by Sam Moe
The night after my grandmother’s funeral, while I’m half-asleep on her faded gold couch in the living room, where below our fourth-floor apartment are people screaming, and singing, and laughing, in the distance there are sirens and more laughter—I hear someone—or something—lean into my ear and sigh once, loudly.
*
Ghosts. Poltergeists. Phantoms. Her voice, whispering phantasma in the dimly lit apartment, upset that you would ever suggest such an occurrence. In her apartment? There is a reasonable explanation for everything.
But I felt them when I was younger, the way the walls of my house pressed in too tight, my mother calling down to me, saying darling in a voice quite unlike hers, the many-clawed bathtub filled with memories I don’t want access to but they follow me around, this grief monster is there as I sleep in my childhood bedroom, a singular glow-in-the-dark star keeping me company as I try, and fail, to sleep.
Soon it’s the dusk of the day before: meaning Connecticut, meaning pines and the way the cold reminds me of blue soap bars, sparkles, open maple syrup in the fridge for too long. I’m lying in the bed; I don’t want to see your father. The sky is bright navy again, the way New England will stay all winter long, constantly under threat of storm, windy but not like back home in Illinois. The lawn here is bright, so green you become viridescent, and I’m obsessed with the evergreens, but I don’t go to the forest anymore, not since I was younger and my body was a mannequin-girl, non-girl, non-human crouching in the sand pits crying, baby, baby, please, I wished I was dead.
*
But I go to Connecticut anyway. What good is a story without a couple of villains, and aren’t I a villain, myself?
I enter his kitchen. Seated at the table are my stepmother, my father, and my sister eating pizza and a salad with blue cheese dressing in near darkness. There is a single red candle, unscented, burning in the center of the table. I wonder if my father buys these types of candles all the time. Two years ago, the last time I saw my grandmother in person, he had this same red candle almost burned down to the wick, red wax flowing all over the table. I wrote poems about how I thought it resembled a whale heart, but in reality I have no idea if it’s the right size.
No one talks to me while I eat pizza cut into rectangles. I am so hungry from driving for twelve hours—eating gas station bagels and chips—that I’ll eat anything at this point, even the blue cheese salad my father keeps trying to get me to eat.
“How’s school going?” he finally asks me.
“Good,” I reply, shoving more pizza in my mouth.
He doesn’t care about what I’m up to and I know this. Against my better judgment I volunteer more information. “I’m going to graduate this year.”
“How many people are in your class?”
I tell him I think twelve, and so far, only one of us has graduated.
“There were only four of us in my graduating class,” he tells me.
He’s a biochemist and I can’t remember for the life of me where he went to school. All I have are haphazard details from my mother that he wouldn’t want me to know, but that connect him to me. He used to sell drugs, he has a complicated relationship with his siblings, he once broke his collarbone and my grandparents didn’t take him to the hospital for several days. Years later, when my mom sprains her ankle, he’ll refuse to drive her to the hospital until she crawls down our front steps. “Alright,” I imagine him saying. “Don’t make a scene.”
My stepmother is swearing at the stove as she sifts through raviolis bursting with ricotta cheese, everyone is rushing to eat the crispy bread disks in the center of the table, everything is covered in olive oil, the tomatoes are diced perfectly, I consider telling my father I love him, he hands me an envelope of money, and I sift through responses in my head. Feeling justified, I slip the card in my coat and the two of us don’t hug. He’s wearing surgeon gloves again because of his boils, I call it a rash by accident, and he becomes upset.
Outside, it’s dark. I left for Connecticut so late the road was already filled with terrible drivers, and I could barely see, praying for the deer to stay in the forest where they belonged—I couldn’t afford another accident. My father wouldn’t care, he would have told me to come at a different time. There is no other time. This is the eve before the funeral, the last night before I’m back in New York City. I feel brilliant and awful, I feel like Manhattan doesn’t want me back but I’m going anyway. Something about this feels like a breakup, I can’t put my finger on it. Is this a way to grieve or is this my way of remaining in disbelief. Like, what if she’s not gone, she’s at the market. She’s not passed away; she’s hiding in the back room. It’s a game. When I arrive, she’ll duck out the fire escape and hide out in the bodega—not the one with the neon lights, the other bodega with the rug that reads Deli, and there she crouches to play with a small grey cat, between its paws spinning a greasy acorn.
*
My father lets me leave my car in his driveway while I take the train to Grand Central Station. Soon I’ll hail a cab and try to make it on time to help my mother.
I’m exhausted when I wake up at six, even though I slept for almost nine hours. My stepmother and I get on the same train. She says goodbye to me before walking to the next car over, already staring off into space with headphones in her ears.
I spend the hour listening to music and wondering what my grandmother would be doing if she were with me. Sobbing, probably, which isn’t unreasonable. I haven’t been able to cry yet, and I don’t know when that’s going to happen. I get sucked into daydreams about when she was alive, bending over my bed in the pink room—my aunt’s old room—and kissing my cheek before heading into work at Macy’s. Her face was always wet and cold, she was crying every time we arrived and every time we left.
*
The last time I saw my grandmother alive was during winter break in 2019. It was my first semester in the PhD program, and I had driven home to work at a restaurant and try to save a little bit of money before returning to school. The restaurant is in the same family-owned company as the now extinct Prime 131, a restaurant where I worked for almost a decade. But before I head to work, I must see my grandmother.
I had originally planned on seeing her that July, before I moved between Boston and Chicago, but I was exhausted and told her I would see her in my next break. It’s not lost on me how we have no idea how much time we have left and we make all these decisions without thinking to ourselves, what if this is the last time? Even still, how was I to know. How did I not know.
She was in the early stages of dementia that winter. We ate breakfast, lunch, and dinner together every day, an aide helping with the cooking and the cleaning. The aide fed us turkey in thick strips and plátanos chopped into disks and fried in oil. When we run out of plátanos I ask my grandmother if we have any left and she tells me to go to the supermarket down the street and get some.
“Pregúntale a alguien para ayuda,” she says. “I’ve never been able to find a madero in my whole life.”
I don’t have the energy to tell her that maduros are just ripe plátanos and that when we were younger, she used to buy so many we had to eat them at every meal.
*
The dreams didn’t continue until a few weeks after the old restaurant closed.
I have moved to Illinois, pursuing a PhD in creative writing, though sometimes I think every action, every performance, was a thinly veiled attempt to dislodge myself from the town and its history. I also wanted to let go of the extreme feelings of both love and fear I experienced during each shift. The way I would wake up early, purchase three iced coffees, and enter the space with a buzzing heart twisting in my chest, as if it might burn out at any moment. After ringing the back doorbell, where we received deliveries, one of the chefs would let me in. Almost two hours early for work, I would begin to set up the entire front of house on my own.
I stayed late, begged the other servers for their closing shifts so I could be one of the last ones to leave the space. I’d sit on the dirty floor in the office, texting the executive chef while my manager counted money. If the shift went well that day, he would throw candy at me from a large jar at his desk. He would tease me and toss my cash-out report all over the floor as I laughed, scrambling to collect every crumpled twenty. Once, when I was waiting on a couple who had stayed past closing time, I came into the office to find my money had been folded into tight patterns and taped to the doorframe.
Or perhaps I’d been dreaming about the restaurant the entire time I worked there. But I’m certain the nightmares were the after-effect of the space closing down, as if the architecture itself had chased me twelve hundred miles into my new home, begging me to answer the question on everyone’s mind: why did I leave? Fine, I told the dreams—the nightmares. I’ll immortalize you, are you happy now? In a word, yes. I was—and still am—ecstatic to be a student again. But I missed the restaurant industry, and by the time break rolled around, that pivotal winter break, December 2019, I decided to return, try my hand at one of our other stores in the company.
*
I spend each winter break weepy and half-healed. I’m up until four, sometimes five in the morning, jeering when the sun slides through the blinds, at breakfast with sunglasses on, hungover and exhausted from the night before. My friend has taken to carrying around a bag full of a dark, moss-smelling substance he mixes into every drink.
One night, I accidentally planned to attend two dinners at the same time. I went to the restaurant first, a fine-dining place in Concord, MA, that served me a nine-ounce filet mignon so tender I practically cried after the first bite. A few minutes later, I excused myself, claiming I had to make a phone call to my mother. I left my coat with the couple, a husband and wife I used to wait on at the old restaurant, who were celebrating my having completed my first semester at the program.
Once outside, freezing in a sweatshirt, I booked it down the street. My friend’s parents had also cooked me steak, feeding me whole potatoes coated in butter and herbs. When they asked where I was going, halfway through dinner, I claimed I needed to stop by the pharmacy. I made it back to the restaurant in time to watch our server present us with a twenty-year-old bottle of champagne.
*
When I finally exit the train in Grand Central Station, I realize I’ve left my coat behind. It was so expensive it would have cost me an entire paycheck to replace it, and I still wonder how my mother was able to buy it for me in the first place.
I get distracted in the center of the room, staring up at the constellation mural painted in gold and green. I hear my mother’s voice in my ear telling me I’m a New Yorker and that I need to move on, the longer I stare up at a piece of art or a building the more likely I am to be shoved onto the ground.
I feel cool while hailing the cab, like I’m off to some secret adventure where my grandmother is not alive but she’s a ghost and we’re going to take on Manhattan together. I’m excited, even though she’s gone, that I’ll get to see the rest of the family. I like to think she would have wanted this for us: for everyone to be in community at the threshold of grief. I am teetering on the precipice, uncertain if I’m going to need to remain strong and steady for my mother, or if I should give myself over to self-destructive tendencies and scream and bang my fists on the window of the taxi, then scratch at my skin until it bleeds.
Instead, I call my mother, and we whisper quietly on the phone so as not to disturb the taxi driver who is listening to his favorite music.
“It’s okay, I’ll get you a new coat,” she is saying.
But she won’t, and when I get to my grandmother’s, I’ll take her last two New Yorker coats, which are pea coats in black and brown, each wrapped in several layers of plastic.
“I love them,” I breathe, holding the coats close to my chest.
“Don’t tell the rest of the family you have that,” my mother advises.
She’s kneeling in the entryway of the apartment, doing her bright blue makeup in front of a long mirror, gilded and spray-painted with fake gold. To her right is one door and behind her is another. I lean beside the front door, which has four storm locks, and seconds later in walks the glittering perfumed body of my aunt, exclaiming she’s so happy to see me.
“You look like such a mom,” my mother says, which she is, and I don’t know what that means—my aunt looks elegant and is covered in sequins. She looks like she’s going to a party and not a funeral.
“Hey, you,” my aunt says, hugging me.
The apartment has four bedrooms, one living room, a dining room, and a kitchen. Each room has a different theme and colorful rug. The kitchen has a thick fuchsia rug where I sleep beneath the chandelier. Next is the blue room, with bright blue walls and a red floor. Beyond is the pink room, then through another door—which is blocked on either side by two dressers—is my grandmother’s room, which has gold tones. You can run straight from the living room into the bathroom. After exiting the second door of the bathroom, you must walk a few feet down the long, green hallway to enter the dining room, which has a deep pink rug. There are golden and bronze masks on the walls from Ecuador. In the kitchen are clay scenes from life in Guayaquil: people cooking, eating, resting. The final room, which my family lovingly calls “The Vatican,” is my great-grandmother’s room. She’s gone but the room is still hers. On her wall hangs an enormous cross, stolen by my aunt from a church down the street. On the cross are photos of us as children—the cousins and my sister—flowers my great-grandmother knit, and rosary beads. I notice on this most recent trip that someone has unpinned my photo from the cross and hidden it.
*
My first semester was behind me and I let myself give in to the restaurant industry once more. I wanted to impress these new people: the servers, bartenders, and food runners who had been working with each other for years, who saw me as just another grievance, someone who would hopefully be trained enough to be supportive, but not enough to make more money than them. I jotted down recipes in a stack of notecards I kept in my pocket and studied the alcohol list late into the night.
My obsession with gastronomy started years before I’d ever entered a restaurant and it only became more intense when I started working in kitchens in my first years of college.
I started out in fast food, washing dishes, scrubbing stove tops. We stayed late those days, flirting with each other and making out on the kitchen counters. One of my friends did whip-its near the french fry station, others played baseball with ice cubes and sticky food trays. I couldn’t remember how to label any of the food and I didn’t last long before I was leaving for retail, thinking that might be a better fit. But retail was worse, of course, and I returned to restaurants a few years later, starting out as an awkward host. Passion twisted into obsession and desire, as it always did, leading to late nights spent writing allergens and recipes in my journals, recalling the day’s events, the history of nuts and fruits and wines, and words like fisherman’s stew and coulis, terra firma and eighty-six.
*
Back at my grandmother’s apartment the stoop is falling apart again, loose trees buckle between faded blue skyscrapers. There are gum-stained streets—an underworld existing beneath subway grates—and Central Park is within eyeline. I sleep late, waking only to eat triple-decker clubs from the bodega with two pregnant cats eating rats. I have bags under my eyes, I sell gifted jewelry to make ends meet, and I remember being in love twice. It hardly matters.
I eat in greasy diners, memorize ancient tiles lining the walls of pastry shops. Sometimes I try to peek into the kitchens to see where they keep the spoiled meats, and other days spoiled men. Sun filters through the windows of the living room, barely catching the center of the apartment. The stoop is littered with feathers from pigeons, discarded peppers, soggy napkins, and texts from exes that they miss me. Lying was easy; moving to the Bronx during college involved me sealing my heart, making myself palatable to gods and hookups and frenemies and professors.
The dreams started when I would visit my mother and sleep in the living room.
In the first dream, I am faced with what appears to be an enormous column of dollhouse parts and toys, frozen in place. This house is always dim, and the lights are gray. Without warning this doll-tower sinks into the floor, like a well, and I am somehow responsible for climbing all the way to the bottom. I never make it to the edge, however, and I always wake up before I can even try. In the next dream, I find an alternate world inside of a bedroom mirror. I am a child. I touch the surface of the mirror, which ripples like the disrupted surface of a pond. I climb in and my reality disappears. In one of my dreams, my mother is in the apartment space with its glowing, old-sunset reds and oranges; she has drawn me back to Manhattan and when it’s time to leave she won’t let me and I get lost trying to make it to a fake train station.
After the pipes in the pink room have stopped shaking like they contain pennies, a door opens in my mother’s closet, revealing a needle universe filled with clear blue syringes. Every time I dream in the pink room it’s out of the corner of my eye. All the hauntings exist on the outskirts of time—perhaps I could see them at the hem of my grandmother’s skirt, just there, a phantom attached to fabric having followed us home to the West Side apartment.
Tucked away between Amsterdam and Broadway, a few feet away from a church where strangers continuously steal the fingers and flowers of Christ, near the brick hallway my mother took to run away from bullies, there hang puddles of low-light, sidewalk fruit, and bags of trash—was there another strike? I don’t remember. I’m lucid dreaming, getting out of bed, headed not towards the nightmare but down the hall. How could I have prepared for the years to come? How was I to know it would have been safer to climb inside my nightmares than to survive, begrudgingly, against thistles of pain, the animals in the forest averted their eyes. I remember walking my bike home and longing for city streets smelling of old pretzels and drunken shouting that kept me up all night—at least I knew the city was alive. That day there were hikers, bikers, the wolves, and I made it home by myself, winded, ignoring mymother when she asked what was wrong. I fell asleep on the hardwood floor and dreamed of soft pretzels and great blue whales.
*
Christmas in the old restaurant was sticky buns and my desire to know, without a shadow of a doubt, that everyone cared about me. I tucked cards from my grandparents inside my server notebook, mixing their money with bartending tips. I thought I was more like the glossy-haired waitresses, whose tattooed skin never seemed to burn when they stuck their arms in the hot window. I hyper-focused on the roundness of the onion buns and whether I had properly cleaned the blue-cream sauce tubes. I ate frozen cookies in the walk-in freezers and the executive chef saved me beers by the buckets of brine and bins of fresh lettuce.
On New Year’s Eve we took tequila shots in the office. I started to hate alone time. I hung out on the sticky bar mats, twirling sugared orange slices on plastic picks. Some days the power went out. I learned the difference between a strip steak and a ribeye. I made ends meet. I didn’t see my family most of that year.
I daydreamed, often, about turning into a bird or a candle, a hot plate or a scallop, caramel-coated pecans, or maybe a note. My body was so sore when I got out of bed, I had to roll my feet on frozen water bottles. Some days I could barely walk and my arms were frequently covered in wrist-supportive bandages.
*
Dentro de la cocina, detrás del refrigerador, hay un cuarto cálido, con flores y fotografías, recuerdos y una gran cruz con los rostros de todos los niños.
And in this room behind the kitchen and the stove, beyond where the mice gather in wreaths beneath tables whose surfaces were once coated in flour and egg, there is a room with a cross stolen from Saint Patrick’s Cathedral. Later my mother and her sister are arguing with each other on who gets to keep it. They don’t realize the cross belongs to the room.
The apartment—falling apart and fading in a decaying Manhattan, four-bedrooms, a living room with a now-disappeared red carpet and a dining room with a rug the color of pale rose champagne—still feels heavy with the souls of my deceased family members. Once when I was younger, my grandmother awoke to her mother’s ghost visiting her on the edge of the bed. Everyone could hear her laughing and my mother decided she was sleeping and needed to be waking up. Soon she is crying; the ghosts remain.
Our apartment is on the same block as the church. My cousins and I sit together, still silly and making jokes like we were kids. None of us has seen each other since before quarantine.
Afterwards, everyone heads back to the apartment to eat cookies painted like leaves. We order bodega sandwiches and hang out at my friend’s apartment. We talk about the day we got the news, how both my mother and my aunt were in transit. My aunt was driving my cousin back to the city and my mother was leaving that day for Massachusetts.
“My friend was calling me the ‘death receptionist’ because I had to call all the relatives while my mom was driving,” she tells us between bites of her sandwich. “They were all saying, ‘ay! No me digas. Okay, me voy a llamar a alguien.’”
Our next stop before dinner is the Cathedral of St. John the Divine. The priest—who doesn’t tell us his name, which causes my mother to hold a grudge—tells us Joan Didion’s memorial service was also held at the church. My cousins and I sit towards the back, whispering about where Joan Didion might be. We never find her, and after the blessing is over and my mom gives a tear-filled speech, we head out to dinner.
The cathedral is filled with alleyways under construction. Everything is dimly lit, smelling of earth and rain. Overhead stand large stained glass windows casting rainbow light in the air. I barely speak, too busy writing down everything everyone is saying on my phone so I can immortalize them later.
*
Us, bent over the counter during pre-meal, listening to the chef rattle off the ingredients for this week’s specials. Foamy smoke from the fisherman’s stew curling into the air. Sweet, tomato-orange broth, shining and newly cleaned mussels, vague outline of a purple and white shell that once hid a scallop. The scallop, floating in the stew. My hand inching towards the crisp, thin bread slice hiding just beyond the other servers’ line of sight.
When I catch his eye, he raises his eyebrows. Don’t, he mouths, and we both know he’s right. I am exhausted from tolerating the yelling.
Weeks later I’ll have left, books stuffed in cars, journals full of stained dupe papers, your goodbye card taped to the inside of a journal. I can see the restaurant on my body. Hot plate burns on my right hand, a thumb bending too far, nights I wake in a new space covered in sweat, faded memories of floors covered in mushrooms and upturned nails.
I tell myself these are dreams of love. I remember watching the chefs use their hands to skin a beautiful silver fish. I pressed my stomach against all the tables, I was seduced by the maple glaze, I waited, eyes glossed over, loving the curl of the carrot as it was peeled again and again, until only the core was left. I am haunted in kitchens I have no attachment to: I dutifully wrap takeout orders. My skin everywhere is cold. I cry over the loss of a building I lay no claim in. I begin dreaming of my family, together, on a boardwalk. The river is full of cranberries. Before I wake up, I trip into the water and drown.
*
My mother doesn’t want to have blood or veins in her body. She calls me with her legs propped up on the wall, tells me her uterus is falling out again.
“Are all the things I’m telling you going into some book?”
“Maybe,” I reply while peeling paint off a bookshelf.
“Well, I’m telling you all this so you can write it down. You’re the poet. I’m going to write down everything I remember and I’m going to give it to you, and I hope you can help preserve them. You know how to rhyme things.”
We talk about how my great-grandmother used to listen to a radio show every week where a host would say “Viernes para recorder.” My grandmother leaves us on a Friday, and every Friday since then, when I’ve been waiting for news, my mother texts me and says not to forget: Fridays are for remembering. I know she’s right, but I find my body remembers its history easier when I’m in certain spaces, like the small kitchen in my apartment in Illinois.
Jean Duruz’s piece in Gastronomica, “Haunted Kitchens: Cooking and Remembering,” reminds me that these spaces, coated in translucent cobwebs of the past, can become haunted spaces: “It is these ‘hauntings’ that intrigue me, with all of their shadows of desire and loss—the ghosts, perhaps, of other stories attached to the spaces of the city, mundane stories of everyday rituals and practices told against the dominant discourse of urban planning or corporate management. In fact, according to Michel de Certeau, ‘Haunted Places are the only ones people can live in.’”
I think again of the empty space of doorways and holes, the way space becomes an object and an occurrence, the looseness of bedsheets that might contain ghosts, the balls of thread my grandmother used to keep in bins under the bed—might they help me understand the maze?
My cousin calls me the day of my grandmother’s death. She tells me a story about how on New Year’s Eve the year before, a Friday in 2021, she made a sacrificial altar. She placed fruit around the candles and a hundred-dollar bill and begged the spirits for the apartment. I wonder if I should try and kindle a deal with a god, to ask one for protection or clarity. We’re on the phone for hours and the doorway shifts into two, the light fraying every space. Outside there is thunder and rain and I think, of course.
After I hang up, I’ll tell my partner about what happened, crying only once after he says he’s sorry for my loss. I make plans to head back to the restaurant then abandon them at the last minute, out of fear.
“You know,” he says, rubbing the small of my back, “you said your soul is going to return to you, but I feel like that’s not true.” He tells me he feels like part of my soul will always be in another space, like limbo.
Power Prayer
by Jaina Cipriano
Sam Moe is the recipient of a 2023 St. Joe Community Foundation Poetry Fellowship from the Longleaf Writers Conference. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming from Whale Road Review, The Indianapolis Review, Sundog Lit, and others. Her poetry book, Heart Weeds, is out from Alien Buddha Press and her chapbook, Grief Birds, was published by Bullshit Lit in April 2023. Her full-length, Cicatrizing the Daughters, is forthcoming from FlowerSong Press.
Jaina Cipriano is an experiential designer, photographer, and filmmaker exploring the emotional toll of religious and romantic entrapment. Her worlds communicate with our neglected inner child and are informed by explosive colors, elements of elevated play, and the push/pull of light and dark. Jaina is a self taught artist with a deep love for creative problem solving. She writes and directs award winning short films that wrestle with the complicated path of healing. In 2020 she released You Don’t Have to Take Orders from the Moon, a surrealist horror film wrestling with the gravity of deep codependency. Her second short, Trauma Bond, is a dreamy, coming-of-age thriller that explores what happens when we attempt to heal deep wounds with quick fixes. Jaina founded Finding Bright Studios—a design company specializing in set design for music videos and immersive spaces. She has collaborated with GRRL HAUS, Boston Art Review, was a Boston Fellow for the Mass Art Creative Business Incubator, and a finalist in EforAll. Her photographic work has been shown internationally.
Ignatian Literary Magazine 