Fiction
He stands before the class, the lectern his wheelhouse, the teen- or twenty-
something-aged students his sea, the sky in the back windows his horizon. The worn paperback before him lays open to a page. If he were to brush it to
the floor, the spine would strike first and the leaves would fall three-quarters right, a quarter left. The book would lay open on page 63, just as it does on the podium.
I saw the man before he died, under the front tire of my father’s truck. He was pinned and the truck stalled and then settled in the mud and three grown men were not enough to push the truck forward or backward to stop the man’s pain. I was not a grown man. I was a girl, fourteen, puny, under a hundred pounds, not useful to their efforts, so I crouched by the man under the tire and tried to distract him from his fate.
One day in those first months after her mother’s death, Cenem resolved to finally see Los Angeles. She’d spent the afternoon at one of the cheap matinees, seeing Casablanca yet again, and after, went directly to the used bookstore off Taksim Square in search of a copy of Baedecker’s California.
I don’t mind the night shift. I’m still new here, granted, so it doesn’t really matter whether or not I mind it.
They have carried his bed downstairs to the study where he can see the garden as he dies, with you, his collection of small gods, around him.
Mikhail Timofeyevich Kalashnikov wakes in gray light to the sounds of the injured soldiers in the cots beside him moaning, crying out.
Danny used to open the door and let me into his apartment downstairs at seven a.m. every Saturday. My mother would already be up, stooped over the kitchen table in our upstairs apartment, wearing her pale-blue nightdress, spreading tangy lebanah on a plate for my father before he left to open his grocery store.
Ammu has never known anyone who died. Not a grandparent or a rickety neighbor or anyone struck by what Ammu’s tightlipped mother, Nina, referred to (after six months of her own successful chemotherapy) as the C word. Ammu’s mother swatted away death as if it were a mosquito and marched forward into a robust if unchartered future.
Occasional lapses in taste or discretion within this narrative are entirely intentional. So, if it seems inappropriate to interrupt a tragic drowning with observations about the nesting habits of local birds, then consider this…