First Place: The Alchemist's Messenger

“When you want something, all the universe conspires in helping you to achieve it."

Paulo Coelho, The Alchemist

There is a neighborhood in Baltimore City that is as quaint as it is gritty, a mesh of cobblestone streets and tilted buildings with historic landmark signs affixed to the brick fronts, a blend of dark Irish pubs and nautical-themed bars, all with live music most nights of the week. The Fell’s Point musicians are all locals, and on Sundays they gather in the alley behind the local American Legion for a hootenanny, box drums booming under hand taps and guitars swaying against bodies. The air itself sings with the clanging of nearby sailboat masts docked in the harbor, the rumble of a car’s tires over the cobblestones. It’s the kind of place you escape to, if you have something to escape from.

 It was summer and crop tops were all the rage, but my torso was covered, because beneath my shirt were bruises dotting my skin with violets and navy blues and browns, a Rorschach swirling of injection sites. My husband and I had been trying, and failing, to get pregnant for a few years, and had finally fallen in line with the local fertility clinic’s prescribed protocol. I found I couldn’t insert the needles myself; John had offered to do it for me, an offer he likely regretted later. Every time he guided the needle toward my flesh, my body flinched, recoiled, pulled back. We found it worked best when I stood with my back against a wall, no air behind me to back away to, no escape. He jabbed, as gently as he could but quickly enough that my body wouldn’t jerk away from him, and I whimpered as softly as I could so as not to worsen his angst over the whole ordeal. Every morning, every evening, like this: I braced, he injected. After each cycle, I went under anesthesia, they retrieved the eggs, they tried to fertilize them. Every time, the call afterward was the same: No viable embryos. We’re so sorry. We’ll try again next cycle. It was starting to feel like maybe it wasn’t meant to be for me, the whole motherhood thing. This was what I was escaping from. What we were escaping from.

 Fell’s Point in those days was our escape: we knew the smell of the corner hot dog stand, the sound of the harbor taxis skimming the water. The bartenders started pouring our regular drinks with a familiar nod when we approached. The musicians knew our requests without asking. The bar entrances were packed in as tight as the cobblestones: a mishmash of old and new, divey and over-priced, sidled up together in the same way the stones had been unevenly laid and then replaced over time.

 John sorted out our lineup of music for the night: Ricky’s band was playing at the corner bar at 7, and when they took a break, we could swing by to catch Ed’s band at the saloon for a set, and finish with Katie’s band at our favorite spot, The Cat’s Eye Pub. We were making our way from the saloon to The Cat’s Eye Pub that night when I spotted JB.

 Here is the thing about spotting an old friend, when decades have passed: it’s not the clothes, or the hat, or the smile you recognize, but the eyes. JB’s face was mostly covered, a hat pulled down low on his forehead, long hair framing the sides of his face, and a beard that stretched halfway down his chest. It was dark out, the few working streetlights casting just enough light and shadow to illuminate the cobblestones. But there was no mistaking the eyes. There was also something about the way he walked that had both a heaviness and a lightness to it—as if his feet were both laden with fatigue and buoyed by indifference. Despite the beard and the hat and the dark and the swarm of people weaving between us, I felt myself lift at the sight of him—feet arching onto tiptoes, eyebrows reaching upwards.

 "JB?!" I shouted, and in acknowledgement, he picked me up and swung me in a circle, stumbling on the uneven stones under his Birkenstocks. We stared at each other laughing in that how long has it been! kind of way. “This is my husband, John,” I said, when he set me down. JB asked where we were going, and I told him the Cat’s Eye and off we went. Inside, JB kicked off his shoes and danced barefoot on the beer-stained slabs of wood. It was too loud to talk about what we'd been doing with our lives, so we danced instead.

 “Great guy,” my husband shouted over the music to me, pointing at JB. They hadn’t even spoken a word, but it was as if they had known each other forever, too. “Where do you know him from?” he asked.

 “He was my prom date!” I laughed. Later that night, away from the din of the crowd’s foot-stomping and the glasses clinking onto the bar and the locals singing along, I would tell my husband how JB and I had met: the way he had rescued me.

 When I started having anxiety attacks as a teenager, I had no name for them. They were just a feeling: the air closing in, my throat thickening, a desperation to move the air in and out of my lungs before they collapsed upon themselves. What they were to me was unnamed, but I at least could recognize what triggered them: specific settings. The school cafeteria was the worst of them. When I entered the space, which was vaster and had higher ceilings than the rest of the school building, I felt suffocated. The air felt stagnant, sour. Instead of eating there, I spent lunch periods hiding out in my creative writing teacher's classroom, where she encouraged me to write it all away.

 That is where I had met JB. He had started popping in at lunchtime, making small talk and offering me snacks from his lunch until I started letting myself smile, laugh at his jokes.  Until I started eating again. He didn't even really like writing, I don’t think, but he didn’t like high school and he didn't like following rules. He could just see that I was alone. He was just kind. Not a lot of teenagers were kind in high school. 

 One day we played hooky, left school and drove into the city. Here’s the thing about Baltimore: there is the city and there is the county. People who live in the county don’t really go into the city, and people who live in the city don’t really go into the county. Our town in the county was cookie-cutter suburban and even though it was just a twenty-minute drive into Baltimore City, we never went there except on field trips to museums. So, when JB and I got to the city, we didn't even know what to do, but we went there because it was different; it was an escape from the town and the school and the people we knew. We weren't old enough to go into bars, but we walked around the cobblestone streets in Fell’s Point, listening to the live music spilling out of each bar with its stumbling patrons.

 Before then, I had only ever been to Fell’s Point on chaperoned field trips. There were smoke shops with colorful blown-glass bongs on display and men sleeping on benches even in the daylight. There were eclectic vintage shops and record stores instead of the strip mall Abercrombies and Gaps of the nineties. The row homes were all connected but each had their own charm—a neon yellow door on one and bright lavender siding on its neighbor. It felt so far away from our high school. The edge of the road teetered over the harbor’s waters without a railing or a fence, and in the dark, I imagined you could just be walking along a little tipsy and tumble right in. It felt like a dream. We sat on a bench for a while, just watching people moving about, watching boats on the water listing in the wind, a gentle bobbing on waves.

 We walked downtown from there, paid a couple bucks to go to the top of the World Trade Center and took photos of the tall ships in the Inner Harbor. I still have the photos but even if I didn't, I'll always remember that day. I'll remember its simplicity, its lack of agenda, its ease. I’ll remember thinking how I'd like to live in the city one day, walk to any place I wanted to as easily as JB and I had that day, have no agenda. I remember thinking this was what life was meant to be: wandering, savoring, searching.

 I always associated Fell’s Point with JB after that, and perhaps that is why I spotted him so easily that night. Perhaps I was always looking for him.

 “We should catch up,” JB said, looking around under the bar for his shoes. My husband nodded. “Yeah, let’s go,” I said, and the three of us skipped off down the street to a quieter dive bar.

The thing about catching up when you haven’t seen someone in years is, you don’t know what questions not to ask. JB asked how my brother was. At prom, when he had gone as my date, my brother had gone with us as my friend’s date. The four of us had rented the obligatory limo together, found a table in the back of the dance hall, away from everyone. The two of them had become fast friends. I had watched them laughing together at the table as I danced, and it was my happiest memory of that evening: awkward in their tuxedos, tucked away in the corner, smiling. The two safest people in the world to me.

I told JB that my brother had died, shortly after I had graduated college. Usually, when I told people that my brother died, they mumbled something about the good dying young, or time healing all wounds, or feeling sorry for my loss. “Shit,” JB said. “Shit. That’s absolute shit.” I recalled our high school creative writing classroom, the way the air in that room felt more breathable than the rest of the school building, when it was just me and JB inhaling it. The way it rippled like a current when we exhaled.

JB asked what I was doing now, a safer question, and I told him we lived in the city now, had for a decade, that I worked down there too, in Human Resources. “I thought you’d be writing,” he said, and yeah, I thought I would have been, too. I told him I hadn’t been able to write since my brother died. “Shit,” he said again.

He asked if I liked working in HR and I shrugged, said I guessed I was good at it. He nodded. I returned the question, said I thought he’d joined the Navy? He said he had, apologized for not staying in touch, said it was tough when he’d been living on submarines. I tried to imagine the air on a sub, the way it must have stuck in place like mud. 

He said he’d had enough of it eventually, all the yes, sir bullshit and the rules and the rigidity. That he wanted to just do the opposite for a bit, quit, and moved to the Appalachian Trail. Fresh air and all.

I hadn’t known that you could just live on the Appalachian Trail. That you could choose to just not do life in the way you were supposed to, the way it was prescribed. JB said he was delivering peanuts to hikers along the trail for work. That he only came back because of his father’s death.

I told him my mother had just died, too, that it was cancer, but it was sudden. I found myself always emphasizing that with people—when you say cancer, people think it was drawn out, that the person suffered; they offer that you should be happy they’re no longer in pain. But it wasn’t like that with my mother. One day she wasn’t feeling well and the next day she died. Her death felt faster than my brother’s, and he had been in a car accident. “What happened to your dad?” I asked.

JB said that one day his dad asked him to come home from the trail so he did, and then when he got back, his father killed himself, shot himself on their front porch, and JB guessed he was supposed to be there so that he could find his dad like that and take care of his mom. “Shit,” I said. “Shit.” And then, “When?”

He told me the date. It was last fall, within a few days of my mother’s death. Somehow, some way, despite how the years had distanced us, despite how we had left that place, we had both been in our childhood homes, breathing the same air, losing our parents at the same time.

It had been almost a year since my mother had died. I had plans to leave the following week to go on a trip with my father, to spread her ashes. “I’m going to the beach with my dad next week,” I said. “I think you’re supposed to come with us.”

So, JB came with us to the old wooden beach house we had rented, and he slept in the backyard in a hammock he brought, even though we had extra bedrooms that no one was using. One night there was a thunderstorm, and I was terrified he was going to get struck by lightning, so I ran outside in the rain when the thunder woke me up and told him he had to come inside. It was the middle of the night and I could hear my father snoring as JB and I toweled off from the rain. I poured us some drinks and we sat at the kitchen table in the dark. “You know, I really thought you’d be writing,” he said.

“Yeah? Me too, I guess,” I responded. “I mean, I wanted that, to be a writer. I wanted that for myself. And I wanted to be a mother, too, but it doesn’t seem like that will happen for me, either.” I laid my cheek on the table, wet hair dripping from the rain into a puddle around me as I cried. I cried and cried and he sat there and he let me and he just stayed with me, the same way he had in the creative writing classroom back in high school.

The next morning, I woke up to JB blasting a song by a local Baltimore musician at full volume. My dad had gone for a bike ride and JB felt weird knocking on my bedroom door so he figured that the music would wake me up. I had lain in bed smiling as the lyrics buzzed through the walls of the old wooden beach house, filling its air with warmth. I could hear JB’s bare feet stomping around on the wood floors below me.

We took towels to the beach and laid there all morning catching up, occasionally splashing into the ocean to cool off.  He told me a lot of crazy stories you would never believe if you didn't know JB—like how he was shot at while rafting down a river in West Virginia. He told me about one time a buddy of his had been tripping on acid and almost went crazy because of a book JB made him read while he was hallucinating. I asked what book and he said The Alchemist. I told him I'd never read it and he said that was crazy, that he couldn't believe anyone could go through life without reading The Alchemist, and especially not me.

"We've gotta go get you a copy," he said, and got up, shaking the sand off his towel.

"What, right now?" I asked, shading my eyes from the sun as I looked up at him. "Yes, right now!" he insisted and kicked sand on me playfully before running off toward the dunes. He borrowed my dad's bike, and I hopped on mine and we went into town and found the only bookstore. It was a small local shop and I figured most people who wandered in there were looking for a light beachy read, but the woman at the register nodded and smiled when JB asked if they had a copy of The Alchemist.

We grabbed ice cream on the boardwalk and laughed when it melted so quickly that it coated JB's beard with white drippings. Then we rode back to the house with the book tucked into my back pocket and took our towels back to the beach. I read the entire book that afternoon, just barely finishing as the sun started to fade and my warm skin started to goosebump from the chill of the ocean breeze. JB had left me at some point to go back to the house and keep my dad company, but I was immersed in the book and hadn’t noticed I was alone.

When I got back to the house, I didn't say much to either of them for a while. I took a shower in the rustic outdoor stall, helped prepare dinner. But the next morning, I told my dad and JB that I was going to quit my job and write a book instead. That I was going to quit the IVF treatments and just see what happened. That maybe it was possible I could get pregnant without it, and if not, at least I wasn’t going to lose myself and my marriage along the way.

My dad seemed perplexed but probably thought I was hungover from the gin and tonics of the night before. But I could tell JB knew I was serious. He had read the book too; it had done something to him, too. Perhaps, like me, he had read it at just the exact right moment in his life, like that day we played hooky and went off in search of some kind of change in the air.

That night, we spread my mother’s ashes as a thunderstorm approached. I waded into the ocean with a bowl gripped between my hands. I had a bowl because I had decided to mix my mother’s ashes with my brother’s ashes and spread them all at once, all together. Their ashes were indistinguishable from each other, anyway, all white and gray bone fragments that glistened on the shoreline like broken seashells. The gray of the ocean was starting to blend with the gray of the sky, jagged streaks of lightning jutting downward in the distance as I waited for a softening in the waves.

Toward the end of The Alchemist, the narrator is determined that he is going to turn himself into the wind. He’s been searching for his ultimate purpose, but for some reason, he decides that his purpose in that moment is to become the wind. At the ocean’s edge, I stood waist deep as my father watched, the crackling of thunder muffling any sounds escaping his mouth. The current tugged at my ankles, coaxing me away from the shore. I lifted the ashes, held out my hand, spread my fingers. I watched the waves splash at the pieces of my mother and my brother, watched them melt into my skin. I watched the wind lift them up, away from me, cradle them like an infant. I watched the air change. I felt I could become the wind, or the current, or my mother.

*

It is July in Baltimore, and that means the air is so thick with humidity, it seems you could drown in it. It is July in Baltimore, and it has been six years since that beach trip with the melting ice cream and the spreading of ashes and the book. My husband and I are in a new house, just outside the city I said I’d never leave. It has four bedrooms, four people living inside them: husband, wife, daughter, son. JB works at a farm just down the road, now, just around the curve of the local reservoir where we take our kids to chase the ducks and dip their toes in the water.

It is a Saturday, and I pack my children into the car, my daughter, four years old, wearing round pink sunglasses with silhouettes of princesses over the lenses; my son, eighteen months old, clutching his favorite toy, an inflatable beach ball. “Mommy,” my daughter says as I tighten her seatbelt. “Will the horsies bite?” I shake my head, “no, sweetie. They’re nice horses.” I switch to the other side of the car, tighten another seatbelt. “Ball,” my son declares, holding up his toy. “Yes, baby, ball,” I confirm, before hopping into my seat up front.

At the farm, my husband and I each hold a child while JB swings the metal gate wide and a line of horses parades by, black tails swishing, hooves clomping on the concrete outside the barn. JB has cut his hair, trimmed his beard, and my daughter warms to him much more quickly than she does to the horses. Perhaps she has observed the way he is with the horses, the softness with which he guides them. When he dips out of sight in the barn for a moment, she grips my arm: “Where is JB?” she asks. “He’s inside,” I reassure her. “He’ll be right back.”

We watch JB dole food out into the stalls, lead the horses gently to their places, brush their manes with a stroke of a hand. When they’re done eating, he shovels the manure from the hay-lined floors, and I watch my daughter wrinkle her nose at the smell. “Do you want to leave the barn?” I ask, and she shakes her head quickly. “No,” she says. “It’s okay. The air is moving.”

She is right, there is a slight breeze lilting through the windows of the barn. The swirling of hay at our feet, and the air thrust with force out the horse’s nostrils does make it feel like the air around us is moving.

I watch JB lead the horses back out to the field and I think he looks at home here. I wonder if he thinks I look at home, too, standing there with a daughter propped up on my hip. As if she had always been there, a part of me. As if she had always been meant to be. As if the whole universe had conspired to help us to achieve this moment.

-Annie Marhefka

Annie Marhefka is a writer in Baltimore, Maryland whose recent publications have appeared in Pithead Chapel, Variant Literature, Reckon Review, Literary Mama, and more. Her writing has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net. Annie is the Executive Director at Yellow Arrow Publishing, a Baltimore-based nonprofit empowering women-identifying writers. She has a BA in creative writing from Washington College and an MBA. Follow Annie on Instagram @anniemarhefka, X @charmcityannie, and at anniemarhefka.com.