Month: December 2019

Every day she brings her son to see the turtles. He carries a small jar of turtle food in his hands. She dislikes leaving the apartment and the comfort of the air conditioning, entering this foreign world, but these small trips down to the guardhouse she can manage. The turtles weren’t there when they moved here a year ago. One day she came home from the grocery store, shopping bags digging into her palms, and saw the plastic container outside the guardhouse.

She was about to walk past it. She nodded to the security guard; she couldn’t wave because of the bags in her hands. Then she saw a little head poke above the lip of the container. She found turtles inside, some swimming in the water, others perched on rocks. The container was the type you might use for under-the-bed storage, sweaters tucked away until winter but there was no winter here.

The guard shuffled out of his little house, which did not have air conditioning, just a fan mounted on a wall. This seemed cruel to her and she thought one day she would talk to the apartment manager about it, but it seemed to be common in Singapore: these old men sitting inside guardhouses with no air conditioning. They weren’t capable of guarding much of anything. This particular man spent seemingly half of his shift in the bathroom, the other half asleep in his house. Cars would arrive at the gate and honk until he woke up, startled, perhaps unaware of where he was, of how much time had passed.

She asked if the turtles were his and he said yes, smiling, revealing the few teeth he had left. He seemed so proud of the turtles. She nodded and continued on to her apartment, walking three flights of stairs because the elevator was broken.

Since then, every afternoon she and her son walk down to feed the turtles. He is three and this small daily adventure is thrilling. He had been asking for a pet, but she did not want to get one, didn’t want the responsibility of another living thing, but in this small way, he has many pets now. Although they belong to the guard, her son has named them: Lenny, Bob, Jeff, Linda, and Jack. She does not know where he comes up with these names. There had been a Susan as well, but she died the first week.

Her son sprinkles the turtle food into the plastic container. Mostly the turtles seem uninterested in the food from the small jar her son carries. She thinks maybe the guard fishes the pellets out after they leave, maybe he feeds them something entirely different, lettuce or worms, she has no idea what turtles are supposed to eat other than this jar of food from the pet store.

Every day that she makes this trip downstairs with her son, she worries that another turtle will be dead. She offered to replace Susan, but the guard waved her off, saying, “these things happen.” And she knows this is true, knows her son must learn these things too. She wonders about the guard sometimes, about his life: where does he live, does he have a family, was he a young man once? What does he dream about when he falls asleep at the gate?

Each turtle will die eventually, she knows. One day they will come down to the guardhouse and find no container. Or maybe one day they will come down and find no old man. Maybe then, they will pick up the container of turtles and take it home, carry it up the stairs carefully so the water doesn’t slosh out. They will look online for information, maybe she’ll brave the heat and take her son to the library. Together they will learn how to care for turtles, what to feed them, how to keep them safe. Together they will make a new habitat.

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Shasta Grant is the author of GATHER US UP AND BRING US HOME (Split Lip Press, 2017). She won the 2015 Kenyon Review Short Fiction Contest and was the 2016 SmokeLong Quarterly Kathy Fish Fellow. Her work has appeared in cream city review, Epiphany, Hobart, MonkeyBicycle, and elsewhere. She received her MFA from Sarah Lawrence College and has been awarded residencies from Hedgebrook and The Kerouac Project. She lives in Singapore and Indianapolis.

 

She couldn’t escape the creosote scent of that summer, even years later. It stalked her in the tunnel as she scurried to catch a train, it drifted through the crowds when she spoke at a convention, and it hid in the pocket of the suit she nearly bought her son. She never told anyone about it.

Their first breakfast together they shared a Rooty Tooty Fresh ‘N Fruity. He’d sat down across from her. Or maybe she’d sat across from him? After so many years, she couldn’t remember who arrived first, but she couldn’t forget the way the skin on the back of her legs stuck to the blue vinyl cushions, and the feel of his hand caressing hers when he called her pretty. No one had ever used that word to describe her before.

When she looked in the mirror that night, she saw that her bulbous nose—a genetic gift from her grandfather—didn’t look so horrible on her face.

Her mouth parched from the long days in an empty house, his visits became a sparkling oasis. Her friends all left Phoenix that summer—they went to expensive camps in the mountains and visited out of state grandparents. But her mom worked two jobs.

She would wait for him beneath the sparse shade of a palo verde, stepping out of her purple flip flops and pressing her feet onto the hot sidewalk. She counted how long it took for her calloused soles to burn. He always picked her up a few blocks from her house, but he rarely arrived on time.

They went to his apartment often, but she only saw his roommates once. He seemed surprised to find them watching baseball in the living room that day, and rushed her up to his bedroom without an introduction. She still wondered whether they’d known, or if there had been others like her.

He kept a gun on his bookshelf. It felt heavy in her hand: hands he liked because they were “small and soft.” When she picked up the badge, sitting next to the gun’s holster, light reflected off the golden insignia and flickered across his bedroom ceiling. She trusted him.

At night, she would lie in bed with the phone pressed close to her ear, listening to him describe afternoons spent drinking Corona’s on his best friend’s houseboat in Lake Havasu. She twirled her finger in and out of the spiral cord, and pictured diving into the sun-rippled waters. She wanted to join him at the lake, go on a double date, or meet his younger brother. She wanted to be included in his life. “Maybe later,” he always said.

He promised to teach her to drive the next summer, when she’d be old enough for a permit.

One evening they raced through the streets in his dust-blue Toyota pickup, chasing the monsoon as it rolled across the valley. Rain crashed overhead, then subsided. Blue and purple bolts of lightning danced in the sky and guided their course. Her hesitation and insecurity dissolved beneath the storm and, wanting more, she leaned over to kiss him. He pushed her back. “We agreed,” he said, “not on the lips.”

For her birthday, he took her to a restaurant on top of North Mountain. They shared a meal her mom could never have afforded. The waiter slid her chair in for her, folded her napkin when she stood up, and returned their leftovers wrapped in a tin foil swan. The setting sun painted fuchsia clouds, and fire flickered on the horizon.

He bought her a dress for homecoming which she wore just once—when she modeled for him in his bedroom. “I love you,” she said.

Should she have known better?

He never returned her calls again. She did not go to the dance. The dress hung in her closet, his stains unwashed, until she moved away for college.

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Victoria Miller has a BA in comparative literature from UC Berkeley, and an MFA in creative writing from Antioch University Los Angeles. She spends her days producing video games where she often finds herself juggling flame-engulfed-chainsaws and excel sheets. When she’s not slurping the best ramen in LA or proclaiming her hatred of olives, she finds time to work on short stories and her first novel. Find her on Twitter @tigrvix

The first thing you do when you walk into my apartment is go to the bathroom to wash your feet. This takes longer than I expect but you’re very drunk and you’re breathing hard not just from the smoking or the stairs, but also from the singing.

You are uncomfortable in your work shoes, but more uncomfortable with the way your feet smell in an apartment that is not your own. You will not risk it. There is a process. You need to take off the shoes and the sheer black socks too. They’re damp with the cold but also with your sweat. You can never keep from sweating even on the first really cold day in early December.

I hear, behind the closed bathroom door, the water turning on and off and I hope you don’t puddle the floor like you do sometimes. When the faucet is shut, I hear you trill something familiar, The Pointer Sisters? Not the lyrics, just the melody in oohs and coos. You squirt liquid hand soap in the tub, since when you tried to use the sink last time, you fell and almost hit your head on the toilet. When you come out your feet are clean and dry, and I smell lavender. Your pinky toe nails need attention. They curl over, uncut. Your feet are the smallest part of you.

You’ve always been big. You showed me that video your mom had done at the mall in Bayonne—an early iteration of green screen—where you stood in front of a staticky rendering of the Brooklyn Bridge, like you’ve just jumped off of it and landed standing in the river. On the little TV at your mother’s in Jersey City, you looked uncomfortable. What were you? Eleven? A zebra-patterned t-shirt and shorts set—watered down new wave—from a department store’s husky section. Your skin looked stretched across a growing frame. A boy awkwardly looking at the camera forced to be there by a well-intentioned mother. But it wasn’t that simple. There was a hint in the way you connected to the lens. You didn’t mind being in front of it. There was a reason to be there, it was just the wrong time. You couldn’t be something good if the first thing people thought when they saw you was something bad. On the screen, I saw your hope. That your body was just temporary.

You’ve told me how it feels to have people look at you and immediately only one word comes to minds. We’re all reduced to one word, I rationalized. And you asked what I thought that word would be for me and I paused and guessed girl?

You said:

There’s nothing wrong with being a girl, but fat is something you’re always trying to change. I’m something no one wants to be.

You had the same face then that you do now. I can’t help but put you in present tense. This is all the past.

The last time I saw you was in your casket, so strange to see you there, in a suit, just like at work, except your eyes are closed and all these co-workers sit on folding chairs watching a slideshow projected above you. We look at the dead you and the captured-living you at the same time.

I haven’t seen these people since I left the job, fired really. I don’t work, just take the baby to the park and push the stroller and listen to podcasts, needing to hear people talk, not sing. I came for you because I hadn’t talked to you in awhile and I kept meaning to. I hadn’t heard you sing since that last night at karaoke.

You still have the look of an alter boy with a strangely dated pompadour. Your cheeks are still as red as ever. Are you even thirty now? A few days before, your father told me you couldn’t breathe and you went to the doctor and they questioned you: Why are you here? They told you that you should be in the E.R. They called the ambulance and you died inside of it while it was in motion, the sirens blaring down Newark Street.

Forget this place. Let’s hear you sing.

In our private karaoke room, we bring a tower of plastic cups from the office kitchen and screw top wine from the liquor store. I buy a bag of chips at the deli.

You sing Jolene and you sound like Dolly.
You sing Cabaret and you sound like Liza.
You sing Complicated and you sound like Avril, over-enunciating all of the words to make fun of her voice. You’re funny too.

You have the song binder in front of you and while you scan it, you fold a foot up on to your knee to rub it through the leather. They hurt you and you have that look on your face like you want to sing some blues, some man-done-me-wrong shit. That body you feel trapped in, you know a song is its escape route.

We finally sing a duet. It’s one of the only times you sing a man’s part. You are Eminem and I’m Dido. I never know any of the words you sing, I have to read along, but my part, I can close my eyes. It’s not so bad, it’s not so bad. You say I sing well, but I’m always just under the note. And flat. But we are not here for me.

I take the binder, open it up to a random page and let my fingertip fall. I plug in the code and wait for whatever song comes. Sing yourself out. It doesn’t matter what plays, your voice is a skeleton key. When it’s over, we’ll make our way back to my place and you can clean yourself up and sleep.

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Melissa Ragsly’s work has appeared or forthcoming in Best American Nonrequired Reading, Best Small FIctions, Iowa Review, Epiphany, Hobart, and other journals. She is an Associate Editor for A Public Space and a Program Coordinator at the Authors Guild. More can be found at melissaragsly.com.