RESTING PLACE by Kim van Alkemade
“Is it strange to see your name on a headstone?” I ask Alex, my teenage daughter. We’ve followed my uncle Wim on borrowed bicycles from the center of Amsterdam, peddling over arched bridges and along the banks of the Amstel River, to the Zorgvleid Cemetery where my family has a single plot. When she was a toddler, my daughter and I would picnic in old Pennsylvania graveyards so she could practice her alphabet by tracing letters on headstones, but this is the first time she’s ever visited a cemetery in which a relative is memorialized.
“I guess so,” Alex says. As tall as I am, blond with blue eyes, she looks more Dutch than I ever will. “But, you know, it’s only my middle name, so it isn’t like I use it every day.” True enough. Too long to hyphenate with my ex-husband’s name, the jumble of consonants and vowels I inherited from my father had to settle for second place. Alex was five years old before I ever heard her say it. Imitating me at the chalkboard in my classroom, she solemnly pronounced “van . . . all . . . kuh . . . maa . . . duh” as she drew a long line across the slate.
Zorgvleid’s spaciousness strikes me as extravagant for such a compact nation. Maps available at the entrance chart wide, meandering paths bordered in boxwood and shaded by towering poplars and beeches. Where paths intersect, green watering cans and little rakes are stacked near spigots as if this was a community garden, and in a way it is. Around us, people are busy tending amazing little plots. Some are flower gardens, blooms covering the ground and obscuring headstones; others are Zen gardens, no name visible, just a spare arrangement of smooth stones and bonsai. Many older graves are overseen by marble statuary – angels, urns, elephants, saints – while newer ones are dominated by thick slabs of glass etched with images of the dead who smile at passersby like holograms. I didn’t know the Dutch harbored this romantic streak.
Our plot is out of place in this lush and varied landscape: a forlorn expanse of crushed gravel presided over by a plain granite headstone with three names chiseled in strict engraver’s font. It took us a while to track it down; my uncle is still off wandering somewhere. An empty cone at the foot of the plot designed to hold flowers is empty and dry. Alex and I walk to the end of the lane, fill a watering can from the spigot, return to fill the cone. In it, I place the bouquet I bought from the flower cart at the cemetery entrance. I feel disconnected from the gesture, like a tourist observing some local custom. No one will be back to see the flowers wilt, the water evaporate, the gravel covered in falling leaves. And in December on lichtjesnacht, the annual “night of little lights,” when relatives of the dead stroll through the dark cemetery carrying lanterns and placing tapers, no candle will illuminate my father’s grave.
I spoke to Kurt Klinkhammer, who advised me he was walking in the wooded area shooting birds, when all of a sudden he noticed that there was a large amount of flies hanging around in the area. He stated at that time he thought that maybe there was a dead animal in the bushes and upon his investigation, in trying to find a dead animal, that is when he came across the body.
Officer DeBord, Mount Pleasant Police Department
Death Investigation, April 26, 1987, Case No. 4245-87
Before us, the headstone lists not only my father, G. P. J. van Alkemade III, but his father, the second Gerard Pieter Jacobus, as well as his mother, Cornelia Kwakkelstein. My Opa and Oma, who’d send a box every Sinter Klaas filled with salted black licorice and painted marzipan fruit and Droste chocolate oranges and little presents wrapped in thin paper. They’d come to visit every summer, crossing the Atlantic by ship from Rotterdam to New York, then later by air, Schiphol to JFK via Reykjavik, as Icelandic Air always had the cheapest fares. My Opa, the teacher and historian, whose favorite tourist destinations in America were Civil War battle fields. My Oma, smelling of lavender, who’d talk to us in French sometimes, or German, forgetting in her dementia which language her foreign grandchildren spoke.
I thought all the bodies would be stacked three deep to save space, but many of the plots in the Zorgvleid Cemetery seem dedicated to the memory of only one soul, another unexpected extravagance. Knowing only one Dutch family intimately, I’ve always assumed mine was a template for the rest, but I’m beginning to suspect my grandparents’ famous parsimony was an exaggerated expression of a national trait. Maybe not all Dutch parents visiting émigré sons in America spend an entire month sleeping on the pull-out couch, the long visit justification for the expense of the trip. Maybe not every Dutch housewife saves the leftovers of each weeknight meal and serves them, beef and spinach and fish and potatoes all mashed together, to her husband on Sunday nights. Maybe not all Dutch families extinguish the pilot light on the gas furnace before going to bed to save even that small spark of fuel.
My Opa, having died first, is buried deepest. A Calvinist, he believed we are born in sin, predestined by an all-knowing God to heaven or hell no matter what we do in life. Banking on the heavenly outcome, he lived the upright life of one of the elect, a model of fidelity and thrift. But on his deathbed he panicked. Doubting his eternal fate, he wailed that his soul might not, after all, be saved. “It was pitiable to witness,” my uncle Wim told me, his English more precise than my own.
Then my Oma, who remembered me when I saw her last. She was living in a nursing home, surprised by the many strangers who came to see her claiming to be sons and daughters. I was fifteen and visiting my Dutch relatives, the first trip taken on my own. “I wonder who she’ll think you are,” my aunt Ineke joked as we approached this elderly woman after whom I should have been named. It’s a tradition in the Netherlands: the first daughter born to the oldest son is named for the son’s mother. My Oma had explained to me once that my name was, indeed, an Americanized version of her own. “Kim is for Cornelia,” she’d said on one of those summer visits. “And Ilene is for Helena. Cornelia Helena,” she said, pointing to herself. “Kim Ilene,” she said, her finger on my breastbone. At the time I didn’t believe her, but sitting in front of her on my last visit, something about me must have been as familiar to her as her own name. Humming softly, Oma reached up to tie the laces of my cotton blouse. “Who do you think this is?” Ineke asked, ready to be amused by the response. “Dit is Kim, de dochter van Gerard,” my Oma said, as if it were the most ordinary thing in the world for her American granddaughter to drop by for a visit.
On the granite headstone, my father’s name is listed last, his remains closest to the surface. I look around for some smooth stones, the chunks of gravel covering the grave unsuited to my purpose. I find two along the lane and pick them up, handing one to Alex. Following a practice that owes more to the closing scene of Schindler’s List than any example set by my mother’s Jewish family, we place the stones on my father’s headstone. “So he knows he had a visitor,” I say, inventing a meaning.
I step back off the gravel. Fanciful and beautiful plots stretch away in all directions. Our little stones look like empty gestures. My father’s name spelled out on the bleak headstone seems surreal. I’m reminded of Magritte’s painting of a pipe, its wood bowl rounded for tobacco, the stem arched towards an unseen mouth. Below the realistic portrayal, the artist’s admonishment: Ceci n’est pas une pipe. For all the connection they have to his life, to his death, the letters cut into granite might as well read This is not your father.
Writer was dispatched to a complaint that Roger Klinkhammer’s son believes he found a body in the woods, east of Racine County Highway H, in the 4900 block of Highway H. Writer responded to 5206 S. Highway H with Officer Sparks in squad #117, with Officers DeBord and Swanson also responding. Writer picked up Mr. Klinkhammer and his son at the residence, at which time they escorted us all back to the area where the deceased was found laying in a prone position on his back, facing in a slightly southeast direction amongst the pine trees in a small wooded area located between farm fields. Writer immediately observed that the party appeared to be a male of middle age and was in an advanced state of decomposition. Due to the amount of debris on and around the body, writer felt that the body had been at that location for at least several months.
Officer Chaussee, Mount Pleasant Police Department
Death Investigation, April 26, 1987, Case No. 4245-87
My father is buried in the Netherlands because I brought him there, even though it was a homecoming I’m sure he didn’t want. When he emigrated to the United States in 1957, he meant to leave behind those childhood memories of war and starvation; meant to leave behind the guilt he felt for disappointing his parents when he got bad grades or was caught making trouble; meant to leave behind the country he couldn’t quite forgive for giving up so many of its Jews. He met my mother in the Empire State Building, where they both worked; by 1962 he was a married father with a job on Wall Street; in 1975 he took a job in Wisconsin as an international finance manager for a manufacturing company. For a while, his sails had seemed set fair – a successful executive with a new ranch house in a respectable neighborhood, his wife back in college now that their kids were all in school. But the 1980s were hard on him. Our parents’ divorce was followed a few years later by a mild stroke, and recently the company had downsized, leaving him unemployed.
And now it was just me and my brother Glen, making arrangements for our father’s remains at the funeral home in Racine. I’d come down from Milwaukee, where I was in graduate school; Glen had taken a day off from his engineering job and driven up from Chicago. We sat across from Michael Meredith, the director of the Maresh-Meredith Funeral Home, a friendly young man taking over the family business. Except for the clown paintings, the room couldn’t have been more cliché if a set designer had staged it: dark wooden desk, carved high-backed chairs, plush burgundy carpet. “My mother’s hobby,” he explained, gesturing to the gallery of paint-by-number clowns on black velvet that lined the red walls of the room.
We reviewed our options and quickly chose cremation. There’d be no funeral, just a memorial service at the Universalist Church, so no urn required, thank you.
“We’re not sure what to do with the ashes yet,” I said.
“Just leave them with us until you decide,” Michael Meredith said.
“Can we ask you something?” Glen said, as we didn’t have anyone else from whom to solicit advice on this point. “At the memorial service, when people come up to us, we don’t know what we’re supposed to say.”
The past few months had been so strange, we weren’t sure if standard expressions of sympathy would apply. It hadn’t been a surprise, exactly, when the Racine detective had huffed up the stairs to our father’s apartment to tell us his body had been found. We’d been almost certain since the January day he’d gone out, claiming to have a date, and never come home. It was the first full moon after his fifty-third birthday, a lunar connection pointed out by the officer who took our missing person’s report. “We’re always twice as busy when it’s a full moon,” he’d said, rolling the blank form into an electric typewriter. “Brings out all the crazies. Now, how do you spell your father’s name?”
That he left behind his car, his keys, his cash, his wallet and his will all told the story of his intention, but he never spelled it out. We muddled our way through the rest of the winter, my mother visiting from Florida, my youngest brother Rob trying to go to school, Glen coming up from Chicago on weekends, me driving my dad’s abandoned car back and forth from Milwaukee. I appeared in court and was appointed receiver of my father’s estate so I could sign my name to his checks, pay his bills.
For months, I was wracked by the thin hope that he lived, but I flinched at the thought he might come back wrecked. In my dreams he came, a shadow at night, tapping at my windows, but I always woke before I could let him in. It made me grateful for the flies; if it weren’t for them, we might never have known for sure.
“You just shake their hands and say thank you,” Michael Meredith told us, while the clowns smiled and frowned and shed their painted tears. “That’s all, just thank you. Go ahead and practice,” he suggested. So we did, my brother and I, clasping hands and thanking each other in turn.
Writer also observed an empty green glass wine bottle resting on the body, between the thighs of the individual, with the mouth of the bottle pointed towards the head. To the west of the body was a chrome plated corkscrew, containing a cork believed to be taken out of the wine bottle. Immediately next to that devise was an empty prescription bottle in the name of Gerald van Alkemade for 30 capsules of Placidyl capsules 500 mg. dispensed to him by Roeschen’s Pharmacy, located at 5625 Washington Ave. in Racine. The date on the prescription bottle is 01/09/87. Another prescription bottle for Temazepam 30 mg. capsules with a 30 count was found to the northeast of the body and as was the case with the first bottle, it was empty. The wine bottle consisted of Inglenook Chenin Blanc Wine and was devoid of contents, except for what appeared to be rain water and insect life.
Officer Chaussee, Mount Pleasant Police Department
Death Investigation, April 26, 1987, Case No. 4245-87
After the memorial service, I booked a summer vacation to Europe, paid for with money my father left me. As long as I’d be stopping in the Netherlands, we decided I might as well bring my dad’s ashes along. I knew there was space for one more in Opa and Oma’s grave, and asked my aunt Ineke if my father could have it. I clearly remember debating whether to pack his ashes in my carry-on luggage or my checked baggage. Each had its drawbacks. While checked luggage ran the risk of being lost or mishandled, with a carry-on, I might be asked to explain the small but heavy box at security. But I can’t remember which I chose in the end, whether I flew from O’Hare to Schiphol with my father’s ashes above my seat in the overhead bin or below me in the belly of the plane.
I wasn’t taking him to Holland because I thought it’s what he would have wanted. On the contrary, it seemed all wrong to bring him back to the country whose citizenship he’d shed, but nothing else seemed right. Scattering the ashes somewhere, maybe in Lake Michigan, would have required more poetry and generosity than any of us could muster. If he didn’t like it, it served him right, I told myself, for leaving me to deal with all this mess.
In Amsterdam, I stayed with my uncle Wim who, eschewing all ceremonies of a religious or emotional nature, declined to attend the burial. Instead, he put me on the right bus to meet the rest of the family at Zorgvleid. In my knitted shoulder bag I carried the cardboard box I’d picked up from the funeral home, still taped shut, my address written on one side. I couldn’t bring myself to peel off the tape, open the box. I wasn’t sure if there was a container inside or if my father’s ashes were just there, loose, waiting to puff out like an opened container of talc.
At the cemetery, we gathered around the plot – my aunts and their husbands, my uncle Dick and his partner, four of my cousins. I handed the cardboard box to Ineke, who wrapped it in a scarf. She said a few words in English so I could follow along, but I won’t claim to remember them. Then she placed the box in a small hole that had been dug in the center of the plot, above, I supposed, where his parents’ ribs were stacked.
Afterwards, there was some conversation among my family in Dutch, which I didn’t understand. My father had always been more interested in correcting my spelling in English than in teaching me his native tongue. “So, you are going back to have dinner with Wim?” Ineke asked, and since Wim had invited me back for dinner afterwards, I said yes. “Alright then,” she said, and they waited with me at the cemetery gates for my bus to come by. Once I was gone, they went all together to an Indonesian restaurant to have my father’s wake without me. They must have assumed I knew what I was doing, but I wish they’d given me the choice. “It was such a nice dinner,” my cousin Hanneke told me the next day. “We’re not often all together anymore. It was so good to see each other and remember your father.”
I was not on the scene at the time [the coroner] arrived, due to the fact that I was at the station getting some stuff to package evidence in. When I returned, the body was already gone. At 6:00 P.M. I then took soil samples from under the body and also two control samples. Item #1 would be dirt from under the victim’s abdomen; item #2 would be dirt from under the victim’s feet; item #3 would be dirt from under the victim’s head; item #4 would be dirt control sample from east of the victim; item #5 would be dirt control sample from west of the victim.
Officer DeBord, Mount Pleasant Police Department
Death Investigation, April 26, 1987, Case No. 4245-87
Eighteen years passed before Glen and I decided to find out where, exactly, our father had died. By now, I was an English professor in Pennsylvania, with a child of my own. Glen had given up engineering to become a missionary, living communally on the north side of Chicago with a group called Jesus People USA. We knew the generalities from the detective who’d informed us our father’s body had been found – a boy out hunting in the first spring thaw, police notified, missing person’s report consulted, dental records confirmed. But we’d never visited the spot that was, more than the sterile plot in the Netherlands would ever be, his final resting place. So Glen called the Mount Pleasant Police Department to request a copy of the report, I flew out to Chicago, and we drove north on I-94.
It was a perfectly Wisconsin winter day: bright with sun and minus six degrees. We stopped first at the police station, where a thick manila envelope was waiting for us. We placed it on a narrow counter in the cinder-block lobby of the station, missing children peering over our shoulders from posters taped to the walls. Gingerly, we pulled out streaky xeroxed pages, squinting a little like you do at a scary movie, not wanting to be surprised by something gruesome. But the opening pages gave us exactly what we needed: an address out on County Highway H where a boy had run home to tell his father what he’d found in the woods across the road.
The police station was adjacent to the Racine County Visitor’s Bureau, and we crossed the icy parking lot to get a map. Designed for tourists, it cheerfully listed all the local attractions: the Regency Mall, the Racine Art Museum, the Mars Cheese Castle. We plotted our course to Highway H. After driving just a couple of miles – had it always been this close? – we pulled over on the plowed shoulder of the road.
“This must be it,” Glen said. We looked out the car windows at a copse of trees in the middle of a snow-covered field. “What do you want to do now?”
“I want to go for a walk,” I said.
I’d dressed for the occasion: two pairs of socks, tights under my jeans, a down jacket. I remembered how bitter Wisconsin could be. The snow squeaked under our feet as we made our way down the frozen path leading to the trees. It seemed a fox had worried a rabbit; fresh blood spattered the snow. A few steps further and the pine trees became surprisingly dense. A ten-minute drive from Circuit City and WalMart, and here we were, in a scrap of woods so thick they could hide a man for months.
We stood together in the cold until our feet began to go numb.
“Should we say something?” Glen asked.
“I don’t feel like talking,” I replied.
I wasn’t just afraid my brother’s emotions would get the better of him and spark a nosebleed, like at our father’s memorial service. I hadn’t spoken then, and I didn’t want to speak now. I don’t like voicing my feelings until I’ve had a chance to think them through, write them down. I wouldn’t mind crying later, alone at my desk, as I spun the experience into sentences, but not while standing at the very spot where our father died.
I’m not always able to script my emotions. When the detective had climbed up the stairs and said, “I’m here about your father,” tears burst from my eyes, betraying the front I’d built up so successfully people were always telling me how strong I was. And in the months after I’d been told my father was dead, I’d still be ambushed by the sight of him. I’d lift my head and see a man of my father’s height with glasses and a beard walking toward me down the sidewalk and my heart would seize. I’d be certain for a moment that he still lived, that if I just reached out I could again have him in my grasp. It only lasted the space of a breath, this heart-stopping delusion. The man would get closer and my father’s face would be swallowed up by a stranger. My hand would drop as my eyes filled. Those were the tears I resented most, the ones I wasn’t ready for.
The autopsy began with the removal of the victim’s clothing, which were bagged and later discarded by the hospital in their incinerator. The clothing removed from the victim is as follows:
One pair of black slip-on shoes, dress style;
One pair of black over-the-calf socks;
One pair of blue pants in a small herringbone style;
Two black winter gloves that were found at the scene, but not
on the victim at the time;
One long, tan winter scarf;
One navy blue, mid-length winter coat;
One light brown sports jacket, brand name “Copurne Square”;
One long sleeved, light blue shirt;
One black belt;
One navy-blue pair of undershorts, jockey style, brand name
“Poco”;
Also recovered from the body would be the full upper denture and the partial lower dentures, these items recovered at 11:38 p.m.
Sgt. DeBord, Mount Pleasant Police Department
Death Investigation, April 26, 1987, Case No. 4245-87
In the Netherlands, after showing Alex where the grandfather she’d never met was buried, I have one last lunch with my cousin Hanneke. Over coffee and apple tart, she tells me a story about my father I’ve never heard before. “You know how the old water heater works in the bathroom, how you turn on the gas and light the flame to heat the water?” Yes, I did know; whenever I’d visited my relatives, I’d been afraid of the contraption mounted to the wall, of the open blue flame licking copper pipes that doubled back and forth in the metal box like intestines. “Well, my parents told me when your father was a teenager, he tried to kill himself with the gas from the heater. He was in the bath with the flame out but the gas still on when Oma found him.”
She tells me this, and her words dislodge the memory of a story my father once told me. “When I was young, but after the war,” he said, his accent so familiar I still recognize it instantly when Dutch aid workers or NATO soldiers are interviewed on the radio. “I read in the newspaper about a boy who had ridden his bicycle all around Holland, to celebrate our liberation. When he returned home after riding for days and days, he took a bath. But he was so tired from riding such a long way, so tired he fell asleep in the bath, and slipped under the water, and drowned.”
When he told it to me, I thought it was another of his strange cautionary tales: don’t lick your knife, you might slice open your tongue like aunt Gertrude; don’t eat uncooked oatmeal, your stomach might burst like the starving man after the war who was so hungry he couldn’t wait for water to boil; don’t take a bath when you’re tired, you might fall asleep and drown. But there must have been something in my father’s voice when he told me this story that signaled its significance, a frequency my young brain recognized but couldn’t understand. So it stored the words away deep where they waited for meaning to find them.
I imagine my teenage father, the same age as my own daughter, filling the tub and blowing out the pilot light. I wonder if that’s what gave him the idea, reading about this sleeping boy slipping under the bath water. But just as I begin to doubt that a person could actually sleep through his own drowning, it hits me. Maybe there never was a boy who rode his bicycle around Holland and fell asleep in his bath. Maybe there was only my father, letting himself into the warm water while gas silently filled the room. Until his mother came in, threw open the window, and pulled him back.
My coffee cools in its cup, the apple tart sits uneaten on a white china plate, as I come to believe my father told me this story as a way of describing the immense weight of his depression. How tired would you be after riding a bicycle all around Holland? Legs pumping, thighs burning, hands cramping, back aching, heart pounding, day after day after day after day. How heavy would your head feel, having been balanced so long between the handlebars, chin sinking to your chest, neck snapping up, over and over and over again? What a relief it would be to slide under the water, slip into sleep and travel, weightless, to some undiscovered country where burdens are lifted and the mind no longer suffers.
“Thank you for telling me,” I say to my cousin. For the first time since my father disappeared, I’m certain it couldn’t have been my fault. His longing to die, to sleep, was indigenous: before the drinking, before the divorce, before the stroke, before I was born. Short of drugs that hadn’t yet been invented and treatments that never did work, there was nothing any of us could have done to stop him from keeping that last date.
During the internal examination of the organs, I had the opportunity to take samples of the items requested in the Autopsy Worksheet for Toxicology Analysis for the Regional Crime Lab in Milwaukee. The items collected consist of the following:
One brown envelope, containing approx. 40 to 50 hairs pulled
from the head of the victim in several locations;
One 4 oz. jar containing a sample of the victim’s liver;
One 4 oz. jar containing a sample from the victim’s kidney;
One 50 ml. glass tube containing a urine sample;
One 50 ml. tube containing a blood sample from the victim’s
heart;
One 5 ml. tube containing a sample of bile;
Three 5 ml. tubes containing a sample of blood from the
victim’s chest cavity;
One 12 oz. jar containing a sample of stomach contents;
One plastic container containing a variety of insects removed
from within the body of the victim.
Sgt. DeBord, Mount Pleasant Police Department
Death Investigation, April 26, 1987, Case No. 4245-87
Back home in Pennsylvania, my daughter at school, I open the manila envelope and pull out all of its contents. I want, at last, to know everything. I read through the police report, appreciating the efforts of so many on my father’s behalf and admiring Officer Chaussee’s writing style. I pore over the xeroxed pages, reading the coroner’s report, the autopsy report, the toxicology report. I consult books I’ve checked out from the library on forensic entomology and websites that archive meteorological information. I chart the temperature – high, low, and mean – for each of the days my father lay, alone, in the woods. I realize what a slim window of weather and chance brought together Kurt Klinkhammer and his gun and the flies that swarm for only a handful of warm days, their life cycle short, their purpose singular. I must seem morbid, learning the formulas for using maggots to determine time of death, but to me it isn’t grotesque.
The police report, the autopsy, all of it, reads to me like a benediction. There are the insects busy doing nature’s work, returning earth to earth. There is the communion of wine, like a Christian absolution of sin. There is the honoring of the chakras – head, abdomen, feet – where energy pools in our bodies. There is the stripping and cleansing of the corpse, like a Hindu ritual in the Ganges River. There is the litany of the lists, a Kabbalistic recitation of measures and substances. All that’s missing from the ceremonial naming of directions – south, east and west – is the burning smudge of sage. My brothers and I hadn’t known what to do with his ashes. But eighteen years later, in the streaky pages of a police report, I find that his remains had already been attended to.
Based on the condition of the remains in the wooded area and the presence of two prescription bottles, which were later found to be filled days prior to the victim’s disappearance, and the confirmation from the Crime Lab that those prescription medications were found within the victim’s system at an either high level or a lethal level, at this time leads me to list the manner of death as a suicide. No further investigation required at this time.
Sgt. DeBord, Mount Pleasant Police Department
Death Investigation, June 22, 1987, Case No. 4245-87
Because his mother found him that first time in the bath, turned off the gas and opened a window, my father lived long enough to mature, to marry, to have children. Because, another time, my mother found him unconscious on the couch and called an ambulance in time to pump out his stomach full of pills, he lived long enough to tuck us into bed at night and correct my spelling and take us hiking in the Alps and swimming in the Aegean. But this time, my father made sure there’d be no waking.
How heavy his legs must have felt after he took the city bus to its furthest stop and trudged along Highway H in the fading light of that January day. How lovely the woods must have looked to him, so dark and deep, as he crossed the frozen field. How tired he must have been when he laid himself down beneath those trees. I’ll never know just what he was thinking; though he left us cash and trust funds and bank statements, there were no words of explanation waiting in the envelopes we opened the next day. But having stood myself in the place he chose, there are some things I’ve come to know.
I know that, before the sun set, there would have been birdsong from the sparrows and cardinals that winter over through even the coldest days. And later, in the flat light of a full moon, after he smoked his last cigarette and swallowed the pills and polished off the wine, after he tucked his glasses into his coat pocket and pillowed his head on needles of pine, he would have heard, familiar as a lullaby, the low whistle of a passing train.
Kim van Alkemade’s creative nonfiction has been published in Proteus: A Journal of Ideas and The Rambler. Her short stories have appeared or are forthcoming in Fourteen Hills, Cimarron Review, and The Massachusetts Review.