el venado

I dream of a tiny tsunami. I am at the beach with friends and we are each 400 feet tall. The beach is small to us and the tsunami is smaller still. We laugh at its impotence as it rages against our shins.


***


I dream we are on a barge on a klong in Bangkok. We are boating to a launchpad where we will board a space shuttle and I am dangling my feet in the water. I watch the wats go by. Wat Arun. Wat Po. I am so happy because you have made a space suit for my miniature stag, so that I won’t have to leave him behind during our trip. You are so good to me.


***


I dream I am on the southern coast of France, maybe in Nice, with a group of friends. We are walking around and I am holding hands with J***. You don’t mind. We come around a corner and the buildings are so beautiful that we all stop walking. The edifices look like glass succulents and the font Metropolitan Tryout.


***


I dream that I walk into an abandoned classroom in El Salvador. You are erasing the board as though you’ve just finished lecturing. There were lots of diagrams referenced in your lecture. The White Stripes song I Can Tell That We Are Gonna Be Friends is playing. You are incredibly happy to see me and you pull me into an enormous hug. My ribs are okay and I am so glad that we are gonna be friends.




***



I dream that we’re kissing. It isn’t awkward, even though we both know that if we did kiss it would be really awkward. Instead of being awkward we are both unabashed and sincere and very good. We kiss and kiss like we haven't realized certain things yet, or like we don't believe them. 



***



I dream I have a gorgeous butternut squash in hand and am trying to navigate a river on foot. At one point the squash slips out of my hand and then moves with its own volition. It darts away, cunningly swimming under some downed branches.

el corazon

Terms of endearment I hope never to be called again:

*gordita
*baby
*chickabiddy
*chi-chi
*monkey bite
*snooky
*fifi

el barril

"Aaaarrrrrr," you said, a young pirate on the bridge at the 123rd Street playground.

We were suspended above the sand sea. "You’ll walk the plank, I say," you said.

"You don’t have a plank, I reply!" I replied.

"Better yet, I'll stuff you in an old ale barrel and throw you overboard, I say."

"I pour hot wax, no, hot oil on your bald-but-bearded head, I rejoin."

Unfortunately for me, you didn’t know what a rejoinder was, and you definitely weren't familiar with the verb rejoin.

And, under article 212 of our Code of Play, you’d been relieved of having to acknowledge anything you didn’t already know about, or couldn’t understand without “buckets of explanation” (your phrase, of course). As I began defining the word for you, I could’ve sworn you chose not to understand it. And so, I was thrown overboard.

The cold water seeping through the slats of the barrel took my breath away.

el muerte

I’ve always hated the phrase being there for someone, but when I held her moments after she stopped breathing, her bones like unfrosted Pocky, I understood how years ago I had gone away from her and how I hadn’t thought again of her waking and sleeping moments, or of the morphine and the nausea it caused her, or of Chucho having to wipe off the tar-like excrement and soap her up and wash her off; I felt like I had never really been there for anyone.

el soldado

Run, Jane, run, we hear Joe cry. I turn in time to see Jane run. True, she runs. But how she runs. Oh, my, she runs. All four tree trunks-for-legs, all tusks and ears she is. And we run, too. We hope to distract them from their sport; we’re not the sort of men to shoot game like Jane. And then we hear him. Dick has come. Sounds like a freight train. Sounds mad male. Sounds like things just changed for Jane.

el apache

“St. John the Divine is slipping sideways,” Amsterdam whispers to 111th and 112th Streets, who always seem to be listening.

“Yeah,” says 111th Street, “we know.”

“It's happening right in front of us,” 112th Street quips.

They were all very aware of what earth did. Earth allowed the mining and taking, the changing of this into that. But the labor of construction workers, of men in hard hats and orange vests had to be constant, had to be vigilant, because earth was an Indian giver; she always took it back.

“You can’t say that,” 111th spoke up, unsolicited.

“I can’t say what?” the author typed.

“That thing about Indian giving. It’s crude and perhaps racist. You need to find a more culturally-appropriate way of phrasing your thought above.”

“Actually, I’m making use of a widely understood idiom in order to quickly and efficiently get my thought across so that I can continue with the narrative,” the author answered.

111th was known for asserting himself where he didn’t belong. Like when he tried to cut right across Morningside Park in his campaign for “More Logical City Planning And Easier Driving From Here To There.” That was in 1846 and even then you could count on 111th to be longwinded when brevity would do just as well. This is how it was with 111th.

“Then I want out of this piece. I want no mention of me to occur,” 111th complained. “And I want you to stop describing my logical requests as complaints.”

It wasn’t as if one could invent a new place for St. John’s the Divine to exist. It lived, and, one might say, slipped sideways, at 1047 Amsterdam, between 111th and 112th Streets.

“By the way, that photo was taken from an interesting angle,” 112th asserted. “The building is not, nor was it ever 'slipping sideways'. It may appear to you to be slanting off to the side, but that’s the effect of the angle at which the photo was taken, not a result of Earth, or anything else doing any swallowing. You’re a photographer. You should know about this.

“Besides which, personification of buildings is a silly idea.”

Personification worked well enough for 111th and 112th. But to extend it to other works of concrete, steel or rock was too much\.

el pajaro

You said Chicago's bridges smelled like chocolate, so when you sent me that photo of the LaSalle Street bridge, the one you took with your Holga, I smelled it. I got, as you might expect, the scent of developing chemicals. No chocolate.

The familiar odor reminded me of the mess you used to make of our bathroom. The dripping negatives. Your enlarger balanced on the toilet. Me banging on the door.

Go next door, love, you’d say, convincing me that I was the one being silly, to want to use my own toilet.

The sun would set and I’d sit curled up on your leather chair, reading until the sand underneath my eyelids bloodied them, until I couldn’t pretend any more that I wanted to be awake. I’d hear you whistling on the other side of the door. Lost to prints of Prague, Puebla, or Manarola.

You lost, trying to perfect the contrast between the minaret and the sky. Between native bird and flower. Between breast and areola. Within folds of velvet.

And me wishing for a little chocolate.

las jaras

In the summers, the marquee out front reads WELCOME BACK BOATMEN when all the letters are present. Steve, the owner of My Brother’s Place, means it. The raft guides return to Cañon City every summer like so many amorous penguins to Argentina and spend much of their tip money at Brother’s.

Brother’s is also home to the locals, the bikers. And they aren’t so much looking to hook up as they are looking for a little excitement. And just when the weather becomes perfect for riding Harleys and showing off those new chrome crash bars, in come the penguins. So sometimes there are misunderstandings. And sometimes misunderstandings are cultivated. Just for the hell of it.

Tuesday of last week was such a night. Hell—or some of its angels—bumping into the ice berg. My sister Megan and her boyfriend Nate were sitting outside Brother’s smoking cigarettes when a biker eased his Harley into a parking spot. “Two little bitches,” he called out to them. “Who will I take home with me tonight?”

What you should know is that my sister is a penguin. She’s a certified whitewater raft guide. She loves the river. Loves knowing where to soak a crew, how to throw around words like feldspar and choya. She’s part of the Arkansas River’s meandering history—its present tourist claptrappery, its past Silver Rush railway guerrilla warfare, its one-time duty as the border between Mexico and the United States, and its provision of shelter and water to the Ute and Kiowa peoples.
My sister’s boyfriend is also a raft guide. He’s good with kids. He has a broad smile and studies geography and ecology. His hair is straight and blond and reminiscent of one, or maybe all of the members of Hanson: Mmmm-Bop. But he’s 6’4” and isn’t easily mistaken for a girl (or a bitch, for that matter).

In response to the biker’s catcall, my sister stood up. “Why are you so full of hate?!” she yelled. Looking at Nate she said, “He has more love in his little finger than you’ve ever had for anyone.” Her response had too many syllables to pack a proper punch, but this is real life. The biker walked up to Nate.

“Yeah?” bikerman taunted. He popped Nate a good one, fist to the face.

When he tells what happened next, my brother, who was at the bar and not his place, says that this moment was straight out of a Batman rerun. The distress signal went out via pheromones and 15 raft guides put down darts, beers and cue sticks. They moved as one and found themselves on the sidewalk of Main Street, underneath the marquee.

At this point the biker, while a fighter and the aggressor, was clearly outnumbered. But he couldn’t back down. What would he tell his friends—that he was stared down by a raft of penguins? So his friend did what any good friend would do. He grabbed Biker, who could still appear aggressive and threatening by struggling against the friend, and dragged him towards a parked car. The biker continued his theatrics, looking tough all the way to the passenger seat of his friend’s El Camino. The bad guys drove away, my sister experienced the rush of adrenaline mixing with whatever else was in her blood, and the good guy got a new nickname: Mmmm-Pop.

It could be that The Moral of this story should be something simple and helpful, like don’t go to biker bars. Or, men, don’t grow your hair long because you’ll invite strange attention.

But I think the more important lesson here is don’t date my sister. If she can get a penguin in a fight with one of Hell’s angels, what will she do to you?

la sirena

Your bedroom is upstairs on the corner. Mom says that the shag is burnt orange. There are two dressers in the bedroom. One is so tall that you had to stand on tiptoe to reach the handle of the highest drawer this past Christmas, to hide the Barbie your aunt gave you. Barbie is the wrong size to ride the plastic horses you collect. And she has blue eye shadow and B-R-E-A-S-T-S. She’s so embarrassing!

The bed is a grownup bed, almost as big as Mom and Dad’s. The bedspread has twisting vines and orange flowers on it. So it’s like you’re sleeping in an enchanted garden. You sleep while doing the middle splits sometimes to practice for the 1988 U.S.A. Olympic Gymnastics Team and also so that one big toe hangs off each side of the bed.

Sometimes it’s hard to sleep at night because you cough and cough and cough. When that happens, Mom reads you Madeleine L’Engle’s stories about mitochondria, which are tiny organs inside cells. They make energy and maybe music, because that’s what Grandpa’s organ does. Sometimes you think there might be tiny grandpas inside the cells playing the tiny organs. Mom has to read to you for a long time because you are too afraid to sleep. You have to keep breathing. That is your job.

el pescado

Miss Penner lives on the corner, where she grows worms. Last Tuesday, she had 217 of them underneath the cardboard! It is biology to watch the dirt move through the bodies of the worms. Their pink skin moves up and down and the elevator inside them carries the dirt from their mouths and out through their tails. They are always swallowing. Some worms help gardens grow and some work to catch fish. That is their job.

Kevin Hook lives next door to Mr. Horscht. Kevin has dark curly hair that looks like little slinkys. Once, when he fell off his bike and landed like a sack of flour on the driveway, he said, “Jesus Christ!”

When Kevin jumped up, Dad put his large hands on Kevin’s shoulders. He said, “we do not say that here” in a way that made Kevin look at the ground. But we do say “Jesus Christ” sometimes. We just don’t say it with an exclamation point like Kevin did.

Mr. Horscht lives on the other corner of the block, by the high school. His skin is like yours is when you sit in the bathtub until the water gets cold. He walks with a cane and wears a hat called Fedora! Mr. Horscht is Miss Penner’s boyfriend, which is easy to tell because of the pigeon way that they turn their heads toward each other when they talk. When the sun sets, Mr. Horscht and Miss Penner sit on the steps at the side of his house to watch it sparkle over the river. That is their job.

Amy Ramirez lives around the corner in a stucco house with white trim. The Ramirez house is fun because of the toys and cereals like Cocopuffs and Honeycomb, which are not the kind Mom buys at the co-op. Jay the brother, who already reads the Wall Street Journal, even though Dad says he doesn’t have any real assets, likes to go, too. He plays with Amy’s brother, Ryan. Once the Ramirez’s doorbell rang and Mrs. Ramirez answered it. She laughed, asking Jay, “Did you forget something?” Jay stood at the door wearing bubble bath. No clothes at all! Jay had forgotten to tell Ryan something about He-man, and that was his job.

el tambor

Favorite Song: Late in the Evening

Dad’s stereo is in the den. The speakers are huge. The music makes everything buzz. Dad says that rhythm is finding the heartbeat of a song—clap, clap, clap-clap-clap. Each song has a different heartbeat. Other things, like sidewalks beneath skates, mixers full of cookie dough, and even, sometimes, the rain, have heartbeats, too.

Dad’s favorite singer is Paul Simon. Dad plays the song Late in the Evening so that it fills the den with the sounds of horns and drums and guitar. When it’s time to dance, my whole body is the clap, clap, clap-clap-clap, the heartbeat of Late in the Evening. The song is too short, so Dad plays it again.

la bota

No, he said. It sounds so crass when you say it like that. We've just arrived at the understanding that this doesn't work anymore. No one gave anyone anything.

el arpa

I squeezed fresh oranges for juice the summer I worked at the Musical Offering. Each morning, I would unlock the weathered, cerise side door, trying to avoid the homeless man who slept in the basement.

He’s harmless, the café's owner told me, just don’t startle him.

The Musical Offering sold Early Music exculsively. So while Berkeley's other cafés did brisk business with beats, we were too cool for Beethoven. We wanted it earlier. We were into the harpsichord, the lute, the recorder.

My first customer—right after the last half-slice of orange was juiced—was Amir. Amir was from Iraq by way of Mississippi. He hid violet eyes and long lashes behind horned rims. Every day he wore the same corduroy jacket over a pink izod shirt that was slightly too small for him. He bought an orange juice on his way to German.

Things that occur every day tend to swell disproportionately in one’s affection. This was true of Amir.

On my way home from the café one Friday afternoon, I stopped at the hardware store to pick up materials for signage for a poetry reading we were hosting at my house. I grabbed butcher paper, a big box of crayons, and some wooden spikes for support.

Rounding aisle 7, I nearly ran into Amir.

Who was with a girl.

I dropped my box of crayons onto the linoleum floor. The reds and magentas skittered underneath the metal shelving. Pacific blue, denim, and wild blue yonder spun around my feet and tumbleweed rolled out the door and onto the sidewalk as someone walked in.

I managed a hello and mumbled somethingaboutthepoetryreading. I think I invited them.

We’re buying an alarm clock, she said. Ours is broken.

***
Amir didn’t come in to the Musical Offering for two weeks.

I imagined the conversation:

Who was that?
Oh, I buy orange juice from her.
Well, stop.
Okay, okay. Did you set our alarm clock?

She, of course, had. For 7:38, just in time for German.

Late one morning, just as the daily low slung clouds were burning off, I looked up from a hummus sandwich to find Amir standing on the other side of the counter.

Hullo?

I blushed somewhere between vivid violet and torch red.

He ordered the hours-old juice that was left over from the morning. He paid with exact change and then leaned in close.

I like you.

Which he could say; he already had someone with whom to share an alarm clock.

He slid a junior-high looking note across the almond counter top and walked out the door.

I pulled the tab.

Maggie,
96 colors may go
96 directions,
but there are only 60 minutes
in each hour.
And too late
is just that.

Lamentably,
Amir

el borracho

He had found a penny and he had picked it up, but the trajectory of his day had not changed.

la chalupa

She wore the same jeans and t-shirts and sweatshirts as everyone else. Orange and black. Grey with black and orange. Black and orange.

But underneath she wore other things. Garments with ornate beadwork or intricate laces or warm velvet—clothes with texture. She combed the Goodwill for forsaken camisoles, negligees, stoles. She stripped satin lining from men’s suit coats and women’s skirts. She slit seams and rescued faux fur from misguided 80s couture.

She sewed the salvaged pieces of fabric together and wore the resulting work secretly, like the undergarments of a devout Jew or Mormon, as a reminder that this was not her home. San Francisco or Milan would be her holy city. Or next year in New York City, she thought each January 1.

The other students in her 7th grade class noticed what she did not—namely, that she spent all of her class time, when World History introduced her to Genghis Khan’s metal-clad warriors, or gave her a tour of the jasmine-infused, silken courts of one or another maharaja, or asked her to examine the purple Medici palazzos and the time when English demanded that she construct formulaic paragraphs with graceful transitions to form essays commencing with giant sweepers claiming “Throughout human history, people have…” —she spent all this time with her left hand inside her shirt, running fabric or beadwork thin between her fingers.

What she did notice was that small holes appeared on the left side of her handmade garments, a phenomenon about which she could not ask her mother because that would mean explaining, or even showing, the garments to her.

At school they began calling her all sorts of names that might have made her cry, had she been paying attention.

el violincello

One thing about the houses in the neighborhood with Tigger signs in the windows is that they are part of Neighborhood Watch. That means that anyone can go to those houses if they are in trouble.

There was trouble, once, on the way to cello lessons at Aunt Martha’s house. A car drove close, very, very slowly like a cat slinking underneath the bird feeder or like the minute hand on a clock.

The car was a stranger car and the person was a stranger person.

It was hard to walk any faster because of the cello.

The house at the end of the block had a Tigger sign in the window. But all of the curtains were closed and there was no car in the driveway. The house looked like Baby, the tortoise, when she sleeps—all pulled inside—or like a chalkboard after the day’s vocabulary is erased. No one was home.

Even though it was a kind of lie, it seemed okay to open the screen door and pretend to open the front door. If the stranger person thought the door was open, that there were people home, good. If he noticed that no one was home, bad. It was possible to pretend to open the door by moving a hand around the doorknob and leaning into it.

The stranger car sped away as fast as a car can go, faster than a pizzicato.

el arbol

We find ways of not talking. Ways of living near but not with each other. There’s nothing aggressive about this. It happens accidentally. It becomes easiest.

Our communication has never been better.

I hurt, I tell him, gauze in the wastebasket. I hurt, too, he says, scribbling band aids on the grocery list. There’s a charge for a call to America lamenting, I miss my mother. The empty refrigerator says, I can’t find what I need. His re-genred, his perfectly-justified book spines: I’m starting over.

The mail piles up: I want to be alone.
e.e. cummings on the lamp table: make love to me.
The winerack is empty: I can’t.
A stack of books on 1940s architecture, elements, materials: I’m doing something.
Spanish language cds: I’m working, too.

New bookshelves with empty spaces: together?
A black and white of us: I hope.
A hammer left on the desk: you’ll need more than hope.
A Goodwill receipt.
A tandem bicycle.

Then, there was the kumquat tree. It showed up Thursday, which would’ve been a hopeful sign, except that the tree was withered. Was the withering a sign, or was the tree a sign, or, maybe, was Thursday a sign? Was it a hopeful sign (the potential of fruit)? Was it stable because Thursday is mid-week? Was it the withering that was important? Was the tree in the process of becoming stronger? Was that the sign? Life coming from death? Regeneration of desiccated things?

I tilted my head, as though it would clear, confusion pouring out my ear like so much sand, right there on the living room floor. I always knew what he meant. I always understood. But what was intended by a wilted kumquat tree?

I touched its leaves, its smooth bark. What exactly was botanified in this little tree? I knew nothing about soil. How did one prevent aphid infestation? I wanted to watch blossoms turn into citrus fruit. Someone said that talking to plants helps them grow. Or was it music? Could that be true?

I hoped for the first time in so long. Watering the tree, I thought, come, tiny, brilliant kumquats. Mixing minerals into the soil: grow. I put the little tree on a stand in a sunny corner of the room.

And then, my first words aloud: What do you need?

la escalera

It’s only a nun costume, I reminded myself as she squealed with delight and ran inside the house, palms so full of gooey caramels someone had to open the front door for her.

Of course: Halloween.

The vestments would make no difference, I told myself.

Habit would not overcome habits.

It was just a costume.

She was waiting. I thought of people everywhere waiting. Waiting for promises to be fulfilled, for vows to be kept, for the ice cream man to come down their street, for pay day, for papers to come through, for nightfall, for things to cool off. She wasn't waiting for any of these things.

Every Tuesday afternoon, I got the call.

Jesús, he would say, you need to be more thorough. Make sure you get to ALL the sliding doors and the windows. There are a lot of smudges on the glass even after you've cleaned them.

Si, señor, I would reply. Claro.

But there were other houses to do; I could't wait until nap time. Or for her to tire of the game. So, always, I climb the ladder. I wash and squeegee. I am precise and quick. And my work is perfect. It is so perfect that the sparrows are confused by the illusion of nothing.

And I don't look inside. I pretend that the surface is all there is.

I see nothing beyond it. Not even the wee nun waiting until I finish to press her sticky little palm against the glass I've just washed.

el catrin

To cops:
At first I didn’t take him seriously, but when the old man took a backswing with his cane and mumbled something about my wallet, I just gave it to him. I was leaving the last matinee showing of The Incredibles, so that must’ve been around 6:30. He was wearing a suit and wasn’t quite as tall as I am, so I’m thinking he was about 5’ 5.” He smelled strongly of citrus and, once he had my wallet, he dropped the limp.

To diary:
Mugged by very old man in suit. God, was that you?

To mother:
Mom! I was just mugged. I’m okay, but I can’t believe that after living in Mexico City I get mugged coming out of the dollar theater in Colorado Springs. The guy was a trip—he looked like old Ms. Penner’s suitor on angel dust. Must’ve been a snowbird.

To boyfriend:
Hey, you’ll never guess who lost her wallet… again. I ended up giving it some old man who wanted it more than I did. Do you still have BankOne’s hotline number in your phone?

Best friend (text message):
Mugged. Late. C u Soon.

la dama

This is what it is like for the statue of liberty: on the rare occasion that she’d like to be taken out for a quiet dinner somewhere nice, she’s got to face the facts. She’s the largest lady in the Americas. She’s got to travel to Brazil to find a man big enough for her and, as luck would have it, Rio de Janeiro’s Jesus Christ isn’t in to women. He doesn’t date much.

If height isn’t enough of a barrier to being asked out, her perceived regality intimidates even her peers. North Dakota offers the only local company to scale, but the Dakota Boys keep their distance: her parisian birth makes her too euro for Crazyhorse’s taste. She is snubbed by the Ex-Presidents as “inspirational, but just not very much fun.”

And so, misunderstood and beautiful, Lady Liberty, sits at a table for one.

el diablito

What was consumed during 24 hours of overeating?

*The hours. I gorged myself on time. I bit off more than I could chew, urged time not to wait for me. Wasted, wontonly, time. Tried not to stop time. I watched terrible movies just to pass the time because, for this one day, there seemed to be far too much of it.

6430 calories
(Time is rich and is better eaten with moderation and breathing space.)

*42 edifices. With much of my smile inside, so as not to be ridiculous, I approached the brown line’s stop at Armitage. I ran my tongue up buildings (into open window), over roofs, and down subsequent brickwork. The architecture was delicious.

1000 calories
(Metal, brick and concrete are dense, but low-calorie.)

*One woman’s body. With avarice I looked on long legs, thin hips, short, dark hair, dramatic brows and cheek bones, the kind of features generations of borscht and verenika eaters ensured I would never have. The graceful moves here, and there the merciless multi-tasking, quick wit and the hat. So-so. So stylized, clean-lined. I looked away. But there were also: earrings, jeans (how long had it been since I’d owned a pair of The Jeans?), tight, neat apron.

450 calories
(I regurgitated most of what I saw soon after.)

la luna

How big is the moon? Alethea asked her mother.

The moon is so big, her mother replied, that it takes two hands to hold it. Even then you can’t really hold it all— it leaks out all over you and makes your forearms sticky. Like when you eat cantaloupe.

Alethea looked at her mother. She loved cantaloupe.

Can you swim in the stars? she asked.

Yes, you can swim; it’s best to keep your eyes open.

Alethea shut her eyes and then opened them again, as wide as she could. I can keep my eyes open.

Will you walk around the earth with me, on all the land parts? she asked.

I will walk with you, wherever you want to go, her mother told her.

Alethea walked down the hall without her mother and into the library where her grandfather sat in an old leather chair, smoking his pipe.

What are these? Alethea asked, pointing to the seeds he’d scraped out of the half-cantaloupe sitting on a plate on his desk.

Those seeds make baby melons that grow and grow until they are ready to be eaten.

Do people have seeds? She asked.

People have half a seed, her grandfather answered, they spend many years trying to find the other half. It takes sex to make a whole person seed.

Alethea wrinkled her nose, disappointed to find out that she only had half a seed. She decided to count the cantaloupe’s seeds.

How many people would it take to make 3-4-5-3-2 seeds? she asked grandfather.

They spent the afternoon talking about multiplication and division.

la mano

He gave her his hand in marriage because when, in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for one man to leave his mother and father and for one woman to leave her mother and father and cleave to the United States of America and to the republic, for which it stands, one March-April-May, Kanye! Heroes! One-two-three-four. Numbers! Deuteronomy... all on Fox.

English would be her third language. She studied it in a program staffed by some young Americans. They liked Ashgabat, they said. The Turkmeni people were so kind and beautiful. She didn’t know what they were talking about, as none of the people she saw on the bus looked anything like the beautiful people she saw in People. But even the Americans didn’t look quite like the People people. They were a little fatter. She thought her English teachers were, perhaps, more beautiful than the for this very reason. Their teeth weren’t quite as white, which the advertisements in People seemed to think important, but still.

They used American literature and documents to teach reading. The Constitution. The Bible. People Magazine. Comic books full of villains who rubbed their hands together as they plotted the possession of the world, which appeared to be made mostly London, New York City and, occasionally, Hong Kong.

Her classmates loved People magazine for the pictures, but for her, it was words, as many as she could catch, as many as she could scribble into her tiny notebook. She had a section in the back for her favorites. Words she didn’t own and couldn’t pronounce. Stolen words she had no right to. Yet.

She would flip to this section of her notebook and run her finger along the ph of these words, touch the ougher, the br or the tch.

Soon, she would say, you will be mine. Oh, yes, you will be mine.

el melón

It was twenty years ago now that Raul’s mother stopped moving. It was a warm day, a day that woke his tongue first, the sweetness of ripe melon and papaya so thick that you could taste without eating. This made Raúl hungry. Because smelling (even with your tongue) is one thing and eating is another. He went into the kitchen and found his mother with arms folded and head down on the table where they ate breakfast, lunch, and dinner. He called to her as he walked across the kitchen tile, careful not to knock over any one of the menagerie of pots—housing herbs, orchids, and sapling starts—that littered all the horizontal surfaces between them.

Mamá.

She was asleep.

Or something.

He touched her shoulder and one of her arms slipped off the table as she rolled unnaturally, forearms and forehead impressed with the flora of the lace tablecloth, her skin embossed with a mendhi as though she were an Indian bride-to-be.

It was then obvious to Raúl. Her body was here, but she was gone. She smelled like clay. The earthen scent of her choked Raúl with its insistence. He was afraid.

It is okay for this to be frightening to Raul. He is only six.

el tecolote

What, she said, not who. What time is it.

He was always asking questions.
Who was calling?
Who—if she could travel back in time—would she want to take a long walk with?
Who was she most afraid of bumping into in the dark?

But also:
Who time is it?
Who was she hoping for?
Who did she just say?

And:
Who did she smell of eucalyptus?
Who was she coughing?
Who was she so recklessly moving her queen around the board?

He cared. And it was true that she used to say to her girlfriends, the ones he now asked after, that she wanted someone who cared about her everything. The phrase was cute in a way that she later hated, but what she meant was something big. There were places in her, places that, were she to color them, would require black. Or, okay, maybe not black. But definitely midnight blue. They were dark. Whoever he was would need to be brave.

And he did know the places. He was a wonderful, nocturnal lover with night vision. He could see into the midnight blue. Or the black. He seemed to care about everything. The dark spaces, how she knew when to rub that spot between his scapulae, why she consistently mispronounced the word library, the reason she preferred port to any of the drinks he concocted, the reason she wore a dress over her pants.

But.

Who? Who? Who-who? Who?