back to Issue 18
by Matthew Torralba Andrews
after Kaveh Akbar
My mother moved quietly through the Clark Air Base chapel, easing to her knees with her elbows propped on the back of a wooden pew. She clasped her hands together at her forehead and slid black beads, one by one, through her fingers. Occasionally she whispered a phrase and acted as though she didn’t hear me—half her size at her side—pushing air through my lips, echoing her. Kneeling there, beneath a stained-glass window, my mother’s bent form shone blue, red, and yellow.
I wanted that serenity.
I didn’t know yet the Apostles’ Creed or the Mysteries or even all the words of the Hail Mary, Glory Be, or Our Father. I knew only that my third friend had left me—Ligaya and her family restationed to Okinawa, before that Chris to Germany, Danise to New Mexico—and that I had found that day, in the steady slide of my mother’s beads and the rhythmic whisper of her words, something so ordered, so unwavering, that a person praying it could divide into different colors and not break apart.
Matthew Torralba Andrews (he/him) is a queer writer of mixed Filipino descent and the author of the forthcoming chapbook How to Build a Bridge Across the Ocean (C&R Press). His fiction has appeared in Cincinnati Review, Puerto del Sol, Sonora Review, and elsewhere. He lives in northern Arizona.