“Who Am I?” by Marilyn Sears Bourbon

Sara wakes after midnight. The moon is bright, the room lit in indigo and bone. The lacy curtains billow. On the breeze, the scent of salt, the waves’ ceaseless crash. Sara’s shoulders are sore to the touch. She smells of lotion. She lights a cigarette and, with lips pressed to the window screen, blows a smoky plume. Her parents had fought earlier—too much bourbon and too many cigarettes. Now another sound, a rhythm like the surf. Soft moans. Sara rises from her bed and lays a hand on the thin wall.

A conch shell rests atop the dresser. Sara lifts the shell from its wooden stand. The shell’s shape reminds her of her brother’s old football. She runs a finger along the bony ridges, wipes dust from the opening’s shellac-glistening tongue. Using two hands, she raises the shell to her ear.

Of course Sara does not hear the ocean. The low-frequency hiss is born from the fact that the shell acts as a closed-pipe resonator. Its wave-mimicking song is white noise, the blank slate upon which all recognizable sounds are etched. In a bit of Mobius logic, its gentle purr is also the washed-out resultant of all sounds, a tone which gravitates more than any other toward purity and which also contains almost every audible frequency.

Hot the next day, the air thick with haze and a fishy odor. Sara lies in the umbrella’s shade but soon grows restless. She is annoyed by the stink. Annoyed by the radio station the boys beside them play. She tries to focus on the sounds of waves and gulls, on the call of children’s voices. From behind her sunglasses, she considers her parents. There are all coping with memories, with silences and empty spaces. She goes for a walk. The seagulls hover, the shoreline thick with their calls and the too-close beating of their wings. There are no swimmers in the water, the surf overtaken by wave-nudged jellyfish, dozens, maybe hundreds of them. In the wet sand, a boy pokes one with a stick. The texture and thoughtless cruelty of the scene make Sara ill.

She lies back on her towel. Sand bristles the nook of her upper thigh. She pulls the elastic aside and brushes out the granules. Turning, she catches the boys with the horrible music looking her way. The boys smirk. One leans over and whispers into a friend’s ear. Sara rises and shakes out her towel, ensuring the boys are hit in the fallout. She repositions the towel on the other side of her parents and lets the sun beat upon her face.

Friction is the rub of this world. Friction wears on a body from without and within. The smoothest surfaces are rough at the microscopic level, imperfect despite their machined polish. Mu is the measure of the coefficient of friction. The higher the mu, the greater the frictional force. Mu is equal to the force applied divided by the force perpendicular. Both forces are measured in Newtons, which, upon calculation, cancel, leaving mu as that rare phenomenon of physics, a number unclaimed by a unit’s measure.

Last year, Sara’s science teacher introduced her class to mu in a lab involving sliding blocks. Calculating the frictional coefficient was simple enough, but despite her teacher’s words and diagrams, Sara struggled with the notion of mu. She found its lack of a proper unit vexing, the unshackled numbers threatening to flutter off like a summer butterfly, but today, on the sun-baked beach, she feels a previously unappreciated force all around her—in her mother’s crinkling page turns, in the boys’ music and banter, in the breeze that stinks of rot and death. Here, perhaps, lies the crux of her consciousness, the most telling confirmation she exists registered in the rub between herself and the world.

That night, they go to the boardwalk funhouse. There is always a hitch at times like these, the memory of her brother, dead these eight months. A car accident, a night of bad decisions. Gone. The funhouse would be his kind of thing. Spooky, silly, stupid. Sara is not the type to scream—yet she does, her hands clutching her father’s arm when a knife-wielding woman bursts through a curtain.

They enter a room of mirrors. A dozen reflections surround her, fragmented views, distortions fat and thin. Sara grows disoriented. She reaches for her father, but she is fooled, her hand grasping air. “Daddy?” she calls.

In physics, /images are divided into the real and the virtual. A real image’s rays converge at a focal point, which in turn can be observed on a screen or sheet of paper. A virtual image does not exist in these terms; rather, it is a trick of the eye and the properties of light, the plaything of magicians and the subterfuge-filled origin of the phrase “done with mirrors.”

Upon exiting the funhouse, Sara thinks again of her brother. Recently she’s been distressed by his fading image, another abandonment, leaving her nothing more than memories and photographs, /images both real and not.

Sara sits atop the sloping shoreline. The late-day sun strikes her back, her shadow stabbing far into the foaming surf. Nearby, a little boy dips a bucket into the lapping waves and empties the water over his sister’s feet. A bigger wave rolls in. The boy tumbles but the girl pulls him from the water. The children yell and laugh. Seagulls hover on the breeze. The lifeguards are gone, and most of the day’s crowd has left. The light is warm and yellow and rich.

A complex wave is formed by two frequencies separated by more than 7Hz. The world is awash in dissonance, two waves that mesh in an unpleasing manner. But if the resultant sound is pleasant, consonance is achieved and a chord is formed. Cultural and experiential influences surely affect the judgment of consonance and dissonance. The symphonies of John Cage and other avant-garde composers raise the question of whether our values of consonance can be altered by experience. Traditional music of the Far East, with its pentatonic scales and lack of quantitative rhythms, often registers as odd, even unpleasant, to the Western ear. Thus, unlike most of the hard-set rules of physics, the values of consonance and dissonance appear to be flexible and open to interpretation.

Sara listens to the children. What a deceptively simple magic, their voices able take the surf’s crumble, the caw of gulls, and elevate them into chords. Sara closes her eyes. She hears her brother’s voice and hers, arguing, laughing, teasing. In this echo, her brother lives. She will keep this chord in her heart.

Curtis Smith’s stories and essays have appeared in over seventy literary journals and have been cited by The Best American Short Stories, The Best American Mystery Stories, and The Best American Spiritual Writing. Press 53 published two recent story collections Bad Monkey and The Species Crown. Casperian Books published the novels Sound + Noise and Truth or Something Like It. Sunnyoutside Press recently released his latest book, Witness, an essay collection.

Read our feature of Curt (including the author’s own words about his work) here.

“Survivor” by Marilyn Sears Bourbon

There were three women. They all had dry skin, good nails, an ability to gossip and husbands who didn’t know what to say. Marge and Angela wore curlers at night and hair lacquer during the day. They both said that Sabrina should dye her hair a chestnut colour and put on a bit more make-up. Marge was the mother of Angela and Angela was the mother of Sabrina.

Marge

I was twenty two; it was 1938, just before the war. It was a smashing time for dancing; I wanted to be Ginger Rogers. I didn’t know much about men, only what I’d learnt from Joan, my brother’s wife. She said marriage wasn’t all it was cracked up to be. The wedding dress was as good as it got, it was all downhill after that. Especially once the baby arrived. Boiling nappies up in a large saucepan was what you had to be getting on with, oh and making the hubby’s bread and butter pudding. But we had a nice house, better than most, a proper front garden with a row of standard roses that flowered yellow and red in the summer. I’d been married just over a year the first time. I’d missed a couple of months – I guessed one must be on the way. I was upstairs brushing my teeth when I felt it. Sharp as anything it was. I shouted for Harold, Mrs Bell next door must have heard me.

‘I’m bleedin’ to death,’ I said, as he came up the stairs two at a time.

I grabbed his arm and squeezed so tight it left marks on his skin.

‘You better get me an ambulance fast, I’ve not got much time left,’ I was bent over with the toothbrush still in my hand.

‘Get a grip, Marge. You’re gonna be alright.’

He left me on the stairs and ran down the road to phone for an ambulance. There was only one phone in the street. I bet there would be a queue, being it was Sunday morning. I couldn’t get to that hospital fast enough. Once I was there I wished I was back at home.

The doctor was a bit curt. He stood looking down, with the metal bed guard between us. Acted like he’d catch something if he got too close.

‘You’re probably losing your baby Mrs Dearing. Only twelve weeks so it won’t be too bad. A few days in bed should sort it out one way or the other.’

‘Will it hurt Doctor?’ I wondered what he was like with his wife.

My mam always said having a baby was the worst pain ever. She’d put me off sex telling me that. Even when I married Harold I was a bit reluctant. It took a good year before I got up the courage. Harold was quite patient but even he’d had enough. Everyone kept asking if we’d had any luck. If a baby wasn’t on the way within a year they thought you were having troubles.

‘It’ll hurt a bit, Mrs Dearing, but you’ll be right as rain in a week or two.’ He wrote something on his clip board, nodded at Harold and then went off in a hurry. I lay on the bed and looked at the cracks on the ceiling and took deep breaths as the pains came and went. I felt like I was on a rough sea without any travel sickness pills.

The doctor didn’t tell me I’d bleed for a month, not see the curse until January and that I’d be crying into the washing. He missed out the bit about it hurting like hell too. I didn’t tell anyone about it, not even my sister Nelly.

Angela arrived in the end, after another few goes. She was the bonniest lass, golden curls with blue eyes. I felt like I was right back home looking at her. We’d sit together and imagine we were up in the mountains looking over the lochs. Naughty at times mind, but we had a laugh. I just had the one girl. It never worked out again; though I did my best to try. On the mantel piece I’ve got a picture of the three of us on the beach down at Southend. I’ve got my hair all long and curly, nice dress too, stripes always looked good on me. Just the three of us.

Angela

My mother made such a fuss about those sorts of things. She spent all my teens lying down. I was listening to The Beatles in my room and she was listening to The Stones in hers.

‘Where’s Mum?’ I’d ask Dad when I got in from school.

‘She’s got one of her heads,’ he’d shout from the kitchen, where he’d be trying to cook kidneys in tomato sauce. Smelt like someone’s intestines.

She didn’t tell me much and definitely not the facts of life. I found most of it out from books, especially Lady Chatterley’s Lover, everyone got that one. I used to work in a boutique along Oxford Street, as a window-dresser. We had all sorts in our shop, so there wasn’t much I didn’t know when I met Don. Still no one told me you could get pregnant and then it could all go wrong. I knew my great-grandmother had died in childbirth but that was a long time ago – before the NHS.

I was in there for about two months, Bushy Maternity Hospital. It was a small hospital, just forty beds. I’d wake up at six to the smell of porridge and the sound of the nurses pushing round their trolleys. A whole row of us not allowed to move. We woke up in the morning and the first thing we’d do was put on our make-up. I liked to look nice for Don when he came in. Foundation, black eyeliner and lipstick, of course. We’d wait for the doctor to come round. The young nurses would sit on the edge of the bed and watch. They said I was just like Twiggy, thick eyeliner sweeping upwards.

‘I don’t want my ward smelling like the perfume counter at Selfridges,’ the staff nurse would moan, pulling her starched collar up around her loose neck.

We’d all had a few misses and they preferred to keep an eye on us for the last bit. Don visited in the evenings, escaped from Mum who seemed to be delivering a constant stream of steak and kidney pies; even though it was summer and too hot to eat anything but a chicken salad.

I spent most of the time crocheting lurex gloves. The feel of the wool on the hook, calmed me. I’d rather count stitches than weeks.

‘I reckon you’re carrying a girl, you’re carrying low,’ said Eileen, in the bed opposite.

‘I’d like three boys – Don doesn’t mind.’

‘Sounds like hard work.’

‘I’d call them Anthony, David and Michael.’

I had a girl and I called her Sabrina after a French woman that used to come in our shop. The last time I tried I was in my forties. I got to about ten weeks. I was out shopping with Don’s mum and Aunt Lil. We’d just been in Debenhams for a coffee and cake. I felt it start. I didn’t tell them. I left them all having their tea and rushed to the ladies. It was everywhere, I almost fainted it was so hot in there. No windows, just bright red lino and white tiles to look at. So that was it, it wasn’t fair on Sabrina to keep trying, she was getting older. She wouldn’t have wanted a baby in the house.

Sabrina

The waiting room was full of women, large and cheerful, stroking bumps of various sizes. You’d think they would separate us out. There were posters on the wall showing breast-feeding mothers and immunisation dates. A video was playing; you could choose a ‘normal’ birth or one in a giant pool with an inflatable ball. On the table in front of me was a pile of magazines all called ‘Mother and Baby’. Nick put his bag on top, to cover them up.

‘Miscarriages are very common, Mrs Wilson. One in three embryos are lost before twelve weeks. Most women even after three miscarriages are very likely to take home a healthy baby.’

‘My Mum and Nan had one girl each and at least sixteen miscarriages between them.’

The consultant paused and wrote it down in my nice new set of notes.

‘We don’t usually run any tests until a woman has had three miscarriages but……’.

“Well, I better get on with it then.”

I fitted three in within the year. Had lots of tests and eventually got to take aspirin every day until 36 weeks. This one was going to stick.

It was two am on the 29^th January 2003, they said heavy snow was due. But there was no snow yet and in the room it was so hot that there was a fan on to thin the air. The bed was high enough that I could watch the night bus taking nurses home to their beds.

I hadn’t expected it to be like this. I couldn’t feel my legs. I’d left them behind hours ago. I was so relieved when the epidural delivered a numbness that meant I could actually concentrate on breathing. It seemed impossible that when I looked down something small and new lay there. I had heard a midwife tell Nick that this helps the bonding process. All those magazines I’d been reading talked about those marvelous first few moments with your baby. All I could think of was numbness, stitches and the fact that my face looked like Tyson had done a good job. I didn’t realise that I’d need any help bonding. Her eyes were so tightly shut, so determined not to let in the light. I couldn’t recognise anyone in that face, not yet. I kept seeing ribbons floating above my head. They were beautiful, multicoloured shimmering slips. They were so far up I couldn’t reach them. Nick stroked my bare arm, talking to me about how I needed to feed the baby.

The room was heaving in its usual way. Women queuing with urine sample bottles in front of the tank of fish. Toddlers being sick in the play area, fathers trying not to look at the woman whose bump was so large, she could hardly fit in a chair. They were playing Take That on the radio.

‘I’m back again.’

‘Everyone comes back. They say they won’t but a few years later I get to see them all over again. Early scans, tests, aspirin, heparin injections, women will do it all. Over and over.’

‘Shall we take some blood then?’ I stuck my arm out willingly. That needle was like sucking treacle from a spoon.

‘I can’t imagine what it’s like to be a sister. I can’t imagine what it will be like for my daughter to be one.’

‘What do you think it’ll be like?’

‘I think it will be like having a sequined shawl when your shoulders are cold.’ She laughed at me, I bet she had lots of siblings.

‘You’re in for a shock then, it’s more like wearing a coat with holes in it.’

‘Shall we check for a heart beat at seven weeks?’

There were two sisters one curly and blonde, the other straight and dark. As they grew up they dressed up in scarves, hats and rows of plastic beads. Amber and Grace argued about who should plant the sunflower seeds in the vegetable patch. Their mother told them stories about girls who got locked up in towers and women who fell asleep for a hundred years. She made sure that when they crossed the road they held hands so tightly there would be no chance of them letting go.

Simone Davy has had her work published in What the Dickens? Magazine and her story Cockle Shells is to be published in the anthology ‘You, Me and a Bit of We,’ Chuffed Buff Books. She aims to create imaginative fiction that explores ordinary life events. She is currently working on a novel set in 1930s Epsom, England, where she lives with her family. As well as writing, she also works as a Social Science tutor with the Open University. You can read her blog here.

Read an interview with Simone here.

“Four Red Birds” by Marilyn Sears Bourbon

Roshani is going to be an oceanographer. Her mother tries to make sense of this career choice by telling relatives her daughter is going to college to be a scientist, and oh, look at the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico and how useful scientists are in that situation. It’s impressive enough that she managed to raise a child in war-torn Nepal – but to bring her to America and put her through college? That deserves some sort of Nobel Prize.

For the most part, Roshani lets her mother brag when the mood strikes because it doesn’t happen often. Usually she’s agonizing over how Roshani recently dyed her pitch-black hair with the slightest hue of red, or making wary comments about Roshani becoming “just another cushy, entitled American.” When they came to the US a few years ago, a school counselor recommended Roshani take anti-depressants for Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, and of course, when her mother saw the prescription in the medicine cabinet, she flared into laughter. “Are you serious? You don’t need drugs. These Americans just like to diagnose things.” Roshani watched as she flushed them down the toilet.

At the same time, her mother seems to have left their past in Nepal. She discourages talking about the day at the market when they saw those dead men, or the long bouts of depression her mother has suddenly shown since Roshani’s father left six months ago. Her black hair has grown unkempt, her body sagging like a frayed tapestry, her oval face—which once resembled Roshani’s—has thinned. The closest she ever came to explaining her overwhelming lethargy was, “Your father, he was usually the one I talked to.” Which leaves Roshani in some position of being the new source of comfort, a job she’s not even sure how to do for herself.

After her mother curls into bed tonight, Roshani slips into her tightest jeans and a shirt that shows just enough cleavage. She pokes her head in her mother’s doorway to wave goodbye and sees her swallowed by the striped comforter, her tulip eyes staring at the ceiling fan. She secretly wants her mother to order her to cover up some of that skin – anything that will indicate she’s seeing the world in front of her.

“I just have a little headache,” she says instead, but Roshani knows it’s something fiercer, more insidious, eating away at her. She’s too afraid to offer her company because she knows she’ll likely take her up on that offer.

“Sleep should help,” she offers. To her, sleep is the act of hushing all thoughts. She and her mother could dangle in nothingness like specks near the deepest ocean shelf. There, sunlight won’t penetrate and life forms numbly float, hoping to crash into an ally or a predator, anything that reminds them that they’re not alone down there.

Outside, Roshani’s date-of-the-week has been patiently waiting to take her to the other side of the Bronx where a small-time street race is happening. She slinks through the heavy summer night humidity to his Dodge Charger, and a burst of air conditioning hits her when she opens the door.

“Hey, Marcus,” she says. He looks slightly different than she remembers from when she gave him her number – more confident, perhaps. His face is strong, with a firm jaw and straight teeth. His eyes are a dark shade of brown, verging on black, and his hair is just long enough for her to let her fingers disappear into it. He’s listening to heavy Caribbean rap, the kind she likes to hear in clubs because the syncopated beat gets everyone moving as one glimmering mass, as if they’re all part of one big flock of birds.

“Damn, about time,” he says. His teasing has a biting undercurrent of impatience. “You ready now?”

“If you’re so tired of waiting, why are you talking instead of moving?” she returns with a smile, slightly taken aback by how unfiltered his tone is. She fingers the side of her seatbelt for a second then opts to leave it off. Speeding without it feels like freedom.

Marcus shrugs away her joke and pulls the car from the curb. Roshani takes a moment to convince herself she doesn’t like guys with a sense of humor anyway, that his impatience indicates a measure of depth and complexity. They met only a week ago at a mutual friend’s party, and they had exchanged looks – then a dance – then a kiss – then phone numbers. Despite their quick connection that night, the excitement of finally being alone together feels stale.

She tries to warm things up. “Are we stopping to grab some drinks?”

“Na, don’t have time,” he says, the irritation blatant this time. He then throws a smile in her direction as if to salvage the mood. “But after?”

“Sure.” She relaxes into the fat leather of the passenger seat. Her arms are folded against the blasting vents, her shirt too small to offer much warmth.

Marcus reaches to the stereo and turns the volume knob down. “So what do you want to talk about?”

The candid question is endearing, in a way. Roshani catches herself stroking the side of her cheek to keep from giggling uncomfortably, her fingers grazing the raised skin of a two-inch scar. She wants to say the right thing. Something interesting but not too personal. Something that will make him remember her when this night is over. Her mind scrambles desperately but comes back with nothing.

“I’ll talk about anything,” she replies, though this isn’t completely true. Thought after thought is discarded: her mother, following the hypnotizing circles of the ceiling fan. Her father, off with another woman, probably someone with soft curves and contagious laughter. Her old friends, still in Nepal, who have fallen completely out of touch.

She could talk about Nepal. About how she used to hide under her covers at night when the rebels spat out bullets or how her mother used to drive her to the market when curfew was lifted for a couple hours each day. One day her mother told Roshani to cover her eyes at the military checkpoint in the road, but she didn’t listen. Roshani opened her eyes too wide and saw men preparing to torch bodies with bloody pinholes punched through, the skin drained to the faded color of shale. It smelled like spoiled lamb and ash, and the hot acid of vomit had burned her throat while she tried to swallow it back down.

“Do you party a lot?” Marcus asks this halfheartedly.

Her mind snaps back to the cold car, Marcus’s indifferent silence. She wonders why his mood is so heavy, if it was something she said. “Once in a while. Do you?”

“Same.”

She fidgets with her hands, tries to find something to keep the silence from becoming too noticeable. Nothing. When she thinks of partying, she’s only brought back to a time before she came to America five years ago. Lately, as she fills out college applications and eats silent dinners with her mother, those are the only memories that matter. She thinks of how when she was twelve in Nepal, she and her neighborhood friends used to line up on a break wall and sip bottles of stolen malt liquor. They’d play balance games: try to walk the narrow strip of crumbling concrete without falling off. She’s not sure why she suddenly recognizes this memory with worry. They were only twelve years old; no one even suspected that alcohol would be on their breaths. Even though those moments already passed without injury, she fears that the children in those memories will unexpectedly stumble and fall off the wall, break the growing bones in their bodies, disfigure themselves.

Marcus and Roshani don’t speak until they get to the barricaded street, where several cars are lined up, their drivers clustering behind them. Marcus pulls up to a starting line of sorts and gets out. The goosebumps on Roshani’s body melt off when she exits the car, and she’s reminded that it’s summer.

Marcus tells her to “hang on” while he steps over to his friends. She leans against his car door as they greet each other, slap bets into firm palms, check out one guy’s new rims. They audibly tease him about being late – to which Marcus clicks his tongue apologetically, jerks his head in Roshani’s direction, and the other guys perceptively go, “Ohh.” It’s only a few minutes before he gets back, but by then, she has thought of something to say.

“How often do you race?”

“Every other week about,” he says.

She smiles. “Then I’m safe with you,” she says lightly.

“Safe?”

His look makes her feel like she’s chock-full of naïveté. She’s bothered for only a passing moment, and then she realizes she’d rather him think that than have her explain why she’s not naïve.

“The cops could bust this at any moment, and you call it safe?”

She shrugs casually and looks down at her shirt as she straightens the neckline. Marcus doesn’t watch; he goes to the other side of the Dodge and gets in to start it. His car purrs like a jungle cat, and Roshani gets in timidly.

She finds the courage to ask, “Something wrong?”

He throws her a look that seems to laugh at her. “I’m just focused on the race. You not enjoying yourself?”

“No, I’m good,” she says. “This is cool.”

Their surroundings are shaken by revving engines. Spectators are sprinkling the sidewalks. Some glance around nervously for flashing police lights, while others quietly study the drivers. Roshani feels misplaced in the passenger seat, as if she’s not supposed to be there. But isn’t this feeling familiar? Hasn’t she felt this way since leaving Nepal? No one ever told her where to be – she just ended up somewhere far away, where the only way to avoid danger is to keep moving, keep occupying herself. She doesn’t want to become like her mother, counting ceiling fan rotations. She wants Marcus to like her. She always wants her dates to like her, but something usually seems to be amiss. She’s narrowed the explanation down to this: she either shows too little or too much of herself.

Marcus is focusing on the road and moving his hands along the steering wheel as if rehearsing every turn. Roshani wonders why he brought her here. To impress her? To see how she’d react to this setting?

Someone waves a flag, Marcus punches the gas, and the car lurches forward. The streets have been scouted out and barricaded, and the four cars take full reign of the four open lanes. Their noses line up for a while, then one after another pulls ahead or drops behind.

Roshani can’t take her eyes off the speed limit. 70…75…80…85…90… The borough is blurring along East Fordham Road: away with abandoned apartment complexes, dimly-lit tattoo parlors, auto repair shops with faded signs. The street lights strobe in and out of the windows; the sheer force of velocity presses her back, wills her to be calm. She thinks of nothing but movement.

In a way, she expects the race to take her somewhere – a beautiful destination, perhaps. Something more than a finish line. But they pass another flag several minutes later, and it’s over. They come in third. Marcus slaps the dashboard but doesn’t say anything. He slows the car, and they’re soon like any other driver on the road. They have to clear out of the scene fast, settle their bets in a parking lot ten blocks away. Again, Roshani waits in the car as things are worked out between the racers.

When the lot clears, Marcus’s mood has changed. He turns to Roshani with new interest, a sudden focus. She can smell the ginger in his cologne. Something inside tells her this is the moment he’s ready to pretend he is interested in what she has to say. She is ready to let him.

“You smoke?” Marcus asks.

“Sometimes.”

Marcus immediately produces a small plastic film case containing weed and a square piece of paper. He rolls the joint like an expert. They light up, and her thoughts ping pong between fast and slow.

She finds herself leaning toward the windshield and looking up at the sky. In Nepal, the stars would stick out like a billion pin pricks in large, sweeping clusters. The Bronx is different. Everything is clouded, smogged-up, bloated with light so that she often forgets there are stars at all.

“What are you thinking about?” Marcus asks, studying her thin face, her wide-set eyes. As she avoids his gaze, she catches the sight of a stray cat creeping from house to house.

For a second, she lets herself sink into another memory of Nepal, of being five years old and watching her mom crack the neck of a chicken. She helped her pluck the feathers in fistfuls. She never imagined being here, with chickens already dead and plucked and stacked in grocery store refrigerators.

Marcus realizes she is clamming up, and he urges kindly, though in a somewhat jocular way, “You can tell me.”

Maybe it’s the weed, but she wants to trust him. She wants to tell him about her future in oceanography, about how she’s finally found something she understands. It comforts her about death, about how they are all just floating crustaceans suspended in slate-black depths of the ocean, and dying is like knocking into an anglerfish’s bioluminescent lantern. There is a magnificent wash of relief at finding a lambent orb of light, the type of relief that devastates the heart with too much happiness. Everyone feels this right before the giant jaws clamp over them, back into darkness, and truth is, in the scheme of things, barely anyone will notice they are gone.

Instead of saying this, she surprises herself. “Just this weird memory, something back in Nepal, where I’m from.”

“Tell me,” he says, though she feels he wouldn’t care either way.

Still, it’s been so long since she’s talked about Nepal with anyone. Her mother treats those memories like garage clutter she prefers to neither examine nor throw out. “I’m just remembering slaughtering a chicken,” she says, almost as if she’s confessing it.

Marcus scrunches his nose. “Why?”

Immediately, she’s angry she said this. She tries to shrug it off, but she doesn’t want to leave without an explanation. “Strange, right?” she tries to laugh, but it sounds unnatural. “I guess I’m just trying to find something beautiful in things.”

“There are plenty of beautiful things about you,” he says, not understanding. He smiles as if to charm her. “You have the prettiest smile I’ve seen in a long time.”

My smile? she wonders. The one with the two-inch scar curling up the side, the one she got from a piece of shrapnel in a bomb blast?

Marcus is just twisting words, but still she gives him credit for being there with her. She knows what he actually wants, so she gives it to him. She lets her dimples show and runs her hand up his thigh to his pants’ zipper, and he smiles back. She goes down on him with her eyes open, but she does not see, like sleepwalking. Being noticed in this moment is the farthest from being alone that she can be; it is the closest to healing she can imagine. Every time he sighs, he acknowledges her, that she’s giving him something perfect in this moment. She’s a frigid, floating crustacean, grasping for something warm to hold onto in metallic water.

When he finishes, Marcus offers to take her home. After giving him directions, she turns up the stereo to make the silence less noticeable. The car rips recklessly through the Bronx, hitting the staccato of potholes, speeding up for yellow lights. This night has given them all it has to offer; in that, she senses an undercurrent of urgency to end it.

When they pull up to her house, Marcus says, “See you around.”

“Yea,” she says, knowing the noncommittal insinuation of that statement.

When she gets inside, she goes to the sink and washes out her mouth with cold water. She wonders if her mother is still in bed. She goes to her to see if her headache has gone away or if she needs ibuprofen.

Her mother is curled up but not sleeping, her arms wrapping around her body to keep the world out or her soul in. The room has the deadweight heaviness of fatigue but the restless feeling of insomnia. Roshani forgets what she came to ask her and just stands in the doorway, adjacent to the dimmed lamp and the tissue-littered nightstand.

Her eyes are open, but she is not seeing. Roshani can tell she is still thinking, still churning her marriage over exhaustively like turning over couch cushions to find missing keys. Nothing was missing from you, she wants to say.

“Roshani.” Her voice is achy from crying. “What is this loneliness?”

The feeling she gets is bare-boned, as if something has been slowly scraping her raw for days, months, years. The man who helped raise her is gone, but it is worse for her mother. The man she loves, the man who held her during the hardest times, has left.

Roshani crawls onto the bed and lies down next to her, cradling her back into her chest like a shell. Her mother’s sobs crescendo, and Roshani squeezes her tighter to let her know she is there to take care of her, still love her. And together, they float into sleep.

Katherine Russell is a freelance writer and editor residing in Buffalo, NY. She’s currently working on finding an agent and publisher for her novel, Without Shame, which looks at the interactions between an American English teacher and pre-independent Bangladesh. She recently came out with a poetry chapbook called Shapes of Water, which chronicles “coming of age” with cystic fibrosis, a genetic lung disease. She maintains a blog for cystic fibrosis patients at www.lifewitheverybreath.com.

Read our interview with Katherine here.