Dear Friends:

I am happy to announce that my short story, “Smoke” is a winner in the 2024 Next Generation Short Story Awards competition in the category for Black, Indigenous, and People of Color. Want to read it? Here it is…

Smoke

By Helen Delaney

There is no good end to the smell of smoke, I can tell you that. You shouldn’t trust everything I tell you now though, because a lot of my memory is gone.

You will remember what you need to remember, they say.

My father was dead. My mother had no one to hunt for her and we were always hungry, especially in the winter, and it was winter when he rode into our village with five horses. He came to my mother and said I will give you these five horses for your daughter. And she said I can be rich with five horses but I will still be hungry. You can trade the horses to some men in the village and they will hunt for you, he said. And she said how do you know my daughter? When she said this, her eyes pinched together. I have seen her in the fields looking for food, he said. Will you feed her? And he said, I will feed her. And what will you do with her? Will you make her work like a slave? she said. She will be my wife, he said. My mother looked at me and I knew she was going to give me away and I ran and hid in the bushes until I fell asleep. When I woke, the sun was in my face and he was standing over me. He put me on his horse and he walked alongside, and that is how we left the village. I looked back and my mother was standing outside our dwelling and she was holding the horses.

That is enough, they say. You must sleep now. That is how it is here. You don’t want to remember too much too fast.  

Listen. I had a dream. My husband came to me in the dream, the one who bought me with the five horses. He handed me a rabbit to cook. His eyes were black like the river at night. I smiled at him and he smiled back. He went away and I made a fire. l feel better now, because he came to me in the dream and I don’t feel alone anymore. Where am I?

You are here, they say. What happened when you went with him?   

I was young and we had not been together yet, so I had to live with his mother. She made me do too many chores, because I was not from her village and she didn’t want me for her son. She was old and smelled bad and her mouth was always turned down. She gave me her hard voice every day and called me names. There were times when I wanted to push her down. The people hated me too.

And what about him? they say.

Snow was on the ground and he gave me a blanket because I was cold. I was wearing the blanket when he and the other men rode into the village. They had been away in a battle with the men who looked like ghosts. I was glad to see him because his mother did not like to share her food with me and I had started to get hungry again. I saw him on his horse and there was a wound on his thigh. Blood was all over his leg and on the horse, too. I had wood in my arms for a fire for the old woman. I threw the wood down and followed him. He came to lie down in his mother’s dwelling and soon he had a great fever. The healing man came to see him, but he got worse. His old mother cried and made loud noises, but I wasn’t thinking about her. I went out and found some moss hanging from a tree. I cleaned his wound with water and put the moss on top and bound it with a piece of cloth. Every day I made a fire to keep him warm because he had started to shiver. I found some herbs for his fever and made a tea and held it to his mouth. It was bitter but he drank it and it made him sleep. He slept days and nights and days again. I put new moss on his wound and clean cloths that I washed in the river. My mother taught me this. The people gave us food and I think they didn’t hate me anymore.  

Are you tired, now? they ask.

No. When I remember him, I do not feel tired. The trees were dropping flowers on the ground when I came to him and his black eyes were looking at me, and he smiled and I knew he was well. It took a long time because the wound was deep and the fever came and went and came again. When he was strong, the people made a ceremony. The trees had turned yellow by that time and I became his wife. The people accepted me then. I think I will rest for a while, now.

Yes, they say. We will wait.

He was tall and had a beautiful face and he stayed with me even when I had no children. You should have another wife and bring our people children, the women of the village said. Too many of the people are dying. But when their children were sick I healed them, so there were more children in the village because they did not die when they became sick, but they did not remember that. Our dwelling was very clean and I kept healing herbs there and beautiful blankets that I made to make the children feel better. And I took care of the old woman till she died. I did that for him. He was a good hunter and we had many days when our stomachs were full and we were laughing and making love and being happy. The people did not know this, because our laughing and loving was soft and stayed in our dwelling. He fought many more battles and had many more wounds, but none like the one on his thigh. I healed him and put medicine on the other men too, but some of them died. I was always glad when he came home from the battles and was not killed. When he was not away, we were always together. When the smoke came, we were together.

Yes, we know about the smoke, they say.

That day it was dark, like it is before a big rain, and we put the horses under the trees, and covered them with blankets and tied them up. We should not have done that because when we smelled the smoke, the horses were too far away and we couldn’t get to them. I could hear them whinnying. After a while, I didn’t hear them anymore. I think they broke loose and ran away. When animals smell smoke, they run. Do I have to remember everything?

No, not everything, they say. Just enough.

Enough for what?

Enough to rest, they say.

We knew they were coming. He and the other men had been talking about them coming for a long time. I heard them talking and I knew they had killed everyone one in my old village. But my mother had been long gone before that and I was glad. That day he came to me and said we have to leave now because the men who look like ghosts are coming and we have to run. I began to pack our things, but they came too fast. We heard the people running and screaming…

Do you want to stop now? they say.

No. I want to tell you what happened. Our horses were gone and we were older than the others and we could not run fast so we stayed in our dwelling. We could hear their horses and their guns knocking the people down. Someone fell outside our flap. And we heard fire crackling and the ghost men screaming their words and we smelled smoke. Nothing good comes from the smell of smoke, I can tell you that.

You can stop now, they say.

No, it’s all right. We sat down together on an old bearskin. He was holding my hand in his two hands and he was looking at me with his black eyes. There was no fear in his eyes. I was all right after that. He had put an eagle feather in his hair. I looked at him and said you are still handsome. And he said that we had lived a good life together. And I said that my happiest time was when we were under the trees and the yellow leaves were falling and it was warm and the people were dancing and we were laughing. And he said yes that was a good day. And I said I am glad you came to get me with five horses.  

Is that all? they say.

I looked up and saw fire in the top of our tipi. And the smoke came down. I think you can trust me on this.

Ah yes, they say. That is enough. You can rest now.  

“My father says that children keep growing/Rivers keep flowing too. My father says he doesn’t know why/But somehow or other they do. A hundred million miracles/ A hundred million miracles/ A hundred million miracles/ Are happ’ning ev’ry day.”  – From The Flower Drum Song, Lyrics by Oscar Hammerstein II

***

You can relax, now. You are where you are supposed to be. You are here because you want to think about something else besides the news. Perfect.

I’m going to tell you a little story. It’s about a cat and it’s about a miracle. But more than that, it’s about the unassailable evidence that we, and all living things, are loved and cared for – far, far beyond what we think we know.                

***

The Cat

A day or two after moving into our new house, I thought I saw a mouse. Horrified, I gave Bill, my darling, patient husband, a choice: Crazy wife, Cat. Crazy wife, Cat. Bill, who did not like cats, mulled this over for a full minute, and chose.    

The minute Bill and I walked into The Cat House, a home conceived and constructed by my friend, Gail, a noisy, gray and white cat walked up and introduced himself. The Cat House was a refuge for homeless cats, a place where they could live out their natural lives (neutered and inoculated) in peace. Or, better yet, get adopted. It was a one-room structure, lined with donated old sofas and chairs for cat lounging, with openings to a fenced-in yard and bins of dry food for grazing. The best place ever for cats that otherwise would have led hard, lonely lives. Bless you, Gail. 

Anyway, from the moment we walked in, the gray and white cat never left our side, yowling at us as we inspected all potential mousers. Lazy loungers appraised us with hauteur, indifference, or ignored us altogether. Except the noisy one at our feet, caterwauling at ten decibels. “Me, me, me!” he was yelling, “Take ME!” It was, truly, a metaphysical experience. With a good reference from Gail, we adopted him.

He was about one-and-a-half years old, and the name on his papers was something like, “Champ.” Bill re-named him immediately: Dorian Gray. And maybe that was the moment he became Bill’s cat. They bird-watched together. They took naps. They watched football together.

Bill tried not to love him, but failed. For nine years, Dorian followed Bill relentlessly, refused to let him read his newspaper, and brought him innumerable dead squirrels. They were inseparable, except when Dorian, a confirmed outdoor cat, went roaming. When Bill got cancer, Dorian began to spend more time indoors. And when, in those final days, Dorian jumped up onto the hospital bed in Bill’s room, his well-meaning sister pulled him off, his claws clinging desperately to the sheet. She didn’t know their love story. 

When Bill died, Dorian and I found comfort in each other. He began to sleep in my bed. He brought me squirrels, and when I told him I didn’t want any, he deposited them with my neighbor. A few years later, we moved away from the house in Maryland to resettle in Arizona. Dorian protested loudly from his carrier in the airport, on the plane, and on the two-hour drive from Phoenix to Sedona. By the end of our exhausting trip, I was crying, too. But we made it, and in no time, Dorian adjusted to the new neighborhood. I wanted him to stay indoors (after hearing stories about coyotes!), but Dorian wasn’t having it. He visited the sick, made friends with people walking dogs—and their dogs—and lounged in the sun on top of my car. I’m not going to lie; Dorian was no saint. He got into more than one scrape with the other neighborhood cats, and our vet got used to patching him up. Still, he was the neighborhood favorite.  Everybody knew his name.  

One day, Dorian stopped eating. On the advice of our vet, I drove him down to Phoenix for a sonogram. It showed large nodules all over his liver. Cancer. Like Bill’s. By this time, he was thirteen years old, and the vet told me the cancer was probably also in his lymph nodes and possibly in his kidneys, and to say goodbye.  I cried the whole two-hour drive back to Sedona as Dorian lay in his carrier beside me, quiet and still.

As the days passed, I managed to get him to drink a little chicken broth, but he lost a lot of weight and almost all of his hair. Every day I thought of the words of our hometown vet who promised me that he would come to the house and end Dorian’s pain, if it should come to that. But I never saw signs of pain, and Dorian insisted on making his rounds. Strangers to the neighborhood, seeing him so thin and hairless, threatened to call the Humane Society. I had to explain more than once (even to a policeman) that he was not a stray, just my little buddy who refused to wear a collar and who had cancer. Neighbors with tears in their eyes brought flowers, cards, and organic catnip. He was loved.  

The Miracle

Because this is Sedona, and we have such things here, I contacted a woman who communicates with animals. Dorian told her, she said, that “he’s not ready to go yet.” She knew nothing about his cancer. She never even saw him. She told me this over the phone. As I said, this is Sedona. Still, all I could see was my little friend fading away, and with him, a last part of Bill.  

One day, a little voice inside me told me to stew some chicken for Dorian in my Instant Pot. That day, he ate a few bites. I was overjoyed, but still braced to lose him.  

As the days passed, he ate a little more and a little more, but he was still very weak and almost all of his hair had fallen out. Now, I wonder if losing his hair was the result of some kind of internal chemotherapy. Every night, Dorian would climb onto my bed and lie very still on my lap (something he had never done before). Instinctively, I would put my hands around his back, feel the bony little spine, close my eyes, and quiet my mind. And the tingling in my hands would start. And the heat. Some kind of energy was flowing through my hands (Remember that this is Sedona, after all). I didn’t know what I was doing, but he came, asking for…something, and I did what seemed natural.

It has been almost a year since that sad trip to Phoenix. Dorian is eating heartily. He still looks thin, but that’s because he doesn’t have his big, furry coat. He makes his rounds as usual, and now we go on walks together. He shows me his secret places. He loves it when I’m outside with him. I’ve learned that the time I spend with him, walking leisurely, stopping to sit in the sun, greeting the neighbors and their dogs, listening to the birds, is a great gift. It quiets my soul. His friends are delighted to see him. He rides in the car with me when I go to the Starbucks drive-in, and sleeps in a ball, wedged against me every night. Every once in a while, we do the hands-on thing. His hair has started to grow back. It is new hair, like a baby’s, soft and curly. We have never been back to the vet.

***

The Explanation

There is none. There is only wonderment at the workings of the Universe, and the holy force of life. So whenever you’re feeling down, dear reader, think about this: A hundred million miracles/A hundred million miracles/A hundred million miracles/are happ’ning ev’ry day.   

Dear Friends:

I stopped writing my blog a year ago.  I told myself that I wanted to concentrate on finishing my second book. That was true.  The book is coming along, by the way. Slowly, but it’s coming along. The working title is The Messenger II: The Well.

But that wasn’t the only reason I stopped writing. Something happened in my country in a town called Charlottesville that shocked me. It conjured up a vision of my ancestors, sad and disappointed, and I rushed to their defense. As if they needed me to defend them. No, they are safe. They are fine. But I was finished with my blog.

I know now that that was right. I needed to take a break. Regroup. Back away from the very thing that held me and my country in its grip: The Fight.  The toxic, righteous fight. I withdrew, feeling helpless to do anything about anything.

Until this past Sunday. I was sitting in a spiritual center in Sedona, beautiful and festive with Christmas decorations, a fireplace crackling against the far wall, listening intently to the voice of an inspiring spiritual teacher, when a voice within, as clear as day, told me to reconnect.   

***

We are in somewhat of a dark night right now. All around the planet. And everything around us seems to be conspiring to make it darker, especially the news. It affects us in ways we can’t even imagine. It is selling sadness, worry, fear, and anger with relentless regularity. We’re drowning in conflict and rage. It’s enough to make you lose hope.

The little voice that spoke to me on Sunday said, Go back to your friends. Write. Say that there is something else to think about.  

***

First Entry:  January 1, 2019

Full disclosure: I’m a news junkie. The addiction started when I was a little girl. I watched my father read three newspapers a day. There was the morning newspaper, and the late edition, and God only knows what came in between.  But my father read them all, and he was the smartest person in the world.  

Much, much later, I had a career in Washington, D.C., the spiritual mecca for news junkies.  For forty-two years, I read the Washington Post from cover to cover. Including the obituaries. I mean, you had to know who died, right? The Post was required reading. I also read the Wall Street Journal. I read news releases from all the federal agencies, and countless publications thrashed out by non-governmental organizations, like the one I worked for and even wrote for. NGOs, we were called.  

I read other things, too – like the Federal Register, the holy bible of wonky nerds who thrived on the esoteric threads and minutiae of regulation. There was also the Congressional Record – the daily report on the comings and goings, the actions, and the thoughts of Members of Congress—C-Span on steroids. I read every Congressional Bill that was introduced that was remotely relevant to my non-profit, scientific community, and I was doing that before anything was online.  My office was lined with piles of printed news.  I don’t apologize for it.  That was my job.  That was everybody’s job in Washington. News. Information. Insider stuff. Connections. The more you knew, the more you were valued—by your employer, your clients, your colleagues, and your friends.  No wonder I became a junkie. Knowing stuff equaled value. Think about that for a minute.   

Don’t get me wrong.  There is nothing wrong with information. There is nothing wrong with news.  I believe that being a citizen in a democracy is not just a privilege, it’s also a responsibility. The government of the people, by the people, and for the people should be directed by an informed people. So there’s that.

But what we have today in the form of news is, well, a lot more than information. News has become a soap opera. A crime novel, filled with suspense, horror, and fear. The train wreck we cannot look away from.  I’m retired, and I don’t have to read this stuff. I don’t have to watch it on television. But I’m wired for it now. I read the New York Times online every morning. I read portions of the Washington Post, and every week, the editorial and as many articles as I can of the New Yorker.  And every night, I watch Rachel Maddow. Okay. So right there, I have given away something about myself. Put that aside for a moment, if you can. We’re all biased.  

I’m not suggesting that you abstain from the news. I’m not. My own new year’s resolution, however, is to not get drunk on it.  What I am saying is, Take a Break. Take a moment to think about something else.

Feed your brain some oxygen. Give your mind some light.  Take a deep breath and let it in.  Stay with me in the year 2019, and every once in a while, let’s think about something else. Together.  Love’s first kiss. The smell of coffee in the morning.  Raindrops on roses and whiskers on kittens. Bright copper kettles and warm woolen mittens. Whatever.

It will change your energy, and you’ll change somebody else’s energy, and the Universe will notice.

***

Coming up in the next blog:  How my cat, Dorian Gray, had cancer and then didn’t.

Just three days ago, a friend asked me why I stopped writing my blog. One of the reasons, I told him, was that I just didn’t believe in talking unless I had something to say. I told him that I had run out of things to say, and that I just couldn’t bore my friends for the sake of maintaining a blog. Besides, I wanted to turn my energy toward my second book. That was three days ago. That was before my ancestors came into my consciousness and nudged me in their ever-so-gentle way. The way spirits do.   

I have never expressed my personal political views on this blog or any public media outlet because I saw no value in it. My position was that people will believe what they want to believe, and that my political views, no matter what they were, would attract anonymous, angry people with nothing better to do than to sling mud from behind the safety of their darkened rooms and backlit computer screens.  I don’t enjoy conflict, online or off, and so I kept my views to myself. But now, I’m done. I’m done, because I am here, alive in my body, in this country, on this tortured night, representing my ancestors.

Let me introduce them: My maternal grandmother: Her name was Sarah. Her father was German, her mother African American. Her husband’s mother, my great grandmother: Her name was Elizabeth, and she came to this country from Syria. I’m sure that wasn’t her name when she stepped up to the immigration official to be registered. Then, there is my paternal grandfather. His name was Edward and he was all or part Native American. Cherokee. His wife, Helen, came from a family of Irish indentured slaves. My parents were the “mixed blood” children of those I have named. They lived in South Carolina before and at the turn of the last century. In this country, they were all either indentured whites (in our case dis-owned by their families), or Negroes. I’ve seen the census reports.

I cannot imagine the bravery, courage, or the depth and breadth of love it must have taken for them to raise families of seven, eight children. Or just to stay alive. I also represent their children, uncles who fought in both World Wars, my father, who wore a policeman’s badge in Philadelphia for 35 years, a man of color who could not rise in the ranks but who nevertheless served and protected all the citizens of that city, my mother, who broke ranks with her family to come North with my father so that I and my brothers could live a life that was free of harassment, degradation, fear, and sorrow. Or so they thought.

When a black man was elected President of the United States, my husband and I sat before the television set and watched Barack Obama and his family write a chapter in history unlike any before it, except, perhaps, the one written by Abraham Lincoln.  At last, I told my husband, the tears running down my face, our country has become what it said it would. It has marched steadily toward its own ideals. It has kept its promise. My husband, who was Irish American, nodded, tears blinding his own eyes. We were proud of our country. We were proud that the idea of freedom, that the experiment in equality, the stumbling, difficult climb into a true democracy, and the repudiation of all things indecent, had made us the most powerful, important nation on the planet. We were not to know, on that night, that it was only a moment in time.

We have taken a step backward to a place my ancestors would recognize. My tears tonight are ones of grief. I am not proud. I am ashamed. I am ashamed that I must accept sympathy from my friends around the world. I am ashamed that our doors are slamming shut against people like my ancestors, and that all sense of generosity, compassion, and conscience seem to be absent from the hearts of those who could make it different. I am ashamed that once again, my ancestors are the subjects of hate and derision. No wonder they won’t let me alone.

And now, I’m done. I can no longer be quiet. I speak for those who came before me, those who gave me life, and for my children and my grandchildren. Today and ever after, I disavow the indecent, hateful bigotry that is despoiling my country and the man who is the face and the voice of it.

And I say to you, whoever may be reading this blog – if, after what has happened in the past two days, indeed in the past year, you can still support the man in the White House, his ideas, his language, and behavior, you support everything I, as an American, as an African American, as an Irish American, as a German American, as the great granddaughter of a Syrian woman, and the granddaughter of a Native American man, abhor, and I ask you to unfollow me. If you are a “friend” on Facebook, I ask you to unfriend me now.  

This is the time to take a stand. It is time to speak clearly. No more excuses, no more mealy-mouthed explanations.  No more burying heads in the sand. It’s over. The President of the United States is a racist. I repudiate that hateful concept, and I repudiate him.  

Matthew said it: “By their fruits ye shall know them.” Choose your camp.