POSTS

Erline

Here is the place. The silent young couple at the table, postures guarded. The mother, tall and gaunt, looming like a specter in corners and breathing down their necks. The cluttered half of the kitchen table that has long been relegated to disuse, piled with coupon books and mugs and the lumps of carefully-wrapped half-sucked lozenges and abandoned knitting and dust-clogged locks of baby hair and a purple smear of jam, attracting ants. The dog wedged beneath the coffee table, obsessively licking a spot on the rug where a piece of pork belly was dropped years before, when she was a long-eared puppy and was treated gently. The children who play quietly, nervously on the rug, setting down their plastic blocks with great precision, making no noise. 

The young woman at the table, pressing her husband’s shoe with her toes, eyes unfocused. She never meant to be an angry sort of woman. And yet, there are times these days – too frequent for comfort – when she comes to from some unknown place, finds herself shouting at the children, hitting the dog. She assures herself that it isn’t her, not the real Annie, not really. But it is beginning to filter down, the realization like points of drizzle which slide slow and indirect through the sweetgum canopy, that what she is might be related to what she does. 

Round the corner and down the dim, narrow hall, a closed bedroom door. Behind it, the old man in the small wrought-iron bed – Annie’s childhood bed – quiet, awake, breathing slowly, eyes unmoving from a patch of textured plaster. All the trappings of the teenaged girl’s room – the ballerina jewelry box, the few stuffed animals on the armoire, ragged from long use, the glossy cutouts of black-haired boys tacked to the violently orange walls, paper skin faded to corpse-blue from long exposure to the sun, all turned macabre in relief against the sunken old man, semi-paralyzed since his stroke. His spectral wife disdained the Medicare home-nurses but lacked the affection for real care, leaving him to sit in his piss and his bedsores when no one was around to see. The commitment to their marriage strong, ironclad, devoted as they are to their decades-long game of getting-back, the cycles of punishment and retribution, circling around the heart of their mutual hatred, outside of which there is little self-identification, the only thing that gives any real pleasure. 

The little family – husband, wife, children and dog – is back in Annie’s hometown, crammed in the house for ten days, called there to help the mother in caring for her husband after the stroke. Though since they have arrived she has rebuffed any real offers of help, instead cornering them at the long table and talking ceaselessly (long-suffering, demanding praise) all while the door to the sickroom is closed tight, keeping in the stale, April-moist air. The young husband sits across the table, distractedly peeling an orange, nails a bit too long, the white pulp lodging underneath in pale crescents. Little things, tiny things, setting the ends of Annie’s nerves crackling like sparklers. His ability to sit quietly without expression, the experience alien to the women in the room – they sense his mind like a glass of still water, colorless, their reactions ranging from jealousy to anger. But internally he is anything but tranquil, his muscles carefully rigid, sheathing his bones, controlling the tremors. He eats and drinks endlessly, glass after glass of sickly-sweet iced tea, filling his mouth with something other than conversation. Every thirty minutes he excuses himself to the small, mildewed bathroom with its potpourri and framed bible verses, and stares at himself blankly in the mirror, taking five deep breaths before flushing, wading back into the solid air. The old woman scares him more than he would like to admit. It’s not the grey face, the heavy crucifix bouncing on skin-draped clavicles, rather it’s the features that so resemble his wife’s, and the expressions of animal rage that flash across the women’s faces when they speak to each other. In four days, he has only made eye contact with the mother once, accidentally. 

Annie has been doing this more often lately, bursting out of the house without warning. She omits explanations, retains some dignity. 

She drives in silence along the too-familiar roads. Each turn, each patch of switchgrass and algae-slicked cypress submerging her into some prepubescent memory. She misses her grey expanse of Baltimore, the scenes crafted by human intention. Back here in the place of her youth the landscape is oppressively fecund, stems tumescent with water, the wet spring air over-thick with swamp-scent, her windshield smeared with yellow insect gore after a few slow miles. There are few safe, neutral places in this town. There are no bars, no cafes that feel like moving into this highway-side tumble of houses with only one flashing stoplight. So, she drives towards the grocery store while the grey clouds gather for the morning rumble of rain. The drops are hot as blood, steaming off the asphalt as she walks through the parking lot. She slips herself damply into the white, humming aisles. There is color enough, words and texture and smell enough here to occupy her for hours. She strolls gently, loitering, palpating an avocado, fingering a packet of sunflower seeds. 

Annie rounds a corner and sees her. Her hair is a home-dyed jet black, with lighter roots creeping in along her part, making it look as though she is balding. A small boy has chubby arms clamped around her leg, whining gently, like an engine in winter. The woman drops a packet of cereal into her basket but remains standing, apparently transfixed at the boxes in front of her. The small boy gives a wail, and she slaps his hand. Two pairs of eyes flicker up and maybe, maybe, meet.

*

She found Erline when they were eight years old. Annie big and awkward for her age, with hair that frizzed and shoulders hunched permanently in an effort to conceal the budding of young breasts. Her asthma, mild but self-emphasized in disinclination for group sports, was her excuse to spend recess periods in the library, reading novels under the long-stemmed ceiling fans, doted on by the spinster librarian. 

Troublemakers would sometimes join her for stints, the length of their detention depending on the severity of their transgressions. Erline came in February, her confinement due to last until summer break, because she had hit Jodie Bryant so hard in the mouth that one of her front teeth had fallen out. 

“It was just a baby tooth,” she whispered to Annie, unprompted, before the librarian told her to hush. 

Through Annie’s child’s eyes, she cut a figure of gross intimidation, her knuckles and knees ragged with peeling scabs, leaning her chair back on two legs. 

“I don’t like Jodie Bryant,” she mouthed behind the cover of her book, amazed at her own daring.

She had not learned yet, awkward and socially immature as she was, that sometimes all that is needed to create a bond is a common enemy. Erline’s teeth pointed every which way, but Annie noticed she didn’t smile tight-lipped like the other girls with bad teeth. She smiled with her whole mouth, with her whole face. 

Annie began spending regular afternoons at Erline’s place, while her mother finished long shifts at the restaurant. Her mother begrudged these visits, preferring Annie to stay home alone with her schoolwork, but was overruled by her husband, the casual finality of the paterfamilias. He drove trucks cross-country and was most often gone. But when he was home, he treasured his position as the yielding parent – that though he gave so little of his effort, he was Annie’s favorite, and at the time, she felt these allowances more than made up for his casual neglect. 

Annie’s parents’ home was a small bungalow, the inside clean as a surgical theater, and so quiet that at night when Annie lay under her quilt with her eyes closed, sleepless, unmoving in case her mother came by to check on her (the bedroom door had been removed the year before, when Annie’s mother had pried open the lock on her diary and read her daughter’s words that were uncouched and unguided by her own opinions and sensibilities, and had determined that this child – this child that she had had for herself, brought into the world to love her, and reflect her – had turned out rotten), the silence pressed into her ears like static pressure, broken only by the chirping of the Carolina peepers. 

Erline’s place was better. The double-wide was packed with upholstered furniture that her mother kept covered in a thick, clear plastic. The yard was dirt, or mud in the springtime, and dogs and chickens and ducks were perpetually underfoot, taking dirt baths in the shade under the trucks on blocks. The sleepy grandfather in his chair by the sprawling garden, shaded by the green leather of magnolia leaves, his .17 stretched over his knees (on watch for groundhogs), a cooler by his hip, the warm drift of his winter years. Erline’s mother barefoot in the garden, flax-haired, sunburned, her pretty smile with the one winking gold molar. The TV and the radio were always on, turning the clearing lively – as Annie imagined it, untraveled, mind stuffed with fat novels – as a Moroccan souk, a South African bazaar. 

On a boiling day that spring, soon after they became friends, the girls decided to go gator hunting. Never mind that no one in Pasquotank County had seen a gator in decades – they believed in the creatures only to the point which gave pleasure and no fear, the thrill in the daring, the secrecy, the sucking of the peat bogs, the black-red cypress water that splashed over the lip of the tallest rain boot. They squatted in the shade of a sour-smelling dogwood, attempting to whittle the ends of long sticks into spear-points, Erline rhythmically swinging her long, lank blonde hair to keep away the greenheads. 

Annie heard bootsteps and turned to see Erline’s father approaching, his concave chest mirror-slick in the heat. She stood up and backed away quickly, body shocked as though with electricity at the thought of oncoming punishment, patting her pockets for her inhaler. 

But the man picked up her abandoned spear with a crow of laughter. 

“Now what the hell is this supposed to be?” he asked. 

“We’re going gator hunting!” chirped Erline. Her thin limbs glowed milk-white in the springtime sunshine. 

“Hmmm,” he said, and rolled the stick between his fingers, “hold on a minute then.” 

They trailed him behind the shed, shooing away chickens and the dogs’ curious, wet noses. His machete flayed away the green wood easily and he handed back the newly-sharp spears, real interest in his long-nosed freckled face.

“Go on and catch me a big one,” he said. 

When her mother came that afternoon, Annie could tell she was in a black mood. She stood in the open door of her car in her tuxedo shirt, yellowed at the armpits, flyaways tumbling out of her tight bun, the evening thunderstorm crackling behind her, encroaching from the southern horizon. 

“You’re filthy, what have you been doing?” she said. 

“I’m sorry,” said Annie. 

Erline came up behind her.

“Hi, miss Janice.” 

Annie looked at Erline. The girl had a softly weeping cut down her arm from playing with the dog, her cutoff shorts too small and fraying along the pocket seams, her smile huge and full of teeth. The mother smiled, but it was amazing how feckless such a gesture could be. She bundled Annie in the car without saying anything. As they drove away, Erline’s smile faltered, and broke.

Days later, the girls were laying belly-down on the bank of the creek, hands trailing along the pebbles crusted with algae, soft mud dimpled by the tracks of lizards, the minute feet of palmetto bugs. Without preamble, Erline spoke. 

“Why doesn’t your mama like me?” 

Annie splayed her fingers in the hot slick of the mud, like oil under her palms, unaffected, using the unabashed candor of a child who has been nowhere, who has known no one. 

“She says you’re white trash.”

“What does that mean?” said Erline.

“I don’t really know,” said Annie, “but I’m not.”

“Why?”

“Because we eat lots of vegetables, and we don’t have a TV.” 

Erline nodded, then waggled her hands in the shallow creek water, causing several fat toads to hop onto the opposite bank. 

“I don’t like vegetables,” she said. 

While Erline was tough, brash, and confident – those traits that generally wrought popularity and acceptance – there was something about her a little too rawboned, a little too cutting, for the other children. Annie had thought she would have to fight for Erline’s affection (her manner was to be subservient to other children as she was to her parents, she would demand her playmate’s favorite color before naming it as her own as well, always the same, always attempting to match, her obvious desperation precluding the result), but Erline was alone too. Two only children, a strange pair, tall to short, round to bony, nervous to bold, but the match was a good one, allowing for the young life’s first bloom of interreliance. 

It was Erline on the other end of the landline when Annie crawled into the back of the coat closet, curled phone cable protruding from beneath the door, whispering through quick breaths about the collapse of her family’s nucleus. Mother caught Father cheating with not one, but several women all along his truck route to Texas. The mother forbid Annie from leaving the family room while the parents fought – while the mother screamed at her husband with the windows open, causing the dog-walking neighbors to speed their steps, ripping open fifteen years’ worth of wounds. The mother had a grim triumph witnessing her daughter in the corner – Annie sitting on the sticky leather chair with her hands folded in her lap, staring hard at the opposite wall – while she shamed him, taking pleasure in his comeuppance, at the rescinding of his title of favorite parent. But the father knew, and Annie knew, there, with her sweating thighs glued to leather, that the title had staying power. 

The mother stayed with the father without joy, gaining an air of self-sacrifice that she hoped would give her an air of godliness, a whiff of the forgiving Jesus, but which only led the neighbors to turn their heads from her (the southern ladies’ mixture of smiling pity and condescension), unable to look at her dark eyes, falsely wide, the damp desire for sympathy covering the grey iron of fury. She took over the guest bedroom as her own and flung herself further into the Church, having conversations with Jesus as though he were in the room with her, enrolling Annie in every bible study that she could find. As she grew more and more grim, she clung to her daughter all the harder. Many times throughout the following years she attempted to keep Annie from her friendship with Erline, this child’s dirtying influence on her daughter’s clean future. For the most part, Annie was a docile, pliant child, but she saved up her rages for those occasions and expelled them in tantrums that she believed – with satisfaction – inspired real fear in her mother. 

They were fifteen when Erline’s mother died. She had seen a puppy on the roadside, half-submerged in ditch water, and swerved to the shoulder (she had always been a nice woman), brought it back home and wrapped it in baby blankets, poked mashed pumpkin into its mouth, wiped away the green mucous that bubbled from its tiny snout. But the dog died within a day, and Erline’s mama was dead within the month. Rabies, the kids at school said. So will you reap, thought Annie’s mother. Annie sat at the sticky lunch table alone for weeks, bereft of any other friends, chewing her celery to fibrous pulp. She remembered Erline as she had last seen her, out by the old firehouse with their purloined menthol Parliaments, Erline with her sparkly purple eyeshadow, plastic wrappings and cans whose dregs smelled hot and fierce in the sunlight, and Annie remembered thinking she had never seen anything as elegant in that moment, the girl’s eyes like twin bruises, garbage fluttering at her feet, the way her chest felt caved in with affection, scaring her. After, Annie had tried to sketch the scene, but she was no artist, and the attempt looked childish, and she tore the paper up into bits, angry that her own hands would flatten a moment so precious.  

When Erline came back, after, there was a hardness to her. Annie tried to ask about her mama that first day, and Erline shouted at her, and so she never asked again. Erline was still small and skinny, nearly runty, but her face looked older, like a grown woman’s lopped head on a girl’s body. Years later, Annie will think of her in those days, standing on a chair, stiff-spined, stirring spaghetti in the stock pot. The five of them – grandparents, father, Erline, Annie –- sitting at the round table, all trying to act normal, all failing, the grandfather weeping at odd times, the father drinking and drinking to incoherence, and the grandmother forcing endless measured conversation with Annie, asking questions she knew the answer to, terrified of the silence. The stock pot with its remnants was placed on the floor for the dogs to fight over, and Daisy (the big female German shepherd) got the lion’s share, snapping at smaller ones, lapping noisily, flecks of red drool spotting the rug, while the grandmother shouted over the noise, asking Annie again and again – a ballerina? a marine biologist? a librarian? an astronaut? where will you go? (Annie had that look about her, unmistakable even then, of one who would not stick around.) 

Their friendship, ’til then bowstring-tight, slackened. Erline found other friends, older friends, keen to be out of the house whenever she could manage it. She pierced her cheek like Marilyn Monroe. She began experimenting with taking lit matches to the insides of her elbows, the skin as pale and vulnerable as sweated cold cuts. Her father had lost any stabilizing influence, he was a man lovesick enough that he felt no more responsibility for his actions than of some man he glimpsed on the roadside, his grief reducing him to near-babyhood, jerking between his basest instincts, drinking heavily, going missing for days at a time, turning reckless when despair performed its practiced alchemy in creating anger. 

A year after the death of Erline’s mother, Annie heard the familiar ripping sound of a motor, and behind the twitched curtain was Erline’s grandmother’s mustang, idling on the shoulder. The car honked twice (Erline never came inside). In the kitchen, two glasses of sweating sweet tea with lemon, the wobbling ceiling fan, the half-finished Scrabble game, and the mother frowning from her seat. 

“You can go down and say hello, but you’re not getting in that car,” she said. 

“Alright,” said Annie. 

“You need to spend time with your family.”

Annie slipped down the driveway towards the low-slung car, loud even when motionless, and Erline kicked open the passenger side door. 

“I can’t get in,” said Annie preemptively, “my mom said I have to stay here.” 

Erline leaned way over the center console, straining at her seatbelt. With affected nonchalance, she allowed her right arm to drop onto the passenger seat, the white gauze bandage on her forearm glaring conspicuously in the noontime sun. 

Annie got in the car. Erline accelerated so fast that the door slammed shut before Annie could do it herself. Annie looked into the back seat, where a case of beer was half open, leaking cans which jounced around the upholstered seats, a few partially-filled handles of liquor clacked together noisily with every pothole. 

“What are we doing?” Annie asked. 

“I’ll show you,” said Erline.  

She drove out into the backwoods on the winding ribbon-roads, the bright air rippling over the blacktop, the car’s interior icy with air conditioning. The car kicked up a cloud of pale dust as she maneuvered onto the dirt road to the place they had shared bright moments, by the old firehouse, long abandoned in the center of a fallow field, the soil cracked with deep, thirsty fissures. Past the chain link, clogged with plastic scraps on the Eastern side from the relentless ocean wind, the old blue dumpster with its halo of buzzing insects, the muddy possum prints on its broken black lid. Erline parked the car and the girls emerged into the noonday heat. Intense cold feels like pain, but heat feels like pressure, and it bore down on their chests, constricting breath, curving the young shoulders forward. Erline dragged the thirty rack from the backseat and flung it onto the ground, metal cans bumping along the dry soil. 

“Are we drinking these?” Annie said, half-excited, half-scared, toeing a can with her sandaled foot. 

“No,” said Erline. She strode quickly to the dumpster, pinching her nose, and stood on tiptoe to flip back the heavy plastic lid. She sprinted back as the lid flapped over, slamming against the dumpster-back, the resulting explosion of flies from the impact. Erline picked up two cans and tossed one to Annie. 

“You ready?” Erline asked, and Annie nodded, not knowing, not needing to know, grateful just to be asked along. 

Erline got into a stance like a baseball pitcher, left leg tucked up to her chest, flip-flop dangling from her toes, the nails painted white, tiny as Tic Tacs. She hucked it with an almost-grunt, an almost-scream, like a tennis player at the end of a losing match. The can flew, tumbling, and hit the inside lip of the dumpster. It exploded, spraying white foam into the air. Erline whooped loudly, bouncing on her toes, arms in the air, face full of a hard kind of joy which made her seem old, which looked strangely close to indifference. 

“You do one,” she said, and Annie threw. The impact of the can on the metal dumpster-wall sounded like a gong, a gunshot. They threw the rest, and then threw the glass bottles, the sound of shattering glass satiating, like an itch deeply scratched. When it was done, they stood panting, excited, the air smelling of yeast and sun-heated liquor and their own pubescent sweat.

“He’s quitting?” Annie asked. “Your dad?” 

“He will be,” said Erline. “And there’s one more thing.” 

She led Annie around to the back of the car, and jimmied the trunk open – inside, a black contractor’s bag. Annie pulled back the plastic to look inside and jumped back with a shriek, waving her hands, as though she had disturbed a snake’s nest. 

“Don’t be a baby,” said Erline, widening the bag’s opening with her hands, exposing the contents – two long shotguns, the .17, several handguns, and a hulking semiautomatic thing with a complicated scope. 

“Why do you have these?” whispered Annie, tiptoeing back near the trunk, as though the guns were some wild animal that might be frightened by her approach.

“They can’t be in the house right now,” she said, worrying her lip with the sharp tip of her pink tongue. “It’s not for forever, just right now.” 

“What are you going to do with them?” 

“Hide them,” said Erline. “For now.”

She reached behind the contractor bag and pulled out two short-handled shovels. She didn’t ask Annie, but there was no need – Annie was already reaching for the handle of the bigger one. They walked to the treeline and found twin pines, tall and parallel-straight. Between the trees they began to dig, the soil loose and sandy, easily disturbed. Even so, their shirts were dark with sweat by the time the hole was big enough. 

They carried the guns over, holding the soft plastic of the bag with sweating fingertips, arms out straight, trotting and tripping along, eyes squinting and faces turned away. They placed the bag softly in the hole and smoothed handfuls of silty soil over the top. Standing up, they could have been mistaken for two old women, hunched, swaybacked. They were both filthy, ribbons of brown sweat flowing down their arms, armpits and finger joints turned to mud slicks, Erline’s bandage soiled brown with its splotch of percolating maroon. Erline used her pocketknife to mark one of the trees, gouging an X into the fibrous bark. 

The light was failing, and the cicadas had begun to scream. The girls sprinted back to the car, cottonwood twig fingers grasping and trailing over their faces, tangling in their hair. At the car, they crashed together with no conscious thought on either side. Damp salted limbs gripped each other, the top of Erline’s head barely reaching Annie’s chin, her thudding heart reverberating through Annie’s stomach, and Erline showed the first bit of weakness yet, digging her black-chipped nails into the ditch of Annie’s spine. They broke apart, conscious that something significant had happened, was perhaps still happening, and Erline watched Annie’s blotched red skin, and Annie saw Erline’s sharp eyes, ringed by wilted sodden mascara tracks, and she felt the familiar hitch of breathless asthma, felt a strange sharp stab of unplaced shame. 

Back outside Annie’s house, the car idling, the mother looming on the porch like an iron thunderhead, it was dark in earnest. They looked at each other, the whites of their eyes bright in the dash lights. Annie wanted to say something to her, do something, to let her know – but she didn’t know what. Something indefinable. Her hand reached out, then stopped. She wasn’t brave like Erline was. She got out of the car and walked slowly up the driveway. 

The engine roared as the mother dragged Annie roughly inside. 

“I thought you were dead,” she spat, “you could have been dead.”

“I wasn’t dead,” Annie said. 

When the father got home from his route that night, stone tired, the mother had him fit the door back onto Annie’s door with the lock fitted backwards, only to be manipulated from the outside. The mother heard Annie’s weeping, pleading from inside, and was glad of it – she had been herself forged in fire, and it had turned her scrappy, thrifty, immune to pain. Children were done a disservice when coddled, they turned to jello-soft adults, and this confinement was the greatest gift she could give her only child. 

At school, Annie waited for Erline, but the girl didn’t come back. Through the week, Annie sat as she was wont to at her solitary table, sliding her eyes along the pages of a novel, not taking in any meaning. She missed Erline as much as she had ever missed anything. On Friday she told her mother that she was going to have a sleepover with her lab partner, a plain, dumpy Christian girl who her mother liked very much. But she got off the bus at Erline’s. 

They sat in the woods. Erline smoked cigarettes in earnest, idly picking ticks off the dogs. She looked vital, whip-like, her eyes grown to the size of cue balls. 

“I don’t want to be here anymore,” she said. 

“You should go to college with me,” Annie said, and Erline snorted. 

That night they lay side by side in her bed, with Daisy stretched snoring along the foot. It was too hot to fall asleep, and Annie stared for an interminable time at Erline’s things, her dresser cluttered with bottles, her closet exploding with clothes, the posters papering the wall so thoroughly that almost none of the original paint was visible. 

“Are you awake?” said Erline, and Annie realized that the silence had not been hers alone.

“Yeah.”

There was a crumple of sheets as Erline rose onto one elbow. The moonlight streamed through the blinds in parallel slats, and her face was beribboned with white light. One eye shone green and piercing, the other a dark pit. 

At the same time, unbidden, they leaned into one another. Erline’s lips were thin and tasted like toothpaste. She pulled Annie on top of her, running her fingers along her body where they tickled like insects. Daisy grunted in annoyance and jumped off the bed. Annie felt hot, insane, her brain resounding with static. It was the best she had ever felt. 

Erline slept, snuggled into Annie’s shoulder. But Annie did not. She watched the slats of moonlight creep up the wall, illuminating different planes of her posters in turn. When the illuminated hands of the clock reached 5:00 a.m., she moved slowly, slowly out of bed. She put on her shoes, and walked carefully out of the room, the carpet muffling the soft footsteps. As she closed the door she looked back. She thought she saw the wet glint of eyeball, but it was gone too quickly to be sure. 

The phone rang twice, and her mother picked up, voice laced with panic. 

“Hello?” she said, “what’s wrong?” 

“Mom,” she whispered, and shivered in the dampness of the driveway, batting mosquitoes from her legs. “Will you come pick me up?” 

Her mother took out a loan to send Annie to a private Christian school in Savannah, and she stayed in that city for nine years. It took her six years to get through college. Afterwards, she got a job in a lab. She met and married her husband in quick succession, and her mother cried with joy at the church wedding. 

It has been nearly a decade since Annie last saw her, and here she stands. She walks through the aisle and stops behind her, runs her fingers, unseeing, along brightly colored boxes. She doesn’t acknowledge Erline, nor she her. But they linger back-to-back in the aisle, breathing the same air. 

 

Nina King Sannes is a writer from the Great Dismal Swamp of North Carolina. She holds a Bachelor’s degree in agroecology from Cornell University and an MFA in fiction from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and is currently pursuing a PhD in English from the University of Rhode Island. She is a winner of the AWP Intro Journals Award, and her work has previously appeared in EPOCH Magazine, The Colorado Review, The Broadkill Review, and Carolina Muse. She is the co-host of The Airport Fiction Podcast, available here: youtube.com/@Nina-King.

 

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Waterbreath

The late June mornings were humid, especially along the coast, which was littered with plastic bags, straws, and bottles, remnants of the early summer storm that passed through the Island. Waves folded over each other, one after another. Jin felt their sound reverberate through her body, hiss hah, a feeling both familiar and unaccustomed. As she walked the shoreline, Jin was reminded of how her grandmother would say that each wave came from the breaths held in by the Island’s haenyeo during their underwater forages. She drank in each breath now, the scent of the sea filling every crevice of her lungs. 

The second of the funeral’s three-day ritual had gone as expected. Jin donned her black hanbok and a white ribbon pin in her hair, as did her mother. During the day, the Island’s people came in one by one and bowed twice to the picture of her grandmother, murmuring faint words of supposed comfort to the pair of descendants. 

“I pray for a blessed afterlife for the deceased,” most of them would say. They then exited the small room to mingle over hot noodles, boiled pork, and soju, which her grandmother’s diving cooperative had helped prepare and where her uncles spent most of their time drinking, only getting up occasionally to greet the guests. Some of the guests, especially the co-op members, who had witnessed not only Jin’s whole life but her mother’s as well, wept as they lay a white chrysanthemum on the altar. Jin and her mother had no tears of their own to reciprocate, in contrast to the endless tears shed at her father’s funeral twenty years ago. 

As night fell, the attendees thinned out until Jin was left alone with her mother. At another funeral next door, the sound of wailing pierced the air as Jin sat with her mother in silence, waiting for any late-hour guests. 

That night, they slept poorly awaiting the final day of the funeral. Struggling with jet lag and unable to bear the stuffy funeral home, Jin got out of bed and decided to take a walk. Once out on the pavement, her slippers caught in the cracks of the poorly maintained roads. Somehow, it was even more humid outdoors than in as the haemu floated inland. There was little visibility due to thick fog, but Jin could hear the sound of the tide approaching as the water rose with the morning. 

As she reached the sand, Jin spied a crab preying on a clam, remembering that as a young child, her mother and father took her to the Island’s sandy beaches, along with a bucket, to hunt for crabs. Sometimes, the three of them went out on her father’s fishing boat for a day out at sea. Those clear, blue summer days with nothing to worry about, the world just the right level of brightness, lingered in Jin’s memory like a foreign country. The memory forged a hollow of something faded, nothing left in its place except for the outlines of something that used to be. 

Jin knelt along the sand, hoping to find answers, but the sea didn’t respond. It only listened, calmly, while its currents ran forcefully underwater. 

*

When her mother had first called with news of her grandmother’s death, Jin didn’t quite know what she was supposed to do with the information. Her grandmother was eighty-eight years old and had been ailing with Alzheimer’s for some years. Although Jin grew up living with her mother and grandmother on the Island, she lived her entire adult life away from them and had ceased all contact. 

Jin figured her grandmother didn’t like her very much. As a child, Jin envied her friends, whose grandmothers showered them with compliments and snacks, while her own grandmother stayed aloof. She was half expecting the news when she saw her mother’s name pop up on her phone, knowing that death was the only reason significant enough to break their decade-long silence. 

“I’m sorry to hear that,” Jin told her mother quietly over the phone.

A brief pause ensued, and the two of them started speaking at once. “How are you—”

Another pause filled the air. 

Her mother cleared her throat and spoke. “Will… you come for the funeral?” she inquired hesitantly. 

Jin contemplated the dwindling number in her bank account, then asked, “When is it?”

“The… day after tomorrow. I know it’s last minute and you must be busy…” Her voice trailed off. 

Something inside Jin flashed with anger as she thought of her mother on the phone, how tightly her mother’s hands must be gripping the receiver, how alone she was now that both Jin and her grandmother were gone. Jin had left her mother alone to figure out the logistics of caring for someone with a debilitating and terminal illness. But the more time that passed, Jin found it increasingly difficult to go home, knowing that the frayed threads between them could snap with one final pull. 

Her mother started again, “You don’t have to if—”

“I’ll be there,” Jin finally responded. She first spoke the words out of anger, which upon reflection seemed like too much given the situation, then added more softly, “I’ll send you my flight details later.” 

*

Upon arriving at the airport, Jin spotted her mother waiting beside the exit. Though it was still early morning, the airport was bustling with a few too many people due to the arrival of tourist season, the noise level several decibels above one that might be considered tolerable. 

Jin started walking towards her mother with a carry-on in tow, exactly as she had left the Island. Her mother’s eyes didn’t meet Jin’s as the distance between them closed. 

Jin cleared her throat. “Hi, umma.”

“Hi,” responded her mother. 

Dawn fell into morning as her mother drove, the two of them journeying wordlessly further into the island as the sun rose from the sea beside them, its rays indistinguishable among the cloud-packed sky. 

Once at home, Jin stepped into the living room to find it exactly the same as she had left it, only with a darkened hue that could only be explained by the passage of time. The yellow linoleum floors were sticky, even though her mother still probably wiped them clean every day. Although her mother didn’t smoke, the house still smelled of old cigarettes and sweet rice, probably left over from her grandmother’s half-century long presence. 

She made her way to the bedroom, remembering to step across the ledge of the doorway, as if her foot was responding to the ghosts of countless stubbed toes. She reached for her chair and sat at the desk, momentarily taking in a breath, eyeing the array of college entrance exam preparation books and childhood journals on the shelf. 

Her mother appeared at the doorway with a blank expression, croaking out, “The sheets are washed. Make yourself comfortable,” then disappeared into the hallway. 

That night, as Jin lay in bed, she took in the silence, which produced a strange sensation of emptiness in her stomach, as if a vital part of her abdominal anatomy was missing. When she lived here, all Jin wished for was peace and quiet among the cacophony of visitors, among them her parents’ coworkers, friends, and neighbors. She remembered grimacing at the sound of laughter coming from the living room, bolstered by the warmth of alcohol. Her body absorbing the memories of sound waves floating through the walls, Jin fell asleep. 

*

Jin awoke the next morning to clamoring in the kitchen. Her mother was chopping, frying, boiling — all sounds she had heard thousands of times before but now felt alien. 

The geumchaegi was approaching as the weather grew warmer, which meant that her mother, a haenyeo, no longer left the house at dawn to do mooljil with the other women in her diving cooperative. Jin remembered looking forward to the summer months as a child, when she could spend time with her mother, eating silky cold bean noodles and sitting on the steps of the house with nearly frozen watermelon slices in hand, spitting out the seeds to see how far they could go.

Entering the kitchen, Jin sat at the table as her mother heaped rice into two bowls and set them atop the table, which was already covered in side dishes and Jin’s favorite food: two day-old kimchijjigae. Long accustomed to a simple life abroad, Jin had almost forgotten about its existence, which represented a cumulative labor of love, from the planting of the cabbage seed to the harvest, then the kimchi making, and finally, the cooking of the stew. Her mother would have begun cooking as soon as she phoned Jin. This steadfastness comforted Jin in a small way. 

Jin had once attempted to make kimchijjigae, spending a fortune on store-bought kimchi and faithfully following what laid in her memory, the order of ingredients: first the kimchi, stir-fried in hot oil, then the water, anchovies, tofu, and minced garlic. Finally, time. Kimchijjigae was better the day after, after many reheatings, each time renewing itself into something better. But Jin’s version struck stale no matter how many times it was reheated. Despite this, she wanted to tell her mother, look what I made, but found only silence between the stasis of time. 

Her mother sat across from Jin and the two of them picked up their chopsticks. 

“Try the kimchijjigae. My kimchi turned out pretty well this year.” Her mother looked at Jin with hopeful eyes. 

Jin picked up her spoon and took a sip. The tangy spice caught in her throat, and she began to cough. Her mother got up quickly and retrieved a glass of water. The coughing subsided, but Jin still felt the sting lingering in her throat, like nettle on lace.

*

Soonie waded in the water to find a good spot to collect conches. She took in a deep breath and dove in. Her hands grew stiffer as the days passed, the articulations of her joints beginning to grate against each other, and her ears rang with frequent headaches despite the biannual oxygen chamber treatments. Still, even though she now had enough money to retire, she couldn’t give up her job, her purpose, her independence. For nearly thirty years, her life drew meaning from the simple act of holding her breath and digging for sea creatures, such as the conches that she now freed with her hoe. Its wooden handle revealed cracks from erosion in the seawater. Newer tools were available, but Soonie preferred this one, which was handed down from her mother. 

Soonie took to the waters at sixteen, like her mother and her mother before that. She was from the sea, her existence tied to its cycles, its provision, its history. She knew these waters better than she knew her own body. She knew where all the conches and sea cucumbers lay on the ocean floor, locating them like an infant finds its mother’s breast. Spotting a conch now, she took her hoe into her right hand and hacked at it. It came away with one swoop, which Soonie now took into her left hand. 

When Jin left the Island for university and stopped contacting her, Soonie’s heart broke and scattered all over the sea. Soonie would listen jealously to the women in her cooperative, who bragged about their children sending gifts or visiting for the holidays. It ached to think of the kind of mother she had become, the kind that lost contact with her own daughter, the kind whose inner demons dictated the kind of love she displayed. Soonie sometimes felt that the world demanded too much from her. She loved Jin, but the world was so different. She wanted the best for her daughter, yet… 

And what kind of daughter was Soonie? Her mother’s health was ailing, worsened after the death of Soonie’s father some years back. At times, her mother woke up screaming from nightmares, and she would suddenly grow rigid and quiet, tears streaming out of her eyes. Soonie thought it might be best that she lost contact with Jin, because then she could be shielded from this. Her mother faded, one giant piece at a time, until Soonie finally had to put her in hospice for full time care. Soonie wasn’t sure whether to feel sad or relieved. 

When Soonie first started mooljil long ago, her mother told her that each woman’s waterbreath was her unique gift. One’s breath was a gift from the gods when one was born, but the waterbreath required the blessing of the sea. Countless young women had been turned away from mooljil for this reason. Soonie found that her mooljil often depended on her state of mind. Her waterbreath came more easily when she was in a good mood. On a day like today, fettered with thoughts of Jin and her mother, she felt her lungs constrict. Her harvest for these kinds of days were often two-thirds or even half of her usual amount.

Hands now full of conches, Soonie popped her head above the water and squeezed her breath into the air, which sharply whistled as it left her body. The whistles could be heard at these waters all times of the year, including the frigid winter, only ceasing briefly during the summer geumchaegi. Soonie placed the conches into the net attached to her taewak, which floated above water with a net to collect her catches. After taking a brief break, she took in another breath and dove into the water again. 

Whenever Soonie visited her mother at the hospice center, she would often be in a worse state than usual. Often, her mother broke down into tears and refused to talk to her. 

“Please, tell me what is going on,” Soonie would plead, knowing the words would not reach her. 

Young-sook only peered towards her through tear-stricken eyelashes and kept shaking her head and cried out, “No, no, no,” as she sat with her knees in her chest. 

Soonie could only sigh and wait by her mother until the episode passed and she fell asleep. 

Last week, however, her mother had a rare moment of lucidity. Recognizing Soonie, she rushed to her when she arrived. 

Taking hold of Soonie’s shoulders, she said, “Why did you come back? Just when I thought you had escaped.”

Soonie took her mother’s wrinkled hands and sat her back down. 

She said patiently, as if she was talking to a child, “What do you mean escaped? I’m right here with you.” 

“You were never supposed to come back. Never supposed to become a haenyeo. I promised your father that you would have a better life.” 

Distraught, Young-sook’s entire body shook as her tears spotted the hospital gown. 

Soonie sighed, assuming her mother was having another episode. But that day, she insisted on telling Soonie a story, speaking frantically, as if she was scared she would run out of breath. Soonie had never experienced her mother willingly explain anything to her. She was the strict disciplinarian, her father the silent witness. Soonie tried to bury these memories now, which poked out from under the seabed.

But whether or not Soonie listened, her Young-sook began talking, and she could not stop once she did.

It was almost winter. A windstorm ravaged the Island as gunshots rang in close distance. The gunshots went pang pang pang, eight in total, and I covered my ears, scared that my eardrums would pop. When they ceased firing, and we were sure that the soldiers had left the village, we searched for our father’s body on the street among the others who were killed with him, including our uncles and three members of the neighbor’s family. We took our father’s body to the patch of farmland next to their house. We barely had time to cover his body with a few handfuls of dirt before we had to run away themselves. There was no time to move our uncles and the others. Blood stained the road and sank into the dirt below it, coloring its layers. 

I could feel my heart beating into my ears as I joined the rest of my uncle’s family running into the mountain behind the village. There were seven of us left now. Me, my mother, younger brother, newborn sister, my aunt and two cousins. My mother, holding my baby sister, looked back on the village, its dirt streets surrounded by houses with roofs made of dried grass, as she hitched up the skirts of her hanbok, which kept catching on the weeds. Worried that my mother would get tired, I took my baby sister from her arms, and the seven of us hurried towards the mountain. 

We spent the night in a cave, one I used to play in with my friends as a young child. The early winter chill made my teeth chatter. Even in the middle of this peril, the Island’s weather refused to give in. 

My mother and aunt contemplated whether or not to move further south that day or to spend another night in the cave. My mother glanced at the children before saying, “We have to go before they find us here. Didn’t you hear about the eight men who were found dead in a cave just like this the other day?”

My aunt replied frantically but in a hushed voice, “You’ve only given birth a week ago. You barely have the strength to walk, let alone go all the way down to the coast.” 

“We have to go. I won’t hear more about it.” My mother spoke with the air of someone with authority. But when I looked at her face, her eyes flashed with fear, and her lips trembled. As the eldest daughter, I was used to reading my mother’s needs, often taking my younger siblings to go play when I thought she was tired. 

That morning, I clung to my baby sister as we marched. We were so desperate to escape towards the coast, where we would be safe from the killings. The younger ones cried until their eyes could no longer produce tears from the dehydration. My mother and aunt took hold of them periodically to relieve their legs. My own legs were so tired from walking that I thought my skin would blister from the pain, which was then followed by numbness. I didn’t think we would make it. 

Night fell before we finally reached the village on the coast. My mother collapsed from exhaustion once she saw the destination. We were safe for now. 

Young-sook, still shaking, turned towards Soonie. 

“After what happened—” 

She stopped to take a breath in. The tears stopped, and she started speaking more calmly.

“After what happened, my mother began diving again to support her family, and I started going along with her. I took to the waters at sixteen, like my mother and her mother before that, although my mother had given it up to get married to a man inland.” 

Soonie, annoyed at the sudden show of emotion, interrupted. “Why are you telling me this, why now?” 

Young-sook ignored the question. 

“The sea provided, as it always did. It gave us our past and our future. But the past was so sticky, so painful that I had to bury it deeply. Your father couldn’t even bear the thought of it. Do you know why he always wore long sleeves? It was to hide the scars from the torture. He was so scared it would happen again, that the danger was always lurking from behind.”

“We’re a democratic country now, umma. That kind of thing won’t happen anymore.”

Soonie was already regretting visiting that day. She didn’t have time to listen to her mother’s end-of-life regrets.

“Even so, Soonie. Even so. Our fear made us live in the past, even as we tried to forget it. We… tried to protect you from it. I vowed I would give my children a better future. One where they don’t have to live in such fear. I would give anything to do that.” 

Soonie almost rolled her eyes from the irony. She never needed to know who she was, nor wondered why she had this gaping hole where her heart should be. The sea provided, as did her own hands, if not her family. 

But then, Young-sook looked Soonie straight in the eye and said something that almost made her heart stop. 

“But what if we made a mistake? What if we held onto the pain so tightly that we forgot to pass down the love as well?”

*

Soonie descended further and further until the colors grew darker and light became scarce. Dark blues and greys monopolized her vision, but suddenly, a flash of light below caught her attention. It was an abalone. Because they lived in such deep waters, which only the most senior of the haenyeo had access to, they fetched a high price. Soonie savored the exact moment that she felt them give into her strength, ripped apart from the ocean’s volcanic floor. Eyeing the abalone, Soonie reached for her bitchang. 

Soonie was in deep now, and her waterbreath was running scarce. One more breath, just one moment more, she thought, as she approached the abalone. Soonie wrapped the rubber end of her flat metal bitchang onto her right hand and poked the other end of it between the abalone and the rock, just enough to create a space, exposing the brilliant cyans and yellows and violets of its undershell. 

Countless times, the Island’s haenyeo had run out of waterbreath chasing after deep abalones. In the sea, you had to let everything go; the water gods demanded humility. There was no room for greed. 

Soonie was now at her very last waterbreath. She felt the edges of her lungs reach their limit against her chest cavity. She gathered her remaining strength and pushed her bitchang down against the powerful force with which the abalone held onto the ocean floor. She could try to get it on her next dive, marking the spot with a pearly abalone shell that she carried for that purpose. But Soonie didn’t feel like giving up now. She pushed further down. The abalone finally popped off. She reached her hand out to grab it, but her vision began to fade as her waterbreath turned on her. 

The world turned to red, the burning kind. It smelled of sweet peaches, the fresh kind that Soonie never had because they were saved for her brothers, then baby Jin’s tiny toes, which smelt of baby lotion. Then she heard the thunderous sound of two thousand six hundred seventy men falling to their deaths twenty years ago, skulls cracking in favor of high-rise apartment buildings, and even before that, the thirty thousand gunshots that rang across the Island. Pang pang pang. The water gods called out to her, what are you doing here? She was falling, no, rising, as each breath linked the next, one after another, forming a chain she couldn’t escape. Then, some force other than herself, perhaps the accumulation of her mother’s waterbreaths, swept in below her and took her up to the surface. 

Soonie gasped for air, suddenly remembering it all. 

*

Holding Young-sook’s picture, framed in white, Soonie walked with the procession towards the burial site. Unlike much of the Mainland, it was the Island’s custom to bury its dead. The breeze blew into her skirts and bent the tall summer grass into a deep bow. 

Jin followed behind, remembering Young-sook’s story of the Island’s people being brought back dead in white cloth after grave illness or accidents while abroad during the Occupation. Young-sook rarely said anything about the past, which meant Jin always listened carefully for any morsels whenever she did. Jin didn’t know why the story of rotting bodies wrapped in white cloth stuck with her for so long, but the desperation to come back to the Island—even after death—felt unfathomable. Jin, too, was supposed to have belonged here, to be born and die and be reborn. Her mother had worked hard to make another life possible for her, so that she could leave the Island, exist outside of it. They should have known that she would be lost without it, without acceptance in the only place she had ever known. Jin now felt like she waded through life in clothes borrowed against time, both of which were running thin.

It was easier to cease all contact with Soonie. The silence prevented Jin from remembering the scars, the hate and love and grief wrapped up into a single entity, so intertwined that the individual threads could no longer be distinguished. Now that she was here, the sheer force of emotion that Jin held towards Soonie came as a surprise. Contempt, worry, regret, followed by all the feelings in between that didn’t quite have a name, the bleeding remains of a bond that had been severed, but not quite. It was lingering, pulsating, alive. 

While continuing along Young-sook’s funeral procession, Soonie was really thinking about Jin, about the last conversation they had before they lost contact. The Island’s residents had begun drying seaweed in swaths along the coast, left out in the salty air, filling the Island with the faint burning scent of iodine. Jin had called to tell Soonie something she couldn’t understand. 

A part of Jin regretted making the call. But something had inside her swelled with the urgency of a pot boiling over, something that had to do with all the years of suppressing herself, something to do with not wanting to live a lie to the one person who had always been there, who had birthed her, from whom she wanted nothing more than to be loved for who she really was. 

Jin’s throat caught when the words left her mouth, not that any words could encompass the pain. It was a mixture of regret and helplessness, that Jin could not help but be who she was, love who she loved, and at the same time not give her mother any of the things she wanted, any part of the life she must have imagined for Jin when she was born. Jin knew her mother loved her, but she also knew why she had to leave the place she knew best.

“I’m sorry,” said Jin. She didn’t know if she meant it or not.

But in Soonie’s response, the anger came before the love. 

“How could you do this to me?” Her eyes flashing, she felt the sting in her palm as her fingernails dug into her own skin. 

Soonie wanted to talk more, but no words came out of her mouth. Her chest trembled, knowing she was finally losing her daughter, just not in the ways she had ever imagined, not to the sea or the army but her own violence. Her breath caught in her mouth, remembering the times her mother and father opposed her marriage, the joy of Jin’s birth, the fear of losing her, the grief of losing her husband. But still, even as she wished it was different, she couldn’t do anything. 

“I get it. But I hope you understand too, why I had to leave,” Jin said shakily.

Jin then hung up one final time, Soonie’s greatest fear confirmed. 

Soonie still couldn’t understand Jin, but she now desperately wanted to tell Jin that she was sorry, that she loved her the best she knew, that she knows it wasn’t enough. Soonie wondered where all these unspoken words went to live. Her mother’s words, spoken aloud, now lived their existence in her. They were so little, so late. 

From the other side, Jin had picked up the phone countless times to call Soonie but found that she couldn’t. The wall of memories engulfed and paralyzed her. It prevented her from crying out for help, reaching across the divide, even though she knew her bones were the same composition as her mother, and her mother’s mother. She knew that imperfect but beating hearts fueled the flow, of breath and memory, through each of their veins, the code of life reprinting folded messages, generating a damaged and brutal love, but a love nonetheless, with all of its bad and good and misguided attempts. 

So that was how it worked. Every subsequent generation vowed to do better than the last, to not make the same mistakes, not knowing that both new and old mistakes lay in wait. Soonie reflected on the fact that she was a product of that history, one small hope for the next generation. Maybe things had gotten better. Maybe they could still get better. Better as in coexistence, not evolution. A devolution, perhaps, stripping away all that is unnecessary, circling back to the beginning, where past histories and future hopes lay assembled in imperfect and unstable harmony. 

The procession arrived at the burial site, a small field where Soonie’s father was also buried in a square grave, bordered by rocks of the same composition as the ocean floor. Young-sook went to rest in the ground. Soonie and Jin took the rocks and placed them carefully around the grave. Nothing mattered, except that they were here now. 

 

Chae Yeon Kim is a bilingual, transnational writer and activist. She lives in Seoul, South Korea, but is local to many other places. She is interested in stories that cross borders, the space between words, and anything that disrupts what we consider to be truth. Her words have been published in Write or Die Magazine and Mochi Magazine. She is sometimes on Instagram as @alter_archive.

 

 BACK TO ISSUE

 BACK TO FOLIO

Darkness Once Begun

When Maqbool awoke, the fish was lying on his desk. Who put it there or why, he could not say; he lived alone. Studying it for a long time—that solitary, cold, almost-dying fish—he decided it was a sign, and answered its only question honestly: “Have you counted us before?”
“No.”

Stepping outside, that unmistakable stench of dead fish. Growing stronger as he walked. By the time he reached the giant office tower, he could hardly breathe.

“You’ll get used to it,” the doorman laughed, pointing to his nose. 

Maqbool nodded. Crossed the quiet, well-lit lobby to the reception desk, where a small woman with scarlet fingernails held out her hand. Glancing at him, she smiled. “Don’t worry, counting is counting is counting.”

Soon, a sallow-faced guard led Maqbool down the stairs. As if troubled by his scruffy mustache, he kept smacking his lips while he talked: “…count softly so as not to disturb the others… a break at every thousand, not a moment earlier… you’d do well to keep up, you understand…”

With each step, the light from above dimmed. That smell grew thicker. Unbearable. After a while—the air black, impossibly still—Maqbool wondered if they’d ever stop, if perhaps the guard, unusually silent now, might have lost his way. 

Suddenly, a great void. 

No, mouth. Like a gaping underwater cave. 

The only light trickling from torches held by the guards, seven or eight, patrolling along a narrow railing high above. Below, scattered in every direction like countless ghosts, the silhouettes of men, of women, some standing—hands on hips or wiping their foreheads—others bent over, working in silence: emerging, disappearing, emerging again. 

“Over there,” the guard said sharply, his torch shining at an empty patch in the corner. 

When Maqbool finally reached—slipping repeatedly on slimy layers of fish, his trousers damp with detritus—the guard’s flashlight deserted him, faded steadily in the distance. That suffocating darkness again. Somewhere: the sound of retching. A wail. 

“One… two… three…” Fingers trembling against stiff, clammy flesh. A narrow head. Triangular, comb-like teeth. Forked tail… Mackerel? Digging inside that fetid, gelatinous surface pooled around his ankles, he lifted each one gently, counted, placed it to his right. “Seven… eight…”

“Faster, my friend.”

Maqbool straightened: to his left, the silhouette of a man—tall, slender—the sleeve of his coat flickering in the air.

“Pardon?”

“Faster. Or the guards—”

“Quiet!” hissed a woman’s voice.

“Another word, and I’ll kill you myself.” A man. Further away.

“Let’s count together,” the stranger whispered. “We can talk freely during our break.”

Spurred by the stranger’s warning, Maqbool tried his best to keep up. Yet this proved impossible: no matter how frantically his fingers moved or how many fish he swept together, how many he counted simultaneously with both hands, the stranger always stayed far ahead, the gap between them steadily widening with time. 

When at last he stopped—panting, his arms streaked with pain—the stranger was already before him. 

Was he smiling? 

“You are Maqbool, the painter. Am I right?” 

Maqbool started. How many years since anyone had recognized him? 

“How could you—” 

“It wasn’t easy in this darkness, to be sure. But I noticed how you handled the fish, so carefully, so… what’s the word? Deliberately? Proof of an artistic mind! And then, of course, your unmistakably arched nose and— well, you might say I’m something of an admirer. I visited your exhibition in Calcutta several years ago. A fine showing, all in all. A triumph of—”

“Another lifetime.” Maqbool shook his head. “You may as well be speaking of a different Maqbool.” Gathering himself, he asked, “How do you count so fast?”

A low, pleasant-natured laugh. “There are many ways to count,” the stranger said. “More than you can imagine.”

Maqbool fell silent, pondering the stranger’s response; weighing each word, he repeated softly, “More than I can imagine?”

“Certainly,” the stranger said. “Most begin with their fingers, then switch quickly to their toes. Some recite aloud, others count in their minds. A few murmur as though in a pleasant dream, the rest as though in anticipation of escape. After many generations, I have seen all the ways people count.”

Generations? Maqbool peered in astonishment; although his face was shrouded in darkness, the stranger gave the formidable impression of youth—his posture unbending, voice brimming with intensity. 

“When I arrived,” he continued, “we counted very slowly. Looking at each fish, admiring it for a long time. I remember some even kissed them before counting. Of course, back then, the guards did not mind. They played long games of cards with us, and many were our friends.

 “But gradually, things began to change. Demanding ever-greater speed, the guards started shrinking our breaks. They no longer joined in our games. Whenever we asked why, they gave no answer, saying only, ‘You’ll see, you’ll see.’ Eventually, when our complaints grew too loud, they beat us with their sticks. No one dared to kiss the fish.

“At first, we sought to prevail using our usual methods, though we soon realized our foolishness; frightened by our constant failures, by the guards’ mounting punishments, we tried all manner of things. In time, guided by our innumerable mistakes, a few of us learned to adapt. Those who couldn’t were taken away…. But of course, I cannot share my technique. Even calling it a technique cheapens its inventiveness. As your friend, I can only hope you’ll find your own way.”

He seemed to smile. “Shall we count together again?”

“Two, six, eight!…” Maqbool clawed violently, snatching fistfuls of fish, his nails tearing into gills, into eyes, their scaly, brittle flesh. Yet, despite forsaking his scruples, despite counting four, five, ten at a time—his face soaked with sweat, with remnants of rotting flesh—the stranger kept humming evenly, racing further and further ahead. 

“I can’t go any faster!” Maqbool said to himself. “How in God’s name does he do it?” Then suddenly, it occurred to him: What if I didn’t use my hands at all? 

Crouching low, his face inches from the surface, he began counting their eyes.

Initially, he thought he might be catching up with the stranger. But every once in a while, squinting into that sea of pale, shimmering discs, he began to feel he had double-counted—so easy in this darkness—and had to start again. 

“You were slower this time,” the stranger said.

“I tried using their eyes.”

“A common mistake—it will get you nowhere. All of us have attempted it, too.”

“I can think of no other way,” Maqbool murmured. “Perhaps I lack some essential faculty? Something the others here possess?”

“Nonsense. We are all much the same.” A trace of amusement in his voice. “Shall we count together again?”

Years passed.

For a time, Maqbool persisted in counting their eyes, hoping he could perfect the technique. But to his dismay, even when he did—when he completed an attempt smoothly, without double-counting—he discovered he was still miles away from the stranger. 

Then, suspecting the secret lay in some internal disposition, he began a wealth of experiments: he imagined himself a child, playing with the fish and singing happily as he counted; he counted as a criminal, his mind consumed with thoughts of murder, of violent revenge; acting as a saint, he counted, wishing peace and eternal happiness upon everyone around him. He counted in English, in Sanskrit, his once-familiar, faltering Bengali; he counted in a language he invented for the sole purpose of counting. 

He counted backward; he counted randomly from the middle, then filled in the rest. He even counted like a fish, sucking in his cheeks, sobbing all the while for his fallen comrades. He counted once as though he had no past; several times, without desire for a future. He counted beatifically, picturing the snow-covered peaks of the Himalayas; he counted despairingly, contemplating the thinning ice.

He counted more ways than he imagined possible.

For many of these efforts, Maqbool was punished by the guards, their brutality tethered to his pace: when he was relatively faster, he suffered only a few lashes on his chest; more frequently, he was forced to swallow mouthfuls of putrid fish until he choked. And yet, even in his most successful moments, in those rare instances when he came somewhat close, he could never keep up with the stranger, who had, by now, all but forgotten him, whose unattainable murmurings, through all these years, haunted him in the darkness.

Had haunted him.

Now, at last, bloodied and exhausted, his tongue severed, lost among the fish—he had tried counting like an amnesiac—unable to bear it any longer, Maqbool decides to spy on the stranger. Discover his secret. 

Watching the guards disappearing along the railing above, he takes a small, quivering step; his legs buckle: he has forgotten how to walk. With effort, he rises, learns again to use his feet. That wet squelch of fish underneath. 

He moves gingerly. 

As he draws closer, the stranger’s faint profile—that same youthful posture—bent gently toward the fish; hands hanging loosely by his sides. Maqbool stops. The man’s eyes are closed; a tranquil smile on his face as swiftly, steadily, he whispers, “…twenty-nine, thirty, thirty-one…”

Trembling, Maqbool wants to warn him, “Wake up, or the guards will kill you!” but just as he is about to touch the man’s shoulder, those words—who had said them?—come rushing back to him: counting is counting. His hand snaps back; he looks around. And for the first time, the darkness melting away, he sees the others.

In those fleeting moments of light, as it departs, as that inevitable darkness returns, Maqbool remains motionless, staring at them—at their softly parted lips, that blind, rapturous chanting. 

Then slowly turns, makes his way back.

“One. Two. Three…” 

The last thing he sees: the fish.

Those eyes.

Unshimmering.

 

Kartikeya Shekhar is a writer based in Mumbai. He previously worked in venture capital and technology across the U.S., Africa, Singapore, and India, and holds an MBA from INSEAD. His fiction appears in Narrative and elsewhere. He is at work on his debut collection of short stories.

 

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Sometimes things grow

How fast are bat wings? Does the tooth fairy plant baby teeth to grow adult teeth? Ami imagined her wobbling incisor in a gleaming white field, red in the middle where nerves used to be. Do plants have ears? Do millipedes have milli-eyes and if peacock feathers filled pillows could a princess sleep on them? I filled her breakfast bowl, washed tomatoes for dinner, her questions burbly as the stew. I fastened her shoes, smeared sunscreen on her nose. Purple knapsack, skinny striped legs. If I stop for a minute I lose the ability to move.

 

Ami pouring her own cereal, making her own eggs. She waited until sun clawed all the way across the floor to my throat and I wake, coughing. Her fingerprints like tulips on the water glass by my bed she carefully carried with both hands so it wouldn’t spill. She chattered musically to a corn plant without ears. “A corn plant without ears,” she yelped, another joke I don’t get. It’s been years since I fell in the backroom of Jinny’s. The blood in my head sludges my limbs, I suffocate in my own resin. Ami forges my signature on school documents and credit cards. She calls me from school, her formal voice colliding with her childish questions. If pillows were stuffed with lashes would I dream of eyes? The electricity is still on thanks to Ami. She gets decent grades. The school only called me once when she slipped on a field day and broke her ankle. You need to come get her they said but I didn’t know where they were.

 

Some people shouldn’t have a child, my mother said when I was one hour and twenty minutes away from delivering. “Some People” is me. Some People never grow up, Some People are stupid as shit, Some People should not be born is what she really meant when I was plastered to a hospital bed about to give birth, her racer-road mouth propped into a smile for the nurse. Thank god you’re here, please take care of her and the child. She didn’t stay long enough to even see the baby. Your grandmother is dead I said when Ami was old enough to ask and maybe she was. I wouldn’t know.

 

Ami packed her own lunches, got a part-time job. The electricity stayed on, food appeared and didn’t rot. When I felt better I made it all the way to the kitchen, different than I remembered, darker, as if wet. When Ami came home I gave her pancakes and syrup, the only thing I still knew how to make. She stabbed her fork in the warm puffy rounds but didn’t eat. I’ll clean up I lied and went back to bed, my brain bouncing off my hot skull. 

Sometimes she dressed me up and brushed my hair all the way down to the place where my waist used to narrow. She led me into the government offices where she lied I was mute. Just nod in the right places, shake your head in the right places, for god’s sake don’t mix them up she pleaded as we pushed through glass doors into beige rooms with greige carpets, everyone in lanyards behind counters almost as tall as my head. I clung to her hand so as to not fall. You see how she is. The bob-haired woman tapped the spot of our exchange, my shaky signature for our trickling benefits. Ami smiled on the sidewalk and let out her breath. You did well she told me, the first I’d heard that in my life. 

 

After my fall, barely awake watching the spray of passing cars like searchlights for the lost. The smell of physician wafted above the whir and beeps of medical machinery. She’ll get better but not like she was, the doctor said. She was always nothing my mother said and flicked on a smile so bright the doctor was sure he had misheard. 

 

Sometimes I dreamed. Monsters, slick and green with purple eyes and tongues like fire. Sometimes of vegetables, an ordinary kitchen knife sliding through them making neat rounds and rectangles. The hand on the knife is always smooth and pretty, there’s music in the background, the song is always soft. If I listen carefully I hear a ball in the background and Ami’s excited voice calling did you see me did you see me to the rosebush because roses have ears. The gap in her mouth is proof of the tooth fairy’s crop at least for other kids under another sun. 

When did she stop coming home? Middle school? High school? Was her hair long or short then, did she have the small glinting chip in her nose that caught the light when she turned? She made me pancakes with syrup and melon sliced into geometric shapes and sat one last time on my bed watching drizzle melt diamonds on the window. Shadow and plaque invaded greater swathes of me. My resin thickened. Strangers lifted my arms, pushed damp cloth over my skin, smoothed hair cut to my shoulders, her last act before leaving. Inside my head only Ami’s old chatter drifted above the quicksand. Does mud go to heaven? Can birds learn to read? My skittering heart raced like squirrel toes. Ami’s song swelled as it finally burst. Her old childhood skipping-rope chant, she sang it so loud and never tripped. Everything dies, but sometimes things grow. 

 

Eirene Gentle writes and edits, mostly lit, mostly little, usually from Toronto, Canada. She’s happy to be published in some great journals.

 

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The Bird Girl

The birds hear her first. A petrol-coloured male pheasant and a handful of females flush from the hairy hedgerow. They sprint across the tilting field toward the dark smile of the woods. 

Their co-cook co-cook co-cook call reminds Sarah of the squeal of the trampoline springs at the new school she visited before the holidays. 

Behind her, and beyond the hedgerow, the red-brick houses of Madeira Close sleep. 

At this time, even the planes, whose endless drone has filled the summer holidays, are caught kipping. Sarah bends. Her fingers catch the discarded twine. It bounces, curls—as if alive. She places it in one of the pockets of her mother’s old maternity shirt. The hollow in the hedgerow smells of the biscuits her nan used to dunk in her tea. Somewhere in the tangle of brush a wood pigeon warbles. It is then she sees it. Almost black in the shade. A long, primary buzzard feather. Sarah straightens. Her trousers have bunched at the knees. She pulls them down over the brown moles on her legs. 

Mrs. Greaves pecks with pinched fingers at the hedgerow. She stands at the end of the twitten that hugs the backs of their homes. Her thick support tights wrinkle around the knees, giving her swollen joints the appearance of squinting eyes. Her slippered feet tread carefully over the brambles. They bow under the weight of glistening blackberries. Gnarled hands clutch a blue plastic bowl of berries.

“Hello, Mrs. Greaves!” Sarah calls.

The old woman startles and places a hand on her heart. 

“Child, you must stop sneaking up on me! You’ll give this old bag of bones a heart attack!”

“You sneaked up on me. I was here before you!” Sarah says without a trace of humour.

“Is that so?” Mrs. Greaves squints through thick glasses at the feather in Sarah’s hands. 

You’ve found more, I see.” 

The girl nods. She wants to pass, but the path is narrow and the old woman’s body takes up so much of the space that Sarah places her back to one side of the beech hedge. As she shuffles past, bramble talons tug at her short, wild curls. A few strands of chestnut hair glisten on the thorns.

“You have your father’s hair,” Mrs. Greaves says.

The old woman is being kind. 

Most people talk about the chocolate-coloured moles that tether Sarah to her father. She thinks of her older sister, Gina. Long before she flew the nest, Gina had once insisted that Sarah’s father was in fact the milkman. Gina was wrong, of course. 

Unless her dad was a milkman before becoming a writer and baggage handler.

 

The house smells of cigarette smoke and burnt toast. But no sign of her father. 

Sarah inhales the silence, and glances at the calendar where her mother has neatly written “HAIRDRESSER” on today’s date. On Monday, the words “BACK TO SCHOOL” taunt her.  

Sarah climbs the narrow stairs, with their threadbare orange carpet, peeling wallpaper and missing bannister post. Into the room she once shared with her sister. Twine in one hand. Feather in the other. 

The day that Gina left for London, Sarah had felt strange. She finally had the room to herself. 

But it wasn’t freedom. It was echo. Not the good kind. That day, to fill the quiet, she climbed onto Gina’s bed and jumped until she could touch the ceiling. The squeal of bed springs was so loud she feared her mum or dad would hear and punish her. But she couldn’t stop. 

Each time her feet left the mattress, pure light filled her body and she began to understand why it was that the birds sang with so much joy. 

Now, Sarah sits at the edge of the bed. She is careful not to disturb the frame she has almost completed. The colours of the feathers she has attached are not uniform, but the sizes are correct. It has taken her all of the summer to collect the feathers. But it will be worth it. She places the primary she found this morning on the empty space at the tip of the right wing. Then, she pads back down the stairs to the kitchen for glue. The bird magazine that her dad found at the airport is on the kitchen table, its pages dog-eared from daily use. 

“Dad, did you know the bee hummingbird is the smallest bird in the world? Songbirds leave the nest when they’re only three weeks old. And an albatross sleeps while it flies.”

“Wish it could teach me, Titch, then I wouldn’t be so knackered from night shifts.”

Every morning at breakfast, the same routine played out. But today there wasn’t even an ashtray on the table. Just two slices of charred toast under the grill. And a jet-black feather on the table, at the place where Sarah normally sits.

“Dad? Dad?”

No reply.

Later, Sarah’s mum comes home, and from her bedroom she hears her yelling at her dad for frittering away what little money they have left at the bookies. He couldn’t even be bothered to clean up his burnt toast. Did he think she enjoyed working her fingers to the bone cleaning the houses of strangers? 

From her bedroom window, Sarah gazes down on the brown moles on her dad’s neck as he darts out of the kitchen and retreats to the garden shed. At the shed door he looks back, grins sheepishly. He’s like the lazy pigeons who steal all the nuts from the bird table—he has everything he needs right here.

Pee-oo pee-oo, pee-oo pee-oo. In the field beyond the garden, a buzzard cries out to an invisible partner. A car’s radio draws Sarah over to the other side of her room. Through the window, she studies a car, “brown as a nut,” her dad would say. Inside, Tracy, the hairdresser, fusses with her handbag. Sarah wants to run back down the twitten, through the field and to the woods. Anything to escape Tracy’s comb and scissors. She darts to the bedroom door, but her mother is on the stairs. 

“It’s only a haircut, Sarah. Please. If you go to school with your hair like that, it won’t be any surprise if…” She didn’t have to finish the sentence. 

 

Later, Sarah is seated in the kitchen, eyes fixed on her mother’s bird bath in the garden. Snip, snip, snip.

Dainty birds with chubby chests, and eye make-up that wouldn’t be out of place in a glam rock band, flutter in the shallow water. Others feed at the bird table, fattening up ahead of the long migration journey. The sight is joyful but not enough to uncoil the tightness in the girl’s stomach. “Take me with you,” Sarah wants to whisper to the birds. “Don’t leave me here!” 

Snip, snip, snip. 

The last time Tracy tried to comb out the knots, Sarah had screamed so loudly that Mr. Franks came round thinking someone was being murdered.

Sarah’s gaze falls to Tracy’s red toenails and the brown curls that accumulate under her feet.

“Lift your head, Sarah,” Tracy says, cheerfully. “You’ll meet my Belinda when you start big school!” 

Sarah raises her chin defiantly. She knows that Bel, as she likes to be called, is at upper school so it is unlikely their paths will cross at her new school. But correcting Tracy would sound petty. Small. And right now, she needs every scrap of bigness she can muster. 

Snip snip snip. 

Moments later, her head drops as if the weight is too great. Tracy cuts off the knots, secretly praying that the poor girl won’t be picked on at the new school.

Sarah’s mood lifts when she remembers that birds like to use hair to make nests. When Tracy is finished, she will sweep the hair into a bag and give it to Mrs. Greaves. 

 

The next day, Sarah rises early as usual. But the rain keeps her indoors. She stares from the front window of her bedroom into the gloom of Madeira Close. Mr. Franks’ face is red and stubbly. He puffs on a pipe while walking his incontinent poodle. The twins from number 42 scowl as they pile into the car for Sunday school. Then there is Mrs. Greaves motioning at her to come to the front door. 

Light rain pats the brown moles on Sarah’s cheek. 

“Good heavens, I didn’t recognise you with the new hairdo!” 

Sarah touches her fingers to her shorn head. It is not quite a crew cut. Not quite anything.

Mrs. Greaves thrust the candle nub into Sarah’s hands. “For the project,” the old woman winks. 

In exchange, Sarah hands the old woman a small bag of her hair. “For Blinky. To make a nest.” 

Blinky is Mrs. Greaves’ green budgerigar. It lives inside a tiny cage in her orange living room and always sings when Sarah visits. 

The old woman’s fleshy face is framed in tight white curls, like an angel or a fluffy white cloud.

“Blinky says thank you. And, by the way, the haircut suits you. You look a bit like, what’s her name? Audrey Hepburn!” The old woman smiles. 

Sarah’s cheeks burn and she flits back indoors. Inside her room, she melts candle wax and attaches the last feather to the frame. Once the wax cools and hardens, Sarah strokes the fan of feathers, feeling a combination of smooth silk and the rigid spines of feathers. She considers showing them to Gina when she arrives later, but then thinks better of it. The wings are hers. Not for anyone else’s gaze.

“Wash your hands,” her mother says later, when Sarah is called down to help prepare lunch for the “big visit.” 

Gina introduces Ian as “the love of her life” even though they’ve only been dating for a month. His skin is pale, like the Milky Bar Kid. It is so white that Sarah thinks if they were ever caught in a blizzard, he’d be completely camouflaged. Today there is nowhere to hide on the chocolate-coloured sofa. Blue veins show in Gina’s arms, which are even skinnier than they were when she lived at home. A new fringe frames her spotless face which is coloured only by her favourite lipstick which she buys in Woolworth’s—Flights of Fancy.

“Titch starts secondary school tomorrow,” her dad tells Ian. 

Ian nods, blowing on a cup of strong tea.

“Before we know it, she’ll be moving out too. And then I’ll turn her room into my study!” Her dad is the only one to laugh at his joke.

Sarah wants to sneak off and read her magazine upstairs. But she is under strict orders to stay put. So she sits cross-legged on the carpet, her eyes drifting across its orange-and-purple maze. If she blurs her vision, the shapes lift into patchwork fields—the kind holidaymakers see from the sky when they fly over her home. On their way to Majorca or wherever it was they went.

Dad asks Ian about his job in pest control and Sarah comes back down to earth.

“Pigeons, they’re the rats of the avian world!” the Milky Bar Kid says. 

Sarah stiffens. “Pigeons helped win the war, you know. They carried messages across enemy lines.” Her voice comes out sharper than she means. 

Ian looks at Sarah as though seeing her for the first time. Dad sniffs and rubs the stubble on his chin, the way he sometimes does before teasing her mum. 

“We’ve actually been hearing some scrapings in the chimney. Maybe you could take a quick look?” 

Ian squirms. They are all saved when Sarah’s mum enters, dark circles under her eyes. 

She looks at Sarah’s dad sternly until he pulls out the largest of the nest of tables, and she slams down a bowl of Twiglets and another of raisins.

 

After dinner, Gina says she wants to show Ian something and sweeps the Milky Bar Kid away to her old bedroom. Her dad picks food from his teeth with a toothpick. Her mum tuts so loudly you can hear it over the click of her knitting needles. Sarah pads silently upstairs and listens at the bedroom door. Sucking noises merge with the squeal of a bed mattress. Gina’s bed! 

Sarah thrusts the door open and stands hands on hips.

“What the…?” Gina looks up from her bed. Flights of Fancy is smeared across her mouth along with strands of her fine straight hair. 

Ian’s face is as pink as a newborn baby. 

“You’re breaking them! Get off!” Sarah exclaims, running to the bed. 

“What are you talking about?” Gina sits up, her blouse flapping open to reveal pale, spotless skin.

“My wings!” Sarah screams. She tries to push her sister and Ian off the bed. 

Ian is too heavy and sits dumbly on the wing with its scores of feathers painstakingly collected and attached.

“I wish you’d never come back. I hate you! I hate you! I hate you!”

Sarah’s mum bounds up the stairs. When she sees Gina’s open blouse, her face goes whiter than Ian’s skin. 

“I didn’t raise you to be a little slut!” 

There is a sharp snap of air from her mother’s hand before it hits Gina’s cheek. Gina’s hand rises to the spot, tears well at her eyes. Sarah pauses briefly before shoving her sister off the bed and retrieving the bent wings. 

Gina sniffs and scowls, yelling, “I don’t live here! I am an adult. I can do…”

“When you’re in my house you obey our rules!” her mum interrupts. 

The Milky Bar Kid buttons up his shirt, his cheeks red with shame.

 

Everyone is relieved when her dad suggests that they leave. From the street side window of her bedroom, Sarah watches them get into Ian’s car and drive off. Gina laughs but the red welt on her cheek is still visible. Downstairs, her mum and dad are shouting. The sky is overcast and large gobs of rain spit onto the potholed street. Sarah studies the scrappy remains of the wings. The frame is intact, but she needs at least four large feathers to replace those broken by Gina and Ian. At the back door, she pulls on her wellies. Her mother is smoking while talking on the phone, probably to her sister in Horsham. 

“If we had a car, it’d be bearable. But…” She inhales hungrily on the cigarette and exhales a cloud of smoke from the side of her mouth. “Any time money lands in his hands, he’s straight down the bookies.” 

Another inhale and exhale. 

Sarah can’t understand why anyone would smoke those things that smell like a dirty bonfire. 

“Don’t get me started on the pub. I’ve told him. Any place is better than being stuck here! It’s like a cage!”

Sarah closes the door quietly behind her and marches along the twitten, out onto the field. The rain has stopped and the earth releases smells which were previously trapped by the summer’s heat—peppery mustard and pickles, and wet hay like her favourite breakfast cereal. She finds a wood pigeon feather, striped in grey, white and then ash black. 

It goes inside the breast pocket of her mother’s shirt. A tatty rope hangs from the branch of an old oak, the remains of a swing that someone once hung from it. Beneath the rope, she finds a pheasant tail feather and deposits it in the pocket. Sarah enters the woods. Silent like a church. Have the birds begun their migration already? She walks to the small clearing where she and Gina used to play house when they were younger. A carpet of dried leaves crunches beneath her boots. Rabbit holes pepper the earthen bank leading down to the camp. A fallen tree has created a natural wall between the dip and the field. No feathers. 

She trudges back to the field. 

In the long grass, crickets resume their weak song, perhaps their last of the summer and from somewhere in the distance the deep, crackly echo of a plane reaches her tiny corner of Sussex. Bleached grass sways and glows like cotton in the weak dusk light. At the field’s edge a young buzzard sits on a five-barred gate. The same bird that has watched over Sarah whenever she gathered feathers or sat at her window. Behind the bird, the sun’s last rays leak out in reds, oranges and pinks on the horizon, like Flights of Fancy. No, Sarah thinks. “This colour should be called Buzzard’s Revenge.” 

A loud crack smashes the calm like a fist and the bird’s wings open, but instead of taking flight, it slides from its perch, dropping into the long grass.

“Bullseye!” a broken voice shouts from the edge of the field. 

Sarah sees Robin, an older boy, slinging an air rifle on one shoulder. A smaller boy, Gary, laughs. Sarah’s face prickles with rage and pain. Why? What did the buzzard ever do to them? She wants to grab the boy’s stupid rifle and smash it over his head. But her feet are fixed to the ground. 

“Well, if it isn’t the bird girl!” 

Robin approaches the bird that twitches in the bleached grass. 

“More like a Dalmatian, with all those spots,” counters Gary. 

It’s nothing she hasn’t heard before. But still, she wants to scratch the boy’s eyes out. 

Robin chuckles. “Is she even a girl? I’d say she wants to be a boy with that haircut,” Robin sneers. 

“One way to find out,” Gary grins. His short legs stride closer to Sarah.

Sarah’s senses become more attuned. Her fingers coil at the twine in the front pocket of her mother’s shirt. She recalls the magazine with its dog-eared pages, the first feather she took home. Jumping on the bed. The planes overhead all summer long. It is then that she becomes aware of the deafening silence around them. It is too late for children to be out playing in gardens. Even the birds are preparing for their own journeys. Sarah is in danger. But this is her playground. If only Mrs. Greaves were here. Maybe she could be. She glances behind the boys, to the overgrown twitten behind her house.

“Hello, Mrs. Greaves!” she yells. 

In the seconds it takes the boys to turn and look, Sarah bolts down the sloping field back towards the woods. Her legs are short, but she knows the terrain and hops over the cracks and dried mud holes that could snap an ankle. Woodsmoke, a rotting carcass, and something like pickled onions. She has no time for the smells now. When she reaches her old camp, she slides her body beside a felled tree and pulls dried leaves over herself like a crackly blanket. Tiny drops of liquid pat on the earth. Rain? No—her own tears, falling fast, feeding the earth and the ants. 

The gruff voices and clumsy footsteps of the boys suck all of the air out of the evening for a good twenty minutes. In her head, Sarah counts the feathers on the wings she had made. She goes through the different feather varieties. Lists the facts she has memorised about birds. The smallest bird in the world is the bee hummingbird. Songbirds leave the nest only when they are three weeks old. Buzzards can live up to thirty years. 

Finally, she rises from her nest, dusts off the leaves, and treads cautiously to the field. Traipsing along the milky trail cast by the moon, Sarah pauses at the post. A few covert feathers trail on the ground where the creature fell. She wishes those boys were here now so she could beat them with the post. She also feels something else now. Not just rage. Guilt, maybe. As though she summoned the bird with her wanting.

Instead of taking the twitten, which now seems like a dark, tight corridor which might swallow her, Sarah follows the footpath to the main road and then down her street. The familiar housefronts of her neighbours stare back blankly. Sarah can hear the shouting from Mrs. Greaves’ house. 

“This place will be the death of me!” her mum yells.

“You know what you are? You’re just an ungrateful bitch! You’ll never be happy. Not here. Not in a big town!” 

Her dad’s words are like a verbal slap. The air changes, and Sarah raises a hand to her cheek, though there is nothing there. 

“That settles it, then,” her mum says. 

 

In the momentary silence, Sarah slips into the house through the back door and bounds up the stairs. From her bedroom, she hears sobbing. A small firefly lights up in the back garden, and the smoke from her dad’s cigarette reaches her room. 

An hour later, from her bedroom window, Sarah watches the moonlight glinting off the buckle on the suitcase they used to take on holiday. Her mum places the case in the back of a taxi. She never takes taxis. Says they’re too expensive. Her chest tightens as though the suitcase buckle were looped around it. Sarah climbs under the bedcovers and cries, this time letting out huge sobs. She cries for her mum. She cries for the buzzard. She cries at the thought of having to go to a new school the next day. A school with its loud noises and angry teachers and lonely rooms. The pain of it all swirls together like the dancing colours on their living room carpet. There’s a knock on her bedroom door, and though Sarah doesn’t answer, her dad comes in anyway and sits on Gina’s bed, careful of the wings. 

“Titch, are you awake?” His voice is croaky, and he sniffs as though he is sick. 

Sarah turns to face the wall. 

“Your mum’s going away for a bit.” He sighs.

In the long silence, Sarah thinks maybe he’s left. 

Then the springs of Gina’s bed squeak as he rises to his feet.

“Do I still have to go to school tomorrow?” Sarah asks.

“What? Yes, Titch. You still have to go to school,” her dad says and leaves. 

 

Sarah lies awake listening to the sound of the TV downstairs. She loves her dad, who in many ways is like her because they both have the same moles on their bodies. But that is the only way they are alike. He has everything he needs. Here in this house. Sarah wishes she could be more like him. But she can’t. The wings are still missing feathers but maybe that shouldn’t stop her. The magazine says that when a bird loses a feather on one side, it sheds the same feather on the opposite wing, for balance. She gets up, examines the wings.

Where there are gaps on one side, she plucks out the feathers on the other. Sarah pulls the straps over her shoulders, tying the twine into a wreath knot over her flat chest. She opens the window that looks out on the fields and climbs onto the ledge. The moon renders her speckled wings and skin in black-and-white, as though she is an actor in a film. She raises and lowers her arms, closes her eyes, and steps off the ledge. 

Air rushes up to greet her—not like the trampoline spring of her sister’s bed, not like falling. She rises.

Above the stubbled fields,
above the woods,
above the village—
a scatter of toys,
a map in miniature.

Behind her, a buzzard rides her slipstream.
Not dead.

Or maybe it’s the mate,
calling her higher.

Sarah banks left.
Chimneys tilt like matchsticks.

The bird follows.

It banks right.

She follows.

Wing, wing—
catch, rise—
wing, wing—
glide.

Together, they migrate.

To warmth.

To elsewhere.

Sarah is still young,
but her wings are ready.

It is time.

Note: Twitten is a term from the county of Sussex to describe a narrow path or passage between two walls or hedges.

 

Jess Bauldry is a British writer and journalist who has lived in Luxembourg since 2010. A graduate of the University of Hull MA programme, she writes short stories, poetry, literary non-fiction, and theatre, and also performs standup comedy. Her work has been published on a number of literary websites and in two anthologies, including one from publisher Black Fountain Press. In 2021, she won the LEAPA short play prize.

 

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Birdsong

One disturbing thing about listening to a language you do not know is that there are no pauses. The sounds go on until they suddenly stop. There are no distinct words. No chunks of meaning. Nothing on which to hang your understanding. People speak and respond in one long birdsong. You just listen in awe.

This is how I sat in a room when I was six years old. Palms pressed into a dusty grey carpet. Surrounded by new classmates and yet another teacher. Facing a language that didn’t—couldn’t—reach me. It would take time. That’s what my mother told me. And, until I could manage on my own, she’d be there. One safe point was all I needed to brave the world. 

For weeks and months, my mother joined me on that foreign carpet. Sat with me on the classroom’s tired wooden benches. My personal translator: she told me what the birdsong meant. 

It has been a year since my mother died. Meanwhile, Sarah’s due date is in two weeks. There are times when the pain seeps in and discolors the joy. Mom will never meet her grandchild. My child will never be able to turn to her like I did. 

Sarah and I have no intention of moving abroad. But every child needs a translator. In two weeks, it is my turn. My mother showed me the way. Wherever my child goes, I’ll be there to explain. Whatever twitters; anything that chirps.

 

Steven R. Kraaijeveld is a Dutch philosopher, ethicist, and writer who grew up in Czechia, China, and the Philippines. His fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in ANMLY, Epiphany, L’Esprit Literary Review, Massachusetts Review, Maudlin House, and MoonPark Review. He was a finalist in Fugue’s 2025 Prose Contest. Find out more about him on Instagram @esarkaye or through his website, stevenrkraaijeveld.com.

 

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Copycat

A. My dear friend Anna tells me about Lilia Carrillo, her beloved painter, as she furiously types an essay on Duchamp’s urinal. Anna discovered the painter because her aunt owns a Carrillo painting. She previously told me how someday, that painting will belong to her. Lately, Anna’s been most fixated on Carrillo’s only self-portrait, autorretrato from 1948. I met Anna over a year ago, through some course on eco-poetics. Now we’re a month away from the end of spring semester. I’m sitting across from her, looking at her downturned eyes, admiring how focused she is on her work. I note how Anna pursues life so organically: “I love it,” she declares, and then she’ll devote her entire intellectual life towards it.

B. In a few weeks, Anna will be boarding a flight to Mexico City to study Lilia Carrillo. In February, she received news that the university awarded her a “large” research grant, though I call it a “considerable” grant, because the school is cheap and Anna will barely break even for the summer. A staff member from her department conducts an interview about her, snaps a headshot of her in front of a tree. She emails me the story when it’s published, but I never read it. Suddenly, I feel an urge to visit Mexico. Is this what jealousy feels like? I occasionally wonder how Anna’s grant money might feel in my hands. But then the thought goes away by money’s unforgiving nature, how it craves to be spent, to touch as many needy hands as fast as possible. I can feel how substantial money is, though it’s never felt real. Almost like sex, or a kind of prostitution I’m too disconnected from my body to feel its allure. For all of Anna’s ideological stances against capitalism, her physiology absorbs the pleasure of what money allows. She lives for beauty, makes daily solemn vows to art. Her hunger for an aesthetically pleasureful life results in heartburn when she’s surrounded by ugliness. On the contrary, my body languishes and struggles to process the basic necessities. I can endure long periods of hunger without even realizing. Once, I broke my pinky and didn’t feel a problem until the next day, when the finger throbbed all red and swollen like a fat bee.

C. Over email, Anna sends me articles about Lilia Carrillo. From the little I have read about Carrillo, she never really spoke about her gender. But being a women’s and gender studies major, Anna speaks about womanhood on Carrillo’s behalf. “Surrounded by men,” Anna writes in one of her emails, “she can only speak of herself without words. Carrillo and her male counterparts do not share a common language, so how could she speak?” Carrillo belonged to an era of abstract expressionism, typically intense in its gestures. Yet Carrillo approaches her work methodically and carefully. Anna claims this to be gendered expression.

D. Anna and Carrillo are both Mexican. I am Chinese, still looking for an artist to love and study. My refusal to love is a racial expression.

E. The most important possession I own is my pocket dictionary. I found the book a few years ago in a shoebox under my mother’s bed. She first purchased it when she immigrated to America. I was surprised she still kept it—she’d long removed most remnants of her former life. The dictionary was one of a few essential items she budgeted her waitressing tips for. She must have been around my age. The little booklet helped her survive. It’s hefty, like a Bible. I imagine all the potential energy in my mother’s hands as she carried around the dictionary, translating the thoughts trapped in her body into a form. I cherish this dictionary like an art, flipping through stacked definitions like a book of poems, soaking each meaning until all sense dissolves.

F. I dropped out of my first ever class in college, “Experimental Drawing,” after my professor pointed his finger at me. I remember this finger decorated with pubey hair and a thick, engraved ring, lifted after all the students introduced themselves. He widened his eyes large like a dead fish and spoke in a huffy voice: “You have a gift, being Chinese. Take that lineage and artistry, and go look at all the Chinese artists of the past and emulate them as a Chinese person of today!” I hate you; those words emerged immediately. I had never hated anyone before, wasn’t sure what it even meant to hate, if that’s what was happening. Though the encounter did confirm how love would not be possible for me. Later, I searched for the professor’s name on the internet. He was an artist from Rhode Island and spent two years in Beijing, on a grant to take photos of architecture. Even more later, long after I dropped out of the course, it was that professor’s sandpapery voice that still lingered, never my Chinese ancestors “of the past.”

G. “What will I do?” I lament the summer to Anna. She advises I apply to the university’s summer program in New York like she did last year. “It was kind of a waste of time, but I found love,” she gushed. But she didn’t find it. Finding is, my dictionary informs, the coming upon by searching or effort. Anna doesn’t put effort into her life or search for it, never needs to. She lives in the center vantage point of all existence, her body as the receptor to pain and happiness. These emotional experiences give substance and depth to her personality, qualifying her as more interesting, appealing than someone like me, who coasts along life’s corner without experiencing anything real. I know Anna thinks this to be our fundamental difference. She’s always bringing me to club meetings and the parties she’s invited to, pestering me like my mother to “experience more.” She sees me, maybe secretly resents me, meekly observing time’s elusive passage, a lackluster pantomime peeling experiences belonging to more remarkable people like her. Anna’s the kind to be remarked, practically bursting with love like a movie. But when I’m feeling jealous or angry at her, I think about how she’s guilty of the same copying as I am. Is she not taking advantage of art and Carrillo? Of course, she does it more tastefully than me. She loves autorretrato, loves Marco, the tall Italian she met in New York, loves the capability to love, to feel herself extend itself and belong. Love, to hold dear. Anna loves because she has the receptors to hold. Anna loves me, but I don’t love her, I lack this ability. I think that’s our fundamental difference.

H. In my sleep, my mother tells me about moving from China to America. She’s young and Chinese again, wandering a street as her hands hover above her stomach, as if holding an invisible object. In dreams, I neither see nor tell. I’ve never dreamt words before. I dream of meaning by absorbing a language-less dialect, nonsense cradling my head steadily like the organs of a belief system. I realize my dream is lucid when there’s no dictionary to hold. I’ve stripped it away from my mother’s hands, and now, in this new dimension, there’s no way to remind myself what belief means, or how a dream’s supposed to feel. My mother’s face melts. It’s burning in this American dream. And because there’s no words to ask me to help, my dictionary doesn’t exist, no flipping to the page on what it means to save her.

I. I go to the library, scan a photo of myself and print it out small, tucking it on the page the dictionary defines “apple.” Apple, the fleshy, usually rounded red, yellow, or green edible pome fruit of a usually cultivated genus Malus tree of the rose family. The 5-letter signifier of a pome, a word once uttered you can’t imagine anything besides itself. When I’m transplanted into the dictionary like this, I’m assigned meaning: CHINESE, ORIENTAL, ASIAN. Rather than generating imagery of a fresh, colorful pome, I trigger sulfur-like imaginations: CHINK, CHING CHONG, CHINAMAN.

J. News of my acceptance to the New York program comes from an email by a woman named Ruby. Her email begins, “Congratulations,” followed by kind-spirited sentences. I text Anna about my acceptance; she replies, “congrats!” The cost of summer tuition is almost the same as Anna’s grant. So this is how the summer will go: me giving thousands of my parents’ dollars to the institution, Anna receiving institution money to go abroad. I search Ruby online and discover she is white and a poet. Her work has received numerous prizes and awards. She lists these accolades in her biography, as if a definition in the dictionary. Phonetically, it sounds like we have the same full name: /ˈruː.bi/ Wae-NG. But my last name is “Wang” whereas hers is “Wayne.” Wang means a Chinese ruler. Wayne means wagon driver.

K. I search for all the information I can about white Ruby on the internet. First I find her online profiles, study all the Macbook photos on Facebook, blurry images from parties she attended in college, old tweets about how great The Flaming Lips were last night, internet confrontations where she defends Sylvia Plath, self-promotion for her poems. I open a new document and list these facts as bullet points. She’s native to New York, spent vacations on her family’s second home on Martha’s vineyard, adores haikus and Ikkyu, quotes I-Ching, had a pet whippet named Rufus who passed away in 2012, posted dozens of haikus about Rufus, had a brief teaching stint in a small New York college but “hated how dictatorial institutions restricted her language” (one of the replies said, “your poor art!”). Had a husband who came out gay. Divorced. She might be gay? She moved to North Carolina, and she hasn’t posted about her writing in the last three years. The document fills up. I morph the facts into a story, script them into my fiction until I believe it as true, until Ruby Wayne feels like my biography.

L. My American-minded mother is thrilled about my summer in New York. I visited New York once when my mother freshly arrived in America, too fresh to be American. I was four and when we walked around Times Square with foam statue-of-liberty crowns on our heads. The streets overwhelmed me so bad I threw up on the sidewalk. People stared. Don’t think we had the appetite for America yet. But now my mother is assimilated, more nation-like. She considers intensely overwhelming abundance condensed in a small place like Times Square a kind of heaven. Convenience and possibilities to outfit, eat and buy oneself into a real person.

M. My professor for a compositional writing course returns my final essay and the pages are decorated by red pen marks. She’s made a diagram out of my work. Little dots and circles around certain sentences with annotated question marks, arrows connecting one paragraph to another. Her scribbles look like a piece of experimental poetry: “What does this mean? What do you mean?” But it isn’t an essay about anything! “Essay” originates from the French “essayer,” meaning to try. Essay in English also can mean the result or product of an attempt. So when the professor tucks the graded paper all folded up to hide my horrid grade, I am not dismayed because I have essayed, conveying attempted truth and my honest nonsense.

N. My first meeting of Ruby Wayne feels like a miracle. My fiction as reality, like meeting God from the Bible. “Is this real?” I keep asking myself. My hand grips the suitcase so tight I’ll only realize I’m hurting my palm after she’s gone. Her torso stretches long and lanky. She’s helping another student with their bag. Her serious face and mannerisms, exactly how I imagined a writer! Her voice carries a deepness and heaviness, making me too frantic and nervous to speak honestly and carefully. Thankfully, I don’t have to say anything besides “hi, Ruby.”

O. Over the cohort’s first dinner, white Ruby takes us to her favorite restaurant. I’m too nervous to stomach the falafel and baba ganoush, instead probing it with my fork. I anticipated this introduction, rehearsed a short script for it on the plane to New York: My name is Ruby, I like to read poems, especially adore Sylvia Plath (I only read “Daddy,” “Ariel,” and The Bell Jar the week prior). I also enjoy The Flaming Lips and Sparklehorse… It’s my first time in New York. I even practiced the natural pauses and nervous laughter. But when it’s my time to share, I’m stutters and nerves. I avoid looking at white Ruby as I deliver my introduction. I feel embarrassed and take it out on the pita, ripping it into tiny shreds. I refrain from speaking, flattered that white Ruby doesn’t engage in the conversation either. Students start discussing our generation’s self-obsession online. One student says something about social media and panopticons, citing Foucault to remark on our self-surveillance. He smirks smugly, utters the statement a bit like a lecture, I think because he’s reciting a professor’s lecture. Does white Ruby think the same? Finally white Ruby speaks, noting the effects of groupthink on culture, how we acquired certain tastes and preferences by being grouped together. This instills my confidence to speak, so I speak, elaborating on her spiel by citing Lilia Carrillo to claim how individuals within groups could resist homogenizing aesthetics and forms while still maintaining consistency. “This artist Carrillo made paintings comparable to her abstract painting counterparts, but she committed herself to a creative practice that was personal to her,” I say, this time without pausing. Later, the next day, white Ruby tells me about how she looked at some Lilia Carrillo paintings online and she was impressed by them. I smile like she’s impressed with me.

P. White Ruby teaches a class each week. She lectures about different figures from New York. One lecture on Susan Sontag, then another on Andy Warhol, James Baldwin, Frank Lloyd Wright. I’m starting to understand “a figure.” “Susan Sontag” is morphing into something more fundamental than before. When white Ruby delivers her presentation, it’s difficult to discern if the ideas belong to Sontag or to her. White Ruby is becoming a figure, too. “Art isn’t mimetic,” white Ruby asserts. When I look at her, I feel my mind creating an image of my ultimate role model. It’s stunning! Is this the vision of an artist?

Q. Susan Sontag considered emphasis on interpreting art’s “content” as limiting, resulting in a loss of appreciating “form.” I think Sontag would’ve appreciated my artful, chinky-sounding parents, who carved my language out of a heavy concern towards form. There is an art to their sound, an art to all their hate. Sontag, could you interpret this? My sensations endure what explanation fails to experience: the form of their self-hatred, the ugliness of misshapen mouths, my unlucky inheritance.

R. Anna emails me a paragraph of text about her time in Mexico so far and attaches a photo of a Carrillo painting. “Literally and feeling-wise, larger than life,” she writes in the email. The painting contains hues of tan, red, and white. The lighter colors dust over the darker shades. She lists her frustrations about the limited existing archives of Carrillo compared to her male counterparts. I try to read the message in her voice, but I’m forgetting the inflections and intonations she speaks in, so I read the message with my own voice. I download the image and attach the painting in a new email to white Ruby. “Literally and feeling-wise, larger than life,” I write in the email. I hit send and then compose a reply to Anna. I thank her for the image and I ask her about her time in the program last year, whether she remembers white Ruby. “You know, we share the same name?”

S. Besides attending the weekly classes, the program doesn’t entail much else. I spend most evenings in Chinatown. In this country made into a town, guests are welcome to eat until they implode. I, too, come with the motive to eat dinner, but I lose my appetite once I arrive. Yet I keep coming back, waiting for that feeling people keep telling me a Chinese person should feel. I’m a tourist of tourism, taking inventory of where the crowd flows and lines form. One night, a man named Tyler guides a group down Mott. Tyler speaks with an accent and says his name isn’t Tyler. I then wonder if his accent is even real. His name is “Jiatian” but they can call him Tyler. “I’m from China,” Tyler informs them, like this fact gives him the ethos to speak on all Chinatowns. He describes “here” like it’s Treasure Island, the perimeter of hidden gold. Tyler guides the group to eight spots during the tour: two dumpling spots, shops specializing in bao, beef noodle soup, lamb skewers, “hamburgers,” and chop suey, as well as a Chinese bakery. I follow the group like a hidden attraction, observing patrons exchange cash for my inner treasures.

T. It’s been a month in New York. I feel bloated from wasting so much money. I wonder how Anna’s doing on the grant money. I keep purchasing books I see, some things on sale, poetry collections, lit-fic books with kitschy covers, a few things white Ruby recommended. Though I haven’t finished anything yet. Each morning I perform an embarrassing ritual where I put each of the books I’ve acquired in a circle and pick one like tarot. Who am I today? Then I read a few pages, morph into the character, and believe I am becoming someone.

U. Wandering in the bookstore, I thought about how I couldn’t buy anything. My bank account was practically nil. I didn’t want to ask my mother to wire me money, even though she would probably do it happily. In the poetry section, a single copy of white Ruby’s collection titled Loosenings is shelved. Plain spine, released by some publisher I’d never heard of. I’ve clicked on one of white Ruby’s poems online before. I scanned through the black pixels as fast as possible: Etherized, like a cloud, gone, pause. “Was this good?” I remember asking myself, though it wasn’t like I’d really read it. With the physical copy of her work in my hands, I still don’t want to read the poems. Instead I thumb through all the pages fast to create a blur of her work. All the poems become the same. My thumb gets stuck in a page and the blur stops. I am dislodged by the “oriental”  (something of, relating to, or situated in the Orient) printed in the middle of a poem, staring back at me like a little window. I stare so long I don’t register the word as meaningful, instead just a scramble of letters. Ironically, “oriental” is the perfect word to describe how I feel about this non-meaning nonsense, an adjective that prompts further describing: “of,” “from,” “characteristic” of whatever you make of this unknown, faraway quality.

V. Thirteen days following my message, Anna replies: Honestly forgot her name was Ruby, but I just looked her up online and yes, that’s her. I remembered she was white and a poet (?), but mainly how off-putting she was. She assigned us these reflections on the artists she was lecturing about and then told us she was keeping our responses for a “conceptual” piece. Later that fall, one girl in my cohort found an essay Ruby published in a relatively large lit mag, an essay revisiting Andy Warhol and Valerie Solonas, and it included nearly direct passages from the girl’s assignment.

W. In what will be our last excursion, white Ruby takes the cohort to a play housed in a tiny theater in the Lower East Side. As we take our seats, the usher hands us folded sheets of paper. “It’s a questionnaire,” the usher informs, but he instructs us not to read the contents until the show has completed. White Ruby is in high spirits. I see her two seats to the left of me, beaming at the narrow stage. The show begins a few minutes after we take our seats. Three actors decorate the floor, no set pieces. They wear a black, white, and beige bodysuit with a matching mask. The black and white actors interact with each other aggressively—collapsing on one another, shoving, screaming. The beige one attempts to intercept, then becomes timid and hides behind the stage. No dialogue uttered during the 50 minutes of the show. The slip of paper includes three questions: 1) What is the race of the actor in black? 2) What is the race of the actor in white? 3) What is the race of the actor in beige?

X. The dictionary lists one definition of “slur” as a verb: to indistinctly speak, performing the words in a hurried manner. The other definition is a casting of insult, or disparaging remark. I draw a connection between assimilation, the process of taking in habits, attitudes, and mode of life, and the slur, how assimilating lives in the world of the slurry. The slur sings a song of references, insulting through allusion, using language as a hint, a suggestion of a reality. Upon assimilating, the innuendos of the slur hold meaning. The slur, previously an indistinct blur, gains clarity.

Y. In the last week of the program, white Ruby conducts one-on-one meetings to collect interviews about our experiences. My meeting lasts seventeen minutes. In the first five, she compliments what a great job I’ve done on the assignments. “They were brilliant,” she says. Her validation makes my head fuzzy. I tell her I saw a book of her poetry in the bookstore and bought it, how excellent I found the poems, then ask whether she’s working on anything new. The rest of the meeting involves white Ruby telling me about her new writing project. “It’ll be a form of automatic writing,” she tells me. A spirit is sending her messages, transmitted via subconscious writing. She grins like a child, tells me about how the practice originates from China. “Foo-gee. Have you heard of it?” I’ve never heard of it. “It sounds familiar,” I reply. “Topically, I’m going to merge my familial ancestry with my literary ancestry, something like the intersection of my relatives with Susan Sontag, Edith Wharton, Andy Warhol, all the figures we’ve been covering in our course. It’ll be an ultimate reflection of me,” she boasts. “That sounds brilliant,” I say.

Z. Anna and I rent an apartment in the fall. I move in after her and see she’s decorated the living space with a photograph of Audre Lorde. She’s gotten tanner, practically glowing from the summer. We exchange postcards, and I give her one of the books I purchased in New York. “I read this and thought of you.” She tells me anecdotes about Mexico but none of the stories stick. I struggle with listening to her. I don’t share anything about white Ruby or my summer. She’s still dating Marco, who sleeps over each night. I try to arrange my room, but it feels like a mausoleum, full of dead objects that don’t belong to me. There’s one last week of break before the semester starts, and I’m terribly tired but I sleep awfully every night that week, tossing and turning in bed for hours before my body allows me rest. One night, I dream of a scene with words. A spirit has infiltrated, starts speaking to me. He says, “This is automatic dreaming, have you heard of it?” I say, “It sounds familiar.” He’s my ancestor and he’s been watching me. He slaps me in the face. He’s fed up with me, he’ll be gone by the morning, when I wake up I’ll be drenched with sweat, hazy voice of the spirit still aching in my head. I’ll look for the bottle of painkillers and swallow a gulp of water down. When I put the painkillers back, I’ll realize my pocket dictionary’s no longer there.

 

Ruby Wang is an MFA student at UMass Amherst and contributing editor for Zona Motel. Their work appears or is forthcoming in Buckman Journal, Sine Theta Magazine, Poet’s Row, the museum of americana, and more. rubywang.carrd.co.

 

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Midnight Multiplying

We lived together, the wildest ones. Our memories were like this: Burning quick like shots of Jäger. Singeing our fingertips, sparklers we held onto for seconds too long. Now we lay in bed, midnight multiplying the wounds. The machines hung around. We weren’t quite right.

One girl was called Fear of Birds. Fear of Birds, young and innocent, sought out an older woman for protection, Fear of Not Saying It All. In the closet, according to Fear of Grownups, was some kind of beastie. A former teacher, Fear of Not Doing Enough, was unable to ignore a constant itching of the skin.

The guards would come near and we’d pretend to be asleep. Or we’d hiss instead. Flash eyes at them like bats. We’d bitten before; they weren’t fazed. We wanted someone to confirm we were occupying the same physical space as them, but we were scared we’d hear otherwise. Our eyes were raccooned; our tears, blackened with makeup, carved out paths on our faces. Sometimes a bruise peeked out.

The wildest included Fear of Being Touched and Fear of Sin, kindred spirits. The cowering one, who had Lizzie Borden Disorder, or maybe just the Fear of it. Fear of Inflammation of the Meninges. Fear of Crumbling, Fear of Disease.

We’d put on our sleep masks. The doctors would tell us to count to a million. Somewhere, a girl barked. Teeth opening, winged pain flying out. The rooms had symbols on the door: an illustration of a cracked egg, an eye, a shattered mirror. We didn’t know what they meant.

Bedfellows, cont’d: Fear of Forgetting, Fear of Time (best friends since before they arrived). Fear of Staying Stuck.

We’d force ourselves static. Grasp at any hint of dream. Carpaccio: a red meat, named for a red painter. Unsettling sitcom laughter. Cross-eyed in a crowd.

Fear of Tilting Buildings, The Floor Slipping Away Underneath Us, Fear of Being Used.

We’d write love letters to the possibility of sanity. Game shows, bombs, glass slippers, windows shattering. Cracking the codes on the doors.

Fear of the Moon Falling, Fear of Being Followed.

Did the world fall ill at once, or was only the ill world visible? We wanted nothingness, and felt the sufficient amount of shame that required of us. We lay in bed, midnight multiplying the wounds. We rolled into each other’s messes. We tangled ourselves up. It wasn’t enough to be alive. We still had to want.

 

Danielle Zaccagnino is a teacher, writer, and new mother. Her first book, Suppose Muscle, Suppose Night, Suppose This In August, is available from Mason Jar Press. She has an MFA from Texas State University, and her writing appears in journals such as Diagram, Waxwing, and Puerto del Sol. She is the EIC of Fast Flesh Literary Journal.

 

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