Fiction – Page 5 – Writers Resist

The Kindness of Jolene: a #MakeOurPlanetGreatAgain Parable

By Dan McClenaghan

There’s no telling how the frog got into the lettuce. Hopped up out of an irrigation furrow just prior to harvest is the best guess. What is certain is that he ended up in Jolene Rivard’s salad, a rainbow of raw vegetable matter collected by Jolene herself at the salad bar. She didn’t see him hiding there until three bites in, when she stuck him in the butt with her fork.

This minor harpooning sent the small amphibian into a high hop that arced across the table and terminated in a landing, with a splat, on the top patty of Jolene’s husband Frank’s double cheeseburger, momentarily unbunned for the addition of condiments.

Frank tilted the ketchup bottle back and gazed into the eyes of the frog.

The frog returned his gaze and let out a feeble chirp. The melting cheese had entrapped him.

Jolene looked across the table as the frog struggled to free itself from the orange goop. Her sudden awareness of having possibly eaten some frog slime salad dressing made her stomach churn. She took a deep drink of water to rinse her mouth, then spit it back into her glass, as Frank nodded at the salad bar and said, “They got a crock of these guys up there? Wriggling around next to the radish slices?”

This frogs-in-a-crock image ramped up Jolene’s incipient nausea. She jumped out of the booth and strode, with extreme urgency, to the restroom, while Frank lifted the frog from his burger—strings of cheese stretching from each of its four little feet—and dropped him into Jolene’s water glass.

Jolene returned, pale and shaky, and slid back into her booth, as the waitress approached with the iced tea pitcher.

“Oh shit!” the young woman said upon spying the frog, which was swimming the perimeter of his new home.

“Got him at the salad bar,” said Frank. “Then he jumped onto my burger.” Frank pointed at the frog indentation on the cheese.

“Here, I’ll take him,” said the waitress, reaching for the glass.

“No!” Jolene shouted. She’d waitressed in her younger days, and she was pretty sure that a frog going back to the kitchen was destined for a ride inside the garbage disposal. “Bring us a to-go cup.” she demanded. “We’re taking him.”

Frank knew better than to protest. He drove. Jolene navigated. She told him to go to Guajome Park, to the small lake there. Frank carried the frog to the lake and poured him out of the to-go cup. The frog swam off.

It turns out, he was a she and, upon maturation, she laid eggs. Tadpoles emerged. Hundreds survived to adulthood. And on a warm spring evening they formed a choir, to sing a croaking ode to the kindness of Jolene.

Previously published by Excuse Me, I’m Writing.

___________________________________________________________

Dan McClenaghan writes stuff. He began with his Ruth and Ellis/Clete and Juanita stories in the early 1980s. At the beginning of the new millennium, he started writing reviews of jazz CDs, first at American Reporter, and then (and now) at All About Jazz. He’s tried his hand at novels, without success, although he has been published in a bunch of small presses, most notably the now defunct Wormwood Review. This was in the pre-computer age, when we whomped up stories on typewriters, then rolled down to Kinkos to make copies, which we stuck in manila envelopes, along with a return envelope with return postage attached. Times have changed. Aside from the writing, Dan is married to the lovely Denise. They have three wonderful children and five beautiful grandchildren; and Dan is a two-time winner—1970 and 1971—of the Oceanside Bodysurfing Contest. Kowabunga!

Photo credit: Marc Dalmulder via a Creative Commons license.

An Open Letter to the People Beyond the Fence

From David H. Reinarz,

I am writing to you from the Political Re-Education Farm, which I believe is somewhere in Southern Idaho. They won’t tell us exactly where we are. It’s part of the New Regime’s disorientation/reorientation technique. They’re trying to change our minds. There is a big fence around the farm—President 45 likes walls and fences. The Internal Border Patrol is on guard.

I don’t have a lot of time to write. It’s after bedtime, but it’s midsummer, so there’s still enough light to get this done before the guards do head count. One of them gives us scraps of paper and stubs of pencils he cadges from the supply room. He says his wife is Muslim and is in a camp in Alabama. We write down our resistance words. He says he will get them to the outside. I don’t know if he does. If you see this, know that we have not given up. We are not dead, yet.

We are poets, writers, playwrights, musicians, artists, dancers, actors, some college professors, a few politicians. America’s dangerous intelligentsia!

I was part of a group rounded up in Omaha, a blue spot in a red state. What we’d been writing and publishing was not only making the president crazy, his clones in the governor’s mansion and mayor’s office were angry and embarrassed that we wouldn’t be controlled. Even in the Midwest, there were voices of resistance.

We were held in the public baseball stadium, named after the governor’s family business. We were interrogated. We were given a chance to recant our views and sign a loyalty oath to President 45. It was the same loyalty oath you have to pledge to get a voting card or receive any government benefits since the New Regime initiated Level 2 of Making America Great Again.

Bowing down and giving in wasn’t going to happen. That night, we were handcuffed and hooded and put on a train headed out of town, destination unrevealed.

We do potatoes here. They have de-mechanized the agricultural practices, so there’s more work for more intellectuals to struggle with. Our struggle! On top of that, we are force-marched and receive regular beatings. Not so much that we are injured and can’t work. No, just enough to make us hurt a little more, make our farm work a little harder, know that our thoughts and words have brought us here and are the source of our suffering.

How is your health? How is your physical strength? How is your endurance? Did you ride a bike today? Did you do your yoga? Did you run up the stairs to your office?

You will need this, my friends. You will need this.

After we are done working in the hot summer sun and are physically weak and exhausted, there is interrogation. “What is your name? Where are you from? Who are your friends? Who did the publishing and distribution of your pamphlets? What books and newspapers did you read? What social media did you use? Give us your logins and passwords!”

Then dinner. Potatoes. Always potatoes. Potatoes and road kill.

After dinner there are three hours of re-education. “Who won the election? Who were the losers? How do you demonstrate loyalty to President 45?”

It’s brutal, listening to this guy from the Propaganda Ministry drill us on White Supremacy theory and Creationism and the need for a strong leader in a dangerous world. I think I would prefer another beating. Every day I make the point that whites are not supreme. I remember the Supremes. They were not white, but they were supreme. I also make the point that the only thing created here is a stronger Resistance. And I make the point that the world is only dangerous for those who support the leader, because the people will rise up and take back our country.

I get another beating.

I know you don’t want to hear, “I told you so,” but I don’t mind saying it. “I told you so.” Many people who’ve studied the history of the world and the history of America told you so. It doesn’t take long to take apart a government when you have a self-obsessed president surrounded by a few hard core ideologues, a few bad hombres working for them, a complacent Congress, and a de-fanged judicial system. You can’t just hope that everything is going to be OK. I am telling you this from a political prison farm in Idaho. They should have been stopped early on, before they got rolling.

If this gets to anyone on the outside, all of us here tell you: “Now is the time to resist!”

If this gets as far as the UN Headquarters in Berlin or The World Bank Headquarters in Tokyo, don’t be afraid to help us. We need the whole world to work for justice and to affirm the human rights of our wonderfully diverse population.

Time for dinner. Tonight’s menu: potatoes.

After lights out: Dig the tunnel. Dig, dig the tunnel. Before the hyenas come.

Yours truly,
David H. Reinarz

David H. Reinarz lives in Omaha, Nebraska. He recently retired from a long career as a retail bicycle shop manager. He is an alumnus of the 7 Doctors Writers Workshop and the author of a Story City: Ten Short Stories and One Long Story in the Middle. Published in 2016. It is available on Amazon.com, and he will donate 100 percent of Amazon royalties from all 2017 sales of Story City to the ACLU. His poem, “Album Cover: Songs from the Country Western Café” was published in the Winter 2017 issue of Plainsongs, Hastings College Press.

Photo credit: Ben Dalton via a Creative Commons licesnse.

First 100 Days: Two Trump Heads Are Better Than One?

By Marleen S. Barr

Professor Sondra Lear, a feminist science fiction scholar who teaches at the Metropolitan University of New York, could not ignore the persistent pain in her molar. Thus it came to pass that she found herself sitting in an oral surgeon’s chair about to have her tooth extracted.

“Do you want me to put growth material in your gum, to facilitate implant insertion?” asked Dr. Doogie Horowitz.

Sondra, who was scared as hell that she was about to be decapitated, nodded her head affirmatively.

When she returned for her post-operative check-up, she asked for details about what had been inserted in her mouth.

“Bone,” Dr. Horowitz said.

“What kind of bone?”

“Bone from a cadaver.”

“What if the cadaver wasn’t Jewish? I might have goyische bone cells reproducing in my jaw.”

Sondra went home and fell asleep.

Upon awakening, she felt a weird sensation on her shoulder. She looked into a mirror and saw a second head attached to her body. The head did not look like a normal head. It had a small pursed mouth, steely eyes framed by white makeup, and a very strange orange haircut. Yes, Trump’s talking head was pervasive in the all-Trump-all-the-time media circus. But having Trump’s head attached to her body right next to her own head was the limit. Sondra immediately phoned the surgeon.

“I have an emergency. The cells grew into Trump’s head, not new jaw bone.”

“Oops,” said Dr. Horowitz. “The cells I used came from Trump’s deceased parents who were buried locally in New Hyde Park. Instead of simply generating new jaw bone cells, these cells grew into a completely formed Trump head.”

“Will I gain weight? Trump is not thin and he eats—I can barely say it—fried taco shells. And if he has access to my hands does that mean that he can grope my pussy?”

“The Trump head has no control over your body.”

“How do I get my normal Trump headless body back?”

“I need some time to research this unprecedented question.”

Sondra decided to get a heads up on the situation by seeking an audience with Trump himself in Trump Tower. She put on a burka to disguise the Trump head. Politically correct New Yorkers, loathe to stare at a burka-clad woman, would not notice the covered shoulder protrusion.

Sondra entered Trump Tower and asked to speak to Trump. Fearing that a woman wearing a burka had to be a terrorist, Secret Service agents swarmed around her. Frantically frisking her in search of a gun or a bomb, they instead closely encountered Trump’s head.

“I’m not a terrorist,” Sondra insisted. “I obviously have a huge problem. Trump has a swelled head. Maybe he has a suggestion.”

The agents escorted Sondra to Trump’s apartment. He became enraged when he saw his head attached to Sondra.

“Get me a guillotine,” screamed Trump. “Two Trump heads are absolutely not better than one.”

“Sir, presidents are not allowed to behead people,” said a Secret Service agent.

“Trump began to tweet: “Dr. Sondra Lear doesn’t know how to use my head. Not.” He then continued to shout. “I’ll use the nuclear codes to explode the hell out of the imposter Trump head.”

“Sir,” implored the agent. “It is not advisable to deploy nuclear weapons simply because the second Trump head hurts your ego.”

“Can’t we blame the Mexicans? Initiate a travel ban to prevent any other Trump head from entering the country.”

Trump’s real head—not his alternative head—suddenly exploded. Flying cranium shards became projectiles, which hit the Trump head attached to Sondra and severed it.

Dr. Horowitz closed the hole in Sondra’s shoulder. She recovered completely and survived four years of President Pence. Although she did not agree with Pence, she was grateful that he was not sick in his head.

Marleen S. Barr is known for her pioneering work in feminist science fiction and she teaches English at the City University of New York. She has won the Science Fiction Research Association Pilgrim Award for lifetime achievement in science fiction criticism. Barr is the author of Alien to Femininity: Speculative Fiction and Feminist Theory, Lost in Space: Probing Feminist Science Fiction and Beyond, Feminist Fabulation: Space/Postmodern Fiction, and Genre Fission: A New Discourse Practice for Cultural Studies. Barr has edited many anthologies and co-edited the science fiction issue of PMLA. She is the author of the novels Oy Pioneer! and Oy Feminist Planets: A Fake Memoir.

Marleen also has a piece in a new anthology, Alternative Truths, just released by B Cubed Press. “Alternative Truths is a look at the post-election America that is, or will be, or could be.” Read more about it here.

And Then He Moved On

By William Aime

On his first day, his boss gave him a pair of t-shirts. She asked his size, which was extra-large, but she only had large or medium. She gave him two larges and told him that she’d give him the right size when more shirts came in. He wore the shirts once or twice until he realized that no one else wore them. They were not a uniform. They were just a pair of fairly ugly shirts, with some joke about gluten intolerance on the back that he wasn’t entirely sure wasn’t offensive. Either way, he never wore the shirts again, nor did he ever think about them.

That is, until he got his first pay-stub two weeks later. This was not his first job, so the deduction for taxes came as no surprise. Still, he idly scanned the stub, looking at all the places his money was going—federal taxes, Social Security, state taxes—the usual. But there was one more line, one he wasn’t expecting. “T-shirts: -$24.00.” It took him a moment to remember, and then he experienced the peculiar feeling of anger and shame occurring at once. Why hadn’t his boss told him about the charge? Would it have mattered? Could he have turned down the shirts? And if he ever did get the extra-larges, would he be charged for those?

As he contemplated this, he took stock of his situation. What had he lost? Twenty-four dollars off an already small paycheck. What had he gained? Two bad t-shirts that were already balled up in his bottom drawer and a new job. And then he moved on.

The first few weeks were hard on him. The food service industry has always been a constantly moving enterprise—people need to eat and food needs to be cooked, but many people don’t like to do it for themselves. He was expected to learn on the job, quickly. The more experienced prep-cooks showed him how to do something once, watched him do it to make sure he had it, then moved on. He needed to focus on what he was doing until his muscles memorized it, and he needed to watch the other cooks work on other projects at the same time. If he could learn from them without asking, then they wouldn’t need to waste time specifically showing him, and the kitchen gained some efficiency. He was a moving part in a large, difficult to control machine that was only useful when running at peak efficiency. He was a prep-cook, and he was making food for well over five hundred people a day. He sliced meat, he mixed toppings, he built salads so that customers could see all the ingredients at the top. At the end of the day, he collapsed into bed, his feet burning.

Slowly, day-by-day, he improved. He didn’t have to watch the other cooks work. He found shortcuts that no one had shown him. He learned how to slice ham as thin as paper, how to mix berry schmear perfectly. He learned how to peel a hard-boiled egg in two seconds while it was still hot, the vinyl of his gloves softly melting into the grooves of his fingertips. He worked and he worked and he worked, a part of him dripping into the food he made like sweat from his brow.

The more he worked, the more he began to think he wasn’t making enough. Those paychecks always seemed to be just a little too small, just a little too lean. At first, he thought nothing of it, hoping that with diligence and hard work, he’d eventually earn a raise. But then he was talking to one of the older prep cooks—one of those cooks who was so old his wrinkles looked like they were carved by knives, who looked like he salted his grievances so they’d store better—and he had a great many things to say.

I put lemons in with the eggs, makes them peel easier.

I once had a girl that looked just like that waitress, you know. It’d be good to stick my dick in something like that again.

You don’t need those oven mitts, just grab a towel and move quickly.

Don’t let that pretzel get dark like TJ over there. You’re aiming more for Diego.

Slice that melon down the sides, and don’t worry about leaving a little rind. We can take that off later.

Those bastards used to cut me short on my paychecks all the time. Still do, when they think I’m not looking.

And it was that last one that stuck out to him. It wormed its way into his mind and found a quaint little corner to snuggle up in, rearing its head every time he looked at his paycheck. Only then did it strike.

He devised a plan. He spent two weeks counting his hours, noting exactly when he clocked in and out. He added it up each day, noting with pride when he passed thirty, then fifty, then sixty hours. When the pay period came to an end, he had worked a total of eighty-two hours, and he felt proud. That’s a respectable amount of work, after all. He fed a lot of people working those hours. He should feel proud.

He waited the five days from the period ending to payday. He might have even forgotten about his scheme for a moment, caught up in fantasizing about what he could do with his especially big paycheck. He forgot that he ever doubted his employer.

But then he examined his next paystub—extremely carefully—and it was right there, out in the open. “Time worked: 79 hours.” The maximum amount that didn’t push him into overtime.

Like any sensible person, he went straight to the manager. Not his manager. The manager, the one who runs the whole shebang, reporting only to the owner. He pointed out the discrepancy, that he was sure he worked eighty-two hours. He did his best to not say, “wage theft,” but they both knew it was there. The manager was apologetic and extremely embarrassed and then let him in on a little secret.

“We’re too small a company,” she said. “We can’t afford to give everyone health insurance, and we always try to avoid overtime, because it might make problems for us. We’ll put the hours back on your next paycheck though, I promise.”

And she was so charming and so friendly that he forgot his outrage. He made the concession, and she thanked him for being so understanding. Sure enough, on his next paycheck, there were three more hours than there should have been.

It took him a while to see the problems. He remembered that thirty hours is considered full-time and therefore worthy of health insurance, not forty. And even though they gave him the hours back, he still missed out on time-and-a-half pay. He had been duped, plain and simple. But by then, it was too late. The manager had already dealt with it, the way she’d been dealing with the same problem for twenty years. So then he moved on.

Part of his complacency, he had to admit, was fear. He’d been on the job long enough to see some people get fired. That old coworker with salted grievances had finally gotten fired for saying something racist or sexist—nobody was actually sure which—a little too loudly. Another got fired for showing up late once, even though his manager had also been late that day. He learned that taking food is fine up until the sorority girl took the wrong apple and was fired on the spot. He heard about the co-manager being fired for refusing to cut a corner that could have broken a health code. Then the next week, the manager who fired the co-manager was fired and the co-manager rehired. In some sense, he knew that all these firings were “justified”—as in there was a stated reason that was legal. But he also knew that there were less savory reasons underneath, reasons that couldn’t be proven. The prep-cook who was fired for being late had been a good worker, smart, keenly aware of health codes, but he also had Asperger’s, and something about that had always rubbed the manager the wrong way. The sorority girl, a week before being fired, had refused to slice meat because the slicer was broken in a way that made it unsafe to use, something that everyone knew but had tried to ignore. And the manager had never seemed to mind the old racist and sexist cook’s many faults, until the old racist and sexist cook talked about his wages with the other cooks. But of course, none of these were the stated reasons.

Sometimes, he would wonder what happened to these people. He wondered if they ever found other jobs, if they managed to hold onto that one. He wondered if that one baker was able to get her daughter the toy she wanted, or if that dishwasher ever saved up enough to go to college. He wondered if it could happen to him. And then he moved on.

He can’t deny that the work did him some good, that it gave him experiences he’d never forget. His skin turned brown in the face of a roaring oven. He ate a pretzel that had been drenched just a second too long and cooked just a second too short, so that the leftover lye tingled on his tongue and his gums bled for a week. He collected knife scars up and down his hands. He made something truly delicious, and then he repeated it. The work, though hard and mindless and grueling, never crushed his soul.

Inevitably, one day, he got sick. It started as a cough—a plain old cough. But slowly it grew. Eventually, he had a full-blown fever, was coughing his lungs out, and was throwing up in between. There was no way in hell he was able to work. So, he called in and let his manager know. Even then, though, he was given another task.

“Find someone to cover you,” his manager said, “or bring a doctor’s note.”

The second task was particularly unfair. The company didn’t give him any kind of health insurance and his state insurance covered jack shit. His manager herself had complained to him about how she couldn’t go to a doctor to look at her jaw because it cost too much. Now, on top of having to miss work—for which he’d get no sick pay—he also had to get a doctor’s note? Instead, he called people.

The first person he called had class. The second was out of town. The third was working a second job, as was the fourth. And so on. There were only so many replacements he could call, and all of them were busy. So he called his manager back.

“I can’t come in,” he repeated, “and nobody else can cover me.”

“Get a doctor’s note,” his manager said.

He held his head in his hands. “I can’t afford a doctor,” he said. There was a moment of silence from the other side. “Look, I’m throwing up,” he continued, “I’m coughing, I have a fever. It’s the flu. You don’t want me anywhere near the food. I’d come in if I could. Trust me.”

“If you can’t get a doctor’s note,” his manager said, “then don’t bother coming in tomorrow either.”

“What?” he asked.

“You heard me. I have to let you go. You’re not reliable anymore.”

No amount of pleading could save him. He told his manager that this was bullshit. He told her he was just sick, that it happens to everyone. He promised to work just as hard as always in the future, that he’d get well as soon as he could. Nothing. He tried the restaurant manager too, with the same result. He begged. He pleaded. He bargained. No matter what, he could not get his job back. He tried to tell himself it wasn’t his fault, but believed himself less and less each time.

And then, just as everyone always does, he moved on.

William Aime is an American writer whose work premiered in November of 2016. He has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and was a finalist in the 2016 Fiction Vortex Contest. He lives in Bloomington, Indiana, with his partner, Rachel.

Photo credit: Paul Sableman via a Creative Commons license.

Cagey

By Koushik Banerjea

“What are you doing?”

He was surprised by the question, believing himself to have been alone. He had been admiring himself in a shard of mirror he had found earlier, discarded on the dirt road snaking around the park. Gauging his reflection, he tried to look haughty, then severe, by turns flaring his nostrils then dulling his eyes. Was it obvious he was a thief? He didn’t think so, not any more.

“You! I asked you a question. Are you deaf?”

He turned around hoping the disdain didn’t show. His questioner stood, feet apart, in the familiar khaki uniform of the police. The man was carrying a bhuri, a little Ganesh potbelly, sagging over his belt, and in that one detail could be spied so much of what would always divide them. As much as the uniform or the steel tipped lathi, it was the softness of that belly, its partiality to sweetmeats and greed, which marked out this man’s tribe.

“No, sir. I was just leaving, sir,” he said to the policeman, observing the expected protocol but knowing from the deep-set rituals of the cage that it meant nothing.

He watched as the policeman prodded a bundle of rags a little further along the path. The rags began to stir and a dishevelled face appeared, already terrorized long before the steel tip brushed its chin. He realized then his good fortune in even being afforded the courtesy of a question. Standing there with a shard of glass in one hand, he could just as easily have been deemed a threat by the policeman. The city was on edge, the bodies still fresh, and he was taking a risk each time he drifted away from the huddle. He knew he had to hurry back to his brothers, still prone on the same benches where they’d eventually found one another, to warn them of the danger. But when he did, he saw to his relief that they were already awake, sitting up for the policeman’s benefit like a couple of early morning bhadralok, discussing current affairs. The lathi briefly paused, satisfying itself that these were indeed gentlemen and not miscreants, before moving on to the next set of unfortunates.

And watching this, with the shard now safely wrapped in a fold of his vest, it made him think how no one ever asked the right questions. It had been just the same when he was in the cage.

•

Picking away at the scab, he felt a certain amount of regret. Space was limited here and he had taken to marking his tiny locale with whatever was at hand. More often than not this involved hair (his own), or a chipped fingernail, and on one occasion a tooth unhooked by day after day of the cage gruel. But today he had noticed a scab building up on his forearm, and the urge to scratch the itch had proven too great to resist. The skin had not yet flaked, so his action drew blood and pus. He didn’t mind too much, though, as it made for a richer signature on the floor. He knew the other inmates would be looking at him as he pinched the skin, then released the gunk; knew as well that there would be no complaints, the memory still fresh of those other days when it was their teeth or blood that had lined the floor.

He sensed that his blood had been in some way corrupted by the surroundings. Now even the mosquitoes tended to avoid him on their night-time sorties. The moan and slap of the other wretches meant they were still being plagued by malarial torments, yet his nights were oddly peaceful. He would hold the gruel down and continue to build himself up with press-ups on his knuckles. And he would watch, and wait. The wretches would occasionally come to blows with one another, but even when this happened they were careful not to allow their dispute to spill over into the micro-fiefdom he had marked out for himself. His vest started to fill out with this taut system rigour, vein and fibre and barely concealed violence in those arms; the knuckles long since cured of the taste of floor, safeguarded as they were by an extra layering of skin. And though he was young, one of the youngest in fact in the cage, there was now a strong beard shielding that face.

And then one day the news he had been so desperate to hear. News he had waited so long for that there were times when his resolve had nearly crumbled, when he had imagined that this was what his life would always be. Yet when it finally came it was delivered without ceremony. A perfunctory ‘You!’ and the unlocking of bolts. Space, which he now knew to be the most precious of companions, was apparently needed for another kind of inmate, and with a final reminder that he was a lucky badmaash ringing in his ears, the system spat the thief back out into the dust and the tumult.

•

No one was there to meet him, and after the initial disappointment, which was barely even that, he felt nothing. Shielding his eyes from the harsh glare of late morning, he squinted at the first building that lay beyond the dirt track and at the thick plume of smoke that was rising from it.

•

“Bhaiyya,” implored a man, skeletal arms thrust outwards, that simple action evidently so draining that no more words would come.

He paused to look at the man, noting the distant saucers of eyes set back in hollow sockets. Instinctively he reached up to soothe the bridge of his own nose with thumb and forefinger; felt surprised when the fingers traced thick hair in the space just below his cheekbones; strode on purposefully towards the plume without looking back.

•

As he crossed the waste ground, his eyes picked out more stricken figures, little more than shapes really, only the occasional spasm indicating any life at all. Mostly, they were just covered in rags, though one or two were still sitting, as though meditating, in the clothes they must have been wearing when their lives were touched by fire or tragedy or whatever it was that had left them like this.

He could hardly bring himself to look at these figures, so implacable did they appear in their sadness. It was even worse with the ones who called out to him, begging for food, or, perhaps, just comfort.

“Dada. Bhaiyya. Amar ke kichu ekta ditte parben?”

“Dada. Amar khidda.”

Or sometimes, just “Dada.” Dada, though he was barely old enough to be considered anyone’s Dada. He looked at their arms, little more than flesh starved twigs really, and felt something surging up within him. At this stage, there was still no sign of his own brothers, whose Dada he actually was by virtue of being the eldest. Even so, he found himself studying the blank faces on display for any traces of recognition. Perhaps his brothers no longer looked the same? He had heard how beards were grown or heads sometimes shaved. He knew people had done what they could, had often had no choice but to hide in plain sight. There had been whispers in the cage, the most recent arrivals breathing terrible tales of riot and flame, cleaver and bone. And he had absorbed it all, shapeshifting imperceptibly from a thief to a warrior.

People change, he thought, even in a short space of time. He had seen that for himself in the cage. Right in front of him, big, strong men reduced to urchins, the fight drawn out of their faces with one savage beating. The unexpectedness of it, perhaps the shame, but either way all that swagger absorbed by the blows, repainted as something smaller, delivered in silence. Yet these figures around him now were of complete strangers, and in that sense should have exerted no more pull on his imagination than the boundary markers of detritus in the cage. So when he looked again, this time more closely, and saw that they were in fact not meditating but sitting on recently bandaged stumps, he was as surprised as anyone that the thing surging through him, up through his gut and into his throat, then out of his head, felt more primal than anything he had experienced behind bars.

Author’s Note

“Cagey” is a dark little tale of trial and tribe, set in the turbulent period leading up to the Partition of India, in 1947. The timing feels apt this year, which marks the 70th anniversary of those traumatic events, but also the inauguration of deep disquiet at political upheavals on both sides of the Atlantic. Given that we appear to be stuck in the early stages of “post-truth,” the most honest thing I can say about myself and my writing is lifted from the great Chinua Achebe: “I wouldn’t have wanted anyone to teach me how to write. I prefer to stumble on it … not to be told.” I hope some tiny element of that is present in my words. And yes, every fightback begins in the tales we tell ourselves and one another.

Koushik Banerjea is a London-based writer. His work is featured in Verbal magazine and darkmatter: in the ruins of imperial culture.

The Daylight Underground

By Héctor Tobar

For the last time, we share a moment of sensual repose. My hand in yours. The sweat on our bare skin, a salty moistness in the desert air. My mestiza, Maritza Melanie. And me, your James, your lover for one hour more.

We weren’t supposed to happen. That chance meeting at the political sociology symposium, at the gloriously plain and functional Ramada Inn of Cabrillo, California. If I had turned to the right instead of the left after making my presentation (“The Voting Patterns of Latino Millennials in Suburbia: A Los Angeles Case Study”) we would have never been. I’ll remember that first lunch and the sudden exchange of intimate stories, the dramedy of our family lives: my absent mother, your oddball father. And that first kiss on your couch, and our lustful fingers and palms, and much later the long walks in search of flora and fauna on the trash-strewn hills above Los Angeles, you showing me the routes the Spanish explorers took, the gathering places of the cholos and the homeless.

Now our final decision as a couple. Do we part ways here, and say our goodbyes at this Tucson hotel? Or do you risk coming with me to the collection point a few blocks away? The risk being that some knucklehead federal officer will see us and smirk at us, and steal that one last thing that belongs only to us. Our farewell caress, the last physical expression of our love. That bond with you that has become as much a part of my being as my citizenship once was. Now the object of his uniformed amusement, his official disdain.

I try not to think the worst of people. A basic politeness is all I ask. But all the kindness is draining from the world. We are too frayed, too harried, too angry, too rushed.

“You need to go,” Maritza says.

“Come with me.”

“I can’t. We discussed this.”

“Just walk alongside me.”

“If they see me with you. … They have cameras.”

“We’ll keep a distance.”

My own theory about the Powers That Be is that they’re less precise and all-seeing than we give them credit for. A million deportations requires blunt bureaucratic instruments, the systematic feeding of names into databases. Persistence, not precision. An army of thick-skulled federal agents and underpaid police officers. Not drones or surveillance. Maritza and her merry band of Pinot-swilling pranksters could start making bombs and those buffoons wouldn’t notice. Not that she and her friends are actually planning such a thing. Assorted acts of defiance is all. Spray-painted slogans scribbled on walls at midnight. Messages of resistance delivered artistically, à la Banksy. Surprise shit-pie attacks on the faces of assorted fascist tastemakers, pundits, and politicos: probably a felony, or soon will be. Fecal assault. I worry for Maritza when I hear her talk about these secret actions. And I worry for her now, as I pick up my suitcase and stand next to her.

Before I open the door I present myself to her. My about-to-be-exiled countenance. My belongings: the one bag allowed per regulations, in compliance with the size requirements. Here I am, Maritza. Reach for me, touch me. She reads my thoughts and holds my paler face with her darker hands and kisses me slowly, and our tongues and lips intermingle, and our entire 18-month love affair, beginning to end, is alive in that moment, until salty tears are dripping into our mouths and we step back and wipe off our faces on our sleeves and I open the door.

“I’ll walk ahead of you. Follow me,” she says. “Just a bit behind. And when you get there we can look at each other, at least.”

“I don’t think I’ll be able to bear that. Seeing you and not touching you.”

“We need to be strong. We need to remember everything we can about this day. The injustice of it. It will make us stronger.”

“OK.” And now I kiss her on the cheek. “Goodbye lover.”

“No, not goodbye.”

She steps ahead of me in her vermillion corduroys, and I follow the movement of her hips and thighs, and I feel a twinge of desire, and then a heaviness in my chest, and finally I remember a spinning slot-machine of Maritza moments. Her coffee-table and lecture-hall brilliance, the intelligent eyes I can’t see. What will she become without me? This is all going to get serious. For her, here, in this crumbling country. Suffering from a chronic case of “convulsiveness,” the word Walt Whitman used to describe the U.S.A. before the Civil War. Arguments over slavery that finally ended with fields and fields of dead. “At some point, you’re going to need some hard people to help you,” I told Maritza just last week. “It may come to that.” When history gets truly fucked up, idealists make common cause with street brawlers. In the French Revolution, Danton and his buddies channeled the anger of the unpredictable and violent mobs of Paris. Nelson Mandela was a heavyweight boxer and he started the Spear of the Nation with a few hard-as-nails dudes offering essential assistance. Not that I have any experience in this myself. I’ve just read about it in books.

One million deportations requires blunt bureaucracy. Persistence, not precision.

There are more people on the street walking alongside us now, and none of them look hard. Like me, they’ve acquiesced. We accept a short bus ride into Mexico today, instead of a year in jail making hopeless appeals followed by this same trip to Mexico. It’s easier, just get it over with. My people are like that. We’re all late to our appointment, too. The bus delayed us, the flight delayed us, who gives a fuck? The government is happy to have our unpunctual but deportable bodies. Walking alone, walking in pairs. Carrying suitcases and backpacks. In mine: the embroidered vest I wore when I proposed to Maritza and books. Curiously enough, mostly Latin American authors in English translation. Bolaño, Cortázar, Lispector. And my New Oxford American Dictionary, Fourth Edition. “You’re taking a dictionary with you? Shouldn’t it be a Spanish dictionary at least?” In our hotel room, between our lovemaking sessions, I opened up my Oxford and looked longingly at my favorite words, like a man studying his children’s faces for the last time before they head out to college. Prolix. Praxis. And my Dictionary of American Idioms, “impossible to find in Mexico,” I tell her, with gems like “whitewash” and “the whole kit and caboodle.”

“You’re such a nerd, James,” Maritza said with a laugh from the bed, pulling a sheet up over her. “A word nerd.”

We reach the address listed on my summons. It’s a fenced-off asphalt lot, with a few Tucson police patrols hovering on the perimeter, and a fleet of Customs and Border Protection vans parked nearby, and CBP agents standing by some tables at the entrance to the lot. Maritza, still walking in front of me, makes a slow turn and gives me a sidelong glance with her eyes cast downward. I almost brush against her back as I walk past.

I stand in line and take in the sorrowful tableau. Families gathering to say farewell, lined up on the sidewalk across the street, a few holding medals of Catholic saints. They mourn as if we were dying, and maybe a part of us is. I think I recognize this one guy ahead of me in line. Smart eyes, wrestler’s biceps, tall. Yeah, he’s the manager at my Jiffy Lube. Suddenly everyone around me looks familiar. The dude with the wispy mustache, can’t be older than 30—I’ve seen him skateboarding on Figueroa. All of us here are from the 90042 ZIP code. The undesirable All-Stars of Northeast Los Angeles, bad hombres and sassy señoritas together one last time as we bid our country adieu. The young woman behind me and the erudite message on her T-shirt: “History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.” Smart aleck, Occidental College undergrad probably; she makes the rest of us into a piece of performance art illustrating her message. “Marx?” I ask her. “No, Joyce,” she says. Ah, an English major, that’s why I didn’t recognize her. They’re not deporting housekeepers any more, just the troublesome overeducated “anchor babies” like me and this Oxy chick. Actually, no. That lady further back. I remember seeing her walk up the hillsides to the fancier houses, very mexicana, pobrecita, going home now. Don’t take it so hard, señora, you’re not alone. See?

I decide to take a deep, contemplative breath, and consider this undoubtedly bleak historical moment. My professional observation as a political scientist? The obvious: We’re a wounded community. The soon-to-be deported ripped from the people we’re leaving behind. An old tree with deep and twisted branches, now being sawed through, from top to bottom. The severed bonds of mothers, uncles, sisters, cousins, lovers, and soulmates. I feel our shared nobility, the mixed Mesoamerican-Iberian-Afro-Saxon complexity of us, our twisted bilingual tongues and our triple-tangled DNA, our romantic Latino subconscious and our North American Anglo hang-ups. In our daydreams, we worry. Yes, the Mexican food will we better (by definition); but will we find a decent Starbucks over there, on the other side?

Another professional observation: In the valleys beyond Tucson, the flow still runs northward. Our people are coming here, still somehow smuggling their Spanish-speaking selves over walls, through moats and past motion detectors. Risking their lives for jobs grilling burgers and scrubbing bathrooms. Someone has to do it. They will be living harder lives on this side of the border, undocumented laborers laboring in plain sight, deeper in the daylight underground.

“You’ll be back, Matt,” I hear a lady yell across the street. “You’ll be back.”

“I love you Grandma!” Matt yells back.

I reach the front of the line, and the agent inspects my papers.

“Birthplace,” he asks me.

“Pasadena, California. U.S.A.”

The agent is a big white man who looks embarrassed and/or put out beneath his layers of wool and Kevlar. Maybe he’s nostalgic for the Fourteenth Amendment, too. “Your passport?”

“I gave it to the judge.” He nods and inspects my California Driver’s License, my summons, and gives them both back to me as he punches a few buttons into a mobile device. He waves me forward, through an opening in the fence, into a holding pen. They’ve found an appropriately barren and ugly location in this otherwise pleasant desert city in which to rustle us together. A last vacant, weed-filled lot at the end of our American road.

“This is so fucked up,” the Jiffy Lube manager says to me. He lights a cigarette and offers me one. No thanks. Several other people have started to puff away, and their tobacco smoke forms a series of exclamation points over their nicotine-soothed heads until a soft breeze comes through and the smoke serpentines into question marks. I look through the fence, across the street, and I find Maritza’s face. Wearing shades, of course. My spy, undercover in her Ray-Bans. Or is it so I can’t see her tears?

“This is a nonsmoking area!” one of the agents says. Federal regulations, you know.

“What are you gonna do, deport us?” the Jiffy Lube guy says, and everyone keeps smoking.

I look over at the line and my eye is drawn to a tall woman near the front. Black, straight hair falling over her face. She looks up to wipe her tears. Oh shit! No fucking way! It’s Katarina Consuelo Ramirez. Los Angeles City College adjunct, and my fiery, passionate, and deeply disturbed ex. Known as Kat-Con to her many fans and detractors in the small and incestuous circle of untenured Latino political scientists. Kat-Con, my intimidatingly beautiful partner for two years and Maritza’s nemesis since grad school at Berkeley. Kat-Con with her high cheekbones, the tiny exotic bump in her nose, has many eyes falling upon her. She’s not carrying a single piece of luggage. Not even a purse, as if she were here to model Southwestern eco-fashions. I am Kat-Con, a martyred second-generation Honduran immigrant deportee of Los Angeles: Yes, you may take a picture of me, of the glorious, tragic beauty of my stripped citizenship, with this carefully chosen cashmere scarf against the winter desert chill. She looks up from the agent’s desk and walks into the holding pen and she spots me, and hugs me, and she buries her head in my chest.

“Oh, James. Look at us.”

No, look at Maritza, says the voice in my head. So I do. My fiancée has lifted up her shades in shock. From across the street and through the fence she’s mad-dogging me. I see her mouthing words. I’m not a great lip reader, but I’m pretty sure it’s: “How could you?” followed by “You son of a bitch.” As if I’d arranged my deportation so that I could have a tryst with my ex. With Kat-Con still embracing me, I raise my arms and shrug my shoulders as if to say, How could I know?

I see Maritza turning away, leaving the crowd of onlookers, headed back to her car at the hotel parking lot, no doubt. And now the thought hovers over me. That my Maritza will write me off, forget me, assuming me happily reborn into a Mexicanness I’ve never truly known, content and coital on the other side of the border in the arms of Kat-Con. No. This can’t be. I feel the absurdity and an emptiness all at once. In the name of Thomas Jefferson, Clarence Darrow, and Oscar Zeta Acosta, no! This is one crazy and unfair thing too many. So I break free from Kat-Con’s tearful embrace and push through the crowd to the opening in the fence and the desk, and back out into free Tucson, with the CBP agent behind me yelling, “Hey where the fuck are you going?” And for the three seconds it takes me to cross the street everyone around me—my fellow deportees, Kat-Con, the families on the sidewalk, the Tucson police, and the Customs and Border Protection agents—are all frozen in place, and only I am moving toward the departing Maritza, whose back is still facing me.

“Maritza!” I yell, and she turns, looking at me in confusion, and before she can say anything I’ve got my arms around her, and I’m saying “I love you I love you I love you,” and she whispers “I know you do,” and of course we kiss. An illicit, public meeting of our lovers’ lips, with 100 people and unseen cameras watching. The street and sidewalk around us erupt with appreciative sighs and laughter. I hear ranchera whoops, and catcalls, and a “who-who-whoey!” and an “órale!” It’s as if we were back home in a bar on York Boulevard—before the bars got gentrified. But now the desk agent is walking toward us, and he’s got a baton in his hands. I am about to raise my arms in surrender, when I see Kat-Con running behind him. In that instant I remember that she was once a taekwondo instructor in Oakland, and I watch as she grabs the agent by the shoulders from behind and uses her hands, arms, and legs to expertly separate his feet from gravity. He falls heavily and beefily to the asphalt.

Now that’s a tough woman. But is this “political” Kat-Con, in full militant mujer mode, in a final act of defiance against the machinery of hate? Or is this a Kat-Con who once carried a torch for me? Or is it just the impulsive, crazy Kat-Con who got fired from Cal State Dominguez Hills after she screamed at the dean? Or maybe it’s all those Kat-Cons at the same time. As two CBP agents rush toward Kat-Con and their fallen colleague, a few of the deportees in the pen start climbing the flimsy fence holding them in, and the fence falls, and several of them run across it to kiss and hug their lovers and their mothers. Kat-Con breaks free of the confused and distracted agents. She begins running down the street with long strides, and she turns to flip the bird to the agents and their smashed holding pen. Then she is gone around the corner, free.

“It’s a riot,” Maritza says. A riot of kisses, hugging, wrestling, prayers, sirens, and shouts.

I take Maritza by the hand and we start to run, spontaneously, without thinking about it, as if running were a behavior written deep in the code of our being.

“We’re fucked,” Maritza says a block into our sprint.

“But we’re free,” I answer.

We run one or two blocks more. And then we walk. Normally, as if nothing were amiss, as if one or both of us wasn’t a felon. Back into the daylight underground, where we will remain. Waiting for the data miners and the drones to catch up with us. Maybe this afternoon, maybe tomorrow. Maybe never. We turn a corner, taking a zigzagging route toward Maritza’s car even though no one is following us. We reach a big, open lot of sandy ground with a single huge cactus in the center. “Whoa,” Maritza says. “Look at this.” We admire the plant and the weird, prickly, tangled snakes of its many arms. We stand there, in the crisp sunshine of Arizona winter, and take a moment to hold hands in its holy presence. Maritza says it’s probably 100 years old, and as we continue our journey I think about all the decades it’s survived, all the droughts and the floods, growing gnarly limbs, pushing roots into the desert soil.

Héctor Tobar’s most recent books are Deep Down Dark: The Untold Stories of 33 Men Buried in a Chilean Mine and the Miracle That Set Them Free, which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, and The Barbarian Nurseries, which won the California Book Award Gold Medal for Fiction.

This short story was originally published by Slate in The Trump Story Project, which asked authors to imagine the future of the United States under Donald Trump’s presidency.

Photo credit: Daniel Oldfield via a Creative Commons license.

On the Front Lines

Fiction by Kit-Bacon Gressitt

You look in the bedroom mirror, small enough to deny self-adoration, and pull your brownish hair into a ponytail. Tight, like Mother used to do it. You turn to the bed. Your clothes are laid out on sheets held in place by perfect hospital corners. You dress in practical layers, to accommodate the variable temperatures of the daylong vigil you perform every Thursday. First, your underthings, then flesh-tone tights and a plain white t-shirt. Next, the pleated blouse Mother used to wear, when you held the vigils together, and ski pants, a modest one size too large. Finally, a nice worsted wool skirt you found at Goodwill for a dollar. It’s a bit matronly, but you top it off with your 12-week ultrasound hoodie.

You strap on your choose-life fanny pack, loaded with crisis pregnancy tracts and embryo dolls; take the bigger-than-life-size fetus parts poster in one hand and your calico-covered Bible in the other; and you march to the local abortion mill. Battle ready. Here profit motive thrives under Satan’s leering eyes and abortions are marketed to the vulnerable—to provide lucrative embryos for ungodly research. You believe this with all your heart because that’s what the tracts tell you.

You bungee-cord the poster to a tree and take your position between the clinic entrance and the parking lot. You’re armed with the assurance that you’re doing God’s righteous work, as Mother taught you, witnessing for life, sidewalk counseling would-be abortion victims, guiding them away from mortal sin, toward salvation. You adjust the bunched-up layers around your waist while you await the poor misguided mothers, bearing their precious preborns to slaughter. You know they will come, as they do every week, in numbers that torment your heart with the horrid image of God’s beloved innocents torn asunder by evil and torturous tools in the hands of Death’s doctors. But you are stalwart, determined to rescue a life from the great abyss of immoral destruction.

The clinic opens, the women and girls—not so much younger than you—begin to arrive, and you gird your supplies—they are comforting. Mother was so much better at this.

You take a breath. “Excuse me,” you say as you step before the nearest sinner heading for the door. The young woman looks sad. She wears immodest jeans from which she’ll soon burst forth in the full flower of maternal fertility—if you can lead her to Jesus.

“How many weeks are you?” you say.

“Huh?” the girl says, wires dangling from her ears to a front pocket.

“How many weeks pregnant are you?” You give her your kindest, most eager smile.

“Hmm?” The girl frowns, pulls a phone from her pocket and, without looking up, says, “What?”

“Do not renounce God’s miracle growing within you,” you say. “Already it feels. Already it knows life. Already it loves you.”

She stares at you, says nothing. She needs you.

“I know you’re scared and confused, but don’t succumb to the fear of your situation, to the temptation of an easy solution. In truth, it is not easy. There are better ways. God has sent you his love and support—through me. Choose life for your preborn child.”

The girl pulls the wires from her ears. “What did you say?”

“Choose life,” you repeat. You put down your Bible and pull a tiny plastic embryo from your fanny pack. “Look, this one, this one here is probably the size of yours. Choose life for the blameless gift God has given you, and you will receive his endless blessings. Choose life for your baby and heavenly eternity for yourself.”

“You don’t know what you’re talking about,” the girl says and steps around you.

“Please wait!” Mother taught you how to deal with denial. You must use extreme counseling technique. You grab the girl’s hand and drop to your knees. “You needn’t be afraid. Turn your heart away from the evil of abortion. God’s innocent fruit grows in the garden of your womb. Don’t let them suck it out to rot in the bowels of evil!”

“Gross.” The girl pulls away from you.

You hold on tighter. “Don’t do this,” you say. “We’ll help you through your pregnancy and then—”

“Yeah?” the girl says, “and then what?”

“Then the lord will provide.”

“Yeah, right.” The girl snickers and pulls harder. “Let go of me.”

“No, please.” You try not to, but you cry. “Listen to me.” The girl hesitates. Your nose drips. You look up at her and think of Mother. “Before God formed the sinless one in your womb, he knew her. His hands shaped and made her. Would you now turn from the wonder of his love?” You wipe your nose on the sleeve of the ultrasound hoodie and wrap yourself around the girl’s calves.

“You’re nuts.” The girl struggles against your embrace. “Let go—let go!”

“I can’t. Jesus wants me to save you. Please don’t murder your baby! Give your preborn the gift of life!”

The girl yanks one leg free, puts her foot against your chest and pushes you backward. “Cool your shit,” she says. “I’ve got a killer UTI—stay the fuck out of my way.”

You gather yourself and get up from the sidewalk, brushing dirt and leaves from the nice Goodwill skirt, tidying your ponytail, and you wonder if the clinic switched the weekday it murders unborns. Nausea quivers through your belly at the thought of having to change your routine. The routine you and Mother performed together every week. Mother, who didn’t abort you.

“Have a blessed day,” you call after the girl.

She’s already inside.

January 22 is the anniversary of the Roe v Wade Supreme Court decision guaranteeing women the freedom to make their own private reproductive decisions. It’s also Kit-Bacon Gressitt’s birthday, which has long seemed significant to her. Spawned by a Baptist creationist and a liberal social worker, K-B inherited the requisite sense of humor to survive family dinner-table debates and the imagination to avoid them. As a result, she’s a feminist writer, she supports unrestricted access to affordable abortion and other reproductive health services, and she’s an LGBTQ rights advocate. She also birthed a child of color, who’s taught her a lot about white privilege and intersectionality. An erstwhile political columnist with an MFA in Creative Writing, K-B is now an occasional Women’s Studies lecturer. Visit her website, Excuse me, I’m writing.

Because it’s unlikely the nation will see anything from the new administration akin to President Obama’s 2016 commemoration of the Roe v Wade decision, it is reprinted here:

The White House
January 22, 2016

Statement by the President on the 43rd Anniversary of Roe v. Wade

Today, we mark the 43rd anniversary of the Supreme Court ruling in Roe v. Wade, which affirmed a woman’s freedom to make her own choices about her body and her health. The decision supports the broader principle that the government should not intrude on private decisions made between a woman and her doctor. As we commemorate this day, we also redouble our commitment to protecting these constitutional rights, including protecting a woman’s access to safe, affordable health care and her right to reproductive freedom from efforts to undermine or overturn them. In America, every single one of us deserves the rights, freedoms, and opportunities to fulfill our dreams.

Reading recommendation: The Cider House Rules by John Irving.

Embryo doll photo credit: Anthony Easton via a Creative Commons License.