A SHORT STORY
by Jeanie Kortum
Jeanie Kortum is the author of the novel Ghost Vision, loosely based on her experience living in a Greenland village at the top of the world. She researched her next novel, Stones, of which this story is a part, by joining a hunter-gatherer tribe in Africa. In 1994, in partnership with the National Park Service, she founded A Home Away from Homelessness, an organization dedicated to helping homeless children. Profiled by CBS News, Kortum is also a journalist. She makes her home in Northern California.
FACES PRESS AGAINST the window of my cab. I see a nose, the camouflage pattern of uniforms, the sharp glint of a gun. Soldiers, I think, and curl my hand tightly around the handle of my suitcase.
More men move behind the cab. They begin to speak in a jagged language, almost foreign to me after my two years living in America. A soldier shines a flashlight through the window. Its beam snakes across the shabby upholstery, touches my face, then travels on to the back of the taxi driver’s head.
It’s as though the light activates my thoughts. Stray, divided, unimportant reactions fill my head. I hope Mama’s present hasn’t broken. When I get to the youth hostel, I’ll take a shower.
“Step outside, ma’am,” says one of the faces. He speaks in formal, careful Katiku, probably enjoying his small authority. I fumble for the latch of the door, and when it finally swings open, it makes a sweet rusty sound like the gate in my mother’s garden that leads to the cow pasture. As I stand and my lungs fill, I find what it is I’ve forgotten. The air, the air. I’ve forgotten how old it is, how fragrant, how it travels across a long distance. The night is different too. Long and black, almost thick, it comes to drape my shoulders.
“Didn’t you know there’s a curfew on?” asks a soldier. Long holes have been punctured into his earlobes, stretching them until they nearly drape his shoulders. I wonder what happened to his ear pellets, where the inserts are now. This tribal fashion of ear piercing contrasts with the fastidiousness of his uniform. I remind myself not to stare.
“Well, didn’t you?” repeats the soldier. In his indignation I hear something connected with his position, and the starched corners of his shirt collar. “Well?” He’s beginning to sound angry.
I come back to attention. “Yes,” I manage to reply. “They told us on the plane when we landed.”
“Then what are you doing out after curfew?”
I sift through everything I could mention. I could tell him I have just been offered an important job with the land reform movement. I could tell him I’m a student, just returning from studying abroad. But maybe they frown on female academics. If I tell them why I’m here and where I’ve come from, the information might make them angrier.
A familiar impatience stirs. Pay attention, I berate myself; if you concentrate rather than floating away like you usually do, you might be able to figure a way out of this mess.
I talk to myself all the time. I make lists and schedules, give speeches, exhort rather than really converse. Even as a little girl I had to discipline myself to speak efficiently. The discipline has certainly paid off. My interior pushing kept me going to school long after most of my schoolmates had quit. That same talking won me a scholarship to the university and now has brought me home triumphant, full of pride, after studying in America.
But somehow tonight, breathing this old air, I can’t seem to think of the right thing to say.
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