Category: Short Stories

Troy

What’s the last movie that made you cry?

It always rocked Bunny to the core, the lengths he would take to hurt her.  She decided to look at things differently, maybe she wouldn’t have a manic episode each time he attacked. Greek colonizers only needed a reason to invade, made false treaties, turned brother against sister, and children against parents.  Similarly, exhausted her resources, college savings and precious moments, the only means of defense, guerrilla warfare. Foolish pride would only lead to destruction, so she chose to make peace and not war. 

If she would suffer, it would only be to finally end it. No more long diatribes and dissertations demeaning her efforts and humanity. The weeklong spammings and harassment post separation ate at her nerves, now diagnosed “mild generalized anxiety”.  Vertigo threatened after suffering years of an equilibrium so out of wack it seemed to have caused the “degenerating diin her back. Stomach always queasy, hardly eating but binging to quell imprinting breaking down. She thought of her sweet cousin overwhelmed with motherhood, neglect and postpartum that never ended. She needed to fight for peace, she was liberated but subject to the decisions of weak men and gullible women. Peace, He would never give it to her, that’s why it was over.  

Sway

He was originally from New Oleanes, and not long after Katrina, Sway found his way to Carter G. Woodson High School her senior year by way of Houston. Sway was a 90s kind of fine, with Nelly’s swagger and a Houston drawl that would knock any girl’s panties straight off. They shared a love for music and Bunny felt akin to an anthropologist when he played 50 Cents Wankster screwed and chopped on a burned CD in her bedrooms boom box.

He tanned a reddish brown like her, but something about him gave Indigenous North American, maybe even Indian. Slim and a tad lanky, Sway always smelled so good and greeted her with his biggest grin. She’d asked him to prom after the guy Bunny had been talking to ghosted her. They would go as friends and would commit to at least taking pictures together. And took pictures they did, despite Bunny’s teammate high jacking the night with a promise and booked hotel room. Splitting her prom date senior year and suffering from instant diarrhea from drinking a daiquiri she’d been handed a the Prom entrance was born in her plan.

Big Red

It wasn’t until his funeral that it was said aloud, actually written in the obituary, Uncle Red was Autistic. It’s funny how Black folk had a silent understanding that neurodivergence was seen, protected, yet not openly acknowledged. Perhaps Bunny became an educator with a heart for students who were equally as genius and divergent. Or maybe she was led to a graduate degree with English learner certifications because she sat at dinner tables listening to Arabic, on the porch in Glendale with Armenian and Tupac bumping in the background, on the coach of immigrants from Mexico who taught her some of her first preschool words in Spanish. It’s funny how fate weaves such a complex web throughout space and time. Bunny only wondered where this new adventure would bring her next. Why did she have to say goodbye in order to welcome in a new beginning?

Lady

Bunny opened up her favorite app as she walked towards the door to get her order. Margarita’s consommé de pollo and empanadas con bistec were top in her cart. She scrolled upon an interview of Ms. Maya Angelou describing her childhood. From being abandoned as baby, then rescued as a child to being raised by her grandmother. Ms. Angelou speaks of her mother so deeply and radically. She loved her and as an old woman , Ms. Angelou had processed this paradox.

She would, like Ms. Angelo call her Lady. Similar to the space opera, science fiction novel she read about an orphaned child. Last night, for the first time, she spoke aloud to her father, the pain of being abused by Lady mother. Kweku, her stepfather, had been a steady shoulder under the tempest of Lady mother and Fredrick.

Birthed into the monsoon of a Black girl growing up a military brat during the Jim Crow era. So of course she was cruel. Lady mother said it was the only way to make her great, all things considered. Lady thought Nana Mae sold out when marrying that cold hearted man. Poor Papa Jimmy did know that most of the damage was already done before he arrived.

ajima

We lived in what felt like the IE. But in the San Gabriel Valley just south of the 210. There was a Smith’s grocery store and a Guitar Center across the street. She liked Smith’s, it was a wide white grocery store with the tall grocery carts she could ride under. And on the street that led to her apartment complex, there was a pizza shop.

No one really knows how this relationship came to be but a few days spent on the pinball machine of the dining space became a regular. And if she were to really think about it, maybe Ronnie left her there under the watchful eye of Ajima.

Ajima wore a light blue floral house dress white a white apron. It was never dirty but just mussed up to know that she was a disciplined and hard working woman. Sometimes Snuggles would have a slice of pizza, one of Ajima’s son’s ran deliveries, the other worked the counter, and Vince tinkered somewhere in the back. Vince was so elusive, waist length jet black hair draped like a rocker.

But one day Ajima’s boys came by the house, which never happened. Lonnie told her to say he wasn’t there. Door propped open, she saw a look in Sam’s eyes that she’d never seen before.

He must owed them money, like everyone else. Was she a pawn? A way to get by? A singing handsome father, raising a daughter whose mother had abandoned and abused her once again. Yes he was Superman, coming to save the day. This time she found him, after she made so many calls to disconnect numbers and her paternal grandmother. It could have been worse, to believe a man with an “S”, isn’t just a man of many shirts.