Nance Van Winckel
Associate Editor Caitlin Doyle: What better way to herald the change of seasons than with a miCRo double feature that simultaneously registers and resists time’s passage? In this week’s two micro nonfiction pieces, “My Husband’s Story from the War” and “Assisted Living,” Nance Van Winckel explores the human relationship to memory and invites us to consider how the past continually shifts under our feet as we move through the present.
In taut and layered language, Van Winckel prompts us throughout “My Husband’s Story from the War” to imagine how a missile fired more than four decades ago, “passing over rice paddies” during a “sweltering summer,” can remain forever midflight in a soldier’s mind. Similarly, the residents of an elderly care facility in “Assisted Living” exist in a state of suspension that renders their immediate reality a haunted projection of the lives they used to lead. When Van Winckel tells us that one of the residents, a woman named Betty, “misses the creek at the end of her road,” we can’t help but follow that road in our minds, much as we can’t resist envisioning the missile’s trajectory. Yet Van Winckel, by leaving the creek out of view and withholding the moment of impact between the missile and its target, suggests that ultimately our current selves can “never quite arrive” at the destinations sought by our previous selves.
To hear Nance Van Winckel read “My Husband’s Story from the War,” you can click below:
My Husband’s Story from the War
He tells it only when he’s tipsy. A missile was in mind for a minute: the captain’s brief thought bubble that became an order.
Happy New Year, my husband was instructed to print on the side of a bomb. His job for that particular December’s end in 1969 Phuoc Vinh. As company clerk, he was typist, painter, and ornate calligrapher of placards for colonels’ seats at steak dinners in Quonset huts.
And the soaring hardy har-har of the missiled message. The long screech of Haaap—eeee passing over rice paddies in that sweltering summer as already the Haaap—eeee raced toward a forty-fifth year later in a man’s future, where the New and the Year never quite arrive—just the punch line’s boom, and then the boom’s echo.
To hear Nance Van Winckel read “Assisted Living,” you can click below:
Assisted Living
I sit outside with the residents on the last warm afternoon—as it turns out—of the year. We watch the shiny cars and loud trucks whiz by. My mother waves and says she thinks she knows him, or her, or them, and Betty says he or she comes by here all the time asking for food. Then Margaret sighs and says she misses driving. Jim says he misses pets. Dot says she misses nicknames. Since all the lawn chairs are occupied, I sit in Mom’s walker, eyes closed, imagining myself as a shadow beneath the huge maple, the wind striating the shadow’s shape, leafing it out, nicking its edges, cars running over it. Mom says she misses her bike. Jim misses his boat. Betty misses the creek at the end of her road.
Nance Van Winckel‘s newest books are Ever Yrs., a novel in scrapbook form (Twisted Road, 2014), Book of No Ledge, a poetically altered encyclopedia (Pleiades Press, 2016), and Our Foreigner (Beyond Baroque Books, 2017). She teaches in the Vermont College of Fine Arts MFA in writing program.
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