HOW THERE WERE BRIDGES by Meagan Arthur

How I said, we’ve seen these same bridges. How it was dark. We’re driving in circles, I said. We wound the mountain roads away from your parents’ cabin, the yellow dashes in the middle of the black flashing by underneath us. How you didn’t say anything. The dashes flashed by like a treaty. How you turned the brights on and off, on and off, every time a car passed, which wasn’t often. How again we came upon the same fork – two bridges, splitting different ways over the river, one a little bigger than the other. One with a tunnel made of rusting metal, the other tunneling through the mountain. It was dark. But I could tell. We’d been here before.

How I was swimming in that creek. Years ago, before the bridges. When we met, I was in that creek feeling like nothing. How I flew to Louisiana. For my friend’s wedding. How I flew on a plane and took pills to keep from looking down. How everyone else came to the wedding in pairs. I took the pills so I wouldn’t have to see how far up the plane was. I was there alone, me and the creek. The pills had worn off. Which was why I was swimming. Everyone else was somewhere else, in pairs, not swimming, wearing stiff clothes in the sun. How I’d scrambled down a steep path and found a creek surrounded by smooth pebbles. How there was no one around. I’d taken off everything and smoothed my way in, displacing the water as if in communion. How I floated there, watching parts of myself reaching the surface, buoyed. How the water was warm. The water was the same temperature as I was. How it felt like the pills. Felt better. Each body part of mine broke from gravity, somehow, and became a part of that water, warm and buggy and free.

You had said, I’ll drive. We approached the bridges together, your hands tight to the steering wheel, holding the frame together. We’d been at your parents’ cabin in Idaho to celebrate New Year’s. We’d driven down the mountain as the sun was setting. Now it was dark. You’d looked down from the mountain and said, here, let me. A mountain covered in tall trees, like a luxury. Like a textured coat. We were in the dark, driving in circles, trying to get back home. It was the mark of us being fiancés, me being invited, finally, to one of your parents’ holidays. You’d said, they’re just traditional. You’d said they didn’t believe in inviting us to share a room and a bed when we weren’t joined in matrimony. But now we were close. Now we were almost joined. Tied together and sinking to our resting place. Down the mountain. When I’d offered to help with the dishes, after dinner, your mother had gone in and reloaded the dishwasher after I’d finished. I had watched her turn over every piece of silverware and replace it in a different spot, one by one. The headlights shined on the same two bridges in front of us. It should be impossible, that we hadn’t yet chosen one to drive over.

How I’d broken my ankle in that creek. In Louisiana. How we both heard it snap. I didn’t know where you came from, pastel and angelicseeming, the sun sliding into your reflection on the water. For all I knew from somewhere else. For all I knew separate. How I’d been ripped from the oneness with the water. How I was dazed, being returned to my body, returned to bones that are brittle and break. Returned to looking. How in your mind, you’d stumbled upon Bathsheba. Not from the Bible, you admitted later, but from the song. How you’d chosen that day to hike along the creek. Like a prophet. How you called the rescuers to come and take me in. How you carried me up the hill yourself. How my breathing was ruined. How I felt ruined, looking at you, sun soaked and golden tipped.

We were driving through the dark wilderness. We were watching the snow fall. I asked you again if you knew where we were going. You finally answered, soothing tones only, words that meant only words. You turned on the radio and casually switched through channels, and then static. Music. Then more static. The static started to turn over and over, in a twist, with our car, and us inside it, the mountain tunnels we refused to enter creating a conduit, us twisting in smaller intervals, a black hole of a road. I watched as the static split us into bridges.

How the moment we met I’d been broken. How you heard the beautiful song in your head. How you slid into place. In the hospital afterwards, you stayed to make sure I was okay. My ankle was in a cast. And the pills. We talked, me loopy, trying to string the things of my life together. You laughed, thinking it was the pills. You asked about my family. My gone parents, I said, phrasing it wrong. You gripped my wrist. How you gripped me like you were trying to hold me in place. You asked me how I liked Louisiana to change the subject. I tried to explain how catfish was to Pacific fish as dark meat was to light meat. How you could chew on it forever. You talked about your graduate program, about being so far from home. I told you how being in a place feels the same as watching movies about that place. How the pills turned the hospital into a curled-up haze. It should be different, I told you, being in a place in real life, but it’s the same here, with the music like in the movies, and the decks where people talk and eat things like they eat in movies. As if all of the South had been filmed the same. In the same frame. How I told you I must be missing something. I tried to explain how I knew my view was incomplete, but I felt unable to complete it. You said later you’d fallen in love with me. Right then and there. How the vulnerability of my myopia became one with your bathing effigy.

The radio found a song, static slipping away. The clouds covered the moon above the trees. I told myself to relax about the bridges, relax as the radio signals came to us. Located our car, its wheels carrying us to a different position than we had been previously. The signals that proved we were still here. I leaned my head back against the headrest and felt your arms relax on the wheel. I told myself I’d missed it, the passage over those bridges. I told myself we weren’t circling the same loop, weren’t spiraling smaller toward some kind of center. I tried to believe it.

The premarital counselor told me to try to keep track of memories. In the room next to the room with the clapping. To try to keep up. To 10 use the phrase: I remember how. I remember how, something. To get myself straight, when I lose myself. To put something into my head. Orient myself around myself, she told me. In the room our counselor is in, next to the room with the class in it, all the clapping. The counselor apologizing and shutting the door, telling us to ignore it. Telling me to make a list of things I remember. To make a list of examples of how things connect, one to another. The counselor teaching us to talk about how the other person makes us feel, not to pass sparkling judgements, sparkling like a hot surface in the sun. I feel betrayed when you go all foggy, you’d say. The clapping next door going on. I feel hurt when you won’t help me to solve this problem. You’d often use phrases like this when talking about me. This problem. Our problem. Maybe it was a dance class. Your meaning was clear. My brain, something a really good fixer could make use of, find the spare parts and mend. The clapping to the rhythm.

How you drove me, pills in tow. Back to the resort for the wedding. How you tugged on my hospital bracelet and laughed. The perfect accessory for a wedding, you said. How my friend was worried. She’d been calling. How you, helping me and a pair of crutches out of your car, must have looked from the outside. How my friend stood in the turnaround at the hotel, where the cars drop people off, waiting for me. How she narrowed her eyes and smiled. After that you were invited to the wedding. After that we were us. You helped me around the dance floor with my new cast, and everyone watched. How at the table, we all sat in pairs, in even numbers.

We passed the bridges again. I was sure of it. This time I said nothing. This time I read the language of your face. An immobile stare. Hard and set. The world becomes a horror movie so fast. The movie shifted through my head like the static. There are always characters who understand the shift. The merry-go-round goes on forever and you can’t get off. The shift from the world before to the world during. To the world unraveling. In the horror movies they don’t scream on the merry-go-round. Driving through the snow, on a loop, forever, like this. I felt my legs and arms prick up a million times, bumps setting themselves in my body and mind. It looked like the trees outside were rustling. The trees, my body, all growth, twisting, moving, stuck in the same shapes. A supernatural breeze followed us as we passed the very same fork, over and over again.

How before we met, I drove myself around in the dark. How I drove my old loud engine through the suburban neighborhoods at night. With big gleaming houses. Lit from within, shining through big gleaming windows. How I drove around to watch people in those houses. Sitting in front of big gleaming TVs. The engine screamed. How I watched the families sitting together. Me watching them. Them watching their movies. How I could turn on the radio inside my car and change my perception of myself at will. How I could direct the shot, in my head. How I could decide the world. I’d find a fast song louder than the engine and turn myself into a movie. Driving alone listening to rebellious music. A pin on a map, solitary because I stood up, everyone else lying down. I’d become the car on the road and drive flat. The people in their houses looking out their front doors. Watching me go. How I’d switch the station and the world would lift. I’d find a soft song that wound through me like a disagreement. How I’d imagine myself in that story, just before the plot ticked upward. Just before I’d found someone to sit inside and watch movies with.

There was a time when I realized I could go anywhere. When I became a grownup I realized my body could stand any place. Orphan or not. I was free. I went to stand in the aisles of the supermarket. I went to stand out on the streets and nobody came to find me. I went to the movies. Nobody came to take me back to wherever I was supposed to be. Whichever house had been assigned to me. I diligently worked at the job that had been found for me. The social workers stopped coming to find me and said, go to work. Said something like, get on with it. Something like, leave. I left. I made enough money and then applied for a different job. I went to stand in different states. I stood in the water. I could be anywhere and not mind it. It didn’t matter. I went everywhere.

The dark road started to feel like shifting air. Like the merry-goround. The moment when someone’s face turns backward. In the horror movie. I remembered how the air shifts to different temperature and wetness and thought about the static from the radio, gone now. The music was still playing. Your face was still hard, arms holding the wheel. Everything in the same place. I thought to tap on the dashboard with my fingers. Just to make sure that there’s still air in the car. That everyone isn’t completely static. To make sure things can still change.

How your parents wanted things for you. Things like marriage. Like a mirage. Things like a long lawn in front of your house. Things like a vase. How they called you all the time to make sure you would get the things. How I told you I wanted things. Maybe not the same things. Maybe a vase. How I wondered what my parents would have wanted for me. Maybe flowers. How I wondered what I wanted for myself. How wanting is for people like you.

When you proposed, we both cried. We sat on the top of the building to look at the stars. You gave me your jacket like we were in a movie. There weren’t any. Stars. We cried and hugged each other close. I tried to melt into you and you tried to melt into me. I tried to hug you so tight like I wanted to pop. Like I wanted to mesh, to meld. I failed. We remained in our bodies. Locked in your arms I remained boundaried. I couldn’t help it. I remained fenced in and whole.

How the world had turned into a terrarium. How when everything broke there were glass walls. When I was a kid the world was a dark box. How I heated up soup for more than a week before anyone came to find me. I was eight when the walls turned to glass. When the people broke open the door after the knocking. Everyone could see in. How the empty house became full again. How I didn’t even know they’d been dead for who knows how long. How the soup pots sat unwashed on the stove. How I just stayed there and waited. Why didn’t you go outside, they said. Why didn’t you call for help. How I left the world, then, and when I came back there was gravel under my feet and see-through edges. How the terrarium was a trap. The TV was left on and shining blue from switching the movies. How the people came and knocked and took me away. They left the TV on and the soup pots sitting there. How I didn’t bang on the panes. I didn’t try to get out. I saw that I was in a tank. How I figured out a way not to see it.

The wheels were turning beneath us but I couldn’t hear them. I couldn’t see the road passing us anymore. Everything was dark around us until we came to the bridges again. And our headlights lit up both paths. But somehow the car didn’t take either. We didn’t cross any bridges. The darkness surrounded us. And then we came upon them again. Over and over.

At your parents’ cabin I escaped into the sauna and turned up the heat. We hadn’t said much at dinner. I tried to lie there and find a way to be hot enough to float. I’d said I liked the potatoes. I breathed in the fire, trying to feel like the pills. Your mother had responded. I couldn’t remember what she’d said. I remembered it meant something like, leave. In the sauna I couldn’t help but come back to myself. Eventually, you came and found me. The sauna didn’t work well enough. I watched through the glass screen as you took off your sweats, your shirt, watched as the heat was sucked out the gap when you pulled the door open. You came in and lifted my head up. Placed it on your lap. You held it between your hands. Trying to be telekinetic. As if you could will me to be different. As if it would help.

How you’d seen that I was a satellite. Lost somewhere where physics still is. Floating like in an unfamiliar creek. How you’d jumped into the center of the orbit. How I was a lost void. How you finally, for yourself, found space.

In the moments when you start to lose your focus, the counselor told me, you can list the memories you know, and start there. Like, I am sitting on a couch. I remember how I sat on a couch yesterday, in my own apartment. I’m on earth. I remember how it feels to walk around my floors. I’m bigger than a worm, smaller than the world. I remember how I’m tilting and turning along with everything alive.

No cars had passed us in hours. I continued to drum my fingers on every surface of the car, on my knees, on my temple. I tried not to panic. We could be driving by these bridges forever, I told myself. The momentary panic would be useless. Like the moment before the song ends. Like the static at the end of the movie that would play forever in that empty house. Like a ring around someone’s finger, a clock hand that traverses the same path over and over. It’s a mundane trap. There is no point in panic. You learn to live inside the looping. You forget there was ever anything else.

How I realized the pills could bring me out of myself. I realized the pills made people like me. How the dinner table was a mirror. How it was glass. How I looked at myself in the table, at dinner, and realized. I realized I could become like other people. People who have glass tables. How people who weren’t cared for don’t know how to care for. The words your mother told you in the kitchen when she didn’t think I could hear her. After dinner. How you’d defended me needlessly. You’re seeing it wrong, you’d said. How it’s all about seeing. How your mother was right.

When someone begins life with trauma, our counselor said, she spends a lot of her time trying to catch up on receiving care. You started off life wounded, she’d said to me. Sitting on the couch you nodded along with her, rolling up your sleeves. Cracking your knuckles. Ready to mend. Still, the clapping next door. I sat in the counselor’s office watching myself as a fishing pole. Unwound. My line loose.

How it feels to look at you, sitting in the car, your arms moving the way arms should move. Driving us back home. How your eyes are staring like eyes. Looking for our home. How we pass the bridges over and over. How it feels to look at real people. How it feels like a movie.

I wonder what my life would be like if I’d grown up with your parents, spending New Year’s at the cabin, I said to you, as we passed the same bridges. I didn’t wait for a response. When I learned how not to need anyone, I wanted to say. I learned how to keep other people around by not needing them. That was how I made a friend. The one who got married. In Louisiana. That was how I met you. I could explain all of this to you. I could say it aloud. But you’re already driving. We’re already stuck in a time loop. The tense has already changed. It won’t make any difference.

How right before we met I’d been floating in a creek. Under a tree. How all of a sudden I’d forgotten where I was. How I’d forgotten why I was there. How I got scared. How the wet hot air became a vacuum, sucking out all of me. Leaving only my eyes. Seeing and confused about the trees. How they were different trees. How the bugs were a symphony, one that would be played when floating with Charon, loud and buzzing and hurt hurt hurt in my ear. How I’d jumped up in surprise when your foot made a twig go, crack. Ending the symphony on a low note. How we’d both watched my ankle go, snap.

You reach over silently and grab my hand. I watch the bridges out the window. I watch them passing us, instead of the other way around. I watch me loving you. I watch me not. I watch the loop the same way. I watch it not make a difference.

How we are driving in circles. Coming upon the same two bridges. Over and over again. How we always come back to ourselves. How both of the bridges are tunnels. How both of them are pitch black inside.

---

Meagan Arthur’s work has appeared in Quarter After Eight, Cream City Review, Identity Theory, Pontoon, Figure 1, and California Quarterly.

ERASER by Lauren Alwan

When Gillian pockets the red licorice, the boxes on the shelves begin to rattle. The supermarket aisle is deserted, and Gillian, being six, reasons that if no adults are nearby, then there’s been no actual theft. She’d meant to eat a piece right away, a reward for taking the candy no one would buy for her, but she’s distracted by the overhead lights which have begun to sway. In the next aisle, she hears a woman call out to someone – her child? – to run. It occurs to Gillian that her grandparents will be looking for her. She’d left them in the produce section, her grandmother inspecting a cantaloupe and her grandfather insisting it wasn’t ready, the scent not yet sufficiently floral in the way of a ripe melon. A trio of canned nuts falls to the floor, and at the end of each aisle, shoppers are running but Gillian stays put, hand in pocket, the cellophane of the box smooth against her fingers as the ordinary things of the world crash down around her.
She’d been eyeing the licorice for months, having asked her mother for it only to be refused. Once, at the store, she’d asked her grandmother, who after inspecting the package, pronounced it inferior and returned it to the shelf. On another trip she’d asked her grandfather, and he’d patted her shoulder which she took to mean another time. When this morning she’d ended up at her grandparents’ house and heard there would be a trip to the market, she knew the time had come to take matters into her own hands.
Her grandmother appears and takes her by the wrist. “Where were you?” she cries, and they hurry through the glass doors. Outside, shoppers stand astonished in the unsparing San Gabriel Valley light. Where was she? Right where you found me, Gillian thinks, in the candy aisle, but says only, “Nowhere.”
Gillian has been known to defy rules, embroider truths, to invent things even when invention proves unnecessary, but this time, her words have the ring of truth. Nowhere, it seems, has become a place she increasingly finds herself.

***

She’s an only. That’s what her mother tells people. This is Gillian. She’s my only. An only what, Gillian wonders? Her father, who this year decided to live somewhere other than their house, does not describe her this way. She’s his kiddo, his buddy, his girl. There was a time when he brought her along on work appointments and introduced her as his daughter. This pleased her immensely, the feeling of pride that came from hearing him say the words. Davud Almasi is her father, and it’s been weeks since she’s seen him, but knowing she’s his daughter, the thought steadies her. She imagines a game board in which all the pieces have been overturned and the word daughter sets them upright again, enabling her to move, strategize, conquer.
It’s summer, when Mondays are normally spent at home, but this morning her mother announced Gillian was going to her grandparents’ house. Gillian often ends up at her grandparents’ on short notice. She never protests going since being there means she’ll be catered to, while at the same time, being left to do as she pleases. She’s fed more than she can possibly eat, naps on any bed she likes, watches television in the middle of the day, and if the urge strikes, disappears into the overgrown reaches of the garden. She found out the hard way not to pinch the balloonish buds on the fuchsia until they burst, or strip her grandfather’s ferns of their leaves – though how elegantly they came off in her hand, in one clean pull from the base of the frond to the top. She’d gotten a rap on the hand for that, along with a stern warning that still echoes when she walks that stretch of garden path. Today her mother has promised to be back by three, but Gillian would prefer it were later, as late as possible, in order to have a plate or two of steaming rice upon which she’ll lay a pat of 17 butter, or spend time in the shade eating apricots beside her grandmother, or bide her time in the living room where there is rarely conversation between her grandparents, and in the silence, Gillian, belly down on her favorite silk cushion, can devote herself to her books and games without interruption.
Arriving that morning, she’d found her grandfather at the kitchen table reading the paper and her grandmother at the sink peeling hardboiled eggs. Gillian loves their kitchen in the morning, more than any room in the house. The long counter, the bank of east-facing windows, the cupboards that hold items for which she has no name but regularly takes stock of, turning a jar or shaking a bag to assess its unfathomable contents. Outside is a towering bougainvillea, and when the sun tops the mountains, the cresting sun penetrates the vines and light floods the windows in spectacular array, filling the room with eastern sun and turning her grandmother’s curtains to thrilling pleats of light and shadow.
That morning, her mother wore a navy blue dress and heeled shoes, and her grandmother took notice.
“You’re going somewhere?”
“A job interview.”
“At the bank,” Gillian added.
“No jewelry?” her grandmother said.
Her mother touched her throat, at the place where a gold pendant might have been had she thought of it. Gillian’s mother isn’t like her grandmother, who’s inclined to ideas about how women should look. Her mother’s concerns center on practical things, like money, and as she’s put it, on paying the bills now that things are different. Gillian observes, but cannot yet articulate, the incongruence of old and new between her mother and the world of her grandparents. She gleans the difference in purely visual terms: her mother’s bare wrists versus her grandmother’s braceleted ones, her mother’s disinterest in food versus her grandmother’s preoccupation with feeding others. Though inevitably, each time her mother comes through the kitchen door she becomes famished, and Gillian’s grandfather makes a plate for her. That morning, there was a row of mason jars on the counter, newly cured olives floating in brine.
“You’ve been busy,” Gillian’s mother said to her grandfather. He did most of the serious cooking.
“Take one,” he said, nodding to the jars.
“You’re sure?” She seemed surprised and clearly pleased.
Gillian wished her grandparents wouldn’t give any of the olives away, and instead, keep them strictly for her. She dislikes store-bought olives, with their sad routed centers and briny flatness. She eats only her grandfather’s olives, habituated to the glistening bitterness and a ritual of lining the pits at the rim of her plate.
Holding the jar her mother declared, referring to Gillian, “She’ll behave while she’s here.” Then turned to Gillian. “You’ll behave.”
What was there to say? It was impossible to know in the moment whether an act was wrong or right. There might be inklings, distant hunches that certain things – the fern leaves for instance – might cause trouble, but Gillian’s desire in the moment inevitably skewed the impulse and erased any pangs of conscience.
“She’s a good girl,” her grandfather said, opening the newspaper.
“A pistol,” her grandmother said, and set a hardboiled egg into the slicer.
Her mother gave her a look. “Go on then.”
And with that, her mother was gone. Gillian was now given the task of slicing the egg, a task she relishes. She set it into the slotted base and pulled the hinged frame over it. The taut wires sliced through the gelatinous white – and what a miracle that was, eight perfect circles, each with its yellow middle that sat appealingly offcenter. Once, her father showed her how to remove the shells without spoiling the egg’s pristine surface, by cracking the shell and rolling it against the counter until the membrane pulled away in a single neat layer – the mystery of a hard-boiled egg revealing itself yet again.
The bread was set down, the rounds of egg laid upon them. The slices suggested planets, suns and moons, and the pepper and salt tiny stars. Gillian, as always, eats the egg’s white outer circle but never the yolk, which though visually arresting, she dislikes. The habit always annoys her grandmother and will account for the first in a series of willful acts that punctuate this day. But then, Gillian is a girl who wants what she wants, and this too would be hers: the soft white bread and mayonnaise, the slight resistance of the egg as it met her teeth, the crystalline salt and spark of peppercorn. How simple a thing it is, the sandwich reminding her yet again of those things she wants: a full mouth, people to do what she says, all her unfillable needs unequivocally met.

***

Outside the supermarket, a few remaining shoppers mill about. They look stranded on the asphalt, as if their curtailed marketing has left them at loose ends. Similarly, her grandparents have no groceries to bring home, their cart having been abandoned in the produce section.
Gillian watches her grandfather in the telephone booth outside the store. He’s calling for a cab home, but is likely first checking on 19 the family grocery. Though not nearly as large and bright as Market Basket, her grandfather’s store has shelves of cans and boxes, cases of cheese and olives, trays of pastry. Gillian imagines it all shaken loose and scattered on the rough wood floor, and this saddens her in a way the fallen goods in Market Basket do not.
Her grandfather pays her uncle to work at the store, or so Gillian presumes. Her grandfather doesn’t go there every morning like Uncle Naj does, but all the same, according to her mother, nothing there happens without his knowledge. Her grandfather once offered the job to her father, but shopkeeping isn’t his sort of work – which is how he put it. According to her mother, her father has been adrift ever since. There’s the suggestion of a bad turn, though to Gillian’s ear, adrift sounds like something lovely. She imagines a small boat on hand-drawn waves, though clues tell her otherwise. Adrift may not be what it seems. She gleans this in the way her father ends their phone calls before she is ready, and in the worry she sees on the faces of her grandparents when they talk about him, and how, when Gillian enters the room, the discussion inevitably switches to the Arabic she doesn’t understand.
In the parking lot, her grandmother watches the glass front doors. Inside, clerks go about the work of restocking shelves and pushing brooms. “The shake’s over,” she observes. “But it always comes back.”
Gillian has heard of earthquakes, but until today, never truly understood the concept. She’d been thrown off by the word earth, and in her confusion imagined the entire planet, thinking of the childhood globe in her uncle’s room, shaken in the vast atmosphere of space. The word quake was a mystery, but according to her mother, it was a word for shaking, as when you’re afraid. You quake in your boots, is what her mother had said, and as Gillian watches her grandfather in the phone booth, his eyes fixed on some detail she cannot know, she imagines the earth, smooth and pale and sheathed with green continents, sporting small legs in boots, trembling in an indifferent universe. Her grandmother, on the other hand, is familiar with earthquakes, having been born in a place she calls Constantinople, where shakes are evidently a common occurrence.
“My father talked about a shake before I was born,” she is saying. “On the coast, in S¸arköy, so strong it knocked people off chairs in Beyog˘lu.” The idea has its appeal, Gillian thinks, imagining a jolt catapulting her off a chair. Her grandmother goes on. “We lived in a wood house, and a wood house is better. The stone houses in S¸arköy fell down, and one family, the children and the grandparents too, were buried alive under stone.”
Gillian is eager to know things of the adult world, but less so of 20 what it was like being buried by fallen stones. Frightening as the thought is, she speculates it’s something like pushing sand over her legs at the beach, that same heavy cold weight on her limbs. Stones of course would be heavier, and there would be little windows of light between the shapes, tunnels to a world you couldn’t reach.
“I don’t like shakes,” she says.
“Who does?” her grandmother says, and at that moment her grandfather emerges from the telephone booth and tosses them a wave.
The wave, Gillian understands, means the cab is on its way. She fingers the licorice in her pocket, debating whether to eat a piece now and risk curiosity about where it came from, or wait until she is beneath the branches of the fig tree in a far corner of the garden where she can finish the box in private. She knows it’s wrong to take things without paying for them, and knows too the act must remain secret. All the same, a part of her would like it to be known. She feels a certain pride in the act, of having taken what she wanted.
At home, the cab drops them at the foot of the driveway. Her grandmother hurries ahead, and Gillian stays behind with her grandfather. He takes his time, folding and unfolding himself until he is out and upright again. The driveway’s incline is becoming difficult for him to manage, and as they walk beneath the mottled light of the deodar boughs, he explains he’s yet to find a driver who’ll come up the narrow drive and drop them at the kitchen door. Gillian listens, her hand in his, saddened by how old her grandfather has become. And yet, she imagines he has always been old. Even as a young man, he must have had the same heavy gait and clipped mustache, sported a shining bald head, brown from the sun, and wore a baker’s apron as he served customers in the store.
When they reach the kitchen door, her grandmother is there, handbag over one arm and a look of astonishment on her face.
“Davud’s here,” she says, looking toward the garage. Ahead, parked beneath the shade of a pepper tree, is her father’s Cadillac, dark green under the sun, the hot engine still ticking beneath the hood after the long drive from the place he lives, the one with the strange name. Tuolumne.

***

“Did you feel the earthquake?”
They find her father in his old bedroom off the kitchen, and it’s the first thing her grandmother wants to know. He sits on the carpet rifling through boxes pulled from the closet, looks up only briefly then goes back to his work, but Gillian takes notice of his eyes. Round, the 21 color of a graham cracker, and a sad cast she watches for, knowing it will come sooner or later.
Is he happy to see her, Gillian wonders? If not, she hangs back. She’ll wait for a sign, or a look. Not long ago, a friend of her mother’s visited the apartment, and the two women spent the afternoon on the couch talking, glasses of wine in their hands. Gillian, normally eager to eavesdrop on adult conversations, found the talk tedious and went to her room, but not before hearing the friend ask her mother a question that struck her as odd. Will you separate? the woman asked. We already have, her mother answered, and it was only after her father began to stay away that Gillian suspected the word referred to her parents. Milk separates, rockets separate, but parents? No matter how she turns it in her mind, the idea doesn’t add up.
“Gilly,” her father says. He holds out an arm and she rushes forward. There is contact: the heat of skin, the bristling hair on his arms, the broad stretch of his back beneath her hands. This is what she wants. She wants nothing else but this. The grit of his unshaved chin, fingers paint-stained gray, thickset arms beneath her hands. Her father is a wonder of scale and tactile sensation, and the only one who calls her Gilly. He’s also the only one who cleans her glasses, exhaling a cloud of warm breath on the lenses then polishing them with the tail of his shirt. The process has a special term only they use, hah-ing – as in, Can you hah my glasses? He’s also the only adult who entrusts her with meaningful work, and she hangs on a moment longer in the hope a task is forthcoming. He pats her shoulder twice, a sign she must let go.
“You didn’t feel the earthquake?” her grandmother says again.
“I was in the car. You can’t feel earthquakes in a car.”
Gillian finds this fact fascinating, like knowing cardboard boxes are made from trees, something her father told her the day she’d sat beside him in the apartment and watched him pack these same boxes.
In the open box before them is a collection of things she associates with her father: mechanical objects with plugs and switches and gauges with neat red and white numbers, along with stray folders of papers, a box of old erasers. He’s an artist, but his pictures, he’s told her, are ad art – a term that continually occupies her thoughts – for spare parts, ones you might need for cars. In the pictures he creates, the gadgets gleam in gray tones against a glossy white background, and Gillian finds them cryptic and beautiful.
“You’ll go to Malek’s?” her grandfather says. Uncle Malek lives in a place called Phoenix Arizona, a place Gillian knows nothing about, only that it takes seven hours to drive there.
“For awhile. I’ll need my light box, the tripod, a few things.”
“For how long?” her grandmother asks.
“Pass me that cord, Gilly.”
“But why Phoenix?” her grandmother says. “One boy there is enough.”
“Work, Ma. A month or two depending. Malek knows people. The money’s good.”
Her grandfather says something to her grandmother in Arabic, though it’s clear to Gillian her grandmother wants her father to stay. In the course of this summer, Gillian has been assembling stray details, drawing her own conclusions. Not only from her grandparents, but conversations not for her ears, as her mother says, the endless back-and-forth between her parents. Her: You struggle when you don’t have to. Him: I do fine when they pay their accounts. Her:You should have gone into the business, the store would have bought you time. Him: I’ve studied too long, worked too hard to end up working in a grocery. Of all the exchanges Gillian heard, she was most shocked to learn that time, like a box of licorice, could simply be bought.
“The shake was bad luck,” her grandmother says.
“Where’s my newspaper,” her grandfather says to no one in particular, and turns back toward the kitchen.
“Bad luck?” Her father laughs. “It’s geology, Ma. Land masses bumping against each other.”
“What an idea,” her grandmother cries.
Once, Gillian and her grandmother were in the kitchen when a jolt nudged the house. One quick thud and it was over. Her grandmother said a prayer, quickly, in Arabic, then picked up where she left off, washing mint as though the quake were a stranger she’d bumped into on her way to someplace else. At the time she’d seemed immune to the forces that caused the shaking, but now Gillian isn’t so sure.
Her grandmother turns to go. “You’ll stay for lunch?”
He will, her father says, and Gillian is pleased. Staying for lunch will mean they’ll eat in the dining room, a room designated for meals that are special. Gillian loves the room’s dim light, the murky chandelier overhead, the scent of cedar that lines the cabinet that holds the porcelain plates and gold-rimmed glasses. Lunch will also mean freshly made rice rather than reheated, and the thought occurs to Gillian that if her father cannot live with her mother, as he’s said he cannot, he could easily live here. Then meals would always be in the dining room, with the lace cloth and the framed pictures on the sideboard and the windows shaded by blinds and drapes and the deodar’s dark boughs.
“Gilly, give me a hand here, will you?”
He passes a box of blackened erasers and a square of cardboard 23 on which to rub them clean. She’s done this before. A few of the erasers are the gum type, the grey putty blackened by pencil lead and misshapen from being rolled, smashed and otherwise manipulated to remove any evidence of a mistake. Gum erasers are cleaned by pulling and stretching until the carbon miraculously disappears. Cleaning the Pink Pearls, on the other hand, is more laborious; they must be scrubbed against paper until all traces of the blackened surface is gone.
Gillian takes her time – especially with the Pink Pearls – a job she’d much rather do than setting the table. As she works, she can hear the sound of rice being washed, followed by the ignition of the gas burner, the sizzle of butter in a pan. It’s new, working like this with her father while her grandmother cooks. Given the choice, Gillian would prefer to apply her energies to the strictly interesting things her father does, to calculations such as he makes now, of how many rolls of film to bring, of sketches that must be examined and assessed, and which pencils to bring with their leads that vary in hardness. As Gillian sets the last of the cleaned erasers in the box, she thinks of Phoenix Arizona, a place she doesn’t know, and her Uncle Malek, a person she only faintly recalls, and worries her father might never come back.
He looks over a page torn from a magazine, and she studies him. His gray-stained fingers, the knuckles that are large and callused, the color of strong tea. The temple-pieces of his glasses are heavy and dark yet translucent, and there are bristles of hair in his ears – it’s something of a revelation that hair grows there as well as on his head and arms and chest. In the stubble on his chin there are patches of gray, and gray too in the sideburns, shaped like dominoes and carefully trimmed. Her father’s body is a looming presence, in the weight of his footfalls as he crosses a room, or the length of couch he occupies while watching television. There’s a sheltering quality, and she feels it now, as she sits beside him. Tomorrow, or the next day, he’ll be gone, with no guarantee that Phoenix Arizona will make him happier than anywhere else. She could remind him of the laundromats he owned, and before that, the mail order business, neither of which made him happy. Or the job running her grandfather’s store, still his for the asking. But she knows better than to raise certain matters, and the store is one of them. Mention of her mother, especially, makes him irritable, so it’s best to keep silent about news of home – even ordinary things, the egg she dropped on the linoleum that the cat lapped up, the portable color TV her mother brought home from Fedco – can cause a dark sadness to come over him. With most people Gillian says what she pleases, she might test the bounds and break 24 rules when the mood strikes her, but never with her father. With him, there is so much she cannot say, a wealth of subjects better left alone. What does that leave? She’s out of ideas, and that leaves nothing but silence, and with her father, silence feels the same as his being gone. At that moment, having nothing else, she takes the package of licorice from her pocket, and tipping a few pieces in her hand, offers them.
He looks up from the magazine page. “Ah, the red kind,” he says, taking a piece delicately between two fingers. Her father dislikes black licorice, finding its taste too aggressive. “The old man buy it for you?”
The old man. The old lady. Her grandparents are in fact old, but calling them old, instead of Mom and Pop as her Uncle Naj does, strikes her as disgruntled. The words make the world feel small and miserable. Gillian has always been fond of the names her father uses for her. Gilly, Gil, and sometimes Gigi, all of which she loves for their intimacy, their familiarity. But her father’s names for her grandparents fill her with unease. They make the world feel off-kilter, wrongheaded, as though a mistake has gone uncorrected.
“No,” Gillian tells him, her grandfather didn’t buy her the licorice.
He doesn’t say, Well who did? It’s a question Gillian would certainly ask, though she knows how effortless deception can be, how irresistible it is to lie in the face of a bothersome truth.
“Okay,” he says, apparently unwilling to press her further.
But she’s not ready to let the matter go. Who knows when he’ll be back, or if he’ll ever know how she felt and what she was thinking in that moment before the shaking started?
“I took it. At Market Basket.”
He doesn’t look up from the open magazine in his hands. “I see.”
The moment the words come out, she sees her miscalculation. It’s there in the tightening of his expression, in the uncertainty at his brow. She’d been gripped by the audacity she felt in the supermarket, and wanted him to see her as bold, but as he sets the magazine into the folder, and the folder into the box, she suspects otherwise. He sees through her story, and the knowledge brings a familiar prickling of shame along her back, her neck.
Adults have rules and reasons that in the scheme of things seem needless, and knowing this, she readies herself for a scolding. But he doesn’t look angry, far from it, and in fact, her father’s manner suggests she’s told him something he wishes she hadn’t. In that moment, Gillian reverses course. She’s nimble that way, in her ability to improvise. She concocts a rationale, pulling it out of the air as she often does when she’s out of explanations.
“We were going to pay, but we had to leave. Because of the earthquake. We’re going back tomorrow and pay.”
He doesn’t look at her, but at his belongings in the cardboard box, as if a more reasonable explanation might be found there. “Sure,” he says. His tone is uncertain, his eyes not meeting hers. “That sounds right.” He stands and brushes the front of his khakis.
Gillian stands too, and brushes the front of her shorts. Her face burns and her hands are gray with carbon residue. Ahead of lunch she’ll be told to wash them, to use soap, but those gray smudges came from her father’s pencils, from his drawings and his lettering, and how sad it will be to wash it all away, the only remnants she has of the work he does when she isn’t there.

***

At lunch, there is the consolation of rice with vermicelli, and a bowl of her grandfather’s yogurt, made earlier that morning. There’s a dish of chickpeas in tomato sauce. A plate of olives. A pitcher of lemonade. Gillian eats with gusto, though her stomach has been jumping – or as she knows now, quaking, since telling her father about the licorice. That sounds right.
“Gillian,” her grandmother says. ”Get the glasses from the cabinet.”
The cabinet is normally off limits, but today she’s allowed to open the paned doors and reach into the shelves of breakables. She loves the dark wood, the ripe scent of old varnish, the way the glasses and china plates twinkle in the shadows. There are rows of delicate sherbet dishes etched with vines and clusters of grapes, and tiny glasses rimmed in gold, no bigger than her hand. She carefully takes four glasses from the shelf, feeling a competency and adult prerogative as she sets them on the table. She returns to the cabinet to shut the doors, anticipating the satisfying catch of the latch, when in the shadows, she sees it. There, behind the row of sherbet glasses, flickering like a spider web, is the small glass globe her father received in high school, won after he placed first in a national science competition. But it’s in pieces, broken to shards, a tiny heap of razored crescent moons. She’s always loved staring at the globe through the glass. Once, she opened the door in order to get a better look and was delighted to find her father’s name inscribed across the equator, as though his abilities had planetary magnitude. Now, the object is in pieces, nothing but translucent claws and angry teeth. She worries she’s the one who broke it, but then remembers the earthquake, which was surely the cause. And yet, her propensity for untruths and errant acts hangs over an otherwise simple explanation. She is certain to be implicated 26 no matter what. The damage will be found soon enough, later that day, or the next, but by then Gillian will be home where she can plead ignorance at a remove.
As they eat, no one speaks, a feature not uncommon at her grandparents’ house, but few things make her more anxious than a meal at a silent table. Relief comes when her grandfather looks up, and seeing her across the table, smiles. His starched collar is bright against his sun-browned skin, his grip loose on the fork, his movements slow. His gaze falls to Gillian’s plate, which is already clean but for the olive pits set carefully along the rim.
Thinking of her father’s name for him, she understands her grandfather is indeed an old man. When he’d sat down to lunch, she was struck by his stiff descent into the chair, his body that seemed incapable of lowering until dispatched by gravity. He seems to grow older each day, each hour. He looks older to her now than when they returned from Market Basket, older than when the cab pulled up to the house. And when they’d walked up the driveway, the weariness of his steps made her fearful. She cannot imagine time when he is not there, sitting across from her at the table or his hand in hers as they walk under the deodar trees.
Now, his gaze falls to Gillian’s plate, which is already clean but for the olive pits.
“Give her more rice,” he says to her father.
Her grandfather’s tone is stern, as though her father has done something wrong. His tone is harsher than when she’d pulled the leaves off the fern or popped the fuchsia buds. What, Gillian wonders, has made him angry? That her father won’t work at the store? That he’s going to Phoenix Arizona?
Her father forks the last chickpeas on his plate. “She’s had enough.”
More than once her father, and her mother, have remarked on her eating habits, that she’s grown plump, and should, as they say, watch herself.
“She’s hungry,” her grandfather says. “Give it to her.”
Gillian knows how it feels to be told what to do, and is stunned by the realization that she’s not the only child at this table. Her father, after all, is her grandfather’s son, and when he sits here, he must do as he’s told, or, as Gillian herself had so often been reminded, face the consequences. She’s old enough to know adults don’t say such things to each other, but the threat feels likely all the same. The fact of consequences can leave her at a loss for words and that perhaps is what accounts for the silence. Her father is no doubt glad to be going to Phoenix Arizona, a place apparently far from this table, from 27 her mother, and from her grandfather’s demands. Gillian tells herself he’s not glad to be away from her, an equation that doesn’t quite add up, but which serves for now.
The look on her father’s face suggests he’d like to be somewhere else, and reluctantly, he spoons the rice onto her plate. Gladdened as she is by the extra helping, as the spoon travels between the bowl and her plate, she’s thinking of the glass globe. How to remove the evidence, how to spare her father from yet another disaster, one he might be inclined to associate with her.
Years later, when she’s forgotten that day’s earthquake, when it’s buried in memory with the numerous other times she’d leapt to the nearest doorway, she’ll remember the lie she concocted to cover her theft of the licorice, and the way her father accepted the falsehood, or rather, overlooked it. There will be decades of similar exchanges to come – her willingness to lie, his reluctance to challenge her – but the licorice will be the first, the blueprint for all that’s been false and misunderstood, all that’s been wrong between them.
Though that afternoon, she sits beside her father at the lacecovered table in the dining room with the dim chandelier overhead and the musty smell of the china cabinet at her back. She could mention the broken globe, but is unwilling to risk it given all she’s guilty of. Soon her father will leave, and she’ll forget the meal, just as the licorice will be forgotten beneath the memory of the broken globe, but she’ll remember the erasers, how well she cleaned them, how she removed all evidence of carbon from their soft surfaces, and the care with which her father took the collection from her hands.

***

When the meal is finished and the dishes are washed and drying on a tea towel, Gillian returns to the dining room. As is customary after the midday meal, the house is quiet. Her father has returned to his boxes, and her grandparents to their respective chairs, where, as always happens on full stomachs, they fall into a post-meal slumber. She opens the cabinet door and retrieves the pieces of the broken globe, drops them into the pockets of her shorts, and as she does, imagines the warnings from her mother, her grandmother, her grandfather. So sharp! Watch yourself!
Quickly she goes to the garden, though she takes the roundabout route, out the kitchen door and to the end of the driveway where a set of smooth concrete steps lead to the garden’s furthest reaches. She’s headed to a place no one knows, her favorite spot. It runs along the chain link fence at the property line, a desolate and untrod corner rife 28 with dust and the clutter of decaying branches where the ground is thick with moldering leaves. She clears the detritus away and takes the pieces of glass from her pocket.
It’s quiet at midday, even the jays are silent. Her fingers part the rotting leaves, where beneath there are rotting clumps of barley grass and dandelion, stray rose hips likely fallen from a jay’s beak now dried to an unappealing wizened brown. And squatting in the cover of a nameless shrub, she begins to dig.
The cast-off nature of this corner allows her to imagine a kind of ownership, a miscalculation that in years to come she’ll reckon with – that in fact, nothing of the ground in which she digs, or the garden, or the house or the land on which it sits, are hers. None of it belongs to her. But for now, in that moment, the place is hers alone. She knows well the sandy loam in her hands, its toasted color and grit, the brittle leaves at her feet, the San Gabriel Valley dust that coats the leathery leaves on the tree branches. All are a constant, deeply known, and allow the illusion of ownership to go unquestioned.
It proves easy enough to dig through the topsoil, but the ground beneath is hard, compact. It gives off a mineral scent, like clay and heat. Its iron stains her fingers orange. There’s only the sound of her digging, the rasp of each stroke and the short, sharp sound of her breath. She reaches hardpan – she doesn’t know yet that’s what it’s called, but it’s clearly impervious and will require the aid of a rock. Even then, her efforts produce no more than a gentle hollow, so she keeps going until her work will accommodate the pieces of glass.
Finally, she lays each shard down, and together they are all but transparent in the shadows beneath the trees. The act recalls known things, things of her father she’s sure of. Her father the artist. Her father the photographer. Her father the man who drives from Tuolumne. The father who cooks, gardens. The glass disappears beneath handfuls of loose earth, beneath an artful camouflage of leaves and stray twigs. She must be thorough. Should the glass be found, it would require too many explanations, too many shaming admissions.
There are secrets that Gillian keeps easily – trouble between her parents for example – and yet, with her own secrets, she tends to speak of them in veiled terms. Even as she’s careful to cover her tracks, to keep the worst parts hidden, there’s a part of her that wishes to be known. Earlier, as she sat beside her father in the dining room, with the dim chandelier overhead and the musty smell of the china cabinet at her back, she considered announcing her discovery of the broken globe. What if she had? Her grandmother might have blamed her, but her father knew earthquakes, understood the dam- 29 age they could do, and he would have likely defended her. Though in the end it was a gamble she’d been unwilling to take, given all she’s guilty of.
Before leaving the garden, she removes all traces of evidence. She brushes the leaves that cling to her knees, runs the hose over her hands to wash away the stains on her fingers. Her plan, of course, is to come back for the globe, and soon – to dig up the pieces, take them home, and somehow put them back together. But in fact, years will pass, and by then she’ll have lost track of where they’re buried. By then, the garden will have changed. The shrubs will be different, the lay of the garden’s neglected tract will have shifted, altered over seasons until it’s unrecognizable. Sometime in middle school, she’ll spend an afternoon digging there and will find nothing. At sixteen, she’ll make a second attempt, since by then, on the days she misses her father, she’s more inclined to search the ground for broken glass rather than phone him, telling herself the pretense of an amiable chat won’t make up for all that’s gone unsaid.
But that afternoon, when she returns to the house, there’s the familiar shift from bright sun to shadowy interior, sun blocked out by window shades and venetian blinds, by heavy drapes pulled to block the hard light. The rooms are quiet. There’s freedom in this darkness, this emptiness, in the bounds of the house with its meandering rooms, all empty, all available to her, and when she goes to look for her father, she finds the boxes in his room are gone. The narrow bed with its colorless spread, the bureau with its archive of objects that go unused, and the dun-colored carpet on the floor look as though he was never here, a room that waits for her father to return in order to be occupied again.
She goes to the driveway, knowing his car will be gone, but seeing the empty driveway she is crestfallen all the same. He sometimes calls to say goodbye after he’s gone, an odd custom, she thinks, because the goodbye has already happened. She’s about to go back inside when she stops, drawn by something in the air. It’s a stillness, a feeling of space and scale she doesn’t yet have words for. She feels the sensation of being a small figure beside a towering house, beneath vaulting palms and cypress and vaulting sky, and something in it feels meaningful. She’s only six, but Gillian senses the moment and takes it in. She doesn’t know then, but the feeling is one of being anchored to a place, knowing how you fit within it, seeing its outlines that define you in sure, bold fashion.
Years will pass. Her grandparents die – first her grandfather and her grandmother years later. The house is dismantled and sold, but the feeling of scale, the rightness of that place, remains. By then, having grown to a sensible and compliant adult, Gillian no longer imagines stealing back into the garden in a desperate attempt to unearth the cache of broken glass. Instead, she carries the idea privately. It no longer matters that the place and the house as she knew it – dim-lit, shadowed corners, the dark wood of old furniture – is gone, vanished as though it were never there. She’s satisfied knowing the evidence remains, that her father’s name is there, somewhere in the ground. She buried it in the sandy loam in the foothills of the San Gabriel Valley, a watershed given to the atmospheric whims of a small spinning earth and the force of colliding tectonic plates, in the garden of a house that was never really hers.

---

Lauren Alwan’s fiction and essays have appeared in The Southern Review, ZYZZYVA, Catapult, StoryQuarterly, Nimrod, and O. Henry Prize Stories.

A VERY SHORT CHILDHOOD by Dina Nayeri

One slow afternoon at the café, Darius clicked through discount travel sites until he’d bought a plane ticket. He’d fly to Heathrow and crash for three days with Beatrice, a new hookup who’d passed through Fort Greene and told him she was a Londoner only after the sun came up. “Come visit,” she’d said, the slim rays from his gable window striping her back as she stumbled into her jeans. Weeks later, with his miles about to expire, he thought of her honeysuckle perfume and the way her cheek dimpled when she chewed, and decided she meant it.
At Sunday dinner, he dropped a word or two about the plan, keeping his mouth full and his eyes on his father. His aunt Suri went quiet. (London? Aunt Pari whispered in her ear.)
Years ago, Suri, a gynecologist, had done four free sessions on Darius’s first girlfriend, who’d then dumped him because (fair enough) it’s weird dating someone whose eccentric aunt has prattled away about gluten-free bread and cock sizes while lubing up your fourth vaginal expander, to which she’s given a name and a backstory. “Meet Simon, approachable Physics grad student. Very easy, all he cares about is your pleasure . . .” Okay, fine, Suri was fun.
Darius had spent high school cringing at his weird Iranian family, his cut-rate surrogate mothers. Now and then, he reminded himself that at least his mouthy Aunt Suri, with her medical degree and private brand of cherry lube, was a better caricature for his classmates to tear into than the sexist turban-clad ball sacks always on the news. But lately Suri’s rusty sex positivity had become embarrassing. “We get it. You’re so new world,” he’d taunt. “Calm the fuck down.”
Now Aunt Suri scowled at him. “It’s non-refundable,” he said, “so don’t start.”
Baba smiled tightly at his son. “You smoking things?” he said, leaning into the long yogi breath Darius had just released. Baba’s first name, Babak, had long confused all of Darius’s friends: which one meant “dad,” and which one was his name? Such handwringing, even though “Dan” and “Dad” too, are only a letter apart. “I smell the skunk,” said Baba. (He hasn’t been smoking, Aunt Pari reassured him. Pari, a farmer, knew the smell of every natural thing.)
“Where will you stay?” Suri asked, folding her arms.
He barely glanced at her. “I just told you, with B.” Unable to resist, he added, “While I’m there maybe I’ll jump on the Piccadilly . . . drop in on the grandma you guys are hiding from me.”
“There it is,” said Suri, lips curling slightly. She glared, because wasn’t this the true reason Darius was going? Finally, to investigate his enigmatic grandmother, to find out the greatest of the Amirzadeh family secrets before his cousin Kayvan did, so that he could publish them like the scavenger they all believed he was? And what if Kayvan did find them first? If he wrote it, he wouldn’t be a scavenger at all. He’d be their archivist, their hagiographer, a hero. Darius reminded himself that his grandmother’s address was easy to find. Kayvan had never visited because he simply wasn’t that interested – Kayvan always overlooked the truly interesting in favor of the familiar, the warmed-over, and anything related to his own small life. And that, not who got there faster, would decide things in the long run. Meanwhile, Suri carried on accusing. “There’s the real reason,” Suri sneered. “Is there even a Beatrix?”
Darius didn’t give her the satisfaction of correcting Beatrice’s name. His baba’s back straightened. “No, Darius, please,” he begged. “Don’t go looking for our mother.” (She’s selfish, whispered Suri. 33 An abandoning, selfish woman, muttered Pari. She didn’t even leave after the revolution, you know. She left before, with a first-class ticket. With curled – )
“Yeah yeah . . . With curled hair and the good suitcases,” Darius chanted. “We know.”
“Curled hair! And the good suitcases!” they said, their voices tumbling over each other and overlapping, Babak, as ever, echoing his sisters.
“Maybe that’s why you’re so interested,” Pari muttered. “You share the ungrateful gene.”
That was a touch cruel for Pari, and he told her so. Pari shrugged.
“She left us,” Suri said, “alone against all the evils in Iran. Never even looked back.”
“Didn’t you have Baba Ardeshir?” Darius asked. Babak’s eyes bulged. Pari muttered a blessing for the old patriarch under her breath. Suri glared at Darius and made a crack about crossing an ocean for a mere fuck. Again, Darius didn’t correct her.
“She abandoned her children,” whispered Babak. “We weren’t even us . . . We were tiny, small, innocent . . .” he started panting, struggling for volume. Babak started drumming the table.
“Okay, Babajoon, breathe.” Darius covered his father’s hand with his. You couldn’t let gentle, undiagnosable Babak get frantic. He’d lose an entire day to worry. He’d begin picking his hair, or overpruning the garden, or he’d disappear into the attic, trying to fill the gaps in the boxes of photos, hunting a single unimportant shot that crossed his memory. Babak started arranging the cutlery, and Darius helped, moving his own teaspoon to the end of his father’s row.
“What do you even want with her?” said Suri, releasing a long, labored sigh that gave Darius the itch to goad her until she cried.
“Dunno,” he said, pretending she meant Beatrice. “I need something to prod.” Darius wrapped a morsel of lamb into his bread and dabbed it in the sauce. Suri glared. The truth was the more Baba and the aunts protested and wrung their hands, the more his imagination stirred. And anyway, if Suri could intrude so grossly into his life in the name of openness and family, then why shouldn’t he repay the favor? He shrugged and stared back.
If Darius had an earnest American family with boundaries, he’d tell them that he’d lost his way, and that he was afraid he might be wasting his pricey American education (way pricier than cousin Kayvan’s, the finance-bro turned lit-hack now writing a melodramatic turd of a book about their family). He’d tell them that he understood that one day he’d have to parent his own father, but he didn’t know how because nobody had taught him. He didn’t know how 34 mothers spent their mornings, or how normal fathers reacted to a missing teaspoon. He’d never consider Baba a burden, but Darius needed a minute to just breathe and to orient himself, to figure how just how he was meant to function in the world, before he could be somebody’s mother.
And, if they gave him the slightest room to open up, he might admit that Beatrice made him feel good, better than the others. Sure, it was one night, but they’d told each other real things and he’d woken up to her long fingers untangling his hair. She’d made him pancakes and coffee.
For three years, Darius had slept in a friend’s illegal attic rental at the edge of Fort Greene, writing overworked stories and making Turkish coffees and falafel in the café below. Now and then, Princeton classmates came through in dry-cleaned jeans, said an awkward hi and asked about his unfinished book, on their way to the F or the N for media or banking jobs. He told them the truth: it didn’t matter because nobody’s listening. Even if he became a writer, the terminus of his every dream, he’d still only be speaking into a selfish and unmovable void.
Darius needed a distraction, to rouse his curiosity out of its long sleep. “I forbid you to go,” Baba muttered, resting a hand on his shoulder. Darius touched his father’s hand.
“It’s just a weekend, Babajoon.” He tried to make his voice gentle. “It’s nothing. I’ve met a chill woman and I want to see her.”

***

Weeks later, Darius stood jet-lagged and hungry on a cold outerLondon stoop. He shuffled on her doorstep, lips to the speaker, with an overnight bag and the shit-eating grin that had gained him entry everywhere since he was a motherless schoolboy. He scanned the two columns of doorbells for her name: Mrs. Golshifteh Amirzadeh. He double-checked the photo of her address, snapped from Baba’s journal. This was the right place, this shabby post-war building, three floors of flats above a fish and chip shop in north (north north north) London. Hardly worthy of a runaway Persian princess or whatever she thought she was. He ran a finger down the columns again, stopping at 1B. The name plate read: Emmeline Amiri.
“There you are, Azizjoon,” Darius muttered the affectionate name that Baba had taught him for a hypothetical Iranian grandmother. He’d shortened Amirzadeh to Amiri before; they all had. But where did ‘Emmeline’ come from? Decades in England, he knew, but he hated it when Iranians Westernized. For a while in college, he’d insisted on being called Daryoosh, but his classmates wouldn’t let it 35 happen gracefully. The intercom crackled as he muttered in Finglish. “Azizjoon, it’s Darius. Your grandson?”
Would she remember him? His grandmother knew his face, of course, and Kayvan’s. Baba and his sisters sent formal letters, photos, graduation news.
A small, reedy voice that seemed to have gone unused all day (maybe many days) chirped through the speaker. “Oh dear – is that . . . oh, darl – ” She let go of the button mid-darling, poor old thing. Darius knew from his father and aunts that Azizjoon was senile, and not particularly maternal. Anyway, she’d be in her eighties, and you don’t go knocking on the door of your most clinically bat-shit ancestor, a stranger who ghosted her children decades ago, expecting Pari’s butter cookies or Baba’s tea with a shot of Baileys.
But he had nowhere else to go. At the terminal in JFK, he’d decided it was time to text Beatrice. Firing off a message, he noticed she’d been the last to write. Twice. He had no new messages when he landed at Heathrow, so he decided to head to his grandmother’s first – he’d do the visit, take some notes, then go to B’s. But Beatrice’s response, when it came, was surprisingly not chill, accusing him of disappearing from her DMs and treating her like a backup.
He wanted to tell her that she wasn’t a backup, that he’d been playing it cool and overshot. But he was nauseated and tired, and he kept seeing Suri’s little smirk. Maybe B would laugh, too. She’d gone from zero to seething so fucking quick, he had no time to massage things. For now, Darius needed a bed and a roof, maybe some slowcooked lamb, a doting ear to listen to him complain about stuff. Still, he tried to remember that he wasn’t here to get his head scratched. He was here to grab the old stories and go before the old lady kicked it and Baba’s childhood secrets were buried with her; they were probably fast leaking out of her head right now, and Kayvan, the story-stealer, was closing in like the striving, unoriginal try-hard sack of shit that he was. God damn it! Thinking about Kayvan always got his temperature up.
The door clicked and opened a crack. Purple-lined eyes peered at him, then the door swung wide. “Oh, my Darius,” Azizjoon sang through tears. Her accent was nearly English, like those fancy Iranian ladies who’d flown off to boarding schools in London and spent their useless lives lugging skis between Dizin and Chamonix. Azizjoon didn’t have a life like that – she will have cultivated this accent, forcing her mouth to clutch the marble, that tight English “o,” to let her r’s drop into oblivion. Her pronunciation wasn’t so much received as it was wrenched. She will have practiced before a mirror, into a cheap tape recorder, as her daughters had.
He allowed her to hug him, to pat his back, but something was off in the tightness of her grip, in her smell. This wasn’t the grip or smell of a geriatric. She had power in her arms, the scent of a fancy perfume, something Chanel-like. Could this be his grandmother? This woman looked the same age as Suri and Pari, his younger aunts. She looked sixty. His aunt Goli, her eldest child, was about to turn sixty-two.
“Come in, darling. I’ll put the kettle on.” She continued to speak as she turned and led the way upstairs. “I’ve just been out, so there’s biscuits and a pot of goo. Oh, dear, I . . . How handsome you look. Just like your Baba . . . and my Baba . . . much more my Baba.” She stopped for a breath, turned and noticed his befuddled expression. “I suppose they’ve told you things.”
He removed his shoes at the threshold. Set down his plastic rain jacket. The staircase led up to a bright room with whitewashed wooden slats covered in an old Nain rug. It smelled of cardamom and rot and muscle-relaxing cream. He summoned the charming Turkishcoffee-and-falafel Darius. “I didn’t expect to be fed. But thank you. I’m starving.”
“Oh, poor you, sit sit, this instant. I’ll fetch the goo.”
What the fuck is goo? “It’s fine, Azizjoon,” he muttered, craning toward the kitchen.
His phone buzzed. It was Beatrice. She’d already closed the door on this, but here she was again, probably day drinking. Fuck you, she said, u ghosted and now suddenly ur here? He began to type, letting the ellipses to show. Then he stopped and put the phone away. If she was going to be mean, so could he. Moments later his phone buzzed again. He peeked: ur just scamming for lodging. What a waste to love you. Not that I did. Ur just a bygone fuck.
Woah, what love? He walked to the middle of the room, where he could see Azizjoon pouring loose-leaf tea into a decanter and dumping some kind of store-bought personal pies onto a chipped floral plate. She threw out their cardboard boxes. The labels read, in huge letters, Gü.
Ick B, he wrote, because that bygone stung, but then a wave of cruelty overcame him, and he went right for the “thirsty” emoji he reserved for when he wanted to crush someone. “You know that feeling,” he used to say to Kayvan, “when you don’t want them mad, you want ’em calling a hotline?” Kayvan had called him immature and flaunted his shitty trophy marriage. But Darius didn’t want to sleep here, under a strange old lady’s roof. Besides, texts have a way of staying around forever; he deleted the emoji and wrote instead: there *was* love there. So much.
Instantly he felt awful. That’s not how he’d wanted to say it, 37 all slick and fake. He wanted to say he’d felt good with her. But he couldn’t now because she was being such a bitch.
“Here we are,” said Azizjoon putting two creamy white spheres – cheesecakes maybe – on the glass coffee table. She poured tea into Darius’s cup. “Shot of Baileys?” At the offer of Baba’s night drink, he dropped his jaw, “My baba drinks this!” to which she rolled her eyes, “Almost as if we were blood relations!” Then she winked and tossed in a classic Amirzadeh family dig: “Where’d you go to uni again?”
“Azizjoon,” he said stirring his tea with the comically tiny spoon she had provided. He was almost sure it was a salt spoon. “I’m sorry to ask, but how old . . .”
“Oof.” She sucked a drop of tea off her upper lip. “Right to the shameful calculus, huh?” She paused. “I’m seventy-four.” He kept stirring. Aunt Goli was sixty-two. “Seventy-four,” she slowed, fake British accent thickening, as if he might be deaf, which, for most Iranians, is preferable to sucking at math. “April 1941.” She sipped her tea, smoothed a thinning patch behind her ear. “Don’t strain yourself, darling. Your aunt Goli was born in 1953.”
“So, you’re not . . .” said Darius, latching on to more palatable scenarios. “I mean, Baba Ardeshir had a first wife? Or . . . Goli isn’t your natural . . .”
“Of course, she is!” her voice rose an octave. “That’s my first baby!”
“Sorry,” muttered Darius.
“So, they told you nothing. Poor you. Do you know when those children started banding together to lie about me? Early . . . I was almost proud they got it so well organized.”
“They never tell me anything. They’re afraid I’ll write it.” He paused. The mischief was draining from her eyes. “They said if I ever run into you, don’t ask questions, just keep walking.”
She chuckled and smacked his arm. Then she sighed. “Well, darling . . . it suited them. But, look at you, a writer? I happen to love embarrassing writing. We’re artists on my side.”
It surprised Darius how much he liked her. Her faded flat, the full tea tin, and the dusty shoe rack hinted that he was her first visitor in a long time. Darius had heard the stories of her personality: feisty, rebellious, desperate for attention. Childish, Suri often called her. Though no one spoke of her age, Darius now remembered that in the stories she had always behaved young.
After that silent beat, though they were sipping from their second cup, she announced, “It’s Harrod’s ’Festive Afternoon’!” He snorted and spit some onto the plate. “Oh dear.” She waited for him to cough it out, then said, “Do they want privacy from ugly Iran business?”
“No, no! They just want to give it to Kayvan,” he said. “If he wrote it, they’d be proud.”
“Yes, of course, Kayvan,” she said. She sat across him on a plush yellowing loveseat. “Goli’s boy. I thought you two were like brothers?”
“I wouldn’t trust that guy with a used paper towel,” Darius muttered.
Her gaze sharpened, as if she were studying, having forgotten the family tree, having been pushed off her branch of it. “He steals stories, then? He’s the wicked one?”
So, she was just rolling with it, with his version of things. In one gulp, she had swallowed a reality with Kayvan as the devil. He was beginning to understand how this woman had survived mid-century Iran and immigrant London and a childhood marriage and even managed to smell the theocracy coming. Now her infamous and almost instantaneous post-exile religious conversion made sense. (To Christ! Pari whispered, wide eyed. To fucking Christ, Suri echoed).
“Yes,” he said, and grinned in his disarming white-toothed way, and she reached over and touched his cheek with her cold, overmoisturized hand. He told her about the summer barbecue when Kayvan strode toward him in his khakis and asked how freelance life was panning out. Then came some self-righteous job advice, Kayvan acting like some kind of authority on graceful adulting. And Darius had told him to fuck off. Kayvan’s face had gone cold, and he said, “You know, markets are slower in summer. I’m thinking of writing about the family. Why not, right? It’s a good hobby.” But the family story had long been settled as Darius’s. What Kayvan was saying, Darius explained to Azizjoon, was that writing is easy and worth no respect, that Darius had wasted his Princeton degree, and that anything Darius could do Kayvan could do better. Kayvan wanted every good thing for himself. He was restoking the old rivalry, the one Darius had won when his university acceptance had dwarfed Kayvan’s, and Kayvan had stolen his application essay and read it at family dinner: Over the years, Baba’s habits have become a comfort to me. I watch as he washes his hands twelve times. I arrange our socks in rows of three. I only buy mine in blue. The aunts were stone silent. Darius caught Baba’s wet wounded gaze, fumbling hands folding his napkin into eighths. Then the glory ended. Baba and the aunts stopped celebrating Darius. At least Kayvan had gotten into Fordham on his merits. Darius snooped for weeks, looking for Kayvan’s essay. Finally, Kayvan just showed it to him: it was about his love of Persianfusion, grilling burgers in turmeric or some such ass-lick. “The saddest part,” he told Kayvan, “is that you’ll never see why that essay didn’t get you in somewhere good.” That wiped the smug smile off 39 Kavyan’s face. “You don’t understand, Azizjoon,” Darius said now, “he’s a hack. I get that I’m rude and mean sometimes but he’s – ”
“I believe you,” she said, “because you’re the one that was sent.”
He made a show of eating the cake. “I thought of you a lot growing up. Wondered if you bake and stuff.” He waited a beat, for her to melt and dive across the table and hug him.
“Oh, listen to you go,” she made a halfhearted grease-slathering motion that made Darius chuckle. In his pocket, his phone vibrated. After all these years of feeling like an Amirzadeh outsider, the sleazy and ambitious one, the manipulative one, here was his ancestor – whose specific genes only he carried forward – ostracized for chasing her stolen youth, for daring to want things, to say things. “I always thought, in photos, Kayvan was a bit . . . off,” she continued. “He looks like that boy in every schoolyard who bites other children. His head is far too round.” Darius grinned at her. She was so transparent and committed to his narrative, though she’d learned it minutes before. He checked his phone. B had texted: #hobosexual
Ouch. He wrote back, I don’t owe you a play by play of my whereabouts, B.
To which she texted back the middle finger emoji and: just have the balls and decency to say ur gone. Don’t keep ppl on the hook for next time ur in London.
Azizjoon eyed his phone, swallowed a small burp and said, “Tell me everything Kayvan’s done.” She started to mutter, as if losing her way, as Babak sometimes did. “I wonder if I can find Goli’s old photos . . . the ones from. . . . He had a hairline like a Syrian refugee.” Woah. Darius sat up, eyes wide, and so she straightened up. “Tell me darling, I’m listening.” How weird to see his father’s oddities, his singular quirks, reproduced here in a virtual stranger.
He carried on about Kayvan, how in ten years, maybe they’d be competing for BBC interviews and guest spots on talk shows, both telling the same story. And would the media see the difference between Kayvan and Darius? Would they understand that Darius was the serious one, the artist who loved language and would’ve been a writer even if his family didn’t have a superbly timely story? Or would they lump Kayvan’s side hustle with Darius’s lifelong calling?
“You should write it,” an MFA buddy had said to him, “this thing with your brother.”
“Cousin,” he’d corrected. And Darius tried. But then he just ended up writing a comic piece about two geriatric holocaust survivors, Herschel and Benjamin, who kept getting booked for the same memorial events. At every panel and podium, they played nice, while undermining each other’s stories, insinuating themselves the more 40 genuine survivor, the one with the more harrowing story, the better memory, the longer ordeal, until Benjamin decided his dream was to be a writer, not just the guy who survived the Nazis, and started writing current events instead. But the world just wouldn’t have it: Benjamin was his brutal story and nothing more. They didn’t want to pay for this old coot’s journalism. They wanted the Auschwitz story. And so, pretty soon poor Benjamin was back on the survivor talk circuit, sitting across the laminated floor of the White Plains UJA from his old pal Herschel, who looked at him wisely and said, “Well, now you’ve screwed yourself,” and he told that audience of old ladies that Benjamin had always been just a wannabe writer, embellishing. Oh, but the things he (Herschel) had seen. He wished he didn’t have to tell it – he was no storyteller, just an engineer, a birdwatcher – but it was his duty. He ended the story on the men decades before, their real tragedies in its detail, the hours and days cracked open to their bloody viscera, to show a grave unsentimental truth doomed to be mangled by time and other people’s gaze.
But Darius wasn’t going to become like Benjamin. He wasn’t the story. He was a Princeton-educated writer who’d happened to have come from a family of post-revolutionary Iranian immigrants with a bunch of undiagnosed mental health issues, and it was best to establish that credential right off the bat – that he was here for the long haul and could outlast Kayvan. Then Kayvan could do all the victim porn posturing and refugee dances that he wanted. His “book” would be a flash in the pan, a small embarrassment in Darius’s memoirs.
As he spoke, Azizjoon interjected with sighs and grunts and ei vais. She made clear in her performance that she loved listening to him, that, in this moment, she was his grandmother only. Once she referred to a stroke of bad luck as “hard cheese,” and drank in his delight.
By the time he was finished, Beatrice had texted twice more. Such a coward.
“What’s that there?” Azizjoon eyed his phone. “Is that a woman you’re toying with?”
Darius let her scan the last day of texts. “It’s hard to explain the situation,” he said. Would Azizjoon have had romances, lovers? When? “I guess you never had . . .”
“You mean before I got married and pregnant at twelve?” she laughed.
“What happened?” he asked. “I thought Baba Ardershir was a nice guy.”
Azizjoon started fussing with the plates and forks. “What does this girl want? You mustn’t let her lead you down a sinful path.” She 41 paused as Darius slipped the phone back into his pocket. She cleared her throat, released that reedy little laugh again, “You know, darling, I do have someone. A love . . . a man, called Julian, that I love.”
Darius sat up. “What? Are you serious? Nobody said anything – “
Had Azizjoon tried to build a life with someone new? Surely not. What happened to her after Iran? Maybe that was the real story here, the one he’d come to London to unearth.
“Oh, those kids don’t know!” she said. “They’re brainwashed, all four of them. I envy their childhood. They had every freedom.”
“They didn’t have every freedom,” said Darius. “Baba’s got major spectrum issues – ”
“Stop!” said Azizjoon. “None of that nonsense.” Her eldest, Goli, too, had this rule. The Amirzadeh blood is clean, and they didn’t need lazy millennial excuses and diagnoses and pills.
So, no bonding over Baba then.
Darius got up, brushed a few crumbs from his lap. “Sorry,” he said. “Are you going?” she sounded alarmed, regretful, almost panicked.
“I – ” he stopped. “I was just looking for the toilet.”
“Oh,” she breathed out, voice shaking as she tried for nonchalant. “It’s just there.” Then she started muttering, “Those poor children. There is no worse lie than the lie you tell yourself.”
She started clearing the dishes. She moved in a quick practiced way, hobbling only a little as she delivered a stack to the kitchen counter. By the time he returned from the toilet (which was strewn with little dried roses and draped in crochet wall hangings), she had brought out a stack of letters, the ones at the bottom darkening and frayed. Darius sat in the yellow armchair and watched her rifle through pages on the floor. He waited for her, picking at the leftover cheesecake and glancing at his own tired reflection in the glass coffee table.
Exhaustion was washing over him, and she must have sensed his interest waning. She blinked a few times, frowning as she shuffled her papers around. “Have you moved your bowels today?” Darius scoffed, so she tried to clarify. “Your bowels must be open once a day.”
“Yeah, I . . . that’s not it,” he said, getting up. Suddenly her pile of scraps repelled him, and he was dizzy after the long flight. “Can we get a real drink? I saw a pub around the corner.”
“I have – ” she stammered and pitched toward the cabinet with nervous fingers.
He touched her shoulder. “We can come back after. Let me buy you a whiskey.”

***

At the corner pub, they ordered cheap red wine, two whiskeys, and a Yorkshire pudding (just to see). He told her about New York and his plans.
“I want to write my memoirs,” Azizjoon said after half a drink. “I have the first line. Do you want to hear it?” He nodded. “I had a very short childhood.”
“That’s a beautiful first line,” he said. And he meant it. It was perfect. Briefly, with the whiskey burning his throat, burning down the skin of his heart, he wondered if this was why he was sent here – if he was sent – not to write about her, but to help her write about herself.
They talked about good stories and bad stories. He told her about Proust’s madeleines and hagiographies and lazy strokes of fate. Again, he warned her against Kayvan’s stories.
“When I was young,” she said, “all my favorites were about djinns and kind spirits.”
“Maybe you could start with what you remember, your house and your town and stuff.”
She waved away the suggestion. “I already have that,” she said, “in my papers.”
“Your papers?” he said.
“My work, my meditations,” she said shyly. After a beat, she added, “my poems.”
“You write poems?” Darius sat up, but she’d already moved on.
“The papers are for after I die . . . my poems, letters. I’ve left lots of instructions for the historians and . . .” Probably Darius was smirking because she stopped, gathered herself, her tone changing. “They’ll want to know about Iran in the ’50s and ’60s. It’s history! I have documents.”
She told him a story, about leaving Iran in 1972 (curls and the good suitcases), wandering Europe for years, moving from bedsit to hostel to church basement, then, four years later, arriving alone in north London at thirty-five years old, a teenager in mind, if not body. “I was still very young,” she said. “But I’d given birth to four kids, tried to raise them, in my way. Have you ever seen a thirty-fiveyear-old with four grown children?” He shook his head. He’d slept with childless thirty-five-year-olds, of course. But they just looked like a more experienced twenty-three, bodies indistinguishable, sometimes a cute line or two framing their mouth. Azizjoon continued, picking crumbs off her plate with the pad of her forefinger as she spoke. “It isn’t what you’d expect. You still look young. Just a different sort of young. The changes are . . . well, you’re used up, aren’t you? 43 But sort of renewable, maybe. There’s this hope that you’ll get a chance to do your childhood again . . . or, rather, just once, but late . . . you realize it’ll go by quicker, but you’re also a lot faster at grabbing the memories, so . . .”
He wanted to jot that down. He wanted to jot down so many things she said. These memories had to be preserved, lovingly, by a person whose history and identity were intertwined with hers.
She continued. When she left Iran, the children were teenagers – barely. Pari, the youngest, was eleven or twelve. Goli would’ve been nineteen and off to university. Azizjoon was tired. Of childcare, housework, watching a fourth lucky kid have the childhood she was denied.
Then she paused. “Lucky,” she whispered, as if to herself, “but I worried . . . for my young girls, with him. Suri and Pari were just the age – ” She stopped. An image returned to Darius, of Suri waving around Simon the Physics student. Azizjoon looked away.
“What happened in those four years?” he asked.
“What years?” Azizjoon looked up from her letters, eyes glassy. “Oh . . . those were just nothing years. Looking for where to go.” She described tiny spaces, rooms and apartments, where she spent much of her time tending to her body. She did calisthenics and stretches, plucking out extra hairs, dying her hair, and pinching her fat, and dreaming of a new life, which, of course, meant a new man. “I had my silly women’s lib days,” she said, chuckling. “Briefly, I had a friend who encouraged me to think of the rest of my life as mine. She got me a toolbox and plants,” she sighed, as if missing this friend. “She kept saying, why does all of life have to be a pursuit of a man? And I thought, okay this lady is bitter. I have a plan, and I can’t do it by myself, can I? I have no education, just a little money, enough for a flat. What am I going to achieve alone? So I’m going to have my European husband, and my big house, and all my scattered children and my clever, Western-educated grandchildren will return to me, and my daughters and I will put on beautiful dresses and come down to dinner in the garden, on a big table with vines coming down the sides of the house. And the grandchildren will prove everything I’ve told my husband: that we are a smart family, a talented family. Such good blood, if only we weren’t stuck in Iran. And you’d have one of those big, intellectual conversations with him, like Baba Ardeshir used to have with his university people in our living room.”
He hadn’t wished to interrupt her, but now a wave of emotion dislodged his words. After everything, these were her dreams, and in demanding them, she believed herself brazen. “You’ll have that one day, Azizjoon. I promise to come to your party and talk about everything I know.”
“God promised it,” she said, leaning over and patting his hand. “Julian is my future.” Julian again. Darius sat forward, thirsty for more. Was this a secret love? Or an unwitting crush? Darius had already drafted half the plot in his head. Azizjoon sighed, glanced toward the door, and added, “Not everyone wants it. I have enemies in the church. It’s very political.” She paused, took a deep breath and dropped her gaze, as if in prayer. “But God called me to London, to claim our life together. So, I sent thirty-two pounds to Benny Hinn, and I put it directly to Jesus.” She released a contented sigh. “It’s as good as done. I have peace about it.”
Baba had told Darius about the televangelists who prey on desperate men and grieving women, people whose true need wasn’t celestial but crushingly human, to “name and claim” their desires with money. “She’s become a fanatic, my boy. Leave it,” Baba had said.
Desperate to shake off Baba’s voice, he said, “So you met Julian in Europe somewhere?”
Azizjoon shook her head. “No, no, he was here,” she said. “He lives in London.”
In 1972, a terrified but giddy Golshifteh Amirzadeh arrived in Berlin with a suitcase full of her best dresses. She’d stashed away some money, over her nearly two decades of grudging domesticity and forced motherhood. So, when her eldest was safely in university, and the others sure to follow, she took her secret cash, the luggage she’d been given as a thirtieth birthday present, and she ran. She wasn’t looking for love or sex or fun. She wanted a new life, and a new life meant a new marriage. She didn’t even consider that a life alone could be the reward for all her suffering. If one man had wronged her, the answer was simply a better man, maybe a man from another faith. She didn’t want any more to do with Iranians or their version of marriage or womanhood. What was a marriage if the bride was never asked if she wanted it? Her mother had asked only if she wanted an excuse to wear high heels. And she’d said yes.
“I know I can’t call it rape,” Azizjoon said, almost as an aside. “But I swear it felt like that.” She looked up. “Why didn’t someone just tell me before I got married . . . what this act was? What’s the good in letting a girl discover it like that?”
“Uh,” he inched as one would toward a sparrow, careful not to spook her with his fascination. “You can call that rape, Azizjoon . . . I can’t believe your mother did that to you.”
A faraway look shadowed her face. “I betrayed my kids, too. Not as badly, but.”
“They’re really angry,” said Darius. “Suri – “
She released a low moan, pained, like a struck deer. “Ohhh, my
Suri.” She began rocking. Eyes shut, she mumbled, “Sweet Jesus take this evil picture from my mind.”
Darius wanted to comfort her, but his limbs had gone stiff. “Anybody else would’ve run.”
She kept rocking. “I kept my babies close in their young years. When Goli turned fourteen and sturdy, with big muscles, I knew, that was the safe age. But when I left, Suri, she was . . .” Darius kept nodding as a weight took shape in his chest. He thought of his aunt’s thick laughter, performing her bawdy stories. “She was wiry, just the age he liked.”
They were silent for an age. Then her chest lifted, as if by a string, “I’m sorry, I’m . . . this is my mind . . . Satan playing tricks. The Amirzadehs, we were a glorious family.”
Darius nodded. “Suri has a great life, you know. She likes to be shocking but mostly she’s chill, and happy, and I think she has boyfriends and stuff. She’s not alone.”
Azizjoon wiped her eyes, mumbling more prayers. “Who explained adult things to you?” she asked. “Was it . . .” She stopped, pressed her wet thumb against the wooden tabletop to pick up a fat crumb. “At my church there’s a girl who talks to me sometimes,” she said. “She’s very chatty and every week she knows something new. This is how you get a boyfriend. This is how you kiss. She says the cheekiest things, and I listen, not because she’s cute but because – ”
Darius smiled, “Because you want to know those things, too.”
She nodded. “Why couldn’t we let our kids just get there? No fumbling blind till you’re off a cliff. No . . . shame-shame for every curiosity, then . . . saddle up, it’s your wedding night!”
Darius let out a quiet laugh, and she smiled kindly.
“She died, my mum, just a few years ago,” said Azizjoon. “I was here. I got a call from a nurse in Iran saying that her last deathbed wish was to talk to me. So dramatic.”
“That’s very sweet,” said Darius. “That you got to, you know, say goodbye to her.”
“Oh dear, I didn’t, of course. It was just nice, after all that, to deny her that final wish. She denied my every wish from the day I was born.” Azizjoon started to chuckle. She cradled her whiskey to her ample breasts. “You should’ve heard that poor nurse gasp. It was all very dramatic and Iranian. And she explained how hard it had been to find me, and who is Emmeline Amiri and why won’t I talk to my own mother who gave me the sweet gift of life? So I said “Goodbye dear, I’ve got some Gü in the microwave,” and just hung up . . . plunk. Cheerio, Mummy’s nurse! And then I went and ate my cake with some good Harrod’s ‘Festive Afternoon’ and prayed that that 46 woman ends up in a part of hell where every morning you wake up having forgotten what the sex act is, and you learn it from a brandnew disgusting man each day, and you see a long line of them waiting before you fall asleep, and you wake up again, your memory wiped. And that’s a mercy, Darius joon, to forget.” She laughed her girlish laugh, then stopped abruptly. “Oh dear, your glass is empty. Darius joon, let me just – ”
Darius stiffened. “No, no,” he said, fingers buzzing now because how many people get this chance? To meet the ancestor who makes sense, uncorrupted by all the strangers who had a hand in one’s creation. “I can’t drink any more. Please Azizjoon, relax. Tell me about Julian.”
In Berlin, she found Christ. Or rather – because Darius was learning to read between the lines like a writer – she found a church full of kind people who welcomed her. The price of admission into their social circle, Darius now guessed, was her salvation. And Berlin was too frightening and debauched. The part of the city where she lived was traumatizing, so much flesh and desire always on display, people celebrating things that should be torched. She moved to a village in Holland where asexual locals made cheese and grew tulips and roses, and fair-skinned men seemed to age from a safe fourteen to a safe eighty overnight. “It was like God spared them the genitals, Darius joon! If I wasn’t called to London, I would’ve stayed in that Dutch village.”
Her friend, she explained, had a job in the UK and dragged Azizjoon along, promising that she’d be happier in an English country, since she spoke it well enough. “Then I met Julian in the church one Sunday and we fell in love. And I just . . . I got stuck in . . . waiting, waiting.”
She took a long sip, wiped her mouth, and said, “Let’s go home, dear,” and briefly she looked the age he’d expected her to be, the age that would have been right.
Back at the flat, she stacked their shoes, hung her jacket neatly on the only peg. She sat on the rug in front of the sofa and gestured for Darius to sit beside her. He felt revived now as he thumbed through the papers she’d left spread out on the floor. He wanted her to keep talking, and she did, pulling out letters from his father and aunts.
Then a computer pinged loudly from the bedroom and Azizjoon began hoisting herself off her haunches. “Where are you going?” asked Darius.
“I have an email,” she smiled gently. Something tightened in Darius’s chest.
“Of course,” he said, and watched her chase that single lonely ping.
“Probably Julian,” she said, her voice receding into the bedroom. “He works so hard.”
When she was gone, Darius checked his phone. He started recording a voice memo, whispering into it the best details from the pub, chastising himself for not switching it on earlier. What an astonishing legacy. And Kayvan had no right to it; that opportunistic bastard worshipped Baba Ardeshir. Kayvan would never admit that they were all the outcomes of rape, or give space to the whispers of deviance, a sickness following the family from Iran to America, creeping into the blood. Maybe both grandsons were like him, a couple of sexual menaces.
“Everything okay in there?” Darius shouted into the bedroom. She was muttering to Jesus again, when lord when, and some words about suffering and patience. “Should I put a kettle on?”
“Oh yes, darling, thank you!” she strained, her voice reedier from far away.
He headed to the kitchen. “Was it your man?” he shouted, teasing.
“Oh . . . no, I just have to send this email message . . .” she was typing with two fingers, eyes on the keys, then screen, then keys, then screen. “The great irony of technology, my darling, is that it adds so much admin to life. And people expect instant replies.”
The electric kettle was still heavy, so he pressed the button and headed to the bedroom. He glanced at the screen, then leaned over her shoulder, thinking he might offer to type it out for her. She was composing a reply to a Microsoft user message.

“Dear Microsoft,
Thank you for your kind note. I will do the update and let you
know.
Many thanks,
Emmeline Amiri”

“Oh, Grandma,” said Darius, flushed, then recoiled at the word that had slipped out of his mouth, almost on its own. Darius had never called anyone that. As she hauled herself out of the chair, suddenly she seemed so much frailer than she had at first, when he could hardly imagine that she was older than sixty. She seemed now from another era, another universe. How did she survive here, in gritty north London? At her bedroom threshold, she paused. “Please don’t call me Grandma, darling. Julian doesn’t know I have grandchildren.”
Watching her drink more tea, Darius tried to find a way back to the story. She hummed as she sorted through the letters, and Darius searched for words. Now that she was comfortable, sometimes she spoke in accented Farsi. He wanted to ask if she had friends here, if the people from the church ever visited. Did her email alert ping once a day or twice, or five? What did Julian say in his messages? Then, as Azizjoon situated herself under an afghan and blew on her tea, his gaze fell on the pile of letters at her shins. The top envelope wasn’t postmarked or stamped. Julian’s address was written neatly below his name. “Are those from . . .?”
“I keep copies,” she said. “I have every letter I ever wrote to him just in case they don’t arrive. And even if they do, one needs to remember what one last wrote.”
“For your papers,” said Darius.
“That, too,” she smiled.
“And Julian – ” He started to ask a question, but stopped, not wanting the answer. “Azizjoon, is Julian . . . is he here, right now?”
There was a tense beat, and then Azizjoon started laughing into her fist. “Oh, my stars, my wicked children did quite a number on you, didn’t they?” She paused, spread out the letters. “Darius! I’m not crazy. Julian exists. He’s at home just southeast of London with his wife and two sons. And the reason there are no letters from him is that he hasn’t written back quite yet.”
“Oh,” said Darius, slowly, feeling silly. Of course, there was a wife. Azizjoon was the other woman. This felt much truer to stories of her: selfish, reckless.
“Jesus promised him to me, and yes, in this life there are sometimes complications and obstacles. Look at Charles and Camilla! We don’t know what’s going to happen in the long run.”
“You mean, like, will his wife die in a Parisian tunnel?” said Darius, shifting in his chair.
She flushed, her chest rising and falling as if something had lunged at her. She sprang up from the floor – no more heaving sighs; indignity makes the haunches young and lithe – and gathered up her letters. “I think I’m finished telling you my secrets now,” she said.
“Oh, I’m . . . ,” said Darius, rubbing sweaty hands on his jeans, cursing himself for his big mouth. Now she’d give the whole thing to that hack Kayvan and he’ll write some bullshit about a family’s journey across the waters, and how resilient everyone was, and how the women in the family are formidable and brave, and all this vague heroic shit that doesn’t require him to imagine his tiny, freckled grandmother, even tinier than now, barely a teenager, having seen nothing of the world, nothing of men or male bodies, thinking “yay, I 49 get to wear high heels,” pinned down and penetrated by their own beloved Baba Ardeshir, a monster. Kayvan won’t write that. And he won’t ask unseemly things, like how far did his disgusting affection for his daughters go? And why was his son, Darius’s own father, so deeply fucked? And why do Pari and Suri talk as one voice, one with a medical practice and the other with her own farm, yet in the confines of the family, unable to function if you pried them apart? And Goli, the eldest, a tyrant and a narcissist, with her strange rules and demands for loyalty. Sometimes he pitied Kayvan, having to be raised by that woman. He took a breath, steadied himself. “Azizjoon, I’m very sorry. I didn’t mean that . . . I understand the situation.”
She looked at him with sad eyes, part forgiving, retreating into a known world and its rules, part curious, some long-imprisoned girl who wants to know just how people do it now.
“Do you know, the first time I was pregnant, I thought there were snakes in my belly?”
“Snakes . . . didn’t you know . . . hadn’t you seen pregnant women –”
“Hush,” she snapped. “I knew what pregnant was, but I didn’t know how you become pregnant! I thought I’d married a monster with an evil secret, but I didn’t connect that to my snakes. By the time I sensed Goli in there, I was six months along and the doctor explained.”
“Wasn’t your belly growing? Was the doctor a woman?”
“No,” she said, “he was a man, and he laughed at me and pinched my cheek and said the same things you’re saying now.”
“I’m sorry,” said Darius, feeling like a moron for both judgy remark and apology.
“My belly didn’t grow any more than the rest of my body. I was eating a lot in those days, trying to make myself fat and ugly . . . because your grandfather said on the first night how much he liked that I was tiny . . . ” Darius flinched, but she continued. “And then with Babak and Suri and Pari, I knew. I tried to end those pregnancies, but you can’t do it yourself, and I didn’t know anyone. So. More motherhood.”
Darius’s cheeks felt cold. He wanted to hug her and, at the same time, to run far away. He was annoyed too, at her self-sabotaging choices. “Azizjoon, do you have any Tylenol?”
“I have Paracetamol,” she said. “And the Bailey’s. Do you need a rest?”
“Can I sleep over a few nights?” he asked, forgetting Iranian politeness.
“Here? With me?” she said, “Well, yes, of course. That sounds very nice.”
Darius thanked her. Now he felt an urge to apologize to Beatrice but didn’t. “Do you want me to go out and get us some food? I saw a really chill-looking curry place – ”
“Indian curry? My goodness . . . I’ll make you ghormeh sabzi!”
While she cooked Darius flipped through the letters. Some of them were practical, some heartfelt, some just pages of bad poetry. Though looking closely, they weren’t bad. They were the product of a stellar Iranian literary education rusted by self-conscious late-life English. After reading a few pages, he felt that he could see the beautiful sentiment underneath the adornment.
“Julian is a kind soul,” Azizjoon shouted over sizzling onions and the thwack of her knife on the chopping board. “He’s not like Iranian men. He suffers so much over our situation.”
What Darius wanted to know now was: what is “the situation” in Julian’s mind? Is this a love affair gone wrong? Is he afraid to leave, or waiting out the dying days of a bed-ridden wife? Glancing into the kitchen, Darius snapped a photo of Julian’s name and address. He started to put away his phone, then he checked the kitchen again and took photos of two of the poems, too.
“Azizjoon, do you need help?” he shouted, after his phone was safely in his pocket.
“You relax, darling,” she said. She was wearing a starched-straight floral apron that gave the impression of aged disuse. “I’ll get this meat browned and then I want to hear your stories.”
“Smells good,” said Darius. The air quickly filled with searing onion, turmeric and cumin melting in oil. Now hunger panged in his stomach. He leaned over the sofa to open the small window overlooking an alley below, just behind the chip shop, and as the stale air rushed in, was overcome by nausea. Why did he eat all that sugar? “Do you always eat dessert first?”
She laughed, projecting her voice into the living room for his sake. “I timed the Gü badly, didn’t I? But who knew you were coming?” She paused. “I don’t usually have teatime guests.”
Dinner was comfortably silent. It felt strange eating this familiar food, his father’s best dishes reproduced here in London, by a stranger. She warned him that she had under-salted everything, to suit all palates. “That’s what you learn when you cook for big families,” she said, pushing the saltshaker toward him. “In Iran, I was cooking for fifteen, some kids, some old men. This isn’t salted enough for a young man in his prime.”
“But it’s just us, Azizjoon,” he said, shaking the grains onto his meat.
“Habits,” she said. “I don’t know how much to salt anymore.”
He asked her about her church. Kensington Temple; she said the name proudly. “Will you go with me?” she sat up, back straightening. “I can show you off to my friends.”
“How long have you been going there?” he asked.
“Since I got here,” she said, taking dainty bites of her khoresht with a fork.
“Why are you eating that with a fork?” he asked, shoveling a spoonful of basmati.
Azizjoon looked up and shrugged, then dropped the fork. “You know, you’re right. I haven’t eaten with an Iranian for ages.” Then she squealed, an actual squeal, and said, “What a miracle you’re here.” She got up to clear the dishes, turning on the television on the way out.
“Isn’t Kensington in central London, though?” Though he knew. It was basic diasporic snobbery. What Iranian wants spiritual escape with the riffraff from their own neighborhood?
“It’s not far, darling,” she said, “Just the overground to the Victoria, then the tube to Notting Hill.” She wiped her hand on her apron. “Oh, that reminds me I need to iron my frock.”
Darius got up from the table. The TV blared out some kind of religious revival, an old man in a suit with one arm to heaven, the other clutching a microphone as he beseeched God before an enraptured crowd. “Where’s your remote?”
“No no, darling, Benny Hinn’s on. We can watch him with our coffee.” She brought two brimming coffees in elaborate mugs and set them down on paper doilies, spilling a drop from her own. (Rather, she assigned that one to herself after she deemed it imperfect. Such inconsequential martyrdoms were typical of Persian mothers. Once Kayvan said that in his negotiations course at Fordham, the professor said to sacrifice little things, to label every sacrifice. They laughed and toasted the shrewdness of Persian mothers. It was a long time ago.) Darius thought of all that he’d one day write about these wonderful misfits that made him. He thought of Suri’s loud medical office, rows of vaginal expanders with racially questionable names standing proudly. How much he loved the Amirzadehs and hated them both at once.
That night, in the airless room, streetlights glaring past flimsy curtains, Darius couldn’t sleep. He tossed and turned on the narrow guest twin, his cheek pressed against a roughly piped cushion, his big toe catching in the nooks of a loose crochet throw. He tried to recall an Alice Munro story he’d once loved. What was it called? A poet with a husband and child travels to Toronto. She’s chasing a married man who gave her a ride home once. She is consumed with longing for this stranger who may or may not want her. She sends him 52 a note that feels like putting a letter in a bottle and hoping to reach Japan. To Reach Japan. That’s it. On the train, this mother leaves her kid alone to go fuck some guy that two pages earlier she described as “a boy.” He once said to Kayvan, “Every time I get bored with life, I think about how much of a prude I am compared to Alice Munro’s 1950s mothers.” And yet, he’d hated that story the first time he read it. He hated the mother for her selfishness, so wrapped up in her own physical need. Is there anything more deplorable than abandoning mothers? Doesn’t motherhood give you all the animal instincts and pheromones that you need to protect that child, even at the expense of yourself? Or do only some children inspire that jungle protection in their mothers? Was he too male, too swarthy, too stout, for his mother to want to tuck him under a warm flank? There had been days that he’d wished that his mother was the Amirzadeh, instead of his father, because then at least he could blame genetics, that leaving itch that Azizjoon shared. But Darius’s mother was just an ordinary white woman, an Alice Munro housewife. And worst of all, she knew exactly what she was saddling Darius with, all of Baba’s shit. She knew that Darius would spend his childhood lining up condiments and counting his blue socks simply because he refused to be like her, a deserter. His mother didn’t have Azizjoon’s excuse. She wasn’t a raped and exploited and perpetually gaslit child bride. Darius thought of the sweet way Azizjoon described her “papers.” What did she have? Diaries? More letters? He wanted to read them all.
The next day, Darius found the Munro story online – Azizjoon’s computer was riddled with viruses and pop-ups; he’d fix that later – and read it to his grandmother over “Breakfast Tea.”
She sipped from a dainty cup as she listened, nodding or frowning. When he asked her what she thought, she made a bored comment about God’s will, and how, if the couple on the train were meant to be together, God would bring them together in marriage whatever their sinful beginnings. This frustrated Darius, her singular focus. She scraped butter off her toast and said, “You know, one day I saw Julian pass me on the street. I chased him for a block, and then I realized, it wasn’t him. I sat on a bench and tried so hard to remember his face. I commanded it, in the name of Jesus, to appear, but poof, it had vanished from my brain.” She eyed his clothes, the same ones he’d worn the day before. “I noticed you haven’t moved your bowels since – ”
“Azizjoon!” he laughed. Her gaze was unmoving, so he said, “I did it in the night.”
He managed to dodge a shopping trip to M&S by tempting Azizjoon to read her letters aloud. They spent most of Saturday leafing 53 through old letters. For years, she’d written to her four children, keeping copies of everything. Medical school encouragements for Suri. Organic farming tips for Pari. Instructions for Goli. Praise for Babak. And so, Saturday was spent.
Darius went with her to Sunday church service, where she clung onto his arm with such intense devotion that he started to think of all the ways this fragile person, alone in a big city, might fall apart, taking with it her even more fragile universe, her budding sense of herself.
During the hymns, his grandmother sprang to life. She waved her arms, and sang in her sweet accent, and danced with her hips, rising to her tiptoes as the music peaked. By the second chorus of “Shine, Jesus, Shine” she’d forgotten herself, swaying as none of the English women around her were doing. This made Darius love her – really love her – for the first time. He wanted to dance, too, but felt self-conscious in this strange congregation (or any congregation), so he tapped his feet. Azizjoon didn’t notice; her eyes didn’t open the entire song. It pained him to think she was praying, claiming Julian again as some TV charlatan had taught her.
Then the rustle of a hundred skirts sitting, the patter of the preacher’s thick forefinger tapping the mic. Darius felt a wave of peace, of intense safety. This sanctuary was filled with grandparents well past the worries that now consumed him, past the rat race, the cycles of ambition and crippling inadequacy, the endless wanting. What they craved now was their children, their grandchildren, God. Some of them had undoubtedly done great things (this was Kensington, after all). Others not so much. And yet, here, this morning, they were all drinking the same instant coffee and asking Jesus to shine his face upon them so they could carry this collective joy into the pub where they’d order Yorkshire puddings and gossip about the same things they’d gossiped about as teenagers: crushes, betrayals.
As his grandmother drank in the sermon, an idea occurred to Darius. What if he were to meet Julian, be charming, let Azizjoon show off a bit? The romance couldn’t be real (he felt sure of that), but at least Julian could fill in some gaps, sit down to tea, maybe, and tell Darius the rest of the story. Azizjoon was the mystery that had called Darius to London, but the letters, and Julian’s vantagepoint on them, would give him his literary breakthrough. In exchange, Darius could smooth the situation in a way Azizjoon couldn’t. And he could be her stand-in family, like in old-world proposals where the families offer themselves for each other’s judgement.
He turned over his Sunday bulletin and scribbled with the halfpencil for prayer requests, Let’s visit Julian. He slid it over to his grand- 54 mother. She squinted, her eyes clearly weaker than she was willing to admit. Then her eyebrows shot up and she looked at him with big, happy eyes.
He regretted it instantly. What good could possibly come of visiting Julian? It was a bad impulse, a coffee rush intensified by praise songs. Azizjoon looked so joyful, guileless. It’s fine, he told himself, it’d be an adventure, a way to bond with his grandmother. But shame scorched him head to toe; he knew why he’d suggested it. He had a sudden urge to protect this fragile woman from himself. All her life she’d been used and discarded, rejected by her children. Now she stared wistfully into the middle distance, clutching his hand with all kinds of foolish trust.
That afternoon, he flipped through the photos he’d taken of Azizjoon’s old letters. He remembered himself in those years, terrified after his mother ran off, a little boy stuck caring for a fussy, traumatized father who refused to see professionals. Nothing wrong with the blood. Darius had done all his diagnosing himself, on the internet and, later, in the stacks at Firestone Library. Babak’s sisters with their six-hour screaming matches about a random day twenty years ago. Babak tiptoeing in, timidly, with sensibly timed tidbits of memory, then, without warning, speed walking to his bedroom to bury his head under a blanket.
While his grandmother cooked, he used her computer to research Julian. He had a private Instagram. Darius was tempted to log in and friend him but stopped short of typing his password on the virusriddled computer. He entered Julian’s address into Google Satellite. His house was less isolated, more modest, than his leafy photos suggested, the next garden within spitting distance. Sensing the creepiness of this, he closed the browser. The last time anyone had gone knocking on doors for Azizjoon’s potential husband, she’d been handed into domestic slavery.
Azizjoon appeared over his shoulder. “Should we call first?” Darius asked.
She shook her head. “His wife . . . Let’s just go. I feel God’s hand in this idea.” She closed her eyes and mumbled, “I’m coming, my love.”
Jesus. It was clear now that Azizjoon considered Darius’s presence game-changing. Whereas a solo visit might have been stalking, this visit would be legitimate and ordained and conclusive. He considered going on his own. Would Julian tell him what this was, then? Alone, Darius would be freer to say what was needed, to massage things, away from her eager ears.
Darius imagined walking up to the door. He imagined knocking, 55 being greeted by a benign English smile. “Can I help you?” the man in the Instagram photo would ask, kindness blooming on his reddish cheeks, teetering on his toes. Crossing the threshold, maybe he’d step on the morning paper, covering someone’s byline with his dress shoes. Was this the man reading Azizjoon’s letters? Maybe Azizjoon was writing into a void, as Darius, too, had been. Maybe her letters had gone the way of her Microsoft emails – into someone’s trash – and there was no story here. Again, Darius felt this bitter new truth: nobody was waiting out in the world.
That night Darius slept badly. He photographed more letters, but his grandmother stirred behind the thin wall, and he felt the day’s exhaustion in his shoulders. Tomorrow he’d stand his ground. He’d tell Azizjoon that going to Julian’s house was insane. He’d say that he believed her about their love, but it was wiser to let Julian come to her, given his situation. He’d apologize for suggesting the visit. I’ve never been to a church. I was overcome by something, ecstasy or joy or whatever else church is meant to inspire. Please forgive me. Maybe he’d promise to contact Julian on a future visit (wouldn’t that be nice?), or to help Azizjoon write a decent memoir.
He’d tell her that he understood what it is to be alone in this rigid family; he understood it more than most. He’d lived alone, grown up alone. “I had a very short childhood,” Azizjoon had said. Well, Darius had a short childhood too. Most nights he fell asleep to horrified thoughts of living out his days alone, without warmth or softness or kindness nearby. And years of dating had taught him that you can’t force anyone to stay. Even if you luck into a warm body and a kind face, she’ll be gone by morning, leaving you with nothing but a memory and perfumed sheets. Marriage won’t make a man stay forever, Azizjoon. He wanted to tell her that he didn’t blame her for the awful way she sent her own mother to her grave. “She deserved it,” he’d say. “She was responsible for your rape.” But that didn’t mean that all that motherly debt was Darius’s burden now. He was a lost kid, too. He’d suffered, too. His world, too, was full of nightmare.
Now the fear came over him again and he switched on the lights, tried to breathe again. He resented his grandmother for bringing back this panic. And what was Julian’s deal in all this? He wasn’t innocent. Even if Azizjoon was delusional (a big if, since she was relatively young, lucid, her memory so precise), what kind of a jerk doesn’t at least call a poor old lady to let her down gently? Caught up now in despising Julian and his confusing silence, he decided to write to Beatrice, to break things off officially, decently, with words. He stared at her humiliating final message. I’m not your mother. Anger rose up in 56 his chest again, but he stamped it down and started typing: I’m sorry we didn’t work out, and that I asked to use your flat. You’re right, you don’t owe me anything. She didn’t reply, probably never would.
In the morning, Azizjoon found a blue cotton dress in her closet. She pressed it and tried it on under a long wool cardigan, her soft curls blooming out from under a reasonably priced hat. As she ironed, she muttered softly to God, and Darius’s shame almost burned him to ash. How had he let it go so far? How did he get tangled in his own rope like this?
“Azizjoon, are you sure you want to go?” he asked.
She looked up, her eyes earnest. “Of course. If God opens a door, we have to walk in.”
Briefly he wavered. What’s the harm of trying? But then, watching her get ready to meet her imaginary love, he thought of Baba’s socks, his rows of spoons, and his unchangeable ways.
“Azizjoon, I don’t feel great,” he said, “and I have my flight. Can we go next time?”
Her face fell, her eyes grew wet behind her glasses. “What next time?” she said.
“Next time I visit. I’ll come back soon, I promise.”
He remembered Baba’s bafflement when Darius’s mother went away, the months of quiet afterward. Darius understood now that he, and even Azizjoon herself, had misjudged what she truly wanted. She had been abused and raped and now she’d found a man willing to go precisely as far as she could, a safe married man to write letters to and plan and pray for, and gossip about. Her church told her that the only honest pursuit was marriage, so she pursued it. But if Darius took this quest any further, he’d break her best thing, her audience for her letters, a spiritual and literary kinship that he, too, had craved for years.
He wished he’d understood this earlier, before he’d rifled through her papers, when they were just a pair of estranged relatives catching up over Baileys and Harrod’s “Festive Afternoon.”
“But . . .” she looked down at her dress. “But we’re going. We planned to go.” Her voice grew less insistent, though, as if she were speaking only to herself. They were silent for a long time. Azizjoon dropped onto the couch and smoothed her skirt as she muttered quietly to her hands. She unpinned her hat and cast it off, her lavender perfume wafting from the underbrim.
“Next time,” Darius reassured her. “Do you want to go for a whiskey?” he asked, desperate not to lose access to this sacred space that had opened up between them, though only days before she’d hardly existed. By some miracle, he’d found this ancestor who resembled 57 him in a thousand ways, whose kinship he craved, who was a mother to him, despite everything.
But Azizjoon was in another world, her stare faraway. “I’ll order us a curry,” she muttered to no one. Darius glanced at her loafers, placed neatly by the door. He wondered if she ever wore the high heels she’d craved so badly as a girl. She lifted herself off the couch, turned on the television, and shuffled into the kitchen to make more tea. Benny Hinn boomed into the flat like a beckoning ghost. You are a little messiah on earth! Darius sat for a long time with himself – with this self, whatever it was, that was only now coming into view.

---

Dina Nayeri is the author of two books of creative nonfiction from Catapult, The Ungrateful Refugee (2019) and Who Gets Believed? (2023), and two novels from Riverhead, A Teaspoon of Salt and Sea (2013) and Refuge (2017). Her short dramas have been produced by the English Touring Theatre and The Old Vic in London, and her short fiction has appeared in The Yale Review, Longreads, Kenyon Review, The Southern Review, The Decameron Project (New York Times, 2020), The Best American Short Stories, and O. Henry Prize Stories.

LIBERTY PANCAKES by Geoffrey Becker

I was hyper-aware of everything: my dad’s thick black beard; the uncomfortable, Danish modern chairs with black cushion seats that exhaled audibly when you settled onto them; the dark oil painting of a man in a hat and suit, some ancestor, staring at us from over the sideboard. I hadn’t thought ahead to dinner and now here we were. My mother was telling us about the trip her Feminist Forum group might take.
“Seneca Falls,” she said. “Or maybe Florida.”
We’d been to Florida once when I was little, but I had no memory. All I knew was that every winter, a box of grapefruits arrived from my great-grandparents, who vacationed there. Indian River, it said on the side, with a picture of a canoe.
“A trip,” said my dad. He was forty, a historian, expert on WWI, a quiet, conflict-averse man who took excellent care of his shoes. My mother, who had earned a PhD and now had nothing to use it for, was one week older. An aspiring writer, she stayed up all night typing at things: plays, poems, stories. She got up late, drank black coffee, left lipstick on the white cup. Many years ago, she’d been in a college production of A Doll’s House. I’d seen pictures. In a few weeks it would be 1974. She expected liberation.
I excused myself. I was four hours into my own trip. Through the kitchen, down four steps to the family room-TV area, then down a short hallway and left into the tiny powder room across from the door that accessed our two-car garage. I stood, hands gripping the sink, grateful for the silence. I was flickering like a bad bulb. Ed and I had each swallowed one purple barrel after school, right before band practice at Montcalm’s. Ed was fifteen, a year older than me, played bass, had shoulder-length hair and a girlfriend, Linda, with whom he had regular sex. He’d tripped before. I said I had, too, when I was hitching with Charly Sand back in August, but it wasn’t true. I lied about many things, including my age. I looked a lot older, and because of this I’d been skipped a grade in middle school (I was already in a multi-age classroom). Most people – if they didn’t know otherwise – assumed I was sixteen or seventeen.
The stages so far: Apprehension (the walk to Montcalm’s); Hilarity (rehearsal); Electric Mind Fog (the walk back home through town with my pulse racing and Ed saying “fuck me” over and over for no reason); and now, Interminable Bad Movie (possibly foreign). Band practice had been the funniest thing ever, like the room was filled with nitrous. We were in tears. “Wait,” Montcalm said, at one point, wiping his own eyes. “Are you guys high?”
“Nope,” Ed said. “What a crazy insinuation.”
Montcalm was as giggly as us just from proximity.
We all took a deep breath, the only sound for a moment the 60- cycle hum of Montcalm’s amp. “You still dating that Janis chick?” he asked me.
My face in the mirror was red, almost sunburnt; I looked like an Italian Renaissance portrait of someone with a skin disease. The walls were pink, as was the sink and the toilet paper roll. I washed my hands, dried them with a light-blue hand towel while looking at the small drawing of Provincetown that hung on the wall to my right, the work of my great aunt. There were people in the drawing enjoying themselves on a sunny day, rough sketches of them, jagged lines that somehow came together enough that you could understand what you were looking at, and in the distance the Pilgrim Monument.
I returned to the dinner table, where my sister was talking about something wrong with her horse. I had never seen this horse – it lived in the country, and she got driven out to take care of it a few afternoons a week.
“Thrush,” she said. “They will have to clean his hooves every day with an iodine solution.”
“That’s a shame,” said my dad.
“Thrust,” said my mother. “Lust.”
“Plush,” I added. We liked words.
The horse had been a gift from our grandfather in Connecticut. The main thing I knew about horses was that they were expensive to keep, and I was sure we were living beyond our means, with our new house, our new car. Our other animal was also my sister’s, a grey cat, Simon, who lived in her room when he wasn’t hunting birds in the yard. For a few months when I was ten, I’d had a puppy, but my mother had let him out in the front yard of our old house unattended and with no tether, so he wandered into the street and got hit by a car. He was a long-haired dachshund, from a kennel with papers and everything, and the rules were that when I was at school, he stayed in my room. But he’d barked and barked, and she got tired of the noise.
“Iodine shouldn’t cost much,” I said.
“He can’t be ridden for at least two weeks,” my sister said, enjoying the authority that came with knowing bad news.
“Is there garlic in this?” my father asked.
The red, green, and yellow stew on my plate vibrated in the candlelight.
“There’s shit in it,” said my mother. “How about that?”
I focused my eyes on the weave of my dark blue placemat, which ended in knots at the edge. We’d eaten off these mats my entire life, it seemed. I remembered playing with one when I was small, pretending it was a flying carpet.
“Could be some rain coming through,” said my dad. He took a swallow of iced tea. “It’s uncertain at this point. And of course, if it gets cold enough, that could turn to snow.”

After dinner, as usual, we all headed to our separate areas. Our new house was a split-level with a decent yard, built fifteen years earlier, and much larger than the bungalow we’d lived in before, with its cramped bedrooms and creepy basement where centipedes regularly invaded the carpet. My room was downstairs adjacent to the front door, small, wood-paneled, with a front-facing window. I could slip in and out without people knowing.
My sister and I settled in front of the television and watched a show about a magician that starred Bill Bixby. I couldn’t follow the plot, but I enjoyed the colors – we had our first color TV, now, too, a Sony Trinitron, and even stupid shows made for interesting viewing. I thought I was myself in another, equally unfunny show about aliens taking over the bodies of a suburban family. When it was over, my sister went upstairs to her bedroom and I retreated to mine, closed both doors, and did pushups until my arms hurt. I lay on the bed and opened my paperback anthology of science fiction short stories and tried to read, but the sentences bounced meaninglessly off my eyes and back onto the page. “Cabot stepped down from the transport.” “All religions had long ago faded from memory.” “My first voyage to Mars was as a stowaway.” I looked down at the floor. The carpet – a fake Persian – had shapes I saw as scary portals. I stared at the drapes, which were Colonial-themed, with liberty bells and cannons. My dad’s idea. They were something he’d have enjoyed in his room back when he was a kid, so he’d bought them for me. The dresser and night table were Colonial as well and smelled of wood stain.
I dug out my February 1970 copy of Debonair and flipped through the familiar photo spreads, the redhead posed in various ways around a ladder in an unfurnished room with paint cans and drop cloths, the blonde with the enormous breasts lounging next to a swimming pool. Nothing. The pictures might as well have been of cornfields. It’s speedy acid, the mutton-chopped senior who’d sold me barrels had said, and now it occurred to me that he hadn’t meant you’d feel it quickly, but that it had actual speed in it. So, I’d probably done two new drugs. I tried thinking about Janis, the strawberry smell of her hair, her taste when we kissed last Wednesday after school in this very room while supposedly doing homework together, the way her right breast had felt when I’d slipped my hand under her shirt at the matinee of Gone with the Wind the previous weekend. I want you, she’d whispered, and I’d been replaying the words ever since.
I turned on my radio, an ancient brown Zenith from my father’s college days, and waited for it to warm up. The rock station out of Philadelphia was getting interference tonight, possibly from Comet Kohoutek. I closed my eyes and watched patterns behind my lids leap and rearrange themselves.

***

I had a hard time getting through the next day on almost no sleep. There was also an incident in a stairway between classes where a greaser named Jonny Tkacs called me a freak and kicked me from behind, sending me stumbling into the wall. High school came with an almost constant threat of violence. With my center-parted pup tent of dark, frizzy hair, army jacket, red eyes, and general aroma of smoke, I was an obvious target. Six feet tall and 130 pounds, I looked, not unintentionally, like an R. Crumb character. I had a nickname, too, one I’d chosen for myself, Lucky, after the cigarette brand.
I walked to Nicole’s house, and we smoked her hash out of a zebrawood pipe. Nicole was the fattest person I’d ever met. Her dad was a policeman. My eyes kept shutting as I watched Oscar the beagle repeatedly lick his paw. Nicole and I had been friends since last summer when she’d cast me as the Tin Man in the Youth Theater League’s production of The Wizard of Oz. Charly Sand was the Wizard. I was looking for any excuse to get out of the house, even if it meant being in a play. We had gotten high together a lot, the three of us, in the parking lot behind the building where YTL held rehearsals. Sometimes, Nicole led us through Beatles tunes. She was a good singer and knew about harmony. That’s how I had first gotten to know Charly Sand, singing “This Boy” with him.
“Your parents still going to the shore Friday?” I asked.
“They are.”
“I need a place for me and Janis.”
“Cheerleader Janis? Go-o-o team!” Nicole took another hit, exhaled, coughed uncontrollably for twenty seconds, then rubbed her eyes and blew her nose into a Kleenex. “What do I get?” Nicole had dropped out of her first semester of college in St. Louis and was now biding her time until she could enroll locally at Rider, where she would study theater.
“What do you want?” I picked up the hand grenade cigarette lighter from the coffee table and flicked up a two-inch flame. I could never get over partying in a policeman’s house. The album finished, leaving us in silence.
“Why do you look half dead, anyway? And what happened to your lip?”
“I fell. And I was up most of the night tripping.”
“Get lost. Can you get me some? What are they?”
“Purple barrels. They have speed in them.”
She wore dramatic eye makeup and fake lashes, probably to draw attention to her face and away from her body. Her outfits were always the same: oversized, white, button-front shirts, and blue jeans. “Get me some,” she said, “and you can use the house. It will, in fact, be an honor. Mi casa es su casa. Think of it! Your first time!”

***

Charly Sand and I had run into each other downtown around noon on a humid Thursday in August, the last weekend before school was to start. An hour earlier, my mother had thrown open the door to my bedroom and yelled at me for practicing guitar, screaming, “Stop that noise. It sounds like dying mosquitoes.” She was still in her robe and without makeup.
“Why don’t you leave me the fuck alone,” I muttered. I stood and tossed the guitar – a $35 classical I’d been given when I was eleven – onto the bed and picked a random paperback off the bookcase and paged through it, making a point of ignoring her. Infuriated, she slapped me across the cheek. She’d hit me before, but I surprised us both this time by slapping her back. I did it with the hand that had the book, so what hit her was a copy of Steal This Book by Abbie Hoffman, which I had obediently stolen from a drugstore rack. Her eyes grew wide and there was a red mark on her right cheek. She started to laugh. Then, I replaced the book, pushed past her, and left the house, slamming the front door as hard as I could behind me. I didn’t know where I was going, and I didn’t care. Downtown for a slice of pizza made sense. It was lunchtime, after all.
Charly had just finished his own slice. He was headed west, he said, Gonna hitch. Wanna come? I didn’t even ask where west. I got my slice to go, on a white paper plate. The Wizard and the Tin Man, hitting the road.
Hitching proved miraculous. You stuck out your thumb and people stopped. Certain people, at any rate. We smoked fat, ragged joints with strangers in the back of a VW Microbus to the distorted sound of Crosby Stills and Nash playing through cheap, nailed-up speakers. We went to a showing of Beneath the Planet of the Apes, then slept on the floor of an unlocked church in Frenchtown, New Jersey, because Charly, whose dad was a minister, said it was always okay to go into a church. We made up obscene song lyrics and sang them at the cars that passed, talked about the rock opera we would write together. We didn’t even have a map. Our destination was St. Louis, to visit Nicole. A bearded guy in a pickup truck left us on a rural road that paralleled I-80 outside of Hazelton, Pennsylvania. “Best I can do,” he announced. “This is where you get out.”
“It’s cool, man,” said Charly.
And it was. We goofed around. We sang “This Boy.” We tried to do “Niagara Falls” (“Slowly, I turned, step by step!”). But I was tired, and this was a terrible spot. The few cars that passed by didn’t even slow down, and sometimes no cars appeared at all for as long as ten minutes. After three hours of holding up the cardboard sign we’d made still yielded nothing, I said we should turn around. I said I needed to be back for school.
“School?” Charly said. “You can miss a couple of days of school.”
“That and we don’t have money. And no one wants to pick us up.”
“Loser,” Charly said, and I could tell he meant it. “Chickenshit.” But unlike me he had no immediate place he had to be. He had either graduated or been kicked out of Landon Academy, a school in the area that catered to problem kids – I wasn’t sure which. Also, it had become clear that he had not told Nicole he was coming.
“We’re stuck in mud,” I said. “We don’t even know where we are.”
“Like that matters,” he said.
At a gas station phone booth, I made a collect call home and got my dad, who wanted to know where I was. “Pennsylvania,” I told him. “I’m headed home, though.”
“I’ll come get you,” he said. “We called the police. We’re worried.”
“I’m fine,” I told him. “I’ll be back in a day.”
We walked until it grew dark, then knocked on the door of a farmhouse where the family – a mom, a dad, two young daughters – fed us dinner and let us stay the night. They didn’t ask us questions. They even had a spare room with two twin beds. There was a picture of Jesus on the wall and one of those little girls with the enormous eyes. The air smelled vaguely of mothballs. Before we went to sleep, the mother knocked and brought us two glasses of milk and two oatmeal raisin cookies. We thanked her and ate them in silence.
“I’ll bet you wish you had a toothbrush,” Charly said, finally, like it was another failing on my part.
“I can use my finger,” I said.
In the morning, we had corn flakes and the father drove us to an access spot for the interstate eastbound.
“Don’t know how the hitching will be on a Sunday,” he said, “but good luck.” He shook both of our hands.
“‘For some have entertained angels unawares’,” said Charly in his Wizard voice.
We made it home in two rides, the first a real estate agent from Port Jervis in a yellow Ford Capri, and the second a swimming pool installer from Trenton in a blue Impala. He talked about Terry Bradshaw for a while, then put on country music and whistled to it. “I’ll drive you right into town,” he said. “I don’t care.” He dropped us off twenty yards from where we’d met up three days earlier, and we thanked him. I walked the mile or so back to our house. It was after dinner already. My mother stayed in her office. My dad said he was glad to see me. He said he wished I wouldn’t do this sort of thing. I took a hot shower and went to bed.
I didn’t see Charly after that. But a week later, he set out again, this time in a car he’d “borrowed” from his parents. He drove to New York – to buy drugs was the story I heard – and smashed into the back side of a parked maintenance vehicle on the Goethals Bridge. After three weeks in a New York hospital, he was transferred closer to home. Supposedly, he was out now. Nicole had been to see him at the rehab place. She’d quit school after less than a month. “It wasn’t for me,” she said. I’m a Jersey girl.”

***

Headachy from Nicole’s hash, I rode my bike uptown, picked up my papers and delivered them. As an experiment, I had recently stopped wearing underwear. The result was a certain feeling of freedom, but also considerable chafing.
I had the worst paper route in town, with only 30 customers, almost a third of whom didn’t answer the door when I rang to try and collect, so that not only was I out of the running for the incentive prizes offered to paperboys, I owed the company fourteen bucks. When I finished my route, I continued riding. I’d taken this job because I thought it would please my parents to see me working and being responsible, and to make up for the scare I’d given them. They seemed unimpressed. The Trenton Times was a bad paper, so maybe they were embarrassed, but there weren’t any delivery routes for the New York Review of Books. It was cold out and I’d lost my gloves. There was something else, too, an almost religious feeling left over from the acid, like I’d been scraped and repainted inside, like I’d been reborn.
I returned to the first house on my route and saw that the paper had been taken in. Same at the next. I continued cycling; I didn’t want to go home yet.
The business district downtown: Carousel Diner, Vito’s Pizza, Thrift Drug, the bank, the paint store, the Hobby Shop, the toy store where I’d bought my chess set with the badly made board. I saw everything as if for the first time. I passed Montcalm’s father’s office over T&C Meats. Mark Rosen was an architect. Rosen was Montcalm’s real last name, but Montcalm, whom I knew from Hebrew school and who had let me and Ed join his band, had invented himself a new name that he liked better. In the shop below, a muscular bald man in an apron wielded a cleaver against an ancient wood chopping block.
Through the front window of Liberty Pancakes, with its painted outline of a cracked bell, I saw Janis and Montcalm sharing a plate of pancakes, their faces pasty in the restaurant’s overhead lighting. They hadn’t seen me. They had sodas, too. Wholesome, like a date from Archie comics. Liberty pancakes weren’t good pancakes, but you could get them any time of day. I stood for a while, ghostlike, watching. Montcalm seemed to be doing most of the talking. The bus to New York rumbled past on the other side of the street, picking up speed with its loud, diesel breath. I thought how I could just as easily be on it, right now, reading a novel in the yellow light, or just watching the passing landscape, my nose against the window.

***

I saw Janis at school the next day, but she was with friends and in a hurry. I called in the evening after dinner and her father answered. “Janis?” he repeated, suspiciously. “Just a minute.”
My parents were upstairs screaming at each other, possibly about money. The phone was in the kitchen, but it had one of those extralong cords on it, so I could get all the way down the four steps to the family room and take the receiver to a relatively quiet corner, next to the sliding glass door that led to the back yard.
I waited. My reflection in the door anticipated me. It raised one arm and so did I. It stuck out a leg and I did, too.
“Hey,” said an unfamiliar voice. “What’s up?”
“Nothing,” I said.
“Me, neither.”
“Okay.”
“Not at all,” said the voice. “Dull, dull. Yawn.”
This was followed by a long pause, then the sound of something falling. “Hello?”
“Hello?” I asked. “What . . .?”
“Nothing,” the person said, and this time it was Janis. “It’s okay.”
“My friend’s house is cool for Friday.”
“All right,” she said. “Yes. That will be fine.”
She had to be careful, of course – perhaps her father was standing there. I gave her the address and told her eight o’clock. Then I snuck the phone back to its place on the kitchen wall. So what if she’d eaten pancakes with Montcalm? I was the one she’d made out with at the movies; I was the one she wanted. My dad’s voice upstairs was louder now, and it had an anguished tone, a way I’d only heard him once before, when he slipped on the front steps and dislocated his knee and an ambulance had to come for him. “That is bullshit!” he shouted. A door slammed. When they divorced, who would stay in the house? Would anyone? I took my cigarettes and slipped out the back door into the yard.
Another cloudy, grayish sky – nothing visible. Comet Kohoutek was officially a joke, all that buildup and then nothing. Sly and the Family Stone played through a window from the Hastings’ house next door. I pictured Hannah Hastings, now back from her first semester at college, the way I always did, in her bright yellow bikini, the way I’d seen her over the summer, through the gaps in our wood fence, lying out by their pool, her long legs extended and shiny with oil.

When I got home from school on Friday, my mom was angry for some reason and I worried she might attempt to ground me. I assumed she’d snooped and found something – the bag of weed I kept hidden inside the Polaroid Swinger camera her mother had sent me for my birthday, maybe, or the magazines under my mattress. I had two more purple barrels from the senior, purchased at lunchtime with money I’d stolen from her purse. I did that a lot – she never noticed. “Last of the batch,” he’d said. “Four-way windowpane coming next week. Stay tuned.”
I examined the flat people in the New York Times on the kitchen table, grayscale adults. Another crossword begun and abandoned. A dried circular stain from her coffee cup. International, I read. Doris Day. The silence was a string drawn taut. She put away the groceries, and in doing so accidentally dropped a head of iceberg lettuce that then rolled along the floor.
“Jesus goddamn Christ,” she said.
The escaped vegetable was somehow my fault.
I picked up the lettuce and carried it to the counter. It was surprisingly heavy, although not, perhaps, as heavy as an actual head.
“I got an A on my English paper,” I offered. “The one on Tortilla Flat.” It was true. I had Fs in Math and Latin, a D in Chemistry, and a B in Choir, but I was acing English. “I wrote about parallels to Arthurian legend and the Knights of the Round Table.” My mom only nodded, her hazel eyes plastic buttons. I knew she took pills because I’d stolen some. I wasn’t sure what they were for, but I’d memorized their names: Nembutal, Placidyl, Librium. Last week, working over her blue bathroom sink, I had carefully emptied the contents of two fat green Placidyl caps into a pill bottle, then refilled the caps as best I could with flour and replaced them. I’d sold this powder to a tough character named Mike Russo at school for three dollars. He tossed it back into his mouth in the boys’ bathroom, scooped some tap water with his hand as a chaser. Seconds later, his grin turned to an expression of panic and he hurried into a stall and puked operatically for thirty seconds. I’d had to give Mike Russo, who was eighteen and owned a motorcycle, his money back. Placidyl appeared to be a made-up name, a combination of “placid” and “idyll.” I wondered if I was the only person ever to have noticed this.
“Go to your room,” she said. “I can’t cook with you here.”
“Why not?”
“Because.”
“What am I doing?”
“Being here.”
I didn’t want to be around, anyway, but now I could pretend that what I wanted wasn’t what I wanted, and that I was just leaving to make her – my insane mother – happy.
As I headed downstairs, she shouted after me. “I’m not insane.”

After dinner – tuna casserole – I reminded my parents that I was spending the night at Ed’s house. “We’re going to rehearse.”
“Your performance is Saturday,” said my dad, rearranging the glasses in the top rack of the dishwasher.
“Exactly. We need more work.”
He extracted a coffee mug, peered into it, then put it back. “And these are middle-schoolers?”
“Thompson Park Middle. We’re even getting paid.”
“Very nice,” he said. “Paid is good.”
I biked to Nicole’s, checked to make sure her parents’ car was gone from the driveway, then rang the bell. A light-up plastic Santa was affixed to the door and there were plastic angels in the small front yard. I gave her one of the barrels, which she swallowed immediately. Then we smoked a bowl in the living room and went outside and scanned the cloudy skies.
“Is that it?” she said, pointing in the direction of a neighbor’s oak. “I think I see it!”
“Could be.”
She grabbed my hand and the two of us stood looking up for a bit. The truth was, I didn’t see anything. But I didn’t want to tell her that.
“I’ve got snacks and root beer and there’s a bottle of Popov. We have another TV in the basement. You won’t even know I’m here.”
Back inside, we listened to records. At 8:20 pm, Nicole pointed to the phone on the kitchen wall. “Call,” she said. “What have you got to lose?”
“And if her dad answers? What do I say?”
“Hang up.”
“I’ll wait a while longer.” In my jeans pocket I had one bluepackaged Trojan, stolen from the top drawer of my dad’s dresser. He kept a box of them right next to his stack of laundered handkerchiefs. When I was ten, because I had bad allergies half the year, he had tried to turn me into a handkerchief person, but there was no way I wanted to put one of those things back in my pocket after using it.
Nicole got chattier and chattier as the acid came on, pointing out that Janus the Roman god was two-faced, which didn’t necessarily reflect on Janis the high school girl. “Transitions, doorways, beginnings, borders,” she said. “January looks both forward and backward, right?”
At 9 pm, we turned on the Friday Night Movie, which was about a runaway train with a bunch of skiers on it, all convinced they were going to die.
“Oh, my god, this is the funniest movie ever,” she said, holding her pigtails straight out from the sides of her head like handlebars.
I got up to go to the bathroom. I noticed, not for the first time, how dirty things were: soap scum on the shower curtain and around the sink, battered-looking toothbrushes leaning against the inside of a plastic Flintstones cup like people on a hot air balloon ride, their brushy faces peering over the side.
Coming back down the hall, I stepped into Nicole’s room, which she had prepared for me with beige sheets that smelled of fabric softener. I lay down on the waterbed and stared up at her ceiling, the surface shifting noticeably around me. White squares, a water stain by the outer wall. A Mickey Mouse stencil over the doorway. I heard a rippling sound, like I was on a raft adrift on a lake. A cheaply framed photo of Charly Sand in his wizard costume sat atop the dresser.
I rejoined Nicole on the sofa. “Jeepers,” she said. “This movie is so bad. Fricking-A. What do you think, Oscar?”
Hearing his name, the dog got up off his towel and rolled onto his back.
We had a glass of root beer with Popov in it.
“I’m going,” I said. It was after 10:00 pm.
“You can’t. Come on. Pizza Bites? You know you want some. I’ll heat the oven.”
“I’m tired.”
“Her dad could have forced her to stay home. He could have figured it out. It might not be her fault. Or she’s working on a new cheer. If you go home, what will you tell your parents?”
“Nothing. They won’t care.” My mother would be upstairs by now, typing; my dad was probably grading papers.
“You gotta stay. I need a spirit guide.” She took my hand. “Check this out.” Nicole led me into her parents’ bedroom, where she lifted a pillow, revealing a revolver with dark metal and a wood handle. “Smith & Wesson, five-shot.” She pointed it at me. “Don’t worry.” She lowered the weapon. “He loads it at night, after he brushes his teeth. In the morning, he unloads it. The bullets are in the dresser, on top of his underwear.” She put the gun to her head, then returned it to its spot under the pillow.
We listened to her Bette Midler album. Side One ended with “Am I Blue,” and she sang along – she knew all the words.
“Nice,” I said. She could sing. “Did you quit school because of Charly Sand?” I asked.
“No. Why would you think that? I don’t give a sour grape about Charly Sand.”
“Me either. I mean, I’m happy he didn’t die.”
We sat there in silence, me imagining what it must have felt like to be in that accident and whether you’d even remember it at all, and her tapping her foot to whatever was going on in her brain.
“Jeepers. Fricking-A. Just go home,” she said.

***

Montcalm and Janis arrived for our holiday dance gig together, dropped off by Montcalm’s mom. Janis greeted me with a cheek-kiss. She was on a pure Montcalm high and it made her transcendently beautiful. She wore a very short red leather skirt and black boots that came to her knees. Montcalm wore a black shirt unbuttoned to midchest, a leather thong around his neck with a sea-shell pendant.
“Sorry, man,” he said with an apologetic smile.
The drummer Montcalm had found for us was a junior named Melvin with an Afro and freckles, and his T-shirt had a big blue star in the center. His younger brother, Reid, with shorter hair and darker skin, had brought his saxophone. These guys were good, and I was self-conscious about my guitar ability, since I’d only been playing a year and a half. Montcalm sang “Wake Me Shake Me” and “I Saw Her Standing There” and “Can’t You Hear Me Knocking.” At first, no one danced, but someone turned out the lights and a few brave kids ventured forward.
At the break, Montcalm and Janis disappeared together. Each had an arm around the other, and each had a hand in the other’s back pocket.
“I got herb,” said Ed, helpfully, patting the Sucrets can he kept in his front shirt pocket.
“No, thanks. I’m going to have a cigarette,” I said.
I went outside and then around the back of the building to avoid being spotted by the parents who were monitoring this event.
In the tiny playground area behind the building, I stood under a slide. After a minute a thin girl with long, straight hair parted in the middle and no coat on joined me. She wore a lowcut, sparkly black top and bell bottom jeans. “Got another?” she asked. One of her eyes was elaborately made-up, Clockwork Orange style. I recognized her as Julie Tedesco, Janis’s 13-year-old sister.
I gave her a Lucky and some matches, and after three tries she lit it, taking in a deep drag, then exhaling. Her ears, which stuck out noticeably, were pointed on top, like an elf’s.
“These are disgusting,” she said. “No filter?”
“They’re ‘toasted’. Whatever that means.”
She pulled tobacco off her tongue and flicked it. “I’ve heard a lot of bands. Kingston Road Blues? And Downtown Sheiks?”
“Yeah,” I said, although I’d only seen their posters.
“What’s ‘Beggar’s Velvet’?”
“You know the dust balls you find under your bed? It’s another word for that.” I’d found the name, which I was proud of, in the Dictionary of American Slang my parents had bought me for my twelfth birthday.
“Not under my bed. My bed sits on the floor.”
Julie Tedesco was telling me about her bed.
“If your bed is up off the floor,” I explained, “then dust accumulates under there. That’s the velvet. Aren’t you cold?”
She shrugged, then took another drag and blew a perfect smoke ring. “Blech. Sounds like ‘Beggar’s Banquet.’”
I’d never thought of this and found it embarrassing. The band name I’d come up with was almost identical to the name of a Rolling Stones record.
She moved closer. It had started to rain lightly, the drops tapping out a samba on the metal above us.
“Don’t feel bad,” she said. “My sister’s not cool. Not at all.” She dropped her cigarette and ground it out under her sneaker. “We can kiss if you want.”
Her mouth tasted of hot smoke. We stayed pressed tightly against each other, the rain stopping and starting on the metal overhead, for a full two minutes, stopping occasionally only to catch our breath. I figured the traitor Montcalm was kissing Janis, too, somewhere not that far away.
We took a break. Julie located a piece of gum in her pocket, unwrapped it, and popped it into her mouth.
“So, can I buy some acid? Frankenstein said you were holding.”
“Frankenstein?”
“Charly Sand? That’s what everyone’s calling him.”
I had one more of the barrels in my wallet, wrapped in tin foil, but I didn’t say so.
“I’ll pay you back, I promise. Three bucks? Four bucks?”
“No,” I said.
“Seriously?”
“I don’t. I promise.”
“I don’t believe you, but whatever. What songs are you going to play next?”
“The same ones we already did.”
She stared off into the distance, then turned and punched me in the chest.
“Ouch,” I said. “What was that for?”
“Bit of the old ultraviolence.”
She was an alternate, more volatile version of her sister, I thought, her own bright comet, skimming past Earth. “Should I call you?”
“You can try. My dad dominates the telephone. But give it a shot. Let it ring once, then hang up. Wait fifteen seconds, then call again. That way, I’ll know it’s you.”
We held hands for a few yards, before separating. The rain had stopped. She walked a few steps, then turned and looked back at me. “I play guitar, too.” She mimed playing for just a moment, then turned and jogged off. A group of other girls opened and assimilated her like some biological organism.
Beggars Velvet reconvened and re-played most of our songs, including “Jumpin’ Jack Flash” because it was requested for a dance contest. The real contest was between the dancers and us. My hands felt like they’d been run over from playing the same four-note riff over and over.
The gym lights came on. 9:45 p.m. We stopped, said goodnight, started to pack up. Worried parents rounded up their kids. Go Eagles, read the banner beside the ancient clock on the wall that peers out like a jaundiced eye from behind the cranked-back basketball hoop. The painted, chipping yellow brick walls echoed with voices and laughter. I looked around for Julie but she was gone.
I called home from the payphone across the street. After a while, my dad answered, sounding tired, and said he’d come get me. I waited outside with my guitar case and amp.
“Rock and roll!” a voice shouted nearly in my ear. It was Charly Sand, along with Mike Russo and another guy with a moustache I didn’t know. They carried beers and seemed wasted, although in his case it wasn’t just that. He was different. Charly Sand wore a long military surplus coat and had a cane in his hand. His movements were awkward and robotic, like important wires between his brain and body had been disconnected. “Didja get laid las’ night?” he said, loudly. “Hey, got a cigarette, Tin Man?”
I gave him one. Charly lit it with the vintage Zippo he always carried.
“Got anything else?”
“No.”
“That’s not what I heard. From our mutual friend.” He poked me in the same place Julie had given me the punch.
“Ow. Well, I don’t.”
“Check this out,” he said. He pulled a sword out of the cane and swung it a couple of times, the lit cigarette dangling from his mouth. “Errol Fucking Flynn.” He slid the sword back into the cane. “See ya ’round.” Charly and his friends continued walking in the direction of uptown.
It was colder now, the air damp and smelling like snow. I had to be up early in the morning for my Sunday route. I remembered the meal the family had served us in Pennsylvania: hamburgers, and fresh corn, and big, beefsteak tomatoes cut in thick slices as a first course, how we all had to join hands first. Charly had grinned at me from the opposite side of the table as if he were no longer mad, as if to say, Yeah, man, the adventure continues! Good people had opened their doors to strangers, fed them. There was grace in the world, and love. I had never eaten a tomato that way, and was surprised at how delicious it was, and how simple, a big red circle with salt sprinkled over it like stars.

---

Geoffrey Becker is the author of the novels Bluestown (St. Martin’s Press, 1996) and Hot Springs (Tin House Books, 2010), as well as the story collections Dangerous Men (University of Pittsburgh Press, 1995) and Black Elvis (University of Georgia Press, 2009). His stories have appeared in Beloit Fiction Review, North American Review, Ploughshares, Gettysburg Review, and The Best American Short Stories.

THE TREE CUTTERS RIDE by Dustin M. Hoffman

Donovan climbed trees every day, massive ones that poked at the sun, but the 250-foot Skytower ride pained his groin – a plunging tug on not one but both nuts. He ascended over the amusement park, the city, over both the Carolinas. The park was built straddling the state borders, like it couldn’t make up its mind. He turned to his friend Yan to say, “I’ll climb the tallest tree you got, but I don’t like this having no control.”
Yan nodded toward the acne-pocked teenager operating the ride’s controls. “And we’re the dummies trusting this kid not to drop us. How many shits you think he gives?” He said this as he held his sixyear-old son’s ears. Donovan hadn’t thought about freaking out Yan’s kid until now, which probably made him an asshole, as much as his own dad had been. Once Yan uncupped his kid’s ears, he nudged him toward the curved window. “Take a look down, kid. See your whole world.”
Donovan kept the back of his head glued to the wall. His body tingled at the sight of his home state made miniature, at the corpselike lump of Kings Mountain, at the endless trees Donovan could hack away if only he was steady on the ground, armed with his chainsaw. On the next Skytower rotation, the setting sun caught Charlotte’s skyscrapers and glared. From here, they resembled cutter teeth on his saw chain, all lit up as if sparking like in the nightmare he had where he was buzzing off branches at work. They dropped toward his dead daddy who was resurrected only to drunkenly stumble under Donovan’s murderous branches.
“How long they gonna spin us around up here?” Donovan asked.
The Skytower continued rotating, and Charlotte’s twinkling buildings disappeared. The roller coasters now plummeted in front of him, soulless silhouettes flailing from the cars. He’d rather fall out of a thirty-foot loblolly than go on one of those. If Yan asked him, though, he might have to do it. A guy can’t say no to another man’s dare, can’t risk looking like a pussy, and that goes double if they work together. What if Yan told the other guys? They hated Yan anyway, talked about him sneaking across the wall from Mexico to steal their jobs. He’d only started last month, and Donovan felt bad for him, which is why he’d said yes when Yan asked if he wanted to join him at Carowinds. He’d thought maybe Yan would be bringing his wife, but, no, turned out he didn’t have one. Just this kid. Just the kid and two guys, and people had already been staring at them, probably imagining who got top and who got bottom.
Yan’s kid was smushing his face against the glass, and Yan yelled at him to “stop licking everything all the dang time.” Donovan was goddamn grateful for this forty-seven-inch tagalong, too short for any serious rollercoastering.
“Kid is gonna catch Ebola licking everything like that,” Yan said.
The kid pressed his whole body against the thin glass, and it made Donovan’s insides start twirling again. He couldn’t help imagining, and then couldn’t stop from blurting it. “If he fell out, little guy’s guts would splatter thirty feet across the concrete.”
“What’s wrong with you?” Yan said, covering his kid’s ears too late.
Donovan waved an apology toward the kid without risking moving his body from the seat. “Sorry. I’m just saying.”
“That’s dumb, man. That’s impossible.”
But people probably died all the time on these rides. Why all the seatbelts and bars and guardrails and signs warning off pregnant ladies and weak hearts? That’s why his chainsaw wore a slew of stickers and had a manual warning about lifting the saw above your shoulders, about never touching the chain without pulling the sparkplug, about safety glasses. When a tree cutter stopped worrying about buzzing off three fingers or catching a splinter through the eyeball – that’s when he’d hurt himself. Fear was a protectant. Fear kept a man’s various viscera stowed in the skin casings where they belonged. He’d never witnessed a bad accident. But he had seen his crew messing with Yan’s harness. Donovan had laughed along with them, all those assholes he worked with who’d tightened the harness so small it must’ve strangled Yan’s scrotum. If he would’ve warned him, he might not have felt guilty enough to say yes to the amusement park.
The Skytower lurched into its slow, steady descent. It was a good feeling to have the ground in your future. He even allowed himself, in the last fifty feet, to unstick his sweaty scalp from the wall so he could glimpse the parking lot in miniature. The ride landed, and the passengers turned toward the exit. He was happy to join his fellow survivors, and he even scruffed Yan’s kid’s hair to celebrate the confidence recalibrated to his groin.
“What next?” Yan said as they stood on the concrete, the park crowd swirling around them in currents of human traffic. “We should ride a coaster, right?”
“Doubt they’ll let your little guy on.” Donovan cracked his knuckles. “Too bad.”
“Freak that. Let’s go check,” Yan said. “What do you say, little macho man?”
The kid ran ahead, and the two men had to break into a jog to keep up. He zoomed past the Dale Earnhardt coaster, the Nighthawk, the Southern Star, all of which he was too small for.
“Well, what the hell can we do here?” Yan asked the teenager holding a measuring stick outside the Carolina Goldrusher.
“Maybe try Camp Snoopy?” the kid said, wincing, because Yan’s fists were balled, and Donovan admired that about his coworker, his buddy, how he scared this stranger without hardly trying. His muscles flexed in neat scoops that showed through his Johnny Cash T-shirt.
“We’re not here for some wimpy cartoon stuff. Give us a real ride. I paid a half-day’s work for me and my kid and my man to get in here.”
The kid eyed Donovan, and he wished he could explain that it was just a language flub to call a friend “my man.”
“Maybe, like, the water park might be more fun, um, sir,” the kid said.
Donovan hadn’t brought swim trunks. He and Yan and his son would have to strip down to their cutoffs. Three guys splashing each other in the wave pool, their bodies bobbing, bumping, everyone watching as Yan slapped Donovan’s nude back.
“Or, if not the water park, maybe try a spinning ride or something. You and your family would love those, I bet,” the worker kid said, and Donovan’s face burned.
“Point me at a spinny ride then.” He smiled and punched the kid in the shoulder.
So they headed in the direction of the teenager’s finger, a ride called the Rock ‘N’ Roller. Donovan studied the ride and was pleased to see it stayed at ground level. No lifts. No drops. Just a frenzied spin, the buckets slicing the air like the teeth of his chainsaw. Fast he could handle. As they lingered in line, Donovan felt the crowd watching them again, kids mostly, a few man-wife couples. Their eyes seared. That teenager had called them a family, and anyone could’ve heard that. He imagined shouting to them all, We’re friends from work. Just two dudes hanging out, because he needs a friend, you know. But that explanation jammed in his head. He revised it to leave no room for questioning. He’d shout: I like vaginas, and so does my friend. And for good measure: He’s barely my friend. Just a guy I work with.
Donovan realized then that he was staring at an old man’s mouth, a white beard stained yellow probably by years of chain-smoking Winstons. The old man sneered, mouthed a silent, bit-lip fuck you. His daddy would’ve been that old, that angry, if another man tried staring at him. His daddy had once gotten into a shoving match with Donovan’s shop teacher at a bar for being a “lippy faggot.” Donovan had liked that shop teacher, who trusted him to run the lathe, to run any saw he liked, said he had the sharpest eye for angles of any kid in class. Donovan had been proud, but maybe that, too, had been a gay thing. His daddy had kicked out three of the shop teacher’s front teeth in the bar parking lot.
The line moved, and they were ushered through a gate to pick their seats. The three of them popped into a single car. Yan in first, then his boy, then Donovan. Yan pulled the seatbelt, slapped it into Donovan’s hand, as if they were at work, prepping the mini excavator bearing its fanged bucket. The kid stayed silent as Donovan closed the door, locked it, and Yan secured the grab bar over their bodies.
“Kid goes in the inside, dudes.” Another ride worker stood above them wearing opaque sunglasses and slicked black hair, his sleeves rolled like a ’50s greaser.
“He is inside,” Donovan said.
“All the way in is the rules. Just read your car.” The worker kid snapped his fingers at the car’s safety door, where a sticker printed with red letters indeed proclaimed: “Smaller passengers must sit on the inside.”
“Sure, yeah, we got it,” Donovan said, because he could tell Yan was ready to make a scene again. The three of them reshuffled until Donovan’s hips pressed against Yan’s. Donovan scanned the other cars to see who was watching. He could feel the warmth of Yan’s legs through their jeans. The seatbelt pressed into his thighs, threatened to slice through him.
The ride started moving at a slow, loping speed. Yan’s kid looked worried, and Yan looked bored. Outside their car, eyes swirled around them. Couples giggled and whispered in each other’s ears. A car full of boys cackled, and young girls giggled somewhere behind them. As the ride picked up speed, Donovan spotted the stained-beard grandpa, who scowled, who stared so hard a hole felt bored through his forehead. Faster and faster, the faces blurred. Elvis Presley moaned about shoes on the speakers as Yan and his boy slid against the centrifugal force, their body weight sloshing into Donovan. By top speed, Yan was practically on top of him. He hooted and his boy shrieked in joy, and Donovan reminded himself to smile. You were supposed to smile on rides. That’s what normal people did. Yan’s shoulder rammed into his pectorals, mashed his nipple. Their knuckles merged along the grab bar, and Donovan tucked his hand to his side but ended up sandwiching his fingers between his and Yan’s thighs. The blurry stares tornadoed around, churning into a thousand-strong whir of pale, wet eyeballs. Yan shouted frick yeah into his ear, shouted it again, so close he could feel his hot breath, taste the funnel cake Yan had eaten. Yeah, yeah, yeah, fricking yeah. Their hips squeezed together, fused, Donovan’s hand trapped touching. His jeans pulled under him, pinched at his crotch. The ride wouldn’t stop whirling his body against Yan’s, and everyone watched.
So Donovan punched Yan in the nose. Instantly, blood sprayed. The people behind him were screaming. Yan clutched his nose, his body folding against Donovan. The ride slowed finally. Yan’s kid gawked at his bleeding dad and started whimpering. Now, surely, all eyes were fixed on them. Yan’s blood had speckled the white cars behind them, and the riders shouted. Donovan’s legs surged with the electric desire to flee, sprint all the way home, where he’d drink himself into a stupor until work on Monday, when he’d tell the guys they’d been right not to trust Yan. But the grab bar locked him in. No escape as Yan’s head lolled against Donovan’s chest.
“I’m sorry, man,” Donovan said to the back of Yan’s head. “I didn’t mean to.”
The ride worker, still sporting the blackened shades, was rushing to unlock the bloodied passengers. He slammed up bars to free them. He moved so fast that his sunglasses fell to the ground, and he didn’t notice when he stepped on them, crunched the plastic into shards.
Fuck this, Donovan thought and heaved at the bar as hard as he could. Surely eight years lugging chainsaws up tree trunks could grant him the ability to escape a kid’s ride. He pushed harder and pushed so hard a fart ripped through his jeans like a gunshot.
“You just fart?” Yan was finally lifting his head. “That’s messed up. We’re trapped here, man.”
The kid quieted, soothed to see his dad move. Yan lifted his head and blood drained in fat drops from his nostril. He studied the blood on his fingers, smiled at his kid. The crowd of blood-speckled passengers ogled him. “Good news, folks,” he announced. “I got the cleanest blood in the Carolinas.”
Someone laughed, and a din of chatter crashed the silence like a felled oak.
But Donovan waited in hell for the worker kid to unlatch him – trapped, hip to hip, next to the man he’d just punched. If Yan would just punch him back, they could be done with the thing. Instead, Yan wiped his nose with his shirt and soaked it in the last gush of blood escaping his nose. Then he reached a blood-stained hand behind Donovan and clenched his shoulder.
“You could’ve just said you weren’t into me,” he said.
Yan’s hand pressed heavier than that blur of a thousand eyes, heavier than a tipping tree trunk. He could smell his sickly sweet funnel cake breath again, practically taste the copper of his blood. Across the circle of cars, the greaser worker tugged at stuck bars. There were a dozen more cars before he got to theirs, and here Yan was admitting he was gay, that he’d tricked Donovan into a date. Or maybe Yan was just fucking with him about being gay. How often had all the guys at work mimed thrusting with the chainsaw at their crotches while winking at each other? Donovan performed that joke weekly. It was the same reason they cried wolf. Screaming Good fucking God, I just sliced off my thumb, which made the chance of dying by blade seem silly.
The greaser kid finally reached their car. He’d donned blue rubber gloves hastily enough to have missed a finger that flopped flaccid and broken looking. “Shit, shit, shit,” he said, fumbling at the lock. “Oh shit, sorry for saying shit in front of the kid.” He jerked at the bolt, and Donovan prayed to the amusement park gods to give this kid the strength of one hundred workers to free him.
Yan reached around Donovan and grasped the kid’s floppy blue hand. “It’s okay, man. No rush. I’m not dying.”
The bar released, giving like a sawn tree limb. Donovan hopped out of the car and had the urge to run again, but he waited for Yan and the kid to sidle out of their seat.
They left the ride and made it as far as the Do-Si-Do, its red wheel whipping above them, before Yan gave his kid a twenty and told him to buy them all a treat. The kid lumbered off slowly. Donovan would’ve gladly hopped on the Dale Earnhart rollercoaster to avoid being alone with Yan. It was as if the chainsaw belt had snapped, flinging its rakers and teeth into flesh.
Yan patted Donovan’s cheek, and Donovan winced. Yan said, “Think I’m gonna punch you or something?”
“I deserve it. I can handle it.” As Donovan said it, he heard how stupid it sounded.
“We don’t go places much.” Yan was looking over his shoulder at his poor kid who’d never be able to enjoy a carnival ride again. “I wanted you to meet him. He doesn’t know too many other good adults. No grandparents or aunts or uncles around here. Just me.”
“He’s a nice kid,” Donovan said. But he was thinking about his own father who’d hated rides. The one time he’d coaxed his drunk dad to get on the Gravitron at the local carnival that sprang up in the vacant lot near the cemetery, he’d afterward vomited into Donovan’s cotton candy bag. He could still feel the weight of it bulging inside the thin plastic. “But why me?”
Yan rubbed a knuckle against the dried streaks of blood under his nose. “When you know as few people as we know, you just want your kid around people. Kids need people, as many as you can get. One guy can cut down a big maple with root rot, but it’s faster and safer if you got five guys on it, right?” He sucked his knuckle now, and Donovan imagined the coppery taste on his tongue. “Hell, at least one more to help. My kid deserves that.”
Donovan didn’t say anything. He was thinking about how the best Daddy memory he could conjure was him drunk driving Donovan to the carnival. His mother had called the cops on his daddy when she’d found out. But he never stopped being drunk. Couple years later, his daddy had ruined shop class. After the bar fight his teacher wouldn’t let Donovan near even the drop saw. If Donovan ever had kids of his own, he’d teach them how to run every kind of saw. Blades were so much safer than daddies.
“Doesn’t he?”
“Doesn’t what?”
“My kid. He deserves people. He’s better than a big rotten maple.”
“Yeah, Yan,” Donovan said. “He’s better than a maple.”
The kid returned, and, of course, he carried a bag of cotton candy. Donovan hadn’t even dared to whiff that burned sugar smell for years, and now the kid was stuffing pink fistfuls into his mouth with no pleasure. Just shoveling. No smile. Yan’s kid was too sincere, too stoic. In that way, Donovan supposed, he was pretty similar to a big fucking maple. Sometimes you just had to prune some diseased branches or poison the pests, not topple the whole thing.
“Get yourself a good batch there?” Yan asked.
“Yeah,” the kid said through a mouth gummed up with pink. “It’s pretty good.”
Yan dipped in his blood-stained hand, came up with a pink fist. His smile bit in. “It’s still warm,” Yan said. “Offer some to Donovan.” The kid aimed the opened bag his way.
Somewhere, the old man with the stained white beard might’ve been watching, sickened by these men and this boy. Yan’s blood from the ride would be drying into his white beard, a new stain, pink as the cotton candy. Maybe others watched them, too – the whispering, kissing couples, the kids, his coworkers spying from the treetops. Donovan reached into the bag, fingered a big fluff, tore it free. He let the cotton candy melt on his tongue.

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Dustin M. Hoffman is the author of the story collections One-Hundred-Knuckled Fist (University of Nebraska Press, 2016), No Good for Digging (Word West Press, 2019), and Such a Good Man (University of Wisconsin Press, 2025). His stories have appeared in New Ohio Review, Ninth Letter, The Threepenny Review, Witness, and One Story.

BROTHERS by Susan A.H. Grace

Henry Noble’s nine-year-old self wears a bright green canvas cap with a half-moon bill that shadows his eyes. His brother Jesse’s eleven-year-old self has a hat made of straw with a rolled-up brim that circles his head like a halo. Long-sleeved shirts and overalls, bare feet, young hands as big and worked and callused as men’s. Till soil. Plant seeds. Harvest crops. At dusk, run wild in the woods – a forbidden still and sips of shine; sickle moon and pinprick stars; wade in the river but race away home when the fingerless ghost comes humming his mournful dirge.
Henry Noble dreams. On the monitor above his head, lurid green numbers flicker – a hundred ten, a hundred thirty-two, a hundred fifty-three and climbing. Down the dimly lit hallway, orthopedic shoes whisk over cracked linoleum. The night attendant braces herself, eases through the door, notes the time: 4:29 a.m. She is young and new and not eager to encounter her first dead body. Luck is with her. The heart rate has already begun to drop. Tubes snake into the old man’s nostrils, delivering oxygen in mechanical, measured streams; a needle taped into his vein doles out peace. This is what it looks like, thinks the girl, if they suck everything out and the bones and skin are left behind. He is hardly bigger than a child. Beyond the window a net of thin clouds captures the setting moon. Her shift, thankfully, is nearly done. Stable at seventy-one, she notes. Then: blood pressure, oximeter, temperature, time. On the cramped nightstand, between lamp and bible, a small easel-backed picture frame catches her eye. In the glow of the nightlight, she sees two young Black men in military dress, no older than she is now but from decades ago. Their uniforms are different but the men are similar. Brothers. Which one, she wonders, lies here?
Jesse, the old man whispers. What was that, Mr. Noble? she says. Mr. Noble? Tenderly she touches his shoulder – it is like holding a door knob. She glances at his numbers one last time before she decides he must be wrapped in a dream.
A thousand coins swirl in the sky. One falls through the clouds. It lands on edge in autumn rain spatter, rolls through winter freeze, turns lazy circles around spring dew, settles on a rising, summer sun. Reba Sue Pretlow. Henry can see Reba Sue’s ten-year-old self – pink as a new rabbit, teeth like little pearls, sun-freckled, sun-dappled – lobbing dirt clods at red-winged blackbirds and hitting not a one. You see that, Jesse Noble? she hollers. I almost got him. Jesse shakes his head and rolls his eyes. Henry grins, utterly distracted – patchwork dress, errant hem, knobby, coltish legs. Jesse calls, Swing it high! Henry responds, Swing it low! Their axes graze the Virginia sky. Split wood, stack wood, fill the stove. Butcher a hog. Pick some greens. On Sunday put on your shoes – clap your hands; stomp your feet. Sing your praises to God.
The night shift clocks out; the day shift clocks in. On a stained Formica counter in the basement kitchen, a cook in a hairnet scoops oats from a vat and brown sugar from a tub. In no time at all oatmeal is ladled and juice is poured. Carts wheel away one two three four into the elevator, down the halls.
In a field of brown grass, Henry’s thirteen-year-old self pries rocks from the body of the earth. Jesse’s fifteen-year-old self gives each rock a name and returns it to its grave. This one’s Levi Harrington. This one’s Sam Hose. This one’s July Perry. On and on. Seven in all today. They cut em off, says Jesse, and passed em out as souvenirs. That’s why he’s fingerless – that ghost. Same with the toes. Henry shudders and averts his eyes. It’s a retold story as monstrous as the lynching itself. For a while they sit in solemn silence. A chevron of geese glides high overhead. From her father’s collard field, Reba Sue Pretlow calls out to Jesse and waves. Henry sees her drop everything and bound their way; and her sunhat, snatched by the wind, cart-wheels across the sky; and her hair made of buttermilk ripples past her waist. Jesse smiles broadly and waves. A shot rings out. The chevron shatters and a single goose falls from heaven. Jesse leans toward Henry, a hand cupped at his mouth, a secret ready to spill. But in that watery interlude when sleep begins to melt and the mind to stir, the dreamscape falters. Wind-shaped words from his brother’s lips sift past his ear like feathers decoupled from a wing.
Morning. Alone. A rented bed, a shoebox room. A window no bigger than an open bible. The eve of his one hundred and fifth birthday – a detail he will not remember until the White woman who changes his sheets reminds him, and the doctor who boomerangs through salutes and tosses out, Well done, Henry, good for you, as the door swings wide and whispers shut. Through the window he can see a granite sky and a faraway hawk riding thermals. Wind bellows. The building creaks. Henry Noble laughs. He pictures a train barreling down the walkway, come to take him home. The clatter-clack of wind-whipped branches could be metal wheels on loose rails. The swoosh of runaway leaves could be plumes of smoke billowing from the stack. Rain, his bones shriek. Gonna spill buckets of rain today. The kind that falls sideways and drags rivers over their banks. Good, thinks Henry and he laughs again.
His fingers find the small box at his side and feel for the center button. He presses it with his thumb and the bullfrog in the bed motor croaks. Used to be when he was young, sleep was the disruption. Couldn’t wait for the day. Soon as he got old, soon as his world got smaller, soon as he wound up here, that truth spun on its heel. When the bed gets to the sitting angle he favors, his thumb relaxes. Silence ensues. Even the wind that could be a train holds its ferocious breath.
On his bedtable he sees a bowl of oatmeal and he laughs. Oatmeal because he’s got no teeth. Oatmeal to keep him regular. What a hoot they’re worried about his bowels. Once when he was in his thirties, at a meeting meant to make great progress in the world, surrounded by friends, acquaintances, and unknowns, someone – he can’t remember who now – asked him why he laughed so much. Don’t know, he’d said. Must be I get it. The man he can no longer recall said, Get what? And that made Henry howl.
The hawk is gone. A passing shadow. The drone of traffic, the purr of oxygen – sounds that soothe. That shutter his eyes. That send faces flashing across the in-between on the way to the gallery of dreams. Room by room, like a hawk riding a thermal. Forms, figures, scenes: some he knows; others, a mystery. In time he lands: Summer of 1932. Still images stir and ripple to life. Here, the Depression rages. Here, despair ravages souls. From the back platform of a special train fitted with microphones and speakers, a candidate called Franklin Delano Roosevelt belts out hope to a bedraggled crowd: I pledge you, I pledge myself, to a new deal for the American people. The men murmur. They kick the dirt and rub their chins. Listless applause. The wheels begin to turn, the train rolls out, on to the next town, the next weary throng.
Henry is fourteen when his father sends Jesse and the cousins down to the Grange to pick up their allotment of seeds. There is no telling how long they’ll be gone. They will line up behind the building with other Negroes and wait until the White farmers out front have received theirs. It could be an hour; it could be three. While they wait for Jesse, Henry’s father points out the cylinder head on the old Wallis Cub tractor and applies a wrench to the nuts. The tractor barn smells of oil and metal and the ghost of livestock long since sold or eaten. On a pegboard fixed to the back wall are too many tools for Henry to count. Most homemade. Who can afford new?
Henry leans against the drive wheel and watches his father – a lean man with strong hands, muscled forearms, and skin marbled with dozens of scars. Each scar, his father has told him, contains a bitter chapter in a brutish story. Ordinarily, silence runs through his veins. But in his weaker moments, when his tongue will not be corralled, the elder Noble laments out loud. A juggler, he tells Henry, a genius at straddling the line. With a waggle of his fingers he motions Henry over and drops nuts and bolts into his cupped hands. Believe it or not, he says, the Northern Negroes turned out for him. The progressive Republicans, the Jews, the Catholics – they marked his box too. Not us, Henry – we Southern Negroes still got no vote. Off comes the cylinder head. At the work bench, Henry’s father begins to grind the valves. We’ll see, he shouts over the noise, which promises get kept and which’ll be forgotten. Tell you this, if we get anything it’ll be crumbs. They’ll sweep us their crumbs and call it progress. You watch. When he finishes the valves, he goes to the pegboard and selects another tool. Set those nuts and bolts over there, Henry. Let me show you how to get the carbon off the pistons, then you try it.
Federal prohibition ends; Virginia drags her feet. She’s still working out how to regulate, oversee, and supervise the sale and consumption of alcohol. No matter. The still in the woods cooks like a dream and there’s always a jug kept behind. Henry is fifteen, Jesse, seventeen, and they don’t need much to get woozy, to stretch out on the duff after a grueling day, to watch treetops spin riotously. Suddenly, venomously, Jesse shouts: We got to change the world, Henry. Henry laughs. He is nearly cross-eyed looking at two moons shimmyshuffle over a patch of black sky. I mean it. I truly do. Okay, says Henry. Okay. The brothers sober up a little under the weight of that pledge. Harlem, Henry. There’s a place in New York called Harlem. That’s where we should be. Henry spools Harlem through his tipsy brain and says, Just us? Jesse rolls over, a hand cupped at his mouth, and leans in to deliver a secret to his brother’s ear.
Henry, you awake? Henry? The White woman who changes his sheets sits in a chair wedged in the space between his bed and the wall, a mound of clean bedclothes in her lap. Henry drags a hand across the corner of his mouth where gummy spittle has gathered. Oh, hell, he mumbles. Help me up then. How about, she says, we go outside for some air and maybe you could finish your story from Monday. Henry Noble laughs. He has no idea what story he started Monday that needs finishing. He has no idea when Monday was or what today is. What he knows is that it’s going to rain. The woman follows his gaze to the blackening sky and tells him that on second thought it might be too cold. She says, Right here will have to do. Then she says, But first. With a flourish, her hand disappears into the folded linens and out comes a small, cardboard box tied with a yellow silk ribbon. Henry’s eyes brim with confusion. Her laugh is just like Jesse’s, joyful as a sparrow; not at all complicated like Henry’s. It’s a gift, Henry. I can’t come by tomorrow, so I brought it today. She leans over and places the box on his lap. Happy day before your one hundred and fifth birthday.
For a moment they are quiet. The wind in the eaves, the hum of oxygen; and an old woman’s wail far down the hall: Take me home, oh please take me home.
Henry raises his bed another notch and chuckles: A hundred and five? Time’s fun when you’re having flies. She says, Did you just quote Kermit the Frog? She has such a fine laugh, this woman. Nope, he says. Greenie cribbed it from me. He cannot remember the last time anyone gave him a gift. He cannot think what this White woman who showed up one day out of thin air to change his sour sheets could have brought him that he might need. Or want. The touch of her hand at the back of his elbow coaxes his arm; his big hand floats forward; crooked fingers pull the ribbon’s end.
It falls away like petals on a primrose.
In the early morning hours of his seventeenth birthday, Henry Noble wakes with a sensation of doom. He jerks up in the bed he shares with Jesse, but where Jesse should be is cool as glass. The squeal of the woodstove door, the whump of wood shoved in, the clang of the iron poker – and voices: Anger? Agony? He sprints lightfooted to the end of the hall and peers through the dim living room to the lamp-lighted kitchen. A half-dozen Nobles surround his brother who is naked but for his flour-sack undershorts. His left eye is swollen, nearly shut; a gash on his forehead pulses blood down the length of his cheek, his chest, leg, floor. Nothing makes sense. A low keening rises from Jesse’s throat and his body quakes and his head jerks each time Henry’s grandmother dabs at the wound with a rag gone red. Oh Lord Jesus God in heaven, she moans, while Henry’s mother laces her fingers and weeps. Their uncle Jasper, a victim of lightning, cries to the ceiling: L-l-l-lynch us all, b-b-b-burn the place down and l-l-l-lynch us all. And Jasper’s boys, Henry’s cousins, both in their early twenties, curse Jesse, curse Reba Sue, curse their Maker and shake their heads in growing alarm.
Amid this nightmarish spectacle, Henry’s father says nothing. Feet and back bare; yesterday’s workpants thrown on in haste. In the lamplight, his shoulder blades shine with sweat. The stoker of woodstove flames. A twist of the poker, a quick jab. The last remnants of bloody overalls vanish in the belly of fire. The eyes in the back of his head find Henry: Get your brother some clothes. He’s got a train to catch before sunrise.
From the cardboard box, Henry gently extracts his gift – an old photograph peeling around the edges, as though it has never found a home in the sleeve of an album, as though it has been passed, hand to hand, down through the years, cherished. On the bottom right corner, the photographer’s stamp: L&M Studio, Tuskegee, AL – 1942. Henry sees none of this without his glasses. But even without his glasses, he knows the man in the picture.
Jesse’s good eye goes wide. Train? What train? Where am I going? To the cousins, Henry’s father says, Go find that Pretlow boy’s body, haul it as far into the hills as you can, bury it so deep it’ll never be found. To Jesse he says, Alabama. He says, They got a New Deal program. He says, You’ll go plant trees till your arms fall off. After that enlist. Silence gathers and falls like ashes. Then: Be best if you don’t find your way back here.
The gift rests in Henry’s palm. It’s Jesse all right. And it strikes Henry just then that his brother seems to be dressed in the same service uniform as the picture on his nightstand, the picture from Italy, 1944, the Negro section on the American base.
Jesse? Henry? Oh Lord, look at you. Got myself into the Tuskegee Army Air Corps, Jesse says, the 332nd Fighter Group. Henry laughs and claps his brother on the back. A pilot? Since when do they let the Negroes fly the planes? Says he’s proud of him, admits he’s support staff with the 370th, just a driver running a deuce-and-a-half loaded with supplies to the front lines or wherever they’re needed. That sounds about right, brother – you save lives, I end them. Smile, flash, click. They hug fiercely. They promise to keep in touch, to reunite after all these years. Not now, though. Back home. After the war. Salute. Salute.
Outside the clouds split open and spill rain. Thunder cracks like artillery. The woman retrieves Henry’s glasses and places them on his face. Now he can see clearly – Jesse’s crooked grin, dark eyes filled with promise, mottled scar across his forehead like a retold story. And someone else? Henry draws the photograph closer. He examines it with parted lips and creased brow. A young White woman. Pink as a new rabbit, sun-freckled, sun-dappled. And in her arms is a blanket. And in the blanket, a tiny baby. Henry can hardly breathe.
All week he has been bump bump bumping along on the old Wallis Cub tractor, acres yet to go. They cannot afford the new FergusonBrown, one with hydraulics and a three-point hitch. Instead, at the end of each row, it is up to Henry to get off the Cub, raise up his three-furrow plow, climb back on, make the turn, get off again, drop the plow back in the soil and proceed down the next row. The year his father sent Jesse away, he fashioned a hoisting contraption to make the job easier; it is still tedious. The engine growls; the blades rattle. Bump bump bump. Abutting this field is another – a sea of cornstalks ready for harvest. He reaches the end of his row. The pale green light of the cornfield shimmers. Stalks sway; leaves rustle. As though two young brothers hide, chase, eat raw corn until their bellies groan. An echo of laughter light as mist. In his chest an ember smolders and the searing pain of Jesse’s absence flares. He gets off the tractor, lifts the plow, and like a wraith Reba Sue Pretlow steps out of the corn. A stopped heart; a seized breath. It is her and not her. This version is taller. Thinner. Childhood features all but gone. In her hair, flutter strands of corn silk.
You’re all grown up, Henry. Somewhere, I suppose Jesse is too.
At the sound of her voice the years turn to quicksand.
Do you think of him?
All the time, he whispers.
Do you miss him?
All the time.
They fall quiet. Rooted to the ground. No wind. No crows. Only a single white butterfly swims wide circles in the morning light between them. He wants to tell her of the hole in his soul, that it will never heal, that she is to blame. He is glad just then that he says none of this.
They believe, she confides, that my brother ran away with an Indian woman. They say Jesse’s somewhere planting trees. They never put the two together. Where is he, Henry? Not here in Virginia.
It’s been such a while. I don’t. I mean I doubt –
Please. Oh please tell me.
It is as though every molecule of oxygen has left the world. Never breathe a word, Henry, not a word. The pooling in her eyes; her quivering lip. His gaze falls to his feet, to the freshly cut clumps with upended green grass now dying by the blade of his plow.
Alabama, he breathes.
The rattling stalks. The gentle ticking of the leaves. Only corn now. Corn and the rolling foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains quiet as a graveyard.
Jagged light scorches the sky. The lamp on his nightstand flickers, dims, restores. Words fall from his lips like stones: This baby? The White woman who changes his sheets and pries stories from his lips takes his hand. Jesse’s daughter, she smiles. My grandmother.
Hours later Henry lies awake on clean sheets. He has refused dinner, swallowed his pills, assured the young attendant he does not want his bed lowered just yet – there are things to think about. How long has it been since he has had such a bone as this to chew on? Years? Decades? Never? The wall clock insists it is minutes before midnight. On the television a man in a yellow rain slicker stands in front of the Food Lion and reports on the storm. Henry laughs. Outside his window the storm reports on itself. You left off, she’d said, with a flood that almost cost the farm. Their hands still clasped and him nodding, I remember now, I remember. Everything aches. He can feel the rumble of an eighteen-wheeler trudge past on the highway; then it is gone. Rain clatters. Wind gusts. Relentless.
When the Rapidan River climbs her banks and sweeps over farms along the old state route, Henry is in his seventh year. He stands on a berm and watches his father survey the destruction. Tin-colored air smells of sour soil and reeks of dead fish stranded in barns, on roads, under porches. Up ahead Jesse is transfixed by a rope of flesh dangling from the beak of a turkey vulture. In the middle of the field, his father paces, mud to his calves, arms limp. Lost, he cries, and waves of fear roll off him, crippling, caustic. In Henry’s young heart, a dark glee coils: Maybe now we can move to town. Just then he spies movement, a glancing prism. He crouches. In a puddle no bigger than a dinner plate, a young trout looks at him through its startled, glassy eye. Its gills open and close in desperate pulses. Minutes later it is still.
Wednesday mornings they lug baskets to town. Get off the walkway, their mother scolds, and they leap into the street until the White folks pass. A rap at the back door of a lovely brick home. The next back door. The next. Fresh laundry exchanged for soiled. Their mother takes what’s offered. If not money – a bag of buttons, a glass bird, a piece of chocolate cake. By the time they finish supper, the cake is a sticky mess. Henry’s grandmother goes first. When it gets to Jesse, he drops his fork and runs. Henry’s mouth waters; tears cloud his eyes. All day he has dreamt of this cake. He sets his fork with Jesse’s and follows his brother out to the woods, the still, the pledge. We got to change the world, Henry
In soft lamplight, at the kitchen table, each evening before bed, they learn to read. Their mother waves a wooden spoon and whaps them on the shoulder if they bungle a word. Henry traces his finger along a verse in Isaiah and labors, But they that wait upon the Lord shall renew their strength; they shall mount up with wings as eagles; they shall run and not be weary; and they shall walk, and not faint. Now Jesse, says their mother, spoon hovering and ready. But Jesse’s voice is sure and steady, resonant, musical in Psalms. They that hate me without a cause are more than the hairs of mine head: they that would destroy me, being mine enemies wrongfully, are mighty: then I restored that which I took not away.
Humid nights they sleep on the porch. They drowse on cots and listen to a ruffed grouse drum his wings five miles deep in the woods. Insects chirr. The moon winks between passing clouds. Henry stirs from a dim sleep to the sound of feathery footfalls and the tender laugh of a girl. From the edge of the porch, he tracks their silhouettes until they are swallowed by shadows. Hours past midnight: a whiff of river grass and sweat, the whisper of a rustling cot. It feels as though a roving devil has slowed and turned its face in their direction.
That was a couple years before Alabama, he had told her. And my remembrance after Alabama is like broken glass. But then the war arrived. If we could prove our worth overseas, wouldn’t things change for us here? I knew Jesse would sign on. For me it was as much to escape the farm as anything else.
I forbid it, says his father. But Henry is twenty-three and has lied to the White recruiter. No he is not the last of his line. Yes he has six younger brothers at home right now. They examine his eyes, his teeth, his feet. They draw blood. Can he read? Write? Yes, yes. Exams are taken and graded. Papers stamped – Colored. Twenty hours later he boards a Jim Crow rail car with a hundred other Negroes and watches the Blue Ridge Mountains shrink to nothing.
The horror. White, Black, Brown. When covered with blood, men are men. Limbs with no bodies, bodies with no heads, faces erased, burned, unrecognizable. Henry drives his truck from the base to the front lines to the base to the front lines, and each morning at reveille, this is in his mouth: Lord, bring me back alive, dead if I’m maimed.
May 1945. Henry comes home on a Liberty ship and boards a Jim Crow rail car with ninety-one other Negroes. Nothing has changed. Don’t wear your uniform, someone says, they’ll tear it off you. And don’t dare swim in the public pool, says someone else. Don’t drink from the White only fountain or try to eat in restaurants or sit anywhere but the balcony or in the back or outside in the alley. Vote? snarls the conductor. Who do you think you are? The victory overseas does not equate to a victory at home. Nothing has changed. Not a goddamn thing has changed.
Plow, sow, harvest, church. Seasons progress in a ceaseless spectacle of color and weather and memory. Sixteen hours a day, sometimes eighteen – the farm is a kind of hell. On her deathbed, his grandmother says, Don’t cry, Henry. Living is the hard part. Death is easy: Claim your sins, forget your sorrows, count your blessings. Welcome to the hereafter.
He is angry at Jesse. Jesse the pilot. The maker of pledges. Jesse who has not contacted him. Who has not reunited with him. Who is probably in Harlem or Chicago or DC doing important things with important people – We got to change the world, Henry – while Henry is left behind, laboring miserably in his father’s fields. After months of writing the wrong letter to the wrong people, asking about Jesse Isaiah Noble of the Tuskegee Air Corps, 332nd Fighter Group, USAAF, and receiving not a word, Henry, at last, mails the right letter to the right person and two weeks later his world goes dark.
With the heels of his hands he wrings tears from his eyes. He slips on his glasses to find hardly any time has passed. Three minutes to midnight. He’d love to press the button, ask the young attendant to up the morphine. But as it is he is having trouble breathing and he knows she’ll make a fuss. He clicks off the TV. The night pours in through the window. Sins, sorrows, blessings. Fallen leaves scattered across the floor.
Years pass. A thousand times he has read the Missing Aircrew Report and the We regret to inform you letter until two words swim off the pages and lodge themselves onto the underside of his eyelids: REMAINS UNRECOVERED. On a Sunday afternoon, in his thirtyfourth year, he sits in a field of brown grass. He sets the report and the letter on fire and waits for the ashes to settle. He pries a rock from the body of the earth, gives it a name, returns it to its grave. This one’s Jesse Noble.
Plow, sow, harvest, church. Sometimes a jook in the back of nowhere, Delta Blues, a hand of cards. Sometimes a lover. Sometimes two. An able-bodied man, a crippled soul. Plow, sow, harvest, church. Plow, sow, harvest, church.
The storm surged and lulled. The afternoon stretched. At some point she had moved to the edge of his bed and reclaimed his hand. All those years, he had said. Fallow. I don’t know why I stayed. Guilt? Fear? A thousand times I packed a bag and a thousand times I emptied it. Jesse had been dead about ten years. I hadn’t hit forty yet, but I could smell it coming. And then in 1955 a terrible thing happened. It was August . . .
A fourteen-year-old boy leaves Chicago for Money, Mississippi, and comes home to his mother in a pine box. The world rocks on its axis. Henry feels as if someone has dropped a live grenade in his lap. No bag, no goodbye, he shakes the dust off his feet. In Chicago he weeps over the open casket, the brutalized lamb, a sight more horrific than any in the war. At the funeral he bows his head. At the gate he remembers a forgotten pledge.
In Ohio every odd job means money for food; money to send home to his father. In New York writers, singers, painters, philosophers, great and powerful activists – Muslim and Christian, Marxist and Progressive, militant and peaceful – baptize him into the struggle. In DC, his first demonstration, The Prayer Pilgrimage for Freedom, he learns of a ruling called Brown v. Board of Education. He is one of thirty thousand on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. One of a million to hear the first national address by Martin Luther King, Jr.
It takes him four tries to get into law school. He is the oldest student they have. Are you saying, he had challenged the Admissions Committee, I’m too old to change the world?
Work, school, protest, church. He volunteers with others to sit at lunch counters and wait respectfully to be harassed, beaten, jailed or all three. In time they are served.
In Alabama a bus is burned. Henry cries Count me in. When the jails are near bursting, Parchman makes room to Break their spirits, not their bones. But the Freedom Riders do not break, and at last the Interstate Commerce Commission does. Every hateful sign comes down. Yet hate stubbornly persists. In a cell on death row, next to a “convicted murderer,” something akin to a crisis in faith pierces Henry’s soul: no march, no sit-in, no demonstration, will ever change the heart of a racist. No sir, says the “murderer,” heart-changing is for God and time. Laws, justice, equality – do that. And when you get to lawyering, think of the fair trial I never got. The one that a million others won’t get. In forty-one days Henry is released. In seven months the “murderer” suicides. Upon his grave Henry lays seashells, and around the shells he plants rows of periwinkle. I will. I will.
And I did, he whispers. Trials – more won than lost. Overturned death row convictions – more than expected but never enough. A thousand Black faces whorl through his mind. A thousand mothers. Alone, pain migrating through his bones, a frenzied storm, and a clock that says a minute to midnight, Henry Jeremiah Nobel sighs.
At an NAACP convention, his law professor makes introductions. 93 Merle McCurdy, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Ralph Abernathy. A pleasure. A pleasure. Later a man called Robert L. Carter drops a warm hand on Henry’s shoulder. When you graduate, get in touch, hear?
In Birmingham he attends sit-ins and meetings and boycotts designed to undermine Jim Crow. He is slammed with a high-pressure fire hose and attacked by police dogs. Like everyone else, weeks later – King in a cell penning Letter from Birmingham Jail – Henry goes back for more. The world looks on. In sorrow. In outrage. That’s me, he tells his current lover. That leg with the dog hanging off it. The effect of images broadcast nationwide galvanizes the world.
The Lincoln Memorial – two hundred fifty thousand souls March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom and listen with ardent hope to the noble, heartfelt I Have a Dream. Tears stream. The applause is deafening. Oh Jesse.
When the Civil Rights Act of 1964 is signed, he is eating pie where he once held a sit-in.
One Bloody Sunday, Henry is not in church. He is on a fifty-mile march from Selma to Montgomery to protest the gunning down of Jimmie Lee Jackson, ongoing police brutality, and the outrageous violations of civil rights. Mere blocks from the start, on the Edmund Pettus Bridge, they are gassed, trampled by horses, beaten unconscious, whipped, hospitalized. The courts, the National Guard, the President get involved. Two weeks later they march unmolested those fifty miles, twenty-five thousand strong. On the steps of the capital Dr. King calls out, How Long, Not Long.
Voting Rights Act of 1965: What is he doing? Studying the 15th Amendment for class.
It takes seven years to graduate. Cap and gown. Magna Cum Laude. The woman he lives with is already a lawyer. She helps him study for the bar. She is on a first-name basis with Stokely, Bobby, Huey – and Malcolm before he was assassinated. It is a Long Hot Summer. Race riots erupt all across America. Break time, she says and they head for Detroit. Tear gas, bullets, bombs in bottles. She is armed with a .45 caliber semiautomatic. He is armed with a pledge. In the war zone they get separated; tanks roll in. He prays she is not among the dead. Weeks later a letter arrives: Dear Henry, ship my things to this address. It is an apartment in Los Angeles. I’m glad you are alive, he pens. On a cold Tuesday in September he passes the bar. I will, he assures his mother and father, never give up.
In a crowded bar, under a veil of smoke, he drops change in a jar on the piano; his eyes meet hers as her fingers walk the keys and she cries, Strange Fruit, blood on the leaves in a voice that drips with blood. He walks out into the night and sees the road is paved with bodies. Centuries of lynchings, decades of executions. Stolen treasure. Funerals, flowers, tears.
Another surge. Another lull. She had kissed his hand and then his cheek. The photograph, she left on his lap.
Outside his window no bigger than a bible, silence has fallen. Sins claimed, sorrows forgotten, blessings counted. He can hear the hiss of oxygen, the drip of the IV. Somewhere far away, church bells ring midnight and all three hands on his clock point up. Clouds part for a sliver of moonlight and shadows crowd the room. I kept the pledge, he murmurs. Jesse smiles. Did you know you have a greatgranddaughter? And I have a great-grandniece? From miles away, he can hear orthopedic shoes on cracked linoleum racing down the hall. Jesse, he whispers.

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Susan A.H. Grace’s work has appeared in Catamaran Literary Reader, Fiction International, and Orca Literary Journal.