January by Hannah Liberman

You have to leave now and outside the wind is unwavering along the windows. On the old oak nightstand the telephone screams and falls silent, screams again and falls silent, screams and no one answers, screams and no one answers, and then the telephone trembling and you have to leave and outside the wind barks now at the windows, and the room dusk gray yet shrouded red and what time is it? The dusk room dense with smoke and you have to leave now and outside the wind beats dogged at the windows and beyond that all the windows of all the houses rattling in their frames, the smoke tucking the houses in dusk, and you have to leave now, the phone screaming and screaming, silence, you have to leave and you have to leave now and this char and burn must have settled down your son’s throat through sleep, taken in through his nose and released again in tiny lulls through his lips, and the phone is onto something else now, the air outside is unbreathable, it’s announcing with the plain blatancy of fact, and then silence, and a great shrieking, and you have to leave now and outside the wind, and the unbreathable air must be coating your child’s throat, rushing below his skin, and the windows can’t weather much more and you have to and you have to and outside the wind beats dogged at the mortar and glass.

But the weather channel warned of this, and so you bathed your son the prior evening, the bathwater too long cold and never filling to cover his whole body, his little bumped kneecaps poking into the air like something illicit, something you should hardly have looked at, but you did look and you did bathe him and so the smoke in his hair now must have been brought in through the night and knotted in his curls amid sleep, and you touch the curls to try to get it out without waking him, and your clothes already waiting in two backpacks by the door, the house old and the door mostly for show, hardly separating inside from out, and still, you think, staring at the backpacks by the door, still, there must be more the two of you might need, and so from the closet you pull a worn overnight bag that once belonged to your father, the seams long busted, and the room filled now with the fluorescent overhead light never turned on, the fan blades spinning shadows that cut the room in lines of dark and darker, and in you throw the first pair of jeans you find, which are too big, and from the dresser you grab five more pairs of cotton underwear for him, thick socks, more jeans and pajamas, his blanket, and what else? What else? What else do they say to bring? The six Ps in the news, something about the six Ps, but all you can remember is plastic and what the fuck does plastic mean and who came up with that acronym—PPPPPP—as if any person in their right mind can remember P after goddamn P? Panic and panic and panic and panic and panic and panic. Stop, you tell yourself. Ridiculous. Not the time. 

Six Ps. Passport? Photographs? Plastic? And what the fuck does plastic mean? You forget it for now and you blaze through the old oak drawers and find your passports, throw them in the overnight bag, and contacts, glasses, headlamp, down jackets and hats, those you’ve already packed in the backpacks by the door, so what else? What else? Wallet, of course, plastic means cards, and ignore the splinter of wooden plank that lodges in the pad of your foot on your way running out of your bedroom and the whole house moving, the walls smoke smothered, and outside the sun is blotted out by smoke, the smoke hanging dusk up against the bare sky of the morning, and for an instant you notice the orange, ragged on the windows, and it is astonishing that there can be any beauty there, but there is, you think, but no, no, what do you need? What does one need? From the yellow walls you grab a few photographs hung with tape, and from the old oak dresser grab the letters from your mom and your dad and your ex-partner and your brother, those letters he wrote you before he died, and you can’t think about that right now, his dying, because you have to leave and you have to leave now and outside the branches are at the windows, crashing in waves, and you run past the bookshelves, all of them organized meticulously by fiction and nonfiction, short stories and novels, prose and poems, essays and criticism, memoirs and theory, and you can’t think about all those books organized there, the hours you’ve spent organizing them there, because to think about even one would be to blow down a whole dammed churn of sorrow, and with sorrow comes indecision and nostalgia, and with nostalgia, pragmatism lost, and so you take none, no, don’t look at any of your books, all those words there that steadied when reality felt beyond the realm of steadying, don’t look at your books, keep moving and moving, moving and moving, and moving.

And hadn’t it been just yesterday when you’d sat at the dining table facing the bay window which looks out at the orange and lemon trees, the tiny birds picking at the fruits’ peels, the clothes hanging between them on the line: crumpled black linen pants, wool sweater, socks. The past week you’d forgotten them out there, where they came to resemble something else, lost the curve of arms and legs and fallen toward the ground, limp. On the window, hadn’t the light lain in great lazy splotches, the leaves from the orange tree obscuring the sun in patches larger than the leaves’ outlines. And hadn’t this been newly remarkable. How the leaves cut out shadows larger than themselves, how the dark spaces shivered cool on the window’s glass before trembling in the wind and going elsewhere. January, and still warm you had thought, still warm everywhere really but the house, where the floor had been cold, the bed sheets, the tub. On the back porch, a squirrel had been going at the pumpkin placed and forgotten on the top step. Seeds and pulp messy through the teeth-gnawed hole. Seeds scattered down cement steps. And the sun, wild, rotting the seeds. And the sun, greedy, rotting the seeds. Whole. Hole gnawed out by the squirrels’ teeth burnt ashen by the sun, blazing, and then gone.

Okay, one. One, you tell yourself, pausing. One book. And so you grab 2666 though you don’t care for it much anymore, but once you did, because it made you realize when you were a kid that something else existed in language, it made you know that was the ground where you could find footing, and that sentence in there, now, forcing itself into your head, about fate and coincidence, and what else? Papers, that’s one of the Ps, so you run back to the bedroom and don’t look at your son still sleeping there on the bed, and drop to your knees and pull from beneath your bed the plastic bin of manuscripts and letters and old newspapers and magazines with your essays and your stories, the only copies left because a week ago you lost all your digital writing and documents, your computer wetted by coffee in an airport café on the way to the oncologist, all your work up until that moment on the precipice of knowing, it seemed, all that life would contain or not contain after, all that work on the computer, gone, except for the paper copies beneath the bed, the letters and the drafts, so this is it, you think staring at the thin box of papers, this is it, because of that Bolaño line about fate, you think, and you remember the teenager who stood there glaring at you when the coffee tipped onto the open keyboard and how you could have hit that teenager in that moment, the anger in your fingers, but instead you just stood there, both of you in the silence, and coincidence obeys no laws and if it does we don’t know what they are. Coincidence is like the manifestation of God at every moment on our planet. A senseless God making senseless gestures at his senseless creatures, and indifference, that’s all coincidence really is, all of us reflecting the world’s indifference, that’s the banality of evil, indifference in us which is the indifference of nature, which is everything, but you’re just lightheaded from the smoke, really, get a grip, keep moving, and all that’s left now of your writing, of your work, is these hard copies in this box, though that couldn’t be what the news meant by papers, and birth certificates, yes, there must be those somewhere, with the manuscripts, and papers and passports and photographs, done, done, and outside the smoke everywhere, and a mask, you need masks but you don’t have any, and your throat, you can’t swallow really and so you don’t, and there is ash thick and light as arid snow now fleeing the sky, the wind tugging at the tree trunks like cello strings, ash in your hair, now, still knotted along the back of your scalp, as you run outside in sandals and try to remember where you parked the car on the street latticed with toppled trees and branches’ shadows, and ash blanketing the windows of the car, and after you pull the car in the driveway, fingerprints erasing the ash across the steering wheel like clouds do shadow, and a page of a book, Spanish, burnt lonely on the ground, and the oranges in the trees crumpled into the color of bark, and you run back into the house because you need a guitar for your son, yes, your guitars, just one of them, the old acoustic Martin handed down to you from your dad, then to him, pushed crooked into the corner of his bedroom, blanched there by sunshine, and you grab its case from the closet and run to the bedroom and shove it in there, fastening each buckle of the case quickly, and then you stare at the black handle in your hand, and no, no, the two of you don’t need it, you don’t need the guitar, another thing to worry about wherever you’re going from here, and you set it back down on the floor and you decide for yourself in that moment what you can stand to lose, and the bed with your son in it will go unmade, white linen crumpled in a heap at the foot of the bed, because you wake on the sun’s knock, usually, but today the sun didn’t come, the window’s glass clouded by smoke, the sky’s face shrouded by smoke, and you have to leave now and outside the wind is tearing at the windows, and your son inhales and the whole house shakes. He exhales. On his side in this near dark, but no, the darkness is everywhere, whole, outside and in. He inhales, and the walls move, and you need a mask, because you can’t breathe on a good day with the masses they’ve found only recently in your neck, pushed up against your throat and your vocal chords, so you can’t sing or speak so much these days, no, don’t think about that, but you need a fucking mask and you don’t have one and so you hold your breath as you run out to your car and pull it into the back driveway, and the parrots are silent this morning, not squealing like children at recess in the schoolyard, even the birds holding their breath, and you have to leave now, the phone the only one talking, you have to leave now, the phone the only one talking, and you run back in and there is water dripping from the ceiling, a new leak, and from what you don’t know, ignore it and keep moving, period, not one of the Ps but you remember, and grab a tampon to change later, and prescriptions, that’s another P you remember, finally, prescriptions, and you run back to your bedroom and grab the bottles placed on the floor by the old oak nightstand, and while you’re down there on the floor, you see a box of photographs you’d forgotten beneath the bed, photographs which have no other copies, each dated on the back, each having no replica, and one photograph on top, one photograph there of you and your brother smiling when you were teenagers, the photograph taken in a synagogue in Spain, and you’re holding him against your chest, and he is leaned back against you and he is laughing, and there is God, there, in that photograph, too, whatever that word means, it’s there, and it’s taken just a few years before he died at nineteen, and you just twenty-one, then, and for a moment you’re that girl in the photograph, twenty-one, not the woman here, and you close your eyes and erase the image of your brother behind them and try to forget the image of her before you, and you erase that girl you were in the photograph, too, that girl who doesn’t exist anymore, because now you are the both of you, you are what remains of your brother, really, and you are his absence, too, and you realize that is the difference you can tell in a person, maybe, those who have come to stand in for another, who have become absence, too, and those who are, for now, just themselves, and for a moment you stare at the guitar case left over there on the floor and your son in the bed you share when his nightmares come raging, and you think for a moment you are glad your brother is dead, glad he has not been here to witness all the ways we have burnt this world to rot, let it all burn to rot, and all the pain, but no, no, you can’t think about that right now, but now looking at those kids laughing in the photograph you remember the bracelet he left you, just a thin black piece of thread, and where is it? Where is it? That bracelet without which you can’t, no, don’t think about it, it must be here somewhere, and so you grab the photographs and run to the jewelry box and begin to file through the earrings and the necklaces, none of which you need, and there, there is the thin black piece of thread, and you take that and your watch you see there, too, that watch your parents bought you, when you’d just graduated college, the silver dulled in the smoke, and so you put them both on your wrist, though the time on the watch has spun off its track, and there in the jewelry box, too, you see another photograph, of your parents smiling and holding two tiny children, the two children trying to leap from their arms and fall toward the ground, but them holding the children, resolute, their smiling faces, so young and still naïve, in that photograph, of everything to come, and them just holding the two of you up from the ground, and where they are across the country, are they awake now? Are they sleeping? No, no, you can’t think of that now, not now, you don’t have time now because you must leave and you must leave now, so you tuck the photograph into your back pocket and you run out to the car with the boxes in your arms and you go back in and you wake your son, carry him out to the car and buckle him in the backseat among the ash that has blown in the open door, and then you look at the trembling houses lining your block, and people, you remember, people, so you run back toward the house nearest yours where your neighbor each evening rocks and rocks on the front porch, wrinkled hands lain across her lap as she watches the trees, and you scream, and you scream from the frame of the door, but no one answers, and you scream from the frame of the door, but no one answers, and you scream from the frame of the door, but no one answers, and you scream, but no one answers, and you scream, but no one answers, and you scream, but no one answers, and you scream, but no one answers.

Hannah Liberman is a writer and editor. She lives and works in Los Angeles.

18 July 2025