
NEA BIG READ
"Where We Live"
In the Spring of 2025 Folio: The Seattle Athenaeum, in partnership with Humanities Washington and HistoryLink, will host our first National Endowment for the Arts Big Read.
The National Endowment for the Arts, in partnership with Arts Midwest, aims to spark conversations, celebrate creativity, and strengthen community connections through a variety of activities across libraries and cultural centers, centered around a single book. Folio is one of 62 organizations awarded a grant to host an NEA Big Read in 2024-2025.
This year’s selection is The Cold Millions by Jess Walter,
The theme "Where We Live" emphasizes the Pacific Northwest. Set in Spokane, The Cold Millions provides an opportunity for dialogue between the two major cities of Seattle and Spokane that frame Washington State.


NEA Big Read Writing Contest
As part of this celebration, Folio invited writers to submit an original piece of narrative writing, with setting playing a vital role in shaping the story’s atmosphere, themes, or characters.
The winners were selected by David Nikki Crouse, S. Wilson and Grace M. Pollock Endowed Professor in Creative Writing at The University of Washington.
Enjoy reading their stories!
🥇
The Menagerie by Naghma Husain
It’s been five years since I’ve laid eyes on the house I grew up in, or on The Menagerie, which I always considered my second home. Father had Svetlana make my favorite dish, and he pours me a glass of wine I know he can no longer afford. He’s trying to put me in a good mood before my visit to The Menagerie, and it worries me, what I might find there. I know what the papers have said over the past few years. But for now I choose to enjoy the meal and the wine, and I marvel at how good the kitchen looks, how well it was finally restored. You’d never guess there was a fire here.
Once we finish lunch, Father offers me his arm to walk over to The Menagerie. He looks like the one who needs an arm to hold on to — he shakes at each step — but I accept his arm, trying to remember a youthful Father escorting Princess Isabella from room to room of The Menagerie like he was royalty himself.
As we walk up the winding driveway, I see the once perfectly tended grounds are now overgrown with weeds. A knot tightens in my chest. I don’t want to see what this place has become.
It’s dark in the first exhibit room. The grime covering the windows blocks out the sunlight. Mother said our specimens’ moods and health benefit from natural light, so each exhibit room was built with huge windows. An undertaking to keep clean, but they were always clean, under Mother’s care. We approach the cage, the curtains draped across it. Guests are -- well, were -- invited to pull the rope to make the curtains part, and as people who rarely do anything for themselves, they enjoyed it.
“Please, have the honor,” Father says, as I’ve heard him say countless times. There’s no joke to his voice; he’s really acting like I’m a guest. How long has it been since he’s entertained a guest? Two, three years. Yet, Svetlana told me, each day he dresses in a suit and tie, what little hair he has left slicked back, a rose in his lapel. Looking at the rope I remember Princess Isabella’s first visit, when I was around six years old. She was in her 30s but girlish in her demeanor, laughing with delight as she got to tug on the rope to reveal the first exhibit. As I grab hold of the rope I can feel the dust on my fingers; I can see it layered on the curtain fabric. I picture the residue it would leave on Isabella’s white gloves.
Father is beaming at me. To him I might as well still be that six year old he proudly showed off as part of the family business. We were specimens too, Mother would say, the three of us; we were part of the show. I tug at the rope, and the curtains part. I’m relieved to find the first cage contains Lemarce, as it has for years. But my relief changes quickly. The cage is filthy, there’s a huge spider web in one corner, and the rug is threadbare and stained in several places. Lemarce is sitting on the floor staring straight ahead, unbathed, his beard several inches long. He isn’t wheeling himself around the room in his special chair. He used to impress guests with his dexterity; they would clap at his energy, his good humor, despite deformed hands and stumps for legs. Now, something in the air around him tells me he spends most of his time just sitting there. The chair hunches in the corner, dusty.
“When is Marcia in next?” I say, a hint to Father that Lemarce needs attention.
“I had to let her go. She was making too many demands, saying she needed more resources. You know,” he says, as if Marcia was always unreasonable, when I know she wasn’t.
“You didn’t fire Albert, too?” I’m suddenly a bit panicked. Albert tends to the last exhibit.
“No, rest assured. Albert still has his job.”
Relieved, I turn back to Lemarce, only to remember how little there is to be relieved about. I now see the stains on the rug are from Lemarce soiling it. Perhaps he had no choice because the slop pail was full, and the thought makes me cringe. I walk up to the glass. I hope if I catch Lemarce’s eye he will recognize me and it will create some spark in him. When he doesn’t look up, I squat down so our eyes are at the same level. He used to get excited when I’d approach; he would wheel himself close to the glass and show me whatever new trinket Mother had found him. Now, the basket that held the toys is gone.
“What happened to all of Lemarce’s toys?”
“He didn’t seem to want them anymore. He broke them, threw them at the walls.”
Lemarce won’t look at me. There’s no reason to close the curtains but I do anyway, thinking the view of the fabric is kinder than the giant dirty windows.
In the corridor hangs the portraits of my grandparents, filmed over with dust. They created The Menagerie: they opened with a mere three specimens in simple wire cages, their son the tour guide, and a young go-getter their all-around helper. The go-getter was Mother. Together, my parents -- mostly Mother -- transformed the low-budget zoo into a world-class attraction accessible only to the .01 percent. “Perhaps no other single attraction has ever had so many members of the elite clamoring for their turn,” said my favorite-ever profile of us, in Vanity Fair.
The next specimen is Sagoraya. When I last saw her she was a child clutching a doll, wearing that specially-made frock. When I part the curtains they reveal her standing in the middle of the room. The change is startling, from the child I remember to an almost woman; but even more startling, she is naked. I’m mortified, especially with Father a foot away. I'm also unexpectedly repulsed by what should be a familiar sight: the head of Sagoraya’s never-quite-formed twin poking out of her neck. Many of our guests enjoyed touching Sagoraya’s appendage through a window in the cage. As a reward for her agreeability, Father would then dispense a biscuit to her through a lever. She would devour it, crumbs flying everywhere, and our guests enjoyed that too. Sagoraya looks right at us, then she puts her hands between her legs. I grab at the rope to pull the curtains closed, but not before I’ve seen the look of recognition on her face. I wrap my arms around my chest, my skin crawling.
I want to believe I’m the only one who has seen this spectacle, but I know it probably isn’t true. How proud I used to be of what my parents built. That they turned my grandparents’ idea into a first-rate attraction. How ashamed I am now of what father has allowed it to become; how ashamed I am of him, an old man, his suit and grooming now making him look like a chauffeur. Worse yet is his manner, jaunty, ever the proud impresario, when the only audience he has left is me.
When care of The Menagerie was first solely left to Father, I knew he couldn’t run the place as Mother had, but I believed he would generally keep things on track. For a brief time after Mother’s accident, I visited often; but my life took me in other directions. What did mother say to me, once, years before? A strange moment of candor; I can’t recall another time that she spoke of Father’s shortcomings. “If it had been up to him, he’d have put the specimens in barn stalls and charged $5 admission.”
I share some of the blame. If I’d agreed to come home and run The Menagerie with him, I could have tempered his worst instincts. It was so unexpected, mother’s accident; I couldn’t abandon the independence I’d carved out for myself. I’ll come back eventually, I told ather at the time.
“Let’s skip to the end,” I say.
“Of course, whatever you prefer.”
***
Mother lies in the same bed I remember. It appears a bit sunken in the middle although still in respectable shape, thankfully. The bed coverings, of fine white silk, look grayish now. Her upper half is uncovered and elevated for a clear view. They tell us she has almost no brain function, but I fear the worst, as impossible as it is -- that she knows.
As if he’s heard my thoughts and wants to counter them, Father says, “She’d be so proud, knowing how we’ve kept going without her.”
So much equipment to keep her alive. It takes up most of the cage.
“I think it’s time to take her home,” I say.
He twitches. “This is what she would want.”
I can’t disagree. The three of us were specimens ourselves, Mother always said. “You’re just feeling sentimental,” Father says. There’s a hurt note in his voice. “I could return.” Words said before realizing I formed the thought.
“Yes, you could. Svetlana would love someone else to cook for. And if you could visit the specimens regularly, it would make a difference. They were always happy to see you.” As he gets excited, his voice gets higher. “We could open to the general public — maybe that’s the next phase. Your mother was always insistent that only the very best should experience The Menagerie, but she also understood adapting. Why couldn’t we let more people in?”
I don’t think he wants an answer, so I don’t give him one.
We never opened Mother’s cage for guests to touch her. But there was one time. I’d returned home to visit, my stay coinciding with a visit from Isabella. When Isabella pulled the curtains on Mother’s cage, tears engulfed her eyes and she turned away. She dabbed at her face with the handkerchief Father immediately handed her, then turned back to look at Mother. A quick dart of a glance at first, as if the glance itself would sear her eyes. I couldn’t blame her; Mother was now a mess of scar tissue in human shape. I thought we perhaps should move Isabella along for her own sake. Then she said, “May I get closer?”
Without hesitation Father typed in the code — Mother’s cage locked like the rest, although for no reason — and the glass slid open. Isabella approached Mother slowly as if she were a feral animal. She took off a white glove and smoothed her bare hand over Mother’s flesh. I could see the goosebumps form on her own, perfect skin. She made a strange noise like a coo. Then again.
“I think we should let Mother rest,” I said absurdly. I grabbed Isabella’s arm -- the soft fleshy part where she would most feel my fingernails — and pulled her away.
Outside the cage, Father reached for Isabella’s hand. “Danae hasn’t gotten used to losing her mother.” Father looked at me expectantly. I glared back at him. He said, “Apologize, Danae.”
I expected a scene and knew I deserved it, but Isabella said only, “Let her be.” Relieved, father quickly ushered her to the lobby where her people waited, as our guests’ people always did. They were never allowed the privilege of going past the lobby. Of course, they never wanted it.
Now Father says, “I’m so glad you’ve had this idea. I knew you’d return one day.”
I turn to look at him and know I’m looking at him for the first time since I arrived, because every other second he’s been playing a part. The pity I feel for him claws at me as much as looking at Mother’s destroyed body does.
I turn away, reach for the rope, and cover Mother up.
🥈
Artisanal Truffles, Humanly Foraged in Cascadia by Parker Ragland
With bare hands, I clawed at the wet dirt around the base of a Douglas fir, while the pungent smell of its buried treasures filled my nose. I sniffed and sniffed—a reflex, a side effect of the surgery.
I dug quickly and carelessly because I was still angry at Leigh about what she’d said over the phone the night before: “Either I should get them all or neither of us should have any.” Apparently she’d made the same argument to the judge. I didn’t understand why she was fighting so hard. After all, she was the one who changed her mind about wanting to be
a parent. Maybe she thought that I didn’t deserve a share of our embryos—that I couldn’t tolerate a kid.
I stopped to catch my breath, and I looked upward. The tree was about the right age. Its trunk stretched thirty feet high. The bark was
gray-brown and smooth, blistered here and there by deposits of resin. Conical buds, about the same shape and size as the tip of a sharpened pencil, sprouted from the branches.
Rain drizzled down on me, and the air fogged each time I exhaled. Despite my calluses, my skin hurt from working in the cold all day. I tried to ignore the pain, and the anger, and the throbbing in my head.
The wind shifted, and I caught the scent of something new. Stinky feet. Deodorant. Body odor.
I turned to where the smell came from. A kid no older thaneleven or twelve stood there, dressed for the outdoors. For a moment, I wondered if I was hallucinating, seeing the child I might never have. But I could smell them. They were real.
“Why are you pretending to be a pig?” they asked.
I sniffed again. I didn’t smell anyone else nearby. “You lost?”
“No. We’ve got a cabin not far.”
“ . . . You supposed to talk to strangers?”
The kid shrugged. “I’m Davey, he. What’s your name?”
“ . . . Finley, he.”
Davey smiled. “Now that we know each other’s name, we’re not strangers, right?”
“Not as much.”
“If you’re not pretending to be a pig, what are you doing?”
I gestured at the loose earth by my feet. “Foraging.”
“What’s that?”
“Looking for food.”
“In the dirt?”
“I’m looking for truffles. They grow under this kind of tree.”
“Do you need a shovel?” He took off his backpack and pulled out a plastic spade.
“Not unless I need to use the bathroom.” I bent over and churned more soil through
my fingers.
“Won’t a shovel make it easier?”
“Easier, not better. Might damage the goods.”
“Oh.” He put away the spade. Then he pointed at another tree. “Does that one grow
truffles, too?”
“Trees don’t grow truffles. Truffles grow around the roots.” I looked at the tree he
had singled out. “I don’t smell any over there.”
He stuck his nose up in the air and inhaled. “I don’t smell anything but the forest.”
“I’ve got a special nose.”
“How?”
“A doctor gave it to me.”
“My mom’s a doctor.”
“Maybe she’s the one who gave it to me.”
The boy picked up his backpack and walked toward me. With each step, his scent intensified. Hair product. Granola. Toothpaste. Artificial banana. My headache intensified, too.
I waved my hand. “Back up!”
He stopped, face stricken. “Sorry! What’d I do?”
“You didn’t do anything. I just smell things a little too strongly, you understand?”
He didn’t respond.
“Too much smell gives me headaches,” I said.
“ . . . Then why’d you get a special nose?”
“To pay rent.” I pushed my fingers back into the soil and wiggled them. I felt
something that was the right texture.
“Why don’t we grow truffles on farms?”
“They only grow in the wild.”
“So you have to find truffles?”
“That’s right.”
“What about bots? Can’t they find them?”
“Not really. Not yet.” I looked at the boy. “You ask your mom this many questions?”
“Yeah, but she doesn’t answer them most of the time.”
“Why’s that?”
He stared at his feet. “Because she’s working.”
I narrowed my eyes at him but decided not to pry. “Speaking of work, you mind if Ifinish doing mine?”
One after another, I exposed the truffles hiding beneath the soil and between tangled
roots. I cut them free using my mushroom knife, then sealed them in an air-tight pouch in
my pack. With each deposit, their smell grew fainter.
The whole time, Davey watched me.
“I’m all done here.” I wiped my hands together, brushing off dirt. “You alright
getting home by yourself?”
The boy said he was, and his confidence made me believe him. Still, I couldn’t help imagining an emergency news headline about some child going missing in the Cascades.
“Mind if I tag along?” I asked.
He beamed. “Not at all!”
I pulled a specially made noseplug out of my pocket, and I inserted it into my nostrils. The pain in my head went away.
I followed Davey eastward through the foothills, down well-cut deer trails. In the mud, I spied tracks that matched the prints of his boots; they were fresh and they led back the way we came from, so I knew we were following the same path he had taken earlier that
day.
Wending onward, we raced the sun. It was setting faster than I wanted. We’d begun our trek in the middle of the afternoon, but night came quickly in the winter—and even quicker on the wrong side of the mountains. I hoped I wouldn’t have to navigate the dark to
get back to my truck.
“We far?” I asked.
“No,” he said.
“Will your mom freak out, you being with a stranger?”
“She won’t notice. She’s working.”
I wondered where she worked. There weren’t any towns to speak of nearby. No
hospitals. Maybe she was a wilderness medic.
Davey had fibbed, or at least his definition of not far was a lot different from mine. We hiked for another hour, and soon, I feared there was no chance of getting back to my truck before nightfall. But I’d started something and I intended to see it through.
“We’re here.” He pointed up ahead.
A ways down the trail, there was an old cabin. Its planks had turned gray from weathering. I didn’t trust the integrity of its stilts, but the place was small. Only one story. The structure couldn’t have been too heavy.
An old gas-powered Toyota SUV was parked outside. Grass had grown up around it. I couldn’t see any tire tracks. I wondered when was the last time its engine had turned over.
“You want to come inside?” Davey asked.
“No, no. Definitely not without your mom around.”
“I can ask her if it’s alright.”
“ . . . I thought you said she was working.”
“She is.”
“From home?”
He nodded.
I looked up at the sky. Stars shone between gaps in the clouds.
“I just need you to ask her if I can make camp around here. Too late to get back to my truck.”
“She might not answer, but I can ask.”
“And tell her I just meant to make sure you got home safe. Make sure you say that,
alright?”
He ran up the steps to the front door. After thirty minutes or so, the porch light came on, and the front door opened just wide enough for someone to peek through.
“I’ve got a gun!” The voice was hoarse.
I raised my hands, slowly.
“I don’t mean any trouble. Just wanted to make sure Davey got home safe. You the mom?”
“I am,” she said. “He said you want to camp out here.”
“My truck’s far, and I’m afraid I’ll get lost in the dark.”
The boy’s mother stepped out from behind the doorway and onto the porch. She did,
in fact, have a gun, a twenty gauge over-under with a wooden stock. She braced it against
her shoulder and aimed down the sight at me.
I raised my hands higher.
“That’s what he told me,” she said. “He also told me you were nice to him.”
“I tried to be.”
For the longest few seconds, she studied me. Then she lowered the barrel so it pointed toward the ground.
“You got kids?”
I thought about the embryos Leigh and I had made, sitting in a freezer in some lab. According to the state of Washington, they weren’t kids, but according to me, they were the promise of kids.
“No.”
“You swear you’re a good person?”
“I do.”
“Alright then. You can camp out here. You can come in and have some dinner, too. A drone dropped off groceries this morning.”
The inside of the cabin was simple. It had a single bathroom, a small kitchen, a living area, and two bedrooms. The furniture looked expensive. Solid woods. Fine leathers. Exquisite fabrics. But everything was dusty.
I sat at the dining table while Davey’s mother, Becca, unpacked a box of condensed meals and stacked them neatly on top of the shelves in the kitchen cabinets. As she reached up to put away one of the boxes, the sleeve of her baggy sweater slid toward her shoulder.
I spotted a bed sore near her elbow. The boy put logs into the furnace, whose flame had all but died, then prodded them
with a poker.
Becca shivered. “No wonder I was so cold while I was at work.”
“Sorry,” Davey said. “I didn’t know how far I’d wandered. I got bored.”
Becca braced herself on the counter and stared downward. The muscles in her jaw swelled. “I know you did, sweetie.”
I cleared my throat. “You’re a doctor, right?”
“Um, yeah. A surgeon.”
“You remote in? From all the way out here?”
“I’ve got an interface in the bedroom. The satellite service is good enough. Living out in the sticks isn’t my favorite, but you’ve got to save money somehow.” She nodded at the boxes of condensed meals. “Pot roast, beef stroganoff, or rosemary chicken?”
“Whichever tastes the least like anything.” I tapped my nose, drawing her attention to my noseplug.
“Chicken it is.” She tossed a box onto the counter. “I’ve done a couple nose jobs. Yours treating you right?”
“Does the trick. Don’t like the headaches, though. Hence the noseplug.”
She tore open the box and removed the food from inside. It was a brick the color of lard, the same shape as its packaging. She set the stuff on a plate, then put it in the microwave to cook for two minutes.
“I’d like to pay you.” I unzipped my pouch and took out a truffle. “Will this do?”
“You don’t have to pay.”
“Please.” I put it down on the table.
“Ooh!” Davey scrambled over and stared at the truffle. He frowned. “It sure doesn’t
smell like chocolate.”
I chuckled.
Becca chuckled, too.
Pretty soon, our chuckles became full-bellied laughter. And we kept laughing, and laughing, and laughing—until I was crying.
My noseplug had dislodged itself sometime in the night, so I awoke to the smell of almond extract, which meant banana slugs were nearby. I caught a whiff of coffee, as well.
I unzipped my tent, and morning light flooded in. I squinted. Becca was on her porch, leaning against the railing.
“You sleep alright?”
“Better than I have in a while.”
“Hard times?”
“Hard times.” I moved to pack up. “I’ll get out of your hair.”
“It was nice having someone else around.”
I stopped, then turned to face her. Sparse droplets of rain were falling, shimmering in the sunlight like sparks. She stared into the mug cradled in her hands. “If you find yourself around these parts,
Davey wouldn’t mind a hiking buddy.”
For the shortest few seconds, I studied her, trying to figure out whether she meant what she’d just said. “That so?”
She nodded.
I thought about the boy who had once been an embryo. Halfheartedly, I fought against my cheeks as they formed a smile. “Well, isn’t that something? I wouldn’t mind one, either.”
🥉
The forces of electricity, 1912 by Mark Childs
Over the trestle, over the Duwamish
mud flats, at the antipodal terminal
of the Seattle Electric Company trolley,
Luna Park manufactures full-moon moonlight.
Eleven thousand Buxbaum and Colley ‘A’ lamps
trace the Dreamland Theater, Tunnel of Love,
Great Figure Eight Roller Coaster, Great Whirl -
Machines for the purposes of pleasure.
A Parson’s turbine overcomes ohms, fabricates
volts, excites the Midway, conjures crowds, whirls
carousel music out over Elliott Bay.
Incandescence magics away the night.
After the witching hour, the last patrons sing
the nighttide trolley back to cockcrow Seattle,
completing the circuit cathode to anode,
the spark of Luna Park in their bones, new jazz,
new men, new women, charged
with the forces of electricity.
🏅
Fireworks by Tiia-Mai Redditt
Daughter
Our family sat in the front living room of my grandparents's house, in a quiet oak tree lined street in Salem, Oregon several blocks from the capitol building. The front door was wide open. July's cooler-evening-breeze fluttered in. The triple front windows framed the capitol building's top above the tree-line, its white marble cylinder looked like a wedding cake. On top of the cake, a 22 foot gold-leaf brawny pioneer woodsman stood. He holds a splitting axe in one hand, and a tarp over his shoulders ready to build shelter in Oregon's uncharted territory. As a little girl, I sometimes fell asleep to the gold-pioneer-man spotlight at night, under the dormer windows in my grandparent's upstair's bedroom. I dreamt of wedding cakes and trailblazing.
"More cake," Grandmother passed Kringle on a gold-cross porcelain plate.
Sunset rays of fuchsia-rose gleaned from Gold-man's surfaces. A car drove by and backfired. My grandmother's expression blanketed, "I don't like fireworks."
Odd... could that be true? Why wouldn't she like fireworks? Hadn’t we watched the fireworks together, I was sitting on grandmother's lap? Was it only once? When I was eight... maybe?
My first memories as a toddler, our family watching the Fourth-of-July parade down State Street. We out-waved our American flags. My grandparents lit up like fireworks. We are more American than the American born.
My grandmother spoke Estonian to my mother.
Mother interpreted for me, "Parades remind grandma of when grandpa won the gold Olympic medal for Estonia, in swimming. He trained in the frigid Baltic Lakes. Grandpa's photo on the front pages of all the newspapers, the Estonian president shaking his hand. He became a national hero, his gold trophy still displayed in the Tartu sport museum. They made a downtown parade for him."
My grandfather stood and saluted the veterans in uniforms. His own foreign battle- scarred uniform left-behind in his birth country.
After the parade, we had a BBQ at my grandparents. We ate likeAmerican. My father and grandfather flipping burgers and hotdogs over a charcoal red weber. I scoop baked beans with ruffle potato chips. Grandma and mother studied the American flag colored desserts from July's Women's Journal and Good Housekeeping. Food traditions had meaning for us. We had our Christmas black sausage, sauerkraut fermented in large clay pots.
Our birthday Kringle, how high it rises, the folklore forecasting next year's luck. So on Fourth-of-July we ate white lumpy frosted sheet cake, uneven blueberry and strawberry lines, never as perfect as the magazine covers. It tasted deliciously American.
Was I eight? The firework finale? Kaboom, metal-salted smells, red, white and blue chrysanthemums blanketing the night sky. My grandmother's face glowed the American flag colors. Her eyes closed?
"Isn't it so beautiful?" I asked her. She looked at me, wet eyed, and squeezed my hand. She never answered. I thought those were joyful tears.
I grew-up wondering, her stoic posture, her moist blank eyes, when old memories surfaced. She kept those river teeth buried so deep in a place she never spoke about. It was my mother that gave me... perhaps... clues.
Mother
I had graduated from Salem University, left home, was working my first job in Washington DC, sitting on a blanket at the National Mall waiting for the fireworks to begin, with a boyfriend.
"You've never seen fireworks?" Disbelief plastered on his face.
"We always went to the parade and had a BBQ." I defended my Americanism. Did my trace of an accent give me away?
I had seen Estonian night skies lit up like day, milk-white, amber and claret-reds. We were running to the bomb shelter. I was holding my four-year-old sister's hand. She stops, her wide eyes reflecting the fire flames. "It's so beautiful," she said. "Like the church's big Christmas tree candles twinkling when the angels visit and grant wishes."
I was in first grade, I knew better, it was angels flying from heaven, helping souls that night. I tugged her hand, "Hurry."
For hours, booms, earth shaking, I felt the claret-red and amber colors burning downtown Tallinn. In my mother's arms, I silently cried. I repeated in my head, "Angels please protect us. Thank you."
"We decorated American flag cakes," I told the boyfriend.
My mother and I studied the Women's magazines, our Fourth-of-July cakes, our tasty imperfectly jagged and misaligned blueberry field and strawberry stripes.
In college, I broadened my understanding of the horrors from history books. The day the Russians sabotaged Tallinn's water supply. I remember the trickle of water out of the facets. That night they dropped 3,058 bombs on Tallinn. It left 20,000 people without homes.
It must have been a few days after the bombing, that we stayed at a friend's house a few blocks away. My mother joined a legion of women that went to clean up old-town Tallinn. We stayed with her friend still breastfeeding. I was frightened my mother would disappear forever if she left. Most of the men were gone, fighting, missing. She returned stoic, blank, silent, parts of her disappeared. I spent my life looking for her naive happiness that never returned. She never walked in old-town Tallinn again.
It was fortunate we all spent the night with our friends.
A second attack. A long shrapnel came through my parent's bed. For days, I watched cargo-box trains crammed with people. Our family left shortly after. One suitcase for each of us, out of a home crammed with memories. Our clothes were practical. I could only pick one doll. I'm so sorry, I whispered to the other dolls their stoic faces staring back.
I must go. These were friends I would never see again.
We raced from farmhouses, and homes of friends and relatives, until we boarded a crowded boat that landed in the allies's zone. An American army truck drove us to the Displaced People's Camp. We lived there for years. We made friends for generations as our parents created our community. A photo from when I graduated from middle school in DP camp hangs in a wood carved frame on my front wall. It was carved with Estonian folk-art flowers by one of the men at camp. Father taught swimming and life saving. I have a hand-tooled leather photo album labeled life in DP camp.
It's filled with photos; chalkboard written food rations of bones, fat, meat. Photos of swim meets, theater, rows of children behind school desks, my mother ringing the camp's wakeup bell.
When we received an American sponsor, we sailed the cold, choppy Atlantic Ocean in a crowded ship. For weeks, the ocean skies illuminated by hundreds of stars. I imagined a milky way of angels guiding us to refuge, the liberty lady holding her flaming torch, and arms wide open. We were safe.
Mother made excuses not to go to the fireworks. We were too small. It was too late, too noisy. I caught the blank, stoic places she disappeared into. She slipped there when a car backfired, or an ambulance drove by. My body reflected my mother's anxiousness, stiffening when hearing ambulances and backfires.
Mother told me, "Some River Teeth need to stay buried deep at the bottom of the muddy river. They can't be unseen." Only she knew her secrets.
Grandmother
I still shake when the night sky darkness is shattered by bursts of fire-rain. I go vacant to a place safer than feelings. Why would the Russians bomb a medieval walled city? Old town Tallinn is filled with cafes, shops and apartments along its cobblestone narrow streets and steep alleys; its military usefulness expired centuries ago. We heard the blasts for hours in the bomb shelter, not knowing who had homes left. A putrid haze loomed over Tallinn's ruins for days. The men gone: dead, prisoners, conscripted, fighting for Estonia. The women gathered to find and help survivors, and tasked to clean up hell.
We women hauled fifteen century stones from tumbled apartments, and uncovered crushed bodies. Faces I recognized, the young man barely grown, who brought us coffee and milk cream pastries at the 1864 Maiasmokk cafe. My friends and I sat for hours in that cafe, on bent wood chairs, black and white tiled floors, wood paneled walls, and gold mirrored ceiling. Maiasmokk cafe survived blast-dusted, a window shattered. Astrid, my friend since elementary school, always ordered a meat pirukad, and talked about her two sons. I heard that her whole family was buried under a toppled limestone wall. Another pile of stones, a child's small burnt hand, not older than my youngest daughter, rose out of the rubble towards the sky that betrayed her. Ambulance sirens came for any bloodied and crushed still breathing. A few survived. My soul crumbled beyond tears.
Late in the evening, after the women toiled in the wreckage, I went to pick up my daughters from my friend's home. "They are sleeping, stay," my friend pleaded. I was too exhausted to argue. It was a good thing we all spent the night together. Our home was near the railroad tracks. That night shrapnel went through our house. We would have been dead. Would death have been better, I wondered then? Life happens in tiny decisions. We survived: random falls of bombs, ahead of the front lines, friend's homes. It took years to travel several cities south, to a boat dock, to sail to another country to Displaced People's Camp. My husband and I lost each other for long-times during the war, as he fought, and the girls and I ran away from the front lines. I looked up on moon nights, hoping he still saw the moon, not knowing where he was, not knowing if he was alive. Then, on the dock, waiting for a boat to leave our country, he was walking towards us. He was able to squeeze into our boat that left earlier. His assigned boat was bombed and sunk. We both saw infernos, we kept our witness silent. Why would we talk about such painful things?
In DP Camp the parents organized a city. We wanted our children educated. We wanted happy moments in their childhood. We had refugee teachers in every subject. The Red Cross and American-aid gave us books and school supplies. I had packed my husband's American made 1940s Kodak camera when we fled. He filled many leather bound photo albums of our life in DP camp, food rations, theater, singing, sports. Several families immigrated to Oregon near us, and we stayed friends for life, our children and grandchildren became friends.
I studied how to be American in women's magazines and language classes. My husband had graduated from an American University and spoke English well. He became a professor at Salem University. Neither of us lost our accents, mine staying thicker. On the Fourth-of-July parade we waved our American flags. We salute American heroes. My husband was a hero, though he never had his military parade. I waved my flag for him. We salute all the courageous heroes carrying their river teeth.
My granddaughter insisted that I go to the fireworks one year. Sky-fire, and the river teeth floated out from deep cavernous memories long buried in mud. She asked me if I thought it was beautiful, and my tears came. I squeeze her hand. Her birth was a slim chance of luck and small decisions. I am glad her river teeth are different from the ones I carry.
I kept the hellish river teeth hidden, not to burden other souls. We had a lovely life in Estonia. We have a good life in America. We ended up creating many happy river teeth, I let those float to the surface, buoying on my life's river. Those I gladly share.
⭐️
Cobblestone Home by Alison Peacock
Covered, coveted, cut into the hillside, Pike Place Market holds secrets.
At first glance, it’s chaos on cobblestones. Fish flying over heads, flung from hand to hand with grunts and shouts. A circle of grins, crowding the bronze pig, a sculpture, a symbol, a spirit animal. Neon melting into neon, colors exploding above the molasses crowd, where giant bouquets poke everyone in the eye. Excitement, boredom, frustration—all barely contained by the old white columns, a terra-cotta corridor teeming with people.
This is where Seattle is least itself, speaking in every tongue, gathering treasures from far and farther, smashing the loud and brassy up against the quiet ones, who only leave the house when family comes. This is New York Northwest, or Europe South. This is not our misty, moody Emerald City, wrapped up in blankets most of the year.
But this is also not the whole Market. You have to look deeper and listen harder for its heartbeat, for the sounds and shapes missed by the masses.
There’s something in the dust of the place, the perfume of pixies, perhaps, that tosses its grit onto your skin, lodging in your eye like a shard in your heart.
Come early, when the farmers unload their produce as the sun winks awake, when gleaming tables fill with flowers, every petal every which way.
Come late for the endlessness of vacant halls. Slip into the darkness under the neon. Listen to the echoes—yours, exclaiming at the stillness, but also the shouts of history, preserved in the very air.
Breathe it all in: the salt from the Sound, the scent of old wood—even your nose can hear it creaking—the urine-soaked concrete above the open-air stairs.
Let yourself get lost. All the jostling of mid-day has too much purpose. Now you can chart your own course with ease. Disappear down hidden corridors. Follow see-through threads into the bowels, a labyrinth of glass closets. Find the tunnels at midlevel, where stairs are always a climb. No descent, just content.
Find the state of the art. Stare at the bleeding color of murals, sculpt minty clay for the gum wall, listen to the horns howling at the moon. Follow the sound to any number of saloons.
Here comes the rain again. Soak yourself in Seattle’s spit. See how it makes the cobblestones gleam in the red glow of the clock? Now that’s a spit shine.
Marvel at the emptiness, the sense of having it all to yourself, since you don’t see another soul.
But know the souls are there. They hide in plain sight, just as you do. Peer around a corner and follow that faint thump of music—there they are, behind the pink door, watching trapeze artists and listening to jazz. Or up there, behind glass in a greenhouse that serves food. Or through a dark hall to the cabaret, where anything goes.
If you must meet the Market in the middle of the day, just follow the instructions left for Alice. Eat. Drink. Nibble your way through the crowd: a piece of pain here, a Turkish delight there, a Piroshky, twice for good measure. Curds on the corner, chocolate in the alley. Biscuits and honey, tea and crumpets, if you know where to look.
I left all of this once. How could I have left all of this? I went away for a year, 12 months filled with canyons and hoodoos and Redwood trees, with beans & greens, biscuits & gravy, and hash-brown casserole. I crossed the country slowly, no mists in sight. I didn’t miss the mist—but I did miss the Market.
I came home changed, as wanderers will. Meanwhile, Pike Place delighted me by staying the same.
Some say it didn’t—that it doesn’t—that it morphs through its own eras. Vendors come and vendors go; only the tourists stay the same. Friends remember the Market with older eyes, editing it back to how it used to be.
I don’t. My older eyes got that way in tune with the Market, marking time together. Those hidden alleys still delight me, the stones still cobble, the fish still fly, the neon still glows in different cursive. Spoon man’s ghost dances every night with Chief Sealth’s daughter. Angeline will always haunt her courtyard, with or without its tree. And I will always haunt it with her. We are kindred spirits, the kind that feel the throb and thrum of our beloved Market as we dance to the beat of an unseen drum.
After all, this is where Seattle is most itself. Seagulls sing our song all day, and the scent of the sea wraps itself in the clouds, shrouding the alleys and hill climbs in our midst. All the gathered accents define our city, a place that glitters long after the Gold Rush because we keep the trail left by all who come and play, eat and pay, leave and stay.
⭐️
Seattle Downtown by Janka Hobbs
The lunch crowd on Union Street
shifts away from the building,
giving wide berth
to a scruffy man reclining in the doorway
of a boarded up store.
He is yelling something unintelligible through the roar of traffic.
I, too, intend to steer clear of his reality.
As I pass, he sits up and asks, in a conversational tone,
“Why does everyone avoid me?”
I glance over, our eyes meet.
He says,“I have a hundred dollar bill.”
Suddenly we are both laughing.
He has made the best joke of the day,
and we both know it.
He leans back against the cold marble.
I hurry along to my appointment.
I hope his day was warmed, as mine was,
by our shared moment
of being human.
⭐️
To Call the Whales Home by Sarah DeWeerdt
It’s Sunday afternoon, what would twenty years ago have been an unseasonably warm day in October and is now simply October. A clot of people clad in Pacific Northwest outdoor style has formed next to the gravel parking lot of a disused golf course in the Seattle suburb of Bothell.
The group piles a motley assortment of shovels, loppers, and tarps into a pair of wheelbarrows. The instigator of the gathering, Whitney Neugebauer, tells everyone to pick a pair of work gloves from the jumble in a mesh hamper nearby.
Then we set off along what was once the second fairway, trekking through a landscape shaped like a cupped hand holding the former tees and greens, the now-indistinct hazards and roughs. The ground slopes from the parking lot towards the Sammamish River, which is home to three species of salmon: sockeye, coho, and Chinook.
The river curves along the northern edge of what used to be the back nine of the course, then sluices through the middle of the former front nine. A couple miles downstream, it empties into the northern end of Lake Washington; from there, via a series of human-dug cuts and canals, its waters move through Lake Union and enter Puget Sound. Finally, in the salt water, the salmon born in the Sammamish watershed become part of a marine food chain topped by the region’s iconic and beloved southern resident population of killer whales.
The southern residents currently number just seventy-some individuals, and are listed as endangered in both the United States and Canada. What motivates our gathering this afternoon is concern for these whales.
The group consists of about a dozen and a half people, all but one of us female. I overhear one woman congratulate another, here with her tween daughter, on “joining the over-40 club.” There’s a crew of four or five high school girls, along with the mother of one of them. The lone man, sporting a full beard and a spandy woven-cedar hat, is accompanied by a woman wearing a sweatshirt emblazoned with local marine mammals.
This place has been not-a-golf-course for long enough that a casual visitor might not recognize its past incarnation. And yet the long, dry, late-summer grasses punctuated by clumps of ecologically unrelated trees evoke the savanna landscape of our supposed evolutionary longing even better than the active golf courses that strain to replicate it.
Near the first tee we group up again, and Neugebauer gives us our instructions for the afternoon. Neugebauer is the founder of Whale Scout, the environmental nonprofit leading salmon habitat restoration on the front nine of the course. Her wiry frame is dressed in ripstop nylon hiking pants that zip off into shorts. She has an open face, corn-silk hair, and a hard knot of bicep below the hem of her t-shirt sleeve.
During the golf course years, this stretch of the river “was mowed basically up to the banks with turf grass,” she tells me later. That makes the golf course a synecdoche: All over the Puget Sound region, salmon spawning and rearing habitat has been lost to the sprawl of human development, meandering gravel riverbeds and braided side channels replaced by rectilinear infrastructure and monocultural landscaping.
Along with these changes, salmon populations have declined dramatically, and Puget Sound Chinook are federally listed as threatened. Chinook are the most important food source for the southern residents, who traditionally frequented Puget Sound during the summer months to feast on abundant salmon runs and socialize with other members of their clan. Lately, the whales are seen in the inland waters much less frequently than in the past.
As a small contribution towards calling the whales home, Neugebauer’s group is ripping out invasive vegetation on the golf course and planting native trees and shrubs. This will shade the river to keep the water comfortable for salmon in the region’s increasingly hot summers, provide food for insects that young salmon eat, and filter the runoff from the nearby highway.
Today’s assignment is to clear Himalayan blackberry from the work site – cutting down the thick, thorny stems with loppers or digging out the roots of brambles that were cut during a previous work party and have dried stiff and pale brown, like stubble on the chin of an earth god.
The Himalayan blackberry was introduced to the Pacific Northwest in the late 1800s by California-based plant breeder and eugenicist Luther Burbank, and has become one of the region’s most notorious weeds, swallowing anyplace that has been altered by human hands and then half-neglected, the vines pricking out our carelessly abandoned intentions across the landscape.
Still, we humans can’t help but hold some affection for the exuberant bully of a plant, especially its abundant berries. Blackberry season is over now, but during previous work parties people picked blackberries, ate them as they worked, took pails full home to make jam.
Today we spread out to different parts of the work site, forming subgroups based on age-class and affinity. I don’t know anyone, so I pick up a shovel and start working on my own to dig up blackberry roots near an overgrown ravine that once held a small, salmon-bearing side channel of the river. The important part is to dig out the root balls of the blackberries – hard fists of sugary energy reserves that enable brambles cut down to the ground to sprout right back.
⭐️
The Gatekeeper by Ivan Schneider
Exhibitor badges only. “We’re still getting ready, please come back at ten,” I say.
People show up without badges and I send them back up two flights of escalators to Summit Lobby. “Let’s start you off at Registration and get things sorted for the show, okay?”
A pair claims to have badges at their booth. What, am I supposed to just take their word for it?
What am I even doing here?
I say no. Except I do not say no, because saying no is negative and we must be positive. Instead, I say that the best thing to do is to visit the sorting desk and get registered, isn’t that a wonderful idea?
I am called a rule-follower. They go to the other entrance. The shift lead lets them in and tells me we can let some of these slide.
Another one shows up without a badge, has it AT THE BOOTH, I PAID 1000 DOLLARS FOR THAT BOOTH. I let that one slide.
Elwin comes in. I wouldn’t have recognized him without seeing the name on his badge. He doesn’t recognize me in my uniform. He asks where we met. “Your backyard,” I say.
I was the guest of my real estate agent, Claudia Castillo, who wrote three books: a memoir about her Guadalajara childhood, a book of short stories, and a guide to selling real estate. All three were published by All Bilingual Press, run by Elwin and Rita Wirkala – both writers, teachers,
translators, and publishers.
Rita translated my academic article about Cervantes’ talking dogs into Spanish. She had initially offered to translate my self-published book, LEON: A LIFE, which recounts the boyhood escapades, WWII survival stories, and maritime adventures of my father. I should have said yes, but instead, I pushed the idea off into the future, saying that I didn’t want to have foreign language editions until I had a better website; more audio and video; an updated digital edition; and a large-format coffee-table edition. Plus, I didn’t really know how translation rights worked, and isn’t it complicated? What happens if I get a book deal or a movie deal or who knows, maybe a podcast? The consequence of my delusional demurral is that if you want to read my work in Spanish, you’ll find Rita’s translation about talking dogs but nada about Papa Leon.
Claudia helped us negotiate the purchase of our First Hill condo. During the pandemic, others moved toward the periphery while we moved toward the center. After all, Seattle is a city, right?
And cities always rebound after pandemics, right? We’ll find out soon enough. Over two years, we watched the Summit go from who’s-going-to-pay-for-this-unfinishedmonstrosity to isn’t-it-the-loveliest-convention-center-you’ve-ever-seen. I went to the public opening. Swept away with gawking admiration for the spacious modern architecture along with
my civic commitment to the renewal of the city, and mostly because I needed money, I became an Admission Attendant (On-Call).
The show floor’s open and the crowd starts coming in. I’m paying close attention, mostly to keep out people who thought the bookfair was free.
I tell myself that I’m happy not to be here trying to bullshit my way into a publishing deal.
For my six-hour, forty-five-minute shift, I’ll earn ninety dollars net, more money than I’ve ever made through my own self-publishing imprint.
An attendee from Old Dominion compliments me on our staff’s demeanor and helpfulness. That was sweet. Five stars.
After my break, the shift lead radios to say that I’m now at coat check.
Except that it’s not just coat check – it’s also luggage check. And the luggage keeps coming.
The East Coasters have large wheelie-bag suitcases. Inside, they have books, let’s call it inventory, cushioned by clothes for a four-day trip. Why pay for shipping or handling or delivery or stacking or whatever else ends up on the exhibitor invoice? They hump their heavy luggage into and out of taxis, up and down escalators, onto scales or into overhead bins. On arrival, they
pluck their bags from a serpentine conveyor belt, find their way up an escalator, cross one of the pedestrian passages to the parking structure, and take an escalator down to the cab stand or rideshare. The hotel rooms won’t be ready until 3pm, but you can check your luggage at the conference, it says so in the program.
Coat check, you can’t miss it. Turn right at Registration. Walk towards the big windows along Pine. To your left, look for a sign on an easel, just alongside the escalators going up to the Flex Hall. And to your right, you’ll find the escalators down to the Ex Hall.
Ex Hall, Flex Hall – what the hell were they thinking? It’s Alpha-Bravo-Charlie, not Alpha- Balpha-Chalfa. Yes, it’s a Flexible Hall. But Flex is not a name, it’s a feature.
Guests don’t care if it’s flexible. They just want to check their luggage.
The brand-new Summit doesn’t have a dedicated coat room. Instead of permanent space for seasonal needs, we define temporary spaces using tensor barriers and attendants.
And today, we don’t have enough space. We only get part of the long hallway. We can’t block traffic. That’s against the fire code.
We line up the luggage in columns, but not tightly like teeth on a comb. We need room between columns to roll out any bag without lifting. People get injured that way. When we’re full, we’re full. Except that it doesn’t look full. It looks like there’s plenty of space for just one more.
I’m turning people away, but they don’t leave. They roll around Summit Lobby, unsure what to do next. They talk to the event volunteers, confer with each other, and register their complaints.Or they come back looking to be the exception.
Here’s a guy with the air of someone who makes big publishing deals and advises boards and collects wine and knows people who know people, he’s smooth, he tries different arguments with me. I politely parry each attempt. He says: “You’re not going to take my bag, are you.”
I smiled. I’m the gatekeeper now. If I was being slick, I’d have slipped him a promo card. “Promise to read my book and I’ll take your bag.”
But I wasn’t there with the hope of being discovered.
I had lost hope of being discovered. I had packed my 97-year-old father’s best stories into 99 tight pages, written with historical interest in a distinct voice. But you can’t get a book deal for a family memoir. Plus, I wanted it done while he was alive, so I self-published.
I brought my brand-new book to Hugo House for an intensive seminar on the publishing industry, moderated by Seattle author Peter Mountford. I explained my situation: I had selfpublished a family memoir, but for my next project, whatever it might be, I wanted a literary agent. How would I go about it?
“Change your name,” Mountford says. Anyone in publishing takes one look at my Amazon sales rank and that’s the end of it. They’d rather take a chance on a new name.
“Fuck you,” I did not reply. “Why don’t you change your name to Meat Pounder?”
I stopped going to Hugo House. I gave up all hope of success in traditional publishing. During Covid, my business as a marketing writer dried up. My business was gone, but I wanted to stay in the city, and so I became an Admission Attendant. This was a flight to safety, a safe job within walking distance in a world gone mad.
The reward was an hourly wage with the prospect of lifetime stability. If you accept enough early-morning, late-night, and garage shifts, you get the thousand hours you need for health insurance. As you can climb up the seniority list, you get steady daytime shifts even when there’s
not much happening. It’s a union job in hospitality, so as long as groups keep booking conferences, you’ll keep earning, no matter what AI does. We’re Teamsters. These jobs aren’t going anywhere.
The price of that stability is that you become a rock. You don’t take tips, and you don’t accept gifts. You don’t hand out your business card or your manuscript or your screenplay. You’re not there to get rich. You don’t do special favors for big shots, hoping for reciprocity. You do your job, and that’s it. I lasted 11 months before deciding that it was time to take bigger risks.
The complaints about the luggage situation made their way from Registration up to the Event Manager, who came over and worked with us to expand the area for bags.
Let every weary traveler to the Summit be assured that they may entrust their luggage to honest workers with friendly faces. And let us demand the same from all Gatekeepers, to whom I say:
We carry our stories for lifetimes and generations.
We travel across continents, over oceans, and through borders.
After our long journeys, we seek to unburden ourselves.
Do not tell us that there is no room.
Do not make us change our names.
Do not say that if you ever walk alone, you must always walk alone.
Make room for who we are, what we have to say, and how we say it.
If you respect my identity and history, I’ll respect your judgment.
So if you could just go upstairs and talk to the Organizers, that would be wonderful, thanks.
⭐️
A Kinship with Strangers by Bridget Norquist
This is an excerpt from my novel in-progress, A Kinship with Strangers, which begins 150 years in the future. Sea level rise has transformed Seattle’s historic hills into islands, and the city has been renamed The Seattle Archipelago (The S’Arch to locals).
Io Kosten has just been pulled from an interfacing room (a virtual reality program) by her grandmother. (Io is short for Irene Olivia Kosten, also named after the goddess and Jupiter’s closest moon.)
“Ow, what—stop shaking me!”
“We’re not shaking you, it’s an earthquake.”
Grandma Ronnie and her girlfriend Sasha pulled Io to the doorway, bracing themselves against either side with Io between them. The floor, the walls, even the windows wobbled and swayed. Io’s dresser, which had been anchored to the wall, tore loose and crashed onto the bed she’d been lying in moments before. Almost all her other stuff had tumbled off the shelves, and her lamp had overturned, casting a forlorn light across the rug and underneath her bed.
Grandma Ronnie’s salt-and-pepper hair looked even wilder than Io’s, and she wore an oversized sleep shirt that said, I give zero fox with a cute fox on it. Sasha’s raincoat was wet, her curly red hair in damp ringlets. They talked in urgent, low tones as the world continued to shake.
Io fixed her gaze on a knot in the faux wood flooring in front of her. It looked vaguely like an open-mouthed surprised emoji. She just had to breathe and wait until the shaking stopped.
But it didn’t, it just kept going, and suddenly—She was ten years old again. That quake was milder, but strong enough to collapse the ceiling of the restaurant where her parents had been having their anniversary dinner. Only two people walked away unscathed.
Not her mom. Not her dad. They died at the hospital.
Io would never forget that stupid waiting room. It smelled like baby wipes and rubbing alcohol, and there was that woman with smeary lipstick who kept trying to get her to play with her son, who pushed painted blocks in primary colors along matching twisty wires. It was a game for infants and toddlers, but Io played all the same, mostly because she wanted the woman to stop asking. The yellow, star-shaped block was sticky with raspberry-flavored jam, and then Grandma Ronnie was crying and hugging her and saying that Io could live with her, that she would take care of her, and the whole time Io worried that she was getting jam all over Grandma Ronnie’s white shirt. She asked to wash her hands, but when they went to the restroom, the automatic faucet was broken, and Io just let the water run and run. Grandma Ronnie didn’t even notice, and when Io looked at their reflections side-by-side in the mirror, she knew, with a jolt, that her parents would never stand close to her like this or be in another family picture together, ever again. It seemed like a really dumb thing to think of, but it was the one weird thing that made sense, with all that precious water hissing into the sink, and Grandma Ronnie dabbing at the gobs of mascara on her cheeks with a dampened shirtsleeve, and someone paging Dr. So-and-so, code blue. They were gone, and they weren’t coming back.
Grandma Ronnie pulled Io close, because she knew, better than anyone, where Io’s mind and body had gone. The shaking finally stopped, but Io felt like she was still moving, as if the memory of that movement left ripples inside her body, deep within her bones. Her balance felt off, and she was queasy.
She would forever despise raspberry-flavored jam.
“Good God, that seemed to last a long time,” Grandma Ronnie said.
“It did,” Sasha said. “Almost three full minutes. Had to be at least a nine on the Richter scale. Maybe a ten.” Sasha’s manner was crisp and alert as she flicked through text on her com bracelet’s small screen.
Io felt like a frightened mouse by comparison. Sasha was always calm and in control because of her military training. Io used to be intimidated by her, but not anymore. Both Sasha and Bernie had been with them since Io was little and they were family.
“Um, where’s Bernie?”
Everything about Bernard Shultz was big: his physical size, his voice, his booming laugh, and especially his tendency to bulldoze through emergencies. His absence during this very real emergency was strange.
“I was just gonna try him again.” Sasha tapped her com bracelet. “Network’s flooded, but hopefully in walkie-talkie mode…Bernie, do you read?”
“Sasha, thank God. Ronnie and Io with you?”
“Yeah, they’re both okay. Where are you?”
“Front porch. Southwest corner. Be careful. It’s not stable.”
“Hang in there, I’m coming.”
“Heh. Literally doing that.”
Sasha ran to the living room, Io and Ronnie following. The place was a mess. There were broken picture frames, overturned plants and bookshelves, curtains billowing. It was cold and wet indoors—the slider door to the deck was open. Bernie flopped into the living room like a big fish, soaking wet and gasping for breath. Sasha offered him a hand while Grandma Ronnie pushed the slider shut.
“What happened?” Sasha asked.
“The deck … came loose on one side.”
“I’m going to throttle Jack,” Ronnie muttered, storming past them to grab Bernie a towel from the kitchen. “He said the house EQ was up to date, but obviously he lied about that like he lies about everything. Bernie, you could have—what if the whole place goes sliding down the damned hill? Maybe we should—”
“Hey—hey,” Sasha gently touched her forehead to Ronnie’s. “It’s probably just the deck, some box somebody forgot to check. We should be pretty safe here, but you guys might want to pack some go bags just in case. Something you can carry a long way if you have to, like your school backpack, Io. Put on comfortable shoes and rain gear. Pack any medicines you might need, a change of clothes, non-perishable food, a bottle of water ...” she gave Grandma Ronnie an affectionate smirk, “Essentials only, hear me?”
Everyone knew Grandma Ronnie was a notorious over-packer.
“They key is to stay calm,” Bernie added, his big chest rising as he took a deep breath to demonstrate.
“If he starts meditating, I’m gonna lose it,” Ronnie said.
Sasha laughed. “He’s not wrong. Go. Hurry. But no need to panic. It’s going to be okay.”
Ronnie kissed Sasha briefly before turning to Io. “You need help with your bag, honey?” Io shook her head.
She still felt dazed as she changed out of her pajamas and pulled on her running shoes and jeans. She stuffed two pairs of underwear, a bra, a t-shirt, and a pair of socks into her backpack, along with her interfacing headset, tablet, and, impulsively, a stuffed bear that once belonged to her mom. He wore a little blue coat and a floppy hat. His original name was Paddington, but Io renamed him Bob when she was five. She had to shove Bob way down so his hat didn’t get caught in the zipper.
Why did it feel like she was forgetting some important item? She couldn’t stop thinking about how the deck almost collapsed. Bernie could have died.
And what about their neighbors? Were they okay? Like all the other homes on the steep, west-facing side of Queen Anne Island, the Kostens’ house was built into the hillside. Lots of people had porches like theirs that leaned out over the drop like staggered bookshelves. The house was one of Grandma Ronnie’s few, coveted luxuries: a beautiful home of their own with an actual view: partly of Elliott Bay and partly of the homes that climbed the east bluff of Magnolia Island across the way.
And then Io knew what she wanted to find: that book! She dove into her closet, tossing things aside as she scrounged. It was a children’s book that told a story of how the space between Queen Anne and Magnolia Islands was once a tide-flat with railroad tracks running through.
the Underwater Train of Magnolia Slough,
carries the friendly ghosts of sea creatures,
and people, too,
all the way out, to the deep clear blue.
There, all creatures great and small were reunited with their loved ones in an imaginary, unpolluted sea. Free to play, beneath the waves, day after day. Io could still see the artist’s rendering of that marine paradise with its swaying algae forests.
After her parents died, she hated that book. Her mom and dad weren’t on a stupid train partying with extinct orcas and cartoon otters. They were gone forever. And once she was old enough to question everyone’s obsession with the time Before, she hated it even more, because of how the people back then ruined the world for the people of Io’s now.
And yet, right now, she needed it. Maybe because anything from her parents felt precious in the face of disaster. Maybe Grandma Ronnie would know where it was.
Grandma Ronnie was in her bedroom, standing in front of a full-length mirror in her underwear. “I found glass inside my shirt just now, can you believe it? I was in the kitchen when it first started. Stuff was flying right out of the cabinets and shattered everywhere.” She fished a small shard of glass out of her bra before frowning at Io. “Honey, it’s cold out there. Why are you wearing a t-shirt?”
“You’re one to talk.” They both laughed weakly. “Hey, do you know what happened to my Magnolia Slough book?”
“What? You hated that thing. We gave it to Goodwill.”
“Oh.” How could she have forgotten? We’re probably all in shock.
“Honey, grab yourself one of my sweatshirts out of the drawer, ‘K?”
Io chose a purple sweatshirt with a large, gold W from Grandma’s old university. It had a hood and a kangaroo pocket and was very warm. She then helped Grandma Ronnie find and remove bits of glass from her hair and back. Most of the cuts were small, except for one or two that needed band-aids. As Grandma Ronnie added the band-aids to her bag, Io spotted some familiar, teal-colored fabric.
“You packed the Teal Tank?”
“You know me, I never leave home without it.”
Grandma Ronnie’s teal suit was legendary in their house and in the public eye. She wore it to every important speaking engagement or press conference. Whether it was lucky or not seemed to matter less than the fact that she looked, and clearly felt, good in it. But the way Sasha had been talking, Io pictured hiking in the Cascades, not conversations with reporters or televised speeches. Then again, she’d brought her old teddy bear, so she said nothing more as they grabbed some protein bars from the kitchen before joining Sasha and Bernie back in the living room.
Sasha stood by the slider door. She turned and beckoned, her face gray.
“What?” Ronnie said. All seemed quiet. Calm. The sun was up, and the sky was overcast. The wind had chased most of the haze away and the rain had finally stopped.
Sasha pointed at Magnolia Bridge. “Look at the lower bridge supports. They’re exposed when they’re usually underwater. That means a big wave is coming. Apparently, the origin of the quake was the Seattle Fault, which is the worst possible scenario.”
“Why? What’s so bad about it?” Ronnie asked.
A sequence of three beeps blared from everyone’s wrist: a signal to evacuate immediately to higher ground. Everyone but Sasha gaped in horrified disbelief. The feat of engineering that was the S’Arch sea wall had never failed their city before, but those alarms would not have sounded in their zip code if they weren’t in danger. Sasha pulled on her backpack. “There’s an evacuation tower on the roof of Io’s school. We can’t drive, we might get stuck. We need to run.”
⭐️
Book with the burnt corner by Thushara Wijeratna
I am speeding aboard the greyest of Seattle GreyHounds groaning to Puyallup on a rain-slicked Route 99 hemmed in by white-flecked gray clouds; The drab surroundings are a fitting tribute to how I look and feel, the expensive sports jacket supposed to hide years of neglect somehow accentuating all my accumulated defects — pulling at my elbows and rumpling at the sleeves, it clings to my oversized body. Perhaps my single redeeming feature is this children’s book with the burnt corner I grip in my weathered hand. I’m a forty five year old man clutching a children's book in a language I don’t speak or read. It’s August 4th 1942.
But this story starts twenty three years before, on a happier day, Feb 7th 1919 to be exact, at a milk station in Ballard, within a larger metropolis that buzzed with the vigor of ten thousand shipwrights, welders, machinists, carpenters joined at the hip by dock hands, waitresses, musicians and lumberjacks from as far as Enumclaw, men and women who walked off their jobs and decided to feed the city without permission which had Anna Louise Strong writing that “For the first time in the United States, labor is attempting to run a city”.
People were lined up in four rows twelve deep, and every minute the wooden doors flapped out and banged shut as the line moved. Mothers, children — some as young as eight — crowded forward with grandmothers carrying tin pails and bottles. I was hauling crates of milk out the back to the Ford Model TT, where two boys half my age hoisted the bottles up to the stained pine flatbed, relieving me to hop back out double quick inside the warehouse to steal yet another glance at the unhurried Aiko that filled three bottles every minute without spilling a drop. She would ladle the thick creamy milk through the narrow neck, and the washrag lay forlorn and hurt and the air smelled of hay and sweet clover. Aiko lifted her face from the sea of bottles, and I felt her deep brown eyes sparkle for a second under the lashes that arched like brushstrokes in a Chinese painting. Her silky smooth hair — the color of a moonless night — twisted and held with a worn-smooth pin, she was adorned in an immaculately pressed faded blue haori under a pleated gray skirt that fell to her ankles.
We loved under the incessant rumble of street cars on trembling overpasses, our fevered breath chattering in the cold shadowed corners of twisted alleyways that stretched our desires thin into the deepening dusk. But in early 1919, there was defiance in the air, with unhushed possibilities, women marching with men of all shades, and I held my lover’s hand in the open as we sprinted home past rows of workers who either paid no heed or cheered us with a whistle. The city was awash, pregnant with a new dawn, we felt it, we planned for it, and we saw it snatched from us all in the span of a week.
But that day we felt invincible, in this city of dreams. Even the grey flecks of rain that collected in rivulets and sped to the gutters sang a siren song matching with the kettle-drums and bagpipes playing at the street corner. Bobbie — a tall rake of a man with a hooked nose and sallow cheeks — slipped a wet copy of The Socialist to my free hand.
“What do you think Bobbie? We gonna win this or what?”
“It all depends whether we read what’s in here” - he tapped my sleeve that housed the two sheets of parchment that according to Bobbie would determine our fate. Bobbie didn’t smile — he was always deadpan, serious and precise in manner — Bobbie was an idealist, going far beyond what we wanted. I suppose he was that Bolsheviki Seattle Times feared, and that better-read paper had been printing non-stop of the dangers of a revolution, when we will run the machinery, the docks and the transport — when all we asked for was a fair day’s pay.
We sat on a crate at the Fishermen’s Wharf and watched the incessant surge of the waters in the dappled harbor lights. Aiko rested her head on my shoulder and spoke softly, and her words lifted and sighed like the waves - hopeful but fleeting.
“I hope we can be like this, not just today, but once this is over.”
“Yeah! People are ready for a new tomorrow. I can feel it, something about how everyone is so hopeful - did you see how many waved at us today? Heck, even the cops smiled! And the cops have just been standing there, not beating anyone or nothing.”
“You know it’s because we run the city for now, but how long do you think this can last?”
“As long as it takes, the union says we will win this.”
“But they are asking for a dollar more a day, I think they will stop if they get that, but what we are doing today is more than that - it feels more than that anyway.”
“We’ll figure it out.”
“I hope so, but I have reason to doubt the sincerity of the leaders. Honestly, I don’t think they really see us women, Japanese women - we clean their floors and wash their uniforms for pennies, but we can’t even join the union.”
“I think we start somewhere and continue, you know?”
“I hope so, but I don’t know - you would think having us in the union would make us all stronger, but it feels like our leaders just want justice for the better off workers. I don’t know, I’m tired, I probably don’t understand well… ”
She shifted an imperceptible inch, which was Aiko’s way of ending a conversation that neither of us were ready for. We walked slowly now, heads down and arms linked, the sound of the waves giving way to the occasional street car — till we reached Market Street where we went our separate ways.
In the days and weeks after we left the streets, Aiko’s words played like a prophetic flute in my mind. In the harsh unforgiving light, I could see how we didn’t stand a chance because at our head rode complacent men like Samuel Gompers who never missed a meal and so never dreamed of challenging the bosses, too happy to sit with men in suits as they clouded the room with cigar smoke and spat in his general direction. We had vastly underestimated our enemy camouflaged yet determined to stop us with a ruthlessness that was every bit as foreign to us as what they labeled the movement itself. We thought they misunderstood, oh but they understood only too well.
Still, in those five short days, with a rapidity that amazed us all, we shed these prescribed notions of polite society, freeing ourselves from all sorts of prejudice that they told us kept the world predictable. Black men that worked in the railroad linked hands with white ship builders, a mining man walked a bread line carrying a child in a coal sack so his wife could deliver someone’s baby, coy Asian women kissed their non-Asian paramours and pranced down cobblestone streets in unnaturally short knee length skirts.
It was an icy end to February. To witness us falling back to familiar patterns of distrust, fear and despair. Having to go back to the law ordained chaos which we dared to break, so Sam Gompers, Ole Hanson and men like them were once more predictably respected and gushed over in the papers.
So, once more, Aiko and I went back to snatching a passing glance and stealing a hurried kiss behind the laundry, all of which came to a stop when they blacklisted and drove me out of the city that was home for twenty five years. We spoke frequently at first, then rarely before stopping altogether, like a lake that dries in an Indian summer, our love quietly gave way to the larger forces of the predictable world.
And I was predictably turned away at the Tacoma shipyard, the railroad and Weyerhaeuser. For years I scraped a living bartending through the Prohibition at the misnamed Edison Soft Drink Parlor until age and a one-too-many shut that door. There followed some rough years that brought me to the doors of a Pinkerton office, like a whipped dog that returns home. It was a low point, I admit, but they paid well for a job with little risk.
Nothing could have prepared me for that day some twenty years later, when I knocked on a red door atop a faded wooden stairwell on a second story flat in the heart of Chinatown. The face that peered through the crack jolted me upright from my perpetual hunch, and I knew then that all the drinking, self-loathing and bitterness of the intervening years couldn’t erase the memory of those liquid brown eyes.
What made Aiko open the door and usher me in, I wondered after it was all over. Did she feel, perhaps instinctively, what we shared in our youth of unwrapped beginnings? She was every bit as beautiful, hardly a line marred her face, nary a wrinkle around those deep set eyes. “Aiko”, my voice was somewhere between a whisper and a croak, and my lips trembled as her hand shot up to her face.
Trevor from the Tacoma Police was whistling his way up the steps, but the years coupled with the sudden shock of seeing Aiko retarded my reaction. Before I could croak “Sorry, we have the wrong house”, Trevor was amicably inside, enjoying the view. “Come on, let’s go”, I elbowed past him, but the cop leered at Aiko and motioned me to “slow down a minute, fella. Let’s take a look at what we have here.”
The blood pounded in my head, I told myself to keep cool. Aiko stood motionless, her head bowed slightly as the cop walked around her, smirking. “Didn’t think they made them this polite.” My hands clenched inside the coat pocket, and beads of sweat pooled around my eyelids. It couldn’t have been more than a minute, it felt like an eternity.
“All right then” - as Trevor moved to the door, I smelled the acrid stench of burning paper before a wisp of a girl — no older than five — rushed out the open bedroom to her mama, screaming and flailing with the book with the burnt corner. She clearly didn’t have the heart to burn it and the titled letters pointed accusations like so many pointed daggers.
So I watched stone-faced as the only woman I had ever loved was led away in handcuffs, with a child not old enough to understand the brutal chaos of a law-ordained world. It would not be prudent to hold on to the book, charred as it were, the law deemed it subversive. As I picked up the book from the scratched pine floor, the ash smudged my fingers and trailed an accusation infinitely more damning.
The Puyallup Assembly Center smells like a stable, the summer months having dried the ground into a brittle quilt of clods, and my boots lift and drag a low cloud of dust behind me. Moving through the barbed wire fence with a manufactured grin for the guard who’s too bored and mollified by my Pinkerton credentials to check my coat pocket, I walk towards the huts, with slits for windows and rough-hewn planks that barely close. All the doors have a name, sometimes scrawled with a pencil, or a stick of coal. Some names are carved with a pen-knife. The guard said to look for “Mrs. Sato”, but I know where she is when I see the two Japanese characters that stand for “Aiko” — “child of love” — stained in black with pain-staking care. I wonder how she smuggled the brush or the ink. I try to straighten into my ill-fitting jacket with its mismatched elbows and ungainly girth.
I knock.
⭐️
By Chris Hollinger
I remember sitting down on a trail to try to stop the intense fear I was feeling. I was thinkingthat by getting as close to the earth as I can, I will not fall.
It was June 3, 1986, ~ ten days after the worst climbing tragedy occurred on Mt. Hood, inOregon. A brutally devasting storm blew in with 103 MPH winds at 8,000’ and four feet of snowfell in 24 hours. Nine students and two adults took shelter during that snowstorm in a makeshift snow cave for more than two days. Two students, by the grace of G-d, survived.
And since that storm, my class, a woman’s mountaineering class led by Kathy, had made the decision, by vote, to climb Mt Hood as we had originally planned. Kathy had offered climbing Mt Baker as the alternative. My friend Peggy and I voted to climb Mt Hood although we both
had listened to the news on television and read about the 3 days of tragedy on Mt Hood. We talked with each other as well as with friends about making this difficult decision. We had been preparing for this climb for 6 months. We were ready.
By 8 AM on the third of June we were going up the chair lift that would carry us as well as all our gear to seven thousand feet in a quick moment. This gave me time to view, with my eyes wide open, the mountain rising into a blue-sky backdrop. It was craggier than what I imagined and there were plumbs of steam rising from the fumaroles ~ volcanic steam vents. And to the north, cousins Mt Rainier and Mt St Helen’s rose.
Soon we were on the snow-covered ground to begin our climb up one thousand more feet to find where we would camp that night. At eight thousand feet we found a rock and soil outcrop looking down into Zigzag Canyon and to our north, “Illumination Rock.” While sitting on a
rock, I realized, my stomach was tied in knots as I tried to eat my lunch. And by evening, after exploring one of the routes for the next day, I was fighting back tears. The snow is so deceptive up here, as are distances.
No sleep, but rest, we are up at 2 AM. I start the stove to make coffee. I can see the stars shining brightly through a deep royal azure sky with a waning crescent moon sinks into the horizon. The coffee warms me, and a blueberry muffin fills me enough. It is 3:30 AM and we are beginning
our climb to the summit of Mt Hood. At 4:30 AM my throat is parched …and water tastes really good! At 5:15 AM, we begin to pass Illumination Rock, and the smell of sulfur overtakes our senses. 6:00 AM, we are sitting at “Hot Rocks” putting on our crampons for the last of the climb.
The masses are moving up the main route like traffic on 1-5 at 4:30 PM on a Friday. I am asking myself why, dear G-d, am I here? I have followed all those footsteps and now, as I rest, please tell me why I am here.
6:30 AM, Kathy tells us we are not going to go up the main route but will go up what she quips is “the Hot Rocks Route”. We all rope up into teams of four. My team has Kathy in the lead, Louise, Peggy and I bring up the rear. This route first descends across a basin and then we head up, a very steep slope that has tingling ice covering the snow. With each step the ice breaks away
and falls like broken glass down the slope, quickly. Watching how fast it falls makes me shiver.
I do not trust my crampons even though they are holding me. My left arm is aching as I use my ice ax to help stabilize me. I begin to see the top come into view as I step over an eighteen-inch Bergstrom…. And I am thinking ok… this is not so bad, none of it is that bad. I hear Peggy yell down to me…Chris ~ here is the top! As I climb the last twenty odd feet, I step up …onto a
platform and I can see Kathy a good 20 – 30 feet from me as Peggy moves forward.
I begin to freeze as I watch Peggy. She has begun to walk across a catwalk. YES, a CATWALK. It is twenty inches wide, snow covered with a sheer drop off on both sides. It drops 1000 to 2000 feet. I can hear Kathy say she can belay me across as the tears just begin to stream down my face. I
am shaking, gasping for air, I yell “I can’t do this!” 8:15 AM, we summited. Mt Hood is 11, 239 feet high. Somehow, I am now sitting on her summit
with twenty others. I may be the only person whose tears just keep flowing, I do NOT want to be here. And I do not know how I crossed that Catwalk.
At 9 AM I am plunge stepping from the summit, down, down, down. I step over the Bergstrom, down past the Devil’s Kitchen and its sulfur stench then we get to take off our crampons for the last ride. I sit down into one of the well-worn glissade slides that will carry me down slope faster than my feet will ever carry me…down to where I can breathe, down to where I can say:
Veni, Vidi, Vici …. I came, I saw I conquered.
⭐️
An Obsession with Autumn by Nan Harty
Out the window a tall maple’s leaves,
more orange than red, stands beside
a sunshine yellow birch.
In the front yard a broad branched maple
finally has oranged itself fully. For days
it has been half greenish and red.
And the Japanese maple, petite and fragile,
holds the fewest leaves.
It was Mother who started my leaf love affair.
She sent us out to look for leaves in Midwest cool
where wind would whip across the combined fields,
oak and elm leaves scattered everywhere.
Now, seventy years and counting,
my head down, I look for a “good” leaf
by color and texture.
I save them in old Encyclopedia Britannica,
some end up in collages or cards,
others stay in books for years.
Today a lovely poem, “You Could Be the Last Leaf”
has me thinking about leaves as anthropomorphic:
leaves choosing to dive off the tree first,
those that just hang out for lack of any initiative,
all the leaves that want to stay together,
then fall, dive and drop as a group,
while others solo one at a time.
In autumn, decades ago, Mother was one of the first leaves
to go in my life. I like to think she stayed as long as she could.
⭐️
Lucille Leaves the Island for the First Time Since 1969 by Ann Spiers
Lucille's mind was stuck on Earl, now dead. To get unstuck and to be allowed to go back to her daily routine of trying not to do anything, she decided that she, and Turtleback Island on which she lived, needed off-island help, not about the manner of Earl's death, but about Earl's doings before he got dispatched into the great clearcut in the sky. She told her husband Fred she needed a ride to the weekly mail boat that left for Friday Harbor on the mainland at one o’clock that day.
Fred was taken aback. Lucille never asked for a ride except to weddings or to the cemetery. Lucille took rides only to high island occasions. Worried, Fred said, "Sure, Lucille. But are you leaving me?"
"Not a chance," she replied, lifting a bag of rolled oats up from under the table. She measured out servings by letting the neck open and close so the right amount of the oats ran into the boiling cauldron of water. There were a mob of their children to be fed.
"Are you ill?" he inquired further.
"Not ill," she informed him.
Being assured that neither desertion nor impending death was Lucille's motive for asking for a ride off island away from Fred, he answered amiably, "Okay, you got your ride." Outside of her not deserting him, he didn't much care why or where she went.
Lucille was soon ready. She had on matching tennis shoes, her army helmet decorated with bobbing red poppies, and a tight dress made out of what even Goodwill would reject as covering for its couches.
Fred loved her. He knew he was the stand-by driver for her parade of one. Today her parade was going to the mainland on grave and important matters, whatever they were.
Fred went out to the truck to clear room for Lucille in the front seat. He opened the passenger door. Stuff fell out onto the ground. He gathered an arm load of warped library books and old fruit leavings of banana peels turned black and of apple cores turned rubbery. He picked up and tossed this detritus of past good days into the bed of the truck.
This ritual of cleaning out the cab by transferring the mess to the truck bed was one he had done many times. His truck bed was a moving sanitary fill. Lucille had suggested that he throw on layers of dirt and fallen leaves and that he should take a pitchfork and turn the whole mess occasionally. Perhaps after a few seasons, he would have soil. In the bed of his truck, he could plant a garden. His garden being in a vehicle would enable him to move his truck in order to catch the full sun all day. During a rain, he could back the truck up under a downspout for a good watering.
Someday he would plant his mobile garden, but today he needed a fairly decent seat for Lucille. When finally satisfied that she wouldn't get her duds dirty, he climbed in behind the wheel and waited for Lucille to join him.
Lucille had rarely gone off the island since the day they had arrived, newly met, newly in love. The two had found each other some place on Interstate 5 between Grant's Pass and Portland when he picked her up hitchhiking. He was out cruising in his new pickup. She was out on the road to happiness, she had said. The time was back in the late and great 1960s.
They decided to go as far north as the United States allowed without going out of the country. This condition on their travels had ruled out Alaska because Canada got in the way. The US army had already thoroughly rejected Fred, but being questioned about his draft status and their means of support if immigrating to Canada was too much of a hassle. Washington State was rumored to be hip. They kept north on smaller and smaller roads until the pavement ended at the Strait of Juan de Fuca where they could see Turtleback Island bumping out of the grey waters.
At the shore in front of them, a barge was loading lumber for a summer cabin on Turtleback Island. The barge had enough room left for the truck. Fred and Lucille drove on. Luckily, the barge guys were so taken with the bony girl in the passenger seat who kept yelling "Northward Ho!" that Lucille and Fred were not charged. They got a free ride over. They had no money anyway.
So now, years later, with his cab cleaned out, his compost heap working in the truck bed, and Lucille enthroned in the passenger seat, Fred chauffeured Lucille to the island dock. There he leapt out of the truck to open the door for her. She got on the boat an hour early and sat still and straight, erratically folding and unfolding her arms. At departure time, the captain came on board and asked her for her fare. He did not get a response. She continued to fold and unfold her arms. Finally, he gave up and slid the craft out of the slip and headed for Friday Harbor.
At Friday Harbor, Lucille disembarked grandly, telling the captain she would return. She bobbed her poppies at him once when he said, "Well, bring along the fare, Lucille."
On land, Lucille set about looking for a phone. She marched up the main drag. She knew the bank would have a phone. She walked into the cool, dark of the building and stopped.
"Mom!" greeted her. Lucille was hailed by one of her many daughters, now grown up, who escaped the island and lived in Friday Harbor. The girl's face first beamed with surprise, then clouded with worry. She asked, "Mom, is someone dead? Are you sick? Why are you here?" The daughter left her station behind the counter and came to Lucille's side.
Lucille twitched her face as if she bothered by a fly buzzing too closely to her crop of poppies atop her helmet. She said, "I need a phone."
"Of course," the daughter responded, simultaneously hugging her mother and, as best she could, rearranging into conformity her mother's outfit.
Lucille handed a slip of paper to the girl. "Phone this number in Seattle."
The daughter looked stricken. "I'm not allowed to make long distance calls, mom."
Lucille looked the girl straight in the eye. "You're no daughter of mine." Then Lucille turned and left the bank.
Lucille continued up the street. The daughter had recovered and came out onto the boardwalk lining the main street. The daughter jumped up above the throngs of tourists to see which way her mother had gone. Having spotted her mother's bobbing poppies bouncing up hill, the daughter yelled, "I love you anyway, mom. I love you more than you love that stupid hat." The tourists who milled about the town had stopped to watch and listen. Lucille didn't turn back but smiled and mumbled to herself, Well, with a screech like that, maybe you are my daughter.
Lucille decided that asking for a phone in a place of business would just expose her to more of her offspring who loved her in spite of her hat. Her purpose in town was not to see them in the world giving out bank loans to the rich or employed grinding sno-cones for tourists. Her purpose was to find some definitive answers about the newly dead Earl’s Last Will and Testament.
Lucille walked left onto a road that held wood-frame houses. By choosing one of these houses, she would avoid further contact with any of her grown children. They lived, she knew, in dark cabins and funky doublewides at the town’s edges. In town, the houses were straight and Victorian. They were Northwest, redone. Tarted up, Lucille decided, was what the houses looked like. These houses had real furniture in them, such as stools that started life as stools, not as crates or industrial-sized spools. She chose the first house that looked empty. As she expected of most small Northwest towns, the front door was not locked. She went in and yelled "yoo hoo" to the emptiness inside the house. She proceeded to the kitchen, being satisfied no one was home in this house where she knew no one.
She put on the tea pot, located the phone, but there was no dialing ring on its face. There was a grid of push buttons. She adjusted herself forward twenty years and punched in the numbers. She cussed when the phone didn’t react with a connection. But a voice did tell her to hit a number one before dialing the area code. She told the voice to dial it for her. Soon she recognized that the voice was a recording using its measured cadence to inform her over and over that she didn’t do this phoning correctly.
Lucille punched the #1 button, then her contact numbers. The connection was still not made. The recording's voice bugged her again. So Lucille punched zero. Surely an operator was still there, night and day, alive, responsive, civil.
However, Lucille was sorry she got an alive operator. The answering operator gave her all grades of pushback for not dialing direct. Then the operator asked Lucille who her long distance carrier was.
Lucille was lost. Lucille thought about long distance carriers of drugs and disease. But she knew an operator with a voice like this one was not into drugs nor communicable diseases.
Lucille went into a passive mode. She tried silence on the operator. The silence was one of those long ones. The operator must have been feeling a little generous that day because the child of Ma Bell did not follow the prescribed procedure and hang up on Lucille. Finally, the operator consented to connect Lucille to her desired number.
As the tones played the phone number, Lucille asked herself why did she feel like she had wronged the world by failing to dial direct and by asking for help. Lucille had spoken in a pleasant tone of voice. She was tired now. Using the phone, Lucille decided, was not like it used to be. In the future, for Lucille the use of the phone would work itself into an avoidable task.
Soon Lucille got want she wanted. A happy voice came on line: "Whom should I say is calling?"
"Lucille," Lucille said.
"Lucille who?" the voice edged back.
"I can't remember off hand." Lucille had found the teabags and a cup. The teapot whistled tunefully.
"One moment please. I’ll connect you to the secretary." The voice smoothly gave over her insistence on things done right.
Lucille squeezed the tannin out of the tea bag into the water in the tea cup. She felt good. She had her energy back.
⭐️
Ribbons Down Her Back by Dana Snyder
I see her
Like clockwork
As I entered the bus
Always the front seat left
After the wheelchair access folds down
During covid
Not a fun time riding the King County Metro
But she is there.
I sit a row behind
Her hushed pink hair ribbon
Cascades down into my seat space
I don’t mind.
It brings me comfort
Somehow.
In this scary uncomfortable time.
I cannot see her face
Trapped behind a KN95 mask.
But her mahogany rich almond shaped eyes are visible
To admire.
Always glancing down
Her hands gently in her lap
Or holding a book
Everyone else on their phones.
I have a habit of reading over her shoulder
Anne of Green Gables
& Heidi
& Little House on the Prairie.
Those poor Ingalls had it hard, man.
When Mary lost her sight to scarlett fever
I bust out crying
A big ugly cry
Grown ass man crying over a girly book.
My ribboned companion
Simply closed the book
And was silent.
For the rest of the bus ride
Head tilted forward
As if her neck had broken.
A moment we shared
Unaware.
And kinda
magical.
She doesn’t dress like anyone on the Metro
Which are mostly loud construction guys
And waitresses
Moms with brats.
She is head to toe layers of pastels
Like an easter basket exploded.
Lost in a sea of basics and neutrals.
Breath of secret spring
A moonflower in the mud of us.
I don’t know where she catches the bus.
But I know where her journey ends.
King Street
Chinatown
Harmony Palace restaurant.
After she exits the bus
She smooths her skirt
Tightens her hair bow &
Enters the restaurant.
Every weekday
Clockwork.
‘Til an average Monday
I entered the bus
And
No MASKS!!!
Biden has lifted most restrictions
And we are all truly face to face
For the first time.
In a forever of covid
I FINALLY see her full face
And I melt.
I have never seen beauty such as this.
I take my seat
Maskless.
And for the first time I can smell her.
She smells like honeysuckles and fresh linen.
Dressed in white and pink
Like a cherry blossom bouquet
Cascading ribbon intact.
I try to catch her eye.
But she is looking down.
As I take my common seat
Odd to see the random faces of strangers
I sorta see on the daily.
Today is different.
I can feel it.
Same old musty bus
Which usually smells like
Chop
& pot
& dirty feet.
But today.
Theres a freshness in the air.
A new world
A clean start.
……….
It’s her stop
No, not yet!!!
She waits for a full stop
Before she stands
And places something on her seat
Before she walks to the front of the bus.
One quick glance back
At Me?
And a small parting of her coral lips
Did she mean to say something?
Or a simple smile?
Neither occurs.
She exits.
I was left to wonder
Was it just a dream?
I see her smooth her skirt
Put on her apron
Tighten her hairbow
And we pull away.
My stop is next.
As I Exit
I notice a small cellophane package on her seat
Curios
I grab it.
On the pavement
I realize it is a cookie
Wrapped in plastic
A fortune cookie
I can’t help myself
I unwrap it
And crack the cookie
And read the fortune.
It says:
“What are you waiting for dumb dumb? Ask her out already!!!”
And I smile.
⭐️
Listening To The Past On The Streets Of Old Seattle by Karen I. Treiger
I started my bike tour at the center of old Seattle – 1st and Yesler. This is where my great, great-grandfather, Paul Singerman arrived in 1874. Young Paul was short, with broad shoulders and a balding head. His round face was accented by sharp, determined eyes.
What Paul found was a small town with fewer than 1,500 US Census-counted residents, with approximately fifty Jews. Seattle was so young and rugged that coal lighting on the streets had just been introduced. Henry Yesler’s sawmill was at the center of town, located at the base of Yesler Way, down by the waterfront for easy shipping.
Seattle didn’t have much going on - there were a few hotels, a Territorial University, a bank, saloons, brothels, churches, general stores, cobblers, breweries, barber shops, a school, and homes. Back then, the main road of the town (today’s 1st Avenue) was a dirt path that had two different names: north of Yesler Way, it was called Front Street and south of it was Commercial. Seattle’s future was murky because just one year earlier the Northwest terminus for the cross-continent railroad was announced – Tacoma. It was a harsh blow to Seattle – a city with dreams of grandeur.
The day of my bike tour, the streets were empty due to COVID-19, so I had the opportunity to stand in the middle of a usually busy throughway. I looked north and south and was offered a new perspective on a familiar landscape. I noticed that 1st Avenue has a gentle curve at Yesler Street. This gentle curve was not here when Paul arrived in 1874. I knew this because I had just finished William Speidel’s 1997 book The Sons of the Profits. In old Seattle, Speidel writes, “[t]here was a jog of about thirty feet along Yesler Way.” This “jog” connected the two parts of the city between Front and Commercial with a series of right angle turns. The locals called it “the Throat.”
Standing there in the middle of the street, I recalled that after the Great Fire of 1889, the Seattle City Council “took” a piece of Henry Yesler’s property and connected the two parts of downtown, smoothing out “the Throat” with this gentle curve. Henry Yesler, who Speidel describes as a mean bastard, was furious. He called the “taking” a theft and sued the city. A settlement was reached, but, according to Speidel, Yesler was disliked even more after this episode.
I biked the short block from Yesler to Cherry, site of P. Singerman & Co. I dismounted my bike and took my camera out. I stood at what was most likely the spot. Today, there is a short, squat, gray structure - the Emerald City Building, built in 1905. It’s sandwiched between a 7-11 and an open-air parking lot. Paul’s store must have been smack in the center of town with Yesler’s sawmill half a block south and the waterfront half a block east.
Gilbert Costello in his 1924 history of the San Francisco Store/Toklas & Singerman described what he saw in a photo of this street taken by Charles Thorndike around 1874: Western Union Telegraph Company, Wusthoff Hardware Store, Masonic Hall Building, Henry Yesler’s residence (behind some trees), L.S. Rowe grocery store, Nels Childberg grocery store, Boyd & Pencin, dry goods, and Frenk Plummer, cigars and tobacco.
I imagined the 1874 Seattle pioneers walking the dirt streets and saw in my mind’s eye the horses and buggies going up and down, people stopping in the stores to buy something, standing on raised wooden sidewalks to gossip and discuss the politics of the day.
Business at Paul’s store was brisk and within a few months, Paul had sold every piece of merchandise he had schlepped up the coast. He headed back to San Francisco with his cash. He reported to his partners, Ferdinand Toklas and Hyman Aurbach that Seattle was indeed an up-and-coming place with good prospects for merchants. Maybe Paul spent 1875 in San Francisco planning the opening of their new store because we don’t find Paul back in Seattle until 1876. He returned with plenty of merchandise for the shelves of the newly minted San Francisco Store.
To visit the location of the second store, I didn’t even have to get on my bike. It was right next door to the first one. This second store was opened in 1876 on the west side of Front Street, “just opposite Piper’s Candy.” Paul’s first newspaper ad ran on March 18, 1876, claiming the best prices in town for “Dry Goods – Clothing-Boots-Shoes-Hats-Caps-Cigars and Tobacco. And a full and good stock of Family Groceries, Crockery and Glassware.”
Just one year before Paul’s arrival, steamship service had begun directly between Seattle and San Francisco. In 1876, the Territorial University graduated its first student - Clara McCarty. Two months later, in August of 1876, the YMCA was founded.
Business for the San Francisco Store was also brisk, and Paul outgrew this small store in no time. The following year, 1877, the San Francisco Store moved to the other side of the Throat.
I pushed my bike south on 1st Avenue and stopped mid-block between Washington and Main, feeling instinctively that this must be the place of Paul’s third store. There was a mural on plywood with large bold lettering: “Wish You Were Here.” This message was of course meant for all the people who created the vibrant life that is the norm of Pioneer Square but are now missing because of the COVID-19 pandemic. But the words spoke to me of my great-great grandparents’ lost world. I wished I had the opportunity to know them and to ask them all my questions.
If I had that chance, I’d want to know how hard was it to leave their families and move here alone. What were their parents like? Were their families Jewishly observant? What was it like to live here and raise their children in a pioneer town? What language did they speak to each other? With their kids? What were their hopes and dreams? What was it like to be a Jew in Seattle in the late nineteenth century?
Paul and Jenny died over 110 years ago, and I’m left to find clues to their lives and thoughts in photos, documents, newspapers, and here on the street. I’m reminded that today, I’m part of their world as I search for traces of their lives and strain to hear their voices.
During the three years that this third store was in existence, Paul and Jenny were married. Jenny came from Kempen, Prussia. The January 11, 1879 edition of the San Francisco Bulletin announced the marriage of “Paul Singerman of Seattle, Washington Territory and Jenny Auerbach of Kempen Prussia.” Kempen, today called Kepro, is 78 kilometers east of Wroclaw, Poland and a three and a half hour drive to Dresden, Germany. I marvel at the risk Jenny took leaving the old country to start a new life with a man she didn’t know.
Paul and Jenny wasted no time – their first son, Isidore, was born on October 9, 1879. They were living in a house at 924 Washington Street, just one block south of Yesler, on 10th. This was well before the iconic Smith Tower was erected in 1914, but when I visited 10th and Washington and stood on the spot where they lived, I had a spectacular view of that tower.
That spot, and that hill, was in the 1870’s and 1880’s known as Yesler Hill because it was “home to the city’s elite classes, including its namesake, Henry Yesler, and his wife Sara Yesler.” As the population of Seattle grew, and people began moving up the hill, “the elites fled Yesler Hill for land tracts farther away on the outskirts of the city, selling their Victorian mansions to buyers who subdivided the properties and leased the cramped apartments.” The Singermans remained on Yesler Hill until 1899, when they moved to Capitol Hill.
Paul, a new father, was busy meeting the needs of a growing town. His business grew quickly. Between 1880 and 1915, when he died, Paul owned and operated his store at eight more retail locations in Seattle. He watched the city grow from 1,500 U.S. Census counted citizens to 285,000. He fostered the city’s growth northward to the Pike Street corridor and was an active member of Seattle’s civic, business and Jewish communities.
For me, the most important event during these years was the birth of Paul and Jenny’s daughter, Belle. Belle grew up to marry Louis Friedlander and was my great-grandmother, who I knew as a child and who we called Gigi.
This place, Seattle, which I call home, grew from a rugged pioneer town to the major city where Boeing, Microsoft, Amazon and Starbucks thrive. Just today, I was down at Pike Place Market and I felt the energy of the city. I walked by the first Starbucks store and the line to enter went all the way down the block! This is all part of our city’s history and walking the streets, living here in 2025, makes me part of it.
My bike journey to Pioneer Square connects me to my past and helps me understand myself better and appreciate the city into which I was born. There are so many stories to tell and the streets of Seattle are holding the secrets. We just have to listen.
⭐️
En Coyoacán by Eric Olson
Somewhere between pulquería and ceverzería, the young man stepped into a rather large hole. These were not uncommon in the city. He had in fact been documenting them in his journal, which he mainly used for poetry, in petty catalog midway down page six. “Four-inch diameter, electrical junction box outside Hacienda Cortez.” “Whopping asphalt VOID, collapsed catch basin, eastbound Calle Xicoténcatl.” Things like that.
Harold was an observant lad, and for this very reason never expected to fall (hup!) victim to the area’s infrastructural perils. Yet as mentioned, or perhaps inferred, he was drunk. He was pulque drunk, ¡simplemente borracho!, that uniquely Mexico-City-Drunk where cobblestonesslither underfoot, where street berms teeter like cliffs. He was the type of drunk to be swallowed, indeed, enveloped by a literal hole.
Ironically, the same crapulence dooming Harold to ruin proved unlikely savior, for his reflexes had slowed to such a degree that upon placing his right leg in the sidewalk’s ghastly seam the rut gobbled him to knee-height before his body dared react. This muscular tranquility spared menisci from the unthinkable, leaving our boy with naught but a pair of bruises, shin and ego, one of which he tried to assuage by yelling, “Fuck!” which stuck out for its amazingly gringoesque consonance, so he tried again, “Chingon!” wondering if he should conjugate the thing – who was doing the fucking, he had been fucked, so: “Me chingó!” That settled it. A band of schoolchildren across the road pointed and laughed. Harold waved enthusiastically, assuring them of his wellbeing.
Leveraging palms on the concrete, he shoved upward and eked his limb from the depression, brushing his pants free of cobwebs and gypsum dust. Locating a street sign on the corner to his south, he removed the journal from his backpack and scrawled, “Ave. Miguel Hidalgo and Calle Vallarta, N. Side of Road – LARGE ENOUGH FOR LEG.” Harold bent the appendage to-and-fro, side-to-side, application of weight. Check, check, check.
Satisfied, he flipped a few pages back in the notebook, wondering if inspiration might rear its rarified head. Some lines he’d penned the previous morning at Café Avellaneda reflected his curious gaze:
‘Yak-yak-yakarandas,’ spat a birdsong
Call me Hector, triumphant I am come post-Pat, pre-sneeze
Riding high on much-lambasted material
When, or how, will frugality sunder keen momentum—
Harold closed the booklet and shuddered, wondering if he might be insane.
The friendly-walled compounds of Coyoacán spilled over in green vines flowering purple, complimented and offset in turn by pastel blues painted early last century, chicken wattle reds, champagne yellows framed in wavy Spanish tilework. Black iron gates shielded paid parking lots, private porticos, expensive middle schools and tasteful daycares, secret gardens, sleepy dogs, listless housekeeps. Afternoon sunlight gleamed like the golden middle of a two-peso coin and flimsy car horns chided someone or something. Everyone on the street looked toward the sound – well, everyone except for Harold, whose eyes were soaked in immediacy (a stucco wall on his right peeling with cerulean plaster suggestive of wartime Trafalgar, in miniature).
Momentary desire lifted a thumb to his nostril, which as it turned out was already picked clean. Placing one wobbly foot before the other, Harold made for the façade of a church looming over the nearby square and resumed his trek, a la ceverzería, wherein the hours might abandon their preposterous schlep.
The clinking of coins in his pocket – the pocket of a jacket he’d always thought of as his “writing” jacket – had Harold ruminating on his financial state. Halfway through its purported timetable, the stipend from his fellowship was all but spent. Granted, it was not a graded affair. There would be no finish line, no crashing gavel. Harold would leave, edit, submit, and then his poetry would fade into ethers indeterminate, the poor man’s continuum, to be plucked at and discarded by the literati. Soon – very soon – Harold’s “eight-month living stipend,” which he’d spent in four on mezcal and cigarettes, would be gone, having gifted him that haziest of gifts: creation.
He paused at a corner near the indoor mercado and ripped the four-liner (“Yak-yak-yakarandas”) from his journal and scrawled a hasty “Thank you” at its footer. He’d mail it to the fellowship office in Brooklyn.
It being a Friday, Coyoacán’s eastern square brimmed with revelers, vendors, sweet tooths, buskers, and scroungers. Organ grinders wound out-of-tune contraptions while assistants propounded the little hat. Shoeshiners coaxed lunch-drunk businessmen from familial maladies, listening patiently: “claro, claro.” Through yipping packs of purebred dogs, churro-bloated children chased churro-bloated children while relative elders, the twenty-somethings still sheltered by their parents’ rooves, kissed with wild abandon on park benches. Harold had grown quite acclimated to this place. He wasn’t sure what would happen upon his leaving – how much he’d miss it, what he’d miss the most (beyond the price of booze). Nevertheless, leave he would, for he was young and he was a poet, as broke as his broken Spanish, and the bedroom in his mother’s Long Island split-level didn’t charge rent.
In a brick building along the square, Harold’s favorite ceverzería resided up rickety stairwells reminiscent of old-timey Wyoming. A single occupant table, typically unoccupied against the western wall, faced the bustling plaza. The hostess saw Harold and gestured to this spot, smiling with a hint of teeth. “Buenas.”
“Buenas,” he replied, easing himself into the armless wooden seat. “Un mezcal de la casa y dos tacos con nopales, por favor.”
He removed the journal from his bag. Also a Ginsberg pamphlet and some untranslated Neruda. Before he began to read Harold gazed out the window and allowed his thoughts to wander. The mezcal arrived in a whisk of movement barely registering until rays of sunlight through an open window drubbed the orange slice sprinkled in sal de gusano – savory crimson worm salt – on a white plate by his stack of poetry. A nibble on the fruit’s flesh readied his senses for the smoky inundation to follow, pleasant pathway unto oblivion… Harold quaffed the shot’s top half, swished it once round his cheeks, gulped it down with a familiar rush and then suckled an edge of the orange slice where the worm salt had congealed. His eyes rolled up in his head.
With middling rigor he opened the Neruda to its earmarked page and began to read. The book was untranslated; many of the words were unfamiliar to Harold, but he didn’t stumble over them as some would. He read for a sense of momentum, the suzerain’s / syllabic / prance. In some ways he preferred it with less meaning. He could loll away the afternoon in pure melody, a catchy tune with the lyrics “La da, la da da.”
After a time Harold signaled pre-emptively for another round. He opened his notebook to a blank page, took out his pen, and attempted to reflect the conceptualization just aired:
Hooot, blither hoot
Lek, mint, Slither! Thither?
Jopsing, jopsing. Jopsin’… jopsed.
Smiling to himself, he raised his head and faltered.
The table to his left, which stood apart from the window and thus had two seats, was occupied by a girl of approximately his age with Mexica features and deep brown eyes almost black, hair of the same hue, long and straight, lustrously snatching the shade—
It was rare, these days, that his sexuality so announced itself. Alcohol’s incongruity: a pinch to prove enkindling, yet Harold’s prolonged abuse had pared his desire to a trifling nub, a forgotten constituent of himself surfacing only, it seemed, at present.
He returned to the poem until another mezcal materialized, along with tortillas lathered in stickysweet nopales. Harold sensed the waitress over his shoulder and clapped the notebook shut, shielding idiotic notions from the prying public. His self-worth twanged as though strummed by tortoise shell guitar pick. The girl at the nearby table shuffled in her seat, wearing what might’ve been an inner grin.
Over Harold’s first two months in Mexico City, when a compositional momentum borne of novelty and adventure still flourished in his chest, he’d had some luck with women, meeting them in cafés, art museums, travelling hubs. There was a German girl named Rebecka for whom he’d penned some kitschy Sonnets, Beatriz the barista from Iguala working in Colonia Roma who’d accepted his halting Spanish with lovey-dovey patience.
Well, that was about it: Rebecka and Beatriz. After Harold began his tumbledown theatrics into mezcal dependence – o, velvety underworld – the two of them floated back to surficial realms, where one must collect money with their time and spend it in ways which did not involve (theoretically) circumventing writer’s block. Anyhow, about the nearby girl over which Harold’s thoughts lingered. Seeing that her opposing chair was empty, he leaned over the side of his table and said, “The nopales tacos here are excellent, if you haven’t tried them.” His Spanish was at a roughly first-grade level, good for generalities and things in easy sight.
Looking up, she asked if he was new to the cactus flavor.
“Sí,” he answered, “relativamente.”
She replied with something he couldn’t understand, starting with “lo que…” Had it been an idiom—
“¿Qué?” he asked. This was a troublesome part of any conversation, when he got into saying, “¿Qué?” An incomprehensible phrase’s reiteration rarely yielded breakthrough, and Harold hated the feel of that word on his tongue. (“¿Qué?”) He imagined that he became slightly cross-eyed when he said it.
She repeated herself more slowly. “Lo que… el sabor nacional… además de…”
Harold took a tug on his mezcal and proclaimed, “Me llamo Harold,” sidestepping the issue.
Her name was Emilia, with cheeks swelling (the poet thought) like raindrops, skin-commercial skin a tapered chin and eyes like almonds, yes, eyes very much like darkened almonds.
A bibulous dialogue followed. In its lulls Harold returned to the Ginsberg of which he was eternally fond. Emilia’s presence quivered just out-of-sight, bleeding crimson onto his peripherals, making his ears grow hot. He’d soon explained his fellowship (“traveling money from a writing program”) and told her that he was a poet – “soy poeta” – a phrase he adored because it was followed, unerringly, by puerility.
Emilia said she’d enrolled in a master’s program at the university a couple miles southwest, either anthropology or archeology – Harold thought it was the former.
“¿Ideas sociales o cosas muertas?” He’d been formulating the question in his head, pretending to mull over the opening lines of “Kaddish.” Emilia’s phone rang before he could ask it, and as he thought back to the words themselves – “Social ideas or dead things?” – a smirk resulted of their myriad interpretations.
Emilia returned, having left the bar to take the call. Harold polished off his Corona.
“I was going to meet with a friend,” she told him excitedly, “but she has to pick up (take?) her sister from school. Would you like to go somewhere else, with me?”
“Conmigo.” The word rang with bell-like resonance.
⭐️
Legends of Leschi by William Murray
Newt
Biggest toughest kid on the block
Played football without a helmet
Became a fireman and saved babies from burning buildings
Didn’t like girls
Had a Nickname
Never to his face
Creedell
Pitched for the Royal Giants
Hardball Jackson Street league
Before Blacks could play pro ball
Tim and Neil played against them
No one could hit off Creedell
Three thousand at Garfield Park calling out Creedell Fast as Hell
In trouble with the law
Finklestein
During prohibition
Neil brewed beer in the basement
Dark beer like porter
Supplies bought from Bad Eye Finklestein
Left side of face hit by stroke
If you didn’t sell the Feds didn’t mind
Bootleggers sentenced to the island
Finklestein re sold equipment
Old Leschi Blind Pig
Last stop on the Yesler Street cable car line
Speakeasy just past the bridge
Caught free rides
Wouldn’t try if Lynnberg was conductor
Cable car quit running past 8 o’clock
Made a mechanical noise
Hard to get to sleep
Pat McClain walked the tracks
Oiled the cable
Uncle Pat
Came out of the mines in Butte
In Columbia City
Made whiskey during prohibition
Worked Northern Pacific
Cussed every other word
Gave Five Dollar Indian head gold piece for birthdays
Mom took for groceries
Boxing Lessons
In the basement
Tim taught us to box
Never punch in the face
Only the nose
Stomped on the foot
Walked Margaret to St Therese
School kids called us Catlickers
Boarding Houses
The Hurleys, Boyles, Lannigans and Murrays
Ran boarding houses on Yesler
Mr Hurley earned his passage to America fighting in the Boer War
Boyles boarded steel workers from County Cork
Murrays railroad workers from County Down
31st and Yesler
Harry Kiahara’s store
Played poker in the back for tax tokens
Bags of Bull Durham for a nickel
Tailor mades for ten cents
An excerpt from Sé do bheatha 'bhaile an Irish immigrant story self-published 2024. Copies available for purchase at Third Place Books Seward Park. Digital copies available upon request.
⭐️
Eaton Fire by Amelia Seraphia Derr
For years they grew into the grain of that house. Him, with cedar hands and a saw's gentle hum. Her, bowing Bach into the dusk. Cats curled like commas near windowsills he built by hand. The garden knew them both: his sun-shaped fence reaching skyward, her songs nested in the elm tree’s limbs. In the spring, daffodils and iris would sing up over the porch like a welcome. In the fall, he raked their daughter’s laughter out of the leaves.
Then came the fire— a scream across the canyon, wind pushing the cruelest flame.
She ran with nothing but breath. Two cats crying in their carriers, two cellos strapped to survival. Everything else: his poems stacked in the office, her mother’s wedding dress, their daughter’s childhood art— all turned to smoke too fast for memory to follow. When she returned, the dogwood tree was charred bone. The piano, a ghost. One sagging wall still held where the front door used to be. Mounds of rubble, almost familiar. Everything melted into earth.
Later, when crews cleared the wreckage, they shaved the land down six inches deep. Below ash, below nail and pipe—to the clean wound of beginning. Now, the plot is quiet. No song. No sawdust. Just dirt with a memory of fire. A tulip reaching up through the ruin.
⭐️
A Dream I Had About a Blue Colored Heater by Briseldy Hernandez-Ramos
It smelled so bad, but it kept us warm. A thin layer of yarn.
I remind my mom of the constant urge to depict the forbidden ways of life. The cold rusty cement walls hovering over my big family of two. My mother and I. No siblings surrounded me, and no abusive husband surrounded my mother any longer. The only thing that surrounded us were more people like my mother and me. Just women. Every fiber of my being only wanted to scream in agony in the hope that someone or something could help us surpass this wave of what felt like the edge of a needle.
My mother leaves me alone most nights if not all. I don’t know what lies behind or in front of these walls. I just fall asleep most days wrapped like a soggy burrito in a layer of thin yarn staring at the rusty cement wall. My sternum ached from the heating pad.
If only more people could throw more money at my mother while they admire her beautiful dancing. That way we could buy a heater. Or if my mother agreed to go home with those men and do their laundry perhaps, we would have enough to buy a heater then!
My mother still does not know that I snuck out of the cave once to go see what the world looks like. I think she would go cross-eyed if I told her that I’ve seen all those men that admire her and the way she dances. Or that I have listened to some of the women that live with us. It’s kind of weird. All those other women do is go home with the men that throw money at them and they come back with a lot of what my mother and I need. New clothes, food, jewelry, but nothing that keeps our cave warm. Why doesn’t my mother do that too? Doesn’t she feel the coldness of my skin every night beside her? Only the aching warm heater by my side.
The thick cement wall is tipping over slightly more than it did yesterday. When will it fall, I ask?
The rubber that is separating my foot and the cold pavement is only getting slimmer with time. I hope to see the sun again today. I probably won’t, unless I sneak out with the woman that offers me candy sometimes.
Maybe she knows more about how I can get a heater without money!
So, I follow her, but I don’t speak. However, she does and says “My sweet child, you and I are leaving today. Today you’ll know what tasty food is, clean clothes, and a nice bubble bath”
I want to ask her if a heater is promised too, but the words just don’t come out of my mouth. Hours pass in a car beside the nice woman, and I reflect on my actions. Did I abandon my mother?
The car finally stops moving forward and all I see are blue, red, and white colored lights flickering on the world.
The nice woman whispers to me “Here awaits the blue colored heater. It’s over”
⭐️
Where everyone is welcome
By Craig Eidsmoe
To love where you come from can be fraught with unpleasant associations. It can create a provincial chauvinism that fears, derides and harms outsiders.
I don’t love any of that. But I do love where I’m from.
I love to learn about the place where I live. I love to study its history, to celebrate its uniqueness, and examine all its flaws.
I want to welcome visitors, to show the love and prove that strangers are welcome.
Seattle. That’s my home. For a few years now my wife, our cats and I have lived about 12 miles north of the core of the city. Before, we lived in the thick of it, on Capitol Hill.
Now I’m retired. On a typical day, I walk about a mile to the transit center and train to downtown Seattle. Then I walk a short distance to the soul of the city, to Pike Place Market.
The Market is many things to many people: tourist spot; home to about 450 residents; 500 businesses including restaurants, handcrafted items, fruit and produce vendors, fish mongers, and a meat market; and street performers (buskers). The place is full of historical preservation and 5 social services (food bank, child daycare program, senior center, medical clinic, and assisted- living program).
The people who inhabit the place as residents, social-service recipients, employees, farmers, buskers and business owners are what makes the place really hum. Getting to know so many of them is a thrill. Each day these people enrich and nourish me. The conversations I have are rich and varied.
One of my favorite things is to show people around all the twists and turns of this amazingly byzantine 9 acres. It doesn’t matter if someone is an already-existing friend, or a visitor from near or far, if I can get them to a restroom, a restaurant, the gum wall or the waterfront, it doesn’t matter, I’ve done what I set out to do, be an ambassador. And if I can sneak in a little history while I’m at it, all the better.
Sharing my home is what it’s about. For me there’s no conflict. Everyone is welcome.
⭐️
Chambord by Daniel Tam-Claiborne
In retrospect, the carbo-loading may have been overkill. We were cutting an equilateral triangle through the French countryside, eighteen kilometers on each leg, for a total of just over 30 miles. I had toast, oatmeal, and cereal for breakfast, topped off with a croissant for good measure. Much to our dismay, there were no tandem bikes of the ilk displayed prominently on the tourism board’s promotional brochure, so we made our way on mountain bikes. But I was skeptical of even that; road bikes, in perfectly good shape, were renting for a couple Euros cheaper.
For the record: I was wrong. We started on smooth asphalt as we left the city but quickly shifted over to narrow country roads hemmed in by agricultural fields for tilling. An eighteen- wheeler scuttled us off the path to deliver, what we later learned, was a massive shipment of dirt. After our first eighteen kilometers, we arrived at Chambord, a UNESCO World Heritage site, and the grandest of the Loire Valley chateaus.
Inside, the marble floors glistened like floor polish, stained glass windows cast colorful arcing quadrilaterals on the tiles, each tiny square magnified to the point of nonrecognition. There was an entire room of mounted deer heads so ancient that only the skeletons remained. But somehow, even without the eyes and the fur, they looked more real than their taxidermy counterparts, like the facsimile of a face tries so hard to mimic reality that it undermines its ever having existed.
“Do you know why this place is so popular?” Courtney asked. I looked out at the throngs of people bunched into sitting rooms and peeking out from within the double helix staircase. “Everyone wants to imagine themselves as royalty.” Who wouldn’t dream of private gardens, being entertained nightly by comedians and playwrights, feasting on a bottomless glut of deer meat? There was something romantic about pretending to be nobility living during the French Renaissance—like a Medieval version of Cribs—without for a moment imagining the actual kings and queens we were emulating.
By all accounts, they were more than likely terrible people. And yet, we know so little about the historical figures who staged their lives at Chambord compared to the politicians of today, themselves incapable of having their every misdeed documented and exposed. It would seem, however, that simply knowing more about a vile character isn’t enough to dissuade people from wanting to emulate him. It’s like that deer head, like no amount of dressing up can disguise that which he so nakedly is. It hardly mattered that the moat around the base of the castle had algae growing up the stone sides, or that the draw bridges had wooden gangplanks that led to underground slave quarters. There will always be people who will insist: wasn’t having the moat enough?
It was another eighteen kilometers to Château de Cheverny and a last eighteen back home, all of which felt longer because of the gravely farm roads—prickly with dry grass and punctuated with grain silos draped in creeping thyme—that doubled-backed on themselves to avoid the main highway arteries. Alone on the trail and attempting to make the best of a bad situation, Courtney and I sang Disney songs. Even now, it’s hard to explain. Maybe it was the clapboard houses that looked straight out of Beauty and the Beast or the leaves that brushed by us like colors in the wind, but we didn’t stop belting out tunes until we’d made it all the way back. We sang to brave reflections, to whole new worlds, wishing for the arrival of new kings to oust those we hadn’t yet known we’d lost.
⭐️
Tonight’s Meeting Canceled by John Whittier Treat
“His name is Mark.”
“Mark?” Claire said in a voice louder than called for indoors.
“Mark. His lover died of something. We think it was AIDS-related, about half a year ago. He’s been going to the grief group that meets here. You’d probably recognize him if you saw him. Irish-looking. Strawberry blond. Gap between his two front teeth.”
No, Claire didn’t know him. Many of the young men who pass through her homelook like that. She was Irish, too, but shared more in common with Vinnie’s darker Sicilian looks. The biggest difference between she and Vinnie was that she had lines and wrinkles where he had none.
“Well, what do you think?”
“Jesus, Vinnie, I can’t have a stranger living in my house. Why did I agree? What was I thinking? What will everyone think?”
“I’m thinking of you, Claire. And there are already plenty of strangers in the house. If that’s what you want to call us. Including me.”
Claire tried to dismiss the thought making itself plain inside her head. She failed. “Why don’t you move in here, Vinnie?”
“No. You’ll like Mark. He’s normal. Well, mostly normal.”
“You’re making him sound so . . . wonderful.”
“Aw, com’on, Claire. You know I’m going to get my way.”
Three days later, Vinnie and someone she presumed Mark showed up in a van to unload his things. Claire’s first impression was that Mark looked like a leprechaun. But he was adorable and instantly funny, not what Claire expected from an addict in recoverywho recently lost his boyfriend.
The two young men carried boxes up to the spare bedroom on the second floor of the gabled Queen Anne house. That evening, Mark walked to the grocery store and came back with the ingredients for beef stew. He assembled them in the kitchen while Claire, sitting on a stool by the counter, laughed at his stories. She sipped wine she had uncorked for herself, after checking with Mark that was okay with him. Sufficiently fortified, Clairestarted to ask the questions she’d wanted to ask all day.
“Tell me about him.”
“Him?” Mark knew whom Claire meant.
“Your partner who passed away.”
“He didn’t pass away,” Mark replied. “He died.”
I know, Claire nearly said before she stopping herself. She didn’t know.
“He got a bad cold, that’s what we thought, then he went from worse to worserand two weeks later he was dead. Lungs filled up with all sorts of things. He drowned in the middle of night.”
“At home?”
“No, the hospital,” Mark said calmly. “If you gotta go, that’s the place to do it. Unless you can do it at home. But he got scared and said he wanted to go back to thehospital. He died alone in the middle of the night, because I’d gone down to the goddamn coffee machine. With a big fat plastic tube down his throat and all by himself, just him and that tube and no me.”
Mark told Claire a little about his friend’s life, never mentioning his name, as if that information were forbidden her. Mark had grown up all over in a military family, but had lingered in Seattle since getting out of the army himself five years ago. He worked at the Salvation Army store downtown, repairing things people donated before they were put out for sale. “Funny, no one could fix him, when it was him who needed fixing.”
They ate at the counter, Mark standing while Claire perched on her stool. He kept talking as he washed their dishes, handing them to a Claire now standing as well to dry and put away. Clean-up didn’t take long when two people did it, Claire realized. That had never happened before.
“His mother and his little sister came to the apartment to get his things. They didn’t say a word to me. I guess they blame me.”
“For a cold?” Claire said, and saw Mark frown.
Claire could tell that Mark was tired. She suggested they turn in for the night.
“Anything you need right now?” Claire asked. “There are more towels in the hall closet upstairs.” They walked up the staircase and stopped at the door to Mark’s bedroom. Claire asked if he needed help unpacking any boxes before he went to bed. This was the first time she’d shared a house with a man since she and her husband separated, and her son had struck out on his own.
“Thanks,” Mark said to her, starting to close the door. “Tomorrow we should talk about how I’m going to help you. With the meetings. And the house.”
Claire smiled as she nodded. “Sure, Mark. Plenty of time.”
The gay AA meeting downstairs in the living room was just coming to an end. Claire got the house in the divorce, but unexpectedly lonely in it, she invited gay 12-step programs and AIDS support groups to use it for their meetings. Vinnie found Mark to live with Claire, rent-free, to help with chores and the growing number of activities to supervise.
Claire could hear deep voices reciting the serenity prayer just before the meeting broke up. Claire stayed where she stood in the upstairs hallway. She felt guilty about the wine on her breath and didn’t want anyone to smell it.
Mark and Claire said goodnight to each other and Mark closed the door completely. Claire’s apprehensions were gone. It was actually nice, she thought, to have a young man living in her house. It made her feel a little safer, and it oddly made her feel more of a woman to have someone to take of, though it was meant to be the other way around.
She headed down the back staircase to her own room in the basement. As she turned the cold metal doorknob, she could hear Mark’s heavy footsteps two floors up. She was tempted to run up and say one last thing to him, but the footsteps might be thosebelonging to AA folks who hadn’t left yet, and not Mark’s at all. She thought better of it and closed the door to her bedroom slowly, so as to make no sound at all.
#
There was an old school desk in the basement that Mark commandeered. No groups met down there, except for her son’s grunge band, which wasn’t really a “group” and hardly ever used it anyway. The kitchen’s bulky cordless phone worked in the basement, far from its base unit, so Mark was free to make phone calls down there in privacy. If someone called him when he was gone, he could see the red light blinking on the counter’s answering machine Claire attached to the phone, so that was no problem. Mark worried the messages might be for Claire and personal, but that was never the case.
Claire lent him an old-fashioned gooseneck lamp to use on his school desk, so he was fully equipped in his basement space. As he scheduled groups each week, he kept track of the details on a big calendar Seafirst Bank had given Claire because she had anaccount there, the one her alimony check showed up in every month. Every so often Mark would go to the first floor of the house and transfer the information to the freestanding blackboard near the front door. Mark was at his desk one morning, waiting for the facilitators of the 21-and-under NA and the Recently Diagnosed groups to call and confirm, when Claire descended the back staircase from the kitchen.
“Mark, I just opened the refrigerator and there’s a bowl of pasta salad. Someone must have put it there last night. It wasn’t there when I went to bed. Do you think someone forgot it? Or did someone leave it for us to eat?”
“Not me,” Mark said, pushing his folding metal chair away from the child’s desk so he could turn to face Claire standing close to him. “Was there a note?”
“No note.”
“Well, if it was for us to eat, someone would have left us a note saying so.”
“You think?” Claire bit her lower lip. Mark and Claire’s son were the same age.
Mark swiveled back to the desk and switched off the gooseneck lamp. “Let’s have some of it anyway. It’s almost lunchtime.”
Mark and Claire sat at the counter on stools and ate their cold meal.
“Pretty good. Wonder who made it,” Mark muttered.
“I assume it won’t kill us.”
“I’m having more.” Mark got up from the stool and walked to the refrigerator to help himself to seconds. When he returned, Claire looked about to say something.
“Mark. It’s nice having you here.”
Mark shoveled a forkful of macaroni into his mouth. When he was growing up, it was Spaghetti-Os out of a can or nothing . He was happy to be in Seattle now. But Claire’s tone worried him a bit.
“It’s been nice having a place to stay,” he replied. Was he about to be told to leave?
“I miss men,” Claire said softly.
“Men are here all the time. Like dozens of them. Every day.”
Claire shrugged as if to say that’s different. She wearily stood up and carried her plate and fork to the sink.
“Vinnie’s coming over later, you know.”
“No, I didn’t,” Claire said over the sound of running water. “To talk to you?”
“Not sure. Maybe to the both of us.”
Claire’s relationship with Vinnie had changed recently. The part of her that wanted to flirt with the part of him that might be attracted to women was hard to make out. The difference between earlier and now, it dawned on Claire, was Mark’s presence in the house. She didn’t think she was the one affected negatively by it, it had to be Vinnie. Claire wondered if Vinnie had a reason for moving Mark into her house that he nevershared. Whatever his plans, Mark was growing to be like another son to her. Was that why she thinking of Mark more, and her own son less?
“What time did he say?” she asked, trying to shake herself out of her thoughts.
“He didn’t,” Mark said as he got up to rinse his own plate. “I’ll be here all day, so it doesn’t matter to me. I’m going out to mow the lawn now.”
Claire didn’t have any plans either, but she suddenly wanted to make some. There was always laundry. She could vacuum. Still, she hadn’t seen Joan, or any of her old women friends, for a long time. But Claire knew if she called Joan today, it wouldn’t be because she missed her. It would be because she wanted to avoid Vinnie. She only knew him because he had been the one to answer the phone when she called the LGBT Center,months ago, to volunteer the use of her home out of the blue.
Claire took Mark’s plate out of his hands and put it in the dish rack next to her own. Mark wiped his hands dry with a kitchen towel.
“Did you think that pasta salad tasted a little funny?”
Not one bit, Claire replied.
“After I mow, I’ll do the laundry and vacuum for you.”
Her husband had never lifted a finger around the house. Maybe gay men really were more like women, she wondered a bit ashamed. But the ex, unlike gay Mark for sure and bisexual Vinnie only theoretically, could give what she missed most.
“Here, give me that towel. I’ll put it in the clothes hamper and do the laundry myself. Oh, and Vinnie. I might not be here when he shows up.”
“What should I tell him if he asks and you’re not here?”
Claire was already out of the kitchen, but still within earshot, when Mark asked his question. She pretended not to hear him.
#
One afternoon, uncertain what errand to run next, Claire idly looked at the empty folding chairs arranged in semicircles in her living room. Her thoughts were interrupted by men’s voices upstairs, upstairs off-limits to everyone but Mark and herself. She climbed the staircase to investigate and heard a door slam just as she saw Vinnie coming in her direction from Mark’s bedroom. When he wordlessly ran into her shoulder while walking by, Claire could see that he had been crying. The sudden shove spun Clairehalfway about, and she caught sight of Vinnie’s thick, black head of hair disappearing as it descended below the far edge of the hallway.
Claire knocked on Mark’s door, but she pushed it wide open before any response, something a landlord would never do but a mother might.
She’d never seen what Mark had done with the spare bedroom since moving into it. There was nothing on the walls, no posters, no photos, not even the lone crucifix you’d expect to see in a similarly austere monk’s cell. The ceiling light was off but rays of sun coming through the room’s one window illuminated Mark on the edge of his neatly made bed. He was sitting atop the ratty old bedspread Claire was now ashamed to have left him, a corner of it gnawed ragged by the dog she and her husband and their son once had.Mark’s hands were clasped between his spread legs and his head bent down, offeringClaire a view of his own thick head of hair, though reddish blond rather than black. She could also see and hear that he was crying, just as Vinnie had been. Claire’s cordless phone was on the bedspread beside him. Her first reaction was surprise it would work at this distance from the kitchen. A torn white envelope and an unfolded white letter lay tossed beside the phone. Claire never knew Mark to take the house’s paperwork from his desk in the basement. It was at that moment Claire realized Mark was no longer the stranger who had been installed in her home. Nor were Vinnie or any of the anonymous young men who sat for an hour in the folding chairs lent her by an obliging church. She was.
⭐️
Parquet Florist by Paul Pottinger
Believing the sound of words strung together in obtuse reaction to sabotage
Calculating the weak attempts of warrior women to outwit the dessert fox of fallacy
Eating orange rectangles and watching the walls wave to the crowds onshore
Rushing ambassadors to underground exit strategies amphibious contrivances plummeted Washing tons of cliff hung bamboo shoots dressed in vests and read in polka daughters Twisting the handlebars of bisque marks bad old shipwrights wrong in longhand
Calling the noble by the name given to downward gazes the blazes of rage stage explosions Blessing the understudies of excess with the renunciates’ wholly wadded infusion
Holding hubris in collusion

The Cold Millions
Featuring an unforgettable cast of cops and tramps, suffragists and socialists, madams and murderers, The Cold Millions is a tour de force from a “writer who has planted himself firmly in the first rank of American authors” (Boston Globe).
Visit Folio to get your FREE copy of The Cold Millions.
Available February 2025.
An intimate story of brotherhood, love, sacrifice, and betrayal set against the panoramic backdrop of an early twentieth-century America that eerily echoes our own time, The Cold Millions offers a kaleidoscopic portrait of a nation grappling with the chasm between rich and poor, between harsh realities and simple dreams.
The Dolans live by their wits, jumping freight trains and lining up for day work at crooked job agencies. While sixteen-year-old Rye yearns for a steady job and a home, his older brother, Gig, dreams of a better world, fighting alongside other union men for fair pay and decent treatment. Enter Ursula the Great, a vaudeville singer who performs with a live cougar and introduces the brothers to a far more dangerous creature: a mining magnate determined to keep his wealth and his hold on Ursula. Dubious of Gig’s idealism, Rye finds himself drawn to a fearless nineteen-year-old activist and feminist named Elizabeth Gurley Flynn. But a storm is coming, threatening to overwhelm them all, and Rye will be forced to decide where he stands. Is it enough to win the occasional battle, even if you cannot win the war?
About Jess Walter
A former National Book Award finalist and winner of the Edgar Allan Poe Award, Jess Walter is the best-selling author of seven novels, two books of short stories and one nonfiction book. His work has been translated into 34 languages, and his fiction has been selected three times for Best American Short Stories, as well as the Pushcart Prize and Best American Nonrequired Reading. His stories, essays and journalism have appeared in, Harper's, Esquire, Playboy, McSweeney's, Tin House, Ploughshares, the New York Times, the Washington Post and many others.
Walter began his writing career in 1987 as a reporter for his hometown newspaper, The Spokesman-Review. He was a finalist for the 1992 Pulitzer Prize as part of a team covering the shootout and standoff at Ruby Ridge, in Northern Idaho. This became the subject of Walter's first book, Every Knee Shall Bow, in 1995. He has also worked as a screenwriter and has taught graduate creative writing at the University of Iowa, Pacific University, Eastern Washington and Pacific Lutheran.
Walter lives with his wife Anne and children, Brooklyn, Ava and Alec, in Spokane, Washington.


Upcoming NEA Big Read Events
- NEA Big Read Book Discussion: The Cold Millions by Jess WalterWed, Apr 30Online via Zoom
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- Author Reading: The Cold Millions with Jess WalterMon, Mar 24Folio: The Seattle Athenaeum
- Radicals in the Community: Wobblies in the Pacific NorthwestMon, Mar 17Folio: The Seattle Athenaeum
- Labor Connections Between Seattle and Spokane in the Early Twentieth CenturyMon, Mar 10Folio: The Seattle Athenaeum
- NEA Big Read Book Discussion: The Cold Millions by Jess WalterThu, Mar 06Folio: The Seattle Athenaeum

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