Binti's Escape

Yesterday, the volunteers—people who talk at her loudly, widen their eyes, and wave their hands—explained the oil she’d been putting on her skin was for cooking. She’d laughed and laughed until she cried. The children, their easy mix of words, were on the living room floor fighting over the rules of a board game. Binti takes in the couch, the framed photos of farms, the brown flowered curtains. She’d chosen none of it. She glances out the window at the taco truck, the Christmas lights. Comprehension wouldn’t be hers today, either. The dough prepared and her oldest capable, she tosses a quick bark over her shoulder about dinner then dashes away; the door closes heavily behind her. She continues down the stairs, steps echoing off the peeling walls. She needs sky, needs to sense herself in space. She thinks, I am drowning here. Even her own thoughts are strangers to her these days. Most nights, when her husband lies down next to her exhausted, smelling of glue and metal, he’s come to repeat simply, We’re in America now, Binti. She dreams of her parents, her mother braiding her hair, her father’s mouth of bright teeth. Where were they? Keep running, child, they’d told her, soldiers’ uniforms coloring the street olive drab. Her skirt too thin for the wind here, she burrows into herself and focuses her eyes on the ground. When she next looks up, she’s at the river, ice in its foreignness bobbing in the flow. She watches the trees that grip the bank, how they let cold swirls of water wrap around their exposed roots, how sometimes a piece of root will break off and rush away downstream.