By JAMES K. BOYCE
With photos by TIANNE STROMBECK
Sitting on a boulder one morning on a little island in northwestern Ontario, I watched a loon fishing about fifty yards offshore. The air and water were dead calm, the lake surface mirroring the clouds above and the trees along the shoreline.
For Ana María Alonso
It was late October, and my half-sister, Nikki, and I walked arm in arm with our stepmother through the streets of Caracas. The sweet metallic smell of gasoline, ever-present in the city, mixed with the acrid sourness of tropical flowers decaying at the end of the rainy season to create a pungent indolic scent. The sun had set behind Mount Ávila while we were at the party, so we walked under the glow of streetlights toward our car parked a few blocks away. Even though Nikki and I hadn’t anticipated needing nice clothes for this visit, we’d each thrown a dress into our suitcase at the last minute. The special occasion turned out to be our step-cousin’s son’s second birthday. The click of our high heels echoed through empty streets. Armed robberies, carjackings, gang activity, and police shoot-outs had contributed to a climate of fear and insecurity amongst residents, who no longer went out after dark unless necessary. But our stepmother, Inger, never bothered with such warnings—she entrusted her life (and ours) to fate.
It was March 2023, and I was alone in Wellington. The creative writing class I’d traveled there to teach had ended. Antipodean summer was ending too, night falling earlier, rain dripping from the lemonwood trees, the gray surface of the harbor whipped and wrinkled by a wind that roared ceaselessly through the Cook Strait.
By RIMA BRUSI
Translated from the Spanish by JESSICA POWELL
Excerpted from Phantoms
In January 1970, two months before my conception, John Lennon and Yoko Ono shaved their heads, and a few weeks later they released the single “Instant Karma!”
If this thing I’m writing were a script, my parents’ acid-filled days on New York’s Lower East Side would be accompanied by this song. This is what I’m thinking about today as I talk to my mother, Teté, on the phone. This is mainly how we communicate: in-person visits rarely go well for us. In fact, our life together has always been more or less a disaster. We maintain our relationship, what remains of it, with the help of the telephone and letters.
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