Inextricable Circumstances

It is summer 2008. The weeping willow trees in back of a suburban house creak in the wind, two trunks straining against one another. They are one unit, they are two things. Their roots are in a tangle.

In the house up the hill, an au pair from Mexico City sleeps with my father. She and the other neighborhood sitters spend many evenings in our kitchen, away from the less-gracious host families. Our house is often full. Years down the line, my mother will refer to her as a sweet and smart young woman. Someone who got caught up in something too complicated. But for the moment, the secret is unrevealed. Perhaps the au pair hopes my father will leave my mother for her. My father only wants attention from someone new, overflowing with youth. The au pair will go on to become a professor. Perhaps she’ll feel bad for homewrecking, or perhaps she’ll forgive herself for the foolishness of youth. She’ll think fondly of my father, or she’ll realize she dodged a bullet.

For my mother, it’s the summer before her second round of grad school. Her program is four hours away. She doesn’t know about the affair, so she has decided to keep the family together the best way she knows how. She will spend two days a week on the four-hour commute between the future she’s got and the future she wants. By the time she finds the damning emails, it’ll be too late to change course. She will spend much of her time that year in Illinois, in a small apartment with a European roommate. She’ll pursue a degree which she will never really get to use, except to escape my father. She’ll drive the car in which I have my first memory, gazing at the rising sun which seems to fill the entire horizon. In these solitary hours, my mother will chain-smoke and blast mix CDs that my almost-aunt makes for her. Many years later, my mother will tell me the details of the affair from our big old house in Illinois while I sit at my desk in Missouri, four hours away. For now, she still thinks she can hold our Ohio household together.

At this exact moment, my someday-stepfather is in London, eating one meal a day in his under-furnished flat, content in the way of young bachelors. His office has a view of Big Ben. He is living a bachelor’s life that the small, angry boy from far northeastern Colorado could never have imagined. He is collecting stories about scamming scammers, mountain fishing, foolishly breaking bones. Right now, he’s walking to meet his diverse cast of friends at the pub on the corner. Or he’s en route to the little bakery down the way. In a year or so, he will fall in love with my mother again, as they were in love at the age of five. They’ll remeet at a wedding. He’ll shed worldly excitement for Midwestern contentment, one year at a time. Years from now, he’ll text me, his daughter in every way but blood, pictures of our aging dogs snuggled on a couch. I’ll know this means he loves me.

My father’s future wife, or whatever she is to him, is in some ways like the au pair. She is also young, also in the States hailing from abroad. As my father cheats on my mother, always seeking adulation, never full, my eventual stepmother is pursuing a degree in engineering — which, like my mother, she won’t get to use. Not long now before she will meet my father. She will decide to keep the baby, bear my half-sister and hate me for existing, straighten her teeth. She will throw a game console at my father’s head; he will exit into the suburban dark. I will watch him go and suddenly realize that someday I might wrest myself free, though he’ll appear the next morning in the day-soaked kitchen as if nothing has changed.

It will take a while, but it will happen: I will become an adult, get into strange circumstances all on my own. I will stroll across my college campus and under a pair of old, inextricable trees. I will call my mother, text my stepfather. I will hope that my stepmother might still get away. That she will take my half-sister to her mother’s house across town, find an apartment, try again. I will forgive everyone but my father, and, finally, him too.

~ ~ ~

C.L. Barbieri (they/them) is a student currently pursuing a BFA in creative writing at a Midwestern public university. When they're not hunched over a laptop and a hot drink, they can usually be found wandering outdoors, perhaps petting a nice patch of moss. They have been published once before, in Pensive Journal.

 Shackleford Street

I often think about my grandmother     her little house on Shackleford Street     how it was filled with hand-me-up furniture     the ugly ceramic wall hangings of George and Martha Washington    stained wet blood red     that she got from one of her daughters in Tennessee     who filled her house with early American brown     that scratched and itched when you sat on it     like the navy pea coat I had as a boy     that I got from my uncle David who was in the Navy     when he could have played football at State on a scholarship     but didn’t     guaranteeing his limitations would be fulfilled     spending his entire adult life     working as a chain restaurant manager     not as nice as Red Lobster where I worked after college     which was a crappy job     not like the hip restaurants I worked at in Boston while in art school     and summers on Cape Cod that looked exactly like the postcards and the song by Patti Page     who I always confused with Patsy Cline who is my favorite singer     next to Billie Holiday who died a junkie     like I thought I would and may yet.

~ ~ ~

Greg Garner is a writer and artist living in Asheville, North Carolina. His writing has been published in One, Hive Avenue, and Panoply among others and nominated for Best of the Net. Greg’s art has been exhibited up and down the east coast and featured in multiple publications. Current work includes Poem Boxes combining writing and found object sculpture.

Graffiti on the Logan Street Overpass
(Wister, Philadelphia)

It’s neither illegible scrawl nor bubble-lettered boast. Straight, straightforward, it’s printed so simply, as if by a third grader unafraid of both heights and cops: My Dad is my Uncle. By the time these words register, I’m under and past the overpass. It’s after five o’clock, and I’m leaving work—another day done and fading away. I see it again, replayed now as my newest memory: My Dad is my Uncle. I immediately think of old riddles: I am your mother’s brother’s only brother-in-law. Who am I? But what’s written on the Logan Street overpass ends in a period, not a question mark—a statement of fact, not a head-scratcher—and it’s only then, a few microseconds and tire rotations later, that I make that last leap, the one that reveals the necessary correlative: that if Dad is Uncle, Mom must be Aunt. This still sounds potentially palatable but only because I haven’t even reached the stop sign at Stenton yet. For this to be, though, this union, I’m gradually coming to realize as I begin to brake, squinting into the brilliance of a glistering Thursday sun, that if Dad is my uncle and Mom is my aunt, then Uncle Daddy and Aunt Mommy are brother and sister—and the parents of their own niece or nephew. By the time I’m past Generations Child Care (yes, really—no one would be stupid enough to make this up) on the left, I’ve turned on All Things Considered and am already beginning to forget everything from the last several seconds as I take in the details of today’s roster of casual atrocities, leaving the poor Wister child behind me now, possibly to paint more confessions for me to read tomorrow—and then gradually forget—on my way home to my wife and children.

~ ~ ~

Kevin Grauke has published work in such places as The Threepenny Review, The Southern Review, StoryQuarterly, Fiction, and Quarterly West. He is also the author of Shadows of Men (Queen's Ferry), winner of the Steven Turner Award from the Texas Institute of Letters. Bullies & Cowards will be published by Cornerstone Press in 2026. He teaches at La Salle University and lives in Philadelphia.

Small World

It was late afternoon. I was sitting with Elaine in Small World Coffee, buzzing on caffeine and the effervescent intellectual energy of our academic town. We were young and in love and in graduate school. We were writing research papers when a woman approached our table. She was carrying a sleeping baby buckled in tight to an infant car seat.

I had noticed her earlier. She was well-dressed and deeply tired. I noticed how she tried to read as she sipped a latte and how she ended up staring at the wall. All of the polish of her exterior could not hide the distant weariness in her eyes. I wondered what it would be like to be her, a new parent—how one's life turns over. We had already seen what it had done to a few friends.

"Excuse me," she said. "Would you two mind watching him while I go out and feed my meter?"

"Sure,” I replied.

The woman placed the car seat with the sleeping baby near our feet. "Thank you so much!" she said. She turned quickly and was out the door. We watched her through large glass windows until she was out of sight, down Witherspoon Street. We looked down at our new companion.

We could take him, I thought. We could pack up our laptops, pick up the car seat, and walk calmly out the back door of the cafe, into the alley, into Palmer Square. We could make our way along the quiet university walkways, through courtyards, on out-of-the-way paths, until we reached our cramped third-floor apartment. We would look like any other young family out on the town. It would be easy.

Good thing she picked us, I thought. Safe, moral, responsible. There are so many creeps in the world. I smiled at the sleeping baby. I smiled at Elaine. I looked back at my laptop.

I looked back at the baby. What if he woke up? Should we let him cry? Should we take him out of the seat? How do those straps work? When was the last time I had even held a baby? Come to think of it, had I ever held a baby? I looked over at the door. No sign of the mother. How long does it take to feed a meter?

What if she doesn't come back? What if she cut anchor? What if she had seen our freedom from across the coffee shop and it reminded her of a past life? What if she thought our faces looked just kind enough that we would know what to do with the little orphan? Maybe she had said no to herself too many times. Maybe she was off to buy a motorcycle, or start her novel again, or finally take those ceramics classes. What if she simply said, enough: I want to sleep again, I want my body to be my own again, I want to be alone at least some of the time? Maybe she missed hiking, or the extra glass of wine. Maybe she was already on a stool at the Alchemist and Barrister, armed with an invented backstory, a new name, and a desire to feel new hands on her body—hands that would help her remember a life before she had birthed, and nursed, and diapered, and rocked this now sleeping baby at the foot of our chairs.

I looked at Elaine. She was already back in her own mind, typing away. How could she not see that we weren’t ready for this responsibility? It was too much to bear.

The woman breezed back into the coffee shop. Her hair was wet from the rain, drops glistening on her shoulders under the bright lights. The cold and rain had brought color to her cheeks. She was rejuvenated, vibrant and alive. "Thanks, I owe you one,” she said. She picked up the car seat with her still sleeping baby. She returned to her table where she had left a bag packed full of diapers, bottles, wipes, and extra little baby clothes. She picked up her book and began to read. Elaine and I packed up our laptops and walked calmly out the back door of the cafe, into the alley, into Palmer Square. Because we could. Because we could do anything we wanted.

~ ~ ~

Nathaniel Van Yperen is a teacher and writer. His writing has appeared in Miracle Monocle, Flyway: Journal of Writing and Environment, Sky Island Journal, The Common, and others. He is the author of Gratitude for Wild: Christian Ethics in the Wilderness. He lives in central New Jersey with his family and teaches courses in the humanities at The Pennington School.