More on: Fiction

WEARY AND NUMB, Niam Khabbaz trudged through the streets of Rising Sun. Her heart was pounding for no apparent reason as she made her way through the narrow passages she knew so well. She paused briefly when she noticed the police cars and ambulances outside her house, and as soon as she spotted her neighbors…

This would be the first New Year’s Eve in their new flat, and Tanya wanted everything to be perfect.

The Old Church, on the Thames embankment, couldn’t welcome people with a blaze of lights in its porch because of the blackout regulations. Tiny slits of brightness had to guide the way.

THE MOTHER WORRIED when her Catholic son married a Hindu woman. To protect him, she sent a plastic glow-in-the-dark statue of the Madonna for his bedside table. She included a note: Our Lady, Help of Christians, will always watch over you, Baba. A dutiful son, he set up the Madonna on his nightstand. Every night…

That is actually what I thought. That a small bird had fallen from the sky and thumped my back, and when I looked at the ground I expected to see the bloody entrails of a tailorbird, but no, it was my hair, limply coiled on the dirt, already coming undone in the breeze.

He became numb as the cool metal handcuffs were slipped over his wrists for a third time. His late father would’ve told him, “Boy, I eh make stupid children. What wrong with you?”

The priest had a real hard-on for alliteration. It drove Maggie nuts.

In most of my memories of my father from childhood, he is moving.

I was only twenty, driven by a dreamy conviction that life would unfold exactly the way I wanted. Others told me I floated through the world. This they said with a mixture of pity and scorn. I didn’t know what they meant; I’m still not sure I do.

In December of 2022, adrift (again) and staying with my parents, I found among my grandmother’s papers a sealed envelope addressed to me.