INTERVIEW with Khairani Barokka
FWR: “To enter the indonesian language is a science fictional enterprise,” you write in the first section of amuk. Reading forward, you show readers how Indonesian tenses permit a simultaneity of temporal possibilities not included within the narrower scope of English; traveling through time or existing beyond the limits of time altogether. What does it mean to you to move into and through languages, recognizing how structures and concepts so often cannot map directly? How do you feel through and comprehend the idea of translation, knowing it as something different from and more than the word-to-word equation of which one (at least in the Anglo-American context) is often trained to think it?
KB: Firstly, thank you for having me in this space, and for the time you’ve given to the work. I see the whole of the book amuk as my translation of the word. A strong interest of mine over the past years has been to query what the west thinks of as objective ‘truth’ and expose it to be fiction, and also giving encouraging people to provide the grace of truthfulness to what is called ‘fiction’. amuk highlights what is ultimately speculative non-fiction, and the infinite possibilities that affords, in terms of so many languages (including Indonesian) not having time tenses. And isn’t it strange that innumerable translations from languages without time tenses, like Indonesian and Malay, pin down just one time tense for verbs? So, as the titular poem says, each translation from these languages is both right and always wrong.
The book is a way of elucidating how moving through languages is equivalent through moving between differing cosmologies, psychogeographies. Any translator who really understands two or more languages will know that translation is not at all a word for word equation, especially considering differing grammar rules—and again, it’s about moving away from that deeply colonial understanding, that there is only one kind of English rather than different Englishes, that there is an ‘objectively right’ translation at all. Translation is an art form, and is a form of creative writing, no two translators will translate the same poetry collection the same way.
FWR: The body and body parts arise frequently over the course of amuk. What, to you, does it mean to understand the body as implicated in language—beyond simply the mechanics of its production? On the other end, thinking of lines like “language cosmologies […] hunted at the throat,” what does it mean to you to configure language itself as a mode of embodiment, with all of its potentials and vulnerabilities?
KB: Thank you for pointing this out, I suppose the bodily is a preoccupation. I think that each bodymind being so unique means each interpretation of language is uniquely ours, and the beauty of language is communication being potentially misunderstood in so many ways, as well as the hope of being potentially understood in so many ways as well. It is the hope for community, in a sense. Just as, in the book, rage is a prayer, is a manifestation of hope.
FWR: On the note of embodiment: among the multiplicitous ways in which amuk exists, it declares itself very early on as being a performance. We are even told what voice-voices we are switching into at various points, from that of amuk to one that is human. Have you performed this work before? If you have, what was that experience like? If you haven’t, how do you imagine it being performed—especially when it comes to facets, like the brackets, that cannot be communicated using the voice, or parts like the wall of texts pronouncing “I love your rage”? What does it mean to you for this work to exist as or be understood as a piece lived bodily, viewed bodily, and not encountered only in the context of the page?
KB: Yes, the long poem ‘amuk’, that forms half of the book, was originally a performance lecture on climate justice commissioned by Edinburgh University. I’ve been fortunate enough to perform excerpts from it, as well as the entirety of the poem, since the book was published, as well. Each performance is different, as a big fan of improvisation, and I make use of the voices by using different accents. I recently performed that wall of ‘I love your rage’ by asking the audience to yell it with me—and they did! The beauty of poetry always existing in different sensorial states—audio, visual performance, text—is part of an ethic of disability justice, to me, and access as translation. I love how seemingly singular texts reveal different aspects of themselves in different mediums, and I certainly have a different relationship to the text each time I translate it, so to speak, through my body. And therefore a different relationship each time to the audience I’m trying to connect with. That’s a really astute observation that the bodily connection is foregrounded intentionally, because I hope this understanding of ‘amuk’ is felt bodily by others, as I feel it within myself. I think the work as text is just as bodily received as the work as audible performance—how you read visually is always very much your bodymind involved in the art.
FWR: Much of the book discusses the “mistranslations” (if one can call them that) wrought by colonial/hegemonic ignorance and arrogance, from “run amuck” to the poetic genre of the pantoum. What was your intention behind giving voice to human and nonhuman alike in this work—and particularly giving voice to an act of language itself? How did you first land on the term amuk to be the word at the heart of your collection?
KB: I’ve been thinking about the mistranslation of ‘amuk’ for years… To me, it encapsulates the history of colonialism, to mistranslate ‘rage’ into psychopathy or a ‘culture-bound’ homicidal syndrome or a ‘running amuck’ of chaos. It’s the theft of rage, by Dutch, Danish, Portuguese, English, and these languages deliberately mistranslated the word in the late 17th century, during violent colonisation. Criminalising and pathologising the rage of colonised peoples has been going on for centuries, as a very specific tool of oppressors. The history of this one word ‘amuk’ stretches all the way into what’s happening in the present, with the multiple genocides ongoing in Palestine, Papua, Sudan, Congo, and elsewhere. And with regards to the nonhuman, all of these continued colonial genocides are also environmental genocides, as I’m glad the book makes clear
To answer your first questions, I suppose voices are important to me because I felt the original and persistent soul of the word ‘amuk’ contains hundreds of millions of lives. In each word’s etymology in mis/translation is the history of so many voices.
FWR: One of the many innovative aspects of this collection is the way it uses punctuation, and specifically brackets. Brackets even open the book—framing the incantation of “bahasaku” and then filling, in various sizes and formats, the otherwise empty space of “In Praise Of.” In a book so much about both the idea of alternate possibilities of seeing or understanding and about what it means for such possibilities to be hidden or devalued, among other subjects, what led your decision of how you use brackets? Do the meanings and motives behind this punctuation change for you as we see them across different poems in the collection?
KB: Yes, it relates to the use of voices, I think—the truth that lies behind each word, and how it’s used in the English language. Saying the quiet part exists, the quiet part is out loud for a lot of people, and having to make it ‘quiet’ does something to you. And also drawing a boundary of respect for language. There is something protective about brackets for me, that the true meanings will always be there, no matter how much people try to obscure them. Protecting from disrespect what needs to be held in secret spaces, to avoid the surveillance of disrespectors. The great thing about brackets is that meanings and motives are also open to interpretation, throughout the book.
FWR: amuk is astounding both for what it communicates and how it communicates it; the stories it tells and the innovative ways in which it tells them. There are many instances of playing with or complicating form, and the book even includes and references work from other art areas like photography and film, as with the photos of hands and in the poem “preceding a prayer for the dead asian men who inspired a nightmare on elm street.” As you were writing this work, who were you looking towards as your models and inspirations (can be writers, musicians, painters, relatives—whomever!)? How would you say your experience in performance and working with artists in other mediums has influenced your work?
KB: Thank you so much. As you say, I come from a performance/interdisciplinary art background as well as a literary one. My PhD was in Visual Cultures. For me, these interests have always been tied to poetry, and to translation, and to a wide range of influences, and to collaboration with other artists. So ‘amuk’ starting out as a performed text—with the words on a screen as I performed it—was just an outpouring of all the different artistic influences I’d accumulated, probably many I’m not even conscious of. Certainly my family, and Minang and Javanese traditions of poetry as communal, as voiced. Certainly artists who use performance, such as Arahmaiani, and the late, great Cok Sawitri, and many musicians I admire. Certainly other disabled and ill artists in the literary and performance world.
FWR: Though a collection of original writing, your background as a translator certainly shines through in amuk, especially in its interest in language and the politics between languages. What do you feel that being a translator as well as a poet gives you access to? How do each of your practices inform the other? What do you feel like is/are the responsibility/ies of translators?
KB: Many thanks, I’m glad the translation background comes through. One understanding being a translator gives me access to is that the notion a translated poem is only good if ‘it reads as though it was first written in English’ is a false colonial paradigm, and again, one that presumes there’s only one kind of English in the world. And using multiple tenses in one verb is definitely something that comes from my understanding of language as a translator—it is actually quite weird that all verbs from non-tense-containing languages are translated in just one tense in English. I started playing with multiple tenses in one in my previous book, Ultimatum Orangutan, and decided to really go in on it for this one. Translators’ responsibilities are manifold, but I feel that ultimately, it is about humility and respect for languages as entire universes and philosophies of thought. I’m so glad you enjoyed the book, thanks again for having me.
- Published in Interview, Issue 30, Translation
THE JUNIPER 3 by Trudy Lewis
No one even remembered our dad’s sad song until Tate brought it back on TikTok. The angst and the ecstasy. The emo vocals and the math rock chord progressions. The long and whining bridge between curt, accusatory verses.
My mother killed me
My father ate me
My sister gathered up my bones
I’d heard it hundreds of times, of course. It was The Juniper 3’s anthem back in the aughts, before the drummer took up with the Sufis and Tate’s mom OD’d on oxycodone. The band only recorded one album, but they toured the Midwest for four years on the strength of cult favorites. For the last few months, they brought baby Tate along with them, leaving him in the motel with his teenage aunt while they banged it out at college music festivals or milked the instrumentals for hardcore fans in the clubs.
Maybe that’s why Tate was always vocalizing. I remember him rapping nursery rhymes when I was a toddler and beatboxing with his cheek next to mine, so that I could feel the rhythm pop and swell against my skin.
By then, Dad had gone back to programming and married my mom. It didn’t take him long to realize that he needed a responsible woman to help with Tate, who was already becoming difficult, throwing tantrums and refusing to sleep. So Dad got on a dating app, one of the early versions, where the developers clearly hadn’t worked out the kinks. Of course, people can make bad life choices without any help from an algorithm. But the external validation only encourages them to ignore their mistakes.
I was thirteen before they admitted anything was wrong. Meanwhile, I had been noticing for years. Dad steered around her in the kitchen, so that they never touched. She flinched as he leaned across her to open the glove compartment. Mom set the alarm for five a.m. so she could get some quiet before going into the insurance office, and Dad stayed up making music until one.
What did it measure anyway, that outmoded app? Sexual compatibility? Economic stability? Common interests? She must have claimed to enjoy music, at some point. After all, she insisted I learn an instrument and bragged to anybody who’d listen when I made first chair flute. But ever since I could remember, she’d been shouting at Dad to keep the volume down. When I was little, he’d bring his guitar into the living room and pass out triangles and maracas so we could play along. By elementary school, he was down in the basement experimenting with his sound system every night. By middle school, he didn’t even eat dinner with us, just grabbed a plate and took it down to his studio.
But they were adults. The person in our house I felt sorry for was Tate. You couldn’t turn Tate down. He was always spilling over with sound, humming, beatboxing, pretending to speak French or German, whistling, cracking his knuckles, snapping his fingers and clicking his tongue.
One day when he was nine or ten, he got detention for disrupting a school assembly and Mom asked if Dad thought the kid was on the spectrum. She certainly hoped so, because then maybe they could get some medication to even him out.
That was one of the few times I saw Dad explode at her, his voice cracking into sheer static and his thin, handsome face turning red as his goatee.
Because, of course, Tate’s mom had died of drugs.
I was thrilled to see him defending my brother for once. Usually, Dad wasn’t around when Mom punished Tate by making him go without his dinner and sit out in the mudroom in the dark. Once, she made him pee in the girl’s bathroom for getting into her make-up. Another time, when he had a meltdown in the electronics store, she left him there, driving halfway home before going back to pick him up. Even then, she sent me in to get him.
She was constantly asking why Tate couldn’t be more like me.
“See how Lena cleans her room without anyone asking?”
“Look how Lena sits still for the dentist.”
“Lena is so quiet that she gets an extra stick of gum.”
I’ll never understand why Tate didn’t hate me for the preferential treatment. I know I hated myself, that pitiful zombie who followed along behind her mother without any will of her own. If he was a regular person, my brother would avoid and resent me. But, being Tate, he loved me more than anyone else I’d ever known.
*
One afternoon just after my thirteenth birthday, we were sitting outside under the tulip tree when Mom drove up in her Escalade. Tate had been telling me about his confrontation with the gym teacher, punctuating the story with sound effects: the bouncing basketball, the squeaking bleachers, the banging lockers, the splashing in the pool. Sometimes it was hard to look at him when he talked. So I stared up through the branches instead, admiring the pink blossoms with mouths as wide as teacups and remembering how we pretended to drink out of them as kids. A plain brown bird perched next to one of them, singing a sad and piercing song.
The jerky motion of Mom’s vehicle let me know something was wrong. My throat closed, and I thought about the anti-anxiety pills I was supposed to be taking. I’d skipped a couple of days because they were making me dizzy, and now I felt a full-fledged panic attack coming on.
She pulled the car up too close, nearly veering into the yard, and emerged like a storybook pop-up, with her long neck, bright make-up, curly hair, and ruffled blouse. Even her smell was dangerous, a perfume so strong that it singed the hairs inside my nose.
“Get in the house, both of you. We’re not going to give the neighbors a free show.”
She herded us up the front steps, kicked the shoes out of the doorway, and slammed the front door behind her. I stayed as far away as possible without appearing to retreat, because I knew from experience that would only make things worse. Tate, of course, went right into the path of danger, taking her canvas tote from her and setting a hand on her arm.
“Bad day at the office?” he asked. “Trouble at the low-cal, no foul, farm insurance saloon?”
“You could say that. I found out my stepson is making a fool of himself on social media, letting his freak flag fly out over the internet for everyone to see.”
Tate blushed, bringing his new sideburns into focus. Although he’d always been a brunette, his facial hair was going to be as red as Dad’s.
“Yeah, it was just an experiment.” Tate said. “I wanted to see if I could drum up some interest in Dad’s old band. You’d be surprised how many people remember. And then some younger kids just like the bebop bipitty of the down and dirty beat.” He began demonstrating, pursing his lips and blasting out a series of verbal farts that shook the windowpanes and ruffled Mom’s hair.
She turned away, waving her hand in front of her face, and swung the sharpened blade of her profile toward me. “Lena, did you know about this?”
I couldn’t deny it. After all, I was the one who had filmed the video of Tate mugging for the camera in Dad’s studio, wearing his mom’s old blue fright wig and a vampire cape.
“It was just a goof.” I said. “We did it last week when we had early dismissal.”
Tate’s rendition was nothing like my father’s. It was speeded up and syncopated until it was nearly unrecognizable. My brother punctuated his lines with a flurry of clicks and whistles, his cheeks puffing out, then deflating with a loud pop over his cheekbones. His phrasing was so erratic you could only make out a few of the words. Mother. Father. Sister. Kill. Eat. Bones.
“And what about your father?”
“I was going to surprise the old duder once I got up to a million views.”
“Which should happen, like tomorrow, if it keeps on blowing up,” I said, bragging on my brother even though I ought to know better by now.
Tate tugged on the string of his sweatshirt. “It’s supposed to be a birthday present for his fortieth, you know, to show he’s not completely and irrevocably irrelevant.”
Mom rolled her eyes and pulled a miniature bottle of hand sanitizer out of her purse. “You need to take it down,” she said, pouring a clear puddle into her palm. “Take it down or I’ll cut up your learner’s permit and never let you drive the car again.” She rubbed her hands together, as if she had the problem solved.
“Don’t you even want to see it first?” I asked.
“Believe me, I’ve already got an earful from my colleagues. Take it down and your father never has to know.”
*
But I couldn’t let that happen. Not when Tate was so invested the project. I waited until Mom was asleep, then walked down the orange-carpeted stairs to the basement, feeling the shag catch between my bare toes. I smelled pot smoke and popcorn. I saw a flicker of fluorescents, heard the blunt attack of the guitar. My father was singing in his angry young man’s voice. The sound was much more confident than his speech, and for a minute, I wondered what my life would be like if I’d been raised by a singing father instead of a silent one.
He must have known what I was thinking, because he inserted my name into the music: Lena, Marlena, Marla, Marlene! The sound enveloped my body and warmed my ribs, until I could almost believe he was a regular father and not just a sad, defeated hipster who had given up all pretense of parental responsibility.
He sat at the bar in his day-glo T-shirt and hiking sandals, head bent over his guitar so I could see his bald spot, an icy, white thumbprint in the lava flow of red. Behind him, a huge poster showed The Juniper 3 at the height of its fame: Dad skinny, in horn rims and a paisley button-down, the drummer rocking a fedora, Tate’s mother ripped as an apocalyptic warrior in her leather vest and shredded tights.
“What’s up?” he asked, gesturing for me to speak over the music.
“It’s Tate,” I said. “He did something amazing. And now Mom wants him to throw it away.”
“What was it, this spectacular thing your brother did?”
I handed him my phone.
Dad’s face went white and his hands slid off the guitar.
He pulled it close, then blinked and adjusted the volume. There was Tate, puffing and blowing, clicking and tic-ing, bringing out the banger side of Dad’s mumblecore song.
“That’s it, all right. Though I don’t know if I’d recognize it if you hadn’t pointed it out to me.”
“It’s heading for a million views.”
“Which translates to what, about twenty bucks and fifteen minutes of fame?”
I shrugged. “Who knows? Anyway, Tate did it for you. For your birthday.”
He replayed the video, slapping his leg in time to the beat. “I never knew he had any interest in that old tune.”
“Mom’s telling him he has to take it down.”
He rubbed at the screen, like he was trying to wipe away a smudge.
“His mom always thought he’d grow up to be a musician. I mean his biological mother, Krista.”
Krista. The bass player with the shaved head and the arms bigger than Dad’s.
“She was deliberately trying to get pregnant, you know. It wasn’t an accident, like your mom always assumes. Krista went to a psychic who said it might be now or never. Why she consulted a psychic and not a doctor, I’ll never know. Then after five months, she finally missed her period and we knew that Tate was on his way.”
I blushed, thinking of three months earlier, when I found the first clot of blood in my underpants and had to borrow a pad from my frenemy Blair Simpson who was applying eyeliner in the girls’ bathroom. But I felt a kind of pride too, knowing that Dad wasn’t too embarrassed to discuss the female anatomy with me.
Dad started the video again. “I guess I’ll have to talk to Mom.”
*
Sometimes, I envied Tate because he had another mother, even if she was dead. At least there was a reason he got treated like a stepchild. Though Mom favored me, her attention could be dangerous, and her praise sometimes felt like a curse. She monitored my weight, my schoolwork, and my medication. She made a chart where I was supposed to record my flute practice. She was always nagging me about me getting a solo in the band concert or raising my grades. Tate, on the other hand, she could ignore for days, until he did something disruptive.
But the TikTok really got under her skin—maybe because it was so public. Now there was no way to hide the eccentricities of her adopted son, who, though he had never been diagnosed with any particular condition, was clearly some kind of genetic anomaly. When I came home from school the next day, she was already there.
“I got off early for good behavior,” she said, switching out her sunglasses and snapping them into her purse. “I thought we could go out for ice cream.”
“What about Tate?”
“Just us girls. So we don’t have to talk over the noise.”
She hadn’t been so chatty when I got my period, only tossed me some pads and told me I better stay away from the boys.
But now her voice was low and sweet, melting as quickly as soft serve.
“Did Dad say anything to you?” I asked.
“Your Dad has bent my ear with fish stories and fairytales, most of which I attempt to ignore.”
She drove me downtown to the Sweet Spot where she ordered a cup of mango sorbet for herself and chocolate marshmallow on a waffle cone for me. We ate our treats outside, watching little kids smudge their faces and dogs beg for the tail ends of their cones.
“Should we get something for Dad and Tate?”
“They already eat enough sweets, don’t you think? Besides, I wanted to talk with you about the TikTok.”
“Tate didn’t take it down?” I asked, even though I knew he hadn’t because I checked the app multiple times a day.
“No, and now your Dad is backing him up. It’s all this ego he has around his college band. Sometimes, I think he’ll never get over it. I can’t imagine what people are saying about your brother’s performance. But I can’t see the comments because I don’t have an account.”
I could tell where this was going. I licked at a drip of chocolate that was sliding down the side of my cone and tried to buy some time.
“Lena, I wouldn’t be asking if I didn’t think it was for your brother’s own good.”
“Hmm,” I said, biting off a brittle piece of waffle.
“You know, it’s a thin line between admiration and sick curiosity. And I think we both know the kind of attention your brother tends to attract.”
I thought about the kids who’d piled up on his Insta, the lacrosse player who did an imitation of his stutter, the language arts teacher who made him stand at the front of the room and recite a tongue twister every time he talked out of turn in class.
“OK,” I said. “But only because I don’t want him to have to delete it.”
I texted her my password and she immediately got on the app.
I thought about the comments I’d seen.
Sick vibes, Dude. Props to your old man
When we saw The Juniper 3 in Milwaukee, they played for two hours and the bass player flashed her tits
This kid is hilarious
Seriously, what kind of yodeling is this? It reminds me of those African throat-singers
Just think about the kind of head this guy could give
“Well?” I asked.
“I’m reading.”
“Why do you hate The Juniper 3 so much anyway?”
“It nearly killed your father. And now it’s doing a good job on his son.”
*
By Dad’s birthday, Tate’s TikTok had hit a million views. A few followers contacted him, asking for signed memorabilia. A college radio station in Kansas asked if Tate and Dad would perform a father-son duo at their fall festival. A music industry scout wrote asking if Tate had any other songs. Even Dad’s drummer got in touch after a solid decade of silence, wondering if he’d like to play a set of old Juniper 3 numbers for a Sufi fundraiser.
There was no way anyone was taking the video down now. I bought a penny whistle for Tate, even though it was Dad’s birthday and not his. I thought maybe I could teach him the basics so he could add a legitimate instrument to his next video. We celebrated with dinner at a Japanese restaurant, where they threw pieces of meat and vegetables onto your plate like confetti. Mom got a shrimp stuck in her hair.
Dad told us he was looking for a job where he could work remotely and spend more time on his music. Tate, who must have picked up on the permissive atmosphere, asked if he could quit school and finish his degree online. He’d never liked the academic gig much anyway and now that the bullies had started sucking up to him, it was even more obscene.
Mom didn’t relish the idea of everyone hanging around the house, making more messes for her to clean up. But she didn’t actually say no. Was I imagining it, or did I see her touch Dad’s leg under the table? For once, I could see why they were together, his tender voice and her raspy laughter, his deep dimples and her pixie face.
*
Of course, the truce didn’t last for long. Dad’s new job turned out to involve a lot of travel in addition to the down time at home, and we saw less of him than usual. Tate’s TikTok started attracting negative attention when some activists claimed it mocked the disabled. And I was having more episodes, losing my balance while standing in the lunch line, my mouth so dry it began to affect my embouchure when I was playing my flute. I hadn’t entirely stopped taking my medication but, at this point, I couldn’t distinguish the symptoms from the side effects. I felt alienated from my friends, who didn’t want to talk about anything but Tate, begging me to put them in one of his videos. Meanwhile, Mom had started monitoring my social media accounts, demanding my passwords and editing my posts.
Tate wasn’t making much progress with his online courses. As far as I knew, he still hadn’t recorded another song. He never took out his Airpods and if I wanted to talk to him, I had to reach in and pull one off him, like breaking a wishbone.
“Hey. What’s up? Is anybody in there?”
“Hey, what’s going down, sister? Beep-bop you later on the B-B-B-B side.”
I admit I understood Mom’s frustration, trying to communicate with a person who’d rather use his words to make music than actually tell you what he means.
After a couple of weeks, he stopped taking showers and wore the same gray hoodie every day, until it was covered with mustard and ketchup stains. He didn’t shave his beard when it came in red, just let tufts accumulate like random feathers on his lip and chin. It began to look like he might flunk out of high school. What was Mom going to do with him then? According to her, he was Dad’s responsibility. But according to Dad, Tate was nearly an adult who could make all major life decisions on his own.
One day, when I came home from band practice, I saw Tate sitting on the floor of the mudroom, his face hidden behind the coats.
“What’s up?” I said, sitting down next to him. “Is anything wrong?”
For the first time I could remember, he was completely still, so that I noticed how long his legs had gotten, stretched in front of him in his outgrown jeans, one leg ripped over the kneecap and the other covered in purple ink.
Mom called from the kitchen, her voice animated with insider information. “Your brother is sulking because he got some negative comments on his Ticky-Tacky. Maybe you can cheer him up.”
I gave him a punch on the shoulder, and he still didn’t respond.
“Come on, Tate. Don’t let the haters get to you.”
What could be bad enough to make him go silent?
I pulled out my phone and scrolled through the comments, where I saw my own profile picture, a cartoon goldfinch, next to words I would never say. That I was the sister of this dimwit genius. That I was already struggling with depression and anxiety. That I begged him to take down the video so I didn’t have to quit school or die of shame.
I felt a stab in my stomach like the worst cramp I could imagine and my mouth went so dry I couldn’t feel my own tongue. But I didn’t need it anymore. I had someone else speaking for me.
“Ask him when he’s going to stop pouting and clean out the mudroom,” Mom called. “If he’s giving up on his schoolwork, at least he could do something to pull his weight around the house.”
I shook Tate’s shoulder, but he didn’t respond.
“It wasn’t me who wrote that,” I whispered. “I promise. It was Mom.”
He slumped toward me, his weight shifting onto my shoulder, like he might consider forgiving me after all.
“I gave her my password. I know it was clueless. But she just kept badgering me until I couldn’t hold out anymore.”
I breathed in the sour smells of lunch meat and marijuana, mustard and cereal, oily hair and stale sweat. I thought of all the times I couldn’t look at him because his face made me dizzy. I pulled harder at his shoulder, wishing that I could go back and stand up to my mother. Then he toppled over, the weight of his head in my lap. For a minute, I thought he was just goofing. Then I looked down and saw the broken veins marking up his face like red pixels, the spot of blood in his eyeball, the bungy cord wrapped around his neck.
In some ways, it was the first good look I ever got at him and I didn’t recognize what I saw.
*
After the emergency workers left, Mom gave me a pill, and I fell into a sleep so deep I couldn’t find its edges. Then I woke up in the middle of the night, sweating into the school clothes I’d never managed to change out of. Lying there looking at my hands on the comforter, I almost convinced myself it was just a nightmare: the hateful TikTok comment, the silence in the mudroom, Tate’s head heavy and still on my lap. Then I felt my stomach split open, ripping like an outgrown one-piece bathing suit from groin to navel when I realized again it was true.
Even though it was two a.m., I could see the light under my door and hear Mom talking to my father in her dripping, soft-serve voice.
“Honey, you should try to sleep.”
“First Krista, then Tate. What is it that I do to people?”
“It would never have happened if we’d gotten him on medication.”
“I don’t know. Look at Lena. The pills don’t seem to be doing her much good.”
“He was disturbed, Babe. He was suffering. He was not equipped to live in this world.”
There was a long pause and my neck prickled as I imagined her touch on his shoulder, her hand in his hair. How many times had she comforted me like that, tenderizing me like meat before going in for the kill.
“This TikTok incident was too much for him. I know you were flattered by the attention. But it’s a lot of pressure on a kid trying to kick-start a moribund career.”
His groan seemed to come up from beneath the house, trailing like a tree root though my intestines. It unearthed worms and mushrooms, tore through grass and spattered mud. This time, Dad wasn’t the musician, but only the instrument. And it was my mother who played him like a cheap penny whistle, putting her own spin on the tune.
*
Of course, Mom handled all the arrangements. She scheduled the funeral in the Presbyterian church where she and Dad got married and forbade any mention of suicide. She had to give Tate credit, at least, for choosing a method that left a presentable corpse.
I couldn’t stand the idea of people coming to gloat at his funeral, gratified that his one spectacular success had ended in the ultimate failure. Why was it that the other big life rituals—weddings, anniversaries, bar mitzvahs, birthdays—were by invitation only? It’s only at the end they let the whole un-curated world in to gawk at your remains.
At Mom’s request, I prepared a flute solo to play in between the scripture reading and the eulogy. I’d been practicing Bach’s Partita in A Minor for months, getting ready for the state competition, but I never thought I would have to perform it under that kind of stress. Somehow, I made it to the front of the church in my black recital gown and waded into the opening bars of the Sarabande.
I looked from the audience members with their smug living faces to the still body in the casket, nothing like the real Tate. Then I locked eyes with Mom, who was dabbing a Kleenex over a face dry and perfect, makeup unsmeared. She knew I’d never tell anyone what she did to my brother. Because accusing her would incriminate me.
I wandered through the Bach until I found the nodes of Dad’s song: the C and the A, the trill and the rest, the aching whole note and the treacherous bridge. I was on my way now, playing the song without lyrics, telling the story without words. The tune sprang free from the score and flew around the church, echoing off the rafters and lingering like a ghost over the pews.
Some of the kids from school recognized the music. They stood up and flashed peace signs or pounded their fists over their hearts.
And Dad, who had been drifting, came up to join me, filling in the sad, mad lyrics of the final verse.
*
Afterwards, Mom went into a flurry of redecorating. She cleaned out the mudroom, scrapped the living room furniture, and took all of Tate’s possessions to Goodwill. She finally had the quiet house she always wanted. Meanwhile, Dad flew to California to meet with the industry professionals who’d contacted him after Tate’s death.
As for me, I spent most of my time outside in the tulip tree. The blossoms were gone by then, but I could still make out their melon smell on my fingers. And when the branches moved above me, I thought I could hear Tate whispering: mother, father, sister. Sometimes, Krista joined him, harmonizing in her reedy alto. And if I was very still, I could even hear my father singing along in his angry young man’s voice.
After what had happened, I was afraid he’d never come back to us and that I’d be left alone with my mother, growing more and more inseparable from her. Even if he wasn’t much of a parent, at least Dad formed some buffer between us, and I missed his silent approval every time I passed the basement door.
Then, a week and a half later, he texted to say that he’d signed a music deal and was coming home to celebrate. Did we get the gifts he sent us? They should be arriving any day now: a necklace for me, a freezer for the mudroom, a designer purse for mom. It was all Tate’s doing, bringing good things to his family even after he was gone.
I was sitting in the tulip tree when Dad drove home from the airport and Mom ran out of the house to greet him, so excited that she hadn’t even bothered to put on a sunhat or slip into her shoes. Even the tree shook its branches, welcoming Dad home.
But I thought heard something else in the branches above me, a bird singing a familiar tune.
The mother and the father. The sister and the brother. The killing and the eating and the bloody bag of bones.
I reached in the pocket of my shorts for my phone so I could play Tate’s version, remembering how happy he’d been when he recorded it. My chest expanded and I felt a strange comfort in the the clicks and pops, the garbled lyrics and the explosive beats.
Then I looked down at Mom and made sure she heard it too. Her expression went flat, weighted down with memory. Did she even feel sorry for what she’d done to my brother? Did she expect me to forgive her? Or did she believe that keeping the secret would bring us even closer, uniting us forever in a sinister sisterhood?
I gripped a tree branch and shook it as hard as I could. If I could bring the whole tree down on top of her, that’s what I’d do.
But I only managed to startle the poor bird, a bright Blue Jay who flew down in front of me, sailing past my mother and off into the woods.
- Published in Featured Fiction, Fiction, Issue 30
FALL FOR IT by Claire Hopple
After they escort us out, we are told to wait here. The here being a square of sidewalk.
If you could see the two of us on this sidewalk square. Trying to maintain appearances. It’s a delicate operation. A heavy quiet.
Some convenience store employees switch off who gets to peer out the window at us. They take turns and they take their time having a look.
Ben is carrying around his old fourth grade science project. He refuses to set it down. It’s a standard volcano, but he never quite finished the eruption part. The magma reservoir’s empty. It won’t be petrifying any ancient civilizations anytime soon. When he showed it to me, I told him my school had an arts and science fair (not exclusive to science), and that my project had been a short story about a giant blob overtaking a city, and he said that was just typical. The course of history changed on that fateful day of the Heritage Elementary Arts and Science Fair— probably! I think I got third place in my category. I don’t think there were more than three people in my category.
Now I sit here on the concrete and I see it all coming. I know how things will turn out for us. But not Ben. He appears caught unawares at all times. His face looks like a damp sandwich. There’s no other way to explain it. I guess his face is stuck like that. He’s forever cornered.
You wouldn’t say his volcano is dismantled per se. More like lethargic. Painted rivulets of what must be molten lava punctuate its sides.
We exchange information about the comings and goings of passersby on the street while we wait. I scootch away, tapping the sidewalk.
“Hang on a sec. Maybe there’s a trapdoor under here,” I say.
Ben shrugs, in all likelihood too busy pondering his next move to respond.
“Call the embassy. They’ll sort the whole thing out. Write this down!” I start shouting.
No one knows what to say. And by no one, I mean me.
So that’s the situation.
He can’t let go of his science project, yet he insists on continuing his errands. Turning the whole day into an expedition of sorts. A sad one. Can there be sad expeditions? They seem part of our destiny. Which adds up. Because otherwise, we’d be unstoppable.
We sit and blink like everyone else. When really, we are untamed animals.
They let us go. This teenager wearing a polyester vest walks out and says, “You can go.”
The whole escapade is very anticlimactic. There’s nothing they can do. No charges they can press for carrying around your childhood science project. There they go, attempting to press charges like you can press a button. I imagine a big red button with the word CHARGES on it, and there’s some old white guy in a suit sitting at a large desk swiveling around in his chair, caressing the button and laughing. That can’t be how it works. Or can it?
Admittedly, he looked vaguely threatening in there, hauling the volcano in a nearly somnambulant state. But come on. Who isn’t a threat?
We leave. Ben drives his car like a movie prop. His steering is all over the place. Somehow, I’m noticing this for the first time. I check behind me for a projector screen with a phony background playing on it just in case.
He gets panicky about yellow lights. You never know if he’s going to accelerate really hard or hit the brakes or sort of waffle around and make these timid little mewling noises while going the exact same medium amount of speed.
Earlier, in the store, I asked him why he was doing this, why he felt the need to carry this thing around, and he said, “To get the blue ribbon.”
He seemed a bit mysterious to me after that. I liked the feeling and wanted to leave it there. Knowing what he meant would ruin it in a sense, and so I didn’t ask any follow-up questions.
“And now it’s time for Amelia’s piano recital,” he finally says, tapping on the steering wheel with the volcano nestled in his lap.
“That won’t do,” I say.
“What do you mean? I can’t go alone.”
“Yes, but I can. She’s my niece.”
“What are you saying?”
I think about reaching over him to open his door handle, then ejecting him and his failed project out of the vehicle and onto the pavement. Somehow making it look like an accident. Corralling the car into a parking spot without moving from the passenger seat.
To get the blue ribbon. The blue ribbon of murder. An art and a science.
I stay buckled. I stare at my seatbelt and say nothing— but one of the many rewarding tasks of camaraderie with my fellow humans.
“This is really important. I don’t know when I’ll see anyone again. I’ve booked a trip and I’m not sure when I’ll return,” Ben says.
“Oh yeah?”
I feign interest to throw off suspicion. To have him at my disposal. I’m not used to it though. I’m always interested. Even when I shouldn’t be.
“Yeah, I’m going to visit the real Bigfoot. Prove his existence and all that. Develop a pact with him. Maybe even a secret language, who knows.”
“A commemorative plaque,” I say.
“Huh?”
“You should get him a commemorative plaque for the occasion. That’d be a nice gesture,” I say.
I can tell he’s waiting for more from me. So I cup his kneecap in my palm. Nice and snug.
“These things happen,” I say, not really knowing what I’m saying.
“Anyway, I wanted to tell you first,” he says, glancing down at his knee and back up at the road a few times.
My hand is still cupping his kneecap and I squeeze it firmly. With my grip strength, I could pop that cap right off.
I release my hand. That was close. Too close.
I open his sunroof and lift his project up through it, showcasing his handiwork for the whole town to see. This paper volcano is part of my life now. That’s the main thing.
I examine Ben’s damp sandwich of a face, awaiting a signal.
GIFTS by Samantha Neugebauer
Marie and Ms. Simpkin’s unexpected meeting on the park’s northwest corner got their lunch off to a bad start. Neither felt quite ready to commit themselves to conversation, yet what else could they do? They would need to proceed around the gated park and down Irving Place together as if the ten minutes of solitude they’d lost had been no loss at all.
Walking side by side, each suspected the other’s inner disappointment, though neither could right it, and the more questions they posed to one another, the more each mourned their solitary stroll and the things they would have seen and pondered on their own. In the body, disappointment, the quotidian sort, wedged firmly between tension and imagination, the only paths outward. Taking shorter steps than she was accustomed to taking, Marie fixed her gaze on the old woman’s plump, jaundiced hand clutching an ornate snakehead cane; its one eye a bright costume sapphire, the other, a tarnished cavity.
Ms. Simpkin had been Marie’s professor in her first-year writing seminar, The Palace Versailles, the previous spring. On the first day of class, Ms. Simpkin had arrived late, out of breath, large, and mummified in a floral, gauzy scarf. Their class had met in a tight, square, windowless room in the library, the walls the color of a hearing-aid, and the first thing Ms. Simpkin had uttered was that if a shooter came in, they’d all be killed. “You should demand more for your money—or your parents’ money,” she’d told them with a wicked chuckle.
Now it was late June, and Marie could barely recall how exactly the lunch had come about. She must have arranged it near the end of the term. She must have approached Ms. Simpkin after class and, in a surge of daring and career-mindedness, encouraged a further meeting. But had Ms. Simpkin suggested a meal off campus and the particular date? Marie could not recall any kind of back and forth. She felt funny about it, and all summer, she’d jailed the lunch inside a thick blue circle within her calendar notebook so that she could forget about it until the time came.
Circumstances forced Marie to be a meticulous calendar user. She had three part-time jobs and an active social life. The previous night, she’d been drinking at El Cantinero with her friend Will, a screenwriting major. For a few months, Will had been crushing on the handsome older man who tended bar there, and though it was beyond Will’s current powers to draw the bartender’s interest, Marie and Will made a game of studying the bartender’s words and mannerisms for signs of hidden affection. For her services, Will bought Marie as many Blue Hawaiians as she wanted. It was 2009, Marie was nineteen, and Blue Hawaiians were the only drink she was sure she liked. She drank five that night, as well as three large glasses of water, and she and Will were the last people to leave the bar at four in the morning.
And in three hours, after her lunch with Ms. Simpkin, Marie would need to report to her dorm for her overnight R.A. shift, where in exchange for summer housing and ten meals a week, she served in an on-call rotation, minding the other students staying in New York over the summer completing unpaid internships and taking extra classes. The position also required Marie to work thirty hours a week at the university housing office. In addition, she cashiered fifteen hours at the Union Square Barnes and Noble and babysat for a Tribeca family on Saturday afternoons and Tuesday nights. Although Marie considered the babysitting the least impressive of her jobs, she enjoyed it most. It got her out into the city and into an interesting lofted apartment—her possible future!—and the two little girls weren’t the spoiled monsters Marie’s mother had told her to expect.
*
Daria had seen something in Marie, a little talent, but now whatever she’d seen did not seem enough to warrant this outing. A haze of pity, directed at Daria (!), floated on the edges of the large-chested girl, who was chattering gently about her sibling structure back home in “Delco.” Marie was the eldest apparently, and Marie thought this meant something, although she faltered at saying so directly because, Daria intuited, Marie didn’t know what it meant, and staying one step away from the meaning allowed the meaning to be more mysterious. If the girl wanted to be a writer, she’d need to overcome that. They waited for the light. Daria checked the clasp on her dark floral carpetbag. “What about you?” Marie asked. “Do you have siblings?”
“Siblings?” Daria hollered. “Yes, yes. Two brothers and a sister.” To be kind, she added, “I’m the eldest.”
Marie smiled knowingly, knowing nothing. Not for the first time Daria scolded herself—she could not continue to use her heart to make all her decisions.
Daria was sixty-four, a contract faculty, and lived in a one-bedroom apartment in Brooklyn. She had moved to New York in 1965. Initially, she’d worked as a magazine copy editor while earning her master’s. She stayed and stayed, working and working and writing novels that never sold. In her chic way, she’d scorned marriage, children, and large single houses. She’d seen so much! So much!
A whoosh from a too-close bike startled them both, and too soon, Marie asked, “Do you have any animals?” wearing an indulgent smile, and Daria wanted to whack the girl with her cane.
*
Inside the tavern, they were seated in a tall booth in a far, dark corner where Ms. Simpkin immediately ordered a burger deluxe and an unsweetened ice tea, and Marie said she would have the same as her friend. Her friend—Marie had known the phrase had been the wrong choice as it was leaving her mouth, and she kicked her inner self for saying it. She had become more nervous since sitting down, and she found only a smidgen of relief in that Ms. Simpkin seemed too preoccupied sighing and arranging her large handbag on the booth cushion to notice what Marie had said.
Middle-aged men in pale blue dress shirts, the sort of men who looked to Marie as if they ran before work, filled the tavern’s tables. They ate easily and spoke assertively to one another like they had all the time in the world. Opposite Marie and Ms. Simpkin was an enormous black-and-white portrait of O. Henry, his handlebar mustache as long as Marie’s plastic straw. Marie felt glad to see the portrait; she would use it as a conduit to bring up the writer, as Will had advised her to do at El Cantinero. Will had been a student in The Palace Versailles too. He was from Connecticut and his parents worked “in the city,” so he knew that O. Henry had written his short story “The Gift of the Magi” at this very tavern.
Will had also said that if he were Marie, he’d cancel with Ms. Simpkin. “Agreeing to it was a moment of temporary insanity,” he explained to her. “You’ll never see Ms. Simpkin again anyway. Thank god. It really doesn’t matter! Just email her and say you’re sick and come back to my apartment and have a sleepover with me.” For reasons she hadn’t quite worked out yet, Will’s insistence that the meeting “didn’t matter” irritated Marie.
Marie had stopped by The Strand bookstore that morning to read “The Gift of the Magi.” She chose The Strand because she felt clumsy inside the Barnes and Noble when she wasn’t working. She had not felt that way before she’d worked there. In the same way, she avoided certain streets in Tribeca when she wasn’t scheduled to babysit.
*
They were discussing Michael Jackson, who’d died the previous day. Ms. Simpkin took the top bun off her burger and tucked it inside her napkin, then proceeded to cut and eat her burger like a steak. “Michael adored Versailles,” Ms. Simpkin said.
When Marie mentioned the pop king’s child abuse allegations, their budding conversation immediately deflated. Ms. Simpkin sighed with gloomy concern.
To Marie, the teacher seemed equally irritated by her bringing up Jackson’s errors as she was by the errors themselves. Fazed, Marie gestured feebly to O. Henry’s portrait, hoping to redeem herself. She told Ms. Simpkin that she liked the line in “The Gift of the Magi” about the tiny mirror hanging in the couple’s apartment, and quoted: “A person could see only a little of himself at a time.” Daria, pleased and touched by the girl’s preparatory instincts, responded kindly. Daria felt better about making time for the lunch—she would bestow upon the girl some valuable advice after all.
After a final bite of dry patty, she said, “I’ll be frank with you, Marie. If you truly want to write, you should leave New York. Keep your overhead low.” Marie dipped her fry in ketchup, smiling and nodding politely.
“You don’t believe me. But a girl like you won’t be able to do both. You think your thoughts and your feelings are unique, but they’re not, especially here, and what will happen is your peers with more means will get those thoughts and feelings down before you.”
Marie’s eyes froze blankly. Her ears felt stuffed with cotton.
Daria continued, “Then more girls will come, younger and younger than you, and your experiences will feel older and smaller and more overdone.”
*
Later, on the train home, Daria forgot nearly everything about the lunch except her own magnanimity and the girl’s tepid responses, especially during the latter half of their meal when Daria had given the girl some tough love. Marie, Daria contemplated, might not have been ready to be given such sincerity, but Daria felt no remorse: her gift would remain inside Marie and deny her the delusion that nobody had warned her. With a sense of calm and self-satisfaction, and feeling that twinkle of purpose that never lasted long enough, she folded her hands over the carpetbag perched on her lap and enjoyed the skyline view as the train crossed the East River.
Meanwhile, strolling down Broadway back to her dorm, Marie checked her phone. Will had already texted four times:
How’d it go???
I can’t get out of bed
Could I still be drunk??
Tell me everythinggg
Marie’s first instinct was to call Will right then and tell him about the unfortunateness of the impromptu meeting beside Gramercy Park and the long, dragging walk, and the almost-getting-hit by the bicycle, and the prettiness of the tavern’s tin roof, and a few of Ms. Simpkin’s odd comments about this and that. But when her mind reached the part where Ms. Simpkin gave her the writing life advice—the part that would be of most interest to Will too, she supposed—a mixture of protectiveness and self-consciousness strained her. She could, she thought, share what Ms. Simpkin had said, leaving out its specific application to Marie’s own situation.
Marie veered to the side of the sidewalk and leaned against a brick wall between two shops. People appeared, disappeared. Buses, shouts, small and large dogs. Long columns of gold light reposed in charming delicacy across the building ahead. Marie felt significant in this atmosphere of significance. She fell into a premonition of Will’s reaction to Ms. Simpkin’s advice. She heard his blithe laugh, his oh-my-god-no, and then, his voice becoming a little more serious as he actually considered what their former teacher had said. Will could be serious when he wanted to be.
He would say something like, “She might be onto something,” then quickly dismiss it again because he could, because he could “never leave New York,” and Marie would agree with him, “of course.” Marie leaned forward; the rough brick was scratching her neck and the backs of her shoulders. A small woman with an enormous Saint Bernard climbed the steps of a townhouse on the street parallel. Once she and her canine were inside her door, Marie imagined what else she might say to Will. Perhaps: “Promise me I’m not going to end up like Ms. Simpkin!” and Will would assure her, no, no way, never, and Marie started forward, feeling their harmony lifting her and levitating her heart into her eyes so they shone like that charming light as she strode ahead. One saw these young women all the time—coming, going, the knowing far back behind their eyes, then rushing forward at unexpected intervals, like a cool draft entering a house, dropping the temperature before departing again in some mysterious way.