Literary Orphans

Seeing Sarah, Sarah Seen by Dylan Taylor

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My wife is at the DMV renewing her licence. The attendant drones off his list of questions, eyes affixed to a boxy desktop screen.

“Sex?”

“Female.”

“Age?”

“Twenty-eight.”

“Race?”

“Mulatto.”

“Sorry?”

“Mulatto, you know, mixed.”

The attendant sighs, looks at my wife. The aberration one of many tedium’s that mould his waking hours.

“I’m sorry ma’am that’s not an option.”

Her smile is splendid. So southern I can taste the sugar stirred in tea.

“Well today I’m feeling like my daddy so you can mark me down as black.”

His fingers punch in the five characters. I laugh to acknowledge the moment, to mark it, to add what little weight my voice carries. Our son tells the woman beside us, “You have a beautiful baby!” in his outside voice. I tell him “Hush.”

“I said the baby was beautiful.”

Six years old and he has already perfected the eyeroll.

Everett was born four years before I met them.

When we go to Wal-Mart Sarah sends me off to find handsoap on clearance. When I come back an employee is stalking my family.

“Why is he hiding?” I ask.

“Asset loss prevention” Sarah replies in a way that makes me feel like I’ve never been shopping before.

“No. Really?”

“Really… and I even know him.”

The employee tries to make his exit quietly but Sarah won’t let him.

“That’s right Ray, you can leave now that the white man’s here!”

A flush of anger pulses in my forehead. My fists clench on their own. Sarah opens my hand knuckle by knuckle, weaves her fingers through my own and kisses me. We walk on.

Five months in and her bellybutton has blown. We find exiting ways of navigating love. Her face aglow, deep orichalcum, polished by the fingers of Hesiod. Sweat beads, rolls down the nape of her neck, and cools my skin in our embrace. Her scent is different now, fecund. It drives us to our bedroom at all hours.

At a cookout with Sarah’s mother’s family we sit drinking Peach Nehi’s and listening to Christian Rock poolside. Everett can swim without water-wings. He shows us. We clap. He shows us again. We cheer.

“S leave some watermelon for the rest of us.”

“Oh you know she can’t help herself. It’s in her blood.”

I apply sunscreen generously to my entire body, even the top of my receding hairline. I will not make that mistake twice.

“I bet no one’s asking you to share that at home.” It comes in singsong and lands tough.

Sarah is spitting seeds at Jesus radio.

A quick stop at the grocery store. Sarah pulls into a parking spot. I reach into the backseat to find a toy for Everett. Sarah opens her door to step out. Neither one of us see the flashing blue and red light. Neither one of us see.

“Get the fuck back in your vehicle NOW!”

In the rear-view mirror I see the officer’s hand on his weapon, clasp unfastened. Time inside my mind and time outside our car moves at discordant velocities. Sarah sits back behind the wheel, her whole body atremble. I touch her arm and she whimpers.

“Didn’t you see my lights?”

“No sir.”

“Licence and registration.”

“Here you are sir.”

In the time it takes for the officer to return, we have almost caught up to our breath.

“You’re tags are expired,” he says meekly, never looking at Sarah, only me, a million miles away in the passenger’s seat.

“What?” Sarah pauses as the officer’s words sink in, the implication that hangs between. “Oh yes, they’re coming in the mail, here is the receipt.”

“Make sure they get on there A-sap.” His boots look three sizes too big.

Juneteenth with Sarah’s father’s family. A full spread. The men hang around the porch so they can sneak cigarettes and sips of beer without breaking Granny’s heart. They are, all of them, in their 40s. Sarah and I are in the kitchen with the women, whose vices are unapparent, answering questions. When are you due? Is Everett excited? Girl or boy? Names, will you tell us your list? We’re laughing, eating plate after plate, barely denting this immovable feast. The kitchen seems miraculous. That trick Jesus pulled with loaves and fishes only delectable and various. Sarah’s father comes in from a cigarette to get himself a plate. He pulls me in for his patented handshake-hug.

“Just holler at me when you’re talked out, alright?”

“Will do.”

“Say Sarah, you not eating any chitlins what’s wrong with you?”

“Daddy, you don’t eat them either.”

“I don’t need to, I ain’t got nothing to prove.”

“How about Mabel as a middle name, wouldn’t that just tickle Granny?” Aunt Squeaky asks.

“Sure… sure it would” a smile back upon his lips.

The night darkens. Even the dead stars come out down the mountain. Lightning bugs flare in multitudes among the canebrake. Our voices carry yet no one is disturbed.

After we bring Neale home and tuck her snugly into the cradle, a cradle that my father made for me, my name carved on the bottom along with the names of cousins and nephews, Sarah begins to cry. These tears are sorrowful, a Kaddish so unlike the tears we shed together at the hospital.

“What’s wrong?” I ask.

“What is my biggest fear?”

I pause for a moment. I hold her gaze. In the years I’ve known Sarah, her eye’s have changed, turned from onyx to chestnut. I pull my wife close to taste her salt.

“That the world will treat Everett differently than Neale.”

“Yes”

“It’s up to us not to let that happen. To make a better world.”

She pushes me back, those chestnut eyes hard. Her hands still gripping mine, they tighten as she speaks each word, palpable with punctuation.

“Don’t you see, of course you don’t, how could you?”

She is right.

I am a spring leaf catching its first breeze.

I am guilty.

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Dylan Taylor is Dad who sneaks off in the small hours to write. Dylan is a writer who spends his afternoons as a dinosaur. He has work published in Scissors & Spackle, the Kentucky Review, decomP, Crack the Spine, Entropy Magazine, The Airgonaut, Maudlin House & WhiskeyPaper. Find him on twitter @MacTaylor89

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–Background & Foreground Photography by Jon Damaschke

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