Adelaide Literary Award Anthology 2018: SHORT STORIES, Vol. One

SHORT STORIES
“What are you doing?” she asked.
“I’m emoting,” I said.
The dark trees on either side of the road began to blur into a
single tree. We raced up a rise and gathered speed down the far side.
The engine roared as the tachometer climbed, fell, and climbed again.
“Will, slow down,” said Kat.
There was no way I was slowing down until I was good and
ready. My faithless heart rose in my chest and I felt the blood draw
away from my hands and feet, but my mind was perfectly clear. I
was thinking that the person next to me needed a lesson in crisis
management, that you can’t live in a constant state of emergency,
that constant strain produces weakness. And that no matter how
deeply you think you feel certain things, how much you know that
you’re the one for whom the universal has specific meaning, you, the
one we’re all waiting for to save us, the one who feels and sees what
we’re not ready to feel and see, you have to know that you are just
one of a hundred million people who feel that way, too.
The speedometer hit ninety. Ninety-five. My heart was at a
thousand. Kat yelled to slow down, but I didn’t, I couldn’t, until
we’d crested a hundred and my heart hit a thousand and one, and
then, holding on tight and putting an arm across the seat to keep Kat
in place, I slammed on the brakes and turned hard to the left. The
tires screeched and the trees to both sides melted together with the
road as we turned completely around, three hundred sixty degrees,
water vapor beneath us spraying out in all directions. We came to a
stop in the opposite lane. I waited a beat, two beats, looking at Kat.
Then I pulled back into the right lane and started off towards home
at a leisurely fifty-five.
Kat said nothing.
I opened a window. My mouth was dry and I made smacking
noises as I tried to draw up spit. My heart slowly found its normal
rhythm.
“Driving is dangerous,” I said. “It’s more dangerous than riding
in an airplane, which is probably more dangerous than walking
down the street or taking a bath. But they’re all dangerous. Living
is dangerous.”

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Kat looked as though she was afraid I would hit her, which
I’d done once, I remembered suddenly, many years before. Before
Sam was born and when she and I were newly married, we went to
an office party where she spent the evening talking to a colleague of
mine and when we got home, I slapped her hard across the face so
that she spun to one side and then she straightened back up into ex-
actly the position she’d held before, like a Gumby man, completely
immune, like it hadn’t happened the very second after it had. Like
nothing could hurt her if she didn’t let it.
I didn’t quite believe that that was something I would do, and
yet it was right there, the memory clear as glass. I wondered what
else I might have forgotten.
She practically leapt from the car as we waited for the garage
door to open, and was inside and upstairs by the time I’d parked
and watched the garage door close behind me and locked the inte-
rior door and turned off all the lights on the ground floor. She was
brushing her teeth when I came up into the master bedroom.
“Kat,” I said. “I’m sorry. Sometimes I just don’t know what
to do. Something came over me, but I’m better now. It’s alright.”
Her reflection considered me blankly through a mouth full of
toothpaste. I waited while she spat and rinsed. I sat on the bed while
she changed into her nightgown. Flies on walls have received more
acknowledgement.
It occurred to me she might have thought I was going to crash
the car. I wondered whether she would have welcomed it. The ro-
mantic gesture. A seizing of the inevitable.
I said I needed a glass of water.
She nodded.
I said I wouldn’t be long.
I left the bedroom and went through the hallway, downstairs
and into the kitchen. I was omniscient but powerless. I opened
the fridge – buttery light forcing out the darkness – got out the
water filter and poured myself a glass. Closed the fridge. Took
a sip and walked into the TV room, and on the couch, feeling
my shoulder blades press against the cushions in the darkness, I
waited.

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Jeff Bakkensen lives in Boston. Recent fiction has appeared in The
Lullwater Review, Oblong Magazine, Smokelong Quarterly, and
The Antigonish Review.

351



In the Country of the Blind

By Jeffrey Ihlenfeldt

The colors were the first to go the day Ciela went blind—the hot
yellows of Indian mallow, the reds of firewheel—until the world
became as cool as the blues of Lago Cuerde, as cool as midnight at
Mt. Elijah or the cheek of a sleeping child.

It was in the morning, mostly, that Ciela struggled to remember
the last thing she had seen. The small girl, of course, straining in her
yellow sundress as she scratched at the material like old skin. Rather
than complaining to her mother, she separated from her and walked
to the shop next door to Ciela’s, one of a dozen makeshift stores at
the market, where a short dark woman sold geckos housed in glass
containers. The floors of the containers were lined with white sand
and the glass backs covered with glossy preprinted desert scenes—a
cactus or a boulder or a sunrise. The girl scratched at her shoulder
with one hand as she pressed against the glass front with the other.
The gecko stared at her spread fingers. Her mother coaxed her back
to Ciela’s store, and the young girl, resigned to her impending por-
traiture, posed on the edge of the seat beside the easel.

Ciela sketched in the girl’s thin arms, then the shoulders
emerging from the yellow cotton straps, and the stitched ornamen-
tation resting against her neck. The girl’s lips tensed, and her eyes
darted from one spot on the wall to another. Then, with tranquil
composure, they followed Ciela’s hand and the pencil as it scratched
across the paper. Ciela heard the vague and approving comments
from the two women—“such a realistic expression,” said one, and

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“such accurate coloring,” said the other. “And the texture…the
length of the hair,” they agreed. In twenty minutes, the girl’s image
was complete, but rather than giving her own approval of the por-
trait, the girl’s gaze drifted toward the storefront next door with the
geckos and their glass-front containers and their cacti and boulders
and sunrises.

Two days later, there was the father of the dead infantryman,
whose portrait Ciela painted from the sole remaining photo of his
son in civilian dress. It was a gift, the father explained, for his wife,
his son’s mother, who had prayed for his return in time for his 19th
birthday from the distant sands of the Middle East to the desert
highlands of New Mexico.

“It’s cool in the north,” he told Ciela, as she molded the boy’s
checks with her narrow brush. His half-grin and nearly mischievous
eyes peering from beneath a twist of hair made the boy seem younger.
“Can you show him at home? In the coolness?” the man asked.

Disregarding the blotted sweat on the boy’s checkered collar
and the swath of full sun across his neck and face, she followed the
man’s request and placed his son standing amidst the cool green of
the high desert, enshrouded by the fallacy of shade pines and grass-
land, his history erased. Home, Ciela thought, as his eye took shape.

The last season she had set up shop at the tourist market, most
of her business came from capturing portraits of roadway travelers
for souvenirs, a remembrance of their time in the desert southwest,
in the heat near the inscrutable border and sand of Sonora. For some
patrons, the portraits were more than souvenirs, the veracity behind
their travels, perhaps for posterity, but such requests were rare. The
travelers who fooled themselves into believing posterity and reality
were akin were more plentiful and easy to spot, for they had similar
physical characteristics—white flesh tones and randomly scorched
complexions. The children and wives and husbands, the sisters and
brothers would comment on her skill in rendering their likenesses
so perfectly, like the snap of a photograph. And they commented
on the desertscapes—the vividness of the cacti and the mesas, the
earth’s physical truth. Yet, for Ciela, they were stock images, stock
memories, and a distant reality.

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During the height of the tourist season, buses would arrive
and line up along the asphalt like soldiers in drill. Passengers would
chaotically disembark, and then quickly reassemble into the single
file of the food court luncheon lines. They would fill their plates
with tortillas kept warm and pliable in steam trays. They would
fill the tortillas with oily beef and pinto beans, as if these south-
western delicacies were more remarkable than the food served at
the drive-through taco stands in Los Angeles or the buffets in Las
Vegas. In fact, the food, like the tourists had all been shaped and
shipped there by the truckload, shifting in the trailers and cargo
vans with hand painted logos and primitive images of half shucked
ears of corn and farmers and field hands grinning broadly through
their dark brown complexions, smiling over rows of deep red to-
matoes, smiling through mounds of fleshly picked lettuce, smiling
over grinding stones, sacks of corn meal, hot oil. And everything
was fresh, even if it wasn’t.
Amid the commotion of off-loaded produce and off-loaded
tourists, Ciela would compose her painting supplies: a small case of
oils, acrylics, a blending palette, a walnut easel, a tray of pencils and
pastels, a large drawing pad, a stack of small canvasses.
Ciela suspected her blindness was her own doing, that her ac-
quiescence to fictionalized desert art and family desires for happiness
where none was capable of existing, and the need to coax smiles from
these terse lips, the desire for cool flesh beneath the sun’s force, or
delight from despair, trained her, urged her toward blindness. But
she knew there was more to it than that. She knew spirits appeared
with the living, voices arose with silence, and colors merged with the
gray of the Black Hills and the white of bones.
Lucero thought it was her imagination, her loss of sight, rather
than a physical malady, but she had searched her paints and her pal-
ette thoroughly—the oils, the acrylics—and she couldn’t distinguish
the primaries from the pastels or the gold from the burnt umber.
And his comments on her blindness, at times, bordered on patron-
izing, as he reassured her that she would persevere and move on and
on, unscathed. Did he think she had no sense of color after all these
years? No sight after all she had seen?

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It was not her sight that had vanished as much as her vision.
Her eyes could still see the circle of sun rising above the Canelo
Hills each morning. Occasionally, even the details coalesced—the
stripedtail setting up housekeeping in her moccasins (perhaps it was
the scorpion who lacked clear eyesight, mistaking a moccasin for
the desert floor). And the random path of Russian thistle outside of
town and the chaotic sprouting of Canadian horseweed enduring
the mid day temperatures at the scorching space between Nogales
and Lochiel.
In truth, Lucero was not even her husband, although it made
it easier for them to think of it as so. Once, it was easier for all
concerned—before her mother’s death, and her father’s two years
after—to apply his name, to speak of themselves as wife and hus-
band. Her father’s acceptance particularly surprised her since he had
only met Lucero briefly, years earlier. At the time, he was a boy, and
her father readily pointed out the foolishness of his boyhood and his
innocence. “What do you know of…” he had once asked Lucero,
but his voice faded before finishing the question. Her mother had
kissed his cheek, an image she still remembered quite clearly, before
their departure, before their joining together. How could Ciela not
see him as her husband?
In the midst of her blindness, she had given herself over to
words. Before, she had never laid down to paper a single poem. She
had not transcribed a single story, although she had heard many,
and lived many, until the day she lost her sight. Clearly, poems and
stories needed to be written down, perhaps concurrently, the story
being the poem, the poem being the narrative, the tale being the
song. Ciela found it hard to distinguish between them, now that she
was blind. Who would insist that Mercado had no music or Paz had
no tale? Her mother could never resist the opportunity to sing her
life, and her life became less a story than a poem, less a story than
a song. Throughout her mother’s life, and near the end, she sang
the first vision of her husband, the story of their encounter, and the
recitative of their life.
Ciela only wrote fragments:
In the desert

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I step slowly
pausing long enough to fill
my own shadow, pour my body
into shelter. My hot blood persists.
She spoke the fragments to her husband in the mornings, but
he was sighted and, she imagined, distracted by threads of clouds
or spires in the distance, as she would have been distracted in her
sighted life. Now it was only the hot breeze across her skin and the
call of a wren. Lucero responded with a quizzical “umm,” to her
words, and she was never certain if he understood her or even heard
her.
Lately, Ciela drifted only briefly past the image of her mother
and the desert, and the crossing of borders from south to north,
from east to west. From the Sonora and Ajo of her childhood, and
later from Papago to Phoenix. She remembered how her mother
navigated them toward Ciela’s first home and how her mother bore
her through will and faith, without a hospital, without a doctor
or nurse, without a midwife or neighbor. She held Ciela, touched
her, and wrapped her in cotton clothing after the birth along the
dusty shoulder of the road. After 30 years together, what had Ciela
neglected to tell her husband of her life? What story, suddenly re-
called, had she not spoken of? Her birth beside the highway? Her
life traveling the same road? The border towns to the south and the
industry to the north? Her mother’s grasp? Her caress? What stories
did he need to know? What did he need to see?
“Have I ever touched your lips with my fingers before?” he had
asked her in bed one night.
“I imagine,” she replied, although she couldn’t say truthfully.
“You’ve kissed them. Does that count?”
He dipped a finger into his water glass then drew it across her
lips and lingered on the dry crease and then the moistness within the
separation of her lips. He drew the water over the dryness.
“There’s one more thing I’ve done,” he said, and she recognized
within his voice a pleasure she resented. “How could I have missed
that for so long?” he asked as he touched the corner of her mouth.
Her lips tightened.

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“Where does this sudden desire come from?” she asked.
“All these years I’ve never really been able to surprise you.”
“So you enjoy that I can’t see?”
She felt the air move across her face as he waved his hand in
front of her, and she swatted at it.
“You shouldn’t try to take advantage of an old blind girl,” she
told him.
“Yeah, well don’t read too much into it,” he said, but his reas-
surance seemed halfhearted.
During the night she felt his fingers move across her cheek and
her hair. She felt his lips on hers. She didn’t move, which only gave
credence to her suspicion that, with her blindness, came frailty. And
her frailty increased in direct proportion to Lucero’s boldness. What
seemed like newness to her husband only struck Ciela as loss.
A few summers earlier, during a visit with them in their apart-
ment in Phoenix, her mother embraced Lucero. She recognized his
kindness, she told him, a kindness that managed to endure through
all things. “Cultivo. Acaricio,” she said. She held him tightly, her face
against his. She kissed his lips firmly, with the kiss of a lover. She
said, without compunction, that she thought of him as her lover, as
the desert, as though his name were not Lucero, and Ciela realized
it was not Lucero her mother kissed, but something else.
“Espacio,” she told Ciela as she stroked her husband’s face.
“Antiguo. Silencioso.”
Unlike Lucero, Ciela had always been the desert, stormy and
resilient and tormented. The path and the horizon. The near and the
distant. The beginning and the end. Ciela had tried to reconcile, if
not to reclaim her vision, or at least to reclaim her sanity when her
sight had faded. As she tried to recall her final vision, she also tried
to remember the tapering away of that vision. Although she couldn’t
pinpoint the exact moment of her blindness, she imagined it to be
somehow justified, as if she had seen it all.
She knew what true blindness was. She had seen it. The woman
leading the man. The wife and the husband. He wearing the broad
brimmed hat, she the cotton scarf. He the denim jacket and she the
beaded vest. He the dark glasses and she the tortoise shell spectacles.

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The woman also used a cane and hobbled through the en-
tryway with the man close behind her. Her left foot leading the
man’s foot, her wooden cane tapping before the man’s left leg, step
by step, she guided him into the market. The man’s broad black
glasses cast shade across his prominent nose and thick lips. Then he
was all in shadow. He gripped the woman’s arm as she cautiously
led him through the parted curtains of Ciela’s art enclave. The man
followed her to the two chairs dividing the sitting area from the
display of completed prints.
“Buenos dias,” Ciela said. “Can I help you?”
The woman twisted around in her chair and looked along the
row of prints lining the side wall of the shop. She leaned into her
cane and lifted herself from the chair. The man loosened his fingers
from the woman’s arm, and she separated from his grip. She traced
the strokes of an oil, a scene from the foothills of Tucson, a lone
girl kneeling on the shoulder of the path and gathering stones into
the pockets of her blue dress. The late morning sun beat down on
the path and the shoulders of the girl. In the background, a curtain
of rain fell along a stretch of hills and washed into the valley before
it. The sun in the foreground, the storm in the distance was a phe-
nomenon Ciela had seen often in the low desert regions. The girl,
however, she could not remember.
The woman inched her fingers along the streaks of light and
the streaks of rain.
“Paint us,” she finally said.
“Both of you?”
“Yes. Us,” she said, then turned and lowered herself into her
chair. The man’s hand grazed the woman’s forearm, then rested it
on his jean-clad thigh.
Life was hard, Ciela thought, for what seemed like the first
time, although the idea had occurred to her many times in the past
when reflecting on her mother, her father, even her own life. It was
something she had always known. In this case, it was hard for the
man and the woman, but especially for the woman. She carried her
stilted weight while leading the weight of the man. She carried the
weight of her vision for herself and the man. She saw for the man.

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That had to be especially hard. Yes, she had always known life was
hard, but now she knew it again, and as if for the first time.

When Ciela asked her which background she would like for
the portrait, the woman seemed confused, and her eyes squinted into
the sputtering fluorescent tube on the ceiling just above the curtain
to the entrance.

“What do you need to know?” the woman asked, and her
cheeks relaxed and her eyes closed.

The misunderstanding was obvious, and at first Ciela raised
her arm toward the portraits, her gesture sweeping the length of the
side wall. As the woman with her eyes closed showed little interest
in Ciela’s suggestion, she returned to the woman’s question. Yes.
There was much Ciela needed to know: the dark glasses, the half
dreary eyes, the hardwood cane, the details of struggle, the weight
of responsibility, the weight of care, of love.

In drawing the woman and the man, the hands were the most
difficult to capture, which surprised Ciela. She would have guessed
the eyes. It had always been the eyes in the past—the depth of blue,
the sadness or joy emanating from the iris. Now, she captured the
hue and tears of the woman’s eyes, the vastness, the ocean within the
edges of her flesh, even when the woman’s eyes would drift closed,
hiding the ocean and the sandlines.

But oh, the hands. The woman’s fingers slipped over a portion
of the man’s exposed arm, and the space revealed a sparse feathering
of downy hair where the cuffs of his sleeves were drawn up and
folded over. The woman’s freshly scrubbed fingernails held the stub-
born stain of earth embellishing the yellowing tips. And the man’s
fingers, each bend as thick and cracked as a dry riverbed, cupped
softly over the papery skin of the woman’s left hand.

When Ciela took her sketch home, and she showed Lucero
the hands, the fingers, the eyes—drowsy, half-closed, and tearing to
nearly overflowing, she told him of her apprehension in capturing
the pair, blind or sighted, at rest or in love, content or enthralled.

“Why is it so important to choose?” he asked.
“It can’t be all those things,” she told him.
“Why?” he said, as he studied the black and gray lines.

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“Choices need to be made,” she said.
“This,” he said, and followed the length of the woman’s hair.
“What is it?” she asked.
“I don’t know.”
“And his glasses?” she asked.
“I don’t know. I don’t know the choices.”
He set the sketch on the table, where Ciela picked it up later to
further consider the choices. The visionary and the tactile. The eyes
and the lips. The color and the contrast. The skin and the hair. The
composition. The commitment. The choices.
The woman’s eyes focused forward, then down under Ciela’s
quick erasure, then back until she wasn’t certain what they revealed,
mere labor for the sake of the man’s blindness, or a translucent
shroud, veiled and muted eyes. She followed the man’s hand to the
woman’s arm. And as Ciela erased, the lines became less distinct,
eradication of the two figures rather than a blending. The husband
became less a man than a morning vapor, a mist, and the wife swept
the page like a breeze, or swirls of sand until the two figures blended
into something unrecognizable, or nothing. Still, Ciela drew and
erased, envisioned and reenvisioned the tenuous sweep of the man
and the woman.
In the morning, sheets of paper lay strewn across the table,
each revealing a version of lines and spaces and erasures, the table
itself becoming an impression of real life. She felt Lucero’s hand rest
upon her shoulder. She watched his shadow drift across the still life
of table and paper, which made her images even harder to discern.
“It’s nothing,” she said. The predawn light slipped through the
window. Lucero lifted the papers and laid them out edge to edge.
“It’s not everything, but it’s not nothing,” Lucero said.
One night, after she had gone blind, Ciela dreamed of the
woman and the man. In her dream, the lame woman and the blind
man drew open the curtain and entered her enclave. What seemed at
first to be synchronicity between the woman’s cane and the man’s foot
wasn’t synchronicity at all. The man appeared to lead her through the
entryway. The man didn’t follow the woman but walked in tandem
with the woman’s step, the tilt of her shoulders and cane.

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“I can help you,” Ciela said to the man in her dream. She
touched his shoulder, but he turned away.
“I can help you,” Ciela repeated.
“How can you help me?”
“With my sight.”
“Think you can’t stumble in the bright light of day?” the man
asked, and turned from Ciela.
When the man removed his dark glasses, the brightness of his
eyes illuminated the chairs before them. Shade and shadow had dis-
persed. Along Ciela’s wall, beside the portraits of desert frontiers
and distant travelers were shelves of bones, bleached white beneath
the force of the yellow sun, and skulls and arms and legs, hips and
shoulders. Ciela shut her eyes tightly to black out the brightness of
the sun and the bone and the man’s eyes, but she continued, even
in darkness, to envision the man and the woman, treading the sand
of the desert, one moving with the other, one guiding and the other
urging, and in this way the two approached the distance of the red
hills and the horizon in one painting. The man held to the flesh of
the woman’s arm, her hand upon his. Together, they traced their
fingers over other paintings—the foothills of Tucson, the girl on the
path, with stones in her pockets, stumbling forward. They touched
her. They knew her as well as they knew the valley and the streaks
of rain.
“Sueño, vuelvo,” the woman said.
The dream startled Ciela and woke her. She reached toward
her sleeping husband and touched his cheek and his damp hair. She
recited to him a fragment:
“Vacia, vacia”
the scent of fire,
not the blaze,
not the blinding light
not the consequence,
not the human consumption,
the scent.
She told him the story of her dream, but he was sleeping and
didn’t hear.

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She was beset by sadness, but it seemed not to be her sadness.
Not the sadness of weakness or dependence. Not the sadness of dis-
tance or isolation. Nor the sadness of age or regret or death. Not the
sadness of a woman at all, but the sadness of a child, the sadness of
a girl, solemn, as if she had finally witnessed the desert at dawn. She
stood and felt her way to the window. She reached out slowly and
searched forward for the glass, and she pressed her fingers against it.
Through the haze of a young girl’s tears, she began to see the rising
of yellow sun, the burgeoning of firewheel, and the swirling of red
dust. She closed her eyes and began to tell her story and her mother’s
story, which now seemed to only hold truth within a young girl’s
solemnity.
“Acaricia,” she whispered and touched her face.
She told the story of her mother’s kindness and her father’s
constancy.
“Cultivo. Humanidad,” she said.
“Lucero is the desert,” went the story.
“I am the desert,” went the story.
“As we all are the desert,” went the story.
They were more fragments than stories. The path and the
horizon. The near and the distant. The beginning and the end.

Jeffrey Ihlenfeldt’s work has appeared in numerous publications
including Story Quarterly, Southern Humanities Review, Ascent,
Quiddity, and Adirondack Review. He was two-time finalist for the
Fulton Prize in Short Fiction and has been nominated for Best of
the Net. His website is http://www.jlihlenfeldt.com.

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Entertaining Monsters

By Bettina Rotenberg

In the spring of 2006, I visited the class of a musician I’d hired to
teach a kindergarten class at a school in Richmond, California. I
watched the children struggle valiantly to sing and play instruments
against a very nervous teacher who kept trying to get them to be
quieter. It would have been actually hilarious if it hadn’t been so
sad – the teacher being so nervous because of the “No Child Left
Behind” act which made the kids, even K kids, test constantly in
reading, writing, and arithmetic, so the teacher was terribly fearful
they’d fail because she’d lose her job if they did. Horrible no-win
situation. I’d received emails from this teacher who was so eager to
get an artist, and then, poor soul, got someone who actually got her
kids (Latino) to sing in English and play instruments which upset
her when I was there, thinking I would share her concern about
making too much noise. I laughed when I saw the kids actually
enjoying themselves, raising their voices when they sang (instead
of somehow – how? – singing quietly) and getting off on playing,
really playing. She kept telling me they weren’t usually this “wild”,
usually they “played by the rules” (what rules are those? Especially
in a class meant to be making sound?) If it hadn’t been so funny,
I’d have cried. I felt like a rebel just observing these kids having so
much fun. The girls, except for one little kid in pigtails, who hung
out with the boys, sat there silent and sad.

One music class a week for six weeks, and no recess. That’s all
they got.

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It would be hard to forget that these children, and all the
rest of the kids our artists taught, were low income, at-risk, un-
der-served, English language learners. And yet, they were as capable
as their more privileged peers of feats of creative and personal ex-
pression.
As an arts educator, even as a teacher, I had to ask myself,
“What can I possibly do for six classes of children, even for twenty or
thirty classes, when so many more are suffering from poverty, loss of
their real parents, unsafe neighborhoods, and over stressed teachers
struggling to teach boring, often irrelevant, standardized curricula
and test them relentlessly?” Certainly teachers with these pressures
think twice before they let an artist into their classrooms, even for
six weeks, one hour a week.
But the fourth grade class I taught at Grant School in San
Pablo in late spring of 2008 was an exception. I entered the school
and was met by a blank hallway with empty walls between class-
rooms which led to Mr. Prather’s class of thirty children. It was
notable for the shocking written accounts of accidents and murders
the children witnessed in their neighborhoods.
In the first two sessions, I focused on a couple of poems about
the homeless by the San Francisco poet, Sarah Menefee:
You can’t describe his homeless eyes in the sunburned face
Where everything has been destroyed but the human sadness
Blaze of dignity deeper even than anger and rage
That’s deepest somehow out there busted down to the pave-
ment
Everything else is ashes
I taught these two poems on two successive days. With the
first poem, probably the first “real” poem these students had ever
encountered, I started with very simple questions:
“What do you know about this man?”
Wendy responded, “He’s homeless.”
Edwin added, “He’s sad.”
Leleni posited, “He’s dead.”
I asked Leleni, “What makes you think he’s dead?”
“Because everything is destroyed,” she answered.

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I said, “that makes sense, but how does the sadness survive if
the homeless man is dead?”
Daniel interpolated,” his face is burned.”
I queried: “How does the poet tell us? Does she use a positive
or a negative statement?” I argued, “she says she ‘can’t describe his
homeless eyes’ which seems to deny that she can describe him, to
say that she can’t actually write the poem. Why can’t she describe
his eyes?”
Daniel responded, “because they are burned. Destroyed.”
Daniel was a child who stood out from the other children be-
cause he remained apart, isolated in the world of his own mind. He
appeared lost and confused, and distractedly asked many disjointed
questions, and proffered comments that wandered from the point
of our discussions. A shock of brown hair fell over his forehead into
his eyes, making him squint when he looked at me.
I asked, “how do you describe someone who is destroyed?”
It turned out they were very familiar with death.
My method for teaching poems, adult sophisticated poems,
was to ask many questions, essentially creating and leading the dis-
cussion through the answers, multiple answers, my students gave in
response. And there were many responses, and in that first class I
turned no answer away. No answer was wrong, and if it was some-
what out in left field, I’d interpret it in such a way as to bring it back.
The students who talked that day, and the ones who didn’t, sat up
straighter and looked more involved as they saw that there were no
wrong answers.
During the next class I taught the second poem, and this time I
did let them know that some of the answers weren’t really answering
the question. But by now they seemed ready to learn more about
how to talk about a poem. I felt my way, sensing an opening in their
interest, a receptivity to participate in the discussion in multiple
ways, but to steer closer to the meanings in the poem.
The first question I asked about Sarah’s second poem was about
the meaning of “blaze of dignity.” They knew what “blaze” was and
they understood “dignity;” but it was difficult for them to put to-
gether the two words and uncover the new meaning. But when I

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asked where the blaze of dignity was “deepest,” they knew right
away where “busted down to the pavement” was. We next talked
about the choice of the verb “busted down” and why she used that
expression.

So, already students were learning that the words in a poem are
chosen for a reason. The writing task I gave them was to describe a
homeless person, focusing on a part of the face or body or clothing
to express an emotion.

My students had many recollections of homeless people they’d
seen in the streets, some of whom turned out to be relatives of
theirs. I was alerted to the intelligence of one child, whose name
was Edwin, who used the word “overwhelmed” in a discussion of
one of the poems. I found him and the boy next to him giggling and
horsing around during the time allotted for writing poems. I went
up to them and said, “You boys must be feeling a lot of pain about
something and that’s why you’re joking around instead of writing.”

Edwin got down to writing and described a murder he had
witnessed the week before. I had asked the kids to write about some-
thing “bad” that led to something “good.” Sarah’s poem arrives at a
place so burned out that everything is ashes, and in that awful place,
the deepest thing is revealed as that “blaze of dignity.” The imagery
of blaze is linked paradoxically the final image of ashes, as though
the dignity is so “ablaze” that it burns even as it redeems.

We wrestled with the paradoxical complexity of this very
short poem and talked at length about the idea that the capacity
for dignity could “somehow” be deeper than the “anger and rage”
a homeless person would justifiably feel. Several of the students de-
scribed a homeless person and moralized that, in spite of the fact that
he was homeless, he was glad to be alive. But Edwin just narrated
the murder he’d seen without supplying any redeeming outcomes.
It was enough that he was able to withstand the fear and pain of
writing it down on paper.

Mr. Prather commented after the second class that ten chil-
dren had participated in the discussion, and he predicted that all the
children would talk soon. Neither of us anticipated that every single
child would write poems in the third class.

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Next I read my own poems about my brother who died when
he was thirty-six years old. This is what I gave them:

NOT OF THIS WORLD

Not of this world III
your vision
you bent
towards the mountains
you scaled
that broke
you
and severed you
from me

My heart is chill IV
Ice lodges in your place
dissolving into grief
I melt and shiver

I asked many questions about these poems and we charted a course
through the metaphors of a “vision” that scales mountains, a heart
that “dissolves” into “grief,” and a loved one who is displaced by
“ice.” It was a painstaking process as we passed through these steps
to grasping the nature of the relationship; and it was thrilling, for
these kids jumped into the poems with a new intensity.

Then I prepared them for writing. I asked, “Has someone you
know died? How did you feel? How did that person die?” I told
them to write a poem that described someone who died. I con-
tinued with my questions: “In the process, describe yourself, your
feelings. What are you like now? Did you change at all? Who did
you become?”

Following the discussion and the assignment, I hung back and
didn’t move around the classroom to talk individually with children

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who needed my help. I sensed something new in my experience –
that these kids would now write very well on their own. And I was
right.

What got these kids writing? I wasn’t sure if it was the topic
of my poems – the death of a relative – or the fact that I was now
teaching poems I’d written. The questions I posed opened up an
arena familiar to all these children that they were more than ready
to write about. Wendy had an instinctive grasp of writing succinct,
short poems that epitomized her feelings:

You died and left
a sadness in me. I
miss you so grandpa.
I became aware of another child, Leleni, at the end of this class who
had a different relation to writing poems than anyone else in the
class. She approached me and handed me several pages written in
an indecipherable script without smiling, silently indicating I should
read them. I spent several minutes attempting to read her large,
scrawling hand, but couldn’t. I took the pages home and, with the
aid of strong reading glasses, was able to type most of it up. Here
it is:
My great grandma died
when I was only
three years old.
She used to play

with me
and plant gardens

decorate them
and we used to have

so much fun.
The day she died

was in 2004
When I came over
Mom dropped me off

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and she went to work

I knocked on
her door

I called her name
and I didn’t hear
her everything

was broken.
Glass was on the floor
the water was running

and I turned it off
I went to her room
and she was lying
on her bed. I touched
her – she was cold
and hard like someone
stuffed and then I knew

she was dead
I lay beside her
When my mom came
to pick me up, everything was

on the floor
and she called me
and when my mom
came in the room, she saw
my great grandma

and me lying
next to each other

and she said,
“What happened?
What did you do?”
I said, “I didn’t do anything
When I got here
she was like this.”

The cops said
they were on their way

and I started to cry
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in my moms arms.
I felt like my head
was about to explode
and my mom said

everything was going to be
as I said to her
no it’s not
and I love
my grandma
so much
and I still wish
she was here
I also still think
of her
right now.

From that class onward, Leleni continued to write pages and pages
of poetry. She seemed to be the one child who took very seriously
the act of writing, identified with it, and found in it her own private
vehicle for expressing her thoughts. When I read this poem aloud to
the class a couple of weeks later, a hush settled in the classroom as
they listened to this child’s story of the death of someone who was
important to her, a death she could not accept.

Poem after poem uncovered the terrible realities these young
children carried in their minds. Two of them informed me at the
end that they hadn’t read their poem in class because “it was too
personal.” I said to one of them, ‘It’s good you wrote a poem. It’s
not like a newspaper that everybody can read. Very few people read
poetry.”

In the next class, I taught them about line breaks. Daniel called
me over to his desk and I was explaining it to him, but he didn’t
understand. So I read his poem out loud and asked him to listen for
the pauses. Then I left him to give a vigorous explanation to another
student. They all wanted to know if they’d gotten it right. They were
all clamoring; and I was with Daniel again, and I did something I
never do – I made pencil marks on his paper. And at last his poem

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was right, and he must have felt freer too, because he started to talk.
pHe told me, “I had a nightmare, and there was a monster, and he’s
still here. He won’t go away.”

Then he added sagaciously, “I know I imagined this.” But he
came back with,

“But the monster is right here. He’s rea!”
I said quietly and calmly, “but you know, don’t you, that it’s
your imagination?” He looked at me with wide intense eyes, probing
mine, and insisted that the monster was there. This is the poem he
wrote:

My nightmare
is my terror and strife
is next to me in my
thoughts and in my

life all I want is for
them to go away now

and forever.
The way these children start to talk is something I’d already seen
in the previous class. A little girl began to tell us about the death
of a relative. She talked on and on for about thirty seconds. Then
another child raised his hand and spoke some. Then the same girl
raised her hand and talked some more, picking up where she’d left
off as if there’d been no interruption. The whole class listened. She
talked rather softly from the last row in the classroom. You could
actually hear the children listening. Her story continued on and
off for most of the class. It was almost as though she spoke for all
of them.

I had not noticed Alfredo before I put up his poem on the
board and asked, “Who wrote this poem?” Alfredo raised his hand
with a big embarrassed grin where he sat at the back of the class. Like
many of the other children his poem narrated a death, a murder:

My nephew died
from a mistake
‘cause a cop shot him

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because they confused him
with the robber
so when he reached
into his pocket
they thought he had a gun
so they shot him
he then handcuffed him
when he tried to get up
the cop shot him again
he was trying
to reach his legs
and they thought
he had a gun
so they shot him
and killed him
and he was only
12 years old
and I didn’t even
meet him
I didn’t even
see a picture.

Maybe we were all excited that day – me, for my reasons, and them,
because we’d already come so far in writing about terror and suf-
fering, and today we would just deal with line breaks. And we would
even break up Bre’Asia’s poem about her grampa getting sick with
cancer and his lungs falling out just before he died running on his
way to the door.

These kids, who regularly observed homeless people and mur-
ders in their neighborhoods, lived with nightmares that visited
them at night and haunted them by day; for the monsters regularly
perched on their desks, and were written into their notebooks; and
who could convince Daniel that the bite felt on his shoulder was not
hurting him long after he woke up?

I regularly passed the children playing kick ball on the asphalt
playground outside their portable classroom. It looked a little like a

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moonscape – grey, hard, hot – with children screwing up their eyes
as they poised to kick the ball.

One morning on my way to their classroom, I noticed Daniel
standing by himself, squinting at nothing. I smiled at him and said,
“hello.” He didn’t even see me. Was he the only one out there who
entertained monsters regularly on that arid asphalt in the open,
alone?
Bettina Rotenberg grew up in Toronto, attended Radcliffe College,
studied painting for three years, and received her PhD in Compar-
ative Literature from University of California, Berkeley. She taught
art, literature, and creative writing at colleges in the Bay Area, and
between 1995 and 2015 was the founding Director of VALA (Vi-
sual Arts/Language Arts). She sent visual and performing artists into
public schools in the East Bay to work with poets to teach low in-
come minority children poetry in conjunction with the arts. She
wrote a book about her work, I Dare to Stop the Wind, which was
published in 2010. She now writes, draws, teaches, and takes care
of her dog.

375



Oxygen

By Hina Ahmed

“What do you think about the X-rays Dr. Smith?” Dr. Zoya Khan
asked him over the phone. “I think we should remove that tooth,
especially since she has been complaining about its pain for so long.
It just needs to come out.”

“No, I do not foresee any complications with this procedure,”
he added, before hanging up.

Text message
Zoya: I scheduled your procedure with one of the best oral
surgeons in the area. The appointment has been made for exactly
two weeks from now, at 8:00 a.m. Make sure you show up on time,
don’t eat or drink anything four hours before the procedure. You
will be just fine, trust me. There is no reason to be nervous.
“Hi, I would like to see Dr. Smith to talk to him before my
procedure,” Zareena said to the secretary over the phone. “We are so
sorry, but he is booked solid each day of the week. We even have him
working through his lunch. Why don’t you come in a little earlier
on the day of the appointment?” Zareena agreed.
Zareena’s father sat beside her on her bed. “I can take you to
your appointment.”
“Thanks Abu that would be great.”
“Don’t worry, this seems like a routine procedure and it has
been bothering you for sometime. Certainly, this is the wise choice.”
“Yes, you are right.”
The night before the procedure, Zareena came downstairs
and chewed on half a loaf of bread, sliced tomatoes, and parmesan

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cheese. “It’s just a tooth Zareena, get some sleep, you will be juuuust
fine,” her mother said.

Zareena made her way upstairs into her comfortable bed, but
was unable to sleep as the strong winds crashed against her bedroom
windows. The night erupted in a noisy storm, as blood poured pro-
fusely between her. While approximately 7,000 miles away, ghastlier
winds targeted innocent bystanders, with heavy shelling and explo-
sions of countless missile attacks causing an outpouring of bleeding
veins in dying bodies, while enormous dust clouds captured the
desert sky scattering darkness upon an entire city.

Zareena woke up at 6 a.m. to the reckless wind that blew out-
side her bedroom window. Recalling that her sister had said not to
drink anything before the procedure, she did so anyway. She washed
her face with lukewarm water, brushed her teeth, and got dressed.
She put on fitted, black jeans and threw on a sweater. She took her
tincture of rose-hip oil and dabbed it around her bare chest. She
looked at herself in the mirror, her skin glowing, her black, thick hair
tousled. She thought back to the last time she had met Dr. Smith
who had told her that she was ‘a pretty little thing’ whose presence
in his office ‘added sparks’ to an otherwise boring day. On the one
hand, his remarks had angered her, making her feel like the objecti-
fied, brown woman. Yet, on the other hand, his comments fed her
craving for a man’s attention, enabling a kind of femininity within
her that she both loved and hated.

When Zareena came downstairs, she saw her father dressed
and eating breakfast. Zareena sat on the steps, waiting in front of the
door. The rain poured, the wind blew, striking the house. Zareena
gazed out of the glass door, waiting.

“Ready?” her father asked, putting on his coat.
“Ready.”
In the car, Zareena inserted her headphones and listened to
NPR, as they drove through the dark, desolate streets of the early
morning. “The United States, along with Great Britain and France,
bombed Syria last night, hitting three targets all related to what the
United States believes is Syria’s chemical weapons program,” the
commentator said.

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“This war in Syria sounds strikingly similar to the narrative that
was used in Iraq doesn’t it Abu?”
“Yes, it certainly does.”
“The United Nations and Arab League has estimated that the
total death toll since the start of the war has been around 400,000,
of which over 500 have been children,” the commentator continued.
Zareena turned off the radio.
She looked through The Independent instead, where she saw an
image of a boy wearing an oxygen mask.
Zareena turned off her phone.
They arrived at the office. A solid structure made out of red
bricks sat on top of the hill, overlooking the entire city. Although
it was the beginning of spring, snow continued to fall and the wind
howled like a werewolf, pushing Zareena and her father through the
entrance doors.
“Please have a seat over there,” the secretary said. The room
reminded Zareena of a fancy ski lodge with its wooden interior,
sleek leather couches, and pottery barn style décor. The room faced
a shiny black, flat screen T.V. and a remote controlled fireplace that
was next to a fully stocked Keurig machine.
“Hi, are you Zaa-riiin-a?” said a woman with the kind of
freakish smile one would see if a circus clown was doing a crest
whitening commercial, with skin that looked too taut to be real, and
orange enough to resemble Donald Trump; a woman with bleach
blonde hair that had been hair-sprayed to a stiff perfection.
“You will come with me. Everything you need to know will
be on the blue sheet that we will give you after the procedure,” she
said. “You can leave all of your belongings here.”
Zareena looked at her father. “Ok, Abu. I will see you in a bit.”
She followed the nurse down the long hall into a fluorescently
lighted room with a mint green leather chair that was awaiting her
arrival.
“Go ahead and lay down. Let me take your glasses.” the nurse
said while she turned on a machine that sounded like a humidifier.
“I am going to place this mask on you. Just inhale and exhale
like you normally would. Just relaaax into it...breeeathe deeply.”

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Zareena pressed her head deeper into the cushion of the chair,
her eyes slowly closing. As she breathed into the mask, her fingertips
tingled, while her legs began to feel unattached to the rest of her
body.
“Yoo-hoo are you ok over there?” Zareena heard the voice of
the nurse and giggled. A few minutes later, Zareena began to move
her head from side to side. Her eyes fluttered and her hands dangled
off the armrest.
“Ok…I am going turn this down from a 5 to a 3,” the nurse
said, dialing the knob to the left.
Zareena bent her neck further back, her chest rising and falling.
The images of war- ravaged children flashed before her eyes. She
swung her hand to her mouth and ripped the mask off her face.
“I am not doing this!”
“Ok...Ok…! We need to get the doctor in here!”
The doctor emerged. With her blurred vision, Zareena could
see the foggy shadow of his tall, burly silhouette.
“I don’t know if I can do this.”
A momentary silence filled the room with the weight of toxic
fumes.
“There is nothing to be afraid of, kid. But I will tell you this, I
won’t be rescheduling this, not after the effort I made to get you in.”
“Well, it’s not my fault I feel afraid. Don’t you understand? I
think I need ten minutes to myself.”
The nurse stood behind Zareena frantically unwrapping plastic
packages.
“I will be back in exactly ten minutes,” the doctor said.
“I am sorry. I just don’t know that this procedure is neces-
sary...I’m just not convinced that the pain will be worth it,” Zareena
said to the nurse.
“Well, it has been causing you pain. If you don’t get it out, it
will get infected.”
“Well, I just, I just don’t know that I can do this.”
“Oh, you can. You can do this.”
Ten minutes later, the doctor re-entered the room.
“Fine. I will do this. But, I do not want that gas mask on my face.”

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“Open your mouth nice and wide,” he said. Zareena watched
his large, rough hands move in and out of her mouth, her hands
clenched, her body frozen. From the corner of her eye, she could see
the nurse’s leg covered in navy blue pants. Images of her sweating
hands grabbing her leg, flashed before her eyes.
“That’s it, that a girl,” the doctor said. The residue of her chis-
eled tooth flickered like sawdust in the air. The nurse held her head
still with her hands covered in red acrylic nails, the tips of which
pressed down on the sides of her brown temples.
“Now, I am going to just stitch this up,” the doctor said, taking
a long, black string and weaving it in and out of her.
“That’s it, the procedure is all done!” he said.
“That’s it? It’s over?” Zareena said springing up in the seat.
“Good job kiddo,” he said taking out his fist and bumping
it against hers. As she walked out of the room, she saw her bloody
tooth lying on a white paper towel.
The doctor stopped her in the dark corridor, where he stood at
the entrance of a room with a manilla envelope in his hands. “Ev-
erything you need to take is in this envelope right here. Take all of
these today, and it will be as if nothing ever happened.”
Zareena left the surgical room and arrived in the waiting room.
The room was completely full now. It seemed as if each seat held the
body of a white man wearing a camouflaged jacket and a baseball
hat. The channel of the television had been switched from CNN
to Fox. The reporter said, “The United States has successfully con-
quered the Islamic jihadists in Syria.”
Zareena’s father walked toward her and placed his hands on
her shoulders. Zareena asked, “were you able to hear my screams?”
“The procedure will be three hundred dollars,” the woman at
the check out counter said. “I thought my insurance would have
covered this,” Zareena whispered to her father, as he took out his
wallet.
“Do I need to schedule a follow-up appointment?”
“No, there will be no need for that.”
Zareena grabbed her coat and followed her father. Outside,
the wind gushed harder, with a thin layer of snow covering the

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ground. Her father opened her side of the door. When he got in the
drivers seat, he did not insert his keys. Zareena silently stared out
the window. Her father did the same.

When they arrived home, Zareena called her sister.
“I just hated that mask. All I could see was the image of war.
The Syrian war, the Holocaust, the gas chambers of war…” but
before she could finish, her sister interrupted.
“Ok, you are so crazy. Of course someone like you would make
those comparisons! It is not the oral surgeon’s job to help you with
your trauma, or the trauma of the world. You know time is money
in this world. Why can’t you just act like a grown-up and carry on
in the world like normal people do?”
Zareena sat in front of the bay window in the kitchen with
her cat next to her. The wind had stopped swirling, the snow had
settled crisply onto sharp edges of green blades of grass. The sky was
clear with white, puffy clouds fully settled within it. Zareena’s father
stood next to her slicing a soft pear with a sharp bladed knife. “These
are for you,” he said placing the plate in front of her. But Zareena
was unable to eat them. Instead, she looked on at a world that stood
still before her.

The Colonial

Zareena and her childhood friend Sydney sat in a Mexican restau-
rant at a bar beneath dim lights, waiting for Sydney’s friend Katie to
arrive. It would be Zareena’s first time meeting Katie. Sydney had
told Zareena that Katie had recently broken up with a boyfriend.

Katie walked in, her black mascara smudged from uncontrol-
lable crying. She sat down next to Sydney, who was now in the
middle of them. They ordered glasses of wine and Zareena ordered
her usual diet coke. After this encounter, Katie and Zareena’s re-
lationship grew when Katie started dating a Muslim man, causing
Zareena to become a newfound liaison of support.

Katie had been a cheerleader in high school, the star of the
volleyball team and a long distance runner. She was a Varsity athlete

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who was designed to fit in perfectly within the school systems of the
white, upper-middle class suburbs.

Zareena did not have the same sense of belonging in her
school, where she was one of the few students of color, and one
of the fewer Muslims. Although she was involved in many school
activities, she always felt like the outsider. Yet, despite their dif-
ferences, both Zareena and Katie were inclined toward one an-
other. Katie had the free-spirited warmth that Zareena gravitated
to, and Zareena offered her the safe space to be exactly who she
was, free of the judgment that came from her otherwise waspy
community.

Katie was excited about her upcoming thirtieth birthday. She
had been fighting feelings of personal failure and thought celebrating
would be a way to boost her morale. “I hope you can make it!” She said
to Zareena in an online invitation. Katie’s birthday fell in Ramadan,
but Zareena knew she would most likely not be fasting—how could
she with her chronic migraine and digestive issues? The guilt of which
had slowly faded over the years, as she began to accept herself more
for the kind of Muslim she was, over the one that she thought that
she ought to be.

The birthday party would be held at a bar called, The Colonial,
the name of which was enough of a reason for Zareena to not want
to go. But then again, it did serve the best falafel burgers in town and
her attendance would be to make Katie happy after all.

Zareena met Sydney in the parking lot. There was always some-
thing about walking into a party full of people she did not know that
unnerved her. Sydney’s blonde hair was shining brightly beneath
the sun, her sleeveless dress: long and accentuating, her shoes: high
wedged platforms. When Zareena inched closer to give her a hug,
she was mesmerized by her pink glossed lips, her shimmering gold
eye shadow, her long black eyelashes, and the dabs of bronzer high-
lighting her cheekbones.

Sydney and Zareena walked down the streets of a downtown
that lacked any rhythm of life. They made their way inside, the
smell of alcohol infusing Zareena’s senses. White men sat at the bar
staring at three large television screens. They showed men tackling

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each other, or lifting heavy weights, silencing the recent killing of a
Guatemalan woman at the hands of ICE1.

Katie’s mother Rebecca, her aunt, and her best friend, Stacy
were there by the time they arrived. The back of the bar was ded-
icated to the party, where they hung black and red balloons and
decorated wooden tables with red glass vases filled with artificial red
carnations.

Zareena had met Katie’s mother before when Katie was sick
in the hospital. She remembered walking into the room alongside
Sydney, but never being looked at. To avoid feeling invisible again,
Zareena decided to demand attention.

“Hi!” Zareena said. Rebecca turned around. Her lips glossed
in red. “Hello!”

“Sydney! Your drink is on me, it will be my way of thanking
you for everything you did for this party,” Rebecca said, while Za-
reena looked at them. Rebecca glanced at Zareena. “And you too…
both of you, the drink is on me!”

“Oh, I don’t drink,” Zareena said, but Rebecca had already
started walking away.

Sydney had started talking to Stacy. Zareena went to sit in the
corner of the bar. She looked at Stacy: the all-American beauty, with
her long brown hair, petite physique, and face full of make-up. She
was probably the most popular girl in high school—most certainly,
the Prom Queen. Sydney morphed into another being when she
talked to Stacy, her head tilting to one side, her fingers stroking her
long hair. Later when Stacey came to sit next to Zareena, she found
herself interacting with her in a similar way to Sydney, feeling like
she had to reduce a part of herself in order to forge some artificial
connection for the sake of ‘being social.’

Zareena watched as the guests arrived, bringing bottles of wine.
Some were dressed up in sophisticated rompers and dresses, while
others wore cut off shorts and t-shirts. Most of the guests were white.
There was a South Asian woman who walked in, wearing a tiny
white dress. Zareena always found it interesting to run into people

1  Immigration and Customs Enforcement
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of her kind. They seemed to respond in one of two ways, either they
wanted to strike up a conversation right away, or they completely
ignored her. This woman fell into the latter category, as she went to
sit next to a white man at the bar.

The platters of decadent food arrived. Trays of sliders, an enor-
mous salad, spiced tofu, gourmet shrimp, cheese and crackers, and
meat platters filled up the table. Katie’s family helped themselves to
the food. The guests watched. “Are we allowed to eat too?” One of
the guests asked jokingly. Zareena thought back to the parties her
mother had hosted. How she only ate after all her guests had left
and would go up to each one of them and say, “go eat,” followed by,
“you hardly ate anything, go eat more!”

While Zareena stood amidst a group of people making small
talk, a girl with long brown hair, wearing a bright red sleeveless
dress, came frolicking up to them. “Oh my God. Did you guys try
the truffle fries? They are to diiiiie for.”

“What is truffle?” Zareena asked.
“Oh, my God, you don’t know?
A tall, white man made his way toward their conversation. “Oh
my God, Dad! Can you believe this girl has never heard of truffle?” The
girl’s father looked at Zareena with eyes of wanting. His face: wrinkled
like a sun-dried tomato, his hair: gray and slickly combed back.
“Ok, you have to try the fries, just try them!” The girl de-
manded. Although Zareena wasn’t quick to believe her truffle nar-
rative, she was curious–and well, one fry wouldn’t kill her. “Ok,
ok, I will try the truffle fries!” she said. “I need to watch you have
this experience,” the girl said, as she and her father stood watching
her. Zareena took the first bite. “Oh, I’ve this before,” Zareena said,
resisting the urge to create a voice of excitement to please the girl
and her father.
“So where are you from?” The father asked.
“I’m American.”
“Oh, well, where is your family from?”
“From Pakistan.”
“Oh, do they speak Farsi?”
“No. They speak English and Urdu.”

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“I know a lot of Pakistanis. I go to New York City all the time
and I love to talk to everybody.”
“So what kind of work do you do?” He asked.
“I’m a blogger.”
“Oh, what kinds of things do you blog about?”
“Oh, you know, the countless social justice issues in this
country.”
“Well, how do you pay your bills?”
“I try and save everything I make, and avoid extraneous
spending. It’s just a different kind of relationship to capitalism.”
“You millennials have the wrong mindset. This is a capitalist
economy! It reminds me of the man that I saw on the news who is
thirty years old and still living at home. His parents are suing him
because he is refusing to leave. I mean, I would do the same thing!”
“Well, the economy is hard for millennials these days. I don’t
think there is anything wrong with families staying together and
helping each other. That is what people ought to do.”
“Wow, you sound like a true Bernie Sanders supporter!” He
scoffed.
“Actually I was, and I am.”
“Well, you millennials need to realize that Bernie is a socialist
and socialism just doesn’t work. I mean think about it. How would
you feel if you got an A in a class for working hard and another
student got the same grade for doing nothing?”
“Well…sometimes grades have less to do with ‘working hard’
and more to do with a student’s life circumstances which are you
know…linked to things like race and class, so I would probably help
that student.”
“No you wouldn’t!” The father’s daughter said.
Zareena moved back to stand next to Sydney, staring at a dark
room.
Later in the night, the father came up to Zareena again. “You
know all this stuff happening at the border now…” You mean the
break-up of countless families and the kidnappings of innocent chil-
dren? Zareena thought without saying, because there was no space
for her to speak.

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“Of course we need to have borders! I mean it’s so ridiculous
that people think they are just entitled to this country. It isn’t our
responsibility to house illegal immigrants! Detaining their children
should teach them a lesson. We need ICE, just like we need police
officers. But of course, they get a bad reputation to! Let me ask you,
do you ever see any videos of white people being shot by the police?”
Zareena stared at him.
“White men do not…” But he did not let her finish. “I just
hate how these black people think that they are always the victims…!
Same with women…women with this whole MeToo Movement…
always acting like victims…everyone blames the men, women need
to take accountability for their own actions!”
His wife came to stand beside him.
Sydney noticed Zareena’s horrified expression from across the
room.
“Hey! How’s it going?” Sydney asked, coming up to them.
“Oh! Hey! Great! I really have to go to the bathroom!” Zareena said,
while the father scanned Sydney from head to toe.
Zareena went toward the bathroom doors. One door said
‘George’ and the other said ‘Martha.’
What was she doing here?
“I actually am going to get going,” Zareena whispered to
Sydney. She hugged Katie good-bye. The father stood in a dark
corner at the other end of the bar, watching Zareena leave from the
corners of his unblinking eyes.

Hina Ahmed is a writer based in Binghamton, New York. She has a
BA in history from Binghamton University and an MA in education.
She a novelist, a short story writer, a poet, and a political essayist. She
has had published work in Pipe Dream, Press and Sun-Bulletin, East
Lit, Archer Magazine, FemAsia, Aftab, Adelaide, Sun Independent,
among others. Her work explores themes relevant to the South Asian
diaspora, Islam, identity, sexuality, race, and gender.

387



The Hearing Aid

By Peter Hoppock

Karen Musial’s father came home unexpectedly while she and Toby
Dodson, illuminated by the silent flat screen TV a few feet away,
were making out under a blanket on the carpeted living room floor.
Toby was on top of her, kissing her neck. Karen’s back was slightly
arched and her head twisted, facing the entrance foyer. She would
have seen the door swing if her eyes had been open; she might have
heard the thwick of the deadbolt withdrawing, the scraping of the
strike plate, or the squeak of the hinges as the door swung free, if
she had not been breathing so hard. But she opened her eyes only
when the door slammed shut, in time to see her father’s feet at the
step-down to the living room, still and pointed in her direction,
then twisting and disappearing down the hallway to the bedroom
section of their split-level. Beneath the blanket her legs unwrapped
from the small of Toby’s back; her left hand—the one that had been
squeezing Toby’s back—was instantly re-assigned to push away his
right hand—the one that had been roaming under her sweatshirt;
her right hand—the one daringly close to his zipper—she used to
withdraw his left hand—the one that had been slowly and consis-
tently moving down her spine and underneath her jeans.

It didn’t matter that they were fully clothed. The sounds they
made as they dry humped, and the fact that only their heads were
visible outside the blanket, created the illusion that they had actually
been fucking. This, of course was part of the delight for Toby. He’d
never fucked a girl. He didn’t know any other 15 year-old boys who
had. Only after Karen had thrown off the blanket and sat up, too

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late for her father to see that they were both fully clothed, did she
explain to Toby the reason for her abrupt termination.

“It’s my father,” she said, between breaths.
Having already fantasized that their movements—with Karen
so energetic and passionate, pressing up against his erection, fingers
pressed into his flesh, kissing hard enough to grind teeth—would
have passed for fucking if his friends had been watching, he easily
imagined that Karen’s father might have thought the same.
“I thought your dad was away for the weekend,” said Toby as
he moved from the floor to the couch, for the moment holding out
hope that Mr. Musial had rushed by without getting a good view.
Toby started to raise the volume on the TV, but Karen snatched
the remote from him and shut it off instead. She sat on the couch
near—but not next—to him, hands refastening the bra underneath
her sweatshirt, head cocked to one side, peering down the hallway.
When her hands were free and visible, she held one finger up to her
lips—and waited.
Karen had a sweet face with blue-green eyes, full lips, and long,
straight blonde hair. Unspectacular—except for her shape. She had
been blessed—or cursed—with a full figure that boys at school ogled,
and most girls resented. She thwarted the more obvious, lustful urges
of the older boys—and tempered the mean-spirited envy of girls—
by dressing in drab, loose clothing.
Toby was thin and wiry, but muscular, with deep-set brown
eyes that suggested an empathetic nature—perhaps that was what
she had sensed when he had asked her out.
As true as that was in general, regarding Karen he had enter-
tained lustful urges, just like all the other boys he knew. Before asking
her out, he had spent considerable time in the lunchroom, in study
halls, on the school bus they shared, asking her questions—at first
about how she felt about certain teachers, did she like sports, what
movies she’d seen, what music she liked, then later about herself, her
family. She seemed accessible and open except about her family. She
mentioned that her mother had left five years ago without contesting
the divorce or custody, and that she lived alone with her father—
beyond that nothing. He didn’t press. When he asked her out—a

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movie and perhaps Starbucks after—she had immediately said yes to
the movie, but suggested they go to her house after, to watch music
videos and just “be together.” “Be together” immediately triggered
his imagination; might he get to see her naked, at least from the
waist up?

Seated in the back row of the movie theater, they had talked
during the previews. She told him he was the first freshman to ask
her out. She was used to being asked out by the older boys, boys
with “experience,” who swore they didn’t believe the rumors about
her, and they were just looking for a normal date. In the beginning
she had said yes if they were good looking, but every time—“every
single time” she emphasized—that she had allowed a boy to kiss her,
they had wasted no time trying to go all the way, which she was not
going to do, “just so we are clear, in case that’s what you are looking
for.” But she also said she had a good feeling about him from the
way he behaved in school.

When the feature began, she had taken his left hand and guided
it behind her neck to her left shoulder. Later she had leaned her head
against his. Halfway through the movie, her forehead touching his
cheek, she had twisted her face so her lips brushed next to his. It
took only the slightest movement on his part to initiate the kiss. She
stayed with the kiss, eyes closed, ignoring the movie, until she pulled
away, saying, “You kiss nice. You’re gentle.”

Convinced that she was not going to let him do anything more
than kiss her, he had relaxed for the rest of the movies, content to
feel her lips gliding and roving over his, as they took turns being the
aggressor, she initiating the tongue, he happy to comply.

But at her house, she had allowed Toby to discover her hidden
voluptuousness; his response—as they lay together on her living
room floor—was to be aggressively thrilled and silently thankful for
the opportunity, his erection unaffected by her insistence that they
stay clothed. He hoped that, after a few minutes’ hiatus due to her
father’s entrance, she would announce that they could continue—if
they were quiet and kept the music soft.

“You should know,” she cautioned him in a loud whisper. “My
dad is ex-Army.”

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His erection still awkwardly positioned in his jeans, Toby
sighed and sat back into a pile of soft cushions. She hadn’t men-
tioned that before. “So your dad was a soldier,” he said casually.
“What’s he gonna do? Shoot me?”
“He keeps guns in the house,” she said curtly. “Don’t joke
about shooting.”
“Have the young man meet me in the kitchen!” came a
booming voice from down the hall. Her disconcerting reprimand
combined with her father’s directive to end all hope Toby had of he
and Karen returning to the floor. Huddled together on the couch,
Karen and Toby watched her father stride by with military bearing,
carrying a laptop-sized leather case in one hand. His crew cut, mus-
cular physique, and chin-in posture suggested that the “ex” in “ex-
Army” meant only his uniform had been retired.
Mr. Musial offered Toby the chair opposite him at the break-
fast table, and placed the unzipped case between them. Karen stood
to one side. Her father slowly began unzipping the case, without
looking at it. His focus was on Toby. The veins in his forehead stood
out in relief, and his skin seemed stretched tight over every facial
feature. Toby felt light-headed, and scratched at the sweat beading
in his armpits. He had the urge to bolt, to run out of the house, to
escape whatever was about to happen.
“Daddy, this is Toby—from school,” said Karen suddenly,
leaning into Toby’s back and over the table. Mr. Musial ignored
her, and continued to pull slowly on the zipper. She waited a few
seconds for him to react. “We were just making out. Clothes on!”
she added, stridently. Then softly, “Swear to God, daddy.” When he
opened the case, Karen withdrew to her place behind Toby.
“Do you know what this is, son?” said Mr. Musial grimly. In-
side the case was a pistol with the magazine partially exposed.
“A handgun, sir,” said Toby. He was no stranger to guns, was
a junior member of the NRA like all his friends, and had achieved
Marksman certificates with a .22 rifle. He was familiar with a 12-
guage, and had been duck hunting with his uncle. He did not rec-
ognize the firearm on the table, however, and the strangeness of
it served to increase his anxiety. Beneath the table he pressed the
fingernails of one hand into the sweaty palm of the other.

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Karen sighed and stepped back from Toby. “Sweet Jesus,
daddy, do you have to do this?” She walked around the table and
stood next to her father. “I told you we were just making out!”
Mr. Musial grabbed her wrist and squeezed; she froze in position.
Toby imagined that if the grip tightened further Karen would let
out a scream. Mr. Musial fixed her with the same gaze he had been
directing at Toby. “God,” she said, “You are such a control freak!”
Mr. Musial turned his attention back to Toby. “A pistol, ac-
tually. A 9mm Browning Semi-Automatic to be precise. Favorite of
ex-military like myself. But not tonight,” he said, every consonant
snapping to attention. “Tonight, young man, this”—he pressed the
clip up into the bottom of the grip until it clicked and locked into
place—“is a hearing aid.” He pulled at Toby’s right arm and placed
the loaded pistol in his hand.
Karen ripped her wrist from her father’s grasp and returned to
Toby’s side; she wrapped her arms around his neck while he cradled
the weapon uneasily. Her father retracted his hands. Despite the
pistol’s light weight, Toby’s arm quivered, strength leaking from it
like air from a balloon. He felt he was in one of those dreams where
you showed up naked for school, or kept falling forever.
For a few seconds, Mr. Musial looked at Toby as if he were
sighting a weapon, head tilted sideways to the right, left eye shut.
Karen whispered in Toby’s ear, “Do you realize you could shoot him
right now?” she said. It wasn’t a question. She slid her fingers down
his arms and over his hands. “Pull the trigger. And put me out of
my misery.” She lifted his hands and pointed the pistol at her father.
“Pull the trigger!” she cried out. “Pull it!” She tightened her grip
around his hands, but did not attempt to press the trigger herself.
“Are you nuts?” said Toby nervously. His entire body was
shaking. Karen’s head was next to his. Her arms paralleled his. Her
hands lifted the gun so that it pointed at her father’s head.
“You don’t understand!” She screamed. “He’s a monster! He’s
been—do I have to explain it to you? Ever since my mother left!”
Sweat dripped into Toby’s eyes and stung them. Within a few sec-
onds he couldn’t see Mr. Musial’s face clearly. His hands shook. His
shoulders ached.

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“Well, there’s different interpretations on that,” said Mr. Mu-
sial. “But in any case, this young man is not the answer to your
problems, sweetheart.” With those words, Karen loosed her grip,
and Toby let the pistol down gently on the table. He looked back
and up at Karen, who had withdrawn, and whose face was con-
torted, exposing a feeling Toby could not fathom: pain or anger, or
fear or confusion. A mix of all four? When their eyes met, she shook
her head sideways—a rejection of him certainly—and ran out of the
room and down the hall. He heard a door slam.
Mr. Musial grabbed the weapon, ejected the magazine, and
reinserted both into the container. “OK then,” he said. “That’s that.
Nobody’s going to shoot anybody. Agreed?”
“Yes, sir,” said Toby, his knee-jerk response to power. He
struggled to rise, so rigid had his body become under the stress of
the last few minutes.
“Good.” Cradling the gun case in both hands, Karen’s father
stood up, and followed Toby out of the kitchen. “Time to go, son.”
In the foyer, Toby stopped and looked down the hallway to-
wards the bedrooms. “I want to tell her goodnight, at least,” he said
sheepishly. “It’s only polite.”
Mr. Musial fondled the gun case, and Toby thought he could
see the skin loosen around the man’s cheeks and mouth. “Give it a
try. I believe she’s quite disappointed in you, however.”
“Karen!” Toby shouted. He was sure she could hear him. “I’m
leaving!”
“I know!” came her voice from down the hall and behind a
closed door.
Mr. Musial opened the front door and positioned himself be-
tween Toby and the hallway. He seemed to relish giving Toby time,
confident in the futility of his request.
After several seconds, Mr. Musial stepped closer to the front
door, forcing Toby towards it. They both turned when they heard
Karen walking down the hallway. She gave her father a determined
look, like the face she wore when she asked Toby to shoot, a hateful
look, with tinges of anguish. She had been crying.
“I’m going to walk Toby out to the street,” she said. She
grabbed Toby’s arm and ushered him outside.

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Halfway there, she kissed him lightly on the cheek. “Are you
going to tell? Are you going to go to the police?” she asked.
“Should I?” said Toby.
“No.”
“What has he been doing to you? Has your father—I don’t
even want to think it, much less say it—”
“Oh Toby,” she interrupted. “You poor boy. Do you think I
would stay here if he were forcing himself on me? Do I seem to you
like a girl who would put up with that?”
“I don’t know what to think anymore,” said Toby, turning
away from her. She seemed alien to him, and he felt suddenly as
helpless with her as he had been with her father. “You told me to
shoot him, for God’s sake! To put you out of your misery is what
you said.”
“Well, that’s what I wanted. It’s not good, what my father and
I have.”
Toby took a few steps more away from her. “I barely know
you! I’m not going to shoot somebody for you! Not your father.
Not anybody!”
“Then who’s going to save me?” she said, cavalierly, the way
a teacher might request a student stay after class to help clean up.
Mr. Musial appeared at the front door. “That’s enough, now!
Time’s up!” he called out.
Karen looked back at her father, and as if to taunt him, grabbed
Toby’s head with both hands and kissed him again, with hard, al-
most painful, pressure. When she finally pulled away, she said, “It
could’ve been you,” and ran back into her house.
“You’re nuts!” he cried out to the stars that had begun to ap-
pear.
He looked back at the house. Karen stood in one of the large
bedroom windows, silhouetted against a bright interior light. She
might have been facing him, but he was in dark shadows now and
doubted she could see him if she was. When he took a last look
down the long driveway after reaching the road, he thought he saw
someone else enter the bedroom and join Karen at the window. He
thought he saw her remove her jeans and toss them behind her, then

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jump up into the man’s arms and wrap her legs around his waist. He
turned away and lurched into the darkness, struggling to keep his
balance on the unstable gravel shoulder.

He tried unsuccessfully to picture himself back at the kitchen
table, pulling the trigger as Karen’s hands closed around his. In its
place the image of Karen and her father in the window, disturbing
and draining, sustained itself against his will.

By the time he got home, he was convinced that he had con-
jured up the image of Karen with her father in the window, as some
perverse reaction to his display of gutlessness at the kitchen table.
Had she actually asked him to shoot her father? What a bizarre
notion. The gun had been real though. He was certain of that. He
could feel the weight of it, the cool metal of the barrel, the ribbed
wood of the handle, as if he were still holding it. Hearing aid? Her
father had barely said a word—it was Karen’s voice that resonated
with him, her unexpected and languid request that gripped his imag-
ination and kept him awake: …and put me out of my misery.

Lying face down, spread-eagled on the bed, the sheets became
Karen’s soft skin, and his erection returned with a vengeance. He
reset the scene in his imagination: her hands tightening around his,
his finger on the trigger, the soft, heated voice in his ear, his finger
moving, the flash and explosion of sound, the kickback of the pistol,
the look of shock on her father’s face, him falling backwards. Toby
reached for the Kleenex next to the alarm clock and rolled onto his
back. You can do this, he told himself as he began. You can save her.

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