Breadcrumb #138
KASIA MERRILL
We are not in love.
We are standing, two feet apart, and I keep saying the same thing over and over.
I am in love with you.
She keeps shaking her head, her hot pink hair swaying with each turn. No, you aren't, she is whispering. We are both crying and neither of us love the other and I wonder what exactly it is that we are mourning.
We have been in fake love for 2 years. Our fake love was at least not real hatred. Our fake love was comfortable. Our fake love was more than I expected from a relationship.
We are standing in the hall of our apartment building. Her torn backpack is on her shoulders, her black hoodie is hanging out from the unzipped opening. She has not zipped it, she never zips it, and this bothers me again as we stand here, and I deeply wish to fix it, but I wonder Who am I to fix someone I am not in love with?
I don't say this. Instead, I say Maybe we can fix this and she is shaking her head again.
I imagine the two of us together. I imagine us kissing, laughing, holding hands. We have said I love you one thousand times and not meant it once. We have picked furniture and watched one another sit on it like props. We have existed in one another's space and imagined what love might feel like.
This is not what I expected, I say.
She looks down at the ground. She has a gold nose piercing in the shape of a ribbon and she is wearing too much eyeliner. Her nails are expertly painted silver, but her jeans are ragged and ripped. I suddenly remember that when she is happy, she has a sleepy half-smile. I remember liking this about her when I first met her. I had witnessed that smile and I immediately imagined what it would be like to wake up beside her, to see that smile against the blue of my pillowcase. I imagined us listening to Sufjan Stevens and smoking weed. This was how I had fallen in love with her, this fake memory I had constructed.
“I suddenly remember that when she is happy, she has a sleepy half-smile. I remember liking this about her when I first met her. I had witnessed that smile and I immediately imagined what it would be like to wake up beside her, to see that smile against the blue of my pillowcase.”
I later realized she loathed Sufjan Stevens and got paranoid when she smoked weed. She didn't like drugs. I did not fall in love with this version of her. I didn't fall out of love with my fantasy, either, and perhaps this was what went wrong. Perhaps my heart was already taken when I met her by somebody she never was.
In the apartment hallway, people are passing, neighbors we never spoke to. I clear my throat.
I want to love you, I say to her. I really do.
She exhales loudly, runs a hand over her forehead. Her hair sticks up and I remember placing it back when we were first dating, before she told me that she hated when I did that. She looks at me, but it is hard to take her seriously with her hair propped up from her head.
The problem is you want everything, she says. And none of it works.
I am unsure what she means by this. Before I can ask, she says she has to go and walks past me, her shoulder brushing against mine. I stare after her and watch her steal the life I had created, the life we were meant to live. I watch her steal our cute date at Ikea, our MDMA roll at Electric Zoo festival. I watch her steal our Pitbull mix, our shared closet. I watch her rob me of the girl I had fallen in love with and never had.
We are not in love.
Breadcrumb #137
CAROLINE REDDY
Parisa stood by Navid’s old bedroom, holding tight to the hyacinth flower, and wondering if her brother’s soul had found a home yet. She had changed into her yellow polka dot dress along with the white stockings even though they made her knees all itchy. On her feet she wore her new shoes--with insoles that were decorated in lemony polka dots.
Parisa had been standing there a while daring herself to take a peek into her dead brother’s room that had been left undisturbed since the car accident.
It had been a quick death.
Navid hadn’t felt any pain-and her family had told her all the things that adults say when they are not sure how to speak to children. Mina, her mother, cried for weeks as she straightened up the house. Sami, her father who was an accountant, had lost himself in his work and treated Parisa like she was the one who had died.
When Parisa asked her parents about her little brother they always said the same thing: Navid was in a better place.
None of that explained what had happened to Navid and why his bedroom was tended to every few days- as if he would run upstairs with a slice of pizza to play his video games or read one of his comics.
Her mother had been in Navid’s room that morning straightening things up. When Mina caught her daughter’s confused eyes she cleared her throat and said:
“Spring cleaning is part of Nowruz...it’s our tradition. Parisa-borro bache get the flowers I bought and bring them downstairs. Stay out of your brother’s room.”
Then her mother went to work on placing the items that represented the coming of spring on the haft seen: coins, goldfish, sabzi, mirror, colored eggs and the poetry of Hafiz instead of the Qu'ran since her family didn’t practice Islam or any other religion.
Nor did anyone ever enter Navid’s room-except for her mother. Parisa was caught once but her aunt Haleh pulled on her arm:
Boro-boro bache...boro ye jaye digge...hichi ke inja nist barre shoma. Go child...go somewhere else….there is nothing here for you…
Parisa had gotten angry and remembered how everyone always fussed over Navid even though he was such a little brat: always tugging at her hair and stealing her peanut butter cups: her favorite Halloween candy. Still, Parisa missed her brother’s scent: a mixture of peppermint sticks, cinnamon and maple. It was a sweet scent and thinking about it almost made her cry.
“Parisa missed her brother’s scent: a mixture of peppermint sticks, cinnamon and maple. It was a sweet scent and thinking about it almost made her cry.”
“If his body is buried and his room is still the same-what happened to his rooh-his soul?” Parisa asked her uncle because she thought that maybe Navid could appear for the Pars festival. It was a silly thought by a silly little girl-but it wasn’t impossible. No one could see her lemony polka dot insoles that matched her dress for it was hidden. It was sort of like Navid. She thought she had seen her brother on Shabe Yalda-the winter solstice when they had stuck out their tongues at each other like it had been any old day.
“If he came to see me during the Winter Solstice why wouldn’t he come for the spring?”
Her uncle sighed heavily and turned the page of his newspaper. His forehead was crinkled and he lifted his eyes slightly.
“Ey babba...veleshkon. Leave your brother’s soul alone. Navid is happy. That’s all that matters,” Uncle Behrooz said.
Her uncle had been immersed in the news about the recent lifting of sanctions in Iran. Since the summer it had been the one thing that had been on his mind more than anything else...because it meant that things might get better for his kin back home.
She heard him speaking on the phone with Mr. Saman, his friend, and advisor, who had been helping Behrooz with his dissertation. Her uncle had been working on a long project but had taken some time off to help the family.
Parisa poked his shoulders.
“Hmmmm?” Her uncle said.
“I think I saw him...on Shabe Yalda…dooroog nimigam ke!”
“Parisa, joonam...maybe you saw him in a dream. Your baradar is gone...but we still have you...”
Uncle Behrooz smiled thinly and cleared his throat. His mustache seemed to wiggle. She knew that it meant that the conversation was over. Parisa found herself sitting in her room and resting her chin on her Snoopy doll.
She heard her uncle and mother screaming at each other downstairs while her father tried to keep the peace between the two:
“Both of you need to calm down…”
“That room…it’s sick and it is confusing her.”
“Behrooz now you care? Where have you been this past year? In your own little world getting a useless degree in theology…”
“My studies are separate from Parisa. Babba...the girl thinks she still sees her brother. She needs help...”
“My daughter is fine. If you want to help you can get your head out of books and help us with the bills. We took you in when that gende...that whore left you.”
“I work at the university.”
“Azizam, we are fine. Let Behrooz finish his studies. I can adjunct again if needed.”
“No. Your daughter needs you and you ignore her. No wonder she speaks to ghosts.”
Parisa thought about her brother.
On the winter solstice, Shabe-Yalda, where her family celebrated the long winter night eating watermelon, sharing pomegranate seeds, the poems of Hafez and keeping warm by the fireplace, she had heard something outside. When she looked out the window she thought she had seen her brother. Then he stuck his tongue at her and she did the same-feeling horrible afterwards and wondered if his soul was cold.
Parisa dropped the hyacinths on the floor. She placed her hands on the bedroom door and opened it slowly. She entered quietly, and stood in the middle of Navid’s bedroom hoping that he didn’t mind; her brother hated it when she went into his room without his permission.
Her eyes spotted David Beckham on the closet kicking up a soccer ball that splattered dirt beyond the edge of the poster. Parisa felt the big red eyes and wide grins from the video game characters standing guard with their swords for they were still pinned to the wall as well. Navid’s bed was also still there, with the dark blue Justice League bedsheets and his Akira manga all stacked neatly on the table next to his bed.
Parisa walked towards his desk and pulled open the drawers. She found envelopes that held foreign coins from countries that uncle Behrooz had visited. On the windowsill a few mason jars held a collection of preserved insects. Parisa picked one up and stared at the shriveled grasshopper, wondering about its soul, wondering if it too was keeping her brother safe.
There was an awful scream.
Parisa dropped the mason jar as she flinched and turned around. The jar rolled over to her mother who was standing there in her long green dress and her apron. She was speaking fast in Farsi and Parisa just looked down at the blue carpet that had been freshly vacuumed.
“Biya biroon as inja...chi behet goftam? Bare chi be man hitchvaght goosh nimikoni! Get out! What did I tell you? Why don’t you ever listen to me!”
Parisa closed her eyes and thought about Shabe-Yalda, the winter solstice, where her family celebrated the long winter night eating watermelon, sharing pomegranate seeds, the poems of Hafez and keeping warm by the fireplace.
Navid had still been alive and she remembered that they had stuck their tongue out at each other-just like when his ghost had visited her.
All of a sudden, Parisa realized that she wasn’t sure if she had seen her brother’s ghost or if she had simply mixed everything up in her head. The little girl sat down on her brother’s bed, confused by the string of memories that all of a sudden didn’t make much any sense anymore and she began to cry.
“Chi shode...what happened? Why is my Parisa crying?” Her father was standing at the threshold with Uncle Behrooz. Both men looked at Parisa and then at Mina.
“She was supposed to help me with the haft-seen and I find her in here messing up her brother’s room…” Her mother was whispering as she held the hyacinth and the mason jar close to her heart. Parisa saw the dead grasshopper and imagined it blinking its eyes as if to say the little girl was next since she was ruining the Spring Equinox for everyone.
“Yes…we need to set up the haft-seen for Aide Nowruz…” her father said.
“Nowruz...it literally means a new day Mina,” Uncle Behrooz said. He looked at his sister and then the walls. Then her uncle began to take down the posters carefully.
Mina nodded her head gingerly.
Sami held Parisa and gently rocked his daughter in his arms.
It had a while since Parisa had hugged her father.
Breadcrumb #136
MAYA MENON
Last year, my hallucination arrived late and sat in the empty chair at a meeting. She was decked out in a mesh bodysuit, manacles and spikes and sat with her legs spread apart on the table. No one but one other could see her all the times. He mostly saw her as self-destructive and attention seeking, when I insisted it was just healthy playfulness. I tried to whisper to him the story I’m going to tell you all but he always felt brevity is an art I’m unfamiliar with. I had to read his face because he didn’t entertain my quiet speech. I would blame him, but I shouldn’t. I imagined these words hanging above his head:
“Yet,
even the most feral animal can be taught to utilize sense
and social knack to exist among the human race.”
On some workdays, I shuffled through posters depicting sensual flowers at work, scoffing a little. O’Keeffe’s got it down, I suppose. Whether in rosebuds or fig leaves, sometimes I still covet brazen dishabille. Brevity is not for those whose passions are seen as excess.
I haven’t conquered subtlety, yet.
As something I’ve been battling with since my pimply art-kid times of high school, it’s not always easy to achieve. Those days, my lunch break consisted of scribbling shock-value into pieces of used printer-paper. When the bell rang, I would accidentally leave doodles of men and women in various forms of undress on the table. Oops. I wasn’t completely oblivious that the special education class following mine could discover my pornographic scraps. It was amusing that in result, they drove my teacher crazy with anatomy questions. It wasn’t quite the rebellion he claimed I was committing. But just a curious puck-like humor that I sometimes have trouble getting across. I guess I didn’t see the dilemma. I just forgot my dirty pictures sometimes. I also didn’t see the dilemma when the security guard told me my thigh-highs weren’t school-appropriate, and I had to wear gym shorts over them because they were too distracting.
“I wasn’t completely oblivious that the special education class following mine could discover my pornographic scraps. ”
The catholic college I eventually went to didn’t require uniforms and liked my portfolio. They told me they had a liberal university art program that didn’t censor work, and would love to have me. At the time, I couldn’t tell if they were pretending to be blissfully unaware for the sake of trying to convert me or if they were in denial, and in need of students. I quickly began to realize it was the latter. In my first year there, I was working on a painting depicting two women I found in the lower circles of kink.com that appeared to be enjoying themselves. My professor asked me why their faces held no love. She blanched when I told her the scene was purely about sex- not making love, as I fashioned one of the women’s lower parts with purple pubic hair in a flurry of carefree brush-strokes. I had to take it off the walls mid-process. They weren’t the classical nudes my scholarship was paying for.
Today, I walk out of my home occasionally dressed in a button-down and blazer that covers my tattoos, pretending to be an adult. The older city folk know little of my erotic art hobbies. No one wise advises me in hushed voices to “tone it down a notch,” anymore. Not even him. I leave the controversially smug teenager back at home, oversleeping in twisted bed sheets.
But there are moments, during the most lackluster meetings, where I sit in my chair, feeling a bit feral, scribbling grotesque phalluses into the margins of the agenda, looking ahead and nodding from time to time. The papers were going into recycling, anyway, living brief lives told only to those in search of a lack of subtlety.
Breadcrumb #135
KEN VALENTI
It was raining the day I was born. I remember this, I swear.
Water thrummed at the hospital window from a grey sky and made me drowsy. Alive not yet an hour and already, all I wanted was sleep. A nurse placed me, all seven pounds, four ounces of me, on my mother’s chest and Mom said in a croaky, tired version of the voice I would come to know; “Welcome to the world, Stephen Elijah Warren.”
And the rain rushed the glass.
_____
Seven years later, a heatwave broke with a downpour, a trillion drops of water hushing the scorched sidewalk. I went for a walk in the downpour. No raincoat, no umbrella. Just me in jeans, sneakers and a cotton shirt, feeling like the raindrops that pelted me had fallen with the express purpose of soaking me. They wanted to break on me, run along my skin. And I spun, and stomped in puddles and sang, “La! La! La!” until my mother grabbed me and yanked me by the wrist back to the house.
“I went for a walk in the downpour. No raincoat, no umbrella. Just me in jeans, sneakers and a cotton shirt, feeling like the raindrops that pelted me had fallen with the express purpose of soaking me.”
“Look at you! Look at you!” Her words came fast and low, as if she were talking to herself. She was rubbing me down roughly with a thick towel, fresh with the scent of Tide. I was horrified that she had made me strip down so she could dry me off. “What the hell were you doing?”
“I’m sorry, mom. It reminded me of when I was born.”
That got her to stop, at least for a moment. “What was that?”
“Remember? When I was born? And it was raining outside, like this?”
“How could you possibly remember the day you were born?”
“I just do.”
“You’re eyes weren’t open yet. Besides, it was sunny.”
“It couldn’t be. Maybe, like, it was sunny in the morning, but after I was born, it was raining?”
“You mean you brought the rain?” A small note of mirth slipped into her rattled voice. “With your cloudy disposition?”
"I don’t know. I like rain.”
Really I loved the rain. Walking in a deluge, I had no worries. I didn’t have to look out for the big kids on my block, the ones that were almost teenagers. I had wanted to be their friend, but they made me pretend to be their pet cow as an initiation, then refused to hang out with me anyway. I had to walk around on all fours, eat grass and say, “Moo.” And when I stood up and said, “Now can I play with you?” Allen Teague, the leader of the group said, “Oops. You stood up before I said you could. You blew it. See ya later.”
Now they always found ways to push me or get in my way. But when it was raining, the world was mine.
“It was sunny,” Mom said, bringing my attention back. She got back to drying me off, though by then, I was as dry as I was going to get; “Do you think I would forget anything about that day?”
“But we danced. In the rain.” My own comment surprised even me. I only remembered the dancing just then, and only vaguely. I wasn’t sure how it could have been true. But I was sure that it was.
Mom didn’t bother to respond to me directly. She muttered to herself, something about being unable to put up with my nonsense.
I tried to get my father on my side at dinner that night.
“Dad. It was raining the day I was born, right?”
But he only said, “I’d go with your mother on this.”
“Stevie,” my mother said. “Stop being silly.”
_____
The day she left, sun shone on the maroon Toyota she packed up to go away, making the car difficult to look at.
“He couldn’t even come help,” my father said bitterly.
“He thought there might be a scene,” my mother said. “He was right, wasn’t he?”
“Just go.”
When she bent down to touch my face, I could feel my father bristle, even though he stood behind me. I remember that sense, that perception of the bristling, even more than I remember the touch of my mother’s fingers.
“Be my good little Stevie.” And she left me there, crying.
_____
After she left, Dad took me to do more things. Ball games, sailing lessons, a local arts-and-crafts fair. I smiled a lot, and he smiled back, but each of us was doing it more for the other than for ourselves. After a couple of weeks, though, the smiles became easier. They were real again.
When my first report card of the new school year came, I was scared. A D+ in science, C- in math. An F in history.
I felt as if my insides were cold. Like I was becoming a zombie from the inside out. I waited for Dad’s fury when he looked over the marks. Instead he exhaled a deep breath and said, “You really miss her, don’t you?”
And I cried all over again.
_____
It was years before I raised the subject again. Dad had made my favorite dinner – lamb and beef burgers with a mess of fried onions. He’d been happy lately. He’d begun seeing a woman he’d met online. Her name was Sarah.
I was almost 11 now. And when I saw the perfect dinner waiting for me, I was immediately afraid. Was he about to tell me he was going to marry Sarah? They’d just met! Did these things happen so quickly?
Maybe I was trying to head off the serious talk about Sarah when I asked, “Wasn’t it raining? I mean, the day I was born?”
It took Dad a moment to catch up, and he laughed in surprise.
“Where did that come from, Steve?”
“I remember being with Mom. And the rain. I remember her blue eyes.”
“You think your mother has blue eyes?”
I knew better than to say “Yes” to a question like that, so I went with the classic standby: “I don’t know.”
Dad recovered a photo album he’d stored in the basement. He dropped it in front of me and opened it to photos of us on Cape Cod. One shot of her smiling over a cracked lobster, I could clearly see that her eyes were gray.
“You see?” Dad said. “Do you see blue eyes?”
I was surprised at how annoyed he was.
But I know that, the day I was born, her eyes were blue. I know that it was raining. I remember it. And in that moment, I remembered so much more. I remembered how she held me up and smiled, and her eyes were so blue, and she wore a dress to match, a dress that I recognized as the color of San Francisco Bay, even though I would not see San Francisco Bay for another five years, when we visited her brother in Sausalito.
She wore a delicate silver chain with a single silver drop on the end. Not a tear, but a drop of rain. She lifted me, and she took me outside and danced with me in the downpour. But I could not tell this to Dad, so I only answered his question. Did I see blue eyes in the photo?
“No.”
_____
Dad died a few years ago. The other day, Mom’s brother called. He’s out East now.
“You should see her. We hope she’ll remember you.”
She’s in a nursing home a couple of hours from me. I almost didn’t recognize her. Her skin hangs loose on her face and arms now. But there is still some of the sandy color left in her hair and her eyes are still gray. Yes, gray, like in Dad’s photos. Not blue.
Her head bobbed with Parkinson’s. Her hand shook as she turned the page of The Daily News. I had forgotten how religiously she had read the tabloid when I was a kid. Now, she barely nodded at me, just politely enough to keep a stranger from complaining that she was rude. Her eyes seemed to look only at the photos and to see nothing.
I asked her in my best chatty voice what she just read and she frowned and said, “Don’t be a wise-ass.”
It’s something I remembered her telling me when I was a kid. Did she recognize me, or did she say this to all people who annoyed her?
“Mom? Do you know who I am?”
The gray eyes roamed over my face.
“You?” she said, as if remembering long ago. “It’s you?”
“Do you know my name?”
Her head shook, but maybe that was just Parkinson’s. The nurse had warned me not to push her, not to try to force her to remember. But I couldn’t help myself.
"I don’t remember.” Her voice was barely a whisper.
“Do you remember anything?” I asked.
Softly, she said, “It was raining the day you were born.”