three pink roses sit out on a peeling window sill. No bigger than the tip of my thumb, they’re tucked in tiny thimbles of water. It’s a day when we walk back slowly from the community center, late summer heat, a strange, sticky silence on the streets. It starts to rain, not quite drops, but the air’s so humid something has to fall. My little sobrina—who’s not really, but she calls me tiá because, she says, “estás aqui”—sniffs the petals, just at her eye level. She touches each one with curious 4-year old fingers. “Tiá, tiá look,” and I do. Our hands hold slick with sweat when the sun comes out, steam hissing off the pavement like a resurrection for all that has landed here. “No guns today,” she remarks, the way she might notice her clothes or some other common thing she knows. “No lice” (by that she means ICE). It startles me that she sees in this way, but I think she is right about the moment. How joy can be quiet as nothing at all. Or the old woman peering at us from behind the window, her smile so big you can hear it: our sweet, serendipitous, but fleeting trinity. That’s the last time I’ve seen my sobrina. People at the center say her family has disappeared.

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Thomasin LaMay is a writer, singer, teacher, occasional midwife in Baltimore, MD. She’s taught music and women/gender studies at Goucher College, and currently teaches high school for at-risk teens. Her writing appears in Thimble Literary Journal, Ekphrastic Review, Yellow Arrow Journal, Yellow Arrow Vignette, and forthcoming in Tiny Memoir and Bluebird Word. She lives in the city with 50-ish plants, 100-ish books, 9 dulcimers, two cats, a dog, and random strays. New project is a micro-memoir. For fun she plays drums.

Photo by Thomasin LaMay