We search the face of every old Puerto Rican man we meet, hoping to see our grandfather’s face looking back at us. The way to and from school is paved with old brown Boricua men. Up Riverdale and Rockaway,…
The monsoon our mother delivers a boy, we’re saved from our father’s anger. Our hands are raw, unrecognizable, carrying hot water, tugging clean sheets beneath our mother’s heels, taut like our names. The baby looks whittled out of a…
We can’t take Mam’s new baby to school, the boys guess as much from my silence and nobody wants Mam to wake and make Baby cry, so when I put him to feed there’s quiet, just suckling sounds and…
Honey, MS, 1973 I When it gets cold in the South, Mama puts Devilish-Daddy out, again. It’s where he belongs, she says, cold is like warm milk to funny daddies like the one y’all got. All it gone do…
Gale Massey and Louise Marburg met in 2016 at the Sewanee Writers’ Conference over a tarot card consultation. Discovering a shared interest in exploring the dark side of human nature, they immediately clicked and have been friends and writing…
September Every day we met for lunch in the art classroom in the school’s east wing. It was the woodshop before the woodshop closed—a cavernous space full of defanged band saws and belt sanders stewing in desuetude. The art…
Moores lived next door. He worked construction; she stayed home. I don’t know how old he was, but I remember that on her birthday, she turned twenty-two. It seemed old. I was twelve. Moores had a baby, Sidney. Their…
I am humming along to Lucky Dube’s voice over the radio on the windowpane. The cavernous room swallows his tenor, leaving his words bare, airy, like scattered feathers in the sun. I do not know what it means to…
By Lee Upton • Probably like many writers I’m protective toward my characters—even though I put them in impossible situations or give them unfulfillable longings. I pretty much pickle them in vulnerability. Sometimes I let them avoid any action…
In Katya’s house there are eight women who will never leave. They are splayed across a big, black, L-shaped couch in various states of beatific decline at two o’clock on a Wednesday afternoon. They are arranged haphazardly: Some dozing…
When I began writing “Katya’s House,” I was spiraling at the precipice of two major endings: (1) the death of my beloved grandmother and (2) the implosion of my marriage and, with it, the foundations of my adult life thus far. I was questioning everything about story—about linear narrative, choice/will, continuity, individual voice, and destiny—both in writing and in life.
How did any “rules” of story make sense when widows slump on couches in hospice homes like Katya’s house, still seeped in fragments of stories, conflicts, secrets, desires that would never be known or completed? What form could contemplate the big black nothing at the end of a marriage where all the pain and ugliness and hope were supposed to deliver us somewhere redemptive, somewhere other than nowhere. And…was there something especially masculine and American in the idea of a singular, self-determined story, one with conflict defined and surpassed? Something to learn, perhaps, from the widows, from Grandma, about the swirling and spiraling interconnectivity of real stories and lives that might guide a way forward, or at least provide some solace?
This essay was my attempt—in both its narrative and form—to explore these questions and ideas. It was my attempt to write my way through my own darkness and into my next chapter. I dedicate it to Grandma Nettie.
SHANA GRAHAM is a Miami-based writer, producer, and community builder. She is currently a Lawrence A. Sanders Fellow at Florida International University. Her work has appeared in publications including The Los Angeles Review, Utne Reader, Litro, and Queen Mob’s Teahouse. You can find her on Twitter @_supershana_.
