Current Life Situation: Lucrative Work-Assignment, Stable Marriage-Union, Model Son. After daily work-duty, take Municipal Transporter to Metro-Sector T—Genome Modification Center—and receive Target Sequence Update. Then hurry home. Find Model Son (name Theo) at study-station, solving math problem concerning volume…
We haven’t seen her in weeks, our neighbor with white hair that tufts and spumes, not a trace of color in it, not even a sliver of gray. We never learned her name, but we noticed—the way you notice…
“My stepdaughter is a horse.” The school psychologist waits for me to say more, then resumes her review of the pedagogical strategies she and Lilja’s teachers have employed. She speaks at a clip that makes me wonder if her…
I had the pleasure of chatting with Annell López, author of the award-winning debut short story collection I’ll Give You a Reason over coffee after work in New Orleans, where we both live and write. I’ll Give You a…
Elvis Presley’s warbling on the overhead speakers as Mom and I browse a warm, wood-splashed Barnes & Noble. She wants to buy a puzzle for my nephew in Florida. She turns to me. “Oh god, the day Elvis died?…
We fill up on deep-fried bricks of cheese and rib eyes big as our heads at Burly’s Roughrider Bar & Steakhouse. Our neatly laced Merrells and moisture-wicking Patagonias set us apart from the mud-splattered, steel-toed boots under most every…
I told my mom I loved her at a gas station in Minnesota but I’m not sure she heard. The cashier must’ve been stocking drinks or something so it felt like it was just me and her in there.…
“She cursed that baby—” “Her thirteenth, I heard, and who can blame her—” “You can’t blame her for thinking it, but doing—” “Who among us—” “I wouldn’t—” “That’s you, though, isn’t it?” “You’re better than us?” “You think she’s…
“The fuck you take your gloves off again?” you growled, never letting up, the oldest. Brother trip, our third in two years, anywhere there’d be northern lights. We hiked out of the frozen Alaskan woods—the black-dark, wraith rider intimidation…
I should have noticed when my wedding ring fell out of my pocket. I should have heard it strike and plink on the concrete floor in Big Willie’s dressing room behind the bar when I slung my jacket over…
New Orleans! The moment I landed at the Louis Armstrong Airport, the city seduced me. The convergence of cultures, the jazz and blues spilling out into the street, the French, the food. New Orleans is fifty-seven percent Black and the full spectrum of our color is on display: I didn’t have to explain the history of my lighter skin. I wanted to write a story with a voice that conveyed the emotional intensity I felt when I visited the Big Easy in my forties. It was a place that was home/not-home.
The voice had to be first person, but whose? Nurses who choose permanent nights are special—they run the show because there are few doctors about. On a medical ward of old sick people, death is always close, and when the visitors leave, the patients feel especially vulnerable. It takes a strong, matter-of-fact person to walk the ward at night. Not the traditional stereotype of the doctor’s wife.
Brenda is used to taking care of herself, even feels somewhat uncomfortable with her husband’s attentiveness. When I decided that she was newly married, it occurred to me that her wedding ring might slip off easily, so that she could lose it. I thought of the song title “Hold On, I’m Coming” (Sam & Dave were from Georgia, where my grandparents lived) before I thought of the ring, because Brenda wanted to hold on to her New Orleans experience, but the tangible ring became the heart of the story.
Travel wakes us up by exploding our routine. We think that no one can see us because we are among strangers, but we see ourselves, often differently, under a tropical sun, with a soundtrack that evokes the past. Brenda and Charles are compatible in middle age but she would not have chosen him as a young woman. The struggle to figure out who we are does not end in adolescence—if anything, it is complicated by greater personal history and wider experience.
I wanted to write a happy ending, wherein the woman doesn’t suffer for a moment’s indiscretion. Yet I wanted Brenda to acknowledge Mr. Washington, to risk drawing Charles’s attention to him. What if Charles asks about him? Is she a good liar? Does she feel guilty enough to confess? She is still emotionally unsettled when the story ends.
TONI MARTIN is a physician and writer, author of When the Personal Was Political: Five Women Doctors Look Back (2008). Her stories and essays have appeared in East Bay (San Francisco) newspapers and many other publications, including The Threepenny Review, Bellevue Literary Review, and ZYZZYVA. Read her blog, “Random Thoughts,” at the website linked above, and find her on Facebook @ToniMartinWriter.
