They would try lifting the house from its foundation first. Eva imagined this easy translation of her home: a crane in the mud prying it up, the groan of its body suspended over the earth. But the house would shudder back into its old place. It’s too heavy, the workers said. If she truly wanted the home to face north—out of view from the highway, where she had last seen her son—they would have to pull it apart and piece it together again. For Eva, this was no different than her work as a translator. She was used to reading anything, unfastening it into fragments, building it back to its original shape. It was the same skill of gutting a fish, or ripping out the seam of a dress.
That afternoon, they began belting the panels from the walls. Eva stayed in her son’s room and opened the untranslated texts she had been assigned, but soon ran into trouble. A manuscript about the mother country of democracy translated into She helped her son put on his shoes and socks. A paragraph on the mother ship of international space travel became She told him not to go too far now, stay away from the highway. A mention of mother nature was Look both ways, then cross. And a quote about the mother lode of California gold: Come back to me, my son.
Instead of translating, Eva listened to the workers undo the integrity of the columns, braces and support beams around her. They stripped the house as though it were a sentence, she thought. The simple syntax of rearranging the highway behind her, her son’s accident behind her. And when all the walls finally buckled away to the sky, the sound of this language felt familiar to Eva—something like a mother tongue.
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Nadia Born writes peculiar fiction, both literary and speculative. Her work is featured or forthcoming in Gulf Coast, Water~Stone Review, Jellyfish Review, and elsewhere. She also has received nominations for the Pushcart Prize and Best Microfiction.