Idris Maria Monserrate De la Vega
Idris was standing on the cusp of the train platform's yellow strip, waiting for the train, and thinking about throwing himself in front of it. There was something about the sudden violence of it that attracted him. After all, in the slow paced way that it doled out consecutive miseries, life could be much crueler.
He couldn't recall when he'd begun to feel this way, when the smile and cocksure confidence with which he’d faced the challenges of his youth had dissolved into the salt hewn tears he periodically left on his pillow. But it didn’t really matter when the change had occurred. He was changed. He suffered. And in trying to feign his way through the day, he inflicted the shoddy pantomime of a better man on those he cared for most.
As a child he'd been a beautiful little colored boy (just what color no one knew nor cared to ask), inciting fits of madness and giggles with his exotic cuteness. But as he grew, so too did his recklessness. His nose became flatter for it, his jaw more chiseled, scar tissue built up around his eyes. Innumerable punches had carved quite a distinctive looking man out of him. Even still, there remained some of that boyish beauty.
However, Idris learned early on in life that boyish beauty was no currency in the world of men it wouldn’t protect him or earn him anyone’s respect. And so, as he grew older, Idris would invest wholly in the manly abstraction of strength, burning threads of tender beauty at their edges in exchange for the violent, short-lived existence of the fighter. And when he had exhausted every sacrifice, every sore muscle, every open cut, every ache with which he could pay, he would stand as close to the yellow strip on the platform of 28 street and 7th avenue, thinking about throwing himself in front of the encroaching train.
A sudden rush of warm air preceded the slow illumination of grime stricken tiled walls. It roused Idris from suicidal reverie and turned the hourglass of his mind so that a dreadful countdown began. Each grain traveled down the curve of his spine, making his hands go clammy, before ultimately settling in his shifting feet, cementing them against the dimpled surface of rubber yellow track before the abyss.
The lights of the train pulsed as the doors stumbled shut behind him and Idris stepped into the empty interior. He let out a sigh. Tomorrow, he would stand on the same platform in the same spot and face down the same decision. Today, he would continue down to the gym on Church Street and try to prove to himself that he was still a son of a bitch. Afterwards he'd meet Em for dinner, his face tender and bruised, drops of blood falling from his lip, mixing with the blood of his steak.
Emily Rivera De Silva
Em awoke on the couch wrapped in a velvet a throw. From the way her friend stared at her she might as well have been wrapped in the stars themselves. A cup of fresh coffee smoked in his hand as he crouched before her. His smile sang through the dark of his beard.
"Beautiful women should always wake to the smell of French coffee."
"And beautiful men? To what do they wake?"
"An empty bed, obviously."
Taking the cafe au lait from him she wrapped the throw more securely around herself. Her clothes lay in a pile on the floor. The apartment was cold. Francois liked to live in shitholes. He felt it helped his creativity and kept him better in tune with the ghost of dead men who valued the struggle only so much as they could appropriate it.
"Drink. The coffee will help warm you up."
"Thank you, François.”
François was a 30-something Muslim poet. He had kind, longing eyes, a gentle smile and wrote love poems on napkins to seduce café women. Em, years earlier while studying abroad in Paris, had been one such woman. Many a morning after that, she and François would lay in bed together discussing anything that popped into their heads, sharing the intimate details of their lives and believing they'd never had so much in common with another person. They would fuck with the windows open and after, he would recite poetry to her as she lay on his chest, the two becoming a formless, flesh colored rorschach atop unchanged sheets. In those days she would tell him he was the greatest writer she'd ever known. And after hearing this everyday for five months, he'd come to believe it. It was true too, given the company Em kept at that point in her life was a menagerie of EDM djs, over-righteous film students, and married french-men with their best years behind them, looking for their youth in the many freckles that dotted her skin.
When François finally published his first volume, it was to critical acclaim but no great success. Every poem save one was about her. After years of going overlooked he’d finally found fame, with a small collection of ginnawas he titled “The Simple Six”. It was made up of six two line poems telling the story of two lovers, the city they meet in, and their journey through an entire relationship over the course of single day. He was rewarded for this simplicity with rapid success. Gone was the ornate verboseness which had characterized much of his prior published work, but for which he had not had any room on his napkin poems. In returning to those first poems he had found a public clamoring for passion, resentment and regret in an easily digestible form. Something perfect for the instagram generation.
It was these six poems that found their way onto Em’s desk at Penguin Random house, first as a verbal recommendation from a good intentioned intern, and then in physical form; a wordless gift that appeared after one of her two martini lunches.
Upon reading the first poem, an undertow of nostalgia curled around Em’s limbs sinking her deep into memory and the longing that comes as the inequities of the present are laid bare, measured against the gilded nature of the past. She pulled her phone from her pocket and, after setting a violent gaze on the screen to make it and its numbers still, called the publishing house of the open booklet in front of her.
François Ayoub
After so many years of going overlooked, François’ new found infamy was a bit bittersweet. Everywhere he looked he saw his name in the papers and found it lovely, even if it was there for all the wrong reasons. They claimed his poetry was being used to recruit young men and women to extremist causes, claimed it subliminally extolled Sharia Law. Of course none of his critics could come to an accord about what Sharia Law actually was, but that really didn't matter. All that mattered was that his works would lead to the doom of the French nation. Upon hearing that his works were being burned he headed to the square and began to sternly chastise the mob. His words were so eloquent that many of the mob's members were brought to tears. In that moment they realized that it would do no good to burn the man's books for he could always write more. He was his art, the living embodiment of it. It seeped from his eyes as he slept and many a morning he would wake to sheets stained with words he could not remember writing. It was in his radiant smile, even in the way he pronounced the definite articles of language most people tend to roll over on their way to making a point. No, it would do no good to burn the man's work and not burn the man. So, with tears in their eyes, the mob turned their pitchforks and pyres on François.
When Em finally arrived in Paris, François was squatting in an ex's apartment, nursing his second-degree burns. She had two boarding passes in hand and Idris' passport. The plan was for François to assume Idris' identity until they got to the states. Even though he and Idris looked nothing alike the facial blindness of mobs as it pertained to particular ethnicity would work in Francois' favor. All Muslims looked alike to the mob. (At this point we should mention that Idris, while crowned with an Islamic name, was not muslim himself. But he could pass for what the public thought a muslim out to look like. And that, is exactly what Em’s plan banked on.)
Everything was going to plan until François realized he had left his notebook in his apartment and, against Em's ardent protests, went to retrieve it. He'd almost made it back out when the mob arrived, pyres ready. As they surrounded him Em made her way through the crowd and ,once in front of Francois, planted a passionate kiss on him. The distraction worked and the mob was stunned into dropping their pyres. It was a phenomenon unique to interracial couples. Even the most prejudiced among them were forced to acknowledge the beauty of the moment. One man even threw a rose. Back at the airport the two friends walked hand and hand disguised as a happier Idris and Em. Not even airport security, with their specific instructions to stop and question anyone who looked faintly Muslim, gave them a second glance. Such is the power of a happy couple. Those dangling in the webs of their own misery can scarcely bare to look.
The Locker Room
The faintest collection of scarlet drops were pooling at Idris' feet. His nose had stopped bleeding, but as the ice he clutched to the side of his face melted, it streamed through the crusted over blood around his nose and lip. Many a Saturday night had ended like this for him. Rarely had an afternoon.
The hollow metal door swung open with ease. The crash it made against the wall as two of his fellow sparring partners entered hardly phased Idris. He remained sunken, ice against his face, head arched against the lockers.
This is what they got paid for, to provide a decent enough challenge to the champion before being vanquished to locker room in blood and bruises. For the younger men it was a rite of passage. Every second in the ring was one they learned from, one that would mold them into better fighters. For the older ones it was the debt they paid to the sport that gave them everything. Every second in the ring was one in which they relinquished their livelihood, their legacy, to someone younger and stronger.
The two younger men strolled over to him.
"That was good work champ. Real good body work."
"Yeah champ, you're still a monster to the body. Trust me, he'll be pissing blood."
All Idris could do was smile and dam his tears behind a flash of bloody teeth. The two boys were just that, boys. In their early twenties, he guessed. But their faces were already contorted by the sport they loved so much. One put a hand on his shoulder, while the other took the fast melting ice from him and examined his eye.
"I used to watch you, you know. My mother used to sit me down to watch you. She'd say look at him, that's a man. A man does his work with his hands, makes what he can with his hands.”
The young man drained the plastic bag of water and reapplied it to Idris' swollen left side with all the tenderness of a lover.
"That's funny," said Idris. "My mother was the one who got me into boxing too."
La Pelirroja
Idris' mother had been a statuesque Iberian pelirroja with olive skin, long legs and a short torso. She'd gotten pregnant in the Moroccan town of Essaouira. It'd be fair to say she'd been impregnated by Essaouira itself, as she'd fallen in love with the white walled city. But no, it was a man who'd done it. Her man, at the time. They'd been very much in love, backpacking from hostel to hostel, filling their nights with the songs of the Medina and their mouths with each other at any opportunity. In fact if one were to try and hold a conversation with them, one would find it incredibly frustrating, as sentences would emanate from one lover only to get caught in the mouth of the other and finally regurgitated in a sort of amorous game of telephone. They were so very much in love.
But as they traveled up towards their hometown of Andalucía, their love faded, until by the time they'd reached Tangier, bloody lips and noses were very much the norm for the two. Of these lovers quarrels Idris' mother would usually get the better. And while physically her lover, Idris' father, could handle these beatings, his ego could not. And so he left her, quietly as she napped beneath the newly risen moon, the song that rose from the medina having lulled her to sleep. When she awoke it was alone in a still night, but with a name for the boy, the child to whom she would impart both her strength and her rage. In fact, he was so strong that when he was born he shot out from between his mother's legs, hitting the doctor in the solar plexus, knocking him unconscious. It was a beautiful body shot knockout. Yes, the boy would be a boxer. But never a champion.
The Second Pair of Lovers
Twenty-six years later Idris met Em by chance at a bar. He was an up and coming, undefeated fighter at the time. And just learning how to dress. It was summer. Idris wore a light grey windowpane waistcoat and matching slacks. His white shirtsleeves were rolled up to show off his new watch and his reflection shown in each cap of his brown cap toe shoes. Em, however, was unimpressed. She sat at the bar with a beer and a book, uninterested in the world around her.
When Idris walked in to a round of applause and with a black eye (having just won his 15th fight), Em hardly noticed. He, however, immediately noticed her. In fact since she'd been fifteen the world had taken notice of that particular beauty which Em possessed. Since then she'd been responsible for 117 car accidents, fifteen duels, three divorces, and one attempted suicide(the latter coming after rejecting a proposal of marriage from someone she'd only dated a month.) That very night she'd already been offered five drinks, had drank three and sent each suitor off in shame without so much as lifting her nose from her book. But none of those men had had a black eye. And so while Idris didn't exactly impress Em when he came up to her, he was fortunate enough that he did interest her. But, for Em it went no further than interest, a kind of curiosity that was sated after only a few minutes of conversation. Conversation would only ever flow easily between the two of them when alcohol did.
Still, they exchanged numbers and Em got up to leave. She had no intention of calling him, or responding to the messages he might send. But the next day, fortune was again on Idris' side as one of Em's friends had stood her up for dinner. Bored and not wanting to eat by herself, she called Idris. By the time he arrived, again wearing a suit (and a slightly faded black eye) Em was already tipsy. They finished the bottle. One bottle turned into two. Two bottles turned into three. They drank and laughed into humid night, the restaurant staff stacking chairs with twisted faces as the pair effervesced, any nerves or inhibitions spilling out of them in bouts of hearty laughter. Idris was high on his new found clout, his undefeated streak. He felt like he could do anything. Em asked him to make it snow for her. It was July. Em had a thing for taking a jab at every inflated ego foolish enough to saunter in her direction. The smile never left Idris' face as he responded:
"Just you wait."
They left the restaurant and walked hand in hand down the empty Williamsburg streets. One by one, the lights of the brownstones that fenced Kent Street were being put out. Soon, the only lights to guide the couple were the persistent neons of dive bars and the dulcet yellows of wrought iron street lamps, burning holes into the black rivers they traversed. In the distance the hum of motors stuck in traffic on the BQE beckoned as footsteps fell in unison, echoing into the dead of Brooklyn night. Idris asked to hold Em’s hand. She gave him a quizzical look, but nonetheless, relented.
"My cars right here."
She pointed to the luxury sedan parked far too close to the pump.
"Are you going home?"
"Yes, but first I'll take you home. Where do you live?
"I live right here."
He motioned with his finger down Havemeyer Street. Em smiled and walked over to him wrapping her arm around his.
"How convenient?"
The two walked arm in arm down Havemeyer, up the steps that traced Idris’ door, until finally they were swallowed by the mouth of a dark apartment, lumbering in effervescent stupor towards the bed. They thrilled with each patch of naked skin laid bare, their clumsy hands clamoring blindly to convert the unknown into the familiar.
Hours later, the impact of the crash woke Idris from his sleep. He turned to find Em gone and a note in her place. He rushed to the window to see her car flipped onto its roof and smoke coming from beneath the hood. By the time he got there the smoke had turned to fire. He didn't feel the glass or bits of metal embed into his feet as he crouched down to her door. It had been impacted shut when the other car slammed into it. A hit and run. Idris gripped the door at the top of the frame where the window had burst. But pulling with all his might only succeeded in moving the car a foot or two and did nothing to unjam the door. Em was barely conscious and incapable of undoing her seatbelt and climbing out. Half out of panic, half out of frustration, Idris balled up his fist and starting pounding away on the door. His blows landed with such force that they shook free the asbestos from the soon to be renovated brownstone across the street. As chunky alabaster flakes filled the thick velvet of early morning, the door gave way. Idris lifted Em from the wreckage and upon seeing the fluffy white chunks glinting in pallid morning, she remarked:
"You made it snow for me."
Right then she decided to love him. Even when she would hate him. Even when she would pity him. Even when his memory would flee into the parts of his brain made dark by blows, leaving her exasperated in the arms of a man child. She would always carry a piece of that love wrought from broken glass and charred metal, knowing that he would never again be as great as he was on that cerulean dawn.
An Anniversary
Em had already been waiting an hour when Idris showed up to dinner. She was used to it. Dates and times seemed to drip out of his skull the way water did from a cracked vase. That's what punches do. They crack you in places that people can't see, in places that don't heal. As he sat down she could see the other places in which he was cracked: his bloody lip, his swollen nose, and his eye, just as fashionably bruised as the day they had met.
"I'm sorry babe, I--"
"It's ok, Idris."
She smiled sadly as she spoke. The morning spent with François played behind the blank silver of her eyes. He had made her a wonderful breakfast to go along with her coffee. A light drizzle had left the streets mostly unoccupied so that they could stroll arm in arm, unmolested, unburdened by the lives accumulated since their early twenties. But now, as Idris slid heavily into the seat across from her at the small, upper east side steakhouse where they dined, the rafters above seemed to cave just a bit. It wasn't that she didn't love him. Somewhere down past the places where she hid her dislike, where resentment burrowed into her spine like needles driven too deep, lived the last vestige of her love. And she knew that while she could free herself from him, she wouldn’t. That on the days she would wake next him it would be with memories of their better selves running from her mind to the smile on her lips. And that that smile would fade as quickly as the morning light did.
Idris didn’t noticed when she started to cry silently. Instead he looked up at her freshly wet face as if he’d emerged out his front door to find a damp street with no sign of the rain that had caused it.
He didn’t know what to say. There was nothing he could say. Nothing to cover the sound of his breaking heart at the realization of the hurt he habitually caused. The knowledge had been there for sometime now. It stuck around too, stubbornly, as birthdays and due dates slipped out past it. She would be happier with someone else. He’d lied to her all those years ago. He’d promise her the best version of himself only to arrive at this, a thirty-six year old shot fighter with holes in his brain. A man with nothing to offer but the whisper of who he had once been. He called to the Som.
“Bring us the Chateauneuf du Pape."
The Som vanished quickly to the back and returned with the bottle. Em looked at Idris quizzically as their attendant filled her glass first.
“What’s the occasion?"
“Don’t know yet. Let’s make it one though.
She smiled while wiping her tears.
“Ok."
They pulled the rest of the night out of years past, out of memories and laughs shared. Idris was funny and sweet and as naive as he'd been when she’d first met him. And Em, Em was happy and goofy, riveting and full of ideas and wonder all over again. They talked about moving to Montreal and getting a dog. About teaching Idris to speak French. He tried to speak the few French words he’d picked up from Em over the years and they both erupted in a fit of laughter. They decided against Montreal. The waiter came back. Idris ordered another bottle in shitty French. More laughter ensued. Then he switched back to English, but with a horrible French accent. By the end of the night Em’s face hurt from smiling so much. Idris' did too, but he couldn’t tell if it was from smiling or the cuts and bruises.
Montreal
They’d been to Montreal once. It was right after they’d started dating. Idris had just made the paper for his rescue of Em and was a tabloid sensation. They called him “The man with hands of iron.” They said he was Jack Dempsey, Joe Frazier, and Roberto Duran reborn. His career took off. With each subsequent victory his legend grew. In one of his fights he’d stopped an opponent's heart with a punch, only to start it again with another punch. His opponent was so grateful he threw in the towel right then and there.
Em attended every fight. She thought him unstoppable. So when the call came to fight the champion in his home city of Montreal, she went out and wrapped herself in the most exquisite robes and stones. For she swore it was the night Idris would claim the title. But while into his fate, the divine seamstress had woven ardent glory, the kind befitting a Trojan prince, she had also sewn sorrow in spades. Idris would never be champion.
The truth is he wasn’t ready for the fight. Too inexperienced. Too one dimensional, relying solely on his power to get the job done. The media coverage surrounding him had done such a job of inflating his ego that he became blind to his faults. Everyone around him did as well: Em, his trainer, his manager. They all stood by in confidence as Idris took the fight that would end his career as a contender. At least he would live comfortably off the money for years after. But that was the day. That was the day when it all changed for him. When somebody took everything he had worked for, stripped him of all his confidence, poked a hole in a paper god.
For one moment in the eleventh round he was brilliant. For one moment in the eleventh round he had a chance to make good on his promise to Em. The champion backed himself into a corner. Idris, blind in one eye by that time and growing blind in the other, unleashed everything he had. Every uppercut, left hook, over hand right that his tired arms could churn out he threw. He threw punches to lay a mountain down. Indeed, they did. The next day a group of tourists from Wisconsin, would be hiking Mt. Real only to find an entire section peeled away by punch induced rock slide. But not one punch seemed to hurt the champion. His defense was too good, his reflexes too sharp, pulling his head effortlessly out of the way just at the moment of greatest danger. Instead of landing the solid blow he so needed to win, Idris only succeeded in tiring himself out. And with a minute left, the champion went to work.
At its highest level boxing is an artform. And in the latter half of the eleventh round that Saturday night, connoisseurs of the sweet science witnessed the final brushstrokes of a masterpiece. For eleven rounds the champion had played the long game, economical with his blows, sliding them into the crevices between elbow and hip, chastising Idris’ overzealousness with left hooks that, little by little, painted his insides with purplish hues. Punched out, Idris walked backwards with his hands at his side, half out of exhaustion and half out of a deeper instinct to protect the soft tissue just under his ribs. The champion moved forward behind his jab, walking Idris further and further back. He touched him, almost gently, with the left only to strafe him with straight rights and overhands that knocked sweat, blood, and vaseline into the ringside seats. But although they drew the “oohs” and “ahhs” from the crowd, these punches were bait. With Idris completely backed onto the ropes, the champion launched a tentative right hand that made Idris muster all his strength to bat it away, bringing his hands up in the process. And then came the uppercut. The champ launched it from his hip, arcing towards Idris’ midsection. It landed somewhere in between his solar plexus and soul. The air shot out him as if it were his ghost. His legs buckled. He was down, his panicked lungs shutting off his locomotor system as they struggled to find air. The ref began his count, but Idris could not get up. At 7 seconds in he stopped trying. He’d never known himself to be a quitter before that day. He’d never recognize himself as anything else after.
This memory too, was seared into Em’s brain. The rowdy Quebecois unleashing fervor at the result. The way cigar smoke became trapped in the beams of light that illuminated the man she loved. Idris squirming in the center of the ring, looking paler than she’d ever seen him. All his confidence drained like blood from hung goats. He didn’t even have the strength to carry himself from the ring into the private shame of the loser’s dressing room. Em had to. And in its stark fluorescent light he fell to his knees, weeping into the folds of her emerald dress.
He kept fighting after that. He kept losing. Em dressed him, fucked him, wrote things down for him. She wiped him when his hands were two swollen for him to do it himself. And she bathed him when she couldn’t stomach his blood infused stool. She invested his money in pieces of art he had no idea what to make of. She could often be found standing in front of them in the two bedroom condo they shared, a vacancy in her eyes as she retreated into the gold leafed brushstrokes. More and more did she take solace "in things," in the corners of her mind where she kept her barrel aged memories.
The Come Down
Em awoke to the burning sensation of having to pee. She found Idris standing confusedly in the bathroom, dripping water onto the new floral print rug she’d bought.
“Idris?"
He snapped out of it.
“Hey,Em."
“Idris, are you okay?
“Yeah, I’m fine. It’s just that I came back in here for a reason and I can’t remember what it was.”
Em sighed and sat down to pee.
“Well, you’re dripping wet so you obviously showered.”
“Yeah."
She looked him up and down. His face was significantly less swollen and the scabs where he had been cut had dissolved in the steamy water of the morning’s shower. There were new ones as well, all along his jawline and neck, the product of shaky hands and a razor. Idris, had already shaved so that wasn’t what he’d come back into the bathroom for. She opened her mouth and out came the verbal checklist she had become so used to reciting.
“Peroxide on your cuts, you clean your eyes, cut your hair, floss, brush your teeth, cut your nails, clean the hair from the drain."
“Brush, babe. I came in to brush my teeth. Thanks."
Idris slid the toothpaste over his brush. When he lifted his head he saw Em in the mirror standing next to him, a hand on his shoulder. His face was a foamy mess of toothpaste and water.
“We’ll brush together.”
When they were younger she’d playfully spit her toothpaste out at him, giggling fits at his deadpan reaction to her capriciousness. Working the toothpaste over in her mouth now, she contemplated letting it drip slowly over his shoulder. Em couldn’t remember when she’d gotten into the habit of letting these moments pass, probably because she didn’t make the decision. It was forced on her by circumstance and now she exercised her will by denying herself the bit of childishness she so missed.
Idris slid from her side and out of the bathroom, letting his battered fingers trail through curly strands of yellow-brown hair as he left. Normally when he did this, a swollen finger would get lodged in a curl and clumsy ineptitude would ruin what was meant to be a tender moment.. But, on this morning they both smiled as Em’s hair parachuted in frizzy ringlets down her bare back. The toothpaste foam smacked thick against porcelain.
Moments later she found Idris in the bedroom dressing. He was having trouble slipping a royal blue t-shirt over his broad shoulders. Em approached and gave it a tug to help him out. She let her hands linger a little. She'd always liked the way he felt, always so warm, emanating heat through his clothes. It made him a pain in the ass to sleep next to in summer, but in winter, she'd lay all her weight on him in the mornings, just to keep him in bed, make him a little later for his morning run. He'd laugh softly to himself on those mornings as he tried to unravel their gangly mess of limbs without fully waking Em.
"I'm heading to the gym for a few hours."
"Your cuts haven't healed yet"
"It's just going to be light today. Nothing major. You know I can't leave things as they were yesterday."
"I know."
He stepped into the crushed backs of black running sneakers, grabbed a grey hoodie from a mess of athletic clothes and headed out of the bedroom. Em called after him.
"Hey. I'll make dinner tonight."
"It's saturday though. You don't want to go out?"
"Na. Being honest, I'm still a little fucked up from last night. I just gunna take a nap, and then I'll get started on something special. How about a paella?"
Pain shot to the cracks in Idris' face as he smiled at Em.
"You know--"
"I know."
He turned silently and stepped into the hallway, more determined than ever to run his way to the gym and run his way back for Em's paella. Meanwhile Em walked around their lonely apartment, determined to get lost in her paintings. Only this time she found no relief and memories welled up in the corners of her large coffee colored eyes. After a half hour she found the apartment unbearable. She began to get ready.
As a child her family had called her “little negrita,” for the way her skin would soak up every stray ray of sun. She’d play with her boy cousins for hours in the parks and would marvel at the way that fat July star could leave her skin fired to a deep bronze, while bleaching the unruly, thick ringlets that sprouted from her scalp. It was like there were two different little girls, struggling for dominion inside her Puerto Rican husk. It fascinated her. But as she grew older, this fascination changed into anxiety. The cooing pronunciations of “little negrita” gave way to lessons from her aunts and female cousins about the dangers of letting herself get “too black.” Other, more specific lessons, came soon after: how to burn curls into lithe silk strands. How to bring just enough mocha out of her cheeks. How to contort her body into strange positions that would lock the sun into her curls but keep it off of her face.
Presently, in front of her bathroom vanity, she was engaged in the second of these lessons. It dawned on her that neither Idris or Francois had ever seen what her skin could look like if she let her guard down and relinquished dominion over what, many years ago, she had reclaimed from the sun. She put it out of her mind, as that was a battle to be waged in the warmer months. Outside, dreary autumn cast its monochrome gaze on everything the light touched, including Em, and she decided her sallow cheeks could use all the mocha they could get. She dabbed away furiously and then, dawning a thick empire waisted black dress, grey wool stockings that stopped at her thighs and a 3/4 length grey coat, left to buy the necessary ingredients for the nights dinner.
The Farmer’s Market
The early March clouds were thick and threatening sleet as Em walked the farmers market. François trailed behind her, picking up random produce in his hand. He did it with an absent mind, as if committing the feel of the thing to his senses completed the image. Noticing his silence Em turned and took note of the plaintive smile on his face.
"Well, I remember that look. There's a poem on a napkin coming, isn't there."
"No. No napkin poem. I was just thinking."
"About what?"
"That this is nice. And I'd like to do it again."
"Ok, then we will."
She walked back to him and grabbed his arm. It started to sleet. Em opened her translucent umbrella above them.
"You know, this is the way I pictured it. Us. A simple life.
"Really? Shopping at the farmer’s market in the cold? Sleet and everything?"
"No. It would be snowing lightly. We'd live in a small village by the French-German border, above a bakery. They'd provide us with fresh bread daily, and fresh rats too, to eat the crumbs we'd spill while feeding each other. I'd write, you'd write. Most of the time. But sometimes we'd stumble. Stumble into bed, out of bed together. Waking up when most everyone else was stumbling home from work.”
The two didn't fit fully under the umbrella together and François' smile was as wet as it was wide across his face.
"That wouldn't have fit on a napkin."
"No. That's why I don't write stories."
"Thank you for that though. It was very beautiful."
They walked through the rapidly emptying farmer’s market in silence for a few moments.
"We should probably go to a supermarket."
A Pat on the Back
Idris pulled his hoodie over his head as he stepped out of gym on 26th Street and into the fast falling sleet. He could feel the heat emanating from his body into the grey haze of winter. The ground was slick under his feet and he imagined the run home. He took pleasure in adverse conditions. In the cold licking at his exposed skin, his lungs burning with constricted air, his clothes weighed down with water. But it was pointless to endure it today. He was done. The cool air and cold water did feel good on his swollen face however, so he lingered a bit in front of the gym before heading down into the train station two blocks away.
He almost slipped down the wet stairs, but managed to catch himself on the handrail. He arrived at the platform to find it crowded with wet faces. The sleet had made the tiles slick with dirty water that pooled in the places people congregated. Idris, could feel the black liquid soak through his light running sneakers and into his white socks. He wanted so desperately to be home. He was tired and cold and would lie down in bed as Em cooked a paella. He would stroke himself unconsciously. Smell the food. Think of his mother. Toss and turn. Think of his father. Get up and pour Em a glass of wine as she cooked. Try to help. Get turned away. Run his swollen fingers through Em’s yellow-brown hair. And--
This was the last coherent thought that passed through Idris’ mind. What occurred in the seconds after that couldn’t really be described as thought, more like feeling. Feeling the wind of the approaching train on his face, it’s light forcing his pupils to dilate. Feeling the hands press into his back and his body slide weightlessly through the air. Feeling every neuron in his brain fire at the same time carrying him into the instantaneous embrace of death.
The Uptown R Train
The train was crowded when it careened to an abrupt stop, sending bodies tumbling over each other in the disorganized choreography of clumsy limbs and Em’s groceries to floor. François busied himself trying to pick them and Em up and the same time but only succeeded in either dropping them or her again. The doors opened, but no one tried to rush onto the train. From the platform Em could hear the murmur of a panicked crowd growing and a few stray profanities and shrieks from those entering the station via the stairway directly in front of her. Inside the car the majority of passengers failed to notice the growing commotion, too busy were they in trying to disentangle themselves from each other. A lot of the profanities that Em heard were actually coming from inside the car. She waved Francois off and lifted herself to her feet. Seeing she was ok, he peeked his head out of the car to see if he could discern what had caused the sudden stop. He tried asking one of the men in orange vests standing on the platform, but the man could not understand his broken tongue and instead chastised Francois to “speak English”. This reaction left Francois confused as he was certain that he had indeed spoken in English and not the French that currently populated the avenues of his mind. However, François, being one to never let things get to him, simply asked the next available person, determined that his thoughts would indeed come out in perfect English this time around. Unfortunately, the person that he asked, a shorter, older woman in a sunflower raincoat, responded in Spanish. He turned and shrugged helplessly at Em.
The shrug was his go to expression. Over the years Em had come to expect it as an answer to any number of situations. It was his way of dealing with the world, of dealing with the things that did not suit him or that he could not be bothered to worry about, which turned out to be most things. When combined with the careless grin that wandered lazily across his lips, it was usually enough to ferry him from one interaction to the next. But this time it was returned by a look of pallid distress from Em.
“What? Did she say something bad?"
“She said that we hit someone. The train hit someone."
The Inevitable End
The police couldn’t say who had pushed him or why. The ambiguity surrounding his ethnicity had frequently made Idris an easy target for a variety of unwanted hate and slurs. From “Spic,” to “Nigger,” to the increasingly common “Sand-Nigger,” Idris got it all. He could usually handle himself in these situations, and it usually fell to Em to bail him out afterward. Somewhat counterintuitively, when his career as a contender was over, Idris’ propentient for getting into fights skyrocketed. As in the aforementioned interactions, sometimes his violent outbursts were justified. He would tell Em after, when she chastised him for his recklessness, that he didn’t fight, he taught lessons. That there were just too many eager young students out there. But justified or not, it was an expensive curriculum; the wearisome paradigm of lawsuit, settlement, lawsuit, settlement fraying the already taught threads of Idris and Em’s union.
Given the frequency with which he leaned on the crutch of a clenched fist, the officer’s first conjecture put aside the notion that Idris’ indistinct otherness, which provided the misguided of the world a sea of henna skin in which to wash their hands of hate, had anything to do with the heinous act. Instead, it was more likely that a former “student”, one for whom the money doled out by the courts could do nothing to piece together the Herculean fragments of ego, had taken their vengeance. Afterall, Idris’ eyes would often go glossy, the feats of his titanic strength projected onto the milky film of his irises as his arms mimicked the patterns and punches of a younger man. That is to say, he was not hard to get the drop on.
Having briefed Em, the officers broke the frame of blue uniform in which they had enshrouded her and departed. Alone in the corner of the hospital room, François having taken his leave to go and write about a tragedy that he was only trivially apart of, Em emptied her lungs with a long rush of wind. If she were on a beach, somewhere where solitude was plentiful as flowers in bloom, she would’ve screamed and let her frustration, her grief and joy mix and be consumed by the shrill cacophony of feasting sea gulls. But in the sterile environment of the hospital, she had no choice but to remain composed, the sigh being her only solace. In the center of the room lay Idris, dry fluorescent light illuminating his head to toe bandages. His chest rising and falling in time with the beeping of machines. Seeing a fray in one of the bandages, she walked over and began to twirl it around her finger. He would survive. And this fact made Em just as happy as it did sad. And she knew that deep down beneath the mountain of breathing bandages, Idris felt the same.
Fin