Must a People Disappear for Us to Know That It Existed? The elegiac title of Ben Buckland and Carissa Western’s photo essay poses the question at the heart of Guernica’s July issue: Is our contemporary gaze fundamentally reactive? Does our attention gravitate only toward that which is already endangered? The works gathered in this issue question and resist this belated recognition. Across photography, nonfiction, fiction, interview, translation, and poetry, they ask what it means to look before disappearance, to listen before silence, to love before loss.

Buckland and Western’s photo essay turns to Sebeïba, the centuries old Saharan festival, and the ritual and cultural life of the Imuhar. The essay explores the uneasy ethics of visibility, and questions whether preservation, tourism, state interest, and spectatorship can ever be innocent when they arrive at the threshold of threatened worlds. 

Mahreen Sohail’s The Death Years measures motherhood against mortality. Moving between family history, inherited grief, and the terror of loving a child, the essay asks what it means to remember the dead while learning how to live.

In fiction, Herbert Girtley’s Bojack Blues gives us a story of friendship, hurt, and music rendered in a voice so assured it seems to gather force almost effortlessly. What begins as a man disappearing before a gig opens into a rich portrait of friendship between men. By a creek, two men slow down long enough to share a moment of pain, and in that sharing, create room for the communal, and the sublime.

Also in fiction, Andra Otilia Nicolescu’s Places of Memory, an excerpt from her unpublihsed novel Midnight in Exile, follows Paul and Ana into America late in life, where exile becomes at once a strange new beginning and a reckoning. Set in the aftermath of 1989, as the collapse of state socialism in Eastern Europe opens borders, old certainties of country, ideology, and home are unsettled. From the rubble of an old world emerges a layered meditation on migration, marriage, history, and the intimate revelations that arrive only after a life has already been lived.

In The Poems Will Not Stop: An Interview with Kathy Engel, Tyler Barton converses with poet, activist, and organizer Kathy Engel, who has spent a lifetime writing alongside struggles of Palestine, Nicaragua, Indigenous sovereignty, and social justice. Beginning with the 1982 barring of Mahmoud Darwish from a New York poetry event after Israel’s invasion of Lebanon and the Sabra and Shatila massacres, the conversation reflects on art, solidarity, grief, beauty, and the perennial work of refusing the separation between the poem and the world.

In Global Spotlights, Masami Kakinuma’s Go for it, translated from the Japanese by Sharni Wilson, brings us into a grandmother’s ancient home in rural Iwate. Folklore is braided with the muted disappointments of adult life as the story reimagines good fortune as something made possible by the courage to move toward the life one once wished for.

In poetry, Michelle Matthees’s Svetlana at the Dacha, 1938 and Joseph unfold childhood innocence inside the shadow of Stalinist terror. Together, the poems ask how private wounds become historical violence. In Denoo Edinam Yawo’s The Anatomy of a Bullet Alchemising into Death, violence begins as the wound and endures as inheritance stored inside the human body. The bullet becomes a language of displacement, secrecy, and grief—ancestral rites—carried from mother to child. In Her Five Children and Noose, Anna T. Szabó, translated from Hungarian by Ági Bori, traces the point at which the domestic gives way to horror and probes what remains of care when the structures meant to sustain it have broken apart.

In this month’s conversation with Tyler Barton, Kathy Engel quotes Bayo Akomolafe: “The times are urgent—we must slow down.” The line could serve as missive from the July issue: to slow down and attend more deeply to the people made visible only at the edge of disappearance, to the dead who remain among us, to friendships that hold men through shame and hurt, to marriages still revealing themselves after decades, to poems that will not stop.

Featuring, courtesy of the artists, striking original artwork by: Ben Buckland, Melissa Monroe, and Andra Otilia Nicolescu.

Raaza Jamshed, Editor-in-Chief

But first, everything anew. For them, the millennium came early. 

Early evening on the fifteenth of September 1998, America unfurled beneath steady seas of clouds beneath Paul and Ana’s eyes. Holding hands, they peered past the window crystals.  Trembling bodies, intent on a first look at their new country.

What if I don’t want to live in  any country? A four-year-old Maya had asked nine Septembers ago, when told that she would soon be leaving for another country, with her parents. No, that wasn’t an option.

Is nowhere not a country? 

Well, maybe just the seas and clouds, but then you’d have to turn into a birdfish, babygirl. 

Is it a story?

Those first few months, America was pure fiction. A “lifetime special” of new things. Funny things. Good things. Strange things. Times Square and department stores. 

Think of how striking it must all be, for them, Teresa had to remind Maya, whenever they marveled too deeply at ordinary things, whenever the newness of things revealed itself in unexpected ways (a teenager bringing pizza to your door, kids with purple hair, women with earrings in their tongues, men with tattoos on their faces, cold coffee from plastic cups, endless bounty of heaping fruit, gleaming dewy beautiful for their pleasure at every hour of every day). 

For all their years (a hundred and forty lived between them), Paul and Ana couldn’t be jaded. Not during those first trips into the City, not by the novelty of the Manhattan skyline, grey Goliath unfurling from the bend of the L.I.E. then, or by the city’s angles, tones, surfaces cascading in, piercing the light at the tunnel’s end. The tall streets, busy with every kind of person, singing the magic of togetherness in time, of now, of moving shouting being with wind and dirt and steam, under the narrow skies. Everything brilliant tesserae, bewitching mosaic in timeless flux. 

The capacity to be astonished. Breathlessness, in a good way. 

With relishing their children’s long-absent physicality came a profound sense of visceral rootedness. Thrilling reminder of how it is to know things that have become unknown.

Teresa’s face: aged, circumspect, truly adult for the first time, in a way he couldn’t have imagined. Those final remnants of her youth vanished by her bold audition for the American Dream, by diligently exercising the hard-won privilege of doctoring America’s folk back to sanity. A living face their lips hadn’t touched for eight years, last seen through a disappearing Skoda 100R Series window, on Saturday the twelfth of May, 1990.  

Her voice, disembodied for 3,048 varied days, attached now to its body’s gestures, eyes, limbs again. Thoughts, until recently penned in ink, now a hand resting on his shoulder.  

And Maya. Bodies borne of him, everything he’d ever made. Breaking the world open at his feet. 

Paul experienced the move to America as something of a swan song. It wasn’t Ana’s victory march, but a postscript punctuating an already spent conclusion. The end of a long narrative burdened by too many plot twists. 

First, they’d survived. Them—subjects of foreign kings and whims, of native-tongued monsters and other-tongued prophets (hear the German boots the Soviet tanks the Yankee bombs, the slogans and drums). They—old bodies. But relatively unscathed.

That last opus, a year so monumental it sent history in search of new meanings. Stand alone. Sign, signifier, and signified. 1989.

With revolution, worlds collapsed, inverting. Walls tumbled, airspaces yawned, enemies became mates and friends nemeses. 

And what do you do, when places forbidden transfigured into playing-fields, when demons and angels swap robes? When slogans reinterpret themselves and new meanings become possible?  

Everybody asked, nobody knew, but all that mattered was that the shouting never stopped, that hope was only getting started, new lives just beginning. 

Overnight, scarcity became plenty—products, products, all around! Politicians handed out blue jeans on the streets. The King of Pop came and went moonwalking off western winds, and young and old together succumbed to collective hysteria. A personality cult of a different kind—that cocktail of hope and freedom and love for the tormented body of an American god, too potent to bear. And Brazilian voices graced you, singsong, because everyone fell in love with a woman called “Isaura” when telenovelas replaced the Party on television, when television came with color, when fuck production quotas but long live the consumption!

And Ana? At last, she prayed to her Virgin and her baby in peace. Prayed for her family, for the souls of heroes felled for freedom to ascend to heaven on schedule. Blessed little Maya for the extraordinary foresight of being born on the cusp of freedom, no less. Fed her, while her parents bartered dollars for trips across newly opened borders, all the way to Istanbul. Where, two among thousands of budding entrepreneurs, they filled their car with the bazaar, and idled in a traffic jam of biblical proportions, idled for their impending profit. 

And Paul? Even during those forty long days, Paul was as productive as ever. So much to do, decommunize the rule of law, institutionalize democracy, streamline facilitate evidence accord transition transfer fix and administer—administer the bureaucracy of daily life. Lest we forget that all survival demands are the passionless things. (So busy he was, in fact, that he hardly had the time to think about ghosts past. To ask the questions he’d longed to exorcise. To wonder, where’s Bluma? Could I find her, now? What say you, this irony? Freedom, just in time for my sixtieth year!). 

And just as soon, the side-effects arrived. Because the cure for such a chronic illness—first shocking, the unsurprising, the ever-shifting commentators, new arbiters of free thought, opined—proved to be almost as dangerous in its side-effects, as it sequelae. The realities of unplanning, of liberalizing stabilizing privatizing, dispersed the revelers with concussive force. 

Great deceptions uncovered, how freedom forecasts doom, for some. The unbridled wizard of rogue capitalism, unbound from his cage, performed his party tricks: pensions dissipated, livelihoods threatened. Those who missed their daily bread, their promised recompense of lifetimes of quietude and acquiescence, wailed and mourned the deaths of their dictators on new television channels. Irony became something like products now lined the shelves, asking to be owned—but shiny bills in your pocket had sprouted so many zeroes over night, that you couldn’t make them worth anything.  

And what’s going to happen, and what should we do? Teresa and Nick, asked. Paul’s longstanding experience, coupled with his consummate optimism, predicted that eventually, the markets would tame themselves, come to shine in more socially democratic, charitable ways. Accept that inevitable compromise, the communitarian contract, inevitable station of all civilized humanity. That eventually, real democracy—ever incentivized by that strict European mother, waiting to welcome its lost children with open arms, should they behave, prove their repute— would deign to smile. 

But who ever knew, how long eventually might take? And so he just couldn’t say when, or how, or stay.

And with that, Teresa and Nick, like so many others, made the leap. Dove into the cracks that had opened, burrowed and wiggled and clawed their way to better. 

Teresa’s campaign to get her parents to America began almost as soon as she’d arrived, and proved as relentless as all her others. Sure, they wouldn’t be able to move for who knew how long, what with the gods of immigration blowing hot and cold, trumpeting their whims at leisure. But surely it would never be too early to start the convincing, figured Teresa.  

Inevitable though he knew the move would be—because how could he deny Ana her right to grow old with her children, her own small foreign corner of family, standing firm until the end—Paul feared that it would stifle his vigor. Soak-up his intellect and paint him lackadaisical and enervated. Entrap him, in a waiting room for absolutely nothing. 

Be patient, was the parting incantation he sometimes heard Ana whisper into the receiver, those years of stubborn resistance, while waiting his turn to speak to Teresa. A small window into that parallel universe of women teaching women how to convince their husbands, or fathers of things. The painstaking, stealthy art of claiming something, cajoling your due, from your husband. Passed down through generations, tricks for clearing paths of resistance—here’s how you weave coincidences, how you plant ideas, how you jostle from the margins, how you give and withhold, how you take patient detours. It pained him, to find Ana, and the girls, dealing in this real-politick of the powerless, deploying this absurd Aesopian-think. For surely, he’d never been that kind of man. 

That’s how we’ll get him used to the idea—give him time to close this chapter, she said, another time.  Which made him remember the chapter of her fourth and last pregnancy, which she spent in bed reading novel after novel (month after month four times over). And how difficult those decadently bourgeois books had been to procure, there being no hint of social realism between their lines. But procure them he did, because—in her only act of counter-revolutionary resistance—no way was Ana going to read books about the sacrificial love of star-crossed tractor operators. And while he’ll never know what books his wife did read during the long months, he’ll always be grateful for those words that safely shepherded his second born alive child into life.

This younger child, his namesake Paula, had always been a free spirit. Unconventional one who took flight like a tropical bird of paradise on the winds of revolution, to administer medical care to Caribbean islanders. 

Imagine Paul’s surprise to discover that even Paula had, if reluctantly, joined the America cheerleading team. Of this he learned one summer afternoon during Paula’s home leave, when, arriving home at an unusual time, he caught her plotting loudly with Teresa on the phone. 

Of course I’d be relieved if they went, Paula was saying, but you know he has a life here, contributes . . . No, you just act like he’s crazy for not groveling to chew the fact in your. . . Why should it be appealing? Yes, you need to frame it another way . . . God, I don’t know—is it me they’re paying to be a shrink? He’ll have to have some activities, at—

Tiptoeing back outside, Paul was in unequal measures disturbed and tickled by this inevitable reversal. His children dissecting his future, his doings, his choices. At least I’ve made it this far, is what he told himself. 

Paul’s resistance began to give way when the rallying cries turned to the familial (don’t you want more time with Maya, before college, and Paula will visit, and mom will be so happy!). To his health, to guilting him into living, as though that wasn’t what he’d been doing just fine, for so long. Take care, slow down, don’t consume yourself so, they said, like he’d been chewing himself from the inside out, the workforce will reorganize itself, the laws will draft themselves, this godforsaken country’s problems aren’t worth your health, and treatments in America are more advanced…in case, I mean…just. 

The temptations of America soon came filtered through yet another lens— Didn’t you know, that Queens is the paradise of our people, just like back home, really, your language rings through streets where you run into friends, we have stores. Truly, it sounded appealing, and it wasn’t even that far from Stony Brook, this microcosm of home called Sunnyside.

When at last they went, penning their own postscript, it was a peroration that Paul dared not complain about. Because how many hadn’t died, for that chance to live the end of their days in Uncle Sam’s benevolent playground, that realm that had won history?

Sometimes, it was better than he had hoped for. Presiding over that first Christmas, the feeling that all the life he needed had gathered itself around him, Ana, Maya, Teresa and Nick, Paula and Emil. The plentiful table, nothing to want, escape, negotiate—just life. 

Only the tree, felled and sagging under too much warmth and kitsch, had looked unhappy then. 

❈

Once they had settled in, life once again surprised Paul. This time, with its extraordinary capacity to adjust itself, to morph into routines, as consistently reliable and startling as daylight lancing darkness after a long night. For the first time, he felt that he would be perfectly content, should things continue in the same ways forever. There was nothing more to strive for, the striving having morphed into encouragement of their children’s striving—the prospects of which, given their winning personal characteristics of Caucasian, advanced degrees in the sciences, reasonable good looks, want discipline diligence and commitment, he found no reason to worry himself over. There was nothing more to fear, at least nothing that was not inevitable. Like time, about which nothing was evitable, but which long ago learned to accept as incontrovertible. 

On Long Island, nearing the turn of the century, the routine of their new lives had set in as solidly, as incontestably, as the new millennium. Which they’d rung in, in a fit of merriness, dancing to the lost notes of Boney M. and ABBA, at Nora Constantine’s house in New Jersey—which was much like how they spent many other weekends, when the five of them would pack into the car and head to New Jersey, or better yet, drive the car onto a boat, and cross the Sound into Connecticut.

The Stony Brook home—two-floored, four-bedroomed, gardened—was like a lush, sprawling story, big enough, good enough, to cradle them all in its benefic grip. And yet, became as gently familiar as their cramped apartment back home. Each day, the same intimations of life left them satiated, filled. For the first time in her life, on weekdays, Ana would sleep longer than her husband, than her daughter. Leaving her in the never ceasing comfort of the soft sheets (the duck-filled comforters of which she could only have dreamed a few years ago) Paul would put on the coffee—not on the stovetop in a small Turkish kettle, as Ana had done all of her life before, but simply with a click of a button on the automated machine—and wait for Nick and Teresa to make their ways downstairs. He replaced Ana in playing that part now, of father encouraging daughter to eat something before her day at the hospital. Every day, he would shuffle his way, lazily across the driveway, to pick-up The New York Times from the edge of the lawn and deposit the mail, usually bills that Teresa had signed the night before—because here, you didn’t have to queue at the Post Office, to pay your dues in a duly social manifestation.  

Every day, they exchanged morning thoughts and words, for half an hour, like he imagined families around the world always should have. Every day, he beamed with pride in the fact that his daughter, that very one that they’d created, had created herself anew. That she could leave her spacious house, drive her spacious car, and practice medicine in America, filling her days with the worthy tasks of caring for others, of helping life continue, carry on, satisfy its desire for living. Sometimes, and despite lacking a local license, he even drove the mammoth car, automatic, laughably easy to navigate, on the smooth American roads. 

Then, the full days with Ana. Somehow the same and variable, at once. The satellite television channel the children had gotten them, despite their automatic protestations, which added a pleasant dimension to their days—a string of continuity somehow. Neither of them enjoyed the vapid new shows that tried to mimic the melodramas of the Uruguayan or Colombian telenovelas, or the mindless droll-but-not-actually-funny inconsequential chatter, meaninglessness, of American TV shows. The forms just didn’t translate, somehow. When they were lucky, there would be retrospectives of vintage performances from their days. Lyrical ballads sung by glamorous, then young now old women, comedy skits that were truly funny, rapid-fire wit-laden performances that were all the more interesting, for the things they couldn’t say—their hints, their insinuations, their hidden messages. The large screen mercifully black, white, and silver, a comfort they didn’t realize they’d needed. 

Watching these retrospectives with Ana, Paul noticed for the first time how they both laughed at the same time. How much they’d experienced, understood together, without even the need to speak things. He understood now the placidity and tameness of American political comedy, like that the girls loved to watch late on Saturday night (that it was live from New York, seemed to be main selling point), probably had something to do with the lack of creativity inspired by the ability to speak things plainly, to mock in plain sight, to jostle outwardly. There was no fear, no terror, no threat, lying behind the surface of this comedy, which made it less effective. The one he liked consistently was the Daily Show. He also didn’t find groundbreaking, what with its usually in-your-face conclusions, things too plainly stated and mocked, the absurdities in much too plain sight. Or maybe it was just the fact that he didn’t know so many of the guest actors, musicians, like most other viewers must have, that lessened his enjoyment. But Maya did, and loved it, and so they always watched it together, the only ones to do so, and he liked the host, his enthusiasm, his seemingly genuine caring, warmed something in Paul.

And of course, his daily, parceled-out consumption of the New York Times, to which he would return several times a day. Sometimes, even the following days, armed with a notebook and his old fountain pen, to make strides in his English, to note new vocabulary words, phrases. So much did Paul love that beacon of American democracy, that Maya had most delightfully unexpected of surprises bought him the newly-minted fifth edition of the The New York Times Manual of Style and Usage for Christmas later that year. Where he found all manner of curious, or hilarious, exhortations.  

And there was plenty of time to read other books, too. In fact, in those early years, Paul felt his curiosity returning. Curiosity about the world, about history, about the organization of life—something he hadn’t felt since the early days. Like a self-forgotten anthropologist, sociologist awoken from a century-long dream, a color enthusiast finally able to tear off his sepia glasses lenses after a decades-long slumber. 

But awoken from what, exactly? From a lack of spare time, but also of possibility, and of uncensored words, in some good measure. It was good, too, to find himself interested in the same subjects he’d always been interested in. Never mind that most of it led to the inevitable conclusion, which he didn’t need to be reminded about, that this world leaves so much wanting. That all systems have their problems, and that life, as designed, rarely tends towards fairness. 

And so it was that those two years could have stretched on forever, or at least indefinitely, as far as Paul was concerned. 

❈

But it was all the new, unburdened time spent with Ana that most satiated Paul. Coming to know her in a different light, so many full decades later, after Teresa and Paula and Maya, was remarkable. 

Of course, they hadn’t said to each other, on the day of their wedding, only four short months after they met—Let’s do this, yes, forget our own selves where necessary, because every young Party functionary needs an adored wife at his side, to demonstrate his seriousness, his commitment to nation-building, and because every lovely young woman needs her knight, his armor and his promise. What better shield against this brutishly changeable world, making family, building lives other than our own? This, our only shelter against death and against country. 

And that’s just how it was, all those solid years of country-building and home-making, of child-scrambling and security-chasing, leaving little time, or inclination, for mutual soul searching, dilly-dallying, probing the beloved’s useless dreams.  

Paul wouldn’t change a thing. And yet, watching Ana prepare his favorite dishes for the first time, he’s amazed that he’d never known a moment like this before. Had she always ever so gently poked the dough that rose like a belly full of new life? So lovingly cradled the potatoes, washing them like precious stones? Sung those soft notes just beautifully so, paused to gaze beyond the trees with dreaming in her eyes? It made him shudder, to realize the ways in which his other’s look and hand and breath and skin, that she who touched and held and fueled him for so long, could yet conceal so much. 

These are the kinds of things Paul comes to know of Ana: 

The night before the miscarriage—the first, she says unprompted. She puts the knife, the eggplant down, straightens her back and gazes across the kitchen table. Fixes her pale gaze, splendidly still blue eyes, on the woody parcel of land behind their deck, as if addressing the squirrels who meander on the edge of the flowerbed. 

It was February, do you remember? 

How could I forget? He asks about that winter of 1955. It isn’t easy to forget a second year of crushed hopes, the death of Stalin having sent no calmer winds their way as yet. A year that landed screaming its dubious facts—how a decade passed since the war’s end, and things are worse; how he’s just turned twenty-six, and how there’s still no child, two years later—

Praporgescu. She names the street, their first home, tapping its memory like a hollow tree, and he sees the house, all twisting wooden bones and beautifully carved motifs. The timber gate, veiled in violet-purple, lavender-blue lilacs each May. 

The wagon-style house was large, three rooms off a hallway, a kitchen cramped at its end.  They lived in one room, Mrs. Nagy in another, and Fraulein Ute, Ana’s Salesian friend, in the last.  Mrs. Nagy’s husband, class enemy, had once owned the entire house, before the people’s representatives stepped in to remedy his exploits. Both his landholdings and his subjugated peasants, still foolishly weeping for him or for themselves, were then collectivized. And while Mr. Nagy marched himself to a prison camp (for such is our complicity against ourselves), Paul and Ana, devoted young harbingers of the luminous future, timidly obeyed their generous directive to quarter themselves in one of the Praporgescu rooms. 

It was a happy house for a while, before it was a sad house. Place where they dreamt and named their first child, who was labored, but never lived. 

Unthinkable, Paul thinks, that if Cantemir had lived he would have been forty-seven. Or that Teresa, Paula, Maya wouldn’t have lived at all, because isn’t that how it works, life wagered against life without logic? 

I wanted to die, then. The night before we lost him, Ana said. I couldn’t tell you. You might’ve locked me up, the old woman laughs. I woke up with a start, because Mrs. Nagy was swallowing her bitter life with wail-shouts like she did sometimes. And I knew that something terrible would happen. I felt that death was coming from the inside. Cantemir told me in a dream, that he didn’t want to come. He asked if it was a good world, if the world was good, and what could I tell him? 

Why didn’t you tell me? 

You had to leave. Remember it was that meeting that couldn’t be missed. How Leon wouldn’t let you, bitterly, she sees his face fall in sadness. No. Don’t worry. I would’ve been too scared, too young and stupid to tell you anyway. 

District sub-Secretary, Paul couldn’t miss the monthly meetings in the capital. The grueling 8-hour journey aside, it was a coveted position. Entrusted with sufficiently apolitical portfolios, bureaucratic enough, removed enough from the center to stay clean—but still, reserving a seat at a table. Which, if the reformers, Leon’s grand campaigns, prevailed, would become an entirely other proposition. The position, the result of a hard-won compromise with Leon, who had convinced him not to quit the Party, not to commit that special brand of suicide, not with a young wife with child. Patience, was Leon’s motto, wait out these hardline years. Turn away when you feel aghast, because that dream we fought for, it’s just around some corner.

But you were dancing—he says, wondering if he misremembers, but he’s sure, it was that same night when, rushing home like a madman, he stepped into the warmly-lit bosom of that old house to find Ana with Fraulein Ute in the kitchen, flour smeared in their hair, at arm’s length because Cantemir, invisible, lay between them. Looping, they laughed like children, and even Mrs. Nagy sat watching from the table, untensed until her smile became a glare with the sight of him.  

And then the dancing stopped—You must be hungry, Ana exclaimed, and—Yes, my dear, he said, although he rather would’ve danced, and Fraulein Ute, embarrassed and warmed pink up to the roots of her impossibly blonde hair, giggled her good night. Leaving them there, disoriented, some energy unspent and trapped. 

It was only hours later, from the depths of a dream he would never know, that he heard Ana’s blood curling scream. Running into the bathroom he slipped on the blood of wife and child, then dragged it across the carpet, the steps, and snow, screaming doctor! telephone! into the night, while Mrs. Nagy and Fraulein Ute hovered over Ana, screaming terrified.   

Did I ever tell you, Mrs. Nagy told me once that you’d think it was my fault? She was drunk, said you’d think I was an evil, a loose woman, for killing two of your children. That men like you would divorce stupid women like me, for not contributing to the national cause, she laughed now. Maybe then I would finally understand the poison that is the Party. And stupid girl that I was, oh God, I believed her!

Old bitch, Paul said, although of course she would’ve still been relatively young, compared to them now. Baba Yaga, he sighed, that’s what they used to call her, because they were still children. From so far away, it felt impossible that they had ever been that young, and lived those other lives. 

I was so frightened of her, sometimes, when you were gone, that I would knock on Frauelin Ute’s door. And she would let me spend the night with her, Ana said like it was something to confess. I never told you, because I thought you wouldn’t like it. She rubs the skin of a small, spotty potato, examining its surface as though it might offer a looking-glass onto those women sharing a bed. 

Fraulein Ute, she said, her eyes soft. I wonder where she is.

If she is, Paul thought. Two and a half years after they left Praporgescu, Ana stopped receiving regular letters from Fraulein Ute. Her last had described the growing difficulty of things, vivid memories of her once Bavarian summers. It was a coded plea, Ana, at last a new mom, had decided, and begged Paul to help her emigrate. And he had tried. 

Are you sure that they let her go? she asks now and slices her finger instead of the potato. Paul jumps at the sight of her blood falling, the same blood that he and the Fraulein had wiped off a different floor, crying themselves into the morning.

As sure as we can be of anything, he says. 

Ana watched him lingeringly sometimes, after such revelations. As though waiting for him, too, to confess to something. As though waiting for him to say, yes, I also never told you, how afraid I was, of those, my own nights in bed, with a foreign woman.

“Places of Memory” is an excerpt from the novel-in-progress Midnight in Exile.

Everyone round Hilton done heard tell of Bojack Rivers. Just like they’ve heard tell of that sharp buzz cut he’s always flauntin and those gold teeth and fancy rings he likes to wear on his pinkies. He’s the best bluesman in the Pine Belt, you ask me. Folks say he can master any composition you place in front of him or any record he cares to learn by ear. And at gigs, you best believe he’s totin that ebony Les Paul he calls “Bonita,” going on a long solo, even turning his back to the crowd like he’s Miles. Thing is, though, he’s got a history of falling headfirst into dogshit off the bandstand and I’ve been the one to clean it off of him, whether it’s been lending him a couple hundred cause he had a bad night with the dice. Or pulling him out of one his ole ladies’ houses when they were getting evil with each other. Or even digging his pickup truck out of a ditch on account of the gin he was drinking. Don’t get me wrong: I love him like we came out of the same womb but gah lee. Now I ain’t got no room to judge—Lord knows it—and there’s no denying that Bojack’s managed to get himself and his discipline together in these past four months, but I just caught word that he ain’t show for the lil walk through his bandleader, Miss Josie, wanted to have before the gig they got today. She’s told me in the past that he can be loose when it comes to practicing sometimes, but it ain’t never been like him to be as good as a ghost an hour and twenty before a show.

So now I’m sliding on these blue jeans I pulled from the dirty clothes hamper. My fiancée, Cheyenne, hands me my green Delta State cap and I jam it on hard, hard. Head out the bedroom door.

She asks, “How long you think it’s gone take to find em, E.J.?” 

I keep going down the hallway, knocking over one of them lil toy trucks, not saying a thing. I can’t find an answer that’s worth a damn. She yanks me back so hard her rollers nearly fall from her head. She sure did grow up with some brothers. 

I turn round to her and suck my teeth. Say, “Ain’t no tellin, and you know that.”

Cheyenne lets out an ole hiss. She hikes our boy Jeremiah higher up on her hip; he’s got a half-eaten cheese puff in his lil hand. I liked to cried when he was born.

I look out through the screen door at D-Lo, Bojack’s bandmate, the one Miss Josie sent to come get me. I refer to him as “the Ohioan” when he ain’t round. He’s sitting in his ‘13 Buick with a black pork pie hat on his head and a slim ole suit to match. He comes over to the house with Bojack sometimes to play Crazy 8s and watch some ball games. One time, I said he looked like a knockoff Lester Young, and he ain’t like that.

He honks the horn all kinds of crazy, yelling, “Getting cussed to death by Miss Josie ain’t what I scribbled out on my agenda for the day.”

I yell back, “It ain’t what I had on mine either.”

And it’s true. I planned on using my off day from the lumber yard to put some nice clothes on with my family and hear Bojack and the rest of Miss Josie’s five piece band play. It’s the first live show at The Bluebird in decades. Supposed to be a fancy get-together. Even folks in the Hilton Courier are writing bout it. I know the weight of this here situation—it’s clear as day—so I don’t know why D-Lo calls himself raising his voice as if I won’t wring his neck.

I kiss on Cheyenne’s cheek and head on out the screen door, finishing off the last of the Corona I had set down on the porch railing.

She says to me, “You and these Bojack blues…”

Which is what she always tells me in times like this. It ain’t no different from when I ran out to Casey’s that one evening cause I heard Bojack and another fella got into it over a dice game and pistols were said to be involved. Or like that afternoon Bojack’s ex girlfriend, Liv, left him high and dry on Highway 98 cause he was eyeing some lady at Golden Corral. Or when Bojack called me from a New Orleans jail cause he slapped a club owner for trying to short his pay.

*

Sometimes it just comes down to the principle of things. You show for me, I’m liable to show even harder for you. Just how my heart works. How I was raised. Bojack said he was brought up that same way and he sure nough done backed it up. 

See, bout four years ago, I came up on my daddy dead as a doorknob in his brown leather rocking chair. This was after I had worked a shift washing dishes at Louisiana Hot Spot. He had his hand in a can of those cashews he loved munching on. His mouth was as wide as an O, just like his eyes. Jesus. I reached down and kissed his lips, which were still warm, and called the people to come get him. I was at the bottom for weeks. Barely ate a thing. Didn’t shave or bathe or clean the house. Never left the couch less it was to fetch myself a beer. Stayed there so long I lost my job at the restaurant. Then Bojack came by after he got back in town—this was when he had that offshore job and that lil fro—to see bout me. He sat down next to me on the couch, looking bone tired. First thing he asked was, “Did ya eat?” And I pulled my head from underneath the covers, said, “Naw.” He got up and went through the refrigerator, saying, “Ain’t got a stick of butter in here.” So he went to Walmart, came back with a whole bunch of groceries, put them up in the cabinets too. He made me a pork chop sandwich fresh outta the grease and I ate just a lil half of it. He cleaned up the mess that had been building up since the funeral: the old Papa John’s boxes on the table, all the beer cans crowding round the couch, packs of cigarettes I had smoked through, the pile of dirty clothes sitting up on one of the other couches. Being that I was already half drunk by the time he came by and got even more drunk when he was out getting groceries, I was heaving vomit up out of my throat and right onto the carpet he had just vacuumed. He pulled me from the couch and took me to the bathroom, sat me on the toilet, and wiped my face clean with a rag. Then another round of vomit came shooting outta me and he held my head like it was a jewel while I hovered over the toilet bowl and cursed all of creation. After that, he sat me back on the couch, said he was going out to his truck, came back with his acoustic guitar and said he’d play me any song I wanted to hear. It went from “Spanish Joint” by D’Angelo to “Kiss of Life” by Sade all the way down to “Death Letter” by Son House.

You need folks like that. Folks that’ll drag you up out of that cold and nasty bottom, even out of sticky situations you don’t have no business being in. Hell, Bojack done did that too.      

Bout two years ago, me and Bojack were sitting on the trunk of my Taurus. We were on our break from that wretched engine plant we had got hired at. The pole light in the parking lot covered us like a bedsheet. There were other workers sitting out on the hoods of their cars or on the inside of em, passing weed on the low or stuffing their faces with food. Our hands were stained with oil and cramped up like we had rigamortis or something. Seemed like I couldn’t shake the sound of those conveyor systems from my ears either. Bojack was saying how bad he wanted to get out of the durn place with his guitar and I was going on bout saving enough bread to move up out of my Ma’s guest room. I had been munching on a bag of sweet heat chips when a big ole man with a thick ole beard walked up to us with a gal named Ginny on his arm. She worked cross from me at Module 5, where my main job was to screw spark plugs in and drill em while she pumped oil into the engine. She had a whole bunch of freckles on her face and hair the color of amber; she was looking gold underneath the pole light. She knew how to hold a conversation over those loud ass conveyor systems, so we had been talking bout who our favorite character on The Wire was and how she liked Sinead O’Connor and what high schools we went to. Nothing more than that. Not one time did she say she had a man and not one time did she say it was this broad shouldered joker who drove forklifts at the plant. He had on an Astros t-shirt that was too big for em, an elbow compression sleeve, and dirty work jeans. His mug was mean, mean. “Your eyes is meant for your head,” he said. “Not this one here.” I sucked my teeth harder than hard and the man came up closer to me, breathing all in my face. Ginny was standing there like she ain’t know me from a can of paint. All that time Bojack was quiet, going in his pocket for that switch blade his daddy got him way, way back. All of a sudden Ginny started yanking on the man, telling him to come on but the man ain’t see the blade or the smile coming cross Bojack’s lips. He was too busy staring me off in the eyes. A crowd started forming. “I done spent my whole life dodgin prison,” Bojack said. “And I’d hate to be headin there tonight. But if that’s what the Lord see fit for my life, well…” “You best get gone,” the man said, not even seeing the blade till Bojack flipped it open, smiling harder. Long story short, that man ended up on the ground that night, not due to any deep cuts all over his skin but due to that haymaker Bojack laid on em, making everybody round hoot and holler. 

We got fired behind that mess but again sometimes it just comes down to the principle of things.

    *

Now me and D-Lo are headin down Taylorsville Road. The smell of Mr. Daniel’s spareribs simmering on the grill runs right up my nose as we pass his yard. The sun’s still beaming up there, all round and orangeish, and it won’t be too long fore it’s settin. D-Lo’s got his eyes straight ahead, passin this pack of teenage boys on four-wheelers, poppin wheelies better than I ever could back in the day.

He says, “You ask me, Miss Josie shoulda been dropped his ass. He thinks that lil talent he’s gotten blessed with can keep him doing anything he wants, how he wants. When he wants.”

D-Lo looks at me, like he’s wanting confirmation or something. He gets none. Not Jack. Cause what if Bojack’s just in the thick of some trouble and here he is tootin up his nose?

He keeps on, saying, “He was just doing good these past couple of months though. He brought donuts to practice. Glazed. Jelly. Frosted. Ain’t that some shit? I assumed we really were looking at a changed man then. Guess that ain’t so now.”

I don’t say a word, just keep my eyes fixed on what’s lying on the other side of this here window: these ole bare fields that used to be scattered with Mr. Holman’s cattle, First Baptist Church, the graveyard MoMo Connie was buried in when I was nothing but a lil boy. It’s better for me to hold my eyes to what’s out there. If I turn to D-Lo, I might curse him. Might call him everything but a child of God for speaking on Bojack this way. Yeah, he’s got a point: I can hear some of the truth in the fella’s words, hear it loud as I don’t know what, but the right to let it go from his lips is reserved far away from him. Some folk might call it unfair, might say it ain’t a bit of right, but that’s just how it oughta be. In my eyes, anyway.

Cause, see, me and Bojack done only known this pork-pie-wearing fella for a few months anyway, ever since Bojack brought him round to the house, saying they were now practicing as a part of Josie Collins’ five piece band. He’s from Cleveland, grew up there in all that snow, so, quite naturally, he hadn’t been round much. Hadn’t been round when me and Bojack were looking for a slice of anything to fall into on Rankin Road with our Mongooses: Mr. Jonah’s garden full of cantaloupe, the bras of Tabitha Ingram and Shayla Pittman, those inflatable pools that used to feel as wide as Lake Pontchartrain in Miss Mo’s backyard. D-Lo hadn’t been there when we were sitting out in Lake Hollis with our daddies and our rods and those cans of Budweiser we wished we could chug. When we were pressing our young knees gainst those piles of Jasmine rice on Bojack’s mama’s kitchen floor for causing too much ruckus in her house. 

Naw, D-Lo hadn’t been round for that.

So I turn to him with my lip curled just enough to let him know he oughta tread lightly. He sucks his teeth and puts his eyes back on the road.

“Can you tell me where we’re going?” he asks. “Miss Josie’s texting and calling.”

D-Lo’s eyes oughta belong to a sad puppy’s, the way they’re fixin to well up as he’s waiting.

I say, “Bojack’s got him a friend round these parts. Figure they might know where he’s at.”

“Who?”

“Would tell ya if I knew myself.”

D-Lo’s eyes are facing forward again. His lips are mumbling something. I know he’s thinking I’m lying through my teeth, just tryna give him a hard time, but I ain’t. Some things just take a lil bit too much time to get into.

Quiet as it’s kept, I had heard bits of a “somebody” on Taylorsville Road from Bojack bout four months ago. A somebody who earned a fine ole Master’s degree in English Literature from Fisk University, had a painting of Nina Simone hanging on their living room wall, and encouraged Bojack to read more and drink burdock tea. Other than what they lived in (and where) and that they were new to Hilton, Bojack didn’t say much else bout em, tell you the truth. But I realized after bout two months that that “somebody” musta been why Bojack had gotten himself together in recent months. Coming to practice on time all the time. Leaving the gambling at Casey’s lone. Getting back into the Word a lil bit. Even giving guitar lessons to a couple of kids round town. But Bojack never said for sure when I pressed him bout it, asking who the new gal was.

“I’m keeping it real low,” Bojack had said one of those nights he’d come over to the house. “Cause if I brag on it now, it’ll been done snatched itself way come tomorrow mornin.”

And I picked up what Bojack was putting down, so I left it lone. Trying to yank anything from that fella’s throat only pushed it further down anyway. 

Now I’m wishing I woulda prodded more. Maybe then I’d have a number to call or a Facebook profile to message for Bojack’s whereabouts. 

But at least we’re coming up on this tamale-colored trailer now. It stands at the end of a dirt lane with red brick skirting at the bottom. Whoever did work on it musta been paid real nice for it. Attached to the trailer is a carport with a Nissan Maxima underneath and Bojack’s silver ‘75 Monte Carlo ain’t nowhere near it. Nobody’s sitting on the concrete steps leading to the screen door. Nobody’s standing in the window where I figure the kitchen is either. 

I say, “Turn right here.” 

When we reach the trailer, I get out with my eyes on the front door, hoping some kind of face will show. By the time I reach the top step and knock a few times, I realize nobody’ll be welcoming me. Not a soul. I turn round to look at D-Lo at the bottom step, ready for him to tear me a new asshole for wasting time, but he’s got his eyes scrunched and one finger in the air, walking to the side of the trailer like he’s some detective.

“The hell you going?” I call to him. “Your skull must be feenin for a bullet. Walkin behind somebody’s house like it’s yourn.”

“Ain’t know you were born half deaf,” D-Lo says. He doesn’t even slow his stride.

“What you hear?”

But D-Lo’s gone. 

I wait to hear a couple of bullets or maybe a few curses to ring out. Don’t hear any. So I move to the side of the trailer. Peek round the corner. And D-Lo’s approaching a woman in a white robe. She’s sitting on the steps of the back porch with her eyes on the yard, which is damn near bare with only a picnic table in the middle of it.

“Woulda put two hot ones in y’all if I had my pistol,” she says. 

She doesn’t turn, only rubs her fingers down one of her two strand twists. Her voice is low but loud enough for me to place her thick lilt. A Tennessee woman, she must be. Memphis. 

I say, “Told this one here that. But he’s a city boy. Don’t know nothin bout how to be round these parts.”

D-Lo turns round, tryna hold some evil in his face, but it does no good. I chuckle at him.

“We searching round for Bojack, love,” I say. “I’m sho you know but he’s got a show in an hour, and we can’t seem to find him nowhere.”

“And it must be a felony for him to pick up his phone,” D-Lo says.

The woman turns her head just a bit. “He told me bout you. Showed me your Facebook and all.”

“What he say?” D-Lo asks.

“Not you,” she says.

I step closer. “What’s your name?”

“Dawn,” she says, more like a whisper, really.

I reach for her hand, but she jerks back real quick. 

“Where he at, love?” 

 She stands up and goes towards the back door. She stops bout halfway through.

“He,” she says.

“He what?” 

“And I… Then he…”

“Then he what?” 

Dawn sucks her teeth. “He ran outta here saying he was going to Marion Creek,” she says. “Needed to cool his head.”

“And you just let him go on his merry lil way?” D-Lo asks.

She looks at the both of us like we’re the scum of the earth. Like we ain’t worth two wooden nickels. “He had all that evil sitting up in his eyes when I tried to grab hold of em,” she says. “Told me to leave him be.”

D-Lo sucks his teeth and holds his phone to show Miss Josie calling. I shake my head.

“He… Then I… And then we,” she says, headin to the back door. “Just get the fuck way from my house.”

We don’t move though. 

“Don’t cost a dime for me to call the Law, do it?”

D-Lo takes off for his car. I hold still with my eyes on the door as Dawn slams it shut, locking it just as fast as she opened it.

“Bring your  ass,” D-Lo says. “Point me to the creek.”

*

When we get back on the road, D-Lo says, “Bo must’ve did her dirt.”

I don’t say nothing but he might be right. Much as I hate to let it fester up inside and boil like my MoMo’s grits, Bojack’s probably done started back going over to Casey’s to mess with those dice too much and Dawn probably done got onto him bout all the risks—losing his life or his money or, hell, both—and he just couldn’t stand to hear it. Maybe Bojack had moaned another woman’s name when they were making love like they sing bout in those blues songs. Or maybe he just cut her loose cause he couldn’t stand the commitment. Didn’t know what to do with a woman that good. With two degrees and allat.

I say, “Ain’t no tellin.”

But I reckon it must’ve been bad for Bojack to be at Marion Creek to cool his head. We both hadn’t been that way in a while, but it’s a sack of memories resting there: I can see them now. The big ole cushion of sand we lay on while we chomped down those burnt patties and chicken wings my daddy had grilled. That old acoustic guitar Bojack used to mess round with, playing the songs of Muddy Waters and Jimi Hendrix like a lil savant at nothing but sixteen. That Budweiser bottle I cracked on Wild Bill’s head that one night. That moccasin Bojack killed with his daddy’s walking stick and held up with the kind of pride that carried itself over for weeks. That tussle we had over Pauletta Harris. Those tears we’d cried when we got drunker than skunks off that Taaka Vodka and let out what crowded our insides like sardines in a can: me coming up on my dead daddy in that chair, Bojack losing that music scholarship from Alcorn State, me learning Cheyenne was pregnant with Jeremiah and keeping him, Bojack showing the ring he bought from Kay Jewelers for his first wife.

Now look at me, gah lee. Speedin down this durn road, tryna beat the sun.

*

His silver Monte Carlo is parked on side of the road with the door wide open. Willie Dixon’s crooning “Nervous” on the radio and the engine’s growling underneath the hood. When I lean further into the car, I can smell all the woody sage with one durn sniff. On the passenger seat is Bojack’s billfold and his phone, dead, of course. Bonita sits up on the backseat, her body all worn down, her color faded at her edges; there’s even what seems like a swirling scar curving round one of her pickup switches. I would search round for more, but  D-Lo’s in the passenger’s window waving for me. 

“Not going down there by myself,” he says.

    I close the door and go towards the path leading down to the creek, which is sitting pretty at the bottom of a lil hill I done climbed and slid down since a boy. I wish I could savor what’s round us—the sound of the wind whipping up a quiet song, the leaves on the silver maples whirling about—but Bojack’s sitting at the mouth of this creek, where this  bed of sand is. His black dress pants are pulled up to his knees, his feet are in the water. His mouth is latched onto a bottle of Taaka Vodka, and his body is swaying long to Willie, sending lil ripples through the water. I’m at the bottom of the hill now, passing Bojack’s suit jacket and dress shoes, which are buried in the sand. A shame. All that good money gone to waste. 

“Boy, I tell ya,” Bojack says. He grins and shows his teeth. He’s got those slugs in today. And just one pinky ring on.

“Man, get up outta that damn water,” I say, leaning down towards him. “You drunk as all get out.”

“Ain’t drunk,” he says. “Just cracked this bottle open, swear fore God.” He hums a lil something sweet and low. 

I look back at D-Lo, who’s standing with his arms folded and his head shaking. I kinda believe Bojack though. He’s not reeking of liquor, just sweat from sitting up in this sun.

“Y’all a be somewhere off in the deep, you knew what was twirlin up in here,” Bojack says. He points a finger to his temple.

“Oh, we got an idea,” D-Lo says.

“What?” Bojack asks.

I tug him a lil bit from the water with his dress shirt, and he rises. Tug him some more towards the hill.

“You muhfuckas don’t know the half,” Bojack says.

“We gotta get you changed,” D-Lo says.

“Don’t you know where you gotta be?” I ask. 

Bojack breaks way and stops the three of us. “Know exactly where I oughta be,” he says, plopping back down on the sand. “Shoulda knew somethin won’t right soon’s I woke up.”

I reach down to pull Bojack by the shirt one more gin. We might be tusslin here in a minute. “Come on,” I say.

But Bojack goes on: “I wake up in her bed, she gets to sayin how she’s sick. I look at her. Her hair’s all thick and nice cause she just got it retwisted. She’s lookin good in that lavender dress too. I’m thinkin, ‘Don’t look sick to me one bit. Don’t sound like it either.’ But I just nod cause that’s my lady—or was, or is, or…”

D-Lo winces, steps a lil closer with his face scrunched up. I loosen my grip. Bojack sips from the bottle and swallows the liquor down like it’s ammonia swirling round in there. He keeps his head towards the creek, even though his eyes are someplace else. Far off.

Bojack goes on, “And I don’t wanna cause no fuss with her even though I’m .38 hot cause this evenin’s sposed to be the night I show up with her. Then I get to thinkin to myself, ‘Well, Bo, that’s real selfish for you to be thinkin like that.’ Start feelin guilty then.” 

“I don’t blame you,” I say. “Lord knows I don’t… But Bo.”

I show him D-Lo’s phone, which has Miss Josie calling it.

Bojack waves the phone away. “Damn The Bluebird right now!”

I hand the phone back, sighing, knowing we ain’t gone beat that sun, which is heading down past the horizon where those trees are standing at the end of the creek, looking all pinkish and perfect.

Bojack keeps at it, “So I get on up, kiss her on her forehead, and play with her lips with my finger. She’s got this mole on the right side of her lip that made me quiver when I first saw her round town. Got a brain like Berkeley too; I’m talkin stacks of books in her room soon’s you walk in. Jayne Cortez. Gloria Naylor. Nikki Giovanni. Same thing with her records: Bessie Smith, Memphis Slim, The Vilionaires. Her taste’s better than mine, hell.” Bojack chuckles; so do I, just a lil bit. “Anyway, I put my clothes on and head down to my house. Start gettin ready for The Bluebird. Then it hit me like a 7.62: I ain’t even ask her what I could do for her. Ain’t even ask her if she wanted me to run to the store to get some Tussin, at least. Hell, ain’t even ask her what kinda sick she was. I look round in my medicine cabinet in the bathroom and drawers: ain’t got a thing in there. Onliest thing I got is a can of Campbell’s Soup sittin on the kitchen counter. I snatch it, snatch Bonita too. I jump back in the car, feelin nothin less than a fool. Speed back down the road like I’m fuckin Earnhardt or somebody. I don’t know. I hop out. Get past the screen door, put my key in the latch. I’m bein all quiet cause I figure she sleepin. Naw. She ain’t sleepin. Ain’t sleepin one bit. She moanin. And her moanin’s mixed with some other fella’s moanin. I’m thinkin I done lost my last screw.”

I say, “Unh unh unh.”

D-Lo gets even closer now, still saying nothing. He’s got his phone in his pocket now. 

Bojack keeps his head forward and goes on, “I go out and get my blade from the glove compartment.” He takes the blade from his pocket and stares down at it, runs his fingers over its edges like he’s Rambo. “I go back in the house with this one here, not givin a damn if I’m quiet or not. Then the moanin stops. I haul ass down the hallway to her room. Get to the door, door’s locked. She’s tellin him get gone through the window. So I run back to the front door and guess who I see runnin through the front yard in his durn briefs?”

“Who?” I ask.

Bojack sips from the bottle again. “That pretty somebitch Coach Billups.”

“The lanky dude? High yella? Used to play at Grambling?”

“Damn right.”

I sit down in the sand beside Bojack and see all the hurt sitting in his eyes, waiting to drain itself. “Gah damn, boy,” I say and reach over for the bottle. “Ain’t figure it was this bad.” I sip and grimace. It’s been a while since I done had some liquor.

“And I get to thinkin he musta been sweet talkin her in them hallways up at the schoolhouse cause you know she teaches them sophomores.”

I hand the bottle back. “Naw, I ain’t know that. You ain’t said more than two things bout her to me since you met her.”

“Yeah, well. I told you why. Ain’t like I was hidin her… Took her to Hattiesburg every Sunday and we got all dressed up, went out to eat at Ed’s Diner, Crescent City Grill. All the nice spots over there. Took her to New Orleans too. Congo Square. Ate poutine, listened to some good music. Showed her where I used to live in Algiers. Allat.”

“So what you do next?” D-Lo asks. He sits down but only for a quick while. He stands up again and wipes away the sand from his pants.

Bojack goes on, “Nothin. Couldn’t do nothin, hell. She jumps on my back fore I can even get up outta the house. I’m talkin bout pulls me down so quick, the blade falls up outta my hand. Woulda thought it was Ray Lewis put me to the ground, cept she ain’t got no shoulder pads on or no raven up on her helmet. She’s buttass naked.” The three of us let out an unsure laugh then a looser one that goes and goes and goes. Then a hush comes. It’s nothing left but the quiet tween us and Willie Dixon’s voice, which stretches as long as the Pearl River. “I’m layin there and layin there and she’s cryin and cryin and I’m yellin for her to get offa me and she yellin, sayin she ain’t doin nothin, sayin she gone stay put and I’m a stay put and I’m a listen to her tell me how got dang sorry she is. Then she gets to sayin, ‘Oh baby oh baby oh baby oh baby.’ But I throw her offa me and get the blade but the muhfucka Billups, he’s gone outta the yard by the time I get up. I get to thinkin it’s awright cause I know where he stays. I pass his house sometimes—he stays right down the road from her, hell—and I be seein him out there playin with his daughter and son. Jumpin on the trampoline and allat. So I take one step out the door and she pulls me in one more gin and I just start to look at her and look at her and, hell, I get stuck just like that: one foot out the door. Ain’t sayin a word to her now. Just lookin. Then I turn round cause I feel my eyes burnin. Start lookin at that sun: it’s brighter than bright outside but feel like it’s goin down in my gut. She turns me back round and tells it to me just like this, she says, ‘I laid with him. Ain’t no excuse. Don’t want one. Ain’t askin for one.’ She says, ‘I had a taste for him and it hurt so good, hurt so bad to fill it. But it wont nothin but matters of the flesh.’ Then she looks at me deep off in the eye and she says, ‘Me and you, matters of Spirit.’”

“Damn,” D-Lo says.

“Ain’t never had no woman put it to me like that,” I say.

“And then she holds me,” Bojack says. “Holds me tight, like I ain’t got no blade off in my hand, like we ain’t standin in the middle of the front door for anybody to walk on by and see us. I get to thinkin back on her and me. How she’d have me up all night readin those books she assigned me like she was the professor and me the student. How she’d let me cook that shrimp creole for her cause she couldn’t never get it right herself. How’d she helped me get my breathin right, like we were monks somewhere over in Asia. How I just sat and listened to her tell me bout those kids at the schoolhouse while I rubbed her feet. How there’d be times when we’d just be laid up or sittin on the back porch or ridin in the car or sittin at Lake Hollis and not a word, a look, a gesture was needed tween us… So she’s grippin me and grippin me and I’m grippin her and grippin her then all of a sudden I turn her loose. Cause I remember. Member like hell. I try to leave again and she asks me where the hell I’m goin. I give her bout the meanest look I can muster. Tell her I’m goin to the creek and she bet not try to make her way there. So now I’m here.”

“Boy, I tell ya,” I say.

Except for Willie Dixon’s voice still reaching over to us, there’s another quiet at the creek that nobody is fool enough to try and break. Bojack puts the blade back into his pocket and takes another swig of Taaka Vodka, which is only halfway done. He stands to his feet and aims the bottle towards the woods, but it only reaches the middle of the creek, where it splashes and floats when it pops back up. I walk over to him, drop my head on his shoulder, and wrap an arm round his waist to hold us both up. He rubs his hand over the top of my ball cap and lets it sit there. 

I must be bout the stupidest fella in all of the county, doubting him how I was.  A doggon shame is what it is. Feels like I ain’t even worthy of his touch. But even still. We stand quiet, breathing what seems to be the same locked breath.

We don’t turn each other loose till D-Lo stands beside us.

“Didn’t know you were sitting on all that,” D-Lo says. “Had I know that, I…” He looks down at his shoes, frowning. “What to tell Miss Josie?” 

Bojack turns to D-Lo and burps a lil bit. “Tell her we’ll be on the way, hell.”

You’d think he’d be wanting to head home and listen to some more Willie Dixon, but he’s got himself an obligation and that there just comes down to the principle of things.                                     

*

While I’m driving the Monte Carlo, bout halfway to The Bluebird, I say to Bojack, “Worried bout you, boy.”

I look over at him in the passenger seat. His eyes are closed and his head’s leaning back on the seat. 

“I’m a play,” Bojack says. “Know them songs better than anybody in that band.”

“Ain’t talkin bout no music. Talkin bout you.”

Bojack’s quiet now.

“Worried bout you goin back to that old Bo. And you know bout what Bo I’m talkin.”

He doesn’t budge.

I say, “Seem like Dawn got your thick head right, kept you way from that old Bo. Better than I could.”

Bojack opens up his eyes, looks at me hard, hard. 

 “Went and saw her today cause we were huntin you. She told us where you was at. How else you think we found you?”

Bojack burps. “Hell, I don’t know. All I know is this: that gal got me right. Lawd hammercy.”

“You your own durn jigsaw to solve though.” 

Bojack’s quiet again. He looks out of the window with stale eyes, nodding a lil bit.

“Y’all through?”

Bojack sucks his teeth. “Would be a doggon fool if I said I was sho.”

And there ain’t no arguin with that.

*

I’m feeling shame for not having even changed out of my jeans, sandals, and wifebeater when we get to The Bluebird. The fancy people with their ole fancy dresses and fancy hats don’t make my shame any lighter, just like the fancy red drapes and white table cloths. Ain’t never seen this place like this. But at least Bojack has cleaned himself up and got rid of that dust on his suit and dried his feet off. Least he’s walking through the crowds of folks to the side of the bandstand. At long last. 

I see Cheyenne leaving a red booth with our boy and throw a hand up. They come to me at the front door. I got a taste for the catfish frying over in the kitchen and surely would like a piece after all this rippin and runnin.

“Found him at the creek blastin Willie Dixon,” I say. “Damn near had a full suit on.”

“I’ll be damned,” Cheyenne says.

“You ain’t heard the half,” I say. “I mighta been out there too, I saw what he saw.”

“What?”

“Tell you later.”

“Well,” Cheyenne says. She points to a wall beside the bandstand, where Miss Josie sits in a row of chairs with the rest of her band. “She been lookin stressed since I walked through the door.”

Miss Josie’s in a black tinsley dress with a gold cross pendant on her neck. Her eyes are locked on Bojack like an eagle set dead on its prey. She wastes no time in whispering something I just know is cutting into his ears. The ole gray haired bassist, Benny Coleman, steps closer. D-Lo and the drummer, his name’s Travis Kennedy, do the same. But Miss Josie holds one hand up and pauses all of em. I motion to go to the side of the bandstand too, but Cheyenne puts a hand on my gut.

“Unh, unh,” she says. 

And so I stand still, just picturing Miss Josie saying this’ll be the last show he’ll be playing with em. A lost gig and a maybe-lost woman. All in one evening.

When the band gets up on stage, Bojack goes to his spot a couple of steps in front of the upright bass and plops down in the wooden seat set aside for him. D-Lo adjusts the mic, making sure its height is to his liking. Miss Josie sits at her piano and messes round with the keys. The rest of the band get into position with their instruments. The crowd done goes quiet now. Bojack’s planning something as he plugs Bonita into the amp and tunes her: I see it in his durn eyes, see it in the sad grin coming cross his face as he stares down at her strings. Soon enough, the first notes to Jimi’s “Red House” try making their way out, but they’re hushed, timid, really. Bojack tightens his grip on Bonita and secures her on his lap. His fingers move like a group of clever copperheads sure of their way; his foot drums as their heart. Benny, D-Lo, and Miss Josie turn to him, but he’s not looking towards em; his eyes are closed as he slides up and down Bonita’s neck, making her squeal and squall while she makes him sway harder than he would in any pew on any Sunday morning. All of it seems like a private conversation finally made public. A conversation crumpling Bojack’s face, which is holding so much ecstasy, so much hurt up in it, that I can’t even tell which one I see the most of. But I know this much: whatever it is sitting on Bojack’s face is close enough to taste deep off in his mouth. Hell, I can taste it too and, from looking round, so can the crowd. A man sitting right in front of the bandstand grunts at the sound of Bonita’s growl. A woman back at the bar surrenders a hand and waves it real, real slow. Another man leaning on the back wall drums his foot with the same kinda gumption as Bojack’s, like they’re both beating something outta themselves and bent on beating it good. Even Cheyenne’s eyes are closed in concentration, cipherin every one of Bonita’s wails. When the other instruments chime in, I tug her closer to me and let the music take us over into Glory. Bojack raises his head to the ceiling, and I know he’s someplace else now, mining his day into a kind of gold. 

Text: Ben Buckland and Carissa Western

Images: Ben Buckland

The desert is green. Just a tinge—enough that you barely notice it at first and then you look again across the sand and it feels impossible. It’s been raining. Heavy drops in the afternoon. And the desert, this most patient of landscapes, is coming to life. Emptiness and stasis, it turns out, are illusions. If you watch closely, you can see the desert change.

We are here to witness Sebeïba, a festival said to be three thousand years old. Moussa, born in Djanet into one of its oldest families—the families, he says, who carry Sebeïba—tells us the story: when two rival tribes living in an oasis deep in the Sahara, locked in a long war, heard that Moses had been victorious over the Pharaohs, they laid down their weapons in peace. Or perhaps—for there are multiple stories—it began as mourning for the death of the Queen of Sheba, in the form of a poem and a hat (the tkumbut) made as a memorial for the local families who traced their lineage back to her noble tomb “so our next generation remembers our queen is dead.” Or maybe it is just the fear of the wind, says Moussa,* as a thick tesist (sand haze) hangs on the air around the oasis.

Like the desert, Sebeïba first appears unchanging. A day-long contest between two rival ksours of the oasis town of Djanet: El Mihan and Zelouaz, staged through dance, drumming and song. The swords and the scarves. The tall red hats. We could be time travellers and news of the Pharaohs fresh off the latest caravan. But if we look closer, Sebeïba’s meaning is as layered as its history, and it is evolving—subtly but profoundly, in response to forces from far beyond the oasis. 

Despite Sebeïba’s three-thousand year history, the way Ibrahim, a veteran teacher and scholar of history, describes it to us resists the idea of simple preservation. Not a re-enactment. Not a custom on autopilot. “The people who reflected on it,” he says, “were desert sages.” It has been reasoned through, not stumbled into.

The journey south begins days before, in Algiers, where a cold fog is flowing off the sea, creeping along the alleys of the Casbah and wrapping the minarets in long white scarves. Below, the Haussmann boulevards pile their grid upon the rocks and beyond, the Mediterranean. Fishermen and the dark, sleek bodies of swimmers on the cliffs. Cats waiting on the rocks for whatever is left of the catch. 

Here in these streets, the 20th century was at its cruelest—the crucible of torture that crushed opposition in the Battle of Algiers. Then later, the civil war’s too many uncounted deaths, and the question “qui tue qui” still waiting for an answer. 

In the desert, the Imuhar** were long overlooked. They lay at the margins, but no longer. The eyes of both the state and of tourists have turned towards the south. 

Flights to the deep Sahara take off and land in the middle of the night. We hear various reasons why: less turbulence in the cool night air, or that the planes are needed for more prestigious routes in the day. Whatever the reason, we arrive and the desert is deep dark; the sand piling up on the road, flowing over it in the wind, like the surface of a river in the headlights. As if the desert would take all this back if we just turned away for an instant too long. 

In Djanet, preparations have been ongoing for weeks. Women have been making food, polishing silver and swords, and inspecting tagelmust, their precious indigo, almost black in the shade. And in the past few days, practising the music and the dances (and selecting the dancers and musicians) that will determine which side of the oasis carries the day. These practice days are also when the youngest members of the community can learn and rehearse; though their exclusion from the more serious festival day is no longer as strict as it once was. Now when they enter the ritual they are allowed to stay. Moussa explains that, amid so much change, there is an even greater need to instill a love for Sebeïba among the young.

The importance of this day for the Imuhar of Djanet is heightened by the fact that most of the festivals and gatherings that used to thread communities together across the region no longer exist. We hear of their absence in whispers: Tafsit and Ziyara of the Hoggar are gone; festivals in Niger have stopped; gatherings across the border all but a memory. This in a context where governments are worried by the idea of transnational meet-ups and what they could mean for the fragile security of the Sahara, even if relations between the Imuhar and jihadist or broader independence movements are more complex than these fears might suggest.

Whatever the reasons, here, Sebeïba has adapted by becoming more local, less transnational. Judges once came from Niger and from Libya, unknown to the dancers until the contest began. Now the festival turns inwards. The community judges itself. 

In place of the Imuhar who once came from abroad, visitors to Sebeïba are now more often tourists. Mostly Algerians from the north who come, says Ibrahim, because they are “curious about this culture, which is theirs too,” despite its long years on the periphery of Algerian politics and society. 

They—we—gather at the edges of the wadi, as the men and women of each side of the oasis assemble. At times, we’re aware of the lenses. The phones held up. Of people asking for selfies. Of the Algerian TV crew and their drone and looming boom mic. In these moments, Ibrahim’s words feel darkly prophetic, that tourism, which funds continuity, also threatens to fossilise what we’ve come to see. “We fear that one day people will go looking for Sebeïba and we’ll be forced to buy a ticket … like at the cinema.”

But as the day draws on, the light softens and the dust rises, and the distractions and foreboding fade away until the whole scene feels mystical and timeless. The watchers dissolving into the haze until only four camel-riders remain, rising like ships above the dust. The swords of the dancers shaking, humming like the sound of giant beetle wings. Song and drums a low background swell. Rising like the sea.

Among the poems, Moussa tells us, are some that remain unchanged, poems as old as Sebeïba itself, and a key criterion by which the festival is judged. Others, he explains, evolve every year, reflecting recent changes. Praising whoever is “a hero” in society. 

“Our society is matriarchal,” explains Ibrahim, “the woman is at the base of everything.” And in Sebeïba it is no different: it is the women who lead.  “All the poems are from women, all the music and rhythm is from the women, everything is from the women, the men just dance,” Aicha, a locally respected performer whose family has farmed the oasis for generations, tells us. In the afternoon, as the percussion deepens and the atmosphere intensifies, the women’s formation, a pyramid of emerald and deep plum rising above the gathering dust, choreographs the final stages of the event.

As they play, their jewellery glints in the soft light—silver pieces reserved especially for this day. In everyday use the designs have changed, the metal is as much nickel and zinc as pure silver now. The tall red hats of the men (which some say are adapted Ottoman fezzes) evidence that change isn’t only modern. Though Ibrahim strikes a note of warning about both the changing materials and the newer fabrics that appear each year, Indian saris and glossy cottonade shimmering next to indigo. “If you have changed”, he says, “you will change again and again […] if you falsify today, you’ll falsify your whole life.”   

There is less too. The exquisite geometry of traditional jewellery is lost, along with those that used to make it. Families covet a few cherished pieces that still speak to geography and place. And fewer hats. As Moussa explains, the town now pools all the tkumbut and assigns them to the best dancers, rather than the inheritance they once were. In Zelouaz, the uzarnas, heavy drums, are gone too, for lack of those with the strength to carry and to play them.

Though all of that is forgotten in the moment, in the wild energy of the dancers and the crowd, as the music swells, swords clank together, and the two sides move across the wadi.

Later, once it is over, and the moon is rising over the desert, Moussa’s words come back to us. “Sebeïba,” he says, “is my ID card in the world … You will not find Sebeïba in other places.” In the hazy half-light the words ring differently. Sebeïba appears as the unique and irreplaceable character of Djanet.

Looking out across the landscape, the stone towers of the Tassili rise like dark forests. A pair of jackals dart, noiselessly, across the sand. A goatskin abayoug, once the sidepiece of the camel, bounces gently against the window of the car. The desert, neither empty nor unchanged. 

* Some interviewees are identified by pseudonyms. Given the sensitivities around discussing cultural and political identity in Algeria, names have been changed to protect those who spoke with the authors.

** We have chosen to use this term rather than Tuareg, both because the etymology of the term Tuareg is itself not agreed, and, more importantly, because those we spoke with preferred to self-identify as “Imuhar”.

My son likes tomatoes, birds, dogs, cats, string cheese, the pedestrian wait signal at the traffic light. He says, “park” and “up” and “off”. He says “baahir” for outside and “ao” for come. Since he was born, I am scared to think through to the end of a thought, in case I find myself facing an uncertainty: a future in which he is not happy, or he is unwell, or he is not there. I am aware I am in the middle of life now, a bustling, hard, joyous time where the days blend into each other. This is what my mother must have felt when she was pregnant with me. I keep trying to look for a way to live my life by watching hers. But it’s hard to take stock when I am in the thick of it. Every day is beautiful and also terrible in how quickly it goes by. 

During the year that she was pregnant with me, my mother lost one of her uncles and her brother-in-law. They died in front of her; she saw their dead bodies. She was twenty-seven at the time. And then, after I was born as one of a set of twins, she lost my brother just a few hours after his birth. I think about the way death shadows my writing; and I wonder if some of the losses she faced while I was growing inside her were inherited by me. At times, I think about how much of my history my children will worry over. Will they sift through my life the way I want to sift through my mother’s past? The deaths that chased her the year she was pregnant eventually gave way to a period of happiness that lasted thirty-eight years, until my father’s death. This past year was the first year she forgot their wedding anniversary, seven years after he died. 

Muhammed Ishaq (1987)

My mother says that she had trouble conceiving for seven years. Then she and my father moved to Baghdad and the doctors there told her she would have to go to London for treatment. They would take the eggs out of her body to strengthen and fertilize them, before inserting them back in. My father was employed by the government of Pakistan at the time, so he applied for funding to cover the procedure. His application was approved and she traveled to London in 1987. While there, she stayed with her oldest maternal uncle, Muhammed Ishaq, one of seven uncles and aunts on her mother’s side. 

Muhammad Ishaq was a kind, and gentle man who was always laughing, according to my mother. He had moved to England in 1962, leaving behind a wife and five kids. In England, he had a brief marriage with a Scottish woman, and from this he had another daughter, my mother’s step-cousin. 

While my mother was in England, she took English classes. Every week, her uncle would go with her to class and sit on a bench outside. She felt so guilty about him waiting in the heat for her that she quit the classes after only three or four weeks. 

One day, they were all at home and her uncle felt unwell. She asked him what was wrong and he said his chest felt heavy. By then his brief second marriage was over, though he maintained a close relationship with this daughter from that union. His wife from Pakistan had moved to be with him. 

Muhammed Ishaq collapsed in the living room, and died later that day. “When did you find out he had died?” I asked my mother, “And how did you react?” She told me then that she rode with him in the ambulance. She had worried that the CPR, performed amid the blaring sirens, would hurt his chest when he woke up. When they arrived at the hospital, the paramedics ushered him away, behind doors. Finally, a doctor came to them and asked if the man had any blood relatives, so my mother stepped up. They took her into a room and told her, very kindly, that he had actually died back at home. They had hoped to revive him, but it turned out they could not. This was the first person she ever watched die up close. My mother’s other younger uncle, Abdul Razzaq, flew back to Pakistan with the body for the burial. He said he had to buy a ticket for the dead body. When I spoke to him about his brother dying, some thirty-three years after the fact, he only said: “It was very hard.”

It makes me sad that my mother’s uncle died in front of her and while looking back at the long arc of her life, this—the first death she ever witnessed—only ended up being an afterthought. “I was in the ambulance,” she said, almost as if she was remembering again, after many years of having forgotten. 

My mother’s side of the family is traditional. Mohammed Ishaq moved to the United Kingdom, married and left another woman and yet his first wife still took him back. His children speak of him fondly; my mother speaks of him with love. The family has a relationship with the step-daughter. It reminds me that what remains after you die is not what you did and not the manner of your dying, but only how people felt about you. My uncle’s death taught my mother that death can come unexpectedly. She learnt that lesson two times over within that same year. Yet, for many years after my own father’s death, all I could think about was yellowing eyes, knees buckling into a wheelchair, a body so thin it looked like it would break apart at any second. 

What is better? To die quickly, or to be able to say goodbye? For my son’s sake, I hope I die quickly. For my own sake, I hope I get to say goodbye. Some days I can hear my son playing upstairs. We live in a small house, and both ends of the short flight of stairs are childproofed with a gate. But sometimes if I am downstairs and my husband or my mother are upstairs with my son, I hear him laugh and make a dash for the stairs. I think, sometimes, of him falling down the stairs, and his neck landing at an angle, hitting the metal gate downstairs, his small body bruised and still. And each time my brain short-circuits, thinking, oh no, oh no, oh no, until I hear the laughing upstairs continue. Ever since I became a mother, I am always in anticipation of something going terribly wrong. And my mother is always telling me, it will be fine, he will be fine, everything is fine. 

I told my father through the year that he was sick, that he didn’t know exactly when he would die, that he could live for years and years, and yes, maybe cancer would kill him, but it might be when he was eighty. “You will be fine,” I said. “It will be fine.” Sometimes he seemed cheered by this. I wonder how many times my mother looked at my father that year and wanted an end to the suffering, even if it meant she would lose him. 

By the time my mother left England, her uncle was dead and buried on a small plot of land in Pakistan. By then, she was pregnant with twins, one of them me.

Anjum Amin (1987)

After my mother had completed her treatment in England, and once her pregnancy had been confirmed, she and my father returned to Baghdad before travelling back to Pakistan as her due date approached.  My mother was in her final trimester. She was expecting to deliver in Islamabad. My mother’s older sister was married to my father’s older brother, Anjum Amin. This uncle, my father’s brother, was thirty-four at the time. He felt some discomfort and laid down on his bed to rest. His five-year old son, Ali, began to take off his shoes. The whole family, all my father’s brothers and sisters, had gathered to welcome my parents home. 

Eventually someone suggested taking Anjum to the hospital. Someone else suggested giving him a Nitrstat pill for heart attacks, but my father vetoed it, saying they should check with the doctors before medicating him. Anjum died en-route to the hospital, and for many years, my mother says, my father blamed himself for vetoing the medicine. My mother was sent to stay with her mother; everyone worried the shock and the weight of staying in a house struck by such an unexpected tragedy would affect her pregnancy. My father buried his brother the next day, and my mother’s sister became a twenty-eight-year-old widow with two children under five. She never remarried. When my father came home after the burial, my mother said his voice was hoarse from crying. I had never seen my father cry, so this story stayed with me for a long time. In pictures, Anjum Amin, the uncle I never met, is tall and thin. 

When my father died in 2017, three decades after his brother, my aunt said to my mother, “Now we are the same.”  But it was not the same. My mother had thirty-eight years with her husband, and my aunt had seven. I believe that had he lived, the sisters would have talked less on the phone. But they had shared the moment of loss. My mother says this aunt is her best friend. She is like my mother. Her son, my cousin, is like my brother. I want my son to be close to his children. 

*

When I was nine weeks pregnant with my son, I began to bleed. The doctors had not been sure I would be able to become pregnant. I carried with me my mother’s stories of her seven years of infertility. I went to the hospital with my husband, and while we waited in the Emergency Room, I went to the toilet every five minutes to see if I was still bleeding. When I called my mother, then visiting my brothers in Australia, she asked me what I had done to cause the bleeding. I shrank in the face of this questioning. 

I had not known that I wanted the baby until I was faced with its loss. I felt afraid suddenly of what lay ahead, but thankfully the pregnancy remained viable and I carried my son to term. Afterwards, when I knew everything would be fine, I told my mother she should not have made me feel like the bleeding was my fault and on the phone she sounded stricken, “I was worried,” she said, “I felt helpless.” I thought then of my father and the medicine he did not let his brother take. In Islam, we believe that you will die when the time of your death is written, never sooner or later. And the time of your death is written when you are born. This is meant as consolation to those who have lost loved ones. But still, people cannot help but say, you should have done this, you should have done that, if only this had happened this way. 

*

When I was six years old, my parents lived in Germany and, one night, I spiked a high fever. My father, probably still haunted by the sudden death of his thirty-four-year-old brother, drove through every red traffic signal in his way, his hand on the horn so the car made a continuous blaring sound as it sped down the streets of Bonn. Having been told this story so many times by my mother, I almost remember it myself. She says, in the hospital, after I had recovered, the doctors were taking some time to discharge me, and I was crying to have the needle taken out of my hand. My father took it out himself and was later told off by the nurses. “You should have been here sooner then,” he said, “She was hurting.” When he was dying himself, I sat with him in hospital rooms at night and told him that the hair falling on his pillow would grow back, that he looked better thinner, that the pain would fade. My mother played Surah Rahman by his bedside. I had forgotten about that until two days ago, when I thought it might soothe my son if I played a Surah for him to sleep to. The one I accidentally picked was Surah Rahman. Suddenly, I was back in the hospital room in Islamabad, and my father was making small moaning noises. My aunt, my mother’s sister, his long-dead brother’s wife, was in the room. “You’re looking good,” I often told my father. “He’ll be fine,” my aunt often told my mother and me. My cousin also stood in the room like a sentry. 

Every time my son touches my shoes, I think of my dead uncle whom I never got to meet. I think of my cousin taking off his father’s shoes a few hours before he died. 

Bilal Sohail (1988)

My twin died a few hours after birth. Now that I am a mother, I can understand what it might have meant for my mother, who had to grieve a baby she carried inside herself for nine months after seven years of waiting to have him. She told me when I was eleven and begging for a horse (“How many children do you have who are eleven and want a horse?”) about the twin I’d never met. I didn’t mention the horse again. We lived with our cousins, Anjum uncle’s son and daughter. By then I had two brothers, so there were always five children in the house. Still, our mothers must have watched us closely. My widowed aunt had had three miscarriages before having her two children. They built a happy home. We played cricket on the rooftop, drank from juice boxes, spent endless hours on the street making up games. 

*

At the hospital, right before my scheduled C-section, I had a contraction. I told the nurses I was in pain, but they did not believe me. They readied me for the operating table, took me to the toilet, and then I lay on the stretcher, stiff with pain. “I’m hurting,” I said. Still, they plugged wires on my body, calmly said a doctor would be in soon. They thought I was nervous because the procedure was about to begin, but suddenly a voice in the room urgently said, “There’s no heartbeat.” I heard that with my whole body. 

The room became alight with sound and alarms. Doctors rushed in and out. Then the pain stopped suddenly, and the baby’s heartbeat came back. The rest of the C-section went as planned. Later, I asked my doctor what had happened, and she said, “I think you had an intense contraction and the baby went into distress.” I joke about that sometimes, “I could only handle one contraction,” but I tell the story less and less as my son becomes older. It’s harder to imagine him not here as my love for him grows by the day. I miss who I used to be as a daughter, but I am beginning to love who I am as a mother. 

I was twenty-nine when my father died. While sorting through his papers, I found a small newspaper article announcing my birth. My mother said he had been furious to see the article, worried it would cause people to treat me differently when I grew up because of the nature of my conception. He loved me like that, fiercely, like a hard-won prize. I recognize that love as the love I have for my son, and I am grateful for the gift of having been loved and for being able to love back like that.

Sohail Amin (2017)

My father was diagnosed with Stage 4 pancreatic cancer in May 2016. It took one year from diagnosis to death. This is the only person close to me who has died, though both my mother’s parents died during my lifetime. Before he died, the chemical imbalance in my father’s body caused him to hallucinate. He often worried he was in India, that the authorities there were going to imprison him. I wonder often where that fear came from. He was born in 1952, five years after the formation of Pakistan. Maybe it was something my father’s generation had inbuilt in them, this fear that the land under their feet was hard-won and could be taken away. He tried to instill in us the belief that nothing was ours, except what we earned ourselves. Everything else was luck or privilege. 

My brothers live in Australia. They like it there. Sometimes, I send them this quote by James Baldwin from a 1984 Paris Review interview, “I think it is a spiritual disaster to pretend one doesn’t love one’s country. You may disapprove of it, you may be forced to leave it, you may live your whole life as a battle, yet I don’t think you can escape it. There isn’t any other place to go—you don’t pull up your roots and put them down someplace else. At least not in a single lifetime, or, if you do, you’ll be aware of precisely what it means, knowing that your real roots are always elsewhere.” 

The year after I got married, my father had been dead for four years. I had moved to the United States a year after he had died, gotten married three years after he had died. That was how I measured time then. On his birthday that first year after my wedding in 2022, I spent the whole day crying. I had cried like that only once before, when I had seen his dead body wrapped up in a shroud at the hospital. I told my husband I was crying because I was living a life which would be unrecognizable to my father now. He never met my husband, had never been to the United States. I had been close to him, and sought him out for advice on everything. Four years after his death, I felt unmoored again, wanting to have him back.

After the ambulance ride with her uncle, Muhammed Ishaq, in England in 1987, my mother rode in an ambulance again for the second time with my father in June 2017. My father’s stomach was filled with fluid, a condition called ascites that stretched his stomach out, and made it wet to the touch, his pores leaking fluid. He had to have the fluid removed every few days, a complication of the cancer. While in the ambulance, she held his stomach so it would not jerk around during the bumpy ride, causing him more pain. Later, after he had died, my mother told me that when she was getting in the ambulance with him it occurred to her that he may never come home again, alive. He did come back home, but only briefly. Soon after, he returned to the hospital, and then he died. We brought his body back to prepare it for burial. By then we were ready. We could not see him suffer anymore. 

Once, a friend of mine asked me to interrogate my writing about my father’s death: “just saying that he suffered isn’t enough to make readers care about the death of your father.” 

Maybe witnessing death with everything in you open to it, then recounting it and sharing it with others as something that belongs to you, is an act of worship. 

Among other things, this is what my mother has taught me: Look. These people died, but we remember.

*

There will come a time in my life, and my son’s life, when my mother won’t be alive either, and then one day I won’t be alive, and his father won’t be alive. I want to document the rest of her life for him, and in doing so, I want to document mine too. But these days, every day is new, and sometimes there is no time for the past. For example, I notice birds everywhere now, even when my son is not with me. I think, I wish he were here,  so I could point out that bird to him. He would follow it around until it flew away.

My mother also lost her mother, my grandmother, in 1999, when I was eleven years old. I was old enough to know Bari Ammi. But I don’t remember her well enough to miss her, and it pains me that there may come a time when my son doesn’t miss my mother. I did not write about my grandmother here, because thinking of my mother losing her mother makes me think of losing mine. Right now, my son calls us both mama. He asks for my mother when he is hurting, or when he cannot fall asleep. When I joke with my mother about how jealous I am, she says, “How many adults do you know who weep over their grandparents? He will love you the most.” She has seen enough of death in her lifetime to know that it will come for her. Every day, I think about the fact that my son will never know my father. But for now, the only possibility open to us is to enjoy my son’s life. He likes to be in water, he drinks the bubbles in his bath and we are resigned to it, he hates sitting on the potty, he needs to pet every dog he sees. At night, he cannot sleep unless a very specific routine involving milk, music, and shush-ing is carried out. These are mundane things that feel fantastic to us now. I cannot believe I am living this life. One day it will be a different life. For now, we watch the birds in awe. 

In November 1982—in the midst of Israel’s second invasion of Lebanon and on the heels of its massacre of thousands of Palestinians at Sabra and Shatila—Kathy Engel addressed an audience at the New York City Society for Ethical Culture with the following remarks: When any poet is labeled inadmissible, when any voice is silenced, when freedom of speech for any of us becomes negotiable, then each of us is threatened. The exalted Palestinian poet and exile living in Beirut, Mahmoud Darwish, had not been granted a visa to the US for the event. The line-up—comprised of Lebanese, Palestinian, and US poets—now had a gap, and Kathy Engel and her co-organizers would not allow this gap to be silently overstepped. She read a statement they co-authored:

We are diminished by the absence of Mahmoud Darwish from this stage tonight. Our poems cannot be complete while his voice is banned. We speak as poets despite the many attempts of different governments to separate and silence us. We raise our voices here with the voice of Mahmoud Darwish whose spirit is with us, moving towards home. The poet has been barred, but the poem continues. The poems will not stop.

The poems will not stop bombs from falling. The poems will not stop power from its absolute corruption. These are all arguments often made, but at the same time the poems will not stop surfacing in our heads. They will not stop pouring out of pens, as the history of Palestine’s long liberation never ceases to be written. Poets speak, and that is action, but they also act, and this is what has drawn me to Engel’s work at a time when I feel despair about our ability to effect change as writers and believers in human rights. She has always written poems alongside other work that saw her putting her body, her time, her energy, and her relationships in between the oppressor and the oppressed—in Palestine, in Nicaragua, in New Hampshire. In our conversation, Engel reflected on her first anti-nuclear occupations at Seabrook and Shoreham. Her epiphany in those spaces: These are my people, this is my place. 

Where is that place, and who are the people that populate it? They are who Engel and co-editor Kamal Boulatta thank in the introduction to their 2006 anthology We Begin Here: Poems for Palestine and Lebanon, when they write of “individuals who believe…that aesthetic expression can be formidable when its articulation is inseparable from the struggle for political justice and social change.” They are who Engel means when she says later in her preface, “We are strangers who meet seeking peace.” I met Engel last June at a poetry festival I helped organize. In addition to We Begin Here, I’d recently read her life-affirming collection Dear Inheritors. Engel’s strong adherence to justice-seeking—in both verse and in person—is what made me want to have a conversation. 

I wanted to learn more about Engel’s faith in poetry’s indispensable belonging in social movements, a faith that seemingly has not flagged for fifty years. The author of seven collections of poetry, Engel not only gives voice to other poets, sharing words of her heroes and comrades when she touches a microphone, but she also pours her frustration, sorrow, witnessing, and sublime gratitude into each poem she writes, resisting the neoliberal impulse to separate poems about nature from poems about political oppression, to separate poems about horses, mimosa trees, the love of family, the haunting call of home from poems about police brutality, Palestinian resistance, and the horrific recent past that saw Indigenous women and girls systematically killed and erased at Canadian “reform” schools. The next time I would hear Engel read was at a fundraiser reading she helped organize to raise money for relief in Gaza. Among others, Engel read alongside both her daughter, the writer Ella Engel-Snow, and the Pulitzer Prize-winning Palestinian poet, Mosab Abu Toha, who, in addition to sharing poems, spoke with reverence about the strawberries his father would grow in Gaza. I wanted to learn from her about how to speak on these topics for all the right reasons, how to let go of all the divisions between people, emotions, perspectives, and generations, and how to persist in using poetry to stand up for justice. All while keeping the world’s wonder—animals, oceans, fruit, the lyrical ‘I’—on the page just the same. 

I also wanted to know if what comes off in her work as unflagging—her faith in humanity, the vital function of art, and that another future is possible—does in fact flag, and if so, how does she replenish her sails with wind, how does she weather the storm?

In this time of such proud and out-loud fascism ruling in America, I see in Engel the opportunity to learn from a living leader. Though “leadership”, too, is something Engel has helped me learn to rethink, as the division between leader and follower is yet another separation she would remove in building the world she still believes is possible and necessary. I was grateful to sit down with her for an interview on July 3rd, 2025, a few days after she performed at the second annual Flower City Poetry Festival in Rochester, NY. 

— Tyler Barton for Guernica

Tyler Barton: How are you feeling? 

Kathy Engel: I’m okay. You know, I never liked the 4th of July. For years my older daughter and I organized, along with others, a 4th of July walk for “interdependence” in our community. It has long been a thing we did, and then we began connecting with other groups and made it a street block party. But other than that, I ignore this holiday. I always used to write something. Now I’m just like, Well, I have nothing. I have nothing new to say. 

Then again, we do have our Sunday vigil this weekend, a vigil to support Palestinian sovereignty. The beautiful small group we work with has been hosting it every Sunday since October 2023, right here in Sag Harbor. So this Sunday we’ll be there, and some of us will hand out leaflets. I’m really proud of it. This place is not wildly active. I grew up here. We’ve been demonstrating here since we moved back from Manhattan in 1994, and with Women in Black since 2003, trying to prevent the US invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan. So there’s a history. This vigil started really small, but it’s become an interesting, intergenerational, unexpected group—steadfast people with very different ways of being public and engaged. It has become a very strong group, but we’re all amazed at the people who don’t show up. But it continues regardless of the size.

Anyway, Sunday we will be out, even though it’s been pretty ugly lately, because there’s a group that comes and harasses us.

Tyler Barton: Oh.

Kathy Engel: Viciously. 

Tyler Barton: I can imagine. 

Kathy Engel: Did you get any bad feedback from my reading? [Engel performed at the festival wearing a keffiyah, sharing poems that center Palestinians, Lebanese, and Indigenous peoples, and the working class.] 

Tyler Barton: No, not at all. People loved it. And it’s not like I was prepared for detractors, but I was maybe bracing. I did have someone email ahead and ask which night of the festival would be the least political [laughs]. They wanted to bring a friend who loves poetry but didn’t want to hear “anything about Israel”. I said, “Don’t come Friday.” But you know I really wanted to say, “Actually, you should come on Friday,” because I do want people whose minds are made up to hear a poem they might not know they need to hear, something true, beautiful, and heartbreaking and that makes them feel, and then they learn it was by a Palestinian writer, or about resilience in the face of slaughter. To show them it isn’t scary to hear words. To prove persuasion and empathy are still possible. But I know that these days a single mention of the genocide can make someone fold their chair up and go home. I did see one couple do that during your reading, but you could tell it was their loss. 

You know, I’ve always tended to steer away from this stuff, the explicitly political in poetry, but lately I’ve been feeling that’s a mistake and that one should steer toward it, because it can be productive. To have the confidence in one’s convictions to say “No, no, you should hear this.” 

Kathy Engel: Just hear it. Just see what happens. Hearing it isn’t going to hurt you. It may feel like it hurts you.

Tyler Barton: Were you politically active before you were a poet? Or were you a poet first? 

Kathy Engel: I started writing poetry very young, so, yes, a poet first. But at the same time I always had this leaning, this inclination, this kind of yearning—how can I engage? How can I connect? I was always someone who started things, but back then the things I started weren’t overtly political. I went to an experimental school for a period that my mom and others had started, where I was involved in unscheduled, student-led spaces. I came from a family of educators. I wasn’t even political in college. I have always been an introvert, you know, in many ways.

My mom was a social worker, and later in education and started the school, so I was raised to be conscious of service.

My dad was a documentary filmmaker who made a film when I was 13 that was critical for my development: Dr. Spock and his Babies, about Doctor Ben Spock, the New England pediatrician who was radicalized during the Vietnam War and became outspoken. That was my dad’s contribution to the movement, to make that film, and I was in on the film mix, and I wrote a poem about it. I met Ben Spock and made brownies for the reception in my dad’s Upper West Side apartment, and that was a pivotal time for me, because I saw that artists had a role to play.

So from a young age I had the desire, and also fear like, How will I do it?

Tyler Barton: So when did you figure out how you could engage politically and poetically? 

Kathy Engel: One day I was at work—I was working at the Academy of American Poets as a bookkeeper and a program associate; this was 1978 or 1979—and got a call from my dad who said, “Grace [Paley] and others are going up to Seabrook, New Hampshire. There’s a nuclear power plant, and it’s what they’re calling an occupation. It seems really important. Do you and Jon [Engel’s partner] want to go?” And I said, “Yeah, I think we should go.”

That was a pivotal point—everything changed. I became totally immersed, and everything started to seem connected. Of course this decision led to more activism, including my being arrested at Shoreham Nuclear Power Plant years later. So there was really no going back. 

I became friends with the people I met there, like Denise Levertov. We were setting up our tents, roaming around; it was dusty, hot, with bugs everywhere, and I was trying to figure out, Okay, what’s my role here? How am I gonna fit in? And there’s Denise on the ground in a circle, reading poetry to a group of people. I was like, This is it. This is where it is. These are my people. We became friends in a very beautiful and moving way. I mean, I was very young. I was in my early twenties, and I kept thinking—this is going to be my community. 

And so I became politicized very intensely, very fast, because I had been waiting for this. 

Tyler Barton: What was your poetry like then? 

Kathy Engel: I had studied poetry as an undergrad—with Jane Cooper, Galway Kinnell, Jean Valentine—but I was by far not one of the better poets. I kind of went through a period of asking, Why am I not good? It was partially a crisis of: What is my voice? What am I supposed to say? What can I say? I was often holding back the ‘I’, feeling at that time that in order to be a good poet I had to take myself out of the poem in a sense, that there was too much of me in my early writing, and that it was self-indulgent. What ended up happening when I held back the ‘I’ is that my poems lost their juice and emotional connectedness. I thought I had to be more distant, but I’m not good at that. 

Tyler Barton: Tell me more about wrestling with that question of permission in your work. What stories, topics, places, people do you feel that you have a responsibility to speak up for in your writing? Is there ever a discomfort, or a questioning, Am I allowed or even able to speak to this?”

Kathy Engel: It’s an ongoing question of, What do I need to say? What I’m supposed to say, and according to whom? What is my responsibility? Where? When? How do I do it? When am I going over? 

It’s a very hard question, and I’ve grappled with it because things have changed in terms of awareness and consciousness, and how we see accountability. I’ve long been working with many different communities, like in my work with MADRE [an international human rights organization that began in Nicaragua in 1993, of which Engel is the Founding Director], for example, where I was conscious of my role as a white, privileged, Jewish woman. My role was not to be the center, but to work with people to create things, and then stand back.

At one point or another I’ve had friends, from every kind of background, criticize me for that, for standing back. They’d tell me: You know you need to say what you need to say, and claim that place. That’s part of your job, too. 

Tyler Barton: Tell me about your poem, “Unmarked graves of Indigenous children, 2021” from Dear Inheritors.

Kathy Engel: That particular poem I was very uneasy about. I wrote it when I became aware of the discoveries. I’ve been long involved with different Indigenous communities; I have a close relationship with a number of Indigenous leaders and poets, and specifically connected with members of the Shinnecock Nation, near where we live, but I’ve also been engaged with Indigenous struggles in active solidarity for many years, and in Nicaragua too, through MADRE. 

But “Unmarked graves…” really came to me when a member of my beloved extended family, a Shinnecock pastor, called me to tell me about the situation. We talked often about it, and she kept telling me that so many people weren’t talking about this. I felt that it was incumbent upon me to—I mean, I felt she was telling me: write the poem. So I wrote the poem. Which is not to say I didn’t also feel it deeply, and I felt it part of my responsibility, but nonetheless I was very uneasy about it, so I showed it to a friend and I asked her, “Is this okay? You know I don’t want to burden you with that, but what do you think?” She thanked me for writing the poem and later told me she had read it for an audience at one of her sermons. 

I wouldn’t just go out there and put that poem in the world without checking with people in a community with whom I have mutual trust and honesty. And I also always try, when I do a piece like that, to share my relationship, that I put myself in it in a way that is hopefully respectful, reverent, and shows that I’m not just writing about people. I’m having an experience.

It’s about relationship and experience. Grace Paley used to say, “It’s how you do it.”

When we went to Nicaragua with a group of women, including June Jordan, we were asked by the Nicaraguan women if we would tell their stories. I mean that was in 1983, and we’ve learned a lot since then, but we were asked. They gave us this book with their letters to Ronald Reagan and the US Congress that insisted—Stop killing our children. They looked at us and said, “Tell the President.” 

Tyler Barton: So MADRE was born of that trip to Nicaragua? 

Kathy Engel: Yes, and that trip to Nicaragua was for  “Talking Nicaragua,” [a dramatization about US foreign policy in Nicaragua of which Engel was a co-producer] which was born of a reading called “Moving Towards Home” that we organized in November 1982 at the New York Society for Ethical Culture. The event featured Palestinian, Lebanese, Israeli, and US poets, in the aftermath of Israel’s invasion of Lebanon and the Sabra and Shatila massacres. Sara June, Kamal Boullata and I came up with the idea. Etel Adnan read. Stanley Kunitz read. Kamal read a poem by Mahmoud Darwish because he was denied a visa. It got strong press, and there was even a little video clip from local CBS about poets making peace. 

Congressman John Conyers came to New York in his tuxedo. He was the only politician on the national stage who was speaking out, questioning US-Israel policy. He did a beautiful job hosting. Then, Conyers hosted us in Washington, DC, the year after. And then in Detroit.

But there were fireworks at the end of that first NYC event [in November 1982], after June read her closing poem “Moving Towards Home,” which is an indictment of the Israeli participation in the massacres at Sabra and Shatila. Just after she finished, an Israeli poet moved to the foot of the stage and shouted a racist attack at June. There was also fallout from PEN America, a sponsor of the reading, and others. Ostensibly those who were angry said that it was a “setup” because the name of June’s poem was the same as the title of the event, and we closed the reading with that poem. I mean, that’s what they said. Honestly there could have been no other way to close the reading. And it’s clear they just couldn’t tolerate Israel being held accountable for the massacre. This led to the end of my friendship with Galway Kinnell, who had been a teacher and friend. It was for me a pivotal moment, because we were really attacked. I was twenty-five. And I was the only Jewish one of the four of us.

I soon learned that some board members of PEN America were also really upset, and they had a special meeting to disavow their relationship to the reading, which was also a benefit through UNICEF for children in Lebanon.

It was after the “Moving Towards Home” event that Michael Ratner—from the Center for Constitutional Rights—came to Sara, June, and me, and said, “We’re doing a groundbreaking lawsuit on behalf of Nicaraguans who were kidnapped, raped, and tortured by the Contras [a right-wing counter-revolutionary militia supported by the US]. Though there’s a solidarity movement in the US with El Salvador, we feel that people don’t realize what’s happening to Nicaraguans. Could you do a cultural program to widen the audience the way you did for Palestine?” 

So we came up with this dramatization called talking nicaragua. Sara Miles wrote the script and then another writer worked on it as well. Susan Sarandon, Giancarlo Esposito, Ed Herrmann, Rosalba Rolón and Alvan Colón from Pregones Theater all participated. Nicaraguans who were plaintiffs in the lawsuit came to New York City to participate. We did a one-night performance that was videotaped for PBS. 

Of course then PBS’s people didn’t show it, because it was too critical of US policy. That is what led to the invitation to Nicaragua. My husband Jon was the photographer, alongside me, Sara, and June, who was on assignment from Essence magazine and the Village Voice. That trip then led to the forming of MADRE and the Coffee Brigades as well as a photo project Jon was asked to create.

Tyler Barton: Did you ever write something you ended up not publishing or working on because you felt you didn’t have the right experience or perspective to speak on it? 

Kathy Engel: I usually wouldn’t write it if I didn’t already have some connection, but you know there are poems I would definitely write differently now. It’s one of the questions that I grapple with…

I will never forget this moment in 1990, in the West Bank. We were standing in a bulldozed home, where this man is living under plastic sheeting held up by a few poles. His kids had all been imprisoned with no due process; they were really kidnapped, hostages. Despite this, he had set up a little table and some teacups, and he hosted us. It was this very small delegation. He said to us, like so many people did on that trip—Don’t forget us. Tell our story. 

It’s an important question and it comes up a lot with my students. I never have a fixed answer. I’m always nervous. What is my job here with the voice that I have? And the job is never to tell someone else’s story unless they’ve asked me to. But also I try to implicate myself, or not to implicate, but to question myself and question my role.

And Grace said it’s about the love: Did you say it with love?

Tyler Barton: I find it very refreshing to find these subjects come up in your work, because I feel like when I was in my MFA program ten years ago, writing was supposed to be about beauty, wonder, personal pain, but probably shouldn’t be about politics, or anything specific about widespread oppression.

Kathy Engel: Can I say something about that, though? I don’t think they’re separate.

I had a beautiful poet friend we lost much too young because of cancer. Safiya Henderson Holmes—look her up, if you don’t know her work. She was one of my closest friends, but we used to laugh and say we were going to read a love poem when we got asked to read at a rally. She was an amazing force and we were sisters. We even wrote a poem together once for a reading at an event for the William Moses Kunstler Fund for Racial Justice, which I am so proud to have been part of in its early days.

It’s funny—I was just asked if I would contribute a bunch of poems to a new project. In the letter of invitation it was clear that they think of me as a political poet. I mean, I know I am a political poet, but I argue at times with that category, as I think everything is political and I don’t think the challenges I address are “issues” but part of the map of the world. 

I think highly of wonder. I try to write about beauty and to write into beauty and honor beauty. Beauty is part of the politics of resistance and resilience, of possibility. And we see that in a poem, the beauty, the tree I’m looking at right now. And, yeah, hopefully, that comes through. 

Because that’s why I always integrate the poems. I don’t put them separately. I keep myself in them. But when I was a young, I didn’t think I was allowed to do that, and you know my poetry was terrible. It was separate from me. Galway did say to me when I was very young, “You’re a spiritual person.” I looked at him like he had ten eyes. I grew up in an atheist family. But he was seeing something in me. I mean, I was always my most at home in community, yet also craved quiet and solitude, like being next to a tree, or in the ocean. Because I’m not just interested in reacting. I know that I can’t, especially at my stage of life, just be running on urgency all the time. It’s what they want, you know that? So I worked really hard for years to allow myself back into the tree, and the tree root, and the love. 

I had a poem last year called “Veto,” about how the US continually vetoes UN resolutions for a ceasefire. And I sent it to someone who I trust who said, “There’s always a question with this kind of poetry: Will it make sense to anyone out of context? You know, the word “Veto” even?” He said, “I’m really interested in timeless poems.” So I started thinking, What does that mean? What is timeless? And how?

Have I ever written a timeless poem? [Laughs.] I’m not saying anything that I know. I’m saying that these are the things I ask. 

They’re human challenges, the things we’re dealing with. I mean policies, dictators, democratic impulses. I don’t know how to describe this time. So I don’t have a brilliant answer. What I’ve learned is that I have to write what I have to write. What am I doing here, otherwise? 

Tyler Barton: It seems you also feel impelled to write of plants, animals, and nature. These subjects often populate and steer your poems, maybe serving as answers or sources of power—trees, horses, oceans. Are you trying to translate the communication you find with animals? Are you trying to put that relationship with nature on the page? Are you trying to make their voices heard?

Kathy Engel: Oh, well we’re all animals. I don’t think we’re anything but animals. 

I just feel that there is so much to learn. People in different cultures and communities have always had this notion that separation, or the creation of hierarchy of life, is pretty violent—and violence is part of life, don’t get me wrong. But horses were part of my beginning; I became connected with horses at a very young age. There was a horse in my life who I saw right after she was born. I was a little kid, and we grew together. She was my rock. I always had friends, but she was my solace and my—it was something more. I think we, as humans, have evolved in such uneven ways.

I mean, I don’t know who’s trying to tell anybody anything, but I do know that I have a lot to learn from all the living. I read about that a lot, but also, I feel it. I notice the turkeys who hang out here and I watch them, the way they congregate, and the way they move together. And the geese—their formations, rhythms, seeming intentionality. I wrote a poem about this that is not in that book, about trying to learn from their democracy in flight. 

I learn from the horses, I learn from the canines, I try to learn from all living things. I’m trying ultimately to unlearn the separation between us. And that’s one of the things that makes life possible to me is the never-ending ways of learning.

Tyler Barton: You have to think, anytime there’s a separation between things in life, who’s making money from that? 

Kathy Engel: Right. Who gets some power from that? That domination that says, “Put the mind here, and the heart over here.” English is here, but history is over there. Potatoes are here, and tomatoes—you know what I mean? But I think the answer is in the integration. 

Many of us have been trained to disregard our intuition. We lose so much of our power to think even, and to come up with ideas, and to come up with solutions and visions. When we do that, we’re missing so much.

Tyler Barton: Do you have a morning practice? 

Kathy Engel: I sit and listen to whatever can be heard. I do so every morning at home, near trees and sea. Even if I’m in the city. There we have a little landing, so I go out even when it’s cold, or I just open the window wide. I need to spend a little time listening. 

I learned a certain ritual nearly ten years ago, on my sixtieth birthday, when a group of intergenerational women were gathered by a dear sister. We were in a circle, and one of the women in the circle shared that she had been through a terrible crisis and had been on the edge, and she told us how she had come back. She had these chants that she said, and then she asked us to write down ten of the negative things that we say about ourselves, things that limit us. And then to write the opposite of each of those things, and with each positive one, rip up the negative ones. 

I kept with it after that circle. I reduced the list so that I could remember it. I keep a few of those positive ideas and add some from time to time, and that’s part of my morning, saying them aloud. I usually listen to a short meditation. I like to sit longer with my notebook. Thanks to Sonia Sanchez, I write a morning haiku, and I have done so every morning for more than ten years, I think. Then I do a list of gratitudes. 

Afterward, I either go to the horses, or visit with a particular tree, or go to the water, and often have some kind of connection with those who’ve died, who’ve left, who are important to me. I don’t do it all every day, but when I can, mostly I do. Then I write a haiku. Then I read a poem by someone other than me, usually more than one. I may listen to The Slow Down, or to Poem-a-Day. And that’s my beginning. That’s the basic. I run in the morning, too, and that’s meditative for me as well. 

I went through a period of intense anxiety. There was a lot happening in my family, and I lost my brother to suicide—there was a lot going on. I’d read somewhere that if you wake up really anxious, the first thing you should do is open the window and stick your head out, or otherwise just go outside. And I started doing that because it fit me. That’s what I did as a child, not knowing I was doing it. I was seven when we moved to Eastern Long Island. I would go out each morning to the ocean, to feel the wind, the wind, the wind. And that helped me, you know. I don’t know how to put it—the cuttingness of it, the intensity. The outdoors, for me, is one of the central things. 

Tyler Barton: What do you think we learned from living through the COVID-19 pandemic? And what did we fail to learn? From your perspective, what were the lessons we could have learned but didn’t? 

Kathy Engel: Bayo Akomolafe says, “The times are urgent—we must slow down.” I love his writing, especially his book of letters to his daughter. I think about going to Bread and Puppet Theater when Ella was about twelve and Jaja was eight, and the circus that summer was in honor of the slug. I was so taken with that. At first I was like, Okay, that’s cute. But then I realized I kept referring back to it. I think with the pandemic there was an opportunity there, to take in what that could mean. When suddenly you could see the horizon differently, because so many things had stopped. 

I think the possibilities we were granted were ones of care, and interrupting the kind of ruthlessness that our dependence on dominance and capitalism enact. We can do all these amazing things, but we can’t really talk to each other. We can’t live together. We can’t. What have we learned? That’s my question.

I recently found a poem from 1982—this is part of the work I’m doing—called “Letter to the Editor” and it’s about the mirror or parallel between what happens in an individual relationship where there’s abuse, violence, and pain. And there’s a chance to either break the pattern or else  reenact that pattern. The poem is about a child who was abused and then grows up to become violent with her own child. I mean, you look at the world, all the incredible, loving things humans can do, but there’s also that. So, what does it mean? 

Tyler Barton: What does it mean? 

Kathy Engel: I think about when I stopped doing the national work and started focusing on smaller actions—what the late Princess Elizabeth Thunderbird Hale from Shinnecock would call “small, brave projects”—I saw all these people starting to farm again, and all the ways of building community. In 2016, when this tyrant was first elected, my best friend Alexis De Veaux and I were just talking about what needs to be done, and I said, “I think we need to build strong communities.” And I still believe that, but we’re just dealing with so many assaults at once. 

I don’t believe everything needs to be said, but if so many things have not been acknowledged, it allows fear to grow. Which has everything, tragically, to do with money. The way fear is used. And there was such a terrible fear at that time, during the pandemic. Look at what people lost. I know people who have been sick ever since. 

Oh, a storm is coming, wow.

Anyway, I don’t know if any of this helps. What do we dare to learn? What can I let go of and say? 

I was recently talking with my mom about some political thing or organizing approach, and she said to me, “Well you used to say the opposite,” and I said, “Yeah, mom, I learned something. I changed. Aren’t you happy about that?” 

Tyler Barton: You’re talking about learning and what can be learned. One of my last questions here is actually to go back to talking about June Jordan and your friendship with her, which was born in those late 1970s spaces where poetry and politics could meet. What did June Jordan teach you? 

Kathy Engel: June taught me to believe in my writing. 

She invited me to Stony Brook to read when no one was treating me like a poet except people in political movements. She supported younger poets; she was just amazing. She taught me to read the headlines and then read the article and understand verbs and nouns and accountability, and to read it in terms of power and race and gender. To know the difference between when something just happens, or when somebody did something, and when something just happens to somebody, or when somebody perpetrated it, and how that is often a question of race and class and gender. “You know, the writer of the article doesn’t get to write the headline,” she used to remind me. 

Once I was struggling to write something for MADRE, and I didn’t trust myself writing prose at all. It was a statement, or maybe a fundraising letter, or whatever it was. Just write the way you write, June told me, and use everything you know about poetry.

[Jon comes in—“He’s trying to batten down the hatches, because it looks like a storm.”] 

When Ella was born, June asked me, “What do you need for her?” and I had the audacity to say, “A poem.” And weeks later I got this lullaby that she wrote for Ella. I learned from her as a mother in the sense that she was a mother to the world. That all children have a relationship. She loved young people, believed in them. When she would go and talk to students, they would say, “But June, the news, it’s so terrible,” and she would say, “You’re the news. You are. That’s good news.” 

She taught me that an essay doesn’t have to be some rigid formulaic thing outside of yourself. She taught me that poets can write the best essays. She’s in a category of her own, but she taught me that I could think about essays the way I think about poems. I began to understand that they are not separate.

It was June, Sara Miles, Vivian Stromberg, and Norma Becker from the War Sisters League, who really brought me into the question of Palestine in 1982. 

She knew how to have fun. Her laugh and her delight. She had an incredible energy and verve. And she taught so many people. She had a poem called “Apologies to all the people in Lebanon” which was published in The Village Voice, and she got a lot of flack for that. And a lot of love. People are still reading it. Angela Davis read it at a big conference in the beginning of this period of the genocide in Palestine. 

June had this way of believing in young poets, and supporting them. She wrote a blurb for my first book, which I don’t even really talk about that much—a chapbook that I made when Alexis De Veaux and I decided we should put our work into the world ourselves, be in charge of it. I made the chapbook Banish The Tentative and Alexis made an amazing book in a kind of sheath or portfolio, with her illustrations, called Blue Heat, that was just republished by Sinister Wisdom. June gave me that blurb as she was so generous that way. She was so generous in her support and her enthusiasm. But at the same time she was totally in touch with her rage and her indignation, all of it. It wasn’t separate.

I remember after Moving Towards Home, she asked me, “What did Galway say?” and I told her what he said, and she said, “Oh, well. But what did he say about your reading? Did he like it?” I told her, “He said I read well.” And she said, “But what did he say about your poem?” She was simply a champion of young poets’ work. 

We were in Nicaragua in 1983 on a high school playing field in the Afro-Caribbean town of Bluefields, and they asked June to read. It was like she was Stevie Wonder or something. She was a rockstar, in her neat blouse and skirt, and it was—I spoke about this at her memorial in Berkeley—it was one of these moments. They knew who she was.

Tyler Barton: Who are your leaders?

[In the interview Kathy Engel spoke at length about writers, activists, and friends Engel has learned from, grown with, and remains in solidarity with, but afterward sent me the following email.]

Kathy Engel: As you predicted, I was thinking about my discomfort responding to the question about leadership. Here’s the crux of it for me. There are many ways of leadership. I hope to support the enactment of honoring and uplifting the different ways people contribute towards community, towards vision, towards making a more just, loving, healthy, sustainable, and noticing world. I’ve had this exchange with colleagues, community, and so called students. Yes, there are projects, individuals, who—in their vision, work, and way of being—help me. So, so many. And yet, I resist the way leadership is so often categorized and characterized. I know humans crave icons. I’m just interested in the ways any one of us can be the guide, the spark, the contributor, etc. Horizontal!

Zashiki-warashi, a child spirit said to bring good fortune, roams a grandmother’s ancient home in rural Iwate. A grandson returning to the house from his Tokyo apartment senses the spirit’s presence, and understands it for what it is: a quiet provocation to recognise happiness, and to choose it.

Written by Masami Kakinuma and translated from the Japanese by Sharni Wilson,“Go for it” braids an inherited folklore with the muted disappointments of adult life. Published first in Creation of Stories All Around Japan, the story reimagines good fortune not as a whimsical gift of fate, but as a condition made possible through attention, reciprocity, and the courage to move toward the life one once wished for.

— Raaza Jamshed for Guernica Global Spotlights

Yuto stared up at the ceiling, but the wood grain looked like clumps of worms, about to squirm around; he squeezed his eyes tight shut. Lying in his futon, he couldn’t get to sleep—by his side, his gran was reading him folktales.

“…Soon afterwards, the family of that house and their servants, who numbered more than twenty all told, were poisoned by toadstools. They all perished in a single day, save a seven-year-old girl, who grew old without producing an heir, and in time fell ill and died.”

“Nooo!” Yuto frantically burrowed under the covers of his gran’s futon. After the zashiki-warashi spirits moved out of a house, the people who lived there were doomed to horrible fates—Yuto was very young, and he felt how unfair and terrifying it was.

Gran did her best to comfort him. “There, there, I didn’t mean to scare you. But you know, zashiki-warashi aren’t malevolent beings.”

She patted his head as he snuggled up to her, but the idea that zashiki-warashi left and took away people’s happiness lodged in his mind; he sobbed bitterly and eventually cried himself to sleep.

*

“What—propose?” Yuto choked out. His low-alcohol cocktail had gone down the wrong way.

His friend Keita had pressured him into coming along to check this place out, to see whether Keita should bring his girlfriend here, as she had wanted to go to a late-night cafe. And then Keita had casually dropped that into the conversation like an afterthought.

“She’ll like it here—it’s got a great vibe,” he went on, over Yuto’s sputters.

Yuto coughed and cleared his throat. “Nice of you to be so thoughtful.”

“Where do you take your girlfriend on dates?”

Uhhh—Yuto swirled the drink around in his glass. “I dunno. It’s so hot in the summer, so cold in the winter, I don’t feel like going out much, I guess…”

Keita looked at him for a long moment, his eyes serious, and then grunted as if to fill in the awkward pause. “Hasn’t she said she’d like to get married soon?”

“Uh-uh. I mean, she hasn’t brought it up.”

“What about you, Yuto?”

“Ummm. I … dunno.”

You dunno, Keita echoed, looking briefly appalled. “So you’re more focused on your career at this stage?”

“Uh-uh. I don’t care about getting promoted or anything like that.”

“Well, that’s one approach.”

“Mmhm.”

Keita glanced away and tapped his phone. “Anyway, this is the engagement ring I’m looking at.”

Yuto peered at the phone that Keita angled toward him. On the screen, an intimidating diamond sparkled in a pink gold setting. “Wow.”

“I know, right?” Keita swiped through a few more pictures, beaming.

Other than “wow”, Yuto had no idea what to say. Keita was focused on his phone, looking at the gleaming ring. Yuto had to stop himself before he admitted out loud: you seem really happy.

Yuto got back to his studio apartment and gargled as usual, but the sweetness of the cocktail lingered in his mouth. He should’ve had the parfait instead; that was the late-night special.

He took a quick shower and sprawled out on the bed. When he looked at his phone, there were several missed calls from his mum. What a pain, he thought, but he called her back.

Her voice came booming down the line almost immediately, shouting “You hardly ever return my calls!”

“What?” Yuto turned the volume down.

“Don’t you ‘what’ me! So yesterday I went to your gran’s, okay? She wants to see you.”

“Um, okay.”

“She asked me how’s Yuto, is he alright living all alone, what’s he been up to? But I couldn’t answer any of that because you never tell me anything!”

“Ah…”

“Don’t you ‘ah’ me. Look, you said you were going to take the week after next off, right? I told Gran you’d go see her then.”

“Huh? No, I might have mentioned it, but you can’t just go and make plans for me like that…”

“You’re the one who hasn’t been to see her in such a long time; honestly, if I didn’t do something you wouldn’t organise it yourself, now would you? You’ve always been so…”

“Okay, fine, I’ll go. Bye.” He hung up before she could get started on his other personal failings.

He hadn’t been to visit his gran since junior high. It wasn’t that he didn’t get on with her. When he was at school, every time he got the traditional New Year’s gift of money from her via his mum, he’d call and thank her, and once he was out in the real world, they exchanged New Year’s greetings cards. He had sent a gift last year to congratulate her on marking her 80th year, the traditional milestone of Sanju. But he didn’t like how gossip had a way of spreading in the countryside, or how his relatives got on his case. The different feel of the house she lived in, which was old-fashioned compared to his parents’ place in Tokyo, might have put him off too. The year the great earthquake struck, he had genuinely wanted to go with his mum to check on how Gran was coping in the aftermath. However, as the TV bombarded him with horrific footage of the disaster, he couldn’t bring himself to go. 

Whenever he imagined his gran’s misery or his mum’s exhaustion, the dread would crush him all over again, and he couldn’t shake the urge to stay in Tokyo and try to blank it all out. By the time normal service was restored and he could call his gran, she told him it would be too difficult for him to visit just then, and to his shame, he accepted her words at face value.

Yuto turned back to his phone and tapped out a quick message to let Hiroka know he was headed for Iwate.

It’s a long way away, so I thought I should probably let you know

Her response pinged back quickly:

You should always let me know, not just probably!

It’s only one night at my gran’s

Can I come with?

He hammered out a reply, not giving it much thought:

Whatever

What do you mean, whatever?

Don’t mind either way

So it’s all the same to you? You didn’t think to invite me?

Yuto pushed down the urge to argue back and ask what her problem was, and he sent a few more messages to placate her, saying things like: we wouldn’t be staying at a ryokan, so it wouldn’t be much of a holiday; it’s way out in the countryside, but if you don’t mind that; maybe we should plan some kind of trip for a later date, etc, but she didn’t reply again.

Alone, Yuto boarded the Tohoku Shinkansen.

Iwate’s closer than I thought, he realised, and immediately regretted not taking the night bus instead, which would’ve been much cheaper than the bullet train, since he was travelling solo.

On an afternoon long after the summer holidays, he had expected the train to be deserted, but it was full of all kinds of people: business travellers, groups of middle-aged women, and families with children. He didn’t need to commute to rural areas for his job, and he couldn’t imagine himself as a father. In a few decades time, when he reached his mum’s age, he couldn’t picture himself enjoying a trip with a group of friends, either.

He killed time by playing with his phone and staring out the window, and then changed from the bullet train to a local train, getting off at the station closest to his gran’s house.

As he left the station, he was greeted by three kappa statues. Perched on boulders in a pond edged with stones, the reddish-brown water sprites seemed to be in the middle of a chat. They had the air of salarymen hitting the pub after work. All three were as long-limbed and spindly as a certain comedian who was constantly on TV.

“Yutooo!”

Yuto looked around and saw a woman in her forties running toward him. Behind her, a tiny pink-beige microcar was parked. She must be Ms Sasaki, his gran’s neighbour. His mum had told him about her: apparently she had moved here from Tokyo a few years back, and his gran was very close to her; she sometimes helped out with the farm work, or lent out her cute car when his gran had errands to run.

He said hi, and she encouraged him to climb into the back seat. The way she spoke reminded him of the kindly manager who had shown him the ropes when he was new to the workplace. She told him that Gran had been in good spirits every day lately and laughing at all her anecdotes. He was reassured to hear that his gran was happy.

Driving along the road, jolting and bumping at times, they passed a few large, relatively new houses among the fields of vegetables.

A few minutes later, they arrived at his gran’s house, an ancient wooden hiraya; coming back there after such a long time, Yuto was struck by the lonely, isolated nature of the wide acreage. It gave him a twinge of anxiety to think of his gran out there, working in the fields all alone.

He thanked Sasaki, who had to be off on her next errand, got out of the car and set foot on the weed-dotted ground. He looked up at the roof of the house, which had been repaired in one section with deep red tiles; the outside of the wooden house had deepened to a much darker brown than he remembered.

He rattled open the sliding door to reveal the concrete doma space, and the earthy-musty petrichor of a massive tree after rain flooded his nostrils.

“Oh!” his gran exclaimed, in a tone of surprised joy. “I’m so glad you came,” she said over and over, gently patting him on the arms and back in welcome. “You’ve really grown. It must be hard, all alone in Tokyo.” She took his hand and led him inside.

When he went to wash his hands at the basin, he used the tap with the little red circle on it, but the water didn’t warm up, so he had to rinse the soap off with cold water.

Glancing through the bathroom’s half-open door, he noticed the yellowing white showerhead which lacked a water pressure control, and the motley blue, white and black tiles that covered the floor. A faint smell of two-in-one shampoo floated out, a brand that hadn’t changed in decades.

He took a seat in the living room and reached out for a fun-size bag of sweet treats from the tray on the table. Next to the tray stood a vase of flowers as big as his palm, along with the same Nambu ironware teapot she had always used. It was exactly the same scene he remembered from childhood.

“You finally get a holiday, and your mum tells you to come all the way out here? Sorry about that, I know you have a lot on.” His gran settled her comfortably rounded hips into a chair.

“Oh, yeah, I’ve been quite busy…” Yuto swallowed. “Sorry it’s been a while. I’m happy to see you’re so well.”

“I’m wonderfully well. Now, I should get dinner started—you must be hungry?” And, without demanding why he had failed to visit her for so long, as he had feared, she calmly got up and headed for the kitchen.

“I came here to see you, that’s all—you don’t need to bother too much about dinner.”

“Don’t give me that. You’ve come all this way, so I want you to eat up, and please don’t hold back.” She deliberately wrapped her half apron around her waist.

The kitchen floor, with its faint pattern of little cream flowers, took him back to his childhood. It had felt a little sticky to walk on in bare feet, he recalled. The old-fashioned gas stove, a bottle of soy sauce left out, three calendars hanging on the wall, the dish cupboard with the frosted glass doors, and the stacks of aluminium pots … time seemed to have stopped here since his last visit back when he was in junior high.

Left at a loose end, Yuto watched his gran as she busied herself in the kitchen.

“It’s hard to cook with you watching me like that,” she said, but she looked gleeful.

Yuto felt he should offer to help, but there didn’t seem to be anything he could do, so he continued to look on. The leeks he glimpsed over his gran’s shoulder were longer than the ones to be found in Tokyo, and the shiitake mushrooms looked luscious.

The chopped vegetables tumbled into the pot on the stove with splashing thuds.

“Hellooo!” a familiar voice called out from the front door. Gran must have invited Sasaki over for dinner.

“This is my contribution.” Sasaki proffered a plate wrapped in clingfilm.

Gran’s face lit up. “Oh, tofu dengaku, how lovely.”

“Yuto, you might not have had this before,” Sasaki said.

“I’m excited to try it,” he said politely. The long pieces of tofu were nicely browned, with a miso glaze.

“The traditional way is to skewer them and grill them on the hearth, but they can also be fried in a pan,” Sasaki explained.

“Oh, that’s great.”

When Sasaki took off the clingfilm, a delicious aroma of garlic wafted out. She deftly set the plate in the middle of the living room table and bustled back to bring his gran’s dishes in from the kitchen. “Ooh, hittsumi soup!”

That must be the soup Gran was preparing earlier, Yuto thought, as he sat there awkwardly waiting for the food to be set out. He seemed to have missed the window to offer to help; when he turned toward his gran, she beamed at him and asked if he would like some mugicha, as she got the cups out.

The table was laden with the hittsumi soup, white rice, tofu dengaku, greens with a walnut dressing, and sakana no nitsuke, a fish dish simmered in flavourful sauce. In sync with Sasaki and his gran, Yuto put his palms together and said, “Itadakimasu.”

The hittsumi soup had a smooth, mellow dashi flavour that slipped down his throat easily, and he felt it gently warming his insides. He asked his gran what the mochi-like things in the soup were, holding one between his chopsticks. She explained that it was a hittsumi dumpling, made by kneading soft wheat flour, salt, and hot water into a dough; the dough was torn into small pieces by hand and simmered in the broth to soak up the flavour.

He took a bite of Sasaki’s tofu dengaku—as he expected, it had the punchy garlic tang he loved. The sakana no nitsuke, which his gran said was left over from yesterday, was so delicious that he couldn’t stop eating more and more of it, and he shovelled down the rice.

“Your gran taught me that walnuts go so well in a dressing,” Sasaki began, with an easy smile. “Sorry for gate-crashing your family reunion, but we have so much fun together, I’m constantly popping over.”

People seemed to naturally flock to his gran; locals were always coming round to share food or dropping by for a chat and to check on her, one way or another.

“Yuto, it might be hard for you to see it objectively,” Sasaki led in, “but while your gran’s house is old, it’s so beautiful, don’t you think? The garden produces a lot of vegetables, let’s go see it later; we pulled turnips that were a really unusual colour,” she rattled on. Every time Yuto responded, with a “mmhm” or an “uh-huh”, Gran smiled at him.

“Garden”—the word summoned up a vivid memory of the girl he used to play with.

“Watermelon!”

Sitting side by side on the veranda, legs dangling, Yuto and the girl took giant bites into the watermelon wedges his gran had chilled for them. The juice smeared all around their mouths.

“Want some salt?” Yuto looked over at the girl.

“Does it make it taste good?”

“It’ll be a lot sweeter.”

“Really?”

Yuto sprinkled a bit of salt on her watermelon, and the girl shrieked with laughter.

“Wow, it’s so yummy.” When she looked up from her watermelon, she was sticky with juice from chin to neck. “After we finish this, are we gonna play again?”

“Hmm, I dunno…” Yuto said. He pursed his lips and sent watermelon seeds flying into the garden: ptui, ptui, ptui. The girl squealed with delight and copied him. Yuto’s seeds were flying further than hers; the girl frowned and then spat one in his direction with a sly grin.

*

“What are you smiling to yourself about? Fond memories?” Sasaki’s voice brought him back to the present moment. “Well, I should be heading back soon.”

She stood up to ferry the dishes back to the kitchen for washing up, but when Yuto told her he would take care of it, she grinned and let him take charge of the dishes and cups.

Yuto dried the dishes his gran washed, wiping them off with a plain white tea towel, and then he went back to the living room and sent Hiroka a message to say he was in Iwate.

Having fun? she texted back.

When he replied Sort of, she sent back an expressionless face emoji and nothing else after that.

By nine pm or so, Gran was ready to go to bed. “Rest, you must be tired,” she urged, so Yuto went into the tatami guest room and got into the futon she had laid out for him.

There was a monkey painted on the sliding fusuma door, and he had the odd feeling it was watching him; he rolled over onto his back. A cord dangled from the centre of the ceiling light, which was shaped like an upside-down tulip.

Staring up at the ceiling, he noticed the sinuous eddies of the wood grain. The lines looked like they were creeping steadily further apart, and he got the same feeling of unease that used to come over him so long ago, when he had slept here next to his gran. To shake it off, he tried to think about something else, and the girl he had remembered earlier sprang to mind. Her hair had been cut in a short bob, and she had worn some kind of yukata, he thought, sifting through hazy recollections. Slowly, a few more details came back to him: the watermelon they’d shared had been so delicious, and they’d waved sparklers around in the garden as well.

It was way too early to fall asleep—he got up and slid the fusuma open. The adjoining room was also tatami, with sliding glass doors at the end which gave onto the garden on the west side of the house.

He inched a glass door open, and the verdant scent of the night swept in. There was a gibbous moon, shining brightly nevertheless, and the scattered stars seemed to cluster around it. Yuto breathed in deep and savoured the cool breeze. In the absence of artificial light, he was surrounded by surprising darkness.

No car noise, no human voices, only the ti-ro, ti-ro of crickets chirping to his right and left. Time passed slowly; he felt as though he were suspended, floating in a magical night that would never give way to dawn.

Still, he began to feel the chill, and he knew he should get back to bed. When he lay down again, his head felt cool; the breeze from outside lingered pleasantly on his skin, and he closed his eyes. His body heat was gradually warming the futon.

As consciousness receded, he sensed a vague presence by his side.

“It’s been a while.” It was the voice of a child, which sounded familiar. “So you can’t get to sleep?”

“Yeah.” Oddly, Yuto didn’t feel at all scared. “I was just thinking about back when I was little. I remember being really happy back then.”

“Are you happy now?”

Yuto hesitated. “Uh, I don’t really know…”

“Mm.”

“My friend’s getting married.”

“Mm.”

“He seems so happy.”

“Mm.”

“But I feel like things haven’t been going so well for me lately…”

“Mm.”

“I’ve been with my girlfriend for three years, but I still don’t really get her.”

“Mm.”

“When we go out, I try to take her where she wants to go, at a time that suits her, but by the end of the date she’ll be kind of sulky.”

“Mm.”

“I always do as she says, you know?”

“Mm.”

“I really wonder whether we’re okay.”

“Mm.”

“It’s hard to judge, I guess.”

“Mm.”

“I feel at home here. But I’ve been away too long.”

The girl listened quietly, as he vented all the worries that lurked at the back of his mind.

When Yuto woke up, it was after noon.

The fusuma were wide open, and the sun angled in through the glass doors to reach the room he lay in. He sat up unhurriedly; he felt much lighter than usual. Maybe the dinner last night had done him some good, or maybe it was that he’d slept well for the first time in ages…

Yawning, he headed for the living room, and his gran asked him, “Do you always sleep in this late?” with a wide smile. Breakfast was on the table, and as Yuto briskly stirred his natto, he told his gran about his experience of the previous night.

“Gracious, that was our zashiki-warashi,” Gran said cheerfully.

“Huh? Zashiki-warashi?”

“Your mum used to play with her all the time too.”

“What—seriously? There’s a zashiki-warashi in this house?”

“Didn’t you know? She’s been here all along.”

He remembered the folktale his gran had told him when he was a child. The first time he heard it, it had terrified him. The irrational fear had stayed with him, unconsciously associated with his gran’s house; maybe it had contributed to keeping him away.

Out of nowhere, little footsteps could be heard, scampering about in the hallway; startled, he turned to his gran. With a calm smile, she looked toward where the sounds were coming from.

His childhood terror came rushing back to him. What if the zashiki-warashi left this house? He looked pleadingly in the same direction.

“Oh, that’s right,” Gran began, “today, Sasaki said she’d take me out in the car. Since you’ve come all this way, how about we take a little outing before you go?”

As she looked at him eagerly, he chewed on a tomato with unnecessary force to quell his anxiety and nodded.

Sasaki took the wheel, telling Yuto in the same lively manner as yesterday, “Isn’t it funny how if you live close to a tourist spot, you don’t tend to go there?”

Sitting next to him, Gran was looking out the window with a radiant smile. “I’m so looking forward to it!”

The place they drove to was called Denshoen Park.

They passed through the entrance, which was a large barn with a thatched roof. The breeze carried smells that he wasn’t used to; he got a whiff of sand and fresh green leaves.

“It’s like a museum,” he muttered. Sasaki guided them around, reading out the descriptions of the buildings. They saw a waterwheel, a well, and replicas of toilets and baths used long ago. Visitors could also try their hand at making the small wooden votive plaques called ema.

With a twinkle in her eye, Gran mentioned that she knew the perfect spot for Yuto to visit.

There was a building known as the magariya house, which had a lived-in feel to it. Once they were inside, Sasaki led them on at a brisk pace. Yuto followed reluctantly: through a doorway, the walls were shrouded by bunches of motley cloths in overwhelming numbers, and he stifled a yelp. Struggling against his rising sense of dread, he couldn’t take in much of what Sasaki said, but apparently they were Oshira-sama dolls. They were made from sticks of mulberry wood, with the head of a girl or her horse carved into the end; visitors dressed the mulberry sticks in cloths upon which they had written a wish. The dolls numbered a thousand or so.

“Come, come,” Gran called, beckoning Yuto to the room where the zashiki-warashi were. “See, have a look over here,” she said, taking him by the hand to pull him along.

In the gloom, written in hiragana were the words: Oku-zashiki. Gran grinned and waved him inside first.

Yuto walked on nervously. The small room’s sliding door was open, and as he walked in, a little shadow floated hazily in the orange light.

A grunt burst out of him as he edged closer—a cut-out of a child with a bob was silhouetted on a paper lantern. She was looking at him with eyes full of mischievous calculation, one hand spread palm open in front of her.

“Honestly,” he groaned. When he turned around, he saw his gran giggling like a child.

“That’s a zashiki-warashi.” Sasaki was struggling to keep a straight face as well.

“It’s only a display,” he muttered under his breath, trying to put a good face on it, but his deep-seated worry welled up again, stronger than ever—something terrible could happen to his gran, and Sasaki too, if the zashiki-warashi moved out some day…

After they left Denshoen Park, Sasaki took them to a popular Jingisukan restaurant.

Yuto ordered the basic set meal (the “assari”), and he was served raw lamb that looked beautifully tender. Sasaki and his gran taught him the best way to cook it: the cabbage, onions, bean sprouts, and carrots were placed around the edge of the round grill, leaving a gap in the centre for the meat. The lamb didn’t have the strong gamey smell of mutton, and they could devour it the instant it was done.

It was getting on for evening by the time they left the restaurant, and Sasaki laughed. “I can’t tell if that was lunch or dinner.”

Gran laughed as well, saying that good food was good to eat at any time. “Yuto, why not buy a few souvenirs to take back with you?” she suggested.

He said he didn’t mind either way, and Sasaki drove them to a roadside station where souvenirs were sold.

The local produce hall had a huge variety of things, from turnips and wasabi to unrefined doburoku sake and beer; he found himself walking around in circles inside the shop, repeatedly picking things up and putting them back again.

“Oh my, they’re here as well!” Gran called out.

Yuto went to her: Gran was holding a zashiki-warashi key ring. The tiny girl doll was made of soft, springy material, dressed in a red kimono tied with a yellow obi. She had black hair, cut in a short bob, and her eyes were big and round.

Gran bought him three as souvenirs. “One is for you. One’s for your mum. And the last one, you should give to someone that makes you feel happy when you’re with them.” She handed him the bag.

Someone that makes me feel happy when I’m with them … He thought about it, and sent a message to Hiroka:

What would you like as a souvenir?

It didn’t change to ‘Read’.

“Could I come back to Iwate another time…” he wondered aloud.

A smile came to his gran’s face at his soliloquy. “That would be great.”

When they arrived at the station, Yuto got out of the car to walk to the ticket gate; Gran got out too and clasped his hands in hers, repeating passionately, “Go for it, go for it.” Yuto was bewildered by her intensity but he returned her grip without embarrassment, nodding over and over again.

In the driver’s seat, Sasaki was waving goodbye.

Wishing he had taken a few more days off, Yuto took his leave reluctantly, turning to look back several times before he entered the station to board the train.

By the time he reached the platform for the bullet train, it occurred to him to call his mum. “I’m just about to leave Iwate.”

“Did you have a good time?”

“Sort of. Last night I thought I saw a girl, and Gran said she was a zashiki-warashi. Maybe she was the one I used to play with when I was little.”

“Oh, you got to meet her? Isn’t that great?” For his mum, it was clearly no big deal.

“So she is a zashiki-warashi then? But then, will she stay at Gran’s house for good?”

“What are you talking about?”

“I can’t help worrying about that. If she left the house, something horrible would happen to Gran, wouldn’t it?”

“Oh no, you were worried about that?” His mum scoffed. “You silly boy!”

“But it was in the book Gran used to read to me.”

“It’s not like zashiki-warashi call down misfortune,” his mum said, snorting with laughter.

“Huh?”

“Okay, so you think Gran’s only happy thanks to the zashiki-warashi?”

Yuto called to mind his gran’s smile. In his mind’s eye, she always had such a kind look on her face.

Because of the zashiki-warashi that lives in her house … or is it?

Was Gran’s happiness bestowed upon her by chance, by some other being? Maybe I had it all backwards.

His mum sighed. “You know, if something’s bothering you, you can always talk to me about it.”

He envied his mum’s incredible confidence. “Sure, okay, bye,” he said to cover his awkwardness, and hung up.

Go for it, go for it.

Watching the scenery speed past outside the bullet train window, he turned his gran’s words over in his mind, and the warmth of her wrinkled hands returned to him.

He took one of the key rings she had bought him out of the bag. One for me, one for my mum, and the other for…

His last message showed up as ‘Read’ but there was no reply.

Are you happy now?

Last night, when the zashiki-warashi had asked him that, he hadn’t been able to give a confident answer.

You think Gran’s only happy thanks to the zashiki-warashi?

His mum’s words came back to him too.

Gran’s natural warmth gathers people to her because she’s great to be around; the zashiki-warashi is drawn to her as well, and that’s why she’ll stay.

Yuto reflected on his own life. I have Hiroka, Gran, my family, and my friends. The zashiki-warashi at his gran’s house had appeared to him. And the gift his gran had given him was in his hands.

Are you happy now?

He wondered how Hiroka would answer that question.

Yuto gazed at the zashiki-warashi. A happy future was within his grasp. He held the doll gently, with the hope that she would want to stay with him always. The scenery outside the window was fleeting past at the speed of wind.

Next time I’ll bring Hiroka with me. Now I know what I want.

He sent a message to her:

I have a souvenir for you, can we meet up tonight?

Nestled in his palm, the thumb-sized doll in the red kimono only had eyes painted on her little face. And yet she was definitely smiling at him.

“Go for it,” written by Masami Kakinuma (trans. by Sharni Wilson), and originally published by SHORTSHORTS as part of Creation of Stories All Around Japan, a Japan Cultural Expo initiative that describes itself as a project in which “young contemporary writers create short stories inspired by local legends set in various locations around Japan.”

When a bullet leaves the mouth of a shark

into the belly of my mother,

it renders the skin away from fat,

teachers her  

to rent space in my body

for secrets. 

“Don’t you know,” it says.

You must 

                Hide, hide, hide

God between her gums and 

                fold, fold, fold 

enough hope. A gallon or two for the march

into the barrel of a foreign land.

The entrance

to fear

from grief

is narrow.

               The barrel,

               is [only] wide

               enough to

               allow loss.

               language

               to name.                           

A bullet is a 

wound 

watching the future

               alchemize into ash,

forcing death into rooms of tiny bodies.

Her five children, with one kitchen knife.

Later on, she blamed it on her husband.

Her husband, he was not empathetic

that she did everything alone.

She got up on her own every night,

washed the diapers alone,

lugged everything by herself,

reared the children and smiled,

with her nails she scratched

hardened eggs from the stone floor.

And Doctor D. was always there.

He was against their marriage,

yet for their wedding he gifted

them a house, a car, and money.

He’s lived with them from day one. 

He named all the children.

He breathed on the napes of their necks

when they lay in the marital bed,

and the moment they fell asleep,

he slid in between the two of them.

He said everything was his, after all. 

And indeed—no one else understands her.

They say she has completely lost her mind, 

they say she bawls all by herself,

though she’s alone just the same,

she’s not alone just the same:

in his white lab coat that reeks of chlorine,

with his cold hands, his smile,

through the walls, as was his habit,

Doctor D. visits her here too.

He ties the strap on his left hand, as he had seen

his grandfather do it during his childhood, then

puts the knocked-down lamp back in its place,

covers up his dead wife with fastidious care,

and raises the shutters in the kitchen.

He opens the door to the children’s bedroom,

and quietly pulls the floral curtain to the side,

sunlight pours in. He turns around, he bends down.

But she is breathing, he thinks. He cradles 

the dead little girl, dresses her nicely,

puts her in the car seat, carefully buckles her in, 

takes her to school. It’s seven o’clock.

I insured my grief and the inherited hatchets. 

I want them buried for a century, at least. 

I jiggled beads around a gourd that couldn’t hold wine,

to remind everyone of my oaths to love this country. 

Sometimes, love comes in a parcel of rice straws

or takes the shape of a gourd, fractured beyond shape. 

Ṣẹ̀kẹ̀rẹ̀ kíì ròde ìbànújé, no one brings a Ṣẹ̀kẹ̀rẹ̀

to a room where its walls have pictures covered in dust.

When I sleep, my mind clones itself and wanders

beyond every boundary. The songs I memorized

nurture my dream, so I remember the origin of my scars.  

In an altitude where the clouds are visibly the shape of drums, 

I think of trees that resist floods and storms, 

I think of the celebrations where the gourd is left to rest. 

It’s a simple scene. The man

and woman sit across from each other

in silence. He’s already reached for the peach,

weighed the summer soft skin in his

palm. The woman has turned her head

towards the window, exposing

that part of her neck she knows

will keep him long enough

for her to breathe. He isn’t

looking. He’s digging his finger

deep into the flesh, fishing

to find its center. She fights

the febrile urge to squirm

as he carves his fat thumb

through the core. Silent

as the scene may seem, we see her shift

focus to the sky—maybe the thunder yawns, maybe

the wind throws through the panes, maybe

she hears a sadness that sounds like her

childhood and reminds herself not to think

about flying. Finally, finds what he is

looking for. He drops the sweet pit

on his tongue and rolls it

cheek to cheek. She stifles herself

on the chair, wishing she could

ask the seed how it feels

to begin again.

In him, another dialectic appears, trying to find expression; the contradiction of the terms yields in his eyes by the discovery of a third term, which is not a synthesis but a translation; everything comes back, but it comes back as Fiction, i.e., at another turn of the spiral.

Roland Barthes 

Spring in Lingnan, cold. My mother gave me two hours to return from the market with at least three wén in change, not to come back with less. I drifted out, hungry but happy, collecting loose pine and bamboo branches from the woods by our house, and meandered slowly to the market. After a long winter, it was a perfect day for robe and sandals.

A group of monks, having arrived from the north, gathered in a circle at the market. I walked past them with my giant bundle of sticks, to the stalls. Bao, the old man, bought them all for four wén, and I was free to wander back to the monks’ circle. They were shouting—competing, it sounded like—and I couldn’t hear, so I edged in closer. I finally made my way to the clearing. A man in a bright red robe, shaved bald, with a giant nose like a bird of prey, shouted at the people around him theatrically: 

All conditioned phenomena! 
Are like a dream! An illusion! A bubble! A shadow!
Like dew or a flash of lightning! Thus we shall perceive them!

I sat down, dizzy. I remembered my father’s face, who died when I was a kid. The face was like the face of the moon. No different. But it was his face.

The monk was still yelling, but I was sitting and wasn’t sure who I was. I didn’t even recognize my body. My hemp robe, my belt, my sandals, were like the dirt and the wood poles and cloth of the stalls. I was no different; I was part of it.

When the men stopped shouting, the circle cleared. I still sat in the dirt. “Hey kid,” said the monk with the nose like a bird of prey, “are you ok?” “I feel like a bag of sand fell on my head,” I said. “What,” I asked him, “ were those lines you read?” “The Diamond Sutra,” he said. “And where,” I asked, “are you from?” “From the Gunin Daiman monastery in the North of China.”

So I walked there. My mother hardly looked at me when I left. I picked wood and sold it as I went. I shouted the lines I’d heard at the top of my lungs. And after thirty days I arrived, kneeling in front of a monk with a lavish embroidered cone on his head. 

“You,” he said, “are from the barbarian south. How can you become a Buddha?” In response, I yelled the lines I’d heard.

They accepted me, but put me to work in the rice shed. It was hard for me to operate the hulling machine. I had to step on the treadle to lift the pestle: step off and the pestle drops and pounds the rice. But I was skinny, much too skinny. So I tied a stone from the river to my waist to make me heavy enough to operate the machine. It was not an easy life, but something in me had changed and was content. All day, alone or with others, rain or sun, I shouted the same exact lines: 

切有為法，如夢幻泡影，如露亦如電，應作如是觀

*

That’s the legend of Huineng (638-713), the sixth great patriarch of Zen, who seems to have been hit with the lightning bolt of nondualistic understanding as a young man.

Zen—and, to some extent, poetry—sees the world as nondualistic. Nonduality, from the Sanskrit Advaita (“not two”), points beyond divisions. It’s tricky to define because language itself is dualistic. The nondual can only be perceived by what it’s not: not personal, not time-bound, not separate, but impersonal, timeless, indivisible. “Non-duality,” Jane Hirshfield says, “is not the negation of multiplicity in favour of some idea of the absolute; it is also not the nihilism so many Westerners think Buddhism to be.” 

Poetry describes unlanguageable space. Take the shortest poem ever written in Italian: “Mattina” by Giuseppe Ungaretti: 

M’illumino d’immenso.

“I illuminate myself with immensity.” This poem presents no “self” as narrator in time and space—but self as an unlimited field of experience.

Assuming that the world is nondualistic, as I think it is, then using nondualism as a lens allows us to let the world be what it is. 

But if I’m not writing about my false “self,” then what will my subject matter be? 

In this famous Zen koan—

A monk once asked Master Joshu, “Has a dog the Buddha Nature or not?” Joshu said, “Mu!” 

—“Mu” means  “no” or “not” (in Japanese), but more importantly, it’s a kind of non-answer, rejecting the question itself. If we pause to consider “Mu,” we are working against all the prepared answers of our dualistic minds. Keats’ notion of Negative Capability works in a similar way, embracing uncertainty rather than knowledge. Keats applauded people “capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.” This sense of not-knowing—“being in uncertainties”—is an embrace of the nondualistic world.

Poetry, like Zen koans, can interrupt our dualistic minds. When Lorca begins a poem—“Woodcutter. / Cut my shadow from me”—we as readers are unable to process this with our usual literal way of thinking. We’re forced instead to shift our perception from one kind of psychic space to another.

The poet Chase Twichell says that neither Zen nor poetry can be paraphrased because the literal-focused mind can’t process them:

Zen is said to be a “mind-to-mind transmission.” The best poems are exactly that: they leap from one mind to another without stopping to explain exactly how they did it. Poetry cannot be paraphrased because it can’t be apprehended by a purely literal mind. I think this is why so many people are afraid of it, or think they dislike it. In our culture, out of necessity, we’re used to living in a mostly-literal mind, and poetry demands that we enter it with another kind of mind.

There is nevertheless transmission because we can and do understand the nondualistic world beyond the literal. In fact, the literal—which we cling to for support—limits our perception. Dualism is the figure in the cave staring at the shadows on the wall; nondualism is the figure stepping out of the cave and looking at forms directly. 

Poems disrupt the literal, pointing like a finger toward nondualistic perception. Language, poets know, can never convey what it wants to convey. So poems, as literal signifiers, must always fail. But when poems—such as Twichell’s “Makeshifts,” below—point to the end of language, they urge the reader toward the nondualistic.

Nothing has a name it can’t

slip out of. The waterfall is solid ice

by late November; the white pines

vanish under snow that’s

blue in the morning, pink in the dust.

Here’s a little bouquet—ice

and evergreen and sun, three moments

arranged for human looking,

though it’s only the husks of their names

that I’ve gathered and paralyzed. 

The waterfall of solid ice refers, I think, to a literal thing in the world, which perhaps the poet came across on a walk. And I believe that she saw that blue-pink color of the snow. In the second stanza comes a shift and an admission: that the three moments of the first stanza—ice, evergreen, sun—are not actually real but “husks . . . gathered and paralyzed” by the poet. So Twichell disturbs what we thought was a simple nature poem, meant perhaps to ground us in a landscape. The poem is more like a spider wrapping up the “husks” of words: a trail that leads to the unknowable. 

The poem convulsively interrupts our reverie of white pines in the snow by reminding us of the poetry-making process: a fabricated construct. This interruption, like a koan, wakes us up out of our dualistic slumber.

As Twichell says, “Poetry’s not window cleaning. / It breaks the glass.”

*

Film, too, can break the glass.

Antonioni’s L’avventura (1960) urgently pushes against a dualistic thinking. Like Twichell, Antonioni is fascinated by what happens when we run out of language. Film traditionally relies on plot, narrative, and dialogue—dualistic tethers to our literal lives—to carry the spectator along. Antonioni rejects these, following, in discursive slow-cinema mode, Anna, her boyfriend Sandro, and her friend Claudia. Anna disappears, and Sandro and Claudia fall for each other.

Sandro and Claudia seem like amnesiacs: they love each other, they change their mind, they run away. Dancing with delight, then falling into despair. Antonioni achieves this sense of amnesia through a framing device. He simulates a kind of doorway effect—the psychological phenomenon in which one suffers short-term memory loss when passing through a doorway—by showing Claudia continually passing through archways, doorways, thresholds. 

Watching Claudia and Sandro—passing through doorways, changing their minds, forgetting who they are—has a koan-like effect on us as spectators, disrupting our notion of what is real. Huineng seems to have experienced something like the doorway effect when he heard the lines shouted at the market. And we, as spectators/readers, can experience a doorway-effect feeling while experiencing transformative art.

L’avventura leaves room for not knowing, for Negative Capability. Like an Ashbery poem or a Pollock painting, the film will not commit to be one thing or another. By not privileging one side of the binary over the other, the film embraces nondualism. The characters are not exactly psychological, so it’s hard to know if their not knowing is because they are wealthy and bored, or “modern” people trammeled by old modes of thinking. It almost doesn’t matter; the filmmaker isn’t interested in providing answers, but only in providing us a mystery with no way out.

The last five minutes take place in Taormina, Sicily. Claudia, discovering that Sandro has cheated on her, runs off onto the empty streets in the early morning. She stops in a piazza, surrounded by an apocalyptic bombed out tower, a tree, and Mount Etna in the distance. 

Claudia stares at a tree for twelve seconds; the tree rustling in the wind, reflecting her turbulent inner space. She cries convulsively, and then stops as if she’s learned something. Sandro arrives, sits on a bench. A long static shot: Sandro weeping on the bench. Claudia approaches. Diegetic sounds from the hills: train whistle, wind, dogs barking. And—impossibly—ocean waves, as on the island where they lost their friend Anna. Claudia puts her hand on Sandro’s head: an act which Antonioni called “pity,” not forgiveness. The camera pulls back to an establishing shot: the characters small and Mount Etna, an active volcano, in the distance. 

Antonioni’s characters are ephemeral, all of them—not just Anna—“missing” or in the act of disappearing. They resemble, more than psychological characters, “husks” that Antonioni “gathered and paralyzed.”

Critics begged Antonioni for exposition in his next film. He replied, Mu! 

Young Lad yawns under a cobwebbed bulb that may well have come from Noah’s Ark itself. As he runs water into two large bottles, screws on their caps, the old and jaundiced kitchen clock slogs towards midnight.

He cradles the bottles under an arm. Pauses in the doorway. Birds outside have finally stopped singing. Oxygen hisses gently from the downstairs bedroom.

He heads up to his own room then, windows open for weeks in a futile effort to disperse the gelatinous and unrelenting heat. Young Lad can’t remember the last time he felt a breeze.

He lies on the bed. Places bottled water either side of his body, jerking against the initial cool, before easing both arms down against them. This is the way to sleep in the furnace of July, in an emerald country that isn’t built for hot weather.

The following morning, he wakes to birds already in song.

Light sweat.

Slither of sun creeping the curtain-gap.

Bottles no longer cool.

He carries them downstairs then, pausing in the kitchen doorway. His spot. From the nearby bedroom, gentle snores break against whispering oxygen like sea lapping beach.

It used to be, he couldn’t smell anything untoward here in the doorway, but illness has a way of spreading its odours and accompanying clinical smells, to the point where he feels like he’s living in a hospital.

He sets his bottles of water by the sink then.

Stares into an almost empty fridge, and same, for an almost empty larder.

Opens a tin of beans.

Slugs them into a bowl.

Places a small plate over the top to keep flies out.

Pulls a drawer and sifts through pieces of paper for the one he wants. Sets it beside the beans.

Microwave. Two Mins.

Runs water into a glass.

Downs it.

Refills and leaves it next to the beans.

From the high cupboard, he takes down a compartmentalized plastic container labelled with days of the week. Thumbs open Wednesday. Fingertips the kaleidoscope of tablets onto the counter, puts the container away and heads out into a muggy morning, easing the door back into its latch.

Young Lad walks along Heath Avenue where the lampposts cast long shadows.

Gardens mostly nondescript, except one, necklaced with white stones. The adjacent house has no garden at all, just concrete. A shitty red car. Bumper-sticker:

If she’s not red, keep ‘er in the shed.

He slows at number eighteen. The weird house. Centre-piece hedge, shaped like a large bird. Garden cluttered with outdoor ornaments – gnomes, rabbits, bird houses, sundials. Greek-looking nudist statues – an affront to the entire street.

Young Lad quietly shakes his head. They might as well burn the money.

At the end of the street, he takes right, follows a road for a mile-and-a-half and counts the chestnut trees. This is where the voice used to take him as a child, to gather conkers, back when it was normal and spoke without torment and had a name.

He reaches the sign for Hodgson Concrete. Gates already open.

Clouds of dust lingering in the yard like inverted sky. A water sprinkler jettisons in starts. 

Sprays. Adjusts.

Turns.

Sprays again.

To his right, two stacked metal containers form some kind of office.

A door bursts open, man in jeans and tatty vest striding across the yard.

Before Young Lad can decide whether to approach, the man is up into the cab of a cement mixer, engine thundering, giant cylinder turning, crunch of gears, then the lorry growls past, brakes squealing at the gates.

Smoke sputters from a vertical silver pipe, then the entire beast roars and spurts out onto the road in a wake of dust.

Young Lad danders further into the yard of shouting machinery and hard-hatted men in plastic goggles. A forklift loaded with bags of sand whirrs by. He briefly watches the stacking of slabs, a dangling pipe pouring concrete across moulds, then approaches a bristle-faced auld fellow with bushed eyebrows, sagged worn jeans and legs so bowed he must have ridden horses all of his life.

‘Have ye any jabs goin’?

The auld fella steps away from his machine. Leans an ear. ‘What’d you say?’

‘Have ye any jabs goin’?’

‘Jabs?’

‘Aye!’

The auld fella narrows his eyes. Hawks phlegm into his throat. Spits like a bullet into the dust. Scowls then at the poor young lad, as though he’s never before, in his entire hardened life, saw someone so stupid.

‘What in the holy blue dung-shit are you on about – what’s a jab?’

‘Ye know – a jab? Work!’

‘Ohhh! A JOB!’ He laughs his way into a fit of coughing. Hawks up more phlegm. Spits. ‘You’ll not get a jab if you can’t bloody talk right.’

Young Lad glares into the auld fella’s cursed green eyes.

Briefly clenches one fist.

Turns.

Heads for the gates.

The morning is thick and warm as a quilt.

He walks half a mile, maybe three quarters. Sun pooling the road, cutting into his eyes.

Tarmac will melt again today.

He stops at an opening. Cows lounge in the field to his right. Rattle of a distant tractor.

As he danders up the hedge-lined lane, sparks of yellow gorse drink in the sun.

A cottage. Low-roofed. Cowering.

He knocks.

Waits for an answer that doesn’t arrive.

Continues into a mucky yard. Huge sheds on both sides. Cavernous moos bounce the metal roofs.

A woman plods around the far corner pushing a wheelbarrow.

Welly boots. Checkered shirt. Rolled up sleeves.

‘Excuse me, have ye any jabs goin’?’

‘Talk to the boss.’ She nods towards a shed.

As he steps inside, the smell assaults him in waves of dung, animals, straw, damp and mud, and he immediately doesn’t want a jab here. But his mind returns home, the haggard voice from the downstairs bedroom, calling through to the kitchen – that’s ye finished with school. Uhhhhh…no more summers aff…uhhhh-huh…ye need a jab! Must is a great master!

He finds himself before a horizontally-barred pen, with the biggest goddamned bull he’s ever seen, lying in straw with his two curling horns, massive metal ring clasped into his wet nose. Brown. Suede-like. Skits of manure pebble-dashing his legs and belly.

Young Lad glances the long row of pens. Spots an auld fellow leaning on a stick. Heads on down.

‘Excuse me, are ye the boss?’

‘Depends. Are you the taxman?’

‘Nope.’

‘TV Licence Inspector?’

‘Nope’

‘Are you sellin’ arms for Colonel Gaddafi?’

‘Kernel Ga-Who?’

‘I’m only windin’ you, lad!’ He chuckles. One perfect white tooth among the yellows.

‘Do ye have any jabs goin’?’

The boss nods. ‘You’re after a jab? Uh-huh.’ He studies the dirty ground, as though an answer might be found there. Cheeks swirled crimson from a lifetime outdoors.

‘Aye.’

‘I’ve nothin’ at the minute now, but sure, leave your number and I’ll give you a buzz if somethin’ comes up. We’ll be pullin’ apples come September and –’

‘Never mind.’ Young Lad tightens one hand into a fist. Shakes his head.

Stops to drink from a hose on his way out. Doesn’t have a telephone number and can’t wait until September.

As he heads for town then, sweat trickles his spine and it’s a shitter of a day to be turning sixteen and out hunting for a jab.

He passes the off-licence, a place he hadn’t considered.

Stops. Illuminated Harp Lager sign in the window.

Enters to an electronic beep-boop.

Stands in the cool room. Fridges. Bottles. Cans. Fridges with bottles and cans. A smiling man with a short-sleeved shirt, blue tie and a combover, appears from a doorway.

‘Some day! Wha! Ye could fry bacon on the very pavement.’

Young Lad glances around. Knows nothing about alcohol.

‘What’s good fer thirst?’

‘Water.’ Smiles the man.

‘No, I mean, what drink’s good fer thirst?’

‘Water.’

‘No! I mean…’

‘Have ye any ID, son?’

‘Nope.’

‘Well, ye’ll be gettin’ nothin’ in here then without ID.’

‘Is that right?’ Young Lad takes a step toward the counter. Squares his shoulders. Fists clenched.

‘Alright Billy Big Balls, settle yerself.’ The man raises a stern finger. ‘And don’t let the door hit ye on the way out.’ He turns and disappears back through the doorway.

Young Lad finds himself back outside. Breathing in air that is thick like gravy. Squinting.

It was lovely and cool in there.

He returns inside.

Beep-boop.

As the smiling man emerges once again from the doorway, his smile slides off and pools on the counter like melted tar. He sighs. ‘Are ye gonna make me get the bat?’

‘Listen, have ye any jabs goin’?’

‘What age are ye?’

‘Twenty-five.’

‘Yer no more twenty-five than I’m Clint Eastwood!’ His face fills with pity then. ‘What age are ye right enough?’

‘Sixteen.’

The man shakes his head. Eyes soften at their corners.

Young Lad looks to the floor tiles. ‘Sixteen the day.’

‘Listen, ye have to be eighteen to work around drink, son. Come back and see me in two years’ time.’

Young Lad clenches his jaw.

‘Here, son,’ the man sets a bag of Salt n Vinegar crisps on the counter. ‘Happy Birthday.’

Young Lad stares at them. This cool place. This gift. Could be heaven. Could be what life was like before his only parent became ill, then cranky, then a monster. And the only way to deal with it would be distance, first by the kitchen doorway, then by rendering them nameless, a non-person. Merely a voice.

‘Thanks.’ He takes the crisps. Pauses by the door. ‘Yer sign in the window is still lit. Waste of electric.’

He walks on up past the butchers. Hairdressers. Mulberry café.

‘Hello.’ Someone touches his shoulder.

He turns to find a kind smiling face, edges of her brown hair aglow. ‘Sure, there’s school finished only yesterday and I’m bumping into you already!’

Young Lad doesn’t really know how to respond. Gives a polite nod. Squints a little.

‘What are you up to today? Enjoying the wonderful sunshine?’

‘Oh, just out and about Mrs. Kincaid.’

‘Well, lovely to see you and if I don’t bump into you again over the summer, I’ll see you in September!’

He doesn’t know where she gets this joy from. Always with the joy. Maybe it’s because she has a jab…

He heads for the doctors then. Didn’t tell her he wouldn’t be back in September, that he needed a jab, that there was a voice in his house that called out and called out and called out.

Young Lad walks up the alley to the doctors.

Pushes the door.

Doesn’t budge.

Stands with his hands out, what-the-hell style.

Spots the sign on the door: Closed Wed Afternoons.

Clenches both fists.

Continues down the alley towards the back of the grey building.

He shimmies a streetlight to reach the top of the wall, which for some reason is cemented with shards of glass.

Carefully climbs over.

Drops into a small yard.

Hunts among the bottles for O2 Oxygen.

Lifts one. No real way to determine empty or full, other than by weight.

Empty.

Tries another.

Empty.

Another.

Full.

He has to set the bottle up onto a metal cage, then climb it himself in order to reach the top of the jagged wall again.

Manoeuvres best he can.

Sits carefully onto the broken glass.

O2 tank across his lap.

Leaps.

Feels the rip into his hamstring.

Strikes the ground. Hammer against anvil. Impact reverberating both shins.

Carries the tank with him then for the rest of the day.

Tries the supermarket for a jab, where they ask for a CV, which he doesn’t have.

The hardware shop, where he has to wait for five minutes while two men discuss how to kill a weed. One weed!

Chinese restaurant.

Even the swimming pool and he doesn’t know how to swim.

Finally, he heads for home.

Enters the house quietly. Sets the oxygen tank on the hall carpet. Moves through to the kitchen, microwave door open, flies zip-circling inside at the light. Beans spilled on the counter, sauce drooling the cupboard. More beans on the floor. Empty, stained bowl in the sink.

‘Who’s that?’ The crackled voice drifts across from the bedroom.

‘It’s me. Who do ye think it is?’ Young Lad moves to the kitchen doorway, his spot, reaches up, fingertips hooking the architrave. Low hiss of oxygen. The bedroom door ajar.

‘Oh, it’s ye. Did ye get a jab or wha?’

‘Nope.’

‘No? Did ye say no?’

‘I did.’

‘In the name of God, how are we supposed to live!’ Coughing. Hiss of oxygen. The voice like a rusted guitar string. ‘I’ve taught ye everythin’ I know and ye know NOTHIN’!’

‘I’ll try again tomorrow.’

‘Yer a fuckin’ idiot!’ Wheezing. Grunts. Something gets knocked over and crackles to the floor. Sounds like spilled sweets. Or tablets.

Young Lad drops his arms. Clenches both fists.

Feels pain in the back of his thigh then. Pulls down his trousers. Small gash. Dried blood.

‘I got yer oxygen.’

‘Oxygen? Huh. Oxygen’s no good til me. I’m done. Another clean shirt will do me.’

‘Do ye need anythin?’ Young Lad is unsure what to even do with the cut on his leg. Pulls his trousers back up again.

‘I need ye…’ Coughing, deep and rattling and deathlike. ‘I need ye to get a fuckin’ jab!’ The coughing explodes. Volcanic. Rasping.

Settles then.

Young Lad listens. Focuses on the oxygen.

Steady would be someone dead.

Undulating, a person alive.

He remembers the Salt n Vinegar crisps in his pocket.

Sets them on the counter. They’ll do the voice tomorrow.

Hears the suck and hiss of lungs drawing containerized breath.

Sighs.

Washes the bowl in the sink.

Cleans the counters.

Empties his two sleeping bottles down the plughole and starts filling them again from the tap, ready for another hot night.

We’ve had plenty of arguments throughout our marriage—five years of it—but then there was the one about the cottage cheese.

I found the container in the fridge and maybe went too far when I held it up to Suzanna’s face.

“Here—smell it,” I said. “Did you buy this just to let it spoil?”

“Stop it,” she said, pushing me away. There was a tightness in her voice I’d heard before—half irritation, half worry. She shoved me so hard that I lost my balance and knocked into the kitchen table where Zenith was napping, causing her to leap off, and claw into my thigh, sending the cottage cheese flying, before darting out of the kitchen.

“Now look what happened,” I groaned, rubbing my thigh. “And I just mopped the floor.”

“Is it my fault?”

“Well, you’re the one who buys this strange cat-tage cheese and then lets it spoil.”

“It’s cot-tage. When are you going to learn English? First of all, it’s not strange. And second, for your information, it’s very healthy.”

“Oh, yeah? What was it the cheese guy said in that French movie? In the history of cheeses, cottage cheese is only a footnote.”

“So what? Who made you the refrigerator police anyway?”

She was right. I had started checking the fridge regularly, making sure no food went bad. Suzanna wouldn’t touch leftovers, and coming from a place where throwing away food was a no-no if not a sin, I ended up eating them, reminding myself that many people in the world didn’t have enough to eat.

The other side of this was saving money. My worry about money—and being able to pay the mortgage—started after the dot-com crash, when I lost my software engineering job. It wasn’t long before the daycare center where Suzanna worked closed as well.

“Suzanna,” I said with a note of desperation, “how many times have I told you that we need to save money? You should buy less of this weird cheese.”

“Oh, yeah? Do you think Dunkin’ Donuts is any better? Have you looked at yourself in the mirror lately?”

She hit a sore spot. But she didn’t stop there. She went on saying she was the one saving money. I almost laughed. This was from a woman who once rented a chicken. The cottage cheese, the waste, her tone, made it all come back and I said, “Sure . . . like your egg project.”

As soon as the words left my lips, I knew I’d gone too far. The egg project was something we hadn’t gotten over completely.

I still remember the sound of that van, brakes squeaking as it pulled into our driveway a couple of months after we lost our jobs. A yellow van with a chicken and a basket full of eggs emblazoned on the side. A thought-bubble above the chicken’s head said, “Yes, I came first.”

Two bulky men in white T-shirts with the same chicken-and-egg logo got out. Suzanna waved and rushed out to meet them. They took a large box out of the van and followed Suzanna to the backyard. 

I was used to her buying things online. Mostly odd household or kitchen items that never worked as advertised or went bad quickly. One I remembered well was the tiny, solar-powered mosquito-repelling device that was supposed to emit low-frequency sound waves that mosquitoes hated but seemed instead to attract them.

But this box and whatever was inside was bigger than anything she’d ever ordered. 

I stepped out into the backyard and watched the men open the box and pull out a wooden chicken coop with a live hen inside. My eyes traveled back and forth between the hen, Suzanna, and the men until Suzanna explained that for a hundred dollars we could keep the chicken and the coop for a month, with the option of owning it for two hundred dollars more.

“What?” I wanted to yell out, “three hundred dollars.” But I held my tongue. 

The hen was a puffed-up ball of red-orange feathers squatting in the corner of the coop. I had to admit that the coop was tastefully built, with a gable roof, windows on either side, and a perch in front with a sloped platform leading to the ground so the hen could move in and out. One of the men reached in for the hen, patted her head, and held her out to Suzanna. To my surprise, Suzanna—a city woman who I was sure had never touched a chicken—held it as if she’d known about chickens all her life. She stroked the hen’s head and murmured to her in a low voice.

“Welcome, little one. I hope you’ll be happy in your new home.” There was a softness in her face, something I missed seeing since we lost our jobs.

Then she turned to me. “We need to find a name for her.” And right away she added, “I know, we’ll call her Joo Joo.”

Joo Joo means “bird” in Persian, and I wasn’t surprised since Suzanna was good at picking up words that she liked. 

The hen, cocking her neck right and left and blinking her bitty yellow eyes as if approving the name, let out, “buck, buck, buck.”

“She’s really cute,” I said to the men. “There’s no denying that. But for three hundred dollars, she’d better be the hen that lays the golden egg.”

Suzanna rolled her eyes, but the men grinned politely.

The coop came with a booklet and DVD explaining how to take care of the hen and clean the coop, plus two bags of chicken feed, which they pointed out was organic, and an arsenal of sprays for disinfecting and deodorizing it—all at an extra cost. I wanted to say, “Of course—what’s another hundred dollars,” but held my tongue again.

It turned out that Joo Joo didn’t lay an egg a day as promised. At first it was one egg every two or three days, then one a week, and finally none. By my calculation, the dozen or so eggs she laid cost us roughly ten dollars each. Suzanna, who worried about Joo Joo day and night, thought she was depressed, and kept calling the company, and in the end they came and took away the hen and her coop.

Now, the moment I mentioned the egg project—saying that instead of saving money, Joo Joo had eaten better than both of us and produced nothing—Suzanna let out a loud groan, ran upstairs to the bedroom, and shut the door.

I knew that tone of hers—part worry, part pride. As I scraped up the cottage cheese from the floor, I realized how often a little thing pushed us into arguing about something silly. I went upstairs and stood outside the bedroom door. It was quiet. I cautiously knocked and said I was sorry. After a moment, I said that I loved her and it was my fault things got out of hand. Usually after an apology and a show of affection, things would calm down and we’d make up, but this time, after bringing up the chicken story, I wasn’t sure and decided to leave her alone, hoping that she would read one of her murder mysteries and before long everything would return to normal.

I grabbed a Rolling Rock from the fridge and headed down to the basement to busy myself with the collection of used computers, printers, and scanners I’d dragged home from the swap shop at the local recycling place or bought at yard sales. Cleaning and fixing them was a way of passing time with the hope of selling them and making a bit of money.

I dusted off one of the computers, laid it screen-side down, and was loosening the screws in the back when I heard the doorbell. I started upstairs, but Suzanna was already there. I was relieved to see her, thinking that the bad moment between us had passed. Then I saw them at the door, a police officer and another man, both in dark suits and sunglasses, standing on the front steps. Over their shoulders I could see the police car parked the wrong way in front of our house, blocking the driveway. My first thought was that Suzanna had called the police. Assault by cottage cheese—I could see it coming.

The notion of needing to be wary of the law, from the old country, was still with me, and here living in America, it had intensified during our honeymoon in Hawaiʻi. Suzanna hadn’t wanted to hang around Waikiki Beach sipping exotic drinks like Blue Hawaiʻians or Piña Coladas from glasses decorated with little paper umbrellas. Instead, she’d wanted to go hiking in the mountains behind Honolulu. The day before the end of the trip we went up Wilhelmina Rise to an obscure trail she had somehow found out about. We hiked more than a mile on the knife-edge path to a place where Kaneohe Bay on the opposite side of the island came into view. Suzanna opened her arms to the fragrant breeze and sighed.

“Heavenly,” she said. “What a place, what a paradise. Perfect for the Sun Salutation.” Then she took off her shoes and stood up straight in Mountain Pose, saying we might never be on this spot again and asking me to follow her, because she was dedicating her practice to our marriage. 

I was moved by her gesture and tried to copy her through the vinyasa, but soon gave up. Yoga had never been my thing. Thin and beautiful, she faced the sunset, bending and curving gracefully while breathing in a rhythmic pattern. My eyes and heart filled with desire, I watched, losing track of time, until I realized we’d stayed too long. The day was coming to an end and the sun would soon sink into the sea. We’d have to hurry to get back before darkness descended, and one misstep on the narrow path knotted with rocks and roots would send us crashing down the valley.

Suzanna put on her shoes. We started to walk in single file and had gone only a few steps when she stopped and turned her green eyes on me.

“Do you know what I just thought?” she asked with a smile.

“No, what?” I said, thinking that she’d decided to take her clothes off, lie down beside a bird of paradise bush, and suggest we make love to add to the memory of our honeymoon.

“I’ll bet,” she said, still smiling, “that if I accidentally fell off this cliff, the police would think that you’d pushed me, but if I pushed you off, they’d think that you’d fallen on your own.”

I just smiled, but as time went by, I began to think that maybe she was right and that she had the upper hand. And now there were two police officers at the door.

The man in the black suit said he was an FBI agent and showed Suzanna his badge. Then he opened a manila folder and pointed to a twenty dollar bill clipped inside.

“Ma’am, we’re here about this.”

“Oh, it’s my husband you want then,” she said in a cheerful voice. “Please come in.”

So she hadn’t called the police after all—it was that damned twenty dollar bill. My thigh started smarting again, and I scratched my leg nervously, moving out of the way to let them in. The officers walked into the living room and stood with their shiny black shoes on the blue-and-red Persian carpet that had been a wedding gift from my family to my wife.

“Are you a US citizen, Sir?” It was the officer in the black suit. His tone was calm, but his eyes were obscured behind his dark glasses.

“Yes, I am . . . What’s this all about?” I tried not to look nervous, even though I knew very well the reason they were there. It was the incident at Dunkin’ Donuts two weeks earlier.

The Dunkin’ Donuts in our small town was a hub for retirees who enjoyed the cheap coffee and pastries and, more recently, jobless parents who brought their children there. It had become my habit to go a few times a week, get a cup of coffee and a chocolate glazed donut—my favorite—and sit at a table near the retirees, listening to their conversation, talking about sports,  music, old films, or how in the old days, life was simpler, town wasn’t so crowded and the policemen said, “good morning.”

That morning, unlike other days, I didn’t go inside, since I needed to get a bag of litter for Zenith at Walmart and then go to the library to pick up the mystery novel Suzanna had put on hold. So I went to the drive-through and ordered my usual. At the pick-up window, I handed a twenty dollar bill to a puffy-faced young woman who looked like she’d had a long night. After a moment she pulled the window shut and disappeared. Soon a young man pulled open the window and stuck his head out.

“Sir,” he said in accented English that I couldn’t place, “we accept no counterfeit bills here.”

It took me a moment to realize what he was talking about. My first thought was that he was pulling my leg.

“Oh, really?” I asked.

“Is not joke, sir,” he said firmly.

I was astonished, and to tell the truth a bit excited. I’d never seen a counterfeit, and asked to have it back.

“Why you want it back?” he said. “Is no good.”

My idea was that I would take it to my bank and ask for a good one, but he said the bank wouldn’t exchange it. They would take it away. It was the law.

“Really?” 

“Yes, sir. And if I give it back to you, I need your name, your plate number, and a copy of your driver’s license so I can inform the authorities.”

That was the last thing I wanted. I paid with a $5 bill, which luckily turned out to be genuine, then drove home and told Suzanna all about it.

“Good,” she said firmly. “That should keep you away from that place for a while.”

The events of that day were running through my head. I was realizing that the guy at the window must have taken down my license plate and reported it to the police, when the FBI agent waved the bill in front of me.

“Where did you get this?” he asked. The other officer stayed quiet but vigilant, his hand on his gun.

“I don’t know,” I said and turned to Suzanna. “Honey, didn’t you give it to me?” 

“I don’t think so,” she said coldly.

The officer surveyed the living room, taking in the large flat-screen TV, the art on the wall, and the Persian carpet under our feet.

“Sir,” he said, “What do you do for a living?”

“I used to work for an IT company.”

“You mean you’re out of work?”

“Yes.”

“How do you spend your time, then? How do you earn any money?”

“Well . . . I’m trying to write a book.”

I surprised myself by saying that. Suzanna gave me a look. I couldn’t blame her. I’d been talking about writing a book for more than a year, but every time I went to my desk in the basement, I couldn’t get started. Maybe because Suzanna repeatedly warned me not to write a word about her or her family.

“Hmmm,” I heard from the officer.

“Sir,” he said, “I want you to tell me where you got this bill. We know you were trying to buy donuts with this.”

“Officer,” Suzanna cut in, “I’m sure it came from the bank’s ATM. It must have, because we always get cash from there.”

One thing I loved about Suzanna was her cleverness and confidence. Shifting her gaze between the two officers, she explained that in order to have a twenty-dollar bill, you’d have to sell something—which we hadn’t done. Or you’d have to buy something with a fifty or hundred-dollar bill—and we never had large bills like that—in order to get back a twenty in change.

I was amazed by how she calmly explained this as if she had rehearsed it the night before. By the slight smile on the officers faces as they glanced at each other, I could see that they were impressed by her reasoning.

But the FBI agent wasn’t giving up.

“Sir,” he said, “are you counterfeiting money in the basement?” The serious note in his voice had gone up a notch.

“No, officer,” I said nervously and started to rub my thigh again, the degree of itching seeming to increase with the seriousness of the officer’s tone.

“He wouldn’t know how, sir,” Suzanna said, all smiles. “He wouldn’t recognize a counterfeit bill if you handed it to him.”

She was trying to impress him at my expense. It was working.

“Well––it’s very easy.” The officer put the folder under his arm, pulled out a twenty-dollar bill from his wallet, and handed it to me.

“Here—feel the texture between your fingers.”

Then he gave me the bill from the folder. “Can you feel the difference?”

I shook my head, and Suzanna grabbed the bills from my hand. 

“Oh, yes,” she nodded. “This one is smoother.”

“Exactly. And not just that,” the officer said, “Look at the edges and the lines. They’re not as sharp and clear as on the real bill.”

“I see,” Suzanna said, handing the bills back to me. “Here, honey, look. It’s so obvious.”

I again tried to compare the bills, but wasn’t sure I could actually tell the difference.

“They even smell different,” the officer said.

I took a sniff of each bill.

“Sweet,” I said. I could see that other officer, his hand still on his gun, listening with amusement.

“How was it made?” Suzanna asked airily, as if chatting with a long-time acquaintance.

“It was probably scanned and printed on a color printer.”

I thought about the collection of printers and scanners I had in the basement.

“Oh, really?” Suzanna said. “I had no idea. That simple!” Then she turned to me with a questioning look. “Did you know that, dear?”

 I shook my head and wanted badly to tell her to stop talking. But she went on as if she were part of the investigation team.

“I always thought that it was done outside the country, and that it was hundred-dollar bills that were counterfeited.”

“No ma’am,” the officer said. “It happens here as well. People try twenties and sometimes fives—they’re the easiest to pass off.” 

I was looking for a chance to signal to Suzanna that she’d said enough, but she kept on talking.

“That’s interesting,” she said. “I really had no idea.” Then she asked several more questions that they seemed happy to answer.

Finally the officers moved toward the door, and I started to relax a bit, thinking they must have concluded we weren’t the type of people to be counterfeiters and they were wasting their time.

At the door, the FBI agent turned around.

“Let me give you a piece of advice. You should check every bill you receive, even the ones from the bank.”

I nodded, and Suzanna said we would certainly make sure to do that. 

We watched them get into their car. As soon as they drove away, Suzanna narrowed her eyes.

“Good going,” she said. “That’s all we needed—to have the FBI show up at our door.”

There was no point in saying a word. I grabbed another Rolling Rock from the fridge and took refuge in the basement, collapsing in exhaustion on the old couch where I usually sat ruminating or watching TV until I fell asleep.

I didn’t know how much time had passed before I woke up and found Zenith, who had crawled out from wherever she’d been hiding, lying on my chest, purring.

“Oh, it’s you,” I said, “the unfaithful. You take her side and scratch me and then run off?” She meowed and rubbed her cheek against my unshaven face.

“Ok,” I said, “you’re forgiven this time, but you better be careful.” She looked at me with sleepy eyes and meowed again. 

The house seemed strangely quiet, and in the semi-darkness of the basement I felt as if I were waking from a monstrous dream. It took a few minutes for the events of the afternoon to come back to me. I was thankful that it was over, but not exactly relieved, thinking that the police might return.

After a moment I pushed Zenith off my chest, stood up, and went over to the desk. I wanted to write down what had happened, thinking it might be a good opening for the book I’d been trying to start. All the gestures and conversation were alive in my head, but when I tried to write things down, it wasn’t the same. I gave up and sat there, thinking. Above me, I could hear Suzanna moving around the kitchen, and it made me think perhaps she was right when she read a few pages of my writing and said I was trying to describe a simple situation using fancy words, and the characters seem wooden.

I got up and went back to the couch. I felt the bulk of my wallet in my back pocket, and as I took it out to lie more comfortably, a thought flashed through my mind. I took the only money I had, a five-dollar bill, looked at it, turned it over, and checked the other side. I smelled it–it smelled of paper with maybe a faint trace of Suzanna’s hand lotion–and then stared at Lincoln’s wrinkled face and sober cast-down look. I couldn’t tell if it was genuine or a fake. Examining the bill, I started to wonder whether I could scan and print it. Just to see how it would go, I got up and plugged in one of the scanners and was about to put the bill down on the glass when I heard Suzanna at the top of the basement stairs. In a panic, I crumpled up the bill and pushed it into my pocket.

“I’m going to the grocery store,” she shouted down. “Do you need anything?”

“No, I don’t think so,” I said quickly. I wanted to add, “How about some cottage cheese?” but stopped myself.

“Alright then,” she said, “I thought I’d get chicken for dinner. Maybe you can get the barbecue ready.”

“Okay,” I said. Then I felt something by my feet. It was Zenith playing with the five dollar bill that hadn’t gone into my pocket after all, but had fallen on the floor. She was batting the bill between her paws, stopping and staring, then jumping on it as if it were alive. I bent down to snatch it from her grasp, but she outmaneuvered me a couple of times. I finally got it back, put it down on the scanner, and smoothed out the wrinkles with the palm of my hand. Then I closed the lid and pushed the button. The scanner clicked and sent a blue whoosh of light along its length. I checked the result—Lincoln’s face was barely recognizable.

Alright, I thought, so I need a crisp new bill. And a better scanner. And a good printer. I’d only print a few bills. Just a handful. Enough to pay off the mortgage. Maybe get a new car. My mind was racing. Or maybe just enough to take Suzanna on another trip to Hawaiʻi. I’d get to have a Piña Colada on Waikiki Beach and maybe we’d even climb up Wilhelmina Rise again. 

This sweet winding thread was broken by Zenith meowing and pressing her head against my feet. I rubbed the stomach of my furry accomplice, then decided I’d better hurry and get the grill going before Suzanna came home. 

–George Armwood, lynched

in Princess Anne, 1933

Someone had to see the beautiful darkness

of night passing in silence overhead and still 

reach for the rope. Someone had to find him, 

scared and shivering, barely beyond

boyhood, beneath the bed and see nothing 

but weakness. Someone had to wrench him free

as his fingers fought to hold the bed frame. Someone had to

place the noose around his neck before dragging him 

to face the crowd. Someone had to tie that noose. Someone 

had to bloody his body in the autumn-dead 

corn stalks, had to pull his ears from his head 

to scream sour their hatred. Someone had to 

cut both his ears off, had to point his head 

towards the tree they would be hanging him from, as if bringing

his body to prayer. Someone had to draw him up, feeling the rope

burn in their fingers, had to watch him 

jerk through the violent air as if treading

water in an absence of water. Someone had to bring his body 

to flame, making him, for that moment, the brightest star

in the October sky. Someone had to extinguish him

so they could give him another

piece of their mind. Someone had to hear the rope snap

as they cut him from the branches,

had to feel the melted skin loosen as they pulled 

him loose from the noose. Someone had to sleep soundly 

in their bed that night. Someone had to sleep 

in the trees. Someone had to wash his blood

from their stained palms, watching the last of him 

drain, whispering 

the only lie

that would let them

shut their eyes. Someone
                            had to. Someone had to.

You tell me it began with the word mine. Once

you give a name to something it starts

to be. After we’d made

mine it was easy for words like us and

them to follow. This separated us, so we tried

the word want in our mouths

until it tasted like need, until our tongues turned

it to take. Now, water is soft on the road. Little air

bubbles make a world of it and the sky is eaten

up. You breathe light

and quick. You watch. The miles

of roads. The fields. The ditches of rotting

and regrowth, of cycles all alone. Corn

in rows, a faceless army. We tell ourselves

they are all like this: enemy is not a word

with a name or a family. At home, the live

oak dips its branches back in the earth, a child

playing soldier, arms pulled inside shirt

as though blown off. When you speak

the ground waits for your words

like rain. The world teaches

us about lying and I am lying

in the grass, skin against the sharp,

beheaded blades, wondering how

and when hurt became

another type of language.

It almost always started with women. It was about

covering, something like forming

a home out of dirt, an ash-body. Maybe it was a mask

or medicine, or just desire tucked into ritual. We’d never

even felt permanence against our tongues,

and an infant could tell you that’s the only real way

to know, so we took our only always

and made a mouth of it, tried to taste

god. There was needle pricking, and soot, since it all begins

there, and there was bleeding, of course, like everyone was trying

to make a woman out of themselves, but really womanhood is nothing

like needles, it eats needles, how do I explain pain bigger

than the body bearing it? It wasn’t

needles at first, it was anything that could make

an opening, and the smaller the opening the finer

the details, and the smaller the opening the more

one body could open, and maybe that was the point, to try

to open, or to try and hold more than hands can. It was about nourishing

the deep inside-hunger, mixing ashes into breast milk to feed

each made mouth. It wasn’t always a solution,

sometimes it was just charcoal smeared into the wound. You have to

fill yourself up with something if you don’t want

the bad to come back, and if the hurt gets bigger

than you, you start making a door for it.