swatting a fuzzy green ball

"Now, years later, he recognized that with a child on the way, this would elude him — enough money to avoid worry. To feel secure and at peace. And he’d certainly never finish writing that book. No, sir. From now on, his life would be a working one. He would scramble for dollars. Get a kid through college? He’d probably never have enough. No weekday mornings and afternoons on tennis courts. That much was assured. He wouldn’t be wasting his time swatting a fuzzy green ball."

~~ from "An Amazing Turn" by Alex Kudera

the way to her mouth

"She couldn't find the way to her mouth, her hands kept wandering off to the right. I helped her to eat her cake. When her fingers were empty, she continued to raise them to her lips. I wonder if a child does that; I can't remember."

~~ from I Remain in Darkness by Annie Ernaux

It could all go wrong.

"And then he thought of what could go wrong — the child could fall off a rollercoaster or drown in a lake. Get hit in the head by a ball in a Little League game and suffer irreversible brain damage. Or be a complainer — at his side to criticize his every move — or have a learning disability or autism. They could do it all wrong; they could spoil their child — buy too much stuff, or the wrong stuff — all the electronics that ruin a kid. As an adult — into his or her 30s — his offspring could call up to whine and plead for money. Or could get killed in a bar — an innocent sipping cocktails in a lawless country — or, worse, kidnapped by aliens from outer space. They would beam down and sweep away his child, who would be disappeared as if America were Stalin’s Russia or Mao’s China. It could all go wrong."

~~ from "An Amazing Turn" by Alex Kudera

They did not want us.

"They did not want us as neighbors in their valleys. They did not want us as friends. We lived in unsightly shacks and could not speak plain English. We cared only about money. Our farming methods were poor. We used too much water. We did not plow deeply enough. Our husbands worked us like slaves. They import those girls from Japan as free labor. We worked in the fields all day long without stopping for supper. We worked in the fields late at night by the light of our kerosene lamps. We never took a single day off. A clock and a bed are two things a Japanese farmer never used in his life. We were taking over their cauliflower industry. We had taken over their spinach industry. We had a monopoly on their strawberry industry and had cornered their market on beans. We were unbeatable, unstoppable economic machine and if our progress was not checked the entire western United States would soon become the next Asiatic outpost and colony."

~~ from The Buddha in the Attic by Julie Otsuka

An Amazing Turn

I'm grateful that the New Oxford Review published "An Amazing Turn."

the hood

"The tricky thing about the hood is that you're always working, working, working, and you feel like something's happening, but really nothing's happening at all. I was out there every day from seven a.m. to seven p.m., and every day it was: How do we turn ten rand into twenty? How do we turn twenty into fifty? How do I turn fifty into a hundred? At the end of the day we'd spend it on food and maybe some beers, and then we'd go home and come back and it was: How do we turn ten into twenty? How do we turn twenty into fifty? It was a whole day's work to flip that money. You had to walking, be moving, be thinking. You had to get to a guy, meet a guy. There were many days we'd end up back at zero, but I always felt like I'd been very productive."

~~ from Born A Crime: Stories From A South African Childhood by Trevor Noah