a screwdriver, pliers, and a small crowbar. The sheen of sweat on his face somehow doesn’t diminish his cuteness. His wild-eyed determination heightens my own excitement amidst the bittersweet sentiments that course through me. It’s weird how we can hold two—or more—emotions in our bodies at the same time. How do human beings just not explode from too many feelings?
“A crowbar? You’re not planning on destroying this fountain, are you?”
“I’ll do everything I can to avoid it.” Alexandre is totally serious as he says this.
He passes me the screwdriver. My hands are clammy; I can’t get a good grip on the rubber handle. I try to rub the sweat off on my jeans, but in a second my palms are sweaty again. The cycle of nervous anticipation. The screwdriver only succeeds in loosening the screws slightly—it’s not the right size, which I suppose makes sense, seeing that the tool is from the twenty-first century and the screw is probably from the nineteenth. Alexandre steps forward with the pliers and begins gently pulling at one screw until it pops out. Then he gets the other, but the medallion stays in place.
We try to shift it. And it budges the tiniest bit. My mouth is like cotton, my pulse racing. I want so badly for this to be something.
Alexandre attempts to grip the medallion from around its edges and nudge it out of place. His faces strains from concentration; he grits his teeth. This time, tiny bits of stone fall from underneath the lion’s head. It’s getting looser. He wedges the screwdriver between the medallion and the stone column. I stand next to him, holding up the medallion by its slim edges so it doesn’t fall forward on us. Alexandre shoves the screwdriver in the hollow we’ve made by shifting the medallion to the left and right. It gives. We both gasp and catch the face of the lion in our hands as it careens forward. We gently place the medallion behind us, then turn back to stare into the dark abyss of a hole in the side of the fountain.
There’s nothing quippy on the tip of my tongue, but my brain brims—a synaptic tangle of thoughts and feelings and silent screams. My hand trembles as I reach into the darkness.
The hollow is cool, slightly damp. I stretch up on my tiptoes until my fingers skim the bottom. A shelf, maybe? My hand brushes against something. A jar. It slips from my fingers with a clink. My heart stops. Time stops. “There’s a pot or something in here, but I can’t quite grab it,” I say as I remove my hand.
Alexandre reaches in. The searching look in his eyes transforms to wonder when he finds the jar. “Got it,” he whispers and carefully pulls the pot out through the hole.
He cups it in both hands. It’s a simple, milk-colored ceramic pot. A dirty one. I chip at the caked-on mud with my fingernail, and a leaf of dirt falls away, revealing a logo: confitures fines felix potin paris. It’s a jam jar.
Alexandre stares at the jar. “I knew you’d find it.”
“We found it. Let’s hope it’s not a-hundred-and-seventy-five-year-old rotten jam.”
Alexandre puts a grimy hand on mine. I don’t flinch. “Khayyam. Without you . . . I was wrong to deceive you, to let my uncle influence me and push me the way he did. You deserve so much better. I should’ve been honest from the beginning. You deserve the truth.”
“Maybe that’s what we’re about to find,” I say, my voice catching.
Leila
Though I will soon be forgotten, perhaps have been already, I leave this record now to tell my truth:
I lived.
I loved.
I had a voice.
And in this life, where I had so little to call my own, where my liberty and love were torn from me, I seize this power: the freedom to write my own story.
Khayyam
Stories are funny things. Even the mere idea of fiction. Facts exist. But I see now that facts are different than truth. Facts are supposed to be indisputable, unbending (at least until science tells us we were wrong about everything), but even the true stories of who we think ourselves to be are a kind of