1981 was a bad year for a Parsi to come to America. The Iran hostage crisis had left Americans with a smoldering resentment of foreigners. “Go home!” Viraf was told.
Not to his South Bombay stomping grounds: Marine Drive, Churchgate, Mahatma Gandhi Road, Cuffe Parade, Eros, CCI, Colaba. Not to Seth Building and his loved ones: Mum, Dad, Mamaiji—best not to even think of Maya.
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California is Sinking by Martin Ott
It was water draining, earthquakes kissing in the shade of the moon winking in tune with the marionettes of Godzilla tap dancing for dinner. It was the office pool being rigged before the steering column in the ribs, the storage shed turned into a homeless brig, the matador’s cape or baby’s bib hung in the closet or on a billboard begging for consideration, the fib that became the real story rehashed until time lost its will. It was the small screen sucking us in, the vodka gimlet transformed into gin, the famed taco truck up in smoke that we followed for years, the treasure in limbo just beyond the beyond, the yolk discarded in the heart-smart omelet. It was the drone sent out for cigarettes by the director lost in the desert. It was the lost scene in Steinbeck’s last work. It was the invisible collapse of the land’s face, stretched taut like an actor turned professional patient. It was the hidden reservoir beneath the migrants streaming into the void. It was the crash that no one heard and the warnings we pretended to ignore.
Martin Ott is the author of six books of poetry and fiction, including the poetry book Underdays, Sandeen Prize Winner, University of Notre Dame Press and the short story collection Interrogations, Fomite Press. More at www.martinottwriter.com.
While my hostess sat across the glass kitchen table fanning away the smell of diarrhea exploding from one of two recently adopted kittens mewling on the other side of the screen door, while my six-year-old son, also on the other side of the screen door, finally took the turn he’d never been offered to mount his friend’s toy arrow in a bow, while the boy he’d come to play with, the boy named after the Hindu principal of cosmic order, abandoned my son in favor of his brother, I began wondering why I’d agreed to take a kid like mine on a playdate.
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My five-year-old niece June wears a 24-E bra. Not to play dress-up, but because she needs one to support her breasts. Mellie, who is my sister and June’s mother, blames me because I gave June a Barbie doll two months ago. That’s when her mammary development began. You see, my niece has been assuming the characteristics of toys and games since she was born. For example, her eyes took on the Calder-like shapes and swivel movements of the wind-up mobile above her crib.
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I cannot make you understand how much I love this place. I love our houses the color of sand, so you can look over the town from up on Mt. Lemmon and almost miss it. I love that everyone knows my name. When I walk into the Oracle Market, Will Whitby says “Hey, Maxine, how are the boys?” Our families go to the same church. It seems like we all did when I was a girl.
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The day before our father would have died, the Scientists cured cancer. They had a press conference from their secret lab on an Antarctic ice floe.
“We cured cancer,” they announced, then opened the floor to questions.
“How?” a reporter for a Spanish newspaper asked.
“Everyday household items,” the Scientists answered.
“Which cancer did you cure?” asked a South Korean blogger.
“All of them,” said the Scientists. “We cured all of the cancers.”
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Mr. Ambrosio in N252 says if you hold your breath long enough, you’ll pass away. He admits this does nothing for most people, swears and swears it works for those of extreme age. “The superannuated,” he says, show-off. Not true. That is the plan of a child, she is sure. Mr. Ambrosio is an idiot, she is sure.
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Nothin bout this fella to grab on to. Nothin he tole me yet that takes holda my conversation-maker. Half an hour and there’s nothin he says I can ask him bout.
“Awfully pretty out here in the morning,” he says.
“Yassir,” I says. I’d be a halfwit not to agree, but there ain’t nowhere to go with it. It’s a pretty spot, and I know it, or I wouldn’t take tourists like him out here at the asscrack a dawn to get piddly lil trout to take home with em.
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I first came to Coney Island Avenue as a bride. I didn’t know anything about Brooklyn at the time. New York was crowded and noisy, I knew, but it would still be part of the gleaming white First World. We lived above a Pakistani restaurant that fried samosas in stale oil, fumes rising up to our apartment. A sign just under our window proclaimed “Income Tax, Overseas Transfer” in Urdu. I hung my head out the window and read the sign upside down, a pattern without words.
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June awakens to an echo. The farmhouse and surrounding woods are swathed in darkness punctured only by pinhole stars. What was that sound? It might have been a dream, or the house settling, or a loon in the swamp beyond the woods. The loons scream like women. Their screams shiver and die on the wind. What if someone were dying out there? The sheet has twisted around her legs, and when she peels it from her nightgown, static sparks against her skin. What if someone were dying, and she just pulled her covers over her head?
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In that full second before flight finds stillness, before head fills with quarters and lungs stretch with dirt and blood, before bone tips split skin, before windshield splinters into stars and car completes its first rotation is everything physics needs to prove: a body in motion will remain in motion unless acted upon by the gravity of youth; only matter can’t be created or destroyed.
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Today I had a lunch appointment with my old boyfriend who married someone else. I’d called the meeting because I had a discovery to divulge, but he ended up talking the whole time. Then our hour was up, and he left. I’d been too overwhelmed by the physical fact of him to speak.
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OBJECTIVE
An employment opportunity in marketing, business, hotdog sales or funeral operations (anything with health insurance), or the type of thing that might impress an ex, make her think about things
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The first one hopped the fence into the lion pit. We almost thought it was an accident, what with... you’d be amazed at the stunts people pull for photographs. But then we found a note in the guy’s shoe.
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An agave can be many things, its tough gray-green spikes frozen in their waving like the stilled arms of an anemone in the desert’s long-parched sea. The bison of the Aztecs, it proffers its lathering innards as soap, its vicious brown-pointed tips to men as arrowheads or to women as threaded needles ready-made (with a strand of fibers left attached), its deep rubbery layers as condoms, its thinner dry sheets near the surface as paper, and its fibers as the thread for weaving, tough but softening with washing and time.
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"On my bridge, I decide what I like," the devil said. He dangled scaly ankles over the edge of an open platform he’d built of pine under the very center of his bridge, Devil’s Bridge. The platform extended several feet beyond the bridge's edge. To move from bridge to platform, the devil hopped down to the platform's edge. To ascend, he hooked a claw on the bridge and hauled himself up—though only at night so the sun did not hurt his delicate eyes.
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I was in fifth grade when I heard missiles explode in the sky for the first time. During the Gulf War, it became commonplace to hear that air raid siren, which indicated that we had to run to the basement. I was only scared the first time it happened, before we had cleaned the basement, when I thought something bad might happen.
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The archivist read the words again and tried to ignore the stirrings of a new fear.
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Coffee Maker. $40. Age: 2 years. Location: Kitchen. Purchased by my wife and son as a gift for my 40th birthday, left wrapped on the kitchen counter for me to discover when I woke. Lost beneath debris, beneath mud, beneath so many splinters of wood.
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Every night he dreams in infrared. Five, six weeks now, the world a thermal scan of itself. The map becomes the territory. A series of targets and the not-yet-threats in between.
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