The Writer’s Corner features poetry, essays, short stories, satire and various fiction and non-fiction from SCAD Atlanta students. To submit your own work for the Writer’s Corner, email features@scadconnector.com.
We Leave to Return by Catalina Cano
I remember choking on the crumbs of hope. Today marks a year since they took her and the screams still echo in the hallways of our house. Sometimes I won’t hear them for weeks straight and I fear the worst — that she’s finally abandoned me — until I pull open a cabinet and there it is. My mother’s voice, pleading. I can still hear her knees hitting the ground as she wrapped her thin fingers around the chipped leg of a wooden table, begging them to leave her children untouched. Above the memory of her face lies the rugged slope of her neck and shoulders. The feeling engraved on my fingertips, white lines crosshatched like tally marks — product of carrying loads heavier than her.
I have watched birds of prey deliberately spread fires with the purpose of flushing out prey; I have seen them carrying burning twigs and sticks to ignite new fires. The number of things we’ve learned from nature is insurmountable.
I woke to the smell of freshly made coffee seeping underneath wooden doors and impregnating the walls, the bedsheets, the drawn curtains. I grabbed a strand of my own hair and sniffed it, finding that traces of the earthy smell had already clung to it. It was my brother who rose earlier than the rest. Looking back, it would’ve been an anomaly. We all knew better than to disrupt his deep sleep as he dreamt of foreign worlds and narrated unintelligible conversations. No, Jon’s new habit started after we found her. After five days of agonizing obscurity and delirium, he discovered that the only way to have me open my eyes and push my body upright was to let the heady smell permeate every corner of our home.
I welcomed the scalding cup into my numb hands, the gelid mornings of January forever unforgiving. We walked to the garden, Oka the mutt gracefully dancing around our ankles and we sat amidst the stubborn violets and begonias.
I glanced at my brother but did not find him there and I knew where his mind had gone. Like a video recording or perhaps a captured image, I saw the flames burning bright in his eyes. Two weeks had gone by since both of us, with the aid of seven others who had become our equals, turned the S. Company’s warehouse where all their sinister machinery was kept into a blazing spectacle. I looked closer and saw guilt concealed in the curve of my brother’s brows. There had been men inside, six of them. Their men, but men nonetheless.
I allow my mind to drift away, if only for a moment. It has led me once again to the same place and I realize that Jon’s regrets do not match mine. I find myself in this very same spot, the restless heart has remained unchanged. It’s all so vivid I can still hear the knock on the door and Volga the seamstress on the other side: an unexpected visit. She asks — no, commands — us to follow her and leads us to the riverbank. The river defaced and degraded by foreign hands — their hands — had become shallow, barely a stream.
Jon and I see her removing her shoes and rolling up her olive-green pants. We both follow and with trembling knees reach the other side of the stream.
I must’ve known then what I was about to face.
Never would I have expected to become plagued by a story my mother had once told me about her own mother. The night her mother left this world, as my mother and her sister lied restless in their own beds, they felt the warm touch that could only belong to one person as it carefully grazed their foreheads. A farewell.
Her shoulders were uncovered, displaying the patchwork left behind by all the years of carrying sacks filled with fruit — our fruit — and the barren branches of thorny trees. Disposed the way you may dispose the core of an apple, straight on the earth. This land is damned, we all know what men do to things that exude fertility and she was not the only one. Just down the river we crossed two more were found: someone’s father, another daughter.
They searched for culprits but found no one. We were safe. Us, the arsonists. Their actions had affected many. Soon, they realized they couldn’t accuse an entire country. They rebuilt their warehouse, revived their machinery, replaced their men and took the fruit from our homeland to where they came from. Whenever the fruit reached our markets and stores it came with foreign prices, to think it was our hands that witnessed their genesis right next door.
Jon waited patiently for me to return to him, he knew where I had gone. I stared at his brown eyes, the fire not gone, only waiting until the next voyage into the past. Oka approaches the both of us, her wire-like tail proud in the air. Though her snout is covered with dirt we allow her to lick our faces. A greeting. She knows we were gone but she doesn’t know where.
