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Special Issue of the Adelaide Literary Magazine. Best essays by the Winner, 6 Shortlist Nominees, and 40 Finalists of the Third Annual Adelaide Literary Award Competition 2019, selected by Stevan V. Nikolic, editor-in-chief.

THE WINNER: Joanna Kadish
SHORTLIST WINNER NOMINEES: Ruth Deming, Hank Kalet, Noelle Wall, Michael R. Morris, Jeffrey Loeb, Megan Madramootoo
FINALISTS: Gabriel Sage, Jamie Gogocha, Jeffrey Kass, Aysel Basci, Sloane Keay Davidson, Allen Long, David Berner, Juliana Nicewarner, John Bonanni, Steve Sherwood, Christopher Major, Robin Fasano, Claudia Geagan, Peter Crowley, Clay Anderson, Megan Sandberg, Wally Swist, Royce Adams, Raymond Tatten, John Ballantine Jr., John Bliss, Cynthia Close, Deirdre Fagan, Elise Radina, Patrick Hahn, Daniel Bailey, Terry Engel, Peter Warzel, Larry Hamilton, Susan M Davis, Larry Weill, Jason James, Xavier Clayton, Elizabeth Kilcoyne, T. Harvard, Suzanne Maggio-Hucek, Marianne Song, Brianna Heisey, Valerie Angel, Janel Brubaker.

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Published by ADELAIDE BOOKS, 2020-04-07 19:46:36

Adelaide Literary Award Anthology 2019 - ESSAYS

Special Issue of the Adelaide Literary Magazine. Best essays by the Winner, 6 Shortlist Nominees, and 40 Finalists of the Third Annual Adelaide Literary Award Competition 2019, selected by Stevan V. Nikolic, editor-in-chief.

THE WINNER: Joanna Kadish
SHORTLIST WINNER NOMINEES: Ruth Deming, Hank Kalet, Noelle Wall, Michael R. Morris, Jeffrey Loeb, Megan Madramootoo
FINALISTS: Gabriel Sage, Jamie Gogocha, Jeffrey Kass, Aysel Basci, Sloane Keay Davidson, Allen Long, David Berner, Juliana Nicewarner, John Bonanni, Steve Sherwood, Christopher Major, Robin Fasano, Claudia Geagan, Peter Crowley, Clay Anderson, Megan Sandberg, Wally Swist, Royce Adams, Raymond Tatten, John Ballantine Jr., John Bliss, Cynthia Close, Deirdre Fagan, Elise Radina, Patrick Hahn, Daniel Bailey, Terry Engel, Peter Warzel, Larry Hamilton, Susan M Davis, Larry Weill, Jason James, Xavier Clayton, Elizabeth Kilcoyne, T. Harvard, Suzanne Maggio-Hucek, Marianne Song, Brianna Heisey, Valerie Angel, Janel Brubaker.

Keywords: poetry,literary collections,contest

ESSAYS ANTHOLOGY

Bernstein and the Los Angeles Philharmonic. Seventeen min-
utes and ten seconds of beauty. Listen to it right now. I hear it
sometimes, and it feels almost eerie. Like someone’s trying to
tell me something.

Senior year of college, the university orchestra played it.
All that semester, anywhere you went in the music center, you’d
hear some instrument practicing it. It was like being inside the
piece. Like walking around inside it. Pulling it apart to put it
back together. But that’s how life is, isn’t it? You see it section
by section, hear it instrument by instrument, until finally it
comes together with a glorious resolution.

I see people in it. I see my mom. I see my mom as I saw
her as a kid and still do. She was the most beautiful woman
I’d ever seen. I guess all kids think that about their moms, but
mine really was beautiful. I saw her in every famous actress
onscreen. She was beautiful because of her smile – her eyes had
an Irish twinkle to them and her lips were naturally a deep red.
She was beautiful because she didn’t try to hide the fact that
she was getting older – that’s what made her look so young.
She wore her greying hair like a crown. She was beautiful be-
cause she loved – intensely, selflessly. She was beautiful because
she had a line ready for everything. She was powerful because
she could laugh at anything. She was powerful because she
didn’t take any crap. She was beautiful because she saw beauty.
And that’s what she was teaching me.

I see him in it. I see his eyes, the same blue I imagine in
the song. I hear his laugh in the jazzy piano. The same synco-
pated rhythms. I hear his humor in it. The same quippy quality
that the piano has with the clarinet. I hear his talent in it. I
hear him playing the piece, feel the awe I felt at his skill. I see
the city lights cutting through the dark on that hill. I see him
looking at me.

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Of course, twelve-year-old-me couldn’t know any of that.
I just knew it was beautiful. That I would love it forever. That
I would remember my mom as attached to it. That I hoped
I’d be listening to it when I had my first kiss. That I hoped I’d
learn to play it someday. Twelve-year-old me didn’t know it
would follow me everywhere. Like a blue guardian, holding
my hand, wiping my tears, introducing me to new people, re-
minding me of the people I love. Parts of my personality come
from it, burst forth from its themes. I can’t separate myself
from it. Some people say they wish they had a soundtrack to
their lives. I do. It just shows up. Sometimes when I ask it to.
Sometimes when I least expect it. When I hear the opening
trill, I feel the pressure draining out of my head. It forces air
into my lungs and space into my mind.

Juliana Nicewarner is the daughter of a Marine, which means
that she has lived in twenty-odd houses in her twenty-odd
years. She has pursued many things in her life, working as ev-
erything from a logistics manager for guiding companies to an
equine veterinary assistant. She has to stay busy, and while the
one constant passion in her life has been writing, she continues
to pursue anything and everything she can. She lives in Denver
where she is the singer and manager of a Colorado-based jazz
band, works as a substitute teacher, is a sometimes editor, and
an all the time writer. Her work has been published in local
travel guides and more than once by Adelaide Literary Maga-
zine. Her passion is for reading and writing well-written stories
that focus on the real and the inexplicable things encountered
in everyday life.

150

Treehouse

by John Bonanni

I look at the ten-inch bolts I just purchased. They are heavy,
rust resistant steel rods with a grooved screw on one end and a
square head on the other. I wonder if they are strong enough
to hold the four by four weather treated posts that protrude
past the back end of the two door Jeep Cherokee. The vehicle
that delivers the children to hockey practice, playdates, church,
school, and baseball is unique. It is one of the last Cherokees
made with a manual transmission. One of the last vehicles that
celebrates an indomitable character of adventure.

I walk the two acres of wooded area past the clearing
where the house was built years before me. I step over fallen
trees, rotting trunks, tons of leaves dead from countless seasons
of winter. I search for rocks, boulders really, large and heavy
enough to use as a base to prevent the posts from shifting once
they stand rigid and strong. I find them, one by one, and place
them in the wheelbarrow I purchased when I first bought the
house. Every homeowner needs one, I figure, just like a lawn
tractor, power washer, hedge trimmer and a host of various
garden tools. Suburban living encourages cautious jaunts into
agriculture, forestry, conservation, all supported by house ac-
counts with Home Depot and Hollandia Nursery.

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I am building a playground from scratch. I don’t want the
prepackaged, precut Gymboree available to be delivered and
installed by a professional. I want permanence, a claim to set-
tlement, a stake in destiny.

I am building a presence of my fatherhood.
I slide the sheets of exterior plywood that will become
the subflooring of the tree house from the Jeep. I unload bags
of quick dry cement that will form the pilings into which the
posts will rest. I cut sailing canvas in triangular shapes and tie
them to available branches of the three swamp maple trees that
will form the outside perimeter of the treehouse. I drill holes
into the posts to accept the bolts, pour mixed cement into the
holes I had dug earlier to fit the posts, level and secure them
with temporary lean-to supports until the cement cures. I place
the heavy boulders at each post, making sure they rest against
them to secure their move even more. I secure two by six boards
on the sides near the tops of the posts to form a box ten feet
high. I add more joists and lay down the exterior plywood
sheets. Once I can stand on the new floor, I secure a rung ladder
for access to the floor. I add more exterior plywood sideways to
create a barrier where my son and my daughter could peer out
safely. The canvas canopies move as the swamp maples bow to
the wind, but the treehouse stands, rigid and strong.
I dig a trench from the back deck of the house to one of
the posts of the treehouse. I lay a PVC pipe across the length
of the trench and thread electric cable through the pipe. I con-
nect the cable to the outlet near the deck and install an exterior
outlet on the inside wall of the treehouse. I place exterior, wa-
terproof floor lamps illuminating upwards, lighting the canvas
and providing ambient light.
My son and my daughter play in the treehouse for years.
They hide then seek, fight imaginary wars, have a thousand

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ESSAYS ANTHOLOGY

picnics, sleep a hundred nights in sleeping bags with their
friends. I spend more time commuting to work than living
with my family, and those workdays provide a comfortable
living for them. I am not at home enough, but the treehouse
becomes my presence while I am away at work. It gives them
adventure, invention, creativity. They imagine, they playact.
On those summer nights when I have an opportunity to spend
time on the deck, I hear them laugh and talk in their hideaway
with their friends, the warm light casting the shadows of their
movement against the canvas above them. Then I hear them
squeal when I switch off the power of the tree house lights.
Sometimes, that is how they know I am home.

When the children are older, I add a tire tied to a gym
rope and secure it to the largest branch of one of the swamp
maples. I cut out a hinged opening of the sidewall of the tree-
house, so they can swing off and land on the lawn below. They
play for hours. The backyard is a true playground, a work-
shop for child play, and they busy themselves well into the
late summer nights conjuring up scenarios, enacting situations,
planning strategies.

The treehouse is their sanctuary. It watches over them, al-
lows them to explore, but in a way that protects them. If they
fall from the upper level, they land on soft ground. I make sure
the ground near the structure is free from rocks, branches, sharp
edges. I install a barrier fence around the perimeter of the tree-
house. I insulate the power source from their touch. I pad the
interior walls, the floor. The treehouse is the gathering place for
the children of the area, the starting point for expeditions con-
ducted through murky woodlands into the next clearing of the
neighboring houses. At times there are as many as ten of them
climbing, playing, peering out like sea pirates. I never worry
about the treehouse durability. It remains, rigid and strong.

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Adelaide Literary Award 2019

Years later, my son begins to mow that lawn. He is careful,
methodical. He attempts designs, spends hours cutting linear
arrangements into the landscape. He spends less time in the
treehouse and more on the rider mower and homework. My
daughter and her friends take charge of the treehouse. Worms
and cricket trays are replaced by tea service, paint brushes and il-
lustration boards. Goldfish cracker lunches sustain their energies.

Both love to catch a baseball. I throw carefully and evenly.
One to my son then one to my daughter. I am always aware of
fairness, of equal treatment. My son could throw faster, but my
daughter could catch with her right hand. Then it is time for
my daughter to mow the lawn. She drives the rider fast, taking
curves that tilt the rider like a muscle car.

Years pass, and the treehouse loses it occupants, but we
keep it there, just in case. Just in case we want to go back to
our innocence.

Growing green with moss at its concrete base, its once
bright canvas triangles threadbare and yellowed, the treehouse
stands, still rigid and strong, survivor of rain and snow and
wind and cold. It is now worn, abandoned, except for the
cat, who finds it a perfect perch from which to survey squirrel,
opossum, and raccoon. The occasional visitation by a wan-
dering deer forages the outcroppings from the large rocks at the
base of the treehouse now firmly embedded into the ground.

I suspect a change, like one feels from the first chill in the
wind of a fall afternoon. I sense a loss of virtue, righteousness,
simpatico with the world. Inside, the fireplace is comforting,
an oasis of contentment, a primal affirmation of good and
right. I want my son and my daughter to be here always in this
moment of living; secure and safe by this primitive comfort by
fire. I wonder how many times this will happen. I wonder how
long this anomaly will last.

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ESSAYS ANTHOLOGY

The treehouse is now worn, green with moss and aban-
doned.

My son goes off to college. His bedroom is empty of its
occupant and filled with the things of his life as I knew it.
But they are of a baby, and a child, not of a young man. My
daughter is growing too, and she adds to the things of her life.
The family unit is still there, strong as ever, just with a longer
tether.

We still return to moments of connection. When I inspect
the freshness of the fruit bowl, I discover an overripe orange or
apple. My daughter wants me to pitch the fruit to her, so she
could swing at it and watch it disintegrate upon impact. We
giggle at the sight of the spoiled fruit exploding into the air.
I remember that sense of abandon, of perfect freedom, living
and loving unabashedly and passionately, savoring the joy of
my own children. It reminds me of when I would turn out
the lights in the treehouse and generate screams and squeals of
surprise, only to hear laughter when I turned the lights back
on. I thought of how much control I once had in and of their
world, their well-being.

And every day, I feel less able, less capable, like the aging
treehouse, slowly witnessing its own demise, but still visible,
still rigid and strong.

My son and daughter are now on their own. The tether is
now in a text, or in a weekend visit. But there is no one left in
that home made by the heart, by the tenacity to create some-
thing from scratch, to build from sticks and hardware carried
in an old Jeep.

The treehouse sidewalls are beginning to warp. Some eye-
lets on the canvas triangles have ripped away from the corners,
making the canvas flap in the wind with more ferocity, as if
they are releasing their restriction and are violently pulling

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Adelaide Literary Award 2019

repeatedly to free themselves from the ties. The cement is re-
vealing cracks from shrinkage. The posts could use a creosote
application.

My children are adults, and the little affections of child-
hood, the hot cocoa at the Corner Pub that embraced us with
a secure and warming confirmation of things being right with
the world are no longer attainable. This is not because they
have changed.

It is because I haven’t, and I don’t want to.
It is because my stake, my security, my comfort has been
being a father. I am a father in advice, in direction, in decision,
in dependability. I pitch the ball when needed. I lock the door
at night. I change the tires that are worn. I take out the trash,
screw the bolt that is loose, check your room at night, one
last time. I pick my children up when they are tanked-up at a
secret party in a parentless household that resembles a small
mansion, or stranded because of two flat tires, or unconscious
because of a seizure, grateful that the confidence they have in
our relationship does not make them fear calling me when they
find themselves in a dangerous predicament. I stand, rigid and
strong, when they need compassion as well as reprimand.
We sell the house. The new owner has grandchildren. Her
husband will refurbish the warped walls of the treehouse, re-
place the swing rope and the tire, clean up the moss and mold,
replace the canvas sailcloth. He comments that it is overbuilt,
but that is probably why it lasted all these years. I am pleased
it has a new life.
My son announces that he has met the love of his life and
will marry soon. I meet her. She is warm, engaging, attractive,
intelligent. There is nothing I can find or see or feel about
her that does not make me think she is the perfect match for
him. And him for her. I think of what I need to do, how I can

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ESSAYS ANTHOLOGY

continue this new take of father to this new person. I wonder
how my relationship changes with my son. I prepare a speech,
one that will not be embarrassing to him or his new wife and
their friends. I begin to write.

I say that the significance of their decision is not that
they have shown, in every moment together, how perfectly
suited they are for each other. How they complement each
other’s needs and desires and hopes. How seamless they are as
one vibrant entity without losing their individuality. I men-
tion that their togetherness aspires to serve things they have
yet to imagine. Their love is bigger than the two of them and
that love, unspoiled by requirement, unedited by condition,
impervious to doubt, is what binds them. Their love is perfect,
because it is by choice, rigid and strong.

I say the most telling significance of their commitment
today is not in them but from them. It lies in how many of
us are here today, fully knowledgeable of the joy of their proc-
lamation to live as one, for life. The value lies in how many
people they have affected by their actions, how overwhelm-
ingly proud and happy they have made two sets of parents,
how they have joined two families who likely would have never
met and now who hold each other’s friendships with affection,
basking in the celebration of a match made truly in heaven,
rigid and strong.

The joy they have created for all of us will take a lifetime
to enjoy the pleasure of seeing them both in a forever embrace
of each other. I feel I have made a good fatherly impression
without making a fool of myself. I hope I am right.

I feel that somewhere in the process of physics and the
hope of spirituality, a flying plane is still a miracle. Yet, when I
ask my son why the tips of wings are turned up, he will provide
an hour-long dissertation on aviation design methodology. I

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Adelaide Literary Award 2019

am interested and floored by his response and his knowledge.
Somewhere in the middle of my creative spirit and his practical
physics lies the genes we share as father and son. I cherish those
genes. They are rigid and strong.

I tell him of the moments I wished we could have been
together more often, and when I did have moments, the worry
that I was not spending them wisely enough with him. But
somehow, the generosity, the sweetness, the goodness in him
assuaged my fears. I tell him he was always reassuring, never
unreasonable and always appreciative.

I look at the man he has become. I tell him while I hap-
pily wander in my soup of unfettered inspiration, he speaks a
language of creativity that soars high above any random or ex-
ploratory artistic statement. I reassure him his creativity serves
others. His reaction makes me confident he has character, in-
tegrity.

My daughter laments about a rejected job opportunity.
I reassure her it is their loss, not hers. A pizza at Pepe’s, the
place I introduced her to twenty-nine years ago, soothes her
frustration and elicits a dismissal with laughter and good mem-
ories. She mentions the time when she brought the pizza up
to the treehouse and forgot the last uneaten slice overnight. I
remember the clean up the next day. Her resilience is rigid,
and strong.

There is not enough I can do to hold on to the fatherhood
in me. It is my center, my hunter/breadwinner/midcentury/
mania I hold to be an integral part of my being.

I pass by the house where we once lived. The treehouse is
gone, replaced by a Playskool Play System with three swings, a
trapeze bar combo, and wavy slide advertised “to provide kids
with hours of outdoor play.” It is constructed with a heavy-
duty steel alloy, but one would not know this from looking

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ESSAYS ANTHOLOGY

at it because it is covered in primary color vinyl plastics that
promises low-maintenance and is crack-, chip-, fade-, rot-, and
warp-resistant. All the hard edges are rounded to minimize
injury and the corners are covered with plastic caps, while the
chains have rubber grips to prevent pinching.

It is a safe space, without adventure. It is fatherless.
The giant swamp maple that stood in front, staining the
roof shingles, and threatening to land a massive branch onto
the master bedroom with every major nor’easter, is no longer
there. Underneath that tree, on a wood bench placed on the
front porch, I remember helping my son spend hours installing
and fiddling with a sound system in his car, an old M3 with a
hundred thousand miles on it. I remember playing basketball
with my daughter before she went off to college. I remember
scraped knees, jammed fingers, bruised cheeks. I remember
lessons learned from adventure.
The bench, a memory of those moments, is still there,
rigid and strong.

John Bonanni spent a career in theatre management on
Broadway, Radio City Music Hall and on tour. Off-Broadway
he produced “Under Fire,” “Hands on a Hot Pickup,” and
“Moolah.” His memoir, “Pay No Attention to the Man Behind
the Curtain” offers a rip-roaring look at the silliness of show
business. His works have appeared in Adelaide Magazine, Poor
Yorick Literary Journal, Inspired Living, the San Antonio Review,
and the Raven’s Perch. He holds an MFA in Creative & Profes-
sional Writing from Western Connecticut State University.

159

Rumors of His Death

by Steve Sherwood

Dad sits up in bed, his lips twisted in a faded half smile as he
looks at his children, who have rushed from Texas and Cali-
fornia to see him for the last time.

“Listen to me, everyone. I have some final instructions.
When I’m gone, I want you to spread my body in equal por-
tions over the state park beach in Brookings, the old home-
stead in Perry Park, and the Blue Spruce Campground in Col-
orado, where we used to go when you were kids.” He pauses as
if overcome with emotion. “And I don’t want to be cremated.”

I laugh, and he joins me, though his laugh is feeble. Al-
ready in mourning, eyes leaking slow tears, my three sisters
stare at us.

“On the way here,” I say, “I saw a shop that rents wood
chippers.”

He nods somberly. “That should do the job.”
My older sister Janet stares at us. “You’ve never been funny,
and you’re even less funny now.”
She’s right. Hairy cell leukemia is no laughing matter,
though the name always brings to mind the image of an old
man with bushy eyebrows and hair sticking out of his ears—a
fair description now of Dad. She’s also wrong. When he isn’t

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ESSAYS ANTHOLOGY

shy, or playing the tight-lipped attorney, or brooding over
friends lost in the South Pacific, he can crack you up. Our
mother used to say his wit got him through World War II,
law school, forty years of tough cases, and a lifetime of social
awkwardness. At the family dinner table, he often regaled us
with stories of his life as the spoiled youngest son of a railroad
station master in western Kansas and of his ongoing failures as
a carpenter, car mechanic, fisherman, and practitioner of any
other useful occupation. Though he once argued before the
Supreme Court, he chose law school only when the medical
schools turned him down. “But I would have been a terrible
doctor,” he once confided. “I hate sick people.”

He wasn’t joking. As children, stricken by measles, mumps,
strep, or chicken pox, we could go days without seeing him.
Our mother would tend us—swollen and feverish—and pass
along Dad’s best wishes. Now, he is sick to the point of death
and no doubt filled with self-loathing.

To cheer him up, we take out the DVDs his grandchil-
dren—all musicians—made for him. My nieces sing and play
the piano. My son, a talented guitarist, plays and sings James
Taylor’s “Close Your Eyes.” An audiophile, Dad has eclectic
tastes in music that range from classical to classic rock. Partial
to the Big Band jazz of the Forties, he nevertheless introduced
us in our early teens to the Beatles, the Stones, Carol King,
and Jerry Reed. In his own teens, he was so consummate a
clarinetist that the Navy Band recruited him, but instead he
spent two years driving a Sherman tank in the Philippines
and New Guinea, and after the war he abandoned dreams of
directing the New York Philharmonic to pursue medicine and
then law. After a hard day in court, and oiled by a few scotch
and waters, he spent the typical evening in front of his stereo,
conducting Mozart, Beethoven, or Copeland, waving his arms

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Adelaide Literary Award 2019

in flamboyant rhythm, trilling his fingers to bring up the
woodwinds, and stabbing a hand at the back of the orchestra
to cue the cymbals. He might flash us a self-deprecating grin,
but he fooled no one. He was serious about music. He passed
this passion on to us, and each of us passed it on to our kids.

Toward the end of the visit, Dad is sleeping—mouth
open, face pallid, irregular breaths coming in gasps. The on-
cologist stands a few feet away, flanked by a nurse and an in-
tern. Tall and bearded, the doctor tells us how much he has
enjoyed talking to Dad about jazz. He answers our questions
in a soothing tone that betrays, along its edges, a desire to
placate us with a few careful words and get on with his rounds,
on to patients who still have a chance. His smile comes and
goes like a nervous tick, alternating with a look of compassion
and steadfast concern.

“As I mentioned on the phone, the chemotherapy drug
that was your father’s best hope almost killed him outright—
fever, sky-rocketing blood pressure, heart palpitations.” He
flashes us the smile, which melts into compassion and steadfast
concern. “We almost lost him yesterday, and I don’t expect him
to live past tomorrow.”

This prognosis brought us to Seattle, and later that after-
noon it prompts my sisters and Miriam, Dad’s girlfriend of
ten years, to sort his things into piles—a large one to go to
Goodwill and six smaller ones to divvy among us survivors,
including our brother, who couldn’t make the trip.

I stand off to the side and watch them go through Dad’s
clothes. Janet holds up a stack of folded boxer shorts. “Do you
want these?”

“Pass.”
As the eldest child, she is the executor. “I’d hate to see
them go to waste.”

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ESSAYS ANTHOLOGY

“Thanks,” I say, “but I’ve been buying my own undies since
I turned forty.”

“Ha, ha.” She thrusts Dad’s boxers into a trash bag.
Her rigid posture and cool gaze make me wonder if she is
more upset about the wood chipper joke or about my confronting
her on behalf of our younger sisters, who met my plane and
spent the ride from the airport to Miriam’s house complaining
about her attitude. Ingrid said, “You need to talk to Janet. She
calls me ‘Baby’ and Lisa ‘Sweetie’ in the most patronizing tone,
like she thinks she’s Mom. And she’s been ordering us around.”
Lisa agreed. “We told her to cut the shit, so she cried and
asked why we didn’t love her anymore. Of course we love her.
We just want her to treat us like adults.”
Dark-haired, clear-eyed, and pretty, they both look
younger than they are—late-thirties—but no one would mis-
take them for babies. As soon as I could, I pulled Janet aside
and told her what Ingrid and Lisa had said. Janet’s wide, sen-
sitive face went cold. Then the tears came.
“We’re about to be orphaned, and now they don’t love me
anymore.”
I rested a hand on her shoulder. “They’re grown women,
with families of their own. They don’t want to be treated like kids.”
“That’s not how I meant it. ‘Baby’ and ‘Sweetie’ are terms
of endearment.”
“You wouldn’t use terms like that at the office, right? Try
treating them like colleagues—maybe call them by their names
instead of by terms they don’t find so endearing.”
Janet wiped her eyes. “It’s a habit. I’m not sure I can stop
myself.”
A few minutes later, she asked Baby to go through Dad’s
bedroom closet and Sweetie to start with the sock drawer. In-
grid and Lisa shot me looks but did as Janet asked.

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Adelaide Literary Award 2019

Signs of Dad fill Miriam’s house. In framed images of
the pyramids of Giza and the Matterhorn, Dad looks tall and
substantial, his longish white hair blowing in the wind. He and
Miriam met on a Nile cruise four years after our mother’s death,
traded e-mails, and moved in together. Each had lost a spouse
to cancer. Each brought to the merger enough assets to make
marriage legally messy, so, as Dad explained, “We’ve decided
to live in sin.” In a veiled and appalling reference to their sex
life, he let slip, shortly after he introduced me to Miriam, that
she made him feel like a teenager again. “When your mother
died, I never thought I’d find love again, but I have.”

Petite and fit for her age, Miriam has a pleasant smile
and kindly blue eyes. For ten years she has shared her well-ap-
pointed home and a series of Elder Hostel adventures with
Dad. Though most of us warmed to her slowly, we have learned
to like Miriam during the past three years as she pulled Dad
through the early stages of leukemia. Anyone who saw them
together, laughing as they drank wine and played Scrabble,
could see they loved each other.

To please her now, I obey her command to try on Dad’s
wardrobe of coats and jackets—expensive and fashionable for a
man of eighty-three but not my style. Miriam insists each jacket
looks good on me even though the sleeves end three inches
above my wrists. In the end, I accept two fleece pullovers I can
wear hiking or biking. She also offers me Dad’s collection of
shoes and hats. From them, I choose a felt hat Dad wore to the
beach and a pair of Nike Airs he bought but never wore.

I stop in the middle of lacing the shoes and glance up at
the four women. “What if the doctor’s wrong? If Dad survives,
he’ll have nothing to wear home from the hospital.”

A short silence ensues. Then they go back to sorting his
things.

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“Let’s take a walk,” Ingrid says. Outside, the Puget Sound
glittering in the distance, we stroll past homes built decades
earlier for a tenth of their current value. We are the creative sib-
lings, the ones our family voted most likely to live in poverty—
she an actress, who often lands minor roles in major movies,
and I a former journalist, who teaches at a small college.

She slips an arm through mine. “Last night, Miriam said
she can’t take care of Dad even with a home-health nurse. If
he goes into remission, he can’t come home.”

The news burrows into the base of my throat. “Has she
told him?”

Ingrid’s eyes are a shade of pale blue adored by movie
cameras for their size and expressiveness. “They picked out a
hospice a few miles from here—close enough to make visiting
easy. Dad asked Janet to clear out his things so Miriam doesn’t
have to. She’s eighty. There’s only so much she can do.”

Knowing he has no home to return to makes his im-
pending death real in a way the doctor’s grim prognosis had
not. “Well, goddamn it.”

Ingrid smiles. “For a second, you sounded just like Dad
at rush hour.”

I look and sound like Dad, everyone says, but the one key
trait he passed to me, by example not DNA, is road rage. As
he once put it: “Everywhere I go, the highways are filled with
sons of bitches.” I mimic his tone of puzzled outrage as I quote
him to Ingrid.

“But he’s always so gentle in his anger,” she says. “One
time, in L.A., he tried to flip off another driver but couldn’t
quite bring himself to do it. He flashed him an index finger
instead, like ‘we’re number one,’ and the guy kept glancing
over, unsure how to react.”

We laugh as we make our way back to Miriam’s house.

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That night, we travel downtown as a group, but most of us
will return to Miriam’s house to sleep. Lisa will spend the night
sitting up with Dad, and she carries a bag with enough snacks
and romance novels to get her through the ordeal. I plan to do
the same tomorrow, taking a cab from the hospital directly to
the airport for a Monday morning flight back to Texas.

Dad looks fragile. His eyes convey a haunted quality, and
when Ingrid asks how he feels, he falters. Janet opens an album
of photographs from our childhood in Colorado. As she points
to different pictures and reminisces about family picnics and
camping trips, Dad’s eyes slide away from the pages and up
to our faces. Ingrid and Lisa weep openly. I’m trying to think
of something to lighten the mood, but nothing comes to me.
Fond of Mark Twain’s quip that “Rumors of my death have
been greatly exaggerated,” Dad has spent much of his adult life
poking fun at the idea of dying. Now he’s up against it, and the
humor has left him—left us all.

He shuts his eyes and sinks into his pillows. “I’m sorry,
kids. I’m having a rough time tonight.”

We understand, we say, and will see him tomorrow. In the
hallway, my sisters muffle their sobs in each other’s shoulders.
Outside the huddle, I pat the random back.

We get up early the next morning to load trash bags of
belongings into Ingrid’s rental car, Dad’s Acura, and Miriam’s
Volvo. Our caravan makes its way to a suburban Goodwill
store so new it shines even in the muted winter sunlight.

Fifteen minutes later, Dad is wearing the only clothes he
owns. The homeless, the destitute, and the bargain hunters
of Seattle will soon inherit his coats, shirts, pants, hats, shoes,
socks, and boxers. They will also get their pick of watches, Swiss
Army knives, and other gadgets he compulsively bought on the
Internet. By noon, and for pennies on the dollar, Half-Price

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has acquired his books, movies, and compact disks. Everything
else that Miriam does not want is in moving boxes or arranged
in neat stacks.

While Miriam spends the afternoon at the hospital, we
convene at a local pancake house. For a couple of hours, we talk
about work, husbands and wives, kids, our absent brother—
anything but our father. Then Ingrid says, “Listen, I’ve been
thinking that maybe we shouldn’t cry in front of Dad. I can
see it bothers him.”

I nod, having been thinking along the same lines. “Crying
only reminds him he’s two steps from death. We need to treat
him like he’s still among the living.”

Janet and Lisa look at us as if the two of us have slapped
them. Janet asks, “Why wouldn’t we cry when we’re about to
lose the man who took care of us all our lives? I’m sure Daddy
understands even if you don’t.”

Ingrid and I find each other’s eyes. “Daddy” rings false. So
does the image of a lifelong caretaker. An old-fashioned man,
Dad has always been a soft touch to his daughters, but above
all he values self-reliance. He weaned my brother and me early,
financially speaking, making clear that our success or failure in
life hinged on our education, talent, and drive. We had his love,
he said. As long as we supported ourselves, did not look to him
for handouts, we would also have his respect. Ingrid weaned
herself. At twenty-one, she was earning enough as a court re-
porter to move to L.A. and pursue an acting career on the
side—against Dad’s advice. Janet and Lisa had a harder time
cutting the ties, leaving home for good in their late twenties.
Over the years, I have come to see our father, with all his faults,
as a close and dear friend. I admire him, but I don’t idolize him.

Ingrid tries again: “All I’m saying is we should try to make
his last days happy ones.”

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Janet brushes away an angry tear. “You cope in your way
and let us cope in ours. You have no right to tell us how to
grieve or how to act when we’re with Daddy.”

Her gaze flat and cool, Ingrid dismisses this declaration
with a shrug, but Janet is right: none of us has a special insight
into managing grief or helping Dad get ready to die. Thanks
to variables of gender, birth order, personality, and experience,
each of us knows a different Dad—or Daddy—so we can’t take
a common approach to his death or to our grief.

The server arrives with the check. We reach for wallets or
purses, eager to back away from our standoff.

That evening, my sisters get through an entire hospital
visit without crying—until we’re standing in the hall, hugging
goodbye. We won’t see each other again until we spread Dad’s
ashes around his favorite places in Colorado and Oregon.

Back in the room, he has his eyes closed as if he’s sleeping,
but when I sit in the chair next to the bed, he reaches over and
takes my hand.

“You okay?” I ask.
He hesitates. “I guess I’m afraid one of these times I’ll
close my eyes and never wake up.”
At age eighty-five, my grandfather lay down on a couch
to read, fell asleep, and died. My aunt found him in apparent
slumber, King Lear lying open across his chest, so Dad’s fears
are real. “You probably don’t want me to fetch you a copy of
Shakespeare’s collected works?”
He gives a feeble laugh. “No thanks.”
“What can I do for you?”
Suddenly shy, he asks, “Would you rub my feet?”
For the first time since I came to Seattle, I have to fight
an aching, almost overpowering urge to cry. When I was a kid,
eight or nine years old, he used to have me rub his feet after a

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hard day in court. This act became one of my chores, like cut-
ting firewood in the winter or mowing the grass in the summer.
It takes me a moment to answer. “Sure.”

His feet are flabby and look smaller than I remember. So
do his legs. Leukemia has consumed this man, once tall and
strong, and left only bone, fat, and tendon. I rub his feet gently,
trying not to press too hard.

“Maybe Janet told you, but I’m not leaving much to you
kids. If I have a regret, that’s it. I meant to leave more behind,
but between traveling and this goddamned leukemia, I’ve gone
through my savings. There may be enough to help out with
college tuition for the grandkids, but it’s not going to change
anyone’s life.”

I mutter reassurances. No doubt we could all use more
money, but none of us needs it.

He sighs and takes several breaths. “Listen, I know you
were closer to your mother than to me, and I was hard on you
when you were a kid, but I want you to know while there’s still
time that I’ve always been proud that you and Ingrid had the
guts to do what you wanted with your lives. I never had that
kind of courage. If I had, you’d be looking at a retired orchestra
leader instead of a broken-down old lawyer.”

Part of me wants to offer comfort by denying the truth of
this admission. His words of regret about failing to pursue the
big dream affected Ingrid and me, as children and as adults, in
ways he never intended. “Thanks, Dad, it means a lot.”

“And I always wished we could be closer.”
My mother liked to talk. Dad might tell funny stories at
family gatherings, but he was not much for conversation, es-
pecially about puberty, sexuality, or self-doubt. And he did not
like looking at us during those rare times when he did agree
to talk. He and I did our serious talking in the car, at night,

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staring straight ahead at the road. He seldom volunteered ad-
vice—I had to ask for it—but he delivered it in so thoughtful
and circumspect a manner that when he did speak, I usually
listened. Even as an adult, I often consulted him about the
big decisions—marriage, divorce, career moves—seeking not
approval but a calm, well-considered opinion.

“Yes, growing up, I felt a little closer to Mom,” I say, “but
when I needed to talk about something important, who did I
come to?”

Enough said. He closes his eyes and lets his head fall back
on his pillow. I tuck a blanket around his feet and go into
the hall. At the nursing station sits a woman in orange scrubs
with soft, tired eyes and stress lines around her mouth. “Uh,
that’s my dad in the last room on the left. The doctor says he’s
probably going to die tonight, and I was wondering what to
do when the time comes.”

The soft, tired eyes stare at me for a moment. “What’s his
name?”

When I tell her, she studies his chart and shakes her head.
“Dying tonight with those vital signs? Listen, Jack, that man’s
not going to die tonight or anytime soon—maybe not for
weeks or months.”

“But the doctor—”
She rolls her eyes. “The doctor!”
“Are you sure?”
“I work with terminal patients four nights a week, and
their vitals don’t look anything like your father’s. He’s dying
but not for a while yet.”
A damp February snow falls on the streets outside the
hospital. Dad’s hand is cool and dry in my grasp. “I talked to
the nurse. Your vital signs are strong. She says there’s no way
you’re going to die tonight.”

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“She said that?”
His rasping voice conveys surprise, not pleasure, at the
prospect of living another day. Then he smiles. “So rumors of
my death have been greatly exaggerated.”
“That’s right. Looks like I should plan another trip to Se-
attle.”
“No,” he says flatly. “I don’t want you kids to see me in any
worse shape than I am now. We’ve all had a good visit and said
goodbye. That’s enough.”
A short time later, he falls into the deepest sleep of the
night. I go back to a plastic chair near the window to watch the
snow. I wonder what Dad will do when he finds out we’ve do-
nated all his clothing to Goodwill. Maybe he’ll laugh. Maybe
he won’t. To soften the blow, I take his felt beach hat and one
of the fleece pullovers from my suitcase and hang them in his
closet, wishing now that I’d accepted his boxers and a pair of
pants so he could have a complete outfit.
At dawn, he’s still sleeping. I whisper goodbye, kiss his
forehead for the last time, and head out into the snow to catch
a cab for the airport. Later in the week, Janet will rent a small
truck and a car trailer to haul his worldly possessions to Texas.
Her husband will fly up to make the drive with her. If Dad
lives for weeks or months longer, she will return then to settle
his affairs. When the moment comes, the Neptune Society will
collect his body, cremate it, and deliver the ashes. Everything
is ready. All we can do now is to wait for Dad to die.

A writer and teacher living in Fort Worth, Texas, Steve Sher-
wood has published fiction or creative nonfiction in Talking
River Review, Northern Lights, descant, Windward Review,

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Adelaide Literary Review, and other journals. His books in-
clude two novels, Hardwater (Texas Review, 2005), which won
the George Garrett Fiction Prize, and No Asylum (Texas Re-
view, 2014), a literary thriller set on the high plains of Kansas.
Currently the director of the William L. Adams Center for
Writing at Texas Christian University, Sherwood has taught
writing and literature courses there since 1988.

172

American – American

by Christopher Major

It’s hard not to notice that hyphen. It’s hard not to think about
what it means to us; reminding us of a tragic insult and acting
as a backhanded compliment at best. African-American. Leave
it to my countrymen to let me know that I was black first,
then American. I’d only hoped the first Africans to see white
men jump out of their boats in strange clothes, Bibles in tow,
doubted the sincerity of men willing to trade their “Holy” texts
for clumps of gold metal my ancestors’ children kicked down
the street on the way to their grandmother’s house. This phe-
nomenon, the first sighting of white men, always proved to
be an apocalyptic foreshadowing for cultures long perished.
After years of primary school, secondary school, college, and
hindsight with better vision than what was behind my black
frames, I surmised it started with curiosity about the man who
tended to get red in the face.

“What’s your name?”
“David, but everybody calls me Dave.”
Dave had just jumped from a swing that was at a mild
apex before falling on his face. I watched as he dusted him-
self off and ran up a rusted slide just to ride back down it.
His black penny-loafers remained shined through these ample

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opportunities to scuff them. I’d be damned if I let the Nike
Air Max Penny’s I’d earned through six raked yards, infinite
trash bag removals, and a sink that always had at least one dirty
dish to be washed got so much as a crease. My team lost our
pickup game at so I had to wait until the next one was over
before playing again. “Why you over here? Nobody plays on
the playground anymore.”

This was fact. The girls jumped rope and hopped scotch
on concrete. The boys played a brand of streetball that pro-
duced the occasional black eye. We’d looked at the playground
as a thing of the past, a relic left behind by children who were
no longer children. But Dave saw land ripe for the taking.

“Because the Redcoats are here. Duck!” He shoved me out
the way of an imaginary bullet fired from an invisible musket
and fired a colonial handgun at the jungle gym. “You got a
weapon, soldier?”

“What?”
“Here,” he threw air at me. “C’mon!” Dave ran towards
the jungle gym and began climbing. “We are free men, here!”
Standing there with every colonial weapon in history at my
disposal, I watched as Dave held down the fort before the bell
ending recess rang out. He climbed down visibly angry. “We
lost this one.”
“This what?”
“The battle. The Redcoats beat us. They have the jungle
gym and the slide. All we got is the swing and monkey bars.
You should’ve been here earlier. We need more men.”
We. Men. You. Us.
Reconciling the five ideas harmoniously in the land of
the brave required—requires—a brand of American patriotism
passed down from privileged hand to privileged hand. I’d gone
home that Friday and thought about the Revolutionary War or

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as a friend—a foreign exchange student and a Briton—called
it years later, the American War for Independence. The syntac-
tical difference would read in bold print in my mind. History
would show nothing revolutionary about these States, however
united, fighting a country that’d traded African descended au-
tonomy—not Bibles—in exchange for African resources, Af-
rican bodies; my body. But at ten-years-old I went back to
school Monday ready to go to war for this idea.

“Where you goin’, Chris?” Marcus needed one more body
for an even three-on-three matchup.

“I got next.” Freddy, a poor shooter but an excellent re-
bounder, would have to take my place.

I walked up to Dave. “Where are they today?”
“It doesn’t matter. We’re taking back the jungle gym. I lost
my lieutenant.”
“I’ll be lieutenant.”
“Okay. Here,” another musket. “When I give the word,
shoot everything but me.” Dave charged the apparatus. I
waited by the monkey bars. A vulnerable America needed me,
and I’d be there to save her. The jungle gym was going to be
America’s—ours. “Now!” I ran to David Whitman’s rescue, to
rescue him from his suicide mission—from himself. I’d run to
his rescue for weeks that fall. When Colonel Whitman gave
orders, his lieutenant followed them. He’d call for reinforce-
ments, I’d reinforce. He’d be bulletproof, yet I’d die a hundred
bullet-ridden deaths. He’d declare victory, and I’d rise from
the dead to celebrate. He’d always been colonel, and I’d always
been lieutenant. With the ring of the school bell, we’d win
another battle.
During the last week of the schoolyear, as our class walked
single filed down the halls to recess, I tapped D. Whitman on
the shoulder.

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“I want to be colonel today.”
“Why?” Our teacher, who taught at our school to have her
student loans forgiven, had been giving lessons on a new war
to be won, one that would define us, the U.S. It’d also be the
deadliest in American history.
“Because we gotta free the slaves.”
“Well I know how to win a war.”
“Me, too.”
“I won the last one. You can be colonel, but I’m the gen-
eral.” We resumed the trek outside with our class. He out-
ranked me in military imagination, adherence to dress code,
and was immune to invisible bullets issued by governments;
real ones, too, once we’d become adults, and dress code. Maybe
he’d earned the right to be general. But then again, these were
qualifications Whitman came up with and changed when he
wanted. They’d always change once I’d earned my stripes, once
I’d died for my country; sometimes twice in an hour. As soon
as our feet hit the concrete outside we ran to our base—the
swing set— to find a strategy.
“I wanna be President, then.” I’d found a hill I was finally
was willing to die on.
“Which one?”
“Abraham Lincoln.”
“But he’s white.”
“So?”
“You can only be somebody like you.” Or somebody who
looked like me. Barry Obama was freshly removed from orga-
nizing communities and hadn’t been a senator long enough
to warm his seat, and Michelle Robinson was still grooming
the man who’d qualify black kids on playgrounds around the
country to be wartime leaders—leaders during anytime.
“I don’t care. I’m president today.”

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“I don’t want to play anymore.”
David Whitman’s war had already been won, I suppose.
I’d go to war, though. I’d fight after hundreds more deaths,
real ones and recorded on mobile devices. While I’d never be
President, and although the Michelle Robinsons of the world
wouldn’t be interested in a literary writer from slave country,
the daughter of Kenyan immigrants would be.
I doubt David would have passed up an opportunity to
serve the country he idolized so much. If he hadn’t served, the
country would’ve passed on a man that saw the country the
way it wished to be seen. I doubt, handicapped in my qualifica-
tions to be a colonel, or general, or the President, that I would
have been anything other than a writer who saw the nation
for what it was. David saw, perhaps still sees, an America—an
idea—that has yet to fully materialize.
I’ll be there, though—my African body. I’ll be there to
reinforce the idea of her, America. I’ll be there to defend her
honor. I’ll be there to save her from herself. I’ll be there, more
than likely and against my will, as a bullet-ridden believer in
the idea. Then I’ll die one stripe short of being an American.
The kind without a hyphen.

177

The Orphanage in Kabul

by Robin Fasano

I secure my headscarf and get out of the car. My driver, Latif,
is with me; women don’t drive here.

Months ago when Latif met me at the airport, I told him
I came to Kabul teach English. His eyes brightened and his
eyebrows lifted, “Ah, my granddaughter wants to be a teacher,”
he said.

Today, it’s taken us nearly an hour to find the address as
we’ve dodged potholes, zigzagged on rutted roads, and scanned
the dusty streets to find the house.

I meet Mariam first. She’s at the door to greet us. Her hair
is wrapped tight in a black headscarf just like mine. Latif and
I take off our shoes, as is customary, and add them to the pile
by the door.

Mariam tells us that she’s fifteen, she’s been at the or-
phanage since she was one—the longest of anyone.

She welcomes us and leads us inside, down a long hallway
with faded white paint flaking and chipping and curling. At
the end of the passageway I spot the kitchen, with a sloped,
corrugated linoleum floor, and weathered cabinets hanging
lopsided off broken hinges.

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We enter the main room, where forty children—twenty
girls and twenty boys—are standing in a horseshoe curve: tall,
short, dust-smudged pants, long-sleeve shirts, cropped hair,
headscarf covered, a runny nose, a scratch on the chin. Latif
and I move one by one through the line of children. I extend
my hand to each child, asking his or her name and age. Some
speak in clear, crisp voices. Others shy and softly, and with a
few I have to lean in to catch the syllables.

Then the house manager, with his trimmed beard, deep-set
eyes, and thick black mane of hair, instructs them to continue
with their daily activities, and they disperse.

A young girl is standing apart from the group, near the
back of the room in the corner. She’s quiet and doesn’t speak
or engage with the other children.

“What’s her name,” I ask Mariam.
“Zainab,” she says.
Zainab has an oval face, and her hair is cut short like a boy’s.
Her brown eyes are bright and round like a full moon. Tooth-
pick shoulders jut out from under her worn-out dress. Leggings
hang loosely over her knobby knees and rumple at her ankles.
Her wrists are so thin, a rubber band would slip right off.
“She arrived at the orphanage a few weeks ago,” Mariam
explains, “her family couldn’t take care of her. They couldn’t
feed her.”
I crouch down so I’m eye level with her piercing brown
eyes. “How old are you?” I ask.
No response. She stands stiff. Her eyes dart to Mariam.
Mariam speaks to her in quick, choppy sentences. She tells
her that I’m a teacher who is working in the country, teaching
at a Kabul school. She tells her I’m visiting the orphanage and
prods her to reply to my question.
I try again. I crouch down and ask how old she is.

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With barely a thin puff of air, she replies: seven.
At seven years old, Zainab is as small as a four-year-old.
Concerned, I glance over at Latif. “Why do you think
she’s so little?” I ask.
Latif ’s eyes sag. He has gray hair at his temples, and his
creased face is weary from decades of living in a crumbling
country. With a downturned mouth, in a serious, low tone, he
replies, “This is what happens. This happens to children who
have no one to take care of them. She can’t grow. She doesn’t
grow because she doesn’t have anybody to give her anything.
This happens…no care, no grow.”
Her upper and lower teeth—which should be white and
square and shiny—are yellow and brown and crusty.
“She feels shame,” Latif says. “That’s why she doesn’t talk
and covers her mouth with her hand. She doesn’t want to show
her teeth.”
He pauses.
“Shame,” he says flatly. “This is common here.”
Mariam says she will show me the girls’ bedroom. We
walk down the hallway to the bedroom.
Zainab’s miniature footsteps follow me like breadcrumbs
into the room.
Creaky, rickety, metal bunk beds line the walls, each cov-
ered with a single sheet, pulled firm, and a blanket as thin as
a pancake neatly rolled at its foot. Worn blue carpet covers
the cement floor. White bare walls surround us, paint peeling
down from the ceiling in the far corner.
Mariam says she’s going to the main room to set up col-
ored pencils and paper for the children to draw with, and then
she leaves.
I bend on my knees and sit on the carpeted floor in the
bedroom. Motioning with my hand, I signal to Zainab that
she can sit on my lap.

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Her round eyes widen.
I nod, to confirm.
And then her tiny frame bunches low on the carpet. And
she sits in the fold of my crossed-legs, the back of her head
snug at my sternum—like a bird in a nest, like mother and
child.
Because she is not used to being held—is not used to
feeling the press of flesh—her tiny frail limbs are stiff, awk-
ward, afraid to move—afraid that if she moves even an inch to
the right or left or up or down, she’ll lose the touch, she’ll lose
the warmth—she’ll fall out of the nest. And so she is very still,
as if she’s perched on the sharp edge of a table.
And we sit like this, in a nest, in silence.
The bedroom window is open and the sheer white cur-
tain is billowing in the gentle breeze. A stream of sunlight is
pouring in, shining on us like a spotlight. The brightness colors
our cheeks to rose pink. And we are silent, in a ray of light.
In the main room down the hall, girls and boys are chat-
tering and murmuring as they’re sitting in a circle on the floor,
drawing with pencils on rustling, crunchy paper. Mariam
briefly peeks her head into our doorway to see how we’re doing,
then goes back to drawing with the children. At the end of
hall, pots and plates clatter and clank in the kitchen as a few
girls help to prepare lunch. Through the open window, we
see a crowd of boys outside hollering, whooping, and kicking
up clouds of dust as they scrimmage in the dirt with an old
soccer ball.
And still we sit in the nest.
After a while, Latif enters the room. “It’s time to go, Miss
Robin,” he says solemnly. “Visiting time is over.”
I don’t say anything. I glance at Zainab’s smooth black
hair shining like a piece of silk in the sun, the soft air from the

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open window embracing us like a cocoon. Zainab’s bony legs
settled on top of mine, her resting dangling feet, the small of
her back leaning into me. And after a few minutes, my voice
barely audible, I finally mutter, “okay.”’

Leaving is like cutting an umbilical cord, breaking off the
supply of oxygen and nutrients and blood that keep one alive.
Zainab’s round brown moon eyes gaze up at me—wordless—
then she glances down at the strands of fraying carpet. Her tiny
body slowly unfolds upward like a puppet on strings.

Silence.
She stands limp like a ragdoll, eyes cast down.
From my position on the floor, I reach out to hug her. I
squeeze her tightly. Her stick body is like a sack of twigs. Be-
cause she doesn’t know how to hug back—isn’t used to being
hugged—her arms hang lifeless at her side. And I keep hugging.
Latif is waiting in the car for me. In the main room, the
children are putting away their pencils and paper to clear the
floor for lunch. Staff are spooning out equal amounts of rice
and beans and naan for each plate. Zainab needs to sit with
the others or else there won’t be enough food for her. I finally
release my arms. She lifts her eyes to meet mine, then silently
trudges over to the other children taking their places to sit on
the floor for lunch.
I get up and walk down the hall to the front door. I’m
standing at the door lacing up my shoes just about to reach
for the doorknob when Mariam hurries over to me, tugging
at the ends of her headscarf. And with one quick stroke she
brushes her cheek up against mine with a kiss. Then without
saying a word she turns and wedges herself between the other
children on the floor.
I open the door and as I’m walking to the car I think of
Zainab, and hold her in the nest.

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Robin Fasano has written for Spirituality & Health, Berkshire
Magazine, and the Massachusetts Review, among others. She
has spearheaded cause-driven campaigns for over 16 years and
traveled throughout the Middle East and Africa. Most recently,
she’s been living and working in Kabul, Afghanistan.

183

Woman in the Bridge

by Claudia Geagan

Curt’s casket, closed and austere, was wedged against baskets
of white roses in the center aisle. The living Curt had been all
bounce and imagination, his life a response to light and texture,
curve and angle. I tried to picture him in a suit, hands folded,
thin lips sealed. He must have owned a suit, but I never saw it,
and his hands were always moving, shaping the air. I looked
around at people I didn’t know. This was Curt’s real life and it
was huge, but my Curt was a ribbon of creative energy.

I leaned against the back wall of the choir loft, almost
the last mourner to be crowded inside Christ Church. The
loft smelled of lemon oil and old wood, and to my left an or-
ganist pumped the foot pedals. People in the nave below me,
rows of dark suitcoats and black dresses, were packed shoulder
to shoulder, like ravens on a wire, patient, waiting. As the
Episcopal priests, male and female, glided around the arched
chancel in their white albs and brocade chasubles, the Collect
floated up – …Accept our prayers on behalf of your servant …

When it came time for the Eucharist, ushers helped us
find our way downstairs. I kneeled at the communion rail and
when the Chalice Bearer stood in front of me, I put my lips to
the cup like those around me. Were they grieving in their own

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way or were they here because they ought to be, grieving for
the very public and very good Curtis Chandler?

Southern as a swamp breeze and equally as mysterious,
Curt was feted for his brave contributions to racial equality in
our small deep-south city. Curt was a smart country boy who
quit college, married young and went to work as a carpenter.
Forty years later he retired as president of a large construction
company and became a sculptor. He also worked with prisoners
re-entering society, providing jobs and housing. I knew Curt
the successful commercial builder and Curt the sculptor, Curt
the philanthropist, Curt the crusader and Curt the husband.
Back in the loft, I looked down at his country-girl turned gour-
met-chef widow sitting in the first row. Family and friends and
distinguished representatives of the black community flanked
and petted her. She seemed his round peg in a round hole, the
connection to society he needed.

The first of Curt’s sculpture studios that I saw was strewn
with art books and photographs, the walls paneled in oak, the
floor paved with wood blocks. His battered brown leather chair
was snugged up against the fireplace. On a reclaimed mantel a
bouquet of hand saws splayed from an earthen vase, each be-
queathed to Curt by a retiring carpenter who’d worked for him,
saws worn and sharpened, honed to their various shapes by of
the strength of the carpenter’s hands, the angle of his cuts, the
speed of his work. Each stroke one moment of a man’s finite
life. Some stubbed, some thinned, some simply worn. Each an
explosion of atoms, the thrust and contraction of a muscle, the
severing of a board. Curt looked at those saws and saw them
move, smelled the sawdust and the sweat.

As a sculptor, Curt worked a hunk of wood or a piece of
clay the way a man coaxes a woman, with his hands, with his

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shoulders, touching her until her back arches, till her shoulders
and her head are thrown back in abandon. That was the pose
of the woman in his most noted statue, a bronze casting of a
woman possessed by an inner passion. All Curt’s statues were
of women.

At the time Curt’s studio was the lowest level of his art-
charmed house, and my private tour was an adjunct to a small
dinner party-fundraiser to which my husband and I had been
invited. His wife had studied cooking at the French Laundry
and they were combining their talents to raise money for re-
leased prisoners.

Being in Curt’s work space was like scuba diving on a
coral reef – weightless and seductive. The molecules in my skin
started to dance. To discourage my unbidden arousal I com-
plimented Curt on all the good that he had achieved for his
community. “We try,” he said, “ but I don’t believe in too much
goodness. Don’t trust it.” He crowded my shoulder and ran his
index finger slowly along the back of my waist and when I didn’t
move away, he pursed his thin lips, then dropped his hand and
stood motionless for a moment. “Let me show you my latest.”
He kicked over a block of hardwood. “Part of a bridge they just
took down. I dunno.” He kicked it to another side. “You see a
woman in there?” I wanted to but I didn’t. I moved toward the
stairs and he ran his fingers up on back bone, then put his hand
on the small of my back to guide me up, releasing us both into
the party at the top. His hand was pure pleasure. I don’t believe
in too much goodness myself, but enough to keep my married
self out of trouble. Safely back with the other guests, I found
my glass of wine and melted into the chatter.

Curt stood about five ten, thinning hair, small features
and curious gray eyes that seemed to take in everything, Not

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conventionally handsome, but when his hands had felt for my
skin, for my bones, I could have stopped, and through that
electric channel of connectedness, offered him a pass to explore
as he wished. I wanted him to rub his hands everywhere, read
the Braille of my body, memorize it, find the sculpture of a
woman in there.

I wanted to be known, leg bone to hip bone, vertebrae
by vertebrae, the curve of my back, flesh and skin, downy hair
on my arms, curly hair on my head. Who knew me like that?
Who would even care to grasp for knowledge of me. Lightly as
we had tread, in my constrained middle-class life, I felt I had
crossed some taboo.

Was Curt really who he said he was? An artist who be-
came a builder to make a living, or a builder who became an
artist when he could live without working? I don’t know. A
philanthropist who acted on his Christian principles or just
someone pissed off enough at injustice to do a little some-
thing about it? I can’t answer those questions. I can only tell
you that the people in that church admired Curt for the
goodness he wasn’t wed to. His artistry was mentioned in
passing, but there was no mention of his sensuous creativity.
No doubt there were other women the church who, like me,
felt that maybe, just maybe if she let his hands wander he
would memorize her, find her in the dark. Perhaps he had
done that for them.

About a year after my studio tour, Curt tried to kiss
me on a staircase leading to his nearby and darkened exhibit
space. I demurred. The second try he merely bussed my face
near my lips as though someone had rubbed velvet on my
skin. I backed off with a little force. Pure reflex. “Okay. Okay,”
he raised his hands in surrender, “I’ll behave myself.” And
he did. I wonder sometimes what that kiss would have been

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about. A push towards an end or maybe an exploration of
what was going on, where we wanted to go from there. Curt
liked to search, and I wanted desperately to be found. For me,
each of Curt’s improprieties was like the thrust of a chisel, ex-
ploring in that block of wood for who I was. How did I look
naked, not just without clothes but without flesh? What was
the shape of my spirit, of my desire to be alive?

Keep chipping away, I wanted to say, show me who is in
there. Get to know her, Curt, then introduce me. I had done
a good job of hiding in that log of propriety and role playing.
I was married to a very good husband, laid claim to educated
children, a biggish job title. The bridge support I hid in had
been solid. As far as I know everyone believed it, even me. No
stray hair, no non-conformity broke through the surface. Nei-
ther could anyone reach in.

I remember a second-grade teacher with a deformed
thumb, looking as though it had been smashed to pulp in her
childhood, then allowed to grow back in any shape it wished.
She’d cup my chin in her palm and smooth my cheek with it. I
loved her beautiful thumb. If I’d had a deformed thumb would
someone have loved it? Would Curt have sculpted it?

A year or two later, Curt bought adjoining 1950s store-
fronts on the not yet resurrected end of Main Street and carved
a home out of burned joists and red clay. No one but Curt
could possibly have seen a home in there. I haunted the job
site when I was in town. If it looked like Curt was around
I wheedled for a tour of the progress. In a bear’s den of dirt
and dangling roots, I surveyed charred beams and chunks of
concrete fringed with twisted rebar while muscled, hard faced
men shoveled debris into big rubber trash cans.

Close to Curt, I whispered “Where’d you get this crew?
They look like they belong in prison.”

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“That’s where I got ‘em.”
The stringy muscle and deliberately unseeing eyes kindled
a sense of danger, but the men ignored me.
Curt indicated a semi excavated cave about a foot above
the main level. “That’s the bedroom.”
In the other direction he pointed into a wall of dirt.
“That’s gonna be a floor to ceiling window. Just slope the hill
away from the house a couple feet and we’ll be bathed in light.”
I swiveled left and right, awestruck at his imagination.
“First six feet across the front is my gallery. Buffer us from
the street.”
If your home is to be a work of art, you must discover
the home in the site the way you discover the woman in the
bridge strut. You see into the void and to see in such darkness
you must feel. You must know the malleability of dirt and con-
crete and the strength of your own will. There is no language
to express the unbedded bedroom or the unlighted window,
only feel.
Curt nurtured his southern-country accent and relished
his poor-stories. And while he did hail from a few acres down
a country road with his family name on it, he turned out as
smart and as worldly as any man. Most of it based on feel and
instinct.
“You’re ‘bout the only visitor I let in here,” Curt drawled,
“cause I know you can see it. Rest of ‘em got no idea.” It was
as though Curt stood me in front of a mirror and the woman
staring back was all carved from butter, smooth and slippery
to his touch. He never touched me on those trips, but was
flirtatious enough to look over his shoulder a few times to see
if he had opportunity. Nothing else in my life at that time gave
me opportunity to undulate in such a never-ending curve of
imagination.

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The finished house stood dense with weaving and wood,
tile and stone, bathed in meandering light and imagination.
Curt’s studio was perched in a rooftop garden. He opened
one of his many Italian sketchbooks of nude women, leaned
into my body and invited me to look. If only I hadn’t been
so afraid. I wanted to sit next to him and explore the draw-
ings, to run my fingers over the shapes, to feel Curt breathe,
to know him, to know myself as curve and movement, as
warmth and want, as need and arch. To know the slight
mound that is my belly, to thrust it upward and let Curt’s
palm feel it and hold the feeling till he would see me in the
wood.

But I would only glance at the pictures. I felt the danger
of my own sensual longings and disregard for too much good-
ness. I was never alone with Curt again. Not long thereafter
Curt went into the hospital for a simple procedure, contracted
sepsis and died within days.

In the deep, southern August heat, I walked several city
blocks and then across the breadth of the uneven graveyard
with a small hearty band of other mourners to the gravesite.
The noise of road traffic receded into the background, and a
ribbon of creative arousal drifted across the grassy mounds–
just Curt fooling around, I thought.

Inside my black linen dress, I felt the firmness of my own
body, appreciated the strength that had let me make the trek.
The priest intoned about being made of dust and returning
thereto, but I thought about being created of energy and curve
and imagination, of moving molecules, of all that Curt had
bequeathed to me.

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Claudia Geagan spent most of her life in big cities and big
corporations using her now aging degrees in English and Fi-
nance. These days she lives and writes on a leafy mountainside
near the Piedmont of the Blue Ridge. She enjoys yoga and golf.
Her work has appeared in the Lindenwood Review, Hippo-
campus Magazine, River Teeth’s Beautiful things, Persimmon
Tree, Adelaide Literary Magazine and others. She has been
nominated for a Pushcart Prize.

191

‘Independent’ Contractors
And Worker Precarity

by Peter Crowley

There is a strong push towards ‘independent’ contractors in
recent times. Ostensibly, this gives the worker a wider array of
freedom, in which the worker, too, is the capitalist reaping eco-
nomic rewards of a free enterprise system. Yet unlike an estab-
lished business performing contracted work for another busi-
ness or wealthy individual, the trend of the worker-made-inde-
pendent contractor today is to treat the individual worker, who
is very nearly an employee and sometimes ruled as such by U.S.
courts, as an ‘independent contractor’. Thereby, employers can
lessen their health insurance costs and not have to worry about
paying their de facto employees a minimum wage.

In my early twenties, I worked on and off at a hometown
courier company, Commonwealth Carrier Corporation. Regu-
larly I’d quit when I wanted more free time for music, writing
and travel and then return some time in the next year when my
bank account went thin. After traveling to Singapore and Japan
with my brother in early 2005 and then throwing my back out
during a second stint as a construction worker, I ended back at
Commonwealth Carrier and resumed my former role as lead

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driver. It would be my last time working there, for about a year
and a half before I went back to college.

When I returned to Commonwealth, I soon learned that
the co-founder of the company, who was a bit gruff but had a
good heart, had sold the company to a businessman not tradi-
tionally in the courier industry. The new company was called
Optima, an international shipping and packaging corporation.

There was an odd dynamic I noticed soon after returning,
which my colleagues complained to me about. The company was
shifting towards ‘independent’ contractors for delivery routes.
The couriers for the company were being pressured to assume the
status of independent contractors, for which they’d have to use
their own car, pay for gas and car repairs from their own pockets,
not to mention purchasing their own health insurance. As in-
dependent contractors, they would also lose their sick, vacation
days and other benefits. If they refused to comply, they would be
replaced by new independent contractors. The independent con-
tractor would be told what hours they could work, the delivery
route they would have and how to set up the route.

Because this move was extremely unpopular for the
workers, they hired a professional lobbyist, who had a genial
manner and previously worked as a lobbyist in the British and
Italian parliaments. His job was to smooth the transition to
independent contractors and convince driver-employees that
shifting to contractor status not only made them ‘their own
bosses’ (which was hardly the case in this or other instances of
independent contractors), but the switch would purportedly
also drastically increase their income. It goes without saying
that he did not mention their losing of company health insur-
ance or the expenses of maintaining a car that would be used
for about 50 hours/week delivering. These expenses would ac-
crue and substantially eat away at the new paycheck.

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Adelaide Literary Award 2019

Nearly all of the employee-couriers of the company de-
cided not to become ‘independent’ contractors, so the com-
pany hired contractors from outside. It was my job to train
these new contractors.

Occasionally, the former owner would randomly arrive
and sit on one of the two chairs towards the center-front of
the warehouse, in front of the distribution area, where drivers
would find the boxes and envelopes to be delivered.

I can remember the many times sorting large shipments
that just came in, as the manager would sometimes throw
them to me like a quarterback – if they were light enough –
and I, as the receiver, would catch them and place them into
the assigned area of the warehouse. Also, further back, I recall
coming into the warehouse in the morning stoned and going
to my area to organize the delivery route. On either side, old-
timers would be chatting, usually saying little to me. There
was one middle-aged former radio DJ who I would talk about
music occasionally.

But the company had drastically changed, so when the
former owner came in, who at that point was in an inebriated
alcoholic haze and would soon pass away from cirrhosis of the
liver, sat in the front center of the warehouse, as if visiting a
past life.

Upon my return to the company in the spring of 2005,
when he saw me he said, “Jesus Christ. It must be a vision! It
couldn’t you, Peter!”

Then I knew he was long gone. But perhaps, in some
clearer moments, while sitting in the warehouse that he for-
merly owned, he felt how much it had regressed. And his own
regression, after being born in 1945 at the dawn of America’s
Golden Age for industry and workers, was almost in parallel
with the diminishing of high-paying industrial age jobs.

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A decade later, the independent contractor industry has
run rampant, providing salaries without benefits with little
true freedom or independence, from the courier industry, to
information sciences and to passenger transportation services.
The most legally contested of these is the latter.

The cheap service of Lyft and Uber is paid for by the
ostensible ‘freedom’ of the workers. However, if Uber drivers
choose not to work at a certain time as measured through
their acceptance rate to take passengers, they will be ‘deacti-
vated’.1 Their independent contractor status has been fought
in court, the outcomes of which vary depending on states
and judges involved. Some variation in legal outcomes can be
attributed to the archaic industrial age laws that have not yet
caught up with crafty business innovations in ‘independent’
contracting.

Surely, one can argue that because one is not coerced into
driving for Uber or Lyft, they agreeably accept the terms and
conditions of their contractor status. Theoretically, this may be
true. But it is only true in a vacuum that eliminates any social
context. Unskilled jobs, which workers for Uber and Lyft are
generally in the market for, are low-paying and limited. They
do not offer wages that one can live on without government as-
sistance or working 60-plus hours a week. In other words, this
freedom of the unskilled worker is minimal, taking into con-
sideration basic survival, and exacerbated if they have a family
to help support. Uber and Lyft, along with other companies
that treat their independent contactors as something very close
to employees, exploit their workers. In turn, these companies
and the consumers benefit. The former benefit from increases
in stock value and profits, while the latter benefit from the low
price and convenience. To an extent the consumer is at fault;
they either do not know of the exploitation or do not care.

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Besides pushing regular employees to become ‘indepen-
dent contractors’ at Commonwealth under Optima ownership,
both the old and new managers took full advantage of the U.S.
Fair Labor Standards Act’s overtime exemption for workers in-
volved in interstate commerce. Immigrants and working poor
white, black and brown alike tended to work upward of 50-60
hours a week, with some working up to 90 hours.

In the late 1990s, wages at Commonwealth were pretty
low for Massachusetts, one of the most expensive states to in.
In December 1998, when I began working at Commonwealth
Carrier, I was told I would receive $8/hour, but ended up get-
ting $7.50 on my paycheck. I didn’t say anything because I was
just out of high school the previous spring, recently went on a
month-long trip cross country alone and, though I’d worked
at least a dozen different jobs up to that point (thanks largely
to working for a temp agency), I had finally found a job that
I enjoyed as a courier.

Six years later in 2004, after quitting, travelling, estab-
lishing a band, working other jobs and returning to Common-
wealth a handful of times, I was asked to become a lead driver.
I was told by the lower managers that it would be a ‘great
opportunity’ for me and that I’d get a $1.50/hour bump on
paycheck, raising my salary to either $11.25 or $11.50/hour. I
never actually accepted or refused the promotion, as I someone
who was content with a laidback delivery route, though was
not averse to trying something new.

One morning I went into work and there was someone
who I supposed to train to takeover my route. I accepted this
new reality ambivalently and decided, before leaving my route,
to ask out a woman who worked at Portrait Simple at the
Natick Mall, who I had heard from her co-workers liked me.
We ended up dating, living together for a couple years and

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ending up, as life would have it, with an ugly breakup. Though
I was by no means dying to take on the new lead driver role,
after being nudged into the position, I wanted the promised
compensation. But the new owner didn’t incorporate the salary
bump into my paycheck. So I went upstairs to the corporate
manager (who had been hired when Optima took over the
small business) and asked where the raise was. He said it’d be
on the next paycheck. Two weeks later, it was still not there.
The bastards, I thought. I went up again, this time I was colder
and more demanding. The boss claimed it would be on the
next paycheck. I told him that it had better be, along with back
pay for the previous two paychecks. The same thing happened
for the next month or so. Finally, I was given my $11.25/hour
salary, which the manager implied would break the business’s
back.

After I became lead driver for Commonwealth, I usu-
ally worked around 50-55 hours/week. Occasionally, working
hours would go higher when I covered routes for people who
worked themselves to death. An overweight, middle-aged white
man, who was infamous among the workers for his bad breath,
had a schedule that was nearly 80 hours per week. His day
route started at 8am and was based in downtown Boston and
Southie and then he had an evening-to-night bank run (bank
runs, we called them, as though they were bank robberies)
that began in rush hour in Lexington, went on to Newton and
ended around 10pm in Braintree. For four weeks, two weeks
learning the routes and two covering, I worked 80 hours/week.

I soon realized it wasn’t worth it to work exorbitantly, es-
pecially without overtime. So, I told the company that I was
taking multiple college classes (though I only ended up taking
one class) and needed Mondays off. They agreed to it. Without
unions or laws protecting the worker, how else to fight back

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against oppression but lie? Though I worked only four days, I
still averaged 45 hours/week.

Role change-related salary struggles call to mind my recent
experience at EBSCO. Nearly two years ago I was unofficially
promoted to become Workflow Coordinator for Abstracting
and Indexing (A&I), or a de facto team lead. After a couple
months, my co-worker Coordinator and I requested a salary
jump to compensate for additional work and responsibility.
The manager agreed but had no power to deliver; she went to
her own boss who refused the salary bump. The following year
we asked for a salary increase again; the manager agreed but
couldn’t even (apparently) get a meeting with upper manage-
ment about it. Presently, my immediate boss is in the process
of – at last – strongly advocating for my official promotion
after nearly two years as Workflow Coordinator/Team Lead.

Such anecdotes highlight the fact that this is not a good
time for the American worker without advanced high-tech skills.

In the A&I department at EBSCO, I was initially under
threat of Tom Friedman’s much celebrated global outsourcing
in The World Is Flat. External vendors in the Philippines, India
and Israel were increasingly distributed most of our work. As
high technology has morphed at an exponential pace, in six
short years, in-house A&I workers’ primary threat to employ-
ment shifted to artificial intelligence and machine learning
software. In each situation, we would be training another
entity or person our occupational knowledge so that it/them
could covet our jobs.

I stepped into my first office job a month before turning
32, at EBSCO Information Services. For someone who had
worked as a courier for approximately 13 years, I had a hard
time adjusting to the office environment. It seemed absurd

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