Hi all. I’m Shavonne Clarke, now working with Josh Diamond as one half of the nonfiction contingent here. I grew up in Great Falls, Virginia and received a BA from Sweet Briar College and an MA from Texas A&M University, both in English. Currently I live in Lafayette, Indiana as an MFA student in fiction at Purdue University.

I’m very excited to be reading and helping to select this year’s nonfiction pieces. As a fiction reader, I was frequently impressed by the caliber of writing submitted to Sycamore. In this case, I also have the honor of “induction,” in some sense, into other lives and experiences. Because creative nonfiction seems such an expansive genre, I look forward to seeing how those truths find their own expression.

If you’d like to read more on the preferred aesthetics of each submission, ...MORE]]> By Shavonne Clarke, Nonfiction Co-Editor

Hi all. I’m Shavonne Clarke, now working with Josh Diamond as one half of the nonfiction contingent here. I grew up in Great Falls, Virginia and received a BA from Sweet Briar College and an MA from Texas A&M University, both in English. Currently I live in Lafayette, Indiana as an MFA student in fiction at Purdue University.

I’m very excited to be reading and helping to select this year’s nonfiction pieces. As a fiction reader, I was frequently impressed by the caliber of writing submitted to Sycamore. In this case, I also have the honor of “induction,” in some sense, into other lives and experiences. Because creative nonfiction seems such an expansive genre, I look forward to seeing how those truths find their own expression.

If you’d like to read more on the preferred aesthetics of each submission, check our submissions page.

Hello Sycamore fans. My Name is (what?) Josh Diamond. I was born in Akron, Ohio. My Akron stays home on the weekends. Rubber Capitol of the world, but she don’t make tires no more. The Goodyear Blimp used to live here. So did I. I studied English, Sociology, and Writing at nearby Kent State University, and edited the Stark Campus literary journal Canto. While at Kent I met Cindy Kelly, Editor and founder of Amsterdam Press, and worked as her Fiction Editor at Plain Spoke, a quarterly literary magazine project. I also repaired guitars for a living. Now I live in Lafayette, Indiana and am pursuing an MFA in Poetry at Purdue University.

Nonfiction is sort of the red-headed stepchild genre. Instead of trying to change that, I embrace it. Sycamore only has room for one or two pieces of creative nonfiction per ...MORE]]> by Joshua Diamond, Nonfiction Co-Editor

Hello Sycamore fans. My Name is (what?) Josh Diamond. I was born in Akron, Ohio. My Akron stays home on the weekends. Rubber Capitol of the world, but she don’t make tires no more. The Goodyear Blimp used to live here. So did I. I studied English, Sociology, and Writing at nearby Kent State University, and edited the Stark Campus literary journal Canto. While at Kent I met Cindy Kelly, Editor and founder of Amsterdam Press, and worked as her Fiction Editor at Plain Spoke, a quarterly literary magazine project. I also repaired guitars for a living. Now I live in Lafayette, Indiana and am pursuing an MFA in Poetry at Purdue University.

Nonfiction is sort of the red-headed stepchild genre. Instead of trying to change that, I embrace it. Sycamore only has room for one or two pieces of creative nonfiction per issue, so I’m looking for the reddest-headed, most freckled, pasty kid on the block. I’d also like to widen our aesthetic lens to consider hybrid/lyric essays alongside more traditional forms—the personal essay, experimental journalism, and the memoiresque (see Chuck Carlisle’s recent essay at Pleides as a wonderful example of the form). See our submission guidelines for my aesthetic statement.

When the doctor told me, days after I had been spread eagle in his stirrups feeling him scrape, scrape, scrape inside me, that it was the early stages of cancer, he was full of questions. “Does cancer run in your family?”

“Yes, I think so,” I said, telling him about Grandpa.

“I see,” was the ready response. “And what about your mother’s side?”

My grandmother falls, I wanted to say. She has had every kind of cancer, parts of her body have been hacked away leaving gaping holes, scars. But these things do not matter, not when someone else’s blood is pulsing through my veins.

*

When my mother went searching for the family that abandoned her, her birth mother told her to stop looking. I never want to meet you, she said. My mother gave her plenty of opportunities, told her she wanted nothing ...MORE]]> BY AMY HOLWERDA

When the doctor told me, days after I had been spread eagle in his stirrups feeling him scrape, scrape, scrape inside me, that it was the early stages of cancer, he was full of questions. “Does cancer run in your family?”

“Yes, I think so,” I said, telling him about Grandpa.

“I see,” was the ready response. “And what about your mother’s side?”

My grandmother falls, I wanted to say. She has had every kind of cancer, parts of her body have been hacked away leaving gaping holes, scars. But these things do not matter, not when someone else’s blood is pulsing through my veins.

*

When my mother went searching for the family that abandoned her, her birth mother told her to stop looking. I never want to meet you, she said. My mother gave her plenty of opportunities, told her she wanted nothing from her, just to see her face. But after these requests went unanswered, the line of communication fell dead. Severed with the cold sterility of scissors at the umbilical cord. Years later, the face of my mother’s mother, a woman we knew only as Tootsie, graced a billboard-sized poster plastered against the walkway of our local airport. A friend came knocking with the photograph she snapped returning home from Cabo San Lucas or Myrtle Beach. “It’s your mother,” she shrieked. “You look just like her!” At the dining room table my mother cupped the photograph in her hands and stared at her birth mother’s wide smile, highlighting the words: WELCOME HOME.

For years after the birth parents’ names were released on my mother’s eighteenth birthday, we heard rumors. People knew people who knew people who heard. Unwinding the truths of a hidden history is a bit like playing a game of telephone – you hear things whispered, passed along, transforming into something unrecognizable. When Tootsie was pregnant, she bound her stomach. This much we think we know to be true although no one is sure where they learned it. We heard that she wound fabric tightly against her protruding belly and covered up with layers of bulky clothing. There are rumors that Tootsie took my mother home for a few days, hiding her under pillows when guests came over before she dropped my mother off, unceremoniously, at the orphanage. Another rumor is that she simply walked out of the hospital without her baby. Whatever the rumors, my grandmother received a call that there were infants for her to choose from and she threaded her way between the collection of cribs, perhaps peering down intently at each face, perhaps not, before selecting my mother, the smallest baby of the bunch.

My mother was in her late thirties when she received a call from her birth brother—they shared the same mother but different fathers. He told her that he’d recently become a Christian and that the Spirit had moved him to call her, to know her. When they met, they did so in secret. His mother, their mother, this Tootsie, would have been enraged, he said. When I saw them together for the first time—my mother and her brother—it was like staring at a split screen image, two sides of the same coin. When he turned and saw my face, the color drained from him, stark as the sun disappearing behind clouds. “You look just like her,” he said.

“Like who?”

“Like Tootsie.”

This woman I do not know.

She is rough, he told us, rough to the world, and rough in it—tumbled around like a stone that never polishes, but chips away jagged as a crag. When we asked, he didn’t know much about her medical history, especially not the things a woman might want to learn from her mother. He didn’t know what parts of his mother were genetic, what parts were brought on by her three-pack-a-day habit, her alcohol abuse. She aged prematurely, can’t think rationally, functions through anger. “Does that help?” he asked my mother. Does that even scratch the surface?

*

When I was twenty-four, I met a man in a dance club. We danced together, our bodies moving as one. He said, “Let me buy you drink,” so we made our way to the bar. When I ordered two shots of Rumplemintz, he said in a voice like purring, “Oh, I’m not drinking. Alcoholism runs rampant in these Bellefonte genes.” When he repeated himself, Bellefonte, I recoiled as though he were on fire. Yes, I knew this name. Bellefonte, the named inked on my mother’s birth certificate naming her father. Tootsie’s one night stand.

One Christmas Eve night, when I was too young to remember, my mother approached her birth father in a church parking lot, moments before midnight mass. I imagine she was weeping, snow clinging to her wavy brown hair, the tips of her wet eyelashes. “You’re my father,” she said.

We had heard many things about him, too. Heard that he fathered several children, drank his weight in whiskey, taught women how to Samba, punched walls, worse. But in that moment, in the light of the frosted midnight moon, he reached out a gentle palm to my mother’s hair and stroked it. “You call me anytime,” he whispered. And then he was gone.

But now, standing in the club, he returned in the slate blue eyes of his only son, this Bellefonte. I had seen photos of this man, clipped from newspaper stories, laminated in thin sheets of hot plastic and saved in a shoebox under the bed, a makeshift family album. When he married a local news reporter, his last name splashed across headlines: Bellefonte, Bellefonte, Bellefonte.

“I think you’re my uncle,” I said. And then he disappeared like vapor. Like the wave of memory, running.

I remember hearing how my mother’s birth-father called her late in the night. How he slurred curses into the phone. “She’s my daughter,” he might have demanded. “Put her on the damn phone.”

“Don’t call here again,” my father said. And he never did. But it has always been this way. This coming and going and drifting of things that comprise me. The things that lurk around corners, shadowing in my definition like a charcoal sketching and the back of a fist, rubbing.

*

When the doctor told me he had found these precancerous cells, he said the surgery to remove them would be simple. “Imagine that your cervix is like an orange,” he said. “I’m going to go in and peel the skin off that orange.” He said it would be as simple as making breakfast. Casual, as if he could already feel the juice dripping down his fingers as he wedged a thumb between peel and pith.

“You should have someone with you,” he said. “You can’t drive yourself home.”

I said I would ask my mother, but like my father, I found that words were difficult. Like fear. Like the loss of control. But she beat me to the punch as I stood awkwardly in the kitchen. “Your grandmother fell again,” she said. “Let’s go.”

At the hospital, the doctor told us there was nothing wrong with my grandmother. “Her brain scan is normal,” he said. And then, “Perhaps it’s her legs. They may be too weak to hold her,” as if this had only just occurred to him—that weakness leads to our falling.

To read the rest of the story, order your copy of Issue 23.1-Winter/Spring 2011 today.

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A note on why we chose it:

As both an editor and a writer, I believe image is everything. If I had been born with a better ear poetry might’ve been my calling, but fiction and nonfiction are what I’ve fallen into. As soon as I began to read “Family History,” it was the imagery that made me catch my breath. The legs spread eagle in stirrups, a grandmother’s shattered bones, a doctor peeling cancer from the cervix like an orange. Amy Holwerda tells a story that could easily fall into victimization, self-pity, obsession with the unknown. But she focuses on what she does know: her non-biological grandmother’s love of falling down; her father’s destructive, though self-preserving, silence. Amy Holwerda takes us on a quest to figure out what makes us up, and it is a pulsing, lyric journey. That’s why I chose it.

~Chidelia Edochie, Nonfiction Editor

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I stopped writing to my pen pal, Mary Wang, of Anchorage, Alaska, the year I started high school. Partly because my mother told me she was too ugly for me to be friends with, but mostly because I was terrified of being ugly myself.

Beginning from when I was ten years old until I was fourteen, I wrote over eighty letters to Mary, who must have also written over eighty letters back to me in Napa, California. My parents had immigrated to San Francisco from Seoul, Korea during the sixties; in the early seventies my parents moved to Napa, fifty miles north of San Francisco, because they enjoyed nature, open space, clean air, camping, hiking, and outdoor sports. They wanted to start a family in the country. They bought a large ranch house with glass walls and a guest house on five acres of property. Standing ...MORE]]> BY LISA LEE

I stopped writing to my pen pal, Mary Wang, of Anchorage, Alaska, the year I started high school. Partly because my mother told me she was too ugly for me to be friends with, but mostly because I was terrified of being ugly myself.

Beginning from when I was ten years old until I was fourteen, I wrote over eighty letters to Mary, who must have also written over eighty letters back to me in Napa, California. My parents had immigrated to San Francisco from Seoul, Korea during the sixties; in the early seventies my parents moved to Napa, fifty miles north of San Francisco, because they enjoyed nature, open space, clean air, camping, hiking, and outdoor sports. They wanted to start a family in the country. They bought a large ranch house with glass walls and a guest house on five acres of property. Standing in the yard you could see mountains, sometimes deer, a coyote or fox.

I know that my pen pal Mary and I wrote over eighty letters to each other because I have a letter postmarked January 28, 1991, on which Mary wrote on the outside flap of the envelope in purple ink: Fact: To date, I have received 79 letters from you from Nov 1987 to Dec 1990. I’m waiting for your 80th letter!! The five-page, double-sided letter is covered in words and pictures drawn in purple, pink, and green ink. One page is written in a spiral pattern, maddening as you have to turn the page slowly and continuously in a circle to read it. Some of the pages have drawings of bunnies and little faces, other unidentifiable doodles and scribbles. The letter is folded into a complicated, origami-like square with an arrow on a tab you pull in order to open it. There’s another letter postmarked February 16, 1991 that says on the outside of the envelope: Ur last letter was the 80th letter I received. I would have been thirteen going on fourteen that year, finishing up the eighth grade at Silverado Middle School in the Spring and entering Vintage High School in the Fall. I stopped writing Mary letters the first semester of my freshman year.

Mary sent me a picture of herself, triggering the change. It’s a wallet-sized photo, the kind you pose for at school, order in different sizes and cut with scissors into individual single pictures. On the back of the photo she sent me, she wrote the following four lines in black ink:

I saved fifteen of Mary’s letters (plus a Christmas card). I can deduce from those letters that I had been asking Mary for a picture for a while and had recently sent one of myself. Mary nervously mentions that she’ll send me one when the school pictures get developed. On the outside of an envelope she writes: Bracelet? Maybe. Picture? No way. (The “bracelet” refers to a friendship bracelet. Apparently I made one and sent it to her.) In another letter she says that she’s worried about her new haircut, which makes her look like a boy, and wonders whether she should wear her glasses in the school photo.

In the picture Mary sent me, there’s a cute Asian girl who looks more like a child than an adult. She has a short bowl haircut, braces on her teeth, giant glasses, and wears a shirt decorated with little pink rosebud appliqué, the kind of top you can find in the children’s section. By the time Mary sent me the photo I had already started freshman year of high school. At school, I noticed that some kids still wore children’s clothes, but that made them automatically “uncool.” Meanwhile, my friends and I had been dressing up as tiny adults, smaller versions of our mothers.

By seventh grade I had already begun wearing some of my mother’s clothing—too large and loose, of course, but I still wore them. My hair was long and permed. I curled my lashes and wore mascara, a sheer lipstick sometimes. All of my friends did the same. In Mary’s picture, Mary is a child, which technically at thirteen and fourteen, she still was, as was I. But Mary looks much younger than my friends and I did at the same age— less sophisticated, less mature.

I did not notice this at first. I was excited to have finally received a picture from her. I ran over to the kitchen to show my mother. She was chopping carrots and onions. A tall pot of beef stew simmered on the stovetop. She paused, knife hovering over the vegetables, leaned in to look at the picture and said, “She’s ugly. You don’t need to be friends with her. You have lots of friends. All of your friends are pretty, Lisa, you stop writing to her.”

A few things of note: (1) my mother never told me I was pretty. Normally she pointed out the unattractive parts of my face and body, suggested that I should get plastic surgery when I got a little older, made sure that I knew that she (my mother) was prettier than me, that all my friends and pictures of women in magazines were prettier than me, and (2) I did not know I was prettier than Mary.

I looked at the picture more closely, realizing that Mary was ugly, that if she went to my high school I would not be friends with her. If my friends saw her picture, they would make fun of her. If they knew she was my pen pal, they would make fun of me for even having a pen pal in the first place. I was afraid of being the girl in the picture, someone who people saw and remarked out loud, how ugly. I didn’t want to be Mary Wang. I stopped writing.

But Mary kept writing. She sent several letters asking why I hadn’t written. She said her mother told her it was because I was pretty and she was not, and probably after I got her picture I decided she was not good enough to be friends with. Mary wrote that she hoped this wasn’t true, that she didn’t want to believe her mother, that there must be another reason why I’d stopped writing. She said she was sad and asked me to please write her back. I am repeating this from memory. I don’t have those letters anymore. I threw them away after I read what her mother said about me, wanting to forget I had made Mary feel bad about herself. I couldn’t believe her mother had figured out the truth. She had never even met me. How could she know? I thought. How can someone figure out what I’m thinking when I haven’t said anything? Mary eventually stopped writing.

Pretty soon I regretted ending our correspondence. During high school I guarded a secret. My father had beaten me with a golf club one day after school. It was an isolated incident but the welts on my arms and my sides from trying to protect myself remained for weeks. I remember thinking that I wished I could write Mary. But I had already betrayed her and I didn’t think I could go back.

To read the rest of this essay, order your copy of Issue 22.2-Summer/Fall 2010 today.

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Lisa Lee is a Kundiman fellow and received an MFA from the University of Houston.  She received a    B.A. from U.C. Berkeley and J.D. from Santa Clara University.  Her work has appeared in North  American Review, Gulf Coast, The Tusculum Review, Pebble Lake Review, and Reed Magazine.  She  lives in Brooklyn.

Chidelia Edochie

Chidelia’s fiction has won numerous awards, including the Joan Jakobson Award “given to writers of unusual promise,” and a scholarship granted by AWP. Recently, her writing and reading efforts have shifted toward creative nonfiction. As Nonfiction Editor for Sycamore Review, she is looking for memoir, personal essays, experiential journalism/personal reportage, and ...MORE]]> Chidelia Edochie lived and wrote in the southern Chinese city of Guǎngzhōu for almost 2 years before making the move to West Lafayette, Indiana, where Sycamore Review is headquartered. She originally hails from Stone Mountain, Georgia, then lived in New York City during her undergraduate years, and ultimately settled in China, making her a rather rootless woman. That’s probably why it is the fiction and nonfiction in which humans have been uprooted, whether voluntarily or involuntarily, whether physically or emotionally, that speaks to her so.

Chidelia’s fiction has won numerous awards, including the Joan Jakobson Award “given to writers of unusual promise,” and a scholarship granted by AWP. Recently, her writing and reading efforts have shifted toward creative nonfiction. As Nonfiction Editor for Sycamore Review, she is looking for memoir, personal essays, experiential journalism/personal reportage, and lyric essays. Check out the Submissions page for her full aesthetic statement for Nonfiction submissions. She also oversees Sycamore’s book reviews of newly released fiction, nonfiction, and books of poetry. Nonfiction submissions should be made online via our Online Submissions Manager

You can contact Chidelia with submission questions or book review requests at: Chidelia [dot] Edochie [at] gmail [dot] com, and follow her at Twitter.

Two Vietnamese girls, maybe 7 and 10, on a well-lit Hoi An sidewalk after dark, wearing tee shirts, shorts, and flip-flops, stood frozen, their hands dangling uselessly, their mouths open. In the middle of the street, one of the ubiquitous mid-sized Vietnamese dogs, muscular and square headed, was rapping the death snap on a skinny orange cat. Blood on the pavement, dark red and clotted with dust, had been sprayed as if the cat’s plight began with a motorbike that didn’t stop. Two women, possibly the girls’ mothers, stepped into the street, giving the Vietnamese equivalent of “scat!” and waving their hands, forcing the dog to back off. The cat writhed left and right, wailing, its whole body shuddering, then suddenly sprang three or four feet into the air. Charged by the spastic motion, the dog darted in again, worrying the cat by its throat. Now ...MORE]]> BY CHARLES WAUGH

Two Vietnamese girls, maybe 7 and 10, on a well-lit Hoi An sidewalk after dark, wearing tee shirts, shorts, and flip-flops, stood frozen, their hands dangling uselessly, their mouths open. In the middle of the street, one of the ubiquitous mid-sized Vietnamese dogs, muscular and square headed, was rapping the death snap on a skinny orange cat. Blood on the pavement, dark red and clotted with dust, had been sprayed as if the cat’s plight began with a motorbike that didn’t stop. Two women, possibly the girls’ mothers, stepped into the street, giving the Vietnamese equivalent of “scat!” and waving their hands, forcing the dog to back off. The cat writhed left and right, wailing, its whole body shuddering, then suddenly sprang three or four feet into the air. Charged by the spastic motion, the dog darted in again, worrying the cat by its throat. Now the English version, very loud, coming out of my mouth –“SCAT!”– startling the Vietnamese and me too, catching myself doing something before thinking, risking a dog bite in a country where I know I shouldn’t, and then worse, stepping off the curb to scare him, preparing myself to kick him with all I had should he turn on me. The dog bolted into a hotel parking lot, and when it disappeared behind a fence, I stopped following it and looked back. The cat now rocked from side to side, slowing down, taking its last breaths. A hotel security guard emerged from his booth with a dustpan to scoop it away from where his guests might see it. The girls hadn’t moved. The women stood behind them.

I walked on, wondering what sort of sign this might be. I was on my way to a travel agent to hire a car to Son My the next day, better known to much of the world as My Lai, the site of the 1968 massacre. I had wanted to make the trip since returning to Vietnam five months before, and here on the way was not only death, but a chaotic, violent, and painful one, witnessed by mothers and children. I didn’t have time to parse it out then, the office would close soon.

The agent, a weathered fifty- or sixty-year-old man with large rectangular glasses and coarse but still jet black hair, seemed amused by my ability to speak Vietnamese, and refused to speak to me in English, even though I’d heard him speaking English on the bus a few days before. After telling him I taught at the National University in Hanoi and wanted to write about My Lai, he arranged the trip without taking a commission. Something in his eyes obviously approved.

The next morning, I woke early, showered, and dressed in long pants and a button-down shirt despite the heat. It’s not polite to enter certain places in shorts, and though I didn’t know for sure the memorial would be one of them, I wanted to do everything right. I roused Jen, my wife, and Owen, my two-year old son, and made them eat breakfast with me before meeting the driver at eight. It was the middle of our Christmas vacation, and none of us wanted to spend a day apart, but I couldn’t take Owen to My Lai.

The driver, Hai, an earnest, good looking man with full, wavy hair, sported one of the wide, thin catfish mustaches popular with many men in Vietnam. He took my Vietnamese with used-to-foreigners nonchalance. On the way out of town, we exchanged ages and the particulars of our immediate family situations–the usual introductory Vietnamese conversation. He had married just last year, at thirty, the same age when I married, and planned to have a child next year, at thirty-two, the same as when we had Owen. There was something about the way he grinned and said “ theo Anh ” –following you, big brother– when he spoke of having his first child at the same age that made it all feel real, like genuine human kinship. Vietnamese forms of address–all based on age and familial titles that force a speaker to change first person pronouns depending on who’s being spoken to –could feel a little alien, but now, with someone I barely knew compared to all my Vietnamese colleagues and friends in Hanoi, something felt right.

Along the flat and silty Vu Gia river, the tourist hotels gave way to wide, one story homes typical of the region, and Hai pointed out one set back from the road, painted blue long enough ago to now be as faded and nearly white as the hazy Vietnamese sky.

“That’s my house,” he said.

“Beautiful,” I replied. “It must be nice living so close to the river.”

He beamed. “Very nice. Lying in a hammock, watching the river go by. It’s a good place.”

We turned south on to Highway 1. A few dusty machine shops, fix-it joints, and dry-goods markets trailed from the intersection before giving way to the empty, mud-brown paddies, framed with narrow, red clay dikes. On a rise overlooking the fields and the road spread a civilian cemetery full of raised tombs, all painted in bright swirling colors and adorned with flowers. Each incorporated a small censer, so the survivors could pray to their ancestors, sending them fragrant reminders of their love and respect. Not far down the road, a national cemetery cut a different shape and feel, with its hundreds of neat, white tombstones and a central monolithic monument proclaiming “ Ghi Cong To Quoc ” — in commemoration of the fatherland — as do the thousands of others just like it, all over the country. Another one, small, probably a single family’s, occupied a corner of a rice field, protected from the paddy water by a concrete dike. Within a half mile, another, overrun by a flock of ducks. In metropolitan Hanoi, I could go for days without thinking about the war, but on this trip, obviously, there could be no avoiding its consequences; four million killed in a country smaller than the state of California meant 31 casualties per square mile, if spread throughout the whole country. But most of the fighting took place here in this very narrow part of Vietnam, so the real figure must be something like 190 casualties per square mile. In a place where people worship their ancestors, believing that they continue to have an influence on day to day life, I couldn’t help imagining this trip as a pilgrimage into the land of the dead.

Hai asked me what I taught at the National University, whether I lectured in English or Vietnamese, and if my teaching related to our trip. I explained that I taught American Studies, and that for me the subject involved literature and the environment, history and culture. I told him in the United States I also teach the literature of the American war in Vietnam, and I have my students read about My Lai, so I wanted to visit so I would have some first hand experience to share with them. I said I wanted to write about it so that more Americans would have an appreciation both for what happened there in 1968 and for what it means now. All these answers seemed to satisfy him. Hai told me what he knew of the massacre, which was a lot–more than I could understand in Vietnamese. One phrase I couldn’t miss was one he repeated several times nonetheless: “ Nhieu nguoi chet do, nhieu con em be ” — Many people died there, many babies. I could only nod, and tell him it made me very sad.

After awhile, we talked about lighter things: the road, the car, differences between driving in Vietnam and the US. Soon enough, though, I ran out of Vietnamese, and we fell into an amicable silence, which I appreciated. I wanted to drift with my thoughts about the upcoming visit and the landscape around us.

Even though I had always been welcomed warmly and with exceptional generosity by my Vietnamese colleagues in Hanoi, I wondered whether people in Son My would hate me for being an American. Seeing so many tombs alongside the road, I already felt deserving of hatred: my country had caused many of them. I knew no matter what I would do or see, the experience would drain me emotionally. At least the land held some comfort. The suitably overcast sky, a melancholy slate, made the greens in the trees deeper, more serene.

When we occasionally topped a rise in the road, the Eastern Sea (or the South China Sea, depending on your point of view) appeared beyond the long tidal flats of shrimp and fish farms. The mountains loomed just twenty kilometers to the west, their steep faces rumpled with deep, jungle green. Between them lay the fertile plains, descending ever so slightly, paddy by paddy, to the shore. I could actually see all at once the geographic root of the Vietnamese myths in which the spirit of the mountain and the spirit of the sea battle one another, afflicting the people in the middle with the worst of the consequences.

The further south we went, the more alive the land became. The flat, empty paddies suddenly had men in them, plowing up the heavy mud with tractors or buffaloes, and then others were already full of rice seedlings. Further on, the seedlings had been pulled from their dry beds, and men and women waded through flooded paddies, bent over with baskets of the young green shoots on one arm, inserting them into the muddy bottom with the other. Within another thirty kilometers, some of the transplants had begun to glow golden green, nearing maturity.

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Charles Waugh’s stories and essays have appeared or are forthcoming in the Wisconsin Review, Two Lines, B/N Magazine, Knock, Proteus, Studies in American Fiction, Placing the Academy, and ISLE. He teaches American Studies and Creative Writing at Utah State University and is the fiction editor of Isotope: the literary journal of science and nature writing. In 2004 he received a Fulbright Fellowship to join the faculty at the Vietnam National University of Hanoi, where he helped develop undergraduate and graduate programs in American Studies, taught a Literary, Cultural, and Environmental History of the US, and delivered the first lectures on ecoctiticism in Vietnam. In 2006, he and Nguyen Lien received a Rockerfeller Fellowship to translate and edit a volume of Vietnamese fiction and nonfiction chronicling exposure to and suffering from agent orange.

I have both of my parents—although in ten years’ time they will live apart, separated across the country in New York and Arizona—and I have a younger sister, a soft, pale-skinned visionary named Emily. This is her religion, the desire to create things from nothing, to create beauty from what is insubstantial but becomes real under her myopic green gaze.

She paints pictures, she invents jokes, she starts questionable fashion trends among her peers, she makes her own peanut butter from scratch, she borrows our Mother’s ...MORE]]> BY REBECCA EPSTEIN

The house where I grow up is an expansive split-level with slippery wooden staircases and rooms that seem too large and too chilly. The house is built on what was once the inner slope of a ravine, now a steep street that winds back and forth and downwards in the same places that a stream once did, a long time ago.

I have both of my parents—although in ten years’ time they will live apart, separated across the country in New York and Arizona—and I have a younger sister, a soft, pale-skinned visionary named Emily. This is her religion, the desire to create things from nothing, to create beauty from what is insubstantial but becomes real under her myopic green gaze.

She paints pictures, she invents jokes, she starts questionable fashion trends among her peers, she makes her own peanut butter from scratch, she borrows our Mother’s long red nightgown and twists it, wraps it around herself, ties it into an infinite number of configurations. She demands that our mother weave her hair into experimental braided hairdos in the mornings before school. She has thin, pale lips and dark hair with squarish bangs.

She is six, and I am nine. I work at making her understand that she will never be like me. I am tall and skinny and blonde. I can read chapter books. I have been singled out by our elementary school for an unprecedented amount of academic enrichment. I am allowed to cross the street, and I am allowed to use the microwave, and I am allowed to be home alone. I will be a famous doctor who saves sick children, and she will be my nurse assistant. I will write bestsellers, and she will make illustrations in the margins. My body will bend any way I want it to, like a double-jointed miracle, like I could take a step off the ground and be airborne, and she—she will ever only be my little sister.

All I know at age nine is that when I wake up on weekend mornings, and I stumble from one room to the next, trying to find my family, I can’t find them, even though at least one of them should be awake. I push open the door to my parents’ bedroom, and that is where I find them. My mother is asleep on the left side of the bed, my father is asleep on the right, and my sister is asleep in the center, beneath the blankets.

The sun comes in strong through the windows, illuminating a world of floating dust that frightens me when I realize it is always there, even if it is invisible most of the time. The master bedroom is the warmest one in the house, filled with the body heat of three people. They are happy to stay asleep, cuddled up together.

I try to be loud. I rattle the doorknob. I cough. I scuff my bare feet into the carpet. Nobody awakens. I slam the door and go back to my bedroom to wait for the family to wake up. But just as the door is swinging into its frame, I see that Emily’s eyes are open. She is looking at me from between our parents, a blankness to her face, an expression that I understand as completely as if she has spoken aloud; she knows that this is one battle she has won against me, even though somehow neither of us is aware that there is a war going on in the first place.

The children on our street convene in the afternoons in a dead end road that branches off from the main street. We play with a basketball and some water guns. We choke each other to see what will happen. We throw pebbles at the black Newfoundland tied up in the yard on the corner, whose bark makes the earth shake. We venture onto the property of the old woman whose house is cloaked in shade, and whom we have only glimpsed once, closing a window against us.

But when my father installs the Fun Ride, Emily and I lose all interest in these social encounters across the street. Here is something that can occupy us for hours, and we prefer to keep it to ourselves, because when our friends come over, we are supposed to be courteous, step aside, allow them to play with the Fun Ride as much as they want, leaving Emily or me only two or three chances to ride it in the course of an entire afternoon. We stand off to the side and scowl.

The Fun Ride is a knock-off of the zip-lines one finds in adventure courses and summer camp retreats. It requires that one has two trees, at least twenty feet apart, preferably rising from ground that is mildly angled, like the aisles in a movie theater. In that sense, we are lucky. Our backyard is ideal for a Fun Ride. It is punctuated by two silver maples, one emerging from the hub of the yard, the other atop a mild incline at the southwest end. Together, the trees form a canopy of leaves over the backyard, tingeing everything in sleepy green light, shifting in dappled patterns across the grass when the wind blows through the branches.

My father assembles the toy. A taut steel cord is threaded through a plastic handlebar apparatus and strung between the two trees. A foot of green twine found in our garage dangles vertically from the bottom of the handlebars so that we can pull it along the cord from the lower tree to the higher one.

The Fun Ride is rather inane, in reality, but divine to us, all the same. It is like skiing down a very small slope and then riding the lift back to the top, over and over for hours and hours. We climb two or three steps that my father has built against the base of the higher tree so that we can reach the handlebars, and we grab the handles and lift off, hurtling across the yard to the tree in the middle, which we bounce off of with our feet and jump to the ground. Then we grab the green twine and pull the handlebars back to the higher tree, for another turn. We think the Fun Ride is miraculous, almost as good as the miniature golf course our father has been promising to build in the backyard for several years (and never will).

Maybe the monotony of the Fun Ride is what inspires my sister to raise the stakes. Still, Emily and I are not children who are keen on taking risks. We swing hula-hoops and kick soccer balls, deriving our excitement from the stamina required to become truly gifted at backyard play. We experiment with pogo sticks, jump ropes, hopscotch, even gymnastics among the cushioning ivy that overtakes our yard a little more every year. But when my father installs the Fun Ride, it becomes the only thing to be done in the backyard; it becomes the backyard itself.

My sister and I invent acrobatic stunts to perform while zipping across the yard, which leave my mother leaning forward and holding her breath until it is over. We unintentionally invent a code, a secret language, all having to do with the Fun Ride. We name different stunts, such as The Double Whammy, and we refer to the handlebar as, simply, The Yellow Thing. We can ride it backwards, facing where we have come from instead of where we are going. We can go two at a time, grasping the handlebars together, facing each other as we fly. We can swing our knees up and through our arms, so that we traverse the yard upside down. The string hums, it buzzes as we travel. It is fantastic and terrifying.

It sometimes seems to me like everything important happens in July. Emily is born in July, on the twenty-second. I am bitten by a tick in July at age ten, and left with a bad case of Lyme disease for well over a decade. I save my sister’s life in July. As a child I don’t notice all the hassles of July that will make it my least favorite month as an adult: the constant mosquito bites which I can’t help but pick at, the sweaty stickiness that re-surfaces on my skin as soon as I step out of the steamy bath, the smell of chlorine always in my hair, the blisters from water sandals, and the sprawling days which are so long, so boring, I try to create disaster to entertain myself. But Emily beats me to it.

On July 4th, 1991, one year before I become ill, we invite a neighboring family to have a backyard barbeque with us. Our mother and their mother are good friends. Both women are short, round, Jewish in culture but not in practice, shimmering with yellow gold rings and tennis bracelets. They often intersect on their way off the block to go run errands, and they stand in our driveway, chatting beside their idling cars. I can hear both of their laughs drifting through my bedroom window, light and dulcet in a way you wouldn’t expect from such history-heavy women. In later years Betty will lighten her hair, develop a befitting laugh. My mother, living alone in the house once my father has moved out and Emily and I have grown up and gone away, will enroll in court reporting school. Her joints will swell with age, and when the two women meet in the driveway she will shiver, even in the most delicate breezes.

The neighboring family consists of Betty and her husband Mark, and their two girls: Alana, who is a toddler, and Stephanie, who is almost exactly one year older than Emily.

The adults sit at the kitchen table, which is adjacent to the panoramic windows that face the backyard. They eat salad, drink Fresca and Scotch, and tend to Alana. Stephanie and my sister and I play in the backyard. Emily and I pause from our implicit rivalry long enough to make Stephanie acutely aware of her status as uninvited guest, as far as we are concerned. She ignores Emily, and I ignore her, out of loyalty to my sister. Emily and I use our code words and show off our stunts on the Fun Ride for a while, before the three of us move to our respective corners of the yard, engaged in solitary play like infants.

Stephanie can’t seem to master the rhythm to keep the hoop circling around her hips. The hoop swings around in two lazy revolutions, and then falls to the ground. I wander over to the swing set, where I hang by my knees from a trapeze and watch the branches twitch overhead. I am already getting too big for the Fun Ride, so that if I don’t tuck my legs, my feet graze the ground and I slide to an anticlimactic stop. I resent this.

The near-death experience that Emily is about to have isn’t the sort of near-death experience that probably everyone has had one or two of. I once dove into a pool and missed crushing my skull against the bottom by inches. I’ve had a fever that shifted from ninety-nine degrees to almost one hundred and five degrees in less than two hours. I’ve tumbled down tall, hard staircases, had allergic reactions to foods, been stricken with a brain infection. But this is different, with Emily. This is the sort of event that will be abbreviated by family members over the years to “Remember the Fun Ride?” followed by a roll of the eyes and a half-sad, half-mirthful sigh. Our neighbors won’t mention it again, as if they had intruded this evening on a very personal family memory in the making. This near-death experience, as lethal as it is, was brought on entirely by Emily herself.

And what happens to her is a horrible thing, an event that undoubtedly contributes to my nervous flair, my fear of flying, my fear of flames, and my fear of strong winds. It is the reason why I continue to jab at her self-esteem—it is anger I am expressing at her, for almost dying. For taking such cavalier carelessness with her own life. It is what makes me an over-protective sister forever, guiding her through intersections and helping her study for exams. I see it now, only now that I am writing this all down; I am a terribly selfish person.

She shouts something like, “Watch this!” and, while holding the handlebars, she flips upside-down so her legs are tucked through her arms and her head is pointed toward the ground. It looks as though she is halfway through completing a backflip. I too, am hanging upside down, from the swing set’s trapeze, and for a moment, there we both are, airborne, upside-down, seeing the lawn as sky.

There is the steely zip of the Fun Ride being ridden. The adults are eating salad in the kitchen. Stephanie is in a corner of the yard practicing with the hula-hoop. My head is full of blood and I can feel it pulsing behind my eyes. The backs of my knees ache from supporting my weight. I am hungry and irritated and wishing the neighbors would just go home so I could eat Lucky Charms for dinner and watch The Little Mermaid.

Over the rattlesnake sound of the hoop I hear the thrumming of the wire as Emily takes off, and I wait for the clunk of her feet hitting the trunk of the tree, and the soft thump as she hops down, gasping and laughing and proud of herself. But it doesn’t happen. I hear a sound like a zipper getting caught and then a sigh. I hear my name whispered into my ear. It is the wind blowing through my hair, it is a shout diminished to a whisper by the distance it has traveled. It is sister telepathy.

I look to the Fun Ride and it takes me a moment to see how much trouble Emily is in. My sister is standing in a funny way, on her tiptoes, her chin tilted upward, swaying like a drunken ballerina. In a half-second I am running across the yard, toward Emily. For the rest of my life I am running toward my sister, in dreams, in arguments, in stories I write. I see Stephanie standing still, the hula-hoop on the ground like a defined circle of safety around her. I trip over a tree root on the way to save my sister, and it gives me time to resent Stephanie for her immobility in an emergency.

It is obvious what has happened. My sister, in a moment of Houdini-like inspiration, tied the foot of twine that hung down from the handle around her neck before taking off on the Fun Ride. She was showing off for Stephanie. Or maybe Emily had been showing off for me, letting me see how weightless she is, how acrobatic she is. Later in the day I sit cross-legged on the floor of my bedroom and cry, as I try to understand what on this planet had made Emily think tying twine around her neck was a good idea.
This time, the Fun Ride didn’t stop all the way at the tree, where the underground roots make a slight rise in the lawn, perfect for an easy landing. Instead, the handlebars stopped a few feet short, closer to the middle of the ride, and when my sister tried to hop down, her feet couldn’t quite reach. The rope around her neck went taut.

The branches shift overhead, and her smooth cheeks reflect the flickering green shadows. The look on her face—in another context it could be a stomachache or a bee sting—lets me know how serious this is. I lift up one knee to create a seat for her dangling body, to slacken the string. But it is impossible. The twine is knotted around her neck and there is no loosening it, there is nothing, nothing I can do to help her.
I am trying to hold her up, trying to undo the knot, trying to keep her calm, trying not to scream “Emmy!” Instead I am screaming at the adults through the kitchen window, screaming at Stephanie to go get someone, to do something. I decide I officially hate Stephanie for this. I am listening for any sounds from my sister, and there are none. There are colors surrounding me and that is all I see: the green of the twine and the salmon-pink of Emily’s tie-dyed shirt, and the gray of the dirt on her elbows as she claws at the rope around her neck. I look into the kitchen window and see my mother sipping from a glass.

There is the struggle against gravity, uniting both of us so that we must look like one desperate creature. There is the evening chill coming over us, the leaves of the silver maples shifting in the wind, and the sparkling dots of fireflies emerging in the dark corners of the yard.

I scream at Stephanie again to go get someone. She stands within her circle of hula-hoop and watches Emily’s face turn blue. I am fading under the weight of my sister, and now all I can think of is the image as I ran toward her—a dim expression, genuine fear. I am doing two things at once: trying to keep my sister from dying, and mentally adjusting to the prospect of a life without her; I am minimizing the damages already.

Emily’s hands relax and fall to her sides, but she is still conscious. She is resigning herself to her fate, whatever it will turn out to be. Stephanie and I watch and wait, as Emily swings in the breeze. I have given up on Stephanie. Look, I will the grownups. A sip is swallowed, a punch line hits its mark, a fork clinks against the side of a salad bowl. The adults reach a lull in their conversation. And then one of them hears our prayers and my screams, and glances out the window with Scotch-glazed eyes. In moments the four of them are with us in the backyard. My mother cannot untie the knot. My legs are buckling.
The grownups make a huddle around the problem, pushing me aside so they can lift Emily higher. I am relegated to the edge of the yard, with Stephanie. “She’s alive,” I hear my father say. “Is her neck intact?” Mark asks, whatever that means. Fingers pull at the twine, women’s voices coo at Emily to keep her calm, and someone shouts “Hurry!” as someone else leaps back into the house, and then back out with a pocketknife.

There is a collective sigh as her heels touch ground. And when she wobbles away from the zip line and sits down on the grass, she has a stunned look on her face and she is wheezing. My mother examines her throat and Betty pats her head. My hatred for the adults bubbles over. I go back to the swing set to hang upside down and watch the sky in bookish contemplation.

My sister will have a raw ring of red around her neck. My mother will breathe heavily all night, my father won’t say a word to anyone, and I will be required to apologize to Stephanie for yelling at her while I tried to save my sister.

Years later I will feel more kindly toward Stephanie, as she develops troubles of her own. A severe and chronic stomach illness will overtake her in high school, flinging her back and forth between malnourished emaciation and steroid heft. There will often be crinkled packets of Pepto Bismol peeking out of her pants pockets, and she will not get the chance to attend parties and drink as much as her friends do. There will be talk of surgery, even.

And years later Emily will grow into her magnetism. She will know better how to use it to her benefit. She will glide across the Cornell campus, always with friends, always doing the talking. She will nod at acquaintances, who feel giddy at being recognized. Professors will know her. She will be alabaster, with wide hips and enormous eyes and thick henna-dyed hair all the way down to her waist. She will wear long cotton summer dresses over jeans with knit socks converted to fingerless gloves, and, famously, a pink cowboy hat. It will seem that everyone knows who she is.

Her drive to create will have been channeled into crocheting and knitting. She will be able to make anything, a knit cap or a crocheted potpourri bowl, and it will perhaps be one of the things that allow her the supreme satisfaction of outdoing me. In my guilt, I will welcome it. And her drive to create will have been expanded as well, into a drive to prevent destruction. She will study Natural Resources. She will dream of lobbying for animal rights and rainforest preservation. She will worship Maureen Dowd and tremble with potential when she thinks of how she too could be a journalist, both creating sentences and preventing planetary destruction, all at once.

This is the part I will never tell anyone—I see Emily tie the twine around her neck in the first place, before she even takes off. I see it, and I don’t stop her. It seems unimportant at the time.
About thirty minutes after Emily is rescued, after the adults have gone back inside to set the table, I sit down next to her in the cool grass beneath the silver maple in the center of the yard. She seems as if she’s stepped away from herself for a moment. There is that blank expression again; she sits cross-legged and watches the sky, which is darkening. This is not the awake, effervescent Emily that I know. When she is older she won’t remember this day very well; all she will know about it is that she did a very stupid thing that was upsetting to everyone, and that I, her taller, older, more capable sister was smart and able enough to save her life. I am praised for my quick actions. The words “Fun Ride” will bring a twinge of shame to Emily’s mind when she hears them, although she can’t be sure why.

But in this moment she is pink-cheeked again, breathing, and alive. I reach out and smooth her hair. She turns to look at me, and she seems as though she’s suddenly been made aware of some important pattern in her life. It is as if she is seeing the years behind her and ahead of her, strange and frightening years full of parental divorce and a sick sister and the onset of any number of other troubles, and how it is all woven into a cohesive picture, a life that progresses linearly by my constant belittling of her. It is one thing she can be sure of, for many years to come. “I’m sorry, Em,” I say to her, apologizing for something we are still too young to understand. “Thanks,” she says and then coughs, touching her throat, “It’s okay,” and she stands up and walks back into the house, leaving me sitting outside in what is quickly becoming night.