Two Stories
ICEBREAKER
Not until I began using it as a test did I come to enjoy the story. Before that, whenever I told it—whenever I so much as thought about it—my whole body would contract, as if in an involuntary, full-scale scowl. But then I realized I could add it to my arsenal of icebreaking questions: What skill would keep you from being kicked off a desert island? When the apocalypse comes, would you prefer to survive or die first? Do you crumple or fold? Prefer bolo or bow?
The story went like this. I was teaching a writing workshop for adults through a local nonprofit. Most of the people were new to writing, but there were a couple who had published poems here and there online. And then there was Gerald. Mid-forties, blond and boyish, softspoken, a little stooped. He was a doctor, did two semesters at the Sorbonne studying Sassoon, volunteered every other year with Doctors Without Borders in sub-Saharan Africa. “Have you ever read The Constant Gardener?” he asked the woman who asked him what it was like treating the malnourished children in South Sudan his poems described in tender, if somewhat mawkish, terms. “A lot like that.” His stint started before the workshop ended, so he didn’t make it to the last three meetings. We gave him a simple goodbye, two-bite brownies and sparkling cider. People were quiet, solemn even, in the breakroom, commenting on the volume of the fridge compressor. Not that he was going off to die but that he was going to try to keep so many people from dying. What could we say that wouldn’t betray our total inability to fathom what he was going off to see and hear and do?
Some months later, I came across Gerald’s profile on a professional networking site. It said he was an oil and gas lawyer, and some cursory digging confirmed it. And this is where I find the eyes of my audience to ask how they’d react. Request to connect? Send a message asking how his stint went and when he’d be back? Would you pay the $16 processing fee to receive info on his criminal background, home address, phone number? Would you borrow a car and drive out there, slowing beneath the centenarian live oaks, their sweeping low-slung branches festooned with mossy epiphytes and holiday lights put up and removed by hired crews, some of the branches propped up by wooden beams? Would you say you were birding now, when your soon-to-be-ex asked what was up with the binoculars? That the dry-treated half rope was for securing yourself when scaling trees for a better look at migrating cranes? Would you, as night burns off to reveal the pump jacks nodding out of sync along the speed-blurred floodplain, tell him from the driver’s seat that you pitied him? Didn’t he know that lies bind, that they coil around the future and twist it into something comically small or painfully bent? While the truth, you say, catching his unblindfolded eye—even when it’s dull as a butter knife, it can always, with enough effort, cut.
CHANGING THE SHEETS
It had probably been a month. At least a few weeks beyond the recommended one-week-per-set, but he rationalized this delay by remembering a friend’s unverified advice that it was better to leave one’s bed unmade each morning, as he did, since the exposure to light and air made it a less desirable habitat for whatever would otherwise fester or bloom in the tight darkness of the tucked-in sheets.
He folded the duvet down to the foot of the bed, piling it on itself like an intestine or an oxbowed river, so only a thin section of it actually lay on the rug. Then he pulled the top sheet free, balling it loosely onto the floor before unhooking the fitted sheet from the nearest corners. He shimmied between the wall and the bed to free the opposite corners then shuck the cases from the thin pillows then shove them against the headboard.
There was nothing in his mind but the task itself as he shuffled his fists inside the clean fitted sheet, searching for the puckered corners and then hooking and pulling and smoothing it around the mattress, but as he unfolded the top sheet and lofted it over the bed, tugging it this way and that to settle it evenly, he thought of what his father had said about bed corners, as he did every time he made the bed, the way an argument about a friend’s doomed relationship entered his mind whenever he mowed around the scraggly lilac by the fenceline, or how the final image of another friend’s poem surfaced whenever he was testing the bathwater for his son.
The thought was involuntary. Consistent as a comet. Pulling the triangular fold up and tucking the lower fold under the mattress, there was his father, saying dismissively “of course she’d call it a hospital corner. She was a nurse for thirty years.” Why had she—his grandmother, his father’s mother-in-law—told him this? He couldn’t remember the circumstances, but he remembers understanding now that what you call something says more about you than about the thing itself.
“In the Marines,” his father went on, “we called them…” and here the memory slams shut. It wasn’t intentional. He just couldn’t remember what his father had called them. This meant something, but he wasn’t thinking about it as he stuffed the pillows into their fresh casings. He was finished, but he was stuck, standing in the middle of the room as the sun slipped its polygon of light off the bed. What was it like when he lofted the sheet over the bed? Not a sail, because what boat sails on its side. It was like the colorful parachute elementary kids played with in gym. Or a flag being draped over a coffin, its sharp triangular corners smoothed out into a final attempt to assert that the person within had belonged to an idea. Not their true nation, the earth. The soil and the dirt.
∩
Conor Bracken is a poet and translator based in Cleveland. His most recent book is The Enemy of My Enemy is Me (Diode Editions, 2021), and his most recent translation is of Jean D’Amérique’s Workshop of Silence (Vanderbilt University Press, 2025). He teaches at the Cleveland Institute of Art.