Seeing Things
by Michelle Herman

Facts about Blakey
by Franz Neumann

The Cryptozoologist Chaperones His
Daughter’s Prom
by Nick Lantz

Seeing Things
    Michelle Herman

We were in the kitchen, cooking together. It was early January, early evening. We were cooking and talking. Chopping, pouring, beating, scraping, setting pans in the oven and on top of the stove—a great commotion of cooking, with plenty of clatter and mess (which is the way we like it—or the only way we know how to do it, and thus we’ve come to like it; who can tell?)—and all the while talking. The stereo was on, too, the volume way up because it’s in the living room, so that anyone passing through the living room on the way upstairs to our only bathroom had to make the trip with her hands over her ears.
    My daughter was seven and a half that winter. We were doing a lot of cooking together then. A lot of cooking, a lot of talking, a lot of listening to music. I don’t remember exactly what was on the stove (and in the oven and on the cutting board and in the mixing bowls) that night, and I can’t say what music we were listening to, turned up so loud, or what we were talking about. (If I were writing fiction, as I used to only do, I would be able to tell you. Not being able to—having to guess, because I don’t want to pretend that my memory is better than it is—is part of why I never used to be interested in writing nonfiction. The other part has to do with what I once thought of as being “constrained by” what actually happened—stuck with and tied down by, weighed down by, the inartfulness of “real” life. But as I’ve grown older, I’ve found that what actually happens is, in fact, at least as interesting to me as what I can make up—and that real life, when looked at closely, is enough like art that the distinction between what is art and what isn’t is less interesting to me than it used to be. “Art” may be the wrong word. “Artful” might be better. For that matter, “interesting” may be the wrong word. What I probably mean is “meaningful.” But let’s let this be for now. I’ll come back to it: It’s one of the things I most want to talk about. But first things first: I have a story—a true story—to tell.)

Continued in volume 43, issue 2, spring 2007