Written by Jeff Radwell
WHO WILL NOTICE THE REAPER? | Artwork by Melissa Ruth Rotert
The relationship between Marisol and Héctor was drywall. She didn’t know his last name. Not what he did before he came here. But that he woke at five-thirty, that his fried eggs sizzled when she was watering the garden, and on Sundays, he played music low enough that she could only catch the bass. He had a daughter who visited on weekends and fought with him in the exhausted way of a young woman who has been fighting the same fight for years and loves the person she’s fighting anyway. That he cried, more often in winter. She couldn’t tell you which nights, but she’d lain awake listening to a man try to cry quietly and fail.
Héctor was on the other side of the street with a coffee and he saw them before the two plainclothes men reached him. She could tell because his whole body changed, coffee still in hand, and then they were on either side of him and it was fast. Coffee was on the ground and Héctor was in the van and then the van was gone.
She’d known this could happen. Not to him specifically but to anyone. Héctor had the same reading in his eyes, seen in the fraction of a second when they met on the stairs, that mutual recognition, same recognizing same; the small tax of vigilance that you paid these days and never spoke about because speaking about it made it larger and it was already large enough.
Years of his life conducted four inches from hers and she didn’t know his last name or where he was. A woman came past pulling a girl dragging her feet the way children do when the world is moving faster than they want it to. Marisol held out the bag. The woman looked at her. Marisol nodded and the woman took them, uncertain, and the girl immediately reached in for one.
She knew it was nothing. A performance for an audience of herself. But they had taken Héctor in front of everyone and no one had stopped, and she understood that this was the point; not the taking itself, but the way it dissolved into the ordinary, how the street healed over it in seconds, the way even she was standing here thinking about a hawker’s oranges. That the goal was not to frighten people into stillness but into the continuation of small motions. To keep everyone moving. To make resistance look like standing on a corner with oranges while a man disappeared into a van.
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Jeff Radwell is a novelist, essayist, and short-story writer. His fiction is featured or forthcoming in Consequence, Hobart, Thimble, and elsewhere. Website: jeffradwell.com.