The Gauntlet

The whoop, whoop, whoop of the police siren died to a guttural moan as Anais pulled her Kia to the curb just inside the small Ohio town of Springfield, within striking distance of Dayton. She peeped into the rearview mirror and spied a policeman alighting from the cruiser and striding her way. What now? she thought. She was driving down Rivers Road, a virtual gauntlet of police speed traps, according to her husband.

The policeman rapped with his knuckles on her window and so Anais lowered the glass pane. “Yessir?” she asked.

“Driver’s license, registration and proof of insurance,” said the cop dully.

Anais turned and fished through her glovebox and purse and eventually turned up the requested documents. She passed them through the window to the policeman, who accepted them without a word. Anais, a recent Haitian refugee, had never been accosted by law enforcement in this country. But, she had heard stories. She didn’t know what to expect, but remembered what her grandmother, who’d raised her, always said: “Hope for the best but prepare for the worst. Do whatever they say,” she’d cautioned. Anais waited.

The 19-year-old woman turned her head and noted that the policeman was staring intently at her, through the harsh beam of a huge flashlight. She couldn’t make out his features. Did he suspect she harbored drugs, because her skin was brown and she dressed differently from others? Unable so far to buy native apparel, she was still clad in a vibrant, red and blue chambray Karabela dress.

“Get out of the vehicle,” directed the cop, taking a step back to allow Anais to open her door. She silently complied. Out on the pavement, she stood by the car, uncertain and forlorn. Where was her grandmother when she needed her? She glanced at the western sky; the sun had already slipped below the horizon. It was quite dark now. The road at this hour was little travelled and not a vehicle had passed since she was stopped. She felt very vulnerable.

“Do you have any illegal drugs, contraband or weapons in your car or on your person?” he asked next.

She shook her head no.

“Do you speak American?” asked the cop impatiently.

Anais blinked. “I speak the English,” she told him in her thick accent.

He grunted.

“Why did you stop me?” asked Anais nervously.

Ignoring her question, the cop handed back the documents she’d passed him before and said, “Do you have citizenship papers?”

Anais nodded. “I have the green card,” she said.

“Let’s see it,” grumbled the cop, extending his tiny hand.

Anais gave it to him. He drifted back to his cruiser, engaged the radio for a few minutes and then returned and handed the document back.

“What’re you doing on the roads at this hour?” queried the cop.

Anais glanced at her cell phone: it was almost 9pm.

“I’m on my way home–from the grocery store,” she said. She began to feel some dark misgivings about the way this interrogation was proceeding.

Now the cop directed his large flashlight again into Anais’s face and after a moment, said, “turn around, put your hands against the vehicle, take a step back,” he ordered. She did.

At just that moment, another police can rolled up and parked behind the first. Men got out of both doors. Their boots scunched over the gravel on the side of the road. The first cop withdrew and met them halfway to his vehicle. They talked in hushed tones. That left Anais standing awkwardly against her car.

Anais looked up as the men exchanged a bawdy laugh. Were they talking about her? she wondered. Anais was a newlywed and she longed for the comfort of her partner, to hear his voice and feel his arms around her, but the policeman had seized her phone.

Finally, the first cop tromped loudly to her car and roughly patted her down and then, without warning, seized one arm and pulled it behind her back. Handcuffs clicked into place over her wrist. He took her other arm and secured that wrist as well. What was happening? she thought wildly, as the cop opened her back door and pushed her through and face down onto the bench seat in the rear of the Kia. Now the other two cops approached and stood staring down at her supine figure, chucking malevolently. They likewise had flashlights.

“Not bad,” murmured one of the newcomers, “for a greasball.” They all laughed.

“Got a nice ass for a spic,” opined the third racist cop,” reaching in and groping Anais’s backside and running his fingers between her legs.

She whimpered and struggled fruitlessly against her bonds.

“So,” said the first cop. “Who wants to do her first?” he asked the others conversationally.

One of the cops said, “Maybe we should do dinner first. You said she’s from Haiti. What’s your pleasure, senorita, a dog or a cat?” They laughed yet again. The burning essence of marijuana now wafted through the air.

Anais thought hard, then suddenly spoke out. “I saw your face,” she rasped desperately.

The three men grew silent as statues.

“I thought she didn’t see you,” whispered another of the three.

“She didn’t,” said the first cop. “I never gave her my name or showed her a badge or nothin’. I used my flashlight, like the last time. She’s lyin’.”

“But, what if she ain’t,” said another voice.

“Then you’ll have to kill me,” Anais spoke out. “Or go to jail for kidnapping and rape. I’m a married woman,” said Anais with sudden rage. “And my husband owns a big gun. You’ll be shot, if you touch me again,” she shouted. “You release me now, and I’ll forget about the touching and the disrespect. You decide now. You got five seconds to decide.”

In a matter of only a few seconds, the handcuffs were opened and Anais was freed. The other two cops hurried off to their car and sped away. The first cop snatched the keys from Anais’s ignition and tossed them and her cell phone into the weeds a few feet away and loped to his vehicle and likewise took off. She could hear the tires burning rubber.

Finding her keys, Anais stumbled back to her car and was soon motoring home, shaking and crying as she drove. She lived only minutes away. The only thing she saw when she entered the small house was Michael.

He said, in his rich, soft baritone, “Carino. I was worried about you.”

She fell into his warm embrance and immediately told him of her narrow escape at the hands of the rogue policemen. After she’d completed her narrative, Michael gently grasped her shoulders and said, “Did you really see his face?”

Anais had the grace to blush. “No, Michael. The flashlight was in my face the whole time.”

Then he said, “Anais, I don’t even own a gun.”

She smiled up into his face. “No, but you would’ve gotten one,” she whispered with confidence.

Facts

Hegel: Facts? There are no facts in philosophy, only truth.

Tarski: Facts? There are no facts in maths, only stipulations.

Dershowitz: Facts? Who says we’ll see a jury?

Brooks Lindberg lives in the Pacific Northwest. When not at work, he’s stalking butterflies, hiking, or prepping for winter.

THE STAR CALLED PRIYE

My second mother wore a wide black, hat that exposed only her chin, but since I was right beside her, I clearly saw the contortion on her face, an ugly expression like the combination of a gleeful smile and a hateful sneer. Her black gown billowed in the wind, softly at first, then harshly, as the sky darkened and hesitant raindrops plummeted down as if the clouds themselves were grieving with us.

The priest’s solemn voice monotonously articulated the last farewell for Priye. Her embalmed body lay in the brown casket seven feet in front of us, quiet for the first time in seven months. Her picture was hugged to my chest, where her face blossomed with a pleasant smile that would forever haunt my dreams. The green, chiffon dress she wore in the picture was resting at the back of my wardrobe. I would wait for six months before wearing it along with all her clothes and jewelry that had become mine, even though it had only been seventy-two hours since she died.

Priye was my elder sister by three years. She was frail, sickly and short. But she was more intelligent than me, and she had a beautiful voice that mesmerized everyone in our school. Last year, her performance of Whitney Houston’s “I will Always Love You” was so breathtaking that our principal’s mottled face cracked a smile for the first time that term and he approached her in his black, pinstriped tuxedo to shake her hand. “That was marvellous. It reminded me of my late wife. She loved that song in our twenties,” he had croaked, looking wistful.

Priye had beamed with an ethereal radiance, looking more like an angel than a human being. If not for the leukaemia that ravaged her body…“Oh God, her mother died barely five years ago. Why?” my grandmother wailed in her wheelchair, her saggy cheeks throbbing with every sound she retched. “Why did she die so young?”

I looked at her, at the wispy patches of white hair on her head, and her wrinkled face. In eighty years. Priye could have resembled her. She would have enjoyed her old age, tending to her hibiscuses alongside a host of stubborn grandchildren. I pictured it for a moment, and gulped back a sob.

“Why?” Grandma cried again. She turned to look at me. “Priye, is this a dream? Wake me up!” She gestured at the coffin. “Wake Ifunnaya up, please!”

My second mother hushed her. “Priye is dead, Mama. The person you are talking to is Ifunnaya. The priest is still speaking.”

Did she ever wonder why Grandma kept making that mistake? Maybe not. Grandma’s eyesight was very poor anyway. Most times, she couldn’t see people until they were stooping very close to her nose. But I knew, and the truth was stuck in my throat like a goitre, something I couldn’t swallow, yet couldn’t spit out. Because my mother killed her before her time, I thought, answering grandma’s question silently, hugging Priye’s frame tighter. My mother was a more insidious disease than Leukaemia.

On those dreadful nights, three months ago, when Priye howled in her bed, my mother sang in her room, eulogizing God for bringing misfortune to all her enemies. She rocked expensive aso-oke to galas and to the birthdays of her clients while I held Priye’s hand and assured her, she was not alone.

In those moments, it hurt so much to remember that two years ago, she had been well enough to attend school, chirping tirelessly about everything like the Maths teacher’s knack for singing Fuji in class, her dreams about sailing the Atlantic in her own yacht and her subtle affection for a tall, nerdy boy in her class whose glasses were three times the size of his eyes and who always came first in Mathematics, even though my mother never gave her food for days. It was later that I knew that she poached food from her friends during lunch break, and she did it so prudently that they never suspected that she was being maltreated.

I remembered waking up late in the night, disentangling my second mother’s limbs from around me, and tiptoeing outside. I would go to the backyard with a nylon of biscuits for Priye. She always kept her window open so that I could throw the biscuits in. The window was two stories high so I was often successful two times out of thirty.

Many nights, I was totally unsuccessful, the biscuits thumping against the sliding glass or the wall. Most of the biscuits that made it in had been smashed into crumbs that Priye had to pour into her mouth.

That was when I noticed her fascination with stars. Those nights I woke up after midnight and raced to the backyard, I found her stargazing, with her window open, the chestnut curtain bunched behind her, her white nightgown draped over her skinny frame, looking as bright and quiet like the celestial bodies she stared at.

The only time I ever saw her differently was one night, months afterward, when my mother said she would not waste another dime of her late husband’s money on her disease and Priye latched onto her like a monkey and bit her neck. But after that, she apologized. Though, that night, she looked into my eyes with the intensity of a camera taking a picture. Her diary entry for that night read this: I think we human beings are more like stars than we think. We shine brighter when we start to fade.

It was as if she knew that she would die, so from that day onward, she said her goodbyes quietly. She confessed her love to the boy who told her sorry, he was in love with Zendaya, and she ran home without taking the bus, crying and laughing at the same time. She told me she was crying because he was so stupid, and laughing because she finally mustered up the courage to ask him out. All I did was stare at her, dumb, because I had no idea what it meant to have a crush on someone.

After she calmed down a little, she asked me to draw her, so I took my drawing book and drew her at her window, staring at the sunset. I should have painted the sky black to show it was night but I wanted the memory to be warm, not bleak, besides her skin tone was the colour of a brown sunset and I wanted that effect to show when I painted the drawing.

That night, she sat by the window in her satin nightgown with a crime novel in her lap, staring at the man selling suya on the busy street behind our house and the people walking, and she suddenly asked me a question.“Did you know that stars shine the brightest when they want to fade?” her laptop was playing a YouTube video of how a star becomes a supernova. 

She didn’t seem to expect my answer. She probably knew I didn’t know what she was talking about back then. Now that I remembered it, I could assume that she thought of herself as a supernova.“Ify, will you remember me after I’m gone?”

I just stood there in her room, petrified. I was bigger, healthier and more loved than her, but in that moment, I wanted to become her. I wanted to be the strong one, even if it meant our second mother would hate me.

“I wish my mother didn’t die,” she sighed, and looked at me with a sad smile. There were no tears in her eyes, only the shimmering darkness of her irises that portrayed her beautiful soul.

Believe me, I wanted desperately to, but I couldn’t tell her that her mother didn’t die five days after her car accident, mine did. And the woman who called me her child now was actually her own mother. This was the last thing my late mother told me. It was the secret only I knew.

I couldn’t remember my real mother’s face clearly anymore, but I remembered her dimples and dreads. She might have looked like Asa. She was our first mother and she loved Priye and me the same way. All I did was cuddle closer to Priye that night. I noted how she smelled like a flower garden. It was the soap that a chubby, jovial boy in her class gave her. She told me how expensive the soap was.

While I listened, I wondered why she didn’t realize that this other boy had a crush on her. We talked for hours uninterrupted because my second mother had travelled to Abuja and left us in a neighbour’s care. We pretended we were sleeping so he let us be. That night was the Champions league final so we weren’t his main priority. We heard him screaming and cursing from his room as his club conceded four goals during the match. We couldn’t help laughing at his plight.

Priye and I talked about many things until she began drifting off to sleep. I was often amazed at how quickly she slept. In a few seconds she was breathing softly, relaxed, her hand which moments ago had clutched mine now limp.

“This woman is your mother, you know?” I whispered so quietly that Priye might not have heard me. It was the best I could do.

And for a brief moment, I was sure she did not hear me.

“I know,” she said faintly. “You are Priye and I am Ifunnaya.”

I LOOK AT YOU 

Where has the shine disappeared

In your sad eyes

I feel, longing destroys your

Despite the years, beautiful face

Can you free yourself, 

Forgive those who

Didn’t know how to love you 

As you deserve

Do you have the strength to let go

The devastating pain in your chest? 

Who are you unconsciously punishing

Despite the love they offer you

Can you love again

Release the weight, take off the shackles,

Free your soul, let the light in

Into life, without fear of rejection, 

Consciously accept a dormant desire

Are you able to try to change yourself? 

 

Melita Mely Ratković is a poet, translator (Spanish, Portuguese, English, Bengali) and literary ambassador of Serbia in Brazil and Spain. She has participated in world anthologies, including HYPERPOEM for the Guinness Book of Records, and has been recognized among the 50 most important women in Europe. She is the winner of international literary awards and a member of several world academies.

(Middle aged light skinned woman in a black top)

THE BEST GIFT 

Good morning! For everyone, 

With a smile. A mate, a coffee. 

Good morning, accompanied by an I love you. 

Necklaces of hugs from everyone, at home. 

Bunch of hands, are the best flowers, 

The perfect decoration for all mothers. 

It’s the joyful setting for everyone gathered, 

May they sing her name, may they call her mother. 

May they pamper her and cherish her. 

A prayer to heaven for those who went before.

TERESA DE LUJAN SAFAR, MEMBER OF TOGETHER FOR LETTERS. I LIVE IN PERGAMINO, BUENOS AIRES PROVINCE MY BOOK: “CRISOL OF IDEAS” I PARTICIPATED IN: • THE “HUELLAS DE CRISTORES” ANTHOLOGIES • THE LITERARY WORKSHOP OF ESTELA TORRES ERILL • SEVEN “ROSARIO, BRIDGES OF WORDS” ANTHOLOGIES, GUARDED BY WRITER GLADYS LOPEZ PIANESI • I CURRENTLY ATTEND THE “FLORILEGIO” LITERARY WORKSHOP, COORDINATED BY WRITER MARTA SUSANA LOMELLINO • I AM CURRENTLY A MEMBER OF “TOGETHER FOR LETTERS”

Christina Chin (plain)

Kim Olmtak Gomes (italic)

honking horn – 

a dog chase

of the schoolbus 

umbrella 

my shield 

weather change – 

the windchime 

soundless stillness

cloud peaks

forecast rain

rainy season –

thrillseekers

tapping the untamed

flooded street 

boys in roller skates 

A Cup of Coffee

My morning cup of coffee

On the table of displacement

I taste the bitterness of life

And live the dark and terrible nights

I watch the violent storm inside

Eradicating my tent so far

And the dogs attack my innocent children.

I see the world as a foam

Cover the heinous crimes

While we are drowning so deep.

I smell the scent of blood

With every sip of my cup

And I see the faces of the children

Who immersed in their blood.

After awhile,

I woke up while I’m absent-minded sitting 

On the table of displacement

Gazing inside my coffee

And listening to the silence of the the world.