Zazen - By Vanessa Veselka Page 0,35

hands and I thought—these sounds have traveled across a galaxy to get to me. My last thought was—the singer’s been gone for years. He started to sing and Miro, the lost fish of the Morava, snapped his torn tail and bubbles filled with strains of Czech lullabies shot upwards, each for Cady.

We all have our mother’s mouth and our father’s cheekbones, sharp and high. I have my grandmother’s lighter hair. It turns blonde in the sun and when I was at Davis nobody believed it had ever been brown. Credence has dark hair and dusky skin just like Cady did. Even now, in the end of September, there’s rose on his cheeks. They both had blue eyes but Credence has a dark spot in his left iris. Someone told me that those are trauma scars and not genetic. I don’t know if that’s true. Eyes change over time though just like rivers and it would make sense if every place we’d been, everywhere that counted, we left behind a meander scar.

Mom cut the Frito pie.

“It’s nothing but meat and cheese,” I whispered to Jimmy.

“Shut up,” she hissed.

The skin under her eyes was swollen.

Grace came over and tucked a piece of Jimmy’s hair behind her ear.

“How are you doing with all this?”

“It’s pretty sad, Grace.”

“Yes. It is sad,” Grace put her hand lightly on the back of Jimmy’s head, “but it is important to remember that we have always had our political martyrs.”

Grace reached across and pulled two grapes off a dense cluster in the center of the table.

“What do you mean?” Jimmy asked.

A veil came down between Credence and the world, thin, shimmering and nearly invisible and Miro, like a man waving in the distance at a passing ship, smiled. He set a piece of buttered bread on the edge of Grace’s plate.

Grace squinted her eyes.

“It was a failure on my part, “ she said, “Cady never really did understand the role that gender played.”

She sat back down and took a bite out of the buttered bread.

“I don’t understand,” said Jimmy.

“You see, Cady understood class and race. She was very good on those points. She had a wonderful critical mind but she did not understand gender. Her grasp of feminism was tentative and that’s where I slipped. You see she didn’t have the tools to protect herself from gender-based criticism—she didn’t know how to let what that boy said, calling her fat, roll off her. If she had had those tools, she wouldn’t have run to the back of the bus.”

Annette looked down at her plate and shook her head. Jimmy put her fork down.

“We have to learn from our mistakes,” she continued. “I know you more than anyone at the table must understand the importance of gender. Della’s always been pretty clear on that too. But I underestimated it. We are nothing if we can’t face our own past with clear eyes, no matter how much it hurts. I take full responsibility for what happened to Cady.”

Then Grace picked up the empty bowl and walked into the kitchen to get more salsa, trailing behind her the harpoons and tangled rigging of a terrible storm.

16 Sea Goat

As I got into the truck to go home my hands were shaking. I felt like something was finally becoming clear but I wasn’t sure what. Something had failed, something big and now there was a vast plain before us on which I could build anything. Jimmy spun us around on the trail rock and out onto the road.

We drove under the night sky with the windows rolled down and the cold air rushing around us. The broken speedometer bounced frantically between numbers as we barreled down the mountain. Capricorn blinked through a lattice of radio towers in the distance.

It was like the world had broken open and nothing was hidden anymore, like we were crawling all over it like salamanders. I felt my own life, a minnow in a brook silvered and fleet. I was alive for no reason at all, finally unindentured. Miro told me that he swam the Morava when it was flooding. All the landmarks he had counted on were sunken beneath the water, which just kept rising. He dove into the current and when he came up he was surrounded by sticks and card tables, shoes and bottles. He said it was as if the river had swollen with debris of his country, like it had done it on purpose to keep him from leaving. I felt that way