Smoke
after Ocean Vuong
I remember your car lighter. I remember your car lighter’s orange tip igniting the cigarette at your lips. I remember your breath thickening the cabin air. Back then you smoked every drive home. I remember the smoke replacing words, explanations, like why you were always the one who picked me up from school and why I colored my fingernails with pink and purple markers. I remember the smoke as our language, our world, easing me for those ten minutes until we had to squeeze into the driveway, beside Dad’s truck, and exit our scented haze for the house.
I remember the last night I saw you breathing. I remember you breathing erratically in your hospital bed, the same way your limbs twitched and jerked when your medicine stopped working. I remember the Filipino nurse apologizing that he didn’t speak Tagalog either. By then that’s all you were speaking. I remember you speaking like you had already left, or returned, to another world. I remember me speaking and failing to explain why I’d kept our worlds so far apart, even after Dad had passed, even though Arizona is just one state away. Because I didn’t have the words.
“Remember?” Kai mumbles, lifting the covers for me to return to sleep, “Everything’ll be fine.” I stand at the bedroom window. The smoke that woke me filters through the screen. He must have sensed me stir, assumed I’d forgotten the reports of prescribed burns on the mesa. And, for a moment, I did. I accept his invitation and ease into the rise and fall of his chest. I close my eyes, and as the air thickens, I imagine the scented haze as your breath. I imagine language as only a screen. I imagine—that night in the hospital—I didn’t need to have the words.
Matthew Torralba Andrews is a queer writer of mixed Filipino descent. His fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in Apogee Journal, South Carolina Review, BULL, Cosmonauts Avenue, and elsewhere. He has received support from the Tin House Writers Workshop and the Community of Writers Fiction Workshop. He holds an MFA in creative writing from Eastern Washington University and lives in Flagstaff, Arizona, where he is at work on a story collection.
