Tag: xenophobia

And They Lived Happily Ever After

By Myna Chang

 

Myna Chang writes flash fiction and short stories. Recent work has been featured in Flash Flood Journal, Atlas & Alice, Reflex Fiction, Writers Resist, and Daily Science Fiction. Anthologies featuring her stories include the Grace & Gravity collection Furious Gravity IX; and the forthcoming This is What America Looks Like anthology by Washington Writers’ Publishing House. Myna lives in Maryland with her husband and teenage son. The family has no patience for racist bullshit. Read more at MynaChang.com or on Twitter at @MynaChang.

Image from the Muppet Wiki.

 

Refugees Displaced in Foil

By Uzomah Ugwu

The guards did not even give us numbers
or sound the vowels in our broken names
that were whole before we arrived
at this destination
that keeps us moving in grief.

She asked what I wanted to eat
like we weren’t going to die here
at any minute, any hour,
borrowed moments we could,
would, not be given back.

She asked with a burnt punctuation
I was forced to feed on for a while ’til
I forged an answer off my dry and unused throat.
Words I cannot remember at all
95 degrees, it did not matter

She grabbed my hand and placed it on my belly,
like she was giving me direction to another life,
and smiled. I wanted to beg her
to take her happiness away
for this was not the place,
here where we laid wrapped in aluminum,
where they baked off our rights as they chose.

We did not give up our freedoms
to feel this consumed.

Her eyes yielded to the floor
for we all were crossing over the border
in hopes of so much more.

Such a high risk for a life
we thought was a myth.
Was it worth it to be sitting here,
like a chicken on a stick
they do not even turn over—do or won’t?

Before I could listen to my grief any longer
she stopped me, looked at me
leaving thorns in my eyes as she said,

“You are always going to be them.”
If you don’t think you have worth in this life,
if you don’t, they will eat you alive.
She took my hand and gave me an orange and smiled,
gazing at the foil that covered us,
smothered refugees

 

Uzomah Ugwu is a poet-writer and activist.

Photo credit: Mitchell Hainfield via a Creative Commons license.

The Right Hat

By Luke Walters

 

The little girl’s teal hat is what caught my eye. She and a woman were hugging the bottom of a gravel drainage ditch, hidden from sight—except to me, perched high in my rig.

I’d just passed dozens more like them sitting cross-legged along the highway next to green-striped border patrol trucks. Their hike across the desert from the Mexican border at an end.

Having headed the back way to Phoenix to avoid the zoomers and the Department of Public Safety, I’d left Tucson early to pick up a trailer of fresh chilis at a farm west of Casa Grande. With the sun rising behind me and miles of highway in front of me, I’d been sleep-driving 75-mph down I-8, a four-lane, flat-straight black-ribbon of asphalt cut through the rough Sonoran Desert. After skating on and off the white edge line for maybe twenty miles, I decided I wanted to live for another day, turned off, and wrestled my 18-wheeler into the parking lot of the rest stop—nothing more than paved-over desert with a half-dozen picnic tables. That’s when I spotted them.

Now, parked lengthwise in the empty lot, I scooted on over to the passenger’s side, pushed past my stack of crossword puzzle books, opened the door, and let my legs dangle out. A can of Monster in one hand and an unfiltered Camel in the other, I relaxed, taking in the monotone landscape. My old favorites, Waylon and Dolly, brought back too many memories and the regrets that came with them, so I listened now to Mozart.

The woman and the girl raised their heads to stare at me. I paid them no mind. After a quick jolt of caffeine and a hit of nicotine, I planned to be back on the road. The pair of fence jumpers weren’t any of my concern.

At least that’s what I thought, until the green-striped SUV of the border patrol passed through the lot.

After scanning the desert behind the picnic tables, the driver, a woman in an olive green uniform, stopped next to me and opened her window. She had the same burnt-brown skin and coal-black hair as the pair in the drainage ditch.

“Howdy, officer,” I said, shutting off the music. “Beautiful morning for catching beaners,  ain’t it?”

Not answering, she gave me her cop smile while studying me. Too much Burger King and too many bottles of Bud showed on my face and my ass. Pretty, I wasn’t.

“Sir, is there anything you’d like to tell me?”

I blew out a smoke ring. “Yeah, there is.”

She watched me, tapping her steering wheel, as I crushed out my butt on the heel of my boot.

I raised my eyes to her.

The woman pulled the little girl close.

“Well, what is it?” the officer asked.

Taking off my Make America Great Again ball cap, I held it out, turning it for her to see. “Just got this. Looks nice, don’t it? Some big-smiling guy who wanted me to vote was passing them out at the garage. I liked my old John Deere better, but it was grungy—all sweat stained and greasy.”

Squaring my new red cap on my head, I said, “Not sure what it is, but somehow, there’s something about this one that just doesn’t feel right.”

The agent waited for me to say more. When I said nothing, she asked, “Is that all?”

“Yeah, that’s all.”

“Okay, sir,” she said, rolling her eyes like she’d been talking to someone simple, and she zipped out onto the highway.

I glanced toward the ditch. The little girl and woman smiled at me. Those were the first genuine smiles I’d gotten in ages. They lasted with me all the way to Phoenix, where I dropped them off.

 

Ed Radwanski, aka Luke Walters, resides in Arizona. His flash fiction has appeared in Yellow Mama, Mash Stories, Post Card Shorts, and in Envision – Future Fiction, an anthology by Kathy Steinemann, published on Amazon.

Photo by Ryan Riggins on Unsplash.

 

Oh, brother, where art thou?

By Kathleen Hellen

“You never really get the smell of burning flesh out of your nose entirely.”
– J.D. Salinger

I’d thought that you’d do better than a sidekick, thought that you’d articulate—knowing,
as you must, about the stink they left behind, the helicopters lifting from the ruins in Saigon.

Of course, I smelled it as a kid—a whiff—when boys who lived in trailers—their fathers pulling double-shifts, drunk on sulfur stink, spoiling for a fight, raising fists—shouted Jap—go back!
picked me up and threw me down a hill. They spit on my mother.

I smelled it when the mills laid off. Again, the odor. They murdered Vincent Chin.
Again the hint—like chlorine burning in the failed reactor:
ching chong ling long ting tong. It smelled like girls I knew in college.
A strange perfume, as if they’d lit the storefronts, piled up bodies (murders, exonerations).

And then I saw you in the clip, aiding and abetting. You turned your back on witness, like Frankl said. Only those most brutal, those who’d lost all scruples, were self-selected in the camps.
The well-fed, red-cheeked guards who ushered others to the crematoria.

I suppose that in this game of self-selection there are always those
marched off to smokestacks, and those who choose instead to pinch their noses.

 

Kathleen Hellen is the author of The Only Country was the Color of My Skin, Umberto’s Night, winner of the Washington Writers’ Publishing House prize, and two chapbooks, The Girl Who Loved Mothra and Pentimento. Featured on Poetry Daily and Verse Daily, her work has won the Thomas Merton poetry prize and prizes from the H.O.W. Journal and Washington Square Review. Her poems have appeared in American Letters and Commentary, Barrow Street, Cimarron Review, Colorado Review, Diode Poetry Journal, jubilat, The Massachusetts Review, New American Writing, New Letters, North American Review, Poetry East, and West Branch, among others. For more on Kathleen, visit kathleenhellen.com.

Photo by Mike Marrah on Unsplash.