101 Words

The bus air is stale: a thick stew of sweat and synthetic upholstery made fuggish by the recycled air blasting hot from dusty vents.

She shifts her grocery bag onto her lap from the seat beside her, revealing a crumpled old receipt. She picks it up. Six cans of cheap beer, overpriced bubble bath, and a packet of lamb’s kidneys.

Someone by the doors, all city clothes and white airbuds, is shouting at thin air—the builders won’t be out until the 22nd, would you bloody believe it.

She frowns, looking down at her own shopping, picturing someone else’s evening.

You always knew she’d go. Like a train that isn’t scheduled to stop at your station, she whooshed past making her own wind.

You remember tucking precious hairs behind her ear as she recounted dreams, before they were lost strand by strand with each morning coffee.

Everything ached. Words became tiresome. She grew light, wispy.

You miss her quiet apologies for disappearing.

When you catch the scent of her honey-bergamot shampoo, you whisper her name. Even though it’s impossible.

You leap out of the carriage and the train doors slide shut.

In her powder-soft shadow you are running, staggering, stumbling, falling.

Mom insisted on doing my hair even though I was entering 9th grade. It was the yearbook I didn’t buy because I was embarrassed by the photograph. My braids were taut tight with Indian Amla oil binding each hair to another.

No hair out of place.

Inside, I felt like an outsider.

At school, people whispered the things I wanted to ignore—her nose is too big, she is too skinny, she isn’t cool.

“Who wears braids in the 9th grade?”

“Go back to India,” they said.

Mom didn’t realize my braids were uncool.

I didn’t know how to tell her.

The masked mother toted baby wipes in one hand and hand sanitizer in the other, and called out, “Keep your distance” as she raced behind her rapidly moving, unsteady toddling son who approached a child climbing off the slide. Her voice was louder as she instructed him to “Remember six feet!”

The child was barely two years old. He did not comprehend the concept of measurement. The mother pried her child from the other, while her slighter older son fearlessly swung from the playground’s germ-covered metal monkey bars. Unwatched and unnoted, it was the first time he reached the final rung.

The path of least resistance makes for an easy escape. Ignoring his wife had won him the divorce and this private beachfront property (now noisy with his two sons, who would also eventually lose interest). Replace needs with wants: Nintendo, Big Macs, iPhones. Make them do the work.

For now, he played Dad as his eldest, eight, dug a hole to China.

Climbing into the crater, he let them bury him up to his neck.

“You’re staying here, with us,” the boys announced, pausing in their work.

He laughed, amused.

And then his sons, accustomed to their wants, finished the job.

Looking at the four-by-six print of you in the sweatshirt I gave you when Clemson won the Natty, I sense again our distance. We were young when I took this—miles younger, years nearer, pulses dearer. Alone, yes, I get by. But my fingertips remember brushing your chin when you’d shaved and when you hadn’t for five days. My touch, stirring up the aftershave smell of rainforest loam. This glossy print emits neither your touch nor your fragrance, but I still stretch out my finger, try to click you like an icon for an app that will somehow bring you back.