Author: Sarah Fitzgerald

It was a nearly two-hour grueling trek, but finally, I found an acceptable campsite. The night was falling rapidly, and of all the tasks I had to perform, making a fire was perhaps the most important. I dropped my gear and got right down to it. With the flashlight in one hand and the large hunting knife in the other, I did some quick chopping and stomping to reduce a few dead branches to a pile of firewood. Almost everything was damp, but I found enough dry wood to burn. There were plenty of twigs lying around for kindling. With those, I made a second pile. Pine needles, moss, and birch bark would have been great for tinder, but it was too dark to scout out these items. Fortunately, my backpack had a fire starter kit and a box of waterproof matches. I struck a match and said a prayer to the patron saint of campfires, hoping the damp wood would burn. The spark caught hold, and I leaned in close and blew into it. There was more smoke than fire at first, but soon, the tiny flame breathed on its own. Its survival was the most crucial thing in the world just then. I didn’t need to cook, but I needed the fire’s warmth, light, and protection from insects and wild animals. I fed more wood to the flames and sat back on my heels to admire my creation. When it was strong enough to sustain itself, I moved on to the next important thing: 

setting up camp. 

I spread the shell on the ground near the firepit and snapped the flexible rods together. After threading them through the fabric sleeves, I carefully bent them to create the loft and popped the ends into the grommets at the corners. I was in a rush, so I took a chance that there wouldn’t be much wind that night and didn’t bother to stake the tent down. I did, however, cover it with the fly. I couldn’t take a chance that it wouldn’t rain. When my humble abode was erect, I returned to tend to my precious fire. 

Darkness descended like a thick blanket over my tiny camp, completely isolating me from the rest of the world. Orange and gold flames curled around the logs in the pit, casting enough light to push back a bit of the night. Shadows swayed eerily around the camp’s perimeter, enhancing the mystery of the evening. Still, I breathed a profound sigh of relief for the first time that day. The race against the setting sun was over. I was where I needed to be, off the grid and out of reach. There wasn’t another person in the world who knew where to find me then; that was precisely how I wanted it. 

I sat on a stump beside the fire, removed the knee brace, and assessed the damage. Since the bumbling incident earlier that evening, when I stumbled and plowed face-first through a massive spiderweb, I was limping again. Sighing away my annoyance at the possible setback in recovery, I rubbed my hands together and began to massage the injured joint. While gazing into the fire, I reflected on what had been a most trying year. 

It began with the death of a dear friend, with whom I sat as she lost her battle with cancer. The following season, I caught and held another young woman who attempted to throw herself off a bridge. Those life-and-death encounters, happening in such succession, seemed to 

affect me in ways I had yet to come to terms with. Then, shortly after that came my own brutal fight for survival against a group of thugs for some stupid gang initiation, as was explained by the district attorney afterward. The confluence of these seemingly unrelated events had me contemplating those existential questions for which there were no easy answers. “Who am I? Why am I here? What should I do with the time I have left?” 

As the tensions of the day and city life drifted away, inevitably, my thoughts turned to Taz. The two of us had become very close. I recalled our last conversation with a pang of guilt. I tried to explain why I needed to make the excursion. She quickly pointed out all the potential dangers. 

“No one will be able to reach you,” she argued. “Did you consider that your family and friends will be worried sick about you?” She debated this and several other valid points, not too subtly implying that my personal needs might be selfish in this light. Her argument did not fall on deaf ears, though. I had already considered these and agreed. That’s why I’d omitted a few details, like the fact that I would be fasting the entire time. As for Taz’s argument, I understood the truth behind her words. She had a sense of adventure rivaling my own and didn’t like being left behind. After all, since we’d met, we had been rock climbing, sport cycling, mountain biking, hiking, and camping together. That competitive spirit was what I loved most about her. 

A rustling sound caught my attention, and I turned to see an eddy of leaves swirl into the firelight and out again. Flames fluttered, and something howled in the distance, sending a cold shiver along my spine. Suddenly thinking I needed a more robust fire, I scooped up the rest of the chopped wood and placed it in the pit. A pot of water with herbs that sat near the fire began to simmer. That blend of chicory, licorice, and bancha twig tea was supposed to curb hunger. I’d read that somewhere. I called the concoction “The Brew.” 

While the tea steeped, I went to my pile of gear to retrieve the one companion I did bring along. The zippered bag was roughly the size and shape of a rifle case. It contained no weapon of destruction, though. Knowing there was bound to be a lonely moment or two, I’d brought my backpacker’s guitar along to keep me company when the silence became too loud. I called it Onyx because of its black lacquered finish. After a quick tune of the strings, my guitar and I began to get reacquainted. Strumming softly and sipping warm Brew, I sat beside the flames until they burned to glowing embers. Eventually, weariness took hold, and my hands stopped moving of their own accord. Before I called it a night, I placed my feet firmly on the earth between the roots of that twisted stump. I closed my eyes and grounded myself in the tangible reality of the material plane. The night was still and peaceful, and I breathed it in. 

When the embers cooled, I rose to my feet. With Onyx in tow, I crossed the clearing to the tent. I was almost there when I felt a tingle at the nape of my neck. I whirled around suddenly to peer into the trees. Although my eyes could not penetrate the darkness, I knew something was watching from the depths of those shadows. 

—

Roderick Priestly is a martial arts teacher and owns a fitness studio in
New York City. He writes a fitness blog, “My Studio In The Heights.”
Once a year, he travels into the mountains on a solo sojourn for
inspiration and insight. He has worked as a professional
singer/songwriter/performer, studio owner/manager, private personal
trainer, and master trainer at New York sports clubs. He attended The
Ohio State University for music, The Fashion Institute of Technology for
computer design, writing workshops at Manhattanville College, and
writing groups. His work is forthcoming in Freshwater Literary Journal,
Perceptions Magazine, SLAB, and Umbrella Factory Magazine. He writes
using the pen name R.V. Priestly.

If you wake up next to me and cannot move, I will not eat you. I have taken every tender piece of you into my mouth to taste, and yea, Lord, it is good, but I have promised myself not to bite. I will only place my tongue in your ear and listen. 

A ghost might creep into your body as you lay in our bed, immobile. I will know it’s a ghost when my tongue hears it speaking in your head—it animates you: suddenly you talk and walk again, and I wonder—should I call a priest? A shaman, a wise woman, someone to exorcise you, evict the thing living underneath your skin—until I decide I like him, your ghost. His jokes, his smile, the sweet way he holds my hand in the street. I like him better than I ever liked you. 

Maybe he’s not a ghost. Maybe he’s an angel. Maybe he will sprout three more faces: a lion, an ox, and an eagle. When that happens, I will pull a feather from his wings and make a wish, and every candle in the house will blow out like a birthday party. 

He could be a pirate, a privateer, who has boarded your body like a boat, those candles attached to his hat like Blackbeard, sporting an earring and one untameable eye. Like a knife, he clenches me between his teeth, and I attach my mouth to his like the tentacle of some creature of the deep, but I don’t eat him. I keep my promises. 

Pirate and sea monster, ghost and cannibal, we suck and sway upon the sand. When, finally, he slips from your skin, shows me his face—divine and terrible!—we shall dance into the ocean, my beautiful friend and I. What’s left behind? A tongue, shriveling in a shell? Puppet strings of gristle, bones foundering in shallows—not you. Not you, my silent love. Just leavings on a plate—the things I swore I’d never swallow. 

—

A writer of fiction and poetry, Jennifer Maloney is a disabled woman living with chronic illness. Find her work in Litro Magazine, Literally Stories, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Neologism Poetry Journal and many other places. Jennifer is the co-editor of the poetry anthology Moving Images: Poetry Inspired by Film (Before Your Quiet Eyes Publishing, 2021) and the author of Evidence of Fire, Poems & Stories (Clare Songbirds Publishing, 2023) and Don’t Let God Know You are Singings (Before Your Quiet Eyes Publishing, 2024). Jennifer is also a parent, a partner, and a very lucky friend, and she is grateful, every day, for all of it.

I am not a pessimist: I am a realist!
--Charles Sullivan

If you want me again, look for me under your boot soles.
You will hardly know who I am or what I mean,
But I shall be good help to you nevertheless
And filter and fiber your blood.
Failing to fetch me at first keep encouraged,
Missing me one place search another,
I stop somewhere waiting for you.
--From Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass

I am astonished by how tiny and thin my legs are! They resemble pencils! I’ve lost significant muscle mass from my legs, and I need to do something about it, to the extent that I can. The name for this phenomenon is Sarcopenia. Old people lose about seven percent of their muscle mass each decade, and the process accelerates the longer one lives. I call it slipping away.

How does one explain what it is like being old to a younger person? First, being old must be distinguished from getting old. Clearly I am already there and there is no point denying it. My body is changing, and with it so too is my perspective. Alopecia has claimed my hair. All of it. It feels like the process of aging is accelerating. To my astonishment, the difference between being 68 and 70 seems quite significant, an unbridgeable chasm, from where I am now.

The bright side is that you can belch, fart, shit your pants, piss your pants and vomit, choke to death on a peanut, and fall down and no one notices or cares. These behaviors are attributed to being old. They are expected in this culture of the self.

You can buy diapers for old people at any drug store or Walmart. But most old people wouldn’t be caught dead in them. Who wants to shuffle along with a load of excrement in their shorts, smelling like a litter pan that hasn’t been changed for a month in a house full of cats? Leave us a shred of dignity for Christ sake!

This old body of mine is like an abandoned house that is no longer kept in good repair. It is only a matter of time before the roof leaks and hastens the interior’s depreciation, its demise and final collapse, a pile of rubble that no longer resembles what it was. Disorganization. Chaos. Decomposition.

I hardly recognize myself these days. I’ve never been this old before. It is all so unfamiliar, as if it were happening to someone else, and I am somehow standing partially outside of my body, observing the spectacle, simultaneously being observer and the object observed. Departing consciousness, mirages shimmering in the desert of selfness.

Without fear, I find little comfort in knowing that it is only going to get worse, if I live long enough. Perhaps that is why old people often look so grim and serious, but I do still enjoy being alive. I continue to laugh and smile and challenge myself. I still enjoy and savor the company of the people I care about. I can still walk long distances on mountain trails. I intend to savor the time I have left, whatever experience it brings.

Being old feels like I am observing myself, like an actor on a stage, as both the actor and a member of the audience. What an odd sensation this split vision, as if I were standing ever so slightly outside of this bag of flesh I call my body. The notion of selfness, of having a separate identity from my surroundings, feels like an illusion to me.

It is sobering to know that I’ll never be this young again. I am on the way out, and I must accept that. There is nothing I can do to turn back the hands of time. No point in resisting or struggling against the inevitable. Go with the flow. Do we really have any other choice? Raise your sail and use the wind to your advantage.

Approaching the end of life is equivalent to entering the wildest wild that can be conjured by the human imagination. Adventure awaits at the terminus. My Rubicon beckons, and, dear reader, so does yours. You are only more distant from it than I am from mine, but rest assured that it is waiting for you.

My senses are changing; they are more blunted and dulled each passing year. Every perception feels more surreal, less connected to what we call reality. What is reality anyway? Every waking moment feels less real and more dream-like. The delineation between dream and reality is blurred with age. I am leaving the realm of substance bit by bit, particle by particle and entering a more ethereal state of being. The space between the particles is increasing and the particles are fewer in number.

I remind myself that, according to modern physics, matter cannot be destroyed; it changes form. That is what is happening to me.

Every moment, consciousness is waning, and I am at once slipping away into nothingness and everything. I feel diluted. I am aware that I am dissolving into the background, unnoticed by anyone. Less of what is known as “me” remans in this form. Where have the missing parts of me gone? I surmise that my skinny ass was absorbed by my protruding man boobs. Be careful. You could poke your eye out if you get too close. Am I still me? Am I still here? And where is here? Are time and space even real?

The aching in my arthritic knees will worsen, making it more challenging to remain ambulatory. Parts are wearing out. My mind is slower and more addled than it was last year. My vision is deteriorating. I don’t hear as well as I used to. I am shrinking and bending like a bow, losing grace, speed and agility, but still moving.

My wife has an artificial hip and knee, like replacing a worn tie rod on a car. I am somewhere between uncomfortable and fascinated to see how this ends. The unknown always affects us that way. Being old takes getting used to. Acceptance of reality. I am acutely aware that my existence is embedded in cycles, and now the trajectory is leading downward. Perihelion inevitably leads to aphelion in the elongated orbits of birth and death, being and non-being, consciousness and unconsciousness.

How does one wrap his brain around all of this? I see my two sisters, both of them a few years older than me, on a similar trajectory. My wife is eight years my senior. I have friends older than me by a decade or more. Every year they are fewer in number. All of us are approaching the waterfall. We hear its roar and feel the cold spray on our faces. Apparitions of quavering rainbows appear through the spray, dispersed sunlight seen through the prisms of water vapor.

We ponder what it will it be like when we go over the edge and become one again with the river. Does our journey end there? Does life even have a clearly defined beginning and end? The river continues its passage to the sea beyond the waterfall, just as it did before reaching the fall. Water vapor circumnavigates the biosphere and falls as rain elsewhere. Have we ever truly been separated from the river? I doubt it.

Cycles are operating within cycles. Birth, death, and rebirth? I cannot pretend to know, because I cannot define where “I” end, and where my surroundings begin. Everything we think we know is shrouded in mystery. Every wave has a trough. Every peak a valley. Matter is embedded in a
matrix of what we call empty space. River and waterfall. You and me. Us. Everyone. Everything. Nothing.

Light requires darkness and darkness light. Each reveals the other. It’s all the same.

—

Charles Sullivan was born and raised in Hagerstown, MD. He currently resides in Morgan County, WV where he has lived for over thirty years.He has thru-hiked the Appalachian Trail from Georgia to Maine, the John Muir Trail in the Eastern Sierra Mountains of California and other foot trails. At the age of seventy, he remains an avid backpacker. Charles is also a natural philosopher and a freelance writer.