2026 Memory Contest Creative Nonfiction Winner
1.
On February 23, 1987, at 9:02 pm in Warsaw, Poland, I leave my mother’s womb, and her body tries to kill me. Her immune system names my blood a foreign substance. She has Rh-negative blood, and I have Rh-positive from my not-present Bengali father. Her white body designates me as a threat, a danger, building antibodies to protect herself from me. My mother’s first child, Anya was born seven years ago. My mother’s body did not try to kill her. Unlike me, her father was white.
In researching my near-death, I learn doctors can screen for this complication and provide RhoGAM if needed. Maybe in 1980s Poland, this was not an option, or perhaps as my mother lay on that hospital bed, legs spread open, womb heaving, she prayed for my death. How much easier would it have been for her if I, a child of a three-day impulsive fling, an accident of mixed descent, had died?
But I live. I survive her cells crashing into my arteries. The doctors give me someone else’s blood, saving me.
2.
My mother plans to keep me a secret. Specifically, my biracial ancestry. She hopes no one will know. Then, in a moment of weakness or maybe loneliness, she tells Lena, her neighbor and best friend, a stout woman with thick hips and a stern chin, I am pregnant with an Indian man’s child. She says Indian because she does not care enough to distinguish between India and Bangladesh. She says Indian because she is hoping I will be 100% Polish and the other half will not matter. Lena does not keep her secret. Word spreads from friends to family. Soon my mother’s mother, my grandmother, knows.
A week after my birth, my grandmother visits. I am in a cradle, and she stares at me, eyes glinting, like one of those wicked witch-mothers from Disney cartoons. Except that cradles are American, so it is more likely I am on my back lying on a bed with white cotton sheets and a cloth diaper. Hands—with those crinkly pink baby fingers—reaching for the lineage that is supposed to love me.
My grandmother looks at me—at my olive skin, not white and pink, at my black, curly hair, not wispy and blond. Sputtering and shaking her head, she glares at my mother, her voice hardening. Your daughter cannot stay here. She cannot be raised with her. Her tone is cold. She says daughter, like Anya is my mother’s only child. She says her, like I am not a human but a baby beast.
My mother nods. She does not argue. My grandmother has informed her of the consequences of birthing a biracial child. Maybe the punishment would have been different if my skin had been lighter or my hair blonde. Maybe this is why my grandmother waited until after my birth to remove Anya from our lives. Maybe they were both hoping that somehow, despite the genetics, I would look only Polish.
Anya hovers at the edge of the door, listening to our grandmother and mother argue. Fear slices her throat. She is only seven, and ever since our mother’s belly has grown bulbous, stretched like a universe before the Big Bang, she has known something was wrong. She watches our grandmother’s narrowed eyes, the stern outline of her lips. Scuttles back, as our grandmother whirls around and begins walking toward her. Our grandmother’s icy gaze envelops her and Anya gulps. Bending down, our grandmother cups Anya’s cheek, her palm, dry and leathery, her skin fragrant with roses. Start packing your bags, our grandmother says softly, almost kindly. I will return tomorrow. You will stay with me from now on.
Confusion swirls around Anya. Her lower lip trembles. What about Sofia? Can she come too? Sofia is the chubby Dachshund Anya loves.
Our grandmother does not look back at her daughter. No regret in her firm reply. Of course.
Our mother stands frozen, halfway between Anya and me. Her eyes are wild and pulsing. I open my mouth and howl, my cries spitting against the walls. Our grandmother flinches, stands, and walks out of our flat without another word.
After my mother loses Anya, constant headaches and auras debilitate her. Followed by her first seizure. She goes to her doctor and blames the motorcycle accident of her youth, saying nothing about Anya, nothing about the emotional wound she bears. She tries to believe her own lies. The doctor diagnoses her with epilepsy and prescribes her Tegretol, an anticonvulsant, and Valium, a benzodiazepine. Beginning her lifelong addiction. They minimize her symptoms; they also numb her, making it impossible for her to grieve. Unable to grieve, her illness grows roots deep into her heart.
3.
My mother tells me, I do not like children. My child-heart aches at this declaration because it means that she must not like me.
She hires a nanny, Renata, to tend to my needs. Renata is not from Warsaw, but a nearby village. My mother, with disdain, calls her “a country girl.” My mother is proud to live in the city and to know its ways—the swelling crowds, the wet, slick concrete, the rumbling car engines. She, unlike Renata, is modern, spending the day in her office, behind a locked door, her appointment book spread out on her desk, answering phone calls about her bed and breakfast. Sometimes I hear the creek-creek of the fax machine. I never quite know what she is doing. Only that, it must be more important than me.
Renata is kind, patient, and unlike the other nannies, my mother has hired, she indulges her demands. Her voice is husky velvet, and her hands are tender and soothing.
To make up for her lack of attention, my mother showers me with gifts—toys mostly—a rocking horse, Barbie’s dream house (with a working elevator!), and an armchair of stuffed animals. I buy you whatever you want, she tells me. What else do you want from me?
I show my mother a picture I drew of the two of us holding hands, and she ignores me.
Once I start preschool, Renata only comes in the afternoons. In the mornings, my mother is tasked with brushing my hair. She pulls and tugs at the strands, frustrated at their thickness, the not-quite curls that she is unsure how to manage. When I cry from the pain, she calls me a baby. I imagine her brushing Anya’s hair, the comb moving easily through her thin strands, no tears glistening in her eyes.
In the evenings, after Renata leaves, my mother feeds me Campbell’s tomato soup. I hate it. Too thick, too chunky, too bland. When threatening to spank me fails to coerce me into eating, my mother tries a different approach. She takes me into her lap and tells me stories of talking rabbits befriending mice and sassy hens clucking in indignation when the rabbit steals the farmer’s tractor. An hour later, my bowl is empty.
Tired from these nightly rituals, my mother takes the Valium her doctor prescribed, and does not invite her friends over for tea like she frequently did before I was born. Perhaps she does not want them to see my brown skin. Or perhaps they have abandoned her, afraid of this woman with a biracial child.
4.
Outside our hotel, near the Sea of Marmara in Istanbul, Turkey, lined up along the road leading to the beach, men hold the reins of camels, the camels’ teeth gnashing against the bits in their mouths, their tan skin fly-stuccoed. We are here with Renata and her niece, Eva. My mother wants time to relax without worrying about five-year-old me, so she splurges on an extra ticket and, in a gust of generosity, invites Eva as well. Stingy is not in her vocabulary; she believes in abundance and dismisses worries of debt.
As we are walking, a man with a camel gestures at us, pulling the reins, and like a graceful puppet, the camel folds her legs and kneels before us. He holds out his hand, and my mother gives him a few bills that he pockets quickly before looking at me and urging me forward, toward the camel. Fear coils in my throat.
Go, my mother tells me.
I look into the camel’s eyes. They are far away, daydreaming of a desert stretching out before her, where she is wild, free to be herself, not commanded by a master’s hand, not a commodity to tourists and their young children. I understand those dreams of the wild. I, too, dream of a place where I can roam without the judgment of others. Without the judgment of my mother.
I have no interest in riding the camel. Backing away, I hide behind my mother’s legs.
Hazel eyes shining, cheeks ruddy in excitement, and the mid-morning heat, Eva recognizes her opportunity. Can I? she asks. Eva is bold. Five years older than me and not afraid to seize what she wants. Maybe, at that moment, she is the child my mother wishes was hers. A full-blooded Pole, bright and vivacious. Like I imagine Anya is.
My mother glances down at me. I am shaking, pale under my tan, hands clammy. Noticing the man with the camel growing antsy, she shrugs and says, Sure.
Eva scrambles forward, and the man helps her up on the saddle. The camel’s gaze remains rigid and glassy, yet her legs lift smoothly. Eva rises higher and higher into the sky. My mother watches, her eyes shining with disappointment, hotter than the sun.
5.
My grandmother, wearing a dark green dress buttoned up to her neck, curving down to her ankles, arrives to visit, gripping Anya’s hand. Six years have passed. My mother greets them. Her voice catches. She clears her throat and leads them to the main room, where I wait, palms sweaty, not sure how to be, what is expected of me. I am only six.
Before the visit, my mother took me into her office, kneeling in front of me. I remember her watery stare, her body trembling, her face contorted in longing and sorrow. I do not remember her words. My sister, like my biracial ancestry, was a shame my mother carried like a shroud wrapped around her head. Your grandmother wants to see you is perhaps what my mother said.
Anya’s eyes haunt me. Her smile is forced, her limbs awkward. She is thirteen, a teenager. I show her my red ball. We toss it back and forth, not speaking, neither of us knowing how to close the gap between us. My mother snaps photographs of us, where we look like strangers, not siblings.
My grandmother pulls me into her lap, studies me, presses a złoty bill into my palm. Be a good girl now, she tells me, her voice, toneless and scratchy.
My memories of this day are vague, perhaps imagined. I did not fully understand why my grandmother and sister were visiting. Maybe I did not care. Maybe I would have preferred to build Legos with Renata, whom I knew, whom I loved. What stuck is my mother whispering after, Do not tell anyone about today. You do not have a sister.
A year after this visit, my mother will flee to America, my hand clasped in hers. We will never return. We will never see Anya or my grandmother again. I wonder what my grandmother told Anya about me, about my mother. Perhaps she lied to her, manipulated her into believing that we hated her, abandoned her.
6.
My mother explained the differences between us through melanin. Your skin has more, she said. But I am your mother. When my mother’s friends or the clients from the bed and breakfast she operated, commented, She is so dark, I understood myself as simply having more melanin. But I also knew, not in words, but in the hard knot in my chest, that the melanin was to blame. That the melanin was why my grandmother shunned me, why Anya was not allowed to be my sister.
7.
In America, things will be better, my mother promises. Poland has failed her, economically and emotionally. A white American stays at her bed and breakfast, fills her head with how, in America, we will scrub our bodies with gold soap and sleep on sheets stitched from twenty-dollar bills. In America, especially in Los Angeles, where he lives, my extra melanin will be accepted. My mother believes him, decides she will marry him and move to the United States. They have known each other for less than a month.
I am eight years old when we board the plane to the legendary land of opportunity. The sun sets on our flight and we arrive as the lights of Los Angeles turn on, the city a glittering geode below us. The American waits for us at the gate, his lips twitch into a smile under his whiskers. I do not trust him.
In his dented Honda Accord coupe, he drives us north on the 110, the downtown skyline ahead of us, a necklace of iridescent cubic zirconia. My stomach calcifies, my skin pebbles, and my heart hammers. We’re here, we’re here, we’re here is the chant inside my head.
We stop at an In-N-Out. The American says, This is the best burger you’ll ever have. He’s eager to show off his country. He orders me an animal-style cheeseburger. Always get it animal-style, he advises, winking and asks, Do you want anything else?
I am still struggling with English, despite my mother’s lessons. My tongue stumbles over unfamiliar syllables. Scared of how his eyes devour me, I say nothing. He buys me a strawberry milkshake.
We sit outside at the only open table, waiting for them to call our number. When our food arrives, the burger explodes in warmth and secret sauce, dripping down the corner of my mouth. The sweetness of the milkshake and the salty French fries he shares with us hum the song of American fast food inside my belly.
After we finish, in the parking lot, my belly rebels against the tune. I throw up next to his car, vomit spraying on the bumper, to my mother’s dismay. Standing behind me, she sighs, hands on her hips, apologizing to the American.
We stop at a gas station for some Sprite to settle my stomach, and I curl up in the backseat. Driving up the 110 toward the 5, we exit in Glendale, meandering through a neighborhood, until the American pulls into a driveway, stops the car, and I scramble upright to look at the house.
The American hesitates, does not leave the car, does not say, Welcome to your new home. Rather, he says, looking straight ahead, fingers lingering on the steering wheel, I’m staying with a friend.
My mother’s eyebrows knot, her mouth hardens, but she is silent.
In the quiet, he adds, I’ll find a place just for us. He moves to open the car door. I just need to find a job first.
That night my mother tells me, Sleep on the floor. Husband and wife must share the bed. Her tongue flits across her lips nervously, uncertain.
The American grabs a cot from the closet and hands me a threadbare blanket that smells of cigarettes and mildew. On the floor, I close my eyes, only to be awoken by grunts, moans, and squeaks of bedsprings. I pull the blanket tighter to my body, quelling the bubbles of unease percolating in my tummy.
In the weeks that follow, the American will reveal himself as monster. Within seven months, my mother will leave him. Officially, they will be married, but separated. He will demand sex, threatening divorce and deportation. She will trade her body for the privilege of an American passport. Preferring this over returning to Poland.
8.
One day, when I am eleven, my mother, standing in the bedroom, wearing her blue robe after a shower, her pale green eyes shining, announces, I am going to bring your sister here. Heart speeding up, my skin tingles in anticipation, picturing Anya here with us, imagining us as a family. On my tongue, I taste the honeyed love of a sister, her arms wrapped around me.
The next day, my mother buys a long-distance calling card and dials her mother’s number which she still knows by memory. After picking up the phone and hearing my mother’s voice, my grandmother says, I do not have a daughter and hangs up.
My mother will never mention Anya again.
9.
I imagine an alternate life for my mother, one in which I am not born. In this alternate life, Anya’s mother serves her a bowl of Campbell’s tomato soup, and she eats it without complaint. Afterward, her mother enjoys the evening sipping hot tea with her friends. In this alternate life, Anya and her mother vacation every summer on the beaches of Istanbul. Her mother takes photographs of a grinning Anya, sitting on top of a camel. In this alternate life, Anya encourages her mother to date, and her mother falls in love with a handsome Polish man. They marry, and Anya calls him papa. She is the perfect daughter, and they are the perfect Polish family.
10.
In my imagination, Anya is always a mythical creature. A plot point in my life, an abstraction of what if’s, and I wonder. I do not miss Anya as a person, never having known her. I miss the idea of her. An older sister. Someone to give me advice on relationships and kissing. Someone to admire. Someone to understand what it is like to grow up with our sick mother. I miss what could have been.
11.
Do you have any siblings?
No.
Even after, my mother and I move to Los Angeles, thousands of miles away from my racist grandmother, our lies follow us. I lie about Anya, erasing her.
For years, my mother will also lie to me about my ancestry, saying, You are three quarters Polish and one quarter Indian. As if saying, Indian instead of Bengali and one quarter instead of half will bring me closer to passing, closer to white, closer to the child she lost.
In my 20s, the no will burn in my throat. I will start writing about her, telling the truth of my racist grandmother. Friends from high school will be surprised when I tell them. I didn’t know you had a sister, they will say. I will reply, She was not allowed to be raised with me because I am not white. Often, I am the container for people’s discomfort.
12.
A friend, who’s a mother, tells me, I can’t imagine having my child taken away from me.
My mother claims she does not miss Anya. I have you, she says, as if trying to convince herself that she made the right decision, leaving Warsaw without Anya, that I am the child she wanted to keep. She refuses to acknowledge her grief or her trauma.
My mother will never recover from her loss. It will chew her up, like a shark with the taste of blood on its snout, leaving me with the hemorrhaging chunks of a parent who will not know how to love another child. I wish I could have soothed her sorrow, been her anchor, her boulder—someone she could lean on, someone who did not add more stress lines to the corners of her mouth. Cleaved apart by unspoken grief, we will flounder amidst the shattered pieces of a family.
My mother will die alone at age sixty-seven at an assisted living facility. I will not be there to hold her hand. When we fought, she told me, You are shortening my lifespan. You have a sick mother. Do you want me to die sooner?
If I had never been born, would my mother have lived longer? Or at least, would Anya have been there to witness her last breath? The real question hangs in the back of my throat, Why, Mom, why did you let your mother take Anya?
13.
What if Anya escaped the clutches of our grandmother and found us? I carry the dream in my chest, a beating fantasy.
I am fifteen; she is twenty-two. It is Saturday, beginning of January. Clouds polka-dot the sky. The warmest part of the day has receded, the sun dropping west. In my room, I chat with friends online, fingers flying over the keyboard. Our mother sits at the oval dining room table, playing double-deck solitaire, when we hear a buzz from the intercom. Pausing mid-card, thin paper rectangle hanging in the air, our mother calls out to me, Are you expecting anyone?
No, I grunt back.
Placing her seven of spades on top of the eight of hearts, she rises from her chair and presses the speaker button on the intercom. Hello? her voice crackles, as does the intercom.
Anya is too nervous to say anything. What can she say? Hello, this is your daughter?
Greeted with silence, our mother shrugs and settles back in front of her game. Outside, Anya’s finger trembles before pressing the call button again. This time, when she hears our mother’s voice, she blurts out, It’s Anya. At the sound of Anya’s name, our mother’s face changes. Her round cheeks rise like helium balloons, her jade green eyes glow. Anya, she murmurs, pressing a button to let her in.
From my room, I overhear the exchange and hover at the threshold of my door, mouth slightly open. Our mother is frozen, staring at the intercom grate, as if she expects it to dissolve or for Anya to appear through it like smoke.
A knock echoes through the apartment. Our mother does not look at me, running to the door, flinging it open, her arms outstretched. Anya buries her body into hers, drinking in her Ivory soap and Lubriderm lotion. In her arms, Anya is home. From the edge, I watch. Anya is stunning—high cheekbones, glittering cerulean eyes, and creamy freckled skin. She is wearing tight-fitting black slacks, short-cut boots, and a sunflower yellow blouse.
Come in, come in, our mother blubbers, gesturing toward the couch and recliner. Sit! Sit! she urges. Do you want anything? Tea? Coke? Water?
Coke, Anya responds, her voice wobbling.
Our mother brings two cold cans from the fridge, one diet, one regular. I remain in the shadows, silent, self-conscious about my baggy jeans and oversized t-shirt with frayed edges.
How did you find me? our mother wants to know.
Anya explains how she hired a private investigator. How a neighbor told her our mother was probably in Los Angeles. How our grandmother is dead and that if she were alive, she would never have allowed this. How she disliked our grandmother because she was strict and cruel and did not let her date. Her stories surge and swell, and our mother listens, sitting on the couch next to her, in tears, her arms around Anya like she cannot believe she is real. Anya’s head rests on her shoulder, thirsty for her affection, her attention.
From the dining room, I step forward. Hi, I croak out, mouth dry.
Anya lifts her head. Our eyes meet, sibling to sibling, not stranger. Hi, she replies, her arm extending toward me. I sit in her lilac-scented embrace. The three of us are on the couch like fallen dominoes, me leaning on her, her leaning on our mother.
She is only supposed to be visiting, but she decides not to return to Poland, choosing to stay with us, to care for our mother when I go to college. Anya is the rock we need—stable, balanced, grounded. At night, they sit together, watching television, eating pepperoni pizza. Anya’s love keeps our mother healthy and safe. Our mother lives to be ninety-three years old and dies at home, a smile of gratitude on her lips, both of us holding her hand, one on each side.
14.
In a self-help article on Medium, I read that the key to joy is acceptance. I accept I will most likely never see Anya. I accept I was born, and I lived, and that my birth, as all births, transformed my mother’s life forever. I accept it was not my fault my grandmother took Anya away from us.
When I was twelve, I rummaged through the closet I shared with my mother. On the top shelf, underneath the jeans my mother did not like, I found a yellow manila envelope. Inside were several drawings, with Anya’s name signed at the bottom. In a smaller white envelope, three photos of her.
In the first photo, I am in a black buggy with white trimming. Anya peers over the edge, smiling. Surprise and longing flicker on her lips. She has blonde hair, the dark kind, not platinum. I wonder what it was like for my sister to lose me. Does she also grieve? I accept I may never know.
In the second photo, just her—climbing a chainlink fence, one leg artfully sloped over the top, white stocking gleaming, face scrunched in concentration. In her expression, I witness a boldness I will never embody. A boldness I envy. I accept I will never know what Anya is like, whether she is as fearless as the camera captured or if the camera, as it often does, lied.
In the final photo, we are older. Anya holds a red ball, handing it to me. I am up to her knee. Her smile is not the same. It is confused, hesitant, scared. Staring at the photos, I try to puzzle out what is hidden behind Anya’s smile. Screams in my chest rise. I soothe them. I accept her smile will remain a mystery, that Anya will only be real in my fantasies.
I hope Anya did not believe the lies my grandmother told her. I hope she walked away from her, faced her wounds, and is healing. I hope she is in loving relationships with people who respect her. That an ocean and a continent apart, we are both breaking the curses passed down to us.