House Hunters International They’d wanted the two-story two-bath above the creperie in De Pijp, though they’d been willing to reconsider the budget for old-world charm and sleek, modern finishes in Zagreb, a quintessential hacienda in the hills flanking Quito, or a lanai shading the Russian district of Phnom Penh, but what they’d really, really wanted was Prague in a black & white movie adaptation of a book about Prague in the 70s. They’d even read it in college, and they’d known even then they wanted other people’s architecture and pathos. They wanted other people’s transit and squalor. They’d been prepping for years in unincorporated Atlanta when a job-call lit up their scopes. They’d tracked it to this bang-on-budget studio nestled above the ornamental fruit stands and decorative geriatrics occupying a piazza at the city-center of this other life they’d wanted to wear like a pelt. And we watched their wanting from a blind we’d erected in our living room, and we watched as they waded, timid at first, into the liquid crystals of the television. Then, more swiftly, their daggers clenched between their teeth, they slipped beneath its pixilated surface.
House Hunters From a hill road above the thicket of rickshaws, gelaterias, and brewpubs crowding the high street, she caught sight of it at dusk, perched in its flaxen and summer coat: the house, as if lapping from the river, as if a ten-point buck on a shady bank. She choreographed our advance out of the west, camouflaged in North Face jackets and New Balance sneakers. Papa hushed the baby strapped to his chest in a Baby Bjorn. At half a klick, he signaled for us to egress out of the realtor’s Citroën. The elder children knew to hide our numbers in a single file. She winked to us once before cocking her musket, our doting mother, crack-shot and immigrant on the hunt.
Jaswinder Bolina is author of the full-length poetry collections The 44th of July (2019), Phantom Camera (2013), and Carrier Wave (2007), and of the digital chapbook The Tallest Building in America (2014). His debut collection of essays Of Color was released by McSweeney’s in 2020. He teaches on the faculty of the MFA program in creative writing at the University of Miami where he is currently completing work on a fourth book of poems.
