I saw it when I was seven, when Joe Mitchell pushed me in the pool and laughed and
slapped his wet swim trunks until his hands turned red.
Not at first. After I sank, after Joe poked me with the skimming net.
There’s no light. People say that happens. It's not true. I did leave my body, though. I
watched Mrs. Mitchell turn me on my stomach and smack my back while my head hung over the pool filter and stared into the tangle of hair and bugs and leaves.
I saw everything.

***

At the trial, the lawyer told my mom if I crap not to change my diaper. But I didn’t go.
Even when Mrs. Mitchell said she hadn’t been drinking, and she checked for a pulse and
performed CPR.
It doesn’t matter. I’m never going to be me again. The only body part I can really
control is my right hand. But not my arm so I can’t scratch my nose. Or lift a spoon to eat
cereal.

***

Dad used to tell Mom the Lord works in mysterious ways. Mom would shake her head.
But it's true. When Mrs. Mitchell pounded my back I felt like I could walk right into that
tangled mess and begin to make sense of it all. But I didn’t have time. I rejoined my body. It's
like going down a water slide except there's no water which I now think is so ironic.

***

Mondays are bath days at the care center. Lately I’ve been the last one. That's good,
because the nurse isn't careful and I fall and see all this hair in the drain.

When it happened again and my hand landed over the drain I grabbed it. I held it the whole week until Saturday morning when Mom visited. She uncrinkled my fist and tiny white puffs of mold had blossomed like clouds. She screamed when she saw that paradise. Then she ran into the hallway to find Dad, so he could see too.

Roger D'Agostin is a writer living in Connecticut.

The moment they let me walk the farm alone
I screamed it in the well.
I had a dog then, a long brown haired dog, who
brought mud through the foyer and sunroom and den.
On summer mornings we’d walk with him, Barky.
I could kick pebbles with my hard and tough barefeet
as the sun rose over the tufts of grandmother elk and
maple, announcing the day on my forehead.
Barky’s nose in the rivulets, the smell of drying fruit
through that honeyed monthlessness, yearlessness, breath.
Unlamenting, without compare, away from the alley
through which I now side-step, wedged between back then
and maybe later.

We’d run to the well after tumblers of juice
drained to drops except for the pulp, specks
instabaked to the plastic pink silos, the eastborne
summer sun torilla’d through the carrot curtains.
Remember when Javi broke his beaver tooth on the
stone wall of the well? Could you believe it? The
first time any of us ever tripped in our lives
thwack
just like that, perfect. Blood through too many fingers
as he howled the whole way home. How they sat us
on the checkered sofa which used to fit all five
and said “no more— no more races— couldn’t we see—
trying to get yourselves killed?” But, ha, there we were
sprinting like always, Javi smiling through his swollen lip.

When I could rent a car, years later,
I drove out to the well.
My hope: smudges of farm dirt on the linen of a suit
I no longer wanted. Setting eyes on the spread of pink house
I’d hear the faraway bell of voices now gone or changed.
In the clean cabin of the car along that ghostly road
I steeled myself to see condos or commercial limbs
or an expanse of faceless industry where the well once stood.
There’d be no more house or back shed or rolling rugs of crop;
cabbage and grape, cherry and lime.
But I needn’t have tried, for I couldn’t find
the farm at all. I’d forgotten the names. I was like
the black birds swimming above, circling nothing,
knowing it lay around the corner but never finding it there,
as the minutes clicked and gas eeked towards empty.

Though Elan Maier hails from the mean streets of Silicon Valley, he currently lives in New York City. His writing has been published in the Appalachian Review, Darling Records, and BoomPowSplat. He earned his masters in creative writing from Oxford University and his first novel was a finalist for the Screencraft Cinematic Book competition.

"The Plan" by Roger D'Agostin

"The Well" by Elan Maier