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I 

 

We are standing in the doorway of our grandparents’ basement apartment, staring straight through the house to the back door. Step outside, and you are at the bottom of a square, concrete pit covered by a black metal plate drilled with holes. We know this pit to be a well that floods the house every time it rains, but right now it is sunny, and the sky is blue, wispy clouds halfway between cumulus and cirrus streaking the sky. Here, summer sounds like the creaking-shrieking of insects, and through this back door, always and forever, is the leather-skinned figure of our grandfather—his hands in the dirt, down on one knee, his shoulders stooped in penitence. Climb the crooked brick stairs up into the yard. See how the light burnishes his every fold of skin, the thick silver brush of his mustache like filament in the light. See how he opens his hand, soft and thick as oiled hide, and wraps our small fingers around the globe of a ripe tomato. 

Lift and twist, K—, he says, moving our body like a puppet, and suddenly the weight is resting in our hands. A simple transfer, from vine to your small, puffy fingers. A weight as heavy as a baseball. 

Can I eat it? we ask. 

Nah yet. First, we must weed. 

 

II

 

I used to think that I was born under our father’s belt, but maybe I was born here: in the garden, sun on our face, the bright green smell of tomato plants wafting up to paw at our noses. Long, fat earthworms wriggling in our hands. The pillbugs and millipedes that curl up when prodded, unfurling with tentative grace, meandering in twisting paths like silver buses helmed by drunk drivers. The women worked in the kitchen from dawn ’til dusk, but we wanted to be outside. We did fifty sit-ups for grandpa’s thirty, and twenty push-ups to his ten, and followed him into the yard to put our hands in the dirt, to pull the weeds from around the plants we knew were good. To kill the slugs and toss the snails into a bucket. To pick what was ripe from the vine.  

After, we sat on the steps down into the dark pit of the house and ate tomatoes raw and juicy, orange pulp spilling over small fingers dotted with tiny golden seeds. Cucumbers were scored with a fork down the sides, sliced and freckled with salt and hot sauce homemade with scotch bonnets from the yard. Aubergine became baigan choka, and the okra went into curry or was fried in thin rings, and the long green beans we hated and never ate, so I don’t remember how they were prepared. A daily ritual. A bounty made from our hands. Everything luscious and golden and warm. 

I never want to leave this place. You saw it as a prison, a holding pen for the wild animal of our body, but I have lived your future and I know better than you. I know what comes after the open door: the black, steep stairwell with its nails that catch skin, the two floors above that are always gray and cold and empty. The slick wood your nails scrabble against as you try to crawl from the pain. Hard surfaces that refract your screams. The door to the basement, where once you tried to escape only for the door to be slammed on your fingers. Your nail falling off, the skin beneath black then blue then purple and green, being so sure something was broken but never being taken to the hospital. The way my fingers are still crooked now. 

Talk to me, little prophet. Little mountain goat, tiger cub, tykeus rexus, “gifted” in more ways than even our grandmother knew. Little eneoge—the one who sees. Remind me what it is to shake apart and come back together; to believe that love lies at the end of the whip; to see the heavens every time you close your eyes and will it. Remind me what it is to fall down and die in the middle of a sentence, to wake up with no memory of where you went when the radiance left our body. To return to the black again and again, and still somehow remain whole. 

 

III 

 

We learn to live in the dark. At first, we are afraid, but it is easy to learn better. How can we fear what comes without violence?  

No, this is a lie. It isn’t easy at all. But we learn quickly, as we are taken by him again and again. He comes as he pleases and takes even our memory and we wake up in strange places—in corners, and strangers’ couches, and sometimes even on the train, the city rocking us like a babe in her great silver cradle.  

They want to take the darkness out, but they don’t know how. They attach wires to your skull, sticky gritty paste that never comes out in the first wash. They put you into huge, white machines—long tunnels that sound like jackhammers, so loud it makes your breath quake as you try so hard to lie still lie still liestillliestillliestill—

Eventually, they give us little pills that you choke on every time. Our mother cuts them in half so they go down easy, but the chalky taste of the exposed innards is almost worse than the size. 

You want the darkness to leave because it means you always need watching. That you must go to a soft, squishy place full of strange children strapped down to rolling carts like Hannibal in that movie your ma was upset your father let you watch. The children there are mean to you because you are healthy, and they do not help you when you fall, and sometimes you come awake to them standing around you, staring down like you are a body at the morgue. The lights are cold and too bright and maybe you are dead, until eventually one of the wardens shoos them away and they scatter to the corners, shrieking like animals. 

Sometimes, you are so tired of being in the world that darkness comes like a miracle. You dream of the Other Realm, the place your grandmother calls Heaven—a place of pure light, endless repeating patterns, and the beings that inhabit that place are made of light, and they and the world are one, and the world and the beings are made of the same light and you are also made of light, tessellating and refracted as if through a crystal, and the things humans call wings are just rays of light extending out forever—

You wake up, shivering, on a plastic-covered gym mat. One bored warden clicks a mouse at a boxy computer. Everyone is screaming, bright and too-loud, and so you close your eyes and lay there for just a little longer. Maybe they’ll never notice you’re awake at all. Maybe you’ll never have to wake up. 

 

IV 

 

The darkness is Hypnos, and when he leaves, he never returns to us. Whatever they give you, do to you, makes us unable to sleep, and we never remember how to sleep, and even now I have never seen him or the Other Realm again. 

In the evenings, you watch our grandfather brush his teeth. He flosses every single tooth, every time. His teeth are in excellent condition for a man of his age, clean and straight, all present and at attention like little soldiers in the line of his mouth. He is very proud of his teeth, and up above them his moustache is a fall of silver brush like the tassel on a curtain rope. 

Late night, and your grandfather is snoring, rip-roaring like a chainsaw, and the sonorous might of it shakes the whole house, makes you grit your teeth and tremble. For hours you try to sleep—to lie still, lie still, liestillliestillliestill. Eventually, at 3 a.m., you crawl out of bed into the hall, the same square of floor where you watched your grandfather comb out his moustache. You curl up sobbing, rolling around on the scratchy carpet because everything is loud and hurts and it will always hurt, and nothing ever stops hurting. You bought your father a mystery book for his birthday, spent all your money, didn’t eat lunch for days, spoke to a stranger to ask their recommendation even, and he didn’t even look at it. Just gave it away and never touched the thing again, and nothing you do will ever be good— 

Someone is touching your shoulder. Someone is on the phone. Someone asks if you want your parents, but you don’t, you don’t want them. These are our parents. If only these were our parents. You are hurtling towards a future without these people who were our parents and they took the darkness out, but some lights can only be seen in the dark. Some lights are worse than the dark. Sometimes the darkness is better than nothing at all. Sometimes nothing is better than something. 

 

V 

 

What I mean to say is that I have insomnia. 

What I mean to say is that you had epilepsy. 

What I mean to say is that we were abused. 

What I mean to say is that we were raised by our grandparents who taught you to read and grow and when they were not raising you, you were being abused, both at home and at school. 

What I mean to say is that our grandparents live in the hot syrup of my nostalgia, always warm and bathed in gold. That their kitchen was always faintly steaming and smelled of curry and cook-up and dal and hassa fish, that everything was delicious, that our parents were never home and when they were, they were ghosts—strangers moving through the empty upper stories of the house, too tired to pay you any attention, who expected you to sit silently beside them on the couch like a dog without absorbing any of the grisly copaganda our father loved despite you reading at a fourth grade level in kindergarten. 

Even dogs get walked. A doll, then. A doll they could dress up and take to church in black patent shoes you hated, who our father could beat when your stockings ran or your shoes scuffed or you wandered too close to traffic when no one was looking. 

I am not allowed to say these things this way. We must be poetic, see? Ugly things cannot be presented in an ugly way, because we must make people care. We must make our suffering beautiful. 

You would not believe how many beautiful things I have made of your suffering. 

 

VI 

 

Weeding is a process, and it never ends. It is the definition of Sisyphean. 

I grow my own tomatoes now. Bowls and bowls of them, bright orange and cherry red and even some deep, dark purples. When I twist them on the stem and that acid smell blooms upwards, I can feel our grandfather’s hands cradling mine, huge and warm and calloused. 

I do the weeding first, and then the watering. I spray off any bugs. The local wasps take care of the hornworms. I leave leaf litter in the corner to toss the slugs and snails into, good feeding for lightning bugs. I am building on what I was taught. I am growing the garden. I am tilling the soil, making room for new things. 

When the yard is clean, I rinse my tomatoes down. I sit in the sun. There are fewer insects to shriek at us now, but I hear some all the same. The low buzz of fat bumblebees, and the chitter of nosy cardinals, and even the occasional monarch if we’re lucky in the summer. 

In a moment, I will have to return to my desk and take a call, argue with corporate, try to wrangle a manuscript from an author who did not take a single one of my notes. But right now, the sky is blue, and we have tomatoes to eat, and the whole yard smells of basil and lavender, and my dog is asleep under the picnic table—all ninety pounds of him strong and silver-moustached, hiding from the beaming sun. 

Metal bowl full of my favorite bright yellow tomatoes, gleaming and semi-translucent like a stained-glass window, strung with pearls of water. One by one, I put them in my mouth. Thin skin splits on my teeth, each bauble a juicy burst of tangy sugar and acid. 

It is not yet time to return to the dark. 

 

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K. A. JAGAI is a queer and multiracial writer, artist, and editor from Brooklyn, New York. Their writing has appeared in Frontier Poetry, Electric Literature, The Quarryman, Publishers Weekly, and elsewhere. They are a graduate of Bennington College and a current student at the University College of Cork, where they are working on their debut poetry collection. In both art and writing, they are seeking that light within themselves and others that can only be seen when one is forced into the dark. Find them on Instagram @kintsukroi.

Featured image by Markus Spiske, courtesy of Unsplash.