the wellesley review
no. 5 / fall 2010
the wellesley review [no. 5 / fall 2010]
table of contents Untitled [Lucy Cleland]. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . These Palisades [Hayley C. Merrill] . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . View from Palacio Barolo [Gabriela Lopez]. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Desert’s Bride [Janna Mehdi Zimmermann]. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Mangoes [Sarah Zaidi]. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Lifedeath [Xinhong Qiu] . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Shrewsbury kids had it bad [Jordan Parker]. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Untitled [Caitlin Greenhill]. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Yesterday [Natalie Ospina]. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
6 7 8 9 15 16 18 19
Routine [Claire Shiplett]. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Fishers Island [Abigail Murdy] . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Sichuan, China [Amelie Ye Wen]. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Mia [Zoe Mungin]. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Untitled [Margaret Zwiebach] . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Poem [Jaya A. Stenquist]. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Bird’s-eye View [Naureen Mazumdar]. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Acknowledgements [Staff] . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
25 26 28 29 30 35 36 37 38
These Palisades [Hayley C. Merrill]
I don’t know if I mentioned this but my sister tried to commit suicide recently, you said as the yellow and black taxi drove through the monsoon flooded Bombay night. I picture her in a room bathed in white, lying listless.
View from Palacio Barolo [Gabriela Lopez]
Am I lying if I say I felt nothing? Nothing will come of nothing: speak again. Rain speckles my toes my unholy feet each step pounding life life. No full stops for me, and none for your sister, sitting by the window watching for death in her white walled room. I want to turn over and roll like a marble through these palisades: until the disconnects dissolve away faster and faster until the colors blur. [6]
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Mangoes [Sarah Zaidi]
Desert’s Bride [Janna Mehdi Zimmermann]
I was thirteen when Amma fell. Just like that. None of that Crash. Boom. Pow. Probably more of a Thud. And then…nothing. It was one of those sticky days when the sweat trickled down, causing your kameez to press to your back, creating a heart-shaped stain. Maybe not heart-shaped. Perspiration rarely dribbles so romantically. More of a paisley design, then. It was a lethargic summer day where the minutes merged, seconds synthesized… a perfect mango sucking day. Mangoes. Al-Manjoo. Aam. (Sorry, I don’t speak any more languages. To be honest, I don’t really know Arabic, but I’ve learnt words here and there from the Qur’an and from my second son, the contractor in Dubai.) It really was a perfect day…until she fell. Munnoo was actually a munna back then (and not the jiggly waste of flesh and blood that he’s become). We could even fit on to the same charpoy. It was a late July afternoon, and we had dozed off. But Munnoo had shuddered awake, startling me. A group of women had assembled around us while we were sleeping. “Shh…” I remember telling him. “Go back to sleep. They’re angels. We’re not allowed to stare.” And with that, we both turned the other way and went back to our summer siestas. Only later did I realize how right I was. Angels they were—malak al maut—the angels of death. They were the Christian ladies from the dispensary across the road who had come in their knee-length white dresses, frocks so short that Abba said he would cane my legs until they were nothing but pulpy oblivion if I ever wore them. They had come—and
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failed—to heal Amma. I didn’t even know that there was something wrong with her. Can a perfectly-functioning, reproducing-annually-without-fail, thirty-two-year-old, barely-begun just die? Of nothing, absolutely nothing at all? “Of course it wasn’t ‘nothing’,” Abba would say later, “It was a headache.” A headache?! Can one die of a headache? Allah knows best, but…oh, mangoes. After Pakistan was made, I—who was used to only bucketful of mangoes with hairy pits that got stuck in my teeth—was dismayed. Along with Kashmir and the Taj Mahal (which was built by a Muslim!), the British had also given the Hindus the land better suited to mango-growing. Amma was eating a mango the day she died. Munnoo and I sat next to her, as she brought out a knife from the fourteen-piece set that Auntie Farah brought her from London and cut mangoes into eighths. Munnoo and I sucked on the mangoes so it looked like the peels were our teeth. Dull yellow teeth with black specks. Scary smiles. The ayah said Amma had a scary smile when she fell. Those who saw her said Amma’s lips were curled into a haha-I-know-somethingyou-don’t-know smirk. Even years after the fall, the ayah would quiver and touch her earlobes whenever someone mentioned Amma. “Arrey, she leered at me afterwards! Something wasn’t right. She didn’t have the peaceful look of death. And I swear on the Qur’an, her teeth turned yellow and had black spots, and her hair, it became white instantly, minutes after she died…” My hair went white too, the year after Amma went thud. I was fourteen. “Aiyaa! She’s an old maid!” they shrieked once I stepped into the palanquin. “What kind of bride has white hair!?” That was my first meeting with the in-laws. I didn’t see the future father of my sons, though, of course. We were strict, purdah-observing Muslims. All I knew about him was that he was thirty. I was barely fifteen. Fifteen times two equals thirty. I was always good at mathematics. Sister [10]
Mary was always proud that I was the top of my class at the Bharatpur Girls’ School. She said I would go far, take the world by storm one day. Not many other Musulman girls made it to Class 8. I did. My husband was educated until Class 10. Just two years more than me, and he worked as a government officer. I always thought I could become a dentist like Fatima Jinnah. I wouldn’t want to pick out the mango hairs from people’s teeth, but I would like to perform more complicated procedures like root rivers or lakes or whatever it is that my American doctor son’s white wife did for me. Before the days of Colgate and Aquafresh, we were simple miswak—chewing stick—using types. Teeth consumed our thoughts. Abba told us that the Prophet (may he rest in peace) urged his people to maintain hygiene and take care of their loaned body, but especially of their teeth. I also learned that to avoid confrontation with the in-laws about my hair color, all I had to do was form a concoction of henna and coffee and leave it in my hair for two hours each month. The smell of the paste on my head also appeared to repel the husband enough into staying away. That was helpful; I no longer had to sip the revolting potion the hakim gave me to avoid having a new addition to the family every nine months or so. That was an unexpected relief. My marriage was in 1942. My oldest son, the anesthesiologist in America, loves Bollywood films. His favorite is 1942: A Love Story with Manisha Koirala. I hope he realizes that I wasn’t her and his father wasn’t Anil Kapoor. There were no stolen kisses, no longing gazes, no fluttering yellow saris and dancing in the rain scenes between his father and me. Where would a girl confined to the women’s quarters even find such love? On the roof, facing the neighbors? Things like that only happen in atrocious Punjabi films. In reality, when a girl’s mother dies, a part of her ends too. There remains no one who will fight for her. She must be strong; she is her own keeper. At the sight of the first blood, she is restricted to the zenana and is told by aunts that the time to put together a dowry has come. All dreams of dentistry are destroyed. Instead, it becomes time to em[11]
broider bed covers and crochet curtain tie-backs. If I had known, I would have feigned sickness and hidden the monthly to buy myself some time. Would I have had an illicit rooftop affair with the boy next door? Probably not. But who knows? If there’s one thing I’ve learnt in my life, it’s that people can surprise you. After I began to live with the father of my sons, life became all about how circular my chapattis were rolled. Originally, mine looked like Australia. Even if I only went to Class 8 doesn’t mean I don’t know how Australia looks. Just because I don’t speak English as furrfurr as the rest of them doesn’t make me stupid. I was unlike the other daughters-in-law who devoted hours making perfectly-shaped pieces of bread which were to be consumed by the men without remark about whether Australia or New Zealand was more accurately represented. While they pined for some recognition of their geographical knowledge, I used the lid of a Quality Street chocolate box almost like a cookie-cutter. And so, my chapattis were the most circular of all. This meant, however, that teeth were forgotten. Multiplication tables were put away to the back of my mind. I was now in Pakistan, too, so mangoes went from being brought home in buckets, to being prodded, squeezed, and weighed pound by pound. Life was now measured. No time for useless ponderings. Back when days weren’t calculated, computed, and quantified, Munnoo and I used to build houses out of matchboxes. My house always had large windows. His always included a swimming pool. He had heard about pools from Auntie Farah’s youngest daughter Safra. Her name is Arabic for “yellow”—I learnt that from the now-unemployed son from Dubai. I needed fresh air and a view of the outside world. Munnoo needed to submerge himself. One day, Munnoo dropped all of the matchboxes and one of them slipped into a crack in the wall by the floor where some plaster had peeled off. We saved the miniature boxes, but the hole in the foundation seemed to grow. The week after Amma’s chehlum, I found something on the floor, stuck between pieces of plaster. It was a glass vial. It had a bit of mango-colored liquid. I [12]
pressed it into my hand, not knowing what it was, but intuitively realizing that it was not something to be shared. It was to be a secret. I had never kept one before…I was too dutiful, too naïve, too trusting of others. I pressed so hard, the cover of the bottle imprinted itself into my sweaty palms; I was branded with the sign of a paisley. Just over half a decade later, on the train from India, to guard our honor from the Sikhs, my brother-in-law gave me a tiny vessel of yellowish fluid. I was instructed to gulp the contents of the bottle should a non-Muslim enter our ladies’ cabin. It’s more honorable for a Muslim woman to surrender herself to death, than to be touched by an infidel. A man must have created this concept of honor. I, frankly, would rather just be alive. To make my brother-in-law happy, though, I kept the bottle, just in case. I pressed it tightly in my hands until I felt an indent. I looked down and saw…a paisley. Amma. Suicide is forbidden—haraam. Amma taught me how to pray. She was buried in the Muslim cemetery with due reverence. No posthumous casting aside for her. Paisleys are stylized mangoes. Mangoes. Paisleys. Fertility. Bleeding out babies. Bleeding out life. Yellow liquids. Yellow teeth. Black spots. White hair. I’ve carried the twin vials side-by-side for as long as I can remember. The broth of death. No one ever found out. After Benazir Bhutto was killed, the people of Pakistan demanded that she be cut open. Autopsy. Science. Truth. But “no,” said Zardari. “Leave my wife alone.” After Amma fell, no one demanded an autopsy. Her supposedly bizarre countenance after death was attributed to the heat. No one knew about the bottle, of course. Women dropped all the time then, just like flies. But quite honestly, what a romantic way to die—just like Romeo and Juliet, or like Socrates. So much more feminine than cancer or getting run over by a bus. I’m old now. Yesterday, I realized it was time. After dinner, I walked to the almirah in my dressing room. Behind the dowry silks, even behind the fading sepia prints of Amma, Munnoo, and I, wrapped in an old cotton summer dupatta were two bottles. Had I thought about putting it in my evil-eye giving, sister-in-law’s chai or [13]
Lifedeath [Xinhong Qiu]
my son’s crossbred American, probably-Jewish (!), wife? Of course. But I never thought of using the stuff on myself. Never. But enough was enough. I had carried the bottle for long enough. The doctor said I was beginning to have heart problems. Of course—family secrets eat you up from the inside until you’re hollow. One morning after Fajr, the time where I was told the angels came out, I thought it was time to do the deed. The yellow liquid accidentally-on-purpose spilled from my hand to the floor in the shape of a heart. And this time, it really was a heart. And no Drip. Drip. Drip. like I thought there would be. No sound at all. And no paisley or mango in sight. The stain darkened into a shade of burgundy, and then was completely absorbed by the cement flooring.
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The Shrewsbury kids had it bad [Jordan Parker]
all nine redheads in sleeping bags packed in the living room like cigarettes and woke early for chores, their teeth stained green like moss. They stayed busy for weeks in their father’s old garden shed and when finally they finished, Eric snuck over to my porch where I’d promised to wait and led me across the street. Branches of lightening crawled across the amethyst sky, flashing the image of a bare tree in winter. Two canvas chairs at the pond held wells of rainwater in the impressions made by small bodies.
until I saw the rugs made from knotted rags and couldn’t bear to wipe my feet. With feed bag curtains and a three legged table propped in the corner and adorned with a blanket of dandelions and clover, it was the most beautiful playhouse I’d ever seen. A tawny chair, dragged in from the dump, its cushions still soaked with another day’s rain, occupied the center of the gritty wood floor. When finally Jill left, I gave Eric a clump of rags that he cradled in his arms, playing mother.
We took cover in the shed where Jill, pregnant and thirteen, leaned against the only wall that hadn’t caved from the blizzard when the fire-haired toddler searched for the ducks gone South. They pulled him from the pond, frozen, his head like a small blue balloon. I thought he’d been the lucky one
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Yesterday [Natalia Ospina]
Untitled [Caitlin Greenhill]
The day that follows is sunnier, sunshine reflecting violently off the cars and rising in hazy waves off the dark concrete. She sweeps the floor and her son scrubs the windows. Her brown hands are strong and tough from thorns and factory work. He has paler hands, with delicately defined knuckles. She finishes her chore quickly, and then helps him polish the windows. They take the sheets off the couches, coming together and then away again as they fold the white fabric into smaller and smaller squares before hiding it away in a closet. Relatives trickle into the house, their hands full of folded paper boats. The mother bows to each group at the front door, thanking them for their gifts, assuring them they are helping her youngest son arrive richly into the afterlife. She leads them to the table she has set up in the kitchen, the surface covered in more designed folding paper. Her son had expressed his dissatisfaction with the sheets; they weren’t appropriate. They didn’t remind him of Jamie, he had said, but she had not listened and had bought them anyway. Looking at them now, she agreed with Ciarán. After several hours the padre arrives, his robes austere and heavily ironed, his nails clipped short. Ciarán’s mother scuttles toward the bedroom to change, afraid to have the padre see her so poorly dressed. And so Ciarán is expected to bow in her stead. He wants to trail after her and remind her he had never maintained a good rapport with this religious mumbo-jumbo, all this illusionary worship for no real gain. Then he remembers giving his brother this speech, and he recalls where his lectures led them.
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Here. So, he bows to the padre, who only wrinkles his nose and announces that the house is still contaminated by death. More incense is required. Ciarán wants to let loose a violent tirade against the infuriating authority in the padre’s voice, but he holds his tongue. Putting on the robes of the dutiful son, he nods silently. His mother gives him the money for the incense, and he escapes out into the street. The heavy glass door closes behind him, and he hears it lock. Inside, the murmur of the guests is silenced, and he is left to his own thoughts, which envelop him like a stifling wool blanket at midday. Cigarette smoke might help block the reflections, but he’d have to go back into the house for those, and that doesn’t appeal to him. He blinks against the sudden onslaught of day, which greets him fiercely. Normally he lurks inside until at least three in the afternoon, when the wind hits the city from the shore and the leaves shiver in relief. He has grown too used to the lazy self-scheduling of an intellectual, and the oppressive heat disconcerts him. He feels the sweat pooling where his collarbone juts out, and his shirt clings to him uncomfortably. To distract himself from the heat his mind moves away from the present to things he wishes he had —a car, sunglasses, a career, a cool glass of water, his brother. The first sound he hears as he closes the gate behind him are muffled cheers. He prefers these to gunfire, but the clamor of human voices remind him of yesterday, and his mind swiftly rejects the noise. He has lived here all his life; he knows the lonely streets where no one will be celebrating. There is no place where the shouts will be silenced, no place but sleep or death, and after yesterday neither are options for him. There are empty bottles and empty bullet shells littering the streets, physical reminders of the previous day crowding the gutters. He kicks a bottle. It cracks. The market is mostly empty, only one employee grinning widely as he enters. The rest have joined the dancing in the streets. Ciarán follows the aisles, everything still in its proper spot, as if yesterday and [20]
today were mirrors of one another. He smells the boxes of incense before picking out several. They all smell the same. —Exciting, huh?—the boy asks as he rings up the items Ciarán placed on the conveyer belt. Ciarán stares at the boy in uniform—he is a boy, really, the same age as his brother had been—and isn’t sure how to respond. It takes him a moment to make the connection. The boy is referring to yesterday’s coup. He seems so eager, so ready to accept this brave new world before him. So ready for this today to be tomorrow. —Did you know exciting was often used as a medical term in the 17th century? As in an exciting cause of a disease. Ciarán’s words are made up of years of yesterday’s education, of sharp eyes scanning words and finding in them the meaning behind all the lies he knew best. The facility with which Ciarán can tell a man what he knows is wrong and frivolous is frightening, as if a man were nothing more than a dog to be frightened off. His tactics are those of yesterday, and his theories those of change and Shangri-la. These words shaped yesterday, they shaped today, and may shape tomorrow. They slipped into eager minds like Eden’s snakes or sharp syringes. These words seem heavy on his tongue now, foreign and poisonous despite the sizzle of excitement that fills the streets. The boy with eager eyes says no more to Ciarán, and simply nods, his lips no longer curled upward. He leaves with his purchase and heads back to the top of the hill, where his house is perched. From there he can make out all the dirty streets and is in plain view of the hot sun. The doorbell to his house is shrill, as shrill as the surprise in his mother’s voice had been yesterday. She opens the door for him, nodding as she checks the insides of the plastic bag he offers. The gown that replaced her earlier outfit is long, and he can imagine when it had once been a deep rich black, but it no longer holds the same depth of feeling as it once did. It has been washed often, and she’s been alive for many years now. [21]
There are more people than when he left, the endless ink-black sea of bodies obscuring his view of Jaime. If silence could kill, the silence of the guests would have frozen his blood. If a tree falls in the forest, does it sound like it’s echoing Cain, Cain, Cain? Ignoring them ignoring him, he sets up the incense as his mother instructed, and lights the sticks with the flick and ease of an addict. The flame reflects off her laugh and worry lines. She never liked Ciarán’s politicking, but she’d seen it simply as word games. She had pretended not to see the heavy boxes her sons would bring home. The house would smell of gunpowder for weeks, with only her incense to overpower the scent. When they brought home strangers for her to feed, she would only question her sons with her eyes. Today, those eyes are a dull brown, no longer pleading for a response, only for peace. Her questions were answered yesterday. The padre takes his place at the front of the room, kneeling on the large pillow his mother had placed there for him. Instead of joining the other guests as they kneel on the carpet, Ciarán leans against the back wall. The urn is made of bronze, an ornate vessel his mother had chosen for herself. After her own father passed on she had gotten into the habit of talking as if she had mere days left. The purchase of the urn had been part of a morbid obsession neither of her sons had paid any attention to. Both of them had assumed their mother would come to terms with her own disappointing mortality in time. In a way, she had. In the copper she could see her own reflection gazing back, a mirror into a world a mother only dreams of fitfully. Ciarán’s face looks too long in his copper reflection, and it resembles Jaime’s. —We are gathered here to pay tribute, the padre begins, and the audience repeats his words in a collective murmur. —This son of God has carried several titles. History will know him as a hero, and his mother has the honor of remembering him as her son, the padre continues, his voice smooth and steady. He is a good public speaker, and from the pulpit he easily slips into the role of puppet-master. [22]
Here they are, kneeling and upset, much as the students were at the university. Jaime hadn’t gone to the university like his brother. He’d gone to work in the fields outside the city, plowing and burning the crop until the black ashes would rain over his city like snowflakes. Only when you reach out to touch them, they turn to black ash on your fingertips. Jaime would come to accompany his brother when Ciarán and his comrades met in the cafés of San Antonio to smoke and argue about revolutions. Look at Mao, look at Che, look at Daud, look at Vargas, watch the way enlightenment spreads its wings wide, casting its shadow over the world, bit by bit, pupils dilating to absorb more light. In the dark, smoky atmosphere of these cafés, jazz playing behind their words, Jaime would listen in silent reverence, sitting stiller than he would in church. The scent of the incense reaches Ciarán in the back, and he closes his eyes, taking a deep breath. Like the hookah smoke, it surrounds him, and though this country may have overthrown the rich and the powerful, it smells exactly the same. The padre speaks in the same tone. —We can all be sure if Jaime were with us today, he would give his life again for the cause which he understood to be bigger than death. His mother turns around to look at him, and the two of them exchange their silent alternative to words. Jaime was not a boy who understood things. He felt them like a blind man, his fingertips ever reaching for the burning sugarcane snowflakes. Ciarán knew this, but he continued to bring his brother to the meetings, even when words grew stronger and harsher, even when plans were made and money thrown down for secret purchases. It is on the backs of boys who feel that revolutions are fought and won. Orators narrate afterward. The padre moves forward, his sermon enlightening. Or it would be, if they hadn’t already heard it before. His sermon connotes the same images as yesterday’s speeches on freedom and oppression. [23]
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Untitled [Lucy Cleland]
Hero, cause, history. Today these words echo as if in an empty room, and inspire no one to anything but tears. The fingers of the guests run across the bronze urn, smudging it. —As we look around today, let us remember this soul amongst all the others who were lost yesterday in the struggle for tomorrow’s freedom and happiness. Something else is rising in Ciarán, a silent urge to vomit, to heave and expel what’s churning low in his belly. A cigarette will steady him. He can just barely make out the rhythm of the padre’s words through the glass door as it closes. The burn of the cigarette tickles his throat, the pain expected and easy to fall back on. The smell is on his hands and lips, the poison spreading tar across his lungs, his teeth yellowing, his sense of tranquility growing. Jaime’s laughter had been subtle, silent at first as his joviality worked its way up his throat. He’d hold his stomach and close his eyes. Jaime’s eyes were the same brown as Ciarán’s, minus the darker bags which made Ciarán’s face look much older. His younger brother’s face was littered with small dark birthmarks, and sometimes they were mistaken for freckles. The sun is lower now, and every so often a cloud runs in front of it, making the city a little darker than before. Ciarán is enamored by this intricate dance taking place miles above him, separate from the rules that govern below. It is the same ritual of yesterday, of years before and of years to come. It is familiar to him, more familiar than theories and words, infinitely more comforting than celebrations and funerals. It burns when he looks at it, it hurts when he understands the immensity of what happens every day, of what happened yesterday. He blows out the smoke, his silent good-bye, and goes back inside to join the mourners.
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Routine [Claire Shiplett]
Her bullet hits a tree trunk. Thud. Afterward they don’t talk about it. Husband and wife walk in the footprints they had made on their way up. One set of tracks. How her body crumpled to the ground. Snowflakes wet her bare palms, the knees of her blue denim jeans. Long hair blows into her mouth, chapped winter lips. By the time the sun begins to rise, her shaking hands, she blames on caffeine. Watery eyes wide, she’s shocked herself. Spooked by the ease of release. Uneven breath spouts from her mouth in clouds of smoke, a steaming train engine tracks the white pines. She feels the rhythm of its wheels in the pit of her stomach. It propels her next words, she speaks in train-track beats. Every morning he says nothing. He stares at her lips, the red of her cheeks, the pinpoint, glaring pupils. He doesn’t sleep anymore. He knows how to move in the dark. Walks around the house in shadow, corner book cases, television sets. He folds himself inside cupboards, under chairs. Anywhere light can’t hit. Another life not shared with her. Neighbors see him sometimes, crawl under the porch. He can dislocate something, an elbow maybe. People are fucked up, they mumble. He tries that under my porch, I’ll call the cops. Garbage Day tomorrow. With sleep in their eyes, neighbors watch him dislocate. She sees bits of leaves, sticks in his hair at breakfast from under the porch. Morning, dear. Morning, dear. Every morning husband and wife pull on parkas, winter boots. You can’t trust in this town. You notice that? You notice how they all got this little grin? But they keep the front door unlocked, an incentive. We have to go back. Some shit old man is gonna steal
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our china plates. They walk in the footprints they had made on their way up. Every morning, one set of tracks. We should get snow tires on our truck. She nods, they nod, they don’t listen. Only to the train and the wind blowing their hair, chapped lips. Approach the woods. Trees naked in winter, they can see the twists, peeling skin. Husband and wife can see through to houses, smoke stacks, a frozen lake. They pick a place for him to stand. Two birches, that’s nice. She pulls the gun from her pocket. Ca-chunk, ca-chunk, ca-chunk goes the train. She aims the gun straight at his heart. Ca-chunk, ca-chunk, ca-chunk. Somehow, every morning, her bullet hits a tree trunk.
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Fishers Island [Abigail Murdy]
You, jellyfish. An aquatic bloom sifting up and down, just above the seaweed, tentacles swaying in that massy breeze called current, soft current. Smooth and glistening – your fanned circumference, catching the light. Me, a thin-legged girl on the dock, dangling her feet above you and your bald head, never thinking to remember this –
Sichuan, China [Amelie Ye Wen]
the dust of sand dunes on her toes the warmth of sun on her shoulders and that jellyfish sitting for hours in greenness bigger than the round pout of her stomach – years later. She just scrapes at the dock with a fingernail, feet swinging, and blinks, flinches, once – at the thought of your sting.
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Mia
[Zoe Mungin]
My sister is born second. She is second for my mother, and second for my father, but this does not mean the same thing. My mother has John, who is three; however John’s father has run away to the Air Force. This is why she and my father meet. My mother is walking to the store to buy Enfamil or beer, and my father sees her, says, “Hello, fine lady.” She brushes by him and into the store. She pays for the baby formula with the WIC checks and sells her food stamps for cigarettes, because it is the 80s and you can still do this. She buys beer. She lights up a cigarette as my father gets into a cab. He smiles at her, waves. My mother quirks a brow at him and the cab speeds away. He is there the next day, and the day after that. Months later, she is having his baby. My sister is not second for my father because my father has Melinda, born only a few months before. My father has Ms. Yvonne and a home as well, but that doesn’t matter at first, because my mother is young and naïve, and she thinks that my father will leave a grown woman for an eighteen-year-old girl. My father looks over my grandmother’s shoulder as she holds my newborn sister, speaking softly to the yellow bundle. He holds John in his arms so that he may see our sister as well, and for a moment, they are a family. My brother is not as yellow as the sun and my father is not as dark as the earth. My brother’s nose widens, his hair darkens, and his eyes take on a shape reminiscent of the island my father calls his home. For a moment, they belong to each other. My mother is my father’s wife, my brother his son. [30]
The image shatters in an instant. My father says, “She look like me Melinda when her were born.” The specter of illegitimacy returns. It stands at my mother’s bedside, condemns her for her sins against her family and her faith. My mother curls into herself and stares at the wall. My grandmother asks her, “Do you have a name for her?” My mother doesn’t lift her head. She says, “I’m all out of names.” My father throws suggestions into the air like rice at a wedding. My sister’s name will be Yanika, or Ernestine. In the end, it is much simpler. Ms. Yvonne shows up at the hospital with a baby in her arms. My father ruffles John’s hair and takes Melinda from his wife, or whatever Ms. Yvonne is to him. He coos at his oldest daughter and tells her about her new sister, of a future of kinship and love. “Her be pretty like you, baby,” he says to her. Melinda doesn’t open her eyes. Ms. Yvonne stands next to my father and together, they look like a family. It is not because they are both dark and Jamaican, or because they have created a baby that looks like them. My father and his woman fit together, puzzle pieces interlocking to form a picture: Melinda. My father doesn’t fit this way with John, or my mother. Ms. Yvonne takes my father home and my brother is left in the charge of my grandfather. He is tired and unclean, dirt beneath his fingernails and in the creases of his skin from his long shift digging ditches at the cemetery down the road. He holds three-year-old John with calloused hands, hefts the slight boy onto his shoulder before taking his leave, leaving his wife and daughter alone. My grandmother sits beside my mother in her bed, my sister still clasped in her arms. “Do you want to hold her?” “No.” “Do you want to name her?” “No.” My grandmother glares; my mother is gold-skinned and freckled, [31]
thick-haired and slim in a way that makes her beautiful, stupid. It is a disposition borne of her position in life: she is in the middle, the only girl in five. Boys can be beat into shape, submission, however girls require something different, something gentle and ephemeral that my grandmother has never been able to grasp. My grandmother raises my mother as her mother raised her. She is too old to see the problem, how much that sort of life hurts. However, the time for beatings has come and gone; my mother is eighteen and now has two children by two different men. Were she not holding a baby, my grandmother may have struck her then. It is not because she thinks it is right, that punishment will change what my mother has become. It is because it is the only thing she can do, lest she admit to herself that there is nothing more to be done. “I won’t take care of any more children for you,” my grandmother warns. “I don’t want any children.” “I’m serious, Patricia.” My mother doesn’t respond. My grandmother remains with her on the bed, her hip pressing into the curve of my mother’s back, my infant sister in her arms. My sister cries for something that my mother will not give her, and before long, a nurse enters the room, a warm bottle in her hands. My grandmother holds my sister to her breast, looks down at her with eyes that are sad, longing. She takes the bottle from the nurse and tends to my sister the only way that she can. “Mia,” she says, to the baby, my mother. Mia is my sister’s name. --The relationship my mother has with my sister is tumultuous, at best. My mother does not know how to raise a daughter because her mother did not know how to raise her. My mother doesn’t want to raise anything, really, besides her hands in the air as she dances to music only she can hear in the streets, still high on the acid pills Tracy slipped her when they were in the club. [32]
My grandmother watches my sister when she can, however there is work and other things to be done, and inevitably, she and my mother are left together. My mother beats her when she cries, tells her that she will beat her harder if she doesn’t stop. John hides in the bedroom but he is not safe there, or anywhere. My father is nowhere to be found. She calls his house. Ms. Yvonne answers. “Bitch,” she says, “where is my man?” They curse and fight for hours. Ms. Yvonne hangs up, and my mother calls back. My father does not call my mother. There is a downward spiral into something I can’t understand, as acid pills transition to something more. All the while, my sister grows fairer, leaner: the very image of my mother as a little girl. However crack leaves no room for families or anything. My mother only cares that Mia does what she says when she says it, and that there is someone to watch her kids so that she may go out and do as she pleases. My father comes by when he has errands to run on our side of Brooklyn; when he has deals to make, or money to pick up. He straps Melinda next to him in the car and drives to my house. He and my mother fight, however it ends when he takes Mia away, telling her and Melinda to talk nice in the car while he does what he needs to do. Mia is five, Melinda is six. Melinda says, “You see these shoes? My daddy bought them for me.” Mia’s shoes are old and worn, sneakers that are nothing like the patent leather oxfords Melinda has on her feet. “He buys me other things, too. He buys me dresses—” “He buys me dolls—” “But he didn’t buy you shoes,” Melinda says. There is an undeniable air of finality to her words. “He buys me more stuff because he loves me more. This is what my mommy says. She says your mommy is a whore.” They fight like this for years. They speak about my father through dolls and dresses because that is the only way they know how. Me[33]
[34]
Untitled [Margaret Zwiebach]
linda dances circles around Mia in her pretty shoes, an obvious battle won. When my father takes Melinda home first, Mia waves at her happily from the front seat of the car, delighted at the broken look on her sister’s face as they drive away. There is none of the kinship or love my father dreamed of in their relationship. He killed it when he stopped returning my mother’s phone calls, when Ms. Yvonne began telling Melinda hateful things of Daddy’s other family, so that Melinda would hate us as much as she did. My mother fights with my father when he brings Mia home. She hits him and he hits her back. Once, when he is sleeping, she ties his laces together and yells, “Fire!” as loud as she can. He jumps up, trips, and bangs his head against the dresser so hard that he bleeds. “You’re a madwoman,” he says. She says to him, “I hate you.” He leaves because she is like this, and she is like this because he leaves. She raises John and Mia on food stamps and WIC checks. She trades them as often as she can for money, to fuel her habits. There is never enough food, enough clothes. My grandmother buys what she can and my mother makes up the difference. They eat cereal for dinner and go to Payless for their school shoes. Payless is cheap, and my sister is rough. She runs down the heels of her Mary Janes in two weeks. They have to be replaced, and my mother is so angry that she beats Mia with the rundown shoe, until her face is mottled and her nose is bleeding. At school, my sister’s teacher takes her into the office and asks her if anything is wrong. Mia’s face is purple, red. “What happened, Mia?” “I fell.” “Did something happen at home, Mia?” “Ms. Balkin, I fell.” My mother buys her new shoes later on in the week. She tells her, “You better not mess these up. Walk on your toes if you have to.” [35]
Poem
[Jaya A. Stenquist]
All I know is: the war made everyone go crazy. You can see it in the architecture, in the weird topiaries. Put on your best gold leaf dress, there are children starving in the streets of Dresden. It’s that hour now, between days, when time winks at lovers retreating to dark apartments. Through my bedroom window I recognize only addicts ravenous for love, for sex, for the trenches of Alsace-Lorraine.
Bird’s-eye View [Naureen Mazumdar]
After we split the earth at Somme, everybody knew there could never be stillness again. We took one second to breath our collective wonder. There is a kind of perfection to the interwar lust, even inside it we know its fated end, desire, desire it. But certainly, now, It’s late. I thought I must be falling in love alphabetically, and what will it mean if I pass 26?
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wellesley review staff Megan Cunniff WR Galen Danskin. [Editors-in-Chief] Cicia Lee
Julia Grace Brimelow [Layout Editors]
WR
WR
Charlene Lee
April M. Crehan [Poetry Editor] Lesley Thulin [Assistant Poetry Editor] Faye Bates
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Claire Grossman [Prose Editors]
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Julie Daurio
Jennifer Lin [Assistant Prose Editor]
[ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS]
Sumita Chakraborty, Founding Editor | Zoe Jansen, Cover Artist