Author: Post Road

ART
Ghosts — Roycer

FICTION
Travel, Travel — Wayne Conti
The Last Field — Colin Fleming
Goddess — Mary Granfield
Sick — Colter Jackson
Sad in New York — Elise Juska
Death of a Daughter-in-Law — Judith Lichtendorf
Way of the Dog — Douglas Silver
Mermaid — Gregory Spatz
Renunciation — Diane Yatchmenoff
Poker — Trevor Creighton
Midday Clusters — Casey Haymes

NONFICTION
Anchored — Rachel Fleishman
Hodads in Wonderland — Phillip Hurst
On Inis Mór — Helen Sitler
Shortly Before the First Time My Nephew Went to Jail +
One of My Cousin’s Photos from The War + Dang It +
Ordinary Exchange — Nance Van Winckel
Adult Education — Brandi Handley
Dalinian Triangle — Jeremy Klemin
Middle Passages — Reverie Koniecki
New Year’s Day — Helena Rho
Sticks and Stones — John Wamsted

POETRY
Sabbath + I will not be embalmed and placed behind
an iron gate — Kaitlyn Airy
State fair + “Diadems–drop–” — Lauren Hilger
Frugality — Mark Halliday
The Light the Light the Light the Light (One) + The Light
the Light the Light the Light (Two) — Margaret Yapp
The Butterfly House + Climate Change — Adam Scheffler
The First Aerial Bombardment — Serhiy Zhadan (Translated from
the Ukrainian by Ilya Kaminsky and Katie Farris)
The Correct Approach — Regina Derieva (Translated from
the Russian by Katie Farris and Ilya Kaminsky)
[Night. Street. Lamp. Drugstore] — Aleksandr Blok (Translated from
the Russian by Katie Farris and Ilya Kaminsky)
Infrared — David M. Sheridan
The Pond + Origins and Forms: Eight Sijos — Sarah Audsley
A Habit from Tikrit + Fleeing Never-Pleasure Island — Gordon Kippola
Our Friend Karl — Mark DeFoe
Deepfake Ashbery — Benjamin Aleshire
This is the Light — Carl Phillips

GUEST FOLIO
Edited by Christopher Boucher
The Speed of Living + Mother, False — Tara Isabel Zambrano
I Love You, Joe Ceravolo + Sweet Venus + Feldspar — Dan Chelotti
How Do You Roll + I’m Still a Little Sassy — Kim Chinquee
The House — Guillermo Stitch

RECOMMENDATIONS
On ONE HUNDRED YEARS OF SOLITUDE — Richard Z. Santos
Brandon Hobson: The Cherokee Novelist Who Quietly Kicked
Off the Fifth Wave in Native American Fiction — Erika T. Wurth
Camellia-Berry Grass’s HALL OF WATERS — Elizabeth Deanna Morris Lakes
Joy Priest’s HORSEPOWER — Chet’la Sebree

New Year’s Day

Helena Rho

Staring at the peeling floral wallpaper in my dimly lit kitchen, I feel the first regret of the New Year. It is noon, January 1, 2003. I am hosting a Korean New Year’s banquet, and my sisters and their families will be here in an hour. I wonder why I chose to do this: this meal, this year.

            I walk across the white and navy blue ceramic tile floor, chipped in so many places that I lament, yet again, the fact that I haven’t replaced it. I swing open a creaky cabinet door and extract the largest pot I own. As I fill it with water, I stare with dismay at the stained enamel sink, no longer a pristine white. I switch on the bulb above the grimy, formerly white range stuck in an awkward corner of the kitchen. The light flickers. I hold my breath. The weak, yellowing halo stays on.

            Although we have spoken for many years about gathering for a traditional Korean New Year’s celebration, this year will be the first. If we had a brother, the jangsohn, we would be going to his house because it would fall to his wife to cook and host the meal. Instead, my sisters and I remain in the shadow of the missing son. My sisters and I all live in the metropolitan New York area. But, in two months, I am following my husband to Pittsburgh, to advance his career.

            Still, I regret the invitation I impulsively extended to my sisters when I saw them over the Christmas holidays. Christmas matters because of our acquired families, our children. But for my sisters and me, it is Seollal or New Year Day’s that has resonance. When we lived in Korea, we celebrated Seollal on the first day of the lunar calendar, like millions of Koreans on the peninsula. But now, like other Koreans in the diaspora, away from our homeland, we celebrate Seollal on the first day of the solar calendar.

            I have already made pots of steamed white rice and mounds of jhap chae—clear vermicelli noodles sautéed with beef, mushrooms, onions, carrots, spinach—and small, assorted side dishes called banchan. I have also cheated and catered gimbap, Korean cooked sushi rolls, and mandu teugim, fried pork dumplings. But I haven’t started on the tteok guk, rice cake soup.

            Tteok guk is the soul of Seollal. And there is an art to cooking tteok guk. A deceptively simple dish, to get it right one has to be vigilant and patient. Tteok or rice cake, the heart of the soup, is capricious. Cook the sliced white ovals too long and they turn to mush, cook them too briefly and they retain the consistency of rocks. The list of ingredients is spare: beef broth, rice cake, eggs, scallion, sesame seeds. But it is the proportion of each component in relationship to the others that is important. And the order, in which the five elements are combined, is crucial to the taste.

            Start with the broth, and then slide in slivers of rice cake. Eggs, whisked with a little salt, have to be stirred in before the scallions, or else the eggs clump around the minced green onions, creating chunks, not wisps. Crushed sesame seeds go in last, otherwise the soup tastes burnt. Sometimes, mandu or meat dumplings can be added. But that changes the soup, and then it’s called tteok mandu guk—rice cake and dumpling soup. My sister Sophia prefers tteok mandu guk. But not me. I am a purist at heart. Any other time of year I will eat tteok mandu guk gladly, but not New Year’s Day. Because Seollal is always about tteok guk.

            When my sisters and I were growing up, whether it was in Kampala or Petersburg or New Jersey, my mother made rice cake soup every New Year’s Day. My mother used to say: “You can’t grow another year older and wiser if you don’t eat tteok guk on Seollal.” New Year’s Day, not New Year’s Eve, is the time of celebration for Koreans. It is our Thanksgiving. We reunite with family members and feast on an elaborate meal, prepared by the host family. There is no such thing as a potluck dinner for Koreans. Guests are not expected to bring anything other than the honor of their presence. After every grandmother, uncle, older sister, and youngest cousin have gorged themselves on the plethora of flavorful dishes, the children perform a time-honored tradition called sebae, in front of each adult. Boys bow, girls curtsey. And the children must recite a specific phrase: “In the New Year, may you receive much good fortune.” In exchange for these symbolic gestures of good will, the children are rewarded with cash. When we were young, my sisters and I competed to see who could win the most money.

            In my kitchen, the maple cutting board clatters on the warped and slanted counter as I slice beef into slender two-inch strips to make broth. Blood oozes along the grain of cut wood and drips onto blue-speckled Formica. I think: I should have bought three pounds of beef, instead of two.

            My sisters are petite women: none of them crest the five foot barrier. In pictures of the four of us, at five foot two inches, I am the bump that breaks the straight line. But their husbands are all tall, and my oldest sister’s husband is a big man. Susan, already twenty pounds past her ideal body weight, tries to keep up with her husband in the amount of food consumed. As though eating were a competition. Their only son at age three can eat at a pace which will no doubt match his father’s very soon. Rather than being disturbed by this potential problem, Susan is proud of her son. As a pediatrician, I feel duty bound to warn her against what I believe is permissive parenting. But despite my supposed expertise in childrearing, Susan dismisses me. She tells me that unconditional love is good for a child. She says she wishes she got even a drop from our mother. Susan is a clinical psychologist, who now devotes her life to her son and has not worked outside of the home since his birth.

            I sigh and press my lips into a thin line, as the stainless steel pot squeaks on the uneven surface of the old, outdated cooking range. Dense constellations of bubbles erupt on the surface of the water. Steam rises and soon obscures the faded blue flowers on the worn wallpaper, coming undone at the seams.

            My sister Sophia, older than me by two years, has no patience for Susan’s parenting. She tells her seven-year-old daughter and four-year-old son that she runs a boot camp. Sophia is all about scheduling. She is so organized and determined that she involves both her children in a frenzy of activity, six out of the seven days of the week. They race from school to the ice-skating rink, to piano lessons, to soccer games. I tell her to slow down or she will run herself and her children ragged. But she quotes from the Bible instead: “Idle hands are the devil’s workshop.” Sophia has rheumatoid arthritis, but works full-time as a pharmacist, volunteers in her children’s classrooms, and flatly refuses to stop the frenetic pace of her life.

            I drop shreds of beef into scalding water and add dashida seasoning. I swirl the stew meat around. Clear water clouds into broth. I worry: Will there be enough?

            My younger sister, Clara, doesn’t understand any of our arguments. She and her fiancé live in Manhattan, work miserable hours as attorneys, and get take-out most nights, unless they actually go out to a restaurant. Clara is childless and not about to change that any time soon. I tell her that thirty-three is not so young, but she rolls her eyes and tells me that she has plenty of time to have children. Someday. She disdains the advice of a sister, older than her by five years, as out of touch: “Why should I have children?” Probably a legacy of being raised by our mother.

            Paralyzed by anger and guilt, my sisters and I avoid the subject of our mother. We cannot all agree on how to deal with her willful isolation and increasingly erratic behavior, and it is easier not to argue. But we are united in our failure. We all married non-Korean men, a moral crime in my mother’s eyes. Even Susan’s husband, the Chinese man among the white brothers-in-law, is not good enough. Two of the brothers-in-law are physicians and one-yet-to-be is a lawyer, professions my mother considers successful. But that is still not good enough.

            My mother remained so opposed to this notion of tainting thousands of years of pure Korean blood that she did not attend Susan’s wedding. The first wedding among the four sisters. Although she was present at my nuptials, she came only grudgingly. I remember pleading with her while her face remained unmoved, as smooth as alabaster. “How could you do this to me?” she said. It was the first time in my life I disobeyed my mother’s wishes. She did not attend the Rehearsal Dinner, the night before my wedding, and until I saw her seated in the front pew of the poorly lit St. Catherine’s Catholic Church, I did not know she would come. Of course, I could not know the price I would pay in marrying an emotionally and physically abusive man.

            Susan bitterly points out that our mother is too much of a snob to have missed my wedding—who would take the credit for me becoming a doctor and then crowning my achievement by marrying another? Certainly not my father, another failure in my mother’s eyes, and not just because they are divorced. To say that divorce is rare in Korea is an understatement. Koreans do not get divorced, especially those in the upper class like my parents. My mother still hasn’t told her family fourteen years after her divorce, and she probably never will. Because of her overwhelming sense of shame, a character trait I inherited. She rarely visits Korea, and her mother and sister last visited when I was a child. She no longer speaks to her family on the telephone. The last time she got a phone call, it was news that her father had died. So she writes letters, blue folded notes with “aerogram” printed on them. I imagine she can create a parallel universe on those thin azure sheets: one in which she is happy, one in which her family does not have to worry about her.

            In the tight confines of my dreary kitchen, the fragrance of meat rising in temperature fills the air. The blade of my knife falls across the bodies of the scallions, releasing a bitter yet refreshing scent. I finish the rest of my mis-en-place: prying apart oval slices of rice cake, resisting the starch sticking them together like glue; cracking open large brown eggs into a white bowl and whisking them with a little salt; grinding sesame seeds in the ceramic mortar and pestle. The nutty, nostalgic aroma of crushed seeds bathes my nostrils, reminding me of all the meals my mother cooked during my childhood.

            Until my children were born, I did not know how to make tteok guk. Growing up, my mother shooed me away from the kitchen whenever I asked to help. She would say, “You need to study. You are going to do important things when you are a doctor. Cooking is easy. I can teach you that later.” Except later never came. To learn how to cook Korean food, I bought a cookbook written in English by a Korean-American, who interspersed her mother’s recipes with personal family stories—about her grandmother, a renowned chef, in what is now North Korea, and her mother, the primary bread earner, struggling to start a restaurant in the East Village in New York. Estranged from my mother, I can’t call her to ask if she uses more soy sauce and less sugar in her bulgogi than the author suggests. Or if she adds more scallions and fewer sesame seeds to her tteok guk. I have to rely on my memories of tasting her soup. With the guide of a cookbook, I am trying to recreate my mother’s tteok guk.

            Like a cyclone of motion, my six-year-old daughter bursts into the cramped kitchen. “Mommy, Mommy, you have to help me!” She careens around, making miniature circles on the ceramic tile floor.

            “Erin, please, stop the noise.”

            She fights to contain her energy, but her arms flail with each word. “I need your help putting on my Korean princess costume!”

            “Do you have to wear that today?” I am referring to the Korean hanbok or traditional dress worn by women in Korea for special occasions. I had bought a miniature, pink and white one, fashioned like a Joseon Dynasty princess, for my daughter as a Halloween costume.

            “Yes, yes, yes!” Her eyes are wide, her head nodding vigorously. “I’ll get more money if I’m dressed like a Korean!”

            “I don’t think your cousins are coming dressed in hanboks. Can’t you just put on your regular clothes?” I try to reason with her.

            “No!” She is impatient with my lack of understanding. “Mommy, please, let me wear it!”

            I am defeated. “Okay, okay. Just bring it down. I will help you.”

            She thunders upstairs, her shout of thanks echoing in the stairwell.

            I remember dressing up in my mother’s hanboks as a child on New Year’s Day, to do my sebae with my sisters. I can’t blame my daughter for wanting to do the same.


“Why didn’t you start the tteok guk sooner?” Sophia asks the moment she steps into my kitchen.

            My sisters have arrived in a flurry of noise and activity, one after another. Their children play with mine downstairs in the family room while they set two tables—putting out the fine bone china, glasses, silver chopsticks for the adults’ table and the paper bowls, plastic cups, and wood chopsticks for the children’s table. I hear snatches of my sisters’ chatter and laughter. One of them scolds a child not to run in the living room. One of them tells me that the fried pork dumplings are delicious, while another sister wanders into the kitchen, chewing on seaweed-covered gimbap filled with rice, beef, spinach, daikon, egg, and carrots.

            I dip my Korean spoon into simmering soup and take a cautious taste. The beef broth has infused heartiness into the rice cake ovals; the scallions are bright and tangy; the eggs are light and delicate; the crushed sesame seeds have been absorbed into nuttiness. And the slices of rice cake are soft, but structured. All five ingredients have melded, and harmony has emerged. I ladle the soup into round celadon bowls. We sit down to eat.

            “Next year we should have it in my house. My kitchen is bigger. And it will be renovated,” Sophia says.

            I nod.

            “Why didn’t you put mandu in the tteok guk? You know, it would taste better that way,” Sophia says, wanting her dumplings.

            “Because I didn’t want to,” I snap. Immediately, I regret my curtness. The new year will not bode well if we start with a fight. “Tteok guk is what we always have on New Year’s Day,” I amend, passing out gim—roasted and salted seaweed squares—to crumble into the soup.

            “It’s boring. It would taste better with mandu,” Sophia insists.

            “Tteok guk is comfort food.” I bite on a sliver of rice cake, savoring the firm yet yielding center and the play of flavors and textures—so simple, yet so complex.

            Sophia shrugs. “Whatever.”

            She will never understand my love of tteok guk.

            Immediately after the meal, our children clamor to do their sebae. We decide that each adult couple will take turns sitting on the sofa while all the children bow and curtsey together. That way, the children will prostrate themselves four times, instead of eight. Sophia and Clara give one dollar to each child. I do the same. But not Susan. She distributes twenty-dollar bills in shiny red envelopes. The children shriek with delight at their windfall. When the adults look at her askance, she says that it will be Chinese New Year in a matter of weeks, and we should celebrate that, too.

            Clara, characteristically quiet through most of the chaos, approaches me with her coat draped over her arm. She intends to go into the office, billing more hours even on this holiday.

            “Why don’t you stay for coffee?” I say, hoping to extend her visit.

            She brushes me off, as expected. “I can’t. I’m going to trial next week.”

            I am resigned. “It’s good to see you. Let’s get together for dinner in the city before I move.”

            She shakes her head. “I don’t know how long the trial will be.”

            We still have time. You can’t squeeze me in? Instead, I just nod.

            But Clara hesitates in her haste to leave my house. She slowly pulls on her coat, adjusts her scarf, carefully inserts each finger into her gloves.

            I wait.

            “I got a letter from Mom,” she says, her words rushed.

            I close my eyes and hold my breath. When I open my eyes, I see Clara staring at the broken tiles in my kitchen floor.

            “What does she want?” I ask.

            “She needs money.”

            “What else is new?” I say.

            “She’s getting worse. She used to ask for a couple of hundred dollars every few months, and I would just send a check. But this time, she wrote me some story about an emerald that is worth $30,000. But she will sell it to me for $20,000.”

            Clara speaks softly to try to hide the fact that she is crying, but her tears fall faster. I try to put my arm around her shoulder, but she rebuffs me. I understand. Sometimes, one touch and I come unraveled.

            “It’s not your fault. You know she tried that with me. When I told her I couldn’t buy the emerald, she stopped speaking to me. She moved on to Sophia then Susan and now you,” I say.

            “What do I write back? I know she needs money, but $20,000! If she needs that kind of money, she needs to sell her house.” Clara is literally wringing her hands.

            “The roof is falling in. But she clings to that house. Insisting it will be worth a million dollars in a few years. How do you reason with a delusional woman?” I say, rehashing old ground.

            “If only we could get her out of that house!” Clara twists her scarf into a knot.

            “We tried. We can’t,” I say softly.

            Silence and failure hang between us.

            Clara wipes away her tears, her mask back in place. “I have to go. I’ll call you about dinner.” She slips on her shoes and steps out the door.

            I lean the weight of my body against the worn floral wallpaper of the kitchen, rest my head on the wall. I want to close my eyes and go to sleep. Instead, I take a deep breath. I go back to the party.

            My children and their cousins are running around my living room, shouting with joy, dropping crumbs carelessly. I do not curb their enthusiasm.

            “I guess they’re having a good time. But they’re making too much noise.” Sophia says, as she tries to rein in her children, with no success.

            “Leave them alone. You’re too uptight,” Susan says.

            “No, Sue, just because your kid is out of control doesn’t mean my kids should be too. My children know what is expected of them,” Sophia says, as she pointedly stares at Susan.

            “Okay, you guys, no fighting,” I interrupt before things escalate.

            Susan and Sophia live in the same development of cookie-cutter houses, only blocks apart. They rely on each other to pick up their kids from school, car pool to activities, and trade babysitting. Most of the time it works. But they clash in their methods of discipline, and their children play together often. I frequently get complaints from one about the other, especially in the aftermath of a battle. Like our mother, they haven’t made close friends, maybe because they have each other and perhaps feel they don’t need others.

            “Do you remember the last New Year’s we spent in Korea?” Susan suddenly asks, her voice wistful. “It was the last time we saw our cousins.”

            Her yearning is too much to bear. I look away.

            On Seollal, 1972, my parents, sisters, and I lived in Seoul. We took a taxi to a relative’s house in the suburbs of the city. I can’t remember which one. I think it must have been someone on my mother’s side of the family, but I could be mistaken since my father’s family is from Seoul and my mother’s family is from Gwangju. By the time we arrived, groups of people occupied every room. My sisters and I went to play with other children, plotting ways to get more money from the adults when time came for the bows and curtseys. We were allowed to eat everywhere and run while doing it, something quite unusual in our everyday lives. I remember a whirlwind of sound—adults laughing, children yelling, music playing. I remember my mother happy. At the end of the night, I was the child who made the most money. I paid for our taxi ride home. I was proud of my accomplishment. I couldn’t stop smiling as I sat, among my sisters, looking out at the lights illuminating Seoul. I thought: what a wonderful end to the first day of the new year.

            After my sisters go home, I am left with the remnants of tteok guk. The broth has congealed from the starch of rice cake ovals, which are now bloated and misshapen. Beef strips, shriveled and discolored, stick out of the soup like brown twigs. Dried, yellow egg tendrils cling to the sides of the stainless steel pot. I pick up the dirty dishes from the dining room table and take them into my woeful kitchen. The peeling wallpaper, the mismatched melamine cabinets, the stained sink are thrown into sharp relief by the dismal lighting.

            I tell myself that I am glad I saw my sisters before I go through yet another disorienting shift in geography. But I have to stop myself from dropping to my knees on that broken tile floor. I want to mourn the girls that my sisters and I used to be. I want to mourn the woman my mother was. But I do not cry. Instead, I wash the plates, the pots, the chopsticks. I erase the detritus of a misguided meal.

            An opportunity was lost that New Year’s Day. I still go over the events of that day and wonder what I could have done differently. How I could have convinced my sister Clara to stay for coffee. How I could have persuaded my sisters to sit down and talk about our mother, to find ways to show her kindness and preserve her pride. So she wouldn’t feel shame in asking her daughters for help.

            I wonder if I could have changed what happened the following year. I wonder if I could have stopped my mother from trying to commit suicide.

Helena Rho, a former assistant professor of pediatrics, has practiced and taught at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, the Johns Hopkins Hospital, and the Children’s Hospital of Pittsburgh. Her work has appeared in Creative Nonfiction, Slate, Crab Orchard Review, Entropy, and Fourth Genre, among others. “New Year’s Day” is part of her memoir-in-essays, American Seoul.

Spaghettification

by Ali Raz

Spaghettification is a scientific word. It refers to the vertical stretching and horizontal compression of objects into long thin shapes (i.e. spaghetti) in a very strong non-homogeneous gravitational field. A black hole would generate such a field, for instance – and not much else. This means that the phenomenon is purely imaginary. It is a hypothetical. Even the name suggests this.

In 2018, researchers at the University of Turku claimed to have witnessed spaghettification. They wrote a paper about it. In this paper, they discussed having ‘seen’, via high-frequency radio waves, the debris of a shattered star. The star had been shattered upon contact with the gravitational field of a black hole. The star had been spaghettified.

In support of this, the researchers offered printed sheets of readings from their radio receivers.

A character is spaghettified in High Life. It happens towards the end. After she is harvested, impregnated, soaked in breast milk, nearly raped, slapped around, and called an insulting name – she offs herself by leaping into a black hole. She doesn’t leap exactly. What she does is, she hijacks a space craft (a small craft which one drives like a go-kart). She cracks the pilot over the head with a spade (the pilot’s brains splay out like intestines) and then makes away with the go-kart spaceship. At first she’s laughing. After all, she is where no one else had been before – an explorer, an adventurer. Then her face begins to change. The mouth is pulled to one side. The cheek to another. She makes grunting noises, like one exposed to great tearing pressure. Then her head explodes.

In the spaceship, they ate soft vegetable soups.

What is space? By rights, there are times when I doubt that it exists.

One gets lonely all alone. One gets lonelier than lymph, a vital fluid no one talks about.

I had been talking to my grandmother. Our conversation was enabled by globe-spanning satellite networks and regimes of power decades (and more) in the making.

Consider a song by Daft Punk. Put on their album RAM.

A violent storm begins, full of lightning and wind.

The visualizations of space in High Life are animated effects. Colored swirls and strobing lights stand in for things that can’t be said. These are cheap effects. They don’t connote (except to designate the unsaid). I much prefer an earlier move. There is a moment, very early in the film, when a character (a man named Monte, whom the others call a monk) drops a spanner from his perch atop the spaceship. He had been performing mechanical repairs, tightening lug nuts and such. Then he knocks, by mistake, a spanner off the side of the ship. He begins to lunge after it – then stops. The spanner falls an infinite fall. Slowly and steady, at one even rate, it falls into the unrelieved black. There is no depth to its fall. No background against which to sense it. It becomes, to the poor stricken character and also to us, as flat as a cardboard cutout, dimensionless as a video game. It is an effect of the mind to derealize what it can’t understand. And it can’t understand an object falling outside of time.

Sensations of scale.

The near-vertigo of scale.

A storm in space would be an invisible, battering, particulate wind.

I would eat an apple in it.

Drop the core down your rotten throat.

The girl I loved would not be here. She would not be anywhere at all.

Not in the gaps of each synapse, virulent and spreading, more motile than bacterial fins.

There are some people – some actors – who are, how should we say this, soaked in such charisma – such personal force – their aura is so reaching and strong – that the hand simply itches to photograph them. Even the camera wants it. The camera itself wants to film them.

Buster Keaton for instance, have you seen him? Getting repeatedly hit on the head with the spinning handle of a well. He doesn’t look like much. He looks like another grain of sand from the desert behind him.

Or Robin Williams. He is a better example. The flickering of that fluid, vital face.

High Life is less frightening than Solaris and less infinite. In its center is a specter of sex; this specter inaugurates, inside the film, another film.

The split of a schizo, hapless structure.

Or the passage, unmarked, of fear between my breath.

My teeth. Your hands.

My teeth, carious. My hands, removed by your sparkling blade.

Ali Raz is co-author, with Vi Khi Nao, of Human Tetris (2020, 11:11 Press), a kooky collection of sex ads. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in the LA Review of Books, The Believer, 3:AM Magazine, Tupelo Quarterly, Firmament, and elsewhere. Her first novella, Alien, comes out in Spring 2022 from 11:11 Press.

“up and down the ladder” by Robert Couse-Baker is licensed under CC BY 2.0

Sky, Ladder, Cow, Lantern, Lake, Flowers, Heaven

Shane Jones

From the novel Young Forest

The hotel PDC was found online for two hundred dollars off the original price. Melanie had celebrated with half a beer and then immediately felt guilty because she imagined the alcohol infusing with her breast milk and brain damaging Julian. In the room I stood looking at the massive sand colored tub before deciding to lay down in it to see how large it was compared to my body. I could easily fit seven of me inside it and I wondered at what size a bathtub becomes a hot tub, and laughed to myself, alone in the hotel room. It had no jets and finely detailed clawed feet, so technically it was a tub. The rest of the room was dark, eggshell white walls and maroon carpet with black diamond shapes along the edges. I couldn’t stop laughing at the size of the tub. Even when I checked in the hotel manager commented on the tubs, arrogantly stating they had the largest of any hotel on the East coast. But what about the West coast? I had asked. I stood with my bag in one hand and holding the card for Athena in the other. What about it? You said this hotel had the largest tubs on the East coast, which is an interesting thing to mention, you didn’t say it had the biggest tubs in the country, which I probably would have accepted, you said the East coast. I surprised myself by the way I was talking. Maybe Athena’s work was influencing me. Portland, Oregon, said the hotel manager. It’s called The Foxtrot, owned by my brother. He heard about the tubs here so he installed even bigger ones there. That’s crazy, I said. No it’s not. Brothers do that sort of thing. Any time we stayed in a hotel Melanie made sure the room had a tub. She would pay extra for one. I never used them until the hotel PDC, where I had to take a bath in the largest tub on the East coast, and besides, my legs hurt from walking all day; the stress of finding my brother and not hearing from Melanie was exhausting. The warmth of Athena’s sun was still in my stomach. After the tub was filled I climbed in and closed my eyes. Because of the size I kept sliding into the water. Even when I did go under my feet never touched the opposite side. Next to me were folded washcloths neatly stacked in a thick triangle labeled heaven cloths, and soaps labeled soothing stones, and a Velcro headrest labeled sky cloud that I attached behind me on the tub wall. I checked my phone and made sure the volume was on. Still nothing, and the worry I had earlier was surprisingly gone in the comfort of the tub. Since Julian’s birth I couldn’t remember the last time I slept more than an hour stretch—now my fatigue had maxed out. I thought I was going to fall asleep during the meditation, or maybe I had, I couldn’t remember. I had slept maybe twenty minutes on the train and had momentarily fallen asleep across the backseat of the cab. When I closed my eyes I immediately fell asleep and saw four treehouses in four trees, waking once because I thought I heard my phone vibrate. I reminded myself to call Melanie again when I woke up to tell her about my trip, how much stranger everything had become, but still no idea where Nick was. I would also call my father and let him talk about Horse, hoping he would talk about my brother or my mother and what she had done that day, but I knew he wouldn’t. He would discuss Horse and what he was fixing around the house. Finally, I let myself relax. I envisioned the field. I dreamt about the hotel I was currently inside of. Nothing was different in the dream, and I found myself inside the dream telling myself how boring the dream was with just me walking into the hotel, nodding to the manager in a BIG TUBS t-shirt, riding the elevator to the fourteenth floor, and walking into the room where I laughed uncontrollably at the tub. The dream didn’t feel like a dream because I could move around inside it, I knew it was a dream, I could experience it and I could make fun of it. I checked my phone again but still didn’t have any messages. An intense hunger—my stomach held an empty heat. In the hallway the lights were bright pink, the carpet sun yellow with skinny black stains, and every door to every room was open. Cats were passing between the rooms, and at the end of the hallway stood a horse, inferno red. As I walked, I looked into each room and found a new environment, a new setting. The cats similar to Horse moved around my legs and I sat down to pet them, letting their bodies slink under my hand before continuing on. In one room I stood at the doorway, the hallway light behind me bright pink, and viewed a wide field and a lake on the hotel window. In the lake was a floating cow and two people swimming with ropes, attempting to rescue it. They brought the cow to the shore under a sun seemingly made from construction paper, and the longer I watched, other details I realized were drawn, colored with crayon, cut from paper and childishly taped down at the corners. Someone had hole-punched the sky, making ovals of white light—it was more beautiful than real life. At the shore, a family of four walked into a dark transparent gas rising from the dead cow’s mouth. It formed a bag around them. Then the lake began to smear like brushed paint to the far right side over the trees outside the hotel window. The next room was much darker, but still held the appearance of something created from paper, pen, tape, crayon, and scissors—in the middle tree branches were mended in a triangular structure. The light in this room came from a pile of burning flowers at the top of the structure, and I was in there, climbing one side like a ladder. I stayed in this room until I reached the top where I began speaking at the fire. A man standing at the bottom of the structure, who had previously been motionless, turned and was sucked into the wall. The last room I had to get on my knees to be able to see what I was looking inside of it was so short, which was connected cabinets with children stuffed inside. I stuck my head in. I heard my mother and father in muted voices from above. Hunched over, my brother was in there, surrounded with papers he was furiously writing on, single words on pages reading: SKY, LADDER, COW, LANTERN, LAKE, FLOWERS, HEAVEN. When I crawled a little closer, I noticed the hiding cabinets were made of cardboard. How long I stayed in this room I’m not sure, easily much longer than the others, and as I stuck my head as far inside as possible, reading my brother’s papers, I tried to speak but what came out was an amphibian groan of hot air, and one of the cats, scared from the noise I had made, slipped past and over my brother’s lap who just kept writing the single words on entire pages, furiously flipping the pages. I continued down the hall with the cats following me, trying to see if one of them was Horse, they resembled her, but each time I looked closer a white spotted foot, clipped tail, one eye green the other blue would tell me it wasn’t her. I kept walking but it didn’t feel like I was walking, more like I was telling myself to walk, seeing myself walk, but not feeling it. At the end of the hallway the horse had been replaced by a man in hunting gear who wore a red hat low over his brow, a black flannel jacket thick with muscle, and from where his eyes sat in shadow two blue lines moved vertically off his jaw. A rifle was strapped to his back, but he wasn’t menacing, rather, I felt comfortable standing in front of him, so I asked if I could leave the dream and he said why, this is what you’ve always wanted, and I said what I wanted was to see Julian, I couldn’t remember his face, and the hunter raised his arms—I braced for him to hit me—and his fists came thrusting downward through a pool of water.

Shane Jones is the author of six books, including Light Boxes (Penguin 2010), Daniel Fights a Hurricane (Penguin 2012), Crystal Eaters (Two Dollar Radio 2014) and Vincent and Alice and Alice (Tyrant 2019). He lives in upstate New York. 

Medication

by Eric Buechel

Jesse was staring down at her when I walked into the room. His face looked puffy like he’d been crying. He leaned down, kissed his mother on the cheek, and whispered something I couldn’t hear.

            A picture of the two of them hung on a thin nail in the bedroom. His mom was wearing a white dress with tiny yellow tulips in the embroidery, holding Jesse’s hand. He was probably five or six in the picture, but I never asked about it since I didn’t want to upset him. It looked like they were at an Easter egg hunt at a church.

             The machines hummed. It reminded me of listening to the waves at the beach when I was younger. Monitors beeped and pulsed around the body, lighting up the bedroom. They diagnosed Jesse’s mom before I had met him in the seventh grade. When she stopped speaking or walking, they put her in a homecare bed to wait until she died. The room smelled sweet, like the bandages needed cleaning. It was a kind of smell you only know about when you’re around rotten skin.

            Jesse and I had been close for a while. My dad had died when I was eight, so it felt like we had something in common. My mom had a boyfriend right after Dad died. He was some type of artist. He built sculptures out of trash in the backyard, and I helped him pick out the right pieces from the neighbor’s garbage can. He let me sip his beer while I handed him cans and broken furniture bits that he balanced and fixed together with twine.

            “I can’t believe people toss this gold,” he’d say, marveling at the variety of artistic supplies he could scrounge. Sometimes, he snuck me R-rated movies to watch on the weekends that I wasn’t allowed to see. I still carried the pocket knife with me that he gave me for my 12th birthday. A few weeks later, he asked for it back while he was drunk, but I told him I lost it at the park. I liked him. He had another girlfriend in Seattle the whole time, and after my mom got pregnant with my sister, he moved away to live with her.

            Jesse put his hands underneath his mother’s torso and lifted her, rolling her over onto her side so the bedsores could breathe. She had that absent look in her eyes like she was looking at a car crash that had just happened and didn’t quite know how to react to it yet.

            Jesse put his face in his hand for a second and looked like he might be crying. I wanted to reach over and put my arm around him. I looked at his long hands and thought about holding one of them in mine for a while. It doesn’t have to mean anything about me, really, I thought. It could just be something friends do.

            I pushed that feeling out of my mind, terrified at what it might signify, and clenched my jaw slightly. Jesse was just rubbing his eyes. He sighed a little, then looked over at me and gestured with his head at the medicine shelf.

            The insurance sent the money to her boyfriend, Marty, who lived in the master bedroom. He spent a lot of time with his new girlfriend, drinking in the kitchen. Whatever homecare he did for Jesse’s mom, I never saw it happen. He seemed too angry to be a nurse, but most adults seemed angry to me then.

            The shelf had stacks of prescription pill bottles neatly arranged on it. We looked through them to see if there was any left to steal. We each picked up the different containers and shook them, hoping for a rattle, but they were all empty except for a stool softener and a blood pressure medication.

            “She’s supposed to get a new prescription delivered sometime soon, I guess,” Jesse said. I don’t think Jesse felt good about it, but his mom hadn’t spoken in so long that he probably just wanted to get high to forget about her. He told me once he talks to her all the time since she’s his only real family. Marty probably wished Jesse wasn’t around at all. I only ever saw them yelling at each other.

            “Let’s go,” I said. Jesse turned around and shut the light off. The glow from the machines made the dark of the room seem possessed.

            As we shut the door, we heard Marty’s new Charger pull into the driveway. He’d put on an aftermarket muffler when he got it. It made a loud gurgle that echoed off the garage door while he was in the driveway. Jesse told me that the neighbors had complained about the noise, and then Marty had threatened to break their car’s windows with a golf club. He got pretty wild after his shift at the hospital; so, usually I timed my visits so he wouldn’t be there. We snuck quietly into the kitchen.

            “I don’t want you to be bringing people in that room,” Marty said, catching us just as we made it to the sliding glass door to the backyard. He slurred a bit. His red hair was unkempt and pointed in different directions, making him look like a broken clown.

            “It’s just Gabe,” Jesse said.

            “I don’t care who it is,” Marty said. “Did you check the mail today?”

            “No. I mean, I did, but it didn’t come yet,” Jesse said while he inched us closer to the door.

            “Shit.” He looked tired with his nurse scrubs dirty and covered in wrinkles. The hospital shift must’ve been busy. He opened the freezer and brought out some vodka with ice caked around the bottom of the bottle. “I know you’ve been stealing those pills.” He poured the liquor into a small, blue-colored plastic tumbler. She needs them, not you, you little bastard.” Jesse didn’t respond. Marty got a big jug of cranberry juice out of the refrigerator for his cocktail. On the fridge door was a picture of girlfriend Alexis that he must’ve recently put up.

            “What the hell’s that up for?” Jesse said.

            Marty stirred the drink with his finger then licked it clean. He stared back at us. His eyes were glassy, and I knew we had to leave. 

            Jesse got as mad as Marty sometimes, almost like they were related, and I could tell then he wanted to scream. I took his arm and led him outside before Marty could hit him. We walked out and grabbed the bikes in the grass of the backyard. I tried to catch Jesse’s eyes to tell what he was thinking, but he wouldn’t look at me.

            Some of the trees were already beginning to shed. Our bikes left a divot in the thin pile of leaves as we rode past the boundary that separates the east side of town from the west. Susan’s ice cream stand was open until dark, which still gave us some time. I looked up along the hillside and the bridge where cables of light came through the smatter of dark clouds, brightening up the golden edges of maple leaves as they turned yellow. I could feel the first real edge of cold in the air. It burned on the low end of my breath when I took a deeper one.

            Jesse rode ahead of me like he usually did, leaning back on the bike’s seat and coasting casually down the hill. When he was far enough in front, he took his feet off the pedals and spread them out in a V shape. I pumped in a low gear, trying to catch up, but he was older than me and encouraged with the ropy muscles adolescence had thrust on him overnight. As I finally inched closer, I could see he was smiling in the breeze of the ride. When he smiled, his cheeks bunched up around the speckles of acne scars. They were healing purple craters all down from his temple to chin. I couldn’t help but smile too. I know everyone thinks you should be ashamed of scars like that, but I always thought they looked nice on Jesse. He had a happy face, even if his life at home wasn’t any good.

            Mine wasn’t good either, but I guess that’s the age we were. Looking at the other kids in our class, by comparison, made me clench my teeth, but I don’t know if their life was any happier than Jesse’s or mine. It just looked that way.

            Once the hill curved back up, we pushed back into our pedals and towards the bridge where the tents were. Ever since I could remember, the parking lot near the bridge’s underbelly had been a campsite for the homeless people in town. Faded blue and red second-hand tents formed a makeshift village. Scattered trash and panhandling signs had spilled into the street near the camp. We weaved around the plastic cups, plastic bags, and broken needles, then up towards Susan’s.

            Jesse got a blackberry milkshake, which I decided against since my mom always told me that the fruit flavors were all artificial, and I got a butterscotch one with a scoop of peanut butter mixed in for fifty cents extra. We walked our bikes and shakes to the curb and sat where we could oversee the parking lot. The shakes were too thick to pull through a straw, so we waited for them to melt. Jesse took the top off and poked at the ice cream with his finger to get it to thaw quicker.

            A man was picking up cigarettes on the other end of the parking lot. He pinched them and poured the tobacco out in tiny flakes into a plastic shopping bag. He was shaking a bit; he looked sick with something.

            “Hell,” Jesse said,” taking a labored sip from his shake,” I feel kinda bad for him. I should just give him one, huh?”

            “Where’d you get smokes?” I said, my ears tingled a little.

            “Marty had them, only have three.”

            When Marty was drinking, Jesse would sometimes pocket a few of his cigarettes. Marty usually just figured he’d smoked them himself unless Jesse got greedy and took the whole pack.

            “Here,” Jesse handed me one and walked over to the man. 

            I lit mine immediately and took a drag before taking a sip of my shake. The salt and the sweet, all mixed in with the taste of smoke, gave me a quick headrush that felt nice. I kicked a couple of brown and golden leaves next to my feet that were piling up and rotting in the parking lot. It was too cold for ice cream, but I was still warm from the ride, my sweat cooling the fabric on the back of my shirt. Jesse handed the guy a cigarette. The man tore off the filter and lit it right away with a book of matches. I could see them talking about something, but I was too light-headed and enjoying myself to care. For a moment, I felt content. They walked back over. Jesse was grinning with his cheeks all wrinkled up with scars.

            “Gabe, this Isaac,” he pointed at the man, “Isaac said he’ll buy us beer. What kind of cash you got?” I had exactly six dollars. Jesse, for some reason, had ten.

            “Perfect,” Jesse said as I handed him the money. The bills were damp from my sweat since I didn’t have a wallet, and I felt embarrassed about it. Jesse didn’t seem to notice. He smoothed the bills flat in his hand, stacked them up, licked his finger as if imitating a serious checker at the bank, and counted them out. He handed the stack to Isaac, who put it in his pocket without counting them.

            “Gotta go get my ID,” he said. He was looking past us when he said it like he was staring at something further off.

            “Why do you need that?” I said, “no one’s gonna ID you.” He looked like he was fifty years old. I looked at Jesse, who shrugged it off. Isaac turned and walked towards the bridge. We followed, walking our bikes. I figured the money was gone.

            We walked past the sifting swoop sounds of rush hour traffic and down the hill. After about a half-mile, before the bridge, Isaac turned left and pushed through a thick patch of blackberry bramble and pine branches, then disappeared. I tried to catch Jesse’s eyes.

            “He said he could get pills too, Jesse hissed, following Isaac through the branches. I waited for a second, then decided I might as well follow. I didn’t have to be home for a few more hours. I took one last sip of my shake and left the still half-full cup on the concrete, hoisted my bike up over my shoulder, and wobbled in. Bramble vines stuck in the spokes, and the ground was too soft and wet to balance on. I fell forward and onto a pathway that was so well maintained and smooth it looked like it should be in a park near a mansion.

            The ends of branches were tied up at their tips, forming a lattice above us that made me feel like I was walking through a portal to a lush garden. Bits of trash, woven together in little stick figures and dream catchers, hung from all over. Chunks from a tin can, cut up with a serrated knife to look like tinsel, reflected bits of the light it could catch in tiny flashes of pure white.

            Isaac plodded along in front of us, muttering to himself words I couldn’t understand besides the curses. The path winded downwards and finally opened up to the sky near the water, where we could see the bridge’s backside. It was an angle I had never seen, and I realized the camp spread out much further from what I had imagined it did from everyone else’s view on the side of the road. The whole of it seemed to stretch for miles.

            Old cardboard boxes lined the path, so pushing my bike was smoother even though it was still wet from the rain.

            “Mindy’s got my ID,” Isaac said, breaking up his incomprehensible mutter. “We gotta go see Mindy.”

            He curved into the camp, which I now saw was more than just used tents and tarps. Pallets were stacked to build castle-like barriers from one dwelling to the next. Repurposed appliances lined the pathways like futuristic cobblestones. Camp stoves and tiny firepits glowed in dwelling areas where people cooked. Shopping carts were all over. I had never seen so many. They carried people’s belongings, acting as a dresser or a car for some people. Each one had its unique pile of junk in it. One of them had piles and piles of bike parts. Another was full of what looked like old groceries left too long in the sun. A man turned a hunk of meat on a spit over the crackle of flame in an old coffee can. I watched him throw the plastic wrapper in the heat and heard it crinkle.

            This Mindy was mending a rip in her pants with a spool of cinnamon dental floss. You could see the criss-cross pattern of red where she’d already gone over. It looked sturdy enough. She sat next to an old pitbull with markings on it like a brown and white spotted cow. It wagged its tail a little when we got close. Otherwise, it looked nailed down to the cardboard, too exhausted to attempt a sniff at our pant legs.

            “Need my ID,” Isaac said to Mindy. She looked up at him for a second without talking, like they were communicating through thoughts. Then she got up and walked off further into the camp. The dog leaped up like it touched an electric fence and trotted off behind her with a grin on its face, its pink gums full of drool dripping onto the cardboard on the ground.

            “Wait a few minutes,” Isaac said, not addressing Jesse or me directly. “Doc’s coming soon.” He lay down on some paper and curled his knees under his arms. I could hear him swearing. He started to shiver so hard I thought he might be having a seizure. I touched his shoulder and tried to get him to turn over, but he rolled away from me and moaned.

            “What guy?” asked Jesse. Isaac didn’t answer. He pushed his forehead into the dirt and made a high-pitched sound. 

            It was twilight by then. The autumn light was darkening quickly, and I was starting just to wish I wasn’t there.

            Mindy came back with Isaac’s tattered ID card. Her dog chased a Shepard pup away, nipping at its tail. They circled each other, growled then sped off into the camp like they were friends. Mindy laughed at it and didn’t seem to think Isaac on the ground was anything much to be concerned over. She saw I was scared and put her hand on my shoulder.

            “S’alright hon, he’s just getting sick without his meds. The doc will be here soon. He’ll be okay.”

            “What’s wrong with him?” Jesse asked.

            “Just dope sick,” Mindy said. “He needs a bunch of other stuff too, but he doesn’t have ways to get it. Pills will help him calm down.”

            We stood and looked at the man, shuddering and clenching his jaw. I felt like I shouldn’t be watching. I looked over at Jesse, and he was facing the other direction, looking at someone coming towards us.

            A stringy-looking man with black pools for eyes walked up.

            “Are you boys in some kind of bike gang?” he said. He laughed at his joke, and we clung to our bikes a little tighter. He had burn scars up and down his arms that were raised and irritated from scratching.

            “Let me see that,” he said as he started to reach for my bike. I stood dumb and unmoving. I thought about the knife in my pocket but knew it wouldn’t help much. He grabbed the handles as I held onto the seat post. I fingered the knife in my pocket, but I was too scared to pull it out.

            “Stay back!” Jesse yelled out at him. He was loud but still sounded small. The man wrenched the bike from me and hopped on.

            “Ooh wee, this is a nice one,” he said, pedaling around in a circle and smiling. “Real, real nice.”

            Jesse dropped his bike and ran towards him, colliding with his whole body weight into the man’s side, knocking him down. He landed with a hollow thud, his arm twisted back behind him, with his teeth in the dirt. Stunned, his big black eyes wide open, he began to howl. Jesse picked up my bike and brought it back over to me. People were looking at us then. A few of them started walking towards the hurt man on the ground. “Shit,” Jesse said. A half-circle of the camp residents began to crowd us.

            “Who are you?” somebody yelled out at us. Someone else threw a bottle. It hit the side of my neck and bounced off my bike to the ground. I felt it, but it didn’t hurt then. I looked back at Isaac and realized he was gone. Looking past the crowd, I could see him headed towards a man parked in a car that looked sort of familiar.

            “Isaac!” I called out after him, but he was too far off to hear us. A couple of the people turned around and saw who it was.

            “Doc’s here,” I heard a few of them say. They began to peel off, one or two at a time, and head towards them.

            We ran, wheeling our bikes fast over the lumpy ground. We took a route up the side of the bridge that was steep but passable. Looking back, I could see the group crowded around the car that had driven to the side of the camp. I felt a tingling feeling that went from the base of my spine to somewhere in my forehead, where it settled. Marty’s red hair was visible from this distance. He passed small bags of something to the men and women that swarmed around his vehicle, exchanging them for wads of dirty bills.

            “What’s he doing here,” Jesse said, “let’s go before he sees us, c’mon.” he pulled at the back of my shoulder.

            “He’s selling something,” I said. Then a sinking feeling came over us both, knowing that we’d lost our money.

            “We could wait for a bit, then go try and get the cash,” Jesse said.

            “It’s gone, man,” I said.

Back at Jesse’s, Marty’s girlfriend was watching television on the couch and smoking a cigarette. We walked past her without saying anything. In the kitchen, Jesse grabbed the garbage lid off and started digging out the insides. He pulled out some empty microwave dinner packets and fast food bags, then he found it. A white prescription bag, with his mom’s name on it and today’s date, crumpled up and empty.

            Jesse looked down at the bag and wrinkled up his face, then threw it on the floor with the rest of the trash and walked towards his mom’s room.

            He turned his mom back up and over, finishing his chore for the day. She groaned. It sounded like it came from somewhere far off, like the third echo down a canyon in an old cartoon.

            “Mom?” he said down into her face, “Mom, can you talk?”

            But she couldn’t.

            I wanted to stay, but I had to be home. Jesse’s face was puffy, and he looked older, like in his twenties already. Marty’s girlfriend laughed at something on the television in the other room. I said goodbye to Jesse, but he didn’t say it back.

            “I’ll see you at school tomorrow,” I said. I looked at Jesse’s shoulders, skinny in his thin shirt, and wished I could wrap my arms around them. “Love you, man.” He didn’t turn around.

            I left. I didn’t know what else there was to do. If I didn’t get home by ten, my mom would drunkenly call the cops. It’d happened before. I went outside alone and picked up my bike. I felt a bad feeling all over like something was going to happen that I didn’t want to, but I couldn’t help. It moved around my chest like something had burrowed there that shouldn’t have. The streetlights were on, I could hear the buzz in the cold, and for a moment, I watched a couple of moths bump into each other near the glow. The Charger pulled in just as I walked off the driveway. I ducked behind the neighbor’s rotten fence and held my breath while Marty walked inside. The car’s engine clicked and tittered as it cooled. I sat for a moment, thinking, then got up and took out my knife.  It felt heavier than it should in my hand as I pushed the blade’s tip into the tire’s center bulge. At first, nothing happened, but I worked it in until it punctured. Rubber-thick air gushed into the night until the rim touched the driveway.

            I pushed down hard on my bike pedals towards home. The wind stung the skin under my eyes, and I wished I was drunk or asleep. Maybe someplace far off and away from anybody. The street lights flickered dimly, just barely light enough for me to see the road.

Eric Buechel is a writer from the Pacific Northwest. He has a BA in Psychology from The Evergreen State College and an MFA in Creative Writing from Sarah Lawrence College, where he was the fiction editor for Lumina and taught in the Right to Write program through Westchester County Corrections. He works as an editor and English tutor.

Dalinian Triangle

 Jeremy Alves da Silva Klemin

She is calling my bluff. She is calling my bluff and looking at me challengingly and already knows what I’m going to say. I tell her I’d like to go with her, but my phone is dead and I would have no way of getting back to the hotel. She wastes no time with her response.

“You can run and go get your charger, if you want. We’ll wait.”

            I’ve apparently run out of excuses, so I agree and make my way toward the three elevators tucked in a corner near the buffet area of the hotel. Going up, I start second-guessing my decision and consider backing out. I can’t think of a particularly valid excuse aside from being tired, which seems insufficient, so I find myself continuing toward my room. Many of the decisions I’ve made while in Brazil have followed this format: I do not have a readily available alternative or a legitimate excuse, and so I am swept along, acting in opposition to my instincts. I grab my charger, wipe the warm evening’s sweat off my forehead with my shirt, and quickly change into an identical one. One of the beauties of Brazil is the country’s active hostility toward excessive formality—a black shirt is appropriate for almost any occasion.

            I get in the car that is waiting for me and apologize for the delay. It’s unclear to me if the driver works for Uber or if he is a relative of one of the children in the backseat. Their names are João and Catarina; they’re eight and eleven years old, respectively. I’ve just agreed to attend João’s eighth birthday celebration. Mariana, the woman who has invited me to the party, is a fellow American. We’re both staying in the Bahia Othon Hotel as part of a conference for a Fulbright grant we’re on in Brazil. Mariana happens to be posted in Salvador, the city we’re currently in. Her connection to João and Catarina is initially unclear to me, but I learn that they are her Brazilian neighbors. I take note of them because I haven’t seen any other kids in the hotel—there are 115 Fulbright grantees staying here, and it seems as though we make up a significant portion of the hotel’s current clientele. Because we work in universities, those of us not living with host families almost never interact with younger Brazilians.

            Before spending the past twenty minutes helping Mariana look for the keys she’d lost while doing capoeira on the beach that day, I’d never formally met her–I know perhaps a third of the cohort by name, and have spoken passingly with roughly half of them. I’d first noticed her when she spoke up in a session earlier that day, which was about race and ethnicity within the Fulbright cohort–issues surrounding diversity have served as a sort of backdrop for the weeklong conference; impassioned debate has been common since the grant began five months ago. Most of these disagreements have been leftist in-fighting–the Fulbright, because of the type of program it is, mostly attracts progressives. In our cohort, there are six or seven, maybe, who would be classified as centrists, and even so, all but perhaps one or two of that group is of the social-liberal/fiscal-moderate type. Solidly left by any metric, I am not among these centrists. The session today was about being an ally, about how white folks in the program can more actively support their POC co-workers. The activity involved splitting up white and POC-identifying Fulbrighters into separate rooms and then bringing them back together for closing remarks. The ending of the session felt like a muted version of those same disagreements–the explicit end goals of the activity were unclear, and so most left the room feeling more conflicted than they had before.

            The driver and I start chatting in Portuguese, and Mariana remains quiet in the backseat. I tell him I’m American, but live in the south of Brazil.

            “Ahh, Americano. I used to teach capoeira to an American here. You know capoeira?”

            “Yeah, of course!” I turn to the back seat. “Mariana, you do capoeira, no?”

            Mariana nods. It’s unclear to me if she’s not participating in the conversation because she has trouble understanding or because she’s disinterested. The only Portuguese I’ve heard her speak is in the form of relaying basic information to João and Catarina.

            While driving, he pulls up the Facebook of the American he taught, asking if I know her. Unsurprisingly, neither her face nor her name registers.

            From the back, João says something about Catarina being sick. I initially have trouble understanding both of the children, but the cadence of the Northeastern accent becomes gradually less difficult as I recall the numerous Bahians I’d met while living in Portugal–I’d spent the last fourteen months there working remotely and learning Portuguese. My grandfather was born between Lisbon and Cascais a year before the Great Depression, and both my mother and I are citizens of the country. Though I have room to improve, I’m more or less fluent in the language. European Portuguese is significantly different from its Brazilian counterpart (the gap between the two is larger than that of European and Latin American Spanish), but nevertheless, with some adjustments, I’m able to get along well in Brazil. This made the settling-in process easier for me than most other grantees, as most folks came to Brazil speaking Spanish, but little Portuguese.

            We’re almost out of the center now, passing places I vaguely recognize from the day before. To compare the center of Salvador to, say, the historic centers of Europe would be both misleading and imprecise. Like the rest of Brazil, Salvador has no referent: it is wholly itself. Nor is there a useful comparison for the drastic difference between the center of Salvador and even a mile or two out of it; the only other place I’ve been with so little buffer between wealth and poverty is Rio. As we get closer to our destination, it becomes clear that João was right about Catarina–she has started throwing up in the back seat, apparently not used to being in cars. It is a sobering realization for me–in what circumstances does Catarina ride in a car in her day-to-day life? The driver rather unconcernedly asks if she’s vomitando, which, given his nonchalance, leads me to believe that he is a family member after all. Nor does Mariana seem particularly concerned, even though Catarina is (mostly) throwing up in Mariana’s backpack.

            We come to a stop in a rather nondescript place. We’re no longer in Salvador’s architecturally rich beach/hotel triangle, but we’re not in the city’s periferias, either. Translating information about the structure of cities into or out of English is often difficult, primarily because the nature of wealth dispersion varies by country. During the World Cup, which had come to a close a few days earlier, I watched a Portuguese-language interview with Gabriel Jesus, a baby-faced, instantly likable player for the Brazilian national Seleção. In the interview, he talks about growing up in the periferias, which, in the video, is translated as “suburbs.” I was mildly shocked by the callousness of the translation–for any native English speaker, “suburbs” means something entirely different from what Jesus is trying to get across with periferias. Because of this one difference, the assumed arc of his life is drastically altered. No longer is Jesus a rags-to-riches story for the English-language viewer, no longer is he favela-feel-good material, but an inhabitant of the suburbs. I imagine expensive sports camps, overzealous parents, and whatever the Brazilian equivalent of a soccer mom van is. The wrong picture.

            I see the driver open up his Uber app, which means that I was wrong after all. This is a surprise, given how nonchalant he is in response to a child throwing up in his car. Mariana’s backpack (and likely her Uber rating) are in a miserable state. To our right, maybe 400 feet away, is a McDonald’s; in front of us is a sloping decline. We inch closer toward the gradient, but João decides he wants to pee behind a light pole settled in a thicket of weeds and we wait for him.

            We start making our way down. Mariana turns to me, trying to gauge my reaction. “A little different from what you’re used to, isn’t it?” It’s unclear to me if she’s making a statement about Curitiba, the significantly wealthier and whiter southern city where I’m currently living, or if she’s making a general assumption about my own background. The logic behind where certain grantees were placed has also been a contentious topic among the cohort–I lobbied hard for the southern city of Curitiba primarily because it was the “coldest” big city I could find.

            “Sure, I guess so.” I tell her.

            Mariana has the same look on her face she did when she invited me to the party. We seem to be communicating on two planes, meaning expressly transmitted and meaning implied, the latter more substantive than the former.

            As we make our way down the hill, Mariana asks João if he’s excited for his birthday. He is shy and seems small for his age: I would have guessed he was no older than five or six. While she continues to speak with the children, I notice that Mariana’s Portuguese occasionally reverts to Portunhol, a mix of Spanish and Portuguese, every few sentences: Vir becomes venir, the endo gerund on occasion, though not always, becomes iendo. I want to ask her if she speaks Spanish natively, but don’t want to come across as a white person interrogating her authenticity if the answer is no. In my home state of California, the only thing worse than being a proud Spanish speaker is being a brown person who can’t speak Spanish. I’ve grown up with countless monolingual Perezes and Guerreros and Muñozes who don’t speak Spanish because their parents wanted them to be “as American as possible”–if not one generation back, then two generations back. Nor is my own family exempt from this. Despite knowing no other background save Portuguese, my mom grew up monolingual because her parents wanted her to be a “normal” American, an American sans hyphenation.

            Ahead of me, I can see multicolored houses and huts sprawling along the hillside. I can’t rightly call this a favela because Brazilians seem very particular about what this term constitutes, but to my untrained eye, the communidade we are entering is at the very least favela-esque. I remember another American in the city offhandedly mentioning that one of his coworkers had decided to live outside of the city center of her own volition, and as we continue down the seemingly endless slope leading into the neighborhood, I realize at that moment that he was referring to Mariana. I also remember asking him if Mariana (though at the time, of course, I didn’t know it was her) chose to live outside the center because it was cheaper, but he seemed certain that she was not saving any money by doing so. I wonder if I’ve made a mistake, if I’ve now unwittingly become the pivot for a point Mariana is trying to prove.

            We make our way through a narrow passageway with beat-up doors on either side, which eventually opens into a sort of courtyard or gathering area. To the right of the courtyard is another 150 feet or so of sloping greenery; past that is the rocky waterfront of Salvador’s bay. I had no idea we were still close to the water.

            In the courtyard itself, there are around fifteen to eighteen people, roughly a third of whom are children, a third teenagers, and another third adults, most of them women. All but one of them, besides me, is some version of the Brazilian understanding of black–cafuzo, mameluco, or mulatto. Mariana briefly greets them as we pass by, entering into another narrow passageway barely wide enough for two people standing side-by-side. We’re again descending, ostensibly getting closer to the water. Mariana rings a bell, and a woman in her mid-forties comes out. I first notice her striking green eyes, which remind me of the Cabo Verdeans I’d met in Portugal. She is beautiful, even though she looks both momentarily tired and perpetually sleep deprived. After a brief exchange about the lost set of keys, she gives Mariana a backup copy, explaining that it is not a perfect replica, but might work anyways.

            We unlock another gate and walk into a sort of living room. A woman is sitting on one of two couches hunched over smoking a cigarette; next to her are a stack of books and newspapers. Two identical doors are just a few feet away from where she’s sitting. To the right of the living room is a kitchen that is semi open-air; less than half of it is covered. I make a mental note about the setup of the kitchen, initially surprised, but only later do I realize just how unusual it is. Salvador is perpetually between eighty to ninety degrees year-round, but like most of Brazil has a considerable rainy season. How does one cook in the rain? Aren’t there electrical concerns?

            Mariana tries inserting the backup key into the lock, and with some enterprising, it works. Good enough, apparently. She signals for me to follow her in.

            She tosses her vomit-filled (or at least partially vomit-filled) backpack on a stack of papers. Her room is cluttered, but it’s clear that it follows a logic she understands. A vine pokes past a cloth that seems to be covering a hole leading outside. It looks too small to be a window. Heavy, wooden double windows open westward onto a breathtaking view of the moon over the bay blocked only by a spider the size of a half-dollar coin. I think to myself how impossible it would be to have such a community living so close to prime beach water property in the States, and Mariana seems to read my mind.

            “Nobody has property documents here, of course…real estate developers have been hounding them for years. They’re constantly in danger of losing the property.”

            “They don’t have any pro bono lawyers helping them?”

            “They’re not too eager to accept help from outsiders.”

            I’m not sure what this means, exactly, but I nod my head. “I see.”

            I wonder if she has formally involved herself somehow in the dispute, if this is her reason for choosing to live here–part of our grant requirement is that we do a side-project of some sort, but I can’t think of a tactful way of asking, and so the moment evaporates. After showing me a bit of the kitchen and chatting with the all-smiles woman on the couch, we head back outside.

            “That lady lives upstairs, I don’t know why she’s hanging out in our living room.”

            I laugh, unsure if she’s genuinely annoyed or not. We make our way back up to the courtyard where everybody is still gathered.

            “You can sit here if you want,” Mariana says, motioning toward the end of a stone fence where a few children and twenty-somethings are sitting.

            After five or ten minutes of alternating between watching children play tag and enjoying the view, it becomes clear to me that Mariana won’t be introducing me to anyone. It’s clear, now, what Mariana’s game is. She’s challenging me; she wants to make me feel uncomfortable. That I’m forced to parse through expressed and implied meaning in Salvador, of all places, is not without irony. I remember in Portugal, when having a “serious relationship conversation” with my Bahian ex-girlfriend, she would speak in English, and I would speak in Portuguese. I thought, at the time, that we did this to introduce levity into an otherwise difficult conversation, but in retrospect, it was the obliteration of subtext that speaking in a foreign language provides that we were after, the brazenness that being another version of yourself allows. “Por que me trouxeste cá?” would put up far less resistance in the back of my throat than, “Why have you brought me here?”

             A teenager and a young man are scraping away at an old checkers board, and I ask them what they’re doing but don’t quite understand the explanation. I ask them both about Mariana and about João’s birthday, but I can see they’re only tolerating me. I get up and go toward the railing that separates the courtyard from the bush below.

            I’m closer to where Mariana is now, near the cake and the rest of the food. The mother with whom I’d already spoken offers me food, and I try to find an excuse not to eat it. I don’t eat meat, and realize that I’m transgressing one of the most universal social rules on the planet–accept food you’re offered.

            “Alérgico.” I mumble.

            “But you can eat popcorn, no?”

            I glance toward the popcorn, coming to terms with the fact that it will probably be my social crutch for the rest of the evening. I start picking at the kernels one by one trying to make my lifeline last as long as possible.

            “Come on, man, eat more than that! You’re making me look bad.” Mariana says to me, managing to joke in a way that is not, in the end, joking. She’s not wrong, though. I’m offered food again, and resolve to go sit back on the wall to avoid further awkward food situations. A few minutes later a teenager comes up to me.

            “Cê não é Brasileiro?”

            “No, I’m from the US. I do the same thing Mariana does, but in Curitiba.”

            “Where are you from in the US?”

            “Los Angeles…Long Beach.”

            “I love West Coast rap!”

            “Snoop Dogg is from Long Beach, have you heard of him?”

            “Snoop Dogg! I like to smoke herva while listening to Snoop Dogg. I love American music, love American hip hop.”

            “Yeah, me, too. I like Brazilian rap, too, lots of good music right now. What groups do you like?”

            “Older stuff, you know, Wu Tang Clan, Lil Wayne, older stuff, man.” “Old school,” he says in English, pronouncing it with a Brazilian D–oldgee schooluh.

            “How old are you?”

            “Seventeen, he says. You?”

            “Twenty-five.”

            He motions for me to follow him, and we walk back to the lookout point, which is maybe 100 feet away. “It’s beautiful, no?”

            “Very beautiful, man.”

            He tells me he used to take his ex-girlfriend down to the water, and they’d smoke weed together. We touch on universals–about not texting your ex, about avoiding weed edibles at all costs, about life in the US compared to life here.

            He points more or less in the direction of my hotel. “I work down there.”

            I don’t fully understand what he does, but it’s either working right on the beach or doing labor of some kind. I learn that he earns around 1,500 to 2,000 reais a month, and works around forty-five hours a week. Not ideal, but far fewer hours than many Uber drivers I’ve met. 1,500 reis is anywhere from 400 to 450 USD, depending on the rapidly fluctuating exchange rate. Not much, but by my understanding of wages in Brazil, not bad at all for a seventeen-year-old doing menial work.

            “It’s enough to eat, go out, have fun and relax, you know?” he says.

             A bit more time staring out at the moon, and he tells me that he has to go to sleep soon.

            “What was your name?”

            “Jeremy, you?”

            “Lucas.”

            “Um prazer, Lucas.”

            If Lucas was suspicious of me for being a foreigner or for being from outside of his community, I didn’t notice. Maybe one negated the other, maybe being a foreigner was better than being a Brazilian from the south. I was not a novelty, not completely–Mariana, at least, had come before me. It’s still entirely unclear to me how she’d even found the room to rent, but without her, I wouldn’t be here.

            After Lucas leaves, I return to the social crutch as old as Time itself, the snack table. I circle back around to my popcorn, taking care to eat a fair amount so I won’t be offered food with meat again. People are gathering for Happy Birthday–I sing along, watching as João continually blows out his candles, lights them again, and blows them out. As everyone disperses, Mariana turns toward me, interested that I’ve spent the last twenty minutes or so talking to Lucas.

             “Seems like you’ve made a friend. I actually don’t know him; I’ve seen him around but never talked to him before. What’d you talk about?”

            “Rap, his girlfriend, the dangers of edibles. You know. He’s a nice dude, started talking to me. Super friendly.”

            “Yeah, he seemed friendly.”

            After talking to Lucas, Mariana seems more open toward me–I feel as if I’ve passed some significant barrier, as if my rapport with Lucas has in some way made Mariana less wary of me. It becomes clearer that Mariana’s decision not to introduce me to anybody is a calculated decision and not mere tactlessness.

            A few minutes pass, and folks start shuffling home. The evening is waning. João sits down with a ukulele and starts strumming.

            “Let’s go, João, it’s getting late and you have school tomorrow!” I’m not sure what this woman’s relation is to João, but she’s too old to be his mother.

            “He’s a very serious man, you know. An artist.” I joke, and the woman laughs and agrees.

            “Where are you from?” You have to try food from the northeast!” She names a bunch of foods I can’t eat, and I stand there smiling, about to voice my agreement.

            Before I can agree with the woman, though, Mariana blurts out that I’m a vegetarian. I am less than pleased–this is not information that this woman needs to know, not something that inspires trust–o branco, the whitey, is too good for our foods, it says. It feeds into the sort of evangelical trope that I try so hard to avoid. I try to convey all of this in a look directed at Mariana.

            “It’s okay! He can still eat chicken and fish. We love fish here, shrimp…”

            I smile, and we talk a bit more about nothing in particular. As I’m leaving, I give her a hug and am reprimanded for not giving her “a Baiano hug.” I’m grabbed again, vigorously–no room for Jesus in between. I laugh again, she laughs, and Mariana and I are on our way.

            “Not too many outsiders come through here. There were two Austrian ladies here, doing some type of research–took a while for the community to accept them.”

            I nod, listening. She says very little about what her own settling-in process had been like here, about whether people immediately pegged her for a foreigner or if, without speaking, she passes for being Brazilian. Another one of the joys of Brazil–like the US, anyone can pass for Brazilian as long as they keep their mouth shut. This still holds true in Salvador, the blackest city outside of Africa. I have Portuguese relatives who grew up in Rio, who returned to Portugal with the sort of mangled, mixed accent that only children or non-native speakers can have, but if I am to pass for being Brazilian, it’s likely as an Italian descendent from the south.

            Many of these European descendants in Brazil’s South arrived during the country’s branqueamento (whitening) period, which took place in the late 19th and early 20th century. The philosophy is not at all complicated, nor is it unique to Brazil: incentivize “desirable” immigrants to come to your country with the promise of free land and hope that the indigenous breeds out. It’s not dissimilar to what’s happening right now to the Uyghur people in China, where men are being taken away and women are being forced to “pair up” with men from outside the Uyghur community.  In the case of Brazil, desirable meant white or Japanese. One of the great ironies of the sort of soft-racist European pride in the south of Brazil is that most of these people, indeed, descend from poor Polish, Italian, and Ukranian farmers–people who moved here as a last resort, who had very little besides their supposed “desirable background.” Far from the sort of eugenic prime stock they envision themselves as coming from.

            I am reminded of Esther Kinsky’s book Rivers and the way she writes about the sort of buried, secondhand homesickness for places that, had history played out in a slightly different way, would have been her home. My grandfather met his wife while he was stationed in the US while working for the Portuguese Navy. He also spent time working in Brazil; it’s not hard to imagine a universe where he meets a Brazilian rather than an American woman. In that universe, maybe I wouldn’t be a Southerner after all. Maybe I would have instead been one of the myriad Portuguese descendants in São Paulo or Rio–my grandfather would have easily acclimated in Rio especially, where the city still holds on to the sh sound from European Portuguese.

            There is a pause in our conversation, and I try to find something to say. “Have any of the other Fulbrighters visited where you live?”

            “Nah. Pedro—the highest up Brazilian on the Fulbright Program–said he was going to come tonight, but canceled because he was tired. Another administrator said so, too–same response. I want people to come here and understand that Brazil isn’t all caipirinhas and good vibes, you know?”

            I find some irony in her wanting to show Brazilians a different side of Brazil, but even if I disagree with her means, I’m forced to agree with her ends. Pedro, with his perfectly rootless São Paulo accent, has likely seen fewer favelas than Mariana has. If dramatic wealth inequality in the United States can be described as being “in your face,” in Brazil that inequality must be in your face, it must be in your pores and in the sweat that only year-round summer is capable of producing. Regardless of the good-will (or lack thereof) behind her intention, I can’t help but feel like having a well-off Brazilian or American diplomat come to a community like this is, if not a net positive, at least a net neutral. I am annoyed at Mariana for trying to shock me into feeling uncomfortable, but I am glad I am here. Means and ends.

            She continues her train of thought. “People should get out of their comfort zones and get to know the other side of Brazil, but at the same time I’m hesitant about bringing people here, especially white people. Back home, bringing a white person around would lower my credibility, you know?”

            “Where are you from?”

            “LA.”

            “No shit, where? I’m from Long Beach.”

            “Haha, Long Beach?! No way. East LA.”

            “I’d be up in Boyle Heights sometimes for shows.”

            She looks at me–“What do you know about Boyle Heights? That’s where I’m from.”

            “I know it’s ground zero for the gentrification battles right now in LA.”

            She seems pleased. “Yep, exactly. Is this happening in Long Beach, too?”

            “Somewhat in North LB, yeah. Not as big of an issue as in East LA, though.”

            I’m not at all surprised that we’re from essentially the same place. I hear it in her voice, in her attitude, in the way she talks about gentrification. The fact that I’m from Long Beach, LA’s more personable, working-class little brother but with face tattoos, seems, too, to have brought us closer. Starting from North Long Beach, up through Compton, and up into LA proper, you can go on “hood tours.” See where your favorite dead rapper is from, marvel at poverty, and gawk at poor state government policy all at once. You can do the same in Rio de Janeiro here in Brazil–there are dozens of paid, guided “off the beaten track” favela tours. See a “different” side of Rio–take a selfie with a bunch of poor, mostly black children for forty reais a pop. I wonder if such a tour exists in Salvador, and if, after my time here, I would learn anything new.

            After passing a Coca-Cola advertisement inexplicably pasted onto a low overhang that I must duck to avoid, I realize that we’re not going back to Mariana’s apartment. We start going down a set of treacherous, poorly-lit stairs using the flashlights from both our phones to manage. I’m in a perpetual half-crouch in anticipation of spider-webs. “I tell my neighbors to look here if I go missing.”

            A minute or two later, we’re at the water. No explanation of why she’s brought me here is necessary: the view is incredible. We stand together in silence for a few minutes, and then turn around to make our way back up. After passing her apartment and the courtyard, we start climbing up the steep incline we’d initially come down.

            “So what, do you just arrive to class drenched every day? There’s absolutely no way to walk up this in the daytime without sweating.”

            “Basically, yeah. I use it to work out.”

            I wonder to myself if such a dramatic slope factors into rent here, if this is the Salvadorian equivalent of living in a fifth-floor walk-up in a place like Lisbon.

            We reach the top of the hill–Mariana must also spend the night back at the hotel; our first session tomorrow morning is at 8:00 AM. “Can you call an Uber? My phone died.”

            I don’t know where Mariana and I stand. I’m not sure if we’re friends or colleagues, or if she’s even basically a decent person. I resent her for using me to make a point, but I’m happy that I was able to come. I don’t understand the arrangement between her and the community she lives in, nor do I know if these same people were happy to meet me, or ambivalent, or actively opposed to my presence, or if they even realized I was there. Regardless, means and ends.

            I smile to myself and nod, calling the Uber. An exit fee, then. A small price to pay.

Jeremy Alves da Silva Klemin is an essayist and translator. He was a 2018 Fulbright Fellow in Curitiba, Brazil, and has also lived in Portugal and Scotland. You can find other work of his in publications like the New York Times Book Review, Literary Hub, and The Common. He is the editor of Joyland Magazine‘s “Consulate” section and is an MFA student in creative nonfiction at Oregon State University.