Radio Underground by Alison Littman

Author:Alison Littman [Littman, Alison]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780996430630
Published: 2018-10-09T16:00:00+00:00

Eszter Turján

January 25, 1965

It’s happening and unhappening in a loop in my mind. Every night when I go to bed, it happens. When I dream, it unhappens. And when I wake up, it happens again, until I’m gone. Because reality is mine, not theirs. This grotesque horror is just a series of different events stacked up on top of one other, but none of them are real. Or some of them are real, but I say which ones.

Sometimes, when I look out the window, I see people. This window is actually not in my cell—it’s far away in the head officer’s cell. He spends his own time with me when he says it’s time. Time is time, but to me, time is nothing more than the reality of others. For me, time is in the past when I was Dora’s mom, even though I wasn’t really there. These stupid soldiers don’t realize that. They think I am suffering in here. They look at me like they can do anything to me because I am miserable anyway, but I am not in pain when I go back, which I do whenever I want.

Right now, I am putting Dora to bed after reading to her because she asked me to do it, and though she is a teenager, I’m so grateful that she still wants to spend time with her mom in this affectionate way, like she’s a kid. I wonder if she does it just for me—to let me think she will always be my baby because she knows how abandoned I would feel otherwise—and I love her for that. And I smell her hair, which smells delicious, because I infused her shampoo with cherries I picked from my friend’s garden. I’m just crafty like that. All of Dora’s friends come over to our apartment to hang out, so they can talk to me about their crushes and school and the fights they’re in with their friends. And I am totally fine with being that type of mom because I am so generous, and Dora’s friends distract me from the goals I never reached because who wants to pursue goals when you’re happy, anyway? And then I just look at Dora and think about who she has become because of me, and the time I devoted to her, and I get fulfillment from that. They say the greatest gift is being a mother, and in that moment, I know it is.

It’s that easy. It’s that easy to live in that time even though the time that most people know is different. Sometimes when they are hurting me, the way they do—the hurt that goes deep inside—I travel to distance centuries and realms. I imagine I’m Cleopatra or Aphrodite, and that makes me laugh. That makes them hurt me even more. Sometimes I am in a place where no time exists, only blackness, which is on the inside of my eyes, even though they force me to keep them open. I think

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