You would think of your grandmother Claudette Williams, a backup singer for a short-lived group called the Awakening, meeting your grandfather Luis Martinez, a quiet postman. Your mother would play a record by Alice Coltrane, and you would lie on the carpet and move your arms and legs in the shape of an angel until you safely arrived in 1970. All you had was her word, worth no more than paper money: a belief you had built your life around. You were never certain of the authenticity of any of the objects.
#Rain city time machine full#
A letter written by John Coltrane to his wife underneath a recorder full of pennies. The trumpet mouthpiece owned by Freddie Hubbard in a silver bowl on the end table. The picture of Bud Powell and Thelonious Monk sitting in Mary Lou Williams’s Harlem apartment rests on a cupboard in the hallway. It was a short-hand of things, people, places, and years you had mapped out in your mind to navigate childhood, and now, without her, meaning has “floated away as if she possessed a gravitational force that held together everything, even you. She possessed a spatial muscle memory: take three steps west of 1930 rain boots and then jump into the swamps of Florida. Your mother’s mind is this collection of ephemera from the near past that you haven’t touched since the funeral. Stacks of magazines tower over the dining room table. Old rotary phones from Atlanta line the living room wall. It’s a Ghost House, filled with your mother’s archive. You live in your mother’s, your grandmother’s, your great-grandmother’s house in Queens. You don’t look into her eyes because they are entrances to all these unsaid feelings, regret and longing, and you are afraid of how her face might crease into pity for her weak, sad daughter.Īda, do you know which came fi rst, mother or egg? It will lessen the pain, she says, embracing what hurts. You clench your teeth and she tells you to spit out your anger. In one she sits next to you and asks you to be grateful that she is dead.
All your mother has left for you are these rough-cut memories that both stingand shimmer when held too closely. She is an assistant professor in the Rutgers-Newark MFA program.Ī mother is a slippery thing: she brings you into the world and then departs. Her work has appeared in Harper’s Magazine, American Short Fiction, BOMB, and elsewhere. Bingham Prize for Debut Short Story Collection. Kumarasamy is the author of the linked story collection Half Gods, which was named a New York Times Editors’ Choice, was awarded the Bard Fiction Prize and the Story Prize Spotlight Award, and was a finalist for the PEN/Robert W. The following from Akil Kumarasamy's Meet Me At the Roaring Sea.