Xhenet Aliu - Brass

“Can you turn around?” you ask.

He does, without questioning why, and you scramble to find the T-shirt you never bothered to put back on the night before. You slip out of bed and dress in the previous day’s clothes, right down to the socks that are still damp from the previous day’s sweat. Dressing makes you feel more raw. You’re colder the more you move, and you realize that the henley you put on is never going to keep you warm. You have gravely overestimated the temperature in the southern United States, and you made a serious mistake in not bringing along the winter coat that you had naïvely looked at as a relic of your old New England life. You hadn’t even thought to check Weather.com before you left, one of the many oversights that you are finally acknowledging in a plan that is now too far under way to abandon. And you’re hungry. Starving. In need of more than the leftover Gardetto’s snack mix, especially since the premium rye crisps have already been vultured.

Your crummy motel shares a parking lot with a Walmart, a beacon of hope in an otherwise bleak strip mall. This is what the Mormon settlers must have felt when they set out for the Pacific but instead reached the Great Salt Lake: it wasn’t right, but it was right there.

“I have to go to Walmart,” you tell Ahmet.

“What for?” he asks.

“Just some stuff.”

He’s antsy to leave. He doesn’t bother to hide it, the way that the Ahmet from the day before would have. “Okay, but hurry up. I’ll throw your stuff in the car and meet you there.”

“Fine,” you say. As you cross the parking lot, you stare at a lady standing outside of a minivan cum mobile home, and she stares right back at you. She’s wearing a leather bomber jacket and gripping a mug of piping hot something with gloved hands, and you imagine how nice and warm it must be to be cloaked in that animal pelt. You bet it’d be worth killing something to be that warm.

Walking through the sliding doors into the Walmart feels like crossing over into the Emerald City, all warm and bright and swarming with people who’ve been hired just to tell you hello as you enter. So what if everything here is a placeholder, the thing you tell yourself you’ll just get for now until you can get a better version of it someday. You beeline for the women’s section to try on a gray hoodie with a soft nubby lining, and it warms you all the way to your bones. Then you swap out the hoodie for a full-on peacoat and it’s like getting a hug straight from God. It feels like armor, like there’s nothing that could penetrate that thick skin, even the sharpest fillet knife that a sociopathic trucker keeps in the bunk area of his rig.

You somehow managed to ignore your bladder for seven whole hours, and you realize now how badly you have to go, so you ramble around looking for a bathroom, only the laundry aisle smells so good that you have to stop by for a minute and just take it in. You’d been in Walmart perhaps more frequently than any other structure aside from your apartment and school, yet you never before appreciated its splendor, never before noticed how many ways it offers solutions to things like cleaning yourself up, orange bottles and blue bottles and purple and white, liquids and powders and capsules and pods. And everything moves along in a way that makes sense: the next aisle over is for the body, shelves the length of your apartment back home, all filled with body washes that invigorate or relax, whatever you need that morning. There are washes for men that women can’t resist and washes for women that women also can’t resist. You’d gone your whole life not ever knowing what a mountain zephyr smells like, and all along it could have been right there in your armpits.

Before you know it you’ve accumulated more than you can comfortably hold in your hands, but what’s that word your English teacher used once or twice? Serendipity! There’s an abandoned cart with a brand-new litter box and the wadded-up paper from some breakfast sandwich waiting for you in the next aisle over. You drop your stuff in the carriage and pull out the litter box and the paper, but then you think that you might like to get a cat to keep you company in Texas, so back in the cart the litter box goes. The cat will be gray and white and named Bojangles after the breakfast sandwich wrapper, and Bo is going to need some kibble and a soft bed to sleep on, so off you go to fulfill his needs and then some, the spoiled little bastard he’ll be.

By the time you feel the tap on your shoulder, you have an apartment for you and Bo fully furnished, and when you see Ahmet you think, Shit, don’t tell me that I’m supposed to include him, too.

“What are you doing?” he says.

You look down at the cart and shrug. It’s so obvious what you’re doing that you don’t feel the need to answer, but then again, it’s impolite to condescend, and you’re trying to turn over a new leaf. “Shopping,” you answer.

He scans the stuff in the carriage, and by the way his lip curls over his tooth—just that one sharp canine tooth that sits too high in his gums, so it looks like it belongs in someone else’s mouth—you know he’s not happy about something, maybe the color of the cereal bowls you picked out. They’re eggshell blue, delicate-looking but indestructible, more than sturdy enough to handle the Frosted Mini-Wheats you’d picked up in the cereal aisle, along with a couple boxes of Count Chocula for treat time.

“Are you kidding me?” he asks.

“I need some stuff for Texas,” you say.

“A litter box? A Brita filter?”

You’re beginning to take offense. A minute before they seemed like nice things to have, but he’s making you doubt your taste.

“You’re kidding. You’re kidding me, right? This isn’t your carriage.”

Is it your carriage? Suddenly it doesn’t look all that familiar. Eggshell-blue bowls? The real Luljeta would have chosen bone. Luljeta would have chosen Shower Fresh deodorant over Mountain Fresh.

“This is a joke. You’re just playing with me, right?” he asks.

You shake your head. He’s right, this isn’t your carriage. You are just playing with him.

“You did not just go crazy, right?”

“No,” you say.

“You’re not crazy. This stuff isn’t yours.”

“I’m tired,” you say. “I am really tired.”

He turns around and begins walking away. “Let’s go,” he says, and though that doesn’t sound like the best idea you’d ever heard, it’s better than anything you can come up with at the moment.

On the way back to the car, the woman from the minivan stares at you, her gloved right hand holding a cigarette and her left cocked up on her hip. You’re pretty sure she smiles at you, and so you smile back. It’s the least you could do for each other, these little acts of kindness in these little blacktop moments.

You were never a good sleeper. You’d stopped crying through the night at only a few months old, but that didn’t mean that you slept through it. When you first learned to stand, you would immediately rise to your feet when your mother put you in the crib, your hands on the bars as if in a prison, and often she would wake to find you standing in the very same position. She wondered if you’d moved from that position at all during the night, if you’d forgiven her abandonment of you long enough to rest for even an hour, but mostly she was grateful to you for letting her sleep if you weren’t going to. Perhaps she should’ve been more concerned for your well-being than for her own, because she must have read somewhere that sleep was possibly more vital to the growing human body than food.

She’d told you about your sleepless infant nights as if in apology for the sleepless teenage ones you frequently experience now. She told you that you can somewhat compensate for lost sleep with fifteen-minute power naps, according to Redbook or some other women’s mag that she browses through in the checkout line at the grocery store, but you suck at napping even more than at night sleep. Napping is the worst. It brings on the worst dreams, the sleep paralysis that you are not fully convinced comes from misfiring brain synapses instead of the paranormal, and so you avoid sleeping during the daytime when at all possible. Sometimes it isn’t possible, like in the passenger seat of a car after a night of so little rest that it almost doesn’t count as a night at all, when the long, tedious, rolling miles of I-20 have the effect of a narcotic. You feel yourself succumb and struggle to open your heavy eyelids, but when you do, you see cockroaches scurrying over the dashboard, clogging up the heater vents, a solid sheet of them, one throbbing red mass of cockroach. They drop under their own weight onto your feet and thighs, and you try to scream and flail but you’re frozen. All you can muster is a little closed-throat moan that doesn’t convey the terror you feel, that instead sounds like you smell something good in the oven, those crescent rolls from Christmas dinner.