Michelle Reale

This is Not a Situation in Which You Should Remain Calm

We held hands until the intersection. He dropped his first. I pulled my coat around me tight, for something to do, the buttons long gone. My breasts were sore and I shuddered. Don’t do that, he said. He pointed with his head to the ATM machine across the street from where we stood. Make it enough this time, he said. I hurried across the street. I heard him greet some men in the street. The keffiyehs they wore waved like flags in the wind. They spoke guttural and urgent. I could hear them over the vibrating traffic, cars negotiating difficult turns. I stood with my coat open and the wind ripping a gaping hole through me. I had the money in my hand. He waved off his friends and came to me. He stood outside the market. I chose some meat in a plastic package, pink tomatoes small and premature, grown somewhere far from where we found ourselves. There was a name for this in my language, but I forgot what it was. At home I fried the meat. I sliced the tomatoes, cut my finger and sucked the blood. He made a face, called me simple. Picked his teeth right in front of me and I thought of what my father might say. He stared at me, his face softening by degrees. I pulled down the neck of my blouse, revealing my bruised breasts. Purple and green and yellow flowers bloomed like a night flower. He set his toothpick down. It wasn’t me, he said. His coffee boiled over on the stove. I smelled the scorch. Breathed it in to my pulsating lungs. Salvaged what was left. Served it the way he’d become accustomed to; hot. A curl of lemon skin. Never sugar.

[an editor's favorite, 2012]


CP

Michelle Reale is an academic librarian. Her fiction has been published in elimae, Word Riot, Monkeybicycle, PANK, Rumble, Dogzplot and other fine places.

Michelle Reale

 

There is a Possible Explanation for Everything

Your father was not a sad man. Some might even say that he was deeply content, though a simple man. You hated the way his brothers rapped their thick knuckles on his head, pointed to your mother when they thought she wasn't looking, as if that was an explanation for something. He'd sit and shake his newspaper, cigarette dangling from his lips, legs crossed, delicately. "Leave him alone," you'd yell, making your uncles feel bad or angry or both. "He's our brother," the one said, the one who narrowed his eyes when he saw you, infrequent though it was. "We love him, too," they said as if staking a claim. Your father would wink at you, smile, say, "It's okay sugar." You stood by his side breathing in his smoke, studying the cartography of his face. Your mother would watch from the crack in the door, smoking a cigarette, shaking her head in the half-hearted way that everyone who wanted to feel loved usually did.

CP

Michelle Reale is an academic librarian on faculty at a university in the suburbs of Philadelphia. Her work has been published in Eyeshot, Word Riot, elimae, SmokeLong Quarterly and others. She is the author of a fiction chapbook, Natural Habitat, and the forthcoming Like Lungfish Getting Through the Dry Season.

Michelle Reale

Aftermath

After the funeral, the sisters struggled to cook a meal in their mother’s unfamiliar kitchen. Their small, stunned mother sat silent, staring ahead, eyes fixed on her own vision. The nearly identical-looking cousins kicked at one another beneath the kitchen table they crowded around like squawking birds in a nest. Unaccustomed to family gatherings of any kind, their husbands nervously lit each other's cigarette, talked of the blistering heat and all that might come next. The sisters were momentarily united in death and impatience with their mother who refused to talk, eat or weep.

Their kids wanted to take sides, as they were raised to do, but there were none to take until one of the sisters denied her nephew the soda he wanted with his meal. We don’t drink when we eat, she said with an upward flick of her chin, glad to be able to rattle off an old dinner table rule that her father had never bent. Her sister winced and restrained the familiar reflex to yell mind your own damned business. She gave her son a look she hoped was sympathetic. They ate like strangers do with one another: with agitation and nervous hunger.

As they sat in the kitchen, the wind and humidity made a mad swirl, threatening a storm. It levitated the detritus in the unkempt yard. A broken lawn chair slammed against the back door. One of the brothers-in-law jumped up from the table, overturning an ashtray, sputtering smoke. Well, now, he said, looking around the table with a smile, while wiping the sweat off the back of his neck. The cousins were wide-eyed and red-cheeked waiting for something to happen.

The aunt relented and begrudgingly offered the can of orange soda to the boy. It’s sweating, it’s already too hot to drink, the boy whined. The aunt slammed the soda can down on the table and no one said a word, but when a thick branch thwacked the kitchen window, they all jumped. Christ almighty, what next? One of the husbands yelled in a high-pitched voice.

The cousins swiveled their gaze to the hunched figure of their grandmother who sat still as a sentry, her skin dry and dusty. She placed her elbows on the table and laid her small gray head in her gnarled hands. Her grandson picked up the warm can of soda and slaked his thirst, his eyes at half mast, quivering, his left hand curled in a fist on his lap. To everyone’s surprise he offered the old woman a sip. It was the first gesture he’d made to a grandmother he rarely saw.

She lifted her head long enough to look at him. She gazed at the only people she had left in this world, all gathered in the small kitchen bathed in heat. They stared back at her, with some expectation. The room swelled and contracted. When she began to sob, they felt it was a good first step for all of them.

CP

Michelle Reale's fiction has been published in Verbsap, elimae, Rumble,Word Riot, Pank, Eyeshot, Monkeybicycle, Dogmatika, and others.