In conjunction with the launch of Gathering: a Women Who Submit Anthology, we celebrate the fiction of member Toni Ann Johnson. In “Time Travel” from SPROUT MAGAZINE and republished in RED FEZ and ARLIJO, Toni Ann helps us looks across decades in just a few paragraphs. Congratulations to Toni Ann whose work was recently awarded the Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction. To hold this story and others order Gathering here now!
by TONI ANN JOHNSON
Twenty-one years later I’ll run into you outside the Path Station in Hoboken in front of the wide green awning that leads down to the trains. Sounds of rumbling below and the din of chatter swirling, you’ll yell my name above the noise, saying it like a question, as if you could actually be unsure that it’s me.
I’ll turn and totter on the top step. Just in time. Seconds later and I’d be swept into the stream of bodies flowing to the tracks.
It’ll be shortly after 5pm on a late September weekday, humid and sunny, with air that smells of commuters caught in unexpected high heat. Perspiration will roll down my back and leak between the butt cheeks you used to make fun of.
I’ll squint against the sun and stare at you. You’ll smile with closed lips and brown eyes that’ll be gentler than I’ll remember. Several seconds will pass before you’ll say, “Wow. First time I’ve ever seen you away from home. Where’re you living these days?”
“Manhattan,” I’ll say.
“Oh. The big city,” you’ll say, like it’s a truly good thing.
I’ll nod. I won’t ask you anything. I’ll look at you and wait.
Suits of blue, black, gray, and tan will dodge and whoosh past us in both directions. Heels clicking on concrete, huffs and impatient scoffs; we’ll be in the way.
I’ll shield my eyes with one hand and be silent for so long it’ll feel impolite. You’ll hold a cheap gray suit jacket over one shoulder, your white collared shirt bearing sweat marks under the arms. You’ll smell of Obsession For Men, alluring and more sophisticated than the Old Spice I used to notice at the bus stop during high school, when you rarely spoke to me. Your chest will be broad and you’ll be slim, like me, which will mean something, because twenty-one years earlier we were chubby six-year-olds foraging together for Ding Dongs and Oreos my mother hid deep in the pantry so we wouldn’t overeat. We’d find them, and eat them all, and that thrill was a bond we shared.
But being connoisseurs of Nabisco Cookies and Hostess Snack Cakes, and being buddies from the time we could crawl, never made our bond as strong as the one you shared with every kid in the neighborhood but me.
Someone’ll bump into you and you’ll fall into me and grab my arm before I lose my balance on the top step.
“Sorry. You alright?” you’ll ask.
I’ll say, “Fine, thanks.” And take my arm back.
That day, twenty-one years after I lost you, I’ll be wearing a tomato-red kufi atop unapologetically kinky hair —wild kinks I tamed the soul out of when I lived across the street from you, hoping straight hair would make me pretty, and more like everyone else. But you called me an ugly, bubble-butted nigger at the bus stop. Elementary school became junior high, which turned into high school and I barely existed. You had all those years to speak to me. That day I’ll wonder, why now?
I’ll have on black chunky boots and a dress that’s lime-green, like LifeSavers candies. Red, black, and green are Pan-African colors and I’ll wear them because at the time, I’ll be mad and militant, saying fuck you to you and everyone else from home who said my color, my hair, and my big butt made me ugly. That day at the Path Station it won’t matter to me that you were only a boy when you said those things.
I won’t smile. I won’t be warm. I’ll forget any mean things I may have said back at the bus stop. I probably said some, because I will remember how you winced at the mention of your fat mom, crippled father, and port-wine stain birth-marked baby sister. My tongue, sharpened on figurative and literal sticks and stones hurled at me by neighborhood bullies must have pierced your soft spots sometimes, too. Yet you’ll look at me that day with a tenderness that insists cruel words never passed between us.
Your dark hair will be short. Your skin clean-shaven, clear, the spots of adolescence healed and faded. Your face will flush and your eyes will brighten the way they used to shine when you were my round-cheeked running buddy. You’ll look deep into me with such warmth that against my will you’ll begin to melt the icicles that numbed me inside.
My name, when you say it, will sound like songs from playtimes past. In your eyes I’ll catch a glimpse of us singing on swings, flying above the grass where we found four-leaf clovers. You’ll invite me into a little chamber of your heart where you saved us. But I won’t go. I won’t be ready to remember how to get there.
There’ll be no mention of what happened to us, or what didn’t happen that should have. You’ll sing my name again, a young boy’s sweetness shining out of your grown man’s face and you’ll say, “You were my first best friend.”
I’ll know you’re telling me you’re sorry. You didn’t mean to hurt me. You were just a kid.
I’ll nod politely and shrug off your words of apology. I’ll carry my bubble-butt and my baggage down the stairs, catch my train and move on with my life.
In another twenty-one years, I’ll be middle aged and softer inside and out, the rough edges of resentment worn down with experience. I’ll remember how you said my name that day and the way you looked at me with affection. I’ll transport myself back to the Path station, in front of the stairs, trains rumbling below, bodies whooshing by, and I’ll be kinder to you. I will. Because by then I’ll know that love is the only feeling left once enough time has passed.
Toni Ann Johnson is the winner of the 2021 Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction. Her linked short story collection Light Skin Gone to Waste will be published by the University of Georgia Press in the fall of 2022. Johnson’s novel, Remedy for a Broken Angel was released in 2014 and nominated for a 2015 NAACP iImage award for Outstanding Literary Work by a Debut Author. A novella, Homegoing , won Accents Publishing’s inaugural novella contest and was released in May of 2021. Her short stories have appeared in The Coachella Review, Hunger Mountain, Callaloo Journal, and many other publications.