Little Beautiful Traps
Fiction by N/A Oparah
He is a married man. Two kids. Clara and Riccardo, 11 and 8. I remember their names the first time they’re said like they might mean something to me later. Based on the man, I picture them strange-looking — not yet grown into their large eyes and sharp-cornered skulls. I wonder if they have their father’s loose curls and sparse but dark freckles. I learn they are away — this is all he says about his children. That they are too young to be expected to understand his decisions and because of their own commitments, they have left him in an empty home.
The married man’s name is Lourenço. I will refer to him this way from now on. It is easier this way — reducing people from what defines them and the pieces you do not want to think about into a name. Lourenço’s tallest curl would come up to just under my chin if we were standing close enough for me to be measured against. When we met, there was a small, waist-high gate between us. I stood on the soft, grassy part; he on the tiled road. We were on a vista, high enough to see for miles away. The sort of view where you end up looking at everything and nothing specifically. This is what I was doing when Lourenço approached, staring into the distance and trying to find something to latch onto — a backlit shadow in a high window, a car tunneling through narrow, angled one-way streets. The darker black birds moving against the already dark of night. This gate is where he placed the bottle of wine he brought from his empty home to say thank you for finding his bag.
Lourenço and I were not alone. In fact, we were surrounded. By my friends and strangers and people who, within that same night, could switch from one category to the other. Soon, these other people will disappear from the memory — a story’s telling only accelerates that fading.
I think he left his bag on purpose. Likely, he is a romantic, always setting little beautiful traps for someone like me to fall into. The bag contained a tape measure, a journal, a book with an inordinate amount of dog-eared edges, and loose sheets of paper scribbled with words in a different language. These are the perfect contents for a trick — each item both useful and unnecessary. He could go days, months, waiting for it to be found and still exclaim with relief when it was discovered. On the front page of the journal was his name and number. I practiced saying it, before I called. Lourenço Moura. Low-ren-so- more-rah. I wanted to get the sounds right. I wanted him to pick up the phone and hear something familiar in me.
When he comes to meet us, it is obvious he has risen from a bed. His hair is dented and pushed to one side. His eyes seem slightly puffed and sensitive, not to light, but to the quick movements of the awake. He walks towards us like the strangers we are. Searching both in and around us for some sort of recognition.
Lourenço? I say it not at him but in his direction. In case this man is not the right man and my actions might be read not as helpfulness but as eagerness or desperation.
Yes. He quickened his pace with an odd momentum. Like he was that lost child in the grocery store reunited with mother right before the panic set in. I’m Lourenço? He names himself in a question. I nod my head yes because sometimes identity is only about agreement. Both being and being seen. Maybe we are nothing without an audience, only these questions.
Your bag, I say pulling it from between my legs, over the gate and in his direction.
My bag. His smile morphs into a cringed expression as he searches the bag to see what he could have lost. I watch him to see if this is all part of some act. His shoulders roll forward, jaw loosens. His energy flattens. He is less attractive when relaxed. He must know this because he contains his relief quickly. What can I offer to say thank you, he asks several times. Repetition not from gratitude but due to the fact that we were speaking to each other in a mix of our mother tongues. I would replace the words I didn’t yet know in Portuguese with English, he would do the same with Portuguese. The others with Spanish or Russian. So that even in the midst of so much effort and collaboration, without the presence of specific nouns and adjectives, we still understood very little of what the other was trying to express. We moved into gestures soon after. He pointed to himself, a street behind us and further up the hill, and bowed gently. He collected his bag and disappeared in the direction of his finger.
I return my attention to the group. We pass around my phone and add our favorite songs to the queue. Sometimes the song mixes with the city lights and beer, creating the effect we’re living out our dreams. We can’t seem to dance in anything but slow motion. At once I feel both fully there and already somewhere else looking back. Recounting the moments I was this version of myself to a third party’s eyes full of envy. Life always feels amplified when it can be lived more than once, when it’s felt from two directions.
When I return from using the restroom behind a too-thin bush, Lourenço is standing on the other side of the gate watching me.
He brought us wine, someone yells over the music. I try to say he didn’t have to do that. But what I must have said something else because he furrows his brows and points to the bottle, then himself. I try to think of what gesture would mean something was unnecessary. I come up with nothing, but a smile.
He begins to open the bottle. This cork, Lourenço starts to say in effortful English, Here: not trash. Most value. He switches back to a more comfortable language and says the cork is responsible for keeping the wine good. The presence of the cork, he continues, allows the wine to mature slowly and beautifully. Without the cork, the wine goes flat too quickly. Loses its taste. But the wine cork, unlike the wine itself, can become a million things after it has done its job. His people have made an industry of it. He’s energized by this statement and continues faster. He says the cork is a perfect material. Strong, flexible and resistant to abrasion, fire, pressure, gasses, sound. It can be anything you want it to be and it can take a beating, he says, biting the cork with a smile. Wine: just wine, he says in English. Wine. Still good but only wine. Cork, he smiles, everything.
He pockets the cylinder in a new bag secured over his arm and against his chest. He brought small colorful, plastic cups with him. Likely belonging to his kids.
When he pours the wine into my glass, we stare into each other. I am standing on a declining side of the hill so looking at him means looking up at him. What is it about a man that enjoys looking down on a woman? I pay attention to his specific gaze — where his eyes do and don’t explore — and how it feels to receive weight from his body onto my own. We could be a fountain, I think, how still we are. How we feel to be a part of the same system, connected through seamless transfers.
I say thank you in both our languages. He watches my lips and mouths both sets of words with me. This makes me slow down, exaggerate — making each syllable more than the sound. He comes closer, until he is pressed against the gate. Parts of him slip between the rails so he is pressed directly against me. I feel the flesh of his legs and the bone of knee against my own legs. The top of his belly sits against the gate and he leans it into my chest. His lips are smaller than mine. We are blurry, how close we are. Muffled. Because no one is watching us, this can’t be called strange or inappropriate. Because no one is watching us, this isn’t even happening. He’s left just enough space between us to have the vibrations still be a form of speech. This is enough of a reason: we are trying to experience another’s language without abandoning our own. The closer you get to the body, the fewer differences there are between tongues.
After we are both done speaking, we take ourselves back. His body slips off mine like it was never there. The gate becomes a barrier again. My friends, the strangers, the music, the city, the wind all return. I bend to grab the plastic cups stacked by the empty wine bottle. I hold the bottle in one hand, the stacked cups in the other, and extend them like a wide-armed hug. He smiles and says, A minha linda rolha. He says it slurredly so I cannot understand nor discern it enough to remember it later. He goes to kiss me goodbye by placing his cheek against mine but bites me softly on the chin instead. We laugh and almost hit heads as we drunkenly pull away.
This is when I understand all that we have said tonight.
Ngozi "N/A" Oparah is a queer, first-generation Nigerian-American writer. Her other work has appeared in Fictional International, ANMLY, Ghost City Review, and other journals. N/A has received residencies in writing, art, and narrative media from Can Serrat in El Bruc, Spain; Proyecto Lingüistico Quetzalteco in Xela, Guatemala, and HANGAR in Lisbon, Portugal. N/A holds an MFA in Creative Writing from California College of the Arts and a B.S. in Neuroscience & Philosophy from Duke University. She is the Director of Community Programs at StoryCenter, a digital storytelling non-profit in Berkeley, CA. She is currently studying towards a PhD at Loughborough University in Creative Arts and Design in the UK investigating the role(s) of experimental storytelling in improving mental health literacy. Her novella, Thick Skin, was published by KERNPUNKT Press in April 2021.
