One evening, a man and a woman, parents to two daughters, watch Oliver Twist (1948), go to sleep, and in the morning, name their only son Oliver. The family rejoices (even though they are industrious refugees who previously celebrated nothing) and for several years buy him gifts, feed him sugar.
The eldest daughter resembles her brother until she wakes up one morning from a dream in which he lay in ermine, holding tightly to a scepter.
Soon after, her hips widen, one lone hair grows in her armpit. Sometimes the daughter feels like a son. Sometimes the son feels like a shadow.
Who is weak and who is weaker and what does relativity have to do with it?
Let me tell you a story about refugees. A mother and her dead son sit in the back seat of his car. It's intact, in their garage, and he is buckled in; she brushes the hair behind his ear. This is the old country and this is the new country and the air in the car is the checkpoint between them.
Let me tell you a story about seat belts. While driving her children to the local pool, a mother enumerates to her children their failures. There was a mother, she says, who put her children in a car, sewing their seat belts so they couldn't unbuckle them, who drove them off a seaside cliff.
A boy on a unicycle goes round and round a lighthouse, dodging tourists, ridicule, and awe. He doesn't go up, he doesn't fall down.
Son, says the mother, meaning child not her husband. Son, says the father, whose name is Son. Sister, says the son, lying in a coffin. To hell with family, says the rest of the family.
A brother is a brother when he has at least one sibling. The brother believes he is not a brother but one in name only.
When the brother meets a couple his parents' age, he takes the time to tell them he's an only child and an orphan. The three of them agree that one must not be without family, that there must be at least two in a family, that three is even better. They embrace and the couple encourages the brother, the brother waiting for the other shoe to drop. Whose shoe? His or the couple's?
Five pairs of shoes dangle from the pole of a traffic light. Over time, birds make a nest in each hollow, each separate space.
"Your hat is Mexican…?" asks a sailor in Côte d'Azur.
"No, it's Moroccan." "Are you from Japan?" asks a Moroccan shopkeeper in Marseille.
Is belonging and fulfillment possible without family? No. Is it possible with family? No.
You cannot connect if you keep answering no.
You cannot keep your brother alive if you keep your mouth shut.
You cannot keep your brother alive.
Is the lost brother happy?
A man lies in an open grave after a body is taken out of it. This practice is said to lengthen life expectancy. The brother imagines his bed is a nest in which his body is removed.
There's a story about a man galloping by another man who asks, "Where are you going?" "Ask my hearse," says the man.