You are currently browsing the category archive for the ‘Refugee’ category.
I once wept onto bound blank pages and called the result The Book of Tears. I strangled and drowned that soggy volume and titled it Mercy, but this actual knife, here in her daughter’s bed where it was planted by god-knows-who, tells a more urgent story than any on paper. Only a book with a pulse, a temperature, a heft for leverage, and a handle for wielding as a weapon could compete with a butcher’s blade lurking in the bed of a child I don’t dislike. She and her mother had just begun to feel safe after weeks of squatting on a wornout mattress in a corner of Auntie Panty’s studio between a noisy radiator and a litter box. Before that, they’d spent two nights fidgeting in a rented bed at an unaffordable local hotel. Before that, they’d come home from mercy errands to a home that had been their refuge. The bastards hadn’t stolen much, but they’d splintered the front door and run their bleeding hands over everything that was hers, then crapped in the hallway and turned her home against her. She politely informed the police, enlisted me in the reclamation, fled with her daughter to anyplace safe, and languished in exile while I cleaned up. We’re staring now at what stabbed her beneath the covers as she was putting her daughter into bed, as sinister as a turd on the floor but more pointed. I touch her lightly. What chance does language have to blunt such objects or sheathe them, and how can we live without intimacy when items out of place can make the world and not the objects seem so reckless? She extends her arms; I anticipate an embrace, but she’s showing me her wounds. She’s starting a sentence with Since you moved out
Original Copyright © March 08, 2007
Revised Copyright © March 12, 2026
My stupid sister says she wants to be a Sudanese baby in Darfur so Daddy will love her. Now she’s gone AWOL. Mommy says when we find her this time, she’ll wish she was a motherless orphan. It’s just emotion talking; we’re famously emotional. Daddy’s famous for loving children in Darfur. The kids who disappear. He gets their pictures into the paper. He gets their names “out there.” He leaves the door to his office open, even on sick days, but we know not to disturb him when he’s working, which is always. Even with the interviewer, he was eating just enough to take his pills and with his other hand he was sending emails about missing children. He took over my room for his sick bed and most of my sister’s room for his files and folders. Do you see why I feel like a refugee? she said, last time she left. Daddy gets up early when he goes to bed at all. He says, Evil doesn’t sleep and neither can the truth, and someone who could leak the truth is always at a desk in another time zone. But he should sleep. He’s not getting better, even with our marrow. Me, I’d like a regular birthday with candles and presents. I want to change the world, too, but closer to home. I told the interviewer: Everyone can do something. If teaching Shakespeare is helpful, I’ll do that. See what he has to say about politics. What I should have said: If strongly-worded emails could stop kidnappings, I’d drop out of the eighth grade and save whole villages before lunch. Maybe my stupid sister’s gone to Africa this time. Daddy can get her picture in the paper. Mommy’s crying and I have to wonder why wouldn’t she be.
Original Copyright © January 15, 2007 as Daddy Loves Darfur
Revised Copyright © January 22, 2026 as Daddy Loves Sudanese Babies
Very Short Novels 