Zazen - By Vanessa Veselka Page 0,17

stayed in the kitchen for most of the party. Jimmy offered to give me a ride home.

“I have to drop these trays off at the restaurant first but it won’t take long. We can throw your bike in the back of my truck.”

In the truck we talked about Honduras.

“I’m going miss this,” she said gesturing vaguely at the warehouse behind us as we crossed the train tracks and lurched up onto to another frontage road, “but I’m not going to miss the rest.”

We rolled up onto a newly paved street, which ran along the edge of a small park with rusted swings and a slide. Then we turned and drove up a hill until we came to a Catholic church and a coffee shop, the gateway to our neighborhood, and passed between them.

The world outside is only as big as a small island, I thought, a thin spit of sand. On one end they speak Spanish and on the other end Lao. I saw everything anew. We were already in Honduras. New Honduras. My problem was the language barrier. The streets weren’t a record of community decimation. They were filled with merry peasants. Look! There’s a bike shop. My neighborhood was filled with happy people. So much better since all that land reform went through. During the day young paisanos lingered by the food co-ops unloading trucks, glad to be helping farmers bring their groceries to urban markets.

“Hola!” I call.

“Hola!” they call back.

New Honduras.

Jimmy pulled up by Rise Up Singing and we dropped off the trays. When we were locking up I thought, why not leave?

“I might come,” I said. “To where you are, I mean. For a little while.”

There wasn’t any moon, just an emergency light at the other end of the block. I couldn’t see Jimmy’s expression but I felt her body relax. Because that’s the way it is when a possibility opens up; the body doesn’t know any better. It reaches for the glittering incongruity.

8 Redbird Square

The alarm went off and Jimmy jumped up to get it then walked into the kitchen. I heard dishes clank as she pulled cups from the full sink. She called out asking if I wanted tea. Her voice echoed on the wood floorboards and in the short hallways.

I braided my hair naked in bed. I couldn’t find my rubber bands so I made two pigtails and tied them together at the base of my neck. My red corduroy dress was across the room under a book on historic churches of Honduras. I pulled it out and slapped it against the carpet to get the wrinkles out. There were little pink bleach stains all over the front, which I hadn’t noticed before. They started at my ribcage and went all the way to the bottom edge just above my knee.

I put it on and went into the kitchen. The sky was white through the windows. Rows of green seedlings and starts lined the windowsills, which dipped unevenly and had rounded edges from too many layers of paint. Jimmy pulled a kettle off the stove. A ladder of silk now spanned between us. Jimmy set a Japanese teacup in front of me. With the windows full of the blank white sky and everything in the kitchen so clear and sharp, it looked like an unfinished painting, as if someone had meticulously filled in the details of the room but forgotten to draw the world outside.

“The anniversary is Saturday, right?” she asked, sitting down across from me.

“Anniversary?”

“Grace and Miro’s. We’re still going out, right?”

“God, I don’t know.”

Jimmy flushed slightly.

“I just don’t want to think about it right now.”

“Are you really thinking about leaving?”

“Maybe. Don’t know where I’d go.”

“You could stay with me in Honduras if you want.”

I must have flinched because her chest tightened.

“I’m not saying we should get a dog or anything,” she said, “I’m fine with however this goes. Just know you’re welcome.”

Jimmy’s kitchen table was made of salvaged boat planks and I ran my hand across the bowed wood and tried to imagine what the Black Ocean would actually feel like.

She sliced some zucchini bread and poured green tea into a blue-glazed cup in front of me. I looked around like I had been born into that moment. Like I had been somewhere else all along. I saw the glittering incongruity. I was right in the center of it. It’s simple when you’re not clenching up and I was before but didn’t know it. At some point that morning the clenching