Calling My Name

by Liara Tamani

Get out and go—that’s all air wants to do. If it had a mom, she’d probably say, “You better sit your butt down somewhere.” But it has no mom to tell it what to do. So it plays free. Flies outside, catches all the sounds, mixes them up like rainbow flecks in a twirling baton, and tosses them into our room: a pink box with barking birds, crying leaves, rustling music from cars one, two, three blocks away, chirping dogs, babies booming and booming and booming with bass, alive, until the air wants to run free again, and rushes out—whoosh!—trying to take everything with it.

But when I get too still, the motion-sensored light forgets I’m here. I move and it remembers. Move and it remembers. Move and it remembers until I’m tired of moving and I lie still—forgotten, forgetting.

Nobody messes with that Houston heat. That Houston heat does not play. It kills people, young and old, running on fields, lying in hospital beds and cribs in non-air-conditioned homes.

We just throw stones and get stoned, not like they did in Friday, but like they tried to do in the Book of John when the Pharisees caught that woman cheating on her husband.

She and Daddy turn back to the asphalt at the same time, a black spine, yellow grass on either side—opened pages stretched flat to meet the blue sky.

Fifty-fifty, fifty from him and fifty from me—that’s how love is supposed to be. Fifty apiece, like each of us putting two quarters in a piggy bank and keeping two in our pockets, Washington’s raised faces rubbing, his silver cheeks kissing. But Andre’s love is greedy, trying to take three of my quarters, leaving me with only twenty-five cents.