Empty Windows

by Sara Birch

"You know, Short here saw angels in his window one night. They were floating around outside, lookin' in at him. He said they were beautiful."

My stepfather came closer. I shrank back and peered at the little man he'd brought into the house. They both smelled like liquor, old sweat, and something else. Something sinister.

Short lived up to his name. A tiny man, his face, whiskers and clothes were gray, a wraith who rose from the desert floor and seeped under our door like fog. He was beaming, a pilgrim who had seen the face of God and lived to tell about it. Short was a believer, right down to his scuffed shoes and empty wallet.

We had recently moved to a rental house in Phoenix. Our living room had a television set balanced on a wobbly metal stand and two faded chaise lounges we found in the backyard. The house was dusty, battered. There were spiders in corners and stains on the walls.

The sliding glass doors were fly-spotted, greasy with fingerprints, cracked at the bottom. Beyond the doors, the lawn had turned to straw long ago, bleached by the sun. Far from my friends, my only visitors were jet streams, white billowing lines that shattered the blue as people left the desert for somewhere else.

I was seventeen years old that summer. A high school graduate, I had barely earned my diploma. A career truant, I was steeped in too much trauma to tolerate the normalcy of school. When my mother and step-father announced they were venturing west again, I had reluctantly signed on. There were no other options.

So, two months before, I had helped push an old washing machine up the ramp of a U-Haul trailer, along with beds, lamps, and clothes, the detritus of a tattered life. Cardboard boxes, once filled with memorabilia, were a reminder of a past when things weren't as crazy. We had fallen on hard times. My step-father was a drunk and a cruel man. My mother was confused, depressed, and strapped with a toddler. Her boxes held a lifetime of broken dreams. They'd decide where to go in the morning. A flip of a coin. All I knew was we were heading west. Maybe California or Arizona.

The sun rose, and it was off on another trip down Route 66 in the back of a pickup truck. I hung on to my old cat in her crate. We careened through mountain passes and across bridges that spanned canyons so vast, it was tempting to jump from the truck and fling myself over the guardrail to see if I could fly somewhere better, where men weren't cruel, mothers didn't cry, a place where hope might guide us into something brighter. The frightened cat urinated. It seeped out of the crate and into my clothes. I reeked of urine. The wind across the bow of the truck bed was chilling, stiffening my jeans.

We drove all day and into the night. Overhead were a million stars, chips in the ragged night as though it wore sequins. "At least there's that," I thought. The stars didn't care who I was, or where I was going. They danced for me the way they  did years ago, when I was a little girl and wondered what hid in the folds of darkness.

*

When I was four years old, teachers at my Sunday School gave me a picture of Jesus in Sunday School. His likeness fit in the palm of my hand, and it glowed in the dark. I huddled deep in the closet among the shoes and dirty clothes, staring at his serene face, which was bathed in a greenish light.

When I was seven, I wrote letters to God and tossed them in the fireplace, hoping He read the smoke signals as my words rose from the chimney and into the universe.

My mother re-married when I was twelve. I left Jesus behind on the closet floor. We journeyed down empty roads with the Devil at our backs. But sometimes, the Devil walked through the front door with a guest.

*

Short got the extra bedroom. He slept on the floor in a blanket. I did my best to avoid him, but he'd corner me, sharing stories of angels. He saw himself as a missionary for a celestial realm, there to guide us on a pathway to Heaven. Foul breath breached yellowed teeth and struck my face in clouds. Recalling the picture of Jesus in the closet, a thirsty space in me wanted to believe in Short’s angels. I carried his words into my room like a disciple and unpacked them on my pillow each night. Nothing appeared in the windows, nor did I hear heavenly music. The only sounds were a dog barking at dawn, and the furtive noises in a slumbering house. Nights were disappointing, and the days glared in the desert sun.

One afternoon, Short and my step-dad staggered in, beer burps tangling with onions and peanuts. They had been on a bender, days spent at the nearby Elbow Room, a hollowed-out nest for drunks and vipers.

"Short's going back home. I'm gonna put him on a Greyhound." my step-father announced.

Nodding, I went back to reading a book, feigning indifference. I figured I'd never know if angels peered in the windows now that Short would take his crusade elsewhere.

Short said goodbye, rheumy eyes dancing in his head. He left under the guidance of my step-father. They leaned inwards towards each other, shuffled out to the pick-up truck, an ark in a sea of sand. 

*

The next day I walked four blocks to a pay phone and waited.  At four o'clock, it rang.

"Hi," I said.

My boyfriend's voice was far away. About fifteen hundred miles as the crow flies. He was a nice boy who came from a good family. He had no idea what I had gone through for years. None of my friends did. In my family, we wore our secrets well.

He held me tight the night before I left. We stood on the front steps at midnight. The porch light had burned out long ago. The truck and trailer crouched in the driveway like mongrels who hungered for the road.

"I'll miss you," he whispered. A chilling wind blew through our clothes, ruffled our hair. I saw his silhouette in the dark, placed my head on his chest.

"I'll miss you, too," I said, then stepped across the threshold and closed the door on normal.

Every week, on Sunday afternoon, I stood in the phone booth, cooking in the heat. A few cars honked as they passed. I closed the door and turned my back. Wiped the sweat from my forehead.

"How are you?" he asked, his voice warm and concerned.

"Good," I lied, knowing I'd never see him again. I held the dirty phone to my mouth as we talked, wondered who else spoke into it, or thumbed through the ripped pages of the directory. What other nomads had stood here tethered to a cord that reached across the miles?

*

Years later, a man would follow me home from a train station in the Midwest. He'd write a song about me and the angels Short had promised. We'd sing in coffee houses, then dance in empty boxcars by the railroad tracks.

By then the angels would be just part of a story, a chapter in a life spent counting telephone poles along empty highways.

But on that day, in the summer of my seventeenth year, I opened the phone booth and stepped onto an uneven sidewalk. Looking down, I noticed weeds pushing through the cement. Weeds that would survive long after the sidewalk crumbled under the cruel sun. Weeds that flourished and never gave up, no matter how often they were stepped on.

That night, I parted the curtains in the bedroom, pretended the tears on my cheeks were milk from the moon etching stars on my face. I wondered if I looked like an angel through the pane to seekers who passed in the darkness.

Sara Birch writes about growing up in an unconventional family. As a young girl, Sara moved multiple times throughout the United States. Her dream was to stay in one place long enough to find her way around in the dark. She currently lives between the mountains and the sea, with rain as her muse.

The Drive Between Homes

by Chris Davis

The red Miata behind us slams on its horn, letting my dad know—in the rudest way possible—he hadn’t merged quickly enough. The speed limit on Central Expressway is only 45mph, but people always seem to treat it like a freeway. Buildings fly by the window in a blur: Fry’s electronics, where my mom took me to buy my first iPod; St. John’s Bar and Grill, where my Dad and I used to get burgers and watch Sharks games; Fair Oaks Skatepark, where I’d split my chin open and the only witness had decided to leave, rather than make sure I was all right. It all seems insignificant as we now cruise comfortably down the road. The car behind us may have been in a hurry, but somehow my dad never was, even though he knew my mom would yell at him if he dropped me late at her house again.

“Make sure you bring those pants back next weekend,” my dad says.

Not again. I close my eyes to the buildings outside the window. What is it about the short drive from his house to my mom’s that makes my dad think I need to hear all about how my mom’s the worst person ever? His parents divorced—shouldn’t he know how it feels? Who’s the adult, here?

“Your mom always complains about me never buying you clothes, but every time I do, they go to her house and she sends you back with ratty ones. She’s manipulative like that, your mom.”

I scoff under my breath. My mom says the same exact thing, ironically, on this exact drive, but in reverse. I count the lines on the road as they blip by, trying to count them. Anything to distract me until we get there.

“Did she ever tell you I used to come over all the time and fix things for her? She’d call me up and demand that I fix the washing machine or change the oil in her car, and I’d always do it.”

I try not to picture the scene, but the frustration of hearing contradicting sides of these stories mounts again. I remember him coming over and fixing the fridge, the dishwasher, her car. And I believe him when he says he did it just so he could spend a little more time with my brother and me. But my mom tells me one thing and my dad tells another. Somewhere, the details are frayed, and each of them describes themselves in saint-like recollection, while the other acted out of unprovoked malice and genuine ill-will.

“She’d never say thank you or try and pay me for helping her out. It was always, ‘Louis, you need to fix the refrigerator,’ or ‘Louis, the air conditioning isn’t working.’ Never even a hint of gratitude.”

I roll my window down in an attempt to drown out the rest of his annoyingly calm ranting. The warm summer air beats my hair around my forehead, but my dad’s voice somehow permeates the cab of the truck like smoke. The thing is, I have my theories. I can make a pretty safe guess who was “at fault” from hearing both sides of the stories. But truthfully, does that matter? At all? And how exactly did I become the judge?

“And that’s another thing, she always claims I owe her more child support. I don’t know where she gets this stuff. I pay the agreed-on amount every month—I even keep records of it—and she still tries to weasel more out of me.”

I clench my eyes shut, trying to just get through this stupid car ride, but I can’t shut out the memories in my head: my mom stirring a pot in the kitchen to the crackle of my dad’s record player, while my dad, my brother and I race slot cars in the living room of what used to be called “our house,” before it became “my dad’s house.” I open my eyes to the passing scenery, begging it to stop the mental films playing in my mind—I just want them to stop. I don’t care about who was right or who acted vindictively or who said or did or claimed what. Whoever’s in the wrong—I still love both of them, but I just can’t do it anymore.

“Did you know she told all of her family not to talk to me anymore? As if the divorce was my fault? The whole reason we divorced is because she—”

“You can’t do this anymore!” I burst out, addressing the window, rather than my dad. My voice cracks as I say it. I hadn’t meant to shout, but the tears muddying my vision tell me it’s far too late for restraint. This isn’t a thought-out, well-prepared speech—this is unspoken, unrealized torment spilling out of me for the first time. “I don’t want to hear it anymore.”

I can feel my dad’s eyes on the back of my head as I look out the window, not seeing. I can feel his confusion Looking away from him can’t hide the fact that I’m crying in earnest and shaking as I speak. I feel the truck turn off the expressway as more sporadic revelation pours out of me. “I don’t care if she’s the worst person ever or what she’s done, you can’t talk about her like that. Do you know what it’s like? Do you have any idea what it’s like to have your parents tear each other down all the time? To have the two people you care about the most in the world tell you what a horrible person the other one is?”

The truck stops at the far end of the parking lot and my dad places a hand on my back that helps me ease my breathing.

“I just can’t do it anymore,” I sigh, and there’s a sense of finality in the words. All of what had been holding inside for years was out, and I knew there was nothing else to say.

Wiping my eyes, I see we’re in front of the Home Depot my dad and I frequent on weekends for his work. Memories surface in my head: riding on the flat platform truck as my dad speeds around the store, loading it with lumber that I then hid under; being rolled up by my brother in the giant hanging carpet samples; putting on every piece of protective equipment I could find to pretend I was a superhero. I wish I could be rid of them.

“I’m sorry,” my dad says, and I comprehend a lot more than just the two words.

Chris Davis earned the title of “least prepared person to ever enter space” by NASA, farmed exotic guinea pigs in Peru, and was once bit by a goat. His interests include above-ground spelunking and writing fake bios. He recently graduated the fourth grade and owns over seven houseplants."

My Mathematical Father: A Life in Numbers

by Karen Galatz

My father was a mathematical genius. He could calculate long columns of numbers in his head in a flash, count cards at a Las Vegas blackjack table, and estimate the number of pennies in a jar within, well, a few pennies.

I, on the other hand, can barely operate a calculator and cannot convert kilometers into miles. Yet when I think of my father's life, it is through numbers that I can best recount his story.

7 4 31

July 4, 1931: My parents meet at Coney Island. There for a blind date with my mother's best friend, my father said he took one look at my mother and "That was it." He wooed her with hot dogs, salt water taffy, and cotton candy, took her for a ride on the Whip, and then held her hair back as she threw up all that food. There were fireworks then and there were fireworks throughout the five decades they were married.

8

Shortly after meeting my mother, Dad took off "hoboing" around the country. Not for long. He sent a telegraph to his brother asking for money to get home so he could court my mother. On his return to New York, he went straight to my mother's home. Eight months later they married.

Some fifty-four years later, as we gathered around the kitchen table telling stories after my father's funeral, my Grandma recalled meeting her future—and favorite—son-in-law. Standing at the front door for the first time, he asked Grandma to please get her "sister." After so many years, she was still charmed by that first encounter.

14 ½

That's how old Mom was when she married my father. Already a senior in high school, she told my father she was sixteen. Right before they eloped, she doctored her birth certificate to support that lie. My grandmother accompanied my parents to the rabbi, but waited outside so she, in turn, could tell her own lie: "I didn't see anything."

105

That's how many days passed before my grandfather found out that his beloved Dottie was married and would not go to college as he had hoped.

They had planned to tell Grandpa of the wedding after Mom graduated from high school. In the meantime, Dad would spend the night at the house, ostensibly in my uncle's room. But one night, Grandpa, who wasn't feeling well, looked in on all the children. Just as he put his hand on the door to my mother's room, Grandma saw him and rushed him back to bed, saying he was too sick to be up and about. When he commented that my father wasn't in my uncle's room, Grandma said he was hallucinating because of a high fever and that, of course, Julius was sound asleep beside their own snoring Henry.

The next morning Grandpa was told of the marriage. He loved my father, but still, this old-fashioned, yet somehow progressive, Eastern European immigrant had held such high hopes for his firstborn child. He was bitterly disappointed that there would be no college for his brilliant daughter. No high school diploma either.

18 16

Two years into my parents' marriage, my father got a surprise. An insurance annuity Grandpa had purchased for my mother's college tuition was available to be cashed on her eighteenth birthday. On Mom's birthday, my father went to claim the fifty dollars. The insurance man said the policy wouldn't mature for another two years. My father said, "But she's eighteen." The man put his hand on Dad's shoulder and said, "Son, you'd better go home and talk to your wife." It was only then, two years into the marriage, that my mother admitted her true age.

Here's one of my favorite stories about my parents: they were in the back of a car, doing what young people generally do in the back of a parked car late at night. A policeman knocked on the window and sternly told my father, "Son, if you cannot control yourself, you had better marry this girl." My father sheepishly replied, "We are married. We just couldn't wait to get home." The policeman walked away without giving them a ticket.

1930

Sometime in the late 1930s, mobster Meyer Lansky organized youth gangs to break up meetings of the pro-Nazi German-American Bund held in Yorkville, a section of NYC. I know from my oldest brother that my father and my mother's brother, Henry, were part of those gangs. My brother would describe with great pride how Dad and Uncle Henry would come home all bloody and beat up, but also victorious and happy.

From Lansky came this recollection: "The stage was decorated with a swastika and a picture of Adolf Hitler. The speakers started ranting. There were only fifteen of us, but we went into action. We threw some of them out the windows. Most of the Nazis panicked and ran out. We chased them and beat them up. We wanted to show them that Jews would not always sit back and accept insults."¹

3-2-1

Street fighting was one thing, but pro sports was another. Three is the number of times my father boxed professionally. He quit because his arms were too short "from smoking cigars at an early age" (or so he claimed).

However, short arms had no effect on his abilities in track and field and he won two gold watches for setting jumping records in New York City. One of those watches hangs on my bedroom wall in an old-fashioned gold-flecked round frame with faded navy velvet backing.

Dad also could pitch a mean softball. Early in my parents' Depression-era marriage, my father worked in a White Castle hamburger joint. He and the other workers augmented the menu and sold sandwiches and snacks on the side that their wives and mothers prepared to bring in extra income. When the owner of the White Castle found out, he fired all the men except my father, who could pitch, hit, and run. The White Castle team won the citywide championship that summer. The next day, my father lost his job.

0

That is the number of times my otherwise talkative father spoke to me about his parents. From my mother, I learned a couple of sad facts: First, that Daddy's mother had been ill and hospitalized most of his life. She died when he was sixteen. My father was already working by then to help support the family, but, according to my mother, he harbored great guilt that he hadn't done more to "save her" and that whenever he woke up from a bad dream, he called out her name.

From my mother, I got the impression that my father's father was a stern man. Maybe the times required it. Maybe it was his nature. When there wasn't enough food to go around, my grandfather ate first. He was the breadwinner. He needed his strength.

And when it came to helping my teenage newlywed parents, it was my mother's family who did so. Night after night, my mother's father would sit in that White Castle while my father washed down the counters, the walls, the windows, and the floors. "My poor Julius," Grandpa would say. After my father was fired, Grandpa took him into the family electrical business.

5 17 31

Years later, working for my grandfather, my impatient father tried hoisting a massive air conditioning unit without help. He broke his back in multiple places and was hospitalized in a full-body cast for six months.

Even though I was a little girl and visiting rules were strict, hospital staff allowed me to sneak into his room to cheer him up. To pass the time, he counted my emerging freckles. First, there were five freckles; another time, we counted seventeen, then thirty-one. We measured time in freckles. Time in-between visits. Time trapped in a cast. Trapped in a bed. Trapped in a room and in his head.

7 11

No, not the convenience store, but my father's lifelong love of craps. My mathematical father could count cards and win at blackjack, but that was too easy. But craps, that was exciting, unpredictable. He craved excitement. It was the thrill of the unpredictable that held him captive.

He described gambling to a college friend of mine as "giving a license to somebody to take your money."

2

When gamblers win, they buy jewelry. It's a quick way to get rid of cash before the irresistible urge to gamble strikes again. Through the years my mother accumulated many sparkling pieces of hard-won gambling-earned baubles.

One evening my father jubilantly came home with a diamond ring. Mom refused it, saying she already had a beautiful engagement ring and that he should take it back to the store for cash. He refused and told her to give it to twelve-year-old me. Mom explained that was ridiculous. He then told her to put it away and give it to me when I was older. And two decades later, she did that, giving it to my fiancé, who, in turn, presented it to me. A family heirloom, Las Vegas style.

1 x "Y"

I don't have an accurate number here, but every time Dad needed cash, he pawned his 24-karat gold watch. That watch was in and out of pawnshops dozens of times through the years. When he died, a pawn ticket was in his wallet. We went to the store and re-claimed the watch for the last time. Now my son has it.

5

As in "I'll be back in five minutes," code for my father leaving us at some fancy "comped" hotel-casino dinner to gamble. He was always gone more than 5 minutes. If he looked flushed when he returned, it was a good sign. He had won. If he plopped a big stack of chips on the table in front of my mother, that was even better. It meant he had won and was content to quit for the night. If he was sweating and pale, well, that meant our "free" dinner had actually cost a lot of money.

21, 18

My two oldest brothers were twenty-one and eighteen when I was born. The oldest was already in law school when I arrived. Chagrined, he handed out cigars just as his classmates did—except they were celebrating the births of their children, not siblings. My brother used to say I was almost named "Surprise." My father would just smile and say I was the result of the best afternoon he ever took off from work.

22

That's the approximate number of schools I went to. We moved back and forth between NY and Las Vegas multiple times.

We moved West when my parents got sick of the relatives, the cold weather, and the traffic my father faced driving between Long Island and NYC, where he operated his electrical business.

We moved East when my parents missed the change of seasons, the family, and there was a crop of new Broadway shows to see. The other, not publicly stated reason for the moves back East, were the times when my father's gambling proved to be too big a distraction from his electrical business.

3

The most years I lived in any one place until I married.

I didn't mind all those moves. I thought it was fun. I loved playing "Hide and Seek” amid the mountains of the crumpled wrapping paper and moving boxes.

One brother lived in New York; one in Las Vegas, and the youngest brother moved with us each time. So, I had family everywhere, ready-made friends if you will.

And while I don't remember much drama between my parents about these zig-zag moves, my now-gone, oldest brother did. He said the moves became painful for our mother and that was why she went on spending frenzies at each new house. She was obsessed with getting us settled as quickly as possible. I always thought she just liked decorating. My father gambled. My mother shopped. It seemed a reasonable arrangement in my happy, clueless childhood bubble.

4

Even though gambling was my father's preferred means of making money, he had a variety of work adventures and stories. Here are four of them.

One: During Prohibition, he drove a truck from Canada or maybe just upstate New York bringing liquor to joints in NYC. He had already started going bald and always wore a hat (even at the movies), but at the time he wore it for another reason. He hid a gun inside, hoping to see and capture Al Capone and claim the reward.

Two: During WWII, my father worked on merchant ships. One night near the Panama Canal he had a premonition and slept on the deck, cradling a knife he had grabbed from the kitchen. The boat was torpedoed and started sinking fast. Dad did a running jump off the deck and floated in the water for a day or two. Rescued by a US military ship, he was brought to a naval base outside of NYC and questioned to make sure he wasn't trying to sneak into the country as a German spy. When he was released and my family went to get him, he was standing there, midwinter, barefoot, in a sailor's pants and pea coat—both several sizes too small.

Three: In the early 1960s, my father was a foreman on the Titan Missile construction project in Arizona. He hadn't even finished junior high school, but my father was smart. He pointed out a design flaw, which if it hadn't been fixed, would have been catastrophic.

The construction site was dangerous. There were rattlesnakes on the roads where the men walked and in the construction tunnels they descended to work. The men drew sticks to see who would go down first, knowing that the first down would be the one to startle the snakes. They all carried guns to shoot the snakes, but sometimes the deadly snakes were quicker than they were.

Four: After completing some basic electric work in the home of the great pianist Vladimir Horowitz, my father started to leave. Horowitz waved his elegant arm in an offhand manner and said, "Just send a bill." My father replied, "Maestro, I'll skip the bill if you would play something for me." The usually prickly Horowitz gestured for my father to sit and proceeded to play for about an hour.

My father was comfortable with princes and paupers. He was buddies with the Ambassador from Indonesia and equally close with the janitor who cleaned apartment buildings my father managed. His two favorite restaurants were the Bacchanal Room at Caesar's Palace and a short-order coffee shop on the Lower East Side. Both places had limited seating, but the service and the ambiance were decidedly different.

My father's full name was Julius David Galatz. Everybody, even kids, called him Big Julie. A boyfriend of mine gifted him with "business" cards that read:

Big Julie

Poet-Gambler

$1.25

Aside from that fancy gold watch, which he viewed more as collateral than adornment, Big Julie had only one true personal luxury: Prince Philip Macanudo cigars. I don't remember what they cost in the '80s, but they were and are pretty pricey. Christmas, Hanukkah, birthdays and Father's Day, we kids would each buy him a box. We wouldn't let him smoke the stinky stogies in the house, mind you, but we would buy them. One year, I bought him the obligatory Christmas box and also gave him a handmade coupon book "good for one box per month" for the entire year. For once, my gregarious father was speechless.

2

Cigars always for Dad, but for me, the best gifts I ever received from him were two lessons in kindness—offered spontaneously without judgement or condescension.

Once I complained that my father's brother, my Uncle Lou, had called somebody a "Spic." My father agreed it was a terrible word, but he also told me about Lou's hard life and the troubles he had faced including the loss of his wife in a horrible accident.

He added that Louie had some fun times too including a friendship with that "Red Hot Mama" Sophie Tucker. From all that, I realized an important lesson—people have complex lives and that I shouldn't be quick to judge.

My father re-enforced this lesson a few months later, when he handed me a Nazi party membership book. When I came to the page with the member's name on it, I saw it belonged to my father's close friend. "How can you be friends with a Nazi?" I fumed with all the righteous indignation only a twelve-year-old can feel. My father smiled; then said, "'Fritz' was just a little boy in a small village when the Nazis came to power. His membership consisted of wearing a hat, a tie and a pin. He marched in the town square and saluted. He didn't kill anybody. He didn't hurt anybody. He was just a little boy then. He's a good man."

Another time, thanks to my father's billiards' skills, I was "gifted" with that second lesson about kindness. Dad was playing pool one holiday with a dreadful relative. After a while the relative came into the living room, gloating how he had just beat "the Great Galatz." On the car ride home, I asked my father about it. "You let him win, didn't you? Why?" Smiling, Daddy replied, "It meant so much to him."

5 6

In fifth grade, my father played hooky from school for six months. Mornings, he went to the Bronx Zoo; afternoons, he hung out at pool halls. When the truant officer finally showed up at the house, my grandfather gave Dad a beating.

The next morning, limping into school, he met with his teacher. She gave him the six months of schoolwork he missed to study. He came back the next day asking what else he had missed. The kindly teacher said he could not possibly have studied everything in one night. She begged him not to lie and risk another beating from his father. My father swore he had reviewed all the material. She tested him. He got a perfect score and was written up as a "boy genius" in some long-defunct NYC newspaper. I never saw the article, but I'm sure it didn't reference his epic pool skills.

6

My father dropped out of school in the sixth grade to help support his immigrant family. It was a shame. Not only were his math skills astonishing, but he also had a photographic memory. He quoted philosophers and poets all the time. Each Sunday he read The New York Times from start to finish. It was his Bible and his refuge. For leisure, he would pick up a volume of the family encyclopedia and start reading from page one.

My father didn't just read poetry. He wrote it. One of my most prized possessions is a scrapbook my mother kept of letters my father wrote to her in 1941, while working construction on a military base in Newfoundland. Those letters contain quotations by Tennyson and Shelley, poems he wrote, observations about the nature of man in the midst of WWII, admonitions to my brothers to mind their mother and not be scared about air raid drills and blackouts, descriptions of the Aurora Borealis, celebrating Thanksgiving by taking a bunch of "Newfie" kids for ice cream, laments about loneliness and longing for my mother, and the need for her to control spending so they can save money for a down payment on a house.

$.05, $200, $50

"Give Gil and Mal (my oldest brothers) a nickel each for me," he wrote in one of those letters. In another, he suggested that while the two hundred dollar coat my mother wanted to buy was, no doubt, beautiful, perhaps she could make do with a fifty dollar coat.

  

6, 5.5

In those days before the Internet, my father was my personal worldwide web. Once while working as a reporter, I was doing a story about massive construction cables at Hoover Dam outside of Las Vegas. I wanted to give some context for how much weight they could bear, so, I called my father to ask him how many elephants equaled the tonnage I needed to explain. "Do you want the weight in Indian or African elephants?" he asked "Whatever," I replied impatiently. "Well, think about it. It makes a difference. Let me know in a minute. I'm on the phone with your brother. His trial is on recess and he needs to discuss a point of law." (For the record, an adult male African elephant weight about six tons, an adult male Indian elephant, about five and a half tons.)

Dad once observed that if he could have stayed in school, he would have liked to have become either a writer or a lawyer, but that knowing he had produced a daughter who wrote and two sons who were lawyers he felt satisfied he had achieved both goals.

That said, my father led a hard life and suffered many personal disappointments and, in his last years, terrible health problems.

Once when I faced a significant professional setback, I was lamenting the unfairness of it all—this while my father was in a hospital bed after a massive heart attack. "You'll try again," he said. I looked up shocked. "Galatzes don't quit," he said. It was my last conversation with my father. He died the next morning.

54

That's the number of years my parents were married. It was a tempestuous relationship. He moved fast. She was cautious. He was a "regular Joe" without one ounce of pretense. My mother was regal. She could wear an inexpensive polyester dress and look like she had stepped out of a fashion magazine. He ate onions raw, like they were apples. She had a fondness for caviar. They fought a lot, mostly about money.

They argued, but they also agreed on many things: children came first, West Side Story was their favorite Broadway musical; music and books needed to be plentiful; and having company over for dinner was a must.

And besides writing poetry, my cigar-chomping father always bought his "Dottie" corsages to wear on special occasions.

In the hospital, his last words to her were: "You are always kind to me."

72

My father died at seventy-two. "How did he die?" asked a bewildered good friend, somehow not knowing of the heart attacks, the blindness, and the leg problems. My father was an electrician by profession, gambler at heart, and also one hell of an actor. He lied equally well about his whereabouts (when unaccounted hours were spent in casinos instead of on the job) and he lied about his failing eyesight, his chest pains, and the agony of the veins in his legs closing and causing nightly, howlingly painful cramps and spasms.

137

The only time I ever heard my father say anything resembling self-pity was one night watching the news on TV. The story was about the funeral of a very famous person. The commentator observed that the chapel was filled and that the crowd of mourners had overflowed into the street. My father said that he imagined only ten or so people would come to his funeral. He was wrong. I lost count of the number of people who came up and told me how my father had helped them, saved his life, and was like a father to them. I did, however, count the number of people who signed the condolence book: 137.

100%

A few days after the services, my mother was in the garage folding laundry. She was still in a daze, moving through the task she had done countless times before without thought. As she folded my father's undershirts and socks, all I could think about was that this was the last time she would ever do laundry for my father. It was such a painful idea that to this day, the act of doing laundry is a true affirmation of life for me. But at that moment, I knew one thing for sure. There was my mother, moving forward, not complaining, doing what had to be done. Those were actions I knew my mathematical father would approve of—100%.

¹ Quotation from "But They Were Good to Their People", American Jewish Historical Society

Karen Galatz is the author of Muddling through Middle Age, which offers a light-hearted look each week at the perils and pleasures of being a woman of a certain age. An award-winning television and print journalist, Karen's national credits include the MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour and The Nightly Business Report. Now a Berkeley, California resident, she is a columnist for J. and a contributing writer for Humor Outcasts. Her stories have appeared in numerous other publications.

Mizungo

by Sophia McGovern

Kampala is a hive. Streets teem with cold, dark faces that turn to land on me from everywhere—from the backs of motorbikes, from inside vans bursting with strangers. From police officers wearing semi-automatic rifles like sashes. These faces stare at my white skin that reeks of money and a life in an America that more closely resembles the lost Eden.

Strange hands brush over my skin, and quickly take hold of my soft hair. The one familiar hand I cling to leads gently. It wards off propositions and proposals from men who can’t see past my female form and pale skin.

I am coveted.

My body is all they want because it is wrapped in a promise of a better life. I am mizungo. I have no identity besides my lack of color. It is a sign of the poverty that has passed over me, but clings to this air and sprawls out all around me, possessing this crazy city.

I am untouched, blessed and desired.

---

The leisurely days in Lyantonde show me that I can fly. I grip the back of the motorbike as it grumbles under me, lugging us up the infinitely orange hills and into the rural villages three hours west of Kampala where our project lies. Our goal is to provide housing and sanitation for a family still grieving the loss of a husband and father.

As we continue to climb, my host’s brother guides the bike around the potholes. His grip on the handlebars, like his brother’s, protects me. The jungle snakes. Children weave in and out of trees flashing smiles, waves and shouts of “mizungo!” The wind that promises rain twists and frees my hair from its elastic. It pulls hidden music, smells and orange dust—“fufu”—through my flying hair. I am powerful in our partnership.

---

The haunted nights in Lyantonde remind me that I am running. Instead of children flashing waves and smiles, my mother, nearly a skeleton, breaks into my thoughts. She stares ahead with hollow eyes in a yellow nightgown that hasn’t been washed in weeks.

I see my sister and me, mere children, hiding her notes and the kitchen knives. Anything she could cut away her life with so that the younger ones don’t wake up motherless.

I can barely sleep in this world so far from my own. I spend the nights living the nightmares and counting the minutes until morning. I am relieved she finally tried and ended her empty threats, but even more relieved she failed and that I escaped. 

---

“You should be scared. It is not natural to jump off a seventy-five-foot drop.”

A man jokes and laughs as he ties my ankles together, trying to make me smile. Instead, the flashing reflection of the sun off the water of the Nile below me demands my attention.

          I sit on a tribal throne as he works. Below me is the veranda. The Dutch couple I have befriended promised to watch. We mizungos have a bond. I smile and wave to their distant faces knowing they can only see my gleaming white t-shirt.

I stand at the edge of the drop forcing myself to look straight ahead.

“The trick is to jump out not down, and at the count of three you’ll do it.”

Fear is blocking nearly every thought, sound, and smell, but I trust his voice. I inhale.

One…

My knees weaken as I stare out across the miles of treetops.

Two…

My lungs contract as my gut clenches.

Three…

My arms pull above my head, and my knees bend and launch my body over the emptiness. I hang in the air, weightless, and feel as if I belong there. That second stretches and I am invincible.

My stomach turns as gravity catches up to me, pulling me by the gut toward the flashing water. I am close to bursting with fear before it rips out of me in a horrified scream. The water zooms closer until it is a foot from my fingertips. I can see my dangling form reflected in the surface. All I need is to hold that bold girl’s hand.

The bungee tugs me back before I break the surface, bouncing me into the air five or six more times. Each time I am farther and farther from the water, until I am released by two men bobbing in a raft below me.

The countdown man meets me at the shore as I crouch, trying to catch my breath. He scoops me into a hug.

“My dear! What a beautiful jump. You are much braver than you think.”

---

My bags dig into my shoulders, and my knees buckle from exhaustion as I knock on the door in Tempe I’ve missed for the past month and a half.

 “Hey, you at the door, go away for a second. I don’t want you home yet!”

The minutes stretch as I hear my roommate scurrying around inside, the frantic shadow of a tall woman etched on the blinds of the kitchen door. Since I have seen her last, a death has crippled her, and I’ve searched the entire flight for what to say.

When the door flings open, I’m engulfed in her hug.

“You smell like a hippie.”

On our scavenged kitchen table is a bouquet of roses and baby’s breath and a casserole dish. The dish, never before used, is filled with goopy brownies and an entire box of lit candles melting onto them.

In the next few hours, nothing is said about death or anything we are running from. We devour the brownies on our hand-me-down futon and watch our favorite show until the sun rises.

---

It is the second finals week of my college career. Instead of studying, I have burned through way too many hours of Netflix. The familiar Facebook ding draws me away from manly biker adventures.

A message from my sister pulses on the screen.

“Mom and the kids are in the hospital.”

My breath catches.

“There was a car crash. I don’t know what happened. The cops just showed up and took my dad to the hospital. Grandma and Grandpa are there too.”

---

          “The stories don’t match up, honey. No one knows exactly what happened.” My grandma’s voice is tired, careful, and comforting. It’s the voice I always wish my mother had.

“Your mom says there were other cars, your sister says there weren’t any.”

          My dorm room feels smaller and farther away than it ever has.

We both know what I was really asking.

          My youngest sister fractured a vertebra, my brother’s face was sliced, and my mother’s nose smashed against the windshield as the car rolled. She wasn’t wearing a seatbelt, but somehow, she didn’t fly through the glass. A miracle, they said.

---

The permanent breeze plays with the leaves of the mango trees, pawpaw trees, and banana plants. The sun beats at a constant eighty degrees, bouncing off the endless green. Gospel music blares from the speakers, fenced in by scrap metal. The whole town is mingling in the tiny yard thanking Jesus for the heaping plates of food and endless love. It is Sunday and a Day of Thanks. Everyone is full of smiles.

          Children with their hair shaved short bounce and weave in and out of the crowd. For hours they laugh and sprint and play with one another. They pose for my camera, sure they will be famous, captured by the rare mizungo. They feel my skin, wondering if the white can be washed away.

          A hand lightly touches my shoulder, pulling me away from the children. “That one in the blue dress is a boy. He likes to wear dresses and his stubborn mother lets him.”

Inside, the World News constantly plays, showing bright politicians chanting about shooting gays and bisexuals on the street. International lawyers fight to kill the law supporting homosexuals’ and bisexuals’ imprisonment and torture.

The people laugh and words of hate float up behind the Gospel music, mixed in with words of love from my new family.

“His mother is stubborn. She is teaching him to defy God.”

The children continue to bounce and play under the sun, posing for my camera as my hands shake.

---

          The big Utah backyard bursts with cousins I hardly see. The green grass combs my long skirt as I mingle, and my brother tells them about the bags of candy from that week’s parade.

          My grandparents sit in the shade, holding hands. My mother sits next to them. Removed.

          At the end of the night I gather my things from inside my aunt’s home. Shoes of every size clutter the entryway, and the happy shrieks of childhood games filter through the screen door. The living room is dark and almost hides them.

          I’m watching a secret.

          My grandmother holds her daughter. Tears illuminate her face as the words tumble out. They are too far away for me to hear, and my mother’s expression is cast in shadows, but I can feel the words I want to say to her grounded in that embrace.

          I slip away not ready to say them. 

---

Back in Tempe, my girlfriend holds my hand as we sit in an outdoor loveseat in an open-air market. The sun reflects off her Ray Bans as it sinks lower into blue dusk.

          We sit for an hour while the meaningless legs of strangers drift by at eye level. The familiar prick of stares coats us. A man points.

          A family of six walks by, each child the same bright shade of blonde. The baby smiles at us. My girlfriend’s face lights up with hope for her own clan of curly-haired little babies.

          The second youngest boy stops to look at us.

          It is a look of curiosity, unthreatening. I wave to him, and he smiles, looking over his shoulder as he catches up with his family, waving goodbye to the two women in love, sitting in the setting sun. 

---

This room is my space. My new family added a lock to the door and bars to the window to keep unwanted people out. To keep my American skin and valuables safe. Sometimes it is a sanctuary, other times it is a hiding place for my other self.

I have made it across the world on my own. At times I feel utterly alone. My body has come to crave the touch of those I cannot have. I have loved men, but it is she I crave in the darkness thousands of miles away. Her fingers slide into me; her hair falls to my chest as she kisses my neck.

A carnal moan rips from my mouth.

The house is silent.

I hear someone shift in his bed.

No one moves, and I start to breathe again.

---

Piles of freshly printed photographs of Uganda overtake my bed in Tempe. I add these pictures to the twine that zigzags across my walls and documents milestones. My girlfriend watches me work, lying at my feet. She listens as the stories seep from me. Ugandan children caked in dirt stare back. Theirs are some of the voices muted by poverty in Lyantonde, the town I grew to love. I stand on my bed, arranging the photos so the colors flow, but those eyes, pinned back by clothespins, cannot blend in with the rest of my American life. I have made these children decorations.

My guilt haunts me as I tell her their stories, and about my group’s goal to provide them with water tanks so they can strive for more than basic survival. I tell her how beautiful those children are, but how little one water tank can do. So much more needs to be done; so many more families need clean water in that green land. I wish I could show her that beautiful country. I wish that I had not taken these photos, but I keep them as a reminder of my power.

Ugliness and danger would await our love on those green hills and orange roads. But we are mizungos. We have cameras and the power to turn a nation into wall hangings as children serenade us.

---

It is midnight, and my plane sits in the Entebbe Airport. There is nothing but blackness outside, and only the double-paned glass keeping it out. I feel submerged. I am exhausted, and the cabin’s fluorescent lighting is offensive.

The screen on the back of the seat in front of me flashes, tracking my location. The plane straddles the Equator, resting after the ten-hour flight from Schiphol.

My ears are numb from straining to hear the outside world.

Everything I know fits into two small backpacks that cling to my sides and throw me off balance. I step out of the plane. Every part of me, every exhausted pore feels that small step.

The linoleum is scuffed and gray. Ads wrap around everything in sight, reminding travelers that this is the Pearl of Africa. The fluorescent lighting flickers. Bulbs, like so many things need replacing.

I can’t bring myself to make eye contact with the woman who stamps my passport.

I’m supposed to meet my host outside.

The doors slide open and noise envelops me, rushing in after ten hours of absence. The night air is chilly, commandeering my lungs, which are almost used to the recycled junk.

Men crowd together, dressed in plaid button-downs, jeans, and leather shoes. Some sit on motorbikes, most wave, all call out to me.

I am ashamed.

The faces blend and meld together. I only know his from photographs, but I cannot find him.  

---

The car with slashed leather seats weaves in and out of the others. None are new, and none adhere to the sloppily painted lanes lit up only by dim headlights.

My bags fill the seat next to me.

No streetlights give meaning to the looming shapes in the darkness. With concentration, my eyes begin to adjust as the cool night air rushes in and around me.

We speed to an abrupt halt behind a pickup riding low to the ground. “POLICE” is spray painted on the side, barely visible in the headlights. Men with rifles slung across their chests stand in the bed, their eyes scanning the landscape in all directions.

Ramshackle steel structures, decorated with Christmas lights instead of neon, blast music that whips through the car as we zoom past the policemen. The silhouettes of dancing people are etched behind my eyelids. A few of the policemen see my face, their eyes following mine before distance robs them of me.

The buildings get closer and closer together. I have not missed a single tree, smell, or woman in a long skirt walking on the side of the road.

The car leaves us, and we walk for a few minutes weaving through identical turns, and a few staring men. The hotel surprises me. In the midst of crumbling cement, the marble floors of the lobby gleam.

He checks me in and tours the room, examining every corner, every drawer with his hands.

The bed looks like someone just left it, and I try not to wonder what secrets it keeps.

He pulls the curtain shut and makes sure I can lock the door. I am warned not to answer for anyone.

We will meet at eleven in the morning.

I turn the lock and it echoes through the floor.

---

The bus from Kampala to Lyantonde bounces and screeches across three hours of green. Vendors with baskets balanced on their heads shove chunks of meat and bright fruit through my open window at each stop, hoping to pierce my American wallet and feed their families. I am told not to buy anything; my stomach was not made to handle these things.

The bus is overcrowded. It’s the only way to get to rural Uganda from crazy Kampala. People spill into the aisle. His tight grip never slides off of my bags as exhaustion pulls me under.

Lyantonde emerges. As we clamber off, all eyes stick to me, and the fact that this is home for the next six weeks begins to settle on my rumpled clothes along with the dust.

His worn expression dissolves into a huge grin as I reposition my things into a thief-proof hold. “Drop your bags, and stretch, sister. This is your new home. We are so happy to have you.”

The air here is calm. Music and scents of roasting meat lazily make their way to me as huge trucks bumble by on one of the only paved roads outside of Kampala. They lug goods from Kenya or Tanzania, places I never thought could be closer than a news story. The people walk slowly. Time gets stuck somewhere on the way to town and doesn’t translate well. Their looks, instead of dissecting me from my skin and valuables, are curious and friendly. “Hello, my mizungo friend” a man in a tattered suit jacket beams while strolling by.

We weave in and out of tiny shops and houses. Nearly everyone greets me. We duck through a gate, and a lovely house with carefully kept flowers and grass jumps into view. I enter the front door, and an old man whose smile is bigger than any I’ve seen, stands up from the couch. “Welcome to your new home. I am your new father!” My breath catches as he hugs me, and I realize he means everything he says. I am now a part of this family.

---

The Internet café’s roof is an unfinished, cool private space where the town of Lyantonde sprawls below me. Dusk casts a light blue tint on the buildings with their scrap metal roofs, some of which are decorated with worn bike tires and warped from the rain.

As the sun sinks lower, brightly dressed women crop up in the corners of streets and blossom in the entrances to winding alleys. Truck drivers stuck for the night slink after them into the shadows.

I watch the town’s nightlife bloom, and revel in our work. That day, I was actually of use. We talked for hours with past beneficiaries and designed programs meant to foster opportunity. After a week in the tropical sun, the mother of last year’s project’s family had cleared an entire hectare of jungle, ready to harvest potatoes. On her own she had reclaimed land from the green, slashing and burning hope. She only needed the seed.

With our funding, she could yield seven times what we would invest in her. Her children wouldn’t be forced to leave school because she couldn’t afford uniforms. She could be independent and teach them to thrive instead of struggling to survive. I am satisfied instead of aching from my uselessness in the face of the intense poverty that grips so many.

---

I see death. They see life, and we are worlds apart.

The screams pierce my mind, and my thoughts go numb. My head is filled only with the cries of the goat as the butcher hacks at its throat. The cries turn into huffs as the blunt knife hacks the vocal chords into shreds. Its kicks turn from desperate to hopeless as it sags, its life deflating in the red pool surrounding it, filling the jagged cement of the courtyard.

I’ve been snapping pictures. My friends here wanted me to see the slaughter. This is the first meat they’ve eaten in weeks. Family members from all over the country have come to celebrate Eid.

Here, the Muslim and Christian populations flow seamlessly. “We worship the same God, what is there to hate?”

The goat is strung up in an outside doorway. A bucket below its head fills with its draining blood. Its tongue lolls to the side looking no different than it did before the slaughter. The knife slides in and out of the creature mechanically. The butcher’s face does not change. A barefoot toddler dressed in tiny jeans waddles by sucking his fingers, and staring at the carved goat, not blinking as its fur is separated from the meat, and the meat from the bones.

The camera shutter continues to click. I try to capture the moment when this creature morphs from a living thing to chunks of lifeless meat, but all I can hear is its screams.

The flesh is passed to another man. He has laid out banana leaves and is surrounded by sliced fruit, vegetables and huge pots boiling and bubbling with bits of chicken and sauces. He is armed with a machete, and sits cross-legged staring blankly at the meat before him. With no signal he starts hacking at the tough goat meat. He keeps on for ten minutes, looking like a perverse wind up toy.

The family around me sings and celebrates. The courtyard, usually filled with gray, is bursting with the brightness of the chopped fruit and vegetables, the headscarves of the women, the white tunics of the men, and the brightly printed clothes of the children.

---

Later in the evening of Eid, I sit in the courtyard.

The sky opens and it pours. The colors of Eid are stripped from outside and stuffed into the many rooms of the complex.

The celebration remains vibrant, but becomes more subdued with the filling of bellies. Earlier that morning, my new family offered well wishes to their friends. “We have no bad blood, they worship the same God. If He is happy with them, it will rain.”

It rains for hours. God is happy.

I am still shaken from the slaughtering. Apparently, worlds cannot be left behind with travel, no matter how far or for how long. We carry them with us from place to place.

---

For the first time in over a month, I am not the only mizungo.

The river churns and attempts to swallow everything. Our raft bounces and wriggles shooting along the Nile’s rapids. My host is in the front and the rest of our crew paddles in sync with him. With one last tug at the water, we fly forward into calmer water, the adrenaline still numbing everything but the pounding of blood and pride in our ears.

A couple from Amsterdam speaks Dutch then slips into English to include me in the conversation. We share sunscreen and laugh at our burning skin and oily white noses.

That night we stay in a lodge in Jinja overlooking the Nile squeezed in between miles of trees filled with monkeys and wildlife I have only ever seen caged. My host goes to sleep, but I choose to stay with the other mizungos. We talk until we are the only ones left on the veranda hanging over the dark jungle night.

They too are haunted by the intense poverty that warps the children’s stomachs, swelling their starving bellies, and by the hate that lies behind the most genuine smiles. They too are shocked by the love that passes between Muslims and Christians in Uganda, yet has caused thousands of years of war and misunderstanding in the Western world and the Middle East. They too are enchanted yet horrified by this wonderful world.

---

 When I first arrived in Lyantonde, it seemed to be a place of the past. Power wasn’t guaranteed, I bathed from a bucket, and flush-toilets were an unattainable luxury. But looking again, I see the future developing alongside tradition. I see culture translating opportunity. Women in their seventies swathed in bright traditional dress talk on cellphones, even though running water is scarce. Teenagers constantly update Facebook at the Internet café. Children head back from school in immaculate uniforms speaking near perfect English with dreams of becoming world leaders and doctors.

The days are filled with hope for the future while the nights are filled with power play. They are an escape from the past and present where women bloom in the alleyways, and children complete their homework in candlelight with strength that my hands never needed to know.

---

It rains, earlier and harder than ever before, and the farmers worry about the fate of their crops, and ultimately their families. The roads are too dangerous to travel by motorbike. We have no connection to our project or the beneficiaries.

Instead we wait.

It rains for three days. The smell of rain is different here. It is stitched with worry and destruction instead of hope and life. The sky churns into a formidable indigo instead of the deep purple coated with pink clouds that usher green change into my beautiful desert.

---

When the sky clears, the real world is beckoned back with the flip of a switch. The workers have fixed the power line somewhere between here and Tanzania. “One break in the line and the whole countryside goes dark.”

The World News flickers on. I am more informed here in rural Africa than in the developed world. Here, there is no option to look the other way. I watch with my host family as people continue to die by the hundreds. Palestinians and Israelis. Children in Syria. Hospitals and schools bombed. Each night the death count rises. The whole globe gripped by the same rain. A village in India completely reclaimed. Buried. Loved ones beg for help and more search parties.

“God has a plan and reason. We are His people and His instruments, and God is good.”

I can’t see a God or a power to call upon, and I can’t see a reason. Especially not a good one. I am isolated from the people I live with who have opened up their home, and welcomed me into their family.

The loss and death all seems so distant, held back by the secure electricity and plumbing of my world—until it isn’t.

---

The desert I miss is worlds away and filled with those I love. Our apartment seems even farther, and I want nothing more right now than to hold my roommate’s hand. To have her know that I was there for her, really, and that her friend’s death was not her fault. People break. Some pull others down with them, and some pick up the fallen. She was stronger, and for that she must suffer. I just need her to know that she has a right—no matter how far off it seems—to be happy. She can and will carry pain, but she has chosen, unlike him, to live, and she must do that. She has a right to move forward, which is not moving on or forgetting. It is accepting.

This is life. This is our world. Like Lyantonde, it’s beautiful, it’s ugly, and it’s honest.

---

Each night the death count rises everywhere in the world, but death only holds the fringes of my life. I hurt from my roommate’s grief, but it is borrowed pain.

“Everyone here has lost a child, a brother, a sister, an aunt. People here know death well, so we understand your loss, and we pray for you and your friend.”

---

I am hardly unpacked, and my roommate is in a world warped by the horrors of an acid trip. She pleads with me to join her, but sleep is a higher priority, something that won’t happen tonight.

“I’m in Hell.”

She stands on the bed that’s pushed against the wall, arms outstretched, her tongue twisting so only her demons can understand. Her eyes roll back. For a moment, she is serene.

She falls back, shattering the window above the bed and the silence of three AM.

I yank her away from the shards as she screams, clinging to me. Somehow there is no blood. I pull her to her room, needing her to feel safe.

Her body is taken by the trip. She flings herself into every sharp corner, finally convulsing on the floor. I hold her shoulders down as she claws at me, and her teeth break my skin.

When her body grows limp, a cry fills the room—her lost love’s name.

The darkest hours of the night are filled with her grief until her demons release her, and she slips into sleep. 

---

Clapping hands, harmonized voices, and swaying bodies in their best clothes fill my host family’s church. A young woman next to me holds a worn bible, which has been pieced back together with newspaper. In the row of uncomfortable wooden benches in front of me, a child is squeezed in between her parents, yet stands facing me, the mizungo, and stares without blinking. The hymns bounce off the walls and all around me, filling what little space isn’t taken by bodies too close to understand the concept of Western space.

The hymns and sermon are in Luganda. The broken windows behind the pastor take my attention, while the child and some grown men continue to stare at me. From my seat I can see directly into somebody’s room in the house next to the church. This person skulks back and forth in front of the window, yet never faces us.

My host sister hands me her bible and tells me which passages to flip to. I read, holding it between us as she scribbles notes in what little space is left in the margins. The words I’m supposed to be absorbing are squeezed out by the feeling of the eyes boring into my skin.

The service ends, and my host mother steps up to the center of the aisle. She is dressed in bright orange and holds the basket out for the tithing. People pile into the aisle. They sing as they drop money into the basket. Each offering is at least ten percent of what they’ve made that week. Some give more than the bill that is crinkled in my hand. All are proud. The money piles higher, and as I step up to the basket, she locks eyes with me, beaming.

Those who could not offer cash leave the building and wait outside. They march in with bushels of bananas, stocks of sugar cane, live hens, eggs, grain, and seeds. One man drags a bleating stubborn goat.

They stand in front and face everyone. These are the poorest of the poor, yet they give all that they can.

The pastor begins to auction off the items. “What good is a hen to a church?” he asks. “Do we not care enough for our God?”

People then offer more money. The pastor’s smile widens and his accusations get sharper until everything is sold.

My host mother neatly counts and packs the money into an envelope and hands it to the pastor.

A young girl in the choir cleans up the goat shit.

My legs are grateful for the walk home, happy to shed the eyes of the clergy, and replace them with orange dust. It clings to my toes and the white hem of my skirt.

My host sister walks beside me and asks questions about my strange world.

They all lead back to divorce.

          “In our country it is unacceptable. It doesn’t happen. How can it be so common in yours?”

          There was a time when I asked why, but eventually I understood, even if I wished I didn’t.

Here in Lyantonde, life without poverty is a blessing, and marriage is the only way to live. It is a way of combatting hardships. Back home we have options. We have the choice to marry unhappily, and we have the option to end it.

          “When you say your parents had ‘problems’ I assumed you meant hunger, disease, poverty. Real problems. Depression isn’t reason enough.”

---

The Utah sun beats down, contending with the infamous sun of the Sonoran. My siblings and I are lined up on the driveway in four foldable chairs, waiting for the parade, while our mother stays inside, hiding from my questions. I count the browning weeds cropping up in the cracks, as my brother, the youngest, bounces in and out of his chair. He is armed with a grocery bag and the impatience of an eight-year-old, and demands to know where the parade and his candy are. Hoping to tire him out and shut him up, I tell him the faster he dances, the faster the parade will come.

My sisters and I laugh as he bounces and smiles, his mouth pulling at the jagged scar running down his cheek.

It has been one year since my mother’s hospitalization. The parade continues, and they jump and race for the fallen pieces, snatching them up before I can.

The scar on his face tugs at the moment, adding an aching for the mother we almost lost, now inside, missing another memory.

---

“I think she tried to kill herself. No one will tell me what happened.”

I read the message from my sister again and again as the phone rings to depletion.

No one answers, and the line grows cold.

Days go by. Mother fills the silence haunting every mirror. Every step seems lost and packed with lines, phrases, lyrics. They pour out of me onto every surface and thought. 

How long before her fall?

My grandpa’s calm voice ends the silence as the sun slips underground, pulling the campus into blue. 

“She said she was calling to say goodbye.”

         

He kept her on the line. She told him with slurred words about the pills she took and the liquor she drank. He kept her talking. He kept her conscious. My grandma phoned the police on the other line. He heard them break through the door. She cursed him.

          We beg to know the woman who was free.

It is dark. My legs begin to ache from the huge boulder I’m sitting on with no recollection of the numb steps they took to get there. Fellow students’ laughter and chatter slowly start to filter back into my consciousness. 

“That call was a cry for help. There’s a chance this is not the end of her tries. Hope for the best, and prepare for the worst.”

How do we make this woman stay?

No visible disease or virus threatens my family. But there are still threats.

---

My brother and sisters jab at the car windows, ecstatic about the desert’s red rock, which is so new to them. Our mother jumps in, begging my stepdad to pull over so that we can explore the red sand dunes of Snow Canyon.

          When the car slows, we fling off our seatbelts and run into the desert. Our laughter fills the empty canyon, fading into the towering sandstone.

Our mother pulls off her combat boots and peels off her socks, tumbling into the sand with my youngest siblings. She makes a sand angel beside my brother, the scar still pulling at his face. Her dancer’s body is graceful against the red sand. Floating in the colors of the desert, she is filled with life.

---

The police chief’s uniform is so white it almost hurts my eyes. His beret has the perfect tilt, and his manners are impeccable, though hardened. We walk through the station past the lower ranking officers who salute him with their shiny rifles swept across their chests.

The women’s cell is pitch black at midday. It is an eighty-square-foot metal shanty with a padlock. The door stands wide open. One empty bucket for bathing sits in the center of the cell with a dirty rag slopped over the side. There is no latrine. The tropical sun beats at the cell and I can only imagine how stifling it must be behind that locked door.

          I know nothing about the criminal justice system here, only that there is no record system across districts and towns. There are hardly any roads to transport people, let alone information. I wonder how national law finds its way or if it gets tangled up in all of the green.

Laughing voices drift to me from inside a brick structure slightly bigger than the women’s cell. It has pane-less barred windows and a bulb swings lightly in the breeze, illuminating the brick.

          “These are the men’s quarters.”

We make our way to his office where a worn fan lazily disrupts piles of paperwork that crowd his desk. He tells me Lyantonde is “blessed” to have me, and he will answer any of my questions.

I wonder what crimes the chatting men inside have committed. I wonder how long they have had to sit in that tiny cell, and how much more time they have in that block. I wonder if anyone’s crimes involve a love their beautiful country cannot understand.

---

Every meal is stitched with the World News. I yearn for one story in particular, rationing out my meal so that it will last until it airs, the challenging of Uganda’s homophobic law. 

The colorful heaps of food pile before me as the stories unfold. I wait and swallow. Mashed and steamed banana known as matoke; fish; Irish potatoes; steamed pumpkin; rice with my favorite purple ground nut sauce; greens, including a sour eggplant; and a plate of the most sensuous pineapple and watermelon. This feast of a lunch would fill the barren fridge in my college apartment and last me a week.

Outside, next to the goat’s pen, where the stories are mere murmurs, sits a garbage heap. Anything I don’t consume is left to rot.

The story flashes, my ears strain, my chewing stops. International lawyers joined forces to strike down the homophobic law designed to imprison gays, bisexuals, and “accomplices,” those who do not turn them in, for life. A pastor becomes a national hero, denouncing and damning anyone who pardons such crimes against God.

It is time for Parliament to make their decision.

          The tiny screen sits across the room, yet is all I see and hear.

          Someone has entered the house and sits beside me. He leans toward the T.V. too. I chew again, forcing back the nerves. 

          The lawyers have found a loophole. I exhale.

Members of Parliament were not present when the law was voted in.

It is invalid.

My fist clenches with the celebration I must keep hidden. Against the waves of hate coursing through the region, with the whole world watching, the law is struck down.

          My host’s protective hands clasp mine, and my fist relaxes. “My dear sister,” he says, “this is a great victory.”      

---

          We sit on our raft letting the water of the Nile drift by. I talk about the sun and the Mexican food that I miss, and the Dutch couple asks which parts of my beautiful desert they must see. Wildflowers bloom in my mind’s eye, and my skin aches, missing the sun’s blast.  

The shore is a bouncing wave of children shouting “Mizungo bye!” They run after our raft as we smile and wave back until they fade from sight, their cries lingering on the surface of the river. The lazy water laps at the raft and the breeze alleviates the slow burn of the sun. 

          “What does mizungo actually mean?” my new friend asks our guide.

          At the back of the raft he looks up from the river he knows so well. His dreadlocks frame his face perfectly and he folds his toned arms across his chest and smiles.

          “It is an old word from the time of colonization. It means ‘explorer.’”

Sophia McGovern has Bachelor’s degrees in Creative writing and Global Studies from Arizona State University. After global health internships in Uganda and India through GlobeMed and the International Alliance for the Prevention of AIDS, she found the advocacy and literary communities in Phoenix, Arizona. She splits her time between editing for rinky dink press, assisting in a high school classroom, and running the ESL program for the Immigration Center at CASE. Her work has been published by Four Chambers Press, Write on, Downtown, and Lux: The Undergraduate Creative Writing Review.