Mirlitons

CeCe’s nude heels clacked against the concrete sidewalk as she tugged on her black silk dress. It was the only funeral attire she owned, and it was too unforgiving for late June’s inescapable humidity. CeCe had gained ten pounds since the last time she had worn it, which meant it required constant readjustment. She had pulled her blonde hair into a ponytail, but tendrils still curled and stuck in the sweat against her neck. She reached out to pull the ponytail over her shoulder, exposing the tattoo of a chef’s knife on her wrist to her mother Bitsy’s glaring eyes.

The porch on the double shotgun house looked exactly as CeCe remembered -- bright and old and mismatched, just like the left side’s former inhabitant. Lester LeBones, the voodoo skeleton that Lorraine claimed brought the New Orleans Saints good luck, still held his place of honor right in the center of the porch’s sag. Having never made his postseason retreat to the attic, Lester sported a few strands of what had once been purple and green Mardi Gras beads, worn silvery by sun and rain alike.

The front door to the house was slightly ajar, and stanzas of gospel and the smell of boiling crawfish crept out from the living room into the street. CeCe and her parents paused at the front door.

“Remember about the knife and the books,” her father Louis said to her, loosening his tie and rolling up his sleeves. He was all business, but the droop at the corners of his mouth gave away his sadness.

One of Lorraine’s cousins had found a handwritten will dated five years back stuffed in a shoebox full of cash. She had bequeathed her chef’s knife and cookbooks to CeCe. CeCe had spent her formative years poring over those books, devouring the recipes as if they were sustenance. She knew she would take those, but taking Lorraine’s knife seemed too personal, like taking somebody’s arm.

CeCe stepped tentatively over the threshold, followed by her mother and father, and had barely rebalanced on her heels before a giant tree of a man hugged her so fiercely he almost knocked the breath out of her.

“CeCe! It has been a minute!” The boom of the voice coming from the chest it belonged to made CeCe’s ears ring.

She unearthed herself and pulled back to find a pair of green eyes set in ebony skin crinkled back at her.

“Kenneth!” she shrieked, and nestled back into his rib cage for another squeeze. He was Lorraine’s nephew, who had run off to Nashville with his brass band years ago. The last time CeCe had seen him was when she was fifteen and they were drinking illicit beers on the very front porch ten feet behind them.

“Bay...bee...GURL!” he cried, giving her a squeeze with each punctuated syllable. “You a Yankee now? Working at a big old restaurant in New York? Rooting for them Jets?”

“Screw the Jets.”

Kenneth gave Bitsy a gentle kiss on the cheek and Louis a formal handshake. He put his arm around CeCe’s neck and paraded the three of them through the house. Some of the people had frequented Lorraine’s kitchen table over the years and fussed over CeCe like their own long lost daughter. Other folks CeCe knew only from Lorraine’s stories. “Pleasure to meet you in the flesh,” she’d say, and they’d hug like they’d been acquainted for years.

CeCe made her way to the kitchen. She half expected to find it shrouded in black gauze. Instead, she found its formica table and chipped green tiled countertops overloaded with food, enough to nourish the mourners through their grief.

At the sink stood Lorraine’s best friend Doreen. “She loved you as if you were her own child, dear,” the normally gregarious woman said gently, patting CeCe’s cheek. CeCe nodded, tears finding their way to the corners of her eyes. CeCe wasn’t sure why people always assumed she needed mothering, but in this instance, she was happy to accept.

The evening was a funeral, a party, a family reunion, and a group therapy session. It was a blur of faces and names and stories about Lorraine walking through waist-high floodwaters to rescue her Mardi Gras costume box from her momma’s house and what everyone’s favorite meal of Lorraine’s was and how Lorraine had mended shattered hearts one by one, plate by plate. The summer air rolled into the room, coaxing sweat beads from eyebrows and sticking thighs to chairs and keeping stories lingering in the room, in hopes of drawing a complete picture of their subject. Louis laughed and clapped the backs of the storytellers. His sister-in-law had always brought out his most jovial side. Bitsy did what all Southern women do in foreign kitchens and pitched in with dishwashing duties.

Eventually, CeCe snuck away from the kitchen into the dining room, which was festooned with Zulu coconuts and Lorraine’s gaudy souvenir spoon collection. The dining room also held Lorraine’s cookbooks, nearly fifty of them slung and stuffed haphazardly onto an insufficient bookshelf. CeCe pulled one off without looking, and out of habit the book fell open to recipe for shrimp stuffed mirlitons. She and Lorraine had made this recipe together once, a test run before a Thanksgiving feast. They had stuffed themselves with the results while talking about CeCe’s high school boyfriend. She had trusted her aunt with every little detail of her life, from who she kissed to what her dreams were. She ran her fingers over the mirliton recipe, turned the corner of the page down, and hugged the book close to her heart.

                                                                                                        ***

Back in New York City, not a day passed where CeCe didn’t wish she could call up Lorraine -- to make her laugh, to ask her what would go best with the beautiful carrots she found at the farmer’s market. But when the head chef asked her to help conceive a new dish at the restaurant that fall, she had an answer.

“Mirlitons.”

“What?”

“Shrimp stuffed mirlitons.”

Chef looked at CeCe for a minute. He cocked his head to one side and cracked his meaty, tattooed knuckles.

“Alright, Landry. I’m listening.”



Written by: Clancy Fink
Photograph by: Sophie Stuart

When the Streetlights Came On

I used to be a bird.

Marvin, my stepdad, nicknamed me Bird. Taller than all the boys in my kindergarten class, I had comically long limbs matched with a metabolism that made me look as nourished as Mick Jagger or Jack Skellington.

“Birdie, it’s like this: You keep your skirt down and tell ‘em to keep their zippers zipped.”

I sat on a stool in McDonald’s when my dad bestowed this single nugget of knowledge. I swiveled my stool and shoved fries into my overstuffed mouth and nodded like I knew exactly what he was talking about.
At six, I didn’t know much of what happened when skirts went up and zippers zipped down. I knew it had something to do with no-no parts and that now my birthday Happy Meal tasted different.

That was the same day he told me I had an old soul. “Old soul,” I parroted, stretching out the “o’s”. I wondered if it was older than his.

“You’re over the hill today.” He said and patted me on the back. “You’re over the mountain.” I told him and stuck out my tongue.

Marvin’s lessons spanned a spectrum from common sense to street smarts. In front of a sunny summer backdrop while the Temptations or George Clinton played, there were lessons in bike riding, rollerblading, self-defense, dancing, and basketball. How to aim for the backboard, how to flick my wrist to give the ball rotation, and how to guard my opposition:

Follow their gut. Not their eyes.

Our neighborhood got darker than most when dusk moved in. That’s when the heavy lessons helped. Sneakers hung by their shoelaces from the telephone cables on our street. Marvin pointed at them and told me they marked bad houses and sometimes they marked death. He taught me to look both ways before crossing. He taught me to go home when the streetlights came on.

Over the years, even after my mom and Marvin split up and after he moved away from Buffalo, he remained my stepdad, a real stepdad, stepping into shoes that were never filled for very long. I’d visit and he’d call. Before I started college he gave me an updated version of the talk he’d started when I was six. “You just never know what anyone has.”

In early November 2006, I skipped my college classes and went to visit him. My stepfather sobbed into my shoulder. “I always thought of you as my daughter, Birdie.” I knew this to be true. I thought of the time he took me to work with him. A co-worker told me I looked like my dad. He put his arm around my shoulder and said nothing. His grip was strong then like every bear hug he’d given me back when I was fledgling. But now, my arm was around his shoulder and his hug was more like a slouch, his body hung off of mine.

He’d aged 40 years since I last saw him. His scent had changed from his mix of cologne and man musk to the withering body odor of a stranger. I avoided looking at him. His eyes were no place to stay. I looked down, as if this had been my fault. I stared at his ballooned feet swollen with water because of the liver failure. He clung hard to my body, and I pathetically tried to console him, “I’m not ready to go.” He sobbed and I rubbed his head, but couldn’t lie to him.

I’d never seen him cry or break in any sort of way. My gut shrank each time his fingers gripped my shirt, but I never wanted him to stop because it meant he was still alive.

On Thanksgiving morning, Marvin’s body lay still where he slept for the last time. There is a lot to say about that day and all that followed.

Marvin buried in his gators. My godmother, Sue, slipped in the backyard. The mashed potatoes burned. My godsister Jen and I drank sweet, cheap, piss-colored wine. Thanksgiving dinner was quiet; not because of the food. Sue’s son carried her to the couch. The pastor called my sister Krystina “Katrina.” Krys and I danced to Carl Carlson. I heard “Hallelujah” for the first time. I got pulled over.

I got pulled over on the way from the grocery store back to the house.

I ignored a stop sign. I’d gotten lost on my way back to the house. I was sure the road led to a dead end. Pleased to find the corner had a turn instead of a turn around, I took it. I didn’t know until the blue and red reflected in my rearview.

When the cop asked me why I was crying, I cried more.

“You won’t lose anything. No points. Nothing.”

I thought about telling him about Marvin since he taught me how to drive and how he was dead now. But the cop was walking back to his car, and the ticket was in my hand, and here there was no braking. Tears and snot ran into my mouth, I crumpled the ticket in my hand and the cop’s lights swirled once more as he left me where I was parked.

I left the keys out of the ignition. I got out and walked nowhere. The streetlights were on.

Written by: Tia Brown

Photograph by: Matthew Wiebe

Exulansis

The memories are strongest when you sit across from me, knee to knee. We close the circle and hold the moments between us like trapped spirits called in a candle-lit vigil.

“Could’ve just gone to my house. There’s whiskey there,” you say.

I drop the planchette on the wooden Ouija board and the sound echoes across the empty tennis court. There haven’t been real matches here since the seventies; the court taken over by the wilderness and other foreign things. I don’t ask if you remember last year’s discovery: that red plastic lunchbox with cartoon Beetlejuice, hiding other people’s secrets. I wonder what secret you left behind, but I don’t ask, because some things are better left in lunchboxes. I think about the memory belonging to this place and know you must remember too. And that’s enough.

“Here,” I say, handing you my flask.

You close your eyes and squeeze the bridge of your nose. I’m not sure when you picked up the habit, but it’s part of you now. You shift over the only existing corner of the boundary line, tracing the edge with your sneaker.

“Can’t believe we still do this,” you say. It’s strange to think about our first time here, before it became a tradition. That summer before high school exists in a sort of haze now, but I remember the first storm of every summer since because we spent them all here.

“Your question first,” I say, savoring the burn of the booze as I sip once and then twice.

You take the flask again and tip your head back with it pressed to your lips. The etched seven disappears in the shadow of your chin and I miss it. Because you’re twenty-one and still a muggle you said on my birthday two years ago. You forever memorialized my love for Harry Potter in just one small etching.

“Okay,” you say. “What word am I thinking of right now?”

The planchette slips across the board from the rain, but our fingertips stay on either side.

V. E. N. U. S. 

“Just because we’re on a tennis court,” you say. “Like, how do you always guess?”

“And deprive the Goddess of our connection?” I ask and you smile.

I don’t bother the board or the universe with my own question. Sounds of the storm are all around us, the rain softening beneath the ink-stained sky. We swig and pass the flask back and forth until the court crumbles and cracks and we laugh and laugh like lost echoes.

“Know the story about Echo?” I feel myself ask, feel the words on my tongue. They are full and sure and not mine even though they are.

“You’re drunk,” you say.

“Mmhmm. But the story is just so sad. Because she gets trapped with no real voice. And she can’t tell him she loves him because she really doesn’t and he doesn’t so it’s not, you know?”

“But she fell for him anyway?” you ask.

I can’t focus on your face when you ask because the words don’t match your mouth. Your lips have left so many sentences here already and the rain makes listening too difficult. So I close my eyes and I hear you nine years ago. Together, you said, pulling a book from your sweatshirt pocket. We started reading beside each other and we made a promise.

We keep promises. And you are here and I am here and we’re a different kind of we sitting in the rain at our court. It’s just us, but we’re never really an us.

“The first summer storm,” I say.

“Last one, maybe. I don’t think I’ll be back.” Your voice drifts away because I don’t want the words.

“You won’t come home?” I ask. I drain the last dregs and the whiskey no longer burns, just numbs my tongue. I’m not sure I asked the question right because you don’t answer.

“Nica—”

I don’t say your name back because I can’t. Instead I pull my letter to you from my coat pocket. I don’t think I can watch you reading my words here because they will sound so much better on the streets of Seattle with more rain than our court could ever offer.

“Don’t open this until you miss me,” I say, handing you the letter.

“So right now, then?” you ask, tracing the seal. “I always miss you. But this isn’t home anymore.”

“What’ll happen to us? Like we die and then what happens?”

“Why do you always start life talks when we’re drunk?” you ask.

“Maybe there are just some conversations you need to have drunk. And maybe the memory just sits with you for days, like a dream.”

“Babe’s so wise with whiskey,” you say and you pull me to you. I tuck my chin into your neck and you hug me and the shoulder of your shirt is damp. Maybe it’s the rain or maybe I am crying.

The world spins beyond you and stars leak dry dust somewhere out there in the universe. And maybe the ghost of Venus watches us. I don’t have to say soulmate or kindred or best because you know. I don’t have to love you to love you because that wouldn’t be the same as hiding in your neck where it’s safe.

“You think the rain’ll sound different there?” I ask. “That’s the reason you’re leaving.”

You don’t answer. The wind and the rain chink the fence and I don’t see us as caged birds, but the kids we were years ago. The early summer smells thick with worm bodies and rehydrated leaves and whiskey breath. And there is the bitter arugula taste of an ending left in my mouth.

“I’m sure it sings lullabies because—what else?”

Our foreheads meet and they are skin against skin, skull to skull and memories against each other, seeping and sharing this life we’ve had for so long.

“You never asked your question,” you say. We cross our legs, resting the old Ouija board on our laps. I remember finding it in your grandmother’s basement and the way you cried when she died. No one said anything when you curled into me at the funeral. Everyone thought they knew us because they just knew us.

You hold your hands above the board and there are charcoal smudges, the long ago painted letters finally imprinted on your skin. I move the planchette and you follow my lead as we spell words we need. We’ll never be anything more than this because we’re already too much.

T.O.O. M.U.C.H.

T.O.O. U.S. 

T.O.N.I.G.H.T. 

G.O.O.D.N.I.G.H.T.

When I wake, you’re gone. The ground is mapped with cracks like state lines we’ll have to cross to see each other again. Your folded sweatshirt is nestled between my head and the white painted corner of the court. The morning air is cool, and I slip your sweatshirt over my windbreaker. The pocket crinkles.

When you’re missing me. The words are scratched on the back of a Food King takeout menu.

I read on until there are no words left. I’m already missing you, too.

Written by: Kayla King

Photograph by: Daniel Vidal

Hanged Man

Continued from Three of Swords

I try to hold the sun inside the same way your mother did, like a talisman. I see her squeezing that ball of light so tight that it oozed over every inch of your childhood home; an aura of habitual happiness.

I kept your old dresser from 2nd St. and now it’s painted like Lemon Meringue. I know you’d hate it. But Shaw doesn’t seem to mind. He leaves little things for me to find: yellow pieces of paper with other people’s song lyrics, daffodils in wine bottles emptied the night before. He wants them to speak sweet things to me when he can’t write the words himself.

This morning we find each other in silence, watching the sunrise.

“It’s lovely,” I say. But the way that gold glitters reminds me how you’d always quote that book to explain tragedy. The guilt tastes like dust now, so dry and decayed. It makes me think about the moment of evaporation and dehydration; the moment a person becomes a husk.

Shaw drinks his coffee from a tall green mug. I stare until it blurs and quakes and sprouts like grass. When I blink, it’s the color of your eyes. But Shaw doesn’t look into the dark surface of his coffee like you did. His eyes bring me back.

“Just a few hours there and home later tonight,” I say, taking a sip of his coffee.

“Stay,” Shaw says. I know he means it like a promise, not a command. I smile and kiss him on the cheek. I don’t ask him to come with me. A new cd starts playing when I start the car and I look up at Shaw on the balcony. When he waves and smiles, I know he knows I’ve found his new mix.

From the interstate, the green exit signs remind me how close I am to you. It has been two years since we were here together. I remember that last time, the dark sky tinged with lights from the city; acid washed. I wore your old Syracuse University sweatshirt with the hole in the left sleeve, wrapped up in your dreams.

When I pull into the parking lot, the sky is bright and the breeze is cool. I wish I still had your sweatshirt now. But standing in front of St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, I fall in line with everyone else. The church is old, built from beautiful stones, and the burdens of sinners. I stay to the left to avoid the arms of those I know best.

“May we be blessed in remembering,” the priest says.

You grab my hand and lead me from the churchyard, distancing us from headstones and mourners. Smoke dances as you light a cigarette, trying to tweak the tines of my shipwrecked soul; a petite pallograph.

“Tell me a story?” I ask and you smile.

“Lost my first tooth in first grade and it was brilliant. Really, it was,” you say. “I was chewing a cherry gum ball and it happened just like that, just like us.” You kiss me and I bite your lip to stop you. But I taste metallic bits, drinking you in to bring myself back to life.

“Look at them all,” you say. I’m not sure if you mean the people surrounding that distant grave or the tiny blue flowers that grow in this part of the cemetery. They make me think of that summer we spent blanketed in blue, surrounded by sky and chicory blossoms; believing in perfection. Because you were perfect then, even if you didn’t know it. Moss eyes. Dusk hair. Skin like spiced vinegar. You reminded me of the earth and the beginning of time.

“There’s falling from stupid shit,” you say. “Like bike seats and bed frames and billiard tables. And then, there’s this.”

“I know, Jess.”

You don’t need to tell me about the way you love me. I see it in the way you pick up a penny and flip it luck-side up in my hand. I squeeze it tight, trying to absorb you.

“Just in case,” you say. I know what you mean, even if I don’t say it back. For the moment, you are made of stories and secrets and simple things. You are mine again. This time, when you kiss me, I let you. Our lips crush the distance of the last two years. We are closer than we ever were.

“Nothing gold,” I say when you pull away.

“It’s already happened.”

“But what about us? What about falling? What about—”

I imagine you explaining in a letter, maybe writing through the back of my black dress: Love. You. Can’t. Couldn’t. Me. Sorry. Love. Love. Love. But you leave because you were never one for words.

I walk back for the rest of the service. They lower your body into the earth and they pray: ashes to ashes, dust to dust. I make the sign of the cross. The memories fade, and with them, so do you.

Your mother stands beside your casket, so soft, ready to melt. She bears the marks of loss in tired eyes and slumped shoulders. She talks about the way you used to swing from boyhood branches and I taste her guilt like mine; pure and pungent. I think about what I would say to her, praying that a tight-lipped I’m sorry might grow to encompass everything I felt for you. But I know I am not the person your mother wants to hear those words from.

I call Shaw from the car. I wait for him to pick up the phone. You whisper, I miss you, from the backseat.

“He’s gone, you know? And I wrote this fucking thing, this letter, for him, and didn’t even read it. So he won’t know, because I never sent it. I--”

“I’m sure he knew, Gray,” Shaw says.

But I don’t. The not knowing fills the space between the three of us equilaterally.

“I wrote you something,” he says.

Shaw recites his haiku over and over like the chorus of a song:

Light burns from gold to

silver. It can’t stay. But I’ll

seal you in stardust.

On my way back to your grave, I fold the letter until I can’t anymore. I send my thoughts somewhere gold so they won’t live inside me. I leave them here with you.

Written by: Kayla King

Photograph by: Erin Notarthomas

Catharsis

I lost my grandfather three months ago. Thirteen years after my grandmother. Now that they are gone I feel like a big part of my childhood is lost forever.

People ask me if I was close to him. I don’t know what to say. In the last few years, I didn’t see him everyday, and when I did, I didn’t know what to talk to him about. But he was my grandfather, and now my mother is an orphan.

I walked into his room and everything was still the same: his bed, his glasses on the side table, the two paintings of Mahatma Gandhi and Lord Krishna, side by side above the bed. He was there too, his body wrapped up in a white sheet like an Egyptian mummy. From the moment I saw him like that I knew I would never be able to let go of that image.

The next day we took him to the cremation ground. Before leaving, each of the family members had to walk around his body, his face now uncovered, and put flowers on his feet as our last offering to him.

The blazing fire of the cremation pyre is a scene I have seen a thousand times in movies and on bad soap operas. It never really struck me as anything out of the ordinary. It was just another custom, just something that had to be done. Standing a few feet away from the burning body of my grandfather, I could not fully comprehend that it was him in there. It was just like one of those fires on the TV screen. I saw everything that was happening, all the rituals; I held my crying mother, but I could not cry.

With that fire we are supposed to let his soul go on and find peace, but all I could think of was the past.

When my grandmother died suddenly, the entire family was shaken up. Even then, I could not cry at all, maybe because I was still too young to have a clear concept of death. Looking back, I think it was also because I was watching my mother completely fall apart and I had no room for my own emotions. For months she would get up in the middle of the night and go to an empty room, so as not to disturb my father, and cry. She still doesn’t know I could hear her.

She also doesn’t know I found her note.

Once when she was out of town, my father asked me to take out some money from my mother’s drawer because he always forgot where she hid her keys. Next to the money I found a piece of paper with her handwriting. She had written a goodbye letter addressed to my brother and me. Not only did the letter shock me because it sounded like she was going to die soon, she had also written she loved us in it. For the longest time, my mother had been unable to say that to us in words. She couldn’t tell us she loved us. It was simply implied and we were supposed to pick up on it on our own. I put the letter back in its place and never mentioned it to anyone. Some months later it was gone.

To this day, I don’t know if it was some sort of suicide note or just her way of trying to be prepared in case she died unexpectedly, like her mother.

Maybe finding her letter is the reason why I often write letters to people even when I know I will never send them. The way my mother could never say, “I love you” to her children, I am unable to say so many things to people around me. I just write to them, without them knowing it.

I tear up handwritten letters. I spend weeks carefully editing emails and then delete them permanently. Some things I have buried, some I’ve even burned because I don’t know how to say them.

I don’t know how to say:

“I’m tired of looking after you, look after me for a change.” Or

“You let a perfectly good friendship end because of one fight. And I hate knowing how little I matter to you because I still miss you.” Or

“That joke you made four years ago still hurts me even though you think I’ve completely forgotten about it.” Or

“I moved to the other end of the world to get away from you.”

Sometimes, I even write notes to myself:

“When you leave, don’t look back.”

                                                                                             ***

In the days after the cremation, relatives and friends visited my Uncle’s house to convey their condolences to the family. One of my mother’s cousins started talking about the journey of the soul after the death of the body. She talked about reincarnation; she talked about how my grandfather could feel us mourning. I knew she had lost her young son some years back and all I could hear in everything she was saying was her inability to accept the permanence of her loss. She had found every way possible to convince herself that her son was not really gone but continued to exist in some form, in some world or the other.

While some of the family members found comfort in her ideas, I was able to understand the real motive behind the funerary customs we had just gone through. They were not for the peace of the departed but for the living. Every step was supposed to bring us closer to acknowledging the loss and letting go. The fire, the immersion of the ashes into the Ganges, the giving away of all the belongings, it is all so that we have nothing left to hold on to.

It’s like the letters that I write. I burn them because I no longer want to feel the feelings that I write about. A cremation, followed by a mourning and then, hopefully, a move forward.

Written by: Vrinda Agrawal
Photograph by: Sydney Singhass