REBECCA HANNIGAN

Nothing More American

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While walking at night with my friend the sidewalks are abandoned and traffic is abundant and though it’s not a holiday, we see fireworks over construction, nothing more American: red bursting above big digging machines poised like creatures in science fiction. We talk about our anger over artificial bomb-smacks and celebratory violence and my friend mentions a young man from Iraq, a refugee who sought help from the nonprofit where she works, this young man who curled up in a ball on the fourth of July in fear the sounds brought back from the war at home in his country, because while our country was bloating and gloating and adding to their fatalities, they were covering their heads and counting the dead as there were more dead to count.

We keep walking. My friend brings up poetry podcasts, wondering what it is that they’re missing and the inside of my ear itches from the car sounds and to her question, I say, It might be paper. Maybe sometimes poetry wants to sit instead of be said, I respond, though I’m sick of sitting all day and now think about how this place’s coffee is shit, this coffee shop we just passed, storefront full-glass, with potted succulents and an ambiance set by the dude-barista with a well-groomed mustache and house-made oat milk that tastes like cardboard and costs an irrational amount and now we pause. My friend has spotted a man across the street screaming at a woman, which she has noticed because she has the most spacious heart and sensitivity to match and we step behind the pole of a streetlight to keep our eyes out – it sounds like they might be drunk and looks like they haven’t had the chance to change clothes in a month – and I can only think of our helplessness. As much as we want to assist there are only so many ways we can other than showing kindness which seems easy enough as we wait for traffic to clear so we can cross I feel again the pain in my ear that I want to clean out with a q-tip or a twig, like, really get the pain out by digging in, and as we wait we see a mural on the side of a building, portraying evolution at its most offensive, a representation that’s outdated from when “primitive” and “savage” were definitive, as the mural shows an ape figure growing and begetting dark skin, which begets light, we spit on the  images and look across at the woman who’s hunched with arms covering her head as if the man were some storm, collapsing ceilings and throwing shrapnel until he finally walks away, at which point we cross the wide street to make sure she’s okay. We can see she’s crying. 

Before we get there, her head lifts, tilts toward us, and she yells, What do you nosy fucks want?, and my temperature drops and my temperature jumps and I turn to my friend and notice now that she’s wearing a velvet shirt under her jacket and I think of velvet revolutions and I want to reach out and touch it like a little girl in the department store, I want to hold her hand I think as she wraps her arms around herself as if to protect and we look at the woman again while walking away. I see compassion in my friend’s expression but maybe what the woman saw was pity which is likely what she doesn’t want but what she expects, what the woman normally gets, along with a few dollars or a plastic water bottle here and there, and I wish I had water to offer though not in plastic as I see one that’s empty and crushed on the ground. I pick it up and look around to see that my friend has run across the wide street again, and I follow once the headlights have passed. 

When we’re on the other side my velvet friend mentions, again, the young man from Iraq who loves this country, he said, with its freedom and good risks rather than bad. I watch her eyes warm as she tells me about a time when she visited his apartment, bringing paperwork to his mother who has cancer. The woman pulled her onto the couch instead of the rigid table and poured sweet hot tea into a teacup that sat on a saucer beside a plate of chocolate-caramel-peanut clusters which the woman took and placed in my friend’s hand, smiling and replacing one with another as soon as one was eaten. This made my friend laugh and ask how to say thank you, which is shukra, the woman said, and the word tasted sweet in my friend’s mouth, though she can’t stand caramel, she says, she chewed and swallowed and smiled and at this point we’re walking toward my place and my velvet friend looks at me in the flesh of my eyes and again I feel more affection. I ask if she wants to come in once we’ve made it to the house and she says Yes, and she asks, What is that? and I look down at the water bottle I forgot I’m holding which I put in the recycling that’s nearly exploding, and then I see that my velvet friend is looking toward the sidewalk, at the woman from before, now walking toward us, pushing a shopping cart with speed like she’s trying to get away from something. The only sound for a moment is the wheels of the cart bumping along unevenly, and as suddenly as it’s quiet, suddenly it’s loud when another firework cracks. The jolt that makes us jump and a chorus of dogs starts barking, yipping and howling from behind fences and inside houses and one neighbor yells at his to stop but rather than the dog, the woman stops and is illuminated by another bright-sky pop, and I look at my friend whose face is flashing red and blue on her cheeks, on her hair, like the flash from a photograph making her radiant, I feel how we and the woman are standing in the interval, in the silence, waiting in the calm between shockwaves, however long it lasts. 

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