by Brian Turner
“Whitened?”
She turns toward me and smiles so that I can see her pearly whites, which are as brilliant as Number Two’s night-light, an observation that I feel the need to verbalize in the moment. She responds by tossing her hips and backside against my body, a gesture she knows that I like, one that causes me to kiss her again, behind her ear, down her neck, and along the ridge of her collarbone. That shit is my signature move. It’s kind of like the cheat code in Contra.
“Is there anything rolled up?” I ask.
“In the nightstand,” she says.
I reach for the top drawer, open it, and rub my fingertips over a few items until they come upon a half-smoked blunt. I imagine she burned down what’s missing in between cooking and bathing the kids.
“What took you so long to get home?” she says, slowly softening up.
“You know those white niggas, baby. They’re not letting a brother leave until he’s picked that corporate cotton.” I light the joint, take a couple of pulls, and pass it to her. “One of those motherfuckers had the nerve to walk past my cube singing the theme song to The Jeffersons.”
“Get the fuck out of here.”
“Yeah.”
“Did he know the lyrics?”
“Every. Fucking. Word.”
“Did you sing it with him?” she says, laughing now. I mimic her for a minute before I burst into my own laugh, and then we laugh together. It’s synchronized, almost harmonized. She passes the joint back to me.
“You think you’re funny, huh?”
“That shit is funny,” she says, as she tosses her hip and butt back into me.
Outside, a siren blares down our block. Neither one of us flinches, choosing to enjoy our subtle high and to take in the vibrant life of the city that surrounds us: pit bulls barking each other out, soft-soled police shoes chasing young brothers down our block—a pursuit that never stops—rats chewing our plastic trash cans, the sporadic discharge of a firearm through the night, a couple fighting, a couple fucking before they’re back to fighting in the morning. Somehow, hearing it all never fails to remind us of us, lying here together at some other moment in time. The siren dies, and, if you listen close enough, silence comes to the forefront.
I grab my iPhone and put on some mood music. I start with something slow and old, borderline vintage, some Vandross, Guy, Sweat, even a song or two by that Chi-town nigga who shall not be named. Cats lost their way around the turn of the century, so I go no further than the nineties to avoid some new school, misguided crooner serenading my First Lady.
“You still trying, huh?” she says, hearing the first track come through the speakers. “You know, this is exactly why we have all of these damn kids.”
“But I take care of them, though. And I can take care of you . . . if you let me.” It’s a risk to proceed like this, dropping phrases, knowing they’ve got too much room for interpretation, knowing that she might come back with something like:
“You take care of me? Negro, I work, got the same master’s degree, but with a better GPA.”
See what I mean?
“You know what I’m saying, baby.” I make another run of the Contra code to get us back on track, assuming we were ever there. “I mean, let me take care of you tonight.”
I pass the L back to her. She takes two pulls and ashes it in an empty cup resting atop Frederick Douglass’s Narrative on her nightstand. She’s got his shit flagged with Post-it notes like she’s working on a book report. At last, she turns toward me and places her hand against my ear, rubbing my upper lobe between her index finger and thumb, and says, “It depends.”
“Depends? On what?” I ask.
“On if you can tell me how bad you want me,” she says, and kisses my bottom lip in a way that sends my mind scrambling, grasping for the right answer. We’ve moved past the Contra code. What she wants, what she needs, is for me to stimulate her mental.
“I want you bad, baby,” I say.
“I know you do. But how bad?” she says. “Tell me.”
“I want you . . . I want you more than you want me to have Harden’s beard and—”
“I never said that.”
“I want you more than Ellis wants a pad and pen. I want you more than our pastor wants my offering.”
“So, you’re a rapper now?”
“For you, baby, I can get down like that,” I say, and kiss her long and deep enough to taste the hemp on her tongue. “So, please, stop interrupting my flow, my rap.”
“You’re funny.”
“I know, but listen to me when I tell you I want you more than a nineties nigga wanted his first Beamer, more than a dope fiend wants to get clean or another chance to feel the love from his fam, his team. I’m talking about that love like Martin had for this place despite its racist past. The love Coretta had for him despite his cheating ass.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah, baby.”
She leans into me, and we kiss again. And then she looks at me and says to me, “You know I forgive you, baby.”
“I know, baby.”
“But I still want you to tell me more.”
So I tell her, “I want you more than Hillary wanted Barack’s soul. As bad as our people crave our true home. More than Kunta wanted to keep saying his name. More than Toby wanted to choke out master with his chains.”
Suddenly her hand stops stroking my ear, and she begins to rub through my hair and down the side of my face. She kisses my lips and says, “Baby, you’re going to be okay.”
“I know, baby.”
“Good. Now keep rapping to me.”
So I keep rapping and flowing; in the background Luther keeps singing. I keep wanting and pleading until she knows that I need her to feel complete, until she slowly sheds her clothes, showing little concern for the slight chill in our bedroom. We kiss, and the way she sucks my lips is like a sobering manifesto. It’s a wet and warm embrace that grounds my high, or quite possibly is my high. It tells me that there’s no use for a Contra code. It says I know you better than you know yourself on your best day, so don’t try to control me. Just love me.
So I did. And nine months later, I loved our Number Three.
AYLAN KURDI, AGE THREE
Matthew Komatsu
The aspect of the photo that pierces me most is his repose. Angled to sleep, face down and turned to the left on the wet sand of a Turkish shore. Hair black and wet with the Aegean. Red shirt, black shorts, feet sockless in his toddler’s shoes.
So still.
I cannot help but imagine myself as his father, my son in his place. It should have been me, he said to the reporters. Yes, I think, it should have been.
We spotted a ripple of green beneath the torrent of a swollen creek. Easy to miss behind the constant surface flash of an Alaskan summer sun, it took us three legs in a trolling helicopter to spot the dead man’s jacket waving in the current.
My teammate and I hoisted down from the helo to the trunk of pine tree that had fallen into the river. One of its stout branches had snagged the man’s jacket. He was facedown, a foot beneath the surface, one arm extended upstream as the icy waters poured around him. Boils appeared and disappeared in the current, glacier-fed, whitewater upstream and down. It was not a place to fall.
So I held on to the tree and my comrade, while he wrestled with the snarled jacket twisted hopelessly around a branch too green to break. The current was strong, the waters frigid, and the man had worn chest-high waders that now acted like sea anchors filled with gallons of creek at peak flow. I mentally rehearsed what to do if I myself fell in, recalling my swift-water rescue training: Feet downriver, paddle on your back towards shore, try not to die.
In one photo, a Turkish policeman cradles the boy’s body. Midstride up the beach, he looks away from the child held—no, cradled—away from his body with gloved hands. The Velcro straps upon the toddler’s shoes, three of four secured, but the one: rent from its home upon the other half. Dangling, as if forgotten.
My son, now
three, finds himself distracted amid haste. Too often, I react with anger at his inability to move with a sense of purpose, to complete a task as directed. Underpants donned inside out and backward, shirt pulled over his neck and arms dangling, he suddenly joins a world in which toy airplanes and cars have adventures and speak to each other. This, despite the clear and repeated orders and instructions, the adult world of deadlines and schedules. He is oblivious to my need for order.
Perhaps it was the same for the boy and his father. Perhaps this is what haunts Abdullah Kurdi to this day.
The body broke free of the branch and for a moment I thought we might lose it. But Aaron held on and was able to pull it out of the current and into the eddy downstream of the trunk we were balanced upon. We each took hold of what purchase his body provided: a bit of jacket, a belt, the pale, waterlogged flesh of his wrist. We strained against his weight until the creek relinquished him, belly-down on the tree, his waders emptying atop our feet.
We entered the hospital on the day my son was born, birth plan firmly in hand: Minimal interventions. No medication. All natural. My wife donned her gown, lay down on a gurney, and the admitting nurse took her vitals and attached a monitor to her stomach. She turned up the volume and we could hear the baby’s heart, steady and strong. Then a contraction hit, and the tum-tum went silent. We asked if it was normal, but her face gave her away. No.
I took my wife’s hand when the nurse disappeared, only to reappear with a team this time, all haste and whisper. The baby’s heartbeat danced an erratic cadence across the screen, and they rushed us away, shouting, Get a room ready. Words like distress and decels.
In the room, another contraction struck my wife’s uterus. She breathed, focused. All eyes fixated on the screen. The baby’s heartbeat disappeared again and the room erupted in a flurry. A new monitor was attached to the finger of the obstetrician, who pushed it up the birth canal and onto the baby’s head.
A pattern emerged: with every contraction, the baby’s heart rate raced to rates impossibly high for me, a lifelong distance runner, to understand. And when the contraction ended, the beat dropped to the thrum of a zombie shuffle.
My wife endured, in position after primal position, self-conscious despite her pain and focus, of her tattered gown’s indecency. And with each evolution, we held our breaths in the hope that this time would be different. But they grew worse, the oscillations between high and low dancing across the fetal heart rate monitor. The baby was hurting.
The obstetrician called it. It’s getting too scary, she said.
An emergency cesarean. They cut him from the warm brine of his mother’s womb. The sounds of suction, wet flesh, masked utterances whose meaning I could not comprehend as my wife’s body shook with the force of their movements: all this amid the shine of cold metal and scentless air. I held her hand.
It’s a boy, they said, holding him as for inspection. Head misshapen from the birth canal. Skin a gunky wet purple, eyes liquid black, he wailed at me from their hands.
But what they should have said was, Mother, Father, here is your son.
The gesture was futile, but necessary. I pressed two fingers to where his carotid artery once pulsed against the skin of his neck. There was nothing, had been nothing in the hours since his all-terrain vehicle overturned while it climbed the creek’s bank, and dumped him to his fate. Nothing to revive, no living lung into which I could press my breath, my lips upon his.
His ID was that of retired military: blue cardstock, black-and-white photo. Home of record identified as a bucolic suburbia outside Anchorage. Soon the phone would ring at that address. This father, this son; this husband and grandfather: He returns to you as he came into this world.
When I witness my son asleep, every defense against treacle falls away. It becomes impossible to see him as anything but perfect. I open his door nightly, applying odd pressure to preempt it scraping against the frame, and steal into the darkness. His space heater whirring, the air purifier humming: I kneel next to his big-boy bed and let my eyes adjust. When the curves of his face come into view, I can see how he sleeps with his hands pressed beneath his waist. Since the photo of Aylan, a great sadness often descends on me. I see, not a living child, but a boy—my boy—on that beach.
I match the curve of my lips to the bridge of his nose, a puzzle piece that has found its home. He does not stir, doesn’t move. I press the kiss, hold my breath, and await the sound of his.
BAT VISION
John Mauk
Nedra stands in a cloud of dumpster stench, the moon hanging orange and low. She wonders what impulse made Justin show up. For an hour, he’s been hunched in B2 with his back to the television. Why watch basketball or racing when you can watch your ex-girlfriend work? To boot, Gail’s been on a rampage. Don’t smoke if you’ve got tables. Stop leaving your butts on the ground. Don’t fix your ponytail in the dining room. Don’t yawn. Don’t breathe. Curl up and die. But punch out first.
When she took the job at Lead Belly’s two years ago, Nedra could hardly believe her luck. The pay was great. She started whittling down credit cards, offered help with utilities, which her mom accepted, and bought a candy-apple-red Grand Am with only twenty thousand miles. Each week, the money got designated for this and that. Now it’s gone before it comes.
She takes the last drag, flings her butt at the ground, and twists her ankle like a washing machine. Despite the funk, she breathes deep, heads in, and passes the cooks calling each other names. Gimp. Buttmunch. At the swinging doors, she looks through the bubble, and sure enough, Justin is still there like white pudding on green leather, taking a whole booth for nothing but a Beer of the Month. And looky here. Gail is sidling up. They’re having a nice chat. She’s tossing her hair even though she’s got nothing to toss. He’s giving his lippy smile and sleepy eyes—a ruse, something loser doofuses master so they can ensnare women into hollow and orgasmless relationships.
In the office, she hangs her jacket. A wilted spinach leaf hugs the desk leg like flood debris. It’s been there a while. Britney Spears pouts from the back wall. Someone recently gave her a yellow highlighter mustache, curlicues on both sides. None of it makes sense. Nothing in the world does—Britney next to the hand-washing guide, next to the Success photo with seven luxury cars, next to the coat rack, next to a giant crack in the paneling nobody will ever fix. How do people do it? Move from high school to something spectacular, something worthy of a poster or framed photo? Maybe you say yes to everything. Wear a girl’s school uniform, glare over your ballooning boobs, and take whatever comes. Nedra’s mother told her that—take whatever comes—right after her father packed up and zoomed to Florida.
Gail blasts through the swinging doors and says B2’s sitting empty. Nedra considers saying—woman to woman—B2 isn’t worth a full booth, won’t order anything of substance, and won’t tip for shit because that’s how B2 operates. In fact, B2 doinked her pointlessly for two solid months until she woke up and realized one sweaty afternoon with his underwear half down and hers roaming by her feet that he didn’t possess enough brainpower for kindness, romance, adventure, beauty, anything beyond a moany hump and follow-up sandwich. She doesn’t have time to say all that because Gail is aimed for the cooks, already in mid-scold.
Nedra salutes Britney and punches the door. Past the pool table, she realizes something’s off. The sound comes in waves, long collective vowels rising and trailing off. In the gap, someone cheers or screams. Nedra follows all eyes to a fluttering black thing, a maniac Kleenex flapping beneath the lights. People are putting placemats on their heads. A few bargoyles move to the floor and cover their beers with flattened hands. A few others swat with hats or menus. The cooks come out. Everyone’s gawking, like on a snow day, those glorious seconds after the radio announcement comes and you’re marveling because all bets are off, all wonder in full swing.
The jukebox volume goes down. Gail shows up by the server station, raises her arms, and pats the air. She tells everyone to sit tigh
t. They’re going to take care of it. No problem. Have some fun. Then she corrals servers and cooks to the back. Nedra follows, listens while Gail makes two points: One, keep it out of the kitchen. Two, ignore it. Heather asks how they’re supposed to do both. Makayla says it’ll get in someone’s hair and then what? Phil says orders are probably up.
With a full tray, Nedra pauses to get her balance. The bat is now up beyond the lights on a tight clockwise orbit. She focuses, keeps her back straight and knees bent, tells herself bats aren’t interested in people’s hair—that it just wants out and far away. T2 hardly knows she’s there but she does her thing—announcing each plate in careful rhythm: one medium rare burger with steak fries, cheeseburger medium rare with Swiss and fries, medium cheeseburger with cheddar, one barbecue chicken with extra sauce. She asks if everything looks okay, gets a nod.
She avoids B2, stops by B3, who wants battered shrooms and a round of kamikazes in honor of the bat. The jukebox is cranked again, louder than before. AC/DC. The big-haired women in T3 hoist beers and sing, “All night long!” A weekend regular, Jimmy Something, in T1 stands and plays air guitar. And then, somehow, for whatever reason, the bat is gone. Just like that. Some heads are still angled and scanning, but it’s not in the rafters, by the skylight, or fluttering in a corner. It got tired or lucky, either settled somewhere or found a crack in the Lead Belly universe.
In the kitchen, she watches shrooms surface, twinkling and snapping. The new fry guy asks if they still have winged visitors. Nedra says maybe, maybe not. He hopes for more, a whole flock. Phil says it’s called a colony, not a fucking flock. On her way out, she gets past the pool table, veers toward the station, and sees a dot by the Coors Light mirror. She stops, looks hard. The dot twitches. Or maybe it doesn’t.
“Holy crap,” Makayla says. “Is that it?”
“I think so.”
