MENTORSHIP RECIPIENT

Mentor Commentary
Matt Weinkam

Recipient Reflection
Jena Vallina

Conversations at the End of the World

Fiction by ​​Jena Vallina

I am eighteen in January. I go to the pier and pull my hood against my frostbitten cheeks, looking over the lake to where the Chicago sky is bleached white with smog. Caught in the rippling currents, pedestrian spit-up—interfused bodies of plastic and scraps—float to the surface like victims of some crime. I shield my eyes from the sun glinting off the water. At my feet, leftovers from someone else’s evening: a soda can, gouged at the neck into an open-throated shiv. I think of my dog’s soft paws, which traipse these parts in the dark, and of the sky which promises tomorrow’s powder snow. But I must not lie to protect myself: in truth, no thought guides my foot. I kick the bottle because I can and watch it fall down to where the water stirs its toxic stew. I kick it the way I pluck daisies from the earth just to wear them behind my ear. I kick it the way I once snatched a baby bird from its nest and held it clenched like a heart in my fist, the sour sweat of my giant’s skin seeping over its feathers so that somewhere a mother may never find her way home.
 
***

I am visiting my grandmother as I do when it is cold and I am not sure if she remembers how to turn on her furnace. An old Sicilian wench, my grandmother grows olives on the terrace and on her best days can play Stravinsky on the creaky baby grand in the foyer. She adores my dog, feeding her chips out of the palm of her wrinkled blue hand. She adores me slightly less, my resemblance to my foreigner mother—sleek black hair, small mouth—too stark a contrast against her own quintessentially Catholic features to consider me actual kin. As a young girl growing up on Grand Avenue, she resembled St. Catherine of Alexandria, patron saint of unmarried girls, with her pale complexion and auburn curls.
 
I take care of her at my father’s behest, watering her olives and turning the volume up on Jeopardy. I tune out when she spouts on about the immigrants and thugs flooding the streets of Chicago. I do not remind her that she herself was an immigrant once, a small ruddy child speaking only in riddles when she arrived in this very neighborhood decades past.
 
Today is a bad day. There will be no Stravinsky. There will not even be Jeopardy. I find her propped on her bed, blinds drawn. She does not stir as I let myself in, closing the door behind me. The cold vampire air breathes down my neck as soon as I enter. At first, I think I must have left the front door open. But the draft is coming from inside the room. The blinds rouse as if possessed, flapping against the windowpane to the rhythm of outside. Traffic sounds, ricocheting echoes of birds and planes.
 
“Nonni,” I say, hurrying over to slam the window shut. At the sudden broach of silence, she turns to face me. Her skin is paper white. It is hard to believe sometimes that she was ever young, the weight of the years having crushed whatever childhood-tenant once made a home inside her fragile body. “You can’t just leave the window open. It’s freezing outside.”
 
She looks blankly in my vicinity, but her gaze is too tangled in the ephemera to settle on my face. There are blue smudges on the ceiling; my grandfather tried to paint it to look like the sky, but never finished. Back problems, then early retirement, and then earlier death. But if you lie on your back as Nonni lies and cover your eyes so just a slit of space appears between your fingers, you can see only the blue and pretend briefly that you are outside staring up at something other than the same old wall.
 
“I wanted to hear the ocean,” she tells me. “Is that so bad?”
 
“It’s a lake, Nonni,” I reply, grabbing a quilt off the back of her chair, “and you can’t even hear it over the street.”
 
***
 
Under the lake, city fish wean on chemical vermin. Their brains are shriveled raisins and their eyes rot out of their skull, sinking to the floor still-seeing. One day they will be like the teratoma, growing toenails and hair and sharp little teeth, making a mockery out of our gnarled earth-bound bodies with their human disease. You cannot cure us, they will say. You are the thing that inflicts. Look at what you’ve done. We used to be so clean and so simple, and now we are just like you.
 
 
***
 
My grandmother’s house is full of ghosts, some of them living but most dead. Nonni is the only one who remains, and most days she is part-ghost. Only half of her is ever in the flesh; the rest has crawled in the walls and slipped into the avenue between times. There, the mildew scent gives way to fresh paint, the whirring of the heater to infant coos and crackling radio. A man sits on a cardboard box, drawing a cigar from his mouth as if posing for a painting. A small woman, not yet a grandmother, touches up her lipstick in the mirror and curses in Italian when she smudges it on her tooth. It is the Cold War, colder winter, and the end of the world has been lingering on their doorstep for a miniature eternity. Either come in or don’t; at this point, it was the agony of waiting that killed more than any missile end.
 
***
 
When I was fifteen and leaving a bodega, I watched a man in a suit crush his cigarette into a homeless man’s soda can. It was the casual nature in which he folded the butt in between his fingers and sprinkled the ashes into the opening, the small deliberation as he picked up the can and set it back down, which struck me as real brutality. I searched my wallet to see if I had anything to give the man in exchange for his spoiled soda, but I was only in possession of a twenty and that felt like too much to part with even out of a bizarre class guilt. I wondered, not for the first time, why my compassion seemed to lend itself only to the beautiful and paper-thin. Sometimes I think we must be born with a finite reservoir of empathy, and throughout our childhood it is depleted gleefully into every outstretched hand. But one day we run dry and what small mercy we have left becomes like native water to foreigners, sickening inside all bodies but our own. A clementine splits evenly under my touch, the juice running down the length of my arm. If I can hold something in my palm—the baby bird, still struggling—I might be able to love it.
 
***
 
Mutatis mutandis. Once the necessary changes have been made. Lately I have been thinking about what it is exactly that we need to change, but like most I tend to picture these changes only in terms of the outcome I desire. As if working an equation backwards with the solution already in mind, I envision the world I want—and afterwards decide what must be subtracted in order to get me there. But like many, I also struggle to see beyond my limited timeframe; the intangible outcome of the future is never quite near enough to frighten my reality. I often choose the guarantee of today’s fresh soda over the promise of tomorrow’s clean water. These necessary changes I relegate to the nebulous someday, and as such I make no vows to change today. Someday is a promise that floats unspoken, familiar lines fed to the forbidden mistress. We’ll be together one day. I’ll love you enough. Trust me. Fake words leave bullet holes in an impossible future. But how can we mend what we do not admit to be broken?
 
***
 
On a spring day, my grandmother and I cook soda bread in the kitchen. My hands are white with flour and she laughs when I add in too much butter.
 
“Are you trying to give me a heart attack?” Her eyes are blue and dancing. It is times like these when I forget that she slung slurs at my mother when my father first brought her home, and that she buried her fingers deep into dough and turned on the kitchen Sinatra as my grandfather colored his children’s bodies with their pristine white family values.
 
While we wait by the oven for the bread to blossom, I clean quietly next to her. I push up my sleeves and run my hands under the suds. The detergent burns against my skin, leaving it red and chapped.
 
“I don’t know how you do this,” I admit.
 
“I always said housewives worked harder than the Navy,” she replies, smiling idly. “Never believed me, of course. Not just singing a little ditty and frosting cupcakes. Real work as any.”
 
Feeling brave, I wager a question. It is not so often we have proper conversation. Like in that children’s telephone game, even my most cautious words eventually become perverted in her ears by phantom intermediaries. “Do you ever wish you could have done something else? You know, outside of taking care of the house?”
 
She doesn’t reply at first, and I think perhaps I’ll be hit by another treatise on the decaying American family and the evils of modern feminism brainwashing women into becoming scientists and lesbians. I brace myself, but instead my grandmother chuckles softly as if I’ve just humored her.
 
“I wouldn’t have had anything else to do,” she replies. “I suppose it is different for you, isn’t it? You can do whatever you want, if you want it badly enough.”
 
I had been accepted into university a few days ago, and the future feels not only reachable but broaching rapidly upon me. I do feel it opening these days, the unfurling mouth that the French call l’appel du vide. What makes the emptiness beckon, then, is not that it can be filled but that it might not be. It is the ambiguity, the uncertainty of what might happen where nothing has yet laid its claim, that tantalizes me so. I am scared, excited, living as I am in 2018, future of corporate daydreams and instant gratification.
 
“I guess times have changed,” I say at last.
 
“I didn’t really notice it.” She runs a dishtowel between her frayed fingers and sighs. “I didn’t really notice it change at all.”
 
***
 
My grandmother had a daughter before my father. She was pale and fiery-haired and wrote poetry in her textbooks. In the past I dreamt that we were friends and in those dreams we were always the same age. But now I am older and have ceased to dream of her. My grandmother never told me the words, but I learned them anyways: she was swimming and cramped and drowned. She was eighteen years old and they found her body in the water the next morning. These are the things that actually happened, but in my child-mind they left her there and she became a part of her resting place so that a little bit of her trickled into every cup of water that I drank. And when I drank it, I could feel her coursing through me, and if you think about it, didn’t that make me a little bit of her too? I never told this to my grandmother. She’d curse me if I did—that, I thought I knew. But when I graduate high school, eighteen as my aunt’s last days, my grandmother folds a shiny brooch into my hands and kisses me on the cheek.
 
“I was going to give it to her on her wedding day,” she tells me quietly. “But I am giving it to you instead. Don’t tell your sister.”
 
I want to ask why. I want to continue this conversation, because I feel my aunt like a phantom limb, and although I did not know her before the amputation, I can sense the space where she should have been and see the ripples of her absence on all the shiny surfaces. I have learned the sight of missing things too well to mistake it for any emptiness.
 
My grandmother knew loss, and because of that she knew change. She knew that growing old was a kind of bitter cutting-down, just a bigger house made to enclose a shrinking inside. She saw the disappearing figures and etched the imprints they left in her doorframe, and she learned not to wait for their return. Nothing ever lasted. She told me that once—forgive me if I cannot recall her exact words. They left me just as well. No one can be spared from the changing of the tide, our tiny ant-bodies are fragile upon this earth as the soda can. So easily we are sprung into dark waters by a greater creature; so easily we become memory, which itself is a kind of winter, until we become nothing at all but the substance of that same great creature—and indeed, this is only summer.
 
“The world is not made for you to be happy,” she once said to me bitterly, and the words tasted of dry cigarettes. “That’s what I hate about your generation. They think everything has to make them happy, that the entire world bends just to fit them.”
 
But I don’t think that the world wants me to be happy, or that my happiness can ever be furnished out of a place like this. I do think that the world bends though, not for any one person’s need, but for its own. We are just instruments to this process, our feet eroding the landscape and carving its path, but the end result does not belong to us. Imagine that: mutatis mutandis, all obvious changes considered. Let us change then, as we are so obviously in need of changing. And if we cannot change, let it be that we are the ones who must go in order to make everything alright in the end.
 
***
 
The fish swim in clear water and the sun sparkles, and the foxes trample through the snow, although not at the same time. The trees grow strong as bodies and stretch from limb to limb, crawling through the streets of Chicago until their roots plant firmly upon the tips of skyscrapers. There will be no voices for a long time, and when there will be voices again, they will not curse or yell but will sit quietly by the water, watching as the current pushes away and releases back towards them like a heartbeat. All of it belongs to the greatest living thing, the one that does not care who drinks upon its back—the only constant. Here, the air is mild. They’ve never thrown anything away that hasn’t been loved by the earth—and when the tide goes they will leave alongside it, forward into the world without us.
​ 

Jena Vallina

Jena Vallina is a writer and student at the University of Michigan, where she has been the recipient of four Hopwood Awards. In her writing, she seeks to expose the most uncomfortable, vulnerable parts of ourselves. Among other things, she is inspired by the confessional writing of Sylvia Plath, the films of Agnès Varda, the music of Fiona Apple, and her dog Dahlia whose ability to love everything in spite of everything is the biggest inspiration of all. "Conversations at the End of the World" is her first publication.