Excerpt from Short Story, "Evergreen"
Alexandra Cali, 2020
When we were little, the sun-drenched blocks that made up Grandma’s neighborhood felt like our entire world. On July evenings, the horizon would hum as the heat worked its way along the coast. Children with sun-bleached hair clad in matching overalls would kick their rubber ball against the tin door of the abandoned auto body garage. The chain link fence around our grandmother’s house would become hot to the touch, and each of us would bet sticks of Five Gum on who could clasp the rungs of metal for the longest amount of time. Grandma would be inside the house, the house her father had built, that three generations of our family had been raised in. She would throw open the small window above the cast iron sink, and the pops of motorcycle exhaust and buses grunting back to life after pulling away from the curb would mix with the hiss of water filling up pots and pans.
Grandma always made the same meal on Sundays during the summer; Rosetto ravioli that came in the light blue freezer bag, prepared in a glass pan. Jerked chicken and vegetables mixed together in a casserole dish. Potato salad that our uncle used to put in a tupperware and feed to the dogs in the yard after dinner.
My sister and I would flip up the embroidered cloth and sit underneath the kitchen table, exchanging rubber outfits for our Polly Pockets as we watched Grandma’s feet shuffle back and forth. She always wore shoes in the house. We used to wonder if she wore them right up until it was time for bed. After a while, she would grow tired of our giggling and arguing and shoo us into the yard where our uncles sat in plastic lawn chairs, warped and faded from the sun. Sometimes they were smoking, other times they fanned themselves with newspapers or slept.
She would call out from the window above the cast iron sink, “come back later and I’ll feed you. Leave Grandma to work for now.” The white linen curtains would snap in the breeze, an extension of her sun-spotted arm that reached out and pointed at the sprawling neighborhood of one-story homes. And with that, the two of us would take off running. My sister, in her jelly sandals and the thick plastic bracelets that clacked against her wrists as she ran. And me, in my flip flops and the yellow top with the plastic buttons in the front shaped like hearts.
Our feet would slap against the pavement, our shadows bouncing in and out of focus in the hazy summer light. We didn’t ask where the other wanted to go. Instinctually, we would fly toward the Gildersleeve trailer park. We liked it there because we didn’t look like anyone in Gildersleeve, which some residents found fascinating while others were mildly amused.
Grandma lived in a place called Copiague, New York. It was a working class area of Long Island that had long been occupied by Italian immigrants and their offspring. They were labor Union people in Copiague: carpenters, mechanics, and track foramen for the Long Island Railroad.
Where we grew up, the men had massive round bellies, dark deep-set eyes, and wore gold chains with crucifixes. They coughed when they laughed, chainsmoked in the faint light from a neighbor's garage, and pulled their wives into the laps to give them kisses on their backs. The women were loud and affectionate and had long press-on nails. They wore velour dresses and robes with neon leopard spots. When they spoke, their whole bodies became animated, twitching and springing up joyfully as though they were spurred on by marionette strings. We loved watching them.
No one in Gildersleeve ever knew what to make of us. We were le bambine miste, the little mixed ones. "Where did you come from? Who made you?" they would call out as we flew by in search of other kids our age, preferably those who had toys. At the time, I gave no thought to their frequent questions. It had always been that way.
When our neighbors talked about us, they made it seem as though we were born from some sort of experiment. Created in a dish in a lab, then dropped off on the South Shore of Long Island to cause confusion. With our tan skin and almond shaped eyes, many of the women in the park would emerge to brush through our hair lovingly before asking what our mother looked like. We accepted their curiosity without hesitation, because it felt like a very special form of attention that adults only gave to other adults.
Excerpt from Short Story, "Bracing"
Alexandra Cali, 2019
The diamond-shaped shadows cast by spaces in the sagging fence appeared and then faded across her jaw. Her gaze fell to her lap, with her blonde, barely there lashes being washed out by the heavy slab of sunlight illuminating the edge of the field. It was hard to stare straight in this sort of light, and the sun had zapped her of any excess energy. The August heat was oppressive and menacing, draining the town of much life and forcing residents into a reclusive state of sipping iced tea and napping in the shade of screened-in porches.
She’d called earlier that morning, asking him to meet her at the field. He’d been fanning himself with a stack of his sister’s old Cosmopolitans, head pressed against the kitchen cabinet in an effort to absorb a small amount of the cold trapped in the hard oak doors. And then he heard the landline ring.
“The phone, Lawrence. It’s for you.” Called his sister from the next room over. He swallowed hard, feeling the humidity mix with his perspiration and trail down the back of his neck.
“If it’s someone calling about the paper route, just tell them it was too hot to make rounds this morning. I’ll be on it tomorrow once things have cooled down.” He called back, fanning in desperation. 2019 was being called one of the hottest summers on record in the US, and Connecticut had become absolutely unbearable.
There was a pause where he could tell his sister was listening to the other person on the line, so he closed his eyes to try and drown out the heat, wish it away. “It’s Grace Sanders.” He heard her say. And with that, his sister’s magazines found themselves scattered across the light blue linoleum of the kitchen floor.
“Hi Ren.” She said quietly, the receiver dulling but not completely concealing her uneasiness.
“Hi Grace.” Ren replied, twisting the phone’s cord at a measured pace between his thumb and finger. He waited for her to say something, but as each moment crept past he could feel the tension mounting, taking shape in a daunting wave of silence.
As he stood in the hallway, his eyes began to flutter. "Shit." He thought to himself as the tears formed behind his eyes. Ren's mind began to drift, as the tears gave way to memories from this time last year.
How the phone would ring and he’d spring upwards, only to be met by his sister’s eyes rolling in mock frustration as she watched her programs and ate grapes straight from the plastic container. He’d push the receiver under the nape of his neck and drag the phone as far away from the wall as he could before settling underneath the nearby staircase. Ren wouldn’t have to say anything at all, Grace would just start in. The breathless recaps of her day would turn into groggy whispers as the night wore on. Sometimes she’d just describe things to him because they’d run out of topics to discuss, and she didn’t want to hang up.
“My lamp, the pinkish one by my bed, you know the one?”
“Yeah.”
“It casts this weird shadow against my wall. It’s like a rectangle, but more slanted. And the shadow gets a little blue around the edges. Shouldn’t shadows be all dark? What makes it blue in the corners?”
“I don’t know.” Ren replied.
“Maybe it has something to do with my wallpaper, and how the light bounces off of it and mixes with the colors, you know?” She mused.
“Maybe.” He said with a smile, watching the hands on the parlor clock move towards 1:30 am.
“Yea, maybe.” She said.
And there he stood a year later, listening to the hum of the phone line and nothing else. No giggling fits, no advice being given, no updates on anything.
“Are you alrigh-”
“So listen.” She interjected. “I thought it’d be nice to see each other one last time before September rolls around. And we both, you know, head off to school.”
He thought about the time they drove out to the lake for the night. The frayed towel she’d turned a light pink in the wash draped across the backseat of his parent's car, the blurred glimpses of her silhouette in the chrome of the dashboard as she pulled a sweatshirt over her damp hair. Trembling hands cradled a plastic lighter, drawing close to the white jutting out from the corner of her mouth. Her jaw was kept taught in an effort to suppress her laughter, as she balanced the cigarette in place with half a smile.
“I thought you used to be a diver, Sanders. That was a disappointing showing out there. I wanted kicks and flips and back tucks.”
“There aren’t kicks or back tucks in diving, Ren. That’s gymnastics. Wrong sport.” The butt of her cigarette filled the corners of her mouth and the pockets beneath her eyes with a soft red, highlighting the peaks of a grin she was attempting to quiet.
“Thrashing around in water that’s four feet deep and throwing mud from the bottom of the lake at me is hardly a sport,” Ren murmured through the space between the chair and the headrest of the driver’s seat with a smile.
She laughed and leaned forward, pressing her lips into the side of his neck. And with that, she collapsed backward and kicked his seat. That was always their way. Back and forth, never too sweet for too long. It all seemed like forever ago.
“Ren?” She asked. “You still there?”
His throat, hot and acidic, seemed momentarily incapable of making a sound. “Sure,” he let out. “That’d be nice I think.”
“Great. I’ll see you at the field on Mason around 5.” And with that, the line clicked and turned into a low rumble.