HADIYYAH KUMA

Wednesdays Suck

In bed on a Wednesday, I take a lot of medications like Frank Ocean’s ‘Thinkin Bout You,” and Kevin Abstract’s “Peach.” I don’t have clinical depression but I’m feeling depressed. I’m feeling worse and less cute than the sad-eyed Eeyore pillow my mother bought me years ago that presses against my sore lower back. I also have my period, which maybe makes it worse. But it’s a pattern, I suppose, because Wednesday is the middle day and fucks everyone up just like the middle finger. That’s why I named my middle finger Wednesday. Wednesday is in my mouth right now; I text Sparrow with the other hand and ask if they could bring me some food. I don’t why I did that because I don’t actually want company, especially not Sparrow’s because they make me nervous. I’m not completely smitten, just stimulated. My blood is like a waterfall down there. I start chewing on Wednesday like it’s a churro, digging up the skin around my cuticle.

Sparrow is there in an hour, plopping Beyoncé’s Lemonade vinyl onto my lap and sitting on my night table. It rocks a bit as they sit on it, but I don’t complain. I’m too nervous to complain. My pad might be flowing over, but I don’t get up. I’m too nervous to get up. “I thought you were bringing me food,” I start to say, but I look Lemonade and say, “thanks so much,” instead.

It’s about four in the afternoon and the daylight’s making lines across our clothes. Sparrow’s shirt is a shimmery lavender and looks like some sort of weird synthetic disco blend. We play Lemonade on the turntable and Sparrow starts dancing, rocking my night table until my old Cinderella lamp slides off. They catch it with one hand and smirk at me. “Thanks,” I say again, hearing my voice drop an octave. The body rocking induced more flowing. I feel my heart thudding in my forehead and I become an extra bass drum to ‘Love Drought.’

“That’s all you’ve said to me since I got here,” says Sparrow playfully, “how are you doing?”

“Okay,” I manage to say.

Sparrow observes Wednesday and the redness around the nail. They make it tingle with their eyes; some people can do that.

“Didn’t you have work today?” I ask Sparrow. Sparrow is a music teaching assistant at the public school down their street. They teach kids pop hits on the xylophone. They teach kids that Beyoncé is not “just for black people,” because one kid said that, and it stuck with them. They’ve complained to me about feeling conflicted teaching a bunch of white middle schoolers why they should respect Beyoncé. I told them I felt similarly encouraging my friends to watch 90s Bollywood films, but I don’t think it helped, I think it made Sparrow want to quit.

“I didn’t go because it’s really nice weather,” they say, and they get up and open the windows before I can respond. Sparrow pulls their hair back into a tiny brown bun. The bone at the back of their neck moves up and down as they loop the hair through and so do my hips, but not conspicuously.

A person named Sparrow should look like a sparrow. Sparrow looks like a feline, something that would eat a bird. Sparrow is a contradiction, and there are not many other contradictions that can make me feel so invigorated. A person that looks like a sparrow would bring me ramen or fries, not a Beyoncé vinyl. The open window blows air into my skin and I think about getting up and going to Sparrow and pressing my body into theirs. ‘All Night’ plays. I think maybe they felt that thought, because their shoulders tense. My blood flows and flows, but I don’t think about it. I just think about the warmth as the corners of my pad grow heavier. I make an involuntary sound in back of my throat that I imagine a baby lion would make when it wants love.

Sparrow catches the sound, sits next to me on my bed. Pulls Eeyore out from behind me and tucks him under the night stand. Takes Wednesday and pushes it into their mouth. I’m surprised for only seconds and after that I grow warmer. I tuck my knees up and let my blood leak out onto my sheets in two separate directions. One leaks straight down my leg and other reaches toward Sparrow like a river does to a parched wildcat. The liquid movement cools my body down. Wednesday makes wet circles in Sparrow’s mouth. Wednesday makes wet circles in other places too. Nothing else matters. Wednesday fucks in all kinds of ways.

Assumptions

She is more careful now than ever before. Call her J. You wait for me to tell you why she is more careful. You want to me to say that it is because crime seems to be skyrocketing in downtown Toronto, and that women just can’t catch a break. Women are afraid of the dark, you want to me to say.

Well I won’t say it, because it isn’t true. Everything goes out at night just like it goes out in the day. The only difference is that the moon glows and sometimes it doesn’t, but the sun is always invisible. A very overused metaphor is that stars are always there even if you can’t see them. Some people, like you, think that even if it’s cliché it’s a beautiful idea. That is very disturbing to J. That’s kind of creepy, that the stars are always there even if you can’t see them. That’s why Santa Claus is a meme, because he is old, white, and voyeuristic. Who’s to say that the stars aren’t the same as him? But then, J thinks, humans are made of stardust, not Santa. Maybe this should make a difference. But then she is also scared of water, and humans are made of that too. Fearing and accepting, fearing and accepting. It’s very tiring for her, you have to understand that. It’s not simple to hate what’s inside of you, and so on.

Crime is not skyrocketing in Toronto. It is increasing a bit, just a bit. Enough for it to be visible what is going on. Gun violence especially. J doesn’t stay home because of it, she goes out. She attends classes and meets with her friends and never asks anybody if they also think stars are creepy. She is smart, and knows that her musings sometimes worry people, especially her good friends who will notice even the slightest change in the lines around her mouth. Compared to the streets of Tiger Bay in Georgetown, Guyana, she is probably not in danger of being pickpocketed. One of her distant cousins might have been victimized there. You understand this, but maybe you had to Google ‘Tiger Bay’ to get a better picture. That’s okay, it’s infamous.

Fearing and accepting, fearing and accepting. It’s the way she goes out that has changed. Turning eighteen was the year her awareness grew. There it was one day, her body. This tight little object that only existed in front of the mirror. J’s fists roll themselves into spheres that, when she thinks about it, remind her of that cartoon with the bunnies made of clay. You’re looking that up too probably. I googled, “cartoon with bunnies made of clay,” and it popped up. Miffy and Friends is the name of the show. Miffy the bunny doesn’t have fingers, just a round end to her arm. That’s how J feels when she goes out. She feels everyone staring at that end of her arm. They stare so deep sometimes it is sickening to her and she must sit down. But even her sitting is done with hesitation. She just worries. Worries and fears, worries that turn into fears.

When J was a little baby girl people thought she was mute. Almost everybody said that a cat had got her tongue. She always pictured a black and white cat catching her tongue in its little paws as she spoke. The way they scoop fish up out of a tank; very sweet, very natural. A man tells J she is a born dancer in a grocery store, but J has never danced. These kinds of things she remembers when she feels like Miffy the bunny. When she is not on the peaceful streets of Toronto, she is in her hostile bed. These are the miffed thoughts that stop her from getting healthy REM sleep. She is careful to not look at herself in the mirror. She is careful to clear her throat before she answers the phone. She takes special care not to stare at the sky, so that the stars will not infiltrate the anonymity of her eyes. Unlike you, she does not envision the vast universe spread out before her and feel infantile. Nor does she contemplate existence. She only sees her toes at the edge of her bed, curled tight and slightly shaking.

Hadiyyah Kuma is an Indo-Guyanese writer from Toronto, Ontario. Her name is pronounced Ha-dee-yah. Her work has been featured in places like The Rumpus, the Hart House Review, Cosmonauts Avenue, SmokeLong Quarterly, and Yes Poetry. Her debut poetry chapbook tired, but not spectacularly was recently published by The Soapbox Press. Hadiyyah's poetry has been nominated for Best of the Net 2019 and she is currently working on her second chapbook.