A GOD SPEAKS AT THE BORDER
Licensed obtained through Adobe Stock. Edited.
The god of records and archives writes down another god’s recounting of how they continue their legacy:
My story involves a mother and a child left at the border. The father went into a gray building, only one floor, on the outskirts of a forest. He wanted to get papers, find asylum. In the building with flickering lights and only men, he decided it would be easier to be single in the new world. It would raise fewer questions if he only brought one body across.
When he sat on a steel chair in a room with no mirrors but two people—an officer and translator—he listed truth and fiction. As the words mixed together, no one could tell where the shadows began.
In his country, the government gassed his neighborhood to subdue a revolt, a weekly meeting about Nabokov’s Lolita at the cafe a block from his house. He had never gone to a meeting but knew of it. His neighbor always cursed about Ray.
Ray owned a bookstore and was the one selling Lolita. Many of them who met at the cafe agreed that it should be banned. In fact, they all did. They simply met to find a way to convince Ray not to sell it without involving the government. The one thing they hated more than Ray selling the book was the idea of being told they couldn’t read it at all. They would handle it as a community.
The gas brought the radicals, which brought the bombs. Do you know what that’s like? To see a bomb, a building disappear from a galloping horse in the sky? It’s an act of one of us. And it makes sense. We stole the fire for them so they could carry us with them. They just made more of it.
I’m sorry. I’m babbling. I was talking about the man in the room and how he created something better than truth.
“The sound of a bomb will never leave a person,” he told the officer and translator. He waited for the translator to finish before talking again. “It’s always there: a memory held for survival. When a car backfires, a door bangs shut, a vase breaks against the floor, I’m back in my apartment, watching the fibers of reality tear and tasting a fire. It’s impossible to wipe the taste of a chemical fire off your tongue. It seeps into your cells, radiates, multiplies. You forget how to speak words, the names for sign, son, outside. It’s better that way. Forget everything. It’s the only way to survive. And then when everyone walks out into the area with no name, they’ll start anew. They will have their Eden. They can be Jacob or Joseph or Annabelle.”
But he didn’t forget anything. What was his simply lost its meaning. Homes, after all, had been embedded into his skin. The view of the street from each single-foot, square window rolled a film behind his eyes. Lives and angles never seen sowed desire around the threads of muscle underneath his skin. He realized how bland his life was. No affairs, no dealings with radicals, no concealed guns. He just worked at the supermarket.
“They died when the building collapsed,” he said. “I don’t even have a photo.”
The mother and child stayed outside the building. The mother chose to speak in a language that wasn’t spoken in the home. It was a language she only spoke to the boy, a language of shadows and silence. If she covered the sun from his eyes, she was scared for him, telling him to be silent. If she let the sun fall onto his face, he was free. He could fidget, cry out, even move from the folds of her skirt if he tugged at the cloth that circled her legs.
Today, her chin held the sun from touching his face. And he sat still in her lap, counting the number of branches in the bare maple ahead of them. He was at one hundred twenty-six when two men in uniforms popped the air, swiveling the front door on its hinges. They first looked at the mother and son and then conversed with one another in a tongue the woman nor boy knew. Then their looks returned as smoke collected silence and gave the men distance from their human bodies. Their minds wandered with the smoke, detached from responsibility. Their eyes stayed, so she didn’t.
Holding the boy’s hand, she walked off to the river she’d seen on the way. She cradled him for hours on sand and stone. The water ran slowly, loudly, eating thoughts until there was only time, here and then there, there and then here, and then gone.
The sun finally hit the boy’s face as it sat on the other side of the earth. It won the staring contest even as it bled into the sky, paling its luminous body to a shade lighter than its reflection on the water.
She saw the red water as a sign. Violence follows vulnerability. And she saw so much space between her fingers, even when locked, and her arms, even when crossed. She told her son to stay as she foraged for food.
The boy didn’t move from the spot. Hours went by and only the vibration of his organs signaled life. Finally, he stood and doused his thrumming body with water. He watched it slowly absorb into his skin, and he realized he could be anywhere. The boy was meant to straddle a divide. He found my name.
Evan Burkin (he/him/his) is working toward an MFA in Creative Writing at San Francisco State University and serves as an assistant poetry editor for Fourteen Hills. His work has been published or is forthcoming in Birdcoat Quarterly, New American Writing, and THRUSH.