I was forty, and single, and pregnant, and jubilant. I blossomed during a perfect pregnancy and then proceeded to give birth to a beautiful baby boy I named Ryan Peter Schoenthaler, eight pounds twelve ounces and twenty-one gorgeous inches long. He died nine days later in my arms, still and cool.
I buried that boy on a sunny hillside in a tiny casket designed to look like a bassinet, and by the time I stumbled out of the cemetery, I was a dead woman walking. Some days I couldn’t keep my eyes open; other days I could barely speak. I dreamed in adjectives: impossible, unbearable, unimaginable; I woke up with verbs: pulverized, imploding, eviscerated.
Two years later, I gave birth to a boy named Kenzie James. I got through the pregnancy and birth through denial, plain and simple, with one permanent pricetag: nine months of total amnesia. Of that period of pregnant pause, I remember OJ Simpson and I remember grinding my teeth, and that is really all.
Three miscarriages and three years later, when my last son came along—Cooper Craig Schoenthaler—I was wholly awake and fully attentive and I remember everything. Of the six pregnancies, I am left with one birth story.
Cooper was delivered by Cesarean section. An average C-section takes six or seven minutes from incision to delivery; Kenzie’s took an endless half-an-hour; Cooper, eleven minutes. Eleven minutes to a lifetime.
I lay there while they opened me up again, floating along the arc-line that had gradually and irrevocably led me to this scene—lying flat on my back in a yellow room with bright lights. I was a woman physician under the care of women who started out just like me, women who struggled over books and tests and money and hostile men in positions of power for years at a time and who now put their bodies and souls on the line.
I remember my obstetrician Sharon coming to my hospital room at midnight to attend Ryan’s brain-dead baptism. I picture her holding my hand in the NICU that night and then again and again over the next five years. I think of all the phone calls: I would sob and she would let me make any appointment any time as I worked through the surviving of survivorship.
I think of all the tables I have laid on and all the doctors I have seen—a long line, a stately procession—giving me good news and bad news and no news at all. I think of Ryan’s delivery and his death. I think of how I lifted his body straight up above me, offering him to the sky. I think of Sharon two years later holding Kenzie aloft, in triumph, a giddy elevation of child-spirit, a peak moment, a crystal. I think of the dim light in Ryan’s NICU room where his soul sailed away, and the bright lights in Kenzie’s delivery room when his soul sailed in.
I think of the night light that Kenzie uses—how at three he is already such a singular little person who wants to look at books alone at night, how his soul is full of light and always has been. I feel the presence of both Kenzie and Ryan very distinctly within me, as well as a whole line of women who have given birth before me—my grandmothers and my friends, my mom and all the bereaved women in books and on buses.
I listen to the heartbeat monitors and think of Ryan’s heartbeat ceasing and Kenzie’s frantic heartbeat when he’s feverish and the roaring in my ears each time I miscarried and I can’t help but compare them to the steady beat-beat-beat that is my own heart’s rhythm in this room at this moment.
It’s a long eleven minutes.
Then I hear Sharon start to croon. In seemingly an instant, she again holds one of my sons aloft in the light. The overhead lamps create an aura, a halo, an embrace and I experience blindness reversed as the light heightens every pore and every limb and Cooper is outlined in beauty, screaming shrieking bloody beauty. He is alive, he is aquiver, he is a soul.
They bring him to me wrapped up and warm. I get my first good hard look at him: he is red-faced and dumbstruck, and I am the same.
I reach for him. No one says a word. The room is quiet; it feels like an altar. There’s no heart monitor machines now, no barking loudspeakers, just the murmuring of Sharon and her partner, and the nurses counting sponges. I kiss Coop over and over—his perfect cheeks, perfect skin, perfect neck. He turns to me when I speak.
I lay there with this miracle in my arms, flooded with all that can happen over the course of half a decade. I remember the long period after Ryan’s death when a pain-free interval seemed impossible, when anguish never ended and never waxed or waned.
But I realize, lying there, that somehow, somewhere, something carried me through. It is too strong to call it “hope”: there was no hoping back then. It’s too strong to say it was anchored in me—it was not. But it must have floated, in and out, with the moon, or with the seasons, or maybe with each breath.
Because something helped me hear the muffled words that sometimes bounced off the sheer rock cliffs of my pain. I began to hear the voices in the cemeteries I visited—voices of mothers who murmured that if I could just keep breathing long enough the tunneled darkness might begin to lift. I began to see the anguish of my cancer patients in terms of cells defying death. I began to connect myself to a humanity bound up with suffering—plague victims, war dead, road kill, religious martyrs, and most of all a long line of women who had keened over children in caskets.
Something had taken hold of me. It wasn’t optimism or confidence or faith in an equitable universe—that was gone and would never come back.
It was much fainter: a tiny turning, a whispered murmur, a miniature red berry lying deep and dormant. But the berry dropped a seed and the seedling took. A tiny bud appeared and on it there must have been a drop of dew, and that was where I let that little thing that must have been hope float. I never touched it, I never named it, I really never even knew it was there. I just let it float. I let my hope float. I let my hope float on an impossibly tiny bud and now I had another son, I had two more sons.
They move us to the recovery room where it is dimly lit and quiet. Cooper nurses. I am pain-free and at a level of peace that is hard to describe to this world. I curl up on the gurney in the darkened recovery room, all dreamy sated senses.
Eventually the nurse and I begin to chat. She remembers Ryan well. “Every time I pass Room 428 I think of all the flowers you left behind,” she tells me. Then we coo about Cooper, how beautiful he is and already such a good nurser and so alert and connected and smart.
She tells me then about her own difficulties with conceiving, her doubts and how frightened she has become. I can so completely relate to this young woman at the beginnings of yet another long trail. She says to me, “We’ve tried so hard to have a baby, but I’m afraid to keep trying. How did you keep your hope alive?”
I start to tell her, but I hesitate. I’m suddenly tired beyond imagining, my eyes and limbs feel weak and I am nearly asleep. I murmur, “Just let it float.” She says, “Hope Floats? Isn’t that a movie?” and I giggle into the pillow.
Lying there laughing, I feel them like a flash flood, the raw and precious lives that led us here: the lives where pain has a beginning but anguish has an end, where seasons start and berries fall, where there are voices that can pierce the darkness and where cells that split can mean life in one year and death in the next and where there are webs that connect us with our ancestors and that in the darkest winter there are buds that can act as cradles and that hope may not spring eternal but that it can absolutely float.
•••
ROBIN SCHOENTHALER is a writer/mom/physician (the order varies by the day) who lives outside Boston with her sons Kenzie and Cooper. They are now seventeen and fourteen, and Ryan, had he lived, would be a freshman in college. Her website is www.DrRobin.org.
The blinking red light of the phone machine, as usual, unnerves me. Why do I always think that somehow this will be the message that changes my life? It’s all I can do to walk past it, even though I’m holding my baby daughter Pari, even though I need to put her down gently to keep her warm and asleep. Still thinking of that machine, I wait a beat, two. Her breathing is normal, calm. Exhaling now, I walk back to my machine, abandoning my wife Nilly who, as usual, wants to glow in our daughter’s sleep.
There are two messages flashing at me, actually. The first is mainly silence until the very end when I hear “TERRY BARR” in a voice attempting to speak its authority. The message ends there.
The next one begins.
I am standing alone in our living room looking out of the broad picture window at our quiet, connector street. It’s getting late on this Saturday night, ten days before Christmas. Nilly hasn’t emerged yet from Pari’s bedroom, which rests at the back of the house, far from the living room where I stand, and I thank God for that now.
When I hear it, I freeze until the message runs out. I look back towards my daughter’s room. Has Nilly heard? But there is nothing stirring back there, no “Oh my God,” and no footsteps approaching with worry and fear. So it’s only me. Me and my machine.
And those words.
Before I can think this through, I do the one thing that in the light of day I’ll most regret: I hit the erase button. But I want to make this disappear. I want to throw my machine like a discus out into the night. I want to wake up again on Saturday morning for a do-over. I want never to have heard what I heard, and more than anything else, I want to be sure that neither my wife nor our daughter has heard it. Or ever will hear it.
And it’s only in this last desire that I succeed.
•••
We had been to two Christmas parties that night. The first was an Amnesty International gathering celebrating our recent success in our Holiday Card Action campaign. We’d succeeded in sending over one hundred greeting cards to prisoners of conscience all over the world that morning as we took to the main street of our downtown. Stationing ourselves at a cross street with heavy shopping traffic, we would gently accost perfect strangers who’d sometimes smile and sometimes sneer at us as we ask them to send a message of hope to a prisoner of conscience of their choice. We have twenty-five to thirty different prisoners to work for—men and women who have been bound and held in a prison in some remote part of the world for exercising their human right to speak their beliefs, wear what they want, or support some loved one who has run afoul politically of a governmental tyrant.
Mixed in, too, and usually the hardest to get people to sign for, are the death penalty cases. Amnesty unconditionally opposes the death penalty in all circumstances. Sometimes our card-signers want to debate the issue with us. These debates usually get nowhere, and I often refuse to engage because who knows what this other person has experienced? My strong beliefs are my own, and I keep telling myself that I’m not threatening or challenging anyone else’s, or if I am, I’m doing so respectfully. Beliefs can’t hurt, right? I’m aware of the irony here that if I truly think that beliefs can’t hurt, I won’t fully get what Amnesty’s prisoners are suffering.
Still, it turned out to be a good day despite these moments of doubt and conflict. Over a hundred messages of hope that we hope will reach our prisoners. Maybe it’s true that Christmas does bring out “goodwill toward men.”
At our party this night, everyone is in high spirits. We toast each other for our success; we toast those who signed our cards. We toast our prisoners and hope that next year they’ll be free. And we toast the founders of Amnesty, two British students who wanted to change the world, or at least show the hopeless that someone cares.
Our Amnesty group is a diverse lot: teachers, students, lawyers, social workers, and psychologists. Our group leader is a British astronomer, one of the smartest men I’ve ever known. A man, in his sixties, who still likes to climb a good tree.
We eat our potluck supper, raise our glasses one more time, and then the three of us—Nilly, Pari, and me thriving on all the attention—head off to our next gathering, which is a party for the staff of our weekly alternative newspaper. I’ve been writing film and local theatre reviews over the past year, trying to hone my skills and give voice to whatever arts scene our town has.
The party is held at a duplex in an older part of town. As we enter its arched doorway and I see peeling paint on the inner hall walls, I’m reminded of all those grad school parties I attended not so many years ago. Our host, a guy wearing a silken robe and an ascot over what might be flannel pajamas, leads us to a side porch where a pumped up keg awaits. Strings of mismatched Christmas lights are draped haphazardly from room to room, greeting us everywhere we turn, but saying what?
Pari is sneezing at the party’s cigarette smoke. I barely know the paper’s editor—and he’s the only person I know here—but he’s nowhere to be found at first. Soon I see him and another boy his age tumbling out of the bathroom.
“Hey Terry,” he says, before his momentum, or his friend’s weight, pushes him out the door onto the porch.
“Are we about ready to leave,” Nilly asks. She gives me that look, but it isn’t necessary. Not at all.
I love this paper and am glad it gives no restrictions on what I write about and say. No word count; no demand to simply recount the plot and give a thumbs up or down. There is a star system, though, and for my latest review, I gave Spike Lee’s X four and a half stars out of five. I thought Lee’s ability to capture the complexity of Malcolm in just under three hours was a feat itself worthy of high praise. I appreciated his courage and tenacity. His audacity. And my review said so.
As we drive home, I’m thinking that even though we stayed at this party for barely half an hour, it was worth it to mingle with people who, even in our small town, aspire to a more bohemian lifestyle. In fact, the whole evening for me has been warm and cheerful—an evening surrounded by friends and people who love each other. While I’m not a Christian any more, this time of year is still—and I know of no other word for it—so joyous.
Or so I believe until we get home. Until we walk in the front door and I see that red blinking light. Until I press the “play message” button.
Until I hear his voice.
•••
The next morning I walk across the street to my neighbor’s house. Steve’s a police detective, and he agrees to come over and talk to us. After greeting Nilly, he gets right to the point.
“Why did you erase that message?”
“I don’t know. I just reacted. I didn’t want anyone else to hear.”
“What exactly did it say again?”
“Well, it began with: ‘Terry Barr!!! We know who you are and where you live! We’re watching you!’”
That was bad enough.
“Have you had any other messages like this?”
And then I remember the other late night calls, the ones asking: “Is this Mark, the Art professor at ClintonCollege?” The same college that employs me.
“He doesn’t live here,” I answer, but the caller hangs up before I can ask “Why do you think he lives with me,” or more importantly, “Just who the hell are you anyway?”
“All I can tell you to do,” Stevesays, “is to save any other messages you get, and put call-tracing on your phone. We need to build a case file and collect evidence.”
I must still be in shock. Will this work? Will I even want to answer the phone again? Still, we purchase call tracing, the phone calls stop.
In their place, packages begin arriving. Round, white packages unlike any I’ve ever received. They come from The Bradford Exchange and other such “collectible” outlets. Commemorative plates and coins: things you see advertised in popular magazines or on late-night TV. Places with 800-numbers that don’t ask questions and don’t demand credit cards. Places that allow the “Bill Me Later” option.
Over the next few weeks, we receive BassMaster equipment, Columbia House LPs usually containing the latest from Brooks and Dunn or Toby Keith—musicians I’d never intentionally listen to. We get subscriptions to RollingStone, Field and Stream.
Penthouse.
“I’ve never seen a Penthouse,” Nilly says.
When we see him, we ask the postman what we should do with this stuff.
“You didn’t order it, did you?”
“No.”
“Well, it’s all yours then. They can’t do anything to you!”
So we return what we can, refuse what we’ll never want.
And then the first Hustler arrives. We’re anxious now, and ashamed of the pornography, of the violation, of someone we don’t know imagining us holding such a magazine.
I call their 800-number to cancel any other Hustlers and strangely, miraculously, they’ve saved the order card. They mail it to me, and I see the writing for the first time. A hand not only not my own, but a form of printing that I’d characterize as coming from someone who isn’t comfortable holding a pen, someone who stopped paying attention to anything scholastic around the sixth grade.
Next comes an afternoon call from a representative trying to confirm the “escort” I’ve ordered for that evening:
“I have the request right here on my phone tape, though I have to say that the voice really doesn’t sound like yours.”
“Could you play it for me?”
He does. It’s familiar, I think, the same voice: deep, smug, satisfied with itself but in a southern dialect not even remotely close to mine.
I’m from the South, have lived in this region all my life, from Alabama to Tennessee and now here in South Carolina. When I travel to New York or Boston, people there recognize my southern accent immediately. But down here, there are people who believe I’m from New York. Maybe it’s my training in music and theatre back in high school. Maybe it’s that while my mother drawls with the best of them, my father, also a native southerner, has a different slant. A Jewish slant. An accent that seems to defy a specific region.
All I know is that the voice on that tape is truly and defiantly southern. And not “city Southern” either:
“Mah name is Turry Bawhr, an’ I’ed lahke an es Cort for toonaght at sebm.”
He gives our address, and then, in an even more smug tone, he signs off with a “Thaink yew vera much!”
I ask, and in a compliant and law-abiding way, the escort service turns the taped message over to the police. And then, the calls start coming again. Always late at night; always asking for “Mark.” We trace these, turn them over to our investigator. Months have passed since the initial disturbing call, and we have collected diecast cars and random cologne samples and Playboys and US magazines. And more BassMaster stuff. I can’t begin to describe all that we got, all that subsequently made up our massive yard sales.
The police have enough evidence now to confront our harasser. He hasn’t actually committed a crime, but they think they can at least scare him, intimidate him. Make him stop. And just as they’re ready to do so, we put it together, or at least together enough to see how this started, to understand what set him off.
I had asked Nilly before if she remembered any crank calls, anything suspicious, even anything that seemed innocent. It’s usually the thing you’ve forgotten, the thing you say to yourself, “It just couldn’t be.”
“You know,” she says, “there was this time when I got a call asking if you were the same Terry Barr who reviewed movies. I said ‘yes,’ but that he’d have to call back to speak to you. He was polite and thanked me.”
“But he never called back.”
“No, he never called back…Why did I tell him who you were?”
“It’s okay. You couldn’t have known.”
A few days later, our investigator checks in. He and another officer paid our caller a visit. They told him they knew what he was doing and that if he didn’t stop, we might press charges. He never actually denied anything, but he didn’t admit his guilt either.
“We warned him pretty good. You should know, though, that he’s in his late thirties and still lives with his parents. And, of course, he has a record.”
“For what?”
“Indecent exposure.”
They even tell me his name, and later, I look him up and find out where he lives—an area of town notorious for its less-than-progressive thinking, though of course I’m just stereotyping now. It does my soul—so committed to human rights—no good to know the truth behind every stereotype, or to be right in my stereotyping. Is it good to know who this man is, though? Can knowing bring peace?
“Well, that’s all we can do for now,” our investigator says. “Let’s hope he doesn’t bother you again.”
I understand. I’ve watched enough episodes of Law and Order in my life to get it. To get that the best we can do is to change and unlist our phone number, and so we do. The phone calls stop, but the packages still come.
A year or so later, after our second daughter is born, we move to a larger house in a different zip code. The packages stop then, and after a few months, I finally get out of the habit of looking out our window at night when random cars come driving by.
It’s obvious, too obvious to say—though I will anyway—that though I erased that tape, I can’t erase its memory, its message. I can’t erase the fear or the harassment of those many nights in our young life.
I did tell Nilly, as well as the police, what the voice on that tape said. But thankfully, neither Nilly nor Pari ever had to hear that voice, so if they have any memory of that night or that time, at least it won’t be what I remember. At least I protected them from that. And if I did put them at risk by liking Spike Lee’s X, or erasing a hate-filled tape, I’m as sorry as I can be, as I’ve ever been. We didn’t deserve this; of course we didn’t. But then, does anybody?
“Terry Barr!!! We know who you are and where you live! We’re watching you! Remember. WE KNOW WHERE YOU LIVE! SIEG HEIL, SIEG HEIL, SIEG HEIL!”
•••
TERRY BARR is a regular contributor to culturemass.com and has had essays published or forthcoming in such journals as The Museum of Americana, Hamilton Stone Literary Review, Fat City Review, Sport Literate, and Melange Press. He lives with his wife and two daughters in Greenville, South Carolina.
Until recently, I’d entered a hospital exactly three times in my life: for my own birth (technically my mom walked through the swinging doors on that occasion) and for the routine births of my two sons. That was it. At forty-five, I’d never so much as had my tonsils out. And I liked it that way. Oh, I knew all about the OR and the ER, the NICU, and the PICU. But that familiarity derived from TV hospital dramas and heartrending medical memoirs, long my guilty, voyeuristic pleasures.
This contented detachment from all things hospital ended abruptly when I learned that I needed surgery to remove a benign ovarian cyst. The news sunk in with horrid clarity. Scenes from those shows and books flashed into my mind: the tense OR, doctors barking medical jargon, machines hissing—and myself in the center of it all, off the sidelines, pitched into the drama. Even allowing for my propensity toward the melodramatic, it was an alarming scenario.
At the same time, I also felt ridiculous: here I was in midlife, scared of a situation most of my friends had dealt with before the age of ten. Of course, none of my third grade pals had read Atul Gawande’s Complications: A Surgeon’s Notes on an Imperfect Science before going in for those once-routine tonsillectomies.
It wasn’t the surgery itself that unnerved me the most. It was the idea of being put to sleep. What if I didn’t wake up? My best friend in college had knee surgery our freshman year. She woke up. My sister opened her eyes after a c-section. I wasn’t thinking about them, or the scads of people who awaken in recovery rooms every day. Instead, I fixated on a minor character in one of one of Ann Hood’s memoirs, a young woman who dies from a rare reaction to anesthesia while getting wisdom teeth removed. I told myself it was crazy, but I couldn’t shake the vision of looking blurrily up at a masked face, and then…the final darkness.
I looked forward to the first appointment with my surgeon. My book group had recommended Dr. M., whose name inevitably popped up in any online discussion of local OB/GYNs, trailing adjectives like awesome, caring, respectful, and empathetic. Maybe Dr. Awesome would calm my fears.
When we met, Dr. M. turned out to be unsmiling and matter-of-fact. “I can schedule you for Tuesday, “ she said briskly. This was Thursday. I blanched.
Dr. M. gave me an appraising look, then switched smoothly to empathetic. “Some women need more time to adjust to the idea of surgery. I’m, ah, guessing you’re one of those.” We settled on a date six weeks away. Then I asked about the anesthesia.
“There’s always a risk of complications,” she acknowledged. “But it’s very small. And they’ll give you something to help you relax before the surgery.”
I nodded. In all the books and doctor shows, patients are well tranquillized by the time they roll into the OR. With enough pharmaceutical assistance, maybe I wouldn’t be freaking out, after all.
To allay my fears during the final weeks before my surgery, I asked everyone I knew for reassurance about going under. “It was HEAVEN,” responded a woman on a parenting message board—clearly the mother of an infant. “A medically induced nap.”
At my pre-op appointment, Dr. M. concluded by prescribing post-surgery drugs. “Would you like Percocet or Vicodin?” she asked, pen poised over her pad like a waiter inquiring whether I preferred the merlot or the pinot.
I looked at her blankly. Was evaluating the relative merits of prescription painkillers one of those modern-age skills I had failed to acquire, like texting? I searched my brain. “Um, Dr. House is addicted to Vicodin, I know that,” I offered.
“Let’s go with the Percocet,” Dr. M. said quickly.
•••
A week later at the hospital, nurses set me up in a curtained cubicle under what looked like a white blow-up swim raft. A continuous flow of warm air into the raft made it settle into position just above me. I wondered why they didn’t just give me a blanket.
My husband and I waited in the cubicle, where I grew increasingly twitchy. He read Coraline out loud to pass the time. “Is this too creepy for you?” he asked, after the chapter where Coraline is locked in the closet with the ghost children.
I contemplated the warming raft, hovering over me like a monstrous cocoon, and the imminent prospect of being rendered unconscious, possibly forever, via a needle in my vein. “Not really,” I said.
Now and then nurses came around with apologies about the delay. Dr. M. was delivering an early baby, it seemed. “Oh, that’s fine!” I assured them, doing my best to impersonate the plucky patient everyone loves. “It’s actually the anesthesia that really bothers me.” I didn’t mention my anxiety about waking up afterwards, figuring this might attract the evil eye, make me look paranoid, or both.
“Don’t you worry,” one nurse told me. “They’ll give you something to help you relax.” I was relieved to learn that relaxation was still on the agenda. I needed some of that, and soon. The nurse checked my chart. “Ah, you’ve got Dr. A.,” she said. “He’s the best anesthesiologist in the hospital. Really skillful, just great. He’s the one I’d want for my own family.” She winked. “And he’s the best looking, too.”
What did it mean, I wondered aloud after she left, that the nurse thought my anesthesiologist was hot? Why did she tell me this? Was I meant to conclude that good looks correlated with skill?
“I think you’re over-analyzing this,” said my husband.
It took three nurses and five tries to get the IV into my apparently miniscule vein. By the end, I was thoroughly demoralized. In that motherly way of theirs, the nurses kept repeating that I was “being a trooper, honey.”
The anesthesiologist arrived at my cubicle to introduce himself. He was tall and dark, but no McDreamy. Here comes the relaxation, I thought gratefully. Instead, Dr. A. inquired about my breakfast—a ruse designed to reveal whether I’d eaten anything since midnight—and asked a few routine medical questions. “I’ll see you soon,” he said cheerfully before departing. I interpreted this to mean that he’d return momentarily to administer my medicinal stress relief.
Eventually, some bustle began in the vicinity of my cubicle. A gurney arrived, along with a new nurse. She was short and solid and looked very capable. “Ready to go?” she asked.
My husband was holding my hand. “Can I go along?”
“Absolutely,” said Nurse Capable.
I watched the florescent lights pass overhead as we rolled through the long, white corridors and into an elevator lined with burnished metal, like a high-end refrigerator. I tried to breathe calmly and listen to Nurse Capable’s soothing flow of chit-chat. It was mostly about Dr. A and what a great guy he was. “He’ll set you right up,” she said. “Like drinking a bottle of your favorite wine, that’s how relaxed you’ll be.” I appreciated her reassurance. But wasn’t I supposed to be relaxed already?
At the swinging doors to the OR, my husband kissed me goodbye—this part, at any rate, was just like the doctor shows—and I rolled in. The room was very cold and full of people. Bright lights pointed in all directions. Over to the side, on a blue-draped cart, lay a glittering row of sharp metal instruments. I stared at them in dismay. I wasn’t meant to be seeing this. I was supposed to be doped up, so I wouldn’t notice all those scalpels, or wouldn’t care if I did. Instead, I felt horribly lucid.
Nurse Capable maneuvered my gurney to the center of the room. “Ok, hop up on the table,” she instructed.
I’m not proud of my fascination with medical dramas. I admit, there’s an element of morbid rubbernecking involved. And I’ve known all along that they can’t be very realistic, not all of them. But never, not on St. Elsewhere (my gateway drug to the genre), or on any I’ve seen since, has anyone told the patient to hop up on the table. The patients are too relaxed—like I was supposed to be!—to hop anywhere.
Lacking other options, however, I hopped up. Dr. M.’s masked face loomed over me. “This is Dr. S., who’ll be assisting today,” she said, pointing to one of the gowned figures hovering nearby. “Our anesthesiologist will be along soon.” Then she nodded to toward another masked face. “And this is Alex.”
“Hey, how ya doin’?” said a youthful voice.
Who the heck was Alex? Was this Take Your Kid Brother to Work day? And couldn’t he guess how I was doing? “Frankly, I’m terrified,” I said. “Isn’t everyone?”
“Huh. You mean you’ve never had surgery?” Alex asked.
I couldn’t keep the edge from my voice. “No, I have never had surgery. Have most people?”
“Oh yeah, once you get to be, like, forty, it’s a lot more common.” In the mind of Alex —whoever he was—it was clear that forty lay on a remote horizon indeed. I hoped he wouldn’t be allowed too near any of those scalpels.
Dr. M. spoke up. “Ah, here’s Dr. A.,” she said soothingly. “I know you’re nervous about all this. He’s giving you something to help you relax right now.”
I looked up at the lights. I looked around at the instruments and the machinery. A couple of minutes seemed to pass. My final minutes, possibly. “I don’t feel relaxed,” I said.
Seemingly two seconds later, I opened my eyes to a bright yellow light. My mouth felt coated in sawdust, and I was barely conscious, but I knew instantly, gratefully, that I had woken up, after all. “I’m thirsty,” I croaked, hoping someone was listening. “I’m really thirsty. Is everything okay?”
“What did she say?” said a voice.
“I couldn’t make it out,” said another.
“I’m thirsty,” I repeated. “Can I have some water?” The words seemed to float languidly above me into the brightness, like the viscous bubbles drifting upward in a lava lamp. I heard each syllable go by and slowly realized why no one understood: I was speaking Arabic. For it’s own inscrutable reasons, my consciousness had emerged from its chemical sleep set to a language I hadn’t spoken on a daily basis since leaving the Peace Corps, nearly two decades earlier.
I’d navigated a good deal of foreign territory during the course of that long, strange day. The doctor shows had prepared me for the high tech equipment and medical jargon. The memoirs had given me other people’s stories to latch onto. Still, so much had been unfamiliar. (I never did discover the identity of Alex). And yet, I realized afterward, nothing had been quite so alien, so mysterious, as that moment of awakening. It was what I’d fixated on for so many weeks, and it had gone exactly the way it was supposed to. Yet the return to consciousness, and the surfacing of those long dormant words, had brought with it a different, unlooked for awareness: the strangest thing I’d encountered in the hospital wasn’t frightening at all, and it turned out to be inside my own head.
•••
KATE HAAS is a creative nonfiction editor at Literary Mama and the publisher of Miranda, a long-running print zine about motherhood. Her writing has appeared in Salon, Brain, Child, Babble, and TheToronto Star. She lives in Portland, Oregon, with her family. Read more of her writing at www.katehaas.com.
Bone tired and drunk on whiskey, I was wedged in the corner of a booth at Gus O’Connor’s Pub in the small seaside town of Doolin, Ireland. I watched my three girlfriends chat up an international coterie of men who had flocked to our table, drawn to the trio of boozed-up beauties. Adecade older than my friends and more plain, I was excluded from the sexual energy that emanated from their flirtatious repartee, and I turned my attention to the musicians who filled the air with the sometimes jaunty, sometimes mournful sounds of their guitars, fiddles, and accordion. I recently had grown accustomed to my place in the periphery of my friends’ mating dance.
For years I had been a suburban divorced mom, occupied by working as an arts editor for the local newspaper and raising two sons mostly on my own. But that all changed when my youngest son left home for college. I decided my life needed a shakeup, so I broke up with my boyfriend of twelve years and moved into the city. Although a mere ten miles separated my former home (a ’60s ranch house in a working-class neighborhood) from my new abode (a shabby Victorian duplex in the shadow of glass-and-steel high-rises), they were worlds apart.
The moving van had barely pulled away from the curb when I found myself thrust into a lifestyle more like that of a college freshman than a divorced mom in her late-forties. A simple invitation to a colleague’s house party was my entrée into a lively social circle of mostly thirtysomething journalists and publicists who threw raucous parties, went to clubs to hear bands, and closed down bars three and four nights a week. Seemingly overnight, my phone was ringing with invitations to meet my new friends for drinks, dinner, and more. I soon developed an impressive tolerance for alcohol consumption and a constant quest for the perfect concealer to hide the permanent dark circles beneath my eyes.
One night after work, I met my friend Shelly for a beer at our favorite neighborhood bar. A flirtatious redhead with a penchant for floral print sundresses and red lipstick, Shelly is the most extroverted of my friends and the ringleader of our social activities. Her perpetually cranky boyfriend had recently moved out of the duplex they’d shared for six years and taken up with an art school student nineteen years his junior. Since her breakup, we occasionally lamented our single status. We missed having someone to share our beds, to kill our bugs, to carry out our trash; lately what we missed most was our traveling companions. That’s when we came upon the idea of taking a trip together. I had been dreaming of Ireland, and that suited Shelly, so we decided to book a trip in March.
We invited two friends to join us: Amy, the marketing director for the newspaper where I worked, a short, curvy blonde with an infectious giggle and dimples to match, and Scottie, an advertising executive at a global marketing firm, a tall, willowy, strawberry blonde. Amy recently had broken up with her boyfriend, a cute bald-headed boy and utilities trader who had become so obsessed with online gambling he no longer left his apartment. Scottie had been on her own for years, having yet to recover from the day she returned to her elegant, antiques-and-art-filled home to find her trust fund-baby boyfriend of seven years in bed with another woman.
Over a round of drinks one night, we raised our glasses to toast the fact that we were independent women with disposable income who didn’t need men by our sides to see the world.
•••
Our journey began in Dublin, where we spent our days touring the usual sights—museums, churches and shops—and our nights were spent in the pubs where I often found myself shuttled to the side as men elbowed their way in to chat up the girls. Sometimes I would return to the table from a visit to the restroom to find my chair taken by another potential suitor. There was a time when I would have been in that game, I thought, but it appeared that time had passed.
But then, I’d look at these men—overgrown boys really—with their drunken swagger and imbecilic conversations laced with crude double entendres, and I’d wonder why my friends bothered. Especially knowing the night would end on a sour note when the pub closed and the men realized my friends were just having a bit of fun and were going home alone.
After a couple of days in Dublin, we planned to spend the rest of our stay in Galway, but first was the leg of our trip I had anticipated most. I was leading the charge on a 250-mile roundtrip driving tour south of Galway through the picturesque Dingle Peninsula and back north again to spend the night in Doolin, a tiny seaside town famous for its pubs and the local musicians who gather there to play traditional Irish music.
The day of our journey, we woke up early and went to the hotel dining room for breakfast where I scanned the morning paper over a plate of bacon and eggs. “Listen to this,” I said, as I relayed the lead story. A man convicted of raping a divorced mother of three had been set free on probation, and his victim, Mary Shannon, had gone public to renounce the light sentence. Activists were rallying around her, and a protest march was planned in her hometown of Ennis. We studied the photograph of Mary Shannon, her long brown hair framing a face etched with anger.
“Unbelievable!” I said. “He was found guilty!”
“I guess you can get away with rape in Ireland,” said Shelly.
We finished our breakfast and the girls sipped a round of mimosas in the hotel lobby while I negotiated the terms with the car rental agent, a blustery, red-faced man straight out of central casting whose brogue was so thick, I barely understood a word he said. After his interminable lecture on the car’s operating systems, we took our positions—me behind the wheel, Shelly in the passenger seat with a map on her lap, and Amy and Scottie in the back seat. Off we set.
“Stay left, stay left!” “Watch the curb!” were Shelly’s constant refrains the first hour or so of our drive. Any other time I would have been annoyed, but mastering the art of driving on the left was no easy task and I welcomed her warnings. It couldn’t have been a more beautiful, sunny day, despite the March chill, and we admired the lovely green countryside, the low-slung stone walls and the charming little towns we passed as we headed south. But traversing the narrow, winding roads proved more time consuming than we had imagined, and three hours into our journey we found ourselves in a quandary. Our progress had been slow and time was passing; we began to wonder if we could cover all the ground we had hoped to in one day.
We stopped in the village of Camp, the northern gateway to Dingle Peninsula, and studied the map. It indicated a coastal road that looped around the land mass and a cut-through that dissected it called Conor Pass, at the end of which was the village of Dingle. If we drove the circumference of the peninsula, could we get to Doolin in time to make it to the pubs?
“Well, we’ve made it to Dingle Peninsula. We could just turn around and go back now,” said Shelly.
“The point was not to just come here,” I protested. “I want to actually see it. Maybe we could just drive along the northern route a bit, then turn around and head back.”
As precious minutes ticked by, Shelly and I debated our options and studied the map while Amy and Scottie sat quietly in the back seat. The more laid-back half of our quartet had been content so far to let the two alpha-chicks in the front seat call the shots. But we had reached in impasse.
“We’ve come this far. I think we should at least drive through Conor Pass,” Scottie said.
So we all agreed and proceeded along the northern route of Dingle Peninsula, speeding as fast as the narrow road would allow and climbing dramatically in altitude. Before long we noticed there was not another car in sight, not a house, not a road marker, not a sign of civilization anywhere.
“Look behind us!” Amy shouted, and we all looked back at the sunny, grassy, low-lying plains rimmed by the sea now far below us. It was a splendid sight, but it did not prepare us for what was to come. No sooner did we fix our eyes back on the road ahead that we rounded a sharp curve that revealed a vastly different vista.
Like some sort of eerie, lunar landscape, Conor Pass lay before us: a rollercoaster of massive stone mountains as far as the eyes could see. One after another, they rolled toward the horizon, all gray and rounded and rocky. We wound our way through the mountains, around enormous boulders that looked poised to roll over on us at any moment. Along the way were wide spots in the road where we pulled over to get out of the car and run up and down natural stepping-stones that led toward barren mountaintops. We rubbed our fingertips over thick carpets of fuzzy mosses and teal-colored lichen that grew in nooks and crevices around the rocks. We wet our hands in natural spigots of rushing cold water that splashed out of holes in the mountain, creating small pools and streams.
The wind grew fierce atop Conor Pass, so we pulled out every coat, scarf and cap we could find in the trunk to bundle up, and we ran around in circles like little kids to warm up, snapping pictures in every direction. The bitter cold and bizarre beauty made me feel drunk and giddy, and I was struck by the sensation that we were alone in the universe, plunked down in a place completely otherworldly and wholly our own.
Back in the car, we descended down the road, and the landscape gave way once again to lush green pastures and views of the southern coastline on the horizon. We stopped in the town of Dingle, where we shared a round of pints at Dick Mack’s Pub before starting along the peninsula’s southern route. That was when hunger pangs grabbed hold, reminding us that our breakfast had been so many hours ago.
As we approached the end of Dingle Peninsula, we entered the town of Annascaul and spotted The South Pole Inn. It was a ramshackle, two-story pub with fires burning in the hearth and walls lined with vintage photographs and newspaper clippings chronicling the South Pole expeditions of local explorer Tom Crean. Several photographs depicted the big strapping adventurer dressed in parka and pelts standing on a stark, vast landscape as seemingly unworldly as that which we had just left behind on Conor Pass.
Mindful of the time, we ordered our food to go—four toasted ham and cheese sandwiches and a single pile of fried chips. As we sped down the road, we perched the box of potatoes on the console between the front seats and devoured the warm, mushy triangles of meat and cheese.
The sun was no longer visible in the sky but daylight clung on, and I sped as fast as I could, hoping the light would last until we made the River Shannon, where we had to catch a car ferry.
“Um,” Amy uttered from the backseat. I glanced in the rearview mirror and saw her nose buried in the ferry schedule. “Yeah,” she said solemnly. “The last ferry is at 7:30 p.m.”
“What?” I cried. “It can’t be! The schedule says there’s one at 8:30 and 9:30, too!” But I was wrong. I had misread the timetable, mistaking the summer schedule for the shorter off-season one. I looked at the dashboard clock while my toasted ham and cheese sandwich tumbled uncomfortably in my stomach.
“It’s 6:30 now.” I said. “There’s no way we’ll make it.”
I was answered by silence.
“We can make it!” Shelly finally said with forced cheer. She studied the map for a few minutes. “Yeah, we can do it.”
If we missed the ferry, it would add ninety minutes to our drive over unfamiliar roads in the dark and would mean missing out on the pubs in Doolin, which closed promptly at midnight. We had no choice but to fly as fast as we could. I tightened my grip on the steering wheel and said a silent prayer: “Please don’t let us die trying.”
Between towns we zoomed past slow-moving vehicles and straddled the middle of the road on straight-aways at a fast clip. Outside Tralee, we came upon a moving roadblock. Despite our haste, we delighted at the sight of it: a man and his two children herding a trio of black-and-white cows down the road to a fresh pasture.
The clock read 6:43.
Our progress was slowed as we passed through the tiny towns along the way—Tralee and Listowel and Tarbert. We navigated our way around the confusing roundabouts. In Listowel we exited on the wrong road, but realized our error and backtracked through the traffic circle and headed the right way.
It was 7:12.
The last glint of light left the sky as we passed though Tarbert and headed down the final stretch to the ferry docks — a long, narrow, winding road with hairpin turns along the way. Everyone was silent and tense with concentration as though we could propel ourselves there by the combined force of our will. The clock read an impossible 7:24. The road was thickly wooded and our high-beams cut a swath through the darkness as I took curve after curve. My arms and shoulders were as tense as steel rods as I gripped the wheel and negotiated the tight turns.
“Maybe they’ll see our lights coming and wait,” I offered hopefully.
As we came around the last curve, the woods gave way, and we spotted the brightly lit station where the ferry waited, idling quietly at the dock. I shouted with joy as I zoomed on board and eased on the brakes, slipping into our space in the orderly row of cars and trucks calmly waiting to cross to the other side.
It was 7:31.
I rolled down the glass as the ticket-taker briskly approached my window, and I started to fumble with my purse to find my pre-purchased ticket.
“May I take your pulse, please?” he said with a wink.
We piled out of the car to stretch our cramped limbs. While the girls ran off to the restroom, I braved the fierce wind to climb up the steps to the viewing deck and watched the lights of the ferry dock fade into the night as we motored toward the north shore. My heart was still racing from the harrowing drive and my nose and fingers were numb with cold, but I relished the few minutes alone. I could barely believe we had made it. It was just a ferry crossing, but it felt like something more—like a test or a challenge, and I had won. Age may be robbing me of whatever grace and beauty I might have once had, I thought as I stood in the middle of the dark river, but I had guts and drive to spare, damn it. And that counted for something; in fact, it counted for a lot. For the first time I had the freedom and capacity to live a life of my own design, and I was just now realizing what an immense gift that was.
The tension that had chased us to the River Shannon had lessened somewhat, but we were still fighting the clock. The pubs closed at midnight and it would take us at least two hours to get to Doolin. Luckily, the roadways were nearly empty, and I straddled the middle line to avoid the low-slung rock walls that lined the streets and threatened to stop us, literally, dead in our tracks.
Driving as fast as I could, we passed through the dairy lands of County Clare in dark silence. But when we entered the last town before our final trek along the isolated back roads to Doolin, our progress was stopped cold at the town’s main crossroads. My intent was to turn right, but if I had, we would have been thrust headlong into an approaching procession of women and children slowly marching toward us carrying lit candles in their hands. Flanked by two women carrying a banner that read, “Stop domestic abuse,” I could just make out the unmistakable figure of a tall thin woman with long brown hair leading the way.
“My God, it’s Mary Shannon,” I said.
Struck by the solemn dignity of the women’s flame-lit faces as they silently approached, I was overcome by a sense of solidarity. I shared their outrage and admired them for claiming their right to be heard. And I identified with their desire for safety. I was suddenly aware that we were a group of women traveling alone in a foreign land, tempting danger as we sped through the night over unfamiliar roads and chatted up strangers over one too many pints. Our concerns were focused on making sure our money held out and cramming in everything we wanted to do before our time was up—not just in Ireland but in our lives back home, too.
We were city girls who lived in sketchy neighborhoods where panhandlers, car break-ins, and unwanted attention were daily occurrences. We patronized convenience stores buttressed with bulletproof glass to withdraw twenties from ATMs so we could go to dive bars where we stayed out too late. Afterward, we walked to our cars alone in the dark, returning to our burglar-barred homes, where we slept soundly in our beds, secure—however falsely—in the notion that we were safe.
“Quick, turn left,” Shelly said. “We’ve got to get around them.”
I followed her commands as she directed me around the women and back on our route north. Soon Mary Shannon and her band of supporters were far behind, along with the fears they embodied—of physical harm, vulnerability, financial instability, loneliness—the fears so many single women suppress everyday without even thinking about it in order to get through the day.
Eventually we began to descend into the tiny coastal town of Doolin. It was not difficult to find the Sea View B&B; there were only three streets in town. When we spotted the little dormered house stuck in the side of a hill, I couldn’t park the car and empty the trunk fast enough. Being the most eager to hit Gus O’Connor’s Pub—happily visible just across the creek not 100 yards away—I was the first one to clamber up the steps of the house and drop the brass knocker on the wooden door.
A post I’d read on a blog back home about a traveler being turned away from the Sea View for arriving too late flickered in the back of mind.
Again I dropped the knocker.
I heard rustling inside and a stomp or two, then the door flung open to reveal a very angry proprietress, wearing a thin floral bathrobe cinched tight to her waist with one hand, her blonde wiry curls bunched wildly in tufts on her head.
“You might have called,” she barked.
I apologized profusely as the others trundled in behind me, heavy with bags and fatigue.
“You’ll be heading to the pubs I guess,” she said.
We dropped our bags in our ruffled, rose-print bedrooms, ran combs through our hair and flew out the door, down the steep steps, over the stone bridge and into Gus O’Connor’s Pub. Finally! The time had come to toast our adventure and hear some Irish tunes.
The tightly packed bar was teeming with people, young and old, who were not just looking for a good time but had clearly found it. A fire burned in a hearth in the corner of the anteroom, and on the walls were scores of photographs of musicians and instruments.
We stepped into the large, main room, lined on one side by a long bar on the left. On the right, the space was filled with small tables and chairs, every one occupied. In the center of the room seated on chairs and benches were five musicians playing guitars, fiddles, flutes, and an accordion. We lingered by the bar with our first round, soaking in the music, before grabbing a booth just as a large group left.
We weren’t there long before we were joined by a revolving cast of young men, all travelers from various parts of the world. There was much talk about an upcoming rugby match they were eager to see the next day. We chatted and laughed, stepped outside to share cigarettes, and drank rounds of Guinness and whiskey. The muscles in my shoulders burned a bit as they slowly began to unfurl, releasing the tension that had gripped them all day. The whiskey was warm and soothing in my belly.
My mind soon wandered from the boys and their brash talk about where they were from and where they were going. I turned my attention to the music and grew fascinated by the deep red accordion as it wheezed and moaned its sad, lovely songs. A young woman smitten with its player had convinced him to let her fondle the instrument between songs. I had a powerful desire to wrap my hands around the mysterious contraption, to finger the small knobs and gently pump its lung as it wheezed. I wanted so badly to join them so I, too, could get a turn to touch the buttons and curious folds. Instead I just watched them from afar as they manipulated the instrument and felt my throat thicken with longing.
When the band was done for the night, I turned back toward my friends. Scottie was deep in quiet conversation with a beautiful, dark-eyed Italian, their heads so close together they nearly touched. Amy giggled as two animated Brits told her an elaborate story that required frantic hand gestures. Shelly, her eyes bright and her lips awash in a swipe of red, was snuggled up to a very tall Irish man with a goofy mustache. So I drained my glass, pulled on my coat and walked back to the Sea View alone in the dark.
•••
SUZANNE VAN ATTEN is a features editor for The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, a creative writing instructor, and a travel book author. Her essays have been published in the Gettysburg Review and The Chattahoochee Review, among other outlets. She is working on a collection of essays called Everything Is Temporary.
I am in the left front corner of a rubber raft. The guide has told me that if I jam my leg into the groove between the outside air chamber and the one that makes the floor, I’m less likely to fall out of the raft, so I jam my leg so hard that my left butt cheek aches.
The guide, who is almost certainly stoned, decides to do a safety check. “Everyone raise your oar like this.”
He holds his paddle up vertically, with the wide side toward the water. He does it with a sort of swagger, like this job makes him much cooler than scared city girls like me. I mimic his action precisely, clutching my oar in fear. My husband and his sister do the same, with confidence. My sister-in-law’s partner Dawn holds her paddle up, too, but she holds it horizontally, so the wide side is facing the center of the boat.
“I said this way,” the guide repeats. “You need to look at me.” The guide is sun-leathered and rangy, his hair bleachy-blond.
“I can’t look at you,” my sister-in-law says. “I’m blind.”
This statement comes as no surprise to me, and it shouldn’t come as a surprise to the guide either, as we’d discussed Dawn’s blindness with him when we arrived.
We’re on the Rio Grande, the five of us: my husband John, outdoorsy and fearless; his sister Liz, a four-foot-ten Krav Maga instructor; her partner, Dawn, an executive with a Manhattan non-profit; and me.
I am full of fear: I am afraid of heights; I am afraid of riding a bike in traffic; I am afraid of getting a concussion while skiing like I did when I was eleven. I generally don’t talk about my fears like a Woody Allen protagonist, but I try to avoid situations where I put myself in what I perceive to be danger. The more rational part of my brain tells me that lots of people go rafting without injury and that I have reached an age where I am willing to give this kind of risk another try. Nonetheless, I am happy for my helmet and my life jacket, and even though I have lost all feeling in my left leg, I jam it further into the raft.
Since neither Dawn nor I had ever been rafting, we signed up for the beginning level trip, a leisurely float down the calm part of the river. When we arrived, though, Liz and Dawn snuck away to change our trip to the intermediate one, which included something called “class three rapids.” I am terrified, but I don’t want to ruin everyone’s fun. Dawn, on the other hand, is smiling, her legs casually resting on the floor of the raft.
The guide says, “Well, just pay attention.” When we approach the first set of rapids, I paddle as hard as I can, against every instinct I have to curl into the fetal position. When we’re clear of the rapids, I see that everyone else in the boat is smiling, while I’m just happy to be in one piece. The next few rapids are the same—fear for me, smiles for everyone else. After the fourth set of rapids, we float along the river for long enough that I am able to take in the greens and browns of the riverbank.
That’s when I notice the large boulder in the center of our path. It is taking up most of the river, but it looks like there’s just enough room on either side for us to get by. Water splashes up the rock and churns around it in a great white frenzy.
“That’s a big rock,” I say to my husband.
“Yeah. Which way should we go?” he asks the guide.
“Oh, we’re just going to bounce off that thing,” the guide says.
“Bounce?” I squeak.
“Just paddle as hard as you can right up onto that rock, and then we’ll bounce off to the right.”
This does not sound like a good idea to me, but I am a lowly city girl who can’t feel her left leg. The rock looms ever closer, and I paddle as hard as I can straight on top of it. My corner of the raft hits the boulder. We bounce once off the rock and land sideways, the right edge of the boat hitting the water.
I am still in the boat!Hooray!
I look to my right. The seat next to mine is empty. John and Dawn and the guide are all in the water. Liz is leaning over the side of the boat, holding Dawn by her collar. John erupts from the water and climbs back in, his leg bloody.
“Dawn’s in the water,” I shout. The water swirls innocently around the raft. John jumps back in the water, helping Dawn clamber back in to the center of the boat, soaked and grimacing.
The guide lifts himself into the raft.
“Y’all took a swim?” the guide asks. “Get a little wet?”
Dawn grumbles.
“Dude,” the guide says, as about to share the wisdom of the ages. “It’s all about facing your fears.”
Dawn whips her head around to face the direction of the guide’s voice. “I do enough of that taking the subway in Manhattan every day while being blind.”
The guide says nothing. John and Liz turn away from him, back in their places.
Dawn stays in the center of the boat, shaking. “Is she going to stay there?” the guide asks.
“Yes,” says Liz. “She’s had enough.”
The guide looks at John, alone on the right side of the boat.
“Dude,” he says, “you’ll have to paddle harder.”
He says it to John, but I take the message. We launch again, and I paddle with a new determination. Dawn has navigated New York City blind for thirty years; now she is thrown from a raft in the middle of the Rio Grande and climbs back in. Who am I to be afraid?
•••
ZAHIE EL KOURI writes about infertility, parenting, and the immigrant experience in the United States. She has taught creative writing at the University of North Florida and the University of Oregon Law School, and legal writing at Santa Clara University and Florida Coastal School of Law. She holds an MFA in creative writing from New School University and her work has appeared in Mizna, a Journal of Arab-American Writing and Dinarzad’s Children: an Anthology of Arab-American Literature, Memoir Journal, Brain, Child, and Ars Medica. You can find her on the web at www.zahieelkouri.com.
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