My son wanted to run around the departure lounge before we got on the plane, and it wasn’t like I could say, Now we must sit in our seats and wait and wait. He was too little for that. So I followed him as he ran around, making sure he didn’t cause trouble. We were on our way to visit his grandparents, who lived so far away we could only get there by plane. Or cargo ship. But I could not imagine chasing him around a cargo ship for several days as we crossed the ocean. And what if it sank? Then we would be in a lifeboat. Maybe even one of those round or hexagonal ones that auto-inflate during an emergency. How long would we sit in our lifeboat, bobbing on the waves, awaiting rescue? What if rescue never came? How long before my son grew restless? Started crying? At first, he might enjoy the strange new experience, even though everyone else in the boat was clearly not enjoying it. Children are remarkably adaptable (or so I’ve heard said, many times, in those exact words). But what if the man sitting next to us became hostile when my son started crying? Would I have to fight him? Would I know how to fight a man in an inflatable lifeboat? And who would look after my son while I was fighting? Parenting does not come with a manual. Friends give you parenting books, but you don’t read them. You refer to them. But only when something bad has already happened. Would there be a chapter covering emergency situations in cramped lifeboats? What if there was a cat in the lifeboat and my son wanted to pet the cat but the cat belonged to the hostile man? Perhaps we could use the cat as a way of avoiding fighting, of smoothing things over. But what if the cat was vicious and scratched my son? Then what? And of course any number of things could happen. We could starve to death. Military drones might come along and bomb us. A pod of adolescent orcas could attempt to overturn our craft. They would have a hard time, though, if it was one of those round ones. But orcas are intelligent. They problem-solve and work together to kill seals. One of them would come up with the idea of biting the craft in order to deflate it, and the rest would immediately see the merit in this. They would all begin to bite the craft until we were pitched into open water. But perhaps some dolphins would be standing by to save us from the orcas, which are pretty much just giant black-and-white dolphins. Dolphins probably don’t think much of orcas. For them orcas are probably like huge dumb trolls. For the orcas the dolphins are like elves. Confusingly nimble, supercilious, kind of mean. The dolphins probably delight in making them feel stupid. So they would no doubt step in and save us from the orcas and ferry us to an uninhabited isle. They would know where one was the same way you know where lakes are. I suppose the cat would not do well in this scenario. Even if a dolphin tried to help the cat, the cat would panic and end up with its claws out. You can’t blame the cat, though. That’s just how they’re wired. Anyway, things probably wouldn’t get that far. Dolphins almost never interact with cats, and so a cat would probably look pretty alarming to them. A dolphin would be like, No, I’m not going anywhere near that fucking thing. Perhaps the hostile man could stuff it into a waterproof sack and do his best to make sure it didn’t suffocate while a dolphin zoomed them to safety. That’s about the only way I can see the cat getting out of there. My son would probably be all right, though. The dolphins would see he was little more than a baby. He would be their top priority—pretty much the opposite situation as the cat. They would make sure he got to the uninhabited isle. Hopefully he wouldn’t be the only one to make it, though. That would suck. As much as they might want to, the dolphins wouldn’t be able to wriggle out of the water and prepare meals for him until he was old enough to take care of himself. Then again, maybe the isle would have some kind of helpful animal living on it. Calm, thoughtful, nurturing monkeys. Or maybe a lost species of humanoid which had managed to evolve there without us knowing about it, perhaps because the dolphins had misdirected our ships, making sure we never landed there and massacred them. These humanoids would be small, because that’s what happens when your species evolves in isolation on an island. It’s called insular dwarfism. Islands have limited resources, so you end up getting smaller over time. Unless you’re small to begin with, like rats, and then you end up getting larger. Which is exactly what happened on that island in Indonesia where homo floresiensis lived for 700,000 years. So my son might find himself on an island with small humanoids who hunt giant rodents or maybe even saddle them up and ride them around. The rodents would be bigger than the cat, if the cat made it ashore. Who knows? Maybe the hostile man, just before he was torn apart by orcas, managed to toss it onto a piece of flotsam. The humanoids wouldn’t know what to make of it. My son, however, would pick it up, or try to, which would require a measure of patience on the cat’s part, and the humanoids would be amazed. So my son would live on the island with the cat and the humanoids, learning their customs and language. Why wouldn’t they have a language? As he grew, feasting on giant rats, horrifying insects, and the fruit that grew all over the island, he would eventually tower over everyone else even though he wouldn’t be all that tall by homo sapiens standards. How would the diminutive islanders react to this? With aplomb? Not if they’re anything like us! So my son would have to deal with the height issue as he got older, but by then he would know these people well and hopefully be able to come up with something. He wouldn’t remember me or the rest of us, so it would be tough to explain, but I have confidence in him. He is an intelligent toddler so why wouldn’t he be an intelligent adolescent—which is when the height thing would really start to become an issue. Hopefully the humanoids won’t be as fractious as us. If dolphins or the equivalent of dolphins in space (space dolphins) brought us a strange being that had been shipwrecked out there, saving its life, and it grew up among us here on Earth and had some weird physical characteristics but otherwise behaved like us, you can be sure that two schools of thought would emerge. Some of us would be all right with him as long as he was all right with us, while others would want to kill the thing. It would probably be a little more complicated than that, but that’s pretty much how it would break down. Hopefully most of the humanoids aren’t of the second mindset. I bet they’re pretty chill, though. They don’t have to work a hundred hours a week. They don’t have social media or guns. They don’t have to deal with robots calling them on the phone and instructing them to please stand by. They never have to peer into a camera while a truculent police officer photographs their retinas. Not on the island. Giant rats would be the worst of it. But I am getting ahead of myself! We are still in the airport departure lounge. My son is still just a toddler. I’m tagging along behind him, making sure he doesn’t cause trouble. And just as they announce our flight is boarding and families with small children have priority—well, after the active duty service members; we all have to stand there and clap for the active duty service members, toddlers included—he runs up to one of those one-way doors you only find in airports, funhouses, and the International Space Station. It opens. Before I can stop him he barrels through, and the door swishes shut behind him. Now he is trapped in the airlock between the two doors. If I can just get over there before he . . . but no, he’s already done it. He barrels through the second door. He is outta here. If I go after him, I will miss my plane. If I don’t go after him, I will lose my son. Checkmate! And exactly the kind of conundrum you would never have to deal with on that magical, rat-trodden isle.

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ayóó’ ánííníshní / I love you, a lot.

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Crack, crack, crack.

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Who cares that Liesl loves a blonde boy 
who sings to her of her own suppression 
as they shelter from the storm in a gazebo 
before he declares himself a Nazi in full?
Is the hope of happiness ever allowed
to meander past the glare of youth,
as in the summertime gaze of Danny Zuko
before he reenters the familiar territory
of learned leather and greased lightning?
My mother and I watch Meggie being watched 
from afar by the priest and remind each other 
in the end it turns out he sticks around,
for old age and all. My mother always squirms
at Bill tending his moths, the fluid horror
of gender—but for me, the more unsettling 
lurks inside the pull of Hannibal’s few minutes
of screen time, how his minor character
nonetheless propels our heroine to purpose,
powering those black basement breaths 
wherein she must understand survival,
reasoning quick and modest as the flutter
of wings upon a nape of exposed flesh—
This is the good part, I can still hear
my mother saying of manufactured thunder,
indulgent dance numbers, a set of teary 
eyes scanning the horizon with wistful 
romantic score draped like a sheer veil
over the truth. What’s on tonight?
I ask myself, reaching for the remote
to replay another story. Mood is only part 
of the whole picture this evening. 
The question loops back to what I want,
skipping over what I’ll look past to get it.

Dolce Far Niente

Joy betrays in easy ways, 
as when I wake early to find pistachio 
hidden inside a chosen pasticciotto 
and am brought to my knees 
before the sun finishes stretching 
out over Polignano a Mare. 
The others leave to tour caves 
along ancient shore, and I breathe 
behind the open window, sea air
billowing its huge single curtain, 
blood tapping the back of my throat. 
Sweet orange light swerves in and out 
of shadow. Fauvist floral tiles. 
The room’s much too large, 
its windows tall as temple doors 
drawn open. The ocean old enough 
to forget itself sifting upon its cliffs. 
I will never be able to leave, don’t know
how to call upon the gods present here. 
God of ragged rooftop and tinkling bell, 
god of umber brick and unmoored 
boat, god of blue paint flaking 
from patient hull, god 
of every immovable past tense.
Hours tick across the walls 
in quadrants of gold, darken 
like bruises. I am myself, no longer 
asleep. The others return
with a stranger, his shirt aglow
golden as a fleece upon his shoulder. 
They cannot comprehend 
that I, too, arrived here with plans 
to spend days like coins. Now no one 
has need for me to translate 
their commands. Half the fun is not 
understanding. Bass thrums 
in the room above, a chorus 
of mocking, Ma perche? Pear-kaayy! 
An old folktale ends this way.
The woman becomes moonbeam. 
Idle hands pretend to peel 
night back, reveal an honest dawn.

The post The Bittersweet Cruelty of a Rerun appeared first on Electric Literature.

Instagram insists on red light therapy, a pink plastic 
eye mask that glows like a ruby-geode inside, 
Zorro illuminated and self-conscious, afraid of 
aging. Each fissure chips at the issue: I am un-

afraid to die. I am just kidding. Death is 
a blind date, sure as Emily’s carriage 
is right on time. My small dog took 
her own ride six months ago, was picked up 

by eternity. Her atoms have a kind of immortality. 
If matter is never created or destroyed, each white 
and orange hair that still sticks in the weave 
of a blue acrylic sweater shows something’s left. 

When I knit and a long dark hair of mine twists 
into the yarn, I keep it there. Let me be littered 
into the future. Let me be threaded into its fabric, 
of something you wrap yourself up in to stay warm.

i have forgotten how to write and all i can do is eat.

powdered french onion soup mix makes potato chip dip. i pretend 
i’ll only eat the curled ones, and then finish the bag anyway. soup 
from last summer with roadside tomatoes from someone else’s 
garden. add frozen, then thawed, then squeezed spinach to every-
thing– green must be good. i am trying to feed everything that is empty. 
remember when i aspired only to wear a whip-cream bikini? to be seen 
as dessert, strategically placed maraschinos glistening. i cannot undo 
these early mythologies. i have tried eating hearts, half-heartedly, 
to feel whole. chicken yakitoried ones at my first bachelorette, 
two hours before a wide bouncer carried me out, and i clung 
to his front like an infant creature. i no longer drink to forget. 
making anyone’s grandma’s recipe is one way to bring back 
the dead. now, it’s the defrosted red cherries and their aftertaste 
of dirt, and ask the piecrust first why dust to dust and not earth to earth?

The post Knitting Myself Into the Algorithm appeared first on Electric Literature.

One day the alpaca kicked and bit the man from Milwaukee who had moved to Tulum to open and operate an animal sanctuary. As the man was dying, the alpaca stopped biting his face, crouched, and sat on him. The man from Milwaukee’s neighbor Ted came over. “I’m sorry this is happening to you,” he said. “But I really wish you hadn’t sent my wife so many erotic texts and dick pics.” A crowd formed. A difficult death was under way. Some of the man’s neighbors tied a rope around the alpaca’s legs and the other end of the rope to the back of a pickup truck to drag him away. I flew to Tulum to investigate because the man from Milwaukee was my father. The last time I saw him, over a decade ago, he had one good dark eye. We laughed together, remembering the orgies his older brothers had orchestrated in the basement of our sprawling Milwaukee estate. When I arrived in Tulum, I became an heiress. I was seated at a long wood table outside with views of the sea glinting off glass facades, glass walls. By evening, guests arrived who would never tire of my presence on the veranda. I sold the animal sanctuary, a gray enclosure next to a dried-up bush. I bought a house where I was alone. When I ran errands in town, strangers wanted to talk to me about their timeshares. With their encouragement, I joined an exclusive group that traveled the world to examine Greek relics. One day I was invited by the group into a cave where I met my demise. Some years before, Ted took me aside and told me the alpaca loved bananas; my father would always give the alpaca a single banana, but the day he died, he forgot to. I was tired of death! I hired a man to kill the alpaca. The man was beautiful and rich and he liked violent endings. For a long time I had love in my life, but there was not much I could do with it.

The post Dad Died and All I Got Was This Angry Alpaca appeared first on Electric Literature.

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I Still Believe in My Country

I still believe in my country, not because I am immune to disappointment nor because I’ve stopped counting the ways we fail each other, but because here, people keep doing small impossible things. Someone shares fuel during a blackout, counts the litres like prayer beads, says take it, I’ll manage, even though the night arrived prepared. Offices open late or not at all. Files sleep on desks longer than dreams. I still believe in my country when my hands shake, scrolling past grief, when the numbers don’t add up but the bills do, but they still reach out, still type messages that say are you safe?, still cook food meant for more people than showed up, because absence has taught us to overprepare. A boy plays football with a plastic bottle & calls it a match because stadiums are far & promises farther. A mother names her child Blessing like the word can stand guard, like syllables can do what policies refuse to. A man returns a wallet with nothing missing except despair, shrugs like decency is not heroic, just necessary. Tell me this is not something. Tell me this does not count. I still believe in my country because joy keeps happening without permission—at bus stops where time is mismanaged, in markets where prices change without warning, in the way music escapes from phones with cracked screens louder than official statements, because laughter still ambushes grief mid-sentence. Because someone always knows the words to a song everyone thought we forgot. I still believe in my country even when belief feels foolish, even when it feels like loving someone who hasn’t learnt how to say sorry yet. The roads are tired, yes. The promises are bruised. Still, people keep walking, keep carrying their lives in plastic bags, faith & patience in their mouths, ‘e go better.’ I still believe in my country when hospitals ask for everything except relief, when classrooms echo with too many names & not enough chairs. & yet, teachers still stay late when survival becomes a curriculum we all pass unwillingly. Yet, teachers still stay late. Nurses still find veins in the dark. We still argue about football like joy is a civic duty. I still believe in my country when children draw houses bigger than the ones they live in, add windows that open, add trees first, colour the sun generously. I still believe in my country because care keeps leaking through the cracks. After all, even broken places know how to hold water for a while. I still believe in my country, not with flags in my mouth, but the way you believe in a song you don’t know all the lyrics to yet but keep humming anyway, trusting the chorus will find you when it matters.

The post The Policeman Finds Me Guilty of Joy appeared first on Electric Literature.

The demon lasted a good month, emitting low moans and sandpaper coughs into her ear, before Celia found an old Ball jar in the cellar, plucked the being off the cutting board with a pair of chopsticks where it had writhed since its summoning, screwed it in tightly without any empathy, and slotted it between the crunchy peanut butter and the wax beans.  

This one, her first, lasted longer than she expected. She’d heard stories of demons scuttling away into nothing within hours. She was so busy in the kitchen these days. Her own house in disrepair. Social calls gone unanswered. Those weekly visits to her mother’s house to read cheap detective novels out loud while the old woman sipped nettle tea under a cotton counterpane. The frail hand in hers, a confused gathering of bones and time. But business pulled at Celia. So much so that when death had pulled at her mother, she’d barely had space to attend to what her mother left behind in that house. Stacks of cardboard boxes and dusty closets. All those canning supplies, unused.

She’d meant to bake a simple cursed cake for her boss. Necessary for the recipe: a tiny piece of her flesh. Crafting curses was a subtle art what with all the complicated branches of dark chemistry that split off from skin as part of a recipe. She must have added too much skin. Now she was monitoring this accident of personal mismeasurement. 

Each day, Celia would slide the canned goods aside and the demon’s face would be pressed against the wall of the jar, gasping and blue. The tongue distended like a rock band’s logo. The eyes rheumy and desperate. (Did demons breathe? Surely not. Oxygen couldn’t have been a requirement for something so unholy.) She only checked in on it. Never poked the jar or asked it questions. Her mother once off-handedly said that asking demons questions drove holes through your soul. 

But the demon grew less antagonistic to its prison. Less energetic and furious. On the fourth day, it slumped in a corner and lackadaisically slapped the Ball jar. The sound was like a small branch brushing up against a window in a rainstorm. Celia closed her eyes and enjoyed the moment. 

The demon was a mistake, of course, but one that could be dealt with. Had the portion of flesh been a hearty Shylockian amount, the house would’ve gone up in flames, her whole neighborhood a fuming sulphureous pit of black nacre and glistening pitted onyx. Instead, what she created was a measly demon. Ragged and weak. Nothing to be pitied or excited about. She re-made the cursed cake. Then got on with a poisonous jellyroll her friend requested for an HOA soirée. 

It never tried to communicate with her. Instead it glared at her when it had the energy. After two weeks, she knew it needed no oxygen, but there must’ve been something she was depriving it of, a necessary substance. Part of her wanted to make the same mistake a second time. Create a partner for this imprisoned imp. 

One morning, when she opened the cabinet and moved the wax beans aside, the Ball jar rolled out and fell between her hands onto the kitchen floor. The glass shattered and the metal lid rang in an annular dance. She jumped back. The demon was unmoving, its body a deep cerulean and flaking. The claws faded to nubbins and the face drooped. The tail wilted off and the smell was like a paperback book that has been left on the dashboard of a car in the hot summer sun. Grass and vanilla. She inhaled violently as if she’d heard a terrible secret. 

She bent down and cradled the demon in her hands. She brushed a thumb across its chest. She smelled the demon again and thought of the first trip to the library with her mother as a seven-year-old. The vaulted ceilings. The hush of librarians shelving hardback books wrapped in mylar jackets. The protracted and protected silence, the fragile yet enduring shell of imagination she’d exuded while inhaling that smell. She brought the demon closer. No low moans or scratchy coughs. It was now a gone thing. 

The lignin of the decaying book pages faded in her nose, as did those tender-folded times as a child. And as she begged for the demon to return to life, she wondered if she’d been wrong, all wrong, about what it was she’d created.

The post I Store My Demons Next to the Pickled Beets appeared first on Electric Literature.

I’m just sitting down at a table at the back of the bookstore café with a stack of books and an iced coffee, and the woman at the next table, thirtyish, dreadlocks, librarian glasses, nose ring, leans over and says, “Skip that one.”

With her chin she points to the paperback with the bright purple cover at the top of my stack.

I’m talking about the new thriller by a Scandinavian writer everyone swears I have to read. His last name has an Ø in it; I can only vaguely guess how to pronounce it. I’m a little embarrassed to be seen with it. But I’m thinking I can skim the first chapter and the back cover and have something to say the next time I have to talk to my wife’s aunt Christine.

Christine lives in Upper Marion, happily retired, with labradoodles, and belongs to four book groups: Classics, Spirituality, Oprah, and Murders in Oslo. When she sees me, she gets the old cartoon spirals in her eyes. She practically licks her lips. The Writer in the Family.

“Here’s how it goes,” my new friend says. “There’s an old, bitter mystery writer in New York who wants to end it all. So he writes a book about an old, bitter mystery writer who publishes a book with a bright purple cover and then, whenever he sees someone reading it, follows them home and murders them. And then he actually starts doing it. In broad daylight. Every time he sees someone reading the book, on the subway, in Central Park, wherever—­he follows them home and kills them. Not trying to cover his tracks. Fingerprints everywhere, the clearest MO you can imagine.”

I look down at the cover, and there it is: A Detective’s Easy Afternoon.

“But then, of course, he never gets caught. He calls a friend of his on the force, the source for a lot of his research, and says, ‘It’s me, I’ve turned into a serial killer,’ and his friend doesn’t believe him. His friend says, ‘You need to take a vacation.’ So he goes out to his house in Sag Harbor, takes long walks on the beach, and everywhere he goes he sees that bright purple cover. He can’t stop himself. He gets invited to speak at a book group in a nursing home and brings a plate of strychnine brownies. Finally he stages his own death, leaving his book as the only clue.”

“It’s like Paul Auster crossed with Patricia Highsmith.”

“Like Agatha Christie crossed with Borges.”

She’s been leaning over the back of her chair, in the posture of “Excuse me, I don’t mean to intrude,” but now she does the most wonderful thing: She turns her chair to face mine. She’s wearing a red sundress, she has ivy vines climbing up one arm, she crosses her legs and leans forward and says, “I think the only way you could make it work is if the author actually did go around New York killing people.”

“Even by today’s industry standards,” I say, “that’s a long shot.”

“Oh, I don’t know,” she says. “Anyway, do you still want it? I have to go; I’ll take it back to the table if you want. Seriously. That César Aira novel is the bomb.”

When she gets up, and look, I’m not ashamed to say it, I’m following her every movement, the Paris Review tote bag slung casually over one shoulder, the minute adjustment of her coiled dreads, the way she smooths her skirt, the flickers of muscle in her calves, and then the man watching from the corner seat at the high table facing the window, with his cropped gray hair and prominent earlobes and faded, slightly shiny black suit over a blue polo shirt. She holds the book loosely, distractedly, in her left hand while checking her phone with her right, drifting toward the entrance, and he stands up, silently sucking the last drops out of his iced coffee, but then she checks herself and slides it neatly atop the stack at the first table, unmissable, a purple column, and steps into a pane of sunlight, reaching up to scratch the middle of her back, pulling the earbuds from her tote bag, and walks off toward Elizabeth Street, and he sits down again, and we both watch her, our reader, our last reader, watch her as she goes.

The post A Serial Killer Walks Into a Bookstore appeared first on Electric Literature.

I.
The green bùbá of my country felt
silly in that spectral white of heaven. But it was
all Border Control would allow—the cloth
on my neck, futile against a fury
of snow that did not fall
like water off a duck’s back, but stuck
instead like leeches to my wine-
dark skin and sank
their hundred fangs of ice. I could not
speak of the inherent racism that followed
from earth, the obsidian jealousy.
On earth, birds-of-paradise have
long blue tails. What a shame
to have missed such brilliant foreshadowing.
The music of heaven is the blues.
No one here will hold
my frostbitten hands; no one here will pull me
back into the warm blanket of human viscera
I, in earthspeak, call a body—
a life. Heaven is the largest polar
desert of the afterlife, though you may think,
first, of hell. In this pleistocene epoch,
Prometheus, having burned in 27,760 degrees
of god's lightning bolt looks at humans
with no fucks or fennel fronds to give.
The light in the ice is the eye
of Abu Fanus. The mouth that opens
is of the black van of damnation named Maria.
Handcuffed, I am walking towards it.
Take a last look, sister—though this, I don't
say out loud because the big boss forbids,
above all, the evidence of the eye in his land.

II.
Pardon me, sir, but those wings
look ridiculous on you. This, I say
to the smallest angel, knowing he lacked
that righteous anger of god. Light
is what angels are made of,
but he's a white man in heaven, clad
in Armageddon's gear, so what else
to call him but that. An angel—
built too small, dodo-flightless,
he beats me down because he must. Duty-
bound, pathetic as one hand
of a glove—the blind obedience
as five fingers work their way
up its ass—he beats me down
with hands that have never felt god.
And this is where I tell him
of the kinder god that came before,
the greater lord who took the mud
that made us in his hands and reached
for no napkin after. Yes, I was born
in the old heaven—a tropical garden
west of the Nile. It was beautiful
before the bombs. No, there were no
angels in my history of joy. I earned
the destiny that led me here;
struck its stubborn cast-iron till it bent.
No, my dark skin does not mean I escaped
from hell. Or yes, yes it does.
But ask the big boss who made hell hell?

The first nature poem where white is good/night bad—but fear not, there are no ghosts in this one

The little bear jumps up and down; stands
on two hind legs; puffs itself big
and cuddly like a pink smoke
bomb; like a cute human baby saying
with all two feet of body, look,
I’m a big boy, raaahh! What a scene.
In the mirror of instinct, it must
look so scary and tough—intimidating
the small man that stood a few feet away
with his camera black as a gun. Imagine,
in the land of bears, a ramshackle
house of honey and bees, a mother
holding a lesson of survival in her mouth
like herbs—neem leaves, lemongrass—
chewed frantically to cud and waiting
to be spat into the mouth of her young—
those tiny vanities (forgive me),
evolutionary totems of our childhood
and then youth. Imagine then,
the same lesson we teach of bears
and survival, that odd lesson of
colors: If black, fight back. If brown,
lay down. If white, good night (you’re
already dead). The little bear makes
its home midair, running furiously
between the ground and sky.
And so, the hand that holds the flash
is black. And so, camera might
as well be clarinet and this
is nature’s jazz. Because, look again,
the bear is dancing; dancing
as it takes its first human steps,
and mama bear is watching;
watching from the trees, proud.

The post Angel, Those Wings Look Ridiculous on You appeared first on Electric Literature.

The Flamingo Café

There is nothing worse than working breakfast. The breakfast people, they’re in a hurry, they’re usually alone, which means they allow themselves all kinds of behavior, and they are very specific. Dark toast, toast lightly burnt, runny eggs, overcooked eggs, crispy bacon, burnt bacon, bacon on fire.

I bet the lunch people are OK with whatever color the toast is. Not that I would know. And I bet they use whole sentences. Not like the guy who comes in at the peak of the breakfast rush and when he wants more bread he yells, “Hey, Miss! What, bread?” This is how he asks for more bread. It’s not even a sentence. You see what I mean, they would never do this at lunch, not that I would know.

Petie is a waitress who cries all the time. She is four feet ten inches tall and weighs sixteen ounces. You fear for the health of her brittle, little bones, and her hair looks like it is falling out, from stress, probably. Also, she is always apologizing even when things are not her fault. If you step on her foot, she’ll say, “I’m sorry!” If, when she is balancing six plates of eggs Benedict on one arm, you plow into her and send the plates flying, she will say, “I’m sorry!” I worry about Petie all the time. When the Bread Guy yells for more bread, Petie cries. When the manager says the eight-top needs their check, she cries. Every day I think Petie is not going to make it and every day she somehow gets to twelve o’clock and then shows up the next morning with a little less hair, a little less of her dignity.

One day, it’s a mad rush at seven-thirty, every table’s full, everyone’s yelling, and I already smell like fermented ass mixed with bacon grease. I can see Petie starting to tremble. She drops a whole tray of drinks all over the guy at the deuce in the corner—Bread Guy. And now he’s wet and mad. The manager yells at Petie to clean it up and what the hell is wrong with her is she a simpleton or what, and I think this time she’s really going to crack, she’s going to go into shock or have a seizure.

But she goes all stony and serene. She gets taller and her neck gets long and curvy. When she starts to turn pink is when I believe what I am seeing, not sunburned pink, but hot pink. Neon pink in places, lighter pink in others, almost white in others. And the pink—it’s feathers. Petie has pink feathers on her arms and her back that look so soft I want to touch them. They are everywhere but her skinny, white, funny-looking legs. And now she’s standing on one foot. Everyone in the place goes quiet, Bread Guy, the manager, some people have little bits of sausage spilling out of their open mouths. And no one knows what to say because Petie is a seabird in the middle of the diner. I start to cry, and I see other people start to cry too, because what did we do to deserve her, you know? Petie stands there on one foot, the other one tucked up under her proud, pink rump. She turns her beak this way and that like she is looking way off in the distance and she doesn’t care about any of us. And why should she? She is the most magnificent thing in the whole world. And she knows it.

We didn’t know then if Petie would ever turn back into Petie, or if she would turn into a flamingo every time things got hairy, or what it would cost her, or if it would give the place a certain class and maybe people would quiet down at breakfast. We didn’t know that word would get around, or that there would be imitators—the Real Flamingo Café, the Original Flamingo Café—and that we would be OK with that.

But that day, as we started moving again, we moved around her because no one would dare ask a flamingo to bus a dirty table, because we didn’t want to spook the bird, to find out if she could fly. The sound was a puff, a wing seeing what it could do. A pale feather rose. It hovered pink in the light, and we waited, watching, wanting to believe it could last.

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