Brief Encounters with the Enemy by Saïd Sayrafiezadeh Read Free Book Online Page A

on his cigarette. Smoke billowed out from all the orifices of his face. Beneath his apron, his stomach protruded, firm and round. “Come in store,” he said. “No good talk out here.”
    I followed him inside. He put his cigarette in the ashtray and sat down at his machine as if he were about to get back to work. I leaned on the counter like a customer.
    “Yesterday,” he said as he rubbed his dirty hands over his face. “Yesterday they come.” He wasn’t looking at me as he spoke. Somehow his dirty hands hadn’t made his face dirty.
    “Who come?” I said.
    “Oh, no,” he said. He put his black palms up in defense. “I don’t ask question.”
    “Who come?” I demanded.
    He looked at me with trepidation. Slowly, stumblingly, full of error, he told me that yesterday they come for Roberto, yesterday, middle of day, four car, four car, no warning, all pull up same time, right outside, happen fast, take him way, take him. What I can do? I can do nothing. I am one man. They have law. Hurt me as much as hurt him.
    He hunched his shoulders and he looked aggrieved. He was sorry, he said. “I pray for him now.”
    I believed him.
    “He was nice boy,” he said. “Hard worker. Hurt me too. Oh, boy.” He ran his dirty fingers through his thick hair.
    Then some people came in with their shoes, and he stood up to help them. His pack of cigarettes was on the counter, and I took one and stuck it in my mouth and lit it. He didn’t notice. He didn’t care. My boldness surprised me.
    I took the long way home. I walked fast and hard. I smoked the cigarette, and the second I exhaled, the cold wind took the smoke. People drove past honking. I came down the hill and over the bridge. At the train tracks I stopped and tried to get my breath. I was wheezing. A small dot appeared way down the line. After a while it became a train. I could hear the rumble. When it drew closer, I could see that it was loaded with long tubular objects, missiles no doubt, twenty feet long, thirty feet, covered with canvas and strapped down with canvas belts. As the train approached, I saw the engineer hanging his head and arm out the window, and I motioned for him to pull the horn as I would have back when I was a kid. A moment later I heard the blast,
braa​aaaa​mmmm​m;
it was louder than I had remembered, longer too, and then the train passed under the bridge as it headed out west or down south.

APPETITE
    Things were not going as I had hoped. My sole purpose for interrupting my manager at this late hour on this Monday night was to inquire, respectfully, about an increase in my wage. But the conversation had somehow reversed itself, and now here I was standing awkwardly in the doorway of the restaurant office having to defend my very competency at my job. All through my shift I had entertained and distracted myself by imagining the scene in exacting detail: the gentle (or perhaps the assertive) knock on the office door, the disarming smile, the small talk about the weather, and then the casual introduction to the larger issue at hand, the larger issue that I had come to talk about with all reasonableness; the larger issue being eight to ten. That was how I had planned to say it: “I’m looking to move from eight to ten an hour.” Simply put. Or perhaps, I’d thought, I would say, “I’m looking to move
to
 …” Or “I’m looking to move
up
to, up
from
, up
toward
 …” Somewhere I had heard that it’s best to put your goals into clear terms, straightforward terms, and that once those goals had been thus stated, all would follow accordingly. In the rare instance that things did not follow accordingly, the onus was, of course, on you and your own ineptitude. I think I had heard it discussed on television. Or I had read it somewhere. Or my father had told me. The counsel had seemed wise at the time, and I’d been determined to remember it if ever an occasion presented itself.
    So I stood in the doorway as my manager reclined in his