Submissions for the Creative Non-Fiction category are open to one work of creative nonfiction completed for coursework in the last calendar year. Submissions should not exceed 20 pages. Morgan Ackley wrote the 2nd place submission in the Creative Nonfiction Category for the 2016 President’s Writing Awards.
About Morgan
I am from Boise, Idaho. I’m double majoring in Creative Writing and Spanish. My love of language and challenge is what attracted me to both majors. After graduation I plan to travel, write a collection of short stories, and possibly finish the novel I’ve started. In the future I may go back to get an MFA. When I’m not busy studying I love to bike, cook, and hang out with my cat.
Organic Therapy
My cat sounds like a muffled engine. There’s that normal purring a cat makes, where it sounds like they’re taking short breaths in and out. But not my cat. There’s a deeper sound and it’s smooth. He’s lying on my pillow so close to my head my ear is resting against his neck.
His name is Henry. My mother laughed when I gave him the name. Said it made him sound too human-like and too old-manish. But he’s probably seventy years old in cat years, anyways. His fur color is mostly white except for the brown spot on his face. It starts at his muzzle, making him look like he’s got a mustache, and trails up to the top of his head, where it branches off and gradually fades into the white. Kinda looks like a tree.
I only have him because I’m on an eight-week intensive therapy course. I meet with my therapist three times a week for two-hour sessions. Since I refuse to be medicated she prescribed an emotional support animal to help with my ‘anxiety’. My options were between a dog, a cat, or a turtle. It takes an unusual kind of person to take in a turtle as a companion animal and I’ve never understood dogs, so I chose a cat. I’m on week two of therapy. It’s going okay. The only reason I’m still going to my appointments is because I’m in love with Henry.
As I listen to the music of Henry’s purring I trace my finger along the hard texture of my bedroom wall. Sometimes I find shapes in the texture. Right next to my pillow there’s a little rectangular shape with a couple circles underneath. It’s a train. I’ve tried to scratch the texture off, but I’ve only made it more noticeable.
My mother knocks on my door and tells me to come to breakfast; it’s the most important meal of the day. I slide out from the comfort of my white sheets and search the floor for my sweatpants. I find them underneath a pile of clothes spilling out from my traveling backpack and pull them on. As soon as I open the door Henry disappears.
The kettle on the stove is whistling violently. My mother is traipsing around the kitchen in her turquoise kimono I sent her last Christmas when I was traveling around Japan. It’s patterned with tree branches and coral flowers. I overshot the size a bit, so her hands disappear when resting at her side. “Is this really how big you see me?” she had asked. “No, Mom. I just didn’t know your size.” She was gaining a lot of weight before I left.
“Oh, will you get that cat off the table. We eat there.” It’s the first thing she says to me. Our table is a square pub table surrounded by three tall stools pressed against a large four- paneled window. My mom mostly uses it for flower arrangements. She’s got sunflowers in the center today. My favorite. How’d she know. Henry’s big body is taking up the rest of the space on the table, his nose poised in the air, his eyes half closed. He looks like he’s been smoking dope, but he’s just happy because he can look out the window and feel a little breeze come through the screen.
“Henry…” I warn him. He turns his head towards me and I swear he’s smirking. I sit on the stool in front of him and scratch his back at the place where his tail begins. With a quiet meow he gets up and meanders out of the kitchen with his tail flicking angrily. My mother joins me at the table with two cups of green tea and a plate of toast. I take a piece.
“So, you got any plans for today?” my mother asks, her tone a bit chipper than normal. It’s like she’s trying to cheer me up or something. I shrug and bite off half the toast. “Your father called me this morning. He must really want to see you. I mean, he called me.”
My father hasn’t spoken to my mother in a while. Almost two years, I think. They’re not divorced, just separated. My mother wouldn’t agree to it because she thinks they can still work something out. I’m not entirely sure what happened. I came home from college one day, unannounced, and found my mother crying in bed. He had left a few days prior for Medford with only a suitcase packed full of clothes. He doesn’t have another family, if that’s what you’re thinking. He’s not like that. Family life never suited him well to begin with, so why the hell would he get another one?
The last time I saw him was at the end of last summer, the day before I took off for Europe. That May I graduated from U of O with a nice, useless philosophy degree. I quit working at the god-awful thrift store in Corvallis and figured the best way to find some direction in life was to travel. So I bought a backpack, filled it with some clothes, bought a one-way ticket to Ireland, and spent nine months drinking beer, working at hostels, and catching trains.
“He hasn’t talked to me once since I left. Why would he want to see me all of a sudden?” I say. Mistakenly, I sip my tea too early and burn the roof of my mouth. It’s okay, though. The pain isn’t that bad. My mother reaches over the table and rests her hand on my arm, just above the white band on my wrist.
“Honey, he just wants to see you. Is it a crime for a father to want to see his own daughter?”
“Sometimes it is,” I say. She lets go of my arm and scrunches up her face like I’ve told her she looks fat or her make-up doesn’t match her outfit.
“You always take things there,” she says.
“Yea, well,” I say.
“I wish you wouldn’t.”
She also mentions my brother is in town. He’s supposedly only passing through for business. He sells meat. He lives in northern Washington. He wouldn’t come to Ashland, a little hippie town in Oregon you pass by to get to California, to sell meat. Almost everyone here is either vegan or raises their own cattle. I’m serious. My next-door neighbor lives in a shed on a half acre piece of land. He’s using the rest of the land for gardening. All organic. My mom tells me he makes his own everything; toothpaste, lotion, deodorant. Apparently there’s no bathroom in his house. He must use his own shit to fertilize his crops.
Anyways, I’m certain my brother is only in town because my mother told him to come. She’s trying to pretend like they’re not worried about me, but I know they think at any minute I might throw myself in front of a bus, jump off a building, or ride my bike in the middle of the highway. But I won’t do any of those things. Believe me, I won’t.
Janine, my therapist, prefers I call her by her first name. She looks like someone who would be more into that holistic herbal remedy stuff than traditional counseling. She’s got long curly brown hair that she wraps up in a tie-dye bandana and she always wears these long, flowy skirts with crazy patterns on them. She also practices right out of her own home, which is a convenient five-minute walk from my house. Her office is a small room on the main floor of her house painted a bright, almost fluorescent white. There are a couple of pictures hanging from the walls. One is of a ginger kitten hanging from a tree branch and in bright yellow print there is an anti- suicide saying about holding on because life gets better. The other picture is of a train station. I hate looking at that one.
Our sessions are virtually pointless. I sit there and talk about how I’m feeling, which is the same every time. I tell her I’m numb. I don’t care about anything. Food tastes bland. She’ll ask me all sorts of questions after that about why I don’t care about anything and if there’s anything in particular I don’t care about today.
Janine doesn’t know the real reason I tried to kill myself. She knows it was because of a boy, like everyone else. But I haven’t told her the details. I haven’t told anyone.
I walk around my neighborhood after my session with my hands buried as deep into my pockets as they can go. I’m wearing my oversized overalls today, so my wrists are all covered up. I’m not ashamed of what I did. I’m human. Sometimes an idiot. The real problem is that this place is too damn happy. Nobody ever looks sad or angry. Not even the people who are homeless and hang out all day in the plaza near a renaissance pub downtown. Some of them are homeless by choice, though, so I don’t know if that counts.
Most of the houses in my neighborhood are those really old, Victorian-esc historic homes that probably still have the original hardwood flooring from the 1800’s. Except for ours. Our house is a plain, modern home with carpet and linoleum in the kitchen. At the end of the neighborhood, right before you hit downtown is a railroad. Trains have stopped using it, so I’ve never had to be careful when crossing the tracks.
In the two weeks I’ve been home this is the first time I’ve wandered outside the confines of either my bedroom or Janine’s boring white office. I could go downtown and buy an ice cream at Zoey’s Café and All Natural Ice Cream, but I’m not about to get near those tracks. No way, not today.
I’d been in Galway for three days. I met this girl, Camille, from France in the hostel I was staying at. We were in an all girls’ eight-bunk room. Her English was basically perfect despite having only studied it for four years. She told me she’s une majeur intello or “a major nerd” and that’s why she was so good at not only English but Spanish, Portuguese, Russian, and Italian as well. She was also beautiful, of course. Very thin. Tall with medium-length blonde hair and jade- green eyes.
When she arrived with her bright pink and turquoise traveling backpack I was sitting on my bed, staring at the wooden slats of the bunk above me, mulling over the fact I had no idea what to do since I had no major life plans or responsibilities. She came over and set her pack on the top bunk and told me I should get a drink with her. “You look bored as ‘ell,” she said.
I didn’t hesitate. We put on our best traveler’s nightwear (jeans and a clean t-shirt) and wandered around the streets of Galway until we found an 800-year-old pub called The King’s Head. The walls were made of stone and it was so dimly lit neither of us could really make out anyone’s faces. There was an open mic night going on when we arrived, so we ordered a couple pints of Guinness and found two seats near the front of a makeshift stage set up next to the bar.
There was a guy with red hair that reached his waist singing a song by Howie Day while strumming a guitar. His voice was smooth and gentle. The words poured from his mouth like they were gliding along a river. Camille and I forgot about our beers. My hands and feet went numb. Before his set was over he played “Wonderwall” by Oasis and then a beautiful rendition of Johnny Cash’s “Ring of Fire.” By the time he left the stage all the tables in the pub had been filled. Some people were standing against the walls.
Camille rambled in French afterward while I watched the guy walk up to the bar and order a drink. He stood there for a minute, scanning the room, until he saw our table.
“Mind if I sit with yeh?” he asked, smiling. His teeth were horribly crooked. Because another guy was up on the stage now, screaming into the mic, he had to lean in so close I could smell the beer on his breath. His eyes were so blue they almost looked translucent. I nodded. “The name’s Owen,” he said into my ear as he sat down in the chair next to me.
The three of us watched a few more musicians play covers of American pop songs. Camille had drank six or seven beers and was dancing provocatively next to the stage when Owen leaned into me and said, “I think your friend’s had quite a bit to drink. She doesn’t look too good. You wanna take her home?”
Though she protested, Owen and I managed to walk her back to the hostel. By the time I got her up to the room she was nearly passed out. The room was half full of sleeping girls. It was nearly two o’clock in the morning. I put her in my bed and met Owen in the hostel lobby. We walked out to the pier and stopped to admire the murky stillness of the water.
“So what brings an American girl to this lovely country at the end of summer? Not that you need a reason. It’s beautiful enough, isn’t it?” he said.
I agreed that it was beautiful and, because I myself had drank about four beers, indulged him in the story of how I came to Ireland, including every detail about my parent’s weird separation ordeal, my lack of direction in life and my feelings about it all. When I’d finished telling him everything tragic about me he wrapped an arm around my shoulder and smiled. “Sounds like as good enough a reason as any.”
We walked along the pier and he offered to tell me his life story since I so willingly offered mine. He was a twenty-five-year-old self-proclaimed musician, born to a math teacher and a librarian. His parents were still happily married (“I wish meh life was a bit more tragic”) and he had a sister who was studying to be a veterinarian. The possibilities of the future were his guides to life, which basically meant that he, like me, had no idea what he was really doing with his youth or what he hoped to accomplish in the next few months.
“I mean, I’m rather pathetic, really. Still live at home with the ‘rents. Fuck around with my friends all day, skateboardin’ and playin’ music. Look at you, though! Travelin’ around the world…solo. It takes some guts to do that,” he said. And then he jumped up onto the railing of the fencing surrounding the pier. To my drunken state of mind this was the most terrifying thing he could possibly do.
“Holy shit, get down! You’ll kill yourself!” I cried. He laughed and preceded to walk down the railing, his arms outstretched.
“Calm down, yeh drunk,” he said, grinning at me. I followed his movements with my hands out, as though I believed I could catch him if he fell. Finally, he jumped down and wrapped his arm around my shoulder again. “Sorry I’m such an ass. You’ll have to get used to it if yeh decide to hang around me ever again.”
Overcome by drunkenness, I told him I most certainly would not be hanging around him again. However, when I woke up the next morning and found him standing outside my hostel with an invitation to breakfast I forgot why I had protested his company the night before.
Henry’s entire body takes up the pillow next to mine. His purring has a rhythm to it, as though he’s humming Coldplay or Train. There’s a soft tap on my door. My brother walks in with a shy smile. His round glasses take up most of his face and his long dreads are pulled into a bun. My mother hates them and thinks that at twenty-eight Ben is too old for them, but I’ve always been supportive. They suit him well. He sits on my bed next to Henry and scratches his back.
“Mom told me to tell you dinner is ready,” he says.
“Did she also tell you to come here to visit me?” I ask him. I know he won’t lie. He’s bad at it.
“Kinda,” he says. “I also wanted to come. It’s been a while since I’ve seen you guys. I feel like I’ve missed out on a lot, you know.” He glances at my wrists and for a moment I want to tell him about it– the moment I locked the hostel door, a pack of razor blade in my pocket. But then he quickly moves his eyes back to Henry and I don’t have the urge anymore.
A lot of older brothers make childhood hell for their younger siblings, but not my brother. Ben is like a bunny rabbit, soft in every way. As kids he did everything for me; made my peanut butter and celery stick snacks, cleaned my room, pulled the slivers out of my feet. My dad wasn’t around much; working, you know, so my brother sort of stepped in. Not that he did it because my dad wasn’t around, but because he genuinely cared. The joy it brought my mother nearly killed her.
There was this one night my parents were fighting in the kitchen, I was hiding in my closet. For whatever reason I thought that if my parents couldn’t find me I wouldn’t have to get in trouble too and be yelled at by my dad. I was eight. My brother found me, though, pulled me into his room, and we made a fort out of his sheets. He told me if I was going to hide in a bomb shelter it had to be legit and it was better to have company. He was eleven then.
We spent the rest of that night listening to Eiffel 65 on his blue CD player; “no love, no friendship, nothing else, just the dollar bill coming on into their pocket into their bank account, that’s too much of heaven bringing them underground.” The disco-pop drowned out my parents’ fighting to a certain degree. It was probably the effort of trying to block out one noise with another that eventually drained the energy from us and let us fall asleep.
“I would have come sooner,” Ben says.
“But you had to work. It’s fine, Ben,” I tell him. He sighs. I think he worries that he’ll turn into my father one day.
“So Dad wants to see me. He called Mom about it,” I say. He goes on petting Henry as though he didn’t hear me. Ever since my father left Ben hasn’t wanted anything to do with him, which, I can’t say I blame him. I’m the only one who has had any contact with my father after he tore up the family. It’s been sparing contact, though.
“Yea, I don’t know what that’s all about. I probably won’t see him,” I say. Ben glances at me. He’s got a sort of sad, droopy expression on his
“You should really see him, Lenny. Or at least return his call. I’m sure he’s concerned about you.”
“It’s kind of late for that.”
“Well, at least it’s something.”
So I call him after dinner and we plan for lunch on Tuesday. He’s got a real tight schedule, has to go to great lengths in order to pencil me in.
Tuesday, okay.
I’m seeing my father today. At noon he’s picking me up. It’s hot and humid outside but I wear a long-sleeve grey dress anyways. I haven’t bothered with my hair in so long it looks like I’ve been living in the wilderness for the past year. If I could I would copy Ben and dread it because maybe then it would look presentable, but my mother would probably chop the dreads off in my sleep. I have a tattoo of a hummingbird on my ribcage she doesn’t know about.
Not a minute past noon, my father pulls up to the house. He sends me a text saying he’s here. Ben looks out the kitchen window above the sink and shakes his head. “Coward,” he mutters to himself.
“Hey there,” my father says as I plop down into the beige leather seat of his Audi convertible. Some oldies tunes are playing on the radio.
“Hi, Dad,” I say. Unlike most dads who haven’t seen their children in a while and whose first comments are usually something about how the kids have changed, look older, etc., my dad says nothing except that he knows a great Indian restaurant in town with a buffet and “you like Indian, right?”
We eat at the restaurant in silence for about fifteen minutes before my father finally asks how I am. I tell him I’m doing fine, just fine. Excellent, actually, never better.
“I got a phone call the other day about you leaving the hospital. I wanted to tell you in person how happy I am to hear that. I don’t know what I’d do, kid, if, you know…” His voice trails off, so he fills his empty mouth with food.
“Dad, that was a couple weeks ago,” I tell him. He looks up from his plate, his eyebrows crunched together. They’re so bushy and thick they almost form one solid line.
“What? I could’ve sworn it was just the other day…”
“It’s fine, Dad. Don’t worry about it,” I say.
“No, Sweetie, I’m sorry. I guess I’ve been so busy with work I….lost track of the time.”
My father’s a lawyer. I get it. Lawyers work long hours, leaving them with little time for a personal life but loads of money. I bet he doesn’t even have a clue why I tried to kill myself. Everyone else does.
“Look, I want you to know I’m glad you’re still here. I love you, Lennon. You’re my little girl,” he says. We eat some more, he asks me about Europe, I tell him a few stories about some of the people I met and the places I saw. By the way he is looking around the room and down at his plate I can tell he’s not quite paying attention, like he wants to change the subject but he’s trying to be polite about it. I’m so into the story-telling, though, that I almost relate the night when I drank so much beer I sang karaoke in an Irish pub with Owen, but the words fall into the back of my throat.
“That’s great. I’m so glad you got to do all that. Listen, I was thinking, since we’re here together, well, there’s something I want to ask you.”
Suddenly I feel like I’ve been left out in the sun too long, like I’ve given too much of myself away only to receive a nasty burn instead of a nice golden tan. Whatever he’s about to say is the real reason he called and I’m sure it’s horrible.
“What is it?” I ask.
“Know that I never wanted to put you in this position, Sweetie, and forgive me for asking this of you. It’s wrong of me to do this, I know, but I can’t go on with this silly game of your mother’s anymore. Will you ask her to sign the papers? Please?”
Oh, God, it’s worse than I expected.
“God, Dad.”
“Sweetie, look–”
“No, seriously? I haven’t seen you in over a year and you ask me that, of all things. You’re a lawyer. Why can’t you make her sign the fucking papers yourself!” I’m yelling. I get up from the table and hurry out of the restaurant. My father calls after me. I run mindlessly through the streets towards my neighborhood, barely avoiding the pedestrians strolling by.
I pause, hunched over, in front of the stop sign posted before the railroad to catch my breath. And then, out of the corner of my eye I see him. He’s balancing along one of the rails, his arms outstretched. He’s smiling, I can tell, giving me one of those cocky, sideways ones he always gave me when I got upset with him.
He was always doing dangerous shit. I told him he would get himself killed one day. He must have taken that as advice.
“God damn it, why can’t you just disappear!” I scream at him. He keeps walking along the tracks, looking back at me. I close my eyes, but I can only see it more clearly. The pines that hid the bend in the railroad. The broken-down yellow tractor.
“Get off the fucking tracks, you’re not impressing me anymore, Owen,” I call at him.
“Yeh worry too much, hon,” he says.
We can hear the train’s whistle, but he’s still balancing along the tracks, smiling at me. He’s going to wait until the train is just behind his heels. I jump from the tractor when I first see it and scream at him to get down. The train is maybe a few yards away when he makes a leap towards the outside of the railing. But his foot slips. He’s lying across the track. His blue eyes reach for mine as the train slices his body into three large pieces, taking off with the chunk of his torso.
I don’t realize I’m curled up on the ground, sobbing and trembling until a short, round woman strokes my arm. She helps me up and walks me home. My mother isn’t there, thank God, so I lock myself in my room and hold onto Henry as though he’s a baby blanket. He’s so good to me. I turn the old hot pink CD player I found in the garage last week. My mom’s Righteous Brothers CD has been in there since iPods were invented, but it still plays well. I don’t fall sleep, but I lie on my bed in a state of mock consciousness.
My mom comes in some time a while later. The room is covered in darkness. She turns on my lamp and sits on my bed. I’m facing the wall. I let her smooth my hair behind my ears like she would do when I was a child and sad.
“I got a call from the neighbor. Meeting with Dad didn’t go well, I take it?” she says.
“He’s unbelievable,” I say into my pillow. It’s not fair. The way she talks about him– she thinks she’s still in love with him.
“Oh, I’m sure he didn’t mean it, whatever he did that upset you. You know how your father is sometimes.”
“No Mom,” I tell her, lifting myself up from my fetal position. She stops petting my head. “I don’t know how Dad is anymore and you don’t either.”
“Honey, come on now. You’re being negative again.”
“I’m being realistic. He’s a heartless asshole. You wanna know what he asked me today? He wanted to know if I would get you to sign the papers. That’s all he cares about, Mom.”
She looks down at her hands. The thought of being alone for the rest of her life cripples
her, she’s told me more than once. That’s the real reason she wants to stay with him. Because it’s not possible she can still be in love with him.
“It must be true, then,” she says quietly.
“Of course it’s true. I just told you,” I say. She raises her head and levels her eyes with mine, but they seem to be looking at something else. The corners of her mouth are twitching, like she’s trying to smile. She sits there for a minute, staring into space, then leaves without saying a word.
My dad shows up on our doorstep the next day. Like, actually fucking rings the doorbell. Ben and I are sitting at the table eating oatmeal. My mother peeks through the peephole before answering the door and sighs.
“Is Lennon here?” he asks. She doesn’t invite him in.
“Somewhere,” she says.
“Well…er, can you get her?” he asks.
“Matt, please, do you need to involve her in this? Right now?”
“I just want to apologize to her,” he says. Oh. Yea, fuckin’ right, Dad. I roll my eyes at Ben and he shakes his head.
“Oh,” says my mother.
“Well, you’ll tell her for me, then, won’t you?” my father says, and before my mother answers he’s gone. Ben and I hurry to the kitchen window above the sink and watch my dad get into his stupid Audi convertible. The top is down. There’s a blonde woman in the passenger seat. My father says something to her that wipes the smile off her face.
He still has no clue why I tried to kill myself.
My mother wraps her arms around Ben and I and pulls us closer towards her. “You’ve always been good, good kids,” she says. “Please, please, please…don’t ever leave me like that.” She breaks into an ugly sob, resting her head on Ben’s shoulder. He reaches around with his free arm and embraces her. I’m still held by my mother’s right arm. I want to hug her too, but I feel so guilty for nearly leaving her that I just stand there and watch Ben be the comforting blanket he always has been.
Later, I find her in the living room curled up on the couch with a blanket. Henry is tucked up under my arm. There are piles of photos and photo albums sprawled out on the couch and the coffee table. She moves some of the photos so I can sit down. I rifle through a stack of photos. They’re all of Ben and me as kids. Carving pumpkins, our hands covered in orange goop. Ben in a blue baseball uniform, his arm slumped across my shoulders.
“I guess I’ve always known why your father left. I just didn’t want to admit it,” my mother says.
“You mean, Dad’s been seeing that woman this whole time?”
She nods. I guess I’m not surprised. I just feel bad that I gave him more credit than he deserves.
“Ben saw them together once, at the grocery store. When your father saw him he did everything he could to avoid him. This was before we were separated. I confronted your father about it and he told me she was just a coworker. He didn’t love her or anything. I guess I thought he would eventually get bored with her and come back.”
“Mom…”
“He’s never coming back, though. I’ve known that for a while. I just…I wanted us to try to be a family, I guess.” She’s holding a photograph of the four of us from a vacation we took to the coast. I was about five. Ben and I are covered in sand, my parents are kneeling beside us, smiling. We look like your typical American family. “I guess that’s the hardest part, though.”
“I’m sorry, Mom,” I tell her, my throat so dry it feels like there’s an avocado lodged in there. “I’m sorry I tried to kill myself. I won’t leave you, I swear. I never wanted to leave, I just…”
She pulls my head into her chest and rubs my back, telling me it’s okay, she was never mad, she understands. I tell her I miss Owen. I always will. And then I tell her about that day because I’ve never told anyone what really happened. And it feels good to finally tell someone. She doesn’t say any of the stupid shit my therapist says either. She just rubs my back. And Henry is lodged in between us, purring.