-moons, half-hearts, half-throated commas, like memos from the dead: delay just this. Read this slowly. Wait. As if an answer to the question of why—why write your name knowing it would be erased; or why write your name on something that was being sent to kill. As if there is an animal desire to see our names—the image of ourselves writ small, a tiny mirror, a father’s ghosted body, a history—carved on any blank surface. Our names, little lighthouses of graffiti, signal from their dark—cave wall, tree, gas station bathroom, school desk, church pew, bomb. There are no blank surfaces.

There are, by my count, nine names on the bomb. My grandfather’s name isn’t here. But might have been. Or so goes one version of American History told in my family: after the bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, he was one of the first soldiers on the ground and the radiation, invisible as gravity, killed him twenty-five years later. And so it’s not too big a stretch to imagine him alongside these other men signing his name on the aluminum sheet tail, then watching the B-52 disappear above the Pacific.

In another photo, not part of any national archive and displayed nowhere as far as I know, not in the house of my aunt or my mother—I’ve never seen it and take its existence only as hand-me-down gospel—my grandfather stands on a pile of rubble with a skull in his hand. Smile, frown, fear, some look of dulled awe or terror, I’m not sure. Quickly following the famous lines, Hamlet says, skull-handed, of poor Yorick, “…he hath borne me on his back a thousand times; and now, how abhorred in my imagination it is!”   The it unnamed, unspoken—grave, death, afterlife where the body is just bone and the name of the man becomes the fact of his absence. Maybe the photo never existed. Maybe the cancer that killed him was just a coincidence.

*

Secret Americas features writing about images from the U.S. National Archives.

Image via Wikimedia Commons - “Different names which have placed on FM (Fat Man) unit,” National Archives and Records Administration College Park. 

Joshua Rivkin is currently a writing fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, MA. A former Stegner Fellow in Poetry, his work has appeared in VQR, Slate, Southern Review, Best New Poets, and elsewhere.

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After | By Jane Ratcliffe

May 22, 2013 by
Categories: NER Digital, Secret Americas


After the war, after all the pertinacious death, after the women have scrubbed the bathtubs and changed the sheets in anticipation, after the farmers have driven their produce to the nearest market and manufacturers have trucked their goods to the local stores, after the rabbits and chickens and pigs have been slaughtered in celebration, after the cows have been milked and the butter churned, after the children have had their ears washed behind and their manners coached, after the parents have settled their hearts to the inevitable damage of their sons which they know so well having been damaged themselves in the previous war, after the wives have washed and set their hair, and younger sisters and brothers have tried to remember their sibling as someone other than the face in the photo on the mantelpiece, after the cats and dogs have had whispered into their fuzzy ears news of the impending return of their beloved human, after the bars have stocked up on whiskey and the pool halls polished their cues, after the hospitals have opened their windows and the cinemas have reeled up movies about happy families and kindly priests, after the churches have polished their pews and the President has given his speech, after the men have returned–or what arms and legs and hands and ears and hearts and faces are left of them—Nora and I will go to the sea and swim. We will swim out as far as we can without losing sight of the shore. Then, on the count of three, we will drop deep into the water, the way the bombs dropped onto us for so many years, and we will stay there as long as we can without drowning, the salt of the ocean pardoning all that we have seen and heard and touched and smelled and tasted. And then we will surface again, perhaps together, perhaps one by one, breaking through the water with a gust of breath, and swim back to the land.

*

Secret Americas features writing about images from the U.S. National Archives.

Image via Wikimedia Commons - “Like girls from Mars are these ‘top women’ at U.S. Steel’s Gary, Indiana, Works. Their job is to clean up at regular intervals around the tops of twelve blast furnaces. As a safety precaution, the girls wear oxygen masks.” From the National Archives and Records Administration College Park. 

Jane Ratcliffe is a freelance journalist and fiction writer. Her work has appeared in NER 33.1, The Sun, The Intima, The Huffington Post, Vogue, VH-1, Interview, Guernica, and Tricycle. Her novel, The Free Fall, was selected by the New York Public Library as one of the most notable books of the year.

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Practice Falling Asleep | By Alissa Nutting

May 8, 2013 by
Categories: NER Digital, Secret Americas


My horse was not opposed to its mask. The other horses had to be broken against fighting the respirator, but my horse loved the feel of its flannelette bag, opened its mouth readily to accept the canvas mouthpiece. Perhaps it loved the moist smell of its own recycled air and was calmed by the faint reminder of oats on its breath.

We were told to practice falling asleep with the mask on, and I was surprised at how easy this was to do. The amplified sounds of my filtered breathing were a type of lullaby; in the mask, I thought of nothing but the sound of my own breath once the lights went out.

My masked dreams were a different story. In them, my masked self and my masked horse jumped together through bright clouds of poison that looked like fog made from paint. Everyone around us was masked; it was hard to tell whom I should help and whom I should kill, who was man and who was horse. The eyes of my mask became opaque with colorful poison until I was completely blind and could hear my respirated breaths becoming panicked.

Other nights I’d dream that the tubes of my horse’s mask were connected to the animal’s organs. Trying to remove his mouthpiece, I pulled upon a long cord whose corrugated cylinder went from grey to pink inside its throat—too late, I realized I was pulling at the horse’s intestines. When I removed my mask to inspect further, I felt the wind stir at a vacancy beneath my eyes and looked into the reflection of a pail of water to find my face was largely missing. I reached out to take off my horse’s mask and saw that he too had no nose once his mask was removed. I quickly put his mask back on, and mine as well.

One morning I woke with a start to remember that I’d forgotten to remove my horse’s mask the previous evening; the poor creature had worn it all night. Running to the barn, I spoke soothing words to the animal and removed the apparatus from its face. Overall the horse seemed unaffected by its prolonged wear, though once the mask was removed, the horse’s top and bottom lips pulled apart immediately as though he urgently needed to get air to his teeth.

*

Secret Americas features writing about images from the U.S. National Archives. 

Image via Wikimedia Commons - Gas masks for man and horse demonstrated by American soldier, circa 1917-18, National Archives and Records Administration College Park. 

Alissa Nutting’s debut novel, Tampa, will be published by Ecco/HarperCollins in 2013. She is an assistant professor of English and creative writing at John Carroll University.

 

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Bernice Effulgent | By Joy J. Henry

April 24, 2013 by
Categories: NER Digital, Secret Americas


Grandma Bernice bobbed up and down, her freshly dyed hair shielded from the chlorine. She flew down from Wisconsin for my second wedding and hadn’t left the hotel pool in days.

“You career women,” she said as she water-cized. “You think you invented work.”

It was 1982. I was telling her about my new job in downtown Tampa, where I wore a suit with neon piping and did graphic design in front of an IBM PC XT all day.

“After Fred went away I inspected bottles in a milk factory,” she said. “This was during the Depression, of course. They dumped half the milk in a big pond out back. Subsidies.”

She threw her arms in the air and did a twist. She’d had her first husband, Fred, committed decades ago after he ran into the backyard naked, on his way to work on Huey Long’s presidential campaign.

“I visited that damn hospital every single week hoping he could go back to work when he got out. The day he’s released he moves in with some woman from the red-light house. Ah well. They didn’t have no ‘bipolar disorder’ in those days.”

*

Ken and I got married in his mother’s backyard. He and his buddies were supposed to set up the food for the reception, but they showed up late stoned and drunk out of their minds. I sat in my mother-in-law’s living room, already in my dress and near tears. Grandma Bernice tugged the flesh of my ass between her fingers, trying to distract me. “Whale blubber,” she said. She went to the backyard and rounded up seven or eight guests to help put out the food.

Through the window, I watched Ken shadowbox with my son, Jonah, under a live oak. They wore matching white suits. A year earlier I’d jumped out of a second floor window, sure Jonah’s father was really going to kill me this time. Ken lived next door. Every Saturday morning, he’d watch me cook pancakes on a fire pit in my backyard, because we didn’t have money for gas. He’d bring me hot coffee with brandy in it. I made perfect pancakes on that open fire, golden brown.

“Men are the shits,” Bernice said, bumping open the kitchen door with her hip. She handed me a glass of beer and caught me watching the two of them. “Hey now,” she said. Her hand on my cheek smelled like Avon cold cream and cigarettes. “If Ken’s a nice man, you can figure the rest out later. You’re a woman. You’re an expert at playing the long game.” Then I was wed and she led us all in a polka.

*

Secret Americas features writing about images from the U.S. National Archives.

Image via Flickr – Organized Daily Exercises at the Century Village Retirement Community, National Archives and Records Administration College Park. This photograph was taken by Flip Schulke. 

Joy J. Henry is a writer living in California; she will join the MFA program in Fiction at Oregon State University in the Fall of 2013.

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Secret Americas | The Lenores by Rita Mae Reese

March 27, 2013 by
Categories: NER Digital, Secret Americas


The Lenores
The man stands behind his camera in Mama’s bedroom. Gene said the President sent him here to take pictures of the ugliest things he can find, but I know Gene just heard Samson saying that. Samson is the ugliest man you ever saw and wouldn’t let anyone take his picture.

I know the man’s not taking pictures of ugly ’cause he took pictures of us on the porch with all of my mama’s flowers and her ivy and even Gene wouldn’t dare say Mama’s plants are ugly.

The man asks me what happened to my dolls. The question makes Mama’s body stiffen so instead of waiting for my answer he asks me what their names are. I tell him their name is Lenore, which is from a poem that Daddy likes and will tell us some nights when he ain’t too tired to remember it and we ain’t hollering and acting foolish too much, which doesn’t happen much mostly because of Gene and Evelyn. Lenore is the prettiest name I ever heard and I asked Mama why they didn’t give me that name but she just laughs and tells me to go on.

I don’t tell him that the chewed feet and hands and the busted head are what made them become real. They don’t need feet anyway because I carry them everywhere. I am sorry about Lenore’s busted head though. I could tell him that she came that way, was like that when Mama found her and knew she needed a special little mother to take care of her. But her head was pretty then and her body all chewed up, left behind in this house by whoever lived here before us. Mama took the head off and sewed up a new body for her even with all the work she had to do cleaning up and getting us all settled here. Even though we’re not going to stay ain’t no call to live like dogs till we do leave, Mama said.

Lenore, the picture man repeats, and I can tell he likes the name too, and I straighten my neck, like a queen.

I could tell him that Gene did it, which is what Mama thinks though I never said he did and he swore to her that he didn’t. What happened is me and Lenore’s secret and it makes her love me even more.

What’s the other two’s names, he says, while he fiddles with his camera some more, asks me to stand over by Mama’s vanity. Lenore, I tell him, and he laughs, looks around the camera at me and then puts his face back behind it. All three of ’em are Lenore?

Well, I did want to give them different names but I felt too sad for the not-Lenores. It isn’t fair to give one the prettiest name and the other two something else.

When I grow up I’m going to name my baby Lenore, I say and watch the burst of light escape into Mama’s eyes.

*

Secret Americas features writing about images from the U.S. National Archives.

Image via Wikimedia Commons - Daughter of T. J. Martin, miner. Koppers Coal Division, Kopperston Mines, Kopperston, Wyoming County, West Virginia. National Archives and Records Administration College Park. 

Rita Mae Reese has received a Paumanok Poetry Prize, a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award, a Stegner Fellowship, and a “Discovery”/The Nation award. Her first book, The Alphabet Conspiracy, was published by Arktoi Books/Red Hen Press.

 

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The Town That Went Away | By Christopher Barzak

March 13, 2013 by
Categories: NER Digital, Secret Americas

The Town That Went Away
It was terrible, really, to hear of the town that went away. It was a nearby town, a little burg or a hamlet, the sort of place that requires archaic adjectives because it was so archaic. At least, what I remember of that town was archaic, but these days my memory is not so good. I am not old. The town that went away was old, though; and because it went away, it is hard to remember it exactly.

This is how it happened (or so those of us who vaguely remember it think): One day, the town was there. The next day, it wasn’t.

This is what was left in its place: a forest of old growth trees (how old they were, and so quickly!) filled with birdsong and clear streams that feed into Lake Glacier. Lake Glacier is so named because at some point in history a glacier formed it. We can remember its name because the lake is still with us. We see it when we drive over the causeway that once bridged the town that went away with the town on the other side of the lake, which is Shuttleworth. Shuttleworth is called Shuttleworth because at one time it was worthwhile to shuttle oneself from the town that went away over to the town on the other side of the lake. No one thinks it is still worthwhile to shuttle over to Shuttleworth, though, as it is a town in such decline and there are no jobs for people there, or fun things happening, but that is another story altogether.

The town that went away was there one day, then, and gone the next. Where it went to, no one knows. We have taken soil samples, water samples, samples of animal dung, and samples of air quality. We have dug down into the earth to see if an unknown sinkhole swallowed the town that went away, and we have searched the sky with binoculars and telescopes. It is not among the clouds, so far as we can see, nor among the heavenly bodies, and it does not exist somewhere in the ground beneath our feet. There are no remains of previous inhabitants to uncover, not even those who had been buried in the town that went away’s cemetery. And there are no witnesses to the disappearance, probably because they disappeared with the town that went away.

It is as if those other towns that bordered the town that went away had dreamed of its existence, and it is as if we have now woken from that dream to find the world to be a much different place than we had thought.

What was it we’d thought, again? We couldn’t remember this, as we couldn’t remember what, exactly, we’d been dreaming. Or why we trusted our dreams.

*

Secret Americas features writing about images from the U.S. National Archives.

Image via Flickr – View from the Interior of an Abandoned Farmhouse Across Land Strip Mined by Coal Companies Off Route #800, near Edgewater Park, Ohio, and Barnesville, National Archives and Records Administration College Park. The photograph was taken in July 1974 by Erik Calonius.

Christopher Barzak is the author of One for Sorrow, The Love We Share Without Knowing, and a new collection of short stories, Before and Afterlives. He teaches fiction writing in the Northeast Ohio MFA program at Youngstown State University.

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Stone Disease | By Alexandra Teague

February 20, 2013 by
Categories: NER Digital, Secret Americas

Landscape(“Stone Disease,” n:  The Victorian obsession with constructing monuments)

Sarah Winchester, Having Been Rescued from Her House, Considers Rebuilding (Apr 20, 1906)

Already, the newspapers are shilling for new buildings:  safer, stronger, walls that will withstand the earth’s dis-ease, as if windows could be willows:  tousled, weeping glass, unbreaking. Why should I believe?—stretching the chimney back to sky:  unsteady cache of bricks, like prayer words stacked inside a shaking throat. Who finds firm ground in probability? Having contracted like a crushed egg shell, the earth is stronger now, less likely to explode. As if my floorboards didn’t quiver like oaks again, rocked by the wind—my room, those hours I waited, a cradle held in breaking branches. Who—having dovetailed plank to plank or breast to breast—hasn’t felt the space that still resists? That fissure where our blent compulsions meet. I cannot consent to heaven and earth, this world and the next, beaten like the white and yolk of egg, Hawthorne wrote. And yet what holds them separate? Even strong walls bend:  soft as envelopes around a page of fear. Last year, in Argentina, I read, a girl’s heart stopped as she dressed for dinner—silk ribbon at her throat, silk stillness of her blood. She woke to stone, scraped knuckles raw against the dark:  that Doric-columned mausoleum built to honor her. There is no reason for fear, the papers tell us now: No need to leave this beauty spot of earth. We still have sunny skies, invigorating breezes, fertile soil. As if we could live, Edened, inside a peach pit—those fine-webbed hollows deep enough for breath. Who says the ground can’t be mistaken? Cannot take back what’s taken? They found her there months later. The thinnest doors stay locked; yet marble crumbles under its own shine like sandcastles under the gleam of waves. We have so little—chiseled stone, small scars—to mark the earth-flung earth.

*

Read “Safe,” Teague’s companion sketch to “Stone Disease.”

Secret Americas features writing about images from the U.S. National Archives. 

Image via Wikimedia Commons – San Francisco Earthquake 1906: Fairmont Hotel and Synagogue, National Archives and Records Administration College Park.

Alexandra Teague is the author of Mortal Geography (Persea, 2010), winner of the 2009 Lexi Rudnitsky Prize and a 2010 California Book Award. She is Assistant Professor of Poetry at University of Idaho and an editor for Broadsided Press. Her work previously appeared in NER 25.1-2.

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Safe | By Alexandra Teague

February 6, 2013 by
Categories: NER Digital, Secret Americas
 Landscape
 
“The more comfortable man makes himself indoors,
the more dangerous do earthquakes become.”
 
“Let us all banish from our minds forebodings of
the future. WE ARE SAFE. Of this we may feel assured.”
 
-San Jose Mercury News, late April 1906
 

When your city wakes as the new ancient ruins:  blocks’ scrambled rubble:  Delphi’s oracle stone-lipped and raving in the streets (wasn’t it she who said to place your faith in wooden walls?). When buildings crumple like newsprint, catch in the wind’s fist, words burning into voweled cries, the living asleep with the dead—whom can you believe? A man shoots a man for stealing a can of tomatoes for his wife and child. A man shoots a man for cutting rings from a corpse’s fingers. Men crowd up broken brick to watch the bank safe opened:  Grecian doorway gaping dark as a throat. Natural contractions of the Earth’s crust, say the papers. Sun spots. Men who were millionaires at daybreak paupers. Saw blade of wall above dark bowler hats, the white sky cut. Inside the safe:  safe gold? Or paper money? Wings of bees? Or olive branches? Siren songs that drove the gods to murder? There is always a future, the past says. Always temples falling. Prophesies offered in a death-smoke high:  We Will Rebuild Better, Stronger.   Theater Dark Until Further Notice.   (Phroso, The Mysterious, Performance Cancelled)   Barnett Real Estate:  Proudly Selling The Earth. 

*

Read “Stone Disease,” Teague’s companion sketch to “Safe.”

Secret Americas features writing about images from the U.S. National Archives.

Image via Wikimedia Commons – San Francisco Earthquake 1906, Opening a Safe, National Archives and Records Administration College Park. 

Alexandra Teague is the author of Mortal Geography (Persea, 2010), winner of the 2009 Lexi Rudnitsky Prize and a 2010 California Book Award. She is Assistant Professor of Poetry at University of Idaho and an editor for Broadsided Press. Her work previously appeared in NER 25.1-2.

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Beauty

January 23, 2013 by
Categories: NER Digital

The Dog Coat | By Adrienne Su

Adrienne Su

I brought a dog-fur coat home from China in 1988, after an academic year there. Off-white, soft, and substantial, it was a gift from a great-uncle I hadn’t met until he came to Shanghai to greet me. He’d spent three days on a packed train to get there, and had made the coat himself.

Although I recoiled from fur in stores, I’d never been confronted with the pelt of an animal with whom I might have shared daily life. Foxes, mink, and chinchillas were clearly worthy of consumer boycott, but this conviction had until now been more idea than feeling.

At the same time, I was being confronted with what I knew about my great-uncle, whom my mother remembers as an animal lover and Chinese-opera fan. Unlike his brother, my grandfather, he didn’t flee to Taiwan before the Communist takeover, although he was sure to pay for his landowning origins. We don’t know why he didn’t go, whether he even had the means.

Indeed, the family’s houses in Shanghai were seized, my uncle exiled to the countryside. For four decades, he did physical labor in an impoverished southwestern outpost. He never married.

In the moment the coat was presented, it didn’t occur to me to stage a one-student protest against dog fur. Instead, I thanked my uncle in my American-college Mandarin (which, no matter how well-pronounced, marked one as an outsider in Shanghai) and tried the coat on. What else was there to do? Although I couldn’t banish the phrase “the dog coat” from my mind, I didn’t find it repugnant, just disturbing. My uncle had next to nothing and wanted to give me something. Perhaps someone had used the flesh for food; the possibility somehow consoled me.

Some people will tell you, “The Chinese eat dogs,” for shock effect, or to imply an inhumane, monolithic people. But my mother’s family cherished their springer spaniel, Beauty, whom they had to leave in the care of household staff upon fleeing. Decades later, the mention of Beauty still moved my stoic grandparents.

Now, on the rare occasions when the coat comes up in conversation, I’m chilled by the righteous horror that sometimes follows. I struggle to create the context, to convey – as if it were a Chinese condition – that when a person loses everything overnight, for no reason, it’s only natural to try to rebuild, using what resources happen to be available.

After leaving China, I stored the coat in my parents’ house. I could neither wear it nor part with it. It stayed there until several years ago, when my parents moved into a retirement community and donated it, along with masses of other stuff, to Goodwill. Perhaps some unwitting person is wearing it now, oblivious to its origins, grateful to be warm.

*

NER Digital is a creative writing series for the web. Adrienne Su is the author of three books of poems, most recently Having None of It (Manic D Press, 2009). She is poet-in-residence at Dickinson College in Pennsylvania. Recent poems appear in the Kenyon Review, Massachusetts Review,The New Republic, and New England Review (33.1).

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The radiation came to an end

January 9, 2013 by
Categories: NER Digital

 Preston | By William Gilson

William Gilson by M Park

Author’s Note: In this short work of fiction, Burt, age 75, an American living permanently in England, is writing to an old friend in the States.

I enjoyed the drives to Preston. I managed to arrange a schedule of early appointments so I was always one of the first patients to be seen, before the waiting rooms filled or any of the machines broke down, before the technicians grew tired. The coffee was free and of good quality and as I waited I wrote in my notebook. Sort of as I am writing to you now.

Those weeks are in my memory a time of quiet pleasure, when I wasn’t particularly worried about the cancer. I had something specific and easy to do every week-day and I felt that with each trip the cancer, which for years had been trying to kill me, was finally being attacked and possibly defeated. Previous to this I had not trusted doctors, one of whom had operated on me, an “experimental” operation I had stupidly chosen, it was an awful experience, afterward pronounced a failure, causing me to spend eight weeks at home wearing pyjamas, with a blue tube coming out of my abdomen, urine going into a bag hitched to my leg. After I finally resumed peeing normally and the tube was removed, I was assigned a new doctor, a gorgeous smart bossy woman who ordered the radiation with confidence, calculating how to silently blast my groin with precision rays. And in a strange state of trust and painlessness I drove back and forth to Preston, one hour each way. In the car I listened to a reading of Willa Cather’s novel The Song of the Lark, about a girl born with musical talent, how she grows up in a prairie town and becomes a famous singer. Then I listened to a long book on the history of the Byzantine Empire which I never finished because the radiation came to an end.

On the way to Preston, soon after sunup as I drove south on the “dual carriageway,” I watched with anticipation for my favorite passage, a stretch of several miles where a high tension electrical line, three thick cables hanging in long catenaried loops between widely spaced “pylons” like long graceful musical rhythms, paralleled the highway and then began merging toward it, finally crossing overhead near an old stone barn set in a field. So beautiful, that approaching moment when the thick lines crossed.

*

NER Digital is a creative writing series for the web. William Gilson lives in England. Carved in Stone: The Artistry of New England Graveyards, a collaboration with the photographer Thomas E. Gilson, is published by Wesleyan University Press; the text and some of the photographs first appeared in NER 30.4.

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