Opposing Forces

A Short Story

Feb 24, 2025

Welcome to Love + Travel where the world is a classroom and the journey is endless.

Last week I created a portrait of wintry weather in Zero Degrees of Separation and Temperature. You can find more pieces like this in my full collection, here.

Spring is less than a month away (!), so today’s offering is something to put warmer weather on your mind.

Mentally on a beach,

Spring arrived without the usual seaweed blanket in its warm waters, and a week ago two sets of twins were born on the same day in the village. So, when the flamboyant tree in front of the church started to bloom on the wedding day of the mayor’s eldest daughter, no one was surprised when Auntie-Baby fell over and broke her hip three days later. It was understood opposing forces in the world had to remain in check. Locals were simply relieved it wasn’t their flesh that balanced the scales this time around.

For Vega, Auntie-Baby’s only son, the spotlight of the matriarch’s rehabilitation proved too enticing to ignore. His wife, Esme, now handled Sunday afternoons at their shop while he collected prepared plates – and compliments – from visitors at his mother’s bedside. No one believed he offered meaningful help, but they didn’t see the sense in jeopardizing a relationship that saved them from taking a trip into town. It was simply a cost of convenience. Something Fauna had no interest in.

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Fauna made her way to the shop, precisely because Vega wouldn’t be there. She smiled at the chance to see Esme—the shop’s quieter partner, who always needed reminding of who she was. There was the time Esme couldn’t quite place her during their shared wait at Tanti Mew’s Dutch door. And the time Esme’s face lacked the familiar warmth of recognition when responding to Fauna’s greeting, even after they’d been reintroduced twice before. The lack of resonance led Fauna to believe her schoolyard nickname of Pear – not a first selection like an apple, but rather chosen because it was there – might have had some validity after all. For dignity’s sake, she hoped Esme was somehow in on the joke.

As the sidewalk veered Fauna off the main road and onto a side street, the shop came into view. Each house on the block jutted out a little bit more than the one before it, like dominoes lined up, waiting to topple, with the store as the final piece. Its location at the vertex of a hairpin curve made it appear that, regardless of the direction you approached from, there was no more pavement beyond its doors. Twin murals portraying scenes from Carnival and J’ouvert adorned the broadsides of the structure with the swirl of their darkness and light meeting on its front. Cars were extra cautious as they approached because in addition to the blindness of the curve, there was always a chance for a vehicle to be parked just beyond the bend - half up on the curb, half down on the street, like a dog with its hind leg raised - its owner enjoying a Carib or Shandy meters away. Though she rarely frequented the place, Fauna couldn’t deny its ability to slow down the life around it. She ran her fingers through the bottom of her locs and wiggled past the bollards dotting the building’s outline like a necklace. She pushed open one of the double doors and allowed the energy drink ads and reminders of proper dress that clung to its exterior to continue braving the heat without her.

The door’s chime was drowned out by the sounds of an overburdened air conditioner. The machine’s labored hums and clicks blended into the chorus of the interior, where a flickering fluorescent bulb mixed with the voice of a gameshow host hidden from view. To the right of a display of last year’s calendars sat Esme, framed in a plexiglass casing of candy, condoms, and phone chargers.

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She appeared frozen. Taken by the playful charm of the host and the various noises signaling fortune and possibility. Judging by her bent neck and rounded shoulders, her screen was either too small, perched below eye level, or some combination of the two because she appeared to be bowing to telephone wires and double-A batteries. Seemingly, the two constructed an electric fence around her body and that’s the reason she hadn’t moved a millimeter in any direction. If Esme truly wasn’t privy to Fauna’s schoolyard torment, she unknowingly contributed to the young woman’s strife in her own special way. For if being known for mediocrity carries a quiet disdain, being ignored altogether is a piercing sword of humiliation.

Fauna opened her mouth to make herself known, but at the same time, a phone rang. Esme pressed a button and raised the receiver to her ear while never glancing away from her entertainment. Fauna turned into an aisle that held motor oil and dinner plates on the same shelf and became absorbed with the unlikeliness of the two being together. After she decided she had no use for either, she peered in the direction of the counter and saw a slender green tube of lip gloss had replaced the phone in Esme’s cinnamon-colored hands. Esme rolled the slender bottle between her palms, clickity-clacking as its plastic rigidity met the constellation of rings on her fingers. She reclined in the office chair she filled up, and when a buzzer went off from her hidden screen, the audience groaned, letting the contestant know their efforts hadn’t met their appetite for success. Fauna watched intently. Her thoughts drifted to what it might be like to be in the lip gloss's place so she would be the one dragged across the contours and cupid’s bow of Esme’s lips. It’s an area she’s been particularly fond of since that one time an older cousin visited when she was seven. To Fauna’s delight, she was the mannequin for nightly makeovers with a foundation three shades too light, two lip pencils, and a cracked compact of blush. When Fauna little sister found her drawing the double curve of an upper lip two days after the cosmetics cousin left, she yelled, “Fauna’s drawing butts!” and ran to tell their mom. Fauna drew a straight line between the two ends and said, “I was making a bow and arrow!” unintentionally igniting a habit of drawing back.

Fauna found the last of the items she needed and felt silly spending more time in the store, even when certain Esme had completely forgotten about her presence if she even acknowledged it in the first place. The game show switched to a horror movie around the time Fauna was reaching for aluminum foil, and now someone was screaming about their luck running out. Fauna stepped into the main aisle that led to the register but stopped to arrange the items in her arms. As she decided between tamarind balls and kumar, she felt Esme’s gaze already upon her. They locked eyes briefly before Esme turned her attention back to the carnage inches away. Fauna felt compelled to ask her if she knew she was married to a coward of a man. She wondered if Esme knew Vega tells bar folk that he stands on his wallet so his wife’s annoyance with him buying several rounds can’t reach his ears. Fauna stopped as soon as she realized she was full of cowardice, too.

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Had she not wanted to ask Esme how it feels when the rain lands on her shaved head when she’s caught underneath a passing cloud? Or wondered if her hands were as soft as they looked. Had Fauna not left through the backyard of her house so the dense coverage of mango leaves wouldn’t provide a timestamp of her movements to prying neighbors?

Fauna made her way to the front and opened her arms, allowing each item to drop out while willing her mouth not to do the same. Esme stood up to slide the selections into a plastic bag that needed to be retired two uses ago and changed her horror movie to a sitcom already in progress. The laugh track of a studio audience punctuated the air.

Today was not the day Fauna would tell Esme she finds her beautiful or that the thirteen years between them only made her that much more magnetic. She’d keep all that lust and longing to herself, much like she always had. What would be the sense of sharing something of high importance with someone who would hold it in low regard? She felt a hollowness being in front of Esme, now, that had nothing to do with the release of items she once clutched to her chest. The door didn’t chime, but the scales had come to balance themselves in the shop that afternoon. Obsession mingled with obliviousness, and they met in the middle, of an unremarkable mundanity. Instead of confessing her curiosity for Esme, Fauna decided to allow the ordinary to fall from her lips.

“Any vapor rub?” she asked while touching her chest.

And the scales fell into perfect alignment when Esme replied, “Fresh out.”

COMMUNITY CORNER

🔎 When I don’t happen across

Meklit Abebe

’s work in a while I seek her out by name. As always her poetry, My Biggest Curse Was Being Born a Woman, hits.

🍗

Melody Smith

how dare you take my favorite food and turn it into a pyschological examination - The Chicken Wing Test? I am both amused and exposed.

🐛 The writing is vivid, the storytelling is on point and this line, “i was a black girl in the south, and my parents knew if they ever taught me to be small, i’d never be big again.”, made me pause.

asa

you snapped with Pray For My Enemies.