Tag Archives: micro fiction

Elina Kumra

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Evidence in Two Languages

I. Kilometer 72

 
The GPS dies at Kilometer 72. My mother mutters from the backseat—bad omen, bad omen—though she’s been predicting catastrophe since we left Beirut this morning. In the rearview mirror, her hands work prayer beads like she’s counting backwards from disaster.

Three months ago, I was translating depositions in Montreal, turning corporate French into corporate English. The email came at 2 AM: Beit Meri house bombed. Teta inside.

My grandmother. Who refused to leave. Who said they can destroy the walls but not the taste of pickled makdous on Thursday mornings.

My father drives like memory itself: sudden acceleration, unexplained stops. At checkpoints, he switches between Arabic, French, English, calibrating survival to the soldier’s accent. “Canadian passport,” he says.

The house: a mouth with its teeth knocked out. My mother finds her childhood bedroom by counting craters. “This was blue,” she says, holding concrete. “Bleu électrique. I fought for that color.”

“Stop translating everything in your head,” my mother says, though I haven’t spoken.

My father collects shrapnel in a Carrefour bag labeled Evidence in three languages. For what court?

Teta’s kitchen: miraculously intact except for the ceiling, now sky. Her tabbouleh bowl sits on the counter, parsley still green inside.

“Three days old,” my mother says. “She was making it for Friday lunch.”

“Today is Friday,” my father says.

“No. Friday was when she was alive.”

In what’s left of the living room, a photo album splayed open. My mother at seven, holding a doll. The doll survived too—one eye melted shut, synthetic hair fused into punctuation.

The neighbors arrive with tea. Mrs. Khoury serves from her grandmother’s porcelain, the surviving cups.

“الحمد لله على كل حال,” she says.

My mother responds with the formula, but her eyes audit God’s accounts.

My father finds Teta’s insurance papers. “See? She prepared.”

“For dying?”

They switch to Arabic. I catch fragments: your pride… my family… always running…

Evening. Through the holes in our house, I hear the pharmacy’s generator kick in, the argumentative pigeons, someone’s grandmother calling for pills. My father burns broken furniture in the courtyard. The smoke smells like varnish and scoreboards.

“Teta would hate this,” I say.

“Teta is hate. Was? What tense do we use?”

From the rubble: her reading glasses, bent into Cyrillic. A coffee cup—World’s Best Grandmother—I gave it to her, age twelve; she used it for blood pressure pills. Seventeen olive pits she saved to plant “when this ends.” A key that opens nothing I can name.

The key goes in my pocket.

Morning. My mother stands in the doorway that no longer negotiates inside from outside. “Take a picture.”

“Of what?”

“Of me. Here. So we remember there was a here.”

In the photo, she’s holding her mother’s tabbouleh bowl like a green planet.

“What will you tell people in Montreal?” my father asks.

“Which story?”

“Which truth?” my mother corrects. “The one where we’re victims? The one where we’re Canadian now?”

“The one where Teta died making tabbouleh. Where the parsley stayed possible.”

We drive. The GPS finds itself at Kilometer 73, confident again in its lying. But I keep the key. For the door that doesn’t exist yet. For the house that was always already falling.
 

II. Heirloom

 
Two minutes before ten, my phone spasms against a soy-sauce bottle. Caller-ID: 小姨 (Aunt Lydia). Her voice breaks like ice: “你妈在楼顶——救护车来了——快点.”

Silence after news like that weighs what a mouth weighs: damp, stunned, useless. I simply put Baba’s old raincoat over pajamas that smell of hot-pot broth and let the elevator lower me like freight.

Roof scene: industrial floodlight, four aunties frozen mid-mah-jongg, steam from an abandoned thermos ghosting upward. Mama: zipped into black vinyl, small enough to tuck under my arm the way she used to carry winter melon. Red 中 tile glares up. Aunt Lydia presses a chrysanthemum napkin into my hand. “她最后叫了你的名字.”

Someone will have to tend it, Aunt says, nodding toward the tomato planter Mama hauled up here each May—”three floors closer to heaven,” she joked. The fruit are still green, fists clenched against ripening. Roof wind lifts the plastic name-stake: heirloom 禄丰早红.

Back in the condo: a bowl of grapes, each globe severed from its stem so the “spider legs” won’t scare me—second-grade lunchbox hack. I eat two. The sink coughs once, then swallows their skins.

Funeral home smells like stale kugel and ammonia. The director offers pine or MDF. Pine, I answer. 落叶归根. He mispronounces my surname three times while swiping the debit terminal.

Mourning food arrives in obedient circles: sesame balls, scallion pancakes, donuts that shine like planets. Round so death can’t crouch in corners, Aunt Lydia mutters. She refills tea that tastes of chrysanthemum and debt.

Morning congee ritual. One part rice, eight parts water, clockwise stir—Mama’s rule. I crack a century egg. The yolk runs black as funeral ink. Spoonful scalds the roof of my mouth.

Funeral day. Pine coffin sits unadorned—we couldn’t find a Buddhist monk on short notice. The funeral director’s nephew reads from index cards about “eternal rest.”

His Mandarin pronunciation makes rest sound like rust. Behind me, aunties whisper corrections like a Greek chorus armed with grammar. I approach the microphone. “She peeled grapes so we could pretend hunger was optional.” Voice holds, then drops.

Uncle Jian streams Teresa Teng ballads; the melody tries to febreeze the air around the coffin.

Flash-cut: college Thanksgiving. I told Mama I was queer. She slammed the cleaver; garlic shrapnel flew. “I’m not angry at YOU,” she said, “I’m angry the world gives you fewer exits.” That sentence still glows radioactive on a Post-it above my router.

I walk back to the roof with pruning shears. Twist, don’t tug—Mama’s horticulture gospel. The stem resists; soil freckles my cheeks. Under halogen the green fruit glints, stubborn planet refusing orbit.

Yun arrives from the encampment. Two pins on her jacket. Aunt Lydia’s stare is a cleaver held flat. Yun bows. “节哀顺变, 阿姨.” Syntax so perfect it startles tears from the older woman. Cleaver-glare softens.

Kitchen midnight. Yun identifies blossom-end rot: “These tomatoes need calcium or they blacken inside, hollow heart.” Hollow-heart was Mama’s insult for selfishness.

Yun crushes saved egg shells, folds them into the planter. “Give it a week,” she says.

04:32. I open Mama’s old email, type one line:

妈，I’m turning the congee clockwise.

Hit send. Auto-response: user not found.

Dawn paints the sky aubergine. I carry the planter to the parapet. Wind smells of chlorophyll and siren residue. Someone will have to tend it. I volunteer my hands.

Elina Kumra is a BIPOC Bruin based in California. She writes across genres, from speculative and horror to psychologically layered literary fiction. When not writing, she is likely tracing coastal fog or revisiting the recursive dream logic of Serial Experiments Lain.

Robert Vivian

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My Neighbor St. Therese

I am the mouth of the little thing, little way, so small it often goes unnoticed, unseen, and when I speak it is like the miracle of a dust mote lit up by sunlight so bright it becomes brightness itself and no room for darkness, not even the clipped apostrophe of a shadow and lighting the air to float and little thing precious but forgotten thing, jewel box spider dead in a day and hollow wisp of straw that sings what it can of brightness, the least part or veined leaf blowing across a rail yard and the smell of creosote, weeds, or lump of coal, anything left behind or discarded and the love that got away to end up nowhere that is somehow still clings to a button, a piece of torn paper, a note card with a recipe on it or a penny shining in the gutter for the little thing and little way is what mows the grass and takes out the trash and makes sure the dishes are put away along with the forks and spoons, little helpmate, little worker bee, little necessary beggar and cripple with pleading eyes and little thing and little way are not seen or advertised, no cameras or mirrors to strut their stuff in front of, little fish, little minnow and the wake it makes is but a breath beat of water and tendril of water beckoning you to some unseen current and I speak of you now at the edge of a whisper that is almost afraid to speak for little thing, little way, little speck of being how close you are to silence and nothingness, how close to broken slat of windmill who gave its life to gust and breeze and little thing, little way, a hand reaching for a door or a hand lifting a teacup or a diaper with careful fingers the petal of you is a tiny, tiny rose that will never be famous, never be sought after as the love you bear and suffer is so small only the stars believe it though others say oblivion, oblivion, but I know your mouth is my mouth and your voice my voice as together we take care of what we can however brokenly and imperfectly, cleaning a kitchen floor on our hands and knees using our tears for water, the smallest cry in the mouth of the smallest thing, offering even the little we are because there’s nothing left of us to give, not even a flower.

When The Stones Abandoned The World

All at once the stones picked themselves up in the barren field and started walking toward the horizon, silent, solemn march of going elsewhere and rose the thrust and the warbler and the startled robin and I could see that the stones were naked but unashamed and wanted to be washed again and rose the wind and the dust and where was the earth going but to another place not of its keening and to watch the stones I felt abandoned and I did not ask the stones why I was being left behind in a land without them and rose the other birds and still others, rooks and crows and turkey vultures and smoke from a distant fire and if you could see the stones moving, if you could see them turning away you would wonder with me if home was a dream we tell ourselves to keep from dying though death is with us always in the smallest things, a moth on the windowsill with its paper wings full of dust, old, faded pictures of loved ones long since gone into the ground or wind, but the stones wouldn’t say anything as they were moving for they had lain prostrate long enough and the whole earth seemed to tremble and shimmer in the wake of the their passing and it was not without its startling shock of beauty—I mean the way the ground burned after them in variegated fire, I mean the heart and quake of it that had its equivalent somewhere inside me as I knew I was being left behind by the most elemental of forces and there was nothing I could do, nothing, nothing, but watch the stones leaving on their steadfast journey and vault of sky above them, changing itself with every drifting cloud to show them how it was done.

Robert Vivian is the author of The Tall Grass Trilogy, Water And Abandon, and two collections of meditative essays, Cold Snap As Yearning and The Least Cricket Of Evening. He’s currently working on a collection of dervish essays called Mystery My Country.