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Category: Literary Features
Mother Tongue
“Mommy, you sound strange.” My five-year-old looks at me curiously as I sing in Hindi to her. “It sounds funny,” she says again. I smile and nod and try to explain to her the meaning of my words. But then she is distracted and runs away. This has happened a lot recently as I am trying harder to speak in Hindi with and around my children. I play Kishore Kumar songs from the 1950s to them in the car, and I read them Hindi comics that I used to enjoy as a child, bought for an eye-watering price over the internet. But then words often fail me, as I try to grasp wispy words and feathery nuances that sound alien to my own ears.
I am the only one who speaks and understands Hindi in my house. My husband’s repertoire is limited to the words he has learned while ordering takeaway from the local Indian “curry” place: samosa, aaloo, chana. I laugh at his accent and then sometimes find myself repeating the same accent when I make the call to the curry place, impersonating the pronunciation of words, confusedly meandering between the sound that I heard as a child and the ones I hear all around me now. I worry that with this I am losing a part of my childhood and my mother tongue, and my anxiety drowns my words when I worry that my children will never be able to speak Hindi, communicate with their grandmother in India, or watch Hindi movies without subtitles. Sometimes I try and watch Hindi movies alone late at night just to remind myself where I come from, to hear the sounds that are missing from my life. For those few minutes, hours, I feel like the person who used to watch Bollywood movies obsessively as a teenager, singing out loud, playing antakshari with my friends. Often the incongruity of the meaning expressed in the dialogue and its brutal translation that smoothes out all the subtleties and gradations make me laugh, sometimes cringe. But I also feel like an impersonator, an imposter who is pretending to be something I am not. Not anymore. At times I turn the subtitles on. I feel like I am fighting to own a language that is not mine anymore, as if the memory of that language is only an illusion. That person was me, of course. But this is me, too. Where does one end and the other start?
—
It is strange how language shapes our identity. Am I a different person when I speak in different languages, and are my thoughts mapped by the language that I use to think and to speak in? My eldest daughter has often told me that I resort to Hindi when I am angry. Even though I switch between Hindi and English fluidly without a flicker of a thought or hesitation, no doubt there are things I cannot think or feel in either. Do I take on a different persona, another shift of identity as English becomes my way of communicating in writing and in speech? And in dreams, which are never in Hindi anymore? The rhythm of each language works in different meters, and I slow down when I speak Hindi. There isn’t that rush to get the words out before I forget, the precariousness exacerbated by the ever-present awareness that my accent will always belie my notion of being at home in this English language. But does the core of myself change with these shifts? Do I become less funny, more opinionated, more at ease in one than the other?
I went to a school run by Irish Catholic nuns, all through my primary and secondary education, where we were penalized for speaking in Hindi, the deeply ingrained colonial hangover persisting. We were better if we spoke in a language that wasn’t our own, that marked the gentile from the ordinary. English was the only language that could help us make our way in a world where we were never the desirables. I realize the irony of this as I write now in English. My parents wanted me to be good at English because that was how I would make a place for myself in this world. My mother wanted me to be good at English because she didn’t think she was, and she wanted me to spread my wings in a world that wasn’t designed for women. My father would take me to the only bookshop in town, where they had a tiny selection of books in English: some Enid Blytons and Stephen Kings, occasionally classics such as Gone with the Wind. It was our ritual every month. I wanted to be good at English so that I could read all the books that showed me a world far beyond my own, those books with green pastures and Little Women who were fierce, independent, and strong-willed, the female protagonists of their own life. I wanted to drink elderflower juice and have afternoon tea, not knowing what it tasted like. I loved this window into a new world even as I felt my face flush with embarrassment when my father would proclaim with fatherly pride that “she only reads English books.” This felt like betrayal at times as I read about the imperial rule, the Jallianwala Bagh massacre, and the centuries of British oppression in India. The marks left by colonial rule and partition had seared into our consciousness, and there was no escaping it.
This push and pull persisted as this language of our oppressors slowly became my home, even as Hindi was still the language that bridged the gap between my parents and me.
I still find it fascinating that we studied Hindi as a second language, even though it was our first: it was the language of the first word that I heard, the language of my ancestors, the one that our stories were written in. I keep wondering what the world would have looked like if it hadn’t been like this, if we did not grow up with this shame. And I wonder when I started dreaming and thinking in shapes and patterns that were alien and uncomfortable to my own mother.
My ma felt ashamed all her life that her spoken English wasn’t that good, an inferiority that she carried because my father could speak better English than she could. I have never thought about this deeply: how this shame marred her view of herself and her own place in society; of those times that she would stay quiet, only smiling shyly when she thought that she didn’t know how to talk in public or was anxious that she would say the wrong thing, come across as ignorant and uncouth. So much of that anxiety shaped her mothering, her lack of recognition of her talents. And perhaps that is why it took me so long to acknowledge all that is so luminous about her, as she hid her resplendence from everyone including herself.
—
Choosing the language we speak is also linked to our autonomy; our view of our body is shaped by the words we speak, the thoughts we think, the space we occupy, and the way our mind inhabits our body.
Growing up with this discomfort around a language that is your own mother’s tongue, hiding it as a dirty secret at home, while only speaking in English at school, creates a split personality, where one has to keep shifting between two worlds of thoughts, words, and dreams, at home in one, in both, and sometimes in neither. Most people I know speak in Hinglish, an amalgamation of both languages, stepping inside both worlds at the same time, equally comfortable with Premchand and Amrita Kaur as with Hilary Mantel or Margaret Atwood. But people carry this unconscious bias that those who can write or speak better English are also better people, this halo spilling over their other attributes, giving them opportunity and privilege, while making others tongue-tied and even more inhibited in their thoughts.
Would our stories be different if this comfort around our own language had not been seeded and planted from a young age, and would the stories we write and tell our children be any different? These switches have become part of my identity, and they are how I belong in both worlds. But sometimes I can feel like an alien in both.
I remember when my eldest daughter came back irate from school, saying that they had pronounced geography incorrectly because that is how they had always heard me say it: “jaw-gruphy.” I laughed, but they didn’t find it amusing at all, though now they have outgrown that adolescent shame of a mother who has accented English, compounded by their classmates giggling at their quirky pronunciation of words that they had grown up with. I still catch myself worrying about how to pronounce words, and whether the way I speak marks me out as other, often searching for the right expression to say what I feel. It takes a while to shift this persona when I am in India, a few days to overthrow this worry about speaking the wrong word or in the wrong accent. Instead, I find myself searching for the right word in Hindi, which has been buried deep inside the mists of my time away from this place. I find myself stuttering over expressions, feverishly searching for the word that would stop me from being marked as a foreigner, and slowly it comes back. I worry less about switching between languages, and it becomes second nature once again, jolting me into a recognition of myself that I keep abandoning as soon as I leave India and fly back to the UK, reminding me how much I miss these words, this language, the poetic sensibilities of expressions that say so much.
I worry about how we can give words to our children when we ourselves feel wobbly around the edges of our languages.
—
And then I find the five-year-old singing the lullaby that I sing to them on most nights, in her Scouse accent, words that sound jumbled up, but she stands up tall up on the table and performs for us. I clap not just because it is utterly adorable but because hearing her speak those few words of Hindi makes me feel like coming back home, as if I never left, as if the thread from my mother to her is still unbroken, as if my mother tongue might not be hers completely or even mine anymore, but it is still a language that shapes so much of who I am, and hopefully will shape her too. And even though I have fought for my right to belong here in this place and this language, to assimilate and fit in, and I have also struggled to continue to belong to my mother tongue, I can be both or none. My mother tongue still belongs to me even though its edges are tinted with exasperation and frustration at not knowing all the words or at my accent belying my origins. It is seared and etched into my very self and my skin, and I worry less about making my children feel at home with it, because I have to remember that they are never far from home when they are close to me.
Faith Test
When the counselor asked her
disciples to gather around the bucket,
her head crowned in clover stems,
we all wanted to be anointed.
The Pentecost of chapel steps and snakes
expelled from little cabins
lined against the trees:
this was our church, our induction
into something greater
than youth group on Wednesday nights
where a teen with a bible taught us
to renounce sex, rated R movies,
the devil in a hot pink romper.
When the counselor dipped her hand
in the water we thought baptism, the bonfire
lit with praise hymns and acoustic guitar.
None of us imagined the goldfish,
its body of shingled scales,
such orange iridescent delight.
To be brave for the lord is to
combat any fear
How do you say no to a soulless tail,
the hand reaching out to say
you could be special too?
How she called on us
to grab the soft round and place it
on our tongues like communion,
like the body we cannibalized
week after week. This is the memory:
feeling the heart rate pulse
against my thumb,
the way my throat closed up
then pushed the belly down.
Analog
Last October my mother clipped out
an article from the New York Times
about why millennials love plants and
I mocked her for the old-fashion. She
sent me a letter every week in the
month of June, although I had since
left the city, because I didn’t
pick up the phone. My mother
writes things on paper that she
would never say out loud. Her
letters read like the Book of Proverbs
and she always doodles on
the envelope. She says things like No I wouldn’t
take care of your cats but if you have babies
then give them to me. I grow older and further
from her portrait of my future
life lived. Too far to see
the disappointment crinkle
on her eye corners. Close
enough to hear a sigh over radio waves.
Value-added
“Tree-huggers refuse to admit
Mother Nature can be
a bitch, or very blind
or simply is,” my father insists,
though he hikes
the Appalachian every weekend.
I’ve never gone with him.
“We are always at the mercy
of our environment,” he claims,
tells me he outraced a prairie fire
in the Sooner state, more hurricanes
than he can list,
though he’s always been tempted
to get caught up in some disaster,
miss delivering whichever speech
he’d been on his way to give. “Nature is,
I suppose, efficient,” he says, a word
that shows up more than any other
in his writing except “trash,” “waste”
or “recycling.” His boss will use
his rhetoric against him.
He and I argue about anything,
spring, its length, time
and lusciousness after a brief cold spell
as opposed to a short orgasm of color
after a long thaw. Storm-chasing.
A tornado will turn and stare
right at you, rain come down so hard
you can’t see the shoulder, but once,
and I believe the sentiment’s appropriate,
he saw a triple rainbow with my sister,
who shot an entire roll of film
beyond the Panhandle.
They were alone. Dramatic, yes,
even at home, even after a long night
of ordinary thunder and wind,
a tree uproots and smashes
my parents’ bedroom.
It must have all night tossed
violently in the storm,
and they slept through it,
except that once they woke
and saw it swaying, and swaying
was still the word they used
in the morning to describe
it was an accident they lived.
Relative Risk
—A Golden Shovel after Katie Englehart’s “We Are Going to Keep You Safe Even if It Kills Your Spirit,” The New York Times, Feb. 19, 2021
No matter what the therapists say about dementia, how we
should know our half-blind mother can’t live alone, how they are
clear she can’t afford to fall—the only way to keep her going
on her own (not risk-free) is a scooter or a four-wheel walker, or to
move her to a place, they won’t say where—best to keep
the care type vague—helpful doctors will tell you
recommended choices: memory pills, life locked inside, a safe
space, always a mask, no rugs or dancing, hugs, even
if your loved one, if Mom, is vaccinated, if
we instead allow her finger-walking walls, her wandering, it
wouldn’t be the worst to drop and die at home, we’ll say—what kills
is a voice silenced or a vision atrophied, when all your
good intention stymies dignity, what we recall of spirit.
Poisons and Medicines
“All things are poisons, and nothing is without poison; only the dose makes a thing not a poison.”
–Paracelsus
During rituals of divination,
Mayan sorcerers and healers
induced risky hallucinations
with Brugmansia candida,
angel’s trumpet. The poison
in its white, waxy flowers
and dark green leaves,
ingested or absorbed through
the body’s mucous membranes,
causes convulsions, paralysis,
coma, and death.
To dilate the pupils of their eyes
and bring a flush to their cheeks,
fashionable ladies in medieval Europe
drank juice pressed from the berries
and leaves of Atropa belladonna,
the deadly nightshade.
To enhance their beauty,
they risked their lives with a poison
used since antiquity to alter potions
and tip arrows with lethal results.
Our ancestors felt more closely
than we the embrace
of science and mystery.
We are still looking
for the boundary.
Chemicals crossing
the blood-brain barrier
create effects in the brain
that achieve results in the body,
altering perceptions
of pleasure and pain.
Reliever of illness
or harbinger of death
is a matter of degree.
Digitalis from foxglove,
lily of the valley, and oleander
strengthens the heart’s contractions
while causing blurred and double vision
and hallucinations.
Taxol from the bark of the Pacific yew
destroys cancers of the breast
and ovaries but harms the liver.
Although it induces nausea,
vincristine, an alkaloid
from Madagascar periwinkle,
is the reason why most children
with leukemia now survive.
For the stomach spasms
I suffered as a child,
I was prescribed a daily dose
of a chalky green medicine
containing belladonna alkaloids
and phenobarbital
to prevent nausea and relax me.
Derived from salicin
in willow bark and meadowsweet,
aspirin reduces inflammation,
eases headache, and lowers fever.
Years ago, my great-aunt, sick of life,
swallowed the entire contents
of a bottle and bled to death.
Grief Is a Sudden Room
Grief is a sudden room.
After flailing around, breaking
all the furniture inside it for years,
you can think you’ve shut
the ancient door behind you,
but the latch hasn’t worked for aeons,
it will just pop open anytime
you open a window, elsewhere
in your mind. No matter. The room
will arrange itself in your absence
and wait for your return.
You’ve never seen such patience.
Two poems
A Robin at the Bus Station
Newly loose with death,
I can imagine her stomach, the give.
I bring her an oyster shell from the shore,
prop her head. A pine branch blanket.
You taught me how to care for the dead like this,
how to get quiet in their moment,
early January, no other willing witness.
It’s big work. And even I step away,
whisked back to life by the bus,
where in front of me a young man
video chats his girlfriend, who cries
the entire hour-long ride as he slumps
further into his seat, humming short responses.
A whole bus of us listen to her pleas,
and despite her foreign tongue
I can feel the ruptures, the cold valleys.
I press a warm thumb into the sea
spinning past the window. Bleached shell,
pine branch, stuttering connection.
With these tired hands, we can only
build beds, soft spaces to land.
Fall in Languedoc
Officials in Japan are running out
of storage space for the ocean water
used to cool down Fukushima’s
nuclear cores. Tens of thousands
of tons, all newly radioactive,
with talks of releasing it all back
into the ocean. Across the globe,
we fill a tractor load—two or three
tons of grapes—in four hours
with a team of eight. What would
a hundred tons of our juice look like;
a thousand? I try to measure the ruined
water in tractorfuls, but run out of room
in my mental valley. How diluted
does a radioactive ocean have to be
before it stops killing everything
it laps up? How much longer
will the waters stand us?
Here, the Hérault’s been low
all summer, thirsty, only two storms
filling her throat. The gorges dried,
scratchy. Her rocky bottom cuts
into my kayak’s belly, though
the carp are fat, the seaweed
an impenetrable forest. Here, slung
between the map’s bright red pins
that mark each nuclear throne,
I imagine the steel drums planted
beneath us, beating out a cold,
toxic tune. The foxes are hungry.
Tourist-trained, they visit us
at picnic hour, panting, patient,
catching grapes in their skinny mouths
swarmed by flies, fleas trampolining
from their fur as they polish
avocado peels of their fatty linings.
From a too-hot summer, the vines
have fried, harvest light this year.
The last fat bulbs were stripped
in the night by wild boars, though
Christian is diligent in his midnight
rounds, has caught half a dozen
perpetrators already. At lunch time,
he brings me their pink meat
in a small Tupperware, cut
neatly into strips.
Roundabout
It’s his son’s first time driving a roundabout. It’s a Friday just before rush hour, and Nate has drawn the short straw of showing Liam how to do it. Leah was so anxious that she made them go by themselves, saying that she was tired, that the forecast wasn’t great, that she’d stay home. It does look like rain, the sky blown into stone, the air on the verge of slick. As they back out of the drive, Nate stares at the house, thinking of the desiccated remnants of his latest apology. He thinks of Leah leaning over their daughter, Sylvia, of Sadie, their standard-issue goldendoodle, with her tongue lolling stupidly. He thinks of what more he could possibly say.
—
Then there they are, at the edge of the roundabout, and when it’s Liam’s turn, he freezes. Behind them, a car honks its dissonant horn. Nate can see a man in sunglasses with both hands in the air. He tries to keep his voice level, a nervous heat quavering in his throat.
“Liam, go,” Nate says.
“I can’t,” Liam says.
“Just wait for this one to pass.”
Nate watches Liam’s leg stiffen on the brake.
Leah had said he wasn’t ready, asked Nate if he was sure he wanted to do this. And Nate had said that he needs to learn, that she might want some time alone anyway. She’d said fine. On this fundamental point it seemed they were agreed, that it would be best if he weren’t around.
“Liam, you gotta go,” Nate says, his voice dusted with exasperation. Behind them, the line of cars grows from one to two. Then two to five, the honking monotone, laced with invective. “Do you want to switch?” Nate asks.
It’s nearing rush hour. The traffic is only going to get worse.
“No,” Liam says. “I want to do it.”
“Alright,” Nate says, looking back at a gigantic truck on a menacing lift kit. The first note of rain hits the windshield.
“You sure?”
“Yeah,” Liam says shakily.
Finally, a break in the traffic. It’s clear. The allegro of rain pounds as Nate watches his son’s foot ease off the break and onto the accelerator. He can almost feel the relief in the other cars even as thunder slides past the clouds overhead.
Now they’re in it. Hand slaps of rain peppering the windshield. Nate is trying not to shake, as he finally understands Leah’s trepidation in full. His hand slips into his pocket for his phone, the entire world swirling in watercolor as they round the first bend.
—
Then the roads leading into and out of the roundabout are gone, along with the line of cars behind them. They’re at what used to be the second exit arcing around, but it’s gone as well, as though the earth had opened to absorb it. The darkness of the storm presses.
“Just keep going,” Nate says, thumb jamming the phone, dialing Leah.
The streets are gone. There’s a nothingness outside the roundabout, father and son locked inside.
“Dad,” Liam says.
“Drive,” Nate says, not wanting to give away that this was, in fact, worse than any fear Leah could have possibly dreamed up.
Finally, Leah picks up. She’s on speaker.
“Hey,” she says flatly. Unperturbed. Always on solid ground.
“Hey,” Nate says. They drift around for a second lap in the rain.
“What?” she asks.
“I don’t know,” Nate says. “It’s just…”
“What, Nate?” she asks.
“We’re stuck,” Liam blurts.
Nate observes his own knuckles, the alien strings of the tendons in his hands tensing. In the background there’s the lilting sounds of Sylvia humming an indistinct tune.
“What do you mean?” she asks. “Like in a ditch?”
“106th street roundabout,” Nate says. “We can’t get out.”
They round the same, manicured median for another pass. In the middle juts a pristine concrete sundial engraved with the silhouette of a blue heron.
“You need to tell someone,” Nate says.
“The fuck, Nate?” she gasps.
He can feel her voice growing distant as they continue to circle. He can tell she doesn’t believe him. Again. Probably for good reason. They have their normal problems, their middle-America woes. As they make yet another lap, Nate realizes this is the beginning of a whole new set of troubles. Yet he can’t help imagining, as he has so many other times, their heads close together, a damp defense drifting from him into her, a breathy, tentative reconciliation.
“I know how it sounds,” Nate says.
“Who the hell would I even call? Goddammit, Nate,” she yells. “For real?” Sylvia’s humming extinguishes.
It’s only been a couple weeks. He should have gathered this would sound like a lie. Everything for a while will sound like a lie. Maybe it is.
“I don’t know how long my phone will hold a charge. Liam, turn yours off. We’re going to slow down and think about this. I’m sorry, sweetheart,” Nate says.
On the other end ethereal static.
“I love you,” Nate says.
“Yeah, I love you too,” Leah whispers. “Be careful.”
The rain slows.
“Slow down,” Nate says.
“Dad,” says Liam. “What the fuck are we gonna do?”
“I don’t know.”
All of the strip mall corners are gone, all the whitewashed brick and towering billboards, the crush of conformity. It’s just them, circling. Around them a new sameness of boundless meadow where there once were streets crisscrossing and winding toward the highway. Everything flat and gouged out by ancient glacier. Green and tepid, flowing monochromatic. The sky above still gray. Luckily, Nate notes, a full tank, charged phones.
Goddammit, Nate, he can’t stop thinking in his wife’s voice.
He lets Liam keep driving, watching the landscape ripple, the world spin smaller into the absurd ease with which they now sat in silence, winding around the circle, thinking of what to do next. It’s been nearly an hour of silence and revolving. He can tell Liam is afraid.
“Should we call Mom again?” Liam asks.
“Nah,” Nate says.
He knows this is the last thing they need here, and in their own way, they seem to be adjusting already. The concrete circle. The smooth grass. Except Nate’s arms and torso feeling bounded and tight, lower back knotting up against the upholstery. He strains his eyes toward the horizon line, looking for anything.
“Are you and Mom okay?” Liam asks.
“We’re fine. Just one of those things.”
The rain stops, the lie gliding out of his mouth so easily. As he says this, the world seems to shift around them, a low luminescence brimming at the edges of the gloom left from the brief storm. Just the promise of shimmer.
“Maybe we should stop the car,” Nate says.
“Why?” Liam asks.
“To save gas,” Nate says.
“We have a full tank,” Liam says.
“I don’t know, bud,” Nate says. “Just stop. I need to get out and walk for a minute.”
He watches Liam pull over. However, behind his son’s straight face Nate can sense the roiling fear pooling in his jaw muscles.
“Turn the car off,” Nate says.
“I want to listen to the radio,” he says.
“Liam,” Nate says, thinking of his next set of lies, the way he might maneuver things back to normal, the way he might be able to get things back to the way before.
They stop. Liam gets out of the car, pulls out his phone, and holds it arm’s length in front of him. Nate watches him walking to the median then back across the concrete and out into the meadow, watches the steady light of his phone screen.
Nate’s phone goes off. A text.
Leah: Liam is streaming. What happened
Nate: No idea.
Leah: Call someone.
Nate: Why? They can’t get here. There’s no road.
He knows their marriage can’t take something like this. She’s typing again, the three dots holding his sanity. The sun breaks through the clouds.
Leah: I don’t know what to do
Nate: Me either
Leah: I’m sorry
Nate: Me too.
—
“Just tell me. What’s going on between you and Mom?” Liam asks when he returns.
“Nothing,” Nate says. He thinks of the slinking ease of his wife’s laughter.
In the distance, a chunk of meadowland rends itself from gravity, shoots upward into the sky. A green and tan mess zooming up. He watches it into the sky, hearing his son shouting behind him. Liam is there with his phone outstretched, breathing wildly, capturing the whole thing.
Then the shakes are over, his phone rings. It’s Leah, and he doesn’t know what he’ll say, so he lets it ring. In his mind he can still hear his justification, feel the heat of his face during the fight. The resignation of her limp arms as she sat on the bed, tearless. How he’d begged and pleaded with no real hope.
“Dad,” Liam shouts.
The earth shakes. He feels heavy, replete with an exhaustion so absolute that he crumbles and sinks to his knees, a sense of loss careening into his stomach, his collarbones.
“I’m calling Mom,” Liam says.
“No,” Nate shouts back.
“Why? What the hell is going on?”
“It’s just one of those things. We had a fight.”
“That’s not—” Liam says.
“Let’s get back in the car.”
“And go where?” Liam yells. “Dad!”
“I don’t know,” Nate says.
The ground trembles yet again, and another chunk of earth splits in the distance, rockets upward.
A new text.
Leah: It’s all over the news. Everyone saw you disappear.
Nate: Did you feel the earthquake?
Leah: What?
Nate: Nvm. I’m sorry
—
They’ve found there is a limit, an ethereal plane extending into the heavens near where the earth had blown itself upward at the very beginning.
But eventually those outside find a way in, at least to get them supplies. Gas cans appear. Razors and bottles of water, non-perishables. Car batteries and tools to install them. They pile what comes in heaps, Liam constantly reorganizing the boxy remnants like firewood. Reams of business cards and half-complete first-aid kits. They’ve found that they can’t send anything out, but they can receive. They still have cell service, but Leah hasn’t called to talk directly to Nate since their last conversation. Instead, she texts to tell him that she can’t get through on Liam’s phone anymore because of his constant streaming. He braces himself against the car. He’s tried to call, but she won’t pick up. He can feel the dispossession in his toes, the creeping ankle pain as he limps around the sundial when they hang up. He monitors Liam in the distance as he patrols the meadow, arms and phone locked in place, his head bobbing excitedly.
The narrative drags on in the media. It’s t like a hostage situation.
Liam gains millions of viewers on his live stream.
“Dad,” he says in an increasingly rare moment without his phone. “Please. Just tell me.”
“We’ve been through this, son,” Nate says. He’s taken to calling him son instead of bud or buddy or his name. The formality between them a growing cavern.
“Dad.”
The earth rumbles beneath them, and they both crouch next to the car, cover their heads as the sound of moving earth envelops them in a fetal white noise, threatening to break the very air they breathe as it moves through their open, screaming mouths.
Then it stops.
When they emerge, there’s a fully grown, ancient-looking forest crowning hills off in the distance, the same direction of where the ground seemed to threaten to come apart and shoot into the sky all at once.
Nate’s phone goes off.
Leah: We felt that one.
Nate: Can we talk?
Leah: No.
Nate: What about Liam?
Leah: We’ve been through this. I’m working on it.
—
Eventually they stop tracking the passage of days and are just glued to their phones, watching the coverage of their situation. On screen, the barrier shows itself as a resplendent cylinder around the 106th Street roundabout, gossamer cells of writhing light. The crowds swell by the day. Nate and Liam eat what they can, save their batteries, turn on the car only to charge their phones. They’ve traversed the entire meadow, explored the forest, breathed in all the scents of the wood, climbed to the top of the tallest trees they dared. Nate’s back is starting to hurt all the time, his muscles seeming to pile up on themselves in a way they never did even just a few years ago. Liam has all but stopped speaking to him, and yet Nate is glad he has his son with him.
He’s sitting in the passenger side of the car with the seat leaned all the way back when Liam comes up to the door and taps on the window. It’s gotten unseasonably hot outside. The air seems to be dripping.
“Dad, what happened?” Liam says. The pleading in his eyes, the longing to return to his half-open, sixteen-year-old life.
And yet a mysterious glint. His son’s hand gingerly wrapped around his phone.
“I told you it’s best not to talk about it.”
—
They’re sitting together in the car with the A/C cranked.
“Dad, please,” Liam says.
The sun beats down.
“Honestly, son, I don’t even know anymore,” Nate says. He ventures the half-lie into the stale air between them. The heat languid to the point the air glimmers outside the car. Sweat tingling on his collarbone.
A tremor beneath them. Nate closes his eyes. It’s over quickly. Nate raises his head, looks around the meadow, over the tops of the trees. Fire. Black soot seeps over top of the treeline, spiraling up in great smiles of smoke.
His phone goes off.
Leah: Some people think there’s a way.
Nate: Do you even want me to come?
Leah: I’m not doing this.
The fire burns the entire forest, but it’s been contained by something, leaving a stark, black line of ash in the grass. Deer, hawks, a cavalcade of insects run out of the blaze and vanish into thin air; as soon as they hit the barrier, there’s nothing left, not even a sound. Conversely, piles of fire extinguishers, USB chargers, takeout boxes grow into three small hillocks. It’s a one-way. Nate watches his son’s face lighting up when he turns the camera around with an effortless tap. Watches him casually pick over the latest food offerings and come up to the driver’s side door just as the moon glides into the sky.
—
The next night, his phone goes off as he’s on a walk back from the barrier. In the distance, Nate can see the oceanic light of Liam’s phone beaming from the driver’s side window.
Leah: They think there’s an opening. Are you coming?
Nate: I’m sorry.
Leah: Me too. I just can’t do this anymore.
Nate: What?
Leah: All of it. I’m so tired.
Nate: Do you think I wanted this?
As he nears the roundabout, Nate sees the light of Liam’s phone go out, hears the car ignition sputter. Then the car drops into gear, begins going in circles, headlights rotating at steady pace. Then the engine flares, a squeal of tires as Liam picks up speed.
“Hey,” Nate shouts. The light of Liam’s cell phone still flashing in his mind, the finality of his marriage brewing. His back burning as he runs. Perhaps this rift is too great to cross, too absolute. He can’t imagine a scenario in which they go back to the way things used to be.
The engine revs to deafening power just as he gets to the edge of the roundabout, and Nate is sure Liam will lose control. He has all the intention of just standing in the way, of just putting his entire body on the line, as he’s unable to offer much else. But as the screaming tires pass, he can’t bring himself to take the final step.
He screams at his son, unloading his guilt in great heaves as his breath tumbles out, his shoulders shake. Around him, he can feel wind pick up. Liam keeps driving around at speed. As Nate screams, the truth roars inside him. He can’t even remember what happened, now, what the origin of the rift was, how he’d been able to so utterly obliterate the life he’d fallen into, the family they’d made. All he knows is that the damage is irrevocable, that his cowardice is so complete. He screams and screams, the wind picking up, his skin roiling. He wants to shed himself, to just simply step outside himself and float into a billion particles without intention of reassembly.
The car is tilting dangerously. He still can’t bring himself to step in front of it. His legs won’t work, and he wonders if he secretly has no desire to do so, tries to convince himself that he would, yes, of course, do anything to stop his son harming himself. But this wondering breaks him and he falls to his knees, his throat seemingly on the verge of tearing as he just keeps on yelling.
Without warning, the car quiets and slows, pulls over into the grass. He hauls himself up from the damp ground and runs to the door, sees his son doubled over the steering wheel, the most magnificent tears he’s ever seen budding in Liam’s eyes.
—
The world around them shimmers into a vibrato of sobs. Liam keeps asking what happened, and Nate’s mind is murky as creek water. All he knows is that the memory is sliding, burning the base of his skull as he holds his son through the coming storm.
“Why won’t you tell me?” Liam asks, the quakes subsiding past anger into resignation. Nate sees the film over his son’s eyes through his own crying.
“I truly don’t know,” Nate says.
“That’s bullshit,” Liam says.
“I know,” Nate says.
“Just tell me, Dad,” Liam says.
Hearing the word ‘dad’ come out of his mouth sends a tremor through him. Nate’s arms slip from behind his son’s neck as he falls to his knees yet again, looking in the distance at what looks like a tear in the barrier. For a moment, he can see thousands of camera flashes, hear the twittering sounds of a crowd floating on the hot wind.
His phone goes off.
Leah: Did you see?
Nate: Yeah.
Leah: They say they’re ready.
“Dad,” Liam shouts above the tumult gathering on the wind.
“Let’s go,” Nate shouts back. “Move.”
The tear has grown wider, and the crowd is a mass of faces swaying in the oncoming storm. The whole scene wreathed in static light, the barrier finally giving way.
Nate takes the wheel. Whatever his sins, he will get his son out of this.
He checks his phone.
Leah: Are you coming?
Nate: On the way.
They clamber tearily into the car, and Nate slams the gas, drives around the pile of supplies just as the earth starts to shake again, gigantic stones floating upward just as they had that first day. In the rearview mirror, he can see an opening in the ground swallow all their provisions, mountains of sustenance and novelty tumbling down. The rain sheets as the world throws itself upward. As he drives, he realizes that he can barely remember his life up to this point, much less how all this started.
They’re past the copse of trees and wheeling toward the barrier opening. There are armored trucks, toneless voices booming through speakers, untold numbers of uniformed people walking in silhouette. He’s looking for Leah and Sylvia, remembering their presence, the lightness of their hands. The wind picks up and threatens to topple them just as they reach the technicolor opening, barging through into a bizarre mirror of the roundabout they’ve been living in. The same, all the signs of suburbia intact, reassembled from memory and solid as bone.
Liam opens the door and crashes to the pavement, lying flat. Paramedics rush in, and their voices are so quiet in the suddenly dry air, barely able to penetrate Nate’s senses. He can see a fist knocking on his window, mouths moving, but he clutches the steering wheel, trying to remember. He looks at his phone. Nothing. There’s a throbbing in his ears.
Sylvia and Leah are being ushered through the crowd, and when they emerge, they fall upon Liam in a mess of limbs. Boom mics are everywhere, it seems, vans and other vehicles, a crowd with a crush of voices stretching for what seems like miles. The knocking on his window grows louder, more insistent. Nate keeps checking his phone, waiting for the next message, the resolution, then watches his family embrace, the relief palpable in the way their shoulders move freely as they cry. His arms are heavy, laced with the faint tug of weeping exhaustion. His back burns. Coiled in his chest a smoky iteration of his guilt. He can’t grasp it, can’t get out and join them.
Then his family is falling away, a new barrier piling on top of itself around the car, a gilded web forming. The fists and knocks dissipating, the low hum of voices casting off into a watery silence as the rain returns to a plain highway lined with green. When everything settles, he’s on a straightaway with no end in sight.