Issue 38

How Do You Roll? and I’m Still a Little Sassy

Kim Chinquee

How Do You Roll?

Things I love about my new home: having a full spread on the bed if I want. Bright colors. Lighting candles. The whir of the transit busses passing. Keeping my life clean. Being organized. Being able just to find things. Eating meals at the table on a plate without having a dog jumping. Not always having the TV on. Being close to Wegmans. Cooking for myself. Doing my own laundry. Enjoying my art, my plants, my dogs. Long soaks in the bathtub, taking in my salts, lavender oils, lights down, with a lit candle and low music. Practicing self-care. Knowing where my clothes are. Being able to exercise whenever and in whatever ways I want. Drinking wine with dinner. My nice, big kitchen! Cooking vegan, cooking non-vegan, or not cooking at all. Making my own cheese plate. Not having to hear bad things about liberals. Being liberal. Writing at my desk. Reading. Being quiet. Feeling cleansed.

Asking my dogs: how do you roll? Walks to my favorite park, where I can fly a kite if I want. Being in awe of the enormous sky I can see clear out my window. The pandemonium it makes when a storm breaks. Making a lime into a kickball. Acting like a whimbril or a warbler or a goose. Being silly with myself. Playing imaginary golf while playing an imaginary trumpet, eating imaginary (or real) blueberry sherbet in my fluffy velvet robe. Oh, how scrumptious!

My place smells so delicious! Can you study my serology? Can you tell that I am free now?

I’m Still a Little Sassy

Do our ancestors speak to us? I feel the vibrations of them humming on my eyelid. Taste them on my tongue. My grandfather, who served in the second world war, used to single me out from the other grandkids, thank me for my service. If he were still alive, would he be proud of my son, who serves in the army? My grandmother used to tell him that it wasn’t fair to the other grandkids, that he spoke so highly of me, of my service during war.

Do you know what it means to be at war?

Maybe I’m still a little sassy. She used to call, told me to be careful. But I know that’s just projection. Of course she was worried.

My grandfather’s father died at 33, in 1918, from the Spanish flu. My grandfather was seven months old and had six older siblings. He died blind, but the last time I saw him, in assisted living, he knew who I was as soon as I walked into the room.

We are not immune. I’m the same blood as my mom and dad and his dad and mom and my mom’s dad and mom and all the ones before them.

Just like my great-grandfather, at 33, a farmer in Wisconsin, with seven very young children, died from the flu.

Kim Chinquee is the author of seven fiction collections, most recently Snowdog (Ravenna Press). Her eighth book, Battle Dress, (a novel-in-flashes) is forthcoming with Widow + Orphan House. She is the recipient of two Pushcart Prizes and has been published in journals and anthologies including NOON, Denver Quarterly, Conjunctions, Fiction, StoryQuarterly, Story, and others. She is Senior Editor of New World Writing, an associate professor at SUNY-Buffalo State.

The Speed of the Living + Mother, False

Tara Isabel Zambrano

The Speed of the Living

It was late at night when my mother died, my brother and I didn’t cry because she had been sick too long, we paced back and forth after the doctor left and the nurses wheeled out the blank monitors, my brother claimed he saw our mother move—a flicker in her eye, a twitch around her mouth, No way, I said, Shh… he placed a finger on my lips and stalled like statues we glared hot on her see-through skin as if it were supposed to make her warm with a pulse, jerk her bones into a gesture, until he walked out to make arrangements for the body, I swiped apps on phone, posted a younger picture of her on Twitter—RIP mom, she looked deceptively soft because I knew she had a jackhammer of a will, her teeth so straight I forgot I hadn’t eaten the whole day, she didn’t eat before she died, because her tongue that fathered us after dad left could not form any more questions or give answers to fill us up, the likes and comments on her photo−a currency I had never accumulated before on my own from strangers who commented she was in a better place, I pressed my sneakers harder into the phenyl-coated tiles, they squeaked like police cars turning around a corner, chasing a ghost in the city swollen with humidity when my hand palmed the faux leather of the chair it felt like wet skin, and I wondered if I always disappointed my mother and now she was gone where would I be—sad and guilty I didn’t know why this whole time the television had been on with men and women who argued about forest fires and the melting glaciers, illegal immigrants and women’s rights, their faces drowned in makeup and despair, detailed with—I want to love somebody, something, I want someone to want me, while my mother’s lips were chapped and pale she might have freaked out to see herself without proper makeup so I pulled out a hot coral stick from my purse, a bit shrill, tapped it on her lips and to dab the excess a tissue from the box on the bedside table but it came out without a smudge—that’s how I realized how numb death was, there was no telltale red of a kiss only quiet pouring out of a mouth indifferent to the speed of the hungry, gnarly world.

Tara Isabel Zambrano is the author of Death, Desire and Other Destinations, a full-length flash collection by OKAY Donkey Press. Her work has won the first prize in The Southampton Review Short Short Fiction Contest 2019, a second prize in Bath Flash Award 2020, been a Finalist in Bat City Review 2018 Short Prose Contest and Mid-American Review Fineline 2018 Contest. Her flash fiction has been published in The Best Small Fictions 2019, The Best Micro Fiction 2019, 2020 anthology. She lives in Texas and is the Fiction Editor for Waxwing Literary Journal.

Sick

Colter Jackson

Before they knew he was into killing, Wilson Ash held our mother around the waist and slow danced at the town hall. We imagine the long fingers of his small, feminine hands pressing into the curve of our mother’s body, her pale, chiffon dress damp with her glandular teenage sweat, Patsy Cline crooning dreamily, balloons listing on the floor, our mother’s face, upturned, unlined, plump and hopeful pink. It would be years before her cheekbones would emerge. It would be years before she would give birth to two daughters with those same cheekbones hidden under fleshy teenage cheeks.

If Wilson Ash was sick the way they say he was sick, bringing harm to our mother must have crossed his mind when they swayed on the dance floor. Our mother laughs this off, discounting the danger she could have been in. “It was just one dance,” she says. “He was very good-looking, you know.”

We’ve only ever seen the pictures published in the newspapers after. In the grainy black and white, his eyes are shadowy, at half-mast. He is good-looking, we suppose, in that slick, serial killer way.

“He didn’t start with all that until years later,” our mother explains.

“That we know of,” we say back, our voices in alarmed accord.

Our mother is old now and we are almost old and this danger is far behind her, a distant thing, thrilling in its memory. She sits with a half-empty popcorn bowl on her lap, a polka dot scarf wrapped around her head. She says, “Girls, I can only tell you this story so many times.” But we know this isn’t true. She loves to tell this story and we love her to tell it. We are alive with the brush of something so fatal, it would have taken us with it.

We curl our feet under us and say, “Tell us one more time.” And then just one more time after that one more time. Our father gets upset with our fascination. “It’s morbid,” he says. “Talk about something else.”

“Like the chemo?” we ask. “Or the radiation burns?”

He gives us, his daughters, his sternest look, which isn’t very stern, and sulks out of the room.

Our mother with the neon green fleck in her right iris, who sneaks our French fries and loves Fellini and Faulkner and flannel pajamas. Our mother with her tiny wrists and apple knees, who marvels at pine cones, who is crazy for dogs and the color yellow. Our mother with the long, lying lifeline dividing her palm. Our mother, the one we love in a perilous and dangerous way, is alive. And we wish that would be so forever.

We try to count ourselves fortunate. She could have been one of the girls with the eternally young faces, flashing over the screen when they run the TV special on Wilson Ash. But we wouldn’t be here to see it.

The girls on the television are all beautiful in the same way. Beautiful because they are young and because they are not our mother.

Seventeen women. Four men. These are the named. Though it is assumed there are more. We look at each face carefully, haunted by the ghosts of daughters that would never be.

On the counter twenty-three plastic pill bottles lined up like soldiers. On the floor an air purifier hums and hums. On the face of our mother, two penciled apostrophes where her eyebrows used to be. So on the television, Wilson Ash.

We memorize phrases from the stiff narrator. “arrest,” “whole lives ahead of them,” “daughter,” “wife,” “sister,” “manicured lawns,” “worst nightmare,” “taken from us,” “psychopathy,” “victims,” “victim’s family,” “victim’s neighbor,” “death penalty,” “justice,” “cold-blooded,” “member of the community,” “kept to himself,” “seemed like a nice guy,” “forensics,” “DNA,” “disturbing,” “predator,” “horror,” “ski mask,” “strangulation,” “meticulous planning,” “chilling.”

We memorize these phrases because they are less scary than the phrase the oncologists use about our mother. “Six months to a year.”

When we were teenagers, we would drive by Wilson Ash’s childhood home. We would park across the street and stare at the dark panes of glass, waiting for movement, speculating about what went wrong. We heard his mother still lived there. We heard it’s always the mother’s fault. Mothers make mistakes sometimes. But ours never did.

Except that time when she mentioned that one of us had gained weight. Or that time she admitted that she didn’t like one of our boyfriends. Or that time she turned the whites pink.

She is not perfect. She’s bossy and stubborn and can sustain herself for weeks on a good hunk of gossip. Sainting her would only diminish what we have left of her. She’s not perfect, but she’s ours.

One day, the front door of Wilson Ash’s childhood home opened, and we gasped and held each other with our eyes closed. Until one of us was brave enough and peeked and we saw it was his mother. She made her way out and across the frozen sidewalk with her cataracts and her ratty cardigan. What we saw was a woman that we wanted to bundle tighter in her coat, put a woolen hat over her pink and spotted scalp, and spoon hot soup into. She was someone’s mother once. Even if it was Wilson Ash.

Wilson Ash is no longer with us in a corporeal sense. He was long ago revenged out of the world with a combination of sodium thiopental, pancuronium bromide and potassium chloride to stop his heart.

Our mother’s heart thumps strong within the confines of the cage of her ribs. Sometimes when she holds us, we listen. We’ve been listening for as long as we’ve been alive. We understand that heartache doesn’t actually have anything to do with the pink, fibrous organ we call the heart. But it feels like it does.

When we look in the mirror, we see our mother. When our mother looks in the mirror, she sees her mother, and so on and so forth all the way back to the invention of mirrors. It’s the cheekbones. Once the girlish baby fat drops away, there they are.

“Tell us one more time,” we say.

She smiles. She begins, “I was sixteen. I wore a pink chiffon gown. It was balmy inside the town hall. He asked me to dance and I said yes.”

A woman is born with all the eggs she will ever have inside of her. So in some way, we were there when our mother came screaming into the world. We were there on that dance floor when Wilson Ash led her in a waltz. We were there when she walked down a flower strewn aisle toward the weeping, sensitive man who would become our father. We’ve been witness to her life and, likely, will see it through to the end.

When we were teenagers, someone wrote a book about Wilson Ash and his murderous path and we got it from the library. We snuck it under the covers and took turns. We read that his father left his mother when he was little and we were thankful our father never left when we were little. We read that he was bullied at school and it made us think twice about telling that weirdo Jeff Frytag that his face looked like a hot dog. The book contained nothing about our mother. She was just a woman who went to a dance with him once, not even a footnote in the story of his life. But for us, she is the whole book and the cover and the wood pulp pages.

The Evangelicals believe psychopathy is a problem of the spirit. Psychologists believe it is a matter of brain chemistry. History suggests that it is the combination of a fragile psyche and trauma and a conducive environment. An opportunistic disease.

Cancer, the uncontrollable replication of cells, is also opportunistic. Feeding on the surrounding tissues, the cells with their wires crossed, the damaged ones, begin copying themselves. Most living things want to thrive in this way. Dangerous or good-natured, it’s all the same.

Wilson Ash also had children. A boy and a girl. They knew nothing of his crimes. But surely they stared at the closed front door and wondered where their aloof and quiet but handsome father had gone on a Saturday night. Hair pomaded back, cologne wafting. We wonder where these children are now. We picture them with changed names, living somewhere like Santa Fe, watching from a cool, dry adobe living room as the victims of their father flash on the screen. A small coil of smoke rises from a piñon fire. Perhaps they now have children of their own and watch them carefully in their cribs, looking for some inherited quality about the eyes portending trouble down the road.

Back when we were all still fighting the proverbial fight, we would take turns accompanying our mother to infusions. The chairs, plush Lazyboys that swallowed her whole. The nurses, crushing in their gentleness. The plants, healthy, well taken care of — sending the right message. In the beginning, our mother read Seuss and Silverstein and Charlotte’s Web to our daughters to pass the time. Toward the end, our daughters read to her. Passages from Little Women. From Jane Eyre. We watched helpless and hopeful as the IV dripped poison down a tube and into her veins.

Our mother’s eyes dim and she progresses from a cane to a walker to a wheelchair. The woman who tirelessly ran the PTA and was a partner in her firm, the woman who waited up all night for her young, willful daughters to be home safe, is now the woman who is too tired to hold a cup of tea.

“Tell us one more time,” we say. “Just one more time.” We are sick with our love for her.

“I wore a light pink dress,” she begins.

Our mother’s mother used to say that people spend their lives afraid of all the wrong things. As girls, we rolled our eyes at her, but now we see how she was right and had been right all along.

We have daughters and we tell them not to go outside with wet hair. And we tell them to look both ways. And we tell them not to talk to strangers. We have daughters and though we can’t yet see their cheekbones under their sweet peachy skin, we know they are there and one day will surely emerge. And we put our hands over their hearts and say, we hope you never break, but we know they will again and again.

Colter Jackson is the author and illustrator of the picture book Elephants Make Fine Friends (Penguin 2015). You can find more of her work in The New York Times, Tin House, Epoch, Bellevue Literary Review, Hippocampus Magazine, GOOD Magazine and The Rumpus. She has an MFA from Sarah Lawrence College and was a recipient of the Meyers Fellowship. She has been a Ledig House International Fellow and a recipient of the Helene Wurlitzer Grant. She has been awarded residencies for Hedgebrook, MacDowell, UCROSS, and the Atlantic Center for the Arts.

Midday Clusters

Casey Haymes

Giovanna rubs sunblock over and around the mole on her shin. Her eyes slide over him as her knees lower into sand. Waves and breeze, salty air in Marc’s mind and lungs. Her shoulders smell like basil. Her thick hair doesn’t dry after a swim. He calculates the number of nearby seashell echoes. Every medusa that will sting. When in Roma, call it medusa. While roaming in California, call it jellyfish. He moves often, and he wonders why he tortures himself with heavy boxes of possessions. With his finger he draws in the sand a modest house, writes the year: 2000. He draws the curls of her hair and draws his bony legs. They hold stick figure hands. Giovanna draws a beach and umbrella.

Marc sits in the corner of a diner booth after midnight, surrounded by friends who bemoan concert hearing loss. On LSD, the ringing in his ear transmits chords he could only play if he possessed a few more fingers. He pierces the pancake’s browned skin with a fork. Steam rises and hisses. Marc asks, “Is my face as burned as I imagine?” Danny presses his finger to his brother’s forehead, then neck. Contrast blossoms between sunburn and paleness. Red in flames. White fades. In the photo taken earlier at the Earth Day concert, Marc’s face tilts, his hand emerges from the cluster of his brother’s friends. LSD changes his mind to stay within the frame. His brain processes added chemicals and plays a slow motion movie of friends at the Paolo Soleri amphitheater.

In this Earth Day photo with curves for corners, he keeps his eyes open for the flash and thinks of someone he recently met. He and Giovanna will write letters in Italian and English for two years; he plans to leave New Mexico to travel with her. Firenze a Napoli, the letter will end. In the Earth Day photo of friends, his brother leaps into the frame. The red flannel shirt collar itches Marc’s neck. His only brother shouts “Queso!” and sounds like a melodious thrushing. Giovanna thanks him for mailing her the concert photo and for writing on the back a Loa Tzu quote about courage.

An hour south of Roma, Giovanna cranks the beach umbrella handle to widen the shade. Sand crusts her heels and toes. Marc wants his mind to still while he rests in her arms. He’s twenty-five and buries words when the two of them sit in parallel. The sun finds her legs. Edges of shade urge them closer; they scoot on sand that finds crevices and removes callouses. He withholds forecasts of melanoma. “Va bene?” He points to the mole, the ubiquitous cluster of skin cells forming a dark signal. He asks sand to exfoliate it away. He asks for a microscopic miracle beneath her legs. All he has to do is impress it upon her. Glimmering grains drain from the soft side of his fist. Sand percusses her leg. Nearby exclamations of children and lovers on teams, divided by a net, hitting one ball. And waves of salt and water and medusas. She shrugs. Va bene.

She tugs at his shorts. “Dov’è costumi?” He insists his cargo shorts are swim trunks with no speedo underneath. Her laugh tumbles. She’s unsure about her travel friend from New Mexico. Thinking in Italian exhausts him, but he still wants to trade Santa Fe for Roma.

In the southwestern United States, hard soles trample an old saloon floor. Cracks creak underneath a pack of Italian tourists. Fall threatens the summer’s Sundays of ’98. The motor of the bus parked on Water St. rattles store windows. Feet pivot near Marc’s register. Women mumble in his mother’s tongue. “Benvenuto a Coyote Café,” he says to the one who stares. He ignores the other Italian tourists he will never know. “Siamo di Roma,” she says. With the Italian of a four-year-old he announces that L’Avventura is one of his favorite films, Paolo Soleri his favorite architect. She elbows a friend. The air stays high plains dry. She asks about the elevation. About Billy the Kid. He recommends drinking a gallon of water and watching the film Young Guns. His broken Italian disguises his ignorance about New Mexico.

“You see extraterrestre?” she wants to know.

He lets her know he wants to move to California. “Or Italia.” He wants to ask her sign but points to the gift shop stereo and tells her about the band Dead Can Dance.

She nods and scrunches her mouth to say the music’s okay. Then, “Non è vero dead will dance.”

“It’s a band name.”

Her friend elbows her.

“Mi chiamo Giovanna.”

“Piacere. Marc. Marco.”

His Nonna brings the last piece of cannoli to a large table. Not one table, but many joined and covered with red and white checkered table cloths and Christmas candles. “Grazie, Nonna.” He sits near the landscape painting of Capri, thinks that every year he sees something new in it. In his tenth year, he finds a distant woman rendered with a few monochromatic strokes, sitting on a curb, studying something in her hands. A map? At Nonna’s funeral, he will wonder if she painted the island while on vacanza. Now, his brother disappears after manicotti lunch. Sauce on plates crusts in terracotta patterns. Vinaigrette and tomatoes wilt the lettuce, and fine fumes rise and sting Marc’s nose within slow breaths. Nonna asks to dance. She pinches strands of his hair, inspects her latest cut. “Who do you love?” She extends her hand—he imagines Nonna’s fingerprints. He imagines traces of her in his hair, how the oil from her skin bonds the strands. She must’ve licked a spoon while making cannoli. She must’ve baked traces of dead skin and saliva into the crispy shells. He doesn’t enjoy the accordion music. He understands some of the lyrics.

Nonno plays cards every Thursday night in the back of a famous pizza shop. The elders scare Marc when they smile and compare Nonno’s face to his; dentures threaten to fall out, anger flares over wasted youth.

Marc pouts and dances. Nonna blinks more than necessary. Excess eyeliner weighs her lashes. Her silver and turquoise earrings stretch the holes in her lobes. She points at girls and asks about his interest in dancing with the tallest one.

Roma stinks. Windows shut out the August sewer smell. Roma stirs along Via Veneto and via passing trains and small cars and terse Vespas. He imagines Giovanna sleeping on her parents’ couch in the dark that isn’t dark enough for sleeping late. She’s three years older than he is and her parents forbid her from sharing the hideaway bed. He sleeps in a nearby apartment bedroom and shares a bathroom with strangers. The landlord insists the tub doesn’t need a shower curtain and brandishes a mop to prove it. A stranger in the shared kitchen offers him a beer and a taco and he wants to save them for Giovanna. He wants to know where to buy tacos in Roma.

He will move to Los Angeles before he dies. He will teach creative writing to college freshman. On his first California spring break, Marc will beach-dive with his cousin in Monterey. His cousin will rent a house surrounded by pink clusters of mesembryanthemum flowers. They will cross the street wearing wetsuits and clutching fins, tanks strapped and heavy and paint chipped. He will feel like a spy in a film. The cousin will rush. Marc will navigate kelp gardens alone, swimming through the same veils of light that striped Capri’s sea. Underwater jungles will sway. Surface seaweed will toss like thick hair submerged in small waves. Sunblock will abandon him in his fifties. Jellyfish won’t sting. Otters will observe Marc’s search for his cousin. Sharks will watch the otters. Who will watch the sharks? Afterward, his cousin will suggest they watch the last screening of La Dolce Vita at the local art house theater. In the car he will tell the cousin about the passive medusas in Giovanna’s sea. The cousin will praise his life in Italy. “Are you sure it’s over?”

Marc mumbles in Italian that he is never sure. About anything.

He sent his last letter to Giovanna two days before visiting Roma. Marc made a promise inside an Aries birthday card. He responded late to her Easter card that announced Buona Pasqua! and chimed when he opened it in blistered heat, standing in his front doorway with his back turned to a gravel road in Santa Fe.

A month after vacanza he will dig in the moving box that his brother packed and shipped. He will press the battery tucked in the Easter card to stir it awake from a month’s rest. He will enjoy the rhythm of Giovanna’s body on top of his in their noisy Napoli apartment. Weight and exclamations will measure his life of its brighter days, and a courtyard neighbor will scream at him and Giovanna each night, “Per favore, zitto!” He will understand why Jesus would choose to return. Giovanna will anticipate responses to his English tutor applications. Marc promised in English, at the end of his last letter, to ask for her hand. Mi chiamo Marco, he signed.

She opens the glove compartment and removes his last letter. She reads and reminds him she’s older than he is but would still say yes. She would leave Italia with him. Or stay. They sit in a car in the airport parking lot, surrounded by ochre fields that remind him of Fellini’s Il Bidone, but with color. Too much color amongst empty surroundings. Too little space in the living room of her parents’ apartment to consider landing there tonight. The family next to her yellow car watches and sees his hesitation. Giovanna honks at no one. He removes her hand from the horn. She cradles his face with both hands and when he looks away, she looks with him.

“What do you want to say, Marco?”

“Non so come dirlo.”

“Inglese, per favore. Say everything!”

“My fears say run. I have too much imagination for one person. I used to respond to risk to avoid it. I want to run fast. This dear and inadequate man behaving like a boy with a man’s rucksack wants to run away now. I want to know the answers I know I can only live.”

“Rilke?”

Knowledge of the Rilke reference crumbles his guard. Eyes water. When he stops laughing at his own discomfort, language dies inside his mind. They are insieme if he stays, insieme if he retreats. He folds his return ticket inside his passport. She names a secluded beach saved for his second visit. She asks him to drive. They chase each other past small sand dunes. They find warmth and evening privacy under large towels, two faces too close to see with eyes much older. Today, an airplane shrieks over them, over the medusas, a flight west with at least one empty seat in coach. Today her hair doesn’t dry after they swim senza costumi. He says yes to everything she asks of him.

Two days prior to vacanza, he spends an afternoon on a floral-print couch. He listens to Italian language cassette tapes while packing a large rucksack. He studies the Aries star formation on a paper card. He empties the ink of a pen onto blank pages by writing studied Italian phrases and drawing the embrace of two stick figures. Marco writes beneath the romance: ’giorno Giovanna, I will land in Roma soon for vacanza, hope to see more of Italia than in the movies and paintings, and thank you in person in many ways. My stick figure rendering proposes to your stick figure. We will see what memory has to say about a future.

Casey Haymes teaches creative writing and research to first year students at Parsons at The New School. He published a story in LIT, read a story in the Hi-Fi Reading Series, and won a writing residency from The Jentel Foundation. He earned an MFA from Sarah Lawrence College, where he served as the editor in chief of Lumina. Some of his thoughts appear at bypasserby.com.

Goddess

Mary Granfield

Jasmine got through the security checkpoint, relieved the cage didn’t cause a hitch. So far, Phaedra, her Siamese cat, was calm. Jasmine wondered if the sedative she’d sprinkled on Phaedra’s food had already taken effect; it wouldn’t be good if she woke up too soon, when they were still airborne. She lifted the corner of the cloth cage cover and peeked in. Phaedra was asleep.

A tingle in her right breast reminded her she needed to pump before boarding her flight. She’d chosen her airline after hearing about its new breastfeeding pod in the terminal. The only time she’d pumped in a women’s restroom, she’d gotten stares. She was looking forward to privacy this time.

She’d never flown with Dana but would gladly use a pod if she did. Her mother had disapproved of her choice to breastfeed. “I don’t care what anyone says,” she’d declared, “but it’s not sanitary. I gave you bottles and you turned out just fine.” When Jasmine visited her parents with Dana, they’d rush out of the room, muttering, any time she prepared to nurse. Although she loved breastfeeding, she continued to feel self-conscious about it.

She followed signs to the pod and went inside; she unzipped her carry-on and fished around for her pump. When she didn’t locate it, she felt ripples of worry. She paused as an image came to her: the blue pouch sitting on her kitchen counter.

Oh my God, I forgot it. Jasmine had left the pouch there when she’d taken Dana to her babysitter’s, intending to pack it upon her return. In her haste to get everything done, she’d skipped Dana’s morning feeding and planned a quick pump before leaving for the airport. But it had slipped her mind.

She glanced at her phone, calculating the time that remained before she’d land in Chicago. I can make it. At O’Hare, I’ll go to a CVS and buy a pump. After all, she’d been weaning Dana for months and had gotten her down to two daily feedings.

She made her way to the gate and seated herself, tucking the cage by her feet. Boarding wouldn’t start for another twenty minutes. This will be the last time I’ll ever see him, she thought, eyes pricking with tears.

Ah, Ronny. He was her first love, and she’d never really gotten over him. How had she let him go? It was his own fault for writing those bad checks, so of course he got sent away for three years. He’d returned home to Chicago and had just pulled his life together with a new job when he learned he had lung cancer. “Ha, ha, joke’s on me,” he’d said over the phone.

One December morning, she and Ronny made a plan to ditch their families and spend Christmas together, just the two of them. They’d lingered over brunch at a nice restaurant where their server, a former colleague, plied them with free champagne. When they finally left, they were tipsy. On their way home, they paused to watch kittens cavorting in a pet store window.

“Oy, I can’t stand it,” Jasmine said. “The cuteness is killing me.”

Ronny gestured toward the door.

“After you, mademoiselle,” he said.

Twenty minutes later, they emerged with Phaedra in a carrier.

The store owner, a manic fellow with a wispy ponytail, had regaled them with the story of how he inherited Phaedra. His best friend, an actor, had been invited to join a Shakespeare ensemble in Oregon.

“They wanted him to move across the country in just three days. Problem was, his beloved cat was giving birth to a new litter at that very moment. So, who do you think he called?”

His words floated, cloud-like, over the heads of Jasmine and Ronny, who gazed into one another’s eyes, entranced by their new love and what it had conjured: this irresistible feline baby. It startled them when the man added, “You can rename her, of course.”

They’d shaken their heads, appalled by the thought.

“Oh, no,” Ronny assured him. “We love her name.”

They’d lost touch for a long time when he called her out of the blue to tell her he had only a few months to live. He asked about Phaedra, and before she knew it, she offered to take the cat to see him. She couldn’t bring herself to tell him about Dana, the surprise baby she’d had with Cameron, a pothead who dreamed of hitting it big on YouTube, but whose goofy videos embarrassed her.

If Cam didn’t start earning some real money in two weeks, she’d kick him out. Jasmine and Dana didn’t need him; her job comfortably supported them. She’d found a wonderful home day care just a block away from their apartment in Queens, so she didn’t rely on him for anything.

Jasmine had disappointed her parents by dropping out of college and drifting for nearly seven years, waitressing and partying hard with her restaurant friends in New York City. But ever since she decided to keep her baby, she got serious and began building a secure life for herself and Dana.

A friend had mentioned an opening at his mother’s law firm, so Jasmine had applied for it and been hired. She’d started out as a receptionist but was soon doing paralegal work. Her friend’s mother, a partner at the firm who’d also been a single parent, took a shine to Jasmine and encouraged her to finish her college degree and take the LSATs. “You’d make a stellar trial lawyer,” she said.

The boarding process went smoothly. When Jasmine reached her seat, the cage slid easily beneath the one in front of her. Even better, the other seat in her row remained empty.

Thirty minutes into the flight, she was happily spread out reading her book with her feet tucked beneath her. There hadn’t been a peep from the cage, even after the drinks cart rattled by and Jasmine ordered a Virgin Bloody Mary, a drink she only ever had on planes.

The throbbing in her right breast had become more insistent and was now being echoed, if less intensely, in her left one. It’s okay. In just two hours, I’ll be able to pump.

She wondered if Phaedra would recognize Ronny or remember his scent. He loved you a lot, Phaedra, so you’d better be nice to him, she thought, frowning down at the cage.

It pained her to remember how badly the cat took Dana’s arrival. Instead of curling up on Jasmine’s bed each night and purring loudly while being petted, Phaedra boycotted the bedroom altogether. If Dana was home, she never allowed anyone to pet her. Much to the toddler’s frustration, the cat darted off anytime she came near. Only on the rare occasions when Jasmine was alone would Phaedra approach, weaving furry shackles around her ankles.

The high-pitched cry was familiar, yet uncanny, plucking a string deep inside her. Dana. Jasmine’s mind scrambled to make sense of this. How had her child gotten on the plane? The cry went on, its pitch rising to a yowl. Her eyes fell to the cage. Phaedra. It was Phaedra, not Dana.

During the six years she’d owned the cat, she’d never once heard her make this harsh, unsettling sound. She reached down, unlatched the door and pulled Phaedra onto her lap, stroking her desperately with both hands.

“What is that racket?” someone asked from several rows ahead. A boy’s head popped over the empty seat next to her. “Is that your kitty cat?” he asked. “Why is she crying?”

“She apparently doesn’t like to fly,” Jasmine replied. She heard his mother chide him, and he disappeared. Phaedra would not settle down; she sank her claws into Jasmine’s thighs, piercing her jeans, and released another earsplitting yowl. Jasmine’s shirt bloomed wet; her milk was letting down.

A vision of Dana’s face, balloon-like, danced above her, her cheeks rosy and hazel eyes aglow with love and hunger. Often when Jasmine fed her, the baby’s hands would flit around like hummingbirds before alighting on her neck and shoulder.

Guilt shot through her, a hail of darts. What am I doing here, on a plane with a screeching cat, instead of staying home nursing my sweet girl? Milk was trickling down her stomach, pooling inside her navel.

“This is outrageous, I’m calling the flight attendant,” the woman behind her said. Was it the boy’s mother? Jasmine watched, panic gripping her throat, as Phaedra arched her back, preparing for another scream. Jasmine’s nipples caught fire.

Milk, she thought, tearing open the right flap of her nursing bra, aiming her nipple at Phaedra and squeezing. The spray hit the cat in the face. Phaedra blinked furiously and glared at Jasmine with more loathing than she’d ever encountered from another living creature. As the cat opened her jaws to protest, Jasmine, who was still gripping her taut breast like a gun, shoved it into Phaedra’s mouth, amazed by her own actions, thinking: Teeth, oh dear God, those teeth.

She was grateful when Phaedra latched on gently, her teeth digging in just tolerably. The same flight attendant who served Jasmine her drink was charging down the aisle, looking around for the source of the disturbance. She stopped by Jasmine’s seat, her mouth dropping open.

“It’s not what you think,” Jasmine told her. The woman gaped for a few more moments before shaking her head as if to dislodge water from her ears, then hurried away. Jasmine, her face burning, almost tugged Phaedra off her, but the blessed relief in that breast, coupled with the mounting pressure in her left one, stopped her. She transferred Phaedra onto that breast, sighing as the cat went to work on it.

Jasmine winced at her absurd excuse: It’s not what you think. It was bizarre, sure, if you were an ordinary mortal. But in that moment, Ronny’s awestruck voice entered her head: “Jasmine, you are a goddess! Seriously, you are unlike any other woman I’ve known. Are you even for real?”

She peeled Phaedra off her chest and eased her into her cage. The cat was gratifyingly compliant. The flight attendant was the only person who’d seen the feeding because the couple across the aisle had, incredibly enough, slept through the ordeal, their ears cupped by headphones and eyes covered with sleep masks.

“What was that?” asked a free-floating voice.

“God only knows, but it’s over now,” someone replied.

“Fingers crossed,” the first one added.

Jasmine smiled, wondering if the flight attendant doubted the surreal scene she’d come across. Maybe she’ll think she was hallucinating. But Jasmine preferred to imagine that someday—while the woman was serving someone else a Virgin Bloody Mary—it would dawn on her that she’d witnessed something miraculous.

She’d realize she’d been in the presence of a goddess. Yes, Jasmine was a goddess endowed with surprising powers. There was nothing she couldn’t do now.

Mary Granfield is a writer whose work has appeared in People, Money, Glamour, The Boston Globe Magazine, and other publications. Her short story “Towel Imp” was a finalist in the 2019 Reynolds Price Fiction Contest. She lives in the Boston area.

Sticks and Stones

Jay Wamsted

I was posted up outside my door one day, greeting students as they wandered in for class, when Michael came back outside to speak.

“I was in this store yesterday,” he started, nodding at his classmates as they made their way past us, “and this man was super weird to me.”

I was paying attention, though not overly so. I am in my thirteenth year of teaching at Mays High in southwest Atlanta, and in that time I have heard countless stories from so many teenagers. Often teaching is much like parenting—you’re always doing at least three things at once, and listening to an extracurricular exploit is usually the one furthest in the background.

Michael went on. “So I’m just walking around, looking for some snacks, and this white guy comes in, looks me over, and says, ‘You a big n-word, ain’t ya?’”

My brain shut down its other functions immediately; I was paying complete attention now. To be clear, Michael did not say “n-word.” He is black—as are ninety-eight percent of my students, the other two percent being Hispanic—and he spoke the insult out loud, without a trace of self-consciousness. Like it or not, the word remains entrenched in the argot of the black teen.

I squared to face him. “What?” I asked, incredulous, angry.

Michael shrugged. “Yeah, it was weird. His wife kind of apologized for him, and I just kept looking for snacks. But then this other black kid walks in and the guy goes up and calls him an n-word also.”

He paused, his attention distracted by laughter drifting from inside our classroom. He looked back at me. “Anyways, it was just super strange. But when it happened, I thought about you, felt like I should tell you about it for some reason.” I nodded, completely unsure about any proper response.

Five minutes later I was teaching math to a room full of black and brown faces. As usual, I was the only white person in the room.

            Even the most kindhearted white woman,
            Dragging herself through traffic with her nails
            On the wheel & her head in a chamber of black
            Modern American music may begin, almost
            Carelessly, to breathe n-words

—Terrance Hayes, “American Sonnet for my Past and Future Assassin”
#11, lines 1-5

Some years prior I had taught a student named David. Once he came to my room—not during class, rather just to talk—when, apropos of nothing, he asked me, “Wamsted, you ever say the n-word?”

Again, David actually spoke the word. My face went flush, and I came back quickly and loudly with something like, “No! David! Why would you ask me that?”

But he wouldn’t take no for an answer; instead, he kept at me for a bit before switching tactics. David knew that I have a soft spot for Kanye West and his first two albums. “Okay Wamsted,” he said. “Let’s say you driving around in your car, windows up, all alone, rapping along with Kanye. Then he says the n-word. What you going to do?”

I was more uncomfortable than I ever had been with a student; I could feel my ears burning. “No way, David! I just skip those lyrics!” I looked at him, imploring, hoping he would let up, and finally he did.

“Okay, okay, Wamsted, I hear you. Just know this, though: I’m going to keep an eye on you.” He turned heel and walked out of the room, didn’t even say goodbye.

At the time I thought ours was just a bizarre interaction, one from which I was grateful simply to be released, though I don’t see it that way anymore. Now I think I might have missed an opportunity to connect with a young black man who had no good reason yet to trust me.

Monday morning, a class full of seniors, all of them a little down after a big football loss over the weekend. Mays is a good team—we played several years ago for the state championship, and football is an important part of our school’s culture. One of my students, a high-profile college recruit, describes the beating they took on Friday.

“They were all these white boys, Mr. Wamsted, and they were vicious. Every play, you’d get tackled, and they’d stay on you just a little longer than usual, not enough to get a penalty, just enough to curse you out.”

On the ground, n-word! Yeah, n-word, you stay down!

“It was exhausting, Mr. Wamsted. They just wore us out.”

            Yes, even the most
            Bespectacled hallucination cruising the lanes
            Of America may find her tongue curls inward,
            Entangling her windpipe, her vents, toes & pedals
            When she drives alone.

—Terrance Hayes, “American Sonnet for my Past and Future Assassin”
#11, lines 5-9

Sometime after the Kanye conversation David was in my room again, and as is not uncommon for even the best of adolescents, he was driving me crazy. It was during class, and he was harassing me about some favor he needed that I was unwilling to perform at the moment. We were getting louder and quicker with our comebacks as he tried to convince me to see things his way, and finally I took a different tack with a deliberately arch comment.

“David! The exigencies of our current situation counterweight the quiddity of the dilemma in which you find yourself enmeshed. Much to my vertiginous chagrin, I am unable to assist you due to my pedagogical responsibilities!”

(Or something like that. At this point, I have no idea what I really said.)

He turned away from me to a friend. “See? That’s what white people do when you’re winning an argument. They get all loud and use big words to bully you into shutting up.” He and his friend laughed, and once again, David walked away without another word back at me.

A softball game far outside the city, past the inner ring of suburbs and into what is known around here as “the country.” One of my students was playing in the outfield, close to where the teenagers from the opposing school set up their cheering section. For seven innings she trots out there, takes up her position, tries to focus. All the while, a steady stream of insults from the all-white crowd watching the game:

“Hey there, monkey! You sure look like a gorilla. Bet you don’t even know who your daddy is, huh? Maybe an ape. Monkey! Hey, gorilla-girl! Who’s your daddy, gorilla-girl? You hear me, monkey? I’m talking to you!”

She didn’t say a word in response. One of her teammates, however, was thrown out late in the game for getting rude with an umpire while arguing balls and strikes. Mays lost the game pretty badly.

My students think these facts are unrelated, but I am not so sure.

            Even the most made up
            Layers of persona in a two- or four-door vehicle
            Sealed in a fountain of bass & black boys
            Chanting n-words may begin to chant inwardly
            Softly before she can catch herself.

—Terrance Hayes, “American Sonnet for my Past and Future Assassin”
#11, lines 9-13

Once, early in my time at Mays, I was called down to the office to meet with a parent whose grandson had been performing poorly of late. The student was missing classes and not turning in assignments; the grandfather wanted to know what could be done in terms of making up the work. I don’t remember exactly what happened, but as we were discussing what could and couldn’t be rectified, I became frustrated somehow about the situation. Maybe I was in a hurry, maybe the grandfather wanted more leniency for his grandson than I thought was warranted, maybe I felt accused of not doing my job properly. Whatever was going on in my mind, I must have said something in a tone, gotten a little louder than the situation required, because the grandfather interrupted me.

“I will not be intimidated by you!” he intoned, flashing eyes a dare to continue. I balked, in no manner having intended to intimidate him, and we stumbled through the rest of our talk. His grandson eventually turned in the missing work, passed my class, and moved on. All’s well that ends well—an uncomfortable moment papered over by a successful conclusion.

Until David, that is. For years I explained the grandfather away by putting the blame on him: his grandson had made a series of poor choices, and I wanted to believe the moment reflected more general frustration than actual offense. Now, though, I think intimidating an older black man—consciously or not—was exactly what I was trying to do that morning. More subtly than overtly, perhaps, but equally intentional to my high-vocabulary comment all those years later.

David was right—“bully” is an apposite word here.

Sitting with a black colleague at a graduation ceremony, and she is telling me her story, how she moved to Atlanta after winning an impressive scholarship—the Gates Millennium, which paid not only for her undergrad but also would follow her for life and fund her upcoming medical school. She had taken a break in her higher education to teach, was working at Mays for a couple of years in an effort to pay back her good fortune in some manner. I made some naïve comment about defeating racism, something about how she had risen above it with her amazing accomplishments, how certainly she must show the world the foolishness in the notion of skin superiority. She laughed.

“Just the other day I was driving through a rich white part of town, and I got distracted for a second at a light. The car behind me peels around and this white guy hollers out his window.”

Get moving, n-word!

“So, you know, you never really get to leave it behind.”

Of course,
After that, what is inward, is absorbed.

—Terrance Hayes, “American Sonnet for my Past and Future Assassin”
#11, lines 13-14

David asked me that time if I ever said the n-word, and I told him no. Let me now be more honest, offer a story that might serve as a hinge in my teaching career.

Once I was in a hallway meeting with a difficult student. We had been getting on each other’s nerves since the beginning of the year; this afternoon we were arguing about some point of classroom management, and both of us became increasingly frustrated. Finally he rolled his eyes, completely exasperated, and shot off at me in an effort to end the conversation decisively—n-word, please!

I came back at him in what I thought would be a disarming fashion: “Hey, now you’re not making any sense, calling me an n-word. Let’s talk reasonably here.” Again, to be clear, both my student and I spoke the n-word aloud. The conversation from this point completely escapes my memory; the moment slid into the quotidian. I only remember this story at all because of what happened the next day.

That morning I was walking into the building when a colleague, a veteran black teacher some years older than me, stood in my path. “Can I speak to you, Wamsted?” he asked, and we made our way off to the side of the early morning teacher traffic. I had no idea what he wanted to talk about; we taught different grade levels as well as subjects, so our work relationship was limited. The previous day’s conversation had completely slipped my mind.

As it turns out, he had been in the hall and heard my interaction with the student, and he was incensed. For a minute or so, the two of us in full public view as teachers walked by getting ready for the day, he lit into me about the history of the n-word, the terrible struggle he and his forebears had undergone in order to liberate themselves from such oppression, the offense he felt at hearing some white man say it to a black teenager. I wish I could remember what he said, but I panicked and shut down. I was so embarrassed, so horrified at the thought that this older black man I barely knew would think I was a racist—I found myself nodding along and saying “yes, sir” to every word while hearing none of it.

I knew, given how seldom our paths crossed, that it would be some time before he would be able to think of me as anything other than that white guy who, however well-meaning, said the n-word. It was years before I was able to speak to him without something like fear and trembling.

In retrospect, my discomfort could have gone in many different directions—I could have reacted with fear like the Kanye conversation with David, or attempted to bully my way out as I had so many times before. Instead I managed to do the one thing that I think endeared me to this teacher who later become a close colleague.

I shut my mouth and listened.

One morning near the end of my school year with David, he came to my room, his friend tagging along. “Wamsted, hey,” he said, “let me use your deodorant.”

It is true that I had deodorant, and David knew it. I ride my bicycle to work, so I keep a stick in my bag. I told David, however, that I didn’t have any spray and I don’t share stick deodorant. As before, he wouldn’t let up—he kept at me, wheedling away, getting agitated. The situation was becomingly uncomfortably familiar.

Exasperated, I finally tried to come back in a definitive manner, and I said something loud like, “David! I am NOT going to share my stick deodorant with you!”

He got loud right back at me. “Why? Because I’m black? Because I’m unclean? You don’t want to lend your deodorant to some unclean black man?”

The words hung there, heavy between us as we all watched each other. This time, however, I didn’t panic or try to bluster my way out; this time I didn’t collapse into silence. I just sighed. “Really, David? It’s that serious for you to bring up all that about racism? Here, brother, be cool, just use the deodorant.”

He instantly calmed down, and as he slid my stick deodorant under his shirt he turned to his friend. “I knew I’d get him with that black man stuff. White people hate being called racist.” He turned back to me. “Thanks, Wamsted. You all right after all.”

And then, just like before, he and his friend burst out laughing. Instead of walking away, however, this time they invited me in on the joke, and I, realizing I had been played, burst out laughing, too. It was glorious. Somehow through all the years I had stumbled upon a way of speaking without fear or intimidation; I had managed to win David’s trust.

For a moment or so there in my classroom, we were all right after all.

By most accounts my time at Mays has been successful—I am well-liked by both the administration and, more importantly perhaps, the students. I field hugs, high-fives, fist bumps all day long; last year I was honored by the senior class with the highly-coveted “Favorite Teacher” award. Once we had a student-teacher basketball game, one where I was kept on the bench for very good reasons that had nothing to do with the fact that I was the only white man on the floor. Eventually, though, they had to put me in when the crowd of juniors and seniors kept up a minutes-long chant of “Wam-sted! Wam-sted!” It was, to say the least, exhilarating—this despite the fact that at no point did I lay hands on the ball.

Recently, though, I received a compliment of a more Janus-faced nature, when a student told me out of the blue that I was the first white person she had ever trusted. I was both elated and devastated. I am, of course, pleased finally to find myself becoming the kind of white man a black teenager could trust. And yet, after she left the room and the shine wore off her comment, all I could do was to wonder about the kind of world we live in, a world where a seventeen-year-old black girl could say with complete sincerity that she never before trusted a white person. I went home that day frustrated rather than encouraged, asking myself how such a thing could have come to pass.

I offer this essay in response to that unspoken question.

You a big n-word, ain’t ya?

“Anyways, it was weird. And when it happened, I just thought about you, felt like I should tell you about it for some reason.”

Michael is looking at me, sideways, not committing fully to my response, but visibly curious. I paused for a moment, took a breath, and looked him in the eyes. He turned to face me, leaning in to my words. I said the only thing I could think of to say.

“That’s some bullshit, Michael. Some real bullshit.”

He smiled broadly at me, nodded his head. I spend so much time asking students to express their emotions in a way that eschews cursing, but sometimes no other words exist to capture such a maleficent thing.

“Thanks for telling me, man, I’m glad you did,” I said. I grabbed his hand and pulled him in for one of those handshake/backslap/hugs.

“Real bullshit,” I said again, almost a whisper.

Jay Wamsted has taught math to teenagers in Atlanta for fifteen years. His writing has been featured in various journals and magazines, including Harvard Educational Review, Southeast Review, and Under the Sun. He can be found online at “Education Post,” where he is a columnist, or on the “TEDx” YouTube channel, where you can watch his 2017 talk “Eating the Elephant: Ending Racism & the Magic of Trust.” He and his wife have four young children, and he is fortunate enough to walk to work. You can contact him on Twitter @JayWamsted or by email, wamsted@gmail.com.