Three Short Stories
These pieces were originally published by The New Guard Independent Literary Review in their BANG! series where authors are showcased individually online for a month.
#1
When you were young, Festival was louder, smaller, stranger. There were never white people, and those that came smiled at little kids the same way old people smile at cats or little dogs. That’s when you learned to scowl. Babies were born here. The vendors were book sellers and vegan raw foodies about twenty years ahead of their time; they had names evoking Egyptian lore and Nubian splendor and they shone like the sun in jewelry and performed rites and ceremonies on the stage while you lingered at the edge — transfixed.
Kids escaped through a hole in a gate to the football field where they roamed, held only to the field’s simple laws. The toughest was the leader. Anyone else was a follower. If you had money, you gave that money to the leader and he got fireworks and fire. The tough kid never lit the fireworks himself. You were not the tough kid, and you were not the kid with any money. The other kids were scrawny. They were scrappy. They had been fighting all their lives. You did not have to fight. People never really tested you anymore. They already knew. No one wanted to test you lest they rouse the hornets’ nest of your temper. A reputation you earned.
See, there was a boy who had to be a little bit older than you; his laughter was infectious and annoying. He was nerdy and had the look of someone who would grow up to be regular and dependable and bigger than his age. One of the tough kids, the kind who can smell fear, decided it was time for a public bloodletting. This guy was lean, wiry, and strong, with the FILA’s and Lee jeans with the patch on the outside; he zeroed in on a weak link, called for his buddies to join him, and they surrounded the boy.
First, they asked for money. He did not have any. Then they asked for his sneakers, and he started to cry. He couldn’t give them his sneakers. They started poking him, then pushing him, then slapping him in the face. He hit the deck and his glasses went flying. The main tough kid stepped on the glasses and the crowd groaned into silence.
Your invisibility was an asset then. You saw the heat and it settled into the front of your eyes. Your fists balled until they were red themselves and then you pounced. Though all the tough kids were a good four years older than you and outnumbered you, you took each kid out. One by one until you were left pounding the main kid’s face into the dusty football field beneath the far goalpost. A rumbling chorus of clanging metal and shaking steel heralded the passing of a visible LIRR train headed into the city. It took adults who knew your mother, your father, to pry you off. When asked why you did it, you said, “Sometimes the bully has to go down.”
#2
Once upon a time, you lived three houses down from the corner of Classon and Grand. In a house filled with mangoes, kiwi, banana, honeydew melon and cantaloupe, you made smoothies and fruit salad, listening to the music of John Coltrane. Ya’ll owned the house. An empty lot bordered the side. To get to the kitchen you had to pass through a window that looked out to that empty lot. A drape was up because there were a lot of crack heads, one of whom used to tell them stories of the bloc back in the old days — when he was a kid, when the snow in winter would cover the cars, how people used to fight using homemade guns. Dad used to tell them they were too close to the house.
Mom’s world was centered in the study. That was her space where she could read, write, draw, sew, and knit. In the long hallway upstairs hung pictures of the graffiti that she did — “whole cars” she said — she had her own graffiti tag: LENA-79.
In the basement there was another “mommy” space: her workbench, where she could repair almost anything. She was most at ease there, in the wee hours of the morning, in her space that was the opposite of worry was where she made her prayers.
Mom and Dad were rather like oil and water, except for in that one place: a large bay window where they would sit together watching the sunrise, sipping warm water swirled with raw honey. Mom gave out her heart all day long; she always beat the odds. “The energy is right in this house,” she would say, standing by the exposed brick in the kitchen, grabbing the large cast iron skillet in the open space between the island and the kitchen table, talking to whomever listened. And through her waving hand you could see trails of the skillet, and could imagine the world of the Unseen.
Dad would tell tales of his nine lives, once a bike messenger, one of the best in the city. He managed to escape by the skin of his teeth, “Those were different times,” he would say. “I was a very different man then.”
You were the only one out of seven to survive. The fire. Smoke bellowed through the entire house. The path to the front door was blocked. The backdoor was impassable. Smoke enclosed them so that they could not see each other — they were trapped, connected to each other, hanging on, lost in a cackling, smoky, black void.
It has been twenty years since then and now you are stuck on a train in a brilliantly lit subway tunnel. There is train traffic ahead of you. You are in your suit and tie and it’s hot and everyone is miserable, except you are dripping, not in sweat, but in tears because painted on the walls of this subway tunnel is your mom’s old tag. LENA-79.
#3
They say that God is still out there creating at the very edges of the universe. That’s what I am looking for in the people and things around me — to see if God is creating, not just at the edges of the universe, but at the edges of us.
Construction is cracking the sidewalk on one side of the street. Cars are parked illegally and men in suits and uniforms scurry about like lab rats. Cigarette smoke drifts up from people pacing. I like to spend time looking at peoples’ faces. I look to see where their lines etch stories into their faces and think about what they will look like when they are old and wrinkly, or what they used to look like when they were babies.
Lots of people like me walk out of these downtown administrative buildings with our death certificates in hand, looking out into the street for any direction. An old man approaches. We make eye contact. His eyes are deep wells of certainty. We greet one another. I liked him instantly. I’d seen him before. He was the same old guy who sprayed saliva out of the side of his mouth and sold jewelry on the street in front of the court buildings downtown.
His face sparkled to me even though it was flattened and bent. Like things broken, they were once straight. Like things rotten, they were once fresh. Each moment is simply a test to see whether you can see the sparkling around you, or whether your vision is scarred and dull like the pain from an old broken bone.
He had an open can of beans asking for money, but he did not ask me for anything. Instead he pulled me aside and told me that Mickey Mantle and Don Larsen were his favorites. He’d been to Ebbets Field when it was the place to be. Said he even found a $20 dollar bill there once. He bought hot dogs, pickles, and knishes for all his friends and they sat in the upper deck seats until the 7th inning when they snuck down to just above the dugout. From there they saw Pee Wee Reese end the game with a 9th inning two-out double, and Jackie Robinson scored from first.
Fiction © Ibrahim Abdul-Matin, 2019. All rights reserved by the author.