Scoop Toward the Center

by Alishia Dauterive

Identity is rarely as simple as a single label. In "Scoop Toward the Center," Grand Prize winner Alishia Dauterive follows Rosie, a young woman confronting homelessness, adoption, addiction, and the unanswered questions surrounding her multicultural heritage. As she searches for the truth about her past, Rosie discovers that belonging cannot always be found in paperwork alone. Compassionate, witty, and deeply moving, Dauterive’s story explores resilience, identity, and the courage to embrace every part of oneself.

Rosie wrapped her adoption information with pink tape for when she had enough wine to mistake drunkenness for courage. She’d rip it open, ending the feelings of not knowing herself, of displacement, and pretending. But now, as she rummaged through her history in the skeleton of her bedroom, she couldn’t find the envelope. In the living room, the officer’s radio static echoed obscenely, like he stood over her, breathing hot judgment down her neck.

Sweat chilled her scalp. Where was the damn thing? She kicked a plastic container and dove through clothes and old shoe boxes.

“Ma’am?”

She maddenly tossed shirts and pants and bras on top of each other, as if her urgency would make the envelope appear.

Heavy boots thumped from the living room to the bedroom. Rosie lifted her head.

He stood at the entrance threshold, thumbs tucked into the edges of his vest, eyebrows tensed. She knew he’d given her extra time, and she figured that was out of pity, probably because he could go home to a wife who looked like him, to kids who looked like them, maybe a dog. Rosie imagined they had family dinner, and through their chatting, they’d know each other, and his kids would know themselves; they’d know the smile of their daddy and his history; the laugh of their mama and her history; and that history would help them digest the green beans and mashed potatoes. Whenever someone questioned those kids throughout their lives, they’d have answers, because they’d know who they were and where they came from.

Rosie sat back on her ankles and looked at the officer like she imagined his dog looked at him. He jerked his head toward the living room.

She had milked every minute of her apartment before the eviction; spent every day applying to new places, and as she drove toward the parking lot, she'd spend the night in. She forced grateful words into her head, like her adoptive parents taught her. At least the property manager had given her that extension; at least she still had a car; at least she had a job—although her shifts were part-time, and Minnie, the owner, would probably close the business soon and—that wasn’t very grateful.

Rosie shook her head. She slapped the side of her face lightly. Back to gratefulness. She had a gym membership and could shower there; that was more than most homeless people had. She had four large trash bags of clothes stuffed in her trunk, a hot plate, and a cooler where she could store drinks or half-opened sandwiches. That was more than most homeless people had. The word ‘homeless’ tightened her throat. She took a break from gratefulness.

The last time she’d felt waves of grief with such a strong undercurrent was on her adoptive parents’ porch. They said her lifestyle didn’t agree with them and that until she corrected it, she wasn’t welcome back. She thought they thought that part hurt her the worst, that she wasn’t welcome back, but she’d never felt welcomed. She’d felt grateful—there was that word again—but they couldn’t style her hair for school, they didn’t like the music she liked or the books she read.

They didn’t like talking about her culture or cultures, because they weren’t sure if she had an Irish parent and a Jamaican parent, or if it had been a Mexican parent and a Jamaican parent.

And most of all, they never approved of her friends.

Rosie thought it was because of their color. But that would have meant her parents maybe didn’t like her color either—her brownish, fleshy, caramel tan that her school friends had always said made her a bunch of people instead of one.

The envelope she couldn’t find was supposed to give her answers.

With her driver’s seat laid flat, Rosie covered her eyes with her arm in case someone walked past. She hated crying in public.

Exhaustion pushed her into sleep, and sunlight punched her awake. She’d get a sunshade later.

Photography by Olena Yakobchuk

She made it to Minnie’s Soap Shop with five minutes to spare, freshly showered, which had felt surprisingly empowering, like maybe this living in the car thing wouldn’t be so bad—until she broke the news to Minnie.

Minnie’s eyes watered; her flappy arms then wrapped lovingly around Rosie. “Oh baby, you know I’d let you come live with me if—”

“It’s okay,” Rosie assured. “I know. You gotta take care of your daddy and your brother and you got kids and your husband and his sister, so—”

“There’s just no space,” they said simultaneously. Minnie’s bottom lip pouted and Rosie nodded confidently, although her throat tightened again.

She tried not to imagine Minnie having pity, but it was hard with the way Minnie’s head tilted sideways and how her hand rubbed Rosie’s arm. She had the urge to pull away, to jerk herself from the entire situation. She leaned into Minnie’s support instead. Minnie always meant well, Rosie knew, and she’d been the only woman in town to give her a shot at a job with hardly any work history.

“Rosie, baby, I want you to think about going to the community center,” Minnie said, suddenly stern.

“I—I got to close this shop.”

Rosie kept her eyes open against the urge to close them and kept her scream lodged in her lungs where it burned away any remaining cilia that weed, cigarettes, and hot pills on foil hadn’t.

“The community center will help you find another job, another apartment. Promise me you’ll go?”

Rosie promised. She scrubbed her promise into the counters with so much elbow grease that her arms creaked. She dusted between each handmade soap bar, the bottoms of the organic salves and lotions and perfumes and fixed the number 6 on the price tag of her favorite lavender loofa set.

By the time her coworker Robbie arrived, she served three customers and talked two of them into buying extra soaps. Part of her wanted to feel like that was enough to save the shop, but the rest of her knew it wasn’t about money or tidiness or good workers for Minnie. Minnie needed the time with her family through the worst of her daddy’s Alzheimer’s, her brother’s paraplegia, and her sister-in-law’s legal troubles.

Minnie knew what she needed to do, and Rosie envied her security. Just thinking about it made Rosie fumble on the register with a customer. Her one chance at security had been left in a stupid manila envelope, buried somewhere in her former apartment. Envy was as close to feeling secure as she could get.

Robbie swiveled past Rosie in Minnie’s ergonomic desk chair, offered Rosie a cracker and a scoop of hummus. Rosie declined. Robbie pursed their lips, batted their naturally thick eyelashes, and again urged food at her.

Rosie dipped a cracker aggressively into the hummus. “Your family must really have it out for you. First, you come out as non-binary, then you disgrace hummus with crackers?”

Robbie hooted. “I love you. Firstly, you disgraced it by jamming—” they hit the bottom of their hummus container with a cracker as aggressively as Rosie had. “—your whole hand in here. You scoop toward the center, like this.” Robbie demonstrated a delicate hold of a cracker, ran it from the edge of their container to the center pool of oil, lifted a glob, and dropped it all in their mouth. They chewed with a smile and said, “Secondly, this is a pita cracker.”

“You’re reaching. It’s a cracker.”

“Yeah, but it’s also pita.”

“It can’t be both.”

“Why can’t it?”

Rosie didn’t feel like arguing over stupid crackers. She went to find something to do, like restocking the bags at the counter or adjusting lotion containers in the storage closet, but Robbie followed her.

“This could be pita, cracker, and bread,” they waffled. “Think. If you take the dough that makes this cracker, bake it like bread, but then bake it again to make it crunchy, then it’s pita-cracker-bread. What do you say about that?”

“It’s still a cracker.”

“Why are you so rigid?”

“Why are you following me?” Rosie snapped. “It’s a cracker, Robbie! It’s just a cracker. You can have all these add-ons, but in the end, it’s just a stupid cracker. Just like I’m just a stupid human. You can add on that I’m an ex-addict; and my parents hate me; and my real mom might be Irish or Jamaican; or my dad might be Mexican or Jamaican. But I’ll never know because I lost the freaking paperwork! And because—oh yeah—I’m also evicted, and so I’m homeless, and I only work part-time, and that’s going to stop too, because Minnie has to close the—but you know what, Robbie? You know what all that boils down to?” Rosie didn’t realize tears filled her eyes until Robbie’s gaze softened. She hissed, “I’m still just human.”

Robbie offered an embrace.

Rosie shifted away, wiped embarrassed tears from her face, and opened her mouth for an apology. Robbie said softly, “You’re all those things and so much more. You know what helped me?”

Rosie didn’t want to hear it, but she did. She glanced at Robbie timidly.

“I stopped needing certainty. Sometimes I wake up and I feel like one person. Sometimes I’m several people. Sometimes I’m more Syrian than I am Egyptian. Sometimes I’m more feminine than masculine. So, you’re right. You’re only human. But you’re also many things. You don’t need to only be one thing.”

Rosie wouldn’t look at them. “What if I couldn’t even be one thing if I had the choice?”

“You can enjoy who you are without despising what you’re not.”

They scooped hummus from their container and Rosie smelled it before she saw it. She took the cracker.

Robbie said, “I enjoy the pita taste and the cracker crunch. I don’t know whether it’s more cracker or pita.” They shrugged. “I like it for all that it is.”

______

Rosie tightly tied her apron. Last shift, it’d fallen from her hips. She’d lost enough weight living in her car that sometimes she forgot how big her body wasn’t. But she’d saved four checks working at the café and had enough for a deposit on a place.

Her community worker had suggested she save up a few months’ worth of cash before applying to apartments so she could afford the rent after the first month, and Rosie agreed. She’d taken to listening closely to folks; some words meant a lot.

She tied her hair up in a crown puff and logged into the register.

A woman ushered in a little girl through the front door, ordered from Rosie a hot chocolate and a matcha latte. Rosie smiled as she pulled the receipt. Before the woman took it, she squinted at Rosie, a thin smile pulling at her lip-lined mouth.

“You have the most gorgeous bone structure.” The woman ran her eyes across Rosie’s face as if she could touch her skin without using her hands. Rosie recoiled, and the woman laughed. “I don’t mean anything bad, I just—what are you? Like, your mix? What are you?”

Rosie sputtered through a laugh. “Oh honey, we don’t have enough time to go through what I am; there’s a line forming. We’ll bring your drinks out in a minute.”

The woman roughly took the receipt.

Rosie watched her and the girl walk to a seat.

She latched onto the pride thick in her chest. So many parts of her had led her response. It was starting to feel natural.

At lunch, Rosie replayed images of the woman’s shock in her head. The pita crackers and hummus Robbie had packed her never tasted sweeter.

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Alishia Dauterive is the Grand Prize Winner of Kinsman Quarterly's 2026 Voices of Mixed Heritage Award. She is also an aspiring novelist with a deep affinity for magical realism and Afro-surrealism, a calling she believes was written into her story long before she began telling it Her fiction received honorable mention in Kinsman Quarterly's The Presence: A Collection of Haunted Stories and Folklore, while her personal essays and creative nonfiction have appeared in Thought Catalog and Mad in America. A trainer and supervisor in the behavioral health field and a student of public health, Alishia lives in Sacramento, California, where she shares life's adventures with her partner and beloved hype-dog, Canela.