Category: AP28

Ashely Adams

Our Dark EcologieS

One of the theories explored by astrobiologists is the idea that life on another world will utilize different biochemistries, foregoing Earth-like structures for something else. These forms of life could easily elude human detection, as all our methods assume aliens will operate in some replica of us. Taken to its natural conclusion, there could be a whole shadow ecosystem even here on Earth, living, breeding, dying with no notice from us.

Silicon

First, we must consider carbon. All life on Earth is built on carbon and its lightweight structure. Its small size carries an enormous weigh, its six protons crown it “the King of the Elements”. But, there could be other elements that could fit that role. What might life look with one popular alternative?

Sulfur

There are other ways to end carbon’s chauvinism than just silicon.

Sulfur

can

create

long

chain

molecules

essential

for

life.

In

fact

in

the

darkest

pits

of

the

ocean,

bacteria

create

energy

from

sulfur,

gulping

down

the

viscera

of

the

Earth.

But

this

element

rarely

conforms

to

the

branched

chains

needed

for

complex

life

as

we

know

it.

Here,

we

live

in

a

reality

of

an

endless

line,

a

backbone

of

rotten

eggs

and

the

yellow

film

of

the

damned.

Ammonia

Life is resilient, giving and taking everything so it can fit into the smallest gaps of possibility. Yet even the most exotic microbe depends on water to survive. Life needs a liquid, but flowing water is a rarity in the cold burn of space. Perhaps, organisms may find a mimic, so close you could almost imagine its rivers and seas.

Ammonia is a proposed as an alternative to water in biological processes, one that has appeared in the scientific literature since the 1950s; Like water it is made of common elements, hydrogen and nitrogen; Ammonia donates and accepts hydrogen ions in the way water does, dissolving sugars, amino acids, and proteins to be carried throughout a cell; It may not be in a way we’re used to, but Ammonia can split and carry a chemical thought. Ammonia, like many of the alternative biochemistries, is only applicable in extreme environments, boiling at room temperature; But there are many places where the air sits heavy and cold upon its surface; But Ammonia is greedy, it prefers to take ions, not to give like water. Our world is the acrid ice, a world that would set itself on fire before it made a clean break;

Dust-Based Life

But have we considered a life form so strange we can’t grasp its form? A life that looks like an object discarded?

In this life we             float, – unmoored, a particle waiting for the spark to align ourselves.  Really, that doesn’t seem much different from the world now.

Reverse Chirality

Maybe life won’t be any of these things. Perhaps, we will find a life so like us, we will not recognize it for the alien it is.

This is the easiest way life could differ from us chemically. Amino acids and sugars exhibit chirality, a geometric property in which an asymmetrical molecule can have a mirror image. All life has amino acids, the bases of proteins, present in the left form with sugars in the right. There’s no reason as far as we know for this, no inherent advantage. It’s just the way life happened to form on Earth.

Things could look almost the same. There’s no reason you couldn’t snack on a plum, that its skin would be any less pleasantly snappy and tart in this world. There’s no reason you couldn’t drive your truck to school one morning, contemplate skipping and instead swim in your leaf-strewn apartment pool, admire the palm trees shape, the way afternoon rain falls off their heavy fronds.

But maybe in this life, it’s your left hand you use to take the plum out from the grocery bag you’d left it in overnight. Maybe your truck doesn’t cough and wheeze its way the few miles from your apartment. Maybe the fronds have fallen away from the walls after the last storm, or they didn’t fall at all, still reaching their green hands out to shade your lounge chair from the sun.

Maybe, in this reverse world, you’ll see your mirror self, so like yourself. But for all the similarities, life on Earth can never utilize reverse-chiral molecules. So look, but never ever touch that shadow self—the closest, but most unnerving alien.

Ashely Adams is a swamp-adjacent writer whose work has appeared in Paper Darts, Fourth River, Permafrost, Apex Magazine, and other places. She is the nonfiction editor of the literary journal Lammergeier.

 

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Monica Hileman

Funny Story

Would people be haunted by guilt or regret? Would they be frightened? Supposedly we all are. After a long illness, at home, in their own bed, they might be resigned, ready to pass on to their Heavenly Reward, if that’s where they were going. Some hung on from one season to the next, though that was rare, according to experienced caseworkers. Most were weary, with no expectation of regaining their health; they seldom lasted more than a month.

Danielle didn’t know how to refer to her work when she first started. The trainers were so careful about how they phrased things and that made her self-conscious. On the bus between jobs she imagined how she would answer if asked: What do you do for a living? A living—she’d never thought about the use of that word. She could say, “I’m in End of Life,” the way one of her uncles used to say, “I’m in Life Insurance.”

Transition—that was the word they used. A word so ordinary it hardly seemed appropriate. Family members sometimes found it confusing. Clearly this was The End, not a different level of assisted living or the next stage of rehab. But “transition” it was, as if the patient would continue on in some other form or dimension. At intake, they asked about the religious or spiritual orientation, but a person could be undecided or change their mind. The manual stressed sensitivity and being able to adjust to changing situations while remaining calm and compassionate. As Mrs. Gurnsey, their instructor, said, “Be of good cheer—but not cheery.”

Everybody was so serious, especially the young, New Age-y types. Danielle had to watch herself. Humor could be misunderstood; she didn’t want to seem disrespectful. She had only to recall the swift slap across the face that was her own mother’s response to one of her wisecracks. You couldn’t always tell how people were going to react.

Before taking the job, she hadn’t really known anyone who had died, except for her grandmother. Last year she went to the wake of a cousin who was too young to have suffered a heart attack, but that’s what they said had killed him. They weren’t close, but still, it was a jolt to see him laid out like that at the funeral parlor. In grade school, her whole class went to the funeral of a beloved teacher who died in a snowboarding accident. Danielle had never been right there when someone died.

Gathered around the coffee urn during a break in the training, Hannah, a seasoned RN, told them about a patient she had been seeing up until last week. “She had woken up before, when she’d wanted more morphine and it would have been time for another dose, but she didn’t seem to hear or be aware of me. Her eyes were focused on another spot in the room. She seemed to be watching something I couldn’t see. I noticed her hands, the pale tips of her fingers. Her face relaxed and the breath stopped. It was very peaceful.”

The other hospice workers all seemed to be religious. The manual was full of Bible quotes. As a lapsed Catholic, Danielle had no particular beliefs. Death, like life, was a big question mark.

Her friend Connie asked if it was difficult. Compared to standing on an assembly line as she had just out of high school? No, it was easier than that. Easier than waitressing. Easier than working in a shop where the boss would pressure you to go out for a drink at closing time and then try to feel you up. The dying people were easy. Other hospice workers warned that the family members were sometimes difficult, but they usually came to you afterwards and apologized.

In the morning, Danielle woke up tired and bleary. The toast burnt, the blouse she was going to wear had a spot she hadn’t noticed. Another she wanted to wear had to be ironed and she nearly missed the bus. She sat staring out the window and then reminded herself to have another look at the file. Her first visit was a new patient. She had asked the bus driver when she got on about the street and he yelled out the name when he saw she hadn’t gotten up. “It’s one block back,” he said, when
she ran up the aisle.

There were massive homes, many she could only catch glimpses of through gaps in thick hedges or at the gates of high fences. The branches of large elms and oaks would soon grace the street with shade. Behind a stone wall a walkway led up to a stone house, easily a hundred years old. Above the bell a bronze plaque displayed the family name.

The door opened. “Oh, good, you’re here,” said the lady in a white blouse, an RN badge clipped to her collar. “I’m on my way out. The daughter is supposed to be here. She called from New Hampshire and said she’s on her way.”

Danielle followed her into the carpeted hallway. “Mrs. Ryan’s in here,” said the nurse, pointing at the doorway. “I think she just woke up. There’s no change. Signs all good. Her daughter should be here sometime this morning. Gotta run.”

The front door closed and Danielle felt the stillness of the house around her. She went down the hallway, past a series of small paintings of sailing ships, all dark and old, like those in a museum. She looked at one and saw men in rowboats alongside a whale.

There was no one to explain who she was to the dying woman lying in the bed under a velvety brown coverlet. Danielle stood in the doorway, thinking it would be good to say hello before she walked into the room. She prepared herself for the sickroom smell that was as distinct as a forest or a bakery, but there was only a whiff of lavender. On the far wall were French doors that opened onto a patio, the sheer curtains letting in a good amount of light. Though it was on the first floor, it didn’t seem to be a makeshift space, one recently configured to accommodate a feeble person who could no longer climb the stairs. The heavy maple bureau and queen-sized bed with doweled posts all seemed to have been here for a while. At another patient’s, they had converted the dining room into the sickroom and the whole house had seemed thrown out of kilter with people having to skirt around to get to the kitchen.

“Hello Mrs. Ryan, I’m Danielle.”

Close enough to see the woman’s face, it was the same grayish-white as the whale in the painting she’d just seen, the features prominent, a high forehead and gray hair against a white pillowcase.

Danielle stood still, waiting for the woman to register her presence. There had been no mention of a stroke in the file. Without moving her head or showing any sign of acknowledgement, the woman’s eyes focused on her.

“I’m here from the Passages Agency.” Danielle took another few steps. “Is it all right if I sit down?”  

The intensity of the stare diminished. Danielle took that as a yes and slipped off her jacket. “It’s not raining, like they said it would. We could use the rain. The crocuses are just coming up, and the daffodils.” The woman’s eyes stayed glued to her face, not stern but not exactly friendly either. Curious. “Pretty soon the trees will be all leafy again.”

She stopped, wondering if it was wrong to be going on about spring, with all it signified, to a person who might not be here to see the blossoms.

“You have a very nice house.” The face relaxed and seemed somewhat pleased. “Is there anything you need? Anything I can do for you?”

The woman’s head tilted slightly one way and then the other.

“Would you like me to read you a story?”

The woman blinked in a way Danielle understood to mean yes.  

She carried two slim volumes with her:  the pocket bedside companion the agency provided and a collection of stories she’d picked up at the library. The French doors made her think of the story about a precocious girl who tells a tale to a nervous visitor about the men who went out hunting never to return. Maybe that wasn’t appropriate since it involved fright at what are thought to be ghosts.

“Let’s see…” She ran her finger down the Table of Contents. “The Yellow Wallpaper.” Definitely not. Nor Edgar Allan Poe or the one by James Joyce. Not the Jack London either. Why weren’t there any funny stories in this book? Better to stick to what the agency had given her. At random, she opened the book and found a story about a boy and his grandmother on the day of her birthday.

She heard the sound of the front door, then a voice from down the hall. A thin young woman stood in the doorway, large eyes peeking out beneath schoolgirl bangs. The flowery dress and the purse dangling in the crook of her arm suggested a child playing dress up. A high, tiny voice furthered this impression. “Oh, hello,” she said.

For a second, Danielle felt she should stand but stayed seated and introduced herself.

“My mother said you were coming,” the girl said.  “Sorry I’m late. So the nurse was still here?”

“Yes, she let me in.”

“I’m Celia,” said the girl. Her body had not an ounce of fat, her jaw bone prominent in her face.

“I thought I might read her a story.”

“Oh, yes. She likes that. Hi, grandma.” She went up to the bed, stopping just short.

Mrs. Ryan acknowledged the granddaughter with a nod.

“Don’t let me interrupt,” said the girl. “I’ll go make some tea.”

Halfway through the story Mrs. Ryan dropped off to sleep. Danielle kept reading for another page until she was sure. The granddaughter did not come back into the room for what seemed like a long time. Danielle needed to use the bathroom. This was the worst part of being in a strange house, the things people didn’t think to tell you.

She turned down the hall toward the bright room at the end where there were cabinets and a counter. On her left was a white tiled floor and a black-and-white striped shower curtain. The door had a cut-glass doorknob. She closed it and turned the bolt. In another house she’d been walked in on. The silver handles and faucet were shiny, every surface spotlessly clean. Her pale blue blouse neatly tucked into her gray wool slacks, her reflection in the mirror looked back at her with a quiet forbearance. She used one of the monogrammed guest towels and folded it back into place, listening to the sound of a female voice. It was the girl down the hall in the kitchen talking on her phone. Danielle cracked the door open.

“No. I can’t. I told you. I’m in Brookline… I had to go. It’s my grandmother. She’s dying. Or at least she’s supposed to be… Fuck, I don’t know.”

Danielle put her hand over her mouth to stifle her surprise. But that was nothing to what followed. Just as shocking was the incongruity of a girl with the sensuality of a stick figure talking “smutty talk,” as her mother used to say.

“Slowly, very slowly, I’ll take you inside me…”

Danielle wished for her to do it quickly. Soon she would have to catch the bus and she couldn’t just leave without saying goodbye to the granddaughter who was now mimicking—at least Danielle hoped she was mimicking—sounds of arousal. Danielle waited some more, but it was like quicksand; it got worse. Would it be better to interrupt before the climax or wait until after? If she waited until after, it might be obvious that she’d been listening.

The carpet muffled her footsteps. She had the idea to go back to the other end of the hall and from there start down again, calling out the girl’s name. It would have helped if the girl’s name hadn’t slipped her mind. She felt silly calling out, “Hello,” but she had to give warning before she walked in on her.

The girl said, “Sorry, I have to go.”

That was just what Danielle was about to say and she fumbled to come up with something else, so as not to parrot the girl.

“I…ah…it’s time for me … I have another patient.”

Celia—that was her name!—wore the willfully blank expression of a guilty teenager. She held her phone pressed between her hands. Praying hands. A popular image on the pages of inspirational books. Danielle smiled and said, “She’s sleeping now.”

Some of the trees were sycamores—that was the name of the street. On a brick wall by a gate, the house number was written out in wrought iron script. The gate had a tricky mechanism to open. The rose bushes were all thorns along the walk to the imposing dark-varnished door of the two-story Victorian. She could only guess at how many rooms it held. Her finger pushed in the round black button setting off a metallic gong.

 An older woman with an efficient manner opened the door and nodded at her, one employee to another. “Hello Danielle,” said Mrs. Samkin.

In the long, dark wood-paneled hall, Danielle asked how Mr. Bartley was doing today. Mrs. Samkin stopped outside the door of the sickroom. “When I last checked, he seemed to be resting.”

Danielle knew nothing about Mr. Bartley’s life, other than he himself had been very successful or had inherited wealth. On previous visits, she read a few items from the newspaper and they’d discussed the weather, a more substantive subject than it used to be, he said. No family members were on hand to shed any light on his interests.

The sick smell was heavy in the room. Immediately Danielle noticed his color. He didn’t appear to be breathing. The housekeeper stopped in the doorway.

“Oh,” she said, coming into the room.

“Yes,” said Danielle.

“Are you sure?”

Danielle clenched her lips and took hold of the man’s wrist. “There’s no pulse.”

Mrs. Samkin approached, her hands pressed to her stomach. She inspected him closely and stepped back. “I have worked for him for twenty-one years,” she said.

“Does he have other family, besides the daughter who contacted the agency?”

“Yes. I’ll have to call them.”

What would she do, now that her years of service had ended?  But Mrs. Samkin had already left the room and Danielle was alone with the dead man. She sat down and took out the manual to run through the checklist.

She took out her phone to call the office. This was her first deceased and she was disappointed. If she had been present at the moment of his passing, perhaps she would have witnessed something profound. She made her report and filled out the form.

She scanned the room:  the blue tile around the fireplace, the crystal and ceramic items on the mantel. She was fascinated by the kindling in the grate and the split logs in the brass bucket, the long handled implements.  What were they called? Irons or something? In the training, they were told not to show any interest in decorative objects. Things tended to disappear from homes of the dying and you didn’t want to give cause for suspicion. Danielle had never lived in a house with a fireplace. They conjured up Bronte novels, as did the antique furniture with its carved wood scrolls. Was that a settee or a divan?

She pulled out her bus schedule. Last week she caught the 2:38 and was late for her three o’clock appointment. Where had Mrs. Samkin gone? Danielle needed to ask her about the funeral home.

No sounds inside. No sounds from the street. She moved down the hall and a floorboard creaked under the thick carpeting. Where she lived, there were neighbors on either side of the wall, the noise of people and cars passing. She wasn’t used to this silence. She stood at the foot of the wide staircase that rose and divided on either side of a carved wood panel.

“Mrs. Samkin?”

A housekeeper would have a room on the first floor, she guessed, off the kitchen. Yet where Danielle stood, one hand on the curved banister, she heard a faint sound coming from upstairs. The manual was very clear about keeping to the part of the house where they saw the patient. Danielle called out again and waited.

It was like stepping back in time, some of these houses. Danielle envisioned a black rotary phone on a little stand in a room upstairs. On the landing, she stopped and questioned if the voice she heard was that of the housekeeper. There was no one else in the house, as far as she knew. Danielle hadn’t seen anyone and Mrs. Samkin never mentioned anyone else living there.

She went the rest of the way up the stairs. An old woman’s voice, firm and throaty, drew her down the hall to a doorway where she could see an expanse of Oriental rug and a pair of armchairs. The voice said, “I don’t expect so. Not really.”

Danielle looked up and down the hall, anxiously, before she stepped into the room. Seated in front of another tiled fireplace with a large gilded mirror over the mantle was a small, white-haired woman.

“That will be fine. Yes, all right, then.”

Danielle walked across the carpet. The woman saw her and showed no surprise. “Miss Doucette, you’ve come to say goodbye.” She was very old; her skin nearly translucent.

“I…” Danielle had to start again. “I was about to leave…there was no one around.”

“Yes, Ann has things to attend to. I was just speaking with her.”

On the table next to the woman’s chair, Danielle saw some sort of intercom and the back of a screen—the kind hooked up to a security camera.

“He, Mr. Bartley, he went…” she was about to say “very peacefully,” but she wasn’t there, so she didn’t know.

“Yes,” said the woman, not waiting for her to finish. “Thank you. Thank you very much for your service.”

Danielle took a step back. “Uh, I had a question about the funeral home. Is it the one in Newton?”

“Ann can answer that for you.”

“That’s right,” said a voice behind her. Danielle nearly jumped and turned to see Mrs. Samkin.

“Ah, well, goodbye Mrs….”

“Yes, goodbye,” said the woman, folding her hands in her lap.

On the stairs, she expected Mrs. Samkin might explain about the lady she’d just met, but they descended, with only the sound of her breathing and the rustle of her dress. The woman upstairs hadn’t been sitting in a wheelchair, but perhaps she wasn’t able to get around and that’s why Danielle hadn’t seen her before.

Mrs. Samkin told her the name of the funeral home. She opened the door and Danielle went out into the cool, fresh air. She walked down the long path to the gate, stepped out to the curb and started to cross.

Something made her turn and look back at the house with its mansard roof and weathervane. A figure stood at one of the windows on the second floor.

The screech of brakes brought Danielle back to the street and the car that had stopped just a foot or two away from her. The woman behind the wheel stuck her head out the window.

“My God, watch where you’re going.”

Danielle was overcome by the tingling sensation coursing through her.

“It’s not funny,” said the woman. “You could get killed like that!”

Danielle apologized, haltingly, and moved onto the curb on the other side.

She went around the corner and had to lean against the mailbox, she was laughing so hard.

Monica Hileman grew up in the Midwest, lived in the Pacific Northwest and settled in New England. Two years in Greensboro, North Carolina yielded an MFA from UNC-G. Her stories have appeared in publications such as The Baffler, the Chicago Tribune’s Printers Row Journal, Arts & Letters, Catamaran Literary Reader, and Flyway (nominated for The Best of the Net).  

 

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Debojit Dutta

Treeman chipotle

Sometimes a child is found in the lower half of a belly. The one that comes out is a man. Stomach churns. There’s bile in your mouth. You become beautiful.  You become a queen. At all other times, a miracle: you are mother earth, you sprout seeds, roots and shoots and leaves, and then, perhaps, flowers and fruits.

It seems I am of the second kind. I am Treeman Chipotle. Come here, look at my hands, you haven’t touched them. I can imagine swings tied to my hands, I can imagine not one but two of them, three, with children sitting and swaying. I breathe and they sway. I breathe and they sway. I do not breathe too heavily for fear of breathing them away. I do not breathe too heavily so that I do not hurt them. I breathe gently, I can almost count my breath. I cannot heave a sigh of relief, but feel I am present here, now. It is a pleasant feeling. I came into this world, I think, thousands of years ago, but have only started to be here.

The index finger of my right hand has been itching. If you were me, you would think this means you will make a lot of money this summer. I feel I will sprout a leaf. It has been itching to come out. But I am only speculating. I have only been speculating about my body. This is partly because I cannot move my head as much as I once could. I do not trust mirrors. They are never enough to make you see. Hands, strong, do not move at the same speed. It is a peculiar problem–I can feel and not feel my body. I think this happens to everyone. It is as if you are in a deep sleep and you can feel your inside. You can feel your yearnings, your fears. But you can only hope to feel yourself from outside. Don’t believe those who tell you either of these feelings are unnecessary. Don’t believe those who tell you, you can exist entirely inwards, that beauty is all that is inside. What do they know?

*    *    *

You must already be aware of the treeness that affects one’s ability to move. It affects one’s memory too. But I remember, I remember that I am Treeman Chipotle. Come here, I will tell you stories. Stories of how it all started. Stories that I haven’t told anyone before. Stories that you would not know.

I do not know how and when it happened, the precise moment that brought this on. I have wondered if I was always a tree. I breathe at night, I would say, always. This way, deep breathing, except for when children are swaying on the swings. I remember talking to Leela one evening after dusk, on another morning talking to Lalit about reproduction. We wondered if touches could make one pregnant. Later we wondered if one sucked on your breasts long enough, regularly, would you become a mother? We wondered how it would be to see your breasts develop and how it would be to live with an unwanted protrusion. What would people say? Will they laugh or will it make them happy?

As a discussion must end for another to start, we would settle for this:  if anything, only thoughts can impregnate. We do not think ill of someone, fearing that ill will happen to us.  We do not think of food when we fast, fearing that our wishes will not be granted. We do not think of embraces, we do not think of swaying, we do not think that is why we live. We live a little every day. If you are to go on living like this, if I could point a finger at you, you must not think. Unthinking brings you back on earth, unthinking makes you stay.  Thinking is the work of the devil. Daydreaming takes you to faraway places from where there’s no coming back. From where even if you come back, you come back not as you, as you were then. You are lost in the going and coming. I should have known better, you would say. I should have known better those days while idly thinking and biting my fingernails and thinking of another person’s face on mine. The days spent idly smiling and making faces and thinking what if my face did not look like mine and looked like another’s, would they smile this way, would they make this face while biting their nails like me. This would of course end in shame and worry. But those days, I did not know. We do not talk about these things. How do we know?   

*    *    *

What do we call an immobile, unthinking thing whose body acts entirely independent of itself? A vegetable, said a teacher once, when we could not come up with an answer. I remember it was Lalit or perhaps it was Leela to whom the teacher was referring.

What do we call an immobile, unthinking thing that does not know it is sprouting a leaf, but can only wonder? Me. My answer comes quickly without the intended pause of someone who knows.

I am Treeman Chipotle. Come here, I will tell you how I perform charity. My right hand does not know why my left hand moves. My left hand does not know that the right is itching, that it will sprout a leaf. Before either of them know, before I know, I will sprout a flower. It will bloom when the season comes. It will attract the insects, the butterflies, the bees. The function of flowers, I am told, is to be the agent of attraction. If allowed, a flower might become a fruit. A fruit might be born when flowers meet. The cycle of attraction continues. The flowers attract insects and humans. The fruits attract animals and humans; they attract insects in decay. It is said a fruit wants to be devoured as a whole. It seduces so that there are more trees. I remember the purpose of life is reproduction. If I were given a choice I would become an avocado tree. I remember a feeling of longing that does not leave or depart. It arrives frequently and stays for three or four days, soaring at nights. I remember that in those moments I am an avocado tree. An avocado tree waits and waits. An avocado tree is out of place in history; it does not belong where it stands. It waits for the beasts that are long gone. Only they could swallow an avocado with its seed: gomophotheres, ground sloths, toxodons. We think the avocado tree does not know that it has been thirteen thousand years since the beasts are gone. We think the avocado tree does not want to adjust. But we do not know that the avocado tree does not know.

Come here, I will tell you.  If trees had a choice, would they be trees?

Debojit Dutta is a writer and editor based in New Delhi, India, from where he co-runs the literary webzine Antiserious. His works have appeared in Himal Southasian, The Bombay Literary Magazine, The Missing Slate and other places.

 

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Rae-ann Smith

Last Minute

       The world is supposed to end today. Lives are lost each second. Earth trembles and shakes and suffers through her last breaths. Storms ravish the land, sinkholes appear as if by magic and the oceans fight each other to squatter on land that belong to none of them. The lucky few, chosen for the escape—humanity’s last, a mix of the best and the brightest—watch helplessly, while I, pre-occupied, hurriedly look through our fleet’s manifest for Gloria, my wife.
       “Where the france is this damn woman?!” I snort out my nostrils at the computer on the Bridge.
       “Captain?” my first mate Jack asks, always at the ready.
       “What?”
       He looks at me intently, anticipating an explanation.
       I suck my teeth, in frustration more than annoyance. “Get a S.P.O.D ready for me. I’m going back to Earth.” I ignore his protests with a wave of my hand and the command, “Stepping off.” I smile—goodbye, and for that split second I see my life, the result of my ambition—how can I have everything I ever wanted but not have anything I want? “Jack. The Bridge is yours.”
       “But sir…”
       I’m leaving the poor guy in a lurch, I know, but it cannot be helped. I have to find her.

#

       What a time to come home. It used to be so green here but progress changed the colour of the land and when it bemoaned the loss we told it to make do by our indifference. Now, here I am, wheezing and wobbly.
       When I left the planet three years ago to work on the space station, San Fernando stank. People were moving out of the city in droves. It wasn’t just the Usine Landfill anymore, the stench had become palpable, thick and alive. You could see it coming like the rain; a green cloud formed over what was once lush cane fields and made the wind stop. Then the animals left. The butterflies had died out decades before but that wasn’t noteworthy. The fish, the shrimp, the crabs they went in that first decade of the 21st century—they were just food, we could import more. No, I mean the animals left. The pets. Dogs especially. First, their personality changed. They formed gangs and travelled in these feral packs attacking anything that moved. So, people started killing them and making sport of it. That’s when I met Gloria…. Oh gosh, Gloria. I have to make my way to the house somehow and I’m going to have to run.

#

       “Earthquake!” shouts loud-speakers as I run into the excited roar of a crowd. There are people in the street like stagnant water, shoulder to shoulder, jammed in, up against each other, drinking, dancing.
       “What going on here?” I ask a short, buxom woman gyrating on my leg.
       “We waiting on the world to end!” She shouts, barely audible over the music, then continues dancing. I push past her and she shifts her waist to another more willing partner. She’s not bad looking… maybe… if I had the time.
       It takes me half hour to navigate the crowd. In that time, a black rain falls drenching everyone in its sticky filth and the earth shakes like her foundation came loose. Quarter of the people are catapulted each over the other, never to be seen again. Others lie still on the fractured earth. Some bawl, some pray, some stand silently and watch.
       But the music—it plays on.
       “Why we couldn’t all just go same time? Why I remain here to suffer?” An old man grabs me like I know the answers to his questions. I peel his fingers from my arm and leave there; exhausted, affected and dirty.

       I run and I run. I feel a stitch grow near my liver but I do not dare stop. I make good distance before the earth sneezes and sends me toppling head first into a pit. With arms flailing about I manage to grab onto what feels like the protruding root of a long toppled tree. Barely any sunlight pierces the dark hole as I hug the root, trying to find some rest for my dangling legs, praying that I can hold on, that I can get out of here alive.
       “Hellooo…”
       “Help!”
       “Hey! You good?!”
       “For the minute…” Why is this nut asking me if I’m good? I’m hanging on for dear life man!
       “Hold on. I have a hose. I’ll throw it down to you. See if you could catch it.”
       Catch it?! “Say what?”
       “Well I can’t climb down there. So I will try pull you out. But you have to catch the hose.” He says slowly with a strong Tobagonian accent. I can’t place a name or a face to the voice but it floats down wrapped in a warm feeling where many happy memories live.
       “Owww!” The tap at the end of the hose hits me on the head.
       “What happen?!”
       “Nothing!” I just have to grab hold of this thing without plunging to my death. I know my right arm is stronger than my left but the hose is nearer my right. I’m going to have to reach…
       “You ready?”
       “Gimme a minute.”
       “I have all the time in the world.” He replies sarcastically.
       I kiss my teeth, let go and grab the hose in one deft move. Thank You Jesus! “Pull nah man!”
       “A A you ready now.” He says chuckling. Then he inches the hose up and up and up until I near the mouth of the swallow- hole, grab onto its lips and climb out. I roll onto the ground with eyes closed and stop on my back. Air rushes out of my mouth so fast I gasp. Breathing feels so new.
       “Hey?”
       I open my eyes to see my saviour standing silhouetted in the path between the sun and my face.
       “You good?”
       “Thank you! Thanks a million.”
       “Don’t mention it Walker.”
       “Who’s that?” Squinting, trying to make out the dark figure looming over me. “Ram? Is you Ram?” He laughs Ram’s distinct boom laughter; loud, short and a little wheezy. “Ram! What you still doing here?!” I sit up in shock. Ram is a master agriculturalist; a plant whisperer. Once a plant meets him, it needs him. He is a valuable asset to the fleet. Well, he should have been. “Why you not on the ship Ram?”
       “I miss my flight boy.” He says while sitting.
       “What?!”
       “And I did just miss it too… you know. If they did wait ‘bout a two minutes more…”
       “How you so last minute Ram? How you go be late for the escape?” I ask him, in amazement.
       “Walker. What you doing back here?”
       I turn—ecstatic, if Ram survives Gloria must as well—and speak without thinking. “I come for Gloria boy!”
       “You come with a ship? Take me with all-you. Please man. Is like God send you for me!”
       I stand up, ignoring his plea. “I have to go. Thank you Ram.”
       “What you mean I-have-to-go-thank-you-Ram?” His bulging eyes follow me. “That’s it? That’s all? I am coming with you.”
       I can’t look at him. I turn to run off but Ram grabs me and gets up. It shocks me how quick and strong he is. He squeezes the fat knobs he has for fingers into my arm. I try to get out of his grasp but he holds on like his life depended on it.
       Sadly, it probably does.
       I pull and I twist. “Ram… Sorry… It have no room for you.” I barely whisper but my words still cut him.
       “It must have room. It must! It must! How you could come all the way here and I see you and it not have room? It must have room.” He licks his wounds. It increases his strength. “Gloria’s dead. Walker, I will come on the ship with you.”
       “You don’t know how to lie do you?” I sigh, trying to make light of the situation.
       Ram grins with a hope that stains the air between us. “I coming on that ship.”
       “Is not a ship boy. I came in a S.P.O.D…”
       “You could come in a box for all I care as long as we could take it to get out of here.”
       “We can’t.”
       “What? Why the fuck not?”
       “A S.P.O.D only has room for 1 passenger.”
       “Why the fuck would you come here with that?!” He lets go of me, pulls at his hair, scratches his head and paces in confused circles before he throws a right clenched fist at my nose. He throws another before I get time to react but the third blow I block and clock him across the face. He falls. Hard. I reach out, pleading with him to stop. Sitting up, he takes my hand. And when I relax, thinking it’s over, he pulls. Hard. I fall as he rises to his feet. I turn onto my back with anger bubbling in my chest. But in that split second, he throws his body at me and lands on my stomach with a thud. It knocks the wind out of me. I fart too loudly not to have shit myself. Then he straddles me and pounds his fists onto my face; now left and right, then left, then right. But I’m not done. I forget my military fighting skills and bite into his right thigh until he yelps. It loosens his grip as he tries to get my teeth out of his flesh and it gives me enough freedom to bring my knees to my chin and kick into his stomach with all the force I can muster. He goes flying back, back and backwards into the sinkhole.
       “Ram!” I scream, immediately regretting my failure to grab him. I crawl over to the hole’s mouth.“Ram!!” No answer. “Ramsingh!!” Nothing. A tug-o-war rope coils around my heart and as each end pulls it strangles the beating. Ram was my best man. “Oh God.” He just saved my life.

#

       Earth, as though to hurry me along, shifts. I almost lose my footing but I get away before the ground collapses. I run. I run to the house without stopping to indulge the salty tears that wash my bloody bruises.

#

       “Gloria!” I shout as I run up to the front door. I grab the doorknob. The fingerprint scanner reads my prints and it swings open. She didn’t change the locks. “Gloria!” I run through the house calling but there’s no answer. I run upstairs and open doors, shouting her name.
       “What?!”
       I hear a faint shout from outside. I peer through a large, open bedroom window and see Gloria downhill leaning against a shovel, looking toward the house dressed in a white tshirt, shorts that barely cover her bubble butt and too-big gardening boots. She looks younger than when I left her—clearly she’s been working out.
       “Gloria!” She looks up toward the window but doesn’t move.
       “What?!”
       But this woman mad?!
       I run down the stairs and out the house straight at her. I grab her hand. She drops the shovel as I pull her, running. “We have to get out of here! Now!” She struggles, pulls her hand out of my grasp and stops. “What is wrong with you? We have to go! Now!”
       “I not going anywhere.” She says calmly, bent over, trying to catch her breath.
       I look at her in complete amazement. She stands upright, takes a deep breath and starts back to where I first grabbed her. “Gloria! Don’t get me vex! Look! We going now!” Heated breath rushes out my flared nostrils, even my ears feel hot. I lunge behind her and grab her arm. She spins and slaps me across my painful face. She put all her weight behind that slap. Her heavy hand lands on my left cheek and throws my face to the right. In quick reaction I raise my free hand to retaliate but I catch myself. I release her from my grip and bring the hand I almost slap her with to my burning cheek. The coldness of my fingers cools the burn but not the anger.

       Gloria, seeing the monster in my eyes, steps backward without averting her gaze.
       “Augee…? What you doing here?” She inches closer to me.
       “Steups.” Although it’s a sound of annoyance and contempt, I reply calmly. “Don’t ask me no stupid question.” It’s been a while since she called me Augee.

       She reaches out and guides my hand off my face, then removes her gloves before gently caressing the area between my left jaw and neck. She blows onto my cheek. Anger flies out of me through every hair follicle, turbulence assembles in the pit of my stomach and charms fresh air to lift me but it’s not enough to topple me over. The kiss—the moment her lips touch my skin—does that. I fall head over heels and lose all sense.

       “I thought about you this morning. You ran across my mind…”
       “Gloria, the world is going to shit.”
       “I remember you loved homemade bread…” It was like she was in another world; distant, but nearby. “But you used to turn up your nose at mine for some reason. Hmmm… I have one in the house if you hungry. Wholewheat. I trying to eat healthy.” She ends with a giggle before moving past me toward the house. I turn and catch the last jiggle and shimmy that defines her natural but sensual walk, then she disappears inside. With eyes closed I take a few breaths, resolve to grab her—“She will cuss”—and get to the S.P.O.D. “Oh God, please let it be there.”
       I storm through the back door and she pounces, planting her warm lips on mine. Maybe it’s the pain but my heart begins to beat off key as my knees buckle. I try to ignore them and lift my wife into the air like she’s a feather. But she’s not. We fall awkwardly to the ground laughing. Lying under me, she divides her stare between my eyes and lips, locks her legs around my waist, arms latch atop my shoulders, around my neck and inches my head closer to hers. When our lips touch, it makes up every argument, every falling out.

#

       I cannot recall closing my eyes to sleep but I wake up in a daze, stupid drunk with joy. I turn on my side feeling for my wife but she’s not there and it jolts me back to reality: the world is about to end and I’m taking a nap!
       “Gloria!”
       “Hmmm.” Startled, I turn to the other side sharply and see her looking down at me with a small plate and mug of steam. “I made you a sandwich and some tea,” she volunteers, then carefully kneels on the floor before sitting.
       “Forget that. Where’s my uniform? We…”
       “It’s filthy. I threw it out. I put a jeans and t-shirt there for you.” She tilts her chin in the direction of the couch before placing the plate and cup on the wooden floor.
       “You…? What?” How long was I sleeping?
       “You passed out when I was cleaning your bruises.” She responds as though she can hear my thoughts. But that’s impossible.
       “Go put on some pants.” I jump up and grab the ones she put out for me. “And your sneakers.” I remember these pants. “We have to go. Now.”
       “I told you already I’m not going anywhere.”
       Exasperation, from the pit of my stomach, rises like hot air, puffing out my chest. “Look woman I done talk! We are leaving! You really trying to get me blasted vex…” I continue, speaking more to myself, to the world, than to Gloria. “Shit! I was feeling good not even a minute ago…”
       “August I am not one of your sailor people.” She butts in defiantly. “You cannot tell me what to do.”
       And then it erupts; an upsurge more volatile than the storms that begat the beginning of the end. Thunder and lightning are tame comparisons to Gloria and I in this argument. Veins pop on foreheads, fingers wag in faces, words are thrown like stones at mangoes on a laden tree, voices grow louder and louder and rumble more than any earthquake or crashing tsunami until the house sways and groans. I stop and collapse onto the couch when what I really want to do, is grab Gloria and run. So, I let her win and admit in defeat, “We’re not going back together.”
       She doesn’t notice.
       I rock my head back—as her argument enters a time machine, travelling through past hurts and betrayals—close my eyes and count my breaths before repeating, “We’re not going back together.”
       “What?” She laughs more to herself than out loud; a laugh that reveals her you-are-a-piece-of-work-just-incredulous opinion of me. “So you change your mind?”
       “The S.P.O.D only has room for one.” The look on her face is revealing; I know I have her. I turn to face her as she sits next to me. “I was going to put you on it.”
       Oh yes, she’s mine now.
       “And what about you?” Her stare meets my own as it slices through the worry in her eyes.
       “It was for you not me.”
       “Ok. Okay!” She shouts, jumps up and runs upstairs. Then down the steps tumbles one side of a shoe, closely followed by the other. She stumbles after them pulling on a pair of pants, offering that we go together. “I could sit on your lap as we fly to the moon!”
       “We’ll run out of air before we get there!” I declare, springing to my feet, caught up in her exuberance.
       “Well then we look for that ‘cause we were both planning on dying apparently.” She has the cutest giggle but when it erupts into a full laugh, as it does now, the hook of the happy sound reels me in and I laugh too, sometimes without even knowing why.
       “I rather argue and fight everyday than live a quiet life without you.”
       “Don’t get sappy on me I already said I will go. Or… we could just stay here until the end and I could find some work for you to do?”
       “For me? Unlike you I went to work this morning.”
       She laughs, pulling on the last side of her automatic lacing sneakers. “Let’s go if we going.” Then looks around at the house she’s lived in her entire life with a sadness so pervasive, I feel it. I lived here once too but unlike her, I left. I will drag her out – I swear – kicking and screaming if I have to. 
       “Let’s go Gloria.” I say with less empathy than I should have. “There’s no guarantee the S.P.O.D is still there.”

#

       There’s no ground for metres in front of us; like an incubus raped the front yard and left a gaping hole. I stand on the front porch, holding Gloria’s hand, immovable; in shock at how quickly and quietly the world can shift.
       “Let’s just go back…” I don’t wait for her to finish, I grab her hand and run through the house to and out of the back door. We make it out just before the house croaks and tumbles into oblivion.
       There’s no turning back now.

#

       The route to the Uriah Butler Highway, where I parked the S.P.O.D, twists with danger and panic. I remember years gone when Gloria and I walked this way to the shops. Steam—which once escaped through the coloured concrete, even during the day–diffused and tinted the warm, golden light of the tropical sun. Now, everything burns with a raging, unquenchable fire that we cannot get around.
       So, we try going under.
       I locate the hatch to C3’s tunnels but cautious that the inferno may have fused the steel door to its hinges, I touch its keypad with my t-shirt gloved over my hand. I quickly side step the small explosion, pull Gloria and run. How can we get above this blaze? As the panicked question tumbles across my brain and bounces from ear to ear, Gloria stops to catch her breath.
“August… I can’t… I just… can’t… do this…”
       The man-made pristine beauty of city architecture versus the chaos and wild abandon of tropical plants always appealed to me. Gloria though is opposite. Her prediction that the world will either take back her spaces or we will destroy them in an effort to tame them is coming true. I fight against it to survive it but she, she’s always known that mankind’s stupidity would lead to this. In her head, we’ve already lost; we lost a long time ago.
       “…This not making sense…”
       “We can’t stay here Glori…”
       “We don’t have a choice…” She interrupts.
       I’m too resolute to argue. I grab her and run.
       “August!” She yells. “AUGUST STOP!”
       “Gloria we…”
       “LOOK!” She points to a Ferrari Kite. The 7 seater vehicle is too lightweight for space travel but it may be able to get us to the S.P.O.D on the other side of the blaze.
       When we approach, worried people jitter around it, while a novice looks under the hood, trying to get the doors open.
       Not any and everybody can fly a Kite; luckily I can.
       “Hey buddy…” Every-man-jack brandishes a weapon at our heads. “Whoa whoa… We just want a ride and I know how to fly this thing… I can help… Promise.”
       Just then, the roar of the approaching fire pelts flames in our direction. In desperation I lunge for the engine, find the fail safe and pop the doors open. Easy. Everyone but Gloria and I jump in. I ask her to help me look for the hidden keyboard to initiate the override so the computer won’t shut down the vehicle. Not so easy. The LED countdown appears on the underside of the hood, the computer starts its shutdown sequence.
       “Hey what’s this?!” The novice shouts from inside.
       “Gimme five minutes.”
       “Two minutes thirty seconds.” The cruel computer voice announces in reply.
       “Fuck you.”
       “Augee… is this it?”
       “Yes!” I shout looking into the engine and not at her. I turn to grab my wife by the shoulders and kiss her excitedly but the novice is standing next to her with a gun at her head. He couldn’t be more than 19; a skinny kid with a nose too big for his face, wearing greasy Petrotrin—Trinidad’s state-owned oil company—overalls. “I could fix it! Promise! No need for this. I
could fix it.” I plead before typing, reading and responding to the Kite’s MS DOS at breakneck speed. Until,
       “Hello Captain Walker. Where are we off to today?”
       “Well we don’t need you anymore…”
       “You can’t fly this without me and I’m not flying it without her.”
       “Captain Walker, please state your destination.”
       “It’s not going anywhere unless I tell it to. So… let’s just forget all this…” Slowly, he lowers his weapon.
       “Richie boy what you doing?! Let’s go!” An anxious female passenger inside the Kite shouts. She doesn’t know Richie is looking for his death out here.
       “We can all get out of here Richie is it?… Together.” I edge him on.
       “Ok.” Richie replies. “Let’s go. Put your hands up where I can see them. No funny business…”
       “Captain Walker, please state your destination.”
       Gloria and I enter the vehicle ahead of Richie who has the gun at our backs. I slide into the pilot seat and Richie rides shut gun. Gloria and another female passenger sit on the floor.
       “Captain Walker. There are 2 unauthorised passengers in the vehicle. Please ask them to exit the vehicle.” And the left side door opens.
       I look at Richie, who glares at me fully understanding the implication; two people must get out or the Kite isn’t going to move. With the fire imminent, I expose the dashboard keyboard without admitting I don’t know how to fix this. I type and think and try not to show any panic, but the heartless voice repeating: “Captain Walker. There are 2 unauthorised passengers in the vehicle. Please ask them to exit the vehicle” makes it impossible.
       Suddenly it changes. “Captain Walker. There is 1 unauthorised passenger in the vehicle. Please ask him or her to exit the vehicle.”
       I turn sharply. “Gloria!” I drop the keyboard in my haste to exit but Richie blocks the way, pointing his gun at my head. I turn my whole body toward the doorway where the love of my life is standing telling me to leave her.
       “Augee go. You go. You’re needed.” She smiles sheepishly at my loss for words. “My life is here. It have nothing up there for me.”
       In response and quick succession, I hold onto Richie’s gun barrel with my left hand, push it away and strike the boy under his chin with a right uppercut. He flies back into the seat. The other passengers cower as I run past them and leap out of the vehicle shouting, “Autopilot! City Terminus!” The doors close and the Kite lifts into the air. On impulse, I draw Gloria into my arms, hoist her up to grab onto the Kite’s skids, then jump up to do the same. Here we balance, holding fast, as it rises up and out and over our burning world.

#

       Gloria’s eyes look like a window’s glass during a light rain; the drizzle pools at the base then overflows, running out onto her cheeks. I hug the skid and shout for her to follow suit. She does. Awkwardly. But she does. I see her struggling, so I wrap my legs around her. I feel her shiver and pray we make it to the other side; to the Uriah Butler Highway, smack-dab between C3 and the City Terminus, where I parked the S.P.O.D. But when we get high enough, all I see is ocean rushing in, fires blazing and land tumbling over rotisserie style. No City Terminus. No Highway. No S.P.O.D.
       “Can you imagine you and me on one spaceship?” Gloria asks then blows a short chuckle out her nose. The world Gloria lives in must be nice; it’s so separate from reality. I smile and I nod.
       “Liar.” She retorts. So, I kiss her. Softly. Gently. She whispers, “I love you” tracing the words with her lips against mine, before letting go. My legs hold onto her so she doesn’t fall but she slips. And slips some more. I groan from the exertion but I will never let go. “It’s over babe.” She says, her last goodbye before she raises her arms and slides away.
       “Nooooo!” I scream and let go simultaneously. I don’t notice my death waiting, only Gloria as she freefalls into the pure rage below. Why did I abandon her—so beautiful yet so fragile? Why did I wait until the last minute to try to get her back?

—END—

Rae-ann Smith is a teacher, filmmaker, writer and photographer. She has won a Merit Certificate and 3rd Bronze Medal in Photography from the Jamaica Cultural Development Commission’s National Visual Arts Festival. She earned Honourable Mention in The 2009 CANTEEN Awards in Poetry and Fiction, screened at The 2011 Trinidad and Tobago Film Festival, The 2011 San Diego Christian Film Festival, The 2011 Africa International Film Festival, The 2012 San Diego Black Film Festival, The 5th Samsung Women’s International Film Festival (SWIFF) in Chennai, India, The 2012 No More Violence Against Women Film Festival (India) as well as The 2012 International Film Festival for Peace, Inspiration, Equality in Indonesia. She also has photographs in VOLUME TWO // ISSUE ONE of TRACK//FOUR Journal. And she was shortlisted for the 2016 Small Axe Literary Competition. She is currently the Programme Coordinator for the Bachelor of Fine Arts (BFA) in Film Production at the Caribbean School of Media and Communication (CARIMAC) The University of the West Indies Mona Campus.

Filmography: http://www.imdb.com/name/nm3132061/
Portfolio: https://uplift-group.com/portfolio/
Teaching portfolio: http://raeannsmith.webnode.com/

 

 BACK TO ISSUE

 BACK TO FOLIO

Ayanna Gillian Lloyd

Sea Change

The four of us watched as the white man drove his truck right onto the beach. It stuck out with its slick, red paint job as it ground its way down, leaving ragged trenches deep enough to fall into. We’d grown used to the little off-road jeeps that we sometimes saw climbing through the bush, weaving their way inland to the waterfalls. Those guys knew the space and understood the rules. None of them would have driven directly onto the sand during nesting season.

       We were regulars on St. Madeline Bay – Junior, Keisha, Micah and me. Used to be that the whole coastline was wild, and the only people here were the villagers who looked after the turtles when they came to nest, a few conservationists from the University, and us. Not anymore. Now we had to go past the big colourful umbrellas and the picnic spreads to get to our little corner of the bay.

       On our side the sand was a dirtier white, the sea almond trees were broad and shady and with every step to the ocean’s edge the terrain underfoot changed. First was the silvery dirt of the shortcut from the road, then the scraggly patches of seaweed and sticky moss that grew on bits of sharp rock or smooth driftwood, then a stretch of coarse sand growing deeper brown closer to the shoreline.

       We could lie under the trees, sit with our backs against the rough, rocky cliff face or lie on the sand. And we didn’t need signs to tell us not to drive on the beach because it was turtle season; we just knew. Although we were from town, and not the little village nearby, we had long figured out how to fit into its rhythm.

       Micah glared at the red pickup truck and grumbled, “White people.” He took a last drag of his cigarette and dropped the butt into the empty beer bottle that we had stuck into the sand as a temporary ashtray. His long, skinny body was folded up into itself, knees almost reaching past his shoulders, back leaning against the tree trunk, pale brown skin a fraction darker than usual.

       Keisha laughed at him as her slender fingers rolled the spliff and put it aside in the Ziploc bag with the others.
“Micah, you know you white too, right?”

       “I tell you to stop that shit. I not white.”

       Keisha snorted.

       Micah’s face got a little redder despite his tan “You know is the expats I talking about Keisha – the foreign kinda white, the rich people kinda white. Acting like if the place belong to them.”

       Keisha raised her eyebrows and Junior laughed. “Leave the man nah Keisha. You know Micah sensitive.”

       I smiled and listened to them go at it like they had been for the better part of fifteen years. Micah was the only white person we knew that had a problem with being white. No matter how long we had known each other, he still got heated about the joke and Keisha never stopped making it. She couldn’t forget the way Micah’s father had looked at her when Micah had brought her home, calling her his girlfriend when they’d first dated years ago. Me and Junior didn’t like the way he looked at us either, but we let it go. Plenty things in life you can’t help. Your father is one of them.

       “If allyuh going to argue…” Junior interrupted in his slow drawl and reached over me to Keisha’s lap for the Ziploc bag. We both knew that when Keisha and Micah got going it could be a while. She and Micah’s on-again, off-again relationship was just part of the landscape; it might change from day to day, but it was always there.

       When you were friends for as long as the four of us had been there were always things you didn’t talk about, little things you just couldn’t help – like Micah’s dad for instance – and it didn’t make sense talking them to death. But today I wondered about this tendency of ours. The way we talked about some things and not others, the way the years rolled over the things we didn’t mention, covered up in teasing.

       Micah was still carrying on about people who drove on beaches where turtles nested when he let out a triumphant laugh.

       “Look!” He pointed in the direction of the truck. “Stacey, look at the truck.”

       I looked over. The idiot was stuck in the sand. “Yeah, well. No off road tires. Sand too deep on this side.”

       “Even if he had off-road tires, he not supposed to be driving on the beach!” Micah grumbled. He stood up to get a better look at the truck, shaking his head every time the engine turned over and the tires whirred, spraying sand. Any second now Micah would launch into a tirade about people who didn’t give a damn about the nesting area but then came turtle watching at night and posted pictures to their Instagram to show off to their friends, like if they really cared.

       I glanced over at Keisha so we could roll our eyes together at Micah, but she didn’t look my way. Instead she rooted around in the Ziploc bag then cupped her hands around the spliff to light it, guarding it from the breeze. Her hair had fallen over her forehead and we sat close enough that I could see the tiny grains of sand in her curls. She took a deep pull and slowly exhaled. The sunlight created little flecks in her eyes that most people wouldn’t see otherwise. They usually looked plain brown behind her glasses, but she wasn’t wearing them today and when the light hit them, then they were hazel, even a little green.

       I turned away and looked at the ocean instead. She hadn’t said a word to me all day. We were sitting next to each other like we’d done countless times before, but she wouldn’t meet my eyes.

       “Micah!” She called him over, took one more pull and instead of passing to me who was closest to her on her left, passed it to Micah and then scooted backward away from me, stretched her body out on the sand, propped herself up on her elbows and continued staring at the ocean. If Micah noticed the breach in etiquette he didn’t let on but since Micah hardly ever noticed anything that wasn’t right in front of his face, I doubted it. I mean, I loved Micah, we’d been friends forever, but once he got in his feelings about something it took a while for him to come back to earth.

       Junior was a different story. He glanced at me and then his eyes flicked in Keisha’s direction. He was usually quiet and seemed slow to process, especially when he was minding the rum bottle, but nothing got past him.

       “Here, Stace,” Micah reached over and passed the spliff to me and whatever Junior might have said was lost.

       We sat in silence. The truck man was taking turns surveying his tires that were halfway deep in sand and jumping in the driver’s seat trying unsuccessfully to get some traction going.

       “You wait and see,” Micah said, “It will be us he going to ask to help him push his truck out of the sand. Lemme see how long it take for him to figure it out.”

       Micah lit a second spliff while the rum bottle made the rounds. Junior had joined Keisha and was now lying on the sand, his head resting on a rolled-up towel. I was the only one on edge, glad that the truck man’s predicament and our buzz provided a good cover for my mood.

       I was sure that Junior had picked up on Keisha’s coldness toward me. He’d kept looking at me on the drive over too when Keisha let him sit in the passenger seat while she sat in the back with Micah. Keisha usually rode shotgun because she liked to control the music selection. But today she’d made a beeline for the backseat and said nothing about the tunes. Even though he was in relax mode laying on the said, I imagined I could feel his eyes boring into my back. Junior had a way of looking at a person with that calm quiet that made them want to spill all their secrets and I didn’t want that gaze turned on me now.

       We were all high, drunk and splayed out in the sand when from behind us, came the unmistakable sounds of another vehicle ploughing its way through the bushy short cut. “Let’s hope it’s another pickup and they have rope” drawled Junior, “Truck man is fucked.”

       It was a large, dark navy SUV, windows tinted, no plates, and as it approached the driver rolled down the window. A clean-shaved, bald-headed man squinted at us from the driver’s seat. Shit. Police.

       We knew better than to scramble. Keisha imperceptibly passed the Ziploc bag to Junior and he stuffed it under the driftwood. Micah pulled himself up making him the most visible one of the group.

       The front door of the SUV creaked open, but the man remained in the driver’s seat, looked at us and deliberately shifted his body just enough so even from where we sat we could we see the piece tucked in his waistband. A second later the back door opened and two giggling girls in bikinis came stumbling out, one clutching a bottle of puncheon.

       The man climbed out of the front seat and the group of three crossed the berm and walked out onto the sand near to our tree. He was big and tall with a high, round belly. Everything about him just screamed ‘officer’. He could have been my dad’s age and the girls with him looked way younger than we did. He looked at Micah and Junior and they nodded in the mysterious way men nod at each other.

       “What going on over there?” he asked, pointing with his chin to the truck with the geyser of sand now spraying into the pickup’s cargo tray.

       “Stick,” Micah replied, “Idiot was driving on the beach.”

       “But them is not off-road tires.”

       “Same thing I say.”

       The air around us eased. We were obviously high, and he was obviously an armed, on-duty officer with two under-aged girls in his police vehicle. All cards face up; everyone could relax. Micah and Junior got up and the guys walked off and stood together staring in the direction of the truck, discussing off-road tires and traction and the depth of sand. The two girls didn’t approach us but stuck to themselves, leaning against the SUV trying to look cool. I wondered if we had ever been that young.

       Keisha and I were alone under the sea almond tree. She sat up and scooched closer to me. I had been sitting in the same position so long trying to avoid looking at her that my back hurt, but I didn’t dare move. The drama of the truck, the policeman, the girls, even the boys faded into the periphery. All I could hear were the waves and my own breathing.

       “So, we ever going to talk about what happened?”
Keisha didn’t turn to look at me as she spoke. She kept staring in the direction of the boys. The driver had finally realised he wasn’t alone and began the long walk over to ask for help.

       “I didn’t think you wanted to talk about it. I called…”

       “You called to ask if I needed a drop by Junior.”

       “Yeah, but I called. I didn’t know if…”
I didn’t know what else to say.

       Keisha sat cross-legged, her hair surrounding her head like its own black sun, her face in shadow. She flicked the lighter off and on watching the flame die in the wind then reached over again for Micah’s bag, took out his cigarettes and lit two, one for me and one for her. She finally turned around properly to face me, handed me a cigarette and leaned in to light it. It was the closest we’d come to each other all day, and as she leaned away from me to light her own, the smoke curled in the space between our faces until the breeze snatched it away.

       “Listen, let’s not make this a big thing, ok?” she said looking off toward the ocean “If you want to forget about it, cool. We were drunk.”

       “Drunk…”

       “Well, whatever it was. If you want to forget it…”

       I couldn’t read her face. Did she want to forget it, or did she just think that I did? “What about Micah?” I asked

       “Micah?”

       “You and Micah still have this… thing. You always on his case and he looks at you, you know, still. And he’s my best friend too.”

       She looked away. I put the cigarette out in the sand.

       A small crowd had gathered across the way. A few more people had come walking down the beach, observing the commotion. It seemed the truck was about to get moving after all. Junior, Micah, the officer, the driver and a few of the newcomers were fiddling around with rope and a hook and gesturing from the pickup truck to the police vehicle. Finally, the engine revved and they all heaved. The truck rocked in place. They tried again, and the truck rocked a little farther. Then with one last mighty push, the truck dislodged from the deep impressions it had made in the sand and slowly, slowly reversed until it was pulled to sturdier ground.

       Junior and Micah came back, chatting about the truck and the police and his girls. Keisha began packing things into her bag and I followed her lead looking around for bits of trash, butts, bottles, anything we might have left. I was never so glad that the rum was done and that we’d be getting on our way soon.

       “What’s that smell?” Micah asked suddenly, “Sun raise something nasty in the bush boy. Smell like something dead.”

       He looked around and sniffed the air. I could smell it now too. Something about the smell was different though. It was rotting, yes, like something that had been dead for days – strange that we hadn’t smelled it before – but it also smelled like the sea.

       “Look” Junior said softly and pointed out to the ocean. Something was floating out there, still a long way off but coming in to the shore. It looked like a boat, but it didn’t bob about lightly like an overturned pirogue would. God, was it a man? Maybe bloated and swollen till it looked nothing like a man at all. We started walking up the beach for a better look. The truck driver and the other people that had helped him had noticed too and were pointing in the same direction. They too began walking toward the thing that was floating in the sea.

       More and more people gathered, this time from even further up the beach. Small children hung on to their parents who stood looking out at the thing. People covered their noses with towels. The smell was worse every time the wind shifted. What was it? And then the answer hit me. At the same time, it seemed to hit a few other people in the gathering crowd. I could hear the word being murmured all around.

       It was a giant leatherback turtle, dead and floating toward the beach in the ripe heat of the afternoon. We stood together, Micah, Keisha, Junior and me watching the grisly sight, all of us wanting to leave but unable to look away. All was forgotten – the arrogance of white people, the corruption of police officers, the heat of the day, even the way my heart hurt when I thought of Keisha and Micah together, all that was left was the dead thing floating inexorably closer to shore.

       There’d been a night, years ago just before we had all gone off to University. We had come here together to St. Madeline’s Bay to watch the turtles lay their eggs. Micah had been really into the turtles even then and he’d dragged us along, swearing that it was going to be one of those unforgettable, once-in-a-lifetime things, circle of life and all that. The four of us rode in the back of the maxi, stoned out of our minds, shrieking with laughter at the flattened hair of the girl that sat in the seat in front of us, the terrible gospel music played by the driver and Micah’s futile attempts to get us to quiet down and take the whole thing seriously and read the guide book before he collapsed in giggles again.

       We walked along the beach huddled in our jackets against the chill night air and stuck close together. I held on to Junior – he had the flask and the most body heat – and Micah and Keisha were wrapped up in each other like they’d always been. We couldn’t hear a word the guide was saying so we just followed along with the group and awaited the arrival of the turtles. Micah said they’d been coming to this beach every year for thousands of years, following a rhythm agreed upon between their turtle ancestors, the waves, and the shore.

       We waited and waited. Hours passed. The moon rose high and then dipped behind a bank of cloud, but no turtles came. It got colder, and the flask got emptier. Junior was calm as ever, but Micah seemed to be irritated that the outing was not going according to plan. Then there she was. Her back was a black dome in the moonless night. She moved through the surf, making her long, slow way inland through the gentle rolling waves.  Micah was thrilled. He abandoned us and bounded away to stand close to the tour guide. Junior had had enough. He sat on the sand, bundled up in his jacket and promptly fell asleep.

       But I remember feeling suddenly very young, very silly and very sober. I looked over at Keisha then and saw the same expression on her face that was probably on mine. I couldn’t explain it, not even then. But I guess it was a kind of sadness, an awareness that in the face of something that was so old, we were smaller than we could ever have imagined. In the grand scheme of things, we really only mattered only to each other and sometimes even that was very little.

       The sun beat down on us and the smell of death rode the air. None of us wanted to be there when the corpse reached the shore so we turned away and started walking back up the beach. I wondered if anyone else remembered that night years ago when we’d seen the most magnificent creature that ever was.

The boys walked on ahead, and Keisha quickened her pace to catch up with them. I watched her go and then called to her, “Keish…”

She paused but didn’t turn around.

“This could change everything, you know that, right?”

She still didn’t turn but I knew she was listening.

“We could fuck everything up, you and me. The four of us, everything could change.”

The waves continued crashing on the shore, but Keisha stood silent. I took a deep breath. It was a bad idea; the stench of death was everywhere. Somehow it made me brave. Maybe it made me reckless.

“I don’t want to forget it happened.”

She finally turned around and looked up at me, her face grave and unsmiling. We fell in step with each other and walked on.

Ayanna Gillian Lloyd is a fiction writer from Trinidad & Tobago. She received the second-place prize in the Small Axe Literary Competition and was shortlisted for the Wasafiri New Writing Prize. Her work has been published in The Caribbean Writer; Moko Magazine; Small Axe; Poui; PREE; and Callaloo. She is a graduate of the MA in Creative Writing from the University of East Anglia, and is now a postgraduate researcher in Creative-Critical Writing at UEA. She is at work on her first novel.

 

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Reuel Ben Lewi

Flood

It was a Sunday. December.
Not May. Rain falling,
can’t remember when rain
reigned four long days
and nights over watery Paradise.
Streets and drains
succumb to primeval deluge.
East Coast flood plains
became one huge swathe
for useless galoshes.
What can anyone do
in this unfathomable fault?
Wet dreams, our only hope.

Reuel Ben Lewi is a Guyanese poet/ dramatist and a former teacher at the Buxton Community High School, Georgetown, Guyana. He read Sociology at the University of Guyana and has published in Poui, Guyana Christmas Annual, Timbucktu, Sx Salon, Xavier Review, The Dalhousie Review, Moko Magazine, Caribbean Reads.Anthology: Where I see the sun: contemporary poetry in Anguilla (House Of Nehesi Publishers, 2015).

 

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Manuel Aragon

a violent noise

You have always been traveling, on the edge of the wind, even before you were born; a speck of dust thrust across the universe by the explosion of SN-1054; a sky illuminated, blues and greens dancing in the night, traveling at light-speed into the eyes of women and men, transformed onto paintings on walls; light beyond light, a new beginning; life, death, and the cosmic all wrapped into one; a trail of you, stardust, aged for perfection. Eras universal. A painting on a wall in a canyon you visited as a child, your hand perfectly aligned with a hand on the wall. You felt like you had been here before. You placed your hand against it, the rock pressed against your hand; a few grains of sand knocked loose. Nothing is eternal and even fewer things leave more than an echo. Your mother, you heard her in the distance calling your name. You closed your eyes, hoping to disappear, but she found you, her hands imprinted upon you, her fingers leaving traces like birds’ wings on your shirt.

You have always been moving, hard to pin down, like neurons shooting, faster than light, firing on full, across the pathway of a brain, nonstop, since before you could even walk; full strides, longer than your little legs could manage, much more than you could take; full-on sprinting - the blood of the Rarámuri running through veins, pushing your muscles for miles at a time. Running out that door after the argument with your mom and dad, racing the cars down the street; if you had wings you would have taken flight and moved away. You ended up at the park down the street, swaying back and forth on a swing, watching the changing of the sky, from blue, to orange, purplish-pink. What was that argument even about? You walked home, your path lit by stars.

You have always been prone to outbursts; your mind filled with wisdom from los antiguos, trying hard to escape from your heart through your vocal chords into the world. At times, frustration, a violent noise, bursting forth into the world. You have been blessed with un regalo y la lacra. One morning on your way to school a group of girls was waiting for you. Laura had been spreading chisme amongst them, telling them that you were trying to get with Julian, Ramona’s boyfriend. The girls rushed towards you, and you threw your backpack down. You don’t remember the fight, only the guttural screams you let out.

You have always existed, in a way, always been around, a genetic memory come to life, a story that was passed down. Your mother’s thick hair, father’s smile, grandfather’s sense of humor, and abuela’s smarts. 

You have always felt like you were thrust upon your familia, un dificultad, especialmente para tu mama, who barely survived you. She took every opportunity to remind you of this; as your held her hand, you taking your first steps, smiling at her, a giggle escaping your lips, the sour look upon her face; as you held her hand, trying to comfort her when your abuelita didn’t wake up that one morning, your hands in her hair, your tears and gasps filling in the blank spaces of the room, her eyes burning through you; mientras sostienes su mano, her turquoise ring sliding off her middle finger, patches of what once was full, luscious black hair, waves that you used to swim across in your bed at night to put you to sleep, your arms doubled around her body, the cancer eating away at her, “Look at you. ¿Cómo puedes ser mi hija?” she whispers, while trying to squeeze your hand with all her might, in what you had hoped were not her final words. As you gave the eulogy as her funeral, you were reminded of her omnipotence; the power cut out, the microphone turned off. Once again, she had silenced you.

You remember, vaguely, when you were seven or eight, sitting on your father’s lap, as he tells your brother, “Cuídala, porque serás responsable de lo que hace.” Watch her. You’re responsible for what she does. You were fast, curious, and impulsive. That same night, you saw your father packing up a mochilla, preparing for a meeting. You never asked him where he was going or who he was planning to meet. 

You have always known how this comes to an end. You should have seen it coming, but your body was two strides ahead of your mind.

Your first brush came as you went for a bike ride, your brother in front, leading you down 32nd Street, moving between the sidewalk and street, the click-clack-click-clack-click of your spokes, him glancing over his shoulder to make sure you were following, his hair flapping in the wind, the polyphonic melody created by your two laughs morphing into one.

In the distance, you saw him, a man, a white man, pale, with shining not-green, not-blue eyes, blocking your path. You shouted to your brother, causing him to swerve and fall off his bike. You glanced again and the pale man wasn’t there. “What was that? Why’d you do that?” he screamed at you.

“You didn’t see him?”

“See who?”

“The man in the suit.”

He looked around. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.” 

You helped your brother brush off, headed home, while tears streamed down your face.

You looked back, and there he was, the man, smiling at you.

You clearly remember, irrefutably, your brother, inviting you to a party, when you were fifteen. “This shit is going to be off the hook. You in?” he said. “Claro que si,” you said, because you were always down for some pendejadas, always looking to get into some stupid shit. And you knew he would always protect you, like he did, from that pale man.

The two of you walked down Lipan, making your way slowly towards 38th, the sidewalks covered in snow, the two of you choosing to walk down the freshly plowed street instead. You couldn’t risk getting your Saturday night finest dirty. A car moved towards the two of you, flashing their headlights, trying to blind you. Carlitos waved his hands in the air and laughed. “That punk ass. It’s Beto.”

You weren’t laughing. There had always been an ever-present fear surrounding you since that bike ride.

You had never really talked to Beto, but Carlitos—you have always called him Carlitos, while everyone else called him Carlos, later just ‘Los—had told you all about him. Beto’s parents had owned a chain of restaurants throughout Denver, six or seven of them, a rarity for someone from your neighborhood. Beto siempre tuvo the best toys; his parents, the coolest rides.

Carlos had been there, at Beto’s tenth birthday party, the night that Roberto Sr. had killed his wife, Señorita Carmen. The kids had all been outside, a bounce castle in the backyard, a handful of them playing catch with a Denver Broncos superstar, whom you later found out was a frequent customer of Roberto Sr.’s other business, when the shots rang out through the neighborhood. Your mom and dad ran out of the house, down the street in search of the gunshots, passing by you, leaving you unattended.

You waited, hours or minutes, bouncing your ball, waiting for them to come back. Your dad carried your brother home, a stream down both of their faces. Had your father ever cried before? Your mom sat on the curb, watching as the cops pulled up and arrested Roberto, as they took away a body on a gurney, you bouncing the ball next to her the whole time.

You remember the picture of Señorita Carmen upon your family’s ofrenda, her dress the same color as the cempasuchil, both popping off the shelf. Following Día de Muertos, your mom would let you take some of the flowers down and let you drop them off a bridge, an offering to those who had been forgotten. You and Carlitos would walk down to the railyard bridge off of 46th and drop the Aztec marigolds on the backs of passing trains.

Carlitos makes his way into the street, towards the driver’s side of the car while you wait. Beto and Carlos laugh and shake hands. Carlos talks, longer than he needs to.

You could hear it, the fooo-pheww of the siren clicking on and off, the lights flashing as the cops turned down the street, illuminating the vapor of your breath moving in slow motion across the air, Quetzalcoatl flowing in the darkness.

“What are you guys up to?” says the officer, his flashlight scanning across Carlos, the boys in the car, their silhouettes shouting out to you for help. You remember temporary paralysis, your body unable to move.

The second officer slowly gets out of the car, his flashlight mounted to top of his gun, drawn, fixed on you. You have always known the man would find you, because he had always been there, always waiting, always present. Siempre ha tenido una cantidad de tiempo finita. And there he was.

The second officer yells to you, asking you to get out of the way of the car.

Carlitos moves towards you, telling the officer, “She’s okay.” His head turns to you, always looking to let you know that things would be okay. Then he falls to the ground. Your ears ring, your heart so loud that it blocks out as you hold him in your arms trying your hardest to squeeze life back into him, to see his eyes recognize you again.

You scream, your eyes shut, as one of the officers shouts at you.

“Shut the fuck up!” He tries to pull you away, your shirt covered with remnants of life from your brother, but you struggle to hold on. You hear a man shouting, “What have you done to that boy?” and the officer lets you go. You look around, neighbors standing on their porches, cell phones in hand. The police helicopter floats overhead, the sound reminding you of a hummingbird, fluttering and quivering.

One night near Carlitos’ birthday you dreamt of a field, covered in Cempasuchil, all different colors, radiant like the sun. You walked along the field and laid down. When you awoke, you had turned into a flower, all the colors combined, perched on a hilltop. A tiny hummingbird approached, its wings vibrating and pulsating, and landed on you.

Manuel Aragon is a writer and filmmaker from Denver, CO. He is currently working on Norteñas, a collection of short stories centered in the Northside, a Mexican and Mexican-American centered part of Denver, and the people, ghosts, and demons that live there.

 

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Kate Schapira

12/9

                                                             Stayed
with 2 climatologists and they walked me through
multiple scenarios. All very stark. I won’t
describe for you because I worry what
you’ll do if I do. Jenna said it seems like you,
letter, should just kill yourself and I said
that seemed like a copout, like oh
it’s easier to imagine being dead than to imagine
changing. We were at the antiques mall
lifting old things and putting them down
till we ran out of steam. We can always imagine
driving into a powdery sunset, low flare
like a relic we notice without information.
Every tiny darkening will be a letter.
Every hint of rot will be a letter.
Is a letter now, age spot drawn on by hand.
In my dream someone was saying how much
they love trees marked with a rot that looks
like the mark of fire and I knew it was a dream
because it wasn’t me: I don’t feel guilty
about not wanting to manage the night.

12/10

                                                             Stayed
with 2 climatologists and they walked me through
multiple scenarios. All very stark. I won’t
describe for you. Maybe I’ll just explain it in
a really blank way: how thing used to mean
meeting and how that reminds me that people
in a song called a strike meeting and I didn’t
know what that was and still don’t know why it’s
called a strike, is it like a strike at the root
of a plant you don’t want in your life,
nightshade camped in the gutter ruining
not everything, but the gutter: the thing
I like about that is
it sets you up as a garden with self-interest
and its pleasant cells only some of the things
in it, but not the whole thing—anyway only
one other person came to the meeting
and the nightshade tapped its root deep down
and I felt what it felt, not guilt,
but the name of the night.

12/12

                                                             Stayed
with 2 climatologists and they walked me through
multiple scenarios. All very stark. I won’t
describe for you, because I can’t without calling
myself the kind of names you’re not supposed to
put in the world. It’s like I have to
be vicious and I can’t to you, but to myself—
it’s like that, but it’s not that.
I’m vicious to you all the time in the course
of my lawful occasions, my meetings and partings,
my perfectly loving and generous actions in the short
distance that still can’t be wholesome
to you, a word that to hear
brings an aching for you to stitch yourself up
around my hands, letter by letter and law
by law I didn’t make but only find,
the laws that make you up and might let you
shake me off and move on. If you do, please
don’t feel guilty about not wanting to manage the night.

12/13

                                                             Stayed
with 2 climatologists and they walked me through
multiple scenarios. All very stark. I won’t
describe for you. I don’t want coffee but it’s one
of my chores so I make it and try to remember that later
I’ll be writing to ask you: what would your life be like
if it was a quarter better? How about a
quarter worse? How would you ask that
to someone whose math was not that great? I want
our math to split for you. I want to sag it out of how
we are into a catenary. Coffee
tastes how I’d expect it to: full of injury.
My stack of things to do for the current order
is so high, my list so long. In the current
dragging other orders under first, and further,
I don’t feel guilty about not wanting to
manage the night.

Kate Schapira lives in Providence, RI, where she writes, teaches, co-runs the Publicly Complex reading series, and offers Climate Anxiety Counseling. Her sixth book of poems, FILL: A Collection, a collaboration with Erika Howsare, is out with Trembling Pillow Press. Her prose has appeared in The Toast, the Rumpus, Catapult, and as a chapbook with Essay Press, Time to Be Something Other Than Human.

 

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