On the Saturday before Mother’s Day, Envy Nail & Spa is an explosion of pink. Pale pink like rosé and the velvety petals of peonies. Hot pink like bubblegum and the ruffled edges of sunset.
My mother is dying. We’re not quite sure when, but one needs be prepared. This shouldn’t come as a surprise. She’s ninety-two, after all, and has been ailing for quite a while. Ninety-two, and has outlived anyone in the family by decades. Her parents, her sister, her husband, a child. All her in-laws, several nieces and nephews, countless friends.
Martha Witt is the author of the novel Broken as Things Are (Henry Holt, 2004; Picador, 2005). She has received a Fulbright grant and fellowships from Yaddo, Ragdale, and VCCA colonies. Her short fiction, some of which has been translated into Italian, appears in national and international literary journals. Italica Press has published four novels and two plays she co-translated with Mary Ann Frese Witt.
The power has been out for four days, after a bomb cyclone ripped the tops off redwood trees and deposited them around the neighborhood. Initially, my daughter, well past the cusp of patience, asked for story ideas so that she could write and keep the boredom at bay, but of course, my stories are not what she wants. This habit is about a year old, soliciting my ideas only to find a world of her own—hovering, perfecting the art of the unsaid empty space.
After my mom remarried, Dad bought an ice cream stand. It was the kind of place that was open only during the summer months and attracted the local crowd. I’m not sure what prompted him to buy this business. Maybe it was a tit for tat move? You know like, she got a new husband? I’ll get a new side hustle. He named it the Dairy Oasis, so who knows. Maybe it was more safe harbor than life well-lived revenge.
When we wake up in the morning Sam says, “Okay, get up, let’s go. Before you start distracting me.” Before I start distracting him. Like it’s my fault he just wants to get me naked all the time. By the time I’m putting on my pants he’s on the couch checking his email. I’ve already decided that this isn’t happening again.
We’re erasing the whiteboard. We’re not going to drive the Pacific Coast Highway as planned. We won’t hike a trail in the Olympic Mountains, beachcomb for agates on the Oregon coast, or spot migrating shorebirds.
On the day that Christine Blasey Ford testified about being assaulted by Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh, we found Newton, our nineteen-year-old cat, cowering behind the toilet. Each time we reached for him, he recoiled.
My husband adopted Newton before he and I met. . .
I awake to the shrill of chickens, nature’s alarm clock. My two sisters, with whom I’m sharing a bedroom and two bare mattresses, retreat under their blankets like hermit crabs to their shells. Avoiding the hazy dawn that spills out of the window and into the room. . .
Crazy because ten years has gone by and still, I’m not as old as you were when we dated. Would you call what we did “dating”? I used to begin every story about us with “When I was 18, I dated my teacher,” but now I find myself saying, “We had a two-year relationship.” But even that word —“relationship”— it feels too— what?
There is an absence of what I have grown accustomed to: tension, uncertainty, fear. I am acutely aware of how, next to my Uncle, the world is a good place with good people and I am not something that has already been broken. I am eight-years-old and tired all the time. [. . .]
I am floating down an open, empty stretch of I-95, listening to the stock market crash, trying to figure out what I am doing—why I am going home—to take care of whom. It is the twelfth of March, and I have decided that I am coming back for my brother.[…]
This is not my story to tell. I was only a brief visitor to this land. Today, I read that the old town of Kashgar has been torn down and modernized. The Id Kah Mosque is closed to both visitors and worshippers. The city is rife with police checkpoints, and security cameras with facial recognition technology are installed at every street corner.[…]
What children of survivors add to the gift is a moral imperative of conveying knowledge; feelings of being dwarfed by the past; guilt at being alive; and kinship with other descendants.[…]
The white male body that exists and speaks—and shops and wears a mask (or doesn’t)—can also wield a gun, and kneel, and kill, as Minneapolis Police Officer Derek Chauvin proved when he crushed the life out of George Floyd.[…]
He ain’t my favorite person, she’d say, but he is your father. A simple truth he ignored, never once attempting to bridge the gap. Lived ten minutes away, worked even closer, but he was like a ghost, an apparition, someone we fabricated a connection with but who would ultimately vanish.[…]
As anyone who has ever heard a black comic perform or listened to a rap song knows, we don’t do
humblebragging. When you are the bomb, you simply say so.[…]
So, if I feel so alienated from gender, why should it be such a determining factor in who I would like? I can’t imagine making any woman who likes men happy. Wouldn’t we all be better off just liking everyone?[…]
My feelings didn’t shift, but my body did. I knelt beside you on our bed and brought your head to my shoulder. I repeated her message. But you already knew. You had seen my face change.[…]
The small FedEx box arrived in DC bearing an unlikely return address: Peter C. Hulsebosch III, Houston, TX. Surely this wasn’t from my brother, the brother who’d once told me he would never send a card, much less a gift, because then I’d get used to it […]
Simian Immunodeficiency Virus adapted to live in the body of a person, and then the window was pried
open: open to spread through the villages of Cameroon, and then the rest of Africa, and then the world
beyond, until it found its way to a club in the suburbs of New Orleans and into the lifeblood of the man
who lived next door, my uncle.[…]
I take solace in knowing how to make my father’s chicken adobo, because when he died in 2017, it was one of the many dishes he had made for us that wasn’t lost to us forever with his sudden passing[…]
During childhood I heard the stories about the shtetls and the pogroms that escalated to become the
Holocaust where 6 million Jews—two thirds of the Jewish population in Europe— were killed for no other
reason than for being Jewish.[…]
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