The lightning slipped beneath my eyelids

Like a snap of wind in sailcloth,

Quick between act and react,

The space between ignition and combustion

Growing shorter.

Squalls demand your witness,

Spook the dog off the wooden floor, rush out to sea

In a dance of salt spray, beneath mountain clouds

Electrifying the etheral summit.

My dreams are cluttered with the storm,

Pushing off the coming dawn.

Let go of that nervous tension.

Listen to the timbre of the thunder,

So low it feels like nauseous tremors,

Too low to hear, but tumbling across the skin.

Marble-sized rain cracks against the sill

And shatters on the glass in tiny diamonds.

Sleep in the rumbling bones of nature,

Rolling outward with the tide:

Crabs shifting deeper in their shells,

Sailors hunkered to the keel,

Waiting for the next arc of light

To slip beneath their eyelids

And bring the heavy sea,

Another wave of rain sparkling in the flash.

Togetherness rises from beneath the cold sheen of scales and gills, passing through us as instinct older than thought. The whole responds as one.

Each season, green and yellow plankton gather in heavy clouds. We are drawn to them. There is little time to linger beneath the glimmering shafts of white, gold, and green that pierce the fathoms. Change surrounds us always: cold yields to warmth, darkness to light, stillness to motion, life to death.

Below a certain depth, they dwell in darkness. We sense them in passing. Instinct tells us they are near.

Now and then, a sudden death surges out of the black.

We do not sleep. We do not dream. Our nightmares are never inward illusions, but realities all around us.

A great pull comes upon us. Movement grows difficult. The moon marks our struggle across shallow and deep waters, through currents that course like blood through rock and capillary. It is always the moon.

I cannot command the we, so I follow.

To run together is better than to run alone. It is in our nature. Wholeness is greater than smallness. The motion of the whole restrains the urge to surge upward, toward what lies above.

Swimming beside me is a reflection of self. Wide eyes gather what light they can. Together, we become the image of one. Where we have been and where we are going matters less than the present.

Now is what matters.

We feed on the scattered bits that flicker in sunlight, defying the tide in tiny spasms of life. Feeding is energy, and in feeding we forget the whole. That is when we are most vulnerable—scattered, breaking apart.

To feel what the whole feels is its own kind of pain.

We are fed upon, taken from, left wanting. We feel the loss through our silvery skin. The nightmares circle in darkness, waiting to tear us apart one by one. What remains are flakes of scales drifting into the black.

Among eelgrass, the whole splits and scatters. For a moment, it feels singular. Those beside me are versions of myself—one behind, one ahead. When the numbers are small, I long to break away completely.

The whole is safety. The whole is mirror.

Without it, can I become anything at all?

Beyond the eelgrass, there is a chance.

The open ocean calls: vast, singular, pulling. Fins drive me forward as the tide pulls me away. Leave the bottom. Leave the cover. Enter the center of all edges, where nothing promises certainty.

Is that freedom?

Behind me, I see them. Flickering lights. Spinning fog. My forward motion has not freed me from the whole; it has led it. It is our instinct to follow.

Ahead lies purpose without clarity.

The bottom falls away. The light dims. We wait for attack.

It comes.

Felt through the entire school, we split and dart, trying to rejoin as one. Something rises from the darkness below. It narrows. It comes for me.

Instinct burns: turn, shift, survive.

This is my one chance to carry the nightmare beyond instinct and unity. Not survival; something else.

The shadow swells. At the edge of death, I turn upward and break from the whole.

It is the only way out.

Alone, I enter open water.

It is warm.

Below, the surface shimmers like a field of broken light. Above, a pale blue sky holds a dim yellow moon as the orange sun sinks away. The sea stretches outward in every direction, vast and illuminated.

For the first time, I see everything.

And in one violent departure from instinct, I become singular.

I enter the faith of self.

Off of Montauk

Hurricane Ida had slipped out to the south off the Carolina’s and we were still diving. Lately, I had been contemplating winter diving. Part of it is dreading the cold, the stiffness in my hands, and the way my knee always feels sore. The other part of it is being there, out on the ocean, in the sea smoke, a meager five divers in the middle of Block Island Sound. It is part of being alive, thinking about the moment, right now. Diving is always about what’s in front of you right now.

It was out of season for a hurricane to turn into a tropical depression, wander through the southern states, and come out over the East Coast, and spark into a Nor’easter. The dive boat needs to run, get paid – the divers, doctors, lawyers, and construction foreman all want to see it for themselves. It isn’t enough to say it is rough. They need to see it. We might not dive, but we had to go.

To settle the nerves, I checked all my safety gear the night before, my up-line, reel, safety marker, wreck reels, lights, backup lights, a two dollar plastic whistle, and the two knives. I dive with a set of double steel-one-hundreds which are connected with a double manifold and an isolator valve. It is bolted on an elaborate buoyancy vest, held in place by an aluminum backplate. From the two tanks come two regulators, pressure gauge, inflator for my vest, and an inflator for my dry suit. I also strap on a Nitrox computer and a timer, in case something fails. The dry suit is one piece. The hood and gloves are wet. The last of it is a mask, ankle weight for trim, and fins. With all that, all of my body is covered by something. The double backpack weighs close to one hundred pounds on land. It is just negatively buoyant with all my gear on in the water.

At day break in November – the sky was a pink and orange murk. It wasn’t sunny at all. The clearing from the storm hadn’t even started.

My job on the boat was simple – thrown the hook out at the right spot, given by command from the captain looking at the wreck with his bottom finder. Once the line tightens, I get my gear on, dive to the anchor at the bottom, tie it in so we can’t pull out of it, and return with a report. I liken this to a messenger on a battle field, when they say – go across that hill and deliver our conditions. It sounds easy, but the risk of getting shot isn’t really mentioned in the instructions.

The untie from the dock is a time where the divers come out, look around and ask about the local sites as we slide through the river. The water is quiet, but the prop wash is a bit brown and brackish from the rain runoff. By the time we are out of the harbor, the light changes to steel grey. I am surprised that we have two or three miles of visibility. We move along as the captain steers a course south to Montauk. Our dive site is the Bass an American submarine about eight miles south of Montauk. There is a chop but it is relatively flat. For two days, the wind howled north to north east gusting in and out of the forty mile an hour range. Heading to Montauk, it was hard to tell anything had happened. It was surprisingly smooth.

As we closed in on Montauk, we began to see the swells. They were moving around us, like shadows. First you hear it in the boat, pulling and the surfing on the waves. When you are among those giants, you don’t understand the massive size, the shifting movements, the way it all changes. There is no reference to size in the steel grey of water and sky. We were constantly measuring, calculating our worth, but out there everything is magnified to clicking seconds, thumping heart beats, the heave of up to down. I left the bridge and went down to the back deck. The customers were inside, hunkered down, napping, staving of sea sickness, dreaming of mermaids or whatever people dream during a power nap. Off the side of the boat the massive swells rolled by in drifts and heaves on the boat. They weren’t close together, so we weren’t pounding or pushing way over. We were just riding up and over in a strange slid on the back of giants. We had been trying to get information from the NOAA radio system from the Montauk buoy. We wanted to know the wind speeds, the wave heights, and the weather conditions. They ran down all the buoys, but they never mentioned the Montauk buoy.

That was when the captain shouted to port. It looked like birds, but they disappeared. Then they surfaced again, then more. Porpoise. It looked like there were five or six. Then fifteen to twenty broke out around us. They weren’t following the boat, they were crossing. While we were moving south around Montauk, they were coming in. The pod probably had been pushed north in the heaving sea, blown north by a massive storm that was born by tropical water and destined to die in the cold North Sea. The dolphin’s speckled skin shimmered as they broke over the surface of the grey water and diving again.

The fog thickened and I returned to the bridge to help spot debris or a lost fishing vessel that might miss our radar. Our radar was not very effective in the rolling sea that absorbed our radar and found little to reflect. We traveled south a bit more. The fog increased and the swell grew. Out of the fog, a dark shadow drew in. It was closing. It was a twenty five foot swell, taller than the boat. We started up and the captain turned to the east, and the boat slide down the massive wave and into the trough. As we gained the crest of the giant wave, we saw the second one beyond it. There are always two. The captain turned into it a bit and we rode down the wave. We had changed course drastically, pointing east toward Block Island.

The captain took his cell phone and called home. “Hey, take this number down and if I don’t call you within an hour, make the call.” I thought he was giving a phone number. He was giving our current coordinates.

He slapped his phone shut and said, “We need to move east.”

We had rounded Montauk and caught a glimpse at the beating heart of the storm called Ida.

We later found out that we couldn’t get information from the Montauk buoy because it had been wiped out in the storm. No news is not always good news.

Slowly the seas subsided as we moved north east and found some refuge from the big waves, buffered by Block Island. The sea was still heaving, but it was reduced considerable. When we reached the south shore of Rhode Island, the seas were calm compared to what we saw around Montauk.

We set up the anchor chain and deployed the danforth. I had an uncanny relationship with that anchor. It is a sand anchor and the idea is to land it near the wreck and let it bury into the sand. From there, it we often ran a wreck reel from the anchor to the wreck. But I had a way of landing the god damn anchor right into wrecks. And then I had to go down and get the anchor into sand, or in some cases, just tie the anchor into the wreck and deal with it on the pull out. When it did land in the sand, it worked like a charm. That was when I didn’t land it into a pile of twisted steel, wood, and piping.

We dropped the anchor and it set. It didn’t set like it landed in the sand, in fact, in set like we landed it into the wreck. You can tell because when it is in the sand, it stretches and pulls with a little give. When it’s in the wreck, it bites and creaks and has no give at all to it. That’s what we had. The overcast sky hung over us, the seas heaved, but we were content not to be south of Montauk.

I donned my gear while the captain set the running lines out. The running lines are set up so you can jump off the back of the boat, shimmy under the boat and meet with the anchor line and begin the descent to the bottom. If there’s a current, it is a safe and easy way to get to the anchor line. Current is always strange in the Long Island and Block Island Sounds and the diminished hurricane had fucked them all up anyway. Nothing was on time, and the flows weren’t reliable. There was too much wind, too much surge, too much storm for the tides to be of any use.

I jumped off the platform and moved down the sideline. I quickly made it to the anchor line. The wreck sat at about seventy-five feet. I moved down to the forty-foot mark. Below me, it was dark. The overcast and the milky look of the water didn’t help. I pulled open a side pouch and pulled out my light. I turned it on and descended down.

This was the first year I had gotten use to the dark descent. I learned to train my light on the rope heading down. You can gauge visibility, distance, and location on the line, by watching the line when you can’t see anything else in the dark. You know when you get to the chain; you are close to the anchor, close to the bottom, close the wreck. It had been the best way to move into position to tie in the anchor. But I should have known that today wouldn’t be different. It would be shaped by a named storm, by a power greater than the sum of my will, my training, and my fear. It was Ida shaping the world.

I knew I had left a stormy surface condition, but I didn’t realize that I was entering what can only be described as a bottom storm. As I moved down fifty and sixty feet, not only was it pitch black, but I could hardly see the line my hand was sliding down. It looked like a sand storm flooding around me. A foot, eight inches, four inches… I could make out little of the rope. I managed to feel my way into a pouch for the tie in line. It is a ten foot piece of rope we use to tie in the anchor. I felt the chain sliding through my hand and I followed it. My knee slammed into something. I was hoping it was the wreck. The chain slide down the face of a brown surface that I assume was part of the wreck. I followed it down a bit more and found the end of the anchor.

I was able to thread the line through a few chinks of chain. I then found a hole. By pushing my light into the hole, I could see a place to tie the line. But when my light was pushed too far into the hole, it was pitch black. I could feel my legs pushing and pulling on the surge. If I thought about the rope and nets I could tangle into, about the holes, the failure of equipment, all the things that could fail, I would’ve panicked. I was able to tie it in. I moved up the chain and left the bottom.

When I came out of the bottom storm, into the murk, I checked my gangues and moved back up. When I surfaced at the bow of the boat, I hailed the captain.

“How does it look,” he said.

“It’s a shit storm down there.”

He looked at me for a minute and said, “Let me see what they want to do.”

They were technical divers. They all had more experience and training, so I wasn’t worried about their ability. But the conditions were terrible.

I moved to the back of the boat and climbed out. I pulled out of my gear and helped the divers in. The first diver was back in ten minutes. A few divers spent time trying to make the best of it, but it couldn’t be described as low visibility, but no visibility.

All the divers were back in less than a half hour. My job was to go back and pull the hook. It didn’t help listening to the customers talking about how bad it was. The captain reminded me that if it was too dangerous that we would cut the line. As I suited up, one diver, pulling off his gear said, “I feel bad for you. You have to go back.”

I geared up and went back in. My light was ready and I was hell bent in cutting the tie in line, pulling out the hook into sand and getting out of there as fast as I could.

When I got back into the bottom storm, I followed the chain down. For a moment, I let go of the chain and lost sight of it. Luckily, my scrambling hands grabbed it again. I realized that if I disconnected from the chain, I would be lost in a no visibility situation. I would have to surface, signal, and hope for the best. And the boat couldn’t even come back and pick me up, because they would be stuck in the wreck. I could drift to Block Island or out to the North Atlantic. I could hear my heart beating.

My next problem was that I was clutching the chain so tight, that when the chain pulled tight against the wreck, it pinned my hand into the wreck. When I got to the end of the chain, it disappeared into a hole. I couldn’t find the anchor or the line I tied into the wreck. I pulled on the chain, but it was caught and stuck in the hole. I reached into the hole, but couldn’t feel anything. I couldn’t see anything.

I gathered my light and sat looking through my mask at my mask. It was the first time I looked at the glass and the frame of my lenses. It was all that I could see in the dim beam of my flashlight as millions of tiny flecks of sand, mangrove roots, mud, sediment, rust, and algae blew by in a primordial blizzard. I had no place being down there. So, I left.

By the time I emerged into the clear water, I was disappointed and tired. Back on the boat I tossed off my gear and went to the front deck to detach and leave the site.

As we motored back, we were watching the bottom contour on the depth finder. There were massive ripples carved out on the bottom. Things were shifting and moving in deep currents. Things were being reshaped, redesigned; just as things were being destroyed and lost.

Before that day, I had heard snippets about underwater storms. Maybe I was only in a minor squall, but I was in something I won’t forget. It was a black, smothering sand storm moving in deep wall clouds under a layer of tropical green and blue. Knowing that the storm destroyed the Montauk buoy cam as a surprise. And that’s why the dolphins were staying up on the surface. That pod was riding between the storm and massive swells above and the black storm raging underneath. It was raw power, fear, and beauty gliding and changing in a cosmic swirl, lifting off to the North East.

Tomorrow would be better.

The act of reading is often mischaracterized as passive reception—as though meaning resides fully formed within the text, waiting to be extracted by a careful reader. But the experience of reading fiction is far more dynamic. Meaning does not simply transfer from author to reader; it is constructed in the space between them. The quoted passage captures this precisely: fiction’s insights are co-produced, shaped as much by the reader’s interpretive habits as by the writer’s craft.

Consider something as simple as a pine tree. An author may describe it with a particular intention—perhaps as a symbol of endurance, isolation, or quiet continuity. Yet no reader encounters that pine tree in a vacuum. One reader may associate it with childhood winters, another with a dense New England forest, another with environmental fragility. These associations are not errors or distortions; they are the very mechanism by which literature becomes meaningful. The author provides a structured stimulus—language, imagery, tone—but the reader activates it through memory, emotion, and cognition.

This variability is not a weakness of literature; it is its defining strength. Language, by its nature, is indeterminate enough to invite participation. Words gesture rather than fix. They rely on shared conventions to communicate—most readers will recognize a pine tree as a kind of evergreen, tall and needled—but beyond that baseline, they open outward into personal and cultural interpretation. This balance between shared meaning and individual inflection allows fiction to be both communicable and deeply personal.

Film, by contrast, operates under a different set of constraints. While viewers still interpret what they see, the range of interpretation is more tightly bounded by the director’s decisions. A pine tree on screen is not an abstract linguistic prompt; it is a specific tree, in a specific light, framed from a specific angle, accompanied perhaps by music that cues emotional response. The director determines its visual texture, its scale, its mood. Where prose invites the reader to imagine, film presents an image already imagined.

This does not mean that film lacks interpretive depth, but rather that its interpretive space is differently structured. In literature, the reader must construct the scene, filling in sensory details and emotional tone. In film, many of those decisions have been made in advance. The viewer’s role shifts from co-creator to interpreter of a more fully realized object. The imaginative labor is redistributed.

What emerges from this comparison is a clearer understanding of why reader awareness matters. If meaning is co-produced, then reading well requires more than comprehension. It requires reflection on one’s own role in meaning-making. Why does a particular image resonate? Why does a character feel sympathetic or distant? These responses are not dictated solely by the text; they arise from the interaction between textual cues and the reader’s interpretive framework.

This has significant implications, particularly in educational contexts. Students are often taught to seek the “correct” interpretation of a text, as though meaning were a fixed endpoint. But if fiction’s insights are co-produced, then part of literary understanding involves recognizing how one’s own perspective shapes interpretation. This does not collapse into relativism—texts still constrain and guide meaning—but it does shift the goal from extraction to engagement.

Share Suspension of Disbelief

To read with awareness, then, is to hold two truths simultaneously: that the text is doing something deliberate, and that one’s experience of that text is not neutral. The reader is not merely decoding meaning but participating in its creation. Fiction becomes, in this sense, not just a mirror or a window, but a site of interaction—a place where language and mind meet to produce something neither could generate alone.

In this light, the variability of interpretation is not a problem to be solved but a condition to be understood. The pine tree will never mean exactly the same thing to every reader. And yet, through shared language and form, it means enough in common for communication to occur. It is within this tension—between stability and openness—that literature derives its enduring power.

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It was discussed in part one that if fiction can produce knowledge, the next question is harder: where, exactly, does that knowledge live on the page, in the author, or in the reader?

Simulation

One way to describe this process is through the idea of simulation. When we read fiction, we are not just receiving information; we are participating in a kind of guided imaginative rehearsal. A novel builds a world governed by particular pressures, social, emotional, moral, and asks us to move through it alongside its characters. We track decisions, anticipate consequences, revise our judgments, and test our own assumptions against what unfolds. The knowledge that emerges is not abstracted from experience. It is generated through it.

This is why fiction can make even familiar situations feel newly intelligible. Consider how often a character’s decision seems, from the outside, irrational or self-defeating. In life, we might reduce such behavior to a label: denial, pride, fear. But fiction slows that process down. It gives us access to the accumulation of small pressures, the half-conscious rationalizations, the emotional residues that shape a choice before it is made. By the time the character acts, we may still judge the decision, but we understand its internal logic. That shift, from labeling behavior to apprehending its structure, is a form of knowledge.

Form as Cognitive Instruments

Importantly, this kind of understanding does not arise automatically from plot alone. It depends on form. The techniques of fiction are not ornamental; they are cognitive instruments.

Point of view, for instance, determines what kinds of minds we can access and how closely we inhabit them. A tightly controlled third-person perspective can bring us into intimate proximity with a character’s thoughts while still allowing for subtle distance, where judgment and sympathy coexist. Free indirect discourse, in particular, blurs the boundary between narrator and character, allowing us to experience a consciousness from within while sensing its limitations from without. We are not told what to think; we are placed in a position where thinking becomes necessary.

Structure matters as well. What a narrative withholds can be as significant as what it reveals. Delayed information forces us to revise earlier interpretations. Fragmented timelines mimic the instability of memory or trauma. Repetition can expose patterns a character cannot see. Even what John Gardner called “significant detail,” those precise, concrete elements that accumulate into meaning, serves as a kind of evidence, not in the empirical sense, but in the experiential one. These details do not argue; they demonstrate, prove.

Through these formal choices, fiction produces a kind of knowledge that differs from propositional knowledge. It is often said that philosophy and science give us “knowing that,” while fiction offers “knowing what it is like.” That distinction is useful, but incomplete. Fiction does not merely simulate feeling; it reorganizes perception. After inhabiting a particular narrative structure, we may return to the world with changed sensitivities—more attuned to certain forms of pressure, more aware of the narratives people construct about themselves, more skeptical of simplified explanations.

In Toni Morrison’s Beloved, the question is not simply what happened under slavery, but what it feels like to live in its aftermath. The novel structures experience so that memory is intrusive and nonlinear, refusing to stay in the past.

As readers, we move through that disorientation alongside the characters. What emerges is not just historical knowledge, but a felt understanding of how trauma reshapes time, identity, and relationships. That insight comes not from explanation, but from being made to experience its structure.

Misleading

But if fiction can generate this kind of insight, it can also generate its opposite. The same mechanisms that make simulation powerful can make it misleading.

A narrative can invite identification without sufficient complexity, encouraging readers to adopt a perspective that feels coherent but rests on simplification. It can flatten characters into types while still providing the illusion of depth. It can aestheticize harmful dynamics—domination, cruelty, erasure—until they appear not only intelligible but inevitable. In such cases, fiction does not expand understanding; it narrows it, substituting a compelling but partial framework for a more adequate account of human experience.

This complicates any easy defense of literary cognitivism. The value of fiction is not guaranteed by its status as fiction, nor even by its aesthetic achievement. A beautifully constructed narrative can still produce distorted knowledge. What matters is not only whether a text engages us, but how it organizes that engagement—what it makes visible, what it obscures, and what kinds of interpretations it rewards.

The Reader Role

At this point, the role of the reader becomes difficult to ignore. If fiction is a kind of simulation, then its cognitive value depends partly on how we participate in it. Reading can be passive, a drift into identification where we accept the terms of the narrative without resistance. But it can also be active, marked by attention, hesitation, and a willingness to question the frames a text provides. We can notice when a narrative forecloses alternative perspectives, when it rushes us toward sympathy, or when it withholds necessary context.

This is not an argument for suspicion as the default mode of reading, but for awareness. The insights of fiction are co-produced. They emerge from the interaction between the text’s formal strategies and the reader’s interpretive habits. To read well, in this sense, is not just to understand a story, but to understand how that story is shaping one’s understanding.

For those of us working in education, this has practical implications. If fiction can function as a laboratory of consciousness, then reading becomes a trainable practice. We can help students learn how to dwell in complexity, how to track shifting perspectives, how to resist reductive interpretations, and how to articulate the kinds of knowledge a text makes possible. These are not only literary skills; they are cognitive and ethical ones.

Literary cognitivism, then, is not simply a claim about what fiction is. It is also a claim about what reading can become. Fiction does not hand us truth. It constructs environments in which truth—partial, provisional, and often uncomfortable—can be discovered.

Read: Literary Cognitivism - Part One / It’s Complicated

References

Oatley, K. (2011). Such stuff as dreams: The psychology of fiction. John Wiley & Sons.

Oatley, K., & Djikic, M. (2008). Writing as thinking. Review of General Psychology, 12(1), 9-27.

Helen had suspected that Doris was getting forgetful. She was always probing her mother for signs of senility in their conversations. But Doris was crafty. She had a wry sense of self and history and twisted things to make a point or a joke. When she came out of the car, she looked fragile and light, thin and brittle.

I hurried out when I heard the car pull up to the curb. I could hear Doris complaining before I opened the passenger door. I don’t know if I heard her in the sealed air conditioned car, or just felt her vibrations metal and glass. I opened the car like an airlock and it all spilled out.

“Have you ever known trains to have bench seats? I didn’t pay good money to sit in steerage with every bumpkin on the East Coast.”

“Actually, Doris. Steerage is a term used for boats. You were on a train.”

“Jack, let her be,” Helen said quietly. I held the door and waited for Doris to stand up on the curb. We lived on a hill and Doris was always fearful of falling on the incline – like it was perpetually covered in glare ice. She grabbed my arm as she stood up and I could feel her claws dig into my arm. “Don’t let me fall, Jack. Not healthy to live on this kind of incline.”

She shuffled a few steps and let me close the door.

“Mother had a difficult train ride, she needs to sit down. She has to take her pills.”

She was shuffling up the sidewalk, like a climber checking sheets of ice by digging in her heels.

“The last thing I need is to break a hip.”

“It isn’t slippery, Doris. It’s June. And I’ve got you.”

“I have a friend that broke her hip - and it took the life out of her. It broke her will to live. Then you die in one of them nursing homes. Goddamn miserable.”

Doris was a small lady who looked like she was eighty years-old, but she was around seventy. She had been in two car accidents which took their own tolls. And the death of her husband fifteen years back. She had false teeth, glasses, a trick knee, arthritis, and a few things I probably didn’t know about. She shuffled along and made it to the steps of the porch. She held the railing and waved off my helping hand, “I got it now, Jack. Back off. You still got that dog?”

“We never had a dog,” Helen said. “You’re thinking of Bethany’s house.”

Doris had a way of mumbling that shared her inner and exterior dialogue. Sometimes, it was funny. Sometimes, it was scary.

It sounded something like, tell me you never had dog, I remember, I don’t forget, I know the difference between cats and dogs. Pain in the ass, stairs to climb, more falling, more failing. Dogs bark and shit all over.

We got her into the house and she looked around the living room. I went back outside and got her bag from the car. When I returned, she was sitting in my chair, diminutive and composed. The ceiling fan was cooling her off.

“Something to drink, Doris? I’m sure a nice glass of wine, or lemonade would hit the spot.”

“Give me a cold one,” she said loudly.

Helen was in the kitchen pulling the plastic wrap off platters of cheese. She glanced up at me, “Are you sure you can handle this for a few days?”

“It’s fine.”

I poured white wine into a glass. Helen shook her head, “Don’t give her that, she’ll get the gout. And she has to take her pills.”

“Doris, you got the gout!” I yelled from the kitchen.

“No, I don’t want to go out, I just got here, Jesus Christ.” I’m not a goddamn dog, put me out to go tinkle.“ I brought the wine glass out and set it next to her, “You’re a good boy, Jack. We share an affinity for vices. Booze, cigarettes, and Helen.” She laughed and her false teeth shifted in her mouth like ice shifting in a glass.

I went back and got the cheese platter and some shrimp. I sat down on the couch and waited for Helen to come in.

“So, Jack. I’m not all smart and educated, but if you take a sabbatical from a college and never leave your house, do you have to give the money back in the fall?”

“No,” I said. “I can spend the time as I wish. I am writing a little. Reading.”

She lifted her boney hand and pointed, “There was a television program where the fella gets fired and he can’t tell his wife, so he goes out on the streets everyday pretending to go to work. You get fired, Jack?”

“No, I still have my job.”

Helen fixed her a small plate with some shrimp, crackers, cheese and placed it on the table next to her mother.

Helen sat down on the opposite end of the couch. “Mother, is there anything special you need to eat or have during your stay.”

“Prune juice,” she said and winked at me. “She thinks I’m ready for the home, Jack. Thinks I’m losing my marbles.”

“No, mother….”

She reached over and took the shrimp from her plate. She was holding it, waving it as she spoke. “I’ve been in two car accidents, had glass in my scalp, I’ve had skin peeled off my ass and patched on my leg. I’ve lost my hair, grew it back. I had fluid in my lungs, my back hurts, and my knees are shot. I’m not losing my marbles; I just got too many in the bag.”

Doris waved the shrimp around her in arcs and spins. Helen was right, she was slipping. Finally, the tail of the shrimp snapped. The white slimy coma shape spun over her shoulder splattered on the carpet.

“Don’t worry, Helen. The dog will get it.” And she whistled for the dog.

I looked to Helen, but she didn’t look back.

2

Doris went to bed. I was brushing my teeth at the sink when Helen came in and sat on the closed lid of the toilet. She was whispering.

“I think she’s going senile. Did you hear her tonight?”

“It might be frustrating but it doesn’t matter. We can’t stop it.”

“She won’t go to a nursing home,” Helen said. “And we can’t take care of her here.”

I brushed my teeth up and down, moving across the enamel veneer of my teeth and messaging my gums like the American Dental Association suggested when they came to show us in elementary school. I spit.

“She doesn’t drive, she doesn’t get around well. Everything is based on getting help from people. What she eats, what she reads, what she thinks is all she has left. Take that away and she is done for.”

“I can’t see her here,” Helen said.

I rinsed and spit again.

We didn’t think Doris would be someone to snore, and I would be a lair if I called it snoring. But that night, we felt it. It was a chesty vibration that felt like the furnace was running. It was a hot night and the ceiling fans were running, but like the sound of distant surf pounding the beach, Doris pounded the shores of her dreams, for a complete six hour tide cycle. Just before I could drift off to the sound of congestive respiratory illness, Helen said, “What do you think? Honestly.”

I held my breath for a moment. I didn’t want to just fill the space with words like I don’t know or I think this or I think that.

“She doesn’t want to go to a nursing home.”

Helen sighed, “Can you imagine her here, every day.”

I closed my eyes and listened to the vibrations coming through the walls, “I’m trying.”

3

Doris was awake when I came down in the morning. She was drinking black coffee in the kitchen reading the newspaper. All the information that came to her was static and printed. All she knew came from newspapers, radio, and the television if she could stay awake. She had missed the information age. She wasn’t connected to email or a cell phone. She wanted the print as proof. She wanted the paper to clip and send to her friends in distant places. She didn’t need Super Doppler, weather trends, or television personalities, just the back page of the newspaper.

“You think they will ever get rid of newspapers, Jack?”

“I don’t know. Might go electronic someday. Why?”

She turned a sheet of the newspaper and perused the print, “I want my obituary in print. Not on some screen. You remember all the crap you saw on a screen last week?”

I put the kettle on the burner and pulled out the oatmeal. “You want some eggs or something, Doris. I can make you something.”

“No, black coffee is what I need. So, Helen’s going to work today. What are you doing all day?”

I pulled out a bowl and a spoon. I placed them on the counter and looked at the kettle. “I thought we could sight-see or shop. Go down to the waterfront park and see the water?”

“Too hot for any of that. If I weren’t here, what would you do, Jack? Be honest.”

“Sit out under the trees out back and read.”

“Sounds good to me. Can I sleep out there?”

“Sure.”

“Shade, not direct sun?”

“Of course.”

So, after my instant oatmeal and seeing Helen off to work, with the promise of looking after Doris, I went out and positioned another Adirondack chair near mine. I got my book The Crossing by Cormac McCarthy, a lighter, a few cigars, a cooler with ice, a few beers, and the leftover wine. She shuffled out through the grass, clenching my arm.

“Don’t want to break a hip. And make sure I don’t step in dog shit. These are new shoes.”

Nodding, I thought of asking her if she was kidding, but it didn’t matter. I didn’t want to spend the entire day testing Doris, looking for reasons to call her senile, reasons to believe she was less than normal. I kept thinking, she hasn’t lost her marbles, she’s just full of memories and feelings.

“Jesus, Jack. I think I just stepped in dog shit.”

I almost laughed — we didn’t have a dog, never mind the excrement that comes with one. But, sure enough, she had a big brown mushy shit stuck to her foot.

The smell of the shit confirmed any misunderstanding that it might be a leaf stuck to her shoe, mud, or just delusions.

It was shit.

I had her step out of her shoe. “Those have my orthotics in them so don’t get them wet or they will stink.”

I debated, walk her barefoot through the potential minefield, or go get her other shoes? “Can you stand here for a minute and I’ll get you different shoes.”

I left her standing with one shoe on, and pranced across the yard with Helen’s admonishments spinning around my head. I was flustered. This is just the kind of thing Helen warned against.

I went to her room and found her shoes, not on the floor by the dresser, but in a shoebox in the closet under five pressed dresses in dry cleaner’s plastic. I took the shoes and brought them back out to her. When I came back and looked at her face, it was red and distraught. While I was busy worrying, searching, trying to help, she was just standing in the middle of the yard with one shoe off waiting.

“I’m sorry.”

She didn’t mumble. She didn’t say anything.

I put her shoe down in front of her and she stepped in. We swapped the other shoe out and she was ready to continue. We headed to the chairs, the beer, and the shade. As we shuffled on, I looked back to the two shoes. It looked like she was standing there and some giant vulture came and plucked her right out of her dog shit covered shoes. I sat her down in the chair and she let out a long sigh. She looked up at the sun, scorning it. The shade gave her a vantage to look out at the world, like a snake in the rock wall or a crab in a shell.

“I’ve got some beer, water, lemonade, smokes, and a few books. Help yourself.”

She leaned her head back, staring out across the lawn and her shoes.

“I should clean off your shoes.”

“Leave ‘em. Let the shit bake in the sun for a while, then you can just knock it off.”

Doris didn’t say much for a little while and I thought she was angry at me. Maybe she was just tired. I thought she might fall asleep.

“Been a long time since I’ve lived in Norwich. That’s like half an hour away right? Been a long time since I’ve seen the old house,” she said. Her voice was distant.

It didn’t merit a response. Just a beer. I pulled out a can and cracked the seal. I sat back down and took a long drink. It wasn’t a bad day to sit out in the backyard. It was only eleven o’clock in the morning and I was drinking beer.

“You got a lot of stuff in the house, Jack. Accumulation is tough.”

“I know. We need to have a yard sale.”

“Hard to know what to take and what to leave.”

“I think you should move here when you feel you are ready, Doris.”

She turned and looked over at me, “Clean out the basement for the old lady, would ya’?”

“I didn’t mean clean out the basement for you. I mean, we have room for you.”

“Ah, waste of time to board old people. You know when they die you’re never gonna collect your debt. It’s like taking a thirty year loan on a seventy year old, it never pays off.”

She took a cigar and pulled the wrapper off. She smelled it under her nose. She bit the end off and spit it in the grass next to her. If he can drink beer in the morning, I can smoke, she mumbled. A few flecks of tobacco hung in the lace of her collar. Like some old time movie star, I offered her a light. She puffed a few times and got a head on the cigar.

“That tastes good. When you get older you lose the taste of things. But a good cigar tastes good. Important part is to know where all the pieces are, Jack. Important to have all the shit you came into this life with.” I opened a beer for her and put it on her arm rest. “Cigar and a beer, it just goes together.”

“We’re not pack rats, we like to get rid of things we don’t need. If we haven’t used it in the last two years we get rid of it.”

She looked over to me. “Some shit you can’t get rid of. When Stan came home from the war, he had metal shrapnel that was lodged in his ass. After they pulled it out, he kept it and punched a hole in it - hung it on a chain. He always said: that’s my piece of the war. And every time his sciatica acted up he would swear at the Koreans.”

“I wish I knew your husband, Doris.”

“Yeah, greatest generation, biggest asshole, too.”

We clanked beer cans.

“Norwich was a nice place to live. Four Twelve Genthner Street. All the kids were born there.” She puffed from her cigar. “When you live somewhere that long, you gain a lot of life. You gain a lot of stuff. When we moved, I took everything, pots, pans, clothes, furniture, pictures, didn’t leave much in that house. But I didn’t take everything.”

“What do you mean,” I said.

“I left a box there.”

“Something you forgot?”

“Something I left. It was a box that I buried in the backyard.”

“Was it treasure?” I said with a joking smile.

“It was my left breast.”

“Come again?”

“In a box in the middle of the lawn. It’s under a shade tree.”

“I’m sorry, what did you say was in it.”

“I went to the doctor, this is way back now, and he took some x-rays. After the kids were born, Helen was five. Doc said it would have to come off, breast cancer. They wanted to take my breast. The same part that fed my kids, the same part that fluttered under my own heartbeat, the same part that Stan copped a feel when we would sneak away from the dances when we were young and in love, the same part that pinched when I wore my bra for the first time, the part that changed me from a girl to a woman.”

Doris sucked on her cigar and plumes of smoke danced around her like ghosts spinning into the tree branches. “I told that doctor, if you have to cut it off, then I want it. Kids keep their tonsils and give their teeth up to the tooth fairy. Stan kept the piece of metal that hit the nerve in his ass. I just wanted it. And when he refused, I told that I wouldn’t have it done then.”

I drank from my beer, serious - doubting her sanity, hoping this was the beginning of Alzheimer’s disease.

“Doctor told me I would die if I kept it. They didn’t know what they know now about cancer and therapy and all that. I said - then let me have what’s mine. So, after the surgery, he packed it in cloth and paper. I guess it was against the rules back then to hand over parts, but as I was being rolled out to go home, he placed it discreetly on my lap and I covered it over with my coat. He kept his promise. It took me some time to recover. You never get used to loss like that. I kept the wrapped package in my underwear drawer so the kids wouldn’t come find it. You know, where you keep your intimates. I still have a heavy scar from all that.”

I nodded.

“When I was feeling better, I didn’t know what to do with it. I opened it once. It was part of me. And I wanted to see it. You got a strong stomach, Jack? Well, it wasn’t like those monster movies. It was sterile. The flesh was clean and well cut. But, damn it sure to hell, there were eight black spots, like specks of coal embedded in the flesh. Cancer, so they say. I didn’t want to see the flesh, I wanted to see what was in it. And there it was. Proof. That was what I needed.”

She puffed on her cigar and tapped the ash off into the grass.

“So, I saw it. Wrapped it back up and put it in a box I found in the basement. I taped it up. I dug a hole in the middle of the yard, under the branches of the elm tree and I buried that part of me. I didn’t tell anyone. Stan didn’t talk about it. I covered it over and made sure the ground was firm. One of the kids asked about the dirt patch. I told them I buried a bird. They wanted to dig up the bird I lied about, and look at the bones, but I told ‘em it was sacrilegious to dig up things that were gone. And Stan never touched me, intimately again, afraid of what he might miss. After twenty-three years of living there, nothing ever grew on that patch. No grass, no weeds, nothing. It’s probably still a small dirt patch under an elm tree.”

I drank from my beer, because I didn’t know what else to do.

“You must think I’m crazy, or senile. I just think you should keep what belongs to you.”

“Do you wish you took that box with you when you moved?”

“No, it’s hard enough to bury your heart, digging it up is sick. But I always wondered if anything ever grew over that sickness.”

I put my beer down, “Let’s find out.”

I suggested we roll up the windows and put on the A/C, but Doris said, “Let’s ride like kids, hair blowing, let the dog stick his head out the window.”

We drove to the next town. Helen had taken me by the house she grew up in so I had some memories of the neighborhood, but Doris was a good navigator. She told me where to turn, how far to go. Her memories were sharp.

“Up here on the left. It’s a two family. My parents lived on the upper floor. We lived down below. Nice place to live, let the kids be with their grandparents and all. When will you and Helen have kids, Jack?”

“There’s been some debate about that,” I said.

“This is the house. Stop right here. Look there down the side yard, over by the garage. Everything is grown. Hard to tell if things are bigger or I’m just older. My memory is shifty.”

“This is the right place, isn’t it?” I said.

“Of course,” she said. “I’m not senile. That’s just what Helen thinks.”

I opened the door and stepped out. Doris shouted, “Don’t let the dog out.”

I stood there by the car and shook my head. I actually considered getting a dog for a moment. Why not - it felt like we had one. I even had dog shit in my backyard to prove it.

The big two family house seemed very quiet. There was a “For Rent” sign in the window of the lower apartment. The top floor was just dark. I stuck my head into the window of the car.

“You want to take look?”

“Yeah, I made it this far.”

I walked around and helped her out. She got on her own feet and said, “Let me be, Jack. It’s all flat here. I can walk.”

We walked down the driveway. It was one thirty and the sun was hot. We stopped at a low gate and looked into the backyard.

“That’s the tree I was talking about. Looks like no one has limbed it in a while. I’m surprised a storm or a hurricane hasn’t taken it out.”

I scanned around the backyard and opened the gate. We stepped in. The grass in the yard was soft and deep. Doris was careful about her footing, “Don’t want to step in two bombs today, Jack.”

We shuffled toward the tree in the middle of the yard.

“Hey, what are you doing in the yard,” a voice came from the second floor window.

Doris turned and looked up to the face, “I lost my dog, and I think he went over here. Can we look for it?”

“I haven’t seen a dog, but go ahead.”

Doris kept going, “You use the dog thing and people feel bad for you. Works all the time. Until he goes out front and sees the dog in the car.”

“We don’t have a dog.” I said.

She grinned, but didn’t answer. As she drew close to the shadows of the broad reaching limbs, I could see a mark in the grass. Doris and I walked to a patch of dirt and looked down to the spot. She got down on her knees and touched the patch of hard dry dirt. Nothing. Just dirt.

She put her hand on the patch like she was feeling the pulse of the earth. The wind caught a few leaves in a whispering sound. The light shifted in the branches.

“I think we should take it,” I said. “I’ll dig it up and we’ll take it.”

She didn’t respond. I helped her up.

“I have a plastic bag in the trunk. We can take it and bury it in my backyard.”

She leaned back and I helped her to her feet. “You don’t want that in your yard, Jack. Every time you think about your books, your writing, the dog, or Helen, it will be a scar. I don’t need it. You don’t need it. You’ll have your own to bury.”

We drove home and it was quiet. Back home, we shuffled back out to the chairs in the backyard. She sat down.

“I thought you wanted all the parts you came with. I thought that was what you wanted, the things we keep.” I said to her quietly.

Doris sighed, “I guess I thought all my parts were worth keeping. I was sure I would find some grass growing there. A damn flower. I was sure of it. You don’t suppose that will happen in the cemetery, when they bury the rest of me?”

“No, Doris. The grass will grow, the flowers will come — promise.”

I drank from my beer. She closed her eyes and fell asleep. Her snoring was a slow mellow vibration, like the cicadas trilling, the sea foaming, and the heart beating – all on her tired breath.

In my backyard, there’s an old farm wall that’s covered in scrub and dry dead leaves. The weathered flagstone probably came from the fields and farms years before the houses were built. As the yards became terraces running in steps down the street, the walls were fortified and the stones built up in orderly lines. The wall holds off the woods that sprawl out behind the house. Living in the forty-foot wall is a brown copperhead snake. It comes out in the afternoon sun to bask and warm its cold blood. When Gary, my nosey neighbor told my wife that copperheads are venomous, she lashed out. She said, “Well, we won’t be having any children with those snakes back there. No child of mine will live with that kind of death waiting in the grass.” That’s why she doesn’t rake the back part of yard. When she uses the push mower, she eyes the wall looking for the serpent. She wears gloves, even when she isn’t doing anything in the yard. If she thinks of it, she brings a spade with her to hack up anything that might spring out of the grass. Grass got real tall around the wall when June came. So, I took the weed whacker back and trimmed it down from time to time. I liked the grass short back there so I might see the snake out on the rocks.

“Why don’t I kill the snake and then we can have kids,” I offered.

“And if you die trying to kill it – then it will just be me and that snake. Then I’ll have to sell the house. How would that make you feel?” In her mind, the whole backyard was infected.

“I’ll be dead, Helen. Won’t matter to me at all.” I always said bitter things when she went on and on about the snake in the back wall. For a while she was calling the hospital to see if they had plenty of snake anti-venom. She was calling two and three times a week. They stopped taking her calls.

I didn’t tell her about what I found in the basement when we moved in. I guess you might say I’ve spared her from some of the more graphic moments around the house. The cable guy was coming and I went looking for the wire that ran up the wall. There is a hollow between the basement wall and the wood sill of the house. It is about six inches and goes way back where it’s dark and dusty. I climbed up on my step stool and followed the cable into the hole. I felt a wire – with little knobs on it. As I moved down the wire, wishing I had my flashlight – I felt it come loose. It wasn’t stuck in the wall. When I pulled it out I was holding a mummified rat! I shuddered and tossed the corpse on the floor. Jesus Christ! That is the biggest rat I‘ve seen. Then I started looking at the petrified remains sitting idle on the floor. Big teeth – bucked out like knives and a hulking body. Big rat – no, it’s a small squirrel. His head was too big for the common rat and his tail was knobby twisted strand. After looking at it for awhile, the body of the dead squirrel looked more like an empty vessel than vermin. It didn’t smell – it didn’t move, it didn’t even look scary – it looked like it had long since passed by and this shadow on the floor was a frame, an abstract outline of life. It was the natural refuse of the living. I couldn’t even tell Helen about it. It was one of those stories you tell to your buddies but never tell your wife.

After a while, I threw the leathery, petrified squirrel’s body in the garbage. I couldn’t keep it – then she wouldn’t come down in the basement. More and more limits – more and more things to avoid. Fear was the last thing Helen needed – there was plenty of that now that she was thinking of children, now that she was hearing it from her girlfriends, thinking it over when she read her spy thrillers.

Sitting under the elm tree in the back yard, I looked over my book and saw that old copperhead sitting in the sun. His eyes were black and cold. I have to admit it was a bizarre symbiotic relationship between reptile and asshole husband. He looked at me sometimes with complicit intentions. She won’t come out this far, he hisses. Have you found the squirrel that got away from me? I gave him a bite, but he slipped into the basement before I could gobble him up. She doesn’t like what slithers in the rocks.

One Saturday about three weeks ago – I crawled under my back deck to clean out some old wood and put up some lattice so the skunks couldn’t make a nest under there.

My wife, stood over me on the deck, while I belly crawled toward the stone footing of the porch.

“What if that snake is down there and you get trapped.”

“I have a hammer, maybe I could--”

“You can’t trust it. It can kill you – they say these things live for fifty years. It’s too dangerous. We need to just get rid of it.”

It was dusty and dingy but at least I didn’t have to see her trembling lip, something she practiced and used against me for sympathy. But it’s act. When her aunt died and she was crying – no trembling lips at all. She turned and listened to me crawling along. Moving closer and closer to the window, I stopped and looked at something in the dirt. I found a hollow piece of skin that looked like onion peel. It was a little skin, but it had the imprint of my friend from the rock wall. That three-foot snake was getting bigger. Above me she turned it, “Go ahead and let him thrive – bigger snake – bigger problems.”

“There’s no snakes under here,” I said with complete assurance, holding that delicate snakeskin in my hand.

When you see him out there – just sitting in the sun – you realize that everything needs to rest. Even fears stop and soak up something to keep the energy and momentum going. Everything needs its time to warm up to the world. How dangerous could that snake really be? So, with a few sewing pins, I mounted the snakeskin on a nice piece of pine. I got out my wood burning tool and carefully burned the date into the wood with careful, diligent strokes. My hope was to find skin, other things that might be related to this long primordial sun-soaker. Three feet, seven and a half inches – he’s been around awhile.

Sitting inside one rainy afternoon, I snapped on the Croc Hunter – Steve Irwin. “Look at this beauty – isn’t she a darling… by the colors on this snake its says Danger, Danger, get away from me. I’m a king cobra. Swish – and he’ll pump ya’ full of poison. Like all snakes, they pump their victims full of venom and wait for the prey to die. Then, they open up, dislocate there jaws and swallow their food whole. They can devour a rabbit, or even a small fetal pig. Crickey! She’s a beautiful creature.”

I searched the yard, around the wall and under the Hosta and flowers. I picked weeds and I snipped little blades of grass, always looking for him. I wanted to add to my collection of skins. I wanted to see the increase. Little by little, he was giving me little gifts, something to look forward too. Something to burn into the wood, proof that he was growing. Each skin was an extension of the big snake – the big problem. That’s my wife. For me – new skin meant new life, new feelings, new growth, and hope, all from a skin so paper thin. The shedding skins were a reward for letting him live among the daffodils and the roses in my wife’s yard.

Two days before the neighborhood garden competition, Helen came out and looked at the back wall. She stood on the deck and shook her head. I was cooking on the grill. It had been almost a week since I last laid eyes on the snake. One week, two days and a few hours, something like that. She turned and said, “That snake is still out there.”

I flipped a burger and closed the cover of the grill, “How do you know?”

“I saw it.”

“When?”

“It’s out there.”

“Where did you see it?”

“I don’t want to talk about it. It’s dangerous.”

“Seriously, where did you see it? Was it on the wall?”

“I don’t want to talk about it.”

“Near the bird bath, they do like water.”

“I don’t know – near the house,” she said and turned to go inside. “It’s not safe. It’s not right to have a snake so close. What if it gets in the house?”

I thought of the skin on the wood in basement.

“Never happen. They don’t like houses – he’s got a nice wall back there. Where did you see it?”

“Around,” she said and closed the screen door.

The smoke wafted from the grill, “Damn it.”

When the garden judges came to tour the yard, I sat out in my chair reading about twenty feet from the stone wall in the back. The judges came back and stopped, “Helen, dear. Why don’t you plant a nice forest planting by the rock wall? Ferns, holly shrubs, maybe some Hosta, it would make a nice transition from the woods into the yard.”

She looked sad, “We have a snake problem.” And all the women on the committee turned and looked at me. Snakes – infested with snakes. Everyone looked disgusted. One old lady broke out in a denture-laden smile and said, “At least you don’t have rats, dear.”

One woman actually tiptoed out of the yard. I know she was thinking – don’t let me step on one – it isn’t safe. I smiled behind my old copy of A Moveable Feast, and looked over to the wall. Now, it’s infested? What we have here – is a pit of vipers. I could see his head looking out from between two mossy rocks, hissing a laugh. I went back to Pound boxing with Hemingway. I gave the snake life and Helen thought of ways to end it.

Over the next few days I searched for skins while working on damage control with my wife. She had won first prize in the gardening contest for best front yard – but because of the back wall, she had lost first place overall. The judge said, “A little shabby in the way back, dear.” Helen hardly came out into the yard at all. She talked on the phone to her mother and always stopped when I walked by, waiting until I was out of earshot to continue her tired and constant chatter.

So, the backyard became my yard, my problem. I kept the grass tidy and deadheaded the flowers when it seemed right. I gave the snake the weeds along the wall. I stopped trimming back there. There was an uncertainty about the yard that could be seen in the blood red roses and the purple lilac, the color of blood through the veins. The lilies trembled among long blades of overgrown grass; the Impatiences were wilting in the hot sun and the grass was burning out. I was losing control.

I was pruning the red bud tree in the side yard in September. A van pulled up in front of the house. He got out, whistling and fetching a few things out of the van. I came off my ladder as he walked into the yard, “Can I help you?”

“John Maccino – you have some kinda pest thing.” He was clean-shaven but his tattoos splashed out beneath his collar and his gold chains stuck to his sweaty skin. He didn’t have any idea what he was getting into.

“Did my wife call?”

“Yes, sir. Helen Graham. That must be your wife?”

“That’s her. So, what does it take to get to snakes – find the den and chop them up with a shovel?”

He smiled, “No sir. I have these special traps. They call’em “Have a Heart” traps. They don’t hurt the animal. Just catches them so we can relocate them.” He showed me the traps in his hand.

“What can you trap?”

“Get a lot of squirrels and skunks with this one. So, if you don’t mind I will look

around. Your wife said something about a wall.”

“Sure, go ahead. Straight back. I am sure she mentioned copperhead snakes.”

He paused, “Snakes, yeah. That poisonous kind.”

“I would say so, seen it take a squirrel with one shot. One of those fat, nut filled kind, not the lean spring time kind.” That should get him thinking. I watched him walk across the yard – eyes fixed on the wall. She sent a trapper to catch my snake – with a “Have a Heart” trap.

I watched him set the trap and position them by the wall. My thought was – let trapper John try – then I will look in the traps and if the snake does get caught – I will bust him out before the trapper comes back. So, he left and later, my wife came home. I had left Trapper John’s card on the counter in plain view. She looked out the back door and saw the traps by the wall. She didn’t say much.

“Looks like the trapper man came.”

I nodded, “He did. Left a bear trap for a little two foot snake.”

“Can’t live with poisonous snakes in the yard,” she said.

I sat down to read the paper and watched the passing ads on the television – a skin cream commercial – and the super model smiling and rubbing her face, “Love the Skin you’re in with Avoleen face cream.” I thought about the snakeskins in my basement. They were acknowledgments of life. Watching the snake getting bigger and bigger – shedding off layers of growth for a new skin was rejuvenating and hopeful. It was better than science – it was sentimental.

That night, I had a dream that the snake was in the trap and I tried to let it out and it bit me on the hand. I was poisoned. Steve Irwin stood by and said, “Crickey that’s a wallop of a bite, Mate. Never saw a hand turn green like that.” I was so pissed off that my copperhead had lashed out at me – so betrayed and so angry – my wife was… right. Damn it. I picked up the trap and brought it inside, Steve Irwin trotting in behind me. I put it down on the counter and I said, “Is this what you wanted?”

Helen looked in the cage with horror – my heart was lashed in the cage. Steve Irwin smiled, “Have a Heart Traps are just what you need for those pesky things that get in your way. Order now and I will send you a Croc’ Hunter ball cap.”

So, the next morning I went out to the trap and looked inside. A small chipmunk had sprung the trap. He looked at me with a genuine fear. I could see his heart beating in his chest, breathing in short little gasps. I cut him loose from the Have-a-Heart.

The next night I couldn’t sleep. Helen and I made love – all well protected and insulated. She was snoring, but I couldn’t sleep. I tired, but I couldn’t stop thinking about the trap. I went to the spare bedroom, with the lights off and looked to the wall. I could catch the moonlight gleaming off the metal frame. I could see the yard in splashes of light. You know better, snake. You know.

I went down to the basement and turned on the light over my shop. I touched the dry skin on the wood and it felt like feathers on my fingers. Something soft and delicate can only come from nature.

The next morning I went out early, before Trapper John came to see if we caught another yard critter. I could tell it had been sprung as I approached and my heart fluttered. Inside the trap was my copperhead snake – which was sleek and fine looking and could easily weave in and out of the mesh wiring of the cage. I knew my snake was smart and that trap – even if the snake went in – could just slide back out through the mesh openings. But, that morning – the dumb chipmunk came back and fell for the same trap again. While he sat there, heart beating out of its chest - my copperhead came along. Crawling in – the snake knew he had an easy meal. He bit the chipmunk and then gorged on it. He dislocated his jaw and swallowed the cute little chipmunk in one long swallow. And in the ecstasy of eating a fine, full rounded meal – he had made a terrible mistake. He couldn’t get out of the trap with a chipmunk size lump in his beautiful body. It made me see a lot of things that morning. If we caught all the copperheads in Connecticut, my wife would still see the evil – and that type of venom had poisoned my hopes. I looked at the snake and his beautiful scales. He was coiled in the center of the trap digesting it all.

My first thought was to let him out – let him go. But, that wasn’t fair. It wasn’t fair to Helen. So, Trapper John came and took him away. He was impressed with his catch. After he drove off, I went back inside. I walked into the kitchen and sat down next to my wife and said, “Snake’s gone. Nothing out back to kill our kids.” And she looked at me sad and obstinate.

“There’s probably more, Jack. Probably a whole den of vipers out there.”

I put my hand gently over her trembling fingers and I nodded, “Probably a lot more.”

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Thank you for reading. I remember writing this for my entrance into an MFA program. Like all writers, I sat down and just went blank, nothing came to me and I had to write something to be accepted. I remember thinking, write something funny, write something that is true to you. And this story came about. In the end, it is ironically closer to me than I care to admit.

It is the solace

Of the vast ocean expanse.

It is stifling. No one speaks.

Physics act out rules

And conditions on your body.

Theoretical principles about

Pressure, every thirty-three feet

Double the weight, less the time.

Boyle never did any diving, but

His law saved my soul in principle alone.

And there is oxygen and

Nitrogen twenty one to seventy-nine,

Mixing in blood, changing the balance.

Narcosis, the bent bends, gas into solution,

Solution bubble hemorrhage

The soul blacks out.

Write a novel about that,

Stories where no one speaks,

Set in a place where the ocean

Owes you nothing.

Just look into the eyes of flounder,

Nothing but Atlantic bone-breaking cold.

Sailors never thought much

Of being in the water, no more than

James T. Kirk wants to float in empty space,

Damn it, Jim - there’s no point in it.

Sailors moved over the waves,

For thousands of years,

Struggled through storms,

Lost, found, and lost again,

But never under the waves.

Seashells, sand dollars, conch and whelk

All evidence that design is our own

Lies to believe in Poseidon’s trident.

Sand moves, sharks kill, and

The ocean owes you nothing at all.

Maybe there has to be some

Myth to all the mermaids that were

Manatee, and seals that were men lost at sea.

And widowed women whose sailor drowned

Walk on widow’s walks and wait to see.

What they know already.

This is where myth and folklore,

Seafoam, shells and shipwrecks converge,

Hurricane gods churn the great tidal waves

And we will find all great tales

These myths caught in the shell of half

Open oysters still trying to scream that

The ocean owes you nothing.

The dory boat was moving up and down. They were fishing for Porgies. It was a brilliant summer day. Simon was trying to impress Kate with fishing, but she posed at the stern, waiting. There was a rolling sea, but in summer, under the brilliant sun, it was soothing. They drifted further and further off the beach along the edge of the current.

“Catching a fish is a tricky thing.”

“Seems boring to me,” Kate said.

“I have another pole if you want to try.”

“Ever wonder if it’s like a dream in the sea?”

“I don’t know,” said Simon. “Just looks like water.”

She shook her head, “You’re on the sea, silly. What’s it like in the sea?”

Simon jerked his pole. Then he let it settle. Kate was beautiful. Could she love him if she got to know him? What could those blue eyes see? A poor kid who grew up near the mill on the edge of the freight yard? Her long hair whipped on the wind, she peered into the rolling waves, lost.

“You probably don’t think much of me.”

She sat in the back of the boat, the summer sun sparkling in the waves around her, “It isn’t you. There’s my mother and my sisters. My father likes to hit girls. He does things to us. The only reason I am out here fishing for porgies is to stay away. Too many tresspasses.”

That was his opening. “You can escape with me any time. I don’t care.” He wanted to say I love you, but he couldn’t do it.

Suddenly, Kate scurried across the boat. She sat in the middle and drew close to him. Simon smelled of salt and sun. She looked into his eyes, cupped his face in her delicate hands and kissed his lips lightly.

“You don’t deserve this, Simon. But he does.”

She slipped over the side and disappeared into the waves.

After three days of looking and waiting, they assumed the sea took her.

I heard Dickinson’s soft breathe

so close to my ear

I thought she kissed it.

And everything I knew of her,

poetry and words dissolved.

Just the smell of almonds from

a dry sigh caught in a dusty mouth.

Published August 2023 - Phenomenal Literature VOL8

Literary fiction has always seemed to promise more than entertainment. We come to it for beauty, for atmosphere, for the pleasure of language, but also for something harder to name: recognition. A novel can leave us feeling that it has told the truth, even when every event in it is invented. That intuition sits at the center of literary cognitivism, the philosophical view that fiction can be a source of knowledge or understanding.

The idea is simple enough at first glance. Fiction does not need to be factually accurate to be insightful. A story can be made up and still reveal something real about grief, power, loneliness, desire, class, shame, or moral hesitation. But literary cognitivism goes a step further than this familiar claim. It argues that the value of fiction is not merely accidental, as if a novel happened to contain a few useful observations. Rather, its fictional character is part of what makes that insight possible.

This matters because fiction works differently from reporting. A newspaper article tells us what happened. A novel asks us to imagine what might happen, what tends to happen, or what becomes visible only when a life is placed under pressure. In that sense, fiction behaves like a thought experiment. It sets up a world, invites us to inhabit it, and lets us examine the consequences of its assumptions. The truth that emerges is not always propositional, not always the kind of truth that can be paraphrased into a single sentence. Sometimes it is emotional truth, structural truth, or truth about how people actually move through the world. The scope and detail of a novel allows for specific, significant details that build a complex experience. Gardner called significant details as the pathway to proof.

That distinction helps explain why fiction can feel truer than fact. Facts tell us that something occurred. Fiction can show us why it mattered. Facts can describe behavior. Fiction can place us inside motives, evasions, rationalizations, and private fear. A novel can make visible the invisible architecture of a life: the ways a person justifies herself, the small humiliations that accumulate into identity, the silence that shapes a family, the social rules that seem natural only because they are so deeply internalized. This is one reason literary critics and philosophers have long argued that fiction offers access to “inner truth” and the truths of other minds.

Still, literary cognitivism is controversial. Skeptics point out that nonfiction can also teach us about character, morality, and social life, so what exactly is distinctively cognitive about fiction? If a novel gives us insight, is that insight coming from the fiction itself, or simply from the author’s observations about life? The debate is important because it asks whether fiction has a special route to knowledge or merely the power to package familiar truths in memorable form. That question keeps the theory honest.

Not all fiction advances understanding of human experience; some works may instead distort or simplify it in ways that undermine cognitive value. A text may be aesthetically accomplished while still encouraging readers to accept morally misleading or psychologically reductive representations, such as the romanticization of domination, the normalization of cruelty, or the flattening of marginalized persons into stereotypes. In such cases, fiction does not enlarge perception so much as constrain it, substituting a compelling but partial imaginative framework for a more adequate account of human complexity. This possibility complicates literary cognitivism by showing that fictional narrative may generate not only insight, but also misrecognition, and that artistic form alone cannot guarantee truthfulness of representation.

Another apsect of literary cognitivism is that fiction does not compete with nonfiction on the terrain of factual reporting. Instead, it operates through imaginative testing. A fiction creates a provisional world in which a reader can rehearse experience without being trapped inside actual consequence. We can explore fear without real danger, betrayal without real loss, catastrophe without real damage. That freedom matters. It makes fiction a laboratory of consciousness, one where the mind can examine possibility, and where the heart can learn what certain choices feel like before life demands them for real.academic. In reading Borges, not only is the work and ideas that he wrote cerebral, but you can tell he has accepted the page as a landscape of literary ideas, not manifesting reality.

This is why some of the best fiction seems to tell the truth sideways. It does not announce itself as wisdom. It arrives as scene, symbol, voice, and event. We finish the book and realize that what changed us was not a lecture but an experience. We have spent time inside a situation, and in spending that time, we have learned something about limits, motives, or vulnerability that could not have been delivered in a neat proposition. Fiction’s knowledge is often indirect, but indirect does not mean weak. Sometimes it is the only way certain truths can be reached.

In Empathy and the Novel by Suzanne Keen, the central argument is that reading fiction can cultivate empathy by inviting readers to inhabit perspectives they would not otherwise encounter. Through narrative, interiority, and emotional complexity, novels encourage us to imaginatively enter the lives of others, to sense motives, vulnerabilities, and pressures from within rather than from a distance. This process does not simply produce sentimental identification; it can also sharpen moral attention, helping readers recognize the contingency of their own assumptions and the social conditions that shape feeling and behavior. In that sense, fiction becomes a form of ethical sharpening, an exercise in perception that deepens our capacity to understand others as fully human, layered, and distinct from ourselves.

There is also a moral dimension to this argument. Fiction can enlarge sympathy by letting us occupy perspectives we might otherwise resist or ignore. It can make abstraction intimate. Social problems that remain remote in statistics become legible in narrative. A reader may not remember a theory of inequality, but she may remember a character pinned by it. A reader may not carry away a definition of loneliness, but he may carry away a scene that makes loneliness unmistakable. In this way, fiction can alter not just what we know, but how we know.

For writers, literary cognitivism offers a liberating and demanding claim. It suggests that the job of fiction is not to imitate reality mechanically, but to illuminate it. Accuracy matters, but only up to a point. The deeper obligation is truthfulness of perception: to render human experience with enough pressure, specificity, and imaginative intelligence that the reader recognizes something essential. A novel is not a deposition. It is an act of made truth.

That phrase may sound paradoxical, but it captures the central promise of literary fiction. Fiction does not become valuable because it pretends to be factual. It becomes valuable when its inventions disclose patterns that facts alone may not reveal. It can show us what a life feels like from the inside, how a system behaves when it is no longer abstract, and how meaning changes under emotional strain. That is the quiet power of literary cognitivism: the claim that invention, at its best, is not the opposite of truth but one of its most fertile forms.

If fiction moves us, unsettles us, and leaves us newly aware of the world, it is because it has not merely entertained us. It has taught us how to see.

Note: This article and the next few that will come along is based on Katherine Anne Poter’s quote: “I will try to tell the truth, but the result will be fiction.” I’ve always thought that the truth in fiction is more than morality, but the depth in which emotional connection, empathy, compassion, and artistry can change the way we see the world. This is not a flashy topic, but it builds a framework of why a novel, poem, film, or ballet matters when it comes to developing our imaginations.

There is a code in technical scuba diving.

It lives beyond certification cards, beyond checklists and laminated tables. It is personal, built slowly through experience, sharpened by rational decision-making, and anchored in something far older—fear. Not panic, not recklessness, but the kind of fear that clarifies. The kind that forces a decision.

This code is not fixed. It evolves. You revise it with every dive, every mistake, every moment where instinct speaks faster than training. Break it, and there are no appeals. You live with whatever follows.

It is within this code that diving becomes something more than technical skill. It becomes a confrontation with the fundamental acts of being human: judgment, restraint, curiosity, and survival.

I.

The first time I saw a wolffish, it was flattened onto a glossy page in a fish guide. Even there, contained and harmless, it felt wrong. Like something misplaced from a nightmare. A sea serpent rendered just believable enough to exist.

It belonged to the margins of old maps, the spaces labeled with quiet warnings: here be danger.

At that point, I had only just started snorkeling seriously, beginning the transition into scuba. I had seen American eels tucked into rocks and crevices, small, nervous things. The garter snakes of the sea. They startled you more than they threatened you. There was even a thrill in spotting one.

But the more time I spent around divers, the more I heard about the Atlantic wolffish.

Each time, the reaction was the same: a raised eyebrow, a pause, and then—“Yeah, not something you want to mess with.”

II.

If you want to understand a fear, you move toward it.

That’s the theory, anyway.

I read more. Studied images. Searched for anything that might make the wolffish legible, explainable, less monstrous. It didn’t work. Research for sharks, killer whales, and sea snakes has practical understanding and respect.

The problem was not just how a wolffish looked, but how it didn’t meet underwater expectations. It was an animal assembled from mismatched parts: an eel’s body, a fish’s head, and a mouth that seemed designed without restraint. Long dorsal fin. Thick, muscular frame. Teeth meant for tearing, prying, and crushing. Front teeth for a predator, back teeth like a millstone.

Some were described as aggressive.

Worse, they lived in the kind of water where visibility fades and imagination fills the gaps.

III.

The first one I saw in the wild was barely the length of my finger.

We were diving a shallow cove off Fisher’s Island, New York. A training dive. Broken rock spilling into sand, fragments of an old wreck scattered across the bottom.

The recently hatched wolffish sat beside a rock, watching me.

Curious, I moved my gloved hand closer, expecting to spook him off.

It attacked.

Not once but again, and again. No hesitation, no retreat. Just pure, disproportionate aggression in something so small.

I pulled back.

There was no flight in that fish, only fight.

IV.

Every diver carries a private catalog of fears.

Sharks. Entanglement. Equipment failure. Depth. Darkness.

Training prepares you for many of these. You rehearse failure. You simulate a crisis. You learn responses.

But there is no real training for encountering something alive that does not behave the way you expect.

And there is no way to remove fear from the equation entirely.

Years later, in the Bahamas, I dropped onto a wreck near Bimini.

Sixty feet down. Clear water—the kind that makes descent feel like slow flight rather than falling. I had woken up uneasy, slightly hungover, skipping breakfast. The captain suggested a dive to clear my head.

He was right.

By the time I reached the wreck, I felt steady again. I moved along its edges, tracing its shape against the sand. Wreck diving has its own rhythm—pause at corners, look before you move, let the structure reveal what it holds.

I slipped into a narrow corridor along the side of the barge. Metal walls. Limited visibility. Tight space.

Then I saw it.

A green ribbon, uncoiling from a hole in the wall.

A large moray eel.

In that moment, one of the simplest rules in my personal code surfaced immediately:

If it’s bigger than me, leave.

In open water, I might have admired it. In that confined space, sixty feet down, alone, it was different.

I stopped breathing.

No bubbles. No noise. No invitation.

The eel moved away, its body continuing longer than expected—five, maybe six feet—before disappearing into another opening.

I waited. Then I turned, retraced my path, and drifted up in open water.

Hovering above the wreck, I steadied myself.

You’re fine, I told myself. That was fine.

But my hands said otherwise.

V.

The North Atlantic doesn’t offer clarity.

It offers tests.

Cold. Surge. Low visibility. Equipment strain. Every variable presses against your comfort, your judgment. It is a place where your code is not theoretical, it is a constant activation of awareness and focus.

On the wreck of the U-853, those conditions were fully present.

One hundred thirty feet down. Dim light. A history that lingers in the structure itself. The wreck is a submarine hunted and destroyed, its hull torn open by depth charges.

I landed alone on the conning tower. The others were already ascending.

I prefer covering ground, taking in the whole structure. But that day didn’t allow it. Low visibility required some restraint.

I moved cautiously, studying what the wreck had become.

Eventually, I reached the blast hole behind the conning tower.

I knew what was inside. The control room. Accessible, if you were willing to enter.

I hovered above it and turned on my light.

The beam cut through the opening—and found something already there.

An Atlantic wolffish.

Curled in the debris. Watching.

Not moving. Not retreating. Positioned at the threshold like a guard.

And suddenly, the memory of that tiny, aggressive juvenile returned—how it had struck without hesitation.

This was no juvenile.

There are moments in diving where the decision is immediate and final.

This was one of them.

I could enter.

Or I could respect what was already there.

Once you know you’re being watched, the illusion of control disappears. You are no longer exploring freely—you are negotiating with nature.

We held our position. Observer and observed. Myth and reality, finally occupying the same frame.

And in that moment, the code held.

I did not enter.

On decompression, suspended between depth and surface, I kept returning to that image.

The wolffish didn’t chase me. It didn’t need to.

It changed the dive simply by being there.

Fear didn’t disappear—it recalibrated. It became something more precise, more useful. Less about avoidance, more about recognition.

The sea does not owe us access. It does not yield simply because we are curious.

But sometimes, in holding the line—choosing not to cross—you understand something more enduring than conquest.

Respect is its own equilibrium.

And somewhere in the collapsing steel of that wreck, among history, silence, and pressure, the wolffish remains.

Holding its ground.

There is a particular kind of magic we still tend to guard in fiction: the singular voice. The novel, especially, remains one of the last cultural artifacts we instinctively associate with solitude: a single mind, a single consciousness, shaping a world with deliberate control.

But what happens when we give that up?

Imagine a story that begins with one writer—just a few pages, a tone, a character, a problem—and then is handed off. Another writer continues it. Then another. And another. No master outline. No dominant voice. Only the loose inheritance of what came before.

What emerges is not just a story, but a kind of literary organism.

Each writer introduces subtle mutations: a shift in rhythm, a re-interpretation of motive, a new layer of meaning that may align or collide with prior intentions. A character might harden or soften unexpectedly. A symbol might deepen accidentally. A plot thread might be abandoned, then rediscovered chapters later with entirely new significance.

In this way, authorship becomes less about control and more about response. The need to push in a direction fall quickly out of your hands, and the while it all feels hopeless, maybe something different, unexpected is waiting for you.

The question is no longer “What am I trying to say?” but “What have I been given—and what can I make of it?”

This kind of collaborative fiction destabilizes some of our most cherished assumptions about narrative writing. Continuity may fray. Voice may fracture. Meaning may become plural rather than precise.

And yet, something else takes its place.

A collective intelligence begins to surface, not in the sense of consensus, but in accumulation. The story starts to reflect not a single psyche, but a network of them. Contradictions become part of the texture. Ambiguities feel earned rather than engineered.

It begins to resemble something closer to lived experience: layered, inconsistent, shaped by many unseen hands.

There is also a quiet ethical shift embedded in this model. No one writer “owns” the story in the traditional sense. Authority is distributed. Interpretation is ongoing. The narrative resists closure because no single voice has the power to finalize it.

In that way, collaborative fiction may be less about storytelling and more about witnessing each writer encountering what exists, leaving a trace, and stepping aside.

For those of us who spend our lives thinking about voice, intention, and craft, this raises a more provocative question:

Is the power of fiction diminished when it is shared or does it become something we cannot achieve alone?

Perhaps the most interesting outcome is not the finished piece, but the tension it holds: between coherence and chaos, authorship and anonymity, design and emergence. Even the waiting for a response is part of that tension.

Not a perfect novel.

But something alive.

And so, an invitation.

If you are a writer, published or not, practiced or just beginning, I am opening this as an experiment in collective storytelling. I will begin with the first passage. From there, the work will move from one writer to the next, each adding a section, each inheriting what came before without the safety of a master plan.

There will be only a few guiding principles: honor what exists, resist the urge to overwrite, and allow yourself to be surprised.

If you are interested in participating, reach out. I will begin assembling a chain of writers willing to take on a single segment of the story before passing it forward. If we get just a few, you may have a few sections to write. If you get a lot, you may only have one portion.

Sign up here.

Not to produce something polished.

But to see what happens when we let a story belong to no one—and, in doing so, to all of us.

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There is something quietly unsettling about how much of the art that moves us is, by nature, impermanent.

A poem can meet you at exactly the right moment—hold you, name something you didn’t yet have language for, and then, years later, it falls flat. Not because it changed, but because you did. The coordinates shifted. You are no longer standing in that same emotional geography.

Music, for me, is the most impermanent form of all.

It arrives with urgency. It becomes obsessive. I need it, play it on repeat, live inside it, let it score entire stretches of my life. And then, almost without noticing, I let it go. Maybe I grow tired of it. Maybe it becomes too attached to a version of myself I no longer recognize, or no longer want to revisit. Sometimes it even feels like I don’t like it anymore. After a hundred listens, something in the relationship erodes, and I move on.

But that erosion says something deeper about music itself.

If music is the art form that reaches emotion most directly; bypassing analysis, slipping past defenses. Music is also uniquely vulnerable to fading, drying up, or transforming. And yet, after enough time passes, a song can return. Not as it was, but as something newly charged. You hear it again and are transported, not just back to who you were, but into a reconsideration of what that moment meant.

It raises a question I keep circling: does music achieve permanence not through the artifact itself, but through the intersections it creates? Through time, memory, and emotional need?

When I feel unmoored, I often turn to music in circuits. One song leads to another, then another, an associative chain, less logical than emotional. And sometimes, somewhere along that path, I land on a song that feels like it is speaking directly to me. Not metaphorically, but precisely, naming the disorientation, the absence, the quiet sense of being lost.

In those moments, I don’t want to move on. I want to stay inside the song.

Sometimes that song is thirty years old. But the moment it creates is immediate, alive. It is the same emotional response that happens when movies and their scores work so well together. It acts as an emotional bridge to the action on the screen. Music feels that way in my own head, with my own memories.

You hear echoes of this in how artists talk about performance. Singers, musicians, conductors—they describe a particular night, a specific rendering of a song, as if something unrepeatable happened. And audiences say the same: I was there. It felt different. Something important occurred.

That is the agreement we make with music. It gives us access to moments—through sound, through motion, through presence—not entirely dependent on interpretation or prior knowledge, but on a kind of shared emotional immediacy.

I used to think casually about the persistence of music. Years ago, I joked that if all those forgettable songs from the 1980s were still around, I wouldn’t be surprised. But I realize now I was wrong in a more important way. It is not the individual songs that endure—it is the collective body of music that remains available to us, allowing us to re-enter the intersections of sound, space, memory, and experience.

And yet, I still take music for granted.

Until I need it.

Until something feels off, or missing, and I begin searching—not for a specific song, but for a feeling. I move through tracks that don’t quite land, revisit songs I thought mattered but don’t anymore, follow threads that lead unexpectedly to something I had forgotten. Even the “bad” songs serve a purpose; they are part of the pathway.

This is what makes music different from other art forms. Books, paintings, poetry, architecture: they occupy space. You can return to them physically, place them on a shelf, revisit them as objects.

Music occupies time.

You cannot take your favorite moment from a live performance and preserve it intact. You cannot hold it, display it, or fully recreate it. But you can return to the recording. And while you cannot recover the original moment, you can approximate its emotional contours. Sometimes, that return brings you back to joy. Sometimes, it brings you back to grief—to what was missing then, or what is missing now.

One of my favorite moments is to be in a theater before a performance, because the act of being in the space, in the moment, is quite extraordinary (I typically use my imagination to get into a novel, a scene, setting, or mood). People are dressed up. People are together. People are open to sharing this moment. The applause, the act of performing, the shared experience is all purposeful and connective in a way I don’t share in my writing.

In a world that often asks us to suppress, to move forward without pausing, music offers a different kind of permission.

It allows us to feel deliberately.

To revisit. To re-experience. To sit inside something unresolved.

So go back to those songs. Let yourself move through them, not as nostalgia, but as exploration. Follow the circuits. Stay with the one that unsettles you, or the one that opens something you have been avoiding.

At the right moment, the right song is not just sound.

It is a way back into yourself.

A writer’s note to music: I listen to music when I write, but I cannot listen to music with lyrics when I read. It is just how it works for me. Any song, lyrics, mood, feel is all part of the writing process. Sometimes, replaying music gives access back to the writing. Reading, being dyslexic (not sure it has anything to do with it), is no-lyrics only. Classical, ambient music, and white noise are good for reading. I mention this because the writing process is a big part of what I think about, however, this article is more about the essence of music and access to emotionality.

Tell me how music accesses your emotions, your creativity, your process, and your experiences.

Part of the concept of esoteric reading is the concept of reading in connection or (as one commentator mentioned) in a chain of relational reading. Simply put, reading a book that moves you to another book that is related, connected, referenced or in the same sphere. I have a copy of Michael Schmidt’s great reference to the novels titled The Novel: A Biography (Harvard Press, 2014). One of the best things that this book does is put book into relationships (maybe even perspective) with other books to connect their relevance that might otherwise be missed by a reader. Some of the book connections seem improbable until Dr. Schmidt draws them together. In his introduction, he mentions “reading is a cumulative act, adding skill, increasingly creative as it does.” It is through the readers chronology as a reader, as a writer, and as someone who lives within these novels, that pathways become connective imaginative areas in understanding literature, understanding ideas, and eventually the literary constructs that begin to evolve into genres, themes, and critical theories of the novel.

More importantly, Schmidt’s work put writers and books together. I think that is the foundation of creating insight into chains that follow book reading. We spend a lot of time on apps like Goodreads keeping track of books and using their recommendations along with platforms like Amazon or Kobo to curate your next read. Books and ideas often inspire you to read another title by the same writer, it might get you connected to a type of book, or a historical group of writers like Melville, Hawthrone, Walden, Thoreau, Fuller as they became the New England Transcendentalist. Perhaps you read All’s Quite on the Western Front and realize that you want to read more World War I novels about the time. Erich M. Remarque wrote a great novel titled The Black Obelisk, which is just an amazing post-war novel that puts his war writing into a stunning frame. Another chain in my life was reading Yukio Mishima’s Temple of the Golden Pavillion and falling into great Japanase literature from Kawabata and Oe to the explosion of amazing Japanese novel by Murakami and my person favorite Out by Natsuo Kirino.

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Reading with connection makes the next book meaningful. If you like mysteries, you typically read in a series or collection. Why? Because you liked what you read and you want to continue. If you are a writer, perhaps you are looking for how people do their work. I have considered different writers to help me understand the way I can tell stories. Sometimes, that means reading the classics like Dostoevsky or Dumas, but sometimes, it means reading Scott Momaday to hear why stories are based in culture, based in how it is told, and how stories survives in that culture.

What begins to emerge, then, is not just a habit of reading, but a method of thinking. Chain reading, for writers, becomes a kind of informal apprenticeship. One book teaches you something about structure, the next about voice, another about silence or restraint, and another about how far language can stretch before it breaks. When you read in chains, you are not just collecting stories, you are tracing lineage. You are asking: where did this idea come from, and where did it go next?

This matters because writing rarely happens in isolation. Even the most original work is, in some way, in conversation with what came before it. A gothic novel set in New England is not just a story; it is in dialogue with Hawthorne’s moral weight, with Shirley Jackson’s psychological unease, with the quiet dread that seeps through so much of regional literature. When you read in chains, you begin to see those echoes more clearly. You begin to recognize not just influence, but intention.

If you are struggling with pacing, you might follow a chain of tightly structured novels. If you are trying to understand interiority, you might move from Woolf to Ishiguro to contemporary literary fiction that plays with memory and perception. Each step in the chain refines your sense of what is possible on the page. You are, in effect, building a toolkit, but one shaped by curiosity rather than prescription.

And perhaps most importantly, chain reading keeps you honest. It prevents you from settling too quickly into a single voice, a single style, or a single idea of what writing should be. It pushes you outward, across time periods, cultures, and forms. It reminds you that literature is not static, it is a living, evolving conversation that you are entering into as both reader and writer.

Think about the last book that stayed with you longer than expected. Not just what you felt while reading it, but what it made you want to read next. What questions did it leave unanswered? What voices did it make you curious about? If you followed that impulse—intentionally, deliberately—what kind of chain would you begin to build, and what might it teach you about the kind of writer you are becoming?

He suggests (read the excerpt below) that childhood is not simply a prelude to understanding, but a fundamentally different way of knowing. When we are young, we are not yet equipped with the frameworks that make the adult world legible. We do not understand motive, history, or consequence in any structured way. What we experience instead are impressions; intense, immediate, and often incomplete.

Miller calls this “the view from the floor,” a phrase that captures both the physical and epistemological position of the child. It is a vantage point defined by proximity without comprehension. Things are seen and felt before they are understood. And because of that, they are misread—sometimes dramatically so.

But Miller resists the urge to correct those misreadings too quickly.

What he suggests, instead, is that these early misunderstandings are not incidental to the formation of the self, but central to it. They are not simply errors waiting to be revised by adulthood. They are, in many ways, the origin of perception itself. The child constructs meaning out of fragments, and those constructions carry an emotional intensity that later knowledge cannot fully undo.

This is where Miller’s insight becomes especially important for writers.

If these early perceptions are “wrong,” they are wrong in a way that is deeply generative. They are private, unshared, and resistant to external validation. No one else saw exactly what we saw or understood it in quite the same way. And because of that, those moments become uniquely ours. They form a kind of internal logic that does not need to align with reality in order to feel true.

That gap between what happened and what was felt to have happened is where imagination begins to take hold.

Writing, then, is not just an act of recollection. It is an act of return. It asks us to revisit those early, unsteady interpretations of the world and to take them seriously, even when we now “know better.” It asks us to resist flattening them into neat explanations shaped by hindsight.

And yet, there is tension here.

To grow up is, in part, to reinterpret the past. We come to understand the forces that were invisible to us as children like family dynamics, grief, addiction, power, silence. We begin to see how much we could not have known. And in doing so, there is a temptation to dismiss those earlier perceptions as naïve, to overwrite them with something more accurate, more adult.

But something is lost in that correction.

A child cannot name what is happening in a room, but they can feel it with remarkable precision. They register shifts in tone, in presence, in absence. They build meaning from what is available, even if that meaning is structurally unsound. What they produce is not factual truth, but experiential truth. That distinction matters.

Experiential truth is often where art begins.

Miller’s point is not that memory is a mistake. It is that memory is built from partial knowledge, and that partiality is not a weakness but a condition of creativity. The child’s world is not yet fixed. It allows for connections that an adult might dismiss, for interpretations that exceed what can be proven.

Some writers spend years trying to dismantle those early constructions, to arrive at something more stable, more “correct.” Others return to them, recognizing that within those initial misunderstandings is a kind of freedom or a way of seeing that has not yet been disciplined into coherence.

In childhood, we are most open to the world, we are also least able to interpret it. And yet, it may be that this is precisely where the work begins; not in clarity, but in the persistence of those first, uncertain meanings that refuse to disappear.

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Excerpt:

“It is simply that the view from the floor, filled though it is with misunderstandings, is also the purest, the matrix whose content is so difficult to change later on. The impact of things seen and heard from the carpet is red-hot and returns with a far greater shock of truth when recalled because those visions are our very own, our private misunderstandings of reality shared by no one else, and are thus the soil of poetry, which is our freedom to alter mere facts. From misunderstandings, more than from anything dutifully learned out of respect for culture, the threads unwind that spin the uniqueness of each artist’s vision, promising implicitly to remake the world all new. Unknowingly, almost from the beginning, I have sought to reconstruct my life, becoming my brother from time to time, my father, my mother, putting on theirs and others’ forms and faces in order to test the view from angles other than my own. And incidentally, it sometimes took years before I could painfully strip myself of such disguises and find myself again. In a word, at the very time we are most vulnerable to impressions, we are least able to avoid outrageously misjudging what they mean. At a minimum, therefore, life will never lose its mystery.”

Miller, Arthur. Timebends: A life. Grove, NY 1987.

But there is another kind of reader—and another kind of writer—who lives slightly outside that circle. The esoteric writer does not write for conversation but from conviction; the esoteric reader, in turn, seeks not to join a chorus but to listen for notes that are almost inaudible in the mainstream hum.

The Comfort of Collective Reading

Book clubs and reading groups are keeping literature alive at a time when novel-length reading is in decline. Their selections, often drawn from bestseller lists or award winners, serve an admirable purpose: they encourage people to read deeply, to think critically, and to connect empathetically. Reader’s guides and discussion prompts at the end of many novels are designed to make literature accessible—to protect readers from isolation by giving them a ready-made script of questions.

For readers who crave shared experience, this is an ideal structure. But Murakami’s critique holds: if all paths lead to the same conversations about the same ten books that dominate the cultural cycle, what happens to the inner life of reading—the solitude, the strangeness, the intellectual dissonance that literature once promised?

The Risk and Reward of Esoteric Reading

To be an esoteric reader is to read beyond the predictable. It is to open a book with no expectation of agreement, comfort, or validation, and to risk confusion, even alienation. These are not always pleasant experiences, but they are generative ones. As you mentioned, when reviews of a book are divided—when readers “hate it” as much as others “love it”—that’s often a sign that the author is doing something interesting, something that resists easy categorization.

Take A Confederacy of Dunces, for example. Both adored and derided, it sits precisely in that space between genius and excess where the reader must decide what they value in a narrative. Or consider Olga Tokarczuk’s Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead—a book that defies genre, shifting between eco-mystery, moral philosophy, and elegiac folklore. Such books don’t demand that you like them; they ask you to meet them.

The Esoteric Writer’s Invitation

Esoteric writers don’t write for comfort or commerce. They encode ideas, contradictions, and emotional frequencies that appeal to readers attuned to subtlety—to those who read not to confirm what they already know but to encounter something other. Writers like Yukio Mishima, Katherine Anne Porter, and Mark Danielewski invite readers into complex symbolic architectures where meaning is rarely handed over fully formed.

In this way, reading becomes a dialogue of secrecy and revelation. The esoteric reader approaches the page like an archaeologist, uncovering intention embedded in structure, rhythm, or silence. The experience is less about the story and more about consciousness—how a book rearranges what you believe about the world, or about yourself.

Charting Your Own Reading Path

If we take Murakami’s challenge seriously, then the cure for intellectual homogeneity lies in literary curiosity. There is value in stepping off the bestseller lists—not to reject them outright, but to balance them with riskier, idiosyncratic choices. Try reading books with uneven reviews, or rediscovering older works that fell out of the public imagination. Here are a few titles that open unconventional doors:

• Pale Horse, Pale Rider – Katherine Anne Porter

• The Black Obelisk – Erich Maria Remarque

• Winter’s Tale – Mark Helprin

• The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea – Yukio Mishima

• A Gracious Plenty – Sheri Reynolds

• Ella Minnow Pea – Mark Dunn

• The Death of Vishnu – Manil Suri

• The Familiar – Mark Z. Danielewski

Each offers entry to a different cosmos, inviting the reader to think, feel, and imagine beyond consensus.

The esoteric writer whispers across time, and the esoteric reader listens—alone, yet never lonely. Between them, in that fragile communication, literature keeps its power to startle the mind awake.

Kingyens, whose earlier collections established a distinct metaphysical sensibility, extends her vision here by crafting poems that function as connective tissue between chaos and purpose. These poems operate within the interstices of experience—those moments where meaning surfaces through reflection and pause. Reading Lost in the Bardo often compels moments of stillness and contemplation, underscoring the very power of liminality and the creative potential embedded in the “space between.”

One of the most structurally and philosophically significant components of the collection lies in The Bardo I–VI, a sequence that provides both thematic coherence and navigational guidance. These poems articulate concise yet penetrating philosophical propositions that reverberate throughout the volume, forming an interpretive spine that holds the work together. The poet’s exploration of the “family elephant in the room” emerges as especially resonant, exposing the tensions between concealment and revelation that underpin familial and social identity.

Thematically, the collection moves fluidly across the boundaries of dysfunction and intimacy, memory and desire, trauma and transcendence. Kingyens demonstrates a sophisticated cultural literacy, intertwining references to contemporary media and cultural symbols with meditations on psychological fracture and healing in postmodern America. In Mantra of a Teratoma, for instance, the poet employs the linguistic and medical peculiarities of the suffix “–oma” to evoke both pathology and reflection, reinforcing the central motif of the bardo—the act of gazing into the mirror and perceiving the layered space between.

The interplay of poems such as Orbit/Obit and Time Bomb situates the reader within the gravitational tensions between mortality and continuity, temporality and transformation. Across these texts, vivid “vistas” such as Nightswimming and From Scratch illuminate the sensory dimensions of memory, youth, and familial transmission—capturing the way tradition and identity are corporeally and generationally encoded, sometimes diminished over time.

Ultimately, Lost in the Bardo is a compelling meditation on the complex threshold between presence and becoming. Kingyens’ work examines how individuals navigate the fragmented terrain of lived experience—balancing the immediacy of the present with the persistence of memory and the inevitability of change. Each poem gestures toward a reimagined understanding of transition and the elusive architecture of selfhood that exists within the space between.

Find this book on Amazon.com or where great poetry collection are found.

Lost in the Bardo

Carolynn Kingyens

Published 2026

Publisher: Kelsay Books

ISBN 979-8-90146-703-9

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Jack London once said, “You can’t wait for inspiration. You have to go after it with a club.” Let’s talk about that flash of inspiration versus the inspiration as a working tool in your day-to-day tool kit. They are different and we need to know the difference between the dreamy inspiration that is often captured on film or in the media, and the real inspiration that is built on your own hard work, realizations, and vision of the world. While I do not think writer’s block is real, I do believe in inspiration, but as a work product not as a out-of-nowhere explosion.

Inspiration is wonderful, but it is not dependable. It does not show up often enough to be the foundation of a writing life, and it certainly cannot be the thing you build your identity around. If you are a writer or any kind of artist who uses words, the best tool you have is not inspiration. It is discipline. Octavia Butler said, “First, forget inspiration. Habit is more dependable.”

Blind inspiration, for me, is often something I cook up quickly, but have difficulty with when I get to work. I haven’t thought it out, I haven’t defined a lot of things, and while it might be a good idea, it is still a new thing that needs thought, ideas, and connections to make it work. Inspiration comes out of nowhere, but sometimes this is just distraction, confusion, or a snippet of an idea waiting to be developed. I never trust a new idea that hasn’t been tested and developed.

That sounds less glamorous, but it is far more useful. The work of making art is not mostly about feeling struck by lightning. It is about sitting down when nothing feels electric and staying there long enough to find out what the work wants. Most of the time, that means being frustrated, uncertain, and a little disappointed. That is not failure. That is the craft.

Writers often talk about inspiration as if it is the engine of the whole process. In reality, it is more like weather. Sometimes it comes through and changes everything for a moment. Sometimes it clears the air and gives you a view you did not have before. But it does not stay.

If you wait for inspiration to arrive before you begin, you will spend a lot of time not making anything. Worse, you may start to believe that the absence of inspiration means the absence of talent. That is one of the cruelest lies in creative work. The truth is simpler: most serious writing happens without a dramatic feeling attached to it. It happens because you sat down and worked.

Discipline is what keeps the artist in the room when inspiration leaves. It is what allows you to return to a draft after the glow has worn off. It is what lets you revise a paragraph for the fifth time, or sit with a broken scene until you understand what it actually needs.

This is the work. It is here in this work where the inspiration or the creative light shines, in draft after draft, when you feel the weight of the emotional scene, when you see it all come together, where your vision of the story arrives for the first time. It is patient. It is a decision to trust the work more than your mood. It means writing on ordinary days, not just on luminous ones. It means accepting that some of your best thinking will happen in the middle of confusion. That confusion feels frustrating, but it is part of the process. And it means understanding that art is often made in the gap between what you hoped would appear and what actually does.

To be a writer is to develop a relationship with uncertainty. You do not get to control when insight arrives, but you can control whether you are present when it does. That is why discipline matters so much. It creates the conditions for discovery.

So yes, inspiration is real. But it is fleeting, and it is not enough. The stronger tool is discipline: the habit of showing up, the patience to be frustrated, and the endurance to keep shaping language until it it does more than inspire you – it inspires the reader.

I would like to hear about how inspiration shapes your work – talk about it in the comments.

Small art projects and short-run books have a special way of connecting ideas that might otherwise be set aside. I’m fortunate to collaborate with my sister, illustrator Cynthia Samul, whose work spans children’s books, fine art illustration, cover design, and marketing materials. Together, we created On the Beach, a beautifully illustrated mini book that captures this spirit of creativity and accessibility.

Samul’s mini books are designed to be shared easily—each one can be emailed, printed, folded, and enjoyed right from home. They combine the tactile pleasure of craft with high-quality design and art. Ideal for classrooms, book clubs, or community programs, these books make storytelling accessible to everyone—inviting readers to explore something new, practice their reading skills, or simply enjoy the experience of holding a story in their hands.

Explore Cynthia’s website to see her artwork and follow her simple guide on how to fold your own mini book.

https://www.keyartbooks.com/

Cynthia Samul is also the writer and illustrator of Snowman Amuck, a wickedly funny story about a winter night that no one will forget. She also has created some really fun extras and printout sheets for the book that is great for family and classroom use. Check it out here at Amazon.com or at her website: https://www.snowmanamuck.com/