Yes and No, by Paulette Perhach

An application asks, “Have you ever been suicidal?” Offers two options: Yes or No.

At first, I think: Yes. One Thursday not long before high school graduation, my best friend and I sat in class, joking about me peeking at her test the day before, when an office assistant came in, his lips parted, out of breath, as he handed a slip of paper to the teacher, who called to us. We were wanted in the office.

We walked down the hallway, busted, for the umpteenth time. Whatever this trouble was, it couldn’t touch us. We were set to go to college that summer, so all we did was laugh. This is how I remember the end of my childhood.

Weirdly, my mom stood outside. Just from the deflated look of her, I said, “Oh my god, Mom, what happened?”

“Daddy’s been in an accident.”

I pictured my 6’6” bear of a father in a wheelchair instead of his usual dancing and whistling as he made pancakes, a bandage now around his head, as if he’d just been wheeled in from offstage. It was going to be weird to see him in a wheelchair for a while.

“Honey,” my mom said, her sweet face constricting. “Daddy didn’t make it.”

Whatever I screamed, it brought the whole class outside. 

Then, I was rubbing my mom’s arm and saying, “It will be ok, Mom,” and I did not feel a thing.

I was walked out to the car and put inside it, alone. Kid Rock sang on the radio that only God knows why. All I could think was, Oh Jesus, please do not let this be the song serenading this moment.

*

When I left home two months later, the house was stagnant, having long since exhaled the scent of funeral flowers. No one was home to wave me off or to tell me I needed to pack more than clothes and a radio. I drove myself to a college of 40,000 students, ranked as one of the top ten party schools in the nation. My best friend would start after summer.

In the dorm, I watched fathers reach into car trunks and carry the heavy things for their daughters. I wondered if my dad had time to think of us before he died. I knew I’d have to delete his number from my cell phone soon.

Once, when I called home and heard a man’s voice, seventeen years of muscle memory kicked in and my voice said, “Dad?” 

My brother pretended it didn’t happen. So did I. 

Nights, I’d writhe in tangled Twin XL sheets damp with sweat and tears, gritting my teeth and crying as if a lifetime of the love my father had given me was being pulled back out through my heart and my throat.

Other ghosts haunted me. Every time the phone rang, there had been another accident. My brother died in a car crash. My mother had cancer. My friends who were too young to die proved that phrase to be a mere wish.

You have 11 saved voicemails, and 11 voices you’re afraid you’ll never hear again.

On drives back home to visit my mother, how many people saw me, stiff-arming the wheel and screaming?

To everyone else I must have looked like just another freshman, walking to class on brisk fall days, eating pizza with roommates in front of the TV or studying for exams, as if I really were one of them, as if I cared about or even believed in the future.

Sometimes I’d be distracted enough. But then I’d remember that my father went to work one day and a crane crushed the place I’d watch him brush his hair each morning and I’d never hear him laugh at his own jokes again or call me Yetter or stop me in the hallway to play that slappy hand game I was too old to play, our hands speeding up faster and faster until we were just smacking each other, until he bundled me up in a hug, laughing. 

There would be no father-daughter dance at my wedding. 

And then I’d be crying, again.

The friends and friends-turned-roommates who’d been rubbing my back since March 23rd, who’d brought over so many tissues, who’d put in so many hours of nodding: Should I call them, again? 

Did I need them, one more goddamn time?

I hear them out there. Yes, I want them to knock. Yes, I want to pretend to want to be alone. Yes, I want them to insist.

You’re not missing kickoff, are you?

People in my classes and at bars assumed we were embarking together on the best years of our lives. They wondered which sorority they’d get into and if we’d win the big game; I wondered how many sleeping pills I could swallow yet still stay tethered to life. Not a decision. Just a break.

Two. Four. Six. Eight.

Eight, and I didn’t even sleep through Saturday.

My best friend dragged me out of bed to horrific, energy-draining activities I so badly wanted to enjoy. I’d dab eyeshadow on my cry-puffed eyelids and remind myself not to talk about death at this party. But my resolve would weaken as I disappeared into the rooms of college freshmen, until I’d reach out and grab someone who seemed too happy for me to stand. “Oh, you got a C- on your exam, bummer. I’ve been struggling a bit too since my dad just died.” I’d watch her squirm against the terrible things of the world and feel a dark power. The only kind I had. 

They could not face what they really wanted to do, what I wished I could do: turn and walk away from it. So they’d give me their five minutes of a wrinkled, pitiful face, their sorrys. I’d feel a glum sense of stolen pleasure, like when someone tells you you’re pretty, but only because you asked. Then they’d look into their empty Dixie cups and notice they had an excuse to leave.

Then maybe I’d get drunk myself, but all it took was someone to mention her parents, that quick plural word, and the dam I’d built would collapse. I’d lock myself in some stranger’s bathroom, lean stiff-armed against the sink, and watch myself cry in the mirror, hoping someone would notice me missing and ask if I was ok. 

Then I’d slink out to find my best friend, sit within the orbit of her knowing, and try not to say anything.

Once she invited me (but was she really hoping I wouldn’t go?) tubing at a guy’s lake house. We’d been strung along behind a speeding boat a thousand times as kids, but now it just seemed like one more way to be dragged out-of-control, every second the second before the next thing we’d call The Accident. 

I couldn’t ignore the risks, when even a Thursday could kill you, but I went anyway, to pretend, and held my breath as I watched from the boat. Later, half-drunk, I took a wave runner speeding across the lake, gunning it up to 64 m.p.h., as if to ensure any crashes would be head-on and quick. My decision. Then I stopped, surrounded by opaque water, and looked back at those young women lying out together on the beach and drinking beers with guys. I wanted to be the way they looked in the distance, but I could never escape being inside myself.

After a while, it seemed better for everyone if I didn’t even try to pretend.

The idea of suicide became a place to rest, the place I went for a little mental pleasure, something else to turn to. I didn’t want to bother my friends with more of the same-old-same-old, not when so many months had already passed, not when every platitude had been played out, when so many silences had been sat through.

Every time I went to the drugstore, I’d look at the economy-size bottles of Tylenol PM and think, There’s my instrument, right next to the baby aspirin.

Two. Four. Six. Eight.

Maybe I’d write some incredible note, then buy one of those gowns with my student loans, something gorgeous that would shimmer in the candlelight, sparks dancing against my dead skin. In my fantasy, someone would push open my bedroom door and they’d see me lying there, looking peaceful, and know something was terribly wrong. Someone would scream. Then the scene would cut straight to the ambulance sirens, though it’d be too late, of course. They’d all watched my covered corpse being wheeled into the ambulance, a pair of new shoes, from the money I was supposed to spend on textbooks, peeping out from the sheet.

*

And then there was this day. Just a day. I hadn’t bought the dress. Didn’t even have a rough draft of a note. Completely unprepared, I woke up and wanted to die.

I drove to the mall. Perhaps a silly thing to do on your suicide day, but in order to not kill myself right that second, I had to surround myself with the fantasy that life was a place of exciting fall fashion, bright colors, and pretty, happy girls who never had to help toss their fathers’ ashes into the sea.

I succeeded in arriving without unbuckling my seatbelt and slamming my car into a sturdy wall. I haunted stalls that sold bumper stickers, shirts, and baby cheerleading uniforms in my university’s colors. I always looked for the sticker that said “Proud Dad,” the way one might press on a bruise only to say that it hurt.

I passed a woman, some idiot who didn’t even notice I was dead already. And I thought, “What if I had a gun? What if I had a gun and I just randomly chose her, and I stepped in front of her, pulled it out and shot myself in the mouth?”

I made it home. ER was on the TV in the living room, my dad bleeding out on the screen in front of the couch. I went straight into my room and imagined what my friends would do with my stuff.

It had been eight months of grief like constantly cracking ribs, almost 250 days of living in anxiety about the next person that would be taken from me, 250 mornings waking up and remembering I had a lifetime of fatherlessness ahead of me. This was how life was and there was nothing to do but take it or leave it.

The bottle of sleeping pills waited under my bed, minus a few from all those trial runs, but surely still enough. All I wanted was for the world to go on, for me to bow out without hurting anyone. I wanted the cool nothing relief from the burning numbness of living in a world only I could feel.

I went through a mental checklist, as if I were about to go on a long vacation. But my thoughts turned to my mother. I could not do this without doing this to her. 

This thought turned me from numb pain to burning pain, an alive pain. And I began to cry.

Surprise, surprise.

If I called anyone, there would be no relief, no rest. I’d have to wake up the next morning and look at myself in the mirror and I’d probably break down. But there was no such thing as bowing out without hurting anyone.

So I called my best friend, and said sorry to bother her during her freshman year of college but I’d thought of nothing but killing myself all day. And she asked did I want her to come over, and this time I didn’t lie.

Even though her apartment was far, far away, across campus and in the land of the living, even though I’d been nothing but a burden for so long, even though she’d heard it all before and even though there was nothing she could do, she came over anyway.

She listened and then she said, “I love you, more than you’ll ever know.”

More than I’ll ever know.

Her words opened a window to the thought of all I didn’t know. I was betting my life on something I’d taken for fact: that it wasn’t worth living. I’d thought for sure life was only a haunted wait, ticking toward the next terrible loss. I’d thought for sure I was shriveling up and dying anyway. You know how teenagers think they know everything.

But if life could be unknowable, if there were tragic losses, then perhaps there could also be glorious surprises. If there was still wonder in the world, then I couldn’t say with absolute certainty that I’d never be happy again. My imagination could think of 1,000 ways for my loved ones to die, but it couldn’t conjure one scenario in which life would be worthy of living. 

So I lived. I lived to see the bloom of stars we call the Milky Way over the Pacific, to meet the nephew named for my father, to fall in love with men who make me laugh, to diagnose and handle the anxiety disorder that made it all so much worse, to feel pain again but to know nothing could ever be as bad as what I’d already been through, to feel the awe-swell of watching the world work, waves crashing on rocks, lava dripping into the sea, a toucan flying by in a valley of palms, to learn Spanish well enough to make the cab driver laugh, the one with my dad’s smile, and to make him laugh again and again just to remember, and to think so many times, I lived to see this, I made it here. The possibility existed, even then.

On that application, I checked the box for No. 

---

Paulette Perhach is a writer and writing coach with work previously in the New York Times, Vox, Elle, Slate, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, Hobart, and Vice. Her book, Welcome to the Writer's Life, was selected as one of Poets & Writers' Best Books for Writers, and she continues the conversation at WelcomeToTheWritersLife.com. You can write with her at AVeryImportantMeeting.com.

Witnessing, by Jennifer McGaha

On a lazy, last-gasp-of-summer sort of day, I linger on the patio of a south Asheville bakery. Leaning back in my chair, I marvel at the warmth, at the music drifting over from a nearby brewery, at my good fortune for having arrived here on what would have been, COVID notwithstanding, a perfectly normal Friday. Four days before, I had stood before my class for the first time since the pandemic began. Above their masks, my students were a cluster of startled eyes. In the long months we had been apart, we had forgotten one another, and the language with which I had learned to teach and they had learned to student no longer served us. An attendance policy? A late paper penalty? Ludicrous. COVID had shaped and shifted our narrative in ways we were just beginning to understand. 

Let’s crack the windows, I had said. So COVID can fly out the window. 

Of course, this was not how COVID worked, but this was creative writing, not biology. Still, even with our fondness for words, we had no adequate way to articulate our sorrows, not the collective horrors nor the smaller, everyday disappointments. Certainly, we couldn’t refer to them in the simple past tense. Nothing was simply over. Past perfect tense was not helpful, either: Before the pandemic, we had… What good did it do to remember what we did before? The future tense, too, was problematic: This spring I will … Who knew what would happen in the coming months? We could only speak definitively in the present tense, and first-person plural pronouns seemed most fitting: We are unsure how to proceed. And so we talked about our writing processes, about our fears and doubts and the struggle to begin.   

“I’m afraid that what I write won’t be good enough,” one student said.

In the old days, I might have offered reassurances, but as it were (subjunctive!), I offered only validation.  

“Oh, it won’t,” I said. “It absolutely won’t.”  

What sort of teacher was I to discourage a blossoming young writer? What sort of person? Still, there it was, an inescapable truth: Our words will never be enough. On the one hand, it was liberating. If we accepted the inevitability of failure, we were free to flounder around on the page, finding beauty where we could. On the other hand, beauty was so fleeting. Nonetheless, we tried to capture snippets where we could. We were reading Ross Gay’s The Book of Delights, and at the beginning of each class we went around the room naming our delight for the day: A phone call from an old friend. A premium parking spot. A perfect cup of coffee. And now, for me, a new delight: Swedish creme.  

It’s like cheesecake, the man at the counter had told me when I ordered. But the delicacy the server places in front of me is as much like cheesecake as rain is like snow, as a flute is like a drum, which is to say that they vibrate differently in the body. Topped with strawberry purée, the thick custard I slurp from a spoon is creamy, yes, smooth, yes, comforting and familiar and exotic all at once—a moment unto itself. The creme glides down my throat, a heron landing on water, a sensation, a mood, and it is no longer late August but a random, uneventful spring day when nothing in particular happens but everything is about to happen, when daffodils dot the hillsides and the morning air still settles in your hips and mid-day sun hums with the promise of leisurely strolls and lakeside lounging, of outdoor concerts and sparkling rosé and charcuterie boards balanced on wobbly, makeshift tables. 

It is not the end of summer, the end of anything. The season of breathtaking, of basking, of rolling over on your back and exposing your pale, naked belly to the sun, has nearly arrived, the anticipation of which, in the way of things, is almost always sweeter than the thing itself— sweeter, even, than the memory of last summer, which even now surpasses my wildest expectations. I am not a reliable witness to anything, save the impotent beauty of words. 

---

Jennifer is the author of two memoirs, Flat Broke with Two Goats (Sourcebooks, 2018) and Bushwhacking (forthcoming from Trinity University Press in 2023). Her work has also appeared in The Bitter Southerner, Brevity, CHEAP POP, The Huffington Post, Lumina, PANK, The Chronicle of Higher Education, Passengers, HerStry, Baltimore Fishbowl, and many other publications. A native of Appalachia, Jennifer lives in a wooded North Carolina hollow with her husband, two cats, six unruly dogs, ten relatively tame dairy goats, and an ever-changing number of crested hens. She currently teaches at UNC-Asheville.

Synthetic Love, by Lisa Fay Coutley

I. In England 

In case the car starts on fire 
while he’s hang gliding, Everard
pins a note to his love’s chest 
so no one dies trying to save her.
After their morning fuck, she lies
with her sleeping face on 
while he winds the clock
in his dead mum’s room.  

II. In Michigan

Synthetic love activist Davecat
just wants to rub his wife’s feet
in early morning light, but organic
women are not constant. Shi-chan is 
the anchor that keeps him stable
in their room above his parents’   
garage. When he crates his wife 
to be shipped for repair, he kisses 
both hands & cries he’ll miss her. 

III. In Virginia  

Gordon has three guns & two girls / one of which fires as fast as you can / pull the
trigger.  A woman in stilettos / & a thong is meat someone else has / chewed & spit back
on God’s plate. / He wants his dolls buried / in the same box as him / so they can become
one dust.  

IV. In California 

Slade the repairman’s running out of vaginas
& teeth again. Sex is almost like a violent act, he 
says, but these dolls can take a lot of physical abuse. 

V. In Texas 

Michael is grateful for his harem 
of eight top-heavy dolls & the Swedes 
who are willing to sell real pubic hair 
for when his ladies wear out. In this high 
form of masturbation he does not want 
to be seen as a pervert, but when he 
wakes at 3am with a raging hard-on
he goes to the garage, grabs his doll
of choice, & goes at it. You can’t do that 
with a woman, he notes. She can say no. 

VI. At Abyss Creations, USA 

Receptionist Debbie says men are fifty
& balding & never going to get women 
who look like this, who totally love them.  
Doll Creator Matt feels best about men 
who’ve made that emotional connection—
I’ve changed their lives for the better...like insoles
in their shoes. These men come home from work
excited to see their doll, & the food bill’s way cheaper. 

*Language in italics is dialogue taken from the documentary Guys and Dolls. 

---

Lisa Fay Coutley is the author of tether (Black Lawrence, 2020), Errata (Southern Illinois, 2015), winner of the Crab Orchard Series in Poetry Open Competition, and In the Carnival of Breathing (BLP, 2011), winner of the Black River Chapbook Competition. She is also the editor of the forthcoming anthology, In the Tempered Dark: Contemporary Poets Transcending Elegy (Black Lawrence, 2023). She’s the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellowship, fellowships and scholarships to the Sewanee and Bread Loaf Writers’ Conferences, an Academy of American Poets Levis Prize, and the 2021 Gulf Coast Poetry Prize, selected by Natalie Diaz. Recent prose and poetry appears in Brevity, Copper Nickel, Gulf Coast, NELLE, Terrain, and Waxwing. She is an Associate Professor of Poetry and Creative Nonfiction in the Writer’s Workshop at the University of Nebraska Omaha.