María José Navia
Panda
Translated from the Spanish by Lily Meyer
And Daddy doesn’t understand it
he always said she was good as gold.
—The Boomtown Rats
Natalie studies me as I make mac and cheese. I toss the cooked pasta from colander to pot, then add milk, butter, and two packets of plasticky cheddar, which melts in hypnotic swirls. Natalie is waiting for her best friend to arrive. Zoey. She’s a child actress who appears in ads and TV shows. She seems very pleased with herself—which is fair enough, but I still find it odd. Recently, I saw her die of cancer on some medical drama. I wept. A couple days later, she popped back up on my screen, selling a kids’ makeup line. Little girls look creepy in makeup, but I know better than to say so. In this country, kids are too powerful. Have been for years. Lawyers rush to represent them. Networks broadcast cartoons for them, mixed with Kidz Bop shows and PSAs teaching little viewers that nobody can touch them; nobody can tell them what to do. Call 1-800-KIDS-WIN.
I made that number up. Could be real, though.
Kids never sit still. In the evening, maybe, in front of a screen. Kids go to bed early, since children are the future, and the future needs its sleep.
Natalie likes drawing stars on my seminar notes, or in my books. She always wants to hear about the pandas. She likes looking at them on my zoo app, which I let her do. It’s nice to check on them during the day. While she eats her lunch as slowly as she can—cheese hardening, pasta cooling, light softening as it slants into the kitchen—I gaze at my phone, where Nei-Nei chews bamboo or swings from trees.
I see the pandas in real life late at night. I sign up for the graveyard shift, when the pandas are just bundles of black-and-white fur snoring while I gulp cup after cup of coffee.
Panda Watcher, Natalie calls me. Aminals, she says.
I never correct her.
Her mother has migraines. She rarely descends from her third-floor bedroom. She leaves me notes on the front-hall table, or, more often, the chalkboard by the fridge. We haven’t spoken at length since my interview. That was in the Marc days, when I only wanted a couple hours a week. We lived in a decrepit but ideally located studio. I had no need for more.
At first, I took Natalie to school in the mornings, always pushing her in the stroller, though she’d already turned four. I collected her at noon; made her mac and cheese, or PB&Js; took her to pottery, ballet, Broadway Babies, flute. She was always worn out when I brought her home and headed to campus, worn out myself. At school, I read Heidegger and Husserl. Bergson’s philosophy of time. I didn’t need theory. I knew time was limited. Supply would never match my demand. My days were endless to-do lists, filled with boxes to check: babysit, work on dissertation, teach Spanish, volunteer at the zoo. Drop my head to the pillow and shut down. My exhaustion seemed like a virtue. I wore my under-eye bags like a badge.
Sometimes, I fantasize about moving to China to be an official panda nanny.
Here, all I do is stand in an office, watching them on camera.
I like coming to the zoo late, especially in winter. Nobody on the paths but me.
I think the zoo is my favorite place in D.C.
Marc found me the job. Now Marc is gone. I guess I care. It would be nice to care more. It seems sad that the pain disappeared so quickly. I erased the photos. Our songs stopped making me cry. I never even introduced him to my cohort.
When I mentioned the breakup, Anthony asked, “What Marc?”
“No Marc.”
Another volunteer, Tim, walks me home some nights. At the door, he hugs me too long. He’s dying to be asked inside. Not happening. He’s married. I know his wife.
I like her.
Him, not so much.
In bed, I imagine new hands on my knee, new lips kissing my neck, new teeth biting. I touch myself as slowly as I can, so I sound angry and tired when I come. My noises embarrassed Marc. He never went as far as covering my mouth, but he’d try to muffle my groans with his body. In fairness to him, I was prone to exaggerating. I had gotten in the habit of faking. With Marc’s predecessor, I felt zero. I’d slide my underwear off: zero. He moved inside me: zero. Zip. But he kept groaning, kept murmuring in my ear. It was different with Marc. My first orgasm caught me by surprise. We were in his apartment after a party, and he was rough. He understood that tenderness repulsed me. In the morning, I was covered with bruises. And beaming.
I kept some of his stuff. A coffee pot, a lamp, a few books. It was his apartment, but he chose to move. He said there were too many memories. If I wanted the place, it was mine.
(And it was, in fact, mine. For a while.)
I liked that our relationship was in English. Liked living my entire life in a foreign language. Sensing the difference in the words emerging from my mouth. Hearing him call me baby, honey, sweetie. Letting those corny names make me feel good.
I could blame the shooting. Say I was in the wrong place at the wrong time. Not in the wrong place, actually. Which is why I’m still here.
I should have been in my classroom, but I wasn’t.
Nobody blamed me. It was an unfortunate event. University administrators suggested therapy—on campus, they wrote. Free of charge. I got invited to support groups. My students’ mothers wrote to tell me I could rest easy. I shouldn’t worry about them holding me responsible. All of them forgave me. No. Better: all of them said I’d done nothing to forgive.
The school offered me a leave of absence.
The shooter was my student. One who always came to class early, earned good grades, spoke with a perfect accent. She showed up with her dad’s pistol. Wounded seven students, then shot herself in the head.
I only surfaced when I heard sirens.
When a disembodied voice in the hall gave the All Clear.
Teaching Spanish classes is how I earn my Ph.D. stipend. Three mornings a week, I stand at the blackboard, facing a roomful of half-asleep students—I teach first period—with pajamas showing under their college sweatshirts,and explain the difference between ser and estar.
“¿Cómo están?” I ask.
None of them gets it right.
“Soy bueno,” they reply.
Their textbook describes life in Latin America. In the Chile unit, like the ones on the continent’s other countries, llamas and guanacos figure heavily. Mountains and waterfalls. A huge national park, just waiting to feature in the students’ next selfies. They struggle to understand that Brazilians speak a different language. That we don’t twirl through life in permanent Carnival mode. And at the end of every semester, without fail, their evaluations say, Professor T. talks too fast.
But the Christmas cards still show up. Presents, too. Chocolates, Starbucks cards, gift certificates from various bookstores. Students ask to take photos with me, or email me holiday wishes (or, worse, invite me to their Thanksgiving meals).
I let them love me.
Otherwise, I spend my time watching Natalie, relying on my array of useless skills: drawing Disney princesses from memory; belting out High School Musical songs without dropping out of key; assembling her sticky peanut-butter sandwiches.
Forgetting.
Natalie’s mother texted me first that day. Not my parents, whose messages arrived moments later, or my colleagues, who must have been in shock, like me.
Later, I’d learn that Anthony had been teaching next door. Covering somebody’s class. That he’d helped his students barricade the door with tables and chairs. That it took him hours to stop smelling the carpet, the time he’d spent hiding under the desk. That one of his students wet herself. That he could hear the screams from my room.
Are you okay?
I was always struck by that type of American question. At restaurants, servers asked, “What can I do for you?” or “How can I help you?” I knew the correct answer was that I wanted more water or a second glass of wine, but I was always tempted to reply, “You want to help?” then launch into a list of my life problems. But here, my role was limited to smiling and wishing the servers a “good one” on the way out, knowing I’d hear, “Enjoy the rest of your evening!” at my back.
I skipped work that afternoon. Natalie’s mom completely got it, of course. I changed into pajamas the second I walked into my room, then collapsed on the couch to binge Gilmore Girls. My favorite bad-day epiMaría sode was “The Incredible Sinking Lorelais,” in which mother and daughter have a simultaneous hell week. Rory meets with a Yale professor, expecting praise, and he tells her to drop a class. Lorelai has so much work she can’t even make time to wash her hair.
Her mom judges her, her friend ditches her, and she and Rory play phone tag, each leaving messages that trail the other like a ghost. I was the incredible sinking Amanda. When the Lorelais didn’t help, I tried the scene in The Sound and the Fury that always made my heart contract: Jason showing Caddy his daughter from a moving carriage.
At midnight, I put my clothes on and went to watch the pandas, as usual. I always tried to educate myself while I was there, to better understand the bears’ diets and daily routines. I had read every brochure. I had learned the displays’ fun facts. (Meet our bear! His name, pronounced Ti-ān Ti-ān, means ‘more and more.’)
My family in Chile thought I was busy studying for exams. Narrowing down my dissertation thesis. I had told my parents I had a new grant, which covered rent and books. I had not told them I was going to the university counseling center. Dr. Peters wanted—or “strongly recommended”—that I start group therapy for my anxiety. Instead of telling them that, I kept adding more glitter to the picture-perfect image of the American dream I sent home.
In my parents’ defense, I should say it only took them a day to fly here. Luckily, I’d gotten some sleep before my shift at the zoo, so I looked less like a zombie than I could have. DC was having a freakishly cold winter, so bad the news called it a polar nightmare, and my parents didn’t dress warmly enough. They shivered on my doorstep, regarding me with concentrated sorrow.
In my own defense, I should say I had barely slept. I let them hug me. Let myself cry like the cowardly little girl I’d never been. I had to ask for the week off, though I didn’t want to. Both my bosses were understanding, though Natalie’s mom wouldn’t pay me to not work. My parents accompanied me to class, waited in a campus café while I studied, asked to meet my professors, wanted me to give them a tour of DC. I had to fake a migraine on their zoo day (“There are pandas!”). When they left, when they finally left, my dad tucked a wad of bills into my coat pocket.
It was what I made in one day as a babysitter.
***
It’s my job to take the girls trick-or-treating. In Georgetown, people take Halloween decorations seriously. Monsters pop out of corners. Witches and pumpkins are everywhere. I always have a good time. Zoey still isn’t here, though, and Natalie’s starting to yawn. In the interest of time, I start getting her into her Wonder Woman costume. Her mom, in a fit of nostalgia, bought the Lynda Carter outfit, not the more modern Gal Gadot. Natalie is so tired—she had a field trip to the Library of Congress today, followed by a playdate, a violin lesson, and homework to do— that she barely notices her star-covered booty shorts and vintage red top. Her hair is white-blond, so her mother bought a dark wig that I pin on her head, then top with a tiara. She puts her own boots on. Real patent leather, and, I notice, designer: the shoebox looks like it should be holding jewels.
I put her makeup on. Still no Zoey. I stare at my watch, as if I could conjure her with my mind. If she never shows up, we won’t trick-or-treat. If she never shows up, I lose my chance to breathe some cool autumn air and stretch my legs before dark.
I hear Natalie’s mom upstairs, like the ghost in a haunted house. Our own personal phantom.
Her steps are slow.
I imagine her migraines as waves that flood her so completely I can’t talk to her, call her, let her daughter go see her.
I look out the front door at the kids swarming through the street. Nobody has rung our bell yet. I fill our plastic pumpkin with chocolates and sweets.
My star student was named Allison.
After the disaster, it was impossible to avoid her name in the halls. My idiot mind refused to stop playing “I Don’t Like Mondays,” that song about the shooting spree. That shooter was named Brenda Spencer. She’s in prison now. Marc liked the original version, by the Boomtown Rats. I preferred the Tori Amos cover, which I sometimes played in my headphones while I walked. It still makes me think of snow on the sidewalks and polar-nightmare days spent trapped in the house, teaching online and playing with Natalie’s dolls. Marc’s version was oddly cheery, a bouncy jingle with a sinister theme.
Supposedly Allison was wearing a pink parka that day.
I wish I could clear the details out of my head. I can’t get rid of them.
For weeks, we got interviewed. Her classmates; her professors.
Did she ever act strangely around you?
No.
Around her classmates?
No.
Tell me why?
I don’t like Mondays.
Allison was a textbook overachiever. Straight-A Allison. If I needed somebody to collect quizzes, she volunteered. She helped organize end-of-semester parties. She was captain of the lacrosse team, but still, somehow, had a 4.0. She always seemed to glow from within.
I tried talking to my students, but no one had details. “We didn’t know her,” everyone said. “She seemed so happy.”
At night, I sometimes Googled her name, searching for clues: a history of abuse? Low self-esteem? An eating disorder? It wouldn’t have justified her actions. I never found anything.
“Overachiever,” one of my students hissed. A student who had been shot in the foot.
(In my headphones, Tori Amos’s voice shrank to a whisper, singing, “The lesson today is how—to—die.”)
Allison loved Spanish. She’d taken all my classes. She was moving on to Advanced. She wanted to do the school’s study-abroad in Ecuador; she asked me for a letter of recommendation, a draft of which is still saved on my office computer.
The applicant is an exceptionally gifted student.
The worst part was how quickly normal life resumed. My students were more upset when that awful president got elected. True, there were vigils, little lights flickering all over campus. Some of the victims’ close friends took a few weeks off. But soon everyone was back, as if nothing had happened, studying the subjunctive and perfect tenses, handing in dull little essays on Punochet, or Pincohet, or Pinachett, and his dictatorship de muchos anos.
Nobody bothered to spell-check. Not in my class, anyway.
I was a fake professor. A grad student. My country’s history was how they practiced verb tenses and vocab words.
I spent Christmas in my apartment, alone. I had no interest in my colleagues’ parties. Anthony, my closest friend, invited me to Virginia Beach, but I said no. Some professors invited me over for New Year’s Eve, but I stayed home, nibbling at the enormous panettone Natalie’s parents gave me. They also wrote me a $500 check. Mrs. Boyer told me to get myself something nice. I stocked my fridge and paid some overdue bills.
Every month, it got harder to keep up. The university didn’t pay me over the summer. I asked my boss at the zoo for an hourly wage, but the best she could do was a $10 Metro card. It wasn’t her fault. I’d offered to work for free.
Natalie’s family needed me less and less. She was spending more time at school. Her parents only called me a couple times a week, and never asked me to be there long.
I couldn’t turn to my family for money. My parents’ surprise visit was gift enough.
I dawdled at the library till dusk, hoping to avoid the heat without turning my A/C on.
But soon, the solution arrived: live in Natalie’s family’s basement in exchange for babysitting a couple hours a day. It felt strange to live beneath them, next to the purring washing machine. But the neighborhood was pretty, rent was free, and campus was nearby. I purged my belongings before the move. All I told my parents was that the old apartment had too many memories. I’d found a better one for my final year of school. I’d send pictures soon.
Finally, the doorbell rings.
Zoey shows up with her nanny, Alma. She’s Eastern European—Polish? Czech? I never remember. She removes her shoes on the threshold. She’s talking, but I miss her words. Zoey is dressed up as Princess Leia, probably also to serve her mom’s nostalgia. She looks good. I know her fans will stop us on the sidewalk, asking for pictures. She always gets recognized. Last year she wore a Minion mask, but people still knew it was her.
Alma has a witch hat on. I have a headband with Shrek ears. I ask if she’s hungry, but no, Zoey’s dad just took them out to dinner. I still can’t believe Americans eat at five.
Natalie and Zoey take selfies, which will wind up on their moms’ many social media profiles. I’m weaning myself off it. Social media is the worst exchange out there. It takes my time, and, in return, gives me paranoia and low self-esteem.
“Ready, ladies?” I ask. Both girls grab their baskets—Zoey’s is a Death Star; Natalie’s is wrapped in the golden Lasso of Truth—and out we go. No snow yet, but I can tell it’s coming soon.
Supposedly, Allison’s mom lives in one of these houses. Alone. She and her husband split a few months after the shooting. Her son lives in Boston. I wonder if she puts up Halloween decorations. Is she waiting for kids behind a door down the street? Did she buy the best candy on offer? Or did she turn the lights out early so nobody would ring her bell? As Natalie and Zoey climb the stairs to Georgetown’s turreted houses, returning from each one with more candy, I peek in the windows.
I only saw her once. It was at a university function, one of the school’s parade of fundraisers. She was one of the few parents who lived in town. Allison still moved onto campus rather than keep her mom company at home.
“I need my independence,” she told me once. It was afternoon; we’d had an end-of semester party, and she was helping me tidy the room. “Nothing wrong with my mom, but—”
She stopped there. She went to empty the trash in the hall, and, on her return, started asking me questions. She wanted to hear about my vacation plans, my family in Chile, my favorite movies. I told her I loved Lost in Translation, and she gave me a fake, blank-eyed smile. She didn’t care about my answer. I could have said anything.
When Brenda Spencer was asked why she did it, all she said—sitting there with her long red hair, her glasses, her dark clothes—was, “I don’t like Mondays.”
She had killed two people, one of whom was the principal of her high school. She wounded a cop and eight kids. The rifle she used was a Christmas gift. The shooting happened on January 29, 1979. Her dad didn’t speak to the press till 2005. In his first interview, the reporter asked if she’d requested the gun. He said, simply, “No.”
During my first weeks in the basement, I watched documentaries on the shooting every time the Boyers went out to dinner. I made it through all of them—not many, for such a big event. The United States’s first mass shooting. Inevitably, stupidly, the Boomtown Rats’ jingle played in the background of nearly every film.
In one, a reporter asked one of the injured children, now grown, how she felt about the song. She liked it, she said. She listened to it every day at two in the afternoon, when her shift started. Earlier in the documentary, she’d described the morning of the shooting as eerie. She’d said there was frost on the grass.
A bullet pierced her wrist. You can see footage of her as a child, arm bandaged, mother at her side. She looks straight into the video camera, thanking God that she’s alive.
When I told my parents I wanted to study literature, their response was that I’d always be poor. It wasn’t a joke, or the type of comment you make, then apologize for. My career choice embarrassed them. If somebody asked what I did, my parents looked at the floor. Their voices shrank as they said, “Teacher.” Both of them reminded me ceaselessly, eyes always gleaming with envy, that their friends’ kids were doctors, lawyers, engineers. All of them vacationed in Southeast Asia and earned millions of pesos a year.
I left the house, and the country, the moment I could. I kept studying, but not near home. I always knew I’d pick the United States. As a kid, I liked flipping through my English textbook during summer break, poring over each page. I listened to songs in English, wrote simple phrases in my diary. Those words took me far. From one university to the next—always fully funded, of course. I never wanted to ask my parents for anything. Nothing that mattered, anyway.
A baby panda named Yiyun was born the winter of the shooting, and the zoo filled up with people. I couldn’t take my eyes off her during my shifts. She looked so fragile. Just a bit of fluff. In the afternoons, I obsessively checked the panda cam on my phone. If I got too sucked in, Natalie would shriek, “Let me see!” She’d tell her mom, when she came down to make coffee in the mornings, how cute the pandas were. I thought they were sweet, too, but from a distance. Stuffed animals lie to us, convincing us that bears are cuddly. But the zoo displays I’d memorized reminded me, Huggable bears? Think again! Even though giant pandas look cute, they are bears with sharp teeth and powerful claws. When threatened, they may attack.”
In Herzog’s Grizzly Man, the director listens through headphones to the moment when his subject gets torn apart by the animals he loves. We, the viewers, don’t get access to the audio. Herzog’s face says it all.
The word panda is the same in almost every language.
The American dream gave me nightmares. Not ones I noticed at first. For example, the first time—a full semester before the shooting—I had a panic attack on the school shuttle, none of my classmates tried to help. Later, some mentioned that the university offered counseling. All of them went to some kind of therapy. Part of the American dream is veneration of privacy, which creates a mind-your-own-business attitude that borders on not giving a shit. I could have died at the bus stop, and nobody would have bothered to check on me.
Some universities, more prestigious than mine, specialize in suicide. At Cornell, the bridges have nets to keep people from jumping off. Bathroom doors bear worried messages like, Feeling stressed out? You’re not alone. At my university, meanwhile, the messages focus on unplanned pregnancies, on encouraging girls who didn’t want to be mothers to embrace the role.
Part of the American dream was insuppressible anxiety bubbling through my body. It clogged my head. It forced me to consider how little time I had left in my doctorate, how difficult it would be to keep living here, how bad my odds were of finding work someplace else.
I had been flying long enough. Time for Peter Pan to touch ground. The year is ending. After Halloween comes Thanksgiving, and after Thanksgiving the semester is done. I hope it snows so I can hibernate. Sleep all day to save money on food. Natalie’s parents are generous, always telling me to help myself—which I gladly do, but help yourself is one of those expressions that pulls itself apart. It goes nowhere. Fake kindness, not real.
Help yourself: go get some food from the fridge.
The girls trot enthusiastically ahead. Alma has her phone out. Occasionally she takes pictures, which I imagine she sends to Zoey’s dad. He can’t take his daughter trick-or-treating, but he still wants to watch from afar. Fake parents, picking out kids from a catalog, shielding their own private lives. So ready to buy someone else’s time.
I worry about seeing my students. I doubt they trick-or-treat, but we’re approaching campus, and I know some live nearby. A whole group of them share a giant house I couldn’t pay for in a thousand years.
It’s a cold night. Breathing wakes me up. My nose is freezing.
I bundle my scarf more tightly around myself.
I’m miserable.
I was on campus early the day of the shooting. I always arrived in time to unlock the office door—graduate students got keys—and drink coffee alone in the shared space. It was only a few moments, but that time was mine. I had a bag full of graded papers, a PowerPoint of what the textbook called Ojo Words: single words in English with more than one Spanish translation. Take work. For people, we say trabajar, but for objects, functionar.
La profesora _________ en la universidad.
El computador ya no _________.
Teaching Spanish showed me new ways to inhabit my language. At night, though, I spoke in English, reading aloud to refine my pronunciation. My greatest joy was to be taken for a native speaker. To hear someone protest, “But you have no accent!”
Needless to say, that wasn’t exactly a common event.
While I checked my email in the office, Allison, I imagine, was tucking the gun into her backpack, or the pocket of her pink parka.
Impossible to get rid of these details.
(When threatened, they may attack.)
My colleagues began trickling in. Poor us, teaching in the morning. Pablo copied a quiz. Ema bitched about her students, as usual. Anthony asked me to sign a petition against the caging of children at the US-Mexico border.
All three of them headed down to class well before the period started, but I refreshed my email once more.
I had a new message. Evaluations from the previous semester. The panic semester. The disaster.
It was bad. Worse than bad. Students complained that I returned quizzes late; I talked too fast; I seemed incapable of eye contact. I was about to go on the job market! I would have to present these evaluations as part of my portfolio. My cubicle seemed to shrink around me. My heart droned in my ears. My tongue tasted bitter. My whole body felt clammy and wet.
I could lose my scholarship.
I was running late for class. It wasn’t a helpful thought. I’d be late, which would give my students a new complaint when evaluation time rolled around.
I’d be late. I couldn’t be late.
I hurried to the elevator. My vision was blurring. Somebody greeted me in the hall, but I had no idea who it was.
My classroom was close. Around the corner. The walls shook around me. I needed to sit. Dig my phone out. Check on the pandas.
Panda Watcher.
Aminals.
Looking at them never failed to calm me down.
One was climbing a tree. Another chewed bamboo.
I was close to smiling when I heard the first shot.
I dove to the ground and crawled to the nearest bathroom. It was a handicapped one. I dropped my forehead to a metal grab bar. I covered my ears, blocking the screams, and clamped my eyes shut.
When I opened them, clumps of my hair lay on the tile. My fists were clenched, my ears still ringing. I heard quick, heavy steps in the hall. I heard that voice calling, “All clear!”
Don’t ask me what happened next. What happens now.
Natalie runs up to me, basket full. She asks if I can put some candy in my purse. She smiles slyly, showing the gap where she lost a tooth. Her wig is barely holding on. I pour half her haul in my bag, and she bounds back to Zoey.
I photograph the best-decorated houses for my parents. So happy here, I write in our family chat. My mom replies with a red heart, which pulses on my screen. My dad writes, We’re glad you’re having so much fun. I can practically see the correct response glowing in the dark night. I should send the classic postcard message: Wish You Were Here.
Our trick-or-treating is winding down. Alma has night school; Natalie has bedtime. She’s sleepy enough that she wants to be carried. I agree, but quickly regret it.
Her mom is waiting for us in the kitchen. She looks disappointed. She’s holding a big bag, which she displays like it held the cure for cancer. “I got—”
She stops herself from saying more. Instead, she produces a bundle of black-and-white fur from the bag. A panda suit. Not Natalie’s size.
Her smile is enormous. It could glow in the dark.
She holds the suit up to my body. “Don’t you like it?” she insists. “Isn’t it great?”
I’m exhausted. My arms ache. I put Natalie on the floor, and she climbs the steps to her room. I need to supervise her tooth-brushing, then read her two stories, minimum, before she goes to sleep.
All I want to do is shut myself down.
From the basement, the washing machine purrs my name.
But I trek up the stair, carrying the costume— “So thoughtful of you!”—in one sweating hand. In this house, the heat is set to tropical levels.
Natalie has already tucked herself into bed. I ask if she brushed her teeth, and she lies. I sit beside her and, after she rejects every book I offer, make up a story.
I describe snowy mountains. Deserts.
I invent a country that could be called Chile, though it isn’t the Chile I know. She falls asleep.
Downstairs is dark. I hear Natalie’s mom moving upstairs, unable to sleep, or just getting more painkillers. I descend to my world. Switch the light on.
A yellow glow floods the room.
I peel my layers off: parka—black, not pink; tights; dress. I stand at the mirror in my underwear. I have no glasses on, so I see only a blur.
A stain.
A scab.
I remember my students, practicing comparisons, writing, The professor’s skin is the same color as whole-wheat bread.
A bundle sits on the floor, all black-and-white fur. I unzip the suit and let it embrace me. It isn’t my size. Its feet flop, and it zips too easily. I put on the hood, which has ears, while the kettle boils. I pick red tea with cardamom.
When I open my purse, looking for my phone, candy flies everywhere. Skeletons, pumpkins, bats, and, at the bottom, a little packet of marshmallow ghosts.
I sit on the broken couch. I live in the basement, after all, where broken things go. I line the ghosts up single file on a filthy table. Their skin is bright yellow. Their mouths gape.
I drop one in my hot tea, where it falls apart.
Out the window, it starts to snow.