Non-Fiction

I still saw Cormac for a while after he died. Always as I slept. The dream always followed the same basic timeline. It was the last time I ever spoke to him. In the dream, as it was in real-life, I am unaware that in a week or two he would fall from his bicycle on the Luas line between Harcourt Street and Charlemont and his warm, kind heart would be stopped forever.

I met him outside Theatre L in University College Dublin’s Arts Block. I was on my way to a lecture and saw him furiously typing emails – presumably about some sort of rally or protest to take place soon. I stopped and I spoke to him at length – those who know me will know how much I talk; those who know Cormac will know how much he talked too. There is no surprise whatsoever that I ended up fifteen minutes late for that lecture. It was a Critical Theory module, something I suspect Cormac would have found intensely interesting.

When I emerged, he was still there. Still bashing away at the keyboard. I spoke to him again. He was about to leave for the City Centre, to Leinster House. He had recently been elected Chair of Labour Youth. I got the slight feeling I was keeping him from his work so we agreed to go for a pint soon. Then I left.

It is odd to think that not long after that, Cormac would no longer be around. It is equally strange at this point to imagine that Covid-19 was never a factor in his life. He never experienced the mask-wearing, the lockdowns, the itching for a pint. The ongoing pandemic has become such a by-and-by of everyday life that it is hard to imagine that there are people who never had to consider such things. I often wonder what he would have made of it all.

I had that dream on a few occasions. Sleep has always been a tricky enough negotiation for me. Up until that point, I experienced intermittent bouts of insomnia. This happened every few months – maybe three or four times a year. The insomnia was replaced by this dream.

For a while I considered the idea that this was not a dream at all and that it was time-travel instead. The consistency of the timeline within the dream – as well as the fact that, during the dream, I did not know what was about to happen – puzzled me. It made some amount of sense that this was entirely real, and that I was reliving this event by time-travelling back to it, in a Groundhog Day sort of fashion. Ultimately, whether or not it was time-travel is irrelevant – once I was up, life goes on as usual, and Cormac has not returned. I checked several times. I admit now that nothing will ever be different simply because of a dream I had.

About a month after Cormac died, I went to Berlin for the weekend with some friends. The ins and outs of that trip are fuzzy and unclear (and to be honest I’d like to keep it that way). When I got home, a bout of insomnia followed, but this time, the occasions where I did sleep were marked by night terrors. Night terrors are no fun whatsoever. This lasted for about ten days. I was a ghost haunting UCD’s campus during that time. At some point, however, amidst the night terrors and insomnia, I had another dream about Cormac. This one was different. On this occasion, we were still outside Theatre L, but nobody else was around. It also looked slightly paled, as if a graphic designer had toned everything down. Another big difference was that everything seemed slowed down. Not quite in slow-motion, like in a film, but slightly off the pace of real-life. That’s how I know it was a dream and not time-travel.

This time, I knew what was going to happen – that Cormac was not long for this world. I don’t think he knew. I don’t know why I didn’t try to warn him. Maybe it’s because I knew it was a dream.

We talked for a long time. About unimportant stuff, in the grand scheme of things – but don’t they always turn out to be the conversations you remember most?

After a while, I knew it was time to go. I knew what was going to happen to him, but there was no long-winded ‘goodbye’ or any of that. There was a brief “see you later”, and I gave him a hug, and I left. I have not seen him since.

My insomnia has not returned since those couple of weeks. Maybe, in dealing with my dream about Cormac, something else was put to bed, too.

We have spent the last year or so living with various levels of Covid-19 restrictions. Cormac did not live long enough to see any of this happen. As I mentioned, it is strange to think that a person I went to school with has gone before the most seismic event in living memory. Cormac died in December 2019 and I have tried to write about it many times since, but always failed. I wonder what he would have made of the year that has happened since.

Patrick Freyne wrote that the death of a schoolfriend caused, for him, a realisation that you can die in a stupid, meaningless way. Until I read those words I did not know that I had the same realisation. When I was a teenager I used to cross the road without looking and weave in and out of passing cars as I did so. I don’t know when I stopped doing this, or whether it has anything to do with this epiphany. I do know I haven’t done it since then. This may also just be a factor of me growing up – though the people closest to me would tell you that is yet to happen.

Recently I dreamt about death for the first time in a long time. In this instance, it was me who was dying. I was brought into a room by a doctor and told that I had about a month left. There was nothing in the way of diagnosis or explanation, besides the fact that I was, indeed, dying. This information, ultimately, changed very little. I still went to work. I still walked every day. I still did everything I usually do except I was very sad whilst doing it.

In this dream, I received a call from my optometrist to tell me that I was due another eye test. For some reason, I went along with it. Though I was going to be dead in a few weeks, I scheduled an appointment for a week after I was supposed to already be dead. This reminded me of life more broadly. Nietschze might argue that art is a howl against death. I would argue that everyday life itself is a quiet rebuttal of death. We are all going to die. What is everyday life – listening to the radio, kissing a partner, petting a dog – if not a modest decision to cold-shoulder our date with eternity?

I woke up before I reached the end of this dream – that is, before I died. I think that’s the point. I like to think I have a gentle awareness that someday I am going to die, but that I am not anxious or death-stricken.

Richard Dawkins, the unwavering atheist, wrote that “we are going to die, and that makes us the lucky ones.” Dawkins was not anxious nor was he death-stricken or racing towards life’s finish-line with vigour. What he meant was that the potential number of people who could have been here instead – instead of you, instead of me – means that the fact we get to experience death itself means we have experienced life. That certainly makes us the lucky ones.

I’m sure there are more dreams to come about death. I have not dreamt about Cormac in a year, but I can still imagine his face, still hear his voice. One day, that will fade. For now, at least, he is as alive as anybody else inside my head.

 

 

Shane McDonnell is a student from Dublin. He is studying English with Creative Writing at University College Dublin. His work has appeared in Sonder Magazine, Silver Apples Magazine, The Wells Street Journal, The New Word Order, ‘Brevity is the Soul: Wit from Lockdown Ireland’ and Caveat Lector.

You realize when you wake up on Saturday that — since you live in Brooklyn now — you feel the need to think about 9/11 harder than you have in the past; or, more accurately, you think that you should feel the need to think about 9/11 harder than you have in the past; and this is why you signed up for the concert at Greenwood cemetery with the Desdemona ensemble and Buck McDaniel and Noa Even.

A thought comes across your mind: that you aren’t sure where, or what role 9/11 plays in the bowels of your generation. You’ve heard Ocean Vuong speak of growing up post-attack, but as of yet no one talks about what it means, what it should mean when it didn’t mean for you.

You know about Ocean Vuong because you are a poet because your name is Dante. Because your predecessor will have died 700 years ago in the next couple days and here you are, 18-years old, in a new apartment and a new state waving around a name which you must struggle to not be buried under.

As you leave your home — and have triple-checked that you’ve got your wallet and your keys and your mask and your earbuds (necessary to avoid conversation on the subways; as a suburban kid, this is something you caught on to early) — you listen to Steve Reich’s WTC 9/11, and maybe there’s something strangely significant (even poetic, you think) about doing so on the trains. The quartet broke your heart the first time, and will continue to do so each time you reach the last movement.

But you don’t quite get there, not today. (That’d be far too poetic for non-fiction.) Because something catches your attention and demands that you pause before “the bodies were moved to large tents on the east side of manhattan”. A short, older Mexican man jumps on your cart with a little acoustic guitar, and after strumming the introductory chords begins to sing the aye aye aye aye you know too well.

And your first impression is that this too, might be poetic. That there’s something about hearing the line canta y no llores that is particularly beautiful on the R train, on September eleventh, after you’ve been listening to Reich. But it also catches your mind that this might just as well be coincidence. Because one of your favorite writers is Vonnegut, you can’t help but acknowledge that the aye might be the only song this man knows. That it’s one of the most common Spanish folk songs and that a Dawkinsian chance might be the only thing poetic about its occurrence today.

It’s as you consider this that the smiling, sprightly little man is passed money by only one of the passengers (not yourself, because you are worried you will not be fast enough, you aren’t sure what denominations of cash lie in your wallet) and hops off, presumably to the next train, although perhaps not another song.

Later on, as you walk by spindling tracks of old, blistered tombstones, you will hear music coming from the hill towards which you are heading; you’re aware that this music is not all the ensemble knows, not all the composer has written, but you find yourself wondering if it will hurt you more deeply than an old Spanish song you heard for the first time in 6th-grade music class.

 

 

Dante Antonio (@dante_s_antonio) is a musician, writer, and actor based in Brooklyn, NY. He writes plays and poetry, fiction and non-, and is spending quite a bit of time these days researching for a novel (which is taking much longer than he expected). He’s also exploring the worlds of microtonal and electronic music, and writing some weird not-so-pop stuff.

When my father asks me why I refuse to have children, I lie.

In the passenger seat of his car, I shrink myself to conserve space for my father’s words. Slowly, as I watch the moon ascend to her throne, those words become the only proof that time still stretches on. That ugly car, too long and too wide, sits in our driveway. I sit in my discomfort. My father is radiant as he expels word after word, vibrance diverging from each syllable. I reduce myself to grey tones so he can speak in color; I’m expected to accept his words like a gift. As the remnants of our conversation linger in the air, I watch the night around me darken, and darken still.

When my father asks me why I refuse to have children, I try silently to escape my body—my body that tethers me to this earth, my body that will fail him, my body that has betrayed me and has been betrayed. Father, how can you expect me to give up my body—something that was never mine to begin with? Father, how could you ever want a child born from my impurities? Father, may I read to you the stories embossed on my skin—stories without happy endings? I’ve scrubbed the slurs from my flesh, but only after the words seeped into my bloodstream. I’ve scrubbed and scrubbed until I bled. Was my blood not adequate atonement?

My father’s words—part question, mostly command—slither into my ears and sink their teeth into my mind. I succumb to my body’s surrender—the tightening of my throat, blurred vision, shaking, hitched breathing. These tears, born from confusion and shame, snake their way down my face, splattering onto the leather seat. I stare at my hands to stop the tears, meticulously tracing the blood from my thumb I’ve picked raw. I’ve forgotten how to handle discomfort without causing myself pain.

When my father asks me why I refuse to have children, I shatter the truth into shards that splinter and skewer. I nick myself on this broken reality as I hide the fragments of me he can never piece together. I don’t tell him that I will never bear children because I can’t bear the thought of a man inside of me. I don’t tell him that the thought of someone being attracted to my naked body, wanting to touch my naked body, is something inexplicably vile. I don’t tell him that my body is the epicenter of shame or that a grown man once grabbed me between my legs or that I’ve promised a boy my virginity to make him happy. I don’t tell him that I’ve been dismembered by men, that by the time I’ll be able to legally consent, there will be nothing left from me to take. I don’t tell him that my body collapses in on itself at the touch of a hand, but why would he care? Maybe my troubles with intimacy are his fault.

As I allow my gaze to wander upward from my bloodied finger, I lock eyes with the glossy girl in the windshield—a girl trapped in glass staring back at a girl trapped in her body. I didn’t know reflections could exist in such darkness. I ask myself if she’s even real; she looks too fragile to be. I want to soothe her, to reach out and caress her face because I see the eyes of guilt and despair and regret. But I also see my father. In my reflection, I see what I am to him, and what I will never have myself. I’m sorry, father, I’ve failed you.

When my father asks me why I refuse to have children, I can’t bear to tell him that I’ve never been attracted to a man in that way, or a woman, or anyone at all. For a moment, though, I feel the slip of my tongue, and I almost allow the facade to implode. I almost do. The forbidden words curl in my mouth, but when my father asks me why I refuse to have children, I can’t bear to tell him that maybe there is something wrong with me, that maybe I need my hormones checked, or maybe all I am is the result of my trauma.

I concern myself with the girl in the glass—watching the fear in her eyes, the sporadic expansion and collapse of her chest. I think she’s forgotten how to breathe or she can’t fight the words that suffocate her or she’s trying to suffocate her body.

When my father asks me why I refuse to have children, I want to ask if he cares about the girl who lives in this body. I want to ask how to interpret his indifference toward my sexual harassment. Maybe he expects me to be happy he doesn’t punish me for being such a slut. Maybe his silence is merciful, or maybe it is meant to choke me. Maybe, in this moment, I choke on both silence and noise, on every thing said and every word gone unspoken.

I abandon the girl in the glass, leaving her to watch me struggle in silence. I turn toward my father with a conviction unfamiliar to me, in a way that I’ve never looked at any other man.

When my father asks me why I refuse to have children, I want to ask if he cares about my body. I want to ask him what it was like watching me slowly kill myself. Did my starvation inspire your dieting regime? Did you notice at all? I want to ask him if my body is just a vessel, an empty room meant to be occupied and abandoned—because I’ve tried, father, to hollow myself out for the convenience of men, but how can life spring from me if I am dead?

I inhale, at last, claiming all the oxygen I know isn’t mine, all the oxygen that my body needs to sustain its own life—and nothing else. I exhale and unclench my jaw to speak.

When my father asks me why I refuse to have children, I frantically stitch together the fragments of my shattered truth. I turn truth into lie.

“I don’t want children because children don’t ask to be born.” That is all I can manage without falling apart.

“Well, I suppose, but you can’t assume that children don’t want to live.”

How foolish of you, father, to assume that I want to live in this body—this body that means nothing to you yet you still expect to perform; this body that is meant to produce life but not live on its own; this body whose single destiny is predetermined. Perhaps, father, I asked for life, but you gave me this body; I asked for the freedom that my body obstructs; I asked for immeasurable worth that you numericize.

When my father asks me why I refuse to have children, I want to ask if he knows how to value a woman, and if he does, if he could please teach me how to value myself because, father, if I am to have a child, God forbid it be a girl.

 

 

 

Naomi Carr is a writer and high school student from California She is passionate about unlocking the power of language in all its forms. She currently lives in the San Francisco Bay Area where she studies French, art history, and obsesses over cats in her free time.

The sound of the kettle boiling boricha on the stove, the voices of elementary school students playing at the playground until dusk, the warmth of the living room floor in late autumn. By the southern tip of Yongin, where the city meets Mount Gwanggyo and Pungdeokcheon stream, there is a fifteen-story apartment building where a younger version of myself lived. The complex spanned one block of the road, each building inside lined up in a straight row.

In the winter, snow would pile a few inches deep, enough to cover an entire step on the stairs leading up. When it rained, the water would flow through the gap in between the pavement and the car park asphalt, creating a small stream where dry danpung leaves would drift off. After a few minutes’ walk, I would reach the subway station, where I would always find high school students returning home from school late afternoon, just when the sun started to fade over the tall buildings.

I remember the time when I walked with my nanny from kindergarten back home. I was sitting on the step outside the school building when I heard light footsteps approaching from behind. I turned my head around to see imonim walking towards me. I grabbed my bag and skipped towards her. I grabbed her hand and started towards the apartment building. The late autumn air had lost all its humidity to the cold. I was wearing a long-sleeved cardigan and a scarf around my neck, a dark scarf. The ground carried piles of yellow ginkgo leaves that had fallen from its tree a few days ago. Chrysanthemums had started showing their bright colors and cosmos had also been popping onto their shrubs. There were benches every few steps on the pavement, and I would take a look under it to see if any mushroom had grown in the darkness of it.

I liked to ask, “When will mom be back?”

“She’ll be back soon. Let’s go home and get changed before she arrives,” I would hear imonim reply.

When I entered my house, the one on the thirteenth floor on building 107, the entire unit was dark, the sunlight didn’t shine directly into our windows. Instead, it got refracted on the thick glass, making it look all crooked. It was also very empty, no sign of life or anything. I sat down on the sofa, grabbed the television remote control, and immediately turned it on – my favorite show was starting soon. With a sudden bright burst of light from the screen, the living room turned bright. I lay on my back on the couch and without myself knowing, I fell asleep.

We had to leave the house a few months later for the Philippines, and I saw every piece of furniture, every pile of clothes, and my favorite CDs of children’s songs get shipped out of the house. We said farewell to imonim, who stayed in Korea even after we left.

We drove past Yongin a few years ago, past the block where I played all day long, past mom’s company where she worked day to night. Winter was already here, small cotton ball-like specks of white falling onto the car windows. I couldn’t get my eyes off the buildings.

“Can you drive a bit slower?” I asked my dad, who was complaining about the weather again. The sun was fading over the buildings in the distance, and I saw high school students on the sidewalk, carrying their backpacks and running to their apartments.

 

 

June Hyung Kim is a  fourteen-year-old student from South Korea. He is currently studying in Manila, Philippines, and enjoys writing about his experiences from traveling. His work has been previously published in various places.

 

On the first day of kindergarten, I was excited to embark on the new adventure: oscillating between the monkey bars, creating MoMa worthy hand turkeys, stomping down the hallway in my light-up Sketchers, and uniting with new colleagues. It was the day I was going to become a part of a community, something an only-child without pets longed for.

As the teacher goes over the first-day of school protocols, I embrace the unfamiliar environment; I marvel at the colored floor tiles, lysol aroma, and glitter glue. The teacher begins to call the roll. As the teacher exclaims a new name, I swiftly turn my head to match it with a face. Each time, I am greeted with a new wide-eyed smile accompanied by a blonde or brown head. At last, the teacher reaches the end of her list- Annie Wang. As my name is called out, I take note of the teacher’s pronunciation. My name is Wang (W-ong), I politely explain. In Mandarin, Wang is the Chinese word for “king” and is a common surname amongst Chinese people. My mother always talked about how easy “Wang” should be to pronounce for non-native Mandarin speakers, yet few people could correctly execute it. The teacher gives me a blank stare, looks back down to the roll sheet, and examines my name. It says “Wang” (W-ang). No further comments were made, and my new name was Annie Wang (W-ang).

At lunch, my classmates brought packed meals like peanut butter and jelly sandwiches with goldfish while I had leftover white rice and vegetables from the night before. I even brought a niángāo (rice cake) to celebrate the first day of school. My peers lean over the table to gawk at my meal and incredulously ask, What is that? I felt unexplainable embarrassment for my home cooked meal and shyly shrugged off questions. Instead of conversing with potential friends, I broke off small pieces of the niángāo and hastily plopped them into my mouth for the rest of lunch. I could feel my dream to unite with new colleagues begin to nervously drift away.

Over the next few years, I became accustomed to that unexplainable embarrassment. After taking group pictures, my white friends would complain that they looked too “Chinese” from the squinting of their eyes when they smiled. In the mornings, I was routinely greeted with Kon’nichiwa by several classmates. In 4th grade, I was shunned for killing and eating dogs for the first (but not last) time. By the end of elementary school, most of my friends had already experienced their first “relationship”; I learned that if boys had a crush on me, it was because of “yellow fever”.

Mastering tongue twisters used to be one of my favorite hobbies. Sally sells seashells by the seashore was a popular one I struggled with because I couldn’t properly pronounce the “s” sound. A few weeks into middle school, I’m introduced to a new tongue twister in homeroom- one dedicated to me. Ching, chong, wing, wong chants one student. I glance over at them and instantly regret it; they’re pulling both of their doe-like eyes back with their fingers. My cheeks begin to burn and my hands sweat profusely. My eyes follow the influence of my cheeks and hands, stinging and swelling with tears. Before any tears drip out, my innocent fascination with colored floor tiles returns to me. No matter how hard I focus on the floor, I still can’t block out their voice. They proceed to mock Asians with broken English. Is that your mom? Does she talk like this?. I’m worried that if I speak, I will cry. I keep my head low and shake it side to side, unable to defend myself or my parents. I’m paralyzed with humiliation. I finally made an effort to look up from the colored squares, only to discover an audience has witnessed me going up in flames.

When I return home from school, I put on a brave face as I tell my mother about the day’s nightmare. As I rehash the details, my bravery quickly slips away. My words turn into cries, and tears begin to flood out. While trying to catch my breath, I express hatred for my almond eyes, embarrassment from the tragic tongue twister, and confusion for how my classmates could simply watch me crash and burn. My mother is a stern woman, but for a fleeting moment my sobs soften her with sympathy.

As I progressed through middle school, I acquired a code of conduct: always stretch after cross country practice, never forget to turn in homework, and -most importantly- do whatever it takes to fit in. Even after all the blatant racism I had encountered, I still wanted to be accepted into this community. At school my favorite food was Caesar salad, I despised academia, and the only pronunciation for my surname was “W-ang”. At home, on the other hand, my favorite food was jiazi (dumplings), I loved to read, and my father’s nickname for me was Lǎohǔ (tiger). In Chinese culture, the tiger symbolizes ambition and nerve – traits that made the emperors of ancient China successful. My royal names were unfitting, considering my ignoble persona.

Despite my futile effort, I still felt excluded from my white counterparts. In history class, we learned about America’s heroes: George Washington, Susan B. Anthony, Thomas Edison, Henry Ford, etc. I referred to these figures as “my country’s heroes” and a big part of “my history”. Yet, none of these heroes even remotely looked like me. Learning about Asian culture is unheard of in American education: even learning about true American history is rare. On the few occasions Asians were incorporated into the history lesson, China and its people were bashed for being revolting communists and disgusting dog eaters by my peers. Finally, I realized I never saw historical figures that looked like me in classrooms because the curriculum did not see me as a part of the class.

I have conquered countless playground obstacles, created top tier crafts, and raced down a dozen hallways in several pairs of sneakers. I can even swiftly say Sally sells seashells by the seashore. Nevertheless, I have not been able to grasp onto the sense of community I was eager to embrace ten years ago. Desperately reaching for acceptance as an American, my hands always meet a void. I’m frequently reminded that my creaseless eyelids, dark hair, and ethnic surname make me a stray. Regardless of the remarkable value in self acceptance, kings depend on a council to rule a kingdom, just as tigers depend on a jungle’s ecosystem to survive.

 

 

Annie Wang is a junior at Hurricane High School in West Virginia. She is a contributor for WV Flipside, the teen branch for West Virginia’s Pulitzer Prize wining paper, Charleston Gazette-Mail. She is also the founder, a writer, and a graphic designer for Advocating101, a youth organization creating media that focuses on pop culture, social justice, and youth empowerment. She also received a Gold Key for work recognized by Scholastic Arts and Writing.

I have always been afraid of fire.

This realisation does not come to me in a second, incised down the middle. I’m not lamenting a lover, cloaked in white, sitting at a funeral pyre as I watch ashes incinerate into dust. Because children have no place at a funeral. We call them prayer meetings. I see them in my apartment lobby on Tuesdays sometimes- mothers mostly, the sharp sheen of kurtas reflecting into the monsoon wind. Most conversation is in the lack of it- in the knowing nod when they get into the elevator, the clumped-up mascara around their swollen eyes and the unmade hair, still soft from last night’s parlour visit with their daughters, now decaying in party schools in California while white boyfriends visit.

The first person I remember losing was a family friend’s father. He was forty. On a spur,  he went to the country club instead of the gym. Played thirty minutes of tennis instead of a slow jog on a treadmill. His body couldn’t take it. The way the news reaches me is like wildfire, grazing my fingertips. Flames felling banyans to the ground. I know his son from a dream. Three days later, the wife’s Facebook status says look at my love / he is with the stars now. I think that’s what she tells herself every day. I hope it keeps her from falling apart.

The eve of Diwali is known for having no stars. They say the people held wisps of light for the warrior king to be welcomed home. How the people outshined the sky. It is already Diwali and I am wearing the clothes Ma picks out for me every year- the blue cotton kameez and the sequins that itch and leave red marks all over my body, like bruises from dancing too hard at a Pune wedding I didn’t want to go to.  It is already Diwali and I have spent three hours crying in bed. No one takes naps on Diwali. No one studies on Diwali, because here there are no expectations, no white-collar job, no unpaid internships to go to, no fathers that come home too late and shout for too long. There are only those tepid moments of revelry, and the flash-bang-crack of your neighbour’s sparklers out on the lawn. I remember the first time I lit one with my father, his wrinkles illuminated by the candlelight. How I would always step back a moment too soon, think it sparked before it really did.

When I trip my fingers over Debussy on the piano we bought from a family friend before they moved to the South, I see a flame in ivory. And I flinch. It belongs to the diya we light overnight, the one that never dies out. My fingers have always been far more chubby than I would have liked, so they move stagnantly off the keys, mocking my dissonance. I play the piano on Diwali because it doesn’t feel like work. It feels like finishing the raisins in the dry fruit bowl before the guests do and then eyeing the grand, you know how to play then why don’t you show us?  The opening from that one Shahrukh movie everyone loves, the perfect man, his arms open wide. He lives for the show.

I play again. I continue like this- some raging meditation of an unkempt, starving artist. My hands slipping off the ebony, fingertips scorching the slick metal till it dissolves into incandescence.

We don’t eat meat on Diwali. Though, I do. I’m a good girl though, I swear. I don’t talk to boys with gelled hair on Snapchat or drink cheap Old Monk on weeknights. I finish my milk every day, listen to industrial pop and think about shattering the glass ceiling. At garden parties I flay the skin off of chicken and place little toothpicks beneath my palms. The ones in grade school always ended the same- at the end of all the animated movies that should have made me cry and the party games that did, there were return gifts. Goldfish: a pair of fins darting above clusters of fake coral, eyeholes pressed into the Plexiglas. More often than not, they die on the way home, a brake applied too quickly, piscean entrails all over the highway, their corpses floating upwards. To heaven, perhaps.

When my grandfather dies, I am reading a poem. The rough Hindi syllables that years of a high-end job couldn’t kill make their way out through the bedroom. In this moment, I take it to be my father, screaming at customer service. I take it to mean, duty, forsaken. Instead, it is duty, ceaseless. They cut the cord. The ventilator sputtered out. Cause of death unspecified.

Dada died, you know. Yes, I do know, I tell my brother.  We hold each other for a bit. The last time I held him before he went to college. Somewhere in an elevator, a man says expired, not dead. I hate this, how we compare a breathing entity to a tangerine, rotting away in a refrigerator door.

 I open an incognito tab and Google how to stop being angry at everything that tries to make me better. What to do when you’re grieving is the top result.

On a walk, my mother tells me we may have to move soon. But I’m selfish. Because I want to stay in this city that has expensive apartments and bad roommates and poverty porn and girls who live by the sea and push their big-city dreams into the water, wanting to stay afloat. Because it is familiar, and here I can pretend it does not touch me, how I can mould my sadness into the skyline and forget.

There are children in the trees and birds on the ground. And I remember that since it is Diwali, there is light. I think daughter is a synonym for light.

In Hinduism, when a man dies, his son shaves his head. This tradition also takes place when a child is born. Rebirth and ending collide into one another. When my father performs it, it is strikingly cosmetic. Relatives stand around him, watching the barber clip away at his hair. I think he’d joke about his greys finally disappearing, how all the boxes of hair dye were wasted. I remember a boy from school who shaved his head once because he wore a baseball cap wherever he went. He was eight. I hope there were no men in elevators he had to face.

They say the shaving of the head symbolises selflessness- to let go of the world, and embrace your deeds. I don’t know if my father wanted this life. If he wanted to be an astronaut, a chef, the founder of a tech company that sold for millions and then retired to a cottage in Spain with his perfect family that never fussed about the electricity bills and always showed up for Sunday brunch.

When we would spend Diwali with Dadi, she would light a single diya on the windowsill, raking the edges of the gulmohars, their leaves rust-brown, decayed by winter. I hope the trees don’t catch fire.

 

I hope they burn if they do.

 

Dadi: paternal grandmother

 

Anoushka Kumar (she/her) is a student and writer from India, with work forthcoming or published in Vagabond City Lit, perhappened mag, the Ekphrastic Review, and elsewhere.