eat the sun — ruth&ines social

[fox]

I N E S

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A television screen at the colosseum plays a montage loop of the tribute interviews, the ground underneath changing shades of blue from the light falling into the sand.

"It's better to have something to believe in when things are hard," she says in technicolour, and I feel like I've heard the same thing before, a long time ago.

I think our mother holds a heartbreak that tastes bitter.

Months ago, she'd found me in the attic, writing in the margins of his work, a notebook of equations he'd kept bound in leather. I saw her raw with anger, burning in the salt of her tears.

My mother asked me if I wanted to die like my father.

If I would leave her too.

If I was unafraid of death.

Nadim said to me once, that she was grieving, that she would always be grieving over the way she had fallen apart, put back together so carelessly that it could never feel right. Daylight fell through the cracks of her like a sieve.

Yes,

now I wonder if I want to die like my father or to survive like my mother.

The interview fades, another begins again. I turn, and she stands like a mirror, the girl from the screen.

"That was you," I say to her. "Girl of the church."

[marguerite harvard d2a (zori)]

ruth baran

That was you. It was matter-of-fact, almost urgent. Ruth’s face grew red hot. Girl of the church.

She let out a flush of air through her nose at the thought. As if Ruth could have ever been the face of the church. Maybe the little one in the basement of the old tannery, but even then, her pastor would’ve gladly plastered her sister Mary’s smiling face across the walls over Ruth’s.

She couldn’t place Ines, but then, Ruth had only glanced up at the screen when she’d listened to Madison Rae ask her about death. She’d stared anywhere but the screens that lit up the coliseum so that she didn’t die then and there of sheer embarrassment.

They’d made a fool out of her, and she had gone and let them.

Back home, Clyde would’ve told her it was her own fault, trying to play whatever game it was when she hadn’t the tools or the training. She’d given Madison exactly what she wanted, sound bites hey could reply in perpetuity about the naïve little girl from eight. Still clinging to the tired and dated beliefs she’d been raised with.

“Yes.” Ruth replied. She moved to press a thumb across each of her knuckles as she stood, back and forth even after she’d rendered a few cracks. “I’m Ruth.”

Was the girl curious because of the spectacle she’d made of herself, or something more?

“Are you… a member of the church?” Ruth asked. She dared to imagine that the world wasn’t as small and separate as they’d been led to believe. As though she hadn’t just been reminded that death (her death) was about to be unceremonious and natural as it’d ever been.

[fox]

I N E S

► ► ►

"Ruth," and I write her name in the sand. "That's pretty."

Her words come haltingly, “Are you… a member of the church?”

"No."

That one comes easy.

Our father used to pray to the rising and falling of the sun. I learned the motions of his prayers by watching, the words to say by listening. But I never understood him, and now I think I never will. As a child, stumbling over the rituals, I remember asking Nadim why god would ever make us remember all these steps.

"I guess there are different words for the same thing. My father called his god by Allah, his house of worship called a mosque." And during the war, he called them basements, he called them back rooms and warehouses, but his faith and his god always held steady.

I smile, fingers filling in the curves of her name with more sand until it disappears into the ground.

"But if I believe in a god or not, I think that's a different question." I look at Ruth, shadows cast across her face, her cheeks slightly pink in the dim light, and I lean towards her.

"And how about you? Is what you said true – what you believe in?"