When they meet in person, it’s bound to be awkward. How do they think of what to say? Your eyes are black butterflies, black marigolds. Your neck is warm topaz. O, that you would only kiss me with the kisses of your mouth.
The train at last pulls into the Agra station. Full of excitement, Lauren flips through the guidebook one last time, looking for a five-star restaurant where she thinks she will take me.
A small boy waits behind her in the line to exit the train. People are as eager now to leave as they were to get on. The boy alternates between trying to make eye contact with Lauren and hiding his face against his mother’s legs. Lauren smiles at the boy’s mother, whose smile in return is polite but rather small. Lauren looks at the boy instead, with his long lashes that remind her of mine. The boy is shy but looks into Lauren’s green eyes intensely, no doubt liking them. People are yawning and talking, moving forward, and Lauren moves too. She pictures dazed butterflies and the sheen of frightened wings beating above her head, pictures the two of us having a son, as she searches among the people waiting on the platform for me, the woman she still thinks of as her girlfriend, the unseen one. And in the sequence that I imagine, a woman comes to the station to meet her: that lucky woman—me—Nisha—who has not lost Lauren yet, who knows enough to have said Yes to her love. Yes.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
NO BOOK BECOMES REAL without the love of some reader. Thanks go to Michelle Dotter, first reader to decide these stories should be published in the Dzanc Books Short Story Prize collection series. Thanks also for kind, incisive, and really dedicated editing that made publishing with Dzanc live up to everything other writers said about why they love indie presses. Thanks also to Lane Zachary, agent extraordinaire and a wonderful editor in her own right, for kindness as well, but also fearless honesty and loyalty.
Thanks to the renowned authors who pulled me up into what I have come to recognize as not only a “community” but an aerie, a place of soothing, cool, regard and care for each word that we write. Diana Abu-Jaber, first one to say the book had “magic” in it (I’m now a believer but wasn’t at first). Jamie Ford, big-hearted optimist/ realist. Peter Rock, from a slightly amused perspective of integrity. Skip Horack, teacher to so many wonderful writers as well as a thrilling and warm writer of acclaim. New comrades like Emma Eisenberg, childhood friends like Dohra Ahmad, social media comrades like Amber Noelle Sparks, Courtney Maum, and Allegra Hyde, and mentors like Victoria Chang (whose poetry I learn from constantly). Amelia Gray, whose writing is so multidimensional and textured and gripping, it actually gave me confidence in the editing process to learn she’d liked the book. Jeff Vander Meer, both a generous and an incredibly imaginative writer citizen. Anthony Marra, whose stories about Chechnya I remember reading during med school and enjoying so much. And Lauren Groff, whose grace and encouragement of emerging writers is well-known but still delighted and surprised me.
Thanks too to everyone at MacDowell, where one of the stories was written from start to finish inside of a two-and-a-half-week residency, and where I first really acknowledged to myself that I “am a writer,” whatever else I might be. Also warm thanks to Sewanee Writers Conference, where I got up the nerve to read and discovered how much I love performing my own work (Randall Kenan: thinking of you). Thanks too to the other teachers and friends at Sewanee who helped me “believe”—Steve Yarborough, Shanti Sekaran, Marilyn Nelson, Michael Knight, Venita Blackburn. The posse. Various amazing and generous editors made these stories better on every level—Tom Jenks at Narrative Magazine; Anna Schachter at Chattahoochee Review; Mary Akers at r.k.v.r.y.; Bill Berry at aaduna; Kelly Luce and Jenn Baker and Michael Seidlinger, Electric Lit editors who never fail to inspire; and Lydia Kiesling and Julie Buntin and Jimin Han, my comrades at The Millions.
Thanks to my writing partners who kept me going before I believed—Anna Depalo, Jennifer Hudson, Christian Mohler—and super smart teachers like Adam Sexton. Thanks too to writers who took out time to encourage me, like Meg Wolitzer and Min Jin Lee; I learn both from your example and also from the kind words you said to me. To my parents, who paid for my undergrad and came to my first “story telling contest” performances. To my brother Ganesh, whom I think of every single day.
And the ones who are the center of the world: Nazli, Orhan, Muhamet. Always. You three.
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