“And if you don’t pay me next week? No. Now.” 

We’d begun betting a few months ago, when the sweat of summer labor cooled and our fathers left for one of two places after working the fields: the bars, or the races. None of us were ever brought along, probably to save face when they lost a buck, but we always knew what had gone down by the fury that returned home. A ten-dollars-richer man is a happy one, I had learned. Any the poorer, it’s best not to find out. Most of us bet against our fathers so we’d cut a win either way the coin flipped.

“I just told you, I don’t got it.” 

If only that damned stallion hadn’t cowed to pressure, last minute. Usually we’d hash this all out over chips, but things changed. All the boys had become cheap. They wanted their debts paid, and they wanted them at recess. There were three of us. Mike, Pig, and me, Bird. 

Michael was the lucky kind of beautiful. Tall, ginger, and freckled. He played every sport at Fresno Middle School—soccer, football, and sometimes hockey—so he was all bruised everywhere, all the time. You’d have to think those injuries damaged past the skull. His habits made him a little sticky, like he’d woken up late and was just getting to wherever he was supposed to be, spitting into his palm to smooth down his hair. His bones gnarled, at a few junctures, but it inexplicably made him more charming and got me red it was so unfair. 

None of his clothes fit his bulk, and he was too poor to ever size up so the leather of his shoes stretched at each of the toes and his pants cut off at the ankles. His left ear stuck out, the other tucked below his cowlicks. He had a short neck. When he smiled, his lips would thin too much. Nothing about him was exceptional except in its totality, like a piano with all its keys. His father was a carpenter, his mother cleaned houses, and he did nothing. It was all he was good for. 

“What if I pay three now, and then another next week, and we call the last one even?” I haggled, “Let’s play this cool.” 

Pig wanted to help. He came from a legacy of negotiators, mostly Spanish-speaking devils, my father intuited. With black curls and dirty fingernails, Pig never convinced anyone of his intentions. His family arrived at Ellis Island, cut the line, came out West, and never stopped swindling after. My mother called his mother a tart. I thought her sweet. 

Pig tried to mediate. “Pay half now, and he’ll give you a two-dollar discount. You can pay him back in G.I. Joe collector’s editions.” 

“That works.” I chimed, eyeing Mike to see if he bought it. 

“No.” 

“What if I gave you my cap gun and paid you five next week?” 

“No.” 

“And I threw in a Rubik’s?”

“I’ll kill you.” 

“Try it.” 

“Go fuck yourself.”

Mike lived a few houses down, in a smaller place. Shabby, my mother would say, so sad. We are so lucky, just so lucky, aren’t we, Henry? And my father would grunt. Our family wasn’t much better off than Mike’s but we were richer in our minds, it gave us peace. My father hated Mike because he was better than me. I just couldn’t make any of the teams, even when I slaved over weights, weeks before tryouts. I didn’t have it in me. Sometimes my father would see Mike playing flag football on our block, or just kicking around with the high school kids, and opened our window, enraged.

“GET TO THE FUCKING PARK! GET OUTTA HERE!” 

Then, to me, 

“LEAVE THE FUCKING BOOKS! GET OUTTA HERE!” 

After the Depression my father had taken to philosophizing ethnicity, as a way of explaining the whole thing, my mother told me. Why he lost his work in the mines. How dust managed to coat the insides of closets, unopened cereal boxes, cans of tuna or sardines, eggs they cracked at breakfast. Why he moved to California, restarted without his family, broke. Why he married my mother and not a lady. My father wanted me to know that All Things Happen This Way and there wasn’t much to do about it, but wait the curse out. The good would return eventually. Us People always got the good, in the end. By that point in the sermon he would buzz into sleep on the couch. 

If he saw me with the boys he’d make sure to remind me how shit they were, how shit I was. He liked to mention Mike’s stink, a key characteristic of the Polish, he said. Mike was too brown and too red and too hairy. Mike was big-boned and that gave him an advantage in sports, it was so unfair. Mike had no clue. I was ashamed of my father and his jealousy. I knew Mike was made of something, whereas I was cheap and plastic. Everyone knew it.

Mike shoved me. 

“Yeah? I can push too, fatass!” 

Now I’d gotten him. 

“Take it back,” he said, stepping closer.

His hair and face blended in one. The big ear grew, it quivered. It became big and purple and throbbed with fury. I knew I didn’t look much in comparison. I was too small. Impish skin, dimples, and little hands. What wasn’t a lovely shade of pink on my body was just sparrow brown. Like sapling wood, my mother told me. Like pigeon crap, my father would say.

“I won’t. Suck my cock, pol–” 

Mike shoved me. “I AIN’T Polish!” 

“My ass you ain’t.” 

“Guys please, please,” begged Pig, “we can’t solve this before Science, just leave it for after school!” 

I spat on him. Mike followed. We didn’t give a shit, we were ready to really problem solve. Pig sat with his fingernails in his mouth. He didn’t want trouble, he didn’t want me or Mike. He was afraid and I wanted to sock it out of him.

I raised a fist. “Quit thumb-sucking!” 

“I’m not sucking my thumb…” said Pig. 

“I’m watching you!” 

“Oh yeah? How about I thumb you?” 

Pig was thick, with a gut and whiskers at ten years old, I knew I couldn’t take him. I was worried. I was sad. The guys had never gotten this bad. 

I lunged at him. “I’ll smash your skull in! I’ll jerk you! I’ll bitch you!” 

I went to swing but Mike held me back. Jared from the class above, walked over. 

“Hey, hey! Alright! Bird, Pig, quit it!”

Jared’s shoes had no laces and were four sizes too big because they were hand-me-downs from his father, as were his glasses, pants, shirt, and socks. Jared would tie his shoe-laces into a rope-belt that fell every time we played Cowboys and Indians. When he got pantsed we’d titter after where he got his underwear, but that he wouldn’t admit to. He had moles splattered across his chin which he told us grew hair, and meant he was the first to grow a beard. Jared was the son of a veteran and desperately wanted to kill Africans someday. Or the entire country of Japan. Jared was smart and would probably go to college instead. 

He wanted us to reason through the thing: “One talks first, while the other holds his breath, and then he can respond once the first is done. NO interruptions! NO insults.” 

“But what if the first one’s wrong?” I prompted. 

“You wait.” 

“And if he’s stupid?” Mike asked. 

“You gotta prove it. Otherwise you’d just fight again. It’s called de-escalation.” He reminded us his father had been in the army, and had taught Jared about conflict resolution. I told him his daddy had taken it up the ass in that case, and the whole crowd fell to the floor. 

“Cock-sucker!” he yelled, oblivious, as he moved towards me

Now Mike was with me. We escaped, Pig was left behind. The sacrifices we make in battle are the scars we carry, Jared’s dad would’ve reflected. Jared was screeching too loud to care for our dash to the slide. 

We laid flat on our guts, underneath the spout, which must’ve been the position Jared’s father took in the trenches. 

“Ywant?” Mike offered gum. 

“Yeah.” 

“Whabout this?” 

I watched, my mouth slotted open, as Mike pulled out treasure.

“How?” 

“My dad’s lazy. Leaves these Newports and naked women all over the house. My mom hates him.” 

“Do they work?”

“Yeah, you can eat it. Does the same thing as smoking.” 

“No shot. You got a light?” 

He reached back down, into his pants, and into his underwear. His fingers dallied and I got suspicious until he pulled out just an empty hand. 

“I ran out.” 

“Oh.” 

“It’s O.K., we can smoke later. If you want.” 

“Yeah, maybe.” 

A truce. 

“Shit!” 

We heard vulgarities, the horrid cries of eighth graders. We were really in for it: their recess had overlapped with ours. Jared was cheap shit now. 

“I won’t look,” Mike said, turning to me. “You first.” 

I couldn’t refuse. Being the second coward, that’s always worse than being the first. “O.K.” 

I let my fingers creep out. We were hiding at the base of the slide, at the lip, and I could fit my head just underneath it to peek. God, they were animals. Big and thick, even the girls. Everyone was hairy. Everyone was monstrous. I liked the short skirts girls wore, with pink and pretty pantylines, but really they were a freakshow all the same and I couldn’t appreciate it. I  could vaguely figure a hoard of them squealing. Next to the monkey bars, in leaves and grit, two squirrels screwed. 

“Mikey, I dunno what we’ll do. It’s them.” 

He turned to me and craned his neck to disfigure his forehead on the steel. We both knew what’d happened to the boy who’d knocked his head sliding down and ended up in a hospital, later a home for imbeciles. It was better to take risks you cared for. I turned too. 

“If we give it up, they’ll take us. If we hide, they’ll sniff us. There’s no game here.” 

The end of the world was approaching, and I was in tatters. 

“Bird, this isn’t about the guys. It’s about honor.” 

Well, he didn’t have to go and do that. 

“What if I don’t have it in me to die?” . 

“You know it’s coming, might as well make it a big bang.” 

I tallied all the noble reasons I had to remain among the living. Playboy. Horses. Smokes. 

“But, my show comes on in an hour,” 

“And?” Mike rolled his eyes. 

“And my mom might make apple pie if I ask her…” 

“So?” 

“So I’ll have my apple pie and I’ll watch Popeye and things might be good again.”

 “My father told me to never get soft. He said dysfunction decapitates you later in life.” Mike was getting angry, his big ear grew.

“Your head falls off?” 

“What?” 

“Decapitation?” 

“What the hell are you talking about?” 

The end was nearer, now. Shouts, cheap earrings glinting in the yellow afternoon like bullets. I saw a Mary Jane skip past my fingernails and shuddered. 

“Forget it.” 

Our noses touched and we tried not to blush at the femininity of doom. We were men with brave faces. 

“We have to go out,” he said. 

“Face them?” I shivered. 

“Yeah.” 

“Alone?” 

“No.” 

Mike and I got along fine, mostly. I wondered why he wouldn’t settle the bet, earlier, why he always pitched fights with me. I had to ask if he knew it was my father who threw bottles, who’d gotten Mike demoted from class president because of his “egregious commitments elsewhere,” who’d rumored at the watering hole that Mike’s family stank like their sausages. I wanted to say I didn’t know much about that, but I’d exchange a comic book for dinner with meat, and that I was sorry. I didn’t take my chance. I wanted freedom. 

“Alright. Let’s shoot.”

“Get ready.”

We bent our knees into crouches. 

“Mikey?”

“Yeah?”

“Can we call it even?”

The bell rang. Saved by a cunthair.

The post FICTION: What Money Won’t Cover appeared first on Yale Daily News.

Maybe if the rest of the room wasn’t so goddamn boring, she could bear it. Her fireplace is the only piece of decor worth looking at—no eye candy for the eye candy, just two mismatched armchairs, rug here, rug there, dead plant. There’s a grandfather clock out in the hallway—she tries talking to it every hour or so. 

Another day, huh? She’ll say.

Dong, dong, dong, it’ll respond.

Most days, she just holds her breath and waits for the pain to pass. Hums songs to herself. Counts floorboards.

But today, today is a gorgeous day. Someone kneels over the hearth. If she strains her eyes down, she can see the logs breaking, burning. Yes, yes, she can feel the flames rising as the fire, the fire, crackles below her. 

A deep sigh presses against her sealed lips while she looks on. They’re ugly pieces of oak, the logs—their bark isn’t even stripped, pathetic, really, termite food. But the fire can’t get enough of them. Splinters soften to black as the blaze licks them up, up, up. The timber turns to gold, and she witnesses the alchemy: from those cheap chop-ups, so many embers start to rise. There’s nothing more beautiful than this, she knows, these thousand sparks, these fireflies. Even stars stand still, but the embers pirouette in the air, weightless, twirling to music she can’t hear, a dance she doesn’t know.

Another shot of pain snaps her back, stabs her in the side. She can’t even wince. She wants to throw out her stiff spine, her rigid tail, its neat rows of fingernail notches for fish scales. She wants to shout—no, she wants to dance—no, she wants to be charred, burned, she wants to be splintered and sparked in the darkness, set alight, anew, away, but she’s stuck here with the acorns and the ivy and the man, that shriveled bag of a man, always asleep and snoring in front of her. He’s there now, for God’s sake. She glares at him, melting into his armchair, dozing into his double neck, turkey stuffing in a sweaty bathrobe, dead bird bloating in an oven—

She hears jangling. The old man’s old dog shakes its way into the living room, hauling in a stick twice its size, more like a tree limb, one that fought the fall. It drags the branch over to the armchair, but the man can’t play, turkey that he is, out cold. Only the mermaid sees it, that stick between its teeth, that limb, that lighter. Thorns scratch her as she tries to pull an arm out of the polished vines and reach out. Come closer, come here. The dog waddles over to the fireplace, the stick dragging behind it. Put a match to me. Down below, she hears a log crumble, and it sends another tumbling down to the edge of the hearth, sizzling. The dog brings the stick closer. The mermaid’s eyes start glinting bright.

The post FICTION: Mermaids Worship the Fire appeared first on Yale Daily News.

He’d always had the feeling that his mother would die for him. It still came as a surprise when she actually did—a foot in the dark expecting one more step. Now he was alive and she wasn’t. That had never been true before. He vomited three times on the way to the hospital. They checked for concussion but all was clear.

Claire didn’t know him. She never really would. Usually she wouldn’t answer an unknown call, but it was a slow day in the office and any distraction was something. The paramedic on the other end of the line told her the facts and she said she’d be right there. Wrong numbers rarely offered the chance to be a hero, or to clock out early.

It took 28 minutes to reach the ward, and in that time the boy had fallen asleep. He was older than she’d expected—at least fifteen. She could still remember being fifteen with the sort of discomfort that meant she hadn’t quite recovered. But a boy was a boy and she’d answered the call, so she sat by his bed and thought of comforting things to say. She looked at his hands, palms red with the crescent moons of fingernail marks, and placed one of hers on top. He woke in the morning. She said what she’d prepared.

“What do you need?”

“Nothing.”

Claire had no reply to that. They sat in unquestioning silence. When the forms were signed for his release she offered again to help. He refused and they parted, each to their own lives.

Call Number 2:

It was too late for hospice. The paramedic’s disembodied voice hung somewhere between bored and judgmental as she described the 89-year-old woman’s solitary suffering. It had been days. Not just hours. Days alone in the pit of her shower, living off the water that dripped from the faucet. Days that would be her last, or almost her last. She had a few hours left, at least, and Claire might like to say her goodbyes.

Two absences from work in less than a month would hardly be treated kindly. The job was still boring, though, and perhaps this time she would be needed. Any surprise she felt at this second wrong number was quelled by some sense that she was, at least, prepared. She made it to the hospital in just 24 minutes. It was a different ward and a different patient, but the same white walls and white smell and background noise of panic. Already the routine felt familiar, the first sketches of a habit.

She found the woman laughing. To make matters worse it was in response to nothing more than a weather report on the outdated TV. The patient in the bed was shrunken and looked, Claire thought, like a mildewed drowning victim who hadn’t yet bloated. The ocean-green of the covers bunched around her seemed to tint her thin hair. Her lips opened and closed like breathing learned from a manual. This was the sort of old age that was fought for and came at a cost.

“You aren’t dying.” Claire tried to regret her words. The woman coughed out another laugh.

“Like hell I’m not. Just give it time.”

Claire didn’t have time. Not if she wanted to get paid. Still, she wasn’t the one in the bed. She breathed, willing herself to be the calm one—the caring one.

“What do you need?”

“Oh, nothing. Unless you think you could swipe some juice from the nurses’ lounge—I’ve heard they have pineapple. Us poor wretches in the hospital beds get saddled with orange.”

“I’ll see what I can do.” Claire turned, choosing not to wonder how this woman could know about some secret pineapple stash. She was alive, at least, and well enough to come up with busy work. Claire knew she should feel glad. Instead, all she could think was that the paramedic had a vindictive streak and she could have stayed at work after all.

Call Number 7:

Noise was almost always a good thing. A patient bawling in the background of a call meant that they had lungs and minds intact enough to scream. That didn’t make it any less annoying.

The man in front of her had a convincingly stupid goatee. It made it easy to imagine the sort of situation that would cause him to be stabbed in the upper thigh with a fork. His well-tailored suit was ruined, but nothing else seemed to be.

“What do you need?” She asked. The man looked up in surprise, then assessment. His blotchy skin blotched more.

“You could lend a hand pulling this out, if it won’t make you vom all over me.” He gestured down to his leg. There was blood on the hospital sheet, but not much.

“I could, but I’m not a nurse. The fork could be stemming an artery, I shouldn’t risk letting you bleed out.” She imagined doing just that—imagined watching his smirk drip off his face like sweat.

Either her fantasies weren’t visible in her expression, or he wasn’t looking. Now granted an audience, he seemed to have forgotten his previous performance of pain.

“Weren’t doing anything else, I hope?” He asked, flashing what he no doubt called his ‘winning smile’.

“No,” Claire ground out, lying.

“Good good. Fancy getting a new nurse, then? This lot are hardly the attentive sort.”

Claire spun on the heels of her smartest, most uncomfortable shoes—the ones she always wore for important meetings. It had been a last chance, a token of trust. She hadn’t deserved it. Behind her the man pulled the fork from his leg. Blood fountained and nurses were there in a beat.

Call Number 15:

“Zara?”

This patient seemed determined to mistake her for someone else. It was the only word he’d managed since she’d arrived at his bedside. A dreary hospital pamphlet with a picture of a dreary blue balloon in a dreary blue sky had told her that his rasping was the result of fluid buildup in the throat and upper airways. Towards the end a dying person loses the ability to swallow or cough. The excess saliva then begins to block airflow, some mix between drowning and suffocation.

“I’m not Zara. I’m Claire. I’m here to help. Would you like me to look for Zara?”

The man tried and failed to reply. Claire thought he would likely die soon. She adjusted the morphine the way she had seen the nurses do and hoped it would be enough. Nothing much happened. The day stretched on. Horror shifted to boredom. She looked at the clock and tried to calculate how much longer propriety demanded. Her landlord and credit cards didn’t care much about propriety, and temp-agencies didn’t compensate sick days.

He moaned when she left, but it could have just been a rasp. It didn’t matter much, he couldn’t even get her name right.

Call Number 22:

Claire waited two hours for the 60-something-year-old heart attack victim to show up. She forgot to check the morgue. The only saving grace of the experience was that she successfully evaded the landlord who had decided to bring the rent notice to her apartment in person.

Call Number 30:

When she was fourteen, Claire had spent all of ten minutes thinking she was a murderer. She hadn’t checked the box’s ingredients list for allergens and hadn’t known her brother could be saved.

Whether the man in front of her would live seemed as uncertain as she had been in the kitchen that day—too frozen even to call for help. Now, she knew better. She held his swollen hand and counted his breaths, waiting for the medicine to either take effect or fail.

He eventually woke with the groan of a hangover and not a hint of surprise. He’d found himself here before.

“How can I help?”

“What?”

“How can I help? What is it you need?”

“Well, let me think,” he paused to rasp, “maybe a cashew?”

Claire paused, recalling his notes. She scowled.

“That’s what you did?”

“They taste good!”

“Enough to—fine. How are you even alive?”

“Beats me.”

Claire waited, then gave in to curiosity, asking “Was it worth it?”

“I never want it said that I turned down any worldly experience. No one can say I didn’t give it a go.”

“Give what a go?”

“Life.”

Claire paused again, considering. This time it was the man who spoke.

“I’ll be discharged soon, I expect. You can go if you want.”

Claire thought of where else she could be. She came to a blank.

“It’s fine. You might find another cashew if I leave.”

Claire readjusted in her seat, checked her pocket for her phone. She wouldn’t want to miss it if it rang.

The post FICTION: Duty Bound appeared first on Yale Daily News.

On the first day of college, my mom unboxed the tea kettle she bought for my suite. Every night since then, I’ve made myself chamomile tea before bed. From the start of the tea-making process, I am soothed. The kettle whispers soft white noise. Then, its screaming whistle announces that the water is boiling…

“Hey, how are you?” 

“Fine. Good. How are you?”

On the outside, that’s what I reply. 

People are hollow like ghosts, and the whole world is hollow, and I can’t get over that lurking sadness. Most days I wake up thinking about Mom. You have no idea what it feels like to be a shadow. 

I want to scream this truth. 

Being hollow means feeling constricted and feeling empty. Being hollow means having skin and a body and not knowing what’s inside. Being hollow means becoming so used to hiding your pain that you can’t look within anymore — because if you look within, then you’ll discover something that you can’t show to other people.

Hollowness looks like me scratching a pen on paper, trying to bring my mom back into existence. The pen runs out of ink, and I press harder. I’m making grooves; I press harder, and the ink stops flowing. She doesn’t come back. 

 I choke down my despair. None of my friends will understand. It’s not their fault that they can’t make me feel any less alone.

I sit in class as a shell. I get up and go outside to cry because I can’t face the first line again. I can’t bear to analyze Camus’ line. “Today, Mother died.”

…But when I get home, I will make myself tea. Warm steam will caress my face: the mist will transport me back to that very first cup. 

But tonight —

There’s no bubbling. 

The water is cold. I plug it in and plug it in many times. Nothing happens. The light doesn’t turn on. I sink to my knees and stare at the kettle. I’m willing the water to boil. I can make it boil with my mind if I stare hard enough. The water will boil. It has to boil. If it doesn’t boil I don’t know what I’ll do. It has to boil right now. I cast a spell and make a wish. I pray, I pray, I pray. The water doesn’t boil. It’s all falling apart. 

I reassure myself that, when I make my green tea in the morning, the water will be hot. Tomorrow will be better. It’ll be boiling. 

I don’t sleep well. I wake up to make tea as the sun is coming up. I press the button, expecting the gentle hum. Carmen, my roommate, drifts into the common room. 

“The kettle is not working,” I say. I crack my knuckles and shake my head in disbelief. Carmen runs into her room and grabs her own tea kettle. “Here, try this one.” I snatch it out of her hands. A soft “thank you” escapes my lips. It’s not better; nothing’s fine, screams inside. 

Carmen’s tea kettle makes a disquieting hissing sound. I don’t like the water, which is scalding. The water from the kettle my mom gave me was somehow always the perfect temperature. I fill the mug to overflowing, and burning liquid spills over the lip and onto my hand. I wince from the physical pain of the welt forming on my hand, and the invisible shock of grief.

A week later, my dad shows up for Parents’ Weekend. He knows about the kettle, so he comes with a brand new one. He buys me the fanciest kettle. It’s one of the retro looking ones. The kind that makes me wonder how a basic kitchen appliance, which can also be found at The Appliance Guys, can somehow project style. I like the way the chrome gleams on this new one and the way that the outside feels smooth to my touch. The fact that it’s my favorite color, lilac.

We plug it in, and I make tea. The room is too quiet. Why doesn’t the kettle cry out to me? How will I know when the water’s boiling? Even when the kettle is full, it sounds hollow.

A faint beeping sound alerts us that the tea is ready. My dad pours me a cup. I hold the mug to my chin, waiting for the steam to lift me. We sit and catch up and try not to talk about the biggest absence. 

The whole world is hollow. Mom is dead.

The post FICTION: Hollow appeared first on Yale Daily News.

It’s outdated, you know? The idea that you’re supposed to choose between your passions and financial stability. I choose both, I say. The right side of my lips pinch together. My facial expressions have always been uneven like that. 

It’s outdated, I repeat into the phone that evening, my IKEA lamp perched overhead. 

Umma rambles on the other end of the phone, something about how cousin Lana interned at all these major film agencies but now she’s working at a furniture startup. About how Jin-woo from across the street is a computer science major now. How Uncle Park sold his start-up for $100 million, how Yale is the past and Stanford is the future and “you shouldn’t have rejected Stanford for a humanities school.” 

You don’t know the job market as well as I do, I lie. For Umma, I produce soothing placebos of million-dollar book deals and million-dollar movie deals. How humanities majors might not have the best starting salary but “that doesn’t mean we don’t have an upwards trajectory.” 

“Act as if,” preaches the reddit thread r/thelawofattraction. Or, fake it till you make it. On Sunday I talk to Sara about the eventfulness of my summer as if it were a continuous strand of string rather than thumbtacks scattered across a corkboard. I don’t mention that the corkboard was one-half existentialism and one-half nearly-crashing-Dad’s-honda-while-parallel-parking. I imbue constellations of meaning into this web-development internship or this trip to see my childhood friend. I don’t say that my employer asked for nine iterations of the homepage and that visiting Jocelyn was a mutual therapy session. 

Sunday afternoon I’m training as a peer mental health counselor and the counselee scenario I’m supposed to act out goes something like “you’re a second-semester sophomore with crippling loneliness and are considering self-harm.” I’ve never considered self-harm, I think, somewhat pleased by this realization, but by the end of the scenario I am crying. 

For a second I was convinced that was real, the instructor remarks. I laugh. 

No, no, no, I wave my hands. Not at all. 

Monday morning I’m tucked into my chair-desk watching Professor Leitus draw a story diagram on the board. Fiction is realism, he remarks. We read stories, not because we want to watch the knight slay the dragon, but because stories sneak around somewhere near the truth. 

I like writing because I can fold myself inside the word fiction. Oh, it’s just fiction, I’d say. It’s not like I mean any of it.

Monday evening I lean on a beanbag and stare at the drawings on my wall. I wonder if being a writer just means that I’m monetizing entries in my diary.

I wonder if that would be so bad. 

I go on Student Information Services, click “declare English.” I can always undo it later, I say into the phone. Umma, it’s not like law school is going anywhere.

The post FICTION: Saturday morning I consider being an English major appeared first on Yale Daily News.

I bought the bikini a week before Margot’s party. It was the first bikini that I had ever owned, and I bought it specifically for the party, or really for Brandon, who I knew would be there. When I thought about someone’s hands touching my legs, those hands were usually Brandon’s. I liked to imagine him gripping my foot, his thumb rubbing circles on the inside dimple of my left ankle. I thought about him watching as I climbed — shining, newborn-wet — out of the pool and burned my flat soles on the white tile. I thought about him kissing the heart of my foot. His mouth would be cold from swallowing so much chlorine.

Inside the department store, I stripped off my clothes and stood naked in my socks under the fluorescent lights. The bikini that I had chosen was red. Cherry, according to the woman in the store. I loved cherries. In the summer, I would eat so many that they made my stomach hurt. I would eat them all in one sitting, when they were firm but not hard, the flesh swelling with moisture and sweetness, almost bursting from their oily, dark skins — the tautness that held for maybe a day after you took them out of the fridge, before they went soft and old in your mouth. They would leave stains everywhere, all over my lips, my fingers, the front of my shirt. 

Once, when I was little, I swallowed a cherry pit, and Margot told me that I was going to die.

“Those are poisonous,” she said. “If you eat them, you go into shock.”

“Right now?” I asked. “I’m going to die right now?”

“We need to make you throw up,” said Margot.

Following her lead, I shoved my index and middle fingers into my throat and prodded them around. My mouth felt so small on the inside. I coughed until I cried, my gag reflex convulsing against my hand.

“Let me do it,” said Margot. “Just hold still.”

When she slipped her fingers into my mouth, I imagined them like pale flashlights, searching through the darkness, past the stalactites and stalagmites of my teeth, towards the strange, red cavern of my pharynx. I coughed and sobbed around her little white hand, and she kept saying, just hold still, I’ve almost got it, until her mom came running out of the house and told me that I would only die if I crushed the pit beneath my teeth and released the poison into my system.

“Did you chew it?” she asked. “Or did you just swallow?”

“I swallowed,” I said.

“You’ll be ok,” she told me. “Be more careful next time.”

After that, I started picturing cherries growing in my stomach. Not the trees with their pink blossoms, but the dark, red fruits — two of them tied together by their stems like twin babies connected by the same umbilical cord.

“I see a lot of girls coming in to buy this one,” the woman in the store had said, shoving the red, nylon scraps into my hands. “It’s very popular for girls your age.”

In the changing room, I put the scraps on and looked at my body in the glass. It did not look like my body, but it was. It was a body in a red bikini, and I realize that it was probably the kind of body that made people turn their heads around and think — wow. As I ran my hand over my stomach and stroked its smoothness, I felt a kind of pleasure that was almost close to sick. I had never known that it could be so beautiful, my body, not just a shape but a series of curves and planes, shining under the department store lights like something out of someone else’s dream.

I looked at myself and looked at myself, until my mother pushed the drapes aside without warning and stepped into the changing room.

“It’s very red,” she said, after a moment.

“It’s supposed to be red,” I replied, annoyed. “I wanted it to be red.”

“Well,” said my mother. “If you’re sure that’s what you want.”

She stood for a second and looked at my reflection. I folded my arms over my chest.

“God,” she sighed. “You have such a perfect body.”

In my room back at home, I put my new bikini on under my clothes and stood before the mirror with the curtains open to let in the light. I took my shirt off. Then I put it back on so that I could take it off again, more intentionally this time. In my head, I was a flower, unfolding myself under the summer heat like you see in a nature documentary, how the petals spread themselves apart, flushed and opened. I unbuttoned my shorts and pushed them down my legs. I let the sun fall on my body, let it run all over my limbs. I did this endlessly. It was an impulse of its own. Every time I put my clothes back on, I would watch my body disappear beneath my t-shirt, obscured by the space between the damp cotton and my own sweaty skin. Then, I always wanted to see it again, just one more time, to prove that it was still there. Nothing could compare to that moment of first nakedness, the surprise I always felt when I saw myself in the glass. I was like a little kid unwrapping a gift, peeling back the paper, and laughing at the toy inside.

Losing clothes was an art, I thought. A thing of perfection, and if I could just get it absolutely right, it would be beautiful.

When we were little, we used to make-believe that we were mermaids in Margot’s pool. It was Margot, Sarah, Sruthi, and me. We would sit on the edge of the water, flashing our legs in the sun like long, gorgeous tails, and we would spread our hair over our bare shoulders the way that mermaids did to cover their breasts, even though we didn’t have breasts yet, and we didn’t spend any time wanting them either. Breasts were uninteresting to us. We weren’t old enough to care about our bodies. We only cared about mermaids.

Sometimes, we would make Margot’s little brother pretend to be a sailor. We would tell him to stand behind the pine tree in the corner of Margot’s backyard, and we would sit in a row along the pool deck, splashing our tails in the water like we didn’t know he was there, even though that was the whole point of the game. When he came charging out into the open, we would beckon at him and laugh.

“Come here!” we would say. “You can’t catch us!”

As soon as he got too close, we would dive into the water, swimming down to the bottom as quickly as our hollow bodies would sink us, our opalescent tails flaring as we dolphin-kicked our way to safety. We imagined him running up to the water and touching his hands against the surface in despair. We imagined him jumping into the pool to chase after us. We imagined him kneeling on a sandy beach with his face to the sun, crying because he knew that he had just seen the most beautiful thing that he would ever see, and now it was lost to him forever.

After an appropriate amount of time had passed, we would swim back up and do it all over again. This was our favorite game.

When, in high school, we finally became friends with boys, it occurred to us that maybe we should start inviting them to pool parties too. Mainly, we wanted to see them shirtless, but nobody ever said this out loud. Of all the boys, I wanted to see Brandon shirtless most of all. Brandon wasn’t exactly cute, but he was tall, and that could screw with your head a little bit because sometimes he would come up and stand behind you while you were doing math homework, and he would tell you exactly what you were doing wrong, and as he was explaining the right way to find the derivative of a tangent function, he would lean so close over your shoulder that you thought you could feel the warmth emanating from his chest to the hairs at the base of your neck.

Two months before Margot’s pool party, we went with the boys to a park, where we sat in a circle on the grass like kindergarteners, but also not kindergarteners because we were all very horny. Brandon complained a lot. He kept groaning over and over again that it was so hot, sitting on the grass with the sun like a warm hand over his nape. It made him sweat. He didn’t like sweating. He showed us the dark and souring spot staining the back of his t-shirt.

“If I could take my shirt off, I wouldn’t be so sweaty,” he said.

“Do it then,” I told him. “You won’t.”

“You think I’m a pussy?” he asked.

In one movement, he pulled his shirt off. He did it so beautifully that I wondered if he had practiced it before. When he threw the shirt triumphantly into the center of the circle, all of us looked at each other and rolled our eyes and laughed, until he lay back down on the ground, pale and sweating, and I kept laughing, but it was different. It had never fully occurred to me before that his body could exist beneath his shirt like mine did. But I realized then that he was hot, in an undercover way. It was like he had been hiding a secret the whole time, and now he seemed to flash behind my eyes, underneath my tongue, like a scar: a broad and solid white line in the scorched grass. We were 14. Everyone was a mystery under their shirt.

“Nice abs,” said Pranav to Brandon.

“Thanks,” Brandon said. “They were intentional.”

It had been so hot that afternoon. I kept looking at him, and then not looking, like he was too much, too bright, for my eyes. He had to be viewed in fragments. When I wasn’t looking at him, I looked at the sky. It, too, looked hot to touch, like the top of a car that has been sitting in the sun all day, and even before you burn your fingers against the metal hood, you can see that kind of sheen on it that tells you it will hurt.

I used to think about mermaids before I went to sleep. It was like the game that we played with Margot’s little brother, only, in my head, it was an actual prince with dark, floppy hair and blue eyes. He would be wandering around in some great, beastly forest, alone. Suddenly, he would push through the bushes and, stumbling upon the edge of a lagoon, he would see a beautiful mermaid swimming there in the sparkling water. Don’t be scared, he would say, when she saw him. Then, in my fantasy, he would tear his shirt off and wade into the shallows and kiss her on the mouth. Their faces would press together — so tightly that the distance between their noses would be erased, would be swallowed by the closeness, so dark and warm and unknown — but they would make no sound because in my head, kissing was supposed to be silent. The truth was, I had never been kissed before. But I could still imagine Brandon and I tasting the wetness on each other’s tongues

The sun kept hitting my eyes. It refracted off the water, the glass of Margot’s sliding doors, and the pale, hot bone of Brandon’s shoulder blade. All that light — it took to my cornea like a metal baseball bat.

“You can’t just stay up there forever,” said Brandon, pulling at the giant, inflated turtle that I was sunbathing on. “Share the wealth.”

I stretched my hairless legs and extended them across the turtle’s rubbery, green back. The rest of our friends were in the shallow end, on the other side of the pool. In my head, I kept replaying the moment when I had emerged from my clothes and stood before Brandon in my new, red bikini, my skin slightly damp from sweat — another surface of refraction. Even without looking, I had felt his eyes sticking to me as I walked up to the lip of the water. His gaze was a coat of white glue, something that dried on you like a second skin and had to be peeled off. He must have looked almost stupid, I thought. A wide-eyed baby sucking milk from its mother’s tit, staring at me like I was the moment that you rewind again and again in a VCR, where the movie star arches her back over the hood of a car and time slows down just to stare at her a little bit longer. I was so beautiful. I was a mermaid, and I just knew that he was looking at me like something he had never seen before. A new discovery, so perfect, it was too much for his mind to conceive.

“Come on,” said Brandon. “Get off.”

“No,” I laughed.

There were little beads of water collecting on my shoulder, and I thought about how nice the cup of that shoulder must seem to him. It was scented with citrus-flavored sunscreen. I believed that I could hear inside of his head. He was looking at me, and he was saying to himself — so beautiful, so beautiful! It looped through my brain like a song, and I was letting myself drop into the rhythm of its chorus, how I pointed my perfect feet and rolled my long, tanned neck to the same beat.

“Fuck you,” Brandon told me. “If you don’t get off, I’ll make you.”

I flipped over so that my back hit the sunlight and grabbed hold of the turtle’s fat, yielding neck.

“Go ahead,” I said.

When he pushed himself up onto the plastic floaty, the water poured off his body the way I imagined it would off the back of a dolphin. His mouth was pink. I knew that it must be clean on the inside. Under the sun, his teeth looked like the tiles that ran around the circumference of the pool: white, hard, and smooth. He grabbed my arm with his right hand and pulled. For a moment — as we toppled off the turtle with the rubbery sound of skin scrubbing against plastic and plunged into the water where the air fell from our lungs and our bodies seemed to disintegrate into the foam that they themselves had produced — I pictured myself colliding against those teeth, crashing with the enamel, my fingernails scratching the ivory of his canines. They were so bright. They took up all the space in my eye.

When we surfaced, Brandon’s hand was still gripping my arm.

“You suck,” I told him.

“I won,” he said.

“You kicked me when we were underwater,” I said.

“You kicked me too,” he replied.

My foot grazed his leg. I felt the hair that grew along his calf with the pad of my big toe. His irises were so blue, they tasted like copper coins under my tongue. I could have swallowed them whole. I imagined us in the middle of the ocean, clinging to each other to survive, licking at each other’s teeth, disappearing into each other’s mouths as we drowned. Kiss me, I thought. I didn’t know much about boys. I didn’t know how anyone knew to kiss anyone else. I didn’t even really want him to kiss me, but I wanted to be the girl wearing the red bikini who was so beautiful that she got kissed in a swimming pool because the boy couldn’t help himself. Kiss me, I willed, again. I was so stupid that I almost believed he would.

For a long time, whenever I thought back to that moment, I would always cut the memory there. Like how you edit the endings of stories you don’t like: I would leave us where we were, floating forever in circles, not saying a word, his hand tethering me like a buoy to the bottom of the ocean, and the water dripping from our hair to our eyes. When I got older and started having a lot of sex — some of it bad, most of it kind of average — I realized that bodies weren’t mysteries at all, that they were in fact just variations of flesh, which could always be boiled down to the same basic compounds. By then, I had started telling this story a lot. I told it like it was a joke, which, in the end, it probably was.

“It was so bad,” I would tell my friends, as we sat in the emptying college dining hall. “I was so horny for this boy. There was more horniness in me than my tiny body knew how to hold.”

My new college friends would grin. They were easier to tell such things to because they hadn’t known me at the time. They couldn’t remind me of how seriously I had taken it, how seriously we had taken all things as children, before we were old enough to look at ourselves and laugh.

“So, we’re floating there,” I would say. “I’m staring into his eyes. My heart is going crazy, and for some reason, I’m like, oh my god, he’s going to kiss me. But then, instead of kissing me, he looks at my chest, turns bright red, and starts stammering. And when I look down at myself, I realize that my entire right boob is just hanging out in the open, and he has basically been making eye-contact with my nipple.”

We would laugh and laugh, until they turned the dining hall lights out over our heads. Then, we would go back to our rooms and remember about how glad we were to be away from that era of our lives, and we would forget how brightly and painfully we had known the world in those days, back when we didn’t talk about our bodies because we spent so much time thinking about them, back when we were excited and humiliated by anything, back when everything under our fingertips seemed so new and so ripe, even our own skin. 

Never did I mention exactly how, that day in Margot’s pool, I looked down and saw my own breast collapsed nakedly against my stomach like an exhausted whale — a pale and drowning mound of fat. How I wondered if Brandon thought that I had orchestrated the whole thing on purpose, the way that I had really orchestrated everything else, and how that made me hate myself. And later, after Brandon had swum away to join the others, how I told myself that I didn’t care about him, didn’t care if he thought that I was some kind of sex-crazed sociopath, which I almost believed I was. I dove back down to the bottom of the pool and pretended that I was a mermaid. It was so beautiful there, with the light from the sun carving a white hole through the ripples above my head, and the shadows of those ripples falling all over the pool floor, all over my body, which was a mermaid’s body. This was what we forgot, in our laughter.

We had misunderstood the mermaids in our games, I realized, in those lost moments at the bottom of Margot’s pool. All they really wanted was to swim around where no one else was looking. I stayed under the water until my lungs ran out. It was too bad that I couldn’t be a mermaid. It was too bad that I couldn’t stop myself from wanting the air.

The post FICTION: Cherry appeared first on Yale Daily News.

“Ha! Sneaky guy.”

“Hey, why’d you do that?” asked Lá. 

Grabbing a silver knife, Chuông prepared to cut up a salmon. “What? You want freedom for animals?” He chuckled. “Stupid!”

“Sorry, Chuông,” said Hồng, catching up to her teenagers, struggling to push a wonky-wheeled cart. 

“Hồng! No problem. What would you like?”

“Salmon. Three pounds. And five blue crabs. Maybe toss a couple lobsters in there.”

“Full house tonight?”

“No no no.” She shook her hands and head. “Can never be too prepared about food!”

“Ah, okay.” Chuông put the raw fish into a plastic bag. “Here.”

She examined its contents. “Sorry, could you get new crabs and lobsters? Live ones! I’ll boil them extra fresh!”

“‘Course.” 

He gave her a new batch. Hồng moved the cabbages and scallions to one side of the cart, the seafood occupying the other.

“Thanks, Chuông.”

“Any time.”

“Let’s go.” She motioned to the twins, swiping a pack of oxtail from the meat shelves. 

Beginning to tail Hồng, Lá stuck his tongue out at Chuông, and Trời followed behind his brother. The family headed to the cashier. 

“Byebye, stupid!” Chuông said to Lá. The salmon deboning continued. 

The Tran twins grew up in Saint Paul, Minnesota. They lived on The Very Old People’s Street — also known as Minnehaha. Nearly all the residents surpassed 70; Trời felt they paraded their age too much. 

Only when surrounded by family, or by Vietnamese people, did they utter their real identities. At school, Trời was Oliver and Lá was Frederick — names they had seen on T.V. But luck showered over Hồng, since hers boasted a pleasant English translation: Rose. (Also pink, which isn’t as lyrical). 

The name of almost every Vietnamese they knew carried poetry: Lotus, Apricot Blossom, Ocean. As with their mother, colors imbued the boys’ names: Xanh Da Trời (blue, like the “skin” of the sky) and Xanh Lá Cây (green, like a tree leaf). Economical with her syllables, Hồng called them Trời and Lá. 

But even so, Trời’s confusion about colors never vanished. Everything in nature cycles through hues, doesn’t it? he wondered. The sky — it’s also magenta and murky and golden.

The neighborhood treasured the boys’ vitality, with which they became jewels of the street. Hồng could call any of the old couples to look after her children when she had to work an extra shift at the bakery. 

At three in the afternoon, the school bus halted beside the street sign and opened its doors. The two 14-year-olds ran out. They said hello to Bertha, the classically trained pianist next door, who was swaying on her hammock as usual.

The twins marched into the house, their Superman and Captain America backpacks heavy with dreams. Each removed his shoes. Passing the kitchen —“Hey, con!” Hồng said — they scurried to their bedroom. Steam from the minty pho broth humidified the home, stuck to everything and spared none. Not even the clothes.

On the bottom of the bunk bed, Trời lay on his side. Above him, Lá’s body, within minutes, had surrendered to sleep, as happened daily. Trời dwelled on Cameron, a boy in his math class. Tracing both their names on the frosty window, Trời lived up to his name: He was blue. Then he stared outside, his gaze roaming away from the house, to where the grass ended and the fractured street began. Beside their mailbox posed a naked pear tree, from which he tried to extract meaning. 

The next week, only Trời shopped for groceries with Hồng. While she inspected the cabbages and red onions, he stared at the lobsters, elbows on the glass, chin on fists. Like a daydreamer.

“Hey, what the heck you doing?” a muffled voice asked.

Trời flinched. A boy stood on the other side of the tank. They peered at each other through the aqua glass, as though at a border. 

“Uh, nothing,” said Trời, stepping to the side. He thought the boy was weird. 

Weird Boy mirrored the daydreamer’s move; The lobster tank no longer obstructed their eye contact. “I like the crabs, too. I have one as a pet! George. I like to rub his belly. Just gotta never take off the rubber bands. Keep him cuffed. Ba hates George, thinks animals are money-makers, not friends.”

“Who’s your ba?”

He pointed at Chuông, who glanced up from his work. “Trời Tran!” He was cutting salmon and tuna. “Where’s your mom?”

Trời turned to the direction of Hồng, who struggled to choose the best greens.

The overhead lights began to flicker. In seconds Buddha Amazing succumbed to darkness; A power outage infected the whole city. Chuông grabbed a flashlight from beneath the counter and shined it at the two boys. They stared into each other’s soil-brown eyes. Then Trời, his face pink as a sunset, moved his focus to the boy’s mouth: sweat twinkling, the vertical canyon between his nose and upper lip, black dots. An absence of light wasn’t so bad, Trời thought. 

“I like your mustache.” He pointed at the blooming facial hair. 

Weird Boy tapped his mouth. “No”— he shook his head —“you shouldn’t. It means I’m growing up — and I don’t wanna.”

Chuông carried on with his duties as another worker positioned the flashlight’s mouth to his cutting board. The deboning continued — as if nothing had occurred. 

That left two boys, hearts beating fast as a caged bird’s wings. Standing in the shadows. In nothing and everything. 

“What’s your name, anyways?” asked Trời. 

“Oh — I’m Bài. You?”

“People call me Oliver, but I’m Trời.”

“Nice to meet you, crab-lover.”

“Hey I’m not — ”

“Whoawhoa, I’m joking, bro.” No-Longer-Weird Boy’s voice cracked.

“They’re not crabs, dummy.” Trời rolled his eyes. “They’re lobsters.” 

“Okay,” replied Bài, raising his arms up, as if to surrender. “Okay.”

For Trời, the first glance was a test. The second, a revelation. He couldn’t ignore it, this beautiful tension. The lobsters seemed to be side-eyeing him. 

The world, Hồng had taught her kids, has two types of people: conformists and rebels. A third, unofficial category also exists: those who choose to do nothing — which also means conformity. 

The following Saturday, Trời entered Buddha Amazing by himself. Hồng had gone to drop off her famous spring rolls for ill friends.

Trời carried two shopping baskets. In his palm: a wrinkled sticky note, on which his mother had recorded a list: a dozen eggs, two cartons of milk, cabbage, scallions, chicken feet, chicken breast, four corn-on-the-cobs, clementines, dragonfruit and oxtail. No fish needed this round. 

An astute observer of his mother, Trời found every item, swiftly reaching the checkout stations.  

While waiting for an available cashier, Trời unzipped his jacket and removed Hồng’s food stamp card. Its intricate designs hypnotized him: snow-capped mountains, the flaming sky, two deer facing one another, their touching antlers, cherry blossom branches hovering over the frozen lake, bone-white camellias.

In front of him an elderly woman finished paying. And the cashier summoning the next customer was Bài. 

“Hey, why the heck you here?” he asked Trời, who, struggling to raise the overweight baskets onto the conveyor belt, left Bài’s question in the fish-adorned air. 

Pitying the lobster enthusiast, Bài slipped out from behind the cash register and hopped over to Trời. Without any words, the teens lifted the first basket together, each holding one handle, as though they had rehearsed. The whole time, Trời stared down. Bài placed the second basket on the conveyor and resumed his post.

“Thanks.” 

“So, where’s Mrs. Tran?”

“I’m helping Ma with groceries. She’s busy.”

“I see.” 

“And you — why’re you here?” Trời interrogated him, studying the checkout station. 

“A worker’s sick, so I’m helping Ba with the seafood back there and the register up here.”

“Cool.”

In the lane beside them a baby wailed in its stroller.

“You know your mom makes the best pho?” Bài asked, holding the scanner. “Ba tried it once. He fed me and I fell in love with the noodles.”

“Yeah, she’s the best.”

At that moment, Chuông stepped in to check on his son-turned-cashier. “It’s the not-stupid twin! How’re you?”

Trời nodded. 

Smiling, Chuông helped bag up the groceries. 

“We were talking about Trời’s mom and how good a cook she is,” said Bài.

“Dang right! She makes the best soups. But I don’t think her rice pancakes are better than mine.” Chuông shot a proud thumb at his chest. “Why not come eat dinner with us tomorrow—you, your brother, your mom!”

With each scanned item came a beep. “That works, since it’s after school,” Trời replied. “I’ll let them know.”

“Great, see you.” Chuông tied the four bags and looped two in each of Trời’s index fingers. After patting each boy on the shoulder, he returned to the seafood section. 

Bài spotted the food stamp card. “Paying with EBT?”

“Huh?”

He pointed to the plastic card. 

“You mean food stamps?”

“Yeah, it’s called EBT. Eat. Bad. Today.” He laughed, noticing the Hershey’s bar Trời had placed onto the conveyor belt. The final item.  

Trời shoved the card into the reader, typed the password, and clicked enter.

“Mkay, you’re all set.” He saluted Trời. “See ya.”

“Thanks.” The black-haired boy disappeared through the sliding doors and waited in the parking lot for his mother’s car. 

Hồng drove past a lake on the way to Chuông’s, the boys’ heads sticking out of the backseat windows. Trời admired the October landscape: families sprinkling a line of breadcrumbs, bringing the ducks closer to them; remnants of that abrupt snow from the day before, dampening the sidewalks and grass; the rainbow playground in the sandbox, children zooming up and down the slides, dangling from monkey bars, as though over melted iron.

Pulling onto Magnolia Street, they saw Chuông’s one-story house. Painted yellow, it stood ten blocks from Buddha Amazing. The brightest thing in the tedium of white and gray, of foliage. Hồng parked in front of the mailbox.

“Welcome, Trans,” said Chuông, yelling from the front door. He wore sunglasses.

Hồng reached the entrance, her sons behind. “Hi, Chuông.” 

Holding the door open, he waited for them to enter. Once everyone set their shoes on the rack, he led them to the dining room, where Bài was waiting. On the table rose five candles.

“What are those for?” Hồng stared at the flames. 

“Ah, to save on electricity.” Chuông winked.

“Clever!”

Trời and Lá greeted Bài as their parents chatted. 

“Hey! Crab-lover and brother!” He fist-bumped each twin. 

Trời beamed. “Hi, Bài.”

Hồng, the twins and Bài took their seats. Chuông entered the kitchen and returned with a pan of his rice pancakes, dandelion yellow. Containing shrimp, mung beans, scallions and pork belly, every circle had been cut into quarters. Trời considered every burnt spot a condiment, his mouth watering when he beheld the bronzed edges. Then the appetizers joined the show: purple mint leaves, lettuce, bean sprouts. And, of course, fish sauce. 

“Eat a lot! Don’t wait for me,” Chuông begged.

The boys dug in. No teen touched the greens. After them, Hồng clamped mint and bean sprouts between her chopsticks.

Chuông took his seat and, copying Hồng, added veggies to his plate. 

“So, how’s everyone?” He scanned the boys’ faces.

“Normal.” Trời and Lá spoke simultaneously.

“Same,” said Bài.

“Love lifes?” Hồng entered.

Lá scratched his head. “Uh …” 

“Bruhhhh,” uttered Bài.

“I like …  someone,” Trời suddenly began, munching on a peppered shrimp. “But I’m not the one. I know.”

“Well, I guess I lied yesterday. You’re both stupids, you” — Chuông pointed at Trời — “and him,” his forefinger then aimed at Lá.  “How’re you so smart at school but not in real life?”

“Chuông’s right, con. You don’t know until you go out there — what the Americans always say!” Hồng said, as though they observed the country through a snow globe. 

“Just put rubber bands around life’s pinchers!” Chuông exclaimed, giving a thumbs up. 

“Where’s the bathroom?” Trời whispered to Bài. 

“Right there.” Chuông smirked as he pointed to the hallway.

Fleeing, Trời found his destination. He flumped onto the toilet seat and drained the amber pool in his body.

Once he finished washing his hands, Trời noticed on the other side of the hallway a closed door, from which hung a drawing with cartoon lobsters, crayoned brown like autumn leaves. Wielding swords, they seemed angry, as if about to fight. At the center gleamed Bài’s name, in curly letters. Trời, his mouth ajar like a puppet’s, discovered in his pocket a dull pencil. He approached Bài’s door and scribbled a message on the name tag: “Hangout?” Trời tenderly separated the sign from its tape, and slipped it halfway beneath the door. 

But he chickened out. 

Trời withdrew the sign and, finding out the pencil bore no eraser, crumpled it into a paper ball, which he placed in his coat pocket. The cartoon lobsters didn’t have a chance to start their duel.

Chuông had to pick up shipments of fish and bring them to Swordfish Amazing, so he dropped Bài off at Hồng’s the next evening. The sun, like a far-away explosion with increasing radius, was setting behind the oak trees.

The twins, Hồng, and Bài banded together to fashion a bonfire at the center of the lawn. They collected twigs and branches, tossing them into the pit. Hồng squeezed the bottle of lighter fluid until the wood grew wet, and then lit a match. Spreading like watercolor, a fire was born.

Hồng slipped into the home to throw clothes in the washing machine. The boys remained outside, sitting in foldable chairs. Trời noted the fishy stench of Bài’s skin and t-shirt — but said nothing.

Playing games on his phone, Lá drooped into his seat. Bài and Trời were practically alone; they took sips from the hot chocolate Hồng had whipped up.

“Peaceful,” Bài said, exhaling.

Trời smiled without teeth. After a breeze whispered through the oak leaves, he spoke: “I just remembered — you didn’t show me George yesterday.” 

“You’re right!”

Trời chewed on a softened marshmallow, which had absorbed the creamy brown sweetness. “Maybe you can take off his rubber bands when you show me?” he said hopefully. The flames gained power. Flashes of crystals in their eyes.

“I guess I should help out my best bud.” Bài laughed. “Gonna ask me to let him on my bed, too?”

His head lifted to the indigo sky, Trời giggled unapologetically, holding his stomach with both hands as though to keep it from falling off. “Yep!” He gave a thumbs up.

As if to celebrate the night, crickets gradually formed a choir. From Bertha’s half-open window piano notes whirled. Fireflies flashed on. A lovely stink, as of orchids, permeated the evening air. 

Hồng returned to the lawn and covered the boys in hand-made quilts; they had conceded to sleep’s clutches. Trời’s coat, in which the crumpled lobster nametag still hid, was probably being soaked in soap. The fire continued to make cracking sounds, but it didn’t shatter. Drool escaped Lá’s snoring mouth. Beside him, Trời’s head had fallen, as gently as a shooting star, onto Bài’s shoulder. 

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Asha, for her part, had been withdrawn from the local convent school at age nine. The day she had been made to swap her pencil-box for a rake and a pail, she had kicked and screamed and cried herself to sleep as torrential afternoon rain battered the Patels’ thatched roof. Now, one misplaced adolescence later, she spent her days ambling around the family fields, daydreaming, ferrying milk to sleazy storemen and occasionally joining games of gully cricket with her younger siblings.

On Asha’s wedding day, the Patel children were midway through the second innings of a particularly riveting affair when their father approached from afar, clutching to his chest the finest clothes and the only earrings that the family owned. Jaldi chalo mere saath, he exhorted in Asha’s direction, sounding animated for the first time since the previous year’s bountiful summer. Emerging some time later from the makeshift bathhouse behind the barn, Asha mounted his scooter wordlessly, wearily, yet still unable to quell her optimistic curiosity as she clutched Mr. Patel’s sweaty midriff and motored toward her first meeting with her new husband — the first person, she convinced herself, who had ever voluntarily agreed to love her. 

By this time, Swami Ronny, always clad in billowing, sequined orange robes, had built quite a reputation in Bhopal. The Patels could hardly believe their collective fortune. Ronny was rather unlike other Swamis, though, in that he considered the Bhagavad Gita — India’s most seminal spiritual text — to be impractical bullshit, a prized specimen of chutiyapa. In fact, at the time of his self-anointment the previous year, he had only read the Gita twice, and that too in abridged form. 

His higher calling, as it were, revealed itself to him through mediums he considered far more sacred. For one, from the stack of Times of India clippings in which his father wrapped and sold paan, he had quickly gathered that the West was far more inclined toward AC/DC than anything remotely ascetic. Through the rickety radio on the counter, meanwhile, he had been introduced to one Freddie Mercury, a man with skin like Swami Ronny’s own who remarkably appeared to hold the collective Western libido in his vice grip.

Impulsive as ever, Swami Ronny quickly perceived an opportunity, a niche. Those fucking firangis, he thought, his thoughts darting away as his family performed its Diwali prayers. Those fucking firangis, they hate chastity but want to feel exotic, enlightened, smart. America, he reasoned, could use a guide, a curator, a real moderate — yes, someone who could deliver sexy South Asian lore in exactly the way people wanted to hear it. Bhopali vernacular, it bears noting, offered no precise translation for the concept of a charlatan, and Swami Ronny’s English vocabulary didn’t extend quite that far. All in all, then, it felt like an utterly inspired idea — perhaps his best since he’d convinced his papa to add bhaang to a not-so-secret menu at the shop.

Never one to waste time, he sat his parents down the very next morning and explained to them his intentions, his new identity. As his ammi cried into her shawl, his papa sat in silence, digesting, ruminating, as if for the first time considering the prospect of saying no to his son.  Before long, though, his stained fingers teased open the lockbox he kept in a kitchen cupboard, and then, in a purely symbolic, uniquely Indian gesture of paternal support, peeled several thousand rupees’ worth of damp notes from within it and slammed them on the table with gusto. Jaao, Swami Ronny. Go. As father and son embraced tenderly, even ammi couldn’t help but betray half a smile. 

 Buoyed by his family’s support yet cognizant that his avant-garde approach would scarcely resonate in Bhopal, Swami Ronny spent the 12 months leading up to his proposed departure advertising rather than qualifying it. Indeed, on account of his intended missionary bravery, he quickly became something of a sensation, spending evening after evening basking in the felicitations and home-cooked meals showered upon him by neighbors and strangers alike. When asked at the dinner table for morsels of sagely counsel, though, he would simply laugh, returning a knowing, increasingly emblematic smile to his cherubic face. Naaa babu, he would say to aspiring devotees young and old, it isn’t time yet. The tease delighted everyone. Business at the tobaccowala boomed.

When the time did finally come, the Lobos, the Patels and assorted, weeping townsfolk followed Swami Ronny and his new bride by train to Delhi’s international airport. That morning, Asha had been tutored by Swami Ronny’s ammi in the art of hand-washing and folding a crisp robe, 11 of which were now scattered across three ‘Lobo’-inscribed trunks, each carried by an adoring shophand. Asha, for her part, brought along a single suitcase of her own. As she dragged it over the curb, it clanged metallically, her wedding bangles and Hindi books drumming against the Patels’ beloved pressure cooker within its cheap, acrylic walls. Khichdi banaa, Swami Ronny’s ammi offered Asha by way of a farewell, pausing her dramatic wailing to gesticulate toward the cooker and impart one final instruction for her son’s care as the newlyweds disappeared into the terminal. Having never been near an airport, Asha’s parents and seven-year-old twin brothers stood at the periphery of the scene, staring blankly and not knowing exactly what to think.
Swami Ronny and Asha said little to each other over their 35-hour journey to Morningside Heights. Asha refused to cry in front of her husband, stifling racking sobs with her shawl in the dusk of the Boeing 707 cabin, and withdrawing to a bathroom stall during their layover in Frankfurt. Afterwards, she ate white bread for the first time while Swami Ronny browsed for stationery. On the final leg of their journey, Swami Ronny read his dog-eared, abridged copy of the Gita cover-to-cover for the third time, using two highlighters — one a darkish pink, reserved for notions like renouncing bodily temptation, and the other green, for platitudes like ‘whatever happens is for the better’ — to begin assembling his material. From the adjacent seat, Asha watched as Sigourney Weaver fought aliens on a tiny screen at the front of the cabin, drifting in and out of sleep, waking abruptly from time to time as her husband jerked her head from his shoulder. 

In New York, Swami Ronny hit the ground running. He already spoke impressive, charming English, as the receptionist at their 111th Street hostel would corroborate within five minutes of their arrival, and was thus able to begin actualizing his grand vision with rather surprising ease. On top of this, Swami Ronny could scarcely have imagined a more fortunate set of logistical circumstances. Living near a YMCA building meant that a large community venue existed not thirty seconds from home, sharing a neighborhood with Columbia in all of its hippie glory meant an endless supply of impressionable white graduate students and their curious, artsy, insidiously rich friends, and the very nature of America meant that were very few Gita scholars — or Indians of any kind, for that matter — roaming the streets, lying in wait to discredit Swami Ronny’s facade. Swami Ronny plunged himself into work.

 Unfortunately for Asha, though, these latter particularities meant that her own earliest memories of New York would come to be of lugging a dictionary through Harlem’s bus network, trying and failing to find lentils and spices and with them, perhaps a friendly dark brown face to talk to, her eyes filling with hot tears as the cracks of Yankees bats over the radio reminded her of cricket with her little brothers. Her struggles meant weeks full of oatmeal and long silences, only ever punctured by Swami Ronny’s muttering scowls as he inhaled The New York Times and scrawled yet more shorthand notes into the margins of his personal Gita. Night after night, meanwhile, her earnest attempts to either seduce or simply learn more about her husband were met with the same, chaste strain of rejection. Swami hoon main. I’m a Swami. Asha felt wretched and desperately unwanted, which was the truth, but knew that there was nothing to be gained by verbalizing it. Quietly, she let her husband toil, trying her very best behind the scenes to make his life — and by proxy, the marriage that superseded her own life — more comfortable. 

Precisely seven weeks after their arrival, then, Swami Ronny emerged suddenly from his haze to host his first event at the Morningside YMCA. Entitled ‘Modern Soul Food and Freethought in 1981’, it attracted 17 Caucasians who had taken notice of flyers plastered at local bus stops and now sat scattered across the square room’s plastic seating, eating wafers and drinking tepid water that Asha had served to them in plastic cups. The room hummed with anticipation, even if the precise nature of what beckoned remained unclear. Soon, though, this blind faith was to be vindicated.

Introducing himself mysteriously in an exaggerated, colonial accent, Swami Ronny wasted no time in diving into an account of the Gita so revisionist, so precariously close to the line of blasphemy, that it left its inaugural audience spellbound. For the better part of an hour, he moulded one after another of Lord Krishna’s teachings into soundbites left initially ambiguous, and then illustrated daringly with such canonically American constructs as sexual liberty (change is the law of the universe) and marijuana (discipline is crucial, but so is meditation). 

Yet if his morals were dubious, the success of his strategy was not — somehow, from weeks of poring over essentially a child’s version of a single spiritual text, he had produced exotic gold. His audience on this autumn day lapped up every word, the image of a desi messiah reflected in masses of wide, blue eyes. Freddie Mercury, he congratulated himself as he pressed his palms together, bowed, and accepted his audience’s clattering applause, would have been fucking impressed. 

Though she said nothing and understood even less, Asha stood near the door and smiled, clutching a thin stack of entrance fees between her thumb and finger. That same night, Swami Ronny made love to her for the first time, his rough manner leaving dark bruises on Asha’s neck, bruises she would wear on the bus the next day with pride and optimism, before concealing with a shawl in time for refreshment duty at Swami Ronny’s next event.

As leaves took on colors that neither Indian had seen before and then disappeared outright, Swami Ronny’s stature began to swell. Through the receptionist at 111th Street, Swami Ronny had become aware of several other YMCAs willing to host his gatherings and so, sporting a new handlebar moustache, he decided to take ‘Modern Soul Food and Freethought in 1981’ downtown. Asha, meanwhile, had begun to settle into a comforting routine, serving wafers and waters, collecting change at the door and then retiring to a corner of his increasingly bustling sermons to pore over the colorful Hindi-English textbooks a kindly Uruguayan night manager would borrow from the library and then lend to her. One late November evening, after a rousing climax which covered the importance of enjoying nightlife (fortunes can change in a second, and you only live once), she pulled Swami Ronny aside. Clutching his arm, she said in English “nice, I like it very much”, still understanding very little, but nevertheless wanting to prove her commitment, the love she was teaching herself to embrace. As Swami Ronny ran an affectionate if slightly performative hand through her hair and then left hurriedly to hold court among a throng of twenty-something artists, she choked back a happy tear. 

‘Modern Soul Food and Freethought in 1982’ was launched the following February, by which time Swami Ronny’s stock was rising meteorically. Asha saw him less and less, taking the subway back uptown after his events with leftover cups and snacks in tow while he hit the city with groups of devotees who had started to insist on buying him drinks. Once in a while, he would return before midnight, and instead of collapsing straight into drunken snores, he would join her for a late supper on the laminated floor of their hostel room. Sitting cross-legged, they would share a pot of khichdi as he recounted the evening’s stories of Upper East Side preschools and downtown speakeasies, stories of unfamiliar people and places and things that his increasingly sophisticated clientele had begun to expose him to. Asha relished these moments. By now, Asha had found a store selling Indian sundries, which although run by Sri Lankans, meant that she could begin to put her pressure cooker to use. This had helped to endear her to her husband, even if not their neighbors along the hallway. To their mutual surprise, she was a terrific cook.

Life proceeded in benign fashion until one day — a rare snow day late in the spring — Swami Ronny announced that he was clearing his afternoon. Ever since he was a child, this had tended to mean that a big, sweeping plan was about to be unveiled. His parents, had they been around, would have seen it coming. With a copy of a tabloid in his left hand and a spring in his step, he returned to 111th Street from his weekly late-morning tea with a group of ladies he had met in December at Bleecker Street — a group for whom he had become something of an alternative sex guru. Unbeknownst to them, of course, was the fact that he had mostly only ever been with prostitutes from villages near Bhopal, and certainly no one who had ever done a tantric pelvic floor exercise. Knowing even less was Asha, who like a waiting puppy sprang to her feet to greet him. Reaching for his hat, she offered him some piping hot rajma chawal, a food she had learned he loved to eat in the still Bhopal winter after an evening of street cricket. Today, though, Swami Ronny was in a rush. His excitement was palpable. Come, he said to Asha in English, ignoring his food and beckoning her to grab her bright green puffer jacket.

Asha longed to hold Swami Ronny’s gloved right hand as they strolled through the Heights, frozen leaves crunching underfoot. Oblivious to how ridiculous her husband looked in orange robes and a coat, this felt to her like one of the movies that played on the screen in the lobby, like something truly Hollywood. As they settled onto a frigid park bench, Asha coughed quietly, peering contently at her husband through the little, staccato clouds of steamy breath collecting in front of her face. 

My dear wife, Swami Ronny began, reverting to Hindi as he placed his palm on her shivering knee. Do you like the cold?

She did, but she shook her beanie-clad head anyway, perceiving the expectant expression beneath her husband’s unwieldy mustache. 

People like us, he continued, buoyed by her response, belong in warmer weather. Next week, he informed Asha, we move somewhere better than New York.

Asha stared blankly at him as she grappled with the very notion of an America beyond the Big Apple. Her expression bore a striking resemblance to her mother’s at the airport some months earlier, a unique blend of awe and resignation and utter confusion. At the thought of moving, the prospect of their nascent metropolitan life unravelling as quickly as it had materialized, she felt instinctive pangs of sadness. Quickly, though, she realized that she had nothing to be sad about, nothing and no one to miss, and most pressingly, no say in the matter. So she listened.

Swami Ronny smiled obligingly as he plied his wife with a carefully curated summary of a series of events that, truth be told, hardly concerned a passenger like herself. As it happened, earlier that year, one of his star struck Bleecker Street cohort had moved with her husband — a younger IT entrepreneur with no real geographic tethers — to Puerto Rico. 

Portoricko, Asha blurted back, rolling these strange, foreign syllables across her tongue, straining to make sense of them. 

This lady, a Dallas-born blonde thirty-something named Gladys, apparently credited Swami Ronny with having temporarily revitalized her outlook on love — even if, he thought to himself, her resurgent sex life now extended beyond the husband in question. In any event, that day, as she rose from her seat, put her gloves back on and bid Swami Ronny a tearful farewell, she had vowed to return to New York for a catch-up when the weather got warmer, at which time she would present to him a vignette of life in San Juan, which she was sure that he and his ‘sweet’ wife would appreciate.

Saanwan, Asha parroted, more slowly this time.

After Gladys left, I started looking into San Juan, Swami Ronny explained, unfurling and then pointing for visual effect at the old paper he’d been carrying around all day, in which a fourth-page article described San Juan variously as a Caribbean cubby-hole, a tax haven and a burgeoning white Republican outpost. 

Today, he continued, Gladys surprised us all and came back. 

San Juan, she had recounted, was a tropical paradise, and at the very least stood in stark contrast to New York, where April snowfall had by now begun to soak through the lap of Swami Ronny’s robes. By her description, San Juan was all that they (he) longed for in one place — open-minded (read: gullible) white people, accessible (read: cheap and unstigmatized) domestic help, warm weather and what’s more, an aura of foreignness profound enough that Gladys and her adopted community would be inclined to help them (him) settle.

There’s a place for us there, he concluded triumphantly, inhaling heavy, frigid air through his nose as he waited for Asha’s ceremonial assent. 

Chalo, theek hai, okay, she replied, exhaling wearily as she resolved to be optimistic for lack of any other alternative.

Swami Ronny turned out to be right about Gladys, who picked them up at San Juan’s sweltering airport exactly sixteen days of packing and logistics and phone calls later. Arriving wearing sultry red lipstick with a minivan for the couple’s luggage, she took them straight to a tiny, sun-bathed apartment in Condado, an up-and-coming neighborhood stretching along the island city’s northern coast. Rent is covered for your first month, Gladys mentioned casually on her way out, and I live in a gated compound ten minutes away. As the door shut behind her, Asha yelped and clapped her hands, barely able to contain her excitement at the tropical ambience that had replaced their 111th Street hostel room. Swami Ronny smiled. The universe seemed to have dealt them a good hand.

I’ll start unpacking, he offered magnanimously, and maybe you can make us something to eat?

Dragging his trunks to the bedroom, he pointed to the third of four wooden kitchen cabinets, where Asha would find that Gladys had left bananas, kidney beans and strange, yellow rice for her to cook with. That night, Asha unwittingly served Swami Ronny a plate of habichuelas guisadas, which he went so far as to label some of the best rajma chawal he had ever eaten. 

The next afternoon, Gladys called on the apartment to check on its new inhabitants, who had just finished unpacking. Opening the door in baggy shorts and an ill-fitting banyan rather than his typical attire, Swami Ronny felt terribly self-conscious. Still, he asked Gladys to stay for tea, which Asha quickly set about to make. As Swami Ronny sat with his de facto sponsor, drank his wife’s chai and discussed how best to embed ‘Modern Soul Food and Freethought’ into an entirely new fabric — Gladys’ proposal being to start doing home consultations in her gated community, which Swami Ronny thought was ingenious — Asha retreated into the bedroom in silence, barely noticing Gladys’ painted nails on her husband’s bare knee. Digging around in her drawer for something to read, she fished out a Hindi-English textbook that she felt guilty for having forgotten to return to the kindly Uruguayan watchman at the hostel. As she flipped absent-mindedly through its juvenile illustrations, she found herself hoping — to her immense surprise — that everyone spoke English in Puerto Rico, not wanting her hard work on phonics and phrases to go to waste. The thought of such futility riled her, and she soon found herself engrossed, muttering the names of colors and vegetables with a feverish resolve interrupted only by Swami Ronny’s heavy footsteps as he walked into the bedroom an hour later. Feeling particularly chipper after his conversation with Gladys and unable to contain his laughter at his wife’s furious attempts to pronounce the word ‘apple’, he took a seat next to her at the foot of the bed and placed what felt to Asha like a protective arm around her shoulder. 

Gladys left you this before she went home, he said to her in Hindi, handing her a scrap of paper with a phone number and a little heart scrawled on it in red ink. 

It’s for a cleaner, he clarified, because things get mouldy in the salty air and besides, you already do so much work with the cooking. 

He pointed to his right at the drawer he had kept their cash in, explaining that the cleaner would come every third day unless called and told otherwise, and that she was to be paid exactly three dollars on her way out. 

Treat yourself a little bit, he crooned, basking in his own generosity. We’re really going to make it to the top here.

The thought of this left Asha dizzy, the smell of muddy Bhopali primary school floors echoing through her synapses. 

Magda came to the apartment for the first time on the Tuesday of the following week, while Swami Ronny was away enjoying a working lunch of fish and tostones at Gladys’. A 67-year-old Guatemalan lady with a complexion nearly as leathery as Asha’s, Magda had a kind face and small hands which were good for reaching into small kitchen corners.

Hola, she said to Asha, flashing her an unfamiliar, maternal smile.

Hoela, Asha stuttered back, raising her hand awkwardly and retreating instantaneously to the bedroom. 

30 minutes later, Magda knocked twice on the bedroom door.

¿Puedo limpiar aquí?, she asked, pointing through the doorway in the direction of the crinkled floral bedsheet behind Asha.

Nodding, Asha vacated her room and decided to keep herself busy by making some food. Her kitchen, she noticed, now sparkled. Magda was worth her rate.

She decided to make a simple vegetable porridge, throwing spices, carrots and cauliflower florets into her pressure cooker — now miraculously liberated of its gunk — along with the yellow rice she was secretly beginning to warm to. As the pressure cooker whistled, the narrow kitchen counter twinkled in the afternoon sun, and the room filled with a blended aroma of cleaning liquid and comfort food. 

Magda emerged from the bedroom and set her broomstick down by the counter as Asha licked her lips and prepared to ladle a serving of porridge onto a plate for herself.

¿Qué es eso?, she asked Asha, staring at the cooker with great curiosity, inhaling deeply through her nostrils, and making exaggerated, circular hand gestures in front of her face. 

Not knowing how to describe her creation in Hindi or English, let alone Spanish, Asha simply slid her plate down the counter for Magda to look at.

Huele increible, she marvelled, grinning warmly, genuinely at her newest client.

Asha blushed and flashed a fleeting smile back before the unfamiliarity of the whole situation jogged her instincts into action.

Her-is-yoor-munny, she blurted out suddenly, reaching into her pant pocket and handing Magda the three dollar bills she had carefully retrieved and folded while she waited nervously for her arrival. She handed them over with two hands, as was respectful in India, and patted them politely into Magda’s crinkled palms.

Gracias, señorita, Magda replied. As she packed her supplies back into her chipped red bucket, she chuckled to herself at the very concept of Asha, for whom she had almost instantaneously started to feel an affinity.

Not really needing the apartment to be cleaned, but equally reluctant to pick up the phone and try to tell her this, Asha welcomed Magda and her red bucket back into the apartment three days later. The two ladies moved silently around each other as they had on Tuesday — one in the kitchen, one in the room, swap — holding down the fort while Swami Ronny spent the afternoon in Dorado Beach, leading his first consultation with the wife of one of Gladys’ husband’s golf friends. 

Today, Asha had decided to make a spicy bhindi and rice, thinking she would surprise Swami Ronny that evening with one of his other childhood favorites. Like clockwork, she once again lifted the lid of her cooker right as Magda emerged from her room. 

Seeing Magda’s wrinkled eyes perk up at the smell of masala and charred okra sent an inexplicable affection coursing through Asha’s bony frame. Whether borne out of deprivation or homesickness she wasn’t sure, but suddenly, she found herself ladling generous servings of bhindi and rice into not one but two plates.

The two ladies said nothing to each other as they ate standing at the counter, Magda wolfing her food down ravenously, and Asha picking at it as she watched this strange, old, dark lady eating something she associated with the dust and musk of Bhopal.

Gracias, señorita, Magda said, her voice dripping with gratitude as she washed their plates clean. No one had made food for her in years.  

Yoor-welcum, Asha replied, mentally patting herself on the back about her English, which she thought was on its way to being stellar, even if she spoke not a shred of Spanish. Handing Magda her pay as she walked her to the door, Asha felt both delight and devastation, like a child bidding farewell to their playmate. It had been a while since she had had a friend.

Through the summer, Asha and Magda enjoyed twice-or-thrice-weekly lunches. Swami Ronny had begun to spend more and more time on the road in San Juan, his network of clients and disciples snaking its tendrils into every corner of the island. Asha, then, began to be needed for very little — gone were the days of large events where she would serve water, and so, too, the days of Swami Ronny ever returning home in time for supper or having time for breakfast. Still, she felt grateful and relieved to have someone to miss so terribly. 

In June, Swami Ronny had spent some of his earnings on a grainy, second-hand television, belatedly clocking the extent of Asha’s isolation. Asha had never owned one before, so at first, she traced wary circles around it. She much preferred to lose herself in her homemade language school, which consisted of the Uruguayan’s Hindi-English textbook, and the English-Spanish textbook that Magda had sourced for her, lined up side-by-side in perfect transitivity. Spanish, she began to find, was a forgiving language for people with Indian accents.

Over time, though, the ladies’ lunches moved from the counter to the TV area near the window, where they would sit together on threadbare cushions, eat lentils and vegetables, and watch telenovelas under the harsh glare of the afternoon sun. Magda would laugh and cry heartily, and though Asha seldom understood why, she held onto their afternoons for dear life, totally content with simply being around someone who bared first-order emotions. In July, Asha started hugging Magda before she left. In August, Magda stopped accepting money, the pair having realized that a four-hundred square-foot apartment could only be cleaned so many times, and moreover, that they’d much prefer to be able to hang out every day, to be lonely together with no transactions to worry about. One day, after an advertisement for Tourism India had appeared on TV for the first time, Asha even daydreamed about bringing Magda with her to Bhopal to meet her brothers. That afternoon, words posed no obstacle between the two ladies as Asha giggled and gesticulated in explanation of her clearest, rosiest vision of home since she had left it behind. In Bhopal, she figured, Magda would umpire one of their cricket games, eat special-occasion food with her hands under the Patels’ thatched roof, and sleep on a brand-new floormat next to Asha’s own. Magda, she reasoned, could turn even Bhopal into a place of fun. 

In September, Swami Ronny packed his bags for a trip to the mainland — Dallas, to be more precise. Gladys, he explained, wanted him to meet her family and friends, to speak to them, to run a couple of events for Texans. They’re a people in dire need of guidance, he explained. Asha had asked if she could come with him, and he had dissuaded her, telling her that he would be on bumpy roads constantly, which he knew she so despised. Asha had asked if Gladys was coming with him, noticing a split-second of hesitation as he said no, her sister would pick him up at the airport. Swami Ronny was to be gone for four days.

It took nine for Asha to confront the notion that Gladys did not, in fact, have a sister. It would be even longer before her other stupidities, her total oblivion, really dawned on her. Eventually she would feel downright gullible — where in the world does it rain so much that one would need eight pairs of orange robes and all of their underwear? Why would he leave her a fraction of their money and take the rest, rather than the other way around? Why wouldn’t he call?

On the ninth day in question, Magda came to the apartment as usual. She had noticed the growing pit in Asha’s stomach on the fifth day, pointed at Asha’s reddened, cried-out eyes on the seventh, and on the eighth, had asked Asha the simplest of questions, and one she actually understood. 

¿Todo bien?

Swami, Asha had replied, gulping. Yo-no-sé.  

On the sixth day, Magda had noticed that Gladys wasn’t home — the cook let her in, and her house was empty. They’re probably travelling, the cook had said, but they didn’t tell me anything.

On the ninth, after her second mid-morning cleaning trip to Gladys’ Condado townhouse, Magda felt nauseous. Asha noticed the somber expression on her face, her usual bubbliness absent as she accepted a bowl of daal. 

Ashita, Magda began, using the endearing nickname she had coined weeks earlier. Ashita, su marido estaba llorando, y la señora Gladees no estaba en casa, she spelled out slowly, paving tear tracks under her eyelids and pinching a strand of her gray hair to confirm a suspicion that Asha hadn’t allowed herself to fully confront: the blonde whore had stolen Swami Ronny. Of that, there now remained little doubt. 

With Swami Ronny no longer around, Asha wept freely, openly, desperately. She felt the wounds of season after season of alienation ripped wide open as she clutched the pile of his orange robes that remained. For nearly two hours, Magda lay with Asha on her bed, cradling her skeletal face atop her gooey, grandmotherly stomach, and running her coarse fingers through her coconutty hair. 

Tengo-hahmbre, Asha finally croaked after the sun had set, her own stomach rumbling audibly.

Ven conmigo, Magda cooed back. Come. 

Asha took her hand, seeing no other choice. Together, the two ladies took one bus and then another, the streets empty as they walked slowly toward Magda’s decrepit first-floor flat in La Perla, a notoriously rough shanty town running parallel to the stone walls of Old San Juan.

Magda’s flat smelled of cumin and incense — had Asha not been so desolate, she would likely have smiled at how much it reminded her of her grandmother’s cozy hut outside Bhopal. Guiding Asha through one cramped doorway and then another, she brought her to a room in which a male human being had clearly once lived. Adorned with football posters and a single, framed photo of a handsome, well-built youth in military uniform, Asha would later learn that this meticulously cleaned room had once belonged to Magda’s son Antonio, who had died in Guatemala’s Civil War some years prior, having returned home to fight at his father’s insistence. The room felt heavy with Magda’s maternal guilt, the toll she had paid from afar to be able to provide for a son she was unable to protect. Asha often wondered whether her parents felt any such guilt, but would remind herself that she had no means or medium by which to prompt it, and no reason to seek it. 

After a dinner of soup and a reheated empanada, which the tearful, starving, vegetarian Asha had eaten without a second’s hesitation, Magda directed Asha toward her bathroom, where she had placed a fresh towel and a nightgown for her to sleep in. Deep into the night, Magda sat on the edge of her son’s bed and sang old Spanish nursery rhymes until Asha finally fell asleep.

The next day, Magda took Asha back to Condado to pick up some of her things. In her suitcase Asha packed everything she called her own — her pressure cooker, her eight outfits, her green puffer jacket. The apartment was in Swami Ronny’s name, so that wasn’t her problem anymore.

Returning to La Perla, the two ladies set about trying to find Asha’s feet. Asha wallowed for a week at first, draping herself over an armchair in front of the Spanish channel on Magda’s tiny television, rising only to bathe and to help Magda cook when she returned from her day’s labor. But as she regained her strength, she began to join Magda on her cleaning trips, carrying the creaking red bucket on bus after bus, and collecting a dollar or two as a token of Magda’s appreciation, even though she was really just grateful for something to do. Asha hated the work, as it were, but turned out to be very good at it, her own small hands proving as adept as Magda’s at extracting dirt from the narrowest of cracks.

By the time the notorious winter of 1982 had begun to rear its head elsewhere in the United States, Asha and Magda had settled into a routine. Every night upon the duo’s return from work, one of them would clean their equipment and the other would cook. Together, they would take piping hot bowls of food across the living room where they would sit on the floor, watch whatever cable offering caught their fancy, and rest their aching legs. Magda took care to teach Asha new Spanish phrases every day, celebrating raucously on the occasions that Asha would pronounce things perfectly. Asha, in return, had tried to teach Magda some of her own language — though she had little use for it, Magda would nevertheless sportingly pepper little tidbits of Hindi into their interactions, her old eyes glowing in the candlelight as she complimented Asha’s cooking. Yeh khana bahut achcha hai, she would often say, enunciating each word like a Bhopali native.

Somewhere in her limping heart, though — a heart which had taught itself to love Swami Ronny and still pined for his protection, his sponsorship, even if not for his reciprocation — Asha knew that the arrangement had to end at some point. 

Magda, for her part, thought the same, albeit in a totally different way. She was willing to take care of Asha like a friend, a sister, her own blood, she thought, but knew that her old, creaking, arthritic body would not hold up forever. Indeed, detecting in Asha a version of herself, a version for whom there remained time to steer away from the aching loneliness that had come to mar her own life, Magda longed desperately to be able to provide Asha with a future, a purpose, something to call her own and to share with others. 

Nevertheless, as the two ladies’ clocks ticked, Asha’s suspended in ambiguous, existential fear, and Magda’s in mortality, neither said anything to the other, not wanting to disturb the companionship that they had both come to depend on. 

Months passed in this amber until, in March of 1983, Asha came down with the flu. At first, Magda had feared that Asha was just depressed. After all, the two ladies had just the previous week inadvertently caught the tail-end of a tabloid TV interview featuring none other than Condado’s former darlings – Swami and Gladys: Live from Texas. That evening, Asha had gasped audibly and then begun to weep at seeing her earnest affections so spectacularly, publicly rejected in favor of Gladys’ cloying, box-office smile; Magda, meanwhile, had lunged swiftly for the kill-switch, her joints creaking as she sought to protect Asha from visual manifestation of several months’ worth of nightmares. No importa, no importa, she had whispered soothingly as Asha’s shivers and sobs began to cease, a healing silence slowly easing its way into the air once more. 

Asha, to her credit, and to Magda’s great relief, had seemed to take this jolt in stride. And to Magda’s even greater relief, a palm to Asha’s hot, ashy forehead that morning had confirmed that she was, in fact, quite feverish. Before heading to work, then, Magda had left her with hot tea, medicine she had bartered from an upstairs neighbor, and free reign over the television dials. Draped over the armchair once again, Asha began watching a rerun of a telenovela episode she had already seen, but quickly became bored. Heaving herself to her feet and limping toward the box, she decided to switch to the English channel — why not, she reasoned, noting that she had forgotten most of the words she had learned after months of treating the language as a symbolic conduit between Hindi and Spanish textbooks. 

The last time she had watched Sigourney Weaver’s Aliens — or at least, parts of it — had been on her flight over from Delhi. Memories of bread and cold seatbelt metal and German stewardesses came flooding back into her consciousness as she tried this time to trace some semblance of a narrative.

Once again, though, she failed in this endeavor, albeit on this occasion for a wildly different reason. All of a sudden, her neurons began firing frantically, triggered by something on-screen as if jerked awake once more by Swami Ronny’s cold shoulder. In front of her, a group of CGI Androids had gathered around a table for dinner, and it was the most inspiring thing she had ever seen. She almost couldn’t believe that the thoughts that now flooded her brain had never occurred to her. She resolved to clear her afternoon the next day, and to take Magda for a walk. Suddenly, she felt a lot better.

When Magda returned home that night, she found Asha in bed, poring over her two textbooks atop the thin bedspread. 

Magda, Asha began, perking up. Maneeana, no trabaho. She crossed her arms in an ‘X’ in an attempt to indicate the generality of her proposal, the fact that it applied to both of them.

Claro, cariña, estas enferma, Magda replied, as if reminding Asha that she was sick.

No, no, Asha replied, her voice growing louder, more animated. Tengo idea.
The next afternoon, Asha and Magda set off down the streets of La Perla, arriving at a benign-looking bench a couple of hundred meters from home. Asha brought homemade samosas and empanadas in foil — the former she had made that morning, and the latter were left over from a few nights prior.
¿Qué pasa, Ashita?, Magda finally implored, confused and amused in equal measure by the twitching smile Asha had worn on her face since she had awoken. 

Magda, Asha responded, enunciating every rehearsed word slowly, carefully. Magda, tengo idea.

Cuentame.
Tu, Asha said, retrieving a samosa and an empanada and holding one in each hand, y yo. Tu y yo. Magda, quiero abrir restaronte contigo.

¿Restaurante?, Magda spluttered, her face reflecting her visceral surprise at the idea Asha had just shared, her shock at its simple, elegant beauty, her memory of her son’s little feet dangling from his high chair as he purred into the food his máma served him. Cocinera, cocinera he would run around chanting, giggling as he collapsed into her arms when he tired.

Restaurante, Asha replied. 

Instinctively, Magda reached for Asha’s face, cupping its sharp angles softly between her palms.

Bien entonces, mi amor, she finally croaked, pulling Asha into an embrace and sending crumbs flying from the surfaces of both pastries. Tenemos que trabajar.

There they sat for an age, both ladies aware of yet utterly at peace about the trials of recipe, spices, money, space and time that beckoned, neither lady fully comprehending how much they meant to the other, and each of them certain only of the fact that if such a spiritual construct could really, truly exist, they had found their soulmates.

***

“Bienvenido a La Guatemal-India, la mejor takeaway de San Juan según la lista del San Juan Tatler de 1995. Soy la jefa de la cocina. ¿Le puedo ayudar en algo?”

“One dal makhani with rice, three tostones, and a mango lassi, please. I just moved back here on my own from Tex–”

“¿Utensilios?”

“One set”

“¿Nombre?”, the lady asked, rolling her vowels, her accent equal parts Guatemalan and Puerto Rican.

“Ronit Lobo, but back when I lived here most people actually knew me as Swa–”, the man replied, his voice losing its thinness and his head beginning to swell until he heard the phone line disconnect ferociously, instantaneously. Clack. When he tried to call back, no one answered. 

Asha ignored the shrill ringing as she strode numbly into the kitchen to retrieve plates of saffron khichdi for Table 23. As the ringing began to fade, she paused fleetingly beneath the framed photo of Magda which took pride of place above the stove. Under the watchful gaze of her first real friend, she basked in a deep, fragrant breath and a moment’s quiet. No importa, she reminded herself. No importa.

As her own steel returned, ushered in by a drafty Caribbean breeze buffeting the nape of her neck, Asha ran her bony fingers along the cold, metallic contours of her trusty pressure-cooker. Tracing the grooves into which thick subcontinental dust had once burrowed, she paused to admire how durable it had proved, how far from Bhopal it had come, how gracefully it had adapted to its new, exotic identity as the bringer of comforts from a home that no longer felt like hers. 

The post FICTION: The Whistle of a Pressure Cooker appeared first on Yale Daily News.

It was snowing   

And it was going to snow.   

The blackbird sat   

In the cedar-limbs.

—Wallace Stevens, “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird”

I (remembering)

Tuesday is one of those snowy days when the streetlamps switch on at four and cast their gray glow over the wheel-painted road. He’s always amazed by the quietness of cold things, the silent hum that runs shivering down the hills and between the houses. The only sound is the faraway drone of a snowblower. A mechanical whale song.

Mom tells him winter is a time for thinking, because there’s nothing else to do. He thinks that’s stupid. When there’s nothing to do, he thinks, you sit at the window and stare at the icy white until something blurs into nothing. Winter is a time for not thinking, for forgetting. Summer, when the wallpaper melts into little wet strips of color, calls for thought, frantic thought, manic buzzing sweat-beaded thought: about the past, about the future, about the shapes in the clouds, about the color of thunder. About whether mosquitos fall in love. But not winter. Winter is a time for forgetting.

He stands at the end of the street next to the backhoe. Nobody’s quite sure why it’s here. The construction happens, but nobody sees it. Like magic. Is there an hour every day when people stay inside, not looking, not listening, compelled by some strange invisible force? And the workers rush in, dig up their asphalt and pour their concrete, then sneak out just as the neighborhood wakes up and returns to the wobbling rhythm of suburban life, bread-buttering and lawn-mowing and divorce-delaying? The snow is streaked with the mud-brown memories of a day’s work unseen.

No snow without mud. He finds himself repeating the four words silently, chanting them to himself. No snow without mud. It feels like night but there’s the sun, barely visible under the clouds, a diffuse orb of yellow-white. The snowblower has been joined now by another, and the duet smells of gas and candle wax. The scent of a Hanukkah lighting gone wrong.

Winter is a time for forgetting, but he’s shit at forgetting. He remembers everything simultaneously. Radio interference, channels melting together. Like when the ghost of a polka sneaks in over an NPR report about Benghazi. A frenzied static of memories: eating cookie dough with a half-friend, waking up late on Saturday in a writhing mass of blankets, feeling the back-slap of an ocean wave, reading a 400-page Romanian novel and understanding nothing, sitting in a chair with Mom and watching the sky go by. 

Sometimes he resents the overwhelming, headache-inducing simultaneity of it all. Sometimes he wishes the memories would wait their turn. There was a time when a cat scratched him, when he kissed a pillow, when a toaster caught fire, when he cried on an amusement park ride. But when? Which came first? Which came last? His brain promises him that these are meaningless questions. And so here he stands balancing on the curb, remembering and remembering until his entire past starts to feel like yesterday morning, distant but strangely close.

Maybe tonight a faceless man will come and drive the backhoe away. And tomorrow morning, when the moon falls behind the snow, all that remains will be the fat tracks of the backhoe, pointing down toward Park Road and curling right right right until they disappear under the blurry fingerprints of a million cars.

And the mud, too: wet, squishy mud. No snow without mud.

II (punching)

He’s not angry. He’s not. “How was I supposed to know?” That’s what the other man said. The man he gave a white gold ring. The idiot. “How was I supposed to know?” What a load of crap. But he’s not angry. “I’m going for a walk,” he said. And so he is. Down the hill, past all these sloped lives, happy couples by the fire and kids in the snow. Just when he thought they’d gotten through it all. And now: a glance, a hookup. The idiot downloaded the app with torsos in boxes. Little clickable infographics. Desperate desire for spontaneity. “Affair.” Such an ugly word. “You weren’t picking up my calls,” the idiot said. Not angry. Down the hill, down the stairs, falling, down, down. He asked: “Do you need a dictionary to look up the words ‘business’ and ‘trip’?” Clever. What a jab. Remember the first date? The burrito that burst all over his lap. Levi’s. Trainwreck. He’s not angry. Not angry, not angry. The idiot: “This is hard for me, too.” Yeah. Now the wind blows the snow into frantic spirals. He wants to lie in the snow, under the snow. Feel his fingers harden and freeze. Become something solid. An object. He always wanted to live in a museum, behind the thick glass, with the mummies. And the remains of the dead. The things they held. It’s not like he was in Indonesia. Cleveland, a flight away. At a conference. “No, I’m not joking. Look,” the idiot said. Not angry. Jesus, it’s cold. He didn’t grab his gloves on the way out. Where do they go from here? To counseling. Ha, ha. No, but really. Where. Ice on the road, ice on the road. Careful. Slick and sneaky. Not to be trusted. He loves the husband. Loved? Loves. And what is this? Always forgets the name. Bulldozer, dump truck. Backhoe. That’s it. It sits there, leering. Taunting him. Daring him. Like on the playground. “Positive.” He’s not angry. Not angry. “Positive.” Eight letters, fat and flat and heavy. “Positive.” Positive for? Three letters, hopefully never four. In the ’80s men went gaunt. Wasted away. Positive positive positive. The idiot is positive. Right hand back, fist balled. He punches it. The backhoe. Punches it hard. He hasn’t punched something before. Realizes the problem with punching things is they punch back. Knuckles bloody, snow and mud melting into the wound. An ugly palette of red and fleshy brown. Almost lets himself cry. That’s almost, to be clear. Idiot. There are pills now, they say. He’s not angry. He loves the husband, loves the husband so much it hurts. The backhoe stares, dumb and dirty. Not angry. He’s not angry. “How was I supposed to know?”

III (plowing)

The snow roars and she listens to “The Girl from Ipanema” on repeat. It’s dark, but the headlights trace out circles of blinding white. She’s alone on the road. “Tall and tan and young and lovely … ”

Thirty years ago, still young and lovely, she started plowing snow. She had just returned from the trip. She plowed for hours, plowed until the loveless cold woke her up, made things real. She forgot about him. For a time.

Soon the dreams started. Dreams about the dark-eyed man who worked in the gloomy cafe. In these recurring dreams, the waiter’s eyes remained hidden in a sea of shadows. He smiled, and she woke with the bitter taste of unrequitedness dancing across her tongue. 

Her favorite time to plow is at night, when the world sleeps and the spray of white looks like sea foam if she squints. Right turn. Here are two little elms, growing side by side. Do they, too, enjoy bossa nova?

Night is the cradle of insanity. This she has learned. Three decades of driving through black soup have taken their toll. She dreams of strange shapes, triangles bathed in sharp purple light, circles rolling frantically in place, and many others so strange she doesn’t know their names. Shapes with many sides and no sides all at once, shapes that laugh and cry, shapes dancing, shapes on boats, dead shapes, blue shapes. Left turn. And yet still she plows at night, because there’s something intoxicating about that pulsating liminal space between here and there, sundown and sunup. The moon seduced her long ago. No going back to the world of the day-people.

A man walks his ugly dog. “And when she passes he smiles … but she doesn’t see … ” She likes to imagine that she still lives in Brazil, in a town by the Atlantic. That she sits in a cafe where she can hear the whisper of the water and orders an espresso from a dark-eyed waiter who loves her back. That her shoes fill with sand and her hair with salt. Right turn. That after dark she runs naked into the ocean and swims until she can’t breathe.

She slams the brakes and swerves left, passing inches away from a backhoe parked by the corner. Here is reality. The moon and stars jerk right and the plow hits the snowbank with a dull thunk. Deep breath. It wasn’t there and then it was. These things happen. Shapes fade, appear, samba across the windshield. Some shapes are more dangerous than others.

Now the moon hangs still. Its gentle crescent curves an invitation. Come, it whispers, come to the cafe by the beach. A winter moon is the saddest moon there is. I’ll be waiting in Brazil. Brighter, happier. She backs up, puts the truck in drive. Continues into the night.

Maybe I will go back, she thinks. Maybe I will buy a ticket to Salvador, stay in a condo by the singing sea, wander the snowless streets. Will I? Maybe I will, maybe I won’t, maybe I will. And as the tiniest sliver of light peeks up from behind the rows of houses, she smiles a half-moon smile. Right turn. “Tall and tan and young and lovely … ”

IV (mothering)

The truth is they wanted one kid.

Two has figured out how to push open the door. She runs out, careens down the steps, zips across the yard and stops in front of the backhoe that’s been there for a week now. Shoots her mother a mischievous look. Starts climbing into the big metal hand at the end of the orange arm.

Mom sighs and goes and tries to pick up Two by the waist, but Two holds on tight to the metal hand. Finally Mom feels the stubborn girl fold in half like a napkin, sobbing, screaming. She’s so tired.

Two stands on the couch, face stained with tears, and stares out the window with a pout. Mom almost goes to console her.

Here comes Three. He’s been watching his sister, plotting, perfecting his escape. Toddles straight by, opening the door like a seasoned expert, almost like an adult, except he’s shorter than the doorknob. Dad, sensing trouble, comes in from the kitchen.

Three crosses the yard, little velcro shoes striking the snowy slush with remarkable power, and heads straight for the backhoe. Reaches up for the door handle, grasping at the air. He can’t quite get there. Realizes not all doors can be opened. Turns in horror as Dad approaches. He’s trapped.

Three joins his sister on the couch as One makes a break for it. But they’re waiting, Mom and Dad, legs like a wall. “I just want to taste it,” One cries. “I just want to taste it.”

“Taste what?” Mom says.

“The big orange car. I just want to taste it with my mouth. Please, Mommy, I just want to taste it.”

One and Two and Three had a backhoe toy once. It was small and made of plastic. They played with it on the rug upstairs, making nonsense noises, trying to fit it into their mouths. Saliva everywhere. Mom stepped on it one morning and sliced open her foot. Cursed. Threw it out. Three and Two and One have been yearning for a backhoe ever since.

When they stuff their fingers into their spit-filled mouths, they pretend that their fingers are long, fleshy backhoes. When they crawl under tables to hide from seekers, they imagine their meaty hands and calloused knees melting and reforming as fat rubber backhoe tires. They live their little lives like leeches. Instead of skin, metal. Instead of blood, soil. At night, backhoe-shaped shadows slink across the walls. Their mouths water in the dark. Mom and Dad wonder why they don’t sleep.

Dad carries One over to the couch, and Mom locks the door twice and pulls the chain taut.

They’re all crying now, egging each other on, a feedback loop. Dad is back in the kitchen, cooking. She groans, grabs her hair. Just leaves, goes upstairs and shoves earbuds deep inside her ears. She locked them in. Free spirits, full of life and love and curiosity. They just wanted to go for a ride, to lick the cold hard flesh of the sleeping machine. Just wanted to feel its touch, to hold its calloused hand. And she brought them back inside, collecting them like objects, lining them up on the couch. Like when she was little and her marbles rolled under the table and she crawled and found them all and choked them in her hands.

And she locked the door. Trapped them with her. No, bound them to her, clutched them to her breast until they stopped fighting, until their skin was hers and hers was theirs.

She’s so tired. Digs out the earbuds, goes downstairs, finds One and Two and Three still on the couch, quiet now. Says, “I love you guys.”

The truth is they never wanted triplets.

V (landing)

She sits straight in the seat and stares ahead with blank terror, her ears popping, her stomach lurching with the bumps. They must be through the clouds by now, but she refuses to look out the window at the tiny world below. She’ll know when the plane lands because it’ll hit the ground, and it’s as simple as that.

Now comes the braking, that horrible grinding sound, and she sags forward, her lungs stuck behind her, pulled like a string through honey. All around her people murmur, giggle, babble. How can they chit-chat when they’re sitting on padded chairs in empty space?

Her therapist told her to glance out the window, to take the smallest peek, just once. All it would take is a lean to the left. In her peripheral vision, there unfold streets and neighborhoods and towns, but somehow the blurriness makes it more tolerable, more distant.

Two of those oddly comforting dings. Like church bells. A pleasant sound in this symphony of rattling plastic and wailing babies and rumbling engines.

The plane hits an air pocket and a few passengers gasp with mock dread. Almost involuntarily, she crosses herself, peeling her right hand from the armrest and flicking the stale air up, down, left, right. She’s Jewish.

How close are they to the ground? A couple thousand feet at most. She can practically hear the cars passing down below. It would only take a turn of the neck, “a little look-see,” to use her therapist’s patronizing words.

No way in hell.

No. Way. In. Hell.

She does it.

Against her will. Her neck turns. String cheese roads and cranberry cars and there, on that corner, a fat golden raisin atop a dollop of yogurt. A backhoe in the snow. Yellow. Impossibly yellow. What is it about the color, the screaming color of that machine? It’s an unafraid color. Her jaw unclenches, her shoulders soften, her arms hang loose.

Now the plane is whizzing low over the treetops of an asparagus forest, and she finds herself unable to look away, plastered to the ice-laced window, eyes darting from tree to snowy tree.

The plane lurches right, and she laughs.

VI (being)

A backhoe. Still. Fat. 

Feels the caress of a child’s hand, the strike of a man’s. 

Hears the high-up growl of an airplane, the low-down growl of a plow.

Most of the time, silence. A backhoe is lonely.

Big, on a corner.

A backhoe.

Who is this boy standing nearby? Why is he

Big fat wheels in the snow.

Cold wheels.

A backhoe.

VII (remembering)

The snowblower shuts off and he’s left trying to forget. The mud is almost gray under the thin, cold light of the streetlamps. He’s reminded of an old movie.

No snow without mud. Is that true, though? Sometimes it snows and there’s no mud to be seen. But no, there’s always mud. Sometimes mud hides, on the windshields of tarp-covered cars and under the toenails of treetop squirrels. But there’s always mud.

Now he’s remembering the time when he slipped and fell in a deep brown puddle by the middle school. He walked home sopping wet, hair dotted with earthy dandruff, shoes squelching and stained.

And the other time, six months later, when his bike sloshed through a patch of seemingly dry grass, spraying a slimy clay-like mush up his shins and under his favorite blue shorts. Mom spent hours scrubbing the cotton with soap and tired fingers. The result was a frothy coffee-colored syrup that soaked even further into the fabric.

These are the things people are supposed to forget in the winter. But at least, he thinks, at least now he’s remembering things in order. He feels the backhoe plucking his memories apart, one by one. Spreading them out like cards on a table. The first mud stain, then the second mud stain. Mud stain memories waiting their turn. 

From the overwhelming simultaneity there emerges a neat sequence of discrete recollections: 4 years old, toaster catching fire; 6 years old, neighbor’s cat scratching leg; 8 years old, crying on Tilt-A-Whirl; 10 years old, kissing pillow. Memories as dots on a line. He sighs, almost audibly, as the headache he didn’t even realize he had fades to nothing.

Other things fade. The backhoe’s yellow fades into a dull almost white. The sky is gray and the road is black under the white snow. For a moment, he finds himself unable to imagine a color other than none at all. Finds himself living in a Christmas TV rerun with gray-faced children opening gray-wrapped presents around a gray-needled tree.

For a moment, the whole world is a pencil sketch.

Then a fox crosses the street some 20 feet up the hill, its fur the brightest red he’s ever seen.

The post FICTION: Seven Ways of Looking at a Backhoe appeared first on Yale Daily News.

I first observed the tanks through the open blinds of a neighbor’s window. Night had shrouded the streets to the extent that it was difficult to use my bedroom window as anything more than a mirror. Piercing through the black, a neon green rectangle flickered, replacing my face and encapsulating what seemed to be the silhouette of a child’s legs. As I peered closer, I noticed that the rectangle was actually a tank in the window across the street. The silhouette sunk lower in the tank, fruitlessly lurching against a pair of hands pressing him down. I forgot to breathe as I watched the child’s delicate skin ripple and break from the impact of kicking against a lid clamping him down and closing him off from the world. His chest heaved in an attempt to fill his lungs with anything — even water — and I fought the urge to dash across the street.

This is completely normal, I assured myself. This town is just like any other.

Just then, as the boy mustered one last kick, the green liquid peeled back his flesh, unveiling grey shark-skin beneath. Like mouths, gills resembling tally marks opened between his face and ears; his pale hair drifted to the floor of the tank. When his hands reopened, thin, ghostlike webbing bloomed in the space between his fingers. His new strokes were lithe and froglike.

I shuddered a sigh of relief. Ignoring the raw, red crescents dotted across my palms, I resumed my studying.

Every afternoon since then, I have returned to my windowsill to watch the shark-boy grow. A recent development: two adults — I assume, his parents — took a more active role in his physical development. I could read the father’s lips: Bite, bite, he would taunt, brandishing a steak dripping ruby above his head. He tossed it up with the piercing accuracy of an insult, and the boy sprung up, drenching his parents’ clothes while snapping a juicy piece between rows of piercing teeth. The parents stepped back, proudly admiring their work.

One day, the mother’s eyes met mine. She shut the blinds and that’s how they remained.

At school, I noticed these similar, sharklike features on my peers. In the halls, some students flaunted their agility by pumping their gills open and closed.  The insides resembled the undersides of chanterelle mushrooms, the kind I would often uproot. Conversely, many peers were secretive, shrouding their gills with strands of deliberately placed hair.

School was a cold dive into a den of sharks: when raising my hand to answer a question, the wide, glinting eyes of my classmates raised goosebumps on every inch of my arm. As I strode down the hallway, tension curled its heavy fingers around my throat; my peers breathed like wire traps, keen to masticate the leathery carcasses of their peers in the snap of a moment.

Sharks lurking in the lull of the ocean deep.

“Opioids activate receptors on nerve cells and release your …” the biology teacher, Ms. Brown, droned on in the background. Students’ faces were dyed technicolor in the glare of their phone screens, their webbed hands scrolling surreptitiously. I glanced down at my web-less hands, feeling naked. My eyes landed on the desk beside me, where a girl doodled on the margins of her notes, balloons of color blooming from her highlighters. Jellyfish, I mused. Then, I realized with a gasp: her fingers weren’t webbed. My gaze immediately jumped to her neck and found the signature, shark-like gills lining her neck: only they were dormant, like pencilled tally marks and nothing more.

In a burst of impulse, I took out a sticky note.

Hey, my name is Aria. I like your jellyfish, I wrote, gingerly placing the note on her desk.

She flicked her eyes to the note and flashed me a grin. I’m Ashley. Let’s talk later, she mouthed.

“This is — BY FAR — my favorite part of the school.” Ashley swung open a small mahogany door, and sunlight spilled through the opening. Inside, the late sun cradled statues, art stands, and canvas in a golden halo. A freshly-painted mural spread across the cerulean wall: eyes and eyes and eyes, blending together and tearing apart.

I paced around the room, hovering my hand over the paintings and the statues. “I guess Ashbourne’s art department isn’t as bad as they say it is.”

“Oh but it is,” Ashley interjected. “That … and that … and that.” She pointed. “All my work.”

“Oh but you’re fucking brilliant,” I said, face frozen in awe.

Ashley blushed a deep red and mumbled thanks.

I took her hands in mine, and stared into her eyes. “We need to paint together sometime.”

“How about … right now?” She slid open the cabinet in the wall behind her, displaying an array of paints. We shared a mischievous grin before running to grab brushes on the counter to begin our work.

During the next few months of school, Ashley and I became inseparable. After bio, she would show me a new part of the school, and then we’d retreat into the art room until the latest bus left the school. One day, I missed my stop and she offered to bring me to her home.

As we descended the school bus to the path leading up to her house, Ashley’s steps faltered. The spasmodic staccato of her gait indicated a desire to retreat, but she continued dragging her feet forward. Gingerly, Ashley slipped her key into the front door and twisted, her movements growing more frantic as the key didn’t budge. As our eyes slid up the length of the door, we found a pair of wide eyeballs staring back: jiggling in their sockets like boiled eggs. The door crashed open, revealing a hulking man.

“You’re late,” he spat. “Who’s this?” he demanded. “Do you want her to see your tank, too?”

Ashley’s eyes darted back at me. “N-no,” she stuttered. “But —”

Feeling the sudden pressure in my bladder, I blurted if I could use the restroom. The man took a reluctant step back, pointing directions to the nearest restroom.

While washing my hands, I jolted from a loud crash. Glancing out from the narrow door slit, I gazed in awe at her tank — it dominated her room, spanning its length and rising halfway up the dimly-lit wall. Mr. Gong loomed like an apparition, his hands spread out over the lid while a woman — I assumed Mrs. Gong— lurked from afar. Beneath it, fluorescent lights cast a gradient of translucent shadows across the carpeted floor.

“Open your gills,” he demanded. The solution within shook from the impact of his baritone. That’s when I noticed Ashley clinging beneath the lid, still as a stone. Her hair drifted from the clips in her hair, unveiling five long knife wounds. They weren’t gills, really. They were dormant, premature, sleeping.

Ashley’s huge, saucer-like eyes blinked frantically in the tank, growing scarlet from the solution. She cupped her hands around her neck in a strained attempt to breathe. Her skin was wrinkled and pale, and I knew she hadn’t evolved, not like the boy I’d seen grow in the tank. Her very anatomy protested against the unrealistic expectations weighing down on her.

I felt my legs wind like springs, ready to pounce, when I found Ashley …morphing. A film glazed over her eyes, and a sense of calm pulled over her face like a new skin, her breath sputtering from the gills on the sides of her head. I could see her new self bursting to the surface.

My gaze flicked to her mother. Her eyes glinted, nails digging into her palms. Her jaw shifted as her teeth ground beneath her skin. But she didn’t move.

Sitting cross-legged with my back absorbing the cool of the tank, I waited for my friend as her parents left. “That’s such a weird decoration for a shark,” I mumbled, surveying a likely self-painted Eiffel Tower mural with plastic jewels plastered in glitter-glue.

I wiped the thought away as clumps of water tumbled and plopped to the floor from Ashley’s hair, which was tousled like kelp. I glanced at Ashley, half expecting an empty shell where a girl used to be. She asked: “Did you finish the bio lab?”

I shook my head.

After the accidental encounter, I sat sheepishly with the Gong family and pretended Ashley hadn’t been struggling in frigid waters for the past hour. Her mother conjured an entire instant Italian feast, complete with a baked Costco pizza sprinkled with pre-marinated tomatoes and anchovies. Making conversation, Mrs. Gong asked which APs I was taking, what I scored on the SATs, and what tank model I kept at home. While I obediently listed off my APs, I caught Mrs. Gong side-eyeing her daughter.

“Ashley should’ve taken more AP classes,” she murmured.

After that day, I felt a different energy emanating from Ashley. In contrast to her calm, deadly presence underwater, above land, she became anxiety incarnate. In class, her knee sporadically bounced beneath her desk, and her expressions became tight and twitchy. Her usually clean-brushed hair and mascara-swept lashes were replaced with tousled hair and dry, red eyes.

During the AP Biology test the next week, I discovered the root of the problem.

Silence amplified the pulsing of asynchronized clocks: analog clocks, digital clocks. The clicking of pens and the bobbing of knees.

In my peripheral vision, Ashley hurriedly surveyed the classroom and shakily copied down the answers from a hidden slip of paper, almost dropping her pen before stopping it in its path with a loud smash.

She hyperventilated as if she didn’t know the next time she would come up for air. A student complained of the noise as Ashley began to cry.

By wearing a skin she didn’t fit into, Ashley was beginning to slip. And she wasn’t the only one.

Students at school gasped for air without being underwater. If they weren’t focusing, pure oxygen sputtered through their collapsed gills, and their eyes swam like whirlpools from suffocation. Their legs wobbled like vestigial structures.  Each night, they typed away at their computers as if working were the only thing keeping them afloat — keeping them from drowning.  After all, they’re sharks, I thought.

During lunch, I mustered the courage to warn Ashley.

“Hey, Ashley, I’m worried for you,” I breathed. “Cheating isn’t fair to anyone else, or yourself, either.”

“Mind your own business,” snapped Ashley. Everyone else at the table went silent, and I sunk into my chair as if tethered to an anchor.

I should’ve noticed already: the power dynamic between friends, the utilitarian approach to weighing and manipulating relationships. Here, friends were like means to an end: the Future Connection, the Homework Helper, the Popularity Booster. In the way some students stole college portfolios, essays, personas — and yet no one was speaking out. In this symbiotic web of manipulated relationships, I had committed a blunder and tumbled through the cracks.

Success is king here, I thought, and everything else follows.

“Let’s calm down,” chirped Aria with her perfectly symmetrical, plastic smile. It was the same one others wore when anticipating the results of a contest or test. Wishing for your undoing. After all, success is relative to the failure of others.

From then on, I built a mental cocoon distancing myself from my peers. It was a simple feat — even the texture of their skin pricked like tiny teeth called placoid scales. As if I had the electroreceptor organs of a shark, I easily maneuvered the subtle shifts in the atmosphere through the pores of my skin. I found that the longer I stayed, however, the more I fell prey to the siren song of a completely self-centered world devoid of ethics.  If dishonesty pays, I thought, then what’s stopping me from doing the same?

When I returned home that day, my parents were waiting for me with a tank of their own.

“Of course, there’s no pressure to use it,” Dad insisted. “It’s completely up to— ”

“But we highly recommend it,” Mom interrupted. She paused. “No pressure, of course.”

I took note of the strong recommendation and bit back my disgust. Acid reflux lurched against the roof of my mouth.  Living in a tank isn’t living, I thought unconvincingly. Was I really giving in? No — you’ll forget to breathe. You’ll lose yourself, the way Ashley did. And that boy. And countless others.

Back at school, the speakers crackled while requesting a moment of silence.  Amanda Green, they said, cause of death — to be determined. Discovered with pills scattered around her body.

Everyone knows why she passed, I realized in the way their beady eyes remained dry, without a hint of moisture. Jordan scrolled through Instagram while the homeroom teacher, Mrs. Lyon squeezed her palms together in prayer. I closed my eyes and tried fruitlessly to conjure the girl I had never heard of until her death. I wondered if she was the type to hide gills behind strands of hair or flash them like medallions of war. I wondered which tank model she used.

I imagined Amanda Green, sprawled on the carpeted floor, pills tumbling into the crevices in her throat. I saw her gasping for air, clutching her collarbone as her gills heaved into overdrive. Her ghostly hands caressed my skin as phantom pains, and she seeped like stinging seawater into the cuts in my skin.

I gasped. How was I to survive in this ecosystem that cast aside those who couldn’t adapt?

My knees buckled as my fear grew into a desperate cry for survival. Like a taut violin string ready to snap, my body was on the brink of bursting open.

In my room, I took a step back, watching the tank with tired, weary eyes. Surprisingly, I didn’t recall the memories of Ashley and the boy, nearly drowning in their respective green tanks. Instead, I pictured:

Mom, massaging lotion into her palms, cracked dry like asphalt after a long day at the nursery.

Dad, blue light sinking into the furrows of his forehead as he typed in the kitchen with the lights off to allow my sister and me a good night’s sleep.

Mom and Dad, sacrificing everything for my success. My eyes swam.

The realization crashed into me like a tidal wave: I would become a shark for them. But did they truly comprehend the sort of monster their daughter would become?

I collapsed back onto my mattress, eyes glued to the tank. They lingered there until the lights faded.

Today, I woke to the groan of a tank filling with water. The cadencial drip drip of water leaking from the faucet resembled an elegy. I rested my fingertips on the edge of the tank and peered down at my distorted reflection. With an eerie sense of calm, I stripped off my clothes and slid beneath the water. I surrendered to the cool liquid and let it consume me. Now, at the base of the tank, I watch my reflection in a trance. The gentle ripple of the surface refracts light to form patterns across my skin, intertwining like bodies rhythmically collapsing into each other. The ambient noise of the outside world ceases to be comprehensible; waves of sound thumping against a barricade of glass.

I have gills, I think. My smile: perfectly symmetrical, all lips. My eyes: bloodshot and glazed over. I chuckle, and air bubbles scramble to the surface. Was I expecting to see something new hatch from the skin I’ve concocted for myself?

The reflective sides of the glass mirror each other and multiply my image to infinitudes. It looks like a time vortex or a pathway to another dimension. My future has never felt so infinite, so tangible as it does encased in a tank conceived of glass. The water doesn’t unlatch my skin or reveal anything new; instead, it cradles my every curve and corner in a fluid embrace.

Always swimming, swimming from my own blood.

I don’t want to stop.

In my town, children click their mechanical pencils, scroll through Instagram, stare at their reflections on dark tank surfaces. Here, children forget to breathe, forgo sleep, grow skin like sandpaper.

And like many places, our town trades our present for the future.

Doesn’t yours?

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