Karen G. Berry

​Mount St Helens 1976
 
I was sixteen years old, driving to California with a boy I’d marry when I turned eighteen. Born on the prairie, most comfortable in college towns—Bozeman, Missoula—I disliked cities, but the car’s windshield framed an urban view that called me like a siren. Was it the bridges soaring over the river’s wide division? The curling ferns on hillsides cascading with greenery? The snowy peaks of Mount St. Helens and Mt. Hood presiding over the skyline? I barely said it out loud, the mildest expression of a conviction that only grew stronger as we passed through Portland on our way to parts south. “I hate cities, but if I had to live in one, I think I could live here.” He smiled and said nothing. I knew he loved Montana. That’s where we would move after I graduated high school. That’s where he thought we would live forever. 
 
mountains capped with snow
two extinct volcanic peaks
only one will blow 

**

The Astral Plain 1978
 
I tried so hard to believe. I wanted to read palms and lay out tarot cards. I wanted to experience ESP and levitation. And more than anything else, I want to travel the astral plain. Every night before I went to sleep, I tried to cast my—soul?—or whatever it is you’re supposed to send out via astral projection. Every morning, I would wake up and record what I could remember of my dreams, hoping to find evidence that I’d actually done it. My goal was to send my disembodied self out on the astral plain to find intelligent people, funny people, maybe even a few famous people—the people I was having trouble finding in Missoula, Montana, as the 18 year-old wife of an auto mechanic. 
 
curled cats sleeping near
mountain night, chilly air
sleep allows escape
 
**

Laundry Day 1979
 
When we lived in Missoula, there was no laundry room at our apartment. I owned only one pair of jeans, so going to the laundromat was his job. He saved up loose change in a basket, and off he went on Saturday mornings while I lounged around the house in sleep clothes. He did the laundry well, never ruining a single garment of mine. He even seemed to enjoy it. I went with him once. I didn’t understand the appeal of all those humming, agitating, spinning, tumbling washers and dryers. But he loved motors, engines, anything that ran. Even me, after I ran.
 
battered brown basket
three tank tops, one pair of jeans
it’s clothesline weather

**
 
Escape 1980
 
I remember the edges, ends and borders. Railings giving way to terror. Roadmaps you read and refolded, roads you followed. Colt 40 ouncers. Leaning into the train as it passed, screaming. The air pressure gauge for tires you carried in your front pocket. The grease under your fingernails that you cleaned every night with the pocketknife my parents gave you for your 18th birthday. Always being a passenger, in this car, in that car, up mountain trails and down. Ghost towns of no more than piles of reddish, collapsed lumber. Every national park. Every roadside marker. Your cigarette breath, the precise way you cleaned your glasses. Your mute love for me, as crushing as if it had been dropped on you from a great height. All those crumbling apartments, leaking heat and anger. Ants. Running out of fuel oil. Top Ramen. Concerned teachers. Calling my parents from phone booths and crying, wanting to come home. One pair of shoes in three years. A cat with leukemia. No tv. The night your mother called to tell you about your dad, the way you stood in that tiny kitchen and curved your body around the conversation, shrugging away my hand when I tried to touch you. The university chapel full of flowers and Bartok at his memorial service. Your mother in navy blue. My black eye. The moan of the cello. I left the week after his funeral. You forgave me. 
 
Drink the cheap green beer 
Gather boxes secretly
Load the van and drive 
 
**

Glioblastoma Multiforme Return
 
In this dream, we were still pretending to be together, as we did that last bit of time with your parents before your father died. A painful but necessary façade, hiding my imminent flight for your mother’s sake. In life, it was less than a year. In the dream, we’d somehow done it for forty years. Your mother was ignorant and inside with your not-dead father, who was not shaking, not gasping out his last breaths in a convalescent center. No tumor had made a meal of his brilliant mind. 
 
A dream or nightmare 
I’ve had both, my own mother 
alive dead at the same time
 
We hardly knew each other, two strangers in a parked car, exhaled breath floating like smoke in the cold. Putting on our false marriage, wearing it as a mask. Your three brothers entered the house before us, rough hands stuffed deeply in the pockets of their Levi’s, hiking boots crunching through the Montana midwinter snow.  You joined them. As the four of you walked before me, I thought how you all formed a perfect scale on the spectrum, from barely affected to functionally autistic. 
 
All your mother’s sons 
athletic, nodding heads 
coarse and curling hair 
 
We trooped into a home I didn’t know, displacing the silence and that strange smell of a cold and empty house. Your once-disapproving mother welcomed me, finally, the child-bride stranger, a too-tall rebuke of all she was. I congratulated your not-dead father on beating his unbeatable cancer, on his unexpected and extended life, on drawing breath even though he was dead, even though it had trapped me with you. I’d promised to stay until he died—but he hadn’t. So I’d never left you. 
 
My own life was gone
never lived, never known 
erased by a dream.
 
I felt my way along in this different reality, like a blind woman with hands on walls, finding a safe place to stand. Why was I summoned back to this family of strangers who thought they knew me? None of you had children. Your mother asked me if we were we going to try, finally. I couldn’t bear to tell her that the ruse of our marriage had stretched long past my menopause. 
 
Oh yes, I said. We will. 
Good, she said. I have always 
wanted grandchildren.
 
I excused myself to take a walk, and that’s what I did. I walked until I found a long concrete path that cut through Bozeman, straight to Four Corners. I knew that beside me ran a parallel path, also concrete, hidden behind a fence. I knew it had to be there. It wasn’t far.
 
It ran like a track, 
knifing through that empty town, 
and out of it.
 
**

Karen G. Berry lives and works in Portland, Oregon. She is interested in micro-societies, the strange and secret lives of children, and the heroic nature of everyday living. Karen's work has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, and published by Persimmon Tree, Open Secrets, Inknest, The Offing, Pasager, HerStry, Flash Fiction, Thin Skin, Rust & Moth, The Gilded Weathervane, The Ekphrastic Review, and many other journals and anthologies, online and in print. You can learn more about Karen at her blog, I am Not a Pie. ​