White Picket Fence

By Caitlyn Renee Miller 

We promised to change by keeping everything exactly the same. No more traveling faraway places 365 days a year, living in Airbnbs, unpacking our scant belongings just to pack them back up, always planning the next move, the next place. That was done. We vowed to be normal.

It wouldn’t be hard to do, would it? My husband and I could pick a spot and just… stay. Right? Derek and I had stuck with each other for years, after all. And picking a place to live might be similar—the good kind of commitment, where time carves at you both in (mostly) rewarding ways.

We gave ourselves a soft landing: a year. We just had to make it one year—all of 2020—in a house in Maryland that needed watching over while its owners relocated. After that, there were only three viable choices for where we hoped to spend the rest of our lives: Canada, with its immigration officials adding up your “points” for the lottery—we might just barely have enough to squeak through; the Netherlands, where the Dutch-American Friendship Treaty would allow us to become residents but never citizens; or Portugal, with their generous visa for the self-employed.

I could imagine myself in any of the three if I just closed my eyes. I would be very tan in Porto or very pale in Apeldoorn. Easier still was imagining a new start in the Great White North. We were fresh off of two months in Quebec City, where we lived in a tall brick apartment complex so old, symmetrical, and charming that I called it the Wes Anderson building.

The decision didn’t need to be made right away; any of the three would be a great hub for more travel while we worked remotely—not to mention an escape from our home country, a place that broke our hearts over and over again. So, it was settled. We would base the decision on the immigration process that was the least onerous when the time came. Frankly, there’s only so much apostilling a person can handle before nowhere seems worth it.

But it’s always been worth it. Finding a place we loved (that would let us stay) taught me everything I like best about the world. For example, before inventing an alphabet, you must first have an incantatory name, like Sejong the Great (Korean), Vuk Karadžić (Serbian), or my favorite—Mesrop Mashtots (Armenian).

On the Greek island of Corfu, I was so distracted by the iridescence of every dead reptile on our daily hike up the mountain crowned by Pantokratoras Monastery that I started to feel like a lizard medical examiner.

One time, in a park in Batumi, Georgia, we watched a dog owner pick up after his dog, tie off the plastic bag, and hand it to the hulking animal, who took the knot in its mouth and trotted off to the nearest trash can, where he stood tall on his hind legs and dropped it inside. Derek and I, along with some Georgian guy, watched, rapt. We exchanged a look that only people who are watching a dog throw out his own shit can exchange.

These memories obsessed me the year we stayed still. They echoed in news reports of the devastation reshaping the world. Through months of watching everything come undone, making the choice of where to live kept us going. There was so much we didn’t know about the future, but making plans gave us the comforting illusion of control. So, we made a plan, and then, both very suddenly and very slowly, we committed to it.

We bought a house in an idyllic spot, a small place on three-quarters of an acre. We wired the money on a gloomy December day, because we couldn’t go in person. After checking the routing number for the sixth time, Derek clicked “send” with shaking hands. It was official: We were moving… to rural Virginia.

In that one year, normalcy took on a rattling urgency. We’d been right: In 2020 we would adjust to staying in one place. Except the uncertainty and chaos of that year made it clear that that place should be the land of our parents and siblings and nieces and nephew. Our friends who feel like family. All the people we didn’t want to live across a sealed border from. There were too many babies to hold and people to hug and life to be shared in person.

Instead of sending a postcard of a windmill or a maple leaf, I’m writing this from my couch in a little bungalow in a town of 1,500 people around the corner from the beach on the Eastern Shore—a place that was not part of the plan. We park our blue truck in front of a white fence and talk about what to plant in the spring. The trees are flowering; butterflies flit around the yard.  I’m still getting the hang of being still. Maybe I always will be. But at least I’m home.

BIO:

Caitlyn Renee Miller's writing has appeared in the Atlantic, DIAGRAM, and McSweeney's, among others. She works as a ghostwriter and book editor and spends her free time collecting rare plants.

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Check out the rest of the 2021 essay series:
The Future Ancestor by Olivia Pepper
On Going to Work by Anne Ray
A Life of Leisure by Mike Ingram
Zoom Face by Marcelle Heath
Exuviae by Paul Hile
Normal Between April and May of My Ninth Year by Bridget Brewer
Normal Routine by Thao Votang
Introduction from our 2021 Curator

Normal Street

By Mike Soto

I had never considered solitude and loneliness to be two sides of the same coin before. Then the pandemic came. The joy of being alone was lost on me. Instead, I became bad at entertaining myself.

New York had always been a place that felt like home, despite the love/hate relationship that I had with it. I thought, what better place to be entertained? So, while everyone else was fleeing the city, I moved back. I needed to connect, to be witnessed, to touch base. And in the way that sometimes happens in New York, things just worked. I was offered a room in a historic brownstone in Brooklyn with "a communal vision" and gave into nostalgic reveries about the only other time I’ve lived in such a setting.

*

When I was in college I lived with my closest friends in a two-story, five-bedroom house on Normal Street in Denton, Texas. I believe we each paid $325 a month. I had a bedroom and an office, where I read the books assigned to me by my lit professors. A window could be opened onto the roof of the patio, where I pretended to grow plants, but mostly stepped out to drink beer or smoke weed. There was a garage where we set up a ping pong table. Our epic battles (we were all overly competitive) flowed past midnight in the heat. Normal, the street, stretched a total of one block, between Scripture and Oak. Around the corner was "Howdy Doody," the convenience store where we would get tall boys, American Spirits (when they still had the endangered species cards), and the usual convenience store cuisine like powdered donuts and Hawaiian bread.

*

Thinking back on it, the gravity of what I was doing was also lost on me. I was pulled back into the orbit of New York—and I wanted to be back. But all my linchpins were up for grabs: Validation. Emotional support. Financial stability. I was overwhelmed and it only seemed fitting that I’d landed in this historic house—and I used every corner. A stoop café where I read and wrote in the morning and a garden for dusk. A parlor when I needed to stand under a chandelier and feel like everything was in the right place. Living in this brownstone seemed like a fortuitous step toward something grand, and away from that creeping loneliness.

*

There was also an assisted living facility called "Skyview" adjacent to the house on Normal. It looked like a beige relic from the seventies. There was a walled off area around its perimeter that I could see through a door of metal bars. It resembled a loading dock. One resident in particular would stand at the gate and wait for someone to walk past so he could throw his hat through the bars. If I happened to walk by, I would pick his hat off of the ground and return it to him. I think he just wanted someone to say hello, and I knew that feeling, so I didn't mind taking a detour on my way home from Howdy Doody.

We did a lot of things in that house. We listened to Bob Dylan and talked about poetry. We talked about love. We had marathon two-on-two matches of nerf basketball.

* 

One morning in the parlor of the brownstone my landlord, who shared the communal living space, asked me to leave. She refused to explain why. My three other roommates had already been briefed. 

Her twin sister had been staying with us for the month and there had been days of communal anxiety over her sister’s lost phone, which was also her wallet. I asked if she thought I took it. The particular shrug of her shoulders, the long, resigned “I don’t know,” was an unmistakable yes. I said I wouldn't stay where I'm not wanted, where I've been accused of stealing without evidence. Where I won't be heard.

There must have been a moment when her sister had made up her mind: it was me. Maybe the wheels had been turning in their twin mind(s) for several nights in the room they shared. What made them think it was me: Race? Gender? Cranium structure? I am a tall Mexican-American male. Maybe my facial hair is intimidating. Maybe I don’t smile enough. My other roommates in the house included two Jewish women in their twenties and a white guy.

I guess it had to be me.

I felt like an hourglass had been turned and the sand was marking my dwindling time in the house. I tried to keep it cool, even as I noticed the hinges coming undone. Days later I learned through my roommates that the sisters also suspected me of stealing a vintage kimono. And a Teflon skillet.

*

In the Normal Street house there were two brothers. The elder brother had introduced me to the group and was my first true peer as an adult, someone who humored my first aspirations as a writer. Coming from an "underserved" neighborhood of chronically low expectations, he helped make my dreams feel normal. The younger brother lived downstairs, which was probably for the best since he played drums and rearranged the furniture in his room obsessively. He had pages with syntax trees taped to his walls, and he always seemed to become everyone's little brother, including my own. The third roommate came from Bogota, Colombia, to do his doctorate in classical guitar. He was a little older and added an air of wisdom to the house. He was also the first college-educated person I could speak to in Spanish.

It seemed inevitable that the people I lived with on Normal would become my closest friends, but this connection seems so time-bound now, so specific to the naivete of that era. I suppose it’s foolish to want to recreate this, but I don't know anyone who doesn't long for the camaraderie of their college days.

*

After I was asked to leave, I met my roommates at a bar every night to get drunk. We checked in and comforted each other and speculated on the ins and outs of why this was all happening. We had all just come together as roommates, and now it was over.  

One night a roommate texted to let me know the sisters were thinking of getting the police involved. I panicked. If it came down to my word against the word of two wealthy white women, I was going to jail. It didn't matter if I was innocent or not. By the time the Sunday brunch crowds settled in to the restaurant across the street the next morning, I was gone.

*

My favorite part of our house on Normal was a small bamboo thicket that had grown to occupy a corner of the back yard. My friends had made a secret space we called the “bamboo room” by burrowing through the stalks and chopping down the ones in the center with a kitchen knife. They placed a single stool in the middle of this small clearing. The path to get there was only known by us, and even then, we would have to snake through the tight stalks to get to the room.

One night I stayed for an unusually long time because the moonlight seemed like it belonged to the room itself. I stayed so long that the thicket filled with birds that roosted there overnight. By the time I got up to make my way back, the thicket was teeming with sleeping birds. As I rattled thru the bamboo, I startled them awake, setting off a commotion that suddenly surrounded me. There was a feeling of ecstasy in being in the middle of that chaos. Being connected to it.

I couldn’t help but laugh until I found myself standing outside of the thicket, where I took a moment to listen to the birds as they settled back in for the night.

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Bio:

Mike Soto is the author of the chapbooks, Beyond The Shadow’s Ink and Dallas Spleen. His debut collection of poetry, A Grave Is Given Supper, was published by Deep Vellum and was adapted for the stage in a unique collaboration of literary theatre with Teatro Dallas, with recent performances in New Ohio Theatre’s ICE Factory in New York in July of 2021.

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Check out the rest of the 2021 essay series:
The Future Ancestor by Olivia Pepper
On Going to Work by Anne Ray
A Life of Leisure by Mike Ingram
Zoom Face by Marcelle Heath
Exuviae by Paul Hile
Normal Between April and May of My Ninth Year by Bridget Brewer
Normal Routine by Thao Votang
Introduction from our 2021 Curator

The Future Ancestor

By Olivia Pepper

It’s 2121, and you are now an ancestor.

I will not explain how this happened. For the purposes of this thought experiment, you must simply trust that some essential part of you continued in consciousness after you left the world. I am not going to talk about your death in this essay, so you can take a deep breath (oh beautiful reminder of living!). The time will come for all of us to understand about our own deaths, but that day is very likely not today.

Back to our premise: 100 years from now this timeless and invisible fragment of you is a part of the willow shadow on the riverbank, and part of the tiles on the rooftops, and part of the whisper of starlight glancing upon the mountains of old broken bottles waiting to be made into something new at the glass plant. And the vegetables in the gardens leach from your ashes to make food for those who have come after. You are spread all around. It isn't that you have thoughts, exactly, or that you experience time, or think of yourself as having a name. It’s more like being the sky. You carry no grudges, no resentments, no shame. You are integrated. Even at this moment, a beeswax candle is burning for you in the memory house.

Your generation is remembered primarily as the ones who suffered and struggled and triumphed through the great turning. Before and during the collapse, things were very difficult for us—but we were also clinging to what we had made because we were very afraid, because we had no idea what would happen when the money charms stopped working and because poverty was a threat to us, and because we were afraid of injustice and oppression, and because there were rich men with hideouts around the world who controlled almost everything of beauty. 

But this is not a story about the great turning, or about what led to it. You know about the collapse because you are living through it now. You will carry these memories and painful lessons with you all of your life, and when it comes time, you will tell your story. I am not going to speculate about whether we come to face annihilation through war, famine, sickness, drought, climate disaster, or the combination of these. There will be different things in different places. A wall of fire in one city and an immersive flood in another, and neither of them is more gentle than the other. All I am allowed to tell you now is that the tide will change, and that humanity will once again begin to turn the ghosts into ancestors.

Sometimes, in 2121, on Moon mornings, the day's center-person in the round-house meeting speaks in your generation's memory. The oldest living people remember you, and the rest of those that came up in this time a century ago, and they speak about your skepticism and your courage and your guardedness and your resourcefulness, and how you had to be so strong. You are one of the great grandparents, and whether or not you had children or raised them yourself is of no consequence; you are included in the memories of, at the very least, four families—we never know what a difference we make. Plates of spirit food are put out for you in the garden at night; you hover above them, nestled amid the shimmering hairs on a curious moth's thorax. The children often pretend to be you as they run between the crop mounds. They learn by acting out the dramas of history, taking turns being the different sides. The garden crew listens unobtrusively to the games while they twine squash vines around corn stalks, and afterward they may go speak to the mentors about how someone small was playing at being police, and playing at killing. Thus the mentors listen to the scripts the children use, and facilitate discussion based on the play. The mentors then go to see the scholars in the old barn, to talk about what comes next. The scholars are examining some texts recently discovered in one of the investigations into the corrupted cache of digital files (what one of the historians calls "Alexandria'' even though they know it was properly called "the cloud") for the mentors to use in their teachings; they are discussing what from the collective trauma of the past might need careful attention in sharing with the young ones.

But that's not where we are going today. Today, in the early dewy morning on a day in the season once known as springtime, you settle onto the brow of a sleeping youth who has gone out to try to learn something from the chill air. The dawn wind rustles the condensation catchment units. It will be another hot day. The youth are dreaming, which is what they wanted. They went to sleep under blurred stars asking for guidance. They are dreaming of a condominium building whose outer wall has been lifted away by the spirits of dreamtime. There are many levels and on each level is a private dwelling, like what you may remember as a dollhouse. The youth can see electric lamps and mass-produced furniture and television screens and deadbolt locks and tangles of wire and laptops and too many shoes in a little room just built for too many shoes. On the 8th floor, you are there, attached to your old familiar body. You are lying in one of the beds, and you are awake, staring into the little rectangular jewel box that connects you to the outside. The tiny symbol squares on the glass screen open up into worlds unto themselves. Different ancestors in digital masks dance and laugh and sing along to old songs. Streams of words and pictures flow uphill as your finger traces the feed. You are by yourself. You do not know what to do. Lots of your connections are also lying in bed in the middle of the night looking at the bad news in the information boxes. You are tired and you want to sleep; you are scared and you want to be held. You feel too close to everything and yet so far removed. There's a gunshot, there's a car alarm. You are suddenly so sad. You're going to be forgotten, you just know it.

In 2121, the  youth wakes up in the dew beneath the cottonwood tree. They stretch and gaze up startled at the fading stars. In the gardens, someone is singing. The youth knows what to do; they go first to the memory house and find a little clay bowl. Then to the beekeepers who sleep overnight by the beehives and provide a small gleaming lump of honeycomb. The youth goes to the dairy, where someone they have a crush on drenches the honeycomb with goat's milk. They go out to where they had the dream and they nestle the little bowl among the roots. They remember you.

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Bio:

Olivia Pepper is a writer and practicing mystic currently residing on unceded Tiwa land in Northern New Mexico. Olivia is a mixed-heritage spirit worker in astrology, herbalism and Tarot with roots on multiple continents, whose primary objective is cultivating ancestorship. While sometimes running the risk of presenting as dour and serious, Olivia also enjoys things like dusting knuckles with dandelion pollen, playing with kittens and watching Star Trek.

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Image by Jonah Welch

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Check out the rest of the 2021 essay series:
On Going to Work by Anne Ray
A Life of Leisure by Mike Ingram
Zoom Face by Marcelle Heath
Exuviae by Paul Hile
Normal Between April and May of My Ninth Year by Bridget Brewer
Normal Routine by Thao Votang
Introduction from our 2021 Curator