Motherland
A Story
by Baird Harper1.
Though he isn’t in love with his ex-girlfriend anymore, Tomo pores over Juliet’s emails about her charity work in Ecuador, always pausing on the names of the men. Donnie, Danny, Peter, Pedro. The sheer number of them—the lack of a singular standout as well as the fact that there are just as many women mentioned—he finds reassuring.
Otherwise, Juliet’s emails are swamped by their own idealism, rife with misspellings that amplify the naivete of her life handing out blankets to refugees. At the ends of these messages, she typically asks about Tomo’s life (boring), his mother (dead), and his job at “Faker” (actually: Fakee) T-Shirt Company, which is always when he feels the urge to march down the hall and quit, then buy a ticket to Quito. But he never actually does this. He means to and means to, until something intervenes—a client’s call or the unexpected appearance of his boss, which is what happens this time, as Brent Lasher suddenly raps on Tomo’s office door.
