Breadcrumb #668

BRITTANY OBER

My unborn son likes to kick inside me.
This week I took him to MoMA’s screening
of Raging Bull, and I was moved by the manly
beauty of De Niro’s boyish fragility. Isn’t
every man like that: all mouth and swagger
and shiny new car, when, really, inside he just
wants a woman to hold him close, pressed to her
bosom so he can hear her heart beat,
beating only because she can watch him
move? Will my son punch and shadow box
his need into haunting nothing; will he mask
himself with bloodshot eyes and busted teeth? 
Can I ever tell him I suspect I’m an American
new wave hero, too, or will he discount
me because I’m just his mom?

• • •

Breadcrumb #667

KEVIN TRAVERS

Angus’ mother never spoke of family. Miriam said the two of them had come from Newfoundland to the Jersey shore when he was five. That explained her accent. Any other questions were discouraged or ignored. When he was sixteen he demanded to know who his father was and she threw a plate at his head. It smashed against the wall and she cried and cried and apologized but this is something Angus never forgot. But he did stop asking.

Angus’ mother was an artist of some renown. Her sculptures were landscapes in miniature, marvelous sprawling forests and mountain ranges of clay and turf and wood, found materials and painstakingly handmade structures. The geography was fantastic and familiar, fields from song and story. Miriam would never say what mythic place she charted but it was clear she knew it like the back of her hand. Haunted hollows of bending trees, sheer cliffs capped with the ruins of once great keeps overlooking an ocean through a curtain of mist that the viewer could almost feel just beyond the sculpture's edge. The small black rabbits that populate these lands, sometimes burrowed in the vast invisible depths of her little countries, have become items valued by collectors. A small but loyal group of enthusiasts have attempted to catalogue each one and trace their homes.

Miriam’s sculptures sold for high prices in the mid 90s and still sit in the homes of the wealthy and the fashionable to this day. The vague stories of her origins only made her more intoxicating. It was rumored that she was aristocracy fallen on hard times, her charm so old world that it was almost other world. She opened a gallery of her own in New York and was comfortable for the rest of her days. 

Angus, her only son, had none of this charm. He was large and shy and clumsy, more at home with books than party guests. Miriam would pet and preen him in public but at home they were left to their own devices. Miriam’s devices were wine and clay. 

And the box.

Angus had never touched the box, never saw it without spying. When he was very young, and Miriam thought he was asleep, Angus would sneak halfway down the stairs and watch her, surrounded by the half completed mounds of her latest piece, a bottle of red by her side and the box on the glass coffee table with the silver legs. The box was wood, old and brown, thick and gnarled. Next to the box was laid a large creased document, yellowed old. Angus couldn’t make out its contents, but he could tell that it was brightly colored, meticulously lined. He thought that there were dragons at the edges. 

From the box Miriam produced two small figurines: on the table sat a golden lighthouse, blue light shining from its peak and a ship the colors of the dawn. Angus acknowledged as an adult that what came next was impossible, but in his memory, Miriam would raise her hands, palms up, and sigh and the ship would take flight around the room, first gliding about her shoulders and then making its way to the ceiling, sails billowing from a true north wind. When she began to weep, he would return to bed and shiver his way to fitful sleep, dreaming of red-haired people sailing the mist in many-colored ships.

“Next to the box was laid a large creased document, yellowed old.”

Angus was not with his mother when she died. He’d been in Philadelphia, making ends meet at the press where people constantly questioned him about being the son of a famous artist. Ever polite, Angus always smiled but had few friends at work. Or outside of work. He was also being dumped.

 “I’ve known the end was coming for a long time” Chase had said, holding Angus as if that made it easier. Angus did not want the taxi driver to feel uncomfortable, but he could barely mask his sobs as he was taken from one broken relationship to another.

A week later Miriam was gone. They hadn’t spoken in a month. This was not unusual, or particularly unkind, there was just nothing to say. Angus felt vaguely like a disappointment to Miriam and she gave him no verbal indication that he was incorrect. She had never lost the accent that he could not place and never had and only reminded him of things he never knew. 

The funeral was well attended but he didn’t know anyone, not really. 

Miriam left a home by the sea, a two-story modern construction with a studio on the second floor. He’d sell it when he sobered up. He slept on the couch during a three week sabbatical from work, he received only phone calls from his mother’s solicitor and from some of the more ruthless of critics and collectors.

  Angus drank gin by the ocean, from a bottle pink with bitters that he crammed with lemons and limes. 

He went through her things slowly. He had been asked to catalogue her few unfinished pieces, the things that had never quite worked out, her models, and the shadow boxes she crafted as a hobby. The ones containing black rabbits would probably fetch a handsome price. Maybe he could get away, start new.

The box was in her closet, the wood a deep reddish brown, its lines hidden in the gnarled surface. The latch was shaped like a rabbit. Angus brushed the latch and the lid flipped open, almost eagerly. The figurines were inside, the lighthouse and the boat that he thought had been a dream. But there was no parchment, no map of parts unknown. 

Angus fell asleep on the couch, the figurines on the table. There was no light, the ship, though still the color the sky as the sun sets, lay on its side, it’s sails windless.

On his last night by the sea, Angus felt an urge to be out of the house. He needed salt air in his lungs, to be surrounded by my mist and water and sand. He brought the box with him.

Angus took a swig of gin and jammed the bottle into the sand. The horizon swayed slightly before him as the sun began to go down. He flicked open the lid of the box at his feet. Tears in his eyes, almost without realizing what he was doing, Angus raised his hands to the sky and gasped a ragged sigh.

A blue light erupted from within the box, the lighthouse a beacon to the darkling sea.

The ship took to the air around him, ruffling his bushy red beard as it spiraled up and down his body. Out of the corner of his eye, he thought he saw a small dark shape dash across the sandy banks stopping to regard him before retreating into the grassy dunes. 

A northern breeze began to blow. His fringe blew back and his glasses slipped down his nose, tears mixed with sweat and salty spray.

Angus looked out and hoped to catch a glimpse of larger sails moving on the horizon, red and purple and gold coming at last to take him home.

• • •

Breadcrumb #666

FELENE M. CAYETANO

Dear Nicole,

Thank all the gods and the ancestors that leap years come every four years. In between these times I don’t reflect on your suicide, your brother’s tears, your mother’s questions, your father’s broken soul that sagged along with his cheeks each time I saw him thereafter. I thank Sunti Gabafu hama ahari for this small mercy of four years in between the visceral muscle memory of the pain from losing you that no amount of sessions with a balding middle-aged white male therapist immediately dispatched by the Archdiocese of Los Angeles could quell. For multiple leap years I relived your premature death, the subsequent premature funeral and years of questions unanswered. If the leap year found me in Los Angeles, I would post myself physically or metaphysically by your grave talking to you about what the last four years of my life were like.

Did you hear me catching up with you? Did our other classmates visit you? Did you care that I usually brought flowers I’d picked up from the manicured lawns nearby the cemetery? Did it matter that in the later years I no longer cried? Did you miss me when I stopped visiting? 

The first leap year I deliberately decided to override this reflex to visit, I felt guilty. I felt like you would visit me in my dreams and curse me out for not being a good friend—I was twenty-five. You’d been dead for twelve years and I’d kept your birth and burial days holy. My parents used to tell me to leave the dead at the cemetery and my younger self always wondered if they would visit if I, their child, were the one in the grave. These thoughts and my own traumas that made that possibility closer than they knew kept me up many nights. A ceaseless battle with depression and a hormonal imbalance ensured that I was constantly tired, but also perpetually unable to sleep at length. I learned to use this gift wisely to work multiple jobs, freelance, maintain high grades after high school and even publish three books. So much has transpired in these sixteen years!

Ok, the biggest news is that I’m a mother of two sons. Mothering them continues to be the reason I’m grateful that my suicide attempts failed. I used to joke that I was such a failure; I even failed at ending all my failures for good. I can laugh now about it, but you know the long list. Somehow, around the age of twenty-six, I finally started to get life right. This coincided with my decision to leave grad school for a year and return to Belize to keep an eye on my ninety-two-year-old grandpa. At first, my parents were concerned (frankly, so was I) that grad school would be another incomplete journey in my life. I loved staying with my grandpa! He was at a stage in his life where he was absolutely blatant about the people and circumstances that he had encountered. I admired him greatly for this. After all the failures, I felt I had no margins of error for detours and mistakes. I was still tentative about whether to move to California after grad school or return to Belize where I’d have to face culture shock in the land that birthed me. From that year with my grandpa I learned that whatever decisions I made I had to do so knowing that in sixty years, they would still have an impact on me and my family as his did for him and us.

“My parents used to tell me to leave the dead at the cemetery and my younger self always wondered if they would visit if I, their child, were the one in the grave. ”

I returned to grad school then moved back to Belize after a total of nineteen years away. Looking back, it’s easy to see that some of my depression came from a type of homesickness that never left. Nowhere in America really felt like home. In New England, I felt the social and ethnic differences within my peer group who tried to pin a Blackness on me that wasn’t my own. On the West Coast, I carried the weight of being disconnected from my culture because of not meeting the unspoken immigrant expectations of my parents while they watched my friends realize theirs. Actually, when I first moved back, Belize didn’t feel like home either. I started my dream job in the city of Belmopan, almost two hours away from Dangriga where I lived with my grandfather. It’s not two hours in traffic between Gardena and San Bernadino, instead it’s two hours on a winding scenic mountainous two-lane highway in an old US school bus that may stall or may be speeding beyond unposted speed limit signs. I knew those buses well. For the four years of high school I’d boarded one each morning for the one and a half hour commute between my pillow and my desk. In them, I’d learned to write and sleep through all conditions. I mostly slept on the bus ride to work unless a cousin sat beside me in which case we would talk about births, surgeries, marriages, family drama, and deaths as the bus dodged potholes and paused to pick up passengers along the highway. I opted to move to Belmopan instead of commute four months after my return when my grandfather died. The sprawling city of Belmopan was and is quite different from the town of Dangriga. Belmopan is inland, Dangriga is seaside; Belmopan is ethnically diverse, Dangriga has mostly Garifuna residents; in Belmopan I had no immediate relatives while in Dangriga I had my grandfather, siblings, and a developing relationship. We eventually got married, but it didn’t work out. What worked was that we maintained a union while living apart and we brought two sons into this world who are fiercely independent, athletic and funny. They keep me young!

I used to wonder whether you would age in the afterlife or remain the same age. At a certain point, I concluded that you would age as usual. In high school you would have looked like your sister but taller, light brown with stylish thick curly black hair that would have people wondering whether you were half-Mexican, Puerto Rican, or Cuban. You were always such a good listener; probably all those Sunday school lessons would have kept you compassionate and fun-loving. By now, I imagine that you’d look a little more like your mother, before your death erased her joy. The only way I remember her now is grief-stricken. You would have likely discovered contact lenses in high school and maybe continued to be a cheerleader or found a team sport. I’m not sure what your hairstyle would be, but I can’t see you keeping it as long as in your youth. I keep mine shaved these days; it takes less time to manage. 

Aside from working, I use my free time to write, bond with my sons, ride my bike and spread the message that life is worth living. Peace, joy, and self-love were on the other side of trauma, loss, failure and uncertainty for me but I had to live to reach here. These days I’ve been concerned with building a school for the arts in Belize and wondering whether to speak up for immigrant children here and in the U.S. My immigrant experience is so much different than theirs but I feel like telling them that all the sacrifices, unspoken expectations and fears will make them strong enough to succeed at almost anything. Would my participation on the advocacy side further divide my focus away from my purpose? Would giving all youth artistic outlets and access to their culture and history not be more beneficial? For now, I’m staying in my lane. Taking action more than talking about it.

Writing and theater saved me. I remember being teased for my accent in those early Los Angeles school days. My fifth grade classmates were mostly Americans with their American concerns. I was missing the scent of fresh fire hearth food, the sound of my chickens and the feel of sand under bare feet while playing marbles in the yard. Through reading, I stepped into new landscapes and soon found that through writing, I, too could create worlds for myself in which I could be invisible yet larger than life. Later, the stage gave me new possibilities, even as just a nameless part of the chorus. Practices and performances with diverse youth from hoods around Los Angeles expanded my awareness and made me realize there were other struggles beside mine. I learned that my peers were also using the stage to transcend their realities or pressures. That transcendence kept us safe, motivated a few to keep a respectable grade point average and led to a salvation that we now reminisce about as adults living full lives mostly off stage. 

I used to deliver a monologue about the impact of your suicide. Whether it saved others from making the same decision you made, I’ll never know. What I do know is that those tears I left on countless stages were libations to the gods and ancestors who would eventually help me release the weight of your loss.

This month marks my thirteenth anniversary as a librarian. I love working in the national library. Working there has helped me fill in the gaps of Belizean history that I didn’t get in American schools or through independent research, pre-repatriation. The world is currently in different states of facing a public health crisis caused by the outbreak of a disease called Coronavirus. Because of the many evolving symptoms that come with the virus and the risk of death for persons with pre-existing health conditions, people are living in a state of fear. The disease is spread through contact with an infected person or on surfaces they have touched. At work, we are doing what we can to shift services to a hybrid model that will minimize face-to-face contact. At home, the boys are meeting with my parents online to complete school work from the books they last used in March since the school year was cut short. In Belize, we’re out of our homes working full time while the schools remain closed, but in Los Angeles, most people are working from home. To get my mind off the pandemic, I’ve been writing, learning, and exercising. Has it worked? Yes! Especially when I’m writing about a completely different time in the past or future so that the climbing number of persons ill or dying affect me less. 

Maybe when I get to Los Angeles, again I’ll visit you with a handful of scented flowers from those manicured hedges nearby, fold my scarf in half and sit on it to read you an excerpt of my first screenplay.

Your friend forever,

Felene

• • •

Breadcrumb #665

MADELINE DILLON

I

The night she went swimming for the six glowing fish, the boy was already asleep. The river was nearby (similarly, sleeping), and the girl walked there. She was wearing her favorite accessories—calloused bare feet and wild hair made so by dirt and wind. The boy slept soundly as the girl walked out of their home.

It was small, just a single room, and yet they could not fill it. After the boy built the bed, it vanished, leaving nothing but air where the bed should be. The boy and girl slept there together each night, seemingly floating feet above the ground. The stove and refrigerator vanished, too. Then the couch, and then the bookshelves. Now the room is empty, though the girl bumps her wide hips several times a day. 

The girl left the boy sleeping in the invisible bed. Truthfully, as she walked toward the water, she was unsure what she intended to find in its depths. The water was shallow at first. She stepped in one foot at a time and the water lapped softly against her ankles. She wished, in this moment, that she knew how to dive so she could plunge herself into the dark river. Alas, she stepped in slowly until the water reached her neck. Imagining her lungs as latex balloons, the girl breathed in deeply until she thought they would pop, and keeping the balloons at capacity, the girl immersed herself in the black water. She writhed to turn her body upside down and her toes touched the night air through the water’s surface. Her arms were not strong, but she used them as best she could to propel herself deep into the river. 

“She wished, in this moment, that she knew how to dive so she could plunge herself into the dark river.”

When she opened her eyes, there was nothing but blackness around her. She remained still for a moment, noting that her heartbeat seemed to pulse the whole river. At first, she squinted with discomfort from the water against her bare eyes, but quickly became unbothered by the feeling. She had tied a knot on the balloons. Her vision adapted to the dark endlessness and even so, there was nothing to be seen. The girl began to swim through the emptiness.

The girl swam for what could have been several hours. Her arms and legs had slowed and she could not pay close attention to the darkness around her. She wondered if she would ever find what she needed from the river, when the girl saw something from a distance—the most beautiful thing in the world. The girl swam toward it with sudden vitality. It was a fish, she realized as she became close. The fish was tiny, the size of a fingernail, and glowing, as if her skeleton was made of platinum and her scales of rare diamond dust, pink and violet. She swam right into the girl’s hand and nestled there. The girl was so happy, she swam in circles. When she looked at her palm and the tiny fish making her home there, she saw still emptiness, and she began to swim again.

She felt like the sun would come up before she resurfaced if she kept at the rate she was going, but it remained starry and nightly as she swam, exhausted, through the dark water. After finding the first fish, the girl became certain there were exactly five more. She wondered how the boy was sleeping, if he was sleeping, if he was dreaming, if he was dreaming of her, if somehow he was dreaming of her six fish. Mostly she didn’t care, but wonder, yes. The second fish glowed blue. Sapphires and emeralds. The next four shone different colors: crimson and orange like a sunset’s reflection. Silver and gold like expensive jewelry. Bright white and lavender like lush rainy flora. Fuchsia and cerulean like a cautionary summer’s morning. The girl gathered each of them in her palms and swam with her legs, slowly and painfully to the water’s surface. 

II

fish (v). to seek to obtain, to look for

empty (adj). containing nothing

invisible (adj). ignored

III

When the girl returned home, the boy still slept in their invisible bed. 
There were invisible arrows on the floor.
They led to the invisible sink and the girl clutched together tighter her palms. 
As she reached the sink her hands led her to the invisible drain like magnets.
Each of the six glowing fish fell from her palms into the invisible drain of the invisible
kitchen sink.
The girl could feel an invisible pipe narrowing her shoulders and her wide hips. 
She felt her belly contort as she slid through the invisible pipe.
She fell to the ground. 

The boy awoke at the sound of her fall. As he looked upon her, he wondered if she would ever wake up. Then he wondered if she loved him, if she ever loved him, if she’d love him suddenly when she awoke. He wondered, at least. When the girl awoke and raised her head off the ground, she cried at her empty hands and the boy did not understand.

So she told him about her six glowing fish.
She told him about her aching arms in the dark water, how she swam for hours.
She explained the nothingness and how she was so deep she couldn’t even see the moon.
She told him about the first fish, rosy and regal, sparkling and serene in the nightly water.
She told him about the second fish, blue and bold, majestic and masculine.
She told him about the four fish who followed.
She told him about the arrows, how her hands and hips felt heavy with each step.
She talked about the inexplicable need to drop them back into the abyss where she had
searched so tirelessly for them.

The boy thought he began to understand so he said “I understand,” but the girl knew he did not. She knew he would never understand the feeling of the tiny fish in her palms or the feeling that they belonged to her and they always had. The feeling that the fish were somehow a part of her and she them. The girl felt her stomach muscles twist and she felt as if she could fall back to the ground. Instead, she rolled over in their invisible bed with her back to the boy. 

IV

The girl was lovely with her calloused feet and wild hair. She let it grow all over her body. She painted her lips with red paint and sometimes blue when she was feeling melancholy. She kept her fingernails short so she could pick her banjo and her mandolin. Mossy rocks made her smile, along with the twiddle of a flute, knots in trees, fertility, fullness, fish in palms.

The boy was at times aggressive. He often yelled with his lungs and sometimes with his fists. He said he would never dare hit the girl, and she believed him. Still, she watched everything he had made disappear into emptiness around her and she feared she would be next. He was a builder of anything he could eventually destroy.

But the boy listened when the girl spoke. He heard her and he often responded thoughtfully. The girl had always felt comfortable confiding in the boy. Then one day, the girl wept and the boy began to build. She cried and cried, so he hammered away until there were four wooden walls and a tin roof and two windows facing east and west. He hung her banjo on the wall and her mandolin too. He laid a woven rug before the western window so she could nap like a kitten in the warmth from the setting sun. He tried to find her red paint but the best he could do was clay from the river. The boy told the girl he had done something that would make her stop weeping. So he showed her the room he had built for them and for a moment, the girl did stop weeping. When she began again, he built them a bed to sleep on and again, she stopped for a moment. 

“Why are you crying now?” the boy asked the girl when her tears began again.

Soon the bed became invisible. Soon everything else did too. 

“I’ve an idea,” said the boy, as he began to feel further and further from the girl in what had become an empty room. So he tied a red string around the girl’s pinky finger and his own. Soon after, the boy snapped the string, swinging his fist into the wall.

V

When the girl turned to face the boy lying in their invisible bed, she didn’t find him next to her. She wondered where he had gone, but she mostly didn’t care. She wondered, at least. The girl walked slowly, for her belly still felt contorted, to the invisible sink and stared down its drainpipe. She willed the fish to return to her. She cupped her hands and watched them, invisible, in her palms. 

The boy returned, but he did not stay long. The girl let him hold her empty hands. She wept and the boy told her he understood, but he did not.

That night, the girl paced through the empty room before she returned to the river where she had swum so long in the darkness. She knew, of course, she would not find the fish again. They had left a bruise she intended to press for as long as it made her cry to do so. The girl swam so deeply that she could not see the moon. The water was so warm that she could not feel any tears. She let the emptiness fill the space around her, the void within her. She swam.

The boy said “Do not press on that bruise that the fishes left.” So the girl pushed even harder onto it.

The boy asked “Do you want me to hold you tonight?” So the girl told him she would press her back against their wooden walls. 

The boy asked “Do you even love me?” So the girl said “No.”

VI

The girl taped the red string into her diary and she moved from their invisible home. In her new apartment, the girl set up six fish bowls with fresh water and river rocks. When she stepped back to look at the bowls, she found herself dry-eyed and so the girl poured the water out from each of them and packed them away. 

The girl bumped her wide hips no longer. She feared not that she would soon disappear, and she found fullness where there had been none. She wept far less often at the pressing of a bruise though some nights she still swam in the river.

• • •

Breadcrumb #664

NATACHI MEZ

Please, be careful when you hear me speak.
I mix up my I’s with We’s and They’s and You’s,
so when I say I cried myself into existence,
note the alternatives. Know that my tears are equally 
not my own. When I say I cried myself into existence,
I mean the waters of this body have been cycling for centuries,
breaking and bathing and becoming breath.
23 years old and I am still newborn.
I mix up my yesterdays with today.
Still can’t tell my kin from my enemies.
Still can’t tell my skin from Glory. 
Still can’t swallow that people mix up Black
with Death instead of Gold instead of Good instead of 
God I mix up your pupils with mirrors.
Can’t tell if it’s safe to see self in you.
How do you see yourself, there are those 
who drown in their own image, instead, 
shall we go for a swim?
We as in I and You, and You,
can you tell I am a woman? It is said
that women are more likely to attribute their successes
to others more often than men,
so if I say I did this on my own,
know that I am not even my own.
I am a conglomerate of dependencies,
fluid and changed and changing.
I’ve heard of people who have pulled themselves up 
from their own bootstraps, 
and they forget to thank the bootstraps, and now 
I am crying again, reborn, and 
praising those who made the bootstraps,
I don’t know what we would do without them, 
without you, without me,
we conglomerates of dependencies,
fluid and changed and changing.
We’ve been cycling for centuries, 
breaking, birthing, born.

• • •