Hawaii Women's Journal

"Our Room Is the World."

Fiction & Creative Writing (Issue #3 TBA)

From Issue #2

"Oh, Baby" by Keith Meatto

"The Shape Love Takes" by Mayumi Shimose Poe (from Issue #1)

"Reading Signs" by Lyz Soto

"Oh, Baby"

BY KEITH MEATTO

As soon as she awoke on Sunday, Sheila reached for the phone on her nightstand, checked her social-networking site, and learned that her friend Michelle was pregnant. At first, she thought it was a hangover hallucination. But there it was, on the screen in capital letters: We’re pregnant, followed by three exclamation points.

Sheila thumbed the screen to enlarge the image below the announcement. Moments later, she saw a fleck of white in a swirl of black—an ultrasound of her friend’s womb. She stared at the photo for a while, then scrolled down to see that 42 people said they liked this news, and below that, 24 people had written notes of congratulations. Sheila skimmed the comments, but before she got to the end her stomach rumbled. She dropped the phone, ran to the bathroom, and vomited.

After she flushed last night’s sushi down the toilet, Sheila rubbed the stitch in her gut. How was Michelle pregnant? She had been married only six months. Had Phil slipped one past the goalie? In any case, it was official: Sheila was the last of her friends without a child and without any prospects, unless she wanted to get cozy with a turkey baster or shop from a Chinese catalogue. Now Michelle would be the center of attention again—only days, it seemed, after her last photo upload from her honeymoon in Cabo San Lucas.

Not that Sheila had anything against babies. She liked them and all their gawkiness and wonder at the world. If only a man could hold her attention for longer than a month, before her ovaries dried like cranberries. For now, hearing her friends discuss the joys and pains of motherhood felt like watching a foreign movie without the subtitles.

She brushed her teeth, then went back to the bedroom, picked up her phone, and, below Michelle’s birth announcement, posted a public response.

Guess what? she wrote. I’m having a baby, too.

She paused a moment and stared out the window at the snow banks piled like fortresses on the sidewalk. Then she sent her news into the world. Soon, the screen started to fill with responses: first her aunt in Santa Fe, then her cousin in Phoenix, then an antique furniture dealer she had met at the Denver airport bar. She went to make a pot of coffee, and when she returned there was a private message in her inbox.

Thunder-stealer, Michelle wrote. So who’s the lucky guy?

Sheila paused, annoyed. She typed and erased several sentences before she replied.

Nobody you know, she wrote. Talk soon.

An hour later, there were comments from 87 people: former colleagues, acquaintances from high school and college, virtual friends she hadn’t seen in years. She had joined the social network with reluctance, pressured by Michelle to join the twenty-first century. But nobody had paid this much attention when she posted links about her favorite bands or her thoughts on the healthcare debate, the war in Afghanistan, and the earthquake in Haiti. Now, she felt like a celebrity.

Around noon, a private message came from Brian, the balding bond salesman she had met online and slept with last week after they ate what he called the best Spanish food in Brooklyn. The tapas had been bland—but spicy compared to the sex. Hey there, he wrote. Saw your news. Anything I should know?

She waited 15 minutes to reply, savoring the thought of him in a state of sweaty panic in his Battery Park condo. Then she wrote back to say the baby wasn’t his. THX, he replied. At least now she wouldn’t have to worry about a second date.

When the responses slowed, she showered and reheated some curry for lunch. As she washed the dishes, the phone rang.

She-bear, her mother said. What’s all this?

Sheila steadied her voice. Hey mom, she said. I was about to call you.

For a while, neither one spoke. Sheila cradled the phone and dried the dishes.

I never should have let you quit Catholic school, her mom said at last.

Sheila felt her heart climb into her throat. Relax, she said. I can handle this.

Apparently not, her mom said, and before Sheila could reply the line went dead.

Word spread. For weeks, Sheila savored the newfound attention. At Bao Wow, the Asian-fusion restaurant where she worked as a hostess, the waiters and kitchen staff treated her with deference, and her manager started to give her better shifts. The women in her ceramics class at Mud Drunk Love fussed and clucked and made her a set of glazed dishes. Cards and gifts arrived in the mail from the deep corners of her life. Every day, her social-networking page overflowed with comments and new friend requests. And despite their initial shock, her parents came around to the idea of being grandparents. Her father even offered to pay the hospital bill, since Sheila didn’t have insurance.

At dinner one night, she almost blew her cover when she tried to order wine. What are you, French now? Michelle said. Do you want to smoke, too? Sheila laughed and steered the conversation back to Lamaze classes and midwives and nursing consultants.

When people asked about the baby’s father, Sheila let her eyes glaze and said: He’s out of the picture. This only elicited further sympathy. A single mother? She was so brave. Eventually, she knew, she’d have to stop the charade and end the pregnancy. Abortion was out of the question—not with her Catholic family and her friends who were prochoice in theory but not practice. So Sheila got out her calendar and set a date for a miscarriage. No one would press for details. There would be sympathy and condolences and then life would return to normal.

The next month, she missed her period. Her menstrual cycle had always been regular, and she hadn’t slept with anyone since Brian. She waited a painstaking day for blood to flow and when none came she went to the pharmacy and bought a digital pregnancy test. In the bathroom, she dropped her pants, sat on the toilet, unwrapped the plastic stick from the package, and removed the cap. Then she held the stick between her legs and peed on the absorbent tip, careful not to soak any other part. She counted to five and pulled the stick from the stream and watched the hourglass icon blink on the screen. The three minutes the instructions promised felt like a week. At last, the hourglass dissolved and the screen filled with a single word in lowercase letters: pregnant. Blood rushed to her head. The test was 99% accurate. She could be that one percent, right? But when she lifted her shirt and touched her stomach, she swore she could feel a pulse.

She called in sick to work in the morning and went to her gynecologist at Beth Israel. The waiting room was packed with women and kids who zoomed around and threw toys and cried about being cooped up in the office. By the time the receptionist called her name, Sheila had read three magazines and her nerves were shredded.

She went to the bathroom, peed in a cup, and handed the sample to a Filipino nurse, who escorted her to the doctor’s office, took her vitals, then left her alone to wait. Sheila sat on the exam table, her legs sticking to the hygienic paper. The room was bright and windowless and smelled like paint. As she waited, Sheila breathed through her nose and studied the walls: photographs of windmills in grassy fields next to illustrations of female anatomy that looked like giant squid.

At last, the door opened and the doctor, a black woman with dreadlocks and glasses, entered the exam room with a chart in her hands.

“You were right,” she said. “You are pregnant.”

At that, tears pooled in Sheila’s eyes and spilled down her cheeks. She took a tissue from her purse and blew her nose. For a while, neither one spoke. Then the doctor glanced at her cell phone and said she had to check on another patient. Sheila crossed and uncrossed her ankles, tearing the corners of the hygienic paper. After a while, the doctor returned and began her counseling speech, but Sheila was so numb she could barely listen. When she finished, the doctor gave Sheila a stack of pamphlets and told her to come back for a check-up next week.

On the subway to Brooklyn, Sheila felt queasy. The train was full, so she asked a man in a seersucker suit if she could have his seat. When he made a face, she narrowed her eyes and said: I’m pregnant. She followed his gaze from her flat stomach to the other passengers whose eyes urged him to be a gentleman. Defeated, he sighed, moved to the center of the car, and glared at her over the top of his newspaper.

Sheila sat with her hands on her stomach. Across the car, a Chinese woman fed granola to her child in a stroller. Sheila caught her eye for a moment and then looked out the window. As the train inched over the bridge, she stared at the seaport mall, the tugboats and kayaks that bobbed on the river, the bulldozers below the BQE. The city had never seemed so vast or so alien. Who could raise a kid here? And who could do it alone? Her girlfriends had partners and nannies and parents who lived nearby or rented pied-à-terres to care for their grandkids. Who did she have?

At home, she inhaled a plate of leftover pork buns from Bao Wow and a tub of ginger ice cream. For a while, she sat at the kitchen island and swiveled in her stool. She wanted to confide in someone, but everyone thought she was already pregnant. She read through the pamphlets and fought back tears at her choices: single motherhood, adoption, abortion. As she read, her face flushed and she opened the window to let the wind cool her face. Then she had an idea.

She ran across the room to her computer, logged onto her social-networking site, and typed as fast as she could type.

Bad news, everyone, she wrote. I lost the baby.

As soon as she posted the message, her hands flew to her stomach. She held them there for a long time and waited for the pulse to disappear.

................................

KEITH MEATTO
Keith Meatto has fiction published or forthcoming in Harpur Palate, Opium, Artifice, Glossolalia, Ghoti, The Northville Review, Writers’ Bloc, Spork, and LITnIMAGE. He has worked for many years as a teacher and a journalist and is now at work on a collection of short stories.

"The Shape Love Takes"

BY MAYUMI SHIMOSE POE
photos by Bianca Mills

MATTIE
This is the shape love takes. I am going to see you again. The trains take three hours each way, from my Brooklyn apartment to your home in Jersey and back again, but the journey is worth it. I have my routine now, arriving at Penn Station in time to grab a coffee and the morning Times. I choose a window seat. Once we’re out of the tunnel, New York fades into Jersey, but my mind is already drifting toward you. I have never felt this way before. It’s both funny and awful to think that. You know, you get to be certain ages and you think you’ve felt it all, but you’re wrong every time. Remember that.

I sip at the coffee. I fiddle with my ponytail. I lay the bundled newspaper across the aisle seat, and I wait. We’re at Newark—Newark International Airport, Newark now, next stop North Elizabeth. I could work for New Jersey Transit, I
know the conductor’s spiel so well. Next up North Elizabeth, Elizabeth, Linden, Rahway, Metropark, Metuchen, Edison, New Brunswick, Jersey Avenue, and Princeton Junction. After that, Hamilton. You’ll be there, waiting, and I can give
everything I have to give.

Of course, you won’t remember any of this. You’re only a few weeks old. Your eyes don’t focus yet, so these weeks and my presence and most of the rest of it are a blur. All you know is the soft chest against which you nestle and the calming voice attached to it, a voice you’ve known as long as you’ve been her missed period. I believe it, the tiny zygote of you, a cluster of cells swimming through primordial goo, you without ears or eardrums could still hear her. You know this, her, and you know that other—rumpled shirt, stubbled chin, the arms that fold you and the fond-foolish constant touching. They are unable to believe you are here, you are theirs, you live—they hold their own breaths to hear you breathe.

She is mother and he is father, but you’re many months from having the words. It’ll be years before you understand who I am. It’ll be years before I understand it either.

HANA
She had never thought of them as anything but toys. They had been apples, boobies, breastsesses, chichis, fun bags, knobs, maracas, peaks, pompoms, second base, tatas, the twins, titties, umlauts, and yayas. But now they were teats. Udders. Mammaries. Now they were—well, what were they but food containers, like Ziploc bags but without the patented watertight seal. All it took was a cry of a certain pitch—from any infant—and she could feel the colostrum
soaking into her nursing pads, making her grasp at herself in public to check for leaks. Hana had taken to wearing only patterned clothing to camouflage her inability to predict a sudden downpour. But this time, it was her baby’s cry that
engorged her breasts full to aching, and she was at home. She was able to settle down onto the couch, whipping up her old shirt with one hand and tucking her son close to her left teat with the other. His mouth was intent on her, a gaping
red maw, although he missed at first, gumming her breast’s undercurve before she took his neck in her firm grasp. And when she wasn’t obsessing about the overheavy breasts or her chapped and aching nipples, she was hating the rolls of flesh of her now body, all warm and risen from the oven of her womb. The noticing was inescapable because she has nothing to do but sit here, emptying first this breast, then the other. She saw it all splayed before her, a cornucopia
of excess. Her thighs were once so thin they actually bowed away from each other, but now as she sat, they did too, like twin plumped loaves; when she walked, the way they brushed constantly against each other made her want to check for a trail of crumbs. Next, there were her arms, what she used to
call “mommyarms” in an unkind tone of voice when it hadn’t been her own flesh that jiggled off her torso, as beside the point as wings on a chicken when faced with the size of the breast. She couldn’t understand how she could possibly have
mommyarms when she was lifting things all day, every day, things like a baby and groceries and diaper bags and baskets full of laundry ripe for the washing.

Then there was her face, the way the lines had curved and softened, the jawline less defined, the sunken cheeks filled, even her lips felt fat. Her once-oval face was now as round and porcine as morning bao, its richness and meaty quality
perfect alongside a strong cup of oolong. It was as if, over the last nine months, she had managed to produce not one but two new bodies, one a miracle and one less so.

The baby squirmed in her arms almost angrily, pulling her nipple with him as he detached himself. “Fuck!” said Hana, then “sorry, sorry, you didn’t hear that,” as she cradled him with one hand and pressed the other, a flat palm, to her ache.
He sounded a pterodactyl cry, as if he were on the hunt, then attached fiercely to her bicep. And she just let him suck. After a few moments, though, she pulled up the other side of her shirt, switched him to the other arm, and began coaxing him close. “C’mon, I know you’re hungry. You barely ate. Except when you nearly took off my nipple and chewed on my arm. C’mon, Tommy. Take it.” His head bobbled like a doll, as his unfocused eyes moved in the direction of her nipple to her eyes to the green ottoman to the window back to her nipple again. Then back to her eyes. “Be a good boy, Tommy,” she said, jostling him, “and eat your freakin’ breakfast.” And then there it was, a smacking of lips closing on her, the slippery inside of her son’s mouth, the pinch of milk starting to flow.
She sighed and tried to wiggle the pillow behind her into a better position without unhinging his mouth. It really was no wonder that every way she saw her body now was as food.And not even in the good ways—not apple-bruise hair; not cherried lip; no look in the mirror prompted an involuntary,
yet audible, Hello, delicious, paired with a satisfied curve of lip. As once it would have done. Now she was all yeast and grain, vitamin and fiber. She felt like a vending machine of necessity.

Hana checked her watch. She mustn’t lose track of the time. Mattie was coming today, and days went more smoothly with Mattie around. But she still had time, so she placed her bare feet up on the coffee table and tried to relax. The tugging
at her nipple was insistent and steady. There were slurping noises. She found all of this distasteful. A mother who doesn’t want to be one, she thinks. How fucking original. There had been that woman down in Houston, Andrea Something, drowned her five kids in the bathtub, she recalled. Taking it a huge, gaping step further, there was that San Antonio mother who actually ate her baby’s brain, and three of his toes, and some other unspecified parts in a crime the police dubbed “too heinous to describe further.” Hana completely agreed
with their assessment but couldn’t help but wonder: ingesting the brain seemed somewhat logical—in an illogical kind of world—like the account Mattie had told her about, just the other week, of the indigenous cannibals of New Guinea who’d
ingest dead tribesmembers’ brains as a sign of respect. But why the toes? And then why only three of the toes? And what were those other parts that couldn’t be specified? And, finally, what the heck was in the drinking water down in Texas? Hana thought of these parents, so disturbed, quite literally outside of their minds, and yet all people could think to ask is why, if they were so depressed, they didn’t just kill themselves. To be fair, thought Hana, people were missing the point entirely. The point was not needing to end one’s life but, rather, to be given a different one—or, in good probability, merely to recover the one you had before. But oh, god, what was she going on about? “Too heinous to describe further” just about covered it. Hana pressed fingers to her temple as if to massage away such thoughts. She wasn’t interested in any of this, didn’t sit around contemplating the death of her child. She smoothed the wispy top of Tommy’s head. But it was like she couldn’t help it. It was all over the news, and god forbid she do anything as stupid as Google “mother kills child” because of the rash of results that popped up in consequence. She wasn’t interested in these cases; or maybe she was, but morbidly so, obsessed with the horrific
details because she wondered how one got to that point.

Tommy detached himself again, more gently this time, and turned the steel of his gaze up at her. She wondered for a brief, horrible moment if he could hear her thoughts. There had been a time not too long ago that they had been connected in the most deep, intuitive way—a way only ever shared by a child and its mother. But now he was scanning the room and now he was drooling. He didn’t seem particularly upset. Hana covered herself up and slung him up toward her shoulder, patting at his back with a cupped hand. Small noises caught in his chest as she thumped away at him, but he wasn’t burping. He didn’t seem fussy, so she settled him into the spoon of her, so he could face outward. Together, they gazed out the window.

Hana imagined that she was outside, striding up the walk and past the porch swing and looking in, and tried to see what that version of herself would see. The room is dim, a single lamp in the corner lights it, but it beams onto a young woman with an infant on her lap. Her feet are up. The TV is off. The baby cannot hold up his own head. His hair is coming in slowly, but his eyebrows are already thick and wild. The Hana in the room peers over Tommy’s head and uses a spit-wet pointer to smooth each wayward brow. It is a tender scene that the self on the porch observes.

Then again, Hana remembers all those mothers in the news were described as mild, even “non-descript,” and then one day some synapse does or doesn’t fire, some thread is snapped, and the boundary between being in one’s right mind and one’s wrong mind is revealed to be mere filigree. Was it all post-partum depression? And if so, why did the body and mind disconnect so abruptly at just the emptying of a womb? Or was it something more sinister, that these individuals, or even all individuals, carried around in them a whisper of violence, the possibility looming silent and large, like a secret identity, like Clark Kent whipping off his stupid glasses to reveal superhuman and unsurpassable capabilities, answerable only to Kryptonite? What mild mothers were capable of terrified her.

Besides it wasn’t that she didn’t love her son. She did, but she never knew how complicated love was. That you could feel brisk in its grasp. She was not one of those women who had ever melted at the sight of a baby’s face. And now,
presented with her own, she did not coo or bill at him; she made no noise she’d be embarrassed to make if no baby were present. She did not search his body for signs of herself or Jimmy. No, she perched the baby on a hip, she slung him in a sling, she belted him into seat after seat, and in this she could be grateful: even she, impatient with it all, could see that he was a good baby.

MATTIE
Elizabeth, Elizabeth now. Eight stops to go. Car’s starting to fill up, so I am careful not to meet the eyes of the people seeking seats. When they pass, I encourage my sprawl: coffee cup, rifled-through Times, bottle of water, proofs, red pens—I lay it all out on the seat next to me. I take up the front section of the paper and begin to page through the headlines, hiding behind its large spread. President-elect Obama on clear-air technology. Violence in the
Congo. Somali pirates—now there’s a thing I can’t wrap my head around, real live pirates, today. I swig at the coffee, which is going lukewarm. Citigroup to lay off employees. Detroit auto industry seeking government bailout. God, this stuff is depressing. I do let them pay me. Just a little, mind you, and barely enough
to cover what I spend on train tickets, coming and going three days a week, and ingredients for the meals I make and freeze into individual servings so that Hana doesn’t have to cook. So, yes, I let them give a little, because I understand the importance of appearances. It’s important to Jimmy that they don’t appear
to be a charity case, just as it’s important to me to appear to be offering a service, rather than the entire pulp of my heart. What’s important to Hana? I don’t know, even though I grew up alongside her and have been in love with her about that long, too.

Glancing up, I read the platform’s sign as we pull out: Rahway Station. So, Metropark next. I mull it over, decide to take a stab at what matters to Hana. Once, I would have said being beautiful—for this was Hana as a girl, Japanese anime girl hair and glossed lips and clothes that pointed out her tiny figure, and in that vision I see dull, plain me following her about, a moth to light. Later, what mattered would have been achievement. She’d been headed for a marketing career in the “beauty industry;” I was off to the wilds of anthropology; but there was one math class in which we overlapped while at college, Trend Analysis, the one for which she had an uncanny intuition. The one where she’d met Jimmy. Then I suppose I’d be forced to say that he was what mattered—because she gave up everything. And my god, remembering that time is still like a knife to my gut: watching her become his—and, worse,
watching it not make her happy like she thought it would. After that, she came to value privacy—turned inward, started writing in her ever-present notebooks, said she was learning to be alone without being lonely. She pulled away even from me. I think now it’s love that matters—just love of a different kind. Hana has her son now, her beautiful boy; she can’t possibly still feel lonely, for now she’s never alone.

But that’s the reason I go—well, part of it, anyway. I don’t want Hana to feel alone. She never has been; I’ve always hovered near. I go, and we put away groceries and gather laundry and she asks me what’s what in anthropology these days. Just two days ago I had come out; we went to the Farmer’s Market and I held the baby while she shopped. Tommy leaned against my chest in his
carrier, so his eyes were on me the whole time. I gazed back at him and we moved so slow down that dairy aisle that it seemed thirty minutes passed between eggs and ice cream. Each time I saw Tommy, it seemed that he had changed again. I wanted to sit and just watch it all happen: the caterpillar closing into a chrysalis and then emerging, its veins filling with blood and pumping the wings hard with strength, the tentative first flight, then the soaring.

Hana was … I don’t know where, in the canned-food aisle or maybe amongst the produce. We were planning that afternoon to make Bolognese from scratch. “What a gorgeous child you have,” an older couple murmured, stopping our slow progress, wanting to stroke the peachy fuzz of his head. And there I was, next to the milk, stammering that Tommy wasn’t mine, exactly. Hana chose that moment to materialize next to the cart, depositing in canned tomatoes, fresh herbs, and a Styrofoam slab of ground meat. “He’s not giving you any trouble, is he, sweets?” she asked, using her pet name for me, ignoring the older couple. She circled her arms around me, resting the point of her chin on my shoulder,
and reached up to ruffle Tommy’s hair before exclaiming, “Oh, motherfucker, I forgot the damned pasta.” She whirled off while the older couple stared. I’m not sure if they were more appalled by the idea of us three as a family or Hana’s ferocious mouth, but without another word, they left. Hana wasn’t there to hear me lie to the next woman who stopped me, wanting a better look at Tommy. She didn’t see me claim him as mine—because it was easier; because I wanted it to be true.

The doors chime a warning, then close, and the train begins to leave Metuchen Station. A voice startles me, booming as it does into the relative silence of the car. “A-l-l-y-s-o-n? I’d never name a child with a misspelling like that.” The woman in the aisle has a thick Jersey Italian accent. “Are you kidding me?” Her companion is male and quiet compared to the woman. I wish they’d keep their
voices down or move to another car, but they pick the seats across the aisle from me, a coveted four-seater, the two pairs facing each other.

“Rex?” suggests the man.
“No. Just no. That’s a dog’s name.” The man actually slaps his knee as they laugh—a caricature of how to react to funny.
“What else,” says the woman, “what else?”
“Monique?”
“Ex-cuuu-say-mwa, we’re not French, are we? I don’t think so.” The woman laughs hard enough for both of them.
“And as for Micaela?” says the woman.
"I don’t even know what language that is. What is that, it’s just Michael, isn’t it? It’s a girl version of Michael? Why don’t you just name her Lesbo and get it over
with?”

There is a cascade of giggles from both, despite the fact that what she has said lacks any logic. How does giving a “boy” name to a girl, or vice versa, determine their sexuality? Does she really believe there is that much power in a word? Am I being overly sensitive or are they glancing at me between giggles? Do I look
like I have a boy name? I take inventory—ponytailed long hair: femme; jeans and a henley: tomboyish, maybe, but certainly not butch; no makeup: but that’s because I like to look fresh faced. Anyway, I don’t have a boy name; my full name is Matilda. Am I being paranoid?

I prop myself again behind the paper, trying to tune them out. Jimmy thinks I come for the money. Hana thinks I come because I’m a good friend. I tell them, why do I work from home if I cannot help out—“and put a few more bucks in your wallet,” Jimmy assures us all, winking. “Yeah,” I answer. “A few more bucks.” What nobody sees is that I show up for me. That all of this is like
playing house, like pretending to belong. I come because Hana is everything her name implies: Arabic bliss; a Japanese flower; the Czech conception of God’s graciousness; the Hebrew notion of favor; and the Hawaiian word for work.

And, of course, I come for you, Tommy, our son. That’s how I’vecome to see you—as all of ours. You are always Hana’s. You are Jimmy’s when he comes home from work and a silent Hana passes you to him and leaves the room. But you are mine, too, baby, and I can love you out loud as I cannot your mother. I can stroke your head, exclaim over your thick fan of dark lashes, study the sharp little nails on all ten fingers, all ten toes. I can look for where Hana begins and where Jimmy ends—find the places where you are neither her nor him but only you. I can kiss your fat cheeks till your dimples appear, your round tummy till your fists flail, and your small and perfect feet till your toes start to curl. I crumple the empty coffee cup. Edison now. New Brunswick, next.

HANA
She knew she had to get going but she couldn’t hear herself think. He just kept crying. What time was Mattie’s train coming in, and did she need to change the baby first? Could she afford not to, when he’d been making very concentrated faces ever since he finished feeding and there seemed to be a sour odor coming from his general direction, where he wailed his healthy pink lungs out in the carrier next to the couch? She had put him down in the chair so she could stretch every limb out and across that couch and finish her cup of rooibos tea. Herbal tea was bullshit; it tricked neither her mind nor body into accepting it as replacement for caffeine; but she was shivering and she had wanted something to warm her up. By now, the tea had long gone cold, but the microwave in the
kitchen seemed a marathon away.

Hana gave up on the tea and scooped Tommy up from the chair. Though she found it distasteful, she sniffed at his diaper. She couldn’t be sure. Maybe he needed to be burped, maybe that was it. She maneuvered him over her left shoulder again, trying to anchor a burp cloth in place with one hand. She
cupped her hand and thudded up and down his back, and all she could hear was the small, hiccupy, sobbing breaths he took in between larger swaths of sound. Perhaps he wasn’t gassy; perhaps it really was the diaper. She probably should just change him, but that might upset him further. The air itself smelled a little
sour, a little saccharine, like what else but spilled milk left sitting too long and then wiped up with the nearest cloth-like item: a burp cloth, an orphaned infant sock, a mother’s shirt. The laundry piled itself in various rooms, as if conspiring behind her back. The baby was crying, yes, but where were the car keys, her bra, a hairbrush? She was running late. She was forever running late now. Nine-eleven was the train, she remembered now, nine-eleven, a number one always remembered. She had to get going, or she had to make him stop, or she had to reach the right position on this couch such that she no longer saw or heard him or had to think about where she was and what she should be doing. Maybe she should try meditation. Zen stuff. Emptying the mind. Might be good for her. Or might be impossible. He couldn’t possibly still be hungry, could he? She could feed him again, but how could he be hungry? It had only been twenty minutes. Thirty at most, she thought but wasn’t sure.

She’d heard that the sound of a baby crying was a form of torture in some countries. They’d pipe it—like music, like airborne disease—straight into the cells. Just hour upon hour of a baby wailing, inconsolable, like it had been left alone, or was scared, or was being hurt. A cry without an answering shush. No rush of adult feet down a hallway. And no baby that anyone could see or help. It was enough to make hardened criminals break.

Hana wondered, though. It seemed worse to be looking right at him—the wail, embodied—and see that he wasn’t, in fact, left alone, scared, or being hurt and still not know how to just make him stop.

MATTIE
My loud neighbors get off Jersey Avenue, thank god. With only two stops left, I turn to the Science and Technology section. NASA seeks possible new planet in solar system. Scientists discover new method of erasing memories without using drugs. Sulphur dioxide plume of Ethiopian volcano travels halfway around world to dissipate over the Pacific. I’m intrigued by this last article, until I see the photo of four corpses being unearthed—which of course reminds me that I haven’t gotten any of my work done. I feel bad, but I quiet myself with the
promise to proofread on the ride home. For now, though, I am drawn into this story. The corresponding article is about how archaeologists have recently uncovered a new cache of Paleolithic graves. Back in college, I majored in archaeology because I saw it as a mystery that could be solved. You dug through the past and then used your most objective reasoning to interpret it. Things checked out: DNA confirmed that we descended from primates. A copper headdress found in a grave revealed the date of interment and provenance of the headdress based on trade patterns of copper in the region. And so forth. There was a tidiness to the logic. I still deal in tidiness, but now it’s the dotting of i’s and the crossing of t’s. Proofreading is pouring meaning into a
particular template, making it fit, but I miss the mystery of science. There is no magic of interpretation to commas or style or grammar.

It seems Grave 99 is the one scientists and the media are interested in, taking that familiar matrix of adult male corpse, adult female corpse, and two skeletal youths. “Buried in Each Other’s Arms,” proclaims the headline. “Scientists discover remains of world’s most ancient nuclear family.” But what of Grave 90, with its single adult female and small child? And Grave 93, with its adult male and two related children? And what, finally, to make of Grave 98, with its adult female and three unrelated youth? These graves merit only a single sentence, clauses separated by semicolons, a dutiful listing of contents before returning to the meat of the matter: Proof! Of the nuclear family! Goes back to the Paleolithic!! I page forward and back to the pages around the article, hoping for a “continued on…” or a sidebar at the very least. There is nothing. There is absolutely no speculation on whether those other graves formed variations of what constituted a family.

As we pull out of Princeton Junction, I wonder: Who is to say we even have the equipment to discern what these graves could mean? Can science discover irrefutable evidence of the nature of family? Can an equation mathematically prove what shape it should take?

HANA
Hana sat in the parking lot of the train station. The baby was sleeping in the back, probably having cried himself out earlier, and all she could hear were the slight sounds of him sucking at his pacifier. She could almost pretend he didn’t exist.

She could be a very different kind of woman living a very different kind of life. Perhaps she was a successful businesswoman who had bought a second home in the country so that when she could, she slipped the confines of her city life, indulging her longing for nature and open space and stars in the night sky, for miles on the highway flanked only by these trees, bursting like fireworks of fading autumn leaves. Or maybe she was a much-beloved novelist, whose sheer naked talent somehow excused—even explained—her reclusiveness, as if the two facts about her were in direct proportion, linked quantities, and as one shifted, so must the other.

Or maybe she was a wife fresh from the altar, such a very young woman, still unaware of how hard it will all be, being a wife, being just a wife, keeping all those vows and expected to have no more secrets. She was any of these women, and each of them, and sitting in the short-term parking lot waiting for the train to arrive. Perhaps it was time to return to her apartment in the financial district before work on Monday—Monday, this she would sigh in despair. Or maybe she had to make her annual and detested few public appearances to promote her newest book, doorstoppingly thick with brilliance. Or it could be that she was meeting her young husband for a date in the city, that being their job right now, everyone had said so, this was the time for fattening their love on these rich first few years, wining and dining that love and escorting it out to Broadway musicals and exhibits of strange art both would be too embarrassed to admit they didn’t understand.

But the baby stirs.

MATTIE
Hana is waiting when I arrive. I see the car and wave, but she sits, her head straight forward, near motionless. The car is off, and there are no sounds coming from within. For no reason I can put a finger on, the whole thing spooks me, and I speed my steps to the car. When I open the car door, Hana startles.

“Geezus, you fucking scared me,” she says.
“Hana dear, we’re going to have to clean your mouth out with soap before Tommy’s first word is a swear word,” I say. “Anyway. What—were you dozing off on the job?” I place my tote bags and the small cooler of food at my feet.
Hana replies, “Spacing out, I guess.” Her voice is soft and wispy,
as if waking from a dream. Her tone sharpens as she adds, “Anyway, he’s sleeping. He’s fine.”
“Hana. Honey. I was just kidding.” I hug her, and she lets me.

When I let go, Hana starts up the ignition and rolls slowly through the parking lot. I am belted in, but I turn to look back at Tommy, while Hana keeps her eyes on the road. His pacifier has fallen to the side of his car seat, and sweet drool crusts a path down his right cheek. I lick my thumb and use it to wipe the whiteness away. His mouth puckers and unpuckers and those long lashes flutter, but after a big sigh shudders through his chest, he is back to soundly
sleeping. I can’t help the smile that breaks across my face. Those lashes, that pout of lips, that sigh, these are things I have loved about Hana, but they are somehow even more precious in miniature on this boy. We roll up to the longest stop light in all of New Jersey—we’ve sat at enough of them, all around the state, to believe this—and wait.

How will they one day interpret us, I wonder. It could happen in seconds. I could be sitting here in this passenger seat, gazing back at the baby, while Hana keeps her eyes on the road. The light could hold red, and hold red, and hold red, and as our attention wanders, it would come to rest on a secret stratovolcano of central New Jersey, one that had successfully passed as a mountain for so many
years that people forgot it was only dormant, not defunct. And today, it would show how it wasn’t sleeping at all; it was capable of real violence, spewing forth a cloud of ash and pumice that would spread like a blanket over us, fossilizing this day exactly as it was. Pompeii, New Jersey. But the volcano could only reach so far, so life outside this area would go on and someday someone would dig us up. Our bones would long be bleached dry in their sarcophagus of ash and perhaps when exposed to air they would crumble, but I am sure my marrow would still be thick with love.

................................

MAYUMI SHIMOSE POE
Mayumi is Managing Editor of Hawaii Women’s Journal and American Anthropologist by day, Writer by night. She has been published in Hawaii Women’s Journal, American Anthropologist, Eternal Portraits, Hybolics, Stepping Stones, the Honolulu Advertiser, the Phoenix, and Dark Phrases and won the 2005 Poetry.com’s Editor’s Choice Award and a 2002 honorable mention in the Honolulu Magazine Annual Fiction Contest. She wrote the libretto for Ka’ililauokekoa, a Hawaiian opera performed in Honolulu in 2007. She currently lives in Brooklyn, NY. www.mayumishimosepoe.com

"Reading Signs"

BY LYZ SOTO
photos by Michelle Bassler and Kathryn Xian

Imagine breathing in carbon monoxide. It is odorless. It is tasteless. It gives no hint of danger, and symptoms of poisoning can be mistaken for the flu.

Domesticated canaries, for more than a century, were used as early warning detectors in coal mines. These birds’ respiratory systems are more sensitive than those of humans, so the canaries would sicken first, alerting miners to the possible presence of carbon monoxide or methane and giving them a chance to put on respirators or evacuate.

Humans and canaries have a smiliar reaction to carbon monoxide poisoning:

First Stage: Headache/Dizziness
Hemoglobin is the primary oxygen carrier to all tissues of the body but has a stronger molecular attraction to carbon monoxide, which is first absorbed by the lungs. Carbon monoxide binds to the hemoglobin in the blood, which creates carboxyhemoglobin.

Second Stage: Increased Headache/Convulsions/Disorientation
Carbon monoxide attaches to the oxygen molecules, which interferes with the body’s ability to deliver oxygen to organ and muscle tissue.

Third Stage: Convulsions/Respiratory Failure/Death
Carboxyhemoglobin prevents hemoglobin from releasing oxygen, causing the oxygen content in the blood to increase. Cells may respond to the presence of carbon monoxide in the body by changing to an anaerobic metabolism, which will lead to anoxia and cell death.

Imagine reaching for a respirator, after the canary’s song has ceased.

People began breeding canaries for domestication in the seventeenth century. They bred them for color, size, shape, and song. They were pets before they were sentinels.

If the words “bird” and “respirator” are Googled together, Wikipedia pops up an entry for Forrest Bird, who invented mechanical ventilators for people suffering from severe cardiopulmonary illness.

Bird was also an aviator.
Imagine flying with no air.
There are no protective respirators for birds.

My hometown of Kailua, on the windward side of O‘ahu, Hawai‘i, was built on the remnants of a volcanic caldera. The bay was created thousands of years ago when one side of the crater collapsed into the ocean, leaving a half-bowl dipping into the Pacific. One New Year’s Eve, several years ago, there was no wind in Kailua. That did not stop fireworks enthusiasts. They lit, cracked, popped, bombed, and sparkled with abandon. Through the night and the next morning, there was no breeze. A thick white blanket of smoke hovered over the town, and the bodies of birds littered the beaches.

What did the miners do with their canary sentinels after they heralded pending danger?
Swine flu (H1N1), avian influenza, SARS, mad cow disease, salmonella, rabies, E. coli 0157:H7, and Yersinia enterocolitica are all diseases associated with, or first found, in animal (nonhuman) populations.

One to three percent of pigs that contract swine flu die from it.The World Health Organization estimates, as of September 2009, 0.01 percent of the human population that caught swine flu died from it.

There is no media coverage of animal disease until people become ill. Animal illness rarely excites media interest unless it comes into our homes. If our dogs die, or if we cannot eat our meat, chicken, or fish, then we are interested. If we think maybe we will be next, then we notice.

The doctor thought my son and I contracted swine flu. We were sick. We felt terrible. We were not tested. He just said, given the symptoms and the timing, it was probable. My son is not immune to media hype. When he went back to school, he was quite proud to announce that he had been a casualty of swine flu. I got a call from the school. My son got a sound scolding from his principal. He was told not to talk about swine flu. Apparently, my son’s school is not immune to media hype, either.

In the United States, as of November 13, 2009, there have been 4,000 swine flu–related human deaths. The Center for Disease Control estimates that, in the U.S., 36,000 people die from the seasonal flu every year.

The CDC suggests certain practices common in high-density animal husbandry contribute directly to the proliferation and spread of virulent pathogens.

Consider the high-density factory farm, the goal of which is to produce as much food as possible at the lowest possible cost. “Factory farm” was a new term at the turn of the last century. The definition, according to MSN Encarta, is “a farm where animals are raised using intensive methods and modern equipment.”

When my son was four, I had a conversation with one of his playmates. This child was adamant that meat came like a gift from the sky, wrapped in plastic or packaged in decorated cardboard. He maintained there was no connection between the chickens that ran through the yard and the chickens that were battered, fried, and eaten.

McDonald’s USA maintains that it can be a nutritional player in a child’s well-balanced diet. Chicken McNuggets contain: white boneless chicken, water, food starch-modified, salt, seasoning (autolyzed yeast extract, salt, wheat starch, natural flavoring [botanical source], safflower oil, dextrose, citric acid, rosemary), sodium phosphates, seasoning (canola oil, mono- and diglycerides, extractives of rosemary). They are battered and breaded with water, enriched flour (bleached wheat flour, niacin, reduced iron, thiamin mononitrate, riboflavin, folic acid), yellow corn flour, food starch (modified), salt, leavening (baking soda, sodium acid pyrophosphate, sodium aluminum phosphate, monocalcium phosphate, calcium lactate), spices, wheat starch, whey, and corn starch. They are prepared in vegetable oil (canola oil, corn oil, soybean oil, hydrogenated soybean oil with TBHQ, and citric acid added to preserve freshness). Finally, dimethylpolysiloxane is added as an antifoaming agent.

Global meat consumption is on the rise. Production has tripled in the last 40 years. It may double by 2050.

My son loves eating meat. I do not stop him.

An article in the New York Times suggests the easiest way to reduce a carbon footprint is to become a vegetarian. Animals produced for human consumption contribute eighteen percent of global greenhouse emissions.

We are now in a period of time biologists call the Holocene Extinction. They speculate humans may be the cause for this most recent period of mass extinctions. The passenger pigeon, the Honshu wolf, the Atlas bear, the Tarpan, the Thylacine, the Toolache wallaby, the Caspian tiger, the Baiji dolphin, and the Pyrenean ibex are all gone—and this a mere fraction of a much longer list. All of these animals disappeared within the last 200 years.

What happens, tunneled deep into the earth’s crust, when the canary dies, and the miners fail to notice?

................................

LYZ SOTO
Lyz Soto is the Executive Director of Youth Speaks Hawai`i. She is a performance poet, a student at University of Hawai`i at Mānoa, and her chapbook Eulogies was recently published by Tinfish Press.