by Brian Turner
WINTER SOLSTICE
Bich Minh Nguyen
In my family, people didn’t kiss. My parents never kissed my siblings and me good night. They didn’t kiss each other in front of us. If a couple started kissing on a TV show, they changed the channel. There was certainly none of that kissing on the cheek as a greeting. We didn’t even hug.
This was the 1980s in Michigan and we were Vietnamese refugees. We were always trying to figure out white Americans and how we were supposed to behave. Except my grandmother Noi. She didn’t worry about things like that. She had raised four children on her own and uprooted her life twice, from Hanoi to Saigon and then to the United States. I knew her as the matriarch, the one who could not be messed with when it came to cooking, knitting, orchid-growing, or just being. She was a calm, no-nonsense figure, and I was hardly ever happier than when we were eating ramen together and watching her favorite American soap operas.
I never kissed my grandmother Noi. She never kissed me. Maybe it was an Asian thing; maybe it was our family. I knew she loved me and she knew I loved her, yet we never said it. Not in any language. Instead we ate fruit and laughed at sitcoms and wondered who would marry whom on Santa Barbara. At night I would jokingly ask her if it was okay to go to sleep and she would say yes, it’s okay.
Noi died in 2007, on the winter solstice. I drove from Chicago, where I was living then, to Grand Rapids, Michigan, to the hospital where she had been taken after she collapsed. An aortic dissection, it would turn out. It was the only time she had ever been admitted to a hospital, and by then she was already dead.
It snowed hard the next couple of days. My grandmother’s body, by Buddhist tradition, lay in an open coffin in my parents’ house. Guests came by to pay their respects and we wore white cloths around our heads. The night before we drove her body to the crematory, I kept wanting to see her one more time. She was dressed in a silver ao dai, one that she had made herself, and her silver hair was in its usual bun. She was eighty-seven years old. The last time I had seen her alive, she had stood on her tiptoes to water a hanging plant in her living room. Now her body would become ash, though it was already something or somewhere or someone else, unknowable.
How many nights, growing up, had I walked around sleeplessly only to find that my grandmother was also awake, waiting for me?
I touched her wrist. I kissed my grandmother Noi. Her forehead, her cheek. I do not mean to say that it was necessary. It wasn’t. We were not ones to say I love you. Our language never needed that. And I have never written this, or told anyone this, until now. The kiss, I knew even then, was more for me than for her. She would have understood that. She would have understood all of this.
SKEERY THE BLUE
Christian Kiefer
My father’s name was Colgate, a name which, like my own and that of my brother, meant something in the forgotten world before this one but which, now, today, is but a name like any other. I had lost my mother when I was young, so my father had been, in effect, both of my parents in one. It was he who conferenced with my teachers, he who patched me up when I was hurt, he who fed and clothed me, and he, too, who suffered my anger and scorn when things did not go my way. So when he died abruptly soon after my fifteenth birthday, I felt as if my whole world—everything I knew or expected or counted on—had vanished into black empty space. In the days to follow, I simply could not believe that he was gone, still turning toward his absence when I found an interesting snippet of text, an equation worth discussing, a piece of vocabulary from some language he had mastered but I was just learning. But that chair, the chair in which he sat in the evenings, watching the screens and sipping cognac, was empty and would always be empty no matter how many times I turned to its soft, padded surfaces.
My brother Victrola and I were separated by seven years and, as such, lived separate lives, I with my father in our family apartment and my brother across the outpost in the warren of inexpensive housing known simply as “the Quay,” a collection of boxy dwellings stacked one upon the other until they appeared as if toppling rows of tall, thin bookshelves, the tiny apartments there occupied by the outpost’s working class, would-be writers and artists, drug addicts, immigrants, and, like my brother, students living on the cheap. It was, to me, a frantic and beautiful chaos, its colors and textures and sounds and smells a confusion of acrid beauty and florid decay that sent my head spinning to catch hold of it all.
After my father’s death, what I wished for—and indeed what I assumed would occur—was for Victrola to move back home. But alas the apartment had been rented from the housing works and, without regular payments, payments neither I nor my brother could make despite the small cash settlement we had received from my father’s will, the space was offered to a new renter and I, a fifteen-year-old girl with little knowledge of the world outside of school and homework and the various screens I consulted for entertainment and communication, was summarily evicted from the only home I had ever known. What remained were two suitcases carried by my brother and containing all my worldly belongings: my screens, my clothing, a photograph of myself with my brother and father, and a few small odds and ends that I had kept as mementos of my former life.
I did not question my brother’s willingness to take me in and indeed my sadness was slightly lessened by the fact that I was, at least, still among family, still taken care of. I thought I knew him, of course—after all, he was my brother—and yet it was not until I actually arrived at his apartment to stay that I truly understood just how separate Victrola’s life had become from that of myself and our father, separate and, as I was to learn, quite private, for while I knew my brother to have had various girlfriends at one time or another, some of whom he had even brought by the apartment to introduce to our father and, to a lesser extent, to me, the fact that he had a girlfriend now, and the further complication that she lived with him in his apartment—a much smaller, much tighter space than I was accustomed to—had not occurred to me even as a remote possibility. The first indication of my own ignorance came immediately upon arriving at his door, when, instead of opening it, Victrola remained outside for a long, strange moment, his head slightly tilted as if listening for some sound or signal from within.
“What are you doing?” I asked him. “Aren’t we going in?”
He had already straightened, nodding as if nothing were amiss at all, but when the door slid open with its thin, reedy swish, I saw immediately that something significant had, indeed, changed, at least for me. There, in the center of the room, stood, in utter silence, a tall luminous figure wrapped in a pale shift, her skin’s tiny grained channels coursing with slowly pulsing light.
It is a bizarre admission in the wake of all that happened, but Skeery was the first Blue I ever met. Of course I had seen them and, in my sentient biology classes, had studied their physiological differences from humans, but I had never had any meaningful interaction with a member of that species. My only experience with their system of telepathic communication had come in a classroom when a Blue, the guest of the professor, had sent a brief message to the assembled students: phrases and a scattering of related images. The reaction of the students had been, unilaterally, to gasp in alarm, a reaction I was to repeat as my brother’s live-in girlfriend—for that is what she was—brushed her message across my mind.
“Hedge,” my brother said softly, “this is Skeery.”
The feeling—in the classroom and in my brother’s apartment—was like the briefest tickle under the flesh of my forehead and then, a fraction of a second later, a blooming of words and images. You Hedgerow Greeting Happy, Skeery said into my frontal lobe, the individual words popping like bubbles, behind which, in a brief flash, came the image of a purple hill with a blazing white sun hovering just above, its light so bright that it felt, for that briefest flicker, as if I were being blinded from the inside. I must have made some kind of sound, for my brother’s hand was on my shoulder now, my mind still ringing from the flash of light. “It’s a common greetin
g,” he said. “It’s meant to make you feel at ease.”
I may have said something in reply, but really I could do little more than stare at the creature before me. Skeery was, at least to me, at least then, indistinguishable from any other of her species, close enough to the shape of a human to create within me a central revulsion that embarrassed me and which I could not control. Her head was mostly shaped like a human head, although slightly larger, and of course her skin was the pale, almost luminescent blue that had given the species their common nickname. Her eyes roughly coincided with the location of human eyes, although Skeery’s (like all Blues) were large, without pupils, vaguely larval in appearance, their color the yellow of old teeth. But what disturbed me most was not the expressionless ovoid eyes or the hue of Skeery’s skin but the fact that the area just below her nose slipped, at a fairly regular angle, into her neck, unbroken by mouth, jaw, or chin, so that her entire head, especially in profile, had the oblong shape of a balloon.
“Hello,” I said quietly.
The tickle again. You Hedgerow Greeting, she said to my mind. A flicker of the hill, the blazing sun.
“That’s really bright,” I said absently.
You Hedgerow Smile.
I did not know if she meant that I made her smile or if she was asking or even commanding me to smile, but then an image of Skeery herself came, with a smile drawn upon her mouthless face as if with an ink-soaked brush, the effect so strange, so disconcerting, that I actually burst into a laugh.
Skeery stepped forward now and reached out her hand, and after a moment I took it, the feeling warm and so soft it almost felt as if I held something made entirely of water, as if I could crush it between my fingers.
You Hedgerow Meeting Good.
“It’s . . . uh . . . nice to meet you, too,” I said falteringly.
“She’s your girlfriend? Your girlfriend?”
“She is,” my brother said.
There was no food in the apartment—a fact I could hardly understand at the time—and Victrola and I had gone out for ramen, the bowls hot, the liquid steaming my face as I ate. Had it been a few weeks earlier I might have reveled in the experience—eating from a street cart in the Quay, the flavors and smells in the air all around me—but in the face of what I had learned about my brother and about the living situation in which I had now found myself, I could hardly taste the meal at all.
“How long?”
“Have we been seeing each other? Two quarters, I guess.”
“Two quarters,” I repeated.
“I’m surprised you’re so shocked,” he said then. “I thought you’d be more open-minded.”
“I am open-minded,” I said. And yet I had already come to realize that this statement might not have been quite so true as I thought. From the street outside, through the grimy windows, came the churning motion of the pedestrians and peddlers and hawkers of the Quay, some human, some Blue, some the scattered members of other sentient species.
“Just give her a chance, Hedge,” my brother told me gently. “She’s great. You’ll see.”
We fell silent for a moment, each of us spooning ramen into our mouths, slurping, chewing. What I thought then was just how much I missed my father, how I wanted, more than anything, to return to the familiar apartment in which I had lived all my life. But my home was gone and the only place I had to turn was to my brother’s cramped student quarters which, even now, contained the luminous figure of Skeery, her silent, lidless, insectoid eyes ever-watchful.
“We look pretty weird to them, too, you know,” my brother said then, as if he could hear my thoughts.
“She told you that?”
“Not exactly, but I know the idea of eating is pretty primitive to them. And shitting is positively disgusting.”
“So what do you do?”
“What we’re doing right now,” he said. “Eat out.”
“Really?”
He smiled, that dazzling arc of shining teeth. “Really,” he said. “You can’t control what the heart does, Hedge.”
“Sure you can,” I told him. “You wouldn’t let yourself fall in love with a fork or a toaster oven or a glass of water.”
“Don’t be an ass.”
“Well, it’s true. You can’t even kiss her.”
My brother looked at me then, his eyes narrowing. “There’s more to a relationship than kissing,” he said.
From my point of view, age fifteen and in the throes of my first relationship, my brother’s statement was demonstrably untrue. My boyfriend Sim was a year older than I and it was clear almost from the start that my body was not the first female shape he had held in his thin, elegant hands. He was emotional, gentle, beautiful to look at, and even now, so many years later, I feel a pang somewhere deep and secret when I think of those days, not just of him but of he and I together, our youthful passion, the way our first kiss flooded through me like a bloodwave filling me from everywhere at once, our lips touching tentatively at first and then the flick of his tongue across my closed mouth, my teeth, and then nothing but the depths of our hunger. It is this experience—the kissing—that I returned to when I thought of my brother and Skeery, this that I return to even now, the realization of the differences in their physiognomy that meant he would never kiss her, that they would never kiss each other. The very idea of it seemed impossible to me. In those few memories I had of my mother, I could see my father kissing her, his hands holding her. It was, I knew, my blueprint for what a healthy relationship was supposed to be, what it was supposed to look like; even now it is not the sexual act that I think of when I ponder the physical manifestations of human love but instead the warmth of kissing and holding and speaking. Sim told me he loved me. I told him the same. This was what mattered.
So even beyond my own physical reaction to Skeery, I simply wondered what Victrola saw in her. True, there was undeniable beauty in her pale blue skin with its series of finely etched sparkling lines, lines that reminded me of wood grain but which coursed with visible energy like electric wires, and of course there was a certain gracefulness in her motion, an attribute common to the Blue (even watching one of her species walk across a room was like being secret witness to some subtle aquatic ballet), but fundamentally I could not understand looking at that mouthless face with its great yellowish larval eyes and had especial trouble imagining Victrola finding pleasure in that vision. Those of his previous girlfriends I had seen—all human—had been unilaterally beautiful—and quite capable of holding down a reasonably intelligent conversation, one not limited to random flashing words and weird pictures of purple grass and blinding sunlight.
And yet, even then, especially then, it was impossible not to see that my brother was happy during his year with Skeery. Later I would come to wonder if that was the happiest time in his life, since the rest of it—his two marriages, his estranged adult children, the scandals that would periodically rock his personal and public lives—brought to him a depth of sadness that was likely hidden to all but me, his only living family, but in the days of Skeery, when he was but a boy of twenty-two, the whole world before him, he seemed to burn with a bright and luminous fire. Was it Skeery who gave him that? I did not think so at the time but now it seems obvious that it was she who brought out that rare and wondrous quality in my brother, the bright spark of him at twenty-two when he was enthralled by a love that was quite simply beyond my ability to understand.
Of course, there was so much I did not understand then, not only about that relationship but about my brother and about myself, for I had already sowed the seeds that would lead to the end of Skeery’s presence in our lives. That I had done so totally unwittingly only serves to underscore how oblivious I was and, perhaps, how oblivious I still am. That I have spent all of my adult life in the presence of the Blue may be a ready metaphor of penance for my sins, but really my decision to live among them has more to do with the mundane aspects of my physical life than it does with anything else. Suffice to say, some character flaws ru
n deeply enough that they cannot be excavated no matter how many hours we spend in the therapist’s chair, and I can assure you that I have spent a good many hours spilling my secrets in that context, my mouth silent but my mind filled with the images of my own guilty conscience.
I realize now that she was trying to be my friend, in her way. Perhaps the cultural differences made it impossible for me to understand the cues, or perhaps the physical differences, the differences in actual species, were too great a barrier; in any case I did not reciprocate the attempt. In my defense, my father’s sudden death continued to weigh heavy upon my heart. Sometimes at night I wrapped my arms around myself in the darkness of my sleeping mat and imagined that I was a child of six or eight or ten and my father had tucked me into bed and all was right in the world. The arms that encircled me were his arms, as were the little kisses I imagined upon my forehead, my cheeks, my eyes. During such times, I sometimes thought I could feel the faintest tickle somewhere in my forehead, my frontal lobe tingling, but when I focused on that sensation it was just as quickly gone, like something just at the edge of my vision, an illusion, a dream. Was it Skeery listening to my grief? I did not know and could not think of a way to ask. In the mornings, after I had cried myself to sleep, I sometimes thought I could read concern upon her emotionless visage, her great larval eyes seeming to stare at me from across the room. I said nothing. She said the same.
We ate every meal out, of course, my brother and I, and I knew, too, that in our absence from the apartment, Skeery fed upon the light from the sunpanels. Victrola had shown me the panels soon after I had arrived at the apartment.
“Don’t ever come in here without letting us know,” he told me once, gesturing through the open bedroom door.
