The Glacier
Issue Three
Winter 2024

He. She. The End.

He liked the sound of nothing. She liked cranking The Misfits while talking on the phone and vacuuming.

He wore running shoes with t-shirts that said Datacom Systems, Xiotech, and Interop.
She wore black pleated skirts with checked tights and pink mohair sweaters; black Keds that laced up to her calf.

They met at a pizza place, standing in line. He asked her to join him. They dated. He picked her up in his Audi because her Hyundai was in the shop.

He asked her permission to kiss her, and she never forgot how respectful that felt. Later, she accused him of being controlling.

He cooked noodles, broccoli, occasionally salmon. She made scrambled eggs.

He liked a good port wine, late bottled vintage. She drank IPA’s, especially Green Flash Imperial IPA, but a Corona would do.

They moved in together. To his apartment on Randolph and Lake. She brought an orange shag rug and a bean bag chair. He had bookshelves.

He kept his toothbrush in the holder. She sat hers on the sink.

He liked to stay home. She bought tickets to concerts that he wouldn’t go to, so she went with friends.

He worked at a computer store. She painted in oils in the apartment building’s basement.

He liked morning blowjobs. She liked gymnastic-inspired positions in the middle of the night.

The wind bore down their street, straight off Lake Michigan. He hid from the brutal gusts. She loved to watch the leaves swirl down the street and delighted in how the wind twirled her skirt.

He spent money on gadgets for her: an iPhone and a Kindle. She sold a painting to a second cousin of Joseph (Bruce not Utsler) from the Insane Clown Posse and got free tickets to a concert, which she went to with a friend.

She wanted to talk about their “issues.” He thought that would make them worse.

After two years of marriage, they divorced.

He was killed in a car accident in 2019. She wasn’t Facebook or Instagram or Twitter friends with any of his family, so she never knew.

She re-married a year later to a musician named Pic, sold paintings to each member of the Insane Clown Posse, had three children, and died of breast cancer when the youngest was twelve.

The man who buys their previous apartment finds a Corona label and a marriage certificate stuffed behind a loose brick on the mantle. He doesn’t know that the painting he is hanging in the hallway, the 16 x 24 he got for a dollar at the thrift store, is one of hers.

How to Submit a Death Notice

Slip his cufflinks into your purse.
Find the letters. The one where he told you what a beautiful daughter you are and that he had been waiting for you all his life.
Cancel the HelloFresh deliveries. Already one cooler of brown and green bags has gone bad.
Fill the hummingbird feeder outside his kitchen window.
When you find yourself doing the dishes, stop.
As you cancel the utilities, your hands shake.
Get someone else to pick up the ashes.
Count the china cups that were your mother’s and see that two are missing.
Go to his favorite restaurant, sit at his favorite table, and try to eat the meal you order.
Decide with all your might that you will not wait until you are ready. You will never be ready.

Color Her Primal

Fear is a green mentor.
Her mother, lying in a pale-green hospital room with weeks to live; the 12-year-old girl trying not to stare at the bandage wrapped ten times around her chest. Years later, she would remember that moment and write about it, never once using the color green.

Defiance is a red monster.
When she was seven, it flashed its warning to the gregarious neighbor boy who blew off three fingers from a homemade cherry bomb. The red of the plastic, red everywhere. His hand, pants, garage floor. Years later, when her son held a sparkler, she had to go indoors and think of other colors.

Accidents are brown bones.
She sat in the back of her grandfather’s Oldsmobile when he screeched to a stop. He brought the cocoa-colored clump of puppy to the door of a house while the girl’s mother tried to turn her away. Years later, the girl - now old enough to drive - sees the streaking cat in her headlights, the bump, the brown lump in her mirror, and she could not get out of the car. She could not look.

Death is a blue iceberg.
She was called into the care center where her father lived. His vitals are low, they told her. She held his hand, blue ice veins, lips, pillow. Blue a feeling of not yet. Years later, she remembers her father and his blue tie worn proudly from the church pulpit.

Hope is yellow with a streak of tangerine.
It might involve bargaining, fingers-crossed, lips murmuring a quiet please… let my son come home safely from prom, she whispers. Let my husband’s flight be uneventful as it makes its way across the continent, chasing the sun.

When the Contract is Broken

Trypanosomatids. Chagas’ disease. Caused by the kinetoplastid protozoan Trypanosoma cruzi. Maybe on one of his many trips - to Burundi or Chad or Paraguay - collecting his beloved soil samples. Frank loved nature before he loved me. And now, nature’s betrayal.

A kissing bug. Ironic, I think as I take copious notes, going home to google everything. Kissing bug. Kissing. Frank always loved to make out. We could kiss until our lips were red and tender. Now I want to kiss his furrowed brow as he dreams in his sleep.

Acute stage. Flu symptoms. His mother Lois calls and is sure that it is nothing. She reminds him that he has always been strong, even when he was little. Western medicine has a cure for everything, she says. She is not worried.

I remember that trip where Frank came home with a flu, the one where his eye swelled, that lasted for weeks. Made sense with all the travel. He had come home from several trips not feeling well before. I was always worried, and he assured me with his calm ways, that we had made a vow, until death do us part, and he wasn’t breaking his for a long time. Who knew that last time he was harboring a passenger, a villain, a fugitive? Growing an enemy. Not until the stomach pains - doubled over and incapacitated - would he see a doctor. Chronic stage.

His sister, Julie, wants to help. She flies in from L.A. She does not love a Wisconsin winter, but she loves Frank more. She cooks meals while I research death rates and cures. She takes care of our son, Cody, while I drive Frank to specialists out of state.

Frank wants to treat the parasites with his beloved plant medicine, so I research compounds from the Asteraceae plant as he weakens. His heart is failing. Enlarged, say the doctors. Of course. A big heart. But he has always had a big heart.

I bargain with the parasites not to kill the host. I tell them they all need Frank to live. But the parasites do not listen.

Cody is almost 4. His birthday is soon. He asks questions - why Daddy is in bed so much, how come we don’t go to the park anymore, when can he play Legos again?

Frank breaks down and takes the medicine. He hates the side effects. More abdominal pain. The fatigue and constant headaches. He can’t sleep. But he wants to. Oh, how he wants to.

January 12. Cody’s fourth birthday. Frank watches from the window, trying to wave, as Cody and I steer the toboggan down the hill without him.

We do not know it in that moment, with four damp mittens waving wildly upward to the bony hand in the window, that this will be his last lucid moment.

Instead, we thrill in the presence of one another, happy to be alive.

Ann Keeling’s writing and art have been published in such journals as CutMeUp Magazine, Wild Roof Journal, Jellyfish Review, Tint Journal, The Disappointed Housewife, defunct magazine, Lucky Jefferson, and more. She was chosen as a finalist for the Quarterly West Prose 2022 contest, short-listed for the 2022 Force Majeure flash contest, and was an artist-in-residence for the Kolaj Institute’s 2023 Passing Place Project in Sanquhar, Scotland. She holds an MFA-Creative Writing, Goddard College and an MFA-Dance, University of California, Los Angeles. Ann leads art, writing, and movement retreats on the Central Coast of California. @ann.keeling.art.writing.

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