Adelaide Literary Magazine No.55, November 2022

REVISTA LITERÁRIA ADELAIDE

piece, claimed that I would be as honest and accurate as I could. It is up
for the reader to decide whether that has been the case throughout my
writing, or that I have, despite my promise, fallen victim to an inevitable
human error like many before me.

Yun Xiang Zhang is 17 years old and from Beijing, China. She loves to
write and uses it to call for social change. Yunxiang enjoys reading books
related to history and political philosophy.

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ALL THE NEWS
by Thomas Hackney

Alien hunters come in all shapes and sizes. Some wear long flowered
dresses, attend UFO conventions and worship the deceased gods of
Egypt. Some have advanced science degrees and look for intelligently
produced radio-waves. Most chase things that don’t exist or shouldn’t.

None of them look like movie stars. Me, I look for and find
extraterrestrials in the damnedest places, so I’m quite sure they exist. I
just make a distinction between the mawkish stick-figure parodies that
supposedly ride around in crash-prone flying saucers and those to whom
reality itself bows down like a suppliant.

To my mind UFOs are mostly irrelevant. Do I care what kind
of vehicle extraterrestrials ride around in? Not really. I do care about
what they say, though. The ETs I perceive manifest only very rarely,
and, as a rule, in ways unacceptable to science, providing information,
commentary, and not quite scaring the crap out of everyone. Making
things too obvious or easy would create many problems, change the
status quo, and spoil the soup. So direct communication via radio-waves,
for example, is out. This leaves indirect communication.

The most famous and fully documented event of this kind began
when a string of twenty-one comets – one for each anno Domini human
century – was spotted by the comet-hunting team of Drs. Eugene and
Helen Shoemaker and David Levy on March 24, 1992. Designated “A”
through “W” (“I” and “O” were not used), the “string of pearls” later
impacted the planet Jupiterover six days from July 16 to 21, 1994. The
impacts were the most energetic events of any kind ever seen in real time
by man, woman, or anything in between. Period. Fragment “G” alone

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was said to be equivalent to 60 million megatons of TNT or 600 times
the earth’s entire nuclear arsenal.

When news of SL9 broke out, astronomers were beside themselves
for months. During that fateful week in July ’94, many had been up
for days with bags under their eyes and stubble on their chins. None of
them thought it the slightest bit strange that twenty-one comets were
exploding on Jupiter with the 21st century just around the corner. The
quaint pan-cultural notion about comets auguring major events is just
silly superstition from bygone eras, after all. It certainly isn’t science.

I was actually expecting something like Shoemaker-Levy 9 to
happen because I knew when it would happen – March, 1993. I knew
this because on October 9, 1992 a meteor had pulverized the right tail-
light of a car whose license plate read 4GF-933. I thought this quite
fishy at the time because October 9 was only three days before the
Ames Research Center commenced a Targeted Search” for extraterrestrial
intelligence on the twelfth. More radio-waves in space were collected and
analyzed in the first few minutes of this federally funded NASA program
than had been accomplished in all the previous fifty privately funded
SETI projects combined. Ames’s targets were around one thousand
“G” and “F” spectral-type stars located within one-hundred lightyears
of earth. No, NASA wasn’t fooling around, and for once money wasn’t
the problem.

The recovered meteorite measured four by five by eleven inches
and weighed 27.3 pounds. A 1980 Chevrolet Malibu tail-light measures
around five by twenty-two inches. Only the signal-light was destroyed.
Neither the slender chrome accent forming the taillight’s upper border
nor the thick fender immediately below it were significantly damaged.
The only change to any of this chrome was a segment of the accent
that had been bent down across the license plate numbers “933”, as if
to emphasize them. Wow, hard-core! Nobody can do this on purpose
(can they?).

The photo published in the Gannet Suburban Newspaper showed this
very clearly and in full color. Falling rocks from the sky portend major
events soon to happen, too. It’s a human thing.

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One’s worldview, whether it be yours or mine or that of a great
philosopher, may be thought of as consisting of many pieces in a jigsaw
puzzle. The pieces are scattered everywhere in time and space. Each of
us during the course of his or her life attempts to fit the pieces together
so that they form a coherent and logical picture. When the news media
announced in late March that a string of comets had just been discovered
in our solar system and that it was on a course to impact the planet
Jupiter in July the following year, I knew very well what I was seeing
and hearing on my television, and just like that a whopper of a puzzle
piece snapped right into place.

The two impact events were clearly connected, and in more ways than
one. Both events were unprecedented, ridiculously improbable, aimed,
and involved meteor strings. Still photographs revealed that the fireball
consisted of more than seventy fragments. If this weren’t enough, both
sets of projectiles impacted only the back or dark side of their respective
targets. There’s a word for when your extraterrestrial intel is good and
things work out and that word is Bingo!

The hypothesis Ames was investigating was simple enough:
Extraterrestrials exist, nothing more and nothing less. ET’s visually
assisted and preemptive reply was also quite simple: “Right, Ames!”
Drums from the deep. It was the right signal-light, not the left, that
had been tagged within a millimeter of its life. If I’d had an aboriginal
pointing bone handy I’d have chanted, flapped my arms, jumped up
and down and used it, but who’d have listened? Being an existential
detective can be a real bitch sometimes.

Thinking it was time for some good old fashioned detective work,
I called up the Gannett Suburban Newspaper, which published three
different articles about the event and asked it to send me copies of these
articles as well as any photographs taken of the impact site. From this
material I learned many things to support my suspicion that the event
was, in fact, a semiotic extraterrestrial response to the High Resolution
Microwave Survey. In linguistics, semiotics is the study of signs and
symbols as elements of communicative behavior. Pragmatics is the
branch of semiotics which analyzes language in terms of the situational
context within which utterances are made.

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According to one of the articles, October 12, 1992, the day HRMS
began, was also the 18th birthday of the young Peekskill resident whose
car had been perforated by the impact. All grown up are we? October
12 1992 was also America’s 500th birthday. History informs us that
by 1500 the Taino population, which populated modern-day Haiti
and Dominican Republic, had declined from around eight million
to 100,000. Nice calling card. No need to be burdened with any of
the horrific history, but history and linguistics aren’t science. They are
the existential detective’s bread and butter, though. (The exploits and
methods used by the Spanish conquistadors who followed Columbus to
the new world won’t be mentioned here for fear of shocking the reader.)

I got on the phone with Dr. Martin Prinz, curator of meteorites
at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City. The
meteorite’s teenaged owner had agreed to let him exhibit her meteorite
and car together at the museum for a month or two. I saw them there
in the museum’s lobby myself. Before the good doctor’s attention and
patience ran out listening to my harangue about the impact’s ridiculous
precision, I managed to learn an improbable fact that the press had
missed. The annual draconid meteor shower happened to be at its height
on October 9 when the meteor went down. Naturally, everyone in the
press assumed the meteor was a draconid. Dr. Prinz informed me that
the Peekskill fireball could not have been a draconid for the simple
reason that it entered our atmosphere from the south and traveled
north. Draconids, which hail from the northern constellation, Draco
the Dragon, enter the atmosphere from the north and travel south. This
certainly qualified it as both improbable and meaningful.

Draconids and the constellation to which they refer are named
after an ancient Athenian archon named Draco (ca. 620 B.C.). The
laws of this infamous ruler were so severe that nearly all law-breakers
were executed, no matter how minor the infraction. We derive the term
“draconian” from him. So we can take considerable comfort in the fact
that the aimer(s) of the Peekskill meteor, which originally weighed about
a ton before it broke apart into its seventy-odd fragments, must have
gone to some significant trouble to requisition such a specimen. It seems
they wanted anyone noticing their handiwork to know that they are not
draconian, which is very good news, indeed. There will be no melting
of human beings like in the movies.

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There were plenty of other details to notice about the Peekskill event.
It was most conspicuous, fully documented, filmed, scientifically studied,
and publicized event of its kind in history -- that is, until Shoemaker-
Levy 9 snatched the honor a few months later. An international team of
six scientists wrote a paper about the initial event for “Nature” magazine
in 1994. The first sentence read: “On 9 October 1992, a bright fireball
appeared over West Virginia, travelled some 700 km in a northeasterly
direction and culminated in at least one impact: a 12.4 kg ordinary
chondrite was recovered in Peekskill, New York.”

The team had made good use of fourteen amateur videos made of
the fireball in flight that October night in half a dozen states, mostly
by spectators at high school football games. The videos were ”the first
motion pictures of a fireball from which a meteorite has been recovered.”

Triangulation analysis allowed them to determine the fireball’s exact
flightpath, which was shown on a map provided. No mention was made
of the fact that the fireball began its “700 km” flight at a point adjacent
the National Radioastronomy Observatory in Green Bank West Virginia.
In addition to being the birthplace of the SETI paradigm, the NRAO
was a major participant in NASA’s SETI project. Nor did they mention
that Washington D.C. just happens to lie in the middle of that 700 km
flightpath. “During the second half of its flight, the fireball exhibited
extensive fragmentation with several dozen individual fragments visible
on some video frames.” The better for the D.C. progenitors of HRMS
to enjoy the show, no doubt.

The reported color of the fireball also went unmentioned in the
article. It was lime-green.

What else?
Things went quiet for almost twenty years, until the same kind of
thing, sporting the same signature, happened again. The news media
had been counting the days until asteroid 2012 DA14 would squeak
past the Earth. It was eerily reminiscent of the media’s countdown to the
American quincentennial back in October 1992. DA14 was discovered
in February 2012, a year earlier. Weighing in at 130,000 metric tons and
measuring about 100 feet in diameter, DA14 was the largest cosmic body
to just miss the Earth ever recorded. A few asteroids have approached

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Earth a little closer to Earth than 17,000 miles, but they were smaller.
Now, normally one asteroid near-miss in a day is enough to keep the
news media and astronomers hopping, but two unrelated asteroids in
one day? This is not supposed to happen, either. It can; it just doesn’t.

Unlike DA14, the sixty-foot Chelyabinsk super-bolide had not
been previously detected, but like the Peekskill fireball, it entered
Earth’s atmosphere at the shallow angle of about four degrees. Meteors
usually enter the atmosphere at closer to forty-five degrees. It blew up
approximately seventeen miles above the Earth’s surface with an explosive
yield equivalent to twenty-five Hiroshima bombs. The shockwave from
the blast shattered many of the city’s windows causing injuries, mostly
to the faces, of at least 1,500 denizens of Chelyabinsk. Fifty-five were
hospitalized, including thirteen children. There were no deaths, however.
None.

It was another demonstration of the aimers’ precision and power. It
was more “in our face”, strictly speaking, than either Peekskill or SL9.
Like its predecessors, the Chelyabinsk event was both unprecedented
and hugely improbable. Two asteroids near-misses in one day is unheard
of.

More worrisome than any of this, however, was that ET’s semiotic
events were escalating, at least in terms of the vernacular “in your face.”
I notice things like this. It’s my job.

But humans weren’t listening or noticing. No scientist at NASA-
Ames would give me the time of day about my observations. I did
get a response from Dr. Carl Sagan, who wrote on Cornell University
stationary that I had “failed to make the crucial distinction between a
priori and a posteriori statistics.” I suppose he was pointing out some
essential or disqualifying difference between statistics analyzed before
versus after an event.

The public’s go-to guy on such matters, Dr. Seth Shostak at the
SETI Institute, responded to my observations as follows: “To argue
this would be like deciding that a piece of driftwood that happened
to wash up on the beach and bump into a dozing sunbather 7 months
ago was somehow a signal from a deep sea intelligence, trying to make
a comment about Monica Lewinsky and Bill Clinton.” In a subsequent

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missive he wrote: “I don’t think this will find much acceptance in the
science community. It doesn’t explain anything and it doesn’t have any
predictive power—both are hallmarks of science.” And later still: “This
makes no sense, unless you think the aliens hang around Jupiter or Pluto
or some other neighborhood body.”

I’ll deal with the last two comments. Getting to Pluto or anywhere
else in our solar system shouldn’t be a problem. Since the average age of
half the stars in the Milky Way galaxy is 6.3 billion years or 1.5 billion
years older than our sun, the average alien civilization, let’s say, five-
hundred light-years away, would need to extend its sphere of influence
at the rate of only 1 light-year every three million years to get here.
They could have almost walked there by now! Most people, including
scientists, are unaware of this or haven’t thought this through, but you’d
think that a senior SETI scientist would be aware of these basic numbers.

As for Peekskill’s failure to provide any “predictive power”, what
was “933”, chopped liver?

The U.S. government was a slightly different story. The various
departments and agencies I contacted about my findings ignored me. I
received no thanks or reply whatsoever from any of them. They did let
me know that they were watching me, though. Anyone talking about
fifty-million atom bombs going off, anywhere, is probably someone to
keep an eye on. Sometimes when I went to D.C. to shop with my wife
(we lived in West Virginia about two hours away), I couldn’t help but
notice the tails. They weren’t very subtle about them, either. Now, this
was creepy because how would they even know I was in D.C.?

One of these was a young officer in uniform, who watched and
followed us into a restaurant.

The moment we got up to leave, so did he. Nothing too unusual here,
but in Washington D.C., where I grew up the only child of spooks,
picking up on tails is a kind of survival skill.

Another time when my wife, her British niece, and I were enjoying
an elaborate hotel buffet breakfast, this young, drop-dead gorgeous
creature brazenly stared at me from her table populated by several older
grey men in suits. She had moved her chair well away from her table and
turned it ninety degrees to affect a direct line to me. Now, this never

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happens. I’m tall, thin, and dark of hair but not at all handsome, so I
did my best to look like I knew what I was doing.

There were at least two other men sitting alone in the vast dining area
stealing furtive glances at me with varying degrees of skill, one in front
of me, the other -- I call him the chuckler -- behind me and mostly
hidden by a wide stanchion. At first I entertained the fatuous notion
that existential detectives have to get used to this sort of thing; then I
realized that what they were actually doing was messing with my head.
Maybe they thought I was messing with theirs, or maybe they wanted
to acknowledge, in a plausibly deniable way of course, my discovery
of those invisible and powerful entities that probably run the galaxy,
inasmuch as anyone does. I know how it is.

At some point the question becomes, what on earth are these
authorities doing here exactly?

One thing they might be doing is keeping any low level extraterrestrials
only a few hundred or thousand years ahead of us technologically under
some kind of check. Otherwise, some of them would probably be
exploiting or enslaving the human race; some might even like to take the

Earth for themselves, rare jewel that it is. There seem to be all kinds
of things running loose in our skies, coming and going as they please,
but one should expect the spacecraft of those responsible for Peekskill
and SL9 to be more reliable, assuming they even use such contraptions.

At least a dozen UFOs have allegedly crashed or become temporarily
disabled over the years.

Another thing the authorities could be doing is protecting our world
from extinction-level asteroid and comet impacts, like guardian angels.
What a shame it would be if some comet or asteroid wiped out ninety
percent of the life on Earth. Conservation of intelligent life would be
an aspiration worthy of any benevolent ETs, and they obviously possess
the means to carry out this goal.

Another clue as to what they’re doing here is the moon. At one-quarter
the size of the Earth it’s way too large to be a natural satellite. Famed
author, Isaac Asimov, once wrote: “It’s too big to have been captured by
the Earth. The chances of such a capture having been affected and the

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moon then having taken up a nearly perfect circular orbit around our
Earth are too small to make such an eventuality credible.”

Dr. Sean C. Solomon at MIT once wrote: “The Lunar Orbiter
experiments vastly improved our knowledge of the Moon’s gravitational
field…indicating the frightening possibility that it might be hollow.” The
moon will “ring like a bell”, sometimes for hours, any time something as
small as an Apollo stage rocket crashes into it. On November 20, 1969
the Apollo 12 crew jettisoned the lunar module ascent stage causing it to
crash into the moon. The impact created an artificial moon quake that
reverberated for more than an hour. This test was repeated with Apollo
13, which intentionally commanded its third stage rocket to crash into
the moon. Seismic instruments recorded that the reverberations lasted
for three hours and twenty minutes. When the earth experiences a large
earthquake, the reverberations usually last only a few minutes due to
the density of our planet.

The moon is the only satellite in the solar system that has a stationary,
near-perfect, circular orbit. Also odd is the hard fact that the sun and
moon are almost exactly the same size when viewed from Earth, which
is why total eclipses occur. The mathematical random probability that
the sun and moon would perfectly align for a total eclipse to appear on
earth is basically zero.

Without the moon's stabilizing effect, the Earth would tilt as much
as 85-degrees every one million years or so, causing drastic changes and
possibly preventing advanced or intelligent life from developing. Was the
moon placed or tweaked into the orbit it travels? If yes, then bywhom?
The designers of Peekskill, SL9, and Chelyabinsk seem a good candidate.

Our moon also bears, intriguingly enough, it’s maker’s stamp,
933. As we’ll recall,these three numbers, comprising the right half of
the impacted Chevrolet’s license plate, were overscored by the chrome
accent which hung over them. They provided the month and year of
Shoemaker-Levy 9’s appearance in March 1993. The moon’s orbital
period is 27.3 days.

The Peekskill meteorite’s weight was reported as 12.4 kilograms. In
pounds this works out to 27.3.

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After the Apollo 17 mission landed on the moon in December 1972,
we never went back. The reason Dr. Shostak gives for this is there’s been
no public funding for it. But why? Is there some truth to be found or
confirmed there that the public couldn’t handle?

Life is believed to have appeared on Earth 600 million years after
the Earth was formed. DNA’s co-discoverer, Dr. Francis Crick, refused
to believe that DNA, with its billions of fortuitous connections, could
have formed spontaneously on Earth in so short a time. It took almost
three billion years just for single-cell life to become multi-cellular life.
He therefore postulated that DNA or its precursor must have arrived to
Earth inside of a meteor or comet, a theory known as panspermia. But
this seems even more improbable since the meteor or comet would have
had to originate from another solar system, the very closest of which
is 24 trillion miles (4.24 lightyears) away. It seems far more likely that
some Johnny Apple-seeding intelligence created the mathematically
programmed prescription and code known as DNA.

It seems reasonable to speculate that the intelligence responsible for
SL9 and Peekskill is the same one that created the conditions for life on
Earth. Beings that move around and aim large and small cosmic bodies
seem like the very kind of beings that could pull something this off.

They might have designed and engineered the human species on this
planet. Perhaps they created the different races to see if humans can live
together and cooperate in spite of their physical differences. The universe
will surely produce many profoundly different morphologies and what
better way to train humans to deal with this fact than by creating
superficial disparities? All species observe a principle of separation.
Species, races, clans, cultures, nations, and beings from other worlds are
all treated with caution or fear. This is wise, yet interaction builds trust.

The rules of non-engagement that the piloting human parodies
obey are probably enforced by these authorities who gave us a small
peek at their skill on October 9, 1992. But if there’s a single underlying
message to be gleaned from their meticulous actions it is that science
without a conscience or restraint can portend very dark things. With
nuclear brinksmanship between Russia and the free world over Ukraine
even now making headlines, and China itching to grab Taiwan, it is hard
to be sanguine about our future prospects. Both totalitarian nations

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claim some historical justification for their unprovoked or telegraphed
aggression, but current political reality does not corroborate either of
their claims. Consequently, humankind will not be aided in any way
that might hasten our own self-destruction. The 21st century, now only
twenty-two years in, will test our worthiness to intermingle with civilized
worlds.

There are wonders and marvels to be found in the cosmos. You just
have to look a little harder for them. Of course, we can’t know anything
for certain. Everything is statistics and uncertainty, as scientists well
know, when it suits them. The best we can usually ever do is use our
eyes and brains to arrive at what makes the most sense.

Achieving contact with another world is not the kind of thing
one rushes blithely into, especially when that other world is raw and
unfinished. It makes great sense to hold back and test the waters first.
There must be protocols, probably born of long experience. Hey, entire
worlds are involved! Humans must have just witnessed part of that
protocol. It seems we’ll have to brush ourselves up a bit.

Although the communications covered above have come off like
whisperings behind the hand, they were nonetheless in our face, the last
one quite literally. Still, they didn’t exactly bang us over the head with
anything. Everything at the time seemed normal and natural enough if
you didn’t look too closely at them. But if you did look closely, what you
basically found was just what extraterrestrial intelligence can look like.

Thomas Hackney has been writing impactful, iconoclastic nonfiction for
at least three decades. The consensus world generally does not appreciate this,
so his revelations remain mostly under the radar. He currently resides in
southern Georgia (USA).

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HOW TO STEAL A SOUL
by Jordan Souza

In high school I took an immersive photography course. I was in Seoul,
South Korea. An American kid in a soccer hoodie clustered with other
kids from other countries in other hoodies. We were led by a teacher
whose name I forget. He told us to apply what we’d learned and capture
the moment. We walked the busy streets of Inchideon where women
with faces like dried figs sold bundagge out of steaming carts. Besides
them were stacks of fruit and hanging squid and the odd CD table.
You could go down a cement staircase and buy bootlegged clothing and
handbags. But the light was best above ground, all black and red and
orange and blue. I saw a woman illuminated by the steam from her big
pot, an ancient silhouette against the blur of modernity. I brought the
bulky SLR camera to my face and pointed it toward her. I wasn’t quite
sure about the F stop or aperture, but if I could capture the noise and
beauty of this scene, then I had found my thing and I was surely an artist.

But she stopped me before I could click, waving a finger my way
saying “No No No No.” I hurried away, deeply embarrassed. My teacher,
who I guess had witnessed the whole thing, told me that in old Korean
folklore, if you took a picture, you took a piece of someone’s soul. This
felt like something he should have told us before the anthropological
photographic expedition.

I found myself today, after six hours of jury duty with nothing but
my phone on 2% battery and a book I didn’t want to read, vacuuming
the carpet I had already vacuumed and thinking about that woman,
probably long dead now. Through vacuuming, I was cleaning my mind
out and avoiding the thinking that I’d been doing all day about what had

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happened fifteen years before in another country, in another foreigner’s
space.

In this memory, I was seventeen and finishing school in Sydney,
Australia. My best friend lived in a dilapidated house on an overgrown
street. Her parents were intellectuals with art from their travels and
books stacked on top of tapestries. But they were spending the year in
Germany, leaving my seventeen year old friend and her older brother
to look after the place. Naturally, it became our place to smoke and
drink and listen to bad reggae and good punk. That night, I was in the
older brother’s bed, sleeping off a night of booze and pot. I was in my
underwear, no top. It was the first or second time I had ever had sex.
He was 21 and I had no idea what I was doing. He kept asking when
my birthday was.

I woke up to the flash of a red camera in my face, the cheap digital
kind that everyone had in the mid aughts, the ones you’d have to plug
into your computer with an HDMI cable. You would upload the good
ones to the brand new Facebook or the waning Myspace. I asked him
what he was doing. He laughed it off and told me to go to sleep. It’s
nothing, he said.

A week later, my friend asked if I’d slept with her brother. We just
made out, I said. She then told me the weirdest story: her brother was on
his bed, his friends around him, clicking through pictures on his camera.

Is this the American one, a friend asked.
Yeah, he said.
I think she must’ve known what had happened and wanted to let me
know that she knew that I knew. But I wouldn’t give in to the truth and
rather scrunched my face in feigned confusion. My stomach gathered
in my toes and my skin went hot in embarrassment. I don’t know what
that could’ve been, I said.
It didn’t work out with the brother. Their mom died a month later
of a brain tumor. We’d only ever hooked up after a night of partying,
and we didn’t party much after her death. I still came over to hold my
friend as she sobbed big heaving sobs. He stayed in his room.

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I’m 33 now and chances are that the picture has been deleted. I tried
finding this person on the other side of the planet one time. He doesn’t
have social media, except for a fitness tracking app which tells me he
cycles a lot and thinks “it’s not too shabby for a new dad.” I think he
works for a big finance firm and is loaded. He’s probably a decent person
and forgot the event, and I, ever took place.

Still, I felt (and feel) like a thing: used. I amounted to the evidence
of me, not the experience with me. Whatever sacred and cherished felt
like, this was not it. And I know those words--sacred and cherished–do
not often describe early sexual encounters. Still.

Documentation builds great societies, I scribbled in a high school
journal. When I died, when our society inevitably scattered into ash and
something unfathomable grew in its place, I wanted whoever came next
to find these pages as evidence that I existed. It’s clear that this fervent
journaling was a fear of death and disappearance. Maybe the brother had
those same fears and that’s why he had to prove to his friends that this
had happened, his sister’s drunk American friend had fallen into his bed.

Things are sacred and cherishable because they don’t last. There is
no reason to try to capture an illusive moment, like a young American
topless in your bed, or your children making a big eyed face you know
they’ll grow out of, or a purple sunset that only comes across as a harsh
pinhole in a mauvy sky. Does the earth feel like it's been stripped of its
ever present and ever fleeting beauty? Do our children? Did the adjuma
in the market? I do.

Jordan Souza is a writer and editor living in Portland, Oregon. She
serves as prose editor for Cordella Magazine and is currently at work on
a novel. Good books, coffee, and the sound of Pacific Northwest rain bring
her joy.

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MEDITATION ON OUR TRUE LOVE
STORY

by Sandra Perez

Your presence was unexpected today. Restlessness had taken residence
within me. Meditation was not my friend as the ache in my back, chores
to accomplish, and thoughts of other times and places alighted in my
mind like mosquitos. Lightly, they landed and struck before their sting
bristled to my consciousness. I tried to drop the thinking and refocus
each time on my breathing, like prayer, following the ritual steps of my
spiritual practice. Looking for answers to life’s mysteries buried deep
within my soul. Then, I felt a warmth reminiscent of the sun swiftly
rising behind me, radiating toward me, hugging me. Instantly your face
popped into my consciousness, I smiled. I knew that heat was you. I
was not afraid. Fear was never known to me when you lifted, twirled,
and supported me in the light of a hundred viewers.

As I fell deeper inside myself today, listening for your voice, our
long-ago time together rose in my misty memory as snapshots of intense
emotions. I have grown older although presently, I find you as I’d come
to know you then, a young, sensitive Texas boy, full of dreams and talent.
You had looks to melt my heart, while naiveté colored your perfect aura.
You were more to me than a dance partner.

Was it 1972 or 73? My jaw drops open as you stroll into the dance
studio. I detect a slight limp in your gait. I swear I see the rays of
the Divine shining behind you, illuminating your layered, shaggy hair
framing your perfect face. My knees grow a bit wobbly as I eye your
long bushy, blonde sideburns, and sensually tight bell bottom jeans.

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Panic overwhelms me. Will I, a plain little girl from Buffalo, be beautiful
enough next to you, confident enough to star with you?

Our first rehearsal, you extend your open palm to me. I spiral into
you on my pink satin pointe shoes, bodies touching, eyes meeting,
breath close. Tiny vibrations slither through me. My heart is beating
like a baby bird in flight training. Our space together even now revealing
itself. A peaceful dwelling, nonetheless, full of delight. Sparks leaping. I
see us, two young artists honing our craft, sensing our style, dreaming
the dream, creating our careers. We are two young lovers, wondering
what love really is.

We are dancing, flowing in seamless harmony. You lead me with
your sure but tender grasp, your ardent commitment to every step,
every moment. As one, we transport to the enchanted whereabouts
of ephemeral speed, and grace, where time seems to stop and yet it is
carrying us faster than a bullet. We are flying. Two souls melting into
love, life, and luscious movements of grace and beauty. Melding into
each other, sparks igniting, everybody smiling, shining our most pure
light together, elevating those around us. I remember magic.

As we improvise to the music, aware only of our bliss, people clear the
discotheque’s dance floor in my hometown. Disco ball flashing, I close
my eyes; I am whirling high above your head. Voices of awe join me
on my merry-go-round, applause fill the air. At dance’s end I elegantly
slide down the front of your taunt body as you lower me, making sure
I will not fall. My toes deftly, softly, touch down first before my spirit.
I aspire to stay there gazing in your green eyes, in your strong arms,
for an eternity. Breathless, we glide off the dance floor lined along both
sides by the others. We nod our heads to them bowing, your eyes meet
mine in perfect time; we gasp in disbelief at what we just created. I
remember confidence.

We are dancing down the sidewalk, Singing in the Rain, with Niagara
Falls at our side. People stop and watch us. Carefree and young, we pay
them no mind. Our laughter reaches new heights, drifting on the mist
of the cascading waters. Our feet are lacing down the walkway, elbows
entwined, reminiscent of our feelings for each other. Our heartbeats are
synchronized, your feelings mirroring mine, our rhythms blend as one.

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Hopping on the upbeat, flat footed, slapping puddles on the downbeat,
leaping over obstacles of life on every note. I remember Joy.

Camping in the mountains outside of Buffalo NY, we find refuge
between shows. Giggles rise in my throat as I watch you carefully place
your beers to cool in the stream near our campsite, a country boy at
heart. Gentle talk of the day’s work, our successes, and places to amend
our dances. Talk turns deep, and you are exposing inner secrets, hopes
and dreams, high school daze, how you got that limp, and your father’s
high expectations.

You gently unfold the story of your nickname, Buddy; your father
gave it to you. You adore him. You feel a heavy need to please, strong fears
of inadequacy march into the conversation like ants, one following the
other toward their destination, only mindful of their Queen’s command.
Suddenly I sense your need for introspection. I feel your moodiness. I
can see the murky demons you speak of, and I hold you tight. I feel you
calm. I remember compassion.

Night descends, tightly holding an umbrella you stalk the animal
intruder who stole our coffee cake, our breakfast, our nourishment.
I see your bravery, a responsibility to protect. I remember tenderness.

Your generous hands, smooth as silk yet strong as iron, are stroking
my legs. Legs tired from dancing magic on the stage with you. I feel
our lithe, muscular bodies holding each other. Curves of hips, elbows
nestling in arms, legs wrapping around our souls, fitting perfectly within
each other. Too innocent to go too far, yet bare-skin close enough to
feel your heartbeat touching mine. Heady scents of pine tree sap, the
last of the smoke from our little campfire drifting into our cocoon, your
cleanly aromatic Yardley cologne. People nearby. We do not notice.
Our absolute oneness conceives a spell, and there is nothing but Us. I
remember passion.

My family gathers in our miniscule living room, mesmerized by your
presence. You begin to sing, as you play the guitar. Your eyes sprout rays
of love toward me. I hear your sweet accent dripping with southern
Houston charm, engulfing us all with droplets of honey. I hear songs
meant just for me. My heart jumps like the winged footwork of my
dances. I remember flirtation.

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We are sitting in the back seat of my father’s Buick Skylark. He is
driving us to the YMCA where you are staying. Your car rental has been
returned; I don’t drive yet. I kiss you even though he may be watching.
Our time together is growing shorter. I see a little box in your hand and
my heart takes a leap. It can’t be, I think to myself. There you are the
most beautiful man, looking like a boy, all weak and stuttering. There it
is, I see a tiny opal ring with diamond sparkles surrounding it. Delicate
like me. Delicate like Us. You ask me for my hand in marriage, my heart
is melting. You tell me that you asked my father first. I see his head lift
ever so slightly in the front seat, behind the wheel, pretending not to
hear us, String of Pearls playing on the radio.

I say no. We each have our own compass to follow. I am in college;
you are going to New York City to begin a dance career. Pain from your
eyes reflects to me. You drop your head; you tell me to please keep the
ring. I can’t see Us at all. I remember heartache.

We are saying goodbye at the airport in Buffalo. You are shifting
your weight from side to side, nervous energy. Rays of light once again
surrounding you, backlit by the huge runway windows. I feel the pressure
of our pain. The beautiful you is vulnerably standing here once more; my
heart is breaking. Taking in your scent one more time, I slowly release
you from our galvanizing hug. Hands slowly glide down our arms as
our fingertips catch each other’s, coupling together, savoring one last
moment of touch, sparks re-igniting. I now see, it was the last thing I
felt of you.

You hand me a letter, eight pages to be exact. I still have it tucked
away. I only share it with a precious few. It reflects you, an artist, a man
of deep emotion looking for true love. Love that illuminates one’s soul
with color and light. You told me this is what I gave you.

We never saw each other again. I cried deeply when you died, but
relieved for your absence of pain. It was way too soon.

You were one of the good ones Patrick Buddy Swayze. You rendered
me beautiful.

I remember Love.

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Professor Emerita Sandra M. Perez, Towson University Department of
Dance began studying creative writing after retiring from a lifelong career
as a professional dancer, and arts educator. She lives in Maryland among
nature where she continues to pursue her lifelong passion of telling stories
through movement and words. Her stories Wilderness and Light were
recently published in the international literary magazine “Adelaide.”

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THE ART OF OUR NECESSITIES
by Melissa Knox

After my husband died, my realtor cast his eye down the length of our
living room, which could have worked as several bowling alleys, and
nodded.

“I can do this,” he said with a practiced eye, adjusting that tan
Burberry plaid scarf he always wore. The house had begun to remind
me of Norma Desmond slinking down the stairs, readying herself for a
close-up. Our realtor played the role of her devoted butler so completely
the buyers never knew they were being whisked off, caught up as they
were in the faded grandeur of the place. Picturesquely gabled, our North
German home retained a certain bizarre glamor—also gutters housing
mice, dead leaves, and one time a squirrel who rambled his way into
the attic insulation.

The way our bearded, boyish realtor, a Banana Republic fashion plate,
waved his arms toward our bare-bones living room with its dented,
damaged furniture, its faded family photos—as if our rustic, rundown
place were the Taj Mahal—proved hypnotic. At least to the buyers, the
husband shooting his wife an appeasing grin, the wife growling that she
wanted the house this red-hot minute. “This one was okay, Schatzie”
his eyes pleaded. Her shoulders were still hunched, her brow furrowed.
The agent pounced.

“And look!” he crowed, turning their attention toward our drab kitchen
like Noah to dry land. “You’ll get the stove, the refrigerator, the sink, the
dishwasher, the table!” He paused, letting them feast their eyes on blue
tiles peppered with nicks and dents glossed over with non-matching
blue nail polish, the microwave that hadn’t quite given up the ghost

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after twenty years, the dishwasher that groaned like a woman in labor,
the smeared windows from which one could glimpse the overgrown
garden and the snaggle-toothed fence, collapsing in places. Just before
the antiquity of our appliances registered in the wife’s eyes, the agent
breathed, “You know how long it takes for a kitchen to arrive—and
here you have one ready-made! You won’t have to eat take-out pizza for
weeks!” He swept his arm toward the sink like a proud farmer showing
off a prize pig. The wife’s brow un-furrowed. The husband stopped
trembling. The two of them giggled over the other house they’d bought
without a kitchen, the tedious weeks of pizza delivery.

When our realtor had three bidders and one went low, he told me,
with a nod and a wink, how he was stringing the low bidder along,
telling him the other buyer had to get back to him: "It’s driving him
crazy!" (Chuckle, rubbing his hands with glee.) He scheduled showings
so that arriving couples always saw one or two others leaving. In silky
tones, he pointed all prospective buyers toward the grungy nook in our
living room he had dubbed, “a lovely dining area." With a magisterial
wave at the crayon stains on the wall, the pockmarked hardwood from
years of children banging chair legs, toys, tap shoes on the floor, he
hugged himself as if it gave him joy to stand there. In that ultra-smooth
voice, he repeated: “a lovely dining area.” He had the genius to murmur
again, “Yes, a lovely dining area,” as if it pained him not to be able to
sit down in it and consume a meal. “Lovely,” he sighed one last time,
all but letting a tear fall. From the way his victims were nodding and
smiling, I could see that he could sell dirty, slushy New York snow to
arctic polar bears. All the while I was thinking: “That’s where the baby
wrote her name on the wall. That’s where we took a Christmas photo
of all three kids on the rocking horse. That’s where the oval portrait of
Josef ’s parents hung.”

On the landing of our lovely but decrepit home that has survived the
energetic childhoods of two boys and a girl is a sunken board, the result
of the too-heavy tread of a very large babysitter. We’d covered the thing
with a plank. My husband couldn’t believe the kids’ favorite caretaker
could damage so much, but I figured she was probably chasing one of
them on one of the many occasions on which he endangered himself.
Even the agent told me, “This looks bad!” and urged me to get someone
to fix it. When it became clear that I could not do so without incurring
major expense, he spun some yarn about the unusual style, very historic,

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with which the boards had been joined. He warbled that the house had
“real character.”

Like any good hypnotist, he could convince a person that an apple
was really an orange. He could have been pointing to a steaming pile of
horse manure and, with an expression of wonder and delight, convinced
folks that here was real find. An antique. The genuine article. He knew
how to make people want something desperately, and then make what
they wanted hard to get. “The art of our necessities is strange,” King
Lear said, “And can make vile things precious.”

This charming young man brought over garden gloves when my son
needed to mow the lawn, gave me the exact phrase to say when my
movers tried to weasel out of the necessary date, and promised, over and
over, that I would pay “nothing.” The buyer was to pay all, and I must
not worry about a thing. He would take care of everything.

The moment did finally arrive when I was to bring all sets of keys
over and check all meters, so that gas, water and electric bills would be
switched to the new owner. I was looking forward until an email arrived
from our realtor. “Dear Melissa,” it read, followed by another “dear” for
each one of my children. He thanked me for the trust and confidence
that I had placed in him. He was very happy that he was able to help me
and my family in such a “difficult” sale. Putting up our family home for
sale after my “tragic loss” must have been a “roller-coaster of feelings”
for me. He was even more honored that I had “invited” him “on this
journey.”

When I type this over now, I wonder how I didn’t vomit on my
keyboard. Instead, I felt stunned—but curious. What on earth was he
talking about? Subsequent paragraphs boasted of his pride in achieving
a “staggering sale price”—perfectly true in these buyer-beware COVID-
distorted times. He pointed out that he’d done far better than his
competitor, a large real estate company. As our contract stipulated—and
Germany, the location of my former family house, lives for iron-clad
contracts—I owed him nothing. “The buyer pays. You never pay,” he
had whispered repeatedly, in tones I found faintly embarrassing at the
time. But now, because he had put “a lot of time and effort” into the
sale and transaction, because of his “very effective sales strategies” and
because “not many” agents would have put “that much time and effort

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and consideration” into us, he wanted “kindly” to request a bonus. He
wanted 1% of that sales price, because he thought he had done “some
magic” for us, and was hoping some of that magic would affect him. Did
he actually say that? Ladies and gentlemen, he did. Even though he’d
used the word “kindly” three times in three sentences, even though the
thing reads as though he’d googled the right phrases for a condolence
card. I started to feel guilty and wonder if I should pay up. Never mind
what he’d made off the buyers—enough to buy an Alfa Romeo and a
couple of diamond rings.

The man was working magic all right, since I continued to think
of him as scouts-honor friendly. I doubted myself. Would I be stiffing
him? I’d given him a nice bottle of champagne and a New York mug. I
couldn’t stand my urge to see his request as reasonable. Our contract, I
reminded myself, said otherwise, and I knew enough to appreciate the
sacred authority of the German contract. The amount he wanted, when
I did the math, was stupefying. On top of the four percent he’d gotten
off the buyer, he wanted one percent from me? Friends whom I asked
sucked in their breath. “Does he know you are a widow? He knows
you have three children? And cancer?” Well, yes, and I remembered the
casual-seeming questions that led to my revealing these things. But as
I write, the steaming pile of horse manure, doesn’t seem to stink—and
that’s where he worked his wizardry. I still see the kind young man (he
said he was “kind!”) politely requesting, like a harmless schoolboy, his
reward.

An American living in Germany, I often misread signals. In pre-
COVID times, I forgot the polite, obligatory handshake, and felt
bamboozled by the lust for precision (it’s not unusual for ten minutes
of a department meeting to evaporate in disagreements about whether
point 1a or point 1b is under discussion). Was this request for 1% of
the sales some strange German custom? The agent had said at the very
beginning that he often remained good friends with the people for
whom he sold houses.

When it was time to complete the sale with the handover of keys
and the signing of a document, he said he could come over to my new
place and pick them up—“I wanted to save you having to return to the
house,” he texted, as if doing so would break my heart. First, I agreed.
Then I panicked, because seeing him alone meant telling him to his

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face that I did not want to grant his request. It seemed much better to
surround myself with other people—like my kids and the buyers—so
as to avoid the moment.

Over to the house we tramped in the snow, me with all the keys plus
what I was pretty sure were my office set, but I hadn’t had time to check.
I’d try them on the front door to make sure. And I did. There hovered
the realtor to the left of my shoulder, like Donald Trump behind the
debating Hillary Clinton. The owner and I sorted the keys, signed the
document making gas, water and electric his responsibility, but my
office keys vanished. It was as though the house had swallowed them,
and they may have fallen through the lining of my coat, but I know I
was dreading the moment when I’d be on the sidewalk with the realtor,
waving goodbye and saying “no.”

I must have sounded ladylike and timid. “We think you’re a fantastic
agent,” I trembled in front of the gate. “But I have massive expenses
and—” I faltered, watching his expression go from boy scout to serial
killer. King Lear was right. The art of our necessities is strange. This vile
thing who seduced our buyers into seeing our lopsided pre-war Addams
Family mansion as a palace bilked me into thinking of him as my pal,
the guy who always had our back. But even in this moment of having
to see his face shift, I didn’t back down. Instead, I faked a smile, turned
my back to him, and walked away.

Melissa Knox’s recent writing appears in FAIR: Foundation Against
Intolerance & Racism on Substack, in Areo magazine, and in ACM.
Find out more about Melissa’s work here: https://melissaknoxcom



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GOING TO INDIA
by Lynne Golodner

The Leaving
Between the tropical forest and the Dehradun airport, men watched
planes land and leave. Arms overhanging the fence, chins on hands,
they stared.

What did they see? People coming and going when they could not.
Stories winging away in the vast sky. The remarkability of flight itself,
heavy and hot but lifting as easily as a butterfly.

My bags were heavy with everything I carried home. I hadn’t wanted
to visit India, but when a client invited me to accompany her yoga tour,
to write blogs and photograph the journey, I couldn’t say no. A free
trip to the other side of the world! A place I would never otherwise go,
away from my young children, into the humid heat of the Himalayan
foothills.

I didn’t sleep for a month before the trip. A mystic therapist told me
to close my eyes and identify the fear. I was raised in comfort, taught
to travel as a tourist, watch life from a distance. I don’t know how to
get close.

It surprised me when, on the tarmac, I swallowed tears. I didn’t want
to leave. I did not yearn to return to my easy life. In India I had found
a contentment, a calm, that eluded me at home.

Do we all dream of something different? Could the swift current of
the Ganges and the abundant stars in the night sky be enough for me?
Or was it only beautiful because I could leave it?

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The Place
Sometimes a place changes you. A place you never dreamed of

visiting, never even knew about, but when you go, the very feel of the
earth beneath your feet tells a story you want to believe. Of course, it’s
easy (and dangerous) to fantasize that life is better, easier, more beautiful
and fragrant, in a distant place.

Cliché – an overused phrase that lacks original thought, a stereotype.
A white woman boards a train in India, clutching her backpack and
camera bag, squatting in the first-class bathroom to pee over the hole in
the floor, urine streaming onto the tracks. Looks askance at the legless
man pulling up the aisle before the train leaves the station, hand out,
eyes begging her to see him, to drop money in his palm. She stares at
the back of the seat in front of her. Like she’d been taught all her life,
as her parents whisked her away on colonial vacations to hole up in all-
inclusive resorts with tall walls to keep out the natives. As her parents’ car
whizzed past a man on the side of a freezing highway in her hometown,
his sign claiming he had a family to feed and would take anything she
could give. And even as she thinks hometown, she knows that isn’t
entirely true, because she lived on the outskirts of the dangerous city,
in the safe and sleepy suburbs, and when the locked car ventured south
of 8 Mile, she knew to look everywhere else: the gleaming skyline by a
fast-moving river, the radio dial, the interior temperature of the brand
new car, so she could ignore how the man’s knuckles blazed red from
too long in the cold.
Had I learned nothing? I came seeking transformation but at a
distance, perfectly fulfilling the elitist trope that I knew so well: willing
and able to experience a tourist-safe version of India while heart-crying
at the poverty around me. What did I do to change it other than sponsor
the education, room and board of three orphans that I hugged near
Lakshman Jula? I wanted to bring them all home, give them a different
life, but that was impossible. We can only change our station slightly, if
at all, and besides, who says my way would be better for them?
I say I changed when I went to India, when I went to Bali, when I went
to Israel, when I kissed the pink stones and believed they could absorb

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my prayers. The change is in the going, in walking down unfamiliar
streets. I am privileged enough to go, and when I carry revelations
home in my bursting suitcases, I don’t think about how my whiteness
allowed this transformation. I don’t think about how I expect everyone
to speak to me in English, to understand my every word. I don’t think
about how careful I was to not swallow shower water in fear of ending
up sick, my delicate stomach unable to process foreign microbes. I don’t
think about how I can’t live as easily in a new place as I might imagine.

The writer Jamaica Kincaid says in A Small Place, “Every native
of every place is a potential tourist, and every tourist is a native of
somewhere. Every native everywhere lives a life of overwhelming and
crushing banality and boredom and desperation and depression…every
native would like to find a way out.”

I believe I have seen the world, but I have only seen a tiny corner of
it, a whitewashed, neat and clean, tidy corner of a world I can never
inhabit because I must return home to sleep safe behind locked doors
and under old quilts. It doesn’t take long to absorb back into the fluffy
comfort of my privilege. In fact, that is something I never leave, clinging
to it in the darkness, dialing its number as my emergency contact.

If you can’t afford to go anywhere distant and different, does that
mean you can’t open your mind and let new ideas drip in? When I travel,
I gain perspective, realize what matters (being good, doing good, loving
my fellow humans) and what doesn’t (racing to acquire more things,
earning ever more money, filling my calendar until I pray for someone
to cancel on me).

I became a cliché in India. Finding meaning in the old stones of
an empty ashram, Beatles lyrics for graffiti on the walls of crumbling
buildings. The words of white men spray-painted across a place no
longer inhabited. I was the blackbird, capturing pictures of leaves and
stones arranged to say all you need is love. In my hired cars and clean
hotels, eating food approved for western stomachs (that was the phrase
they used, I swear), carrying a Z-pack in case I accidentally sipped local
water, choking down antibiotics to thwart fever, chase away chills. Back
home, I never listened to the Beatles. What made me find salvation in
their words in the tangled hills of northern India?

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The Difference
In India, whole families balance on motor bikes, toss paper plates

onto the street when they finish eating. Beside street vendors selling
sweets, people kneel in prayer. Rivers promise redemption: the faithful
wade in fully clothed, pulling the water over themselves, hoping for
rebirth.

In my home, prayers are private, immersions quiet. We designate days
for worship and spend the rest running. We think our way is better, that
we understand what makes a good life.

I never wanted to visit India. Far from home and clogged with people,
I was afraid of the stories in my head, of garbage and beggars, oblivious
to the same in my hometown.

But going changed me. I became humble, reflective. I poured warm
oil on my hair to soften it, used less toilet paper because there was less
to use. I became OK with everything: rising at 4 a.m., wearing the same
clothes again and again, eating soupy lentils in a squat at the Golden
Temple, peeing over a hole in a first-class train speeding toward the
highest mountains, walking rain-wet streets in a quiet dawn without
word or thought. I cloaked myself in the quiet and saw that a good life
does not need clutter obscuring the view of loping hills. That stripping
away everything might actually be the first step to understanding.
The Fantasy

Because I was her guest, I followed the yoga instructor’s every step.
I’ll call her J. She insisted I share her hotel room, trail after her before
the dawn and invert my body into downward dog for 11 minutes, until
I grew nauseous. She called the shots; I merely recorded them.

“Maybe I’ll find a husband here,” J giggled, her blond hair and golden
skin drawing the gaze of dark men who didn’t speak her language.
“Aren’t the turbans sexy?” She smiled as they whistled. Was it a fetish?
Objectification? Both sides dehumanizing, but ours was worse somehow.

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I had love in my life – a new husband and four young children. In
our shared room, she played mantra music on repeat to help her sleep.

“Will I ever find a love like you have?” she asked.
“I’m sure you will,” I replied. My father always said that people who
want to get married get married. I told her what she wanted to hear.
I didn’t say that I didn’t quite believe my father. Not everyone finds a
great love. Some people just make do with what they have. And, as the
leader of her American yoga community, she was adored, never known.
Infatuation doesn’t make for lasting bedfellows.
I wanted to tell her that pretending to be someone she’s not only
confuses the search. For self and for place. For a true definition of home.
I’d heard her backstory: raised Christian, WASP-y, one failed marriage,
three grown sons, long blond hair in waves down her back, a pierced
nose, a flat belly. She walked naked from the bed to the shower as if I
wouldn’t care. I had no choice; I was there on her dime.
What was she doing in white parachute pants and mala beads around
her neck? Someone else’s prayer necklace as her jewelry. Appropriating
another’s sacred tradition, bastardizing it like tourists do. Claiming it as
her new spiritual path. But that was a story I wouldn’t write, the yoga
instructor in all-white, hair twisted into a turban. A trip of pretending,
like all good voyages.
I sound bitter, maybe even unappreciative. Perhaps because J reminded
me too closely of my privileged upbringing, where I was taught to keep
my distance. I am grateful to her for taking me to a place I never wanted
to visit, for forcing me to face my fear of losing control, encouraging me
to learn a language I didn’t yet understand. In India, I bathed in milky
humility and came home quieter.
The Art of Believing
At the Golden Temple, I walked barefoot on cold marble. I had no
choice. They demand your shoes before you can go in. In my American
mind, I wondered if I’d get my shoes back at the end. In the Amrit

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Sarovar, the pool of nectar, fat orange koi waggled in the depths. Sikhs
welcome anyone who believes in God; 100,000 people visit daily.

I’m not sure I believe, but no one asked. What is it to believe? And
what is God? Would they really turn me away if I said I was uncertain?
But, come on, people! No one can know a God in the sky, a deity we
can’t see, waving magic hands over all the tiny people like marionettes
on strings lifted and dropped down to the ruddy surface of an uneven
planet. This talk of God exhausts me. No one can really know, so why
make it a criteria for entry? Even the gatekeepers can’t be sure. Doubt
lurks in the dark corners of every mind. To doubt is human, to believe is
desperate. And anyway, we all say what we imagine others need to hear.

I have spent a lifetime searching for meaning in the mundane. I may
have found it in the simple task of watching the ghee pot, kneading
the dough for naan, a barefoot man squatting over a hot fire. Don’t his
thighs burn? His knees shake?

Or perhaps in the rhythmic chanting of the Guru. The thronging
mass snaking its way inside to listen and watch, scarves wrapped around
our heads. There are universal truths connecting us all, and modesty
is one of them. For a decade, I’d lived as an Orthodox Jew with my
first husband, covering my hair to fit into his world. When I left him,
I donated all my elegant and expensive hats, freeing my curls in the
bright sun.

But in India, I didn’t resent the mandate to cover up. It was temporary,
for one. I could don a costume, play a part. In Amritsar, I didn’t mind
wrapping my head. I can wear another person’s modesty just fine and
without complaint. It meant nothing to me, so I bundled up and
inched along in a caterpillar of people past chanting men, the rhythm
constant, the words a vibration. I could be obedient for a time. Holiness
a harmony pulsing.
The Point of It All

After the divorce, I took my children to different synagogues, seeking
wisdom and a place to belong. When I married Dan, we recited Jewish,
Native American and ancient Hindu blessings under my grandfather’s
prayer shawl, on the hottest day of summer. After, our children jumped
in the lake fully clothed, like the pilgrims by the Ganges.

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We joined a sprawling synagogue, but whenever we attended, someone
asked, “Are you new?” After four years of not being known, we left in
search of a place where we would be remembered.

I brought many things home from India. Wool blankets. Delicate
scarves and sheer, embroidered shirts. Two heavy statues shipped ahead:
one of Ganesh, remover of obstacles, and a Shiva Nataraja, lord of the
dance. They arrived a month after I did, Shiva broken, the deity severed
from its base of flames. I set the base in the garden where vegetation
overtook it, weeds and grass snaking through and around the licking
flames. I mounted Lord Shiva on the garage; he welcomes me home,
reminds me that it is possible to break free. Ganesh sits on the piano,
visible from my writing desk.

“You don’t pray to those statues, do you?” asked my ex-husband.
Why did he care? Why did he think he had the right to ask? And
why, even, did I answer?
“It’s not my religion,” I said. “But I see spirituality everywhere.”
After that, he refused to enter my house, waiting for the children
outside in the driving rain.
There was so much I didn’t say to him, and I’m not sure he would
have heard my words anyway. Like, all people live in similar ways, even
if we call our gods by different names. I have the privilege of believing
what I want, of picking and choosing. When I was married to him, I
recited prayers, swaying like Orthodox Jews are supposed to, begging a
God I didn’t believe in to release me from doubt. I thought if I moved
my lips and whispered the words, answers would come. But there was
no bellowing voice, no lightning strike.
These days, my prayers are trees blowing in the wind, rivers and birds,
deer prints in the snow.
The Transformation
I left Amritsar by train in the purple-dark, city lights infiltrating
the dawn. Breakfast was milky chai, chopped fruit and thin pancakes
doused in honey and coconut. We pulled suitcases past sleeping bodies

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on the cold concrete, on benches, under shuttered awnings, in the
shadows of locked doors. Sleeping bodies everywhere, exposed to the
elements. I wrapped my expensive shawl around me.

In first class, a bullet hole in the window spidered into a spiral of
cracked glass. Eight hours to Haridwar, and then a car bumped us
along winding mountain roads to Rishikesh. Rain poured down, and
our driver wiped fog from the windshield with a rag.

At the hotel, the proprietor draped marigold garlands around our
necks. You are on a journey of spiritual evolution, he said. You are
seekers. This will be a transformation. The next day would bring bright
sun and monkeys in the trees.

For the right price, you can hire a private guide to take you through
the abandoned ashram where the Beatles communed with the Maharishi.
The rain-scented streets became familiar. The moving waters of the
Ganges like kisses against the banks. I wore baggy pants and fitted
shirts, wrapped my hair in a scarf and danced like I had nowhere else
to be. At sunset, silent monks in orange robes led firelight ceremonies.

Every day, I recorded words and phrases and ideas, the details of
wildflowers and damp alleys, glass-fronted shops and winding avenues.
After two weeks, I boarded a plane for home. During a layover in Delhi,
I ate in a restaurant overlooking the tarmac. There was news of a plane
lost over the South China Sea. The world bustled like I remembered.
Life became immediate again. I spread butter on a roll and wrote in a
journal as planes lifted into the sky.

A former journalist, Lynne Golodner is the author of 8 books and
thousands of articles and essays. With an MFA in poetry from Goddard
College, she lives in Huntington Woods, Michigan with her husband
and a rotating combination of her 4 kids (ages 16-20), and works as a
marketing consultant and writing coach, helping authors build their brands
and promote their work. As host of the Make Meaning Podcast, Lynne
interviews authors and those in the publishing realm on the stories of our
time.

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HIGH SCHOOL ANGST
by Joshua Abel

When I entered high school I had a full beard and a medical condition
(a seizure disorder) that wasn't under control with medication. In junior
high I was called Abraham Lincoln because of the beard, however no
one knew about the seizures. I didn't even tell my friends about it. It was
embracing when I had a seizure. I kept to myself and hid my feelings
about it. I didn't want to go out in public much because I was afraid of
people's reaction if they saw me have a seizure. One time at home I had
just climbed a flight of stairs. When I reached the top, I had a seizure
and fell down the flight of stairs (I didn't hurt myself then). On another
occasion I had a seizure and ended up scraping my head on the concrete
sidewalk. I ended up with a cut to my head. The seizures usually only
lasted for about 10-20 minutes.

My sophomore year of high school one of the classes I had was driver’s
education. I needed a note from my doctor to take the course (because
of the seizures). In my state at that time I had to wait one seizure-free
year before I could get my driver's license. I didn't get my driver's license
until I was 17 (I graduated high school at 17).

Years later I would drive a bus part-time for a non-profit. As part of
the DOT medical exam I needed a seizure exemption from the FMSA
(Federal Motor Safety Administration). I had one and the doctor who
performed the DOT medical stated in the 25 years he's been practicing
he's never seen one. He stated they don't give them out to much, and
I had one (that made me feel good). In 37 of driving up to that point I
had also never had a point on my driving record.

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I had an English teacher, Miss Hartley, my sophomore year who I
liked a lot. She took an interest in her students. A local newspaper used
to have a weekly football prediction contest during football season. I
would make my picks during her class sometime she would give me a
pick or two. Fortunately I didn't have a seizure in her class (I would
have felt so embarrassed if I had).

My junior year of high school the intensity and frequency of the
seizures increased. I missed a lot of time from school then. One class
was Paramedical biology with Mr. Sworgley One day in his class I had
a seizure (I felt embarrassed and ashamed). I was sent to the nurse's
office. As I was going downstairs Mr. Sworgley said to me I didn't
know (I didn't want anyone to know about). That year there were 2
teachers I had who were really a bright spot for me. A Math teacher,
Mrs. Greenwalt and a English teacher, Miss Neidigh They both took
an interest in their students. One day in Mrs. Greenwalt’s class I had
brought in a copy of Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue and I remember
asking her if she would wear one of the swimsuits in it. She replied that
she didn't have the body for it (I felt so bad for her because I couldn't
understand how she could feel that way. To me she did have the body
for it.). I also knew how having a medical condition made me feel about
my body. One day in Miss Neidigh's class she shared with me how she
missed a day of school when she was growing up to go to a Beatle's
concert. Somehow to someone who wanted to go to school my lost time
didn't seem so bad. On another day in Miss Neidigh's class she shared
with me that she would have arguments with her brother-in-law (who
was a secret service agent) as to who had the more dangerous job. She
said she always told him he had a gun (at that time school shootings
were unheard of ).

My parents ended up taking me out of school for a couples of weeks
in April of that year so that doctors could run a number of tests on me.
Eventually my doctor found a medicine that controlled the seizures.

I was truly blessed to have teachers that took an interest in you. I
never got the chance to thank them and to tell them how much they
meant to me. I ended up reworking the lyrics to the song "To Sir With
Love" for them.

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Those school boys days of drills and writing skills are gone.
But in my mind they will still live on and on.
How do you thank someone who has taken you from pretension to
reading comprehension.
It isn't easy but I'll try.
If you wanted the sky
I would write across the sky in letters that would soar a thousand
feet high to Miss Neidigh and Miss Hartley with love.

The time has come For closing books and long last looks must end
And as I leave I know that I am leaving my best friend
A friend who taught me from fractions to functions
That's a lot to learn
What, what can I give you in return?
If you wanted the moon I would try to make a start
But I would rather you let me give my heart "To Mrs.Greenwalt love"

Recently I went on Facebook. I found Mrs. Greenwalt and messaged
her about it. I haven't gotten a response from her. I found a relative of
Miss Neidigh. who passed it along to her. She liked hearing from after
40+ years and finding out what a positive impact she had on me. She
also liked the reworked lyrics. I still don't know what happened to Miss
Hartley. She stopped teaching at my high school right after I graduated.
Miss Hartley wherever you are I hope you are well, and hope you know
the impact you had on me (Thank you).

After 43 years of driving I still don't have a point on my driving
record. I still have the beard only people call me Santa now (only the
hair color has changed)



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THE YEAR OF THE RAT BABY
by Ajit Dhillon

Written in Singapore 2021 during one of the many lockdowns
Our baby was born during the pandemic. In a heightened state of
lockdown. With a team of overeager nurses checking in constantly
because we were the only ones in the labor ward. In a foreign country
that according to all reports seemed to be far more civilised than what
might one day her homeland, her stamped country of citizenship—the
land of the free and the home of the brave—the good ole U S of A which
was devolving into a mess of partisan politics over race, mask-wearing,
and lockdowns all presided over by the orange man.

She didn’t have grandparents or relatives who could come see her. It
was only us—the three of us now, newly alone together. Ajit, Indian-
American/Dirty Jerzey-iite. Marie-Claire, my Hong-Konger/Kiwi wife.
And introducing Nina, a Gemini born in the Year of the Rat. We were a
new family unit whose own loving family had been rendered theoretical
and digital in nature. We tried to navigate and manage as best we could.
Over the next twelve months, I’d learn parenting is just pretending. It’s
a lot of hoping for the best. A wait and see while living with the anxiety
that you probably screwed up, that you could have done it better nags at
you. Then, when you finally make a plan to fix things like her sleeping
or eating and the plan starts working and everything’s going smoothly
and you start exhaling and feeling like you got a handle on things,
something else happens to disrupt it all like her teeth coming in or a
development leap or an unexpected thunderstorm that startles her into
a crippling(for her parents) death cry at 3 in the morning.

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Parenting a child for the first time is a lot like existing in a pandemic.
There’s a sense of isolation. A fear of the unknown. And the general
sense that slowly but surely, you’re learning to live with these new set of
rules—both self-imposed and forced upon you.

My daughter is part of a new generation of COVID babies. Born in
the year of the rat, she like all her fellow mischiefs arrived to a world of
socially distanced covered faces and family that existed only as pixelated
smiles via FaceTime. I’ve often wondered what that means or more
precisely, what will that mean for her in the future? How will it shape
how she sees the world and exists within it?

I find myself waffling between optimism and cynicism. In many ways,
the situation has exposed our worst impulses. We’re selfish. We’re unable
to think of the greater good unless it’s forced upon us. We are subject to
the whims and policies of a bunch of confused bureaucrats who either
go too far or not far enough. We spend all day talking and talking and
debating and criticising that it often feels like we’re trapped in a Socratic
dialogue that ends with a headache and sense of profound ennui.

And yet, nothing cements what really matters like a disaster. Life.
Family. Love. Money. Time. All the things this thing took away from
us. I’ve never been apart from my family for longer and I’ve never
needed them more. I know I’m not alone in this and by no means am
I trying to portray myself as a victim. My wife and I have pontificated
endlessly after the baby’s gone to bed over a glass or three of red wine
about our anger and frustration but also about what we want from the
future. We live in a city, a city-state in fact, and I look around at the
endless apartment blocks, interspersed between tropical trees so lush and
green that it makes your eyes pop, and I imagine these conversations
circulating across millions of couches here and around the world as we
all figure out who or what we’re going to be after this is all over. At the
heart of these conversations is a single idea that I think that drives a lot
of human behaviour and one that may ultimately prove to be a fallacy,
but damnit if us COVID parents aren’t going to try for it—we just want
things to be easier.

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But there I am in the hospital room in June of 2020 at the height
of lockdown wearing a blue surgical mask, which I slip below my chin
when the time comes and no one says anything because the human
experience trumps regulations even in a country like Singapore where
rule following is an enlightened act of civility reinforced by the dread
undercurrent of the watchful eye.

And they hand us our baby. Holding her, swaying back and forth
while she’s all swaddled up, as she sees the world with eyes that can barely
see, I feel a rush of love and possibility. It’s the type of feeling men swear
oaths over. To protect forever. To always be there. To remember this
forever and forever cherish this—her. It’s the type of feeling that makes
it hard to understand how little human life seems to be valued based on
a history of warfare, inequality, and general indifference.

Again, I waffle. Being a father’s got me thinking that there is actually
something profound to being a human. Seeing the mixture of you and
your partner emerge in the form of a new person. As my baby, now
eleven months old would say—“wow wow wow wow wow.” The amount
of sacrifice it takes to being a parent and the fact that so many people(not
everyone of course, by every measure there are some truly awful parents
out there) gave up so much for their children must mean something
about us as a species that goes beyond the biological need to propagate.
Our narratives, our lives, and our future will only continue to exist
through our children. So we better be good to them.

The other side of the waffle. Despite so many people being parents
and caring for humans through sickness and milestones, there is still
so much suffering in the world. As Nina was born, children were being
separated at the US-Mexican border from their parents only to be pent
up in detention centers. Nearly three millions Syrian children have been
displaced from their home and many of them continue to languish
without steady access to education, food, water, or a country to call
home. I can’t wrap my head around the idea that any parent would
intentionally enact, let alone enforce policies that even had the potential
to harm a child. How could you hold an innocent child in your arms,
completely bereft of any ill will or intention and not to think to yourself,
holy shit—life is valuable and the most precious thing we have?

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The amount of cognitive dissonance required must be reserved for
only the most heinous. And yet I know that’s wishful thinking. I think
far more people are capable of harm than we like to think possible. I
think it means the positive connotation reserved for the word ‘humanity’
needs to be revoked. I think it means we’re fucked—doomed to living
out and reading about individual stories of triumph and the enduring
quality of the human spirit when as a collective we are on our way to an
early death by whatever disease metaphor best fits our condition—you
decide. I’m picking heart failure. Too on the nose—okay, cancer. Too
direct—yeah. COVID-19. Has to be. We’re on a ventilator with a family
waiting at home, a family too busy arguing over whether or not we’re
even sick to notice when we finally kick the bucket and flatline our way
out of this sad blue rock.

Now, I’m one of those individual heart-warming stories. I mean, I’m
not going to raise a baby cynically. Flannery O’Connor was once asked
why she wrote such depressing stories and she shrugged the comment
off by responding that the act of writing in itself is an act of hope. That’s
what a child is. It’s a chance to do better. So even as we think, shit, the
world has gone to shit, there’s still a kid out there who represents the
side of us that refuses to submit to that reality.

I spend a lot of time taking Nina on walks. As she sits in the stroller,
I name things. The tree is green. The grass is green. A lot of things are
green as it turns out. The bird goes tweet tweet. Open the door. Close
the door. Did you see the doggy? We live on this street. The houses
are the street. People live in the houses. I exaggerate the words I deem
important. As strangers pass us by I lower my voice. Some people look
at Nina and smile, saying hello either through word or gesture. Some
people whisper a word to their friend, so cute. Some people ignore her
completely like she doesn’t exist. They usually meet my eyes after they’ve
failed to meet my daughter’s. And even though my mouth is covered, I
let them know, in unspoken terms, that I see them, really see them and
the rot in their insides.

It’s too expensive for us to own a car in Singapore so we walk a lot
or take taxis/Grabs(the Asian Uber), or public transport. I’ve learned a
lot about people from buses. Nina doesn’t much care for the bus. She

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gets antsy after about ten minutes. Maybe it’s the starting and stopping.
She does a lot of people watching, but soon gets bored. We have to get
Mr. F(F is for Fox) to dance for her and that calms her for about thirty
seconds. I have become the parent with the kid making everyone else
miserable. But what I’ve seen in these moments is that, for the most
part, people actually don’t care. In fact, more than once, my wife’s been
holding Nina in her arms to calm her while a bunch of random strangers
make all kinds of goofy faces to try and help. It doesn’t hurt that Nina’s
cute as hell. It takes a village and, in rare moments, it feels like the
village understands.

The village also likes to offer unsolicited advice designed to admonish
and tap into every parents’ fear—you are doing a shitty job of raising
your kid. In the supermarket by the fridge section: it’s too cold, put a
blanket on your baby. When we go out for a walk when it’s sunny: it’s
too hot for walking. We live in Singapore. 85 miles north of the equator.
It’s always hot. When it’s raining—cover your baby. But we’re going
to the bus stop. It’s a block away. It’s only just started to rain. I’m not
a bad parent, I swear. Then there’s the inevitable barrage of questions
when meeting other parents that make you feel like you’re on a first date
on, a terrible one at that, when you fail to live up to the expectations.
Questions like—what school is she enrolled in, is she walking, how
many words can she say, is she learning Mandarin? When I say, “she’s a
baby,” I’m met with that inevitable swallow, a painful nod, and a weak
smile that says in no uncertain terms, there will not be a second date.
Oh Nina, Mommy and Daddy are very sorry for being introverts who
hate meeting new people and who fail all their tests when we do.

But the thing is Nina is doing all sorts of amazing things all the
time. If you ask her where her head is, she pats it. Same with her nose,
ears, and tummy. We’re working on mouth and eyes right now. She’s
obsessed with lights and points to every one she sees. When we pass a
bird, she grunts at them. At the zoo, she ignores elephants and white
tigers and giraffes and instead loves the turtles, specifically the long-
necked ones. She has the biggest blue eyes you’ve ever seen like anime
eyes, perfectly round and wondrous. She never really learned to crawl
and she’s not walking yet, but damn my girl loves to cruise. With her
little arms extended on the couch, she’ll walk back and forth, dropping
toys on the floor, picking them up, slapping her hands on the cushions,

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squealing at random intervals. She’s stepped thousands and thousands
of steps without getting bored as if there’s a whole world of possibility
from cushion one to cushion four. And best of all, when we ask her to
say, “Mama…Nina, can you say Mama?” she gets a little small grin and
twinkle in her eye like she’s up to something, stares straight ahead and
says, “Dada.”

Not that anyone sees that side of Nina. It’s just for Mommy and
Daddy and our local supermarket cashier. Once, she performed for an
enthusiastic set of nurses at the paediatricians office who couldn’t get
over the fact that when you tell Nina, “Strong,” she clenches her hands
into fists and squeezes till her whole face vibrates from the flex. They
clapped and cheered when they saw her. Which encouraged Nina to
do it more. Which made them laugh more. And on and on we went
till the bill and next appointments were made. For the most part, the
last year has seen us rotate among a series of restrictions regarding how
many people can gather, can eat together, can be near each other(at
least 1 meter apart). And it’s put a whole damper on socialising, not
that we were great with it to begin with. Now, at one years old, when
a stranger enters the house, Nina gets afraid. She cries and demands to
be held and lays her head flat on our chest, which she only ever does
when she’s super tired. Part of its the normal stranger danger. Part of it
is the fact that she never got to really spend extended time with anyone
else. It was supposed to be the grandparents, but they can’t visit us here
and if we went to visit them there, we’d be subjected to 14-21 days of
quarantine upon return(that is, if they let us back in the country). But
my job is here. It pays well. Supports our new unit. I can’t just up and
leave. Although we’ve talked and thought about it, constantly.

I told my Mom, Marie-Claire was pregnant over FaceTime. I’d
never seen her so happy. A spontaneous smile as she clapped her hands
and rocked back and forth with joy. “I’ve waited so long for this,” she
said. It’s her first grandkid. We’d already been married five years and
my Mom had me when she much younger. Just like me, she was away
from home when she gave birth to her children, my older sister and me.
Instead of being born in India, we were born in the US. Nina, instead
of being born in America, was born in Singapore. I consider myself
Indian-American, but in some ways I’m really American—I love football
and burgers and politics and even know the words to Don McLean’s

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“American Pie.” In no ways do I imagine that Nina will be Singaporean.
I’ve lived here six years and there are beautiful things about this place
from the food to nature to safety, but after six years I also feel no closer to
being a part of this culture. There is an expat culture and a Singaporean
culture and never the twain shall meet.

I don’t know if I’ll ever move back to America. I’m not opposed to
it, but I’m not driven by the idea either. The seemingly random acts of
violence, the guns, they scare me. As do suburbs and grids of identical
houses that require you to drive to anything interesting. I do worry about
Nina, though, if I need to give her more grounding in a home country.
She’s so many things, it’s going to be confusing to her just like it was to
me when I was young. She’s Indian. She’s American. She’s a Kiwi. She’s
a Hong Konger. She’s a Singaporean. I was confused just being Indian
growing up in America. When Nina was born, we had to fill out her
birth paperwork. When the hospital administrator asked us what race
Nina was, we both shrugged and said, “Mixed”, knowing it ti be the
vaguest and hence most apt answer. Apparently, out of all the options for
race, mixed isn’t one of them, at least in Singapore. We scrolled through
the options and narrowed it down to to the option that represented the
most fusion—Eurasian.

When I think of Nina, in no way do I think of her as Eurasian. But
she’s not caucasian. She’s not Asian. She’s not Indian. So Eurasian it is.
What’s weird is, we decided it, knowing it was a wrong choice, but not
having any remedy for it, not really thinking about it in the moment
as significant. But God, I think it portends to a difficult future of Nina
explaining her background to vacant eyes who don’t have the capacity
to understand where’s she coming from or what she is. I saw those same
eyes as a kid when I talked about my background and looking back, I
wasn’t saying anything nearly as complex as what Nina will have utter.
I know she’ll get tired of explaining it. It’ll make her feel like she’s
justifying her existence just by describing it while other people have
the simple privilege of just being simple. Maybe she’ll accept people’s
assumptions about her or take the easy way and go with whatever they
think. She already looks quite white. The doctor who delivered Nina
even warned Marie-Claire later at a check-up appointment when I wasn’t
there that I needed to be careful if it was just me and Nina in the airport.
“Why?” I asked her later in our apartment, confused. They might think

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that I’m not the father. That I’m a child trafficker or some nefarious shit
like that. We laughed, but damn we all know what the world is capable
of too. A piece of advice to laugh at and to haunt your dreams.

As a POC it’s a requirement to ignore all the wrong and messed up
things people say, otherwise your entire life would be devoted to it.
The amount of times my name has been mispronounced or butchered
is incalculable. Sometimes I correct. Sometimes I ignore and move on.
Each time I hear it wrong, I twitch. Probably goes back to high school
and a few cruel boys who ventured the double whammy of not only
turning in my name into an insult but folding in the mispronunciation.
Ajit which should phonetically be AJEET or AJEETH became A-JIT
like a A-ZIT. Not that that’s what they called me although they could
have, especially as a teenager. No, they sized me with their white boy
Jersey eyes and called me A-SHIT.

When you have a baby, it brings you back to your childhood. You
want to give your kid the best of what you had and expunge the worst
or at least reduce the risk of the bad. It’s one of the reasons Nina’s name
is Nina. There are so many lovely Indian names, including Nina , which
don’t get me wrong, I can’t imagine her with any other name, but a lot of
those lovely names are hard to pronounce for some people. I didn’t want
her to go though a lifetime of that. I know part of the logic is wrong.
That it shouldn’t be this way and we need to fight the tradition of Anglo
names as being “normal”, and it’s something that as a teacher I will try
to instill in all the students I teach, but I wasn’t going to subject Nina
to the fight. To the potential torment. To the heartache. An imperfect
decision in a lifetime of them.

Strangers make all kinds of assumptions about your baby. In Nina’s
case especially, perhaps because she’s quite large for her age or Asia(a
Punjabi Kiwi mix with some Maori in the background is going to do
that), or because she has black brown hair and the biggest blue eyes you’ve
ever seen or the fact that we try our best not to gender our clothing too
much, many people, including the frequent Chinese grandmothers we
interact with on our strolls, think Nina is a boy. Sometimes I’ll correct
them. Sometimes I won’t. I don’t think I need to because it doesn’t
matter what sex a baby is. They are all just babies, although people
frequently tend to make personality distinctions based on sex. Boys
tend to be rough and develop language skills later. Girls are sweeter and

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more loquacious. But as an enlightened denizen of the 21st century
who can distinguish between sex and gender(we should all understand
why the term “gender-reveal party” is problematic), being a parent to
a girl, you start to see how gender is weaved into everything from the
toys they play with, to the clothes they wear, and the way people talk
about them or even to them. Heteronormativity feels far less like an
abstraction reserved for gender studies and much more real when you’re
gifted your fifth pink dress.

So here Nina finds herself, born in the year of the rat(2020) to an
Ox(that’s me and also happens to be the year 2021) and Rabbit(MC is
the fire rabbit to my wood ox) , with a father that’s all kinds of mixed
up about his culturally mixed daughter, a daughter who is estranged
and a complete foreigner to her “home country”. As the pandemic rages
on, stretching into year two, I continue to waffle between cynicism and
optimism.

She’s one now and she’s never met her grandparents. Living in this
era is about managing your dread. The longer she goes without meeting
them, without touching them, without them witnessing with their own
eyes me being a parent, the more I feel like something terrible is going
to happen that will prevent it from ever happening. For two years, we’ve
been living with the possibility, and for many it has become a reality,
that we are on the brink of tragedy. I just feel like something terrible is
on the verge of happening all the time and I’m trying to steel myself for
the day when it does come. But I put on my brave and silly face for my
baby and the world. It’s going to be okay. This can’t last forever. We’ll
be together soon. While my heart thumps in my chest from the nerves
and the pressure of a sentiment that I project, but don’t really feel.

When she was about 8 months Nina started pointing at objects.
It’s a big deal. A sign of intention, of marrying the gaze with another
appendage to say and communicate, “Hey, I’m looking at this.” The
things she points to the most, that she still does as a one-year old, are
the lights in our apartment. At lamps and the overhead lights and the
little blue light in our air conditioning unit, that one is her favourite
actually, and maybe there’s hope in that. In the simple act of looking
and pointing and learning. Not closing our eyes, but squinting directly
into the light for as long as we can bear it.

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Ajit Dhillon currently teaches at an international school in Portugal. His
work has appeared in Glimmer Train, The Dr. T.J. Eckleburg Review,
Jasper, The Newer York, Used Gravitrons, and Every Day Fiction. He
is a graduate of The University of South Carolina MFA program where he
was the editor of Yemassee.




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BROWN
by Violet Piper

"I cannot believe you got her a kazoo."
Gemma grimaced at her youngest child, Ayla, who spiritedly blew

into my plastic birthday gift. The toddler accompanied the room as we
serenaded her; she kazooed with such vigor I thought she might faint.
The cake before her was shaped like a haunted house with a single
candle jammed into the frosting lawn. It was March, and Ayla was still
unsettlingly obsessed with Halloween. She craned out of her high chair,
removed the instrument from her mouth, and extinguished the flame.
We cheered! Gemma turned to me and mouthed: I'm going to kill you.

The house was full of deranged birthday shit, like these giant animal-
shaped balloons Gemma bought from the grocery store. They had
corrugated cardboard legs to weigh them down. As you pulled their
ribbon leashes, the animals would bounce along the floor, simulating
life. Ayla whipped the poor things around all night, ramming them into
her guests. I think she was hoping to choke the inflatables to death.

Ayla's three older siblings sunk into the room's corners, away from
the floating zoo. I had a feeling their birthday parties were much less
involved. I babysat them before Ayla was born in high school-- they
lived a few floors above me. The kids loved taking their scooters to the
park but often grew tired of riding and dragged them behind. The things
would clunk clunk clunk against the cobblestones, occasionally pop up,
and nail them in the ankles.

I was in college when Gemma texted me that she was pregnant with
Ayla. I didn't even know she and Mark had split up. When she asked

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me to help with her new two-year-old, I complained, "I'm going to be
a babysitter until I die."

"Just until after I have one more kid during my next crisis," she
assured me.

The older children were embarrassed by me now. They came home
wearing their headphones, flung their school bags onto the couch, and
pushed past me into their respective rooms. They frowned and stepped
over their baby sister as if she were a puddle. I'm not sure she cared.

I was equally embarrassed to blather with Gemma's adult friends at
Ayla's party. They were all holding their own wiggling toddlers, anyway.
I passed the time wiping all the flat surfaces I could find.

"Stop doing that!" Gemma finally caught me. She snatched the limp
paper towel out of my hand. "Jesus, eat some cake."

For the next few weeks, Ayla and I involved the balloon animals in
our ridiculousness. Once, when Ayla was hiding under a throw blanket,
I held the brachiosaurus by its neck, tilted its head back, and pretended
to take a powerful whiff of the living room.

"I smell a baby in here!" I said in a dinosaur voice, which was more
like a John C. Rielly impression. She screamed and balled herself tighter
under the blanket. Eventually, I attacked: Yelling and bopping her
repeatedly with the dinosaur head.

"SMELL BY BABY!" Ayla would demand after each round. That was
our ritual-- I invented a game, she gave it an insane name, and then we
played it until we got mad at each other. It's onerous to argue with the
kid because her speech development is slightly delayed, which I didn't
realize until I conversed with some other toddlers at the playground.

Ayla was tall for her age, and older kids were perpetually approaching
her, urging, "Want to play insects?" or "Are you a superhero too?" She
would look at them blankly and continue to steer an imaginary pirate
ship like a little ghost trapped in purgatory. Then the kids would turn
to me like: What's wrong with her? And I would shrug like: I wish I
fuckin' knew.

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I could have guessed about the speech. "Soapie! Soapie!" She would
exclaim, motioning to her closet. It took me months to realize she
was saying "zombie," by which time she could have self-corrected her
pronunciation but did not.

"Hey, Googa, pay scurry wish."
§

She was so pissed whenever Google Home ignored her, never
connecting that it was because she spoke like a drunk Halloween
animatronic.

"Hey, Google, what sound does a scary witch make?" I would correct
her, enunciating slowly and clearly. Then Ayla would kick me in the
esophagus.

Gemma came home every day to a different flavor of calamity. When
I first started watching Ayla, I constantly said, "NonoNONONO!"
Chasing after her with a broom and dustpan like her Roomba court
jester. She would take out an industrial size bottle of sprinkles, look me
directly in the eye, dispose of its entirety onto the floor, and lick it up
off the hardwood. I was so anxious about the persistent mess that I had
to gently rock myself on the subway home.

Gemma explained that my job was to keep Ayla alive until she
returned.

"I'll clean up after you leave," she would assure me. I tried this system
for a few days, but Ayla's drawing on the furniture, rolling around in the
litter box, and pooping in the shower (not the litterbox?!) became too
much. I started taking her to the Brooklyn Children's Museum a few
times a week so she could instead terrorize its employees and patrons.
The plan ultimately backfired.

"She needs to learn to share," a mom protested in the museum's fake
grocery store exhibit. Ayla was dumping out the other children's baskets
of plastic fruit and bread so she could then throw the baskets at me. Just
as Ayla taught me, I pretended not to speak English.

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One frigid day, Ayla insisted we bring her balloon cat to the museum.
It was the last member of the menagerie standing--er-- floating. The
rest had popped or deflated too much to lift off the ground. I didn't
even attempt to contend with her. I just let her drag the thing across
the concrete for five blocks. At least it wasn't a scooter? Everyone we
passed could not suppress their laughter; it was like creating this parade
of hysterical neighbors. The guy at the bodega gave us our chips for free.

"Don't forget the cat food!" He wagged his finger at Ayla. She just
hummed to herself and ripped the cat along the cold-case aisle.

That day, Ayla's cat was the museum's most popular exhibit. The
parents could not physically restrain their children from lunging at the
thing, and Ayla and I had to bat them away like Target employees on
Black Friday. I was terrified that the cat would pop while we were there
and that Ayla would detonate. For three hours, I was fighting for my
own life.

I knew it was time to leave when Ayla started nodding off in a beanbag
chair, hand still gripping the leash. As we pulled her boots on, one final
employee noticed the balloon.

"Aw, wow!" She bent down over Ayla. "Is this your cat?" Ayla peered
up at the woman and almost nodded. I inhaled sharply.

"I love her! What's her name?" Ayla turned to me and then to her
cat, contemplating it. I braced. And then:

"I...fink her name Brown."
§

What? WHAT? You fink her name Brown? I felt myself short-circuit.
Not Browny? Brown. The cat is white. Ayla is effectively mute and has
never claimed to be "finking" about anything. Did she come up with
that on the spot? And then say it? To a stranger?

I spent so much time with Ayla-- intimate, high-emotional-stakes
time. Just the week before, she had pulled a knife on me. She had
grabbed the chef's knife from the drawer while my hands were fully
submerged in a bowl of brownie batter. I had to chase and tackle her

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