KELLEY WHITE Bucket, wood, braided raw-hide handle

flecked with salt and rose petals and tinted sugar. The flat smells lightly of perfumed disinfectant. It is like we are a museum exhibit. We peer at each other like curious animals. Are you this? we wonder. Are you that? Jet lagged and giddy in the flawless environment, everything we say is hilarious, each sleepy utterance standing up on its hind legs. We laugh and laugh, and for a full day and night we strut around like celebrities on a private island. We bury our heads in each other’s bodies, and we offer up more pleasure, more access than usual. Hold on, I want to say to everything, but the week passes, the treats are consumed, and the soft, feathered edges of the scene around me turn worryingly crisp. I hang some things in the closet, place some things in the drawers, set things out in the bathroom.

After work most nights, Cory puts on big, padded headphones at night and converses haltingly with other language learners across the wires. He is often described, professionally, as a translator, but not in the usual sense. He translates “architectures supporting capacities for automation.” The company’s website explains it: he examines the blueprints of a nascent technological hub, and then he articulates a cultural framework to lay the foundation on which said hubs are built. And what can I do, what are my skills? My expertise is in sharing, playing, consonant blends. I can repeat the same small word one hundred thousand times any way you like it—spoken, written, or in song.

I try walking to the main road, a thoroughfare lined with butchers, bakers, places of worship, a pharmacy, a bar, a spice shop, a print shop, a day care, a bank. I slip into these places, touching the pamphlets and business cards, shrugging at the lilting, undeciphered questions, and I come home wishing I were brave enough to buy bread. On weekends, we try to navigate the new country together, which is to say we try to communicate absent legible context. Sludge has entered the bloodstream. When we are together, our insecurities mesh and compound into an impenetrable weave of failure with debts on all levels, from atom to institution. Each step on the pavement is wrong. He picks up an eggplant at the grocery, and his movements appear poorly acted. He feigns interest in the eggplant for whom? Not me. I dumbly finger the eyes of potatoes. Our sense of space is off—his shoulders bump my shoulders; I kick at his heels. It is not easy to see us completing, from here, a sex act. We stab the silence with ideas, options that sound, against the opaquely stubborn mood, like mockeries of themselves.

30 CAROLINA QUARTERLY