Innehållsförteckning för Spring 2019 från Creative Nonfiction

HOME! Yes, that’s the theme of this issue, and the essays we’ve selected approach it from many evocative angles. Of course, there are stories about houses—Emily Waples’s seemingly haunted house in Ohio, offering up omen after omen, for example, is particularly memorable. But even more, there are stories about entire neighborhoods and towns, and how they got to be the places they are. Shelley Puhak recounts the “Frankenfish” invasion of her Maryland hometown, which was originally designed to keep out any kind of invaders, and Herb Harris traces the evolution of the Washington, DC, neighborhood where he grew up, which declined rapidly following the riots after the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. Harris recalls going back to visit his parents and feeling like a fearful outsider, nervous about walking…

IT STARTED WITH WASPS. At the end of our first year in the house, they ate through the walls. I would find, first, the dusty piles of plaster by the baseboards, the strange detritus materializing like unlikely anthills on the ugly green carpet. Only later would I recognize these for what they were: evidence of invasion. At last, I saw the wasps themselves, clinging to the sheer white curtains and crawling along the windowpanes, or else strewn lifelessly across the floor and sills, their bodies transmuted into brittle husks. For the living, I enacted well-meaning rituals of rehabilitation, trapping each intruder inside a plastic cup and conveying it staidly downstairs and out the back door. As they multiplied, this manual method was soon forfeited for the more practical affordances of…

BEFORE ANYTHING ELSE, there was an idea: an imagined demarcation, long contested but still undefined. So, in 1849, a group of surveyors—half Mexican and half American—set out to finally map the line dividing their two nations. It was, at the time, largely an intellectual exercise: careful measurements toward an ideal, and still more plan than physicality, more symbol than safeguard. But still, there was a need for some kind of map. Treaties, after all, had been signed; decisions had been made. It was time, finally, to formalize the space where one sovereignty ended and another began. Topography was the easier part to understand: the Rio Grande and the Colorado River. Those generous, physical outlines of division. Gifts from nature, when first one country and then the next decided, finally, on…

WHERE DO YOU LIVE?” he asked. It was an important issue for my father—he asked me this same question every time we talked. “Where do you live now?” He knew I no longer lived with him and my mother, but he couldn’t seem to imagine me anywhere else. I ran through the options in my head, trying to think of the best way to answer that might make him understand and remember. A street name was too specific. “I live in a small bungalow in south Minneapolis,” I replied. He had been to my house many times since my husband and I bought it roughly two years before. Circulation problems and Alzheimer’s had turned my father into a shuffler, so he would hold my hand to negotiate the three steps…

SETH CLARK’s work focuses on deteriorating architecture and structures that are on the brinks of ruin. Clark creates two-dimensional collages through an ambitious layering process involving paper and various mixed media; his three-dimensional structures are built from wood and other media layered over an internal framework. Studying the shards of wood and layers of rubble, Clark finds a gentle resolve and an inherent honesty, as well as a present energy. Clark’s drawings, paintings, and sculptures have shown nationally, including exhibitions in the Carnegie Museum of Art and the Chautauqua Institution. Recent honors include Best in Show at the Three Rivers Arts Festival and publication in New American Paintings. Clark was named Pittsburgh’s 2015 Emerging Artist of the Year by the Pittsburgh Center for the Arts and is the recipient of…

A CAR TURNS into my neighborhood just as I am heading out. It is early July, eight o’clock on a Friday morning. It’s sticky hot, and I have ten minutes to get somewhere twenty minutes away. My heart is already racing when I notice the car (compact, silver) and the driver’s arm (white, wiry) flagging me down from fifty yards away. The car is unfamiliar, and the wave is jerky, urgent, not the fluttery wave of a neighbor. I grip the steering wheel. A voice inside me says, Keep driving. Another voice says, Stop. One says, Nothing good can come from this. The other says, Be kind. SIX YEARS AGO, when my husband and I moved here with our two sons, a friend jokingly advised me to buy a Kevlar…

A TOOTH CAN GROW in a heart: I learned this from the Internet. It is true that when I investigated further, I found that hearts are one of the last places teratomas grow; these tumors containing scraps of hair, bone, and enamel are far more likely to emerge in the ovaries, for example. But I still wake in the middle of the night certain that this ache in my chest is the deep-dug root of a stubborn tooth, one that has resisted orthodontia and the professional aspirations of the middle class bourgeoisie, where I otherwise reside. This tooth has kept me simultaneously grounded and stuck to the ground. And as I clunk about my darkened house, looking for a place where I can still my anxiety enough to calm myself…

A FEW YEARS AGO my mother had a phase in which every three or four months something would short in her heart or brain, and she’d slump to the floor. Whatever did this left no trace; we guessed some kind of seizure. By the time I’d find her in the emergency room with her skinny arms taped and wired, she’d be back to herself, toss her head, and say, Oh, never mind. I’m fine. The last time this happened, as she again lay wired in a hospital bed, we played an alphabet game to kill the dull time as tests were run (names of flowers from a to z; names of birds; names of cities or cocktails). She began to fall silent for longer spells between words, forgetting which letter…

A IS FOR APPLE. Two of them in the yard, stunted and blackened. We peer at them in the January chill, trying to determine if they’ll flower and fruit come spring. Or maybe they’re cherries. They’re knobby trees, all elbows. It’s hard to tell. B IS FOR BEDROOM. We’re getting two of them: one master and one little one that would be perfect for a little one. In the meantime, it will be my office. No pressure, jokes the realtor. C IS FOR CHERRIES. It turns out they are cherries after all. But C is also for choices. We have them: we could have lived farther out, way out, in a bigger house, or closer in toward the city center in a condo or crappier house. Instead, we’ve settled in the middle,…

WHAT IS THERE TO TELL you of the place I am from? It’s a nowhere place. The kind of town you drive through and thank God you never had to live there. A few dilapidated houses and a fourway stop interrupt an otherwise empty Texas countryside. If you go down Broadway, you’ll see a handful of buildings—a lumber store, one small café, a bank, a grocery store, a post office, and novelty shops. Weekday mornings, you’ll find the Longhorn Café dotted with the usual group of farmers, sipping coffee and shooting bull, waiting for daylight when they’ll begin slow work on dry land. And Friday nights, you’ll catch every Sue, Jack, and Sally heading to the high school field to grumble about the football players, now struggling as a six-man…

MY WEEKLY PHONE CALL with my mother had been following its routine of meandering family stories and local news. I had given my usual report about the things I was learning in my second year of medical school, and she had asked when I would be coming home for Christmas vacation. Maybe my mind had wandered for a moment, and then, seemingly out of nowhere, she said, “Your father is OK.” My father? I hadn’t asked about him. Why would he not be OK? The possibilities started flooding in as my mind raced ahead of my mother’s words. She had a way of letting bad news spill out in the middle of an otherwise ordinary conversation. She tried to keep things pleasant and cheerful until the pressure of what she…

Oh, return to zero, the master said. Use what’s lying around the house. Make it simple and sad. —stephen dunn MY FATHER HELPED my sister move out of Richmond. The lease was in his name; the blood on the carpet and walls, his financial burden. He scrubbed with a sponge and a bucket of bleach while my sister gathered her things. She could take only what fit in a suitcase and duffel. A lifetime of acquiring and now, here, at long last—the ineluctable purge of consequence. She was lucky to be free. Police found gunshot residue on her hand, from the gun that killed her boyfriend—a shot to the head. It was his gun; his fingerprints were on it. There were no witnesses, though neighbors heard them arguing. She spent…

THE COLD The year is 1882. A crew of four hardy men travels forty miles north from the white settlement of Grand Rapids to complete one of the first land surveys of Minnesota’s north woods before the onslaught of winter. Equipped with canvas tents and staples—pork, beans, flour, and dried apples—the crew members camp for a month among towering virgin white and red pine, surrounded by desolate swampland, while snow and cold wind blow through the November air. For reasons unknown—was it the severe cold? the blinding snow?—the crew makes a huge mistake in its mapping of the six-square-mile territory between Moose and Coddington Lakes, plotting nearby Coddington to be a half mile farther northwest than it actually is. The result is that 144 acres of virgin pine are recorded…

Can you tell a true story in a single tweet? To join in the fun, follow us @cnfonline and tag your entries with #cnftweet. Your micro-essay could appear in the next issue of CNF! ZippyZey A musician explains his song title, Empty Houses. “As a child, I thought houses stayed empty when families moved away.” How innocent: blank spaces, new adventures. My empty home is a jagged hole of grief. An empty bed, the silence of lost endearments. 26 Feb 19 lauriegranieri I want to trace my fingers over all the broken places in the house I grew up in—the doors he shoved his body through, the cratered wall they covered with a calendar. I’ll whisper, “Where does it hurt?” The aching wood and wallboard will answer: “Here. Here. Here.”…