A Proud Grandfather

The smell of freshly brewed coffee lures me out of bed. I pour a cup, grab my wedding magazine, and walk outside to join Ken’s grandfather, Mr. Hamilton, on the porch. I sit down next to him on a handmade porch swing. I turn my head in the direction that he is looking and see a tall, broad shouldered, tanned man wearing a faded blue swimsuit. He is standing along the shoreline while the waves collide with his ankles. There is a blue board beside him, held up by his muscular arm.

“Ken was an amazing surfer. I wish he would give the waves a try again. His accident has scared him from returning to his passion, but I think if he went out there, everything would come back to him and he could take any wave that came his way.” Mr. Hamilton’s voice brings me back to reality. I try to concentrate on the conversation.

Mr. Hamilton shares Ken’s adventures of surfing. He starts with Ken’s first wave and hesitates at the tragic part: Ken’s accident. Mr. Hamilton’s eyes tear up, and I squeeze his hand.

“It’s okay, Mr. Hamilton, Ken has already told me about it. I’ve read the articles. You don’t need to share this part.” I give him a soft smile.

He puts his hand up in objection, “No, no, no. You don’t know the real story. I must share this with you.”

I sit back on the porch swing nod for him to go ahead. I look through the railing poles to observe Ken’s figure as I listen to Mr. Hamilton’s story of the accident.

“He took a magnificent wave. As he was about to escape from the billow, the lip of the wave slammed his head, knocking him off his board. The strength of the wave enveloped him and drove him head first into the coral reef. The lifeguards ran out to help him. When they brought his unconscious body out of the water,blood streaming out of his head from the gash, I never thought he would live.” Mr. Hamilton pauses to take a deep breath. “I thought Ken was dead.” His eyes shimmer with tears. I twist my engagement ring and thank God for Ken’s life.

I wish Ken never had to experience this part of his life. It ruined his fearlessness and left him with horrible symptoms that come and go. I think about the month after the accident--sometimes he couldn’t remember my name. He’s always tired now. He used to be the first one out of bed each morning, brewing the first batch of coffee. Now he naps during the day to try to fight off the fatigue and confusion that hits him by afternoon.

“He used to be brave and excited for where life would take him,” Mr. Hamilton adds, “but the accident ruined that. I believe if he swims out and takes a wave, he will remember his journey and all his success, all the medals he won.”

“Well, I think today might be the day,” I say, stretching my hand out to him to help him up. We walk towards the railing and Mr. Hamilton squeezes my hand in excitement. He can now see Ken swimming out into the ocean.

“Do you know why his parents named him Ken?” Mr. Hamilton asks while we wait for Ken to find the right wave.

“No, why?” I ask, eager to hear the story.

“Because ‘Ken’ means clear water. My daughter thought that it would be a perfect name for her baby boy. From the day he was born I could see it in his eyes, he had so much potential to be a great surfer. He could conquer any water he wanted to.” Mr. Hamilton smiles, his eyes glowing.

Ken floats in the water, the sun kissing his skin, and Mr. Hamilton keeps talking, about the Triple Crown, about the Mavericks Big Wave Surf, which he won at just seventeen.

As Mr. Hamilton continues his praise, I stare out at the ocean and notice a different movement in Ken. He’s sitting broadly on the board. I watch him shift his body, open his arms, and start swimming. Then I notice the large wave that he is trying to catch.

Ken turns his muscular body around, facing inland, and starts to swim toward us. Mr. Hamilton points out toward Ken and we descend the porch stairs to move closer, onto the sand.

“He’s going to do it!” Mr. Hamilton exclaims.

Ken swims faster and faster. He embarks on the wave, stands on his board, and sails through the barrel with a familiar confidence and control. Mr. Hamilton is ecstatic. My heart swells with pride for Ken, and I realize that this is the day that will change our lives forever. A feeling of relief washes over me. We can stop dwelling on the past and move on with our lives.

Ken clears the wave and throws a fist up in the air as he hollers in excitement. As he celebrates his victory, I notice his body rocking back and forth on the board. He slumps forward. My body tenses.

Ken falls sideways off his board into the waves. A lifeguard runs into the water, calling for others to help. I break away from Mr. Hamilton and run, burning the soles of my feet, and throw myself into the water. The waves splash over my head, making it difficult to reach Ken.

A large man pulls me out of an overpowering wave as it pushes me down. He carries me out and sets me on the shore. I look up and see a lifeguard’s bronzed, stern face looking down on me.

“Leave it to the professionals,” the man says in a deep southern accent.

He grips my arm so I can’t return to the ocean. His fingers dig into my sunburned skin, and I try to escape when he lightens his hold. Over and over again he stops me, and tells me to stay on the shore.

“Let me go!” I seethe, but in return he pushes me down on my knees. I am helpless on the scalding sand.

A few minutes later, I feel a tap on my shoulder. I look up and see Mr. Hamilton pointing toward a figure in the ocean. It gets closer and closer. Now it is so close to me that I can touch it. It’s Ken.

Written by: Kimberly Kupres

Photograph by: Blake Bronstad

The Sleeping Dragon

My brother, Lynn, was only one year old at the time. His first birthday had just passed. The first snowfall had arrived that afternoon and blanketed the fields and meadows surrounding the farmhouse. Night came early. Its black cloak settled over the white blanket, muffling sound, forcing whispers in deference to the silence.

My grandfather threw a log on the ebbing fire then took his place in his rocker. He motioned to me to join him. Lynn had gone to bed early. It was just the two of us. I crawled onto his knee, settling into the crook of his arm. The new log spat and flared; its flickering light danced on the walls and filled our faces with a warm, orange glow.

“Shall I tell you about the sleeping dragon?” my grandfather asked. “I think you’re old enough now.” He pushed the rocker so it settled into an easy rhythm.

And so the story began...

“The legend goes that even before the discovery of fire, the hole was there. No one could remember a time when it wasn’t there. It is there now,” he said. I looked up at him. “True.” He crossed his heart. “It’s in the north meadow. You’ll find it some day when you go exploring. No one knows how deep it is. It breathes a warm mist, keeping the cold air away. It even melts the snow and warms the ground. Ancient men believed it was a living thing--a sleeping dragon confined to the depths of the earth with no means of escape. And so, it sleeps.”

“Don’t it ever wake up?” I asked, a little scared. I’d only heard about dragons in fairy tales.

“No, no. It just sleeps and breathes,” he said. “Sometimes though, it burps.”

“Burps?” I sat up.

“Sometimes near the hole, it smells like rotten eggs.” As we rocked back and forth, he looked me in the eye. “But I figure the dragon just suffers sometimes from indigestion. Some of the ancient peoples believed the hole had magic powers, so they threw dead animals into the hole, hoping to appease the sleeping dragon. Whether that kind of thing works or not, no one knows. Seems people down through the ages have always been a little crazy. What do you think?”

“Sounds crazy to me. No wonder the dragon burps,” I answered. He laughed.

“Yes. Would give anybody heartburn. But still the dragon sleeps and breathes to this day.”

I stared into the lick of flames that curled around the sizzling log as long as I could. My eyes closed to the hissing of the log’s boiling sap trapped inside it. I dreamt of a hole in the ground and the warm, fetid breath of a sleeping dragon.

When I was twelve, my grandfather sold the farm. When the town built right up to its northern border, he’d felt the pressure to sell. He figured he was too old to stand in the way of progress. Neither my father nor his brother were interested in farming. They’d left the farm to pursue their own careers. For the sins of the parents, it was the grandchildren who felt the loss.

The farm was our home, our adventureland. We scouted the creek, meadows and woods that made up the the farm’s one-hundred sixty acres. We used to climb in through the shattered windows of an old, rusty Model A Ford that sat down by the creek and pretend we were gangsters running from the law. Lynn was five years younger than me, so I had to watch out for him. It was my parent’s mandate. But no matter what we did, my brother and I always ended up at the hole.

My brother knelt on the warm ground by the hole and stretched his back and neck as far as he could over the edge to look down into its dark throat. I crouched down beside him. The hole breathed in and out. On exhale, a sour puff of mist rose out of hole. We felt it on our faces and leaned back away from its edge.

“What do you suppose it is?” Lynn asked.

“Don’t know. Grandpa says it’s a sleeping dragon.” Lynn looked at me wide-eyed; then looked back at the hole.

“I heard those Nevitt boys, next farm over, tossed their dead dog in there. How long you think it’s been here?”

“Forever, Grandpa says. Don’t matter. It’ll be someone else’s soon. Come on, let’s go.”

We walked across the meadow and through a stand of giant oaks to catch the path back down to the farm. We came to the fence that bordered the meadow and stepped out into a clearing. I put my hand on my brother’s chest to stop him.

We both stared at a dead deer. I advanced cautiously. My brother trailed behind. It was a full grown doe. It had tried to jump across the fence but had misjudged. Its leg had gone through the top hole in the fencing, and the top and bottom wires had twisted around its ankle, trapping its leg forever--to the end. The ankle was worn down to the bone. Though the doe had struggled and yanked and pulled, the wire held firm. It had starved and died, held by fear, the desire to escape, and two thin pieces of twisted metal.

“It must have been scared,” Lynn said.

“It just wanted to get away, but progress held on tight,” I answered. “Let’s give it a proper burial.”

Together we freed the doe’s leg from the wire mesh and dragged it back across the meadow to the hole.

“Think it’s deep enough?”

“We’ll find out. It’s like a sacrifice to the sleeping dragon,” I answered.

We pushed the deer carcass over the edge and watched it disappear into the darkness; then we headed back home in silence. We never spoke of it again, each placing the day’s memory in a special, hidden place only brothers shared.

In the years that followed, the town paved its way across the farmland and became a city. I got a job with the city highway department. I was supervisor on the night crew. One night, we were called out on an electrical fault.

I stood around the hole with my colleagues, hard hats in place, heads bowed, watching the progress of the John Deere backhoe. As soon as the backhoe hit a limestone crevice and the sour smell of rotten eggs hit my nostrils, I knew where I was and what was about to happen. If legend could be believed, one metal dragon was about to awaken a sleeping one.


Written by: James Shaffer
Photograph by: Matthew Wiebe

Catharsis

I lost my grandfather three months ago. Thirteen years after my grandmother. Now that they are gone I feel like a big part of my childhood is lost forever.

People ask me if I was close to him. I don’t know what to say. In the last few years, I didn’t see him everyday, and when I did, I didn’t know what to talk to him about. But he was my grandfather, and now my mother is an orphan.

I walked into his room and everything was still the same: his bed, his glasses on the side table, the two paintings of Mahatma Gandhi and Lord Krishna, side by side above the bed. He was there too, his body wrapped up in a white sheet like an Egyptian mummy. From the moment I saw him like that I knew I would never be able to let go of that image.

The next day we took him to the cremation ground. Before leaving, each of the family members had to walk around his body, his face now uncovered, and put flowers on his feet as our last offering to him.

The blazing fire of the cremation pyre is a scene I have seen a thousand times in movies and on bad soap operas. It never really struck me as anything out of the ordinary. It was just another custom, just something that had to be done. Standing a few feet away from the burning body of my grandfather, I could not fully comprehend that it was him in there. It was just like one of those fires on the TV screen. I saw everything that was happening, all the rituals; I held my crying mother, but I could not cry.

With that fire we are supposed to let his soul go on and find peace, but all I could think of was the past.

When my grandmother died suddenly, the entire family was shaken up. Even then, I could not cry at all, maybe because I was still too young to have a clear concept of death. Looking back, I think it was also because I was watching my mother completely fall apart and I had no room for my own emotions. For months she would get up in the middle of the night and go to an empty room, so as not to disturb my father, and cry. She still doesn’t know I could hear her.

She also doesn’t know I found her note.

Once when she was out of town, my father asked me to take out some money from my mother’s drawer because he always forgot where she hid her keys. Next to the money I found a piece of paper with her handwriting. She had written a goodbye letter addressed to my brother and me. Not only did the letter shock me because it sounded like she was going to die soon, she had also written she loved us in it. For the longest time, my mother had been unable to say that to us in words. She couldn’t tell us she loved us. It was simply implied and we were supposed to pick up on it on our own. I put the letter back in its place and never mentioned it to anyone. Some months later it was gone.

To this day, I don’t know if it was some sort of suicide note or just her way of trying to be prepared in case she died unexpectedly, like her mother.

Maybe finding her letter is the reason why I often write letters to people even when I know I will never send them. The way my mother could never say, “I love you” to her children, I am unable to say so many things to people around me. I just write to them, without them knowing it.

I tear up handwritten letters. I spend weeks carefully editing emails and then delete them permanently. Some things I have buried, some I’ve even burned because I don’t know how to say them.

I don’t know how to say:

“I’m tired of looking after you, look after me for a change.” Or

“You let a perfectly good friendship end because of one fight. And I hate knowing how little I matter to you because I still miss you.” Or

“That joke you made four years ago still hurts me even though you think I’ve completely forgotten about it.” Or

“I moved to the other end of the world to get away from you.”

Sometimes, I even write notes to myself:

“When you leave, don’t look back.”

                                                                                             ***

In the days after the cremation, relatives and friends visited my Uncle’s house to convey their condolences to the family. One of my mother’s cousins started talking about the journey of the soul after the death of the body. She talked about reincarnation; she talked about how my grandfather could feel us mourning. I knew she had lost her young son some years back and all I could hear in everything she was saying was her inability to accept the permanence of her loss. She had found every way possible to convince herself that her son was not really gone but continued to exist in some form, in some world or the other.

While some of the family members found comfort in her ideas, I was able to understand the real motive behind the funerary customs we had just gone through. They were not for the peace of the departed but for the living. Every step was supposed to bring us closer to acknowledging the loss and letting go. The fire, the immersion of the ashes into the Ganges, the giving away of all the belongings, it is all so that we have nothing left to hold on to.

It’s like the letters that I write. I burn them because I no longer want to feel the feelings that I write about. A cremation, followed by a mourning and then, hopefully, a move forward.

Written by: Vrinda Agrawal
Photograph by: Sydney Singhass

The Judge

Gene wakes up to the sound of a baby crying. He turns his head to face the digital clock on his nightstand, lime green letters glowing 3:30 AM. The room seems blue as bits of moonlight slide through the blinds. Gene is disoriented, pondering the origin of that persistent wailing. A neighbor perhaps? But something inside him suggests that the sound is much closer, making his feet itch. It’s been so long since the last time he heard a baby cry. His children and grandchildren are grown now, and he lives alone - a widower.

Pulling the quilt from his body, he slides his legs from the bed and plants his feet on the floor. As he stands and makes his first step, he feels something sticking to the bottom of his feet. He turns on the lamp next to his bed and squints his eyes to investigate. Perplexion knits his brows; thousands of toothpicks litter the hardwood floor of his bedroom. Gene’s heart picks up pace as the wailing reaches a terrible volume. What the hell is going on? Someone must be in the house…

He opens the door and steps out into the hallway, thinking only of his Remington sitting in the gun cabinet in the den. The nightlight cuts on as he moves forward, but strange shadows play on the walls on either side of him. There are sheets of paper taped haphazardly over the wood panels, covered with child’s script. Gene steps toward the most illuminated one and reads a sentence written in black crayon: The monster comes out at night and gets into my bed. His mouth is dry as sweat builds in his armpits, soaking through his shirt. Seventy-five years old and only now does he know terror.

Panic propels him into the kitchen, but before he can grab a knife, the corners of rectangular silhouettes scratch at his eyes and face. He flips the light switch and discovers photographs, hundreds of photographs, surrounding him. Each one bears the image of one person, his estranged granddaughter Miranda whom he has not seen for twenty-two years. One picture shows her dressed up as an Indian princess for Halloween. In another, she stands on a diving board in her purple swimsuit, smiling for the camera. She is no older than six years old in the photographs, her age when Gene last saw her.

The wailing baby fuels his horror as he rips through the suspended images and all but falls into the den through the swinging door. He stumbles toward the gun cabinet and reaches for the lock, but it isn’t there. It’s already open. The shotgun is gone. And then, the lamp beside his brown microsuede recliner cuts on. He turns, clutching his chest as if his heart might burst and beholds a person dressed in black from head to toe. Only the mouth and eyes are seen, the gender questionable. With the press of a button on a remote control, the stranger stops the recording of the crying infant playing from the stereo. Gene’s Remington sits across the figure’s lap.

He falls to his knees, tears welling up in his eyes, nausea overtaking his insides. The stranger watches, listening to Gene blubber words like “please” and “don’t”. Snot dangles from the old man’s nostrils and spits drips from the corners of his lips. On hands and knees now, he crawls toward the intruder in supplication. He is begging for his life, pressing his forehead against the floor as if hoping he’ll fall through. The stranger takes the shotgun in both hands and pumps the slide, aiming at murder.

“Get up,” says a woman’s voice.

Gene weeps and hiccups uncontrollably, shaking his head.

“Get up.”

With weakness of spirit and knee, he stands up and covers his face with his hands.

“Now,” she continues. “Tell me what you did to me.”

His jaw shakes and teeth chatter.

Her voice calm and controlled, the stranger repeats, “Tell me what you did to me.”

Gene drops his hands and looks into Miranda’s eyes. He remembers taking her fishing on the lake when she was five years old, getting up before dawn to gather their supplies. She slept in the crook of his arm as they drove out in his pickup truck, country music playing and the volume low. He remembers slipping into her room in the dead of night, studying her face by the streetlight coming in through lacey white curtains. She was beautiful and she loved him. He hungered for her love more than any other because she worshipped him. Miranda wanted nothing more than to please her grandfather.

Now, she sits before him and listens to his last confession with silent severity. She knows that he has never told anyone these things, that this horrible occasion is also the release of a heavy burden. She recalls the day her father received orders to be stationed overseas, wondering if her grandfather would be angry, if he would kidnap her one night as she slept. But as months turned into years of living in one country and then another, the stomach aches stopped and the nightmares waned. In time, she grew new innocence.

Gene, silent now, stares at the floor. Miranda stands up and hands him the shotgun as she walks past, out of the den and out the front door. She slips through the open gate of the chain link fence and reconvenes with her motorcycle, pulling on her helmet and kickstarting the engine. The early morning hours and long highway shield her from the sound of an empty shotgun breaking her grandfather’s heart and the sight of his fruitless search for the shotgun shells in the small pack on her back. The miles that multiply between them hide an old man’s tears spilling on the photographs he holds in his hands as he lies in a heap on the kitchen floor. Miranda rides, cocooned by wind and an aching dawn.

Written by: Natasha Akery
Photograph by: Emily Blincoe