Fears, Explained

Fears, Explained by Kayla Jessop After A. Papatya Bucak’s “I Cannot Explain My Fear”   I have a fear of spiders, snakes, and bees. At my favorite brunch spot downtown, a bee kept flying around my head even after I wished it away. It landed in my mimosa moments later and drowned in the sweet nectar of orange juice and champagne. The waitress brought me another. I have a fear of red ant piles. Once, my grandfather accidentally stepped in one while mowing his yard. When the little bites didn’t heal on their own after weeks, he went to the doctor, and they found cancer in his bloodstream. I’m afraid of swimming in the pool alone, swimming in the ocean without people close by, and floating on an inflatable in the river. I saw a movie as a kid where an alligator came up from under the water with its mouth wide open and swallowed the relaxing woman in one go. Their death roll scares me, too.    I have a fear of thunderstorms. The thunder causing the house to shake makes me think of a picture falling off the wall and giving me brain damage. Motorcycles and scooters scare me. Two tires don’t create enough balance to protect my lack of it. I’m scared of restroom door handles, gas pumps, and restaurant silverware. I have a fear of Russia. I didn’t sleep for two days when there was talk of going to war with them. I live in a major city– we would be an easy target. Asteroids, meteors, and falling satellites make me scared. I have a fear of dragonflies after they were used as a way for the dead wife to communicate with Kevin Costner in the movie Dragonfly. Ghosts, ouija boards, and the dark scare me, too. When I visit my mother’s grave, I’m afraid each step I take near a headstone to get to hers is going to make a ghost angry and follow me home to punish me. I’m more afraid my mother’s ghost won’t visit me.    I have a fear of scales, carbs, and calorie trackers. Shopping for jeans and little black dresses gives me goosebumps. I’m afraid of fireworks because of a Fourth of July celebration that ended with everyone fleeing from the outdoor venue because of a possible active shooter. I’m afraid of ditches because it was hard for me to climb out of the one we hid in once the police arrived to secure the area. I’m scared of Easy-Bake Ovens because I don’t know how they work. I cannot explain my fear of scarecrows. I’m scared of AIs, my Amazon Alexa, and the camera on my laptop because they’re probably spying on me. I’m worried I made my sister afraid of deer because I make her look out for them when I drive in the dark, terrified of hitting one. When I was a kid, I was afraid of dogs because they were loud and liked to jump. My family still makes fun of how I used to be now that we have a dog.    I have a fear that the gum I swallowed when I was seven is still in my stomach. I’m even more scared of the idea that my stomach won’t hold life in it after being on birth control for ten years. Relationships and love scare me. I’m afraid of marriage because my mother was miserable during hers. I’m more afraid of divorce because she was too heartbroken after her marriage to love again. Airplanes, cars, and buses scare me, too. I’m afraid of the words “no” and “yes” but prefer to say “yes.” I’m afraid of Costa Rica because my boyfriend wants to propose to me there. Sharks, iguanas, and rogue monkeys live there, too. Nonfiction Home Art by Keegan Baatz

Something So Simple

Something So Simple by Wendy Fontaine When the Head Start teacher reported my daughter’s trouble with routine eye exams, I shook my head. My child, age three, could see just fine. Not only was she already reading, she could tell me the color of Mrs. Leclerc’s flowers hanging on the porch across the street. She could say the color of the car parked two houses down in Mr. Romano’s driveway. Little did I know, Angie couldn’t see those things at all. She’d simply memorized her surroundings during our afternoon walks around the neighborhood. At the teacher’s suggestion, I made an appointment with a pediatric optometrist who later diagnosed Angie with astigmatism and amblyopia. Her vision, he said, was 20/200, meaning she needed 20 yards to see what others could see at 200. Meaning she was legally blind. Her first pair of eyeglasses came from Sears. Purple, inscribed with the name Hannah Montana – her favorite TV character at the time. No bigger than a deck of playing cards, they cost two hundred dollars, none of it covered by medical insurance. I put the total on my credit card. I was a single mother at the time, and the amount was exactly one week’s pay from my part-time job as a secretary. When we got home from the store, Angie sat cross-legged on the living room floor, took off her new glasses, and broke them in half. She’d heard the sales lady at Sears say that when little kids don’t like their glasses, they break them. We went back to the store the next day and bought them again. Later on, when Angie learned how to swim, things got much more complicated. ** Swim goggles were invented in 14th century Persia, where divers used tortoise shells polished to near transparency to go searching for pearls. By the 18th century, they’d devised wooden goggles with deeper frames that trapped a layer of air to improve visibility underwater. However, those goggles only worked when the divers looked straight down. As soon as they turned their heads, the air escaped, filling their goggles with water and rendering them useless. They had no choice but to squeeze their eyes tight and float back to the surface. ** Seven years after the Hannah Montana glasses, Angie got her first pair of prescription swim goggles. Up until that point, she’d been taking lessons and getting by with the one-size-fits-all goggles sold in the lobby at the pool. But when she made the junior competition team, she needed something stronger to see better underwater. Contacts were not an option since the lenses can absorb pool water and trap bacteria against a swimmer’s eyes. One day after school, I drove to an optical shop downtown, where Angie picked from the owner’s catalogue. Tony sold a thousand kinds of glasses but only one kind of swim goggle. The singular choice came in the color of the frame: blue or green. Angie asked for blue. Because her prescription was severe, her goggles needed to be custom-made. Give ‘em two weeks, he said, then charged me four hundred dollars. ** In 1911, an Englishman named Thomas “Bill” Burgess donned a pair of motorcycle goggles to breaststroke across the English Channel, which he successfully did on his 16th attempt. The goggles were not waterproof, though they did protect his eyes from splashes during the swim, which he completed in twenty-two hours and thirty-five minutes. Fifteen years later, his protégé Gertrude Ederle did him one better by using paraffin to seal her motorcycle goggles and becoming the first woman to freestyle across the channel. She endured fourteen hours and thirty-four minutes of strong waves and jellyfish stings. The press called her “Queen of the Waves.” ** Sometimes at swim practice Angie’s coach writes instructions on a white board at the edge of the pool, which of course my daughter can’t see. Sometimes that coach observes Angie not doing what she’s supposed to be doing or talking to the swimmer in the next lane over and assumes she’s goofing around. Really, she’s asking her teammates what the whiteboard says. Sometimes the coach calls her out of the pool and makes her do extra pushups on the hot concrete deck. On those days, she comes home with aching shoulders and bleeding fingers. I email the coach about my daughter’s vision issues, but that whiteboard always returns. Angie does the pushups anyway, knowing they will only make her stronger. ** In 1940, Popular Science magazine printed detailed instructions for readers interested in making their own wooden goggles at home. “With a little care and patience,” the writer explained, “you can construct diving goggles exactly like those used by the spear fishermen of the South Seas and expert Hawaiian divers!” ** At a swim competition during the pandemic, when parents were not allowed on deck, Angie’s goggles broke at the start of a relay. She’d already climbed up onto the block and prepared to start her dive when suddenly the nosepiece snapped. The lenses split apart, and the goggles fell around her neck. In a flurry, she tossed them aside and dove in for her portion of the swim – the anchor leg of the 4×50 freestyle relay. She had no choice; her team was counting on her. She swam hard, goggle-less and blinded, her eyes exposed to the harsh chlorinated water. Still, her team took first place. Her eyes stung for the rest of the day, but her smile never wavered. ** The first pair of commercialized goggles, which came in only one style and one size, appeared in an advertisement in Slimming World magazine in 1968. Marketed as aids for swim training only, they were not considered for use in competitions. They were for workouts only – for observing strokes underwater and protecting the eyes from irritation. One year later, British inventor Tony Godfrey developed a goggle made of polycarbonate, a plastic known to be thin, lightweight and shatter resistant. Swimmers, including some Olympic hopefuls,

Yellowfin

Nonfiction Home Art by Alice Stone-Collins Yellowfin by Abby McCord There’s a delicate painting of koi fish on the porcelain bottle my mom pours her sake from. My dad and brother are discussing politics, their voices muffled over the music. We are sitting in a Japanese restaurant; the light is dim but illuminates each table and our faces in a soft, warm glow. Various staff rush behind me with boards of fresh sushi and steaming bowls of chili garlic noodles.    Our waitress emerges from the chef hats and smokey pans as she brings out our food: ginger salad, miso soup, vegetable tempura, and rolls of sushi we share. On the plate sits a decadent Philadelphia roll with salmon roe and a dynamite maki roll with yellowfin tuna. The yellowfin is red like a pomegranate—slightly pink but rich and deep. I reach for a piece with my chopsticks and devour its bright taste as if it came straight from the salty waters. Yellowfin tuna typically reside in the epipelagic zone, the surface layer of the ocean that mixes with waves, wind, and raw heat from the sun as if it were freckled. At its base is the thermocline, the zone where temperature drastically drops and descends into deep, indigo water—the hidden, pale skin of the ocean. Yellowfin are strong schoolers; they swim in a strange synchronized fashion as if they are an intricate ballet following an unseen director.    The restaurant is full for a Sunday night. I wonder why all these people are here and if it’s for the same reason as us—a distraction from the holiday break’s inevitable end or to soak up the moments with our loved ones before splitting across the country to different homes.    To the right of us are two men in their twenties. They drink beer and wear hats and hunch their gym-addicted shoulders to watch a game of soccer on their phones. They don’t look at each other but are still together in their own way. I can tell they think the waitress is pretty by the way their eyes soften when she walks by.    To the left of us is another family; the parents sit closely while their adolescent daughter is across from them. Her glasses sit lopsided as she rests her chin in her hand and impassively pokes the table with a chopstick. I wonder what brings her melancholic expression, if she’s experiencing the confusion of being a teenager or maybe missing an older sibling who couldn’t come home for the holiday. I wonder if she’s navigating the dark water for the first time.   Directly behind our table is a wooden wall that splits the restaurant into two sections. It’s some type of glossy oak also illuminated in a soft glow. A long, stringy plant sits on top, its vines daintily traveling down the polished wood.    Somewhere in a gap of the plant’s speckled leaves, I spot another version of me across the restaurant. She is 18 years old, sitting on the edge of a booth, shoved beside her boyfriend at the time and his friends she doesn’t know. Six years ago, on homecoming night, dressed in heels and hairspray and uncertainty, sitting in a Japanese restaurant.    As if a wave drags me under its current, I am thrust over the oak wall to be by her. I swim and tumble into her energy as the temperature drops and my vision blurs in shades of indigo. She is navigating the dark water. I watch her closely, remembering her mind and the way it works. Her dress hugs her stomach in ways she doesn’t like, but she wonders if a subtle suggestion to what was underneath would impress him. She crosses her arms in her lap and smiles as he laughs with his body turned away from her. She desperately wants to hide her pale skin, although she cannot hide her freckling shoulders from coming to the surface.    I know her contentment is only a fragile shell she inhabits. She knows somewhere deep within her there is me, a version of her that knows what it’s like to swim in the sun-kissed waters. She doesn’t know I am standing beside her, that I have always been with her, even in the dark water. I want to scream I am here I am here I am here.    She sits small with her shoulders low and razor-nicked legs crossed as if the space will burst if she takes up too much of it. She picks at her fried rice with her fork, stirring the steam until there is none left. Her gaze finds the interlaced fingers of the couple next to her as she notices the empty space in between her own.    When I reach for her, another wave thrusts me under its current, and I am being pulled over the oak wall again. I desperately claw and cry to her so I can tell her all the things she needs to hear: you do not need to fear being alone or taking up space or wandering into uncertainty. Somewhere, somehow, I am with you, and I know all the beauty and pain and heartbreak and love you have yet to feel. Trust me—let your world crack and burst and you will finally see how tenderly sunlight dances upon your skin.    Her innocent, uncertain eyes only catch a glimpse of me. But I know, in this one millisecond transcending across years, she hears me.    Breathless and drenched in an enigmatic feeling, I am placed back into my seat; warm, gentle water swirls around me. There are still discussions of politics and sake to be sipped. Our rolls of brightly colored sushi have diminished to clumps of sticky rice and chopstick-poked wasabi. The yellowfin has been eaten. I look through the gap in the leaves but only see an empty table.    In this fleeting moment—where the four of us sit under a