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Issue # 43 Fall 2020

Prose

Edited by Dorian Gossy

 

 

 

Austin Adams
A Full Accounting

 

I’m sick of all space. I never know just where I am. Light falls exactly the same way here, but I only know because I’m told. Dad died Friday. We had the oddest time. Where to stick so many sorries? Stuff them in a pocket. They’re scrap gum. I sang the sweetest song. I sang ‘I will not fear, star among the sycamores, dawdle near, star among the sycamores.’ No applause then anyone near walked away. The only excuse I can believe is well no one asked for a song.

 

“Beautiful service.”

Found it most frightening.

“He would have loved it.”

That’s strange taste in parties.

“You’ll always hold him in your heart.”

Service is what you get at the lunch counter.

 

May’s too late for most of what I like. If it isn’t too cold it isn’t cold at all. Sunshine is a thing that happens to other people. It’s always a coincidence. Music played in the park. I said I wish my friend could hear. I said so others would know I wasn’t alone. My friend doesn’t care for music. Not that kind or any. If I go out it’s best when the lights are low. Full moons are no darlings. I don’t ever want it to smell like anything but flowers. The park is miles and miles and so also a few other things. There are rocks and they’re fine. There are trees and what to say? I am not a rock I can babble out Like not at all Like a rock I am a A very I’m very much I go to I’m like a Very very Yes Much like that Is graffiti art is the kind of question I wouldn’t answer if I knew. The river goes from here to there. But if it was always there it is really going? The worst thing about questions is most everything. Anyway still I have some. There are always for anyone some. I’ll ask. I won’t. This one that one. Isn’t that how it is? I’m not sure. Who is it who wants actually to learn what they want really just to already know? Then also bells did a toll. So loud and much a reminder. Was that once ever needed? There’s nothing personal about the weather. Everyone wants to say it’s mean when only it’s raining. Like it all smiles on you. Like the whole earth’s just waiting for you to say mine. Pollen is as dust and is as leaves which is as other things. It all falls. Only pollen is yellow which is as the sun that falls too. It’s perfect when you know what’s what. Fourteen starlings in a dogwood. I’m told. Who personally looks at birds?

 

“Beautiful day!”

Had enough of that beauty, gah.

 

A short cold shower. It gives me no pleasure but it happened and let no one say otherwise. I could say the same about this or that. I could mention anything about him. Queen bed means you have no sister. Last of the kind whichever kind it was. Lumps in the soft. How am I supposed to be comfortable? Oh I see I’m not. View of wall and not even the right kind of wall. A whole bit of bricks come off when you rub. You could take a town with time just rubbing. Sheet is one of those words that who can even? You feel like a fish in one. The lamp clicks. I click the lamp. Things do things to things. It’s almost a laugh. Before electric light night was a whole thing. The worst to sleep is when everything keeps just on and you overhear most anything. Like bugs don’t have our manners. That’s why they’re fine to kill. I know bits. I keep a ledger. Of this and that. I’m owed some and owe much but no one collects in full. But it’s not that but more this. What color is a corpse? I’d say basic. I’d say don’t even ask. Running’s not hard when you say to pain ok you too. As things are that’s just not the case. I’ll sleep right now. Go. Did it? No. But. Nothing goes because you say. Cars even need a foot. Here’s another. How dumb is a roof? Of course it still rains. The sound is practically wetness. I’m practically a tomato. Just a fat belly full of rain. All gummed up with bones and bone meat inside. Can’t see one living thing from a bed. If I could I could say to your leaves they have a cancer. That’s a laugh all right. Trees have got something else entirely. They eat the light. Whoever sings they’re beautiful better be lucky he’s not the light. Nature is this new horrible idea every day. It eats the dirt they eat our bones. I haven’t eaten anything in four or three days.

 

“Now you stay as long as you need.”

You can’t keep me. I could just not be.

“Tomorrow we’re gonna visit your grandparents. Won’t that be nice?”

They hate everything I love. Like not being old.

 

I couldn’t eat if I were eating. Having a sit is most always the solution. Seat by a window in a room with a window. It could be anything out there. It’s hard to believe the rain until you’re full of it. Welcome! They say that everywhere and don’t even mean hi really just you are there I see. Why, aren’t you lookin’ sharp? Then don’t touch. I’ll leave this here. It just is there. Take your time. From whom? Thirty-five isn’t the right age for anything. A cucumber seems to me something rarer than most anything I’ve done. You haven’t done something just because you want to. They don’t let you do anything just because you believe. You can’t stop in the street and hold a hand and say I know you. So you heard a trumpet? So you aren’t New Orleans. Anyone could calculate. Miles hours people money. That many only. Squeeze it like they’re really it those fat little digits. Who thinks that? Somebody I bet with not too much of what to do right now. Pass the time please. It’s always in front. What’re you having? Hot cup of mud. People call it that someplace. I’ve never been there and couldn’t be troubled to without cajoling. I’m from the place that says cajoling. Sweetheart? Pancake face is patience. She’s seen a few. Other places for going. Lighthouses are romantic to be alone in a lighthouse. Freight trains are real and be a train bum. Lisbon may be a place. The best thing I can imagine right now is two egg sandwiches. That’s why it’s OK to eat. Something’s ripe! Ripe rot. Step one step two. May I see some identification? Aren’t you looking at me?

 

“Innocence is the opposite of rigor.”

“You hungry? Want waffles?”

“I can’t tell if he’s drunk, if he’s crazy.”

“What would Havemeyer say about that? Wait, I know.”

“Or you could have blintzes or sausage with iced tea or water.”

“He could be sad, or if he’s coming from a big party...”

 

This yellow is a description of old. The smell here is the exact of that yellow. Can’t decorate sick so don’t water the ferns. If I shuffled so slow tomorrow could be weeks away. What a place to be a place. They got cages made of everything. Dead before you die. Just sit and wait and wheeze and wait. Strong sun this morning like look what I got. Can’t walk they can’t run. Pushed like a barrel full of beans. Make conversation. Make it out of this and that. Family trees don’t grow in the grass. I am not an acorn. Didn’t just fall far just didn’t live in Nebraska. Teeth can be more colors than you think. How are you is a tough one. Some words are too much. Moan, bloat, trauma, yesterday. Can’t make a table out of those. Only conversation made of what? When you want me to say terrible and what I say is OK. Yeah I know. Tell me someone I don’t hurt. Talk about forever ago. How can I even believe what happened before I was? I don’t cry like you cry. I’m a fat belly full of rain. So OK I’ll die too. Rules are rules. Everyone says that with a shrug. I smoke every time I want which is later. I choose not to do this and that or maybe even neither. Choice is the same as walking around. Nobody I can see right now walks all right. That says something as they say. Scars come not every time there’s cuts. But you get crippled always. Family’s like a balloon. Only for kids. They named what they wanted and everyone heard. No one went to get it. No one tried to do it. The room was warm and I complained of exactly that.

 

“Haven’t seen you in ages…”

Can see your heart wheezing.

“Time, and it’s terrible, and such a good man.”

Where all breath tastes of tablets.

“Which--heeh? You? Would you like to stay to eat?”

Two egg sandwich deep from a pancake face already.

 

What’s been on your mind? Relationships are not always crystal. ‘Silence or I’ll hit you! Fill up a cup or green is mean.’ Tell me about this week. I held a boy like you’d hold a big carrot. I could bite its top off with emotion. Why? It’s either a baby or a dog that does it. No one takes joy in every little face. Personally I’m for dogs. What is it you’d like to tell me? I clap louder than I mean to. What is it you’d really like to tell me? That I don’t clap but I’m not lying. I could introduce myself but what would you believe? What’s been troubling you lately? Sex, sundown. Can’t figure what it is with those two. I told her all right but only if you show me. She said the whole fun is not to show. I don’t really want a relationship with my fantasies. Are you on anything? Only the furniture in here. Every day I get asked something unfit. All my favorite things are prone to illness. I’m asked what does this say about you. I say not even a little do I understand that question. Keep talking. Few thoughts on suicide. None is check was it an accident. That’s good. I know this song and I sang it better. You say tell me the truest thing you know. I say don’t ask directions. I say I think that settles it. You say I don’t think it does. Who pays for jabber? It wasn’t always like this. Who said that? Yes it was. Tell me about Monday. Lots of people talked. What did you think about that? I thought waxed laces. I mean, what did you think about what they said? What is needed is a sturdy pair of waxed laces. Boots laced. For walking away.

 

“You’re paid up for the next four sessions.”

Paper dollars thin as skin.

“You might want to consider using our time more constructively.”

Now construction paper now there’s a heft.

“I’m here to help.”

Oh I’m not here.

 

“It’s strange to think that our arms and all, stomachs and legs are the same as galaxies to the simple things that live inside us. And that we’re the simple things that live inside— you could call it the universe, but that’s a place, although I’d bet we seem like a place to what’s inside. It might make sense to call it a creature and say it has a body or in any case something like an arm. It may be better to call it all just a form and avoid the whole issue of is-or-isn’t-it and anyway what is. I don’t know much about what to call it. Viruses don’t know much about me except that sometimes I fight back. Does a virus have a thought? Does it have anything like a plan? What does a wound want? These are strange questions to think, and it’s strange to think that each of us is a universe, as hard to know to, say, a virus as our universe is to us, or to a anyone. Every man is a universe. Perry, for instance, was a universe. I think a lot about work. I have a hard job. I like my job, but it’s the kind of thing you have to think a lot about. All I mean to say is that these aren’t the kinds of questions I’m used to spending my time asking. Perry is my neighbor—was, before he had to move out to St. Vicks. He was a good guy—still is, if you, you know—and I’ve been thinking about him. I visited him. It was maybe a few Thursdays ago. He smiled and didn’t say much. He said it was good to see me and it was nice of me to come and see him. I didn’t know about that, nice. What was I going to do, not see him? He was my neighbor, and he was a good guy. He’s still a good guy. Even if, you know. You don’t know what it’s like. If it hurt real bad. So anyway, I’ve been thinking about it. Thinking about what’s inside me that I am. And I feel like I know. It isn’t a hard question. Only then when you really think about it then it is hard. I read a book. It didn’t help. Did you know there are people who don’t even think that we exist? There’s a name for them. They don’t even think that we exist! When we’re this whole universe if you think about it! Anyway, try telling that to Perry.”

 

Tough stuff every day. Anyone who says it isn’t lives on some other street. Death makes strange. It’s dust and it’s dust and that’s that. All the things we say and what was anything? I leaned down to him. I said you go home now. What kind of thing is that to do? You go home now. Sad I think. Maybe funny too a little. Who knows.

There’s still things to account for. His neighbor talked good though.

That’s most everything from the week. Only no another thing. One of those birds from the dogwood was all over the place this morning. Hopping. I thought they were supposed to fly when they were little but maybe that’s a rumor. There wasn’t bread crumbs or anything. Grass and graves. There was no reason to be around in joy. But what it was was that I saw that actually there are actually sixteen birds in that tree. There are sixteen birds exactly.

 

 

 

Olusola Akinwale
We Are What We Make Ourselves

The advert read, Babysitting job for somebody for one six years old girl. Contact the people, Zakharovs: 84993826335. 

It was in a Russian showbiz blog that was published in flawed English, but was a staple of entertainment among us the Anglophone students in the Higher School of Economics. I’d given the information no consideration for two reasons. First, it was illegal for me to work. Second, the idea of a Russian couple letting a person of color look after their child wouldn’t hold up in a land where I’d been forced to think about my Blackness for the first time, where I’d been forced to see my Blackness as a difference that wasn’t always accepted.

It was the second year into my corporate finance studies, but I’d suffered numerous putdowns for my skin color, particularly outside the campus. Foremost in my mind was the incident at the Chertanovskaya metro station when a redheaded woman wrinkled her nose and refused to use a lavatory I’d used. I put my hands under the blower, and when the air didn’t feed out, I thumped the device. “It doesn’t work for people like you?” a second woman jeered in Russian. She waved a hand beneath the machine and it exhaled air into her palm. She sneered as if I was a goddamn leper. A searing bubble swelled in my throat. I fought the urge to cry, wondering if machines, too, could be set up to perform bigotry.

Such theatrical expressions of antipathy had made me feel diminished, worthless like salt that had been tossed out to be trampled underfoot.

But to Jasper, my Sierra Leonean colleague and confidant, those two reasons were no excuses for me not to give the job opening a shot. He knew I needed money not only to support myself, but also to help my mother and siblings back home. I’d come to Moscow on a BEA—Bilateral Education Agreement—program between Russia and Nigeria, which entailed the Kremlin paying for my tuition and accommodation and the Aso Rock covering my visa, flight, and a monthly allowance of US$500.

However, the scholarship had become what the Nigerian students here had termed a “suffer-ship.” Our home government owed us ten months’ arrears of our stipends. The student visas we were issued didn’t permit us to work. Except we might try to work through the backdoor, which could earn us a deportation if apprehended. Thus, we had been at the mercy of our fellow African students.

I’d enjoyed Jasper’s benevolence on several fronts. But I felt his pestering me to find a job, as he’d secretly done, was an indication that he was getting tired of me. His suggestion was a chasm yawning in front of me, beckoning me to plunge into it.

“You’re a man. I don’t have your heart,” I told him now as we sat on a wooden bench at a shuttle stop overlooking a chestnut tree, the evening breeze balmy on our skin. It was one of the last hours of fall to be enjoyed. In a few days, winter would emerge with its fang to bite our skin.

“Of course, it’s risky.” He curved his arm under his nose and cracked two sneezes as if his senses were uncomfortable with his own smell of sweat and cologne. “But the thing is many girls are into it, too.”

He’d failed to understand that some people didn’t get lucky enough to pull through a situation as others did.

We lapsed into silence. The birds scampering atop the chestnut tree provided an interlude with their twittering. Jasper crossed his bowed legs and laced his stubby fingers across his knee. He flaunted his legs in different Bermuda shorts. Today, he wore a gray pair below a matching polo T-shirt. I, too, was in a gray jumper. A coincidence of color, I’d told him at the department in the morning.

“Anyway, no one finds a job through the backdoor anticipating an arrest,” he said. “Except if she’s Sesede.”

If he meant it to be a joke, it didn’t sit well with me. I gave him a terrible look, and he apologized. I cradled my head in my hands, the thought of him turning down my request for monetary help one day knotted my stomach.

“Hey!” he said, getting back my attention. “There are restaurants that will give you a job and cover your ass. Trust me. We can work it out. But the thing is, you may not earn as much as other workers, which is still better than nothing. Okay?”

A Black girl with no work permit—having to contend with discrimination and illegality? I wanted to tell him this, but he’d narrowed his milky eyes to warn me not to raise any objection.

We quieted again. Two brunettes walked past, staring at us as if we were freaks. They sniggered, pushing each other away.

“Bitch,” Jasper muttered.

I gazed at the chestnut tree. A little bird dropped to the ground—maybe cast off from a nest. It flapped its tiny wings helplessly but couldn’t fly. I thought it had suffered for its vulnerability. I sighed. Wouldn’t it be a dishonor to be deported? In Badagry, it would be humiliating to be tagged as the girl who traveled abroad and returned home empty-handed.

“I don’t want to be sent back to Africa with shame,” I said.

“Who would send you back?” he asked as if he hadn’t understood me.

“You know what I mean.”

“I don’t know what you mean, kid.” His voice seemed to have been dragged on gravel.

I felt like a child being talked down to.

He faked a smile, brought out a can of Pepsi from his bag, and set it beside me. “It’s for you to drain. When you finish drinking it, you have nothing left to drink.”

He wasn’t having me on with those words, was he? If he was, his eyes would’ve twinkled like the stars appearing over us. But I couldn’t decipher the subtext layered with the words, and I might agitate my brain to think of any.

He slid the bag over his shoulder and walked away. I swallowed hard. My tongue was suddenly so dry a carpenter could use it as sandpaper. I popped open the can, but instead of drinking the Pepsi, I found myself pouring it on the ground, where shoes had worn the lawn to a patch of dirt, as if pouring a libation and beseeching the Moscow earth to be kind to me. The drink fizzed and drilled a hole in the soil.

*

The Tuesday I’d learned I would receive a scholarship was the day I realized ecstasy was a force of gravity. Something—maybe a travel machine—whirled me up and conveyed me to another planet that hadn’t been known to any man. My heart swelled with fluttery excitement that almost took my breath away.

I burst into our one-bedroom apartment in Badagry, gushing, “Mama, I made it. I’m going to study abroad.”

My three siblings embraced me in a huddle. The cement floor turned into a bouncing castle, and we jumped in place, our arms wrapped around one another’s shoulders, celebrating like a team that had won a tournament, unmindful of the cups and plates falling off the table and clattering against the floor. The silvery moonlight illumined the room with otherworldly radiance and silhouetted our forms against the wall.

The scholarship was a succor to my widowed mother, who measured the length and breadth of the room with her dancing steps, casting off her wrapper and head tie. When she sang about the end of her problems, I sang inside with her. But it didn’t take me long to figure out the reason for her joy. It had less to do with my studying in Russia and more to do with my attaining a position that would give me an opportunity to send money home. Who didn’t want to have a child abroad who would help relieve their burdens? I created for myself a theory of abroad-daughter/sibling responsibility in which I would have an obligation to meet their needs, having found myself in a place far better than theirs. Right away, Rebecca, my youngest sibling demanded in her silk-thin voice, “Sister, when you get there, send me plenty of shoes and clothes for parties.”

But the joy had fizzled out, leaving only gray worthlessness. It was crushing not to be able to meet my siblings’ expectations. Whenever I thought of them, a talon of guilt clawed at my heart. The abjection of abroad-daughter/sibling irresponsibility.

 

*

A few days after my time with Jasper at the shuttle stop, a protest that ended in skirmishes went viral. Disenchanted Nigerian students picketed the country’s embassy in Moscow, bearing placards with different inscriptions: “We are suffering.” “Nigerian government, fulfill your monetary promises.” “Stop doing business with our money.”

Winter had arrived, spreading a dusting of frost. After shivering in the burning chill for three hours with no response from the embassy officials, the protesters smashed car doors. They shattered windshields. Shards of glass showered onto car seats and flew about like sparks. They kicked through the doors of two offices, leaving their wooden frames splintered.

“Sesede, you’d better find a job,” Jasper advised me again, after the incident.

We were in our faculty cafeteria, set with blonde furnishings and a hissing space heater.

“Do you think a government that doesn’t give a damn about the outcry of the people back home,” he continued, “would heed the call of the minority abroad?”

The last allowance we had received was for one month instead of three, despite the scholarship department’s assurance that they’d pay us quarterly. The appeals we had sent to the Abuja lords for full payment had yielded nothing.

My appetite wavered. I wanted to push my food away—creamed coffee in a Styrofoam cup and pancakes on a paper plate. Simultaneously, I wanted to finish them, so the money Jasper had spent wouldn’t be wasted. I stared into the sludgy depths of the coffee, mulling over the inherent hopelessness of his words.

He was on his third cup. He claimed he’d been a Bohemian in his first life and, although he’d come back Black this time, his love for coffee was still as deep as it had been in his first world.

I bit into my pancake.

“It’s a shame that African governments aren’t dependable.” A puff of steam escaped between his fleshy lips that reminded me of my father’s. “They offer their citizens scholarships without fulfilling their obligations. It’s like sending someone to the Arctic with no windbreaker or gloves.”

His words prompted me to look again at the wraithlike flakes of snow falling against the windowpanes—swirling flurries that had dropped on our heads like hyacinth confetti, veiling grasses and blacktops in a duvet of white. He pulled the hood of his red jacket over his head as though the warm humidity hanging over the room wasn’t enough. I zipped up my sports jacket. I’d bought it at a thrift store, where the attendant had been eager to see me leave.

Something shifted in Jasper’s features, and a belated sadness unfurled across his face. Maybe it stemmed from commiseration.

I took a long sip of my coffee, which blazed down my chest and warmed my belly. We were in a country known for its freezing weather, and the Abuja lords couldn’t care less if we froze to death.

Our table was be-ringed with cup bottoms and scarred with, perhaps, fingernails as though the students who’d used it through the years had graffitied their worries across the top. Maybe no one could sit there without turning into a calligrapher because I found myself pockmarking “I must survive” into it with my fake fingernail.

He squeezed my hand. “Think of something.”

 

*

Two days later, Jasper sent me a message on WhatsApp about a job opening in a restaurant owned by a Congolese couple. He knew a man close to the couple who could help me get the job.

No work permit, I replied, with two teary emojis.

Fuck your excuse kid, he wrote.

The angry face emojis accompanying his text made me feel like he was in my dorm barking into my face.

The dots on my screen appeared, disappeared, and reappeared. IF YOU DON’T FEEL OK WITH D RESTAURANT, he wrote, GIVE D FUCKING BABYSITTING JOB A SHOT. WOULDN’T DAT BE DISCREET.

He’d never used the f-word before. What surge of terrible emotion had dragged the word out of him? It jarred me to think his eyes might have clouded with indignation if we had spoken one on one. There was an inherent bleakness to losing his support without an alternative to fall back on.

I sat up in my bed and logged in to the blog again. The post was still there. Why hadn’t the Zakharovs found a babysitter? Could it be that they weren’t satisfied with the applicants they’d met? If the applicants, who I believed were white, had fallen short of the Zakharovs’ expectations, how would I, a Black girl from Badagry, meet them?

As I closed the blog page, an image stirred in my mind, like a wild animal roused from a long sleep—my mother, emaciated, on the hospital bed with IV fluid dripping into her veins. She’d collapsed while going to the bathroom one morning. After six hours on the oxygen machine—hours in which a frisson of horror speared my spine—she came to. When the doctor said she could have died of stress and high blood pressure, a wave of guilt overwhelmed me. I should never have allowed her to overstrain herself for us. I was old enough to share her burdens, to help her to feed the house.

The beep of the phone roused me. I unlocked the home screen. Jasper had texted another message: U SHOULD GIVE IT A SHOT. It was like having his voice whining in my head, heating up my temples. He had given me the last fifty dollars I’d sent home three months ago, which was eighteen thousand naira barely enough to last a month.

Now, an inner voice nagged me: Is it too much to take a risk for your family? How could your mother have a daughter abroad and still suffer? Do you want her to overstress herself and ravage her delicate health to provide food for your siblings??

Stabbed by guilt, I dialed the number. Unlike the impoverished tabula rasa of a wall near my bed, the wall beside my Belarusian roommate Phoebe’s bore glossy prints of bare-chested, muscular WWE stars—Bobby Lashley, Randy Orton, Shelton Benjamin—and models with tanned bellies and lacy bikini briefs who could have sent the WWE stars’ testosterone frothing. As the phone rang on the other end, I gazed at the posters as if drawing strength for my impending inquiry from them. 

“Hello,” a girly voice answered. “Chem ya mogu tebe pomoch?”

I’d learned enough Russian to know she was asking what she could do for me.

“YA khotel uznat' o rabote nyani Zakharovs,” I said, not too fluently, trying not to make my nervousness apparent. “I would like to be your babysitter.”

“You speak English.” It was more a statement than a question.

Was that one of the job’s prerequisites? “I speak English.”

“We the Zakharov. Come at five or six tomorrow.” She sounded breezy, as though she needed to attend to another issue clamoring for her attention. “To the house.”

“What’s the address, please?”

She relayed an address on the south side of Boulevard Ring. Building ten. Thirteenth floor. Apartment fifteen.

“I’ll be there,” I said.

 

*

     

It was only 4:20 in the afternoon, but the sky was blue-black. I was on a corner in the Tagansky District, standing by a boutique storefront displaying fur coats, velvet gowns, and sequined blouses on shiny chrome mannequins. A sign above the gilt-edged awning said, “Dobro pozhalovat'.” Walk-ins welcome. Maybe, but I could only afford to window-shop or enjoy the courtesy of being allowed to read Sputnik or Cosmopolitan or any of the other women’s magazines fanned across a glass coffee table inside. In the amber glow of the sodium vapor lights lining the street, the snow drifting down looked like splinters.

The sidewalks were strips of slippery white. They swarmed with men and women in suits and jackets released from the talloffice buildings, trampling the dusting with their footprints, heading home to burrow into warmth and intimacy. I recalled the time just before nightfall at the Badagry Market, when the road was deluged with a tide of people you hadn’t seen all day. When the figures milling about, who had come for the late-night bazaar, might, according to my mother, have been goblins and ghouls turned human. But that aside, wasn’t one reason I came to Moscow was to be like those office people, to have a great prospect of wearing Armani to a sleek office where my Jimmy Choo would clack on marble floors, where I would earn enough to provide warmth for my home?

I pulled my coat tighter against the icy wind slashing me. I also had on a gray shirt, a hat, gloves, and jeans, all secondhand. Vehicle traffic was a pulsing horde of yellow cabs and glossy cars. Opening the cab app on my phone, I set my destination and requested a driver. The taxi service had cabbies who could speak a smattering of English.

Within three minutes, the driver pulled over and leaned toward the passenger-side window. When I met his gaze, he grimaced, mumbled, “Chernaya,” and pulled away from the curb. I looked at the glass wall of the boutique. It roared back at me above the traffic din, “You’re a chernaya!”

My heart tore in two. I’d tried to get used to cabbie rejections, to not allow them to weigh me down, but whenever it happened, I felt I’d failed. I shivered, more from the sting of the rebuff than the cold, and held my handbag to my chest. My eyes brimmed and fogged. I wanted to go back to my dorm and sob into my pillow. As I wiped my eyes with the back of my glove, I heard, “Hey! Hey!”

A man was beckoning me from his car. “Kuda ty sobirayesh'sya?”

“Tverskaya,” I said.

“Zakhodi.” He gave a smile that could have melted the dusting on the blacktop.

I thought of shaking my head. It was an unofficial taxi, and I’d been warned about them. But his cheerfulness comforted me, so I got into the car, which smelled vaguely of grilled meat. The man was in a tobacco-colored turtleneck and very blue jeans. His curly, dark hair was combed straight back off a wide, ruddy face.

“Thank you,” I mumbled.

He shrugged, and the window slid up with a soft hum.

He steered into the babble of car horns and screeching brakes. “You’re from Anglophone Africa?”

I nodded and stared out the windshield.

“You were lost in thought. Kept me waiting for long.”

His English was the most fluent I’d heard from a Russian outside of the campus.

“I’m sorry. I was—the first cabbie they sent…” My throat constricted, and I sighed.

“He shunned you because of your skin color?”

I glanced at him. Are you a seer or what?

“My seventeen-year-old daughter is mixed race,” he said. “She’s been Jim-Crowed several times. You know what I mean?”

“Yeah.”

“Natalie even got picked on at her elementary school.”

“Even by kids?” The anger that spiked my voice stunned me.

“Are the kids to blame?” His words had a sharp edge. Slowing down, he gave me a sidelong glance, his green eyes narrowed to slits. “Blame the fucking parents who brought them up to be racists.”

He stopped at a red light. The wipers maintained their thump-thump sweep of the windshield.  

Perhaps Natalie had been called “Olympics Child”—a derogatory term used about children like her, whom racists claimed resulted from sexual relationships between the athletes from the Black world and Russians during the 1980 Moscow Olympic Games. I imagined the pain she must’ve endured from the fiery darts of abuse thrown at her, from the ostracism of her peers. The desire to meet her stung my heart. I wanted us to talk about our experiences, the web of bigotry that spun around us and possibly draw strength from our bond.

The light turned green, and the cabbie drove on. “No one is born a racist. You make yourself one. We’re what we make ourselves, aren’t we?”

I nodded. “You’re right.”

“The Swiss are known for a cheese with many holes,” he said. “It’s delicious. Everybody wants a bite of it.”

I had no idea what he was talking about.

“The world, too, has got many holes in it—racism, homophobia, transphobia, name them,” he continued. “These things perforate our lives. The narrow-minded created these holes and made this planet uncomfortable for others to live in.”

He’d veered into a soliloquy, talking as if I weren’t there.

“Humanity trumps every other thing we do. But those bigots are running short on it.” He circled a flagstone roundabout. The muscle in his temple twitched as if it were jumping around under his skin. “I’d rather be a cabbie who’s an A person than a software engineer who’s an F person. I’d rather flunk college and be tolerant of others than graduate from Stanford and be a pest to the world.”

I got the impression that one of the racists he knew, perhaps the one whose children had been terrible to Natalie, was a software engineer.

He pressed a button on the stereo, and Pierre Narcisse crooned “Chocolate Bunny.” 

“Love knows no color. The open-minded know that. Natalie’s mother is Kenyan, came to Rostov to study, and we fell in love.” He regarded me, smiling. “I’d marry Rosaline again and again and have Natalie many times over.” 

Talking about his wife seemed to purge him of his anger. And those words—together with Narcisse’s voice laid over a synthesis of drum, guitar, and violin, telling Russians that Blacks were chocolate bunnies and one hundred percent sweet—warmed me as much as the car heater.

“I’m so happy to have met you. You’ve lifted my spirits,” I said when he dropped me off. “Send my greetings to Natalie and Rosaline.”

“All the best.” He waved and drove away.

 

*

It was unsettling to think of the endless rows of identical stucco tower where the Zakharovs’ apartment was as havens that might be harboring the kind of pests my cabbie had talked about, to think the Zakharovs had invited me over because they had no idea I was Black.

I headed down the sidewalk, my shadow preceding me like a route-finder in the streetlights. I walked past a glass-walled café, past a parking lot where cars with frosted windshields rested, then into the lobby of building ten where two men wearing heavy black jackets sat behind a marble counter, monitoring a bank of closed-circuit TVs.

“YA idu v kvartiru Zakharovs,” I said to the one with a drooping face, remembering I hadn’t mentioned my name when I called them yesterday.

“Zakharovs?” He glanced at his mate.

Was he newly employed and wanted to confirm if they had any Zakharovs in the building? I reached into my pocket for my handkerchief.

“Thirteen-fifteen,” the second man said. He had smooth skin, pink cheeks, and gleaming eyes—the kind of man I would like to have help from if I was stranded on a highway.

He picked up the intercom and looked up at me. “Kak tebya zovut?”

“Elizabeth,” I said, giving him my baptismal name, wanting to sound English. I shouldn’t let my native name, which might twist their tongues, mar my chances before I even appeared in front of the couple. I wiped my forehead and tucked the handkerchief in my bag as if I had hidden my color from the Balakovs.

He spoke into the phone, mentioning my name, and waved me through.

“Spasibo,” I muttered with a bow.

I boarded the elevator—a chamber with bronze walls that shimmered in the light of a crystal chandelier—and punched the thirteenth-floor button. As the machine rose, my stomach squeezed tight, not from the manner it whisked me up, but from a sudden sensation of anxiety. I whispered the Lord’s Prayer, fingering invisible rosary beads.

Trespass. Temptation. Evil. Those words ricocheted in my head with no assurance of the Father saving me from their consequences—of being apprehended for not having a work permit, of being deported. The little bird that had dropped from the chestnut tree sprang to mind. Wasn’t this fine car taking me up to be dropped into humiliation? This thought scorched my head.

Why had the prayer threaded pessimism through my mind? Was it because it had been a long time since I’d said it? Was it because it had been a long time since I’d paid obeisance at an altar blazing with scented candles, where boys appareled in colorful vestments swung cloudy censers? Two Sundays ago, I’d walked past a neo-Gothic style Catholic Church, ignoring the come-hither gesture of the Virgin Mary on its stained-glass window. Forgive me, Mother of God.

The elevator dinged. My neck prickled as I stepped out. The red carpeting, furrowed with vacuum-cleaner tracks, muted my footsteps in the hallway. The apartment doors were polished walnut, bearing numbers on brass plaques. I stopped in front of 13-15 and wiped my shoes on the thick-bristled doormat. The other apartments had the same doormat, as though to indicate the occupants lived identical lives.

I snapped a loose thread off my jacket cuff, took a deep breath, and pressed the bell. What questions would they ask me? I hadn’t contemplated any, hadn’t prepared myself for an interview. Shame! I should have Googled “interview questions for babysitters.” My legs seemed to be melting.

The response to the buzz of the doorbell wasn’t immediate. Perhaps the household hadn’t heard the bell ring. Had they gone into a cold-induced deep sleep?

Finally, the door opened to a girl who ran her slender hand through her long dark hair in a self-conscious gesture. Something struck me about the hair—the fact that many white people carry the color on their heads. Why then should a white person with dark hair abhor someone who is Black?

“Elizabeth?” she said. The same girly voice I’d heard on the phone. Her attire was summery for winter—an aquamarine blouse matching her eyes and white short-shorts. She appeared to be high school age. 

“Yes.” I shifted my weight, searching for a hint of revulsion on her face. None. Perhaps she’d peered at me through the peephole first, and during the interval between my buzzing and her answering, the shock of my skin had worn off.

“Zilya.” She offered her hand. “We speak together. Yesterday. Come in,” she said in broken English.

The stride of her shapely, olive-toned legs was graceful enough for a modeling runway in Milan.

Her apartment had oyster-white walls, and the furnishings, which ran the gamut of shades of white, were all neatly arranged, as if styled for a TV commercial. The odd mix of cigarette smoke and the aroma of bacon filled the living room with a musky domestic incense. 

My stomach quivered and turned queasy, the way it had when I’d faced the panelists for the scholarship interview. Holy Mary! Begging to use their bathroom wasn’t the first thing I should do.

“Hello,” I said stiffly to the man seated on a leatherette couch.

He appeared to be in his forties. His black T-shirt clung to his well-built body and his ripped baggy shorts showed hirsute legs. A scraggly ginger beard defined the lower portion of his broad face. But there was this aura around him that suggested steeliness, something military and analytical.

“Hello.” He dropped a smoldering stub into an ashtray shaped like a dinghy on the coffee table. A crystal box lay beside the tray. He fixed his gray eyes on me, indexing my appearance. “My name is Gleb.”

He motioned me to a seat—the most merciful thing he could have done to save my weakening legs.

“Elizabeth.” I sat. “Happy to meet you.”

He muted the wide-screen LED TV hung carefully on the wall showing no wires. A guitar sat on a stand near the TV.

Zilya tucked an errant strand of hair behind an ear. “Remove your coat. House is warm.”

I shed my coat, drew off my gloves, and handed everything to her.

 “Me make coffee for you,” she said, phrasing a question like a statement.

“I could do with a cup. Thanks.”

She went to hang the jacket in an adjoining closet, came out, and headed toward the kitchen. She returned with a steaming mug of coffee. The show of hospitality seemed a booze-induced illusion. The Zakharovs’ home was a shelter so soothing it was like the world outside didn’t exist; it was like I hadn’t suffered the chilly burn of the snow glare. Was there any subtext to this moment, something to be hopeful about, something to change the course of my existence in Moscow? Even if there was none, I would preserve the moment like a memento and draw strength from it to ward off the infestations of the pests.

I deduced Zilya was Gleb’s daughter and expected her mother to emerge from a room. How wrong I was! She sat beside him and kissed him deeply in the mouth. My cheeks burned, not at the slurping duet of their tongues, but at the recollection of my first kiss—a horrible one that ended with Prosper slobbering into my mouth.

Zilya sighed with pleasure. Her flushed face betrayed her as still being in the intoxicating youth of love.

“Elena, my baby,” she said. “My special girl. We looking for someone to take care of she when we go out to play music. We musicians.” She glanced at Gleb, who nodded.

“We play four nights every week. Me like someone that speak English. Me want baby speak English.”

What hadn’t I done? After high school, I’d taught at a private school, using Brighter Grammar to tutor pupils. I sipped my coffee. It was so rich my tongue was reluctant to let it go down my throat. Jasper would have relished it. “I can help her speak English well,” I said, imitating Serena Williams’s accent. The spontaneity of the enunciation made my chest tingle.

“We like you speak English.” She beamed and, after a pause, said, “You speak it okay.”

I grinned but wondered where the girl was. Was she out at some friend’s place? Had she gone to bed? It was 5:45 p.m. But then, my gaze went to what I’d missed when I’d come in: photos of the family on the mantel. Elena as a baby sitting on Zilya’s lap. A gilt-framed photo, likely recent, showed her in a swimsuit holding Gleb’s hand on a beach. But it was curious to note her eyes slanted in the pictures. Perhaps my eyes deceived me.

Gleb plucked a cigarette from the crystal box and lit it. “You Africa?” he asked around a cloud of smoke.

“Yes.”

“Iz kakoy ty strany?”

“Nigeria.”

“Nigeria?”

The note of suspicion I detected in his voice made my heart thud so hard it vibrated in my throat. “Yes.”

What had he heard about us? Perhaps the off-putting news about Boko Haram and yahoo-yahoo boys. Was he aware of our violent protest at the embassy too? I wanted to sip the coffee, but the mug had become heavy.

He blew out smoke rings and watched them as they curled upward. “You babysit before?”

I scratched the bridge of my nose. “Yes.”

It was neither a truth nor a lie. I hadn’t babysat for pay, but I’d cared for children for most of my life. I’d been six years old when I’d learned to look after my next younger sister, strapping her on my back, feeding her, and singing her lullabies to stop her from wailing. I’d grown up to become my siblings’ de facto mother. They’d trusted me to lead and tell them when it was safe to cross a road. They’d run to me when they got their periods.

“What bring you to Russia?” Zilya asked.

“I’m studying at the Higher School of Economics,” I said.

“You come Thursday, Friday, Saturday, and Sunday nights,” she said as if the decision had been made.

Gleb checked his phone. “There’s a problem.”

A sick tension knotted within my stomach. We were getting to the point where they would ask about my work permit, and my bank of answers would show insufficient funds.

“We not sure you get this job,” Gleb said.

Zilya nodded. “Me like you but am not knowing if you get it. We was having many people come since we advertise. But my daughter, she don’t like them. I know it crazy, but I want make she happy.”

Perhaps Elena was an over-pampered girl, one of those kids who dropped into long, standoffish silences if she didn’t get her way. As a teacher, I’d interacted with such kids, and they’d all eventually warmed up to me. They should let me see the girl. If she didn’t want me, I would be satisfied that I’d given the job a shot.

Zilya seemed to pick up on my thought. “If you want to see she, she in her room.”

I followed Zilya into a bedroom with white floral-patterned wallpaper, where assorted toys sat piled in a corner. Elena was asleep on the bed, her auburn hair accentuating the white spread. She wore white pajamas with cherries printed on it. Her back rose and fell with each breath.

Zilya sat down on the foot of the bed. “My sweet baby.” Her voice was laden with emotion.

The girl roused, sat up, and rubbed her eyes. She had pale ivory skin and could pass for a three-year-old. When she dropped her small hands from her eyes, her expression seemed to say, Who the hell is this Black woman? But I couldn’t care less. Her flattened face, slanted eyes, pug nose, and small ears brought back an image of my late sibling, Maupe. A painful sensation burned inside my chest.

My mother had been in her forties when she conceived Maupe. When Maupe had been born as a special girl, people said it was because my mother had her too late in life. My mother had blamed herself and my father for making an accidental baby and causing Maupe’s plight. When my father had died a year after Maupe’s birth, she wailed that he’d abandoned her to carry the burden alone. The guilt had driven her so insane that she conceded Maupe’s care to me. I’d never known a woman so afraid to behold her child.

Maupe and I were so connected that I could finish her sentence before she stuttered it. When she died of a bacterial infection at five, I’d felt a part of me gone. I could have signed a devil’s Faustian deal and died in place of her. For two months after her death, I’d wandered with a sucking emptiness in my chest at nightfall around and beyond our neighborhood in search of her, wishing I had the power of necromancy to call her forth.

Now the wound of bereavement opened again, and tears stung my eyes. But Elena worked up a smile that transformed her face to the one I’d known before. The tears seemed to rinse my eyes and sharpen my vision. Maupe had risen like a phoenix from the ashes within Elena. They shared a resemblance in the moles on their necks, in their tightly set mouths, in the manner their brows drew together. A ten-year gap swallowed me whole. Could you lose a sibling and then meet her reincarnated elsewhere in a different skin color?

A flaming rush of maternal urge coursed through my veins, giving me an ecstatic ache to touch her. I sat on the bed and held out my hands. Elena crawled over and ran her hands over my face, as if ascertaining I was the sister-mother she’d known from her former world. Her feathery touch was caressing. I folded her into my embrace, shut my eyes, and rocked her side to side. Her syrupy smell filled me with a desire to give myself to her and OD on love for her.

“Mne nravitsya tsvet tvoyey kozhi,” Elena said with effort.

It was the first time I’d received a compliment for my Blackness, and this stirred the hair at the nape of my neck. I should hold on to her voice; the sincerity in it trumped her stutter. I kissed her forehead, letting my lips stay for some moment.

“Oh, Elizabeth, she don’t love others like this,” Zilya said in a quaking voice, tears glistening on her lashes. “You the only one she love.” She stroked the girl’s hair. “Elena, ty khochesh', chtoby Elizabeth prismotrela za toboy?”

Elena nodded.

“You want Elizabeth?”

“Yes.”

Gleb appeared on the doorway.

“Papa, mne nravitsya Elizabeth,” Elena said. The rosiness of her cheeks rendered her cherubic. If she had a better way to convey her excitement about me, she would have uttered it.

“My dolzhny uvidet' vashe razresheniye na rabotu,” he said.

I tensed. His mentioning the work permit fell like boulders on newly laid asphalt, cracking the smooth surface. The blacktop this time was the bonding I’d built with Elena.

“Gleb, she like Elizabeth. She want her,” Zilya said, as if to let him know that the work permit mattered less than the affection her daughter had found in me.

The truth itched my throat, then turned into a ball expanding and choking me. I couldn’t swallow it.

“U menya net razresheniya na rabotu.” My voice wasn’t as steady as I mustered it to be, but admitting I had no permit lifted something burdensome inside me, and I tasted the sweetness of it at the back of my throat. 

My confession in Russian should have resonated with Gleb faster than it might have if I’d spoken in English and made him decide about me quickly. But he hovered there sentry-like, as though absent from himself.

An exhilarating thought carved a path into my heart. “You’ve shown me hospitality. Spasibo, chto prinyali menya kak druga.” I straightened my back. “I can babysit Elena as your friend.”

Zilya’s brow knitted. I imagined the idea spinning around in her head, and when it found a convincing place to settle in, her eyes brightened. “Aw, Elizabeth, it good. We make you friend that help take care Elena. We give you money for it.”

It gave me much pleasure to think I would be coming to help them rather than work for them, to think they would gift me money rather than pay me in return.

She went to her husband. “My voz'mem Elizabeth za druga i vse ravno zaplatim yey. Razve eto ne khorosho?”

Gleb nodded. “Eto khoroshaya ideya.”

She whirled back to me. “How much to give you? Tell us.”

The giddiness in her voice seemed to indicate they were ready to accept any amount I stipulated. But how much should I request to nurse the angel fate had brought my way again?

Elena crawled back to me. I sat her between my thighs and began to twist her hair into a ponytail, its shampoo smell curling about my face.

I exchanged a grin with the couple and focused on Elena’s hair again. She sang and craned her neck to look at me, her eyes lit with sensuous radiance. I didn’t think of an answer to her mother’s question. Instead, I imagined us taking turns to skip on a rope. I thought of the English lessons I’d give her and the story of Pinocchio’s nose I’d tell her in the same manner that had made her cackle when she was a Black angel.

 

 

 

Ron Dowl
Otis Discovers Mysteree’s Secret

Beat ‘em down, beat ‘em down—way down! Go Apaches! Woo! Wooo!
Centennial High School Apaches War Cry

 

To soothe his butt pain, Otis Dunwitty sways on the hardwood bleachers in the musty gym. It’s the Friday afternoon pep rally, and three girls rollick two rows above to his right.

“Wakombozis—beat ‘em down, beat ‘em down—waaay down!” Their clamor challenges his brain, a brain dulled by the Lilly Pharmaceutical F40 sedative-hypnotics he'd swallowed to block out Wendy's affair and subsequent rejection, to help him force upset from his mind. It was all over the grapevine. Last Saturday night, at a friend's off-to-Vietnam party, Wendy spent the evening in the coat closet with a jock, doing everything Otis had hoped to do with her but hadn’t. 

Tournament time in Compton is when different neighborhoods around Centennial High suspend their rivalries long enough to aggravate opposing basketball teams. A cheerleader, bitch Wendy sits along the sideline far below all hugged up with the power forward, a Willis Reed wannabe.

Last Monday before Homeroom, he’d confronted her.

"You're always broke, Otis," she’d said to him, her light-skinned long shiny legs like fence pickets below her miniskirt. His arms crossed over the empty Pee-Chee folder pressed chest tight. “Me and you, uh, it was just for one night.” His neck muscles tightened. "Besides, I don’t see me hanging out in housing projects with you and your family. You never leave the PJs.” Hollowness settled from his lungs to his navel. “Our backgrounds don’t jell—sorry.”

Sorry? What a Godammed sorry word. What’s wrong with government housing anyway? “It’s not all bad,” he had said as if the claim would somehow minimize the sting of her curb kick to his gut. He shook his head slowly. She had rubbed Otis away like a squished roach wiped off a shoe sole onto the rug; that rug, that mid-spring, 1969. What a shitty way to end his senior year.

Now she has Power Forward in a lip lock and, her head, her face angles away from his, seeming to look toward Otis. Her eye winks. Power Forward stands and turns, points, and hitches his head up in Otis’ direction. What the fuck?  He’d never met the Cyclops motherfucka. The vinegary aftertaste of Silver Satin Bitter Lemon wine he’d used to wash down F40s sours his mouth, his head fogged by the joint he’d smoked to lighten his load, Otis’ buzz now threatened by the girls in back and Wendy and Power Forward below him. He hopes Wendy can see him from so far away when he mouths, I still love you.

He rests his feet on the bleacher, chin in palms, eyelids gummy. No matter how high he is, he can’t block the hushed sniggers and his sense of being watched by the three girls behind him. The girls whisper, huddle in a game as if they do not want the opponents to overhear the next play.

Otis manages a dazed smile.

“Hey, don’t you go with Wendy?” grins the beige-skinned girl with frilly auburn curls. “You know—Wendy.” She points to the picket fence-legged girl below. “She’s a Squawnette.” The grapevine worked fast if these three strangers already knew about Wendy’s closet escapade. “She likes basketball players,” she says.

Otis' head falls. He bows his shoulders and tries to disappear. Voice weak, he says, "No—not anymore." He runs a hand across his short flat-top hair that's parted on the side and glances around for an escape route. "We broke up,” he says finally, tapping the bleacher seat with his fingers.

“Awww—that’s sad,” says the tall girl with full lips like Nina Simone. “Makes sense, though. You don't look like much of a ballplayer.” She gestures with her palms a few inches apart and says, “You’re way too little,” and then she points to his pants leg. “Where’s the flood?” Otis's bell bottom pants cuffs are high above his scuzzy gym socks, socks as visible as the sparkling Watts Towers pinnacles next to the flat in which his family squeezes. "You’re too dark-skinned for Wendy." The two girls bend over and cackle like magpies.

He tucks his arms closer to his sides, gives a halfhearted chuckle to save face in the stuffy gym.

The third girl doesn’t laugh with the other two and sits with her back to him. She turns and faces Otis.

Otis stares into her large brown eyes, which have vibrancy he's unfamiliar with, shocking his lethargy and speeding his slow pulse. Her hair is black, cut into an uneven bob, shorter on one side than the other. She's not skinny and indeed not fat, skin flawless, two shades darker than a brown paper bag; a small gold scorpion amulet dangles on a nylon cord around her neck. Otis's heart bangs against his chest.

“You’re probably better off,” she says. She scrunches her pudgy nose. “Wendy’s a slut.” He’d never heard a raspy voice quite like hers, a soft low pitched sultry sound, like Eartha Kitt’s, sexy, penetrating the drug wall surrounding him. "Everybody knows about her.” Her mouth corners turn up. “Well, maybe not everybody,” she says and winks.

His stomach flutters in late April’s stickiness, which feels like June swoon, a wet toothy grin splits his face. Who. Is. She?

The drummer hits a snare drum on the gym floor, snatching Otis’ slobbering focus away from the girl to the proud Apache portrait painted mid-court. Trumpets blast, the Squawnette’s burst into dance to the pep rally theme. Boom, boom, boom, the drummer pounds. Yeah, yeah, yeah, three thousand students thrust to their feet, squeal, howl, yell. Wendy and the other cheerleaders bounce, their shoulders back, their feathered headdresses flipped behind them like long hair; they hoist scarlet pompoms into the hot air. The building rocks so much an earthquake would go unnoticed. Otis can’t hear the three girls anymore.

After the rally, teachers release each grade division one by one, the three girls before his. The raspy-voiced girl pulls her blue plaid pleated skirt down to her knees, her white socks clothe her calves, and then bounds down the steps with her friends.

He’ll hustle to catch them.

When permitted, he stands and wobbles to the handrail, his eyes following the girls as the crowd carries them away like foam on Dockweiler Beach waves.

He reaches the last bleacher rung, squints to the exit, misses the step, and stumbles onto the gym floor face first. Several players, the lanky center, the point guard whose overbite makes him resemble a gopher, and Wendy's power forward all rush over. The guy is about six-four and probably thinks he is Willis Reed since he wears jersey number 19. His thick arms heft Otis to his feet. Power Forward crouches, for a moment, they are face to face. The guy’s breath smells like lunch meat. He isn’t as big as Otis had thought, but with his hard-faced clones as a backup, he’s more than Otis can handle alone. He swallows—or tries, but cannot find one saliva drop. Power Forward turns Otis toward the exit, dusts him off, and gives him a playful kick in his jeans' seat.

“Watch you don’t hurt yourself, little project’s fella,” he says as his clones laugh.

Projects? What had Wendy told this fool? Before he'd left for school, Otis' dad had finished a coffee cup and was off to work, black lunch pail in hand when he turned back to Otis who scarfed down Cream-o-Wheat breakfast mama had made. “Come on down to the rail yard after school.” Dad had upped the pressure for him to get a job since he was finishing high school. “Maybe you can get work sweeping boxcars or something——get your unit across the courtyard.”

“Do I have to live here?” Otis had asked.

Dad looked back through the door screen and said, “Where else you gon go? South Gate? Lynwood? Everybody knows Negros aren’t welcome in those places.”

Now the Cyclops power forward glowers in his face telling him to get back to the projects. Otis opens and closes his fist, the veins in his neck hard. He twists and swings a wild left hook into the air. His right cross also misses its mark as Power Forward quickly leans away. Then Otis' face wipes the gym floor again. Owww, he screams when Gopher Teeth delivers a kick to his kidney.

Power Forward lifts Otis by his sweater lapels, grip tight near his throat, “You crazy?” He holds Otis up on his tippy-toes like a marionette dangles. "I took your woman—” Otis barely controls a sudden urge to pee his pants. “I’ll slam dunk your ass too,” Power Forward says.

The raspy-voiced girl's words come back to him, "everybody knows about her,” she had said. Otis exposes most of his buff-colored teeth and says, "Keep the skank. The clap clinic opens at nine o’clock.” Why should he scuffle over someone who had sex in a closet at a party with Willis Reed? “Line up early to avoid crowds.”

Power Forward blinks first. Otis parts his lips. His nose touches the guy’s ear when he slurs, “Fuck you.”

The basketball coach bellows, “HUDDLE UP,"  across the gym floor. Power Forward releases Otis, makes an about-face, and he and his teammates jog away.

“Your daddy’s calling, asshole," Otis says to Power Forward's back. Otis totters outmanned, impaired, but not outmaneuvered.

The raspy voice girl and her friends had long since disappeared into the late afternoon swelter. He’ll find her.

*

Otis lights a menthol cigarette outside the gym and scans for the girl in the blue pleated skirt. She has a different vibration than Wendy. He'd met Wendy at a waistline party when he awoke after two days of steady drinking and drugging. He should've known it wouldn't work when she opened her droopy eyes and said, "Billy?" She had her nerve, saying he never leaves the PJs. Their romance was quick and shitty, a turd drying in the sun, but now a new girl attracts him. But where’d she gone? For sure, she's not from the PJs where he knows everybody. He must find her and stumbles across campus in the direction he thinks they've taken, across the cracked asphalt tennis court to the track area where he trips over a starting block and crashes onto hard dirt.

He gathers himself and ambles south into unexplored territory. Off-campus, he passes subdivision homes with attached garages, newer cars in driveways, umbrellas of shady Jacaranda trees towering over fenceless lawns, loud splashes of purple-blue blossoms carpet the streets.

 There are more trees on the block than in the whole of hundreds of government units where Otis lives. Unlike the continuous din, fuss, and blues music he'd heard through thin public housing walls located north of the high school, the area's quiet. These Negro's have money.

Otis stumbles into Nutty Buddy territory, rivals in a much different neighborhood than his. Acid assaults the back of his tongue, signaling his brain to turn back, but his legs keep moving. Never much one for cliques Otis tried to get along with everybody, even assholes like Power Forward.

Otis stops when he recognizes Khayin, a Black History classmate, and describes the raspy-voiced girl and her blue pleated skirt. The guy, a squat quick-tempered drug dealer, known for over-using his product, wears black rimmed glass frames without a lens, which makes him look studious and stupid at the same time.

“You sold me my first joint last year in the bathroom. That was some good shit," Otis says. He reaches to Dap, but the guy keeps hands at his sides. “Have you seen her?” Otis asks.

            “If I did, I ain’t telling you,” the guy says. “Project’s motherfucker. You here to cop or what?”

“Lookin’ for the girl,” Otis says both palms up. “That’s all.”

Khayin rifles a knuckle off Otis’s mouth. He falls backward onto his back, rolls, and swipe-kicks the drug pusher’s shin.

Khayin yelps like a hurt puppy and falls to one knee. He turns and whistles. Otis sucks blood, draws in slow, steady breaths until doors from nearby homes slam behind boys carrying ax handles, chains, and baseball bats. 

“It’s war—get his ass,” the dealer shouts. “Fuck him up.”

Typically Otis runs like a tortoise, but with twelve guys in pursuit, he sprints over sidewalks, gutters, lawns, purple-blue blossoms, the street back toward the high school, lungs bursting from pack-a-day Kool menthols.

He races across Segundo Blvd, which runs alongside the school, where cars honk. One swerves to avoid him and crashes a fire hydrant. The water explodes skyward, drenching Otis. A swan hood ornament detaches and ricochets off his knee, spewing his blood, but he doesn't feel any pain. The fools chasing him stop and wave their fists. Thank God.

Until now, to Otis, Nutty Buddy was a lame name, a bunch of punks with money who liked candy bars. “Don’t bring your black ass back,” one yells. “We’re Nutty Buddy,” he says. 

Who needs Vietnam to get killed when it's easier to die in Compton over bullshit?

Nutty Buddy cuss him but does not cross the boulevard into PJ territory. They are smarter than Otis in that way. He gulps breaths, wheezes, presses both hands to his chest, keeping his heart in check. They leave. He drags his damaged knee and busted lip home to the Palm Lane government housing projects and acres of single-story two and three-bedroom units. He's anxious to see his dad, mother, two sisters, brother, his many cousins, his granny and great-granddad, and all his friends, friends who’ll want retribution for his whipped ass.

Maybe the raspy-voiced girl doesn't live in Nutty Buddy's direction. Otis needs to know for sure.

*

Otis must find the girl with the raspy voice. Like a ghost, he roams the campus, and carefully avoids Nutty's between classes. He discovers she’s a junior and recent transfer from St. Michael's Catholic school.

Once the last bell rings, he lingers near the north gate, waiting for her two friends to walk through. These students wear red, the colors of his neighborhood. It's a long shot because he knows most everyone from Palm Lane, where none of them compares to the raspy-voiced girl.

On Tuesday before Homeroom, Otis lolls against the east gate with the kids in gold. He monitors the west gate at the bell, where kids dressed in purple colors stream through like mating grunion.

On Wednesday, he sentinels the south gate, shielding his eyes from white morning light as students make their way past him in blue waves.

Wendy approaches hand and hand with Gopher Teeth. She regards Otis a few seconds before she rams her tongue down Gopher's throat. She never kissed Otis that way. Wendy never kissed him at all.

She lets Gopher catch his breath and manages to contort her leg around his. “How’s PJs life?” she asks. 

 Otis' thoughts scramble, his drug buzz running low. Maybe it’s the strain of isolation; he cut off from whatever's just across a street, beyond a park, or across railroad tracks because of clothing colors or something imaginary and artificial, which maintains division and discord in his community. People like Wendy only add to his confusion, but he'd not let her suck him in again. It's time for him to let go. Otis' breath quivers when he says to Gopher Teeth, “Have you made your clap clinic appointment yet? They open at nine o’clock.” He considers Wendy. “Slut,” he says to her.

She flips Otis off with her middle and ring fingers, a double fuck you gesture, and steers Gopher Teeth onto the campus.

The next day, Otis again searches. He listens to conversations, hoping to hear her distinctive voice. Visions of him and her on prom night creep through his drug-induced numbness. Maybe he'll glimpse a pleated skirt and white knee-high socks.

He's at the exit gateway to Nutty Buddy territory when he runs into Khayin, the dealer who had chased him.

“What’s happening, my man?"  the guy asks as if nothing had happened before. Otis’ jaw tightens. “Buy a couple of these F40s—I’ll tells you where the girl hangs out.”

For such information alone, Otis will pay him. Earlier, he’d rifled a telephone booth with a clothes hanger and cashed in Blue Chip stamp books stolen from his mama's stash to scrounge enough snacks and dope money. A barbiturate transaction packs a bonus. "Check the quad by the band room at lunch,” Khayin says.

Khayin didn't lie. In the quad, she sits alone under a canopy sheltering her from bird shit. Seagulls squall overhead.

“I’m Otis Dunwitty, what’s your name?” he asks.

“Mysteree,” she says.

“Oh, it’s a secret?” he asks.

She smiles and looks up from the picnic bench.

“Just is,” she says. She sips a Coke. “It’s not just for any and everybody to know.”

“But I told you my name,” he says. Just getting her name proves difficult; getting her to the prom could suck. He looks away.

“I told you my name,” she says, her laughter raspy. “It’s M-Y-S-T-E-R-E-E—Mysteree.”

He digs his hands into his pockets. What an unusual name. Maybe it’s African with a special meaning. Her voice pierces something deep inside his gut. Then her smile fades. She might anticipate a stupid question or a comment about her name, which doesn’t come.

“Hmmm—Otis Dunwitty. There's something about you I just can't figure. I'll call you 'Duu,’” she says.

And so Duu it is.

*

Otis closes his eyes and savors his moments with Mysteree when they walk the block from school to her house, holding hands under the jacaranda umbrella and over the carpet of purple-blue flowers. The school proximity keeps him from entering Nutty Buddy territory too deep. She strokes his arm, he hugs her every few steps, lost in her clean body scent and warm, fresh breath. She smiles at nothing and, unlike Wendy, laughs at his jokes. He carries her books, which hides the erection he gets whenever he’s with her and keeps a hand in his pocket half the time they are apart. She likes to work crossword puzzles, solve arithmetic problems, and play Scrabble. They spread the game board on the front porch of her tract home. "I’m not gonna mess this up,” he says aloud to himself.

“Then you’d better learn to use a dictionary,” Mysteree says. She grabs her side laughing raspy when he spells ‘love,’ ‘l-u-v.’ “—unless you want to join your daddy at the rail yard,” she says.

His voice weakens, “Sweeping boxcars is what I don’t want to do.” But what option has he with graduation so close?

Otis always loses their board games, but he pushes himself until his brain aches, trying to win. Even when sober, he’s no match. Mysteree’s no Wendy, and he wants to keep things that way. 

At ease in her world, Otis’s love for Mysteree is a pine needle, sharp and hard.“Will you be my prom date?” He asks.

He thrust his fist skyward and says, “YES,” when she agrees to attend the prom. He'll rent a tuxedo, and her mom will drive them to the fancy hotel.

They sit and let their legs touch and tingling sweeps up the back of his neck and across his face.

“Mysteree’s a good girl,” her mom says when she joins them on the porch. She’s dressed as if she’s going somewhere important, a PTA meeting or something. “Mysteree’s going to college—what about you, Duu?”

College? He’s never considered more learning, never known anyone who’d attended except maybe some of his teachers. Would his 1.3 GPA do? His saliva dries, and he swallows air.

“She needs someone like her.” Mysteree’s mom stands up on the steps and fumbles around in her purse. “You know—someone with high aspirations, perseverance.” She pulls car keys. Her boxy Volvo waits in the driveway.

Otis bounces his knee on the porch step. “Yes, ma’am,” he says. He vows to himself to study harder and look into the local junior college even though school ends soon.

"Poverty is a nonstarter, not an option for us,” Mysteree’s mom says. “It’s hard, Duu——I’ve been there. It’s like being held captive like you’re a prisoner. You’re waiting for someone to find you. You hope you live long enough for someone to find you in time and help you out of captivity—do you understand, Duu?  Government housing defines government policy, Duu. No one comes to save you. We don't choose what situation we're born into, but we can choose our destiny ourselves once we see the truth. That's all, Otis. Are you up to the challenge?"

To an extent, her words penetrate Otis’ mind fog. She has expectations, a smart daughter, and won’t settle for less. It’s that simple. His dad wants him to visit the rail yard, get a job, a government apartment. His stomach drops to his groin, and he offers a distracted nod. He wants another F40.

She winks at Otis, starts the car, and drives off. Otis’ eyes follow the car’s license plate until it turns the corner out of his view.

“We need our song,” Mysteree says to Otis. They choose The Dells, Always Together, as their favorite tune, just like Lilly F40s, and cheap wine are his other favorites. She doesn't use alcohol and other drugs, and she’s not like Wendy and the few other girls he'd been with who'd drink anything handed to them in a cup, can, or bottle. She doesn't seem to mind his habits, but she'd heard about LSD and its mind-expanding effects and believes hallucinogens will somehow make her smarter.

"I want to try acid, Otis," Mysteree says.

“Acid is hard to handle—the high too long, unpredictable,” he says. He understands Mysteree's mother wants him to be more like Mysteree, not the opposite. He rubs her hands. "You should try marijuana first.”

“NO.” She squeezes his hand in hers. “It stinks. Makes you stupid.”

He concedes her observation since he’s done much stupid shit when high on weed all right. “It’s too dangerous,” he says.

She flings his hands away and says, “No more so than F40s and cheap wine. Khayin will get it for me if you can’t.”

Otis rocks in place on the porch, quite aware he’s discovered a new world just on the other side of high school, a better one, and must now decide what’s worse—having to deal with Khayin, betray Mysteree’s mom, or displease Mysteree?

He’ll get her the LSD.

*

Saturday night, Otis uses his mom’s rust-bucket 57 Chevy to date Mysteree. “We’re going to a movie,” he tells her, momentarily weighing the pro and cons of lying.

At Burrell-MacDonald Park’s darkened parking lot, Always Together explodes the tinny door speakers. Heartbeat sluggish Otis says, "Here, let’s put this on your tongue.” Mysteree bites her lip leans in, and opens her mouth—Otis tears in half a sliver of the pink stained newspaper. "I’ll give you just a little," he says. Sly and his Family Stone scream from the eight-track player screwed beneath the dash, “Stand, in the end, you’ll still be you—one that’s done all the things you set out to do—Stand.”

He swallows his half of the acid: he and Mysteree tongue kiss and cuddle, his dick so hard it hurts against his jeans. He rubs around her belly-button, fingers around until she’s wet, her moisture is like a feather, soft and delicate. She shivers, and a sudden flush of warmth grips him, spreading from the groin outward. Ten minutes in, rainbow colors emanate from the tiny green light on the tape player. Otis hears unfamiliar melodies and new instruments in songs he's heard hundreds of times before.

The refrain from Chain of Fools plays over and over in his head, “Chain, chain, chain—Chain of fools.” Mysteree’s eyes grow wide, her lips move, yet no sound leaves her mouth. “Chain, chain—Chain of fools.” She looks like a fish gasping for water. “Chain, chain—chain of fools.” She slides to the opposite seat corner and reaches back as if she’s trying to touch Otis but can’t. Her skin seems to blacken like charcoal under the car’s dome light. “Chain, chain—chain of fools.” The gold scorpion amulet she wears crawls across her chest, and the nylon cord tightens around her neck. “Chain, chain—Chain of fools.” "Where are you, Otis?" she says. “I’m scared.”

She's too high, and the only way to bring her down is with F40s. He holds her close and starts to kiss her, to comfort her with his familiar. "I've got you, baby,” he says to her. The windshield fogs from their panting, the green pine tree deodorizer shakes below the rearview mirror, the seat springs bounce under pressure from their grinds and kisses. “Chain, chain—Chain of fools.”

Mysteree screams, hysterical, as if she’s just seen the Bouncing Ball Man serial killer.

*

He hasn't talked to her since their date, and Monday, Otis waits at Mysteree’s Homeroom. She doesn't show. After school, he calls, and she answers the telephone.

“Where you been?” he asks her.

There’s a long pause, her voice breaks, “I can’t talk to you anymore, Duu.”

“What?” She has a quirky sense of humor. “I just saw you Saturday.”

"I know, but I can't see you again.”

“You’re joking—right?”

“No—they saw it.”

“I don’t—" For once, he's not high and tries to fit pieces together.

“My mama saw your stuff on my socks.”

“Mysteree—what’re you talking about?” He trembles inside. “That’s not funny.”

“Your semen was on my clothes.”

There's silence. Otis takes a while to process her words. Both are inexperienced at fucking, and excited, Otis had come before he could enter her, prematurely, or so he surmised. Stoned, neither of them was in control.

“I didn’t mean that to happen,” he says.

"My dad saw the stains on my socks when I got home.”

Otis’ chest falls to his stomach.

“—after you walked me to the door.”

He grabs a paper bag and hyperventilates. “I didn’t notice anything,” he says.

“They don’t want me pregnant, said I acted funny when I got home,” she says, “like I was in another world.” Her voice trails over the phone line. “They said I couldn’t see you anymore.”

Otis’ heart seems to stop beating for several seconds. A sharp ache explodes his temples.

“We can’t go to the prom together,” she says.

*

By summer, high school ends for Otis. July burns hot, and he cools under a lone eucalyptus in the government apartments. Its aromatic scent offers respite from blues music and the constant chatter among his PJs neighbors.

He pulls her picture from his otherwise empty billfold and runs his finger over its surface to help him remember her soft face, hair, and voice. On the reverse she'd written, I’m sorry things turned out the way they did. I hope you will find someone to love so you can know true happiness. Don’t forget me! Love Always. Mysteree.

Otis shakes his head slowly and foresees cold days and nights ahead; his mind dulls from Lilly F40 barbiturates' effect, and the aftertaste of Silver Satin Bitter Lemon sours his mouth. He'd ventured beyond public housing for a while to meld with Mysteree, and she'd never pushed him about his drug use.

If only he could return to the other side of the high school, salvation in another neighborhood, a lifejacket, secure, and comfortable. He misses the block on Nutty Buddy territory's edge, where canopies of trees dropped purple-blue blossoms.

He sits, elbows in palms, alone, and he studies the junior college course catalog and admissions application a while. The PJs? They’re not all bad, maybe a staircase, to rise, change.

Then he hoists himself up and heads to the rail yard.

 

 

 

Bryan Jones
Cliff Hanging

The caves with the pictographs were somewhere up in the canyon cliffs.  I wanted to see the ancient markings.  After parking my car off to the side of a road, I hiked up a rocky trail lined with thick mesquite brush.   At a flat spot, I looked out over the sprawling canyons that seemed deeply scarred from the innumerable savage meteorological assaults that had battered them over a great expanse of geologic time.  My marriage had collapsed eight months earlier.  It was difficult to talk to people about it.  The canyons seemed like a giant ear waiting to hear my troubled story. 

The hot afternoon took a toll. Several yards ahead of me on the trail, a coyote with some wolf DNA in him ran out from behind a large, spiny plant.

The coyote looked at me before it vanished into some brush.

The trail led up to a small, shallow cave in the cliff wall.  As a tourist attraction the place left a lot to be desired.  I imagined I would find on the rocky interior stick figures of indigenous people hunting game.  I hungered for answers.  But the secrets contained in the prehistoric pigments on the cave walls were as sure to be to me as mysterious as the forgotten campfire rituals of those long-lost ancestors who had struggled to survive in this unforgiving terrain.  

At the mouth of the cave, I peered inside.  Three teenage boys with a can of silver spray paint defaced a wall with graffiti tags.  The incalculable cultural and historical loss sickened me. 

“Stop what you’re doing,” I shouted at them. 

They turned to face me.   They were in their early teens.  The boy on the left had an athletic build.  The one on the right was tall and skinny.  The middle one with the spray paint glared at me with yellow eyes.

“Who made you the cave cop?” the middle one asked with a sneer.

I noticed the skinny boy holding one of those folding shovels like I had seen in army-surplus stores.  I wondered if these kids had escaped from some nearby summer camp.  The athletic one kept his hands out of my view.  I became concerned for my safety.  I was alone.  I never had kids.  I didn’t pretend to understand them.  They seemed unpredictable.  For all I knew, they carried switchblade knives in their jean pockets.

“I’m getting the authorities,” I said. 

I hurried back down the trail.  I kept looking over my shoulder to see if they were following me.  But then on my way back, I noticed this time that the trail forked.   I wasn’t sure how I missed it before.  It seemed a shorter route down, so I followed it. 
From the opposite direction, two women in hiking attire approached me.  They used plastic hiking sticks with silver handles on the trail.  The expensive outfitter stores back in the city sold that particular brand.

As they got closer, one of them asked me: “Are you going to see the pictographs?”

“We just came from there,” her friend said with a huge smile.  “Truly amazing.” 

The first woman pointed to some caves up on a canyon wall behind her.  My eyes followed the direction she indicated.  Suddenly I realized that for the entire afternoon I had been on the wrong trail.  My sense of frustration must have registered on my face. 

“Some teenage boys are spray painting graffiti up in that direction,” I said to them.

One of them whispered something to her friend. 

“We’re not going that way,” the whisperer said to me. “The guidebook says there’s nothing up there.”

The women walked past me.  That was the first I had heard about a guidebook.  I resumed walking.  I should have stood up to the boys, I thought.  I didn’t take a stand for my marriage, either.  Instead I always opted for an exit.  But I had survived.  I had bought myself time.  Before I sold our house, I took down the portraits. I caulked the nail holes and used touch-up paint to make it appear as though we were never there.  When we had just started out, we had hunted for something like happiness.  We hunted it to extinction.  At the end we left skeletons on a barren plain.

Suddenly, the trail took another turn.  Moments later I came upon a tall sign post with a conspicuous arrow pointing to yet another trail up into the canyons.  The sign described in silver text the pictographs.  I read that it cost money to see them.  A guidebook was provided upon the purchase of a ticket.  I feared I’d parked in the wrong spot.  I never saw a place to pay.  I reached for my back pocket.  Then I realized I’d forgotten my wallet.  I didn’t know where it was at the moment.  I no longer cared about finding the authorities. 

I began walking back to my car.  When I drew close to it, I heard a noise.  A coyote emerged from behind several clumps of prickly pear cactus.  The mangy animal had brownish-grey fur.  Its ravenous, yellow eyes locked on me.  I remembered to raise my arms to make myself appear larger.  I shouted at it.  The coyote flattened its triangular ears and darted behind the cactus.  But a moment later, it re-emerged with two coyotes at its side.  The leader took four steps toward me.   I instinctively took a step back.  The rule I had learned was to never run from one of them.  I broke the rule.  I dashed to my car door, which I quickly opened.  Once I was behind the wheel, I fumbled for my keys and hurriedly started the engine.  After I pulled out onto the road, the car tires spun dust clouds behind me.  In my rearview mirror I saw through the rising dust the pack of now five coyotes standing in the road with their hungry canine faces and alert ears trained on my abrupt departure.

 

 

 

 

Natthinee Khot-asa Jones & Hardy Jones
Foot in the Spokes

Every day I played with the doll Father bought me. I didn't care to go to school, and Father wasn't happy about that. He tried different ways to motivate me to attend school. He bought my sisters and I new lunchboxes. Pi Karn’s was light blue, Pi Nga’s was green, and mine was red.

After breakfast, my oldest sister packed our lunch boxes. Since Pi Karn was a student-leader, she had to lead the students to school at 7:30, so she couldn’t wait for me. I dressed for school slowly. If I were slow enough, I hoped Father wouldn’t make me go to school; I could stay home and play with my beautiful doll.

"No. You have to go to school,” Father said. “You are allowed to play with your doll only when you return home. Do you understand me?"

"But I don't like school."

I tried hard to please Father with everything I did, but school was different. I didn't have many friends there, the teacher spoke only Thai, and most of the time I was lost.

My closest friends were Tum, Nong Puen, Nong Nork and they were younger than me and still stayed home with their parents. I envied them.  

"I know you don't like school but you have to go. I’ve already bought you a uniform and a beautiful doll. You have to go to school. Do you understand me? If you don't go to school, you won’t be smart."

"I don't care. I want to stay home with you. Please, Father. Please let me stay home with you." I cried softly.

"No, you can't. You are a big girl and you must attend school. Your oldest sister will take you on the bicycle."

My tears didn’t change Father’s mind. He wanted me to pay attention at school and make good grades. He dressed me in the school uniform and tied my shoes; then he put the book bag on my shoulders, held my hand and walked me to the front of the house. Pi Narng waited on the bike.

Father lifted me onto the bike. I still cried and was determined not to go to school. I continued saying: “I want to stay with you, Father!” Tears covered my face. 

"Pay attention at school and listen to the teacher. Be a good girl," Father said.

"No. I don't want to go to school. I want to stay home with you. Please don't send me to school." I cried and screamed unceasingly. When Pi Narng started pedaling, I shifted my body to one side so she couldn’t control the bike. She would have to stop the bike, and seeing how hard it was to ride the bike with me on the backseat, she would bring me home. That was my plan.

Pi Narng kept pedaling. I looked back and saw Father watching us from in front of our house. I had to do something quickly, or I would be out of Father’s view and have to go to school. I decided to do the stupidest thing in my life: I jammed my left foot into the back-wheel’s metal spokes.

My cries and tears were now for the pain in my foot. The bike couldn't move. My sister was shocked. Before sticking my foot in the spokes, I had actually hoped I would get a little wound and Father would let me stay home. 

My wound, however, was not little. And my ankle was almost broken. Father got my foot out of the wheel’s spokes. I looked at the wound and realized I had done a bad thing. 

Father wanted to spank me for my stupidity.

He repeated over and over: "Why did you do this?"

He raised his hand, but when he saw more tears burst from my eyes, he stopped.

His eyes welled up. He held me tightly.

"Don't cry, baby girl. I will take you to the doctor."

But I still cried. I hurt so bad.

My half-sister, Pi Reen, who lived next door, ran to Father. She was afraid Father couldn’t control his temper with me. She quickly volunteered to hold me as we walked to the doctor’s house.

Father told me to stop crying and continued asking why I did such a stupid thing. Pi Narng parked the bike in front of the house and followed us to the doctor’s house.

"Father, don't be too upset. You will scare her," Pi Narng said. She touched my hand. "I know you hurt but don't cry. We will be at the doctor soon."

"I don't want to see the doctor. I want to stay home with Father."
I feared that the doctor would take good care of me. I didn’t want to get well. If I was better, Father would send me to school.

"Your wound is too big. I don't think you can go to school. Stop crying and the doctor will take care of you," Pi Narng said.

"Why did you do such a stupid thing? Did you know what you were doing?" Father repeated.

"Because I don't want to go to school. Please don't make me go to school, Father."
Father didn't ask me anymore questions. From our house to the doctor’s house was about a half-kilometer. I didn't see Father or my two sisters complain about how they had to carry me to the doctor.

Father didn't care how tired he was. He was sixty-two years old, I was only six-years old. Father worried about my life and feared that this accident may disable me.

"If you become disabled, what are you going to do with your life? How many men will want to marry you? If I die, who is going to take care of you? Please don't do something stupid like this again."

Sadness was on his face and water was in his eyes, but he never let the tears out. At that time, I didn't think about my future. I was a child and only thought about today.

"I don't want to go to school. I want to stay home with you," I said.

"If you don't go to school, the police will put me in jail. If I am in jail, who is going to take care all of you? Do you understand why I have to push you to go to school?"
When I heard Father’s explanation, I felt sad and very bad for what I did.

I realized why Father pushed me so hard to go to school. I felt sorrow and shame for what I did.

The doctor wasn’t really a doctor. She was a nurse who worked in the hospital in Khukhan but she lived in our village. Most villagers called her “doctor.”

We arrived at the doctor’s house and Father took me from my sister and held me tightly. The doctor cleaned the wound with alcohol before applying medicine and wrapping white bandages around my foot. I hurt when the doctor cleaned the wound, and I leaned on Father’s chest. He wiped away my tears and told me to stop crying. The worry on Father’s face saddened me. I knew how much I had hurt Father; I knew how much Father loved me.

"Don't cry, baby girl. You will be ok. Let the doctor help you. You will be better soon."

When the doctor finished, Father immediately asked, "Will my daughter be able to walk?"

The doctor smiled. "Yes, sir. If you take good care of her wound and there is no infection."

"What can I do to make sure that her wound doesn’t get infected? Please tell me, doctor. I don't want my daughter to be disabled."

"Don't let her wound get wet. Bring her to me every day and I will take care of her wound. Make sure she takes the antibiotics that I gave you. I think in less than a month, she will be better."

Father thanked the doctor and performed a solemn wai, holding his praying hands level with his forehead.

Father carried me home, where so many people waited wanting to know what happened. Father explained to the family and neighbors; everyone told me to be a good girl. I didn't talk, just wanted Father to hold me. He had calmed down and no longer yelled at me.

I was happy to be home with Father.

Due to my wound, I hopped on one foot and carried a cane. But I didn't have to go to school, and I enjoyed staying home with Father. Only, I didn't have any friends to play with; my younger nieces, nephews, and closest friends worked on the farms with their parents. Father and Pi Narng worked in the store; they didn’t have time to play with me, and I couldn’t help them in the store. I was lonely and bored. I couldn’t swim in the river because I couldn't get my wound wet. My life was just staying home with

Father, which had been my dream, but now the dream was not fun.

Every morning Father took me to the doctor. When we returned home, he prepared my medication so I could take it after breakfast. Father looked tired taking care of me and going to work, but he never complained.

Because I was home, Father couldn't travel far away to conduct business for the farm and store. He still worried I would develop an infection and become disabled. If I were disabled, I would be dependent on my siblings all of my life.

At that time, the 1980s, in Thailand, families with disabled children never received financial help from the government. If you had a handicapped person in your family, then you must care for that family member on your own.

One day I saw Father sitting on the front porch quietly chewing betel nut. Gray hair covered his head and his face wore wrinkles. Father was starting to be an old man. I’d never realized such a thing until that moment. I never thought about Father’s age. Father was simply Father—eternal and constant. 

I walked to him and lay on his lap. Father stroked my hair.

"When will my wound heal?"

"In a few days. Don't climb trees and don't swim or you will develop an infection."

"I won’t, Father. But when I am going to be able to go back to school?"
Father’s face lit up when he heard my question. "When your wound is better, you’ll go to school. I will take you myself."

"You promise, Father?"

"I promise."

I lay on Father’s lap and played with my beautiful doll until I fell asleep. When I woke up, I was on the bed covered with a blanket. Father always took care of me. Whenever I had a nightmare, for instance, Father always calmed me down until I fell back to sleep. I don’t know how many hours of sleep he missed due to me. 

Being at home with Father was fun for a short time, but without my friends to play with, I’d rather be at school with children who could become my friends. When I was able to return to school, Father prepared my red lunchbox with my favorite foods, including two boiled eggs. Father took me to school and asked the teacher to teach me many good things today and every day. Father’s face looked to be the happiest in the world as he walked from the classroom. I will never forget how Father looked that day.

When I was eighteen years old, Father passed away. I had the opportunity to go to a business college and earn an accounting degree. I studied hard, focused, and told myself that I would make Father proud. I graduated with the highest GPA of any student in the Accounting program. I wish Father had been alive to see my accomplishment. But I know Father’s spirit is proud of me.

As a child, I didn’t want to go to school, but after the bicycle accident, I promised myself that I receive as much education as I could.

Education would be how I would protect myself after Father’s death. 

 

 

 

Eleanor Lerman
Murmansk

 

Paul is sitting in the bedroom of his small apartment on the lower east side of New York City, trying his best to keep the twelve students in his Zoom English class engaged in a discussion of Frankenstein by Mary Shelley. The antique language of the book is difficult for his community college students but they’re all gamely plowing through. At least the genre of the book is surely familiar to them: Netflix and Hulu and all the other streaming services they are likely wired into are swollen with horror movie listings.

The school requires that he teach this book and help his students analyze its meaning and discuss what life lessons they have learned from the story. Paul was told that the point of this exercise is to help his students develop a relationship with great literature, but he suspects there is another motive at play here: the people in his class, most of them adults and some still not completely fluent in English, are being groomed to enter the American workforce, or perhaps rise a little further in the ranks than where they now find themselves. This particular community college is not a feeder school for the nation’s fine universities: it is a factory, designed to pump out copy after copy of low-to-mid-level customer service representatives, bank tellers, sales managers, and the like. These future employees are reading classic literature as a way to help them understand and evaluate text so that, in the future, when they are reading technical manuals and memos from their bosses, they will be able to comprehend the information being conveyed to them and act on in it in a manner that will reflect well on them personally, on their work ethic, and most importantly, on their company’s bottom line.

That is, of course, given that business and industry—along with the economy’s public service sector—survive the coronavirus. The nonprofit foundation where Paul worked for nearly two decades has not: its shoestring budget, dedicated to finding safe housing for the indigent and homeless, could not stretch past the spring. Now, in the fall, with schools opening up again, some in person but many online, Paul has made use of his forty-year-old Master’s degree in English (Not quite as antique as Mary Shelly, Paul has thought more than once, but in the running), and found work at the community college based in New Jersey where he is now an adjunct professor. Paul has never actually set foot in the place. The school was desperate for teachers and Paul was desperate for work.

Seventy minutes after the class began, Paul says good-bye to the faces in the boxes onscreen—his virtual students, beaming into his bedroom from beyond the Hudson River, across the towering cliff of the Palisades that guard the Jersey shore. He makes some notes, sends an email to one of the students who needs some extra encouragement. You’re doing really well, Paul writes. Please let me know if you have any questions about the book that I can help you with.

It’s late in the afternoon when he finally turns off his computer. Then he turns on the tv and switches around the channels to see what the news is. Every channel seems to be running breaking news banners no matter what time of day or night it is because everything seems a hundred times worse than it ever was and one thing happens after another after another: crazy politics, crazy weather, crazy people screaming in each other’s faces, with or without masks.

He eats dinner, watches Jeopardy to assure himself that even at the age of sixty-four, his mind is still able to range across a wide array of subject matter (he knows the answer to a good number of the questions) and then grabs his jacket and a six-pack of beer from the fridge and heads up to the roof of his building. It’s a cool night but still mild enough to sit outside.

Soon, the door at the end of the interior staircase that leads to the roof creaks open and Paul’s friend Nat steps out. The two men wave at each other, a half-welcoming, half-ironic gesture, because, after all, they are adults, not playmates escaping from their family group to meet up on the roof of an old tenement in an old part of the city.

In fact, this has become a regular routine for the two men who were not close friends before the pandemic but probably are, now. In the world of before, these two were mostly drinking buddies who knew each other from hanging out a bar near St. Mark’s Place where, over the years, they felt comfortable having a few beers now and then. But the bar has been closed for months and rumor has it that it will never open up again. Since they both live in the same neighborhood, getting together on the roof of this building has become an easy fix, for Nat, for the tedium of only seeing the other repairmen on the Con Edison street crews he works with and a welcome relief for Paul from being alone most of the time, except for online classes and Zoom chats with distant friends.  (The roof of Nat’s building is inaccessible due to a double-locked door, which is probably illegal but who is going to do anything about that?)

Paul is sitting in one of the pair of beach chairs he keeps hidden up here, stashed behind a pile of metal struts left over from some long-ago repairs to the water tower. Nat, a big, beefy fellow with several corny tattoos (an anchor, a hula girl) from one long-ago tour of duty in the Navy, lowers himself into the other chair and Paul hands him a bottle of Sam Adams.

“Thanks,” Nat says, as the two men click their beer bottles together. After that, good citizens that they are, they move their chairs a distance apart, sitting separately but still feeling connected. Paul and Nat know each other’s stories: Paul is long divorced, and though there have been women in his life since that time, there is no one now. Nat is a widower: his wife died of pancreatic cancer five years ago and though he would like to move out of the apartment they shared for decades because he still thinks he will see her walking out of the bedroom or the kitchen, smiling at him, he is trapped by rent stabilization. He could never afford a different apartment in the city, and neither could Paul, who has lived in his small place for what feels like forever.

“It still looks the same, doesn’t it?” Nat says, gesturing towards the cityscape spread out before them. From where they’re sitting, they can see much of the East Village, with its mix of old tenements and new construction—fabulously modern co-ops and condos with equally fabulous price tags—as well as the East River, with Queens and Brooklyn on the far shore.  

“It does and it doesn’t,” Paul says, sipping his beer. “Or maybe I just mean that it feels different. Emptier. And all those sirens—they wake me up almost every night.”

“Yeah, right,” Nat says. “Last spring it was the ambulances, now it’s the cops. Bang, bang, bang, every night. And there are so many gang killings—gangs,” Nat repeats, for emphasis. “When did Manhattan become major gang territory?” He really doesn’t expect Paul to offer an answer that question, so he supplies his own commentary. “Everything’s all screwed up.”

Paul nods yes, but wishes he didn’t really agree. Maybe he doesn’t, entirely, because Nat left one thing out: the protests that managed, for a while, to turn the city’s attention from the virus to the cause of racial injustice. Paul joined in a few times because he’s an old hippie—at least, he kind of thinks of himself that way—and he marched in a number of Vietnam protests back in the day, stomping through the streets of Manhattan with thousands of other young men and women fired up with their patriotic ideals of what they wanted America to be and what they wanted their future to offer: a recognition of the basic humanity, and thus the equality, of all men and women everywhere. Well, that certainly was a hope that didn’t even come near to being recognized, so Paul felt an obligation to join the new protests against the systemic injustice baked into the American way of life. But to his great surprise, after stepping off into the river of people chanting slogans and waving banners—thousands of people; angry, serious people committed to their cause—Paul felt completely out of place. Though there were certainly other men and women his age mixed in with the younger marchers—not many, admittedly, but some—Paul just felt too old to be in there, among the new troops of the progressive left.  He had tried to reason with himself, to tell himself that he was being ridiculous, but he couldn’t change how he felt, which was that his time for that kind of thing had passed. Once, he even stared at himself in the bathroom mirror for a good long while to try to convince himself that he didn’t look his age, and what he saw was a once-handsome-and-still-not-bad-looking guy with graying hair, his second-generation Irish mother’s blue eyes, and what he thought was a generally thoughtful but still genial expression on his face. Not bad, but even that didn’t help. The protests went on without Paul, who stopped sending himself into the streets.

“On a lighter note,” Nat says, tipping his Sam Adams forward so that the brown bottle seems to be acting like a pointer aimed at something important, “you know what sitting up here reminds me of? That old Drifters song.”

“Up on the Roof,” Paul says, and immediately hears the lyrics begin to play in his head. It’s the kind of song, he thinks, that you never forget.

“Right,” Nat says. “It’s like the sixties are back.”

“Well,” Paul responds, “that might not be such a bad thing.”

They hang out on the roof for another hour or so and then Nat says he’d better be going—he has to get up early for work tomorrow. Nat is one of the more fortunate people in New York who has remained employed throughout the pandemic: no matter what, the city’s electrical utility has to keep the power keep flowing through its high-tension veins and Nat, who is a good ten years younger than Paul, has been out working on the crews that are digging up streets and crawling through manholes to wrestle with the billion intricate parts of the municipal power grid.

Paul lingers a while after Nat has gone. The moon has risen over the city, a big, round, glowing happy face of white light that almost makes things below seem normal. Soon it will be October; Halloween is in the offing, though Paul assumes the little kiddos dressed like ghosts and superheroes won’t be coming around for candy this year because the moon can go on smiling all it wants: things aren’t normal this autumn and likely won’t be for a long time. He was feeling better when he was singing Up on the Roof to himself but now, that good feeling is beginning to fade away.

He goes back down to his apartment and turns on the tv again, but soon turns it off. There’s nothing he wants to watch and besides, he’s feeling restless. He’s been staring at screens all day, people on screens, screens winking on, winking off. He just can’t look anymore. He wants to do something else.

Wandering into his bedroom, Paul finds his attention drawn to the radio sitting on shelf next to his computer desk. This isn’t an ordinary radio: it’s a ham set that belonged to his older brother, Adam, who died around the same time Nat’s wife did. Also cancer; also a cause for incurable sadness. The brothers, who lived in different states, still managed to be good friends. They visited each other, often talked on the phone. It fell to Paul and an older sister that the brothers were fond of but particularly close to, to clean out Adam’s small apartment. Adam worked in a shop in Philadelphia where he repaired antique lamps and chandeliers; it was skilled and complicated work that he loved doing. Paul is sure that this is so: his memory of his brother is filled with images of Adam tinkering with all kinds of small appliances and electronics—he was a natural with things like that. Paul thought that Adam’s affinity for fixing broken wiring and handling delicate, expensive art deco glass and eighteenth-century lights and lamps was akin to magic.

The ham radio, however, was his real love in the world. He, too, had been divorced long in the past, but he never seemed lonely—after all, as he said, he talked to people all over the world, all night long. Adam had built his first radio when he was a teenager, using parts he scrounged at the local dump or purchased, cheap, from the kind of electronics repair shop that hardly existed anymore. In his later years, of course, he was able to buy whatever he needed online and the radio that he owned when he died, built and rebuilt over and over again on the bones of the original, was a complex device connected to a compact but powerful antenna that he had installed on his small balcony. These were among the only items Paul took home with him from Adam’s apartment, along with a few photographs and a faded denim jacket with a Grateful Dead patch on the back that Paul remembered his brother wearing. He didn’t intend to wear it himself: he just knew he would like to see it hanging in his coat closet whenever he opened the door, and he was right. He did.

Along with the radio, Paul also had Adam’s ham license, which he had received at the age of sixteen after passing several arduous tests and achieving the highest level of licensing available. He also had a wooden plaque on which he had etched his call signal, KA6BLJ, with a woodburning tool.

Paul had installed the radio on his bookshelf along with the wooden plaque, but he packed away the antenna because he had no place to set it up and filed the license in with his other important papers. He kept the microphone that was attached to the radio turned off because he was only vaguely familiar with how to use the device to actually call other ham operators and talk to them (what Paul knew was only what he remembered from watching his brother when he was a kid), but he was also aware, because his brother had explained to him when he had once asked if he could speak into the mic, that only licensed radio operators were allowed to make contact on the amateur radio bands, which reached across the globe.

Now, however, somewhat to his surprise, Paul has found that he enjoys using the radio as a kind of scanner: he had gone online and looked up the public service frequencies employed by the police and fire department along with the air traffic overhead and the marine bands that let him listen in to what men and women were talking about on the tug boats and other working vessels sailing up and down the Hudson and East Rivers.

Pulling his desk chair nearer to the bookcase, Paul sits down and turns on the radio. For half an hour or so, he listens to pilots of commercial airliners talking to the control tower as they make their approach to Kennedy Airport; their calm, measured voices fly down from the sky to be captured by the radio. Paul closes his eyes and begins to relax.

Suddenly, the pilots’ voices fade away and all Paul hears is a lot of static on the radio. Then there are some sharp clicks and an odd buzzing sound; Paul leans forward to reach for the dial to try and tune in the channel he was listening to, but just as he does, he sees the numbers of an unfamiliar frequency appear on the radio’s screen. In glowing green, he reads 145.7750 megahertz. He has no idea what that means.

He has his phone in his pocket, so he types in the numbers and the question, Ham radio frequency? When the answer pops up in Google, he is astonished to find that he is somehow tuned into an amateur radio repeater in the north of Russia. He can’t imagine how that’s possible since, without Adam’s long-range antenna set up, all the radio is using is its own internal antenna, which can’t possibly be pulling in an international ham frequency and yet, there it is, on his screen: Russia.

Then, suddenly, he hears a human voice coming out of the radio. A man’s voice. Faint at first but quickly, becoming stronger and more clear.

“CQ?” the voice says. “CQ?”

Paul remembers what that means, because he remembers his brother dialing around the ham bands and sending out a CQ call, meaning, he was asking who might be listening on the same frequencies and want to talk. Paul knows he’s not supposed to answer the call. He’s not a licensed operator and absolutely should not be broadcasting. But he feels like he can’t help himself. So, he turns on the mic, but before he can say anything, he hears the voice again.

“CQ?” the voice repeats, and then gives his call sign. “R1YHBX,” the voice says, and adds, “calling from Murmansk.”

Murmansk? How unbelievable is that? Paul feels like the mystery of the moment has made a decision for him. He pushes the button on the mic and, although he can’t remember the exact proper protocol for responding, he says, “CQ,” speaking firmly, hoping that means he’s is answering the call he’s hearing, and then offers his brother’s call sign, reading it off the plaque. “Calling from New York City,” he adds.

“Whoa-ho,” the voice says, sounding cheerful. “Hello, New York City!”

“Hello, Murmansk,” Paul says. Then he says his name and the man he’s hearing on the radio says that his name is Alexei.

Trying to orient himself, to understand where the man he is talking to is actually sitting in a chair by radio (which Paul imagines he must be), in a distant part of the globe, Paul asks, “Are you somewhere near Moscow?” Not that Paul could actually place Moscow in the vastness of Russia, which he has only seen on maps a few times, but it’s something to try to grab onto.

However, the man’s answer starts with a hearty laugh. “No, no,” he says. “Murmansk is almost a thousand miles away. Two degrees north of the Arctic Circle,” he adds. “Very cold this morning.”

From that last bit of information, Paul realizes that there is quite a time difference between himself and his radio contact, who speaks with a heavy accent but in perfectly understandable English.

“Well, good morning,” Paul says. “It’s not too cold here yet. Nice fall weather. And for me, it’s still night time,” he adds.

After this exchange of pleasantries, Paul, who is still somewhat dazed by the fact that he’s talking to a man who lives in what sounds like a frozen city in the far north of Mother Russia, says, “Listen, Alexi. I’m glad to be talking to you but I don’t know how we’re doing this. I don’t have any kind of antenna installed outside my place and when I heard your CQ, I was actually just tuning around my local public service channels. I was listening to air traffic going into Kennedy Airport.”

Does Alexi know where Kennedy Airport is? Maybe it doesn’t matter, because he doesn’t ask. “I have an idea about that,” Alexi says. “We’re in a solar maximum period. In this time, we have high sunspot activity, which is great for signal propagation. Some bands that are hard to access are suddenly open all day and night. Sometimes, in these cycles, communications are screwed up but right now, we are good.”

“Signal propagation?” Paul says, and thinks he can figure out what that means. “You’re telling me that because of sunspot activity, somehow, my radio was able to capture a very distant signal even without any kind of antenna?

“I guess so,” Alexi says. “Perhaps we both just hit some sweet spot in the ionosphere. All the ions dancing around up there are being supercharged by sunspots so normal refraction is causing radio waves to travel at an angle in the sky that transmits them much farther than normal. They can go great distances, even transcontinental distances. That’s called skywave propagation. Or else it’s just magic,” Alexi says, and laughs again.

After this exchange of complex but useful information, Paul isn’t sure what they should talk about. He’s hoping that Alexi will open a new line of conversation, but in far-away Murmansk, the Russian radio operator has fallen silent, as if he’s waiting for Paul to say something first. So, Paul begins with what’s always on his mind these days.

“So, Alexi,” Paul says, “do you have Covid in Murmansk?”

“Yes, unfortunately,” Alexi responds. This is a port city. Not such a big population—maybe 300,000 people—but the Russian Northern Fleet is based here, so there is a great deal of back and forth between Murmansk and other regions. It was inevitable that someone would bring it to us. The outbreak is pretty bad.”

“Still?” Paul asks.

“Yes,” Alexi says. “Still.”

The radio suddenly emits a burst of static, and in the buzz and crackles, Paul thinks he can hear the sun sizzling in the darkness of space. But then Alexi’s voice comes through again, smooth and clear.

“Coronavirus,” he says. “We just have to live through it here, like you. But it won’t dominate our lives forever. Worldwide, enough people will get infected and eventually, there will be a vaccination, so it won’t be able to propagate as well as radio signals in solar max.” Again, the laugh. Alexi’s cheerfulness is holding steady.

“I hope you’re right,” Paul says.

“Sure,” Alexi responds. Eventually, it will just be like the flu. We live with the flu in the fall and winter and just don’t think about it too much. It stays in the background. But then, eventually, we will be in the background, too.”

Puzzled by those last few words, Paul asks, “What do you mean?”

“Like the people who lived through the 1918 flu pandemic. They are in the background for us now, aren’t they? They’re important to us because we compare ourselves to them, to what happened in their time but still, they are long gone. Part of history,” Alexi says, and then repeats, “In the background,” perhaps trying to make sure that what he must be thinking in Russian is being expressed clearly in the language that Paul understands.

But Paul does indeed understand. However, the only person in the background for him right now—at least, the way Alexi seems to mean it—is his brother. Long gone but still, important. Very important. And now, without realizing what happens, it is Paul’s turn to fall silent. Adam is very much on his mind.

But apparently, Alexi wants to keep their contact going. “Paul,” he says, “would you like to hear some music?”

“Sure,” Paul says. A kind of blue mood has taken hold of him, but it’s the kind of mood that’s open to hearing music. He expects that Alexi is going to turn on his phone and play him some downloaded tune—a pop song, maybe. Or maybe something classical. Rimsky-Korsakov, Paul thinks, as the only Russian composer whose name he can conjure up comes floating into his mind, though why he should assume that Alexi would play him specifically Russian music…

Paul’s meandering thoughts are suddenly interrupted by a bizarre crescendo of what sounds like horror movie music: strange vibratos and swooping glissandos that seem to come screaming and trembling out of some crazed violin. But the sounds coming out of the radio are too weird and frightening to be produced by any real musical instrument that Paul can imagine.

“What is that?” Paul asks when the sounds—the music?—finally pause.

“It’s a Theremin,” Alexi says. “I built it myself. I got a little bored with just working on my radio.”

 Paul knows what a Theremin is, and even what it looks like: a box with dials and a tall antenna. Sort of like a radio, he realizes. “I haven’t heard one of those since back in the 60s,” Paul says. “Rock bands used to use them.”

“Yes,” Alexi agrees. “The Rolling Stones. Led Zeppelin.”

He produces a few more eerie sounds on the Theremin and Paul can picture what he’s doing: moving his hands back and forth in the air between the tall antenna and another attached to the side of the box, disrupting the electromagnetic field between the two antennas. The controlled movement of the person “playing” the Theremin creates the sounds it produces. Or something like that, Paul thinks, because what he thinks he knows probably comes from the liner notes he once read on the back of an old album cover.

“That was really something,” Paul says.

Again, that laugh bounces off the dancing ions and lands in Paul’s brother’s radio, on Paul’s bookshelf, far away from where it originated. “You didn’t like it,” Alexi says.

“I did,” Paul said. “Thanks.”

“You are very welcome,” Alexi says. “But now I have to sign off. I have to go to work. Very nice talking to you Paul. And I hope things improve soon—in New York City and here, as well.”

Paul remembers what Alexi told him earlier—that it’s morning where he is, in Arctic Russia. He wants to ask Alexi what he does for a living, wondering if it is something related to what this man—clearly a master tinkerer—does in his spare time, but before he can, Alexi repeats the call sign he gave earlier and then says, “Seventy-three.” After that, he is gone.

The radio, now, is emitting only static, so Paul turns it off. Then, on his phone, he looks up what “Seventy-three” means in amateur radio lingo and finds out that Alexi has wished him best regards, a term that originated in old telegraph code. Paul wishes he’d had the chance to say the same.

The next night, after another Zoom class, Paul watches a little television but then, urged on by an impulse that he doesn’t try too hard to contain, he goes back to his bedroom, pulls his desk chair close to his bookshelf and turns on the radio. He remembers the frequency of the Russian radio repeater that connected him to Alexi in Murmansk, but when he tries to tune it in, all he hears is static. As Alexi had explained, their connection might have been an anomaly, an ephemeral, one-time event caused by unusual atmospheric conditions that cannot be replicated. Perhaps if Paul knew how to set up Adam’s long-range antenna he would have better luck—but he does not. And besides, not being a licensed operator, he shouldn’t be calling CQ anyway; he can’t be broadcasting across the international amateur radio bands, trying to reach a fellow in Murmansk who plays a Theremin—or anyone else, for that matter.

So, as usual, he spends a little time listening to the public service frequencies, hearing ambulance calls and half-empty airplanes circling overhead and cops talking to each other in their flat, nasal New York voices—always so calm, always seeming to approach everything from a minor fender bender to attempted murder by a crazed man wielding a machete with the same level-headed attitude of stoic forbearance.

Bored by all this, he begins to tune around the local VHF amateur radio bands and he does pick up some chatter, but the ham operators are talking about nothing that he finds interesting: a man in New Jersey is talking to another fellow in Connecticut about the best way to repair some damaged tiles on his roof; two other voices in the distant suburbs of more distant states are talking about the odd shortages that have been appearing in their supermarkets: there is plenty of toilet paper now but they still can’t find various cleaning products or—who knows why?—a certain kind of instant rice.

Again, Paul tries the international frequencies but he hears nothing other than the static that is beginning to sound to him like the hum of time and space. That’s an alarming idea, he thinks, but deep down, he feels that it is equally alluring. Maybe not so deep down, which is more than possible.

He turns off the radio, goes to sleep, gets up in the morning and teaches his class again. But during a short period of time when all the faces in the electronic boxes on his screen are looking down as they read a passage in Frankenstein that Paul will shortly question them about, he begins to think about something else. And what he is thinking about focuses on the radio that is sitting nearby, on the bookshelf: he’d like to learn how to use it better. More expertly. He’d like to figure out how to set up the antenna—which, perhaps, he could do on his fire escape—and develop a better understanding of how the complex radio equipment he’s using actually works, an area that he has zero knowledge about. He also finds himself worrying that if anything goes wrong with the radio, he will have no idea of how to fix it. The skills that came naturally to Adam do not dwell in Paul: he is more of a dreamer, he thinks, maybe more of an idealist and a lover of literature, which was not an interest of his brother’s. And yet, these two men—two grown boys—loved each other. Perhaps, Paul thinks, he has simply not yet discovered what parts of his brother must be alive in him—asleep, in a way, but still there, still available to be awakened. And maybe that’s what’s happening to him, at least a little, because he feels a tug, a pull, a growing desire to turn on the radio and make contact with people, to hear human voices sailing towards him through the ionosphere, across the invisible radio bands. He’d like to send his own voice up into the atmosphere, the circling clouds, and be able to say Hello, hello, what’s it like where you live?

As the days go on, as fall grows colder, he and Nat continue to meet on the roof now and then, bundled up in their jackets, still keeping a distance because Nat is out all day, mingling with other Con Edison workers who sometimes wear their masks and sometimes not, so there is a chance that he will be exposed to the virus though so far—fingers crossed—he feels fine. Paul has told Nat about talking to Alexi and one night, he finds himself discussing the idea of getting his own amateur radio license.

“Really?” Nat says. “Is it hard to do?”

“Maybe for me,” Paul says. “You have to take a test—well, several of them for different license classes. I’m not the most technically oriented guy in the world, but I think I can puzzle out the basics.”

“You know, I can probably help you,” Nat says. “After all, what do you think I’m doing all day? Remember, Electricity is Us,” he says, with a smile. “I’m sure I’d be able to help translate the radio jargon. Ohms, megahertz, kilohertz—just ask me.”

“Thanks,” Paul says. “I might take you up on that.”

But will he be able to? Eventually—unless climate change really sets in this year and decides to eliminate winter altogether—it will get too cold to meet on the roof, where the open air provides a measure of safety from virus transmission. If Paul and Nat get together in Paul’s apartment, or Nat’s, they’ll both have to wear masks and how long could they both bear that? When he goes outside to do errands or shop at the supermarket, Paul does his best to keep his mask on, pulling a new one every day from boxes of surgical-type masks he buys online, but they’re not the most comfortable thing in the world.

So there’s a push-and-pull in his view of his life, now. Paul doesn’t want to live behind screens forever; if he is going to go on teaching, which he probably has to because he needs the money, he’d like to try doing it in person. And he’d like to go back to hanging out with friends in bar—even if he has to find a new place and drag Nat with him—and more, he wants to be able to just walk around the city without feeling that he is trapped inside some violent video game with  empty streets and gangs gathering in the corners of the night. The Theremin would be the perfect background music for all this.

So, as he and Nat say goodnight, Paul realizes that he’s pretty much settled on the idea of pursuing an amateur radio license and getting his own call sign. It can’t become an obsession, the be-all and end-all of his existence—he’s not that kind of guy and anyway, he won’t let that happen—but in the here and now, the possibility of reaching out further and further, across oceans and boundaries, seems freeing. Like it’s a way to overcome history, as Alexi defined it. To call CQ, CQ in the unbreakable, indissoluble, and endlessly humming radio frequencies encircling the earth, and hear who responds. At least it’s something. It’s something more than he’s doing now. It’s interesting, a bit mysterious. It’s life.

 

 

 

 

Nicanor Millan
Thoughts before Bed

 

Isn't sleep strange?

At days ends, we succumb into tomb-like boxes, bouncing idle heads on-to feathers, and naked (or near so) we close our eyes,  and wait… wait… but for what? Well, you wouldn't believe me anyways… rest assured tho’: we travel an impossible length in a leap towards within.

When they first explained to me what exactly was a dream, I couldn't believe it. Ludicrous, I thought. The whole thing began out of an argument about ghosts because I said ghosts did exist, to which he said they didn’t, to which I said: “How can you be so sure?”

                 To which he said:        “Ghosts are real, but their fuel
                                                             Is imagination… 
                                      If everyone vanished from the world,
                                                 do you think a ghost would stay behind?”

                  To which I said:        “If that were true,
                                                             then dreams are real too…
                                                  And when we awake,
                                                             They vanish without a trace.”

 

Oft enough they re-occur tho’; they don’t just do the ol’ magicians poof poof and that’s that. Actually, it’s more like a haze, like night and day— flickering on and off, they're bulbs playing and pausing existence. Do we postpone their life then,when we stay up all night?

He laughed at my little ramble.

To which, of course, I also laughed.

It's always better just to laugh when another person laughs: first of three lessons in the cult of Dreams. D. himself, they say, originally received the wisdom from one of those western movies where the bad guy says:

“What's so funny, punk?”

 

D.’s first law:        The currents a laugh,
                                             The winds a path.

 

I don’t much believe in ghosts anymore. In that sense, i’ve grown— i’ve changed tho’ i’ll attest to longing once more for the feeling of being chosen by a spirit. Anyways, as an apprentice of D. you can believe what you will, but the core need be: law-jik, which means ψυχή λόγος, which can be basically understood with a simple analogy.

Truth is a party… ok? Anythingis true as long as it fits with everything else that you already know is true. If an idea is not part of the party, ergo: it doesn't know how to dance with the others, it doesn't know how to chit-chat, the invitation is a mystery, it cannot tango in the wild, so to speak, etc., and etc., then it is a lie. Ghosts, for example, don’t fit; they contradict alot of other stuff, so I can't believe in them anymore. The first law encompasses this… other things too, obviously, but this here is my own contribution to our cult. I’m pretty proud, to be honest, of my little theologic addition.

What really got me into the cult at first was this thing called the hypnagogic state: the state right before you fall asleep— and right before you’re actually awake— when your brain buzzes in Theta waves. I heard that the thoughts you think while hypnagogic are the ones that manifest reality, the ones that actually materialize both asleep and awake. I heard it from a machine, granted— a portable TV— but it claimed that what we think we see is what we see, or: who you think you are is who you are… Believe me, facts were presented, evidence intercepted; in the end, it said that while hypnagogic you’re basically building your life— so whatever you think while kinda-drowsy-still is the lot you get. A lot like language, I remember saying while muting the machine; ’cause only when you actually spit the words out loud do they come alive… in your head, it’s just oscillating static. In the beginning there was the word, said Jon; the world originated through song, said Talk-ien; which is why that bunch of monkish namesake’s chant all day, that’s why the Buddhist sings: ॐ, or OM, over and over. That's how they tap into the beginning of things… feel the original texture of the world. At least that's what I've heard.

But I get it. Usually the explanation of the action is pretty petty compared to the actual action. Thoughts are cleaner than any mouth. Must be because the mind is written in abstract hieroglyphs; meanwhile, language is ritualistic, orderly, and step-by-step— arborescent! It's a shame, but language is a wild beast; while thoughts are tamed circus freaks. Or is it the other way?

Personally, I have always preferred the inner world.

When I close me eyes, it all makes sense. Wrapped in this black sheet of the mind, I feel the interconnection of everything contained within me. It feels as if the right question, the knock at the right door, will illuminate my theater with an amazing inner light. With sight, the paradigm morphs. When I open my eyes, the world suddenly becomes incomplete; I feel as though no matter the effort of the search, what i'm looking for just isn't there. My surroundings transform from the mysterious, yet comprehensible to the incomprehensible, yet plain. That's why you gotta prioritize sleep, treat it like a sacred hobby. My mother never deemed it morally worthy of competing with stuff like etiquette and art, of course; and she always had the monopoly on morality. So, as a kid, I learned to do this thing they call daydreaming. It's actually sensational stuff. If I could sell it, I would… well, I did— for a bit— but I found out currency dislikes being attached to the abstract. That's why tangible stuff sells so well… because like attracts like, and money’s as material as you can get. This was another of my disagreements with him. He was certain money belonged to the realm of ideas— the abstract.

                 He said:           Ni-ke, fact is: everything is free.
                                                    Currency is just time divided by three…
                                                    Produce the formula and: magic!

                 To which I said:            So say the rich, Da-nah-yell; 
                                                              In fact, what matters is the feel in ones teeth
                                                              With each: Ka-ching!

 

The problem is he justifies his thoughts through this thing he calls common sense. Yea, the thing is: culture’s the key to that door, and some fit while some don’t. So what, whoever swings the biggest keychain wins? To that I call forth my German ancestry and say: Kulturbanause! Now, on the other hand, I justify my thoughts through simple logical experimentation. This one happened to be in the field of magnetics. Shake two magnets in a pan, make out one magnet every time. But even children know that magnets repel each other as much as they attract. Leave explanations to the equations. Leave implications to the cult of Dreams. Whatever is, also is not. Everything has a shadow when shown to the sun— the o.g. God. So, simply said:

                 D.’s second law:         To my conscientious self:
                                                  If it seems like it is,
                                                            It is not!    

Let me tell you something else about magnets. The mind is a magnet; like it or not (and you better do!) it attracts thoughts and repels everything else. Ah, but of course they’re interchangeable! They say every situation is the ideal situation… like those Taoist stutterers that waste their youth in pursuit of the way— the path, the Tao— only to insist, while old and gray, that it's impossible to stray from that magnetic grain.

“Put your mind to it, son,” says the hero that passes on the knowledge… another lesson from the movies. 

In dreams, the concept couldn't be clearer. The outside world is within you. The environment is literally a manifestation of your thoughts, a world you control. First step stuff. Although anything and all is available to the dreamer, nothing irrelevant will ever be a part of that nightly film. Which leads me to law numero tres of the cult of dreams:

 

The Dream is Dis.

 

D.’s a witty antiquate, unfortunately. Dis Pater is a Roman reference to the underworld. Also, wordplay. Why are so many obsessed with that imaginary place? Maybe ’cause those that return are never the same, and change is Nature’s name to fame. My guess would be that the afterlife is a pulse. A steady drum. A heart beat, beat, beating. Breath. Coincidentally, that might just be the best way to slip into sleep. Counting sheep, eh? I like to count my inner duets: one, two, one, two, one, two… and eventually: two, one, two, one… and suddenly you feel like a dune, a yawn, or a bunch of dust in a pantaloon. 

It feels good to just lay down in thought, catching stray thoughts, then letting go. The tide of peace seems to surge through stillness. Rising from within and orbiting thoughts, it cradles the mind asleep with a subtle kiss.  

 

 

 

J. Alan Nelson
The Book Cobbler

     Steve Marly’s novels contained occasional, brute violence.  His friends viewed him as a mild, skittish man. Most days, he tried make stories out of words.

     While Steve wasn’t famous, he was well respected. Some novels had been published. Although not best sellers, the books sold well. He’d made the short list twice on prestigious literary awards. He knew he was fortunate.

     In his study, he’d stenciled an inscription on the wall against his desk: Of making many books there is no end  He even had been on Bookworm podcast. He privately listened every day to that podcast, now five years past. When Michael Silverblatt gushed how Steve’s words and sentences glistened like shiny fairies that lept from a fountain, Steve felt as he soared, light, airy, complete.

     Yet like many people, a dread haunted Steve. Sometimes the dread tickled the back of his throat. Sometimes it settled in his stomach. Steve’s particular trepidation was that he might miss an opportunity of great consequence. That he’d would die unsatisfied, unready for the nunc dimittis. That like Henry James’ beast in the jungle, he’d be devoured by time because of a failure to recognize a certain truth about himself.

     The date was set up by his friends Chris and Barb. They heard Diana was into books even more than he. A Book Cobbler, they had said. Some sort of book binding or publishing they said. A promising hunch. He immediately said yes. Fewer and fewer people were book people now.  Whenever Steve heard someone speak of a classic, he’d found they were referring to an episode of Game of Thrones or Seinfeld or some other series they’d binge-watched on a streaming service.

     Not that Steve believed you had to read bound books. He himself read many books on his iPhone through the Kindle App. He listened to even more books on Audible as he took long walks or trips in planes, trains and automobiles.

     “It’s the story,” he once told a close friend who criticized him for not supporting brick-and-mortar bookstores. “It’s the words that form clauses that form sentences that form paragraphs that form chapters that form stories. You can read or listen to the words. It’s not the format.”

     Diana’s shop was an old home in a hipster neighborhood in East Austin. She had shown him into a central den with high cased windows that let in gold light in certain old paintings like the Donald Justice poem. Diana apologized while holding a ringing iPhone, saying she had to take this call. After smiling a beautiful smile that quite stunned him, she stepped into the next room.

      Steve sighed with content. The light glowed, glistened on worktables stacked with books, tools and other materials. He felt an excitement at the room’s beauty. The light burnished the books, playing across their covers, the textures of end papers, the weighty chiaroscuros of old leather bound volumes.

     He allowed himself to pity those who did not read books. They scraped for meaning in meaningless days. They scanned Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, voicemail and emails to root for purpose. They pondered thousands of photos on their phone for a pattern. They scrabbled for a god. They flipped through calendars and avoided the realization their bookless time leads nowhere but only circles itself like a dog with a behavioral tic chases its tail, going nowhere

yapping snapping in the absurd, hollow Now.

     “When you water them, try to avoid getting water on the title page,” he heard her say. “You covered the soil with dry moss? Good. That hides the hole in the text. And it helps support the plant. And be sure the soil is packed tightly around the roots.”

     He jerked. What did he hear? What was she saying? Then he saw it. And he didn’t understand at first why a leaden weight pressed on his gut, an obesity of dread.

     At first he thought it was a paper unicorn. Then he looked closer. It was a book with pages folded into a shape of a unicorn. It was a book he read once. An autobiography by John Cleese called So, Anyway...

      Steve’s throat contracted, felt filled with sand. He tried to swallow. He coughed harshly, felt his face redden, then took a deep breath. He had enjoyed that biography. He remembered that Cleese’s family name once had been Cheese. And he remembered Cleese’s strained relationship with his obtuse mother.

     Why? Why would you ruin a biography...Then he saw the novel. It was Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women. In a leather binding. As he looked closer, a horror gutted his stomach. The book’s pages had been gutted. Fabric applied. A latch. It was a clutch purse. He thought of the death of Beth. This...was even worse, somehow.

    How could a creature do this? He glanced through the window at her talking on her phone, laughing. She appeared as strange and unknowable as a creature that had had been stranded in a remote area such as the Galapagos archipelago and evolved into a bizarre animal like a lion-tailed macaque or the Texas blind salamander of the Edwards Aquifer.

     “How big is the book? Oh, good. You can put a layer of gravel at the bottom.”

     He saw an end table by his chair and realized it was made of stacked, drilled books. An edition of J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit sat on it. Surprised, he reverently picked it up. It felt wrong. He lifted the cover to look at the title page. It was a book safe. Filled with Jolly Ranchers.

A book safe.   And by it was first edition of  Vladimir Nobokov’s Lolita repurposed into a tissue box.

     A work table was nearby. Exacto knives, spray glue, a drill, and other supplies sat on it.

     She was still on the phone. They had to leave soon for the book sale. He looked at the clock on the wall. He gasped. It was an 1895 edition of H.G. Wells The Time Machine that had been gutted and fitted with clockwork. He looked closer. A William Heineman published the century before last. A classic. She had bought some clock kit at a hobby shop, cut a square through the Martians landing and killing people with their heat ray, drilled a hole through the old tight, well preserved cover, and glued the hours 12, 3, 6 and 9 for the clock dial around the winged Sphinx.

     He felt sick. He thought he would vomit. He had thought she looked rather sexy and smart when he came to pick her up. Now she came off like the worst sort of artsy-craftsy woman who made bought bric-a-brac at Hobby Lobby. This setup was a mistake. Worse than a mistake.

     A smell of musky school gyms and dodge balls filled his mind. His stomach roiled. He found a trash can, and saw the cutout pages and scraps of text from her “craft.”  He glanced up. Through an open door on the far side he saw a bedroom, then a bed with its base and headboard made from of hundreds of hardbacks. He swayed for a moment. He wondered if he’d pass out.

     “I would not put a cactus in the planter,” came her voice through the vents like a public radio host. “Most cacti are top heavy. You must wedge it in to give it stability.”

     A well intentioned blissful path toward ignorance. Crafts of slicing apart a voice, a story, every book had its own soul, some had cities of souls, all those voices she silenced with folds and cuts and glued and drills...it had hardened her heart. He stumbled over to sit on a bench, and then saw it was made entirely out of Herman Wouk hardbacks.

     “A wolf in the woods,” he said. Then he gasped. A rose bush made out of the text of another book seemed to grow from a bookshelf.

     He read the words on a petal:  —trapped in a howling silence like a book of Shakespeare forgotten in a library study carrel, opened, highlighted, annotated, in silent unread horror at the scene where King Lear shrieks his madness at the storm.

     His first novel. The New York Times critic raved at the his age, 23, and that he’d created a minor masterpiece of mature thought even though neurologists said the brain didn’t mature until age 25.

    The blood roared in his head. He picked up the X-acto knife. The tool felt la good in his fingers. A special, comfortable gravity in his hand. 

    “You must be Steve.”

     “Tell me about your work,” he said, disoriented. He made a vague gesture with the blade toward a book and recognized it a moment later as a first edition of Lyrical Ballads. 1798.

     “Oh. I’m a book cobbler. I recycle books. Barb and Chris said you love books.”

     She sensed his emotion and added. “Because of the glue that binds books along their spine, most paper recyclers will not take books for recycling unless the cover and glue is removed.”  She smiled.  “So, the problem of these vintage books are solved this way.”

     “Problem?” he said.  He swayed, looking about blindly as if he was in a dark far blacker than any night he knew.

     “Yes,” she said. “I deconstruct books, decontextualize their texts, and then reconstruct and recontextualize them into something with a spark.  I guess that’s my artist statement...what’s yours?”

     He smiled. He realized all dread had disappeared.

     “The flash of a blade.”

     “Wha—?”

      He watched her body fall against the wall. As it slid down to the floor her hand unclenched her throat and knocked over a intricately folded windmill  from a leather-bound English translation of Don Quixote circa 1697. 

    “Nunc dimittis,” he whispered.

 

 

 

Leah Sackett
The Lord's Table, Reservations Required

 

She watched Father Thomas Keating scrupulously, armed with a little flip notebook where she recorded the rituals of the altar boys. Nadine wanted to be an altar boy more than anything; ultimately, she wanted to be a priest. Nadine meticulously poured over the argot pantomime of the altar boys. She knew these boys. Dirk was a bully, Robbie ate his boogers, and Todd stole food from the lunch bags at the back of the classroom in the coat closet. Why was it they were allowed to be closer to God, and she was not? Something about her female gender was akin to a diabetic's open wound that it would not heal. Was her vagina a festering sin? Her Health class by Sister Mary Allen introduced a slathering of ideas about her body, sometimes accusatory claims that she was charged with her own and the boys' purity. Did her genitals threaten contamination of the sacrament of the Eucharist? Was this an extension of the sin of Eve? Was there no end in sight? Could she not be judged by her self-standing thoughts and actions?

Didn't Christ absolve the whole Eve thing? Nadine resented Eve more than anyone in history, except for Hitler, of course. All of humanity, even the psychos, hated him above all else, hands down.

It didn't start out as a plot. It was an act of desperation. Kneeling in the ambulatory of St. Jude, located in the hollow of Sweetgum county, Nadine prayed for intercession to be an altar boy, girl. Nadine couldn't bear to be denied that one step closer to God. The grace of the sanctuary. Then it came upon the Carter family. It was supposed to be a moment of pride. Her younger brother, Marty, was becoming an altar boy. The opportunity was passing her by. Soon, she'd be too old to be an altar anything. Nadine started making excuses to sing in the lofted choir. Instead, she sneaked down to the ambulatory, edged her way as close to the sacristy as possible, and here, Nadine chartered the sacred relics stored in the sacristy. Ducked down on a kneeler, she inched forward and lifted her Dad's binoculars. There were her coveted Sanctus bells. They shined and twinkled like the wings of Tinker Bell. Nadine was nowhere near enough to identify the embossing at the rim of the bells. She tested fate three weeks in a row to get a closer perspective on the altar boys'  tools of the trade. The paraphernalia that only the altar boys and priest could touch. 

*

It was the last Sunday in July. Nadine had promised her little brother, Marty, a month's allowance to change places on the altar. Marty was satisfied. He was going to use his newfound funds to pay the entrance fee at the Taxi Compound for a tour of the living dead across town in West Sweetgum County. Nadine and Marty rode their bikes to get in early for Mass. Their parents made the most of the free time they had suddenly thrust in their hands. Nadine had brought a pair of pinking shears from their mother's sewing basket and handed them over to Marty. Tucked back in the sacristy, before anyone else was scheduled to show up, with shaking hands, Marty took a great clump of his sister's hair in his left fist and cut across. He did this three times. It was short enough but unusually ragged. She held up a shiny paten and used it as a mirror to see how bad the damage was to her looks. It was terrible, but she was thrilled. She was going to debut as an altar boy. If Nadine could pull it off this one time, she didn't see how they could deny her a repeat performance. For Marty, a tightness in his prepubescent chest melted away as he scooped up loose strands of hair and put them in the trash.

Nadine kept her face down as she recited the vesting prayer. Her heart was racing, and her palms were sweating with holiness. She anticipated dressing the altar. In her excitement, she had to restrain the desire to let loose with little yips. Nadine continued to peer into the patens, the gold plate on a stick and trespassed about the sanctuary. Taking in the gold, the crosses, the smells, the sleeve of unconsecrated Eucharist, Nadine became heady . She started following the lead altar boy out, bent in the much-loved genuflection. Her excitement began to outpace the lead altar, the bully. Only the priest noticed something amiss, but he was not able to investigate this new boy. He didn't remember sanctioning a new boy. When it was time to deliver the Eucharist to the congregation, the priest gained a look down the back of the suspicious altar boy's neck. Loose blonde hairs hung to the back of his neck, on closer inspection, he looked into her face. It was Nadine. Father Keating was acquainted with Nadine's lofty pursuits. The priest grew hot, blushing as he continued to give the Eucharist.
While the recessional hymn was still playing, the priest swept Nadine to the sacristy, where are all things church are often hidden. He held Nadine by the shoulders, forcing her to look him in the face. 

"Did I do a good job?" she asked, atremble.

"You did a boy’s job," he said.

The priest was gruff in his language as he paced the little room. He used words Nadine had only heard from her Dad when he was untangling and hanging the Christmas lights. Father quoted scripture while also giving rhetoric on the contemporary discourse of girl altar boys. 

Nadine was not afraid. She felt something yield and loosen, breaking free of the moors she never knew were planted deep inside her. Nadine wanted something more than the church seemed willing to give. Instead of lacking, she felt emboldened to continue her spiritual journey. At this turn, Nadine didn't want to be Catholic; she wanted to be normal.

 

 

 

Jeff M. Sellers
Cokie

In bed, about half past midnight.  Call me a fool, but I’ve spent more than 40 years trying to remember Cokie, the girl I should have married.  I know: If she was The One, why can’t I remember anything about her?  That is my conundrum.  At 67 years old I can remember many other things – that I was a year out of Wharton, pretty sure I didn’t want to work in an office, so I’d gone to Mexico with the general notion of saving polluted rivers and ancient ruins.  This was back in the 1990s, when my consorts – blithe, smug, or the just plain afraid – were plummeting into debt to get MBAs, and I felt pretty cool about sidestepping all that.  Their ambition was to work absurd hours to make outrageous piles of money to go into still more impressive debt.  I was more focused on squirreling away enough money, or inheriting it, to acquire and care for a pet llama.  Along the way I met Cokie.

Now, in this hazy Southern California fall of 2037, here’s what I’ve been able to remember about her: That she was short, and that she cleverly turned that to her advantage.  At five feet tall she could take on the air of a pretty elf, or a cute kid – which at 26 she in essence was, but I was only 23 and saw her as an older woman – or she’d play changos, jumping up and down on me like a monkey.  “Cory, please let me be your pet changa,” she’d say, then make monkey sounds.  I used to marvel that she really did believe it was more fun and noble to be short.  She really did.

“Dear?” says my beautiful bitch of a wife, Elaine, lying in bed beside me, wondering when I’m going to put away my new, palm-held WriteBrain and turn out the light. 

“Are you almost through?” 

It’s only by intuition that I “know” Cokie was meant to be my mate.  Of course I remember there being a time when I thought she could be my life partner, or else I would not have gotten involved with her.  But I can remember almost nothing else about our 10-month relationship except her jumping up and down on me, shrieking like a wild little changa. 

So “game over,” as we used to say, right?  No way.  In the attic I have found some boxes containing my journals, and I’m optimistic that buried deeper beneath them are the notebooks from my Mexico City days.  I’m not ashamed to say that, like the Mexicans themselves, I abandoned the provinces (where I taught English to support my environmental/archaeological crusades) for the silly-ass jobs of the urban jungle, and ended up as a market researcher/go-for at Chemical Bank de México.  I’m pretty sure that’s where I met Cokie, who was probably either a marketing type or what’s known as an azafata, a kind of stand-around receptionist serving as eye candy at conferences or board meetings.  Women were like chattel there, back then.  It was a different world – still is, for the most part.  No matter how much Mexico catches up to the United States in technology or economy or profligacy, the consciousness and realidad there will always be alien to those of us on this side.  So alien that very little will translate.  That’s part of my memory problem; after nine years in Mexico City, when I returned to the United States, none of my Mexican memories translated.  It was like every image went dull, from brilliant to shadowy, from pot-induced lucidity to alcohol-drenched blurriness.  The memories wilted.  To put it a totally different way, official U.S. border consciousness caught my Mexico memories trying to sneak across and shot them dead. 

 

*

 

Back at the office, lunch.  Elaine got me this WriteBrain last month for our fifth wedding anniversary, I think in hopes that I would use it to keep a journal.  She probably was hoping that by getting in touch with my feelings moment by moment, I’d realize I want out.  She thinks she wants a divorce, doubtless in part because she’s so young (55).  With the wisdom that comes with what is now called middle age, I think we should make the best of a bad situation; we’ve got a good 70 years of life ahead with steady personal upkeep and daily doses of Celrejuv.  I’ve been in worse marriages.  My staffers think me ridiculously quaint for getting married at all, and the other bank officers here thought I was crazy; after three failed marriages, why would I try again at my age?  What I am is an idealist.  As far as vocation goes, the bank I manage is employee-owned and lends only to socially- and environmentally-friendly concerns.  As for relationship, I continue to believe matrimony can be deep and beautiful – holy. 

But there I seem to be dancing alone.  Elaine just called and said not to expect her for dinner, she’s meeting some friends at Starbucks — as she did last night, and the night before, and several times last week.  She also has a habit of being absent even when she’s home.  I’m not going to write out how our interpersonal dynamic has crashed.  That would be a little on the self-serving side, and anyone who discovers this digital journal will surely know, anyway, how totally heinously a relationship can deteriorate. 

Damned if I can remember why I broke it off with Cokie.  Damn!  Damn.  Gosh-dammit.

 

*

 

“Dear, I was just kidding,” Elaine says.  “It was great.”  The thing I hate most about this statement is the condescending Dear . . . (In bed in the morning sun thru the window, anticipating the pleasure of shaving, the feel of scraping the years off my face.)  Is she trying to be funny with that patronizing Dear, or just plain patronizing?  Either way it sucks.  The only time she calls me Cory, the name attaching to my entire consciousness and identity, is when she’s upset.  So only when she is tense with fury does she feel the need to address the real me.  That is, I only exist when she’s pissed.
She’s spraying on her hosiery on the other side of the bed, wondering if I’m scanning my frustrations into my WriteBrain rather than airing things out with her.  For what it’s worth – by the time anyone reads this, this new technology will also seem ridiculously primitive – the marvel of these new WriteBrains is that you don’t type, you brush your fingertips across the miniature screen as it lies in the palm; so it looks like you’re just curling your fingers to examine some cuticles, when actually you’re scanning thoughts into the nanoprocessor through your nervous system.  People have tried holding the WriteBrain while they’re asleep to record their dreams, but invariably their fingers unclench and slide off the screen.  You’ve got to keep your fingertips moving on it.  Anyway, I’d like to act like I was not hurt by her comment in the first place, which in fact is the case, annoyed though I was.  She had quipped that maybe Pfizer should make a drug that forces you to slow down, which did not have the humorous effect she apparently hoped for.  The fact that she presumes I’m hurt is irksome, and besides that there’s no way for me to correct her without sounding defensive, dysfunctional, or otherwise juvenile.  My shutting the bathroom door without a word may have confirmed her inaccurate cognition that she has shattered my fragile male ego, but it feels manly to ignore her comment altogether, and to sit and on the toilet and push her out of my system.

While dear Elaine was Latte-ing it up with her friends at Starbucks until 11:41 last night, I went through the boxes beneath the journals but found not one page from my Mexico City days.  Their disappearance is as much a mystery as the deletion of my Cokie memories.  But then, I’ve got so much stuff in that attic; they might still be up there. 

Standing and staring into the mirror, I see my wrinkles are as fresh and moist as a schoolgirl’s translucent cheek, in this mild and flat reality, as Elaine predictably slams the bedroom door on her way out. 

While I’m waiting for the water to warm up for my much anticipated shave, the bathroom’s glaring white light is illuminating the droplets on the shower curtain that Elaine has left to one side.  There in the tub is something she has bought somewhere, something I’ve seen before only in Mexico: a spongey ball the size of a grapefruit, softer and more absorbent than a loofah, dull green and pocked, like the bath sponge in that clean-swept old home where Cokie grew up, and I never knew whether it was for washing the body or wiping down the tub.  Sensing a memory returning, I grab my WriteBrain: I would step into that hot course of pulsing water, amid the shadows of ancient sea shells basking under a bare yellow light bulb, and lather up with shampoos that belonged to Cokie’s sisters.  Hazy sunlight would fight through a modest window above my head, near peeling paint, pale green, and the wood-framed pane was cracked open enough to feel the morning’s industrial breeze, the fresh stink of it, and hear the buses groaning, and I would relish the one timeless spell when I was not sticky from smog or the damp night’s sleeping sweat.  The water drum on the level roof did not always hold enough for everyone, but Cokie’s family would insist that I shower first.  She is called Cokie because as a child she once unwittingly transported a packet of cocaine from one block to another for some drug dealers in Colonia Juarez, though the hardest stuff she ever tried was marijuana – at my bidding.  I am lying in the snug, willowy bed with the delicate knit spread, the kind we associate with old ladies or old countries, and Cokie is wrapped there with me.  We lie in the lower of a bunk bed, her sister Aurora is snoring above us.  Sometimes their grandmother sleeps up there with Aurora.  Cokie’s mother, the Señora Barrera, does not know I’ve snuck from the worn couch of the den into the girls’ room, but in any event her sense of traditional propriety about whether her daughter sleeps with me under her own roof has been worn away by ten thousand murdered hopes.  Likewise, the family patriarch is a sad old little guy.  Nothing his daughter does can disillusion him beyond what he has already suffered at her hands, beginning with her steadfastly refusing, at age 15, his order to sweep and mop the kitchen floor, then running away to Chiapas.  She did not return for nine years.

One night when her father is still brooding in spurts at that metal-legged dining room table, I retire to the little den full of figurines and curios, glazed swans and Holy Virgins painted in blues and blacks, to a sagging couch with the sheets and blanket that Cokie’s mama has left there.  Cokie brings me a glass of water with lots of lime juice squeezed into it.  Later, when the only sound comes from the grandfather clock, if I do not sneak into her bed, she will come to the couch just before dawn and lie with me. 
“Cory?” Cokie says.  We’re breathing the musty air of the den that is cramped with artifacts – doilies, and a red-clay Mayan woman giving birth from a squatting position, and a dried gourd, tapered and yellow – and we are lying under the blanket on the couch before sunrise; her almond eyes peer up at me above the babyish puffs of her cheeks.  “Cory, if we’re getting marry, I have to be taller.  Or you have to be shorter.  No es cierto que soñaste conmigo y era más alta? (Isn’t it true that you dreamt of me, and I was taller?)”  She speaks to me in English when she can, which is not always.
I laugh, as quietly as possible.  She says again, as she has before (and I never correct her grammar): “Cory, you have to accept me the way I’m.”

I only whisper a laugh, and my ticklish ribs and stomach shake against her.  She rises up on her elbows and adopts a stern look.  “Cory, you are going to marry me, aren’t you?  Okay.  You can marry who you like.  But promise me you kiss me today, o te voy dar las cosquillas (or I will tickle your ribs).”  She jabs my side, I give a start.  Blocking her hot hand, I only laugh, and she gets me with the other.

“Okay,” I whisper.  “I kiss you today!”

“I want you to kiss me right now, Cory Alan Connor.”

I hesitate and brace, I double over to protect my sides.  She gets me in the kidneys from behind as my face pushes into the loose sheet gathering into itself, detergent fresh and closet stale, on the creaking couch.  Cokie smells of some bittersweet simmering cocoa with cinnamon.  “Okay, okay!”  I kiss her cheeks, and she demands it on the lips, and we kiss for a long time, bad breath and all. 

Hearing someone flush a toilet, we stop.  We lie quietly, and I lightly stroke her face and hair.  Blue dawn colors the curtains of the window.  Iron bars with curving florets and other details in the fashion of the 19th century French occupiers stand guard outside the window, seeming to protect it from the gathering sounds of traffic.  I think of something Cokie told me the first night we shared a bed, in the Hotel Francés in Guadalajara: That even though she had slept with many men and lived with a few, she knew how important it was for me to stay a virgin until marriage.  “So I don’t want that we come together all the way,” she had said.  “Then you would feel so bad.”

Cokie and I have never come together all the way.  Suddenly she turns her eyes up to me.  “Cory, if we don’t get marry, and I marry somebody other – well, then I don’t want to have kids.”

We try to speak in each other’s native tongue, and I whisper to her:  “A tí te encantan los niños (You are crazy about kids).”

“No, I don’t want any childrens.  But Cory, if I do have kids, will you take care of them for me?”

She laughs mischievously, and as the notion takes hold her laughter grows dastardly and rich in her smoker’s throat, and we both laugh hysterically, quietly, in the musky room.  Maybe we will get married, if ever I outgrow the lonely sense of distance from her.  She’s fun and strums my heart but seems so alien to me, as though I’ve come to the threshold of her psyche from across the ages.  Can she ever have any clue about my world, inner or outer?  She seems oblivious to how far I’ve had to travel, in all senses, to be this close to her.  With vague and lonely thoughts of how we can be at once so close and so impossibly distant (I’ve been in Mexico for almost two years but I can never be one of them, the magic is simply not in my blood), I shut my eyes.  I yearn to drift into dream, leave behind these sad thoughts and the pulse of our hearts tamping our souls into their separate chambers. 

This love is not for life.  Like everything else here, it is unchanging yet ephemeral.  We are young, but in this city we know we could die on any day of misfortune – a sliding ton of earthquake rubble burying us on a sidewalk, or our bus in a race with a taxi skidding off a thoroughfare, or the first division of cancerous lung cells – and both youth and death summon us to mind only the present.  I will not look beyond this moment: hearing Cokie’s voice as I drift to sleep, “Cory, I love you so, so much,” the echo of it fading, inducing in me a trance from which I hope never to wake.

 

 

 

Diane Simmons
     Setting the Water

"Setting the Water," was a winner of the Fish Publishing (Ireland) short essay prize and was originally published in the Fish Anthology in 2016.

When I go back now I sleep alone in the bunkhouse, a low, dark room over the cellar.  It's not much like a bunkhouse in the movies, but that's what it's been called for generations, going back to the day when hired men came on horseback, staying until the haying was done.

When I was growing up here, the high school boys who were our hired men drove up in fabulous old cars. I remember a big black Buick with doors that had to be wired shut; I remember a red and white Chevy with a smooth spool of greenish glass installed on the steering wheel.  The guys called this a suicide knob, and joked about it in ways that were over my head. I did understand that the knob allowed you to drive with one arm around your girl, but I never worked out how suicide came into it.

But they drove home at night and so there was nobody to sleep in the bunkhouse.  It had been neglected for years, filled with a jumble of bundles and boxes, hot and dense with the smell of rotting paper and mouse droppings.  Still I used to go up to secretly to look at my mother’s things, her old sorority magazines, her diaries.  She had been a beauty from the South and though she was present throughout my childhood, she remained a mystery to me. I didn't learn much from her diaries, however.  They contained nothing but the events of farm life.  A typical entry would say only: "Colder.  Did two loads of wash. Two bummer lambs died.”

Now, grown, returning from my life in the city and sleeping alone in the bunkhouse, I have trouble waking up, drugged, even on a July morning, by the pungent darkness. When I finally come to, I hurry to dress because I had meant to have breakfast with my dad. But when I climb down the ladder, he has already eaten, and is sitting on the back porch pulling on his knee-high rubber boots to go irrigate. 

We are up in the hills here, the high desert of Eastern Oregon.  Before the whites arrived, nothing but sagebrush and tumbleweed would grow. In fact, those travelling the Oregon Trail passed quite near here but never stopped.  Even though they were exhausted by the time they got this far, one look at the arid hills was enough to tell them they had to push on.

But later on people did come into this country after it was opened up by gold mining. One such person was my great grandfather who'd ridden west from Kentucky, then got a job driving a freight wagon to one of the mines.  Once out here, he and some others got the idea of digging two irrigation ditches, climbing them up out of the valley to the icy waters of Eagle Creek that drains the high snow-covered mountains.

Ever since then and all summer long, somebody on our place—now it’s my dad—has had to go out several times a day to direct the water that whooshes through the ditches, turning it onto this field, turning it off that, creating a green oasis amid the dry hills.

“Ride down with me,” my dad says now.

When he was a young man and I was a toddler, he didn't drive but walked out to irrigate, swinging along with his shovel over his shoulder, bronzed and muscled in the tight white T-shirt he had learned to wear in the Air Force. I thought him the most beautiful sight in the world.

Sometimes he would take me along, lifting me to his shoulders, where I would ride high in the sky, clinging to his blond curls.  When he got to the ditch, he would set me down on the bank. While he took his shovel and did whatever irrigating was, we would talk about this and that.  When we talked he would usually try to slip in some far-fetched story to see if I would fall for it. It was his pride that I never did.

Now he drives his beat-up old pickup to irrigate, but still proceeds at a walking pace, his boot barely touching the gas.  He drives so slow we can hear the yellow road-side weeds pop in the heat.  We can hear the tires crunching on the gravel; we barely raise a dust.  We creep along the valley floor, the fields shining around us.  As one always does, we raise our eyes to the tan foothills that lie like sleeping lions all around us, and behind them the  snow-capped mountains.

“Look,” he says. “There go the Indians.”

He points to a jagged line of mountain tops.  It was his mother, one of the first white children in the Valley, who said that the line across the horizon was Indians marching. By my time, it was a well-worn family saying.  But when my grandmother was a child it was a perception born of fear; this valley had been part of Chief Joseph’s domain and thoughts of the Nez Perce still frightened children.

Everything here is timeless.  Yet we are changed.  For one thing, it's the first time I’ve been back since my own mother has been gone.  After she left, my dad, a daredevil pilot in World War II, kept wrecking his pickup, sailing too fast around mountain curves. When I heard of these wrecks, I imagined him flying the old pickup out over Powder River, young and fearless again, that old crazy grin lit up by the green dash light.

Recently I’ve had a breakup too, and have myself started driving too fast, late at night through the city streets.  But I never had his nerve.  I never wrecked anything. I never even got a ticket.

Now we go as slow as you can without killing the engine, crunching a quarter of a mile down the gravel county road.  I remember my dad as always being in a rush, hustling to make a go of the little piece of land he had inherited.  I don't know if he's slowed down now, what with everything, or if he's just giving me the chance to take it all in:  the mountains, the fields, the immense blue dome of sky that I seldom glimpse amid the prison walls—as he can’t help but see it--of the city.

Finally we turn into the lane that goes between our field and Baxter’s. We’re going south now, guarded by tall corn on either side.

Baxter is somebody new to the Valley, one of the type that sometimes comes from California; they’ve retired from a job and have money to buy a farm. Everyone understands it's the best way to farm these days, not needing to make a living off of it.
But I know from my dad that Baxter is more serious as a farmer than most such arrivals.  Now my dad points out for me to admire the concrete irrigation ditch on Baxter’s side of the lane.  On our side there's still the mud ditch, close to a hundred years old and so welcoming to mint and quack grass that every spring my dad has to hire a high school boy to help him dig it out.

“Is Baxter a good farmer?” I ask.

“You bet he is.”

“I guess it helps to have the money.”

“I don’t care,” my dad declares. “He’s a hard-working son-of-a-gun.

“His corn isn’t better than yours is it?”

My dad studies Baxter’s corn with a look I’ve often seen.  On Sunday afternoons we used to go for a drive around the Valley, my dad critiquing other farmers’ corn. In the end it had to be acknowledged: his was the best.

“No,” he says now.  “Baxter’s corn is no better than mine.”

We creep down the lane.  We smell the corn; it’s a hard, dry smell like broken rocks, not like anything that could ever be eaten.  But when the corn is chopped and put in the pit silo for the winter, it changes, begins to ooze juice and give off hot steam. 

When I was little, I would go with him to feed the cattle, playing around while he pitched the silage into his wagon. He'd put me on the tractor seat to "drive" while he went back and pitched the feed out to the cattle.  He was proud of this especially nutritious, scientifically produced silage, and would always offer me a piece of fermented corn to chew like chewing gum. He would never fail to warn me not to chew too much or I might get drunk.  I would always put it in my mouth though I already knew I couldn't stand the pungent sour taste for more than a couple of seconds.

Now he comes to a stop in the middle of the lane, climbs out and walks over to his cornfield.  I stay in the pickup, looking out the open door.  He reaches up to the top of a corn stalk with his shovel.  It is about a foot higher than the shovel can reach. 

“See,” he says.  “This is how tall they should be.”

He measures a few more stalks to make sure they are tall enough.

As he stands measuring with his shovel, I see, as if for the first time, how small he is, not much bigger that I am.  Otherwise he looks like I remember him, his skin red and hard over his face bones.  His grin, as always, is a little sideways. He was embarrassed about his teeth, my mother once told me, because they weren't straight. I was astonished to hear it; I thought his strong, shiny teeth were beautiful.

If you really want to check up on your corn, though, you can’t stay on the edge of the field; you have to go inside to see how it grows there.  So he pushes the leaves aside and steps in, calling back, “Come on.” I get out of the pickup and follow him, though I don’t really want to. I know that inside it will be a dark jungle where the sun can’t reach.  The big sticky leaves snatch at your head and shoulders; they make a fierce clatter in your ears as you try to walk.

Though cutting across the cornfield was a shortcut home from our "bottom," I used to be afraid I would get lost in there and, maddened by the noise, never get out.  Afraid that I would just crouch down frozen because I couldn’t stand the leaves grabbing me any more, couldn’t bear the derisive racket.

My dad, though, thought you had to face fear, going it one better if you could.  When he was teaching me to drive, for example, he instructed me to take the twisting mountain roads ten miles per hour faster than the speed limit on the sign that announced each curve.   That way, as his logic seemed to go, you saw the road's threat and raised it.  You showed you weren't afraid, showed it to the road and to yourself too. Then you could be calm.  So when I said I was afraid of going into the cornfield, he told me to use the field against itself.  "Just stop for a minute and wait until you can think.  Then go on following the furrows. You’ll come out one end or the other.”

Obviously.  You can't live your life avoiding cornfields.

Now I push through the leaves, holding my arms around my ears, as I once taught myself to do.  I try to stay close but I can’t see him anymore and I can’t hear him over the clatter.  I stop and listen, and soon hear him moving up ahead. Then he stops and it’s quiet again.

“There’s lots of deer in here now,” he says, his voice surprisingly close.  “When we cut corn we’ll see a dozen trying to hide. They’ll keep pulling back into the last rows. But pretty soon we have to cut those too.”

“Where do they go then?”

“Oh back up in the hills.”

We swim back out to the sunlight, get in the pickup and drive on.  We leave the cornfield and drive past the small feedlot where he has his cattle in the winter.  It’s empty now except for the gently rising odor of manure and trampled feed. 

We drive past a tumble-down old barn, abandoned for decades. We were barely moving before; now we stop altogether.  Inside are four deer, their heads up, silhouetted against the sky where the back wall is missing.  They stare at us as if fascinated, as if seeing, though without particular interest, everything we are both keeping inside our own skins.  We watch them for a long time and they watch back. 

Finally my dad touches the gas and we creep on.

“I never heard of deer coming to live in a barn,” I say.

“We had a bad winter last year. They were starving up in the hills and they all came down to the valley.”

“But there must be food up there, now that it’s summer.”

“I guess they like living in a barn having somebody throw them hay.”

“You throw them hay?”

He shrugs.

“Oh. Once in a while.”

“Be easy for somebody to get them. Living in here, they get used to people.”

“Yeah. But I don’t let anybody come to hunt. Some guys were out from Baker but I said sorry, go someplace else.”

Of course he has brought down from the hills plenty of warm deer carcasses, still dripping blood when he hung them up from a tree in the glare of the headlights.  He got his deer each autumn. It was just something a man did.

None of us really liked the strong gamey taste and we had our own good beef.  But you  had to get your deer and then you were obliged to use the meat.  So he took the skinned carcass up to the butcher and had it packaged and put in cold storage.   We ate it all, quietly glad when--sometime in early spring--the last blood-stained package was gone.

“Oh well,” he says, as if acknowledging this history. “These are more like pets.”

We get to where he has to change the water, so he stops the pickup and we walk along the edge of the cornfield to a homemade wooden box in the irrigation ditch.  He gets down on his knees to pull out the lids, as he calls them; really they are just two old boards that slide down into a notch in the box.  When the lids are in, they dam up water so he can divert it to his fields.  Or if it isn’t at this time “his” water, he takes the lid out and lets the water flow undisturbed.

Somehow the farmers along the ditch know when to put in the lids and when to take them out so that they all get their proper share.  These shares are based on rights that were assigned when the land was taken up. We have pretty high rights since my great grandfather was one of the first in the Valley.

For a long time I didn’t understand about these “lids.”  I took them to build forts if I happened to be playing by the ditch and I didn’t understand why I got in trouble. It seemed he had enough old boards lying around that he could spare me a few. 

Now, my dad reaches into the box and the first lid comes out easily but the second one sticks. He yanks and twists but he can’t get it out.  He has to take off his hat and lean way down into the box, one rubber boot in the air.  He pulls and pulls. Still it won’t come.

I turn away to pick mint. I wander a ways down the ditch bank with the mint to my nose. If he were to glance up he would see that I have not noticed him on his belly struggling.

Finally I hear the water pour through and he comes walking along the ditch drying his hands on his pants. We go along to where he has to build a few tiny mud dams to change the course of the water that's already in the field.  He shows me a piece of red metal, a part off some old machine.  He’s planted it in the mud to use for a marker.

When he has a full head of water, as they say, that metal piece is covered.  He digs in the mud, building his little dams, redirecting the muddy flow, but the red metal piece is still sticking out so he digs some more until he gets the water running over it.

We start walking back. But now he’s flooded the way we came and I stand on a clump of sod, trying to decide whether I want to get my shoes and socks wet or take them off and go barefoot through the rough grass.  He looks back, hands me the shovel, then bends over, his back to me, and says, "Climb on.”  

He is not a big man.  He never was I suppose. But I climb on and he carries me out to the road.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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