Fiction

Cars began to file out of the driveway and the house grew quiet again. The cries and the mumbled condolences had filtered out the front doors, leaving a silent reminder of what had occurred that day. Although Nancy had only been Rose’s stepmother, she still missed the woman dearly.

During the funeral Rose had stayed with her half-brother, Charlie. At just two years old, he did not yet understand his mother would not be coming back. Charlie had a strong grip on Rose’s black silk dress as he dragged her through endless hallways lined with frames.

Pictures of her father’s family.

Photographs from Charlie’s first birthday in the summer of 1931.

Portraits of Nancy in her wedding dress.

She felt she was intruding just by looking at them.

After passing Charlie off to an uncle, she made her way to the garden behind the house. The land was cut down the middle by a single walkway which wrapped around a great fountain of stone lined with white marble. Rows of tulips of every color blossomed before her eyes. It was easy to see why it had been one of Nancy’s favorite places.

Looking to her right, she found her father sitting on the bench against the garden wall having a cigarette. She stood silently at the double doors and took note of just how different he looked since she had last seen him. Rose had kept in touch with Nancy through letters and the occasional visit, but her father had faded from her life.

Though it had only been three years since Rose last saw him, the changes were drastic. His once proud stance had shriveled into a hunched form. His skin looked sickly and the bags under his eyes were as gray as the gravel below his feet. His black hair, though short, was disheveled and strands of it fell on his forehead.  When she drew closer to him, she could see that only his eyes remained the same. The ice blue was still just as cold as she had always known them to be.

“When mom died, it was just Aunt Lizzie and I that went to the funeral. The rest of you were fighting in the war. It was odd,” Rose said as she took a seat beside him on the stone bench.

“I thought you left with Lizzie.” He didn’t spare her a glance, only throwing the cigarette to the ground before looking out to the garden his wife had loved.

“I was playing with Charlie.”

She didn’t want to make the interaction longer than it had to be and there was only one reason she had gone to him.

“Here.” She handed him the package from her purse.

“What is this?” He held the brown parcel but didn’t open it.

“Nancy found Mom’s wedding ring and gave it to me.”

“It wasn’t hers to give,” he said as he pocketed the ring into his jacket.

“She thought I should have it.”

“Why are you giving it back to me? So I can give it to you properly?” There was a sliver of amusement laced in his voice.

She scoffed and said, “I have very low expectations of you as a person, James, let alone as my father.”

He seemed unmoved by the insult.

“I came to pay my condolences,” Rose continued. She wrapped her jacket tightly around her as the wind picked up.

“That’s what funerals are for.”

“I meant to you. I lost both of my parents. Mom and Nancy. Nancy knew I loved her just as much. I’m sorry that she won’t get to see Charlie grow up.”

A minute of silence came and went before James looked at her face for the first time in what felt like forever. Rose felt a great sympathy for his suffering, but she had no love left for him. The only thing holding them together was their blood and their mutual love for those who had left them.

“He looks like you, aside from the eyes. Those are Nancy’s.” Charlie and Rose were the exact opposites in that way. She had her mother’s golden locks and pointed nose, but inherited her father’s eyes. Aunt Lizzie once said it was the only thing he had given her.

“I’ve been told.”

Their gazes broke off and settled on the sight before them. The flowers only served to remind him of his late wife. He planned to rip them from the ground that weekend, but the faint smell of tulips would still linger in the air.

“Make sure to spend time with Charlie. Keep the portraits up so he’ll remember what she looks like.”

“Are you giving me parenting advice now?”

“You would benefit from it.”

James nodded at her words before standing and saying, “I’ll have someone drive you home.”

He walked away and headed back inside. She knew that once she got home Lizzie would tell her that James tries his best, but she would sound unconvinced.

She stood and took in the beautiful garden for the last time, silently thanking Nancy. Nancy had managed to bring light to the parts of James that Rose had only seen as a kid. When the two had loved each other as a father and his child should. Nancy had managed to melt the ice in his irises into lukewarm pools.

Once she met her father at the front door, the car was waiting for her. Her father kept his gaze planted on the floor.

“I’m leaving in two days. There’s a nursing school near mom’s sister. She said I could live with her until I get my own place. I probably won’t come back.”

His response was so delayed she thought she wouldn’t get one until a whisper broke the silence.

“Forgive me.” James’s voice had taken on a vulnerable tone Rose never heard from him.

She hid her surprise behind a cold mask she had perfected from years of watching her father.

“I’m not sure I can do that.”

James cleared his throat and stood straight.

“When Mom got sick, I tried to care for her. But how much can a child do for a dying woman? I needed you there,” she inhaled sharply before laughing slightly, “the day they announced the war had ended; it was the happiest day of my life. I thought that I would finally get my father back but when you came out of that train, you barely glanced at me before walking away. I won’t forgive you for coming back.”

“I can’t change the fact that I went to war. I lost too many people in those years and your mother just ended up being one of them. What do you want me to do about that?”

“Just do what you’ve always done: nothing.”

Rose turned to look up at him before speaking. “I want you to remember this moment and pray that Charlie never feels the way I do. That he never tells you there’s no love in him when he looks at you.”

“I did the best I could for you.”

“I know you did. That’s the worst part of it.”

This time Rose was the one to walk away. She willed her eyes to remain forward, but her mind drifted to Charlie. She could only hope that his life would be filled with the happiness hers lacked.

 

Thais Jacomassi is a recent graduate from Emerson College with a Bachelor’s in Writing, Literature, and Publishing with a minor in History. She is an award winning author as well as a Pushcart Prize nominee. Her work has been featured in various literary magazines including The Emerson Review, Concrete Literary Magazine, and The Echo Literary Magazine.

It is mid-day. The sun is high and ablaze with a cloying brilliance. I watch as it treks into a cluster of stratocumulus clouds and mollifies. Time is crawling a tad too slowly as I await Ejike, my little brother, my back against the side of a nearby candy truck. To pass the time, I duck into a rundown eatery and greet the people inside absentmindedly. There are two middle-aged men seated leisurely on a bench on the far side, near Iya Franceska, who is rinsing off an exhausted enamel plate. I take a seat near the doorway and the scent of melon wafts to my nose. One man starts to complain:

“Madam, be fast please, it’s almost 6pm.”

“Oo,” she calls back, “Oga Paulinus, you’ve heard the stories?”

“He has heard,” the man beside Paulinus says, laughing, “I think he’s afraid even—”

“Tah!” Paulinus interjects, “I’m not afraid of anything in this life.” He puffs his voice to sound boastful.

It fails miserably and I scoff. I know Paulinus is just as scared as everyone else in Brass. This past week alone, there’d been fervent reports of more than a dozen sightings in Lower Enyong alone, where I knew he lived; reports that recalled the dead with startling undeniability, and called forth thoughts of Lucy. It seemed utterly bizarre that she could be back here, in this here Brass, roaming the shadows—perhaps following me, willing my mortal eyes to grasp spirit. I found myself watching my back every so often, feeling spooky eyes poking it, wishing for a half-moment that those eyes would be Lucy’s and they’d stay gazing just long enough for me to behold them when I turn.

Some people, like my father, were eternally skeptical, and perhaps rightly so. But everybody cannot be lying at the same time; certainly not Mama Amaechi, whom I saw with my own eyes. I’d been returning from school, hungry and in the grip of aimless thoughts. I saw her pivot over a small fence in frenetic flight, land, lunge and fall mercilessly onto red earth, all the while screaming the name of her dead husband,

“Ejima! Ejima!”

Wide-eyed, frozen at my deepest core, I stood and stared at the emptiness behind her, the battered shrubbery, the lone wild mango tree, and the breasts of hills in the distance. Where was Ejima? I certainly knew him when he was alive: stout, severe man who ran a clothing store at the edge of the market near Ajunta River, where the fishermen caught bonga fishes with large, encompassing cast nets. I don’t think I ever saw Ejima smile as a living person. I remember once, when his wife forced him to celebrate his fortieth birthday in front of their house on Igwe street and invited friends and neighbors. Ejima cut the cake with what looked like bitter amusement on his lips, and when the cameraman insisted he smiled a proper smile, he gave a look of bones that shut him up for the rest of the evening. I imagined Ejima as a white-garbed ghost and I felt fingers crawl up my spine; that immense sternness etherealized by a stint in the underworld, that irrevocable glare. Mama Amaechi got up and ran, on and on, towards her parent’s home two miles away at Abbah. I heard she died three days later of an illness that confounded all the medicine men  the whole of Brass.

I request a small plate of okpa, eat it quickly and exit the eatery.

Outside, I can see the market, milling about, sending up an indeterminate wall of white noise. I wonder if the sky changes color when a ghost unveils itself. If it goes from a patient blue to a menacing grey. I feel uneasy. Today, everything relates to the finger of ghosts; the flock of birds that scatter haphazardly from the top of a building in the distance, the domestic animals in wild commotion, fleeing what seems to be their shadow, the rabble I can now see forming up chaotically, knocking things down in their haste, dispersing at breakneck velocities away from the market and towards the town. I stand upright, suddenly apprehensive. It looks like a riot out there and Ejike is still amongst them. I am suddenly aware of a vast greyness in the sky when, suddenly, Ejike appears beside me, screaming.

“Brother, let’s run. Faaassst!”

I swallow hard.

“What about the vegetables, did you buy them?”

“Brother, let’s run!” he urges, raising an impatient eye to the rabble dashing towards us.

“Anh-anh,” I mutter, “what happened in the market?”

He casts me an ugly look before he breezes through the narrative. He was buying Oha under the shed where Anty Ananta sold vegetables when suddenly he saw someone he knew he shouldn’t have seen, Lucy, pricing a bunch of periwinkles beside him. It was her own mother that had spotted her and shrieked her name in befuddlement. Lucy turned and ran towards the river and the entire market erupted in chaos.

My heart stops and I want to ask Ejike which Lucy he saw – was it my Lucy? What id she wear? What did she look like? – But the rabble is already too close and Ejike turns to flee.

Amidst the blood-curdling fear, I nurse a thought. Even after 3 years, I can remember fervently her face, her supple eyes and ebony skin, the peculiar shade of milk that was her nails. Love does that to you, and Lucy and I had been embroiled in it like pigs rolling in mud before she left me. The fleeing mob speeds past me mercilessly and I jump aside to let them trample past, all their screams, and fear, crystallizes a question: what if this is the only chance I ever get to see her again?

When I begin hasting my way towards Ajunta River, I recognize I am little more than a profoundly stupid man. But I cannot help myself.

 

 

Divine Inyang Titus is a writer, performance poet, and songwriter keen on exploring the nuances of the human experience through art. He is the winner of the STCW Future Folklore Climate Fiction Contest, 2021 and author of the chapbook “A Beautiful Place To Be Born”. His works have appeared or are forthcoming in Brittle Paper, The Parliament Literary Journal, The Puritan Literary Magazine, The Hearth Mag, The Shallow Tales Review, The Kalahari Review and elsewhere. He deeply enjoys reading, making music, and observing the rudiments of excellence.

One Day
I unwrap the heirloom china, stacking each plate nervously one on top of the other. You rearrange the couches into infinite configurations, repeatedly stopping to place your hands on your hips, determining if it lives up to what you pictured in your head.

I guess I didn’t realize how much work this would be, you say to the air.

Me neither, but I think we’re doing okay, I reply.

You turn back and smile at me, and I hope you can’t tell how cold my feet are–– how scared I am that this is all too serious and too sudden. I wonder if I am like the furniture–– do I keep falling short of who you expected me to be? What parts of us need to be reorganized, rethought?

I’m not being mindful of what I’m doing and drop a plate. Despite hitting the tile, it somehow stays intact. You laugh and tell me to be careful.

 

One Week

            Hey, do you know where the address book is? I need to ship a couple things back home to my sister, you throw over your shoulder while opening up the last few boxes aimlessly.

You mix home into your sentences so slyly, like a mother putting cough syrup in juice. It emphasizes that this is not home. Maybe it never will be. You’ve been saying things like this since we loaded up the car. And of course I have no godforsaken idea where it is! I am dating someone who puts tea towels in the same box as loose hangers and old postcards and drink coasters!

I sigh and say No, I’m sorry, but what I really mean is It’s long gone by now.

One Fight

            You hold the dustpan while I sweep up broken dishes.
You wipe my tears and say sorry, but we both know none of this is your fault.

 

One Month

            We get a cat to keep us company, but I also believe it’s a last ditch effort to keep us together. The couch has quickly been lost under a sea of blankets and pillows. Is that why you wanted so badly for the living room to look perfect? Because you knew you’d end up sleeping in here most nights?

I’m not mad at you, baby, you just keep tossing and turning at night. I go into work exhausted. This makes sense–– we haven’t fought in weeks, but it’s just like me to assume a goodbye will come out of nowhere.

One night, I fall asleep watching cartoons in bed–– a childish habit of mine–– then wake up at 2 a.m. to the smell of ramen on the stove. Shrimp. I can smell it through the door. I walk out and sit on the counter, where you already have two bowls pulled from the cabinet. It feels like there’s a wall between us, for we cannot seem to meet eyes.

You hate shrimp, I say blowing on my noodles.

Yeah, you slurp.

We decide to name the cat Billy Pilgrim–– because you love science fiction, and because I keep praying for a way to travel back in time.

One Season

            The coat closet is bloated with tweed blazers and parkas and wool scarves. We could do an entire load of laundry of just the fuzzy socks we’ve collected to layer under heavy boots.

Standing in front of the apartment door, you button up my puffer coat and kiss my forehead, while I brace myself for the blustering wind. We both grew up in the cold, but I left it so long ago it’s been hard to come back. You tell me, You’ll adjust to it! It’s gonna be so beautiful in the winter, you remember!, and I try so hard to believe you.

I think back to being a kid–– when my family would rake rainbow leaves into piles on the front lawn. My mother would hold my hand, and we would jump in together, like diving into a pool with a partner when you’re too scared to go alone.

But things are different now. You and I squeeze into the car and go around, raking the multi-colored corpses into black garbage bags. The couples who live in these houses are old and rich and white. The men look at you funny. Their wives shoot me big doe eyes. And they pay us chump change compared to what they can afford.

Maybe it was a mistake to move here. Maybe as the seasons change so will our feelings. When we get home, I cannot tell if you are angry that I am the only person in this city you know, or if you’re just frustrated that it’s late October, and you already need mittens.

 

One Holiday

            My family is afraid of things they cannot quite place, and from far away you look like a mirage to them. Grandfather keeps asking you where you’re from, and when you say New Jersey, same as you, sir, he doesn’t believe it. You squeeze my hand under the table everytime they say something sexist, and I squeeze yours when they say something racist. We make a little game of it, until my cousin starts flipping through the television, stops on a K-drama, and asks you to translate. I’m Burmese, you whisper. This time, you’re the one squeezing my hand.

When we get home, Billy Pilgrim has run away. You’d been smoking out the window and left it open. Maybe he’s on Tralfamadore?, you ask jokingly. As mad as I am, I cannot help but giggle through the tears.

We pile leftovers from my grandparents’ on a plate. While you work on a ‘missing’ poster, I take turns feeding myself, then feeding you.

 

One Semester

Rent is now divided 60/40, but we both know it will quickly become 70/30. The assistantship stipend doesn’t cover much, and although you seem happy and proud to support me, I’m afraid you’re secretly resentful. So while you’re at work, I spend the early mornings pacing around the apartment, biting my nails, and searching through odd-job postings online until I have to head to class. Everything would be different if I wasn’t so shy, so afraid to tell you how inadequate I feel.

How easily frustrated I get at myself.

How ashamed I am for getting easily frustrated at you.

It is a Friday night–– one of the few nights our schedules don’t conflict anymore–– and as we are leaving the apartment to go downtown, Billy is on the doorstep. He looks starved. It’s not too late for him, but I wonder if it is for us.

I hold him close and whisper, what did you see when you came unstuck in time?, and he sinks his claws into my blouse.

One Birthday

You take the china from the cabinet and cut the coconut cake into large pieces. I get shy about getting older, as if I am undeserving of whatever new responsibilities and experiences come with aging. As if all I am at twenty-three is all I’ll ever be.

We get full and take a nap on the couch. When we wake, you hand me an envelope. Inside there is a piece of paper. It says Peru. I kiss you until my lips are numb and bruised–– until I convince myself that twenty-four really will be different.

 

One Summer

            We never take the trip.

 

One Year

            There is a plane ticket on the counter when I come home from class. An overstuffed  suitcase seems to swallow the small foyer it sits in. It looks like you’re taking everything with you. Except for me. I am too afraid to ask when you’re coming back, because I know when I say when, what I really mean is if, and you’ll see right through me.

You say, I love you, when you leave.

And I wash the dishes alone.

 

 

Abigail Wells, 20, was raised in Arizona’s East Valley and is a senior at Middle Tennessee State University, where she studies English literature. She has been published in Collage Magazine, Off Center Magazine, Outrageous Fortune, and Girls Right the World international literary journal. Wells was a selected poetry finalist representing MTSU for the 2021 Southern Literary Festival and is an essay and poetry finalist this year. She was a recipient of the 2021 Richard C. & Virginia Peck Award for her creative writing.

Like a prodigal son returning home, I stood at the peak of a mountain I once lived on, looking out at a city I once knew better than the pipa and violin calluses on my hands. In Hong Kong, every building shone like a beacon in the night. It brought a different kind of peace than the nighttime quiet that Arkansas provided. During the two years I lived in the Natural State, I became familiar with the type of still where you could hear the night breathe. Never still, Hong Kong brought the sort of peacefulness that came with screaming, a sounding declaration of human existence. I am here, look at me, look at me, look at me. As my parents laughed somewhere behind me, I wondered if we looked out at the skyline and saw the same neon green tinted memories of streets and insect glow.

We had begun our hike up Lion Rock just as the sun barely grazed the crooked horizon line, painting the harbour skyline warm gold instead of searing white. Fireflies, their yellow-green tails twinkling like stars, had danced amidst the swaying wild grass and tree branches. My father and I used to catch them in little glass jars and bring them home to watch the glowing dots fly around the living room, all the lights switched off.

“Do you remember that time we saw a snake one night?” My father had asked as we inched our way up the road, the salt and pepper of his hair standing out though the leaf-speckled dusk. “You were so scared afterwards, I had to carry you home.”

“I was five, but okay,” I replied. “Many-banded kraits are venomous. I had every right to be terrified.”

My father looked wistful. “You’ve grown a lot since then.” He spoke with a heavy blend of sadness and pride. I understood. Everything seemed much smaller now, less giant than they had been when I was a child. An oasis within a metropolis, mountains remain immortal, but the people stepping foot in them do not.

We had arrived at the peak just as the sky turned a vibrant pink, the sun tinting the glass skyscrapers and grey estates orange and rose. Last time I stood here, I had just hiked it with my aunt seven years ago. Some part of me still longed for the recklessness of my childhood, the thrill I got from climbing the rocks just a little too close to the edge. Pictures of me standing on a boulder with my arms stretched wide as I yelled into the wind still floated around somewhere in the family group chats. We had started in the comfortable winter morning chill when the sun was just rising and took the long way up, arriving just before noon. I could still feel the weight of my then-long hair, brittle with cold and mountain wind, and how bright everything shined, sunlight making crystals out of windows and concrete.

Closing my eyes, I thought of my American friend Rose’s backyard in the middle of nowhere, Arkansas. Once, we had driven her back home after a day over at my house in the suburbs. The hour-long drive south took me down winding roads through places I called forests and she called woods. Listening to the soft lilt of her voice in an accent that had become familiar, I had placed my hands, dry and scarred from cold winters my body had never known before, against the car window and imagined rough tree bark breaking the skin apart.

If my hands were charcoal-stained instead of string-callused, I would have captured the view in watercolour. If Hong Kong was a mural, a shattered marble mosaic, Northwest Arkansas from the I-49 was a forgotten Andrew Wyeth, tucked away and awaiting display, gathering dust in a museum drawer.

 

That March evening, I had learned that Rose actually did live in a log-walled cabin in the middle of the woods. I also learned the feeling of speeding in a golf cart, the adults we left behind in the dust yelling at us to go slower.

Rose taught me to find constellations from her little hill top in West Fork, Arkansas. Start with the North Star, and you figure it out from there. She had laughed when my weak eyes, blinded by city lights, failed to do even that. But just before my mother called for me to get in the car, I picked out Cassiopeia, that little flattened W, hanging by the corner of the navy sky, tucked between two tall shadowed cedar peaks.

Although I kept my eyes on it the entire way home, I still lost it when I ran from the garage to the yard.

On Lion Rock, the sun was almost entirely gone. Only a few strands of pink and purple remained, streaking across a navy sky now illuminated by the lights of highways and buildings. The Remains of the Day, I thought. Ishiguro understood metamorphosis, that thin tightrope line between cultures, the way values and morals and everything changed with time and place. From up high, Kowloon—the district I grew up in, a home within home—didn’t look all that different, but I knew better.

The stationary shop I used to buy pastel blue mechanical pencils from shut down three months ago, replaced by a Chow Tai Fook selling diamond necklaces no one in the area could afford. The building across the street from where my cousin used to live caught on fire a year ago and turned the sky the colour of opium smoke, burying my childhood in its ashes and ruins.

I watched the lights in apartment building windows as they flickered on one by one, forming little stars on the ground. 8 p.m., and in some ways, the city just came alive. Just as the boulder I was leaning on had once brought me to the top of the world, my hometown that had once seemed so big I now understood as a pencil speck on an atlas. My love for it felt too big for my heart, and the streets of Kowloon seemed like too much for any one person to know. And yet.

I could tell you where to find the best noodles (Kam Ho Restaurant on Fuk Lo Tsun Road). I knew where to find good quality boba and fruit tea drinks for impossibly low prices (Hoi Saam Guo Yuen, Happy Fruit, on Yuk Wah Crescent). Po Kong Village Road Park allowed for moon-and-street-lit strolls and teenagers practicing kickflips, making it the best place for late night walks. A pro-protests and pro-democracy store, Dai Gai Siu Goon had the best desserts, my favourite being the coconut pudding with taro and grass jelly.

The window lights made constellations as the night grew deeper, imaginary but symbolic figures and patterns appearing in a night sky of human life. Rose had seemed to know every star and tree and pebble in her woodland backyard, and I now wondered if I could ever hope to know Hong Kong, or even Kowloon, just as well. The memory of yellow revolution banners flying in the wind of this very spot burning fresh in my mind, I thought of all the people who loved this city just as much as I did and fought the urge to fall to my knees.

Basking in the light of Kowloon blooming and coming to life under the warm blanket of darkness, my parents and I began our journey down. I only had a month left in Hong Kong, summer vacation only lasted so long. Moving down the path that a few months ago was lit up by a human chain of protesters, I swore an oath to every crystalline speck of light that made this city beautiful. I was a Hongkonger, and as long as I still breathed its fragrant harbour air, I would not waste a single day away from its streets.

 

Chiu-yi Rachel Ngai (she/her) is a high school student hailing from Hong Kong. Currently studying in Arkansas, she works closely with her school’s award-winning literary magazine, Footnotes. She also serves as Blog Director for SeaGlass Literary and writes for Intersections Magazine and Project Said. Her work has been published in Skipping Stones, Paper Crane Journal, and Unbroken Journal. She hopes you have a lovely day!

He pointed a finger, crooked from a life of construction work, at a distant building. The sidewalk before it was swollen and cracked like the black eye he’d once told me he got from a broken beer bottle at the Cotton-eyed Joe. Every visit I made, my grandfather told me the story.

“The buildin’ has a slight tilt now, not that anyone’ll notice.” He spat on the pavement through a gap in his teeth, rubbing it in with his shoe in a single mindless motion. “I don’t guess I know how long it’s been so don’t bother askin’ me,” he cackled. “There was a kid who used to clean those windows way up there. It was real routine for ‘em I imagine. He sure as heck’d move fast. Anyhow, there was a windy day in the city and I’d just sat down to get a bite to eat right over there at the sandwich shop.” He ran his hand from the top of the building down to the ground with a painter’s care and described to me some long cables that hung from the platform where the window washer stood.

“I was sittin’ there eating my… well, it must’ve been a meatball sub. Those things had good all through em’. They’d just about make your tongue slap your brains out.” He took a moment to lick a corner of his smile, but then fluttered his eyes ashamed at his digression.

“Anyhow, I saw those cables blowin’ in the wind underneath the platform. They’d gotten so low, a whole loop of it was sittin down by the curb. There was a real sharp young man sitin’ in the booth next to mine. I figured he’d show his concern.” My grandfather gestured with his head signaling for the young man to come over just as he had done on that day. “I said, “Hey, take a look at that cable sittin’ on the street like that. Say if somethin’ were to get a hold of that rope in all this wind…””

He said the boy was polite but paid it little thought and I wasn’t too sure anyone but my grandfather would be keen enough to notice, much less find it at all intriguing. “I betcha not two minutes later, a car came down the road and that blessed loop wrapped right around its mirror. I said, “Oh mercy!” The young man and I burst out the shop and ran towards the scene. That window washer’s platform had tilted and he was holdin’ on tight way up in the sky.”

“Did the car ever stop?” I’d made a routine of asking the question.

“He stopped within fifteen feet of takin’ that loop. He didn’t know anything had happened until someone on the sidewalk got his attention. There really weren’t too many people on the street that day, all at work I guess. When the driver hopped out’a the car, I hollered, “You gotta get that cable wrapped around that telephone pole and then loosen up on it slowly!” He was terrified from what I could see so he took no time to second guess my orders.”

“Why did he need the telephone pole if he was just going to loosen it all?”

“If he didn’t use the pole, the force of the platform would’ve overpowered him, slamming it back into place and risking shakin’ the window washer off the side. It all had to be done slowly. The car driver wrapped the cable two times around the pole and gradually gave it slack.

As he loosened the cable’s tension, the platform moved back into place and the weight of it made the flesh come right off his palms and the cable chip the paint off the pole, but it looks like they’ve repaired it since, not that anyone’ll notice. In fact, it looks like they might’ve replaced it entirely. When all was done, the window washer stood up and shortened the cord below ‘em to get away from the street and went back to scrubbing the windows.”

When my grandfather’s lips returned to their unmoving, limp appearance, he took me into the sandwich shop where he sat that day. He told me it would be the perfect place to eat lunch.

As we made our way to the counter, we looked around and were met with the interior of a shoe store.

“Is there anything I can help you find?” A man approached us from the register. “No, thank you, we’re just looking,” I replied.

The man seemed all too accustomed to the unprofitable phrase and he walked away dissatisfied.

My grandfather turned to look at the building across the street. Its glass was dirty, only subtly capable of reflections. And just below his line of vision was an aged memorial plaque I knew was engraved into the sidewalk. He too was somewhere resisting.

 

 

 

Sam Baker is an author of poetry, fiction, and essays from Louisville, Kentucky. He currently works for the Kenyon Review as an associate and as a teaching assistant for the Kenyon Review Young Writers Workshop. Baker’s reads have been published or are forthcoming in The Pinch Literary Journal, Polaris, The Blue Marble Review, and elsewhere. His work has also been recognized by The Missouri Review, Guesthouse Lit, Penn Review, Apparition Lit, Wrongdoing Magazine, Silk Road Poetry, Smartish Pace, Ruminate Magazine, Columbia University, Kenyon College, University of Massachusetts, Washington University in St. Louis, Sewanee: University of the South, Ohio Northern University, University of Louisville, Bellarmine University, Variant Literature, The Alliance For Young Artists and Writers, and The Kentucky Governor’s School for the Arts.

There was a girl at my school who never spoke a word. She had turquoise hair, a septum piercing, and she wore a green hoodie like a shell. We all called her Turtle Girl.

I don’t know why I called her that and laughed with the other kids. You see, I was unpopular like Turtle Girl. The only difference was that I talked, and she didn’t.

One day, some bullies hit me at recess. I wasn’t much of a fighter, so I took it for fear of worse. The other kids watched from a distance, some trying to defend me but most doing nothing. Turtle Girl sat on her own, away from me, the bullies, and the other kids. She chewed her sandwich and looked bored, until suddenly, she wasn’t. She stood up, walked over to the biggest bully hitting me, and she left her shell just like that. She rolled up the sleeves of her green hoodie and hit the bully.

When the bullies retreated, Turtle Girl left the scene. She didn’t say a word, just walked away. While the other kids talked, I followed her, spewing thanks and wonder. Turtle Girl remained silent.

Eventually, frustrated by her silence, I asked her, “Why did you help me?”

Turtle Girl blinked at me. “You looked like a turtle going into its shell,” she said, rolling back down her green sleeves. “I thought I’d help you, because you don’t have a shell.”

And just like that, she returned to her shell and resumed her lunch.

I never called her Turtle Girl again.

 

Patricia Jane Donato is the aspiring author of short stories, novels, poems, and maybe even graphic novels. When she’s not writing, she’s reading, walking in the woods, drawing manga, or chatting with her friends. Patricia’s work also appears in The WEIGHT Journal and Cathartic Literary Magazine.