Indigo Literary Journal

On Saturdays I turn green like my mother, take my plants to the sink and soak their roots. I wait for the water to drain from the little holes, alone in the silence, save for the quiet drip and my wilted yearning. I am rehearsing the lesson of my childhood—how to love from afar.

at all times i am dying. after all, we could not have seen the guillotine. we could not have seen the way the road gorged itself on unvigilant passerby & the vigilantes, too. the sky seemed a stranger to me. i could not speak for you as i once had; i could not peel back the skin of an orange without my hands shaking like tin cans.

we live in an ocean town, but neither of us is a fish. I am a universally acclaimed Tokyo-drifter. You are my noisy backseat driver, picnic basket-holder, smushing egg sandwiches as I triumphantly hydroplane. Let’s thread rickety mountain roads and race these monsoon trains.

On the day we buried my mother, our shovels uncovered another coffin as their tips kissed the ground. Pausing, we cast aside our sand-crusted supplies until we’d identified the obstruction: it was a jewelry box, in the style that was popular when my mother was a little girl. I thought it was an animal’s heart when I first saw it in my brother’s palm: preserved somehow; salted with earth. Then my brother brushed it clean and the veins and arteries became intricate designs raised in mahogany. Reality ensued once more.