Cattle Haul

It’s easier driving through the country, especially when you doing a cattle haul. Two lanes on one side and two lanes on the other. Switch lanes and pass. At night, like now, the signs sharp and clear. The trees like waves at the side of the road, all black and blue, coming in and going back out like a tide. Ain’t no lights to distract me, to crowd up around me. Just taillights, red lights, like ants, leading me in a line westward.

Part of me want to stop. Part of me want to pull over on the side of the road and turn the rig off and start walking back to where I come from; want to get out the rig and leave it all here in the dark. But I press the gas hard and daydream about flying past the flatlands, speeding to dry, parched Texas, and through the desert to Phoenix to drop these cattle off, but they got weigh stations and state troopers, and cars and rigs like bad potholes: they waiting just to slow you down and fuck you up. I see a deer by the side of the road, two of them, night-feeding by the pines. They don’t even flinch when I pass by.

Posted on May 14, 2008 | Fiction / Issue 5 | Permalink

Off the Page and onto the Sidewalk

Ten p.m. in Shimokitazawa, a neighborhood of circuitous alleyways ten minutes or so west of central Tokyo by train. Think Long Island City or Williamsburg in Brooklyn, early nineties. Three separate bands busk on street corners at the bottom of a hill. Above them loom a giant McDonald’s and several closet-sized ramen shops. Three cops appear, batons in hands, nodding sternly, and the bands crumple their gear into canvas sacks and disappear. A few minutes later, one of the bands, a hyper-speed blues trio, reappears and plays two more numbers before applauding passers by. Then they fold it all up again.

Just past 10:30 Rikimaru Toho bounds down the station stairs with plastic bags in both hands and a plastic washbasin under one arm. Toho is a professional manga reader. He has been out here every Saturday night since five years ago, when he moved to the city from the seaside village of Chigasaki. On Sunday afternoons, he’s at nearby Inokashira Park, only a few stations away.

Posted on February 12, 2008 | If You See Something, Say Something / Issue 5 | Permalink

I Don't Burn

Dear Darkness--consider this
my last attempt

to reach you. My previous
few missives

having boomeranged back
unread, postmarks blurred

by the gloved hands
that tried carrying

them to your door.
Or, torn

by the machines.
I wish

you could see the water
here, so clear

you can see the bottom--
though that's nothing

new for me. All afternoon
I let sun seep

my skin, steep me
like strong tea.

Despair,
if you've moved

I wish you would
send word

or ring.
How I would sing

like a kettle to keep you.

Posted on January 24, 2008 | Issue 5 / Poetry | Permalink

At-Talifoon

Just after the first Gulf War, I moved to Jeddah with my husband. I didn’t realize at the time that I hadn’t married Essam, I had married his mother and the women of his family. The minute I arrived, they became my world.

During the day, there were six of us: my mother-in-law, Um-Essam; her two youngest daughters, Arij and Johara; a daughter-in-law, Hasanat; and me with my infant daughter, Yasmina. They had never lived with an American before, and they regarded me like an ugly old armchair that was too big to stuff out the window. (For the virtuous, home-bound woman, the window was the only way to dump trash.)

Posted on January 22, 2008 | If You See Something, Say Something / Issue 5 | Permalink

Shark Means Knife

The story goes that as a child my mother finished a book every day. I have tried to imagine her then, but the best I do is a blurry glimpse of a girl walking among a vast and towering library of the things she's read, fingers dragging along the spines on the lower shelves.

Somehow, among all the many volumes, Slaughterhouse-Five persisted as her guidebook. In seventh grade, it became mine too. We took its signature phrase so it goes to be our own, invoking it at every tragedy major and minor. We went to it as others might the bible. It said there was no reason behind anything and we'd be better off not seeking any. We liked that.

Posted on January 22, 2008 | If You See Something, Say Something / Issue 5 | Permalink

The Rat Ship

The North Pole lies beneath perpetual ice. It can be reached only on snowshoes, by dogsled expeditions, if at all. In summer, however, the broad expanse of ice is crisscrossed by fissures and crevasses that have emerged from the melting ice sheet under the weak rays of the sun. Yet in winter, when these breaks in the ice are frozen over, the rigors of the weather are too great. For four months, night is total. One must therefore make use of the short summer.

To best reach the pole by water, daring explorers had occasionally entrusted their lives to an enormous ice floe! But they did not find this method a happy one. For they moved northward on the ice floe (it was vast), the floe drifted southward, and all was in vain. But in those years, at the end of the nineteenth century, a world-renowned arctic explorer (it was not my father) came as close to that coveted piece of cold ground as was possible given the technical means of the time, that is, without the use of radiotelegraphic devices and without airplanes or airships. His method was the same as my father’s; here, as in much else, there was only one practical way. For him it succeeded. Not for my father. Was the other more astute? Perhaps not. He merely had fewer rats on board.

Posted on January 17, 2008 | Fiction / Issue 5 | Permalink

Secessionville

There is a tiny Southerner inside me. Whenever I try to sleep she sets to work kicking the soft sides of my stomach. At my in-laws’ house in North Carolina, I toss with her, hearing again what my husband’s father asked at supper, “Are you sure the sonogram was right?” He’s kept hope alive that my baby might be a boy, someone to carry on his family name. I thought he was kidding and I was wrong.

Posted on January 17, 2008 | Essays / Issue 5 | Permalink

Morphology of the Hit

We begin with the first function.

I. One of the Members Absents Himself from Home. (Definition: absentation.)

I didn't exactly leave home for Nicaragua. I'd been leaving home for years, felt like, living in Boston, Iowa, Manhattan. Nicaragua was just the furthest I'd gone.

Near a city called Granada I taught Spanish to kids who knew their language better than I ever would. I worked in a school with two concrete classrooms sometimes invaded by goats or stray dogs. The dogs were skinny. Some of the kids were too, though they were always buying treats from an old woman who sold bags of old potato chips and bright pink cookies from huge straw baskets. She sat in the shadows under their rusty swings.

I liked the kids. They touched me--literally my arms, legs, my whole body--more than anyone else I'd known. I knew their families by sight and sometimes by name. Many of their mothers sold chewing gum and cashews in the parque central next to the bus station. Their fathers and brothers called out "Guapa chica!" every time I passed. I should have been offended. I wasn't.

Posted on January 8, 2008 | Essays / Issue 5 | Permalink

The Old Man

The two women appeared in Conrad's office late one afternoon in March. Olga, the mother, had rouged cheeks wrinkled like walnut shells and wore several rings on her gnarled fingers. The daughter was blonde, with a flat, handsome face and a full figure that she carried with confidence. According to her résumé she was thirty-eight years old. Her name was Lydia Krasnova.

The two had come from the former Czechoslovakia, where they had worked in a flower-growing cooperative until the fall of communism. After making their way to the States, they had settled in Albany, opening a flower stand near the Rensselaer train station with the help of a loan from an émigré business fund. From there they had scoured the area for a plot of land where they could start their own growing business. They had found a two-acre lot a few miles outside the city. There was a house on the property, which they had moved into, and a dilapidated cottage that they rented out. Now they were looking for some capital to start building the greenhouses.

Posted on January 8, 2008 | Fiction / Issue 5 | Permalink

The Revenge of the Angry Black Artist

Years ago, when I was a Disney Screenwriting Fellow (a program that evolved out of the need for Disney never again to be dead last in employing women and writers of color, probably more out of corporate embarrassment than enlightened self interest), I had the thankless task, they didn't even own the rights, of adapting Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man.

From where I'm from, you need to know when a game is getting run on you. Disney, though it seems pretty naive of me at the time to have been surprised, was white as toast, and I sensed from day one that all things being equal, I was in the wrong neighborhood, the wrong side of town.

Posted on January 8, 2008 | If You See Something, Say Something / Issue 5 | Permalink