“Ember” & Forced Perspective
Image from and story published at American Short Fiction.
Story: Ember
Smoldering and small, Pascha Sotolongo’s “Ember” lives up to its title, holding within its burnt remains both ruin and reignition.
“Sister had us painting trees and bowls of fruit and signing our names like we were real artists. ... Sometimes she’d tell us to close our eyes and sense the beauty all around us. Those were her exact words. I know because I wrote them down.”
In “Ember,” the narrator and his brother, Chuchi, live in a town where places of cultural importance are destroyed, one at a time, and replaced with new cultural icons of “progress” like a Starbucks. The story is bookended by fire, beginning and ending with the burning of the Brownsburg Public Library as the community looks on, apathetic and optimistically mislead as the last cultural building of Brownsburg is razed in a state-sanctioned burning. “It started small,” the narrator notes, “the little free libraries in people’s front yards disappearing a couple at a time” before an art gallery is razed and a museum is leveled and then the Santa Maria Art Academy, about which the narrator and Chuchi share specific memories. Memories like those of Sister Esperanza having them paint pictures and tie-die shirts—which Chuchi still wears to bed twelve years later—and memories of making popsicle art for Día de los Tres Reyes (Three Kings Day) that would bring the community together in celebration. In its last days, they even gathered to watch the Academy burn.
“Then the mayor said some stuff about progress and the technological age. Anthropocene, she called it. Chuchi said she used the word wrong, but I wouldn’t know, so I wrote it down to look up later…. Flames quivering behind her and firemen at the ready, the mayor repeated the words progress and digital literacy, or sometimes she said digital readiness.”
There are plenty of breadcrumbs in the story to lead a reader towards challenging their conventions, or at least begin to question preconceived notions about gentrification, progress, and what that might mean for a community. This is because “Ember” draws effortlessly from Sotolongo’s vast knowledge of American Ethnic literatures, postcolonial theory, and contemporary fiction. And while that sounds intimidating it shouldn’t. It’s so well blended and sublimated into the narrative that, to read “Ember,” you wouldn’t immediately recognize the threads from which it’s woven unless you were already initiated into such weighty, postmodern ideas.
There’s also something recognizable and unsettling about the story’s arc, even for those of us who aren’t knowledgeable about topics like postcolonial theory or neocolonialism, which is the aim of the story altogether: to force awareness and to upset the norm.
For example, when the museum is leveled the narrator says he feels “kind of empty” when he passes the muddy hole where it once stood, a sort of loss we’ve all experienced in one way or another, that pang of sadness that a familiar place is gone or shutdown. In 2020, this has become a more than common shared experience. There are other recognizable sadnesses in “Ember,” too, like when the neighbor boy, Lorencito, weeps as the Santa Maria Art Academy is burned down because his popsicle-stick donkey was inside; a soft metaphor of loss represented by the donkey, itself a metaphor of a shared cultural memory about Día de los Tres Reyes which has already been reduced to mere popsicle-sticks before being destroyed in the conflagration altogether. And the narrator, who doesn’t know yet how to feel or what to think about it all, writes everything down. He can’t make sense of everything but he intuits that there’s sense to be made, an ember of important information, he’s just not sure hot to reignite it yet. In his own way, the narrator is documenting his experiences and working to build a timeline for himself, gathering and giving meaning and context to what’s happening to him. And writing is always a type of meaning-making and a sort of history-keeping, even when it doesn’t aim to be.
As the community is slowly destroyed and replaced with “new” things, the mayor, a figurehead for everything new and encroaching, directs the community to “an enhanced Q&A page that addresses potential questions and concerns,” a Q&A page that seems legit to the narrator at first but, later, doesn’t seem to answer his questions, but it’s all they’ve been allotted. The Q&A is a type of competing history presented by the mayor that the narrator begins to reject because the answers don’t fit his questions and they conflict with the history he’s been documenting and marking a small change in the narrator’s sense of what’s important and that, maybe, he’s not as ambivalent towards the loss as we’re first lead to believe.
Because we’re forced into the narrator’s perceptions we’re challenged to look beyond plot for something more. It forces us to see a community’s destruction through the eyes of one of its own, a snapshot of something happening around the world, in the gentrifying parts of American cities, that might leave us feeling uncomfortable and disturbed, bothered by something we can’t quite place about the story—what Chuchi says, the lack of direct action, or maybe because the state is burning buildings. Subtle and indirect, the violence in the story happens off screen and what’s shown to us are the people and their responses to the loss. Thanks to the first-person narration, we’re left with the narrator and Chuchi smoldering in their ruined community, similar to how embers are left smoldering in ash. By the end, the last culturally unique building is gone and all that remains is a small, glowing memory that gives off just enough spark and warmth to force us to face what’s become a common act of cultural destruction in our country. We’re forced to think about it—beyond it—and, hopefully, to feel differently about it. Maybe we’ll even care enough to act on it.
Cocktail: Forced Perspective
Mad world, mad kings
All ashes, but blow on a dead man’s embers and a live flame will start
O joy, that in our embers is something that doth live
See? See how the birds fly unaware in the hurt of the night?- Chuchi
2020 has been a tough year. It has taken from everyone in some way, but what it has taken in the form of life and material and comfort it has returned to us in the shape awareness and forced perspective: with the additional time from furloughs and layoffs, from shutdowns and quarantines, we’ve had time to spend with politics and racial injustice, and with ourselves. There was time to think, and we’ve been forced to deal with these things and the feelings they’ve stirred within us and our community. “Ember,” too, forces us into a perspective that raises questions and ignites empathy and that requires us to think beyond what’s presented, to look deeper. At the bottom of it the story asks, Would we have looked at all if we weren’t made to?
This week’s cocktail is Forced Perspective. It’s a French 75 riff with a smoked spirit base topped with effervescent wine. The base is an Old Fashioned, the way early Europeans and Americans used to enjoy their spirits, built with imported rum and topped with an effervescent red Italian wine—a stark departure from the pale, more aesthetically pleasing French 75 that’s topped with clear and bubbly Champagne. It’s built with Caribbean and Central American rums, a spiced simple syrup, and a dash of bitters that’s all blended together and then smoked. It’s then built in a tall glass and topped with Lambrusco wine.
The cocktail is a little sweet, made more for after dinner or bold, spicy food, like pizza, but highly enjoyable and full of robust berry and vanilla flavors, and it carries within its bubbles a surprising smoky undertone that forces your perception back to your pallet. It makes you wonder if the smoke makes the drink or if it detracts from it. I won’t tell you there’s a correct answer; I’m just happy you’re thinking about rum in a different way.
The cocktail for “Ember” is specifically built with imported rum because it was enjoyed in the early years of the United States when it was widely available and cheap due, mostly, to slave labor where it was made (this is still reflected in the names of some rums, like Plantation). There’s a long history of colonialism and imperialism with many of the spirits we take for granted now, and maybe this will pique your curiosity. Make sure to take note and Google it later.
Recipe: Forced Perspective
0.75oz Bacardi 4 year (Puerto Rican)
0.75oz Plantation 5 year (Barbados)
0.75oz Flor de Caña 4 year (Nicaraguan)
2 dashes Angostura Bitters (Trinidad & Tobago)
0.5oz Spiced Syrup*
5oz Lambrusco Wine
Add the first five ingredients to a tin or pint glass with ice and stir for 30-40 turns; strain into a small bottle or jar with a lid.
If you have a smoking gun, pump smoke into the bottle with the base mixture, seal, and roll back and forth 5-6 times; let sit for a minute before opening (if you want a deeper, more burnt taste, let it sit for much longer). If you don’t have an expensive tool like a smoking gun, you can trap smoke in a bottle by burning wood beneath and upside-down bottle (check out this video, it’s easier than it sounds). You can also skip this step if you would prefer not to drink smoke.
Pour the smoked base into a tall glass, like a highball or champagne flute, and top with the Lambrusco (I used Riunite).
As the smoke velvets your pallet look beyond your own experience of the world. Make a note, mental or otherwise, to explore the cultures of someone else not like you or your friends. At the least pan up to the moon and night sky, and keep your eyes peeled for some kind of sign.