Thanks for This Riot by Janelle Bassett

Author:Janelle Bassett [Bassett, Janelle]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: FIC029000 FICTION / Short Stories (single author), FIC019000 FICTION / Literary, FIC076000 FICTION / Feminist
Publisher: Nebraska

Safe Distances

Gia is in my closet going through my outfits, purses, and shoes and calling them all scores or tragedies. This feels like a surprise inspection, like she’s going to put on white gloves to check for dust and sad, bad choices. Gia dresses like she’s from a decade I lived through but didn’t thrive in. I find the style she and her peers have adopted to be very “ugly on purpose”—brown-heavy, saggy-baggy, much too downtrodden for upstarts—but I don’t say that to her because I want to appear open and receptive, even though the older I get the more I feel my heart and my mind trying to slam shut, BAM, dust flying.

I was planning to take Gia to the botanical gardens today (peak bloom for flowering cherries), but the rain kept us home. My husband left early and won’t be home until dark, and I’ve totally cleared my schedule for the week, given myself a short break from barely looking for graphic design jobs while watching that Swedish TV show about blended families.

It’s just us. Here. All day. Together. This feels impossible.

So . . .

Let’s say: I haven’t seen my niece Gia in person for three years, since she was ten, since she came up to my chin, since she was pliant, since she wore bright colors and smiled without first considering whether she should smile and how big and teeth or no teeth.

Let’s say: Gia and I spent a lot of time together when she was small. I got down on the floor with her—stacked the blocks, laid the tracks, made the stuffed duck say, “Excuse me, beep beep, pardon me,” while it paddled through the pond of pillows. Before I moved five hundred miles away, Gia and I were very close. We were known to each other. She called me Antenna, like Aunt Tina but more receptive.

Let’s say: we video chat often, though, quick check-ins to confirm that we still care enough to push the buttons that show us each other’s faces.

Let’s say: my sister sent Gia to stay with me for a week. Grace was very clear that if Gia stayed at home for the entire summer break, she would do something awful to her daughter, like cut off her hair and slap her with it, or tell her the truth about all the brain problems she stands to inherit. Grace thinks I have endless patience for shitty attitudes because I kept a goldfish named Kickstand alive for eleven years, even though the sight of his little on-ramp mouth made me gag every time.

(Let’s deny: any patience I have or pretend to have is only me grinding down my mind the way people grind down their back teeth. If I appear patient, it’s only because performing patience has exhausted me.)

Once our plans were canceled, Gia apparently felt the need to find an indoor project quick to avoid any kind of knee-to-knee heart-to-heart. She landed on closet raiding, but I have a feeling that she’d have

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