Olga Trianta-Boncogon
Olga Trianta-Boncogon’s stories are based on her experience as a biracial, multilingual, and incorrigible immigrant. Her interests include playing harp, learning languages, and writing. Her short fiction has appeared in The City Key and Flash Fiction Magazine. She teaches in Taiwan where she lives with her family.
RESURRECTION
We sat through long liturgies with tonal chants, thumbed through prayer books with cracked spines and stood, knelt, stood, prayed, read, listened, chanted, and thought about grocery lists. Spring wardrobes. That summer with the first love and that wedding with the last. Whether the kids needed haircuts, whether they hated us and whether it was justified. We peered at our watches to see how long was left, we examined those around us and wondered how they looked so damn calm. We made eye contact as we spread the flame on lambathes and reminded the children not to drip wax. We bowed heads to look like we were praying and one of us fell asleep and was nudged awake. We held sleeping children swathed in pastels, we were grateful to crying babies who gave us a reason to leave the chapel.
And then it was done. We packed our kids in our minivans. We stopped by homes for spanakopita, for crispy lemon potatoes that weren’t cooked all the way through, for cookie assortments we bought at a bakery and would claim as our own. We drove to a relative's home. We pretended we didn’t mind when the men sat down to drink beer as we scurried around them to wash toddler hands, greet elders, change diapers, set tables, warm food, while they glanced from patio chairs to see that the lamb was still roasting.
We called everyone to dinner. The men sat first. They got their servings and sat and the children got their servings and spilled juice on the floor even after we told them to pour it when they were seated. The doorbell rang.
We waited for the men to move. They ate and started discussing The Game and Politics and How The World Was Going To Hell. So we answered it.
Iannis.
He looked at us, rumpled hair and that cotton shirt he never learned to iron. The cooled air combed our skin and journeyed outside. We sighed because we would have to call The Home and reconstruct who let him out and how he made the three-mile journey here.
“Happy Easter,” He said.
All of us stared. We did it wistfully, angrily, fearfully. We saw Calliope’s father who told her her eyes were like diamonds but also beat her when she was raped at a party. Maria’s only love. Lydia’s uncle who bought her a book every Christmas. Daphne’s brother who called her hippo, even after she lost the weight. Anna’s son, who spent all of his money to bring her over. Mariana’s grandfather who called her SLUT! when his memory went and it was always 1982.
Our hearts pried apart this nesting doll of a man. When we were done, we blinked away tears and went to fix him a plate.
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