Punch Me Up to the Gods by Brian Broome

Author:Brian Broome
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780358439110
Publisher: HMH Books
Published: 2021-05-18T00:00:00+00:00

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The bus has crossed the redline. This is Squirrel Hill where a lot of white people get on. I refuse to move my suitcase from the seat out of sheer principle. Squirrel Hill. The nice neighborhood. It’s the first neighborhood I lived in when I moved to this city a long time ago, but I couldn’t afford it and had to move out soon after. Squirrel Hill, to my knowledge, was the first time I ever laid eyes on a Jewish person or at least a person that I could identify as Jewish. The houses here are nice. The storefronts are thriving. But like every other spot in this city, bad memories are waiting for me here. They jump out of the neatly trimmed hedges, wiggling their bony fingers and shouting “Cootchie-cootchie-coo!”

Tuan has become bored and restless again. He is fidgeting and keeps trying to stand in his seat to look out the window. He begins to fuss and his father is still talking on the phone. In a move that I wasn’t expecting, his father pulls an iPad out of his backpack, fiddles with it for a moment, and then hands it to Tuan. He has queued up a game. I can tell by the reflections of lights twinkling in the boy’s eyes that it’s a colorful game filled with distracting cartoon characters and sounds. Tuan begins to press buttons randomly and finger the screen. He can’t press buttons fast enough, and the iPad is making electronic crash and bleep sounds. Each time it does, he smiles big.

But the game is more than just pretty lights. It requires skill for it to keep working and Tuan has none. The objective of the game is lost on the child. He just wants it to light up and when it stops, he hands it to his father with his bottom lip poked out. His father takes the machine from him, resets the game, and it all starts over. Tuan plays with it again, savoring the pretty lights that make his eyes dance, but his lack of strategy and skill get in the way, again leaving the game little more than a frozen brick in his hands. He can’t get it going again. He hands it to his father to reset. His father resets it and hands it back. The same thing happens.

This last time, he hands it to his father who ignores him and the sobs begin to well up. He pushes it closer to his father’s face and begins to cry.

“Stop cryin’.”

His father snatches the game from Tuan and puts it back in the backpack and now the boy is about to lose control. His father will have none of that.

“Stop cryin’ right now.”

Tuan immediately chokes back a sob. He sits on it. He squeezes his eyes shut until his body complies. He swallows it. Makes it all disappear. All he wanted was the pretty lights. He didn’t know that he had to prove himself for them to appear.

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