The Gift of the Magi —Aubrey Hirsch “I’m Amy,” I say. “Don,” he says. “You know that, I guess.” I sit across from him in the crowded restaurant. It smells of sesame and lemon. I try to find the scent of his cologne and match it to an early memory, perhaps one too early for eyes and ears. But I cannot. He tells me I look like my mother now. Probably he has to say this. Really, I look nothing like her. I am all elbows and knobby knees. Mousy hair. Big teeth. He’s never had Middle-Eastern food, he says. “They don’t have much of it in Idaho.” I make a few suggestions, though I do not know his taste. “Not bad,” he says after the first bite. A pearl of tahini sauce clings to the right corner of his mustache. When he is looking, I raise my right hand, wiping imaginary sauce from my imaginary mustache. He twists his lips into an embarrassed smile around a mouthful of falafel. “Thanks,” he says. But he wipes the wrong side of his face—left hand to left side—with his brown paper napkin. I laugh. “Other side.” “What?” he says. “The sauce. It’s on your right side.” I tap my right cheek. “Oh,” he says. He finds it with his finger and removes it with his napkin. “You used your right hand. Most people do it like a mirror, you know, because you’re across from me.” He draws a sight line, in the air with his finger, from the left corner of my mouth to the right corner of his. I shrug. “I do right to right,” I say, gesturing diagonally to each of our right shoulders. I take a big bite of lamb kebob. It is tough, spicy. Even after I swallow I can feel heat in my mouth that isn’t taste. It is something different, something chemical. He tells me a little bit about his kids. His other kids, he says. There are three boys. They play soccer. The have hamsters. One of them wants to be a veterinarian, like me, but I don’t say anything about it. Soon, he has food on his face again—a streak of hummus in the same spot on his mustache. This time when he looks I use my left hand, like he suggested, and wipe the left side of my face. Because, he is my father. And we will have to learn to accommodate each other. He is learning, too. Again, his left hand raises his napkin. “See?” he says. “Left to left.” The hummus lifts as he smiles. I laugh, shaking my head. He checks the right side, pulls back fingers oily with hummus. He laughs, too.
AutismShopper.com Laura T. Behrendt—Designer/Creator (612) 669-6109 service@autismshopper.com
Margins of Solitude It is spring, after all. The end of May. The sun is drunk, a burning wheel in the sky. Tree branches slowly ache with the weight of burgeoning leaves, and with robins dancing about, their beaks stuffed with worms. He has neither made love nor read his poetry in public in five years. Sunlight strikes the peroxide blonde hair of the woman dying in the bus seat directly in front of him. He’s convinced she is Venus de Milo. He leans forward, lips pressed almost to her ear, and says, in a loud baritone made of Chardonnay and lust, “You are almost unbearably beautiful!” (It is spring, after all.) The faux blonde Venus turns about. With a ferocity usually reserved for drunken jaguars and rabid nuns, she glares at him, her anger multiplied by contempt. The weight of fear rips her flesh from its bones. Her face is now a jigsaw puzzle. She gets off the bus and scuttles away into the suburbs like a sand crab. His eyes are now locked upon the sidewalk. His lips are moving, as if in silent prayer or kissing a woman who is not there. —David Kowalczyk
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