The Office of Historical Corrections

by Danielle Evans

There was always something they wouldn’t tell everybody, and she wanted to be told, which meant she had to look like a real person to them, like a person whose mother deserved to live, like someone who loved somebody.

All of her adult life people have asked Rena why she goes to such dangerous places, and she has always wanted to ask them where the safe place is. The danger is in chemicals and airports and refugee camps and war zones and regions known for sex tourism. The danger also sometimes took their trash out for them. The danger came over for movie night and bought them a popcorn maker for Christmas. The danger hugged her mother and shook her father’s hand.

“You have no idea how much you take for granted,” my mother told me the first time I’d brought a white friend home to play. But she was wrong about that—you take nothing for granted when the price of it is etched across the face of the person you love the most, when you are born into a series of loans and know you will never be up to the cost of the debt.

Here is what you have to understand about Charlie Sullivan: his life at home as a child was bad enough that joining the army at the tail end of World War I seemed like a safer and more cheerful alternative.

I believed in government, or at least believed in it more than the alternative. That my country might always expect me to audition for my life I accepted as fact, but I trusted the public charter of national government more than I trusted average white citizens acting unchecked.

Besides the tablecloths, the decor is all old photographs and postcards that they scrounged up from wherever, because you know how white people love their history right up until it’s true.

I looked at Nick’s sleeping face, but instead of calming me, it reminded me how easy it was to slip into wanting something, how easy to become something else by wanting.