Short Stories

THE WAY WE WERE.

By Jamie J. Philbert

From the outside, you could almost see through the cloudy eyes of her window and she could always see out. You could never be certain if she was looking directly at you. Appearing there with arms akimbo, hands saddled on her hips with those dusty white curtains blinking against her bony bruised shoulder blades, I watched her. Those were the last set of linens she had sewn on the day that Zake left. She never quite finished them, the way she never finished her sentences. Her sentences, like those curtains, always seemed to be hanging open waiting for an arrival or a return or some other unknown destination to unearth itself. 

I sat there in a corner waiting to grab her attention like a courting stranger across a crowded room. But this particular morning, she only faintly looked in my direction. I stealthily crawled towards the edge of the bed where she walked over to continue packing a suitcase, a never ending task she had begun three days before. Where was she going and would she take me with her?, I wondered. She crushed her hips down to the ground, reached under the bed and rocked a small shoebox out. Dropping it on the bed, she swayed out of her clothes towards the doorless closet. Her body boarded into a red dress which let her right leg peer provocatively through the open seams.

I heard a familiar echo knocking up the wooden staircase outside the door. As the hinges of the door unwrapped themselves, she strategically moved towards the bed where I was. She sat down facing the door and slowly wiped her hand across my back,  flipping open the lid of the shoebox as her destination arrived. It was Zake. A thunderbolt of nothingness swept across her face. 

Zake entered and walked towards the closet. 

The words danced off his tongue, “I came to collect the last of my things, Charm.” Charm dug her hand into the shoe box, pulled out a small silver and black handled object and stabbed the air towards Zake. BOOM! BANG! My hairs stood up as if they would walk away from me and my claws clung to the sheets. My voice trapped itself in my throat. 

Zake fell at the foot of the closet gasping at the mercy of the shots he collected to his heart. Charm picked up the suitcase and walked towards the door without looking back saying, “ You thought you would get away with putting your hands on me, Zake. You thought I’d let you get away with happily using the same hands to lay down with another woman. Now she can return here once more to hold your remains.” She unraveled the doorknob and vanished. 

I could feel the sound of Zake’s blood covering the air. I tipped cautiously to the eye of the window watching her walk away like a run-on sentence. There I was, a witnessing feline, and the final punctuation to Zake and Charm’s tale. 

Back to Back, Belly to Belly

By Jamie J. Philbert  

Lavway Refrain:

‘Back to Back, Belly to Belly. Ah doh give ah dam cause ah done dead already’- This Lavway/Kalinda Chant, Prayer,  Law, and Proverb was shared with me by Rondel Benjamin.

The plan was to attend Kalinda King, Moxilal’s 87th birthday celebration that day. I had all intentions of leaving home before noon. I slow-dragged between the hours devising a plan on how and when to travel into the country-side. My bed took hold of me and insisted I sleep in intervals and I obliged. There were knots in my belly, no pain, just a rising anxious feeling all day. I called at 4pm to book a rideshare driver for 5:15pm, and cancelled it 5 minutes later. Something about the driver’s vibe and our interaction triggered me to cancel. 

There was that one time, the day after my 40th birthday, that I silenced my vibe to cancel a rideshare driver because I was in a hurry. That ended in threatening rocks and aerial cuss words from him, the driver. Ever since then I honor the tickle of my intuition over the press of time. So that day, Moxie's birthday, I gave myself permission to continue this dance with the bluesy mood of my day. There was nothing in my closet to perfectly match my mood so I decided to make something. I lacerated some stretch black leather fabric into shorts and decided to birth another in red.  

I only let the serger pause heavily against the seam of the red shorts for a moment as the parade of syncopated bullets riddled the neighborhood’s jolted serenity. It was Saturday.

Just after 5:15 and not quite 5:30pm. The screaming quarreled with the light of the air for space to breathe out what should have been laughter at some ritual prank. 

It was not laughter. And I sat in myself thinking for weeks how our screaming could imitate laughter, how our laughter mimics screaming, how our voice was part of an alchemical potion that draped our DNA. I only saw the pool of blood tiled against the concrete with yellow miniature plastic numbered tents. The yellow tents housed the footprints of shells that the bullets left outside the absent body.  I exited my rusted white battered painted gate and landed on the pavement. 

On the street, there was a tableau of still sorrow. People all over and still like lost children. All loss is how I remember the children’s faces that witnessed more than I wanted to know. Everything seemed still except for my heart beating like a motor in the pedals of my feet. I knew that none of us would be normal again, not the road, not the children, not the animals, none of us and with this thought I cleared the crossing and vanished from the murderous air of La Horquetta. . 

Days later I still had not been able to face the discomfort of my neighborhood and ultimately my home. The countryside was generously holding me in its arms . I received a call to inquire of my well being and my insufficient report on what had occurred on my street. I didn’t know who the horrific symphony of shots had rang into. My ignorance was smashed with the stutter of words that said I think his name is Ak.... 

My entire soul erupted and melted all at once. I didn’t want to believe it. I still don’t want to believe it. I spent the next few days with his smile, youthfulness, promise and gentleness scraping the fibers of my mind. No tears would suffice to clean the blood I saw that day. It is now tiled in my brain. The blood and the boy who crossed the kalunga line at the entry of his 21.  

There is a silence that washes over me. There is a silence that washes over me and rocks me to write although at that time my paralyzed words could not find the muscles to move past my lips appropriately. I often find myself here the past few decades churning words out of cemetery milk. The cemetery has more milk than many of black mothers. Black mothers crying over their spilled milk in cemeteries are too common and too heavy. 

I often find myself here, crawling back into myself to feel the weight of my own mothers womb cradling my innocence against the wrench of this broken reality. I crawl through the cracked spaces to grab my creativity by its fine hairs and sauté my spine to stand atop the crash of gloom that funds systemic rage. Acceptance is violent comprehension, at times and it's also a door to stitching together pieces of peace.  Perhaps in another reality, there is no war and no peace, perhaps there is just a devotion to the liminality of our backs and our bellies.