I read about isolated protagonists like Harry in The Blue Sword, bookish ones like Lirael in Lirael, downtrodden ones like Taran in The Prydain Chronicles. I found myself in these pages and gloried in the idea that these characters did eventually triumph.

I think my baffled teacher—who caught me reading beneath school desks during class—assumed it was something I would grow out of. Reading lists were filled with books like Lord of the Flies, The Jungle, A Separate Peace, or Anthem. These were the books that mattered, or so I was told again and again.

Fantasy was just escapism. And thus, fantasy was unimportant.

But I think back to those younger years, and escapism certainly felt important to me then. It let me explore new landscapes, get to know people who had no chance to reject me. It showed me that someone like me could find acceptance. It gave me strength and hope.

I didn’t grow out of it.

Admittedly, yes, I write fantasy now, so reading it is sort of a job requirement. But we’re also living through a pandemic. We’re all stuck inside our homes for more hours in a day than we’ve ever been before. This is the reality we’re living in. These are trying times, testing everyone’s mental and emotional endurance.

But open a book and you can fall into an entirely different world. Fantasy is more important than ever—not just because it provides us with entertainment. It’s something to look forward to. Something to immerse ourselves in. Something to enjoy when everything around us feels more difficult than it should.

Escapism doesn’t just entertain; it bolsters resilience.

And it’s not just that. Escapism is often presented in a dichotomy with real-world issues. Would you like to read a fantasy book that is escapist, or something that addresses real-world issues? But these are not mutually exclusive. As the popular meme says—why not both?

By its definition, escapism means diverting your mind from unpleasant realities—but just like daydreams take us away from the day, fantasy can be a means through which we process events.

Real-world issues can still be addressed in a bright and immersive fantasy world. It doesn’t have to hold a dark mirror to our world. And sometimes, this can make ideas more palatable, easier to digest. Works like The Golden Compass are delightfully, deliciously escapist. Who doesn’t want a soul-bound companion for life? The story contains prophecies, witches, and portals to other worlds. But it also explores ideas of theology and oppression. Zen Cho’s Sorcerer to the Crown immerses the reader in a tale of romance and magic—a beautiful veneer on a tale that addresses racism and sexism. And has there ever been a more entertaining example of escapism mingled with real-world issues than Terry Pratchett’s entire Discworld series? I have laughed my way through his books. I’ve turned to them when I’ve needed something that felt light and hopeful. At the same time, I’ve saved the passage from Men at Arms regarding Vimes “Boots Theory,” which delves into socioeconomic unfairness and explains why it’s so expensive to be poor. It’s as applicable to our world as it is to Ankh-Morpork. And what are you more likely to want to read, especially during difficult times? A treatise on economics or a comedic novel set in a fantasy world?

Come for the talking weasels, stay for the religious critique!

In all seriousness, escapism doesn’t just bolster resilience; it disarms us. It draws us in, lowers our defenses. It helps us to process things that we otherwise might shy away from or find too difficult to face head-on. Daydreaming can help a person solve pressing dilemmas or provide a safe space to tackle difficult problems. We often learn things we don’t intend to while daydreaming. What is escapist reading except a structured, collective daydream?

Fantasy doesn’t need to be dark or overtly literary to be the sort of work that matters, that is valid.

I hope to never grow out of wanting or needing escapism. As Neil Gaiman states in his The Sandman comic, “Things need not have happened to be true. Tales and dreams are the shadow-truths that will endure when mere facts are dust and ashes, and forgot.” If growing up means putting such literature behind me, then may I never grow up.

“Flight” is a story that I have always wanted to write. It first came as a micro fiction I wrote at an online workshop in 2016. The characters kept haunting me to flesh them out. Also, I really wanted to write about birds; they’re such fascinating creatures, and flying. I always want my characters to fly (either physically or emotionally) because in that way they escape.

Jekwu and Izu explore the tension between captivity and comfort vs. freedom, deprivation and risk. What draws you to that theme?

I don’t know because I don’t actively think of themes when I write. I know I want to “say something” but I don’t usually know what I want to say from the beginning. With “Flight,” as with all my short stories, I trusted the characters and listened to them and let them guide me. It isn’t until I am done with a story that I start seeing the patterns of a theme. Maybe it’s just my present; constantly fighting for comfort and freedom, constantly prising the hands of oppressive systems and structures open so that I can have these things—comfort and freedom, that seeps into my writing.

Ndidi the vulture and Egwu the owl play roles that are brimming with myth and superstition. They each represent a turning point in Jekwu’s and Izu’s story. Are they also metaphors? Do they have stories of their own?

Vultures and owls are very interesting birds in Igbo mythology. As children we had stories about how “evil” these birds are, how they bring bad luck. I wanted to recreate that in this story, albeit with a twist. And now that you’ve asked, maybe I should write a spinoff about Ndidi and Egwu.

Our protagonists do not get the happy ending that we might have hoped for; sometimes the satisfying ending is not the happy one. They pay the price for their principles. Can you tell us how you arrived at this end for their journey, and what you hope the reader takes away from it?

I know this may sound pretentious, but I really wanted Izu and Jekwu to have a happy ending. Every story is always a struggle for me to give my characters a happy ending or not. Sometimes, I cave into happy endings. Sometimes, I try to strike a balance. Sometimes, the unhappy endings come. With “Flight” I struggled with the ending. I thought of altering the ending multiple times but the alternatives felt false and inorganic. I really hope the reader understands that “happy endings” can also be a matter of perspective and fiction, just like reality doesn’t always go the way we want it to go.

What are you working on now, and what can we look forward to seeing from you in the future?

I’m currently playing around with short stories; exploring newer terrains, form, style and structure, and social distancing from my novel-in-progress.

Tonight, Jekwu and Izu are perched on Chapel’s fence. They love this fence. It is the only fence in Selemku that is still coated with fresh algae-spirogyra lichen, warm under their feet, like a rug. Here, the glint of the full moon on Chapel’s stained-glass windows crisscrosses their grey feathers, the same way rainbow beams stretch out across the sky in the mornings. The air from this height is cold and dry. It wriggles its way under their skin, sending spasms down their spine. From time to time, the halogen-bulb atop the belfry comes on and then goes off and then on again. A never-ending cycle. Jekwu and Izu have gotten used to it. The bulb does this same thing every time they come here. Jekwu and Izu do not know if the belfry has had this same bulb for the six months they have been coming to Chapel’s fence to warm their feet on the lichen rug or if the bulb is always replaced with another faulty one. Izu thinks the bulb is this way because it can sense their presence and does not know how to behave, so it jitters when they are around and steadies itself once they leave. He does not tell Jekwu this, of course.

“One. Two. Three.” Jekwu swaggers his wings a bit as the bulb flickers on after his count. He nudges Izu, who seems to be lost, staring into the night.

Jekwu and Izu are hungry. They have been hunting worms and bugs in the city, all day. From Central Refuse Dump where they had to fight beak to beak with the egrets who lay territory over the dump, along the stinking gutters that washed into River Bambu, behind Madam Okey’s fish shop where they were careful not to swallow bits of plastic bag as they dug into the trash, to the abandoned cemetery where they scoured rotting bones, still they could not find any. Chalo, the-one-with-the-broken-wings, had told them a week ago that it was the tremors from Town Planning’s bulldozers that drove the worms and bugs away. But everyone knows it was not just Town Planning’s bulldozers that drove the earthworms and bugs away. To tell you the truth, the worms and bugs were not driven away, they were killed. All of them. The Debug Selemku Project and those things that men wearing shimmery red aprons spray from fancy aluminum cans killed them, shrunk their bodies, dried them out, until they turned to powder. Jekwu and Izu and the rest of the grey parrots know this: that the bugs and earthworms may never come back, but they do not say it out loud. They still rise every morning and fly around the city, hope warming the edges of their wings, in search of the worms and bugs. They also know they could not risk snooping around human houses for leftovers, the few who have dared were never seen again.

“A weed-seed is stuck in your feather,” Jekwu says.

“Where?”

“At the back of your neck.”

“Help me take it out.”

Izu can rotate his neck in a complete revolution and pull out the weed-seed but he lets Jekwu do it. The feel of Jekwu’s beak as he pecks out the weed-seed is ticklish. He smiles, shuts his eyes, and soaks the tickle all in. Love makes one relish jejune things, doesn’t it? Izu remembers the day they first met, almost a year ago, on a sunny afternoon at the old schoolyard. Jekwu was burrowing through the roots of the grass under an ukwa tree, looking for grubs. He was not the only grey parrot in the schoolyard, many of them used to visit the old schoolyard before it was refurbished with synthetic carpet-grass and all earthworms and bugs disappeared. But it was not difficult for Izu to spot Jekwu out. There was a thoroughness about the way he pecked at those roots. Jekwu caught Izu’s stare, flew over to where he perched, and asked what his name was. Izu had frozen a bit before he found his voice and whispered Izu. And then Jekwu had asked him why he has chosen to stare at him instead of scouting for food, to which Izu replied, with his newly found voice, that staring at him was better than looking for some silly grubs.

“Do you remember when the trees were still here?” Jekwu asks pointing towards the rows and rows of bungalows at Shonibara Estate. “Do you sometimes wonder where all the trees went to? How they disappeared, like the worms and bugs?”

Izu does not answer Jekwu’s question. What is the need? The answer will not bring back what used to be their home. His mother, Nneka, used to tell him that before Chapel and all the rows and rows of bungalows that looked so much alike Izu wondered how the occupants could tell their house apart from their neighbors’, Shonibara Estate used to be filled with trees that almost grazed the clouds. It was home to innumerable birds. But one day, shortly after he hatched out of the egg, they woke up to the sound of chainsaws and bulldozers. Izu’s mother said their nest used to be on one of the many branches of a giant oak where Chapel’s parsonage now stands. So, on nights like this, when someone asks Izu if he remembers the trees, he thinks about his mother and all the stories she told him, before she decided to toss caution into the wind and look for food where the humans live. She never came back. Someone must have captured her. But knowing her mother, Izu is certain that Nneka would rather kill herself than let anyone lock her up in a fancy cage.

When Chapel’s clock strikes midnight, Udoka joins them on the fence. She unfurls her wings and brings out some cherries and a small tin of sweetcorn. Udoka is Reverend Green’s new pet. The three used to be food-hunting mates until Udoka decided that she was tired of sifting through gutter waters and burrowing through sandy roots for food. She had flown over to the parsonage and allowed herself to be captured. As the birds munch on the cherries and sweetcorn, Udoka prattles on and on about her silver cage with a certain kind of newness that would make one think this is the first time she is talking about it, and not every time she joins Jekwu and Izu on the fence, on nights when Reverend Green forgets to lock her cage.

“Do you know it has two pots? Ehen? One for water and one for my poop. Have you ever pooped into a pot before? No, you haven’t. And the interior, the good old Reverend designed it himself. There is a mock tree inside and I can fly around from end to end. Why would anyone want to live in the wild? Why?”

“It’s not the wild, Udoka, it is home,” Jekwu says. “Our home.”

Udoka ignores Jekwu and continues. “Reverend Green washes my food tray after each meal. And they have this little box filled with bright light and little children who sing all day. There was this evening Reverend Green came back from Chapel and…”

“Why are your cheeks pink?” Izu asks, hoping it will stop Udoka’s rambling about her cage.

“You noticed,” Udoka squeals and wags her rear feather. “I knew you’d be the one to notice it. Obianuju, Reverend Green’s daughter, started painting them every morning. On some days it’s green, blue, or yellow. But I like the days she paints them pink. Ah, her brush tingles my…”

Izu fills his lungs with air and whistles softly into the breeze, wondering if it will be rude to tell Udoka that nobody cares about Reverend Green or his bird-cheeks-painting daughter or her stupid cage. Especially, her stupid cage.

“Udoka maybe you should…”

A gunshot rattles the stillness of the night. Udoka falls off the fence and lands limp on the concrete at the other side. Silence swoops down on Jekwu and Izu. Another gunshot cracks the air, jolting the birds back into the present. They do not wait for the next gunshot before hopping off the fence down to the concrete where Udoka is groaning in pain.

“I…I…I…,” Udoka stutters in between coughing out spurts of blood.

“Jekwu, we must help her. We can’t leave her like this…to die.”

“What are we going to do? We’re just two helpless grey parrots. It’s not as if we know what to do to a bullet wound.”

Jekwu slants Udoka’s neck to show where the bullet is lodged. Udoka winces.

“I…I…I…”

“Should we pull out the bullet, Jekwu?”

“All her blood will drain out if we do that.”

“How do you know that?”

“I’ve seen someone shot, clean, through the chest. When they tried to…”

The remaining words die on Jekwu’s lips as footsteps and human voices draw close to the fence.

“Aye, Reverend Green! Was that your rifle firing?” A croaky voice asks.

“Yes!” The reverend’s voice is frail, barely piercing through the darkness. “Had to shoot at those bastards on the fence before they drop poop and yank at my precious hibiscus.”

“How many of them?”

“Three bloody parrots. Shot one in the head. The other two scurried off. They better tell their friends to be aware of this fence. God’s house don’t want no bird poop or yanked hibiscus littered around.”

“How is that parrot of yours?”

“The damn thing is probably sleeping in its cage. My daughter can’t seem to stop fussing over it.”

“Ah, little girls and their silliness. Give it time.”

Behind the fence, Udoka has stopped writhing. Her breaths are almost silent now.

“We should go before the brutes jump over the fence and finish us off.”

“No, Jekwu. We can’t leave her here to die alone.”

“But she is going to die regardless.”

As if to oblige Jekwu and Izu leaving her, Udoka shuts her eyes.

“Now. Now. We must go now.” Jekwu pulls hard at Izu as the noise on the other side of the fence grows closer.

II

It is exactly six days since the night Jekwu and Izu watched Udoka breathe her last on the concrete behind the Chapel. A lot has changed for and between the two birds since then, the most prominent being that they have ceased going to Chapel’s fence to warm their feet on the lichen rug. Izu still has nightmares about that night. He would wake up intermittently during their sleep, gasping and squeaking in low tones and kicking the air. Jekwu would try as much as possible to calm him, cooing into his ears and fanning him with his wings.

Four days ago, the first time they went out to scout for food after that night, Jekwu and Izu stumbled on a rotting cherry along the sidewalk on Faulks Street. It was evening and they were wandering the street, hoping someone left half-eaten or stale bread on the sidewalk. Izu stopped dead in his tracks on seeing the cherry. Then he began to cackle, his entire body quaking all over.

“I never really liked her that much,” Izu said, once he was able to quieten himself. “Okay, I do love Udoka. She was the only friend I had before I met you. But she started being hard to bear when she became Reverend Green’s pet. Ugh. Is it weird that I miss the cherries and sweetcorn she brought more than I miss her? Stop looking at me as if I am crazy, Jekwu. This whole grief thing is because I saw how I may die one of these days that night. Kpai, just like that.” This was when his voice broke and became too throaty for him to continue talking.

Jekwu unstrung whatever weight hung around his neck from that night and threw his whole self into supporting his lover. He succeeded in talking Izu into staying in their nest, under the staircase of what was once a tin factory, while he goes out to find food. Well, Izu stuck to this arrangement until this evening, when he flat out refuses to stay at home and declares that he is going outside to catch the whoosh of the evening air, that he has missed that very part that made him a bird– the freedom of being outside.

“Are you saying I cannot protect myself outside, gbo Jekwu?” Izu’s eyes narrow at Jekwu who is standing in his way. His tail faither stretches upwards, tall.

“That’s not what I am saying. I’m just saying it’s too soon for you to leave the nest by yourself.”

“Why?”

“That night rattled your core, Izu. You still have dreams about it?”

“Didn’t it shake you as well, Jekwu? Were you not with me that night? Didn’t you see all of it happen? But you still leave every morning to find food.”

Jekwu does not respond.

“You think I’m too frail to go outside. Look here, I just turned two when my mother left and never returned. I ran this street, slugged it out with the egrets at Central Dump, tussled beak to beak with parrots older than me. I don’t need you to protect me, Jekwu.”

“Stay safe, Izu. It’s wild out there.”

“I’ll try.”

But Izu is not going outside to catch the whoosh of the evening air. He is well aware of this as he glides through Faulks Street and takes the narrow bend into Simosa Avenue until he hits Bode Way; the wide stretch of cobblestones that leads to Shonibara Estate. The streetlights lining the estate are on. Izu only stops flying when he gets to Chapel’s fence. He swoops down on the concrete behind the fence. Sniff. Sniff. The air is clear with no trace of days-old carcass. Where is it? Izu was sure this was where they had left her six nights ago, buried under a pile of rotting leaves.

“Hmmm, look who we have here. Izu. What are you doing here without your Jekwu on this dark, weary night?” A voice behind Izu asks.

Izu knows the voice and would recognize it even if he is dead asleep.

“Ndidi, will you ever get tired of hiding in the shadows and trying to scare me?”

“It’s very easy to scare you, Izu, I don’t even need to hide in the shadows. I’ve been scaring you since we were fledglings.” The voice emerges into the light cast by one of the streetlights, in the form of a vulture with a pinkish-white head and thick feathers ruffled into a hood around her neck.

“My, you’ve grown…bigger since the last time I saw you,” Izu says to the bird who is one-and-half times his height.

“Can’t say the same for you, Izu. Your feathers are so wobbly around your frame. Oversize?” Ndidi guffaws. “A parrot sure has seen better days.”

Ndidi and Izu have an interesting history. They grew up together, three nests apart. Uzoeyelu, Ndidi’s mother, and her daughter had migrated to Selemku from Achina, a town that grazed the mouth of The Great Orange River. Their colony was burnt by men who hunted them as a part of the rites to be initiated into manhood. No other bird colony in Selemku wanted to take in the vulture and her daughter. Who would? You know how vultures carry their ill-luck everywhere they go nau. Izu’s mother had knocked on every nest and employed every grey parrot to let Uzoeyelu and her daughter stay in their colony. Uzoeyelu and Nneka became bosom friends and, by extension, wanted their children to be best friends. But Ndidi and Izu were like palm oil and water, they could never mix. Always fighting over cherries, walnuts, and twigs. They are kids, they will grow out of this behavior, their mothers had thought. Still, the rivalry deepened. When Nneka left and never came back, Ndidi had taunted Izu that all birds who swore they saw Nneka snooping around human houses were lying, that it was Uzoeyelu who lured Nneka out of the colony and killed her, that she and her mother had Nneka’s carcass for dinner, that Nneka’s bones were too soft, too tender, for a mother parrot, that Uzoeyelu was also planning to kill Izu sometime soon. Izu did not believe Ndidi at first, until she dared him to come to their nest, where she showed him a bunch of feathers that looked just like Nneka’s, tied together with a string. It took the whole colony gathering and the birds that saw Nneka fly into a human’s house to reassure Izu that it was not her mother’s best friend who killed her.

“Long time no see, Ndidi.”

The vulture scoffs, “Indeed.” She swaggers towards Izu. “What brings you here again, Izu son of Nneka? Didn’t Reverend Green scare you good the last time?”

“What?”

“Oh, I know everything,” Ndidi glares at Izu, her pupils reddening. “Behind this fence is a perfect spot because I know that every night the old reverend or one of his neighbors will shoot one bird off the fence and dinner will be served.”

“I thought you…”

“… don’t eat carcass? Give me a break, Izu. That was when my mother, Ani bless her soul, was still alive. That woman forced me to join you silly birds in eating cherries, corn, and leftover bread. A vulture eats flesh, our talons and beaks are designed for that purpose. Can’t believe my mother tried to take that away from me.”

“Uzoeyelu really did her best to set you right.”

“It’s biology, Izu. You cannot set it right,” Ndidi pauses. “This whole talk is draining all the air, let’s talk about something bright and shiny. Your friend has really tough flesh and rocky bones. What were they feeding her in that parsonage?”

“What friend?” Izu pauses until realization dawns on him. “You ate Udoka?!”

“When you say it like that it’d seem I killed her and then ate her. She was dead, Izu. What are you going to do with the carcass, weep and weep on it until she comes back to life? Okay, she was not dead-dead, but I waited patiently for her to breathe her last before tearing her up. Despite all the nasty things folks like you believe about vultures, we’re not murderers.”

“Did you eat her to spite me?”

“Um, yes but also mostly because I was hungry. I saved some of her carcass if you’d like some.”

“Good night, Ndidi.”

“Good night, Izu. Just know that if you or Jekwu ever get shot, I’m not letting those filthy humans touch you lovebirds. I’ll find you a worthy resting place, right here, in my belly.”

III

Chalo, the one with broken wings, is leading the dirge. Her voice, haunting and clear, rises and falls with every new line. The dirge is always the same:

Swinging swifting wind carry me home,

Far away from here where I no longer belong,

Into the land of our mothers,

Oh, swinging swifting wind carry me home.

And no matter how many times Chalo sang this dirge at a parrot’s funeral, it never fails to leave everybody in tears.

They are gathered around the dying stump of an udala tree, behind the abandoned tin factory. A tiny grave has been dug and Ifenyinwa’s carcass, wrapped with browning plantain leaves, is laid beside it. Ifenyinwa was the oldest bird in the colony, she was born long before any of the other birds’ mothers hatched into this world. She died yesterday. Old bird was drinking water from the pond in front of the tin factory and choked on the bits of plastic that seeped into her gulps.

Chalo pauses her singing for Dike, the self-proclaimed clergy of the colony, to pray and direct the pallbearers on how to lower Ifenyinwa’s carcass into the grave. The dirge peaks again, Chalo’s body is quivering as she belts higher and higher until all the birds gathered fear she will run out of air. And then with a rehearsed automation, she stops.

Jekwu is squatting at the back, head lowered so his beak is almost kissing the ground. He has known Ifenyinwa all his life. Akwugo, his mother, used to leave him at Ifenyinwa’s nest when she went out scouting for food. After Akwugo’s legs got caught in a barbed wire trap and she bled to death, Ifenyinwa had taken Jekwu in as her own. Fended for him, clothed him, taught him how to fly. Her death broke Jekwu, it was like losing a mother for the second time. Izu is standing beside him, his right wing forming a halo around both of them.

“Won’t you go and partake in the dust-to-dust, Jekwu?” Izu asks nudging his lover.

“I don’t think I can do this. I don’t think I want to see Ifenyinwa in this state. I want to always remember her alive.”

“Jekwu, this is the least you can do so her soul can journey beyond. See, lemme help you,” he pulls Jekwu up with his wings. “We’ll go together, it will be easier this way.”

The two birds squeeze their way through the crowd until they get to the front. Jekwu lets out a squeak as one of the pallbearers hands him a flattened stick. Izu steadies him and coos softly into his ears as he scoops some red earth and pours it into the grave. When the grave is filled up, Dike tells all the birds to close their eyes and dwell on the many beautiful memories Ifenyinwa’s life brought to them, especially the ones they shared with her. He signals Chalo to begin another song.

Clouds and clouds above

Where my everlasting home crests

Wait for me as I journey this troubled place

As I behold my joy at last

Clouds and clouds abo…

Chalo’s singing is cut short by shrill hoots in the sky. The birds look up to see Egwu, swooping down towards them.

“Cover your eyes! It’s the barn owl!” The birds squeal as they scamper around the tree stump.

“Oh simmer down pretty birds, nobody is going to mix stones in your corn grains because you saw an owl in broad daylight,” Egwu says as he perches on the old tree stump. He flicks off a splinter with one of his talons and ruffles his feathers to shake off dust.

“What are you doing here? Be gone you creature of the night!” Dike stutters from where he is hiding, behind Jekwu and Izu.

“I am only here to bring you not-so-good tidings. And it shall come to pass, they will come with fire and snare and they will smoke you out of the sleazy hiding place you call home. There will be no escape. None. Do whatever you want to with this.” Egwu shoots into the sky, howling as his wings flap against the wind.

At this point, the birds needed no other indication that the burial is over. They retreat to their nests, heads bowed, in silence.

“We have to leave,” Izu says to Jekwu immediately when they get home.

“You’re not suggesting we leave Selemku because of what that bird who feeds on fear said? This is our home, Izu.”

“A home that wants to kill us.”

A lump forms in Izu’s throat. He has been nursing this idea of leaving Selemku since that night he met Ndidi. He wanted Jekwu and him to flee far away to a place where Ndidi will not find their carcasses and gloat as she tears into their flesh. Egwu’s prophecy just intensified that need to leave.

“We’ll be fine, Izu. We’ll be fine. We will go through this together. And what if the place we run to is worse than Selemku?”

“No place can be worse than here.”

IV

The night before the morning they came for the grey parrots who lived in the abandoned tin factory, Jekwu and Izu found worms under a rock behind the building. They munched on them throughout the night and saved the rest in an empty water bottle for the next day. Afterwards, they stayed up late, tracing the stars with their eyes, dreaming that maybe the worms under the rock was a sign that things will get better. But the dreams died in their throats by morning when they were woken up by the scuffle in the tin factory. Trap doors snapping closed, clap traps whooshing in the air, birds writhing inside mist nets, and the air heavy with smoke.

Right now, Jekwu and Izu are crouched in the farthest part back, underneath the staircase. They are looking into each other’s eyes as if to say, “Don’t let out as much as a breath.” A hand slips under the staircase and grabs hold of Jekwu’s legs. He struggles to slip his legs free but the grip is too firm. Jekwu continues to shake, to jerk, to scratch, until something cracks inside his legs and they cannot move anymore. The hand pulls him out from the staircase.

“Hey, this one’s legs snapped.”

“Now, who would want that as a pet?”

“We’ll leave him here.”

Izu shuts his eyes as the voices beside the staircase continue to deliberate on what to do with Jekwu. He knows that any time from now, a hand will slip under the staircase and grab his legs. He knows he will fight and break all the bones in his body before he lets them take him.

But no hand slips under the staircase. The men toss Jekwu on the ground and leave.

The tin factory is a mess of blood and feathers when Izu crawls out from under the staircase. All the birds are gone. A few of them lay on the floor, dead, dying, and half-alive. The fire has licked up more than half of the tin factory and is spreading fast.

Izu rushes to where Jekwu is lying in a pool of his own blood.

“Jekwu. Jekwu. Can you hear me?”

“You must go now. You must leave Selemku. Promise you’ll do this for me,” Jekwu manages to whimper.

“But I can’t leave you here.”

“You have to. We both can’t make it out of here. My legs are gone and I can feel death’s hands on my throat.”

“You can’t die here, Jekwu.”

“Why?”

“Because Ndidi will eat your carcass and gloat about it until she dies.”

“Who cares, Izu? I’ll be dead and won’t know what is happening. The fire will reduce my carcass to ashes before Ndidi can get here. Stop worrying about me and save yourself.”

“I can’t. I don’t know how to save myself anymore, Jekwu.”

“You must learn. Do it for me.”

The men are heading back to the tin factory. Izu can hear their shouting.

“Now, Izu. You must go now.”

Izu sneaks out through the backdoor. He follows the alley, the washed-out tunnels, and the empty gutters, until he gets to the outskirts of Selemku. There, he spreads his wings and flutters upward, until he catches the whoosh of the morning air, and he soars into the blurry sky.

The box is a vibrant garden of sweets neatly arranged.

A sugar rose so real it seems grown, stolen from some witch bramble of candy thorns and gum drop hips. A truffle banded white and blue that smells of fresh cut grass and rain.

The chocolatier grins.

His mouth is a vibrant garden of teeth neatly arranged.

He waves you closer.

All of them enchanted, of course, he whispers in your ear.

One will teach a language, though you won’t know which. Perhaps the language of a nearly extinct tortoise, or of a civilization long buried under dust. Or it could be French.

One will grant a skill. Perhaps being a great painter, or dancer, or a brilliant athlete in a sport no longer played.

One will grant you safety for everyone for whom you care. None of your family will ever starve or sicken. None of your friends will ever be stung by violence or poverty. Everyone you ever love will die safe of old age in their beds.

One, ah, one will kill you, and not just kill you, but slowly, painfully, stripping you of all hope and dignity, and you will die alone.

But oh, alas, the goblin chocolatier sighs. I have lost the little paper guide. I cannot remember which is which.

Perhaps that caramel snail crackling with salt and scales of gold will give you grace. Perhaps the marshmallow mouse covered in shimmering sigils will grant you wit.

That is the price, that makes the magic work. And that is the spice, that makes the candy sweet. You cannot know. Not until you taste one, and probably not even then.

Of course, I could be lying, and they could each and all be poison.

Or worse . . .

. . . They could all be ordinary sweets. You could wait and wish your whole life hoping for a miracle that never comes, or dreading disaster that will not arrive.

But then, says the chocolatier, that’s not so different from how you lived already.

The goblin chocolatier waves his wares under your nose. Sugar. Danger. Possibilities. Rain.

He smiles.

Will you eat?

No, this is a darkness of jagged beach-rocks and sharp things scuttling in the sand, a darkness that confounds you with the whispers of waves and the blinking noises of unfamiliar insects.

This is a cold darkness, all that remains once the sun has burned itself out. You huddle in the rags they permitted you to keep, hoping that sleep will bring warmth.

You worry that the constant whispers are more than just the wind and water.

• • • •

You’re unaccustomed to nightmares. Your grandmother used to say that it was her cooking, filling you up until there was no room for bad dreams. (Can you remember her? Was her voice deep and throaty, or high and girlish? What did she smell like?)

These past few weeks, you have had many. While each morning brings toil, each night brings terror: echoes of the mob that demanded death, of the other women’s pleadings . . .

You struggle by day, digging for edible roots that squirm under your touch, plucking heavy, meaty fruit off of thorny trees. You lash branches and grasses into a roof against the rain. The crash it makes as it tumbles in the wind mocks you like laughter.

You feel that the day’s calluses and exhaustion should harden you against the nightmares but, instead, they serve only to draw them closer. You’ve been seeing and hearing things in the early evening: shapes in trees, mutterings at the edge of perception—dreams that invade your waking hours. (What did you dream of before this island? What did you hope to achieve, to become?)

You see bright birds flittering among the trees. Their plumage glows a vivid blue. You envy their abandon.

• • • •

There is a presence on the island.

• • • •

They left you here to die. They cast you from their boat, expecting perhaps that you would drown, or hoping the island and the elements would do what they dared not. They feared the curse that would befall them if they hanged an innocent. (Did you struggle? Did you howl in defiance and break their teeth? Or did you accept your fate with dignity, stoking their guilt?)

You clung to the waves, grasped at the water, and heaved at the current, until you found this lonely place, until you pulled yourself to shore.

• • • •

Once, in a delirious half-sleep, you think you see your grandmother, here to wipe away your pain. But no, there was an altogether sinister timbre. It was something monstrous.

You spot it again, as you climb a tree to steal birds’ eggs. You snatch a glimpse of it watching you from the shadows, catch faint whispers among the rustling foliage. (What do you see? A tall silhouette? The outline of a jaw? Or something else?)

The eggs, issued by the brilliant, blue birds, are sulphurous and unappetizing.

• • • •

Of course you screamed.

When they came with their thumbscrews, their heated pokers, and their stones, your screams tore your throat hoarse, tore open on your skin, wounds like gaping mouths, wounds that themselves wanted to scream but whose blood-red tongues refused to do anything but ooze.

You did not admit guilt.

“Witch!” they said, but you said nothing, because what could you have said, really?

(When they finally stuffed you in the boat, did you feel rage or relief?)

• • • •

You have not slept for days.

Movements stalk you from the half-light. Rustles follow you in the darkness. The feeling of being watched invades your mind, driving away any thought of rest.

You must deal with this thing.

You enter the trees, determination hard as knife.

The birds, cerulean like the open sky, parade their freedom above you.

• • • •

Sunset ruptures the horizon, bleeding into the sea and sky. A clot appears in the distance. A boat.

They have returned.

Time has passed. They believe you are dead. They want to burn your body, lest it rise up and haunt them for their sins. Yet . . . their boat rocks back and forth against the waves, hesitant. What if you still live?

Finally, they venture onto the island. A scrap of bloodstained cloth trapped in a spider web startles them. Towards a mound of stacked rocks, they gesture against evil.

The birds’ corpses lie like flowers scattered around the verdure. Their wrung necks are twisted stems; their crushed bodies are pressed petals, blue like lightning, luminous.

(This is one possible ending:)

Your remains lie in the middle of it all, hunched and twisted, a centerpiece to the sublime carnage around you. They try to mutter prayers, but the words claw at their throats.

Presently, one of them manages to stack kindling onto your body. They shiver as the flames that devour you shed little warmth.

The trees whisper unkindly, but it’s only the wind. There is no-one else alive on the island, and the shapes in the shadows must lie only in their imagination.

Did you die thinking of your grandmother? Did you succumb to the shadowy presence? The answers rise up with the smoke, thick, black, and choking.

(This is another ending:)

They stand in the empty clearing and stare dumbfounded at the delicate corpse-beauty of the birds. They cannot turn away.

You watch them from the shadows of the trees, murmuring under your breath. But is it really you? No—you are something altogether sinister, something monstrous.

You watch as they finally turn away, wait until they separate to search for you.

You stalk through the darkness, closing in. “Witch,” they once called you. But what are you now?

Flight, and flying, the test of spreading wings
made of gold and silver, then trusting them to
hold my weight. Using the heart for navigation.

Incantations and enchantment, and the knowledge
of spells not found in any book. We don’t
keep grimoires, for true magic is written upon
the brow, etched there by the sweat and tears
of loving. I am my grandmother’s memory,
she said. As you are mine.

That every gift must be returned
in kind, that raindrops and snowflakes
are a blessing, that my own power is not to be
trifled with.

Wherever you go, she said, remember:

You are enough.
You are enough.

Thank you for these kind words and your careful reading. The genesis of Kisser is a recurring dream of mine: my teeth crumbling out of my mouth like castle wall bricks that decide to call it quits. I’ve had this dream most of my life. A few years ago, I learned this is a pretty common dream that gets interpreted as a whole swack of things related to self-esteem or lack of control. I’m always relieved to wake up from this dream and find out my teeth are indeed where they are supposed to be once I press my tongue to the ones I’m worried about, but for “Kisser’s” main character Bragg, I didn’t want it to be a dream. It’s happening. There are parts in the story where Bragg wants it to be a dream, or thinks it’s a dream, and later, hopes it’s not a dream, but damn if it’s not really happening to him.

Only because I think this might be helpful to other writers, but I want to mention that “Kisser” is a reclamation project. I first wrote a version of it, gosh, fifteen years ago when I was still a creative writing student in Victoria, BC. I wasn’t really working on this story all that time so much as I remembered it in late March 2020. It was early lockdown, my brain was all over the place, and I couldn’t really read, let alone write anything. So I started visiting older work to take the pressure off of having something new or profound to say about the present we’re all going through. The process of looking at old writing put me in touch with a more innocent creative and personal self. Insomuch as I can claim I’m coping with the state of the world, I found this process helped the early fumbling around with living in a pandemic, and in a month, I ended up rewriting two old plays and one old story. That story was “Kisser.”

Bragg is such a well-drawn study in contrasts. He’s equal parts vain, self-conscious and lonely. Can you tell us about how his character developed during the writing process?

I do think revisiting Bragg’s vanity and loneliness during this period of pandemic-related isolation gave this story the extra little push over the finish line it needed, but yeah, this self-consciousness thing goes back a way for me.

When I was a kid, I jumped on a hockey net, and it flew up into my mouth, smashing out a bunch of my permanent teeth (so that explains the recurring dream, right?). They popped the teeth back into my gums, but obviously, my mouth was altered. So I had what was essentially the scar of that event on my teeth through some oh-so-delicate high school years. I seldom smiled in photos, and I was terribly self-conscious about showing teeth. A crush of mine once asked if I had a gold tooth, and I knew I was being teased. Anyway, once I was old enough, I was fortunate enough to get dental implants, but I still find it hard to show a big toothy smile.

So I wish I could say Bragg is entirely fictional. He’s a concentration of all that self-consciousness I’ve just described. He compares himself to everyone, and so he feels like he is no one. Vanity is a really lonely state, isn’t it? A mindset where you’re alone in some perception of yourself. Bragg thinks invisibility is a practical solution to this vanity. And he isn’t mean about others’ appearances. In fact, he fixates on physical beauty in others. In a moment of crisis, he notices his dentist’s lovely complexion. But he is never pleased with his own physical presence.

Bragg first suggests he’s evolving in Section II, but quickly dismisses the idea. Later in Section 9, the thought takes hold. What’s changed for him?

Bragg doesn’t trust his inner voice. He thinks Zen is impractical because he only has a surface awareness of what it means. An earlier draft of this story was really a conversation between him and this voice, but that’s faded a bit because it felt derivative of other stories where everyone had their Tyler Durden from Fight Club or whatever. But for Bragg, everything is on the surface. He trusts mirrors. Strangers. A man named Brutus over the phone. Old encyclopedias. A somewhat trite message on a birthday card. He hasn’t cultivated self-knowledge. Even early in the story, when he has these semi-philosophical realizations relating to things like romantic love or traffic, his mind isn’t ready to trust its wisdom. He’s always one step forward, five steps back when it comes to intellectual confidence.

So when he’s forced to sit with thoughts (and a few more teeth are gone), the molt is truly on. He looks for heroes who overcome their physical disruptions. He searches for purpose and confronts new activities. Obsessive reading. Ships in bottles. Jumping jacks. Certainly, he’s delirious when he resolves not to sleep, having connected sleep to teeth loss. In a sense, he starts developing the inner life he never had before. In trying to keep his teeth, the rest of his body grows in some places and decays in others. It’s rather adolescent. I hope that by the end, he’s addressing the growth rather than the decay.

It is only after Bragg begins to heal himself that Minnie comes into his life. Is this by design?

It’s important to me that Bragg is not some tragic hero who is saved by Minnie’s love, but their burgeoning romance is a bit of a fairy tale, pulling little inspirations from things like The Hunchback of Notre Dame, Beauty and the Beast, etc.

He thinks about an ex-girlfriend he’s had. Still, it’s later revealed that he’s never even kissed a woman, so he’s someone for whom sex and love have never quite been available, a definite consequence of his inability to offer that to others. In his first contact with Minnie as his dental hygienist, he feels her warmth through a rubber glove, and instead of applying anything romantic or professional to it, he thinks she’s got a fever. Because Bragg doesn’t know emotional warmth. He equates it with sickness.

Eventually, he accepts Minnie’s help even if he still doesn’t know how to trust it. I don’t even know that Minnie’s his one true love or anything. But if Bragg and Minnie are to live happily ever after, good luck to them. She’s really just an example of the type of person that can enter your life when some barriers come down. Or when the barriers are ripped away. This idea of fantasy and intimacy intersecting has been a theme of my theatre and opera work over the last couple of years, genres that by their very nature create fantasies in intimate settings.

What are you working on now, and what can we look forward to seeing from you in the future?

It can be so tough to be motivated during these times, and I know the notions of productive or creative can be barriers to everyone right now. We’re all adjusting our pace, practice, and tolerance for creation, and I’m fortunate that a lot of pre-pandemic work is coming around now, where I can edit and advocate rather than feel the pressure of new ideas for an uncertain future.

It’s helped to have a co-writer to keep motivated, and I’ve been working on a screenplay for the last couple of years with Mike Haliechuk from Canadian hardcore band Fucked Up. The script accompanies his band’s new EP Year of the Horse, and it’s currently in pre-production. The film will be a fully scored and full-length ballet-western based on the medieval epic of Perceval. It’s called Perceval. The main character is a horse. There are dancing cacti, constellations that come to life, an evil poet-sorcerer, and a bandit posse chasing our horse across the desert.

I’ve also found it important for my own sense of well-being to cultivate a daily writing practice. Usually, that means 100 to 500 words a day. But it is indeed every day, so I guess I’m working on a novel. I’m not sure what to say about it right now since I’m smack dab in the middle of it and trying to let the process be more important than the product. It’s skewing high fantasy meets historical fiction, and I’m currently chasing an ending.

Bragg sleeps alone. Thirty-four. This morning, he wakes up with one less tooth in his mouth, a central incisor. What his dentist, later and while looking at a dental chart, calls the patient’s Number Nine.

Bragg’s Number Nine, root to crown, a crucial corn-on-the-cob tooth, is not in his mouth. It’s on the pillow beside him. Bragg rubs sleep from his eyes. That first glimpse of the tooth sends his tongue darting to the front of his mouth. An absence. A canyon.

Bragg taps the tooth with his fingernail to check its hardness. The off-white tooth is almost yellow on the back for a world that only ever sees brushed fronts. The Number Nine looks a bit grizzly there, propped up on a flat island of dried drool like a continent on an antique map. It’s been there a while. Stale. Bloodless. Evidence of a heinous act. Bragg closes his eyes again, knowing that when he really wakes up, the tooth will be snug in the gums where it belongs. That’s the way nightmares work.

His tongue flits around in the open space of the Number Nine slot. The gum section that once supported a tooth is smooth flesh. Had a tooth had ever been there at all?

But it doesn’t hurt. There’s no clue, no reason for Bragg’s tooth to be on his pillow rather than safe in his mouth. He opens his eyes and decides to have at the day, if he can. These incidents in bad dreams don’t last long, and then they are over, and one is made optimistic by an early morning scare that proved to be nothing.

II

Except this is really happening. Bragg stands at the bathroom mirror and considers his smile. Mouth closed. Dark hair, short on the sides, longer on top, kept the same by haircuts every two weeks since his late teens. While his face has always been square, Bragg has recently felt some concern about what he considers a rounding of the jaw and chin—he thinks himself handsome by the standards of those who, on a day-to-day basis, summon the courage to leave the house. He tells himself he is vain, but he also asks himself, who isn’t?

Bragg opens his mouth and lifts the top lip. Two years of braces in his mid-twenties closed the small gaps he once carried between each tooth; that cosmetic correction erased the perception that Bragg still had baby teeth. But now, a cavern punctuates his face, near dead centre. He holds the Number Nine in his left hand and then closes his mouth.

Beyond the bathroom, the sun is out. The sky is blue enough to improve the mood of those who need weather to tell them how to feel. Someone will go to the park on a whim. Offices will be short staffed as people skip work after fake coughs on a phone call. A couple in love will be more in love for a few hours. It was a long winter. It’s a long life. Today it will look like the whole world is kissing.

Bragg draws the venetian blinds closed and decides that today is a terrible day for a crisis. Surely there is a good explanation for this, and it will come in due time. He cannot be so unique as to be the only person in history whose tooth has left his mouth with the gums concealing the trauma.

The answer doesn’t come.

So Bragg calls a dentist, though most of his discussion is with Dr. Parish’s receptionist Brutus.

“It’s just . . . gone, Bragg?”

“Yeff, Bru’us. It’s gaw-n.”

Bragg’s F’s intrude on words. F’s have half their power. T’s and V’s mutate, unrecognizable. An L requires the craft of tongue emphasis solely on his right incisor, where it can bear the full brunt of its phonology. Brutus tells Bragg to put the tooth in milk and get to the office right away. A fly on the wall hears Bragg say, “Why wood I pug’za toof in a bag of miwk?” before Bragg hangs up on Brutus.

Maybe I’m evolving, Bragg thinks. Then another thought replaces it. I am falling to pieces.

III

The Number Nine swims in a clear plastic bag of half & half (he had no milk) and dangles from Bragg’s hand as if he was carrying a lantern to a midnight search party. Or would an onlooker see that Bragg carries the bag gently, as though he was protecting a goldfish home from the pet store? Or would anyone who saw him think anything at all?

He limps into his car, a two-seater, and lays the bag in the passenger seat. He secures the bag with a seatbelt, more for the tooth than the bag. The seatbelt squeaks to remind him that no one has sat in the seat beside him in a year. Bragg catches a glimpse of himself in the rear-view mirror and opens his mouth to check if this has all been some misunderstanding, the bad dream extended a little too long. Absence. Canyon.

He starts the car and hates himself a bit for wallowing in something as stupid as loneliness when there are real problems everywhere.

The two pieces of him, one a driver and one a passenger, crawl along in the morning’s slow traffic. Bumpers on bumpers. Rims on rims. Those who ignored the potential of Mr. Blue Sky and go to work provide the bricks for the wall of gridlock keeping Bragg from his effortless path to Dr. Parish, DDS. From the confines of his car, Bragg looks right to a boxy brown four-door idling beside him. The sedan is from another era. 1983 or something. He makes eye contact with the sedan’s driver, a middle-aged man who gives him a nod of solidarity, or perhaps he nods for no reason at all. People nod for no reason all the time, and how can Bragg know the man’s intentions? Bragg flashes to a lifetime of unsolicited advice, sentences that begin, “You know, someone like you Bragg . . .” or “Guys like you and me . . .” or other misinterpretations, as though personality was abstract art which someone else needed to decode for him.

Perhaps the 1983 Man in the sedan smiles as reflex because he is uncomfortable acknowledging a stranger. Perhaps 1983 Man is mindful of the idea that those caught in rush hour traffic are at once the victims and perpetrators of their own predicament. Perhaps he would make the joke, why do they call it rush hour when it moves so slow?

Bragg can offer him nothing familiar in this moment. He unwedges the bag of cream from the seatbelt, raises it for 1983 Man to see, and smiles. The man’s face crumples up into something more familiar to Bragg, confusion and, as if by magic, his lane of traffic unclogs. The boxy-brown vanishes into a horizon of cars.

Bragg puts the bag in his lap. He feels the chill of the half & half through the front of his jeans and onto his balls. It’s a nice feeling for that moment. He would do it again in freer times. For the rest of the trip, Bragg keeps his eyes forward and breathes through his nose as the half-and-half warms to an undrinkable temperature, and the cool relief disappears.

IV

Dr. Parish’s rubber glove fingers around in Bragg’s mouth. A hunk of metal pries Bragg’s mouth open. A dental mirror taps on his remaining teeth from time to time. A stark light overhead keeps Bragg’s eyes shut for him. The mirror taps and taps and that music lets Bragg knows the dentist has no idea what’s happening. Everything about this visit is cold, as though Bragg was an alien that scientists recovered in a New Mexico desert crash.

“Gums are intact where the central incisor should be. No sign of a blow. Minnie, could you pass me the tooth.”

Bragg feels warm cream drip onto his face as Minnie, Dr. Parish’s dental hygienist, passes the tooth over him. “Sorry, Bragg,” she says as the long white suction device that normally slurps mouth saliva goes to work on the droplet of cream on his cheek—a little too close to the soft skin under Bragg’s eye. As she pats everything dry, Bragg can feel warmth from Minnie’s hand through a latex glove. Her warmth is surprising, and he wonders if she is suffering from a fever. “All clean,” Minnie says.

At the best of times, Bragg hates dentists: the powerlessness he feels lying under adults, the light magnifying imperfections (particularly anything up or around the nostrils). There was no time for the usual pre-game of heading to the dentist today: the frantic brushing of teeth, mouthwash, flossing—just to avoid the accusations that he wasn’t a partner with the dentist’s office in his own oral health, how dare he. And now here’s Parish and Minnie, trying to figure out the Number Nine, while no doubt distracted by the snot and nose hair . . . disgusting . . . Bragg knows they hate their jobs because of people like him and the horrors trapped at the nose and mouth holes . . .

“It’s pretty beautiful out there, isn’t it, Bragg?” Minnie says. “Plans for the weekend?”

Bragg shakes no, knowing that even if he did have plans, a missing front tooth has put an end to them.

“So there’s no pain? No discomfort?” Dr. Parish is all business.

“Nugh.”

“You just woke up this morning and it was . . . out? Like, on the pillow, you say?”

“Yugh.”

“I’ll be right back.” Dr. Parish exits the room.

Minnie winks at Bragg as she removes the metal bars, “cheek pullers” she calls them, holding his jaw agape. She tilts the lamp away and there’s a moment of relief until Bragg remembers where he is.

Bragg is sure that Parish has no clue what’s happening. That he’s gone to consult a textbook or call a colleague, some smarter, richer dentist in the financial district. Parish made eyes before he left the room, telling Minnie, I have no idea what is wrong with this guy’s mouth hole. I’ve never seen anything like it.

Minnie stands up with a tray of dental tools covered in Bragg’s slobber. The vertical blinds sway as her body passes them on her way out of the room. Slivers of this beautiful fucking day seep into the room, and gently rock Bragg to sleep, as though he were relaxing on a dock at a rich dentist’s summer lake house.

V

“Bragg, wake up. Bragg.”

He is relaxed and warm. He doesn’t open his eyes, sort of remembering where he is, hoping that a dream that feels real is merely a sign of an evolved spiritual being, hoping that he is now in the dream-within-a-dream phase that would put his Zen ex in a tizzy. The dentist’s lamp flashes hot and his eyes open, squint, then close again. Minnie touches his shoulder, and shakes him softly. “Bragg, wake up.”

She looks different, more serious, but not grim in her neck-to-ankle turquoise uniform. Her black hair is now pulled back tight in a bun, a look of, what is it? . . . horror . . . on her otherwise flawless skin. Does she know she has good skin? Everyone is vain.

Minnie is betraying her cutaneous gift with a look of outward concern now. Could she tell Bragg was examining her? Is she turning against him? Story of his life. Bragg forces his mind to stop thinking of her appearance, or his own, just in case she can read his shallow thoughts. Bragg is sure that people he is attracted to can read his mind, so as much as possible, he tries to let her know he isn’t a complete monster in his own thoughts. He closes his eyes and thinks, I am not a monster. He opens his eyes, and hopes she will transmit back, I hear you.

“Dr Parish, come quickly!”

Parish enters, hovers. Age has been good to him, if it has noticed him at all. Bragg is at it again, noticing his dentist’s hair as that blonde-grey of blonde men going grey. His skin is orangey-brown, not fake tanned, but clearly the sign of a man who doesn’t wait for winter to end to find some sun. Maybe he has a lake house and a dock . . .

Bragg notices that neither Parish nor Minnie look at his face. Instead, they look directly at his chest. Parish says, “Could you open your mouth, Bragg?”

Bragg opens his mouth.

“His Number Eight, Doctor?” Minnie says.

Parish picks up a tooth from the paper bib on Bragg’s chest and holds it under the lamp. “Right central incisor.”

Bragg sweeps his tongue across his mouth for a survey. The front gap has doubled. L’s will never sound the same. “Ca’ I get’ a tiggue?”

Parish holds the two front teeth together, reuniting them after an uncertain time apart, for Bragg to see. “I’m thoroughly at a loss here, Bragg. You’re a real mystery. In the meantime, if any others come out, keep them in cold milk. Keep them nourished until we can figure this out.”

Parish plunks the Number Eight and Number Nine into the bag of half & half. “Let’s give these a bit of a refrigerate before we send Bragg on his way, Minnie.”

“I ha’ to lee?” Bragg asks.

“Will you just be at home?” Minnie asks.

Bragg nods and they sit him up in the dentist chair. He blows his nose. Relief.

“Do you have anyone we can call?”

Braggs shakes his head no. He feels the harsh of his lonely no.

“It’s not so bad,” Minnie says to him. “I’ve seen much worse situations. Did you know that country singer LeAnn Rimes had baby teeth until she got famous?”

Bragg thinks Minnie is bullshitting him, but she looks him in the eye, and it is a kind look. It is a look he cannot remember seeing in such a very long time.

VI

Bragg is slumped on his sofa, fiddling the remote, moving the television channels. A fast-food commercial reminds him of hunger. Putting food into his mouth seems incongruous. He sulks to the kitchen.

The refrigerator is a grocery list of things he can no longer eat: a Granny Smith, leftover pizza, expired items in plastic containers. He picked up a new jar of milk and, in a small jar, Number 8 and Number 9 bathe in 2%. In the cupboard beside the stove, a bit of salvation: tomato soup. Bragg wrenches the can-opener around the rim of the soup can, pops the lid off, and tosses it. He drinks the thick mush right from the can. The cold soup is rusty. The can has leeched into any semblance of vegetables that once made up the mixture. It tastes like blood iron. The blood Bragg thinks should be in the mouth of someone who has just today lost two front teeth. He chokes a bit on the soup and it feels like a golf ball has passed through his throat. Bragg follows with water to carry the soup down into his stomach, but it does little to change the metallic aura in his mouth. He predicts he will vomit and stands at the sink over last night’s dinner dishes. When the puke doesn’t come, he leaves the kitchen.

And then he is back on the sofa. The low flicker of the television is the only source of light he wants in the room. He watches the weather channel. He leans into this Quasimodo moment, and his stomach growls. He belches, and the moldy soupy taste escapes through his nose. The soup event reaches conclusion.

He flips to the music channel and makes a bargain with some non-specific universal force: if the next video is for a LeAnn Rimes song, everything is going to be okay. A commercial is next. It advertises a complicated piece of at-home gym equipment and promises a better body in only 14 minutes a day.

VII

It’s been 24 hours since Bragg has been back at home . . . . Parish’s office still hasn’t called. Bragg wants a name for his syndrome. An explanation . . . . He is afraid to sleep . . . . He has just slurped leftover pizza mixed with an ounce of water in the blender jug . . . . The shades are drawn and it is night. But then it is morning . . . . He has slept. Though he must have slept twice, since on top of his television are his two bottom incisors. There is now a square in his smile. He takes the small rectangular bottom teeth to the kitchen and pops them into the jar of milk with Number Eight and Number Nine. He doesn’t know what number these newest escaped teeth are…so he keeps it simple by thinking of them as three and four.

VIII

Bragg has stopped sleeping, and he hasn’t lost any more teeth, so a mystery is solved. Not how, but certainly when. Caffeine was good at first, but the effect wore off and he needed something stronger. Exercise works if he keeps it at a slow pace: invigoration rather than exhaustion. He practically lives in the shower, knowing that not even his body, careless and rebellious as it is, would allow it to fall asleep if it meant drowning. The first three days were the hardest, when the body begged for rest, but Bragg ignores the voice that says Sleep and now, ten days without sleep, Bragg is winning the battle against this body to keep the teeth in his mouth.

Sleep.

His liquid diet and exercise and lack of sleep have revealed his bones. His ribs are beginning to peek from his torso and his skin is a tedious grey. Bragg has shunned electronics as well, keeping away from the sex and youth immediately searched on a computer, the porn that he once devoured, and decides instead to throw himself into old books with spines stiff from disuse. He started in on an old book of his father’s, Secrets of Ships in Bottles by Peter Thorne, and plans to get his hands on the materials for “Cutty Sark model in round rum bottle.” In a set of encyclopaedias, which have been in storage for at least a decade and that are twenty-some years out of date, having been purchased for him as a kid (baby teeth), Bragg looks up old definitions for terms that would have new meanings by now like “Computer” and “East Germany” . . . He decides he should read the whole set, in order, and he plans to start that tonight after a round of jumping-jacks.

Things Bragg once called boring, like book reading and exercise, now sustain him. He is evolving, he thinks, and the thought holds.

IX

Bragg’s motivation is intense. Keep the teeth. Constant vigilance that the same body he deprives of rest is the same body revolting against him. Body and mind must stay active, no stopping. He will not be his own traffic.

All the lights are on. The curtains are open. Making himself uncomfortable is another trick staving off sleep. He had always wanted to take a crack at exile, to cut himself off from the outside world and quit his crap job at the call centre, but it was always such an empty thought. He had no Zen. Zen was impractical. That’s what he said to his ex once, just as she was on buying her third book on how to become Zen.

Now he’s on sick leave. Paid. There might have been easier ways than losing his teeth, but achieving the power of invisibility feels like an attainable goal. He flirts with making this invisibility business his superpower.

There has been a long gap in time when Dr. Parish’s office finally calls. When Minnie, not Brutus, is on the other end of the line. Bragg doesn’t know how much time has passed. He stopped looking at clocks or calendars, to simplify time. Maybe long periods of isolation wouldn’t feel as long if he lost track of days.

The ring of the phone reminds him that he still has a phone at all. He tells Minnie what he’s up to with sleep deprivation, and she says, “That’s concerning.” She says, “I’m coming over,” and before he has a chance to tell her not to, or to even give her his address, she hangs up.

Bragg opens the N encyclopaedia and reads the half page on Nursing, then the three-quarters page on Florence Nightingale which begins:

1820-1910, English nurse, the founder of modern nursing, b. Florence, Italy. Her life was dedicated to the care of the sick and war wounded. She was called “The Lady with the Lamp” because she believed that a nurse’s care was never ceasing, night or day; she taught that nursing was a noble profession, and she made it so.

Bragg remembers then that Minnie is a dental hygienist, not a nurse, and looks this up in Da-Di. No entry. He wonders if dental hygienists operate under the same code of conduct as nurses. Wonders if a modern encyclopaedia would have an entry on the profession.

Bragg hunts and pecks through Buddhism (B-C), Zen (Wi-Z), Rust (Ro-Si), and Lady with the Lamp (La-M) as four of his teeth, now beyond salvation, float dead in the expired milk at the back his fridge.

X

Minnie’s hanging around now, and Bragg likes her being there. He hasn’t mastered invisibility just yet. She brings him food. Changes his milk. She’s helping him with his letters, getting him to rethink the new shapes his mouth can make. Bragg has new role models: the artist who learned to paint with his left foot, Def Leppard’s drummer reinventing his gear and technique after losing his right arm in a traffic accident. I too have got this, he thinks. Bragg presses his tongue against his right molar, shifting the lower jaw to create a hard T sound.

He’s been awake for nineteen straight days, and twenty-eight teeth remain in his jaw.

Today, Minnie tells Bragg, “Dr. Parish made you flippers.”

“Flibbers?” Bragg’s bottom lip presses to canines to produce that difficult F and he whiffs on the double P sound.

“Temporary false teeth. You know, until we can do implants. Maybe we can even get you out of the house.”

“Where woul’ I go? I’ve gaw everything I need righ’ here. Books. No ‘istractions. I’m becoming what I always shoul’ve been.”

“But once you’ve got your teeth…”

Bragg scratches his nose to cover his mouth. Takes heavy nasal breaths. “So like…wha’?”

“I just figured we could go somewhere sometime.”

“Like a d-ate?”

“Maybe.”

“We shoul’ put the grow-sries away.”

At the top of one the bags Minnie’s brought over, Bragg spies a yellow envelope with his name on it. Minnie snatches it up and puts it behind her back, but they both know it exists. Bragg shelves the coffee, milk, a bag of apples for applesauce, pineapple for this pineapple-rice dish which liquefies well, black thread for the Cutty Sark in round rum bottle model’s rigging. When he’s done, he pours a glass of milk and sits at the kitchen table, waiting for Minnie to give up the goods on this envelope. “Whu izzit?” he asks.

Bragg puts both elbows on the table and rests the lower half of his face in his hands. It makes him think of the first time he saw her, a surgical mask covering the bottom half of her face. He thinks he remembers half her face behind a mask, but he also remembers thinking she was pretty and how that is such a small part of what she is to him now. So now he doubts she was wearing a mask at all. He will ask her if there’s ever a lull in their conversation.

“Like . . . a card. It’s just . . . something.”

“Fff-or me?”

“Yes.”

“Can I ha’e i’?”

“Now?”

“Whe the-n?”

“It’s just a card. It’s stupid.”

Bragg cannot remember the last time anyone gave him a card. He was a child, certainly, and it was from a parent, even more certainly. He drops his hands from his face and shows her his toothless smile. He reaches across the table and takes the envelope from her fingers. He opens the envelope gently, careful not to tear it, thinking the choice of a yellow envelope denotes a special sort of care that white envelopes do not. On the front of the card, a centered orange flower on a purple background and in black lettering, a pretty standard “Get Well Soon.”

Bragg flips the card open and ignores the stock writing printed on the inner right panel. He looks at the delicate wisps of Minnie’s writing in the card’s left-hand panel.

Bragg. Smile. X. Min.

Bragg gulps the rest of the milk and feels a tremble in his eyelids, like a spasm. “You’re not supposed to read it in front of me. Now it’s awkward,” Min says.

Bragg reaches across the table and puts his hand on hers. He leans across the table and kisses her.

It’s the first time he has ever kissed a woman, and it’s interesting for both of them. His lips push back into his mouth, and he wonders about the fortification teeth must normally provide a kiss. Min pushes her face closer into his, and his top lip has curled to the roof of his mouth. The kiss breaks naturally and they both sit down across from each other at the table.

“Wha’ ew you e’en see in me?”

“What do you mean?”

“Iz this li’e Florens ‘ightingale?”

“I don’t understand.”

“My teef.”

“So?”

“Iz jus . . . I ha’e tis i-nn-er foice. It zays things.”

“Like what?”

“I look ter-rible.”

Min giggles intentionally to lighten up what she’ll now say, “You’re very vain, Bragg.”

Bragg shields his mouth with a wide palm as the inner voice tells him she’s looking right at the gaps. But she’s still looking at his eyes. “I’ve seen worse,” she says.

“Worse ‘an this?”

“Like . . . Baby bottle tooth decay. Way worse.”

Bragg hasn’t read this entry in the B-C encyclopedia. He shakes his head no and Min continues. “Mostly happens when parents let their baby sleep with a bottle. The baby sucks on the bottle for so long that their mouths are continually bathed in whatever sugar is in the liquid. It can be lactose from breast milk, formula, juice. And the baby is powerless do anything about it. It’s completely the parents’ fault. The worst thing I ever saw was a mother who put Pepsi in her daughter’s bottle. The little girl came into the office crying. Screaming. Loudest shriek I ever heard. From the rot. It was all I could do not to cry along with her. Her little mouth was red raw. Her teeth were being corroded the minute they popped through her purple little gums. She didn’t know what was wrong with her mouth any more than you know what’s wrong with yours. The difference is, you can manage . . . You can smile.”

Bragg drops his hands. “I doe wah-na l-ose any more t-eeth!”

“You’ll manage,” Min squeezes Bragg’s hand. “I am not here to save you. But we’ll manage.”

XI

Bragg looks in the mirror. Dark circles dominate his face. His hair has gone white in just three weeks. Who is this guy? He counts the remaining teeth in his mouth with his tongue. In twenty-eight sleeps, if he lets sleep happen, they’ll all be gone.

“Min,” he calls and “Minnie,” he calls again.

She doesn’t answer. I am not here to save you, he thinks.

A thing sinks in the same place where he felt the kiss, somewhere starting at the mouth hole but moving almost to a single spot under his balls. Not sexual, but deep within. Like a field of energy in front of his spine. A very peaceful place that he doesn’t have the language for. It is too new for a name. Was this what his ex was talking about when she said words like chakra? He can feel tears, but none come. He steadies himself to cope with the loss of another piece. I didn’t deserve Min, he thinks, so did I dream her? He opens the faucet, lets the cold water run long and loud. He splashes his face with the water over and over and over again so that the dream that she was ever here at all can end. But it won’t end. He has known for a while that this isn’t a dream, and so Min appears behind him. “Were you saying something, Bragg?”

Her hand is on his shoulder. “Let’s go to sleep,” she says, so that tonight he believes he could sleep like a baby.

That night, and for at least the next twenty-eight nights, Bragg will sleep like a baby. Unsure if anyone will be in the space beside him each morning. Unsure if this is a punishment for something he is or something he’s done, and if he is doing anything now to make amends.

CY: This month’s essay by Andrea Stewart is on escapism. As we write this at the end of the first week of January, escapism seems vitally necessary. Around the world the pandemic rages on, though finally we have hope in the form of initial vaccine roll-outs, and here in the U.S. where our foundation has been rattled in a way that’s hard to even grasp. People are heartsick and exhausted, and the mental escape of a book, story, or poem seems more important than ever.

AS: I absolutely agree. There’s a tough balance to strike: to engage with the issues and events in a meaningful way, but not to be overwhelmed by them. Literature can be a means to engage with ideas, and it can also provide relief from the barrage of negativity which seems more and more constant. In fact, some stories can do both at the same time.

CY: Also there’s something about winter that makes me want to turn inward. I’ve been reading for pleasure a lot more lately, rereading old favorites and prioritizing the books in my to-be-read pile. I’m trying to branch out this year, too, and read more poetry and some classics that I’ve meant to get to but never have.

AS: Winter has me sipping hot soup or tea as I read, wrapped up in blankets or thick sweats. I recently wrote a Year-in-Review piece for Locus Magazine which forced me to look back at the fiction I’d read throughout an extremely tumultuous year. There were so many wonderful stories! In the day to day, in the face of our worries, it’s easy to forget how much great fiction is at hand. In remembering, I smiled, and I got excited for the stories to come.

• • • •

In the February issue of Fantasy Magazine . . . Original fiction by Innocent Chizaram Ilo (“Flight”) and David James Brock (“Kisser”); flash fiction by Sharang Biswas (“Of Course You Screamed”) and Shingai Njeri Kagunda (“Blackman’s Flight in Four Parts”); poetry by Danielle Jean Atkinson (“Like a Box of Chocolates”) and Lynette Mejía (“What My Mother Taught Me”); and a new essay, “The Validity of Escapism,” by Andrea Stewart. Thanks for reading!

Blackman knew lack

      Of _gravity      before _gravity

      had a name   

Black man ^flew  before he was told to

Till the ground

      Till the ground

              Till the ground

Till he forget to look at the sky

Till Blackman forget he knew how to fly

Part 2.

      Let me tell you something about the sea . . .  ahh, that one, she is lined with salt

      & everybody know Blackman used to kno how to fly before gravity had a name

      So when they got tired of Blackman’s dreams of flight, guess what they did?

      & everybody know too much salt ain’t good for flight

      Too much salt will have u stuck to the ground like soil

      See the sea lined with salt

      So guess what they did?

      & everybody knows these days the sea is sick

      & these days she throws up interrupted histories & dreams of flight

Part 3.

Wat no one knows is that the sea sees
Wat no one knows is that the eyes of the sea lay nxt to ha nose
Wat no one knows is that sometimes she hears
& of all of these things that were collected
I’s,
Nose,
Ears,
She could neva getta hold of a tongue
& so she cannot speak
No one knows but she sees ^bodysouls
No one knows but she hears ^{bottomless wailing}
No one knows but she smells ^{spoiling flesh}
They were dropped out of boats, these pieces of her
Bits & pieces of History tumbling
Down
Down
Down
Into the sea that no one knows

Part 4.

& What happens to the 1s that couldn’t fly

Force fed salt; Eyes away from the sky

Living bodies tied to the dead

The ones who refused to die

Sink

Sink

Sink

The ocean swallows Blackmen whole

Without her tongue, ohhh no, see how the sea has a taste for salt

She does not let them go

Down down down

To where they will never grow old

Some Blackmen fly,

Some never die.