Today is 2 August 2025. I usually open the month on the first but I wanted co-Editor Dale Williams Barrigar’s fifth poem in this week’s series to do that because A.) It is brilliant; B.) This is not.

Still, here at Saragun Springs we strive to publish every possible day. And this month, while still in progress scheduling-wise, will be no different. It is far easier to accomplish when you do not feel pressure. The Universe has been doing its thing for something along the line of fourteen billion years before this post and will not make any special note of it now or after. It keeps things in perspective.

Every Sunday the Drifter will appear, and this month we will be displaying excellent photography by Christopher Ananias. He also has a story scheduled. And we will be publishing bits by other friends, residents of the Springs and whatever we find that isn’t nailed down. As always, it will be a lot like walking through a Curiosity Shoppe.

Come back tomorrow for the Weekly Drifter column, which, in my own and the general opinion, is a tremendous success.

Leila

(Dedicated to the late Hunter S. Thompson, on his 88th birthday)

29 May 1975

Nora had a thing about trains. Sometimes she’d have me and Tess walk with her to where we could see the freighters enter and leave the shipyard. Often she would go alone. Mom never went with her on these trips, even though they did most everything together.

“The Choctaw had a saying,” Nora told me. It was just her and me at the train watching spot. “‘Then the railroad came.’”

“What does it mean?”

“Meaning goes two ways, like those trains. For the Indians, it meant whitey was coming to take everything. But it also meant that you could go away too—at least that’s what I thought threshing in the field, when I heard a whistle blow.”

That has stuck with me through the years. Then the railroad came. For the Natives, it brought smallpox, alcoholism, law, jail, and reservations. But even after the tribes had been wiped out, the railroad never stopped coming. It comes to this very day, obliterating current old ways and bringing back other old ways. In the larger sense, the railroad never brings anything new.

The railroad came for Nora late in 1974.

Mom seldom spoke directly to me when I was a teen. That began when I was twelve or so. But none of that mattered when Nora got sick. For a while, a truce was in order.

Tess and I were in the kitchen playing hearts. Mom was at the hospital. We were waiting for a call. We played a lot of cards during the death watch. Mom didn’t want us hanging around the hospital; we tended to get on her nerves.

The phone finally rang. It was Mom. Nora had named death Roy and she had told Mom that Roy was coming soon. She wanted all of us to be together one last time.

The hospital was about a mile and a half across town. The bus system was a joke, and we would have walked if it hadn’t been raining. Nora wanted rain on the day she died, she got that much. The dope that made her uterine cancer bearable often caused her to share such things. We decided to get fancy and use three of my vast fortune of eight bucks on a cab.

I’ve come to an understanding with hospitals and rehab centers and hospices. I quit being artificially cheerful while in them, and they no longer close in on me like one of those squishing rooms used by silly-assed villains on Batman or The Man From Uncle. Still, their ceilings remain too close to my head.

At sixteen, I’d yet to make the deal, and I felt like I was suffocating. Tess was drawn to places of pain because of that fucking dreampurple light; in her mind, faces that absorbed suffering and kept coming back for more were the only beautiful things.

I never experienced dreampurple. Tried once. Tess gave me a swallow of methadone, which tasted like poison. And for a glittering moment, I felt lifted and expanded. Everything I so worried over meant nothing, and there was a sense of well-being utterly alien to me. Then I got sick, everywhere, and for long enough that a trip to the hospital was looking to be in order. It was like a door had shut in my face. When reality came slinking back, I met it with scorn. I couldn’t believe that the physical universe could be so easily swept aside by a teaspoon of a substance that tastes like cherry-flavored Clorox.

At fourteen, Tess was nearing the end of her free-range dreampurple experience. When we arrived at the hospital, it was on her. She was excited, and her pupils were blasted open despite the harsh lighting. She was connected to every atom of electricity. Only I noticed. She was otherworldly and utterly amoral; something in her sought the dreampurple beauty in dying. I wanted to slap it out of her. It was Nora’s hour and not something to be greedily sucked up.

It never felt possible, yet Nora was going away. I had hung onto false hope much longer than I should have. The last of it vanished when Tess and I entered her room. It seemed impossible that a person could still be alive in her condition. She had gone from one-twenty to under seventy pounds in less than six months. Uterine cancer. Mom was holding a cigarette for Nora, and when she saw us, I caught a glimpse of her shoving something that glinted into her purse with her other hand. Mom usually didn’t give a fuck about such things; and maybe I shouldn’t have, given the situation.

“Hi, Kid. Hey, Sister,” Nora whispered, with an underwater voice. Her skin was the color of old paper, and her eyes were yellow.

I mumbled something and smiled.

I wanted to smack Tess (a long running theme in my life). Her ravenous eyes were sopping up every detail. But that gave over to tears and she sat down and lay her head on Nora’s shoulder.

After a few moments of just standing there, Mom glared at me and nodded at Tess. Nora was increasingly in and out of it, and it was clear that Mom wanted the final moments to herself. So I peeled Tess off Nora. I didn’t know what to do. I kissed Nora on the cheek and hustled Tess out of the room. Without speaking, we left the hospital.

Tess and I walked home. The rain had backed off, which made a taxi unnecessary. Even if it was still raining, we would have walked. That’s the way, we tend to huddle away during the truly big bad times; nobody wants to make small talk with a cabbie after they have seen the face of death.

“Mom hid a spoon,” Tess said.

“A spoon?” I recalled the quick furtive gesture.

“You saw. Bet it had something in it; something for the pain.”

Tess was uncanny. She often had impossible insights when the dreampurple was in her; in her way she was holy.

“But we won’t talk about it,” she said, smiling.

“No, I don’t think we will.”

The world was in black and white that day. The fuzziness of the pollen season had been washed clean by the rain. It all lay in ruins, and yet even there, the railroad had yet to come.

I later dismissed the poison spoon theory. I poured specious logic all over it and locked it in the place I used to stick the things I did not want to think about. I convinced myself that Mom hadn’t helped Nora out the door, even though such potions have always been extremely easy to get in our neighborhood. Still, Nora was as good as gone, why hasten it by what—an hour—and risk a murder charge? (No one noticed anything untoward, it’s unlikely they explored Nora’s cause of death with much of a fine-toothed comb attitude; I doubt there was an autopsy.)

But that only made sense when placed against the ways of regular people. Lovers have their secret expressions, and maybe what had transpired between Mom and Nora was as much none of anybody’s goddamn business as a thing gets.

Tess died in May 2004, not long after her forty-third birthday. I was not in the room because her death was sudden (although never wholly unexpected), but I had been there every inch of the way. Heroin was not the direct cause; years of speedballs had reduced her heart’s ability to withstand stress. Could say she died of a chronic case of being Tess. Now, she was just as loaded as ever, but legally, on methadone, the authorized party plan. Tess had reached the point of gaining weekly carries on Saturdays. Naturally, she had chipped into the next day’s dose (which always meant that a relapse was coming soon), and her turbulent existence ended quietly in her sleep.

So, whenever I’m not quite depressed enough to suit me, I like to look through her things. And as I sat at home, tired of the hand poker game, I looked through her stuff and found the suicide spoon. I’d seen it a bunch of times but always ignored it because it represented the cheap, dirty side of dreampurple. Is the world such an awful place that a person needs to poison herself to find beauty in it, to coexist with it? Yes, yes it is. But this time I picked it up and examined it. I was pleased to see that there were no tell-tale scorch marks on it. She never tried to bail, no matter how bad things got. That made me proud.

It also gave me an idea that would make sense if our lives were a story that followed a plan of some sort. Still, although unlikely and insincere on most levels, the idea gave me something semi-positive to hold onto that particularly long night.

The End of the Mess, 2019

My mother, Kaaren Patricia Johnston Spahr, died at either the age of seventy-nine or eighty-one on 20 April 2019, a Saturday. In a state of delirium that the morphine drip finally brought peace to.

We were outside the evening before, and I went through the motion of lighting a cigarette, ostensibly for myself, but handing it to Mom. The doctors and admin would have gone crazy if they had seen us; but the CNAs, mostly Filipino nationals, the people who do the real work, the human work at hospitals, hospices, and long term care centers, know when to look the other way.

Mom was very high on morphine, and we had to bring her drip along; in America, we all get high in the end. But she was mostly coherent, and kept breathing and producing just enough urine to remain alive.

Mom didn’t say much toward the close. She appeared content, like a person awaiting a bus she knew would come by and by.

She used to love Friday night. And it was a Friday; I remember her and Nora getting ready to go out to the Sportsman or White Pig Tavern, the apartment reeking of hairspray and cigarette smoke, everyone talking at once. The radio on. The energy was exciting even though I was not in on it.

But the railroad came.

“I can do for you what you did for Nora, if you want,” I said. It would have been easy. And I would have done it if she wanted me to. I figured God might be watching again, maybe giving me a second chance in case I had blown the first.

Mom looked at me, skin the color of old paper, the whites of her eyes yellow, just like Nora’s. “I knew you knew … straight morphine … got it from some guy at the Pig,” she said with a feeble laugh. “It was all over Tessie’s face.”

“I can, if you want.” I knew where to get it, but I also knew her answer, which is why I hadn’t bothered. And I couldn’t shake the ridiculous notion that I’d made a polite offer of euthanasia, like offering coffee to a guest.

“No, Sarah,” she said, savoring the final drag off her last cigarette. “Hell ain’t big enough for the both of us.”

The End

May 1985

There comes a moment when God stops everything and shines the Big Light on you. You’re presented with a problem that has no solution, and doing nothing isn’t possible. When that first happened to me in 1985, I learned the truth: the closer you get to God, the further you are from your humanity. I have yet to decide if that’s sarcasm, irony, or the wages of being holy. But none of it mattered at that moment. It was up to me to select the least shitty course of action, and I had to choose now.

“Don’t use the suicide spoon,” Tess said.

“The what?”

“The big one.”

This was the first time I’d ever looked inside her kit. In it lay two spoons. Both faux gold. The smaller of the two was slightly mangled and heavy with scorch marks. The other was basically untouched. A soup spoon? I wondered, because I ask myself stupid questions when I get nervous. Who the fuck cares?

I showed her the smaller one. “This?”

She nodded.

“You shouldn’t cook coated stuff … causes brain damage.”

“Har-dee-har-har, Sar-duh—I’m dying and you make jokes.” She lay on my sofa, used up, dopesick, but knowing she’d be getting well within seconds had perked her up.

“You’re not dying.”

But she was and had been ever since dope became the love of her life. Tess was an artist. Even though she sold a few paintings, the money they brought didn’t legitimize her. You have to be born an artist. Whether it’s a gift or a defect is a matter of perspective. Some called her a genius, but they didn’t have to clean up after her. The clichés are true. Genius does consort with madness, and it also creates a single-minded ruthlessness that gives genius a license to shit on people, especially those closest to them. Regardless, Tess was mine and always would be.

It all began and ended with what Tess called the dreampurple light. The anxious expression on a welfare mother’s face waiting for the mail to come on the first was dreampurple. The old drunk she saw burst into tears at the little store because old Graydon had caught him boosting a bottle of wine was hell dreampurple; giving the fellow her lunch money, oddly, wasn’t. There was no set rule for the condition except nothing in the natural world, no matter how stunning or powerful, could ever be dreampurple. Tess was born with a dreampurple mind, but it began to fade in her late teens. That’s when she discovered the pills that led her to heroin. She swore that it gave her back the thing she loved and needed most.

It’s not my object to present a DIY on fixing. Let’s say it involves powder melted in a (in this case a smaller) spoon by using a (in this case a red cricket) lighter, then carefully drawing the stuff into a hypodermic needle without air bubbles. Everyone said the bubbles go to your heart and kill you. No one knew anyone that had happened to, but junkies are like anyone else when it comes to needing stupid shit to believe in.

I hesitated … it was my big moment, and I felt God’s Hot Light on the back of my neck.

“C’mon big sister, be a nice guy. Slide it in easy-like.”

“Say that again, and you’ll be picking up teeth,” I whispered as I shot her up. The effects were immediate, like what Oswald did to Kennedy’s head. Tess was a different breed of junkie. Smack usually turns the user into a useless drooling mess. Although that would happen to her later in the day, she was someone who became very happy, funny, witty, and alive when she was high. Both pupils enlarged like Bowie’s weird one. Tess was on top of the world, but I’d never felt lower: I just fixed my little sister, has it really come to this?

“That good? Not gonna die on me?”

“Nope.”

Tess couldn’t do it herself. She had a strange complex about not being able to shoot herself up after she’d been dry for a few days. But just the first one, she’d be fine after that. Some sort of mental hangup. Usually one of her tenth-rate boyfriends did it for her (all of whom she called “Earl”), but the last Earl had damned near killed her. I made her promise me in the hospital to come see me for that first dry hit in the future. She knew I wasn’t fucking with her, and I knew that she would turn up sooner than later.

“You mean it? No rehab? No speech? Just bring it and you’ll do it?”

I rose, went to the window, and peeked between the drawn drapes. Junkers do not like bright light. The world was going on in the 1985 fashion. It was the year of the power ballad and mall rats. A pastel, dayglo season that smelled vaguely of clove cigarettes and cinnamon. There was something hopeful about the mid-eighties that I could never lay a finger on. It was more than Michael Jackson moonwalking or power tie money, or the vast amount of teen girls imitating Madonna, painted lips as red as a chimpanzee’s vagina. There was a certain optimism that didn’t last. Alas, sometimes forever comes in 1989. Yet I was a bystander of that world. Even though I was only twenty-six, the era had already passed me by. I had but one purpose, I served the Saint of the Unknown Martyr. Anyway, I figured a world like that would keep moving along without my input, and that God would do the same after watching my big moment come and go. He has yet to tell me if I’m wiser; some things a person cannot judge herself.

“What’s the big spoon about?”

Tess seldom lied to me in the technical sense, but she had the irritating habit of releasing information a bit at a time, usually when it was too late to do anything about it. I really didn’t want to know, but since I’d taken responsibility for her, it was my duty to know as much as I could. She was a tremendous bundle of contradictions that somehow added up to the truth. That’s art, I guess.

“It’s my marilyn-monroeverdose,” as though that explained everything.

“Say that in dumb fucker.”

“Only if you tell me why you kept your promise.”

“Because I’m a dumb fucker,” I said.

“What a coincidence! That’s my reason too. Got anything to eat?”

Junkers crave sweets. You get used to watching them dump ten packets of sugar into a cup of hot chocolate. It usually brings them to dentures. By 1985, I’d been dealing with Tess’s habit for eight years. When she was on the nod, I avoided being in public with her. She’d be up and even charismatic, then all of the sudden, without warning, the smack in her system dropped into low gear, and the result was a half-awake blob of protoplasm. It was the same as hauling a drunk around. At least dope doesn’t stink.

I kept her limited food groups stocked in my apartment. Vanilla ice cream, Hershey’s syrup, Mountain Dew soda, Pop Tarts, and “Chocolo’s,” which was a fudge Twinkie-like thing that was only on the market for a couple of years; I figure it got the hook after spreading all the diabetes the FDA would allow from one item.

“How come I never see you eat anymore?” she asked.

I was like Mom and could survive on cigarettes and black coffee for days on end. Tess was the only non-smoking junker I knew. She considered the habit disgusting and even “bad for you;” I’ll let the irony lie where it is.

Do you know what you’re doing to me? was the big question I never asked Tess. The answer was sprinkled like ashes on our lives. Mom asked her that plenty. Her answers were the usual “defensive wound” sort of slogans that sound right, but actually deflect the guilt back to you.

Sometime between her two bowls of ice cream and syrup, she asked why I had fixed her.

“The same reason why you disappear into the bathroom with your kit, like I don’t see,” I said. “Some shit must happen—like there’s a law.”

She laughed. “You’re such a cunt, you know?”

“I am what I am,” I said. “Hey! Do you know how many times I’ve dragged you to rehab?”

Tess scrunched her face sarcastically, as though seriously pondering the question. It was a gesture from childhood that coasted on nostalgia, for without that I would have wanted to beat it out of her face.

“Dunno, six?”

I made a sound like the buzzer on game shows when the answer’s wrong. “Seventeen, not including jail. On average, every six months. I have finally got the picture. Everyone wants you off the shit but you.”

“The big spoon’s my ticket out,” she said mainly because she was quick to change that subject. “I figure a big-ass shot from it should do the job, should it need doing.”

And you wonder why I’m a cunt, I thought, putting out one smoke then lighting another. But what she said released an old memory from the dungeon. “Like what Mom did for Nora?”

Upon mention of Nora, the buffer of the smart-assed, unrepentant junker, which she habitually placed between us, vaporized. All her stories and aversions and justifications puffed off like summer fog after the sun leans into it. I liked seeing that, almost as satisfying as giving her a sharp slap in the face.

(This story was published in the fine Hotch Potch Literature and Arts earlier this year. It is about six thousand words, thus presented in three parts–Leila)

April 2019

My mother died at either age seventy-nine or eighty-one, most likely the younger. Once upon a time, you could get away with hoodwinking the facts when records were kept on paper. What you needed to get one over was a strong set of lying skills. Although she was pathologically honest at the personal level, Mom was a first class liar as far as the record-keeping side of the world was concerned. It was an ability she needed to master early in her hectic life. The most impenetrable pettifogs of the world couldn’t throw her off a fiction no matter what the files said. She understood that a quality story has few moving parts. Windy-assed explanations, even truthful ones, just sound like bullshit. Active short sentences, eye contact, and a firm, clear voice are the best way to sell a whopper. Plus she was very pretty and knew how to use it.

Mom’s green card states she entered the USA in 1954, at the age of fourteen. Yet two years later, her marriage license placed her at eighteen. On top of that, she changed her name from Karen to Kaaren (after an actress she saw in a movie). She could have been legally married at sixteen but would have needed permission from her guardian. Mom was a Canadian orphan and a ward of the Catholic church. Considering she had run off, she figured that upping her age and marrying a sailor in the United States Navy was her ticket out of both the church and potential deportation (nobody, including Mom, knew why she was sent to America). She claimed that the green card was in error, which was tough to believe because she looked twelve in the picture. However and whatever, she got it over; when a lie settles in as authorized, it is the gospel ‘til the judgment trump blows.

“Don’t you dare try to feed me, Sarah–not unless you want to lose a finger.”

“Alright, Mom. Not like I’m missing out on a dream. They told me you refuse to eat.”

She snatched the spoon from my hand and flung it across the room. At least there was nothing in it.

A young Filipino CNA named Maisy had entered the room to straighten it up just in time to see the latest little melodrama unfold. She tutted playfully at Mom as she picked up the spoon.

“Sorry, Maisy,” I said, “she hasn’t had a cigarette since Tuesday. Makes her a little tense.”

Mom had been smoking since she was old enough to light one; she was a chainer who at her height sucked down four packs of Winstons a day. When advised to cut down, she switched to the 100s and knocked a half pack off her habit. I’d been sneaking her outside for a butt, but we got busted earlier in the week. Still, smoking had little to do with her death; her kidneys had decided to leave the party early.

“They tell me that you’re refusing dialysis too,” I said. With the perfunctory tantrum out of the way, it was time for me to address the real business at hand. I had been coming in every day after work for a month, after shortness of breath caused by excess fluid had landed her in the hospital. She was in that weird state of needing to get better so she could go to hospice.

“Love the way you keep going around my back,” Mom said.

Refusing dialysis made Mom a terminal case; the doctor asked if I could get her to change her mind or at least stop telling him to “fuck off” long enough to lucidly explain so she understood the consequences. She had a procedure done on her left arm the year before to make future dialysis possible (it was already coming to that) due to her lousy veins, but now she no longer wanted to go through with it.

I sighed. “Alright, Mom. It’s your life. Always has been. But could you at least say it plain to the doctor and quit the bullshit?”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“It means you’re a selfish bitch, just like me,” I said, softly, my eyes firmly locked on hers. “I’ve always admired that about you–no shit. You do what you want–no hard feelings, anymore. But I’ve gotta tell you, to make sure you got it clear: rejecting dialysis means death, as in fucking soon and forever.”

Mom laughed, a bit of the old fire flickered in her eyes; the petulant child that had been around too long vanished. “They don’t call it death around here, Sarah—oh fuck-fuck no—it’s ‘an end of life event.’ Ain’t that so, Maisy?”

Maisy had finished thissing and thatting.

“So, we’re straight on that?”

She nodded. Mom’s face was always a perfect mask of what she wanted to convey. Rarely, save for scorn, was it an accurate match with what lay behind. But this time it was. And for the second time in my life, I understood the dreampurple light of death.

“Fuck it,” I sighed. “I’ll get you out for a smoke somehow.”

I went home after I took Mom out for two cigarettes. Surprisingly, we didn’t catch hell for that. I knew how Mom could get, so I figured the staff looked the other way and hoped the nicotine would improve her disposition.

At home, I tried not to think about it. My phone sat there, threatening to go off, waiting for just the right moment. But there was nothing else to think about and no one left to talk to.

In every family, there’s one person who has to clean up after the house lights come on. From about the age of two, after my father checked out by choice, I had only three other blood relatives, who fell off one by one, leaving just me. And it remained that way. No children, no unwanted arrivals of unknown cousins. Just the four of us: me, Mom, my little sister, Tess, and our Aunt Louise, whom we called “Anna-Lou.” She was actually an older cousin of my late father and not an aunt at all.

And there was Nora. She wasn’t kin, but calling her a friend has never been good enough, especially with Mom. Although Nora has been gone for fifty years, I can still hear her voice. She was from Oklahoma and said stuff like worsh instead of wash. She also had a way of renaming people and places. I was “Sister,” and Tess “The Kid.” She rarely called Mom by name, opting for common endearments like hon and dear. She called the White Pig Tavern, where she and Mom practically lived at on weekends, The Whore Museum.

She lived in an apartment in our building two floors up. But it was more like Nora and Mom’s room than an apartment. They did everything together. Both had been married once and never again. Our father committed suicide just after Tess was born, so we had no memory of him. Nora might still have been married for all she knew. She ditched the guy in Kansas and wound up here soon after. Both Mom and Nora worked for Howe’s Hardware and sometimes they dated men, but they were always older guys and the type that was easy to push around. None lasted long. For all intents and purposes, Nora and Mom were a couple; I honestly don’t know if that extended to sex. It really doesn’t matter. After Nora died, Mom (only either thirty-three or thirty-five) allowed no new people into her life.

Although Nora was not well educated, she had a keen mind and understood people. She knew things others couldn’t see. Mom begged her to tell us the Facts of Life, after I had my first period. At the end of the story (that she knew we already knew), she smiled, gave me a hug and whispered, “I know you needn’t worry about that shit, Sister—just kick everyone you don’t want in the balls.”

Nora was there at the beginning of my memory. She died at thirty-three. Cancer. Mom saw her out. For years, that was the worst day of my life, topped only by one other.

I thought about Nora more than usual as Mom’s “end of life” process unfolded. In many ways she probably should have been my mother because I was much closer to her than I was to Mom. Frankly, Mom and I didn’t like each other. We had similar personalities, thus we constantly and successfully explored each other for the things we hated about ourselves.

Even though I’m not the most sensitive person in the world, I will care about what I should care about. Still, don’t look to me to hold your hand and lie to you about angels and better worlds than this. But I can be counted on. I showed up for Tess, Anna Lou, and, finally, Mom. I figure my end will happen alone and won’t be noticed until someone complains about the smell. I think it’ll be better that way; I don’t want a socially awkward death.

Mom was always reluctant to give up center stage when she got it. And despite her refusal of dialysis, it took nearly three weeks to accomplish something that should have happened in one. Some say that nothing dies harder than an old lady. Maybe so. But I knew it would be a protracted scene because she was a one-of-a-kind creation, the type the gods are slow to kill.

The protracted death watch gave me a lot of time to visit the dungeon where I keep the memories I cannot kill clapped up.