A boy dressed as a robot is sitting next to a fairy.
A boy dressed as a robot is sitting next to a fairy.
A baby’s crying woke me up at midnight.
The black and white photo is loosely tucked into an old photo album of my late aunt.
The floor thrusts towards the ceiling. Walls splinter and pieces of plaster crumble around us.
To feel safe, I lock myself into bathrooms.
The school said our year wasn’t mixing well.
“You look very good,” she said, patting my arm. “I’m sorry,” I said. “Do I know you?”
Resetting the antique clock was an occasion—my mother stood behind me, coaching.
The only sound I remember was the hiss of the camp stove with the smoke-stained bottom holding the aluminum pot as we waited for water to boil.
His little legs stick out from underneath his green backpack, making him look like an upright walking turtle.
It is an unsaved number but I answer, leaning back as the preliminary recording begins.
I squatted on the sand at dusk, hoping the sound of the sea would soothe me, but it churned and roared like my stomach.
Even though I’d attended my proudly multicultural school for years, they cut up my name.
I was drowning. Or so I thought. My head kept bobbing under and I was taking in gulps of lake water again and again.
I’m bereft at the grief-grey stripe, the immensity of black, how much further I’d have to fall to feel an absence so deep.
The four of us sat together on the bed he and I had shared, where we woke to classical music, where he brought me coffee, where their bright faces greeted us in the morning …
“It’s important to be calm and quiet because we don’t know how these dogs will react to children,” I remind my six-year-old in the parking lot of the animal shelter.
“Jam-butty land” her estate called ours, mocking what our parents fed us so they could scrimp for the payments on basic brick boxes to pass on to us.
The huge cruise ship casts its morning shadow on the dock. Through a metal net we see a tent on the tarmac, rugs and mattresses on the floor, a book – a Quran?
Little fingertips prod my eyelids, scouting before the assault.