We arrive in the raspberry fields when it’s dark. It’s dark when we pile out of our secondhand pickup. My father, my mother. My brother and me. It’s dark when we start walking the rutted, sopping dirt road that…
Gordon Bishop, fifty-six, is a one-eyed, one-legged, one-breasted single father. He is a native New Yorker who shares an antique-filled one-bedroom apartment in Hell’s Kitchen with his teenage daughter. Every night, Gordon sits at his desk wearing tighty-whities and…
When my mother died, I inherited a sizeable goldenrod-coloured envelope; inside, I discovered birthday cards given to me from family members throughout my childhood, handmade get-well cards crafted by classmates upon the occasion of having one of several surgeries…
BAŅUTA RUBESS pioneered feminist theatre and contemporary opera to national renown in Canada and Latvia. She has lived in four countries and writes in two languages. She has written plays, libretti, radio drama, television biopics, stories, and…
It’s all a blur. It can be separated into two five-year periods: using alone and using with Haley. Haley had piercings everywhere: the bridge of her nose, her septum, her nipples, her belly button. She had stretched lobes—one had…
Content Warning—suicidal ideation The story I tell goes something like this: Did you know I once helped a boy escape from a mental hospital? When I tell it that way, people start imagining things: guns blazing, alarms blaring,…
Content Warning—child sexual abuse Tansy My sister, Liberty, tells me I need to exercise, that it cures all ills. Well, I don’t see how swimming cures hers. All it does is dry out her hair. Jolee, my youngest…
All spaces are haunted. In a way, all spaces are about memory. In A Summoning, “a conceptual, psychological experiment focused on memory,” Nicole McCarthy invites readers to sit and feel and think and remember. Throughout this fragmented collection, McCarthy…
I found Brittany Ackerman’s piece “Mia’s Birthday” in Forever Magazine in the summer of 2021, in the midst of an intolerably painful breakup for which I was wholly to blame. Asked to write an introduction for our conversation, I…
My father, after slipping backward on a stretch of rooted Alaskan ice and hitting his head, miraculously walks the three miles to get back home—heavily concussed and alone—with our two unleashed labs directing him in the winter dark. He…
“Even Though He Fell” started off as an idea in my Notes app simply titled, Essay that repeats itself. I knew it was going to be about my father’s concussion, and I knew it was going to be about mine too. What wasn’t so clear was how I would be able to show my confusion, isolation, and panic. For me, my father was the person I could rely on during my parents’ divorce, who cared for me when I had migraines, and so when he had a concussion, I was thoroughly shaken. At the time, I didn’t have the tools to properly work through how I was affected. Instead, I studied essays such as “An Avalanche’s Lessons in Grief” by Christy NaMee Eriksen and “Tennis Is the Opposite of Death: A Proof” by Joy Katz, which both weave in larger themes about fathers and what they leave behind. Their use of avalanches and tennis, respectively, reveals how fathers imprint themselves onto us by their passions and the environments they foster. Once gone, these unassuming imprints become anchors in processing traumatic events.
When I write, I see myself as an archeologist who digs at the earth until the skeleton of a story is revealed as a jumbled mess. The story won’t be reconstructed perfectly, but what’s important is the pieces exist. This essay’s structure is fractured, imperfect, and disorienting at times because I wanted to convey how the fall still rattles me. The backbone I finally found was to use the little knowledge I had of coding to process these intensely emotional moments. Programming is often a frustrating and solution-oriented skill, wherein a single error can prevent the rest of the code from working. The “error” I couldn’t stop thinking about was how helpless I felt living multiple states away from my father. I have constantly wondered what would’ve happened had I been there; what would’ve happened if he hadn’t called me; what would’ve happened if he’d never made it home. The questions are repetitive, unrelenting, and exhausting. Though through the turmoil, coding allowed me to contextualize my father’s concussion and uncover how vulnerable both of us turned out to be.
MAXWELL SUZUKI is a queer writer who lives in Los Angeles. Maxwell’s work has appeared or is forthcoming in Lunch Ticket, South Dakota Review, and Cheat River Review. He is the prose editor of Passengers Journal and reads for Split/Lip Press. He is writing a novel on the generational disconnect between Japanese-American immigrants and their children. Find Maxwell on Twitter @papasuzuki.
