A person can vacation anywhere, but most people go to the places everyone else goes: four-hour cruise-ship islands, rubber mat ski-rental locker rooms, rental car offices that sell insurance. They struggle with paddleboard levers, trudge past boardwalk shooting galleries, hunt for exits out of famous museums.

There’s always rain and 95 degree heat. Pecans. Fudge. Salt-water taffy. Tour guides that want you to sing. There’s one day left.

And lines. Lines to lines. Lines at theme parks, ski lodges, all you can eat buffets, and gift stores to buy magnets for coworkers because you can’t go back empty-handed. There’s jostling onto city tour get-on get-off buses, jostling to find two adjacent seats on the upper-deck, jostling to get the left ear of the international headphones to make a sound.

And disappointments: whales from a quarter mile away, icebergs that don’t calve, fish that don’t bite and backs that are starting to hurt.

Somebody left soaking-wet black socks and underwear in “your” hammock that have to be removed them with a stick.

… aaah, but some people go to Norway, borrow rowboats without asking, paddle to the center of vast lakes ringed with the late-afternoon silhouettes of pine trees, jump into freezing cold water, clasp hands somehow around an oarlock, laugh until they sigh and fall asleep on seat planks. There are eleven more days.

They lie back and stare up at the stars. He tries to remember the names of constellations he once memorized in high school. There are eighty-eight. Now he can only think of twelve.

She hums the only piece of Norwegian music she can think of, something by Klieg, no that’s not right, Frieg maybe. After she’s hummed her song for a bit, he recognizes the tune. It’s Grieg, not Klieg. Now it’s their song together. They couldn’t have done it alone. More laughter. Northern Lights. Their voices carry over the water.

They can’t possibly make love in a rowboat, right?

Wrong. He bets nobody else has ever done it.

Have.

Haven’t.

Dawn.

Then just the two of them stealthily returning a rowboat on an unnamed fjord in Norway.

This little guy was inspired by the first line of someone else’s story which was inspired by a writer’s prompt, both of which happen to have been written by the same person, a former employee of the Eagle Harbor Bookstore on Bainbridge Island, WA. Fellow writers, you can find her pencil-chewing, time-sucking, dastardly writer prompts via the link below.

what now?

writing and talking about writing and other things (but mostly prompts)

By mary g.

for i have known the world: street lamps through a window in Shanghai, hiss and steam, the soft palms of a child’s hands tucking me in foam.

i have known youth at sea, my brave companions huddled beside me in the hold, dreaming of the world to come. i do not know what became of them.

i have known the tumbling of city streets, the clatter of the hand truck, the heights and depths of merchant shelves. men and women held me to the light, gazing, testing their dreams against me. i saw hope in a thousand faces.

i have lived in the fragrance of warm cotton above the mighty rumbling of dryers, outlasted a legion of bare bulbs that set like suns, ranged by garments piled as mountains. i have made my bed with the runaway socks and the ragged cloth and the burned-out nightlight. i have been born into the resolutions of January, abandoned in March dust, and born again.

i have known sorrow in the darkness of a basement broom closet, longing to press my dimpled flesh into supple thigh, to know the dew of surrendered spine.

in my grief i took refuge in a torn cascade of drapes beneath a king-sized bed, and in the darkness there, i knew friendship, settled by the purring chin and the warm breath of a house cat, royal and patient and wise.

i have known the rainy stoop and the sunlit brownstone, the rummage sale and the giveaway box, tobacco dirt, palaces of cardboard and glass.

i have stood eye to eye with dogs, large and small. they retreated, all.

i do not know what is to befall me in this modest encampment, but here i stand. my scars are stories and my wounds gratitude.

for i have known life, and i will carry the memory of the arch of a grandchild’s foot rolling upon my back, the sudden flight, and a single burst of glorious locomotion.

A week before I set off for Japan, I bundled a collection of stories written over the last two years and shipped them off to the agent that represented my memoir Finisterre.

Assembling them, I liked what I saw: particularly Howl, Pigeons, Jack London, and A Box of Rain. But nine others hold their own. I’m deeply proud of the work, and it kills me that I’ll have to tell my agent that I spent their first publication rights on Substack. They may find new life in a collection, but otherwise I’m sitting shiva.

Twenty-four stories dead in Kyoto.

Publishing a story a month has been the source of the deepest joy for me. To throw oneself into a story and then have the heady pleasure of being read, right then and there, what a thrill that is. To Click Post and Be Known. How I’ll miss it. It is a guilty spiritual pleasure, but it’s spending all of your money on the way to the fair. It needs to stop.

But there’s more to it. Substack is an awful place for fiction. Awful, awful, awful. It’s too long for inboxes. It asks far too much from readers. It is a graveyard for nuance. I’m chasing after readers while they are jogging.

I have the same number of subscribers in April of 2026 as I had April of 2025, and I’m writing better than I’ve ever written.

Pigeons, for fuck’s sake.

*

So voila, a reimagined site: Kneejerks.

I know some of you are sitting shiva now. Some stories disappeared before you even read them. But it’s still me. I still have opinions, a penchant for make-believe, a funny bone and soft spots. As do you. I hope you’ll stay with me on this new trajectory.

I’m constraining posts by length and time. Under five hundred words, I will post to everyone. When I drift over, the posts are for paid. This will both keep me honest — I want lots and lots and lots of people to read me — and it will make sure paid subscriptions receive distinct value. Because, honestly, I do run over.

I plan to write creatively as well. Compact. Less beginning, middle and end. More back-of-napkin. More often, I hope.

*

I have never done the marketing legwork my writing demands. The clock is ticking. I have not abandoned my one hundred stories mission. I have the backbone of a sprawling trilogy:

Gabriel’s Horn

Amanita and Clathrus. The Grey Men and the Fish Lady. Terror. Tattoos. The depths of adolescent loneliness. Stand clear.

Bow.

Readers, I want you to hold my work standing by a bookshelf in a bookstore — oh, hell, I’ll go all in: you’re standing in a bookstore in Kyoto — and I want you to think, “I know that guy. He writes Kneejerks.”

Stick with me.

Taking a break from all things written and subscribed, a due break.

Here’s a repost from years ago on my life as a beloved, senior monk in a Japanese monastery.

*

I imagine myself passing away in a wood and bamboo room at a mountaintop monastery. I’m not sure how or when I get up there, but something significant will have to happen and fairly soon because the years are starting to click by now. Anyhow, it’s all very cinematic. Very Eastern.

In my ever so simple mountain monastery room, I leave behind nothing but a neat parcel of my belongings wrapped up in rice paper and scratchy brown twine. My monk’s robe is folded into a perfect square and placed in front of my empty teacup – a simple wooden teacup that I insist on cleaning myself even into my final hours. The teacup should be positioned exactly in front of the little square futon where I once answered my visitors’ questions. You can put a flower, like an iris or something, across the top unless it looks too staged or bulky on the teacup.

Outside my window I’d like to see the ancient Kirosawa Cherry Tree, grief stripping its petals in an April breeze. A ten-year-old should be able to tell you that the tree “knows” I’m gone. Earlier in the good-bye film you’ll need a set-up scene of my character very patiently pruning that same tree at dawn, with tiny, dandruff-sized Bonsai snips accumulating around the foot of the wooden ladder. You can worry about the details on how all that comes about, but obviously, nobody else should ever be seen tending the monastery trees but me.

At the exact moment I depart, let the cherry tree shot roll for a bit. Park the camera on the tripod, pop a fresh roll of film on there, turn on the wind machine and point the lens at the cherry tree. Get yourself a cup of coffee. Don’t be afraid to push the “this is an awfully long shot” envelope. Very Japanese. It’s okay if the audience starts to wonder if maybe it is the last shot in the film. (Spoiler: It’s not.)

As far as music is concerned, I’m thinking simple, soft, background farm sounds like chickens clucking occasionally mixed in with extravagant bursts of women wailing from one of the sheds. Maybe some creaky hinges and doors opening and closing off-camera. That can be people scurrying about doing whatever people do when somebody’s died on a farm. But real quiet and subtle so you can still hear the crying. I don’t want some over-the-top violin soundtrack. It’s not John Williams who’s died. It’s a beloved old monk. I can’t afford to lose the Zen payoff of my entire life.

Then slowly begin to montage all that with the other monks in long, silent procession as they lose their deep reserves of calm and weep convulsively without moving their heads. In cutaway shots one of the senior monk’s hands should reach to brace itself against the stone stairwell. It should be clear from information in an earlier scene that something like this has never happened in the monastery before, definitely not to the head monk character anyway.

Don’t force it, but I’m thinking we might have been competitors somehow, but with me being the “not competitive” one who wins in the end. And now the head monk also knows and, of course, I tried to tell him both directly and through parable.

I’d also like a scene with pilgrims who came on foot some ridiculous distance to see me but arrived too late because then I was dead already. They should learn of my passing from the sandbox gardener. Don’t even let the gardener look up. He should inform the visitors over his shoulder and keep raking. Because everything that happens is perfect and for a reason. And this is perfect, too. It turns out that this was the message they came a thousand miles for and what they needed to hear: “you came too late to meet him.”

Only that. Nothing more:

“You’re too late. He’s gone. You wanted to meet him. You didn’t.”

Dut-dee-dut-dee-dut-dee-dut.

This, my friends, is What Life Wanted You to Know.

Ouch. I love it. Oh my god! It’s perfect. I’m getting enlightenment tingles. Look at my forearms!

For credibility it would be better if the visitors aren’t English speaking. Have them be Portuguese or something. I want humble, poor Mediterranean people who pick a religion and stick with it. Please don’t use Americans.

Then, in the very, very final shot, you should have a close-up on a long-stemmed ink brush faltering suddenly mid character or hieroglyph or whatever you call them. The Japanese should be translated in an italicized subtitle to let the audience know that the word was “Sorrow.” Consider spelling it wrong for authenticity.

If you had a know-it-all friend who studied Japanese in college, he would nudge you in the theater and whisper that none of the Western words for sorrow can even begin to get at what this word means in Japanese, but that “sorrow” is still the best translation without resorting to koan.

And then it’s over and I’m gone forever and guess what?

You didn’t get to meet me either.

I love it.

It’s perfect.

Thoughts are coming at me at a thousand miles an hour this morning. I rarely post the day I write, but this morning, people, we are coming at you live, live and unedited from downtown Cobble Hill Brooklyn, where not a single man, woman, or child has any idea of what is about to hit us, and it is all very exciting.

Snow, baby.

Snow.

Real snow.

24 inches? 16 inches? 157 thousand inches?

Zero inches, of course, wah, wah, wah, is a very real possibility, too.

Anyone who’s ever loved meteorological predictions that take out entire seaboards knows “oh, so sorry, only zero inches” is always a distinct possibility, and let’s face it, the likely scenario. This is New York City, not Nebraska.

We are jilted lovers, all of us, pining hopefully through years of underwhelming calamities, waiting for the Big One that stops time and human civilization and closes schools, which I’ll come to.

Anyway, this Nor’Easter just might — please, please, please — finally be the one. Imagine my “please, please, please” coming from a fed-up child, head cast backwards, arms rigid at his sides, imploring the heavens in deep and guttural groans of frustration.

Now, shhh...

Hear that?

That’s rain.

The rain is just beginning to tap, tap on the living room air conditioner that I still haven’t taken to the basement — “Sweetheart, it’s February” — and, let me tell you, gentle readers, that plucking rain is going to turn to snow at some point after 1pm, and then our little blizzard is going to push on through like Little House on the Prairie for three days and four nights. The brownstone sidewalks will be littered with lost mittens, trapped Ubers and men having heart attacks, shovels jammed firmly into wet snow drifts, dogs in foot mittens, Donner parties, etc.

So, here I am, like a big kid, typing away, dreaming of yesteryear and school closures coming over the kitchen radio. Those early pyjamed mornings as an elementary school student, standing in the kitchen like it was Christmas morning, more excited than actors on Oscar Day, waiting on the school closure report. No holiday could compete with this.

They even scheduled these impromptu inclement weather holidays into the school calendar. Gather around, my little Global Warmers: they tagged three days on at the end of the school year.

Why?

Because They Knew The Storm Was Coming.

*

Some of you may remember school closure announcements.

Others may remember radios.

… West Windsor School District, Princeton Day School delayed opening, Pennington Prep, Flemington Friends Academy…

… Still not Hopewell… who is running New Jersey?…

And again, five minutes later…

…West Windsor School District, Princeton Day School is now a full closure, Pennington Prep, Flemington Friends Academy, Hopewell Public Schools…

Hopewell Public Schools!!!

No three words every created such joy in our little Hopewell hearts than those three words coming from WHWH 1350 AM.

*

That is, we don’t have one of our “so-sorry-people, it was zero inches,” and provided this storm is as once-in-a-decade as advertised, then my current story will turn out to be an act of deep, awe-inspiring soothsaying then you’re going to have to trust me.

Why?

Because I’ve been working on a story for the last couple weeks.

And it about a snowfall in New York City.

Yes.

Correct.

A snowfall.

“I began to snow,” it begins, curiously.

THE ARK

If I don’t have a heart attack in front of the building shoveling later, maybe story 25 for April?

*

25!

I’m almost a quarter of the way to 100, if you’re still here and counting along.

*

So, yes, Story XXIII, ‘Untitled,’ was brief.

Eleven words, two quotation marks, two periods and one little em-dash.

There it was.

I knew early on I’d have one piece of microfiction.

I would wait until it arrived. Then, it did, and there it was.

And I want to say this: if you think I just typed

and went on my merry way, you are seriously mistaken.

I have never spent so much time on two sentences in my life. I poked and prodded and swapped and situated and cast and recast and settled and unsettled until I was throwing pens across the room.

It needed to be a story, for starters, with a beginning, middle and end. It needed to engage the reader. It needed every word to do a load-bearing job. Even the carriage returns were called to duty.

To wit:

I needed the “out,” for example. Otherwise it would be the simple idea of crying as in weeping, which sacrifices ethical outrage somehow.

Can’t repeat the word hit tonally, but there was more than that using “struck” the first time. “Struck” introduces something formal and rigid that creates a personality, even a back story in the father.

The late-breaking change (after posting twelve words in the teaser post, was a discovery, too. You may have noticed I removed the “only” from the puzzle and swapped for the em-dash. Now, eleven words. The em-dash adds temporality, a new thought, something defensive, a moment left to the imagination of the reader.

My rule for microfiction, and I have no idea if this is a thing, but it became a thing for me: the “story” needed a beginning, middle and end. I believe I got there. The moment had a before and after. And, I believe, the narration also has a long-after feel to it, a moral residue that has stained.

I believe you can visually see the child looking at the father, if not turning up to him.

Heavens no, it couldn’t be daughter. “Man hitting girl” would completely derail a reader. But “child” was too distant. I needed the possibility of letting you bring a face to the son.

The ethical root is, of course, the story. If that isn’t clear, then I failed and no amount of explaining the story’s meaning here will rescue me.

The order of phrases and clauses mattered. Story XXIII was like testing jigsaw puzzle pieces. Every pattern was tested for fit until it popped in snugly.

Interestingly, my co-authors all went subtly different directions, according to their particular muses.

Some else really bothers me: I wasn’t clear the story needed — in addition to the quotation marks and periods specifically called for — the silent, Almighty Holy Ghost of the paragraph return.

Untitled is an entirely different story without a paragraph return.

I mean: in microfiction it might not even be a story without the paragraph return.

My Left-Brain Editing Mind is now confronting yesterday’s Right-Brain Enthusiasm Mind’s gushing output after watching Episode 6. The one half is thinking the writer who typed the following opinion should be in a twelve-step program. The other half is sticking with yesterday morning’s grenade blast of unadulterated enthusiasm.

“Let me start at the end. Six seasons from now, naming your child Carol will be the equivalent of naming a child Hermione.

Paraguay Manousos and Air Force One Mr. Diabaté will be popular reference points of the same water-cooler-jug caliber as Breaking Bad’s Jesse Pinkman, Mike the Enforcer, and Gustavo the Kingpin.

For the next six years, viewers of this show are going to lean forward on their couches like they are reporting on hurricanes. Hands are going to lift to mouths in slow-motion. Everyone else is going to hear shouts and sobbing from the family room.

We are in the land of tour-de-force storytelling with one of television’s great premises and a team that knows how to do it justice.”

Here is what my long-suffering internal editor salvaged from the right-brain blast radius this morning.

Many scenes and references assume you’ve seen the episode or that you are comfortable with spoilers.

CARAMEL TIME

Generally speaking, writing advice is worth what you pay for it, and even that isn’t true. Witness Substack. But at some point over the last couple years I learned that in fiction, the more tightly you focus on a specific sensory detail, the more you pump the brakes on time. There is an inverse relationship.

We live in a moment of breathless video cuts and sensory hyperactivity. Images flash and scroll on our phones, our work computers, at our dinner tables, in our cars. I can barely read a novel, my attention is so restless.

But on Friday night, key scenes in Pluribus unfolded like dissected origami: the slow-burn gem of a scene at the casino table, Carol’s meltdown in the luxury suite bathroom, the Hitchcockian egg sandwich breakfast at the hotel room countertop, and every last crossed-out journal line and spin of the ham radio dial. Then Manousos watching Carol’s video. The last scene a master class in slow, and less is more, and the suspense of watching facial muscles for clues.

Feelings and thought appearing like Polaroids. Exquisite human detail.

Then high-speed 2x doors slamming, cityscape panoramas, Tunisia.

Caramel time, all of it. In and out, slow and fast. This is counter to everything right now. It is neurologically brain-altering.

And somehow, each of these tiny, specific moments are becoming load-bearing for a story as epic as the entire planet.

PHILOSOPHY

Most importantly, the show matters.

Who are we together and alone? What does it mean to be an individual, a point of consciousness apart from all other points of consciousness? What does it mean to be a point and not a line? The show is framing this beyond ethics.

“Do you seriously believe the world is a better place now just because it is peaceful?” I might tattoo that quote on my arm.

And how do our principles constrain our relationships? The principled turmoil in both Carol and Manousos speaks to profound questions of integrity.

Isn’t our desire to be included in groups in constant opposition to our desire to be true to our principles? Don’t groups demand a self-destructive mind-meld and an inevitable ethical and behavioral conformity? So what is it that stirs our humanity in these two principled loners standing against the world? Why do they resonate?

Could the set piece rejection of Carol by everyone on the entire planet speak any more powerfully to this? Carol is all of us in that luxury suite bathroom in Vegas. She is, bless her, everyone who has ever been stuck with the weary burden of their principles and the personality life has foisted on them, by whom I mean everyone.

And then, wait!

A few scenes later we suddenly have two principled loners who must rely on each other! What a beautiful paradox for the characters and for the viewer. You and me against the world.

Isn’t this connection between isolated points of consciousness what Love is? Can you even have love without separateness? Can the Collective “Us” in the story truly love? Or is their kindness always a “smile through a veil?” Who do they love? And how?

I get that they don’t pick apples, and they are ethical to a fault, but who do they love?

Undoubtedly, we’ll learn more. Roller-coaster psychological story jolts seem to be a given here. For me one of the jolts on Friday was a line of dialog from Mr. Diabaté:

“Ultimately, this is not about you, [Carol].”

Now the group is having its say. We are torn between all of them. As we all are. What does it mean to care for others? For groups that need our help?

It may take six more seasons to work through all this, the dramatic waves growing in each of them.

This is a world.

MR. DIABATÉ

Mr. Diabaté’s character has snuck up on us, no?

It couldn’t be any more gripping—not to mention the contribution of the actor himself and the art department. What a sound stage of spa bubbles and self-portraits they have surrounded him in.

There is an obvious structural weakness in his soulless, hedonist heaven. But not so fast on the facile dismissal. His actions hold a tantalizing logic. Because he’s more than a hedonist. Much more. He is growing more three-dimensional by the episode.

And in the depths of Carol’s global social exile and despair, Mr. Diabaté tucked her in and made her breakfast. The relief! Thank God for others. It was like eleven billion people tucked her.

And it’s like he’s watching her, considering her case, weighing her up as an ally while managing a growing unease.

But thank God he’s a hedonist in the meantime!

Think of what he is constructing for himself at the gambling table! It is a self-evident hell—I think, hope— but it is a deeply alluring hell. He has surrounded himself by the trappings and satisfactions of the flesh.

What makes him interesting, though, isn’t the harem of ladies, it’s the theater of poker table confidence he has constructed for himself. The cosplay of the soul. It is the rigging of effortless social interaction and gracious dominance in his favor. He has found the genie’s bottle, and he wants his chance to rub it.

Look at Diabaté’s smile at that poker table. It is a real human who has gifted himself a James Bond smile.

The Devil is at that table, and the Devil’s got game.

“All of this shall be yours, Mr. Diabaté.”

Yes, this is landmark television.

6.

0.

Falling, falling, falling.

November 16th, 1965.

For a better timeline vantage point, “I Got You, Babe” was top of the charts.

Friends were over last night. Melanie was in her Hospitality Zone. The work she puts in! Table setting below. I played my iTunes favorites, which solved the recurring “what-music-do-we-play?” challenge.

“We shall play my music,” I declared in my Adam Declaring Voice, with maybe a little too much emphasis on me, me, me.

I had a birthday song: I chose the crackling, fireplace warmth of “We Have All the Time in the World.” Louis Armstrong was not correct on this matter. I have the calendar to prove it. But if you’re at the dinner table and everyone is laughing, you can close your eyes for a fraction of a second, and hear he was possibly on to something.

I baked my own cake and candied my own kumquats.

Before the sleeve rolling up, I laid the counter out like a chemistry lab, each ingredient in its own little white container. There were four Earl Grey tea bags simmered in milk. Whip cream peaks gently collapsing like snowy elf hats. But only until they had a sheen!. Crap! It turns out we already had vanilla extract. Wasted trip to the store. An overly cautious judgement call on flour past its expiration date. Too close to the recipe’s end, there was a near miss forgetting to fold the Earl Grey concoction into the egg whites. “How the fuck?”

Swearing.

Cake no worse for wear the table reported later.

Small pictures were placed around the table in cute little stands (see below.)

Friends were asked to guess where I was in each photo. Turns out: Bainbridge Island, the summit of Mt. Rainier waving a mountain ax, Cobble Hill, Brooklyn, the Luberon in the South of France (some disputing on this location), a headshot photographer’s studio in Soho. The mystery man leaning perhaps too confidently over a wooden fence holding a wedding top hat.

England.

There was marveling at hair loss. Someone asked Melanie if a picture of me at eighteen was me. The cognitive disconnect between interior and exterior age is a problem I’m increasingly working through. I stare at old photos of myself like I’m trying to unscrabble a Rubik’s cube.

I broke out my favorite story about my acting career.

Years after the collapse and the tail between my legs, I found an entire thread about myself online. It had the most adoring thing I’ve ever read about myself. This was followed a few comments later by a comment so rude about me it crossed into hilariously funny. Perfect for a dinner party when things are starting to loosen up.

No, I will never tell you.

There was a particularly special gift: Melanie framed three pictures of the family for my wall: one of my son leaning tight against my daughter-in-law, an engagement picture. Then Melanie in the center, in the snow, a a furry winter coat hat circling her face. Our gentle matriarch. Then daughter leaning left against dad, the two sitting on a Brooklyn sidewalk in yellow leaves. A real smile for the camera. The picture frames have heft that mean business. They will go over my piano. I will accidentally allow them to be seen on Zoom calls from time to time.

They are my people. They are beautiful. “Yes, I agree.”

At midnight, my friends counted down to my birthday like it was New Year’s.

This morning, the kitchen looks like a war zone. There are wine bottles in gift bags hiding around doors. I have confused whose gifts came from whom. A chin-scratcher of a problem.

Shit: the whip cream was left out. I had no idea we had so many plates. You can count them in dishwasher cycles. It seems someone gave me a supply of curious candy. However many years are left for me in Fate’s hourglass, I will never finish this supply. If I have grandchildren, I will need to remind myself to move them to an upper shelf when they race from room to room like little terrors, stopping only for candy.

This morning, I’m aware I can play the “it’s my birthday, I’m not helping clean up card,” but the devastation stretches across three rooms, and that dog won’t hunt.

Sixty wasn’t as cruel as forty, but kinder than Kamikaze Fifty.

There are adventures yet for the two of us that are coming into focus like Polaroids. One will be a trip to Japan with the family next April. A much, much, much longer time in France, a “foot to the earth” in Paris, if the stars align. It’s okay if they don’t. It’s all okay.

I bought myself a new electric guitar. Oh, the poor neighbors. The best toy I ever owned was a convertible. The second best might be this guitar.

My best friend called yesterday from Los Angeles.

After a five minute ritual of “what the fuck do you want?” whenever we pick up the phone for each other, the two of us talked for a good hour. I can’t remember a word of it, so it must have been a good call.

He never misses a birthday. Ever. Not one.

Alannah called a few minutes ago. I spoke quietly since Melanie was still sleeping. My son will call later today.

They are both doing well, out in the wide world, three thousand miles in either direction.

Alannah is, I learn, working on a Substack post. Every time she tells me she’s writing something, my heart skips a beat.

Daniel and I will go skydiving in Moab before I hit sixty-one. It’s on the calendar now. I think about this at 3am. I try to imagine smiling for a video photographer at terminal velocity.

But there’s no one I trust more in the world to jump with. Somehow that we’re both jumping together makes it easier. He’s my secret parachute. These moments as father and son are cement.

And so, sixty…

I have a small handful of sharp regrets, but I wouldn’t swap them out, even if I could. It might have changed everything after.

And I certainly wouldn’t want to do the first sixty over. Jesus. Once was more than enough. I love my wife. I love my friends.

And…

Here we go…

Parachute open, falling falling falling, taking in the view.

And All the Time in the World.

best words, best order is an occasional feature of 100 Stories, celebrating brief excerpts of exceptional writing read aloud by their authors. Subscribe at bottom to receive 100 Stories in your inbox.

The Nomination

“Jill” is the semi-anonymous writer—and illustrator—of Life Litter, a wide-ranging collection of essays on travel, people, marriage, nature, children, battles to save pubs, and what she might call “litter.” Hardly litter.

I discovered her work reading about her experience getting high in Williamsburg, an essay (travelogue?) that came with its own Venn diagram, not to mention a Substack Featured Publication medallion. After that, I was off and running.

She has a fierce intellect, suffers no fools, holds herself and others to high standards, and fights for what she believes in. She also happens to be very, very funny. Quite the mix.

Jill has a book on the way, and I suppose we’ll get her last name then, but if you can’t wait, consider these essays to tide you over. I’ve taken complete liberties with the essay titles: On Getting High, On Penis Terrariums, On Adultery, On Pubs and Enshitiffication, On Mortality.”

– Adam

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Ode to Oxford

A friend once teased me that wherever I lived I thought it the best place in the world.

We worked together and I often banged on at him about the amazing places I had lived in London. Wapping, with its potted histories of pirates, riverside hangings and sunken jetties. Rotherhithe’s foreshore, peppered with ancient beads, coins and clay pipes. West Norwood too, where I wanted to know everything about the hidden River Effra, the old Great North Woods and the brooding cemetery on my doorstep.

Writers mythologise our internal narratives: that’s what we do. We mythologise wherever we happen to be and whomever we happen to be there with.

I know I’ve done this everywhere. I also know I was wrong about everywhere but Oxford.

Marvellous as all those places were, nowhere tops Oxford.

It’s a funny thing: there’s a long tradition of having to pretend to be bored and unimpressed with the majesty of Oxford when you’re a student. Being awestruck is for the tourists, not for those who hurry unseeing to the library. We must keep shtum, not talk about how amazing it is to eat at high table or how endless are the corridors of journals in the Bodleian. For heaven’s sake, be cool. Take it in your stride.

Well, I’m not cool and never have been. I think Oxford is magic and I’m happy to share it. We’re not in the Middle Ages; I’m not some elite monk trying to keep literacy all to myself.

To Oxford: the city of books.

— Jill, Life Litter

Trigger Alert: this is travel porn on airline miles disguised as travel porn.

Melanie and I are in Tuscany. That’s Italy if you don’t get out much. Italia, of course, if you do.

If I look out from my Room with a View, I can see Melanie floating in an aquamarine pool. Your correspondent writes to you from an obscenely beautiful, recently renovated castle in Tuscany. Undoubtedly, the locals call it a castello, but we haven’t met any yet.

One of our two Da Vinci length dining room tables is situated outside. We have a flower bed where butterflies hover over the lavender like Snow White’s bluebirds. (I’ve tried to capture it in video, but it’s not the same as being here.) The ceilings are so high, Melanie called them “Sistine-like.” Not everything is perfetto: the pool-side grass is too green, and you can make out the outlines of freshly-laid sod.

Are you still here?

Then, I continue.

In the late afternoon we drove in from Rome. We had pizza off of the highway and a charming conversation with an Autogrill worker who described the pizza in almost impeccable English. We arrived during the magic hour light of sunset shaded only by the tall stands of cypress trees, just past the vineyard on the bordering hillside. Surely, Roman soldiers once encamped there.

Last night, at our dining room table, there was Under a Tuscan Sun laughter. We had fresh pasta. Bright red tomatoes were carved into thick slabs adorned with delicate leaves of basil descending as delicately as autumn leaves over the spaghetti. A new friend who reminded me of Stanley Tucci showed me how to twist the pasta as you settle it which is as aesthetically pleasing to watch as to eat. Bezosian.

In our ensuite bedroom, the underground spring water flows softly over the skin, but we brought something to remineralize it. There is a bidet available if, per caso, we want to take it for a spin.

This morning there is laughter coming from the kitchen. Someone doesn’t know exactly how to use the cute coffee maker. Even the discomforts are charming! You have no idea.

We feel a kinship to the group that has taken over Venice where the More or Less Richest Man in the World1 celebrates his Festa di matrimonio in Venice with a glorious thousand man choir of Gondolier Singers and the pigeons of the San Marco bleached to marble white. Ah, Le Nozze de Bezos!

This is not another basta post to the sfarzo and eccesso. (from left to right: “enough”, “extravagance,” and “excess.”) This is kinship writ small. Anyway, we were not invited to Venice, so we are the little people making do. Haha!

*

With a band of fellow New Yorkers who have all chipped in together for this palazzo, the cost of our home for the week is less per night than when we took the kids to Disney World, so put your pitchforks down. In fact, it was less per night than the Lightning Line cheat the crowds passes.

We are staying at the “Motel 6 of Tuscany.” This is the equivalent of a fraternity renting a Jersey Shore beach home. Broken out over several credit cards, the whole thing becomes deliciously affordable.

Because it turns out, there’s a secret:

It’s called “villa math.” All you need are twenty-seven friends. If you don’t count the people we don’t know, then it’s only five. It took us thirty years of marriage, but Melanie and I finally reached our fifth friend, and this long-awaited trip became possible. We hoarded them like frequent flyer miles to make this work. Punti fedeltà di American Airlines!

Also, there is an extra room we didn’t fill. If we had, it would have been cheaper than staying in Brooklyn.

With posts like this, you probably find it hard to believe it took us so long to make that many friends. And with posts like this, it is very likely we dip, once again, below the five-friend mark after this week together, but right now, bambini, we’re in heaven.

Cinema Paradiso I call it.

I have to run, we’re off to Siena for the James Bond horse race.

Afterwards, join us for virtual dinner on the terrace at 10pm your time.

Ciao. (That’s both hello and goodbye in Italiano it turns out.)

best words, best order is an occasional feature of 100 Stories, celebrating brief excerpts of exceptional writing read aloud by their authors. Subscribe at bottom to receive 100 Stories in your inbox.

The Nomination by Rebecca Hooper

“Susannah’s poems are like fires in the hearth; they leap and flicker and dance, wild and free and sensuous, yet in their hearts they are quiet and still – soft embers holding light within them, gifting their wisdom to the world with a hushed whisper. For me, the dance of the fire comes with the first read; the quieter gift comes with the next (and the next, and the next – I find myself reading and reading Susannah’s poetry and each time, there is something new). The Violet Tiger was one of the first Substacks I read when I joined this platform, and I was instantly besotted. It’s not an exaggeration to say that Susannah’s visceral, embodied, brave and vulnerable work has quickly made her one of my favourite poets. I chose Plum Moon Sighs to nominate for Best Words, Best Order because it is the very first of Susannah’s poems that I read, and it was the perfect introduction to her work.”

– Rebecca Hooper

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Plum Moon Sighs

The tongues of mad iris 
lick me, slowly soften the day’s lacquer. 
I bed her immaculate purples. 

Why a woman buddha? 
Her body half flowers, 
sacrum, illium, and folded legs 
are like fields that have been left alone, 
gone to seed, like words in the dark.

Indian summer takes me like this.
Under the Red Oak, acorns 
are umbilical. 
I lie with the spiked leaves,
turning brown. 

If I wake deformed, I would not be surprised.

I bleed like the sun, haemorrhage light.
The moon presses her bare teeth
into my burnt shoulder,
falls into me.

An unexpected flick of new life, 
its tadpole-tail in my belly.
I conjure myself with this body-made-vial.

From liquorice and star-filled obscurity
I birth myself anemone. 
Leave the mist as afterbirth
Lie fresh in the sparkling dew.

— Susannah Violette, The Violet Tiger

The Violet Tiger

poetry and art

By Susannah Violette

best words, best order is an occasional feature of 100 Stories, celebrating brief excerpts of exceptional writing read aloud by their authors. Subscribe at bottom to receive 100 Stories in your inbox.

The Nomination by Julie Gabrielli

“I’d been an avid reader of Ben’s essays before participating in his first community writing project, “Same Walk, Different Shoes,” in December 2023. I was so taken with the quality of writers that the project attracted—and more importantly, the depth of care and encouragement of one another—that I circled back to catch up with his fiction. His serial novel “Harmony House” was underway, so I binged all available chapters, then eagerly awaited each weekly installment.

The story of six strangers crammed into an uber-sustainable tiny house on an isolated field deep in the Smokies weaves together many themes of interest to me. But it was the well-drawn characters and Ben’s trademark empathy for each, no matter how flawed, that held me. Yes, his descriptions and place-setting are superb, but the real genius is how, even a year later, I can still conjure up in memory those characters and their dilemmas and emotions. And talk about a twist! Hooboy, that story needs to be streaming on Hulu, now. I volunteer to design the house (although Ben made all the right choices himself, yet another dimension of his many talents).

Ben’s care and respect for the hopes and suffering of his characters shines through every detail and gesture in his latest novel, “Departures.” The premise of this one is powerful: what if you knew upon meeting someone, the exact date of their death? This is the shadow hanging over the life of one Wild Thorne, and it makes for all manner of difficult situations for him—and the people in his orbit.”

– Julie Gabrielli

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an excerpt from “departures”

“Her lips bent into a deep frown, and she nodded slowly. She reached up and touched his cheek with the palm of her hand. It was a tender gesture and Wild felt shame for enjoying the comfort of it. She kept it there.

“You see things, don’t you?” she asked, not allowing him to break eye contact. “You knew something was going to happen to my Marvin.”

Wild was too stunned to answer, much less come up with some believable denial. She squinted as if trying to look into him. Finally, she took her hand away and let out a sound that was something between a laugh and a sigh.

“Listen to me, talking nonsense. Now I sound like my grannie. Whatever it is you are, I’m grateful to you, Wild. If there’s ever anything I can do to repay your kindness…”

Wild’s face must have done something he couldn’t control, made some desperate plea like a kidnapped victim scribbling a message on a fogged car windshield. He opened his mouth to speak but stopped.”

— Ben Wakeman, Departures

Catch & Release

A free-ranging collection of creative work in the form of speculative short fiction and novels, songs, essays, and multimedia made with the intention of connecting and inspiring.

By Ben Wakeman

Sweet Home Alabama

Sweet Home Alabama transformed that wedding hall into shot glass whiskey on long wooden bars, black plastic ashtrays, thick paper coasters with uncomfortable flags for the Confederacy, forgotten Dixie cups of Budweiser on amps, scuffed cowboy boots, and rattlesnake neckties. There were girls with red polka dot shirts tied off on their chests like the Dukes of Hazzard, and guys holding pool sticks straight up and down like pitchforks. There were backlit plastic waterfalls circulating in Rolling Rock signs, sticky red barstools, lip dangling cigarettes, amp burning cigarettes, cigarettes tucked into guitar strings near the tuning knobs. There were juke boxes you could kick to get free songs and pinky-finger guitar slides made from the necks of broken beer bottles.

Pandemic

I'm thinking of the lost early days here in New York City, long before the promise of vaccines, before that first season of sidewalk shelters and December heat lamps, before the white collar exodus from the city, and plummeting rents in Manhattan, before the NFL stadium seat cutouts, and the motorcycle rally in the Dakotas, and the doctors in front of Walter Reed, and the feverish President on the balcony. Before the pointless inertia of hand sanitizing and fruitless contact tracing, before the lumbering, bureaucratic WHO, the slumbering CDC, before the parade of forgotten Greek letters, the second-guessing, the bad blood, the knee-jerk acrimony. Before the long-COVID victims began to suffer their bad luck out-of-sight, each with a personal flavor of misery, depriving them of even the camaraderie of shared symptoms.

Last Things

My father’s bedside table was cluttered with plastic syringes and saline bottles. There was a medical device with a respiratory ping pong ball that hurt him to blow into, but whose toy-like quality, even in his cancer-ridden pain, amused him. There was Vaseline for his dry lips and crumpled tissues and modest turrets of pocket change that my father stacked by denomination. There was his bulky yellow Casio diver’s watch. There were old National Reviews. There was a plaster cast of his hand entwined with my brother’s that his sister had molded during her farewell visit. There were piles of cards from grieving friends trying to get something down before goodbye. There were New York Times book review sections haphazardly folded. Pairs of glasses. His things. Real things.

Mannish Boy

“The Sound” and the stop-time riff that follows have within them the complete DNA of rock and roll. The universe in a single measure. And every time I play it the same great doors of the same locomotive roundhouse rotate and open. There’s the same ground-trembling quake from the bass drum, the same fist-sized stones jumping up and down on the train tracks, the same bull hoofs crashing on the stable floor, the same horizon clouds crackling with heat lightning, the same roosters skidding across the roofs of tin shacks, the same moss-gurgling pools of testosterone bubbling up in the bayou, the same thrashing moonshine alligators, the same women stumbling through the burning corn, tearing their cotton dresses and chasing Waters’ unstoppable, slow-moving, black locomotive.

best words, best order celebrates brief excerpts of exceptional writing read aloud by their authors. Subscribe at bottom to receive best words, best order in your inbox.

The Nomination

“An abiding reverence for nature and a commitment to the wild comes through in everything Julie Gabrielli writes. So, too, in her dreamy, often ethereal watercolors—landscapes and animals and brushstrokes that love light and invite you in. I picked this passage from so many wonderful choices because, when I think of Julie, I think of the great blue heron and her deep fierce affinity for this bird and because it’s from one of my favorite of her stories, and because, not only does she paint the human characters and the scenes in the story perfectly, she also embodies the bird. That she opens with this embodiment captures the wonderful experimental aspect of her work. I gasped, yes, when I first read the heron passages and then again when I listened to the recording. Don’t miss all Julie has to offer—the stories, the responses to Walden, the intricate explorations of the Prayer of St. Francis, the Nature Stack compilations, and more.”

– Holly Starley

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an excerpt from “shapeshifting”

“Rowing training had begun with a video. “Your boat is your life raft. Never leave it. Worst case, haul up on the overturned hull and paddle to shore.” A guy rolled sideways in an indoor pool and turtled, popped to the surface, positioned the sculls, righted the boat, climbed in. “Free your feet first,” the voiceover said. Right then, Hank had vowed never to capsize.

Stronglegs stalk, stalk, stalk

Longneck turns waits watches

Wrigglemeals dart silver

Neckthrust beakplunge

Behind the island, he tries breathing in to a four-count and holding it before a slow exhale. But the aquatic reek nauseates him. He coughs out the breath. Too jacked from the exertion, his body greedy for oxygen.

In the pool for capsize training, the geometry of blue lane lines and clean grid of white tiles had done nothing to tame Hank’s dread. A girl in their group had executed the drill perfectly. Then an old guy. Then it was Hank’s turn.

There’s movement on the shore ten yards away. A great blue heron perches on a submerged branch, wriggling fish clamped in a razor beak. With a head-toss, the fish disappears down its long gullet.

The teardrop body floats above the log. Legs, spindly as an old woman’s finger, blend with shadows on the shore beyond. Front-on, the bird is barely there. A vertical sliver cut from water, shoreline, trees.

His mother had loved herons. Or was it pelicans?

The heron turns, shapeshifts into a pewter soup ladle. Steps into shallow water with the solitary coiled energy of an edge-dweller. Mesmerized, Hank’s pinned feet feel each step. His head swivels like the bird’s.

Its neck reaches snake-like from hunched shoulders, then retracts. Hank’s chin pushes forward and tucks. He swallows. The bird singles him out for a piercing stare. Its black eye rimmed with gold has him pinned.

Brotherbody boatbalances

Fearbreath heartskips

Eyepair watches

Heartmind thumps here

Hank can’t look away. He falls awestruck into the bird’s fierce strangeness, its pure wild belonging. His chest aches with a homesickness he doesn’t recognize.

He wrenches from its gaze to bend and stretch for his phone in the small drybag beyond his toes, one hand on the oars for balance. He manages a few shots and the start of a video when the heron croaks and leaps into the air.

Squawkhonk launch

Wingspread rows and rises

Six-foot wings deploy like the time-lapse of a blooming lily, tight bud to extravagance in an instant. The breeze-sound of flight disarrays Hank’s chest, pulls his gaze aloft, phone forgotten, until his mind floods with her trailing wing feathers, the delicate scribble of feet extending from her torpedo body, the neck tucked in a tight S, the beak slicing the air.

Necktuck legstretch

Bodybeing streaks and glides

An oar pokes Hank in the ribs. He recoils, off-balance, overcorrects and topples in slow, unsalvageable motion.”

— Julie Gabrielli, Shapeshifting

Homecoming

📖 Shapeshifting

Hello from very rainy Maryland. As I wrote that, our resident heron landed on our dock, stretched very tall, and stalked to the other edge before leaping and gliding to our neighbor’s dock. I could watch this bird all day. Seriously. I’ll go ahead and take it as a blessing to share this story that’s been in the works for five years. Hope you enjoy it…

Read more

2 years ago · 40 likes · 51 comments · Julie Gabrielli

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I loved America because three ships risked the cliff edge of the world to find her, and only two made it home.

I loved America for the Mayflower and New World pumpkins, for her rough, patchwork corn and tobacco shared in thin, clay pipes — for schoolbook Indians standing quietly beside long Thanksgiving tables.

For the bundled papoose on her mother’s back and the paddling of midnight canoes and the carving of totem poles in mossy Northwest forests. For the roadside names of a thousand orphaned towns and Connecticut rivers and Dakota states, signs that paid respect to their forgotten stewards as silently as Quakers.

For the sounds of “Apache” and “Sioux,” and “Cherokee” and “Iroquois.” Names that could be felt but not explained.

For an Indian chief who stood by a city highway weeping.

A million buffalo.

*

I loved America for Jack London’s dogs, Steinbeck’s Red Pony, Hemingway’s whiskey, Mark Twain in a seersucker, lost poems tucked in Emily Dickinson’s desk.

They were ours, all of them.

Robert Frost in the snow.

Ours.

*

I loved America for her piano student ragtime, flapper-girl Jazz, Muddy Waters and the Chicago Blues, for Aretha and Stevie, Waylon & Willie, for Me and Bobby McGee. Sweet Caroline in the seventh inning stretch.

Because Bob Dylan.

Because Oklahoma was spelled out on high school stages from Maine to Hawaii. Because Rhapsody in Blue’s lush melody was the nation dreaming of itself. Because Louis Armstrong’s Wonderful World became an American prayer.

And when Ray Charles sang America the Beautiful, he made it our national hymn. He sang it for all of us—for each of us—his head rocking in whatever holy place that song carried him, to a land of hope. Black and White, and red, white and blue hope.

When he sang of peace, we felt America in our bones.

I felt her in my bones.

*

I loved America because Gregory Peck in To Kill a Mockingbird, because the Hollywood sign, and the trumpet fanfare and searchlights spinning from a 20th Century Fox light tower. Because Gilligan and Mary Ann, James Dean and leather jackets.

Marilyn Monroe with the wind in her dress.

Coca-Cola.

Play-by-play radio baseball announcers who were models for American men and knew how to lose.

And America’s stammering Everyman Christmas Eve in Bedford Falls then hoarse at a Senate podium. The 1940’s movie stars who visited our gaunt troops, boys who chain-smoked and dreamed of home and felt the aching bliss of bare leg for a few hours.

And painted Vargas girls with see-through dresses on Air Force fuselages — and you know the boys could do that, they should do that, because they were fighting for all of us, and they might never come home.

And Playboy cowgirls in three-story haylofts, bursting out of their staples. Goddamnit, they were glorious, and they were ours. Every last month of them.

And the Redfords and the Newmans.

There were no men more handsome or women more beautiful than in America.

*

Because redwood forests and Gulf Stream waters and waking up in a tent on the valley floor of Yosemite and seeing Half Dome for the first time.

Because the steamboat Mississippi traveled high to low, and if you drove U.S. 1 all the way down to Key West her bridges stretched out like skipping stones.

I loved how Vermont leaves turned red and gold on kitchen calendars back-to-back with wintry covered bridges and Arizona cactus, or posters of Route 66 in black and white with deserted gas stations and glass bulb pumps.

An American child held a puzzle piece of Texas or Florida one time and remembered it forever.

Nothing would ever sound more American than “Colorado.”

*

Wyoming cowboys lit Marlboros by sunset cattle and Pennsylvania Dutch rolled up their sleeves and taught their sons to raise barns. Oregon hobos watched the sun come up from boxcars.

They were poor—poor but free, but more than free—free in the Land of the Free.

We had garages in Silicon Valley. We had all the best doctors and all the best hospitals. We cured polio. We invented the lightbulb. We planted our flag on the moon.

(Perhaps it is there still.)

*

When Americans paraded into the Opening Ceremonies, we were the greatest nation on Earth — because our boys and girls were all nations with their youth and innocence and easy, wide smiles.

Then we proved it in the rink and on the slopes and the mats and the parallel bars.

We proved it with our skin, and our eyes, and our hair, with our heads low and our fists high.

*

We spoke truth to power: high-ho, high-ho!

And what did we want and when did we want it?

We wanted it now and now and now.

In America, the church and state had respect for aisles and pews.

You could speak your mind.

You were innocent until proven guilty. It took twelve men and women from your peers to send you to prison.

They appointed you a lawyer if you couldn’t afford one. They read you your rights, and the police couldn’t make you talk even if they tried to trick you.

Quiet librarians defended our books like she-wolves.

Fourth graders knew we didn’t torture.

A single man with the courage to ask, “have you no decency?” could make it all stop just like that.

*

We had Rosa Parks. Then, praise God, we had a preacher with a dream. And more than a dream—more than Malcolm, more than Martin—we had a little girl who walked alone into an elementary school, where the windows were papered over so they wouldn’t shoot her.

She was a blessing we hadn’t earned, and we didn’t deserve her, but she was ours, too.

*

We lived in a land where every vote was counted, and all men were created equal.

Because if you were born here, then goddamnit, you were an American, the same as everyone else, no more and no less, even if you traced your people back to the Mayflower. There were things that couldn’t be taken away from you here, and the whole world, like us or not, knew it.

I loved America for her “I Voted” stickers that reminded us to vote and the no-nonsense, ancient Black women who volunteered to run elections in the Bronx. They checked off names like accountants, scolded voters into their booths, and kept the nation’s blood pumping.

I loved our citizenship ceremonies in the flickering fluorescent light of county courthouses, where judges handed out pocket Constitutions and gave the children tiny American flags.

*

We had the White House and the Capitol and the Washington Monument towering over her own reflection. We had America’s temple, where the hands of the greatest American president steadied the nation from his marble chair. The miracle of his words rose so high beside him, we had to crane our necks to read them. We held our children’s hands there.

Our Justices were just, and they knew how to lose.

Because right was might, and we had Susan B. Anthony and Obergefell v. Hodges to prove it.

I loved America because the Founders negotiated an imperfect dream in the heat and sweat and stubborn frustration of a Philadelphia hall. Jefferson and Hamilton agreed on nothing but a shared dream of thirteen stars, then Betsy Ross rocked in her chair and stitched a flag full of them.

I loved America because her ashen firemen wandered in a daze through the ruins of the Twin Towers searching for the hopeless dead.

Because a single Capitol policeman led a raging mob down the wrong corridor and saved our nation from frothing tyranny.

*

I loved America because the huddled masses came here from everywhere, sailing into her harbors on black smokestacked steamships.

Their tired and poor crowded onto the bows, saw America’s lamp and wept. They’d come home.

And Germany’s Einstein was America’s, because it was safe for a genius to do great work here in peace. He was our genius, and we were proud of him, every Jew and every Gentile.

In that America, Mexican workers gutted it out in golden valleys, working hours no natural born citizen would work, picking what I would never pick.

Then they huddled together in Home Depot parking lots, laughing into the foggy morning air.

In that America, Korean bodega owners closed up shop the day their children graduated from expensive colleges, and Dominicans and Puerto Ricans prepped onions and potatoes in restaurant basements and pushed racks through steaming dishwashers listening to Spanish radio stations. They worked two jobs to send a few bucks home.

They got on with it.

With dignity.

And the Kikes and the Wops and the Polaks and the Micks and the Chinks and the Spics — and the one word in English we put on an altar and sacrificed from shame — we got to know all of them, our Koufaxes and DiMaggios and Aarons and Clementes, and we cheered for them as they rounded the bases of our baseball stadiums.

We all did.

I did.

I loved America.

*

Oh, America! Sweet America! Sweet land of liberty! Your endless skyways, your ribboned highways! Your wheat fields waving, your dust clouds rolling! Purple mountain majesties! Fruited plains!

It’s a special treat to post the spoken word of kimberly warner this week. Shortly after she recorded this excerpt, Kimberly made a surprise announcement that her upcoming memoir will be published by Empress Editions (from which this excerpt is taken.)

If you enjoy her words, and you will, take a moment to pre-order her memoir:

unfixed: a memoir of family, mystery, and the currents that carry you home)

🤫 And, pssst: take a sneak peek at the book jacket below ⬇️ with a blurb from Alisa Kennedy Jones.

The Nomination

“She works hard to set the stage and then she quietly slips behind the curtain and takes a seat next to the rest of us. Kimberly also wrote her memoir. Riveting, heart wrenching and warming. She lays bare her soul, raw. For all of us to feel. A true story of cinematic capability. I do not need to spend time searching her memoir for the excerpt I will highlight. Though I read this last year, I will never forget the number 43. Often, we read, or have left a comment for an author’s wonderful writing ; “ I felt like I was there with you”. This excerpt goes well beyond any reasonable depth of that meaning. We, the reader, on our knees, with a hand over our mouth.”

– Lor

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an excerpt from “4/3 on Highway 43 @ 5:43”

“There was an anesthesiologist from Appleton Medical Center driving behind dad. He recognized dad’s car and vanity plate. He said moments before the collision, dad reached his hand through the sun roof and waved to the rising sun. Was he waving hello?

Or was he waving goodbye?

Does his spirit exit stubbornly

clinging to ribcage and bone

or was he squeezed out like toothpaste

from a phantom umbilicus?

Maybe some rise easily, like the yeasty force of leavened bread,

warmed to meet a new infinite ceiling.

Maybe others catch on spinning fans and ride out eternity

on a dizzy blade.

Or is it simpler than all of this — 

after car crushes

heart ceases,

breath escapes,

we mistake a vacant body and

it’s yawning void

for a soul.

We name it, we animate it, we call for it

but it’s only

so our own void has a place to go.

The strange and complicated relationship mom and dad shared is irreparably broken when he doesn’t return from a hospital staff party. He and his surgical partners had dressed as famous musicians and sang farewell tunes to a retiring nurse. Luis Suarez was Julio Eglesias. Trevor Rattray was Harry Belafonte. Dad, already halfway there with his pony tail dressed up as Willie Nelson. Twelve hours earlier he had bypassed a cheese-encrusted artery and saved a life. Twelve hours later he drove head on into a truck.

He dies on Highway 43, right before the two-lane road splits into four. The insignificant little town of Fredonia cradles his crushed ribs that morning as his spirit unfurls its tireless wings. Or maybe they were tired. I don’t know. Highway 43. At 5:43. On April 3. 4/3. He was also born in 1943. This number will haunt, comfort and deceive me for the rest of my life.”

— Kimberly Warner, 4/3 on Highway 43 @ 5:43

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Subscribe to receive best words, best order, a bi-weekly feature of Adam Nathan’s 100 Stories, then visit our submission page to share exceptional writing from the Substack authors you love.

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best words, best order celebrates brief excerpts of exceptional writing read aloud by their authors. Subscribe at bottom to receive best words, best order in your inbox.

The Nomination by Jill

“Kate is what to read when you don't know what you need. When you're flinching and the world's on fire. She's brought the warm breeze, the Jameson—and the smoke? It's already curling. This poem is on fire. Kate’s writing will always send you somewhere else. Might be to an all-girls construction crew in Provincetown in 1987. This time, it’s to a fire escape, floating above a troubled world. Sit there with her for a moment, to escape the fire, and let this poem grab you by the ears, lift you swinging ten stories up, and hand you the bottle. It's a corker. Enjoy.’’

– Jill, Life Litter

“Prescription” by Kate Mapother

I need something. Something strong. 
A diagnosis that doesn’t involve self-care or cutting sugar or gluten. 

I need a professional. Someone with some gravitas to say:
You know what you need, Kate— you need a fire escape on the 10th floor. 

A perfect breeze and a bottle of amber liquor between your legs. 
I’ll write you a script for something that burns going down. 

Something that throws you like a lead anchor into that lovely dappled 
place where you sink to the bottom of it all but feel like 

you’re in a penthouse at the top of the world. 
The instructions are to sit there quietly. High above the traffic. 

Tune into the TAP TAP of a pack of Marlboro Red’s against your thigh 
like a cigarette fidget spinner. Lose yourself in the click and snap 

of the heavy Zippo lid warming in your hand. 
Click-snap. Open-shut. Like your heart lately. 

Then, open. 
Thumb the flint wheel and light it up, love. 

It’s okay. None of it will kill you. Not tonight. 
Not the alcohol or the nicotine or even the fall from grace. 

Just, let it go. It’ll get you out of your head so you can sleep. 
Tonight, it’s all about magic.  


In the morning, I promise, the wars will be over and the peaceniks 
will have moved in next door. Overnight, your friend will no longer 

say ‘survivor’ when they ask her who she is. 
She’ll be a king, an angel, a merriment. 

She’ll change her name and live on Easy Street. 
She’ll always leave a light on for you. 

Her eyes will be so bright, you’ll stop worshiping the moon. 
You’ll fall hopeful at each other’s feet

in love with how easy it is to be happy. 
Free. And filthy fuckin rich.  

You’ll ceasefire and heal. You’ll be healed and you’ll matriarch. 
You’ll be queerer than you were before your diagnosis. How glorious.

When you wake in the morning— clear-headed, sure-footed, feeling like 
it's all too good to be true but my-god-it’s-so-fucking-true— 

The One’s dress will be on the floor at the foot of your bed. 
The room will smell like mingled skin. 

You will roll to her side and whisper good morning into spaces that 
were once so silent in you, they stung. 

There will be rainbow glitter on your best wool sweater, and you 
will never have been happier about anything.  


You’ve been wound too tight, babe. Been too goddam precise. 
Trying too fucking hard. 

Try less. Try less than less. Try not at all. 
Go ahead it’s alright. 

Tear yourself apart a little. Push your fingers into the cracks. 
Rip at the seams. 

Inhale that good smoke through your mouth. 
Exhale through the nose. 

Watch the smoke float on the surface of that medicine. 
Then drink up— it’ll do you good. 

You’ll see. 
Tomorrow’s a new day.

— Kate Mapother, Life at the Bottom of the Canyon

Life at the Bottom of the Canyon

Thoughts, free-writes, a poem or two, an essay here and there, upcoming book chapter previews. Live, from my little adobe at the bottom of the canyon.

By Kate Mapother

Life Litter

No brand, no message. What’s left

By Jill

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A selection from Philadelphia Freedom, a story from the 100 Stories collection.

“I know she thought he’d call her back, but he didn’t, and I told her he wouldn’t if she was always such a bitch, and she called me a bitch back and smacked me. I heard her crying in her room, and I made sure she heard me, too, so she wasn’t the only one. I thought she might knock later, but she didn’t. It was a really bad night.

That night definitely stuff happened. I remember crying so hard I threw up.”

best words, best order celebrates brief excerpts of exceptional writing read aloud by their authors. Subscribe at bottom to receive best words, best order in your inbox.

The Nomination by Anna Schott

“Deirdre’s writing has it all: it’s got the rhythm and the melody and the pathos and the fun — doesn’t matter what it’s about, could just be a quiet encounter with one neighbor while she’s out looking for another neighbor’s cat. The writing is incredibly observant; of people, of feelings, of place. Something about the cadence just pulls me along and at the end of every piece I think the same thing: “damn, that was good.”

– Anna Schott, She’s Gone Chilaquiles

waving not drowning – an excerpt

“I walked past an old dusty Plymouth with a shattered windshield and when I looked up I was startled by a man with tubes up his nose wheeling a tank of oxygen behind him. He might have been more frightening if he hadn’t looked so frail and old. But still. He wasn’t that frail and old. And he was not the least bit concerned or surprised to see someone on his property.

“Hello,” he said.

I explained that I was looking for my neighbor’s cat and I thought he might have run into his yard.

“Oh,” he said, “a cat will never make it out here.”

“Oh!” I said.

“The coyotes will tear him apart.”

“I mean—"

“You won’t see any cats around here. No.”

He was silent for a spell. He was a sweet guy, despite the brutal honesty.

“Well,” I said, “he’s very smart, he used to live on the streets.”

“Nope, not here, he’ll never make it”.

I let out a laugh, what else could I do? “I don’t like to think that way,” I said.

“Good for you,” he said. He was touching his nostrils where the hose was blowing oxygen into his nose. “It’s very strange getting old,” he said. “Nothing lives forever.”

I wasn’t sure where he was going with this line of thinking.

“Me, I’m on my way out,” he said.

“Do you mean to the--”

“Three months.”

“Ah,” I crossed my arms, “Is your family staying with--”

“Let me tell you something,” his voice trailed off for a second and it seemed like he was going to get sad. He cleared his throat, “Let me tell you the three things I’ve learned so far.”

“Okay,” I said. I noticed his hand shaking by his side. I thought I saw Percy’s tail under a hedge and I pointed and then walked towards it. The man turned to follow me.

“Whenever you’re stuck at an impasse, when you’re fighting with someone or you’re not getting along, try saying, Thank you, or I’m sorry.”

“Okay,” I said. It wasn’t the cat. I turned back towards him.

“It’ll get you out of any bind. Trust me.”

“Okay,” I said again.

“The second is: be with people who light up when they see you.”

Something about the way he said it made me smile, “I like that one.”

He closed his eyes for a second like he was searching for the right words, and then he said, “Be with people who turn your lights on.” He paused and whispered the word yeah and it sounded like eeeyah.

“Always,” I said. We walked a little further on the path. I was going his pace now.

“And the last is,” he waited for me to stand and look at him, “The last one is, listen to what a person does, not to what he says.”

“Listen to what he does,” I repeated, “I like the way you put that.”

“I think that’s right. It’s Iyanla Van Sant. Do you watch her?”

“I don’t.”

“She’s sensational.”

Across the yard a middle-aged woman walked out of the house in her bathing-suit. I watched her walk down another path and straight to a huge swimming pool. I looked back at the man.

“You should check her out,” he said. “She’s on you-tube.”

Full essay here

Snaps

sketches, flash fiction, musings and observations

By Deirdre Lewis

She's Gone Chilaquiles

Chips and salsa, essays, memoir, food analogies

By Anna Schott

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A selection from The Gondolier, a story from the 100 Stories collection.

“But nobody was coming for Mikhail. He wouldn’t have allowed it. Houston wouldn’t have allowed it. There was no Hail Mary plan.

'“This is it,” an ancient inner voice observed indifferently.

There were no more tasks, no more missions, no more men, nothing to focus on but the hopelessness of his situation and the black expanse that awaited him.”

best words, best order celebrates brief excerpts of exceptional writing read aloud by their authors. To nominate exceptional writing from the authors you admire on Substack, visit our information page here.

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The Nomination

“The only thing more mysterious than the dark pull of drug and alcohol addiction is finding your way out of it. It's a war, and never has the war been written about with the clarity, tenderness, soul, and no bullshit reality that it is in the Substack "Notes From Treatment." The writer may be "Anonymous" by name, but their humanity, heart, wisdom (the wisdom of no wisdom), and most of all their experience is radically personal. "Anonymous" never draws attention to themself, yet they are present everywhere. These are not stories, these are downloads from the source. It's the best writing on addiction and recovery I've read, and I've read a lot.

For "best words, best order" I've chosen the piece "A Phone Call," but I could have chosen any of them.”

– Tommy Swerdlow, Feel the Rhythm

“a phone call” – an excerpt

“The other day I let a patient make a phone call to his wife on speaker phone
This patient is a large ugly proud partially deaf man who talks in a low dumb voice
His wife answered and they both began crying
She said how much she missed him
She said how hard it was for her to be without him
He remained silent and cried

She kept asking,
Can you hear me?
Can you hear me?
He would gather all his strength and in a low dumb voice say,
Yes I can

She told him about the factory where they both worked
And how they were both getting two dollar raises at the end of the year
She told him how hopeful she was about their future
She told him how well she had cleaned her station the other day and how no one had noticed and how she knew if he was there that he would have noticed
and he would have appreciated it

He cried
She said
Can you hear me?

He eventually stopped crying and told her he might have to stay an extra thirty days
She told him that was alright and how she can’t imagine being away from him for another thirty days but that everything was going to be okay
Because they loved each other
And they were getting raises
And they were going to make it

She told him she drives around at night because she doesn’t know what to do without him
She doesn’t want to be in their apartment alone
So she just drives and drives
Sometimes she goes through the drive through at McDonald’s but can’t eat the food she buys and just drinks the soda

she asks,
Can you hear me?

He tells her he’s sorry and when he gets home he’ll never leave her side again
He promises
She tells him not to apologize
Just get better
They’re both crying again
She says
I love you so much

He eventually gathers all his strength
And in a low dumb voice says
I love you so much too

The man hangs up, thanks me, and leaves the office

After a moment I run to the door
He’s halfway down the hall
No, I call after him…
Thank you!
Thank you for letting me hear that!
She’s amazing!
And you’re amazing!
What you have is amazing!
I feel so bad for you you guys!
And I’m so jealous of you guys!
I’m so sad!
And I’m so happy!
To be alive!
In a world full of pain and love!
So much pain!
And so much love!

He just keeps walking
I shout after him…

Can you hear me?

Can you hear me?.”

Full essay here.

Notes from Treatment

For the past 8 years I’ve managed a drug and alcohol treatment center. Names and locations have been changed…

By Anonymous

Feel The Rhythm

"The Rhythm" is a piggy bank to hold my pennies. The phrase comes from Cool Runnings a movie I wrote thirty years ago.

By Tommy Swerdlow

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