Savannah Balmir is a Caribbean-American writer from Mount Vernon, New York. She studied English at Howard University and earned an MFA at the University of Kentucky where she won the 2024 UK Fiction Award. Savannah was named a 2023 Emerging Scholar by the Haitian Studies Association, and she has received fellowships and residencies from Kimbilio, Oxbelly, and The Albers Foundation. Her short story “Night Riding,” published in Pinch Journal, was longlisted for the 2024 Elizabeth Nunez Caribbean American Writer’s Prize. Savannah’s writing has appeared or is forthcoming in Castle in Our Skins, Kweli, Pree, The Seventh Wave Magazine, and elsewhere. She is currently at work on a collection of short stories.
At the End of Every Apocalypse is a New Apocalypse
The Greater Mercy Episcopal church yard is full of squealing and laughter, and the occasional territorial conflict. English is the lingua franca of this place and has become the currency of arguments. Yusuf and Damian quarrel about who can be goalie. They boot the same four words back and forth (Am Goalie! No, Me!) Meanwhile, the older boys patch a hopeless soccer ball with duct tape. Yusuf and Damian don’t realize that they could both be goalie, if one of them just walked to the other side of the yard.
On the concrete edge of the playground, Joy and Grace have a shared desire for one translucent hula hoop, the kind with swishing liquid and purple glitter inside. Joy calls out that she wants the hoop, but Grace gets to it first, steps into it like an invisible skirt and sticks her tongue out at Joy. Grace sets the hoop in motion, relishing in the tinkling swishhh of every revolution. Joy’s envy gets the best of her. With one sharp jab she knocks the spinning hoop down. It falls and catches Grace’s soft sneakered ankle.
Lucy, a seventeen-year-old in a yellow Greater Mercy T-Shirt, intervenes. She confiscates the hula hoop, sits the two girls out on a picnic bench.
“You guys shouldn’t fight,” Lucy reminds them. “You’re from the same place.”
Joy and Grace roll their eyes, thinking how dumb Lucy is to not know the difference. The only thing they have in common is the river Zaire. The difference is de Brazza and Leopold. Jupiter and Mars.
The girls one picnic table over trade tales of their past selves, though none of them is older than fourteen. Orlendy clips plastic butterflies onto Hindou’s hijab. Asmahan uses the tip of a pencil to trace sections in Fabiola’s head. Aissatou says she has two older sisters who used to do her hair.
“What are their names?” says Heben, whose large eyes glitter under the sheen of her wide forehead pulled tight by skinny Habesha braids.
“I can’t remember,” says Aissatou.
“You can’t remember your own sisters’ names?” says Heben.
Aissatou’s mouth parts and then stiches back tightly. Her eyes blunt with incomplete memory; her gaze sinks to her lap, to the red henna flowers in her palms.
Aissatou is not the only one. The entire group is caught on the question. They search their own memories for names.
“Yes, if they’re back home,” says Asmahan, nodding with the lifted eyebrows of an elder. Her long fingers pause in Fabiola’s thick hair.
“If they’re back home, and you haven’t seen them, sometimes it happens. You can forget.”
The girls breathe. They nod their heads too. They are learning to sift through their losses.
Nadia, who looks like a young Alek Wek, retrieves her phone from her hoodie pocket, and scrolls through her feed. The music playing from the phone lifts the general mood a bit. Heben rises to show them all her rendition of the bacardi, and then Joy gets up to join her. They skip their feet and treble their hips to the ting ting ting of A-Star’s latest amapiano hit.
“That’s not how you do it!” says Grace, delighting in Joy’s stiff back and awkward footwork.
“Let’s look for one that teaches the steps,” Nadia says. The girls huddle together, and Nadia keeps scrolling.
In the next video, there is a body without legs. Eyes lacquered open. A skull crushed and weeping. Dust. Dust like a lace veil over curling hair, along the fan of a baby’s eyelashes. Blood like black sap, crusting on blued skin.
Silently, they watch the apocalypse. Each of them has already lived through one of their own.
In seconds, the death is gone, replaced by the tutorial Nadia had been looking for. Nobody says anything, and so they forget. They get up and dance. They record themselves and after a dozen takes, post their coordinated steps online. In a few months, when new children arrive freshly salvaged from their apocalypse, the girls will learn their names. They will invite them to the picnic table. They will brush their hair and henna their hands. They will remember, and they will forget, and they will survive.
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Torch Literary Arts is a 501(c)3 nonprofit established to publish and promote creative writing by Black women. We publish contemporary writing by experienced and emerging writers alike. Programs include the Wildfire Reading Series, writing workshops, and retreats.