I. Volcanoes

On Saturday July 6, 2019, I was working a cash register at Häagen-Dazs in West Yellowstone, Montana when some tourists from India approached to order ice cream. The tourists were speaking Telugu, a Dravidian language from southeast India that I had partially picked up while living in Andhra Pradesh for two years as a missionary. 

I’d just finished my first year of college. I was working more than sixty hours a week, with a second job waiting tables at the Three Bear Lodge and Restaurant. On weekends, I drove an hour and fifteen minutes back to my hometown in southeast Idaho. 

“Bogu nara!” I said as they approached the window. 

They weren’t the first Telugu-speaking tourists I’d met that summer, nor would they be the last, but for some reason they were particularly surprised to be greeted in their native language by a Caucasian American on the other side of the world. No one expects a short, blond-haired, blue-eyed graduate student with a mousey nose and large Adam’s apple from middle-of-nowhere Idaho to speak Telugu, a language that is often referred to by both native speakers and foreigners as “the Italian of the East” (a term first coined by Venetian explorer Niccolò de’ Conti who noticed that, like Italian ones, Telugu words tend to end with vowels). As I greeted them, their mouths widened in shock and surprise. 

They laughed. We talked. They took videos with their phones. One posted to Facebook. 

Unbeknownst to me, sleeping peacefully in the western hemisphere, the video erupted overnight in India. Within sixteen hours, it had 48,000 views. The next day, 150,000. By the time I could post a reply, 600,000. My journal entry reports: “that’s more views than the ESPN highlights of Roger Federer and Novak Djokovic in the Wimbledon final from yesterday.” 

Perhaps because I was a declared pre-communications major, I saw that viral video as a window of opportunity. The headlines weren’t helping my ego either. “American guy wins the internet with his flawless Telugu,” wrote India Today. “American youth speaks fluent Telugu, wows all,” read The Times of India. And in The News Minute: “This American garu is slaying it in Telugu and the internet loves him.” 

Once you’re in the news, you realize how inaccurate it can be. The earliest articles reported that I worked in a coffee shop in New Zealand or a cafeteria in Britain rather than an ice cream parlor in Montana. So, for the first time in my life, I created a personal YouTube channel and posted a two-minute reply to greet my adoring fans and correct a few facts. But let’s be clear: I didn’t have any idea what I was doing. I didn’t have a concrete goal beyond taking advantage of this apparent opportunity and maybe making money somehow. I certainly didn’t know what was going to happen next. All I knew was that I was living my best life. A photo from that summer captures it best: I’m posing at the bar in Three Bear, a slot machine and wall-mounted deer antlers behind me, hundred-dollar bills fanned out on the counter in front of me, and a virgin strawberry daiquiri in my hand. 

Meanwhile, the Yellowstone Caldera in Yellowstone National Park—the largest super volcano on the continent—continued to boil. Hot pots bubbled. Geyser basins steamed. Old Faithful exploded every ninety-two minutes on schedule. And beneath the gorgeous pine trees and canyons of the internet, a geothermal chain reaction was about to blow. 

*

I grew up on top of a dormant shield volcano known today as Rexburg. Founded by Mormon pioneer Thomas E. Ricks in 1883, the town Rexburg, Idaho (population 29,409) boasts a drive-in theater, access to the Teton mountain range, and a small university that has been named and renamed as the Bannock Stake Academy, Ricks College, and, most recently, Brigham Young University-Idaho. If Rexburg has a biggest perk, it might be its week-long October break from school called “spud harvest.” 

About five million years ago, as the North American Tectonic Plate cut southwest to form the eastern Idaho Snake River Valley, an underground pillar of molten rock called the Yellowstone Hotspot seethed beneath what would become my hometown. Rexburg’s last eruptions were about two thousand years ago; the next ones are predicted to occur around the year three thousand. My childhood field trips were to Craters of the Moon National Monument and Preserve, which protects more than 50,000 acres of hardened lava fields and volcanic formations. Roughly the size of Rhode Island, Craters of the Moon encompasses the entire Great Rift volcanic zone and is clearly visible from space, where it looks like an inky black stain spreading across a parchment-colored desert. As a kid, I spent hours wandering those lava flows—cold, windswept badlands of wavy black stone, sparse sagebrush, sloping cinder cones. 

Every March, I shoveled three-foot snowdrifts off our high school tennis courts. In June, I carried twenty-foot steel sprinkler pipes through wet, armpit-high barley fields. I drove a tractor before I had a driver’s license. I watched cellars longer than football fields fill from dirt floor to cavernous ceiling with potatoes. My first kiss was at college. 

Like the volcano my town was built on, that sheltered innocence was bound to explode.

II. Prisons 

Three years before going viral, I knew nothing about India except Gandhi and elephants. I was still a senior in high school when a large white envelope arrived for me from Church Headquarters in Salt Lake City. 

“You’ve been assigned to labor in the India, Bengaluru Mission,” it read. That night, my parents drove me thirty minutes down a highway to eat my first Indian food at Tandoori Oven in Idaho Falls. 

In the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, two-year proselytizing missions are strongly encouraged for most young men between eighteen and twenty-five years old. The Church decides where these missionaries serve. I had no idea where I would be spending the next two years of my life until I read my call letter aloud to a living room full of family and high school friends. In a video recording of that moment, I’m standing in front of our fireplace unfolding the letter in eager silence. As soon as I say the word, “India,” the volume explodes with screams, gasps, cheers, applause, and laughter. The camera shakes and chaotically pans the crowd. 

I now recognize that Latter-day Saint mission call-opening custom as akin to the college acceptance letter genre. If you viewed that video without audio, you’d think I just got a scholarship to my dream school. When I watch it now, I can still feel my excitement, thrill, and wonder. I can see the skin on my face, white and dry from Accutane, flush red. But with hindsight, I’m also confused, anxious, and mystified all at once. Just as I can see my former self in the video, I can see my own naivete now, in a way that I couldn’t as an eighteen-year-old caught up in a social ritual. Looking back, I probably should have been both more worried and more informed about India’s missionary history. 

Between my call letter and my departure, I played tennis, worked at an essential oils warehouse, and read Nothing More Heroic: The Compelling Story of the First Latter-day Saint Missionaries in India (who served from 1852 to 1856) by R. Lanier Britsch (Deseret Book, 1999). Written by a Latter-day Saint to Latter-day Saints for inspirational and devotional purposes, Britsch’s work of popular, first-person narrative adventure history did little to challenge my worldview. Then, a few months before I left for India, we got the news. Two Latter-day Saint missionaries had been arrested in Coimbatore—a city within my assigned mission boundaries. 

India’s status as a backsliding democracy is well known. Major news outlets in the United States publish frequently on its rising authoritarianism, censorship, and discriminatory policies, but the centrality of religious freedom to these developments often receives less attention. The state has declared itself secular since gaining its independence from Britain in 1947 and per its 1950 constitution. But from what I experienced as a missionary and read as a PhD student in Communication Arts and Sciences at the Pennsylvania State University, its religious realities are much more turbulent. India is home to Hinduism, often considered the world’s oldest religion, and is a veritable fountainhead for many other influential spiritual traditions like Buddhism, Jainism, and Sikhism. In this context, Muslims and Christians—who belong to majority religions elsewhere around the world—can be particularly marginalized. While once known as the world’s largest democracy, recent evidence suggests that India has since become a violent hotspot for routine and institutionalized religious intolerance. 

In 2023, the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom reported India to be a “country of particular concern”—the most severe category—for the fourth year in a row. “The Indian government at the national, state, and local levels,” continues to promote and enforce “religiously discriminatory policies,” the USCIRF report writes, “including laws targeting religious conversion, interfaith relationships, the wearing of hijabs, and cow slaughter, which negatively impact Muslims, Christians, Sikhs,” and other marginalized groups in India’s complex caste system. This assessment has a history of declining religious tolerance behind it. After Prime Minister Indira Gandhi was assassinated by her Sikh bodyguards in 1984, anti-Sikh massacres killed thousands of Sikhs nationwide. Almost a thousand Muslims were murdered in both the 1992-1993 Bombay Riots and the 2002 Gujarat Riots. In 2008, anti-Christian rampages in Orissa resulted in nearly 400 churches burnt down or destroyed, more than 5,000 ransacked homes, and the displacement of more than 50,000 people—many of whom lived in government relief camps for months where they suffered continued harassment. While the government’s official death count was 39, most estimates are much higher. Dozens were raped, and approximately 2,000 Christians were forcibly converted to Hinduism. After acquiescing to convert-or-die threats, some of these Christians were fed a “purifying” paste of cow dung before bindis were painted on their foreheads. 

Beyond these severe instances of violence, mundane religious skirmishes also hit the press frequently, and perpetrators (often government officials) are rarely tried or convicted. For example, in 1992, a mob demolished the Babri Masjid mosque. Investigations afterward found several prominent politicians culpable for inciting the mosque’s destruction. Among those who had delivered incendiary speeches at the political rally immediately preceding the incident were Deputy Prime Minister L. K. Advani and Minister of Human Resource Development Murli Manohar Joshi—two figures closely associated with Hindu nationalist organizations. Scholars and writers in my field often point to politicians like Advani and Joshi as being among the most problematic perpetrators of democratic backsliding and religious intolerance in India. Through their fiery rhetoric and prejudiced policies, they seem to encourage, normalize, and even incentivize widespread religious hostility. 

This was the immediate context for yet another banal instance of Christian hostility, but this time involving two Latter-day Saint missionaries. In early March of 2016, roughly two weeks before I received my mission call to India, Travis Barlow from the United States and Anil Kollipara* from Bangalore parked their bicycles outside a corner market bakery in Coimbatore. They had stopped to get a snack before an appointment with a church member.  

“This random person showed up,” Anil said, when I called to ask him about his experience almost a decade later. “A guy named Immanuel approached us and asked to learn more about what we were teaching,” Travis said. “He asked for a pamphlet, which we gave to him.” I only had a vague memory of this Coimbatore conflict, but eventually I was able to track Anil and Travis down through a series of WhatsApp messages, Facebook friends, and mutual connections to ask them about it. We hadn’t talked in more than seven years, but they both remembered me from my YouTube videos. 

Their incident happened several months before I ever met them. During my years of service from 2016 to 2018, there were roughly 120 missionaries in the India Bengaluru Mission, divided into zones, districts, and companionships across the southern half of the country and bordered by the New Delhi Mission to the north. I only interacted closely with missionaries who served in the same cities and geographic areas as me. By the time I was a new missionary, Travis and Anil were almost finished. We only overlapped for a few months: Travis and I served in the same zone for a few weeks, and I met Anil at an occasional mission-wide conference. I’m not even sure I put together that they were the ones involved in the incident I’d heard about earlier. It was all very hush hush in the mission at the time, mainly just rumors. 

“Soon we were surrounded by at least sixty people,” Anil said. They tried to leave but the mob grabbed their bikes. Someone ripped Anil’s nametag out of his chest pocket. Another held him by the shirt collar. They drilled them with questions, some in English but mostly in Tamil. “Which church do you belong to? What exactly are you doing here? Are you trying to convert people?” 

In the one-minute video that Anil and Travis sent me, the crowd’s voices are harsh, bold, and angry. I can hear traffic intermixed with men shouting. One waves a finger inches from Travis’s nose. Another takes close-up photos of their faces. They circle the missionaries, pressing in around them. 

They’re trapped. 

I ask a friend to translate the video’s dialogue. Someone suggests they search their bags. Another threatens to deport them as early as tomorrow. Travis’s face is drained; he stares forward blankly as if watching a horror movie. Anil, looking young and nervous, tries to stay calm and respond to their accusations. The scene is claustrophobic, blurry, and dark. As I watch it, I can feel my heartbeat accelerate as if someone is adjusting the tempo settings on a metronome to tick faster and faster: beat beat beat beat beat.

Someone called the police, who detained both Anil and Travis at the station for five hours. Travis’s passport was confiscated. A high-ranking official “with a lot of stars on his collar” conducted an aggressive interview. 

“He told us that distributing unsolicited pamphlets during an election season was a crime,” Travis said. “We explained that [Immanuel] had asked for the pamphlet.” 

Turns out that 2016 was an election year for the Tamil Nadu legislative assembly, and Coimbatore is a favorite turf holdout for the Bharatiya Janata Party—the ruling political party under Prime Minister Narendra Modi. The BJP (as it’s known) is a right-wing faction committed to Hindutva, a Hindu nationalist philosophy, with close ideological and organizational ties to the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh or RSS (literally translated as “National Volunteer Corps”), a far-right paramilitary establishment. Travis says he believes the mob were BJP members, affiliates, or voters “looking to make a stand against Christian proselyting in the country.” Anil, on the other hand, thinks they were RSS volunteers. 

This BJP/RSS distinction, however, is thin at best. Religious mob violence in India often has a political-paramilitary component. For me, what Travis and Anil experienced is in many ways representative. Their account parallels what the French political scientist Christophe Jaffrelot has closely documented as India’s broader trend toward a kind of quasi-state-sanctioned brutality bent on restricting religious diversity and political dissent. The RSS often acts as a sort of shadow version of the BJP, but the former is rarely held to the same standards of scrutiny or accountability because it’s seen as a grassroots volunteer organization rather than a legitimate political party (like the latter). As a result, government officials can sometimes carry out suspicious or illegal acts under the guise of the RSS and get away with them. But even these phenomena are not entirely unique to India. When I research religion and democracy around the world, I find similar patterns in several authoritarian regimes. They seem to occur whenever leaders seek to suppress genuine pluralism—both religious and otherwise. 

In other words, whether the antagonists were members of the BJP, the RSS, or both is beside the point. What Travis and Anil both agree on is that the so-called “Immanuel” character was “definitely not interested” in learning about Jesus Christ. 

“He intentionally faked it,” Anil said. “It was more like a planned trap.” 

“At one point he said, ‘let me call some friends,’” said Travis. “I struggle to see how they could’ve coordinated between fifty to one hundred people to all show up on such short notice otherwise.” 

Eventually, a local church leader was able to come pick them up from the police station. Travis returned a few days later to retrieve his passport. The mission president emergency-transferred all missionaries out of that area, which remained closed to further missionary work until long after I arrived seven months later. Somehow, through emails and blog posts, I learned about this event before I left for India. I wasn’t too worried about the news, though my mother was. Like many teenagers, I felt invincible. I also never experienced anything even close to that sort of incident during my own missionary service in India. But this Coimbatore confrontation can help explain why I was terrified by the next development of my YouTube stardom. 

*

Shortly after I posted my reply video, which corrected the errant facts with my actual name, someone found my missionary blog. Images of me in a white shirt, tie, and black nametag exploded over the internet. Much to St. Paul’s chagrin (“I am not ashamed of the gospel of Jesus Christ”) I frantically adjusted my privacy settings, unpublished several posts, and deleted photos. The comments on my videos, which had previously been a gushing fountain of adulation, were now interspersed with lava-hot rage. 

“His mission was to spread [the] gospel of that Abrahamic cult. Obviously he has to learn native language to spread that shit,” commented @harinathvelu84271.* “SAVE HINDUS… STOP CHRISTIAN CONVERSIONS IN INDIA!” @naveenmadiraju66308 wrote. And finally, 

I really admired you when the first time I saw you speaking in Telugu. But I realized your real dark face when I got to know that you are a paid agent for those Christian missionaries. This is actually a good trick to convert people. No matter how hard you try it’s not going work. Go back to history countless attempts were made after all the massacres you did to Hindu people still you did not manage to convert us and this should make you realize that Hinduism is something that you cannot destroy. I hate u.

– @MadhavCheruku79231 

I was surprised how the burst of anti-Christian sentiment affected me. My neck veins pulsed, and my palms sweat as I read through the comments. Still, this appeared to be a minority view, at least among my 50,000 subscribers. More often, I was getting comments like: “your Telugu is very cute sir,” “you almost sound like a native,” “this is the wholesome content I didn’t know I needed in my life!” and “marry a Telugu girl!” Or even: “whenever I hear Telugu from his videos, I forget all my sorrows!” At least a half a dozen people dubbed me the unofficial Telugu “brand ambassador” to the world. “I really love to hear Telugu from people whose mother tongue isn’t Telugu,”@tejasvemuri58144 wrote. 

I didn’t realize it at the time, but my channel had quickly become another microcosmic battleground for democratic religious pluralism in India. Christians commented things like: “I remember that you used to visit the Arilova Colony & Dwaraka Nagar areas visiting God’s people. I am residing in Arilova colony and seeing Latter-day Saint believers. May God bless you & use you mightily,” from @arvindkesava41726. To one of the aforementioned anti-Christian comments, another user replied: 

Christianity preaches ‘love’ and ‘forgiveness.’ Do you think preaching these things India gets spoiled?!? Does your religious priests preach you to ‘hate’ someone and ‘kick off’ someone ruthlessly without a reason? My God! Are you serious! Though I am not in a support of any religion… I don’t find any reason why do some people hate Christianity and bring it to limelight by themselves. Learn to respect every religion and faith, imbibe the values taught by any religious holy book, instead of hating the worthy! NOTE: *Article no. 25 to 28*: Every citizen of India has a right to practice and promote their religion. 

After about a week of this, TV5 News in India offered to interview me on live primetime television. I accepted on the condition that they not ask any questions about religion. They complied and streamed the interview to their six million viewers. By this point, Telugu tourists in Yellowstone were showing up at the Three Bear Restaurant and Häagen-Dazs just to take selfies with me and post them online. One day, I sat down in the West Yellowstone Public Library and spent hours copy-and-pasting a generic reply to every single Facebook direct message I had received. Lakshmi Manchu, a Telugu movie star with 1.8 million followers on Instagram, posted about me: “his Telugu is better than mine.” Before I knew it, I had been offered an all-expenses-paid trip to Dallas for the North American Telugu Association Convention. They wanted me to help welcome Jagan Mohan Reddy, then Chief Minister of Andhra Pradesh, to the stage. 

During my sheltered childhood in the shield volcano of Rexburg, I’d had little exposure to politics. I attended a town council meeting as a Boy Scout once. In fact, I’m not sure I was even thinking about “politics” when I got invited to the convention. Like any starry-eyed first-year college student, I was just thinking, cool. Free trip to Dallas? Cool. Big Telugu convention? Cool. Chief Minister of Andhra Pradesh? Cool. Sign me up! So they did. 

Prior to the convention, they sent me a script that I recited for a promotional video advertising the event. I knew nothing about CM Jagan, nor did I think twice about the potential repercussions of declaring “Jai Jagan!” on YouTube. I’d seen his face plastered over the cities where I served. I’d even happened to be at an airport at the same time as him once, and I remember watching him break free from swarms of fans to catch his flight. I posted the convention’s video, but my lungs caught in my ribs as soon as I saw the first comments. Surprise: Jagan has a controversial backstory. His father was also a former chief minister of Andhra Pradesh who died in a mysterious helicopter crash in 2009. In 2012, Jagan was imprisoned for embezzlement. While in jail, he went on a hunger strike protesting the creation of a separate Telangana state. He was eventually hospitalized for low blood sugar and, seven years later, went on to serve a five-year term as CM from 2019 to 2024. And he’s a Christian. 

“Y.S. Jagan is not good and he was in prison 16 months. If something happens in the future, you will also get arrested.” 

“Isaac what is your hidden agenda? Are you planning to spread Christianity? Jagan is a robber and highly corrupted person.”

“I am staying in Memphis Tennessee if you came for any vacation I will meet you here. So sweet and proud of you.”

“Isaac Richard the guy who fooled us all with his Telugu skills and later turned out to be a missionary agent meets Jagan in Dallas. Very cleverly planted by Jagan & Co.” 

“Oh my God oh my God oh my God I’m your biggest fan.” 

“Isaac just ask google who is the most corrupted politician in AP.” 

“I don’t know whether it is right or wrong to say this… but I have to say this. I love you.”

“With YS Jagan at the helm of affairs in Andhra Pradesh these missionaries will rapidly try to make AP another Kerala!”

“One missionary meets another missionary!” 

“I am disgusted that you are promoting corrupt politicians on your channel. You lost a subscription today :)”

“Even though I am BJP supporter YS Jagan is our CM for 5 years we should respect him.”

Scrolling back through my WhatsApp messages now, I find a thumbnail for a video that is no longer available. The caption in Telugu reads: “Conspiracy things that foreign Christians do in our country to convert people’s faith.” My friend’s message below says, “He wants to shut down our church in Vijayawada and arrest you.”  

III. Missions

The academic research on missionaries and democracy is mixed. Several studies have argued that missionaries are good for democracy because they promote religious liberty and mass literacy. Among these is Robert D. Woodberry’s article, “The Missionary Roots of Liberal Democracy,” published in a 2012 issue of American Political Science Review. “This article demonstrates historically and statistically that conversionary Protestants (CPs) heavily influenced the rise and spread of stable democracy around the world,” it reads. But a follow-up article in the British Journal of Political Science by Elena Nikolova and Jakub Polanski attempted to replicate Woodberry’s analysis with different measures and over a longer timespan; it showed a statistically insignificant relationship between missionaries and democracy and was published with an equally provocative title: “Conversionary Protestants Do Not Cause Democracy” (2020). Empirically, the relationship between missionaries and democracy appears to be at an impasse. 

I think, however, that there’s an obvious reason for this discrepancy. The relationship needs to be inverted. It’s not that missionaries are good for democracy per se, but that democracies are the only countries that continue to allow missionaries. It’s a chicken-and-egg problem. Whether missionaries promote, encourage, or facilitate democracy is a moot point—democracy enables missionaries in the first place by protecting religious freedom and supporting tolerant pluralism. In that sense, the presence of missionaries in a country can be an index of the country’s democratic nature, but not enough to prove causality. Missionaries and democracy are two sides of the same coin. Missionaries can be a litmus test, so to speak, for the strength of a democracy, or an indicator of its shift toward authoritarianism. The fact that India permits missionary visas today should be a cause for hope. 

To be sure, the question of historical missionaries and contemporary missionaries already boggles comparison. Early missionaries were veritable engines of colonialism, and the territories they entered were not democracies in their eyes. Think of William Carey, one of the first missionaries to India, who wrote An Inquiry into the Obligations of Christians to use Means for the Conversion of the Heathen (1792). But perhaps that’s why the vectors in the two studies (Woodberry versus Nikolava and Polanski) push in different directions once they are differentiated by a longer time span. Receptivity to missionaries several centuries ago probably did make a region more likely to adopt a liberal democratic political structure after it gained independence from its colonizers, but today, countries that resisted or evaded European colonization are less likely to receive missionaries or be democracies. Perhaps the only thing that scholars of missiology agree on is this: missionaries were good for language and literature. Missionaries were among the earliest translators to acquire remote languages, and many texts exist only in missionary records. 

When I set out for southeast India as an eighteen-year-old Latter-day Saint missionary in the twenty-first century, which vision was I living? Was I, by preaching Christianity as part of a religious and ethnic minority in Modi’s India, a champion of tolerance, pluralism, and freedom? Or was I just a contemporary incarnation of British imperialism, another white savior blinded by orientalism and socially conditioned to force Western, Judeo-Christian norms onto a vulnerable indigenous population? 

I’ve only been home for seven years, but it’s hard to describe the chasm of cognitive dissonance between how I feel about my mission and how higher education has taught me to view it. As a missionary, I saw myself as a force for good. I helped people overcome harmful addictions, reconnect with estranged family members, nurture their commitment to moral values, find a religious community, and discover renewed spiritual meaning in life. Only later, in college, would I acquire vocabulary I didn’t have at the time—terms such as cultural appropriation or whiteness—that would help me better recognize my place in India’s postcolonial history. 

I now understand that some people, perhaps including most readers of essays like this one, find missiology to be intolerant and problematic rather than positive and pluralist. That’s a view I completely respect. There are plenty of valid things to critique about missions. I’m certain that I caused some harm as well as good, just like any humanitarian or service effort. But even still, no amount of critical theory seems to change the special place that those two years hold in my heart. I’m still connected to many of the friends I made in India. We call and message each other for life updates. One family that I baptized was absolutely thrilled to tell me that their son had received his own mission call to New Delhi. He’ll be sharing in his home country the same message I shared as a foreigner. What I dream of, then, when I think about what Jürgen Habermas called “the postsecular society,” is a foggy middle path. I’m not willing to fall for the false choice between religion and democracy simply because either feels like more solid footing than walking the tightrope between them. 

*

My friends in India often tell me that YouTube views don’t do justice to my popularity; I really went viral in Facebook groups and WhatsApp channels, where my videos were downloaded, circulated, and shared. Dozens of Telugu content creators capitalized on my fame. In the early days of my channel, I submitted privacy complaints and copyright claims so others couldn’t steal and repost my videos. Still, I’ve been meme-ed, parodied, remixed, and more. I still get hundreds of strangers wishing me happy birthday on my Facebook timeline every year. I get emails and messages almost every week asking me to post videos again. At the time of this writing, I have posted twenty-five original filmed and edited videos for a total of more than 40,000 watch hours, 1.4 million views, and 15.5 million impressions. By monetizing my YouTube channel and running ads, I also earned around $400 total over a two-year period. Pay-per-click in India is roughly 0.20 rupees, or less than a penny. 

In my recap video from that 2019 trip to the North American Telugu Association convention in Dallas, I shake hands with children and pose for group photos like a natural media personality. Still, there’s something slightly uncomfortable about watching myself being greeted by hundreds of adoring fans after my speech. As a current PhD student taking seminars on rhetoric and communication, I’m more aware than ever that part of my viral appeal was my race, gender, and nationality, which resonated with a hegemony of mass media and commercial products bent on exporting American ideals to other countries. My YouTube channel, named “Telugu Marchipokudadhu” (“Don’t Forget Telugu”), not only exemplified the tensions of religious pluralism and democracy in India, but also embodied the paradoxes of globalism. Somehow, the internet has both made other cultures closer than ever before, while also collapsing and reinscribing them within one larger, increasingly homogenized culture.

These days, most Indians grow up learning and speaking English. Scholars have predicted that more than half of India’s 780 languages will die out within the next fifty years—that’s 400 dead languages. When I promoted pro-Telugu content within a larger system of language assimilation in India, perhaps my embrace of a local dialect hit a special nerve in a country beset by language loss and largely run by Hindu nationalists in a period of cultural retrenchment. Viewers who watched my videos saw a foreigner not only speaking, but appreciating and valuing their mother tongue. To see my videos was to see a message contrary to mainstream propaganda—to see one’s culture celebrated by an American “other.”  

My experience wasn’t even really that new. In 2014, a group of four Latter-day Saint return missionaries who served in the Philippines noticed a lack of family-friendly content in the Filipino language Bisaya and posted their first YouTube video. Their channel, The Hey Joe Show, named after the Filipino nickname for Americans, ended up garnering some fifty million views. They wrote a song, “My Morena Girl,” that reached number three on the Filipino national chart. As international heartthrobs, they returned to tour and perform in the Philippines, where young girls chased their van and kissed its windows. But the question remains: does The Hey Joe Show contribute to diversity and intersectionality by filling a void of Bisaya content and connecting white and Filipino audiences, or does it simply reinforce cultural hegemony?

I first encountered the Hey Joe Show in my Communications 101 class the spring semester before I went viral. I later learned that my professor replaced her Hey Joe Show clip with my first Telugu video the following semester. Our textbook was titled Converging Media: A New Introduction to Mass Media by John V. Pavlik and Shawn McIntosh. Convergence, the word they use to describe our global media landscape, is the same word for the phenomenon that forms volcanos. Convergent boundaries are where two tectonic plates collide. This, I think, is one thing that globalization and the internet have done: placed “the self” and “the other” in a subduction zone. That subduction zone is also where the messy realities of religious freedom and democracy play out. 

Personally, I found my mission experience to be neither as vicious nor as glamorous as the YouTube comments on my videos made it sound. At the time, I certainly didn’t see myself as a liberator of Christian minorities or a villain of cultural imperialism. In many ways, it was rather mundane—not that this ordinariness made it any less mired in ethical quandaries. Every day, I got up at 6:30 a.m., studied the scriptures for two or three hours, and then spent the rest of the day knocking on doors; teaching thirty-minute lessons to church members, their interested friends, or relatives; or teaching free English and piano classes. Other hours were spent attending church or other missionary meetings. Every night I went to bed at 10:30 p.m. only to repeat my schedule the next day. I observed strict missionary rules (no television or swimming) and spent a lot of time praying, fasting, and looking forward to my weekly “preparation day” when I could email my family from an internet café for a maximum of one hour. 

To talk legally rather than ethically, proselyting in India is certainly not illegal unless it involves bribery or coercion (laws leftover from British rule). I chatted with anyone who seemed eager or at least willing to talk to me, usually learning a bit about their beliefs before asking if I could share a message with them. I didn’t push it if they weren’t interested. Conversion is still the goal of Latter-day Saint missionary work, but the barriers to entry are so high that people rarely get baptized unless they are seriously committed to the church, typically after conducting sustained periods of investigation by attending weekly services and reading church publications. In my experience, few people are willing to give up coffee, tea, alcohol, tobacco, pornography, pre- or extra-marital sex, and ten percent of their annual income, not to mention Sundays every week, simply in order to join a new religion. Informed consent wasn’t really an issue. 

But I also cringe when I think about some of the attitudes I held as a missionary. I wish I would’ve listened more. I wish that eighteen-year-old me, posing to imitate a Buddha statue in a photograph, would’ve thought about how he wanted his own religious tradition to be treated. I wish I would’ve realized sooner that perhaps I needed India much more than India needed me. How else does one learn tolerance, cross-cultural connection, and respectful communication across difference without directly encountering radical others? And isn’t that the essence of democracy? 

I’d like to think that my time in India changed me, and not just in the ways my church may have hoped or expected. I’d like to think that, somehow, I was soaking up the ancient wisdom in the air, that spiritual confluence of global religions shimmering on the street—from the Sanskrit Vedas to the rishis. I came back with a yoga-like flexibility from sitting on the floor every day, and I developed at least some of the meditative calm necessary to enjoy the view inching by me while I sat on a bus in bumper-to-bumper traffic. I hope I learned the essence of namaste: to salute the divine in others. To respect, and even embrace, difference. 

I’ve shed many naïve beliefs I held as a missionary, but some of my commitments to other principles—like pluralism and religious freedom—have matured and only grown stronger. These days, I’m trying to advance those causes through my PhD studies. Isn’t that the deepest sense of the word mission? Discovering a sense of purpose, ambition, or calling in life? At eighteen, I was called on a mission to India by my church, but ever since then I’ve still been trying to figure out what it might mean to truly answer that call. 

Several sources indicate that Telugu is one of the fastest growing languages in the United States. Emory University now has an endowed chair for Telugu Studies. I recently received a grant from Penn State to hire a tutor and continue learning Telugu. At the end of one of my interviews with a potential tutor, she asked if she could take a selfie with me because she recognized me from my videos. I’ve stopped posting videos for several years, though I’m not entirely sure why. I still might post again someday, but what happened to the Hey Joe Show happened to me. I grew up, grew out of my shenanigans, and moved on. I got married, prioritized my new family, got busy, and focused on school. My viral YouTube fame faded into memory. 

From my vantage point as a graduate student in the United States, religion clearly appears to be having a moment. The 2024 Pew Religious Landscape Survey revealed that 92% of U.S. adults believe in either a spirit or soul, a God or higher power, a spiritual reality, or an afterlife. Last year, the New York Times officially launched its “Believing” Project—a landmark subscription column giving voice to the myriad ways that people experience religion and spirituality today. The fall of the Twin Towers represented a watershed in what literary studies scholars like Lori Branch, Mark Knight, and Amy Hungerford have been calling “the postsecular” for a quarter century now. Many other scholars, like Talal Asad in Formations of the Secular and Charles Taylor in A Secular Age, have argued that the secularization thesis—the gradual death of religion and triumph of rational science—hasn’t proven to be true, at least in the West. The United States was founded by pilgrims seeking religious freedom, and the language of Christianity pervades its founding documents. As a nation, it has been grappling with the stubborn persistence of religion ever since. 

As a missionary, I found myself smack in the middle of this historical moment even though I was completely unaware of it at the time. I’m also convinced that postsecularity isn’t unique to the U.S. context. What I have come to call “contentious religious democracies” demonstrate the challenges of pluralism in a postsecular age, and they appear in several places around the world. Authoritarian-minded leaders often leverage these national origin myths for populist and rhetorical purposes. Still today, religion and democracy keep colliding with one another in ways that I couldn’t see when I was flying from Idaho to India in the summer of 2016. 

The volcano, the prison, and the mission—even these three metaphors are not enough to do justice to the geopolitical complexities introduced by late modernity and the internet. But each metaphor is true. Like a volcano, no one chooses where or what tradition they are born into. The flow of time and history shapes all—erupts, cools, crusts, collides, and carves our world. The prison can represent the impulse to resort to force or violence, rather than speech, when navigating human differences. But I’m convinced that a personal and collective sense of mission against that instinct can help protect democratic ideals like pluralism and religious freedom. A commitment to accepting diverse others, to tolerating the preachy and the intolerant, is one hard doctrine that such political systems demand. And while missionaries may not cause or create democracy, a democracy that denies missionaries fails its own test. 

When I want to remind myself of the messy complexities that constitute the everyday, lived realities of globalization, I pull my box of missionary keepsakes from a shelf in my closet. There are two traditional Indian lungis in there, one checkered and one with a floral pattern. I’m always unsure whether wearing them constitutes cultural appropriation, or how many years one must spend in a place to internalize its culture ethically. Next, there’s a mug that two of my friends gave me after they chose to be baptized, screen-printed with images of us together and embossed with words like “memories” and “love you” next to my name. For me, that mug, and the fact that most of my Indian friends never did join the church, represents the way individual human relationships transcend intellectual categories—not missionary or Hindu nationalist, not radical or fundamentalist—but the friendship that results when two people treat each other as equals, whether they have cultural or ideological differences, or not. Then there are my scriptures coated in ink, highlights, and notes, representing my own Christian background and my teenage ethnocentricism (in hindsight, I wish I would’ve spent some of that time reading the Bhagavad Gita, as I’ve done since and been changed by). Finally, a notebook titled “White Handbook Principles” attempts to distill the copious mission rules into ethical generalizations rather than categorical dos or don’ts. Perhaps that’s early evidence of the tensions I faced while trying and failing to live my own moral values perfectly. So much of the complexity that accompanies missiology, religious freedom, and the paradoxes of liberal democratic tolerance—from globalism to nationalism to patriotism to multiculturalism to pluralism—can be found in that single cardboard box: handwritten thank-you notes, an Indian flag, and a veshti woven of white and gold.

* Pseudonyms have been used. 

In “Cupid’s Bow,” a husband’s altered touch unfolds into a journey through folklore and myth, where a woman confronts the logic that has bound her to a life she no longer recognizes as her own. Written by Pingali Chaitanya and translated from Telugu by P. Samata, the story draws on the Vikramarka–Betala cycle, a classical corpus of South Asian tales in which a king carries a wily spirit who poses riddles about morality, identity, and justice.

Appearing first in The Bombay Literary Magazine, the very cadences of the Telugu language – its intimacy with the body, its textures of domestic life, its easy movement between the sensual and the philosophical – work to unsettle the story from within. Against the authority of inherited narrative, the woman refuses both riddle and answer, rejecting the primacy of reason and insisting instead on the knowledge of the body, desire, and lived intimacy. In choosing to write her own ending, the woman steps beyond the script itself, and in the recognition of that choice rests the story’s quiet revolution.

— Raaza Jamshed for Guernica Global Spotlights

Lost in reverie, she did not notice the fire in the stove sink into ash. Startled, she thrust in a bundle of dry palm leaves, riddled with white ants. The flames sprang up, hissing. Tapa dubu chita pata — the leaves crackled, as though a riddle was being whispered between Vikramarka and Betala, the legendary king and the wily spirit from the old folktale.

‘What am I to do?’ The question circled in her mind, stubborn as smoke.

She sat in her chuttillu — the open courtyard kitchen — watching the pot. A few yards away, at the well, her husband was bathing. He called out to her, asking her to scrub his back. A hot wave of irritation rose in her chest. Still, she left the stove.

From the lintel of the chuttillu, she took the small packet of almond leaves she had tucked away the night before. With a sudden gesture, she tossed it into the fire. The edges curled, the green turned black, and soon the veins of the leaves and the withered kanakambaram flowers inside were swallowed by the flames.

She caught the edge of her sari pallu in her mouth and folded to the ground before the stove, eyes fixed on the fire devouring the flowers.

Those kanakambarams had been picked by him.

Every evening, once her mother-in-law had strutted off to the village square, hungry to gossip, eager to boast, her husband would dart into the courtyard, gather the flowers, strip plantain fibres, and braid them into a garland. When she lay down at night, he would place it in her hands, a gift wrought in secrecy.

She never wore the garland in her hair. Instead, she stretched it long and wound it around his neck. On his dark, glistening skin, the blossoms glowed like a string of coral beads. By dawn, those same coral beads left tender imprints across the pale skin of her throat.

But last night, his fingers faltered. The stalks were broken, the garland was loose, hurried, careless. It was not the flowers — it was the lost craftsmanship, the fading laghavam, the lightness that once played in his touch, that unsettled her. Morning came, and her neck bore no coral traces.

Her hand moved absently to her throat as she stared at the burning garland. From the well came his voice again, sharper now: ‘How long?’

Her anger flared. She did not answer. Rising swiftly, she turned her back on the kitchen, the courtyard, the well, and walked towards the forest.

It was the nineteenth day after the new moon. Clouds stretched across the sky, and shallow rain-pits on the ground marked where showers had fallen earlier. She walked on, stepping across them. As dusk thickened, a chill began to set in, but she did not slow her pace.

Suddenly, lightning tore through the heavens. For an instant, the darkened path was revealed in a burst of white, then vanished again into shadow. She paused briefly, then pressed on. A drizzle began to fall. She had set out without a rug or an umbrella, yet she did not turn back. The rain grew colder, the air sharper. This was a journey out of one story and into another, and though its path was strange, the cold was still cold.

The drizzle thickened, turned to rain, and she moved through it as though inside a dream. But in truth, the entire escapade had begun with rain.

It was midnight on that day too. Her husband was already asleep when the rain first tapped on the roof. She felt the moment was enough—garland or no garland. Drawing close, she embraced him from behind, her fingers gently stroking his curly hair, thick as clustered black clouds. He stirred, turned towards her. She slipped her palm into his.

But at once she recoiled. These were not the fingers she knew. Once, her hand had cradled into his so completely that their entwined fingers looked like the stripes on a squirrel’s back. Now, she could not hold his hand at all.

She rose, lifted the wick of the lamp, and carried its glow to the bedside. He looked at her questioningly. ‘What is it?’ The same familiar eyes smiled back. Yes, it was her husband. The flame faltered, trembled. She lay down again, but sleep did not come. He, however, drifted easily into slumber.

Once more she rose, raised the wick, and examined his fingers. In the dim light, they seemed unchanged. Weren’t these the same deft hands that picked kanakambaram blossoms at lightning speed, never once breaking a stalk? Were these not the same rough hands that scrubbed laundry against stone, softened by some secret grace?

Still holding the lamp, she let her gaze wander to his legs. On other nights he would sleep curled around her, his body a sheltering arc, her legs nestled against his. Now, even as she sought them, she felt no contact.

She brought the lamp close to his face. Yes, it was her husband. Even in sleep, he smiled. How handsome he looked. She set down the lamp and lay beside him once more.

But sleep refused her all night.

At dawn, when he called her to scrub his back at the well, her unrest overflowed. She could bear it no longer. And so she set out to seek Betala, who had entangled her in this riddle, and Vikramarka, who had deepened her wound, sprinkling chilli on an open sore. She resolved she would not leave them until she had her answer.

By the second night, she found Vikramarka in the forest. At first, the king could not fathom who she was or why she had come. Alone, seething, at that hour of night. He suspected she might be kin to Betala. He asked her to confirm his doubt.

She hesitated. Should she confront him now? Or should she draw them both — Betala and Vikramarka — into her snare at once? She chose the latter. Steeling herself, she said, ‘Raja Vikramarka, I am a married woman. I have come for your help. You must take me to Betala.’

Vikramarka did not know whether to laugh or to sigh. For eighteen nights he had been burdened with a single task: carrying Betala down from the tree, listening to the ghost’s endless riddles, answering each one correctly, only to see Betala climb back to his perch. He himself had not succeeded; what help could he offer her? Yet he remembered his duty. A king must never deny a woman’s plea. And besides, he was tired of Betala’s nightly games, and the thought of walking in a woman’s company, even for a change, appealed to him. So he agreed.

They walked a few miles in silence. She did not utter a single word along the way. Vikramarka tried to start a conversation, but it was of no use. At last, they reached the tree.

As always, Betala dangled upside down, his tail knotted to a branch. Vikramarka climbed up, lifted him onto his shoulder. But tonight, Betala’s gaze caught on the woman waiting below. Raising himself halfway up from the king’s shoulder, he hissed, ‘Raja, who is she?’

Before Vikramarka could answer, she cut in. ‘Ask me, I will tell you. What does Vikramarka know?’

Vikramarka stiffened at her tone. Such blunt irreverence! Even Betala was startled. ‘All these nights I’ve called him “Raja, Rajan!” with respect, and here comes this woman tossing his name out so casually. Have I been too deferential all along?’ he muttered to himself.

But she was not finished. Facing Betala directly, she declared, ‘Betala, answer my question. If you know the answer and remain silent, I will thrash you by your tail. If you do not know the answer, I will still curl your tail around your neck and thrash you.’

Betala blinked, confused. ‘Who are you, woman? What is your question? And why should I answer it?’

Exasperated, she turned her burning eyes on Vikramarka. He, however, kept silent.

‘Listen, Betala,’ she said, ‘I will fit your lower body, tail included, to Vikramarka, and attach his lower body to you. Will you both agree?’

Vikramarka’s heart jolted. What would become of him if he returned to his kingdom with his noble head on a ghost’s body? Would his people prostrate at his feet, or at his tail? Would his queen faint in terror at such a sight? Betala too was rattled. If his own head were set upon Vikramarka’s torso, his powers would vanish, and besides, how would he relieve himself? How would he hang from trees with only two legs? His anger rose, but he did not lose his composure.

‘How is that possible, woman?’ he asked.

‘Why not?’ she replied. ‘The head is untouched. The body with Vikramarka’s head will still rule the kingdom. The body with Betala’s head will still hang from the tree. The head defines identity, does it not? Or so you claim.’

Her words pricked Betala. He remembered something, though he pretended not to.

‘What, Betala?’ she pressed. ‘Have you forgotten your own sixth tale? Raja Vikramarka, have you forgotten the answer you gave?’

Vikramarka and Betala could not help recalling the story.

A washerman and his friend, under certain circumstances, offered their heads to the goddess in a temple. The washerman’s wife was terrified; she burst into tears, and in her grief, was on the verge of taking her own life. At that moment, the Goddess appeared, assured her that she would restore them to life, and instructed her to place the severed heads near their bodies.

But in her confusion, she placed the friend’s head near her husband’s body, and her husband’s head near the friend’s body. The Goddess restored life to them, and both men rose—only to begin arguing at once: ‘She is my wife!’ each insisted.

After telling him this story, Betala had asked Vikramarka, ‘Whose wife is she?’

Vikramarka had replied, ‘The sciences proclaim that among rivers the Ganga is supreme, among mountains Sumeru, among trees the Kalpavriksha, and in the human body, the head is the foremost and incomparable. Therefore, the woman belongs to the man whose head is attached to the body.’

Pleased with the correctness of the answer and admiring Vikramarka’s wisdom, Betala had climbed back on to his tree. Thus ended the sixth story.

‘Yes,’ said Betala now. ‘I remember. And what of it?’

The woman’s voice quivered with fury. ‘I am that woman in the story.’

Vikramarka and Betala stared at her, baffled.

She sat on a stone, leaning back against a mound. The stone was cool.  ‘I love my husband’s hands,’ she murmured. ‘Washerman’s hands, yet not rough. Long fingers, knuckles rounded like tender drumsticks—I would joke that they could be cut and added to sambhar. And his back! When I embraced him, his chest-hair firm beneath my cheek, it was as if I pressed against the clouds themselves.’

Vikramarka flushed, uneasy. What must his queen be doing at this hour? Betala shifted heavily on his shoulder.

The woman went on. ‘His legs—long, dark, strong. The cracked soles of his feet pressed against me at night, and those very cracks would tickle me. And how many times have I taken the kajal from my eyes and softly touched it to the soles of his feet? His calves, firm yet soft, would cradle mine as we slept, locked together till dawn. But now? Now he pushes me away after a quarter hour and turns to the other side.’

Her voice broke. She let out a cry, raw as a bull’s bellow. Vikramarka shuddered beneath it, the tremor passing into Betala, who stiffened on his shoulder.

‘So what?’ Betala snapped.

She rounded on him. ‘You sages, you shastris, decided the head was everything. You bound me to a head and left me bereft of my husband’s body. Tell me, can a head give children? Is it only eyes that make a wife known? What do you ghosts know of marriage?’ She seized Betala’s neck, choking him.

Vikramarka begged her to loosen her grip. ‘He will slip back to his tree if you anger him. Please, restrain yourself.’ She let go, but her fury did not abate.

Betala straightened, indignant. ‘It is I who pose questions! And you dare question me? You are a character in my tale, just as I am a character in another. If characters rebel, how will the rice cook? You would throw away the head for the fragile body, which holds no thought, no mind?’

Her laughter was sharp. ‘If characters rebel, rice may not cook, but the lentils will not soften either! What folly is this, that all of you, with your heads, declared the body worthless? My husband’s head may nod in agreement, but it is his body that I seek. Whichever head owns his body, that man alone is mine.’

Betala fell silent. He whispered into Vikramarka’s ear. The king nodded. Then Betala cleared his throat.

‘Woman, I did not decree your fate. You are not mine to define. You are my character, yes, but I myself belong to another’s tale.’

‘Spare me these pot-and-vessel tales,’ she cut him off. ‘I have spoken my will. You refuse it. Then I shall write my own destiny. I choose the man who bears my husband’s body. That is the end of it.’

She turned and strode away.

‘Stop! Stop!’ Betala cried. Vikramarka ran after her, clutching Betala tightly on his shoulder. But when she reached the turning—where one story slips into another—she looked back and saw them far behind.

She quickened her pace, almost flying.

And she smiled.

The Bombay Literary Magazine‘s mission is to promote writers through their fine work. We are also interested in nonfiction that looks at literature from a “writerly” perspective. We publish stories, poems, essays, reviews, visual narratives and graphic fiction.

I visited the Indian-administered region of Kashmir dozens of times over almost a five-year period, photographing its passage through winter in three distinct phases: Chillai Kalan (harsh cold), Chillai Khurd (small cold), and Chillai Bachha (baby cold). As the winter progressed, ravens kept watch over the ongoings of the world below, bearing witness to the snow revealing itself to be an illusion.

Kashmir has always been promoted as a tourist destination, a paradise for Indian nationals to experience snow, even as it remains one of the most militarised areas in the world. It has been at the centre of disputes between India, Pakistan, and China since the dissolution of the British Raj in 1947. Each country has laid claim to the land as their own, while its people struggle for self-determination.

My last visit to Kashmir, for a friend’s wedding in August 2019, was cut short when the Indian government removed the region’s semi-autonomous status through Article 370, and a siege ensued. Snow remains an incomplete body of work.

Sohrab Hura for Guernica.

Snow (2026) by Sohrab Hura is published by MACK. 

The DMV camera flashes;

for a second I am immortal —

blinking, crooked-smiled, a citizen of nowhere.

They tell me to wait.

The plastic seat sweats against my thighs;

a boy beside me eats Flamin’ Hot Cheetos,

his fingerprints bloodying every page of his workbook.

In my wallet:

a torn movie ticket,

my father’s faded voter ID from a country that voted him out,

an expired green card.

My face younger, fuller,

a woman who still believed in applying twice, appealing once.

I watch the numbers light up over the counter —

B198. B199.

The woman at B200 asks about “home address” and “legal name,”

like those are simple things,

like you don’t lose them the way you lose teeth,

one at a time, without noticing.

Outside, teenagers skateboard across the lot,

their wheels scraping up sparks from the concrete.

An old man feeds pigeons the ends of his sandwich,

talking to them in a language

even they don’t understand anymore.

When they call my number,

I stand too quickly.

My knees crack like bad translations.

The Arco off Figueroa always smelled

like scorched rubber and too-sweet coffee.

Midnights there were slow parades

of busted Pontiacs and primer-gray Hondas,

some with plates, some without.

I was fifteen when I started filling tanks,

wiping dead moths off the windows,

watching the Chevron across the street

blink its blue fire into the broken sidewalks.

On slow nights, I bought Cherry Coke

and Hostess pies from the cooler,

sat on the curb by the air pump,

listening to the low hum of the ice machine

pretending it was a river.

Everyone said to stay inside after eleven,

but no one meant it.

Not when rent was due,

not when Mom’s Chrysler had two bald tires,

not when the last bus rolled past empty

at 10:17 exactly,

headed downtown, headed anywhere but here.

Sometimes a guy would pull up in a ‘92 Cutlass,

windows down, bass rattling the change in my pockets.

He’d hand me a five and say,

“Don’t look inside,”

and I wouldn’t.

We all learned young

how not to see things.

How to make small-talk about the Dodgers,

about gas prices,

about anything but the boy from Tenth Street

who didn’t come home after the cops stopped him

outside the liquor store.

Even now, when the smell of unleaded

gets trapped in my throat,

I can still hear it—

the cheap buzz of the Chevron lights,

breaking open the dark

in uneven, endless flickers.

“This I do vow, and this shall ever be:”

–William Shakespeare, sonnet cxxiii

it was for tradition and it was for

extradition and it was for excess

and it was for nothingness and it

was for hazing and it was for haze

and it was for days when they’d tie

us to the fence and this was when

we were in the military and this

was when we weren’t in the military,

because when you get out you never

get out, because the fence is in us

and I never tied anyone to the fence

and the VES counselor jots this

down and I’m glad she jots this

down, because I am glad I never

tied anyone to the fence, no, I am

alive because I never tied anyone

to the fence, meaning I would have

killed myself if I’d have tied anyone

to the fence and I fought from being

tied to the fence and my disability

rating was just upped to seventy

percent because of the fight from

being tied to the fence, but either

way they have to take something

from you, whether or not they tie

you to the fence, and I spoke with

a survivor of torture who told me

the worst part wasn’t the torture

but was seeing others being tortured

and I think of seeing others tied

to the fence and the V.A. doctor

tells me one word, saying, torture,

after I told him what they did to us

or did to me or tried to do to me

or tried to try me or the one who

died during the hazing, just one,

and I think of him and he was

the same age as me, a teen, how

we were children then, really,

and a V.A. counselor told me

that when she deals with vets,

she treats it as child abuse, and

she said it’s because of how

young we were, and I think

of ‘we’ and I think of ‘fence’

and I think of ‘walls’ and I

think of ‘borders’ and I think

of ‘order’ and I think of ‘gas

masks’ and I think of ‘tied’

and I think of there being no

winner, and this was done

during desert winter, and was

done by people on our side

and I was more afraid of our

side than I was of the ‘other’

side and I was more afraid

of our side and when you

were tied to the fence, you

had all of these hours to just

think of how you volunteered

for this and you had all of these

flies on you to think of how

hot the sun is and you had all

of these sunburns to thank of

all of these erasers and you

have all of these tremors now

in your insomnia where you lie

on your bed and you think of

lying on fence and you think of

jungle or tropical or tundra of skin

and you think of their hands all

on your body and you think of

how kidnapping, legally, you

heard was taking a person more

than twenty-three feet against

their will and you don’t know

if this is true, but you know

the bodies were taken a half

of a football field at least out

to the fence and they’d duct

tape you to your chair, come

up from behind you, and this

was done for fun and this was

done for punishment and this

was done for boredom and this

was done for bonding and this

was done for bondage and this

was done forever and this was

done for everyone who was

stationed on the night shift,

because they only came at night,

or just before night, or on the week-

ends, or on holidays, when there

were less people there, when you

felt there was more safety, but

there wasn’t, because the fence

was there on Christmas and, yes,

the fence was there on Easter,

and, yes, it actually was called

‘crucifixion,’ what was done

to us, and this is all I have to say,

except to add that I could not speak

for years, except to add that I could

not feel fence for decades, except I

take ten showers per day, trying

to clean off the old rotten food

they poured on us, that I watched

poured on others, because they’d

make you watch, because skin

is inconvenience and my harsh

voice comes from the yelling for

help that makes me wake me, partners

leaving, the ghosts boring, the sky

wearing its belt, the darkness boring,

the E-4s hovering, the shadows bring

the inability to have laws on the other

side of the earth, how we were doing

bombings at the same time, and we

were doing bombings at the same time,

now we were doing bombings at the same

time as our wrists were kissing metal

with the passions of the dead.  

Mine eye and heart are

–William Shakespeare, sonnet xlvi

I don’t know how to write

a poem about being Karelian.

There is no history.  When I was

near the Russian border, I tried

to do a search about Karelia

and got hacked.  I think of axes

and mass graves and history.

I think of absence, which is

hard to picture: nothingness.

I want to tell you about Karelia,

but there are no poems about

Karelia.  There are no Karelians

in those lack of poems.  I’ll look

at photos of the mass graves

online sometimes and find

they’re so hard to find.  They tell

me there are less than a thousand

people in the world with my last

name.  In the U.S., there are almost

three million people named Smith.

I have no children.  The V.A.

counselor told me my life expectancy

would only be about one more year,

but that’s only if I wasn’t going to

counseling.  She told me I have

nearly the same life expectancy

as everyone else with the counseling.

Why? I ask.  Guns, she says.  We

are quiet in the closet-y V.A. room.

I think of our two-word interaction.

Nothing makes sense in this world.

There are more than 5,000 buried

at Sandarmokh.  There are no poems

anywhere in the world about anything.

Introductory Note:
Crow Language / Crow Testament / Crow Gospel is a three-part contemporary poem that reimagines the crow—not as omen or superstition—but as a bearer of memory, resistance, and witness. Drawing from Indian geographies, ancestral lore, and urban decay, the poem gives voice to what society often silences: scavengers, lost languages, buried histories. The crow, in this context, becomes more than bird—it is metaphor, ancestor, prophet, and co-survivor. Blending spirituality, protest, and lyrical memory, this poem listens deeply to the dark feathered intelligence that hovers at the edge of civilization.

1

Crow Language

I learn to see the crow differently now— not as omen, aftermath or dark prophet, just a misread glyph in the city’s broken script. In Kochi, on Marine Drive, a crow lands between two lovers. The girl crosses herself, spits three times.My mother’s village built bitter words around them: kaakka—hissed through teeth like history’s complaint.They forget this is also a child’s first noise, language born where shadow meets throat. Everyone wants cleaner metaphors.Black as what? Coal before fire, ink before alphabet, secrets hoarded in a madman’s coat. The kind of black that doesn’t apologize.They say: too dark, too loud, too hungry. They mean: wrong feather, wrong sky, wrong kind of intelligence watching them back.In school, a child draws a crow. The nun says draw a nicer bird. What the child learns has nothing to do with drawing.When you attach -less to love, you get the sound wind makes through an empty cinema, the echo haunting demolished neighborhoods.Crowless, they call it peace. I call it the kind of silence that comes after forgetting your own name.They want their gods clean as hospital corridors, but mine have always preferred the company of scavengers.A crow lands on my windowsill each morning. I’ve begun to think of it as punctuation, the necessary pause between dreaming and waking.

2

Crow Testament

The city worships what it cannot break. I’ve seen men pray to ATM machines, women burn incense before locked hospital doors.Meanwhile, crows conduct their parliament on telephone wires, speaking in dialects older than concrete, older than borders.What did the crow teach Shiva that made him turn blue with revelation? The mathematics of scarcity, the democracy of garbage.At a random Temple, pilgrims feed the sacred pond while crows watch from mango branches, calculating trajectories, practicing patience. They know what gods forget— hunger is the only honest prayer.In Valiyangadi market, a man sells caged birds. Mynahs, bulbuls, finches arranged by price. No crows. You cannot sell what refuses to acknowledge ownership.My grandfather said: notice how a crow never flies in a straight line. The shortest distance between two points is not always the wisest path.Some nights I dream in crow-tongue, wake with my mouth full of sharp sounds, the taste of metal and monsoon. My neighbors hear me cawing on the balcony and cross to the other side of the street.Somewhere between Palayam and Sweet Meat Street, the bus stops without explanation. Through the window, I watch three crows dismantle something unidentifiable. Their beaks like black scissors cutting reality.The woman beside me touches her mangalsutra, whispers a prayer against bad luck. I almost tell her: it’s too late. We’ve already been claimed by what we fear. Last week, a crow dropped a coin at my feet. I’ve been carrying it in my pocket, running my thumb over its worn face. Not currency anymore, just metal remembering a different shape. The priests say crows carry the dead. I say they carry the parts of us we’re too civilized to claim— the midnight ravenous mouth, the eye that sees in darkness, the voice that refuses to sing what others have written.

3

Crow Gospel

What the priests won’t tell you: when Adam named the creatures, the crow refused its given name.Instead, it swallowed a piece of night. Instead, it carried away a splinter of god’s voice.In Kuttichira mosque, men wash their feet before prayer. Crows drink from the same water— their ablutions equally sincere.My mother feared them. Said: they come back as everything we try to bury.She wasn’t wrong.I’ve seen how they gather after riots, patient witnesses to what we pretend didn’t happen. Their black tribunals assembled on charred rooftops, passing judgment we can’t bear to hear.At Mishkal Palli, an old imam tells me: the crow was the first creature to teach humans about burial. When Cain stood paralyzed before Abel’s body, a crow scratched earth with its beak— showed death’s proper punctuation.This is why we fear them. Not for their darkness but for what they remember that we choose to forget.During the floods, when the sea reclaimed what never truly belonged to us, crows remained. Perched on floating debris, making maps of the drowned world.The truth splits open like a ripe jack fruit: we were never the protagonist of this story.Behind Ansari Park, a madman feeds crows each morning, collecting their fallen feathers in a tin box. When I ask why, he says: to remember the texture of difficult knowledge. to keep something that chose to fall.Half-histories, demolished neighborhoods, banned books, forbidden love— the crow knows how to find them all.It flies crooked because straight lines are a human invention, a failed geometry.Last night I dreamed my spine grew feathers, my fingers stretched to wings.I rose over Calicut, saw how the sea is slowly taking back the shore, how temples and mosques and churches all cast the same shadow, how markets ignite at dawn with temporary hungers.From above, the divisions we kill for disappear.Every morning now, I leave rice on my windowsill. Not as offering, not as superstition, but as acknowledgment.We share this broken century— the crow and I— scavenging for what remains after the fires of progress, after the floods of forgetfulness.When they come, they bring fragments of themselves. A feather. A harsh call. A dark eye.Each piece a verse in this gospel of survival, this testament to what persists when everything else has been washed away.

Notes: Marine Drive is a famous seafront promenade in Mumbai, India; kaakka is the Malayalam word for ‘crow,’ often used in colloquial speech; mangalsutra is a sacred necklace worn by married Hindu women; Valiyangadi is a historic marketplace in Calicut, Kerala; Palayam is a locality in Calicut often associated with commerce and history; Sweet Meat Street, also known as Mittai Theruvu, is a prominent shopping street in Calicut; Kuttichira is a historic Muslim neighborhood in Calicut; Mishkal Palli is a centuries-old mosque in Calicut known for its architecture; Ansari Park is a public area in Calicut, featured here for local grounding; monsoon is the seasonal heavy rainfall typical of South Asia; ablutions are ritual washing or cleansing, especially before prayers.

We brought my sister Ximena home after she’d spent a month in the hospital. Her body was still a bag of wounds after the bus accident, but she said the pain was less at home.  Her body was wrapped in a cast that hid scars and mending bones but also showed the curves of her breasts, waist, and hips. Even broken, I envied her body and cursed the straight line of my own. Family members took turns watching over Ximena, but she usually asked for me.

“You let me fall apart without questioning my pieces,” she said.

She sensed the mother in me that our birth mother never was, how tenderness could be grasped between our eyes and hands. I bathed her, braided her hair, changed her sheets and bedpan, switched out canvases for her to paint to pass the time. But first, she decorated her cast.

“My world can’t be the shade of skeletons and ghosts. I need living colors.” 

She drew spider monkeys, hummingbirds, and pochote trees. Once she finished the outline of each creature, I painted in its skin and slowly her plaster corset became its own ecosystem.

“Can I feel your heart?” she asked one morning. I sat next to her in bed and turned my chest towards her. She undid the buttons of my blouse and her fingers trickled beneath my bra, warm with concentration. Ximena’s eyes were closed, as she drew on the final blank space on her corset the shape of my heart. Just as she was finishing, I heard the crinkle of beads.

“What are you doing?” Our mother stood in the doorway with rosary beads wrapped around her wrinkled hands. 

“Creating,” Ximena responded, her eyes still closed.

Mother quickly moved forward and pulled me off the bed. “Well, I came to pray with you. Apparently not soon enough. Leave us, Elizabeth. I suggest you pray too.” She looked at my open blouse as if it was the true wound. She took the pencil from Ximena and let it drop to the floor, then kneeled next to her and instructed her daughter to repeat scripture from Jeremiah 17. “Heal me, O Lord, and I will be healed; save me and I will be saved, for you are the one I praise.”

I wondered if God heard mother’s supplication, or saw our communion of colors.

*

Our father convinced mother to let me continue watching over Ximena. Maybe he was able to convince her for a moment of the art we shared. Or maybe she’d given up on us sinners and decided to leave us to our filth. Though I was the eldest, she had the boyfriends, went to rallies for reproductive rights, voter suppression, and climate change. Even as a teenage girl with a dove-like body, small and fragile, she wanted to know the strength and pain of other lives, bodies, voices. It all fed into her art and made her a good student. She was hailed for her curiosity and rarely punished for her disregard for rules.

Ximena had been a sickly child. Our mother didn’t think her little girl would live to see her third birthday due to a battle with tuberculosis that later resulted in myelitis, which left her limbs weak for a time. She recovered, but those who knew her well saw the uneven way she walked from then on, how one leg was stronger, slightly longer than the other. Our parents believed Ximena was so adventurous because she was living on borrowed time. I used to think she had mangoes for lungs given how sweet it was for her to breathe.

I stayed at home to help our mother, learning how to become one myself. It was the safe, expected thing to do. But I loved it also. I received through my giving to others, that has always been my art and love, even at times when it felt like a curse—the weight of mother’s instruction of cooking and cleaning, the aspirations to sainthood that was always out of reach, and the suggestion of a husband before receiving the marigolds of a kiss.

I like to think that by sitting down and learning the ways of the house, I gave Ximena a clear path to leave for her adventures and a home to return to in between. But the bus accident forced her to slow down so that the only places she could travel to were the ones she painted. After several weeks at home, I entered her room and found pieces of her cast slipping away, revealing her chest, a split down the middle of her body that further revealed the broken column of her spine. There were nails in her hands and tears in her eyes. I went over, uncertain of what to offer. “Don’t,” she said as she pushed the nails into her torso, “I need this feeling.” Once done, Ximena picked up her paintbrush and shifted on her bed to finish her canvas of a desert.

I watched her form broken earth, dry and brittle under sunlight. An unforgiving heat permeated from the paint.

“What are you making?” I asked.

“Myself,” she responded. 

I watched Ximena’s hands as they figured out the landscape and yet she was still unsatisfied. After a few moments, she scratched her hand, then around a nail in her left breast. She removed the nail and tore at different parts of the canvas. The painting opened into its own sky and desert, real and whistling in the wind.

“I need to go inside,” she told me.

“How?” I asked.

“You’ll have to carry me in.”

Neither of us was surprised by the world her art had opened up. There were always hints of movement in her work, which she first started with our father on cream cotton cloths: a moving cloud, blinking eyes, a breathing ocean. But now she had begun to figure out how to truly unlock the world of her art. I would never keep her from her path; in fact, I’d give anything to walk it with her. I hung up the painting on the easel and then picked Ximena up as she held a white sheet over her thighs. She bit her lip trying not to cry out in pain. I felt the crooked ridges of skin and bone around her hips and right leg. Somehow her brokenness made her more beautiful to me.

We walked into the painting through one of its scratches and immediately found solid ground. The wind blew through her hair and eventually released mine from its bun. I heard crows in the distance. The scenery was never-ending rubble, offering no escape from its famine.

“Put me down,” she said.

I cradled her tighter to my chest. “Are you sure?”

“Why would I be afraid of my own creation?” she asked.

I slowly lowered her to the ground, but she stood on her own feet, straightening her broken back as much as possible, still holding onto the white sheet, now wrapped around her hips, and grew giant. She took up the entire canvas like a looming column I had to stand back to take in. It felt wrong to share in a place she created for herself. Yet as her first audience, I knew it’d be crueler to look away from what she needed me to see.

*

Ximena continued to paint in search of new ways to interpret her body and our home. This had become the way in which she processed the world now. She even painted me after I cut my hair and made me prettier than I was. “I don’t paint ugliness. You should know that by now.” She healed and continued working.

She found other artists including one who eventually became her husband, Mateo. Tall with bloated features, he seemed more fish than man. Though she was eighteen, I covered for her when she left our parents’ house, making sure to wash out the odor of cigar from her hair when she returned. He’d been married twice before and was known by many a woman’s thighs, but Ximena was the artist and could see visions the rest of us couldn’t, so I trusted her judgment.

Mateo was twenty years older than her and therefore couldn’t escape the role of mentor, looking over her portraits and still-lives, telling her which had the most potential. I became her journal and she’d write her smiles into me when she recounted their talks about state feminism, cubism, and mythical creatures such as the alux. Then they’d top their evenings off by drinking tequila from each other’s mouths.

“It’s like the best parts of school, church, and sex wrapped all in one with him,” she said with a smile as I washed her back.

Having no insight on men, I left her to her choices.

They decided to travel around the US and then Europe to paint and meet other artists. Mateo was also exhibiting some of his work. Before they left, she took me to his apartment and brought me to a gold awning with a small version of Mateo and a priest inside. Ximena grabbed her paintbrush and drew roots into the picture. Once she was done, she drew back the curtain of roots with one hand and led me into the painting with the other. She wore starched lace and flowers braided into her mane as we stood draped in the spiderweb of roots.

“Why are we here?” I asked.

Ximena turned to me and I saw a version of Mateo, small enough to fit on her forehead. He was dressed in a suit. “So that we can get married,” she said.

“Don’t you want to have an official wedding with all our friends and family present?” I asked.

“We will eventually. But for now, we want something just for us. And I want you to be our witness,” she replied, holding my hand.

I didn’t know enough about what love was and what it was not to object. Their union was inevitable, so I agreed to support them, happy that my sister was happy as the priest spoke. I wish it had occurred to me to ask why the love of her life was crowning her head rather than standing by her side. If it was a sign that he was gaining control of her mind in ways Ximena was too struck to see. Instead, we let the roots adorn our necks while the priest took the couple through their covenant vows. 

*

When Ximena no longer needed me, mother quickly tried to find a man who would give me nothing but need. Mother would’ve loved nothing more than to see me married in a church, white and wooden, wreaking of pineapple sage. For me to be told I was beautiful by countless mouths, then quickly hidden under a veil as if I was blinding, a vision that needed to be blessed by a husband and holy man before I was seen again. My smile would be made from everyone else’s smiles, waxy as the church candles. With my sister out of the house, our mother’s full attention was on, always waiting for the moment she could be rid of me. But that was her fantasy, not mine.

The days my mother scheduled dates for me to meet suitors, I would conveniently forget the time or the location. I opted to go to the theater, library, or park instead. If I didn’t see the man’s face, I could deny he was real and pretend it was all a bad dream. Then mother caught on and began walking me to my dates, her hand firmly gripping mine, like a child awaiting her punishment for misbehaving at school.

It didn’t matter. My singleness was one decision my mother wouldn’t steal from me. I was full from the love I had for Ximena and our father, and could barely handle the needles of my mother constantly digging into my side. I’d seen so many wives and mothers in our neighborhood with sunken breasts and aching backs. I had no interest in the monotony of children’s cries and shitty bottoms, or asking about my husband’s day because we had nothing else to say. If my back ached, it’d be from the books I leaned over, and my cracked hands would be from the hot kettles I’d carry to fill my own baths. I waited for the men’s polite conversation to run out as we sat under the trees. The sky was more interesting than any of their faces.

After every man walked off in a huff, mother would drag me home to beat my feet. I didn’t know her anger was so strong. “I’d slap you if I could,” she said with her fists still balled, “but you need a fresh face for your next date.”

Swollen and bruised, my feet screamed in heels I was forced to walk upright into each date. I wore my pain as battle scars for a war I’d ultimately win. Eventually the list of suitors ran out, and word spread to avoid Ximena’s stuck up, frigid sister. 

“Mothers at the church say even ghosts have better personalities than you,” mother hissed, twisting my ankle. Her thoughts on who I could be were so narrow, that I closed myself off to them. My eyes drifted as I imagined the blissful silence I’d experience after. Mother didn’t speak to me for months after and left whatever rooms I entered, refusing to exist anywhere near me. Finally, I’d won. 

*

Ximena and Mateo had been traveling abroad for the last two years showcasing their art. I’d only been able to see glimpses of her in her letters, the worlds she’d seen and how her painting had developed. Still, I could also see the loneliness etched in her cursive, the isolation of being in strange places, and the affairs that were already plaguing their relationship. How he came home grimy with other women on his neck and eventually so did she. How sex had become a venomous bite to sting each other, then somehow brought them back together like an antidote.

I was taken out of myself, transported through sky and sand as I read her words and saved newspaper clippings of her exhibits. These were places I could never go, but was happy to see through her eyes. Through her I was less alone, seen as a peer, and desired in a way that made me feel new again. Ximena always ended her letters with I miss falling apart with you. Our mother on the other hand aged me, made my life feel thankless and mediocre. Motherhood had turned her into its cow, always asking for milk and meat. I wondered if she loved her children, but hated herself for not being more.

Just when I was ready to be done with myself, Ximena wrote to me that she was coming home. I hugged her like she was my own skin when we met and I couldn’t make myself let go. She said I could stay with them as long as I needed for which I was grateful. Mom was getting sick and dying, but still had the energy to grip her rosary beads and suggest who I might marry, men further out of town who wouldn’t mind a woman my age and not having children. I needed to get away from her voice because I’d rather mourn her when she was gone, than bear her final wishes while she was alive.

Ximena and Mateo moved into a duplex connected by a bridge. “Some days are for our art and others are for each other,” she explained. 

Of course, there were days they just couldn’t stand each other and crawled to new lovers, but that was not my story to narrate. I was only there for a safe space to stay. I handled the cooking and cleaning, mixed Ximena’s paints and sketched some of the places, objects, people she’d use for her paintings. Her work had become more renaissance-like, beacons of light crowning women and children’s heads, with herself as the child and the women with masked faces.

“What’s your inspiration for this?” I asked.

“Mateo and I have been trying to have a baby,” she said before inhaling from a cigarette.

I was mixing paints together and accidently spilled one mixture into another. It was my first time hearing this. “Why now?”

“My body will only make it harder to carry a child as I get older. It’s now or never.”

“Can your body take it?” Though what I really wanted to ask was if her marriage could take it.

“It’s taken everything I’ve thrown at it so far. I see no reason why it can’t make a part of us. Making something from a place of love is the least painful thing.”

“It’s not art, Ximena. It’s your body. It cannot expand with imagination.”

“I didn’t ask for your opinion. I’m just telling you my inspiration.”

I wanted to stop her, to hold her womb and tell her to be selfish and keep all its life for herself. Deserts didn’t give birth, yet Ximena insisted that the sun cried rain and that sand grew gardens. I wanted to tell her that children don’t sew marriages back together or improve the hearts of men, or women. Children show what’s at the bottom of you, force you to decide what you all will survive on. Ximena had a hunger for the world that a baby wouldn’t satisfy, and it would never tame Mateo. I watched what we did to our mother, how her loneliness grew in our absence as much as it did in our presence. But once Ximena’s mind was made up, there was no way to undo it.

“Come with me,” she said.

I followed her into a still life picture full of feathers. There was a kitchen table filled with ripe fruit. Some cut open and others not. Watermelon bled onto the table, as did the oranges. But other fruits such as guavas, mangos, and papaya sat undisturbed. A few monk parrots swooped down and picked at the fruit’s flesh, ruffling their wings to make room for themselves to eat. Ximena reached out and petted each of their heads. We stood in a background of blue and watched the birds eat for a while. “Which will bring the fruit of my womb?” she asked no one in particular. The parrots jumped around on the heads of the fruits and gathered seeds from each of them before flying away. One of the parrots flew in the opposite direction of the rest and out of the painting. 

“Where do you think she’s going?” I asked.

Ximena wrapped her hair up in a messy ponytail with her paintbrush. “We’ll find out when he’s ready to tell us.”

After we left the picture, Ximena didn’t paint for a while. She slept, smoked, went to activists’ parties. She invited me to come along, but I knew those were places I didn’t belong. That they possessed languages I couldn’t comprehend in their innovations and philosophies. My desires were simple as was my conversation. I did not know how to build ideas, only take care of loved ones and houses. 

Ximena and Mateo each had lovers that visited the house, always when the other wasn’t around. When I got tired of lying to my parents about the friends that visited, I eventually just suggested we go out for ice cream, a movie, an amusement park. Anything innocent and distracting that could help us build happy memories to blot out the heartbreaking ones. Sometimes Ximena and Mateo met for breakfast or dinner, to go to the market, visit their friends, share a cigar and bath. Sometimes the house was quieter when they were together. Other times their fights whipped both the day and night into terror. Anything could be turned into an argument, a chair, a lamp, one of their paintings. Their ferocity was an old wound that loved staying unhealed.

Are you still fucking her? Why does my sister visit me more than you do?

If I didn’t give you pain, would you even be able to make art? I’ve said nothing about who you invite into your bed or the house you refuse to keep. I didn’t even ask to come back here, you did.

The arguments mirrored the bodies they struggled in. His weight laid heavy and made it harder for him to get around. Her crooked limbs and scars ached years after they supposedly healed.

Several months into living together, Ximena was with child. She’d slept with only women to ensure that no male lovers or Mateo in one of his rages would misplace the unborn child’s paternity. Her belly grew enough to start forming stretch marks that she rubbed everyday. As she grew, she was unable to wear back braces for a time, and often laid on her side. I massaged her back, being careful of her spine as the doctor had told me a few years ago. Her skin was tight with tears Ximena tried to hold back, biting her lip no matter how soft my touch was. I hummed to help the pain go down and sometimes it worked. As I felt and sang into the hard parts, Mateo came in a hurry.

“Where did you put my sand and sawdust?” he demanded.

“How the hell should I know? You know I only use linseed oil for my work,” Ximena responded.

“Don’t act like you’re above being spiteful. You were on my side of the house earlier this morning,” he yelled.

“To cook breakfast for you, asshole. While pregnant and in pain in case you forgot.”

“No one told you to make things harder for yourself.”

She shifted around to shoot him a venomous look. “Why don’t you go down to the hardware store and pick up more supplies? I’m sure the owner has a daughter in the back for you to screw.”

“I actually am in need of a model for my next mural.”

“Fine. Elizabeth will pose for you.”

I looked over at her. Usually, I made myself invisible when they ranted at each other, staying out of the room, or if caught in between them, keeping my head bowed and mouth closed until one or both of them moved away from me. But to be assigned a role by Ximena that I didn’t ask for was a bit much.

My eyes widened as I stared at her, pleading to stay out of it, but she was too busy focusing on him.

Mateo sighed. “Very well, but she’ll need to go to the store to pick up some more materials for me.” I heard him ruffling around in his wallet and putting money on the nightstand. He walked out without even looking at me. How did I become the means to an end for them? No longer a person with my own feelings, opinions, boundaries. And yet I found it hard to say no, or disappoint Ximena while her body tormented her. “Why do you want me to help him?”

She reached over to grab a cigarette and match off the nightstand. “I’d rather it be you than another whore.”

I understood the twisted logic and the appeal of my body as a neutral space for both of them and I didn’t know how to leave. So I did what I was good at: I obeyed. As I went to empty her chamber pot, I smelled wood and earth along with her bowels. The sawdust and sand marinated with her urine like an animal’s cage in need of cleaning.

*

I’d been self-conscious of my body since entering my late thirties. Everything felt uneven, lopsided, and flabby. I didn’t have my sister’s frame which never gained or lost weight, perhaps God figured she had enough problems. I decided to focus on the bodies of Mateo’s art instead of my own. He was primarily a muralist, but I never really observed the collage of sky, flesh, and animals that his paintings held. He liked to take up space in his work, make his ideas known from a mile away by any bystander. “Let’s start with your face. Just look at yourself in the mirror.” Though it was a simple instruction, I struggled to look at myself and not focus on my flaws, my age, my regrets, the wrinkles sagging around my eyes and mouth.

“Your eyes are all wrong,” he said.

“I’m sorry,” I said, looking down.

“I mean they’re sad and I’m trying to figure out why.”

“Maybe I could cover my face with my hair or hands. Or a mask.”

“This painting isn’t about hiding. It’s about fullness. And embrace. What do you like holding? Don’t say brooms or books. That’s too easy and it’s not true.”

I picked at my hangnails. “I like watching Ximena gather materials to work, drawing the subject’s outline. Washing my hair. Prayers that aren’t prayers. Sewing. Sometimes I run my fingers through rays of sunlight.”

He took out a charcoal pencil and piece of paper. “Draw the back of your head and neck for me.”

At first, I was uncertain if he was serious, but eventually I took the dark square and drew a few curved lines. They were all wrong no matter how concentrated I made them. As I was about to put the charcoal down, he stood behind me and circled his fingers along the back of my neck and head. “Remember you have dimension and bones.” I stretched under his touch, became malleable and more than myself and the shapes I was creating.

*

Ximena asked me to sit in the bath with her one evening. I kept my dress on and climbed in behind her, letting the water flood on the ground. Ximena was crying in silence, looking to be distracted from the pain. “It infects everything. I can’t even think clearly. Tell me a story that isn’t this one.”

Storytelling wasn’t my inheritance, so I could only describe what I had known. I told her about my sessions with Mateo. The clay and grass, how the garden was coming in and the tortoises that feasted on the dandelions. She squeezed into me tighter with each detail and forced as much color out of me as I could muster. I needed to be tough for her and wished I could offer more than the home I described, which did nothing for her recovery.

A familiar chirp sounded and the monk parrot that left the painting months before joined us, sitting on the lip of the tub. Ximena petted the bird’s breast as it puffed in and out harshly and spit up seeds that flew onto her thighs. He then flew onto the top of her head and nuzzled into her braid as if it was a nest. I reached to remove him, but she told me to leave him alone. Strings of blood began swimming out from between Ximena’s legs causing her to shiver and moan.  I tried to get out to call a doctor, but with the strength of her pain she held me back. Her nails dug into my skin hard enough to cut me open. “Let me feel it. So I can paint it later. If you bleed with me, it’ll hurt less.” Her head grew heavy on my chest as she moaned and squeezed. We felt the water move and deepen with red as chunks of flesh came out. I wished all her torment on the parrot that slept peacefully in her hair.

*

While Ximena was in the hospital, Mateo gave me exercises to perform for him each day. Feeling through the grasslands just outside the house, folding clay, trying on different dresses and shoes. He studied my body one limb at a time, taking in each gesture and telling me to hold when a position struck him, sometimes touching me to see what I felt like in order to embody the sketch.  I found myself waiting for his direction and the charcoal’s scratch along the paper, sketching whatever part of me he needed. 

“Your eyes go big when they’re curious,” he told me.

There was something larger than life about Mateo’s hands. He worked to turn parts of me in the direction of boldness. My flaws were necessary, and things like spinsterhood, regret, and loneliness were useless to me here.

He didn’t ask me to take off my clothes until the final week. A cigar dangled from his mouth and curls of smoke tickled my thighs. “Hold this,” he said, raising the tobacco near my mouth. I stared at his pudgy fingers before accepting it between my lips, kissing his sweaty fingers. He went back to his canvas and I listened to the strokes of his brush, some quick, others smooth.

I stopped smoking years ago, but inhaling the smoke all the way down to my diaphragm felt natural. It served as a fireplace to my mind, burning everything outside that moment.

Mateo summoned me and we both looked at the piece. A calla lily was braided into my hair and there were orange and gray hues along my shoulders that blended in with the cream of my skin.

He rested a palm against my waist. “What do you think?”

“It’s beautiful,” I said, handing him back his cigar.

He took one puff before putting it out. “How’s it feel to be immortalized?”

I wrapped one foot around another, scratching my ankle. “Feels like lunchtime.”

He leaned his head against the top of mine and moved his hand to my ass. “I could eat.”

I kept waiting for things to feel wrong, to become complicated, messy, shamed, but I couldn’t muster up my conscience. Now I understood what made women easy in his grasp, the comfort of being with someone who didn’t remind us of how alone we were. The fractures in his colors and roots formed beauty I didn’t have before I kissed him. The desire to be a part of something bigger, to experience a sliver of what creators got to have was a blessing I chose to devour. I became the art I wanted to be.

*

Once Ximena returned home, Mateo and I met during her naps. The sex became cheaper the longer we had it. Eventually there were no words or art to it, just the yearning for release. I got the sense he continued coming to me because it was easier than going outside the house. I found I was too desperate to be offended, not wanting to give up the feeling of being desired. A few months later, mother passed. While the hurt she had caused allowed me to breathe in her absence, my love for her made the absence hurt more.  I wondered when I would feel safe giving my body back to myself. When my grief ended, I resolved to end the affair, because grief was an open-ended answer that could be over in a week or never if I needed.

But my grief gave way to another’s. Mateo wanted me one morning in his kitchen. As my thighs squeezed into his hips, a sharp crash came from behind us. We looked up and saw Ximena smashing up the pottery and statues in his living room. She was wobbly, her rage bigger than her body. All I could picture was her shattering like one of the broken objects if she fell on the floor. I pulled down my dress and approached her. “Stop before you hurt yourself.”

Her eyes were blurry with tears. “You got tired of being an old maid and settled for being a whore instead?”

I shook my head, even though I knew it was true. My mouth filled with words that didn’t matter and she stopped them by throwing a piece of pottery at me, a shard of which slashed my chest.

“Get out!” she shouted.

I ran out of the house barefoot, my sister’s screams filling my head worse than church bells.

*

My father let me stay with him. I think hearing me walk around, cook, and fuss gave him some respite, reminded him of Ximena and I when we were young. It replaced the remnants of mother’s dying with a little life. He smiled like a younger man when he held me, when we went to the park, or said goodnight. I was glad he was still happy sometimes and lived a life separate from mine, free from filth and anxiety.

I was able to ignore all I was doing until Ximena saw us. Only then did the affair stop being a dream and turn into reality, a marriage, a heartbreak. I didn’t think of Mateo at all because he’d been reduced to being a stain like me. Thankfully our father was blissfully unaware of all that transpired, which made one less mirror for me to look at. The real war in my mind was Ximena’s health. How her pregnancy broke her body down further.

I knew I was banished to the ends of time, that there was nothing I could say or do, and yet I had to try. If for no other reason to make sure she wasn’t killing herself. I wondered if they’d hired another nurse, which in some twisted way made me jealous that someone else could be in charge of the pieces of Ximena that she’d entrusted me with for most of our lives.

I held out for several months before breaking down and going to the apartment I’d heard she moved to. It took an hour for me to work up the courage to go inside. It was a dingy neighborhood where dogs barked and babies cried, that presented cracks and roaches openly, banged itself up as much as the people inside its buildings. I looked for the apartment number I’d been given and knocked at the door. It opened on its own. I walked into sheets strewn off the bed, words written on the wall that’d been partially smudged out. Bottles littered the ground to the point I couldn’t take three steps without bumping into one. 

“Ximena?” I called. I was scared of where in the mess I’d find her. When I got to the bedroom, handfuls of hair swam along the floor like eels. Everything stank of semen, moist and warm from a recent fuck, the air was thick as if it was still breeding the sensation of pleasure. Across from the bed, there was a chair and partially painted canvas with a bench inside.

“What do you want?” a scratchy voice said behind me.

I turned and saw her. Smaller than before as if her body had wilted. Her hair was cut short and lay in uneven patches. Her eyes were night skies and she wore a baggy dark suit. The sleeves covered most of her, but I spotted a silver set of scissors in her left hand. 

“Where’s your cane?” I asked.

She shifted past me and looked at her painting. “Hopefully still shoved up Mateo’s ass.”

“Is that Mateo’s suit you’re wearing?”

She ignored the question as if waiting for me to say something worth responding to. Our silences stood next to each other. I kept waiting for a moment that felt safe enough to speak, but it never came, so I just spoke. “I’m sorry.”

Her eyes stayed focused on the painting. “I don’t know why, but I’m not mad at you. Well, you were easier to forgive.”

I wanted to look at her, but the glint of the scissors made me stay still. “Why?”

She shrugged. “Maybe because of the years I’ve seen you go without. Things that people took from you, that you denied yourself. It makes sense that at some point you’d fall down. Maybe because I know you’ll spend your life trying to make it up to me and you’re still the only one who doesn’t question my broken pieces. No matter how many times I think of you two, I see Mateo as the predator and you as the prey.”

Most of what she said was true, yet I wondered if I was being let off too easily. If there was more to the pain than Ximena was letting on. I shook my head and stared at my feet. “I knew what I was doing.” Flapping filled the ceiling. The monk parrot from before flew in and sat on the dresser and ate some rotting prickly pear. Ximena stepped forward, sliced open her painting with scissors, and entered. She turned around and said, “Get in.”

Inside the painting, the wall was the texture of storm clouds and the bench sat in front of it. But across from that scene was a naked couple cuddling with each other on the floor. The odor of sex returned. 

“Take off your clothes,” Ximena instructed.

I blushed and stepped away from her. “What?”

“You heard me.”

I didn’t know what she was really asking me to do and I was scared to find out, but I knew I wasn’t in a position to refuse her. “Is this for your work?”

She took out her paintbrush from a suit pocket and began designing a white dress. “We wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t.”

The couple stared at me as I slowly undressed, perhaps amused by my awkwardness. Or maybe I was just wearing my shame. Several minutes later, my sister threw the dress at me to put on. It was a European styled dress with frills at the neck and flowers lining the bottom of the skirt. I could barely breathe in it, but I assumed that was the point.

“Sit on the left side of the bench,” Ximena ordered.

As I did, she went over to the couple. “I no longer require you,” she said in the man’s direction. From the way she spoke, I assumed Ximena hired prostitutes.

The young man looked taken aback, apparently unused to being told to leave. 

Ximena turned away and created another dress. A heather shaded garb with even cut sleeves at the shoulders that fell down to the torso and gave way to a forest skirt. It was made from breathable fabric that didn’t clench at the waist or hips. When she was done, she put the paintbrush behind her ear. I could see the scissors peeking out of one of her pockets. Ximena helped the prostitute put on the dress and led her to the bench to sit next to me.

The woman looked up at my sister and her skin was like clay in Ximena’s hands. She elongated the neck, pouted the lips, widened the cheekbones, slimmed the eyes, and made the upper lip and brows thick with hair. My sister was sculpting herself onto another body, and soon she did the same to me. I felt her fingers remolding me, stretching and folding, but it didn’t hurt. Then she brought out the scissors and I held my breath. Ximena sliced me open from my neck to my chest. Then she moved on to the prostitute’s body, using the scissors more as a pencil than weapon that time. The lines my sister drew were light, a choreography she was imagining for her next step. I didn’t realize I was crying until she told me to stop.

“Why are you doing this?” I asked.

She ripped open the top of my dress, exposing a breast. “Just because I’ve forgiven you, doesn’t mean my art has to.”

“Does your art involve death?”

Ximena’s face bunched up as if she’d never thought of such an absurd idea. “Of course not. Just a lot of pain.”

I looked over at the other woman. Her face was vacant, in wait. Did she already know what was going to happen? Was she so accustomed to pain that the threat of it no longer bothered her? Or perhaps she was familiar with this part of my sister’s work. I’d only ever seen Ximena’s pain exacted on herself and yet I knew I was deserving violence. 

If I understood her vision, I told myself it’d hurt less. “Why us instead of you?”

My sister examined my shoulders. “I need a break from me. I feel too much already, and even if I didn’t, there’s not enough of me for this. But there will always be space in you for me. Right?”

I was scared, but told the truth. “Yes.”

“Good.” Ximena reopened the scar of the wound I got from her a few months ago. But this cut went bone deep, past dermis, ribs, and lungs. I shrieked into her arm, biting the sleeve as she peeled open my heart and studied the veins. She only stopped after the inside of my heart lay exposed.

“Try not to bleed too much,” she instructed.

Eventually she brought out one of the veins, holding it between the pincer sized scissors. “Hold this for me,” she said motioning towards my hand, I did and let the blood run down my dress.

Ximena turned to the prostitute and cradled her face. “Is your heart mine?”

The prostitute nodded.

“Show me.”

The woman reached inside her shirt and into her chest, as if she were just brushing past curtains and brought out her heart, placing it on top of the dress. It was full and red, more like a rose than an organ. A few of her veins reached towards her neck and around one of her arms like roots. One vein grew as if it were searching for another. Ximena gently guided it to one of my own veins, which attached to it instantly. Ximena reached into her pocket, got out a small pin with a face on it, and put it in the prostitute’s hand. Then she put the prostitute’s free hand in mine.

“Look forward, this isn’t for you to see.” 

I did as I was told, breathing through the pain, craving the softness the other woman was offered. Ximena stood back and looked at her work, finally satisfied.

“How long do you want us to stay like this?” I asked. 

“Until the bleeding stops and it no longer hurts.”

She turned and left the painting, staring at us from the outside while she had a cigarette and drink. How much of myself could I sacrifice for her art? Would it make her healthier or reconcile us? I hoped that feeling this pain would provide answers. I wasn’t even sure if it made her hurt less. Still, I was more connected to this stranger I couldn’t set my eyes on, than I’d ever been to anyone else, because only she and I would know what it was to have love willingly given while also by force.

*

Time seemed to go on without me, disregarding what it did, what it took, and when I needed more. If I’d had kids when I was young, they’d be young adults. My daughter would’ve gone to a university, my son would’ve found his first girlfriend, and all my hugs, songs, food would’ve been slowly forgotten. Still after all those years, I had no regrets about children being no more than a passing thought in my mind. My father followed my mother through lily-filled pastures, old and content to be done with life. Ximena moved back to our parents’ home with me. Wrinkles lined our bodies like sentences filling up the diaries of our lives. Except people continued reading my sister and her work, fascinated with each color, nature, and dimension her pictures unfurled. She sold enough of her art to get by, mainly portraits and still lives. But she became frailer, one foot eventually becoming useless, and her back caused her to lay down after a few minutes of walking.

I spoke to her about it one evening as I brushed her thinning hair. “I don’t want you to give what little life you have left to art instead of to yourself.”

Ximena chuckled. “When I paint, I’m not broken, not by poverty, men, or my own bones. Art is whole in the pieces it displays and so am I. There’s no other way I’d rather go.”

Ximena ate less and took more painkillers. My caretaking was more necessary and yet wasn’t as useful. Mateo had the legs his wife no longer did, toured his work, and managed hers as well. He came around on the days she was feeling well, though she needed him more on the days she wasn’t. I only spoke to him on Ximena’s behalf, the lust that locked our loins had long since blown away like dust. It was assumed he saw other women, but Ximena was getting too weak to argue or even care. All she valued was his presence, while I just valued her comfort.

On our last day together, she’d painted valleys, her lines slightly wavy from shaky hands. The monk parrot had stayed by her side throughout the years, continuing to use the crown of her head as his nest. She asked me to carry her into her painting, and I did. The creases of her flesh and bone pressed against me, soft with exhaustion. We walked into a beautiful day, while the parrot flew in, testing the sky out on his wings. The valleys, her dress, and hair all were the color of sunrise. The design wasn’t as polished as her others, in fact everything smeared like it was melting, but it would always be beautiful as long as I saw her in it. We rested by a stone wall, took in the light, and the skirt of her wine-colored dress fanned over my legs.

“I wish to stay here,” Ximena said, looking off in the distance, “the world out there has nothing more to offer me.”

I selfishly wanted to keep her, because she was the one person who hadn’t left me, whose body always provided me a purpose, and a way into other worlds I would never have seen without her. But art was one of the last places she could control her body and I couldn’t take that away from her. “We could stay here together if you want.”

She shook her head. “You have more life to live.”

I rolled my eyes. “No one needs me out there.”

Ximena placed her hand over mine. “You can focus on your own needs.”

I studied the age spots on her hands, trying to find the right words. “As long as I was trying to earn your forgiveness, I had purpose. I don’t know who I’ll be if I go back alone.”

My sister reached inside a pocket in her dress, took out her paintbrush, and handed it to me. “Figure out what comes next.”

I looked at the brush and then at her. “That’s never been my strength.”

“Who said anything about strength? Just try to find what I can’t give you.” She placed the brush in my palm and wrapped my fingers around it.

“Is there anything more I can do for you?” I asked.

Ximena looked around and touched the stones we sat on. “Burn this painting after you leave, so that no one can disturb my resting place.”

My eyes grew wet, but I refused to make this about grief. “Maybe I’ll see you in the flowers I make.”

Ximena smiled and leaned her head against my shoulder as we watched the sunset.

*

After leaving the painting, I burned it in the fireplace. She smiled back at me as though it wasn’t goodbye. I could smell flesh and bone among the cooking wood. At first, the house was empty without her, and I couldn’t imagine stepping outside. But I slowly started working from Ximena’s room to the front of the house, painting pockets of flowers with faces until I was ready to open the door and find a new canvas.

I first met Showkat Nanda in the midst of the 2025 India-Pakistan War, while trying to connect with photographers and journalists documenting the cross-border shelling that, over four days, devastated towns and villages across his native Kashmir. On the night of our first call, Nanda, who has chronicled the region since 2007, was still making his way through communities reeling from bombardment along the Line of Control, and I came to him with short, efficient questions centered primarily on the perils and stakes of reportage in Kashmir: the pressures of recording violence in a context rife, especially since 2019, with censorship and surveillance; the inheritances carried by border communities, many of which have now lived through multiple wars.

But it was not long before other, more elusive modes seeped into our conversation, as arrestingly as they do in Nanda’s photographs themselves, sliding in sublime black-and-white from documentary to apparition, or from historical witness to spontaneous play in vibrant technicolor. Speaking to his evolution from news photographer to documentary photographer, Nanda recalled a teacher telling him that single images are like pearls: “beautiful, but easily lost in a drawer unless strung together by the thread of narrative.” Describing the journal he made as a child from two surviving photographs of his brother and a handwritten couplet by his father, he recited the verses aloud in Urdu before offering their English translation, so that I might hear their original music. Alongside the roles of documentary photographer and “opinion photographer,” as Nanda has often described himself, it was soon evident that one could also add those of writer and poet.

Thus began over a year of conversation between us, woven through phone calls, emails, voice memos, writings, and photographs. As Kashmir staggered through yet another aftermath, Nanda continued telling me about the histories and obsessions coursing through his work—violence, disappearances, buried archives, dreams, faith, protest, and the particular burden of trying to give context to lives so often supplied with it against their will. Again and again, he returned to the idea that, in places like Kashmir, the work of storytelling begins precisely where the news cycle ends and the afterlives of violence begin. 

This interview is the record of these exchanges, Nanda’s photographs and sentences forming powerful breakwaters against the sea of sanitization that quickly followed the 2025 war, with politicians and television panels rushing to celebrate, in language thick with a macabre irony, the “return of normalcy” to Kashmir.

— Youmna M. Chamieh for Guernica

Youmna M. Chamieh: You’ve been working as a photographer across Kashmir since around 2007, traveling throughout the region from Baramulla, where you are based. Could you begin by talking about how your practice shifted over time from news photography toward documentary work?

Showkat Nanda: When I first began working, like many others of my generation, I was primarily doing news photography. In Kashmir, news photography itself emerged through the conflict: almost always, the region comes into the international spotlight only during India–Pakistan clashes. Over time, I began to feel that something was missing in that mode of working. There is something amnesic about news images—one day’s photograph is forgotten the next, as another incident inevitably replaces it. Around 2011, after discovering the work of W. Eugene Smith, who saw “objectivity” less as a virtue than a limitation—and a few years after my late mentor Izhar Wani first introduced me, in 2007, to James Nachtwey’s film War Photographer—something changed. I stopped chasing single, powerful photographs and began to see myself as a photographer with a point of view, almost like an opinion writer.

I began revisiting earlier stories and spending more time with people—sometimes a year or two on a single project. I became increasingly interested in what happens after the “flare-up,” once the headlines move on. Outside Kashmir, people often reduce the region to a border dispute, but for those living there, it is first and foremost a humanitarian reality—one in need of photography that treats people as participants, not subjects. Once the explosions stop and the death toll settles, human stories are all too quickly forgotten. And yet that is precisely where our work as storytellers should start. If a photograph is a slice of reality, then we are witnesses to everything that surrounds that slice. We see things the world never sees, conversations, silences, gestures, consequences that don’t make it into the frame. To pretend that those experiences don’t shape the image itself is no longer possible.

Youmna M. Chamieh: Your work certainly feels durational and deeply contextual, resistant to the front-page logic of the “conflict image.” Could you talk a bit about how you began thinking about photographs as parts of larger stories, and about the relationship between image, context, and interpretation in Kashmir?

Showkat Nanda: One of my teachers once told me that single photographs are like pearls. And where do you keep pearls? In a cupboard or a drawer, away from people. But if you want to show those pearls to the world, you have to turn them into a necklace. You don’t need fancy equipment or deep technical knowledge to do this. The only thing you need is a one-dollar thread. That idea stayed with me for years. I realized that individual images, no matter how strong, needed a narrative thread connecting them. Hence the term documentary photographer. As a documentary photographer, you’re not bound solely by what you see; in fact I often think of myself, really, as an “opinion photographer.”

In Kashmir especially, context is everything. I remember once seeing the same photograph used in two completely opposite ways. In one place, the caption described young boys throwing stones as “the people we fight against,” and elsewhere the exact same image was framed as “these little kids are our heroes.” A photograph is only a fraction of a second—it cannot contain the whole reality on its own. It’s up to the photographer, who has experienced the wider situation and seen the moments before and after the click, who knows the whole story, ultimately, in a way the viewer cannot, to tell that story. 

Youmna M. Chamieh: Storytelling might be a heavier burden than ever before in Kashmir. After 2019, when the Indian government revoked Article 370—stripping the region of its limited constitutional autonomy and ushering in mass communications blackouts, arrests, and a broader destruction of public archives—Kashmir was plunged into an almost total silence. How are future generations meant to understand what happened to their elders in the 1990s? Your most recent project, “Fragments Beneath the Earth,” takes on this burial of memory in a literal way: uncovering the family albums that, for fear of night raids and arrests—particularly because photographs of young men became dangerous to keep—families began burying underground in the 90s. How did this project begin for you?

Showkat Nanda: It is a project born, in many ways, of my own first archive. In 1990 my brother left home; we had no idea where he had gone. A week later, my father took me to a nearby rocky stream. Inside a gap in a stone gabion wall, he hid a bundle of my brother’s photographs wrapped tightly in plastic. He told me, “If something happens to me, you come here and take these photographs out and preserve them.”

For one and a half years, we believed it was not the right time to bring them back home. Then we learned that my brother, like hundreds of young men at the time, had tried to cross the Line of Control into the Pakistan-administered part of Kashmir, and shortly afterward had died after falling from a ridge into a gorge. We returned to the stream to retrieve the photographs, but the wall had shattered, probably because of flash floods, and the photographs were gone. I still remember the silence of that moment. My father came back home, walked to a large mirror in our living room, opened the back of its frame, and removed two photographs he had hidden there separately. Those were the only pictures of my brother that survived.

In 1993, when I was around ten years old, I made a journal out of those photographs. I pasted them carefully onto pages and included a couplet my father had written in Urdu about martyrdom and Imam Hussein, along with one of his poems. Looking back now, I think that was my first instinctive act of archiving. 

In a way, the buried albums project is another angle to my 2015 series, “The Endless Wait.” Since 1990, according to human rights organizations, almost eight thousand people have been “disappeared” in Kashmir. Often, all that remains publicly visible of the disappeared are the faces of their relatives. Working with women whose sons and husbands had disappeared, I wanted to understand the other side of those stories: how violence continues to live on in small gestures, expressions, and the private rituals of memory.

Youmna M. Chamieh: These are deeply intimate photographs, far removed from the kind of parachute journalism we so often see in international coverage of conflict zones, where foreign reporters briefly descend upon a place during moments of crisis, then vanish along with much of the world’s attention.

Showkat Nanda: For me, these photographs are never only about documentation. They are bound up with my own family history and memories. One of them is an image of an elderly mother, her hand pressing gently into the soil of a grave. Her son disappeared in the 1990s, and for decades that earth was the only physical connection she had left to him. This image is not a professional record for me; it is a piece of my autobiography.

Every time I stand before these mothers in Kashmir, documenting their wait and their “living through” the pain of disappearance, I feel as if I am photographing my own mother, and the grief she carried each day for my brother. Their faces are her face; their patience is her patience. I realize now that my work with these women isn’t just about collective testimony—it is an act of sons honoring mothers. I am a son who knows exactly what that soil smells like, and exactly how much a mother’s hand can carry when there is nothing else left to hold.

Youmna M. Chamieh: Another of your photographs from this series shows a veiled woman sitting before a grave, the white gravestones rising behind her like fragments of text. After you first shared it with me, you told me, “Remind me to tell you something about the woman’s bag.”

Showkat Nanda: Ah, Ruksi Didi’s photograph. I was in that graveyard documenting a group of young boys who were living on the run, hiding from arrest after participating in protests. The graveyard, where I myself spent much of my childhood, had become their sanctuary. While photographing them, I noticed this silent black figure seated before a grave. Even before I walked closer, something in the geography of the space told me she was sitting at the grave of my best friend.

Rukhsana, or Ruksi Didi, as we call her, has been like a sister to me my entire life. Her husband is one of my closest friends, and she is deeply connected to my own family. But under the folds of her traditional burka I could not be completely certain it was her, and there was a strange silence between us, as though we both understood I was returning as a witness into a very private grief. Later, when I showed the photograph to my wife, she identified her instantly—not from the veil or the grave, but from the handbag resting in the grass beside her. “That’s Ruksi Didi,” she said. “I know that bag.” That realization struck me. In Kashmir, these stories are so lived-in that people can recognize one another through a mundane detail as small as a handbag.

Startling flashes of truth like this one are everywhere in my work. The final image in the sequence I shot that day, in fact, takes us back to the group of boys I was documenting—the ones evading arrest, living in the shadows of the stones. In the frame, a young boy stands in the foreground, his eyes fixed on the camera. Only later, while editing the photograph, did I notice the single word stretched across the boy’s shirt: “WANTED.” In the world of commercial fashion, that word is a meaningless trend. But in this graveyard, on this boy, it was a profound coincidence of truth.

What makes this image even more haunting is the timing. I captured this “Wanted” boy at the exact same moment, in the exact same graveyard, where my friend’s sister sat veiled in front of his grave. One image captures the beginning of the cycle—the young boy marked as “Wanted,” looking out towards an uncertain future, preparing for a life of resistance. The other captures the end of that cycle—the sister, decades later, sitting in the silence of a loss that never heals. Between the boy’s “Wanted” shirt and the sister’s handbag lies the entire history of Kashmir. 

To document them both in the same hour is to see the past and the future sitting side-by-side. It is the perfect example of why I cannot be a “neutral” witness. When I look at that boy, I don’t just see a boy on the run; I see my dead friend twenty years ago. And when I look at the sister, I see what will happen to the boy’s family twenty years from now. As for the graveyard, it becomes a painfully literal landscape for a story condemned to recur.

Youmna M. Chamieh: The “Wanted” boy is one of many children who appear throughout your work. You once told me that children in Kashmir “imbibe” the war before they are even given a chance to register what they are inheriting—the way your son could not know what sharp vision looked like until he first wore glasses. A child may not even be old enough to understand what “India” or “Pakistan” means, and yet military presence and explosions become absorbed into the texture of their world. Your metaphor of eyesight makes me think not only about how one perceives the present, but also how one might imagine alternative futures. Has working so extensively with children revealed anything to you about how different futures might still be imagined for a generation that has never known peacetime?

Showkat Nanda: This is a very interesting question. For children of my generation, those born in the 1980s and then the 1990s, the reality on the ground was deeply normalised. Conflict, fear, and restriction were not interruptions to life; they were life. As children, we did not have anything to compare this with, so it became our idea of normal.

It was only later, when some of us travelled to other parts of India for studies, that this normalisation began to crack. We started comparing our lives against the everyday freedoms others took for granted. More recently, social media has made that contrast even starker. Young people now see, in real time, how differently life is lived elsewhere, and many of them say it openly: they have been living in hell.

I can say with some certainty that many boys and girls of my generation, now men and women, have largely given up. We rarely speak of the future with hope. Instead, we talk about the life that was never lived, the possibilities that were quietly taken away before we could even imagine them. That resignation is something I recognise deeply.

At the same time, I see something shifting among younger children. Through the internet, through new encounters and exposure to the wider world, they are beginning to seek a different future. Even if that future is still vague and fragile, the very act of comparing, of questioning what they were told was “normal,” is a form of imagination taking root.

Youmna M. Chamieh: This gets to the question of what time itself becomes in landscapes of violence—the way recurring trauma can produce uncanny temporalities and sidelong worlds, more surreal than any fiction. In your photographs, it often feels as though you are in dialogue as much with your younger self as with the children now inhabiting the same spaces you once did. Bursts of color live alongside haunting black-and-white, but both feel at once timeless and devastatingly actual. Could you tell me more about those two visual realms and the different ways they hold time?

Showkat Nanda: After my brother died, I began spending a lot of time in the martyrs’ graveyard near our neighborhood. As children, we already played there because there was no real playground for us; we made cricket pitches between the graves, beside the prayer ground nearby. Before that, I had naturally been very scared of death. Whenever a funeral passed through our street, we would turn our faces away because we believed children should never look at a coffin or they would have nightmares. But once the insurgency began and people started dying around us, death slowly became more familiar. Alongside fear came this idea of martyrdom that I had first encountered through my mother and Quran teachers. Suddenly death no longer felt like a complete disappearance. The graveyard took on an intimate, almost comforting quality; it became a place where I could connect to my brother.

I think that place shaped the way I understand time even now. In Kashmir, the past never feels fully past. Every photograph I make, even of a cloud or an apple tree, somehow carries that early graveyard inside it. When I photograph children today in the same spaces where I once stood, it feels like encountering echoes of myself moving through another cycle of history.

In that sense, while most of my work for newspapers and international outlets is in color, which feels like the language of the present, my personal projects almost always move into black-and-white. In Kashmir, certain histories keep returning in different forms, and black-and-white helps me see that continuity more clearly. Yet it does so without flattening the specificity of each cycle of violence: the particular date, order, or decision behind it. I sometimes think of it like this: color is like a calendar, it tells you exactly when something is; black and white is more like a clock, it shows you the patterns, rhythms, repetitions that continue stirring underneath.

The reality is that when I look through my viewfinder at a child today, I don’t feel like a witness returning from the outside. I feel like I am standing inside a recurring dream. I don’t believe objective distance is possible when you are documenting your own home. I once wrote somewhere that “it’s hard to be neutral when your kitchen turns into a battlefield.” In that sense, my memories guide my ethics as much as my aesthetics. There is an image in my archive of a young boy evading arrest whose face disappears completely into shadow. That was not simply an aesthetic choice; it was protection. In a conflict zone, a clear face in a photograph can become a death warrant or a reason for a raid.

When, today, any of the many children I’ve photographed, now grown up, come up to me and greet me with a humble hug and a brotherly warmth, calling me Showkat Bhaya—the big brother—it is the ultimate affirmation of the journey from the graveyard of my childhood to the children now standing before my camera. It reminds me that my work isn’t just an archive of “unrest”; it is a family album of a people who have survived.

Youmna M. Chamieh: In one incredibly delicate yet gorgeously playful series, titled “The Breath of the Wild Tulip,” you photograph eleven girls—best friends since childhood—reuniting during the brief interval between two COVID lockdowns. They are gathering wild tulips in an orchard, just before being separated once again. Why the “breath” of the wild tulip?

Showkat Nanda: The series emerged from a larger preoccupation in my work with the emotional lives of Kashmiri children growing up in the shadow of conflict. These eleven girls had been together since they were toddlers, so for them the pandemic felt like another layer of separation added onto lives already shaped by lockdowns, curfews, and restricted movement. When the first wave eased, they were reunited for only a very short time before another struck. During those days, I followed them to a small hill where they began gathering wild tulips. Something about that moment stayed with me.

In Kashmir, the tulip is not an innocent symbol. We have one of the largest tulip gardens in Srinagar, and it is undeniably beautiful, but tourism here has often been used politically, as proof that everything is “normal” again. That narrative is part of a much longer neo-colonial gaze through which Kashmir has historically been represented: as a beautiful, exotic landscape emptied of its people. The Kashmiri people themselves are often strikingly absent from the image. So when I saw these girls gathering wild tulips—not cultivated ones from the official garden, but indigenous, freely growing tulips—it felt emotionally important. I remember thinking, “Oh, this is our tulip garden.” It felt like reclaiming the flower from its momentary capture.

The word “breath” came to me in opposition to that sense of suffocation. The girls’ movements, their joy, the way they seemed to breathe through the landscape, slowly guided me toward a more poetic and dreamlike space in my practice. I was no longer just looking at the “now”; I was looking at the “ever.” The “Breath” of that tulip represents the survival of a spirit that refuses to be defined only by its wounds or its restrictions. It is about the interior worlds we build when the exterior world is closed off. It is the quiet, persistent pulse of life that continues to beat, stubbornly and beautifully, in the heart of a child—even in the middle of a war.

Youmna M. Chamieh: Images like these become all the more bittersweet alongside archival traces like the one you once shared with me, from the family albums project: the young women who, out of fear of sexual violence, deliberately cut their own faces out of family photographs. Some families were left with these mutilated images; others with empty albums, waiting for a return that never came. What was your process of working with these families, of returning with them to memories kept so long underground?

Showkat Nanda: As albums became dangerous objects in the 1990s, people buried them wherever they could: in orchards, graveyards, hollow streams, abandoned places. In November, I was able to witness people digging up these images, hidden twenty or twenty-five years earlier. One man took me from house to house near the Line of Control with the names of dead people written across his hand, because he wanted to make sure we visited every family. From the hills there, you could see the mountains across the border.  Many young men lost their lives in these mountains; looking out, I felt intensely the closeness between me and what I was documenting.

I remember one evening during this project, a friend called me after work and said he wanted to take me up to his apple orchard in the hills. When we got there, he started digging into the ground in front of me. I was photographing the whole time as he slowly pulled out photographs that had been buried there for decades. It was a strange moment. I realised I was no longer just an observer. I had asked people to return to these buried pieces of their pasts; so I was part of that act. Maybe that was also why I always wanted to bring these albums back—not just my own family’s, but the thousands that were lost during that time. The scars on the photographs became a way of speaking about wounds otherwise very difficult to name.

Youmna M. Chamieh: You’ve spoken about wanting to trace the journey of these photographs—their taking, hiding, retrieval, the marks left on them by time and fear. There’s something strangely liberating in that gesture, as though by reading the damage in a physical object the pain might become momentarily more legible. When you work with these damaged or buried objects, how does their sensory dimension come into play? Does looking at a photograph’s wounds open a kind of softer aperture for talking about the harm done to human lives, human bodies?

Showkat Nanda: When I hold a buried photograph, it almost feels like I’m holding a piece of skin. The sensory part of it is everything: the soil still stuck to the edges, the way the colors have shifted and bled into each other over time. You called them “wounds,” and that’s exactly what they feel like. In Kashmir, when families bury photographs, it comes from fear. And when you see them again, battered like that after twenty years, the damage still carries that original fear within it.

But what moves me equally is that some of the photographs resisted. In many cases, the plastic wrapping protected them; the damage happened, but they survived it. I think that is why they feel so deeply connected to the people of Kashmir themselves: subjected to continual erasure, and yet still resisting. One of the things we recovered was a strip of film, hidden in haste. Upon retrieving it all these years later, the film could no longer straighten; it curled like a strand of DNA. And indeed I began thinking of it as a kind of DNA of memory—because from that strip, in its new form, it was still possible to create new photographs, new life within the archive. That is why I feel this project has not ended but actually just begun. The archive is still growing through recovery, through return, through continued engagement with these materials.

Youmna M. Chamieh: Your use of the metaphor of DNA reminds me of one of the less immediately visible dimensions of your practice, which is language. The associative life of words can restore an image to meanings beyond its visible frame. In 2009, for instance, you photographed a young Kashmiri boy throwing stones at an armored vehicle moments after his classmate was shot, writing of the other boy: “I did not know him or his name. But before he was taken away, he was able to rest in peace in my arms for a moment.” You then turn that word, “peace,” back onto the empty rhetoric of peace and normalcy so often applied to Kashmir even as it continues being subjected to violence. Can you tell me more about how captions, textual annotations, and first-person narratives work to deepen your photographs’ connection with their emotional and political context?

Showkat Nanda: I have felt the urge to write the context of every single photo I’ve ever taken. In 2009, for example, two young boys were killed near an army camp. A few months later, I went back there and found a huge open field beside the ruins of the bunker, with young boys playing soccer. There were exactly eleven players, and one very small boy standing near the ball making a victory sign. For me, it was one of the most optimistic photographs I have ever taken, because after twenty years the army camp had finally been vacated. But without the context, you cannot understand the emotional weight of the image. It just looks like children playing soccer.

When, that same year, in 2009, I photographed that lone boy throwing stones at the armored vehicle, the world saw a “pearl” of a certain kind. Depending on who held the string, he was a rebel, a criminal, or a symbol of mindless unrest. Those are the “ready-made necklaces” the media and other custodians of public narrative have waiting in their drawers. They are eager to slot his image into a story that has already been written.

But I was the only one there who held the actual thread: namely, that moments before I’d pressed the shutter, that boy’s classmate had been killed by the forces in that vehicle. The boy wasn’t just “throwing stones”; he was reacting to the sudden, violent emptying of the desk next to him. That is the thread. Without it, the photograph is just a beautiful, gritty “pearl” of conflict. With it, the image becomes a heavy burden. This is where the “burden of journalism” hangs around my neck. The value of the story isn’t for the editors in distant cities or for the archives of history books. The value is for the boy in the frame. By providing the thread, I am refusing to let his grief be hijacked. I am insisting that his anger has a genealogy: a beginning, a middle, and a tragic cause.

When people come with their “preconceived stories,” they are trying to steal the pearls and throw away the thread. My job is to knot them so tightly together that they cannot be separated. If earlier I described the thread as “one-dollar,” it is because it is humble and often invisible; but in fact, it is the only thing that keeps the truth from scattering into the dark. By doing this, I am not just connecting photographs, but protecting the “why” behind a human life. To me, that is what justifies the act of taking the picture in the first place. 

Youmna M. Chamieh: The urge not to uproot the image from its context has recently become even more acute in your work. You’ve begun using the negative space within the photographs themselves to write in white ink around the image. How did they occur to you, these counter-captions that refuse the margins?

Showkat Nanda: When people look at photographs, many never read the caption. And even when they do, a caption often contains only a hard fact about the photo. I wanted to use the negative space inside the image itself to register the emotional and human context that only I, as the photographer, carry from that moment. I began writing on the surface of the photograph because I didn’t want the viewer to escape this text.

The idea partly came from my student days, when I used to scribble with a white pen across my journals and photographs. Later, because so much of my work took the form of dark black-and-white images with large shadowed spaces, I began to feel those spaces could hold something more.

The texts are written in the first person because I want people to enter the moment as I experienced it. There have been times when I have cried while photographing families after hearing their stories, but none of that ever appears in a conventional caption. You’ll write two, three lines, and no mention of the crying. But I want to tell people that I cried when I took that picture. I want to narrate the situation that made me cry. And maybe that will make them cry too. If I can communicate what I felt when making the photograph—if that feeling reaches another person—then communication has actually happened.

Youmna M. Chamieh: Negative space, in your work, exists not only around the subject within the photograph, but around the photograph itself. The image we opened with was one of children playing near a graveyard in Kitchama village, one of Kashmir’s largest known unmarked gravesites. It’s an image that holds several realities at once: burial ground, childhood landscape, political wound, ordinary place of play. The other graveyard you mentioned earlier, where you yourself spent so much time as a child—was it a kind of point zero in your sensibility?

Showkat Nanda: That graveyard was my first intimate experience of conflict beyond the loudness of bombs or protests. In many ways, it is my starting point as a photographer. One particular thing I am still waiting to do is a dreamy project, anchored, visually and emotionally, in that specific spot. For me, photography did not begin with journalism. It began in childhood; and abstract, dreamlike images of those years will still sometimes come into my mind. The color of my house, for instance: a very particular green that I sometimes encounter again in Alex Webb’s work, which might be why I always want to spend more time with it. But for many years I could not find the approach through which to translate my dreams and nightmares.

Then, a few years ago, I accidentally broke a thick glass bottle. I noticed that the bottom of the bottle distorted whatever was behind it, and I started placing that piece of glass in front of my phone camera. I went back to the same graveyard where I spent much of my childhood, and began taking pictures through it. Suddenly, the images came closer to what I had been carrying in my mind all these years. They were blurry, distorted, unclear—exactly the way memory feels to me. For I was not trying to photograph any particular object. I was trying to photograph a feeling.

The images are all black-and-white and very dark because those years felt dark to me, both literally and emotionally. In my memories, there is never bright sunlight. I remember heavy clouds, dim evenings, the faint light just after sunset. I remember a neighbor trying to dislodge my kite from an electric pole with a stone, only for the stone to strike his head instead. He still carries the scar to this day. Most of these memories seem to happen around six-thirty or seven in the evening. That atmosphere—the gloom, the softness, the uncertainty—is part of the place itself.

In the end, photography is always about feeling. It is not really about technicalities. It is about how you feel when you make the picture.

Youmna M. Chamieh: “How you feel when you take the picture”: this makes me think of a photograph that, in some ways, stands apart within your body of work. On January 23, 2008, you photographed something astonishing in Baramulla: clouds drifting into the unmistakable shape of the word Allah in Arabic. The sight felt so improbable that you deliberately preserved the original straight-out-of-camera RAW files as proof that it was real and could withstand any forensic scrutiny. It’s an image that caused me much emotion upon seeing it for the first time—as much for the cloud itself, perhaps, as for the human finger pointing so instinctively towards it. As someone whose work is so often anchored in the realities of the ground of your community in Kashmir—its histories, its losses and hopes—do you ever still find yourself, almost two decades after this strange rupture in the ordinary, searching the sky for what eludes us down below?

Showkat Nanda: That day is still very clear to me. I was outside in the lawn, just playing with my six-year-old niece, nothing unusual, when I noticed the clouds forming a pattern. At first it simply felt beautiful, but then slowly I realized it was shaping into the word “Allah” in Arabic. Formed in such a neat and clean way, as if it was made by an artist. It caught me off guard. I felt a mix of shock, excitement, and something deeper that’s hard to put into words.

I remember running inside to grab my camera, calling out to my parents in a way that made them think something was wrong. They rushed out, and when they looked up, they just stood there saying “Subhanallah, Subhanallah” again and again. There was a kind of stillness in that moment. The photograph carries that feeling for me. My father’s hand pointing to the sky almost says everything that needed to be said.

I’ve been religious since I was a child, though like anyone, I’ve had my inconsistencies. But my relationship with God had never been only about prayer or ritual. It also lies in these moments where you feel suddenly aware of something greater than yourself. As if, for a brief moment, the distance between you and God has become smaller.

Living and working in Kashmir, where so much is uncertain and heavy, that sense of faith becomes something you hold onto. Not just belief in God, but a way of continuing, of finding meaning when things don’t make sense. I think my work comes from that space. I’m often photographing very grounded realities—loss, memory, everyday life—but beneath them is also a search for something beyond the visible. Even when my camera is turned toward the ground, part of me is still looking upward, not necessarily for answers, but for some sense of presence. 

For me, faith is that instinct: the need to keep looking toward God, even when everything around you feels unresolved.

Hervé Guibert once described the photograph as “an event of light.” The works gathered in Guernica’s May issue move through similar illuminations, but they also expand the events captured outward, asking us to consider not only what the light reveals inside the frame, but also the invisible pressures surrounding it: history, violence, memory, migration, intimacy, labor, and survival. Across fiction, nonfiction, photography, translation, and poetry, these pieces resist the urge to treat the image as extraction or spectacle. Instead, they transform revelation into a psychological and historical experience, insisting that we are implicated in the worlds these works bring to light.

Photography remains central to the issue’s inquiry into visibility, witness, and the ethics of looking. In I Was Trying to Photograph a Feeling: Showkat Nanda on Buried Archives, Generational Memory, and Dreaming Against Forgetting in Kashmir, Youmna Melhem Chamieh speaks with Kashmiri “opinion photographer” Showkat Nanda, who lives and works in Baramulla, Kashmir. Together, they explore “objectivity” as a limitation rather than a virtue, the moral and emotional shift from war photography toward what Nanda calls opinion photography, and the atmospheric normalization of violence in a place where children often only recognize the strangeness of war once they leave home, or encounter the world through screens. Mothers preserve the touch of disappeared sons in handfuls of soil; buried archives linger beneath ordinary life; memory becomes both witness and resistance. Read alongside this conversation is an excerpt from Sohrab Hura’s recently published photobook Snow, a work that moves through Kashmir’s winter landscapes as through a vanishing field of time and history. That the project itself remains incomplete deepens its force: the image becomes a record of what light could reveal before history itself intervened.

In fiction, Jeneé Skinner’s Canvases turns art into both refuge and reckoning for two sisters bound together by devotion, betrayal, and care. Stepping inside paintings of their own making, the story’s characters move through surreal thresholds where suffering, desire, and bodily constraint can briefly be reimagined. Lauren Acampora’s Salvage lingers among roadside debris, roadkill, moonlit structures, and discarded objects, tracing how its protagonist Adam’s devotional gaze attempts to salvage meaning from brutality before tenderness curdles into possession and violence. In Tiffany Tsao’s But Won’t I Miss Me speculative realism illuminates the uncanny pressures of motherhood, labor, and selfhood, revealing a woman trying to inhabit a role her body has entered before her consciousness can fully follow.

In Global Spotlights, Pingali Chaitanya’s Cupid’s Bow asks what happens when inherited narratives are renewed from within. Translated from Telugu by P. Samata, the story turns myth and folklore into sites of bodily knowledge and refusal, as a woman rejects the logic that has governed her life and begins to write another ending for herself. In nonfiction, Notes on Going Viral, written by Isaac James Richards, moves between Idaho, India, Telugu, and the afterlife of missionary experience, and interrogates what it means to encounter the “other” through language, faith, and lived proximity. Here, revelation emerges not through certainty, but through the unsettling light of continuing self-interrogation.

In poetry, Ron Riekki’s work moves through inherited and institutional violence, searching for a language capable of holding what history attempts to disappear. Molly Thapviwat’s Cherry Coke and Chevron Lights and Self-Portrait with Expired Green Card find revelation within the harsh fluorescence of gas stations, DMV cameras, parking lots, and convenience stores, illuminating the fragile textures of migrant and working-class life beneath bureaucratic and economic systems. In Two Women and the Rain, illumination arrives through rupture itself: moments when wind blows backward or light rises through ice rather than falling upon it. And in Arya Gopi’s Crow Language / Crow Testament / Crow Gospel, the crow becomes witness, archive, prophet, and co-survivor, carrying fragments of memory and difficult knowledge across flooded cities, sacred geographies, and broken urban worlds.

In a time saturated with endless streams of spectacle, the works gathered here ask something slower and more laborious of us. They invite us not merely to consume images of conflict–both intimate and global –rupture, migration, and survival, but to stay with them long enough to understand our place within the worlds they illuminate. These are works concerned with learning how to see: how to recognize the histories, pressures, and intimacies that surround every frame, every body, every landscape touched by light.

Featuring, courtesy of the artists, striking original artwork by Jérémie Guiguen, Mike Blackman, Deepak, Taelor Worthington, Cliff Warner, Faheem, Erik Hadifel, Will Yackulic, Nancy McKie, and Ayush Kejriwal.

Raaza Jamshed, Editor-in-Chief

I burst out of the house into the cool dark morning, backpack slung over my right shoulder, Cloud’s socks and shoes clutched in one hand. Cloud himself is tucked under my left arm—barely. I am holding him horizontally, by his middle, and he is screaming in rage. My co-worker Zoe sees my plight from inside the car and opens her door. I heave Cloud and his shoes in and clutch my left shoulder, which is on fire. Zoe helps again by shutting the door, trapping him inside. I run around to the other side and get in. The sound of my panting fills the air.

Lina turns around from the front passenger seat. “Good morning, Vivian,” she says in her educated Malaysian accent, which has a British-posh ring to it. She’s the most proper of all us employees. I don’t think I’ve ever seen her in anything less dressy than a blouse. You’d think she worked at a desk, not a hobbler’s bench.

“Morning,” I mumble, strapping Cloud into his car seat.

Meanwhile, Zoe tickles his feet as she puts on his socks. He giggles, the white-hot tantrum of a few seconds ago already forgotten. That was why he was crying in the first place: he wanted to go out barefoot.

“We must wear socks and shoes when we go outside,” sings Zoe, Velcroing his little sneakers on.

I said almost the exact same thing earlier when pleading with Cloud, but never mind. It’s different coming from Zoe, the kind of person children love. She’s in her early twenties and had four younger siblings growing up in Vietnam, so she’s great with kids. She wears tiny tees and baggy jeans to work, and always throws in fun jewelry. Today she’s wearing a sparkly fruit-bat pendant, which Cloud is fingering in awe.

I open my backpack and take out our hastily packed breakfast: for me, a slice of bread spread with peanut butter and folded in half, for him a plain slice. We didn’t have time to eat before leaving the house.

“Plain bread again?” asks Lina, who has taken the trouble to turn around once more, this time to inspect our food.

“He likes it that way,” I say, mouth full of peanut butter.

She looks doubtful. “Doesn’t he need protein?”

I know I could try to explain that Cloud only started hating peanut butter two weeks ago. That he now protests at even the thinnest smear. That I try to feed him protein in other ways. But Cloud woke up an hour earlier than usual and getting everything packed and ready with an almost-two-year-old grabbing my legs, demanding my attention, is really hard (physically carrying him screaming and struggling out to the car being the final straw), so, I do not have the energy to defend my decision to Lina, the most annoying of my co-workers, who herself was once a new mother but whose son is now grown and whose rebirth went without a hitch, as all rebirths do, my case being the exception, so she will never understand.

Stop being so negative, Vi. I remind myself she’s just trying to help. It’s not her fault she has lapsed into judgmentalism. People always find my state difficult to comprehend.

Despite my silence, Lina persists. “Have you tried making peanut butter pancakes? You could mix the peanut butter into the batter.”

It’s just as well that she’s sitting in front. Otherwise, I’d strangle her.

From the driver’s seat, Nina observes in her low voice, “I’m sure Cloud will be fine.”

And then, Lina actually shuts up. I’m pleased—and surprised. Nina rarely says anything. She’s a lot like her uncle, Acek, in this respect.

We reach the main road and Nina guns it to 45 kilometers per hour. It’s the fastest we can go on the modified petrol they sell to waste-era vehicles. They want drivers to switch to newer energy-efficient models, insofar as they want anyone to drive at all. But Acek’s done the calculations, and replacing either of our ancient vehicles—this rusty sedan or the company van—would be far more expensive than making do with the current state of affairs.

The sky has lightened to a cornflower blue by the time we pull up to work at the corrugated steel shed behind the run-down house where Acek and Nina live. In the summer, we start early to save electricity and take full advantage of the natural light.

As we spill out of the car, we greet Libby, who prefers to cycle to work. Like Zoe, she’s a student who works for Acek part-time. Libby’s bike is already resting against the shed wall next to our sign, Arvin’s Hobbling Services. She’s taken off her helmet and is fluffing her pink-streaked blond bob. Her full name is Liberation. She’s the only one of us who isn’t Chinese, though Acek swears he didn’t take race into account when hiring. “It just happened,” he claims.

I believe him. We once swapped recruitment stories during lunch. Everyone except his niece and me was hired via a flyer on the Chinese supermarket community bulletin board. Libby shops there too—a fact which made Lina’s eyes nearly pop out of her head.

Though we’re all ethnic Chinese, except for Libby, we’re also quite the international bunch. Acek, Nina, and I are Chinese from Indonesia—Medan, specifically; Zoe’s Chinese (a.k.a. Hoa) from Vietnam; and Lina’s Chinese from Malaysia.

These are fine distinctions that don’t matter to most people in the area, and they’ve dubbed us “the Chinese hobblers.” They think we don’t know, but we do. But today, we’re leaning in to our nickname. It’s Chinese New Year’s Eve. We’re celebrating together, as if we’re one big family. Plus, tomorrow, the first day of the lunar year, Acek is giving us the day off.

We five employees trickle in through the wide roll-up door, me bringing up the rear, holding Cloud’s hand. But instead of heading to their benches, everyone who enters the shed makes an immediate detour to the left. Once Cloud and I enter, I see why. A waste-era electric generator sits next to two squat silver cylinders of propane gas—a compact trio of highly illegal items. In the meantime, Acek comes through, parting our little crowd, carrying a metal tripod trailing two tubes. He sets it down with a grunt beside the cylinders, and I realize it’s some sort of cooking setup, with a burner and valves and connectors for gas. It looks like he made it himself.

Hands on hips, he surveys the items with pride.

“Is this for tonight?” asks Lina. She manages to sound excited and disapproving at the same time.

Acek fixes us all with a deadpan gaze. “Don’t tell the cops or you’ll all lose your jobs.”

Everyone laughs nervously, not just because of the joke-threat of unemployment. There’s a certain thrill about a celebration so energy-lavish that it defies the law.

The mood changes tangibly. In anticipation of tonight’s dinner, there’s a lightness to everyone’s movements as they settle down to work. Even I feel buoyant. I lead Cloud to his playpen next to my bench. My goal is to finish the toaster oven. Finally. With this goal in mind, I survey Cloud’s toys like a warrior assessing her arsenal of weapons.

The play kitchen generally keeps him occupied the longest, but he used it a lot yesterday. There’s the chance he’ll weary of it too quickly, or worse, for good. The train set keeps him absorbed, too, but requires more frequent intervention if something goes wrong. The xylophone is useless, as is the pull-along duck on wheels—they’ve become non-entities as far as he’s concerned.

Loved one day, discarded the next, I reflect in passing.

After more deliberation, I select the imitation Hot Wheels cars with their broken but still serviceable plastic track.

“They can race,” I say in as excited a tone as I can muster, placing them in a corner of the pen.

He looks doubtful, but I maintain my smile. To my relief, he takes the suggestion and toddles over to play. The clock starts now, not just for the cars, but for me: I estimate fifteen minutes before he calls for my attention or assistance. I scatter a few more vehicles on the other side of the pen, on the off chance they buy me extra time.

My left shoulder still aches too much from this morning’s battle, so I pry open the toaster oven’s side panel with my right hand. I fire up my sluggish brain to recall where I left off yesterday. The new inverter’s already installed. Now I test it for efficiency. Not great, but it’s the best we can do. More importantly, it passes official state requirements, albeit by a hair.

All I need to do now is replace the plug. I’ve just gone across the shed to rummage through the plugs and connectors box when I hear someone hollering my name. It’s Lina. She’s pointing frantically in Cloud’s direction. I rush back to the playpen.

He comes into view, little eyebrows knitted in concentration as he fiddles with two pieces of track. My immediate happiness at seeing him alive and unhurt gives way to irritation. Why has Lina called me over?

“He’s having trouble with the tracks,” she explains loudly in a tone I know well. It’s the one that seasoned, older mothers often use to speak with me whenever I’m with Cloud, which is all the time. The tone that even mothers my age or younger use once they realize I’m faulty, and therefore, how much I require their insight and intervention.

“Thanks,” I mutter.

Lina is often oblivious, but she picks up on my sarcasm. “I’m just trying to help,” she explains. “I know your condition makes it hard to sense these sorts of things.”

“Then why don’t you do something about it?” I ask.

She looks genuinely aghast.

“But you’re the mother,” she says. “I’d never dream of doing that!”

I close my eyes and take a deep breath. I understand what she’s saying. If I were a normal new mother, I would never let someone else attend to my child. Her way of assisting is to stand on the sidelines, trying to get me to operate normally. It doesn’t occur to her to lower the standards for normal operation; my health may be poor, but Cloud’s needs haven’t changed.

I enter the pen to help Cloud, who is getting increasingly frustrated, as Lina has anticipated. He wants to attach the track to another, incompatible one. I try to show him how they don’t fit together, ashamed that even someone whose mothering abilities have long since faded has keener maternal senses than I do. But the more I demonstrate, the more incensed Cloud becomes. He screams and bangs the offending track pieces against the playmat, then hurls them out of the pen where they clatter against the concrete floor.

I glance at the clock on the wall above the entrance. Two tantrums today, and it’s barely seven-thirty. I want to hide. I want to leave. I want to sleep. Instead, I lower myself with great effort into a cross-legged position and pull Cloud into my lap.

A change comes over me, as it sometimes does in such situations, and always beyond my control. Machine mode, I’ve come to call it. My eyes dim. My hearing grows more muffled. My emotions retract like snail antennae, shrinking from the exterior world. “There, there,” I say, my voice modulating to a gentle register. My hands press his little head into the crook of my neck and pat his back. “I know,” I hear myself say soothingly. “I know.”

Except, I don’t know. Not at all. I don’t know how two pieces of orange plastic can infuriate anyone so. I don’t know why, despite my best efforts to defuse these situations, they persist in exploding. I don’t know what I can do to make everything better. I don’t know why I am missing all the skills that I require to improve the situation. Cloud and I have been thrown into a deep pit, and I lack the ability to get either of us out. We will die in this pit, but everyone dies at some point, so if I can just postpone our deaths, it will be okay.

Cloud has calmed down, but not quite enough to be left alone in the pen again without making a fuss. I lift my body to its feet and sit Cloud on my right forearm, taking care to favor my left shoulder as much as I can. I walk back to the box of plugs and connectors. I set him down, and we both sift through. I select three possibilities and lead him by the hand back to my bench. He’s chosen something too. My hope is that it will keep him occupied while I try to compare plugs and make a fit. Instead, he drops his choice and reaches for the three I’ve set on the bench.

“Those are Mama’s,” I say, pushing them out of reach. He lunges for the toaster oven’s disembodied dials, and I push those away too.

“Wa,” he yells in frustration. “Wa” means “want.”

“No,” I say softly but firmly. My fingers close gently around his wrists.

“How is the toaster oven?”

I glance up. Acek is watching us, sipping coffee from his thermal mug. It’s the first time he’s acknowledged my presence today. Even now, it’s really the toaster oven he’s acknowledging. This is normal behavior for him these days, and yet it still stings.

“Pretty much done. Just a bit of rewiring, and I think she’s good to go.”

My approval-seeking tone surprises me. It’s the voice of a bygone era. It reminds me of when I first started working for Acek as a teenager, enthusiastic and eager to please.

Acek’s expression remains neutral. “I told the client how much the repairs will cost. It’s more than she thought. She said if we can sell it for her, she’d prefer that instead.”

Out of the corner of my eye, I spy Cloud making a grab for the toaster oven frame. I haul him into my lap to restrain him. My left shoulder smolders.

“Okay, Acek,” I reply in that same strangely peppy voice. “I’ll give it a good clean too.”

“You set the price, Vi.”

I nod as Cloud struggles to break free of my grasp. “Wa,” he insists.

At this last “wa,” Acek seems to realize I could do with some help. He crouches down, the paunch beneath his gray striped polo shirt compressing into a ball.

“Come to Akong,” he says affectionately, patting his knees.

Cloud toddles into his arms.

As they walk away, I pretend not to see the jellybean he slips into Cloud’s mouth. Or think about the jellybeans he feeds Cloud in a surreptitious trickle when he thinks I’m not looking. Cloud probably gets at least thirty over the course of an average workday. I suppose I should be grateful that Acek is affectionate to Cloud, even if he’s no longer warm toward me. Trying not to care, I return to the toaster oven. I now have added incentive. It’s been Acek’s new system since moving the business out here: for any item we end up reselling, 10 percent of the net profit goes to the employee who fixed it up. If the item comes from a customer—as in this case—they too get 10 percent commission, like selling on consignment.

Acek’s always been savvy at the business side of things. It’s how he turns a decent profit, though you’d hardly know it from the way he dresses and lives—the same cheap polo shirts and polyester trousers on rotation, the same secondhand furniture he salvaged from the streets and through migrant community networks when he arrived in this country in his late twenties, before I was born. Acek only buys something if it’s on discount or cheaper in bulk. Even the jellybeans he feeds Cloud are from two human-torso-sized jars under his desk. I bet WholeSale had a deal: more jellybeans than any single person could consume in their lifetime, two for one. But to his credit, Acek’s not a cheapskate where it matters. He treats us employees well, and our wages are fair.

Employees, plural. That’s taken getting used to. Back in the city, it was just him and me. There are more customers out here. The cost of living’s lower, but so are incomes, and even now, the cost of even the simplest RDC-compatible appliance is an investment that your average below-average household can’t take lightly, if at all. Twenty years ago, when the shift from alternating current to revolutionary direct current was announced, the government assured everyone that more affordable appliances were being developed. Technology evolves quickly to meet consumer demand, they assured the public. But RDC machines are still expensive, and people out here still prefer to hobble old AC ones to fit the new grid.

Free of Cloud, I fit the new plug in no time. I bring the toaster oven to the testing station and turn the dial. I check my watch. At the three-minute mark, the heating element begins emitting an orange glow. I bring my hand close to feel how warm it is. For the final test, I’ll have to ask Acek if he has any bread.

Acek is alone at his desk, doing paperwork. I ask first about Cloud’s whereabouts, then about the bread. The answers to both questions lie in the house. I exit the shed and enter through the back door, passing through the kitchen to the lounge room, where Cloud sits in Nina’s lap on the rattan-frame sofa watching TV. The blue curtains are closed—though the fabric is worn so thin they hardly keep out any sun at all. He’s watching The Wiggles on DVD. As with most hobbled TVs, the screen flickers, but Cloud remains mesmerized nonetheless. I wonder if he remembers the TV we used to watch—the latest in RDC technology; giant flat-screen; crystal-clear images. So energy efficient that we never had to worry about exceeding our household quota, not that we ever had to worry if we did. Those were the luxuries of being married to Gabe.

“So we’ll pay the fine.” Gabe would always say, letting the episode we’d just finished slide into the next, his arm drawing me closer to him on our sofa, his cheek nuzzling mine.

My chest aches at the memory, my body missing the sensation of being held and loved by someone my size. From this angle, in this light, Cloud’s resemblance to Gabe is undeniable—the slope of his nose, the shape of his eyes, the way his little lips break into a smile.

Nina’s startled to see me standing in the doorway.

“Acek asked if I could mind Cloud for a bit,” she explains. “He had something to do.”

Nina and I both call Acek “Acek,” but in her case, he’s her actual biological uncle—her father’s younger brother. Her parents died in a car crash three years ago and left her the house. It’s the main reason Acek moved out here, so his niece wouldn’t be alone.

I met Nina for the first time last year. She came with Acek to pick Cloud and me up at the station. Truth be told, I’m not sure I know her any better than I did back then. She’s quiet, though I wouldn’t call her shy. Reserved, more like it. She keeps a certain distance, even when she does speak, even when she’s standing right next to you. And she wears heavy makeup but pairs it with stretched out tees, ill-fitting jeans, ugly hoodies—streetwear, but without the style. The total effect is jarring. Somehow, you’re not sure where to look.

I catch myself. Don’t be such a bitch, Vi. She lost her parents. As someone whose mother died young, I should be more sympathetic. Who cares what she wants to put on her face or what clothes she wants to wear? Not like I’m fashionable myself.

“Do you have any bread?” I ask. “I need to test a toaster oven.”

Nina slides Cloud off her lap and heads to the fridge. I plunk down next to Cloud and squeeze his little thigh.

“Having fun, sweetie?” I ask, putting on my widest smile.

He answers with an abstracted nod, then returns to the blissful world of full-grown men and women prancing and singing in brightly-colored outfits. The settings keep changing. One minute they’re in a forest, the next minute they’re rowing a boat on a lake. It reminds me of the old Chinese music video DVDs that Pa would watch: a singer on a green riverbank, then at a famous landmark, then on a beach, the song itself rolling relentlessly on. Though he’s happy, I feel guilty that he’s having so much screen time. Twenty minutes per day is the recommendation for children under five, as Gabe was fond of reminding me.

When I remember this about Gabe, the ache in my chest goes away.

“Be good for Aie Nina, okay? Mama has just one more thing to do. Then we’ll have lunch.”

This time, Cloud doesn’t even bother to respond.

I head to the kitchen, where Nina’s taking out a slice of white bread.

“It won’t be much longer,” I say apologetically. “I just want to get this toaster done.”

She hands me the slice. “Take your time. I don’t mind. Anyway, I’m in between jobs.”

“By the way, thanks for this morning,” I add, to make up for my mean thoughts about her fashion sense.

She looks confused.

“In the car. When Lina was being Lina.”

“Oh, that.” Nina cracks a faint smile. “No worries.”

She looks like she’s about to say something else, but shuts her mouth instead.

Excerpted from the novel But Won’t I Miss Me. Reprinted with the permission of the publisher HarperVia, an imprint of HarperCollins. Copyright © 2026 by Tiffany Tsao.

The day’s first job was an opossum: a silver coin on the road. Its head was intact, jaw pried into a permanent scream. Its teeth were both fearsome and piteous in their stiffened gums. The animal’s abdomen had been split open, the intestines congealed ruby and black. Its front legs were bent, dainty paws drawn up. Adam went around the back of the truck for the shovel. It was a bright October morning, a jump in the air, the ground still soft enough to break. He dug a hole under the pines. When the hole was deep enough, he dabbed menthol ointment around each nostril and went for the animal. The smell wasn’t that bad, not as bad as in high summer. After three years of this work, he still wasn’t used to the stench of death—maybe he never would be—but he’d learned to tolerate it.

He crouched beside the animal and examined its pink paws, defunct tools. He always made the same study of the animals he found, proud to have kept up this small ritual. From frog to bear, he hadn’t neglected a single creature. This marsupial, too, commanded a moment of reverence. Its retired tail—long, thin, and pointed—was as mysterious as anything in the world. Only Adam was there to appreciate its evolutionary triumph, this prehistoric appendage tailored to the needs of opossum alone. He admired the nose, the ears: this little dream of Nature. Then he rose, lifted the shovel, and eased its point beneath the animal’s crushed hindquarters. He pushed slowly at the places where fur and flesh had adhered to asphalt until finally the bulk of the creature’s weight rested on the shovel’s head. He lifted and pivoted to the side of the road, angled the shovel, and shimmied it so that the carcass tumbled into the pit. There, it changed, became just a thing. 

Back in the truck, Adam motored along the empty road as the sun began its play through the trees, its marshaling of surfaces. All at once it blared through the windshield. He pulled down his visor and scanned the shoulder. A glint in the leaves became a beer bottle, and he stopped to pick it up. He put it in the contractor bag on the passenger seat where he collected objects for the chapel. 

He prayed that Jocelyn would come tonight. As he drove, he pictured her sitting where the contractor bag was, wearing her green fatigue jacket. He could almost envision her pale profile in his mind, the soft lips and nose. He could almost see the long dark hair, the ends cut on the diagonal like a broom. In his mind, she turned to look at him, and he tried to conjure the impact of her eyes. The alchemical flame and terror they sparked in him. She’d been coming to see him for more than a month now, quietly, without fuss, as if it were natural. She didn’t announce when she was coming but followed a rhythm of her own, which he was afraid to question and disrupt. But he hoped all day long, every day, that she would come that night. It made the hours sharper, almost intolerably sharp. Every mundane thing flashed with meaning. The pines watched him like silent grandfathers, casting black paper shadows on the road. 

He drove onward, searching. He usually found his treasures in town: vibrant snack wrappers, gossamer grocery bags, sturdy plastic straws. He made quick work of the smaller animals. He removed a squirrel from under the intersection stoplight and escorted a crushed chipmunk away from the library before a child could see it. On his way out of town, he found another squirrel that looked like it had been there for days, that he must have missed. As he scraped it up, he wondered how many others in the world shared his intimate knowledge of squirrel anatomy: the brown saber teeth, the labial maw. This one was no more than a pelt, requiring a long-handled scraper. It was the worst kind of cleanup, the kind that left a putrid splotch on the road.

He’d hated his first few months working with the state highway crew. There’d been bloated carcasses that popped when he tried to shovel them. He’d chased vultures from half-eaten coyotes and porcupines. He’d seen creatures with every organ, muscle, and bone exposed to the air. Eyes pecked out, brains partially consumed, entrails unraveled. He’d found animals in perfect condition, too, like the velvet-muzzled fawn that appeared to be peacefully sleeping, its neck broken. He’d vomited often those first few months. Everyone did, the other guys assured him. They all wore bandanas over their mouths, though this did little but provide the illusion of barrier. 

Now, he was a sole contractor working for the town. He’d become accustomed to all manner of grisly decay, but there was one thing he’d never get used to: the still-living. He couldn’t stand the contortions, the frantic effort and exhaustion of an animal confused by its ordeal, half glued to the road, snarling at the faceless predator that had hobbled it. He used a heavy shovel for these, a strong swing at the base of the skull. Even so, he heard the cries of pain, of non-meaning, in his dreams. 

Late in the afternoon, looping toward home, he made note of a deer and a raccoon. He saved these bigger jobs for dark when there were fewer cars. At last, he turned onto his own dirt driveway and the sunlight was swallowed by trees. His house was burrow-like, not much more than a cabin, a single room with unpainted siding and moss on the roof. Inside, he took off his coveralls and put them in the washing machine. He cranked the hot shower and marveled at the vitality of his own body. Unlike the animals he’d buried today, he could still move about at will. He dried himself and put on clean clothes. Renewed, he pulled the discarded items from the contractor bag, washed them out in the sink, and took them outside.

The chapel had grown to occupy most of the side yard. He called it a chapel in his mind, but it was really just an annex of sorts, resembling a wigwam. As an independent contractor, he thought of trash collecting as a kind of pro bono service. He felt entitled to keep whatever he could use in construction, anything that wouldn’t disintegrate in the elements: plastic juice bottles, cans of Bud Light, broken sunglasses, flip-flops. He interspersed these among the pine branches and twigs, secured them with twine. The result was beautiful, he thought. A hybrid of man and Nature, knotted and perforated.

He especially liked to work on the chapel on moonlit nights, like tonight, when there was a sense of sacred ceremony. After he’d put the new things in place, he climbed into the hammock and admired the patchwork of Snapple and Nike and Lay’s, ocular spaces letting in light. The hammock swayed, and he thought of Jocelyn. This was the time of night she usually appeared. He tried to see her pulling her dress over her head, the rows of ribs beneath the skin, the shy suggestion of breasts, the shock of nipples so neat they looked painted.

He heard a car engine and opened his eyes. A thousand fingers of light pierced the chapel walls. She was there.

He went back out later for the raccoon and deer, wearing a reflective vest. When he saw headlights approach, he stepped off the road into the brush. He didn’t want to court fate, especially now. His body still purred from Jocelyn’s visit. He looked in wonder at the raccoon, its night mask impeccably drawn, its delicate whiskers like sentient grasses. He was so taken by the beauty of the bristling coat that he removed a glove and buried his bare hand in the creamy underfur.

In his mind, he replayed the vision of Jocelyn taking off her dress in her candid way before joining him in the hammock. They’d lain quietly at first, bodies cradled together, Adam’s hands running up and down her back. She’d used her tongue like a paintbrush, tracing color from his mouth down the side of his neck. He saw blue as it lifted over his collarbone, then violet as it wound over his sternum, then red as it thrust into the thicket at his groin. The hammock swung and shuddered. When she’d taken him in her mouth at last, it was a holy visitation, soaring wings and spangles.

They’d lain on the hammock for a while afterward, then gone into the house for cocoa. She never seemed awkward or ashamed. Other girls were always moving, swishing their hair, pinning it up and dropping it down, as if afraid to settle for too long in the wrong pose. Now, Adam was the one who was nervous, who couldn’t think of what to say to the girl holding a mug in his kitchen. He was frozen by fear that she’d snap awake and recognize her error. He didn’t know why she was drawn to him. He didn’t give her gifts, didn’t make a lot of money. Although he technically owned a business, his work was repulsive by nature. He wasn’t yet old, but she was so very young—twenty-two, she’d told him—and almost more beautiful than he could stand. 

As he was digging a hole for the raccoon, another set of headlights appeared in the distance. He stepped away from the road, crunching the leaves. The truck slowed and stopped, the window rolled down, and a man in a ball cap called to him.

“The fuck you doin’? Scavenging?”

The tickle at the back of his neck—the physiological response to danger—came before he even recognized the man. His brother’s friend, Mason Hatfield. So many men and boys had targeted Adam since childhood, as if just the sight of him was offensive. He didn’t play sports. He was quiet and fine-featured, and he hadn’t wanted to join the service, which was a further stain. Mason was active duty himself. Adam’s brother Colton had already deployed twice. One of his squadmates had been killed by an IED, and Colton had come back hardened and sour. Now he wore a hat embroidered with the words Molon Labe and carried a SIG Sauer. He stockpiled ammunition and MRE rations, as if the Taliban might follow him home.

“Seriously, man, that’s disgusting,” Mason pressed.

Adam lowered his head, subordinate. “Yeah, it sucks, but some asshole’s gotta do it.”

This brought out Mason’s barking laugh. He extended his fist, and Adam met the knuckles with his own. 

“Come to O’Reilly’s for a beer,” Mason said.

“Sure, if you can stand the smell,” Adam muttered, gesturing to his own body, hating himself as the truck pulled away. The exhaust lingered, and he was alone again with the raccoon. 

Both of them knew he wouldn’t go to O’Reilly’s. Colton would probably be there, doing shots and dancing with women, slipping them tongue and sliding his hand up their shirts. The women would be tossing their manes like fillies, pressing their hips against him. It was men like Colton and Mason they loved. 

“Are you ever sad, when you find them?” Jocelyn asked the next time she came. Amazingly, this woman wasn’t at O’Reilly’s with Colton and Mason, but in the hammock with Adam in the woods. She looked at him with her dark eyes, and he thought he saw real sympathy there. “It must be hard. You really love animals, don’t you.” She ran a finger over his shoulder, and he felt he’d been marked with hot ink.

Adam started talking helplessly, telling her all the things he’d never tell another man. He talked about how, when he was young, he hated his father—and later, his brother—for hunting deer. He hated his brother for calling Adam a pussy when he cried at the severed deer heads. It wasn’t the death that bothered him, he wanted to shout, it was the killing. But he hadn’t fought back against either his father or brother, and he couldn’t forgive himself for this. The animals had no one else to defend them. Adam was the only one who cared, the boy who sat for hours watching squirrels at their business, digging decoy acorn caches.

As a child, the first time he’d seen a squirrel lying flat on the road, he hadn’t understood. He asked his mother to stop the car; maybe the squirrel was sick. After she explained what happened when animals ran across the street, he was silent. He couldn’t understand how anyone could keep driving afterward, how anyone could casually accept the destruction of a creature that had been animated—foraging, scampering—just moments before.

After that, he made his mother turn the car around whenever they saw what she called roadkill. “But it’s already dead, honey,” she pleaded. Still, he needed to see. He felt that someone had to look. Someone had to contemplate the flesh ripped by the fender, the foreleg crushed by the tire, the eye dotted with gnats. Humans had caused the destruction, and a human should witness it. The first time he knelt by a carcass, his mother was alarmed by his tears. She’d taken him in her arms and carried him back to the car, terror glazing her eyes, as if the trouble were with him. He hadn’t known how to explain that his impulse wasn’t a perversion but a kind of penance. He was looking at the shattered creatures in order to right the balance.

When he finished talking, Jocelyn smiled sadly and lay her head on his shoulder. He stroked her back, the smooth skin over the scapula bone, and for a moment imagined happiness.

“I should go,” she whispered.

“Don’t,” he breathed into her ear. “Stay until morning. It’s dangerous out there.” 

She laughed, but he was serious. He’d seen so much, he knew how easy it was, how ruthless the impact of steel could be.

Over the next four days, Jocelyn didn’t come, and Adam was sure the dream was over, that she recognized him as the misfit he was, the weakling other men saw. 

But on the fifth day, she returned to the chapel. He didn’t wait for her to come to the hammock but went straight to her and pulled off her dress. He lifted her astride him, the way he imagined his brother might do. He pushed her hair back and kissed her deeply. She melted into him, and together they rolled into the hammock. He closed his eyes and allowed pictures to bloom behind his eyelids. Whenever he was inside her, he saw a spacious palatial room. There were fine carved furnishings, fluted columns, art on the walls. He sensed other rooms adjacent, alcoves and antechambers. He would have liked to visit these other rooms but was too involved in this one, enchanted. As he finished—rising to the ceiling, spinning with the chandeliers—he hoped to next time go farther, explore more.

There was a strange melancholy in removing the condom that sagged with his own fluid. So much wasted potential, so many small futures. Maybe next time he wouldn’t wear one. Maybe next time he’d expand into the distant corners of the palace and take up residence. 

Afterward, still lying in the hammock, Jocelyn looked up to the ceiling and asked, “What made you start building this?” and Adam again found that he couldn’t stop talking. He told her about earning badges for the Arrow of Light, the highest rank in Cub Scouts. For his Artist badge, he’d made a construction from found objects: plastic utensils, lace, bottle caps, chicken wire. He laughed. “I guess I never stopped.”

She paused. “Are you, like, an Eagle Scout?”

“No, I dropped out at Star. The uniforms and salutes and all the God and country was getting too militaristic for me. It felt like they were prepping us to be soldiers or something. I only really cared about wilderness skills and camping out.”

For his Naturalist badge, he’d kept a cricket zoo and a terrarium of frogs. He’d observed animals in the wild and kept a behavior log. To this day he remembered the exact definition of a naturalist from his Webelo handbook, and he quoted it for Jocelyn in the hammock: “The real naturalist has a pair of sharp eyes and a great love for Nature. He sees things that other people miss. This is because he knows where to look and what his eyes show him.” Adam glanced at Jocelyn, then away. “What I really wanted to be was a park ranger.”

“That’s not a surprise.”

“Well, clearly it didn’t work out. You need a degree to be a ranger, but I couldn’t deal with college. I just wanted to be outside. Anyway, now here I am.”

“Now here you are.”

“You know, it is hard,” he said after a minute. “You asked me before whether I’m sad when I find the animals, and the answer is yes. It’s hard. Especially when they’re suffering, and I have to dispatch them. I do love animals. I’ve tried to never kill a living thing unless I have to.”

She picked up her head and smiled, eyes narrowed. “Never? That can’t be true. You’ve never swatted a mosquito or squished a spider?”

“No. I mean, I’m sure I’ve killed plenty of things without meaning to, just by walking outside or driving a car or breathing. But never on purpose. Never in anger or annoyance.”

Jocelyn shifted away from him slightly, and he feared his words sounded arrogant.

“Wow, that’s unbelievable, but I believe you.” She sighed. “I’m afraid I’ve killed plenty of insects in my life. And mice. I’m not proud of it, but my apartment’s infested. I feel bad for the mice, I know they’re just trying to get warm and have families, but they poop literally everywhere.”

Adam considered telling her about the mice, squirrels, and raccoons that nested in his own house. They rattled in the walls at night, and he’d grown accustomed to the flit in the corner of his eye when a dusky shape skated over the floor. He swept the droppings from his counter each morning like poppy seeds. But Jocelyn was looking at him now, and the transmutation was starting anew. Her eyes, their melting softness and upturned sweetness, broke him down at a cellular level.

“Maybe I could stay here for a little while,” she said. “If the mice get worse.”

He heard the words, but their meaning hovered just out of reach. He responded quickly, before full euphoria burst over him. “Of course you can stay here. Stay as long as you like.”

She nuzzled into him. “Thank you. That’s so nice of you.”

He pulled her closer to him in the hammock. After a while they’d find a rhythm, a comfortable pattern together. Routines, rituals. He could barely breathe. He pulled away, because he had to, and stood up, dizzy. “Let’s eat something,” he said. 

He put on his jeans, and she followed him naked from the chapel to the house. He made a curry, the first thing he’d ever learned to cook and which he made several times a week: tofu, rice, cauliflower, dyed bright with turmeric. He’d been a vegetarian for over twenty years. It was his first volley, as a boy, against the system of death. Looking at Jocelyn sitting on his bed—the bed itself salvaged from the recycling station, dressed with sheets from the community center, aglow in the light of a lamp from a thrift shop—he thought of the slaughterhouses and poultry farms, the burning elephant tusks, the whirlpools of trash in the ocean. Everything magnificent rubbed out by the compulsive touch of humans. 

He felt like a heroic figure, making a simple meal for a woman in this austere space. He built a fire in the fireplace and served the curry. Jocelyn sat at the table, bare in the firelight, jet hair framing her breasts. There was only a handful of girls like this in the world; it was a miracle he’d found her on a bench outside the community college. He’d stopped to pick up a deflated Mylar balloon from the side of the road and found himself at her feet. He knew nothing except that she was studying nursing and worked at a diner in Dunfield. He hadn’t asked the name of the diner. He didn’t want her to think that he’d come sit in a booth and watch her. He sensed that she’d bloom for him at a remove. 

When he asked about her family, she closed her eyes. “Let’s say I don’t really have a lot in common with my parents. They disapprove of my choices, and I disapprove of theirs. My brother’s okay, but he moved to Colorado a long time ago, and I hardly ever talk to him.”

“Well, siblings can be overrated,” Adam offered. “My brother and I never really got along. I kind of avoid him now.” It seemed she was waiting for more, so he added, “Also, I think there’s stuff he did in the service I don’t want to know about.” He stopped there. He didn’t say that he hated being in the same room with Colton. There was a brutality in his brother’s eyes that wasn’t exactly new, but freshly sharpened. When his brother looked at him, he wanted to step away.

“Come back whenever you like,” he told Jocelyn when she left a few hours later, in the gray vapor of dawn. “If you want to stay, you’re welcome any time.” 

Again, she did it, left him alone for three, four, five nights in a row. How could she talk about moving in with him and then disappear like that? It was a physical ache to look at the empty passenger seat, the flaccid contractor bag. He berated himself for not having asked the name of the diner, the address of her apartment, even her last name. Any man would have asked. Any man would have wrested control of the story. Only Adam would release a girl like that into the wild. 

He was nauseated as he worked. He struggled to see beauty in the animals he found. The smell of decaying flesh just mixed with the acid of his fear and regret. By the fifth day, all he saw was ugly, dumb death.

The temperature dove as the week progressed, and one cold night his headlights caught the mirrored eyes of a cat splayed on the road. A gray cat, likely invisible to the driver that hit it. One of the back legs had been flattened, but the animal was alive. Adam’s gut clenched as he assessed it. The cat had a collar, a metal tag with the name “Dusty.” It was long-haired and its nose was a tight black heart. A beautiful cat. He extended his gloved hand, and the cat lifted its lip to hiss. A good sign. It was possible the driver hadn’t even noticed the collision. Most everyone, no matter the urgency of their journey, stopped for a cat or dog. 

Adam’s gloves were made of stiff leather and reached to the elbows, allowing him to lift the cat into the soft crate. It mewled in the back seat as he drove to the animal hospital where a night vet was on duty. He stayed in the waiting room, hunched in a vinyl chair beside a ficus tree, and for the first time in days felt free of Jocelyn. He saw only the image of the cat’s small face, its slit pupils with wisdom beyond measured time. All the cat knew was the ballooning now. This moment, and this one. Life and death and the bridge in between. 

He stayed in the chair until the vet had called the phone number on the tag and located its owner. He stayed until it was determined the animal would survive. Only then did he leave the animal hospital and rejoin the night road, its yellow lines now seeming a beneficent guide, thanking him for helping make the world more whole. 

It was as if saving the cat had revised the night in his favor, because when he returned home Jocelyn was waiting for him, bundled in the cold. They went straight into the house instead of the chapel, and he started a fire. It was different, less spontaneous somehow, when she took her clothes off indoors. He felt compelled to seduce her in some way. He helped with the green fatigue jacket and the woolly sweater and the buttons of the dress. His fingers trembled. There was, as always, no bra. He pulled her onto the bed, which felt too wide and flat compared to the cradling hammock, but his mind was made up—it must have happened when he’d first seen her at his door, it must have been tied up with the rescue of the cat—and as they lay on top of the blankets, warming each other’s skin, the whisper leaked out of him. 

She didn’t answer at first, and for the moment he thought she’d agree he felt a helium rush. But she only smiled weakly and shook her head. Just a slight movement from side to side. “I know it would feel better for you without it, but…”

He didn’t wait for her to finish. “It’s okay,” he muttered into her neck. Her rejection was clear and cruel. It had nothing to do with his pleasure, he wanted to protest, but didn’t want to dignify her insult with an argument. 

With effort, he reached across her body to the bedside table and found a condom in the drawer. This time, he didn’t feel the gracious dimensions of rooms in a palace. He felt that he was confined to the vestibule, the foyer, the mudroom. When he came, it was like discharging into a shower drain.

“Listen, I’m sorry about the condom,” she said quietly as he stoked the fire afterward. 

“What?” he croaked. “No. There’s nothing to be sorry about.” His face heated, and he was afraid his anguish would be visible.

“It’s just that I’ve had to learn the hard way.” 

She was sitting nude on the edge of the bed, hunched over a mug of cocoa. Her hair hung over one shoulder, a slash of dark on light. A midnight pelt, a mink. The meaning of her words skimmed the surface of his consciousness. The visual cortex of his brain was occupied while the auditory cortex did its interpretive work. I’ve had to learn the hard way, the mink was saying, but what had it learned?

“How’s that?” he said.

“I mean I made a mistake once.” She looked up at him, and he stared back at her, this strange creature on his bed. 

“You made a mistake,” he repeated.

“Yeah. I got pregnant a while back.”

This statement made no sense to Adam. It slid off the framework of logic. She wasn’t pregnant, that much was clear. She would have told him if she were pregnant. She would have mentioned if she had a child. And yet he was processing her message in a buried place. His chest clamped, and he felt that something new was entering his bloodstream. He didn’t answer the girl but looked at her blankly, feeling his pulse gain speed. She appeared to be waiting for something from him. 

“Anyway, it was awful, and I don’t want it to happen again.”

He let his eyes close for a moment, and when they reopened, she was still sitting there looking at him with that unbearable, expectant expression. Adam’s heart raced. 

“You mean that you were pregnant, but now you’re not? By accident, or on purpose?”

His voice was cold. Jocelyn blinked, and her face colored. Adam looked away, into the fire. His body had begun to tremble. He took rapid breaths, staring at the fireplace, the madly flapping flames. For a flickering moment, all the world was inferno, consuming anything put in its jaw. He had an image of Jocelyn placing her baby in that great oven.

His voice shook. “What do you want me to say? I’m sorry for you?” 

Naked, he went to the sink and poured his cocoa down the drain. He pulled on his underwear and jeans. His ears were full with the slamming of his heart. He couldn’t look at her. The image taking shape in his mind was of a mangled thing in the fire, a bloody ruined body, worse than anything he’d seen on the road. 

Without meeting her eye, he took his coat and went outside. He got into his truck and drove. His heartbeat slowed a little as he followed his own headlights into the night. It was a relief to just move forward, to press the sole of his boot to the accelerator and go away. When he came into town, he saw the sign for O’Reilly’s. He hit the directional signal, parked in the gravel lot. 

It was more crowded than usual. A few older guys with beards sat at the bar. Some middle-aged women in flounced blouses glanced up as he came in, and their gazes lingered. Adam was shaky on his feet as he went to the bar and found an empty stool. Before he’d even caught the eye of the bartender, a trim man appeared beside him, raising a hand for a high five. Mason Hatfield. Adam brought his own hand up in rough greeting. 

“Get a beer and come play, man.” Mason withdrew to the pool table at the far end of the bar.

Adam looked, and sure enough there was Colton, taking a shot with the cue. He wasn’t sure if Colton saw him or not, if Mason had pointed him out. Aerosmith was on the jukebox, loud and jangling. He tried to latch on to the drumbeat. He ordered a Jim Beam and watched as a drunk woman climbed onto a barstool and balanced there, swaying to the music. As she wobbled, Adam stared at the breasts pushing up from the low-cut tank top, the butterfly tattoo wedged in the cleavage. Finally, the woman toppled from the stool onto the lap of the man beside her. 

Adam made himself look away. The bourbon came, and he swallowed it fast. He rarely drank, and the alcohol hurt going down. But soon his throat numbed, and he felt only a pleasing heat. He watched the drunk woman. She was in her fifties, maybe sixty. It was a joke that the female body could be owned and operated by women like this. It was an offense that a girl like Jocelyn, with a half-formed mind, could be responsible for life and death. As if the choice were hers, a lever to flip based on mood or circumstance.

He turned his stool away from the woman and watched Colton at the pool table. There was the bald eagle T-shirt, the camo pants, the Molon Labe hat. Sliding up beside him was a girl with flaxen hair, probably bottle-dyed, too straight and smooth to be real, like the hair on a doll. Her turquoise top was just a scrap of fabric, and her stiff, low-rise jeans showed the band of thong underwear. It was like they were dressed for different climates, different planets. Adam watched Colton chat with this girl, drinking from his bottle of Budweiser. She touched his brother’s chest with her fingers. Adam finished his bourbon and ordered a beer, which looked like urine and tasted like backwash. In his mind he saw Jocelyn, whose face wasn’t beautiful to him anymore but pointed and pinched, with flashing teeth. It had been a mistake. The stupid mistake of a boy who’d refused to see.

Now he made himself look. He looked at the woman on the man’s lap at the bar, the bleeding lipstick, the hoops weighing her sagging earlobes, the smudged butterfly between her tits. He looked at the blonde at the pool table with Colton, the dip of ass above the band of jeans, the fried white hair on her head. He looked all around the bar. He looked at what these women had done to themselves. 

He made himself finish the disgusting beer, then ordered another Jim Beam, old friend, slipping down his throat like silk. As Adam watched, Colton came out of the pool room toward him, the girl following behind. His eyes landed on Adam as he approached, and Adam swiveled his stool to face his brother. The illustrated eagle on his shirt was suspended mid-dive, talons stretched, intimations of stars and stripes between the spread of its wings. A joke. Bald eagles weren’t noble raptors. They were scavengers, avaricious thieves who stole the prey of other birds, no better than turkey vultures. For a moment, as the angry eagle drew close and filled his field of vision, Adam was certain Colton would ram into him, knock him to the floor. Adam’s body tensed, his jaw locked. He remembered play-fighting with his brother, how they’d arm wrestle and body slam each other. He remembered the adrenaline that surged up in him against his brother’s surprising strength, the bloodthirst of jousting. Now he prepared for the blow, invited it. The fiery rush came through him, a slug of scorn and arousal. He watched Colton turn to take the girl’s hand. She threw her flap of hair and swiveled her hips. Adam’s teeth clenched as they passed, no more than two feet away, on their way to the other side of the bar where the jukebox was.

Adam remained in place. His hot blood coursed in an igneous, futile loop. He felt an impact in his chest as if his brother had actually struck him—like a stiletto through a lung. In one fast drink he emptied the bourbon. As the bartender drifted by, he muttered an order for another. His vision seemed to narrow so that his eyes focused only on what was directly in front of him. Everything else was blurred, the bar just a stage set. He was distantly aware that the music on the jukebox had changed to death metal, power-drill drums and migraine guitar.

A perfect new bourbon appeared and hit his gut like flash powder. The dark borders of his vision constricted further, and Adam slouched on the stool. He stared at the floor, the place where his brother had gone past, his eyes glued to a sick liver-shaped stain on the wood, the scum in the seams between planks. It took brute effort to slide off the stool and move toward the jukebox. With an ungentle nudge, he forced the blond tramp out of the way and pushed up next to his brother.

“Hey,” he said. It came out as a slow drawl. 

Colton turned, a look of perplexity on his face, a flash of innocent surprise in the naked moment before Adam hit him. But somehow the punch got sidetracked, and Adam saw his fist skate, sloppy and unfocused, off his brother’s chin. It was the same dumb way he’d fought as a kid. The momentum of his own arm pulled him sideways, and he lost balance. The blond girl squealed as he crashed down. 

The next moment, the eagle was overhead, reaching for him with outstretched talons. Colton grabbed his arm. “Dude, what the fuck?” Adam became aware of a pain in his leg and realized he must have collided with the jukebox. “Jesus, man, get up.” His brother’s face disappeared then, replaced with the scowl of a stranger. Adam glimpsed a bouquet of sea-green neck tattoos as the stranger pulled him half-upright and dragged him through the bar to the exit.   

Outdoors, he swayed in the parking lot. He stared up at the night sky, a gauzy penumbra around each pin of starlight. As he watched, the stars merged and traded places. Their movements were nonsensical, unsynchronized, and he couldn’t focus on them for long. Something else was tugging at his attention. He felt that a rancid package was beginning to open inside him. He concentrated on keeping it shut, but it was too late—there was barely enough time to get away from the bar door, to scuttle to the side of the building before the fetid contents spilled out, splattering on the gravel. Adam hated himself deeply and thoroughly. He hated every corrupt, loathsome thing he’d allowed into his life. He saw all of it come out, a runnel of poison juice, a bubbling puddle on the ground. 

As he hunched, catching his breath, he heard a car door slam behind him. He straightened, dizzy, and saw a truck reversing out of its parking spot. Colton’s truck. It paused, shifted into drive, and rumbled slowly over the gravel. Adam saw the two figures in the front cab. He stepped toward the truck as it approached, lifting his arms. The headlights hit his face, then slid away as the truck turned out of the parking lot and onto the road.

Adam took a drag of cold air. His heart jumpstarted. He wasn’t finished. His brother was wrong and needed to learn, needed to be taught who Adam was. He went to his own truck. In the driver’s seat, he struggled with the ignition key, then cranked the wheel and pulled out of the lot. Colton’s taillights were still visible down the road, taunting him. Adam’s head pounded, and his vision blurred, but he picked up speed. It wasn’t clear where the shoulder of the road was. The peripheral stands of trees moved in and out. He tried to center his truck on the double yellow lines, keeping his boot pressed to the accelerator.

Colton’s taillights disappeared around a distant bend. Adam removed his boot from the gas to prepare for the bend himself, putting all his focus on steering. The yellow lines softened and multiplied before him. Abruptly, the road itself seemed to cleave. He slowed. But now, from around the bend came a pair of glaring eyes, a set of headlights on high beam. They rushed toward him in sudden, ferocious ambush. He slammed the brake too hard, entering a spin as the oncoming vehicle swerved.

He spun, and the acres of night woodland whirled. So many animals hidden there. They swirled around, all around, crouched deep in the trees. Animals in the hundreds. Alert to sound, scent, vibration. The rustle of danger, the step of a predator. 

The truck slowed. It came to rest at an incline on the side of the road, a gentle tilt.

Adam spun and spun.

“Salvage” is a short story from Lauren Acampora’s forthcoming book, The Animal Room.

Two women walk in the rain

their backs receding.

The thing is there’s no knowing 

who might rise, fall. One of them 

once said, it’s like when wind 

out of nowhere—suddenly blows 

backwards. The other, or when light comes up 

through ice rather than falling 

down and in. Yes. When a body plunges

sometimes it’s not the same old cold

it’s different. Violent. To be clear

—there’s plutonium 

and there’s helium. There’s a hand

then nothing. 

Something magical happens in the gathering of literary works. When pressed together, they begin to whisper to one another, to resonate. So it is with Guernica’s April issue. Across fiction and nonfiction, poetry, conversation, and Spotlights, these works attend to our present moment through the minutiae of human relationships. War and wonder, suspense and arrival, dread and discovery reflect through the smallest of interstices—between siblings, lovers, strangers, children at play. This issue is populated with microcosms that arc toward the universal, and the questions that press upon us in a time marked by rupture, fear, and uncertainty.

In fiction, Stacie Shannon Denetsosie’s John Wayne’s Jacket follows twin sisters learning to look beyond the similarities a mirror casts, and what begins as a conflict over boys and borrowed jackets unfolds into a deeper struggle for identity, and the fractures wrought in the process of becoming. In Abuchi Modilim’s American Actors, a group of children stage an imagined American film, shoving and fighting among themselves, their play masking a deeper grief. Beneath the performance lies the unbearable: mourning the death of a friend, and the quiet, incomprehensible truth of a world in which children are allowed to die.

In nonfiction, Daniela Gutiérrez’s Three Pages of Don Quixote, turns to the question of what books are for, and how they shape the lives that we come to inhabit, at a time when the humanities and literary institutions are increasingly under threat. Alina Ștefănescu’s Boxing: Against the Games We Are Given, traces how larger systems of power inscribe themselves onto the self–through the contained spaces of boxing, music, and memory–while refusing the closures of certainty.

In a three-way conversation led by Russell Reed, climate organizers Mohammed Usrof and Tori Tsui speak from within the insular world of COP negotiations, where disillusionment and resistance open onto a reimagining of climate justice. As a foundational installment in Posthumanitarian, a series rooted in the fundamental solidarity between decolonial and posthumanist struggles, After Activism: In Conversation with Mohammed Usrof & Tori sets the tone for a body of work that reads the universe of climate justice through its smallest, most charged sites of encounter.

In Spotlights, The Relay, by Marek Šindelka, and translated from Czech by Graeme Dibble, a train carriage is transformed into an electric field of human interaction. Darkly comic and sharply wrought, the story reminds us that even in the most transient of spaces, we are never truly alone.

Poetry in this issue moves through the intimate terrains of language, memory, and inheritance. In At Stefan Stambolov Square, Plovdiv, Immanuel Mifsud, translated by Ruth Ward, turns to the quiet surface of an ordinary place where seemingly uneventful moments gather into something held just beneath what is said aloud. In The Father’s Sin, the poet enters the fraught space between father and child, where recognition falters—I no longer understand your eyes—and a private reckoning unfolds. In dragomana, Nisrine Mbarki Ben-Ayad, translated by Michele Hutchison, writes across fractured and interwoven tongues and legacies. A lover once asked me, by the same poet, lingers in the unstable space between language and desire, measuring the distance between mother tongue and the lived experience of love. In Chronicle of My Thirty-Eighth Year, T. De Los Reyes gathers the granular textures of a life into a meditation on actualization, where the self, reflected and recast, emerges slowly into relief.

“The obscure streets of life do not offer the convenience of the thoroughfares. The traveler has to fumble his way in the dark,” Alina Ștefănescu quotes Shestov in her essay for our April issue. It seems that perhaps it is within this fumbling that something begins to take shape; meaning arrives in fragments, assembling slowly, haltingly, through small associations and connections. And if something magical sparks within a collection of literary works, it is because they remain inside that uncertainty. They refract the world until the smallest moments themselves begin to carry the weight of the universe. Perhaps, it is such resonances which allow us, even now, to recognize ourselves in one another.

Featuring, courtesy of the artists, striking original artwork by Ebenezer Edem Kwame Dedi, Jozie Furchgott Sourdiffe, Rana Samir, and Jonathan Wateridge.

Raaza Jamshed, Editor-in-Chief

The environmental movement runs on an annual calendar, a circuit of climate weeks and thematic forums each building toward the main event: the United Nations (UN) climate negotiations, or COPs, hosted each November in a regional rotation. At my first COP in 2023, I was overwhelmed by the scale. Dubai’s COP28 drew over 86,000 attendees, the largest in the negotiations’ history. But year after year, the crowd shrank into a familiar cast of faces, sitting on familiar panels and in familiar roundtable discussions. For the handful of us under the age of thirty granted access to these convenings, commonly referred to under the umbrella of “youth climate activists,”  the numbers are even smaller. We see one another time and again when we are called in as voices of a future at stake — symbols for urgency in a multilateral process plagued by growing inertia.

Tori Tsui is a defining voice in this cohort. A Hong Kong-born, United Kingdom-based climate justice organizer, she is a senior advisor to the Fossil Fuel Treaty Initiative and a lead campaigner on the Stop Rosebank coalition. Her debut book, It’s Not Just You, reframes eco-anxiety not as a personal condition but a political one. Mohammed Usrof entered the climate circuit as a Palestinian youth negotiator two years ago. In 2025, he founded the Palestinian Institute for Climate Strategy in close collaboration with leading climate justice voices including Andreas Malm and Greta Thunberg. Together, Tsui and Usrof reflect the priorities of a new generation of so-called climate activists primed through justice-driven movements like Fridays for Future and the Sunrise Movement. Unlike the old guard, they advocate not just for climate action, but for resolute climate justice, refusing to separate planetary politics from the personal. 

The United Nations climate negotiations began at the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, when world leaders pledged to ensure “a secure and hospitable home for present and future generations.” At COP30 last November, hosted in the Brazilian Amazon, that promise remained entirely unmet, the world still accelerating toward collapse despite three decades of annual negotiations. Recognizing its own insufficiency, the climate institution has begun turning to its new generation of leaders; over half of countries’ 2035 climate plans include commitments to direct partnership with youth, the result of the campaign for an NDC Youth Clause I co-organized last year. But after years of inaction and recurring silence on the Gazan genocide, which Tsui considers “a litmus test for climate justice,” many young leaders have already turned away.

In this conversation, Tsui and Usrof reckon with what remains. For young organizers failed by the institutional climate movement, is there anything worth saving? It seems the center of the negotiations may no longer be the COP but the flotilla — mobile, networked, and ever-multiplying, even as the institution recedes.

— Russell Reed for Guernica

Russell Reed: Mohammed, we first met as speakers at a fancy dinner for business leaders back at the 2024 United Nations climate negotiations in Baku, Azerbaijan. A year later at COP30 in Belém, Brazil, I noticed a shift in your navigation of the climate negotiations.

Mohammed Usrof: Over time, it became very clear to me where to draw the line. There are spaces that present themselves as a chance to bring different sides together, putting corporate representatives, banks, and fossil fuel executives in the same room as Indigenous people and climate activists. But I learned that we’re just there to be completely tokenized, that it was just a chance for corporate leaders to wash some of the blood off their hands. 

This year, I declined those invitations. It was a complete rejection of any form of complicity. But I’m also someone who’s very strategic, and what’s the really strategic thing to do to create some form of change? For me, it is creating counter-institutions and building power that actually contradicts and resists the status quo. 

Russell Reed: Tori, what is your history with the UN climate negotiations? 

Tori Tsui: The first time I tried to attend the negotiations for COP25, I sailed across the Atlantic with an organization called Sail to the COP because we were lobbying against the aviation industry. At the last minute, it was relocated from Santiago to Madrid, so I missed it. The following year, I went to Glasgow for COP26 as part of an organization I helped found called United for Climate Action. Our aim was to help activists from Latin America and the Caribbean attend and navigate the negotiations, since much of civil society from that region is historically and currently excluded from these spaces.

Over the years, I became disillusioned. It almost feels like a circus sometimes. I decided not to attend COP27 in Sharm El-Sheikh just a month before; I couldn’t justify my role there. Every time I left a COP, I felt exasperated, depressed, and listless — disconcerted with how little I could actually get done in those spaces. So each year, it became a choice of divestment. In the end, I didn’t go to Sharm, I didn’t go to Dubai, I didn’t go to Baku, and I didn’t go to Belém. In many ways, I feel like the UN has lost its credibility.

Russell Reed: This is a common feeling among young organizers — the negotiations began before we were born, and yet they still haven’t stopped our descent toward climate collapse. Mohammed, given that the UN has also failed to meaningfully safeguard Palestinians from ongoing genocide, why did you choose to show up to COP30 at all?   

Mohammed Usrof: The negotiations present a valuable power-building opportunity for the counter-institutions I mentioned before. Over two years into the genocide, Brazil remains complicit in trading oil with Israel. Through our exclusive research on energy mapping, we traced that complicity. So at COP30, we had the chance to work directly with the Brazilian trade unions, holding press conferences with trade union leaders and the International Trade Union Confederation. We worked in alignment with the Italian dock workers, who were protesting Italy’s parallel complicity at that same time. But it was essential to ensure that it wasn’t just a moment at COP, but part of a larger mobilization across the world, using this moment as a chance to build momentum for other moments.

Russell Reed: Tori, you have called the genocide in Gaza “a litmus test for climate justice.” More than two years after the genocide began, what does it tell us about the institutional climate movement?

Tori Tsui: We have to go beyond these two years. Long before October 7th, I started the Bad Activists Collective — part think tank, part coalition with the aim of strengthening the principles of climate justice. One of our pillars was a free Palestine. When we started posting about Angela Davis and her solidarity with Palestine, when we started posting about Sheikh Jarrah and the Israeli apartheid regime in general, claims of anti-Semitism were pretty much every comment, even from within the so-called Left and the so-called climate space. Even five years ago, all the same rhetoric was being spouted out, people telling us that Palestine “wasn’t a climate issue.”

After October 7th, a very clear subset of the climate movement mobilized and declared solidarity with Palestine. But others were extremely hostile toward it. I think it speaks volumes that some factions of the environmental movement see certain justice issues as negotiable. They don’t see it as a necessity to advocate for certain things until they absolutely must — which for me is quite cowardly. It goes against the basic principles of climate justice, and suggests that the idea of climate justice is very performative for a lot of people. It has gotten to the point where I almost hesitate to affiliate myself with the climate movement, because there are so many people in it whose views just don’t represent mine.

Generally speaking, I have found more solidarity in people who can see a humanitarian issue and don’t feel as though they have to justify that it’s also a climate issue. A humanitarian issue is also something that should be spoken about. So I have found myself organizing with fewer people in the climate space and more with people in the anti-war space, people who are fighting authoritarianism and fascism. Because I find that their politics tends to align more with mine.

Russell Reed: It is often implied that the climate crisis is a large enough challenge on its own — that engaging deeply in questions of human justice risks distracting us from the work. What do you make of this perceived separation between social justice and climate action? 

Mohammed Usrof: It’s a divide-and-rule tactic — and it’s not the first of its kind. All social justice issues and all environmental issues are interconnected and inseparable. They come from the same root causes. But even within the climate movement, people seem to find it easier to imagine an end of the world than to imagine an end to capitalism. And it’s really catastrophic that we are unable to actually imagine a better world for us as people, as Tori and as Russell have said. COP is very much a defeatist space. You might say that people who go to COP are fighting the climate fight or whatever — but please, you’re fighting for commas within climate policy documents that really don’t matter.

Tori Tsui: I have met white liberal environmentalists in the UK who have seen Ukraine as an environmental issue but haven’t seen Palestine as an environmental issue. That boils down to systemic racism. There’s a lot of conscious and unconscious bias. And I also think that Israeli propaganda is working on them — that it’s “too complicated,” that there are always two sides — these sorts of narratives keep coming up. And it’s especially ironic because a lot of these people would have said they’ve become attuned to such intersectionality since the reckonings of Black Lives Matter. People think that humanity and justice are given. They’re not. You have to fight for them, no matter what generation you live in. Justice and peace do not prevail unless they’re constantly worked at, and unless people are held accountable. 

Russell Reed: At COP29, Israel hosted one of the most prominent pavilions in the Blue Zone, with brightly lit displays touting a number of technological innovations. Above the exhibition was a big sign that read: “FROM DESERT TO OASIS.” It mirrored the precise narratives that underwrite the genocide, fictions of Palestine as an uninhabited desert ripe for Israeli development. The display exposed the uncomfortable truth that  COPs are not a unifying front for climate action, but a forum for two competing visions for the future: one that necessitates sacrifice, and one that refuses it. The genocide has shown that these camps are irreconcilable, and the institution seems to be tearing at the seams as they diverge further. In this context, do you still consider yourself an activist?

Tori Tsui: I’ve always believed that activism is low-hanging fruit. Activism just means enacting social change, whatever that means to you. It doesn’t necessarily mean that you advocate for justice, or that you get to the radical roots of the issue. The word “radical” comes from the Latin radix, meaning root, so it’s a bit ironic when activists talk about being radical or disruptive. What are you actually tackling at the root?

The term “activist” has been co-opted in many ways. There was a trend of becoming an activist before the pandemic, and it was capitalized on. And then there’s the other side of it, which is: well if you’re not an activist, then what are you? I think “organizer” is a term that comes up quite a lot — actively organizing around a specific cause. Organizing feels more proactive than activism itself, which can sometimes feel a little bit backseat. I think a lot of people are climate activists, I just don’t think there are a lot of people who truly stand for and organize for climate justice.

Mohammed Usrof: I would personally go so far as to say that I don’t want to be labeled a climate activist. What the fuck is a climate activist? A lot of so-called climate activists ignore the root causes of the catastrophe. Climate change is a byproduct of larger systemic issues. If you are an activist, if you’re an organizer, if you want to resist, you resist the core issues. Just be a useful activist. As you said, the issue is that a lot of these activists are not intersectional. We see the kind of rise and fall of the climate movement with Greta [Thunberg] — the minute she stopped serving big philanthropy’s interests by standing for Palestine, she lost her platform.

I am not a climate activist. I’m a Palestinian activist who stands against genocide, against imperialism, against capitalism, and things have never been this clear to me. I can never go back to ignoring these tragedies or the connections between them. Climate activism, unfortunately, is seen as radical when done appropriately or when done right. And that whole equation needs to be flipped — we need to get our shit together, drop the labels, and just get the principles and values right.

Russell Reed: And that brings us to your organization, the Palestinian Institute for Climate Strategy. Tell us about this counter-institution, and why you founded it.

Mohammed Usrof: The Palestinian Institute for Climate Strategy is a Palestinian-led research, advocacy, and strategy institute dedicated to advancing ecological justice and climate accountability by centering Palestine within global climate politics and intersecting struggles against colonialism, militarism, imperialism, and extractive power structures. We believe that climate justice cannot be separated from decolonization and anti-militarism.

As Palestinians, we must contribute to building counter-institutions — to build durable bodies of knowledge that can actually make the struggle for climate justice and decolonization more effective, strategic, and simpler to pursue. In practice, that means developing research that reveals energy infrastructures as sites of political power. The recent gas deals between Israel and Egypt, the continued arrangements between Israel and Jordan — they reflect the entrenchment of capital, fossil capital specifically, and the co-dependency built through current energy systems. The same logic runs from the colonial Anglo-Iranian Company to BP, Chevron, and Shell today. We know clearly how that has manifested into the climate movement and the COP process itself, which was shaped by Saudi Arabia back in 1994.

We also focus on building capacity for youth engagement and empowerment in Palestine — PICS grew from the Palestinian Youth Climate Negotiation Program. We want to continue building Palestinian capacities as a way to build political leadership — because it is very, very rare to see a Palestinian leader who is not targeted constantly, who doesn’t receive death threats. 

Russell Reed: While PICS has its roots in Palestine, it contributes to a range of efforts around the world. How does it embed within broader solidarity networks?

Mohammed Usrof: What is happening in Palestine is not just happening in Palestine. It has happened in Colombia, in South Africa, in Venezuela, in Nicaragua, in Fiji. Racial capitalism and colonialism are seen and felt by so many people — people who continue to suffer right now, at this very moment. So when you present the Palestinian experience in ways that relate to people across the world, it becomes undeniable. It is not only a form of solidarity to connect struggles, but it’s also a way of building power and a way of paving a path forward. We’re serving Palestinians, we’re serving the global movements, and we’re doing this work together.

Russell Reed: Tori, looking at your work opposing the fossil economy with initiatives like the Stop Rosebank campaign and the Fossil Fuel Nonproliferation Treaty, where does Palestine come in? How do these solidarity networks appear in your work?

Tori Tsui: The messaging around the Stop Rosebank campaign has changed drastically since the genocide. There is a lot of focus on Palestine now, and it provides a way to shed light on this issue — to show people that the climate movement is fighting for a free Palestine. And in the other direction, for the people who follow us from the climate movement, we show that you should advocate for Palestine as well because it’s all connected. I think it comes from a genuine place, but I do think that the fact that we have to spell it out in such a way is indicative of this division within the climate movement — of people who don’t quite understand how everything comes together. I have noticed the messaging change, and I think that’s for the better.

I’ll give you an example. I gave a talk at a WaterAid event, and I showed up wearing a free Palestine badge on my jacket. They asked me to take it off. I said I would, but of course I didn’t. And for me it’s like — okay, we’re WaterAid, we support people’s access to water all around the world, except Palestinians whose water is being siphoned off for Israeli homes. Make it make sense.

Russell Reed: By the old model, they seem to think it does. Philanthropists write specific checks to specific NGOs expecting very specific outcomes, which leaves little room for intersectionality. 

Mohammed Usrof: The issue is this whole concept of NGO survival — the borders organizations place on themselves, the red lines they need to stay within. A lot of organizations don’t really follow their purpose. If they did, the world would be a much better place.

Tori Tsui: So much of the existence of NGOs is a symptom of a failed society. The state is not providing for its people and governments are not standing in solidarity with people who have been pillaged and exploited at the hands of colonialism. I feel like a lot of these organizations are redundant and just take up space and resources that should otherwise be directed to people on the ground. I think they’re money holes. And I think they provide a social license for some of the biggest polluters and some of the worst actors in the world to justify their existence — because if they give to charity, there’s a reason for them to exist.

Russell Reed: At the UN General Assembly, I spoke with an Arab philanthropic leader who noted that despite the major Western philanthropies’ total abdication of support for Palestinian relief, money has still made its way there. Not through the old channels, but through small donations in solidarity networks enabled by mutual aid and crowdfunding platforms. She suggested that this is not just a moral failure for philanthropy and NGOs — it’s a crisis of relevance. What are young people building in their place?

Mohammed Usrof: We are building strategic counter-institutions to ensure that the connection between Palestine and the broader climate struggle persists. We work directly with many of these organizations — we set the narrative on unjust transitions with Oxfam, we’ve consulted with groups like Amnesty International and the Climate Action Network. What we’re showing them is that we can be an NGO that works with states and donors, that promotes humanitarian work in Gaza, while also holding a very strict moral and political position that cannot be undermined by threats of financial withdrawal.

Russell Reed: Tori, you have been involved in many of the defining organizations of the youth climate movement. Through all the changes of these past few years, what lies on the horizon?

Tori Tsui: I’m seeing an energy of transformation. My own activism has kind of transformed. I feel like the climate space once held me, and though it held me for that time, sometimes you must let go. That’s not to say I don’t still do climate activism — it’s just my work has transformed. I believe that if you’re a campaigner or someone who is fighting for justice and liberation in any sense, you have to be adaptable and you have to go where your moral compass takes you. And right now that’s taking me to spaces that are trying to counter the rise of fascism, to talk about fossil capitalism, to talk about the impacts of the military industrial complex.

You might not brand it as climate as such, but it’s still part of it. And I’m seeing a lot of similar sentiments with my comrades — people who are transforming their activism and going into other spaces. Then there’s also the slightly sad side, which is people who are stepping away from politics altogether because it’s either too dangerous to talk about politics, or because they realize it’s not profitable — it was trendy and profitable then, and it isn’t now.

Russell Reed: It seems that as the traditional climate movement faces inertia, you are each working in new, justice-driven lanes that are growing quickly in numbers and influence. As the movement shifts toward new horizons, what will come of the old institutions — the NGOs, the negotiations? Is there anything worth saving?

Mohammed Usrof: If any old institution wants to assimilate into a culture of unity — into a collective, hopeful vision for the future that includes survival as the bare minimum — I don’t mind working with them. If there’s a way we can work together, we can. And if they work against us, or against the survival of the world, it is simply a call to resist against them once more. If they wish to pursue profit, pursue relevance, and ignore a genocide until three years later when it becomes trendy enough, those are red flags we won’t normalize. There’s no space for racism. There’s no space for Zionism.

Tori Tsui: These organizations are going to become irrelevant unless they transform. The world is rapidly changing. There’s a lot of red tape at the moment, there’s a lot of fear about politicization. But that’s how fascism wins, and the more we kowtow to it, the more difficult it will be to actually raise our voices.

It feels like this current form of the climate movement has come to an end. So we must adapt and create something new, or transform in its place. But in the face of more adversaries, you need to stand your ground. You do not water down your message. You do not placate. There are many times that I’ve adapted my messaging and my strategy to be better received in the current climate. And then I realized, wait, that’s exactly what they want you to do. They want you to water down what you’re asking for. They want you to lower your needs. They want you to suppress who you are in order to establish more of a power foothold over the current situation.

We are at a threshold — the old is going to be left behind. Something new has to take its place, and we are already building it.

What is seen can be abolished by the eyelids, can be stopped by partitions or curtains, can be rendered immediately inaccessible by walls. What is heard knows neither eyelids, nor partitions, neither curtains, nor walls. Undelimitable, it is impossible to protect oneself from it … Sound rushes in. It violates.

– Pascal Quignard, “It So Happens that Ears Have No Eyelids” (from The Hatred of Music)

1

On the first page of this notebook, I had copied a quote from Gherasim Luca: “A revolutionary thought must reject with indignation any attempt to be closed in a certainty, no matter how fascinating.”

2

Sound, itself, is not definitive— sound waves continue moving even after they reach us, losing velocity along the way. According to the notebook I kept during the summer of my twentieth year, a mother’s scream drifted past the playground and hovered near the bus stop in Bucharest just before a friend said maps would not help me understand what I saw. Nor would speaking the language. Pigeons moved back and forth between the green park benches as we spoke.  “You grew up in Disneyland,” this friend added. He was a philosophy student at the nearby university.

3

“Recordings deal with concepts through which the past is reevaluated, and they concern notions about the future which will ultimately question even the validity of evaluation,” wrote composer Glenn Gould in April 1966.

Eleven years later, Ion Grigorescu created a short, black-and-white film titled “Boxing.” In it, a naked man ‘shadow-boxes’ with his own shadow in a small studio apartment. Divided into three one-minute boxing rounds, “Boxing” borrows this convention from the sport of boxing. Grigorescu made it by first exposing the film as he boxed in one direction, then again as he boxed the other.

In the disciplinary practice known as “boxing a child’s ears,” an adult uses their hand to apply physical force to the part of a child that hears the world.

A game keeps score. A boxing match sets itself up as a game which can be won or lost. Is “Boxing” a game? Is a game always a performance? How does the performance of a game implicate players differently from the performance of an image? Is the artist struggling with an image of himself or an alter ego?

The only sound in Grigorescu’s film involves a brief crackling at the outset.

4

Pigeons carry one twig at a time to build their nests, which they refuse to leave even during fire. The words in my notebook would later resemble a nest, intended to nurture a creation, a being, a life. Even as the branch beneath the nest  died, I stayed with the thing I was building, hoping something might hatch from it.

In a Romanian city that was not Bucharest, I sat in a plaza surrounded by buildings, one of which was an Orthodox church. I remembered Lev Tolstoy describing music as the shorthand of emotion, and it was music which could have described the strange light on this plaza— music which could have carried its complexity more effectively than words. I’m referring to the posthumous orchestration of Gustav Mahler’s 10th Symphony, and how its brightness conceals the silences written by Mahler’s death. Light is the lie which imprints negatives that may later develop into revelations. 

A woman in black pants and leather sandals had paused near the statue of the saint. She assumed a humiliating position: her back hunched  over a small, dark dog, knees pressed into the cement, among the cracked concrete interspersed with pebbles. A stabbing pain wrote itself into my own scarred knees. I suspected the woman was actively leaning into pain as she crouched over this dog’s head, hiding her face from us. 

“She’s not new to the plaza,” said my friend. He called her the woman crazy with dog. To be with-dog seemed different than being with a dog, or being with the dog, and so I wondered if the woman was also pregnant—or if being with dog indicated a sort of exclusivity which prevented the woman from being with child or being with family. 

The woman didn’t appear pregnant. She was too slim, her small hips frozen over the dog’s torso like an awning, or a violin bow I once saw broken. Broken, I had loved the man who held the bow, and who broke the bow over my knee, and whose face turned the color of eggplants ripening in the sun under a tree. 

In Disneyland, we overcome things. We conquer them and collect trophies. We can’t watch anyone  suffer without making a video of it on our i-phones and sharing that video on social media. Thus did I feel called upon to reach out to the woman, creating a bridge between my life  and hers, as I walked away from my philosopher-friend towards the center of the empty plaza where the statue ruled over a woman and a dog at its feet. 

The woman looked up at me, but kept her palm over one eye when speaking, explaining that she was visiting this place with Radu, her dog. She spoke very quickly, smiling, looking down at the dog and then back up at me with the hand covering her eye. She said this place was special to both of them, to her and to Radu, whose name was special in a different way—and whose difference did not diminish the quality of specialness which applied to both. “You can call me Radu’s mother,” the woman said, before comparing her son’s name to an empty crypt, particularly Walter Benjamin’s cenotaph on a Spanish hill near the sea, but also the cave vacated by Christ, according to three women which History has chosen to believe. 

Radu’s mother rummaged through a plastic rucksack as the dog tried to lick her hand. Someone was listening to a radio show on a nearby balcony, and the voices in conversation resembled a sportscast with the rising intonations and suspenseful shrillness of losing, of winning, of scoring, but the theme was national history. I half-listened  as Radu’s mother rummaged through several books, opening each one flipping through pages and closing it until finally lifting a piece of paper from a book, holding it above Radu’s head so he could not bite it or lick it, and looking at me. 

The faded, black and white photo depicted a couple standing near a monastery building—the woman’s long, wavy hair covered half her face, revealing one sultry eye; her torso leaned into the chest of the man whose hands were in the back pocket of her jeans, as if the two had just had sex and were considering doing it again. Before I could ask, Radu’s mother flipped the photo and pointed to a faint, handwritten word in the corner, in cursive: Radu. 

“The one with long hair is my mother,” she said, “but I don’t know who this Radu was. My mother is dead but there was a man who took many photos of her and I do not know where he lives or what they did. Since finding the name, I’ve been a pilgrim, a visitor to each site where Radu took a photo with my mother. And I have watched Radu closely in case he senses something.”

As she shut the photo back inside the book cover, I noticed (again) how her mother’s hair covered half her face, and the correspondence between the photo and Radu’s mother as she looked up at me from the closed book with one hand over her eye. Only at this point did I realize I’dmissed something: she had not covered her eye when showing me the photos, and it was I who had failed to look at her eye, when given the chance. I had missed the opportunity to draw a line between the eye hidden by her mother in the photo and the man whose name now lived in the small black dog licking the woman’s toes. 

She had named her dog after her dead mother’s mysterious lover. 

Radu’s mother laid her face against the knotted black hair of the dog’s back and murmured something for which I was not the intended audience. My head spun from the unfiltered sun in the treeless plaza, with its demanding pitch of light, as when one has been sitting near a swimming pool for hours without drinking water, the brain pulverized by historical sports on radios in the background, and no sense of what to do next. 

5

“Writing is a game to me,” I told my philosopher-friend as we shared a lukewarm Ursus, a beer named Bear. “Writing is  a game that cannot be won, and there is no end to it. Those who believe they can win it with a bestseller are playing a different game. . .  a Disneyland game.” 

Disneyland didn’t yet exist when Arthur Schopenhauer found it “noteworthy, indeed marvelous, that we human beings always lead a second, abstract life alongside our concrete life.” Glenn Gould’s favorite color was “battleship grey.” 

6

During the 1970’s, as Ceaușescu’s regime rode Romanians towards starvation, Grigorescu used his own body to probe the distance between performance and recorded image by staging a series of intimate experiments secretly in his apartment. He created the film alone, and this solitude, this extraordinary confinement, is palpable in the way the subject slips between a character and a self-portrait. 

After taking multiple screenshots from Grigorescu’s film, I study them closely, seeking to glimpse the future anterior —the future already folded into the past — in them.

I assume the alter ego is the boxer on the left because he is slightly less dense and shadowy than the boxer on the right. The boxer on the left fades with each round. By the final round, he resembles a translucent shadow. But it is then, when he is least visible, that the boxer on the left seems stronger and wins the match. 

“A stopped frame outside of a movie isn’t anything, not even a photograph,” wrote Michael Wood in Film: A Very Short Introduction. 

7

According to my notebooks, in Ovid’s Tristia manuscript, the Stygian waters become Scythian waters, creating a strange relationship between these descriptors. 

Puzzled by this, I recalled that the first piece my son composed on the piano was titled “The Stygian Waltz.” He was seven years old at the time. We had just returned from a brief trip related to a book I had ghost-written for a Russian oligarch who wanted to be legible to American audiences. He lived in New York City, like many oligarchs, and had the sort of large apartment customary to Disneyland’s heroes. My editor for the oligarch’s biography was his cousin, who was a distant relative to the philosopher Lev Shestov. A convivial fellow, the editor introduced me to various opportunities, and countless freelance gigs since our first meeting in a Sibiu cafe, which we both remembered fondly. 

My editor-friend played chess with my son as I wrote. Between cigarettes and disgust with drafts, I exhaled various non sequiturs aloud, to which the editor occasionally responded. 

“Writing is a miserable occupation,” I mumbled. “Shestov was right to warn that it is easy to confuse ecstasy with calf-rapture.”

The editor sat up, pressed a large black queen against his chin,  closed his eyes completely as he said, “Shestov believed the public prefers calf-raptures to ecstasy or revelation.”

I spat in my coffee cup mockingly. “Shestov never sat in Manhattan trying to dash off a calf-rapture that will cost me my soul and its after-life.” A few hours later, as the shadows of streetlights drew night across the walls, the editor set a glass of schnapps near my computer and allowed his shadow to fall over my screen. “Shestov opens All Things Are Possible with a certain statement,” he said coyly. “Do you know what that statement is?” Since I did not, the editor quoted Shestov: “The obscure streets of life do not offer the convenience of the thoroughfares. The traveler has to fumble his way in the dark.”  

Although a rejoinder was expected from me, I had nothing to offer. The verb to fumble failed to elicit anything. “I must do the minimum here,” I thought. Poetry would suffice. This editor loved unexpected rhymes and sentimentalism, so I told him the light a traveler needs most may come from a stone, or a spark. My son fell asleep on the sofa near the marble chessboard. The editor began making the sort of romantic propositions that follow heavy drinking and poetry. Once the script began, or once he read a script into the scene, it was easier to go along with it than to risk wounding his ego or upsetting his view of the world. These scripts were pre-recorded performances familiar to both of us. Both my editor-friend and the oligarch wished to be legible to a reading public which they imagined. Both wanted to be read into the stories of their lives, and be imagined by others as they imagined themselves. Their longing to be understood assumed a human condition of equality, or equal co-imagining. But the oligarch could not imagine me outside the money he used to purchase his personal mythology. Nor could I imagine him as more than the money he flaunted. I believed then— as I do now— that what we share, or what we gather together, cannot transcend the transactional nature of structural hierarchies and narrative economies. There is no place outside the box you pay me to build in the name of fathers.

8

“It is now a criminal activity to chew sunflower seeds in public places,” Walter Benjamin wrote  in the Moscow Diary he kept when chasing Asja Lacis through the Soviet Union. Uncertain of whether to officially join the Communist Party, Benjamin decided to voyage directly to the USSR  itself, and study how Soviet rulers had improved the lives of the masses. There is a hint of surprise in Benjamin’s  affectless reporting on the criminalization of sunflower seeds. How gray and lifeless the silence that follows a surveilled surprise. Under dictatorships, absurdity is limitless. The pigeons of Moscow lamented the newfound stinginess of elders on park benches. Street vending had also become illegal. The sale of icons was made part of the paper and pictures trade, so icons stood in booths next to other paper goods “flanked by portraits of Lenin, like a prisoner between two policemen,” wrote Benjamin. 

Eventually,  the oligarch paid a boutique to print his ghostwritten biography. Every biography asserts its brand to a particular audience. To this day, I don’t think my son knows that my ghost ever wrote such a travesty. 

“Please do not include my name in any published manuscripts which come as a result of this,” I said to  the man from Tomis, about a different book, in a different year, using a different map

“Consider it lost,” he replied. “Consider it as gone as Bruno Schultz’s The Messiah. No one would even begin to know where to find it.”

When I asked my son last week what became of the Stygian waltz, he said it never existed. “There was a Phrygian waltz….” he said, “but you must  have imagined the other one. Just like you imagine all kinds of things that never actually happened.”

9

Film stills are only ‘something’ in the context of a film “projected at the right speed, 24 frames per second.” This is the speed of projection, but the speed hides a particular darkness, as Mary Ann Doane notes, since “during the projection of a film, the spectator is sitting in an unperceived darkness for almost 40% of the running time.” The film projection’s speed keeps us from perceiving the “lost time represented by the division between frames.” The stills emphasize certain moments by pausing time, stopping the flow of images, turning the instants into one “instance,” a reified image that makes an “event” from what is removed. In this, the still (or screenshot) resembles the use of textual quotation.  

 “The whole universe, our life as humans, I always felt to be related to movement and the way it becomes still,” Ion Grigorescu told Calin Bota in an interview. 

As I fracture the moving image into screenshots, I divide a motion picture into discrete images that serve as reified souvenirs. I sacralize certain images by saving them. The sacred is always at stake in the games invented by humans. 

Although the dictatorship was officially atheist, Ceaușescu’s secularism was religious. He built a religion of the state and rendered things sacred accordingly. Even the dictator’s name was hallowed: using the wrong appellation was a crime. Radu Jude remembers first hearing a Radio Free Europe broadcast at his cousin’s house and being petrified by the blasphemy. “It was beyond shocking for me to hear Ceaușescu referred to only by surname,” Jude said, since the Romanian press always preceded his surname with a superlative, ‘Our Great Leader Ceaușescu.’ Or something.

Digital archives and collections reference Grigorescu’s film as a piece produced in 1977. While viewing the credits, I pause for closer look and snap a screenshot:

The screenshot announces this as Grigorescu’s “Box” (not “Boxing”), which he made with film lab and an 8mm standard camera in November 1978.  To confirm my own confusion, I also took a photo of the film’s title and presentation on YouTube:

The time stamp for Grigorescu’s film seems to also be plagued by a shadow or shadowed by a year and a title. I’m not sure if 1977 or 1978 is the alter ego. Nor am I sure what winning this match would mean for Time. Am I in a box, or am I boxing? 

10

In his memoir, Me and Him, writer Ion Ianosi never uses Ceaușescu’s name, thus bringing to the page the spectacle of the televised speeches and the act of identification with the leader which lay at the heart of both grammar and syntax. The ‘me’ exists only in relation to the ‘Him.’ “One could say, in socialist Eastern Europe, the camera did not shoot you: you shot the camera,” Ovidiu Țichindeleanu said, speaking of Ion Grigorescu.

According to scholars, the Romanian Department of State Security (known as the Securitate) was the largest and most pervasive secret police force in the Eastern Bloc. Personal conversations and mail were regularly monitored: the “secret police” knew everything, including the dreams of its citizens. Surveillance files literally created the dictator’s citizen-subjects; the dictator’s polyphonic, paranoid gaze characterizes the tone and scope of the Securitate archives. 

Who are you in the eyes of the state? Requesting to see your Securitate surveillance file seems like an act of courage that repudiates fear of being boxed. Similarly, poetry may suggest a repudiation of facile binaries. But poetry, like a film reel, may also sustain binaries rather than refuse them. 

I wrote a story about a woman watching pigeons. I shot the camera and then focused on stanzaic divisions and lineation. Like the anchorite Simeon of Emesis who descends from solitude in order to mock the city and upset the smug order of the world, I stared at the words I had written and realized they did little to address suffering, pain, injustice, and the usual suspects that cause us to ask questions about the meaning of life, where ‘meaning’ itself is linked to the disappointment of not being in a perpetual state of “well-being.” 

At present, ‘well-being’ is also increasingly defined by corporate products, lifestyles, and multiple biopolitical discourses. In January 1965, Ludwig Wittgenstein published “A Lecture on Ethics” in which he mentioned, briefly, a near-religious experience of “feeling absolutely safe.” It is no secret that Wittgenstein grappled with his longing to believe in a god for the greater part of his life, despite refusing to mention or evoke this in his philosophical writings, leaving metaphysics to his notebooks. 

“Absolutely” is a tremendous word. I mean: there is no way to move beyond it. Wittgenstein’s  decision to italicize this word underscores its enormity. What interests me is the connection between absolutely and absolution, which is what religion seeks to do, namely, to relieve us of the meaningless suffering that is part of the human condition. To “absolve” is to render or declare (someone) free from blame, guilt, or responsibility. Absolution seeks to erase epistemic gaps. But Samuel Beckett, who shares my birthday, and whose ghost sits on my foot as I type this, showed us that we go on despite waiting for nothing, and so waiting for nothing is perhaps the truest and most consistent experience of being human.

11

Everyday, I play in my boxes and drag my ghosts into them. 

Tristan Tzara described his play, Mouchoir Des Nuages, or “Handkerchief of Clouds,”  as a tragic farce influenced by the serial novel and cinema. His stage instructions indicated that the cloud-hankie should be staged on a platform in the centre of a box-like room “from which the actors cannot leave.” 

I enjoy playing my selves against my ‘selfing.’ As a constraint, the box doesn’t permit us to ignore our unfreedom; it destroys the presumptions of neoliberal subjectivity, much of which depends on this fantasy of ‘knowing oneself’. As for Tzara, he resembles Paul Celan in how the memories of his Romanian childhood and youth never abandoned his texts. Tzara preserved them in words and images: the despair of the fallen bird, the horses of Moinesti, the window-panes framing early boredom, the streetlights strolling through the cities at night, the volition of objects, his violin, the scythed tongues of village gossip, the labor of recounting, the inflammation of all ears in a row, the echo of the mother who urges him to drink more water in every letter she mails to him. If life is a game, one plays it with the cosmos and the nature of time itself. The games that predate one’s existence, the games we are given, involve passports and papers that replace the living being in order to constitute the “national” subject, the passport-bearing human, the neoliberal globetrotter.  No man is worth anything apart from the self he displays at a custom border. We live in the virulence of that.

12

A life is “a history in which past contingencies are given the sense of necessities to come… a form of rationalization in which the truth discloses itself as a lie,” to quote Scott Wilson’s foreword to Gary Shipley’s On the Verge of Nothing.

“If you want people to envy your sorrow or your shame, look as though you were proud of it,” Lev Shestov wrote in the note numbered 55. 

There are maps in books which are not atlases. Carte de tendre was created as a salon game in the 1600’s, only to return in Madeleine de Scudery’s coded novel, Clelie. George Perec and OULIPO played with maps and other forms of ‘potential literature.’ 

“As long as I am alive, do not forget who you are comes from all I have been – and all the names on the map,” my grandmother told my father before returning to Romania so she and my grandfather could die there, and be buried in the company of their own ghosts. One should not spend eternity among the ghosts who don’t know you, among crowds of historical phantoms made by others, away from your own ancestors. As for the music of ghosts, it is a curse to die a stranger. 

In “The Relay” the entry of a single person in a train carriage sets off a ripple effect. Irritation morphes into desire, into shame, into longing as each emotion passes from one body to the next. By the time the stranger has left the carriage, a crack, imperceptible at first, has begun to spread.

Written by Marek Šindelka, translated from Czech by Graeme Dibble, and appearing first in BODY, this story transforms a train carriage into a microcosm of the world, its passengers unwilling participants in an invisible relay of uncontainable charge. Darkly comic and wickedly observed, it reminds us that even in the most transient of spaces, we are never truly alone.

— Raaza Jamshed for Guernica Global Spotlights

A girl boarded the train. Actually, she was no longer a girl, because she was about thirty. But there was something in her behaviour and her appearance which suggested that, body aside, she was still a girl. The lines around her eyes were from laughter rather than age. No doubt she laughed openly and often – in general, there was something a bit hysterical about her. Within every gesture, no matter how small, lay dormant a kind of thoughtlessness, impatience and coarseness. Everything was highly charged. Each of her movements could blow up at any moment. For some inexplicable reason, I couldn’t stand her from the moment I laid eyes on her.

She came into the compartment and, even though there were plenty of free seats, she pointed to a handbag on a seat and asked the elderly lady by the window to free up the space next to her. She stood in the middle of the train and, with a strange restlessness that contained a hint of aggressiveness, gestured to the seat, invoking the most ridiculous of all rights: the right of a passenger using public transport. What was the point of all this? One thing was for sure: the request had immediately made her the centre of attention. All of a sudden, there was an almost palpable tension between us, the only three passengers. There was nothing calculated about her request. It was just a kind of habit, something that had been ingrained in the girl since childhood, a strategy she had developed which had been reinforced with each new act, a peculiar, animalistic way of immediately drawing attention to herself; an egotistical alchemy she used to get attention at any cost, in any setting.

Raising her eyebrows slightly, the woman she had spoken to made room for her, moving her bag to the seat opposite. I immediately felt myself silently and quite spontaneously allying myself with this woman against the overbearing girl. I watched the girl taking off her coat, sitting down, crossing her legs, flicking the fringe away from her forehead with a strange nervous movement, placing her hands on her lap. All of this was a cry for attention – the fringe, the legs, the hands – and then when she didn’t move at all, her stillness was a cry for attention. I secretly watched her: she was sitting. Never in my life had I found myself getting angry about something as commonplace as that girl sitting. Something about her face and her posture almost sent me into a fury. I knew all it would take was one word from her, one word, and I wasn’t sure if I would be able to control myself. The provocativeness that radiated from her and filled the whole carriage was a strange gust of defiance, a kind of desire for conflict. The girl’s fingers trembled. Her arm occasionally branched off from her body as though on a rail – to throw away a hankie, to turn off the heating. She took out a magazine and absentmindedly flicked through it.

To my surprise I realized I had a terrible urge to sleep with this girl, and I was immediately aroused. And I became angry at myself for being aroused. It came on so suddenly that for a moment I didn’t know what to do. I felt embarrassed and just then the girl leaned over towards me.

“Do you want this magazine?” she said, and I stared at her, dumbfounded. I could see her features, a strong Slavonic tone in her face and in her body in general. The ponytail that swirled round her neck fell onto her shoulders and her left breast.

“I’m done with it, so take it if you want,” she said, handing me the magazine. I could feel the blood rushing unbidden to my face. I didn’t know where to look. In the middle of the girl’s chest sparkled a sun called the solar plexus: a bony disc with the rays of the individual ribs radiating out from it, and then the breasts with black lace trim clearly visible in the deep cleavage.  

I mumbled something in my confusion, thanked her and took the magazine. After that the girl paid no more attention to me, took out her mobile and began to rapidly type something on it. And I sat there with her magazine like a whipped dog. For some unknown reason I had the sense that by being given this magazine I had at the same time lost something important. I glanced at the woman by the window, but she pretended to be looking out at the countryside. Yes, the girl had definitely taken something away from me. She had taken away my anger. Or at the very least she had sealed off an invisible channel through which I could surreptitiously direct it towards her. Now that I’d been given the magazine – incidentally, a magazine which I occasionally like to buy myself – I’d have to be a complete idiot to continue to hate the girl, albeit quite privately. Against my will, the tectonic plates inside the train had been set in motion; the secret conspiracy with the woman by the window had suffered a serious breach. I felt I was shifting closer to the girl, even though that was somewhere I really didn’t want to be. There, beneath her thirty-year-old skin, sparkled her solar plexus, and on it provocatively lay, like two scoops of boiled rice, her white breasts.

But then more people came into the compartment. A family with a child. All of them panting heavily.

“I almost had a coronary,” said the father, wiping his sweaty brow. The train creaked and started to move.

“What’s a coronary?” asked the child.

“A coronary is a kind of forest animal,” said the girl with a smile, without taking her eyes off the phone. Her smile was so subtle as to be almost imperceptible. Everyone immediately turned to look at her. The child stared wide-eyed and thoughtfully nodded his head.

And off we went.

Outside the window a field, a river, a forest. Inside the compartment a fringe, arms, legs, and now the coronary. For a while the parents stared in bewilderment at the swinging leg of the girl, who was paying no attention to anything but her mobile. The child stared out of the window, no doubt with a coronary running round in his head, and the parents, suddenly flagging, didn’t have the strength to chase it out of there. An embarrassed silence. The girl swung her leg. At first the swinging began to visibly annoy the mother, but soon she got over it and the anger was passed on to the father like some kind of infection.

Suddenly it was obvious that it wasn’t just the girl’s movements which were highly charged, but the movements of everyone else in the compartment. The father reached for something, and there was something aggressive in his gesture. He reached for something as if out of spite. As I was watching the father, I suddenly broke out in a cold sweat, because it was like looking in a mirror. Like seeing myself half an hour earlier, when I was still at liberty to hate the girl, which was now impossible. The father immediately got my back up. The idea that just moments before I could have made movements like those, that I could have so visibly lost control over the outside of my body, filled me with an intense revulsion against everything the father did: now he had even begun to faintly tap his fingers on the small table by the window. He soon stopped, but after a while, as though he had remembered something, his fingers started up again, and there was something idiotically spiteful about that drumming.

Just then the girl put down her mobile and took out a packet of sweets. Jelly snakes. She ate one after another. The father secretly stared at her chewing, something stirring inside of him. He was completely beside himself. I watched the father out of the corner of my eye; I watched that mysterious voyeurism and that rage, which I knew so well and which was visible around the father’s mouth, in the faint microscopic twitching of the tissue around his lips. No-one else noticed anything, and the child even started to sing a song. But the girl had somehow managed to sneak her way into this song as well: the cow jumped over the moon, but there was a coronary lurking behind it, peering slyly through the moonbeams.

And then the thing I had subconsciously been expecting to happen happened, but it still took my breath away. The girl bent over to the father and said innocently:

“D’you want one?” and held out her hand with the bag of sweets. Not to the child, not to the mother – to the father. The blood rushed to his face and he lowered his gaze. It was all too obvious – in front of him that dreadful solar and the hint of lace and the ponytail draped over her left breast. And instead of saying something, he took the sweets and started to eat them. He put them in his mouth and chewed on them and swallowed. It was awful. He chewed and blushed. He was trapped. All of a sudden he didn’t know where to look. In front of him a thirty-year-old chest with two breasts, and all of the previous aggression was transformed into passion right in front of him by a dreadful erotic gravity he was unable to control. He immediately turned towards the window and did his best to pretend he was looking at the landscape outside.

But now that screech of shifting tectonic plates inside the train reached the mother. She glanced at the father, who was daydreaming, only occasionally chewing the remainder of his treat a little, and a flush spread across his face in waves in time with the throbbing of his heart. She glanced at the girl, who was once more typing on her mobile, oblivious to everything else. A kind of shadow passed over the mother, the faint shuddering of the earth during a seismic tremor that is barely registered on the Richter scale. That does no more than make the glasses in the sideboard clink, and yet everyone suddenly remembers – spoons halfway towards mouths, steam rising from plates, animals in the forests raising their heads, birds falling silent in the trees – that somewhere deep down in the darkness below, beneath all of those layers and deposits, lies a core which burns at a billion degrees Celsius. For a moment the mother stared absently at the core in the middle of the girl’s chest and a hot flush came over her. Would he be capable of it? Did he have the right to? I mean, his child was sitting next to him . . . But the seismic tremor was over, spoons entered mouths and the world outside the window, frozen with fear for a second, erupted once again. We move on, the landscape behind the glass undulates and that slight shadow lifts from the mother’s face, contracts with a movement like a jellyfish and floats away. But still, in the evening when she goes to put the dishes back on the shelves, she’ll discover that one of the glasses in the sideboard – the one right at the back that they never use – is cracked. And it always will be. A yearning has settled there. And from there, during unguarded moments, during those evenings when you hear dogs barking in the distance and children’s voices from the garden, when it grows dark in the forest and strange patches of cloud quickly drift by in the blue sky, at moments like that, this yearning will unexpectedly spill over into their lives.

The train began to brake. The girl stood up without looking at anyone, said goodbye and left the compartment. She was gone. It was as though we’d all had a tooth pulled at the same time. The empty seat she’d left behind was suddenly lit up. Everyone stole looks at it in turn. The train started off again and I felt a wave of dizziness. Like a hard pill to swallow, the child mulled over the coronary, the father his secret passion and the mother her yearning. And the woman by the window, the one it had all started with, the one who had kept silent the whole time and indifferently looked out at the landscape, suddenly – like a shy conductor marking the beat of all the days, weeks and years to come – began to gently swing her leg.

“The Relay,” by Marek Šindelka (trans. Graeme Dibble), and originally published in BODY, which describes itself as “an international online literary journal [that publishes] the highest quality poetry and prose from emerging and established writers.”

Though their Nalí man recently moved to an old folk’s home in Farmington, Tashina and Krishauna rummaged through their grandfather’s bedroom closet for mementos to decorate his new space, as commanded by their eldest sister, Bryanna.  

Their Nalí man had eclectic taste, collecting river smoothed rocks, and fallen bird feathers he’d tuck into Burger King cups on his dresser top alongside his turquoise necklaces, bracelets, and rings, which he kept neatly stacked in an abalone shell. His mirror was vignetted with photos of his three granddaughters. Some, just pictures of Bryanna holding a NAC feather fan against an indigo backdrop. But most of the pictures were of the twins — pictures of them taken by family members at birthday parties or NAC meetings, or at Sears. They were in their family’s eyes a matched pair. 

As Krishauna pulled drawers open and emptied out a drawer’s worth of socks into a black trash bag, Tashina wrestled with her grandfather’s tightly packed closet, his clothes hangers, as multicolored as Good & Plenty candied licorice. They continued their chores in quiet reverence with only the sound of the hangers clattering together, as Tashina removed clothing from the closet in bundles.

Tashina reached the far end of the closet, where on a fine velvet hanger hung a black garment bag so speckled in dust it looked like a sparrow’s egg. Disturbing the garment bag sent up a flurry of dust, throwing Tashina into a fit of sneezes, but once she’d removed, or rather inhaled much of the dust, she unzipped the bag. It was the exact thing their grandfather had asked them to find. 

Strips of fringe escaped the garment bag. Tashina held back a gasp as she uncovered the rest of the garment. It was a nice jacket — perhaps the nicest she’d ever seen. She ran her fingertips along the fringe; it tickled her fingers. Then she released that gasp when she checked the clothes tag. 

“Shauna, come look at this. Says John Wayne’s name on it,” Tashina said, as she tucked the corner of the collar into her hand, popping the tag out, so it rested flush with her palm. 

Krishauna dropped her garbage bag, stepping over it to lean over Tashina’s shoulder. The clothes tag read WESTERN COSTUME CO. HOLLYWOOD, embroidered in gold thread. Below that line, written in faded permanent marker, were more lines that read:

Prop Number Name Chest Sleeve Waist Inseam

The final line was inked with John Wayne’s name in faded purple. 

“You think this thing is like legit?” Krishauna side stepped Tashina and reached for the sleeve of the jacket. 

“Has to be!” Tashina said, stepping backwards out of Krishauna’s grip.

“Dang, I didn’t know Nalí man was Hollywood!” Krishauna chuckled, before her expression bloomed with excitement. “Let me try it on.” 

Tashina considered something for a moment before sighing resignedly and handing the jacket over to her sister. Krishauna pulled the sleeves over her red Monument Valley Mustang’s t-shirt. 

Screwing up her nose, she put on a smokey accent and said, “Call me the Duke.” 

“Eww, just all creepy!” Tashina squealed, before it turned into a volley of laughter. “Here let me try it on.”

Krishauna obliged and pulled the jacket off before helping her sister into the same sleeves. As the jacket came up over Tashina’s shoulders, she smiled, turning with her sister to face their grandfather’s dresser mirror. Outside the light shifted golden, setting the mirror aglow, drenching Tashina in a honeyed light. In the sun’s beams, her blue-black hair shone auburn. As she swayed to and fro, the jacket’s suede fringed sleeves glittered as they cascaded around her body. She’d never seen herself like this, beautiful, unique, and alone.

Krishauna stood entranced as well, staring at the sight of her sister, haloed by a mosaic of childhood pictures, fractals of their shared life, fragments of their fifteen years spent inseparable, with the exception of the nine minutes Krishauna spent alone, before her sister was engulfed by the overhead lamplight of the doctor. 

*

In the weeks following the discovery of John Wayne’s jacket, Tashina was strangely private, avoiding Krishauna at school, and not sitting by her on the school bus. Krishauna tried not to take it personally, but it was difficult when it was her twin. She was used to being seen when she looked at Tashina with their waist length blue-black hair and matching tomboy style. But then, one day, things changed. Tashina dyed blonde streaks into her hair and started sitting at the lunch tables with the boys who wore the black hoodies. Krishauna didn’t recognize this twin stranger anymore. 

One night, after their eldest sister had fallen asleep, Tashina nudged Krishauna awake. 

“Hey Shauna, wanna go to Collin’s party with me?”  

Collin, one of the black hoodie boys, was Tashina’s latest fixation. She’d been scheming to get his attention and believed that tonight would be the culminating moment, when he’d realize that she, with her blond-streaked hair and Sol de Janeiro body spray, would be the only one for him. Krishauna wasn’t too keen on the idea, but she missed her sister and thought that going to Collin’s party might help get things back to normal between them. 

The truck that picked them up drove up the dirt road to their house with its headlights off. Krishauna didn’t recognize the hunched driver, despite the green dashboard lights illuminating his profile, but she assumed that he was another one of those black hoodie boys. He drove a scratched long bed Dodge Hemi truck with suicide doors. 

Tashina giggled as she crawled up into the cab of the truck, which left Krishauna in the back seat. 

Before he could even put the car into drive, Tashina cried out, “Wait! Oh shit, I forgot something! Can you wait just like one more minute please, Ky?” 

Krishauna grimaced at the nickname.

“Whatever,” Kyle responded. 

Before Krishauna had even touched the door handle, Tashina had already slammed the door behind her, effectively locking her in the car, with its suicide doors. Krishauna’s hands went clammy. 

“You guys twins?” Kyle asked in a deep voice that she believed he practiced at home in his bathroom mirror.

“Yup, I’m older by nine minutes,” Krishauna said, relieved by the conversational novelty of her twin status. 

“Huh, I wouldn’t have guessed,” he said, glancing back. 

“We’re identical—we looked more identical—you know, before she dyed her hair.”

Kyle chuckled at her comment, flashing her a green tinted smile. 

“But what’s your clans?” 

She felt the subtext of his question deep within her bones. Clans before hook-up plans. 

Krishauna frowned, “Bit’ahnii?” 

At that moment, Tashina emerged out of the house, the John Wayne jacket casually slung over her shoulders in the way famous NTVS did on the red carpet—just over the shoulders so it showed off the outfit beneath. In the green tinted light, Krishauna swore she heard Kyle whisper damn under his breath. Damn was right.

The party was up on the mesa, the drive up was bumpy, and Krishauna was starting to feel motion sick. 

“Are we close?” Krishauna asked after nearly thirty minutes of driving. “I think I’m going to barf.”

“We’re almost there, you baby cry,” Tashina snapped. 

Kyle’s headlights pooled into a clearing where several other trucks sat in a circle, their beds facing a huge bonfire. Nearby, tumbleweeds flickered with firelight, casting long crisscrossed shadows onto the desert brush. Patches of dark pooled behind uneven lumps of grass and green thread. Krishauna recognized some of the black hoodie boys, most importantly Collin, who sat on the roof of his truck, his legs hanging over his rear windshield, a beer bottle winking in his hands.

Everyone stared at Tashina when she stepped out of the truck wearing the jacket and Krishauna didn’t blame them. Who was she to tell her sister what to do when she herself was sporting knee length basketball shorts and a sleeping shirt? Tashina, however, was glowing bright as a new ember in her white tube top, denim mini skirt, and leather cowboy boots. But Krishauna knew that a spark that bright could also be all consuming. 

Tashina was euphoric as she approached Collin, who quickly shooed his friends out of the bed of his truck. Like a gentleman, he helped Tashina onto the tailgate by pulling her up by her armpits. 

“You came,” he said, glancing down at his feet when he noticed Krishauna.  

“Of course I did,” Tashina chuckled. “I wouldn’t miss this.” 

Collin then tipped an unopened beer toward her, and she accepted, but he wasn’t looking at Tashina when he offered it, and Krishauna knew this because he was directly looking at her, his eyes aglow, gleaming with the orange reflection of the fire. 

“You brought Krishauna?” He chuckled. “Is she wearing basketball shorts?”

Tashina rolled her eyes, “I had to! And you know she can’t dress herself,” she said, tossing her hand flagrantly.

Krishauna overheard this and stopped short of Collin’s ride. 

“I’m going back to the truck,” she said to Kyle. 

“I’ll come with you,” Kyle responded, sighing as he glanced back over his shoulder at Tashina, who was standing so close to Collin, their outer thighs touched. Krishauna didn’t understand what her sister saw in Collin. He had long shaggy hair, like every other Navajo boy. He was just some Jawn. But at least he was nice to her. 

She didn’t tell Tashina that the previous semester, she shared an art class with Collin. It was her favorite class. Most of their art supplies were busted by her careless classmates, but not hers, her pastels, shading pencils, and eraser putty were nearly as pristine as when she first got them, albeit shrunken by use. Another thing she liked about art was that she wasn’t just good at it — she was really good at it. Someone could bring in a photograph to her and she would hand them back a hyper-realistic drawing, with shading so perfect you couldn’t even see the streaks. And since she was so good, most people didn’t talk to her — they’d just leave her alone and let her draw. Except for Collin. Sometimes, she’d be so in the zone while shading a flower-like pattern to avoid pencil streaks that when Collin tapped her on the shoulder, she’d flinch. 

He’d always ask her about her project, flashing a boyish grin and asking, “What’s the story about this one?” 

That semester she was working on a pastel portrait of her Nalí lady for her Nalí man’s birthday. In the portrait, her Nalí lady wore thick bifocal lenses and a floral scarf wrapped around her silvery hair. She’d drawn it out carefully, but she had trouble capturing the threaded strands of tinsel woven through the headscarf. Normally, she’d leave white space for highlights, because you can’t get crisp whites after putting down a cobalt layer. 

“Yeah, I fucked up on the scarf. I just can’t get this part to look shiny like it does in the picture.” She tapped on the photo reference with her fingernail. 

Collin’s lip twitched with a smile. “Let me give it a try?” 

“Sure, why not,” Krishauna said. She was fed up with the white pastel blending into the blue and her hand was starting to cramp. “If you mess up, I’ll just cover it in more blue.”  

“I won’t mess it up, I do this all the time when I detail cars.” 

Krishauna scrunched her face at him. 

He stepped away from his desk to rummage through the paint drawer that their teacher had filled with different varieties of acrylic paints, purchased with a rural art grant. 

On a Styrofoam plate, he squeezed out a pea sized dollop of paint, then he pulled out an impossibly skinny paint brush with whisker long bristles. Swishing around the brush in a cup of water, he thinned the paint to his desired consistency. Carefully, he pulled a fine white line across the scarf, then a series of dashes so that the highlight disappeared into the rest of the fabric of the scarf. 

Krishauna’s eyes widened, “Whoa! That worked and it looks good! Thank you! Oh my god, why didn’t I think of using acrylics for the highlights, duh!” And when Krishauna said this, she was pretty sure Collin, king of the hoodie boys, blushed.

Krishauna sat with Kyle in the bed of the truck. He’d sigh intermittently, between sips of beer, saying nothing. He only perked up when Tashina waved them over.

“Shauna, come here! Hurry!” 

Tashina had had one too many beers. She was too giggly and slurring her words. When she leaned down from the bed to whisper in Krishauna’s ear she could smell the beer on her breath. 

“I have to piss,” she slurred. “Collin says there’s a ditch over there.” Tashina pointed to a dry creek bed surrounded by trees. “But you need to come with me,” her shit-eating grin turning into giggles.

“Okay,” Krishauna sighed, helping her sister down from the truck bed. 

As they walked over to the dry ravine, Tashina kept laughing and swaying, nearly tripping over her boots several times in the process. 

“I think that tonight is when I’m going to seal the deal with Collin,” she squeaked, the moonlight illuminating the highpoints of her face. Even in the dark Krishauna could almost see the red ocher flush coloring her sister’s face. 

“Okay, cool, now hurry up and go piss,” Krishauna said, gently shoving her sister forward. 

“Yeah,” Tashina replied, before she lurched forward and landed on her hands and knees. 

After helping her sister to her feet, Krishauna took the jacket from her. Krishauna kept watch as her sister hobbled down into the dry ravine and disappeared behind the mesh of juniper branches. Donning the jacket, she waited for her sister to return. 

When she turned around, she was surprised to see Collin behind her. 

“You should probably get her home. She’s getting kind of rowdy,” he said, scratching his neck. “I wasn’t planning on having that kind of party. But I’m glad she brought you.” 

Krishauna felt her cheeks warm. 

“Er — yeah. I actually didn’t want to come, but she just woke me up and dragged me here.” 

Collin stepped closer to Krishauna, his head towering above her own. She admired how the moon reflected the cobalt off his shaggy black hair, and how sharp his jawline appeared with the exaggerated shadows. His skin had a smooth blue porcelain finish. Before she knew it, Collin gripped the fringe at Krishauna’s elbows, leaned down, and kissed her. 

Krishauna pushed a slender hand into Collin’s chest, pushing herself away from him. 

“You don’t know what you just did,” she said, her voice hitching with panic. 

“I-I-I’m sorry, Krishauna, I thought that you wanted…”

“I did, but you’re not mine to want,” Krishauna said, swallowing against the pit of shame lodged in her throat. 

A new look dawned on Collin’s face. “It’s never been like that with Tashina for me.”

Before she could say another word, Tashina barreled into her sister, knocking them both down into a nearby sage bush. She could feel the air rushing out of her lungs as she fell backward into the sound of snapping branches. Tashina’s hands then curled into fists within the dark sheet of her sister’s hair. All Krishauna could make out was the twangy sound of her hair plucking out of her scalp and the snapping of sage branches that dug deep gouges into the John Wayne jacket.  

“Can’t I have one thing to myself for once?” Tashina shrieked. A sharp crack then burst out of the darkness. 

At first, Krishauna believed that a branch collapsed beneath her, that is until, grainy spots began to fill her vision, and her right cheek flushed with pain. Defensively, she clawed upward, drawing her fingernails down any exposed skin. 

“Don’t dig your nails in me!” Tashina burst out. 

A fist struck Krishauna’s brow bone.

“Guys! Stop it! Stop it!” Collin yelled. “What are you doing? Stop it!” 

Eventually, someone from beyond the bush pulled Tashina off Krishauna. Collin reached down and gathered Krishauna up easily. She didn’t register the jacket slipping off her shoulders. Folding her body into his chest, he held her. 

“You whore!” Tashina spat, her shoulders heaving, as she writhed against Kyle’s arms. 

As he restrained her in a bear hug, Krishauna noticed a trickle of blood wink down Tashina’s face from one of the scratches she gave her. She would have preferred further blows to seeing her twin’s face twisted up in agony like this. A familiar weft of pain shuttled through Krishauna’s chest—pulling—tightening—turning back on itself. Her sister’s hurt. Her own hurt. When they were babies, one twin’s tears would trigger the other’s. When did that stop? Surely, it never stopped for Krishauna. 

*

Tashina considered her sister as she lay in their shared bedroom after the party. The scratches her sister clawed down her face pulsed, matching the beat of her heart. The party scattered quickly after the twins got into a fight and Kyle insisted he take both sisters home to “mellow out.” But her buzz had worn off and her head pulsed, and she glared up at the glow in the dark sticky stars affixed to her ceiling above her bed. She only had five large stars, while Krishauna had six small stars, but nonetheless, the stars came from the same pack. Her family didn’t consider affording her the option of having her own glow in the dark sticky pack. She was yet again expected to share with Krishauna. Hadn’t she shared enough? They shared the same face for Creator’s sake. And for a time, she was okay with their sameness. She never felt lonely. But gradually it changed for Tashina, in such an incremental way she couldn’t tell you the exact day it happened, just that it happened. Like the day you dip your hand into the flour bin to make frybread and feel your hand hit plastic. As a child she enjoyed being a twin; they shared a secret language of baby babbles, until real words developed. They shared a secret game called the slapping game where they’d clasp hands like they were going to arm wrestle, and one sister would slap the other’s hand.  

“We’re telepathic,” Tashina would say, nearly nose to nose with Krishauna, raising her hand to slap. “Am I going to slap you? Yes or no?” 

“No.” Krishauna would reply in that raspy feather-light voice she had yet to outgrow.

Slap.

“We’re telepathic. Am I going to slap you? Yes or no?” Krishauna would say. 

“No.” Tashina would reply. 

Krishauna was always wrong, Tashina would always slap her, but she would never slap her back. Sometimes they’d play the game so long that the blood vessels on the back of Krishauna’s hands would burst, turning her skin purple and green, but she never told their mother. Tashina once asked her, after the slapping game, why she’d never slap her. 

“I don’t want to, if it hurts you,” she said, cradling her hand into her chest. “Why do you always slap me?” 

Tashina paused for a long moment. “I don’t know. I just thought that one day you’d slap me back.” 

The pulsing scratches were now evidence that that day had finally come. 

So, they had these games and their late-night conversations and a secret language apart from their families, and Krishauna and Tashina knew they were different, but everyone else saw them as one unit: the twins. Put the twins in matching dresses. The twins get the same dolls on Christmas. Tashina was never just herself. The matching everything was one thing, but the comparisons were far more degrading: the shy twin and the outgoing twin, the fast twin and the slow twin, the sensitive twin and the happy twin. She understood that when people had two like things, they liked to compare them. I can tell you’re Tashina because your face is narrower. That one is Krishauna because she’s better behaved. While Krishauna attended the honor roll dinner in the cafeteria with their parents, Tashina was stuck in remedial afterschool tutoring. Krishauna could always make their parents proud in a way, Tashina never felt she could. 

After fifteen years of being a pair, Tashina craved to feel different. In her mind, she deserved the John Wayne jacket. For one, she knew more about it. While Krishauna was doing art and reading her anime books in the school library, she was on her school-issued Chromebook looking up John Wayne and discovered how while he was on set of the 1956 film The Searchers, a two-year-old Navajo child came down with pneumonia. Unable to get proper medical attention to her in time, John Wayne lent his plane and private pilot to the little girl and her family so they could get to the hospital. And that’s how he got his name “The Man With The Big Eagle,” from the Monument Valley Navajo extras. 

When Tashina watched The Searchers, John Wayne’s character, Ethan Edwards, was scary to her. His character was a Civil War veteran who spent years searching for his niece, Debbie, after her family was killed and she was kidnapped by the Comanche. It confused Tashina how Edwards spent so much of the film searching for Debbie only to get pissed off when he found her living peacefully among the Comanche. He’d rather kill her than see her assimilated? She couldn’t reconcile the John Wayne who could play a racist veteran who sided with the Confederacy, with the John Wayne who lent his plane to a sick little girl’s family. 

Against the familiar backdrop of Monument Valley and orchestral fanfare, Tashina struggled to reconcile her lived reality with the rough and tumble fantasy of Edwards vying to exact revenge on the Comanche, a southern plains tribe, in Utah’s arid deserts.

 How was it that they had his jacket, when everything surrounding his body of work and his behavior towards Natives, diverged so heavily from the Man With The Big Eagle story? From deep within her another question bubbled forth: who did the Big Eagle story benefit and was it even true? 

The jacket, Tashina thought suddenly, bolting up out of bed. Where the fuck was the jacket? 

***

The following morning, Krishauna awoke to the Navajo Nation’s radio station, KTTN 660, droning into her eldest sister’s bedroom from the kitchen. Her mother liked to listen to the station early in the morning, while brewing her NDN coffee on the kettle of their propane stove. She rolled over in bed, only to be greeted by the two dark eyes of her eldest sister. 

“Why are you in my bedroom?” Bryanna asked. 

Krishauna didn’t know how to explain sneaking out, Collin’s party, or the fight, or how after coming to blows with her twin, she didn’t want her throat slit in her sleep — which was probably overdramatic, but still. 

She settled with: “I got scared?” 

Bryanna’s eyes narrowed. “Bullshit.” 

Krishauna rolled her eyes. “Tashina and I got into a fight last night,” she said. 

“Did you win?” Bryanna asked, rubbing her face. 

“What do you think?” Krishauna said, drawing her hair up over her temple, revealing a bald spot. 

“Shit, she got you good,” Bryanna huffed, as she arranged the pillows better beneath her head, so that her eyes were level with Krishauna’s. 

“She did,” Krishauna said, her voice cracking slightly. 

Bryanna’s eyes widened with horror. “Oh shit, this was like a real fight?” 

Krishauna couldn’t do anything but nod back. 

“What could Tashina be pulling your hair out over for?” 

Krishauna shrunk into the bed and buried her head under her pillow. 

“Collin Rodriguez kissed me.”

“Tʼáásh aaníí? For real?” 

“While I was wearing John Wayne’s jacket.” 

“Fawk,” Bryanna said, shaking her head in disappointment. “All over a Jawn.” 

Krishauna nodded under the pillow. All night she had replayed the kiss, the sweet whisper light brush of Collin’s lips on hers, just as much as she had her sister’s blows. 

“Hold up, John Wayne’s wha—” 

“Jacket,” Krishauna interrupted. “We found it in Nalí man’s closet. The one that Tashina’s been wearing this whole time? The fringe sleeves?” 

“That jacket? Nalí man asked me to keep an eye out for that jacket. That’s the whole reason he wanted us to clean out his room.” 

Krishauna winced. “I think Tashina has it—after the fight we got separated, but we had to leave because Tashina was already so drunk—” 

“Drunk? You guys were drinking?!” Bryanna sat up ram rod straight from the bed. 

“Shhh!” Krishauna hushed, clapping her hand over her sister’s mouth. After all, their parents were just down the hall. 

Bryanna’s eyes narrowed, as Krishauna mouthed quiet with her finger in front of her lips.

“So, what happened to the jacket?”

“We may have left it on the mesa,” said Krishauna. 

Bryanna crawled out of the bed and slid open her closet door. Donning her track sweatsuit, she nonchalantly walked out of her bedroom and to the neighboring room.

“TASH, GET UP! We’re going up the mesa!”  

The wood panel walls of their trailer did little to muffle Bryanna’s booming voice, sending tremors through the mirror on her vanity. Her cross-country medals clattered against the mirror as Krishauna stared into her quivering reflection. 

Bryanna insisted on swinging by the Starbucks installed in their local Bashas’ to get her signature venti shaken espresso with brown sugar cold foam. Krishauna unsuccessfully tried to cover Tashina’s drink, but not even a venti pink drink with sweet cream cold foam could mend this hurt. Back in the sisters’ Tacoma, Bryanna swirled her coffee like it were an NAC gourd, the ice hitting the plastic cup in rhythmic circles. The radio droned on playing some twangy country song, one that their Nalí man would probably have turned up. 

In the daylight, the path up to the mesa looked idyllic–sunlit and golden–the washboard road surrounded by scraggly dusty blue-green juniper shrubs, and scattered orange globemallows. They’d been up here with their grandfather back in the day. He’d take the girls on a hike up the mesa, as soon as spring rolled in, and the snow had all melted. They’d wear long basketball shorts and baseball caps, while their grandfather chose to hike the seven miles in his heavily starched Wrangler blue jeans, straw cowboy hat, and his big old cell phone clipped onto his western belt. At least he’d wear his tennis shoes, Krishana thought with a chuckle.

“What are you laughing at?” Tashina snapped, as if Krishauna was trying to be intentionally irritating.  

“Nothing, I was just thinking about how Nalí man used to wear jeans on hikes.” 

Bryanna busted out laughing just as they hit a significant pothole. “He did, huh! Tash, remember when he made us turn over that big sandstone rock? It took all three of us to tip it over.” 

“Whatever,” Tashina said, untucking her blonde streaked hair from behind her neck to shield her face. 

“Eww, just gross with all that attitude,” Bryanna chided. 

Tashina shot a death glare at her sister. 

“Just pay attention to the road, you’re hitting all the bumps.” 

Bryanna eased the Tacoma up a steep hill that lowered into the clearing where they had the fire the night before. As they rolled over the hill, their truck sunk lower into the softened sand before they rolled to a stop near the fire pit. Krishauna hopped out of the car and looked around the site, noting the tire marks Collin’s ride left behind. 

“Okay, where do you remember last having the jacket?” Bryanna asked, giving her iced coffee another swirl. 

“Over there!” Tashina shouted, pointing to the bush that she’d shoved her sister into. Krishauna was surprised her sister could recall the night before, given how drunk off her ass she appeared. 

The girls marched over to the bush, their steps crunching over dry shale. What had once been a bush, now looked more like the nest of a very large animal. An animal that thrashed around a lot, given the tangled branches that caved inward at the center. 

“Here,” Krishauna stated. 

“Shit, I’ll be right back.” Bryanna said abruptly, leaving the twins behind. 

“Where are you going?” Tashina called out. 

“I left my phone in the car. And you two need to talk!” 

Bryanna called back, leaving the twins behind. 

Both Krishauna and Tashina squinted against the noon day sun, their mouths set in the same slight frown. A breeze whistled by, catching on their chapped lips, making words form, those that hadn’t yet been spoken. 

Hair clung to Tashina’s lip gloss as she started, “I really liked Collin.” 

“I know,” Krishauna replied. “I promise, I didn’t know he was going to do that.” 

“Are you sure he didn’t think you were me?” 

Krishauna felt her brow furrow, “I’m sure. He said he was glad to see me.” 

 Tashina considered her twin’s words, her expression shifting as her eyes hardened and locked onto her sister’s. She squared her shoulders. “We’re telepathic.”

“We’re telepathic,” Krishauna confirmed.

Tashina closed the distance between them. She reached out her hand. Krishauna accepted. 

“You tried to hurt me on purpose, yes, or no?” Tashina asked, staring at their clasped hands. 

“No—” Krishauna went to slap her sister’s hand, but at the last second grasped it on her own. “—not ever.” 

Tashina’s eyes were glassy, she glanced away. 

“There it is.” 

The jacket appeared where Collin’s truck had been parked, although when Krishauna had looked there, she’d failed to notice the heap of suede. 

*

The old folks home their Nalí was staying in was swanky as hell. They made the place look all rustic, kind of like the Ute Mountain Casino—plush blue carpets, live edge coffee tables, and big fancy light fixtures. It was funny to the twins, because their grandpa’s trailer was a far cry from his luxurious stay in Pine Meadows. As soon as they checked in at the front desk, their Nalí man was already waiting. Krishauna thought it was cute how he starched his shirt and pants for the visit. The twins tittered about the old ladies in the dining hall who gushed over learning their names from their grandfather.

“Oh, you’re Julian’s twins—you girls are so pretty, I can barely tell you apart, except for the hair, of course.” The old women with silvered perms gushed. The twins basked in their compliments. 

The cafeteria staff rolled in with their carts, plating the tables with mashed potatoes and gravy with peas and pork chops. Luckily, their Nalí still had his teeth, so his food didn’t have to be puréed, like that of some residents. 

“Somebody better get Nalí man some roses, Golden Eagle Bachelor over here,” Bryanna teased.

Their Nalí man wiggled his eyebrows at his granddaughters. “Yah, I like it here.” He speared a chunk of porkchop into his mouth. “They’re not stingy with the food!”  

“Grandpa, these girls, they found something of yours in your room,” said their mom, Marie. 

Bryanna then reached into the tote bag slung over her shoulder and pulled out the fringed jacket by the shoulder pad.

“Tʼáásh aaníí? You found shí buddy John Wayne’s jacket.” He picked up the jacket like he was greeting an old friend, setting it across his lap and stroking the sleeve. “Yeah, John Wayne gave me this jacket a long time ago, back in the seventies.” Their Nalí man squinted searching for his memories of the past, as if they were just out over the horizon. “I was an extra on set for Warner Brothers, we were filming way out there in Durango.” He pointed with a calloused knuckle in the general direction of Colorado. “This is right before,” he wet his lips, “he passed on from stomach cancer.” Shaking his head he hissed low and slow. “He gave me this on wrap day, took it right off his back—it was still sweaty, and he said, here, have this, Julian. It wasn’t until I got home, I found a golden dollar in the pocket.”  

“He used to send us a bag of oranges and peanuts every Christmas,” the girls’ father said gruffly. 

Their Nalí man pursed his lips and nodded in agreement. “He did.” 

“I was invited to his funeral in California.” 

“Did you go?” Tashina asked. 

Their Nalí man burst out laughing. “No! I went to that big boarding school out there. No California for me!” 

“But weren’t you friends?” Krishauna inquired. 

As if he sipped the hot coffee, their Nalí man hissed, “He was my buddy, but he was ayóó diigis—he was nice to me but mean to some other Indians. When we’d go to Goulding’s and get some drinks, he’d buy for everybody there, but then he’d run out there to the magazines and newspapers and say diigis things! Somethin’ about Indians being selfish, keeping all the land to ourselves. This guy, he was telling Playboy Magazine that he believes in white supremacy! And I said to him, John, what in the hell are you saying out there? You’re an actor, not the president! And you know what he says to me?”
The table waited in rapture. Krishauna looked to Tashina, Tashina to Bryanna, Bryanna to their mother, and their mother searched her husband’s face for a hint to the end of the story — but he was already shaking his head in discontent, as if he’d heard the final line of this story countless times before.

“Julian, it’s just in the Playboy,” he said in a put-upon deep voice. “Yeah, so that was my buddy, John Wayne.” 

Patting the jacket, he glanced up at Bryanna. “Go put this in my room. I want to wear it to the Spring Dance. Because things always happen when I wear this jacket, must be lucky.”

The twins exchanged a knowing glance. 

Somehow I think my life opens always on a Thursday.

The days before merely a suggestion. Somehow in front

of a mirror too small for the truth of me I am learning 

to love the ampersand of my body. Which means I own

my hunger. Which means cravings for jjangmyeon at

three in the afternoon. Too I sing offkey in the shower. 

Who are you calling a pedant. I love Ella and Louis 

in the same breath as Squidward Kenny G. I keep 

souvenirs from Macau and I can still lose my left earring 

at the drugstore. I am 5’1″ and I verily insist on that inch. 

I use charcoal to remove the stench of goopy somethings 

stuck in the back of the fridge, which has become a nebula 

of smells. I ask for impossible things: a portrait of my head

bursting into a flower, a pen that never runs out of ink,

reading the same story again for the very first time, cake

that doesn’t go to my hips, the unbearable lightness of

oranges. I have a messy house and I cry often about it. 

There is lots of crying in the long history of who I am

becoming. Somehow I think my life has been torrential 

rains that fill the balcony but my plants don’t die. I don’t 

die. I wear red lipstick like a flag and I take being your 

emergency contact seriously. On the day I was born 

interacting galaxies Arp 81 became visible after a hundred

million years. Suppose it only takes a collision to arrive 

on earth. Most of us sleep through earthquakes and I desire

to be awake for when my happiness is let loose by fissures. 

I want to learn about the world by looking at birds. Try as 

I might I can only exist slowly. When you see me bump

into sharp corners you will understand. Sometimes I can’t

comprehend that I can be loved but I am loved anyway. 

It doesn’t have to be a Thursday. It can be any day.

But life can open. And I don’t have to die.