So Grief Gives Its Beloved Sleep

by James Daniels

Before Ūmi winced, she gripped her sleeve. Its golden bells attached at the seams

wouldn’t stop singing as she pressed her lips together. It was the first time a man other than her

father had hit her, and when she opened her mouth, she could taste the blood surfing across the

edges of her tongue and between the gap in her two front teeth. In her bedroom—a four-walled

barrack with nothing but stained anime posters littering the damp walls—she focused on the red

smudge on the ground next to the man who had hit her. He was sporting a scar on his face and a

war suit like the one her father wore, and he watched her, pointing to the red splotch with the

sooty index finger of his left hand.

“I won’t ask you again,” he murmured. “I see they’re here. Bring them to me.”

She grabbed a small object wrapped in a bloody cloth from her now-soiled sling-over

bag. She brought it to her face next to her red eyes. The man nodded. “Yes.”

“The other one, too?” She held up an identical object wrapped in a less grimy cloth.

“Yes,” the man almost begged. “They’ll change you, Ūmi. No more.”

Ūmi imagined the checkered porcelain floors of the abandoned corner store she had last

seen her father. She imagined herself in her then-favorite sunflower skirt littered with tiny

splotches of red from ketchup or some other unknown spilled substance. Her father approached

in his freshly pressed suit, kissed her forehead, and hugged her tightly.

The holed awning above them almost kept Ūmi shaded from the Carolina summer heat

that day—almost—but not enough to keep wet droplets of sweat from sliding past the bruises on

her legs. Even still, she couldn’t find one wet spot peeking through the white shirt under his suit

and tie. Not even a bead of sweat adorned his Vaseline-slicked forehead as he turned to jog

towards his friend beeping the broken horn of the ‘94 Ford Ranger parked in their driveway. She

turned to the open screen door behind her, scanning for her mother, hoping to ask her why her

father would wear a suit to a war. When Ūmi couldn’t find her, she began tapping her foot—her

mother never missed her father’s departures—but she figured they’d already talked, so she

turned back to watch two of her father’s other war buddies in the bed of the truck with identical

suits waving Ūmi’s father up and yelling a goodbye to Ūmi.

The next time her father’s red eyes locked with hers, they were in a small jar, presented to

her and her mother on their front porch by the same friends. When the frontline men proceeded

to express their condolences, their buffer was returning these two treasures that made this

dark-skinned man an anomaly.

The first day after her father’s eyes were returned, Ūmi tried to explain them to her

younger brother, Naír, but he didn’t bother with them. Instead, wearing his “My Daddy’s a Hero”

shirt and a diaper taut on his bottom, he pushed her to the couch with all of his little might and

crawled onto the cushion beside her to lay his head on her shoulder in silence.

The next morning, after serving breakfast to Naír, she went upstairs and cracked the door

to her mother’s room to slip a look at her father’s eyes while she slept. Her mother, though, was

awake, and she hollered at Ūmi—her breath cutting through the smell of 2-day-old dinners that

Ūmi would place at her doorway every day—pleading with Ūmi to stop asking about the eyes,

that they needed to stay in her room.

So, the following afternoon, she didn’t ask her mother to see them. Ūmi snuck into her

mother’s room while she was asleep and wrapped the jar in a dirty cloth, stuffing the covered jar

in a black sling-over bag. Her father’s eyes stayed in the bag on Ūmi’s wooden desk.

Every morning for a week straight, Ūmi would rush to her desk, pull the jar of eyes out of

her sling, and stare at them until Naír’s cries of hunger snapped her from her gaze. For the first

few days, she would feed Naír, crack her mother’s door open to leave a plate at her doorway, and

head upstairs to her own room, staring at her father’s eyes until she felt a buzz that moved from

her middle to her head. By the end of the week, she had brought Naír to sleep with her in her

bedroom and put the eyes in two separate cloths to have with her everywhere she went, only

looking away from them when she’d cook a larger meal for her mother so that she could stare

into them for longer.

The week after, she started leaving dinners in front of her mother’s closed door instead of

opening it, ignoring Naír’s cries at the growing smell of uneaten food. She continued to ignore

his hungry cries in the mornings, too, as he tossed and turned while she sat at the desk for almost

entire days, eventually dropping a plate at the front of her mother’s door and in her bed for Naír,

hoping not to disturb either’s sleep. Naír had been sleeping for days by that point, and Ūmi

stopped hearing from her mother, so she figured Naír had grown tired of crying and her mother

had grown tired of eating.

At night, while she cuddled Naír to warm him, she’d stare at her black sling on her desk

from her bed, the red of her father’s eyes almost shining through the thin material. She believed

that they protected her from everything. Even when it was cold and she couldn’t rest, she

believed that her father’s eyes would speak to her in short whispers, and the quick bursts always

warmed her brown skin. It was never enough to fall fully asleep—Naír and her mother were the

only ones who seemed to get that blessing—but the brief bits of warmth comforted her.

She felt cold standing in front of the man who had hit her, but after he left her room with

the eyes, she backed up to one of her bedroom walls, slid to the floor, blinked twice, and fell

asleep.