You are a video camera on a man’s shoulder. You spend most of your days in the equipment room at Channel Six News, but tonight you are hoisted shoulder-high before the stage at a local nightclub. It is February, 2003. You are capturing images, stills of color and shape at a rate of twenty-four frames per second. Almost fifteen hundred photographs per minute, creating a retrievable reality, as the air is still and goes in and out of lungs at that atom-thin edge between now and the future.
What you see now, unfeeling, is a hair-metal band that sold millions of records in the late 1980s. These are older men now; it is early 2003. You see beers and pale arms lifted straight up, and the people attached to those beers and pale arms are jumpy, excited, and happy.…
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The journey took more than four hours. Crammed to the gunnels with more than a hundred people, the old fishing boat was slow. As it fought the currents, the engine could do little more than growl. Any wave caused it to shudder, as if it were afraid of the water. Wedged between two men and a woman with a baby on her lap, I couldn’t move an inch. I grabbed hold of my amulet and closed my eyes. Some people had thrown up inside the boat; others had urinated and defecated wherever they could. If we hadn’t been up on deck, lashed by the wind, the smell would have become unbearable. But nobody said a word. Whether it was because we were dreaming of a new life in Europe, or because we were petrified of drowning, we were silent.…
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2 a.m. is the hour of malcontent. The restless lie afraid of tomorrow, and the wide-awake try to bury the past.
Misha shifted her legs so she could wipe off their slick sweat on the bedsheet. The gentle whirr of the ceiling fan did little to assuage the relentless heat of Indian summer. She kept her eyes shut tight in a fruitless attempt to lure sleep, but her mind threw blank sheet after blank sheet for her thoughts to scribble on.
A grinding noise punctured her ears: the crunch of hard, white enamel scraping against itself from inside her husband’s mouth. Karim was facing away from her, and she knew he was dreaming. She poked her finger between his shoulder blades. A grunt, a sharp intake of breath, and a mumbled, “Sorry.…
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On the first day, it came for my abdomen, that sharp pain like the point of a knife, teasing the edges of my pelvis. The type of pain that makes you weep, less from the hurt, and more from the attack deep in the pit, in the core of your body.
And the doctor smiled.
“All part of being a woman, I’m afraid.”
“Or someone with a uterus,” I corrected.
He nodded in that sympathetic way you nod when your grandmother tells you she just saw her childhood friend, the one who’s been dead for decades.
“Of course. In any case, there’s not much we can do except keep an eye on it. Take some ibuprofen and see if that helps.”
I cradled my stomach, pressing my hand to my lower belly as I listened to words about how complicated my body was for having a womb, a piece of faulty machinery that no one could ever seem to troubleshoot correctly, an unfortunate bit of wiring that I would have done better had I been born without it.…
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They don’t tell you about what lingers after – not the pollution or those fiery regurgitations but the wispy krakens, the spiders and their webs. Cracks in the window of the sky. Desire lines circumvent the cumuli, trails forging intersections before they ever burst, and the sky goes lighter each time these paths retread. You know that there is no such thing as independence.
You remember the first time you saw the show. After years of just hearing them through the walls of your bedroom and seeing them on the local news, trying to match them up, your parents finally took you, and it seemed that day that you had grown to their equal. Not just awake when the night sky finally overtook the summer, but outside and celebrating, and the symphony played that sophisticated sound, each song heralding the coming display, red-white-and-blue carpet unfurling.…
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Wednesday, when the gardeners come, Big Mama pops in her ear plugs. (She swears by Mack’s Snoozers, made of silicone putty, uses them for sleeping normally.) Lawn mowers are notoriously noisy and these green-thumb guys also bring in a gas leaf blower. Even operated at half-throttle like our city law requires, they blast a big sound. But when I asked why she wore them, Big Mama said she turned to ear plugs because grass screams when you cut it and she couldn’t stand the noise.
Mom is a short five foot three, strong but skinny body, with race as mixed as a cake recipe—dark chocolate coming out on top. But she’s terrified of getting fat. She frowns at me every time I call her Big Mama, but we exist to tease each other.…
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Kathy’s had this key on her ring for twenty years now. It hasn’t unlocked anything in a very long time. Very occasionally, she will cull the set, when it gets too heavy, too jangly, or makes an ugly bulge in her clutch bag or her pocket. Picking through, she’ll remove the key from her bike lock, the one that didn’t keep her bike from being stolen. Another time she’ll sacrifice to the trash her parent’s house key, since they fled Buffalo, New York, for the horrors of south Florida. Other openers take their places. One for the padlock on her storage space in the basement of building. Another for the mailbox in the lobby. The lock for the new bike. Her rotating cast of facilitators.
This particular key once unlocked a door to a young woman’s dorm room. …
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