“Lung” by Charles Heiner

Miranda purses her lips as she proofreads the assignment for English 101, a compare-and-contrast essay about how her children have adapted to life in Lake Charles, Louisiana since she moved here with them from Panama last summer. The incessant yammering from the math tutors’ table makes me wonder how she can concentrate at all. I’d never be able to work on my thesis in this place, with all the background chitchat and its sticky, mismatched floor tiles, but when I don’t have a student to tutor, it is possible to prepare a lesson plan here. I still haven’t completed the one for the class I’m teaching forty-five minutes from now.

I can worry about that later. First I have to tutor Miranda in English as a second language. It’s not an easy task. She’s far from fluent. Her essay has some issues. The strongest part is about her daughters, Julie and Carolay. Julie is nine, Carolay ten. Since Miranda came in with this assignment a week ago, she’s established that the girls are adapting well to life in America, getting good grades and making lots of friends, but the specifics of their story could stand some improvement.

Then there’s her five-year-old son, Fernando. The essay explains that she likes to spend time with him, and loves him as much as any mother loves her child. It’s hard to find fault with that, but such sentiments are dull. If only there were something interesting about him, like webbed feet, or musical precociousness. I can’t write it for her, but I feel certain, as she flips to the last page, there must be a way I can get her to elaborate.

She tightens her fingers around the pen and makes one last correction, of a spelling error in the conclusion paragraph. I looked at the essay first thing when she came in today, so I know it’s going to take more work than that. When she’s finished I reach for the paper and go over the changes she’s made. A quick scan of the first page shows some small signs of progress, and this improvement is borne out by the rest of the essay as I read it with my elbow on the table and the side of my face cupped in my palm. She’s getting the hang of tenses, and subject-verb agreement is no longer such a problem. I mark a few trouble spots for her to work on later, but what I really want to talk about is lack of detail.

“So you’re holding Fernando,” I say, leaning forward until my stomach touches the table. “He’s joking around with you. What’s that like?”

She closes her eyes for a second.

I press on. “What kinds of jokes does he make?”

She opens them. They wander from my face to the paper. She isn’t paying attention, and it’s making me wonder what I even came here for. The paper was due last Friday. We’ve got to finish it quickly so we can move on to her next assignment, a cause-and-effect essay meant to examine what the syllabus describes, in the pseudo-psychological manner of too many introductory English classrooms, as something that shaped her worldview.

I don’t know why students agree to be subjected to this bullshit. If a teacher asked me about my worldview, I’d drop the class. What I’d really like to drop is this tutoring job. Nobody has any manners here. That guy from the poetry program is shoving an oversized Italian sub into his mouth, stinking up the room with all that garlic and salami, grease dribbling down his chin. He has his headphones on so he can listen to a song on his computer. At least that way he can’t hear the gibberish coming from the math tutors’ table. They’re talking about catastrophe theory, whatever that is.

I lay my finger on the part about Fernando and say, “Read this.”

She pulls the pages out from under my finger and reads aloud, “My son Fernando jokes with me when I arrive home. He stops when I pick him up and hold him. It is nice to hold him because I love him. Then he is happy.”

“How does he joke with you?”

She puts her elbow on the table and slouches forward with her chin in her hand. “Hmm,” she says.

“What does he do?”

She sits up. “He runs into the room and he falls on the floor.” She pauses, casts her eyes down at the table, and whispers rapidly to herself in Spanish, a quiet, hurried, hissing sound. I’m about to say something when she looks at me again. “He does not move before I pick him up,” she says. “I hold him. Then he is happy.”

“Why doesn’t he move?”

“He jokes with me,” she says.

“What does he do that makes you know he’s joking?”

“He laughs.”

“So he’s already happy before you pick him up?”

“He tries not to laugh.” She smiles and looks out the window at a cluster of thin, leafy branches blowing against the glass. “He tries to be still, but his eyes move, watching at me, and he thinks it is—”

“Watching me,” I say.

She clears her throat. She isn’t smiling anymore. “Watching me,” she says. “He thinks it is funny. He tries not to laugh.”

“How do you know he’s laughing?”

She looks at me like I’ve asked a trick question. “His mouth moves,” she says.

I put my hands flat on the table and stare at her, hoping to elicit some further information, but she’s nonresponsive. “It moves?” I say.

“The sides move up.”

“So he’s smiling.”

“Not a regular smile. He tries not to laugh.”

“So the sides of his mouth move a little bit. Does he open his mouth?”

“No.”

“He keeps his mouth shut,” I say, “trying not to laugh, but the sides of his mouth still move. You could say they quiver. That would mean they move up and down fast. Or side to side. Like they’re shaking a little, in little movements.”

“The sides of his mouth quiver.”

“The sides of his mouth quiver with laughter. Is it loud?”

“No.”

“Does he make any noise at all?”

“No.”

“Then he’s silent,” I say. “The sides of his mouth quiver with silent laughter.”

“The sides of his mouth quiver with silent laughter,” she says. She flips the page over and writes this on the other side, spelling laughter L-A-F-T-E-R.

“G-h,” I say.

I wait for her to correct it, and say, “What does the rest of his face do?”

She sighs and rolls her eyes up at the ceiling. “I don’t know.”

“Does he have dimples?” I put on an exaggerated grin, pointing to my own. Miranda smiles and presses her lips together. Although an improvised move, this funny face dimple thing, I realize, is a keeper. Now she’s the one trying to hold back laughter.

When I tease out more information on Fernando, who, I find, does not have dimples, Miranda is able to tell me about the things they do together, along with his social withdrawal upon their arrival to America and gradual reemergence as a quiet but happy child, as well as can be expected from a student of her abilities. We make an outline on the back of the last page, listing details and major events. She reads through her essay again. As I watch her work, I’m reminded of how even with her progress today, some imperfections remain. Her transitions could be smoother, her irregular verbs are off, and she isn’t correcting all of her misspellings properly. But those are minor concerns. She’s getting in her groove now. She zeroes in on an especially botched paragraph, crosses out the errors, and writes the necessary corrections at the top of the page, afterwards connecting the disparate pieces with an intricate system of arrows. When she’s done, her descriptions of her daughters’ academic prowess are probably not on a par with the little prodigies’ own writing, but the improvement will be the difference between a C and a B. Now it explains not only that they are good students, but why, with Carolay setting aside thirty minutes each night to help Julie study her long division.

I check my cell phone for messages as Miranda moves on to the next paragraph. An email from Ruth on the Writing Resources Committee says I’m supposed to write a chapter for next year’s freshman English guide, and my class starts in fifteen minutes. Miranda should be able to finish the paper on her own. I’ve marked the most glaring issues.

After skimming through the rest of her writing, she slips the essay into her notebook, thanks me, and gets up to go. I say my usual words of encouragement, telling her how much progress she’s made, and how much more she can make if she tries a little harder. She stoops down to grab the strap of her large canvas bag on the floor by her chair, drops her notebook into it, and slings it over her shoulder.

But instead of leaving, she stands between her chair and the table. She looks at the door. She looks at me. She starts to sit down, but then changes her mind. She rocks back on her heels, flattens her feet to the floor again, and flexes her left knee.

Finally she sets her bag on the table and takes out her notebook. She sits down, returns the bag to its place by her chair, and tents her fingers above the notebook protectively.

“I want to work on the next essay,” she says.

I’m about to say no, that there is no time, but she fixes her eyes on mine, her mouth set in a careful, steady plane across her now hardened features, and pulls her shoulders back to make herself an inch taller.

“It is about my brother.” She maintains her gaze, unblinking, like someone who actually cares about her work. I don’t expect that level of interest from my own students next period. It’s unusual to see that in the first-years I know, but like many foreign students in remedial English, Miranda is older and more responsible than her classmates are. She’s twenty-eight, like me.

“I didn’t know you had a brother,” I say. “Older or younger?”

“He had five years.”

“He was five,” I say. “How old were you?”

“Eight.”

“Three years younger,” I say. I move my chair forward, closer to hers. “Have you started already?”

“Yes.” She slides the notebook to her chest.

“Can I see?”

“Yes,” she says.

But when she makes no move to relinquish the notebook, the bottom of which is now pressed against her shirt, I realize some coercive action may be in order. I place the tips of my fingers on the cardboard cover, pull the notebook from her grasp, and thumb through the outlines, lists, and hastily scrawled notes that fill its pages until I get to the latest installment.

Luis and me seed big explosions in the nite from the window. It looked like artificial fire. It was fun. But it scared our mother. We did not know why she was scared. We were at the window but our mother captured us and sed we must go to our room.

“What is artificial fire?” I take my hands off the table and rest them on my thighs.

“It has many colors,” she says. “We light it. It explodes in the sky.”

“You mean fireworks?” I say. “For parties?”

“Fire…” She looks at me blankly.

“Fire and works together.” I write it in the margin of her notebook. “Fireworks.”

“Fireworks,” she says.

“Good. Can you describe it?”

“In reality it was not that. We only thinked it was.”

“Thought,” I say.

“Thought. Okay. We thought people were lighting fireworks. We went to the window to see it. It was late in the night.”

“Why did you think people were lighting fireworks?” I can tell by the movement of her elbows that she’s fidgeting under the table. I feel the same way. It’s 12:55, and I’ve only got 10 minutes to get to my class on time.

“It was Christmas.”

“Oh,” I say brightly. “You had fireworks on Christmas?”

“Yes,” she says.

“Was it Christmas day?”

“No.”

“Christmas Eve?”

“It was five days before Christmas.”

“You must have been excited,” I say. “No school. You could stay up as late as you wanted.”

“We were not permitted to stay up late,” she says. “We wanted to see the explosions. They were bigger than any we seed before.”

“Seen,” I say. “They were bigger than any we had seen before.”

“The house was shaking.”

“Any we had seen,” I say, nodding meaningfully.

She tilts her head to the side, looks at the notebook, and says, “They were bigger than any we had seen before.”

“Why?”

She lifts her head. “They were bombs, from the airplanes.”

“Oh.” My teeth start grinding. Sometimes I have to make an effort to stop them from doing that. “In the eighties?”

She squints at me. “Eighties?”

“In the nineteen-eighties,” I say. “But we shorten it. It’s easier. Instead of nineteen-eighties, we say eighties.”

She grabs the edge of the table, her face tightening and relaxing again almost too quickly for me to see the change. “They were bombs from the airplanes in the eighties.”

My memory brings up a jumble of old news footage, mostly of guys talking in front of giant maps. It was a long time ago, so I don’t remember it very well. I was only eight years old, after all. My first televised invasion, it came on right before dinner. They had that dictator, Noriega. We took over his country because he was selling drugs. I sat in the kitchen and watched tanks roll through the palm-lined streets of that place with the canal that I’d learned of in school, thinking, Can we do that? But I still thought the part about them blasting music through his windows until he handed himself over was funny.

“What did Luis look like?” I say.

She loosens her grip on the table. “His teeth sticked out.” A smile flickers across her face, but is gone in an instant. “He had a…” She pauses.

“Overbite?”

“I take Fernando to the dentist.”
“Does Fernando have an overbite?”

“No.” She shakes her head vehemently.

“Were you bigger than Luis?” Tucking my feet under my chair and leaning forward on my elbows, I want to lighten the mood a little. “Could you beat him up?”

She lowers her voice. “He was big enough to see from the window.”

“What did he see?” It’s not a pleasant subject, but if I can’t stop her, I might as well talk her through it.

“We seen the houses burning.” She pulls her bottom lip between her teeth.

“That must have been scary,” I say. She keeps biting her lip, staring over my shoulder. “Were you scared?”

She doesn’t answer. I give her time. I give her plenty of time. “You need to write this down,” I say.

Miranda seems to like that idea. She certainly prefers it to verbal communication, taking the pen in hand and pressing it to the paper so hard I hear every mark. I try to picture what she’s writing—her, eight years old, huddling close to a little boy version of herself while the world explodes around them. But my mind mixes it up with other things, like those black and white videos of men running for cover right before the missile hits, grainy, fuzzy little men seen through a camera on the belly of an approaching jet. When I try to imagine what that looks like from the ground, all the mangled bodies I’ve seen on TV, in magazines, and on the Internet blur together into one big faceless mass.

Miranda’s pen falls silent, but I don’t know what she’s stopping for. There’s no need for her to worry about grammar and spelling at this early stage of the process. What’s important now is that her flow of ideas comes out uninterrupted. She can deal with the small stuff during revision.

“What did you write?” I say.

She puts her pen on the table and turns the notebook towards me. I lean over the page to read.

We escaped her. We were laughing at her. The sides of Luis mouth quivered with silent laughter. We needed to see what was happening. Then it was bad. The explosions came closer. The houses were burning. I holded Luis hardly to my side. Our mother grabbed us. We were fiting.

I raise my eyes from the page, bringing them level with hers. “You and Luis were fighting?”

She shakes her head. “He was not able to stand.”

“Why couldn’t he stand?” I say. I hate it when they leave out crucial details like this until the last minute. I taught my own class not to do that.

“The window broke, and he was, he couldn’t stand.” She puts her forearms on the table and pushes down until it creaks beneath her weight.

“So you were fighting with your mother,” I say. I look at the clock again. My students won’t complain if I’m a little late for class. It will give them time to catch up on their texting.

“Our mother was yelling.” Miranda rocks back in her chair, its front legs lifting off the floor. “She tried to take Luis. I grabbed his arm. He bleeded on my shirt.”

“He bled on my shirt,” I say.

Her seat’s front legs slam to the floor. She can’t seem to make eye contact. She makes a fist, inhales loudly through her nose, and presses her knuckles to the table.

“Was he okay?” I say. She’s digging up some painful memories—which is fine, since those tend to make students want to express themselves more clearly—but I never know how these personal essays will affect the students’ emotions. I had one write about being abused by her father, merrily plotting a stomach-churning outline with me at this very table as if recalling her favorite movie, and another tear up over not being able to find the right words for the bond he shared with his late iguana.

“Excuse me.” Miranda slowly uncurls her fingers, flexing them like she’s awoken from a dream. She folds her hands on the table. “It is difficult to write this.”

“That’s okay,” I say.

“Thank you, Greg.” She moves her hands apart, spreading her fingers. “What is the word for a piece of a bomb?”

“Which piece?”

“La metralla,” she says. “A piece that comes off of the bomb when it explodes.”

“Shrapnel?”

“Shrapnel. Okay.” She scoots her chair around the side of the table to face me more directly. She leans across, elbows forward, her hands close to her chest so the fingertips almost touch. “The shrapnel was from the bomb. The bomb was from the airplane.” She leans back, pushing her arms straight out in front of her, and I notice my teeth starting to grind again. I clench them to make them stop. “The ones that sended the airplane—”

“Sent,” I say.

“The ones that sent the airplane. They thinked, thought, the war was more important than my brother was. They thought it was more important than I was.”

“Forget about what they were thinking.” I sit up straight and fold my arms on the table, realizing I’ve been leaning away from her. “What does it make you think of?”

“On Saturday I danced with a soldier.”

“What made you dance with a soldier?” I say this in a skeptical tone, dragging out the first syllable of soldier too long, and silently rebuke myself for it. What Miranda does with soldiers is none of my business.

“First I did not know he was a soldier. I was at the club. I did not expect to see a soldier at the club. But then he talked about the special phones they use in Iraq, how he could see his little sister’s face on a screen when he talked to her.” She lifts the back of her hand to her chin. “About how good it was.” She turns her hand around, rests her chin in it, and stares at me for a good ten seconds. “I said something bad to him.”

“What?”

“I asked him if he killed. He did not answer.”

My elbow is almost touching her arm. I pull it in towards my side. “Soldiers hate that,” I say.

“He walked away from me.” She bites the tip of her index finger.

“I would never say that to a soldier.”

Her jaw clamps on her finger like she wants to take a piece out of it. I tell myself it doesn’t matter what she told the soldier. This isn’t a manners lesson.

“Try not to get distracted,” I say. If we wrap this up soon, I might be able to get to my class before the students leave, as is their right, outlined in the student handbook, if their instructor is more than fifteen minutes late. “Remember, your brother.”

“A soldier killed my brother.” She takes her finger from her mouth and rests it on her cheek, the skin mashed in around the tip. “A soldier dropped the bomb, and a piece of the bomb went in my house, in my brother, in his…” She looks at the table.

“What?” I say.

“His…” She holds her hand over her ribs.

“In his ribs?” I put my hand over my own ribs, and my chest feels tight beneath it.

“No.” Her voice is lower, softer, her hand still on her ribs. “In his, the thing people breathe with.”

“His lung,” I say.

“It went in his lung.” She scrunches her nose. “Ung.” She laughs. “It sounds ugly.”

“Like this.” I spell it in the notebook for her, by the red line, in the margin, but when I look up from the paper her eyes are on my face, not what I’ve written. Her face has grown inquisitive, eyebrows arched, her lips rolled into her mouth. I’m thinking about what she said, a five-year-old boy with a hole in his chest, blood gushing through the broken ribs, over his clothes, between those thin, delicate fingers on the table before me.

She picks up her pen and uses the heel of her palm to slide the notebook into place. She blinks twice and parts her lips, the lower incisors showing. “Lung,” she says. She copies the word in the middle of the page.

“That’s right.”

“Lung.” She writes it again. “Lung, lung, lung.”

Charles Heiner has an MFA in Creative Writing from McNeese State University. His fiction has appeared in The Laurel Review, Fiction Weekly, Cheek Teeth, and Dirtflask. It has won McNeese’s annual fiction contest, and been shortlisted for the Faulkner-Wisdom Creative Writing Competition. He is working on his first novel, tentatively titledFace. More of his stories are at www.charlesheiner.com.