(27) Julie Mehta: Festival of Colors
“Michael says Indian girls aren’t his type. I heard him tell Jacob that during gym,” says Meera. “They were talking about that lady who does the evening news on channel 5, you know the one with the boobs?”
Yeah, I know. I open my locker and stare at the books crammed inside. “I can’t believe he actually said that.”
“Trust me, Rach, I heard him. I was so tempted to call him out on it.”
I glance behind me at the hordes of students shuffling down the hall and semi-whisper to Meera, “But he totally flirts with me when we go to debate tournaments.”
“Sure you’re not just imagining that?”
“We talked for like two hours straight on the bus ride home from Sacramento last week.” I grab my chemistry book and shut my locker as the warning bell rings.
“I just don’t want you to get hung up on him when there are so many other guys out there. Like Daniel, for example.”
“Ugh, not again. You know I’m not into short guys. I’m a heightist.”
“Ha, ha. You’re going to the thing for Holi this weekend, right?”
“Of course. My parents want me to take along Sunil and make sure he doesn’t get too crazy.”
“I heard a bunch of people are coming from school.”Penny and Zoe were asking me for a recipe for making color, something ‘authentic, like your grandma would make in India.’”
“Seriously? What did you tell them?”
“I asked them if they’d heard of the internet.”
“No, you didn’t.”
“Yeah, I did. Was going to ask them if they’d heard of cultural appropriation, but I didn’t want to offend them.” We laugh and hurry to the third period as the hallway rapidly clears.
***
The Holi festival on the athletic field of Finley Community College is especially packed this year and I can’t find Meera amid the chaos despite several texts. Sunil keeps me on my toes, and I have to stop him several times from shooting a water pistol of colors at the widows in white sitting on canvas chairs on the fringes of the field. The smell of frying samosas and pakoras fills the air and the shimmery morning light makes the powdered hues pop against white shirts and brown foreheads and black hair. Joyful clouds of color hang above our heads. My baby brother uses up color quicker than a jar of glitter but friendly college students keep handing us more bottles of strawberry red and twilight blue and dandelion yellow. The front of my old tee shirt is like a rainbow on steroids and the bottom half of my ponytail is purple. When I tell Sunil it’s almost time to go, he squirts me with a barrage of orange.
That’s when I feel the tap on my back. I turn around and for a minute I don’t recognize him. His face is half purple, half red, and his hair is green. “Hey, Rachel.” Michael. My heart seems to climb up into my ears. I’m too stunned to do anything but stare at him.
“This is fun. Do you do this every year?”
I manage a nod. Suddenly I feel exposed, as though the colors are revealing the feelings I’ve kept under wraps all those hours we’ve practiced mock trials. I think of that long bus ride last week when we talked about music and books as dusk settled outside, of how I waited for each passing streetlight to light up his face for just an instant.
“You look so different.” Michael reaches out and touches my cheek, getting a smudge of green on his relatively unmarked hand.
The emcee taps his microphone and the feedback is shrill, cutting through the crowd noise like a knife. “Five more minutes, everyone. Five more minutes.”
With a jubilant cry, Sunil takes off through the crowd, launching color in all directions. I toss a handful of blue at Michael before taking off after Sunil. His eyes widen and I hear him chuckle as he chases after both of us. “Hey, wait up.”
We race around the periphery of the crowd, and I notice a big group of white kids from school, speckled with colors and gathered under the oak trees drinking from water bottles I know are not filled with water.
Suddenly, I slip on a discarded plastic bag of color and face plant into the technicolor grass. Michael leans over to help me. “My little brother,” I say, helplessly watching his speedy toddler legs carry him into the thick of the crowd. Michael takes off after Sunil. I leap to my feet to go after them, my face burning. I’ve been coming to this festival for as long I could remember. But now those kids from school are using this as just another excuse to drink and act dumb.
Michael is closing in on Sunil but can’t stop him from soaking a particularly stern-faced group of widows with a stream of chartreuse. I am surprised to hear their laughter as I call out an apology and muster my let-them-hear-you-in-the-back debate voice to get Sunil to stop. The emcee announces the end of the celebration and everyone cheers. Sunil turns around and around in front of me. “Am I all colored up? Can you see my ‘sin’?” No, I tell him, I can’t see your skin. I can’t see anything but colors.
I thank Michael for his help. “Sure, this was awesome,” he says. “Hey, a bunch of us are going up to Logan’s for pizza later after cleaning up. Around 5:30. Want to come?”
Meera was wrong. She had to be.
“Okay.” I flash him a smile. “I’ll see you there.”
At home, I admire myself in the mirror before stepping into the shower. I let the white suds of my body wash blend with the riot of colors and slip merrily down the drain.
***
Logan’s is an easy walk from my house, and I try not to rush despite my excitement. I’m wearing the plum-colored sweater Meera says makes me look hot and skinny jeans and just a hint of lipstick. When I open the door to Logan’s, all eyes are on me. There’s a table of about 20 people from school, all white. Penny and Zoe are there. And a couple of guys who used to tease me in grade school before moving on to easier prey. Someone snickers. “What is she doing here?” I hear someone else whisper. Michael looks surprised like he didn’t really expect me to show. I hear his voice, so quiet you’d never know he’d taken second place at county debate finals last year. “I invited her.”
I hear “Kavita,” the name of the news anchor on Channel 5, followed by a chorus of laughs. I lock eyes with Michael and he sort of half-shrugs. “Is there an extra chair or something?” he mumbles.
“I-I just remembered something. I’ve got to go,” I say. And the tears are already filling my eyes by the time I’m out the door. I go home as fast as my pointy little heels will allow and get back in the shower again. I notice stubborn spots of blue and orange on my forearms and rub at them, remembering during middle school when Nisha Auntie came to visit and told me boys liked fair girls and the fairer the better. Mom shushed her instantly but the damage was done. I started taking long baths and rubbing one white lotion after another into my wheat-colored skin. Luckily, high school started and I found out Nisha Auntie was wrong about what boys liked. At least most of them.
***
At lunch on Monday, I’m finally ready to tell Meera about what happened after ignoring her texts the rest of the weekend. She had spotted me at the end of the festival but didn’t want to interrupt. “Maybe I should have though,” she says.
“So why did he even show up?” I ask her.
“Because he likes you. I think that’s obvious now. But I know what I heard him say. And Maggie said she heard he’s going to ask that girl Kristina to junior prom.”
Of course. Kristina with her smooth strawberry blonde hair and freckles and green eyes that always have enough mascara to give her face a haunted look.
After lunch, we part ways and I stop at my locker to grab a sweater. March always gets me that way. One glorious warm day and you believe spring has finally come but then it’s nippy again and it feels like winter will never end.
A tap at my back again and I know who it is. I shake the hair back from my face and turn around.
“Hey, why’d you leave like that the other night?”
“I didn’t feel welcome.”
“Yeah, sorry, I know the guys can be idiots sometimes. They don’t mean any harm though.” He gives me a curious look. “You looked so different the other day.”
“So did you.”
“Back to normal now, huh?”
“Yeah, same old, same old.”
“What was that festival supposed to symbolize again?”
“It’s about the beginning of spring and the triumph of good over evil.”
“Hey, so how about going to that taco place across the street after school? We can practice for next week’s tournament.”
Sorry, but racist guys aren’t my type. I totally want to say it. I imagine Meera’s squeal of delight when I tell her. I imagine the badass slo-mo scene as I strut off to some brown girl power anthem.
But instead, I shrug and shut my locker. “I think I’m already ready. I’ll see you next week.” I wonder if he’s watching me as I walk away but I don’t turn around and in a moment I am carried along in a crowd of blue backpacks and red sweatshirts and pink hair and green high-tops. I spot Daniel waving to me from the doorway of Mrs. Brown’s English class. I smile at him and stop to say hello.
Julie Mehta writes and edits for magazines and websites when she’s not revising her novel about a young widow in 1940s India who risks everything to pursue a career and a second chance at love. She is based in the San Francisco Bay Area and can be found at twitter.com/meaningseeker.
(26) Shelby Rice: a list of the contents of my backpack
one (1) high-powered handheld flashlight[1]
one (1) pair of thick framed red glasses, in case
three (3) pens, red, black, blue ink, no caps[2]
one (1) broken bobby pin[3]
eighteen (18) buttons of various types and origins (political, literary, musical)[4]
one (1) unused spiral-bound notebook, college ruled, pages blank
one (1) pair of scissors, blue handles[5]
one (1) half-broken red-and-black checked umbrella, collapsed[6]
[1] retinitis pigmentosa is one of the most common forms of retinal degeneration. when the opsin gene mutates incorrectly, photoreceptors in the eye fail, leading to a decreased visual field and night-blindness. walking at night, I use a military-grade flashlight. it lights a large circumference around me and provides relief from the blackness which cradles me in skeletal arms. still, I trip over uneven sidewalks and unnoticed tree roots which loom in the sides where I still can’t see, even with the aid of my light.
[2] my sophomore year of high school my best friend gave me a fountain pen for my birthday. smooth and slim and black, it fit my hand perfectly, the nib pouring out inky-black words onto fine paper. I adored the feeling of it beneath my palm, took immense pleasure in crafting each character flowing from my hand. now the words swim in front of my eyes, fading and murky, rendering any physical act of writing mostly moot. I still grip the pen whenever I can.
[3] as an elementary schooler, I wanted nothing more than dark, dark hair. I wanted a mane which matched the leather of my thoroughly-abused fake leather jacket, tresses which would blend into the night. I wanted to rip the blond hairs out of my scalp one by one until my skin blossomed ruby and there was nothing left, so the light hairs there wouldn’t prompt elderly women to coo and middle-aged mothers to call me a beauty, a princess, an angel, a heartbreaker. I never wanted to break a heart. I never wanted someone to asphyxiate on their feelings because of me. I wanted every single follicle to fall out and never regrow; no hair was better than what I had.
[4] politically, I lean so far left I’m almost tipping over (much to the consternation of my grandmother). black flag anarchist, baby.
[5] my preschool teacher failed me on my cutting skills. I’ve long since noted the irony of this, the long line of scars up and down my body thinks the contrary; I once thought dryly that if I ever saw her again I could submit them for extra credit. some doctors call cutting an addiction, others a coping mechanism; my mother calls it sadistic, attention-seeking and deplorable. the first time I thought about cutting myself I was in first grade and it was mostly out of scientific curiosity because when I looked at my veins I wondered if they’d bleed out black tar. so strange how someone so young can detest themselves to the degree that they wonder if they’re even human, wonder if they don’t bleed red like everyone else; but not without cause. I’d been told everything I’d felt so far was unholy, against God’s laws, so it stood to reason…
[6] long fingers fiddle with tan pants as a woman in front of us talks about scalpings. I used to be able to see out of the corners of my eyes but now I have to turn my whole head in order to check where his fingertips lay (unfortunately still splayed over his too-long legs); I pass it off as a quick smile and eyes dart back forward. my hand stretches out on my thigh like a shy foolish middle schooler; yes you can hold my hand if you want to; I rush to put on fingerless gloves to soak in the sweat. he’s two heads taller than me and he blocks the snow, my broken umbrella stretched out in front of us and with clean teeth and snow in my hair, i’ve never felt more beautiful. the night blanketing my imperfections aids my wholeness. I don’t take out my flashlight but grip his arm instead, and I let the blackness cradle me softly.
Shelby Rice often finds her fiction blowing in the wind. She is treasurer for Oxford's chapter of YDSA and is editor-in-chief for a leftist magazine centered in that same town, and also reads for Miami University Press. She won the Montaine Award for Creative Nonfiction in 2020. She has been published in the Oxford Observer, the Oxford Journal-News, the Miami Student, the Femellectual, Inklings Literary Magazine, the Happy Captive, and more. Originally from Dayton, Ohio, she is biding her time until Starfleet is established; in the meantime, you can find her in any nearby library, worrying over whether or not the amulet she bought from Goodwill for three dollars is cursed. You can follow her on twitter at @orcmischief (if you dare).
(25) Jay Hodgkins: The Murals
White
Jeans and grey sweatshirt covered in an oily rainbow of splotches, Lily stepped back to assess her newest creation, paintbrush in hand.
She was unsure of how this Egg had turned out. Her mother Monica had no doubt she was in the presence of genius. She had watched her daughter’s skills grow over the years. She had witnessed her talent, but this mural was special. It surpassed being a simple expression of a child’s creativity. This was art. Its creator, a prodigy, spreading more light than this bleak, abandoned world deserved.
Evidence of Lily’s progression was all around them. To pass the lonely hours, Monica began bringing Lily outside to paint the clinically white Eggs lining the streets of their neighborhood when she was only 2 years old. The ones nearest their old brownstone were hardly more than wild watercolor scribbles. Red and green and blue and purple; brown where all the colors bled together. The kind of thing, in a different time, a child might’ve splashed on construction paper. A drawing Monica would have affixed to the refrigerator with a magnet after carefully writing “To Daddy from Lily” on the corner, that is if Lily’s father would have stuck around.
To walk from their brownstone was to travel through time, from past to present. Eggs mercifully disguised by Lily’s murals advanced from watercolor expressions of her unbridled energy to rudimentary shapes to crude animals, figures, and landscapes. Finally, reaching the Eggs she had painted last year and this, after her 12th birthday, when she told her mother she wanted to paint exclusively in oil, the murals became beautiful to more than just an adoring mother. They were beacons of hope and life in a place with neither. Anyone’s heart would be lifted by the imagination of this child, scenes from all around the world in times past reproduced flawlessly, with Lily’s trademark touch of the dreamy surreal added, something more easily felt than described. A shame there was no one around to have their hearts lifted.
“What do you think?” Lily said.
“I love it, my little flower. It is remarkable,” Monica said.
“You always say that.”
“It’s always true.” In days past, it was a lie. Today, it is not. Lily had surpassed her mother as an artist, and Monica could not be more proud. She thought of her old gallery in the arts district, how her work gained enough of a following among social elites to pay the bills and take the occasional vacation, even after Daniel lost his job.
Lily is ready for Daniel’s Egg, Monica thought. She knows where it is, even though she’s not supposed to. Only The Company is supposed to have that information. It could create problems, but Monica resolved to take Lily there tomorrow.
Blue
“I’ve been out of work for two years, Monica. No one is hiring. There aren’t any businesses to hire anyone, other than The Company. And they only want me for one thing.” Daniel was shouting. He didn’t mean to. This wasn’t Monica’s fault. But his guilt and shame and anger needed an outlet, and she was the only one he had.
“I’m pregnant, Daniel. How could you even consider it?”
Daniel waved her off, like the brush of his hand could paint over facts the same way Monica’s brush painted the scenes of fantasy worlds that whisked her patrons away to better, happier places.
“Lily, Daniel. Your daughter Lily is coming. Don’t you want to be there for her? Don’t you think she needs her father? Don’t you want to meet her?”
“No,” Daniel said. He regretted it immediately, but he couldn’t deny it was true. This world had failed. There was no point to it anymore. Everyone just lived online anyway, and those who didn’t were as miserable as him. At least he was considering the nonviolent route. There were so many family murder-suicides, the news wasn’t even reporting them all anymore.
He hung his head so that his long bangs fell over his eyes and protected him from the force of Monica’s heartbreak. She knew the answer was true, too, observing it in his shape and color more than heeding his words. What she saw was more reliable than what he said; the subtle fibers of his body, the texture of his energy. Daniel swept his hair back from his face and walked out the front door, grabbing his coat as he exited into the cold blue air of another bleak, never-ending dusk.
Red
Monica and Lily stepped outside the brownstone into a day that almost passed as pleasant. The sky was its lightest shade of grey, almost white. The harsh winds were still for once. The Eggs covered by Lily’s painting were vibrant, twinkling even, in the pale rays of morning light.
It was a coincidence they lived on Pollock Street. It wasn’t even named for the artist, though it was fitting given the erratic, slapdash aesthetic of Lily’s toddler years.
“These Eggs are SO embarrassing, Mom. Can I repaint them, PLEASE?” She held up her old shoebox of oil paints and brushes as if she couldn’t wait to start.
“Absolutely not, my little flower. These are the dearest ones to me. They remind me of when you were little and so sweet and you didn’t suffer from tween mood swings.”
“Ugh,” Lily groaned, but her smile betrayed her feelings. She loved that her mother loved all of her art without judgment. It made her feel safe.
They walked past the stretch of Eggs Monica grouped in her mind as Lily’s Family Period. Her creations were as much therapy as they were a creative outlet or a channel to expel energy. For the rest of Pollock Street, before they turned right two blocks down, for the length of perhaps 100 Eggs, which took more than a year to paint, they passed one mural after another of a child, a woman, and a man. Sometimes there was a dog. Sometimes the man changed, from the Cool Dad of Lily’s sweetest dreams to a man with something cruel and unknowable about him. The latter was closer to the truth, Monica thought.
Next to the last Egg at the corner of Pollock, where they turned onto Red Road, there was a utility box that managed energy input-output and food supply to every Egg on the block. A short food line ran above ground directly from the Egg to the utility box. In the mural covering this Egg, Lily painted her father throwing a tennis ball through the air while Monica stood next to him smiling. The forever young Lily’s painted hand wrapped around the food line where it connected to the Egg. This line, Lily painted as a dog leash that led to the utility box, where it attached to the collar of the big red dog from the children’s books, which was leaping in the act of catching the tennis ball.
That painting was the one when Monica realized her daughter saw the world in angles and dimensions Monica could not see.
“Mom!” Lily said as they rounded the corner onto Red Road. Monica knew that tone. It meant danger. She followed Lily’s wide-eyed gaze across the cracked and cratered asphalt of the empty street. There was an old man admiring one of Lily’s Egg murals. It must have been one from when she was 8 or 9 years old. It was as bright and beautiful and hopeful as the man was threadbare and grim. His long, grey beard dripped over an olive green jacket buttoned up to his chin. He hacked and coughed and blew his red bulb nose into a matching wool hat that he’d taken off to soak in the weak sunlight on his bald head.
Lily and Monica stood as still as possible, as still as the Eggs that surrounded them on the sidewalk, as if they were Eggs themselves as if the weeds struggling out of the cracks would grow around their ankles and anchor them to their place on Red Road forever. And yet, it didn’t surprise them when the man noticed their presence. It was so rare to share the air with another human being, the energy between bodies crackled like static electricity.
He swiveled to look behind him, and after searching up and down the road, his eyes fell on them. He looked startled at first, frozen, then he smiled. He was smiling at Lily, Monica could feel it, and she didn’t like it.
“Hey, you’re the one who painted all these Eggs,” the old man said. Great, Monica thought, he’s been watching us.
“Let’s go,” Monica whispered as she wrapped her arm around Lily’s shoulder and pulled her in close. She considered steering them back to their brownstone, where she’d lock the door and pull out the shotgun from the cavity hidden under the floorboards, but her plan for the day was too important.
Today was too perfect. Lily was ready. It had to be today.
She could feel the man watching them as they walked away, and she jumped when she heard him call after them. “Maybe you could do my daughter’s someday,” he said. Monica turned her head and was relieved to see he wasn’t following them. She picked up her pace, shoveling Lily along so quickly that the young girl had to trot to keep up, rattling her paints and brushes in the shoe box as she went.
Yellow
Monica resented having to clean house on mornings after working long evenings at the gallery, all while carrying around an increasingly large object in her uterus. Daniel should have been taking care of his pregnant wife; with no job, he should have been doing all the cooking and cleaning. But he was too proud.
She resented it until she found the pamphlet from The Company in the dresser under his socks, and the receipt from his order tucked inside. Everything about him was listed on the receipt. His name, Social Security Number, age, height, weight, blood type, allergies, dietary restrictions, and the information for a bank account that Monica had never seen before. Jesus Christ, she thought money had been a little tight, but she let Daniel keep the books so he could feel useful.
“What the fuck is this, Daniel?”
If Daniel was surprised to see Monica brandishing the pamphlet in one hand while she held her oversized pregnant belly in the other, he didn’t show it.
“Don’t freak out, Monica. You just have to put a deposit in for the Egg and installation. Once everything is all hooked up, The Company starts monthly payments. You and Lily will be taken care of.”
“Lily doesn’t need money. She needs a father.” Monica was hysterical. Daniel kept bringing it up, more and more since the Eggs had started appearing on the streets right outside their doorstep instead of just lined up along interstates and major transmission lines, but she didn’t think he’d go through with it. Not really.
“A father provides for his child,” Daniel said. He, on the other hand, was calm, icy even. Like he was already gone. In a way, he was. “Lily will be in the VR scenario I chose. She’ll be 12. It’s a perfect age. Still innocent, but old enough to have interests and a mind of her own.”
“That’s not Lily, you coward. Lily is right here.” Monica crumpled the pamphlet and let it fall to the floor as she caressed her stomach, which jumped with unhappy kicks and gyrations from the baby girl within.
“You could go with me. They make them for families.”
Monica walked out of the room to their bedroom and locked the door. When she returned, Daniel was gone, as was the crumpled pamphlet from the floor.
Black
“What about this one? The light here is nice.”
“No, not that one either, my little flower.”
“But we’ve passed a hundred perfectly good Eggs already,” Lily protested. “And do you have to call me little flower? I’m 12.”
“You’ll always be my little flower, dear. We’re almost there. Be patient.” Monica took the shoebox of paint and brushes from Lily to make the long walk to downtown a little more bearable.
When they arrived, Monica had to take a deep breath to compose herself. She had only come here once before, years ago, to scream at the thing and beat it with a steel pipe, but she got scared off by The Company’s drones circling overhead. Her whole body trembled and the tears were at the brink of bursting the dams of her eyelids. Her lips were dry, mouth like the thick paste formed in the potholes when yesterday’s rain-soaked into the deposits of ash and old garbage.
Lily looked at her mother, scanning her from head to toe, taking in her shape and color. “This is his Egg, isn’t it? Father’s?”
Monica closed her wet eyes and nodded yes. She had built this moment up much differently in her mind. She had imagined offering words as beautiful as her daughter’s murals to ease Lily’s distress. Instead, it was Lily who consoled Monica. She was relieved by her daughter’s mercy; that she didn’t have to explain.
Eyes still shut, Monica felt Lily take the shoebox from her and heard the light rustling as she set it down on the sidewalk and began to choose her colors and brushes.
Monica kept her eyes closed and could see Daniel inside the Egg. She imagined him in there, prostrate and dressed in The Company’s plain white uniform for “guests.” You coward, she thought for the millionth time, imagining him in there with the food and shit and piss lines hooked up to the ports they had drilled into his flesh. How comfortable he would be in the recycled heat from his body that also sent power onto the grid. How hollow that existence must be, connected to all the other cowards too weak for the real world, living a virtual life in exchange for having his actual life sucked out of him for The Company’s gain. She imagined following the food and shit and piss lines from the ports in his body to the shell of the Egg and back out into the cold, dull, miserable, empty world he left behind for her and Lily.
But when she opened her eyes, she saw that the world was turning into something greater. Rich, saturated colors were coming alive on Daniel’s Egg, taking shape as Lily conducted magic through her paintbrush.
As Lily mixed a vibrant pink onto her palette next to a series of syrupy reds and oranges, Monica gasped. She saw what her daughter intended. Incredible, beautiful. This would be her daughter’s finest mural yet. But Lily paused.
“What is it, my little flower?”
“I think I need to finish this one alone. Do you mind giving me a little space? Maybe an hour or two?”
Monica hesitated. What about the man they saw? They hadn’t come that far. But here, in downtown, The Company secured the streets with drones. There was no threat.
“I’ll go get us lunch and a coffee from the auto fulfillment center,” Monica said.
“I want mine black.”
“Black?” Monica raised an eyebrow. “No sweetener or cream powder?”
“No thanks. I’m not a kid anymore, Mom.”
She’s become such a serious child, Monica thought. No surprise, in this place. But there was something about her seriousness, just like Daniel’s. Even in his absence, she was like him.
An hour was all Monica could bear to leave her child alone, but when she rounded the corner from the auto fulfillment center with coffees in hand and lunch in a bag draped over her forearm, she thought she had made a wrong turn. She didn’t see the Egg, the beautiful kaleidoscope of reds, oranges, and pinks over tropical blues and greens from the picture Monica kept hidden in her dresser at home; the picture of Daniel and Monica on their honeymoon.
After a hummingbird-in-flight flutter of the heart, Monica saw Lily sitting on the curb. Adrenaline and relief flooded through her body at the same time, competing for space in her bloodstream and nervous system. Monica’s daughter was staring into a black nothingness, dried tears staining her cheeks but jaw set high and proud, exaggerating a strength she hoped to convince herself she possessed.
The Egg was black. Completely black. Covered over in thick, tar-like black oil paint.
“What did you do?” Monica gasped.
“He didn’t want us. He didn’t want to be part of our world. Now he’s not.”
Daniel’s Egg was a void in the landscape; like the space it occupied didn’t exist. It was a wrinkle in the fabric of the real world. Monica wasn’t sure if Lily intended the other meaning her art represented, the void in Monica’s heart and in Lily’s life where Daniel was supposed to be.
“It’s perfect, my little flower. What a beautiful mind you have. A beautiful mind of your own.” Monica said, reflexively cradling the invisible hump over her flat stomach. “He knew what you’d become, and he still saw no color in the world. He chose darkness. You’ve given him exactly what he wanted.”
Jay Hodgkins' short fiction has appeared in The Legendary, Pythia Journal, Oblong Magazine and the Eunoia Review. You can read more at www.jayhodgkins.com. He has written five complete novel manuscripts and thinks two might be pretty decent. He earned a master's in creative writing with distinction from the University of Edinburgh and a bachelor's in commerce from the University of Virginia. Jay currently serves as editorial director at UVA’s Darden School of Business. Previously, he worked as lead speechwriter for the CEO of a Fortune 500 company. As a journalist, he won seven awards for reporting from the Maryland-Delaware-DC Press Association.
(24) Chris Talbot-Heindl: What Color Am I
When I’m in a room with any number of white people, they assume I’m one of them. But while my lack of melanin matches their own, my experiences do not.
In my teen years, I used to joke and say I was salmon. That’s triracial—the colors white, mixed with yellow (the designated color via the white gaze for my Japanese heritage), mixed with red (the designated color via the white gaze for my Indigeneity). Salmon, if those colors were blobs of oil paint on a palette board swirled together.
[It wouldn’t occur to me until my late 20s that saying this or identifying in this way to uniracial white folks perpetuated the normativity of a white interpretation of skin tone. I would further learn in my late 30s that this color scheme (red, white, Black, yellow, brown) was created and remixed by a host of white, racist, eugenicists throughout history].
What color am I?
I am the color abomination, the word the good white church ladies used to describe my sister and myself and our mixed heritage.
I am the color of making sukiyaki for my elementary school class for some hokey learn about each other’s culture through food segment and listening to all the ewws while watching everyone eat up every last morsel.
I am the color of rocks through windows at my childhood home, thrown by little white boys on bikes who hadn’t yet understood why us existing there meant they had to hate us, but mirrored the bigotry normalized in their own homes.
I am the color of you can’t sit here, go sit with the other Asians. I am also the color of why are you in this BIPOC space? You’re white.
I am the color of attending the Title IX Indian Education classes in high school, except when Mr. P. announced you don’t look Indian to me.
I am the color of you may have gotten that promotion over me, but it’s just because you’re a diversity hire. And I am the color of I was just kidding, don’t be so sensitive, when I brought up that statement later.
I am the color of co-workers deciding that farting in my office and leaving the trail behind should be referred to as the Trail of Tears and that eating my cultural foods was disrespecting the community kitchen and peoples’ sensitivity to stinky foods.
I am the color of you don’t belong here and questions about blood quantum.
I am the color of but you’re not really Asian. You’re not like those Asians.
I am the color of some white people’s lust; I’ve never been with an Asian before. Are you going to love me long time?
I am the color of watching white women use my cultural traditions and ceremonies for their own benefit and sometimes financial gain, completely out of context and disrespectfully. I am also the color of white women’s wrath and weaponized fragility when I point this out.
I am the color that makes some white people see red and choose violence when they discover I am not just like them as they mistakenly thought. You tricked me into saying things in front of you!
I am the color that grew up without a kinship network of people like me and never learned how to navigate all these racist obstacles. I am the color that is healing through kinship networks I’ve just discovered and through reconnecting to cultural traditions of healing I never had access to.
I am the color that is the culmination of my ancestors’ choices, victories, traumas, joys, obstacles, arts, heritage, history, faiths, and love.
I am the color of me.
Chris Talbot-Heindl (they/them) is a queer, trans nonbinary, triracial creator working through the complexity of identity through art. They are the co-creator and editor of The Bitchin’ Kitsch and creator of Chrissplains Nonbinary Advocacy to Cisgender People educomic. Twitter and Instagram: @talbot_heindl, Website: https://www.talbot-heindl.com/
(23) Taylor Kowalski: A Certain Slant of Light
The butterflies don't seem to mind dying. They wear death better than I do.
Perhaps it's a survival mechanism. Perhaps, if you only get a few weeks to live, it's better to live at peace with death.
There aren't many butterflies in the city, so I pick my prey carefully. You can tell a butterfly's age by the spots of uncolor that blotch and blossom on their wings. Tiny transparencies which seem to say, Take me. I'm ready.
I wasn’t ready, but I was losing my color all the same.
The day I got the news, you were the one to drive me home from the hospital. When I missed the bus, you were the only person I could call.
I had always told myself we were just office flirtmates. That our friendship started and stopped according to our timecards. It was too dangerous to ask if you wanted me the way I wanted you; yes scared me as much as no.
But you picked me up, instantly, without questioning. You walked me five floors up to my apartment, because I looked as pale and empty as I felt.
My head spun with maybes and could-bes.
When you saw my butterflies, captured in halved plastic bottles and clear food containers, your face twisted. I wonder if I looked the same the first time I discovered a butterfly lapping up mudwater. I was a little girl then, squatting over the puddle, asking the butterfly who flitted in the filth, Aren't you too lovely for this?
You had said, "What's all this for?"
I followed your stare around the room full of the dead and dying. I had hung flat-board shelves on every empty wall, and my apartment had chrysalised into a museum of the soon-to-be-lost.
You would never have fit in a place like that. You were too alive. You had too much time ahead of you.
But still I hoped.
“I sell them, on the weekends.”
“But why?”
The air thinned between us. You were as golden-haired and perfect as the sun. All light. I wanted to cup you in my palms and feel your heat.
I said the only thing I could say: “Because otherwise they just die, and no one remembers them.”
You had given a kind nod, even though I could tell by your furrowing brow that you didn’t understand. You were too polite to say no when I offered coffee, so you perched on the couch like a bird ready to take flight. Unease revealed itself in the restless tap of your fingers against your knee, in your constantly roving stare.
I returned with the drinks, and silence dug out the air between us.
“They’re a nice spot of color,” you said, finally. “I see why you like them.”
“They’re clear, you know.”
“The… containers?”
“The wings.” I stirred my coffee around and around to avoid looking at you. Your stare had me pinned and spread, another dead butterfly on the coffee table. Ready to be packed and carried to the street market like porcelain, just as fragile and precious. “They’re scales upon scales, angled just right. They catch the light and refract it. You can tell a butterfly is about to die, because it sheds its scales and parts of its wings start going dark.” I brought the cup to my lips and dared to find your eyes, only for a moment. “No color at all, really. Just trapped light.”
“Daisy. Why were you at the hospital, really?”
I have dark spots in me, too. A butterfly losing her scales, and no more light can get in.
“Nothing,” I had whispered. “Just a checkup.”
You wanted to ask me more, and I wanted to tell you. But my voice was dry as a pair of brittle wings, and prying it out would only make it crumble in my fingers.
You left without finishing your coffee. When you stood in the doorway and told me goodbye, I turned impulsively and plucked up one of my specimens, pinned to the bottom of an empty blueberry container.
I had found her drowned in a plastic cup of beer. She already wore her own funeral colors: wings maroon-black, edges banded in white. I dumped the beer and took her home in that little cup. Let her air out. Spread her wings daintily and used a toothpick to make her look as if she was frozen forever in flight.
“I want you to have her,” I’d said. “As a thank you.”
“You don’t have to do that.”
“But I want you to,” I whispered.
You held the packet delicately in your hand. Smoothed your thumb over the clear lid. “I’ve never seen a dark butterfly before.”
“It’s called a mourning cloak.”
“Daisy, tell me if you need help.” Your hand squeezed mine. “Please.”
I had hovered there in the light of your stare, my belly lifting and sinking all at once, a boat lost to the ocean. The truth sat heavy under my tongue.
Maybe, if I had more time. Maybe, if the days weren’t down to weeks.
But I am not like the butterflies. I will not die beautifully, light still suspended in my wings as if I’m really alive.
I cannot bear you watching it.
So I forced a smile and said, “Of course I will. Of course.”
And I let you leave.
I quit the next day. Dodged your calls until you simply… stopped.
Only the butterflies keep me company now. On the good days, I still carry down a handful of butterflies to the street market. I stand swaying, dizzy, hoping someone will love them just as much as I have.
Today is not one of the good days. I lie on the couch, heavy-lidded, surrounded by butterflies. Only a few are still alive, and I buy them extra hours of life with little saucers of orange juice and clementine-slivers.
I’ve watched them all die.
Maybe it’s their turn to see me off.
Taylor Rae (Kowalski) is a recently reformed mountain troll who is trying out city living. She holds her Bachelor's degrees in psychology and English literature from the University of Idaho. She can be found in most caves (or, all else failing, @mostlytaylor on Twitter)
(22) Jasmine Sawers: Recipe for Constellations
“I measure every Grief I meet”
—Emily Dickinson
I once met a girl whose whole body was the color of a sunflower in bloom. Eyes like nectar, palms like butter, teeth like points of starlight. We were in Asphodel Books when our eyes met over a shelf in self-help. Rather, I was in self-help, she was in cookbooks, and she didn’t smile so much as her mouth unfurled as petals do in the first flush of springtime, and the world became brighter around us.
Why would someone like her look that way at someone like me? Me, a stippled sky the color of rainclouds and fading auroras. Me, while other customers in warmer shades craned their necks just to get a glimpse of her. What could I do but smile back?
She raised her book so I could see. Bake Guilt-Free! it read.
“More like bake taste-free, am I right?” she asked, and I heard her wind chime laugh for the first time.
“How much Splenda can one person eat before despair sets in?” I said, and she laughed again. My face hurt. She slotted the cookbook back into place and slid around to my aisle. She brought with her the scent of birthday cake. Vanilla sugar and snuffed out candles. She leaned over to see what I was looking at.
“Your Colors Are Not Your Destiny,” she read. She pursed her lips and tilted her head up to look me in the face. “I don’t know,” she said. “You’ve got such a lovely teal, just here.” Her fingertips, more warmth than weight and soft as moth wings, traced the curve of bone around my right eye.
“How do you do it?” I said. She blinked and drew her hand back. At the loss, a burst of mahogany grief crept in tiny tendrils up my neck. “I mean, look at you.” Her, lush and tender and shining in a green sundress. Her, contentment splashed across the canvas of her skin. With the sudden red blazing hot along the bowl of my belly, unstoppable, we hardly seemed the same species.
She wilted and turned away from me.
“I’m sorry,” I said. My thwarted hands, lavender limp at my sides. “I just—”
“You’ve just never seen anyone like me before,” she said. “All one color.”
“I’m sorry.”
She turned back around, only to lean into the crook of my neck.
“Where does your happiness live?” she asked, soft. Pink spilled slow over my collarbone. “Will you show me?”
I have to tell you, I brought this girl back to my studio apartment. I held her summer’s day hand in the winter moon cup of my own and led her past the labyrinth of books and papers into my bedroom with the second-hand mattress crooked on the floor. I let her peel off each article of clothing I wore, let her pass her hands gently over each patch of watercolor skin she revealed. I let her awe at the sight of me soothe the dull burgundy that threatened at the base of my spine.
Her fingers skittered over the spray of white, purple, and green that dappled my left side.
“When my nephew was born,” I said. “Six pounds, four ounces, two days late, and screaming bloody murder.”
She swept her palms over the full swell of pink and tangerine that curved along my right hip.
“When my first love kissed the inside of my wrist,” I said. “I was seventeen.”
She trailed her hands up my stomach and took into them the weight of my breasts. She pressed her mouth to an ocean areola, swiped her tongue over the white crest of a nipple.
“When I read Ishiguro for the first time.” I touched her, finally, stroked trembling midnight fingers through her hair.
Though she was herself still fully clothed, she bore me down onto the mattress. With hands and lips, she mapped each graduation, each publication, each love letter, each reunion with a friend, each infatuation, each perfectly executed batch of scones, each book that changed the fabric of my character, each visit to a new country, each dip of my feet into a new ocean, each sighting of phosphorescence, each tangle of my fingers with those of someone I loved, each shooting star.
Afterward, as we lay twined together in the ruin of my bedding, a swirl of gold arose beside my bellybutton. She rubbed it over and over with her thumb.
“Me,” she said.
“Let me see you,” I said. “Please, let me see all of you.”
The afternoon sun threw long shadows across our bodies, made pale the low light of my bedroom. Made my girl a supernova.
I did not ask her to stay. I did not tell her I loved her. I lay in silence with her while her heart throbbed against my side.
“What about this?” she asked after I’d given up hope for a reply. She cupped my jaw and pressed the end of her nose to the swath of navy that spanned my face, cheekbone to forehead. It was, if you looked closely, dotted with points of white.
I breathed her breath. I closed my eyes against the light of hers.
“The end of friendship,” I said.
She kissed me there. She kissed me where my father had died, where I’d fought long and bitter with my sister, where the neighbor boy had made free with me. She kissed all my pains, great and small, brown and blue, red and purple, light and dark.
When she was finished, she stood and presented her back to me. I sat up to make my goodbyes, but she raised her arms above her head and said, “Help me with this.”
I stood and pulled the sundress over her head. Her breath came quickly as I traced the sunny line of her neck, her shoulders, her spine.
My hand rested upon it then: a star with countless points at the hollow of her back. Hot to touch, it churned every color I’d never seen. Streaks of red blasted forth and faded, cascades of whitewashed it clean, blue boiled into purple bubbled into brown, mauve and green crackled and burst, orange sparked like embers. This infinite starburst stole my senses.
I had no eyes, no ears, no tongue or nose or hands. Caught in its gravity, I became dizzy and hot. I stumbled, but the girl was there, upright, warm, and strong. I shut my eyes and heaved in air. I slung my arms around her waist and pressed my face into her neck, my body to her body, my pulse to her pulse. I felt her shudder in my arms before her hands locked over mine on her perfectly golden belly.
“Does it hurt?” I asked her.
“Do yours?”
She left my apartment that night, and I never saw her again. Not at Asphodel Books, or in a coffee shop, or on the subway. Our eyes never met across the crowd at a party, we were never set up by mutual acquaintances, we never ran into each other at work. She came and she marked me and she left. This ball of sunshine is hers, you know that. But this white lightning, right here, do you see? That was her, too.
“You look like a nebula,” she’d said when she pulled her dress back on. “You are the light of the universe.”
Jasmine Sawers is a Kundiman fellow in fiction and a graduate of the MFA program at Indiana University. Originally from Buffalo, New York, Sawers now lives and pets dogs outside St. Louis. Sawers’s work has appeared in such publications as Ploughshares, Fairy Tale Review, and The Offing. Learn more at JasmineSawers.com
(21) Tyler Barton: to cancel
It was a pink. Damian knew that it was truly a pink. A pink so pale it was an ocean of white with a single Swedish Fish swimming somewhere in the center. That’s how faint. That’s how light. A pink nonetheless. It was a shade of pink that would make Damian a renowned artist. So renown, in fact, that he could, by age thirty, determine to the hour how long ago a croissant had been baked.
At forty, his new photography phase was not welcomed by fans. They wanted more of the color. That color. That color Damian had never properly named. That color everyone just new as and called That color. That color they dyed the tote bags. That color they painted the space station. The first time Damian had ever seen That color, he was twenty-two, and That color was the background of a magazine cover wrinkling in the rain on the road. On the cover, a trio of Korean teens lounged beside the headline: Boy Band Maturity, but behind them was nothing. They simply floated in That color. Damian told this story on a podcast when he turned fifty, and it was decided that what this was was cultural appropriation, and Damian never sold another piece of art again. Except to his mother. His happiness increased exponentially every year until his death.
Tyler Barton is a literary advocate and a co-founder of Fear No Lit. His debut collection, ETERNAL NIGHT AT THE NATURE MUSEUM, is forthcoming from Sarabande Books. In non-pandemic times, he leads free writing workshops for residents of assisted living facilities. Find his work in Kenyon Review, The Iowa Review, Subtropics, and soon in Copper Nickel. Find him @goftyler or at tsbarton.com or in Lancaster, PA.
(20) Ross West: Mandala
A half-dozen Buddhist monks from India labored in the rotunda of the public library in Eugene, Oregon, stooped over, using specialized tools to meticulously place vibrantly colored sand on a platform about four feet in circumference, conjuring as if from nothing a geometrically complex mandala—intricate as a Mayan calendar, bright as a tie-dyed Tshirt. Rope barriers kept us in the crowd of onlookers back far enough to give the red-robed monks plenty of room to work. Their years of preparation for this most delicate art were evident in their careful and precise movements and the meditative attention they paid to position each grain. One of them explained that the sand mandala is the monks’ way of fostering enlightenment by demonstrating the impermanent nature of created things: their transitory arrangement of sand into a meaningful pattern is a unique event in the history of the universe, existing only at the moment that is right here, right now.
And demonstrate impermanence they did. After three days of painstaking work and a short ritual, one of the monks put a brush to the museum-quality mandala and in a few strokes swept it into a drab little pile. What had gloriously been was suddenly gone.
The monks put some of the sand in small envelopes they offered to wide-eyed kids, who excitedly extended their hands as they might for Halloween candy. They also presented packets of sand to adults who, maybe, had a deeper understanding of transience and the need to come to terms with life in a negotiation where life holds all the cards and bargains from a position of absolute indifference. The monks took some of the sand to the Willamette River and sprinkled it in, launching it on a slow journey north to the confluence with the Columbia, and from there eventually out to the Pacific, where, they were sure, the rainbow-colored grains would radiate blessings to all the world.
Ross West has placed fiction, essays, journalism, and poetry in publications from Orion to the Journal of Recreational Linguistics. His work has been anthologized in Best Essays Northwest, Best of Dark Horse Presents and elsewhere. He edited the University of Oregon’s research magazine, Inquiry; was senior managing editor at Oregon Quarterly; and served as text editor for the Atlas of Oregon and the Atlas of Yellowstone.
(19) Alice Kaltman: White, Round, Cold Thing
It was so early that morning four years ago when Dad drove Joey and me to Vinnie’s Barber Shop on Sunset Boulevard. I was still wiping the crust out of my eyes and Joey fell back asleep as soon as we pulled out of the driveway, thumb plugging his mouth hole, as usual.
No Wheaties, no toast, no nothing. Just get up, get dressed, get moving.
“Why’s it so important we get haircuts?” I whined. Our hair had barely grown out from our last trip to Vinnie’s. You could see the pink skin of Joey’s scalp through his blonde scruff. My own hair had barely begun to tickle the back of my neck.
“I want you boys to look your best for our guest,” Dad said. He always talked in rhymes when he wanted to be Mr. Cheery. He still does sometimes. But not as much these days.
“What guest?” Joey unplugged to ask the question.
“My new friend June,” Dad said.
“Since when do you have any friends, old or new?” I asked. At eight years old I was keen on being a Wise Guy.
“You rat, Pat,” Dad said to me, looking through the rearview mirror. “Since a few months ago.” He squinted behind his black horn rims, his whole face wrinkling up like a pug dogs. Then he turned up KMET and “Louie Louie” came on. We all couldn’t help but sing along.
Thing was, Dad really didn’t have any friends, old or new. It wasn’t that he was a bad guy or anything like that. He just wasn’t a guy’s guy. He didn’t like sports and he didn’t drink beer. Honestly? He was a total nerd. Still is. He was some kind of math wiz as a kid, but four years ago he was a bookkeeper for Cal Worthington’s car dealerships. Without a wife around to plan dinner parties or backyard barbecues goofing around with Joey and I was the extent of Dad’s social life.
“Aren’t I allowed to make a new friend?” Dad asked.
“Search me,” I shrugged.
“Swurch me,” Joey parroted.
“Shut up copy cat,” I leaned over and poked Joey’s scrawny shoulder. Sometimes he was such an annoying pee wee.
“Meow,” Joey replied.
***
Vinnie came at us with the Number One electric razor attachment, meaning full-on buzz cuts. I tried not to look at myself in the mirror as he shaved away. I focused on the cover of the Life magazine Vinnie had next to the disinfecting combs, which had a snap of Steve McQueen riding on his motorcycle with his wife. Mrs. Steve McQueen had her arms around Steve and wore what I guess you’d call a million-dollar smile. They both looked wicked happy.
I, however, was not wicked happy when Vinnie finished. Joey and I looked like a couple of cue balls. You’d of thought we had head lice or were joining the mini-Marines.
“Now that wasn’t so terrible, was it?” Dad rubbed my back.
“Ouch!” I yelled. It didn’t hurt at all, but I hated it when Dad got all touchy-feely in public. It was bad enough at home.
Dad was the original whistle a happy tune guy. He liked to talk to us in rhymes, like, “Time for dinner, you winner,” or “Time for school, you fool,” or “Boys, boys, stop with the noise.” I’d only seen him down in the dumps one time, right after Mom died. I was five years old. Joey was a baby. I’d accidentally-on-purpose tossed my Howdy Doody doll’s bandana to the top of the living room bookshelf and I needed Dad to get it for me. I found him in the bathroom sitting on the closed toilet seat, his hands covering his face, terrible throaty howls coming out of him like he was the Creature from the Black Lagoon. He was bawling so hard he didn’t even hear me open the door. If I had stayed there watching him, I’d have started bawling too. Bawling when you’re a five year old because your mom is dead feeling like falling down an endless hole with the worst stomach ache in the world. So nope. No bawling. I quickly closed the door and backed away.
When we got home from the Barber Shop, Dad raced around the house, fluffing pillows, tossing old newspapers into the trash, scrubbing the bathtub, vacuuming the wall-to-wall. We were told to clean our room; we meaning me, myself, and I. Joey was only three years old, with the attention span of a, well, three-year-old. He’d be the opposite of help. He’d put the trains in the toy bin, but right after that, he’d pull out a Tonka truck or his stupid stuffed bear. A no-win situation, so I made Joey sit on his bottom bunk to watch me.
“Don’t move or your ass is grass,” I warned Joey. I knew my way around a rhyme or two also.
“Awww, poopy on your head,” Joey said. He laid back on the corduroy bedspread, picked his nose, and ate it.
I did a reasonably decent cleaning job for an eight-year-old. Some toys made it into the bin, a few stray shoes and underpants were kicked under our bunk bed, and pretty much everything else was shoved into the closet. I went out to tell Dad I was finished. He was in the living room facing the fireplace.
“Done,” I said.
Dad turned to me. He had our three family portraits that usually sat on top of the mantle—Mom, Dad, Ugly Baby Me. Mom, Dad, Cute Kid Me. Mom, Dad, Even Cuter Kid me, Ugly baby Joey—stacked in his arms.
“What are you doing with those?” I asked.
Dad looked like the cat who ate the canary. “Just doing a little redecorating.”
“Why?”
Dad shrugged. “Swurch me,” he said.
I groaned. “Ha. Ha. Ha. You’re so funny I forgot to laugh.”
I followed him into his bedroom where he put the frames face down in the lower cubby space of his bedside table. There was another photo already there. My favorite, and Dad’s too; the one of my mom from when she was in college, the one where she’s wearing a million-dollar smile even bigger than Mrs. Steve McQueen’s when her hair was poofy and healthy and blonde, not scarecrow-straw and cancer-fried like it was right before she died. That photo was usually angled towards my father’s side of the bed as close to his pillow as could be. And now it was at the bottom of the stack, hidden under a bunch of other upside-down smiling faces.
I was about to say something when Dad stood upright and announced, “Done is done. Time for fun,” with a big fakey-fake grin on his face. He marched out of the room as if he were leading a parade. I didn’t follow. I stood in my parent’s bedroom alone for a moment, but it started feeling weird, haunted, and empty. A room that only worked if parents were in it. So I split.
I found my dad straightening the throw pillows on the couch for the fifth time that morning. “When does Jane get here?” I asked while I picked at the scab I had over my eyebrow from a run-in I’d had with the sidewalk after trying to top my previous pogo stick record.
“Hey, hand down you clown,” Dad said. “And her name is June.”
I stopped picking. “Okay, so when does June get here?”
“June, June, she arrives at noon.”
Oh great, I thought, here we go.
“Okie Dokie, Pokie,” he said, “Go get dressed.”
Dad wanted us to wear our Sunday Best, even though it wasn’t Sunday, it was Saturday, and we only ever wore those sissy clothes on the rare occasion we might go to church or even rarer occasion when we visited our grandparents in Pasadena. They were horrible clothes; Joey’s checked short pants with suspenders and sandals that looked like girl’s sandals, my stiffest black trousers on the planet, white button-down shirt, and stupid clip-on polka dot bow tie. Normally I’d make a stink, but that day I didn’t. I could tell there’d be no winning, just more rhymes.
***
June arrived right on time. I wondered if she’d been standing outside the door, looking at her fancy-pants watch before ringing the bell. You could tell just by looking at her that June was one of those prim and proper, no untied shoelaces, no elbows on the table, please-thank you-pardon me type ladies. She had the shiniest, blackest hair I’d ever seen, smoothed in a dome around her skull. Her skin was as pale as could be, like she never ever went out in the sun, which was pretty weird for someone who lived in Los Angeles. When she came closer I could see crinkles and wrinkles on her face buried behind a layer of face powder. She wore a light blue dress with a little jacket that matched and held a cake box out to Dad in white-gloved hands.
Dad took the cake. “Oh my.” He had another stupid grin on his face. I couldn’t tell if this one was real or another fakey-fake. Either way, it looked like it would crack his cheeks to pieces. “You shouldn’t have, Junie.”
Junie, I thought. Oh brother.
“Well, well,” she said. “Who have we here?” She looked at me. Her eyes were spooky. Like I’d come face to face with Casper the un-Friendly Ghost.
“This is Patrick,” Dad said. “Say hello to our friend, June Withers, son.”
Son? What was this? Dad never called me Son. It was always Patrick or Pat. Most often; Pat Pat This or That.
“Hello,” I said. And then to show I was the good kid, that Dad hadn’t raised a couple of chimpanzees, I added, “Pleased to meet you.”
June gave me a little ‘that’ll do’ kind of nod. Then she bent down next to Joey. “And you must be Joseph. What a handsome boy.” June rubbed Joey’s newly buzzed head as if it were a bottle and a genie would pop out and grant her three wishes.
“Ouch,” he cried. Not like me faking it at Vinnie’s, but like June really rubbed his head too hard and it hurt.
“Sorry,” June said, not in a way as she meant it, but in a defensive way, the way I apologized when Dad forced me to.
Dad suddenly bellowed, “Let them eat cake!” He raised the cake box over his head. “How about we head into the kitchen and dig into this beauty.”
We followed Dad into the kitchen. I let June go ahead of me. “Ladies first,” I said. Man, was I ever a good ass kisser.
“George,” June put her gloved paw on Dad’s forearm as he placed the cake box on the kitchen counter, “Perhaps the boys should eat lunch before they get dessert?”
Dad looked like he’d stepped in dog shit, and if June hadn’t been there I would’ve told him so. I would’ve said, “Dad you look like you stepped in dog shit,” and he would’ve said “Hey hey, what did you say?” and then, “We don’t cuss on this bus.” But neither of us said a word.
“Daddy made finger sandwiches,” Joey jumped up and down. He’d just realized the joy of getting both feet off the ground at the same time and kangarooed around every chance he got. “We’re gonna eat fingers! Ew yuck, ew yuck!”
“Calm down, Joe-joe.” Dad said.
“Finger sandwiches,” June cooed, “How divine. Where are they?”
“In the fwidge,” Joey jumped once, then realized his mistake and repeated with both feet on the ground and in a whisper, “In the fwidge.”
“Good thinking to refrigerate in this heat, George” June fanned herself. “Perhaps we should also turn on the A/C? It’s a bit stuffy in here.”
“What’s A/C?” I asked.
“Air conditioning, Patrick,” Dad said.
My friend Keith, whose dad worked as a cameraman for Warner Brothers had air conditioning in his house. You walked in there and it was like being in a giant fwidge.
“We don’t have any air conditioning, Ma’am,” I said.
June sighed. “Oh well. I suppose I’ll make do without the air. And Patrick, you can call me June.”
June, June. Fly away on a balloon, I thought.
Then she linked her arm through Dad’s. “Or Junie, if you prefer.”
“Junie, Junie,” Joey started stomping again, “A big fat looney!”
I tried not to laugh, but I couldn’t help myself. I sounded like a hyena.
“Boys,” Dad raised his voice, “That’s enough!”
“Junie, Junie,” Joey was on a roll, “Your face is a moony.”
“Joseph! Stop, this instant!” Dad never yelled at Joey. And he never called him Joseph. You’re a real piece of work, you cute little jerk, was his usual response when Joe was being a doofus.
But Joey was right. June’s face was a moon. It was a white round, cold thing. It was like a frozen pie. Even without A/C.
June, June, I thought, get outta here soon.
***
But June didn’t get outta there soon. In fact, she stayed the whole darn day. We ate the sandwiches and then we each ate a measly sliver of her stupid dessert, which was the kind of dry, fruity cake grown-ups like, and kids only eat if there’s nothing better around, so really a measly silver was enough.
She ignored Joey after his loony, moony comments, but asked me three questions: What was my favorite subject at school, did I play any sports, and did I have a girlfriend. The answers to which were: I don’t like any subjects at school, I’m not good at sports but I’m really good at Checkers, and girls have cooties.
Dad showed her around the house, which didn’t take very long because our house is pretty puny. I noticed he only opened the door to his bedroom, they didn’t go in. They just stood in the doorway, Dad looking uncomfortable while June stroked his arm like he was a goddamn cat, like she wanted to dive in there and lay on the bed with him and smooch, or do the other gross stuff grownups do in bedrooms when they don’t sleep. Dad shut the door.
***
June gave Dad a big one right on the lips when she finally left right before dinnertime. Dad closed the door after she left and walked into the bathroom. I thought he was taking a piss, but he was in there for a long time, so then I figured it was a number two. Then it took a really long time, and I had to go myself so I just walked in there as usual, and found him sitting on top of the toilet seat with his hands covering his face.
No no no, I thought, not again. No Creature from the Black Lagoon, please. But there were no scary noises coming from Dad this time, just loud breathing. In, out, in, out. But he definitely wasn’t whistling any happy tunes.
Dad looked up at me like I was the Boogey Man. “Pat! You gave me a shock!”
“Sorry. Why are you sitting in here?”
“Just gathering my thoughts.”
“Penny for them?” I said, which is what he’d say to me when I was acting like a mopey-dope.
He just shrugged. No swurch me. No rhymes. His shrug was a defeated, tired thing. Movie monster sadness would’ve been better. His limp, weak gesture gave me the creeps. Actual shivers up my spine. Even though I was eight years old and not a wimpy five year old anymore, I was still in danger of falling down that motherless hole.
I patted his knee. “Later, gator,” I said, and then I left him sitting there, alone.
***
At least I got to wear a real grown-up tie, not a stupid clip on one at the wedding a year later. And no buzzcuts at Vinnie’s. My tie was purple to match the color of the frou-frou dress June’s dumb niece wore as we walked down the aisle together. And you gotta hand it to my idiot brother Joey, who dropped the wedding ring off the little purple cushion, right in the aisle and all the guests had to get down on their hands and knees to help find it.
We’re moving into the new house down in Covina today. Joey is happy because there’s a jungle gym in the backyard. And June is all get-up because of the A/C and the modern appliances in the puke colored kitchen. Dad smiles a lot and rhymes every now and then. But not like in the old days. So, is Dad happy? Swurch me.
I get my own room, so there’s that. Dad told me it would be okay if I wanted to keep the college photo of mom. I’m gonna put it on my nightstand and angle it just so, right next to my pillow where it belongs.
***
I’ll always remember how Dad made our favorite for dinner; spaghetti with ketchup that first time we met June. It would be the last time we ate it, because afterward June was there all the time and insisted we have real tomato sauce. But that final night we sat around the kitchen table the way we always did; me in my place, Joey in his high chair, Dad in his place. The folding chair we’d put out earlier for June was propped against the wall, stiff and closed. I got up and shoved it in the closet. Dad didn’t say anything, rhyming or otherwise. We slurped, letting bloody strands uncoil from the bowls into our mouths, ketchup collecting at the corners of our lips before licking our mouths clean. Joey tossed a few strands at me, or Dad, or at the floor. When we were done, I showed them how I’d perfected rubbing my belly and patting my head at the same time. Then we had a belching contest. Dad won.
Alice Kaltman is the author of the story collection STAGGERWING, and the novels WAVEHOUSE and THE TANTALIZING TALE OF GRACE MINNAUGH. Her new novel, DAWG TOWNE is forthcoming in June 2021 from word west. Her stories appear in numerous journals including Hobart, Lost Balloon, Joyland, and BULL: Men's Fiction, and in the anthologies THE PLEASURE YOU SUFFER, ON MONTAUK, and FECKLESS CUNT. Alice lives, writes, and surfs in Brooklyn and Montauk, NY.
(18) J. Bradley: Rebel, Rebel
My mother was so proud that I wanted to dye my hair a different color. We used the money my grandparents gave me for cutting my hair to buy the blue hair dye from Infinite Mushroom, Orlando’s then-premier headshop.
I sat outside, shirtless, as my mom massaged the blue hair dye into my scalp, brushing the dye down each strand of my hair. Don’t touch, she said, smiling. Once the dye dried, I walked inside and marveled at how my blue hair brought out my blue eyes, one of the only things I liked about myself.
The next morning, I woke up and showered. I put on my black denim shorts and a black Pulp Fiction t-shirt. I walked to the bus stop in the dark of the morning, as usual, and went to school.
I ignored the laughter, as usual. I was used to being made fun of walking like a duck, for picking my nose when I was nervous, for looking like Stewart from Beavis and Butthead. I ignored the laughter until someone said what’s up, Papa Smurf? I ran to the bathroom and stared at my light blue stained face and light blue stained cheeks and my light blue stained hands. My mother never warned me to not shower after dyeing my hair and I wondered whether this was another one of her lessons to teach me to take it like a man.
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