"No Coming Back", "Billows & Waves", & "Life on the Jawa Transport" by J.D. Isip
- Roi Fainéant
- 5 days ago
- 4 min read
No Coming Back
Turn around, don’t drown. There are signs all over the Houston area saying this. You watch the news, and there is someone in Manhattan or Los Angeles, a prerecorded skyline behind them, saying, “Why would anyone stay in the path of a hurricane?” They’ve sent the greenest reporter out with a crew; he’s knee-deep in brown water, his face continually lashed by the downpour. “What are people there telling you?”
Does it matter? They saw the signs coming in, and they even saw a couple of cars trapped in the underpass, said a prayer for the poor suckers who didn’t turn around. Maybe they missed the signs.
The thing is, you see the signs clear enough. The dark sky, the rising tide, coming home late, then not coming home at all, sudden weekend work trips. Soon enough, you stop asking. You just go about your day like normal, walk the dog, water the plants, watch the news, laugh at the reporter in the water asking if the folks in New York know about alligators actually getting into the flood water. They laugh with you. You think about getting eaten by an alligator.
There’s this made-for-television movie you watched with your mom, who loved a soapy drama. The star, this woeful woman clearly on her way to a divorce, gets in a boat with her husband, and he proceeds to drop her into a lake filled with alligators. Your mom says, “Puta! Why the fuck would you get into the boat? Stupid, stupid.” And you both laugh.
Your mother’s marriages were all disasters. People came for the dinner parties, of course, and they offered the requisite single comforting visit after the divorce. On the way home, they’d discuss all the signs, “When is she going to learn?” And they laughed.
People never cease to amaze you. They assume, for example, that surviving is what any rational person would want to do. It’s the kind of thing you believe when you’ve never really had to survive shit. But when you’re a real survivor, when you’ve lost jobs and babies, husbands and hope, survival loses its shine.
The woman survives the alligator attack. She gets 1980s plastic surgery—that is, a total makeover—and comes back rich (for some reason) and proceeds to have her revenge on the ex and the mistress and everyone else. She has the last laugh.
That’s what anyone wants, of course, but it doesn’t usually work out that way. You climb out missing a limb or two, worse for wear. At some point, you tire of telling the stories, explaining the scars, carrying what is left to the next shelter. At some point, you’re exhausted.
You run out into the water. You’re hoping for an alligator. A whole bunch of them. A last laugh.
Billows & Waves
Jonah 2:3
“That bastard didn’t want to let go,” Robyn tells me about
riding a whale. I’m not sure where the struggle takes place,
what body of water he’s talking about. His stories start in Fiji
but always end up somewhere else—Mai Khao in Phuket, or
a boarding school outside Melbourne, or a flight to the States.
Sandy, in the kitchen, hands me a mug of tea for her husband
and says, “Don’t believe everything he tells you, but that story,”
the one about the whale, “that one is true.” They met on that
flight. He played rugby. She served drinks to him and a dozen
other players, living off their good looks, a little charm, promise.
I ask Robyn about his surgery, the third in two years. He smiles,
“There’s this big goddamn robot thing,” this is also true, “and I
asked the doctor if I could come and see it,” he starts scrolling
through pictures on his phone, their granddaughter on a horse,
his sister in a wheelchair, an old black and white, “Look at this!”
It's Robyn, maybe 18 or 19, shirtless skinny body, that 70s hair,
he’s holding these enormous fish by their jaws, one in each hand,
he’s smiling like he’s in a beer commercial. I picture Sandy, a navy
blue number with white hemming, laughing at the boys in first class
(on someone else’s dime) trying to get her number. “The whale?”
Sean, their son, guesses the story I’m interested in, “I tell my dad
maybe he shouldn’t tell it anymore, people will get mad you killed
a whale, even if it was a long time ago.” He’s right, of course. People
never let you finish the story. Which is why you have to keep trying
to tell it the right way before all the billows and waves take over.
"Billows & Waves" is included in J.D.'s full-length collection, Reluctant Prophets (Moon Tide Press, 2025), which can be purchased here: https://www.moontidepress.com/books
Life on the Jawa Transport
We are scraps. We are refuse. Half of us
are half of us, missing gears and gadgets
so long we’ve forgotten our function—
and this bolt, it hurt so much going in,
a pain to keep us in place, to remind us
not to wander or explore—
to stay in this desert place, as merchandise,
broken parts barely worth what they offer,
our motivators bad, silenced in sand.
תגובות