My Mother’s Touch
When my mother tries to touch me, I flinch. I don’t like her to touch me at all, ever, and I don’t remember a time when we cuddled or hugged or she took me “uppy,” although it happened. My grandmother has proof, the old black and whites of me in my mother’s arms, in a...
1000 Somali Shillings
The 1000 Somali shilling note is laminated to protect its colors, a mixture of orange, purple, tan, and green, from fading. On one side, women weave baskets; their images are purple, and the baskets around them are orange. Some of them seem to be full, perhaps with food. On the opposite side of the note...
Solstice
“Life used to be fun,” my mother says a few days before her eighty-ninth birthday. “Now it’s shit.” It’s hard to argue with her. Her memory is such that she asks me questions and by the time I answer, she’s forgotten what she’s asked. Our conversations take on an Abbot and Costello circularity. Suddenly disagreeable,...
Frivolous
On Monday morning, as I do every weekday, I walk up the hill from the subway stop at 161st Street. The Bronx District Courthouse presides over the Grand Concourse, the pale limestone shining in the morning light. I show my badge to the officer at the podium, and cross the marble lobby to the elevator....
Dessert
In Alba, Italy, rain and a market. In my hands, the white greased paper that once held an entire rotisserie rabbit. Its bones clack together as hooves, a horse in the distance. I clutch this paper coffin to my chest, as if for warmth, and scan the piazza for a garbage can. My hunt for...
Semi-Significant Moments in Googleland; Results of My Top Three Searches
1) Where is D., my first love, first sex? Armed with vague notions of where I could find D. I type in his name with the same trepidation I had a decade prior when I’d called him at his hotel in London and we’d met for a curry and kissed like we were trying to rewind....
Salsa Class: Beginners
I can’t dance. I may be Irish, but let’s get that out of the way straight away. I became a céili-failure at an early age, missed out completely, without regret on the line-dancing craze that swept through Ireland a few years back. I am neither able nor willing to follow aerobics instructions. My school report...
Scavengers
The first one arrived early that morning: a small, unsmiling man riding an old bike with a wire basket. When he saw us carrying cartons out to the U-Haul trailer, he stopped. “Got anything you gonna throw away?” He spoke quietly, as if conserving energy. His forehead glistened. The sun hadn’t climbed above the roof...
![](https://brevitymag.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/10/FFU-013-MFA-Digital-Brevity-200x165-181009-Enders-1B.jpeg")