30 Tiny Liver Hearts
The day before the war started, Annette accidentally knocked over a metal bookshelf in the basement. She was trying to kick some heavy boxes across the room because she couldn’t lift them and one of them got stuck. She got mad and shoved with her foot and the whole shelf came down. I heard the noise from upstairs and ran.
“Annette!” I yelled. “Annette!”
When I opened the basement door, she was crying. The bookshelf was on its side and medical reference books were everywhere. She was back up against the wall in the corner with her arms crossed trying to hold still. She was okay, but as I moved closer she shivered.
That morning I’d gone with her to the doctor to look at the Bellyfish. They put us in a dark room and the radiologist coated her belly with clear jelly.
“It helps get better pictures,” she said.
I sat down and looked at the monitor. It looked gray and pixilated like an old TV.
“Well that’s one of their heads,” the radiologist said. “They’re big babies.”
Annette’s face looked blue in the monitor light as she watched the Bellyfish.
“See that, Della?” her voice was soft and crackly. “That’s her little arm.”
A little starfish arm moving like every direction was forward.
Annette took the bus home and I walked. I looked back at her standing at the bus stop. She’s like one of those women on the posters in the Ethiopian restaurants, the ones the North African tourist bureau puts out. Noble and frightening. I could see her throat and fingers wrapped with gold raising her arms. Teff blowing like sand from her clenched fists.
The light changed and I crossed the street, cutting through Redbird Square down to the river. It was Friday and the beginning of a three-day weekend. Normally it would have been busy but it wasn’t and busses passed half full. Taxis waited in line.
All week they had been showing maps on TV. Newscaster Ken was finally learning how to pronounce the names of smaller nation states that had long been on the periphery. The stores sold out of water and the city was emptying. I walked to work and counted the vacant houses, all with kitchen lights on, all with the original trim restored.
Mr. Tofu Scramble said when they took the bars off the windows in Old Honduras there was a big party. They roasted a soy pig and the first hundred through the door got a house. He did, anyway. Told me he could live for ten years in Bali off the sale. I told him I hoped he wouldn’t have to. He was right about the time to get out, though. It had passed. You could feel it.
When I heard the bookshelf crash, I thought it had finally started. So did Annette. She couldn’t stop crying. The impact of the encyclopedias and reference books and that heavy metal shelf, all hitting the cement floor at the same time, made the house shake. I thought it was a car bomb going off somewhere nearby. Annette didn’t say what she thought it was.
When the shelf went over it hit a hanging lamp that I’d rigged up to make it seem less like an interrogation chamber down there, mostly because that’s where I would be living. The lamp was still swinging back and forth when I opened the basement door, which was another reason I thought something else had happened. Annette stared at it, transfixed. I couldn’t get her to look at me.
I remember telling Jimmy about how it was when I first met Annette. How she’d scared me because I didn’t really know any black people. I only knew how I was supposed to feel about them—Now, Della, when you meet a Person of Color, make sure you look them in the eye and open your palm so they can see that it’s only a sugar cube.
“It’s like that everywhere in one way or another,” she’d said. “It was the same for me. You can live in one valley and think the people in the next are a totally different species.”
Annette constructed of tiny mirrors.
Miro told me when he was a boy he had a pet rabbit. They moved into a neighborhood where it was all Slovenians and the first week he was there some boys ripped open its chicken wire cage in the yard and killed it.
“My parents told me it was a dog.”
“What did you do when you found out?”
“Nothing,” he said. “It’s not really any different, people, dogs, when the thinking is that way. It’s the same isn’t it?”
“Yeah, but how can you even sit there knowing people are like that?”
“They were kids too. I’m sure they’re different now.”
“Yes, but how can you f*cking stand to live in this world?”
“Della…”
I was at work the next day when the war officially started. There were planes and sirens and traffic jams. It was just after the lunch rush, which was mostly tempeh reubens and carrot-ginger soup. The new owners were falling all over themselves trying to make friends with the staff, who were working like they’d been pressed. The restaurant was busy because carrot-ginger is the only soup of the day we have that isn’t gross and everyone gets real excited about it. One guy calls every day at 11 AM when the soup goes up to see what it is. When I told him it was carrot ginger, he acted like I had found him a kidney match.
The construction on the patio was almost complete. Broken bricks and recycled concrete glued into green resin so that in the rain it would look like river rocks. Chains of colored lanterns dipped across the courtyard and crisscrossed high and off-center over where the shed had been.
The siren went off about 3 PM and no one knew what to do. There wasn’t a basement. Someone said to get under the tables and stay away from the windows but no one did, not even the person who said it. When the first blast hit, everyone ran. Mitch was standing in the street looking up at something and pointing. I could see her green eyes staring straight into the sun when the second blast hit. Then I saw her running too.
I ran out the side door and made it into the doorway of a brick building across the street. A bus trying to veer away from a collapsed wall of an apartment complex hit a telephone pole and it went down. Sparks shot into the sky as cables snapped and whipped around etching electric meanders in the sky. Some hit water and blue light shot up the poles and across the sidewalks that were wet from an earlier rain.
I crouched in the doorway, pressing myself back into the corner, but I could still see the street. There was a large crack as a bolt of white current shot laterally through the air and contacted the metal streetlight on the other end of the block, blowing it to pieces and engulfing a car underneath in lavender flame. Particles oscillated faster and faster as the heat rose and I thought for a second I could see the real shape of things, the radiating blackbodies incandescent and brilliant, the seamless stream. The Rat Queen shook her fur free of beads and pennies and the Saint with the Black Tears lifted her robe. Thousands of new planets spun out from underneath, filling the sky like clouds of fireflies.
Annette says I’m too hard on the world, that I only see one side.
Grace says I’m afraid of my own longing.
I looked around at the smoke and people. I couldn’t find any hate in me anywhere. The world is a violent child none of us will get to see grow up.
I decided to love it anyway.