Sarah Inhoff
A stray snowflake danced teasingly around the tip of my nose as I kicked the toes of my boots against the asphalt, knocking snow from the soles. My mom called from behind me and my brother, Timmy, as we reached the front door.
“Leave your shoes on the rug!”
Warmth wrapped around my shaking limbs as I pushed past Timmy into the house. The aroma of sugar cookies flooded my nostrils. Timmy shouldered me as we bent to remove our shoes, turning it into a race with a few well-aimed jabs. He always managed to turn anything into a competition. He gave me a crooked smile, letting me know it was all in good fun. We passed through the house volleying childish insults at each other, our socked feet slipping on the hardwood floors. Our dog ran to greet us in a flurry of fur, her nails scrambling on the tiled kitchen floor.
A cleared space on the dining table held racks of cooling cookies. Timmy and I grabbed some with a shared grin. Mom made it into the kitchen, brushing flecks of snow from her short, silver hair. She caught us wrist-deep in her fresh pastries and yelled at us to knock it off. Peals of laughter tumbled from our sugar-stuffed mouths, and we scurried off to set our piano books down. I rejoined my mom to help her powder the cookies. I slid into a seat at the dining table, armed with a bag of powdered sugar. We worked in candlelight.
The holidays were the only time of year my mom burned candles in the house. I liked the way that fire made its shadows dance across the nicked wood of the dining table. I raised my head from the powdered pastries to look at the small flame. When I looked at the shadows, they looked back.
Growing up in a small village in southeastern Pennsylvania, I was always aware of my heritage. The area was rich with Pennsylvania Dutch influence. My grammy, a short and spunky lady, still spoke the language. The barns of my youth were decorated with elaborate hex signs. They came in all shapes and colors: some had scalloped edges, some resembled the North Star, and some depicted distelfinks—brown and black birds with red faces and gold-lined wings. They drew the eye, their symmetry alluring and captivating. To most, they were eye-candy, a pop of beauty against a building typically associated with dirt and hard work. To the Amish and Mennonites, they were pagan and satanic superstitions. To me, they were magic. To be without a hex is to be unprotected. My eyes were always drawn up before entering a barn, checking for a hex to mark the building as safe.
I knew my heritage. I knew my dad’s side came from Austria-Hungary when it was still an empire. Both my great grandparents immigrated before World War I. Perhaps it was fate that they ended up in the same area of America, or perhaps coincidence. Perhaps they bonded over their shared country of origin and found a sense of home in each other. They settled down in Nazareth after getting married, in a house that my dad would eventually grow up in.
Their Center Street bustled with a sense of community. Neighbors knew each other, went to school together, worked together, and even went to church together. Nearly all the immigrants on that street were from Austria-Hungary. The Hungarian culture lived and died on Center Street with the immigrants. The children moved away to start their own lives. The house that sheltered three generations of my family was knocked down, reduced to rubble, and left only partially cleaned up.
Alarms blared in my ears, bouncing through my skull, and making my vision shake from the vibrations. Smoke gathered around the ceiling. The red light produced by the LED strips illuminated the charcoal-colored air in a halo. The smoke drifted down to sting my eyes and nose, wrapped inky tendrils around my throat and reached into the depths of my lungs to squeeze with all its might. I sputtered and coughed as I fumbled with the doorknob of my bedroom door. I ducked my head to avoid the smoke. When I burst into the hallway, the first thing to register was the heat. The convection ovens at work may as well have swallowed me whole. Except there was no place to retreat. My body froze, my skin feeling too restrictive around my muscles and bones. I had to move. Every inhale was as if through a flimsy fast-food straw, and the heat was great enough to start melting the plastic.
I stumbled down the hall. Knots of fire twisted beneath my skin, making it peel and flake off my arms. I made my way toward the living room. Orange and yellows licked their way up the walls. Shadows sprouted up from the peeled and flaking wallpaper to loom over me, their eyes narrow and their grins stretched wide into their cheeks. The silk curtains over the large windows fluttered toward the ceiling like they did on breezy summer days. It was mockery. It was candlelight.
I tried sucking in a breath, only to choke. Even with my eyes squinted, there was no way for me to see through the tears in my eyes. I threw my body to the right. The metal of the door locks stung my hand. I flinched away for only a second before my body jerked forward against the door. My skin sizzled against the metal as I forced the locks open. I wanted to cry out as my burning flesh penetrated my nose, but I kept my mouth shut. I couldn’t breathe. The door swung open, then the screen door, and I ran to the grass. My legs gave out as soon as cool grass flooded between my toes. I sucked air in heaving gasps. When I mustered the strength to prop myself onto my elbows, I looked over my shoulder. I was met with a wall of flame, the white panels of my house barely visible.
I woke in a thick layer of sweat, flailing to kick my blankets off and strip myself nude.
My dad produced a yellowing box from his bedroom closet on a Thursday night. The edges were concaved so far in that it was difficult to take the lid off. It had a decent depth to it regardless, so I was surprised when the lid shimmied off to reveal a few thin magazines on the bottom. They were crochet books. My eyes widened as I caught a glimpse of filet crochet patterns toward the bottom of the stack. My dad told me that they were my great grammy’s while I picked up one of the books to flip through, my movements jerky. I tried controlling the excitement buzzing through my muscles.
The pages were wrinkled and yellowed. Some edges were dog-eared, and loose pages were tucked in at random intervals. I don’t know how long I flipped through the pages, fingers shaking. My eyes tracked the images and barely digested the words. They were nothing like the patterns I was familiar with; these took up entire pages. My dad was still beside me, flipping through a new book with such steady hands that I almost believed he understood what he was looking at. My mouth was moving before I knew it, explaining filet crochet to him and bouncing slightly on the balls of my feet. I added new hooks and yarns to my mental shopping list. As I returned the books to their withered time capsule, my dad pushed a framed picture into my field of sight.
It was black and white. The bottom right corner frayed with age, the ink blotting. A long line of church boys stood in the photo, not paying the camera any attention. They clustered on a sidewalk in front of a school. My dad’s finger traced the attire of the boys through the spotted and dusty glass, identifying the garments crocheted by my great grammy. The blocks of stitches jumped at intervals so one would think a machine produced them. His finger slid to the very right of the photo, where a rough outline of a house could be seen. He said that was where he grew up. I had been to that very spot in Nazareth, along Center Street, where the quaint homes of the 20th century no longer existed. I stared as long as possible before he pulled it away.
My dad dug around in his closet some more. I assumed he was putting the time capsules back in the ground. I returned to my bedroom, furrowing my brow as I resumed getting ready for bed. My ears felt full from the intensity of my spinning thoughts. The rare moments in which my dad disclosed things from his childhood always left me daydreaming about what life would have been like on Center Street. Could I have convinced my great grandparents to pass down the language and the culture? Would they tell me stories of what life was like in Austria-Hungary?
I heard my name called from across the hallway and turned just in time to see my dad reappear with a new picture frame in his hands. This one was a lot bigger than the other one. It was a wedding photo. Four or five rows of people stared back at me, dressed in their Sunday best. Their faces were neutral, their strong brows pulled straight over haunted eyes. They were familiar, but their names, save for the bride and groom, were forever lost to history. Death stole the last remaining family vault-keepers years prior. I saw in them a box full of papers and artifacts, sitting beneath my pappy’s desk in his basement. I saw answers in that box, scrawled in a tongue lost from my family.
I knew the bride before my dad pointed her out to me. She was young, her cheeks still rounded with youth despite her stern expressions. I knew that her cheeks would bunch up and dimple when she smiled. I knew that her tawny eyes were streaked with emerald, and when the sun hit them just right, the bottoms of her irises transformed into lush forests. Her eyes smoldered beneath her stoic brows, locked firmly on the viewer. Her hands rested on her knees. She held a bouquet loosely in her right hand, the flowers tipping carelessly toward her husband’s lap. My lungs hiccupped. I inhaled sharply, unable to remember the last time I did so. I stopped myself from tearing the frame from my father’s hands and turning it away from the glare of the fluorescent lights. It wouldn’t matter anyway; the reflection stayed the same.
“How old was your gram when she immigrated here?” my mom asked, voice echoing around the living room.
“Huh?” My dad, who had been dozing off in the rocking chair opposite of the couch, startled slightly at my mother’s voice. It took him a moment to process what was asked. “Oh. She would’ve been fourteen, I think. Her aunt brought her over after the fire.”
My neck snapped up so quickly that my vertebrae clacked against each other. My phone dipped forward as my wrist went limp. A strange heat shot up my inner forearm. The cheesy Hallmark-knockoff on the TV faded to static. The nape of my neck burned beneath my hair, but the strands were too short to tie up. I watched my dad from my spot on the couch as he pushed against the ground with his outstretched heels, beginning to rock himself in the chair again. Not that it did him any good; his eyes were still closed, and his cheek was smushed against his knuckles. When I swallowed my spit, my larynx turned to sandpaper.
“What fire?”
“Her childhood house burned down. She was the only survivor. He aunt was her only living relative, so she brought her over here. She never really talked much about her childhood.”
When I was young and insecure about my appearance, my mom told me that I was built “like an Inhoff.” I didn’t really know what to make of that. When I asked what she meant, my mom looked up at me over the rim of her glasses. Her hands stilled in her sewing. She told me that the Inhoffs had a distinct look and build, and that I resembled the women on my dad’s side to an uncanny degree. She used my cousin as an example, but that comparison didn’t sit right with me. When I saw a picture of my aunts as teenagers for the first time, I noticed a bit more of myself. There was still something off, though. My great aunt Catherine, who everyone just knows as Aunt Catty, said something absent-mindedly while I was at my grandparent’s house. She was digging in her handbag for a cigarette, gesturing to me with a Bic lighter.
“You look like Joey’s mom with your hair cut short like that.” Aunt Catty was one of my grammy’s sisters. My grammy looked me up and down quizzically.
“My Joey? Or Deb’s Joey?” she asked. Deb is my mom’s name. My dad and my pappy share the same name, so there’s always some confusion when talking about them.
“Your Joey,” Aunt Catty said with a flippant wave in the direction of my pappy, who sat oblivious in the living room. “Look at ‘er.” She then addressed me again. “You look so serious! Your great grammy always looked so serious, ‘specially when she was focusing real hard on something.”
My great grammy’s name was Ethel. She was born in the Austro-Hungarian empire around 1899. The family documents and letters from her and her husband are written in Hungarian, so I knew they were of Magyar descent instead of the many other ethnicities ruled over by the Habsburgs. At the age of fourteen, she lost her entire family and had to cross the Atlantic to live with her aunt in America. She spent the rest of her childhood somewhere near Philadelphia, meeting my great pappy and marrying him by the age of 23. She settled with him in the small town of Nazareth. Their house sat right beside the high school gymnasium. Center Street was a magnet for Austro-Hungarian immigrants.
The community was rich, but the culture from Europe was suppressed. Nothing got passed to the new generation. My great grammy was adamant that all five her children spoke only English, and that they do whatever Americans do. She wanted them to fit in. In her day, conforming was the only way to survive.
According to everyone who knew her, my great grammy was a short spitfire of a woman. She had a cold exterior, never afraid to speak her mind. She told people exactly what she thought of them. She was also a gossip. The women on Center Street would sit together in the afternoons to crochet and gossip, always in Hungarian so their children never understood what they were saying. My great grammy made Gulyás a lot. Though my dad loved it, my mom confessed to me that she couldn’t stand it. My great grammy probably made it with a lot of paprika. She was a devout Catholic and could be found at the church on more days than just Sunday. She would’ve dragged herself to Sunday service even if she was on her deathbed. I don’t think she ever wore a pair of pants in her life. She wore nothing but long dresses and the same pair of black heels, even when she would go outside to garden.
When Aunt Catty told me those simple words, I was flattered. It felt right, though I had never even seen a photo of her at the time. I felt honored to be compared to a woman whom I had never met.
I sit outside with my dog on the rare occasions when the sun’s rays are cooled through clouds and a gentle breeze whistles through the pine trees of my front yard. She’s old and never strays too far from my side. Sometimes I watch the sky. Sometimes I read or write poetry. Often, I find myself staring at the front of our house where the large, living room windows are. There is a small sign, worn and scratched with age, that my mom had stuck in the bottom right corner of the one window. It’s so faded from the sun that it’s illegible. It’s meant to let firefighters know there are pets in the house. I stare, and I plan. Every potential scenario runs through my mind, and I plan escape routes for my pets and me for each one. It’s an instinctive reaction when the subject of fire crosses my mind. Something tells me to always be prepared. Sometimes a paralyzing sense of dread overcomes me. I fear blinking in those moments, convinced that if I do, my house will combust.
I think I met my great grammy in that dream. I’ve known her since I was little, since before I knew my heritage. Even after learning where I come from, there was distance between us. Either I kept my distance, or she kept hers; I’m not sure. Perhaps stimulating intense emotion was the only way she could communicate with my younger self, who always had her head in the clouds. Maybe she saw herself in me as I see myself in her, and she needed to give me tools to protect myself from the same trauma that uprooted her. Perhaps our ancestors change not our reality, but our perception of events so we may take caution to that which we’re predisposed to be damaged by. The night that she shared her trauma was when I met her properly. I know my great grammy in ways not tangible.
I don’t wish to have met her when she was still alive. If I did, I would not know her as I do today. Both of us, stuck in the limitations of corporeal form and inconsequential ideology of man’s creation, would not have understood each other. We would not have liked each other.
I know her spirit. I know her drive and dedication. I know her beyond borders of time and space, beyond social boundaries, norms, and expectations that limit our connections to other people. I know her fire, and her fire lives on in me.
Sarah Inhoff is a junior Writing major and Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies minor at Cedar Crest College. They graduated in Spring of 2023 with their Associate of Arts from Lehigh Carbon Community College. Their poetry and short fiction have appeared in LCCC’s literary magazine, Xanadu. They plan to pursue an MFA in Writing, and they hope to one day publish their own book.