VLR
VIRGINIA LITERARY REVIEW
Fall 2024 / Volume 47 / Number 1
The Virginia Literary Review
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www.virginialiteraryreview.com
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Fall 2024 Staff
Editor-in-Chief
Aoife Arras
Production Manager
Portia Papagni
Marketing Chair
Ebte Abdul-Qudoos
Financial Chair
Isabel O’Connor
Poetry Editors
Khadijah Aslam
Ganeev Kaur
Joshua James Althaus
Sydney McClellan
Ben Gomez
Jack Martinez
Julia Pieloch
Gabi D’Avanzo
Prose Editors
Chloe Ross
Elizabeth Parsons
Kaitlyn Kuchinski
Peter McHugh
Stasia Winslow
Miriella Jiffar
Aliza Susatijo
Sophie Hay
Riley MacKenzie
Robbie Brown
Art Editors
Khadijah Aslam
Gabi D’Avanzo
Riley MacKenzie
Robbie Brown
Founded in 1979, The Virginia Literary Review is the oldest undergraduate-run literary magazine at the University of Virginia. The editorial staff considers literary and visual art submissions from students across colleges and universities in the Commonwealth of Virginia during the first three-quarters of each term. The VLR is published twice a year in the fall and spring. For more information and to view past issues, please visit our website.
As of Fall 2024, the Virginia Literary Review is a formally Contracted Independent Organization (CIO) at the University of Virginia. The magazine is not, however, affiliated with the University or any of its departments, and is completely liable for itself, its members, and its activities.
Copyright 2024. No material may be recorded or quoted, other than for review purposes, without the permission of the artists, to whom all rights revert after the first serial publication.
Many thanks to UVA Arts & the Office of the Provost & the Vice Provost for the Arts for their financial support.
Contents / Fall 2024
Poetry
8 / Escaping the Isle
11 / Self-Portrait as Three Hometowns
20 / Mother’s Day
25 / transfiguration.txt
34 / The Absence of You
37 / Ode to Nebraska
47 / Boiling With It
Prose
6 / corpse, or, an elegy in four
14 / MOHAMMAD MOHAMMAD
21 / Italian for Dinner
27 / Dodgeball Day
30 / Love in eight acts
38 / Santoku
41 / Ah-Gong Pancake
Visual Art
Cover / Atelophobia
7 / A Representation
13 / Jawbone Still Life
20 / IMG_4160
29 / The Fall of the Soldier
36 / Witness
40 / Pop Pop’s House
46 / Senioritis
Rob Yates (he/him)
Will Hancock (he/him)
Aoife Arras* (she/her)
Danielle Wagner (she/her)
Jennifer Miller (she/her)
Hugo Stevenson (he/him)
Haylee Chase Edwards (she/her)
Vaidehi Bhardwaj (she/her)
Yusuf Ragab Hacking (he/him)
Elena Paige Haley (she/her)
Brigid Flanagan (she/her)
Aliya Gibbons (she/her)
Peter McHugh* (he/him)
Eunice Tan (she/her)
Finnley Price (she/her)
Ryan Doty (he/him)
Melanie Keith (they/them)
Jasmin Dockery (she/her)
Candyce Harrell (she/her)
Liz Shanks (she/her)
Madison Hinton (she/they)
Finnley Price (she/her)
*Our evaluation process is anonymous to ensure equality between all applicants.
corpse, or, an elegy in four
my corpse is hidden in the pitting of a cedar tree, somewhere deep inland i don’t know. it posits uncanny theorems. that perhaps i could have heard the beat of your heart echoing in my own chest from five thousand miles away, held your soul like a little fluttering bird in my palms. all those weeks i stood stock-still were those i waited for reanimation. all those weeks i waited for the third day, every myth rebounded into one—a son. a daughter. lazarus, christ of nazareth, perhaps god himself. i dug the pit into the cedar tree with my own two hands. folded myself in, bone by bone—muscle tearing from ligament, eternal unspooling.
here, walking through the blind world, the deaf world, for a moment—i hear your footsteps with mine, your voice on my tongue like my own. i wait for the corpse to awaken. the cedar tree, the world. i stand before god and give proud supplication for something magic, something bright, to reverbrate through what is left. point to you, lodestone that you are.
in a dream, i heard your name. so many omens i created in delphic visions—soft and sharp as the shore, holding as the sea does. i stood where the breath of heaven meets the horizon. heard the beat of your heart shake the ocean floor, the old brick. drank from your seafoam sadness, the air scented cedar and rotting flesh.
the negative space of death—yours—turns minutes, soon years. the cedar will grow, wilt. the world. i wished to make you understand the ways in which my tendons connect. i wished to give you some of what fills the spaces between my joints—an empty handful. nothing new, now, but everything. i stood alone in the wrong grove— corpse hidden, deep inland—uncanny theorem that i know not.
Vaidehi Bhardwaj
Escaping the Isle
The island has only one fire engine. It races itself at night, bright lights and horn, echoes and dreams and furred-over moon.
Don’t turn your back on the water’s edge. Don’t clog the spring, or say that magic isn’t real. Fractal nets of diesel oil. Sound on the river that sounds to the sea.
I am, and you are, the mud.
He’s gone to doze with the oysters, but nobody knows where the oysters are, or what they hear.
Eat, drink, be muddled deep, then throw your dregs of cod and chips to the rampage of gulls. ‘The Rampage of Gulls’— imagine that as an oil painting (year unknown). Picture that in a church—a hunger of beaks, a vortex, feathers clotting, the congregation pinched out like candles, dipped in a twister of prayer and mayonnaise, or sucked in like a breeze.
We are the mudwrack and the glister far at sea.
Pray, for something, then conjure. Pray, for somewhere, then leave.
The ones who sleep in their boats are safe from the underneath, at least, and nothing that lives in the sea will do you harm.
We are the mudluck, glubbering in the bay.
A grey seal visits during the holidays, when the school kids, freed, go crabbing on the concrete pier.
Take something dripping, quickly, from the bag. Leave it on the black beach.
Empty your pockets. These evenings are impossible forever.
We swim, forever, in the gentle shallows, shouting at figures on the sand.
Adrift by the end of the day.
I’ll dance a round, or two, with you, I’ll caper ‘til I’m under. The estuary is lit by sparks, The trees are hung with thunder / wonder.
We are the mudlark and the tumble on the shore.
You empty your pockets: small pebbles, bugs and straw, shingle to build a modest home. The bank clerk smiles sadly through plexiglass. You place an apology on the counter, there for all to read, and fail to go.
Outside—a single, narrow road connects the isle with the stretching main, linking our lantern lives to something more.
I am, or you are, the mud.
Inside—a centrifuge of fire and sand spits glass beads into being, then bowls them into the longest grass, far gone; the salty reeds, the stationary tugs, the gas stoves and the faery rings of solar bulbs and shrooms, twisted and green, boxes of goblin bones, thin aches of smoke from boats that never move, hippies earthed with their cosmic jewels and bongs.
I’ll race you down the Escapade,
don’t let the firemen catch us.
We are, one might believe, the mudsheen.
Drifting from barge to barge, eye-deep, hidden from the harbor guards, I lost my slip-on water shoes, the ones that gave me grip.
Elsewhere, under the stars, an older soul was rising or was falling from a cliff. The cliffs ‘round here are mercifully low. They come apart in the briefest of winds, like bunting on a stage.
We are the mudlight filling up the bay.
Pilot me to the pub. Let the pub fires consume me. Let the top-shelf spirits burn. Let’s snarl ourselves in talk, tangle of grubs and forms, bleary as netting, bloated as shoals.
You’ve inherited a haunted patch. So much is clear. Kids sink, appear and disappear at night.
Empty your stories. These endings are impossible forever.
Time, ladies and gentlemen, estuary folk and sprites of the gloam, it’s Time.
Adrift at the end of the day.
Rob Yates
Self-Portrait as Three Hometowns
Other arms reach out to me
Other eyes smile tenderly
Still in peaceful dreams I see The road leads back to you
—“Georgia on My Mind,” Ray Charles
Atlanta, GA
through monday morning’s rolling train window the Dahlonega gold dome refracts sunrise toward the baseball field built to host the world reconstructed from Centennial Olympic Stadium arrested to me on a soupy friday night under the lights sitting in a Chipper Jones jersey on the first baseline chopping a cherry foam caricature of a tomahawk choking down soft-serve as it melts, spilling over the baby blue plastic of a throwback helmet sundae chocolate vanilla swirl drips onto my white sleeve the breeze only pushes more hot air onto our faces
McLean, VA
the breeze only pushes more hot air onto our faces swamped between the beltway and the Potomac a power in proximity: Barr, Biden, Bobby Kennedy a pressure too in exploration’s vivid uncertainty —missed shots, dropped passes, tough classes, applications, admissions tests, broken rest— that sometimes blurs into pleasant truth on a June morning along Burke Lake trails resting on a flooding bower’s splintering bench after the rich rushing uni of her kiss, she pauses into my eyes, gently pulling my neck lower, her hand through my hair, chest against my cheek trusting her with the weight of my unawareness mizzles a thousand distinct chills down my spine an escape from DC’s exciting exhaustiveness freed from the gridlock of White House traffic
Charlottesville, VA
freed from the gridlock of White House traffic eight presidents come from the Commonwealth of Virginia most of any state, an easy piece of trivia asked at tailgates by second cousins and Grandpa’s fraternity brothers a reliable rhythm to weekends in the Fall since birth with little difference between a two hour flight north and a two hour drive down the rolling hills of 29 Charlottesville as my formative origin feels unearned yet what constitutes growing up besides childhood memory and the quirky stories of how the landscape came to be? the circular barber chair that left The White Spot Elliewood Avenue’s young boarding house namesake grounded in transactional transience of this college town where we learn then leave, walking down the Lawn replenished by the children of next August’s seasonal dawn
I’m simply a product of the 1995 Peach Bowl: Virginia 34 Georgia 27 on a last minute kickoff return
Will Hancock
MOHAMMAD MOHAMMAD
Mohammad is the name my father gave me. His name is Michael. I’m standing with my suitcase outside the dorm and Mohammad is written on my bag in big block letters. My father had this first. My name is written over his.
The taxi driver puts it into the trunk. His name is Mohammad, too.
There are cheap cloth covers on the seats. A note covers the window “1. No alcohol. 2. If you are drunk, no puking. 3. If you puke, two hundred dollar cleaning fee. 4. No alcohol.” Loose wires are coming out from the console, but it still works. Mohammad was playing the Qur’an before I got in. I can see him in the rearview mirror; his face has a hardness I recognize.
“What was your name?” he asks.
“Mo,” I say.
“Mo?” he asks.
“Mo,” I say.
“Mo-hammad?”
Great fucking detective work. “Mo,” I say, nodding.
“Mohammad, habiby! The two Mohammads! Salaamu alaikum. Kayfa halik?”
I muster an “Alhamdulillah,” but then he starts talking fast in Arabic and the only other words I know are smile and nod.
After a while he must figure me out because he says “Okay, habiby. English works better. Where are you from?”
“Minnesota,” I say. But this is not the right answer. “Egypt, too, I guess. My mom is from there. But my dad’s just some white guy.”
He smiles. “Ah. Your mother did well.”
“And you?” I ask.
“Divorced,” he says. “Oh, Iraq. Mosul.”
I ask, “Is it nice there?” but I shouldn’t have, because I forgot that we bombed the shit out of Mosul or wherever.
He still tells me, “Mosul is nice. Very nice.” He says, “I wish we could go right now. It’s not so far from us, you know.” Then he looks back at me. “Have you been?”
“No, not yet,” I tell him. “Inshallah.” If God wills it.
“Yes, soon,” he says. “It is very bright there, very big. Everyone should see it with their two eyes. If you’re ever there, you can stay at my house. But don’t worry, you’ve got time. My daughter is waiting to go, too.”
“Yes, I’ve got time,” I say.
We’re far from campus, out in the country, so there are only fields and billboards out here, and one of them distracted him. It’s a big-breasted woman holding a beer. Mohammad shakes his head at this. “Astagfirullah.” He turns back to me: “This doesn’t happen in Mosul.”
After we’re past it, Mohammad asks me, “You go to the university, habiby? How are your studies?”
I tell him I’m studying classics, but this was wrong.
“Habiby! No, no! Where do those old books take you?” He looks right at me; he wants to know. “Where? Backwards? Backwards? No. Do not go backwards.”
I almost laugh, because this is a backwards, backwards man right here, but I don’t. I ask him what he studied.
“Engineering! What else?”
“Then how’d you get here?”
Mohammad sighs. “They stopped making things in Iraq. So I came here, but then on the news they say it’s the same thing. They forgot to tell me. Now, I drive.”
I look out the window for a while, and it’s quiet until he asks me, “Are the Palestinians classical?”
“What?”
“In university. Do they teach you about the Palestinians?”
“Nope.” I can’t get this guy started on the Palestinians.
“Ah. Yes. Why would they? But they have so much history, of course. Even right here, in America. With the slaves. With Abraham Lincoln.”
Oh no. “What about him?”
“He was their friend, wasn’t he?” says Mohammad.
“The slaves? Or the Palestinians?”
“Listen to how confused you are. The school has taught you wrong, habiby. Think about it: what was his name? John? Johnny?”
“John Wilkes Booth?”
“Yes! John Wilkes Booth! John Wilkes Booth, Israeli assassin.”
I have to play it straight. “But Israel is only 75 years old.”
“Ah. There it is. Something to learn,” he says. “Listen when they reveal themselves to you. What do they say? The Jews have lived in Israel for thousands of years.” He shakes his head. “The Jews have lived in Israel for thousands of years; they had plenty of time to plan.”
“So then why’d they kill Lincoln?” I ask. “The vampires?”
“Vampires? Ha-ha. No. No vampires. Just think about it: Lincoln freed the black people. They were scared he would free the Palestinians, too.”
The history lesson is interrupted by my girlfriend calling. I shrink into the corner of the car and cover my mouth while I talk. Mohammad’s watching. I whisper, “Hi.”
“Hi,” Ashley says. “My parents are gonna cook for you. When do you land?”
“8.”
“Ok, I’ll be there. Love you.”
Mohammad is still watching. I whisper back, “Love you.”
Mohammad asks, “Who’s that?”
“My mom,” I say. But I don’t sell it at all, and then he smiles.
“Come on, Mo.” He’s laughing at the name. “It’s alright to have a little fun. We’re friends now. You can tell me her name.”
I tell him, “Ayesha.”
“Mashallah,” he exclaims. “Good. Good to use the phones. And to stay away from the American girls. They wear skirts and do not know Allah.”
“But I think a lot of Muslims don’t know Allah, either.”
“They are not Muslims, habiby.”
“Then what are they?”
Mohammad huffed and looked out the window. “Something else.”
Out the window there are more billboards. The biggest one is from some fundamentalist Christians—“God Is Real” they say. But vandals have amended it to say “God Is Retard.”
I ask Mohammad, “How did you become a Muslim”
He turns around again. Very serious, he says, “My father, Allah-yarhamu.” He leans in even closer, ignoring the road even more, and says, “Where else could we learn it?”
My father never taught me. Michael, the Muslim.
Mohammad says, “My father was a sheikh, a teacher. He read us the Qur’an every night. He memorized it.”
My father cannot read Arabic.
“There was a Christian in our village. There was! Until my father made him a Muslim. That was his power.”
I do not know how my father was made a Muslim. I do not think that it worked. I suppose in that way I should understand him.
A long time must have passed, because when Mohammad tells me, “Habiby, pay attention,” he’s talking about Lincoln again.
I tried to talk to my father about this. I told him that we’re the same, that we don’t believe, but he disagreed. We had more to talk about but didn’t. My mother was angry. They are waiting to tell my little sister. They are giving me time to repent. I am not going to.
“The soda company, habiby. With the bubble water? The same with them. They are made—”
“How’s your daughter?” I ask.
“My daughter? Subhanallah. She is a lawyer.”
“But when she was a kid, when she was my age—how was it?”
“It was good,” he says. “Very good. It is easy with kids.”
“But did you ever fight?”
“Fight?” he asks. “Yes, yes, fights. But that’s all over now.”
“Yeah, it always works out,” I say.
“Yes,” he says. “Family is forever. It is easy to see her nowadays. Everyday, I can.”
“What?”
Mohammad laughs a little at my ignorance. “Don’t you have the phone?” He shows me. “You know Instagram. Look,” he says, “there she is.”
He has her account pulled up. But he doesn’t follow her. Her account is private.
“You see her? Where?” I ask.
“In the top,” he says, laughing a little more. “You kids don’t even know how to use your technologies.”
But it’s just her profile picture. I tell him, “You can follow her, you know.”
“Oh, no,” he says. His eyes tighten on the road. “I don’t want to bother her. She’s busy.”
It’s a picture of her family, I think. They’re at the beach. It’s a big family picture. Her husband is white, and there’s a white grandma and grandpa. Three sons and a daughter. Some aunts and uncles and cousins. The waves are coming for their feet. Everyone is happy.
This is all the old man sees of her.
“You’re a grandpa,” I say. “Giddu.”
He smiles, but only halfway.
“What are their names? There’s another Mohammad?”
“No. No Mohammads.”
“Is that what they call you? Giddu?” I ask. “That’s what I call my grandfather.”
He says, “I don’t know.”
I want to look a second time, but his phone changes and a haunting Arab melody rings out. “I think you have a virus or something,” I tell him. “I didn’t press anything.”
He’s happy to laugh at this. “You’re so silly, Mo. It’s time to pray. Do you have wu’du?”
I say yes, because what’s wu’du?
“Good, then you can pray now,” he tells me.
“Oh, no, it’s alright. You can’t pray in the car.”
“The Prophet, peace be upon him, tells us we can pray anyway. It is alright. I will shut my mouth and you will pray.”
“Oh, no, you don’t have to. I will pray later.”
“When?” he asks. “At the airport?” The whole car starts to shake because he’s laughing so hard. “On the plane? You know what, yes, wait to pray, but call the FBI first. Take my phone back. Tell them to arrest you. And then you can pray at Guantanamo.” He’s laughing and then looks back at me. “Praying on the plane? Astaghfirullah. You can’t pray just anywhere.”
“But I can’t pray here. We’re moving,” I say. “Won’t it get lost?”
“Allah will find it,” he tells me.
“But we’re going the wrong way. We’re not facing Mecca.”
“We are driving East,” he says. “I won’t turn.”
I begin after another excuse, but he cuts me off and says, “I see your worries, Mo. A good Muslim worries about these things. You are a good Muslim. However, I tell you, I will shut up and you will pray.”
But I don’t know how to pray. My father never taught me. I only know the motions.
So I begin the motions. I know my hands are supposed to go to my knees, and that I have to mumble Arabic, but I don’t know any words.
I check on Mohammad. He’s watching me in the mirror. Somewhere in my brain I hear the words: Ash-hadu an la ilaha illa Allah, Wa ash-hadu anna Mohammadan Rasulu-Allah. It’s the only Arabic I can find.
I try to think about Allah while I mumble, but I don’t know how. I try to feel His presence, but I don’t know how. I have never known how to believe. My mind is always in the wrong place and Allah is never there.
I repeat my phrase: “Ash-hadu an la ilaha illa Allah, Wa ash-hadu anna Mohammadan Rasulu-Allah.” The Arabic passes over my tongue as nonsense, but there is a rhythm. “Ash-hadu an la ilaha illa Allah, Wa ash-hadu anna Mohammadan Rasulu-Allah.”
I’m supposed to keep count of my movements, but I don’t know how many there have been. I decide that I am at the end. I kneel over in the car, hit my head on the seat, and decide that now is when I am meant to ask Allah for things.
Dear Allah,
Why didn’t you make me a Muslim? I can’t talk to you, I don’t have anything to say. I don’t believe. I’m only here so this taxi driver doesn’t see I’m a fake. Take care of my family. Make them well, even without me. Because you can’t help me. It’s all on me. It’s all me. I’m no Muslim. Why couldn’t you make me one?
The car stops and I must have miscounted. Mohammad has caught me.
I still do the next move, which is turning my head right and left and mumbling the words. I look right and we’re at the airport. I look left and Mohammad is watching me. He is a hard and sad man. He cannot see outside his taxi. I am in his taxi.
My prayer is ending but I don’t want it to, so I find Allah in my mind and I say to Him:
Dear Allah,
Please do not leave this man in loneliness. It is not his fault he is hard. Please let him see his daughter again. He needs to show her and her children their homeland. He says it is beautiful.
I get out of the car and tell Mohammad, “Five stars.”
Then he takes me by the shoulders and looks me right in the eye. “Everything I know about Allah is from my father. He memorized the Qur’an. I told you this. When my sisters and I went to bed, he told us its stories. Without the stories, we could not sleep. They always worked. One night, he did not come home and we couldn’t sleep. In the morning, I went to look for him. He was in the road, lying on the ground, drunk. We had always shamed the drunk men we saw in the streets. So what should I do? I cannot shame my father: he is my father! So I go home. That night, my father is not there and we can’t fall asleep. We prepare for a long night. Then my father comes. He recites the Qur’an. I realize he has always smelled of alcohol. Then it is the morning.”
My father never read the Qur’an to me. He couldn’t. The most Arabic I ever heard him say was my name. All the Muslims I’ve met, they say it one way, but my father said it another way. “Mohammad,” he’d say, without a touch of Arabic. “That’s your name, Mohammad.”
I can see him clearly in my mind. He looks less Muslim than I do, and he does not even have the name.
Mohammad hands me the suitcase with my name and my father’s name beneath it.
I tell him, “Thank you.”
He says, “Mo, I know you. You are a good Muslim. That is what the name means. The Prophet Mohammad, peace be upon him, was the best Muslim. We are so lucky. We have the best name in the world. That’s why there are so many of us. Peace be upon you, Mohammad.”
Yusuf Ragab Hacking
Mother’s Day
gushers on the fourth of july gushing missouri rivers gushing blood into the hotel sink
hot dogs on the grill puppies in the plastic tub water gunshots in her spotted back
let’s play fourth of july, Mommy, let’s play american Family— ,
v i o l e n t c h i l d is what you called me when i kicked the back of your Toyota seat little seed inside of your insides that you told me you wanted to rip out of the ground Mommy, a child doesn’t understand why someone wouldn’t want to grow their flowers unless something is really ugly about them.
when you took a fistful of my brown roots in your hand, dragged me by dripping red roses to the table was it to make the table setting prettier for guests we never had?
today is mother’s day, Mommy , and even all these years later
i still carry your violence within me.
Aoife Arras
Italian for Dinner
I had a dream where I scooped my uterus out of myself and ate it, carving up my midsection like a Thanksgiving turkey. I slurped my fallopian tubes up like spaghetti, twirling them around into bloody spools. With that same fork, I pierced my ovaries and gobbled them up like meatballs; my uterus itself, which I saved for last, was gloriously sliced up and savored, well done and of my own creation.
It tasted like fleshy justice, and I didn’t even feel the loss.
This is what I want to announce to the grief group, but instead I stay in my usual silence. My lack of participation goes unnoticed most nights, especially on the meetings that are more populated, because when someone loses a child, they can’t shut up about it. It consumes them, becomes them. They are no longer a person; they are their child’s death.
Maybe I keep myself quiet because of self-imposed invalidation, a subconscious voice telling me that I didn’t lose a fully grown child; my stillbirth is somehow lesser than that. Or maybe I’ve just talked about my stillbirth so much that I’ve realized talking about it just makes me feel like I’m running in circles, going further and further down the rabbit hole of my grief. Keeping it all in at least saves my voice, even if it’s eating me alive.
The local child loss grief group meets on Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday nights. On the bad weeks I go all three nights, and on the good weeks I still go that often, because do I even really have good weeks anymore?
At each meeting there tends to be a rotating cast of characters, with a few regulars. There’s only two other people who go to as many meetings as I do. The first person is the facilitator, Phyllis (the irony of her title being “Phyllis the Facilitator” is not lost on me), which, technically she has to be there so I’m not sure she counts. She’s an older woman with curly gray hair that’s always held back with colorful, patterned headbands. Tonight’s headband is an aqua and yellow paisley pattern.
The other person is Enrique, who lost his son in a car accident involving a drunk driver. Enrique and I have never had a conversation; we don’t even sit near each other. We just occasionally share a glance, and in those glances I receive a lot more understanding than I’ve gotten from people I’ve said a lot more to.
A woman, wispy-haired and teary-eyed, raises her hand to speak. The chairs we’re sitting in are arranged in one wide circle to promote connection—also because Phyllis the Facilitator and her volunteer minions are too lazy to move the chairs in between AA meetings.
I watch the wispy woman begin her tearful soliloquy, my mind blocking out her warbling voice. I feel a flash of rage looking at her. I want to reach out and grab her, shake her. She’s been in here a couple of times before. She lost her son to a drug overdose; he was thirty-two. This is why I hate her. She got thirty-two years with her
child and mine died before she could even make it out of me.
I want to claw her eyes out. I want to rip out the rest of her wispy locks.
All of it’s almost enough to make me say something.
I study her as a means to stifle myself. Her hair is thinning because that’s what happens. You lose your child and you go with them, wherever they end up going. The key to your vitality gets taken and you begin to wither away at warped speed, like a scene from a cringy fantasy film.
It was a beautiful day outside today. I could’ve spent it with my daughter in the park. My daughter who might’ve had my blonde hair or my husband’s dark eyes, my husband who hasn’t looked at me with those dark eyes in weeks. My husband who looked at me and said that kids didn’t really matter to him. Who also said that he would still love me with my fertility issues, would still love me if we could never have kids, who would still love me even though my body had ultimately failed to keep our miracle baby alive, who said he would stick with me even if I didn’t want to try again.
His blame goes unspoken, but I know it’s there. It’s laying between us in the bed, right next to the ghost of our daughter.
If she were living, one of the first pieces of advice I’d give her is that people almost never mean what they say—in the moment, maybe, but never when it comes time to actually act on their words.
Wispy Warbler won’t shut up about her son. Apparently he was “such a bright boy” who “went down the wrong path,” and I can sense the people around me growing impatient. Like fish going for a well-baited hook, they want their chance in the sun. They’re all so desperate to share, desperate to let their hearts bleed all over this scuffed, tiled floor. Desperate for something to make it feel like they’re not buried six feet under.
Me, I’ve accepted my fate. I closed the casket door myself. I feel the weight of the dirt pressing in on me every waking moment.
My gaze travels over to Phyllis the Facilitator; I’m trying to figure out what she’s actually supposed to be facilitating. The woman never says a word except to welcome us and say goodbye, usually with some placating hopeful phrase for the next time. She only gazes upon the speaker in sympathy, like you would a three-legged dog or a homeless person on the street. I’m beginning to wonder if she even wants to help us. Does she just gather us here because she’s some kind of sadist; is she so miserable that she has to use people who have lost children to make herself feel better about her own pathetic life? Where does she get off?
“Who do you think you are?”
The words escape me before I realize. I don’t even realize I’ve spoken them outloud until I watch Phyllis the Facilitator’s glance fix on me, followed by everyone else’s. Wispy Warbler is looking at me like I revived her son just to kill him again right in front of her.
Now that I have Phyllis the Facilitator’s attention, I repeat myself. “Who do you think you are?”
I feel the rust breaking off my vocal chords. I’m pretty sure this is my first time speaking since my first meeting, almost six months ago now. Most of the people sitting here probably thought I was mute, Phyllis even having to remind herself that I have the ability to speak. All of the people from my first meeting have moved on, but not me. I’ve buried myself.
“Excuse me?”
I stand. Everyone’s eyes follow me like a laser beam. I especially feel Enrique’s glance. He’s never heard me speak, either.
My footsteps filling the silent room, I walk over to the coat rack, grab my maternity jacket that I can’t bring myself to not wear, let alone get rid of, and I’m gone. It’s not until I reach the street that I realize my entire body is tense, tense to the point where I’m shaking. My molars might crack under the pressure of my clenched jaw. I might just crack open, right there on the sidewalk, split right down the middle. The rats and pigeons could feast on my innards, taking what’s left after my dream feast.
I brace myself against the brick wall of the community center, my breaths coming out in clouds right in front of me, an aggressive reminder that, as much as I don’t want to be, I’m alive in a universe where my daughter isn’t. Where she never would be.
“Smoke?”
I jerk, whirling to my right to see Enrique standing there. He must’ve followed me out, though I don’t recall hearing anyone behind me. I watch as he pulls a pack of cigarettes from one pocket, the lighter from the other. All the times we’ve left these meetings, and I’ve never seen him stop for a smoke break.
“What?” I ask dumbly. He briefly glances up at me as he lights up, holding the carton out to me.
“Do you smoke?” he shakes the carton at me.
I shake my head. “No.”
What is happening? What did I just do? Enrique and I are finally talking. He shrugs, tucking the carton back into his pocket. We stand there for a few minutes in silence, the smoke from Enrique’s cigarette mingling with the puffs of my breath.
“I think I’m going to go get dinner,” I say, looking at him as if I need his approval.
He nods. “Okay. There’s a pretty good Italian place down the street.” With his nonsmoking hand, he gestures behind him, in the direction of the restaurant.
I nod along with him, like he is a prophet guiding me towards salvation. “Okay. I think I’ll go there.”
“They have good tiramisu.”
“Thank you.”
“No problem.”
I leave Enrique there, looking over my shoulder once as I retreat down the block. I see him undoing his tie with one hand. I probably should’ve talked to him longer, actually gotten to know him, at least asked what he did for work.
But I’m hungry.
Italian food was one of my top pregnancy cravings, to the point where my husband learned to make several dishes, and even mastered garlic bread—my number one craving I would’ve eaten every day if I could have it. Looking back on it now, the idea of him cooking for me seems laughable, but back then it was magical. It was our own little Italian kitchen every night nearly—especially during my third trimester.
Now he’s my crypt keeper in our tomb of a home.
So I don’t go home, because there’s no Italian food there—there’s nothing there for me anymore, really.
The restaurant is a cozy little place, all gold light and dark wood furniture. I come in at the tail end of the dinner rush, during the dead time right before closing. When the hostess seats me, she tells me the kitchen will be closing in fifteen minutes. As I scan the menu, I decide on three things, all easy decisions.
First, I would get the garlic bread as a starter, because I’m a glutton for all things nostalgia, even if it feels like a knife slowly piercing my lungs. Second, I’d get the tiramisu for dessert, because maybe the sweetness would revive something in me. The third and final choice was the main course: the spaghetti bolognese. A reminder for all my failure, my infertility: the taste of my uterus.
Elena Paige Haley
transfiguration.txt
loading... prayers laced with clementines
sweet citrine guilt stinging sour droplets seep into my veins
bronze-tipped dagger pressed at my throat beads of blood adorning my neck the rosary a rippling current of hail marys dripping on the ground to stain the famished fields as pomegranate seeds to be swallowed by some other hungry mouth
buffering… the fire ants clamber over my shoulders minuscule soldiers marching as they pluck stale crumbs off to carry them to the last supper rye dipped into ornamental goblets overflowing with sour grapes fermenting with deferred dreams double shot of blood on the rocks salt rim for them to lick off the cup of righteousness
afterwards
saving text file… diaphanous consciousness a ghost in my mind draped in a gossamer sheet the stone rolled away behold thy microcosmic patron mortar and pestle erode my corpse down to biogenous sediments to let my body salt the sea your text file is now ready to be downloaded…
Danielle Wagner
Dodgeball Day
I shuffled across the wood paneled floor with my fingers intertwined, twisting them back and forth while I tried not to look at the ground. My sneakers squeaked and made me wince as I approached the gym teacher. He had a clipboard in hand that he looked at importantly, then looked up from in annoyance when my presence was made clear. I was much smaller than him, and he had to tilt his chin down to look at me. The knuckles on my hands turned white with how hard I squeezed them.
“Yes?” he asked me, pulling the clipboard up and out of my sight. I took a moment to respond and he raised an eyebrow.
“...I wanted to ask to be excused today,” I forced out.
“And why is that?”
“My—” I glanced away. “My head. It’s a watermelon.”
“A watermelon,” he repeated.
“Yes. Look.”
He looked at my watermelon head. It was impossible to mistake for anything else, bright green and bulbous with streaks throughout, and a bit heavy on my neck.
“Hm,” the gym teacher said, “That’s definitely a watermelon.”
“I don’t think I can participate in class today. I have to wait until my head stops being a watermelon, if that’s alright with you.”
“Hmmm,” he said again. He placed his palm square on the top of my head and gave it a shake. I staggered back, dizzy; something inside my head was sent spinning, bouncing against the walls of the watermelon over and over, producing a fleshy sound as it made contact. I placed my hands on either side to stop the rattling, and eventually it calmed. I turned back to the gym teacher, imploring. He gave me a grin.
“Looks sturdy enough to me. Get out on the court.”
I bowed my head, unable to argue further, and moped towards my classmates. The gym teacher went back to his important clipboard as we milled about, then after a few minutes his shrill whistle sent us into position. My watermelon made me feel unbalanced, and I bumped into a teammate. He scoffed and pushed me away, towards my own spot. I nearly tripped on the way over.
The other team had the ball first. A tall boy near the front launched it with all his might, smacking into a girl a few feet away from me. She clutched her stomach and left the court to jeering. The tall boy smacked another girl, who tried to catch it, but it bounced against her outstretched arms and hit the floor. She departed while cradling her shiny red arms.
The tall boy always played like this. He targeted the smallest of the other side and grinned as he did so. He was the gym teacher’s favorite. I saw him dribble the ball and scan the court, smile sharpening as his eyes landed on me.
He raised the ball in a single hand, arched into position to throw—it could
have been a painting. Then he flung it and it was moving, hurtling straight towards me, and I knew I couldn’t catch it. I crossed my arms over myself in an X, squinting, bracing for impact. The ball sailed between my hands and exploded into the watermelon.
“Headshot!” someone called out. The watermelon’s shell shattered against the ball and I collapsed to the ground, guts flying. The ball became drenched in a dripping red, and a seed landed in my classmate’s hair. I couldn’t move, couldn’t twitch a muscle. My head was splattered across the gym floor like vomit.
“That’s an illegal move,” a teammate was saying to the gym teacher, which made me realize the gym teacher was approaching. He was the last in the room to reach me—my classmates surrounded me on three sides, avoiding the splatter, staring down with curiosity and irritation. I felt my neck burn in embarrassment. My cheeks did not burn, for obvious reasons.
“It’s fine,” the gym teacher responded, coming to a stop beside me. “He just got a bit aggressive. That’s the name of the game, I’m not gonna penalty it.”
He was studying the guts, expression indiscernible. I tried to say something to him, any word I could, but all that came out was a strangled moan. He made a mark in his clipboard.
“Shit,” he said, tucking it underarm and crouching down. “Look at this mess. Why show up to gym with a watermelon for a head? You should’ve gotten a damned doctor’s note.”
Brigid Flanagan
Love in eight acts
One.
Kate sits curled up on the plush leather chair that overlooks the yard. A mouse stands on the windowsill. It runs back and forth from one of the trees in the yard to the window, each time bringing back a pebble.
The old glass is warped in places. It contorts the mouse’s shape in the flexes of the pane as it moves.
She watches the mid-morning scene from the window of the music room and tries not to wince at the sounds her sister produces on the delicate ivory keys of the piano. The tutor frets over Bea’s every move with forced flattery and small pointers. Bea is oblivious to the placating.
Kate was taught by their mother. Bea was too young.
Two.
Lunch is as it always is. Her sister babbles on and on about boys and marriage. Their father fawns. Kate stays silent.
Their father barely spares Kate a glance. She looks like her mother, acts like her too. That’s what he said. The grief is too much to bear.
Three.
Kate leaves the second she can. Her father can’t look at her long enough to forbid it.
She slips out the front door and starts down the road. She begins to shed the morning from under her skin. She takes her father’s grief and sister’s naivete and the suffocating silence of that house and leaves it on the road. She straightens her back, picks up her chin, and walks the path she has taken thousands of times before.
Four.
Kate stands against the frame of the door. Theo hasn’t heard her approach, or if she does, she doesn’t acknowledge it. Kate uses the opportunity to stare at her unabashedly.
Theo has one leg stretched out across the bench of the window seat, the other bent as she leans back against the wall. Her brow furrows ever so slightly as her eyes track across the page. Kate often wonders if this is the only place Theo exists: within these walls, in that seat, book in hand—her natural state.
Kate traces Theo’s profile with her own eyes, from the curls that frame the side of her face down to the tip of her nose, the pink of her lips, across the smooth brown skin that wraps around her jaw, down the stretch of her throat. Kate believes she will never get used to this. She will always feel like Theo is the most beautiful person she has ever seen, and that she is seeing her for the very first time.
“Are you going to just stand there and stare?” Theo asks, turning her head away from her book and up to Kate.
“I’m enjoying the view.”
Theo’s grin is intoxicating.
Five.
Kate looks out the window from her spot in Theo’s arms. She wonders after the mouse, wonders if he is still making his rounds. This window shows the same day, same direction, same view yet an entirely different world. It’s Theo’s window, Kate’s window, too, in some way. It’s a universe away from her father’s.
Even through layers of clothing, Kate’s back is warm where it presses against Theo’s chest. Kate tips her head back against Theo’s shoulder and closes her eyes. Theo reads aloud from her book. It’s in French. Kate doesn’t understand it. Yet she does.
Six.
Girls like dresses. Kate’s sister certainly does, most girls she has ever met have. Kate isn’t sure what she thinks. All she knows is that inside of her own home, Theo is rarely wearing one. Instead, she dresses in smooth slacks and soft button-ups. Kate doesn’t know where she gets them from. They fit Theo too well to be her brother’s.
“Do you not like dresses?” Kate asks.
“I do. But they’re horribly inconvenient.”
“For what?”
“Running.” Theo’s lips tilt up through the word with an expression Kate can’t quite decipher.
Kate thinks maybe she’s outside an inside joke but they are the only ones in the room.
Theo is a matrix of questions that Kate has all the time in the world to solve. Kate will dedicate her life to it if she is allowed.
She knows she’s not.
Seven.
Theo’s fingers tug at the strings of Kate’s dress as they kiss.
“Inconvenient,” Theo says as if it proves her point with a helpless tug on the ends when the tie doesn’t come loose. Her cheeks are flushed, and her eyes just a little wild. Kate laughs.
“Where are we running?” She tilts her head up from where she is standing in the bracket of Theo’s arms until their noses are almost brushing. Theo finally pulls the strings loose.
“Nowhere yet, sweetheart.”
Eight.
When Kate has to leave, Theo catches her hand at the door.
“Would you come with me?” Theo asks. Nervous is not an emotion Kate would ever associate with Theo, but now, Kate isn’t sure there is another word to use. “Running. Would you come with me?”
Kate understands the question hidden beneath the words.
“Of course, I would.”
They both know it is a lie, the most beautiful of lies, but a lie nonetheless. They choose to believe it. If only it were allowed.
Aliya Gibbons
The Absence of You
I melt into a dreamland. I melt into a dream. I melt
into a world untouched by the memory of you; my very own oasis.
I bathe in a stream. The waterfall gushes over my dress of mud before running her hands over me, gently covering my body as a robe of water surrounds me.
The toads sing and it sounds like coming home, their baritone melodies harmonize with the crickets at dusk. Lightning bugs, my loyal nightlights, illuminating the dirt path deepened by countless times I sought refuge.
My house of ivy, overgrown with the absence of you. My toes left the only traces in the dirt and there wasn’t a bruise on my body, besides the scabs on my knees from scaling the willow trees, and my stained cheeks, pink from the sun’s kiss.
As my eyes droop with fatigue, I curl up in a meadow of bluebells and poppies and milkweeds, their stems swathe themselves around me.
Mother earth caressing her baby, my body reborn amongst the rustling leaves
and their whispers of sweet nothings.
Suddenly, my body jolts forward. The all-too familiar feeling of instability. Falling towards something, for someone, that was never fully there.
I stand up on shaky legs, I can’t feel the ground beneath me. I consult my reflection in the river, her face ripples, her features distort into a scream.
That’s when I cut a deal and shake hands with my god.
Don’t wake me.
Don’t wake.
Don’t-
Jennifer Miller
Ode to Nebraska
Exquisite corpse of the midwestern plains, Your rhymes nor reasons make no sense to me, Desert flesh, grass skin, furs of corn and grain, Your dry storm seasons breathe chaos set free,
Edge of the world in the middle of all, I look upon your Icarian isles, Floating above void seas on pillars tall, Life balanced on knife’s edge of Nature’s smile,
Yet how souls cling fast to you everywhere! Avid cattle trim your feisty growth, Crop oceans sway with the tide of your air, Persistent existence covers you cloaked,
But I saw it! Your mummified core, dead! Canopic jars sealed under parched seabed!
But you do not mourn, nor should I dare to, You eke out undead life with grace and poise, I am in purgatory within you, With you at peace with Nature’s howling noise,
Thalassic sands desiccated by wind, Your child’s fossils devoured by liquid rock, Grassfires carouse to tempo on charred skin, Other elements have claimed Neptune’s dock,
Automobile wheels and our thunder hearts, Pump us away on rigid roadway veins, I look to you as we grow far apart, Exquisite corpse of the midwestern plains,
Nebraska! You hollow holy abyss! I gaze at lush emptiness envious,
Hugo Stevenson
Santoku
The wince, I’m feeling it again. The sudden cut through flesh, the pump of blood, a quick bark of “God—fuck!”
I’m standing over a bucket of dishwater. The blood streams from my finger and soaks the glove, spilling from the gash, down my arm and onto the floor. The industrial dishwasher slams behind me as one of my coworkers lashes an iron skillet with blasts of hose water. The knife I had been cleaning falls, rattles against the concrete floor. I rush to stop the bleeding, mopping up my hand with a paper towel then holding firm against the wound to cut off its flow.
In the same spot as last year. The same depth, same angle, same mangled cut that will be kneaded into a scar over the next few weeks.
Last time it had been a broken wine glass. A crescent-shaped shard sticking out of the trashcan when I reached to recover a fork. I remember feeling the thick glass tooth, the puncture then slip of its edge right at the joint, dislodging a wrinkled flap in pouring red. It scarred over, turned white. I learned to forget.
After Neosporin, two Band-Aids and three pairs of latex gloves, I am back to work. The lacerated finger starts out arched. Separate from the others as I scrub and scrape, trying to keep any of the black water or half eaten food from infecting my gash. The knife—a stainless steel, Santoku made in Japan—still sits on the dish room floor, a little scarlet spatter on its blade. I lay it across one of the plastic racks, hidden by a few plates, then send it through the dishwasher for someone else to grab and reintroduce to the cutting board.
Almost a year ago, I swore never to return to this place. To this job, this dish room, this town, and its lifestyle. But here I am, gripping a hot pan, my finger gradually lowering as it leverages the bristle of a steel wool against some hardened grease. I have forgotten the pain, the wince, the blood. My mind has become tethered to the work once again, spinning down the drain with the sloping murk, washed back into the pipes, the bowels. The room’s swampy air sucks in its own heat, breeds it.
Steak juice bounces off the sink and into my eyes as I work the hose. Shouts from all directions, a smell too close to vomit. The dishes pileup in mountains across the floor. Plates, pots pans, buckets—always enough to go around, crusted by burned bread, sopped in yellow flub. I’m saying it now as I have said it many nights: never again. My body (forget my finger) grows numb as I bend, feeding racks into the dishwashing jaws.
Rack. Spray. Slam. Repeat.
For several hours nothing changes. Finally, the last dish arrives, and I wait for it to wash while scrubbing the floor and squeegeeing. My finger pulses under the band aid. My big toe throbs as well, from where I dropped a pan on its joint (“God-fuck!”)
and reinjured the stubbed bone I had broken back in March. On that particular night, drunk and pissed off, I had missed a trashcan and kicked a brick wall instead. From then on, I had made a pact to never drink again, mostly keeping to my promise but understanding the leniency of being human. Swinging my foot with all that rage, back then forth, shattering the same bone that twitched now in pain. Never once, but twice—always and forever.
But there’s hope: my coworkers wait for me in the dining room and before long I’m jockeying through the night, racing my car toward one of their lake houses. The smell of the dish room lingers, even in the open air. Stars rush in through my window. I’m letting my finger breathe a little: the wet, wrinkled skin feeling oxygen for the first time since its wound. A rattling case of hard cider in the passenger seat; wine; a lone beer.
I howl above the radio, knowing no one can hear me in all this darkness.
The parabola of a cannonball, splashing through lake water. Pale limbs, moonlight, dripping clothes and laughter. Someone asks me to open the wine and pretty soon it’s gone and thrown from the edge of the dock. My coworker, the same one from last year, brushes against me in the porch light. The prickle of her cool flesh—our gasping, drunk breaths as we jump in, then swim too far across the black, lapping waves. A million galaxies colliding over our heads, wild supernovas that burned out light years ago, streaking above the echoes of our bobbing, laughing voices.
Once dry, I say my goodbyes then speed off down back roads with the leftover drinks. Sp-LACK-shhhhp…the shatter-scrape of thrown bottles reverting glass to sand. Mist drifts across the poorly paved, gully streets, leaving dew upon the grass. This country, exurbia, sprawling faintly and comfortably into monosyllabic “home.”
55…60—on the street toward my house. I slam on my brakes and pull into the driveway: my limbs, tired and threadbare. Worn to the bone. I shut off the lights and listen to the crickets scream. Nodding softly, I fall asleep behind the wheel—my bed, not inside, but pitched upright in the driver’s seat of a parked car.
But I’m up before dawn, bleary eyed and wiped clear of memory. I drag this body onto the front porch then up to the bedroom where I will sleep out the rest of my sentence until noon.
From there I’ll stand in front of the bathroom mirror, examining my face, tracing its darkness. I will note the slack and draw of my bones, the wrinkles pushed toward age but away from its wisdom.
From there I’ll rip off my Band-Aid, too rough, and bleed again.
I’ll make a pact, swear by it.
Cross my heart, cross my fingers. Hope to die.
Enough, I’ll tell myself. It’s time to make a change.
Peter McHugh
Ah-Gong Pancake
I. Bed of Gold
Here on this couch I await the homecoming of my grandfather—a lean figure holding a plastic bag, sweet steam escaping and melting its flimsy mouth. I stop swinging my legs at the halting car’s muted rumble through the house walls.
While the rest of my family talks, I am silent and dig my heels into the base of the navy-blue couch.
To my right, the front door clicks open. The clanking of his keys sharpens. Everyone turns to look.
“Ah-Gong’s home!” I snap upright so the couch squeaks from under me. I don’t know his real name, though I’ve heard it a few times. Every time I did, I quickly put it away, tucked it in a neat little corner for grown-up me to pick it up one day.
My grandfather emerges, closing the door behind him. I see his beige khaki shorts as he shoves his keys into a pocket. Then I see his grey-green shirt hanging loosely on his light brown body, just like a lousily wrapped present. But his collar is smooth and tidy, and stretching my neck up high, I look into his face of eyes glowing and lips stretching into a bright smile.
“Ah-Gong Pancake?” I squeal, my fists pressing into my pink cheeks.
Ah-Gong nods, eyes crinkling as he holds up the shiny fuchsia plastic bag emitting fragrant steam. I gasp excitedly, then inhale its rich aroma. My grandmother, parents, and sister look at each other, but my eyes watch Ah-Gong’s wildly swaying bag as he sits beside me.
I am six, so I notice more details than I did when I was smaller, such as the parts of Ah-Gong pancake. Ah-Gong’s sand-brown fingers peel back dark pink layers, and the hot steam gushes out—fuller and sweeter. Plastic unfurls to reveal fluffy beds of gold, fresh from a street food stall. He lays them out on the coffee table—iron-hot cakes that melt peanuts to debris and corn to creamy candy swimming in a condensed milk pool pressed in a folded baked cushion. As always, there are two stacks of AhGong Pancakes—one with sheet-thin wraps, my petite sister’s favorite, and the other with mattress-thick ones, my favorite.
With fingers thicker than my sister’s despite being four years younger, I grab a fluffy pancake before anyone else can. My teeth press through the thick texture of the steamed cake, filling me with the sensation of warm earth. Then the sticky, sweet condensed milk wraps itself around my tongue, clinging to my gums and resisting my urge to be free of it. With each thin layer of condensed milk I shed, a molten heat rushes down my throat. Next, the taste of corn bursts through, a natural honey sweetness to complement the concentrated milk. Right as the sugar begins to overwhelm me, I bite down on small rocky surprises: the peanuts. The savory insides of the peanuts explode and balance the flavors in my mouth.
I let out a new musical note for a satisfied hum after each bite. My family laughs, saying I should be in a food advertisement. But my mind is not on TV commercials. With each bite, I taste enchanted tree rings, a castle in the sky, and a couch seat Ah-Gong has warmed for an entire hour.
II. Peanuts: Roasted with Sugar, Savory when Chewed. Why are the peanuts at his funeral bitter?
Cut in halves, the peanuts are naked and unsalted in small pale saucers set on the Lazy Susans of the massive round tables. Family members and strangers in white sit awkwardly around dozens of tables, each of which has one uncle who hoards all the peanuts to himself because all he can do is awkwardly laugh and he has nothing of substance to say. So he eats, crunches hard on them like each crunch shows the patriarch he is, and he smiles very inappropriately at everyone.
I hate them. Not the uncles, though I do dislike them. I hate the peanuts. I grab one, feel its familiar rocky body, then eat it. It stings my tongue, then chokes me. Maybe because my throat is dry from crying. I cough again and again, and my mother pats my back. The bitter taste clogs my throat, seeps down deep. After all my coughing, I don’t think my white shirt is white anymore.
I cannot remember my father’s words from that night. But I remember their taste— Bitter. It was the night we watched a movie. He woke me up in the middle of dark. And he told me Ah-Gong had died. Not was going to. Already. Died. I don’t know what I said. Maybe I didn’t say anything. My whole body seized up, tears rushed out hot as blood, and by some strange impulse, I raced out of the bedroom to grab a photograph of Ah-Gong and me.
“Ah-Gong!” I screamed and cried at the picture. His happy brown face didn’t flinch. “Ah-Gong!”
Daddy says Ah-Gong choked on porridge. His heart stopped because of a problem that had always been there but deep underwater. The ambulance was too late. He was too late. I was too late.
I am seven, and my Ah-Gong has been stolen by Diabetes.
Ah-Gong has a cycling machine placed behind the couch in front of the TV. He doesn’t say why it is there, but I know it is because this way, watching TV might motivate him to exercise. I try it almost every time I visit. The adults and my mature sister sit on the couch while I cycle and watch them talk, laughing at all the right times. I cycle just fine as I direct the wheel upwards, but once it reaches its highest point and drops, my leg dangles in the air—too short to reach the pedal.
I give a eulogy at his funeral. Daddy says it is very touching. All I do is cry and say I miss Ah-Gong and he was very kind to me and I loved him very much.
Inside the house, I begin crying again, loud and red. People are patting me down, trying to quiet me. I am passed a light blue tissue packet with a picture of a penguin and its baby on it. My sobs grow. Then another sound, shriller and brighter, breaks through my crying. My shoulders lurch as I stop suddenly to hear it.
A round lady is laughing at me. She laughs high and dramatic, a scale where each note pierces and makes me flinch. I blink my eyes, unable to believe she is laughing at me, and yet there she is—right ahead, eyes on me.
“Look at her!” she screams between laughs. She points at me. “Look how she cries!”
Haha! My shoulders droop, and I clench the penguin tissue packet. Haha! I wilt into the wall, slow and weak, jaw shivering. Haha! Something thick and dark swarms over me, so bitter, more bitter than anything I have ever felt. Haha! Haha! It is shame.
III. Creamy Sweet Corn
At the end of a busy university day, my boyfriend and I listen to a favorite childhood song for the first time in a decade. “Somewhere out there beneath the pale blue sky,” the little mouse sings of his long-lost family, “someone’s thinking of me and loving me tonight.” As the song progresses, I erupt into ugly tears, a burnt-out twentyyear-old sobbing at singing baby mice on a laptop screen. Perplexed, my boyfriend sits there, looking at the mouse, then at me, then back to the mouse, then to me and asks, “What’s wrong?”
After the song ends, I draw him into my arms and begin telling him how happy I am he is here with me.
“Dear, what’s wrong?” he asks, confused at my sudden cooing over him.
At a loss for words, I say, “Could you get me tissues, please?” Heat like magma stabs my eyelids, and I cannot breathe through my nose.
“Of course,” he says, getting up and leaving the room.
The laptop sleeps, and in the pitch darkness of the room, I cry at a contorting self I cannot understand. I allow myself to wail as loud and fierce as my heart feels. No one is watching. Then I speak aloud.
“I miss Ah-Gong.” I say it almost before I think it.
“I miss you, Ah-Gong,” I say it again.
My chest twists but feels lighter. Like a seven-year-old, I tilt my wet face up to look at the dark ceiling. “Can you see me?” I ask him. “Can you hear me?”
Soon, my boyfriend returns with tissues. I tell him I miss my grandfather.
“I’m right here,” he says, cradling me. “I’m with you.”
“It’s not that I loved him,” I say quietly. “I love him.”
He holds me closer, as if to tell me Ah-Gong already knows.
IV. Warm Condensed Milk
My Ah-Gong loves to eat sweet things. He loves Bah Kuh Teh—sweet pork ribs doused in richly boiled Chinese herbs served over hot rice and with a small cup of cleansing tea. “To wash the fat down,” he and Daddy like to say. Ah-Gong also loves ice-cream. Whenever he buys it, he stores it a little deeper than normal in the fridge and says, “For you all.” But we all know he is eating it too.
Thirteen years after my grandfather’s death, I decide for the first time in my life to search for the real-world name of Ah-Gong Pancake. I type in a detailed description of the street snack—the peanuts roasted in sugar, sweet creamy corn, warm condensed milk all wrapped in a soft pancake wrap—then press “Enter.” Studio-shot pictures of Ah-Gong Pancake appear on the right corner. I gasp, and my eyes trail down to their caption.
Apam balik
Apam balik also known as Martabak Manis, terang bulan, peanut pancake or mànjiānguo, is a sweet dessert originating in Fujian cuisine which now consists of many varieties at specialist roadside stalls or restaurants throughout Brunei, Indonesia, Malaysia and Singapore (Wikipedia). Fujian… I bite my lip. Of course, our ancestral province in China. I focus on the foreign name for Ah-Gong Pancake. “Apam” means “steamed cake” in Malay, and “balik”—
My finger leaves the keyboard. I think I know what “balik” means. My eyes struggle to recenter. What I think “balik” means carves a hollow longing in my chest. To ensure my rudimentary Malay is not failing me, I turn to Google Translate. It confirms my thought under “English,” reading:
“Go back.”
I text my father, “What is Ah-Gong’s name again?”
Forty minutes later, he replies, “Jimmy Tan Boon Khim.”
V. Bed of Gold
I will grab a fluffy pancake and bring it to my mouth. My teeth will press through the mattress-thick golden cake, filling me with the sensation of warm earth. Then the sticky, sweet condensed milk will wrap itself around my tongue, cling to my gums and resist my urge to be free of it. With each thin layer of condensed milk I shed, a molten heat will rush down my throat. Next, the taste of corn will burst through, a natural honey sweetness to complement the concentrated milk. Right as the sugar begins to overwhelm me, I will bite down on small rocky surprises: the peanuts. The savory insides of the peanuts will explode and balance the flavors in my mouth.
Soon, I will let out a new musical note for a satisfied hum after each bite. My family will say I should be in a food commercial. With each bite, I will taste the future. Chewing more, I will taste the past. His end, his beginning.
“Ah-Gong Pancake?” I will squeal, fists pressing into my pink cheeks. The rumbling beyond the house walls will grow, a sign, a summoning. Here on this couch I will await the homecoming of my grandfather—a lean figure holding a plastic bag, sweet steam escaping and dancing ribbons up the air.
Eunice Tan
Boiling
With It
The hot humbling blood of a girl who has realized decided that frankly she deserves more than the love stuck to the bottom of your shoe scraped off with your gas station rewards card & flicked into the gutter after you spat in it. The inflamed anger pushes upward & outward against the skin lining her jugular, it is more than just discomfort & unattainable expectations it erupts into hives like she’s allergic to this you. It’s reinforced by the nausea that rolls from her pupils to the backs of her knees when she hears your car beep long after your shift has ended. The tremble of her laugh lines when she fights against the clench in her jaw because she knows above anything else that she is her father’s daughter, & the harm winding through the double helix in the pit of her stomach is not something you deserve. The grit of her teeth when it settles & the dust launches skywards, when she’s realized (decided) that it just might be something you deserve. If not as a direct consequence of what you’ve put her through, then as a warning to you & everyone else you’ll victimize in the future that she ought to be the last you steal sleep & simpers from with your lack of care, grace, the inequity, the selfish gulf in the back of your mouth that gurgles when she tries to be happy for you this time. Has she not thought of you enough? Has it not been clear from the day she met you the way you swooped her up with her broken wings & shriveled plumes that your savior complex was one she would nurture as long as it kept saving? there is enabling & there is fabling, there is an island of fantastic expectation set upon your shoulders that you have never had the strength to keep above the water, but you were the one who offered those arms to her, open wide & lazy, claiming that there was room in you for her. She has realized (decided) that there will never be enough room for someone made out of space & noise, not in the cave you’ve crafted out of tumbling bricks & brittle bones. She has always been too much, & for once the disdain towards you is just enough, exactly justified, like a heat compress around the swollen limb of one who has spent nearly a decade chasing after another who was never willing to slow down or offer a pause for her to catch her breath. She is leagues above what her circumstances have made feasible & rather unexpectedly, it has been done despite & to spite you. This message is from her to you, the one who will never read it because you always forgot to look up & at her & her art & her words, anyway.
Haylee Chase Edwards
Fall 2024
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