Chelsea Yates

I met her through photocopied fliers scotch-taped to storefront windows. The local radio station taught me how to pronounce her last name. The grown-ups I knew rarely said it out loud. When they did, they spoke it cautiously, as if doing so might summon a demon.

The Sister hunkered down in my little brother’s sled, gathering her habit around her, the rubber soles of her nurses’ shoes squeaking against the plastic.

I didn’t leave my apartment the Saturday before Ike made landfall. I didn’t know anyone in the city, and I had nowhere to go. Only in the early hours of the morning did I finally decide to shelter in the closet.

I leave Eppley Airfield in a rented Nissan, briefly heading north from Omaha on I-29, then cutting west and picking up Highway 275 just south of Fremont. Blanketed in corn, soybeans, hay, and alfalfa, the land silently pulses as I drive, following a course set by the Elkhorn River.

My mother’s family is buried in a little cemetery at the edge of Magnolia, Iowa, population 175. It’s about forty minutes north of Omaha. “Don’t blink or you’ll miss it,” my dad used to say. Mom’s parents lay there, encircled by generations of relatives. Most had worked the surrounding land, their farms scattered across the Missouri River Valley.

One of the last times I saw my dad, he gave me his old record player. I was visiting my parents and mentioned that I had been looking to buy one. Dad told me I could have his. With it came the offer to take any of his old albums.

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