“They have good ice cream here,” Grandma shouted. “When I was a girl, we would ride the train in on Sundays and it was like butter in your mouth.” “But you’re still a girl,” I said. “It was delicious,” she said, looking right through my handsome, handsome face. Not because I was speaking too quickly—and not because the elevator was doing a low moan, but because her hearing aids were back at the hotel / in the blackmetal safe with the passports. There was always this intense fear of losing things. Hah. Like everything (and we too) were born on a tether, and it was our job to care for it. Even when it was raining—which it was—and even when that meant you couldn’t hear it from these 20th century disasters. When I was younger, you know, I used to pretend I was an architect; Grandma would pick me up from school and I’d run straight into Yumi’s bedroom with this garbage bag of toy bricks. They were generational bricks, I was told, and especially then, had the faintest suspicion that a few may have gone missing. It was only natural, really; maybe in a move or a yard sale, or behind some locked door deep in the house, whose key was in an ever deeper, more-locked door. Still. I built as high as they would let me; an identical monument every afternoon. Twice. Three times, a hundred times. Higher, higher—it climbed, until the ground opened up before us, and we were teetering on the edge of ███ . There, the elevator chimed apart politely: “Watch your step,” it said. “Going down now,” it said. Rows of us were standing at the rim, some of which were handsome, and some of which were ruined, but all of which were speaking in voices low and ordinary. Listen—the rain was coming on. Look—it’s your face on my face. 

Marcus Iwama is a writer based out of Queens, NYC. He is compelled by slippage in its many forms: ghosts, coincidences, (mis)translations, slanted light…He is currently working on a book of poems. Some of his other writing can be found in the Cleveland Review of Books and Little White Lies magazine.