We escorted the dying woman to a plot of land. Not the land she has been cultivating with wild seeds for the last who knows how many years. No. We walked with her to a plain spot of loose red soil and mountains at a distance.
She was very short, by the standards of the village, but large in the ways women like her seem to grow to be given titles like curandera, mother of us all, high priestess, or maybe even goddess. Whatever it was she did for you would trigger the right title. For she had touched us all in one form or another. She was our center. We gravitated around her like a planet to a star, a hog to his slop, or a bee to the hive.…
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All day I had been nervous. Frightened. The whole eastern section of the city remained dark behind locked doors. The uniforms were going street-to-street and door-to-door. Fists pounding. Glass shattering. People crying. Shouting. Intermittent gunshot. The echoes of it all could be heard bouncing from building to building throughout the streets. They had been here earlier tromping through my house unimpeded by anything resembling decency or compassion. They had found nothing and no one, of course, for I had little and lived alone.
I was picking up the scattered bits of broken china left in their wake when there came a tentative knocking on my door. I turned off the lamp and went to the window in hopes of seeing, while remaining unseen, who was there before I committed myself to whatever lay outside.…
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- Homecoming
When I returned, I held onto the familiar for so long that the changes were only considered slowly, carefully. My cousin, who I met last night for the first time in four years, remarked that it felt as if I had never left. I felt the same, despite knowing the changes in her own life the past few years: a marriage, a move, and a baby.
When I was away I romanticized Lahore to the point of dreaming about it. The bundles of short trees next to the roads, the feral crows on the too-low hanging phone-lines, the bright colours of women’s shalwar kameez: parrot green, mustard yellow, kashmiri chai pink. In my dreams I wasn’t the current me, but younger, looking up at my mother towering over me.…
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It’s been drizzling and damp the last few days. I take my chance to walk a few blocks and visit a pond I’ve gotten to know. Most of the streets around the city are tidy, controlled. The people wear shoes all the time. City dust is a sad smell. I feel heavy from a week of work. My shoulders are a mess of neat concrete knots. My feet slip around in my wet thongs. Something small and brown flitters across the footpath in front of me, into a restrained, tasteful, potted buxus. The street sweeper will swing through later tonight, but for now the damp leaves in the gutters glitter in the sun. A shiny car parallel parks in the distance, but otherwise the road is empty.…
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I could go blind today
& I would still live
in a body teeming
with visions of colors.
The soft blue of a robin’s
egg crushed up over
cement—a human
body dragging their
shoes in its wake.
I’ll permanently
remember how our
bodies move in the arms
of a loved one; how
they curl and fold
into one another.
– Terin Weinberg…
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Patrice didn’t get to hold her baby.
She woke up without him. She woke cold, shivering, and being fed hot chicken broth.
They pile blankets on her while ignoring her questions.
“Where is my baby, is he ok?”
Finally, a nurse places a cold hand on her forehead.
“He is alive, but you can’t see him.”
Her abdomen hurts from where they cut her open and pulled him out. Her legs are still numb, and she can’t feel her toes.
She tries to take a deep breath, things will get better. They must.
“What’s wrong with him?” she asks, she is afraid. This isn’t how it’s supposed to be.
The surgery was terrible, unexpected, and not part of her plan.
“He is having trouble breathing and won’t eat properly,” the nurse says, adding another heated blanket.…
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The first time the officer told the boy to drop the bat, the boy began to walk forward. He was just under five feet tall, so the bat may have looked longer than it would have appeared if held by a boy of greater height. The boy, people in the neighborhood would later comment, had dreamed of becoming a baseball player.
By the second time the officer ordered the boy to drop the bat, the boy had narrowed the distance between them. The officer wasn’t aware that the late afternoon sun had started shooting rays directly into the boy’s dark brown eyes. Traffic had grown heavy on Seventeenth Street, two blocks south of Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard, where the boy stood clutching his bat in a field infested with weeds and discarded soiled napkins and soda cups, outside an abandoned low-income housing project.…
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