‘The Great Compromise’

Chelcie S. Porter is a bold and unapologetic artist, photographer, and creative director whose work defies conventions and embraces the raw complexities of human emotion. With over a decade of global exploration spanning 60+ countries, Chelcie draws inspiration from themes of migration, identity, and liberation, weaving these into her fine art photography, multidisciplinary creations, and community-driven projects.

The Great Compromise

Barrington Tabor, fascinated at how territorially combative the little sons of a bitch were, watched delightedly as the eight or ten, maybe more, hummingbirds vied for dominance—or simply out of pure orneriness—around the feeder that he’d put out on the tree stump behind the deteriorating one-car garage, a building that hadn’t housed an automobile in fifty years, if ever. It was the ninth of April. The little suckers had arrived unexpectedly early. 

Yesterday morning, Barrington woke to the buggers darting from scrub oak to scrub oak like the speed freaks he’d known in art school in the Bay Area, back in his days of folly and bullheadedness, before he met Debra. Much like the would-be artists used to flit from one student’s easel to another’s in the hope that their work would be the piece that received the attention of the instructor, the hummingbirds seemed to perform their feisty aerobatic maneuvers just for Barrington.  In those classes, years ago, if not praise, then advice or, hell, even criticism was all the future Piccasos and Pollocks lived for. Any notice from an instructor was a victory. Obviously, these little fluttering sons of a gun were irritated that the artist hadn’t had the decency to set out the feeder with the sugary, gooey blend for them to stick their greedy little beaks into upon their arrival from God only knows where. But how was Barrington to know? They used to show up precisely on the fifteenth of the month, year after year, but with global warming, they seemed to be adapting to less time spent in Mexico and more in Texas. For better or for worse.

Even more worrisome than the changes in the Earth’s climate and the impending doom that the alterations foretold was Debra’s, his schoolteacher wife’s, not being home yet. She should have left El Paso before eight. It was now four-fifteen. It wasn’t at all like by-the-clock Debra to dawdle at her parents’ home—of all places—and to not get an early start on her seven-hour trek across the West Texas desert.     

Debra had dreaded her return to her hometown, but it had been twelve years since she convinced Barrington that they should relocate to the dwindling town of Dos Pesos, Texas. A dozen years had slipped by since they made what Barrington called “the great compromise”. Jobs were few and far between back then—the recession and all—so they agreed to give Dos Pesos a try, for a year or two. No more than that. How bad could it be? If either of them one day were to say, “I’ve had enough of living out here in the middle of nowhere,” they’d pack up and skedaddle in the blink of an eye. As it turned out, the circumstance that the Contreras County school district was the only system that needed a high school English teacher that fall semester proved to be almost fateful. She could teach. He could paint with little distraction. Neither Barrington nor Debra regretted that she had waited too long to get her applications out after graduation from New Mexico State. The “great compromise” wasn’t all that bad, not really. So now, here they were, stuck in a town of eleven-hundred people, a place no one had ever heard of, a dusty little settlement neither of them really cared for, yet had no inclination to desert anytime soon.

“Something terrible happened between Van Horn and Ft. Stockton,” said Debra from the threadbare, dilapidated chair in the corner of the living room. Both husband and wife had intended to find someone in town who could reupholster the ugly wingback monstrosity, but neither had the gumption to seek anyone out.

“Geez,” said Barrington. “What was it?”

“I think I might’ve gotten someone killed on I-10.” Red-faced, wide-eyed, Debra pointed toward what she thought was the western wall of the living room in their one-bedroom, hundred-year-old adobe bungalow. It wasn’t west that she pointed, more like north-north-east, but Barrington knew where she intended to indicate. Debra was a teacher, not a cartographer.

“Killed? How did you get someone killed?”

She sighed. “I was driving over eighty. I knew I was running late, but you know how Mom is. I couldn’t get away without a whopping breakfast.” She shook her head, then shrugged. “Anyway, I was about halfway between Van Horn and Ft. Stockton, near Balmorhea. A semi was poking along in front of me. Like I said, I was trying to make up some time. When I pulled into the passing lane to get around the truck, I heard a honk, then the truck driver blasted his horn and, in my mirror, I saw a gray SUV swerving in the lane I was pulling into, the damned passing lane. The SUV must have been passing me, but it had to have been in my…what do you call it? My blind spot. The driver of the SUV lost control and rolled over I don’t know how many times in the median. I looked back and all I could see was the damn car tumbling over and over…and the billowing dust. It was awful.”

“Did you stop?”

“No. But in my mirror I saw that the semi had pulled over and a bunch of other cars had pulled off the road. People were running toward the overturned car.” Debra blinked. “About ten minutes later three state troopers’ cars came out from the east, probably Ft. Stockton. They had their lights flashing…and their sirens blaring. Then, a few miles farther down the road, two ambulances came from the same direction.”

“Oh, God. But you don’t know if anyone was hurt?”

“How could I? I didn’t stop. I panicked.” She glared at Barrington. “I couldn’t have helped anyone anyway.”

“Did the trucker get your license plate number?”

“How would I know?” she cried, took a deep breath then coughed. “He might have been too busy pulling off the road. But he knows that the driver of an old blue Camry is the idiot who caused the whole thing.” She rubbed at her eyes. Her hands shook like Barney Fife’s. “Should I call someone? Tell them it was me that caused the accident?”

“Jesus,” said the artist. “You could call. I guess. But I don’t see what good it would do. What’s done is done.”

Debra knotted her hands in her lap. “I teach my students to take responsibility for things. How can I just walk away from this?”

“You already did. And, holy shit, there’s a big difference between responsibility and taking the blame.” Barrington winced. “You could lose your job over something like this, causing an accident. Or leaving the scene of an accident. Could you see who was in the car?”

“I think I saw a woman in the passenger’s seat. In the front seat. She looked terrified and she must have been bracing herself against the dashboard. But I might have imagined that. I was in a panic myself.”

The artist nodded slowly. “I think you should just let it go.” He turned both of his palms upward in supplication to the gods of randomness. “If they know who you are they’ll show up here pretty damn soon. If no one got your number, you might be in the clear.”

Debra harrumphed. “But I’ll have this guilt to live with. I don’t think it’s worth it. How will I ever know what happened to those people in that car?”

Barrington grinned. “I think you’re better off not knowing. If they’re okay, so much the better. If they’re not, you don’t want to know. Not really. Like you said, what could you have done?”

“I don’t know how I can live with myself,” said Debra.

“You will,” said Barrington. He exhaled heavily. Finally, after a long moment, he said, “They called from that gallery in San Antonio, the one on Hildebrand Avenue. They sold one of my paintings. The one of the coyote on the hillside. The one you liked so much.”

Debra smiled wanly. “That’s good, isn’t it? And just out of nowhere. You weren’t sure anyone would want that one.”

Darrington nodded. No, he thought, I knew someone would want it. It just takes the right person coming along at the right time. It’s all a matter of chance.

Outside, behind the garage, the feeder rested on the stump, abandoned. The frenzy was over. They must’ve had their fill, said the artist to himself. Lucky little bastards. 

He stepped through the knee-high weeds and cactuses then bent over to check if the feeder needed refilling. It was still half-full. At the base of the stump lay a hummingbird. Motionless. Lifeless. The artist was sure of it. Like a penitent on Good Friday, he got down and his knee and studied the creature then poked at it with the forefinger on his left hand. Nothing. It was dead all right. Its pinhead-sized black eye was fixed on something beyond him in the late afternoon sky. He pulled his cellphone from the hip pocket of his Wranglers. He took the picture he would need if he decided to capture the likeness on canvas. In his mind he already had a title for the piece. Nothing Contemplating Nothingness.

“What happened to you, little guy?” he said in a thin voice. “Did the others do this to you, or did it just happen? You flew all the way from Mexico, and for what? I’ll bet you never saw it coming. How would you know? Birds don’t know about this sort of thing. It just happens.” He sighed. “Now, I’ll give you a proper burial. You know how Debra is. I can’t let her find you out here. She gets all weepy over this sort of thing.”

David Larsen is a writer who lives in El Paso, Texas. His stories and poems have been published in more than forty literary journals and magazines including Cholla Needles, The Heartland Review, Floyd County Moonshine, Aethlon, Oakwood, Coneflower Cafe, Literary Heist, Change Seven, El Portal and The Raven Review.   

‘TRAIN AND WINDOW’, ‘GAY AGENDA—WITH TRASH’ & ‘LASTS, DOESN’T LAST’

Genavieve Thums is a senior in high school. Her photography follows the season and shows how she feels from day to day through a moment in time. It helps her express her complicated feelings because she doesn't always know how to deal with her emotions.

TRAIN AND WINDOW

Sun at the window,
a gold train
chugging along, heading
for a depot. I stay
under the sheet
like the dead. The sun
aims for passengers
leaving through a
glass crack.

GAY AGENDA—WITH TRASH

You may not want to live
next door to us. We have
a gay agenda
which we’ve perfected—
it isn’t quiet. I spent
years being quiet. You may
see me do something
outrageous, like take
the trash out
on Thursday nights
or even weed when
it’s not too sunny. I have
been seen clipping
coupons. It’s radical,
this dangerous agenda,
two guys holding hands
and sitting on the porch.

LASTS, DOESN’T LAST

Lake Superior: wind
soldiers guard almost
impenetrable ice forts.
Winter thinks
it will stay forever
with good reason—
yet ice breaks up
like unhappy lovers.
Open water. Spring
writes her name
on every wave.

Kenneth Pobo (he/him) is the author of twenty-one chapbooks and nine full-length collections. Recent books include Bend of Quiet (Blue Light Press), Loplop in a Red City (Circling Rivers) and Lilac And Sawdust (Meadowlark Press). Forthcoming from Fernwood Press is a book of poems called At The Window, Silence. His work has appeared in North Dakota Quarterly, South Florida Poetry Journal, Amsterdam Quarterly, Nimrod, Mudfish, Hawaii Review, and elsewhere. @KenPobo

‘Ars Amatoria’, ‘Sweet Potato’ & ‘Remaining’

Hannah Thomas Reyes is an hispanic artist from the Rio Grande valley. As a young child, she was inspired by the workings of the horror genre and the unconventional. Now as an artist, she wants to share her love for those genres, and wants to put her spin on it.

Ars Amatoria
—golden shovel after Kobayashi Issa

You may find it easier, as the others have, to fall in
love with how I make you feel than with me: this
full-lipped, ill-equipped poet headlong whirled
into the wake your smile left. You may even
find endearing the exodus of variegated butterflies
fleeing my stomach to flirt, emetically mustered
to flutter from my curl-framed face. I’ve learned
to swallow the swarm & to forgive their garish ascent; they’re
just yearning to be perceived, in all their hues, and still kept.

Sweet Potato

“One would think of a boy laying
syllables with his tongue

onto a woman’s skin: those are lines
sewn entirely of silence.” -Ilya Kaminsky

If your neck was an elegy, it was for
me. Writing toward your mouth
with the kisses that dragged us
that much closer to a place
further than sleep from our
reach. When your cheeks burnt
stories into my lips & your tears
soothed their cracks, it happened.
Once or twice in his time, a boy is
diced like a sweet potato. Coaxed
from his peel and softened, then
reduced in moments to what sweet
little he built from his roots. What’s
left makes men and poets. You once
told me you’d never love a poet but
only knew you loved me after reading
about the color of your eyes.
You don’t know yourself yet, or where
to look, the next pages all blotted
with uncertainty. I wrote them on your
forehead every morning with a ks;
in forgotten murmurs you would ask
how I can’t fathom your love
when it is here, driving the sun to rise.

Remaining

I am here under hollow skies
when September finds the city,

reading rondeaux at empty tables
to silent applause, candid in its pity.

Stubborn sunshine reminds me: to be
invisible is not to be unexposed,

and how to wake up. I am here
with ears undocked, airs discomposed,

writing answers to what absence asks
when I listen. I am drawn here

by the reassurance of being seen through;
better undistinguished than unclear.

Summer finds me in the doorway, sees
how comfortable I have gotten making

monsters of myself. I am heard by
dripping sunbeams, fall my awaking.

Julian Kanagy is a Chicago-based poet whose work sets out to explore questions he can't find the words to ask. As Editor-in-Chief of The Wild Umbrella, in regular reading, and in his own writing process, Julian appreciates intention, concision, and variety in structure. Per the advice of a mentor, he lives in search of poems that nobody else could have written.

‘Fava Memories of a Kitchen Midwife’, ‘Carnaval on the Dunes of Ceara’ & ‘Water Lessons’

Zaheer Chaudhry. This visual artist, based between Dubai and Lahore, Pakistan, finds inspiration in the rich tapestry of culture and ever-changing weather of their birthplace, the ancient town of Ajudhan/Pakpattan, Punjab. Drawn to art from a young age, they pursued professional studies at the National College of Arts (NCA) in Lahore. Recognized for their talent, they were awarded the 'Golden Residency Visa' by the Culture and Art Authorities in Dubai in 2024. Their artistic practice is a diverse blend of mixed media art, Digital Art, contemporary photography, travel storytelling, TV, theatre and film art direction, site planning, and communication design.

Fava Memories of a Kitchen Midwife

Today I harvested our fava beans.
I slide my thumbnail down their seams.
Fold back their green wings to retrieve
the embryos nestled in that spongy white.
Slick skin slithers through my fingers
falls plinking to the colander below.
I am midwife at my kitchen table.
My daughters grown, their daughters grown.
My white hair dusted with tiny purple petals.
Before me, a mound of empty shells.

Gathering these, I remember the fazenda in Brazil
where I first saw fava beans. The farmer’s wife
who taught the one-room school there,
kept her husband’s books at his bodega,
raised their twenty children, mostly grown and gone,
tossed fava from her woven sieve like swirling birds
into the golden twilight beneath the shadow of a palm.
She watched her chaff be carried by the breeze, her reflection
so palpable I could enter it, as if we measured life in fava beans.
Was it worth it? Where had it gone?
Light-distant as stardust. Womb heavy.

Carnaval on the Dunes of Ceara’

It’s just the family
but the family a tribe of fifty
descended from Portuguese, Bantu, Tupinamba’ -
everyone but me a different shade of coffee.

It’s already Fat Tuesday on the veranda.
Our make-shift band in full swing: Ignacio on drums.
Seu Lino, under a bush of white hair, strums his cavaquinho
carved from armadillo shell. The guitar riffs, the agogo’ bongs
and the tin-can cuica squeaks, as elders croon to oldies.
Barefoot kids hook a caterpillar chain that kicks its thirty legs
in samba-sync as it weaves its way through revelers.

Uncle Ribamar’s big bronze belly flashes a gold medallion
as he swivels down to the patio floor with me, while maiden aunts swirl,
unleashed at last, hands in waves above their heads like palm fronds.
Tio Chico and Tio Liborio in a duel, seeing who can dance
the longest balancing a cup of beer upon his head.

The scent of feijoada rises from the kitchen where Dona Quinquinha
stirs black beans and ham hocks until another drunk uncle bursts in,
sashays her over the blue-tiled floor, laughter flowing back outside,
where fishermen’s kids now surround the porch in ragged shorts
and kick up feathery whirls of sand with spinning moves.

When night falls only the moon is still,
its gleaming eye silent and unblinking
over the rippling waves that dance backwards
towing our momentum
out to sea.

Water Lessons

Once as a child, naked by my tub,
I watched water gush from our faucet,
its steam fading my image in the mirror,
its thrust bubbling my bath with foam.
I marveled at its abundant glistening stream
that seemed an endless glow of silver light.

I wondered how this liquid,
hot for bath, cold for thirst,
obedient to each subtle twist of wrist,
how such a precious thing as water could be free?
What if we had to pay for it like milk that arrived
in bottles weekly at our door!

Of course, I did not know about my parent’s water bill.
I did not know this water came from high in the Sierras,
a valley named Hetch-Hetchy, a word for grass that fed the Miwok.
Did not know what it cost the Miwok to flood their valley,
robbed of home, community, their link to spirit world,
so this water could flow through pipes to fill my tub.

I knew my water came in pipes, but did not know that all
water does not come in pipes - how many women in the world
must carry water on their heads from wells and rivers
or make their living washing clothes along some muddy bank
where amoebas thrive and flukes from snails that sailed on slave ships
can make their urine bleed, their kidneys fail.

Later I learned how water is abused and must be treated.
How it is polluted, hoarded, stolen from the dispossessed.
How this war we’re funding now is fought for water and the gas it hides.
Water, not an endless flow, but finite like our planet. Like our life.
So much in childhood I did not know, yet even in unknowing
at that moment by my tub, watching water flow, I sensed its sanctity.

Ruth Mota currently resides in Santa Cruz, California after living a decade in Brazil and working as an international health trainer. Her poems often reflect her experiences in Latin America and Africa. Over fifty of her poems have been published in online and print journals including The Atlanta Review, Gyroscope Review, Duo, Terrapin Books and others.

‘Waking Up to A Nightmare’

Clarissa Cervantes is a travel researcher photographer. Clarissa also supplies freelance articles on a variety of topics for newspaper, blogs, websites, and magazines such as USA Today. Clarissa's photo gallery includes images from all over the world, where she finds inspiration to share her photographs with others through her creative lens, inviting the viewer to question the present, look closer, explore more the array of emotions, and follow the sunlight towards a brighter future.

Waking up to a Nightmare

Feb. 23, 2005, ended like most Wednesdays. After driving a Dirt Boys dump truck for 12 hours, Mark Lunsford—an uneducated, chain-smoking, long-haired biker living in Homosassa, Fla.—took a shower, threw on a Lynyrd Skynyrd T-shirt and a pair of Levi’s, and got “Lost.” A few minutes into the hit TV show, his father, Archie, joined him, plopping down on his La-Z-Boy. Mark’s mother, Ruth, remained in their doublewide’s second living room, memorizing Psalms as if studying for an exam like her granddaughter, Jessica, who was scheduled to take the Florida Comprehensive Assessment Test (FCAT) the following day.

About half an hour later, the Lunsfords heard family friend Sharon Armstrong bringing Jessie back from the weekly King’s Kids program at the nearby Faith Baptist Church. Sharon had been preparing Jessie for the FCAT, Florida’s high-stakes No Child Left Behind exam. She also taught her sign language. As she drove away, Jessie signaled, “I love you” to her tutor. Then the 9-year-old loped in through the back entrance, lobbed her brown sandals against the laundry room’s wall, and leapt onto her father’s lap, blocking Mark’s view of the wood-paneled television set.

Kissing her cheeks, Mark slid off the sofa to enable her to turn it into a trampoline. Slumping on the floor, his eyes darted from the TV to his airborne daughter. Jessie dove off the couch and dropped on the floor between the kitchen and the living room to perform a split. Mark and Archie hollered in approval. Jessie bowed and strutted into the bathroom to get ready for bed.

When she came out, her long brown hair clinging to her back like a wet mop, she pecked Mark’s face with goodnight kisses and said, “I love you, daddy.”

“I love you, too, sugar,” he said, hugging her and taking off to spend the night at his girlfriend’s trailer, a few miles away.

Mark avoided bringing women home. He felt it would have been unfair to Jessie because his relationships tended to dissolve within a few months. After two failed marriages, he scoffed at settling down. Although Carmen Howe complained about his commitment issues and threatened to turn him away when he showed up unannounced at her doorstep, she let him in with no complaints this time.

They had met a few months earlier at the Saloon down the road on karaoke night, when he noticed her swaying to Jessie’s rendition of Shania Twain’s “That Don’t Impress Me Much.” But he looked away after seeing that the Hispanic brunette hung out with two underage girls. Assuming she, too, was a high schooler, he lost interest.

He kept running into her during his weekly karaoke night-outs with Jessie but he paid her little attention until one evening, when he heard one of the girls say, “Mom, can I have a dollar?”

Mark and Carmen exchanged bashful glances. He needed a couple of weeks to muster the nerve to say something.

“Hey,” he muttered when Carmen strolled into his aisle at Winn-Dixie one day.

She wondered what took him so long. They made up for it by skipping over the dating stage. Nonetheless, he stopped short of committing. He considered his so-called phobia a survival instinct. The last time he was married, to Angela Bryant, whom he described as “hotter than a fox in a forest fire,” he got burned. She ran off with one of his friends, leaving him alone with Jessie.

Angie’s abandonment gave Archie and Ruth a chance to play an even greater role in their granddaughter’s upbringing. They had been taking care of Jessie in Homosassa during the summers and holidays breaks while Mark and Angie stayed in the Charlotte-neighboring city of Gastonia, N.C.

In 2004, Mark and Jessie moved in with them. Jessie viewed Ruth as more of a new mother than an old grandmother.

As he drove his parents’ old Chrysler Imperial to Carmen’s, Mark thanked God for giving him such helpful parents. They deserved a great deal of the credit for Jessie’s happy-go-lucky demeanor and excellent manners. Playful yet respectful, smart yet humble, Jessie attended two weekly church services, helped around the home, dressed up her Barbie and Bratz dolls with sewing scraps, did her homework with little prodding, and in the Southern tradition in which she’d been raised, listened to her elders.

Mark would soon wish she was less obedient.

***

On weeknights, Jessie rarely asked to stay up late. After Mark took off, she tidied up her room, picked out clothes for school, wrote in her diary, and declared, “Bring on the FCAT.” Ruthie tucked her in at 10 p.m.

A few minutes later, Ruthie said goodnight to Archie. He wanted to join her but knew that if he went to sleep too early, he’d wake up too early, so he forced himself to stay up an hour longer. Sitting outside Jessie’s door, which she insisted on keeping open, he watched muted TV.

At about 11:15 p.m., he shut it off the television. He closed Jessie’s door, dropped his dentures into a cup of water, and tried to catch some Zs, a challenge in his age.

At 4 a.m., he woke up and let out their Dachshund, Corky. He scrambled eggs, fried bacon, and poured glasses of grapefruit juice.

When Corky returned, Archie fed him, put him back in his living-room crib, and slipped back into bed.

Usually, Archie just rested during the two hours he had to wait before taking his heart medication. But that morning, he fell back asleep.

***

Beep ... beep … beep … The alarm clock sounded like a truck backing up. Mark heard it coming from Jessie’s room as he unlocked his parents’ back-entrance door at 5:30 a.m. The mechanical chirping mixed with the sound of rain hitting the trailer’s aluminum shell but seemed to have little effect on his daughter, who, a few months earlier, slept through a hurricane.

She often woke up early to watch “Winnie the Pooh” and other Disney Channel cartoons before getting ready for school. That morning, Mark reckoned, her dreams kept her entertained. So, he wiped the mud off his boots on the welcome mat and headed straight to their bathroom, which Jessie kept spick and span.

Mark washed his bony face and brushed his tobacco-stained teeth. When he turned off the faucet, he noticed Jessie’s alarm persisted. Beep ... beep ...

He poked his head into Jessie’s toy-filled room. He saw an empty bed. He spotted the neatly folded Bratz T-shirt and cheetah-fur-bottom jeans his fashion-conscious daughter laid out the previous night. Her white sneakers waited underneath the chair. He figured she crawled under the covers with his folks.

He opened the door to their room and whispered, “Jessie?”

His father snored; his mother squinted at him from above the sheets.

“Mom,” he said, “Where’s Jessie?”

“In her room,” she said.

“No, she’s not.”

“Look beside her bed,” his father said, his baritone Kentucky twang echoing. “Sometimes, she sleeps on the floor.”

Mark looked around and under her twin-size bed. He checked inside her closet. He found no sign or trace of her. Her toys, stuffed animals, notebooks, books, and bags rested, undisturbed, on top of her nightstand and dresser. Her karaoke machine sat quietly beneath her closed window.

The alarm’s beeping bounced off the trailer’s thin walls. Beep-eep ... Mark shut it off.

He exited to see his parents approaching. As they entered her room, Mark went into his, across the tiny hall. He looked under his bed and in his closet. Nothing. Panic seized his throat. His chest tightened as if to keep his rapidly beating heart from rupturing his ribcage. He knew something was terribly wrong. Jessie had never given him reason to worry. She followed her routine, showed up everywhere on time, and communicated constantly with her family. If Mark lost track of her for even a few minutes, he could always check with his parents.

His eyes welling, he scurried to see if any of the entrance doors were unlocked. He grabbed hold of the back porch’s sliding-door handle. It stood still, locked tight. He sprinted to the front door.

It was unlocked.

“Call the police,” Mark cried.

His mother dialed 911.

Mark ran outside, tears streaking down his face. “Jessie! Jessie!? Where are you?! Jessie!?!” he screamed, racing around the property, throwing open the flimsy doors to the half-dozen sheds scattered on the 2 acres, peering inside their four cars, and flashing a light under the trailer.

“Did she go for a walk?” he thought. “Is she hiding? Is she mad about something? She must be somewhere around here. She’d never run away.”

He covered Sonata Road, scuttling through puddles and kicking up pebbles. An eerie silence permeated the neighborhood. Even the neighborhood’s dogs, who inhabited nearly every yard and usually barked at the slightest sight or sound, kept quiet.

Mark jumped into the Chrysler to hit the area’s main drag, Cardinal Drive. He rolled down the window and yelled Jessie’s name into the darkness. He saw no one.

The sun peeked over the horizon. In the distance, he heard sirens wailing. At the edge of Cardinal, he parked by Emily’s Family Restaurant king lot to consider his next move. He failed to shift his mind out of first gear.

He made a U-turn to cruise up and down the streets. When his cellphone vibrated in his pocket, he immediately reached for it with shaky hands.

“The cops are here,” his mom said, crying.

He raced home. A Citrus County Sheriff’s Deputy greeted him at the back-entrance door and told him to remain calm.

“Sure,” Mark thought, “just as soon as we find Jessie.”

The deputy walked through the home, craning his neck underneath beds, and flinging open closet doors.

Corky incessantly barked at the deputy, who swept through the home a second time.

Holding up Jessie’s diary, the deputy asked, “Is this your daughter’s?”

He handed the diary to Mark, who would’ve never otherwise read it. Her words jumped off the page: “Dear diary, I have a boyfriend, his name is Jacob.”

The deputy sat in front of the family computer clicking desktop folders, photos, and files.

Soon, more than a dozen deputies invaded the trailer, spilling onto the front yard. One taped off Sonata a block from the home with yellow ribbon. Several went knocking on neighbors’ doors. A few examined the Lunsford residence’s objects, walls, and carpets. They took fingerprints and photographed every nook and cranny. They went through sheds and cars and confiscated the computer and clothes hamper.

Mark’s search for the most precious thing in his life soon took an unexpected detour as he learned of the deputies’ theory: The Lunsfords—at least one of them, anyhow—knew of Jessie’s whereabouts.

***

The question dumbfounded Mark. “Did you have anything to do with Jessie’s disappearance?” a detective asked.

“What?” Mark said.

“You heard me,” the detective said, sticking his thumbs between his belt and midsection.

“No, I did not,” Mark said. “If you ever ask me that again, I’ll punch you in the face. Just please find my daughter.”

“We’re going door to door, searching every room in every home in this neighborhood,” The detective said. “Wanna help find Jessie? Answer the damn questions.”

Mark and his parents sat at their dining room table and tried to fill in the blanks for the detectives. Did they know where Jessie was? “No.” Did they hear anything during the night? “Noting,” Archie and Ruth said. Did they see anything? “No.” Did they find even a trace of a struggle? “No.” How come Corky never barked? He slept under several blankets that muffled the sound around him, Ruth said. Did they lock all the doors? They thought they did, although it appears they accidentally left the front door open.

“Sometimes,” Mark said, “it looks like it’s locked when it’s not.”

Archie opened the door, twisted the little lock inside the knob, and closed the door. It looked shut. Uttering something about suction, he reached for the handle and opened the door without having to unlock it.

All the Lunsford wanted to do was to go search for Jessie. At the same time, they figured that, if they could help find her by racking their brains for bits of information, then that’s what they’d do. They went beyond answering the police’s questions honestly and fully—they volunteered everything and anything that popped into their minds, even if it seemed trivial, even if they feared it might get them in trouble.

The police took advantage of their naïve cooperation. Without letting them know they could’ve refused to go, the detective and a sergeant stuffed Mark and Archive into unmarked cars at 10 a.m. and hauled them into the police station in nearby Inverness.

The worst day of their lives was about to get uglier.

They put them in different interrogation rooms, where they continued hammering them with the same questions. The sergeant wanted to know where Mark went the previous night? “To Carmen’s.” When did you last see Jessie? “Around 9 p.m.” Did anyone have a key to the Lunsford home? “No.” Why did you move to Homosassa?

“I needed help raising Jessie,” Mark said. “I work 12-hour days. My parents love her. They wanted to participate.”

“Are you sure you made the right decision?” the sergeant said.

“Yes.”

“Where’s Jessie’s mother?”

“Ohio.”

“When did you last see her?”

“We tried to see her last year.”

“Does she spend time with her daughter?”

“No.”

The sergeant raised his eyebrows.

He became annoyed when Mark answered his cellphone in the detective’s presence one too many times. But when his Big Sis Sue called from North Carolina, Mark had to talk to her.

“What happened to Jessie?” she asked.

“We don’t know,” Mark said. “We can’t find her.”

“What do you mean you can’t find her?”

“I came home this morning and she was gone.”

The detective listened intently. Besides irritation, his expression projected skepticism.

“Where did she go?” Sue said. She still didn’t get it.

“They don’t know, baby,” Mark said. “I’m at the police department. They’ve been looking for her. They tell me they’ve got bloodhounds looking for her, they’ve got choppers looking for her, and they can’t find her. What are we going to do?”

Sue burst out crying.

“I’m sorry, sis,” Mark said.

“It’s not your fault,” Sue said.

After Mark hung up, The detective asked him to turn off the cellphone and control his emotions.

“I can’t have you upset when you take tests,” he said.

He gave Mark a voice-stress test, a simpler version of the polygraph.

“Is your first name Mark?” he asked.

“Yes.”

“Are you wearing a watch?”

“No.”

“Are you now wearing a hat?”

“No.”

“I want you to lie to this question—is the wall carpeted?”

“No.”

“Is today Thursday?”

“Yes.”

“Do you know where Jessica is now?”

“No.”

Saying he was going to chart Mark’s responses, The detective left, saying, “I’ll be right back. Give you a chance to decompress.”

He returned a few minutes later. He asked the same set of questions again. “Is your name Mark?”

When Mark passed the test, the detectives shifted their full attention to 73-year-old Archie. Although he had stayed out of trouble for 50 years, he had a jaded past. In the early 1950s, he slept with an underage girl, drove his son across state lines without his ex-wife’s knowledge, and was accused of rape by a married woman.

The Citrus County detectives pressured Archie with a blind fervor to reveal what he has done with Jessie. When he got up to leave after several nerve-wrecking hours, they pinned his arms behind his back and ordered him to sit back down.

Meanwhile, Mark mostly sat by himself in another interrogation room. Although he yearned to spend that invaluable time searching for Jessie, he saw no way out of that police station.

At some point, he stuck his face in the “concealed” interrogation-room camera and said, “I’m going out for a smoke.”

An FBI agent accompanied him. He put a match to his filter-less Camel and outlined why he and the other detectives believed Archie had something, maybe everything, to do with Jessie’s disappearance.

“Oh, we’re not saying he did anything,” the FBI agent said. “We’re just saying it looks bad.”

He offered no specific theories, just broad allegations. Initially, Mark dismissed them. His dad was a great parent and grandfather. Mark modeled himself as a father after him. But as the detective and the sergeant fired round after round of allegations, suspicions, and statistics—noting, for instance, that most of these cases tend to be “inside jobs”—and as Mark increasingly felt drained and disorientated, he started to believe them.

It was Archie’s “abnormal” behavior that tipped off the investigators, they said. To them, he appeared aloof and calculated, refusing to fully cooperate, arguing, and withholding information. Halfway through the first day, they said they found Jessie’s blood on his underwear. Mark’s weak frame of mind precluded him from questioning how they drew such a conclusion so quickly. He became fully convinced of his father’s guilt.

The detective had him watch his dad being shaken down by the detective. Mark’s lips quivered as he witnessed their standoff through a small black-and-white monitor.

“Look,” The detective whispered in Mark’s ear, “Archie shows no remorse.”

“We all make mistakes,” the detective said to Archie. “I’m not here to judge you. I just want to find out why this mistake happened.”

“Lord,” Archie said, “I wouldn’t have touched that child for nothing.”

Suspecting his father greatly troubled Mark. Yet, in a strange way, it also provided some relief. He hoped he’d finally learn what happened to Jessie. He thought maybe he’d even see her that night.

So, when the detective suggested he confront Archie, Mark breathed deep and tried to summon the strength to shake the truth out of his father.

Mark always had a mutually respectful, caring relationship with his father. Sure, they sometimes fought, especially when Mark was younger. But they never had a major rift. They certainly never accused each other of anything criminal, much less something like this.

The sun was setting when Mark entered the interrogation room.

“They’re accusing me of doing it,” Archie said.

They talked about DNA evidence, which the detectives told them they had.

“I don’t understand DNA evidence,” Mark said. “Do you know where Jessie’s at?”

Archie clenched his jaws, shook his head, and cast his eyes.

“They’re going to ask me to take a lie detector,” Archie said, “and I won’t.”

“Do whatever they want, dad,” Mark said. “I just want to find Jessie.”

“That’s all both of us want,” he said.

“I’m supposed to ask you if you know where Jessie is,” Mark said, for the fourth time. “I’m sorry, dad.”

“I don’t hold that against you,” he said. “If I’d known, I’d tell.”

Mark pushed him to go back to working with the detectives. Archie reluctantly agreed.

As Mark left the room, he remained suspicious of his father.

Mark completely gave up on his dad a few hours later, when he found out that Archie failed his polygraph.

***

The ts never told Archie which part of the lie-detector test he failed. He couldn’t imagine. When they asked him if he ever stole from an employer, he told them no, although Fearless Transportation in Dayton, Ohio, fired him after 20 years for allegedly stealing 55 lunch minutes. He swore he worked every minute he’d ever punched in. He paid a heavy price for that “free lunch.” He lost his home and retirement pension.

When the Citrus County deputies asked Archie if he ever hit Ruthie, he said, “I have never laid a hand over her.” Why in God’s name would he do something like that to the mother of his three children?

When the detective said, “I have all the answers, I just want to see how honest you’re going to be with me,” Archie should’ve realized that he had become a suspect—maybe even the suspect. It took him a few hours to catch on.

Delving into his distant past, to a time when he lived recklessly, he gave the detectives the full details about that 1950s kidnapping charge. His first wife won custody of their child, Drake, when they divorced. She had a difficult time raising him in the bad section of Dayton in which they resided. Archie lived in Indianapolis and drove a truck. One day, he made the 100-mile trip to Dayton to see Drake. He found his 18-month-old rolling in trash in front of his babysitter’s house.

Unattended children ran amok in and around the dilapidated, dirty dwelling. When his boy saw him, he smiled, cried, “Daddy!” and waved his chubby arms.

Archie picked him up, kissed him, and held him tight, soiling his shirt and getting a good whiff of his drooping diapers.

The babysitter emerged from the house holding another baby. “I haven’t seen his mom in two, three weeks,” she said. “You’re his dad, aren’t you? Why don’t you take him with you? He’d be much better off.”

Archie drove Drake to Indianapolis. He washed the little fellow, bought him new clothes, fed him and strummed the guitar for him. He was a brand-new boy by the time his mother showed up late that night with a police escort. They arrested Archie without bothering to hear his side.

Archie next saw Drake at his arraignment. In a policeman’s arms, in front of the judge, he ignored his mother and wailed, “Daddy! Daddy!”

“Let that man hold his son,” the judge said.

He ordered Archie and his ex-wife to settle their differences out of court, which they did, that day. They agreed to let Archie’s parents raise Drake on their Kentucky farm, and that was the end of it. That is, until Feb. 24, 2005, when the police again labeled Archie a kidnapper.

They also wanted to know everything about an attempted rape charge, also from the early 1950s. Problem was, Archie knew very little about that incident. He had no idea why a woman who stayed with her husband in the Cocoa Beach motel he had just started managing claimed he tried to rape her. His attorney said she was trying to extort money.

His father put up a $5,000 bond to release him from jail, where Archie sat for three days. The accuser never showed up at court, so the judge threw out the case. But this stranger ruined the new life Ruthie and Archie had started with their first baby, Sue, in the Sunshine State. They moved back to Ohio.

As Archie exposed his warts to the Citrus County detectives, he realized they’d already made up their minds. The detective stopped just short of saying “gotcha” when he brought that, in his late 20s, Archie had consensual sex with an underage girl, Linda Lively. He thought she was 17. The detective said she was “younger than that.” He didn’t give her age, and Archie didn’t ask. He said he received a suspended six-month sentence and a $500 fine.

Archie knew what he did was wrong. In the mid-1950s, he changed his ways and attended church services every Sunday. Seeing the detective drawing a direct line from Lively to Jessie, however, made him lose faith in the Citrus County Sheriff’s Office.

“We’re at a point in this investigation when we’re no longer wondering what happened,” the detective said. “We’re trying to figure out why it happened. There’s a reason why we brought you here.”

“I’m sure,” Archie said.

“Why would Jessie ask a neighbor to help her get out of the house because of you?”

“I have no idea,” Archie said. “I didn’t know she would even do such a thing.”

Frustrated, the detective switched to explaining the concept of DNA evidence. Then he spelled out the police’s thinking. “There’s no way what happened in that house was a stranger coming in,” he said. “There’s no way Jessie walked off with a stranger. Everything we’ve got is pointing at you.”

He asked if Archie felt “bad.”

“Bad?”

“Yeah.”

“I don’t know how you’re supposed to feel when somebody is leading you to believe that you’ve brought harm to your granddaughter,” Archie said. “I don’t know how I’m supposed to act or look or anything. But I wouldn’t harm that child. No child.”

“I think some things have been going on between you and Jess,” the detective said. “I think Jess goes through some things at school, starts to learn some things about good touches and bad touches and things start to escalate. Maybe she was going to tell somebody.”

“I can’t believe I’m hearing this,” Archie said. “I’ve seen it on television, I’ve heard it. I don’t dislike you for it, I just don’t understand.”

The detective doubled down on his accusations, intensifying his attack with more baseless speculations. He told Archie that Jessie loved only her daddy and grandma, not him.

The detective said they already had enough evidence to wrap up the case.

“I hope you do,” Archie said. “But I can’t believe I can be guilty of doing something and not know it.”

“Well, you’re right,” he said. “You’ve done stuff and you know it. Maybe you’re embarrassed.”

“Embarrassed? I’m paralyzed.”

The detective proposed going over everything again. Archie saw no reason to do that.

“I’m not guilty of anything except loving a grandchild,” I said. “I’ve got nine of them. If you had to get an education to do this, you wasted your money.”

When Archie refused to continue, the detective brought in Mark.

Archie told Mark he knew nothing. But, unable to turn down his distraught son’s desperate plea, he agreed to again cooperate with the detectives.

After absorbing verbal hits for several more hours, he felt so exhausted, so emotionally and mentally drained, so shaken up, that he contemplated confessing. If Mark believes them, he reckoned, maybe they’re right. He must have committed a crime. His brain throbbed as he strained to remember what, exactly.

A law-enforcement official Archie had never met asked if he wanted to go get a sandwich. Mark later identified this man as the sheriff.

“I just want to go home,” Archie said.

“C’mon,” the sheriff said, “let’s go for a ride.”

As they walked to his car, Archie complained about the detectives’ abusive behavior.

“If I gave you these keys,” the sheriff said, holding them up, “would you drive me to where you think Jessie is?”

“I can’t tell you where Jessie is,” Archie said. “I don’t know.”

***

As time ran out of that endless day, the detectives released Mark on one condition: that he stay away from his parents’ home that night.

He went straight there.

His friend Penny drove him. Turning onto Cardinal, they spotted several antennas rising from TV vans that dotted the trailer park. She dropped him off at his parents’ front yard, where the Sheriff’s Office set up its mobile command center, breaking police protocol and curtailing the scent trails.

Detective Gary Atchison approached Mark, saying Archie gave him the wrong storage key.

“Dude, you take me over there,” Mark said, “I’ll cut the lock off.”

Two deputies waited at the storage facility. Mark used a bolt cutter to let them in.

They looked through his clutter of furniture and nick knacks.

“It’s not like they’ll find Jessie in there,” Mark thought.

“Whose stuff is this?” Atchison said, pointing at Mark’s dresser drawers and little wooden boxes.

“It’s my stuff,” Mark said, “from North Carolina.”

They uncovered only one object that interested them—a bong.

“Do you smoke marijuana?” Atchison said.

“Yeah,” Mark said.

They returned home just as Dawsy dropped off Archie.

“Why did the sheriff drive you?” Mark asked.

“That was the sheriff?” Archie said.

The distrust that Archie spotted in his son’s eyes deepened his pain and confusion.

The agents and deputies started eyeing Mark. They knew he’d agreed to stay away that night. So, he asked Archie to take him to Carmen’s. They drove in silence. Two FBI trucks—one black, one white—followed them.

The trucks parked overnight outside Carmen’s trailer.

Mark and Carmen put on a boring show for them. She held him, turned out the lights, and said, “Get some sleep, baby.”

Lying on his back, Mark stared at the wobbly ceiling fan for hours, tears wetting his pillow like a drip.

***

At around 1 a.m. on Feb. 24, John Evander Couey—a slight, bald 46-year-old with Swiss-cheese facial skin and glassy, vacant eyes—gazed at Jessie’s bedroom from his window. Coming off a crack-cocaine high, he watched for signs of Mark returning home for the night.

The previous three nights, he remembered, Mark slept at home. So Couey waited patiently to turn his vile fantasy into a terrifying reality. He had planned it for weeks. Working as a mason’s helper at Homosassa Elementary and living 150 yards from her home, he stalked Jessie without raising any suspicion.

During that period, he also eluded his probation officer, Mary Doyle, who had overseen him for nearly two years. She knew he spent 59 days in jail in 2004 for violating his probation by driving under the influence of marijuana. She realized he failed to check in with her upon his release or return her mailed notices. But she had no idea he was a convicted sex offender with a long rap sheet.

At the age of 8, while living with his aunt, he tried to rape his 10-year-old niece. In the mid-1970s, when he was a teenager, his father kicked him out of their home in the East Florida town of Bunnell for luring a 5-year-old into the woods and making her take down her pants. In the 1980s, his wife, Karen, left him after discovering that he molested her 6-year-old daughter. And in the early 1990s, the state locked him up for two years at the Madison Correctional Institute in London, Ohio, for masturbating in front of a 5-year-old.

The police arrested Couey 22 other times for offenses ranging from burglaries to drunk driving to drug possession.

In November 2004, the Florida Department of Law Enforcement (FDLE) sent Dawsy a letter asking him round up 58 sex offenders, including Couey. A month later, sheriff’s officials issued a warrant to arrest Couey for violating his probation but neglected to track him down.

In January 2005, Couey moved in with his half-sister, Dorothy Marie Dixon, across the street from the Lunsfords.

Aware of the problems he faced and posed, Dorothy considered shutting him out. She had an easy excuse. Four other people already crowded her trailer—her boyfriend Matt Dittrich, her daughter Madie Secord, her son-in-law Gene Secord, and the Secords’ 2-year-old son, Josh. But realizing she served as Couey’s last line of defense, Dorothy let him stay. She gave him his own bedroom, cash, and crack cocaine.

Dorothy’s hospitality to a convicted sex-offender gravely upset Madie, who struggled with the lingering trauma of Uncle Johnny molesting her when she was 7. Knowing he also raped her younger sister when she was 6, Madie feared for Josh and fought with her mom over Couey’s stay, to no avail.

Madie pounced at a chance to remove their danger from her home on Feb. 10, when deputies showed up at her doorstep to question her crackaholic family about a drug dealer. She told them they should arrest her uncle for breaking his probation.

Although they showed more understanding than her mother, the deputies ignored her plea and left without even questioning Couey.

At 3 a.m. two weeks later, Couey climbed down a ladder perched against his window and crossed Sonata. Walking through the Lunsfords’ open gate, he hesitated for a moment, thinking, What if Mark suddenly returned?

Mark intimidated him, what with his biker tattoos, quiet confidence, long hair, and roaring Harley. But Couey had become obsessed with Jessie. He moved methodically, like a feral cat on a hunt. He tore through the Lunsfords’ back porch screen with kitchen knife, unlocked their metal door, and nudged the glass door. He failed to slide it open.

Couey checked the back-entrance door, a few yards away. It was locked. He hopped down the wooden steps and headed home, bypassing the Lunsfords’ front door.

Front doors gave him the heebie-jeebies. So he kept walking.

When he reached the Lunsfords’ gate, he stopped, surveyed the scene, and stared at Jessie’s window, his breathing escalating, his mind filling with tempting images. He approached the front door. He put his shaking hands on the handle. It was unlocked.

Guided by several nightlights throughout the home, he made his way into Jessie’s room. He stood over her. He tapped her on her shoulder. Her eyes popped open.

“Don’t yell or nothing,” he whispered. “I’m taking you to see your daddy.”

Wearing a pink silk nightgown and white shorts and clutching her dolphin, Jessie followed Couey. He stood only a few inches taller than her, but he was a grown-up, and she thought she had to listen to him, even if she’d never met him.

He led her to his back yard and pointed at the ladder. She tried to steady her bare feet on the bottom rungs. He pushed her up into his filthy bedroom, followed her in, knocked down the ladder, and shut the shudders behind them.

Couey molested her and made her lie by his side.

A couple of hours later, they heard Mark yelling Jessie’s name through the light rain.

His voice revived her spirit.

As the sirens wailed, Couey shoved Jessie inside his closet and told her to stay put and keep quiet. She heard helicopters hovering overhead. She clasped her dolphin.

At 9 a.m.—when her classmates were taking the FCAT—Jessie heard the police questioning Madie outside the trailer.

The deputies asked Madie if they could look around the trailer’s perimeter. They circled the home, found nothing suspicious, and continued canvassing the rest of the neighborhood. Had they asked to search inside the home, she later said, she would’ve let them. She insisted she had no idea Jessie was in her uncle’s closet.

At 8 p.m. that first day, the police returned to Couey’s trailer. They knocked on the door. Gene opened it. “Have you seen a 9-year-old girl?” deputy Scott Briggs said. “Brown hair, 4-foot-10, 70 pounds.”

“No,” Gene said. “I heard she’s missing.”

Deputy Lee Entrekin asked Gene for the names of the trailer’s residents. Knowing his mother-in-law wanted to protect her half-brother, he mentioned everyone except Couey.

Gene gave Briggs and Entrekin permission to look around in the back yard. They noticed nothing noteworthy and returned to the command center, 70 yards away. There, Dawsy spoke with them and a few other deputies and detectives.

“I got my man,” the sheriff said.

They nodded, knowing whom he had in mind.

It wasn’t Couey.

***

The next morning at 5 in Carmen’s bed, Mark gave up trying to fall asleep. He kissed her on her forehead and tiptoed outside into the predawn blackness. He knocked on the white FBI truck to wake up the agent, who slumbered on the steering wheel.

“Hey,” Mark said, “can you give me a ride?”

The agent orientated himself, switched on his headlights and rolled down the window, saying, “Hold on a minute.”

Anxious to get home, Mark started walking toward US-19, Homosassa’s commercial spine. The agent picked him up. Neither spoke.

Two deputies guarding Sonata raised the yellow tape to let them through. The FBI agent dropped Mark off right there, made a U-turn, and took off.

Mark walked to the RV command center. It stood empty. He headed to his trailer. He pictured Jessie sleeping peacefully, a cut-and-glued apology note from the kidnapper by her side.

The sight of her empty room shredded his vision.

It looked exactly the same, yet totally different.

Tears, which had been trickling from his eyes on and off for 24 hours, poured out with a flurry, blurring his vision. He nearly missed the edge of the bed when he sat down. He steadied himself with both hands, wiped his face with his T-shirt, swallowed hard, and took a Halloween photo of Jessie out of his wallet. He recalled how dressing her up as a cat and drawing whiskers on her face.

It was at that moment—when he sat there, hopeless, helpless, looking at her photo through a fog—that, in his mind, he started to hear Jessie cry. He believed he wasn’t hallucinating or even imagining. He heard her. The sound of her breath jolted him, instilling renewed hope. He knew she was alive.

“We’ll bring you home soon,” He whispered.

When he heard someone coming in, he put away the picture, remembering that the detective said he’d pick him up first thing in the morning.

Even though he expected to spend another wasteful, humiliating day at the station, he trusted the police. He trusted that they knew their jobs. He trusted that they were conducting a door-to-door, room-by-room search of every home in the neighborhood. And he trusted that their often-puzzling questions would help lead to Jessie. What if he had information that could aid their efforts, let’s say, about his father?

As he followed the detective to his unmarked car, reporters approached them.

“Don’t talk to them,” the detective muttered under his breath.

Mark gazed at the ground.

He thought he knew what to expect when he arrived at the police station, but the detectives threw him off by putting him in a larger, nicer room and bringing up something he immediately admitted doing—something that, by the end of the day, he feared would land him in serious legal trouble.

Porn.

The detectives asked if he visited adult websites. He said yes. They inserted a disc containing links taken off the Lunsfords’ computer and rotated the laptop toward him.

“Did you look at these?” the detective said, as provocative pictures popped up.

“Yeah, I probably did,” Mark said. “I don’t remember all of them, but it’s a good possibility.”

The detective moved the laptop closer to him and uttered, “She don’t look 18. Have you been looking at child porn?”

“No,” Mark said. “I’ve never seen this photo.”

He showed him several more unfamiliar images. The women all appeared to be older than 18.

The detective said someone looked at them on the computer the previous day at 9 a.m.

“Well,” Mark said, “it wasn’t me.”

“What about your dad?” the detective said.

“He doesn’t know how to use a computer,” Mark said. “I remember seeing one of y’all at the computer at that time.”

Nonetheless, his pornography confession preoccupied the detectives, who spent the day going over it, over and over. Mark thought they might charge him with some sort of a crime—not for viewing child porn, which he never had, but for engaging in what he’d always considered to be a legal activity: looking at naked women. Convinced he faced a court date, he started devising a defense.

“I have a little girl,” Mark told the detective, “I can’t have magazines lying around the house.”

When the detective noted that Jessie used the computer, Mark said he always closed every website he viewed.

Although the detectives never named Mark as an official suspect, they treated him like one. They reacted to his answers like lied-to parents. After they gave him a polygraph in the afternoon, they said it came out “inconclusive.” Mark wondered what they were talking about.

***

In the morning, when the FBI asked Ruth to spend the second day of Jessie’s disappearance with them at the police station, she immediately got up to get ready. Archie had warned her about that place, but she wanted to see it for herself.

Archie, however, saw no benefit in Ruth’s Inverness field trip. When she came out of the bedroom holding her purse, he was arguing with the agents.

“Please don’t take her,” he said. “She’s weak, she’s down, she’s hurt.”

“It’s all right,” Ruth said, putting her hand on Archie’s.

“She can’t tell you anything,” Archie said.

“I’ll tell you what I can,” she told the agents.

Archie threw up his hands.

As the agents opened the back door for Ruth, Archie said, “Wait.” All three of them turned around. “Please don’t do her like you did me and Mark.”

At the station, the agents started by questioning Ruth about Mark. They inquired about his lifestyle. She told them to ask him. They brought up his “pornography habit.” She said, “Ask Mark, not me.” This went on a while.

Ruth continued along the same vein when the detectives asked her about Archie. They wanted to know her husband’s vices, criminal background, and relationships with women.

“Why don’t you ask him?” Although she knew the answers—at the very least, she had her opinions—she stood her ground.

When they asked Ruth about Archie’s relationship with Jessie, she threw the agents a curve ball. She said they loved teasing each other. She gave them an example: One day, as Archie baked a cherry pie, Jessie walked into the kitchen just as he yelled, “Ruthie, look what you made me do.”

She saw him fanning singed crust. “It’s not Grandma’s fault you burned the pie,” Jessie said, throwing down her head in an exclamation point and marched to her room.

Archie laughed so hard, he forgot to save the pie, which burned.

That’s how they got along, Ruth said. They entertained each other and anyone else who happened to be around.

The agents, however, were not amused. They continued quizzing Ruth about Archie. She reverted to her sealed-lips approach. So they changed topics. They started out logically, with questions about the night Jessie vanished.

“Help us to understand something: your dog, Corky, barks a lot,” they said. “Do you mean to tell us that he was quiet the whole night?”

“He barks, all right,” Ruth said. “But when he’s in bed with all those big blankets that he has, there’s no way he’ll hear you unless you ring that doorbell.”

“There’s no way whoever took Jessie rang the doorbell, we’ll give you that,” they said. “But you have to admit, that dog barks nonstop.”

“He only started doing that, and a few other strange things, since Jessie disappeared,” Ruth said. “He has a whole new temperament. He’ll go toward you then back up. And he won’t go into his bed.”

Ruth put on her canine voice, saying, “Somebody came in here and took Jessie, and I didn’t hear them and didn’t see them, so I’m never going to get in my bed ever again.”

Although her animated explanation failed to erase the detectives’ cynicism, it did prompt them to move on.

“Did you ever lie to your grandpa?” they asked.

“Lie to my grandpa?” Ruth said. They nodded. “I’m in my 70s and you’re asking me if I ever lied to my grandpa and he’s been dead since the 1950s?”

They were serious.

“I don’t think I ever lied to my grandpa.”

“You’re not telling us the truth.”

“Look,” Ruth said, “we knew better than to lie to grandpa.”

Just as Archie predicted, they made her take a polygraph.

She failed.

She had no idea how or why. All she knew was that the detectives said she put up “red flags.”

She sat up straight and said, “Tell me how I can help you.”

“Tell us—what did you lie to your grandfather about?”

She wanted to say, “Why don’t you ask him?”

Instead, she said, “Nothing.”

***

In the evening, when the detectives let Mark go, he felt relieved for a moment, until he realized that a second day had gone by without a sign of his daughter.

“Did y’all find any physical evidence?” he asked the detective as he drove me home.

“What do you think this is, CSI?” the detective said.

“It’s your job to find evidence,” Mark said. “Isn’t it?”

“We will.”

The detective had other things on his mind.

“Tell me about your girlfriends,” he said.

“What about them?” Mark said, wanting to strangle him.

“How many do you have?”

“Two or three.”

“Do they suck your dick?”

“Excuse me?” Mark said.

“You heard me,” he said.

“Yeah, dude.”

“What kind of sex do you have with them?”

“What kind?”

“That’s right.”

“Normal, dude. Very normal.”

“Ever hit them?”

“Hit them? Why would I do that?”

“Ever get freaky?”

What Mark really wanted to say was, “You’re freaking me out,” but he played along. He dismissed his growing doubts about the police.

“No, no,” Mark answered as he exited the police car, “just good, all-American sex.”

The sight of the fridge reminded him that he’d eaten nothing since Jessie disappeared. He toasted a slice of Wonder Bread, sprayed it with I-Can’t-Believe-It’s-Not-Butter, and took a bite. It lodged in his throat.

He gulped a glass of whole milk and tossed the toast.

He spent the night on his father’s La-Z-Boy, waiting for Jessie. He recalled her stealing raisins from his cereal and driving a bulldozer from his lap.

“Is God punishing me for my sins?” he thought. The mistakes of his younger days swirled through his mind.

He took out Jessie’s Halloween photo. He heard her cry.

***

When the sun pried open his eyelids, Mark saw his father standing in the kitchen, his arms dangling by his side like a teddy bear’s.

“Dad,” Mark said, “just tell me what you did with Jessie.”

Archie looked away.

“You listening to me?” Mark said.

He shook his head. Mark had no idea if he was indicating yes, no or something else altogether. He started screaming. “Damn, dad, just tell me! Tell me!”

Archie left the kitchen, his head bowed, his feet dragging.

Mark scurried outside. He kicked Archie’s Chevy Impala. “Let’s see if you ignore me now!”

Archie stayed away, even from the windows. The deputies, however, reacted like curious coyotes. As they started toward Mark, he ran to Cardinal. They followed him, their black batons and holstered pistols swinging.

They were closing in when Mark bumped into an unfamiliar-yet-friendly face. Stepping out of her front yard, a plump, middle-aged woman he had never seen before opened her arms to embrace him. “Be strong,” she whispered in his ear. The police hung back.

Mark darted into the woods, calling out Jessie’s name. He finally felt useful. He was out looking for Jessie. All he found, though, were broken beer bottles, corroded vehicle shells, and assorted pieces of trash.

When he came out, the detectives picked him up.

“What were you doing in there?” they asked.

“Looking for my daughter.”

Later, he saw them combing the woods for whatever “evidence” they thought he tried to dump.

***

When Mark returned home, he wanted everyone to leave him alone, so when his cellphone rang, he used it as a shield.

“Mark Lunsford? This is John Walsh.”

After Mark described the scene for Walsh, the “America’s Most Wanted” host advised him to start talking to the media.

When Mark let the newspaper and TV reporters know he was ready to speak, they indicated they wanted to interview his parents at the same time.

During the press conference, Mark shook, sobbed, and stuttered as he struggled to spit out semi-coherent answers. “I really need as much help as I can get right now,” he said. “I need my daughter home.”

He figured after that miserable performance, the media would just interview the sheriff, FBI agents, and their spokespersons, instead. But CNN’s Nancy the detective called and asked Mark to appear on her show that night.

Under different circumstances, Mark would’ve been nervous. He had no experience with public speaking, much less live television. But his eagerness to spread the word about Jessie chased away the butterflies. He held up his daughter’s photo and begged viewers to phone in tips. He instinctively realized he needed to deliver soundbites—and somehow, they started coming out of his mouth.

Next thing he knew, Larry King, Geraldo Rivera, Bill O’Reilly and others started asking him to appear on their shows.

***

The following day, after the police again knocked at his door but never checked his closet, Couey raped Jessie. Afterwards, he ordered them pizza.

That night, he tied Jessie’s hands with stereo wire and told her to get into a garbage bag so he could take her back home.

Once she got into the bag, he took her to the back yard, placed her in a hole he had dug in the ground, and sealed her fate with a shovel.

Jessie suffocated to death.

***

Three weeks after Jessie’s disappearance, the official search ended. To keep it going, Mark summoned volunteers through the media.

Mark only stopped suspecting his father when deputies shared what he viewed as their “ridiculous” theory: His parents gave Jessie to friends because of his “partying lifestyle.”

On March 17, 2005, the police apprehend Couey in Georgia for breaking his probation. He shocked them by confessing to raping and murdering Jessie. Two days later, Mark watched deputies dig his daughter’s corpse out of the covered hole in Couey’s back yard.

Mark embarked on a campaign to boost child-protection throughout the country. He addressed the Florida Legislature, which passed the Jessica Marie Lunsford Act. Among other provisions, it required schools run background checks on prospective employees. Mark then lobbied lawmakers in other states to wise up and crack down on sex offenders. It proved more challenging than he’d imagined.

He traveled to state capitals and Capitol Hill and appeared regularly on national TV shows to try to change the way Americans think about sex offenders and victimized children. He quit his truck-driving job to focus on his activism.

He put it on hold to sit through Couey’s trial in Miami. The jury convicted Couey on all four counts and recommended the death penalty.

After the trial, Mark started speaking publicly about the police’s mistakes, including muddling the bloodhounds’ scent trails by setting up the command center at the crime scene. He met with the FBI and other law-enforcement agencies, urging them to study the Jessica Lunsford case and change the way they search for missing children.

Mark joined the Surviving Parents Coalition as a founding member. As he geared up to join them on Capitol Hill, his 18-year-old son, Josh Lunsford, got arrested for fondling a 14-year-old girl. He was charged under Ohio’s just-enacted Jessica’s Law.

Radio talk show hosts and bloggers attacked Mark. They accused him of mismanaging the nonprofit he started. They said his drive to mandate minimum sentencing for sex offenders would shackle judges and prosecutors and turn the justice system into a one-size-fits-all mess.

Josh took a plea bargain for a lesser charge. But he still had to register as a sex offender and spend 10 days in jail.

Ohio had joined a growing number of states to pass Jessica’s Law. But Mark grew increasingly weary of his public status. He felt paranoid and anxious.

After convincing 46 states to pass Jessica’s Law, Mark got cancer and withdrew from public life. Going through chemotherapy, he lost his long hair and strength. But he never lost his yearning to find Jessie.

Boaz Dvir, award-winning filmmaker, tells the stories of ordinary people who transform into trailblazers. They include an average schoolteacher who emerges as a disruptive innovator and a national model (Class of Her Own); a World War II flight engineer who transforms into the leader of a secret operation to prevent a second Holocaust (A Wing and a Prayer); an uneducated truck driver who becomes a highly effective child-protection activist (Jessie’s Dad); and a French business consultant who sets out to kill former Nazi officer Klaus Barbie and ends up playing a pivotal role in one of history’s most daring hostage-rescue operations (Cojot).

Dvir’s critically acclaimed nonfiction book, “Saving Israel” (Rowman & Littlefield, 2020), follows the World War II aviators who risked their lives and freedom in 1947-49 to prevent what they viewed as a second Holocaust. The Washington Times book reviewer Joshua Sinai described this nonfiction book as a “fascinating and dramatic account filled with lots of new information about a crucially formative period.”

Dvir, a Penn State University associate professor of journalism, has written for many publications, including New York’s Newsday, the Philadelphia Inquirer, the South Florida Sun-Sentinel, The Miami Herald, the Tampa Bay Times, TIME magazine, the Las Vegas Sun, the Jerusalem Post, The Satirist, Scripps Howard’s Treasure Coast Newspapers, and the Times of Israel. He wrote a chapter for “Homegrown in Florida” (University Press of Florida, 2012), an anthology edited by William McKeen that includes childhood stories by Michael Connelly, Carl Hiaasen, Zora Neale Hurston, and Tom Petty.

‘Everything Will Be Fine’

Emerson Little (he/him/his) is a visual artist who received his MFA in Creative Photography & Experimental Media from California State University, Fullerton, and his BA in Digital Media Production from the Whittier Scholars Program at Whittier College. His artistic practice merges art and cinema, exploring liminal spaces with his camera that are both alive and dead.

Everything will be fine

“You’re not going to die”, she says, amused, like I’m being silly, and I look at her and I’m neither amused nor silly, and I don’t believe words coming out of doctors’ mouths anymore, not since they said I was fine when I clearly wasn’t and it almost killed me and my unborn daughter. “You’re not going to die”, she repeats, “but we will get the results of the biopsy soon and we can take it from there, does it sound like a plan?”. Taking it from there doesn’t sound like a plan. I want answers and I need to know how a tumor the size of my child was missed when it was growing so close next to her. I need to know if she will get out of my sick body alive and if I will live to watch my two daughters grow up. I don’t say any of this and I walk out of this hellish place and ride the elevator down to the underground parking and I sit in my car, frustrated and angry, angry at God and doctors since neither religion nor science seems to answer my questions, angry at myself for not feeling grateful for being alive, like everyone seems to think I should feel. “You’re both alive” is what I hear most these days, as if being alive is the best thing you can aim for, as if breathing should be just good enough. People complain about the most trivial inconveniences and yet I should be grateful for not being dead. I am angry like I’ve never been before and even though I can decipher the reason, I’m overwhelmed and confused by the intensity of the pain and the anger. Sitting in my car in the dark underground parking, I feel like I’m drowning in a thick cloud of my own feelings. I feel guilty too, even though I know too well that guilt and anger are like gas and fire, a dangerous combination that can only blow up everything around, and soon enough I’ll learn how to navigate those feelings, if not accept them, but not today. 

From inside my car, I watch people walk to theirs. Pregnant women and tired new parents with tiny newborns in brand new car seats, sick, old people and young ones too, kids with arms and legs casts, some faces beaming with joy or relief and some wet with tears and hollowed by grief. I don’t want to leave this place anymore as it’s giving a space and a context to my feelings and I don’t want to go back to my normal routine, where we complain about the weather or our weight or the new waiter at Borschardt, but somehow have to be grateful terrible things haven’t killed us yet. I wish I could drive far away, somewhere no one could find me to tell me everything is fine when it’s not, but I have a child at home waiting for me to come tell her everything is fine, even if it’s not. I close the seatbelt over my round belly and drive myself home, where I lie in bed and tell her to hold on. I tell her how proud I am. She stayed inside while they opened my abdomen in all its lengths to clean the two liters of goey tumor liquid that had spread from my ovary into every corner between my organs. She stayed inside while they removed everything they could. We removed the appendix and the omentum, they said, you won’t need those. We had to remove the tubes and the ovaries, they added, you could have probably needed those, but we had no choice. She stayed inside as they stitched my body back together, this exhausted body that doesn’t feel mine anymore. She’s the only part that still feels familiar and I’m dreading the moment when she will have to come out, leaving me empty without her and without the children I’ll never grow. 

She comes out four months later, the last day of August. The day after her birth, I sit in the NICU in the middle of the night. I watch her tiny body struggle to breathe, her thin skin full of tubes and needles, the thick, hard plastic of the oxygen ventilator mask stuck on her gorgeous face. She doesn’t look sick, her cheeks are pink and round and she seems unbothered; only her breathing is strenuous. The doctors ruled out an infection or a birth defect on the lungs or the trachea and seems to think she was simply not ready to be born when they performed the C-section. She needs time, they said, so that’s what we’re giving her. I feed her every three hours. I am scared to mess up the wires and the tubes so I sit on the beige fake leather armchair next to her bed and they bring her to me, and I push her little mouth to my cracked nipples and she drinks without opening her eyes, until she falls asleep again. I watch her sleep as long as I can withstand the pain and the heat; the room is kept uncomfortably hot to maintain preemies in womb conditions and my back is so damp with sweat that it sticks to the armchair. I see a nurse and I whisper that I need to go now. “I got you,” she says, and she takes Clémentine back to her bed where she wraps her inside a little blanket, and I thank her as she leaves while I stay a little longer to watch my perfect child sleep like everything is fine. I whisper to her too. I explain that I need to go now just for a little while, that doctors also need to check me in my room, even though they don’t care all that much about women’s bodies when they’re empty – they have been making me run from the maternity ward to the NICU and back every three hours to breastfeed, and nobody has once asked if I was doing alright. It’s been three days and the nurses have barely been looking at my C-section scar. I’m only addressed to when I need to feed the baby. The night after the C-section, my phone rang and a voice in the night told me “Clémentine hat hunger”, Clémentine is hungry, and hung up, and I had to pull my broken body out of the bed and walk through the deserted hospital corridors, dark and silent as if the world outside had stopped existing, to offer it to my child. They never asked if I wanted to breastfeed. I was planning to, but they never asked for my breasts and my milk and they just took it, pushing her on my swollen body, leaking with sweat and blood and colostrum. It’s been three days but days don’t mean much here, only my three-hour feeding schedule matters, a rhythm I follow religiously until someone says otherwise. Days are easy, my husband stays with Clémentine until my body is required and I’m summoned to the NICU, while I lie in bed eating pastries. Nights are long; the pain awakes and the fear is overwhelming without anything to distract me from it. I sit in the NICU at night, where I can hear nothing but the beep sounds of the machines that keep those little bodies alive, some nurses whispering and a mother crying. I can barely see her, it’s dark and she sits in the back corner of the room behind the enormous incubator bed where her 850-gram child is lying. She cries through the night, snuffling discreetly, and she too whispers to her child that everything will be fine, and I want to go hug her and tell her that I’m sorry she’s going through that, but I never do. I feel guilty that my child is doing better than hers.

Three months later, in the midst of another cold German winter. Christmas is around the corner and Clémentine has been growing into a pink, plumb baby. We are rushing through the night. There is no window so I can’t see outside of the ambulance, and inside the light is cold and makes the white walls seem blue/gray. The higher part of the stroller sits in the middle, where the paramedics safely strapped it on top of an adult-sized stretcher. They removed the lower part and the wheels that are now lying in the back of the vehicle with my coat and the weekender I packed in a hurry before leaving the flat. I’m sitting on a cramped seat on her left and even though I am wearing a seatbelt I’m holding on to her in case of a sharp turn or sudden braking. The paramedic fills in paperwork and asks me questions about her insurance and allergies and other things I’m struggling to hear with the noise and his mask and the pain in my chest. I hear sounds coming out of my mouth but I have no idea what I’m saying and I just want to scream that it’s a mistake and they need to drive us back home. She is sleeping soundly and flaunting her little fists in the air like she’s having a blast as the vehicle accelerates when we enter the autobahn, and my hands hold the stroller a little bit tighter. 

The next morning in Bernau. She is sleeping next to me, an IV line poking out of her head and breathing support blowing into her nostrils and my heart is breaking. The doctor said bronchiolitis can get much better or far worse quickly so I spent the night watching out for any sign of deterioration, scanning her face and analyzing her movements. A machine is monitoring her breathing and heart rate, the same one she had in the NICU. She gets coughs so strong that the nurses have to vigorously slap her back to expel the mucus blocking her lungs while I sit powerless on my side of the bed. She gets fluids from the IV line but I feed her once in a while so she knows that I’m still here, even though I am scared to mess up all the tubes and wires every time I pick her up. I barely ate yesterday, but today I can’t stop eating. I eat in the bed, and I eat on the chair by the window, while watching a thick gray fog filling the space between the sidewalk and the clouds. I could be anywhere but I am in Bernau, but Bernau doesn’t mean much to me yet. I have never been before, and wouldn’t be here if COVID hadn’t filled Berlin hospitals with babies. I don’t know how long we will stay. I want to go home but I’m with her and that’s all that matters. The hospital in Bernau is actually not so bad. It is small and personal, and it feels as if we’re starring in a sad German Christmas movie nobody’s watching. It is quiet during the day, and at night it seems lost in time and space. We have a huge room and we sleep together in co-sleeping beds that are stuck to each other. Mine is a regular hospital bed, hers is a kids’ bed with drawings of blue teddy bears and pink balloons. We sleep holding hands and it feels good, and I think I need that even more than she does. The staff is mostly available and empathetic, and they’re coming regularly to check how she’s doing physically and how I am doing mentally. They are impressed by my savviness with the wires and the machines, and how I know things before they show them to me. That’s a skill I wish I wouldn’t have. I meet other parents sometimes, when we step outside to breathe the crisp air to remind our numbed bodies that we’re alive. We don’t talk much, but we usually exchange basic information the first time we cross paths. “My two month-old son Jonas has COVID” or “My three year-old daughter Mia has a broken arm”. Our own names don’t matter, we’re only Mia’s father or Clémentine’s mother here. The food is decent, but I eat mostly Christmas sweets. My guts burn from all the sugar but I keep stuffing my stomach to leave no space for fear. Today is Sunday and on my breakfast tray was a little printed note about how God is there to give us strength when we don’t have any. Franck arrives to take care of Clémentine, and he complains about the traffic and the internet connection and the chair and everything that is not really what we need to talk about but don’t really want to. I walk up to the prayer room on the floor above us and I stare at the huge wooden cross in the middle of the space, full of tiny pieces of papers that people write and stick in there. I grab a blank one on the table in the corner of the room, and I write “Clémentine” out of superstition because I don’t believe God will go through the notes, and I hang it on the cross with the rest of the prayers. I sit and ask God why she has to go through this again, and as I’m staring at nothing inside those four bleak walls, I realize that with one change of perspective, maybe she’s simply being saved again, and for a minute I feel ok. I know it’s not going to last, but right now I feel ok.  

A few months later, spring pulls us out of this endless winter. We healed with each week spent without visiting a hospital. Clémentine is growing up, and developing a terrifying personality that makes me certain she will handle whatever life throws at her with courage and violence. I learn to breathe again, and to sleep without drowning in nightmares. Routine check at the cardiologist; I had forgotten about it until I checked this week’s schedule. The three of us go together, we’ll make a date out of it, go for lunch afterward, and have a coffee. The cardiologist is a beaming tall blond, until she starts Clémentine’s ultrasound, and she’s not beaming anymore. I have seen too many doctors, and I’ve been in too many of those rooms. The sudden atmosphere change, the deafening silence, the fading smile on the doctor’s face, my husband’s slowing breathing. I don’t want to be here for what’s next. The room is spinning when she says surgery, and I grab my child from the examination table, and I say there must be a mistake, and I say we’ll get another opinion, and I’m shaking with my naked baby in my arms. My husband asks polite, reasonable questions and I want to punch him just to get a reaction out of him for once, and they whisper like I am a child who can’t handle the truth. Clémentine will need heart surgery. Clémentine will need heart surgery. Clémentine will need heart surgery. I listen to those words but I can’t hear them, and I look at the happy child giggling in my arms and can’t believe her heart could need anything else than our love. “Everything will be fine,” my husband says for the hundredth time as we walk back home, but this time I can see that even he doesn’t believe it. “It’s just a surgery,” we say, “they do that all the time”. We tell each other all the things that we want to believe, as we look for silver linings we can hold onto. We are back home but I’m not really back, and it will be a while before I do, if I ever. A part of me died today, the part that was holding everything together, the part of me that assumed that “things will be ok”, the part of me that carried my faith and my optimism, but because I have two daughters, I keep smiling. I smile and I eat and I purge and I sleep, then I wake up and I do it all again. People tell me they pray for her and I say I do too, even though I only kneel in the bathroom now. People say we are both strong but I know only she is. I am hopeful that she will be fine, but I am not sure I will ever be again. And I think about her sometimes, the crying mother in the NICU. I wonder if they made it alive and unscathed, or if she’s still crying for her child when she thinks nobody is watching. I never knew her name, she was Maria’s mother and that’s all that mattered. When a child isn’t doing well, there is no space for parents to be anything else than just that, parents. We can’t remember who we were before we walked hospital corridors alone at night, when life felt light and full of possibilites. I think about her sometimes, and when I do I don’t feel as lonely, even if it is just for an instant. 

Ludivine M. was born and raised in Paris, France, and has been living for the past ten years in Berlin, Germany, where she works and raises her two daughters. She mostly writes nonfiction essays about motherhood and addictions.

‘Sitting Here’, ‘The Journey’ & ‘On the Day That You Died’

Heather Holland Wheaton is a writer, photographer, actor and tour guide. She’s the author of the short story collection, You Are Here and her work can also be found in Shooter Literary Magazine , Press Pause Press, Red Noise Collective, Slipstream, The Morning News and Every Day Fiction. She lives in Manhattan and will never leave.

Sitting Here 

I’m sitting here, 

in the home of the dead, 

among the tombstones of all those who went before me. 

Death takes so much more than just your loved ones, and it brings so much more 

than just pain and sorrow. 

Dread, Despair, Devastation — stab your heart relentlessly. Over and over and over again, 

until they take your will to live. 

Death brings grief, 

and leaves it with you. 

The grief that everyone is hiding, 

and you, yourself, will start to hide. 

We hide in dark corners, where no one can see us, trying to pretend 

we are stronger than we are, 

and maybe one day we will also believe it. 

Death is so definite, 

so final, 

so ruthless. 

I’m sitting here, 

in the sea of graves, 

in the silence of the dead, 

staring at the infiniteness of crosses, 

tired, exhausted, defeated. 

At my parents’ grave, 

on my birthday. 

All alone in my pain.

The Journey 

Far and wide through hell, 

Have I been since you 

So abruptly left me 

When I did not expect it. 

Not that you can be 

At any time prepared 

To meet someone else's death 

Knocking on your door. 

Crawled and crawled I have, 

With no end in sight, 

Relentlessly, through it, 

To get to the other side. 

All around was burning, 

Torturing my soul, 

Each flame engraving, 

A mark that stays forever. 

Sometimes it was easy, 

As the flames subsided, 

It would even appear, 

That the journey ended. 

But then again, they would 

Rage more brightly than before, 

Encircling around me, 

Torturing some more. 

Out of the exhaustion, 

From the endless road, 

I'd stumble, fall and break, 

In ways I never broke before. 

Yet the journey continued, 

As there is no other way, 

No other path i can take, 

To escape the wrath of hell. 

No one to put out 

The never-ending flames, 

Even if I'd wish so much 

For a saving hand. 

The road I have accepted, 

That I have to go on, 

Yet accept I still can't 

The reason for it all. 

The more I resist grief, 

The more it fights back, 

Until I learned to surrender, 

To the journey that is yet to come. 

Once in a while I 

Would step on a landmine, 

Making the flames shoot up

High in the bright sky. 

Then they'd stop completely, 

Giving me some breaks, 

And time to gather forces, 

To continue to walk ahead. 

Now that the road 

Seems to be soon over, 

I sit exhausted on the ground 

Looking all around me. 

Empty fields behind me, 

No life to be seen for miles, 

Orange dusty cloudless skies, 

The wind warming my face. 

I feel old and wise, 

Like I know Death’s secret, 

But that's foolish of me to think,

As Death itself is the unknown.

Now the flames are small, 

Sometimes they still pinch me, 

But at least I stand right up, 

And walk ahead fiercely. 

The pain is still the same 

Excruciating as it was, 

Right from the beginning, 

A time so long ago. 

It feels like I have lived 

An eternity of lives, 

Although it often seems 

That time is standing still. 

Sitting at the edge of hell, 

Feet dangling in the air, 

Wondering what's next, 

And what lies ahead. 

Hopefully less of this, 

And a lot more of that, 

Those periods of peace 

That soothe me from inside. 

As the tortures subside, 

And calmness comes my way, 

I can finally breathe again, 

Freely, greedily — enjoying the fresh air. With new incoming strength, 

I can look ahead, 

I can feel again, 

The will to live rushing through my veins. Gazing into the future, 

With some returning hope, 

Life does seem less gray,

As I’m finally able to cope.

On the Day That You Died 

On the day that you died 

All hope has gone with you 

Ripped out of my heart, 

Leaving nothing but emptiness instead. 

On the day that you died 

All happiness drained out, 

All traces of joy and laughter too, 

Have gone to the grave with you. 

So did the memories of you, 

Once healthy and strong, 

Went to a place 

Where I cannot reach them. 

All I can remember now, 

Is you sick and feeble, 

And then dead, 

Those images are engraved in my brain forever. How I miss you right now, 

And the memories I had of you 

I miss them dearly. 

Every single day 

I'm going back to before, 

To what I could have done differently, 

To maybe still have you here. 

How hard, excruciating it was 

To watch you die and stand there, 

By your side, unable to save you, 

As if I am all-mighty and have that power. 

From the day that you died, 

And even a little before, 

I've been visited by grief and its companions. They come and they go, again and again, 

Never quite leaving you, a never-ending cycle of hell. I learned to stop fearing them, 

To welcome them like an old friend, 

Because they still are a way to connect with you. One day I'll find the connection 

Not through pain and suffering, 

But, for now, I'll just have a little cry. 

On the day that you died 

Time stopped, and is still standing still, 

But somehow it does feel like an eternity has passed, Like I've lived a million lives. 

On the day that you died 

My whole world stopped, 

And it felt like it won't restart again. 

On the day that you died 

I became uprooted,

Losing connection to my ancestors, To who I was before. 

On the day that you died 

I lost myself, my purpose, 

My sense of being, 

I lost the one I used to be. 

On the day that you died 

I died a little too.

Tanya Moldovan started writing poetry after the loss of her mother. She's a new author and her poetry is grief and death related. She thinks death is universal experience and she hopes people from different corners of the world will be able to relate, find solace or take a glimpse at "the after death" experience.

‘Birthday’

NAYANA SIVANANDAN lives in Bangalore, India and works in a bank. She loves photography but cannot take proper photos of humans.

Birthday

My bones are an aged framework, disfigured by time and the crush of the day-to-day. They hoist the essence of me, organs and all, up and through portals and paths that lead to places reserved for my various parts. I feel them shift and bend as I meander, sometimes purposefully, through hallways and rooms, up stairs and down, for one reason or another, as days drain through the sieve of time as if through the floorboards.

I wander through my mother’s house, day after day, secure within the confines of this old, broken citadel, but there came a day, a particular day, when my bones cried out for more. They insisted that I move, essentially restation myself, emerge from within to a place without and live life beyond these creaking walls, at least for a time. They were desperate and would have leaped through a window if given the chance, but they are bound to me and live within me, and I am now less capable of leaping than ever before.

Despite the demands of my bones, the thought of leaving terrified me, agonized me, generated pain that ran from my head through my torso, and all that pain caused me to remain in place, regardless of whatever rewards awaited beyond the door. I resisted, as scared to leave the house as to dive into a raging sea, and I struggled as my bones waged war against me.

I was alone in the kitchen when, suddenly, the voice of my mother shattered the morning air. She called out for tea. I set the kettle, made the tea and prepared a tray that I carried up the stairs. My feet pounded those steps, already warped and bruised beneath the weight and force of thousands of my footsteps, year after year, up and down that staircase.

On this particular morning, unlike other mornings, I carried the tray in a careless way and the tea spilled, pooled across the surface and shifted from one end to the other. As I walked, silverware jangled, saucers clattered, a small plate slid to the edge while the sea of spilt tea moved about as if driven by its own underlying tide. The noise might have been a warning of sorts, like the ringing of church bells at midnight, loud and alarming, as the entire tray threatened to fall to the floor.

Her room was dark. The curtains were thick and heavy, with large folds and pleats, all in the style of an era gone by. The walls were cracked and hosted shadows that danced in sync with anyone who moved about the room. The ceiling, like the top of a pot, trapped the old captive air that had long settled between the four walls. The only source of light in the entire room was a small table lamp with a dull green base that sat upon her night table. It tried its best to fill the room with light, and the yellow cloud that rose from the lamp highlighted my mother’s face but couldn’t quite reach the outer periphery of the room.

My mother was sitting up in bed. As was her routine, she pulled the curtain away from the window and studied the neighborhood. Her attention was drawn by an older man and a grey-haired woman engaged in friendly conversation on the front steps of the house across the street. They chatted rapidly and, when they laughed, they swayed toward the other and then back, almost as though the exchange were somehow choreographed. Eventually, they went their separate ways but their conversation, lighthearted and loud, became the focus of mother’s attention. Angrily, she leaned into the window so that her head practically touched the glass. “Always a racket, just to annoy me,” she blurted out, though her two neighbors certainly couldn’t hear her and, in any event, had ceased thinking of her years ago.

I approached the bed and I could see my mother’s face in detail. Her cheeks were cris-crossed with deep rivulets of age, the whole resembling a dried riverbed ruptured by furrows of varying depth, and those lines stretched and relaxed with each word spoken. Her glasses held firm upon her nose, resting on the tip. Her hair was long and untamed, straight auburn with streaks of grey. Her lips were tentatively upturned, almost curved, positioned as though she might smile - she used to smile quite often – but today she grimaced, unsatisfied as usual.

She turned from the window and peered into the yolk of my tired eyes as I brought the tray closer toward her. I held it above the nightstand as if offering some tithe, and I lowered it slowly but only after pushing a collection of pill containers to the side. “Over there . . .,” is all she said but I knew what she meant. Her voice was hoarse with frustration. As always, I had hoped to hear the lilt of the voice I had once known so well but I realized that her old voice was never coming back. She said not a word about my birthday though you’d think she’d remember a day that was presumably as important to her as it was to me. Admittedly, she could remember only so much.  In any event, she brought the cup to her lips as drops of tea dripped from the bottom onto the sheets and wet tea circles grew large. I grabbed a towel and did what I could. 

I exited the room without a word. I headed back to the kitchen but my bones, intent upon moving, were driving me out with a force that was irresistible. They were desperate, and it seemed as though my body had acquired a will of its own, separate and apart from my own resolve, inhabiting me and dragging me along despite my own desperate need to remain. I was ushered down the ancient staircase and out the door by my own body.

The car was out front, and I was no longer in control as I was somehow propelled from the door of the house to the door of the vehicle. I wound up in the driver’s seat. Perhaps I really was in control but not in the usual sense. I wasn’t prompted by conscious thought; rather, I was driven by thought’s undertone, the shadow of need, a semblance of will not quite formulated as defined purpose. I had one hand on the wheel and, with my other hand, I turned the key, I stepped on the accelerator and my entire body, bones and all, wrenched forth at resounding speed. I steered and the car carried me onto the highway and I was gone.

I drove through the city, past warehouses and apartment buildings, factories and empty lots until, eventually, I reached open country. I was afraid, and my head began to throb, but I soon felt enlivened. I was now out in the world and, amazingly, my need for my mother and the security of her house quickly dissipated. I felt increasingly free the further I distanced myself from that house, and my pain gradually subsided. I began to drive intentionally, purposely, and it was not long before I was driving relentlessly, in a way that was almost messianic. I jetted forth like an arrow released from the bow but, unlike that arrow, I was propelled by a will of my own. My head leaned forward from my purposed neck with each mile driven, and I trained my eyes upon the yellow centerline that lacerated the highway and split it in two. I pushed that wheel with both hands as if I could speed that car along by throwing my weight forward, and I crushed the accelerator with my foot. I drove ruthlessly, as if racing to catch the last plane out. 

There were some trees along the road and their leaves shimmied in the breeze. Their branches seemed to reach out toward me like long arms, straining to embrace me, and I thought I heard those trees call my name. Their collective voice was calm and consoling and it was not long before those trees began to sing. It was a beautiful song and it lofted toward me, carried by the drifting air, tender like a mother’s song, and it was for me and about me and the sweet sound of it melted within me. I loved it and I absorbed it like rain upon dry ground. Lured by their song, I was tempted to stop and walk among those trees but I resisted: I was determined to drive on. I closed my ears in the same way I close my eyes at night at which point I could hear it no more: I was deaf to it. I heard nothing but the empty whoosh of the breeze and I leaned forward, intense against the wheel, sunlight dripping through the windshield as I sped away.

By this point, I was far from home. I was unaware of time and I wanted to drive forever. The road ahead was my only focus, but I suddenly thought of mother and I knew she would be summoning me, crying out from her bedside. I could practically hear her voice, and I felt guilty. There’s a sandwich in the refrigerator, I thought, and I mouthed the words with my lips. At that moment, I wished I could transmit that particular thought from out of my head into hers but, even if my thought could somehow rise out of my brain into the air, it was speeding along the highway with me, captured in a car, unable to escape, headed in the wrong direction.

I had now driven many miles, and my awareness of the world had become sharp and intense: I had acquired incredible acuity. My vision was unlimited, and I could hear everything. I could see cars that were miles ahead of me, and I could see the people in those cars and could hear their conversations while, simultaneously, I saw the twitch of mother’s lip though she was far away, a universe away, and I heard her call for me, impossible as it may seem. I felt her need and frustration resound within my head despite the myriad miles that separated us. I was here and I was there; I could sense both ends of reality.

I drove on. Night was approaching. The taillights in front of me turned sharp red as the outline of cars ahead fell into the shadows. A police car sped by, siren wailing, spewing blue light. I remembered: today is my birthday.

The sun was sinking. Its warm copper light descended slowly, like a clean sheet that floats and falls upon a bed. For a brief moment, the cars on the road gleamed beneath the light, and they looked like lamps in motion. The night soon stretched its dark arms around the horizon and darker it became, and the air became dim and the ground became grey, and blackened clouds merged as one, a mourner’s veil across the sky.

I was now bathed in darkness, and the world melted away. There was nothing left. There was no road, no speed, no direction, no sound or light. There was no side to side, no down or up, no ceiling, no floor, no line or angle. Everything had disappeared: every morning, every sunset, every thought and every need, all the houses and all the yards, all the streets and all the cars, all the towns and all the farms, everything intended, anything remembered, every hope, every death, every loss and every love, every sorrow and every song, every fading memory, every lonely hour, every mother and every child, every birthday yet to come, all these things were gone. There was no time because there was no distance, and there was no distance because no two things existed apart from each other: all things were one, there was nothing to measure. There could only be me, a consciousness moving nowhere, overcome with stillness. I was the world, reduced to a point, nothing more.

Walter Weinschenk is an attorney, writer and musician. Until a few years ago, he wrote short stories exclusively but now divides his time equally between poetry and prose. Walter's writing has appeared in a number of literary publications including La Piccioletta Barca, The Normal School, Lunch Ticket, The Carolina Quarterly, The Worcester Review and others. He is the author of "The Death of Weinberg: Poems and Stories" (Kelsay Books, 2023). More of Walter's work can be found at walterweinschenk.com.