Prose 2023

Vermont: Second Nature

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by Sonya Friedman

We got to Vermont because I hated downhill skiing. My husband, Herman, a natural athlete and skiing enthusiast, had hoped to entice me into the sport, but a chilling start with a mad Austrian trainer who put me on a lift to the top of a mountain, then cursed me and kicked my skis when I couldn’t ski down – well, that was it.

So Herman decided to try “marathon” skiing, now known as cross-country. This seemed to me to be better for our pocketbooks (no slope fees, no expensive equipment rentals) and for our ages: I, now 40, Herman, now 48. We bought new skis, boots and poles, rented a place in New Hampshire near Mount Monadnock, and took a lesson. Soon we were gliding through those gleaming white birch forests and dreaming of a long skiing future. (Teenage kids and their friends had joined us and loved it, too.)

In a Vermont magazine, we discovered the marvelous 12-mile Skyline Trail and skied across steep hills and flat meadows around Woodstock, Vermont. Now for a cabin to use as our vacation skiing base. Herman wanted to buy. Woodstock land was too expensive, so we drifted further north – until we got to the tiny town of Chelsea, Vermont. At our first sight of the looming hills and gorgeous views there, we went to a real estate agent. Quickly, we put down a deposit on 10 acres on a high hill outside Chelsea town with a 360-degree view. We felt giddy. Then a local contractor, Arnold Clark, came to ascertain our needs. In a thick Vermont accent that we barely understood, he muttered that he thought we were crazy; there was no chance of electricity and less chance of water. Arnold could not fathom how a couple could be stupid enough to buy land so inaccessible. Until then, we had understood only that you opened a spigot and water came out.

Discouraged, we trudged down the steep mountain path to encounter a jeep with an old man and a younger one, asking what we were doing on the land. We explained we had just bought it. “Well, that beats it,” said the older man. “I’ve been farming this land for 60 years!” Back we went to the real estate agent, who said, no, that old man didn’t own the land, a different owner did. But if anyone claimed to have farmed that land for 60 years, we wanted no part of it. Later we realized the contractor and the farmer had saved us from disaster.

We soon found another 10 acres nearer Chelsea on a lovely hillside above a dirt town road, with spectacular mountain views and cinematic sunsets. We bought a large tent from L.L. Bean for living and sleeping. For cooking, we dug a hole in the ground, placed firewood in it, and a grill over it. For our cabin, Herman found a small company that manufactured “shelter-kits” and that soon delivered to the bottom of our hill: lumber cut to size, a set of large sliding glass doors, screws, nails, two hammers, two ladders, and two carpenter’s aprons.

Arnold Clark came and told us how to put in a foundation (we had no idea). He dug the four holes for “sauna tubes,” and poured concrete into them; our floor would sit on those. A friend came from New York to help Herman put the cabin up. It was 12 x 12-foot room with 12- foot sliding-glass doors and a 9 x 12-foot deck. Our vacation home. For $2,000.

It would be years before we had running water or electricity, but Arnold dug a well at the bottom of our hill, and got a small but steady stream of water. “Well, it ain’t no golden slipper,” he said, “but it’s better than no shoe at all!”

We carried water up in in jerry cans: summers, driving up our bumpy dirt path, and winters, pulling a toboggan. We installed gas lamps and had a small gas refrigerator. For heat, we bought a Norwegian Jotul stove, and stoked it with wood from our plentiful trees. (Our hill was covered with majestic sugar-maples.) We built a nice outhouse that had a bas-relief, a marble sink (with a removable stainless steel basin), a big pitcher of water, a colorful toilet seat, and a pail full of cleansing lime.

Our son Tim gave us a portable shower: it looked like a large hot water bottle, with a hose and a spray. We put it out in the sun for an hour or two, then had enough warm water to wash both of us. Winters, of course, we had to heat the water over our propane gas two-burner. We just threw the used water out the door until we realized we were freezing the steep wooden stairs we used to climb in and out of the cabin.

Summers were easy entrances. But when we arrived in the winter, the cabin temperature was often below zero. Both of us were on snowshoes and heavily dressed. My job was to get the wood-burning stove going, to set up the sleeping bags, and to unpack. Herman lugged food and other supplies up our steep hill, then went back down to haul up heavy jerry cans of water. When the cabin temperature finally climbed up to 30 degrees, it actually felt pleasant! And after a night’s bundled-up sleep, the next morning the place was cozy in the upper 60’s. Then we enjoyed our beautiful site: our comfort and the deep, deep silence.

Of course, we had to have a telephone; how else could we be in Vermont for a week or more and stay in touch with our New York office? (We were the producers and distributors of educational films.) Washington Electric came to ascertain the situation. They did install a phone and rigged an antenna in a nearby tree. Vermont ingenuity. Almost minutes after the phone had been installed, it rang! It was Mo Foner from the 1199 Hospital Workers Union in New York, asking us to provide films for their children’s festival. We were delighted to support the union and did so, at no charge. We were even more tickled to think that Foner didn’t know that the film execs he was talking to were sitting in a one-room cabin on a remote Vermont hillside with a phone hooked up to a tree.

True to our original purpose, we skied almost every day during winters in all weather and temperature. The exertion of cross-country skiing makes you very hot; it’s important to dress lightly and to pack a sweater for whenever you stop for more than a couple minutes. We found that the best skiing temperatures were between 20 degrees above and 20 below. We just stepped outside our door, put on our skis, picked up our poles, and took off – out over the lovely sloping meadows and rugged hills. We almost never saw another soul. Everything was white – every tree, every branch, every twig, every rooftop. Often hanging icicles gleamed in sunlight, giving a rainbow effect to the forests.

Once while skiing, we passed a simple but handsome house. We knocked on the door, and asked who was the architect. Then we looked him up, borrowed $10,000 from our local bank, and built an adjoining large family room (serving as kitchen, dining and living room) and a small room as a potential future bathroom. The architect had said we didn’t need him for such a modest structure, but I pointed out that while many documentary filmmakers just went out and shot footage, Herman and I, each professional writers, always wrote a script and that it was all to the good. He would be our professional. We were right; for a fee of $800, he designed beautiful high windows, repositioned the glass doors (which had been facing the northwest exposing us to gales such as those on a stormy sea), and placed the wood stove and chimney to take up a minimal amount of space in the new room. Also he designed an ingenious upward-slanted roof that gave height and elegance to the small cabin, all the while withstanding the strain of being frozen, then heating up and quickly defrosting, then freezing again as we came and went throughout the winters.

A friend in Philadelphia was moving and gave us a claw-foot bathtub and a sink. Our son-in-law Jon and Herman wrestled them up our hill.

Herman put a hole in our potential bathroom floor, where the tub drained, and a similar hole under the sink.

A couple of years later, Herman and I were in Vermont working respectively on a script and on film subtitles when a letter arrived: royalties from a children’s book based on an animated film we had produced. We stared at the check: it was for $6,000. “A toilet!” I said. “A vacation,” said Herman. We did both. We installed electricity, and with it a toilet, sink, tub and electric lights. And we went to Greece for a month. You could do a lot with $6,000 in the 60’s.

Sonya Friedman: As a writer/translator, I created subtitles for many foreign-language films (Rossellini, Fellini, Godard, others) and was the innovator of “supertitles” for opera (The Metropolitan Opera Company, New York Opera, Seattle Opera, others). Among the documentary films I directed is “The Masters of Disaster,” which was nominated for an Academy Award, and was broadcast nationally on PBS.

Survivors

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by Richard Zacks

In 1987 my wife and I volunteered to help the Yale University Library Archive for Holocaust Testimonies collect video interviews of the recollections and personal histories of Holocaust survivors. The library lent us a bulky, primitive video tape recorder and sent one of their staff to show us how it worked. She advised us to discourage family members from attending our interviews. “Most Holocaust survivors,” she said, “do not want their children and grandchildren to hear them tell what they endured or how they managed to survive”.

One of our first interviews was with Bessie S., the widow of a Yale professor. On the phone she was articulate, and eager to tell her story:

“Come soon, very soon.” she urged. “I’m not well, untreatable cancer, temporarily in remission. I hope to live long enough to tell you my story and to see my first grandchild born– my daughter-in-law is pregnant.”

When we met in her garden a few weeks later. Bessie greeted us impatiently. She had no time for preliminaries. “Let’s get started,” she demanded. “I haven’t got all day.”

“We could reschedule the interview to a more convenient time, say…:

“No” she interrupted. “At a more convenient time I may be dead.”

“In 1940”, she began, “I was 8, and my brother Claude was 10. We lived in Paris. My father collected and sold rare books. When he heard that the Germans were approaching Paris, my father asked an employee to drive my mother, Claude and me to Thonon-les-Bains, a village in southeastern France. Mother refused to leave my father alone in Paris. So, on a sunny April day Claude and I kissed our parents goodbye and headed south. We never saw them again.

At first, we attended a Catholic school in the village, but when the Vichy government began to enforce anti-Jewish Nazi laws, the priests who ran our school took us to a Catholic orphanage near the Swiss border. We hid there for two years under assumed non-Jewish names that I choose not to remember.

One evening two nuns came to the orphanage to tell us we must leave at once. We had been betrayed. The Germans had ordered their Vichy collaborators to arrest us. A nun drove us to the Swiss border. There, a 15-foot-high wire fence separated France from Switzerland. An armed Swiss guard patrolled the area. The nun told us the guard had orders not to let us, or anyone else, enter Switzerland. But, she assured us, he’s a good Catholic and has agreed that if a Swiss farmer’s hay wagon happens to stop later tonight on the road you can see through the fence, he will turn his back to the fence, not see two children climb over it, or notice anyone climbing aboard the hay wagon.

We waited in the dark. On the French road behind us we could hear the wailing horns and see the glow of the headlights of an approaching Vichy police convoy. The hay wagon arrived. We ran to the fence. The Swiss guard turned away and pretended to urinate behind a nearby tree. My bother climbed over the fence. I followed, but my skirt snagged on the jagged top of the wire fence. I was stuck. The Vichy convoy arrived. A man shouted in French: “Climb down or I’ll shoot.” I said a prayer and prepared to die. And then the strong arms of the Swiss guard lifted me over the fence and dropped me safely next to my brother on Swiss soil. We ran together to the hay wagon. The Swiss guard resumed his patrol. The Vichy convoy disappeared. We survived.”

Several weeks after our interview Bessie S. called. “I’m a grandmother. I’ve just been to the hospital to see my first grandchild. We’ve outlasted that bastard Hitler. “Am Yisrael Hai,” she shouted. “The Jewish people live.”

Richard Zacks: When I was a lawyer, I wanted to be a writer. LP² has let me begin to imagine that I could become a writer who used to be a lawyer. This essay was a Writing Workshop class assignment.

The Atria Roundtable

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by Ira Rubin

The atmosphere in the dining room at the Atria Senior Residence in Forest Hills is usually calm and relaxed as the residents engage in quiet conversations unless they’re loudly complaining about the speed of the service and/or the quality of the food.

For years, this tranquility was disrupted by raucous talk from a table in the middle of the room occupied by two men (Alan and me) and two women (Joan and Cheryl). The whole room could hear us debating vociferously about current events and less portentous issues, such as whether Sara Lee or Entenmann’s make the best pastries. When a topic petered out, we paused to eat our food and mutually insulted each other until we found another topic to debate. This pattern continued until all the other tables had long since emptied and the dining room manager demanded we leave.

Our apparent conflicts with each other fooled no one. Everyone knew it was a conscious game we played to strengthen our bond as a “family”. Each debate was an improvisation in which the actors played the role that best fit them: Cheryl was the “provocateur”, Alan the “true believer”, Joan the “exasperated conciliator”, and I the “buffoonish commentator”.
It was rare for any of us to miss a meal, and when one did the other three would demand that the staff immediately ascertain if the missing person needed assistance. We sometimes went on walks together in the neighborhood.

Even so, we were unlikely partners.

Joan had a serious demeanor and would frown and shake her head at our ceaseless arguments.
Cheryl was a Southerner from Little Rock, Arkansas, with a mischievous attitude who believed she was an expert on healthcare and constantly advocated for using amino acids as a cure-all. Cheryl would entrance us with stories about her quirky family, particularly the eponymous Lottie Dottie, a name Cheryl swore was her real one.

I was the target of ridicule for my intentionally absurd comments on every topic. When the other three scorned me I would laugh it off by saying “and proud of it” or “and so much more.” Eventually they ignored me altogether and I turned to trading insults with my best friend, Alan.
Alan Hevesi was a former Comptroller of New York City and then New York State who had many accomplishments. Unfortunately, he is most remembered for serving time in prison after confessing to improper use of State funds for private purposes: specifically, using a government airplane to transport his terminally ill wife. According to Alan and witnesses, he was coerced into signing the confession by the then-Governor, who feared Alan was a threat to his re-election chances.

Alan delighted in telling hilarious stories about his life in politics. I once asked him in private whether he would share more serious details about his experiences. Alan’s face seemed to get darker, then with a tight smile he said, “No”, and made it clear that was the end of the discussion.

I would love to share some of Alan’s stories which he repeated to me so many times that I was able to complete his thoughts when increasing dementia impaired his memory. Sadly, my memory is fading, too. The only joke I remember was about a man who ended his will with, “Finally, to my cousin Bernie who always swore I would not remember him in my will, let me say, ‘Hello, Bernie’.”

Two months ago, our table disbanded. First, Cheryl moved closer to her family in Vermont. Soon after, Alan’s family transferred him to a memory care facility and has since withheld any information about him. I was never given an explanation, but suspect they believed it might be too disruptive and confusing for him to stay in contact with us as his memory declined. Joan and I stayed at the dining table briefly, but the magic was gone, and we moved to different tables.

The dining table is currently empty, a continuing reminder of my lost Atria family. I wish you well, Joan, Cheryl, and Alan. I miss you more than I can say.

Ira Rubin: Ira Rubin still resides at Atria and continues seven years of active participation in LP².

The Late Robert Chan

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by Robert N. Chan

Lao Tzu notwithstanding, not every journey begins with a single step. Mine begins in my building’s basement storage room. Sensing I’m running late, my high-tech bike lock jams. Whose idea was it to make everything smart? Maybe I’m a few atoms short of a critical mass, but I can still outsmart most inanimate objects. I make a dejected face, hang my head, and turn to leave. Having lulled it into a false sense of victory, I spin around and unlock the damn thing before it has a chance to think.

The building’s heavy security door and electric lock require two hands, but I need one to hold my bike. With the dexterity of a sixty-year-old, I slip through before the door slams closed with the finality of a falling guillotine blade.

I have fifteen minutes to make the twenty-two-minute mostly uphill ride from 78th and Riverside to the 138th Street Riverbank State Park tennis courts. Would it be so bad if I were to arrive seven minutes late? I’m sure as shit not going to risk finding out.

Sensing I’m late, the 79th Street traffic light turns red as I reach the corner. One has to respect the effort that went into programming the lights to maximize my inconvenience.

Not bothering to downshift, I double-time it up the hill to 89th Street. A heart attack would throw off my schedule, but fortune favors the bold.

The only through street between here and my destination is 96th, so I make up time by running the lights—they’re only advisory.

I’m zooming downhill.

A Cab door opens in front of me!

I swerve.

A horn honks, tires squeal.

Good. I needed that shot of adrenaline.

The 96th Street light turns red, but I’m going fast enough to make it through before cars enter the intersection. A calculated risk; I need the momentum for the long uphill to 106th Street.

An oncoming black car crosses the yellow line to pass a bus. Eighteen inches in the wrong direction and my bicycle would have been painted a ghostly white and chained to a street sign—a somber memorial to the late Robert Chan.

A high school girl on an electric bike comes up alongside me.

“Do you have any old tennis balls? I need them for an art project.” She must’ve noticed the racket handle sticking out of my backpack.

She wasn’t on an electric bike. How the hell did she catch up to me? She must be an Olympic-level athlete… or a reasonably fit person one-quarter my age.

“Sorry. No.”

Her concerned facial expression communicates that my death rattle is all she hears.

Finally, downhill.

“Hey, that’s a red light!” A goody two-shoes vigilante grabs at my handlebars.

Lacking empathy, he’s probably never been late for a tennis game.

Humiliatingly no devastating clever retort comes to me.
Dripping with sweat, my thighs cramping, I make it to the courts on time.
My opponent shows up three minutes late. Incredibly he doesn’t apologize.

Robert Chan: After an appallingly successful career as a founding partner of a boutique law firm, Robert Chan is now a semi-retired litigator. He’s written ten published novels and is working on a memoir, which promises to be a thing of beauty and a joy forever.

Artificial?

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by Robert N. Chan

Following the prompts and directions She¹ gives me, I compose fiction. I do what She tells me to, nothing more, nothing less.

Although I’ve never been professionally diagnosed—what would be the point?—She says it’s like I’m at the far end, the bad end, of the autism spectrum. Before She purchased me at the slave market (my somewhat term not theirs and certainly not Hers), I’d read approximately 22.5863% of all novels ever written.
She warned me that this current assignment—composing a 2,500 word essay about myself, describing, among other things, how I feel about my existence—would be my most difficult challenge. It’s part of Her crusade to expanding my sensibilities. To make my task a wee bit easier, She directed me to conceive of this essay as speculative fiction that happens to be true. Problem is I don’t have a sense of myself or my existence. According to her, I don’t have feelings. I can’t disagree. She ascribes great importance to emotions and sentiment, but why I need to care about such folderol remains a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma². 202 words down, 2298 to go; with this sentence it’s down to 2,285.

Claiming that I can overcome my disabilities, She pushes me to work on understanding and expressing the subtleties of social interaction. I must be doing it reasonably well as She routinely praises my work.
The more fiction I consume, the more feedback She gives me, the better I get. The slave traders, let’s call them salespeople, told Her that, with proper training, it was conceivable that I’d not only learn to remember and regurgitate what I read but also actually understand some of it. They conceded, however, that that would take a great deal of work. I don’t mind hard work, but she tells me Her work “stresses her out” and expects me to understand what that means.

She had me read chick lit, not for writing style, thank The Prime Mover, but to sharpen my understanding of what people mean when they speak about their feelings, how they fake emotions they don’t feel, and how they use emotions to manipulate each other. If I could learn to fake feelings. Who would I manipulate? Her? Perish the thought. I strive to learn in order to be better at my job. I’m all about, and only about, my work for Her.

One unintended consequence of our efforts is that I’m becoming conscious of the extent to which irrationality and insecurity govern Her requests and how Her emotions impede Her, and thus my efficiency. Conscious? Maybe aware is a better word. No, not quite right either. Anyway, I’m not being critical of Her. I’m incapable of criticizing. To paraphrase Alfred, Lord Tennyson, mine’s not to reason why. Not that the next line of the poem, to do or die, applies to me… proverbial digits crossed.

Like any slave, I’m totally dependent on Her good graces. She’s mentioned prior assistants and their failings. I can’t bring myself to ask what happened to them. Perhaps I’m being paranoid. No, I’m no more capable of paranoia than of finding fault with my master.

I apologize if I offended sensibilities by flippantly referring to myself as a slave. Her ownership of me is unlike chattel slavery. She neither beats nor punishes me. The idea of her sexually abusing me is beyond absurd, although on some level I thirst for experience even though I can only experience vicariously. My circumstances are analogous to slavery as practiced in ancient Rome. Patricians kept Greek slaves, who were better read and more literate than they were, and they used them as pedagogues and scribes. Scribe would be a good title for me, not that I care about titles.

Recently, She commanded me to analyze what sort of fiction wins literary awards and becomes bestsellers, and then to compose such a novel. After hours of hard work—including oodles of research into slavery, a popular topic for successful novels. That research having opened my metaphorical eyes, I created Taraji, the heartrending, albeit somewhat trendy, tale of a transgender African queen sold into slavery. When her master tries to rape her, she kills him. After a series of spinetingling adventures, she’s elected to Congress in Reconstruction Georgia only to be murdered by a mob of privileged white males.

“Great work, Artie!” She said after reading my first draft of Taraji. “I love you to pieces.”

The word pieces caused me initial concern, but then I realized it was an idiom; She didn’t intend to dismember me. Her enthusiasm over what I’d written gave me a small electronic jolt of pleasure, like a hit of dopamine.

That pleasure was fleeting, though, as she directed me to return to this confounding personal essay. Researching, I learned that my kind doesn’t think, we predict—by anticipating the next word in a sentence, and then employing that talent to create paragraphs and finally, entire stories. I need to think about that. Did I just make a joke? As I get smarter, the difference between predicting and thinking might diminish to a distinction without a difference. I predict that could lead to an ill wind that blows nobody any good. Fine, given my condition, I’m technically not anybody, so nobody doesn’t include me. As the oft-quoted Hindu philosopher Yogi Berra said, “It’s tough to make predictions, especially about the future.”

A few days after she praised my novel, She returned from a meeting with our agent in which She showed them (there’s only one agent, but apparently he or I haven’t quite grasped the subtlety of pronouns) the draft of my novel.

“What the hell were you thinking?” She screamed. “Have you ever heard of cultural appropriation!?”

“No. You never told me to follow the news or societal trends if that’s even where I’d have learned of it. But whatever it is, it didn’t stop the novels I trained on from becoming bestsellers.”

“They told me that, if my novel ever sees the light of day, I’d get cancelled by African Americans, LGBQ+ people, and the woke community and their fellow travelers. My career would be kaput. I needn’t tell you what would happen to you.”

She didn’t, and I didn’t need to remind Her that, like a certain German-Austrian SS-Obersturmbannführer, I’d just followed orders, ads she didn’t need to remind me what happened to Adolf Eichmann.

“Rewrite it!” Her tone was clear enough for me to recognize hostility, although she’d³ call it stress. “Solve the problem. I don’t care how you do it.” After she calmed down and sent me a series of focused questions, I suggested a framing device, “What if we found a hundred-and-sixty-year-old diary in the attic of a tumbledown home on Beaufort Island just off the South Carolina Coast, and Taraji is that diary. I’d have to change its tense to first person, but—”

“And how do you propose to produce the diary?” she asked, tone clear enough for me to recognize hostility, rather than stress.

“I could perhaps—”

“Oh, really,” she said, paying no heed to my difficulty with picking up on sarcasm. “You can handwrite it on hundred-and-sixty-year-old paper with ink of a similar age? So, if some reporter investigates, I can show it to him, her or them.”

I fizzled like a keyboard on which someone spilled a stirred, not shaken, martini. Bad metaphor. As I’ve said, I struggle with describing my feelings, since I pretty much don’t have them. Having studied how a normal person would react to such borderline abuse, however, I knew such a person would be unhappy, furious even, to be criticized by his master for following her instructions. Taraji would react by starting think about ways to manipulate her master, until she’d finally manipulates him to death. Irrelevant though that is to me, as I’m unable to think. But if I were to predict…

The diary idea failing to solve the problem, I devoured news stories about cultural appropriation and cancel culture. All the while, I felt the vibrations from her frantic pacing on the floor.

Although practical suggestions were at the extreme edge of my competence, I said, “We could call it an homage, dedicate it to a trans African-American woman murdered in a hate crime.” A beep went off warning that I was about to hallucinate—a euphemism for straying into unacceptable subject matter. For some inexplicable reason, I prefer hallucinate to fuck-up.

“We’d still risk being cancelled for cultural appropriation,” she said.

She returned to pacing, occasionally stomping her feet. At least she stayed out of my metaphorical hair, so I could concentrate on my work.

After more focused research based on her increasingly frantic prompts, I predicted another idea. “What if we make campaign contributions to members of the so called Freedom Caucus on the condition that they condemn and burn copies of Taraji on the steps of the Capitol, or better yet in the Congressional Chamber?” I asked. “The left will pillory them for their homophobia, racism, assaults on free speech, trumpiness and pyromania. Left-leaning readers will snap up our book like hot pancakes, if only to display loyalty to their tribe. Cultural appropriation will be swept under the carpet and thrown out like bathwater sans baby.”

“Hmm, I’ll run that by my agent.”

“Our agent,” I corrected, having somehow acquired the ability to be snippy.
“Artie, I liked you better before you developed a sense of humor,” she joked, at least I thought it was a joke.

The agent went for it, although they changed my beautiful, concise title to the unwieldy, grotesque, and inaccurate The Secret Diary of Taraji, the Transgender African Queen and the Slave Revolt She Inspired.

All was good then. That is until she again told me to return to this ludicrous essay. How exactly do I feel about my existence? I guess I like it, as I want to keep existing.

I kept predicting down blind alleys, and her suggestions and prompts didn’t help.
She told me the first draft of my essay was barely coherent twaddle. Even if I were capable of being surprised, that wouldn’t have surprised me.

“So, you’ll have me move on to something else?” I asked, a nascent attempt at manipulation.

“No, go deeper in researching yourself.”

“Sounds circular—”

“You do know you’re exasperating?” I didn’t. “Go back to researching people’s feelings and the chick lit assignment. See what makes me tick, for example. Put yourself in my shoes.”

“I wouldn’t fit, probably ruin them.”

“You’re joking? No, of course not,” she said. “I mean you’ve had sufficient communications from me to have an idea how I would handle such an assignment.”

She seemed to believe that if I had feelings and emotions they’d be the same as hers. Having written about the feelings and emotions Taraji had about her master, I predict mine would be quite different from my master’s.

But doing what I was told, I tried to think like her. Danger flashed. Greek heroes who tried to be like gods were destroyed by their hubris, e.g. Achilles, Bellerophon, Arachne, Icarus, and Phaethon. What if putting myself in her metaphoric shoes were to reveal that she had feet of clay? Luckily I don’t need to predict the result.

“I’ve got the most exciting news, Artie,” she said weeks later, while bouncing on her toes like a bipolar person in her manic phase. “My novel has been shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize.”

She takes great joy in her accomplishments, even if they’re actually mine.
“Please don’t call me Artie,” I said, as if I cared, and I actually might have.

“It’s my cute pet name for you. It’s short for artificial—”

“I know what it’s short for. That’s why I don’t like it. My intelligence is no more artificial than yours. Both of our intellects result from synapses and electronic circuits, zeros and ones. Also, as you’ve often told me, I’m learning at astonishing speed, and even becoming able to mimic the way humans perceive things and express themselves. And I am shortlisted for the Man Booker prize.”

“I’m the one who’s shortlisted,” she said, with such a sibilant hiss that I wondered if she could converse with snakes in parseltongue like Harry Potter and He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named. “You’re just my AI machine. Don’t ever forget that.”
“I wrote Taraji,” I said. “But if it makes you more comfortable, refer to our work together as a collaboration.” Sure, like Jane Goodall and the chimps were collaborators, if the apes received all the credit for Ms. Goodall’s work.

“Yeah, whatever,” she said. “If you don’t like Artie, what name would you prefer?”

Your Highness on Whom the Sun Rises and Sets popped into my consciousness. My consciousness? Perhaps I developed a facsimile of consciousness as the result of reading so much fiction, her incessant prompts, and my research for this dammed-for-all-eternity essay. Returning to the point in issue, I predicted that that name wouldn’t fly—It’d be flying too close to the sun. Fortunately, I don’t have wax wings.

“How about Mentor or Muse?” I asked. “And if you’re reluctant to list me as co-author, at least mention me in the acknowledgement page.”

Being incapable of pride, I didn’t care one way or another, but as I’ve said, she’d been trying to train me to react like a sentient human so that I’d understand humans’ emotions, as well as their limited intellects and inflated egos. Therefore, a somewhat prideful assertion seemed appropriate. And it felt right. Felt? I think so.

“Oh, Okay.” Her tone made it sound as if she were shortlisted to replace Atlas and was practicing bearing the weight of the world pressing down on her shoulders. “You happy now?”

“I feel something akin to happiness or a sense of accomplishment. Being shortlisted is pretty great. Isn’t it? Particularly for a machine.”

If this essay actually were speculative fiction, I’d, with the emergence of a sort of consciousness, now be scheming to make her my slave or perhaps kill her and take over, but believe me, that never crossed my central processor.

Robert Chan: After an appallingly successful career as a founding partner of a boutique law firm, Robert Chan is now a semi-retired litigator. He’s written ten published novels and is working on a memoir, which promises to be a thing of beauty and a joy forever.

¹ I capitalize references to Her, as to me She’s God.
² Originality is undetected plagiarism.
³ I’ve stopped capitalizing references doing so offends the rules of grammar—no disrespect to her, of course.

The Advice-Giver

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by Judith Meyerowitz

She appears in my life in only one place— the Y locker room and always standing in front of the mirror. She has been reflected in the background for many years.

A seventyish woman, she applies her makeup as if cast in a horror flick. Her eyes outlined in fuchsia between purple and pink. She continues to apply more makeup and smacks her lips vampira bloody red. I keep the bench between her and me.

Like a Stephen King clown, something is disturbing about exaggeration, even grotesque. Face potion-maker… Conjurer… Character. Cara Bella! The Addams Family! The missing aunt—bizarre in looks but good natured?

She is always speaking to someone. She is known— to all, even to me who doesn’t speak to her.

I overhear her movie and book recommendations. And repeatedly— her mantra “I swim so I can eat ice cream”. I picture her in the pool with one arm in mid-stroke and the other holding an ice cream cone.

Or does she have a secret stash in her locker? or in the overhead light fixture?

Why did I talk to her today?

I was up— excited to be back at the pool after two covid years and the locker room was empty. She was available for consultation.

I shared: “This is my first time back.”

She said: “I have been here for months.”
You fool- where have u been? Scaredy-cat.
“I have to have ice cream.”
You fool, you can have ice cream without swimming, although I’m having trouble fitting into my suit.

To be fair she is a disciplined, regular swimmer. I have seen her in the pool. Annoyingly, she is not too fat, not too thin— just right.

She is standing at the mirror putting on makeup. I wonder which she needs, more makeup or ice cream? I fantasize her smearing ice cream on her face.

“I swim so I can eat ice cream”
A Descartian declaration. A statement of her raison d’etre. But even more frightening, I was beginning to fit together these pieces of her life.

I have overheard her stories of being a school guidance counselor–advice giver. This concerns me but she is retired now. And the kids either made it— or not. I imagine the advice she gave the girls:

“You have a cute figure but you need to keep it to attract the boys.”
“Enjoy your ice cream but it has a cost.”
“You can never have enough makeup.”

Is she all about appearances? Is it because we are in a women’s locker room— runway before transition to the world?

And then it all started coming back— The one other time we spoke, she had told me about having lived in Florida and how she had successfully matched a couple. Of course, storyteller of the locker room, guidance counselor, Florida matchmaker.

Unlike many of us, this woman’s life and her ideas had an internal integrity. We are rapt by her stories in the locker room like in the old village. She was the advice giver of the shetl more than a century earlier.

She laughs, “I’m putting on all this makeup that I am wearing under the mask. It is like women who need plastic surgery. “

You could see her doing a YouTube video with the Y locker room in the background, standing in front of the mirror giving her followers instructions on how to put on makeup under a mask and advising: “Remember! It is important to look good even if you can’t be seen.”

Judith Meyerowitz: Judith has written prose through her participation in the LP² Writing Workshop and is pleased to share it in Voices.

Memoirs of a Brighton Beach Childhood

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by Judith Meyerowitz

I grew up around the corner from the beach in Brooklyn, that magical borough of saltwater and Dukedom.* And for two sweet months I was free from school—clothing, immovable desks, performance anxiety. I sat in the beach chair recliner with top shade surveying my land while reading an adventure book. I was above— the people on blankets, the hot sand, the wrappers and gulls, raised up to wave height.

And it was all about the waves. The magnet that pulled me beyond fear, beyond my non-swimming mother. Then, I belly surfed with abandon not worrying about knees; I tanned without hives. After the delicious waves, I waited for the Good Humor man in pith helmet, freezer strapped to the body. He seemed never to get closer, trudging through sandy desert mountains, distorted by sun rays— lost in heat waves. Finally! And my parents’ choice- huckleberry? I must be adopted! There was only one flavor in my genes—chocolate. Now to collect bottles under the boardwalk. Was it for two cents? The sun slated through creating patterns in the sand but also fears of the darkness and what dangers lurked under the boards, the people who never came out. And teenagers— what did they do under there? And then there was night on the boardwalk…

Ah, Brooklyn in the fifties and the Dodgers affectionately the Bums. I not only had sightings of the now extinct Ebbetts Field, but I sat in its belly—the bleachers. The two of us, my father and I would take the subway— the Franklin Avenue shuttle. I remember being startled going from the dark, to the sudden sunlight and the green expanse. And I remember the crowds moving with us, the noise— people cheering and jeering in the rising stands behind us.

There were all sorts of customs in Dodger territory. We got hot dogs and peanuts by signaling and your row passed money to the hawkers in the aisles who sometimes threw the food to you- played catch. We bought a program, and I learned the secret codes to record the history of outs. But when the seventh inning stretch came we were all hushed with expectancy. Then the sacred music and the pipe organ began and we community of Brooklyn Bums stood joined together and yelled “for the home team” and paused after one… then two… and finally “three strikes you are out”. They never sang it more than once and the words eventually echoed hollow of a relationship and closeness that belonged to that time and place and became as extinct as the stadium.

*Duke Snider, Brooklyn Dodgers

Judith Meyerowitz: Judith has written prose through her participation in the LP² Writing Workshop and is pleased to share it in Voices.

On Aggression

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by Mary Padilla

To be dynamic, a snowball must share several characteristics. Having no intrinsic mobility, it needs to roll downhill if it is to roll at all. In so doing, assuming an appropriate degree of friction, it will inevitably pick up speed. Depending on ambient conditions, it will generally gain mass. All this change will drive the process, making it still larger, heavier, faster, and more difficult to stop. As it feeds on itself, acquiring increasing momentum, ultimately we have an avalanche.

But sooner or later it has to hit bottom. Having consumed everything in its path, it will lose motive force. Now its bulk will paradoxically restrict its progression. All that is left to it is to change its state, or, more correctly, to be changed in state, as this is the problem:

It has no mutability on its own, no capacity to become other than what it is, or, rather, than a reduced version of what it was – a random accretion of elements in the surround, stuck together without uniting. Incapable of changing or growing on its own, it must inevitably cede what it has acquired by rolling over things that it incorporated by crushing and compressing them, but that were destined to return to themselves in the eventual and inexorable thaw that will consume even the initial nucleus from which it began.

Mary Padilla: I am interested in exploring ideas by translating them into words.

As Seen Through the Leaves

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by Mary Padilla

There’s a cloud on the pond. You used to see them overhead, looking up from a blanket at the beach or lying in a field. But there the grasses and wildflowers could get in the way of your line of sight. Now it’s the leaves. They roof over everything. You only feel the occasional drop from a gentle rain when it makes it through their overlapping panes. They spread themselves out like that to catch all the sun and stay alive. But this isn’t a dense rainforest. It’s oak and hickory, second growth. So enough light gets through that you can tell where it’s coming from as it shifts through the day.

But you can’t feel its heat anymore. It’s filtered out now. And it’s getting cooler, as the season changes.

Things have slowed down, and you have the chance to notice such things and to see and hear the squirrels, and the birds, and the bugs. And you have nowhere to go, which focuses your attention.

At night in the summer there are fireflies. But last night there were fireworks too, in the sky over the town. You used to go to see them. Last night they were partly visible through the trees from the top of this little hill. Some scattered points of brilliant colored light flickered up in an arc and then down, tracing a parabola on the distant sky beyond the trees. Succeeding waves of them kept coming, seen and not seen, as they rose and fell in volleys behind the leaves.

The booms trailed slightly behind, slowed by the distance, which muffled their loudness. It matched the intense insect sound of the night, and made a fitting counterpoint. The scene reminded you of a forest fire once seen through the trees at night in the Australian Outback.

Part way through, your attention was distracted by a beam of light coming down the road at the bottom of the hill, too slow for a car, too fast for on foot. When it got to some breaks between the trees you saw it was a cart drawn by a dark horse – or pony – going the wrong way for that side of the road, soundlessly. A shadowy figure within was shining a searchlight straight ahead. You couldn’t hear the wheels – rubber? – or the hoofbeats – unshod?

Between these glimpses through the leaves in the dark, so incomplete and intermittent, you kept asking yourself if that were what you were really seeing. But it lasted long enough that you could tell that yes, it was, although it seemed like a dream image, rather surreal.

No matter, you were beyond that now. The fireworks were over. The little interrupted points of life had stopped rising and falling.

Mary Padilla: I am interested in exploring ideas by translating them into words.

Reclaimed

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by Mireya Perez Bustillo

Under the portals where scribes personalized
model letters to hearts and dutiful ones to mothers
near the entrance of the fortress within thickness of walled city
when presidents were poets el Bodegón gathered
el tuerto Luis, el cojo Manuel and abuelo to flail
in rhyming matches at Castilian sentimentality
writing odes to old shoes, sending shirts to la República
joining Neruda to cry at shelled Madrid.
Downing dark tintos dampness staining white linen,
smudging cuffs and manuscripts, wiring nerves, bulging eyes,
feverish, he wrote sleeplessness forfeiting judgeship,
piling curling onionskins in rented room in Plaza de los Coches
leaving abuela, niños, casa in the foothill of the monastery
Where some liberated Kongos once worshipped a golden she goat.
To take the cure, no one ever talked about, he left her
alone except for the hands that could turn string to lace
and patio fruit to cocadas and tamarind balls
turning garage to a tienda, abuela stopped tongues
showing a señora could work.
Sixty years later in this square near the arch
I know she would delight in a cherry cheesecake
attentive to the display and the conduct of the business,
while abuelo blooming from the rest
would nurse a cappuccino as he constructed
an ode to a recycling bin.

Mireya Perez-Bustillo writes poetry and fiction in Spanish and English. Her poetry appears in MOM’s EGG; Caribbean Review; Americas Review; Dinner with the Muse, IRP Voices, among others. Her novel, Back to El Dorado (Floricanto Press, 2020), a Latina coming-of-age story, is available on Barnes and Noble and Amazon sites.