The clock on my nightstand says two thirty-three in the morning when the phone rings. “Ronnie!” my mother is whispering into the receiver. “¡Están aquí! They are here! They are coming in!” This is her third call tonight.
A short, bald man winks at me. His buckteeth bite on his lower lip. His eyes bounce up and down off my double Ds. He opens his arms wide and says, as if relieved we’ve finally reconnected, “Roseanne.”
Peeking out of the glossy catalogs and bills, the blue and red airmail border is like a cheery flag unfurling in the breeze announcing, “Land ahead.”
Hippocampus Magazine is honored to announce our three guest judges for the Remember in November Contest for Creative Nonfiction.
Remember in November Contest for Creative Nonfiction 2012
We’re giving away a prize a day in honor of our first birthday! Our wonderful literary friends and business-owner pals donated an assortment of goodies to help us celebrate our birthday! Please visit our donors’ websites to learn more about their work and/or publications and products. We’re still looking to fill a few more days…
If I were the type to write happy endings, I’d end with the four-foot, six-inch fence. It stood in the center of the brightly lit indoor ring of Cedar Lodge Farm, a show barn in Stamford, Connecticut. It was a November evening in 1982 and my hour was just about up. My mother would arrive any minute to fetch me for dinner and homework.
“Why is there a bed?”
Dad was under the impression he’d been hired to work as a doctor again, although Mom had explained to him, many times, that he would be living here now. Obviously he’s unable to accept that this could really be happening to him. Or maybe he’s confused because his former colleague, Frank, lives at Huron Woods, too. They were ear, nose, and throat doctors together for over two decades.
The first time I heard the story of the opera Aida, I was sitting on the screened porch with my grandfather. Out beyond the screen, the fireflies sporadically lit the velvet darkness. On the porch, the light from the kitchen window cast a soft glow touching the top of my grandfather’s balding grey head. It didn’t quite reach me, lying prone on the old metal glider. I remained in darkness, hearing the story of the Egyptian princess who died sealed in a tomb with her lover Radames.
My father and I stop near the fountain in the middle of a plaza. Baobabs and coconut trees lean over us and we are arm in arm as if we have been walking like this our whole lives. We sit on a bench as if we are not strangers, as if twenty years and the three thousand miles between Minnesota and Colombia have never separated us.
