Fiction: The Basket by Z. K. Abraham

Image by Manojiit Tamen from Pixabay

My mother called me to gossip about my father. Given his post-retirement apathy, my mother was surprised when he found the energy to clean the garage. He threw away all their old crockery and bleached towels. He threw away her lace wedding dress. He threw away legless barbies and collectible toy cars. He threw away a complete collection of the book series Animorphs, a few broken lamps, twenty-five years of saved Christmas cards. He threw away his own college diploma. A buzz filled my ears, as if bees were building a hive in the wall. In a low voice, she mentioned he’d thrown away one particular box labeled Leia’s Things.

Yes, it was all gone; he’d driven an hour to take it to the dump. I wasn’t aware I could be so sentimental but I started to cry. Stop, my mother said. You didn’t remember that stuff anyway, you left it all behind. I slept with the basket in my arms.

When I traveled across the world during a few itinerant years, I always brought it with me. Balancing it on varied windowsills, the basket and the buildings looked the same size; woven threads of the basket’s lid just as vast as the golden domes of mosques, the swirling minarets, looming over small houses with terracotta shingles. My great aunt, the one who made this basket, lived in a bone-white cement house, where she hung many colorful baskets on the wall.

She made the basket for me when I was a child, back in our home country. It was a rainy summer in East Africa, when everything smelled of spiced lentils and petrichor. I watched her weave at lightning speed. As I remembered it, many women huddled around her, handing my great aunt rolls of cotton string, lifting the jebena cups so she could take sips of bitter coffee. They were weaving baskets that would last lifetimes. I remembered there being so many people. People stopping by to watch, or peeking out the windows of the houses nearby. They were mesmerized, or maybe a bit of them was caught up and woven into the basket too. So even when those children and friends and neighbors were all gone, the string connecting them remained, holding the pattern in place.

A royal blue, a crayon red, a canary yellow. I remember touching my tongue to the basket when I first received it. Only later did I remember what I tasted – salty blue, dyed in the Red Sea, the red of mother’s blood, a yellow baked in the sun.

My aunt made many baskets, some of bamboo, some of dried grasses, but mine was made of soft cotton. She started with a bundle of string, looping it outwards from an intricate knot. Out and out, again and again, blooming into a circle of alternating red and yellow and blue. It began to take shape, curving upwards. Did she work on it for hours, days, or weeks? She’d promised it to me. I didn’t believe her. I was flying back in a few days. I missed the ease of America, its coca cola and air conditioning. Finally, she beckoned me over and handed it to me. Caught between impulses, I tried to refuse the gift. No, she winked, then lay it across my small hands, planting sour-breathed kisses on each of my cheeks.

Without remembering packing it, I would find it among my things. When I opened my suitcase on first day of college, nauseous with freedom, I heard a humming just out of my awareness. A high, throat-tightening note. Just like those frenetic East African ululations. My roommate continued to chatter but I stopped listening. When my fingers reached the textured cotton under the pile of linens, the sound stopped.

My basket was once full of dust and old teeth and a tuft of my baby hair. After I heard of the things my father threw away, I wanted to be free of all attachment. I emptied the items from my basket into the palm of my hand, and blew them out the window. I thought I could only move forward in departures, not returns.

Yet one humid July night after I turned thirty-five, my heart quivered as I lay down to sleep. My friends and I had picnicked in Prospect Park for hours. While sweating through my blue-jean jumpsuit, I’d lifted their toddlers in the air, engaged in circular small talk about our aging foreheads, gotten woozy on salsa and zinfandel. Against the pillow, a pressure vibrated in my head. Blood rushed through my ears. My breath was acidic. Sitting up, I turned myself around, so I was laying the opposite way on my bed, like I had done as a child. Feet on the pillow, head at the foot, so the breeze from the open window could unfurl over my cheeks. I heard the sounds of the city far below and spotted my shadowed basket on the windowsill. Falling sleep, I dreamt an old dream. The great aunt with those brown hands, blooming with white spots, was weaving the basket. She looked at me, smiled, and looked down at the basket, which had transformed into a baby made of colorful string.

I forgot my basket for a few years in the drawer of a second-hand mahogany cabinet. I’d been forgetting birthdays, the names of elementary school teachers, doctors’ appointments. There were endless tasks and minor dramas that kept me distracted. I was a pile of loose threads. I had the old dream again and woke up gasping. After searching the whole apartment, I found it. The same soft texture under my fingers, those alternating colors like a familiar rhythm. I thought about seeing my great aunt after all these years. I could fly back home, learn to weave. But suddenly I remembered that she’d been dead a decade. A memory of my father crying in the basement came to mind. I should have shown him the basket and said, look, Dad, look what she made for me. I’d have opened it and shown him a chasm hundreds of feet deep, ending with an ancient, sparkling water bed. A city in which we all had lived, but never realized it, surprised to at last notice the others gathered there.

Z. K. Abraham (she/her) is a writer and psychiatrist. She completed a Master’s in Creative Writing with distinction from the University of Edinburgh. She has been published before/has work forthcoming in FANTASY Magazine, The Rumpus, The Chestnut Review, Barren Magazine, Podcastle, and more. She can be found on Twitter @pegasusunder1 and zkabraham.com.