Richie Narvaez is the author of Roachkiller and Other Stories, Hipster Death Rattle, Holly Hernandez and the Death of Disco, and Noiryorican. He lives in the Bronx.
Helena sits at the kitchen table, trembling hands around a mug of tea, steam curling like wisps of some dream. Outside, another gray December day in Scranton—meager snow drifting down.
Kai shuffles in, hoodie pulled tight around their thin frame. The kid doesn’t speak much in the mornings—just like Helena. “Hey, Ma,” they mumble.
“Hey.”
“You sleep?”
“Some.”
“Liar,” Kai says. “You were screaming again.”
Kai grabs the last piece of acorn bread. Since the tariffs, the price of bread has skyrocketed, so Helena has been baking her own.
“You sleep?” she asks.
“Yeah, visions of sugar plums. Weird,” Kai says, taking tiny bites. “I actually thinking I’m beginning to like this.”
“Sorry it’s not gingerbread.”
“No worries, Ma.”
Someone knocks on the outside kitchen door—and Kai immediately gets up and leaves the room. Helena knows who it is by the insistent knock.
“A blessed Christmas Eve to you!” says Martha, her neighbor from the end of the block. “I just wanted to remind you of tonight’s Neighborhood Patriots Christmas Prayer Meeting.”
“Can’t wait,” says Helena, fake smiling.
* * *
Lately, Helena has been thinking of Canada. When her friend Paige said she was going, they’d been sitting on the couch, drinking homemade wine. “I’m serious,” Paige said, eyes glassy, “Toronto’s totally doable. Genuinely friendly people. Poutine! Michael Bublé! And public healthcare—imagine that!”
“Imagine that,” Helena said.
“Then there’s Kai,” Paige said, “Kai would be safe there.”
“I don’t even know what that means anymore.”
“It means not here,” Paige said. “Not under these bastards. There’s no way to win against a fascist machine.”
It’d mean leaving the house her family spent three generations paying off. It’d mean uprooting Kai from their friends. But Helena’s had enough. She fought for this country, killed for it, and now barely recognizes it.
Every night, when she gets back from her Amazon warehouse job, she sees Martha patrolling the streets in her SUV, like a black tank on recon. At a Neighborhood Patriots meeting months ago, Martha said: “That English teacher, he’s gotta go. He’s filling the kids’ heads with improper ideas.”
A week later Mr. Blauner was gone. Sent to an internment camp, Kai heard.
Then there was the Paredes family down the block. Martha’s voice had carried clear from the front of the long supermarket line, sharp as a razor wire: “They’re illegals, taking away American jobs.”
The next day, ten vans of armored men dragged the Paredes family away, a grandmother, three kids, the parents. Official word was they’d deported. But Kai traced them to a labor camp in Tennessee.
* * *
At the Neighborhood Patriots Christmas prayer meeting, everyone pledges allegiance, reads psalms, sings carols.
As Helena leaves, Martha says, “I saw your Kai shoveling snow today. Haven’t seen her for a while. I waved, but she didn’t wave back. She’s an oddball, isn’t she? No offense. I mean, she’s just different is all.”
Different. Helena feels the boot kick of the word. She knows what the new administration does to trans kids. Helena mumbles something, ducks out.
That night, she stays up, sits at the kitchen table, disassembling an old flashlight with hands that move with muscle memory. She works calmly under blinking Christmas lights.
She falls asleep at the table.
When the explosion comes the next morning, Helena flinches awake. Its angry roar shakes the windows, shudders through her bones.
The tiny Christmas tree has fallen over and the bomb she made is gone.
Kai comes into the kitchen, their eyes wide. “Was that it?”
“Was that what?” Helena says.
“Look! Martha’s car is on fire!”
Helena doesn’t get up to see the wreckage. She tells Kai to sit, have tea. She knows militia will soon be swarming outside.
She breaks the silence first. “We’re going to Canada, okay? We’ll just go.”
Helena looks at her child—their narrow shoulders, their guarded eyes. She reaches across the table, takes Kai’s hands in hers.
“I want to stay,” Kai says. “I want to stay and fight.”
Outside, dark smoke from Martha’s SUV drifts into the sky like the memory of some dream.
“Merry Christmas then, Kai.”
“Merry Christmas, Ma.”
~ fin ~
Richie Narvaez is the author of Roachkiller and Other Stories, Hipster Death Rattle, Holly Hernandez and the Death of Disco, and Noiryorican. He lives in the Bronx.
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