Of Beggars and Queens

creative nonfiction
by Michael Theroux

The purloined grocery cart was parked on the gravel by the roadside, holding all the precious scraps the ragman had gathered. Curious children, finding the owner gone for the moment, close in to poke at the plastic bulges tied to the outside, his early morning gleanings. These bits bound for conversion to pocket change would yield six dimes, perhaps a dollar, enough to cover morning coffee and coffin-nails.

Leading the kids, a waif of maybe ten tugs and teases until one large bag comes open enough for her to peek inside. The man’s cache: carefully crushed aluminum cans. The child recognizes the pure Wealth this poor soul has loosely contained in the black plastic trash bag. Abruptly, she turns away - and with a few quiet words, she leads her posse over to a dense row of shrubbery behind the Quick-Mart.

Her extended umbrella she wields as a makeshift scepter, its chrome tip honed to sharp perfection on the concrete. Glancing about her to catch the eyes of the others with her, she disturbs the dust and rubble under the box-cut junipers, actions which her comrades replicate with their sticks and straightened clothes-hangers. With a deft plunge, she spears and extracts that which she seeks: Aluminum!

Countering the crime of metal resource wastage and dispersion, the first crumpled can is salvaged. The child notes with pleasure that this is not the only aluminum she and her team have recovered this morning. With majestic grace, she and her court walk back to the waiting cart. Her cohort standing ready as she leads by doing, the young queen places her recovered metal jewel inside the beggar’s bag.

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Michael Theroux writes from Northern California. Michael is entering the literary field in his seventh decade, seeking publication of two books and around 400 poems and short stories. Some may be found in Ariel Chart, 50WS, City Key, Wild Word, the Lothlorien Poetry Journal, here at Cafe Lit, and elsewhere.

 

I Can Count

creative nonfiction
by Marie Cloutier

We're nine and it's huge in my friend Heather's hand, the red calculator, raised white numbers and a white cat whose face you slide to open it. I can count... I release the clasp on my fake pearl bracelet, yard sale hoard. "Trade you." She looks at the calculator, at me, gauging worth. "Let me see." I hand it over. Plastic beads overflow her little girl hand. "I don't know." Please, I think. Please. I wait, my breath aching. Can she tell? Counting seconds. She ponders. She weighs the bracelet, pursing pink lips. "Okay," and gives it over, my treasure.

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Marie Cloutier (she/her) writes about girlhood and womanhood and complicated loves and losses. Her work has appeared in Bending Genres, Dorothy Parker's Ashes, the Sheepshead Review and elsewhere. She is at work on a memoir. Her website is www.mariecloutier.com.

 

Legacy

creative nonfiction
by Lev Raphael

When I wake up at 3am these days because of chronic pain in my knee or neck or hands, I think about my late mother in the morning. She died in 1999 after a long illness and she hasn't left. I see her everywhere, but especially in the morning. Her morning.

Auburn hair well-brushed, she would sit quietly in the L-Shaped Washington Heights kitchen with her back to the window as if she wasn't ready to engage with something as simple as the view of another six-story, cream-colored brick apartment house built in the Thirties. Or the small bowl of cottage cheese that waited for her spoon.

Reading The New York Times that my father had brought before he went to work, she would have a cup or two of instant Nescafe, take aspirin for her arthritis, and smoke her first Pall Malls of the day while she put herself together. The Yiddish words she used to explain it—"Ich muss mich zusamenstellen" literally meant "I have to assemble myself" and the phrase always seemed both weighty to me, and a little comic. In her red-and-white robe she might have been a human stop sign. STOP. Construction Zone Ahead.

I never thought of her as anything other than "together." Brisk, highly-educated, fiendishly well-read and speaking French, German, Russian, Polish, English and Yiddish, she was quick in her judgments and firm in her opinions. In the Nixon era she dismissed him as a fascist and said that a speech by his vice president Spiro Agnew was "like Stalin on a bad day."

She was in her sixties when her fingers started becoming gnarled and painful because of arthritis and she would gaze at them and sigh, "Getting old is miserable."

In my sixties, and after various surgeries, I feel far less "put together" than I was ten years ago, I can't help but agree with her. I don't smoke, but I have many pills at breakfast and can't even get to them or food before a few cups of coffee to clear my head. And I often have cottage cheese for breakfast, though mine is organic.

My fingers aren't twisted, but arthritis has wrecked both my thumbs and one knee. Taking stairs hurts, using certain tools hurts, and sometimes just rolling over in bed at night hurts.

Yet thinking of my mother, hearing her husky smoker's voice in my head, I feel oddly soothed. It's taken me years to realize that I am so much like her: though I don't smoke, I have more opinions than one person needs, I can't get my day going until I read the New York Times and have my coffee, and I speak several languages.

Pain is now another thing that we share.

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Lev Raphael is the son of immigrants, grew up in Upper Manhattan and now lives in Michigan.

 

Food Memories

creative nonfiction
by R.K. West

When I was little, family holiday dinners were always at my great-grandma's house.

She had a sturdy oak dining table that could be extended by the insertion of multiple leaves. In her tiny dining room, the long table had to be placed diagonally, and even then the table, chairs, and people barely fit. An overflow table (or two) used by random children and claustrophobic adults was placed in the living room.

In addition to the turkey and some other dishes that Granny and her helpers prepared, most of the guests brought their own specialties. We could expect roast beef, green bean casserole, sweet potatoes, mashed potatoes, gravy, brussel sprouts, probably some other vegetables, a few different salads, a variety of cranberry sauces, olives, bread, and, of course, a wide array of desserts.

Nobody went hungry.

One of the things I loved about these dinners was that I could eat whatever I wanted, and skip what I didn't. At home, my parents demanded that we eat everything on the plate, no matter how disgusting it was. At Granny's holiday table, serving dishes were passed around and everyone chose freely.

I remember those meals fondly, and have used my memories as inspiration to cook. I once commented to my mother that canned peas make me smile because they remind me of Granny's cooking.

"She didn't serve canned peas," my mother said.

"I remember them clearly," I told her.

Mom explained that Granny went to all the trouble of buying fresh peas and shelling them by hand. Then she cooked them the same way everyone in her family had always cooked them, which meant boiling them until they may as well have come out of a can. It seems a little crazy now, going to all that trouble to make fresh vegetables un-fresh, but it was the style of a particular time and place.

Today I eat most of my vegetables steamed, roasted, or raw. But now and then I encounter some boiled or canned peas, and I eat them with a smile, feeling just a little bit like a kid at Granny's holiday table.

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R.K. West is a former ESL teacher and travel blogger, currently living in the Pacific Northwest and posting on Bluesky at @ithinkiwrite.bluesky.social.