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Showing posts with label short stories. Show all posts
Showing posts with label short stories. Show all posts
Monday, April 21, 2014
Friday, March 19, 2010
with everything cancelled but shadows
Word Count: 5320
This is a story I've been working on for a while, so I thought I would post it since I have not posted anything in a while. The title comes from an e.e. cummings poem and the poems quoted in the story are also e.e. cummings poems.
He never let them cut their hair short. Her mother promised to take them to the salon right before school, but now Gabi doesn’t think she will be able to get her hair cut anytime soon. Gabi can’t hear what the police officers are saying because all she can see is her mother’s hair, fanning on the ground around her body. Gabi had tried to brush it out of her face before they made her let go, but in this heat there wasn’t any way to keep hair from clinging to skin.
Jocelyn is screaming. Gabi can’t understand why. It is hardly the time to scream. It is hardly the time to do anything. If he was still alive, maybe Gabi could shoot him, but he beat her to that. So she has nothing left to do except wait for her mother to open her eyes again. Gabi twists a strand of her own dark hair between her fingers, lets go and notices wetness on her fingers. Her mother's blood is smeared over Gabi's new blue jeans and the bottom of her t-shirt. Even the tips of her hair has been dipped in it.
***
He came into class seven minutes late smelling of smoke and sat next to Jamie in twelfth grade English class some seventeen years earlier. He slouched in his chair, legs spread wide, arms taking in as much space as possible. His dark hair was messed up, falling over his eyes.
"What'd I miss?" He asked her, so close that Jamie imagined she could feel his breath caressing her jawbone and her earlobe. Her skin seemed to stretch itself up towards his lips.
She composed herself and pointed at the aging anthology opened on her desk. "We're continuing the poetry unit. e. e. cummings," she whispered back.
"Alright. Finally, there's a poet," he said, flipping his book open to "my sweet old etcetera." "This poem," he said, finger lingering over the words.
Jamie's breath caught. "You like e. e. cummings, too? You don't strike me as a poetry kind of guy."
His laugh sounded as though he was purring. "Well, I don't like that rhyming Emily Dickinson crap. But e. e. cummings is pretty cool. I mean, what kind of person comes up with this crazy shit?"
"Do you two have something you want to share with the rest of the class?" Mr. Green had finally tuned into their conversation, turning away from the blackboard to face them.
Jamie didn't know what to say and began to stutter, but he didn't even have to compose himself before answering, "We're just discussing the poetry, man."
Jamie didn't believe in love at first sight, but she let him walk her home that afternoon anyway.
***
The air was thick; the sun was low enough on the horizon that Gabi couldn't see the orange sphere, just the shoots of light that it sent out until the earth swallowed it. Distress signals.
"You have hold still," she hissed at her sister. "You don't want him to find us."
"I want Mama," Jocelyn responded, trying to pull away.
Gabi tried to keep from slapping her. She was fourteen, too young to explain to a four-year-old that her mother was in no position to spend time with her right now. Besides, the movement among the cornstalks might tip him off.
"I want her to run with us." Jocelyn wedged herself underneath Gabi, stringy golden hair sunning itself over her knee. She felt the urge to kiss her forehead but restrained.
The bugs were so loud at night. As the sun got lower, the earth got louder. Gabi's leg cramped up, but she forced her body to stay in that rigid position so she could hear if anyone was coming. Sweat congealed with the hair on her neck. Jocelyn's body had gone limp at her feet; the regular rise and fall of her ribs was comforting. She slid my fingers between Jocelyn's, both because she needed to touch another human being and in case they had to run deeper into the cornfield. Then she could just yank Jocelyn behind her. Once, they had to run all the way into town before he stopped following them.
Maybe he had forgotten about them tonight. He did that sometimes.
***
The hair on his chest was just visible in the moonlight that seeped through the yellowed curtains into Jamie's room. He smelled like cheep cigarettes and wood overlaid with a heavier man-sweat smell. She had never been with anyone who smelled like man-sweat. Most of her other boyfriends had just smelled like the high school gym. He was only a few months older than she was, but his goatee and deep eyes made him seem so much older.
She ran her finger up the muscular indentation from his belly button to his breastbone. She thought he was asleep, but he slowly closed his hand around hers and brought her fingers to his lips. He exhaled hot air through his nose across her knuckles. She moved her face closer to his, wanting to feel the warmth of his breath roll over her face.
"I love you, baby."
She rolled over to look at him, her chest pressed against his, the sheets sliding from her shoulders. "Really?" Her voice was so small she wondered if he could hear her.
He sat up to face her, sheets falling forgotten into their laps. Their sweat glazed skin cooled in the night air. "I was going to memorize another poem for you, but I couldn’t find one that matched the magnitude of your beauty." Sure it was cheesy, but she couldn't help blushing. She leaned in to kiss him, but he stopped her, putting a warm finger against her lips. "Marry me. I'll die if you don't marry me."
"You don't leave me too much of a choice," she teased. He was absolutely serious, though, the muscles around his lips unmoving, his eyes cold, searching. "Of course I’ll marry you." She winced as he wrapped his arms tightly around her slightly bruised ones. He got excited and I bruise easy, she told herself as she shifted her weight, knowing she'd have bruises inside her thighs in the morning too. If he noticed her flinching, though, he'd kiss her bruises and massage her until he had to leave. She loved that. He didn't push her for anything; he just wanted to make her feel good. And he made her feel good all right.
But he didn't notice her pain. He just held her tightly against him and began to kiss her, pushing her back beneath him onto the bed, murmuring about how much he loved her. Afterwards, he got out of bed and pulled his clothes on before climbing out the window and walking back to his house. It would be nice to live in their own house so they could lie in bed together the whole night without worrying about her parents freaking out about it in the morning. Then she wouldn’t mind so much when he didn't notice.
***
At fifteen, Gabi still slept in her mother's bed. It wasn't real sleep, though. The only real sleep she ever had was when she was ten. That time he went to rehab.
They turned the fan on high so that it moved the curtains, which were yellowed since they were so old. Gabi liked it better that way because the sunlight against new white curtains probably would be so bright that she wouldn't be able to allow her body to relax into that almost-sleep. Her mother always said that one day she'd get new white curtains. Gabi wondered when this one day would be. Her mother never specified.
Jocelyn slept in a little ball, her head on her mother's ribcage and her knees pressed against her hip bone. Her mother stroked her hair so that Jocelyn fell asleep. Gabi liked it better that way.
Her mother winced when Jocelyn moved her head higher. "Be gentle, baby," she murmured. She moved her hands from Jocelyn's hair to the top of the little girl's head, rubbing her forehead with her thumbs while trying to keep Jocelyn from accidentally hitting her fresh bruises again.
"Mom?" Gabi waited for her mother to open her eyes. "Can we go to the library tonight? I wanted to get 95 Poems out like you told me too."
"You need to start reading some good poetry. I should go to some PTA meeting and insist that all Emily Dickinson be banned from high school classrooms. If you want to read bad poetry in your own time, there are plenty of anthologies devoted to her pitiful ramblings." Her mother's voice was a hollow, warm ringing pushing up through the humid air.
Gabi turned delicately onto her shoulder so she could better look at her mother. "You know, Mr. Green says that e. e. cummings rambles," she offered, allowing a smile to tweak the edges of her lips.
"Ha." Gabi's mother rolled herself up onto one elbow, checking a gasp as Jocelyn's golden head shifted to press against her abdomen. "Mr. Green is a terrible excuse for an English teacher. I know, he taught me when I was in high school. He taught twelfth grade then."
Gabi scooched closer to her mother, even though the humidity was so thick that it tried to keep them apart. The three of them lay there in the bed, Jocelyn and Gabi cuddled into their mother's stomach as close as they could, even though their sweat made the sheets damp. Their mother still leaned on her elbow over them, trailing her fingers through Gabi's dark, tangled hair. He had dark hair too. Her mother always told Gabi that hers was beautiful anyway.
Gabi looked up at her mother's chin, trying to hear her breathe over Jocelyn's soft snores and the whirl of the fan. Her mother wasn't looking down at the girls anymore but at the flapping curtains. Her fingertips still caressed Gabi's scalp until she was falling asleep. She didn't want to miss a waking moment with her mother, though. Such moments were much too precious to waste on sleep.
"you being in love." Gabi could barely hear her voice. "will tell who softly asks in love, am i separated from your body smile brain hands merely to become the jumping puppets of a dream? oh i mean: entirely having in my careful how careful arms created this at length inexcusable," she closed her eyes and placed her hands over her face, muffling her voice, but she couldn't stop. "this inexplicable pleasure-you go from several persons: believe me that strangers arrive when i have kissed you," she stumbled, "into a memory slowly, oh seriously- that since and if you disappear solemnly myselves ask 'life, the question how,'" her voice broke, "'how do i prefer this face to another and why do I weep eat sleep—what does the whole intend' they wonder. oh and they cry ‘to be being that i am alive this absurd fraction in its lowest terms with everything cancelled but shadows,'" I could barely understand what she was saying, her voice was so unfocused. "I can't remember all of it anymore…--what does it all come down to? love? Love if you like and i like, for the reason that I hate people and lean out of this window is love, love and the reason that i laugh and breathe is oh love and the reason that i do not fall into this street is love.’"
Gabi felt the tears, warm and salty against her already salt and sweat stained skin.
"He memorized that poem for me and recited it outside my window on my seventeenth birthday."
"That was a long time ago." Gabi wondered if her mother remembered that she was in the room.
She did'’t. She blinked and looked down at Gabi. "Hmmm?" Her fingers lay dormant in Gabi's tangles. Then she eased herself back down onto the mattress, pushing Jocelyn and Gabi away as gently as she could manage. "Oh. Not that long ago. He had copied it out of a book at school onto a cafeteria napkin." She tried to laugh. "The napkin fell out of his pocket, so I kept it until it…until it disintegrated. That's how I memorized it."
Gabi could see her, sun-drenched hair hanging out the window, dark brown eyes shimmering with tears, cheeks rosy from blushing with delight. She still looked the same way she did sixteen years ago. Except for the bruises.
***
"Do you want to go out tonight?" Jamie's sister still called her every weekend, even though her friends from high school had stopped soon after Jamie got engaged in her first year of community college.
"He's working tonight," she'd say to Mary-Ann. "He's always so tired after work, and he spends the whole day thinking about me. I want to be home when he gets home." But sometimes she really did want to go with Mary-Ann instead of waiting at home, especially when he came home smelling like alcohol. Mary-Ann said that he had a problem and Jamie couldn't keep covering it up for him. He said that everyone at work drank and he had no problem with a beer every once in a while. Jamie didn’t like how hard he kissed her after he'd been drinking.
He wasn't home too late tonight. She was on the sofa trying to read, but she was up on her feet as soon as she saw the headlights. She opened the door for him, trying her best to smile as warmly as she could.
He kissed her sloppily on her cheekbone. "Hey baby," he greeted her. "What's going on?" He jaunted into the kitchen, which was an extension the family room. They lived in a little rancher that her father had helped them pay for when he gave him a job with his construction business.
She took a deep breath. She was sure he wouldn't be angry. And she didn't need to be afraid; he had never hurt her on purpose. "I do have good news," she started, waiting for him to give her permission to continue. He smiled at her indulgently while eating the food on plate she had set out for him. "I'm pregnant." It sounded so ugly and hollow in the little rancher. "We're going to have a baby," she corrected herself.
His face immediately lit up and he lost some of the tired glazed look in his eyes. He dropped his fork, pushed back his chair and took the room in two steps so he could scoop her up in his arms and whirl her around. She felt immense relief and laughter just bubble out of her, her face flushed with happiness at his approval.
He kissed her and she felt herself melting. She drank him as deeply as she could before he broke away. She tried not to make an obviously distressed noise. He had not kissed her like that for months, and she was not ready for it to be over so quickly. "You make me the happiest man in the world," he told her. She just wanted him to shut up and kiss her.
That night she decided that being pregnant was the best thing she had ever done for their relationship. She changed her mind the next time he came home drunk.
***
The sound of breaking glass can drown out screams. Or at least freeze everything enough that Gabi could breathe before the world closed in on her again. She had enough time to look into her mother’s eyes as her mother brought the bottle down over his head. She could hardly see Gabi through her tears.
"Call 911," was all that she said to Gabi. Gabi didn't know if she meant for him or for Jocelyn, who hadn't moved since he knocked her off the chair onto the tiled floor. He had walked into the room when she was making peanut butter and jelly sandwiches for a picnic. She had wanted both him and her mother to come, but he had said he wasn't in the mood for a picnic.
***
He stayed completely sober for two months after the baby was born.
His hands were so big that he could hold the baby in both hands without cradling her against his chest. Jamie was grateful for all the attention he gave the baby; it gave her some time to rest. She felt indifferent towards it. She was so tired, and now that he was home more instead of out with his friends, she had no need for the baby's company.
His lips massaged the sore parts of Jamie's body so well. They didn't talk all that much, but he started reading her book of poetry aloud to the baby. She would go and sit beside him, curling her body against his and occasionally kissing his jawbone until his body responded to hers and they left the baby to sleep in the crib in the garishly pink baby room alone.
She was in such shock at the end of those two months when he slapped her the first time that she didn't feel it. She couldn't even remember the string of events leading up to it any longer; even though she was sure she felt it coming. Did she really nag him about hanging out with his friends instead of coming home to help her? Would going back to college to finish her degree in English really sabotage their relationship? She didn’t know anymore, so she stopped thinking about it. She tried to get pregnant again, but she had two miscarriages before she gave up and went on the pill. She hoped he didn't find out.
***
Jocelyn fidgeted. Her arm was still in a sling, but her bruised ribcage no longer looked that pretty purple black color, having started to fade to mud brown.
Aunt Mary-Ann and Uncle Danny had taken them out for lunch at the family restaurant in town. The restaurant had a toy train that ran along the top of the wall, whistling frequently enough that the one time they had eaten there as a family, her mother had to talk him down from throwing his glass at it. He wasn’t even drunk that time.
Her mother's back was unnaturally straight, but that could have been because she might have hurt her side more badly than she let on. She had French braided her hair and was wearing a suit jacket with the shoulder pads ripped out and jeans from the junior's section in the mall.
Aunt Mary-Ann was trying not to cry. She was not as pretty as Gabi's mother, and she wore more makeup than Gabi's mother did. Uncle Danny had close-cropped hair and was clean-shaven, which Gabi's mother usually teased him about because she said a man wasn't a man without a beard.
"If you knew he was unstable, why did you keep the children in the home with him as long as you did?" Uncle Danny's voice was quiet, apologetic. Whether apologizing for saying something out of line or for telling it like it is, Gabi wasn't not sure.
Gabi's mother stood up. "I tried to keep my family together, alright?" she spat. "I thought he would get better." If she wasn't so angry, she might have started to cry. "I thought I could help him get better."
***
"I wanted to get you something," he said. Jamie was surprised to see him. His eyes were clear, or somewhat less red than she remembered. He was wearing clean clothes, shirts that she had personally never bought him. "I know I have been a sorry excuse for a man, but I’m going to change that, if you’ll have me."
She didn't answer him. Normally, such a reaction would warrant her a beating, but she was too heavy to care. The baby moved again inside her. It always did that when she thought about it. Not "it," Jamie tried to correct herself. Him maybe. Would he prefer a son or a daughter? She didn't know. They already had a daughter, and he had shown interest in her only on occasion. The little girl helped her a lot, though. She loved to put her small hands on Jamie's stomach and feel the baby move. She had to send her to stay with Mary-Ann while she was in the hospital, though. Gabi had cried as Jamie drove away.
He put the small wrapped rectangle beside the hospital bed. When Jamie didn't pick up the thin package, he picked it up and put it in her hands. His hands were still big, though not as calloused as they had been before he got help. She could smell him, though his sweat was more the smell of nervousness and less the smell from hard work. Still, it was a welcome change from the hospital burn in her nostrils. She opened up the paper and let the book fall into her lap. e. e. cummings. 95 Poems.
"I know it doesn’t have our poem or 'my sweet old etcetera' in it, but I know how much you love---"
She started to cry. "Why do you do this to me?" Her voice was so soft that it was only air; no sound came though.
He knelt beside the bed so he could look into her eyes. He covered her hands with his. "I love you. I want a second chance. I want to be a family for once. I want this little baby to have a father who loves her."
So she let him stay. She was reading the poems, her fingers combing through his hair as he slept with his head on her bed. Number 14.
but also dying
(as well as
to cry and sing,
my love
and wonder)is something
you have and I
've been
doing as long as to
(yes)forget(and longer
dear)our
birth’s the because of a
why but our doom is
to grow(remember
this my sweet)not
only
wherever the sun and stars and
the
moon
are we're;but
also
nowhere
***
Gabi's new house had white curtains. Except it wasn’t a house. It was a one-bedroom apartment. They didn’t have any furniture; her mother wanted to buy curtains first. Jocelyn was afraid that he would know where they were if he saw the white curtains.
"Plenty of people have white curtains," Gabi told Jocelyn to get her to shut up.
She shook her head. "No, but I mean really white curtains. Not just yellowed ones."
Her mother was working at a doctor's office in town, so Gabi took Jocelyn to the playground during the day. Jocelyn would go down the slide sometimes, but for the most part they just sat on the swings. Gabi liked brushing the mulch back and forth, making the little furrow under the swing deeper. Even when it got really hot, the dirt under the wood chips was damp. She could sit in the swing forever, rocking gently. The chains holding the seat creaked in different pitches depending whether she moved backwards or forwards.
Jocelyn always tried to see how far she could swing, hoping that one day she would touch the clouds with the toe of her too-small sneaker. Gabi never had such aspirations.
***
When he saw Jamie standing there, he stopped slowly. "Hey baby," he almost slurred. "Where're the kids?"
"Where were you?" She tried to make her voice sound stronger than she felt.
He laughed uneasily. "Can't a man hang out with his buddies without his wife nagging him to death about it?" He pushed past her and stumbled into the kitchen to his cold dinner plate.
She followed him. "I just don't think this is a good idea with you so soon out of rehab. I know it's been a little over a year, but what you had was an illness. You can’t think that you can just go back and be in complete control---"
"I am in control,"” he spat. She reeled back. He walked closer to her until she was pushed flat against the wall. "Don’t criticize my decisions." He was growling now.
She couldn't keep the tears from collecting in her eyes. "You have to think about your family." She grit her teeth together as she said it. She could not let him slip again.
He shook her. "You know nothing about how fucking hard this is!" He walked away, leaving her to crumble into a pile on the floor.
She pushed herself back up against the wall. "Do you even love me at all anymore?" She needed him to justify her existence, to prove to her that all this was worth it.
But he didn't tell her he loved her. Not until the next day when he woke up and came to find her still lying on the kitchen floor, the two little ones wrapped around her as though trying to protect her. He gently dislodged them and carried her into the bedroom, whispering his apologies to her. She didn't open her eyes until she was laid out on the bed. He stroked her hair and rubbed her hand with his fingers. "I love you, baby." It was all he could say. And she forgave him again.
***
Gabi watched her mother put the lipstick on in front of the mirror. Her mother was standing in her underwear, the lacey kind that she never wore unless it was a special occasion. She let the tube of lipstick fall in the sink as she fumbled for the eyeliner. She could even stab herself in the eye with a pencil elegantly.
"Where are you going, Mom?" Gabi knew but needed to ask her anyway.
"Hmmm?" She looked over at Gabi when she finished with the eyeliner. "Oh, I'm not going anywhere. We are going out. Can you go get the jeans off my bed? My new pair. And the black heels, too."
"So where are we going?"” Gabi pressed, holding the jeans out to her mother and letting the skimpy shoes dangle from her fingers.
"Well, I thought we'd go visit your father. I want him to see his kids, even if it's only for a day or so a month. He's still your father."
Gabi let the jeans and the shoes fall into a pile on the bathroom floor. Her mother raised an eyebrow at her, but Gabi pretended not to notice as she walked out of the room.
"Make sure Jocelyn brushes her teeth," Her mother called after her.
Jocelyn was sitting on the bed, having slipped her shoes inside a pair of red stilettos. "Do we have to go see him?" she asked Gabi. She whispered so their mother wouldn't hear. Gabi didn't say anything. She just took the red shoes off of Jocelyn's sneakers and picked her up to set her on the floor. She was too heavy.
"Let’s go get you cleaned up," Gabi said. "And please don't cry. Mama gets upset when you cry. You don't have to worry, because I won't let him hurt you again."
The jeans were snug, but her hips didn't bulge out of them. Jamie liked buying the jeans in the junior's section when she went shopping with her oldest daughter. She wasn't that old anyway; she could get away with it. The girls were quiet in the car ride over to their old house, but she didn't notice. She whistled some and smiled into the rear view mirror at them.
"Daddy's going to be happy to see his girls," she told them as she hit the brakes. She was speeding a little too much.
But as they approached the rancher and pulled into the driveway, Jamie knew something wasn't right. He was waiting for them, a mess. His clothes weren't clean and his face was red.
She felt stupid for getting all dressed up to see him, even though she couldn't suppress the little lightness of her heart as she saw him. She got out of the car, throwing the keys on the seat and slamming the door shut. She wanted him to know that she was not pleased that he was such a mess. She heard the girls get out of the car and knew that Gabi was shielding the Jocelyn. She could always count on her for that.
She strode towards her husband, trying to appear brisk and in-control. She couldn't keep up the façade though, when she saw that he was sobbing. She hesitated ever so slightly before kneeling beside him on the steps. "Hey, what's wrong?" She tried to make her voice soothing. The girls stood back, still close to the car, as though they were ready to leave already. Well, they would have to wait.
He smell was heavy, almost musky, laden with alcohol. "I just love you so much, Jamie."
"Shhh," she patted his hand. "It's going to be okay."
"Please come back to me," he whispered. His face was wet, and he brought it closer to hers.
She pulled back. "I can't yet." Her voice was firm even though she thought her heart was exploding in her chest. "You need to get better. I can't put the girls in danger."
He eased up to his feet. "There's someone else, isn't there?" he snarled. She looked up at him, still crouched on the ground, unthreatening.
He pulled out the gun before she could answer him.
***
Aunt Mary-Ann has fluffy toilet-seat covers. Gabi is sitting in Aunt Mary-Ann's bathroom. She can hear the faint beating on the other side of the door.
"Don't do this, honey," someone is saying. "You have your little sister to think about."
"There's still blood everywhere," Gabi says.
"There's no blood," the voice on the other side of the door is saying. "We washed off all the blood already, honey."
They lie. Gabi picks up the scissors. The scissors are monstrously sharp sewing scissors. Aunt Mary-Ann likes making quilts.
Gabi's hair is heavy and stringy. Maybe no one else can see the blood because her hair is so dark. Like his. Gabi pulls her hair tight and cuts. The sound of the scissors shearing her hair off makes her spine tingle. The tips of the scissors are sharp and Gabi pokes her scalp accidentally. A little pain is okay as long as she can just rid herself of this feeling.
Her hair lies on the floor around her. Fans around her. What’s left on her scalp isn’t even so she takes Uncle Danny’s razor to try to smooth it out. The pounding on the door is louder now, but it’s hard to hear over the sound of the razor.
She finishes. The door splinters. Jocelyn is screaming again. Uncle Danny bursts through the door and stops. "It's okay, Mary-Ann," he says. He does not turn around in Aunt Mary-Ann's direction; he just looks at Gabi as he says it.
Aunt Mary-Ann comes through the broken door and gasps before she starts hiccupping from crying so hard. "Honey, you scared us," she addresses Gabi. Gabi pats her aunt on the head and opens the destroyed door. Jocelyn is on the other side. She has stopped screaming.
She grips Gabi tightly, burying her face into her stomach. "Can you cut my hair too?" she whispers.
This is a story I've been working on for a while, so I thought I would post it since I have not posted anything in a while. The title comes from an e.e. cummings poem and the poems quoted in the story are also e.e. cummings poems.
He never let them cut their hair short. Her mother promised to take them to the salon right before school, but now Gabi doesn’t think she will be able to get her hair cut anytime soon. Gabi can’t hear what the police officers are saying because all she can see is her mother’s hair, fanning on the ground around her body. Gabi had tried to brush it out of her face before they made her let go, but in this heat there wasn’t any way to keep hair from clinging to skin.
Jocelyn is screaming. Gabi can’t understand why. It is hardly the time to scream. It is hardly the time to do anything. If he was still alive, maybe Gabi could shoot him, but he beat her to that. So she has nothing left to do except wait for her mother to open her eyes again. Gabi twists a strand of her own dark hair between her fingers, lets go and notices wetness on her fingers. Her mother's blood is smeared over Gabi's new blue jeans and the bottom of her t-shirt. Even the tips of her hair has been dipped in it.
***
He came into class seven minutes late smelling of smoke and sat next to Jamie in twelfth grade English class some seventeen years earlier. He slouched in his chair, legs spread wide, arms taking in as much space as possible. His dark hair was messed up, falling over his eyes.
"What'd I miss?" He asked her, so close that Jamie imagined she could feel his breath caressing her jawbone and her earlobe. Her skin seemed to stretch itself up towards his lips.
She composed herself and pointed at the aging anthology opened on her desk. "We're continuing the poetry unit. e. e. cummings," she whispered back.
"Alright. Finally, there's a poet," he said, flipping his book open to "my sweet old etcetera." "This poem," he said, finger lingering over the words.
Jamie's breath caught. "You like e. e. cummings, too? You don't strike me as a poetry kind of guy."
His laugh sounded as though he was purring. "Well, I don't like that rhyming Emily Dickinson crap. But e. e. cummings is pretty cool. I mean, what kind of person comes up with this crazy shit?"
"Do you two have something you want to share with the rest of the class?" Mr. Green had finally tuned into their conversation, turning away from the blackboard to face them.
Jamie didn't know what to say and began to stutter, but he didn't even have to compose himself before answering, "We're just discussing the poetry, man."
Jamie didn't believe in love at first sight, but she let him walk her home that afternoon anyway.
***
The air was thick; the sun was low enough on the horizon that Gabi couldn't see the orange sphere, just the shoots of light that it sent out until the earth swallowed it. Distress signals.
"You have hold still," she hissed at her sister. "You don't want him to find us."
"I want Mama," Jocelyn responded, trying to pull away.
Gabi tried to keep from slapping her. She was fourteen, too young to explain to a four-year-old that her mother was in no position to spend time with her right now. Besides, the movement among the cornstalks might tip him off.
"I want her to run with us." Jocelyn wedged herself underneath Gabi, stringy golden hair sunning itself over her knee. She felt the urge to kiss her forehead but restrained.
The bugs were so loud at night. As the sun got lower, the earth got louder. Gabi's leg cramped up, but she forced her body to stay in that rigid position so she could hear if anyone was coming. Sweat congealed with the hair on her neck. Jocelyn's body had gone limp at her feet; the regular rise and fall of her ribs was comforting. She slid my fingers between Jocelyn's, both because she needed to touch another human being and in case they had to run deeper into the cornfield. Then she could just yank Jocelyn behind her. Once, they had to run all the way into town before he stopped following them.
Maybe he had forgotten about them tonight. He did that sometimes.
***
The hair on his chest was just visible in the moonlight that seeped through the yellowed curtains into Jamie's room. He smelled like cheep cigarettes and wood overlaid with a heavier man-sweat smell. She had never been with anyone who smelled like man-sweat. Most of her other boyfriends had just smelled like the high school gym. He was only a few months older than she was, but his goatee and deep eyes made him seem so much older.
She ran her finger up the muscular indentation from his belly button to his breastbone. She thought he was asleep, but he slowly closed his hand around hers and brought her fingers to his lips. He exhaled hot air through his nose across her knuckles. She moved her face closer to his, wanting to feel the warmth of his breath roll over her face.
"I love you, baby."
She rolled over to look at him, her chest pressed against his, the sheets sliding from her shoulders. "Really?" Her voice was so small she wondered if he could hear her.
He sat up to face her, sheets falling forgotten into their laps. Their sweat glazed skin cooled in the night air. "I was going to memorize another poem for you, but I couldn’t find one that matched the magnitude of your beauty." Sure it was cheesy, but she couldn't help blushing. She leaned in to kiss him, but he stopped her, putting a warm finger against her lips. "Marry me. I'll die if you don't marry me."
"You don't leave me too much of a choice," she teased. He was absolutely serious, though, the muscles around his lips unmoving, his eyes cold, searching. "Of course I’ll marry you." She winced as he wrapped his arms tightly around her slightly bruised ones. He got excited and I bruise easy, she told herself as she shifted her weight, knowing she'd have bruises inside her thighs in the morning too. If he noticed her flinching, though, he'd kiss her bruises and massage her until he had to leave. She loved that. He didn't push her for anything; he just wanted to make her feel good. And he made her feel good all right.
But he didn't notice her pain. He just held her tightly against him and began to kiss her, pushing her back beneath him onto the bed, murmuring about how much he loved her. Afterwards, he got out of bed and pulled his clothes on before climbing out the window and walking back to his house. It would be nice to live in their own house so they could lie in bed together the whole night without worrying about her parents freaking out about it in the morning. Then she wouldn’t mind so much when he didn't notice.
***
At fifteen, Gabi still slept in her mother's bed. It wasn't real sleep, though. The only real sleep she ever had was when she was ten. That time he went to rehab.
They turned the fan on high so that it moved the curtains, which were yellowed since they were so old. Gabi liked it better that way because the sunlight against new white curtains probably would be so bright that she wouldn't be able to allow her body to relax into that almost-sleep. Her mother always said that one day she'd get new white curtains. Gabi wondered when this one day would be. Her mother never specified.
Jocelyn slept in a little ball, her head on her mother's ribcage and her knees pressed against her hip bone. Her mother stroked her hair so that Jocelyn fell asleep. Gabi liked it better that way.
Her mother winced when Jocelyn moved her head higher. "Be gentle, baby," she murmured. She moved her hands from Jocelyn's hair to the top of the little girl's head, rubbing her forehead with her thumbs while trying to keep Jocelyn from accidentally hitting her fresh bruises again.
"Mom?" Gabi waited for her mother to open her eyes. "Can we go to the library tonight? I wanted to get 95 Poems out like you told me too."
"You need to start reading some good poetry. I should go to some PTA meeting and insist that all Emily Dickinson be banned from high school classrooms. If you want to read bad poetry in your own time, there are plenty of anthologies devoted to her pitiful ramblings." Her mother's voice was a hollow, warm ringing pushing up through the humid air.
Gabi turned delicately onto her shoulder so she could better look at her mother. "You know, Mr. Green says that e. e. cummings rambles," she offered, allowing a smile to tweak the edges of her lips.
"Ha." Gabi's mother rolled herself up onto one elbow, checking a gasp as Jocelyn's golden head shifted to press against her abdomen. "Mr. Green is a terrible excuse for an English teacher. I know, he taught me when I was in high school. He taught twelfth grade then."
Gabi scooched closer to her mother, even though the humidity was so thick that it tried to keep them apart. The three of them lay there in the bed, Jocelyn and Gabi cuddled into their mother's stomach as close as they could, even though their sweat made the sheets damp. Their mother still leaned on her elbow over them, trailing her fingers through Gabi's dark, tangled hair. He had dark hair too. Her mother always told Gabi that hers was beautiful anyway.
Gabi looked up at her mother's chin, trying to hear her breathe over Jocelyn's soft snores and the whirl of the fan. Her mother wasn't looking down at the girls anymore but at the flapping curtains. Her fingertips still caressed Gabi's scalp until she was falling asleep. She didn't want to miss a waking moment with her mother, though. Such moments were much too precious to waste on sleep.
"you being in love." Gabi could barely hear her voice. "will tell who softly asks in love, am i separated from your body smile brain hands merely to become the jumping puppets of a dream? oh i mean: entirely having in my careful how careful arms created this at length inexcusable," she closed her eyes and placed her hands over her face, muffling her voice, but she couldn't stop. "this inexplicable pleasure-you go from several persons: believe me that strangers arrive when i have kissed you," she stumbled, "into a memory slowly, oh seriously- that since and if you disappear solemnly myselves ask 'life, the question how,'" her voice broke, "'how do i prefer this face to another and why do I weep eat sleep—what does the whole intend' they wonder. oh and they cry ‘to be being that i am alive this absurd fraction in its lowest terms with everything cancelled but shadows,'" I could barely understand what she was saying, her voice was so unfocused. "I can't remember all of it anymore…--what does it all come down to? love? Love if you like and i like, for the reason that I hate people and lean out of this window is love, love and the reason that i laugh and breathe is oh love and the reason that i do not fall into this street is love.’"
Gabi felt the tears, warm and salty against her already salt and sweat stained skin.
"He memorized that poem for me and recited it outside my window on my seventeenth birthday."
"That was a long time ago." Gabi wondered if her mother remembered that she was in the room.
She did'’t. She blinked and looked down at Gabi. "Hmmm?" Her fingers lay dormant in Gabi's tangles. Then she eased herself back down onto the mattress, pushing Jocelyn and Gabi away as gently as she could manage. "Oh. Not that long ago. He had copied it out of a book at school onto a cafeteria napkin." She tried to laugh. "The napkin fell out of his pocket, so I kept it until it…until it disintegrated. That's how I memorized it."
Gabi could see her, sun-drenched hair hanging out the window, dark brown eyes shimmering with tears, cheeks rosy from blushing with delight. She still looked the same way she did sixteen years ago. Except for the bruises.
***
"Do you want to go out tonight?" Jamie's sister still called her every weekend, even though her friends from high school had stopped soon after Jamie got engaged in her first year of community college.
"He's working tonight," she'd say to Mary-Ann. "He's always so tired after work, and he spends the whole day thinking about me. I want to be home when he gets home." But sometimes she really did want to go with Mary-Ann instead of waiting at home, especially when he came home smelling like alcohol. Mary-Ann said that he had a problem and Jamie couldn't keep covering it up for him. He said that everyone at work drank and he had no problem with a beer every once in a while. Jamie didn’t like how hard he kissed her after he'd been drinking.
He wasn't home too late tonight. She was on the sofa trying to read, but she was up on her feet as soon as she saw the headlights. She opened the door for him, trying her best to smile as warmly as she could.
He kissed her sloppily on her cheekbone. "Hey baby," he greeted her. "What's going on?" He jaunted into the kitchen, which was an extension the family room. They lived in a little rancher that her father had helped them pay for when he gave him a job with his construction business.
She took a deep breath. She was sure he wouldn't be angry. And she didn't need to be afraid; he had never hurt her on purpose. "I do have good news," she started, waiting for him to give her permission to continue. He smiled at her indulgently while eating the food on plate she had set out for him. "I'm pregnant." It sounded so ugly and hollow in the little rancher. "We're going to have a baby," she corrected herself.
His face immediately lit up and he lost some of the tired glazed look in his eyes. He dropped his fork, pushed back his chair and took the room in two steps so he could scoop her up in his arms and whirl her around. She felt immense relief and laughter just bubble out of her, her face flushed with happiness at his approval.
He kissed her and she felt herself melting. She drank him as deeply as she could before he broke away. She tried not to make an obviously distressed noise. He had not kissed her like that for months, and she was not ready for it to be over so quickly. "You make me the happiest man in the world," he told her. She just wanted him to shut up and kiss her.
That night she decided that being pregnant was the best thing she had ever done for their relationship. She changed her mind the next time he came home drunk.
***
The sound of breaking glass can drown out screams. Or at least freeze everything enough that Gabi could breathe before the world closed in on her again. She had enough time to look into her mother’s eyes as her mother brought the bottle down over his head. She could hardly see Gabi through her tears.
"Call 911," was all that she said to Gabi. Gabi didn't know if she meant for him or for Jocelyn, who hadn't moved since he knocked her off the chair onto the tiled floor. He had walked into the room when she was making peanut butter and jelly sandwiches for a picnic. She had wanted both him and her mother to come, but he had said he wasn't in the mood for a picnic.
***
He stayed completely sober for two months after the baby was born.
His hands were so big that he could hold the baby in both hands without cradling her against his chest. Jamie was grateful for all the attention he gave the baby; it gave her some time to rest. She felt indifferent towards it. She was so tired, and now that he was home more instead of out with his friends, she had no need for the baby's company.
His lips massaged the sore parts of Jamie's body so well. They didn't talk all that much, but he started reading her book of poetry aloud to the baby. She would go and sit beside him, curling her body against his and occasionally kissing his jawbone until his body responded to hers and they left the baby to sleep in the crib in the garishly pink baby room alone.
She was in such shock at the end of those two months when he slapped her the first time that she didn't feel it. She couldn't even remember the string of events leading up to it any longer; even though she was sure she felt it coming. Did she really nag him about hanging out with his friends instead of coming home to help her? Would going back to college to finish her degree in English really sabotage their relationship? She didn’t know anymore, so she stopped thinking about it. She tried to get pregnant again, but she had two miscarriages before she gave up and went on the pill. She hoped he didn't find out.
***
Jocelyn fidgeted. Her arm was still in a sling, but her bruised ribcage no longer looked that pretty purple black color, having started to fade to mud brown.
Aunt Mary-Ann and Uncle Danny had taken them out for lunch at the family restaurant in town. The restaurant had a toy train that ran along the top of the wall, whistling frequently enough that the one time they had eaten there as a family, her mother had to talk him down from throwing his glass at it. He wasn’t even drunk that time.
Her mother's back was unnaturally straight, but that could have been because she might have hurt her side more badly than she let on. She had French braided her hair and was wearing a suit jacket with the shoulder pads ripped out and jeans from the junior's section in the mall.
Aunt Mary-Ann was trying not to cry. She was not as pretty as Gabi's mother, and she wore more makeup than Gabi's mother did. Uncle Danny had close-cropped hair and was clean-shaven, which Gabi's mother usually teased him about because she said a man wasn't a man without a beard.
"If you knew he was unstable, why did you keep the children in the home with him as long as you did?" Uncle Danny's voice was quiet, apologetic. Whether apologizing for saying something out of line or for telling it like it is, Gabi wasn't not sure.
Gabi's mother stood up. "I tried to keep my family together, alright?" she spat. "I thought he would get better." If she wasn't so angry, she might have started to cry. "I thought I could help him get better."
***
"I wanted to get you something," he said. Jamie was surprised to see him. His eyes were clear, or somewhat less red than she remembered. He was wearing clean clothes, shirts that she had personally never bought him. "I know I have been a sorry excuse for a man, but I’m going to change that, if you’ll have me."
She didn't answer him. Normally, such a reaction would warrant her a beating, but she was too heavy to care. The baby moved again inside her. It always did that when she thought about it. Not "it," Jamie tried to correct herself. Him maybe. Would he prefer a son or a daughter? She didn't know. They already had a daughter, and he had shown interest in her only on occasion. The little girl helped her a lot, though. She loved to put her small hands on Jamie's stomach and feel the baby move. She had to send her to stay with Mary-Ann while she was in the hospital, though. Gabi had cried as Jamie drove away.
He put the small wrapped rectangle beside the hospital bed. When Jamie didn't pick up the thin package, he picked it up and put it in her hands. His hands were still big, though not as calloused as they had been before he got help. She could smell him, though his sweat was more the smell of nervousness and less the smell from hard work. Still, it was a welcome change from the hospital burn in her nostrils. She opened up the paper and let the book fall into her lap. e. e. cummings. 95 Poems.
"I know it doesn’t have our poem or 'my sweet old etcetera' in it, but I know how much you love---"
She started to cry. "Why do you do this to me?" Her voice was so soft that it was only air; no sound came though.
He knelt beside the bed so he could look into her eyes. He covered her hands with his. "I love you. I want a second chance. I want to be a family for once. I want this little baby to have a father who loves her."
So she let him stay. She was reading the poems, her fingers combing through his hair as he slept with his head on her bed. Number 14.
but also dying
(as well as
to cry and sing,
my love
and wonder)is something
you have and I
've been
doing as long as to
(yes)forget(and longer
dear)our
birth’s the because of a
why but our doom is
to grow(remember
this my sweet)not
only
wherever the sun and stars and
the
moon
are we're;but
also
nowhere
***
Gabi's new house had white curtains. Except it wasn’t a house. It was a one-bedroom apartment. They didn’t have any furniture; her mother wanted to buy curtains first. Jocelyn was afraid that he would know where they were if he saw the white curtains.
"Plenty of people have white curtains," Gabi told Jocelyn to get her to shut up.
She shook her head. "No, but I mean really white curtains. Not just yellowed ones."
Her mother was working at a doctor's office in town, so Gabi took Jocelyn to the playground during the day. Jocelyn would go down the slide sometimes, but for the most part they just sat on the swings. Gabi liked brushing the mulch back and forth, making the little furrow under the swing deeper. Even when it got really hot, the dirt under the wood chips was damp. She could sit in the swing forever, rocking gently. The chains holding the seat creaked in different pitches depending whether she moved backwards or forwards.
Jocelyn always tried to see how far she could swing, hoping that one day she would touch the clouds with the toe of her too-small sneaker. Gabi never had such aspirations.
***
When he saw Jamie standing there, he stopped slowly. "Hey baby," he almost slurred. "Where're the kids?"
"Where were you?" She tried to make her voice sound stronger than she felt.
He laughed uneasily. "Can't a man hang out with his buddies without his wife nagging him to death about it?" He pushed past her and stumbled into the kitchen to his cold dinner plate.
She followed him. "I just don't think this is a good idea with you so soon out of rehab. I know it's been a little over a year, but what you had was an illness. You can’t think that you can just go back and be in complete control---"
"I am in control,"” he spat. She reeled back. He walked closer to her until she was pushed flat against the wall. "Don’t criticize my decisions." He was growling now.
She couldn't keep the tears from collecting in her eyes. "You have to think about your family." She grit her teeth together as she said it. She could not let him slip again.
He shook her. "You know nothing about how fucking hard this is!" He walked away, leaving her to crumble into a pile on the floor.
She pushed herself back up against the wall. "Do you even love me at all anymore?" She needed him to justify her existence, to prove to her that all this was worth it.
But he didn't tell her he loved her. Not until the next day when he woke up and came to find her still lying on the kitchen floor, the two little ones wrapped around her as though trying to protect her. He gently dislodged them and carried her into the bedroom, whispering his apologies to her. She didn't open her eyes until she was laid out on the bed. He stroked her hair and rubbed her hand with his fingers. "I love you, baby." It was all he could say. And she forgave him again.
***
Gabi watched her mother put the lipstick on in front of the mirror. Her mother was standing in her underwear, the lacey kind that she never wore unless it was a special occasion. She let the tube of lipstick fall in the sink as she fumbled for the eyeliner. She could even stab herself in the eye with a pencil elegantly.
"Where are you going, Mom?" Gabi knew but needed to ask her anyway.
"Hmmm?" She looked over at Gabi when she finished with the eyeliner. "Oh, I'm not going anywhere. We are going out. Can you go get the jeans off my bed? My new pair. And the black heels, too."
"So where are we going?"” Gabi pressed, holding the jeans out to her mother and letting the skimpy shoes dangle from her fingers.
"Well, I thought we'd go visit your father. I want him to see his kids, even if it's only for a day or so a month. He's still your father."
Gabi let the jeans and the shoes fall into a pile on the bathroom floor. Her mother raised an eyebrow at her, but Gabi pretended not to notice as she walked out of the room.
"Make sure Jocelyn brushes her teeth," Her mother called after her.
Jocelyn was sitting on the bed, having slipped her shoes inside a pair of red stilettos. "Do we have to go see him?" she asked Gabi. She whispered so their mother wouldn't hear. Gabi didn't say anything. She just took the red shoes off of Jocelyn's sneakers and picked her up to set her on the floor. She was too heavy.
"Let’s go get you cleaned up," Gabi said. "And please don't cry. Mama gets upset when you cry. You don't have to worry, because I won't let him hurt you again."
The jeans were snug, but her hips didn't bulge out of them. Jamie liked buying the jeans in the junior's section when she went shopping with her oldest daughter. She wasn't that old anyway; she could get away with it. The girls were quiet in the car ride over to their old house, but she didn't notice. She whistled some and smiled into the rear view mirror at them.
"Daddy's going to be happy to see his girls," she told them as she hit the brakes. She was speeding a little too much.
But as they approached the rancher and pulled into the driveway, Jamie knew something wasn't right. He was waiting for them, a mess. His clothes weren't clean and his face was red.
She felt stupid for getting all dressed up to see him, even though she couldn't suppress the little lightness of her heart as she saw him. She got out of the car, throwing the keys on the seat and slamming the door shut. She wanted him to know that she was not pleased that he was such a mess. She heard the girls get out of the car and knew that Gabi was shielding the Jocelyn. She could always count on her for that.
She strode towards her husband, trying to appear brisk and in-control. She couldn't keep up the façade though, when she saw that he was sobbing. She hesitated ever so slightly before kneeling beside him on the steps. "Hey, what's wrong?" She tried to make her voice soothing. The girls stood back, still close to the car, as though they were ready to leave already. Well, they would have to wait.
He smell was heavy, almost musky, laden with alcohol. "I just love you so much, Jamie."
"Shhh," she patted his hand. "It's going to be okay."
"Please come back to me," he whispered. His face was wet, and he brought it closer to hers.
She pulled back. "I can't yet." Her voice was firm even though she thought her heart was exploding in her chest. "You need to get better. I can't put the girls in danger."
He eased up to his feet. "There's someone else, isn't there?" he snarled. She looked up at him, still crouched on the ground, unthreatening.
He pulled out the gun before she could answer him.
***
Aunt Mary-Ann has fluffy toilet-seat covers. Gabi is sitting in Aunt Mary-Ann's bathroom. She can hear the faint beating on the other side of the door.
"Don't do this, honey," someone is saying. "You have your little sister to think about."
"There's still blood everywhere," Gabi says.
"There's no blood," the voice on the other side of the door is saying. "We washed off all the blood already, honey."
They lie. Gabi picks up the scissors. The scissors are monstrously sharp sewing scissors. Aunt Mary-Ann likes making quilts.
Gabi's hair is heavy and stringy. Maybe no one else can see the blood because her hair is so dark. Like his. Gabi pulls her hair tight and cuts. The sound of the scissors shearing her hair off makes her spine tingle. The tips of the scissors are sharp and Gabi pokes her scalp accidentally. A little pain is okay as long as she can just rid herself of this feeling.
Her hair lies on the floor around her. Fans around her. What’s left on her scalp isn’t even so she takes Uncle Danny’s razor to try to smooth it out. The pounding on the door is louder now, but it’s hard to hear over the sound of the razor.
She finishes. The door splinters. Jocelyn is screaming again. Uncle Danny bursts through the door and stops. "It's okay, Mary-Ann," he says. He does not turn around in Aunt Mary-Ann's direction; he just looks at Gabi as he says it.
Aunt Mary-Ann comes through the broken door and gasps before she starts hiccupping from crying so hard. "Honey, you scared us," she addresses Gabi. Gabi pats her aunt on the head and opens the destroyed door. Jocelyn is on the other side. She has stopped screaming.
She grips Gabi tightly, burying her face into her stomach. "Can you cut my hair too?" she whispers.
Sunday, October 25, 2009
The Bridge
Word Count: 5375
This is one of my less depressing stories, but it has undergone major revisions since I first wrote it three or four years ago. Any help with the bare places is much appreciated!
A boy stood on the street corner, toes rubbing against the cobblestones opposite the bridge, the famed bridge built under the Ottoman Empire. Tourists came all over to see it before the war. Now no one remembered it or them. His older brother had jumped the twenty-seven meters off that bridge into the river with his friends, the ultimate test of a young man’s courage. Not that that mattered now. His brother was lying at the bottom of an unmarked grave outside of one of the concentration camps surrounding the city.
The streets around him were silent, but he was sure people were lurking within the windows of the buildings, waiting to die. Everything was waiting, always waiting. Even the bridge, wedged solidly between the Christian and Muslim sides of the river, seemed to wait for the bombs. His hair fell across his thin face; it had been a long time since he had to worry about things like a hair cut. He started to rummage through the pocket of his jeans to find a crushed box of cigarettes. Extracting a slightly bent one from the pack, he placed it between his lips and exchanged the pack for a lighter. The cigarettes were cheap, but he hadn’t been smoking long enough to figure that out. He inhaled deeply, smiling when he successfully suppressed the urge to cough. Lifting his head, he blew all the smoke out towards the sky. He let his hand fall, but kept his neck bent so he could still stare at the smoke as it dissipated into the air.
The explosion threw him backward, away from the river; his neck snapped back, but did not break. His small body hit the wall, and he fell to the ground, the broken bits of building digging into his thin chest. The bridge was gone. Jagged stone and thick rock dust had replaced it. The huge noise was not followed by any others, which was unusual. Only the sound of centuries-old rock crumbling into the river remained.
He closed his eyes and scooted his body closer to the wall. Blood ran from his nose down his face, but he just wiped it away with the back of his wrist and tried to stand up. Though his bones hurt, it was a normal feeling for him, so he just made himself walk over to where he had been standing. The cigarette was still burning, lying on the ground where it fell.
***
Samir stood in his yellow socks in front of the microwave, shirtless with his red boxer briefs peeking out above his jeans, and lit a cigarette. He tossed the used match into the cup that was precariously balanced between the sink and the coffee machine. He blew smoke onto the glass door of the microwave, and then took the cigarette away from his lips to crack his neck and yawn. The microwave dinged, so he took out the cracked blue bowl and pivoted to sit at the desk that served as his kitchen table. He finished his cigarette quickly, tossing the butt into the overflowing ashtray in the corner of the desk so he could drink his breakfast. The soup burned his tongue, but he didn't really have taste buds anymore anyway.
He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand and dropped the dirty bowl in the sink while reaching for the on-switch of the coffee machine with his other hand. His mother hadn't sent him coffee beans with the package filled with cigarettes and a sweater his grandmother had made him, so he was stuck drinking weak shit he had found in the grocery store. He rummaged for the soap under the sink and washed the bowl so he could use it for his coffee. The smell of the coffee seemed to leap into the kitchenette as he poured it into the bowl and set the bowl on the desk. He set the pot in the sink and leaned his head against the cabinet above it, shutting his eyes and trying not to grimace. When he thought he had a hold of himself, he took a breath, stepped back from the sink and drank his coffee standing up. The view from the window of the apartment was fairly dismal, though it was nearing spring and therefore pretty elsewhere in the city. Looking out the window at the concrete world below it, he could see how the colors or the world changed beneath the cold air.
But he was late, so he left the bowl in the sink after rinsing it out and headed over to the dresser beside his bed to change. By the time he had dressed and brushed his teeth, he needed more coffee, but he had to hope that someone had made a pot at school, so he left the apartment as it was and locked the door behind him. The corridors in the building were small and not well lit, and smelled funny, though he was unaware of this last detail because he couldn't smell anything through the smoke that always seemed to cling to his nostrils. He wanted another cigarette, but he knew he needed to save money for food and tuition. He stuck his hands deep into his pants pockets so they wouldn't give into the temptation to creep to his jacket pocket for the crumpled pack of cigarettes within.
At the stairs, Emily nearly ran him over. Samir vaguely wondered why she was out and dressed so early in the morning. She smiled at him and murmured an apologetic good morning, holding herself away from him in a way that seemed rigid and unnatural coming from a body with the soft curves he remembered. She spent the night often on weekends, since the time she came over once through that ESL program to help him with his first report for work. She pushed past him towards her apartment, and though the doorway was small, he still wondered if she pressed herself against him like that on purpose. He glanced over his shoulder to see her flounce down the hallway but then shook his head and rubbed his face. He had forgotten to shave.
**
The beginning of spring in DC was evident just by standing in the metro at rush hour, people pouring into each car, smiling. They breathed deeper before they got in the metro, bodies taunt and waiting for the kiss of the sun against their faces. Samir held on to the rails of the top of the car with one hand and held his giant thermos of shit coffee in the other, sipping it at each stop and trying not to get pushed over as people rushed out into sunlight. Towards his stop, the metro emerged from underground. Most of the people had already escaped at this point so far from the nicer parts of the city. The energy here had diminished. Here, Samir could better identify with the exhaustion of some of the people on the metro, people with long commutes and too much time to think. Samir had to lean his head against the window. Had to focus on the movement of the buildings as the train went by.
But Emily was at the metro stop, wearing a dress that celebrated the sun. It clung to her, and as the metro passed, the dress whipped around her. She smiled slowly at Samir when the doors opened. He nodded to her, watching her as he walked past. Her voice stopped him before the escalator. “Samir!” When he turned to face her, she asked, “What are you doing tonight?”
He didn't have time to answer, the metro bells sounded and the doors shut. He walked back to the apartment slowly, feet heavy even under early spring sunshine. At the corner, he took out a cigarette and stopped to breathe it in after he lit it. He walked up the stairs to his apartment, but stopped at Emily's before he got there. On the back of a piece of junkmail he had in his back pocket, he wrote her a note.
***
There was one year in Mostar when not one building had a roof. This was before he was sixteen. His mother wanted them all to sleep in the basement after his father was shot on the bridge, before it was blown up, so he obliged her for the first week. But the darkness was so heavy beneath the stone house, and all the earth over them could not block out the explosions that shook the city.
His sister’s heavy breathing often made him wonder if she was dying. He used to lie awake listening to the duet of the rise and fall of his mother’s and sister’s ribcages, but he could never add his own steady breathing to theirs. One night, he stood up and walked barefoot across the cold floor and up the narrow stairs. He continued to the third floor, where his room had been. It had become difficult to navigate through the hallway because the rubble from the roof coated the floor, leaving very few bare spots for a shoeless boy. He pushed aside the shingles until he had a place big enough for him to sit. He pulled out the cigarettes from his pocket again and looked up towards the sky, hugging his knees into his chest and watching the shrapnel fly through the sky like meteorites.
***
Emily spent the night. Samir did remember to clean out the ashtray before she came over. They sat at the table eating spaghetti, which was pretty much all he could handle in terms of cooking. Emily talked. About when she was in school, about the work she did now at a non-profit across the city, about her family, about traveling. While she talked to him, her face was opened up in a smile.
“Did you travel much when you lived in Europe?” She asked him, twirling her hair with her finger.
He took a breath and leaned back in his chair. He wanted to smile at her, at the way she looked to move her body closer to him, but his lips wouldn't oblige him. So he responded, “When I left Bosnia, I came here.” He didn't mention the time he spent in the refugee camp in Switzerland. It probably didn't count as the kind of travel she was talking about. He coughed, breaking their gaze, and fished a cigarette from his pocket.
Emily sighed. “You aren't serious, are you?”
Samir breathed in and looked over at her. “What?”
She shook her head. “You Europeans and your smoking.” Samir breathed in again and wondered if he should put out the cigarette. But she was still smiling at him. “You know, when I was in elementary school, we had to send letters to members of our family who smoked asking them to quit. I sent one to Eric--- my brother--- who had picked up smoking when he moved to Bosnia and started dating this woman---”
Samir reached out and stopped her. “You never told me your brother lived in Bosnia? Where? When?”
Emily shut her mouth and looked down at her plate, moving the noodles back and forth in the bowl. She tried to smile at him, saying, “Yeah, I was a lot younger than him. He used to say I was an accident. Anyway, he moved to Mostar actually maybe a year before the war--- I don't know, I was a kid. He fell in love, the whole deal.” She opened her mouth a few times, her breath catching as though waiting for words. Finally she offered, “He said the skiing was awesome.” When Samir didn't respond, she laughed at herself and began to talk some more, this time about her fear of skiing. Her voice as she talked seemed to flutter around the apartment, alighting on Samir, who sat still want to reach out to her, wanting to cut through all her words to what she didn't say.
So Samir leaned over and kissed her. Her body immediately responded to him, and he let one of his hands wander down her back to pull her in closer to him. She was the one who broke away, standing and reaching for his hand to get her to follow him. She was quiet, moving to the bed, pushing his dirty clothes off the bed, continuing to kiss him. He thought he felt her cheeks wet against his skin, but she was pulling off her clothes, pulling off his, her fingers tracing the cigarette burns, one for each death, along his forearm.
When they were lying in bed afterwards, she pulled blankets over them and lay against his chest. She was quiet, just exploring his skin with her fingertips until her breathing slowed. Samir listened to the rise and fall of her chest well into the night. For once, Samir was able to lie still with her in his arms. When she woke up in the morning, she said he twitched in his sleep. He found that strange. He didn't think he slept at all.
***
Emily was boiling water on the stove and spooning ground coffee beans into another pot. She was wearing the dress again, the one that made her look like she was floating. “Where's the sugar?”
Samir pointed, breaking the pencil from the paper where he was writing up a rough draft of a grant for work. The words on the paper seemed so much more solid than those on the computer screen. But his fingers were cramped and his eyes fuzzy. He fingered the cigarettes in his pocket. All he wanted to do was lean his head on the table, still his thoughts for a moment. But he didn't want to scare her. She was talking about someone at work, her voice reinforced with an edge he was not used to hearing, so he tried to clear his head to pay attention to her. He tried to hang onto her voice, but he finally had to close his eyes and lean his head against his fists.
Her hands were cold, but felt refreshing against his face. “Are you okay?” She whispered. He knew she saw he was lying when he said he was fine. Her eyes told him. But what about when she lied to him? Weeks had gone by, she did not mention her brother. So he did not mention it either. He waited. And she kissed him gently, pulling him back to her.
She broke away from him to return to the stove. She poured the boiling water into the pot with the coffee and put the coffee on the still-hot burner. Samir got up and walked over to her. “Where did you learn to do this?”
She smiled. “My brother.” Turning back to the burner she said, “I know how bad American coffee is. He always talked about that, even sent us some coffee. My mom wouldn't let me drink it because she said I'd be too hyper.” She took the coffee off the burner and started to pour it into the mugs on the table before Samir stopped her. He sprinkled sugar on the coffee and then spooned the surface, letting all the grounds sink to the bottom. Then he filled the mugs halfway and added more sugar. He sat down and looked over at Emily.
“Thank you,” he whispered. He reached out, groping for her hand, needing to touch her.
For some reason, she didn't respond, and he thought he saw her flicking tears from her eyes as she lifted her mug to cover her face.
“Samir?”
He swallowed and turned towards her, trying to seem eager, to respond to her the way she did him. He knocked the ashtray onto the floor. “I'm sorry,” he said and scrambled to brush the ashes back off the floor.
Emily stopped him. “Will you do something for me?” Her eyes were still wet.
He brushed her hair away from her face. “Sure.”
“Will you take me with you? To Mostar? I mean, if you ever go back?”
amir set his coffee onto the table carefully. He opened his mouth. Closed it. Found words. “Emily, I---” He didn't finish. He picked up his mug, took a drink, and walked to the couch. She didn't follow.
***
A young boy fingered the box of cigarettes in his pocket but didn’t dare take them out. Looking down the line of people waiting for water ahead of him, he jiggled his leg and chewed his lip. The line moved so slowly. A man ahead was finally leaving the line, and he seemed to exhale the smoke from a newly-lit cigarette at the people still in line.
Biting his finger to keep from feeling too tempted, he shifted his weight again. He knew that if he took one out, he would have had to share with the other people in front and behind him. He coughed and leaned up against the building beside him.
Snipers are easy to hear, but usually they reveal themselves after it is too late. The man in front of him collapsed on the ground, blood spreading through his thin white t-shirt.
He wasn’t quite a child anymore, but he was just barely a teenager, and he was still small. People started scattering in slow motion, trying to decide if it would be better to die now or later. He was sure there were other shots, but he couldn’t hear anything. The hand of the body in front of him was close, and he could see that it clutched a packet of cigarettes.
***
Samir's apartment, Samir and Emily's apartment, was dark and quiet. He wondered where Emily was, if the darkness was because she wasn't there. He put the mail on the table. Stretched. Sat down. His head ached, and he felt drained. He pulled out a cigarette and lit it, the glow from the end illuminating the mail strewn over the table.
Laboriously, he stood to open the curtain of the tiny window over the sink and switched on some lights. He took the cigarette out of his mouth with one hand and rubbed his face with the other, wondering when Emily was coming home. The apartment was so heavy. But then he saw the bed. Bulging suitcases were collapsed against the bed, where Emily lay. Emily's chest rose and fell in ragged breaths, her face sunk into the pillow. Samir finished his cigarette and put it out in the ashtray nearby. He rubbed his face again.
“Emily?” He said.
She sat up. “I'm sorry,” she said. “I---I'm leaving.” Her face was swollen, and her hair stuck to her forehead.
He sat next to her on the bed and reached out to smooth her hair. He was shaking.
“Please don't,” he said. She leaned against him, sobs subsiding, but his shaking didn't stop. Then she left.
***
Later he found her calendar in the trash with the name on it. One word, written spastically as though it needed to be written, but she couldn't do it. Eric. He called her. She came over and spent the night.
“What happened, Emily? To Eric?” It was breakfast. Samir had made her pancakes, brought them to her in bed. She was drained of color, and the muscles in her face wobbled too much for her to smile.
“I just had a rough day, yesterday. It happens to everyone.” She reached over to squeeze his arm briefly before she took the plate of pancakes from him.
Samir coughed, reached for his cigarettes, but did not light one. Just wrapped his hand around them. “No, Emily. Please.”
She stopped eating and dropped the fork to the plate. Again, she tried to smile but ended up biting her lip. “He's dead.” The tears overflowed from her eyelids, but she prevented herself from sobbing. “His wife was killed. He began to backpack across the country. We don't know what he was doing, but one day he called me. I don't remember what he said anymore. He stepped on a landmine. He's lying in a shallow grave somewhere, his body in pieces. I don't remember what he said.” She took a deep breath, steadying herself against Samir. He reached over to get the hair out of her face, and kissed her.
“I'm sorry,” he said. He pulled her against him, breathed her in, remembered the night before without Emily. The darkness. And he decided he wanted to give her something. He bought tickets to Sarajevo. As the plane landed, Samir looked out the window to see buildings still pierced with bullet holes.
***
Samir carried Emily's suitcase as she walked into the store. Emily glanced back at Samir before approaching the store owner with her wallet. “Koliko je ovo?” She asked him, pointing at a loaf of bread. Samir wondered how Emily knew that phrase. Her accent was so bad though that Samir was not sure that the man would understand her. Yet the man nodded, took Emily's money, and gave her back bread and some change. The man smiled toothlessly at them, and the wrinkles around his lips reminded Samir of the first time he stole. Of course, he was in Switzerland then and he had not had anything to eat for days. He dropped his eyes to the ground and tried not to remember the feel of his ribs stretching his skin every time he breathed. He had been a small teenager even if he had had the normal weight of a healthy boy. Dropping his eyes to avoid the man who reminded him of that baker, he followed Emily's feet out of the store.
She smiled at him and reached up her hand to rub the stubble on his face. “Are you okay, honey? Maybe we should stay here tonight.” Her voice was much softer now. “We don’t have to rush to Mostar. I mean, we’re both really tired.” Her eyes searched his to see if he was with her or away in another world. She knew he wouldn’t tell her though.
He nodded and pulled her against him, kissing her forehead so he wouldn’t have to look into her eyes. She had answered his question, but her eyes always asked him the questions that he didn’t want to answer. Like they knew when he drifted away.
***
“Baby, please put that out.” She stumbled towards him, rubbing the sleep from her eyes and yawning. Her hair was a mess, but it made her look so disheveled and out-of-control, which she didn't use to be. The t-shirt she had taken from him was pulled up in the front to reveal her bright pink underwear. He wondered if she did that on purpose.
Samir looked out the open window towards the mountains that surrounded the capital and blew out smoke. His head pounded. He rubbed Emily's already messed up hair with his free hand briefly before returning his gaze to the window. She wrapped her arms around him, her hands cold on his bare chest, and laid her head on his back.
“You know I don’t like it when you smoke,” she said as she began to play with his belly-button and run her fingers down towards the top of his unzipped jeans that he had pulled on just to walk from the bed to the window. When he didn’t respond, she tried to hold him even tighter. He felt tears against his skin.
He put his cigarette out in the ashtray on the windowsill, trying to think of anything but the memories in his head trying to escape out of him. Dislodging her fingers, he turned around to hold her. Though her hands were cold, her body was warm. He lifted his head from where it rested on top of hers and looked down at her face. She looked back at him, a sleepy smile on her face, and she began to run her fingers up his spine.
“I love you,” she said, snuggling against him even closer. He wrapped his arms tighter around her and pressed his lips against her hair.
He didn't want to ask her what was wrong, didn't want to look at her with the same eyes she always looked at him with. So he held her and hoped the feel of his skin against hers make it better. Maybe it did.
***
Before they could see the city, three garishly huge white crosses took up the landscape from their places atop the mountains opposite the road that wound down into Mostar. He tried to focus his attention on anything but those crosses, wondering why they still had not been taken down. They had been erected after the war. His sister had told him about it when they talked. It wasn't often. She lived far away now. Emily reached over and rubbed his shoulder.
“Hey.” Her voice was very soft, as it got when she tried to keep him with her. He wrenched his thoughts from the crosses so he could turn to look at her. She smiled at him and released his shoulder to put her hand on his leg.
There were not as many people on the road as he was used to driving into the city. He almost didn’t recognize some of the newer buildings, but then he would spot the skeleton of the bank or the empty shell that had once been a Turkish bath and remember where he was going. He found a place to park, hoping it wasn’t illegal but wondering who would care. She got out first, throwing her sandals out onto the ground for her to step into when she stood up. Closing the door, she stretched and surveyed the buildings around her. When she realized that he was still sitting and staring at the steering wheel, she bent down and stuck her head in the window.
“Are you okay?”
He could feel her eyes searching him, hoping to find what it was that bothered him so she could kiss him and make him better. So he stood up and dragged himself out of the car. She ran around and attached herself to his arm.
Her lips were against his arm, but that did not inhibit the flow of words coming from her mouth. She was looking up at him. She gripped his hand, and he let himself be pulled away from the car. “Let’s go get something to eat.”
Along the river Neretva, that separates the Muslim side of Mostar from the Christian side, the restaurants were just starting to regain their previous prestige. Outside, scaling down the cliff-like rocks that line the river, Bosnians and the occasional tourist filled the tables at the restaurants, plagued by the stray cats that had multiplied in the city after the war.
She was not heading for any of the restaurants on this side of the Neretva, though. He started to redirect her away from the old part of the city, where she was headed. She just gripped his hand tighter. He knew there was not a way to get across the river there, not after the one built during the Ottoman occupation to link the Muslim side with the Christian side had been blown up.
He could tell that she was making an effort to slow down so they could walk beside one another, but she was failing miserably. He took longer strides to accommodate her. He followed her through the streets and tried to look at the city as someplace he had never been before. He kept his eyes focused on her long hair that fell across her back heavily. As long as he could see the glitter of the sun in her dark hair, he couldn’t see the stains on the walls that he knew had to be there.
The cobblestone in the older part of the city was rougher than that in the newer part. Emily's pace was finally slowed down so she could pick her way delicately to keep from slipping. He held her arm, focusing his attention on the ground to make sure she didn’t fall. When she stopped, he continued looking down, waiting for her to continue walking.
Her lips were very close to his ear, so he could feel her wet breath when she spoke quietly. “Samir. Look up.” Her arms were around him then, and he tried not to let his weight slip against her. He had to stay steady.
It was the bridge. So many years earlier, he had watched it get eaten by the river, ravaged by the Christian bombs. And there it was, staring him in the face, cleaner than he had seen it when he was a child. Ten years beneath running water could do that to stone.
“It reopened five years ago. Didn’t you see it on the news?”
He couldn’t speak, only shook his head, eyes fixed on the bridge. He felt Emily's lips on his jawbone and remembered to breathe.
“Do you want to walk across it?”
He tore his eyes from the bridge to look at her. She squeezed him tightly and then began to walk forward, letting him follow her. People were gathered around the bridge, but no one was crossing it. He could see why when Emily stopped and pointed. A skinny young man in a speedo stood poised on the thick bridge railing. He gave a thumbs-up to someone in the crowd and jumped.
“Oh my goodness!” She breathed from beside him; she pushed over to the railing to look in the water below as they heard the splash.
“My brother did it. My father probably did, too,” he whispered. He looked into the almost greenish water below that was still rippling, watching the other young man swim over to the rocks alongside the river.
Emily turned her gaze to the water, lacing her fingers with his against the stone of the bridge. “Do you think Eric did it too?”
Samir nodded.
***
A teenage boy stood on the street corner, toes rubbing against the cobblestones opposite the bridge. He didn’t have the urge to cough every time he took a drag on his cigarette now. The sky was dark, occasionally lit up by bombs streaking through the sky. He wondered if his sister was alive, if anyone was alive anymore. His hoisted his tattered backpack, containing what little food his mother could prepare for him, higher and took a step forward. He only looked back once.
***
He walked with a purpose through the old city. He pulls out a cigarette and lights it, letting the smoke travel through his veins to calm him.
“You aren’t going to rethink this?” She asked, struggling to keep up with him.
He stopped just before walking onto the bridge. He handed her his cigarette. She put it out, crushing the smoke into the cobblestone beneath her foot. He pulled his shirt over his head and took off his pants and handed them to her. He rubbed her arms and looked into her dark eyes. “It will be all right.” As he started to turn away, she dropped his clothes to the ground, grabbed him, and stood on her tiptoes to kiss him. His spine tingled and he rubbed the small of her back before breaking her hold to smile at her. “I love you,” he said.
As he turned away, she called for him to wait. She began peeling off her clothes in the middle of the bridge before Samir stopped her. “I want to go with you,” she said. Her eyes were bright in the midday sunlight, her face open. He squeezed her hand and smiled at her, his face warm.
They walked up the bridge and hoisted themselves up onto the railing. The sun shone off the water’s surface into their eyes. They took a deep breath and let their bodies fall through the air.
This is one of my less depressing stories, but it has undergone major revisions since I first wrote it three or four years ago. Any help with the bare places is much appreciated!
A boy stood on the street corner, toes rubbing against the cobblestones opposite the bridge, the famed bridge built under the Ottoman Empire. Tourists came all over to see it before the war. Now no one remembered it or them. His older brother had jumped the twenty-seven meters off that bridge into the river with his friends, the ultimate test of a young man’s courage. Not that that mattered now. His brother was lying at the bottom of an unmarked grave outside of one of the concentration camps surrounding the city.
The streets around him were silent, but he was sure people were lurking within the windows of the buildings, waiting to die. Everything was waiting, always waiting. Even the bridge, wedged solidly between the Christian and Muslim sides of the river, seemed to wait for the bombs. His hair fell across his thin face; it had been a long time since he had to worry about things like a hair cut. He started to rummage through the pocket of his jeans to find a crushed box of cigarettes. Extracting a slightly bent one from the pack, he placed it between his lips and exchanged the pack for a lighter. The cigarettes were cheap, but he hadn’t been smoking long enough to figure that out. He inhaled deeply, smiling when he successfully suppressed the urge to cough. Lifting his head, he blew all the smoke out towards the sky. He let his hand fall, but kept his neck bent so he could still stare at the smoke as it dissipated into the air.
The explosion threw him backward, away from the river; his neck snapped back, but did not break. His small body hit the wall, and he fell to the ground, the broken bits of building digging into his thin chest. The bridge was gone. Jagged stone and thick rock dust had replaced it. The huge noise was not followed by any others, which was unusual. Only the sound of centuries-old rock crumbling into the river remained.
He closed his eyes and scooted his body closer to the wall. Blood ran from his nose down his face, but he just wiped it away with the back of his wrist and tried to stand up. Though his bones hurt, it was a normal feeling for him, so he just made himself walk over to where he had been standing. The cigarette was still burning, lying on the ground where it fell.
***
Samir stood in his yellow socks in front of the microwave, shirtless with his red boxer briefs peeking out above his jeans, and lit a cigarette. He tossed the used match into the cup that was precariously balanced between the sink and the coffee machine. He blew smoke onto the glass door of the microwave, and then took the cigarette away from his lips to crack his neck and yawn. The microwave dinged, so he took out the cracked blue bowl and pivoted to sit at the desk that served as his kitchen table. He finished his cigarette quickly, tossing the butt into the overflowing ashtray in the corner of the desk so he could drink his breakfast. The soup burned his tongue, but he didn't really have taste buds anymore anyway.
He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand and dropped the dirty bowl in the sink while reaching for the on-switch of the coffee machine with his other hand. His mother hadn't sent him coffee beans with the package filled with cigarettes and a sweater his grandmother had made him, so he was stuck drinking weak shit he had found in the grocery store. He rummaged for the soap under the sink and washed the bowl so he could use it for his coffee. The smell of the coffee seemed to leap into the kitchenette as he poured it into the bowl and set the bowl on the desk. He set the pot in the sink and leaned his head against the cabinet above it, shutting his eyes and trying not to grimace. When he thought he had a hold of himself, he took a breath, stepped back from the sink and drank his coffee standing up. The view from the window of the apartment was fairly dismal, though it was nearing spring and therefore pretty elsewhere in the city. Looking out the window at the concrete world below it, he could see how the colors or the world changed beneath the cold air.
But he was late, so he left the bowl in the sink after rinsing it out and headed over to the dresser beside his bed to change. By the time he had dressed and brushed his teeth, he needed more coffee, but he had to hope that someone had made a pot at school, so he left the apartment as it was and locked the door behind him. The corridors in the building were small and not well lit, and smelled funny, though he was unaware of this last detail because he couldn't smell anything through the smoke that always seemed to cling to his nostrils. He wanted another cigarette, but he knew he needed to save money for food and tuition. He stuck his hands deep into his pants pockets so they wouldn't give into the temptation to creep to his jacket pocket for the crumpled pack of cigarettes within.
At the stairs, Emily nearly ran him over. Samir vaguely wondered why she was out and dressed so early in the morning. She smiled at him and murmured an apologetic good morning, holding herself away from him in a way that seemed rigid and unnatural coming from a body with the soft curves he remembered. She spent the night often on weekends, since the time she came over once through that ESL program to help him with his first report for work. She pushed past him towards her apartment, and though the doorway was small, he still wondered if she pressed herself against him like that on purpose. He glanced over his shoulder to see her flounce down the hallway but then shook his head and rubbed his face. He had forgotten to shave.
**
The beginning of spring in DC was evident just by standing in the metro at rush hour, people pouring into each car, smiling. They breathed deeper before they got in the metro, bodies taunt and waiting for the kiss of the sun against their faces. Samir held on to the rails of the top of the car with one hand and held his giant thermos of shit coffee in the other, sipping it at each stop and trying not to get pushed over as people rushed out into sunlight. Towards his stop, the metro emerged from underground. Most of the people had already escaped at this point so far from the nicer parts of the city. The energy here had diminished. Here, Samir could better identify with the exhaustion of some of the people on the metro, people with long commutes and too much time to think. Samir had to lean his head against the window. Had to focus on the movement of the buildings as the train went by.
But Emily was at the metro stop, wearing a dress that celebrated the sun. It clung to her, and as the metro passed, the dress whipped around her. She smiled slowly at Samir when the doors opened. He nodded to her, watching her as he walked past. Her voice stopped him before the escalator. “Samir!” When he turned to face her, she asked, “What are you doing tonight?”
He didn't have time to answer, the metro bells sounded and the doors shut. He walked back to the apartment slowly, feet heavy even under early spring sunshine. At the corner, he took out a cigarette and stopped to breathe it in after he lit it. He walked up the stairs to his apartment, but stopped at Emily's before he got there. On the back of a piece of junkmail he had in his back pocket, he wrote her a note.
***
There was one year in Mostar when not one building had a roof. This was before he was sixteen. His mother wanted them all to sleep in the basement after his father was shot on the bridge, before it was blown up, so he obliged her for the first week. But the darkness was so heavy beneath the stone house, and all the earth over them could not block out the explosions that shook the city.
His sister’s heavy breathing often made him wonder if she was dying. He used to lie awake listening to the duet of the rise and fall of his mother’s and sister’s ribcages, but he could never add his own steady breathing to theirs. One night, he stood up and walked barefoot across the cold floor and up the narrow stairs. He continued to the third floor, where his room had been. It had become difficult to navigate through the hallway because the rubble from the roof coated the floor, leaving very few bare spots for a shoeless boy. He pushed aside the shingles until he had a place big enough for him to sit. He pulled out the cigarettes from his pocket again and looked up towards the sky, hugging his knees into his chest and watching the shrapnel fly through the sky like meteorites.
***
Emily spent the night. Samir did remember to clean out the ashtray before she came over. They sat at the table eating spaghetti, which was pretty much all he could handle in terms of cooking. Emily talked. About when she was in school, about the work she did now at a non-profit across the city, about her family, about traveling. While she talked to him, her face was opened up in a smile.
“Did you travel much when you lived in Europe?” She asked him, twirling her hair with her finger.
He took a breath and leaned back in his chair. He wanted to smile at her, at the way she looked to move her body closer to him, but his lips wouldn't oblige him. So he responded, “When I left Bosnia, I came here.” He didn't mention the time he spent in the refugee camp in Switzerland. It probably didn't count as the kind of travel she was talking about. He coughed, breaking their gaze, and fished a cigarette from his pocket.
Emily sighed. “You aren't serious, are you?”
Samir breathed in and looked over at her. “What?”
She shook her head. “You Europeans and your smoking.” Samir breathed in again and wondered if he should put out the cigarette. But she was still smiling at him. “You know, when I was in elementary school, we had to send letters to members of our family who smoked asking them to quit. I sent one to Eric--- my brother--- who had picked up smoking when he moved to Bosnia and started dating this woman---”
Samir reached out and stopped her. “You never told me your brother lived in Bosnia? Where? When?”
Emily shut her mouth and looked down at her plate, moving the noodles back and forth in the bowl. She tried to smile at him, saying, “Yeah, I was a lot younger than him. He used to say I was an accident. Anyway, he moved to Mostar actually maybe a year before the war--- I don't know, I was a kid. He fell in love, the whole deal.” She opened her mouth a few times, her breath catching as though waiting for words. Finally she offered, “He said the skiing was awesome.” When Samir didn't respond, she laughed at herself and began to talk some more, this time about her fear of skiing. Her voice as she talked seemed to flutter around the apartment, alighting on Samir, who sat still want to reach out to her, wanting to cut through all her words to what she didn't say.
So Samir leaned over and kissed her. Her body immediately responded to him, and he let one of his hands wander down her back to pull her in closer to him. She was the one who broke away, standing and reaching for his hand to get her to follow him. She was quiet, moving to the bed, pushing his dirty clothes off the bed, continuing to kiss him. He thought he felt her cheeks wet against his skin, but she was pulling off her clothes, pulling off his, her fingers tracing the cigarette burns, one for each death, along his forearm.
When they were lying in bed afterwards, she pulled blankets over them and lay against his chest. She was quiet, just exploring his skin with her fingertips until her breathing slowed. Samir listened to the rise and fall of her chest well into the night. For once, Samir was able to lie still with her in his arms. When she woke up in the morning, she said he twitched in his sleep. He found that strange. He didn't think he slept at all.
***
Emily was boiling water on the stove and spooning ground coffee beans into another pot. She was wearing the dress again, the one that made her look like she was floating. “Where's the sugar?”
Samir pointed, breaking the pencil from the paper where he was writing up a rough draft of a grant for work. The words on the paper seemed so much more solid than those on the computer screen. But his fingers were cramped and his eyes fuzzy. He fingered the cigarettes in his pocket. All he wanted to do was lean his head on the table, still his thoughts for a moment. But he didn't want to scare her. She was talking about someone at work, her voice reinforced with an edge he was not used to hearing, so he tried to clear his head to pay attention to her. He tried to hang onto her voice, but he finally had to close his eyes and lean his head against his fists.
Her hands were cold, but felt refreshing against his face. “Are you okay?” She whispered. He knew she saw he was lying when he said he was fine. Her eyes told him. But what about when she lied to him? Weeks had gone by, she did not mention her brother. So he did not mention it either. He waited. And she kissed him gently, pulling him back to her.
She broke away from him to return to the stove. She poured the boiling water into the pot with the coffee and put the coffee on the still-hot burner. Samir got up and walked over to her. “Where did you learn to do this?”
She smiled. “My brother.” Turning back to the burner she said, “I know how bad American coffee is. He always talked about that, even sent us some coffee. My mom wouldn't let me drink it because she said I'd be too hyper.” She took the coffee off the burner and started to pour it into the mugs on the table before Samir stopped her. He sprinkled sugar on the coffee and then spooned the surface, letting all the grounds sink to the bottom. Then he filled the mugs halfway and added more sugar. He sat down and looked over at Emily.
“Thank you,” he whispered. He reached out, groping for her hand, needing to touch her.
For some reason, she didn't respond, and he thought he saw her flicking tears from her eyes as she lifted her mug to cover her face.
“Samir?”
He swallowed and turned towards her, trying to seem eager, to respond to her the way she did him. He knocked the ashtray onto the floor. “I'm sorry,” he said and scrambled to brush the ashes back off the floor.
Emily stopped him. “Will you do something for me?” Her eyes were still wet.
He brushed her hair away from her face. “Sure.”
“Will you take me with you? To Mostar? I mean, if you ever go back?”
amir set his coffee onto the table carefully. He opened his mouth. Closed it. Found words. “Emily, I---” He didn't finish. He picked up his mug, took a drink, and walked to the couch. She didn't follow.
***
A young boy fingered the box of cigarettes in his pocket but didn’t dare take them out. Looking down the line of people waiting for water ahead of him, he jiggled his leg and chewed his lip. The line moved so slowly. A man ahead was finally leaving the line, and he seemed to exhale the smoke from a newly-lit cigarette at the people still in line.
Biting his finger to keep from feeling too tempted, he shifted his weight again. He knew that if he took one out, he would have had to share with the other people in front and behind him. He coughed and leaned up against the building beside him.
Snipers are easy to hear, but usually they reveal themselves after it is too late. The man in front of him collapsed on the ground, blood spreading through his thin white t-shirt.
He wasn’t quite a child anymore, but he was just barely a teenager, and he was still small. People started scattering in slow motion, trying to decide if it would be better to die now or later. He was sure there were other shots, but he couldn’t hear anything. The hand of the body in front of him was close, and he could see that it clutched a packet of cigarettes.
***
Samir's apartment, Samir and Emily's apartment, was dark and quiet. He wondered where Emily was, if the darkness was because she wasn't there. He put the mail on the table. Stretched. Sat down. His head ached, and he felt drained. He pulled out a cigarette and lit it, the glow from the end illuminating the mail strewn over the table.
Laboriously, he stood to open the curtain of the tiny window over the sink and switched on some lights. He took the cigarette out of his mouth with one hand and rubbed his face with the other, wondering when Emily was coming home. The apartment was so heavy. But then he saw the bed. Bulging suitcases were collapsed against the bed, where Emily lay. Emily's chest rose and fell in ragged breaths, her face sunk into the pillow. Samir finished his cigarette and put it out in the ashtray nearby. He rubbed his face again.
“Emily?” He said.
She sat up. “I'm sorry,” she said. “I---I'm leaving.” Her face was swollen, and her hair stuck to her forehead.
He sat next to her on the bed and reached out to smooth her hair. He was shaking.
“Please don't,” he said. She leaned against him, sobs subsiding, but his shaking didn't stop. Then she left.
***
Later he found her calendar in the trash with the name on it. One word, written spastically as though it needed to be written, but she couldn't do it. Eric. He called her. She came over and spent the night.
“What happened, Emily? To Eric?” It was breakfast. Samir had made her pancakes, brought them to her in bed. She was drained of color, and the muscles in her face wobbled too much for her to smile.
“I just had a rough day, yesterday. It happens to everyone.” She reached over to squeeze his arm briefly before she took the plate of pancakes from him.
Samir coughed, reached for his cigarettes, but did not light one. Just wrapped his hand around them. “No, Emily. Please.”
She stopped eating and dropped the fork to the plate. Again, she tried to smile but ended up biting her lip. “He's dead.” The tears overflowed from her eyelids, but she prevented herself from sobbing. “His wife was killed. He began to backpack across the country. We don't know what he was doing, but one day he called me. I don't remember what he said anymore. He stepped on a landmine. He's lying in a shallow grave somewhere, his body in pieces. I don't remember what he said.” She took a deep breath, steadying herself against Samir. He reached over to get the hair out of her face, and kissed her.
“I'm sorry,” he said. He pulled her against him, breathed her in, remembered the night before without Emily. The darkness. And he decided he wanted to give her something. He bought tickets to Sarajevo. As the plane landed, Samir looked out the window to see buildings still pierced with bullet holes.
***
Samir carried Emily's suitcase as she walked into the store. Emily glanced back at Samir before approaching the store owner with her wallet. “Koliko je ovo?” She asked him, pointing at a loaf of bread. Samir wondered how Emily knew that phrase. Her accent was so bad though that Samir was not sure that the man would understand her. Yet the man nodded, took Emily's money, and gave her back bread and some change. The man smiled toothlessly at them, and the wrinkles around his lips reminded Samir of the first time he stole. Of course, he was in Switzerland then and he had not had anything to eat for days. He dropped his eyes to the ground and tried not to remember the feel of his ribs stretching his skin every time he breathed. He had been a small teenager even if he had had the normal weight of a healthy boy. Dropping his eyes to avoid the man who reminded him of that baker, he followed Emily's feet out of the store.
She smiled at him and reached up her hand to rub the stubble on his face. “Are you okay, honey? Maybe we should stay here tonight.” Her voice was much softer now. “We don’t have to rush to Mostar. I mean, we’re both really tired.” Her eyes searched his to see if he was with her or away in another world. She knew he wouldn’t tell her though.
He nodded and pulled her against him, kissing her forehead so he wouldn’t have to look into her eyes. She had answered his question, but her eyes always asked him the questions that he didn’t want to answer. Like they knew when he drifted away.
***
“Baby, please put that out.” She stumbled towards him, rubbing the sleep from her eyes and yawning. Her hair was a mess, but it made her look so disheveled and out-of-control, which she didn't use to be. The t-shirt she had taken from him was pulled up in the front to reveal her bright pink underwear. He wondered if she did that on purpose.
Samir looked out the open window towards the mountains that surrounded the capital and blew out smoke. His head pounded. He rubbed Emily's already messed up hair with his free hand briefly before returning his gaze to the window. She wrapped her arms around him, her hands cold on his bare chest, and laid her head on his back.
“You know I don’t like it when you smoke,” she said as she began to play with his belly-button and run her fingers down towards the top of his unzipped jeans that he had pulled on just to walk from the bed to the window. When he didn’t respond, she tried to hold him even tighter. He felt tears against his skin.
He put his cigarette out in the ashtray on the windowsill, trying to think of anything but the memories in his head trying to escape out of him. Dislodging her fingers, he turned around to hold her. Though her hands were cold, her body was warm. He lifted his head from where it rested on top of hers and looked down at her face. She looked back at him, a sleepy smile on her face, and she began to run her fingers up his spine.
“I love you,” she said, snuggling against him even closer. He wrapped his arms tighter around her and pressed his lips against her hair.
He didn't want to ask her what was wrong, didn't want to look at her with the same eyes she always looked at him with. So he held her and hoped the feel of his skin against hers make it better. Maybe it did.
***
Before they could see the city, three garishly huge white crosses took up the landscape from their places atop the mountains opposite the road that wound down into Mostar. He tried to focus his attention on anything but those crosses, wondering why they still had not been taken down. They had been erected after the war. His sister had told him about it when they talked. It wasn't often. She lived far away now. Emily reached over and rubbed his shoulder.
“Hey.” Her voice was very soft, as it got when she tried to keep him with her. He wrenched his thoughts from the crosses so he could turn to look at her. She smiled at him and released his shoulder to put her hand on his leg.
There were not as many people on the road as he was used to driving into the city. He almost didn’t recognize some of the newer buildings, but then he would spot the skeleton of the bank or the empty shell that had once been a Turkish bath and remember where he was going. He found a place to park, hoping it wasn’t illegal but wondering who would care. She got out first, throwing her sandals out onto the ground for her to step into when she stood up. Closing the door, she stretched and surveyed the buildings around her. When she realized that he was still sitting and staring at the steering wheel, she bent down and stuck her head in the window.
“Are you okay?”
He could feel her eyes searching him, hoping to find what it was that bothered him so she could kiss him and make him better. So he stood up and dragged himself out of the car. She ran around and attached herself to his arm.
Her lips were against his arm, but that did not inhibit the flow of words coming from her mouth. She was looking up at him. She gripped his hand, and he let himself be pulled away from the car. “Let’s go get something to eat.”
Along the river Neretva, that separates the Muslim side of Mostar from the Christian side, the restaurants were just starting to regain their previous prestige. Outside, scaling down the cliff-like rocks that line the river, Bosnians and the occasional tourist filled the tables at the restaurants, plagued by the stray cats that had multiplied in the city after the war.
She was not heading for any of the restaurants on this side of the Neretva, though. He started to redirect her away from the old part of the city, where she was headed. She just gripped his hand tighter. He knew there was not a way to get across the river there, not after the one built during the Ottoman occupation to link the Muslim side with the Christian side had been blown up.
He could tell that she was making an effort to slow down so they could walk beside one another, but she was failing miserably. He took longer strides to accommodate her. He followed her through the streets and tried to look at the city as someplace he had never been before. He kept his eyes focused on her long hair that fell across her back heavily. As long as he could see the glitter of the sun in her dark hair, he couldn’t see the stains on the walls that he knew had to be there.
The cobblestone in the older part of the city was rougher than that in the newer part. Emily's pace was finally slowed down so she could pick her way delicately to keep from slipping. He held her arm, focusing his attention on the ground to make sure she didn’t fall. When she stopped, he continued looking down, waiting for her to continue walking.
Her lips were very close to his ear, so he could feel her wet breath when she spoke quietly. “Samir. Look up.” Her arms were around him then, and he tried not to let his weight slip against her. He had to stay steady.
It was the bridge. So many years earlier, he had watched it get eaten by the river, ravaged by the Christian bombs. And there it was, staring him in the face, cleaner than he had seen it when he was a child. Ten years beneath running water could do that to stone.
“It reopened five years ago. Didn’t you see it on the news?”
He couldn’t speak, only shook his head, eyes fixed on the bridge. He felt Emily's lips on his jawbone and remembered to breathe.
“Do you want to walk across it?”
He tore his eyes from the bridge to look at her. She squeezed him tightly and then began to walk forward, letting him follow her. People were gathered around the bridge, but no one was crossing it. He could see why when Emily stopped and pointed. A skinny young man in a speedo stood poised on the thick bridge railing. He gave a thumbs-up to someone in the crowd and jumped.
“Oh my goodness!” She breathed from beside him; she pushed over to the railing to look in the water below as they heard the splash.
“My brother did it. My father probably did, too,” he whispered. He looked into the almost greenish water below that was still rippling, watching the other young man swim over to the rocks alongside the river.
Emily turned her gaze to the water, lacing her fingers with his against the stone of the bridge. “Do you think Eric did it too?”
Samir nodded.
***
A teenage boy stood on the street corner, toes rubbing against the cobblestones opposite the bridge. He didn’t have the urge to cough every time he took a drag on his cigarette now. The sky was dark, occasionally lit up by bombs streaking through the sky. He wondered if his sister was alive, if anyone was alive anymore. His hoisted his tattered backpack, containing what little food his mother could prepare for him, higher and took a step forward. He only looked back once.
***
He walked with a purpose through the old city. He pulls out a cigarette and lights it, letting the smoke travel through his veins to calm him.
“You aren’t going to rethink this?” She asked, struggling to keep up with him.
He stopped just before walking onto the bridge. He handed her his cigarette. She put it out, crushing the smoke into the cobblestone beneath her foot. He pulled his shirt over his head and took off his pants and handed them to her. He rubbed her arms and looked into her dark eyes. “It will be all right.” As he started to turn away, she dropped his clothes to the ground, grabbed him, and stood on her tiptoes to kiss him. His spine tingled and he rubbed the small of her back before breaking her hold to smile at her. “I love you,” he said.
As he turned away, she called for him to wait. She began peeling off her clothes in the middle of the bridge before Samir stopped her. “I want to go with you,” she said. Her eyes were bright in the midday sunlight, her face open. He squeezed her hand and smiled at her, his face warm.
They walked up the bridge and hoisted themselves up onto the railing. The sun shone off the water’s surface into their eyes. They took a deep breath and let their bodies fall through the air.
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